skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The proliferation of startups also exposes a need for better integration. If signing up for accounts and remembering usernames/passwords for a dozen different sites is a pain, think about doing that for hundreds!
>> "Sometimes it literally is software, like Hacker News and our application rating system."

You have software to rate the applications?
This is why US Airways is screwed... the cost of replacing the mainframe is incredibly high and the cost of not replacing is incredibly high. Meanwhile, Southwest gets to operate with a modern computer system.
With standardization comes bureaucracy. I dread what will happen when all this starts to become apparent to the government, and they decide that they need to "fix" some of the perceived injustices. How long before we start seeing laws regulating founder/investor relationships that look like our current laws for employers and employees? Will investors start being required to submit reports to the government to prove that their investment decisions aren't racially biased?
well, i hope he's right about startups becoming more pervasive.

i'd love to be on the bandwagon already, but i don't meet a lot of the qualifications. if the bar is lowered just a LITTLE bit, i am so there.
I enjoyed the advice given, regardless of who wrote it. I agree with Narayana Murthy when he states, "Youth and empowerment are the keys to scalability and longevity." I believe this statement is the core intention of Ycombinator. Imagine how much better the quality of life would be if the best young hackers where empowered to start their own company.
I assume he just means that the administrative interface to the submission system lets them record scores for each application they review.
The only qualification that you don't meet is confidence! If you say you can't, then you won't.
"So wouldn't those people drop out earlier?"

No those people would not drop out earlier, because they likely did not know they wanted to be startup founders until they had enough technical knowledge and/or more importantly built those relationships with students around them which led to the creation of a startup in the first place. Perhaps your experience has been different in which case I cannot argue with that.

"when you could do something fun for one year and have a 10% chance of more than paying off your debt"

For precisely that reason -- that the likelihood of success is only 10%. And it often takes more than a year to build something meaningful.

"Also, employers are impressed by people who start their own businesses."

This is not always true. It depends on the role the employee is being hired into.
Regarding the businessweek comment, I can only say that if the desire and willingness to start companies was a meaningful trend, it _might_ have been noted as an option.

I would disagree with this: "1) that doesn't appeal to BW's audience" starting businesses _does_ appeal to businessweeks audience. ;)
that's a nice attitude, and generally i agree.

by "don't qualify," i mean i'm not really into the game the same way as the companies ycombinator seems to fund. for example, i'm not that excited about writing web apps, it just doesn't appeal to me. i think there are important sectors that could benefit from a bunch of startups that paul has completely written off, because he thinks it's less lucrative, i guess. well, i'm willing to take a LOT less money to do something i'm actually interested in, rather than learning ruby on rails, say.
I agree with you 95%. I've worked on both sides, and it is much, much better on the product development side.

That said, I've heard that technology is a big enough deal at many finance companies that top programmers may be considered a comptetitive advantage, rather than just a cost.

That said, I agree with you that a pure technology company is the best bet, because you know you'll be in money making role, whereas you only might be in finance.
What I meant to say is "How can you effectively refactor code that has no tests?"

Refactoring is inevitable. I find that on projects where I've written tests, refactoring goes a lot better.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who is chromatically retarded.
Betting against people being (even irrationally) risk averse is probably not a safe bet.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I think the potential is definitely there, but the regulatory burden is just too massive.

The potential impact of robotics on manufacturing and transportation is absolutely staggering, and could probably be measured in the trillions of dollars (speaking of just the next 10-15 years.) However, I just don't see it happening there. The markets are just too heavily regulated and there are too many competing political interests. It's next to impossible for a new company to break into these markets, even with unlimited funding.

If the robotics revolution(tm) is going to happen anywhere, it's going to come from either the consumer market or a tiny niche market that nobody's ever heard of, and then spread from there.
Was that deliberately self-referential?
Maybe someone with a background in sociology can answer this, but looking at the trends we see that the paper is talking about a change of "happiness" of just one or two percent over 35 years. Is this really significant? Just looking at the trends, it seems the oscillations from year to year are much higher than that.
I heard Carl Schramm (the economist) give a talk on Tuesday, and IIRC he said that MS buys six to ten startups per month. Most big companies are buying startups like crazy now though, even the ones you'd never expect. For example, even Proctor & Gamble buys around 100 startups per year.
It's been possible for a while, see CMU's pioneering Navlab, the final Navlab car drove across the country. But it's still much to difficult to actually implement something like this, because of the regulatory burden and the burden of perfection. Now no one is funding self-driving cars outside of the DARPA competition which is for something very different.
It is tricky, but it's also satisfying. Customers of Open Source based businesses demand a lot more, too, which is both a blessing and curse.

On the one hand, they feel more entitled, but they're likewise more willing to be involved in solving the problem because they have some ownership by being part of the "community". So our customers file bugs or post to the forum, just like users of the Open Source product do, rather than call us on the phone...the culture allows us to support it in the most efficient way rather than the traditional but horribly time inefficient way (the first time you find yourself describing that "slash" and "backslash" are different characters, and that "slash" is the one they want for paths on UNIX and Linux systems is the beginning of wisdom on how inefficient telephone is for support on a system administration product).

We're in agreement on how scarcity fits into the equation--people simply pay more if they can't get it any other way. When asked to put a fair price on the new Virtualmin Professional in the early days, for example, some of our FOSS users suggested unsustainably low pricing, a quarter or less what competitors were charging for less functionality. We ignored those folks, and took the advice of the people who were wanting to escape from the existing products in the field, and were willing to pay similar prices--they just wanted a better product. These days, nobody complains about the price. They're accustomed to paying for Virtualmin Professional now, and have begun to think of it as a separate product in its own right. It has acquired scarcity that it didn't have in the beginning when it was only theoretical and the OSS version was what they knew. ;-)
> a great way to end up wanting to kill yourself

This line is kinda interesting because the type-A personality he projects matches the profile of people who kill themselves when faced with a major setback.

I really cringe at his "change the world or you're a loser" pep talk bits. Chill out, man.

I think the life experience of guys like this makes their prognostications on the next 20 years useless. His formative career experiences happened during a historically unprecedented and continuous boom. Maybe I'm a paranoid nut, but severe and long lasting recessions and broken dreams are way more the norm than the last 20 years would indicate. The economy could blow up tomorrow and we could all be picking lettuce for the next eight years. Are you going to kill yourself over it?

Is it really worth uprooting from a region where you have deep ties for a career opportunity? Careers are ephemeral. Blood ties might keep you alive when the going gets rough.
Awesome essay/speech!

I haven't spent one penny or any time on/in college!
Something that is close but it is a print magazine. Is called "The Weeek" magazine. Very Very high signal to noise ratio.

They do exective summaries of the news, one page or less covering issues from all sides.

They just launched a new website www.theweekdaily.com no rss feeds that I can see. It is the one drop everything and read it magazine when the postman shows that I subscribe to.
Well worth the $50 dollar subscription.
Jason Calacanis Makes "The World's Greatest Coffee!"
Prediction: Angel investors will ink deals with VCs to create an official pipeline. For example, let's say KPCB agrees to fund at least one Techstars company per year in exchange for first pick or something like that. That's the way elite prep schools interface with certain Ivy's, and it seems to work out for both of them. Of course startups will never get as locked down as colleges because there will always be more money than good investments, at least for the foreseeable future.
But that's not a 'place to work'. It's like having a list of the top twenty restaurants, with #3 as "Your kitchen, assuming you go to culinary school and are a talented cook and have the time to cook and..." it doesn't give any real information.

I wouldn't be surprised if BW's readers were less entrepreneurial than average. It's a magazine about big business, not about doing business.
So you're saying that college, while expensive, is still worth it? I don't get your argument. For a given student, either college is too expensive to be worth it, and people will drop out early, or it's cheap enough to be worth it, and people will finish. Only one of these things can be true, and there are obvious conclusions depending on which you pick. So which is it?

"For precisely that reason..."

Did you miss what I said above? If you're already broke, why is getting broker a problem? What do you have to lose if you have less than nothing?

Can you give me some detail on your 'depends on the role' comment? I didn't realize this; when I recruit people (IT/quant finance), employers respond more favorably to entrepreneurs than to people who worked for someone else. Where did you hear otherwise?
Was this deliberately self-referential?
Debunked: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004965.h...
The unexpected Ted Stevens reference at the end really made me grin. I find Stevens so hilarious and horrifying at the same time.

I was surprised to find it in a PG essay, but on reflection it seems really appropriate in context. Though it did distract me enough that I had to read the last section twice.
"We now get on the order of 1000 applications a year. What are we going to do if we get 10,000? That's actually an alarming idea. But we'll figure out some kind of answer. We'll have to. It will probably involve writing some software, but fortunately we can do that."

The company that manages to blend digital identity and reputation with the information power of networks is probably going to be the next MS. I've been interested in this problem for a long time now. Someone should really submit a proposal as a YC idea.
Oh, on big challenge: cheap country is very demotivating. (I'm from Poland)
Well, it's still interesting to note that women are not happier given all the advances they have made with respect to the workplace.
I don't yet have kids but I would be very happy if my son or daughter would be clever and try to hack around the protections on the computer.
This looks really great... until you get cancer.
A VC: The Fiction of 20%
read those contracts!
> Will investors start being required to submit reports to the government to prove that their investment decisions aren't racially biased?

Are you suggesting that investors should be racially biased?

I'm playing devil's advocate far further than intended for sure, but the laws regarding employment, although bureaucratic are there for very good reasons.
If each of us was aware of all the personal experiences of other people here on the site, then maybe we could make more qualified statements. I for one, don't know any of the rest of you in person, so all I can offer are my experiences.

If enough people offer personal experiences, the reader should be able to extract his own pattern from them (that is, after all, what we humans are good at). Just because we are offering raw data (in the form of personal experience) instead of analyzed data (in the form of qualified statements), doesn't make the data any less true (but probably a bit less insightful).

I agree that one person's experience doesn't disprove another persons research about the overall pattern, but nor is the experience completely useless.
The Implicit Web
Ruby on Rails plugin to easily perform full-text searches using MySQL
Car keys.

They give the decision making power to the driver, and are what would shield the car maker from a huge regulatory burden.

Any autonomous action will be dictated by the driver and the driver will be given explicit instructions to continue paying attention to the road.

The same is true for today's cruise control.

Also, the consumer market is for low end processing, not advanced autonomy. You won't get a revolution there.
Not necessarily.

My surgeon Dad told me once that his practice pockets pennies out of every dollar they officially bill the patient. Where does the rest go? Between his own liability insurance, the insurance companies not paying up, and the privacy/medical records red tape.

This guy's model is actually my Dad's dream: be able to go treat a patient for 30mins, get paid for it(versus fight for hours with the insurance). The actual bill would be lower too because for most part he only has to charge pennies on the dollar since there won't be as much red tape.
Changes in income don't make people happier in the long term. See Hedonic Adaptation: http://mit.edu/people/shanefre/HedonicAdaptation.pdf
I'm pretty familiar with automated driving, and see a clear path for incrementatl deployment over a few years.

It wouldn't start with full automation. It starts with gps/ins/lidar positioning, camera & lidar based car and obstacle detection, camera based lane finding, etc. and built up from there.

As I mention in another comment, the regulatory burden is exaggerated considering the human driver still in the vehicle for the early stages of incremental deployment.
Mostly like in Bioscience they are buying patents ( P&G ) so that is not really comparable to web startups
In the case of women, I think it's more that you are replacing one set of problems with another set of possibly more severe problems.

The reason we are on this forum in the first place is that we don't like the most common form of work, where you are not in control.

So why would you expect women to be happier when they transition from just being a housewife to also (mostly) working for others?
> Acquirers will also have to get better at picking winners.

Hrm... one of the things that makes markets work so well is that it brings "the wisdom of crowds" to bear, and doesn't require small, homogeneous groups to attempt to pick winners. So something about that section raises a flag in my head - if there are more startups in the future, maybe more of them will have to go it alone, instead of this "easy out" of being bought?
I think he's suggesting that they could be accused of it. Startups are disproportionately started by men, most of whom are white or Asian. Paul Graham says not to blame on malice what you can attribute to math, but other people might not see it that way.

"I'm playing devil's advocate far further than intended for sure, but the laws regarding employment, although bureaucratic are there for very good reasons."

What is that reason?
Aren't acquirers a crowd?
You're very specific about what you won't do, but very vague about what you will do. Why?
woooooooooooww. Thats all i can say. woooooooooooowww
There are lots of subdivisions of biotech, just like there are lots of subdivisions of information technology... you can drill down from web technology to web services, then to consumer facing social media, etc...

I don't think there is a capital for the new model of biotech I'm going by... here's hoping that Grahamian philosophy works with biology.
OK, you're right, Navlab was doing too much at once for that technology to ever be deployed, but it was still important work for the incremental improvements we are seeing, like the auto-parallel parking functions... with everything computerized in a car anyways, it really shouldn't cost too much to implement things like this even on entry level cars.
yah...
7. Better Judgement Needed

If the number of startups increases dramatically, then the people whose job is to judge startups are going to have to get better at it. I'm thinking particularly of investors and acquirers. We now get on the order of 1000 applications a year. What are we going to do if we get 10,000?

That's actually an alarming idea. But we'll figure out some kind of answer. We'll have to. It will probably involve writing some software, but fortunately we can do that.
Maybe, but orders of magnitude smaller than most markets.
Ah... One appropriate chance for sick==(slick,!healthy) pun and you blew it karzeem.
For those of you using Rails on PostgreSQL 8.3+, you might be interested in using PGSQL's integrated full-text-search capabilities with this plugin, although it's not yet release quality:

http://code.google.com/p/acts-as-tsearch/
Many influential and smart guys like Paul are saying that starting your own company today got a lot cheaper, but what does it mean in practice?

While it depends on a nature of the business you are starting, in many cases "build something quick" advice does not work as well as advertised IMO: for most non-trivial ideas "something quick" still means a few months of full time commitment which means tens of thousands of dollars that many "younger nerdish" founders still do not have.

I guess what I am saying is that a million dollars is no different from fifty thousand when that's the money you need but do not have. Sure it probably easier to find an external investor with 50 grand, but is it really? Especially for "nerdier" types?

This is why YComb exists, but that is only about 30 deals a year.
The Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program
Social networking and the Geocities fallacy
That's good... that means that my big idea (which was the same as parakey's big idea only with no fancy architecture behind it) will still be around for a while. I naively thought that it was going to be done immediately because it had been possible and it looks like no one is doing it.
I'm not claiming that autonomous driving won't happen or won't be a massive industry in the near future (30-40 years.) My feeling is just that it won't happen there first. Here's a couple of reasons:

1. It's a very complicated problem compared to others that could have a similarly large impact.

2. The cost of a mistake made by the robot is quite likely to kill someone. This isn't just a problem as far as lawsuits go, but it's a problem because as soon as the first accident occurs you're going to get a barrage of regulations (and quite possibly bans) on autonomous driving.

3. As soon as you can build a robot that can clean your floors, walk your dog, and bring you a beer when you want it, you're going to sell a million units in a year. Just look at the success of a fairly simple device like the Roomba.

So my thinking is that autonomous dirving will be one of the later things happen as compared to other adoptions of robotics.

Edit: this just reminded me of something. Not too long ago the University of Toronto solar car team was driving their solar car down the 401 highway. The driver lost control and ended up getting killed. Within a month all solar cars were banned from driving on public roads in Ontario.
erm, because it seems off-topic here?

this is paul's world. i like reading about the energy and creativity involved in web startups. i personally think that narrowing the field to just web startups is short-sighted, but that's not my call to make, certainly not here.
Any has a link to a video/audio of the talk?
Children dont convert ads to sales, they get their mommies to do that for them.

I'm not married nor do I have kids, but I have definitely seen the effects of a child desiring something. Often that desire comes from the influence of an advertisement.

I dont think online ads have traditionally targeted young kids much because there is not really a reliable means to focus in on them. The demographic can be very specific (as far as age range). Pikluk could be an new way to target a specific age bracket on the internet, which would be very desirable to advertisers.

I hear you about the legal issue of blocking ads and replacing them with your own though. People might have serious problems with that..
I dont think starting startups gets cheaper.

The whole essay is based on this idea. But Paul gives no reasons, why there should be a such a trend.
I'm wearing black, red, blue, yellow and gray at the moment...
The ThinkGeek 8-bit Tie
A few of us monkeys at ThinkGeek had this great shared dream a few months ago. In it, the whole world was 8-Bit, just like the video games we grew up on. We found ourselves having to leap from platform to platform, to search for pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom, and to fight scary mutated plants and animals. The music was awesome (and still stuck in our heads) but the coolest part was what we were wearing: a tie. But not just any tie, an 8-Bit tie!
One solution is to avoid accumulating a huge debt. I went to a school that gives out scholarships based on SAT scores (CWRU).
Great post, as usual, there is one point though - assuming that all the best will move to the startup hubs is like efficient markets hypothesis i.e. not really. They would move in a rational world but there are many seemingly irrational reasons that you can find world class people in obscure places anywhere in the world and, moreover, they are content to stay there. I am talking from personal experience, in my previous (vertical) search startup my chief programmer was world-class and had results to prove it, has since produced another world-class (Facebook) app and has not set foot in US ever. Similarly in my current search startup, I have some really great young kids. So the moral is that sure, the ratio of world class people is higher in startup hubs, but the rest of the world is so much bigger :) that many more are still out there ...
No it's not. Reading CIL code in the Reflector is often better than reading it in Visual Studio: the Reflector is an amazing little tool with one of the best integrated cross-referencers I've used.

I'm guessing you've never actually used it, because you're using the word "disassemble" to describe it. Like JVM bytecode, CIL is unambiguous, explicitly typed, and doesn't rely on aliasing; therefore, like JVM bytecode, it is easily reversed back out to a high level language. You're not reading CIL opcodes in the Reflector, you're reading C#.

I wonder if this is a valuable lesson for developers here. Bytecode VMs do not offer strong protection of your source code.