skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, remember that he's selling bugtracking software. ;-) Many of Joel's articles are very good, but remember that they are designed to sell his product.

You do need *some* sort of bug tracking system, but I've never found one that I like. I've used Bugzilla, Mantis, FogBugz (Joel's product) and reported on Jira, Sun's bugtracking system, and SourceForge, but the only one I halfway-liked was Jira. At work, I use pencil & paper along with fixing bugs as they're reported. For my startup, I'll likely roll up some custom solution, as I haven't seen anything that comes close to meeting our requirements. I'll take a second look at what's out there first, though - I've heard good things about Trac, and maybe someone somewhere has come up with a decent bugtracker.
The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups
Why finding a partner is hard!
A major motivation to pursue your own startup is to be your own boss. This makes finding a partner really hard. What is the likelihood that you would have two very strong willed people who can work together and compromise?
Is this idea prone to lawsuits?
I have been thinking some more about an idea to help people better understand their books. However, there's a chance that the information submitted by users would allow people to infer the contents of some books sufficiently such that they would not need to buy them. Would this be viewed as a copyright violation? Of course, it may turn out the other way around with the service resulting in more people buying books.
Large companies and 'A' talent
My fortune cookie advice on the subject: _Never_ partner with someone who is not as technically literate as you (= not a programmer), even if they have the money. _Especially_ if they have the money.
You'd better throw in some epsilon of tolerance there, or finding two people both willing to work with each other is going to be *really* hard :-)
If the author voluntarily submits the text, it wouldn't be a problem imo. You could then/also require that any quote over 1 sentence (which could be safely covered by fair use) or maybe even any quote at all is simply a reference to the book itself- maybe even formalize the referencing system. If they are not copying the text, there is no copyright problem. Copyrights do not act like trade secrets or patents.
I'd amend that to "Never partner with someone who is not technically literate as you, *if* they think they are as technically literate as you or believe that technical literacy is not important."

It can often be very productive to partner with someone with people skills, or business skills, or finance skills. Those things *are* important, and yet you won't have spare brain cycles for them if you're doing hardcore programming. That person just needs to realize that *you* call the shots when it comes to technical decisions.

Warren Buffett's advice applies, as always. "It's not how much you know that matters. It's how realistically you assess what you *don't* know."
Seven ways that companies have built virality
Agreed. If you're a musician and you never partner with someone who isn't as good at singing then you'll never have a band. If you're a writer and you never partner with anyone who isn't as good at writing then you'll have no editor, no publisher, and no book.

I don't see why a startup should be any different. You have so many tasks (design, engineering, coding, selling, fundraising, partnering, etc.) that it makes no sense to only work with people of the same skillset.
I could live with that definition, but I've had 2 partnerships now in 2 different companies where I felt the person had qualified on those grounds and while they are still great friends etc., I was a bit disappointed. If it is a tech company, I really think they both have to have real tech expertise. It has little to do with just having someone else to do the programming- in both of those partnerships the partner was more than willing to defer to me on all technical matters that they perceived to be technical matters.

In a tech company, though, _everything_ is a technical matter- for example- marketing. Early adopters for 99% of tech products are geeks- if you are not one then you do not understand the market (hence all those MBA lead failures of the late 90's). Finance for a tech startup usually has to tie into the product / subscriptions, etc- and is thus a tech problem. PR is to fellow geeks, etc. etc. Then there's the fact that the bulk of the work to be done is technical- if you're going to be having allnighters for the next 3 months getting a product out- there is a _big_ difference between having a partner who is right there with you in the trenches coding across the room, and a partner who comes by every day and says "well, uh, how's it going?"- you spend the next hour trying to explain the latest hangup etc. and then they say "well, let me know if the schedule changes- I've got some great customers lined up..." or whatever.

Sometimes that situation is unavoidable, but I guarantee it is not optimal.
I think one factor is ego. Another is how much to give up?
thats not my motivation! thats a mistake if its your only motivation behind starting up...

and your argument reveals selfishness, something I would avoid when searching for a cofounder.

Mutual vision, trust and willing to work hard together, support and help each other is amongs the secrets when peeking cofounders. Other than that, its obvious you are searching for employees.
working with != partnership. I really think it's a different beast. I've also been in bands and occasionally someone would say "I'd love to partner up with you guys and manage your band or do PR for you guys." If they had experience playing or producing music, we'd give them a chance. If they listened to the radio and fantasized about being in charge of the back-stage passes for the next big band, but had never picked up a guitar- no chance.
Competence is of the utmost importance, but it'd be a mistake to ignore those who don't hold the exact same skill-set as you. A startup needs a variety of talents, and it's usually the case where there is some member of the founding team who is the most brilliant hacker, or someone who's great with user interfaces, or someone who has a knack for design and testing.

I do agree that your partner should have a hackers' passion and be technically competent. You don't need someone that's all theoretical and won't get down and dirty with some code.
Ego can go, but confidence stays.

Compromise is a complicated matter. Don't compromise on your good ideas. There will undoubtedly be conflict among founders regarding vision and method, but the best relationships will work through those.

If you don't disagree with your team at some point, you're not contributing enough.
This would not violate our copyright laws.

Refer to Amazon.com's product reviews as an example. There is plenty of information available on a book or movie, submitted by users -- spoilers too. As long as there isn't verbatim material provided in whole contexts, I see no problem. People review books all the time; they even summarize its entire content.

If I misunderstood your idea's intent, let me know.
A couple of my favorites:

Limits of Anti-Phishing:
http://www.w3.org/2005/Security/usability-ws/presentations/37-google

How to Design a Good API:
http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf
True- Maybe I should add though it doesn't take all that much to be as technically competent as I am ;)
I've heard that story before, but never thought about how it could be applied to startups. Interesting.
The only thing I disagree with is your idea that technically literate means being a programmer.

Jesse James Garret, the guy who coined the term AJAX and came up with the design philosophy around it, isn't a programmer. But if I were a great programmer then he'd certainly be someone I'd want to partner with. Literacy just means the understanding of a certain discourse. Once you've taken a couple college level programming courses then you can pretty much understand everything a programmer is doing, but that doesn't mean you always know enough to do it yourself.
New YC Startup: Buxfer
I'm trying to apply this to Reddit, but I'm drawing a blank.
People will probably copy some material verbatim even if the terms of usage policy says otherwise. And if sufficiently many people are contributing to information associated with a book, after a while those copied parts can add up to a significant portion of the book.

But even if material isn't copied verbatim, what happens if significant portions of the book are revealed anyway? This may not even be a summary. The contributed content may end up being larger than the book itself.
1) no way to tell which are new posts - I cant believe it didnt occur to you to color old or unread posts differently! Idea - change the color of every post title as it ages, from Yellow to black. (or light gray to black).
2) poorly organized. I had to reply individually because I wasnt sure they would see it. See here
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1890
3) what is showdead?
4) there seems to be a clamor of links to articles.
Buying Tribe a "wrong bet"
"There have been several businesses that successfully grew by paying both new and inviting users. The economics can make this more difficult for media models than commerce models. However, it can drive a lot of new adoption, and did for AllAdvantage and Paypal."

I'd hardly call AllAdvantage a success story.
if you can get enough bits of books posted to your site that publishers start to notice and want to sue you, then you would be wildly succeeding. even so, this all sounds like fair use to me.
I really like the ability to just use my existing accounts, it was enough to have me take a little look around.
A number of people have gotten married through Flickr...

http://www.flickr.mud.yahoo.com/photos/matt/1424625/
If my bank allows it, can you access my bank account?
I think this is a great idea that can even upstage Quicken.
I stopped using Quicken - it is a pain to have duplication.
However I cannot annotate my transactions with my bank. (this cheque was a donation for charity http://lydiapress.com).
As a result, actually, I dont keep track of my account (shouldnt confess this here!)
Yes, it is a great idea because IF I GIVE YOU READ-ONLY ACCESS TO MY ACCOUNT, WHY SHOULD THE BANK CARE? WOW!
I'm imagining two intersecting lines. The positively sloped line represents the amount of time saved increasing as transactions of this kind increase. The other negatively sloped line is the cognitive overhead of using the system, i.e. higher when the number of transactions is small. I'm trying to figure out where exactly they cross, because while I like the system in theory I can't really see myself using it, at least at the moment.

P.S. Congrats on launching to the founder(s).
Interactive Knowledge Sharing Website
Java has harmed Unix but helped Windows win
'... Wednesday, August 09, 2000 ...'

Pretty sure this article was written pre fogbugz while Citydesk was still in development. Look at the date on the article posting.
Congrats to the founders for building and launching a very nice-looking site.

At this point though, I'm more likely to use something like wesabe for keeping track of my spending since it understands my existing online bank accounts rather than requiring me to enter transactions by hand - that seems like a killer feature to me since my spending these days is overwhelmingly electronic.

[disclaimer: I haven't used either tool. My opinion is based only on having seen the online demos.]
101 areas where startups can create value
well said, volida!
FreeMind -- free mind mapping software
Yes, I am wasting a lot of time at this site.
However, I have also gotten some great advice for my situation - and who knows, I may also meet a co-founder(s) here!
Wow, I have a half implemented (and nowhere near as nice-looking) version of this app on my computer. I guess I should have searched a little deeper before starting to convert my finance spreadsheet to a web app... back to to brainstorming for me.

I suppose I better sign up, then!
This software is useful for solving big problems, like writing a book or creating a business.
Kind of a goofy list, but occasionally when I'm bored I'll glance at a few and brainstorm ways of making each activity more efficient, easy, fun, etc. Good way to stimulate creativity.
How I Became a Big Wheel
Why do you want to pursue a startup?
For me, it's all about creativity. I love trying out new ideas.
Entrepreneurship is the only way to transcend the class structure of American society.

Without college educated parents, you are born into the lower (working) class. You can move up to the upper (professional) class in a generation by getting a college education and working a professional job for a major corporation.

A lifetime of corporate work provides no means to advance to the ownership (ruling) class. I refer to people like Rupert Murdoch, Dick Cheney, the Waltons, and Bill Gates as uber-capitalists -- they have enough money to truly make an impact on society at large.

I'm starting a company now so I can be able to make a true positive impact on the world in my lifetime.
Google introduced new fraud measures (again)
Creating something of great value to others is the ultimate challenge. It makes everything else look like a joke.
Two reasons, which both boil down to "freedom":

1. So that I can spend my time implementing my own vision rather than someone else's.

2. For the money, which gives me the freedom to decide who is worth impressing.
I am sorry to say it, but most Indians are conformists - they are not creative. It's the culture. The nail that sticks out is beaten down. Americans are simplistic.
I'll bet the graphic artist didn't come cheap.
What I want to know is why have they waited so long to hook up Adwords and Checkout. Instead of bidding on $x/click, someone who signed up for Checkout could instead sign up and bid on $x or y% per sale, effectively eliminating fraudulant clicks.

I guess the trouble with this is that you'd still be able to send a truckload of traffic at a competitor to decrease the Google cut per visitor. But it would totally eliminate people artifically increasing their Adsense clicks, and if they optimised for the Google income per Adsense view on a site by site basis, then the long tail would effectively be safe from people trying to decrease the rank of their competitors. Not to mention that the data from the long tail would give you an excellent idea of who is being hurt by artifical traffic (you could even use the data from the long tail to rank the main Google search ads which would eliminate the problem entirely, perhaps at the risk of a bit of inaccuracy).
Meaningful work that inspires others.
"Good to Great" is NOT? The Halo Effect and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers
Is this essentially different from being an incubator? I thought those died out with the bubble.
Looks a little too cartoony for a financial app. Actually, umm, if Windows media player looked like this, I'd say the same thing: Too cartoony. Just to give you a baseline.
a "subscribe to feed by email" option will help !

Hardly takes any time to plug the feed to FeedBlitz/FeedBurner.
People are forced to use tools that are inadequate or clumsy. I want to help those people.
I read Buxfer's review on TechCrunch earlier today; congratulations to YC and the founders on getting featured there! :) The site looks great but they have some tough challenges ahead since Buxfer is coming late in this market.

The key is to resist the temptation of copying features off their larger competitor (Wesabe) and build something different. I think a great lesson we have all learned from Reddit is that a startup can survive in the face of tough competition merely by filling the gaps left by their larger competitor. So far Buxfer seems to have done a great job at it :)

- Jawad Shuaib
It fits who I am as a person better than anything else that I've tried.

I don't think I can avoid it... I've tried, but I keep coming back to the idea of starting a business.

I enjoy the creativity and the stimulation.

To solve the money problem.
I don't want to be pre-Matrix Neo.

Actually, the last company I interned with was a very nice place to work. The atmosphere was casual, the people were great, and I found lots of interesting things to work on.

Some people fear that a life comparable to Dilbert's awaits them if they get on the corporate track. Others, including me, realize that one can be creative and successful in the corporate world.

But that's not for me. Nothing compares to building and actualizing my own vision. I mentioned my internship earlier -- it was a great experience, but I realized that this wasn't for me. My co-founder feels very similarly and it was from this mindset that our best ideas came about.

Founding a company has always been one of my most consistent aspirations and there's never been a better time to go for it. And my final reason: it's fun as hell.
I am slightly biased since my favorites were the onces that were applied to social networks:
1) A social network caught in the Web.
2) Evaluating similarity measures: a large-scale study in the orkut social network.

I also loved this other research paper I read yesterday on collaborative intelligence, "Item-based Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithms" available at http://www.paulperry.net/notes/cf.asp

- Jawad Shuaib
Alex, have you been using this? I'm always looking for better tools for laying my thoughts out, but I have yet to find one that feels natural enough to beat a big sheet of paper and a pencil.
California Home to Quarter of Top 100 Alt Search Engines
Read/WriteWeb is a great blog. I recommend that anyone interested in startups should subscribe to Richard's rss. He usually writes analytical articles on startups (very different from TC, Mashable, GigaOm, etc). Enjoy,
STEVE BALLMER: "I'll be US president in 2008."
New Ycombinator startup Pairwise of sites Likebetter
The Top 5 Pros and Cons of the Web 2.0
Wow it is so fun and a really addictive

http://cutepairmatch.blogspot.com
Yes, I'm currently working on two separate books in this application and a bunch of other things. I've found that it actually lets you have more complex ideas than you would be able to have by starting with an outline (or god forbid just freewriting). The idea is that writing should be about ideas, and words are only there to express your ideas. Because of this it doesn't make sense to start putting pen to paper until you figure out what you believe. And it's a lot easier to figure out what you believe what you can drag and drop pure ideas around instead of mucking around with text.

Concept maps are another tool that lets you do this, but since writing is fundamentally either flat or hierarchical in terms of how you express ideas, I think mindmaps work better. (Concept maps are essentially like thinking in 3D, which becomes a problem when you need to translate your 3D ideas into 2D writing. Also, a lot of concept maps end up with really murky causality, which kind of defeats the whole point which is to clean up your thinking.)
Likebetter
Joel Spolsky talks office space; might rent to startups.
How many guys will do hotornot really :P
Guess will be a massive hit among the college crowd

http://morecute.com/?channel=46
Google sucks man - they cant stop talking they are pos
basically

http://morecute.com/?channel=46
User 'likebetter' seems to be a representative of morecute.com (YC-backed likebetter.com's competitor).

It seems they've been trolling about the net causing the real Pairwise team some headaches. More info here: http://blog.pairwise.com/2007/02/19/on-being-stalked-by-a-fellow-startup-an-open-letter-to-morecutecom/

(summary: this is spam, guys.)
I've been using this to map out ideas for my startup, too...
Because I don't feel like doing anything else.

-Zaid
Did you not notice that we use nofollow links?
Wow this is so kewl... This stuff does work.. Good job Paul graham... Google doesnt respect nofollow ;)
We do not make software to get links - we make real useful software OK
And (for me) to create something beautiful. The products; the processes and machinery of the business; the carefully crafted image; the thriving corporate culture; the systems for watching the market, the competition, and the systems for maximizing the money that you and your employees can thrive on. To see someone you've never met seriously passionate about your product. To be able to craft and share the results of your imagination- having a piece of yourself in the hands of thousands- enriching their lives and creating opportunities for them.

All of it created with sweat and anxiety, most aspects failing at some point and being brought back from the brink. I can't think of a more complex system to build- needing inspiration and creativity and luck in so many disciplines- with unlimited capacity when you finally get it right.
Well kewl now we have a ground to discuss it
Danielha it is not spam... Please read what Likebetter does.. it sues Morecute.com :) This is the internet. if you want to know what really happened... look at morecute and then likebetter...
and we are making cool stuff and innovative things that likebetter is not doing.. likebetter is ajax bait for VCs period... We have a real product
Compare alexa ranks
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=morecute.com
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=likebetter

And no one invented photos and links - Tim Berners Lee did... just stop hogging the net will ya.. it is a free world... if you like Morecute jus play on
I think it looks great. Well done taking the concept and getting it to the "just right" stage without overdoing it. The start page/index is perfect- in 5 seconds I know pretty much what it does and whether or not it's something that I've been waiting for.

Does anyone over there mind if I ask what the plans are for monetization? Paid subscriptions at some point? Tie-ins with other financial institutions like credit card companies? Ads? (it looks like too clean of a site for that, but I'm sure you could make it work if that's the plan).
So is the idea basically to integrate social networking with computer networking by letting you associate your network identity with your real-world identity? That sounds a lot like UNIX finger. Considering that many people, myself included, still maintain .plan files despite the small number of people who know what they are or how to access them, I guess that's not a bad idea.
From what I can tell a lot of this CF stuff starts with a machine learning algorithm and data about likes/dislikes, making filtering a classification or search task. Is there something that differentiates it from the usual machine learning challenges? Like dealing with users interactively, perhaps?
Greenspun's ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up
This is Ashwin - one of Buxfer's founders. Glad you liked the look of the site.

We do allow you to import transactions from your bank and credit card accounts - provided they are in Quicken or Microsoft Money format. Integrating directly with banks is on the cards as well.

One of our goals (besides tracking shared expenses) is to be able to better reason about cash transactions. Our experience as students indicated we spent close to 30% of our income(!) on coke and coffee combined. To capture all these little transactions, we allow reporting expenses via text-messages. (More ways coming soon!) Ultimately the goal is to understand *all* your expenses completely at a central location.
I could use something which cost about 1/10th what this knife did to the same end. But it's handmade...

Amazon has those knives at 55 dollars. Maybe he's using a different model, but you aren't going to get a handcrafted knife for 55 dollars. It would take at least a day to make from raw materials, and that's not much of a salary in France.
Hedlund's startup ideas: "..find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web.."