skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else ... It's called the internet..."

Hooray, I'm glad people are waking up to the lunacy of Facebook apps and other walled gardens like it. The king has no clothes!

I will admit I tried making a FB app myself, but gave up in frustration when I realized how limited my app would be.
4 Things I Learned in the War Zone
Ivan I think the brand of beer matters when it comes to productivity. Budweiser would just annoy me, Guinness I can write 400 words on.

Oh the blog post? More about inner game issues really, success and failure coming from the inside, how to deal with the voodoo hex and such. Jogging was incidental, it could have been fixed by switching to a better beer - read it and see if I'm right.
Has anyone used 'G' for Personal Productivity.. Deep thinking/Brainstorming?
Ah ha! I had not seen that.
I think the site is a bit too focused on startups. More submissions on computer programming and computer science would add some variety.
HitTail Power Play?
It is easier to work naked.
Ben Casnocha just says things that have no real value or meaning. I don't think it's just an age thing but I think the arrival of blogging has made a lot of younger entrepreneurs think they are a lot more important than they really are. Everyone has an opinion on VCs, consultants, lawyers, convertible debt, etc. Casnocha amazingly has an opinion on absolutely nothing except organic blueberries and Zen Buddhism. He's too caught up in the San Francisco world of trust fund babies like himself.
Lol about the "dreaded single founder thread". I don't keep up with YC News everyday, so after I posted I figured that this topic has definitely come up before. Oh well. Maybe people have changed their views since the last time it was posted and have interesting things to share.

Yeah, it seems like a good idea to just start building alone if there is no one else to do it with. People can be added later.
Nice. I like your list. I forgot about reasons 9 and 10. I've known some pretty opinionated people who I would imagine would be very hard to do collaborative work with.
Yeah I'd like that too. It could have more about learning how to build software and different technologies.
I've done both.

I started Swell Technology in 1999, ran it for seven years as the only stock holder. I made a pretty good living, worked on interesting problems, drove a 350Z, and had an office overlooking the corner of 6th and Congress in downtown Austin.

Now I'm a 47.5% stock holder in Virtualmin, Inc. (YC has 5%, and my co-founder has the other 47.5%). I work out of the second bedroom in a rental house a couple blocks away from downtown Mountain View, CA, make barely enough money to cover the rent, and don't own a car. But, having a co-founder is a still lot better. I fully expect that in a year, the success I had with my previous company will be dwarfed by what we can achieve with the new one, and a huge percentage of that is being able to share the load.

I worked all the time with my old company. For seven years running I never took a real vacation. The sound of a ringing phone makes my stomach hurt due to the constant support calls with my old business (so now, I don't have a phone...we have a bug tracker and public forums to help customers).

It's entirely possible to start a company solo. But there are some things you'll want to avoid. If you see yourself in any of the following situations, it is time to change your business:

1. More business than you can handle solo, but not enough revenue to hire help. You're in a bad business or not charging enough. Change something.

2. The mundane (taxes, paperwork, legal compliance, sales or support calls) is taking more than 25% of your time, in order to make ends meet. Pretty much the same reasons as in 1.

3. You realize that the "right price" on your products is such that you'll never be big enough to hire employees, even if 50% of the available market buys what you're selling. If you can't expand the available market, then you're in a bad market.

With a co-founder a lot of these things are more immediately obvious...it's easy to keep plugging along when only one paycheck has to be cut each month, and you can tighten your belt one more notch. With two or more, the math adds up, and one of you realizes "Hey, we're never going to build a business at this rate. We need to change things."

So, sure, there is a possibility that you'll be Markus Frind or Joshua Schacter. If the idea is really good, and you execute well, you can make great things solo. But the odds are against it.
Coming Soon! - Yahoo! Messenger For Vista
Its pretty cool though. I can't believe that people are not more interested in this.
Down2Night Launches Nightlife Platform in 20+ Cities--Website declares war on the 'usual night'
A taste of the new Web from Library House
I think titles like this post deserve a harsh response from Rails enthusiasts. It's meant to provoke, so why complain when the provoked respond passionately? If you so choose, you'll also find a lot of well thought out Rails posters (B. Tate, S. Halloway, D. Thomas, etc).
Did you hear that everyone? Stop developing for Facebook now. Yup, pack up and go home.
what if I think that the market will balloon after my software is introduced? Or that my product will become the Microsoft of its market?

I think most entrepreneurs make that assumption or have that hope. Nobody is that stupid to deliberately ignore the market, The Market.

If you can see this in foresight, then you are probably an ignored prophet. If you see it in hindsight, then you are a historian (or well-paid columnist/speaker/me-too).
Bradley Horowitz on 'internet of things': let's uniquely ID everything!
How are you all sending out your press releases?
I've used eReleases to reasonable effect, but it seems to be a nebulous field with no one listing prices or describing services rendered very well. Anybody have any clarity to offer?
Thanks for the feedback. This list was made partially in jest, but 100% from experience.

In my first startup with 3 co-founders, I wasted (yes, wasted!) 50% of my time on numbers 9 and 10. It got so bad, I was afraid of what our customers would witness. And these were seasoned business people in their 20's, 30's and 40's.

8. Good point.

7. I disagree. I am still stunned at what I can accomplish with today's tools vs. 10 years ago. With time and money. And the more I code, the better I get. Every new project I write takes half the code of the previous one.

6. Really disagree. My experience is that the provider of the advice THANKS ME for the opportunity to advise. There are people out there dying for the opportunity to mentor for free; they just don't find many chances. Their payback is watching you succeed with their advice. They can't buy that.

4. I hate this one. I really do. People come to me looking to invest and then tell me my biggest problem is that I may get hit by a bus. Funny thing, I have never had a customer bring this one up. The next time I hear the bus remark, I'll just jump out a 6 story window. That'll show them.

3. Leave my cat out of it.

1. First start-up alone. We'll see. We'll see.
"99% of the time, all of your equity is going to add up to nothing"

I think that's true no matter how many co-founders you have.

"Jealously guarding your equity when it's worth nothing seems silly to me."

Sorry you see it that way. I'd gladly accelerate my business with the right partners. In the meantime, I'll just keep on coding and selling until I find the right co-founder(s). Nothing jealous about it.
Speak for yourself. The users of this site include the founders of 3 startups from YC alone who've been acquired for multiple millions. Plus a number of more famous founders I don't want to out, but whom you can often recognize from their usernames.
The Do it Yourself iPhone (= Which Startups the iPhone Will Kill?)
dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31413
Had an interesting conversation with an angel today (the kind of angel that does not imply insanity of this writer based on this sentence). We happened to talk about this exact issue, and he mentioned a relevant book -- David G. Thomson's Blueprint to a Billion. The book says that one of the common charecteristics of these successful companies is having 2 founders -- one dealing with internals of the company, one presenting a public face and dealing with externals. I am planning to check out the book.
For dating sites probably.

For "work" sites like this, I'd say no.
And that, my friend, is why you want to live in California, where the law preempts the employer from claiming ownership of work done on your own time.

California Labor Code Section 2870:
http://www.unixguru.com/california_law.html
Now, y'all don't all talk at once...
simple solution: write what you can of the question, then include ellipses. A "xxx has asked Hey! Help me out?" entry in a news feed does not clearly indicate that xxx asked a question that he wants his friends to answer. "xxx wants you to answer his question: 'blah blah blah...'" is vastly better, imho
Email seems to do the job pretty well.
PRWeb
Can't beat the price. I just wonder if it reaches anyone...It's a great interface, and has the best user experience of all of the news wire type companies I've seen, but it's also free...and since anyone can send out a press release any time they feel like it, for absolutely no cost, it pretty much guarantees nobody is paying attention. Or am I missing something?
I don't understand the concept. When to use press releases? What good do they do? Who reads them?
I mean to someone other than your mom.
I ended up talking about this with someone and looked it up.

The article was written by Jerry Borrell.
http://web.archive.org/web/20011031192234/http://www.upside.com/
i write for venturebeat.com -- send me a copy at ereldon@gmail.com
One technical founder will not be able to do as much work as a 2 technical founders. So the downside is less man hours to get your product coded and polished. This is assuming everyone is equally talented. I think it's very inspiring to see two motivated and talented people together set on one goal with nothing else in mind. Also, with 2 people, it's less likely to get depressed because you are always trying to appear motivated for the other person. You just don't want someone unmotivated or without a high value add. He or she should add as much value as you.
I know a guy who would make a good partner. Good programmer, with domain knowledge. But Wife+family+a love of FPSs == nevermind.
"has anyone seen anything written by Casnocha that's in any way remarkable? It it just the age thing?"

He is remarkably good at self-aggrandizement. Hm, wait, no... just remarkably persistent at self-aggrandizement.
Moonlighting? Please Tell Me About It
I've been working 2 weeks now full time, and been trying to work on my own startup on nights and weekends. I didn't know how hard it was when people talked about it until now. And I thought school and startup was hard. To illustrate, I come home at 6pm, fall asleep until 8pm, code until 1am, sleep from 2am to 8am, and start all over again. I guess this is called moonlighting.

I am going to stop this moonlighting stuff and work full time on my startup with a new appreciation in about a week. I'm saving about 1k per week, which is about my monthly expense. I'm almost done with the beta (after 6 months), and I think the reason I'm not at full time is because I'm afraid of failing. But it doesn't matter now because I just paid $500 to get inc'ed and I got enough to last until the end of summer.

A side note, from my full time job, I've learned that lunch breaks are a boost to productivity.

If you moonlight too, or did before, please share your insight.
Wait, a site called "Startup News" that is focused on startups?! Surely not!

(That said, more submissions on CS and the technology behind many startups wouldn't be unwelcome, at least to me.)
There's hard math in computer science now?

The US is still primarily a farming and (high tech) manufacturing economy:

"Exports: $1.2 trillion
Primarily soybeans, fruit, corn, industrial supplies, transistors, aircraft, motor vehicle parts, computers"

http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/country.cfm?id=Unitedstates
When I make it big I am going to not use the internet for a whole year.
Social sites reveal class divide
Nerd quiz - Can you name a programming language for every letter of the alphabet?
Justin.tv crew came up with 20.
No really. The wire services that you can pay for are mostly junk, same with PR Web. It'll get picked up on google, and some sites syndicate the content, but as far as generating any legit interest from the press they're just not a reliable way to go.

The answer is to develop a press list and contact them individually.

And it'll do no good to send your press release to my Mother, she wouldn't want it.
Off the top of my head:
Ada, BCPL, C, Delphi, Erlang, Fortran, Godel, Haskell, Intercal, Java, K (if hypothetical languages count? This is a project by some FreeBSD developers to produce a more powerful version of C designed for kernel programming), Logo, Maple, N??, Occam, Pascal, Q??, Ratfor, Sed, TeX, U??, Visual Basic (if this counts as a language in itself rather than as a version of BASIC), Whitespace, X??, Yorick, Z??

I guess that's 19-21 out of 26, depending on the exact rules.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Just to mention someone we can all recognize. But it's pretty well-understood that PR (not just press releases, but the whole process) is more valuable than any amount of advertising that small companies can afford.
Awesome, Eric, will do.
Where's the challenge in that? I wanna see a factorial function, iterative and recursive (where applicable), in each. Now that's a nerd.

I'm guessing Trevor and rtm could manage about half the alphabet. pg, not a chance, he's too much of a language bigot.

I'd be lucky to get through maybe five without consulting a reference of some sort.
We couldn't figure out N, U, or Z either.

Q is easy - QuickBasic, under the same theory as V.

Whitespace - good call! We couldn't think of a W.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicon_programming_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubercode
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniface_%28programming_language%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnrealScript_programming_language

(Don't ask me where I got my info)
Newlisp, if we're allowed different lisp dialects.

(If not, new challenge: lisp dialect for every letter of the alphabet.)
"Just Say No" Considered Harmful
APL, Brainfuck, Cobol, D, Erlang, Fortran, Goedel, Haskell, INTERCAL, Javascript, K, Lisp, Matlab, NewtonScript, OCaml, Python, QBasic, Ruby, Smalltalk, TeX, UnrealScript, Verilog, Wierd, XSLT, Yorick, Z++
Yes, that's pretty much how it goes. Keep three things in mind: 1. Software projects take longer than you estimate, even if you consider that when you make your estimates. 2. Expenses tend to exceed budgets. Think of one-off expenses that can raise your expenses beyond your estimated budget. 3. The beta version will, pretty much, tell you if the idea is successful or not.

So, considering the above, and since it doesn't seem that you have a lot of savings, and you're close to releasing the beta, then you might as well do that quickly while keeping your day job. If it picks up, then quit and focus on it. This will actually push you to release faster. If you have the whole summer, your work will expand to fill that time. Just a thought.
No, but I can P a lot.

Python, PHP, Perl, PostScript, PDF, Pascal, Pict, Pike, PL/1, Prolog.

Don't you love IBM... Programming Language 1... Operating System 2...
What about A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y and Z?

Seriously, they're all real single-letter languages (Google for "[letter] programming language" and wade through the results).

I knew of only about 5 of them already (B, C, D, E, K). I couldn't find real languages for H, I, O or X.
I also always gripe with Ruby's lack of documentation. It just doesn't feel right. In comparison: I have never spent a dime on a Java book, in the 10 years that I have been using the language. On the other hand, I can't count how often I have downloaded the various available online docs, for example when I did consulting and used the clients computer. I also travel a lot, which has hampered my progress in Ruby (that book is heavy, so it stayed home) - OK, I should have bought the e-book, but still...

26$ is not a lot, but it is a lot if you are not sure if it is worth your money, or if it will fulfill all your needs. Is that the only Ruby book you'll ever need, or are more investments coming up (Rails book(s))? It's all about risks, in a way. Why else use Open Source Software? With Java, I know my needs are taken care of, and if I ever have a problem, I will find the answer for free, and fast.
Also, I would add that, in a big company, you should try to work with people as high up as you can, even if you're intimidated.

People high up either say "yes" or hand you down to someone who can definitively say "no." If they say yes, the people below them are directed to make it happen.

People not high up enough either say "no" or hand you up to someone who can definitively say "yes." If they say no, the people above them never hear about it.

So clearly, dealing with people higher up improves your chances dramatically.

Brad Bird was the one who I first heard point this out: "Oftentimes the people at the top are really fun and the people on your way up are really fun, but there's something about a lot of middle managers -- people that don't have the power to say yes but do have the power to say no."
Why not beat Google?
Today, everybody wants to be Googles good boy. We all hope for attention and money which is exlusively distributed by Google these days. Entrepreneurs even want to sell their business and their souls to godfather Google.

Is that real entrepreneurship - playing someone elses game as good as you can? Why not go after Google itself? Linus Torvalds didnt write cool applications. He rewrote the operating system.

I like the idea to rewrite the web. To reorder how the whole thing works and turn it from monopoly to ecosystem again. I feel fed up with the whole Googleweb.
It does point out which sites have made source available, which is useful if you're looking for how things have been implemented. I didn't think it was just about the visual design of the site.
Linus re-implemented an existing thing; Unix. He didn't go off and invent his own OS with its own concepts, e.g. Plan 9. I think he's a bad example for your point.
wow, I admire your being able to work so hard.

try to find a cofounder to share the load (I dont have one myself, gave up looking).

some jobs allow you to work from home; makes it easier on you, but one must be honest to give them value for money.
Sufficient number of nice packed crap can kill anyone
What is the best way to submit my page to search engines?
How can I speed up the arrival of my web page in the search indices? I have submitted to Yahoo the usual way (web form), but it says that it might take weeks. Google doesn't know it yet, either, even though I use Google Analytics. And what about other search engines?

I haven't submitted the page to news.YC because it is german only, and not very tech cool: http://Mondhandy.de is about an astrological moon calendar for cell phones I developed some time ago...

Edit: I don't think the moon calendar is very popular outside of Germany, however, I might be mistaken, and if anybody is interested in marketing it in the US, I would of course welcome a contact.
I for one dream about beating Google. My scheme would have been a p2p based search engine - by now there are projects trying to do that, but not with very good results, I think :-(

I might have overestimated the demand for privacy, too...

I also think the social bookmarking things would have a chance in improving on Google.
In the Google index you should be in two weeks.
That's a design language, not a programming language, right? Or is UML actually Turing-complete?
Thanks! I just find it confusing - why does it take them so long, when they crawl other pages much more frequently? Also I seem to recall that they aim to deliver results on news items much more quickly (ie new terrorist strike somewhere - can't wait two weeks for the information to show up).
why does it take them so long ... it isn't long just ask other people how long one had to wait to be in the Google index 2 years ago Tichy :)

Just wait, optimize keywords in page, create backlinks and you will get nice pagerank as a bonus.
Hm, marketing 2.0? ;-) Maybe I should contact those guys who sneaked a fake terrorist message into the super bowl broadcasts?
I don't know nothing about that but link from news.yc will help you and PG is tolerant :) so no matter what language is on your site. You know that: "ich pin ein perliner" :)

You could use this tool from time to time: http://www.void.be/googletool.html
Startups and Life
The interesting part is "A long-term research project has revealed...": the original article was posted on news.yc, too, and it was basically just a blog entry.
Everyone's Gunning For YouTube
Looks cool, how are you selling it?
No idea, just thought I'd toss it out there.
One of the things you must realize to make sense of a lot of PG's advice is that the default business model for YC companies is to build a promising product so that venture capitalists will give you money or that a Yahoo/Google/Microsoft will buy your company.

For those two goals, which are based as much on impressing investors as on anything else, your chances are much better if you're not a single founder. Investors are much happier investing in a team than they are investing in a single person. To that end, PG's advice against single founders is spot on.
This article is also the reply to question why facebook can't be the Biggest.
"no need to tie an account to a real person"

So now fat girls that pretend they are thin models to get dates is a feature?:)
Ok I had some sleep. I agree with all of your points except the measurement issue. Yes you can compare Search Engines the way you described, but just because of the size of the underlying corpus, the web, there is no way to measure the goodness of a system over the whole corpus. And yeah my post was a bit brash, subjective opinion typed in by a guy who really lacked some sleep. :-)
Two weeks? Wow. And those eight hours of sleep you get seem brutal...
How does a p2p search engine improve the results upon a non-p2p search engine, e.g. Google?
http://www.nickle.org/

Keith Packard has been working on it for a while...
Free Software Foundation releases GPL 3
Alright. You are correct.

Lets do it all completely different. Lets get rid of search and advertising alltogether.

Any ideas?
GPL3 text
Put the music industry to death. Step by Step instructions.
1) Hack the Ipone and enable Flash

2) Listen to Youtube videos all day

No more need for any other media.
Supposedly they're converting all the YouTube videos to h.264, and the iPhone has a YouTube app for playing all those videos.

But, I can't understand why you'd want to put the music industry to death?
I'd echo the "find a cofounder" sentiment. Sharing the load is good and a co-founder is a good energizer/motivator.

I'm not entirely clear why you incorporated.... Definitely something you want to do, but why not wait a bit and see if what you build sticks/takes off?

My last startup was an "off-hours" thing, and my current one was an off-hours thing for the last few months (and is a full-time effort as of monday). While I didn't work NEARLY as hard (generally one evening and one full weekend day), I sympathize.

G'luck!

My only advice is to brutally slash your idea down to the core-- find out the BASIC value proposition you can offer and get it out...