skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: How did you come up with your startup idea?
What is the process by which you came up with your startup idea?

Did you

(a) build something you wanted and the realize you had a potential startup idea?

(b) do a careful market analysis and find a "hole"?

(c) suddenly get an idea in the shower/while mowing the lawn ?

(d) anything else?

Did you have the idea first and then look around for cofounders or did you first assemble a team you liked and then brainstorm?

Thanks in advance
A VC: Posting From The "Sad-assed Backwater"
Well, that's one way to build a social network. Here's all the people you have talked to, communicated with online or been in proximity of. The problem with collecting this data is that once the government knows you have the data they will ask for it.
Hi i read this every day and dream of starting some sort of internet company someday but am still learning some programming, tell us more about you, do you have a web page, blog, etc? mine is justthinkit.blogspot.com, not about programming though.
I built something I wanted and thought about shelving it until I realized people still encounter the same problems, so I am still working on it.

I never looked for co-founder, I just started building and gathering feedback.

Just build it and see if people you know like it or would use it.
You could always just search through a proxy. Am I missing something?
My first thought was, "that's cheap". But then, it certainly does the job. You aren't likely to confuse it with any other icon.
No, a devil's advocate is definitely what we need. I hear good feedback, not harshness.

I think you're right - the user account is going to our biggest barrier to entry. I think that using the info that already exists in a user's profile on Facebook, Myspace, etc is a great idea. For Facebook, we could build an app that grabs this data. For other services, we might just be able to scrape the data from their profiles on demand.

We definitely want to make it as easy as possible to input data into Seekler. Thanks for the great feedback.
Why the Web 2.0 Bubble Doesn't Bother Silicon Valley
Meebo introduces developer platform, third party voice and video apps
Plentyoffish: 1 (Actually 2-3) Man Company May Be Worth $1Billion
Option one sounds like it will put you near smarter people. If you want time to hack on the side, but are out of cash, move to India and live on 150 dollars a month and hack full time.

Go with option 1 for sure.
Actually I meant "idea guys" in the pejorative sense. From what I've seen, good ideas come from slogging it out in the trenches of implementation. Self-described "idea guys" (and this term is almost invariably applied to oneself) are generally useless.
Someone should put together an anthology of Fred's posts defending NYC.
why didn't they just use Erlang? It's already proven and stable and it was designed to process reams and reams of data... not to mention it was made by a telco (I think) and it was open sourced in 1999
Well...isn't that a surprise? Who would have thought?
This is why people unlock their Iphones...
I guess the issue is that there is no Java 6 you could install on Leopard. For other platforms Sun has been the provider of Java, but for OS X Apple provided it themselves.
A. I really wanted something and built it. I found out other people liked it and wanted it. I've been developing based on feedback and my larger plan.
I love a company that size that can still do such things. Even Google couldn't do this now.
a burning bush told me
A (more or less): I wanted something (encrypted snapshotted online backups); spent a while thinking about how to do it and convinced myself that I could do it; posted to my blog asking if anyone else wanted and would pay for it (about 10% of the people who read that blog entry wrote to say that they would); and then got started writing code.

As for cofounders, I don't have any -- having decided that I knew how to do this, I didn't want to waste time explaining to anyone else how to do this.
My friend learned how to do genetic testing and we both realized that it was a great market to be getting into right now.
Doesn't help your case (no one listen in Mexico City), but anyways worth checking out: http://www.hackrtrackr.com/
"Is 2% reasonable? " -- fuck no. What kind of loser would accept this term?

2% is only reasonable when there is funding, and the developer is getting paid reasonably.
Google to announce wireless plans within 2 weeks
It was made by Ericsson, but its specialty is creating fault-tolerant servers, not processing tons of data. It's a lot slower than C:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...
So much for run anywhere.

Seriously, perhaps Apple is trying to discourage people from developing MacOS applications using Java in order not to make the whole experience appear slow. Their OS is already quite inefficient (which, BTW, makes me wonder why on earth anybody would make a Mac their development machine).
I do realise where this flood of bad titles comes from: Eugen Herigel went to Japan and learnt archery from a "Zen Master"... here the author is quoting some wacky Zen story in the prelude to make the story sound better, that's all.
Sorry, I don't understand what you're getting at?
Wolfram was smart once, but has become increasingly wacky lately. Nobody wants to actually come out and say that Wolfram is nuts, but people are treating him that way -- metaphorically speaking, smiling and nodding politely while backing away slowly. Keep in mind that this is a culture where the quality of one's mind is all-important, so accusing someone of being crazy is the worst possible insult.

Maybe it will turn out that Wolfram has been right all along -- but until and unless that happens, I think it's good that people who make wild and utterly unsupported claims are met with great skepticism.
It's still early enough that the "plus internet" strategy gets you pretty far when you're trying to come up with ideas.

By "plus internet," I mean, hang out with people who don't have an unhealthy obsession with the internet. Lend them an empathic ear, then take their pain/talent/idea and add the internet.

Let me give you an example. I met a musician the other day. He's got a kid now, and he said that most of the energy he formerly put into improvisational music now goes into improvisational storytelling; every night, he makes up a bedtime story with his kid. He said he was thinking about recording these stories for sentimental reasons.

Since I DO have an unhealthy obsession with the internet, my first thought was, "hm, ok, recorded stories plus internet equals ...?" That is, what if you had LOTS of families recording these stories and you managed to get all that data into one system. It doesn't quite work with bedtime stories -- I think those tend to be a little too personal to be of general appeal -- but there are plenty of very talented storytellers out there... there are local societies and whatnot. It's a tradition that dates back to the beginning of language. Why not create a Youtube-like environment where people with a passion for storytelling can share their stories with each other and the world? This guy I was chatting with said he'd never have thought of that, but you could see the wheels turning in his head as soon as I mentioned it.

So let's say you've gotten this far. At this point, if your goal is to create something cool that could change the lives of a group of people, you're all set. (I bet this story idea could turn into a cool folk-art community.) But if your goal is to turn it into a startup, there's one more step... you need to apply this filter: "ok, interesting idea, but is this a business?"

Point is, a good place to start is to get outside the YC/TechCrunch echo chamber and talk to people who have good ideas and painful frustrations but don't automatically think "ok... plus internet?"
I played with a fair number of them back in the 90's. ObjectStore, GemStone, etc.

I think these systems really only make sense in the telecommunications, CAD, etc. niches where performance is critical.

That said, the new trend in DB systems are main memory relational systems based on column store architectures (vs. traditional row store). The performance of such architectures is really quite promising. Go to Stonebreaker's talk at the latest VLDB in Viena.

Or take a look at his new company:

http://www.streambase.com/
GemStone is an amazing piece of software - think transactional, distributed, transparently persistent dynamic language VM. For DabbleDB we rolled our own OODB because the GemStone licensing was too steep, but they're loosening that up and I'd take a serious look at it if I were starting something new.
Another potential competitor: http://www.listible.com/
Abstracting away the "relational" part of the RDBMS sounds like a great idea in theory, but I've yet to meet a good O/R mapping layer in practice.

What I have met is several IT projects that have failed thanks to inordinate amounts of resources sunk into O/R mapping issues...
db4o.org
So what wild and unsupported claims does Wolfram supposedly make? Seems to me he went at great lengths to spell everything out, so "unsupported" sounds a bit unfair to me.
He proves it in all kinds of examples (I think NKS is full of them). Other than that, he is just putting forward a hypothesis that some people might find interesting to consider. What is wrong with that?
New websites
I think I should have made the original question clearer.

I was not trying to say "I need a startup idea. Please tell me how to get one" , though I don't mind if you answer it that way - "plus internet" is a very interesting direction. Thank you.

I was asking "How did you get your startup ideas?" which is a little different.

Some context. I was reading some books (Christiansen's "Innovator's Solution" and de Bono's "Serious Creativity" - I am a developer but I do read a business book once in a while! :-) ) which seem to advocate a deliberate, methodical approach to idea generation.

I wondered how startup founders (especially the YC folks) generate their ideas.

Hence the (original) question , trying to tap the experience of people reading this. Over the last couple of days I heard some debate on on whether creating an idea first and then gathering co founders is better than the other way round so I added that.

Apologies for any errors in phrasing. English is not my first language.
The approach suggested here isn't bad in terms of a more methodical approach to creativity:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/5/lateral-marketing-n...
AJAX developers drive Web innovation - what about the browser makers?
I wonder if it would sell better or worse than an anthology of your posts defending Cambridge. :-)

In all seriousness, I don't know enough to judge the accuracy of either your opinions concerning Cambridge or Fred's opinions concerning NYC; but I can't help wondering if there's a certain amount of "home town"ism going on in both cases.
I stopped reading after I learned that Meebo will decide if the app is worthy.
Don't go for the suits. Enterprise software sucks the life out of people and give very little in return - as someone already mentioned you will deal with the wrong kind of complexity - the lots-of-stupid-little-details-which-fuck-you-up kind.

A large db diagram doesn't mean anything, and if there is a
steep learning curve you should be suspicious that the
software is not so well engineered as they want you to
think.

"run upstairs"? Ok.... then...

Take the "easier" job. Do your work in 2 hours every day.
Use the remaining time for something useful for you. Learn.
> Abstracting away the "relational" part of the RDBMS sounds like a great idea in theory [...]

Abstracting away a model doesn't sound like a great idea to me.
Amazing! The next coming years we'll proabably end up seeing teenagers working alone in their bedrooms, making companies that outrun myspace and facebook. Imagine your 16 year old son rich enough to buy a private jet.
It's hard to say, as we don't have LW on Linux to compare to. My guess is that Windows is a big contributor to the slowness.
Yes, but that $1B is only calculated using the special Facebook RDF.

John.
We're guessing primarily Windows, but with no LW Linux version to compare with, it is a guess.

We're using cl-sql, uffi, md5, portableaserve (with net.html and minimal use of webactions).

We have our own caching system (for key mysql db data) running in the application.
I think the attractions of object databases are:
- It's easier to restructure than a relational schema in isolation
- ORMs can be painful if you want to work like that.

But I think they're inherently slower for things like reporting.

The first item can be overcome with effective scripting (rather than trying to avoid the change necessary to restructure apps and schemas using relational databases instead embrace it and make schema changes easy) environment. And there are some OOs around that do a pretty good job of the second item (cayenne but I'm looking for one . I have had great experiences with using business logic layers around cayenne and have been able to rapidly refactor to achieve major schema changes like this.

Having said that - the allegro graph stuff looks like it might be a good alternative.

I'm currently interested in the idea of using couchdb while getting an app set up and then switching to postgresql later. Can anyone see any benefits or problems with this approach?
The author has decades of experience with people, and has written a full essay about it. How do you support your claim that he "errs"?

For me, it resonated similarly to the Bipolar Lisp Programmer: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm
The only one I've used is ZODB. The database was fine, I guess, but the Zope stack is huge and scary.

I can say that when it came time to move things to another non-Zope system (a pile made up of trac, Moin Moin, Virtualmin, and other bits and pieces), it was painful to the point of ridiculousness. I'm sure ZODB masters can write middleware for that sort of thing without pain (and if you're building your system that uses the ODB from scratch, you'll probably understand it well enough to do so). But I'll stick with standard cubbies in which to shove my things from now on (standard, to me, means flat files or an SQL database, as requirements dictate).
It's pretty easy to get Java on Ubuntu.
I know the developer of NumPy. He has a real job (working predominantly on NumPy and SciPy). Documentation sales provide pocket change.

And the VTK folks provide services, and I'm certain it's a much larger source of revenue than documentation.
It doesn't work very well. Virtualmin was originally developed in this manner. We made about $10000 total over the span of about a year...and a big part of that was due to my existing relationships with ISPs and hosting providers that desperately wanted a non-cPanel solution to the problem. Very little of it came from people I wasn't already doing thousands of dollars a year in business with.
"The advantage is that you would have complete freedom in what you do."

Unless what you want the freedom to do is make a reasonable amount of money. I'm not saying don't do it, if you want to be able to work a bit more on projects you love--I've done it several times, and don't regret the time spent or the low figures earned.

"It's not like you are working for anyone."

Here you're wrong. You're working for everyone that sends you a dime, and they will let you know it, too. Open Source users who've been asked to pay are among the most entitled software users on the planet--more even than Open Source users, in general--I'm a (happy) Open Source developer of 8 years, and I've done several ransomware projects and I think it's a great way to get things done...but don't imagine that your users will be particularly nice when you ignore them.

So, by the definitions of many of the folks here at news.yc, it's not a viable business model. Actually, by almost anyones definition, it's not a viable business model. But, it is a fun way to work on projects and make a little pocket money. If you can make the project profitable in other ways simultaneously, like writing a book about it, writing articles for magazines or a popular blog, providing high end services to deep-pocketed corporate customers, etc. you can make a living...I know many people who've done just that, including myself for several years. But you won't get rich and you won't be without a boss--you'll have dozens of bosses.
He claims that what he's shown in A New Kind of Science is revolutionary, but the revolution has yet to happen. Maybe he's the only one to really get it and he doesn't have enough time to better show "us" the way. It seems unlikely though.
One company that I did was basically a hobby gone way overboard. I was interested in a particular type of technology, and ended up with company to sell/train/install/etc in that industry.

Another time, a friend asked me to build them a POS system. Then they recommended me to another friend, and then again. Soon I realized that most affordable POS software for small businesses sucked, so I put several elements together into an affordable networked POS package of my own.

One of the things I'm developing now is along the lines of an XaaS (X as a Service) play to an industry that is another hobby of mine.
This sounds typical to me, and I've been through this a number of times in various forms. It's a classic example of why so many people are heading off to do their own thing. Nice, eh? "8 million for me... 10K for you."

Imagine it's your company, your idea, your co-founder and you stay up late for weeks, you incorporate, you structure 8M shares each, and 2M aside to "dole out" to hire in people.

How much do you give your employees as you hire them?

Do you give them a bunch of equity "out of the goodness of your heart"?

Or do you do the Socratic thing and ask them, "what would it take?" Or make your best guess at what it would take?

Or do you believe in ensuring long-term motivation of strong employees, and give them a worthy amount? What if they turn out to be an underperformer?

On one hand, you could argue that ideas are cheap -- execution is hard. On the other, plenty of people don't have many ideas, and need a leader to show them the way and press them to excel. I claim that the real challenge is to both have a great idea, and to execute well, and even if you do that, chances of failure are still very high.

If you're not happy with the level of equity, look elsewhere.

If you don't have confidence and respect and faith in the founders, look elsewhere.

If you're surprised that the founders are doing a poker-table-style "8M for me, 10K for you...", pulling a huge pile toward themselves and giving you the small peanut pile... get used to it, buddy.
That's a good idea, thanks
Google has more mobile plans, but still no Googlephone
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Michigan. I was thinking of moving to SF, but right now I just don't have enough money to setup out there. Also, MI is pretty cheap. Why you ask?
You are exchanging cause and effect: you describe my writing as if I wrote a post about the similarity between rewriting essays and rewriting code, then realized it needed spice and inserted a zen story as a preamble.

What actually happened is that someone made a very disparaging remark about my writing in a previous post. I tried to look for the deep truth in what they were saying and realized that I also thought my writing fell far short of describing how I felt. Around the same time I was reading "Zen Shorts" to my son, and read the story of the robe and the moon again...

I sat down and wrote a post that quoted the story and ended an emotional paragraph afterwards, simply lamenting the fact that my writing is so poor. Yes, the original version of the post was little more than the story.

After an hour or so, the analytical part of my brain took over and I thought of one major reason my writing is not better, the lack of enough rewriting (not that rewriting would make it great, or even good, but certainly it would make it better).

I then added the rest to the post. So, you see, I did not actually add a wacky zen story to make a post about rewriting better. Although, to be fair, the way I arrived at the post does not in any way make it better than if I had proceeded as you suggested.

But, and I doubt you will understand this, the way I arrived at the post has very deep consequences for me.
I can answer that one as poorly as I write essays: Zen has nothing in common with Archery, however the practice of Archery can be the practice of Zen when approached in a certain way.

Thus, it is perfectly correct to suggest that software development as we practice it has nothing to do with Zen. It could be that someone, somewhere practices software development as Zen, however Chris--in his refreshingly frank and pretense-free manner--is correct if he is surmising that I do not practice software development as one practices Zen. I don't.

And I believe him to be perfectly correct in suggesting that software itself has nothing to do with Zen. If it did (and I do not know if it could), it would be the approach that is related, not the software itself.
OK, but that is not a mathematical claim. I thought you have a criticism of his mathematical claims.

I think NKS ist at least entertaining, more than what can be said for many other mathematicians work. And people are still wondering about the origin of life, seems to me NKS could do more to show that life is likely to emerge than many other approaches. It seems like a small thing, but maybe it is revolutionary after all, if no other approach is making any headway.
pretty much all of the above.

This is how I deal with ideas.

Get one, think about it, do a little research, build a tech demo, think about it some more and then move on to the next idea :P
I think what the author is trying to get at is that brilliance, ideas, energy etc can be a curse.

I am sure everyone here knows of a few young entrepreneur types jumping from idea to idea never quite sticking with anything for a long enough period. Success is rarely about ideas but about execution. If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs today they rarely got where they were by doing something totally original.

They got where they are through execution. Its about detail and escaping the grasshopper mindset of jumping from idea to idea.
I think you've said as much in an essay or two. What struck me about the 1924 essay was how strong the similarity was between success in early 20th-century grocery stores and success in Internet startups. Determination edges out brilliance in both cases.

Another thing that struck me is that even this grocery store owner noticed the biggest problem with our educational system:

For a time I tried picking these youngsters out of the colleges. But my experience with college men was not fortunate. If I selected good students, I found too often that their leadership had been won by doing very well what their teachers had laid out for them. They had developed a fine capacity for taking orders, but not much initiative.
Will we still be alive in 2150?
Are you really bothered by this? For example reddit and news.yc does the same, I don't see it as a problem. Odd? Yes. Standard? Yes.
Everytime I see stuff like this there is inevitably a want-to-be-29-forever boomer behind it somewhere.

Perhaps, just perhaps, our children may be able to extend their lives, and theirs may live longer still, but to suggest it will happen to the current generation is woefully optimistic.

Give it up boomers, you're going to die.
Hell, I feel like that and I'm way younger than a baby boomer.
I think it is very possible that babies being born now will have significantly longer lives. Not immortality, but much longer than normal.