skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Any advice for single founders applying for YC Summer '09 round?
I'm currently an undergrad graduating in December of this year, and I decided to apply for the YC summer round. Unfortunately, I'll be applying as a single founder as I've failed to convince my friends to renege on their full-time offers from Microsoft and other companies. They’re not willing to sacrifice the safety of a nice salary in this economy for my untested idea.

Google search results revealed that getting funded as a single founder is nearly impossible. With this in mind, is there any thing that we single founders can do to increase the probability of getting in the YC summer round? The only thing I can think of is having a working demo ready. I’m currently hacking out a demo before March 18 comes around, but I feel like that’s the only thing I can do. Am I just S.O.L.?

For the single founders that have been funded, could you provide us (single founders) with some advice on what you did?

EDIT: For clarification, I've been developing a demo for several weeks now and it's about 30% there, but I'm starting to ramp up and I'm trying and get as much functionality built before the due date.
I agree - which is my point, that it's more or less correct to point out that a government, with everything available to it, is unable to 'calculate' an economy, but by the same token, individuals can try their best and miss the mark too. There ought to be something there for them to help pull them up and get them going again.
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Erlang, the next Ruby On Rails ?
I imagine this is going to be a tough sell, prove you can ship early, fast, and iteratively and that there is no way you'll stop trying (even if you're living on other people's couches).

With that, that's a difficult story to tell if you're starting today--you may have to wait for the next round.

My personal opinion: Start by yourself, produce 2-3 iterations of your product, your friends will follow when they see the idea start to come to fruition. No way someone is going to deny you an opportunity with that much heart, a solid demo, and some early indicators of success. I think you have to gun it alone before you can really prove to them that you're not easily demoralized.

This is coming from someone who used to be a single founder himself, good luck--there's hope =)
Latest post doesn't look good:
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A--scala--URGENT%3A-THEY-FOUND-HIM...

Sorry, I have no way to verify that post.
its not a network until it lets you establish connections to other Google users

That’s what they do with "friend connect". Every Website can use this. For example here: http://www.scaryideas.com/
You have my attention. How did that single founder attempt go for you?
If your capacity requirements are very steady, you could save more than 30% on CPU time with this. At the very least, figure out how many instances you need at 3am and buy that many reservations.

That's what I'll be doing tomorrow.
The alternative school of thought is that staring at a white screen is like staring into a light bulb.
Being in Europe, I seem to have been sleeping during The Great Erlang Meme of 2009, so I was pretty disappointed to log in this morning, find what looked like a really juicy article about Erlang at the top of the list, and find out that 1) it doesn't really talk about the innards of Erlang, and 2) it's all a joke.

The innards of Erlang are fascinating, because they're really what make the language so good at what it does, and are fairly different from many other languages in terms of architecture.
Still in progress, I found a co-founder--it's going well. There are more followers than leaders, be the leader and start now rather than waste time.

People are more likely to feel like they are missing out when you're willing to do it with or without them. You have to sell yourself a bit not just the idea to instill a certain confidence in others.
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Yes. But there is one principal difference - the money will continue to flow even when he stops doing it.
5,580,000 is intuitively a ridiculous number, and the reason they use it is that their definition of startup is incredibly lax.

First, they're looking at businesses of all types, not just the scalable, tech-oriented businesses that we typically consider startups. The states with the most entrepreneurial activity, by their metric, were "Montana, Mississippi, Georgia, Oklahoma and Maine". Pretty clear we're not dealing with startups then.

Second, they are counting (or attempting to, anyway) all businesses, incorporated or unincorporated. Everything from your neighbor's babysitter to Bechtolsheim's latest, I guess.

So, pretty much worthless. But it did get our attention.
OK, I'm not familiar with MatLab performance. :-) But image processing is very computationally expensive, and the demo here is unbelievably fast. It must be optimized for its specific tasks. You just can't get that from a general package.

In retrospect, it's not surprising that they're optimizing some parts with assembler - even SSE (Streaming SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) Extensions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions), which I hadn't heard of, but which is the kind of vector parallelism that gives supercomputers their speed.
Does it really make sense for them to live in the heap rather than in the disk buffers?

I presume that you're not hitting a melt-down from CPU time, so I'd assume you'd get better performance by letting the system handle paging in data from the disk and figuring out which stuff needs to be in memory (buffers) and lives out on disk.

Also one thing to watch out for when you make the 64-bit jump is that (internally pointer-heavy) applications in dynamic languages tend to use significantly more memory on 64-bit platforms. davidw talked about this some here:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
I'm not a native speaker, but http://www.answers.com/wealth doesn't agree with you either. A company is something you can own, possess, a resource you can use as a tool. When it is bankrupt, I think some real wealth is lost.
I'm not sure why this was downvoted. Negative tone? I mean, he really does have a point.

I'm interested in some of the other features (such as voice mail transcripts and advanced call routing), but the singular phone number issue was never a problem for me: my only phone has been my cell phone. I'd suspect a lot of young people are in the same boat.
Because a group of 9, say, can deadlock into 3 groups of 3.

Sorry, I think I was supposed to exclude 2.
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I may be getting things confused here, but I usually see captive portals do HTTP redirection (looking from a sniffer). That would involve tampering with the headers, correct?
Transcripted voice mail? I wonder how well that will work out (looks good in the screenshots on techchrunch but are those real). Next step would be to do to this for ordinary phone calls as well and integrate them with Gmail, so you'd have a "Phone Calls" link like you have "Chats", with gmail search being able to find those.

That might be awesome for a business though perhaps unfcomfortably transparent.
Prove to them that you can (and will) pull it off on your own - without co-founders and/or YC.... and they'll come to you.
He is not saying lack of enough money, but is saying lack of enough time.
Sounds like someone is trying to drum up business for their spouse's company...
That is a fake, in very bad taste.
Aardvark: Answering the Tough Questions
Damn, and here I was about to throw out all of that code I'd written and to jump on the Erlang bandwagon lest I be left behind.
Yes, he is also saying it's about the money:

"To make the time for Beautiful Soup development, I'd need enough money to make it my job, and that's too much money to ask for or to expect."

Money == Time
While I'm sure it's more useful with multiple numbers, I've gotten a lot out of it having just one number. It gives me a second number that I can give out to folks who I don't want to give out my primary number to.

It gives you much more flexibility: you can block certain numbers, forward to calls to voicemail, forward to other phones, record calls, make calls & listen to voicemails online, etc. There's plenty of utility even if you have a single phone.
I was a single founder in the summer '07 YC batch. I don't know why they selected me precisely, but having the ability to say, 'It's friggin Photoshop online' certainly didn't seem to hurt. I was also willing to bring on a co-founder (which I eventually did) after I'd built and launched (a process that took about two years working by myself and happened before I ever applied).

The goal is value. I guess... build something to build it, get it launched, and try to build value (because you believe you can, not because you think you can convince someone to believe you can). Building something to reach an artificial deadline is probably not the shortest path to creating real value.
You don't need to pick. A weird unstable combination of the internet and the community on this site will do the picking for you. Furthermore, it will pick 29 other topics to fill your front page. Isn't that amazing?
I spend 90 cents on coffee here in Italy. So this game has to bring me the joy of five coffees at once. Hardly doable.

$5 is too much. I don’t understand why the author doesn’t try other pricing strategies.
HN is a community of human beings. Human beings are prone to do apparently temporarily insane/irrational things such as follow memes, jokes, silly suggestions, etc. If you dislike that here, I'm sorry but you probably won't find it any better anywhere else...
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Going back to school in the fall is another flag against you. It won't hurt to apply this summer, but you're very unlikely to get in. Consider this the practice for the Winter '10 practice round.
Can you adjust the price and test whether the sales respond to changes of price? If you can do one-week experiments at different prices, you might get some very interesting data.

$5 isn't much for an app, but you have to remember that this is a game - a very special kind of app that's not actually useful. It's perfectly possible that your sales will increase enough by decreasing the price so that you'll find yourself profitable. Of course, there's no guarantee of that.
Wow, IRIX 3 looks nice.
Gnome is there, although they don't have a recent version.
Because Weebly is a YC company, and PG probably hard coded in an exception for them ;-)
Ask HN: What's your twitter account?
I just got started with Twitter, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Unfortunately, I haven't found a lot of good birds to follow.

So, since this community is right up my alley, what's your twitter account? I'd like to follow you.

Mine is www.twitter.com/trailbehind
Fair enough. But, in my experience, most issues that cause deadlock reduce to binary decisions - in which case having an odd number of deciders is sufficient.

If you have to account for n-ary decisions, then you can never be to guaranteed to be free from deadlock no matter how many deciders you have (trivially, consider the case where n equals the number of deciders).
The Hyper-Sphere from an Artistic point of View
HowTo: Avoid the smug SxSW tweets
Hi,
Great idea to bring together HN users!
You can follow me at twitter.com/hardikt
Microsoft Research Prototype:  Vault is safe version of the C programming language
Or in other words: Figure out how many of your instances are running 24/7 and buy that many reservations.

By comitting to a small instance for one year you get it for $48/month instead of $72/month. If you commit for 3 years the price drops to $35/month.

Not too shabby.
Can someone create a nifty JavaScript calculator for this?
And yes, in case you did not know, there is a YC bot too.. https://twitter.com/newsycombinator
So, HN is now like the rockstar who puts on a baseball cap and shades and thinks he's out at the WalMart incognito... Ahhh, I get it now. Shhhh ;-)
What were those 'patents' for?

innovation protection?

yeah, right.

I really hope software patents are not introduced in Europe.
For the umpteenth color matching bejeweled wannabe, $5 indeed is ridiculous.

btw, here in Sudan I can shoot people for free. And they expect me to pay $60 for FPS games?
I always have at least one instance running so it's good for saving money...

At this price point it's actually cheaper than a vps at slicehost:
325/12 + 720*.03 = 49$

slicehost for an equivalent instance it's between 70$ and 130$ (but need to count the included bandwidth from slicehost to be more fair)
Before its replaced, can we guarantee it was not responsible for page-rank?
I don't get it... I'd rather prefer unlimited phone numbers for some of my phones.

What if you give your phone number to the wrong people? They'll keep calling you. You might be able to filter out some, but they can always call from another number (think phone spam).

I'd rather have the option to generate new phone numbers and give one number to each person / 'community'. Then if I quit my job I can just filter away all people calling me on my job number.

That's also why people use multiple email addresses, or plus addressing.
Pretty much. The trick is that since scheme is a lisp-1 there is no need for a different special operator to signify you're declaring a local function instead of a local variable (a la the flet/let dichotomy).
For Daemon Tools, you could try the following replacements:

http://blogs.msdn.com/charles_sterling/archive/2007/05/14/vi...
MS Virtual CD Control Panel

http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html
Virtual Clonedrive

I used to use Virtual Clonedrive, and prefer it to Daemon Tools anyways.
It seems like the analog clock widget is the perennial "Hello World" of slightly more advanced GUI applications. Anyone can implement it (no spec required), it's somewhat fun to write, and it works as a test for some of the more essential APIs in a GUI operating system such as vector graphics and timer events.

I think there's also a psychological aspect involved. The analog clock may be popular precisely because it's inefficient in the ways you described. Including it in a computer operating system may be an attempt to communicate that the system's designers want to respect traditional GUI values like user-centric design and real-world metaphors; that it's the kind of system where they don't mind spending CPU cycles on an inefficient information element as long as it breaks the monotony of text-based interfaces and offers a small tinge of familiarity. (The analog clock is something that you wouldn't find on a 1984 IBM system.)
twitter.com/plc
Erlang clogging the pipes...
Webwindows guide to offline advertising
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I do not 'keep peace', we both understand that it is the most productive approach. And yes I do have my voice when needed.
pg, I'd love to read a post about how you've dealt with writing HN to work in one process, in 2GB of RAM, it sounds quite novel! Did you have to make manual indexes? How do you arrange the files on the file system? How do you handle voting and concurrency/file locking?
So you had a problem when coming back to Hacker News and you choose to blame that on the site with the dark background? If that is the case then you should be saying 'Wow I never realised how hard it is on the eyes to be viewing light backgrounds all the time. More sites should have a dark background.'.

Personally I find a dark background better on the eyes.
BBC buys 22k computers botnet.
Unfortunately it's completely unusable on my machine (longest uptime: ~15 minutes), but it seems that I'm alone in that experience.

I also couldn't work out how to set up my home network the way it used to run (sharing Internet connection via my machine - I don't have a proper server or a router or anything like that). I'm sure it's possible, but it certainly wasn't at all difficult to do in XP, so I wasn't too impressed with that. Maybe if the machine stayed up longer I would have figured it out eventually.

Hopefully the next beta or RC will work for me.
Pivots for change
Sounds good. I'm @soundboy on twitter. That was the easiest way to organise things last time.
The (easiest) path to riches on the App Store seems to be lots of quick little apps that may or may not be hits, rather than spending 6 months and $32k on one app and assuming it will be a success.

Unfortunately this leads to a lot of crappy applications.

Ironically (?) this guy will probably have a huge spike in sales of the app due the attention he's receiving (and people feeling sorry for him)
Generally though wireless hotspots allow DNS traffic out (the DNS server isn't filtered) but not ICMP. In fact if anything is filtered it tends to be ICMP. I'm not really aware of any situations where ICMP tunnelling is useful. Anyone know of any?
they were for trolling...
also, I was under the impression that patents apply in europe - I once worked for a swedish company that had a really hard time due to a dutch patent troll who claimed ownership of their IP via broad and vague patents, soon after the company raised VC money...
Or, "slightly less elastic" instances.

Is there a resale/arbitrage opportunity here? Buy a bunch of reserved instances, resell at a price less than "full elastic" instances but higher than your cost (taking the risk that sometimes you might not have buyers for all your prepurchased capacity).

(Amazon could make this easier or harder by controlling whether reserved quotas can be delegated to others, or how easily AMIs and traffic can flow between billing accounts.)
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Well there's only one good thing for the ultimate in scalability -- arc in the cloud.

Which I believe should be called "lightning", right?
If the captive portal is rerouting every IP packet (apart from DNS lookups) from an unauthorized MAC to the same central server (so that it can spoof the HTTP redirect to the payment page), this is exactly what you'd expect to see.

It doesn't matter what DNS you're using - the DNS lookups should resolve to correct IPs otherwise your local DNS cache would be poisoned.
I have asked a couple of questions thus far and received fruitful and quick replies. The IM/email interface works for me and "subjective search" will be big (if done right).

The only issue: since subjective search is very much a 2-way (person2person) transaction, medium/long term, what is my incentive to keep answering questions with no economic gain?
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Amazon has continued to iterate on AWS and execute brilliantly. They're making Google look shabby, and I'd love to know more about how their internal processes differ.
@jgrahamc
Coming soon from a HN author: The Geek Atlas
Userfly - instant web usability testing
Yes, that was a blatant plug for my own book, but I think the subject matter is interesting for HN readers.

And I'm hoping that people here also have great suggestions for a possible second edition :-)
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he is dead. http://www.nabble.com/-scala--URGENT%3A-Please-read-if-you-h... gunshot in the head :-(
When I buy coffee when I'm out and about, it's because (1) I'm tired and I want to sit down and be perked up a little, (2) I'm thirsty and (3) I don't have the option to go home and have much better coffee in comfort.

In other words, coffee from somewhere like Starbucks is a pricey respite from pain, albeit only a little less painful.

For applications at the 5 USD price point, I'm simply not feeling the pain.
"There's no evidence to believe "Dr Hibbert"'s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_Hibbert) message is factual."

http://www.nabble.com/forum/ViewPost.jtp?post=22471998&f...
Yeah, a whole 4x ( http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/03/11/the-slashdot-... ), up to 17 from 4!

I would have bought it myself if it was <2USD, considered it for <3USD. At 5USD, I would need to be in some kind of pain of boredom to consider buying it.
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French police: we saved millions of euros by adopting Ubuntu
hot out = pain; iced latte = relief.

Where is the pain and where is the relief in TFA? And is it worth 5USD?
Windows Vista Performance Issue Illustrates Importance of Context
Surprised? Absolutely not. Google has a team of thousands of engineers, all of which can't possibly be working on it's core products. They'd all be disasters (See Brook's Law). I for one wonder why this sort of "innovation" didn't happen sooner.

As an aside, I sometimes wonder what all the engineers at Google do. Obviously they have an impressive portfolio of products, and I'm sure many internal, and even more just not released yet, but they're constantly hiring. Will it eventually get to a point where half of their engineers are just looking for their keys in play ball pits?
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