skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"On the other hand, a services business might not be ideal for a hyperbrain, since clients naturally care about the work you’re doing for them now, rather than the work you did for other clients in the past."

Probably you're right that services aren't good for "hyperbrains", but I don't think that's the cause. In a services business there is something you build, and that's your reputation. As your reputation grows, your prizes grow too, and also you get to be pickier about the kind of work you choose. So that's the backlog of the services business.

So while you're right that a backlog is useful and needed, it can be derived from the services business too.
Yes, and while I could tell him quite a few tales about dysfunctional startups, there just aren't as many such stories in the world. The number of employee hours spent working for dysfunctional startups is necessarily limited, because such companies evaporate faster than the morning dew.

I also wouldn't be surprised if, to paraphrase Tolstoy, broken startups tend to be all alike, while each pointy-haired boss in the depths of an enormous company hierarchy is broken in his own way. There's a lot of ripe dramatic possibilities in the artificial environment of a BigCo; that's why so many dramas (and even musicals!) have been set in offices.

But for all I know the "Dilbert-does-a-startup" storyline has actually happened several times. I wouldn't expect such a storyline to last much more than a week. There's only so much humor you can get out of a company that's plummeting toward the ground, trying to learn to fly by delegating an intern to flap his arms.
Absolutely, and I know some hyperbrains running services businesses, but they all complain about it. The problem in the case of the services business is that your backlist can evaporate quite quickly if you screw up in the future. It's not really lasting value, because if you're on a down cycle when the client needs you, they'll quickly change their mind and your reputation will go back down.

It's doable, just not ideal.
most people in IT are resigned to the fact that they work for money and live life outside work

It's definitely not just in IT.

For the sake of argument, one could say that life/work separation is good, and that people who start startups are workaholics missing out on all of the interesting things in life.
Best line in the article, re: Carrier forking from Pidgin: "A fork (initially called Funpidgin) was done of Pidgin 2.4.0 because there were disagreements about the size of the text entry field."
Ask YC: Is the coming monday a good launch date?
I was planning to launch a preview of my app last monday. But attention of everyone was a bit focused on the DEMO and TC50 startups, so I decided to shift the launch to a somewhat later date. It's just a tiny launch, a mini preview of the site, that's all.

But I question, are mondays good launch days? Are there better days? When does one reach the widest audience?
Congratulations Shawn!
launch over the weekend, you'll probably get more blog buzz since people don't tend to launch over the weekend.
Despite anti-DRM revolt, Spore high on Amazon's bestseller list
Ironically, he also said this:

"You'd be absolutely astonishedly flabbergasted at how many programmers don't know how to READ. I'm dead serious. You can learn to speed read even faster than you can learn to type, and yet there are tons of programmers out there who are unable to even skim this blog. They try, but unlike speed readers, these folks don't actually pick up the content."
"...I don't think it is terribly relevant to today."

This article is relevant because little has changed (from an outsider's perspective) since May.

Imagine if you were a VC. One of your portfolio companies is deeply behind revenue milestones, user acquisition rates are slowing, the potential sources of big revenue never panned out. And you can't even change the CEO because you don't have board control.

Fast forward from May to now. What has Facebook done? Raise $100mm more, add comments to the newsfeed, start the fbFund competitions, and other things that do not visibly address the revenues problem.

I'm really hoping that Facebook solves the revenue problem before they run out of cash, but at this point I am doubtful.
Thanks for the advice... this story takes place mostly in June. Everything I wrote about feels like ancient history to me now. Once I started moving to my personal plan B I've found a lot of the effects I wrote about reversed quickly. That said, I introduced my tech demo to news.yc about 2 weeks ago.

I fully agree with your assessment that I could use a better designer.

Really though, this is about Shawn here. I see a similar situation, cash in hand, running off to start a venture. I hear the sound of clanking brass spheres.

Oh and I second what Shawn said. This community is awesome. I think I started to read news.yc in July and found the existence of like minded folks a real boon.
Down-modded again. hmmmmm

Too terse? Or just a way of anonymously trashing a view you don't espouse?

I know people get tired of comments about moderation. I get tired of the stupid moderation system. Maybe at some point the frustration on both sides will be addressed.
I don't know man.. if the mods want to remove it, its up to them. I'm just following the submission guidelines.. submitting what 'gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.' This goes beyond hacking and start-ups, from what I've read.
Actually no. Most blogs hibernate on weekends. Best to do it on weekdays.
So what do you think belongs on Hacker News? Would love to hear your opinion.
I wonder if he had anything to say about people who wrote rambling, long articles?

Heck, I'm one of 'em!
Apple tries to patent DRM for sneakers
Why not link to the projects being discussed. That's a lame oversight.
Seeking Co-Founder for Social.com Startup (Greater Boston)
I'm seeking a co-founder in the Greater Boston area to help me startup a company at Social.com (not related to the current web site).

My plan is to offer consumer microblogging services over utilities such as Twitter, with a possible social networking component. I'm looking for a proven professional with Web 2.0 startup experience who can help me explore the market, develop a business plan, finish a prototype, and find funding.

You would be working with someone who is an experienced programmer and techie. I've been working on some general infrastructure code toward an example Twitter App. I take a solid approach to programming projects which includes exception handling, testing, code coverage, documentation, etc.

I'm open to the possibility that two co-founders might fill this need - one to assist with UI and backend tasks (currently Perl/Catalyst) and the other to focus on business needs.

If you are interested and live in the Greater Boston area (this is a must), please send e-mail with some information about yourself to:

cofounder (at) social.com

Thanks!
Startup greatness means coping with trouble successfully: The art of managing messes
I've flagged this as well. In my opinion, it's inflammatory.

My personal philosophical problem with it is that you can be an ID'er without being a religious creationist. But we all get lumped in together. I don't like that.

A second problem is that religious creationists are going to be emotionally moved to respond, and the other side is already prompted to give the religious guys a pounding. Everybody will be talking past one another.

So nothing gets accomplished except for a bunch of posturin and noise.

Thanks but no thanks.
I have a pedal for my Kinesis keyboard, but I almost never use it. When I do use it it's for something like num lock... I tried it for Emacs ctrl and/or meta but it didn't work well. The big problem is that I don't keep my feet frozen in one spot for hours, so when I go to press the pedal I have to find the darn thing by feeling around with my feet. You don't have to lose much time doing this before the point of the pedal is lost.

I could try to train myself to keep my feet in one spot. But I fear the ergonomic consequences. I have enough trouble with the need to keep my hands in the same spot for hours on end...

Maybe I need much bigger pedals. Or special shoes...
Flog lets you measure the complexity of your ruby code
This uses the ABC Metric: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AbcMetric

Does anyone know of other metrics to measure code complexity?
Yes, precisely. This is the point at which you say "I may be indirectly supporting the slaughter of animals financially, but I need to eat. The benefits outweigh the costs, and I'm reducing the demand for meat. I hope that will make a difference. Maybe eventually demand will drop to the point that stores stop carrying meat if enough people follow my lead."

No, you can never support only entirely moral entities, but you can still make a difference. It's not an either-or proposition.
The site is awesome and I would love to have something like it that works in Emacs so I can check out suggestions as I'm typing.
So touch typing let's you procrastinate more efficently? ;)
>It's so much more satisfying to create than to consume.

Yes! Sounds like you've got the right mindset...good luck!
How about sending me one as well! Thanks!
Atanta Startup Gauntlet - Toastmasters for Entrepreneurs
I don't think it matters when you launch. If it's a mini-preview you might not want a big fanfare, but rather a small launch so that you can get users on board, get feedback and continually improve until you reach a stage where you're ready to really pump up the PR machine.
There's no quicker way to get down-modded than to talk about getting down-modded.

I can speculate that the reason you were down-modded was that you didn't explain why it's not worth trying?
Launch on HN over the weekend,get some feedback, make all the changes you want. Then announce it to the world on Tuesday.
Yes. I realize I stepped in it.

I hope you are right. I was getting ready to make a long argument against attempting to measure things with so many unknowns, but then folks tell me I'm long-winded.

So I figured I'd just give a simple answer and if anybody had a question I would be glad to explain myself. I was assuming that a reader would not use the down arrow as a way of disagreeing and would instead simply ask "Why?"

Didn't work out that way, though.
The enterprise startup conundrum
Researchers find racial bias in virtual worlds
Obviously I can't speak for others, but I'd prefer the long winded response over the too short response. Or maybe try and find the happy medium.
It doesn't matter. They still shouldn't lie about their prices.
Gaming Startup makes their own reality TV on buiding their flagship title - Kaos War
An exception: if you want to make a design that is not easy to do in just HTML/CSS, use Photoshop. Probably first.

HTML/CSS is the Blub of design. It's easy and holds your hand, but if you know how to design and know the medium Photoshop makes it easier to do things unimaginable by those working just within HTML/CSS.

So, please, feel free to not use Photoshop. For some, it'll work just fine.

(edit: I actually like to use Illustrator more, but a similar argument applies)
The impact of the network on ... everything
Sometimes developers can be very childish and proud. Just make the damn thing resizable or write a plugin or something.
I started watching episode 1 and got hooked. By the way, the company is Shattered Reality Interactive and they're one of the TC50 presenters.

Lots of startup drama as the series continues.
Come to the Ignite Boston 4 event tonight: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/09/ignite-boston-4-this-thursd...

There will be a good-sized techie crowd there, in an informal networking environment. I'm sure you can make a better impression to potential co-founders through an interesting in-person conversation than you could through an online recruitment posting.

WebInno is another, slightly more formal (more dress shirts than t-shirts), event that's big on networking, happening this next Monday: http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/index.php

Hope to see you around.
Good luck, Shawn! If you don't mind me asking How old are you?
America's Best Young Entrepreneurs 2008
Because he only needs a few more months before he's vested.
I'm planning on being at WebInno on Monday. Would love to connect with anyone that would like to chat. I really enjoyed the last couple I attended. I was aware of Ignite Boston, but unfortunately can't make the event.
I'll tell you what's interesting. This blog. It's from a fairly unsexy uptime monitoring company, whose services I've got little interest in. If the blog was just company updates ("we've got a new server" or "20% off all packages this week") it'd get very little traffic. But I've got it in my RSS reader and it hits the social news sites every other day with well-written and often humorous observations on tech.

Lots of people have heard of Pingdom who ordinarily wouldn't; it just goes to show how a little effort making your website something more than just a corporate website can go a long way.
The CERN laboratory and the Big Bang theory: an essential guide for IT professionals
The "Even Dirtier Secret", HN edition: devs who can't type, don't read books, can't understand LtU or git or BDD, get all their info from Stackoverflow. Oh, yeah, they're not in the top 99.999999%, so now way Joel will hire them.
Best countries for startups
Because Dilbert lives in The Worse of All Possible Worlds, where there are no other jobs to be had. He's trapped.
An Introduction To The Conjugate Gradient Method Without The Agonizing Pain
1. Maybe Dilbert has a family to support.

2. Maybe Dilbert thinks about quitting but lacks imagination and ideas after having such skills beat down into nothingness after working years in IT.

3. Maybe Dilbert doesn't know where to start.

4. Maybe Dilbert can start, but doesn't know where to go from there.
This is interesting, but I think it is missing some key points for technology startups (it seems to be more "new business" focused):

1) Availability of talent
2) Labor laws overall
3) Availability of ready market and spending power

I may be biased, but IMO the US is the #1 place in the world for technology startups when you factor all these things in.
This is just corporate politics, why would they let you make phone calls for free, when you could be using your minutes. This is a business trying to protect its revenue. There really nothing they can do to stop you from using it, except on there network, if your connecting to a wi-fi access point there's nothing in your way accept the protocols of the access point. Once wi-max is in full swing things will get a lot trickier...

Just wait in see.
Immersive Cocoon will Change Computing Forever
> the market tells you what you really should be making.

That's what the market research phase of the project planning is for.

If you need to fine-tweak your feature set, do a closed alpha with a focus group, that's fine. But if your project plan relies on a public beta feedback for flushing out core feature set, that's just wrong. Or more specifically - it is very risky, because you are essentially implementing a wild guess product for a wild guess market and then hoping it would converge to something of a value.
Facebook's relationship with third-party developers has remained problematic. The last several weeks, especially, have been frustrating for many developers (myself included) who have watched Facebook roll out changes without notice that break apps or make them hard to find. The Rock You comment in the article about "playing a game where the rules are changing all the time" is right on. Facebook's developer program is a case study in how not to manage an API.
I was really burned out in 2000, but I had enough savings from the bubble to take some time off. It took me about 6 months to get really interested in things again, and what I ended up doing professionally at that point was totally different from programming for a living.
i think you are biased, if you read a sufficient number of them you'll see that they do consider things like the available workforce and labor laws. the market thing is kind of dependent upon what type of startup you want to create, but if you're working on a web startup, it doesn't really matter where the company itself is located.

the article is referring to startups in general, not necessarily tech startups.
Reminds me of that old adage:

"It's never as bad as you think, and it's never as good as you think."
I have a hard time reading 'only' and '145mm' in the same sentence, much less right next to each other! - but I guess all things are relative. In this case its relative to the MSFT 15b valuation which of course makes everything look small.
We need to organize another HN Boston meet up (using Anyvite of course).

BlueSkies, we should go out for drinks sometimes now that TS's Worldwide HQ is in Boston for another year. Email is in my profile if you're interested.

BTW I'd skip the business plan and just start producing and hustling. The YC application is a great "roadmap", if you will, even if you don't end up submitting it.
Good thing we have Diebold which knows who the next president will be, even before the actual election.

Seriously though: With debt to about every major country in the world, with the values contained in the stock-market and real-estate which backed most of the debt diminishing like smoke signals, and a currency which is no longer the world exclusive currency for dollar-exchange, I hardly find this surprising.

The US might have to prove its worth from now on, instead of just chanting "USA! USA! USA!". But you all believe in free market and such, so you should have no problems with that, right? ;)
How to start up your own tech start-up
Absolutely. And to ask the next question: how many people signed up (and paid) for their service because they heard about it via the blog?
The reality is, that all proposed "climate change" models are mathematically suspect and thus there is no actual evidence that reducing CO2 from man-made sources would in fact modify global temperature.

For instance, sunspot activity or the lack of it, has a far greater correlation to short term warming or cooling.

For longer term warming or cooling, any true scientist should readily admit that the tools currently available have very limited utility, since the mathematical models cannot possibly take into account enough of the real behavior.

For example, the Gulf Stream, which we know has a great deal of influence on East Coast weather, is one of the most studied, yet still is not understood very well; thus no mathematical model of its behavior can be said to be accurate.

CO2stats is more about selling "liberal guilt credits" than anything else.
The problem with common sense is that it's not so common. Good advice is often simply common sense once you realize what's being said.
Michael Lewis: Joyous Loathing at Lehman's Collapse
What other kinds of startups are there? Biotech... Still "tech" though. What else? "Clean tech". Almost all of them are some kind of "tech", even though those might be quite far from the sorts of web things we talk about here for the most part. I guess you could talk about computer-based tech and "other". Or "new businesses" (like, a new restaurant), and that's certainly worthwhile, but not really "startups".

Still, it's not a bad list. I wonder how much money you have to have to start a Danish company though. Places like Italy and Austria are nowhere near the cheap fees that exist in the US.

Edit: Georgia?!? Might be ok in terms of regulations, but has a significant "being blown up by the Russians" risk factor.
Popular Pubic Hair Styles: History and How To Create Them
A Publishing Primer: Here's a guide to the arcane terminology of the book world
Swype demos ShapeWriter clone at TechCrunch50
Swype's method is almost completely identical to Shapewriter (formerly IBM Shark). It'll be interesting to see if they can make this mainstream.
more at:
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/u/zhai/topics/virtualkeyboard.htm
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1240-swype-keyboard-for-touchscreens
A curious fact: all English-speaking countries are in top 10. It would be interesting to speculate why.
i disagree, and here's why: most of the applications that we see developed are based on ideas that flow from the common experience, then crystallize via a good idea. regardless of how good your idea is someone else is thinking of it too, and it becomes a question of who can get it to market fastest. if you're a part-timer competing with someone who isn't (as i was in a previous project) you're going to ultimately lose, as your potential users will latch on to the thing that fulfills their needs first, even if doesn't do so best. when that happens, your userbase's growth curve will be slowed.

a few months ago i quit my full-time job to pursue a startup with only $6k in the bank. yeah, food is slim pickins, but we launch stage 1 tomorrow and it feels darn good.

none of this is to say you can't take on a few hours/week of contract work of some kind, but your startup should be your primary focus.
more at:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1240-swype-keyboard-for-t...
http://www.shapewriter.com/
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/u/zhai/topics/virtualkeyboard.htm
he is a co-dependent. obviously
all of the business definitions for "startup" i see don't restrict the definition to any specific field. just because we talk about tech startups here to the point where it is implied doesn't mean that CNN money also implies "tech startup" when they say "startup".

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=define...
Which begs the question, is it real at all?
Ah, so the clause is specifically meant to exclude the case that a website buys RECs for less than they actually use? That's perfectly reasonable, but I have to admit when I read the bit above, I didn't interpret it that way. You might want to think about tweaking the language to make it harder for skeptics to dismiss you.
Agree. you can move elements and groups of elements SO much faster in photoshop/fireworks than in CSS/HTML. The only thing faster is drawing. If you are brainstorming layout with CSS/HTML, you'll run out of steam quick.
I've been disappointed with my MacBook Pro kbd. Usable, but not great. It helped a lot for emacs to remap the caps lock key to control. I also have an old Thinkpad T42 that I keep around for running Windows apps. The keyboard is quite nice, but I don't use it enough to have really learned it. Both are way behind the Northgate.

The old DEC VT220 dumb terminal had a nice feel, too, though nothing like the Northgate or Selectric.
How the Music Business Spent the Summer Killing Itself
Winner of the Personal Visualization Project is…
Google News/United stock fiasco: RSS and robots.txt to blame?
Problems like this need to be solved. That is, the real world demands that we estimate things that cannot be estimated reliably. To take a less controversial example than global warming, consider the risk of avian flu. Clearly, we cannot get a reasonable quantitative estimate of the chance of a flu epidemic, or how many people it would kill, etc. Nevertheless, we are forced to decide what preparations (if any) to make anyway.

Just because the problem is hard, doesn't mean it isn't worth attempting. I see no problem with what they are doing, as long as they are honest about the uncertainty in the estimates they hand to you.
I'm at ignite tonight and (a bit late) to web inno on Monday.
Do the ad math: When buying a $20,000 domain makes sense
Any (non U.S.) folks with startups in the countries on this list? Is the article consistent with your experience?
My completely science-free analysis (it seems to me) that the less force your fingers have to exert, the less strain you're putting on the internal body parts that actually make that happen. Most laptop keyboards require less force and have less travel, both of which seem advantageous.

This of course assumes that all else is equal (good ergonomic fit, sitting properly, etc. I am not a doctor or ergo councilor, so your mileage may vary.