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Stories from October 16, 2008
Go back a day, month, or year. Go forward a day, month, or year.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin


After reading the Woz interview in Founders, it's obvious that he wasn't paying much attention to the stock market. He was too busy doing what he loved. Their initial business approach (cash for product) may have been produced by their times, but they didn't let that stand in the way.

And that's the lesson for me. All I can control is my immediate situation. The other stuff is just noise best drowned out by hard work at things I enjoy.


I never said it in the essay, but we have actually been thinking it at YC. One of the hardest things we have to do in the selection process is filter out people who are smart but uncommitted. (Smartness is much easier to judge than commitment in a 10-minute interview.) And now the economy is going to be doing it for us. So frankly I'd prefer to be operating in a mild recession. Unfortunately this one sounds like it is scheduled to be a few notches above mild.
34.
50 Excellent AJAX Tutorials (smashingmagazine.com)
18 points by jmorin007 on Oct 16, 2008 | 2 comments

Good Day Gentlemen!

I wish to lodge a complaint with regards to this world wide web page turning into trivial entertainment the likes of which can be found on the games.reddit.com as the youth call it.

This shall inevitably attract an unsavory crowd and lead us down the road to ruin.

Kind Regards,

Some old guy


one of the problems with web-apps is that while they are cheap to get going ... many traditional VCs look elsewhere for their next investments.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.


While exit strategies might be fewer during a recession, the point of starting now is that the economy will (hopefully) be out of the recession by the time you want to exit (typically beyond 12-18 months).
38.
Indie Fever (madebysofa.com)
17 points by blackswan on Oct 16, 2008 | 6 comments
39.
Tim Bray: No Venture Capital (tbray.org)
17 points by erik on Oct 16, 2008 | 3 comments
40.
Is OpenID Too Confusing? (lifehacker.com)
17 points by qhoxie on Oct 16, 2008 | 29 comments

Can you point to one essay where he uses the phrase "make money" or some variant thereof?

More to the point: To me, a startup isn't about money. It's about freedom. That's where I've found much to like in his essays.


Trivial. Pointless. Get back to work.

(3.07)


Yes. Startups generally take 3-5 years to succeed. The economic situation that far ahead is effectively random, so you can discount it.

If I talked like that, my mother would say that I needed a nap.

We've done pieces ourselves, and...

http://www.madebysofa.com/ - Cappuccino logo at http://cappuccino.org

http://metalabdesign.com/ - splash page for http://280slides.com and http://280north.com

http://cocoagrove.com/ - 280 Slides logo and some of the graphical elements in 280 Slides


Would be a lot more interesting if you could mention what your startup does....
47.
CEO Change At Twitter: Ev Williams Back At The Helm (techcrunch.com)
15 points by jmorin007 on Oct 16, 2008 | 3 comments

Good arguments. I think there's a bit of a bandwagon of schadenfreude whenever things go badly, and people begin to outdo each other in dire and gloomy predictions of the world's end.

In my very first job, I got used to the idea that somebody, somewhere in the project, feels that the sky is falling and the project's about to end - on practically a weekly basis. Yet the project went on. Human activities have a huge intertia, and the "economy", and the "world order", are merely a collection of human activities with some system applied on to help keep track of what's going on (and, ideally, help it go even better).

Things change, but ever so slowly.

49.
Iminlikewithyou present their new developers platform (vimeo.com)
15 points by danw on Oct 16, 2008 | 9 comments

I remember the article on why Apple doesn't make conceptual phones. This article reminded me of that.

Apple's magic isn't that they have ideas of beautiful things. I'm sure every company does. Apple's magic is that the beautiful things they imagine come true.

(And I'd guess that's why a lot of people are Apple fans, myself included: because Apple seems to spit in the face of the idea that you can dream but it'll never come true. It's almost a giddy feeling.)


Sorry for the oversight; we just added "unmanned aircraft" to that list.

Crikey. Maybe the new PM speaks Mandarin a little bit too well!
53.
Companies That Sell for Less Than Their Cash (businessweek.com)
14 points by epi0Bauqu on Oct 16, 2008 | 25 comments

Actually that brings an interesting request.

When I registered to HN it was in a second - all it wanted was a username and password. super cool. I gave my short name and voila I have an account.

Now there is a lot of data collected and google is picking it up. I want to change my username to my full name which I use every where else. How about an option to migrate or change visible username if they are not already taken.

55.
The diversity trumps ability theorem (pnas.org)
14 points by michael_nielsen on Oct 16, 2008 | 26 comments
56.
FriendFeed Built The Ultimate Live Blogging Tool (techcrunch.com)
14 points by qhoxie on Oct 16, 2008 | 2 comments

I'll have to disagree with the rest of the commenters here.

These concept devices are useful the same way (as they essentially are) science fiction is. Inspiration and a focus on new ideas instead of implementation. Too much focus on the latter can distract engineers from solving higher-level user problems.

You just have to look at them more as sci-fi than vaporware.


I think it's fairly easy to write those things. What will be more interesting is actual data after a few YC rounds in a weaker economy.

This article seems to ignore the main argument I've heard: exit strategies are fewer in a recession. IPOs are out of the question and few companies are in an acquisition mood. So instead of growing fast and selling out before you hit your plateau, you have keep your traffic climbing until the market picks back up. That's really hard, esp. since founders have a tendency to get bored. I expect many will start something new at that point anyway, so I can see why it'd be tempting to skip the step in between. (That said, it's hard to think of a better way to spend the time -- even a failed startup's more educational than grad school.)
60.
Microsoft starts distributing open-source Drupal (cnet.com)
13 points by azharcs on Oct 16, 2008 | 1 comment

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