skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
one of my favorite pg quotes from "The Power of the Marginal"...

"You often hear people say that you shouldnt major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: dont learn things from teachers who are bad at them."
Could a startup beat Microsoft and Google to market with cloud OS?
I cut and pasted the title and it was displayed as "Ã¢ÂÂcloud OSÃ¢ÂÂ?".

On a tangent, I thought it interesting that Google has been hiring up Plan 9 engineers.
I've never seen or heard anything about a business plan competition, but they seem like amazingly bankrupt ideas. It sounds to me like they're a bunch of middle-aged employees of big companies or universities who have never started a business telling you what's a good business plan. But I *highly* doubt that the winners of business plan competitions correlate at all with successful businesses (as you yourself are an example). For that reason, it seems like they'd be the exclusive domain of PHBs, or at least the administration of them would be.
Ben Franklin's Advice to a Young Tradesman
Hackers in Eastern Europe: so much, yet so little.
Is Google a Media Company?
Computer world lists "The Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in '07" - rails is first
also in the list:
2) NAND drives 3) Ultra-Wideband 4) Hosted hardware 5) Advanced CPU architectures
Even if her arguments do hold up and now is somehow relatively worse than some time in the past (or future?) for starting startups it's still hard to argue that startups are worse than the alternative. Hopefully no one's arguing that this is an especially good time to take a crap job at a large company.
I'm wishing I could successfully internalize #4 right now.
"By the way..."

Pre-alpha.
(800) 511-8544 -- Speak with the CEO -- 7 days a week 12:00-4:00PM
Is YCombinator News better than Digg?
let's take a pop over and see:

* Pot No Longer Beneficial Only to the Cheez-It Industry

* Judge suspends man's sentence after he raped 12-year-old 5x

* Box Wine Dispenser For Your Boxed Wine Presumably Comes in a Box

I'll stop there, and rest my case. More importantly, I haven't seen a single decent comment over there in many months. I don't come here for the news as much as the peers.
Designing Change
Death by Risk Aversion
Sorry but that essay _is_ severely disjointed and unfocused. The prompt asked for a specific work experience/decision and you essentially produced a bootleg PG essay. This is coming from a Cornellian who is going the startup route after graduation so I feel ya on the story -- you just failed to play the game. Nonetheless, your professor is an idiot if that quote is indeed verbatim. Somehow, though, after speaking with my housemates who took multiple OB classes, I doubt it was.
Please, if I'm on this site for more than an hour or so a day, please pop up a message that says "Get back to work, slacker!" and don't display the page for the rest of the day. Thank you.
What? Do you think they're made of money? Paul, Trevor and Robert only got 50 million out of Yahoo. A table costs...literally hundreds of dollars! (Of course, Paul does cook the dinners himself...but there's been a disturbing trend towards pizza at events and even one of the dinners.)
define bad, define company, define everybody else

being a bad or hard time it doesn't mean you can't do it.
creating a company doesn't mean you will produce a new technology or you have thought the next big thing...

after all, we all know that 1 out of 10 start-ups succeed...

from her speech 1 month later, you can see that they made flickr it for themselves..it was fun etc...

http://wiki.ycombinator.com/presentations/apr06/Caterina_Fake.mp3

i guess is not about making a company as much as about doing it for you and hopefully, your idea, passion and implementation will produce a success...making a company is one of the steps...

from ''Founders At work'', being over-funded may kill your company... so everybody else getting funded means nothing...
Copyright: get to know the facts
The Attention Economy: An Overview
I saw a big momentum improvement in my startup as soon as I got a development server setup with Trac. The wiki on there has definitely given us a place to toss ideas around and to have them recorded. The problem with email is that things get too spread out across different threads. The wiki lets you structure it more permanently.
Last desktop app standing: IM Client
The Cognitive Analysis of Tagging
Startup idea for helping people better understand their printed books
Please contact me if you might be interested in pursuing such a startup: amichail@gmail.com.
The serial entrepreneur proverb:

If you go to bat enough times you may never hit a home run, but sooner or later you're bound to get hit by a pitch and walked.
5 New Jobs of the Web 2.0 Generation
It's great how each generation re-discovers the wisdom of Franklin. Unfortunately, it's sad how they fail to follow it.
Can VCs tell an A-Team from a B-Team?
What are the implications of the Conceptual Age for startups?
Conceptual Age: real or hype?

Software startups can run circles around big companies because of their agility and their ability to follow best practices as opposed to standard practices. What are a startup's biggest advantages in the conceptual age?

Is sensemaking purely a service industry, or will there be a thriving product market?

What is the sustainable competitive advantage in a startup that revolves around sensemaking?
It's never a "good time" -- you could always use more capital, more experience, more co-founders, etc.

But if you fall into that mindset, you'll wait for "conditions to improve", and never take the first step towards getting started.
I'm actually working on a similar problem to this now, not as a startup but as a long essay / short book. I'm taking a literacy class this semester, not because I want to be a teacher but because I'm really fascinated by just how illiterate our country is. 1/3 of Americans never read another book after HS for the rest of their lives. We talk about marketing to the base of the pyramid in Africa, but how about the base of the literacy pyramid in the US. You have this huge market that generally has enough money to buy books, but because of a combination of poor literacy skills and lack of interest there is nothing happening. It's not just lower class people either; my dad doesn't read very many books and he was at Davos last month. Granted he's on email and reading reports all day, but still.

I can send you my writing in a couple weeks when I at least have a coherent draft if you want.
Did you hear that everyone? It's time to quit and go home. So please. Stop working on your companies. Seriously. You're not good enough. You'll never make it.

Oh and if you need a job let me know.
Yes, I would be interested in reading your essay/book draft. It might provide excellent motivation for this startup idea :)
I certainly believe it is real. It would be nice however if computer science education and research would have more to do with this conceptual age.
Agreed. The study of IT traditionally ends at data. Brad Burnham actually has a really amazing post about this:

http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2007/01/whats_next.html
Map of Google Subsidiaries Worldwide, with Some Surprises
The problem with a blog is the organization. Many times it is date and category based, and you can better sort a wiki. Also I have found the speed in editing and posting to the wiki to be faster and simpler.

Another issue unless your running your own blog is most blog services run public, and you probably just want to have the discussion with your co founders and advisers. Most blogs also don't provide revision support which we found to be very useful when multiple people are editing and working on a file, a good safety net.

Blogs are great for publishing and archiving those items, but not necessarily the best for continuous brainstorming.
Web First Impressions--and what to do with them
How web 2.0 logos are drawn
Hi Alex

I'm also interested in your essay. please email it to sic@shaw.ca
thanks
Does anyone know of a good FOSS product that emulates the functionality of Lotus Teamroom? I am anal about my organization and much prefer a directory structure for it's ease of organization. I currently use a hacked verstion of Relay (http://www.ecosmear.com/relay) with a custom written XML parsing function to add context to directory and files for my Wiki-/teamroom- like functionality. However, is there a good alternative to this that a reader knows of?
I briefly looked through your documents, but there are a few conclusions I can draw from the elevator pitch alone.

The aim of your product would be better suited as software for mobile phones. From the pitch, I can see no reason why a consumer would purchase the device if it provided no immediate gains. Getting use out of an Emoticomm would entail purchasing the device and waiting for it to reach mass market adoption.
This sounds like a wonderful idea. Not entirely new, but a great way to keep one ear to the ground during the critical phase of business development where you want to get a solid product core out to users.

However, this could never scale with growth. I don't think this is a problem as the early adoption gives way to regular customers and viral growth, but they need to plan for proper customer support after directly calling the CEO is no longer viable.
The negative feedback wasn't the problem; it was more the ogmz lozl amazing.
Just curious if there is anyone else on news.YC that had their first programming experiences with their first graphing calculator? I started with my TI-83 and z80 Assembly in 6th grade learning at ticalc.org.
apologies, but it is amazing
I enjoy the reddit-like simplicity of YC News, but I come here mostly for the community of like-minded people, as jwecker noted. The digg community is much more vocal, however, and I'm hoping more lengthy discussions will come out of these links here at YC News.
This is a great article (excerpt, actually) -- thanks.

Creativity over competence. This is what separates simple programmers from software engineers.
I started programming on an HP-65 in the 70's. That was before graphing calculators, though.
Launch Party 2.0 -- A look into the culture and why it's Web 2.0, not Bubble 2.0
I'd be interested in reading that essay too. Polish up that draft and post it up here on YC News. :)
Startups and the Stockdale Paradox
Interesting piece. How can programming be tested in competition? There's always TopCoder (http://www.topcoder.com/).
I don't think anyone believes this to be their proper customer support line in the short or long term.

This is a popular way to become personable to your customers. This is exemplified further in smaller mom-and-pop shops where intimacy is a selling factor.

Few people will call, but many will feel good knowing that their calls will be answered by the main man.
This is just another company offering to "help" you with your credit card debt.

Probably, the only reason that you can talk to the CEO is because there aren't any other employees to talk to. It's likely the company doesn't have many customers either.
"Yes, there are programming techniques to be learned, and there are tricks to help you keep a large software project on its rails. Unit testing, computational complexity, all these things are very important. But saying that software projects fail for lack of engineering is like saying that the latest Stephen King's novel is boring because he forgot to draw a UML diagram of the book."
http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2007/02/04/why-building-software-is-hard/
RFID staples tell you where you put down that report
How's that for a startup idea? ;)
Yummy Kitchen Connect is Web 2.0 for the Kitchen
Skinnycorp's Jeffrey and Jake talk about "Threadless and other things of Awesomeness" at the CommunityNext conference.
What They Never Told You About Handling B2B Transactions
Sun at 25: Where are the founders now?
Joel on Office Space Calculations
Carly Fiorina about Leadership and Tough Choices (Video)
One idea that has been on my mind recently is the Arts Digita (and other) system where you have small teams that work directly with the customer. If they do well, they will get a bonus, if not, then everyone knows who is at fault and things need to change.
Information on making rails faster.
That article is awesome. I've always has trouble articulating my belief in the power of positive thinking without sounding like a hippie.
His criteria for the definition of A teams all seem to revolve around experience rather than talent. Experienced people probably already have some money, which means they have the potential to lose it, which means that they're likely to be more conservative. Being conservative means cutting both your standard deviation and your mean outcome. But VCs shouldn't be encouraging conservatism, because when you're running a fund, the law of large numbers kicks in and standard deviation doesn't really matter. It should be all about the mean.
I need your advice! Startup Failing. Should I simply release the product?
WordPress 2.1.1 Dangerous, Upgrade Right now to 2.1.2!!!
If it's divided into layers, you could release the substrate as open source and keep some of the uppermost bits.
Zooppa (User-created ads)
Just a dupe, IIRC.
It was a failed idea from Radio Shack (?) in 1998 - I still have the stuff they gave away for free when it failed - the scanner shaped like a d****.
But if you are interested in this, then why dont you look at my post http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1890
-
Anil
It does in a sense, because it makes it faster to add new features.
Interesting and intriguing idea, horrible English name, and near rip-off Kappa logo (the back to back girls, similar to Kappa's back to back girl and guy).
I went to juwo.com when you first posted here and thought "huh, that's kind of funny that there's nowhere where you can actually use the product..." You're competition is going to have a chance to copy your ideas at some point or another anyway- it's a simple fact of business- even if you do have a patent. And no amount of miraculous outside funding will help that. Take a risk [ http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/01/death_by_riskav.html ].

Get the product into as many people's hands as quickly as possible, as massively as possible. If there's a chance that some hacker is willing to do some of the work to make it work with other media formats, then for heaven's sake open source the product (or part of it like pg said). What do you have to lose? You're product is more than just a list of features. Believe it or not, many people will not do a point-by-point comparison of your product with other products- there's the coolness factor, loyalty to you and your company, the subtle touches of your product, the way you support it and it's users, the vision you have of how it can be used to enrich someone's life, how frequently you respond and update it, etc. etc.

None of that will matter if no one is using it. Start a following. It may fail either way- that's got to be part of the reason you still have a day job, but it has absolutely no chance of success if no one is using it and spreading the word about it.
Hi There,

jwercker has some great advice - you need to get this out there. The other products are pulling ahead because they're actively building a community. You aren't!

Adding to that, you may want to take some time to invest in a communications "strategy". After reading your post and checking out the website, I don't think I have much of a clue as to what your product does, other than maybe allowing me to organize media in some way... how will that benefit me? How is it better than the products your competitors have released?

You need to build the community, but in order to do that, you need to communicate how your product is going to improve that community's lives in some way - and you need to do this on the front page of your site.
Why you need a degree to work at Bigco
Right now, your competitors have a product. You have a list of features, as jwecker put it. I do remember reading your posts on juwo here a couple times, and still I am unsure on what exactly it does.

You sunk a lot into this and giving it away would yield you 0 return. I understand that. But don't let regret and hindsight turn into future mistakes. Get it out there and get yourself a user base.
just when I thought user generated content as a business model was beaten to death. looks kind of fun.
My hunch is that user-generated content still has a long way to run. There were so many people held down by the old narrow-channel world.

YC itself is a lot like a user-generated content startup. We encourage young hackers to start their own companies instead of just going to work for existing ones, and we profit (hopefully) by the potential energy thus liberated.
Maybe he gave them a Non-Programmer's Apology http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nonapology and then proceeded to write tons of blog entries, cry in the bathroom, and feel melancholy about being rich.
I remember this from Jon Katz (the regular slashdot guest that everyone hated, but that was insightful a lot of the time until he disappeared). It stuck with me. I think it's fundamental to understanding our generation.

http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/20/1457228
"Attention Economy" explained
There's no scanner involved here.
I'm Marc Hedlund, one of the founders of the company.

We have eight employees total, and yes, we have a real support line (support@wesabe.com). I usually answer, but you can talk to any of us through it. You can also write me directly at marc@wesabe.com if you want to.

The 800 number has been great, and I'd recommend it to any startup. We put it up there since we're handling privacy-sensitive information, and we wanted people to be able to talk to an actual person about what we do. I figured the absolute worst case was that Jason would spend a lot of time talking to customers and potential customers. Seems like a great worst case to me. (The second-worst case, that no one calls, has a pretty low cost associated with it.)

Anyway, it's worth doing for any startup, I think. People love talking to people, and an anonymous web site isn't as friendly as a phone number you can call. Doug is right that it won't scale, but for now, all the possible outcomes are good.
There's two types of jobs. Those where what you do creates value for people within the company, and those where what you do creates value for people outside the company. You only need a degree for the former.

Rule of thumb: Ask someone what their greatest accomplishment is. If what they say is relative, i.e. "I am better than someone else at ___," then chances are they aren't very good at anything.

Avoid those whose self-worth comes from comparing themselves to others, be it through degrees or GPA or money, etc. They're losers and hanging out with them will keep you from accomplishing anything in life.

The funniest thing is that investment banks hire based on GPA even though there is zero correlation between GPA and alpha, and alpha is 100% of your job performance.
a) What's alpha?
b) There are some things where relative accomplishments are OK, like sports. Saying you're an Olympic gold medalist means you're just better than everybody else, but it's still quite an accomplishment.
Content log: An American Entrepreneur in Europe
Why not pull a Kiko?
Ability to view my own comment history. When I click on someone else's user id, I see their comments. When I click on my own, all I see are my preferences.

Edit: correction, I guess the user pages show just submissions and not comments, for any user. So I guess I'm requesting comment history.
I can't comment on what those sites do, as I've never heard of any of them. However it must be hard to get ahead of the herd when you are following it with technology like LAMP. I developed mod_libpq specifically to explore new technological pastures and it seems to be working very well. e.g. tracktype.org
I guess you're right. From that perspective programming tools fall under that category as well, and we won't be running out of those any time soon.
Acquisition as a Business Model?
Tech billionaires pass the hat
X Prize Foundation to announce new competitions
What entrepreneurs read most often
A Startup Idea Postmortem: Proof That Good Ideas Aren't Always Good Business
Online Marketplace for Intellectual Property
10 Reasons Why Great Advisors Matter
Each portfolio has an expected return based on risk. The higher the risk, the higher the return has to be to justify the risk. Alpha is the difference between the expected return based on the risk of the portfolio and the actual return. So positive alpha is good, negative alpha is bad. Traders are compensated based on their alpha.

My point about the relative accomplishment thing is just that you can go through your entire life trying to beat other people at stuff, but just because you can beat someone at something doesn't mean you're making the world a better place.

Being an Olympic athlete is certainly an accomplishment, although hopefully one goes on to do stuff that benefits others. And I say that as someone who pulled a 500 meter piece on the rowing machine that was faster than ltwt Olympic standard this afternoon.
I know that when I've hired programmers I definitely weigh potential and willingness to learn more than experience. Sometimes when someone has experience they are really just stuck in the same old ways of doing things, and it becomes difficult with them to change the company culture or have the kind of momentum that you need. Surely the better VC's recognize that fresh blood often produces the very best results. Y-C does.
Grokking the anthropology of social networks
History of Famous Logos (and a beautiful site in itself)
5 Tips for Startup Hiring
looks like her insecurity speaking
I disagree. From my blog post, "I recently dissolved the advisor group. Advisors are a fixture of startups. Advice is nice, but I much prefer effort - because Talk is Easy but Effort shows Commitment."
For advisors, look to books by Kawasaki, Paul Graham etc.
I would rather get a good team.
It is a compelling story, but I think the lesson is that you need the right *kind* of positive thinking.
Have a great startup idea?  Hmm, maybe not.
3 Archetypes of Startup Founders
The start-up inflection point
Not many companies get past the inflection point; so few that I think it's disingenuous to call it that. Most just languish there and clog themselves up with more and more management overhead. The only exception that comes to mind is Google.
jwecker: I had a demo page up that I took down upon other people's advice.
I just returned from an enterpreneur meeting here in Kansas City and a wise man with 6 startups under his belt told me when I said I am considering giving it away, "Dont give it away because then it's gone".

But then contrast it with, "Cast your bread upon the waters and after many days, they shall return to you".
Thank you pg.
No, it's not divided into layers.
Since it is a GUI, anyone can play with it and copy a feature they lack - that is the problem.
In the finished product, there was to be a Viewer and an Editor that viewers would upgrade to upon paying $5. But I would feel comfortable charging only on a finished product.
Giving away a Viewer makes sense only when I have a multimedia customer. For example, if Paul Graham wants to 'broadcast' his audio talks.
That is an interesting thought - can I get this in front of Paul Graham right now? :)
Websites tend to grow exponentially, meaning that for the first few months mainly the earlier adopter types will be the ones playing with it. Does your website currently do anything that creates value for them? If so, release even if it's buggy and unfinished. People will expect it to improve. On the other hand, if people go there and see that it doesn't solve their problems or make their life easier, they probably won't go back a second time. So if it doesn't yet solve a problem, wait until it does this.