dbul

I love the secret language bit. I always speak Japanese in public and it is great fun. Once, though, I met a couple at an event and I recognized them from a time I was at a starbucks speaking about very personal affairs in Japanese. It turns out they were from Japan. Embarrassing.

In addidition, moral views are mutable. My friend has been vegetarian for 10 years and on account of some book about a farm in Virginia he thinks maybe eating meat is all right. My argument against his decision may have some weight, but ultimately virtue and ethics are an individual's business.

Yes, if this is your first TC article have a party to celebrate that.

Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate? I think this is a critical question.

Several weeks ago I was at a coffee shop and some girl was complaining to her friend about saving her data as they were leaving. Her friend said, "I just use DropBox." Had to smile as it was the first time I saw a (presumably) lay person mention a YC-funded company. It was nice to see an indication of such a breadth of success.

I'm not so sure it is that as much as...

they get hired for research/corporate work ... actually prefer _that_ rather than working in a startup

Most of the CMU nerds want to work at the best companies for stimulating their intellectual minds. I suspect people who get accepted to CMU recognize its capacity for strengthening your inner nerd, and so those are the types who go there: people who can maximize their time thinking about difficult computer science problems.

AlphaLab, I presume the seed funding organization you refer to, is going about it all wrong. They are trying to be a copy of YCombinator, and I'll challenge them to a debate if they think otherwise. What they ought to be doing is being more open to the startup community at large to the point where all of the startups in Pittsburgh and all of the investors in Pittsburgh are in one room hobnobbing. So far I have yet to even have met anyone affiliated with AlphaLab. They had some lame happy hour kind of event at their facility once in the last few months, but I left when the director started to waste our time with a presentation which I could have (already had) absorbed via the information on their website.

I've overheard a few comments from investors here. One said something along the lines of, "AlphaLab expects you to invest a couple million in some companies who give 10 minute presentations? Get real." This tells me the adaption to the trend of angel investing isn't happening here. Another investor, when I mentioned the startups in Pittsburgh he replied, "Yeah. There are not enough."

One solution, as I mentioned, is creating the illusion of a startup scene. Just have weekly events and do what you have to that people will actually go to them. Don't waste their time. Carnegie Mellon has a Pre-college program. These are kids who end up going to UPenn, MIT, Stanford, Cornell and so on. That is, they are there because CMU is one of the best schools for computer science so why not get a sample of what it is like there. So, if incubators like AlphaLab actually helped the startup scene seem as though it exists, those Pre-college students may decide they like it and choose to go to CMU over MIT (let's say Stanford rejected them by chance) because they feel a strong sense of a startup environment.

Why not have someone create a simple, private site which makes salient application information: a screenshot which may lead to the site's demo, video of founders, answers to questions. Then certain trusted people, partners or alumni, can rate the applicants over time. Instead of going days without shaving and being exhausted, you could spend a few minutes each day flipping through applications. Surely over time those you are interested in for an interview will be apparent. I'm pretty sure there was a reason not to use this approach, but it may be worth it to bring it up again.

http://www.barley.com/publications/article.cfm?article_ID=21...

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/multimedia/15818502.html

In the rich areas like Center City, Manayunk, and Mount Airy there are few murders.

http://www.alphalab.org/meet_our_companies.aspx

Informative: http://startuppittsburgh.com/2009/05/innominet-interview-abo...

Update: Looks like others have suggested this. http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/06/10/sign-3year-att-contr...

This was apparent when I was in high school, even: the kid that did best in our CS class had the best eye candy (and he went to Stanford and now works at Facebook I think).

So I'm going to bookmark all of these eye-catching websites on HN and study them. Not only should my startup be something that people want, but also something that makes them enjoy simply looking at it. Good-looking websites draw attention. Useful websites retain and help build a user base.

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  (mac zap (op place . args) ... )

At the end of sophomore year, the tutors at the college decide whether you belong there. Hubris is probably a strong reason for kicking out a student, though over two years humility is strengthened in most.

And database gurus tend to be snobs, so if you can't challenge them on an issue because you simply know how to use inner joins and outer joins and don't have a depth of knowledge, they'll bite your head off. Anyone in a position to earn a computer science degree: trade in that exciting independent research course for a course in Databases.

In other words, companies would only be able to take a deduction on their U.S. taxes for foreign expenses when they also pay taxes on their foreign profits in the United States.

This makes sense. The proposal isn't forcing a company to pay extra taxes. It simply places tax incentives on layaway until the company pays its foreign taxes.

The question is: do foreign taxes count as expenses? They ought to.

http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/tg119.htm

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=604323

Previous record holder with 530 points:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459289

It looks like those in their thirties are well-represented. I don't see why age would make a difference anyway. If you blow them away, my guess is you're in. Just spend a few hours on your application, get a few people who you think are smarter than you to review your application with you for a few hours, submit it, then go back to focusing on your startup.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Conelly

Hey, look at that, it works.

Show just the results for Conelly.

  1. Connelly Skiis

  1. Connelly Skiis

The reality is that it varies. You can't claim just because your startup is working out fine with 50 hours a week of work that other startups don't need more attention. The complexity of each startup is different; the number of founders is different; the amount of time a founder commits varies; and so on.

I should have been more blunt about my co-founder: full time job, girlfriend, side work freelancing, drinking with friends on weekends, and a startup. Do you really think it is possible to juggle all of that?