skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aerons are less common in Europe because they are even more expensive than in the US, harder to find, and marketed for 'executives'.

Not to argue, but I am a semi-EU programmer and my first salaries went to a better chair and screen in my home office (I telecommute most of the time). I work in games, and my job requires me to use mostly Windows software (e.g., the game itself). Almost all the time I need to have most of the following windows open:

- my editor,

- the game window itself,

- a debug console/game object browser/inspector app,

- a log viewer,

- Perforce,

- a browser window with tabs open for Trac, bug tracking system, etc.,

- SQL Client (it's a persistent online game).

- E-mail, and

- IM.

Although I manage when I have to work from my laptop, I could use all the screen space I can get. Still, I have tried several monitors in the past and I didn't like that setup. I prefer a big one. I got a Dell 30" monitor in an offer last March and now I'm spoiled. :)

Maybe you don't need so much screen space if you're in a linux shop doing websites (still, Xobni does something Outlook-related, right?), but I think more pixels always help.

Still, I agree that the factors you propose are more important. I don't care about what equipment a company gives me, as long as they let me bring my own.

Time flexibility is a deciding factor for me, since I have really screwed up sleep patterns, and I just can't function in a 9-to-5 schedule. About technology, I'm spoiled and I couldn't work in any language of the C ancestry (except maybe C itself, if the problem domain is interesting enough). I'd love to hack in Scheme for a living, but I'm more than happy to work in Python.

Barring chair and monitor, which were one-shot investments, I don't have many expenses, so I don't care _that_ much about salary; it helps that life is cheaper where I live than where my company is located, so I can work half time without having to worry about my bank balance at the end of the month. Leaves more time for hobby hacking.
Greetings All,

We are currently looking for excited motivated people to help build the premiere live video website online. If you have extreme hacking skills (python, ruby on rails, javascript, flash action script) and you live in the San Francisco area (or are willing to relocate) please drop us a line!

Feel free to email: info@justin.tv

Peace,

Justin.tv Crew
(Justin, Emmett, Michael, Kyle, and Jacob)

PS: Look out for our new release early next week - lots of fixes, a new justin.tv channel, and more...!
Number 3 really resonates with me. :/
Your points definitely make sense. I spoke to these guys recently. They seem pretty bright and what they're working on makes a lot of sense. I'm guessing that they are pretty competitive on the points you bring up regardless of what random perks they are leading with here.
Sorry, what are "CC licensed DVD images"? Are you talking about Creative Commons-licensed videos?
I think it's great to brainstorm, and have a bank of marketing ideas that you can pull from. With a startup, things change fast, so I'm not sure a 'comprehensive time-phased marketing plan' is the route to go.
Teenwag is hyper sucessful, do take a look at Alexa graphs and the millions being invested in it
Facebook and Teenwag follow similar strategies
Teenwag might be one of the most successful companies ever formed and grown in the shortest period of time by the youngest kids
Guys it is not spam, it is letting people know of the wonderful service they are to use such as TEENWA G
No planning? Heh... and then you'll wonder why everything around you is crumbling.

"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
T E E N W A G hires 33 monkeys in Boston and 21 in cheap East Europe to send messages all over the web..
wow amazing... !!!!!!
Spam is caused by greedy investors, over-eager enterpreneurs and a good system
Teen Wag has about 1 million users registered in a record time of 2 months - even faster than Tagged and myspace
Teen wag is like Microsoft+google+tagged on hyper turbo charge, and they are 14 year old kids no one can compete with 14 year olds except other 14 yers olds. they are beasts who ship out code every 2 hours
I too agree that there is a difference between "creative advertising" and spam.

It's one thing to make strategic posts so that your new community looks larger than it actually is. Reddit did this extensively early on, making pro-reddit comments on relevant blogs under pen-names, populating their own site with news submissions, etc.

It's something completely different to flood random sites with links to your startup (a-la teenwag).
Guys you might think what you want but teenwag, youtube, facebook are all amassing users and making them have fun at an unprecedented rate so stop analyzing n start wokring ;)
sam odio if u pay for it - it is like buying google adsense
FAW #15: Paul Graham of Viaweb
antirez - your points are valid. This page is intended to show that Xobni is a fun place to work. Let me address 1-4.

1. I can't say exactly what we're doing at Xobni yet except for "We're making email suck less" :-) The work here is at the intersection of Machine Learning, NLP, systems programming, and UI stuff.

2. The salaries we offer are very competitive - more than at most competitors. We want people to be happy and not have to worry about money in SF (an expensive city).

3. San Francisco is beautiful. From the Xobni office, it's 10 meters to shopping, 2 blocks to Union Square, 4 blocks to world-class museums, 30 minutes to the ocean, and 4 hours to skiing. Hard to beat that.

We actually give people three displays (not two).

Sounds good? http://www.xobni.com/jobs.php
I'm curious, what do you think of direct e-mail marketing. Is that ever OK?

MySpace took off in large part because of the 3 million strong mailing list of Xdrive users it had.
Think bigger.

We're making email suck less. The work here is at the intersection of Machine Learning, NLP, systems programming, and UI stuff. We're working on something that you will use every day.
I do, but marketing is my job decription at the startup I work for ( avanoo.com ).

I think it's important to set at least rudimentary benchmarks/milestones in terms of growth and brand recognition.

After that, throw a bunch of stuff on the wall and see what sticks. The few ideas with the most ROI in terms of 1. traffic and 2. user retention should be at the forefront of your future strategies.

This may not sound like much of a plan, but as long as you have a mini-strategy in place for every one of your marketing efforts, and as long as you understand and, if possible, participate in the community you are marketing to, the try-everything approach should work.
You assume your users use Outlook, correct? I haven't used a desktop email client since 2001... How will Xobni help someone like me?
Oh please, pretty much everything on scribd is someone else's work and I doubt those guys have any rights to them. Original poster had a valid question.
guys grow up :)
Teen wag transfers 1 Terabyte of video every week!
At the end of January 2007, I bought my first MAC. Yes I hold licenses for Windows so I can play Unreal Tournament 2003 and other already purchased software. No, I will not be purchasing Vista unless I run out of things to throw on the fire.
Everyone, Please buy a MAC. Help support the death of a big, dumb, pathetic excuse for a real OS.
Bill Gates, Please stick to games and Office. You have my credit there but really, genuinely, there is no advantage to having to reactivate because I changed my video card. The Genuine advatage program is malware at it's best.
As far as screwing the customer, Microsoft is all about that. Especially with the 64 bit XP Pro and it's wonderful lack of drivers and wireless support, which I found somewhere else on the web, gave the tip to them and in turn, Microsoft thanked me for my comments and blew me off.
I just now installed over XP Pro on my main PC and am compiling KDE on FreeBSD 6.2.
You are very right sir, they are dead.
We'll ask you, the original tipster, to cough up the tips, then we reduce all tips you made by just enough to cover whatever transaction fee is involved with your preferred method of payment. At least - that's the current plan.

In other words, the transaction cost is split according to 'share' by all the tipjars you are paying into. In practice this translates to worst case scenario 10%, usually far less.

Eat your own dogfood is the motto. We don't intend to charge for bandwidth, site development, server hosting, or any of the other costs normal sites have to contend with. We draw the line at paying transaction fees out of our own pockets, that's all.
I think you really need to make a distinction between targeted announcements to relevant mailing lists and "spam", defined as unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Most successful startups don't spam. They identify a few mass-mailing forums and post to them. Linus Torvalds announced the original Linux kernel to comp.os.minix. Tim Berners-Lee posted the original WWW announcement to alt.hypertext. I believe Netscape was announced there too. Youtube and FaceBook announced their products by e-mailing all their friends. Facebook sent out an all-campus mailing. Reddit was announced on PG's site and comp.lang.lisp. My employer paid or is about to pay $1000 for inclusion in an industry trade newsletter. "Write yourself a Scheme in 48 hours" was first announced to the Haskell-cafe list, and then picked up by Reddit and del.icio.us. FictionAlley was announced on Cassie & Rhysenn and HP Paradise, two high-traffic Harry Potter fan mailing lists.

The key feature is that readers of these lists are looking for announcements like this. If you're interested in Minix, a Minix derivate is on-topic. If you're interested in hypertext, the world wide web is world-changing. If you're friends with someone, you want to know what they've been working on. If you're a Harvard student, you want to know about a website for Harvard students. If you're a Lisp user, you'd like to know about commercial startups using Lisp. If you're a Haskell hacker, you'd want to know about a Haskell tutorial. If you read Harry Potter fanfiction, you'd want to know about a Harry Potter fanfiction archive.

This is very different from what Teenwag is doing, spamming their site everyone. We don't care, and that's why it's annoying. When YC startups launch here, they get dozens of points. When rejected YC startups launch here, they at least get some discussion. When Teenwag posts here, they get killed, because we don't want to hear it.
Original Linux announcement
There's currently a thread about spamming mailing lists to announce your product, so I thought I'd dig up some of the original announcements of some successful products so people can see what a good one looks like.
Original WWW announcement
How about you give us an example of one?

If you are wondering about the volume of planning we do, there's no question that I've thought about marketing for a huge amount of time.
Amazing how do they do it - Handle the traffic - and only 14 year olds wow amazingly kewl
The Six Types of Tech Journalist (and how to deal with them)
How do I find a co-founder to, you know, run the business?
I'm starting a media network by producing weekly news and commentary shows. I know what I need money for, but I'd rather spend my time making creative decisions (writing shows, editing scripts, working with designers) than dealing with investors, accountants, and lawyers. I know I won't avoid that altogether, but I'd feel more confident with a co-founder who had run a startup before, even briefly. Am I right to want this, and if so, where do I start looking?
still wondering what "slightly more" means :P
Seems more like a pros and cons list to me. It is clearly poking a little fun at Google, but it doesn't seem to be dishonest.
I'm sure there's a bit of Bayesian theory involved. I also hear they'll be extracting data from the email to spot trends and stuff. Reading Gabor's blog might give you and idea of what they're all about. http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2006/07/how-researchers-are-reinventing-mail.html
"But when those angry people started cursing you, you start to doubt whether what you do is right."

Has it occured to you that that might be because it's wrong?
Mobile Technology: 2012
Getting cofounders is hard work. I'd suggest getting some shows out on your own whilst searching. That way you can see if the shows are popular enough to need someone to deal with investors etc.
Quick Q... what value do I get, as a user, for my money?!
Practical Common Lisp going into 3rd printing
How can I use PHP and not suck?
I am considering a project which for many reasons will be more economically feasible to implement with PHP. However, I consider myself to be an 'enlightened' web developer -- I prefer frameworks like Django, Rails, Turbogears, etc. I am not looking fwd to going back to mashing MVC all together into PHP pages.

Has anyone used PHP with a successful modular methodology, similar at least in spirit to these frameworks?

In my experience, its not necessarily the languages that make you more productive and agile, its having learned lessons from those languages. So, I'm hoping someone knows of a fresh enlightened approach to PHP.

If not, maybe I'll create one in the process, but I'm really hoping it doesn't come to that, I'd rather hit the ground running than build a framework.
Update: I just found this comparison:

Top 10 PHP MVC frameworks http://www.mustap.com/phpzone_post_73_top-10-php-mvc-frameworks
In that case, how often can you post about your site in the targeted mailing list?
ok. i'll be watching out for you. don't disappoint me :)
Hey thanks! Do they cover all subdomains also though?
Teenwag is a hot growing social networking site that is not funded by YC, so can you support non-YC funded companies or is News YC just a YC Funded pimp
Or even see what the other non YCers are innovating as far as I can see most of the YC companies are losers except for Reddit which was pimped like crazy by PG
Paul graham tries to Kill non Lispy non YC companies invain ;)
learn marketing from Teenwaggers http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=gKs&q=site%3Ateenwag.com&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=gKs&q=site%3Ateenwag.com&btnG=Search
HitWarrior.com: A new approach to click fraud detection.
Self-promoting my startup. Check it out and sign up for the testing phase.

Let's see.. we were #11 (1st alternate) in TechStars and one of the many rejected teams from YC. But we kept going. And here it is so far.
I am indeed.

I imagine many of us here are paying for much more bandwidth than we're using and it's a shame to let it go to waste. I'd love to start pooling bandwidth and sharing all the legal content we can with each other.

Please send me an email if you're interested.
I would suggest setting up a website (nothing fancy, but enough to get the message out) that had your ideas, show transcripts, etc. It would also be beneficial to get some shows out on your own through YouTube. You might find that you don't even need a co-founder. And if you do, you'll have a solid framework to show him/her to help the decision.
ever wonder why pg deletes or deads all non yc companies like he s paranoid that will kill yc chicks
pg if u really think u are training lions instead of bitches stop deleting NON YC companies
Now even more original (Aug 6 1991 instead of Aug 22):
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/395f282a67a1916c

And the earlier message from the same day:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/6dad279804cb3ba

In the day, hypertext was already available, FTP was already available, but WWW provided the virally scalable integration. Interestingly, although Gopher initially became more popular than WWW, the first Gopher announcement I could find is from Oct 8:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.announce/msg/24ad9de8dcfd6e4b

In time, I hope Wikipedia will link to the important bits of history available in the archives of the Usenet.
People starting up don't have time for IRC. (Or news.YC...Oops.)
That's what I'd do if I was in that situation... structure it as separate holding companies for the IP or whatever so you can flip each product individually if needed, but don't unnecessarily duplicate resources. Of course you're probably going to get into a world of fun "internal accounting" taking this approach... you will probably want to "bill" the appropriate holding company for time spent working on that project, etc.
Thanks for the kind words! We're using inexpensive Ikea desks because desks are not where you want to spend your money: Having nice screens and good chairs are more important. I think we got those priorities right :-)
New! Wordpress Video Player
Thanks for the explanation.

We draw the line at paying transaction fees out of our own pockets, that's all.

Oh, quite right. I wasn't expecting you to, that's why I wondered how these costs got covered. I like the idea of the tip recipients having the option to tip you in turn for collecting the tips; very neat. I may not be the only one to read the web site and wonder how transaction costs are covered though so perhaps a little more detail somewhere for us pedants would be good.
I hang out with a bunch of other startup hackers in #polymorphs on niven.freenode.net
Great, this gives me a much more solid idea about your company :) Since I'm very affected by the email-suck problem (in this exact moment my gmail account displays 1705 new emails in inbox, I no longer press the archive button in order to optimize my time, but use it like... twitter :-\ ), I'm also very excited about what you are doing. Thanks for the reply.
Nick - Your best resource are people you've worked with in the past. Even if you can only get them to work some nights and weekends, it's going to be easier to get up and running. Your ability to sell the idea to your team is the first thing an investor is going to look at.
I'd be very interested to hear others views on the CPS or closures style. Myself, I think it's flawed for the reasons given in my other post but I may be missing something and if so would like to know what. Else it seems an elegant but impractical solution for the real world; you're trying to store all possible future contexts for all your clients without knowing when a client has gone away making to safe to reclaim resources. Far better to have each client store some of that in the URLs that make up the returned HTML.

On the REST side, O'Reilly have a book out recently for those that want to understand more. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260/
This issue brings to mind the very old saying "Nature, in order to be commanded, must be obeyed." As much as I admire and would love to work with the CPS style, right now, with the http protocol, REST seems like the way to go as it works best with that protocol. If you use CPS, you have to fight against what HTTP provides, and in doing so, you loose performance and scaling ability very quickly. When a new protocol comes along, maybe CPS will be the best approach. Until then, "Nature" must be obeyed.
Thanks for the info, I've now managed to submit my email address.
We've got that angle covered with a number of features, but primarily: That's up to the blogger/comic artist/musician/whatever that you're tipping. He might post more, write more strips, decide on a story line, and other such things in response to his tipjar filling up.
Why Products Fail
I don't think it's a cultural thing, mroe personal taste. Here in my house (in the UK) we all have dual monitor setups at least (mines a quad).

As for priorities in looking for a job, heres mine:

1) Is the product something I'm passionate about?

2) Do I have fun with the people i the company?

3) Do they let me set my own work hours? (I work better at 4am when the world is silent)
Mobile Phone Novels Boom in Japan
Actually, 70% of the cells in the human body are E. Coli!
Major exploit found on reddit
You could try the OnStartups Linked-In group (800+ members now -- most of whom are interested in startups in some capacity).

I know at least a couple of people have made contact through that mechanism (though the LinkedIn group functionality is severely limited and can be an exercise in patience);

https://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/2877/30950504D0B7/

Joining is free and easy (though finding someone will likely not be).
Feeling burnt out: What's your remedy?
I remember talking to you about this during Startup School weekend. Best of luck with this. Some information on the website about what differentiates you would be good. You shouldn't rely on people signing up just to find out what you're all about.
Before an edit, it was phrased as a matter-of-fact statement rather than a question.

But okay, I'll bite. I also hear the "Internet" facilitates a lot of copyright infringements. Let's go shut that sucker down.
BookTour.com: Chris Anderson's new startup
User-Generated Content is not a Panacea
Why is acquisition integration such a hard problem? How come no big company has figured out how to buy a startup and not drive it into the ground?
Are you kidding me! Is it really you, Nick? I love you, man! And stop this charade of "seeking advice" on a startup forum.
The Solution to the File-Sharing Problem
Not more than once as a top-level post. Then keep watching the list and look for opportunities to plug your site in reply to someone else's question. For example, if you're with Octopart, and someone asks on a mailing list about electronics, "Anyone know where I can buy a Frobinator 42Z?": reply, "ACME Electronics seems to carry it. By the way, next time you should try looking on Octopart for this sort of thing."
I have noticed the same thing. I set news.yc as my home page months ago and love the way that there is always something to read that leaves me better then it found me. There has been much less volume lately (2-3 weeks?).
Oh snap, without even reading the article I can predict what is going to be said: The product was useless.
Hum. This article turned out to be targeted at big company types, not entrepreneurs. Innovation at big companies almost never works anyway. The authors of "In Search of Excellence" did excellent research on just that, and found that inventions which had big impacts almost always came from companies with less than a few dozen people.
You only really need to do enough accounting in order to pay your taxes correctly. You might need more than that if you want to try to go public, but the rest can be repaired retroactively. And if you just sit down with the relevant IRS publications and read through them, you'll find that the tax code isn't as scary as you think it is. A tax return is about as complex as, and makes about as much sense as, a typical Microsoft API.
From my own experience, clickfraud is not a significant issue. I was running a campaign for one of the windows software centered startups and we were spending over $15,000 a month on AdWords. Amount of fraud was insignificant. It was so small that it didn't make any sense to waste our time on trying to do something about it. Google then instituted a policy by which they pay you back for the fraud they detect.We had less than 30 fraudulent clicks per month.

If you're a startup fighting click fraud, make sure you have a solid value proposition. People will not pay for your service if it doesn't save them at the very least 10-20% of the amount spent on AdWords.
my god. let's not make this into a my little pony forum.
Best to keep topics startup-related.