skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's fair, but at the same time, I'm hesitant to agree, on a few ground-

1) You're certainly right that banks have nothing to go on. My credit isn't amazing, but its certainly decent enough that I could probably manage a small loan from the banks on personal credit alone. It would provide a few months float money, at the least.

2) You've argued heavily before that there needs to be an element of becoming personally committed[1], providing motivation. Having a Personal Loan over your head is certainly one way to do that.

3) Are there other options? Raising Angel money would be more difficult for us that for some projects, because we're not as Sexy as we could be.. We sent in a yCombinator proposal that was very ambitious, but were rejected, so we scaled back to what we thought we could achieve on our own.

We're doing a pretty decent job on it, but its not going to be the next Google, or even the next Scribd. Most Angel Investors seem likely to want to back a sexier horse, so to speak.

We do have a dedicated group of users waiting to sign up for paid subscriptions, and we know we could hit profitability reasonably quickly, but how do we get from here to there?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
Sick of Dreamhost, I turned to MediaTemple today. I knew that spending an extra $7 on my existing $10-a-month bill wouldn't be a problem, but I just had a bad feeling about it.

I successfully switched 12 domain names in under 3 hours, and focused on getting mail and everything else working. As I was working it struck me, why the hell did I sign up with this host? Understanding that their (GS) systems are based on one domain, with a piggy back system of extra "containers" for applications, I realized that I bought myself into a crappy host that I will not enjoy throughout my time with them.

I am not hating on (MT), but as a liberal developer, I believe that XPanel with a pretty skin is not the host for me.
You can if you put your personal assets and reputation at stake instead. To a degree, this is what you're doing in a startup anyway. You're putting your money, time and energy on the line, and hoping for a reasonable return on that.

Granted, you may be right in that it's not worth it for many projects. The project we're working on isn't as sexy as some though, and is unlikely to take over the world. What it does have is a moderate number (300ish) of users ready to sign on as paying customers at launch, and a good chance to tripling that within 6 months. Those aren't retire to Tahiti numbers, but they're enough to pay for dev.

Those sort of numbers make it hard to approach most AAs, who want to see a 10:1 investment:return
Hrmm.. Very fair points, both on outside investors, and on CAPCOS. With outside investors, I know we'd get a better valuation if we could launch, and start bringing in revanue before we go out knocking on doors. Investing in a dream and a codebase is one thing, but seeing the numbers on paper has to help.
Alright- You seem to be in the consensus on the news.yc board, and I'm coming around to your viewpoint. That being said, what are the alternatives? I'm already working 65 hours a week on my primary job, which I need to pay rent and the server costs, art costs, etc for the startup.. Then I'm putting in another 30-35 a week on the startup (12 on Sat + 12 on Sun + 4ish Tues-Wed-Thurs)..

I can't really take another job- I just don't have time to do that, and actually code anything.
Approaching AAs is hard, since the product isn't as "Sexy" as a lot of things. It's likely to a good few hundred K per year after we get it going, but it's not the next Microsoft.

Do you have any ideas on where else to look? Is there something outside the AA route, or even a sub-niche within in we should look at?
Fair point, but we need to do something. I'd love any ideas- We're Mass based, and we've got the code about 80 percent done, depending on how you count. We've got users who are ready to pay when we launch, and we've got a decent potential for growth, but we know we're unlikely to be the next Google with this project.

In some ways, we're working to get the bugs out of our Engines, and working on our bona fides, so we can buy google with the proceeds from out NEXT project ;)
Dreamhost gives you plenty.
No, I haven't come close, I just got suckered in when I was looking at different hosting companies and they had the best numbers. One difference between them and other "unlimited" hosting is that I think they do mean it -- I asked them if they had a simultaneous connection limit or any of the tricks other shared hosting providers used to cut people off that use to much bandwidth and they said no.

I would switch to a $20/month VPS like slicehost that provides a tenth as much bandwidth but I don't really need to set up my own services at this point and I don't have much motivation to switch, though I really should before my startup is launched. Latency is kind of bad too, my sites just feel slow when they load.
Yes they do. Are there any coupon codes to get waived setup fees on month to month payment plans?
Thanks- That's certainly an avenue I'll look into.. It looks like they do the SBA loans that I had mentioned, but also do their own private loans, which might be an option.

We have two people in our team- If I could get a Chase loan to allow our lead coder to go full-time, and keep my job to make the payments, we could be OK until launch.

It's not optimal, but it might let us get the time we need to launch successfully and quickly.

I'm very open to any other ideas, and appreciate the discussion.
I mentioned spammers or open mail relays above. I include bot networks in my definition of spammers as they're a source of spam, though I appreciate not everyone else does.

Yes, most DNS blacklists takes care of bot networks. Most also provide a web based query tool.

To identify spam sources, DNS based blacklists look at mail headers from trusted users. Some DNS blacklists may also use honeypots with accounts that should never be contacted.
There was a post about editors a while ago, I'm surprised nobody mentioned Scribes. It still in beta IIRC, and has the odd bug tho.
What's wrong with Dreamhost?
I went thru the same thing man.
I must say its a good feeling :)
Coupon code: PROMOY1L197

Choose yearly option. Comes out to $22/year.
Weak dollar prompts record foreign buyouts of U.S. companies
This is the way people are going to make websites in the future (except techies like you and me). They're just going to pop open a site like clutterme and CLICK AND TYPE. Do you know how much easier that is than WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver? It takes a sophisticated 15 year-old to work Dreamweaver. On the other hand, my MOM could do this, hell my Grandmom, hell: my dead Grandmom. No HTML elements, no uploading, some slick GUI voodoo-magic. That is soooooooooooooooooo Fuckin' cool.

Add links. Ditch the social networking shit. Make it less kiddie (or make one for the kids and one for the adults). Bingo. Good-bye Dreamweaver. Hello THE de-facto place to make a website.

This could seriously rock the world, man.
1) I'm sure you can find a way to get some sort of bank to lend you money regardless of your credit rating. There are plenty of banks in the business lending money in high-risk situations. Getting the money probably isnt the problem.

2) I see your point, but the problem with being in debt is that it is something you don't have control over or can easily fix. Having a collections agency call you all of the time threatening to repo your personal possessions is not exactly a positive motivator either. I would rather run out of money and be piss poor than have an unpaid loan over my head, personally.

3) Raising angel money is extremely hard I'm finding... This is a huge benefit of YC, IMHO. Guy Kawasaki said in one of his books that you are more likely to get struck by lightening than land VC funding. That quote is not as ridiculous as I once thought..

Thats awesome you've got dedicated users, keep it up. Aim for the sky though, dont tell yourself you wont be the next Google b/c if you think that way you surely wont be.
Python vs. Lisp (Your favorite dish)
IMO, using Python is like eating delicate gourmet foods. You know, Great and Innovative Ideas, Small Portions, Cheering up your mind, and tasting of the "Good Life".
Whereas using Lisp is like cooking that food.
Agreed. I sympathized with the "poacher" until s/he started taking needless cheap shots like that at the end.
Four words: zero percent credit cards.
a) This has nothing to do with Ubuntu.

b) I used to like Scribes very much, until I realized one thing: GEdit can do everything Scribes can do, plus much more. It's more mature, and more active. Also, its template system (which is Scribes' flagship feature) is more robust.

Most people don't know how powerful GEdit really is. Take a look at http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/Plugins to get a feel for what GEdit can really do.
Perfect spelling for a PHP framework.
You didn't say friends, you said people you knew. :-)
I'm certainly no expert, but if you have (almost) guaranteed cash flow within some window that will make paying off the debt not a problem at all, I see no problem with taking on some temporary debt. Obviously, you are heavily investing your own funds at the moment, anyways, so what difference does it make if you put up some personal assets?

I can see a real benefit to using a loan in this situation, actually. It should be easy to close a reasonably small loan quickly, you don't have to give up any equity or worry about people trying to control what you do, and if you are in the position where you feel like a short-term loan is enough to get you over the hump to revenue, then you are probably on the path to success.

I do have two suggestions, however:

1. Get your partner in on the loan somehow, too. No matter how much you trust him/her, it's not really fair to you to expect you to take all that risk while your partner takes on none.

2. Reassess your situation and set reasonable expectations. How long will a loan last for? Is that long enough to finish the brunt of the work? How long until you start getting positive revenue (are you sure about your prospective customers)? With all those factors in mind, is the loan a smart way to proceed (i.e. an 80% chance that nothing will go wrong)?
The MySQL server isn't keeping up with my framework's queries.
+1 with this, particularly sucks for anyone on (mt) working on a fb app since the latency makes fb's proxy time out.
we're switching to M5

http://www.m5hosting.com/

great prices and great service so far
Proliferation of Apple notebooks on college campuses
Nothing wrong with trying to destroy other team by stealing their members?!

Oooooooooooooookay.
Software Is Hard
No surprise that it got rewritten in PHP, since we're talking about Yahoo.
Sup - The GMail-like console mail client
Has anybody used it enough to tell me how it beats pine?
Freedom to Tinker  - Amazon MP3 Store Wisely Forgoes Watermarks
Free for the next 60 days: "Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications" book
Why Google cares about its Reader
Parse JSON with jQuery and JavaScript
The Universe of Discourse : Van der Waerden's problem
I feel your pain. My parents owned a dodge Omni hatchback. My mom thought that the best thing about it was that 'Omni' started with 'Om' (she is Hindu). Om? The car provided little peace with its uneven engine and body exquisitely designed to rust more efficiently than the competition.

In an incomprehensible display of customer loyalty, my parents next purchase was a 4 door dodge Aspen. This car had a 6 cylinder engine which produced a hamster-threatening 90 horsepower. The best thing about this car was the horrible white paint which perfectly obscured the bird crap...

The design and production of these cars ranks as the worst example of capital deployment in American corporate history. I mean, efforts like this turned off an entire generation of customers.
Linear Congruential: Random Number Generation, part 1
slicehost are great http://www.slicehost.com/
"destroy", "stealing", what world are you living in? You don't steal people, they leave or stay of their own free will. They're not trying to destroy you, they're trying to succeed for themselves, and making an offer to a talented hacker at any time is perfectly legit. To think otherwise is silly, the other team doesn't owe anyone anything. If I offer a hacker from another company 20% more $$ to come work for me and he takes it, that's called business, not "stealing and destroying". Besides, you can always match the offer.
They will work with you on getting moved to a faster/better server. They fixed everything for me within twenty minutes of my email.
He's just a lucky guy with a valuable name and some intelligent things that he regurgitates in his books.

Not very impressive. 250k old men with cats in their refrigerators? How deluded do you have to be to think that about the blogosphere?
fb seems like the most likely thing i can think of that made them implode if they truly had a "spike in demand"
If you go to a VC with a new idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things he'll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to develop? That is, how much difficult ground have you put between yourself and potential pursuers?

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

For facebook the question "how hard?" is meaningless. There are a 1000 replicons already waiting to take its place. The only thing wrong with what Ballmer said is that it isn't "a couple years", but "right this very moment".
Mashup Idea for Comparing Pages with Social Bookmarks
20 tips to get more juice from your laptop battery
Marc boy seems still upset that MS crushed his darling to dust. But then again it was Marc who had the biggest mouth back then.
All of these social network tools/sites will have their momentum. But thus far, none has been able to maintain it for more than 5 years. If Facebook could be bigger in its 6th and 7th year, then Steve Ballmer will eat his words. Until then, the fact that social networking site is a fad stands still.
Very good point on getting the partner involved in the loan- I'd like to do this, but I'm not sure how to. We have a Delaware corp set up, but since the company doesn't have any credit, I don't know how it could take out the loan.

Perhaps the company could take out the loan, and we could both co-sign?

We're probably about 3 months from being at a point I'd feel comfortable charging- If we got a 10K loan, we could probably cover this easy.

The problem comes in that if our estimates are off, we've made the world a lot more painful for ourselves. We've had quite a few customers asking to pre-register, but I don't like the quality of experience that would give.

I appreciate the advice, thanks.
Direct link:

http://media.sitepoint.com/books/ror.pdf
"... What does this have to do with Ubuntu ..."

The demographic that might be looking for such an easy to use application will probably be using Ubuntu. Most of the other users will be using vi/vim, emacs (don't start it) on the command line on numerous different persuasions of *nix
> We've got users who are ready to pay when we launch

How long (both money and time) are you from being able to launch? How many users are ready to pay and how much?

There are answers to those questions that imply that you can get money the money that you need now by offering said users a discount or longer subscription time if they pay now for your service when it's ready.
Um....interesting perspective (?)

I suppose using Java is like projectile vomiting the food, then?
it looks like nostrademons found it.
You are right about GEdit's power. it is pretty amazing.

Also, Scribes isn't only a Python-editor, unlike what the title suggests (maybe I'm reading it wrong).
"start with the very basics of algorithms and data structures" ,"more academic than practical", "something to get my hands dirty with vs mathematical theories" etc seems to me to indicate that you want to write code rather than work with proofs, runtime analysis etc.

Take it from someone who tried this path and failed. In algorithms, the long path is the shortest path.

If I were advising someone on how to go about learning algorithms today, I would ask him to first learn the basics of proofs ("The Hsskell Road to Logic Maths and Programming" by Doets and Van ejck is a good book as is Velleman's "How To Prove It"), then work through (at least) the first three chapters of Knuth et al's "Concrete Mathematics" - to get a handle on recurrences - and then tackle "Introduction to Algorithms" , probably supplemented by Skiena's "Algorithm Design Manual".

Avoiding the "academic" parts is (imho) a big mistake. As with compilers, the core of algorithms is "academic" and you can't avoid that (imho).

And once you get your head around proofs etc you may find this aspect a lot of fun. I certainly did.

my 2 cents. fwiw.
I guess I was hungry when that thing popped up
and replied to confirm:

"sacca": the quote is more or less what i said. it
was a long time ago though, so i dont exactly
remember. 12:30 AM October 01, 2007
"... My point was just that selling out to Google involved significantly less risk than trying to continue as an independent startup ..."

I'd agree with that. An exit strategy with google is better risk.
Thanks nickb for the tip.
Nice idea. But allow me easy integration with my web site. For example, give me the option to get the utility inputs without any of the logos or text around them. This way, I can link to it from an IFrame on my site and it looks like it's part of my page. Could be very useful to create data collection forms, especially if you also allow a small storage APIs so I can save the form inputs.
If that's from their market cap, Exxon Mobile is at $511 billion.
Justin.tv Wins Funding, Opens Platform
"Think different" my ass.
"I have grown exponentially from having this opportunity and it has been a major and most valuable part of my life and imagination." --Artist

Do you think he's making a secret in joke, that, even though his growth is exponential, it was in negative part of the abscissa, where the total growth is negligble?
Brain drain
Yahoo's Revival Meeting
I believe that is my new choice in a host.
How do Facebook Users Spend Their Time?
A friend of mine is buying the full set of Knuth's books because some algorithms are only discussed here. So if you're a completist, these are for you.
I know we could (They've offered), but I think it's a pretty terrible user experience.

Essentially, they'd be pre-ordering based on trust in us, with nothing to show for it. I'd be happy to give them an extended subscription, but I feel like it would feel cheap, and make us look bad, not to mention that it would be a pretty frustrating experience for them.

I agree with the idea, I just don't think it can be made to work in a classy way.
Wired vs Wired
they control the most accurate and real social graph on the planet

Hm, if Google analyzes the content of e-mail as much as people say they do, they can probably get a much more accurate social graph.
Grid servers are a cool idea, but there haven't been good reports on either mosso or mediatemple. (See webhostingtalk.com) Last time I checked, the grids didn't run all the software a standard VPS would run, and they also frequently had issues. Has anyone had a good experience running on a grid, i.e., one that was better than a collection of dedicated machines or VPSes?
Adobe labs: Thermo
Alex Graveleys Gimmie: A novel UI for interaction
slightly unrelated, but I have been on a few mid to high-spec (mt) (dv) boxes for a few years and haven't had any big problems other than things I inflicted upon myself like trying to install PHP5 or a new OS.
That's a hot UI, I hope to see task-based interfaces become more prevalent.
I'm not entirely sure what the humanities requirements amount to at UCSD, but at Berkeley I do not believe that the minimum humanities requirements (typically fulfilled by intro courses) constituted a particularly strong dose of humanities, much as the math/science requirements don't constitute a particularly strong dose of math/science. In both cases, you can get away with not getting very in depth at all, and often students who are biased one way or the other are more likely to slack off in the classes they're not biased towards and/or forget them as soon as they're done with them. So there's simply no guarantee of well-roundedness either way.

The best thing, in my opinion, is to get at least a minor, with either the minor or the major being in a humanities or math/science/engineering field. If you just want to get a job doing software engineering or some such, you'll probably have to make the technical field your major, but a strong minor in comp sci can be far more formidable a programmer than many a CS major.

If I had things my way, I would actually insist on undergrads having to major in the humanities, as I'm too familiar with CS majors graduating with an impoverished understanding of society and culture and a lack of critical perspective, often precisely because they did not consider their humanities classes to be "real" classes. The more I learn, the more I'm amazed that what I've learned is somehow considered "optional" by the rest of the populace. Democracies are only as smart as their ruling majority, and as much of the realm of smart decision making in national and international affairs is dominated by social/cultural knowledge and perceptiveness as by technical knowledge, if not more. (Though to separate the two this way is admittedly artificial.) Much the same applies to businesses.

In an ideal world, every undergrad has to double major, one in humanities, the other in math/sci/engineering. And I'm not even sure that the ideal is so difficult to achieve or unreasonable to demand.
I've used both Dreamhost and MediaTemple for hosting rails apps. I would recommend neither for anything serious.

I still use Dreamhost to host some non-critical stuff and very low traffic site (like my blog that nobody reads), store backups, and host my SVN repository, because it is so cheap and they give you an enormous amount of space and bandwidth. If you want a very cheap Dreamhost account, sign up with promo code SIDVISCOSITY and choose the L1 plan and 1-year prepay. This code gives you $97 off, which comes out to about $25 for the whole year (I profit nothing from this).

MediaTemple's grid server sounded great, but we had a similar 24-hour+ crisis once that made me look elsewhere. Also, they lock down their servers so much, you can't really run anything other than the standard RoR stack without jumping through hoops and pulling teeth. See previous blog posts with MediaTemple gripes: http://blog.wamily.com/articles/tag/mediatemple

The ultimate solution for hosting (a Rails app) is just get your own VPS from a reliable provider. I recommend RimuHosting (http://rimuhosting.com), and I am running two Ubuntu VPS's there. When we switched from MediaTemple to Rimu, I measured a 50x increase in speed in multiple areas of my app. For those who don't know, a VPS your own virtual server. You truly get your own OS, your own database server, with root access and everything, but it's on shared hardware so its far cheaper than a dedicated box. The MicroVPS2 plan at Rimu is $30/mth ... thats what I recommend for a starter Rails hosting setup. Rimu does a very good job helping you get set up initially, but you will need some Linux admin skills to really roll with it. This is good stuff to know though, so now is a good time to learn. I'm happy to answer YC'ers questions if you email me.

If you sign up for Rimu, please tell them that wamily.com sent you.
yeah, everyone seems to love them. they're at capacity now, they have a waiting list.
I bought this book 2 months ago, its a good read, especially for the nonprogrammer like me. I recommend everyone who is interested in RoR download this.
I'll wait until the e text editor comes out with a Linux version, thanks.
It is. And if all those shares were cashed out and donated to the government, it would only reduce the national debt by about 8%.
To be honest, that room looks like the town hall on the Apple campus. This could be a picture from there in which case it wouldn't be that ridiculous.