skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ive recently been contracting with a large media/design company that among other things incubates web businesses and other ideas. Besides thier own internal ideas they also bring in alot of VC backed companies that need development/design work. These are all web businesses that are essentially outsourcing thier entire product/service frontend/backend development to a third party. This seems flawed right off the bat to me because of the development loop being so large (client -> proj. manager -> my proj. manager -> me) but also it sort of makes sense that there are companies that can charge an arm & leg for work like that and people actually pay it - the clients do not understand the nature of software development and the need for a fast turn around on functionality. Anyways, just wanted to comment on this point of view.
Startup Resources: A Must have List
What can you add?
Test Pilots are bold by definition. Entrepreneurs are not necessarily bold. People tell me all the time how "brave" and "bold" I am for starting a startup and it's complete BS. The only think we're risking is some money, reputation and ego. All of which grow back in time. If we were doused with gas, lit on fire and smashed with ewok log traps if our startups failed then we would be bold. As it is we're just different.
Cocktail party to 23Mil startup payday - mediabistro
Real estate site has all kinds of info - Do-it-yourself feature allows users to add data they want
I was going to vote him up, but then his post has exactly 20 points at the moment, so I guess I'll leave it at that ;-)
I tend to think about this subject from time to time. The problem that I see, at least with user-driven sites, is the difficulty in the beginning. In order to get users, one should already have a decent amount of content on the site to begin with. However, due to the fact that the content is provided by the users, where does this initial content come from? Does it all just start with a small handful of users? I feel that even when creating a buzz, there should be some content on the site. This would give the users a reason to return.
I have also been interested in creating a mashup about renting and buying houses, on a smaller scale, though (basically because I also need it for myself).

I wonder about the legalities of creating mashups, though - is it legal to just pull information from Craigslist and other pages? I wouldn't mind forwarding my users to the pages I pulled the information from for closing the deal, but it still seems difficult legally.
I think it's a good idea, but already done, though. I use Carbonite to keep an online remote backup of my hard drive. They charge a fixed rate regardless of the capacity of the drive. Of course there is always space for competition, so if you think you can improve on their offering, then go for it.
Are you in SV? The Milk Pail pretty much fixes that problem.
If most of the code is finished, why bother with YC? Go straight to a VC after you get something to show them.
What would happen if the 50.1%'er overruled the 49.9%'er on something that was very important? It might very well be the end of the company entirely.

When I incorporated my lawyer thought 50/50 was the obvious choice.
Techcrunch partners with the competition
Of course the YC companies get mentioned on Techcrunch anyways.

What kind of financial relationship does partnership imply?
Agreed. Listen to epi and pg on this one. Your lawyer is nuts.

It just shouldn't be an issue. If you or your partner are afraid it might be, you've got the wrong co-founder. You will eventually bring in others and the potential tie will be broken--but for the next six months to two years (before the first VC round happens), your course should already be plotted. No important decisions should come up that require more than a "for the minutes" vote, because you already have discussed things and share the same goals.

You've already discussed whether you'd be willing to sell early for some reasonable some, right? That's the big one.

Sure, you might have the "do we go for the hundred million user consumer market and burn money like it's going out of style, or the half million user enterprise market and try to make a little money" conundrum that seems so inevitable in web apps...but, as others have noted, if you end up on different sides of this one, you simply can't work productively together...and you probably can't afford to do both.

Everything else is execution...and it's stuff you should have already hashed out and agreed (roughly) on.
How about if Yahoo stopped trying to compete with the likes of USA Today and the Kansas City Star?

Here's the most important item on Yahoo's front page as of this comment:

"Can he talk to the geese?
The "Goose Whisperer" clears parks of the pesky birds by making friends with the fowl. >> His unique methods"

Wow. I'm so inspired. Somebody sell me some Yahoo stock.
Here's a quick calc to help play with the numbers:

http://tinyurl.com/yorkoq

Feel free to click and change change any of the assumptions as you guys fight it out :)
protein from breadcrumbs? No.
More Lean Companies
Decision management is critical to event driven architecture
Your math is still wrong, because of the non-linear utility of money. If I give up 6% of my company, it costs me 6% of any MONEY I might end up getting, but it doesn't cost me 6% of the UTILITY. If I have a utility-of-money function of sqrt($), you don't have to increase my chance of success by 6.4%; it's enough if you increase my chance of success by 3.2%.
Patent law overhaul gets House panel OK
Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead
Photos: New BlackBerry goes Wi-Fi
If you use Carbonite, you're considerably braver than I am. Carbonite has no effective technological security, so you'd better hope that nobody breaks into their offices, none of their employees "go bad", and they're never confronted by a subpoena or have the PATRIOT act invoked against them; and they only keep the latest version of any file, so if you ever accidentally mangle a file you'd better hope that you can retrieve the unmangled version before Carbonite backs up the mangled version and throws away the older copy.
http://www.milkpail.com/

Sounds like an amazing place, but I don't know of anything like it on my side of the country.
Startup Weekend Coming to Boston
Wikipedia controversy: You could look it up: He changed the world
That little phishing problem is still unsolved, yes?
TechCrunch Acquires InviteShare
Startup marketing on Facebook via Wordpress
But if you stoop to their level and say "Oh, look how smart I am, of course I'm going to succeed," you're just engaging in self-justification yourself. And that's a dangerous mental attitude to get into

Very well said.

Remember, whatever disappointments you have, don't come off sounding like this guy (someone who did well in school, but couldn't get hired at the firm he wanted): http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=445136&mc=...
While Red Bull may be delicious, you can also add caffeine to your diet by buying kola nut or guarana. Iamshaman.com has kola nut powdered for $.99 an ounce. The guarana is $2.99 an ounce. They're both great flavors. If you make a strong kola or guarana solution, you can use it to flavor rum and cokes and other drinks. A house teaspoon of either is about equal to a cup of a coffee, which makes them a cheaper source of caffeine than any energy or coffee drink.

This place lets you get it wholesale if you want to try reselling it, they've also got bulk extracts with guaranteed caffeine levels. federalabs.com/1kilopricing.htm.

My preferred stimulant is Kratom.. Sometimes productivity boosts are worth using performance enhancing drugs, caffeine or otherwise. My Kratom site is http://www.getkratom.com and please email if you have any questions.

Then there are other drugs that can make you smarter, or at least measurably increase working memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam. Get your nootropics at www.bulknutrition.com.
So is there any good way to connect with angels besides networking?
and apache and mod_python too..
Who Else Wants to Coin a New Word?
Yesterday I was talking about the phenomena of forgetting someone's name immediately after they are introduced to you. The word name-nesia just came to me and I was pretty sure I had never heard it before. I just coined a word! Well, not so fast. I went to Urban Dictionary, of course, and I'll be damned if it wasn't already there but with a slightly-off definition. That's okay, I added a new one (pending review).
Accommodating Feedburner Redirects?
I'd be curious to get the news.yc community's take on a mini-dilemma we're seeing at SeekSift.com recently.

It's explained in more detail on the blog (http://blog.seeksift.com/2007/07/19/feedburner-redirects/) but the gist of it is that sites which host their feeds at Feedburner sometimes use their own domain for the link instead (there's a redirect the the actual Feedburner URL).

We reject the redirect (because it's not xml in either RSS or ATOM format), but it confuses people who don't understand the hosted-at-Feedburner piece of the puzzle.

I'm wary of making a change just for Feedburner, but is it something that should be done?
Andrew Frame came to speak at one of my classes at Stanford. He's intense and it seemed like he knew exactly what he was doing and where he wanted Ooma to go in a very Steve Jobs kind of way.

I think this has the potential to be quite disruptive to the wireline market.
I haven't done anything big with it yet, but it was fairly trivial for me to implement OpenID support. It has the classic chicken and egg problem. Eventually it will be very useful, if we all get behind it. There's certainly no better option for distributed identity.

Some may find it interesting to know that OpenID was originally a weekend hack created by Brad Fitzpatrick. Now it's a big deal and even Microsoft has announced strategy around it. Definitely one of the most potent "hacks to amuse your friends" that I've ever seen.
How Entrepreneurial marketing can add sustainable value to any sized company
Rice/Pasta/Corn, frozen/canned vegetables, a little meat/eggs.
In the sense that a rogue site can pretend to support openid, but actually present a copy of the openid provider's site, yes. People just have to be careful to check the domain name and SSL cert, just like everywhere else.

Wordpress.com has an interesting way of handling this; when you use your wordpress.com openid, it doesn't let you log in from the page you get redirected to. You have to manually go to the front page by typing in the address, log in there, and then continue. It's annoying, but probably patches the hole.
"Outcome" means the output of the utility function, not the input.
Price: $25k
I'm never sure whether such people are clueless or deliberately misleading. I'm inclined to give most the benefit of the doubt and say clueless. When you change the model for something, it takes people a long time to get what you're doing. I remember from web-based software.
Massive patent reform bill passes House committee
Use a random number generator! http://random.irb.hr/ - a quantum RNG is online, if you get stuck on an issue then a random choice may be as good as any other if both of you are dead-set and won't budge.
Why can VCs afford to give up stock and founders not? Are you talking about liquidation preferences?

Startups are just as subject to competition. There's a profit margin on taking investment just as there is on hiring someone, and it expands and contracts depending on how hot the startups is.
ok I guess either the article has recently been edited...
I like the prior art and total damages cap, but does this sound right, the US will "shift from a "first to invent" system to the "first to file" system used in other countries"?
Sorry, but it's not online anymore. Though if you're curious, it was the part of the essay about people using words that don't mean anything.

No but seriously, what the hell does it mean to be "offended?"
Wow, sounds like the US Congress did something reasonable and useful. This is rare from one of the worst Congresses ever...
Hmm, this shows one difference between the new journalism and the old. In the old model, it was considered wrong for journalists to take money from companies they wrote about. I'm not saying Arrington is doing anything unethical, btw, just that the conventions of blogger journalism are still fluid.
Peer to Patent: Community Patent Review the system is broken but this helps
I don't think they got Wayne as a tiebreaker. According to Woz's interview in Founders at Work, they got him because he knew about business. Woz also said in that interview that he had zero serious disagreements with Jobs. There was one point where Jobs tried to get him to decrease the number of expansion slots in the Apple II, and Woz simply refused, and that was the end of it.
Arrington claims that "We have no financial interest in the venture" which leads me to think no money actually exchanged hands on this.. But you never know.
Oops, my mistake. Change "take money from" to "do joint ventures with."
This reform bill quite excellent and much needed, as it focuses on limiting patent litigation and outrageous infringement lawsuits.
Shifting from "first to invent" to "first to file" actually helps prevent costly lawsuits. Under the current "first to invent," someone who files a patent can be invalidated by someone who claims they invented the idea first, but didn't take any action, which often results in expensive and time consuming litigation.
Hopefully this bill makes it through the full vote...
Pageflakes Goes Live With Blizzard, Start Page Social Network
LaunchTags Offers Revenue-Sharing Model for Bloggers
Why using a Mac over a Windows computer makes sense for entrepreneurs (it's a form of self-control)
There are few games for the Mac. So using a Mac makes it less likely that you will be distracted by the latest games as would happen with a Windows computer.

Even without considering games, there's generally less software available for the Mac in most areas, which again saves you time from trying out all sorts of competing products.
Congress to Examine Google-DoubleClick Deal
Interesting. I could've sworn that in Woz's speech in Startup School 2005, he mentioned that Wayne had been brought on as a tiebreaker (in addition to having business expertise). And that's the story given in Apple Confidential: http://extras.denverpost.com/books/chap0411h.htm

I've also read several interviews with Woz that say he and Jobs had zero serious disagreements, but that doesn't mean that they expected zero disagreements, or that they didn't want to be prepared just in case. They might've brought Wayne on as a tiebreaker and then found they didn't need him (rather fortunate, as they bought him out right when they were getting popular).
Will your service offer a full server backup, or just selected files?
Try clicking on the orange Y in the upper left.
This is really a non-issue.

From the user perspective, you must make that redirect, because they just want the feed, not some long-winded explanation about Feedburner.

If you're worried about security, limit yourself to just one redirect, but only if the redirect points to feeds.feedburner.com/something.
"One person tends to grab the thought-leadership and the others tend to follow"

For us, it's actually been very even. Our visions for the final product seem very much in-sync, enough that I'll do a UI mockup on paper and he'll do a UI mockup on paper and they'll be essentially identical, modulo things like panel placement.

It helps that I jumped on board because I could see myself as a user of the product, so I'm essentially in the demographic that he spent several months studying while coming up with the idea. Plus, we've read many of the same websites and articles (at least as far as the sector is concerned; we read different stuff for general startup knowledge), so we're coming from similar backgrounds.
Since you're good at math and know something about finance, why not just get a job at a hedge fund?

You'll get rich, and you won't get heckled by a bunch of startup founders.
I'd be more surprised if that ever worked. Sounds clueless and suplicating at best, insulting otherwise.
Are you asking if YC charges potential investors to attend their demo days?

Interesting if they did... part of YC's function is to introduce follow-on investors to their startups, but I've never thought about their charging investors for that privilege.

Who says there's no business model in the Web 2.0 world?
Whoever downmodded: I'm interested in your counterpoint. Please reply here or privately at the address in my profile. TIA!
this is actually a better article than the one I submitted
After the startup school in April, I had the opportunity to chat with one of the lawyers who had earlier presented. I asked him about the possibility of a world-wide patent system, where an inventor would file once and enjoy protection the world over. He didn't think that would happen anytime soon, mainly because of the "first to invent" system that US uses vs. the "first to file" that most other countries use.

I guess that dream is one step closer to reality if the law passes. :~)
Not surprising... the benefit of getting accepted is getting face time for advice and networking with potential investors at their dinners, etc., not the funding.

If they said yes to that, there'd be no need to apply, we'll all just show up at Graham's house every day.
Hard work is ticket to the rich list of self-made Britons
You're kidding, right? :)
Maybe this is not so innocent as I thought. Apparently Seth Levine is the partner of Brad Feld, the founder of Techstars:

http://www.foundrygroup.com/team.php

What a slimy move. It won't make any difference in the long run though.
I just read more about your security strategy - and that is definitely something people really want - reliable and secure data backup. Good luck.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) actually does perform this function and does include the U.S. It's PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) applications are valid for all member states, so it's essentially like submitting a patent application for each member state. However, WIPO applications are typically obtained in addition to separate U.S. and International patents rather than instead of, so it doesn't really serve the intended purpose.
Yes, of course I don't think it would work - I'd just be surprised if nobody has tried it.
Well, if they said yes to that, they'd have equity in a huge number of companies too. ;-)

But yeah, I can understand why they didn't go for it. It's turned out that yCombinator partner time is the scarcest resource in the Founders Programs. It makes sense to concentrate that where it's most likely to have the most effect, in the accepted founders. Which unfortunately doesn't include me.

This was for the first funding cycle though: at the time, nearly everyone harped on the money and not on the fringe benefits. Maybe Graham et al knew that partner bandwidth would be scarce, but I thought I was being clever by going for the part I really needed and offering to give up the part that didn't matter so much to me.
Unfortunately using a Windows based dev environment cant always be avoided.. I had to switch back to windows from ubuntu on my home machine because virtually all of the phone emulators are only available for Windows. Sucks I know.
not sure if I like "first to file." It sounds too easy to just write up someone else's idea.
Yeah. But i gave up playing computer games. I was a big Civ II fan.No work done.Ever.
Ooma: $400 Box with Free Calls for Life
On a related note:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200
Windows is fine if you are not the sort of person who is easily distracted by the latest games and other software.
That's a good call by arrington and co.
Thank god openid is here to make logging in so much easier!..
Old news, but I'm sure that it's just sinking in for older people.

Has any site ever proven every guideline that site designers have held strong to be entirely false like myspace did? I think that's the cause of most of the contempt they receive to this day. Entertaining, it is.
will PG please share his chicken stew recipe with us?

(If he wants, I can give him one of my recipes too).
Then you're still wrong. I quote from the article: "For example, suppose Y Combinator offers to fund you in return for 6% of your company. In this case, n is .06 and 1/(1 - n) is 1.064. So you should take the deal if you believe we can improve your average outcome by more than 6.4%."

If by "average outcome" you mean "expected value of the utility function", and assuming that my utility-of-money function is sqrt($), I don't need to improve my "average outcome" by more than 6.4% for the deal to be worth accepting; it's enough if I can increase my "average outcome" by 3.2%, since that's how much UTILITY giving up 6% of the MONEY costs me.
The nature of email is certainly shifting towards business dealings, as this article states. However, it's more than that: traditional email is also becoming a message aggregator. As social utilities, such as Facebook, MySpace, etc continue to utilize their own messaging systems, email acts as a feed reader to notify you when you have a message in any of your more specialized systems. So rather than it being the message itself, it becomes the messenger of a message.
Get your free Moo stickers (for your startup)
I know something about economics, but far less about finance. :-)

In any case, finance really doesn't interest me. I routinely tell Wall Street headhunters to stop bothering me because I would rather create something impressive than own something impressive. I'm not in this for the money.
The letter in the link is probably the most pathetic letter I've ever read.
IMHO

1) interpreting of tags

2) sending the tagged content at a site, to an enquiring browser so that in a virtual sense, one is visiting the location.
Clearly, you've never seen this letter before: http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/tripplehorn.asp
So you'd accept pitches from non S/WFP applicants? (see above: we can't move to SF/Boston)

(Incidentally, speaking of networking, I think you might know my dad-- Mitch Wand @ Northeastern?)
Closures + Lambda = The key to OOP in Lisp
Definitely self-serving move, and certainly won't make any difference in the end... articles like the USAToday one always need to find that contrarian view in order to seem unbiased. I'm sure Seth Levine was all to happy to provide them the material. But how would you feel if you were a Techstars startup group and you see him making comments like that - blasting the model of his partner's program!?
The rise of lighttpd (excellent web server)
Social Web: Late Night Shots
OpenSolaris ZFS vs. Linux ext3 RAID5
I meant YC is (among other things) a way to get introduced to angels.

I definitely do know Mitch Wand. He is one of the stars of the Lisp world.
What should the vesting terms of founder stock be before a venture financing?
Irrationality and Ebay
I read the ooma team's management page. This dude is at the very bottom. My guess is that he has a suitable understanding of the phone's workings. Of course, that barely matters; he is there to sell phones.

In this sense it's a pretty smart move to make a celebrity a plankowner. I'd even call it _innovative_. They'll probably do well.
Seeing the World Through Entrepreneurial Eyes
I thought everyone was joking...some companies have synergy as a core value
Any bets as to which language this will be re-written in if/when they get bought out? :P
How to make the perfect cup of coffee
> So rather than it being the message itself, it becomes the messenger of a message.

Which is ridiculous. Facebook and MySpace can still get hits on their webpage by forcing you to reply by going to the page but having to go to a different site to read a message is annoying.
I agree... they were already doing this same thing through blog posts but now it has structure. nice job.
Timeless: 12 Steps to Better Code
3 Simple Ways To Avoid Making Code Smells