LeBlanc

Thank you to the YCombinator crew and BASES for creating the event, and to all of the awesome people to came as well. Hopefully some of you will be on that stage in the next couple of years!

The reason they want to do it in East Texas is because the patent infringement federal court in east Texas is one of a few that handles patent infringement cases very quickly. Most federal courts that handle patent infringement are very backed up and getting a verdict on a case could take years. Obviously Webvention does not want to get caught up in an expensive and long court battle. They make their money from the $80K fees not the court battles.

Make sure whatever you work on is something you are passionate about. Something you think is the coolest thing ever. Doesn't matter if it is useful or if it is something people will pay for. It could also be something really ambitious; don't limit yourself by what you think you can do.

If you don't pick a project you really really care about then learning programming and finishing your project is going to be twice as difficult.

Good luck! Check back in in a couple months to let us know how it went!

Great idea! You could probably do the collecting dues stuff with the WePay API. I'm using it for a project right now and it's pretty awesome.

If you are trying to save money, you should consider living in Mountain View, San Jose, or the east bay. Living in the city is fun and will be the most like NY (you won't need a car), but it will also be more expensive. I know people who live in Mountain View and Palo Alto who get by without a car, but it is harder. There is also not nearly as much fun stuff to do outside of the city, but that also means less distractions from your start-up.

Good luck with your start-up!

jQuery UI has a progress bar that you can use: http://jqueryui.com/demos/progressbar/

Another thing you can try to do is to load the site in chunks so that the user has something to look at ASAP. If you give them something to look at, they will be more tolerant of a 10 second wait time, which is really long for the web. I have no idea what your website is so this may not be applicable.

I am currently using a Linode right now and it is great. You get full root access to your virtual server which is great. If don't have any server running experience they have great documentation to help you get started. If you get the 512MB plan for $20/mo you should be good to go until you get a whole ton of users.

Given that you are running your servers in house, your best bet is probably not to use a managed hosting solution, but rather something like Amazon EC2 (for windows) or Linode (for linux). Back in the spring I was looking for a managed hosting solution for a small .NET project and the best I could find was GoDaddy which ended up being a terrible experience as you might expect. If you get an EC2 server, it should be fairly easy to port your current setup to Amazon's cloud since you will have root access. I'm running my linux servers on a Linode right now and I love it.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Or you could do something like the Notch, the developer of Minecraft did. The MineCraft desktop app checks with the server to update itself every time it loads. This is very common for multiplayer games. Giving your desktop app the ability to store data on the server is also a great idea.

I really like the idea of desktop/web hybrid apps like Dropbox. You can get the best of both platforms.

Flightcaster is a good solution for tracking whether your flight will be on time or not. You could probably use it for this, but it is obviously not going to be 100% accurate like an actual fight tracking app.

http://flightcaster.com

I do everything in linux already (development, web surfing, documents, etc), so I would have no problem with using linux at work.

I think there are more Linux users on HN than you realize. I found this poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687267 which seems to indicate that there are roughly the same number of linux users as OSX users.

I also recommend learning Ruby before Rails. I tried it the other way and was often very confused as to why something would work or not because Ruby and Rails both do a lot of things that seem like magic to a new user.

Plus, hacking in Ruby can be a lot of fun. There are a lot of really neat tricks you can use to do really cool things.

Interesting idea and I hope it works out.

The problem I see is that you can't exactly apply the online dating model to finding a co-founder. With online dating, you presumably date a number of people before finding someone acceptable/awesome. Sometimes it takes multiple dates to figure things out for sure.

But for a start-up founder, you can't go start multiple companies just to be sure they are the one. You need a level of trust and an ability to work together that you just can't get from a couple of lunch meetings.

I do hope they can prove me wrong though, because that would be awesome.

This same logic could apply to everyone; everyone should be hackers.

I really believe we should be educating middle and high school kids about how to use computers for more than the internet and document processing. Given the way computers and the internet are everywhere and are used for so much, computer use / programming / scripting should be a required class like history and science are.

Any other solo founders interested in this? I am diamond 2v2.

Also, if it helps, rails tutorial ( http://railstutorial.org/book ) is updated for version 3. This is a pretty good resource when you are just starting out with rails.

It depends on what you mean by fail. I've had a few bootstrapped business ventures not work out, but I wouldn't consider any of them failures because of the things I learned, the connections I made, and the fun I had. As long as you can pick yourself up again and learn from your mistakes, it is not a failure.

WePay could be a good solution depending on your needs. They are great for groups, clubs, charities, etc that need to collect money. http://wepay.com

Don't worry about the idea too much. If you find a good one, great, but this project will probably be an awesome experience whether or not you have a great idea. Taking charge of a project and executing on it, even if the idea is mediocre or down-right bad, will be incredibly educational and useful.

So... if you have have a choice between 1) doing the project with a bad idea, or 2) doing a project for industry, I would definitely pick #1.

Dropbox is another example of a successful YC solo-founded company: http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html

I am planning on applying as a solo co-founder as well, so you aren't alone. Good luck!

Very cool first app! Congratulations on shipping something awesome.

One feature you could add is the ability to set your mpg. My car, unfortunately, gets nowhere near 30mpg.

You could also have a google maps display that shows the calculated route by car, bus, or airplane.

Good luck!

In high school I programmed a 1337-speak translator, a hardy-weinburg equilibrium simulator, and a spaceship game. I really loved building things.

But then in college I stopped programming for whatever reason. I guess I didn't think it would make a good 'career'. This was a huge mistake. I got a lot of advice near the end of my education to get a job that I was passionate about, where what I would be doing was something that I would do if left alone.

I looked back at my life and one of the biggest things I enjoyed doing was programming those little applications in high school. All of that programming was entirely on my own and it was one of my favorite things in school.

So, about 3 months ago, I decided to get back into programming and have been working a few really fun projects, including an API for the Stanford Parser http://nlp.naturalparsing.com

Lessons learned:

1) go after what you are passionate about (obvious)

2) its not always too late to pursue your passion and learn new things (not always obvious)

Focus more on the resources at your school than on the degree. You want to attend a school that has good entrepreneurial resources, such as student start-up incubators, business plan competitions, mentoring, etc. Regardless of what degree you have, these are resources that you can use to learn about entrepreneurship and build a company while still in school.

Stanford, Duke, and University of Texas (Austin) are schools I know of with good entrepreneurship resources. Since you're about to graduate in a few months, you may have already picked your school. In that case just make sure to seek out whatever entrepreneurship resources are at your school.

If your school doesn't have any entrepreneurship resources, go make some! Start a business plan competition, or a business incubator.

Good luck!

I agree about having the students create a real business venture instead of learning about theory. Theory is useful if you are experienced, but boring and uninformative if you are in high school.

In high school I made $2000 building and repairing computers for people. This is something that HS students could easily do. Building an eCommerce site is another one. Doing web design for local businesses is also a great idea because most rural businesses have terrible web presence.

One thing I have learned from previous start-ups I've worked on is that choosing your partners carefully is extremely important. You really need to have worked with them before and trust them completely (trust both their honesty, and their competence). A bad co-founder can ruin even the most successful venture.

Right now I'm working on my venture alone because I just moved out to the bay area and don't know anyone out here whom I have worked with before. Sure, doing it alone is tough, but I'd rather do it alone than have a co-founder I wasn't sure about.

Are you thinking about starting something alone / searching for a co-founder? Feel free to shoot me an email if you wan perspectives on doing it alone. Good luck!

Interesting application. Good luck with your launch!

One thing I noticed is that it is not very clear what the little plus icons next to a recipe mean (the ones that are either gray or green). Pretty sure that represents the "health score" but is more green plus signs better?

Also, not all the things I was craving were on there. For example, I couldn't find any variant of steak. Would it ever be possible for the user to submit recipes from a recipe database and have your algorithms calculate its health score and then recommend other things? I feel this should be doable to a certain extent if you have the ingredient list.

I cannot recommend enough "Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingston.

It is a series of interviews of the founders of companies like Apple, Paypal, etc about the very very early stages of their start-up before they ever knew they would be successful. It is a great book to read both for motivation and for lessons learned.

You can read some of it here: http://www.foundersatwork.com/

Good luck with your start-up!

So I was out to dinner tonight and got an email from my VPS saying my disk IO was high. At first I thought someone might have hacked my server, but it turns out that someone posted the link to my site on HN!

I've been working on this website for the past couple of weeks. Please email me at andrew [AT] naturalparsing [DOT] com if you have any questions or suggestions, or want to use the API.

FYI, right now the API is not using all the capabilities of the Stanford Parser, just the word tagging part. More features will be implemented soon. Let me know if you have any specific requests.

Andrew

Everything is working fine for my linode. Dashboard is responsive and my web app is fast as ever. I'm on the California server cluster though. It may be location specific.

The #1 reason to start your own company is because you will have fun doing it and you have a strong undeniable urge to turn your ideas into reality.

It is not for everyone, so don't be discouraged by your friend leaving, but let this be a learning experience that who you bring on to work on your on your idea is extremely important.