skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Grab as much free advice as you can. Present the issues facing your venture and see if the VC can say anything about how to tackle them. Then go back and carefully evaluate their advice, because ultimately you make the decisions. The best information you'll get is how smart these VCs are and whether you want to work with them in the future.
I have to list three: DataVision (http://datavision.sourceforge.net) because it's in use in fifty countries, a version of Objective-C I called Subjective-C (1996) because it taught me about parsing and runtime stack manipulation, and a Java applet-based image manipulation package that let you apply makeup (eye shades and lip shades, with added gloss) to your own photo on the Web back in 1999, because it was ahead of its time.
Poll: Nearly half think U.S. in recession
Ubuntu 7.10 Released
Southeast. A few hours south of D.C.
The Mythical Year of Experience
I think it's important to distinguish between the business model and the mechanism of distribution.

The In Rainbows site was very slow, so I downloaded it via bittorrent. Lots of my friends did too. Most have gone back through the check-out process to pay something -- or they downloaded via bittorrent and ALSO bought the box set.

So there is still a valid complaint that the music industry is behind -- but it is in both distribution mechanisms and business models.

Music should be pushed out the door freely, even through bittorrent, with easy mechanisms to give back to the artist. That is the only model that can compete with piracy because it is the only one that has all the convenience of piracy with the warm glow of giving back to your favorite artists.

But one mechanism that can help is new music recommendations. Piracy is very bad at that. A search for a genre rarely brings up quality.
Cyberwar: China Declares War On Western Search Sites
TechCrunch Goes to Boston, Join Us for MeetUp 11
Ubuntu 7.10 has been released
They DID too. It's just that an investor eventually came around and noticed they were DOING, then gave them money so they could do it better.
Works on foot too. In SV I'd particularly recommend the trails off Page Mill and Skyline. I run on them every day when YC is in CA.

http://www.openspace.org/

From the top of Black Mountain, you can simultaneously see SF, San Jose, and the Pacific.
Thanks for the comment -- three points to make:

1. I didn't write this in the thick of the battle -- I've already had 2 weeks with most of my responsibilities lifted. This is what's given me the presence of mind to write what I have. Also, the more 'down' I am feeling, the more I tend to write. Writing my thoughts comes naturally to me -- it isn't correlated with motivation or mood or anything of that sort.

2. I think advice on tactical stuff like achieving tiny goals daily can actually be detrimental to a person who's beyond a certain point of burnout, because these little changes can distract you from bigger issues that require bigger solutions. Don't get me wrong though, I appreciate what you're saying and I tried ideas just like you've described for weeks before finally realizing where I was at and talking it over with a mentor (who recommended that I act -- fast -- to prevent further degradation).

3. Maybe what you're sensing is that I still really do want to be successful in life -- because I most definitely do. But as for this business, in reality it requires my 100% commitment before it can budge another inch, because we have some big spending humps coming up and if I can't predict with certainty when I'll be back in the game in full force, it's too risky to front more cash right now... and right now all I can think about are the blue skies I need to be staring at while I take a real break, and how intensely awful this has been on my mind and body and how bad it would be to have it continue, now or in the future. So while on some level I do want this business to be successful, I would have a very hard time committing 100% to be available again at a certain, and fairly soon, date. I think that would be too risky for me, and for the investor.
Actually I'm not a big fan of that building. It's too expensive.
What you're saying makes a lot of sense to me. Unfortunately, we may need to make a decision here before we really know whether it's short-term or long-term burnout, because we have to decide pretty-much-100% whether and when I'm going to be back, before I take my break. If there's too much uncertainty, it's a no-go.

If we had the stability to simply put things on hold, I would definitely take 6-8 weeks off before we decided what to do.
So much for ratting out dissidents to get on their good side.
I had one too! Just as in Romania, The ZX was a long time coming to India and was insanely expensive, but I learned programming on it, mostly by writing simple games.

. Once you got your head wround assembly, you could do anything with it and I was fiddling with that machine 12 hours a day till Mom took it away in an attempt to remind me of "normal" life.
Damn I feel old now :-(
This is a principle in the Toyota Production System as well-- in performing any problem analysis, you are to ask "Why?" 5 times to get to the root cause of the issue you are facing.

If you want to get more structured about it, you can do a fishbone/ishikawa diagram, where there are specific categories of "why"s to check against: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram
Thanks for nice input
Yep, In startup we have to do everything ourself but Marketing is something you learn over the time and thro' connection. Yep I am weak at that and that is my main problem.
First of all, remember that this is an INTRODUCTION, no more, no less. So take the following words out of your vocabulary right now: don't, but, money, donations, profit, give, bring. You are there to get to know each other, that's all. Be prepared to speak openly, honestly, and from your heart when asked. And be prepared to LISTEN. These are the best things you can do for him.

I would definitely not push anything in a first meeting, but I would be prepared to respond to any question. You don't mention whether this introduction is over a meal - all the more reason to relax, take it easy, and enjoy.

I would definitely spend some time up front preparing. Mentally have a list of any possible question and your response. Also, learn something about the VC. You already have a mutual contact (your previous CEO), so you should have something interesting to talk about besides your project. Remember, he is interested in YOU as much as your work. Give him a chance to get to know you.

Most of all, do or say something that will make him remember you, so whenever you follow up, he'll immediately know who you are. A light discussion about the local football team or an activity one of his children is involved in may work. A hand written thank you note is always nice (Why doesn't anyone do this much any more?) But beware: you MUST be sincere in whatever you say or do or you'll look like a jerk and do more harm than good.

Most of all, have a good time! And post back to let us know how it went. I, for one, will be looking for your post.
If you applied for this cycle, please tell us your email address
If you applied for this cycle, please enter your email address in the email field on your profile. You can edit your profile by clicking on the name in the upper right when you're logged in.

When responding to applications we use the email address of the username under which each was submitted. So if you haven't entered an email address in your profile, you won't hear from us.

A substantial number of applicants, including several who seem likely to be invited for interviews, do not currently have any email address in their profile.

Later Edit: Never mind. We'll just extract them from the applications. This means you'll get multiple emails per startup though.
DaniFong's point is that investors would do much better to evaluate each startup's profit potential independently, based on the quality of the market, product, and team, rather than worry about the broad macroeconomic environment. Invest in Google or PayPal, even at the top of a bubble, and you still do well. Invest in Excite or Lycos, even if it's not a bubble, and you still get crushed by the folks who invested in Google.

This applies to almost all investing. It's much more difficult to forecast macro movements than micro movements, so you're much better off making your decisions based on specific, tangible information on individual companies. Warren Buffett is famous for not trying to predict recessions or interest rates: he buys good companies at good prices and then holds them no matter how bad the general economy gets.
High resolution image hints at 'Mona Lisa's' eyebrows
Beware:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/10/14/feisty-to-gut...
Thanks for giving detail about where to enter email address. We had our email address in application form and we thought we have everything set. But noticed that we didn't have email address in profile so, just updated it.
Nokia Internet Tablet N810 -- full computer running linux; qwerty, wifi, webcam, gps, bluetooth, awesome.
I am dissapointed that TechCrunch is once again reporting stories without decent fact checking. The fact that some people in some parts of China couldnt access Google and Yahoo does not mean the chinese government is involved. Unless baidu was state owned there is little motivation for the to do something like this. Google has already agreed to implement filtering in China to please the Chinese government. This smells like Baidu or someone else in China was poisoning some DNS servers to get some attention.

Wake up people!
Dilbert: "I Found A Clever Way To Write My Application Code in One Hour"
Mark Zuckerberg won't rule out competing with independent apps
Thanks so much joshwa. I knew there had to be a formal description for this process.
Apple II+... My school had some of them for a year or two before I got one. I wanted my own copy of that book for a long time before I finally got it. There was a local computer store that sold Apples. I finally saved up the $20 to buy a copy of that book from them. I still have it. Fond memories.
Top 10 North American Wireless Broadband Networks
A new report compiled by wireless services consulting and analysis firm Novarum ranks Wi-Fi, WiMax and third generation (3G) cellular networks in 16 North American cities, based on performance, service availability, ease of use and overall value.
Today Is the Day
Good luck to everybody :)

Update: Sorry if some people think this is off topic, I really never post anything like this (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=german), It is just for wishing good luck.
That makes so much sense. I thought you might be pulling the e-mails out of the applications manually, and having coded and used a system for processing submissions (to an online fiction magazine), I was wondering how the hell you could stand to do that for 500+ applications. Glad to hear you're keeping yourself sane ;-)
You got it! It's weird when you say it like that, but essentially it's true.
New Gravatar Caching Plugin
Speed up your site when using Gravatar, with this caching plugin.
Hands-On Review:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/17/nokia-n810-hands-on/

Photo Gallery:
http://www.engadget.com/photos/nokia-n810-hands-on/

Don't miss the iPhone comparison photos. With its hackability, n810 is WAY better. I can't believe they threw in a GPS too!
How true.
All in all, that's an almost completely vacant interview.

I might get slammed for this, but I think this shows that Facebook has grown far beyond something that Zuckerberg has the ability to effectively lead. A key part of building a company is knowing when it's time to step aside. This was a good opportunity for him to really clarify some things about the company, and especially to put their developer community at ease. Instead, it came across as a combination of deer-in-the-headlights, and unwarranted smugness.
A HC(Home Computer) made by Romanians with Spectrum ZX processor and 48KB of memory. It had a ROM with BASIC. That's what I've programmed first.
The YC program sounds cool and like a lot of fun, but as someone who has never submitted an application, I'm going to welcome a return to more 'normal' hacker news discussions.
Problem is, the number of trolls perceived in a forum is inversely proportional to one's capacity to appreciate irony.

Maybe this formula would be a good meta-moderation heuristic :P
I hope new version of proprietary ATI driver made it into this release, I getting quite envious of all those lucky who's running Fusion :)
I wouldn't recommend updating. Back up your home folder and do a clean install. The good news for anyone not keeping up with Ubuntu is that you now get Compiz and AIGLX out of the box. It works great with Nvidia, if you have an ATI card you need to install XGL and the ATI proprietary drivers.
Don't understimate the extent of Chinese Govt. anger over the Dalai Lama photo-op with Bush. The Chinese govt. effectively controls every company and person in China (if they want to), including Baidu. It would be fully unsurprising that they would shut down American search engines to "teach us a lesson" about not heeding their demands. It could, however, prove untrue as well - we'll see.
The new version of ATI is not in the release. The version included in the release might work for you, but if it doesn't get the drivers from the ATI website (8.40), and install them yourself. If you still have problems let me know and I might be able to help you troubleshoot.

I can verify that Compiz Fusion works great with ATI and Gutsy.
Hi, thanks for the reminder, we put our emails in the application itself and not in our profiles, but we just updated them. I hope not having the emails in our profiles didn't effect anything.
That would be great. I'm getting tired of posts on "what NO means" and "what to do if you get rejected" and people trying to make themselves look good to YC at the last minute.
Pretty neat. I was expecting the video to be synchronized with slides somehow, i.e. I roll through the slides on the left, pick one and the video jumps to it.

Have you done a decent competitive analysis? I am not familiar with this space, but from what I know there are plenty of players.
Wasting or investing time when i am on internet?
Is there any application/site which tracks ( after i am member of that site) what I am doing on internet and based on type of site it categorise my browsing history ( with amount of time I spent on that site ? ) e.g My interest is Tech and I am on tech site then it is time investment but if I am just browsing here and there then thats waste. I know that it is not straight but I believe that we need something like that to keep browsing habbit organized.
I'm upgrading Ubuntu right now!
Why should he rule out competing with independent apps? It's a platform, anyone can build apps, including Facebook, to compete with anyone else. He did however state any competition should be done on equal footing.
Adobe sees full shift to Web in next decade
Though...what happened last time was that a lot of insightful long-term contributors were accepted and then disappeared off the face of the site while they worked on their startup. Meanwhile the folks leftover were all the ones trying to make themselves look good to YC at the last minute.

Eventually it rebalanced out. The short-term folks got bored and left, while a new crop of top posters grew out of the ones who weren't ready for YC as of the summer but were going to become startup junkies anyway.
Figures can lie and liars figure. The reality is that if you are looking for some type of objective authority, then use statistics. People are relationships not numbers, though the issue is looking at the numbers representative of the relationships. I find it amusing at how the web marketing world continues to look at the wrong numbers.
Thanks to everyone who responded to this. I really appreciate everyone taking the time. It's a pretty amazing community going on here!
Amen! That was my very first thought as well :) You would think history provides sufficient demonstrations that private deals with tyrants usually backfire in the end.

The Dalai Lama is an amazing person; always has a smile and kind words, even in response to threats and anger from the Chinese govt. I loved his responses after meeting Bush: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/10/17/dalai.lama.ap/index.htm...
Nice thread! Apparently I am not too old for this forum :-) My first was a no-name Japanese box with NEC clone of Intel 80186 processor, shortly followed by a luxurious real 286 machine with 40MB hard drive!

My first IDE was debug prompt in MS DOS :-) Typing assembly language commands one by one was something...
Techcrunch beats Murdoch at his own game
Typically if you're on a tech site, it's still wasting time. You get much higher information density by reading books (the dead-tree kind) and by writing code.

Anyway, there's RescueTime (http://rescuetime.com/), but it's still in closed beta. I submit a beta application a couple months ago but still haven't got an invite.
The Chinese government is always messing with the internet here. I can't even see photos in Flickr or articles in Wikipedia without using a proxy. They are unpredictable and annoying. Government involvement in this would not surprise me at all.
Oh! An it had "Turbo" button, how could I forget?!
Entertaining post esp. for those stuck on the corporate track. The guy pissed off DHH and lived to tell about it!
It has proven untrue, several people have reported being able to access all of these sites (read the comments on TechCrunch). I haven't yet called my friends in China to confirm but I'm sure if this was indeed true they would have called me to let me know.

As far as how bad China really is, I recommend more people travel there and judge for themselves. It might be a communist government and they might oppose certain groups that pose a threat to them but saying that they control every company and every person is a bit extreme. There wouldn't be so many US companies setting up shop in China if they didn't trust the Chinese government.
I once had a user complaining how long a batch job took. After much research, I found a "SLEEP 10" command (sleep for 10 seconds) inside a loop. I commented it out and the run time went from 2 hours down to 6 minutes.

At the next meeting, my PHB asked why Joe User was gushing with so many compliments about me. I explained what I did.

"Idiot!" he said, "You should have changed it to SLEEP 5 so the next time he complains we have something else to give him."
Indeed, Wikipedia managed to get banned in China. A bit annoying but nothing a tech savvy person can't figure out how to bypass.
What I like about news.yc (and why I hung around and eventually decided to apply) is that by being for startups, you can find hacks in almost every field, from marketing to partnership formats to kernel hacking. And the emphasis is on the "hack" -- how to get the system to work acceptably well without a lot of screwing around.

My fear is that the site will get so popular that some of the good material will get diluted. PG assures us that it's not going to happen. I wonder, though.

As a side note, it's very interesting (in a lab rat kind of way) to see how the community of the site actually encourages extra submissions and fervor around YC. YC may crash and burn in the next few years, but the lesson of writing the book, setting up the site, getting the promotion, etc as a way to increase visibility and enthusiasm for the VC/Seed process will remain around for a long time, I think.
Is that around Norfolk, VA? While my brother was in the Navy he was stationed there and I traveled out there once or twice.
I have Thinkpad T60p with Mobility FireGL v5250. ATI does not even have V5250 listed in their Linux drivers section, but for V5200 they want me to use version 8.35.5 of their driver.
Remember it's all just "market research" :)
echo "jd; John Doe; 99; None; john.doe@whoknows.com; ; ." | cut -d ";" -f 5

...so if someone makes mistakes it is automatically out :-)

Guess the way they chose is the best though.
4 hours south along the mountain chain. About an hour from Blacksburg.

Let's put it this way, when I tell people I'm working on a web application, it's not uncommon that they think it has something to do with spiders. :)
Because it's really easy to integrate it with Apache and this will solve some performance issues. If you use it a lot you might get annoyed by some pages loading too slow otherwise.
Updated. Thanks for the reminder.
That's odd, I think 8.35 or 8.37 might be the version included in the restricted drivers manager in Gutsy. Give that a shot before trying the custom driver but I've had bad luck with it on a Radeon X1300.
I wish there was some sort of approval process those apps went through.

Is anyone reminded of MySpace with some of these apps? I am not on a social network to be bombarded with "You've been bitten by a vampire!" notifications on a daily basis.
You shouldn't have to worry. I can't imagine them not contacting you because of something like this. Keep in mind if your idea is good, they'll find a way to contact you. Even if that means manually pulling your email from your app.
Whoa! Good thing we checked.
You're not a bootstrapper. You're trying to get VC. You're an aspiring VC-funded startup.
Eliminating racial and gender discrimination
I think personalized DNA sequencing is the way to go. When applying for a job, include your DNA sequence as part of the application.

You could take this even further by providing real-time DNA comparisons (at least on genes that you care about) with people who are nearby. Such analysis could give you some guidance as to whether you should start a conversation with a stranger say.
I love the reference to 'safe-mode'. Subtle! Really subtle!
The day this becomes the recommended way of upgrading Ubuntu is the day I'm going back to Debian. Operating like that has no place on a solid OS like Linux.

(No need to vote cstejerean down - he was only suggesting something that he thinks works - the problem is Ubuntu and Windowsthink, if, indeed it turns out that they haven't fixed bugs that make updating difficult).
Advice? I bet you $10 she will not say ``No''. You'll even get ``buying signals''. If I were you, and I wanted to learn more than I wanted to sell? Ask ``why would you want to invest in my company'' and pressure her for a real answer.

Sales is mostly about moving a process forward, so your only goal is to get to the next step.

If the VC isn't a full partner, your next step is to get to a meeting with a partner.

If the VC is a full partner, you want to ask, ``what's the process you use to decide on investments''. Usually, there's a dance of customer-validation meetings that precedes a ``partner meeting'', the outcome of which is a term sheet. So you want to chart out the state machine that terminates in a partner meeting, and then transit from state 0 towards that meeting.
So just set notifications from that application to be ignored. Let the vampires have their fun.