nwenzel

Even if your data doesn't fit in RAM... and even if it does... when you're developing, you should be using a sample of your data that fits into RAM.

D3 can do DOM manipulation a. It's more well known for its charting (SVG) functionality. But I've used it to build tables and other data-based DOM structures.

It's not ideal for all use cases. But for updating the DOM based on changes to the data, I find it to be a useful option.

Square built and fast library on top of D3 called Crossfilter. Speed is pretty amazing when you see the data source. http://square.github.io/crossfilter/

Have you looked into whether that 1-2M threshold still applies if the tables are partitioned? Such as a multi-tenant application where a search might be constrained to a single user_id. I wonder if that would provide, at least temporarily, a way to get past that constraint.

Two Factor Authentication. Please, all companies that have any of my data, don't just give me the ability to use 2FA, please force all of your employees to use it on their email, GitHub repos, everything. It should be a requirent right alongside https.

My personal favorite service is Authy, now part of Twilio.

Not true. At least not for this YC alum. I didn't know anybody. I learned about YC after stumbling across pg's essays. Decided to apply. Got an interview. I didnt even know there was an official notification day for application acceptance. Got accepted. No connections to anyone. Summer 2013.

Have a great idea, a great team, show some traction. Traction probably doesn't have to be revenue. Just find something that shows other people want what you're building. Great team means you're the best team for your idea. Not necessarily Ivy League school or Google/Facebook/Amazon employment.

There's a difference between a) flushing water down the toilet and b) pouring it back into the ground.

edit - clarify; Edit2 - add the following

I shouldn't have been so short or flippant. There is a difference between using water in a way that renders it basically unusable without cleaning/purifying it through energy intensive processes or massive dilution (dumping into the ocean which is still unusable without desalinization) and using water in a way that allows it to naturally return to the system through evaporation.

We talk about agricultural use of water as if that creates some sort of excuse to be wasteful. Will not running the water while brushing your teeth or shaving solve the drought? No. Is it completely wasteful and unnecessary? Yes.

I completely agree that ridiculously minor "feel good" measures like only getting a glass of water on request at restaurants will do little to nothing to show love any actual problem. I think it also hurts finding an actual solution because we feel like we're sacrificing so we've dibe our share. Sort of like driving a Prius.

Solving the water shortage problem is going to take a lot more than low-flow shower heads. But it's also going to require a lot more than eating fewer almonds. And the fact that agriculture is a big consumer of water isn't a reason or an excuse to be wasteful.

If you really want to contribute towards a healthier more sustainable planet, skip that burger and have a salad with some California avocados and sliced almonds on top.

I watched the video, but then read further down.

"We even wrote a little app to continuously flash a list of potential YC partners’ questions every 10 seconds, training our brains to not go too long-winded with our responses."

Was that the publicly available app? That was you guys? I used that app. It was really helpful for me. My Google skills are not working for me today as I fight off this flu+NyQuil induced hazed. If anyone has that link and can post, you'd be doing many people a favor.

Great story! I seem to recall a university sending out acceptance letters by mistake. At least this mistake had the happier ending.

Measure twice, cut once.

WeFunder offers the ability to invest in YC (and non-YC) startups.

I'm mid-30s. Dangerously close to upper-30s. Married. Two kids. Non-elite school. No graduate degree. I was in the YC Summer 2013 batch. I wasn't an outlier.

The one thing all YC founders have in common is that we are all incredibly determined. Creating a company is easier than ever but still basically impossible.

This is actually helpful on the employer side too. Makes initial conversations with potential hires easier because we both get a sense of whether it's worth investing more time into something that may not even be a possibility.

How does 24 hours and no cost compare to the time and cost without this utility?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3dYS7PcAG4 (nsfw-language: Louis CK bit)

Django Developer. 1 senior, 1 junior. Mountain View or Irvine, CA.

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Check out Snapchat Discover. It really doesn't have anything to do with instant messaging. It's more like headlines that you can dive into or move on from.

I'm fascinated with the concept of moving up the corporate ladder. I went from a dotcom high growth company in 1999-2001 where the avg age was roughly 25 to a post dotcom company where the avg tenure was close to 25. I always wondered, why are some people CXOs by 45 while others are still "Lead X" or "Senior X" (aside from personal preference)?

I've observed a couple factors that seem to be important. Warning... some of the following my sound like the crap that frustrates you the most at your job.

Smarts really doesn't have anything to do with it. Sorry straight A students. Reality check time. Classes were basically useless for ascending the corporate ladder. You were duped. (For the record, my undergrad GPA was something like 3.7 so I was duped too).

High performers in the career ladder game are ruthless with their time. Sometimes it makes them seem like an ass but they're just focused on their end goal.

The high performers seem to be closer to the revenue. They're not always in sales, but they've been in roles that involve big picture deliverables. Or they were in sales.

They're picky about what they do. They don't say no, but they know how to distance themselves from petty, small, or insignificant busy work. They take care to manage their image as someone who works on a grander scale.

They plan their career path. It's not enough to simply work hard and hope it happens for them. They know how to create strategic projects and get themselves into a position to lead those initiatives.

Hard work is not enough. The high performers aren't just the hardest workers. Though they do tend to work very hard. Their hard work isn't always in the "doing" of the work at hand. Tbat type of hard work just gets you more work and maybe some corporate reward of $50 in perk buying gift cards. High performers see that and figure out what needs to be done to get to the nests level of management. Spoiler alert: it's. It the stuff in the job description.

Balance is not really an option. If you're not doing extra, someone else is. IF you're playing by the rules, someone else is figuring out the unwritten rules.

The rules to follow aren't the rules that are written down. If there's anything that's the most frustrating to those who try to advance but haven't cracked the code, this is it. The job description, the company policies, anything anyone tells you is a big deal... is only important to doing your job. It's not important to your career path. If you want your job to be doing your job, great. But if you want your job to be getting to the c-suite, figure out the rules of that game. Following the written job rules only gets you praise and silly perks.

It is a competition. If the ratio of employee-manager is 10:1, you have to beat out 9 others to be a manager. 50:1 for employee:director. 200:1 for employee to VP. 1000:1 for employee:CXO. You have to beat out 1000 others. I'm not saying all high performers are vicious, back stabbing sociopaths. But some are. Know how to deal with that. Be ruthless with your own time. Be supportive of others. Know which projects have visibility. Become someone who sends out the "we couldn't have done it without these people" email at the end of a big project.

If this all sounds like corporate, political bullshit to you, that's fine. It did to me too. But I watched people who were no smarter than me get promoted and I decided to figure out why. It turns out CXOs are hackers too. They hacked the career ladder. Good for them. I hacked my way to th CEOs chair too. I left my job and started a company.

If you liked building it, then it's worth continuing.

The icons look great.

Happy to see someone makes this point. I think people assume I'm a little nuts when I try to explain that inflation is a tax.

"The biggest predictor of whether a graduate wasn't thriving was whether he or she had student loans. Fourteen percent of those without any debt said they were thriving, compared to 2 percent of those with more than $40,000 of debt. You can't draw iron-clad conclusions from that..."

Maybe "you" can't draw any iron-clad conclusions from that observation, but I can. Debt is a multiplier. It's great when there's appreciation (ex: buying a house) but a heavy burden when there's no upside (credit cards, student loans) and an impossible crushing weight if there is depreciation (ex: buying a house that drops 20% in value).

To all current and future students: good luck out there. Learning for learning's sake is fine. But don't forget to focus on outcomes, too.

I worked at a company that had many dot-com boom and bust companies as customers. 1-800-flowers changed their name to 1-800-flowers.com to increase the value of their brand. Barron's published some research in March (I think) of 2001 from Pegasus Research showing a list of publicly traded companies who, by their own optimistic estimates, would run out of cash and how many quarters of cash they had remaining. I remember because I identified the balance owed by each of those companies to us and gave the Controller and CFO the bad news,

Yes, the funding environment is different.

Congrats Apoorva and team! Wow.

Instacart wasn't first. Webvan was around over a decade ago. More proof that ideas aren't worth much. Execution is everything.

Business Development Companies are actually a thing [0]. They're consulting firms that take equity. So... yeah. You're pretty much right on.

That said, YC is a fantastic way for a young company to identify what's really important and to be reminded weekly (if not daily) to ignore everything else.

P.S. Good luck to all those interviewing for the upcoming batch.

[0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Development_Company

I love tools that make it easier to get a version 0.1 out the door quickly. Thanks for putting this out there!

Says US, Canada, and UK: http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/14/checkr-raises-9m-to-help-o...

"It ended?" Was my thought when it ended. It was getting really interesting. I think an interview with the two of them on Charlie Rose would be the right format to explore YC and how it came into being and evolved.

Well, to know that it wasn't enough money to care about you would first have to have done the math to know that it was only $900M.

I like your first point about it not being about the money. I suspect it's more about proving that their new (at the time) approach to startup investing, their new appreciation for founders, their completely differnt model was right and that the conventional wisdom that came before them was wrong. At least that would be my biggest satisfaction.

New products increase the size of the pie. When websites became something everyone could have, some work was lost to do-it-yourself tools but more was gained by the larger market.

How to figure out if you've built something people want.

1) Get someone to give you money. Hearing, "oh, I'd buy that!" is not the same as, "here's my credit card number."

2) Get them to give you money even though your product is not totally ready for prime time. Basically, even though your product is not done, not refined, difficult to use, etc., having your product is still so much better than not having it that someone is still willing to pay.

3) Short of getting someone to pay you, get them to get past some level of friction. If someone will invest their time to cross the chasm of not-user to user, it means they really want what is on the other side.

4) Get someone to use your product again. There's a reason online apps look at Active Daily/Monthly Users. If someone uses it, then uses it again... it must be something they want.

5) Don't have a product yet, just an idea... pre-orders (see point 1).

6) Can't even take pre-orders... You're just guessing. Build an MVP (or minimum sellable product if you're in enterprise). Don't try to take on the world. Find the minimum that can offer. Then go back to point 1.

Publicity stunts get in the way of actual progress. Money is fungible so it's impossible to actually hold true to that promise. They could only use google money to buy sandwiches. But then money that used to go towards sandwiches can now be put towards privacy.

You can use your term sheet to talk to your firm about fees. Your VC will have a number in the term sheet to address their legal fees. Your should be somewhere in the 1.25-1.5x neighborhood of that number. More if your books aren't organized and your records are all over the place.

$30-$40k is probably right in a lot of cases (if you touch HIPAA, Crowdfunding, Bitcoin, issues you'll need to bump those numbers up).

OP here. Any legal hackers out there who want to get involved, please do reach out. Our customers get really excited when they see how much work we take off their plate.