skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there a list of the current research? I can't find anything.
To prepare for X ... err ... prepare for X.

Of course I agree with you, but it should hopefully go without saying.

Perhaps YC should start with a 1 minute elevator pitch. The point isn't to show off the project, but to get interviewees to understand you won't have more than a minute of the stage and things will be dominated by questions. If I understand it, the 1 minute should be a good test of how you can present at demo day with none of their coaching.
Maxvisit: 960
Minaway: 480

For the first time in my life I'll force myself into a regular sleeping schedule... or at least YC will...
Showing the sexiest, meatiest part of a working demo is probably a good compromise. Without a demo, you're left describing that same part, which is inferior, right?
Meaning of "Object-Oriented Programming" According to Dr. Alan Kay
Google Goes Globe-Trotting
A little poking around seems to show that throwaway alkaline Energizer D batteries have a capacity of either (18000 mAh)[http://battstore.stores.yahoo.net/e94dba.html] or (20500 maH)[http://www.hardwareandtools.com/invt/1399856]. Either way, that's a lot more than the 2500mAh that the rechargeable D battery has. What other reason would Energizer have for making rechargeable batteries with significantly less capacity than the same size throwaway battery?

I agree it was a poor choice for the article to compare rechargeable D size batteries to throwaway AA size though. That's not really helpful.
is that mostly from inflation?
15 Successful Entrepreneurs Who Didn't Need College
hey,
can you email me bkmrkr @ yahoo.com
http://getsatisfaction.com/ ?
Thats it. I am moving to Russia and starting a gang.
5 Business Lessons You Can Learn From The Hip-Hop Industry
I think the word visionary set against "not an implementor" may worry a lot of the people here. How many of you trust MBAs?
Oh... 18! 18! :D
As an Indian , I find it offensive that an Indian Businessman chooses to blatantly display his wealth by building a 1 Billion Dollar Home for a family of 6.With 2.7 billion living on less than $2 a day, I am hoping guys like him pull their heads out of their asses and start thinking about spreading their wealth, instead of, spending it on enormously useless structures!
Conflicting goals between VCs and entrepreneurs
It seems to me that VCs and entrepreneurs have conflicting goals. VCs are looking to hit a home run in one out of ten attempts. Entrepreneurs are looking to maximize their probability of financial independence -- which is a different goal altogether involving less risk and a lower payoff.
Some desktop image editors let you do this, although usually with a less user-friendly interface. Inkscape (free) does this (.svg export), and Xara Xtreme (cheap and worth the price) does it too. I'm not sure how the results compare to the online tool for logos, but they are quite good for photos.
No. I would expect more successful (software) startups had 20-something founders than founders from any other decade.
Your employer force you to set noprocast on?
Ugliest building ever
Take a look of the following which is my on-line book in progress. One of the chapter is entitled "How to turn your VC into your worst enemy".

http://www.startupforless.com

At the end of the post, there are quite a few links for comments from successful entrepreneurs on their experience with VC's. My own advise is to deal with VC's as what they are, not what you think they are.

Do not romanticize, but also do not demonize.
The link is http://www.StartupForLess.com

--Denny--
Oh yay, yet _another_ brand new Swartz project. Bets on how long this one lasts?
Fighting with other founders is the absolute worst thing in the world.

Don't get a cofounder because you think he/she will do all the work that you don't want to do.
Great article. I see your point.
David,

Agree - this is a reddit article. I don't want this on YC.
If you want to start something, and nobody is interested in your idea or you can't find anyone good enough - Just start it alone.

If you have an idea, and you know a fellow co-founder that's interested in starting up - Just start it with him and work together.

Bottom line: Instead of thinking about the non-essential stuff- Just get the first prototype up even if it might mean doing it yourself.

Any school of thoughts that places restrictions on an ideal founding team size is crap. The debate that advocates an optimum team size is no different from saying that man cannot complete a mile in under 4 minutes.

Work with what you have, not what you don't have.
Alert Warren Buffett!
'Atlas Shrugged'
http://books.google.com/books?id=ox4fAQAACAAJ
Yes, I think poor juwo would agree with that statement.
Have a Couple of "Important" Things Going On
Should Startups Use Facebook's New Ad Platforms?
Yay, MIT alums.

What's the startup, Pius?
I've got an app with a similar feature in the pipeline. It's a great idea, if I do say so myself! ;)
See it's not that I wanted to go to college. What happened was, I turned 18, and what do you know I wasn't yet a billionaire entrepreneur.

College is a back-up option that lets you get a job and make 60k a year to support yourself, just in case you don't go IPO before your parents kick you out. In my experience it's pretty tough to get a job without a college degree, but if you're a brilliant hacker you'd probably get hired regardless.
Haha, long time no talk Aston. It's my technology firm, The Uyiosa Corporation (http://www.uyiosa.com). I left Booz Allen in the summer of 2006 and it's been my day job ever since.
I'd say Geico is an example of a Buffett-owned company that pretty much nails these (except maybe the last one, provocation).
Angel financing - What angels look for in a company: Market size and revenue model (part 2 of 6)
This is a very misleading article. Many of the people they use as examples come from an earlier era when college was much less common. Of the recent founders they mention, most did go to college; they just didn't graduate.

My advice would be: college is valuable, but what's valuable about it is the experience, not the degree.
It would be neat if it could also allow someone to lobby against shitty Facebook ads too!
right, http://books.google.com/books?id=6TfTS9ITW7UC&printsec=f...
Nice that they included Frank Lloyd Wright :)
AMD unveils powerful 'stream computing' chip
Most common Windows random number generator cracked
It is difficult for a brilliant hacker to get hired, especially for what they are really worth, with no track record. Going to a good college and excelling is a good starting track record.

Also, you must continue to live in your parent's basement, who else would guard the fort?
My thoughts exactly but i am having tough time conveying that to others. I am not sure if it is inherent human "thing" to like titles or it will slowly fade away like having finished high/elementary school.
Feld Thoughts - Introducing ClosedPrivate
In defense of developing enterprise software
> 1. Not if you take them into your confidence and make them know that you value their opinion. Who doesn't want the CEO's ear? Its really all about the attitude you show them (and their personality, which is something you can select for.)

Very few people are truly open-minded about everything. Most have a few pet issues that they absolutely take for granted, and then a bunch that they're willing to negotiate on. When they self-assess, they see only the ones they're willing to negotiate, because the others are so obvious that no one could possibly think otherwise.

Employees very quickly pick up which issues the boss will listen to, and which will make them dig in their heels. They'll challenge you only on ones where they think you'll listen. That's great if you actually are right about your deeply-held beliefs, but it's disaster if you're wrong. You won't get any push-back from your employees; they'll just leave.

Cofounders have much more skin in the game, and they will challenge you on your most deeply-held assumptions. All the fights between founders you've seen are good things; they're opportunities for the company to correct an issue that's obviously important enough that a founder is willing to raise hackles for it. Whether it leads to failure or success depends on how willing parties are to listen & compromise.
Why Google will Always be bigger than Apple
Definitely similar, but I would be aiming for something more "poignant", I guess. I don't want to supplement the customer service of companies, only motivate them to improve it by themselves.
I think you are confusing founders with leaders. Companies do not need multiple leaders. Just like teams, however, they do need multiple players, each providing different skills.
Man. Makes me want to create a satire post titled:

Absolutely, DO NOT, get married!

This is an argument for being VERY careful about your co-founder and having good agreements in place when disagreements occur.
To take the literal word lobby, what about an app that creates virtual lobbies for a product or company. People who are thinking of buying a particular product could enter into a lobby that is populated by people who both champion and denigrate the said product.

Some lobbies that would be interesting:

Apple Lobby
Lisp Lobby

I guess these are like forums, but are different in that they are built for lovers and haters inclusively.
> will slowly fade away like having finished high/elementary school

The only reason that has faded away is that it is now taken for granted.
Microsoft CEO plays down the threat of Google
Can I say I told you so?

http://reddit.com/info/uctp/comments/cudwx
Number of founders - statistics
I've done some research on how many founders successful technology companies have. Here are the numbers for 100 publicly traded companies

+--------------------+-----------+
| number of founders | frequency |
+--------------------+-----------+
| 1 | 40 |
| 2 | 31 |
| 3 | 17 |
| 4 | 6 |
| 5 | 2 |
| 6 | 1 |
| 7 | 1 |
| 8 | 1 |
| 13 | 1 |
+--------------------+-----------+

Some caveats

The number of sole founder companies is probably slightly exaggerated because sometimes one person is so much more prominent that the others are never mentioned. I did a little double checking though. Another important thing is that some companies were omitted because I knew only that they had several founders but I wasn't able to find out exactly how many. I suspect there are more companies with 4, 5, 6 or more founders.

Unfortunately without numbers about failed companies we still don't know the success ratio of each frequency group, which is what's most interesting for startup founders here. It is well possible that sole founders fail 10 times as often as 2 founder companies, or vice versa.
For anyone interested in double checking (yes I'm sure there are errors ;-) here's the full list:

+-----------------------------+--------------------+
| company | number of founders |
+-----------------------------+--------------------+
| ACS | 1 |
| Activision | 5 |
| Adobe | 2 |
| Akamai | 4 |
| Altera | 3 |
| Amazon | 1 |
| AMD | 8 |
| Amphenol | 1 |
| Analog Devices | 2 |
| Ansys | 1 |
| Apple | 3 |
| Applied Biosystems | 2 |
| Aspen Technology | 1 |
| Autodesk | 13 |
| Avnet | 1 |
| Baidu | 2 |
| BEA | 3 |
| Beckman Coulter | 1 |
| BMC | 3 |
| Broadcom | 2 |
| Brocade | 4 |
| CA | 1 |
| Canon | 2 |
| Cerner | 3 |
| Check Point Software | 3 |
| CheckFree | 1 |
| Cisco | 2 |
| Citrix | 1 |
| Cognos | 2 |
| Compuware | 3 |
| CSC | 3 |
| Cypress Semiconductor | 1 |
| Cytyc | 1 |
| Dell | 1 |
| Dolby Laboratories | 1 |
| Eaton Corp. | 3 |
| Ebay | 1 |
| Electronic Arts | 1 |
| EMC | 2 |
| Fiserv | 2 |
| Flextronics | 1 |
| Garmin | 4 |
| Google | 2 |
| Harris Corp. | 2 |
| HP | 2 |
| IBM | 1 |
| IMS Health | 2 |
| Informatica | 2 |
| Infosys | 7 |
| Intel | 2 |
| Intuit | 2 |
| Jabil Circuit | 2 |
| Juniper Networks | 3 |
| Konami | 1 |
| Kyocera | 1 |
| Lam Research | 1 |
| Logitech | 3 |
| LSI Corporation | 3 |
| Man Tech | 1 |
| McAfee | 1 |
| Micron Technology | 2 |
| Microsoft | 2 |
| Mindray | 1 |
| Motorola | 2 |
| NetApp | 3 |
| Nokia | 1 |
| Novell | 4 |
| Nvidia | 3 |
| Open Text | 1 |
| Oracle | 3 |
| Parametric Technology Corp. | 1 |
| Philips | 1 |
| Qualcomm | 2 |
| Quest Software | 2 |
| RIM | 2 |
| Roper Industries | 1 |
| SAIC | 1 |
| Salesforce | 1 |
| SanDisk | 2 |
| SAP | 5 |
| Satyam | 1 |
| Seagate | 2 |
| Siemens | 1 |
| SRA International | 1 |
| Sun Microsystems | 4 |
| SunPower | 1 |
| Sybase | 2 |
| Symantec | 1 |
| Synaptics | 2 |
| Tellabs | 6 |
| Thomson | 1 |
| TI | 4 |
| Tibco | 1 |
| Trimble Navigation | 3 |
| VMware | 2 |
| Waters Corp. | 1 |
| Wipro | 1 |
| Xerox | 2 |
| Xilinx | 3 |
| Yahoo | 2 |
+-----------------------------+--------------------+
I was thinking today about making a Facebook app that would let you find people who you know by sight but but not name using a dichotomous key.
PG: Is there any way to remove the override function as well, so that there is no way for the user to well override the settings? Thanks:-)
I much prefer Java applets over Flash. They're much more open and don't have the 64-bit issues that it looks like Adobe is never going to get around to fixing.
What a great value add. Thanks for taking the time!

I wonder out of these founders how long each worked fulltime for the company. Also, it would be great to know how many key early employees each had who may have not gotten the "co-founder" title.
Google: $225B and organizing less than 0.02% of the world's information
Yes that would be very interesting indeed. I'm sure there are many girlfriends, wives and children who are not credited either.
I see your point, thank you
I've been thinking a lot about the 10x rule recently. There was a post on YCnews a few weeks ago suggesting that the real success rate was much closr to 50%.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74562

At a panel of Boston-area VCs I attended, each of them said they had no idea where the mythical 10x number came from and that their success rate was closer to 50-90%. I seem to remember YC suggesting the sucess rate was much higher than 10%.

Granted a lot of these 'successes' are companies that are barely managing to stay in business...but they haven't gone bust either. Maybe a better way to look at the situation is that the VCs want to keep as many companies above water as possible in hopes that some smaller percentage will be a huge hit.

Bottom line, I don't think the goals of VCs and entrepeneurs are really as divergent as the 10x factor suggests.
Windows Live Messenger Anywhere on the Web
Unfortunately I think the sample bias that you mentioned makes this useless as any sort of statistical study. The one useful result I'd take from this is "succeeding as a single founder is possible".
..and parents, neighbors, friends etc. Very good point.
Startups are a huge team effort.
Useless for an academic study, but great if you are a decision maker and need quick insight with incomplete data.
Exactly. And maybe one non statistical result as well: A significant number of very successful people _believed_ that it was possible, otherwise they wouldn't have tried to go it alone.
Steve Jobs second most influential in IT
To play devil's advocate, here's some short-term gloom on this topic: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/ad-forecast-08-cautious-...
Red Hat, Amazon deliver Linux on demand
My love for Amazon is constantly growing ... I think Amazon's services are becoming more and more interesting and innovative
evidence? pg hasn't given any either, but he gets somewhat more starting cred than you by virtue of staking his own money on his belief. (If his advice doesn't work, he gets low returns on his investments). You two are stating as fact two contradictory things, and I (and probably most readers) am unwilling to take your statements as fact without evidence.

Can you point me to any studies about the failure rates of startups? anything that's not anecdotal or personal experience?
Hired at market salary for a developer...no college degree.

But I assume 3 other roles as well. SEO/PPC/Accounting.
http://www.google.com/search?aq=t&oq=verizon+suck&hl...
1,320,000

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sprint+sucks&bt...
234,000

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tmobile+sucks&b...
95,500

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cingular+sucks&...
92,400

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=att+wireless+sucks&...
85,500

So what you're saying is, the Internet being full of people complaining about bad service (planetfeedback.com), somehow by magically being on Facebook companies will care more? You know what they'll do? They'll make a call to Palo Alto, threaten to pull their ad budget, and your app disappears the next day.

A GetSatisfaction facebook app would be interesting though.
Well, the guy I mentioned is someone I didn't even know a week and a half ago, when I expressed to the teacher an interest in working alone. I was just saying that based on some initial work with him, my opinion had changed a little, and I could see how something similar could happen with a cofounder.
Going to Extra Mile for your Customers
The value of the companies would be interesting to know.

That said probably it depends of how big the idea is and how many people are required to implement it, so the number of people it's really an illusion.

Relative to that, other interesting data would be to know how early before it was obvious did they go after their idea and if that gave them time to make mistakes and correct them. Minimizing time-to-market, that works probably in favor of no matter how many are the founders.

Thus, as the number/quality of founders decreases so the earlier your implementation should get or be feasible to get to the market.
I think this is an interesting product, which will help bring EC2 into more businesses, but it seems to be added cost for little value for most startups.

Perhaps I'm missing the value-add that Red Hat is bringing to the equation- They're increasing the price over the standard EC2 image.. They're adding a $19/server flatfee, and then increasing the hourly cost by 10c - 16c/hr..

Granted, they're bringing their name and reputation to the party, and you can use official RHEL packages, rather than CentOS, but it doesn't seem worth it for almost any startups.

From: http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/faq/

`
For Technical questions: Red Hat provides support for end-customer questions about the services. Technical issues be addressed by Red Hat associates working in concert with Amazon support and engineering in the event of issues with the EC2 infrastructure.

For Customer Service issues: All customer service issues (Billing, EC2 Account Activation, etc.) should be forwarded directly to Amazon via application-payments@amazon.com.
`

It looks like it's basically RHEL branded EC2, and the extra cost is to support the RH devs and tech support. That Laudable, but probably not enough of a value-add to be worth it.
This is a great effort. Thank you.

However, I don't know if it's terribly useful to include ancient companies like IBM, Beckman or Avnet. Although it does help show that the trendline is going up -- Salesforce, one of the most recent, had four co-founders in 1999.
Awesome Move by Red Hat and Amazon (by Tim O'Reilly)
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/redhat_amazon_ec2....
Productivity: Getting Things Done
An article explaining GTD and our experiences implementing it at New Bamboo.
This is will do great things for news.yc, temporarily.

People here to procrastinate have a lower average quality contribution than people here out of genuine interest. The average submission/comment quality will go up as they temporarily leave.

What will happen is that they will find some other way of procrastinating. The problem isn't that news.yc draws them too strongly; it's that what they should be doing doesn't draw them strongly enough.
'Set the Data Free'
The Upshot of the Dollar's Fall
Wait... which app is that income for? SocialMedia or Appsaholic or something else entirely? And they have no large infrastructure behind the scenes?

Going back to amichail's original comment, the implication was that making Facebook apps is really easy, and therefore a cofounder might be less necessary. The only point I was trying to make was that any Facebook app that is going to be really easy to make is unlikely to be a big revenue generator. My assumption was that any app that was going to be big enough and useful enough to generate good revenue was going to require a significant backend external website to crunch numbers and store relevant info.

So what's the point of what I'm saying? I was trying to counter the idea that building a revenue-generating Facebook app would be any easier than building an independent site. In both cases, you have to build the backend, anyways. So then we're merely talking about the difficulties of building the interface, and I was saying that it's not that hard to do with Apache and a script in just about any language: just print what you want the browser to see to standard output. Even if building a Facebook interface is easier, that is fraught with other complications (such as worrying about Facebook itself doing its own, official version of your app).

So in the end, I'm saying that building a successful Facebook app is not much different from building a successful website, so if you need a cofounder for a website, then you also need one for the app.
The 21-Year-Old Behind Tumblr
Make money while surfing the Web sounds
Groundbreaking == Happened during the last bubble and failed
AOL's New Plan: It's Not Working
Launching the GigaSpaces Start-Up Program
Neither. It's a single application running SocialMedia/Appsaholic ads. It's an app called My Aquarium, developed and maintained by one guy.
Wikipedia and the Salesforce website speak of only one founder, Marc Benioff. Do you have more information? I had doubts in quite a few cases, especially with the older companies. There are cases where a company existed for many years before people other than the original founder took it to the next stage. Xerox is one example.
Every once in a while I enjoy reading news like this about AOL ... I just think there is so much you can learn from their story ... to me they are one of the only companies out there that had many chances to be the biggest player in the industry but over and over missed it ... many ideas implemented by successful companies of today (such as Social Networking in general) could have all been implemented better and more successfully by these guys, years ago... maybe they were just never as smart as the other guys :)
The only thing I can say about the value is that all have a market cap of more than a billion. Most have several billion.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown for software/internet companies founded in the last 40 years. That's the data that matters for most people here.
Great article, will you be my co-founder?
The DejaVu family of fonts are supposed to be a 'better' version of the Bitstream Vera fonts -- they "provide a wider range of characters while maintaining the original look and feel". Seems to be updated more often as well.

http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
A call for video on the web - Opera [video] release on Labs
Why Yahoo (YHOO) Should Buy AOL (TWX)
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/why-yahoo-yhoo.html
I dunno Matt...I'd much rather get wasted than work as a carpenter.