skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally really admire the folks who are pursuing their 3rd or 4th or 10th hit. There are so many such guys who consistently keep churning out great companies that don't necessarily make the press covers yet have great exits or sales numbers.
i agree too:do it as fast as you can. wish you all the best.
That's a very, very difficult question to philosophisize about. When one believes they've been criticized unfairly, they could think the other person is older, shorter, or less confident than they are. But I think the biggest predictor is the other person's mood.

And, anyway, the only external opinion that matters is your customers' (and even then, not always). Spoken word has sometimes been enforced by many a judge as a "verbal contract", which shows the power words sometimes have. Therefore, why focus on the words of those who offer you nothing in return? It's worth nothing. But words backed up by something are worth listening to. If a banker says they will invest X if you twist your idea to do Y as well, there could be something there. If a banker just says, I don't get it, just walk away. Don't worry about their opinion. If a customer says "I really need this feature so I can use your software," do it. If a customer tells you that it would be cool if your program plays a sound when you click on a button, don't do it. There's got to be something you can do with the same amount of time where another person is willing to either put up or shut up. In this case, you don't even consider whether button-push sounds are a good idea are not--you just know that you can be doing something else.

So, by now, if I say "could you quit your idea for me?" you should say "no, I won't unless you pay me X."
Actually these people are great at practicing your pitch. Most investors and folks in real life you pitch to won't be THAT different from the pessimists you meet. And rightly so.

That said, negative nancies over someone who takes my idea and replies back passionately with the apparent problems with the idea and how to fix it--that's cofounder material.
Voodoopad. It's a sort of like a text editor, but it's a wiki.
Depends. I've been developing our site on a macbook pro. I prefer a workstation for the faster hard drive, but when developing a web app based on an interpreted language, that doesn't really matter.

And I'm using an external keyboard + LCD, so I have the best of both worlds.
I have no trouble installing, customizing, and maintaining a Linux machine. I simply don't want to. I'd rather spend the time coding! :)

Plus the Mac OS X desktop environment is nice. This is exactly what I need: native UNIX and a good desktop environment.
Trip Hawkins (EA, digital chocolate)

Tellme founders

Alex Welch (photobucket)
+1. Anything will do, but a pigma Micron pen and a stack of 11x17 paper are optimal. The paper gives you enough room to draw several ideas on a page but fits on a desk or table. The pen makes a clean, fine line that approximates 1px black on a screen, but lets you scribble quickly.
Oh @#%!

It's a little embarassing to admit on YC news ;), but pretty much all of the code I've ever written was Visual Basic interfacing with Microsoft Excel!

As a scientist, most data from most instruments gets spit out into Excel files. Being able to interface between Excel and VB allowed for powerful data processing. (My advisor built an entire CO2 climate model in Excel a few years ago!) I'm sure it was all much slower than it would have been written in another language, but it was easy to look at and it did the trick.

What am I supposed to do now? Teach myself Matlab? Not upgrade Excel?
yep its seem full with of it, there was even one ive been pondering for a while ;)
too bad nooo idea how to implement it.
The wireless works fine for me. I think I've come across a post or two on forums about the newest MacBooks having issues with the wireless that force people to use ndiswrapper, but mine works fine. I wouldn't suggest getting a Mac if you know you're going to be running Linux all the time. I got mine because I got a pretty nice discount. I never touch the OS X partition.
Never. Think about what you are asking. The probability of anyone's startup succeeding is miniscule. And if doesn't succeed and you've sacrificed friends and who you are, what have you become? Miserable.

Don't let a business and money consume your life.
For those who down voted me - I was born and raised (most of the time) in Bangalore. So I know what I am talking about, and have a right to.
PIRATES of Silicon Valley a movie Every wannabe Silicon valley MILLIONAIRE SHOULD WATCH
"you did a very poor job of accepting the honest criticism"

I think you are completely mistaken! I love honest criticism - that way, I learn. Can you please tell me where I did not accept the honest criticism?

I never called Livingston a thief. Can you point out where?

1)
I am not threatened by the abilities of younger entrepreneurs. However, I am very much annoyed by the fact that VCs are more likely to fund younger entrepreneurs.
Goladus, your snipshot example is too easy!

IMHO juwo is different and harder to encapsulate.
I feel like ive invested way too much time to slow down... But im actually out with friends at whiskeys in boston... First time in months. Getting hammmered... Wohooo
You're quite right. I love Ruby but I hate it at the same time cuz it's so damn slow! Rails included! On the on the other hand I've heard great things about JRuby. And I got all hot and bothered when I recently found out that they've already integrated JRuby with Rails!http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JRUBY/2007/03/05/JRuby+0.9.8+Released I hope this gives Rails a much needed performance boost.
I use Firefox and I see it.
Additionally, millions of people play the lottery. Millions of people do not start tech startups. So your odds are not better of winning the NY lottery.
I can't say the 20-30 hours contracting he mentions at the end is the best option in the context of entrepreneurship (all other things being equal it's really hard to complain about; definitely don't tell any of my friends I'm naysaying). I've been doing it for a while now. What you don't realize is that you can't turn off wanting to solve problems and build stuff well. So whatever you're stuck building is going to suck up your thoughts. As long as there are problems to be solved you'll find yourself working on them. I'm guessing more generally thats how people get hackers to work for 80 hours for (relatively) nothing.
dead because of spam.
Who says you can't just be in it to build up a sizeable community and make money from adsense? Blogga, please.
For everyone who complains about America (Jay Leno article)
As a practical matter, if I read the article correctly, VBA is only going away for the Mac. Is that the platform you're working on? If not, no problem. If so:

1.) Not upgrading sounds good .... it's cheap!
2.) You could move to a PC.
3.) You could learn the beauties of CSV format, and the language of your choice. I like Python, but something else might be better for your domain.

The Larger Issue here, IMO, is the peril of using proprietary technologies. It seems unwise to build any long-term project in something a vendor can too easily end-of-life.
unfortunate placement of yahoo ad
I saw this on Facebook posted by a friend, who said Jay Leno wrote it originally.

I found that hard to believe, so I did a Google search. It points to someone named Craig R. Smith who wrote it, apparently.

Anyway, I think it's inspiring for American entrepreneurs to know they're free to choose whatever they want to. Most of this stuff is consistently taken for granted in our busy lives.
Depends who you are.
MacOS is a nice Unix in its own right, and if you really need to have Linux, it runs fine under Parallels. I've got Windows XP, Ubuntu, and the One Laptop Per Child project images on my MacBook, and can boot any of them depending on what I want to check out.
You know what's interesting: there has been a lot of discussion about the fading of MS as the standard of all things office and OS (in spite of their current hordes of cash.) What hasn't been talked about is the environment that this change is making for Apple. The biggest argument for all business to use MS and PC's has been the standard set by them for file exchange and application availability. With that standard now moving to the web, it opens the door WIDE for Apple to start taking market share in the PC market, an opening that hasn't been here for them since the Apple II. (Note: I am typing this note on a Dell laptop, but my next one is looking increasingly like an Apple. How I dreamed of getting a NEXT when they first came out.)
I've found that becoming more disconnected frees me from wasting time. In college, the time spent socializing can become a huge and excessive waste of time. Granted, I'm bombarded with "you have the rest of your f___ing life to work" (one of my professors pulled me aside and told me that), and the usual "you should make college the funnest time of your life!" (according to the hippy generation of people who probably just miss getting high during their youth and being rebelious)

Anyway, I consider what people tell me and then make my own decisions. I'm slowly disconnecting myself from my friends, and I don't see that as a bad thing. I see it as a way to focus my concentration entirely on my startups.

It depends on how much you value your friends versus how much you value your startup. You're going to marry one of them, so you'll need to figure that out at some point.

Some people say you can do both, but it's like getting married in my opinion. Once you get married, you can't keep hanging out with all your old friends like you always did. You're committed to someone (or your startup) from that point on, and unless you really put in the time and work at it, it probably won't work. I can think of very few things that work by just casually doing it on the side (ie Facebook). Even in that case, Zuckerberg is an entrepreneurial individual and had a strong interest in programming.

This is all coming from a college kid who has never been married, though. I speak not from experience, but from observation ;)
The problem is that not many people benchmark the write access time for flash. It's pretty bad, often 50ms+. There is a product I know of, the Zeus IOPS, which gets extremely fast write speeds to flash. Unfortunately it costs about $250/GB. For that price, you can get a RAM based solution, which is even faster. Ones like http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/ can come with a battery backup and a hard drive that it will dump to and restore from if the power goes out. Price is about $220/GB. The prices sound high, but if you're trying to scale a database, it can potentially solve an otherwise intractable problem without any software changes.
Exactly. This guy is doing okay with adsense http://plentyoffish.files.wordpress.com/2006/06/plentyoffishcheque2.jpg
URGENT URGENT PLZ READ B4 OTHERS VERY URGENT NO TIME WASTERS
just for laughs :)
Ubuntu 6.10 on Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pa
That would have been my answer to the parent: I use an external monitor, mouse and keyboard at home.

I've managed to get the ATI Radeon under Ubuntu to display both two desktops or only use one screen or the other. But it was quite a fight. And more fancy things like one large desktop on two screens didn't work out.
Applying American Idol contest ideas for VC eliminating startup founders
Six ways Twitter can make money - Download Squad
You have to keep some balance, I think. Tone things down some, sure, but:

1) Your body needs sleep.

2) In the end, you'll probably just waste time you would have spent with friends here or somewhere else.
A VC: What's Wrong With Alexa?
How do you find a badass co-founder, Part 2
Hey Shanti- glad to find you here as well! :)

Yes this is along the same lines of what I am thinking recently too. It has become impossible to compete with Google 'on their own terms' (so to speak).
So why not just tilt the gameboard a little bit, change the turf, even the playing field back out a little bit? :) (Pardon the worn cliches.)

But seriously, on a related note, here's a very recent article partially addressing this topic: Read/Write Web interviewing Google's open source chieftain (Chris DiBona):
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/interview_with_4.php
What's up with Google? Yesterday personalized home pages, today adsense
Rather than a point-by-point rebuttal, the idea is to always move forward and progress toward more individual freedom. To formulate the question in such a way as to say: "hey, aren't you glad at least we're not Darfur?" is to encourage a race to the bottom.
Yesterday their personalized home pages went screwy (I seem to have lost some of my tabs):

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Web_Search_Help-Personalizing/msg/8b91d7361a074343

Today, adsense seems to have disappeared from my sites. I didn't see it on reddit, either.

http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-troubleshooting/topics

Wonder what's going on in the google plex...
Google and Yahoo aren't the only companies making acquisitions.
Wow, your site is a lot better! I still think a screen-shot would be useful. Flash demo even more so. But these are hard to do.

One easy fix: your click here links are so 1990s. Verb phrases are passe: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere
What's the worst mistake your startup has made?
Somebody should pick up a book on probability theory before posting in his blog...
You're not the only one! haha
Update

Things seem to be back to normal, but still... kind of odd that two fairly major problems turned up in such a short period of time. Makes one wonder what they're up to.
NY Lottery odds of winning, all 6 numbers: 1 in 45,057,474

5 + bonus: 1 in 7,509,579

How many start-ups are there? Your odds of becoming a millionaire have got to be better by orders of magnitude.

http://www.nylottery.org/ny/nyStore/cgi-bin/ProdSubEV_Cat_401_SubCat_201671_NavRoot_320.htm
Contains the sentence "Make no mistake about it." Bad sign.
Dell Latitude X1, but they don't sell it anymore. It is actually a Samsung notebook, and it's successor apparently is the Q40 (http://www.dynamism.com/q40/main.shtml).

Now I love this nb, actually it is the only acceptable notebook that I know of:

#1 FANLESS - no annoying noises whatsoever!!!
#2 really, really lightweight, less than 2,2lb if you remove the battery (2,4lb with battery) - external dvd drive, though

I have tried a MacBook, but it was too noisy for my taste. Hoping that Apple will produce a fanless subnotebook one day...
Haha, this is great. I got sucked in and read the whole thing, the best post was on page 13...

"HERE IS THE ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION. RUN THESE SIMPLE SQL STATEMENTS, AND ALL WILL BE OK:
SQL truncate table OUTFITTER;
SQL truncate table ORDER_DETAILS;
SQL truncate table STYLE_COLLS;
Then run the query again and post the results."

hilarious.
Facebook, talking about a Facebook API Ruby adapter
1. Focusing too much on the wrong target market.

2. Getting into a industry that is unfamiliar.

3. And the last most important thing(the very reason why we failed) is making something users don't want in the first place. It's very difficult to create demand. You gotta look for it!
To paraphrase Rob Pike, if you want Slashdot, you know where to find it.
European startup company structure (UK company vs local company vs US Company)
STARTUP IDEA the web does not have enough interactivity
Rejected by Techstars but interviewed by YC...
That article reads like a semi-subtle "Told you so!" re: the famous API War article.
30 Boxes: Calendar meets social network
Viacom buying last.fm?
If Google has hired all the best hackers, why do they still buy companies?
Flash Based Scratch and Win Card Widget. Will it go viral?
Wouldn't they be able to copy any web based product within hours? Yesterday I read that even Guido van Rossum is on their payroll - basically anybody who has the slightest amount of fame is on their payroll (have they hired Linus yet?).

So either everybody else can just go packing, or all those brilliant people will somehow get lost in the Googleplex and never be heard from again. Perhaps it is actually good for "the rest of us" that Google buys so many talented hackers. Perhaps they will never create anything useful again in their lives (a bit like the stellar scientists retiring at Princeton), and we have so much less competition left.
They've been changing the location of the different search links - news, blogs, images etc and it's driving me crazy.
Process patents won't help if someone who is in a sane country where such daft ideas aren't countenanced wants to copy the idea.
I'm sure its not just the talent they acquire but they acquire the ability of a team who can execute on a concept which has traction.

The intangibles of execution can't be repliated like market share, customers, brand loyalty, UI design.

I mean look at how much street cred Google Video has compared to Youtube - not enough to just slap a google logo on it and wait for the world to beat a path to its door.
It depends.

I've got an impression that Wasabi is highly-specialized domain-specific language (just a wild guess from his article). If it is a general-purpose language it's worth to build a community and get feedback, but if it's a niche DSL, it's less likely that you get a growable community and it's more likely that feedback tends to be feature requests that aren't necessary for the original purpose of DSL.

And if it is designed well, the risk of the original developper's quitting is just about the same as having in-house libraries or workflow, I think.
Once it's launched, contact the same blogs that she has and say look we've already started, you don't need to wait.

Force her to launch earlier than she wants to. The other thing I'd say is some 37Signals advice. Hold back some completed functionality at the time of launch. Release it in a week or twos time. Thus demonstrating that not only did you launch but you are constantly going to be ahead of her.

Finally, please use the anger judiciously. Instead of running her over, crush her spirit.
Multi-dimensional voting, a better defense against trolling?
I was fooled by a troll yesterday. (Then people started docking ME points! Oh, the injustice! ;) )

Anyways, the simple up/down voting seems to reward trolls with lot's of attention (negative points) and prime real-estate (bottom of the page). Instead, why not add a "fader" where a couple of "fades" will turn trolly comments grey then white...

No social news sites I can think of are playing around with multi-dimensional voting of any sort...is there some good reason why not?
These formalities are ways to show your commitment to doing a startup. Granted, there are other ways to show commitment, but there's nothing like putting a little money down on it. For most of us, writing code is not a good way to show commitment because we do this all the time, and sometimes for little or no profit.

If you're considering whether or not to incorporate, you should definitely be asking yourself if the reason you don't want to do it is really because of fear of failure. When you fail and you haven't incorporated, it just means your side project failed. If you failed and you incorporated, it means your startup failed, and you failed. You can't run a startup with fear.
Would you consider Slashdot to have "multi-dimensional" voting, given their Interesting, Insightful, Informative, Funny, and (of course) Troll ratings?

It seems to have worked well enough there.
I'am interrested in this story because I might find my self in the same situation. Here is the strategy I applied so far.

1. Keep key aspects secret. One always has to release some info, at least to get some feedback on the pertinence of the general idea or when we sell it. But keep some trump cards hidden in your pocket. This is often related to the 'how' aspect of the idea where you could make a difference with a "stealer".

2. Proceed in a way allowing you to prove that you shared the idea with X or Y. This is one of the purpose of an NDA (non disclosure agreement). If you can proove that, then you have a leverage on the stealer's investors because you may publish it and it will call back into question their honnesty and fairness. If they ripped you, they could rip clients. This is why public opinion frowns uppon stealing ideas even if it's not illegal.

3. If option 2 is not possible, then another leverage you have is that you can publish the idea and put the investors at risk to face many competitors and eventually freeware versions of it in a very short time. This is even more effective if the product is not out yet.

Be aware that you represent a direct threat to investment when comming up with such kind claim and want to use these leverages. So prepare your negation before using those leverages. This means that directly after presenting the problem to the investors, present the different options you have at hand. First present the options that would require some sort of cooperation from their side, second the only options left to you if they refuse (the one I presented above) and third that you are open to any other options that they may want to suggest and that would respect everybody's interrests.

Be aware that there are things that can't be undone and also that it is better to have half of something than all of nothing. You can remind this rule while argumenting your cause, but keep in mind that it applies to you too. So be ready to accept an arrangement if possible. Keep a very open mind about the options you will consider. For instance you could ask them to invest in another idea you might have, but be very carefull to not blackmail them into that. Just say that this would be an acceptable outcome for you if they agree to it and that you would then drop the case because you don't bite the hand that feeds you. Of course this suppose you have a valid alternate idea to show them when you say that. But be carefull with this because VC can easily get you out of your founded business if they want to. What you have to sell to VC is your capacity to create value by your inspiration or vision. This is what they are looking for.

There is alot more to say, but PG is much better than me at it.
Ditto, except mine is T43.

Caution: PostgreSQL 7.4 disappeared in Feisty. I'd been wanting to move to 8.1 anyway; this just accelerated it.
No matter how hard Google tries to create an environment where people are creative and get things done there's no way to truly duplicate a few really smart people getting together, coming up with an idea and making it.

As I think PG mentioned in another thread, when companies buy a startup they are not only buying the code but the founders too. This means that in essence, they are still hiring the best people out there.
If that's not geek humor then I don't know what is.
Serial Entrepreneur: Mark Fletcher Interview by Elance
NPR audio clip about Warren Avis, founder of Avis car rentals
I heard this the other day and thought it was interesting enough to post. What's cool was that when he founded Avis, there already were car rental companies operating around the country but all their car rental lots were located in downtown areas, far away from airports and travel hubs. Seems obvious now, but he saw better ways to do car rentals. In short, he founded a "me too" startup but he understood how to do it better.
Amazon Leverages Its Scale and Infrastructure Beyond Servers and Into Shipping
Y Combinator and CRV Quickstart Compared
Who got interviewed by Highland?
Now that we know which Y combinator members were accepted into the Y combinator program, LightSpeed, and TechStars. Let's see who got into Highland. Anyone get the interview call this week yet?