Congratulations! You’ve taken the plunge and decided to move to San Francisco for your own startup or to join one of the hundreds (thousands?) here. Making the decision to move may have been difficult, but nothing compared to all the hassles and headaches of moving to this city.

Having just gone through this and spent a significant amount of time asking friends for advice on making the move, I’d like to share the best advice I received and what I learned myself.  For reference, most people take months to find a place to live and move in. With the tips below, I found an apartment and moved in within 2 weeks of landing in SF.

Specifically, I'm wondering where they got their inventory from at the beginning.
Did they buy from a local store and just pack/ship it out themselves?
Or did they negotiate with the manufacturers at the start? If this, then how did they convince the manufacturer to work with them when they had zero customers and thus no purchasing power to entice the manufacturers?

Powerful Websites for Serious Photographers

WHERE TEACHERS BUY, SELL AND SHARE ORIGINAL TEACHING RESOURCES

David Heineimeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals in Chicago, says that planning is guessing, and for a start-up, the focus must be on today and not on tomorrow. He argues that constraints--fiscal, temporal, or otherwise--drive innovation and effective problem-solving. The most important thing, Hansson believes, is to make a dent in the universe with your company.

On SEO forums one of the most often discussed topics are Google penalties. Webmasters seek help to determine whether and why they have been penalised by Google. They also want to know how to deal with the penalty once it’s established that they have been hit by one.

I tell you this not to pitch my idea to you. I tell you this to convey how small and unambitious it can sound. And to tell you this is a deliberate strategic decision.

Focus.

Friends don't let friends scroll horizontally:

[Jchat] More APL (was: No More APL) Morten Kromberg mkrom at dyalog.com Wed May 27 20:15:50 HKT 2009

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I have no doubt that J is growing faster in terms of numbers of users who "take a look at it" and enjoy playing with it. It's free and the training materials are excellent. The discussion forum is much livelier than ours, though PART of that may be because our users are busy making money and don't necessarily want to (or have time to) talk about how they do it ;-)

I can only easily measure our revenues, which have tripled since 2005, while the number of employees has gone from about 5 to about 15 (maintaining reasonable profitability). Our existing customers are generally buying more licenses and we have some new customers as well (sadly mostly through gaining APL marketshare at the moment) - but we're only just getting into some real marketing again...

Service from Kall8 is pay-as-you-go. There are no confusing packages, no hidden fees, and no monthly minimums to maintain your number. Monthly rates for on-line features are listed below. Click the tab below for the per minute rates.

This is a copy/paste of an email I sent to 500 Startups Founders & Mentors email distros.  Another reason why you should join our program – I will fill your inbox with swear words and unsolicited advice.  Enjoy!

—

This is the email where you all find out I am a hyper-socially sensitive (if you didn’t already notice) and have an incredibly intense meta level dialogue going on in my brain during every social interaction.  Basically, it is my super power.
SXSW is upon us I want to share with you some tactics and strategies for having fun and hustling hardcore at this event.  This is a jumping off point for conversation, because I have spoken to several entrepreneurs with various fears/concerns/questions about SXSW.  This does not cover everything, it got really long and I wanted to get off my soapbox and have a beer.

We’re very excited to be starting on this new adventure with Churn Labs.   As we take these first steps, it seems like an opportune moment to pause and reflect on some of things I’ve learned from the past 10 years and 5 startups.  Some these have been published elsewhere, and some are probably just common sense, but I’ve never posted them anywhere all together.  So, here we go

Wow. You just received a job offer from a startup which includes 50,000 stock options. That is wonderful…or is it?

I reviewed and approved hundreds of Employment Offer Letters at my various startups, all of which included stock option grants. The number of otherwise intelligent prospective employees who never ask relevant questions about their stock options was frankly shocking. By getting answers to the seven questions described below, you will be able to make a reasonable estimate of what your options may ultimately be worth.

Put it out there. If you sign-up for an adwords account, you can get free credit. Same with facebook. Read a bit about keywords and such to figure out how to keep it cheap. It really should not take you a long time to put together a relatively broad, inexpensive ad campaign. Most tools out there allow you to set a budget so you don't spend too much. Set aside 20-30 minutes each night, or an hour every other night. It will be worth it.

Welcome to the #1 Marketplace for Voice Over Talent

Another trick that works: break your website.
When I ran a somewhat large music site(100K uniques/day), we'd make significantly more money from adsense when our streaming server went down.
Why? Because when hitting the play button on the player didn't work, people start clicking on the ads.

All of the words in the English language are gone for naming purposes. If you want to alter the laws to prevent protection of novel phrases then you doom us all to a future of Xobni, Loopt, Wufoo, Weebly, Buxfer, Zenter, Zecter, Fuzzwich, Fliggo, Voxli, Nambii, Olark, Mertado, Movity, and other companies drawn as Scrabble™ hands. (Ok, you can't draw Fuzzwich.) Names that don't function as names because you can't say them to someone and have that person later use them to identify the entity because they can't spell it, don't know what it means, and will forget it before they need it.

Interviews with the people who build the Internet

Expectations and results are essential to email marketing, and at MailChimp, we've got loads of data on both. From average open and click rates to bounces and abuse complaints, we can tell you how you perform relative to your industry or business size. We've examined the effects of list segmentation and studied how different subject lines effect customer engagement. Use our research to learn how to best send and track your newsletters.

helps creative people and businesses run their own subscription programs.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.

"Audentis Fortuna Iuvat" - Fortune favors the bold - Virgil, Aeneid X: 284

Today is the first of a series of essays examining startup financing in detail, from the entrepreneur's prospective, and also from the perspective of the small investor. Maybe you're thinking of starting a company, maybe you've started one and need more money to grow, or to survive. Maybe family, a friend, or a business contact is asking you for money to fund a startup, maybe they're coming back to ask you a second time.

Kick-start your Twitter Bootstrap project the way you want. Simply alter the options below and click "Generate" to get your compiled Bootstrap CSS file.

This is how I went about picking up the skills I required in 1 month. First, a disclaimer: I will note that I have an unfair advantage over the general populace because I took Computer Science at UNSW in the early 2000s but since graduation I had never touched a line of code except for hacking some VB macros in Excel in 2007. I held a series of Project and Product Management roles and by 2011 I was very much a ‘Product Guy’.

Step by step instructions for installing Django with Apache and mod_wsgi on Ubuntu 10.04.

About Mapstraction
Mapstraction is a library that provides a common API for various javascript mapping APIs to enable switching from one to another as smoothly as possible. Developers can code their applications once, and then easily switch mapping provider based on project needs, terms and conditions, and new functionality.

Users can switch maps as desired based on personal taste and quality of maps in their local area. Various tools built on top of Mapstraction allow users to easily integrate maps into their own sites, and configure them with different controls, styles, and provider.

Why Mapstraction?
By avoid dependency on any specific mapping provider (or versions within a provider) your code is easier to maintain.

Mapstraction is open-source and released under the BSD License. Yay

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required - businesses can utilize a free usage tier and after that enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer fees.

Pepperjam, a GSI Media company, is an industry leader in online performance marketing and technology. We drive quality pay-for-performance results, provide unparalleled service, and maximize long term relationships between online merchants and publishers through our people, expertise and technology. Pepperjam operates a next generation performance marketing network, which provides innovative tools and analytics to optimize the complex performance marketing channel.

Writing documentation is one of those things that is dreaded by many developers. It takes a lot of effort and time to get right. And too often, people take shortcuts. This is sad, because well designed documentation is the key to getting people excited about your project, whether it's open source or a developer focused product.

In fact, I argue that the most important piece of UX for a developer product isn't the homepage or the sign up process or the SDK download. It's the API documentation! Who cares if your product is the most powerful thing in the world if no one understands how to use it.

The easiest way to create high quality, original written content.
Tap our 24x7 writer workforce to produce high quality, original content quickly. Pay only for the articles you accept.

Glue
Glue is a simple command line tool to generate CSS sprites:

$ glue source output
The latest documentation is available at: http://glue.readthedocs.org
Installation instructions: http://glue.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installation.html
Features

Automatic Sprite(PNG+CSS) creation.
Supports multi sprite projects.
Automatically crop unnecessary transparent borders around the source images.
Configurable paddings per image, sprite or project.
Generate .less files.
Automatically post-process sprite images using OptiPNG.
Read configuration from static config files.
Configurable cache busting for sprite images.
Example

For example using the gorgeous famfamfam icons (4.2Mb) you will get the following icons.png (401Kb).


And also a icons.css with all the neccesary CSS classes for this sprite:

.sprite-icons-zoom_out{ background:url('icons.png'); top:0; left:0; no-repeat;}
.sprite-icons-zoom_in{ background:url('icons.png'); top:0; left:-16; no-repeat;}
.sprite-icons-zoom{ background:url('icons.png'); top:-16; left:0; no-repeat;}
.sprite-icons-xhtml_valid{ background:url('icons.png'); top:-16; left:-16; no-repeat;}
...
Do you want to know more? Visit the quickstart guide: http://glue.readthedocs.org/en/latest/quickstart.html

Today I'm heading back to Techstars to talk to the new class of startups, and it seems like a good time to reflect on what I learned going through the program. Since the three months were focused on raising angel financing and Mailana never did get any investment, it's worth looking at what I did wrong. Here's how to kill your chances of raising angel money.

Last week I gave a presentation on creating early stage pitch decks (primarily focused on the seed round). I took a (fuzzy) picture of my white board talk (very professional on a few fronts, I know) and thought it would be valuable to post it here.

And please take this for what it’s worth: just one investor’s opinion. As is true with everything – the best answer is “it depends”. It depends on your background, your company, your raise, and your audience. And with that out of the way – here is what to think about and my proposed outline:

1) Angel List Fucking Rocks. Period.  it's the single greatest innovation in our industry in the last 5 years (aside from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, & Quora) and it's great for almost all participants. and while social proof can be abused / misused, so can gasoline... doesn't mean you shouldn't fill up your gas tank and go back to riding horses. if you want to effect change, either Engage Fully, or Compete.  inaction/boycotts are rarely useful & should be largely be ignored.

It’s fun to think about getting an MBA.

They’re attractive for many reasons: developing new business skills, developing a better business network, or — most often — taking what is effectively a two-year vacation that looks good on a resume.

In 2001, and again in 2004, I wanted to do all three things.

This post is the first of two that will share my experience with MBA programs and how I created my own…

AngelList (AL) connects promising startups to a sterling network of early stage investors. AL has been getting a blizzard of well-deserved press of late after Venture Hacks released the networks 18 month statistics. But not a lot has been written for startups on how to best use the service. Here's our take in small, bite-sized pieces.

Collect and analyze your web traffic for all your sites in real-time using our fast, reliable, hosted system. See overview data for all your sites on a single page.

So, if you were starting from scratch and wanted to build a robust high traffic web service (site, app, api, etc), what would you use?

While I’ve highlighted best practices and resources on how to pitch your ideas in the past, I thought I’d take some time to share exactly how we prepare for our demos when we’ve been invited to showcase Wufoo at conferences, events and VC boardrooms. We’ve spent a lot of time refining and practicing our workflow for presentations and after doing this a number of times now, I think we have a method that seems to produce results that we’ve been pretty proud of. While the amount of prep work we do probably isn’t for everyone and might be overkill to some of you, hopefully there will be some tips in here that will help you in your own presentations and demos.


For all the examples in this article, I’ll be referring to the prep materials I generated for a 7 minute demo we were asked to do this past summer at the National Society of Collegiate Scholars Convention in Orlando, FL. Because we (the founders) have demoed Wufoo countless times, we had one of our new hires, Tim Sabat, do the presentation to get some experience under his belt. Because this would be his first time with the material and because we’re obsessed about polish, you’ll notice that we leave very little to chance and improvisation.

Have you thought about starting a program like Y Combinator in your city? That doing so would not only build a startup ecosystem but would also bring a good financial return? I studied Y Combinator, TechStars, Seedcamp, and many more programs to develop a framework for “Copying Y Combinator”.

(With apologies to Chuck Palahniuk…)

The first rule of copying Y Combinator is: Do Not copy Y Combinator.
The second rule of copying Y Combinator is: DO NOT COPY Y COMBINATOR.
The key to copying Y Combinator is to figure out how you can be just as good, but in a different way, than Y Combinator.

There has been an explosion of incubators in the last few years. Most of them suck. Some suck so bad that the net value created by the program is probably negative. I’m not going to name names. This is just about results.

Let’s start with a story. There are minor variations, but I’ve seen it played out in real time more than once in the last few years. The story goes like this. An incubator has a class of companies, they give them a little cash, they have a weekly session with a mentor or whatever, time goes by, demo day, no one gets funding, fail, fail, FAIL.

TL;DR Redis the AK-47 of databases

I get a lot of value out of HN, but the biggest wins monetarily have been advice regarding consulting, often across multiple threads. Two favorites which stuck with me enough to be Googleable:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1225179
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191094
Comments rather than threads picked because they stuck, but the contextual threads were also good.

I'm about to graduate next semester(as are many others here I assume), and was wondering what are some of the highest paying jobs available with just a BS? The only reason I ask is because after two internships, I haven't really been able to find something related to programming that I haven't enjoyed doing. Therefore, I may as well go for the highest paying I can find.
Any general areas, or specific things people know of?

Summary: Eric Sink provides a geek-oriented overview of accounting and company funding.

On my weblog I write a series of articles entitled Marketing for Geeks. The concept of these articles is that a lot of technically-oriented people actually do end up involved in marketing decisions. Most software startups are founded by one or more geeks, often without the presence of experienced people in other areas like marketing. For these people, a little marketing knowledge can go a long way.

This post covers a couple “toolbox” topics that are easy to brush up on before the technical interview.

I recently read a post that drove me nuts, written by someone looking for a job. They said:

I can’t seem to crack the on-site coding interviews… [Interviews are geared towards] those who can suavely implement a linked list code library (inserting, deleting, reversing) as well as a data structure using that linked list (i.e. a stack) on a white board, no syntax errors, compilable, all error paths covered, interfaces cleanly buttoned up. Lather, rinse, repeat for binary search trees and sorting algorithms.

These are a programmer’s multiplication tables! If someone asked me “what’s 6×15?” on an interview, I wouldn’t throw my hands up and complain that I learned it 20 years ago, I’d be fucking thrilled that they had given me such a softball question.

Believe me, if you can’t figure out my basic algorithm questions, you do not want me to ask my “fun” questions.

The Hungry Academy is an intensive program that will put you in a position to join our engineering team. It’s an exclusive program for two dozen dedicated people who want to build amazing products.

I've done some research on how many founders successful technology companies have. Here are the numbers for 100 publicly traded companies

Videos from 2011 and other years' Startup Schools

Any assumption that an entrepreneur makes about their customers and markets is nothing but a guess, says serial entrepreneur Steve Blank. But how can one prove a working hypothesis? It goes beyond soliciting friends for feedback in the dorm room. Successful ventures locate real customers in the field, solicit their feedback, and deeply analyze the customers whose problems they hope to solve.

Simple, Cheap Usability Testing for Your Website.
Start a usability test for your site in two minutes. Submit questions about your site and receive 10 responses from our reviewers. The cost is $20.

Simple book production
ABOUT US HELP CONTACT LOGIN
PressBooks lets you and your team easily author and output books in multiple formats including: epub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML, and inDesign-ready XML.

HTML5
A technical specification for Web developers

This HTML5 specification is like no other—It has been processed with you, the humble web developer, in mind.

The focus of this specification is readability and ease of access. Unlike the full HTML specification, this "web developer edition" removes information that only browser vendors need know.

To read about its conception, construction and future, read the press release.

— Ben Schwarz

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments.

By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox, Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments. For more information, see the part of the getting started guide on ”Why Vagrant?”

Are you ready to revolutionize the way you work? Check out the getting started guide, the getting started video.

Job sites are basically designed to exploit clueless people (on both sides of the transaction). You're not clueless, or you are shortly to become less clueless, so you should never be involved with a job site.
Draw a rectangle, where one side is the number of people with hiring authority you've had coffee with recently and the other side is your attractiveness as a candidate. As the area of the rectangle gets bigger, the number of job offers you get will increase. (And, if you're savvy about it, the attractiveness of them will as well.)

Bad news. That last DELETE statement you typed had too wide of a WHERE clause and it wiped out records it shouldn't have with a cascading effect. Or worse, a programming bug has been wiping database records for a while and you only just noticed...

94 hand-selected icons from the Pictos Vector Sets

I haven't used mTurk personally, but I know people who have, and I've looked a lot into their model.
Here's the deal: For a small amount of money (1 to 5 cents, or more if you like), you can pay people to take a specific action on your site, like posting a review, voting on 10 items, commenting to a post, etc.
I took a look at the mTurk site (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false), and here are some things that you can earn money on:
- Look at 25 photos and click on the parts that are sidewalk ($0.02)
- Enter the title, name, and residence of a US Patent ($0.08)
- Write a 30-word comment to a blog post ($0.03)
- Find the longitude and latitude of a business, given its street address ($0.10)
- Write a one-paragraph abstract of an information technology article ($0.05)
I find it amazing that so many people are willing to do such drudgery-laden, time-intensive tasks, but evidently, when you toss a bunch of nickels into the air, lots of people jump.

gimmeh teh CSS docs.
query is a regex. try "background" vs "background$" or "color" vs "^color"

bloggergirl 394 days ago | link

I've been writing web copy for 7 years, and, although the advertising guys referenced so far (e.g., Hopkins, Ogilvy) are great, their tricks focus largely on direct response (i.e., long form letters). Use those tricks for writing PPC ad headlines, etc -- but be careful on your website.
On your site, your copy should set a tone for your service; get your value proposition right; be scannable; and err on the side of clear rather than clever.
Tone can be tricky because it's easy to get carried away... but check out Mint.com for examples of how to stay light & friendly but also professional & credible. As for your value proposition, check out MarketingExperiments for their tips on writing a value prop that resonates --- and that goes beyond "save time and money" (which every company seems to default to, making that phrase totally meaningless).
Regarding scannability, that one's pretty straightforward. Short, snappy headlines. Bullet lists with 3-4 bullets; concise copy in your bullets. No paragraphs over 3 lines long. Bolding used only for things that will be important to users (not just things you wish they would care about). Great typography to help users see the words they're supposed to. Not too much dedication to the rules of grammar (keep the reading level at about grade 5 or 6; Word can help you run tests to see what level your copy's at).
As for clear over clever, that means writing "88% of our users saved 6 hours on payroll last month" rather than "Payroll, meet your match".
(SEO, persuasion, emotion, etc. can always follow after you launch.)
If all else fails, I'm happy to read over your copy and offer recommendations. I'm at joanna AT page99test DOT com. Good luck!

I recently did an interview with a bank analyst, and one of the questions I asked had to deal with innovation in banks. We saw a while ago a lot of guys from tech startups saying that kind of energy needed to be directed to the banking system. I thought that these guys were really underestimating the kinds of roadblocks that prevent change from happening. I thought I'd share this part of the interview with you guys:

Never, ever, disappoint en masse.

After my last post, my linode suffered a traffic surge.

That post passed half a million views, pushing page load time to 24 seconds.

Four years ago, an unexpected surge of traffic hit a start-up I was in.

Then, it ended in disaster as the service went down for three days.

But, because of that experience, I knew how to handle a surge.

Once I detected it, I brought page load time back down to two seconds. I used three techniques, and it took about 15 minutes:

cornershop: rounded corner graphics for web design
Any size, any color, instant creation of graphics for your rounded boxes.
tinytags
Make a little text tag graphic
Superstickies
Make your own stickynote.
make your own animated text icon
Write some text, get an animated scrolling icon.
screedbot
Make your own scrolling typewriter text.
put speech bubbles on pictures!
Put some funny speech bubbles on your pictures.
make your own speech bubble!
Make a speech bubble in the style of diesel sweeties.
Thank You Mario!
Make your own animated Super Mario Brothers castle screen
Easystreet
Make your own street sign picture.
signbot
Make your own animated LED sign.
AutoMotivator
A motivational poster generator you can use for web posters or real poster prints.
roflbot
Make your own image macros without any graphics program.

Protect your brand. Simplify PCI and secure data with tokenization, hosted payment acceptance and remote storage.

This blog post is about building your application in two distinct layers: a HTTP RESTful API and a web frontend. This technique is not new and I am not the first developer to build a web application with this model. However, this is the first time I have built an application this way, and I want to share my experience.

Paul Graham and Harj Taggar doing office hours at Startup School 2011

35 U.S.C. 102 Conditions for patentability; novelty and loss of right to patent.

A person shall be entitled to a patent unless -

WHMCS is an all-in-one client management, billing & support solution for online businesses. WHMCS handles everything from signup to termination, with automated billing, provisioning & management. With WHMCS, you're in control with a very powerful business automation tool.

We create user interfaces,
icons & develop apps. Great design studio from Russia that makes UIs and Icons of the highest caliber for relatively cheap.

Startup School 2011 Videos

It's tough when you're bootstrapping a web app and still have a day job. There's the potential of making buckets of money from your app, but you still have to work at least 40 hours a week at your day job. So where do you find the time to work on your 'side project'? Here's how I found an extra work week, in between the normal work week.

When we launched in March, I spent a fair amount of time getting press coverage for GiftRocket. We haven’t been the most successful startup with PR, but we did decently for not having hired any professionals. We learned a lot over the course of that time. This article describes exactly what we did to get that PR, including the one tip for coldcalling journalists that made all the difference.

great cheap domains

Do you want a 7 KB cross-browser native JavaScript that makes your plain HTML lists super flexible, searchable, sortable and filterable? Yeah!
Do you also want the possibility to add, edit and remove items by dead simple templating? Hell yeah!

Illumination Software Creator allows anyone to create their own software applications… without writing a single line of “code”.
The idea is simple: Arrange colorful building blocks of functionality however you like to create your own, unique, piece of software.
No reading large computer programming books.  No steep learning curve.
One project creates apps for Android, iPhone, iPad, Desktops and HTML5 or Flash websites.

This is not an essay on credit cards per se. If that's what you're looking for, I recommend Joe Ziegler's excellent series Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Credit Cards. This essay has a narrower focus -- to explore the anatomy of your credit card number, and to provide Java source code which determines if a given credit card number might be valid.

So I've helped at least a dozen or so people on this subreddit rewrite their resumes, and I put together something on the advice I give the most:

The purpose of this page is to establish a concise and consistent approach to secure application development of Mozilla web applications and web services. The information provided here will be focused towards web based applications; however, the concepts can be universally applied to applications to implement sound security controls and design.

This page will largely focus on secure guidelines and may provide example code at a later time.

Patio11 or Patrick McKenzie of Bingo Card Creator fame gave this talk at Business of Software conference.

Note that the knowledge for each level is cumulative; being at level n implies that you also know everything from the levels lower than n.