skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is what I was saying.Several bloggers and professionals are screaming Bubble because money is being thrown at startups again and there are popping everywhere. My point is that 1-if you understand that the same amount of money is being thrown at consultant to research the feasibility of a market, then you understand that the money is not much, 2-Just because there is lots of startups out there doesn't make it a bubble.There are way more clothing lines, then startups and somehow the market is absorbing. What will happen is the same as in all markets, if your product doesn't offer any added value through (functionality, price...) you will simply end up being dead before you can even close one round. End of your market research there.
So then you mean they are making a mistake when they hire people that would be bored, instead of finding difficult technical problems and making cool useful stuff. I think you're right.
Did you make a typo with your 6000 figure? It's actually more like 2000 or 3000, depending on the newspaper and your definition of "well".

Also, could you give some examples of ugly urban environments that were built in the last 20 years? From what I've seen of contemporary Japanese architecture, it's simple, modern, and doesn't try to be "original" for the sake of stoking the architect's ego.
6,000 is an exaggeration. There are only ("only") 1,945 "common use" characters that you are expected to know when you graduate high school. Besides, once you know the first couple hundred, you can figure out what the others are about from context.
Some valid points...

A quick search came up with this: http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2006/02/scorps_vs_llcs.htm...

So, advice to the original poster, look into these things yourself and make up your mind. Ask a lawyer or an accountant... maybe they won't charge you for this advice.
56,258 lines -- That's a lot of code! What is Auctomatic written in? Very impressive stuff, from what I've seen so far.
In most cases, I'd advise initially starting out as a Limited Liability Company of the state in which you reside. The main reason for this is that you (and your contributors) can get tax write-offs for investing in your startup. Also, it's much cheaper and easier to set up than a corporation, and provides a great deal of legal protection for your co-founders. There's really no reason to bother with an S-Corp, since an LLC essentially has all of the benefits and far less drawbacks.

However, most VCs won't fund an LLC for a number of legal reasons. If your LLC is planning to pitch to VCs, I'd recommend incorporating (into a C-corporation) before doing so. Sure, it will cost you a few thousand dollars in legal fees and paper work, but I don't know of any VCs that don't require incorporation first.

Also, I'd recommend incorporating in Delaware, since Delaware law is extremely forgiving to new startups. There's a reason why so many businesses are registered in that state...although, many startups have been incorporating in California recently as well.
"... The thing that annoyed me was that this article differs in no way whatsoever from what you'd hear in a Google recruitment video ..."

True, that made me laugh.

"... When a publication wants to tell its readers about something--even if that thing is good--there is an obligation to explore the issue. Literally letting your subject write the story is an abdication of that responsibility ..."

Good point.

Maybe you are right. Maybe it is a submarine ( http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html ) because I found the same post over on the Monster job section of the NY Times ~ http://jobmarket.nytimes.com/pages/jobs/ captured here ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/1685017453/
It's amazing how they could have mixed results with Kiko and then apparently do so well with Justin.tv.
I think I was deleting my post as you were responding, Nick. I normally edit my posts instead of just deleting them, but in this case I didn't want the post to be hanging there while I was still editing. I realized a few things after I made my lazy, cut-and-paste post:

1. The audience on Hacker News is probably much more interested in 'flipping' their companies and taking VC money, in general, than most entrepreneurs. If one assumes a goal of flipping within the next 1-3 years, my (deleted) input has much less value.
2. UBTI is an issue with LLCs, as your Feld link cites. The thrust of my original post was for everyone to research what is best in their particular circumstances, but I muddied that point with my own corner case as an example.
3. I realized how great my accountants and attorneys are, and how long it took me to find them. I wouldn't advocate some of my past maneuvers unless one has a really competent advisor. Unfortunately, competent accounting and legal advisors are difficult to identify in advance...you usually identify bad advisors only after they have screwed you with their incompetence.

To the OP, I would advise that you speak with a legal professional that specializes in small business and has a tax background. Preferably one that you find via a referral from another startup in your area. Entity formation is MUCH more complicated than most articles and forum posts would suggest. There are tons of tiny details that can cost you a great deal of time/money/control down the road if you don't get started on the right foot for YOUR particular circumstances. It is well worth investing a bit more time and energy in the beginning to save future headaches. Nolo.com has some decent books on deciding the appropriate business entity for your needs, although their books should not replace a consultation with a professional.
"Failure makes you ready in ways that success never could."

This is a very insightful article. Anyone down on a YC rejection or similar should give it a read.
we're putting finishing touches to "our product" (outside the US and for enterprise clients) and in the next week the sales would begin...and we're just facing the reality of selling to enterprises.. its a really ardous task... at this point.. we're thinkin of bringing in more people (either as co founders, or as partners). shoot me an email if you would be interested
Perhaps we learned some things.
Storm Worm botnet could be world's most powerful supercomputer
From the URLs, it looks like Auctomatic has been written in PHP, ASP, Arc, Fortran, Python, QBasic, and Cobol :)
I Was a Hacker for the MPAA
Sent a quick email to NYT to see what the story behind this is ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/1685662827/ See what the response is.
Doing Business World Bank Report (pdf)
A ranking of the ease of doing business in different countries.
eBay's Chaos Theory
If I had a botnet like that I would donate my rooted CPUs to protein folding.
Of the YC startups I know about Justin is definitely the most interesting to me and I have a lot of relevant experience. But compared with running my own startup I can't imagine joining them this late in the game and being just an employee with a small amount of equity.
Startups: The Need for Speed -- Dominic Orr of Aruba Networks [podcast]
Because the law is bad.
Facebook: Who needs Google? Facebook's stealth ad system
> There are tons of tiny details that can cost you a great deal of time/money/control down the road if you don't get started on the right foot

For instance?
Interesting, but has to be put in an iframe to enable the user to see the end of the page navigation etc.

Also, for big datasets, it should unload the first items as you scroll. Also the scroller is deceptive - if it's in an iframe, perhaps it can be overriden to show where you really are in the virtual dataset. Enable dragging it for quick positioning too.

Not that simple, it turns out.
windows 7 demo - mini kernel with web server
That is what I was saying: the article mentions that Radiohead sold downloads for 10M$, but later he goes on claiming that they still have to hope for selling T-Shirts and concert tickets to make any real money. 10M$ sure seems like real money to me.
Ask YC: your favorite life management tools on the internet?
What internet tools do you use to organize your life? For example ToDo-Lists, bookmarking services etc.?
You can just update a div in an ajaxy way, you don't need an iframe.

There are definitely some things I don't like about this approach, though, namely SEO/SEM considerations - content on the fly invites poor indexing of content (i.e., no content) if you're using an onload to pull the first n items, spiders won't see what you have to say.
Language Waves
next stop on their website: "radiohead likes up and coming XXXX, download their album here"
True, although last time I had that, I could also order books on someone else's expense.
It doesn't take any clever parsing to see that if person A says "X is possible" and person B says, "No, you're wrong! It's not 100% certain that X will happen!" then person B is misinterpreting person A, either mistakenly or deliberately.
Cool. How about wraparound? That is, after you look at the first 20 results, you'd like to see the LAST 20 results.
Profit, not revenue.
Children detach from natural world as they explore the virtual one
Cross MySpace, cell phones - mobile social networking taking off
New Web site brings the mixtape spirit alive
How Many Site Hits? Depends Who's Counting
A Brief History of Usenet
A Radical Feminist Analyzes the Utilikilt
I just finished "The Long Tail". A good point Anderson brings up is that more often than not, eBay has no idea what its users are selling. People don't use standard SKUs, etc.

This means they can't build a real recommendation engine, which is needed to deliver the mass of long tail content to users adroitly.
Hackers and suits: Tips for bridging the gap
here is a Great Divide in the realm of information technology. I'm not talking about Windows versus Linux or Java versus .NET-no, nothing like that. The gap I'm referring to is between software developers and the people who manage them-what I call hackers and suits.
Ask YC: how to best make money on the side?
The need to earn money is once again weighing down on me. Realistically I don't see any of my projects support me financially in the near future. The obvious choice seemks to do consulting, but my experiences were not so good. I usually don't manage to work on my own projects in parallel with consulting jobs. Typical contracts for me took several months, and afterwards felt like a waste of time (except for my bank account being happy). Small web design contracts usually don't pay very well, and don't require much programming. I am not a designer, so I would have to share the deal with a designer, which makes it economically uninteresting.

What kind of arrangements have worked for you?
Building the Semantic Web in Blocks
I've been mulling over Semantic Web things for the last few days - and this idea hit me today which I'm calling 'Blocks'. Blocks could potentially be a difficult project to implement, but let me chuck out an idea and see what people think.
Why Lisp?
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny --Edi Weitz
Wrap-Up: Future of Web Apps London 2007
The week before last at The Future of Web Apps I presented twice on "How to Turn Your App into a Money Making Business" and spoke on "Lessons Learned" closing panel. My business partner Steven, Dogster Inc.'s Chief Business Office did a straight hour on maximizing Direct Ad Sales and Sponsorship Programs to a room of furious note taking attendees. If I had videotaped the presentation I am positive it would have been requisite viewing for any consumer facing web company. I would strongly recommend he be invited to do a repeat performance soon.
Wow - what a great effot. I'm definitely looking forward to the 2008 version which includes web programming.
Keep Your Startup Co-Founder Closer
Sun Tzu is generally credited for coming up with the phrase, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer." He obviously never launched a startup and got shafted by a co-founder.
The Longtail Of Venture: Why Some Companies Will Continue To Need VC And Others Won't
"This data does not correlate directly to the number of visitors, but it does give them ballpark figures that they say are far more accurate than the extrapolations drawn by ratings companies based on panel samplings."

I think they mean it does correlate, but not perfectly. Otherwise that statement is self-contradictory.
d'oh, thanks!

Updated...
Dick Costolo's (of Feedburner) Entrepreneurial Experience
I think yours is a common feeling among true hackers. Sales is less of a "binary" thing, there are too many other grey areas that get in the way of making it a process that can be solved with pure "math".

You could say that I am more of a social-engineering hacker than a software hacker. Although, I know more than a fair bit of perl, C++, SQL, linux, etc. I've written my own apps and various bits of glue logic as part of getting a sale done, because I could, and because it was the most efficient use of resources.

But sales-hacking is (IMO) sort of a language or process unto itself. It can be fun and challenging and rewarding (when it's not utterly aggravating :) )
Any major snags you have found going this route?

I enjoy working in lisp, but I find the zillions of libraries in python keeps me coming back...
Yes, I've done a major project in Common Lisp and had to do so many things on foot, I just ran out of steam. I guess it depends on how many libraries you can use as they are, and how much you have to write yourself anyway.
Startup Success Benchmark: Have You Made Your Users Stupid?
Heh... From reading the first part of this, I rather expected it to be an implementation of a Lisp-like language (complete with first-class functions, macros, the whole deal, maybe sans some of the bloat) on top of some other runtime environment like Java or Python. That would give the developer the power of Lisp with the libraries of some other language.

It quickly became apparent that it was just an attempt to "dumb down" Lisp.

Incidentally, does anyone know of a (mature) language that does the above? Preferably derived from Scheme? I have really wanted to use this for some time, but I've resisted implementing it myself, thinking that "Someone MUST have done this by now..." As it happens, people have, but it's typically more of an "I hacked this together last weekend; please don't actually use it for anything!" type project.
There are limits in human abilities. We actually don't multi-task very well at all. Concentration is key.

This means that the scarcity of time should kill all illusions of the potential to do it all. There just isn't enough time to get good at many things.

If we could fork our intelligence, learn and do multiple things at once, even if only virtually, and then merge the result, we'd get closer to the ideal. Unfortunately, this is still science fiction.
DZone (www.dzone.com) has that endless pagination thing. If you scroll the articles down, they just keep loading up.

I've got to admit I'm conflicted about this issue. On one hand, what the heck is the point in making the users flip through a dozen pages? Simply to get more hits and ad revenue? On the other hand, the google-can't-index-you issue sucks. And users are used to using the back button and paginators at the bottom of the screens. I guess right now I think that pageless navigation is a "better" way, but I'm not sure the users or market has caught up with it yet.
Small business banking
All-
Who do you use for your small business banking purposes? Any recommendations/important features to watch out for?
Thanks.
A friend of mine has just released a book on this subject: "The Secret of Successful Failing." She is currently promoting with a number of bonuses: http://www.ginaml.com/bookbonus.htm
The Telephone Newspaper
Facebook App (feedback welcome):  Friend Personality Videos
Synthetic Biology: Reshaping nature but at what cost?
Well, go figure -- not an hour after I post this, I find Kawa:
http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/

I remember finding this before, but for some reason deciding it was not what I wanted. I can't find anything important missing, though... Cool.
I was about to post saying you must not have looked very hard. I've been using Kawa successfully for years. Its biggest fault is that there are so few bugs that I'm not motivated to keep up with new releases.

There is at least one other JVM-based Scheme implementation out there, and it's stable and well maintained too.
That web site looks incredibly spammy.
It's an O/S, it's a Browser
Free Programming Tips are Worth Every Penny.
14th and Broad St. $20 for a handjob.
Walt Mossberg tells carriers to "Free my phone"
I agree. Python is a great language with fantastic support. I'm reading ANSI Common Lisp right now (it was a 30th b-day gift from mom, actually - does that officially qualify me as a geek?). I don't know that I'll get to a point where I'm predominately hacking in Lisp, but the book is clearly written and too enjoyable not to read.
Consulting can be a rewarding experience. You have pointed out all the bad parts, and I agree. But where else can you see how so many businesses are run? Every company that is paying you to do technical work has already provided enough value to their users that they can afford to pay you. That means they must be doing something right. Learning how they provide value, how they decide to fund or de-fund IT projects, learning how it's easy to hack a small system but not so easy when you've got 12 thousand coders and a huge legacy base -- these are all lessons that you'll need to know if you want to start a business that is going to grow.

Plus the money is good, no?
JTV is still small enough that you can have a big impact, and you're definitely not treated as "just an employee".

I've been here a little over a month. During the first three weeks, I re-wrote the chat back-end. Now I'm re-writing our search engine. I've also done a bunch of work on our SEO. The work is varied, interesting, and technically challenging. We have big ambitions too - don't think all the interesting work will have been done already when you get here.

Almost every day I also get to be involved in a discussion whose outcome has a real impact on the future direction of the company, and people listen to me - it's awesome!
Dark Pools of Liquidity: using peer to peer exchanges to hide financial trades
I learned a lot through my consulting work, and I met interesting people and some new friends. It is just that it is taking up too much time. Even 3 months, which might be a kind of a minimum contract, is almost 1% of the productive time I might have left in my life, if I consider another 30 years in the workforce. I hope to be productive longer than that, but who knows.

I wish I could find more interesting contracts, but I am pretty much pigeonholed into Java Web Applications.

Today I finally received the "Collective Intelligence" book in the mail, it is so much fun (I always wanted to do things like that). Perhaps if I focus my projects on doing stuff like that, I could acquire different kinds of contracts. So far most of my own projects are also just "normal" web applications, because I try to make money. Mistake? I believe in the "do what you love and you will be successful" mantra, but in reality I still tend to make compromises with the projects I choose (because of the money scare).
Ask YC: Your bug tracker
For all you YC and non-YC teams:

I'm building a better & faster bug tracker. Entering and managing bugs should be fast & easy.

My question to you: what's the bug tracker you currently use? What do you like about it, what not? What would you wish for in a bug tracker?
C# 3.0 - Lambda Expressions
Images search on live.com does this. It's definitely great for image search since it's very easy to glance at an image and know if it's what you're looking for. I like it better than pagination for text search results but I think the issue is that it reduces ad revenue.
The only way I have figured out how to do both is by dedicating each day to one or the other. For now: Monday and Wednesday: consulting. All day Tues, Thurs, Fri, Sat, Sunday: my startup. I don't even bother trying to work on my startup on Monday or Wednesday night. Any user requests from my clients are held until Monday and Wednesday. I even have them trained to email me: no more interruptions.

This way I get the best of both worlds. Try it.
What kind of consulting work do you do? It sounds as if you can work from home? I usually work on site. There were some projects where I could work from home, and I liked it, but they tended to be the smaller ones that yielded less money.

Edit: anyway, good advice, I will try it ;-)
I hate to say it, but it's going to be a bit of a long, hard road. Windows and Linux are very, very different animals. And, if you're cominig from a no command line, GUI filled world, it's going to be a very steep learning curve for you.

If you're not familiar with shell scripting, it will take some time, just to learn your way around the command line. Then, you have to figure out how to install and configure Apache. That's difficult. Then, installing and configuring MySQL... Again, difficult and time consuming. Then, you're talking about installing Perl/Python/PHP scripts and having them talk to the web server, that's an additional learning curve.

I'm thinking that a very knowledgable Windows geek who has set up IIS before, and understands web dev on a Windows box, but without any linux experience whatsoever is probably looking at a couple of months of dedicated learning to get all the technologies to work together well. And then, security is an issue.

I mean, just learning how to edit a config file over the comand line using Emacs or Vi could take a week.

If you're familiar with Windows, try using WAMP on Server 2003. You can ususally get Windows 2003 hosting for a $10-20 premium over Linux hosting. There will still be a learning curve, but it will be a lot shorter.

That being said, any forray into Linux land is a good one. It teaches you a lot of really good things about how computers and networks work that you just dont' understand from a Windows only world. And, knowing *nix is a skill that won't be obsolete the next product cycle. Unix is well worth learning, but it is probably not the best option if you want to launch your startup next week.
I'm a married guy, so I feel a little better about "selling out" and doing some consulting. I've also moved up the food chain from development into strategic technology management consulting, so when I say "consulting", it's probably a little different than when you say it.

It all has to do with risk profile -- how much risk are you comfortable with? You always hear these stories about founders who made it work just running on credit cards and family loans until they took off. But what happens if you don't take off? You can only max out your cards and family loans every so often. So there's short-term risk like "let's live on noodles and saltines for the next six months" and then there's long-term risk like "I'm going to go bankrupt, lose my house, and my wife is going to leave me". If you're single without a lot of commitments, go for more risk and chase your dream. But remember that even if you get your dream, life is always about compromise.

But if you decide to go to some kind of hourly-rate consulting for a while, take my advice and stretch your skills some. Instead of just Java Web apps, be a team lead for project, or an architect. I think as nerd we focus on the technical aspects of a project, but there are all kinds of good business lessons in there that can help you with your startup, if you go looking for them. YMMV
What are a Startup's key assets?
I don't want to demean consulting at all, I guess I just haven't managed to get into the fun consulting jobs yet. But I also feel the "family pressure", I am certainly not the "gamble away your family" kind of risk person.