skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't tell why point 22 shouldn't be titled "Sometimes you need capital other than sweat equity". It's not clear to me why this couldn't come in the form of debt. The only type of debt I recall Paul mentioning is the convertible kind.

I mean, other than the fact you'd have to talk someone into giving you that loan at a reasonable interest rate. Talking investors into giving you the money as a bet for an astronomical interest rate would be easier for companies with no collateral. Still, if you have a revenue stream and can show how a capital expenditure would increase it, it would at least be worth considering.
Crap, I'm still working on the eventcal calendar generator module. I'll add a next month link after my shower (hard to code when sweaty...)
Google Responds to Viacom's $1 Billion Law Suit
Do check out this
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18237

Philipp Lenssen is blogging live about the Google personalization workshop held at Googleplex, where all these news announcements were made by Marissa Meyers.
http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

"Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."

...I'm not sure whose advice to follow
How about: http://est8.com

$ whois est8.com | grep "Created on"

Created on: 14-Nov-05
(Includes interview w/ YC's Inkling founders) Web 2.0: Return of the dot-com
By "YC folks" I meant the YC partners: pg, rtm, tlb & x. Founders should be able to move easier: presumably they are younger, with less "baggage" and with more appetite for adventure.
Turn on auto-complete in Firefox and Internet Explorer and it's just a matter of clicking Login. PG has said in the past that you are logged out whenever the server is restarted.
Ohh I understand now. That is pretty cool. Thanks.
Online Pornography: A Disciplined Business
How does it handle multiple tables? Should I change the file names for each table? Perhaps you should have a list tables file? Why not take this a step further and have it generate a whole CRUD app for the whole DB?
It's still an extra 2 clicks each morning ;)
I think the author is incorrect in every statement. There is nothing I agree with.
Because Eclipse volunteers will be giving it away for free soon.
Also, do a search on Expression Studio. It can also be used to make a straight AJAX page without all of the Silverlight CLR garbage.
ed: you should give the Boston startup meetup a shot. We started it after YC's first Startup School (at Harvard in 2005) so initially it was entirely made up of this kind of crowd. The group has broadened quite a bit since then, and some of the early members have entered new ventures or moved to the SF bay area, but there's still a core of fairly young, hackery folks. You should drop by some time. (So far nobody has brandished a business plan, and AFAIK most of the group members' ventures are bootstrapped or angel-backed.)

On the other hand, there's something undeniably energizing about being able to engage every single other person at the table with you in a debate about filesystem performance (or whatever). A more focused group would probably do well. I want to be there (but might not be able to attend this one) and we should see if there's some way we can work together, because we both want the same thing: more happy smart people hacking on ambitious, interesting startups in Boston.
I'm also logged out anytime I close and reopen my browser.
Drugs work because your body has the ability to react to them.
If your body can react to drugs is, usually, because there are internal receptors that can bind to them.
But of course naturally occurring concentrations of 'drug'-like components are much lower and extended over time than a pill, and the components themselves are milder than their drugstore counterparts (except counted instances such as norepinephrines). Besides the fact that generating them requires (usually) exercise (for example, for endorphines and melatonin/cortisol/tyroxine fine-tunning), and/or yoga-style body control.

A report from your friendly biomedical biologists.
The opposite of an ipod... Hmm, a silent, ornate and depending on triangle, diamond and oval shapes. Must look organic and -not- be advertised as a toy for cool liberal twenty-somethings. Must be sold as a tool, but be corrupted by clever users for entertainment. And you can't make custom covers for it. Okay then, I guess that's the specs?
States open databases for Google searches
OpenLaszlo on Adobe's and Microsoft's open source RIA moves
We certainly think about it. One reason we keep doing the summers on the East Coast is that the universities are there. The Atlantic Corridor is to founders what the Bay Area is to investors. Another is that I think it's good for our brains. SV is more energetic than Cambridge, but Cambridge is smarter.
BuddyTV Gets First CRV $250K Loan (Anyone surprised that they've only done one so far?)
How to get/make a Logo for Your Startup?
The CRV Loan program has been out for a good while now. I was surprised to see this article about the first funded company with CRV's loan program. Maybe the article is wrong? Or is it really this tough to get into their program?
My new startup needs a logo, and I'm not sure if I trust my artistic ability to make one. What would you folks recommend?

If it matters, I want the logo to be a Dutch windmill but futuristic looking (or a windmill/robot hybrid type of deal). I'll announce my startup on here soon, hopefully with a logo :-)
U.S. Video Startups Raised $682M Last Year
Top 10 Ways to Suffocate an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
The World is Neither Flat nor Spiky, It is...
Vote up if you want to see the Arc source so you (ostensibly) can fix it yourself...
80% of Internet Users Will Have a Virtual Life By 2011
VCs start to feel the cold shoulder
Boston's still number 2 (behind silicon valley) in most recommendations of places to start a startup (in terms of available capital, nerds/smart people, and proximity to other growing businesses).

Another part of the argument goes along the lines of:
The YC Founders program is a 3 month intense program where the objective is to build as much of something people want during those 3 months while avoiding distractions of the real world.

In my own experience, unless you have a lot of friends in the Boston/Cambridge area - it's a lot easier to whole up down in Central/Harvard Square in Cambridge - than it is anywhere in San Fran or Palo Alto. There's just too much to do in the bay area (startup related networking / yc folks to chill with...etc).
Try playing around on http://logoyes.com/logocreator.php
Practical Common Lisp |Google techtalk-Peter Seibel
I read the article as saying that BuddyTV got the funding a while ago, not that they just got it.
It wouldn't save any time to see the Arc source, since it runs on their servers, and PG would have to check any fixes to see if they worked and didn't ruin everything, which would probably take more time than just doing it himself.

I'm all in favor of Arc being released, however, even informally and without any promises of updates.
Books for Entrepreneurs
Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL (Google Video)
How did you come up with that name? I agree with danielha. It took me a while to figure out what the name came from. It's been a long time since I typed capacitor (this is the suffix right?) and now it takes me more than half a second to type.

What about the more web2.0 style names? untaken: bootstrappd, bootstrapping, bwootstrap... to name a few
I don't have my draw program with me, but if you want, give more details. I do some monochrome stuff if you're ok with that. And no, I'm not a pro so I don't charge, but I enjoy doing logo-like design.

Right now, I can't really see how a windmill and a robot will go together without looking kinda silly (think propeller hat) or sadistic (blades), if they are merged together.
How many failed companies did he helm?

The book The Halo Effect makes some interesting points on selective attributions for success and failure.

Not to say that he doesn't know how to make a business successful, but I'm skeptical when people look back at what they've done and start declaring that these are the rules for winning, more so if they've only been involved with a small number of operations. I'm unconvinced that they are accounting for all the little details and matters of chance.
Kind of a neat tool, but I didn't see anything that caught my eye. Except the price. A hundred bucks for a logo I design myself online with no designer even telling me it's crap is just a little excessive.

My recommendation is to find a design student and offer 'em a hundred bucks for a logo.
It's a joke - I know we couldn't fix it, I just want to see the source. :)
dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17947
Try http://thelogocompany.net/ . Haven't used them, but there examples are cool. Or, post on elance and see if someone good bids.
WaPo: "Rulings Weaken Patents' Power"
My login lasts for weeks. Is this just a matter of session vs stored cookies? If so, it should be easy to write a little bookmarklet which makes your cookie non-session.
Use Inkscape[1] and do it yourself. It's amazing what even a newbie can do with it in an hour or two. You can always pay someone to make a slicker version later, which will be much easier if you have something to use as a base.

1. http://www.inkscape.org/
http://designoutpost.com - you pay a set fee, and a slew of designers make a logo based on your description. They then iterate till they get it right, and don't get paid till you choose one. Pretty good methodology, i've tried it twice and got what I wanted both times.
http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/04/26/ideas-are-worthless

pg is right, for practical purposes, but not because ideas are "worthless" or there is no demand.
FYI, 'x' is Jessica Livingston, according to the YC site. TLB presumably lives in the Bay Area; his Anybots company is here, anyway, and hosts the WC YC offices.

Which raises an interesting question as to how the YC partners handle the EC/WC split between the SFP and WFP. Do different partners play bigger roles in different programs? Does PG rack up the airmiles/spend 3mo of the year away from home?

Is cloning involved?
This is good, too: http://www.introecon.com/
I don't see any reason why karma couldn't be turned into money. Karma indirectly determines the value a user add to a web site. If the site generates money, karma could be used as reference value to estimate an amount of revenue share they could get back.

This is already how it works in open source even if there isn't an explicit karma value. If good developpers and contributors are detected they may get an offer for a payed mission on the project or even better a permanent job.

PG said for instance that a good karma could catch their attention. Some sort of benefit to getting a good karma.

It is preferable that karma benefit are not made public and taken for granted otherwise the system could be perverted.
It looks good, but do you really think you can compete in that space?

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17621

I decided I'd rather work on something where there is a bit less (established, at least) competition.
Voting enhancement proposal
Ask the Wizard: Fundraising: No-Shop Agreements
"On the other hand, there are also companies which started their businesses from brilliant ideas: Microsoft (operating system), IBM (personal computers),"

IBM was around for just a few years prior to the PC:-) It's a good point nonetheless.
An *Initiate* of the Bayesian Conspiracy
You should put that explanation on the front page of the site. Currently, it's not at all obvious what the site is for.
Votes are important because it reflects the pertinence of the contribution and it should logically influence karma of contributors.

The more voters, the more significant is the voting result (see central limit theorm). If users can only up vote, the vote value is the same as the number of voters. But if users can also down vote, then the number of voters is a missing information. The number of readers is also a missing information.

If v is the vote value and n is the number of voters, v/n is the score. It is a value between -100% and 100%. 1/n is the vote weight on the score. A big vote weight could motivate people to read and vote. Karma would also influence vote weight.

The number of readers is also a usefull feedback, a kind of popularity, and it should also somehow influence karma.

Adding the possibility to view news sorted by score, popularity and/or weight would give new perspective on the information.

Last year I wanted to create an electronic journal using this mechanism with other features I'll keep secret for now. I had to give up for various reasons, though I still believe it can work if it gets enough funding to prime the money pump. The name 'ejnl.com' is now to sell. ;-)
AWS (S3, EC2, etc) Reduces Bandwidth Prices (incl. bulk bandwidth discounts)
Does Silverlight matter?
http://dache.ch/
Did anyone else see the logo and start daydreaming about having electric boots?
Adobe Flash and other Adobe products are mostly developed in India. But the number of hardcore Actionscript developers in India is very small.

I dont really know if the Indian R&D facility of Microsoft contributes to .Net development , but one thing i know is that, practically every Indian computer engineer use .NET

This is where SilverLight matters. Microsoft's development tools are already very popular among some of the most brilliant [and cost effective], software engineers in the world.Imagine all the kind of applications these developers can churn out. If this happens, there will be a choice of applications for endusers to play around with on SilverLight .In such a scenario, users will be forced to install Silverlight , and SilverLight could get popular easily.

Basically Microsoft could leverage on all these developers, and bring in a real competition to Adobe Flash.

If the above said situation doesnt happen,Silverlight will probably die.

Me, for some reason, is not going to try SilverLight anytime soon.
I dislike clicking "parent" multiple times in a row. Can we have a "root" as well to go straight to the top.
Go and find this request on the Feature Requests page and upvote it there. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=363
On Not Allowing Users to Register
I was watching a Google video (http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Designing+Next+Gen+Web+Apps) about designing the user interface for web apps and it talked about Measure Map (http://measuremap.com/).

It looked like a pretty neat product, but when I tryed to examine it more closely, it would't let me register.

I have some vague ideas about why they wouldn't want me to, but from a business standpoint, if someone is inquiring about your product shouldn't you want them to be able to?
Matt Haughey's site about everything he's learned setting up and running a business around his blogging empire.
They were bought by google and are closed to new users while they go through the google intergrate and then kill process.
http://gfxcontests.com - offer a nominal reward to get several people to submit designs in a competition.

I found out about these guys through MashupCamp 3, which was run by Mass Event Labs. Mass Event Labs offered $100 for a logo design and got many entries actually, check out the discussion at http://gfxcontests.com/showthread.html?t=713
I think I can. If not, I'll just switch to something else. In any case, I need some experience with web.py and Python so this is a good exercise.
Vote on news.yc without reloading the page -- Greasemonkey script
you could try this: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8951
What hosting provider are you using for your startup ?
We did a logo contest on SitePoint, and were really happy with the results.

http://www.sitepoint.com/contests/
I'm looking for a hosting provider who offers a full server package with root access. The server should run Fedora or Red Hat Linux with at least 1Gb ram.

Any suggestions ?

The cheapest provider I can find offers the above for about $120 per month (with unlimited bandwidth).
Right now, I'm the reading 'The Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell and the message seems to be very similar to what Alex is saying.

The smallest details can sometime have a surprisingly large impact.

It's not always clear why certain startups are successful and others fall by the wayside, maybe the success or failure of a website just depends on getting the hundreds of little details just right ?

As site developers, we need to think more about the psychological and sociological side of things, we should think of ourselves as community builders not just tool makers.
Ozzie's quiet revolution at Microsoft
Video sharing for dummies
Contest winner: Vista more secure than Mac OS
Google To Viacom: We'll see you in court - and we want a jury trial
Wikipedia co-founder wants open-source search engine
Right. I disagree that ideas are worthless also. I think the point of the original essay is that you shouldn't let fear of having your idea stolen get the way of your goals. Given that, you can still take some steps to protect your ideas from potential competitors.
Alibaba.com reportedly planning IPO
Comcast and Yahoo ink Internet advertising deal
Revamped Google tools let you be you
iMac, iPod, iPhone... iGoogle??
We use Server Beach -- http://serverbeach.com/ -- and have had few problems.

They have a wide range of options, with several servers under $100 per month, but they limit bandwidth to 2,000 gb of transfer per month.

We find the 2,000 is a lot, though, (we've come close, but yet to go over), and you can control it further by using AWS.
Microsoft takes Silverlight beyond Windows
I just started using s3 for a video site I'm launching next week and it's awesome. So far it has cost me pennies (literally)!
The Travails of Tracking Web Traffic
What's interesting is that the average age of the founders listed in the article is just over 27 years of age. Youngest being 20, oldest being 37.
"Google came along three years later and kicked Yahoo's ass"
ha ha.. its cool to read it from Y!ou.

and a very cool article. great points.
Of course the fortune cookie writer is familiar with Paul's essays. The cookie means "sell" as in persuade others of their value, not as in exchange for money. There's no contradiction here.
10 Golden Lessons From Steve Jobs
Should you raise debt or equity?
A lesson on launching -- the Marshall Kirkpatrick way
And don't forget that "Swim You-Yong" is an anagram for "Wing my You-Os". I think someone is trying to tell you something! ;)
Nice hack. Much better than having to ctrl+click everything.
Are you looking for a Rails host or...?
I'm all for seeing a decent login screen as well. It would take - what? - 3 seconds to toss the CSS at the top of that page?
You have some pretty strict requirements there - I am curious as to why. Is your app really that complex where you require these services or are you planning ahead for scaling issues?

Personally, I go with Dreamhost. The price is right, their service is awesome, and customer support is willing to help you with whatever you need. If scaling becomes an issue - then go looking for a dedicated host.

For 90% of the startups that launch, scaling will never become an issue.
Tech.view | Criminalising the consumer | Economist.com
Not counting votes from direct hits is ridiculous. There goes every user who uses RSS, widgets, or the dozen visualizations from digg themselves - all of which link directly to the story article.

digg already throttles people's votes - in a nondirect way. Yes, your vote counts as much as mine, but if a group of users attempting to game the system are voting on that story - then that story requires more votes to get to the front of the page.

The throttling is implemented at the story level based on the users voting for that story and the pattern in which they are voting.
Dead Man Dancing
I like this part: "The lesson here is that an entrepreneur has to learn to be able to live with fear and uncertainty  learn how to sleep in the midst of a fire. If we cant handle the stress of high pressure situations with calm, our companies dont have a chance."
You need publicity to make people aware they want your product. If you are not famous (or have a famous investor, like ycombinator), publicity costs a lot of money.
"Year Zero" project - the way a viral campaign should be run
Microsoft Launches Silverlight -  Adobe Flash Killer
CSS Float Theory: Things You Should Know | Smashing Magazine
It's not a scaling issue, I just prefer to be in control of the server.
IBM struggles to stay relevant w/ press, fails miserably
Isn't it just 30 lines of elegant Lisp code? Write it yourself unless, of course you want the Holy Lispirit come onto you when looking at PG's code :)
Unfortunately not, I'm using PHP ...
My guess is that the lame login screen filters out those gamer kids (digg) and geeky democrats (reddit). YCnews is for the rest of us, you see.
While the bandwidth has gone up, they now charge a price per request to their servers. They said this is a decrease in cost for 70% of their customers.
Thanks, that's great :-)

Theye're very good value for maoney and the bandwidth limits are reasonable too.
Do TextDrive do Lamp ?
Sounds interesting. How much did you pay?
I concur. I went from never using inkscape to having a not horribly embarrassing logo in about 2 hours.
Learn how to use the gradient tool, it is key.
You can see what I did here: http://carhuntr.com/index.html
I'd be interested to see what you put together. Can I email you?

Yeah, maybe the robot part is out then :-)

Maybe just a traditional windmill like one of these below, but then having the building part of the windmill be made of shiny metal. Perhapss the blades could be shiny metal too. ? Can you make that "shiny" effect?

http://www.angelfire.com/sc/soriluc/images/amstertraditional.jpg
http://www.enweirdenment.org/pics/Europe2001/111-1147_IMG.JPG
How to Create Passionate Customers
Google Fails To Blink
I use SoftLayer http://www.softlayer.com/ .. I used to use EV1 but since they merged with The Planet they've not been as good. SoftLayer is made up of many of the "old" The Planet guys and offer some amazing stuff like free private LAN between your servers.

Of course you're going to start at no less than $150 per month, and I spend almost $1000 a month, but.. this is business and you have to pay to get the goods. People who run their businesses on naff shared hosting are crazy unless they think the odd hour of downtime here or there is acceptable.

Of course, shared hosting or a VPS (my personal recommendation if your budget is small) is a good way to start, but once you make revenue, it's time to upgrade :)
Karma reflects what the other users of a system think of you. So it can be meaningful to the extent other users are good judges.
Jabber founder Jeremie Miller joins Wikia for search product
The value servers from aplus.net are pretty good. They're last-gen hardware for cheap. I have a 2.5 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM and a 120GB HDD for $50/mo.
It's from bootstrap + capacitor, as you figured out. We were looking for something that connotes "keeping your energy levels up". I threw out a bunch of physics-related terms, but if you saw particleinabox.com or blackbodyradiation.com you'd think physics and not startups. A lot of our potential names had that problem: there was nothing in them that really suggested "startup".

Then there were names that had the opposite problem: they didn't suggest anything but startups, and the added suffix was just completely random. Startupduck.com fits in this category. So would bootstrappd, bootstrapping, bwootstrap, etc, IMHO. My cofounder also suggested startup-orphans.com, which I nixed as too negative, since negativity was what everyone jumped on RejectedByYC.com for.

My cofounder also proposed dotcamaraderie.com, which I liked, but we didn't think anyone would be able to spell "camaraderie". We also considered shortening it to "dotcomrade.com", but it sounded too communist for me.