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How do you rent apartments in SF when self-employed? | stevedekorte: The problem is the SF rent control laws make it extremely difficult to evict non-payers which causes landlords to up-regulate their choosiness to avoid any possible problems until risk and reward once again meet.Sadder still is that SF law makes it next to impossible to evict the physically challenged. I ... |
Your favorite Startup School moments? | derwiki: AirBnB's electronic music rooftop dance party. Don't get me wrong, SUS it self was a great experience -- but it was reassuring to see that a tech start up crowd could throw a legitimate party! |
Your favorite Startup School moments? | jlm382: Big thanks to UC Berkeley. As a current senior, it's incredible to see how the school has opened up to the idea of pushing entrepreneurship over the past 4 years. The Berkeley CSUA and ST@B worked their butts off to make this an incredible experience, and they'd do a lot to make sure that Berkeley gets the ex... |
How do you rent apartments in SF when self-employed? | mdakin: I faced this and after being denied I offered to write a check for the entire year right then. At that point it was insinuated that I must deal drugs. Fools are absolutely infuriating. I had luck finding an owner who's an actual human in the full sense of the word much like the people I normally work with in... |
Your favorite Startup School moments? | blasdel: Robert Scoble making an ass out of himself repeatedly.He actually interrupted Tony Hsieh in mid-sentence in the middle of his talk, and with an obviously stupid question that Tony shot down without really missing a beat: "What specifically do you ask people in interviews to see if they're egotistical?"A few mi... |
Your favorite Startup School moments? | blasdel: There was an absolutely fantastic question from the audience (rms?) for Zuckerberg, followed up with a perfectly elucidated back-and-forth reparté between them (though Jessica was freaking out a bit).The TechCrunch transcript is just a teaser, the video clip could easily turn into a meme: Q: Can you talk what... |
Your favorite Startup School moments? | rms: I accidentally insulted Mark Zuckerberg. I asked my question about PR lessons and he kind of put it back to me.If I had had Zuckerberg's PR lessons, I would have more deftly answered his yes or no question with an explanation, but I was kind of uncomfortable since I wasn't expecting to have a dialog.I do think tha... |
Your favorite Startup School moments? | dtran: Complete paraphase, but when Jason Fried talked about a company's relationship with customers:
"'We apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused' - What do you mean may have caused? You f-ing caused it."Companies need to be more honest, open, and transparent when dealing with their customers. Make your pro... |
Startup school 2009 videos ? | dtran: Hey yr,This isn't great quality - I was there live and people were tweeting that the audio quality on the stream was awful up until the first break, but I haven't watched it myself:
http://www.justin.tv/clip/2493eb6f993f6e24 |
Where can I find meta.News.YCombinator.com | ErrantX: The poll feature is, I think, intentionally vague as a soft-firewall to having a shed load posted (I wont post a link just in case that is the theory; it's not hard to work out though). THere is a karma threshold but I am not sure what it is.There arent too many guidelines on how to quote. I usually use italic... |
Better alternative to daily RSS feeds reading? | truebosko: Why not use something like www.postrank.com? I'm pretty sure that's why it was made, to solve the problem of reducing all the noise and only showing you the best content. |
Where can I find meta.News.YCombinator.com | cx01: Both of your questions are answered in the FAQ: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html |
How do you rent apartments in SF when self-employed? | lsc: sublet. or find a non-professional landlord. look around on craigslist. there's plenty of people in trouble trying to get out of their lease.Of course, I've not lived in the city proper, but I've lived in the bay area on and off for most of my adult life, and I've not had any trouble avoiding the corporate land... |
Anyone want to sightsee around the valley on Monday? | dryicerx: The Computer History Museum is pretty cool.If you know someone at Google, Cisco or any other big ones see if you can tag a tour around with them.Lick Observatory in the mountains to the east, awesome drive up http://tinyurl.com/130crazyroad. |
Anyone want to sightsee around the valley on Monday? | tptacek: Apple's right off the De Anza exit from 280. The main apple building is pretty cool, a perennial geek photo op, and there's an Apple store that sells T-shirts and other merch.There's a decent Muslim Chinese place within walking distance on Stevens Creek, and I like Gochi Japanese Tapas on Homestead.There's a F... |
Anyone want to sightsee around the valley on Monday? | surfmike: * Stanford (esp. around the oval, but you can walk south of there to check out campus)* The Googleplex* Apple's Infinite Loop HQ* Downtown Palo Alto (coupa cafe) -- (not so much downtown MV)* Buck's in Woodside* If you want, hiking in one of the regional parks in the hills (I know San Antonio, but all of them... |
Anyone want to sightsee around the valley on Monday? | pg: I'd recommend driving up Page Mill and then turning right and
driving along Skyline till you get to Skylonda. Skyline runs along the ridge of the Santa Cruz mountains, so you can see the Valley on one side and the sea on the other.I'd also recommend visiting Palo Alto and Stanford. The main downtown of Palo Alto ... |
How do you rent apartments in SF when self-employed? | tjcrowley: Here are some good tips for self-employed apartment hunting in San Francisco:1) Don't go to a rental company. Citiapartments sucks anyways, they are crooks.
2) Walk around and take numbers off of buildings. The best apartments never go on craigslist.
3) Network hard. You won't believe how many apartments I ... |
Anyone want to sightsee around the valley on Monday? | wooster: Hacker Dojo http://hackerdojo.com |
Anyone want to sightsee around the valley on Monday? | dotBen: You mentioned in the comments you wanted to tour businesses......and I can second that businesses like the Googleplex and Apple HQ sound interesting but they're pretty boring cube farms.If you know someone who works at one of the companies ask if u can have lunch with them at Apple or Google's cafes - pretty co... |
Anyone want to sightsee around the valley on Monday? | wavesplash: I hate to say it, but most of the valley is just cubefarms in nondescript office parks. A tour heading south on 101 of the more interesting bits could be:Oracle campus - one of the more eye pleasing campuses from the outside (the inside of the buildings is awful - don't bother going in). Off of 101.Palo A... |
Statistics for hackers? | tsally: Hidden Markov models are serious stuff. If you already understand them, leverage that power and go build an application! No point in learning the theory if you aren't going to apply it. |
Your favorite Startup School moments? | avk: Did anyone else think the beginning was much stronger than the end? Paul Graham, Jason Fried, and Chris Anderson were great but I didn't care for the Q&A sessions at all. What happened to actually preparing a talk for a big event you've been invited to? I wanted more on startups and advice, not just more pandering... |
Statistics for hackers? | haliax: If it helps, the sort of questions that interest me are: what types of sounds are pleasing to the ear, or, what rules do I have to constrain randomness within before I can generate music that sounds like _____, or (presumably with a factor model) what team is most like to win the world cup =P |
Statistics for hackers? | zackattack: You should write a book, statistics for hackers. I would buy it. Make sure it explains things really well. The best person to teach someone is a beginner, because they understand the beginner's perspective. So you are in a unique position to create this.O'Reillys statistics in a nutshell is a good reference... |
Any designers here in for a rushjob on a fun project ? | spicyj: You don't have a site design for a site that you're launching tomorrow? |
Windows 7 worth the upgrade from XP? | makecheck: It doesn't seem like you are getting anything out of the PC. Why not access the music/web/movies on the Mac too (which also has 10 different ways to open your Word files), and either ditch the PC or buy one of the virtualization programs for the rare need to use Windows? |
Statistics for hackers? | etal: Try this:http://www.bmj.com/collections/statsbk/index.dtlThe examples you gave make me think you've done some applied things with those specific techniques, but haven't covered the theory and related areas in depth. That's fine; the Square One series is simpler but comprehensive, so you'll be in good shape after ... |
Statistics for hackers? | sh1mmer: I've been pretty impressed by the O'Reilly book on statistic: http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Nutshell-Desktop-Reference-... |
Statistics for hackers? | caffeine: Go download David MacKay's Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms (free book). Go through the part on Bayes and the part on Neural Nets (and the info. theory part if you want to, which is fascinating but not as directly relevant), which is a total of roughly 20-30 chapters, some very short. D... |
Statistics for hackers? | waldrews: Sounds like you're more into probability modelling and machine learning than statistics in the traditional hypothesis testing sense. Besides ESL, a book I'd recommend is Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. It starts from the beginning of probability theory applied to computer science problems... |
Any designers here in for a rushjob on a fun project ? | jacquesm: Several good designers have responded in the last hour, one is already making a sketch, I think the job will get done, and hopefully in time.Thanks to everyone that took an interest, HN is quite amazing. |
Any designers here in for a rushjob on a fun project ? | geoffw8: Make sure you update us, I want to see what it is... |
Review My Startup. Bookhu.com: The Gender Compatibility Engine for Books | araneae: I think it would be very cool if you could integrate it with goodreads.com etc. I want to know the gender split of my bookshelf ^-^ |
Statistics for hackers? | tokenadult: Here (perhaps for onlookers more than for your exact case) are more two favorite recommendations for free Web-based resources on what statistics is as a discipline, both of which recommend good textbooks for follow-up study:"Advice to Mathematics Teachers on Evaluating Introductory Statistics Textbooks" by ... |
help students with entrepreneurship class project - survey | pclark: first question:Do you want to get your website translated in the near feature? *Yes, we want to grow bigNo, we're fine with just 1 languageWhy are the answers so biased? |
Statistics for hackers? | silentbicycle: This isn't directed at the author of the top post, but _The Cartoon Guide to Statistics_ is actually pretty good. It's a quick read (cartoons, hey), but works well as a quick refresher, or would be enough of an intro to pick up terminology for more pointed questions. (It's also fairly cheap, libraries mi... |
Statistics for hackers? | whimsy: As far as application of statistics to automated composition goes, definitely check out the EMI project over at UC Santa Cruz. |
Your favorite Startup School moments? | bdr: Only the first one is a funny moment.Paul Graham, in the middle of all the AV trouble, says "What Talks Are Really Like".Greg McAdoo: To sell to enterprise, offer an ROI so powerful that a person who turns you down would be scared of getting fired.Jason Fried: "Cool wears off; useful never does. You will be using ... |
Review My Startup. Bookhu.com: The Gender Compatibility Engine for Books | rsheridan6: Chicks dig Knuth: http://www.bookhu.com/analyse/?ASIN=0321637135&title=The...It would be nice if it would show the breakdown when you search an author rather than making you click again for a breakdown for each book. Having worked with Amazon's shitty API, I'm guessing that their constraints forced you to ... |
Review My Startup. Bookhu.com: The Gender Compatibility Engine for Books | pclark: You could probably get a ton of users by integrating with Librarything etc and offering widgets that show the gender gap of users libraries. |
help students with entrepreneurship class project - survey | JimmyL: After reading this survey, it sounds much more like a pitch-in-disguise than an actual survey for determining if you have a market, information about potential customers, etc.If you want to advertise, advertise. If you want to get information, design a survey to get information. To me, it sounds like you're doi... |
Getting users | icey: Bribery.Every product launch I've been a part of has basically used some form of bribery to get users. Of course, my background is all enterprise software. We have either shown people how they are losing money by not using our product or how they will miss out on making money by not using our product. Maybe bribe... |
Any designers here in for a rushjob on a fun project ? | morphir: Let us hear how big the splash got. |
Any designers here in for a rushjob on a fun project ? | joshuarr: This is hilarious. I wanna see what it is too. |
What can you do with bad reviews? | pclark: its always better to engage the customer and explain and address complaints, why would you think you should do anything else? |
How do you make decisions between cofounders? | dryicerx: Objectivity. Each of you has a reason for why you are rooting for a certain decision's side... so list those reasons out. Just write down the the advantages/disadvantages of each decision (hrs of dev time, complexity, return of the final product, etc), and keep everything objective as possible by numbers if p... |
How do you make decisions between cofounders? | launic: Write down all the pros and cons, then take each topic in discussion and try to bring as many objective and logic arguments as possible.Leave personal feelings and your ego aside, if you do that the other might do the same and you might reach an agreement. |
What can you do with bad reviews? | icey: Don't ignore your users, recruit them.If your customers want more channels and the bottleneck is a TV station, let your customers know that you want to add new channels as well. Let them know that you haven't had much luck getting things done, and if they (your users) wanted to help, they could send an email to s... |
What can you do with bad reviews? | sammcd: For this specific situation it is good to address the issue. However, you need to take ownership. This situation does depend on you. Getting channels is your problem.The best way to address the issue is to work on the product. This isn't a bad review, this is a good user feedback. |
Getting users | bemmu: Link from my other sites.I might be up for sending some HN people their first users if you are getting desparate (see my profile for contact info), but I doubt my audience of MySpacers really matches with anything that anyone here is doing. |
Getting users | omarchowdhury: Search marketing.This avenue may not fit your startup because no one may be searching your industry. I mean, if your startup is Twitter, you're not going to get very far bidding on the keyword "microblogging".It worked with our startup because people were already finding our competitors using search (our... |
Getting users | staunch: Directories. There's almost always appropriate directories to get your thing listed on. iPhone app store is the extreme example. Maybe you can create an addon for Firefox and submit it to addons.mozilla.org. Maybe you have audio software and you can get it listed on some big audio software directory or blog.It... |
How do you make decisions between cofounders? | mvalente: Starting a startup with 2 founders is probably the worst mistake startups make. Voting is split 50/50 and decisions become impossible.The team should have 3 or 5 members (not 4, its even and can also lead to 50/50). Get another founder or get a coach/advisor/friend who you both trust and that can make a ratio... |
Getting users | pclark: our first 1000 users:via our blog talking about what we're doing and why (= good for SEO, engagement of community)PR though you'd be surprised at how little an effect this makes typically though, you gotta really target / be lucky. Tip: DaringFireball = iPhone app sales.Twitter - great to engage users of compet... |
How do you make decisions between cofounders? | jacquesm: Switch positions and argue the others case as good as you can.It will help you immensely in evaluating the relative merits of both options. |
Getting users | kevinholesh: Direct mail. I'm not talking the crappy postcards or the fake credit cards everyone gets.I'm talking about handwriting a note to someone influential. If your market is teachers, write to the department heads at a local High school. If they like it, they'll spread it to their teacher friends.Handwriting the... |
What can you do with bad reviews? | kevinholesh: Let me get this straight. You're making fun of your early adopters, the ones who tried your product and gave their honest feedback.These are the ones you want talking about your product, getting TV stations behind it. Making fun of them is a great way to kill your company early. It may seem like fun now, b... |
Review Our Product | nikz: Clickable link: http://minutedock.com |
What can you do with bad reviews? | DanielStraight: Anything but what you did. That's about the worst thing you could've possibly done, so anything else at all would be a step up.What the reviews indicate is that your product description is misleading. They aren't upset because you only have one channel. They're upset because they were deceived. If decep... |
Review My Startup. Bookhu.com: The Gender Compatibility Engine for Books | DanielStraight: Two thoughts:1. The site looks like a domain parking page.2. Why can I not view books sorted by gender distribution? That seems like the entire point of the site, yet I can't do it. |
Getting users | swombat: The way we got our first users for Woobius was that some of the initial team were architects, and we had strong links with a number of architecture firms. So when the product was barely useable, we deployed it and got them to start trying it out. There followed a frantic search for a decent host when we realis... |
Statistics for hackers? | jakecarpenter: iTunesU has some courses for stats, but they may not be suitable for learning in a hurry.-jc |
Getting users | dotBen: Pre launch:
Blogging about a subject related to your startup and twittering, funneled into the classic "sign up to know when we launch" holding page, along with personal networking should give you 1000 prime users ready for when you launch.Post launch: more personal networking (esp with influentials - either in... |
What can you do with bad reviews? | pierrefar: Oh man. Never make fun of users.Instead, thank them for taking the time to write feedback, explain the situation, and (here is the most important bit) tell them what they can do about.For example, set up a petition online asking a TV channel to open up on your platform, and ask them to sign it. Or give them ... |
Getting users | alttab: This is of course based on the assumption you've built something people need/want. |
Anyone want to sightsee around the valley on Monday? | projectileboy: I don't know if you're avoiding a longer drive, but every time I visit San Francisco I have to get a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the city from Battery Park. I did last night, after the Dropbox party and before my plane took off. |
What can you do with bad reviews? | makecheck: I haven't figured out why, but far too many people will (often anonymously) publicly eviscerate a product when they find a problem, without actually bothering to contact the maintainer for help.It's sad, because there is often a perfectly valid reason for the issue; and the fix is often trivial, or at least,... |
Getting users | patio11: Content creation and organic SEO. If you're the guy writing things that solve problems for your users, it a) brings them into your site and b) pre-disposes them to trust you when you say that using your software/service will help them with the problem they are having. (Content ranks for long-tail terms, cont... |
Statistics for hackers? | dotBen: The trick for me is to learn a good foundation in statistics but to know that you don't need to learn everything.A friend who founded a startup that makes heavy uses of statistics likes to trawl academic papers for algorithms that help his business.Think of research papers a bit like a well documented private o... |
What can you do with bad reviews? | colinplamondon: Wow, you came across as an enormous dick. If I saw that on a product I was considering I would high-tail it away and purchase a competing product.When someone tells me that my company's book app sucks because it doesn't have Twilight or Harry Potter, the answer isn't that they need to read the descripti... |
Statistics for hackers? | drats: I can't speak highly enough of "Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran. It's not everything, you'd need other books, but it covers "fantastic applications" of techniques. It has really clear explanations from real-world scenarios, followed by extremely clear python code and with a second explanatio... |
Getting users | andreshb: Influencers and Media Relations. Picked industry specific niches, and leaders, invited them to participate in our early stages (at least their opinion) and began strong networking. Day of release(s) had support from these opinion leaders and they helped promote. |
How do you make decisions between cofounders? | timanglade: If you're really split after hours of debate, just agree to surrender the decision to an external authority. Agreed-upon third party or coin flip. Either will do fine.But really, if you can't agree after a long, honest discussion, maybe the problem isn't with that specific decision. Maybe the real issue at ... |
Statistics for hackers? | lliiffee: One of the things EoSL emphasizes is that simple methods can often give very good results. If you have been through the first few chapters of the book, you should be able to do some cool stuff with nearest neighbors or linear classifiers. (The reality is that on most problems, fancy methods give a slight in... |
Getting users | sachinag: Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential market. Patrick's bingo cards are going after a much smaller market (teachers) than Drew's online storage (everyone). Colin's online storage for technically astute paranoids is probably somewhere in the middle.So it really doesn't m... |
Getting users | zaidf: If you are making money from get go, paid search is not bad if you can get to a positive ROI after a little bit of messing around.Your leverage with paid search will depend on your longterm earning per customer and your cost of customer acquisition among other factors. I would suggest you read Sean Ellis' blog. ... |
Statistics for hackers? | joeycfan: That's a lot, actually. |
Statistics for hackers? | Anon84: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902478 |
Getting users | fjabre: If you are really niche then adwords is probably the best way to go.If you are mass market then get the blog mentions and organic SEO. |
Getting users | swies: Launch in private beta and email bloggers access codes. We got 18,000 users in 4 weeks like this, not sure if it's generalizable. I wrote the details down here: http://runitback.tumblr.com/post/223371555/how-we-got-18-000... |
Review Our Product | hackoder: FYI, the site loads with a rails error for me. Not sure if you guys are aware of this. |
Favorite quotes from StartupSchool ? | krishna2: Ev/Biz recalling someone commenting on the early days of Twitter: "Twitter is like the Seinfeld of the Internet, a service about nothing.". |
What can you do with bad reviews? | ekpyrotic: Your response is outrageous. Simply inexplicable. |
Review My Startup. Bookhu.com: The Gender Compatibility Engine for Books | hackoder: Good stuff. Agree with what has been said about it looking like a domain parking page.Thoughts:
- The simple look is very useful. List of books, search, categories. Well done.
- The feedback "tab"(?) at the side. Why not move it to the bottom right, or at the top as a menu item? |
How do you make decisions between cofounders? | JangoSteve: You may not always be able to execute and let the results talk, but you can always do the next best thing. If it is an external issue (e.g. adding a feature, building a product, designing an ad, etc.), do a focus group and see which yields more favorable results. Don't let the results make the decision for ... |
Getting users | zackattack: This is really interesting for me, because I'm working on this problem right now with my startup: CustomerFind.Right now, CustomerFind.com is a Twitter application that automatically follows users on Twitter. You specify a set of keywords, and then automatically follow users who have a tweet mentioning one ... |
Statistics for hackers? | Mongoose: I'm in a similar situation, as I'm trying to decide whether or not to minor in statistics on top of computer engineering. From a hacker's perspective, I've found that playing around with the language R is the best way to relate to the field. Check our the tutorial R for Programmers linked from here: http://he... |
Favorite quotes from StartupSchool ? | dasht: One of my favorites is "Limited life experience + overgeneralization = advice" from Bucheit, which I think has to be understood as an important qualifier on everything said throughout all sessions.-t |
Favorite quotes from StartupSchool ? | dannyr: "It's important to do things that will make you uncomfortable." - Paul Bucheit |
Getting users | aaronblohowiak: Buy ads, track their performance, use multivariate testing to improve their performance. |
SUS Videos--where are they posted/where are the best quality ones? | megaduck: In a pinch, you can go to justin.tv (http://www.justin.tv/startupschool). However, the audio cuts out so much that some of the talks (like Jason Fried) are unwatchable.Rumor has it that higher quality videos were taken, but those might not show up for another day or two. |
Getting users | lloydarmbrust: The easiest way is make your product appeal to the widest range of users possible. If half the people on an airplane could benefit from your product than your onto a good idea.Unfortunately my product deals with a very specific market and by the time we have 1,000 "users" we'll be billionaires.I'm still... |
Getting users | DenisM: You are probably solving a problem, right? Ask yourself how would you go about finding the solution to such problem and go there. "There" will be some blogs, community websites etc where you can add comments whenever a relevant question comes up for discussion. This worked for me.What didn't work: approaching a... |
Getting users | wensing: Create a widget with a link back to your site. Good for referrals and pagerank. |
SUS Videos--where are they posted/where are the best quality ones? | n-named: Also does anyone know if high quality videos for MIT Startup Bootcamp are posted anywhere? Some of the ones on Justin.TV are incomplete. |
SUS Videos--where are they posted/where are the best quality ones? | lupin_sansei: Trevor Blackwell has posted some here http://blog.tlb.org/paul-graham-at-startup-school-0 |
How do you make decisions between cofounders? | elviejo: You choose the option that gives you the biggest return on invest per time of the constraint. In this case your development time probably is the constraint.ie.
Sales price Raw Materials Margin
Product A 1000 us 200 usd 800
Product B 2000 us 200 usd 1800so seems ... |
Getting users | iamelgringo: I've used mechanical turk in getting initial users. You can set up a task, and have turkers do very specific actions on your site, for $.05. And, studies have been done, that suggest that Turkers are really very well educated, and are probably early adopters. If you treat them with respect, and show app... |
Who changed your life? | cperciva: When I was in grade 8, I took a mandatory "shop" class -- woodworking, metalworking, and electronics. One day in class the teacher observed that Leonardo da Vinci, while he had lots of ideas, rarely built anything, and as a result of this he never discovered that his plans were flawed.This one remark transfo... |
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