skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zoodango seems interesting. I think making things random sounds much more appealing than stuff you setup up specifically in advance so that you take out more of that 'guilt' factor.
Flock 1.0 Beta Released: Surprisingly Very Good
is it really still open to register? it starts in 3 days
What I'm saying is that there is no scientific basis for making 40 year predictions about complex systems. And I'm not talking about people with bad credentials. Even the best economists' predicitons for a year in advance are pretty bad.
What do you do when you have a great potential co-founder, but don't like their idea?
I have friends who are smart and talented and would make good potential co-founders. And they want to work together. But often the idea they want to work on isn't right. Either:

1) I feel they're thinking too small. They're incredibly talented people, but they want to pursue what I think is a really small market, and could be doing something more worthy of them.

2) We have different opinions on the business prospects for the idea - I think it's just OK, they think it's amazing.

3) The idea seems boring to work on, often because the idea is 95% marketing or content and not technology (e.g. a variant on an online store, blog, content site, etc.) This is bad for motivation.

I have good ideas of my own, but it's hard to persuade people to change their mind once they've decided what they want to work on. Since I'm not in school, I've had to work hard to find other good people (through a lot of networking) and it would be a shame not to do something with them, So, should I move on and look for someone to buy into my own ideas, or start working with these talented friends of mine and hope to evolve their idea into something better?
A good suggestion. Multiple real-life runs through your demo can help you get comfortable with it, and weed out the rough spots.

If anyone is interested, I work in Cambridge (not YC related), and have a fair bit of startup experience in many areas (biz dev, operations, sales, etc) and would be happy to preview demos and give pointers and honest feedback.
You make it sound like this is the only way to go in life. "If you have failed, you still can live..."
Do you have an idea of your own? Talk about your great idea and see if you can get your co-founder all excited...
Regarding the interview, there's not much of a presentation to practice, really. It may just be generally helpful to receive solid feedback along the way, but practicing a scripted demonstration for YC is largely unnecessary.
Make a logical case for why the idea won't work in the marketplace.

If necessary, come up some criteria you both can agree to.

Remember that you both have to be flexible, or the company won't fly anyway.
They've certainly grown. IIRC, I've read that around 50% of Google's revenue if from outside the US.
GW is actually quite convenient for Gore.

"It is the most dangerous challenge we've ever faced but it is also the greatest opportunity that we have ever had to make changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway," Gore said.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/071012/137/6lvvz.html

He's been pushing basically the same program for decades, well before the global warming excuse.
The kinds of people Google likes to hire are "entertained" by stuff like really difficult technical problems and making useful stuff that people actually use. I'm not suggesting they need to take their staff to the movie theater.
> Really, who wants to give up so much for a few dollars and a chance to give a presentation?

You do. ;)
Twine: The First Mainstream Semantic Web App?
I'm thinking more along the lines of brk's comment in getting comfortable with the demo part of the interview and the pitch - similar to what any startup (ourselves included) needs to practice constantly to get really good and essentialize the message based on how it is understood by others. Removing as much of the stress element for interviewing is key for the founders to be able to focus on communicating about their team and plans - and getting comfortable in front of an audience is pretty important to prevent angst from interfering with the message. It is no accident that Jobs practices for his presentations :)

We've decided that in addition to launching soon, we want to raise some money to build out our application faster - so we need the practice ourselves.
1) Starting small is often the best route to doing something big. Starting small gives you the ability to complete something and not run out of steam along the way.
2) Ideas don't need to be mind blowing, they need to be good and for them to work well in a business they need to be solving some sort of problem that will result in you getting paid.
3) That could be a huge problem for your motivation. Is there some subset of the idea that you could run with and think a little bigger than they currently are?

Finding the right co-founders is much harder than finding the right idea in my experience, so I think that is why the general YC motto is the idea doesn't matter nearly as much as the co-founders do.

Best of luck...
A litmus test for what matters in a growth-mode
Not unless they can think outside the "40 buttons and small screen" box.
What's the difference between the two roles? The article assumes you already know.
I live in Santa Cruz right now, and am going to be moving up to the bay. We found YC about 3 months early, unfortunately, and are just now working on a demo to shop around for seed funding.

I'm going to be moving up sometime in January. If people want to get together and rent and apartment, I'd be really interested. I'm thinking a 3 bedroom, with bunk beds and the whole nine yards.

Also, just getting together and eating dinner and talking would be immensely helpful.

Is anyone interested? How can we organize this?

I've created a facebook group (hold the lynching mob please). http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5381210911
MySpace really hurts my eyes and brain. Whoever admits to creating it should be hung.
I live in Santa Clara, here in SV, I'd love to meet up, please feel free to contact me.
I think that honesty is your best weapon. If your co-founders are truly intelligent and motivated, you can probably convince them to think bigger. Try to do it in such a way as to show you thoroughly understand the current idea and its merits, which demonstrating its shortcomings. Just be sure to be nice about it; people tend to get angry when you talk about their own ideas that they put so much time and effort into.

Your course of action, I guess, really depends upon how far along you are though. If you're near a complete beta or working release, you might want to just ride it out.
Comcast Corp. actively interferes with users who share files online by blocking traffic
it's tougher to reject people without providing more details

As I've explained over and over, the reason we don't
provide more details is that there often are no details to provide. Often the sum total of our reaction to an
application is "we don't understand this."

The main difference between us and Fred Wilson in this
respect is that he might evaluate 1 or 2 carefully
screened deals a day, while we evaluate several hundred.
Who wants to bet that the "copyright content filtering" tech is just done by Peter Norvig in his 20% free time.

Give me a break!
He may have had some luck on his side, but he is most definitely not a moron:

Cited in the Fields Medal/Nobel prize in math:
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/30/cited-in-the-fi...

23 Primes in Arithmetic Progression
http://primes.plentyoffish.com/

Prime Number Titan Page:
http://primes.utm.edu/bios/page.php?id=187

The Defense Rests.
You'd be surprised by the skills of east european programmers (and engineers). Yes, their industry may be smaller but on the other hand there is a lot of good hobbyist hackers (e.g. in demoscene and computer security circles).
I actually think is not a bad idea to take the concept and try to replicate it. It'll cost far less to do it here and wouldn't be as much competition.
The big question is if there are enough of us to give it a try.

You can reach me at rafael_imas[at]yahoo[dot]com

Let's open a group somewhere to follow up on this.
This is a great idea simply because it combines two great experiences everyone in their 20s should appreciate - starting your own venture with friends and living in another country for an extended period.

Sprout Systems (the original one at sproutit.com, thank you very much, not the one Clustrix merged with) lived in Prague for ten months when developing Mailroom:

"The three of us met in school at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. After graduation, we decided to launch a business together. Once we got to talking about our past experiences trying to find good software to run our small businesses, we knew what we had to do.

"Since then, the three of us actually moved to Prague, Czech Republic to help launch our business. This is the internet after allXwe can be anywhere. We thought: why not some place that is both exciting and 40% cheaper than California? We will only be here for 10 months or so, but it has made this startup unforgettable!"
Profit is more heavily leveraged than revenue.

Let's do a hypothetical example. Assume that you've got a company that does $100M in revenue, 30% of which comes from Europe (so $70M from US, $30M from Europe). They spend $90M to get that revenue, all in USD, for margins of 10% and earnings of $10M.

Now say that the Euro appreciates 20% against the dollar. That $30M in Euros becomes worth $36M. Total revenue goes up to $106M, but expenses stay constant at $90M. Profit is up to $16M, a 60% increase. However, the operation of the business hasn't changed at all - it's all due to currency fluctuations.
Please don't come here. Stay where you are and try to make it work. Rents are already thru the roof from too many people moving in.
My impression of his definitions:

CTO = High level leader of technical side of the company. Tech idea guy and salesmen. Big broad decisions. Not involved in the day to day.

VP/Eng = IT Director/Head of development/operations down in the trenches implementing the CTO's vision.
I'm curious what motivated the change from "send us an email making fun of us" in 2005 to "send us an email telling us about it" in 2007.
"it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: "Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye."

Comcast has the right to manage its network, but this obfuscation of the source of the blocked upload is totally unethical.

Comcast is not my provider, so I have no direct knowledge of what it is like to deal with them and I am reluctant to base my opinion solely on MSM reports. But, if this is any indication of how they operate, I count myself lucky I'm not one of their customers.
Its easy to create perceptions of yourself that are simply not true. I was one of the people who got that mail. I really thought about shooting an upset sounding email to Paul. But thought the better of it -- amazing that every other person on that list did the same. Only when I met the YCombinators on the interviews to a subsequent cycle did I figure that they were nice people (inspite of not making it). Absolutely no hard feelings, though. Looking back, I simply was not prepared enough to do a startup. I eventually got around to realizing that I did not need money to built a product -- just a committed co-founder -- and so thats what I did. Yesterday's rejection did not sting at all.
to clarify, it would be to make money. Just a small bootstrapped development house where I can try a lot of ideas and have them either succeed or fail quickly.
Ask YC: Good SIP termination/trunking provider?
I'm in the very early phase of doing a VOIP startup and I was wondering if any of you know of a good VOIP service provider that offers connections to and from the PSTN? I have checked out Teliax and Bandwidth.com SIP trunking.

We're planning on handling several calls at a time, but each call shouldn't last for more than a couple minutes.

Also, does anyone have a recommendation for a data center that can easily handle steady traffic that would tend to flow through an Asterisk box? We're looking at The Planet right now and haven't found many other suitable options.

Thanks!
Maybe that is one thing that makes CS more difficult than other areas... that you must learn by doing. We really are hard-wired to learn by imitation (as the original commenter said). That is how we learn language, social norms, etc. CS, however, is definitely something that you need to learn by doing.

Interestingly, that may also explain the idea of "computer geeks". If CS selects for people who learn by doing instead of by imitation, you are more likely to see those types of individuals. If social norms and social interaction is learned by imitation, those are abilities that are harder to learn for someone who is more inclined to learn in another way.
MySpace platform opening up. Finally
Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, on stage with his boss of two years, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, finally announced to the world at the Web 2.0 Summit tonight that MySpace will have an open platform "within a couple of months."
Does Web 2.0 rely on instinct or hard numbers?
Story talks about how a lot of business managers and IT managers act on gut instinct instead of hard numbers. And part of the problem is that Web 2.0 creates so many difficult to foresee results it makes you wonder if there are any real "hard numbers".
Actually no,

One of the primary factors that makes me say this is that Google got over $12million for only a 10% stake in the company from Sequoia Capital. I learned about this after we had already applied.

If PG would have asked us for an interview and invited us, I (personally) would have rejected the offer if their stake was to be more than say 2%.

YC is asking for a huge chunk for slight benefits. Its not tongue-in-cheek, its strictly good business.
It really depends on what you mean by "good". Like most things, you can have 2 of the 3: cheap, high quality, and reliability.

I used teliax for a while and it worked out really well for what I needed. For outbound, I use voipjet.com to keep costs down. Ultimately, it will come down to the quality of your server, installation, and QoS on the network.

For enterprise quality, you need to start looking at level3 and those types of companies.
I live in Copenhagen, and often have Canadian and US exchange students subletting rooms at my apartment. They all complain about the living costs here. The web / startup scene is not impressive. The VC's are really conservative, and don't seem to get the early funding scheme. They'd much rather give millions at a later stage. But hey, the women are beautiful :-)
Ugh, users will run into problems and have no idea why. If comcast wants to manage its network they should at least have a public policy for how they do that.

Oh well, maybe people will start encrypting more of their traffic.
We have not made contact yet. However all of our research suggests that they are an easy bunch to work with.

It is in their best interest not to turn people away on the basis of no-intro. The founders of many of their start-ups contacted them out of the blue with their plan and expressed desire to work with them.
VoicePulse.com has been recommended to me from multiple people. They have a plan for people who use asterisk and other pbx systems, there rates are not too bad.
Factor FAQ
"Combinador I-Griega"? :)

En serio, en el mercado mas grande de latam, hablan portuguesa, no espanol. El problema de las tres idiomas es un poco dificil.

The largest internet market in Latam speaks Portuguese, not Spanish. The problem of the three languages makes things more difficult.
I have heard the Semantic web story since 1998. And I am very, very skeptical. Description logics (e.g. OWL) have been a solution in search of a problem since the 1980's. Really 99% of the effort on the semantic web goes into 'building' vapor-ware. I call BS on these folks and the only way they are going to prove me wrong is by actually doing something that solves a real problem.

In academia the 'group think' among the semantic web folks has been astounding. Try asking them to represent customer-supplier-product type relationships and you will get a vapid or angry stare. Ask them to do anything with time or measure and they start babbling about yet another upcoming and crytic standard. Anything beyond binary relationships gives them major headaches. It takes a database/logic weenie like myself to point this out to them... And I am never satisfied with their answers.
If you have great potential co-founders who are psyched about their idea, run with it right now.

(1) As has been said many times, having 100% of a small market is more attainable than having 1% of a huge market.

(2) If they think the business prospects are amazing, that's great motivation for them.

(3) Boring is good for startup success. The last field you want to compete in is the one everybody's excited about.

If the idea flops, drop it and do something else. If it works, use it to bootstrap your next idea.
I just sent invites to a new google group, its a great idea.
I took Portuguese lessons ;)
Yes.

It's a free, "un-conference" type event, like a BarCamp.
The schedule is less compelling than the opportunity to meet like-minded people.
Just use English or Spanish. Most hackers learn English the way early 20th-century engineers learned German, because most technical docs are in it. Or use Spanish because Brazileros generally understand it, and most think they can even speak it. :-)
My point is basically the same - that the people who don't pay $400 won't want to pay $19.99 a month either.
First I'd like to say congrats and good luck to those who were selected to go to the next round! I'm sure this is going to be a very exciting, yet very nerveracking experience.

For those of you in europe, although it's not quite the same thing as Y Combinator I've been following the Seed Camp blog. This seems to be something that may be of interest to you not in the US. http://www.seedcamp.com/

As for those who got rejected (like me and my partner), just keep on working at it and keep your eyes open to opportunities. We tried and by far that's far better than not trying at all.

t.
Fascinating to see Mark S.Miller and Drexler cited, as I know a guy who knows them.

On a different topic, Dark Sceptre on the ZX Spectrum was very similiar, but I think the whole multiplayer system (which was done by playing out your moves, inscribing them on a ZX MicroDrive cassette, and posting them to the central control) is probably alive only on some tapes belonging to Mike Singleton.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Sceptre
When it comes to taxes, Barack Obama is no Jack Kennedy (WRT capital gains taxes & technology)
:) That works inside the company. At Terespondo we muddled through between engineers in Miami & Sao Paulo.

But with customers you have to go the extra mile to make support for each language (& currency, culture, laws, etc) first-class. Our customers loved that; it was a competitive advantage that helped us go toe-to-toe with Google and Overture in Latam.
What Would a VC Sponsored Coworking Location Look Like?
At this point, I wonder if we should start sharing YC applications, checking mutual interests and after that decide where, whom and when.
Let's take the best out of a loss. If anyone is interested in South America (Buenos Aires) and build a p2p development platform, or need a highly skilled/experienced C++/webstuff programmer, drop me a line: rafael_imas[at]yahoo[dot]com.
Oh, I see. I thought you were referring to difficulties for a Latin-American Y Combinator. You're actually talking about difficulties for its startup companies.
Yeah... that network would get kinky fast.
depends on the size & structure of the company.

VP/Engg are responsible for shipping software/products.

CTO's are technical visionaries or glorified sales people with a big title depending on the company. Here's a link to the various types of CTO's [pdf article]: http://www.brixtonspa.com/Career/The_Role_of_the_CTO_4Models...
http://www.google.com/search?q=japan+mobile+dating+proximity
The really interesting thing about this is that they might be running afoul of some kind of data forgery laws. Comcast is sending RST packets that appear to come from the other BT client, so they're forging packets with the source address set to the remote BT client's address. Just terminating the connection would be legal apparently, but since they're forging packets the legality of this action is suspect.

Source: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9769645-46.html
Engracado, eu aprendi alemao. :D
A few months back, Vanity Fair published a fascinating excerpt from a book (Thunderstruck) about this case. Dr. Crippen was one of the first people ever to be captured because of radio transmissions. He fled the UK on a US-bound ship, and the captain of the ship recognized him and basically started a sting operation. It's pretty awesome hearing about him dining with the disguised Crippen by night and communicating frantically back to the mainland by day.

As for this DNA evidence, fine, it's pretty compelling. I just wish the article made some attempt to explain the presence of a dismembered, putrefying body in Crippen's cellar. Here are the facts. Crippen's wife disappears, a police investigation begins, and shortly thereafter, Crippen and his lover--both in disguise--flee across the Atlantic. Then detectives find a body in Crippen's house.

Maybe Crippen really was innocent and fled because he feared (rightly, as it turned out) that no one would believe him. But if that's not his wife's body, whose was it and what was it doing buried in the cellar?
Current minimal capital requirement is 18000 euro for a Dutch limited company, but a new bill will remove this requirement.
This need probably applies to other companies. We'd probably need a usd/non-usd revenue breakout in yahoo finance or its competitors.
Who are their biggest customers? Do they have any one entity responsible for, say, 5% or more of their revenue?
I'm actually eastern European (Bulgarian) who currently lives and works in US. I'm obviously biased but I think living conditions in eastern Europe are great. The somewhat relaxed atmosphere of those countries is probably great at least while building prototypes.
Google Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/yc-latinoamerica
And by doing so it might convince a court somewhere that the practice is resonable and decide to make other ISPs do the same thing.
There are no presentations at YC. We just talk.
But revenues are up 57% year-over-year. So if forex played a part, it had to be negative -- if they have disproportionate oversease expenditures compared to revenues, that would make sense. Otherwise, blaming the dollar doesn't help.
OpenID Sucks.
Y Not: Silicon Valley
Weren't accepted to YC? Are you going to bootstrap it in the Bay Area? Looking to rent an apartment with like-minded folks in the coming months? Want to get together for dinner and talk shop on a regular basis?

Lets do it.
I've started a facebook group for us to organize, however, if someone has a better venue to discuss and get things rolling, by all means, post away.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5381210911
I thought you were saying that investing in a company, especially seed investing, is equivalent to market research.

You can of course wait for the research before you invest. I'm not sure how that's an anti-bubble argument, though. The whole point of startups is that there's a risk-reward continuum for when you can invest, from highest risk at an early stage to lowest risk right before an acquisition. The bubble argument is that the threshold for risk goes up imperceptibly for a lot more people. Now how does thinking of startups as market research address the bubble argument?

And no, I'm not a VC.
I wish people could articulate valid points without writing like 14 year olds.