skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are Co-Founders in the Same City Really an Advantage to a Start-Up?
Most founders will tell you (and it's the stance that Y Combinator takes) that being in the same physical location as your co-founders is critical to success.

My co-founder and I seem to work very well at a distance. Frankly, I don't see the advantage to being in the same place.

Sure, very occasionally there are things that would go faster if I could draw them on an actual whiteboard instead of a virtual one. But these moments are rare.

Basically, I think virtual communication is something you learn how to do. Since we're not in the same location, we're very used to using tools and communication styles that provide the same advantage as being in a room together.

And there are many, many advantages for us to start an entirely virtual company. Primarily, when we do have to grow our company we're going to be able to hire the best people in the world (as long as they have a good Internet connection.) This seems like a huge advantage over Google, who can only hire the best people within an hour's drive of Mountain View. It opens up an entire new pool of talent for us.

Other advantages:

1. No rent for office space and no commute.
2. We can hone our communications techniques so that we're ready to scale when we inevitably need to have people in multiple cities working together.
3. People get to work in an environment where they're most productive.
4. We cover more of the world so one of us is usually close to an investor or customer that wants to have an in-person meeting with.
5. Since we cover more of the world the company as a whole has more perspective.

As to arguments on the other side, the only one I can think of is:

1. It's easier to communicate, and thus easier to get things done. (But with modern communications devices, e.g. a screen recorder to capture exactly what's going on my system so that the programmer can how I produce the bug, I remain unconvinced that in-person speed of communication is anything more than a slight advantage that is greatly outweighed by the disadvantages of not being an entirely virtual company.)

Are there other advantages to in-person interactions that I'm not thinking of?
Oh, I see, I've got it to work now. I was just clicking "add to playlist" and nothing was happening, but if you click on the name of the song it starts playing.

In which case, very impressive. I'm particularly impressed that it even finds mashups, and the interface (apart from the difficulty I had with getting it to play) is very nice.

I hope you've thought through the legal issues. It could really use a FAQ with answers to questions like "So where the hell is all this music coming from?"
And don't forget this app: http://listen.grooveshark.com/ It was posted here by someone (author I guess) and I ended up using it for some time because it has playlists. I now check it when I'm looking for something specific. But most of the time, I just use last.fm or Pandora.

Most of these apps just do a search on Youtube and play the audio portion of videos. Only prob is that audio quality is not so great but on my laptop speakers I can't even tell the difference so all is good.

I like MixTurtle. It's a nice app! Good job louislouis! Add a queue/playlist and I'll use it as a default music search app.
Could that be because the objective-C run-time or the relevant apps doesn't have that functionality?
fundraising is easier if everyone's in the same spot, because raising money has to do with building relationships and that's best done (perhaps?) with people local to the team. investors get to know the team, etc, then invest in them. in the least, this is an obstacle we've faced.
http://www.gaianation.net/org/animalia.html
Thanks for the comments and suggestions. I'll have to look into those bugs you found. I do admit though it's far from perfect atm and there were lots more features I wanted add before launching, but hacker news has taught me to just throw it out there and get a response, so my server is taking a pounding for it I type.
Learning assembly actually probably isn't going to teach you that either, because the reason one access ordering is beating another is probably due to the cache, and that's microarchitectural.

Not to be, you know, pedantic about it or anything. I liked your response. =)
"... I wrote the post in question and I actually registered with Hacker News for the first time just to reply to you. As far as your comment goes, I apologize in advance for being harsh, but get over yourself. ..."

HN is attracting its share of "1 quip snipers", trolls that criticise but not really bother to expand why & generally make a nuisance of themselves ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html but we're not all like this.

"... But if you look outside of that self imposed box you see there's so very much left to do in technology ... Now I've found that dating someone gives me a tremendous opportunity in bars because rather than be a part of the dating rat race I actually get to observe it as an outsider which is really enlightening ..."

This was the standout part of the post that struck a chord with me. It's the reason I posted it. A hard problem at the moment I see at various levels is the "human" matching problem. I often wonder the reasons why this problem is tackled so badly in software? Is it because the same thing that makes nerds good at computing also degrade their ability to undertand "human matching"?

It's not just dating where solutions to this problem can be applied. It could also be applied to anywhere you have a requirement for recruiting individuals to interact with other people. Part of the reason why the problem domain is not well understood by nerds could also be covered by the "homo-logicus", "homo-sapiens" divide Alan Cooper describes in "Inmates are running the Asylum". Funny enough this idea also partially explains Trolls. Nerds posting insults like jocks giving wedgies.

The big problem with the matching humans from what I can gather talking to people who try pure software solutions, is the lack of ground-truth. What appears on a site just doesn't match real life. Nothing beats the opportunity to evaluate a human in real-life. Any augmentation to help filter this process may have pay-off in a lot of other areas.
I like it-- just a few more bugs to work out. I did a search (for my wife) of "Tori Amos honey" and it took a solid minute to return anything.

Created an account and the playlist I saved there. Cool stuff.

Heh, nice touch with it saying "Welcome" in the search box when I login.

I would be a bit sad using your site a lot because I use right-click frequently to go back/open-in-new-tab, etc. But your service is cool enough that I'd live with it, surely.

Be careful with the music industry-- you may want to make it clearer where the source is coming from somehow so you don't land yourself in hot water.

The few songs I tried don't work on the iPhone, but I wouldn't have expected them to. If you made an iPhone app like this, I'd definitely buy it, but I imagine a lot are youtube/flash/etc.
Thanks for being candid.

Well, let's turn that around. In the years from 1995 through 1998, Windows security was black magic both to defenders and attackers --- Win32 attacks didn't really mainstream until Solar Designer and Matt Conover broke the story on how to exploit overflows in the heap.

During the same time period, Unix systems --- and particularly SunOS/Solaris --- were positively riddled with trivially exploitable stack overflows. Number of Solaris worms and viruses during that time period? Zero.

I'm sort of digressing, but, can you come up with a logic that explains why OS X virus scarcity is about the intrinsic security of OS X and still describes the '90s?

I don't think malware prevalance has much to do with intrinsic OS security at all.

Also: smart not to lump OS X in with other Unixes. OS X has a very different, much more difficult challenge to deal with than server Linux.
Instant access to Barry Manilow; Mix Turtle Rox!

...i write the songs...i write the songs.
Ah, well there you go. If I knew Assembly I'd know have known that knowing Assembly wouldn't have helped me. Either way, it's apparently a useful skill that I lack.
As the company grows, the extra friction on communications between the two locations becomes more of a problem. My company, Kongregate, has 10 people in San Francisco and 5 in Portland, Oregon. We make it work through all the methods you describe, but the couple of weeks a year when we all gather in the same place are definitely easier.
I tried it without JS for seo reasons but the background flash player just wouldn't work. I had no other option. Plus jQuery is just too awesome not to use ;) I love it.
The Login and Signup... "links" don't even feel like they're clickable because they're not underlined, the cursor changes to text editing instead of a hand, and there's no hover effect at all. Same for the X's to close the login and register popups.
Isn't jQuery advocating and encouraging "non-intrusive" Javascript and graceful degradation?
Further comment (because I've continued to play with it, because I think it's awesome):

I've found a couple of tracks where the time (in green on the right as it plays) was given as "NaN:NaN". That's probably not a desired behaviour. (fwiw the track was "Thunderbirds Are Coming Out" by TISM)
10 Gonzo Machines From Rogue Inventor Buckminster Fuller
I missed this too - I think putting a little play arrow next to the "+" is in order.

Other than that, I love it.
You should autofocus your search bar onload.
Even if you read about and then discover this feature, its still pretty inconvenient. I'd suggest making the playlist always visible somewhere on the site, and if you want you could add a hotkey to jump to it.
This has been the problem with AWS all along: Aggregate downtime at good hosting providers is measured in minutes, or even seconds, per year. Downtime at AWS has historically been measurable in days per year. This level of reliability puts it well into the bottom ranks of hosting providers. We're talking about the dregs of the industry here...the hosts who have a single cheap Cogent pipe running into a single cage of machines with no power backup and no backup pipe or infrastructure redundancy. This is the sole reason we don't recommend AWS to our customers, and why we don't use it ourselves for any vital services. We want to like it, and recommend it, and we have quite a bit of software that works with it, that we enjoy selling to people. But, the reliability just isn't there, and it has been a recurring problem since the service launched.
Several times the song has started, but then whatever method is used to determine if its working caused it to stop and keep looking for another source.
having three different X's in the playlist view gets pretty confusing. perhaps use "clear" for the clear playlist feature and a trash can for the remove item feature.
I wish I hadn't made my quip. I had actually written out a longer comment, then re-read it and thought, "this is too long," so I cut it down to something that probably wasn't constructive.

I'm not aloof toward technology or cool uses of it. Awe is an important emotion and something we could all use more of. I guess I was just not very piqued by your post, because the ideas in it are fairly generic, except for the dating one, which has been done in Japan for a while now.

However, this is am amazing time to be alive, and I agree with you, the rate at which cool things happen is increasing.
There are always exceptions, if it works for you, more power to ya. Just make sure it really is best, and not just you making the excuses to yourself to justify it
EveryBlock.com??
Thanks for pointing out the fact that my comment wasn't constructive. Didn't mean to troll, should have kept my thoughts to myself.
Been using it for a couple weeks. I'd hate to show my boss the reports it has generated ;)
Very useful. Interesting data and some good visualization.
I think the wave particle analogy problem is simply that we've reached a scale where the physical properties of the universe don't necessarily have human scale analogues. It is impossible for us to visualize things that can't exist at our scale.
I think a sentient intelligence that lived at the scale of photons would be equally confused by our concept of waves.
YES THIS IS HUGE TRY TO BE IN THE SAME CITY.

Context: I started my company in 2005 from Ann Arbor (which quickly became Chicago) with 2 partners in NYC. Here's what we learned:

* It is very hard to get funded if you're not all in one place. Also, my previous startup, from '99-'01, relocated everyone as soon as the A round closed.

* All-hands company meetings are very hard to do, because they take the form of interminable phone calls instead of lively back-and-forths.

* Software design debates rapidly turn into a game of telephone.

* It's much harder to guage the mood of the team; we lost 2 people because they were unhappy about stuff that might have been resolved had we caught it earlier.

* Solo founders in far-flung branch offices quickly feel out of the loop, which sets up a bunch of vicious cycles involving security, assertiveness, style, and communication.

We've made it work by growing through it, painfully; we now have so many people in just two offices that there's a cameraderie and common purpose (I'm dignifying it, yes). It's still more painful than it would be if we were all in one place. I haven't said this anywhere but here, but we'd have shipped 9 months ago (as opposed to weeks ago) if we were all together.

The company I worked for between startups --- Arbor Networks (a startup, but I didn't start it, and I was employee #40something) --- has a business office in Boston and engineering in A2. This, too, was a debacle. Engineering and management are "us vs. them" in the best of circumstances.

More points:

* No rent for office space is not necessarily a win. We could all work from home in Chicago. But having an office is great, partly for the same reason some people like wearing suits in NYC --- act the part, be the part, etc.

* People are often wrong about where they're most productive. If people are unproductive in an office culture, you may just have the wrong office culture. In Peopleware, Tom DeMarco lays out a great strategy for a skunkworks-style office to house a product team. Peopleware is excellent, read it!

* You're also missing out on the social aspect. How often can you all go out for dinners? When you have a shitty day and you're all pissed at each other, can you go out for a beer? (A teammate I yelled at once brought in a six pack at 2 in the afternoon, killing the work day and resolving the problem). Yesterday was my block party; everyone in my office showed up. How much cooler would it have been if the NYC crew was there too?

* Some really excellent players simply get lonely working from their home or in a tiny branch office. Some of them know it already and won't consider you. Some of them find out after they join and quit in the middle of a cycle. Obviously lots don't, but why cut your chances at all?
good post right up until the end where you wrote "If you enjoyed this post please go back to YC Hacker News and give it some karma." If it's a good post, you don't need to devalue it by getting people to vote for it.
That maybe true, but you would have to make something better than all the currently available free ones. The best platforms seem to be worked on by the smartest people that were just trying to solve their own problems, and then give the solution away for free.
It would be pretty cool to export finished playlists to Muxtape. I mean, you can create your own playlist sharing system, but might as well play along with the marginally bigger dogs.
need audio controls. Pause, play, stop, next, back, etc. Ability to build a playlist and then just have it loop through your playlist, or shuffle through it.
good lessons to learn.
dude you're smoking crack if you think you can run a biz by export your itunes library, parse the meta data, and stick it online with a google-like search interface. I say this while I'm listening to some Ozzy from your site (works great, but taking over right-mouse button is rude). This is cool as your personal web front-end to your library, but if it gets any traction (free music tends to get traction) you're in for a smack-down. Good luck , rock on :)
Constructing a User Experience: The Cost-Benefits Compass
The idea that each person has a unique set of traits that will only allow "deep compatibility" with another person who has another unique set of traits is a theory that seems to be only believed by people who don't have a lot of experience with relationships (no offense!).

Maybe the details of the implementation could change my mind, but in the end this would probably be useful for little other than a marketing gimmick.

Is now really the best time for the online dating world? The best times seemed to be shortly after the big sites we have now had just came into existence. Now there social stigma of actually using them as such has become overpowering. Bars though, don't really have this problem.
Didn't automatically play for me-- I was able to add songs, but had to right click to show my playlist and left click to get started. FF3/Win.
Is God an Accident? The Clash Between Religion and Science
Sure, if you know (to pick just one example) what a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor is, then yes, you're probably right to choose C++ over C.

(http://amalp.blogspot.com/2007/10/what-is-protected-abstract...)
Women in Tech: 50 female bloggers
You're going to have to be together at some point, and if you aren't 100% sure that will work EARLY, you could be doomed. You need the brainstorming back-and-forth for new ideas and to see new market challenges. You also aren't considering the time when you need to hire more employees, all of which you want corresponding with you and giving you new ideas.

It's also easier if you all are together when times gets tough and motivation wains.
Google already fixed this. No one directly navigates to domains anymore. The SERP is a popularity-ranked page of everything that should be at the domain for the keywords you searched on.
this is sick... mainly because I was able to find what I wanted right there...

wondering how long before someone else copies this idea and takes it mainstream... also the elephant in the room, DRM.
While I like the sparse design (and badass logo), a huge problem is that I get to site and within the first ten seconds I don't know what it does (or even why I should care). I decide to figure out more by typing an artist and click 'music search' but now it's taking forever. If I was a random visitor, I'd be gone by now.

While I expect the load time after typing will be better as you work on scaling (and work out the bugs), I still think you'd be a lot better off with a little text explaining why I should even type something in and hit 'music search'. Will I get to play music? Will I get to download music? Will I find the cheapest prices for buying music? Who knows. Just my 2 cents.
As a side note: Arnold Kim is a regular reader of Hacker News.
Taking Control of the Digital World
JS support is required for the flash auto-play on IE due to some rediculous patent dispute.
The Nazi's were notorious for burning books. Was that ok? Do you trust others to decide what books are ok?
Feynman - The pleasure of finding things out [video]
Well first, thanks for posting this. Always nice to know someone enjoyed a post. On what you said...

The big problem with the matching humans from what I can gather talking to people who try pure software solutions, is the lack of ground-truth. What appears on a site just doesn't match real life. Nothing beats the opportunity to evaluate a human in real-life. Any augmentation to help filter this process may have pay-off in a lot of other areas.

I think you’re right that people lie but I think statistics can, to a certain extent, help with that. To give an example, let’s take a guy who loves Gilbert and Sullivan musicals but is ashamed of it so he says he hates theater productions. But then in response to other questions he reveals more truthful answers.

Eventually, a statistical measurement will determine that Women who love musicals match best with guys who claim not to as long as they fit those other traits. So the computer never manages to decode the lie but it still, through the magic of statistics, manages to make the match just the same.

I’m sure we’re years and years away from actually getting to the point of having an effective system like this but just the fact that we seem to have the power to do it is pretty amazing.
Thanks for the feedback! (All of it)

A couple things that I hope will help:

- To search a location, use the modifier "in". So, the search [in London] will parse jobs that have London in their location field (we have a pretty good amount of structured data).

- Right now, the map only shows company "headquarters." Many startups have multiple offices; to post a job in a different location, they first create a new branch in their profile (structure), and then assign that location when they create the posting. So, the startup directory is lacking right now.

- We're definitely planning on getting into GeoIP stuff. As the saying goes: release early, release often.

Thanks again!
No big deal really, it led to an interesting comment thread so that’s worth something.
The success rate of a eHarmony.com would seem to disagree with you. In fact I’d argue that the field of mathematics in general disagrees with you.
Time and time we find that mathematics can determine things that we never dreamed it could. Things like “game theory” prove that the deeper we delve into statistical analysis the more we are able to determine what someone will and won’t do. I’m not saying its ever going to be 100% accurate but if we can determine that x guy and y girl live happily ever after 85% of the time if they share z traits that still gives us the ability to match people far more successfully than we do now.
What do you mean by First Dotcom Boom, when was the second one or last one. There was just one Dotcom Boom.
The suggestions that pop up when you're typing in a name is very helpful. That's one they differentiate. It isn't Flash-based either?
We're working on this! Stay tuned!
so many ideas, so litte time :)
Advanced search is coming soon (as in 1-3 days)!
* No compile time encapsulation
* Outstandingly complicated grammar
* No way to locate definitions
* No run time encapsulation
* No binary implementation rules
* No reflection
* Very complicated type system
* Very complicated type-based binding rules
* Defective operator overloading
* Defective exceptions
* Duplicate facilities
* No high-level built-in types
* Manual memory management
* Defective metaprogramming facilities
* Unhelpful standard library
* Defective inlining
* Implicitly called & generated functions

</quote> Defective C++ http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html
There are quite a few companies in "stealth mode" on Startuply. Generally, I think, providing a company name and some details about your team and office won't threaten your venture too much.
1) php,mysql,js,flash
2) Not very well. My server is dying. I'm about to upgrade but I'll have to take the site down for the nameservers to propogate to the new ips. Anyone know how long this takes?

I considered using amazon for scaling but the article below this one says amazon is down, hehe.
TCO Windows vs Linux (Part 1: a Linux Professonal)
In a very real way, we built Startuply for you. What do you think? Are these good jobs at cool startups? Can you see yourself as a key part of some of these teams?
Yep, recruiters aren't allowed to post on Startuply - we keep a pretty close eye on who's posting. Part of the idea here is that we want to be a (asymptotically approaching complete) directory of startup jobs. That way, you wouldn't have to go to 3 job boards...unless you want to work for American Express.

Advanced search - including customizable location radii - are coming in the next few days!