skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
consider this analogy: a new nightclub opens up in your neighbourhood. now there are lots of popular nightclubs in the city, so it's pretty hard for a new one to establish itself. therefore they go after the "local" market, have a relaxed dress code, don't overcharge too terribly much for drinks, and play atypical music. this works, they start becoming popular. now they're the new place to see and be seen. all of a sudden, there's one line for celebrities and another line for everyone else. dress codes have become a lot stricter, to "keep up the club's image". drink prices go up sharply. there's a new dj, who plays music the old clientele don't care for all that much, but which appeals to the new, trendy crowd.

of course, the nightclub is a business, and are just maximising their profits along good old-fashioned lines of supply and demand, and as an early patron you had no formal relationship with it, but it is far from unreasonable to feel disgruntled nonetheless.
Thanks! Glad I could convert you :)

Need to fix up our copy though to make it more obvious what we're trying to do.

As for helping - if you register your startup at https://www.chargeback.cc/business it'll ensure that we can reach you if we receive a chargeback for your business.
Flask is pretty much the small framework of choice nowadays. It's been awhile since I've heard of anyone using anything else.
Even a basic degree of law enforcement, military, or counterterrorist training would help. You'd hope airport security would require at least the same level of training as an ordinary beat cop, and in a lot of places they need a 2 or 4 year degree, usually in criminal justice.
As PG said in the comment above, businesses with Co-Founders have a better chance of becoming "really big". I'm not sure what data they have about company survival and what "really big" means in terms of revenue and net profit.
Thanks for the suggestion.

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/issues/4

Maybe someone else wants to pick this up and implement it?
> The fact that he has been in this state for so long and still posts (though not very often) is somewhat mind-boggling.

well, even if you are not hellbanned, there's very little to show whether your comments are being read or not. hn's commenting model is far more soapbox than discussion.
Fair point on the timing of your essay. I didn't realize it was written before you started YC.

Can you guys please release your empirical data about the success rates of YC companies, broken down by various things like market, year founded, location, number of founders, etc?
> It keeps a fresh JVM spun up in reserve with the correct classpath and other JVM options so you can quickly connect and use it when needed

So I assume it doesn't help if you are launching JVMs very rapidly (like, scripting stuff in a tight loop). Slow JVM launching has pretty much killed languages such as Groovy for scripting for me, because once I start using them in loops things get horribly slow.
It's relevant as an attempt at consolation. It's sort of like saying to someone who just lost a cat, "It's not too bad, after all, you were allergic."
Has been already discussed, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4796509.
I agree with the complaint about the lock in that's the problem for some of the users. But it's a lock in only if one consider twitter vastly different than other services. I don't see it a unique snowflake. There's no a big difference between Facebook wall and twitter. That being said, I might be missing something, since I never saw any use for twitter. I would use it just for promoting my business if I were in marketing department, and seems like that's the path to monetization twitter is heading to.

Also, I can't see twitter as a monopoly. Monopoly to what? They have a monopol on SMS length message network run on internet? Yes, twitter has a monopoly on twitter. It's not like they have a monopoly in complete social and news network market.

Everyone creating a twitter client or application should have known that twitter can refuse to let it run, or change the rules. They have been pretty clear about that, and they have been doing it for a while. That's their right to do so. There is a feeling of betrayal amongst developers, but it was their choice to build a product upon platform they don't control, in the same way as iPhone developers that know that Apple can just refuse to let them in the app store, but they still build for that platform.
Yeah, inconvenient security isn't useful.
Pockets on your legs mean a lot of extra energy expended raising and lowering what's in those pockets. Panniers or a jersey pocket FTW.
If you look at the voting statistics, majority of uneducated and lightly educated (high school only) votes Democrat. College graduates lean Republican, while higher degrees (academia) leans Democrat. So it would be counterproductive for Republicans to have more less-educated voters, since those prefer Democrats.

Education spending is another red herring - public schools spend no less and sometimes more than private schools, costs of K12 education per pupil tripled since 70s with little to no improvement in any measurable metrics, teacher employment has grown faster than enrollment for 40 years now.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/president-we-need-more-teache...

Sorry for ruining your nice theory with facts.
chargeback only works because most users don't know it exists. If you start telling people all they have to do to get their money back from a merchant is to click a button, it won't be long before credit card companies are forced to get rid of it. please don't abuse this.
Hand-waving wildly, trying to avoid the loss of purchasing power that's the inevitable result of fiat money, and ad hominem to boot.

Actually, I'd be happy to trade places with someone living in 1913.
Critical thinking skills in TSA employee? Probably gets one fired within 24 hours, even if by some magic one gets through training.
It's also rather low to hate on the OP's startup because it doesn't fit your definition of great success. You do that a lot and it's not nice. In the realm of startups -- single-founder or not -- Treehouse may very well be well above average.

There are thousands of single founder companies out there. Your system is biased and your predilection toward group founded companies may self-fulfill your prophecy.

In a way, you're like the coach or owner of an NFL team telling kids to stay in school and do well in sports because they may be a pro-baller some day, when really, they need to hit the books if they want a positive outcome in the average end.

Noam Wasserman wrote about plenty of reasons to be a solo-founder in his book, "The Founder's Dilemma." Some people would rather be king and your proposed path of group founded companies going on to VC fueled greatness is not the map for kings.

http://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma/ar/1
Build a Laser Microphone to Eavesdrop on Conversations Across the Street
Speaking of gravitational lenses, our very own sun can be used as one:

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=22321

Key facts:

can work with existing technology

$5bn cost

long travel time, a century or so to the primary observation point (500-750au) but can visit several distant icy bodies before that point

100x magnification for infrared and visible-light (50-80x for radio and microwave) (only for object directly opposite the sun though)

a good precursor for an interstellar mission and

good study platform for the interstellar medium
I use OpenBSD as a desktop. It works just fine for me. I use Linux systems too.
I wasn't offended at all :) Just pointing out that I was taking the same risk as I had no guarantee of success.
Republican Study Committee disavows copyright reform memo
I'm one of "those morning programmers" who likes to get up before the rest of the world. It's great to be well-rested and it's also quiet enough to work. I guess the what I have in common with the vampire programmers is that caffeine is most definitely involved.
That geo-locates you to a cell phone tower. There is probably a bunch more stuff that anonymity-keen (tin-foil-hatters) people will mention; CCTV from the corner shop when you buy the phone and the sim, whatever you use to buy the phone and sim etc etc.
it is actually worse than that. There is a certain type of customer that will click through the whole process like you describe, and be perfectly satisfied with their purchase but not remember the name of the merchant. Then when it comes time to pay the credit card bill, it's an 'unrecognized charge' and they do a chargeback. They don't look through their email receipts and try to figure out what they've bought, they just initiate a chargeback blindly. fortunately it's fairly easy to fight these as a merchant, but it still takes valuable time.
> The Romans forced engineers to sleep under a bridge once it was completed.

This is exactly what is missing from the banking system. The mortgage madness would never had occurred if banks were forced to retain a portion of every loan (and put that portion in the first-loss position.)
Dalton was just on This Week in Startups. Great to hear more in-depth insights on iMeem, social, ad sales, and app.net http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6ZsIlfzSBU

While I don't necessarily agree with his wording in every blog post, this is an awesome interview.
I observed them in act many times and read multiple articles on the topic, including inside accounts of TSA trainees, opinions of various security professionals and other press coverage regarding TSA. Then I thought about it and arrived at some conclusions.

I do not think I have "so much" insight - it's a regular awareness of the world surrounding us. If you have more insight, you are most welcome to share and provide the missing information, more information is always better.
How is this different from BillGuard.com? (edit:) Well, I mean, for the features this site offers; BillGuard also seems to scan your bills proactively trying to help you deal with charges, but at the end of the process seems to be fairly similar: I (the merchant) receive an e-mail from them rather than a chargeback, combined with information that might be useful to look into the matter and fix the problem. (I only started dealing with BillGuard yesterday, so I don't know much about them yet, and certainly not much about this new site.)
The next time I'm at the eye doctor, I'm going to be wondering what that eye chart really means. :-)

Another poster mentioned the Voynich manuscript. It's available on archive.org if anyone wants to try their hand:

http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript

Here's a list of others:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/undeciphered.htm
I actually agree with you, in that any sufficiently dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

However, even if you set aside the question of its dependence on government-enforced IP rights, Windows is a bad example of a harmful monopoly, IMHO. Network effects make the calculation of net "harm" very difficult. Thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs (to say nothing of Microsoft employees) have become millionaires thanks to those network effects. Good things have happened in the world of personal computing that could never have happened in a fragmented world where dozens of vendors were pushing their own 6502 or Z80 boxes with proprietary BIOSes and OSes, or where Linux geeks worked day and night to make sure ordinary users would never be able to accomplishing anything on their own. Somebody had to step in and harness all of those creative forces in a productive direction. Frankly, I'm glad it was Bill Gates and not Steve Jobs.

Where I think you are wrong is with your supposition that "IBM mercenaries" would have roamed around like mafiosi, crushing the PC revolution. That's what I call moving the goalposts, or more properly, a strawman scenario. You won the argument in your own head by inventing a fictional world where you could claim to be right.

Remove government, and businesses would develop their own systems like copyright and patents, which they would privately enforce through contract, private prisons, and mercenaries.

I'd need to see an example to buy this. (Don't use Somalia or any other failed Islamic states dominated by other governments' proxy warriors.) We don't live on the set of Blade Runner, at least not yet.

I guess the closest example I can think of would be the medieval guild systems. Those aren't coming back, not as long as capital can flow freely between nations and individual actors are gaining rather than losing influence.

You replace one system with another that's almost identical, but small businesses lose any kind of recourse if a bigger business decides it owns a particular creation.

The patent system is doing a better job at that than your violin-case-toting IBM thugs ever could have.
Scaling Agile at Spotify
Whenever people think about Google doing stuff like this, they often get freaked out. Like, "OMG Google is using me for its own benefit!"

Well, yes, that may be true. But the important thing to keep in mind is that you aren't losing anything here. Yes, Google may be using your GPS data to improve its maps. But that doesn't mean you are having any less fun playing the game because of it.

This is, I think, one of the things that's deeply fundamental to Google's culture and really great about the company: Google is always looking for non-zero sum solutions. Where many companies think, "What's the most I can take from my customers to make us money?" Google thinks, "How can we maximize the sum of both us and our users?"

Look at ads, for example. Where many sites are constantly playing, "what's the most ads I can cram into my site before people start leaving?", Google is thinking "how can we make the ads as relevant as possible so that users actually want them to be there?"
I've noticed the exact same thing. 4.2 has ground my Nexus 7 to a halt. Turned off NFC, which helped a lot, but it's still not as snappy as 4.1
Slightly less worse than that (sorry to break pattern), but another irritating example: it wasn't them that made the purchase, it was their son, husband, niece, whatever; I often get people sending me threatening e-mails about how I stole money from them, when in fact they share their credit card, PayPal account, etc. with other people and didn't have the courtesy to ask "anyone else know what this is?" before going all ballistic and demanding their money back.
It would be hard to disclose the raw data without also disclosing the secrets of individual startups, but we might publish some trendlines one day.

In a sense, I already do disclose such data in a general way, because whenever I write or say anything about startups, I wouldn't contradict trends I know about.
Something Someday Will Kill Facebook
This business will fail even though the idea to improve the chargeback process is a good one (for both merchants and customers).

Most customers don't know what a chargeback is. Those who do will never find your site. Only if you sell your service to the credit card companies will this work.
Well, there's upvotes (you can still see your own at least) and replies.

If I consistently got no replies or upvotes to my posts here I'm pretty sure I'd stop posting at some point but YMMV.
Fedora 19 will be named "Schrödinger's Cat"
You do that a lot and it's not nice.

For example?
Datacentric product development and the rebirth of engineering
"What’s wrong with having one founder? To start with, it’s a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn’t talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That’s pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best."

Wow, pg is so wrong. Whenever I get an idea I want to execute it myself. Bringing in friends is not something I even consider.
I think there are (at least) two parameters needing concrete definition: 1) What is success? 2) What's the ratio of solo startups that achieve the level defined in 1).

As has been mentioned, either an exit of a few million or a stream of a million of profit a year for a couple of years are more than enough to many potential founders.

That's the parameter I'm missing when you say cofounders are necessary. Necessary to achieve what, exactly?
It's interesting how much more productive and motivated one is when working early in the morning, versus just dragging through the night, when most of the time only passive consumption of information/news is possible.

I guess this has something to do with our willpower depletion - see here for more http://blog.bufferapp.com/what-the-research-on-habit-formati...
[StartUp Weekend] Take the challenge...Cut your bills...Save the planet
That seems to be how BillGuard (a site that seems to have a similar purpose) is attempting to play this: to provide a service to users, but really attempt to get the ear of banks as a value-add to their online offerings.
I find the age bit interesting because most young people are not interested in creating, and I enjoy celebrating those that do.
I'd love to see someone (ryancarson or pg?) write a complementary article about "what if you have to do it alone?"

In other words, sometimes, it's not your choice to be a solo co-founder. Many people have compared finding a co-founder to finding a spouse. In both life decisions, I don't think anyone seriously advocates for "sucking it up, and going with the least bad option."

Sometimes, you're poorly geographically positioned, or in a "strange" market, or later in life (friends are already "matched up" or in secure jobs), etc

For myriad reasons, you could sincerely try to recruit a co-founder and come up short.

The question then becomes ... do you make the best of it and go for it anyway?

Or, is the lack of a co-founder a signal (to yourself and others) that your idea / plan is unworthy?

I hope the answer is the former because that is what I am doing. Someone remind me to write this article when I figure it out.
The Solo Founder Discrimination
Ask HN: How do you work in an open office plan and get anything done?
I started at a company that has an open office plan (i.e. where everyone sits in the same big open room and can freely walk between people). For those of you who have been doing this for awhile: how do you get anything done? One day I noticed that I got interrupted about every 20 minutes by something..even with the super duper noise canceling headphones. The times that I don't work in the office feel orders of magnitude more productive. Thanks.
> I'd need to see an example to buy this.

The system where that's real is as real as whatever free market system exists in your head. I don't think football metaphors (goal posts) will work until we agree on what the stadium looks like.

Until that happens, all we can do is talk past each other based on our own ideas about what "free market" means. A free market to me is one where the strongest invariably crushes anyone weaker. Anything more restrictive would require government or cultural norms. Moving to any more or less restrictive system requires changing at least one of those things. Any discussion that doesn't see that isn't going to produce anything practical.

And I'm not interested in discussing hypothetical markets, so I'm going to go do something else and ignore this subtree.
Ryan, I don't know about you, but I didn't start any of my companies to become big. I started them to be my own boss and achieve the happiness you can only get through control of your time. I wake up when I want to and work on what I want to when I want to.

I think both paths can be successful, but each entrepreneur should evaluate their goals and make decisions from there. A single person who has a great idea will probably be better off building that idea into a business fueled by their own passion than they will be by hunting around for someone who will join them in the quest.

If you come up with an idea in a group or with someone and it's a shared vision, that's one thing. If you're an individual with a vision that no one around you understands, don't throw it in the trash because you can't find a co-founder. Go build it, make money, and then hire people to fill in the gaps.
Develop Motoric Games with HTML5 - The Making of VeloMaze
Certainly once a company becomes larger, it no longer has only one person doing everything. I think it might prolong the takeoff phase, but there's no reason it's not possible to achieve success if done correctly.

My guess is that the true reason is psychological and social; decisions are made better when discussed from 2 or more points of view. Ideas are hashed out. That, and mutual accountability is a powerful motivational force.

There are reasons, I think, but they're not being elucidated very well here.
One box of Twinkies can fetch up to $20 now on Ebay.
I agree. It'd be awesome if PG would release the data they have on the outcomes of YC companies. There would be a lot we could all learn from it.

This would also allow everyone to come to their own conclusions.
It’s Too Early to Judge Early Windows 8 Sales
Sandy Relief: Get Your Hands Dirty & Fill Your Belly This Weekend
Great idea. I'm often coding at 5 a.m. and that time is magically good for flow.

Have you investigated the history of "second sleep" for clues?

Also try looking at polyphasic sleep, software like RedShift, and products like the Zeo for ideas and people who like night/morning work.
Feedback / thoughts about potential pitfalls:

You're probably going to get a cease and desist letter at some point if you haven't already talked with the various financial institutions and have contacts there... you're almost certainly violating their terms of service (and maybe people filing through you are too).

You might want to be proactive about reaching out and making some contacts with the financial institutions.

Or maybe not, maybe it's OK. Just uninformed intuition there.

Also, you probably want to add some pretty serious language in bold saying "You must be telling the truth, not telling the truth here can cause serious harm, etc."

You probably also want to do some basic confirmation of a person's identity so you don't get whacky results. Ask for a phone number maybe, and occasionally spot check calls? I could see this being used for pranking, harassment, or inappropriate use (disgruntled employee, uninformed spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend, etc).
There have been several threads like this pop up from time to time arguing that there are successful paths outside group founded vc backed avenues. I've seen people list a number of great startups that didn't take your proposed path and you knock them because they don't meet your criteria for successful company. I'll look for a thread, I can't think of any search terms that would lead me to one at the moment.

I'm not saying that your data doesn't support your hypothesis, but I think you need to recognize the plethora of examples of single founded companies that achieve great success and know better than to apply to ycombinator because you don't like single founder applicants.

As someone else said above, success is relative and people deserve their success even if it isn't a billion dollar IPO or 10x cash out that may, in the end, have left them with less money than they'd make over the life of a smaller achievement through some other path, be it group founded, bootstrapped, or whatever.

My point is, there is a lot of greatness to be had that doesn't meet your standard and it'd be nicer to recognize greatness that doesn't follow your rules than to knock it because it is a counterpoint.
muchas gracias!, it is a very useful pointer.
I would love to believe that we're as critical to the success of the companies we fund as you suggest. That would be great. But if I have biased data because it comes from observing companies supported by a powerful YC crutch, wouldn't my bias cause me to underestimate the dangers of weaknesses like being a single founder rather than overestimate them?
You could anonymize the data and release a pretty monumental study. I would imagine the PR bump would be great too.

My post is not an attack on you or TechStars. It's just a counter-point to your data, based on my own personal experience.