skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jesus is more insignificant to the universe than you and me.
I'm not looking for the perfect answer, just the answer to how you would get your first 10 (ten) users.

This would mean reviewing the actual use case and realizing that PR saying your software is easy to use isn't too compelling. Distributing CDs seems very 90s AOL, costs quite a bit of money, and doesn't have a great conversion rate.

Sorry, rms, if I've come across as too critical -- I'm just trying to ask the questions that need to be asked. It's a mental workout of sorts.

I'm still very excited to hear more about Parakey -- it's about time computers became useful!
Hello, I am Aur Saraf.

I was in a lecture about legal matters in starting up when I figured out that the easy and fool proof way to make money in this business is not creating a great product, but instead marketing yourself to VCs, getting some big money and spending it away pretending to do something.

Most of the start ups that fail, I think, aren't people that couldn't succeed in creating a great product and selling it - they're just people taking advantage of a very broken system.

Myself, I still think that creating a great product is more fun, more challenging and more rewarding. It also fits my moral code.

The site has some great info, but try not using it to hack a broken system - instead, use it just to have the smoothest ride through one of the best experiences our world has to offer.
Aur Saraf
Making a point that one is thinking about what is their low offer means he/she is only for short term gains and realizes their idea is not worth that much.
BitTrees - Tree Based Social Network
I must say, this was a revelation. It looks like the author has begun a new streamlined version called Mako: http://www.makotemplates.org/

The reason I tend to prefer this sort of thing to many of the other templating solutions is that it uses native code instead of custom tokens, which are limiting. It does make for less readable code and muddies the distinction between presentation and implementation. I think it works well, though, for startups building applications in which the majority of people building it are developers. It's just a very quick and powerful way to get the thing doing what you want. The designers can then be free to do more blue-sky design work (without templating code) that can be backported into the project. That being said, it can be very helpful to have a backing object in which to hide the majority of the heavy lifting. Then you can just sprinkle a little code in the template for the final polish.
Too many start-ups are doing trite and vacuous work. The world does not need another online calendar or customisable homepage or some clown wearing a webcam 24/7.

The comparitively small number of valuable start-ups are doing good work by tackling problems that are difficult, and/or have a strong potential to separate a customer from the contents of his/her wallet. It is not that hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and identify start-ups with good ideas.

The biggest discouragement for starting a start-up is the notion that you'll bust your ass for a few years and create a great product, but end up skewered by IP patent trolls, aggressively predatory competitors with deep pockets, professional compensation claimants etc. etc. etc.

Incidentally, I wonder how attitudes to starting a start-up will change when the current western bubble of cheap credit finally pops?
Last free WEB 2.0 tools for designers !
AWS is truly amazing.

I'm currently developing an open-source framework that allows theoretically infinite scalability utilizing round-robin dns, S3, EC2, S3DFS (allows mounting an S3 bucket as a local file system on multiple EC2 instances), SQLite (serverless embeddable database where each db is just a flat file).

S3DFS works at the block level and has read/write caching so is really fast. However, it requires a commercial license for non-personal use.

SQLite is amazing in it's power and simplicity. It will start to have issues on a high-traffic website, but I'm breaking each user into their own db file. That sounds really bad - but SQLite has a great feature that allows you to attach multiple databases together and run queries across them as if it's just one database (handy for site-wide stats, search indexing, etc). Also, since the db's are just flat-files - backing up is super-easy with tar gzip!

I'm using PHP for the coding, but anticipate other languages libraries to be built to use the system as well.

Help is welcome, just let me know if you're interested!

I was thinking of calling it infinizon - but that sounds kinda dorky - thoughts?

http://www.sqlite.org/

http://www.openfount.com/blog/s3dfs-for-ec2

Update: I just came across http://rightscale.com which is an amazing AWS console that allows you to control almost all aspects of EC2, S3, and SQS. Too many features to list here, but definitely a must see. I've been playing around with it and it works great.
That is not an issued patent, but rather an editited application. There is a good discussion of this on /. The consensus is that this will almost certainly NOT get approved, and that GWT is prior art (used internally at Google since 2004).

Like PG says, it would never stand up in court, even if the USPTO actually approved it.
Delphi on Rails?
Well, in the abstract, it's quite a hard problem. If they asked him how to clean a particular variety of coffee maker, that would be easier. :)
Added because the tool companies [0] are now catching up. What does this mean to web2.0 companies? Well it means the playing field is being leveled [1] , the market is maturing and the toolset will allow even more competition.

Reference

[0] In this case Borland or Codegear. The spin-off name for the Borland tools division.

[1] Even more so with the release of Borland for PHP ~ http://tinyurl.com/39gkcc
and VCL for PHP ~ http://sourceforge.net/projects/vcl4php/
I suspect Google's AdSense ads are a better model. I've actually seen _useful_ ones!
In languages which have decent ones, certainly. Of the five languages this library seems to work for, only C++ has any sort of macros at all, as far as I know...
Outside Money and Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Examining Motivations: Hollywood and Startups
I'd take a look at:

TurboGears http://www.turbogears.org
SQLAlchemy http://www.sqlalchemy.org/
Elixir http://elixir.ematia.de/
Genshi http://genshi.edgewall.org/
VCs Aim to Out-Angel the Angels
The start-up project
I doubt there is any problem difficulty too hard for a startup. A lot of risks might have to be taken, though.
Intriguing article. If VCs and angels start competing with each other, there must be a decent-sized market of startups with considerable potential. As if the funders are sellers and the founders are buyers. More power to the little guys with big aspirations!
'... If VCs and angels start competing with each other, there must be a decent-sized market of startups with considerable potential ...'

My take is the market is re-adjusting. YC has now shown that the cost to get startups to market is low and therefore the average & not so average VC's who want to give more money out than startups need, have begun to adapt giving less. [0] I'm seeing adaption in the developers tool market as well. [1] Big business is catching up.

'... More power to the little guys with big aspirations! ...'

It demonstrates that the money bit is not the real stumbling block.

Reference

[0] pg, 'The Venture Capital Squeeze'

http://www.paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html

[1] bootload, 'Delphi on Rails?'

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=8494
What will VCs fund next? (interview with Bain VC)
How To Create a Successful Web 2.0 Company
No, it is still not fixed.
Double quotes is fixed, not single quotes.
Seth's Blog: NOBS, the end of the MBA
Extremely ballsy. Refreshing to see someone willing to throw it all out and start over right when they've seemingly reached the top.
I'm confused. That doesn't sound very "high-level". No offense but that sounds like the usual-level of frameworkism. I.e., by high-level it sounded like you're looking for something much more domain specific.

ObUseful: The separation between view, model, and controller is a driver of simplicity. Check out: http://stringtemplate.org/
I simply wrote, "I do not consider software patentable."

http://www.philsalin.com/patents.html
I have to admit that this is one of my favorite subjects. I am by no means smarter than the average person out there but I've done fairly well without traditional schooling. It's been part luck and tenacity on my part. I make a decent salary and am confident that I will have my own company in the near future. I'm hopeful that YC will help me with that. I can't tell you how impatient I am to hear back!

I have a lot of respect for people who get college degrees. I think it says a lot about their intelligence and their ability to focus. What I can't stand however are companies that won't even look at a candidate if they don't have a degree. They miss out on truly great people. Having a degree means something, yes, but it doesn't preclude the candidate being great.

I have to rely on persistence and connections to get work. In a way, it sucks but it's also a satisfying challenge.

When the day comes that I have to interview and hire people I will not take their degree into consideration. I'll use YC's approach and hire them for who they are, what kind of ideas they have and my instincts about what kind of work they can do.
His quote about what they're looking for first dealth with a strong team that could change plans as necessary, and then this, about going after larger markets:

"You also need a large market potential, so the area that you are going after has to be worth going after. There are a lot of businesses out there that are niche businesses that make wonderful companies, but relatively small companies and not the types that require venture capital investment."
If you're an average American watching 4 hours of TV a day just swap that time for your startup and you'll be halfway there. After a month of part time work you'll be able to tell if you should go full time or not.

I'd rather be fully immersed in whatever I'm working and make great rice and beans.
Will, you've just told me my thoughts :) I absolutelly agree with that. A family is a powerful incentive to becoming the best one.
Can anyone make me a list of 6 microsoft powered sites and one ruby on rails site? This is too silly to have so many points.
This is huge publicity. I am shocked so much has happened so fast for Justin.tv.

Does anyone know much about the hardware they are using? I know Justin carries a backpack everywhere, which I assume contains a laptop with a wireless broadband card. Does anyone know what type of wireless network they use? They stream a fairly high quality video image even when completely mobile.
How about holding "free computer lessons" at a community center? The lessons are in using the product in question to easily perform useful tasks.
Two years of Stanford business school - $150K + lost income (http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/mba/financialaid/budget.html).

Filing fee to incorporate in Delaware - $89.
An example of how shifting your prospect's buying criteria can boost your sales
This seems dangerous. If the entrepreneur takes VC money before having a working product and user base, then they have no leverage to negotiate a good terms sheet. Better I think to take a seed round and angel round first even if one can go straight to VC. The 15-20% equity you give up in the first two rounds will at least buy some powerful allies if done strategically, in addition the leverage of a concept you have had time to validate. [test2]
Your Niche Website is a Gold Mine for Info Marketing Data
The State of Technorati (still the most used blog search engine)
Josh is brilliant. If you ever get a chance to talk or work with him be prepared to drink from a firehose.
I saw it on NBC. The attitude of the anchor was "Oh, you are on camera 24/7 -- that's crazy -- and people are actually watching it -- you go to the bathroom, shower on camera -- that's crazy."

And the always cheap "You're probably getting more dates now..." and at the end, "Keep your shirt on, buddy" (in a mocking way).

It was pretty silly.
I thought Justin could've answered a little better -- he should have compared Justin.tv to the reality TV shows. When Survivor (the 1st big reality TV show) came out, it was crazy popular and of course the pundits were like, "Its all a fad...", blah, blah, blah. But of course, they were all wrong.

Like that, Justin should have marketed Justin.tv as the next generation in Reality TV, which couldn't happen on TV because of technology constraints -- it could only happen on the Net. And compare himself to the creator of Survivor, to give the public an image of the pioneer that he is and what he could accomplish....

just my (cents 2)
But our goal is to hook people up with investors, and investors are eager to invest in anything promising. Most great hackers can make something promising enough to interest investors in 3 months, esp. with our advice about how to do it.
I think the Where's The Fire is very poorly named. Whenever I see the WTF acronym I get so confused.
Yeah I agree. We all know it means "Worse than Failure". http://worsethanfailure.com/Default.aspx (cop out alert)
Startup Idea: Startup Law
Startup Law
Generates Terms of Service, Privacy Policy.
I know nothing about this area,
so this might be a really dumb idea.

If that doesn't work, at least a O'Reilly
book that talks about these issues...

What do you guys think?
Podcast Feed of YCombinator Startup Schools 2005-Present
If I haven't mentioned it here already I'll say it now. That site is a waste of time. Did you see the article Jeff Atwood posted there a few weeks ago? There's something about the community that has sprung up there that is so negative and cliquish (is that a word?). Really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000824.html
What a slogan should be
This podcast contains all the published podcasts from the last 3 years of Startup School. Talks from 2005 and 2006 are linked to the official recordings and those from 2007 are linked to my lower quality recordings until the official ones are released.

If you were not there this year and are short on time - I'd recommend listening to Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, and Greg McAdoo first.
The worlds best system to get more referrals
Tweako Announces Revenue Sharing, Submission Buttons, and More
Do these kinds of articles irk anyone else?

"So how are you going to run www.bullshitr.com?"

"I dunno, but I was thinking of making a template Web 2.0 Company."

"Really? I heard about those in Bussiness Week!"

"Yeah, I think I'll start by following these over generalized and weakly supported tips I read on a blog."
Here's a fun one for a personal trainer: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaline/332138063/
Halfway through this I noticed the phrase "new economy" and thought what? Then I checked the top and noticed it was written 7 years ago.
The article's a list of (mostly) necessary rather than sufficient conditions. But even that is rare enough.
The Biggest Reason Small Businesses Fail
Customer Service IS a Profit Center
"but I did get one particularly desperate/angry note from a validation-seeking student last week."

Don't you wish you could pay ten bucks a month to have read only access to Seth's inbox? That would be so much more fun than Reddit / Digg. Plus it could actually be feasible if you limited it to only messages coming from the mailto link on his blog. :-)
Be Careful What You Brag About
I made my first AJAX app with PHP/Javascript and a little help from Prototype/Scriptaculous for effects. Didn't have any major problems putting it together. I'm learning Rails now, and it seems incredible. It really does take most of the tedious work out of programming. I haven't had any experience with other frameworks though, so others might be just as good.

My advice is to spend a week on each of them and decide for yourself. Even if you you don't like them, it'll be a good learning experience. I'm tackling Django next...
Quick Customers or Quality Customers. You Choose
I have a lot of respect for people who get college degrees.

An MBA is barely a college degree. Compare how much you learn in engineering, or the sciences, to what you learn in an MBA. It's all hype except the networking and resume-filtering.

I keep trying to convince my MBA friends to drop out and start something, but it seems to attract non-entrepreneurial people.
Most of the tips are actually good advice that has been supported or demonstrated hundreds of times already. My annoyance stems from something else I can't quite put my finger on.

Maybe it's this tendency to say all new web companies need to follow a strict template, maybe it's that anyone who needed this list isn't going to be successful running that kind of company.

Then again, it might be good some of this advice is getting parroted around, so that less hip investors don't give you odd looks when you say you're not charging for your service.
Wow, TV is stupid.
Google jumps into TV bed with Dish Network
The Right Reasons to Be an Entrepreneur
I plan on going to this
TwitHot: The hottest links on twitter (my latest web app, feedback appreciated)
I think your point is valid, but I'm not seeing the instance where a duplicate rows couldn't easily be identified as being exactly that.

I suppose in a fully normalized world of enterprise db architecture this could be an issue, but most real world applications aren't built that way.

In reality, speed is key, models are simple and normalized data is usually the bottleneck, and as such, de-normalized PDQ.

I know the theory is whack and risks problems, but reality pays the bills in most cases, so it wins.
Feedback (MO, please take with a grain of salt): Anything that enables twitter in any fashion should be avoided like the plague.

That being said your app might have potential. Right now it's just a source of information... maybe add some voting or comments to keep people on your site a little longer.
Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in bidding war for DoubleClick: "...[they] need [to] obtain more user information"
Training, Learning, or Performance
It's a short lesson, but a great reminder...
This assumes that the newly established avenues for marketing will keep their toe hold. They compete for attention as much as the startups do and there will be turnover there as well.

The key will be finding where attention is being focused at any given time (YNews seems to be picking up) and target your efforts there.
Lisp is for Entrepreneurs
How To NOT Write A Business Plan
Interesting idea. Rather then taking on all of the risk (and reward) by doing a startup that risk would be spread across all of the employees in the organization. Sounds like the organization would exist to provide "startup insurance".
Thanks for the feedback.

The idea was to see if I could avoid the problems of digg et all by not having votes/comments. Instead it listens passively to twitters public timeline.

A 'vote' is cast every time a url is mentioned in a twitter and a 'comment' is what is said around the url in the twitter message. I'll add 'comments' soon.
Ask Pud about startups.
You might make your list easier to read by not displaying the full url. Try dropping the http:// prefix and query string data. Just display the domain and the page title. Here's what I mean:

#1 www.youtube.com (YouTube - Alanis Morrisette "M Humps" video)

#2 triqqr.de/ (triQQr)

#3 www.digg.com (Digg - Using Apple's 24 yr old Lisa for Real Work)

#4 news.bbc.co.uk (BBC NEWS | UK | England | Merseyside | Relative Charged over Ellie death)

I think you'll increase readibility by using that kind of format. That said, I think it's a good idea. What kind of interest are you getting?
Actually going out and changing the world - priceless.

There are some things money can't buy... for everything else, there's YCombinator. :)
Amazon Context Links: Text-embedded PPA advertising
Yeah, I frakking LOVE Mako (and to a lesser extent, Myghty).

You may be interested to know that bittorrent.com runs on Myghty. It's definitely scalable.
"The paradox, of course, is that the best people aren't prepared to leave their life behind for two years. They're in a hurry."

This paragraph really spoke to me. Does anybody else feel this way? I am a 3rd-yr. undergrad, and I'm itching to finish school and start a company.

I study Computer Science, and I love it, and I would love to continue studying it in graduate school. I could apply for a PhD, but then I would be putting my life off for another 4-7 yrs. I could apply for a Master's in C.S., but then I would be putting my life of for another 2 years.

I feel that school sometimes creates a disillusioned sense of learning among students. I have to constantly remind myself that I could learn anything I've learned in school on my own time, and that I can continue to do so even after I graduate, and even after I retire.

This isn't true of a lot of people. School certainly offers a strong sense of competition, along with access to bright students and accomplished faculty. I feel like each semester is an orgy of learning, if you will, in which I am focused and determined to intensely work and succeed. But during winter and summer breaks, there is not much difference...

I love to learn and would love to continue school, but in a sense, it restricts you to its curriculum. Perhaps my interests are simply more business-oriented. Perhaps I am afraid to face up to the possible rejection of graduate school. Regardless, I don't want to feel like I am putting of my life any longer.

Anybody else with me?
5%? Really? There's a huge class of young entrepreneurs, who have limited financial requirements (notice, I'm not using the word desires), and slightly older hackers who have greater requirements (car/house/etc) but probably have worked long enough to supplement the YC income with their own stock options, savings, etc.

If you really want to build something new and interesting, you should be willing to make financial sacrifices to make it happen. If you're comfortable, you probably won't be as hungry.
Evil Gambling Monster looks like an opportunity to show off that you were paying attention in your Algorithms class. Do an A-star search, and for your h heuristic, use dynamic programming to determine the maximum possible yield of remaining at your current location for the rest of the 30 days.
This package is really interesting. I originally was drawn to django for a few reasons: it was really well documented, it had a good use history, is all python, and was basically full-stack and took care of the annoyances on the front end (templates) and back end (database).

But this suite of tools (pylons + mako + others) seem more flexible.. thanks for the advice.

I think I'll still investigate rails, but I have reservations.
ClickTale: Another user tracking service launches "Heatmaps"