skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lots of sites make you log in with your email address, is that any different?
You quit your job and put 10 months worth of effort into a product that succeeds or fails based on whether Paul Graham gives you $15,000?

I know this is a YC forum and all, but the cargo culting here is creepy, which is too bad because if you weed through it there are obviously some smart people posting.

Here's a tip: if you can solo jump start a fundable product, your consulting bill rate will "fund" you, YC style, in less than a month. Then, you can ignore what YC says, keep the talented developer (finding talent in this market is like finding weaponizable plutonium on the shelves at a Des Moines Wal-Mart), chuck the dead wood, and take yourself to market on your own terms.
"NBA Syndrome" Helps Fuel Spiralling Inequality
Guido van Rossum on removal of GIL: "It isn't Easy to Remove the GIL"
The author kinda threw me for a bit. I don't think it's our Paul Buchheit (you didn't just become a professor, did you?), but it's an odd coincidence. Plus, it's on topic for startup news...
WebCmd: Command line done in AJAX
Enough With The Rainbow Tables: What You Need To Know About Secure Password Schemes
Hack: How to give your low-end Canon digital camera RAW support (and a ton of other features!)
Tried that - attended a lot of local tech groups as well. However, people seem to have their weekends busy with "stuff" here. That's the bad part of being in LA, there is a lot of "life" here and hence erodes into your time - difficult to get focused people.
it's on topic for startup news

It's a bad analogy, though.

While basketball skills won't help you if you don't make the NBA (especially if you've sacrificed your education in the process), skills you learn as a tech entrepreneur are transferable/useful if you fail and have to do something more "practical".
" The Commandments! "

I like that.

Sure it's a relationship. But the type of relationship bw co-founders, team and customers is very different. If your co-founders, fellow hackers, the ones that should understand the implications of startups the most, balk at such a simple hurdle to start a startup. Communication is not the problem, commitment (or insert N other reasons is).

A very different relationship (more communicative) exists bw staff who are not the core of the team at the start. It goes unsaid that the on-going relationship with the customers is paramount.

But to misunderstand the idea that founders & co-founders should explicitly have to communicate such fundamental concepts as "we might have to move sometime to achieve 'Foo'" or "we might have to actually do 'bar' to get to the next hurdle is fundamentally different from communicating to hires or customers.

BTW can you point http://www.feedity.com to news.ycombinator?
I've attended the last Twistup, I've also attended the last couple of geek dinners. And - yes, I live in Venice. There are very few people that are genuinely interested and most want to do it part time to see where it goes (they don't have the courage to give up the cube).

I even started the startup weekend organization in LA (startup.eventbrite.com). There are 32 signups - however only 3 developers of which 2 I know.

I did connect with a couple of people, but they seem so busy with their personal lives and don't seem to have that burst needed to go all the way. We started a small project on labor day weekend and the next day one of them replied with "it's too hot so I can't concentrate". And this is on our second day !!!
my email is iamyoohoo AT yahoo dot com - if you want to connect ...
Advantages: more hackers, more angels(you can always get more funding, right?), more partnership opportunities, warmer weather, not everyone wheres a Red Sox hat, Arnold will be your governor.

Disadvantages: more expensive, have to build a new network, expensive to move(both time and money), Arnold will be your governor.
Chad - I googled you a bit and seem to have a connection. I met Erik Osterman who I think you created socialverse with.

There's only a very few of us here that want to go all the way - that's for sure.
Those same people were the ones who made me miserable for sucking ass at basketball, kickball, and all the other games I played in school, so I feel conflicted about this.
1000-2000 users and a $15 million valuation? That seems pretty overpriced to me: even if you could see a positive future, FB's success outside the Ivy league crowd was no means guaranteed.

It's worth noting that Peter Thiel later put in $500,000 for 10% of the company, which would value FB at around $5 million, and that was a few months later.
YC isn't for every startup. Viaweb couldn't have done it in the winter; I couldn't have gotten Rtm and Trevor to move. Yet they were good cofounders to have.

It's always a judgement call whether one's cofounders' inability to move is a sign of general lameness, or whether they're so good that they're worth having anyway. But it's that deeper question you need to answer. If your cofounders are lame, you should ditch them regardless; and if they're not, don't worry about YC, because good cofounders are worth more to a startup than we are.
I would think so. Although in this market, even for traditional software providers it is tough - you need to have a history and they want to be confident that you will be around for a long time. For SaaS this is an order of magnitude greater, so it pretty much will rule out smaller players (at least at this stage).
That's not for the finished product, thats for a prototype to build off, show VC's etc and I'd be developing using Ruby on Rails, that's why it'd be so short.
PS: Cool name.
Adblock Plus: what would Jesus do?
I have must have learned at least a dozen programming languages in my time, and none was as difficult and as counter-intuitive as C++. (Compared to C++, Ada was simple.) I think C++ was just a bad idea, a clumsy attempt to merge two incompatible paradigms.

In classical imperative programming (e.g. C, Algol, Fortran, Pascal, and Basic), procedures contain and copy data structures. The heap primarily exists when unusual flexibility is needed, e.g. when the number of data objects you need isn't known until runtime. so you manage them with a global heap-based collection. Generally, you try to avoid using the heap, and where you must use it, you build an API around your collection to hide the nasty ugly details.

Compared with imperative programming, object orientation provides a kind of inversion of control. Instead of having procedures which contain and manipulate data structures, you have objects which contain methods (to handle the messages that other objects send it). Objects manage their own lifecycles and storage allocation. This sort of distributed control implies a level of abstraction well above concerns about storage management. Instances of subclasses tend to be larger than instances of their parent classes, but so users of these polymorphic objects are presumed to be above worrying about the storage they take up. But that makes us dependent upon that nasty heap -- is it any wonder that the vast majority of object oriented languages _presume_ automatic garbage collection?

The very fact that the C++ programmer is responsible for storage management implies that C++ objects are not to be visualized as independent and cooperating entities that manage their own lifecycles -- because then it becomes unclear as to who will have responsibility for cleaning up.

Systems programming is of necessity low-level; a reliance upon automatic garbage collection simply isn't appropriate for those kinds of problems. Therefore, instead of trying to add object orientation to C (and therefore an over-reliance upon the heap), I think we'd have been better off to begin by simply adding a strong, polymorphic type system. Then we could write systems programs with a manageable degree of genericity, without requiring every programmer to become a language-lawyer interpeting seemingly conflicting regulations, or an empirical scientist running experiments to determine what his programming language does in a given situation.

If we could then create easy hooks by which an object-oriented language could make calls to low-level subroutines written in that systems programming language, so much the better.
Take it form a non-technical co-founder. Nate, your co-founder doesn't have to move. You can. It is even better this way. I am working on my startup and my co-founder is a good thousands miles away from me. He handles all technical aspects and I do the other stuff. I read and learn a lot of stuff, so we can communicate technically, but the truth is if I was close to him all I would do is waste his time. So move and do your technical thing, Let me stay where he is and do his thing. Communicate a lot though. And do not start to IM with people like us unless you want to take a break from coding. I only talk with my cofounder at the end of his day, that way I know I am not in his way anymore.
I use something else: require users to load a bookmarked page in order to login. The url has a login key in it.
It would depend on how much they raised. YC companies are unusually mobile. Most haven't raised enough to hire anyone, and it's employees that tie you down. Few companies move after they have 20 people, unless they get bought. So if FB had raised enough to hire that many people in Boston, odds are they'd still be here.
Thanks for the comments guys. And to answer dan97632's question, I get home about 11AM and go to bed from about 11:30 to 5:00 then I get up and do it all over again.
Yes. For one thing, it's probably not the last funding you'll ever raise. Plus there are other advantages to being in a startup hub, and SV in particular, besides the investors.

See #2:

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
He is a rock star - and one of the most dedicated people I know. From what I've seen, he's more committed to this project than anyone else who's worked on it (including me).

However the tone of your post doesn't surprise me - you probably wouldn't understand the difficult position he's in unless you've been there before.
Does not being a hacker make you less desirable in YC's eyes?
If you're not a hacker and dont have any idea about programming, does that make you less desirable in YC's eyes?
Mini-Maxing Mastermind
"... That's the bad part of being in LA, there is a lot of "life" here and hence erodes into your time ..."

Sunny weather syndrome. who wants to be a hermit when it's nice day? That's one plus to geography. If you live in a place (higher lats/longs) where it gloomy "in-doors" weather for a part of the year you don't have a choice but to concentrate-hard on things.

"... difficult to get focused people ..."

Don't really have any answers to this other than Linda Stone's "Attention: The 'Real' Aphrodisiac" talk. You might be able to use your situation to your advantage ~ "http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail739.html
Actually collegiate athletes earn on average more money than their non-athlete counterparts.[1] It's possible that this is not because of any learned skills, which would technically make you correct. However, although collegiate athletes often have lower GPAs than non-athletes, they have been shown to be equally proficient using more robust measures of cognitive development.[2]

I think Julian Robertson (famous for hiring only athletes) said it best shortly after he made his first billion shorting the copper market:

"I once said, 'Let's hire one complete nerd and see how he operates,'" Robertson recalls. "We never did. It would have been fascinating."

1. C.f. http://www.row2k.com/features/print_feature.cfm?id=82&ty...

2. Searching JSTOR for "cognitive development" + "athlete" should turn up the relevant studies.

/Good thing this isn't Slashdot or I'd be modded into oblivion
You're right that $15,000 is easy to find. But what you don't realize is that hardly anyone here is applying to the YC program for the $15k...

I saw more VCs at the last YC demo day than I have in my entire life. And, from talking to the YC founders, I'm not alone. I'm not claiming that high VC interest predicts success. However the number of VCs interested in your startup is a good proxy for the overall interest in your startup, since VCs want to invest in what's popular.
Word. Thanks, Sam.
Paul, thanks for the reply. I know that YC is not the end-all be-all, but I do think it would be a great way to increase our chance of success. I don't think my co-founder is lame at all. Actually he's a super smart guy, we have known each other for 7 years, and have started and sold one moderately successful startup together during college.

What is frustrating that maybe you didn't understand before is that we're not working together now as it is (in two different cities ... at least a 2hr plane away). For my own saneness, team energy, and for the sake of teamwork, I thought that moving to YC would be a great opportunity for us to actually work in the same room together, and have support all around. I know that if that happens, we will do great things.

btw ... I'm gonna apply anyway. So, you'll hear from me again soon.
> Use Square Bracket Notation

No
We've funded one company started by non-hackers, but they had studied science in college, so they understood technical matters.
I agree, 15k is something my parents will give us or money i could raise selling my 350z.

The real victory is winning the prize, and the attention of VC you get.
What RSS reader do you use?
I've been using Live Bookmarks in Firefox, but it gets unwieldy past a number of feeds. Besides, it can be distracting to have it at the top of my browser window.

What do you guys use?
News.ycers in San Francisco! Want to try out Xobni?
Over the next few days, we are looking for Outlook users who are interested in trying out Xobni. Our software will bring you email happiness. An NDA is required, we'll pay for your cab ($30 cash), and we'll give you a beer during install.

Please bring a machine with Outlook! We have monitors if you need them for a desktop.

Our office is at 211 Sutter St; San Francisco. Please e-mail info@xobni.com if you'd like to come!
"I'm mostly trying to figure out what the essential qualities of Perl are such that you consider it more lisplike than any other language."

Not any other language. Merely any other mainstream language aside from possibly JavaScript (which is very nearly Scheme with C-style syntax).

It actually doesn't sound like we disagree on much other than what makes a language Lisp-like. ;-)

I'm primarily concerned with the "blub" and "power continuum" concepts that pg came up with. Any language lower on the power continuum is blub, and if you're only familiar with blub you can't see why a language higher up is more powerful. My basic assertion is that Perl has much more room below it on the power continuum than above it, with pretty much just Lisp (and other macro-capable functional languages) being clearly above it. Perl 6 introduces macros, so the picture changes a little bit come Christmas (or whenever the first Perl 6 is released).

And, I agree that syntax is a huge gaping difference between Lisp and Perl. But Lisp is hugely different from all other mainstream languages in that regard, as well, so it has to be canceled out, as far as I'm concerned. So, once syntax as a difference in removed, all you have is "what concepts can you implement readily in this language", and Perl has pretty much everything except macros. Most other mainstream languages are missing some number of others.
BTW-If you run into any problems with the image, let us know in our bug tracker ( http://www.virtualmin.com/bug-tracker/ ). It's not heavily used yet, but seems to be pretty solid.
Mahalo Update: A clone? - Social Usage - Alexa Rank - Employee Encouragement
I think theres a far more subtle reason... because the weather _sucks_ here.
Wow, that was a really weird experience. I kept thinking "Well, people often have unexpected views on political controversies, but it's so unlike PB to use these bullshit rhetorical arguments." Only at the very end did I realize it was another PB.
" ... What do you guys use? ..."

Fox as well.

"... but it gets unwieldy past a number of feeds. Besides, it can be distracting to have it at the top of my browser window. ..."

Are there any 'webapps' that personalise your feeds (url, return number), summarise (title, description, link) them and give you a page to view? (update: maybe http://www.bloglines.com ?)
I just might do that. I'm sick of Atlanta anyway.
AOL, Yahoo To Launch New Products At TechCrunch40
Up modded for beer.
http://kiza.kcore.de/software/snownews/ or http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php
Good point. Similar to IP and TCP -- from an embedded programmer's perspective, IP is one of the most icky and hardware-unfriendly protocols around. When my friend was at university, they told them about IP just in passing, saying, "it'll die any day now." But now it's everywhere, and it works.
Logix: Adding macros to Python
There is also the problem of otherwise talented and determined potential co-founders who are unready or unwilling to commit fully due to the inertia of their lives.

I wouldn't describe them as "lame", but they can still be especially risky. They will likely be apt to entertain working on the startup which will be enticing, but you really don't want to get strung along. The sooner you can assess the likelihood they are capable of committing the better.

My guess is that the best tactic in this case is to figure out way to convince them the startup is happening with or without them. Just like investors the best motivator is probably fear of missing out.
He gets at a really smart point here, and it's really the most important one of the article: if your existence helps secure others' existence, then you're sitting in the catbird seat. To paraphrase a professor of mine from a couple years ago, why steal pieces of the pie from others when you can spend your time making the pie a lot bigger for everyone?

The best-designed platforms not only get better with more apps, but they make it so that the presence of every new app benefits all the others.
I studied Networking in college for a few semesters, so I have a pretty good understanding tech matters. I just want to make sure that just because we're not hackers the possibilities of us being funded don't go down.
I agree that we agree in our interpretation... =)

I thought of this analogy in terms of existing code (rather than being able to deliver, because OP's partner could take the idea and find someone else to do the code). The OP wrote the existing code, which is allegedly what happened to ConnectU. Of course, if you discount the allegations and assume that Zuckerberg wrote the code himself, then the existing code argument is irrelevant.

This is an interesting debate that can actually be answered if the OP chimed in to explain what he meant!

Re ConnectU: I never assumed that ConnectU would have been successful if Facebook hadn't happened. In fact, I believe that the only way ConnectU would have been successful is if Mark Zuckerberg stayed on that project (or _maybe_ if ConnectU made him sign a NCA).
Liferea (Linux desktop app)
Facebook is Down
Facebook is down(well at least duke.facebook.com--confirmed by 6 of my friends)...This is the second time in one month. Anyone else having problems with it?

I feel bad for all those companies built on the FB Platform that are earning $0 right now from their ads.
Back up. It was only about 15 minutes of downtime. Still, it makes me think that it is pretty risky to build a business that can't function without FB.
You and me both... I'll miss Octane and Javamonkey, though.
The first startup I ever worked for was in LA - a film compositing software company. The scene isn't nearly as big as silicon valley, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if tech startups related to the film industry are more common in LA.

It's a cool area, too, especially if you have a math background. Plus, you can get academy awards :) The founder of the company I worked for had three, and another dude I worked with had one. Of course, these are the sci&tech ones, not the ones you see on TV. But they do send a cute actress to host it.

One thing I'd say in favor of LA - the entertainment industry may be hard driven, but they sure do reward talent. If you rock on the tech side, there is trememdous opportunity.
Vienna on a Mac. It's superb (and free too)! http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php
I think you need to let go, for now.

It's obvious where your priorities are (family/wife, career/money) and at this early stage where product development is driven by coders that need to go full steam ahead, you're not in a position to help.

When your product gains more traction and more attention, you should step back in and help. Your experience in terms of financing and business development will be of better use then.

The timing, unfortunately, just isn't right. Number 1 should move to the West Coast, live for a few months, mingle with people, latch on with a couple of more developers and then give you a call a couple months down the road.
Word. I'm glad (and a little surprised) that you saw this and responded.
While I look forward to Xobni's offerings I wonder how many new.ycers use outlook...
That's cool. I've been to one of the geek dinners before I acquired a commitment on Tuesdays and it seems like over the course of this year things have really improved. I saw recently that an OpenCoffee Club started up over the summer and I'm looking forward to going to that too.

Zach - LA Life
http://www.lalife.com/
It seems you guys are very talented and work well together. Being able to communicate about difficult issues is a good sign IMHO.

Now with the 1% of information I have, I would say:
#1, I think you have to head to the Valley and find another hacker. #2, maybe you could pay for two months rent for #1 and travel costs? Hopefully by then you could have another hacker and get this thing out. It seems that YC would help but it sounds like you need to do this with or w/o YC.

Have you launched the beta yet? IMHO, 10 months is way too long to still be developing the initial version. Once you get the thing out there, if it's good, it will be easier to find people.
How do you implement password recovery securely?
Emails are sent clear-text, so how do you implement a password recovery feature that uses email, without resorting to those what-is-your-grandmother's-middle-name security questions?

Here's a good way, but it still sends a password via email, so is not good for money-handling sites, and is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks:
http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2007/02/09/dont-let-passwor...
Are we attacking the rich? or the military? or the education system?
It's definitely not the worst place to do a startup, but it's only a few hundred miles from the best place. I'm not going to work in LA ever again myself.
> 10 months is way too long to still be developing the initial version

dude, I know. Actually, we have had a private alpha up for 6 months. Changed lots of things, added lots of things, and getting ready for our public launch. Actually, we're calling it "beta" but I'm probably not going to use the "beta" label publicly.
Google Reader, with this userstyle:

http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/google-reader-theme-11
Posting is messed up on muohio.facebook ...
Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone and their mother is inventing a new programming language these days?
Feedreader on PC, only because some of my feeds require passwords, and online ones don't seem to support that too well. Used to be bloglines before that requirement.
cool. what's it good for?
Useful for web 2.0: Given pairwise comparisons with some probability of error, how do you sort?
It's a classic shaggy dog story, its veracity notwithstanding...