Bill Moorier. Originally from the UK, now living in Washington State. I was the 2nd employee at Justin.TV (aka Twitch). Now I'm a stay-at-home dad and homeschool teacher.
I've been using the site for a few days now. My feature requests involve getting rid of potential roadblocks:
Some kind of persistent cookie-based login would be nice. Having to login each time I return to the site is annoying.
Larger default fonts. Yes, I can change my browser's preferences and override your font size. No, I don't want to have to do that for each of the browsers on each of the different computers I use throughout the day!
A longer username limit. abstractnonsense wasn't allowed so I had to use abstractbill instead. Not a big deal, but it did strike me as a rather small limit.
Overall though congrats on the site. I've grown tired of reddit as it has moved away from its early demographic and this is just what I've been looking for. Cheers.
How about an area where we can submit startup advice and vote on it, for example: "don't use bank of america for your business banking", "do incorporate as a C corp in delaware", etc. I think the advice submitted and comment threads generated could be quite valuable.
I think I remember Paul saying that the architect who worked on the Boston YC office also designed the table. I'd had a fair amount of wine that evening though, and this was a year or so back, so I could be completely confused ;-)
Congrats to the founders for building and launching a very nice-looking site.
At this point though, I'm more likely to use something like wesabe for keeping track of my spending since it understands my existing online bank accounts rather than requiring me to enter transactions by hand - that seems like a killer feature to me since my spending these days is overwhelmingly electronic.
[disclaimer: I haven't used either tool. My opinion is based only on having seen the online demos.]
"Ultimately the goal is to understand *all* your expenses completely at a central location."
That's an excellent goal to have. Full integration of bank and credit card accounts would definitely be important for me.
The following may be outside of the scope of your product, but I would love to have a system that knew my finances and goals so well that it could give me useful advice such as "start buying product A, which you seem to use a lot of, in bulk from store B", "use the savings you have in account X to reduce the debt you have on credit card Y", "apply for this savings account that has a higher interest rate than the one you have now", etc. Such a system would have to understand things like credit cards that are zero-percent for a given period of time and so on. It would probably also need to know my credit rating so that it could guess what credit card offers I could realistically apply for.
To make this a little more concrete, my fiancee and I have spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out how we should best combine our various debts and assets. It's been very boring to be honest - lots of comparing interest rates that seems like it could be automated.
For what it's worth, I feel more ready and able to do a startup now than I would have been when I was younger. Just for starters I was already in my mid-20s when I got my PhD.
A good friend of mine sold his startup last year to AOL for enough money that he'll never have to work again. He was 41 at the time and I believe his co-founder was around the same age. This gives me hope that I'm not quite over the hill yet ;-)
While I agree that it's very difficult to compete on generic search, it's certainly not hard to compete in niche domains. And you don't need anything like 15 billion pages for those.
So far I've made mistakes 3 (marginal niche), 8 (slowness in launching), 10 (having no specific user in mind) and 17 (fights between founders). They were painful but instructive.
Mitch's talk was one of the ones I got the most out of. He seems like an all-round great guy - I have no doubt it'd be a hugely enjoyable experience to work with him.
"If you are a developer, I expect you to be very competent."
You don't expect other people you work with to be equally competent?
Maybe you wrote it this way because you find other competencies harder to evaluate. If that's the case, try the "animal test": http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
I had a microcomputer when I was nine years old, in early 84. I was a bit late with email too (92 I think), but I was certainly using the web in 95 (my first real job was in the summer of 96, writing a web-based vertical search engine for British Telecom - I remember being disappointed I wasn't doing something more futuristic, so the web was old news to me by that point).
My only problem with this is all the things that I wasn't aware of at all until completely non-technical friends told me about them. I'm thinking of stuff like hotOrNot and MySpace particularly. Perhaps pg's comment applies at a higher level - broad technologies, rather than the uses to which people will put them?
In any case, I'd be really interested to know what people here are using today that they think everybody else will be using years from now...
I can sympathise. I think my fiancee put it best though, when she asked me "Do you want to turn out like Uncle Rico, always moaning about how life could have been if only coach had put you in the game?"
Out of interest, do you think anything about YC would be likely to change if this did turn out to be Bubble2.0? Would you be likely to scale it back, or to continue funding companies and hope that some of them could ride out the storm for however many years it takes?
I was thinking more in terms of them remaining an available source of early-stage funding even if other investors are panicking (in the event that a bubble bursts). I know people have made good money this way in the past...
Linux (ubuntu). I clicked on the first demo when I saw it, without reading the rest of the front page (which was pretty overwhelming). I didn't see anywhere that would suggest this was a Windows thing until later.
I did the same when our mysql queries were taking around 30 seconds each (iirc the db had about 20 million rows, but I didn't have anything to do with it). The replacement I wrote ran each query in about 100ms. The hard part was in getting my data structures good enough that the whole dataset could fit in 3GB (that's how much memory was in the server I was using).
Funny - I'm exactly the opposite. Making something in memory can be as simple as creating a bunch of objects and stashing them in lists, vectors, hash-tables, etc. Retrieval is just traversing those lists, vectors or hash-tables. Whenever I use sql I find myself guessing at the correct almost-human syntax and getting it wrong. Keeping it all in lisp means I don't have to switch languages constantly while developing.
One of my spare-time projects, lispdoc.com, uses an in-memory approach (although to be fair it is only indexing a few hundred MB of static data, so it's no effort to keep it all in memory on a single box).
"IDEs generate all the boilerplate for you with just a couple
of keystrokes"
You say this as if it was a good thing. Consider the effort, months or years from now, in reading, understanding and modifying all that generated boilerplate.
A better language does not require the boilerplate in the first place.
Lispdoc, a search engine for Common Lisp documentation, is always going to be about as niche as a site can get. But it gives me something to hone my skills on and stops my brain from turning to mush while I wait for my Green Card.
I've been putting some more effort into it recently. I'd be interested to know if people here have suggestions for what I could improve. Please feel free to consider no nit too small to pick.
Some stats:
Lispdoc responds to around 3000 searches per day on average.
Its Google page-rank is 4/10
Alexa rank is 568,856 (three weeks ago it was 1,130,856. current 1 wk avg is 228,583)
A Google search for 'lisp documentation' puts lispdoc in 7th place.
I used the Hunchentoot web server, running on SBCL on an Ubuntu server (1GHz Athlon, 1GB ram, residential cable connection).
The data-sources are html files, which are sucked into memory when lispdoc starts up. The various indexes are kept as hash-tables in memory - there's no need for a database since everything fits in ram.
Hunchentoot is awesome - very comprehensive and very easy to work with. Web development has never been so easy (before I switched I was using Araneida for most things, and mod_lisp for a few others).
I can't say I've tested it with huge loads, but it's been very stable so far.
This describes me very well except for the email response time bit. I have an awful tendency to mull over my responses for days, editing and re-editing to get them "perfect", when I know I shouldn't. Anyone else have this?
After that you'd probably want to learn some web stuff like html, css and javascript. You can pick these up by looking at the sources of other peoples' pages, and by using w3schools:
I'm quite impressed that Steven Levy wrote about YC. I know him from "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", and "Artificial Life" - two of my favorite books.
Here's an idea that may or may not have unintended consequences - I haven't thought about it long enough yet...
For every down-vote a comment receives, give some fraction of an up-vote to that comment's parent.
The idea is that, even if someone is rude and doesn't care about their own karma, if they are sufficiently rude they will actually wind up helping the person that they insult.
It would be amusing (and annoying, of course) if Google started adding virtual billboards to these street-level views and selling ad space on them. Say with an algorithm that would pick out large enough pieces of blue sky from the images, and paste in realistic-looking billboards that would obscure only the sky so as to not render the views totally useless...
