baberuth

That was unclear on my part. What I meant is that Color's valuation doesn't affect Amazon's business (obviously a simplification and subject to some overlapping macroeconomic factors).

i.e. Who cares if some investments are bubbly, so long as you're building businesses that are less susceptible to bubble dynamics.

Editing previous comment to reflect the original intent.

Don't build bubbly products.

Startup/VC bubble seems to be a very popular topic in hacker circles, as if all web businesses might get wiped out when the bubble "bursts".

It's wrong to think of all startups as being susceptible to the same sorts of valuation bubble concerns -- tons of "web startups are just businesses with a web component". Tons of web startups are just retail outlets that happen to do most of their business on the web.

Airbnb, Etsy, Amazon, etc just connect buyers and sellers, which is something brick and mortar retail outlets have been doing for time eternal. The valuation of Color doesn't affect their (Airbnb's, Etsy's, Amazon's) business model.

Don't build bubbly products. Investors will always invest in cashflow, whether its web based or otherwise.

Edit: Clarify ambiguous referent.

Pick a small project you want to work on, then start trying to make it real. Ask for help from people around you. People like helping other people, especially if 1. you make it easy for them, 2. you seem to be putting in a genuine effort.

Tons of "Ask HN" posts on this topic have already been posted. The first step to showing people you're serious is to actually do your own research first.

The post that got me started with writing code was http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/05/teach-yourself-you-t...

Love the idea. Rails Rumble a few years ago produced this: http://tablesurfing.com/ which never actually launched, but I was really hoping it would have.

Comments:

Without the "airbnb for food" tagline on the site, nobody would have any idea that this site is anything more than a bad Foodgawker clone. Nothing about it lets users actually do anything other than share pictures.

If that's the goal, make it clear how to do that or let us know when it will be possible.

to save everyone the trouble of watching a very slow video, the basic insight is:

    if you are working the mobile space, you need to code.  there are teams of
    2-4 dedicated hackers working on your idea, so if you're outsourcing development,
    they can iterate 20x a day and you can only iterate once.
    as such, you will lose.

That said, "Don't outsource coding" is too big a statement. Naval is saying "IF you're working in a crowded space, your iteration cycle will be too slow if you outsource".

There are times when outsourcing coding makes plenty of sense.

that was my point. the part you quoted from my comment was an idea from the original post.

Your point then that Adsense is "significantly different" seems to rely on the notion that it creates value (aiding the discovery process) rather than "merely redistribut[ing] the benefits of the trade".

You've basically already pointed out that HFT has value of some sort to some people (other than the guys who rake in the cash), so that makes it harder for me to see what the significant difference is.

The way I see this is: 2 groups of people (goog engineers and hfts) engaging in activities that deliver value to some people (and annoy the hell out of others). Should we consider acting in ways to prevent them from pursuing their activities; if so, _why_ are we doing that, and are we even targeting the more egregious transgression?

The "Is HFT good" debate is distinct from the point I'm making , so I'd rather have that in another thread. yummyfajitas, I'd be happy to chat with you offline about that, or in person anywhere in NYC.

Correct pg, though for the record, I do also avoid murder whenever possible.

A criticising B is not a problem.

A preventing B from doing something is sinister (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness).

No, its not meaningless -- A lot of good comes from discourse, but its my opinion that HFT takes a disproportionate amount of flak for their real market impact.

The financial sector at large is massive [1], and people seem to think that HFT is proportional in size, but its actually quite small, weighing in at ~2Bn in annual profits [2], which is a blip compared to Google's AdSense revenues. Google does all sorts of good things too though, so I'm not saying that we should reallocate all of Google's engineers to curing cancer, but I think the amount of discourse allocated to vilifying HFT and imagining ways to make "smart people do other things" is out of control.

Edit: Got to read pg's response to @joebadmo about what the dispute is -- No, I don't think its sinister to criticise. I think that's productive and great things start with discourse. I _do_ worry that when issues get blown out of hand people to change the lives of others in ways to coerce them to operate in ways congruent with their moral code. The criticism is fine, but exacting policy to prevent others from doing amoral things is problematic. The (likely bad) analogue for this is European and American cultural imperialism.

Obviously I don't think HFT is "immoral" as others have stated. (I do also think that HFTraders are compensated disproportionately highly w.r.t. their contribution to society, but that isn't unique to HFT's and is far more pronounced in other subfields in finance, and possibly startupdom).

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/26/friends-don%E2%80%99t-let-f...

[2] http://www.tradeworx.com/TWX-SEC-2010.pdf

A lot of good points in there, but it seems to be a little bit on the "developer centric fantasy" side of things, particularly on the Traction section.

Non tech cofounders that are getting 30 users before trying to find a technical cofounder aren't having trouble finding tech cofounders. Non tech cofounders that have 10 people committed to paying up to 1000/mo and signed letters of intent from the 5 of them (120k/year, 60k guaranteed) before building a product are few and far between.

These guys are gems, and betting on them is a good bet. Its like non-tech founders trying to partner with proven Facebook employee #13. Unless you're equally proven as a dev, its hard to justify asking for that level of accomplishment from your cofounder.

Much of the "find a cofounder" game is about making good decisions when its not such an obvious call.

I find the "talented people not fulfilling their potential" argument terrible. That's often cited as one of the costs of HFT, but its really true of a lot of human pursuits.

It just so happens that the prevailing sentiment is that finance, and HFT in particular are particularly immmoral, so its a popular notion; I find it as "bad" that hordes of talented engineers work on optimizing ad revenue for Google.

Humans will always be underemployed from some perspective ("Oh but she could be doing X"). Penalizing them for not operating in a way that is consistent with your (or anyone's) world view is far more sinister.

If its going to sound like he's reading, I'd rather just read the it.

Delivering a fully written out speech word for word in a compelling manner is really hard, so I don't mean that as a criticism, but it was a little hard to listen to.

Hi,

I've been in NYC and I'm hacking obsessively and around the clock. My biggest problem has been finding a place where I can seriously plunk down and work without distraction.

Would LOVE to be in a space with like minded people trying to hack and would also love an excuse to go out to SF.

I've been largely very impressed with the NYC tech scene and would love the chance to hack out there for a while too.

ftlogrtmfb@gmail.com

Reduced friction for adding places is a plausible reason for why 4square might have more venues, but what I was getting at is the order of magnitude of the difference.

10 MILLION places is a ton. Like I said above, thats like 250 NYC's. Even given 4square's reduced friction to add venues, the fact that they've probably launched in more cities, and inclusion of arbitrary venues ("Hey I checked in at the tree that's 10 paces west of my house!"),

I don't think 4square is lying. Now I'm just wondering how useful those venues are. (I am also pretending that Yelp has better than 10% coverage of venues that users care about). Incidentally, either way, you've got to think that 10mm venues has to wreck the data sparsity problem as well.

For reference, the venue count of 3 large american cities:

- NYC 47228 - SF 38656 - Chi 19079

I'd be surprised if Yelp had even 1.5mm venues. Would love if someone could corroborate/dispute this fact. While there is certainly a disparity between the two and Yelp, I'd imagine that the "useful" venues (those that people want recommendations for) aren't your home or rainapololypse2011. Adding those into the dataset actually makes 4squares job _harder_ with respect to teasing meaningful data out of the dataset.

If my phone ever recommends your house though, I just may come a knockin'.

or happier.

Very cool.

10M venues is a lot, and a really hard to believe number.

For example, Yelp lists ~13k restaurants in NYC (3.5k in Chicago, 4.5k in SF)

In the top 10 categories for venues, Yelp NYC has 40k VENUES (restaurants, shopping, food, health, spas, nightlife, and some more).

Either 4square has 250 cities like NYC, a fundamentally different definition of what a venue is, or Yelp is SERIOUSLY missing a lot of places (like on the order of getting only 10% of the venues in each city).

People have written about the data sparsity problem in the Yelp dataset as compared to Netflix (http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs229/proj2009/Fennell.pdf) for using CF techniques, I'm very interested to hear what people will think about the 4square implementation.

I'm skeptical, but I really hope it works, because I have very average food far too often on recommendations from friends with dissimilar palates...

Tomato, tomato.

Just splitting hairs about what people call a hustler. this post is just as easily titled "I've met a bunch of shitty hustlers".

Plenty of good "business guy"/"hustler"/"business-minded, action-oriented cofounder"s have just as much trouble finding good engineering talent.

Yes, finding quality people is hard. That's part of the game.

What I love about this pitch from a non-technical co-founder -- he tells us:

1. What he brings to the table, that he can/will hustle and is committed.

2. What he has already accomplished/shows that he can and will hustle. He is actively trying to learn more about the technical side.

3. He's very clear about what he's looking for.

4. He knows that he needs help and he's not shy about asking for it.

Good luck!

very cool, worked exactly as expected.

great landing page and demo, value proposition is very clear and the demo works exactly as expected.

thoughts:

1. that title bar takes up a LOT of valuable screen real estate, pushing some of informative content below the fold -- don't need quite as much title space

2. draw more attention to the "demo" links. Its easy to miss the link as is. The demo is great, takes 2 seconds only, and was very convincing. You should want EVERYONE who makes it to the landing page to convert to a demo.

i'm curious exactly what this entails as well...it sounds to me like "please build me something in exchange for some equity". if there are indeed developers interested in this, I am interested in working with these developers.

One thing I'd love to have built: http://baberuth.posterous.com/idea-regular-donations-to-me

A post about 60 second meditation exercises that drew me in with "naked girls" in the anchor text.

What actually speaks to me here is the persistence and level of dedication a young James altucher applied to a cause (to be fair, naked girls are a strong motivator for teenage boys (to be fair, naked girls are a strong motivator for me-aged boys))

i got one of the easier ones and was confused about why this would be difficult for machines to beat.

http://random.irb.hr/latexrender/pictures/bba40bf17043b0ced7...

i want to make the same bet with ed cooke.

Fix it.

A lot of people are thinking it, so even if the only responses you get here are "shut up newb" and "welcome to the party" there's an audience for more focused stuff.

People talk about it all the time, so they're just tired of what sounds like people whining and not taking action. I remember a few years ago somebody decided they wanted more startup news. They wrote a short "hacker hacker news" script. source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689204

Someone posted something last week about how the wanted it fixed as well. Less talking more doing.

Fix it.

A few years ago somebody decided they wanted more startup news. Train a classifier to decide what you like and run with that.

source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689204

Find a mentor. Get an internship.

@naithemilkman posted about how he's just getting into it and he cold called startups to offer to do internships, discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2280070

when you're just starting, the most important thing is persistence. You can't hit it hard for 2 weeks, take a month, then come back to it hoping to pick up where you left off. You need to keep pushing, keep making forward progress and keep it fresh in your head.

Having mentors at a startup who are invested in your success (because you being good == free/cheap work for them) will ensure that you have resources to fall back on, they'll help you past a lot of pain points, and they'll motivate you to keep going.

Don't lean on them too hard, think of them as a spot at the gym. You want to do it yourself, but when you're in a bind, they'll give you the nudge you need to keep going.

Cold call startups and ask for an internship.

The good: Great job building something. Producing something is always a win.

The bad: I don't want to rain on your parade, but I don't get the value proposition. Now I just type "chicago weather" in my chrome toolbar and google tells me everything I'm looking for.

More pointed advice, regarding execution:

1. There's only one thing to do on the front page. Make the input box already have focus so the user can just start typing.

2. Be smart about queries: I typed in "Chicago" http://howistheweather.in/#chicago which is a major US city, and I didn't get to a page that told me the weather. I got to a list of 10 matches: 8 in Chicago, 1 in Indiana, 1 in California. You should be returning whatever city Google returns to me.

3. I accidentally typed howstheweather.in instead of howistheweather.in, which does the same thing.

Nai: Congrats for taking the plunge. Getting a faux internship will be immensely helpful. 18 months ago I did the exact same thing, begged a startup to let me work for them for free. Having someone who is invested in your success, interested in making you better, available for you to turn around and ask questions makes the process way faster.

18 months later, I still suck, but most importantly, my mentors taught me how to learn on my own, where to look for documentation, what sorts of problems to look for. I'm definitely not a 'hacker' in the way you're talking about, and every time I think I know something, I get slapped back to reality, but the REAL satisfaction is being able to just keep making forward progress. To be able to sit at a terminal and feel like your startup's destiny, YOUR destiny is in your hands is immensely empowering and a far cry from waiting and hoping your developer is on the same page as you.

One piece of advice, which I still struggle with: don't try to bite off too much. There's a compulsion to understand the entire codebase before you commit to that host startup's project. Don't. Figure out heat you want to get done and just try to understand a tiny corner of that codebase in isolation, then fix it. Keep doing that and you'll eventually have covered the whole codebase.

It's a long journey going forwards, but you'll look back and it'll seem like time has blasted by. Having good mentors in your startup will make all the difference.

edw519, that post was a bit self centered.

To be honest, failing hard made me learn mostly about me, especially my own personal shortcomings.

I didn't have users Round 1.

I understand that it won't ever be a startup without users, but the last journey was very personal.

Derek Sivers said the same in a post called 'keep your goals to yourself' at I read here before.

There's certainly some truth to it.

I failed in secrecy before though, so Im giving transparency a shot.

I am also hoping that it will help me connect with people who can help me make it happen.

Edit: The post was called zip it - http://sivers.org/ There's a TED Talk - http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you...