skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few problems:

1) Not sure about the quality of advisors - doesn't mean they're bad, I've never really heard of them.

edit: It seems that although Carolyn may be well connected, she hasn't run a startup herself. Not promising.

2) I don't really see a lot of conviction in their ability to pick winners, else they would be more interested in equity.

3) "we don’t invest capital; we train entrepreneurs to get things done without it" - It seems kind of funny that they expect entrepreneurs to pay to learn how to conserve capital :)

If I were YC, I'd be annoyed that they claim to be similar.
The virus idea proposed in this article relies heavily on the user being dumb. But the last item in his article about getting the root access, was quite scary.

Using gksu to trick the user into typing the root passwd or the sudo passwd to execute a malicious script is a real threat.
What knowledge base application do you use?
For our startup, we've been looking at different options. Best one we've found so far seems to be KBPublisher (but it does cost):

http://www.kbpublisher.com/

Before I pull out the credit card, wanted to see which ones people here use. I'd like one that we can ideally host ourselves (not required, tho), that has a good wisywig editor and other non-developer members of our team can use easily (so good UI).

This application is for our company's internal use only.
Following rules slavishly is a pretty easy target; of course you want to do X because you think it's the right idea, not just because someone else told you to do it.

But at the same time, often the only way to develop the intuition and experience to know when to follow those rules (even if it's hard) and when to break the rules is to blindly follow the rules for at least a little while so that you get a feel for them. How do they fit with your personality or problem space? Which parts seem to add value or prevent mistakes? Which parts are getting in your way? Which parts add value some of the time but not if you have to try too hard to follow them?

Any idiot can come up with a set of "rules" that other people should follow, but there are also plenty of incredibly intelligent, experienced people who have attempted to distill their knowledge for other people in that form. Dismissing them out of hand and then patting yourself on the back for it ("I'm an awesome programming precisely because I don't follow other people's rules") is not the way forward.

To me, part of being a good programmer is being able to temporarily put aside your existing notions of what's good or bad, what will work and what won't, in order to try out someone else's way of working so that you can truly internalize it and hopefully learn something new. That applies not just to following simple "rules" about how to structure your code, but to trying out new styles of development, new programming paradigms or languages, new toolsets, etc. All of those require the ability to temporarily suspend your judgment about what works and what doesn't and to just try to do something "by the book" for a bit in order to hopefully come out the other side an even better programmer.
would love to try this, invites?
I'm not sure what combination of features you'd want to give up in order to make the logs of a free web chat secure.

Still, it'd be worth putting up a notice somewhere that users can't expect privacy from this site.
Here's a copy of the actual report. I think the authors actually describe the color significance in the report.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1169144
That's a rather big caveat. I wonder how they train people not to eat.
yeah. Breaks stuff like CSSEdit - which we might not use, but lots of developers do :)
"But there comes a point in self-deception where it becomes morally indistinguishable from lying."

Wanted to point out this gem.
I see no problem with them, no promises your job posting won't get critiqued by lots of users though ;)
MIT Shock Absorbers Harness Speed Bump Energy For Better Fuel Economy, Developed By Undergrads
I'd add: help establish some basic decision-making structure (e.g., despotic vs democratic) and simple accountability measures.
I don't recall the last time an article linked from Hacker News so quickly and dramatically expanded my notion of what is possible in software development. Bravo!
If you want to get answers to questions for elementary math questions, you might also want to consider these two sites:

1) MathForum.org

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/

You can check out the previous answers here:

2) Yahoo! Answers (Home->Science & Mathematics->Mathematics)

http://answers.yahoo.com

On Usenet, you're probably already checking math.sci. That's my favorite one.

-Larry
Absolutely right.

Here's an additional use case from my world: I'm in grad school & often want to share data and thoughts with various scientific honchos whose time budgets are very limited.

Now I can cc. a Posterous group called "my advisor might be interested" whenever I send an email. When my advisor gets some downtime, he can check this group out. This lets me communicate in a "non-push" way to him -- I don't clutter his inbox with my email, but I do get to keep him in the loop.

Essentially, this lets me create a "soft" cc. semantic.

I've had this in mind for a while, and made some half-baked efforts to roll my own, but trying out your service will be much easier in the short term.

Keep up the good work!
Honestly, calling this VC, or even an incubator, is probably a misnomer. This is an entrepreneurial bootcamp. Whether or not the training you receive in the program is worth $1500 is up for discussion, of course.
I am a relative novice to hacking, and so here is my two cents:

Over the past year, I've felt the best way to learn was to duplicate. Now, this comes with a certain amount of integrity, because you should never copy applications outright for commercial use. But for educational purposes, this technique is great.

Specifically, I've found text was helpful to code certain features for which there was not a video. When I started coding iPhone applications, I did a mix of video tutorials and Google searches to give me the functionality I desired.

When I learned Matlab, my professor told us to duplicate the pictures in the text (this was for Machine Learning and Bishop's text). Since I could not find good video tutorials for Matlab, I resorted to documentation. However, I knew what the end result had to look like, which was helpful.

For web development I code in ASP.Net and C#. I usually have a project definition to fulfill. I have used video tutorials to a certain extent (to see the wealth of features available with MS Visual Studio/Web Developer).

One option, which you did not mention, is to seek the help of others who are experts. If you can get into a community of developers and actively seek their input, you will learn much faster.
It's interesting how "start-up" has somehow become synonymous with software or web start-up company, but I think it applies to all start-ups in the sense that competency in the skills needed to create the core business are primary when starting out.
Many startups are good to start in recessions, because the new technology they develop is often cheaper than what it replaces. You just have to pitch it from the money-saving side. E.g. if you build something with 2x performance for a given price, then in bad economic times you want to sell it as saving people 50% for a given performance rather than giving people twice the performance for the same price.

(I realize your question was about startups for people who are out of work. I just wanted to point out that that is not the only, or probably the best, type of startup to start in a recession.)
"we certainly don't want HN to turn into a jobs board."

Why not? I mean we sure don't want to mix it with the primary news.yc content, but why not form a sister-board for jobs? And not just YC-funded startups looking for people, but an actual job board. We have the right kind of people here on both sides of the job-searching scenario.
True as far as it goes (got my doctorate on this stuff), but I think he misses the huge influence Gould had on getting folks interested. Yes, he was misleading about some things (although he may well have believed what he wrote), but I think he had a large positive influence as well.
John Chow has you fooled. He has never contributed anything worthwhile. You need to stop thinking about the dollar signs and actually analyze what he writes about - absolutely nothing. He's actually a joke in the blogging community, and so are his followers.
Already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476391

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476024
Corn syrup consumption (at least the high fructose variety) has been implicated with an increased risk of:

* obesity [1]
* diabetes [2,3]
* hypertension [4]
* atherosclerosis [5]

1. http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/79/4/537

2. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19526192.800-di...

3. http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/54/7/1...

4. http://www.john-libbey-eurotext.fr/en/revues/bio_rech/mrh/e-...

5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lfs.2006.09.002
Actually, I disagree. If you have a CEO that does not fully understand the company's product to a sufficient technical degree, then you have someone who is leading the company with no idea of what is possible. What nearly always happens in companies when this is the case is the development group starts making outlandish claims ("that feature will take 30 man-years and $9m to develop", etc.) with no one to call BS on them.

Personally being able to code (even if I'm not the sharpest at it) has led me to be able to drive teams a lot faster because I can say "well, if I can develop this in a week and I suck at programming, then you should be able to get it done in a day - come back tomorrow and let me know how it went".

That said, you're right - after a product is on its way it's all about sales and doing deals. But you still have to be able to whip the parts of the organization that need whipping (mind you, that's not always the development team either).
There are no official guidelines. YC startups get to post on the jobs page. We're going to let other startups post on the jobs page soon via startuply.
i think that if you have a compelling offer, post it. especially if you're looking for co-founders or lead developers.

if you're soliciting for data entry people every few days, no thanks.

might be nice if it were self-policed and tagged like the ask hn stuff is.
Screengrab extension for firefox can do it, too.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476024
Perhaps to turn your department into the good example, and eventually let you be able to say that you work at "Not So Dumb Corporation?"
One can't slander the dead, I thought, and Gould died in 2002.
Since that is his point, I daresay you missed it.

"Blogs don't make money. But people with blogs can."
1) The name recognition of advisors is part of the joy of the Portland technology scene. Which hopefully this program will help fix. Portland has astounding things happening, but no one ever hears of them or the people doing the work.

2. The equity question is something that I asked about... basically the thought was that its your work, you should get to profit from it. Just like when you buy a server from dell, dell doesn't get a slice of equity from your company.

3. This program as being run as a low cost high impact bootstrapped startup itself. That said the costs are a LOT lower than just about anything like it. Tech Stars for example is six percent of your company for office space, and coaching for 120 days. This is just $1500, for just the coaching. (And there are quite a few coffee shops in Portland that will let you work from them if you so choose.)
"The only place a writer signs a check is on the back" - James D MacDonald

This reminds me a lot of a vanity book editing scam, cash up front to make your work "submission quality".

Learn to earn $5000 at home every month... on the internet!

Don't get me wrong, this is probably no scam. It just seems like it's aimed at exactly the wrong people: million-revenue earners on the way up who would've figured all this out anyway. And if you believe pg, cash on the table is the resource startups need most...
What I don't understand is why every single startup has to be around some web 2.0 software idea. There are thousands of industries outside of software for MBA students to pursue. If you're a good businessman, you shouldn't pigeonhole yourself into a position where you have no expertise, that's just bad judgment.
That's what I was alluding to in my comment below. Thanks!
That sounds great, I was wondering if YC had an open jobs page....only problem is I've been operating since 2001 and profitable since 2005....am I still a "startup?" I'm the slowest startup in history.....
Op-Ed: Who's Afraid of the Future?
Coke's New Spin on iPhone Advertising
I remember reading Wonderful Life when it first came out, and thinking "If this guy weren't well respected, I'd think he is a kook".

It's nice to not always be wrong.
I agree with you yan. That's what I meant to not turn the news.yc into jobs a sister board would be great.
I'm going to upvote this because I want to see the discussion. This is a poor way of going about things.

500 a month for advice is consulting. This is a wolf in sheeps clothing.

1 million is a very arbitrary number. What size businesses are they going for? If it's a venture backed size business, 1 million could be a failure. If it's a lifestyle business, that's awesome. A hard feat to accomplish.

I'm sure the intentions are good, but the execution isn't there in my mind.
If it makes you feel any better, most developers can't write SQL either.
Wouldn't be co-founder since my company is 8 years old but it would be real development, not data entry BS.
socially, reasonable. economically, unnecessary.

socialism, anyone?
Studying body language reveals really interesting things during group tasks. It reminds me of a study on how perceived authority makes people jerks, even when leaders are picked out of thin air. Researchers did something similar to the study in the link - break people into small groups; give the subjects a fake task that they thought they were working on together but were unknowingly being tested on how subtle teamwork and leadership issues; randomly assigned somebody to be a leader; etc.

Then they gave them cookies to eat while they did their work.

And they found - without fail! - that it was always the leader that ate an extra cookie (they'd serve 4 cookies for 3 people), ate and spoke with their mouths open, spilled crumbs everywhere, did the least work, and just were general slobs. Regardless of gender, education, yadda yadda.

Scary that we all have jerk potential, no?
I think that's an excllent point. I know from talking to clients recently looking for some freelance web design work that their primary interest right now is maintaining good cash flow, so they would rather have what you said, the same amount of customers reaching them for a lower price, rather than the potential of more customers for a higher price.

I dont like competing on price in this fashion however, as it feels like a race to the bottom and quality suffers. Although there's not much choice if businesses cant legitimately afford to pay.
I does not have to be. This site just doesn't much traffic from interior decorator startups.
68 Business Ideas I Created for Seth's Alternative-MBA
Another huge flaw: balkanization. Bring in millions of indians and chinese in one shot and they will probably cluster and form their own communities. This doesn't usually work very well.

1 million skilled new americans (modulo an assimilation schedule)? Sounds good.

Giving a small chunk of america to 1 million indians and 1 million chinese? Not sure I like this idea.
A comment from one of the advisors:

(We have a $100 challenge– if any of the founders in Portland Ten are able to quit their day job during the program, because they’ve generated sufficient revenue/funding, we will give them $100).

http://portlandten.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/now-interviewing...

$100!? That is insulting... It doesn't look like they have very good advice to give when they have something like that.
I hear echos of William H. Davidow's "The Virtual Corporation", isbn 0887306578, in this post. I thought those ideas were innovative back then - 1993 - and still waiting for then to arrive in mass. mxt
A few of these I've actually posted on HN before. Anyway, the full list is here:

http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html

(Hamster Burial Kits & 998 Other Business Ideas)
Power and responsibility are divorced in our political system.

This was not the case before the checks and balances were thrown out. The system used to work well, or at least better than previous systems.
Ask HN:  Where do startup founders go for health/dental coverage?
We're young, and we don't get sick that often (hopefully). But it still seems like it'd be a good idea to be insured. Seeing that we ought not get sick often, is there any insurer that would be optimal for those corner cases, where we accidentally drive off the road one night?..

Perhaps I am supposing too much. How often is it that founders run around without insurance?
I think posterous is awesome, and it has become my primary blog, although I don't blog much. That said (and no offense intended), this feature is not exactly groundbreaking. Livejournal, Wordpress, and MoveableType all had stuff like this five years ago, right?

My understanding of how posterous works is to select and implement, cleanly, core functionality in a way that keeps the interface simple. I don't think that posterous out-competes other blog websites (or software) on features.
It seems to me that it's a question of aligning incentives. In this case, they've made their money no matter how you do (although if everyone fails, they probably won't do it again, so they probably hope it's not a disaster). In YC's case, though, they're very directly interested in your success because their money is riding on it too.

That said, it's good to see something happening in Portland.
And when and if you do get that huge growth, all these cool features don't always scale well. I think scaling issues is what really slows down innovation with the big guys.
"What an ignorant and simplistic view of our economic system."

The general idea seems to have an empirical basis. Yes, his argument is oversimplified and hyperbolic, but the trend since the the dot-com bubble burst is growing corporate profits and stagnant wages. Such a trend is not indefinitely sustainable, without society breaking down.

As for the $25K, I wander how far we could get towards that if the various check writing functions of the government (food stamps, Social Security, Medi*) were replaced with a single check written to every citizen once a year.
Google Books settlement site - authors get $60 + 63% per book
Jeff Atwood Finally Jumps the Shark
i think they're chasing the money.
What I don't understand about this is how the hell they are going to verify that someone is the author (or heir) of any of millions of out-of-print books. It's not like they can tell you to put a file named google78027ff138ae4bd0.html up... Seems ripe for scammers.
> Country / western and pre-pop jazz aren't new

And neither are R&B, Soul, or Gospel.

> The rest on your list I think non-controversially have African American roots.

There are two lists, separated by "vs".

I'm responding to a claim that almost all American pop genres came from AA roots. I disputed that claim by providing two lists, the first for "not AA" vs the second for "AA". The number of elements in the first is comparable to the number of elements in the second.
i suppose my point is, if you know the community, you'll know what fits. if it fits, i don't think anyone would mind.
Not every MBA is doing this. A number of my MBA classmates are getting into things like bio-tech, micro-sensors and other kinds of industries, where their background matches research developments in the University.

But if you have an interest and passion for a particular software idea (that meets a strong customer need), then I say go for it.

That's what I'm doing. Though I'll admit to having a decent bit of programming experience a number of years back, it's been a while and I'm rusty enough that I'd prefer to partner with a real coder who will be much more productive while I concentrate on the business aspects.
Its a symbolic reward.

There are actually a bunch of triggers for getting the $100. Like getting outside investment, deciding that the business won't work and quiting, and a pile of others.

Its like getting a coffee cup at work with the company logo on it for being there a year. Its not the reason you do the job.
Strangely enough, I have a friend (with an MBA) who's doing exactly that. He's the business talent and his wife is the design talent.
Knowing code has made it a lot easier to hire people to work for my company, as they don't care that I don't know code as well as they do, they just care that I understand their world enough not to place unreasonable demands on them.
I already addressed your point in my original comment.

I believe that Verisign bought weblogs.com mainly because they wanted the name, not because of the service. The site was already losing traffic and becoming irrelevant when he sold it, due to the increasing number of much more useful related services such as Technorati. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Technorati had a valuation of over 12 million dollars one year before Verisign bought weblogs.com for 2.3 million.
Does it really cut off ~ URLs? No one has ever mentioned that to me. I'll look into it.

Of course, we normally log full referrers, even dynamic ones, so you can see the actual sites linking to you. It's not such a big issue more recently, but it used to be nearly every tracking service would cut out the query parameters, making referrer tracking not very useful.
Nate has been writing about the economy lately and receiving criticism that he's just a "baseball" guy, but in fact he has a degree in economics from University of Chicago and so is as qualified (or even more so) than most pundits out there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver
Hey, I knew Abi a few years ago! So weird to read about her here. Sounds like a great business and lessons everyone can learn on the role luck can play in your success or failure. Not sure it's a typical HN story though.
In response to 3.
Techstars has a good reputation. They have been one of the most successful incubators for their 2008 programs. They don't just coach you but they connect you with potential capital/funding or companies that might acquire or partner with you. That is much bigger then getting coached.
It does say that in the paragraph right above the table. For sure, adding another column would make it more obvious, but I feel like that would be overwhelming. I have a problem with the number of columns we have already :)
Totally agree. I'm a product manager, but I taught myself RoR and MySQL last year mostly because I wanted to better understand how databases work with web apps. In the process I also learned how to use CSS, SVN, nginx, and search engine optimization techniques.

I don't ever expect to use these skills in a major web app (I'm nowhere near good enough to do it for real), but they've helped me immeasurably in communicating effectively with engineers. Wish I had done it years earlier.
Are Indian Software Developers "Code Donkeys"?
I used to think that, until I found Four Steps to the Epiphany: http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...

Great book. Read it. Two-sentence description: product development is essential, of course, but "build it and then market it" is way too risky. Instead, do customer development alongside product development, from day 1.