skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) You oftentimes can't afford success. Google and Facebook would've gone broke without outside funding of some kind, long before they found a way to generate significant revenue.

2) VCs are advisors, and are likely smarter than you about lots of things-- especially how to sell a company. If you want a lifestyle business (37Signals, for example), then avoid VC. If you want to sell a company, you'll have a better chance (and sell it for more money) with a motivated VC.

3) Sales, marketing, and support cost money, for most businesses. If you've got paying customers, telling them "sorry, I'm at my day job" just won't play. For a consumer play, this is less of an issue.

4) A lot of ideas (b2b, mostly) just aren't simple enough to bootstrap with 3 people and 18 months. Of course, it's easy enough to avoid those business ideas. ;-)

5) Businesses are ticking timebombs. Stretch out your development time and your stretching out the opportunity for disaster. A team member can lose interest or get a great job, a killer competitor can manifest and snatch up your customers, etc.

6) Momentum. I can say with experience that it's REALLY hard to keep momentum going with 3 people working part time (I'm doing it right now). When you put a startup on the back burner, it's rare that you all get to focus on it at the same time. When you're rarin' to go, your partner is "really slammed this week".

7) Necessity drives success. When your startup is your full-time job and you have an investor looking over your shoulder, your going to work harder and better. If you've got a job, startup failure is more of an option and delays aren't very painful.

8) Debt or VC can get you to the point where your growth curve starts quicker. When you are confident about the fact that you're on track to build a zillion dollar business, $100k of debt/equity financing get get you there a LOT faster.

All that being said, I've sold two bootstrapped companies-- it works.

I'd advocate for bootstrapping your way to the point where you know if you're on to something. If you can prove that the market desperately wants what you're building, then it USUALLY makes sense to get some cash (via debt or equity)... Assuming you want to focus on growth/exit events instead of profit/lifestyle.
And quality scalable software sells itself? Sometimes, but not usually. There are plenty of examples of lower quality software burying the better product because of sales and marketing horsepower.
Is it really that tragic if people know how many users you have? Maybe honesty isn't an awful idea.
Those considering using this finding as a basis for investment might also consider Kedrosky's research comparing the golf handicap of CEOs with the company returns to shareholder:

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/000639.html

/sarcasm
Wow what a valuable article. That was awesome. Thanks for the post.
I never said anything about selling and neither did the comment I was replying to (at least the way I read it). In fact, see my other comment on this thread about why I think you might want to take VC funding if you need to blow out a sales channel.
6. Straight As in college didn't make anyone a good entrepreneur.
Hypothetical Question regarding Intellectual Property/NDAs
How do I ensure that the evaluators of the Y Combinator application do not steal my intellectual property? Especially in the event that the initial application is rejected for reasons not relating to the viability of the idea itself.

Is there an implied non disclose agreement/non compete agreement on the part of the evaluators when they evaluate the vast number of intellectual property submitted to them?
360 degree panoramas of 7 famous world sites
Amazing. I love shit like this.
It's Order Statistic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic

PS: My years and years of studying math are good for something ;)
This question is covered in the YC FAQ: http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

They wont sign an NDA (apparently this is common among investors), but they wont steal your idea either. Even if they did, ideas are only as good as how they are executed. By themselves ideas are worth very little (look at Facebook vs. ConnectU), especially in the early stages since they change a lot.
Lisp stuff practically only ever shows up on reddit; it is way overrepresented there compared to Slashdot et. al.. And it is a similar sort of thing--people want others to run into Lisp, while not actually finding the articles interesting.

I'll give it to you on your essays though, they do pop up all over (however, I will say that although I avoid Digg, Ron Paul can be found all over the place over there).
Does anyone know of Rainbow table-like pre-computation that could be used to crack any private/public key systems?
ImInLikeWithYou seems to be hiring. Does anyone know who funded them and the size of the investment?
The Times article didn't mention the other characteristics tested by the study:

"We first construct probably the most comprehensive dataset on manager characteristics based on more than 4,000 hedge funds covered by TASS between 1994 and 2003.4 The dataset covers a wide range of information on personal, educational, and professional backgrounds of managers of most hedge funds. Specifically, we collect information on the following six characteristics of the lead manager of each fund if such information is available: the manager's age (AGE), the
total number of years of working (WORK), the number of years of working at the specific hedge fund (TENURE), the composite SAT score for the manager's undergraduate institute (SAT), whether the manager has a CPA or CFA, and whether the manager has an MBA degree. Broadly speaking, the six characteristics can be divided into two groups: SAT, CFA/CPA and MBA dummies represent intelligence and education;5 AGE, WORK, and TENURE could represent working experience and career concern."

Their conclusions:

"Specifically, we find that managers from higher-SAT institutes tend to take less risks (measured by either overall return volatility or loadings of hedge fund returns on systematic risk factors) and have higher raw and risk-adjusted returns. On the other hand, we find that managers with longer years of working tend to have lower raw and risk-adjusted returns and take less risks. We also find that younger and better-educated managers tend to attract more capital inflows. These results are very robust to the different risk-adjustment benchmarks, sample periods, and
types of funds (funds of funds vs. regular hedge funds) we consider."

The way they constructed their database raises some red flags for me:
"Out of the 4,000 funds covered by TASS, we are able to identify most of the characteristics of the lead manager for 1,002 funds."

I wonder about biases introduced by the rejection of 3/4 of the funds due to insufficient data. Did managers of successful funds tend to preferentially withhold information, e.g. not mentioning a non-"elite" education if they wanted to emphasize just the results of their funds?
I don't think rainbow tables would work for public key crypto - cracking md5 with a lookup table is nothing like cracking RSA - they are completely different algorithms....

How quick would this do SHA-1?
That's true, no idea by itself is sufficient to becoming successful unless there is solid execution/implementation. However, in the case of startups that are "inventing" a product instead of making something existing better the initial idea becomes the "moneymaker". Startups applying for YCombinator to improve on an existing product (social networking, social news, finance softwares) don't have to worry about giving away an idea that they have been brainstorming for months. They primarily are banking on the fact that their approach is solid and the engineering of the product is high quality (no easy task either).

The idea is a very necessary factor, but yes not by itself sufficient. The Paul Graham article "How to Start a Startup" assumes that a startup is only developing something to improve on an existing idea/technology.

A startup inventing a product would be taking a huge leap of faith by believing that a power broker like Y Combinator would not be tempted to (in the event they came across an idea that they felt was revolutionary) to not farm out the engineering/business dev to seasoned developers; especially if they lacked faith in the approach/abilities of the founders. After all the process of execution/development is pretty much a commodity task.
"managers from higher-SAT institutes tend to take less risks"

This makes sense considering the index massively outperforms the median hedgefund. This seems like another case of the NYTimes spreading FUD.
Researchers show that liberals and conservatives approach everyday decisions differently.
Will Parrot ever truly deliver?
What kernel hackers look like - Kernel Summit 2007 group photo
Researchers show that liberals and conservatives approach everyday decisions differently
PG: A couple of questions about Arc.
Hacker news has been running for more than a half year without any noticeable down time. How do you feel about your child? For an outsider like me, it seems that Arc should be near a point were it can be published, is it only a delusion or may we be using Arc, say, before 2008?
downvoted. well, if I could.
Even in a Virtual World, 'Stuff' Matters
The only problem with these is that because they are panoramic they can't put the camera in the best position. For example, all the famous pictures of Macchu Picchu are taken from behind that little hut you see about 50 feet above where the camera is. The problem is that with a panorama, if you put the camera there then half the picture would be the back of the hut. Because of this you don't get as good of a view of the actual ruins. Similarly, all the famous pictures of the Petra treasury are taken from the opposing cliff, which again wouldn't work for the same reason. So although you get to see more of the surrounding environment, you get a less good view of the actual thing of interest. Still great pics though.
ICANN CEO: Virtual Worlds Are The Future Of Global Commerce
Top Twenty Five Best Selling Video Games Of All Time
> I've proved to myself that it's entirely possible to have decent grades, a healthy social life, run your own business, and get ample rest X all during your college years.

Being in a startup completely destroyed my social life. Also, soon I will begin to feel the full effect of passing up the best opportunities for building a relationship with a good woman.

Perhaps if I had funding then it could have been a little better, maybe not. Having to do the very best in anything is very expensive.

Oh, and you're majoring in painting? Man, I really wish I had that luxury. (seriously, I'm not trying to talk down.)
Store the prime factorization of all numbers up to, say, 2^128.
What a great article. It's nice seeing a piece that's scientific but still emphasizes the importance of subjective, unscientific wonder. To paraphrase the writer, light pollution is bad for a lot of reasons, but mostly because the night sky is simply too beautiful not to protect. I find that sentiment really charming.
> "How to Start a Startup" assumes that a startup is only developing something to improve on an existing idea/technology.

No it doesn't.
Yeah, I think the recent quality of submissions to the site have suffered - at least if you measure them against the name of the site - 'Hacker News'. It seems that voting by itself doesn't weed out non-topical stuff.

Perhaps this could be fixed by asking the submitter to reconsider if the link they are about to submit really has anything to do with hacking or entrepreneurship.
Ah, the old "marketing is a myth", "build it and they WILL come" argument.
Remote and home-based workers report higher satisfaction
Admish Finds the Colleges Fit for You
Oscilloscope hacked to display oldskool style demo
Yes, yes I know this points to a youtube vid, but I thought it was a neat 'repurposing' of technology.
I'm a bit skeptical about this - the about page doesn't make it clear what actual startup the author is involved in if any.

Edit: Now I am even more skeptical about them -- they are selling blog posts (here: http://www.college-startup.com/products/).
Where can I find the swimsuit edition?
Maybe not--but the article is written in a way to minimize the importance of a good idea. Read below:

"In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.

Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year." (How to Start a Startup)

Sure, search engines sucked (algorithm-wise) before Google but the concept/idea of a technology to aggregate links by relevance, was pretty critical to Google's existence, IMHO.
The problem is that too much of the stuff that gets submitted is "content." Good writers don't refer to their writing as content. Why? Good writing expresses ideas, and no one refers to their ideas as content. You'd never hear pg referring to his essays as content, which is probably why they're so popular.

It's actually kind of funny. You'd think there would be lots of intelligent people who had interesting ideas and wrote them down, but really there aren't.
You have valid arguments, but my point is if you're looking to get outside investment, you need to get used to the idea of your potential investors not signing NDA's. Unless you're God himself, they probably wont sign anything (you are LUCKY to have them look at your venture).

If you have some process/idea that is really as significant as you say, and the barriers of entry to implement it are so low that anyone who simply hears about it could screw you, then you should apply for a patent.
Seven Wonders of the IT World
I could not resist, even though I know I should. This is one conservative who changed his mind.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY&feature=bz100
FUD != incorrect information. It refers to misinformation intentionally spread for competitive advantage.
http://lwn.net/Articles/66665/

http://lwn.net/Articles/66666/

Are all those sixes a coincidence?

And the finale, "666" + "69" = CrAzY delicious!

http://lwn.net/Articles/66669/
I'm sure it's an accident that the "incorrect information" just happens to coincide with the paper's support for the schooling status quo.
I thought the article was just an interesting aside to the on-going discussion here of whether schooling matters for "success". As someone who was a pretty poor student for many, many years, the arguments/evidence is really only interesting to me as a way to inform that discussion. To me, this was a just another data point.
Also from PG in that comment thread:

"I know there isn't widespread support for him because I rarely see references to him anywhere except sites like this."

The best measure of any election is without a doubt the gambling market. They've proven far more accurate than any poll. My favorite is http://www.intrade.com where Ron Paul is tracking at around 4% to win the Republican nod.
I'm not convinced it's solving the problem I mentioned, but I'll try to figure out myself, since this becomes off-topic already.
I think even in C or with C-ish programming with C++ you can achieve better performance (in return for some verbosity, of course).
Seems way too high to me. I don't know how the different bets in a prediction market work, is there a way to make money when Ron Paul goes down?
It looks like he is only using rainbow tables suitable for NTLM hashes. For other algorithms you need different lookup tables. I would honestly be surprised if it was even feasible to do this for an SHA-1 hash. The rainbow table would need to be unreasonably large.

And SHA-2, forget about it. Secret salt or not, you're not going to crack any of those variants anytime in the next several years. Rainbow tables would be impossibly large and hash collisions are next to impossible. That is unless you have access to some super-secret multi-bit quantum computer or something..
Too funny. Maybe I should heed the saying be careful what you wish for.
Yes, you'd sell Ron Paul shares right now. If you think he's way too high you should.

I don't like your EV there though.
What about libertarians (of either pole)?
Yes sir. I've done both.
> Sure, search engines sucked (algorithm-wise) before Google but the concept/idea of a technology to aggregate links by relevance, was pretty critical to Google's existence, IMHO.

Certainly Pagerank was important, but I would assume(so I could be wrong) there were Pagerank copycats in the early days. Having Pagerank was a necessity for Google or any copycat to become the best search engine. But it's the dozens of other things that they did at Google that were just as necessary to make a search site that didn't suck IMHO. Clean, fast, simple, etc. I think Pagerank was great but if you were to drop that behind the UI of a competing search engine it wouldn't have had nearly as much impact as it did at Google.

But my assumptions could be wrong. Maybe Google's IP prevented anyone from doing a PR copycat and that led to its success.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47244
That's just the sort of thing I was thinking about.
Would you be interested in selling it, bringing in new partners, or something like that? I'm not saying I'm interested myself (I shouldn't be; plenty of other stuff I am/should be working on) but perhaps someone is. I have been thinking about the value of mildly successful web projects and I have an interest one too.
Windows Live Translator launches - a video review
The recent quality of comments to the site suffered, too.

Is it only my impression, or recently, instead of valuable on topic comments, we see overload of discussions why switching to "Hacker News" was a terrible idea, and endless threads how to improve the site?
Please tell me I'm not the only one who recoils at the inference from

"Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W"

to

"Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas."

!

As the article notes, political orientation is correlated with a lot of things: income, education, religion, race/ethnicity, etc. Even if they tried to control for any possible confounding variables (the article doesn't mention whether they did), I'm very skeptical that they've successfully isolated a causal relationship between liberalism/conservatism and some innate brain capacity that makes you good at pressing a button at the right time.
That's exactly why I was initially worried 1) because most tech-ventures have low barriers of entry (due to low over-heard costs) 2) generally speaking, the expertise required to implement a novel idea is almost rather trivial because programming is a commodity skill.

Thanks for the to-the-point response.
Entrepreneurs: Never Forget, Distribution is King
OK, you've convinced me. I'm coming to join you.
I'm 36, married with numerous kids, career blub programmer with BigCo, and I've had enough.

Friday I notified my boss I would not be there come March, and this weekend my wife and I started work on our new project (I'd forgotten how well we work together). This gives us six months to prepare our family for life beyond BigCo, and I can't wait.

For the first time in ages I'm relaxed and excited about the future. Thanks to everyone here for the inspiration and big thanks to my awesome wife.
Woot. What are you going to build?
Congrats, keep us posted.
Thruster May Shorten Mars Trip From Six Months to a Week - Hacked From Off The Shelf Components!
pg, this is all your fault.
I must just not have been clear. I don't believe in that argument in the least.
If you can get something together by Oct 11 for YC's deadline, you can be demoing to investors in March.

http://ycombinator.com/w2008.html
How to Defeat Comment Spam
What is OpenID for? (Heavy criticism of OpenID)
Come on...which bigco? And which part of the world do you live in?
The problem(s) with OpenID (excellent criticism of OpenID)
no. What put me off is the speculation beyond the data that makes up most of the content of the article.
Web, AJAX slammed for deficiencies - JSON founder slams: security holes, difficult programming
Man it would be awesome to have a wife that I could work well with, I think.
Regardless of YC involvement, you can still be demoing to investors in March. It takes a little more effort--and you'll have to do the demo about 30 times to reach the same number of investors--but you can actually start a company without YC. ;-)
An Open Letter to ISO: Is it time to standardize ISO?
Thinking Parallel: How-to Split a Problem into Tasks
Interview with a link spammer
Of course they haven't. However, considering the letter they chose, I wonder if the whole thing is a put-on...
You might want to check how many kids you actually have. Just in case you forget to, you know, feed one or two of them.
At least it isn't a 10 year old kid or something :P
the math behind this stuff is very interesting...too expensive right now though. Raster will be here for the foreseeable future :(
Now YOU are the inspiration. Good luck!
Ftp Must Die
You'll probably fail, make sure you prepare for that. You definitely put to shame the very young single guys who don't want to give up their cozy cube jobs. Good luck!
I haven't used FTP in years. SCP all the way!
#9. Family to support

http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html
Good luck. Make sure you build something users want and something that has a business model.

Kids get cranky if you don't feed them :-)
way to go man... What is a blurb programmer?
Age has nothing to do with it.
Marital status has nothing to do with it.
Smarts has little to do with it.

Don't do it because you're moving away from a job you don't like; that's a bad formula.

Do it because you want it that badly. That's what matters most.

The decision has been made. Good. Don't hestitate. Don't wonder. Don't look back. Don't ever quit.

Use us for encouragement.

Looking forward to hearing about your success.
Why don't you tell us how you did it?

*cough* Virtualmin -- YC Winter 2007 *cough*

Are you suggesting in retrospect that you'd have preferred a different strategy?
> There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a subreddit for it.

That would probably have worked better if people were forced to choose a subreddit for their submissions, and stories from all subreddits got aggregated onto the main reddit page - and logged in users could choose not to see links from certain subreddits. (That's an aspect of slashdot that does work quite well.)
He's a politician; he made a positive decision to pursue power by permission. He's compromised by default.

(pg covered the orthogonality question.)
Will Weakening Economy KO Web Startups?
I think he's trying to be helpful and encouraging, which I'm sure many appreciate.
[notices that every other comment attached to this link just got -1'd]

And here I was hoping that drive-by downmodding was confined to reddit.

If you don't like the story, fine. But don't take it out on the people who... as it happens, also thought the story was worthless, but found that worthlessness worth mentioning.
You're correct. One user downmodded every comment on this thread. Maybe I'll add protections against that. In the meantime I upmodded them all myself.
Thanks; it's appreciated. And yes, I think protection against that kind of thing would be useful (but it's sad that it's necessary even here).