skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember a Forbes article on a new small airplane business, featuring profiles of the 5 founders. The youngest, if I remember correctly, was in his 40s, and he was an accountant. The engineers were all old. There is very, very little innovation to be had in the airplane business (the US military is, remember, still flying planes designed in the 70s) and success is dependent upon age--which brings a tendency to 1) Not make fool mistakes 2) Understand horrendously complicated, but mature, technology, 3) Have critical contacts, 4) Have personal wealth to risk.

Something like...say...Twitter. What 50-year-old would even consider doing something like that? And if a kid does it, and botches it, no one gets hurt. Clearly the trade-offs between enthusiasm and experience are at work.

Dr. Simonton points out that the periods of Beethoven's career that had the most hits also had the most misses

I can't find that in the article. If by "hits" he means contemporary hits, perhaps. But Beethoven's late stage was both sparse, and choked with his greatest works. Compare that to rock music...the rolling stones' past 30 years can't compare with any 3 consecutive months in the 1960s.
So is YC now doing rolling decisions in addition to rolling applications? I'd think they'd want to see all the applications for WFP08 before deciding which ones to invest in...
Are You a Ninja or a Pirate?
You know the part in Pulp Fiction where Uma Thurman's character states that you are either an 'Elvis man' or a 'Beatles man'. I couldn't agree more but I prefer to classify people as either Ninjas or Pirates. My wife recently blogged about this and our friend Kathleen introduced a new variable into the equation: Monkey or Robot.
This is surprisingly good. Partly because he used another technique you don't get taught in school: editing.

You're usually trying to make school papers longer. As soon as it's the prescribed length, you're done. But in good writing you do the opposite.
This reminds me of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn (http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-Thoma...). Kuhn dissects the idea of the "paradigm shift" in scientific thinking in the context of classical physics. It is basically argued that it takes people who aren't indoctrinated with the "old thinking" to come up with the "new thinking."

In physics, this usually turns out to be people younger than 26, often through seminal PhD theses. But not always. Sometimes people dabble in secondary fields at older ages and come up with significant breakthroughs, like Linus Pauling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling).

I'm not sure what I think about this regarding entrepreneurship. It seems that very successful entrepreneurs are not always coming up with revolutionary thinking, but instead executing well and paying attention to small details that make things work where they haven't before. As such, the age indoctrination barrier may not be as present as it is in physics. But of course there are the risk and drive barriers--people get settled and less willing to take risks and go through the arduous process of starting something new later in life.
There is very, very little innovation to be had in the airplane business

Have you heard about the Boeing 787 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6282820.stm)?
I knew we were headed for trouble as soon as I read "I was brought on to lead up the development of their software platform." That's the kind of thing founders should be doing.
Startup failure despite media coverage and good ideas
Last year I have heard thousands of people saying we have got the new big thing on the net. What I said in October 2006 was: "guys calm down, it's not gonna last forever". A year later I am here to say that I was right, AlumWire is completely down.
We're not doing rolling decisions or rolling applications. Nothing has changed, except that we had to put the application form online earlier this year because people kept asking where it was.

These guys weren't funded by us.
Internet, emacs, putty
For all intents and purposes, that's a 737 with an efficiency tweak. It's like going from merge sort to quick sort.

Have you heard about the concorde? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde (maiden flight: 1969, when the Rolling Stones were peaking.)
We found both to be the case, in one way or another. The entire process is definitely helpful in refining ideas.
You succeed fabulously with the first goal. Our application wasn't considered by ycombinator last spring, but the exercise of working though the questions has proven invaluable several times over the last few months. In another job I've seen $300/hour consultants do no better for a group than that application form did for us - and we considered that consultant good value.

Sorry to be blowing sunshine. But I'm sure you thought through that application form carefully and you should know that it's effective.
I just use cron for asynchronous tasks, because it's less complex to write for (just write the script to do the task once, after all), and any unix will already have cron running for other things.
For all intents and purposes, that's a 737 with an efficiency tweak. It's like going from merge sort to quick sort.

Is it? It's an all-new design, using a new material for the first time, etc.

I didn't mean to be so blunt in my first reply, but there are tons of improvements that can be made in that industry, especially if you look at old problems with new eyes.
If you can do reasonably rapid development with that, more power to you. :) At least the result should be fast.
Sometimes I think humility is a hindrance to an entrepreneur. But it's good to be reminded that you should only put your humility in storage, not get rid of it completely.

I was speaking to an older friend (late 60s), and told him I had quit my job to start a new venture. I said it felt like stepping off a cliff. He replied that he understood, he felt that way when he had to flee the Ukraine in the middle of the night leaving everything behind.
Rails-like database migrations for Python
I saw one of my lead developer / architect became a project manager, within three months he wanted out of that role and came back to design and coding job.

If this "Lead Developer" role involves designing, prototyping, trying out new technologies, then I would say take it as you still be coding as part of the job.

Even if it involves analysis and knowledge management and you haven't tried it before and there is an option to go back to what you were doing, I would give it a try.
Has anyone ever tried to pitch their idea/website on a reality T.V. show such as American Inventor? I was a pitcher/presentor on CBC's Dragons' Den (here in Canada) and one of the presenters pitched a job website called JobLoft...

any thoughts or storys?
Fred Wilson: Venture Fund Distributions - Cash versus Stock
Bizjets have been using those materials and avionics for years.

If you want to talk about all new designs and brilliance in aerospace, look at Burt Rutan.
Can you elaborate instead of posting a vague disagreement?
Is a PMP valued in IT?
I see many people getting a PMP, is there market demand for it? Do startups look for PMP candidates? Do big companies hire PMPs? I have heard that a PMP in IT does not do as much a PMP in contruction. What do you think?
It is much more to have a lawyer draw up an agreement. You can register a company and get and EIN for about $150 usually. It's very simple and if you run everything through the business there should be some protection.

My businesses have been sued several times and I've never worried about my personal liability - and I've never been named in the suit.

I guess the real protection comes with insurance, which is the best idea if you are really worried about liability.

I'm not a lawyer.
Don't waste your time with American Inventor. It is a joke from the "American Idol" camp. They are just looking for laughs, not serious products:

http://www.geocities.com/american_inventor/
There seem to be more references to Lisps (Common Lisp + Scheme) in that thread than this one.

Has anyone previously using a Lisp for your startup since abandoned it? What were the reasons?
Chinese Internet Startups
The Chinese internet is thriving more than you think behind that "great firewall."
You're right, there is innovation in that industry.

And the point is: if a generalization about an industry is incorrect, it's not a good idea to use that as a logical foundation for predicting the age of entrepreneurs in that industry.
The Onion is not news at all, to be clear. It's just funny.
Biotech Startup: Making Gasoline from Bacteria
This would have been beneficial to learn in school, but my arrogance would have rendered it useless to me back then.
Love the image they have. Whoever made it should get a bonus.
What is a PMP?
Surviving in a Downturn
This is a classic case of making a really simple analysis complicated.

The reason for age was simple - as you grow up there are more dependencies which demand a share of your time and more responsibilities to live up to - which is what pulls you down. The age question was not about productivity. Given equal circumstances and responsibilities, there is no question that this thesis would hold true - however that is not the case !!

Sorry Marc - this time it was thought through a little tooooo much and the original reasons that started this debate were largely ignored. I hope you read this comment.
Even if TC were as bad as Valleywag suggests (which is unlikely considering VW's tendency to exaggerate), it would still be nothing compared to the record business.
For starters. You couldn't realistically completely open, Holland, say, to immigration from India and China without some adverse consequences. Between rich countries, people would likely flow back and forth enough to balance things out.
It depends on who you're asking. Big corps and upper management love PMP's because it's like having an MBA to them, somehow, they can't imagine that anyone else could do the job.

If you as programmers, PMP's are useless and a clear signal to avoid the company at all costs.

If you ask me, as someone who's been to a few courses, the PMP cert isn't ideal for IT. It lags behind in more up to date PM methods, and focuses too much on process and not enough on results.
This was a huge part, perhaps the majority, of Yahoo's revenue in 1999.
Facebook's (Evil?) Application Strategy
You don't seem to understand refutation. I'm not claiming your main point was that ad-supported sites are fads. I'm claiming that follows from what you say. And if something false follows from what you say, what you say is also false.
But there is a there there. Some apps are useful. People like them. The facebook app users get something they want, and a tiny minority click-through to ads (for facebook apps or other services), and a smaller minority actually spend money.

That makes it dissimilar to a Ponzi scheme: there is input into the system from people outside the pyramid.
Of course the advertising world is not a zero-sum game. In fact, the overall size of the ad market has been growing like gangbusters over the last few years.

Has it grown too much? Maybe so. It's still possible to argue - easier than ever, really - that Web ads have become seriously overvalued and that the whole industry will collapse when we figure out that the intrinsic value of the average ad is x and not 10x or 20x. That seems like a sensible theoretical approach, but Google took the fun out of the last round of these arguments by experimentally disproving them to the tune of several billion dollars, so I'm not surprised to find that theory is out of fashion and that the modern entrepreneur prefers to be an experimentalist. Darwinian evolution isn't fun for everyone, but sometimes it is the fastest way to explore.

And, yes, of course there are "economic realities". The number of users and their available attention is an upper limit to the growth of ad-based sites. In a recession we will get to explore the lower limits, and the Darwinian evolution will really kick in. But that's just the business cycle. That's not a "bubble".

A bubble is a nonlinear event in which otherwise rational people - some of the smartest people you know - choose to deliberately forget everything they know about business. They're happy to pay 2x for a company that they know is only worth x because there's a sucker down the street who will pay 5x. A bubble is where you're terribly tempted to join that crowd, because they are getting rich, while you're stuck being a middle-class Cassandra with a boring, profitable job.

What I see today is a crowd of people falling over themselves to proclaim the next bubble. That looks like healthy skepticism to me. Maybe even a bit too much healthy skepticism, like a public service ad that runs ten times every hour.

However insane their valuations may appear to us, we're still at the point where investors are debating the actual value of sites like Facebook and YouTube. It's a large, young, and unpredictable market, and even in non-bubble times there are plenty of irrational investors, so it's not a very sober debate. But rationality is still in the picture. Those who believe that YouTube has a fighting chance to become the next News Corp (another worldwide media company; $24 billion annual revenue) might well argue that buying the company for $1b is a good deal. I think that's a nutty argument, because my techie instincts tell me that there are several dozen Startup News readers who could clone YouTube in less than a month, or even a week. But, you know, I could be wrong. I was wrong about Google.
Are You an American Zombie?
"You can see the beginning stages of the disease in the graduates X dark eyes, shaking hands. Their first few years on the job will destroy what little soul they have left."
Are You Smarter Than a Caveman?
FeelImage Searches Flickr Based on Your Feelings
13 Simple Words That Could Change Your Life Forever (on accountability)
"The only person I can control is myself. So when I accept responsibility for something, I am giving myself power to change it. Yes, life will victimize me, but I cannot control all the random external forces that may harm me X I can really only control myself. Therefore, the position of accountability is the most powerful position of all because it encourages us to look inside ourselves and make necessary changes."

.."Sometimes, it's better to take responsibility, even if the fault is not your own. Only by taking responsibility for your problems can you take control of your life."
The #1 Secret to Coasting Through College
5D personality test: ninja pirate monkey robot zombie.

What could these things possibly have in common to make them used in the same fashion in metaphor and play so often? Maybe they all break the rules, in some way.
This one clears things up.

Here's where I think you "went wrong" (so to speak) in the first article:
you spoke of a possible downturn in the economy as a "dot-bomb". To us startup types, that says "party's over, give up your projects, go home". I know, you didn't mean that. Today's post made that clearer. It was the language you picked that caused a lot of the backlash. That, and questioning whether ad-based services are much more than a fad. :-o

Truth is, a downturn (self-prophetic or not) is always a possibility, and preparing for to insulate yourself is just good common business sense.

Saying "hey, it could happen, nothing's a sure thing" would resonate with everyone here, I imagine. Getting (perhaps too) specific and suggesting that the "Web 2.0" market (whatever that exactly is) will die Any Day Now is bound to get people irate because:

1- there is no actual reason to believe that there's anything going wrong in the web economy

2- you cannot have a 2000-style crash when the stock market isn't very involved with the businesses

3- just about everyone here is heavily invested in working the web economy, and so we don't take kindly to what we perceive as groundless doom-and-gloom.

Most of today's startupians want a buyout as an exit strategy -- or to become self-sustaining for a while. To me, there isn't a lot of difference between your John Chow (www.johnchow.com), successful blogger, and your self-sustaining web business (I'll point to plentyoffish yet again). Er, except Chow doesn't make the kind of cash that the dating site does. Me, I'm not sure I'd mind that much. I'll take small success over none.

The 2000 dot-bomb happened because of three interconnected reasons, in my estimation:

1- all the dumb, no-profit businesses burned through their VC money

2- the stock market got impatient and wanted to see some profits

3- VCs got spooked and stopped funding

That won't happen again. Something else? Maybe, but it will have to be a cause quite different.

Myself, I'll bet if something causes us heartache, it will be a downturn in the economy, most likely caused by the population believing that we're "due" for a downturn in the economy.

As PG would point out, as long as we keep trying to find ways to create wealth (not so much by making literal $$ but by improving the world), downturns cannot last forever.
Hiring a VP of Engineering or CTO For Non-Techie (First Time) Founders
I had some back luck hiring a couple PMPs when I ran a consulting division. They're very much old-school in their methods. Big Gantt charts, PERT, waterfall, etc. Didn't match at all with my move towards a more agile approach and we had conflicts.

The best way I found to manage bigger projects was to get technical PMs who still coded, and break down the management into a few sub-teams, each of which could still work in an agile fashion.
Uh, television sleazy?

C'mon, man.

Even a hypermoral person like Oprah is pure sleaze if you know what you're looking at.
LiveJournal Founder Leaves (Probably For Google)
Google News Adds Comments: Why?
Couple things:

1. The #1 thing you can do to protect yourself in a downturn is "Don't spend money." I interviewed at a dot-com in 2002 and know a few others that it made it through. The features they all had in common were that they were just a couple of founders working for subsistence wages, they had simple professional offices (just a couple of rooms), their furniture consisted of yard sale castoffs instead of Aerons, and their only employees were an intern or two and maybe someone working mostly for stock. You see this with more famous companies too: Flickr, HotOrNot, del.icio.us, they were all just a couple guys during the bust.

By contrast, the VC-funded startup I worked at from 2000-2001 flamed out in a spectacular way, as did most of the other venture-funded organizations. The only VC-backed startups to make it through were the ones that had been started in 1995 and 1996 (well, except Google) and had already begun to dominate their market niches. Even those were touch-and-go for a while: Akamai stock was down at $0.50 for a while, and there was some serious doubt over whether Amazon.com would make it through.

2. "In the depression, people were so concerned about making money that they actually took on extra jobs instead of having fun, which as seen as frivolous and risky."

That's actually not true. The 1930s are often seen as the "golden age" of the motion picture, because no matter how hard up they were for cash, people still went out to the movies. Walt Disney got his start then. Bootleggers and bordellos also did well during the 1930s. Radio did well in fundamentals, but their stock was hit hard because they were trading at P/Es > 100.

The whole point of the depression was that there was no work to be found. Very few people worked extra jobs - even if there were jobs to be found, companies were loath to give them to someone who already had an income when 25% of the population was begging in the streets. Many people tried to supplement their income with eg. selling apples on the street, but even more stayed at home and sulked. There was a major sex role reversal: women often found themselves the primary breadwinner, doing piecework out of their home, while the men found themselves unable to get any sort of work and eventually gave up searching.
I didn't realize this until I read "On Writing" by Stephen King (http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Stephen-King/dp/0743455967/). An excellent book about the writing process, and even though he talks about writing fiction, it applies to any writing.
Taking the position doesn't stop you from being a hardcore hacker. Do you ever code outside of work? Projects like these tend to be a lot more engaging, at least for me, because it's something you chose to do versus company needs.

Hackers like to build things, so I understand your concern for taking on the position. But it sounds like you still would have opportunity to write code, just that most of your time is spent elsewhere.
why not. I personally love the discussion around news. From what I read, Google is only allowing comments from those related to the news article somehow. Could be a good means for more follow-up. Though, Im curious as to how well that is going to work out.
motivation, internet, music
How to Hide Your Email Address from Spam Bots
Very nice. But it doesn't have one of my favourite google calculator features: built-in physical constants -- things like "speed of light", "electron mass", "permittivity of free space", "planck's constant" and so forth.

I realize I'm in a bit of a niche here, but that's a very useful feature for me.
YC backed Disqus launches on VC Fred Wilson's blog (see comments)
Part of the problem was that the founders were not technical at all.
I think it's a cool idea. It doesn't appear that the blog author understands what it's about (or else he wouldn't talk about spam). It's only for people mentioned in the article. That allows you to offer corrections when misquoted, etc.
Tandem Entrepreneurs. What impressed me most is that they treated me with respect. It doesn't matter if you serve hamburgers or deliver mail, if you're treated with respect it just changes everything.
Great article! Very informative.. I think you just improved my prospects by 10% and that advice was free!
These articles are poorly written, and the content is not only wrong, it is self contradictory. Paul Graham was right in suggesting that these articles are trolls. Sadly, I think it is a case where the author of the troll is sincere.

The author describes three traits of businesses that will fail during a downturn: based on ad-based revenues, being fun or recreational, and being innovative. Earlier in the article he says: "Back when the sector was hit hard in 2000, there were companies that managed to survive and grow."

It is interesting to note that one of those companies that managed to survive and grow during the last downturn was ad-based, innovative, and also could be considered "fun" and "recreational." Google, anyone?
I agree that simplifying is warranted! I can't understand complex things anyway. Plus if you can't explain it, you don't understand it.. here I feel like I got some modicum
of insight.
Nobody ever writes of their YC interview experience. I promise to write about my experience.

If YC had an impact in our 'going for it' it was probably the encouragement Paul gave us in the phone call telling us we weren't accepted. pg was absolutely classy, and we really realized that YC was cheering for us even though we didn't get funding.
I've found that most IT managers consistently push certifications such as PMP and lead employees toward the path of management, because that is the same choice they made for themselves in the past.

I actually started working on a Masters in Program Management with a goal of also becoming a PMP to compliment the degree. After 7 courses (about half way through), I came to the realization that this path was leading me right into IT management... Something I quickly realized I wanted no part of.

I then shortly after jumped from IT to Software Engineering at my company and have become much more satisfied with my work responsibilities. Not to mention the ability to follow a technical career path, which doesn't exist in IT at my company. To date this has been the best decision I've made when it comes to my career. For me... technical is the way to go.