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jon_dahlon Doug Richard: Why do people hate lifestyle businesses?

I find people who flock to these investors (YC included) ridiculous.

This is pretty overstated. There are legitimate reasons for "flocking" to investors. Some (not all) businesses will have a better chance of succeeding with a large influx of capital, or with the advice, connections, and pressure provided by an investor.

Just because you don't need an investor to be successful doesn't mean that people who take investment are ridiculous.

jon_dahlon My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator startup

The first few hires often happen before VC funding is raised, right? And 2-3% for the first few employees isn't unusual amongst companies that later raise VC funding and make it big.

jon_dahlon PG's Hackers & Painters is O'Reilly's $10 ebook deal today

I always found this counterpoint article fatuous.

To which I'd add, what hackers and painters don't have in common is everything else. The fatuousness of the parallel becomes obvious if you think for five seconds about what computer programmers and painters actually do.

Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.

Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.

How many programmers sit down and say "It's time to do some electronic data transformations"? How many painters say "Time to push some paint"?

PG is right that programming is a fundamentally creative activity, and so are the visual arts. Plenty of programmers forget that. It's not that the medium is irrelevant, but then again PG isn't claiming complete identity between programming and painting.

(Personally, I prefer the analogy of programming to either writing or music composition, because the writing connection is quite strong. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/dahl-programming-minimali... if you're interested.)

jon_dahlon Two Weeks Vacation is only a Recommendation, not a Rule

Minnesota is polarized - there are a lot of independent developers and a lot of Fortune 500 programming jobs. Not a lot in between.

I've hired a dozen programmers here in my day, and so it is definitely possible to find good developers. But you really have to know the right communities, user groups, etc. to find them. Of course, I expect that isn't MN-specific.

jon_dahlon YC has just closed a new $8.25 million fund

I don't think this is entirely correct. Good investors understand that different founders have different situations. If you're 19 years old and your personal expenses are negligible, and you pay yourself $90K, investors will wonder if you're committed to your startup. But if you're leaving a $150K job and have a family, and you pay yourself $90K, your investors won't mind. Or else they shouldn't be investing in you in the first place.

jon_dahlon YC has just closed a new $8.25 million fund

My co-founders and I are in this situation, and we did YC this winter (Zencoder), so it definitely can be done. We basically ran on savings for four months, and were able to raise money quickly, so none of us lost our homes or wives/girlfriends.

But not risking your savings, on the other hand - if you aren't willing to risk your savings, being a startup founder might not be for you. :)

jon_dahlon VP8, WebM, and HTML5 video

Definitely. Vorbis is a good codec, too, so this is a win for everyone.

jon_dahlon WebM - an open web media project

Definitely. This is not "just another video codec" - it is significantly better than any other open source video codec. That's a big deal.

And codecs are really really hard to create, for technical and legal reasons. It's not like 5 new production-ready video codecs come up every year. We might not see another credible open source codec for five years.

jon_dahlon Twitter's Alex Payne quits, heads onto something new.

Not to sound glib, but:

it is a hard problem. Extremely Hard

Isn't that exactly what an ambitious entrepreneur should look for? Especially someone who's had some startup success in the past?

jon_dahlon Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

The biggest goal, at least a few years ago, was to have a Ruby that is substantially implemented in Ruby, as opposed to being a hundred thousand lines of C under the hood. Paradoxically, this can result in speedups, since it's easier to optimize expressive, well-written code. Avi Bryant gave a talk at RailsConf a few years ago about how Smalltalk contains all the "features" of Ruby that are usually blamed for its performance woes, but still managed to be pretty fast. It's not the language features that keeps Ruby slow; it's the opaque implementation.

jon_dahlon Nowmov (YC W10): Sit Back, Relax, And Watch An Endless Stream of Videos

Look at it from the other direction. In 5-10 years, there will be a lot of really successful businesses made as the line between TV and internet blurs. Who knows what those businesses will look like, but I'd bet that a few smart hackers who are able to build and iterate quickly will figure it out before Comcast - and maybe even before Google.

jon_dahlon Nowmov (YC W10): Sit Back, Relax, And Watch An Endless Stream of Videos

Keep a few things in mind.

First, a lot of companies release their long-term vision in stages. Think of Bump: their first release was a way to share contacts on mobile devices. Which is kind of cool, but maybe not IPO-worthy. Now they're doing mobile payments with PayPal, and I can only imagine they have bigger things coming.

Second, YC invests in founders, and the Nowmov founders are amazing.

jon_dahlon Zencoder (YC W10) Wants To Be The AWS Of Video Encoding

The API is just http + json, so it works with any language. But we also hope to have an open source Python integration library very soon. (Anyone want to help us with that?) :)

jon_dahlon Zencoder (YC W10) Wants To Be The AWS Of Video Encoding

Our pricing decreases as volume increases, so at a higher level, an hour of video is currently $1.68, not $3.60. At scale, we have other options we can offer (like dedicated servers at a fixed monthly price). We feel pretty strongly that even someone doing 10M videos/month is better off using a service like ours rather than investing in a custom solution. But we're biased, of course. :)

jon_dahlon Zencoder (YC W10) Wants To Be The AWS Of Video Encoding

Oh, and then a harder one: Could you take a bunch of images & soundtrack file, and render it to a movie?

Not at the moment. It's something we're considering at some point, though.

jon_dahlon Zencoder (YC W10) Wants To Be The AWS Of Video Encoding

Soon! It's in the works. In the meantime, we can of course do non-streaming video for iPad/iPhone/etc. (Email us if you're interested in early access to iPhone streaming.)

jon_dahlon Zencoder (YC W10) Wants To Be The AWS Of Video Encoding

Yep, we're AWS at the moment. We're ultimately cloud agnostic, though, and can support other cloud environments (Rackspace Cloud, etc.) as well as our own servers. EC2 is pretty compelling for transcoding, though, because (1) so many people use S3 for video storage and delivery, and (2) Amazon's fastest servers (XL High CPU) are pretty fast - faster than most cloud servers.

jon_dahlon Zencoder (YC W10) Wants To Be The AWS Of Video Encoding

Hi ripb. Yep, our sales site needs a page that covers this. If you sign up and play around with the API, you'll see this info. At the moment, we do:

Input: just about everything

Output: H.264 video, AAC audio, and MP3 audio, in a MP4 or Flash 9+ container format. Ogg/vorbis/theora are coming soon, as are a few others that we can't talk about yet. We've decided to take the "narrow" approach for now - 99% of the demand that we see is for these five codecs (H.264, AAC, MP3, Theora, Vorbis). If there's anything in particular that you're looking for, let us know.

jon_dahlon H.264 Already Won—Makes Up 66 Percent Of Web Videos

This is a strange article. H.264 is clearly the leader, and clearly the best video codec available today. But everyone already knows that, and so it isn't news.

The news is VP8, which will finally give H.264 some competition. "Microsoft won - makes up 90% of desktop market" isn't news. "ChromeOS captures 50% of desktop market": now that would be news.

jon_dahlon Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

Absolutely. What's wrong with a business having a revenue model? Better this than advertising or a crippled free version.

jon_dahlon The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Man

These people liked IE, the worst browser ever?!? They reject standardization?

Apparently you weren't doing web development back in the Netscape 4.7 days. :)

IE 5.5 and 6 were actually big steps forward for web standards back in 2000-2001. They were actually decent browsers then. Not perfect, but no one was. The problem isn't IE6 - it's that Microsoft stopped with IE6 for such a long time.

jon_dahlon IAMA founder of NewsTilt, a YC startup trying to reinvent journalism.

Not the OP, but: probably not. Ruby is big, but Python is pretty big too. In the latest class there is even PHP, .NET, and backend Javascript.

jon_dahlon On Geeks and Gays

I don't think he was saying that one (religious or atheist) is more moral than the other. Just that when we geeks take a stand on a fundamental question, whether it's moral or philosophical/theological, we often do it with conviction.

jon_dahlon VP8: The Savior Codec

This article rightly points out that we don't know much about VP8 first-hand. But we can infer a lot.

First, VP6 is a pretty decent codec, widely available for comparison. Not as good as H.264, but better than Theora and (IMO) MPEG-4 ASP. Even if Google was only releasing VP6, that would be pretty compelling. It's reasonable to expect that VP7 and VP8 are incremental improvements over VP6. No one knows exactly how much, but if a free VP6 would be exciting, then a free VP6+ would be even more exciting.

Second, Google didn't pay $120M based on On2's marketing website. They obviously evaluated On2's tech first-hand and decided that it was worth buying.

jon_dahlon Non-Apple's Mistake

Apple's aesthetics are important, no doubt. But equally important was its decision to standardize its computers on BSD and Intel. Before OS X, Apple was a niche product, and its niche didn't include most developers. After OS X, the dev community started to trickle in, but it really took off after the Intel switch. Partly because the Core Duo was much faster than the PowerPC, but also because the PowerPC was a form of lock-in. It kept good software out, and made it hard to develop for other platforms.

Apple owes a lot to standardization and opening up. It's not all App Store lockdown. The question is, is this App Store crap a general trend? Are they going to bring that to the desktop?

jon_dahlon Google to Open-source VP8 for HTML5 Video

x264 is a codec implementation, not a codec standard. The x264 source code is free, but what it produces isn't (at least in the US). Rumors are VP8 will be free on both counts.

As for the patent issue, Google has no doubt done this during its ~9 months of due diligence while buying On2. Not saying that issues won't come up, but Google apparently felt comfortable with the situation.

jon_dahlon Google to Open-source VP8 for HTML5 Video

Apple's a big backer of H.264, and they're invested in the codec. Hopefully they'll support VP8 in Safari, but I wouldn't look for the iPhone to change to VP8.

jon_dahlon Google to Open-source VP8 for HTML5 Video

No one will remove H.264 - it's a great codec with wide support. It's more likely that we'll be in a world with two good video codecs, not just one. VP8 will hopefully become the HTML5 video standard, and H.264 will remain in Flash (which will still be useful for a long time), most browsers, many mobile devices, and on the desktop.

Incidentally, this has been the state of audio for a long time - mp3 and aac are both good codecs, and both are really widely supported. (Vorbis is reasonably good too, though not as widely supported. Maybe that will change with HTML5.)

jon_dahlon Ask HN: What is the best qualtiy office chair for long stretches of coding?

I honestly don't know why people rave about the Aeron. I went to a store and sat in a few and wasn't impressed

I hear that from people from time to time. I'm sure it's body-specific - the Aeron probably works really well for some people and not for others.

I tried out a few chairs before settling on an Aeron, and it was my favorite of the bunch. Two years later, I still absolutely love it.

Best of all, I've now purchased 4 Aeron chairs (for myself and for my employees), and I've found all four in the $300-$500 range on Craigslist.

jon_dahlon It's time for Entrepreneur University/Startup Ninja School

I've always wondered if Y Combinator is modeled after the English university system. As I understand it, at a school like Oxford, you:

1. Work independently on your research

2. Meet once a week or so with your tutor to discuss your progress

3. Attend lectures during the week, but this is less formal than in the US, where you have to register for classes and get a grade at the end

At YC, you:

1. Work independently on your startup

2. Meet with Paul Graham once a week or so to discuss your progress

3. Attend 1-2 talks each week at YC that are germane to your company