jnaut

I agree location is important.

I asked the same question on HN 1450 days ago, see the responses I got: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916622

Jaipur may not be the best place to start at this point in time but it definitely seem to have some future promises to offer.

I would like to bring to your notice that Entrepreneurship/Startup radar has picked up in Jaipur lately. Several events, groups have come up:

Some examples are:

groups:

startup jaipur: https://www.facebook.com/groups/jaipurtechies/

ceo jaipur: https://www.facebook.com/CeoJaipur

startup saturday jaipur: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ssjaipur/

events:

Startup saturday event is happening every month

Startup Jaipur also meets physically , a little infrequently though, since December last year. And I plan to do hackthons and stuff under this (I am one of the founding members and an admin on FB), a little short on bandwidth though, would like to take the lead and try a hand?

CEO Jaipur the first co-working space for/by/of the entrepreneurs started some time back. They have space to host other events too.

Then there were some events from TIE like 'TIE mashup' that recently happened.

more events:

Bringing startup weekend to Jaipur is in process.

Overall, it's heating up but agreeably not as mature or vibrant as Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad or Pune. ( Lived and experienced the first three cities and their meetups personally.)

I am from Jaipur too and I run a startup ( http://startuplabs.io/ ) here.

Let me know if you would like to meetup and hangout.

I haven't seen such subtle observations of mind laid out so cleanly and perfectly, ever before. I was going all thru such "unnecessary drifting" disputes/money, for quite some time in recent past, but realised it just now. Feels like enlightened!

I need to change the top idea in my mind for sure. But as pg rightly noted and I quote: """Money matters are particularly likely to become the top idea in your mind. The reason is that they have to be. It's hard to get money. It's not the sort of thing that happens by default. It's not going to happen unless you let it become the thing you think about in the shower. And then you'll make little progress on anything else you'd rather be working on. """ I will still need to do something about it, without letting it become the top idea in my mind.

Thanks!

My demo is down too, hope this comes back soon. :(

Can you give me some numbers to substantiate "costs will be low in Pune"? I agree with events at Bangalore but I guess Pune is lately picking up on that too.

I am a bit surprised here, its been 4hours+ but no answers!!

You're welcome!!

Add the prefix "Ask HN:" to your question, otherwise it will not get the visibility and attention you want.

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Here are my two cents on the issue:

Imagine the country going to vote without Identity/SSN verification (registration) and only asked to put down address (IP), how many times a fraudulent person would vote? once?

Even online registration is not fool proof 'coz one can register many times using many emails, but it does create a filter to keep the spam low.

By looking at your site's name 'BuyersVote' I was reminded about a controversy associated with ebay once (not sure of now), some of the the sellers were creating bogus buyer accounts on ebay and creating fraudulent positive feedback for themselves and this was a 'with-registration' system.

So I guess voting systems today are open to abuse, registration just creates a filter and keep the abuse rate low. This will remain the status-quo till the web gets a universal, neutral online identity provider. (OpenID is there but doesn't seem to be catching enough attention and is not an ideal system in my opinion)

Well, this seems like an 11th hour announcement, many of the applicants might not be watching HN at the moment and may not be able to exercise their right to "unapply" before the deadline.

But those are problems for the fainthearts who get deterred with this kinda announcement.

For the rest of the bravehearts its 'ok', they should feel like they are at day 1 on the market and its all bare now. Just that they should gear up for a much quicker launch in case of a possible rejection, which they anywayz should be - "hope for the best and be prepared for the rest/worst".

Let's face it, trustworthiness, bias, plagiarism and wisdom are all human traits.

@PG: Just a thought from a novice. This kinda late announcements/disclosure may taint YC's image like those "conditions apply" advertisements. An announcement early on would be better. I hope you are not doing this intentionally as a first filter for the applicants and hence reduce the load of applications automatically.

I am not an expert at interpretation but I think he meant the following:

Doing better then others is what bring traction but not always, especially when the market is crowded. Sometimes it just doesn't work, coz there are numerous out there doing the same thing - trying to do it better. Only if you do it the best you get the traction. Even then its a transient state, there might be someone who will do it better then you, tomorrow.

So in these situations an interesting and better bet could be to break the status quo of the market, make a few new rules and stick to them.

They might seem like friction at the onset but if they are really making things simpler and delivering more value it can result in a lot of traction.

Edit: I think I would like to agree more to Alex3917's interpretation. Mine seems a bit amateurish approach compared to his. Point taken.

First things first: There are too many checklists out there for telling you what it takes to be an entrepreneur, I am not talking about them. Do you believe beyond criticism, reason and logic that you have what it takes to be an entreprenreneur??

If the answer is yes, read on. Be sure about it or you will regret this.

I think a good idea will be to take it slow. A phased migration over a time period of year+.

phase1: For a few months at the start, maintain a status quo at current job just keep working right, but change your spending, living and saving habits. Meanwhile prepare your family for the change, slowly. You have lived too long under the cozy umbrella of constant and guaranteed paycheck at the end of every month, that has to change over to a not so persistent income and amounting only to live well and keep the kids just happy. Yes, as someone pointed out, convince and take along your spouse through this transition. Encourage her to take up a job if she is not already doing so. Save money.

phase2: Save more money :-) Then move over to part time, at the same organization if they respect your work or some other organization. You can look at freelancing also, but that a different game, you will have to build that image slowly. Consider yourself lucky if you get good gigs at the start, which is not usually the case. Meanwhile, during this 2nd phase transition, start developing a small fun/serious project or for open source in your part time. As Gary[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4] says: work 9-5, come home, spend an hour with the kids and then 7-1 is enough time to do damage. Second pointer will be start attending dev and entrepreneur unconferences[barcamp, headstart, etc], speak up, listen, you might make a few friends there who can appreciate what you know and vice versa. Do small weekend hackathons with them, to know them more. Not all weekends, some, spend the rest with the family. Hopefully one of these friends will be the one you found your first venture with. Zero on some idea that you are passionate about and a partner who shares the passion and vision. Starting out alone is not usually encouraged, but not ruled out. Start developing a proof of concept and talk to people about it and get feedback. Once you are sure that "this is it" and you have saved enough money for you and your family for 1year, or your spouse earnings will help in that.

phase3: Get in ramen mode. """Startup!!"""

Now you are on a complete uncertain rollercoaster. No turning back. Remember this is a result of the "choice" you made not something that was forced on you, so persevere and may the luck with you.

You can shuffle a few things in the phases. :-)

Hope that helps.

Most of you requirements except the need for SDB and S3 are well satisfied by Rackspace. Rackspace is also coming up with a new feature, similar to S3 called cloud files. But no equivalent for SDB.

Since you are in development Rackspace's low end boxes (like 256M with 512 bursts, etc.)charged nominally for bandwidth will do fine. Whereas Amazon has got fixed boxes with 2G or something as far as I remember, I took it like 5 months ago. For a dev box where there is no/not-much user traffic, a low end shared box from Rackspace if a good option. Its highly efficient on the budget. Once you have used it for dev phase you will have more knowledge and confidence on what Rackspace can do and what not. So you can decide whether to use it for prod or move over to something else.

Rackspace has got a monthly billing and anytime cancelling option. It works fine on budget as well as it gives you control over things if they are going beyond what you initially thought, as you can see the usage in real time (may be a few hours late at max). They had a money back policy too, about 4 months ago when I signed up, for the first month if the user is not satisfied.

About problems:

EC2: very less problems. But remember these are commodity hardware, measly boxes, the moment you start too many process (if doing any mutli processing) the box's response time mounts exponentially :-). Multi-threaded is fine.

S3 - have been using for storing images and haven't had a problem so far. You have options to save your EC2 image to your S3 space regularly to keep backup server images. That costs you in terms of the space required on S3.

SDB: I hope you are aware but will still iterate that this is a key-value datastore, not relational. I will say it is very much in the works. It does a lot good at most of the times, but lack of a group-by, only text data, only lexicographic sort (which forces the user to put even numerical data in special formats to sort on it), a bit ill defined mutli-valued attributes, number of attributes allowed to put at each request and overall number of attributes for a item are a few bumps in the road. But once you read the docs and be regular with the AWS forums most of these get solved.

Rackspace cloud server: Only problem I have faced SSH is slow sometimes.

Rackspace cloudfiles: haven't used. But I know that you can automate your cloud server backup to cloud files, that costs.

Again, as you mentioned LimeLight, that's another factor, that makes Rackspace more suitable for you.

So I guess you best bet is to start off with Rackspace for now and see how it goes.

Hope that answer helps.

The answer is - "It depends", on a lot of parameters like: 1. Do you need a dedicated box or a virtual OS on a shared box will do? 2. What are your avg monthly usage requirements- box and bandwidth? And how these requirements shall change of time. 3. You want to customize you box's configuration before u rent it? 4. You want to pay monthly or yearly or more? 5. Will you need additional throw away on demand computational nodes? How often? 6. Do you just wish to use servers or other services like S3, SDB, SQS, cloud-files(rackspace)? Many more ....

So I think if you describe you requirements and budget better, the suggestions provided will be better.

About problems like low speed, outages, etc. Yes both have their own set of problems, but still a more relevant answer can be given when you have illustrated you requirements.

I have been using EC2,S3,SDB for one of my projects(last 4 months) and Rackspace/Mosso cloudserver for another (last 3 months). Since the durations are short I may not be able to explain everything, but will try my best. :-)

Thanks for an sharing the info. I think I will go and digg nyc nosql links.

Thanks for the great insights.

What are the differences, advantages, dis-advantages between Riak and CouchDB? I haven't found a comprehensive comparison till date.

Edit: Yes, I have been a bit lazy not to go and try Riak first hand. I think I will do it sooner then later but as of now, any light on the subject will be appreciated.

widgets, whiteboard, --> interesting!!.

Actually I was looking to build a collab whiteboard app myself some time ago, but then I decided to focus only on one, the one I am currently building. I explored what is out there at that point of time and I found quite a few, a few good one's will be http://www.jotspace.com/, http://www.instructure.com/ [not a whiteboard, more of other collab features], http://etherpad.com/. Check them out. That interest was the reason why went ahead and explored it. The UI is prototypical, needs a lot of work.

I will play with it sometime when I get time.

Keep up the good work.

good way to beta test a product :-) I created a dev account and tried using the room. It works fine but how is it different from many other ajax based whiteboards out there? and yeah, why jsp?

This post's scope was about an ML library in Python. There was in fact no such argument made about replacement of any other much more evolved project like Weka, Mallet, etc.

But still, thanks for bringing forth the fact that there are much more sophisticated libraries/pkgs that exist, though in Java, but can be used with Python. Which is actually true for any Java code, i.e. it is accessible in Python, I use JPype for it, among the few other available options for the purpose.

Good point: """Libraries likely don't offer recommendations based on a user's checkout history because of a long tradition of utmost privacy concerning a patron's information."""

That's where privacy statements like these come in:

http://www.goodreads.com/about/privacy [courtesy j2d2]

thanks for sharing the link.

Well!! Did I just give a good product idea?? """A recommendation engine for use in libraries to learn from reading habits of students(borrowers)and hence suggest next reads.""" Not sure how much money can it make though. :-)

Edit: Online book/movie selling/renting engines do that, but not sure of real world libraries doing that. Especially now , when the books are going "e". :-)

I can see in your profile "about:librarian". Hence I am a bit confused as to why you don't know where to use ML, but still, I will go ahead and just scratch the surface for you. Since listing all the fields where ML is/can-be used will require a book by itself. :-)

Well I shall limit my answer to two simple examples from the web and in the vicinity of your profile, so that you find it more interesting.

Did you know that ML is one of the key components of Google(1) search, yes, the one that you might be using day in and day out.

Did you know that all the sites offering you personalized recommendations like "people who bought this book also liked this book", use ML.

Why don't you do a fun experiment. Take up a programming language (I suggest Python) and write an algo (using PyBrain and NN's in it) that reads and learns from habits of the students (book borrowers in this case) and then recommends them on what they should read next, based on what the machine has learned from their past behavior. It won't be perfect and best prediction, rather it will be pathetic at the begining, but it will recommend good and relevant books as time goes by and the machine/algo knows more about the students.

(1)for that matter any good search engine.

Have fun!!

In addition to what you have said in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828692, I think that such teams (with slight conflict in interest) should be informed explicitly about each other being in the same market space.

Reason being, to put a word of caution in the otherwise too much friendly disclosures amongst the teams working in the friendly and healthy YC environment.

After this word of caution it will be completely upto the teams to do what they think is in their best interest.

What do you think? Should this be done as an additional practice? or does it sounds like way too paranoiac? Will it effect the environment negatively?

Thanks PG.

:-) Thanks again Lucas and maybe you will do a favor by upvoting the first "thanks!"=-1 and I can say thanks! for that in advance.

Lot's of thanks in a sentence, someone will double downvote it!!...LOL :-)

I will suggest make it a three phase deal.

In phase I

0. Keep in mind your expectations and the fact that they are not to be let loose in this phase.

1. Put the (very) brief of what you have done for the company in the last one year, so that all in the room are in the same picture. Also that you like the company and the people and would definitely like to continue. This will help you in point 3 below.

2. let them know about the problems you are facing with the over hours from what was commited (40 - 70).

3. Express your intentions about joining with equity and are expecting something fair that compensates for the extra efforts you have (and will be) put, as specified in point 1,2.

4. Ask them to put a proposition on the table.

5. Try to scrounge here and there a bit, see if they have something more in mind that has not come out yet.

6. If the deal is at your liking - take it.! - done. Else, just tell them that this is less than what you expect and you will get back to them in a couple of days.

This will also give them time to review and upgrade the offer. Since you didn't like it and as you said that they know your value, hopefully they will consider upgrading the offer.

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Phase II

Talk to people or ask on HN at that point again, you will get better advice with better information at hand.

Prepare two cases in mind:

1. Worst: If they don't think that you are that important as you think and no negotiation is allowed - no analysis paralysis - just Y/N

2. They are looking to upgrade the offer:

    2.1 Avergage: Not to your likeliness but to some midway
        Decide you lower limit and keep one thought in 
        mind for anything below that - Y/N. 

    2.2 Best: To your likeliness - Y

Remember: this is where the lines are drawn, you cannot go back on the Y/N of 1, 2.1 once decided form here.

Give them a call to check what have been thinking, are they looking for an upgrade in offer or not and accordingly fix the next meeting.

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Phase 3

With completely figured out Y/N for all 1, 2.1 just behave and negotiate hard in the room.

If the meeting has a conclusion - good.

Else, if they ask for, give them some but limited (a week max) to turn around.

Now that's hilarious!! a "thanks!" getting a -1 :-) I was working on a similar thing, i.e. co-relation between the size of comments and their usefulness, 'coz I wanted to limit the chars on the comments in my next app and also the level of nesting. This analysis helped me and so I said - "thanks!"

thanks!

Did you mean: you want to start a top-tier incubator program in India ? or get into one for incubating your startup?

Not comparable to YC.

Having said that, I think the initiative is good, though its not mature yet. They are evolving over time, they have come from saying something like "we will put in a big place and give you a bed, table, pc and Internet connection so that you can work whenever you wake up" [treating as kids or just coders, 2008] to saying something like "we will give 5L and open an account for the company" [treated as entrepreneurs, 2009]. Still, a long way to go.

The 2008 archives with some photos http://www.ciieindia.org/blog/category/iaccelerator/ . I do agree that they have a bad choice of photos on the blog, it does effect PR.

Moreover they will need someone like PG to make it like YC, that ain't happenin' that easy. :-)

Still, I wish them luck! We do need "worthy" YC clones in many countries.