skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think #1 is a goal of YC at all, nor does it particularly help YC. There are plenty of founders of businesses who will never consider YC (99% of small businesses, and many startups which don't want to move to the Bay Area, or which just don't know about YC).

#2 is utterly incorrect; YC, like any other seed stage investor, basically doubles down (in time/effort, not money, I guess) on winners and puts minimal effort into failures. Pitting founders against each other is a pretty easy way to move businesses from "winners" to "losers", so it makes no sense whatsoever. The damage to a business from founder strife outweighs the returns from almost any decision (other than "should we sell", which YC or a seed investor has essentially no influence over, or maybe "continue vs. shut down".

3. YC has accepted enough single founder companies which remain single founder companies that they don't force anyone to do this. I fail to see how an investor taking a 2-10% common equity stake could force anything except disclosure, and I don't see how a relatively small investor like YC would be able to manage the administrative overhead or psychic cost of forcing startup founders to do anything.
Windows 8 Apps I'm looking forward to
Developer productivity is nearly a solved problem. What isn't a solved problem is to convince the managers about the solution.

Because the solution is radical. Your ordinary corporate manager is made to believe that, team work + tools + a bit of odd micro management(without a clue about what he/she is managing) thrown around is what takes to win. The fact is that team work matters, but make-or-break deal for ambitious projects is mavericks working full steam for a good amount on project's net demands.This requires a total distraction free environment, a uninterrupted stretches of time(tuits), choice of tools(both hardware and software) and many times managers getting out of the way and letting the actual contributors do their job in peace.

I have thought this over many time, hacked and tweaked my schedule many times and this is what I have come to. Recently every time I decide to work from home. A day before, I write down clearly without any ambiguity the list of tasks I want to accomplish the next day. I start working insanely early. I start at around 3 AM in the morning, The energy level are really high in the morning. I also take in a lot of water. Apart from a break fast break at 8 AM. I work all the way up to 12 in the after. That's 8 hours of uninterrupted time.

The remaining day I generally work on a side project, or some thing I love doing- like play a musical instrument. Or I just continue doing my work. Then to go back to sleep for 6 hours at least.

The great thing about this schedule is, by the time somebody is up and running throwing distractions at you, you are done with your work.

Ironically despite manifest benefits of this schedule, management finds it 'not good team work'(Read- your idea is too radical and is a threat to my designation).
Work from home, get in at 5am, leave at 8pm, have a 'meeting' at an empty desk elsewhere, and finally try to find another job. The problem is that there are lots of roles where success depends on other people. If everyone at the company is doing their own heads down work, this becomes a major issue for people in those roles. It's no mistake that you are being interrupted every 20 minutes.
Cool stuff but how is "in high school" in any way relevant?

Is it a new trend on HN for young folks to include their age (or some kind of clue) along with what they've shipped?
Everyone needs f.lux regardless of sleep patterns. Standard screens are just brutal.
DON'T do it alone - be the first to pitch to co-founders, online
that makes sense, because almost no application of OMAP really used all it's features...

I'm not sure why you say that. All accelerated video encoding/decoding is done on the DSP. This is in contrast to the Freescale i.MX5 series, for example, which has dedicated hardware blocks for this.
"started by multiple people" != multiple founders

This, IMO, is the real problem with pg's "data". For example, I'm currently doing a startup. There are over ten people who are currently participating in one way or another. We even call them "founders", thus, when we grow large, pg would count us in the multiple founder column.

But there's really only one founder, and that's me. I'm the only unreplaceable person in the company at this time, I worked for 10 years before I even got to the point of incorporating, and if I left to start something else, the company would immediately fold. I recruited every person, and could unilaterally let anyone go. It's my money and reputation on the line. I wrote the business plan, designed the product, and most importantly, identified the market and invented a way to reach it and fund the company during growth.

In five years, yeah, I'll be able to move on without killing the company. But not now, not when it's still a startup.

Dropbox was the same, and pg nevertheless counts it in the multi-founder column. Oh well, as I discussed in another comment, it's in YC's best interest to promote multi-founder companies even if it has zero effect on the outcome.
You should check out Parse (www.parse.com). You can both send push notifications and write server side scripts using JavaScript using what they call Cloud Code. It's pretty awesome.
If you "don't read" my book, I'm going to call that "stealing". After all, if you had read it, I would have gotten $20, and I didn't get my $20, so you must have stolen something from me.

(Do you see how insane this is?)
Would make sense. Michael Bender is a co-author on that paper and he apparently works for Tokutek, judging by this presentation: http://www.bnl.gov/csc/seminars/abstracts/Bender_Presentatio...
A secret of game-fu
Let's ignite a candle and hug each other. And then let's watch Bob Ross painting a sunset lake.
Just an FYI, but the website is unusable on mobile (Android ICS). The sidebar navigation completely overlaps the text when zoomed in.
Fascinating discussion, one of the nice things about multiple founders is you get to hear people who don't agree with you. I've found a huge number of people 'self edit' around the boss, even when you tell them not to. So when you're doing something stupid you really need to hear that from someone else because if it was obvious it was stupid to you, well you wouldn't be doing it.

That is something that always impresses me about teams with a solid level of trust, they can talk about anything. They trust that everyone wants the same thing, success for the endeavor and nobody worries that someone is trying to make them look bad in front of someone else or to the team.
As a student who took this last winter, I can assure you it's the latter.
Eh, can't please everyone. It was written from a sincere place.
As somebody at my office put it: "Transhumanists versus bioconservatives...you have to ask?" But yeah, it would be nice to have some more resistance targets around.
True, but even marketing has become a lot easier. Like they say, the 1 million users is the new 100K.
This is a fun toy on the iPad. Not the same as the silk stuff but still fun.
The linked messages from Marc Espie are specifically about desktop software. And the impetus for the discussion was the fact that upcoming Gnome versions are moving towards requiring systemd.

None of the server-focused elements of OpenBSD are in any immediate danger of "linux pollution" (especially the network stuff), so you don't have to worry. Many other people involved in the OS do, apparently.
People tend to post about the constraints involved in building their product e.g. boostrapped single founder, weekend project, used xyz new framework, etc...

What do you think of the game? :)
Some of your examples are wrong (in the same way pg's essay points out -- most successful sole-founder businesses tend to have actually had cofounders)

Sean Parker was a cofounder of Napster.

WvM left AOL when it was nearly bankrupt in the early 80s; a team (including Steve Case) basically restarted the company. I'd either ignore this case or consider it a cofounder case.

Pierre Omidyar left eBay quite early, and raised money even earlier (including hiring Meg Whitman); it's a good example, but probably not as relevant today.

Overture/GoTo was part of Bill Gross's IdeaLab, which is a pretty unique situation. I don't think I'd call Bill Gross a solo founder there; he may have been the solo founder of IdeaLab.

Digg, probably not in the "successful" camp.

Amazon is a good example of a successful single founder. SuccessFactors too, even though I know ~nothing about their business other than it being highly successful -- it seems like a black box inside.
I can't knock your methodology, as it has produced some black-swan type results (Dropbox, etc). But the only justification you have articulated against single founder prospects thus far is some ineffable "esprit-de-corps" in an earlier essay. Right or wrong, most determined single founders would look askance at such intangible, unquantifiable justification of their dismissal.
> first with the advent of email “conversation” threads

Google did not invent email conversations. Most email clients worth their salt could sort email based on thread since at least 1999/2000 (and also before that I only started using computers around that time).
Googling a musician and their song brings up a new track listing UI
I'd rather just file a chargeback with my credit card company. It is just as easy imo.
All calendrics APIs will bite you. It's not a property of the API (though I agree Java's is bad) but of the problem domain. The gregorian calendar is simply a mess, and any API on that is just a facade on the mess. Never trust your calendar API. Never fool yourself into thinking you've found the right one. Always be very, very afraid when you find yourself doing arithmetic on a "date".
New York Techie Chris Dixon in Talks to be Next Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Perhaps, but none of the other webmail clients had that, and Outlook didn't. While it may have been an available feature, it certainly wasn't in any way widespread.
> I just applied to TechStars Cloud in San Antonio for http://commando.io and was denied as a single founder. I knew it was a long shot, but had to apply just for the amazing opportunity that is TechStars and the mentors and experience.

You speak this highly of TechStars, and yet you're still running an LLC?
I'm definitely a night person. I feel like I can turn on a switch on go on turbo mode, hacking away and easily translating my thoughts to code. It definitely agree that being slightly sleepy helps keep the focus, but it doesn't seem to get in the way of accomplishing complex tasks.

I used to wake up at ~7PM and go to sleep at ~12AM for a couple years, which worked out great for me - but unfortunately I couldn't keep up with it, as I got recruited to the IDF (mandatory service in Israel) and than started a business with a co-founder that has "normal people" hours :)

I only do it nowadays when I really feel like I need the extra boost (like when I start working on a new complex project or component - I prefer to do it on nights, and usually have a working prototype with most of the complex logic after a couple "night sessions" that I finish off during daytime).

Great idea for a book, I'll definitely buy it when its ready. Wish you much success!
As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living
Yep, I know that is one of their worries. Parallel store, bypassing Apple's payment system and creating a bad user experience. However, the number of users that jailbreak their iPhone and use Cydia is small, and the new iPhone users are more and more regular people and will not jailbreak their phone. In essence, Apple has all the control it needs to prevent this and shouldn't worry about it
A worrying trend in behavior change in Human Computer Interaction
Nice!

Possible alternative may be https://script.google.com -> "Script as Web App"

Especially when integrating with google's apps for domains and APIs.
Investment banks generally don't write mortgages, so asking them to keep some skin in the game is a little silly.

Glass-Steagal had nothing whatsoever to do with preventing savings&loan banks from making bad loans, nor did it prevent savings&loans from selling mortgages to third parties for securitization.
The best business plan presentation advice ever
Five people whose powers are out of this world
The title of the article is plainly and simply wrong. The you is every prospective founder of a tech company. A fraction of this group of people can build a company to the point of testing their hypothesis. A fraction of this fraction can do that without a cofounder.

Besides that there are some good points in the article, it's fairly well written, and being a solo founder has put its author in a good position.
Please do. If you have any feedback, please post it here or email it to james@chargeback.cc
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798930
It's worth noting that as investors (you a professional, me small fry) we are biased. I just wrote a quick post about my reasons to prefer startups with more than one founder:

http://diegobasch.com/why-investors-want-co-founders
Show HN: MooseFS - a fault tolerant, network distributed file system
The bottom one.
I'm sure you would find a way to anonymize the data if it would result in a compelling story for YC.

But as we all know so well the "startup outcomes" follow a power law. Dropbox and AirBnB make for a great YC PR, but are certainly nothing like a statistical mean outcome (aka "expected value").

I'd say it is a pretty reasonable thing to postulate that "doing things YC way" would result in a worse expected outcome for an individual founder vs. retaining control of a profitable business. If this statement is wrong please refute it with data.

The way things are right now, YC is selling the "possibility" of becoming an outlier, while downplaying what "typical results" usually look like. If you were in a consumer product market it could likely break FTC rules on truth in advertising:
http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/starek/nima96d4.shtm

EDIT / RESPONSE 1: This is not an "accusation". I am simply stating as fact that YC's model is focused on promoting its largest outlier successes (which form the bulk of YC portfolio value) while releasing no real data on the "mean outcome". Take it for what it is worth. As far as my statement about comparing "mean outcomes" it is obviously just a subjective judgement based on anecdotal evidence because there is no publicly released data from YC.

EDIT / RESPONSE 2: Let's be realistic. Any VC firm can release % of IPOs, M&A and failures as well as IRR figures and exit bands. There is no reason to include any company-specific proprietary data. The only reason for YC to not give such estimates is because it would highlight the fact that most startups are nothing like Dropbox.
I have never actually heard an engineer ever proclaim why an open office plan is definitively a better approach to do things. I have heard things like "Foster open communication" or "Collaboration" but I am not really clear why one couldn't collaborate online or slip into a meeting room and conspire. I haven't got a good answer from non-engineering folks who usually decide on the office plan.

Rant aside, I try to get to work incredibly early and get a significant portion of my work done then. Another option as someone else suggested is in-ear phones. These can vary from $200 (Shure) to $500 (Westone ) for a really awesome pair and can get some getting used to, however they surpass active noise cancellation headphones in terms of shutting down coworker noise.
Why Investors Want Co-founders
The way Gmail groups and sorts conversations is not the same as the way a threaded email client does or did it. Here's a random example of the way almost all three-pane, graphical, threaded MUAs looked for years: http://img.brothersoft.com/screenshots/softimage/c/claws_mai...

Gmail did it differently and was considered innovative. Some people who had always used threaded readers hated and still hate it. Other people like it better, or never used the old way.
An example would suffice. You spoke about Twitter on the article, so why not exemplify what should be done different for that specific case of a "big social network"?
Ah thanks for that TOS fix.

The feedback about the "hidden cost" is great. I've heard that a lot. I definitely need to communicate somehow that we attempt to up-sell merchants with premium services and use the chargeback essentially as a lead to talk to them.

Yup, Australian :) Although the site does localise to the US and UK as well.

There will be a short delay before the merchant notification emails come out. We put them through a degree of manual approval and due to load from HN traffic it may take some time for them to be fully processed.
>...saved us several 10s of thousands of dollars over the equivalent Cisco systems.

If companies donated even 5 to 10% of the savings to the projects(if they're able to i.e), then the open source projects wouldn't have such trouble with lack of manpower.
I think all your points are nonsensical, bordering on insane.

"Shrink the available pool of founders"?? In country of 300 million, how in the world is that even possible for a relatively tiny incubator to do??

"Split ownership to manipulate the startup" - YC takes a 5-10% equity stake!

"YC effectively forces successful single founder companies like Dropbox to dilute themselves and gain a founder" - HOW?!?!
Like a lot of people that played Fez, I recently did some frequency analysis by hand, to crack the alphabet in that game. It was pretty tedious, and I messed up frequently. I wouldn't blame her for giving up after a few mistakes.
A flippant googling suggests the Sun outputs 10^45 photons per second. The very bright object in question is a galaxy consisting of, we can presume, a few orders of magnitude more than 10^6 stars. Upshot is that the Hubble Telescope should be receiving a few hundred or thousand photons from that galaxy every second.

In comparison and for scale, IIRC the human eye has been shown capable of detecting individual photons.
Time to sue Novus Partners I guess.

QUOTE

I'm one of the 30 other individuals that acutally patched and commited changes for Bob to include in nvd3.js; I'm looking for contacts for the other 29 contributors. (Please contact me at using the feedback form on congocart.com or master-technology.com) I would like one of us (I'm willing to volenteer) to contact Mr. Qunibi of Novus partners in a position of consensuses from those who actually have code in the product.

My thoughts that would I believe be amicable (i.e. win/win) to both sides is that they can have our permission to take ALL of our changes closed source in the own future versions as long as we also (the community) may use the last release under the open source (Apache) license it has been under since shortly after it was released on there official novus github account and go our own separate way. I know my changes were really early to the library and some of my code may not even exist anymore (lol).

But I believe the cost for them to audit the whole library and rip out all of our changes and rewrite it all could be major -- I believe Bob could legally remove all of our code; but for the actual re-implementation Bob would have to hand it off to someone to do a fully clean-room version to make them legally safe from being sued. And that could be very costly in time and resources. Cost wise for them It might even be cheaper for them to ditch the last 6-7 months of changes and to just revert to the version before my patch/commit (which was issue #3 <G>). So I think we might be able to make this a win/win proposition if I can get the consensuses of the other 29 contributors.

Nathanael A.
I have also noticed this, but maybe it's because in the summer we are more likely to get outside and do something physical which makes you more tired and thus more inclined to sleep earlier.
Coffee overshoot?
It isn't surprising that a programmer made an off-by-one error, they happen all the time. But it is surprising that it made it through a release without being caught by some sort of QA process.
The High Cost of Free Office Snacks
Your argument comes down to "but who's gonna build roads?" which is somewhat of a statist meme among libertarians. In short, it's this: roads are built by private contractors hired by the government, those contractors are paid by taxpayers money. Government acts as a middle man, which, indeed, may be necessary to coordinate the project, however it holds an ultimate monopoly for the middle man. There's no reason why one middle man should exist to coordinate building all roads.

When you talk about risks in undertaking an investment, it means there might not be enough demand for something that the government does and so taxpayers in fact are investing in things not enough people actually need to justify the investment. Which simply means that the government is an irresponsible fund manager.
DADF 1.1 format for automated banner day trading
cool app!
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe YC's shares are non-voting, and I know that they don't insist on a board seat, which makes the machiavellian scenarios above even more far fetched.
Welcome to Buntu Redempter 2.0
I'm excited to hear that you've found a schedule that works for you, but you too quickly dismiss teamwork.

There are perfectly fine projects that only take a single developer. There are some that need a few people working as a loose group. But if you've got something that actually needs a team, then bad teamwork really is a problem.
thanks for the comment and please tell your friends to download it!
We don't do anything super special here. Most databases have some notion of "node" (or in mongo, "bucket", to distinguish from a machine as a node in a cluster), and keep track of which nodes in memory are clean or dirty. We log all operations and by default, fsync that on commit, so we're completely durable, there's no data loss (unless you didn't commit something before you pulled the plug, of course). To trim the log, you have to know that everything dirtied by a transaction has been written to disk, and if you don't trim the log often enough, it gets big and your crash recovery takes a long time (innodb sometimes exhibits this). We and others have a notion of "checkpointing" which says "all the nodes as of this point in the log has been written to disk and marked clean", and that allows us to trim the log. Note that this doesn't have to mean "stop the world and write out everything in main memory", you can do a lot better (but that's a long discussion).

Because a given operation, even if it involves lots of random writes in the key space, still only dirties a few nodes at the top of the tree, we actually checkpoint faster and by writing less data than the same b-tree would (because it would have to checkpoint a bunch of leaves, with random I/O, for every one of our nodes), so our log is often much smaller and our recovery times are much faster, usually on the order of seconds or minutes, rather than hours. By default in our mysql product, we checkpoint every...I think 60 seconds, but it could be 90. It's configurable but that's the ballpark.

But most of my comparisons here are with innodb, to be fair. Mongodb's storage system doesn't support transactions and we're still learning about its durability and recovery model, so I can't make any totally fair claims comparing us to them.

(I love talking about this stuff, so keep up the curiosity)