skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is like being a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. (paraphrasing Charlie Munger)

Self-serving bias all over. As far as I can see, the only valid reason for working on a startup part-time is risk/cost tolerance or some obscure personal situation.

Some 'advantages':

>You can fund your own startup.

Refer pg's equity equation. I'd love to have sequoia/YC worry about my company in addition to my co-founders.

> No one is going to kick you because your took money from them for your FAILED startup. No one even cares if your startup fails

That's not necessarily an upside. I think most people can deal with personal failure a lot better than letting someone else down. This affects motivation. To quote Bezos:
Jeff Bezos: I think one thing I find very motivating -- and I think this is probably a very common form of motivation or cause of motivation -- is... I love people counting on me, and so, you know, today it's so easy to be motivated, because we have millions of customers counting on us at Amazon.com. We've got thousands of investors counting on us. And we're a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. That's fun.

>If you love coding then you can enjoy it 24/7

Try it and notice your efficiency. I'd actually recommend switching roles for your day job and night job.

Regardless, Kudos for being the one-legged man - this shit ain't easy.
NASA Sees Arctic Ocean Circulation Do an About-Face
"Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming," said Morison.
iHate
Burial, Archangel
How are you going to get the initial users for your social marketplace?
Droid Sans Mono: Another great coding font
You have revenue coming in! This makes you eligible for loans, especially once your business is two years old.
Upvoted for the name alone.
Exactly. 'Post' implies it ended at some point. And that's something no one will ever agree on the when or if it has ever really died in the first place.
Banks say they won't loan more than 15-20% of revenue. SBA will guarantee and might be able to get loans up to $250K, but that requires a personal guarantee -- if for some reason something goes wrong, I don't want to be personally bankrupt.
Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices
Listen to Paul Grahams conference speech on Great Hackers in 2004. That should help with your search for meaning!!!!
http://cdn.conversationsnetwork.org/Paul%20Graham%20-%20Grea...
CM
cibermole.com
Read this Carefully, Before Anything Else
Actually, he overlooked one very, very good reason:

You get requirements from your daytime job.

This is so important that when I stopped moonlighting and went full time on my start-up, I kept an outside client 2 days per week. Let me explain...

One of my biggest problems has always been WHAT to build, not HOW to build it. Many successful start-ups have been the result of building what one needed oneself. I just expand "oneself" to include my parttime clients. Think you have needs? Wait til you see the long lists of needs in almost any small business. Sure, I lose a little time in the development cycle, but I more than make up for it at user acceptance time. No cycles there - I already know what they want.
Rackspace's offerings start at $400 a month. And they have no prices on their site, so you have to talk to a 'sales associate'... God I hate it when you can't get a price off a website. Can't believe I wasted two minutes on that. Learn from my error.
I suggest that if it's at all possible, try to recycle or preserve the work you've already done so you might derive some value from it.

For example, if it's a web site/application/service, can you maintain it in a minimal and economical way, such as moving to shared hosting from more expensive options? In this case you may find that traffic grows as more users find the site, or you may come up with some new ideas after taking a break, etc. Perhaps you can scale back or put a new twist on your original concept.

At minimum it could be a portfolio site or demo app when seeking out client work to pay the bills.

Of course this all depends on the nature of the failure and your particular circumstances.

I haven't burned many bridges in life, but I do regret some I've allowed to rot and fall away.
This app had something like 200 different tables, with 20 to 50 columns in most tables. Update and insert statements were 5 - 10 lines long, and there were hundreds of the things. There was some JDBC cruft too, but the vast majority was SQL.

This was an extreme case of course, and was mostly the result of bad design, but I haven't come across a database backed application that couldn't be trimmed down with some sort of SQL generator. SQL is fine for simple queries, but, for me at least, has always gotten unmanageable in the long term. Need to select, insert and update the same columns? Duplication. Conditionally group by or order by different fields? Duplication. Decide after the fact that you need to support multiple databases, or eager and lazy loading? There goes the weekend, and probably most of next week.

You could manage all of the above with some sort of home grown solution, but a good ORM just makes everything so painless. I was strongly anti-database for years, yet I now often find myself using ActiveRecord when a flat file would do, simply because ActiveRecord is easier.

Of course, that's just me. SQL and I were never a good fit, and I'm glad to be mostly rid of it, but I'm sure others have had different experiences.
"It's the reason most universities require a variety of general education classes for all freshman."

It's a bad thing universities do for a bad reason. They waste people's time.

An individual knows best how to find their own talents. When a person knows exactly what they want to do, as long as it's moral, that's what they should be helped to do.

You get a well rounded education by googling when you decide you need a question answered.
how much money do you need? what will you need it for? engineers? a sales force? etc. what still needs to be accomplished?

1) look at http://venturehacks.com to get a better understanding of how the fundraising process works and tactically how to raise interest. investors also generally want a team in place, not one person plus some part timers.

2) if you can talk more about your company, the audience here has some rich individual investors here who wouldn't put you through the bullshit that angel groups would, and even more people who, if not rich themselves, are one degree of separation away from potential investors.
Facebook's Brilliant but Evil design
gluttonous texting
3 things:

Time, time, & time
The Rails magic is well defined though, and it's all documented. It doesn't simply 'stop working'. It's really nothing more than a set of conventions that happen to make certain things really convenient.
"I thought this was well known."

All the forced schooling at their education is not well rounded after all.
I haven't been in your situation, so please consider my comments accordingly, but if you're doing well can't you continue to grow the company organically? Can your business plan prize fund R&D and marketing for the near future?

I don't know your situation, but is it possible you're trying to move at Silicon Valley, light-speed pace when it might be more beneficial to throttle back a bit?

I'd think with your continued success the money would soon be chasing after you.
*and their education
The New Focus Group: Mzinga Launches at TechCrunch Boston
It really depends on what you call success. If you determine success to be getting acquired and retiring, then no I don't think moonlighting will get you to that point. However, if you determine success to be creating a side business that is profitable and has a slower, but possibly more steady growth rate, I definitely think that is possible if not probable. I have succeeded in creating a profitable side business and regardless of what others may think, I consider myself successful because of that.
This is an old article, but in my opinion kids today have the same opportunity to learn programming, only now it's not tied to a particular hardware platform or operating system--it's the Web! They might start playing with simple HTML, text and graphics and maybe some JavaScript. Or customizing MySpace or whatever.

The Web is also more collaborative--instead of coding in isolation they can share their results with the world.
-need it for a sales force definitely and maybe one ops head, engineers won't be necessary for a while.

-no investor has shown any problem with the team. the company is extremely well advised for its space and has lots of people putting in time here and there.

-business has too much traction to pull an unknown cofounder right now and don't know anyone who is willing to jump off the cliff without money

-i am willing to talk to anyone seriously interested in investing, but this is a pretty public forum and I don't want to reveal company details here.
Same here. It's taking that step that looks like it's off a cliff. The irony is that, in talking with other folks, I'm told the drop off is only a few inches. The cliff is an optical illusion.
the.young.ceo.0@gmail.com will come direct to me for offline chat...I can discuss the business one on one but I'm wary of posting details publicly -- however open discussion here is definitely encouraged.
Why you shouldn't go to law school.
optimal -- yes, and this was my longstanding position. I have had a lot of bugs put in my ear like "if you just took some funding, this could explode very fast, speed of acquiring customers will be key". I fall somewhere in the middle: I think it's a good idea to take a _small_ amount of funding to get some sales hounds on board, because I can't do sales by myself and I'm not a fantastic salesman. The product has been winning so far based on its own merit -- competition is really terrible, and people are hearing about it word of mouth and contacting me.
"# No one is going to kick you because your took money from them for your FAILED startup. No one even cares if your startup fails"

Actually, this is not the case. Your family is going to kick you big time if you were away of them for months, for a projects that fails. They are counting on you... (at least if you are married, or you have kids, etc)
re: business plan money --> Customer base is growing fast. This business has a big hardware component to it -- one that requires remote devices at customer sites and lots of servers. (Think 100's of remote devices communicating 24x7) I spent most of the money buying up enterprise-ready servers to deal with a wave of business that is on the verge of closing, and backup devices to be ready for the wave.
I'm sure you know this better than I do. There are just so many stories of companies that implode before their time, or get devoured when the piranhas come around.

Anyway, congratulations and good luck!
If you're curious about this, I suggest following the official Joel on Software "The Business of Software" Discussion Forum.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz

I tend to think of it as "Hacker News for people with a mortgage".
Condescending Customer Service
this is a good point. build it and they will come does not work? build it, market it and if its any good your get a couple of users and then refine and repeat.
Ask YC: Can you help me pick a good domain name?
I'm just posting this here in case anyone comes up with a brilliant domain name :)

I am launching a small startup this month, called
ONE application platform

Essentially it is an application platform like facebook, but for productivity apps like task lists, bug trackers, contact managers, calendar, etc.

My current domain name is: http://unobeta.com - not very exciting
Buildix 2 AMI Image Available
This is a big deal for bootstrapping developers looking to get started cheap with very little hassle.

Something I've been anxiously anticipating for about 5 months.

----
Buildix includes:

* Subversion for Source Control
* Mingle for Agile Project Management
* Cruise Control for Continuous Integration
* Trac as a wiki and bug-tracker
* ...plus a little bit of our own ThoughtWorks magic, to glue it all together

----
Identifying a good idea is my limiting factor. I have the ability (practical and theoretical) to create all sorts of software, but no idea feels solid enough to base my future on. For most of the ideas, the market is too small or saturated.

I wonder if I'm thinking too small.
"Another lie in this essay is that it was Bernie Greenberg who discovered that Lisp was a good language in which to write Emacs. In fact, I wrote the first Emacs in Lisp, for the Lisp machine, a fact of which Stallman is completely aware. It was afterwards that my close friend Bernie, who was one of the other Symbolics founders, wrote Multics Emacs."

"And while IaEURXm setting the record straight, the original (TECO-based) Emacs was created and designed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and David Moon. After they had it working, and it had become established as the standard text editor at the AI lab, Stallman took over its maintenance."

Of everything in the article this, if accurate, is the most disappointing to me. I've always thought about RMS that, regardless of what you think of his political views on software, the guy who wrote Emacs must be a great hacker.

Although, even if all he accomplished was keeping Emacs free (FSF sense), that's still something. If Emacs had gone proprietary at some point, it surely would have disappeared by now.

Am I overreacting here? Is Weinreb downplaying Stallman's part in creating Emacs? Pretty much all software builds on previous software in one way or another, and maybe Stallman took the Emacs that Weinreb describes and made it into something much greater.

Can anyone fill in the blanks for me?
XKCD 1337 comic mini-series all about sharing as a way to take down the record companies
Streamlining SQL code generation and mapping tables to objects are two entirely different feature sets in my opinion. 90 % of the reduction in code you're talking about stems from the former whereas 90 % of the complexity of ORMs stems from the latter. That's why I prefer a leaner toolset to interface with the database.
You might have to change the platform name to match the url. Note that .ne is Niger. Is o.ne available? I can't read the registration site:
http://www.intnet.ne/
Google Has Even Bigger Plans for Mobile Phones
Xoopit: Inbox 2.0 startup
You think they're trying just to be sneaky? All of the alternative questions seemed legitimate.

I'm surprised that you can't ask about military discharge service. Aren't you generally allowed to ask someone the circumstances under which they left a particular job? It seems a little unfair that the military gets a special exemption.
Wow. tones.wolfram.com is bad. Really, really bad.

[edit: I love Wolfram's work, don't get me wrong. I mean specifically that the music generated is horrible. There is such a thing as objectively good music. Use tones.wolfram.com as a contrapositive proof.]
I enjoyed the article, I think the points are well thought out.
platformuno.com
unoplatform.com
theoneplatform.com

all seem to be available
David Moon responded with this comment:

"But in all fairness I have to say that Stallman greatly improved Emacs after he "liberated" it from Guy and me."

So my faith isn't completely shattered....yet
Thanks a lot for the audio link! I didn't know it...
Reading between the lines...bigotry against Christians.

In any case, calm down. I would frankly think twice about someone who actively worshipped a magic multi-armed, elephant-headed monstrosity.
In case you don't know what Buildix is. It's essentially a best practices dev environment including source control (subversion), trac (wiki & bug tracking integrated with svn), Cruise control, and Mingle.

http://buildix.thoughtworks.com/

Traditionally this has been provided as a VMWare image, but now they are also providing it as an Amazon EC2 image. Meaning you can sign up for an AWS account, and start up an EC2 instance running all of this out of the box within about 10 minutes. Presto. Very cool imho.
Angels don't usually donate huge sums of money, 500k is actually higher than I had heard of.

Your income + growth should give you a fairly healthy valuation, even if your market cap is 'only ~4B + 1.6 annual'. It does take a lot of time, but one good option could be getting together a group of angels willing to invest together. It will strengthen all of their individual investments knowing the total investment is quite a bit larger, and it will give you guys the running start you need to grow quickly.
It really looks like now is the perfect time for you to take some money (without giving up everything due to your track record) and grow this company.

Best of luck.
The serverless Internet company
Most companies which are household brands now ( Google, Facebook, Microsoft) etc. were unknown and did not sound sexy at first. The name becomes glamorous when the company actually has cool products, not the other way around.

So don't sweat, pick something pronounceable and easy to spell.
What's the thinking behind "too big a problem, too stupid" and then -> "more people would only hurt us"?
I've been thinking about writing an app to provide services that would go great with online backups.

Hit me up if you're interested in discussing more: mrevelle (at) gmail
Bingo - dead on; I couldn't agree more. Now where do I find these guys ? :) I think that is the root of the problem.
Obviously, Stephen Wolfram has accomplished a lot, but what is the deal. With the sentence fragments? This sort of thing. Can make an article. Really hard. To read. Am I. The only one. Who noticed. That? And if it's not a fragment, it's just a big, long run on sentence, with commas liberally sprinkled, throughout it. Usually I'm the last person to pick on grammar, but someone as smart as Wolfram should at least have a basic understanding of how to construct a complete sentence.
Interesting site. Happens to link to most of my favorite print magazines, and the dual of 'theissue.com's focus on blog posts.
Maybe it was faster for truly smart people to get a Ph.D. back in the day. My father had his Ph.D. in computer science by the time he was 21. I tried to take one masters-level course when I was 22 and they laughed at me.

I think it is the education systems' fault, rather than your own.
Until Dec 6th, my hangup is school, it's a time-eater. I'm taking some time off (and probably never going back) to start my startup, with some YC style funding from some personal sources; I feel like the money is paltry in comparison to the contacts and the tech-world help that YC gives. That's not necessarily a holdup of mine, just a concern. I know that it will be harder to find good business and legal advice, and such; but it will come.
Didn't notice it.
Is anybody of the opinion that these questions are somehow immoral? Like: how old are you? Got any kids? Live nearby? How tall are you?

Some of these are obviously too intrusive, like what's your religion. But heck, most of this is stuff we'd ask each other over drinks at a mixer anyway.

With the hiring laws the way they are, it is no wonder that HR folks have gotten the reputation as conniving. It's a job I would never want to have in a million years.
Try a clever play on misspelled words.

wonapp
wonapt

tough name to find a domain for
The text is a direct transcript from audio, that's why. The link to the conference in mp3 is in some of the comments above.
Web Videos Stealing TV Viewers, and Marketers
Why did Symbolics fail?
the NEW scary kids scaring kids
According to the web site if you want to do this you need to call Mr Salaou (72 29 98) or email him: salaou@intnet.ne. From the other information on the site I get the feeling that the answer is going to be 'no'.
"The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself."
Firefox 3 - The Shape of Things To Come
New YC competitor: LaunchBox Digital
We can add Launchbox Digital to the mix along with TechStars and Y Europe.
Panel Drops Immunity From Eavesdropping Bill
A picture is worth a thousand words. It's one thing to read about theory and quite another to get a glimpse of how their design process works.
Boeing bosses spy on workers
So, the cheap is fairly easy. Just get a group of friends together (hopefully not all hackers). Usually, your IM, Facebook, etc. is a good place to find a friend to play with your stuff. Or if you can get them to sit down with you, offer them free beer and have them play with your app. Just getting one person who is unfamiliar with the product to (1) look at the site, say back to you what it means (2) speak aloud what they're doing and what they're feeling and (3) tell you when they'll leave the site is really useful.

There are testing companies that cost way too much, but provide you some fantastic media feedback. For any startup, they either cannot afford it or they have friends readily available.

As to your biz idea, if you can't get people to beta test your own product, how are you gonna start a company based on that?
yeah I thought about using uno since more is available - though I prefer 'one' a bit more.
Google as a password cracker
Smashing Pumpkins.
yep, kinda hard
You can pull this off if your day job contract has no IP restrictions and there are no competitors coding full time as you divide your time between the start-up and your day job.
Get Ready For Wikia Search; First Screen Shots Shown In South Africa
If I was offering that service, I would be charging for it. :)
They're primarily based around the VA, DC, MD region. The management is formerly AOL, Motley Fool, IAC,, etc.
Gene Simmons Blames College Kids For Music Industry Woes
U.S. Control of Internet Remains Issue
I am not sure what kind of applications you are looking for, but in general there are thousands of successful and big sites out there... for instance look at the sugar network, its based on Drupal

also if you mean built on CMS out of the box, I don't either, and you will have to customize it in order to make something useful, but the point is that with RoR you have to pretty much build from scratch whereas with other CMS like Drupal you already have many functionalities included in the core and you don't have to really reinvent many things, you just customize or add the ones you want
Capitalist Perkins has a new venture: his memoir
In ID Theft, Some Victims See Opportunity
Kosovo News
Not all VC's are like that... I posted a question about a week ago about Disqus a YC company... and asked how big was the market for YC to be interested in the company and invest in it

this was pg's response:
"... I have no idea how big the market is in dollars. It's not worth thinking too much about anyway. Startups evolve. It's enough to start with something you know people need."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77608
NASA, Google partnership still taking flight
Yes, ruby is a good tool for DSL.
This is a great essay! I highly recommend "A Random walk down wall street" to anyone thinking about investing.
In the Kitchen with Web 2.0
Who here loves to code and cook?
Extracting 3D from the geometry of textureless areas.
Xohm's law
Well I haven't created a community yet, but I've been working with some friends and we're starting to create this startup. Our plan is to first get our university involved and start marketing from there. I just want to know what kind of metrics are you looking for with the feedback and what would you be willing to pay for this type of service? I believe we can create the community with the right amount of effort. Once that's created what value would you like to see from this startup?
That may be true for YC which does seed funding but the model for VCs that invest large sums of money is based on the home runs and if you can't show the hope for a home run, they'll probably not be interested.
Has anyone here done this for their web app? I am considering some grid-server space from MT, but if EC2 is good, it seems like it's cheap; is this a viable option?