skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did not mean to attack, sorry if you took it that way. Just trying to give you honest feedback.

"What is wrong with 1 non-programmer + 1 hacker sharing equity equally?"

Nothing if you can find someone to do it. Great deal for you.

No one is accusing you of "twiddling my thumbs". Your mere presence here suggests otherwise.

I'm only suggesting that in the earliest stages, 90% (or more) of the work that has to be done is hacking, pure and simple. This would be like me opening a hair salon and splitting equity with someone who knows how to cut hair. Sure, there's lots of other stuff to do, but the main thing that needs to get done is hair cutting.

Maybe with advanced tools, outsourcing, and some quick learning, you can prove me wrong. I sense from your posts you're the kind of person you can.

Again, I hope you find your match and find great success. Keep us posted. (And someday, come back and let me know how wrong I was.)
How many of you haters have a facebook account?
The Fashion and Style section of the New York Times strikes again.
You know, it's funny to think about it, but a friend of mine (girl) offered to do my myspace profile for me, since I never updated it from the default look.

I think the reason for this might be that of necessity. Myspace only looks cool (subject to individual opinion) if you customize it. Girls spend more time on "social" sites like myspace. Therefor, girls have become more competent in making and installing glitter page layouts. (100% my own opinion. I'm just speculating)

I'm curious, does anyone know the approximate ratio of guys/girls on news.yc?
Kanji backspace seen in the wild.
Few people have to do all the specific algorithms stuff we learned, because now that's all in libraries, but it's still useful to know how those things work, just as it's useful to a pilot to know how all the systems in his plane work.

I think the most useful thing I ever learned in a CS class was from Michael Rabin: that the best way to solve a problem is often to redefine it as something that's easier to solve. This turns out to be applicable to practically every kind of work.
And, of course, this gem:

From a young age [girls] learn that they are objects, Professor Gill said, so they learn how to describe themselves.
>I'm curious, does anyone know the approximate ratio of guys/girls on news.yc?

100:1
The thing here is - for every social app, people are going to ask a) is it worth my effort to join this social network? or b) can this leverage my existing social network? And so, facebook, being the largest 2.0 social network becomes a cornerstone of the next generation of social apps.

I see it like the free-rider problem: facebook is like roads or plumbing or some other infrastructure, everybody profits from having one central established social network, but the reason it is in that position is because it's free. The hard part is just like paying for roads - you have to find a way of getting people to pay for it without diminishing its appeal
You're probably about right. :P
regardless of whether you have previous knowledge or not, if you're willing to program (whether it's front end or back) and you do learn, even if it is on the fly, for this project... then maybe a 50 50 split does make sense...
A total of 400,000 seem to have become bored with the social network and didn't bother to return.

I guess I'm not the only one...
well, what your experience was is that you learned that while at school. but that doesn't necessarily mean school taught it to you. it could also be that school actually makes it harder to learn that, but also puts so much pressure on people to learn it, that they figure it out anyway, despite that added difficulty.

This alternative view is consistent with the evidence in general, and with what you related about your experience.
The last I heard is it runs on AC power ONLY. If it's still true (the web site doesn't seem to say otherwise), it will fend off potential buyers, including myself.
Have, yes. Use regularly, no.
Thanks :) Didn't mean to sound defensive. I posted expecting responses similar to yours. Initially I was naive but a little networking in the tech community solved that pretty quickly.
I'm curious what you'd be doing for 40-60 hours a week while your partner(s) hack. I'm not being snippy. In fact, I am the least technical of 3 hackers on our team (currently YC08). I do all of the Photoshop work, html, css, JavaScript, light Rails, customer communication, copywriting, analytics, cooking (I'm serious), pitching, etc.

But if I took out the BUILDING stuff (design prototyping and front-end development), I wouldn't be a critical asset to the first 3-6 months of product development. I could certainly keep myself busy, but I wouldn't be critical.

If I were in your shoes, I'd focus on pitching why you are critical. Having ideas and being a user in your target market doesn't cut the mustard IMO. And an early stage team doesn't need a project manager, or detailed spec sheets, or other "manager-y" stuff.

That being said, there are startups that could really benefit from early sales/biz dev efforts. I know of at least one YC08 company that has a founder who is selling the hell out of their offering already (for real dollars). THAT has real value, but it really only applies to certain startups (a UGC site like I think you're after isn't one of 'em).
Of course Facebook only gets a small cut of that, unless they start selling massive numbers of "gifts" or Facebook tshirts...
YC is an investment company. They certainly do help their investments to do well, but I don't think they would keep from funding a similar company if they think it will increase their potential return.

After all, they expect a good deal of their companies to fail. If they didn't fail because of the idea then doubling up through a similar company is a good way to increase their odds. They might not fund competitors in the same cycle though.
Extend Your Brain With Evernote (Private Beta Invites)
Any suggestions on things to read so I can start to learn. I am going to buy a book on rails (agile web development). Know of joel on software. Programming.reddit.com. Anything else?
Err, hasn't epic always meant something like that?
Programmers at Work 1986: Where are they now?
So THATs what Y Combinator is
Wow. Add a few puns and one C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker, this could be a comment thread on reddit. That ain't a good thing.
We need more women like Danica McKellar. Women who use technology to communicate that science/math can be part of a girl's domain, if they choose. Since captivating boys on the Wonder Years, she has moved on to marketing/teaching the idea that math doesn't suck (to girls).

Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail (Hardcover)
by Danica McKellar (Author)

http://www.danicamckellar.com/
Making Fake Deadlines Real: Completing Projects with Self-Assigned Deadlines
totally agree. especially since the stats this article cites are just a 5% drop in UK users month to month

hardly indicative of epic fail

You have to understand that the average facebook user doesn't know who created facebook or what beacon is. Facebook will be around for a long while yet because it provides a useful service with a really big inertia.
No officer *hic* I just got out of the hospital
I hope this doesn't come out the wrong way, but why isn't it as simple as that? I'm sure the Enron accountants could come up with a better valuation model, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. It's a simplistic formula, but it seems reasonable enough to me.
It must have been a given that the debris would strike the ocean, regardless of which direction the impact came from.
Find something that has you start AND finish something, anything. Almost any O'Reilly book. Read the reviews on Amazon to see if it's the right thing. Webmonkey also has lots of beginner tutorials. The technology doesn't matter. The important thing is to try to BUILD something, fail (or not), and finally get it working. The first time you see something YOU wrote actually work, it's orgasmic.

An oldie but goodie:

http://webmonkey.com/webmonkey/programming/php/tutorials/tut...

You can't get wet from the word "water".
This delay in Alexa daily updates has actually been there for years now. It used to be related to the ranking of the site so lower ranked sites got updated less often, I dont know if that part has changed.
Yeah, this is worrying. A crap link and a crap thread, and it's number 2.

The fundamental problem on any site like this is that it's so easy to upvote lightweight stuff. When a link sounds like it's going to take a while to read, people say "maybe I'll read it later," and never do. And since they haven't read it, they don't upvote it. Whereas e.g. a cartoon people know will only take a few seconds, so they click on it. And if they like it, they upvote it. Sounds harmless enough, right? And yet repeat and the result is a disaster.

What is the solution? The Right Thing would be to somehow scale votes by how easy/hard it is to vote on something. Or I could add a downarrow on stories for users over a certain karma threshold.
Not a perfect analogy though.

For example, I really do prefer to program alone . . .
I've been working on a big project involving Adobe Flex for the past year. Before we started the project, they brought in Adobe trainers for 5-days of on-site, slightly-better-than-powerpoint Flex training. Too much information - from one topic to the next. We all knew no Flex. Theoretically, we could have learned Flex from the online tutorials but after the recovering from the deluge of 5-days of Flex we could claim plausible knowledge. Then, we sat on it for 4 months - no flex. Of course, not until we started trying to develop UIs using Adobe Flex 4 months later did we start to learn (painfully). But the training got us started.

The point of this little story - get help, ask questions (hacker personalities are problem solvers and love to solve problems), but get started. Training and mentoring can help bootstrap it. Ask a friend who is a programmer to help get you started.

You seem like a good writer - why not write a blog about learning enough about programming to build your own web application?
It might actually be an advantage to facebook to see the social networking investment market turn sour temporarily, to keep out big VC funded marketing campaigns that you have to do something to compete with.

Besides, typically, if someone is going to give you money at an absurd valuation, unless the terms are particularly onerous, it makes sense to take it.
I bet you Facebook has some statistical models that estimate when their user base will stop growing/start shrinking, so they probably knew at least a month ago that this would happen.
All the time, believe it or not. For example, in one class, I learned about garbage collection algorithms, which I used to explain to a coworker why he was seeing a certain memory usage pattern in the JVM. I'm also glad I learned about DFAs and NFAs in my theory of computation class, because they come in pretty handy for figuring out some problems. My favorite incident was when the same coworker was suggesting project ideas, I used Turing's halting theorem to show him that his idea was impossible. Granted, that doesn't happen every day.
The downarrow is a good idea, until you start to consider the cabal of greasmonkey jerks auto-downvoting everything on the new page that wasn't submitted by one of their cretin brethren. Perhaps there could be some kind of difficulty weight a user inputs when they submit a story. More demanding stories get a 10. Cartoons get a 1. Then give more weight to upvotes on the more complex stories. Obviously, this has the potential for abuse with folks misrepresenting the complexity of their article. But that wouldn't be hard to spot.
Redhat send Data Portability group Cease and Desist letter
I've been meditating about this over the last couple of days, and I'm pretty sure there are three stages in the life cycle of social news site discussion quality.

1. "You're wrong because" (intelligent arguments)

2. "You're wrong" (no reason given, baseless opinions)

3. "You're a fag" (ad hominems)

Of course there will always be some of each in any given stage, so the way the community reacts to comments is probably almost more important than the comments themselves. Good users will put up with stupid links, but they'll leave if it becomes clear that their contributions aren't being valued and they start to feel alienated from the community.

Up until recently the discussion quality on news.yc has been in stage one, but I feel like it's been drifting toward stage two over the last couple of weeks. I'm especially worried as we get closer to the deadline for YC apps, since quality always goes downhill during those periods.
I think there's a fundamental lack of agreement on what an upmod, uparrow, digg, or what have you actually means.

Some people upmod for relevance, others upmod for bookmarking purposes, and some upmod whenever they see something that makes them giggle.

Maybe more social news sites need to rise to the challenge of being opinionated in what the point of their upmods are.
Good point. The question is do you use what you learned at school, but if it was do you use what you were taught at school, the answers could be quite different.
Here's an idea for increased contacting functionality.

Let the event manager call a certain number and record a message for the invitation, then have it call everyone and play that message. That way, you have an advantage over picking up the phone and calling people one by one.
Ask HN: The Arc Effect
or HN: the Next Iteration

I get the impression that with Arc being released a lot of people who never had time for HN before are suddenly dropping in more often. (PG: what are the numbers on this? I'm envisioning a spike.)

Not to say that isn't great, but I'm wary of Diggification. Between links comparing programming to sex and a flurry of gratuitous, ostentatious adjectives in the headlines it's a bit concerning.

80% of the stuff that makes the front page is still pretty awesome, but what's in place to keep the signal/noise ratio high? Does the HN model still work as the community scales? What's in store for (++ HN)?
I love the airbags for ears. Obligatory YC orange.
I wish I had Mario. Instead I was stuck with Mavis Beacon.
i still wouldn't trust him with my cats or with mowing my lawn
Another variant would be to have the weight be voted on. Weights only matter for a fraction of submissions, so I wouldn't want to complicate submission by making everyone (especially new users) come up with a weight for what they're submitting.

Maybe it would even be a good idea to have the votes on weights be public, so no one would be tempted to use that as a way of censoring stories.
Google floating wireless baloon idea?
1) algorithms and distributed systems

2) my negotiation class (although practice is more useful :P)

3) getting used to busting my ass/grinding through problems
Hmm, you could just markdead. Do y'all resist the temptation to kill stories past some number of upvotes?
There are a bunch of these coming up. In addition to the ones in the article, a couple on angels in Philly put together DreamIt Ventures.

Hats off to YC for starting it all.
stars fall too, explode to be precise, leaving a big black hole.
This seems silly, but perhaps Data Portability could change the colors so you can easily see the merged d and p characters.

How different does a logo have to be to avoid trademark infringement?
You can see two spikes in unique visitors due to Arc here:

http://ycombinator.com/images/news.yc.1year.png

There was a spike in Jan when I said Arc was imminent, and then another when it came out. But if you squint your eyes and look at the whole curve, the underlying growth rate seems pretty constant.

In other words, while it's true we've been getting a lot of new users lately, this probably would have happened anyway.

What to do about that growth is another matter. I think a lot of users are alarmed at the sight of fluff links on the front page because they remember what that meant for other sites in the past. But the current fluff link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120816) was submitted by a long-time user, and there are no signs of statistical weirdness in the votes on it. I.e. statistically the users who upvoted that story are no different from the ones upvoting the other top stories. So at the moment I'm still hopeful that the bad signs are false alarms.

I have a hunch that the way to fend off the hordes of 14 year olds is to keep up the quality of the stories on the front page. Then if they come across this site they'll decide it's boring and leave.
What if the downvote only appears if the story is above, say, 7 karma? This would limit how long a lightweight story could be high on the frontpage.
Great work. Do I have to register to use it?
Could be worse. This link on Digg got 7070 upmods and 692 (!!!) comments:

http://digg.com/comedy/Coolness_2

...so far.
Universities seem to be struggling to cope with the depth of knowledge that has accumulated. It is empowering to "know how those things work" from first principles, but as time progresses, the volume of such knowledge grows towards and beyond the capacity of the courses that convey it. Universities must then (as they are now) make a delicate balance between covering fundamentals (which most practitioners consider too "academic") and preparing graduates with skills that they can immediately apply in practice. Many graduates seem dissatisfied with the balance that universities choose.
I don't think anything beats this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead
Karma is variable, no? As the site gets more traffic, karma points will start to go up over the board. A rising tide lifts all boats, so to speak. 7 may be a good threshold now, but will it be in 6 months?
Yes, for now, you have to register. We tried to make it as painless as possible though, so try it out!
quick followup to the feedback button, the 'Let' in 'Let us know...' is cut off when viewed in Safari. Cut off meaning covered up by the feedback block.
Probably not, but it's the kind of thing that could be manually or algorithmically adjusted.
Maybe restrict users below a certain karma to X number of upvotes per day? That way, you need to consider carefully which stories you upvote. Comment upvotes could stay infinite.
I would suggest reading this great short story by Asimov. Its called "Profession".
http://www.abelard.org/asimov.htm
Perhaps you could give users a limited anti-karma budget they could spend to downmod articles. Something like you may spend 1 point of anti-karma every 24 hours for each 100 karma you have earned.

For ordering purposes, a story's effective karma should be something like (total upmods / (1 + total antikarma)).
I don't disagree at all, but I'm interested in if you have a particularly memorable example where this sort of thinking helped you.
True, if TiVo or a cable company had 50 million subscribers, then yeah, it could be worth $15 billion. I don't see a $25/mo product from Facebook, though.

Not to mention that we don't know what percentage of the 50 million are active, participating users.
I've opined a bit elsewhere on what happens to social sites as they get more and more popular.

If you want YC to be, and stay, as a particular sort of thing, then unfortunately you have to actively enforce a particular culture. Since, presumably, you don't want to have to babysit the thing yourself all the time forever, that means picking a handful of people and 'blessing' them to do it for you.

So! Here's one way that might work -- though there're gonna be some objections to it:

Pick a dozen or twenty users that you think really 'get' what you want the site to be about. Set a special flag on them in your database. When they upvote a submission, it counts for a little extra, say 1.5 points; likewise if they downvote a submission. Then, you need to make sure that as people come and go, you still have this active core group of people tuning your site for you. So, if an 'unblessed' user gets habitually upmodded in their comments, or their submissions, by members of your blessed group, over a period of time that unblessed user gets automatically blessed, and their votes count for a little extra too.

This still leaves the door open for debates and arguments, while -- I think -- helping the site to stay on-subject without your active participation all the time.
It's easy to dismiss this as so far off that it's not worth thinking about, but there are plenty of brilliant people with PhDs who think robots with sufficient capabilities to resemble strong AI in domain-specific ways (human-competitive in limited specific tasks) will come in the next few decades.

It would be impossible to overstate the magnitude of the consequences of such developments.

A few years ago Prof. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, director of research at the Fair Isaac Corp (they created the FICO credit score) and the confabulation lab at the University of California San Diego, gave a talk to my neural networks class about his very firm belief that real strong AI would come in < 30 years. He didn't convince me that it would happen, but he correctly pointed out that were it to come it would make economics obsolete and could lead to some kind of grand utopia if we don't fuck it up.
Even if it doesn't look it, you should, unless you went to school for nothing. Broad exposure to a particular subject, if anything, hones your intuition about it, such that even if you make "blind guesses" about solutions, they are better suited than those without the education.

At the very least, you will know the names of things and where to start looking, which prevents you from reinventing the wheel. This difference, in my experience, is significant.

Don't overstate the importance of a degree, but don't understate the value of knowledge from school; it's knowledge, after all.
Anybody else read that as "wedding" or "niche space travel"? Talk about an unfocused startup...
how can i remove my url from your DB??

(I entered a site of my own out of curiosity, but now its killing my stats!!)
Bulk of the web's youngest content creators are female.
Glad to hear that such opportunities are open to the CS-knowledgeable. Where do you find such jobs? (Not on Dice -- they seem to just be about buzzwords).
When it comes to tech, simplicity sells
The rise of the genre e-zine: Will it ever find a profitable model?
I use high school algebra more than any other school learning aside from English.

I use a lot of the principles from 6.001 (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) at MIT. I think there were other classes with useful learnings, but it's hard to remember specifically.
Ask YC: Know of a good online flowcharting app?
Especially one that's free and easy to use?
Code isn't beautiful
How hard is it to use Snipshot from ourdoings.com?
I'm looking for a little user testing in exchange for you getting to see how someone else did it.

I integrated Snipshot photo editing into ourdoings.com, but it needs to be explicitly turned on by the user. I want people to understand that Snipshot is a different site, and get a chance to review their privacy policy before they enable it.

Take a JPEG file. See how long it takes to register, log in, create a site within ourdoings.com, upload the photo, and figure out how to turn on Snipshot integration. Please let me know how it goes.
Link for convenience:

http://ourdoings.com/
Yeah you're a fag so what do you know.

(Sarcasm people! Sarcasm! Humor is tough to do in written form)

I would add that there is a step 0 which is "you may be right, although I do not understand how..." which is how, if you think about it, you talk to people you deeply respect. I guess that's the extra-credit level for the internet, because it's rarely seen.
I became so bored with Facebook before I joined, that I never actually joined.