skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Paul, I read in a blog where I found the link, that it's $500 a month per person ($200 rent + $300 services), non-negotiable. That blog post was written in 2005, so I didn't want to put the prices down as they may have gone up (or maybe it became negotiable.) What do you think about $500 a month per person to be located in Boston on the red line between Harvard and MIT? And they allow you to scale to 30 people, as well. Some people here have said they wanted to create startup hubs for $400 rent in Silicon Valley, so this seems to be very similarly priced. All offices have windows, and you get unlimited use of meeting space. Maybe one could get part-time help from some Harvard, MIT or any Boston college students since it's right there.

From what I gather, yours is the better program. Although somebody could probably save up 5 or 10 grand and join the CIC for 6 months with a prototype and show it off to different investors there, they probably wouldn't get much of a better deal than you offer.

What I think makes YC better is that you have all software guys, while they have all sorts of startups, and the people they interviewed seem to be in the 40's, which is also a change from the ages of the people who I saw at startup school.
It doesn't seem as though he was actually going for a "parting the sea" effect. If that was the case, he probably would've spent quite a bit more time than 66.5 hrs on it. My first opinion was that it is actually one of the better designed websites I've seen recently, although everyone seems to be going for the green and orange scheme lately. While I agree with what omouse said about social networking sites not needing to be aesthetically appealing, there will have to be some features that people look for that differentiate them from one another. Simple and beautiful are two that come to mind, although that is a pretty subjective matter.
Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye
No, I've never heard of them either.

I'm extremely biased, but I would put Gustaf (heysan) on that list. One of the nicest guys I have ever met.

and ironically, I would have to put killerstartups.com on that list as well. Interesting.

Thanks for the post.
It depends on how he's defined the implicit quote syntax. You could make it so it doesn't have any effect in a def-macro call or something but that increases complexity just a tiny bit for a feature that doesn't do much for the developer.

Off-topic-ish: The square brackets are kind of neat but not for that purpose. If instead he allowed the interchange of square brackets and parenthesis, i.e. (+ 2 [ 3 2]), that would be neat and useful...it would allow someone to differentiate between nested lists slightly. And of course, it's easier to click [ instead of Shift+[ to get ( :p
It reminds me of something I once read on a job posting:

"Cornell University is a bold, innovative, inclusive and dynamic teaching and research university where staff, faculty, and students alike are challenged to make an enduring contribution to the betterment of humanity."
I'm sipping. :)

When time permits I'll be looking at Scala.
Bootstrapacitor.com (now presumably dead, but of similar complexity to Mingle2) was done in about 66 hours. So was Scrutiny (http://www.amherst.edu/~scrutiny/).

The key phrase in his article was "This is the fifth site I've built using CakePHP so I know my way around." Bootstrapacitor was my second site using web.py, my 4th Python app overall, and reused a lot of code from an earlier Python webapp (which still hasn't launched yet, after 3 months and 200-300 man-hours in development). Scrutiny was my 3rd PHP application - the second (FictionAlley.org) took several hundred man-hours over 3 years to finish. (The first was a minor automate-this-task script and took about 30 hours over 4 days.)

You always become much more productive once you're familiar with your tools. The "writes code as fast as he can type" state that we all aspire too is nothing more than knowing your tools and knowing your problem domain so well that coding is just the act of connecting them. I've found that I can write about 100 lines/hour under these conditions (this is like 20 WPM, well under typing speed). 66 hours at 100 lines/hour is 6600 lines, enough to build a fairly full-featured app.
Considering what business they're in, you'd think they'd do their own PR.
I do. Though, my breakdown came during my sophomore year of high school and by college I had already pieced myself back together and put things in perspective. Incidentally, "Why Nerds are Unpopular" was one big factor in helping me do so. I found the essay through Slashdot; it was the first I'd ever heard of Paul Graham.
As an alum, makes me wince. One of those "mission statements" where they have to get too much into one sentence, and it's all generic anyway.
Do not upmod! (Testing new greasemonkey script)
Some photos of PayPal in its early days
Pentagon may acquire your Startup (read comment)
hey nick,

cltl2 is definitely a good idea - in fact I think that's what I should do next for sure. Thanks!
Unfortunately the tech industry is full of ego maniacs who can't work well with others. It's something about working with computers that makes people think they're smarter than everyone else.
mediatemple has been offering ruby on rails for a while
Comcast Teams Up With Zimbra, Plaxo To Launch SmartZone Communication Hub
Zimbra to serve email to Comcast customers
This is kind of big, I think. I haven't heard of deals of this magnitude happening with the Google Hosted Services/Gmail stuff.

If more ISP's follow Comcast's example, Zimbra could be in a great situation.
www.Ajaxwhois.comm
Conspiracy Theories (cartoon)
New measure of success for social networks: someone makes a song about you (The Facebook Song)
Is YouTube Down the Tubes?
Is it really that they "run out of steam" before finishing their projects? It seems to me that they finish all the interesting problems of the original project and are distracted by an even grander problem that still has unsolved problems. The original project's interesting problems have usually been solved and all that remains is mundane crap.

I also think the extended periods of melancholy are avoidable. After all, the BBM is melancholic because the real world he has to deal with is phony and filled with bullshit, not because he gets a kick out of wearing black lipstick and posting emo entries to LiveJournal. So what's the solution? Save him from the phony bullshit. Put him (or yourself) in an environment where he is stimulated and working on real problems without having to play society's idiotic games. Academia is my standard example of this.. there's just a lot of hoops to jump through to accomplish nothing, and the metric of GPA doesn't actually correlate to anything useful like "knowledge acquired" or "mastery of the subject", but instead reflects the amount of busy work done by the student. Learning is simply a happy side-effect that might happen while maximizing GPA. Even professors seem to spend a big chunk of their time just producing "epsilon papers" that contribute nothing other than an impression that the professor has been busy. </standard academia rant>

Anyway, put the BBM in a suitable environment and they'll be melancholic less of the time. I think.
You can't have deem a startup hot just because a bunch of your startup-peers vote on it. It's only hot when the rest of the Internet finds it valuable. Plus, I've haven't heard of any single one of those.
Article requires registration. Here's the text:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46293/Tech-Investors-Cull-StartUps-for-Pentagon-New-York-Times
not sure how much this has to do with startups, but if we're going to get on the topic of facebook songs: http://youtube.com/watch?v=6FahBBnfHAQ
The best is "New Friend Request" by Gym Class Heroes, about MySpace. Probably the only social network song to be released by a major label.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FT7S15UgSM
By displacing it with positive pr;)

So we must wonder... what are they trying to cover up? hah
Am I the only person left who thinks that blogs are generally a big waste of time? At least if some product I'm designing fails, I will have advanced my skills by creating it. Is having written a failed blog supposed to make me a great writer?
Venture Voice with John Bogle (founder of the Vanguard group)
The "paste" button? Never would have guessed.
I really can't stress how highly I reccommend this interview if you are interested in the finance industry. John founded the first index fund after noticing that the stock market invariably outperforms managed funds after fees are taken out. The same is true today, and the Vanguard group manages around 750 billion dollars with fees around 0.2% (an order of magnitude less than average managed fund fees). Truly inspiring guy.

I couldn't help but wondering after listening to it whether there could be potential for a startup here. It would require a lot of connections in the finance industry and a significant amount of capital, but there's a clear path to profitability and only two real metrics - getting people to trust you (require some kind of insurance?) and keeping costs low. Just how cheap could you make something that maintains an index portfolio?

My other thought was maybe he could offer 'fund x + 0.2%' packages - something that tracks the performance of a specific managed fund, after fees, and tacks on a bonus 0.2%. That would be a cool hack that in the long term you could make a significant amount of money from, but there's always the potential that a fund will do exceptionally well in the short term. Food for thought anyway.
I think he was focusing on raw implementation time.

You could really spend thousands of hours in design of something with so many connected parts as a dating site.
gather -- social networking for adults - 10M$ VC
It seems way too complicated...
"""These days, enlightened web users want to see a "puritan" approach"""

I believe that this is now absolutely critical. I'd like to see some research to back this.
It's a good article, and he sounds like a smart/decent chap. Funny thing is, from the earliest days, I've learned Pavlovian-like to respond to the word "Tripod" on any webpages by clicking the red "X" as fast as possible. Oh, well.
Silverlight Poll Results: Majority Impressed, But Not a Flash Killer Yet
Windows Live Hotmail launches at last
It takes me more like 30 seconds to judge a site.
Microsoft releases new hotmail, now looks more like GMail/Yahoo
Yes, "bad marketing". It's been possible for years to significantly improve the look and feel at the scripting level, but they never bothered. Also, the fact that it took them so long to figure out that Gnome and KDE were where Unix was headed and get with the times is not a good sign that they have the marketing skills necessary to stay current.
Thanks for the link. I have been enjoying working in a shared open-space work space in Vancouver http://abetterplacetowork.com and looking for something similar in Cambridge
A good read! Tarver writes extremely well. And while it echos the voices of what sounds clearly like a cynic, it's pretty convincing and concerning. Sad thing is those concerned few are usually those who don't play by the rules and you end up with little might. But what the hell, someone's gotta fight.
Google TechTalk Showcase - Categorized collections of all tech talks
YC is already changing a couple of variables in the funding function, so it probably makes sense to try and not modify the others, if they can help it. Also, 20 somethings are going to be pretty happy in places like Boston or SF. They're fun places to be at that age.

Once you start getting older, though, you either have a lot of money, or those cities are just too expensive. And even with a lot of money, they're a rat race - a millionaire stuck in traffic is just as stuck in traffic as the minimum wage worker in the next car over.

So I'm happy to see someone giving that kind of model a go and wish him the best of luck.
MySpace did it, I will too
I just realized he also has a 58 page book called Lucky or Smart http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/140006290X/104-7347251-5666331?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Contents:
Chapter 1: Start a company that is innovative, morally compelling and philosophically positive; this will attract smart, motivated people that will do great things because they are smart and motivated (Enron aside)

Chapter 2: you are born an entrepreneur or a manager - accept who you are because you cannot change

Chapter 3: entrepreneurs are B students, managers are A students - unfortunately I was a B student in high school and an A student in college, something the author does not address

Chapter 4: strive to be good enough to survive; if you do you will be bought by a company that can make you great; but don't be great on your own or you will not survive

Chapter 5: have faith

Chapter 6: don't take no for an answer

Chapter 7: entrepreneurs don't have power - "get used to it"

Chapter 8: stay calm and be gracious in difficult situations

Chapter 9: read the WSJ daily, the NY times on Sunday and pick one other reputable weekly or monthly business magazine - and don't read any other form of press

Chapter 10: always sell

Chapter 11: know what you don't know

Here are excerpts from Amazon reviews:

Review 1:

"This small book from the founder of Tripod is worth the hour it will take you to read it. Peabody was a `B' student and suggests that successful entrepreneurs are almost always `B' students: good at lots of things, experts at none. To compensate, `B' student entrepreneurs need to hire `A' student managers (and coders and VPs), who are excellent a one or two things, to successfully take a startup to maturity. This revelation is not rocket science, and not an entirely new concept either, but it is very interesting to hear how this strategy played out for Peabody and Tripod.

Even though he made millions, Peabody does not boast or make the silly claim--like many Internet millionaires--to have known all along that he was destined for greatness. In fact he is quite humble: he readily admits he was making a lot of his business strategy up as he went along, and that with Tripod, it could have just as easily gone the other way and ended in failure.

The three salient lessons from this very short memoir of an entrepreneur: work very hard, hire the right people, and be smart enough to know when you are getting lucky."

Review 2:

"The advice he gives is mainly for Type-A personality entrepreneurs; Risk-taking, project-starting individuals whose main focus is getting product out the door so their effort can be called a success.

For anyone who does not fit that mold, this book is not necessarily speaking to you. However, even if its not directed at you, you'll still gain some insight into why people like Peabody behave and think the way they do.

What I liked most:

-- Always sell. As the person at the top of the organization, always sell.

-- Recognize which role is naturally in you: Entrepreneur, or Manager, and then excel in that role.

-- Know what you don't know. Don't try to buffalo your way through things. To me this is part of being intellectually honest."
Ultimate Web 2.0 Layer Styles - Free Download
Did he lose anyone else when he said "Ego is also the culprit when entrepreneurs cling to their role as founder rather than turning their companies over to more capable managers."?
Part-time founders more productive than full-time founders?
Do you think about your startup at work, and then rush home to implement, knowing you have a limited amount of hours? A lot of startups have begun this way.
I suspect the need of special syntax for list construction came from the introduction of currying. If you want currying you need to know arity of procedures, so you lose variable arity procedures such as 'list'.
You're an idiot.

It's not the most original idea, but it's executed very well. Good looking design, responsive site. What's no to like? It's not something I'd use, but it's cool that he built something.
Good design seems to be working for Facebook. LinkedIn is also reasonably well-designed (if a bit busy and inconsistent). MySpace is the only social networking site with egregiously bad design that is worth speaking of, and it won't last forever.
I think it's almost always a mistake to hope you can get your startup off the ground while working part-time. Usually people will only do the extremely hard (and icky) work necessary when they're presented with a sink or swim scenario.

"...Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day jobs, and most founders of successful ones do. If startup failure were a disease, the CDC would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs." -- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
Web 2.0 participation in America
Here's the follow-up:

http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006-05/msg00080.html

I've thought a lot about both pieces since they were posted to reddit a while ago, but haven't gotten anywhere. I'm not sure if knowing whether or not I have a bipolar mind is really useful in the end.
And where do you find such an environment?
Naturally, as a reader of YC news, I have also looked into LISP again lately. While I haven't really tried it yet, I found a LISP plugin for eclipse that is running SBCL on Windows. They claim to be inspired by SLIME. Not sure if it would be possible to get their SBCL to run on Windows standaline, but i was planning to use that plugin (sorry no link, but should be easy to Google).
Do you obfuscate JavaScript, and how?
For the time being I use this obfuscator: http://www.daven.se/usefulstuff/javascript-obfuscator.html but it seems to have bugs, and perhaps the obfucation could be better, too. Are there better alternatives (preferably open source)?
Nice, I was always turned off by the YC explanations I found, but this did the trick.

But the questions that's really not answered is: Is there anything useful for a programmer in pure CS, excluding AI? Does the ability to follow the gory papers at lambda-the-ultimate make you a better programmer (even if it is only for some obscure application)? Should I really spend a day getting intimate with the Curry-Howard isomorphism?
It will make you a better writer, yes - for exactly the same reasons. The more experience you have the better you become.
As a startup where would you host stuff? Dreamhost looks the cheapest?
Don't Assume Users Want All Ths Technology
Your time counts. You are one. Our time counts. We are many. It is selfish to consume our time by making us stutter over poorly written text.
Microsoft-Yahoo-Google - The Day After
Web App Cool, but Not Useful Enough? Try Data Onramps
I would not choose solely based on price and if you're looking at a shared server definitely not a place with ambiguous terms of service.

"If your processes are adversely affecting server performance disproportionately DreamHost Web Hosting reserves the right to negotiate additional charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of the offending processes."

Before you go with them call them up and if their capacities will work well for what you need to get started and always have a backup plan for scaling up immediately.
I agree on his point that web 2.0 names will look dated pretty soon.
Go and read Slashdot if you want to see posts like this. This is Startup News.
Too Hotmail to handle?
Keeping up with the (Dow) Joneses
Comcast picks Zimbra for online e-mail
Legal troubles mount for YouTube
Joost and Heavy sign partnership
I thought the advertising companies would just track how many ads are being downloaded from their servers? Also I don't understand how the comScore approach is better than Alexa? Both seem to be applications that run on unwitting user's desktops and monitor their behaviour.

Lastly, why are VCas looking at Alexa numbers if they could simply look at the server logs instead?
Zimbra looks like one impressive application - especially the Zimlets for integration to other services. Does anyone have experience with this product?
Zimbra - Zimlets "Mash-up"
Do they have a chance, or will Google eat them up? It looks incredibly easy to integrate with their environment.
I'd like to know what sort of day job he has that manages to squeeze 66.5 hours of project time into a week and a half.
The big thing about Myspace and Facebook is that they aren't overtly "dating sites." You can use them as dating sites, but don't have to tell anyone if you don't want to.

For most people, Free Online Dating is way too much like personals in the newspaper so they don't bother.

It'll be interesting to see if this works. My prediction is that it will wind up overrun by porn spammers.
I disagree.

I'm onto my second startup. My first one is (just) profitable and my second is showing very promising signs.

I put all the profits back into my businesses, so I work three days a week to pay my personal bills (and temporary business expenses). Fortunately, my job lets me go in whenever I want, which helps me juggle my time.

I think it works pretty well. It's meant I've never had to take any outside investment and yes, working my day job gives me time to reflect and come up with new ideas. It undoubtedly makes me more productive.
'... Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software. Not just because it's better, but because it gives them more control. Good hackers insist on control ...' ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

you might run into problems ( '7. Choosing the Wrong Platform' ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) and here (find people to work on it ~ Great Hackers, Ibid.).

Is this the server platform or client? The thing I don't get is also the extra cost in dollars. MS is not cheap.
Being able to go in whenever you want is a pretty key difference from most day jobs.
Case Study: Data Onramps (Twitter's API Evolution)
long tail of programming languages
The E-Mail Addict
Website Design Fundamentals
In Search of the Perfect Web Page
Times are Good Again, but it ain't no 1999
Great Weekly Podcast: This Week in Tech (TWiT) with Leo Laporte
TWiT #96: The Digg revolt, inside and out, why a Microsoft Yahoo merger makes no sense, and the My Space candidate...
The copy of Schneier's Cryptography book is a nice touch.

In The Paypal Wars, the author claims that everyone at the company was obsessed with Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
I suppose it depends how much you're into formal methods, etc. The YC, for instance, was developed (if memory serves) to obviate the need for assignment WRT recursion, because assignment makes it much harder to reason about programs.

In principle, CS theory can help you prove that programs are correct; Dijkstra was big on this.
You actually work a day job part-time and work on your startup full-time. That's the reverse, which seems a lot better to me. I still think the ideal situation is over-time on your startup alone.
Windows Live Hotmail Debuts
A sustained 100 lines/hour is insanely fast to me. Is that a common speed? I doub't i'd be able to cook up something on the same caliber of M2 in a mere 66 hours. Moreover, after 9-5 I usually feel completely beat (I fall asleep standing, in the train).

While M2 is arguably simple, in terms of coding, I'm still amazed at how quickly he had everything from brain dump to production. I had a seed idea which required me to think and rethink, read and reread, draw and redraw. And this whole process took a matter of months.

Is this speed within the norm though, considering you have a decent knowledge of the language you use? Does this time include rereading your code and rewriting for optimization?
if you have firefox and greasemonkey, this script might be what you're looking for: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8951
The problem I tend to have with cross platform "data driven" architectures is that the interfaces (both UI and API) end up at the lowest common denominator.

Now, to be fair, this is more an issue of cross platform than of data driven, but the two are so intertwingled in the real world that they can't be pulled apart.
I think Part-time founders are less productive, because they are tired from working for 8 hours. This causes silly mistakes and bugs to happen.