skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being largely stateless is the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around when I first started writing Lisp code but after a while it is liberating. I still think that data representation is what scares most people away. People are used to defining their data as objects and not many people program any other way today.
Not sure what qualifies as "good" JS, but there's a halfway decent photo gallery in JS at http://davidmckayphotography.com/

The code hasn't been obfuscated or compressed, and most of it is fairly straightforward and readable, except for the parts where the deadline started creeping up on the project. There the code gets a little ugly/hacky. AFAIK, IE 6, Safari, Firefox 2/3, etc. etc. all like it fine.

I wrote it, and I'm not particularly proud of it, but I've received enough (local) requests for it that a version 1 is in the works.
Here's a pretty good tutorial amongst their developer documentation:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Co...
Great post, you discovered a bunch of the gotchas faster than we did on our first rails site. I wish I would have had a post like that a year ago. Thanks
Apple Wireless Keyboard drives the Iphone
We followed 4 of these (3, 7, 8, 13) and broke 7 (1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12) and ultimately failed. The interesting part is that right up until failure, we had checkmarks besides #1, 11, and 12, making 7 yes and 4 no, and then they rapidly fell into the opposite column. It's amazing how quickly they can change.

Those 3 are also quite related - while I still had cofounders, we'd kinda prop each other up during the low points, so we didn't get demoralized, so we didn't give up. But when my last remaining cofounder quit, I tried to keep it going for 2 months, but the emotional burden was far too much. I couldn't do it - if you can, good for you, but I think that there's a lot of truth in these rules.

Also - I think there's too much wiggle room in "Understand your users." I don't have it listed in either column for my startup, which tells me that we probably didn't, but most startups won't have the emotional distance to realize that. Even now, I'm not sure whether we did or not: since getting out to Silicon Valley, everyone I've told about my startup says "Oh, that's a cool idea, I wish you'd been able to finish it." Maybe we should've moved out west before quitting. ;-)
Just an FYI in case anybody was following this. Figured out that we're the #3 free app in Australia. Ahead of FaceBook. How this happened we're still not sure :).
This list is deceptively compact.. so many experiences summarized in so little space. Yes, I agree: nothing really unheard of...but all presented succinctly in one place by one cogent voice.

Absolutely superfluous comment: I heart pg.
Programmers tend to teach themselves. I wouldn't worry about it, Mr. President.
I couldn't think of anyone who would be interested in joining me who wouldn't dramatically lower the average founder quality.

Quality is a vector, not a scalar. What's the average of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak? I don't think that's a meaningful question. But the vector sum of their skills was a startup with amazing technical and artistic skill, product focus, business aspirations, charisma, and salesmanship.

And I'd like to help you become ramen profitable, so let me demonstrate what I mean by putting on my Steve Jobs hat [1] and telling you a story.

I'm in the market for something like tarsnap, so i was very excited to hear about it, for the first time, in this random HN comment 23 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458793

...because the product sounds great. I may sign up any day now. But I distinctly remember that, after reading this enthusiastic blurb, I spent several minutes trying to figure out if tarsnap had any kind of decent security model. I remember this because I literally laughed out loud when I finally managed to figure out the answer, after clicking through more than one link and reading a few blog posts -- tarsnap was designed by a cryptographer! Indeed, now (but only now) I learn that it's even better than that: You're the FreeBSD Security Officer, which presumably involves a great deal of practical expertise in reviewing and fixing insecure software.

Why isn't this information on the tarsnap homepage, next to a "buy it now" button?

---

[1] It's not nice to go all Steve Jobs on someone without being asked, so I'm deliberately toning down my Jobs impression. This is like a 2 on the Steve Jobs bluntness scale.
The other thing Automakers haven't got yet is that like 80% of people want a cheap fuel efficient vehicle. I would rather pay $4000 for a vehicle and have nothing except a 4* safety rating than pay $20,000 have a 4* average safety rating with a bajillion gadgets all priced at like $500 for something that costs $5 max to make.

Everybody on the fucking planet knows a 5 disc CD player with a line-in doesn't cost $500 to install because they're on sale for anywhere between 30 and 60 at any store selling anything remotely vehicular.
US uses songs to deter immigrants
Yeah, no two ways about, for average kinds of tasks, most commercial programmers just can't get it.

I did some (I thought) quite neat Clojure code to merge some data ranges in about 27 lines (versus a house programmer's effort of 1000 lines of c#). My solution was not received well, even though it could have fairly easily been translated into c#.

Sadly, if you get FP and the cool things it can do, it gets really painful to be somewhere people don't get it.
If you are large enough (say, you are a large national access or hosting provider), there is no single, even larger "The Internet, Inc." upstream provider you can use as your single link. You have to negotiate peering agreements with the other large actors so that you have reliable and affordable routes to all parts of the net. At this level you need things like BGP to know where to send traffic for a destination outside of your own net, because you could have several possible routes with different performance and/or price.

Unlike most LANs wich are either physically or logically (via the spanning tree protocol) structured like a tree, the core internet is a weighted graph.
Watch Slumdog Millionaire online and Reveiws
the emotional burden was far too much. I couldn't do [a startup without cofounders] - if you can, good for you, but I think that there's a lot of truth in these rules.

I think it would be very interesting to chart the success rates of sole-founder startups vs. whether or not the founder had a graduate degree: I get the feeling that the sort of struggles single founders often go through are very similar to the sort of struggles graduate students go through when they've been working for X years and still don't have a thesis in sight. If someone can work quietly in a corner and churn out a thesis after a few years, does that make them more likely to be able to churn out a startup by themselves?
Building the company long term does appear to be their strategy. But their ads are so low quality that they are, in fact, distracting. Surely running some nice creatives would be better?
How about a person who creates an innovative diet/training regime - that actually works

Or even the ones building the latest undetectable steroids, blood transfusion techniques to get High Altitude blood into the system, etc..

Much more interesting reading than "I put a rails GUI infront of a simple database" startups.
I hate when people tell me that Rails doesn't scale because I have scaled Rails and it has nothing to do with the framework.

The reason why websites can't scale is ALWAYS the DB. To fix the DB it is always master/slave, memcached, then sharding. For EVERY language.

Good article, sums up a lot of the tools I used to scale my stuff.

I'd like to add a little more.

1. Turn on slow-query logging in your DB and tail -f the slow query log. Find slow queries and kill them in your code through indices or using several fast queries to make up for 1 long-one.

2. Cache most reads. Both from application caching and memcached.

3. Turn off associations, they don't play well with caching.

4. If you're using memcached, don't use the plugins.

5. If you're a serious startup, use Engine Yard, they're life savers.
In my experience, the advantage of functional programming is that it is very easy to understand and debug. If my program consists of series of small functions that each have no side effects, things become very straight forward. I won't have one function mysteriously causing problems in another part of the program because it modifies global state in some unexpected way.

Combined with decent unit testing to ensure that each small function works as expected, it becomes exceedingly unlikely that changes will introduce difficult to debug issues.

One of the best books that first showed me how you can use a lot of the features of functional languages (first class functions, lambdas, etc) to build better functional programs was Norvig's PAIP.
There is a neat bit of irony in there, the spokesman for the border guards has a name that suggests he is of Mexican descent... (Eugenio Rodriguez Jr) That doesn't mean his forebears were illegal immigrants but it certainly raises the possibility.

Borders don't kill people, other people do...

I say any government that preaches the free market but that does not dare to open its borders is hypocritical at the core. Jobs and goods can move but people can't!
What if the limiting factor isn't the amount of capital itself, but rather the ability of the managers to determine whether a firm is likely to generate a return on that capital? An information problem, not a money problem.

I think this hypothesis might even be testable:

1.) If there is simply too little capital to go around, then interest rates should rise accordingly. Individual firms know the returns they can get on capital; they bid up rates accordingly, and the limited supply of capital goes to the most productive firms.

2.) If there is too much capital and managers cannot discern where to put it, and they realize that fact, then you'd see cash pile up while companies/individuals can't get loans. This describes Berkshire Hathaway over the last 5 years, and a couple of the better VC funds, but not really the economy as a whole.

3.) If there's too much capital sloshing around, managers have imperfect information about where to put it, and they don't realize this, then they will invest in poor prospects, those firms will be unable to pay back the loans, and they'll go bankrupt - soaking up the capital in write-downs. Then there's a temporary shortage of capital while everything gets reallocated and people work off the debts (or write-downs) they just incurred.

#3 sounds a lot like the world we live in. :-)

I have some ideas about how Google could help with this - probably not fix it, as that would require the ability to see into the future, but do a better job than the global financial system is currently doing. Ask me about it at work sometime. :-)
Why isn't this information on the tarsnap homepage

Because the tarsnap web site sucks. (Hey, you did ask!)

Until very recently the vast majority of people interested in tarsnap were people who knew who I was, had seen my work on FreeBSD, and read my blog -- so putting information about tarsnap onto my blog was only natural. Now tarsnap is starting to gain recognition as something beyond "that thing which Colin is doing", it's probably time to revisit where and how information about tarsnap is presented.
What's the average of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak? I don't think that's a meaningful question.

I agree entirely. I did say that I was being a bit facetious. :-)
Knollwood Realty Blog
If you want to see more YC-style funding and traditional VC is at capacity, can you (big VC) not take an active role by allocating some of your excess resources into YC-style firms? That could help these firms (and ultimately big VC) add more startups to their portfolios.

Of course, this is assuming they are honest about having to reluctantly turn down high quality applicants each year. I'm sure the relatively small number of mentors would become a bottle neck at this level, though.
Lawrence Lessig's Effort to Change Congress
That made me curious. McDonalds sells about 50M cups of coffee / day. Some startups who I know participate on HN are (multiplying Alexa daily reach by 1G, to get order of magnitude estimates):

Scribd: 5M daily uniques

Justin.tv: 3M daily uniques

last.fm: 2M daily uniques

Just those would equal McD's daily coffee sales in 5 days. So we're not so many orders of magnitude behind big public companies.

It might be satisfying to include some reference lines on your daily user graph, so you can celebrate when you serve more pages than, say, McDonald's sells fish sandwiches, or Wal-Mart sells Spiderman action figures, or whatever.
I'm always surprised to see the extreme bitterness that comes out on these threads.

>>Every single married guy I know is MISERABLE. The sex pretty much stops within the first couple of years. And the woman gains mega weight, because now that they "got" you, they don't need to keep in shape. And then the whole bitchy wife comes out treating the guy as a second class citizen.

You do seem to know an awful lot of extremely unhappy couples. That's not my experience at all. For example, my parents are in their fifties and still have sex 3+ times a week, a fact I wish I didn't know. I know many other very happily married couples.

Obviously, my anecdotal evidence is just as useless as yours...I don't see how we can generalize that there is nothing to gain by being married.

The divorce rate is 50%...but the failure rate of startups is even higher. Starting a startup and failing can also ruin you financially and burn you out -- should we then assume that it is a stupid idea to start one?

>>Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make.

I am not an American girl, though I recently moved to the states. I am European myself -- and I have met just as many cultured, intelligent, kind American women as European ones. Why do you hate American women so much? Perhaps by "nice European girl" you are imagining an especially submissive woman? Perhaps your experience with American women only extends to suburban princesses and soccer moms?

Either way, I can assure you that your explicit hatred of American women ensures that you will never meet one that you will like.
That's actually almost exactly the same thing my former boss said (he has a Ph.D).

I think there's a lot of truth to it, but it can also be misleading. A lot of these solo-Ph.D startups just chug along for years at ramen or small-business profitability levels. They work, they provide a nice living for the founder and a few employees, but they don't grow. Whether or not they survive seems to depend on how independent-minded the founders are, because the financial returns are often less than the founders can get elsewhere. Anyone with a Ph.D that has the work ethic to run a startup ought to be worth at least a couple hundred grand a year in industry.

There're a lot of other benefits to having multiple founders besides the "don't give up" aspect. Ideas tend to become better when they're bounced off multiple people, since the dumb parts of the idea get weeded out and the clever parts get amplified. Other people tend to take you more seriously when you can say "we" instead of "I". You learn how to compromise and accept other's input early, which is absolutely crucial once you have employees. You get a stronger company culture, which always seems to evolve out of the interactions between founders.

Actually, you seem a lot like my old boss - both math Ph.Ds with an independent streak, except you're half his age. He was a good guy and very, very smart (finished a Princeton Ph.D in 3 years). But the startup I worked at for 2 years, which is now 8 years old, is still limping along and hasn't taken off. And I really think that if it'd had 2-3 equal founders instead of 1 majority and 2 minority founders, it would've done much, much better.
File sharing is legal.
How do you get around the restrictions that will be placed on Cohen tickets, will call only and must have id and credit card that tickets were reserved with?
Good stuff. Some more advice from the same folks:

http://tipjoys2cents.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-hack-togeth...

http://tipjoys2cents.blogspot.com/2008/03/yc-applications-ar...

From others:

http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/03/24/how-to-get-accepted-f...

http://mattmaroon.com/?p=247
> Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make. If you really want to get married, go find a nice European girl to marry, unlike American women, at least they know that marriage is not a one way street.

I'm very interested in, comparatively speaking, the pros and cons of marrying an American man. If a society produces X kind of stereotypical woman, we may look for a Y kind of stereotypical man, which would be what?
I did not know there was an IRC channel for HN. Is it a very active channel & do you happen to have a link?
Nepal: Wireless in the Mountains
Aaron Hillegass's "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" is pretty much the standard.

Also see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388538

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431967

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=346967

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=401744
I'm guessing he wasn't counting a page impression as a customer. The actual number of customers of Scribd, Justin.tv, and last.fm is quite a bit less than the number of customers of McDonalds. It may be just a handful, if they contract out to an ad provider and then get all their revenue through that.

Of course, this is a meaningless comparison, because the number of people that Scribd or Justin.TV reach on a daily basis is more closely correlated to the number of users they have than the number of customers.
Discount volcano vaporizer
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Pron: You will be killed.

Drugs: You will be killed.

Gambling: You will be broke.

You can deduct medical expenses from your earnings. You can file for bankruptcy, which can nullify the debt. Talk to re-financing companies, they also can cut that number down a bit.

If we knew how to just make 30k, I think we all would be doing it, nonestop.
Learn Hacking, MSN, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, Hacking tools, Windows hacks
> The divorce rate is 50%...but the failure rate of startups is even higher.

I'm not sure it is. When you see a high figure like 80% quoted for small companies failing, that's mainly due to restaurants. Serious startups founded by serious people rarely fail. (Getting acquired by a public company is like staying married your whole life.)

The failure rate of relationships is very high. If you date 20 people before getting married, that's a 95% failure rate. But it's still worth it.
I'm surprised that you are surprised that our costs would be $4,000 a month. VideoSift serves around 3 million PVs per month, and not a lot of flat content - we have 4 large dual Xeon servers and a CDN to distribute content to local servers. Throw in taxes and misc fees - and we've reached $4K on some months without even paying anyone to work on the site. And yet, a site like Digg can lose $5.3 million in 2008 and it seems perfectly normal. Sure we are tiny by comparison, but we are not <em>that</em> tiny.
The higher the risk the higher the payout. As long as it is not gambling. Hell try the stock market, oversell and wait for the stocks to drop then buy.

To make quick cash you must be willing to risk. Risk means that you have a chance to not win, in fact lose. So weigh your options wisely.
I like this taxonomy, almost "the startup testaments". :) To turn this into a work of classics one needs to add a bit of detail to each of 13 sentences (from all the material that is already out there):

a short essay

three anecdotes illustrating the point

one anecdote providing a counter-example (to provide context and also remind readers about fallability of generic rules)

a short list of literature (e.g. pointers to specific chapter of "founder@work", "4 steps to the epiphany etc")

For each aspiring hacker this could easily replace days worth of reading of assorted stuff out there, just trying to get up to speed. In turn, more hackers will jump in.
Anyone with a Ph.D that has the work ethic to run a startup ought to be worth at least a couple hundred grand a year in industry.

Ah, but that requires a completely different work ethic. To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich.

Ideas tend to become better when they're bounced off multiple people

That's what users are for. :-)
maybe you don't need a co-founder but at least a contractor/employee to take care of this and all the other things you might not have had the time to take care of?
Is marketing evil?
Really a good read. Business incubation is so much evolved in Western world...In India we are still struggling to educate people about VC n INcubation.

Archana
archanag@aikonlabs.com
www.planeaikon.com
Quite possibly. If I was going to hire one person to do some contract work, I'm pretty sure that it would be a web designer.

Most likely I'll do this myself, though -- even aside from the issue of money, I find that doing tedious things like web design myself (a) is a useful learning experience, and (b) allows me to think about issues a bit more clearly.
Thanks to both releasedatez and Ivan Kirigin for taking the time to post this. Not an amazing amount of substance, but still some interesting bits with a few insight into yc's process.
Exactly. A login page that doesn't tell me anything - since I'm not a Dropbox customer, what does the link do to help convince me to sign up?
To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich.

But if that's your goal, then likely that will be what your startup gets. Interesting problems, few customers, and not much money.

There're lots of Ph.D-founded startups in that category. My previous employer was one. Symbolics is another high-profile example. Lots we haven't heard of, since they're working on interesting problems and not getting rich.

If that's what you want, go for it, as long as you're bootstrapping (it's irresponsible to take other people's money when you have no intention of making some yourself). Just be honest with yourself and any future employees about it. I'm still a bit bitter that I was sold on visions of Bloomberg and revolutionizing the financial industry while the reality was more about working on the boring parts of problems that were interesting to my boss and only vaguely interesting to customers.
It was clearly said in jest - think of it as a sarcastic "No easy route that is legal."
While I wouldn't equate archeologists to hackers, I still consider this to be an interesting article. --I'd actually be surprised if this wasn't at least somewhat interesting to a majority of the readers here.
Ah, good for him. It's really a great thing for the fans when the shows are will call only. Tom Waits does the same thing; it cuts scalpers out. I didn't investigate it that closely because I wasn't planning on buying tickets for it.
SecuritySpace is good and cheap, with POPs all over the US and in Europe.
http://www.securityspace.com/dns/index.html
Oh, my goal isn't to live on ramen. I gave that example simply to illustrate that the work ethic involved in running a startup is not quite the same as the work ethic involved in working for a big company.
I'm terminally old-fashioned in a lot of ways. I hold open doors for ladies, take off my hat before entering buildings, and define customer as "someone who pays money for a good or service".
My Agile Team: On Time Estimates | Agile Software Development
Coaching for ADHD: Million Dollar Study
It was just reported that Dr. Sharon Field from Wayne State University will be leading a national study on coaching for ADHD in college students.