skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've thought of open sourcing some of YC's documents. The reason we haven't so far is that they're still getting tweaked. Which implies the earlier versions had holes. And the prospect of having other people use legal documents with holes is a lot more alarming than other people using software with bugs. I.e. we might get sued-- if not by benevolent founders, then by their evil investors.
> but we never will see a robot that makes a cup of coffee, never. I don't believe we will ever see it.

http://www.mrcoffee.com/productmodels.aspx?categoryid=1

> We will never ever have artificial intelligence.

I'll take that bet. Not much of a visionary, is he?

After the Apple II and its disk drive, he basically just... stopped. From the best... to a non-factor. I wonder if the plane accident affected him so he either lost the inclination or the concentration needed to be an engineer.
Then there's little reason to hold back, I think. It's a good opportunity for them to test on a moderately-sized environment with real users, right?
This is one of those ideas that sounds good when you apply it to everyone else.

Personally I want to own my shares immediately. You never know what's going to happen and what technicalities will let VCs/the board/others fire you before you're vested.
Yeah, thats will be really a nice thing to have for ycnews. Looking for a piece in the archive is
not convenient always.
I'll pull a qoute that struck me

"It's going to sound cliched and cheesy, but your apps should be an extension of YOU as a person. You should have an emotional connection to the app that transcends thinking about the mercedes it might fucking earn you one day, so that it will keep you interested and give you the motivation to love, care for and improve it."

I think there's a PG essay about this somewhere. OTOH I'm bother by the amount of pictures this guy has on his webpage. But I love the way he designs the UI's of his web apps.
They're not holding back. Their product just isn't done yet. The startups in the current batch are only 7 weeks old.
Top 10 Signs Your Startup Might Be On The Rocks
Number 1. You only work on your startup on weekends.
Number 2. Your co-founders take the weekends off.
Privacy Is The New Black
It's trivial to move off Feedburner. If Google does anything stupid the whole blogging world will freak and move en mass. I think Winer is frustrated at not having an open alternative to suggest, so he's reduced to fear mongering.
Prince Points the Way to a Brighter Future for Music
We are finished now - one typeface but bold on stream with a subtle graphic. Back to coding :)
Thanks again Vlad - we've just completely redesigned the logo and its up now. Back to coding
Do Entrepreneurs still need to write business plans?
Thanks again - we've redesigned - but in the font we have, the small f looked terrible in the skewed forward position - so capital for now (I know thats a bad reason - but we have to get back to coding)
We converted the tail into a subtle line that ends in the focus dot - sort of like a pan and click (on the focused item - which is part of our interface actually on the system)
Thank you all for the great comments! What we have now is so much better than our earlier versions.
Efforts might fail if Google doesnt participate in the auction and the carriers buy the spectrum. Traditionally Google has had almost no lobbying power. Recently they've been trying but still do not have the political influence that the major carriers do, who will likely lobby the FCC away from accepting the rules that Google proposed. If this is the case and Google does not bid, it will be a big blow to the US wireless industry. The existing stronghold that the carriers have is choking competition and therefore innovation. Its really frustrating.

On the flip side though, if the FCC accepts the proposed rules and Google does bid and win, it could usher in a new era of opportunities for startups. I think the prospect of this is very exciting..
Don't use purple unless you want a strong association with Sun Microsystems. The Favicon doesn't match the logo. The website looks like a weblog--that is not a good thing.

Honestly, there are a lot of problems with the site design. I am not a designer so I can't offer anything constructive. You need some professional help.
Your customers are boring people. You would be better served with a boring logo.
I have trouble envisioning a stream that is not slow and meandering. When a stream becomes fast, people stop calling it a stream.
Isn't this analogous to using open source software in a setting where bugs in the software might result in financial losses -- i.e. is there not a "NO WARRANTY, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK" clause that you can attach that is strong enough to shield you from any potential liability?

If you can get the legal angle sorted out, I'd personally find these sorts of documents useful. As for waiting for a version without "holes", that sounds like waiting until the software is perfect before shipping it :) It's not like a theoretically "bulletproof" set of templates would stop anyone from suing you anyway, if some company tanks and the investors are looking around desperately for someone to blame...
Learning from Touring Bands: Game business model suitable for other businesses too
Top Job Interview Questions (Great for introspection)
Monads for Lispers/Schemers
Norvig's Law: Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration will never double again
Actually yes legally. You never buy the software. You are always buying the right to use the software under a set of circumstances. OEM Licenses are licenses sold under the basis of being tied to a single physical piece of hardware.
I think the typeface you used is pretty bad, and the line that comes out of the "o" seems unclean when it terminates on the left side; I would suggest you remove the line and dot altogether, and use a thicker, simpler font.

Also, and I mean this with the utmost respect for what you do, but those colors are hideously bad. The background is too bright and distracts from the content, and purple is just genuinely a washed out and hard-to-read color.
eBay's first facebook app
Seven Ways Technology Vendors Blow the Sales Pitch
Every decision-maker is the target of a salesperson with a monthly quota and a PowerPoint presentation. But most of those pitches fail. IT leaders share the mistakes salespeople make when trying to get their business.
Scratch is a Programming Language for Kids
Don't think that would work unless you intend to be out there on a weekly basis. We as IT people can get around any system but throw an average user in front of something they haven't seen before and they refuse to even try to learn.

Also what I think most people are overlooking is that while you can run INFRASTRUCTURE services on any OS, those are services that everyone has. Most companies out there have some custom grown app that differentiates them. They use this app internally to do their specialized work on. These apps run almost exclusively on windows simply because it has not been worth it to develop them for the other operating systems.

Everyone is trying to find a reason not to use Microsoft, but it is my opinion that if you take an objective look at the operating systems out there (right now) it is still the best OS. Do you think it is easier to find someone to support windows or do you think it is easier to find someone to support OS X? If you hire an employee, what are the odds that they will be familiar with Windows vs Linux? Do you have an existing investment in Windows? If so how long a ROI is there on scrapping your existing config for something new? What are the odds that the software that someone suggests to you will run on Windows vs running on Unix? Why would you want to limit your options to only those programs that have web front ends when you can have a rich selection of Desktop programs and web interface programs?

Maybe in 10 years we will be at a point where Microsoft isn't in control but its also possible in 10 years that someone new will come on the scene and own everyone. While different can be good, different for the sake of different is not usually worth it.

Also as a side note: Google Apps may be a killer in about 5 years but right now its pretty infantile. I've really tried to use it but honestly OpenOffice or Microsoft Office as so much better its not even funny.
Andrew Chen: In a year, will Facebook be bigger? Or MySpace? Let's bet ;-)
While MySpace is over 2X larger (109MM instead of 47MM), the Facebook growth in the last month was 22% whereas MySpace's was about 4.3%. If this rate were to continue, then Facebook would pass MySpace in about 7 months.

Will Facebook overtake MySpace? How long will it likely take?
Fox News left their root image directory for the browse option
Fox News one of the premier news website has a security flaw, in which they have left their images directory browse able
yeah its not the price but the data that can be retrieved

:D
How much better would our society be if most of the frequencies were unowned and available for public use?
It looks a lot like the language with the new Lego Mindstorms kits, which does allow for functions. I think robotics is just about the best way for kids to learn programming because it's so concrete.
Build and here comes visitors do not work? why is that?
Does it mean it will not work without VC funding? And do names matter anymore with names such as Reddit and Digg or is it a word with a .com?
Oh, OK. I thought the demand of the search feature was obvious, so the reason you asked here was to see if there were enough demand to spend your time on the feature.

To answer the original question, yes, even simple word search would be great.
Facebook Advertising Brings Poor Results
Nick Bradbury: Indie Tip#1: Building something you need.
Functional Javascript, full-fledged and well documented.
VentureLaw blog
I think that disclaimer will be there anyway, so YC's concerns aren't about getting sued but about causing more harm than good.
But for the record I wasn't the one who downmodded you.
For me, the question that the startup should ask more critically is around the total dilution-to-exit. If taking Paul's money for 6% now reduces the dilution at some subsequent round from, say, 40% to 30%, then by my reckoning the founders end up with 66% instead of 60% of the final position. Key here is usually a combination of the value-add from the VC, and their ability to underwrite/cornerstone a good part of that follow-on round. (Although obviously this is only relevant if a larger follow-on round is going to be needed!)
that's what the double trigger is for
http://www.foxnews.com/images/root_images/

this was the best image... http://www.foxnews.com/images/root_images/071907_velocirapto...
Hmm, that is a tough call.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=mysp...

I think that if myspace starts doing publicity on the level that facebook is though, they still can stay on top.
I would take the same bet for Facebook
Interview with Yakov Sadchikov of Quintura - the visual search engine
Let me know when you do this.
Exploiting the iPhone
Think about it in terms of a Venn Diagram with building what users want as a big circle and inside it is a smaller circle labeled success. What you have noticed is that they don't overlap exactly. What does overlap it exactly is a profitable customer acquisition process. That is, if you can find a sustainable advertising channel that has a user acquisition cost less than your average revenue per user, then you win. If you are very very lucky, this process could of course be word-of-mouth. But in most other cases you are going to have to find or engineer a different type of process.

Back to the diagram. In the part of the bigger circle that isn't covered by the smaller one are unsuccessful startups that built something users wanted, but still weren't successful. This area can be grouped into traps that companies can fall into. There are many common ones. For example: (a) building something people want, but just not from you, e.g. because there are too many indistinguishable competitors and you don't win the crapshoot; (b) building something people want, but just enough of them to make a lucrative business; (c) building something people want, but they want it for free and other "business models" aren't lucrative enough. There are others too.

I have actually been thinking about this for a while, and am writing an in-depth essay on it, including approaches to overcoming it. However, while I was in the middle of it I got side tracked on a new startup idea :). So this is a preview. The short answer is, in my opinion, don't concentrate on "if you build it, they will come", but "if you build it, how will they come?"

(And to anyone reading this, I would be interested in feedback on this basic idea. It would help me make my essay better whenever I finish it.)
I don't understand why anyone would use scratch over Logo. The genius of Logo is that it has a certain logic and mathematical beauty which is actually made visible on the screen.
Will do. :-) I'm actually hoping to do something like this when microPledge goes live.
I didn't realize that saving 50% of your time while working so you can do things like start a start-up company in your spare time is boring. If that's boring, I'd love to see exciting :)
The average stay Facebook vs MySpace is what scares me. MySpace has an _insane_ average stay of almost 30 minutes. Facebook has a pretty embarrassing average stay of 13 minutes that tons of other sites beat.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+myspace.com?me...

One year isn't very long. I wouldn't take that bet.
Reddit comments DO NOT AFFECT KARMA.

Only submitted articles do.

I have no idea how you got any different idea into your head, but it was not through observation of reality.
You know why MySpace's average stay is so much longer? It's slow, and you have to click around to every single one of your friend's pages to see if they've updated anything.

Facebook simplified this operation with the news feed and their handy yellow update hilighting.

Consider it "shrinking the market"...
Who owns the stock while it vests, the company? As far as percentage ownership for decision making (if that even matters -- I don't now), how does that work?
They also have different demographic centers, which each use the Internet differently.
While MySpace is very ugly, it seems to be considerably more interesting than Facebook. At least people can express their individuality on MySpace. The Facebook design, if it were black, would be suitable for funeral announcements.

So my guess is that MySpace will prevail. Maybe they can't even be compared, as they do different things.
"Does it mean it will not work without VC funding?"

No, it means you need to work on some basic marketing. I don't know enough about this, but the other day at the grocery store I was thinking, "will these people around me want what I'm building?"

As for names, reddit means you have read it. Digg means you dig it, in the hipster sense of liking something. They aren't just a name with a dot-com.

But don't waste too much time trying to think of a name -- unless you already have a product ready.
Supporting Your Family: So Easy a Caveman Could Do it
You've heard the expression "bringing home the bacon", usually used when referring to a man making money for his family. This phrase goes back to the Hunter/Gatherers (or as I'll show you it should be phrased, the Gatherer/Hunters). Women would gather the food and materials that everyone needed and the men would go and hunt Woolly Mammoth and everyone worked an average of 2 hours each day. Now we can have an even better existence and we can do this by supporting our wives.
i bet you like a gillion dollars. you have no idea!
VC investment in information services up 52% since last year
Hazards of Scratching Your Own Itch
StartupMix: Post your story or link and we will publish it. You can stay anonymous if you wish.
That's a long article. Thanks for the link.
My problem was that I knew I wanted to search, and I knew that workarounds had been posted...but I couldn't figure out how to search through YCnews to find the searchers!
Writing pesky account management e-mails for your site
I'm going through the process of writing all the various e-mails our site sends out to users, e.g. "Welcome!", "Reset Password," "Confirm E-mail Address," "You have received a private message."

1. Is there a template for these things somewhere? All the little decisions about the best language to use are driving me nuts.

2. Is it wrong to (more or less) plagurize the "reset password" kind of e-mail from facebook, myspace, yahoo, or other popular sites? How have you guys gone about this?
Don't do that. Get them on your side with quick, honest replies when they write you. Giving them money sounds weird and desperate, and it's an exploit waiting to happen.
"I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major Googler" (Song)
I actually think this area is very important, and you shouldn't just grab a generic template. This is one of the only areas where you will interact with your users outside of your site, and it can really make a difference in how users interact with your site.

The diction of the emails can give people drastically different impressions about your service. Also, the specific way you layout the messages can have significant impact on what people do with them (delete immediately, click on the right link, etc.). I have been in the position of having huge sample sizes on these account management emails so that I could test different messages. I can tell you from experience, changing one word here or there, link placement, color, fonts, etc. can all have a huge impact. Unfortunately, most people aren't in a position to do useful experiments.

Because of that, I don't think it is wrong to essentially start with a copy of a site you particularly like in this area. I wouldn't just pick any site though--I would pick one that is similar to what you want in terms of style and one you believe has tried to optimize these processes. Technically, if an email was really long and you copied it all verbatim, that could be copyright infringement. However, it is doubtful anyone is going to care. And it is more likely that you will change the emails and they will be short so that the copying really won't constitute infringement anyway.
this is why having your marginal language of choice target a mainstream platform like the JVM or the CLR is nice - you can always use all the great existing libraries (Lucene, for example) while only slightly dirtying your code.
I'd like to see 2 modderation options.

1. The standeard up/down arrow -- does this contribute to the debate, is it a troll etc.
2. The agree/disagree poll. This could be a thumbs up/thumbs down.
If we were on the west coast, we'd have been funded by now.
The kind lies that we tell ourselves on the east coast.
That was pretty obvious. I guess it means you can't ride on the coattails of network effects after that point.
Your overlooking of the obvious here is probably due to the fact that you're not a kid. Logo is a programming language which allows you to accomplish a great number of things, so long as you know how to code.

Scratch, on the other hand, is more like an interaction environment with some coding constructs thrown in. Kids can get pictures display with animations and matching sound in minutes in scratch, which is way more fun than telling a 'turtle' to go forward 25 steps.
It's not for robotics at all.
There is plenty of interesting advice in lostgarden.com, if making games is your thing.
It's not just the investors here who are clueless. The reporters are too. The New York Times, Newsweek, and USA Today have all written about us, but our own local paper still doesn't know we exist. Sigh.
http://flickr.com/photos/7736808@N03/863738963/
It depends--there's no good answer since it didn't happen, but regulation can be a good thing. It created incentives to build out the types of networks that require massive cap-ex (cellular, TV broadcast).

If no one built these in the first place, we wouldn't have anything to build "open access" on.

Regulation turns out to be a bad thing when it turns into a function of political favors vs. public interest.

As with most things in life, regulation is good in moderation.
Microsoft's Gates conquers China or is it the other way around?
Of course you can. Once the Internet reaches 51% penetration, you don't think we'll be able to benefit from the network effects of connecting part (all just isn't going to happen...) of the last 49% of the planet.
Ideas about SMS/texting. Does it make any sense?
My school taught us all Logo in third grade, so I did actually learn it at a fairly young age. I enjoyed it at the time, although I admit I'm probably too old to give scratch a fair chance.
I don't know your business too well, but I would be really surprised if that was the motivation for your customers. Most business people are trying to improve productivity in their main business to improve their main business, not make time for a second business. Plus, why would somebody looking to start a startup spend money on expensive software--wouldn't they save their money to invest in the startup?
(a) building something people want, but just not from you, e.g. because there are too many indistinguishable competitors and you don't win the crapshoot;

Do you mean you built something people want but you yourself won't bother using it?
These comments are very confusing. Paul -- a simple question: doesn't the amount of capital offered/invested have a big impact on the calculation? Sure I'd give up 6% of my pre-natal company for $1 million. But would I for $1 thousand? No. Doesn't your analysis suggest that in both cases the calculation is 1/(1-n)? Yet the ability to add 6.4% value at exit given $1 million is vastly different than if given $1 thousand...
No, whether you yourself want it doesn't enter into it, although I do agree with the premise that it is easier to build something people want if you yourself want it too.

What I meant was that you built something people wanted, but 100 other startups built it too, and in such a way that they all are indistinguishable from the user's perspective. In this case, the users may indeed want what you built, but they just may end up getting it from someone else, i.e. "not from you."

Generally, I think a reasonable amount of competition actually helps a startup. But if you are essentially identical to 100 other startups, I think you have entered into a crap shoot trap. Perhaps a few of the 100 will ultimately be successful, perhaps none.

The way I look at it, I think it is a real trap when the likes of Yahoo and Google are falling into it and shutting down services they had previously created for lack of "traction in the marketplace." If their kind of seed traffic and press edge can't push them to the forefront, you can bet the standard marketing plan--submit to press/blogs/whatever and get some buzz with the early adopting tech-crowd and then raise advertising money to "cross the chasm" into the mass market--is equivalent to a lottery.
Are you talking about the East Coast?
Question: Do any of you use a software engineering "process"?
I've been involved in different kinds of software processes, and the most effective for small projects seems to be:

1. Talk generally about what we want to achieve.

2. Mock up some screens.

3. Agree on relevant technologies (language, platform, data store).

4. Assign responsibilities.

5. Commence.

Needless to say, this is not your typical "big company" software process. I've also been involved in more complicated processes that would involve multi-month-long documentation orgies, in which 50-150 page requirements and design documents would be made, remade, and remade (often for code that would total less than a thousand lines, and that was conceptially just a CRUD app).

Can any of you small-company types describe your process, if any? What is most effective for you?
If the cost of our tool is reasonable and allows deploying faster with a better product, it would make good sense for a startup to use it. We use it of course.