skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It will be a combination of these and other points. As someone who got into YC, I think the things we had in our favour were:

- Strong team (10 years friendship, history of working on interesting projects together)

- Proven determination (6+ tough years working on startups, willingness to travel from Australia just for the interview)

- Good primary idea + several other solid ideas (our primary idea wasn't a new concept at all, but a new, niche angle on a very established concept)

If you didn't get picked, it's because you didn't convey these qualities well enough. All you can do to get yourself there eventually (either into YC or to startup success some other way) is to keep persisting.

The key attributes YC looks for are smart & determined. You need to prove that you have these qualities, or if you don't, you need to develop them.
I can't wait until they launch that thing for real. That's going to be a major milestone in private space access.
I think you can found a company at any age. Just go do it. But you're not gonna create a game-changing company if you're past a certain. Old people simply aren't able to see the world correctly anymore. I have yet to see a single person over 30 write anything intelligent about Facebook. I don't really feel bad for you older people. You had your shot - heck, you had the best chance ever with the dotcom boom. Completely talentless individuals were building garbage products and making big bucks. The bar is much higher now than it was back then.
Visit the site. The tag line is "Friendfeed for the rest of the internet"

Next you'll tell me the tag line isn't descriptive enough. Fair enough, but it goes to show that these show-and-tell startup games have a lot of room for subjective opinions.

Describing a startup using usage scenarios is not uncommon. Peter had a problem with the old description. I felt that usage scenarios would explain the most with the least amount of fuzziness, so that's how I edited it.
One of the shortest most insightful comments of the day.
Would love to read an review without a referral link at the end.
I've personally been to Iran, Russia, and a handful of other ex-USSR countries, and I can't see any real obstacles here. Even those countries in this region that suck at stable government tend to be fairly good at reliable infrastructure; California-style rolling brownouts or Manhattan-type shitty metro cars would be more or less unthinkable here. I'm pretty certain people and politicians alike are ready to embrace this project. In the former Soviet block and in the Middle East alike, especially in Turkey, rail networks still symbolize progress and prosperity like nothing else.
If you believe this - http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html - a 64G drive might last 51 years of 24-hour, 365-day continuous writing at 80M/sec. But that assumes SLC, with MLC it looks shorter - http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html - 6 months at the same rate.

Personally, outside of data capture or similar applications with sustained turnover of large amounts of data, I think it's a non-issue in practice; and for those applications, the SLC drives are available at a higher price.
Exactly, most of the time should be spent thinking about how to make the system simpler, writing less code.
Yes I actually felt a bit sad as I read that "last blog post" - remembering back to when I first came across the essays. I also enjoy the podcast, I hope that continues on in some form.

But I agree with and appreciate the need to do something different - good on you Joel - and thanks for everything. And don't let the VC's eat your soul (unless for a very good price - puppies can get expensive quickly).
Questions: [pre-rejection]
1) Did you have a plan B?
2) If so, what was your plan B and your plans moving forward?
Once it's done I'll travel that thing, what a unique perspective on the world it must be to see the landscape and the culture change like that.

It's a perspective that no airplane ride will ever give you.
Flash has a wear mechanism for writing, limiting the number of erase (and thus write) cycles. The firmware in the device does "wear leveling" which spreads the wear around as evenly as possible rather than concentrating it. The net result is that the SSD will probably outlast the computer it is in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages

Depending on how the "garbage collecting" (moving active sectors out of erase blocks and erasing the blocks, number of erased blocks held in reserved, etc.) is implemented, SSDs can be fast for initial writing, but slow down significantly after they are used a while. Some manufacturers use better algorithms, but the algorithms are based on heuristics and trade-offs, so what works well for your neighbor may not work as well for you.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/10/intels-black-bo...

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-...
Tom, whats frustrating for me is I feel like my partner and I exhibited all those attributes. We don't think its the team, we know our team is strong. So it must be the idea: they aren't getting it.

We emailed a few YC alum to review our application last month, and they all said we were a great team. One loved the idea, one liked it, and one had no clue about the market (wasn't familiar with Facebook and quizzes). Our idea targets young people (12-25 yrs). Which leads to my thinking, that because they're unfamiliar with it (YC partners too old, would never do facebook quizzes), they brushed it off? One other issue is that they prefer built out products with users. We only had a working demo and proof of concept samples.

Either that or all the other teams were more spectacular. Which bothers me, cause I've been looking people up on twitter who say they got interviews, and their products seem mediocre.
That's just a thinly veiled amazon partner ad, including the 'bait' about page 241 and the 'get it today' link at the end.
Great article by a brilliant man. I like the fact that while he admits his mistakes and points out problems with Putin he does not shy away from pointing out some problems that are completely ignored in the western reporting on Russia -- that the so called "shock therapy" that was urged and urged by western economists and bankers was a total disaster and that the second election of Yeltsin and the first election of Putin were fraudulent.
The 6th idea is great.
In the time you were first rejected to the time of the 2nd rejection, you could have done some things to save up the same seed money for yourself, established relationships with angels/VCs through networking, come up with an alternate idea (perhaps the one that was just rejected), or just started working on the idea that was originally rejected. You would have been better off than waiting around and trying to get permission to start something from YC.
Writer Paul Theroux has made essentially this trip twice now, decades apart.

Chronicled in his books THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR and GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR.
Well, AMEN.
Make it a 85% hell ban - they will never figure out what happened, yet they will not be able to continue flaming.
It would be possible in the U.S. because the U.S. does not think long term any more.

Everything is short term, and a failure if not successful within a very tightly compressed timeframe.

There is no vision or ambition in the U.S. any more when it comes to infrastructural projects like this.
Ask HN: How would you advertise on Twitter?
Go.
It would be nice if he went back and updated some posts from 5-10 years ago, or maybe I'm just young and actually believe that things have changed in that time. :D
Yep. I have a development road-map. The only thing that YC (or funding) would offer is a chance to move faster down that map. The backup plan had the same customer development steps in it -- it just moves along slower.

The main problem is getting distracted with funding, not finding it. I can always self-fund. People come to me to ask for help with making teams perform a lot faster. Hopefully I've built up a bit of a good reputation and that makes my phone ring. The problem is -- getting involved with other teams takes time and energy away from my own team and startup.
Sounds like you forgot about it, looked the other way, and moved on, right? Did you build out your idea regardless? What happened afterwards?
Many nations do many things that aren't in their best interest, objectively speaking.

It's not like politics or even economics are ruled by rational decision making, you know.
I know of one other team that did the same.
In addition to already suggested hellban I suggest exponential back-off in response time as a way of dealing with anyone you don't like. They will either calm down or leave in frustration.
It's not negativity, it's a dream that I hope one day will be established; people living in peace and traveling to each others countries to learn and trade, enriching and improving each other's lives.

I am being a realist, there are terrorist attacks almost daily in some ME countries and Pakistan. A train packed with tourists and businesspeople is pretty much the same target value to a terrorist as a plane, except you can attack it from the outside much more easily. The prevalence of IEDs and people willing to use them, highly mobile suicide car bombs and the doctrine of certain radical Muslims which allows for moral permissibility of killing fellow Muslims who are "dealing with the enemy" (strains of Wahhabi and Qutbism thinking like Bin Laden's) would make such an attack inevitable.

This "negative" attitude of mine is part of the economic damage that is done to the moderate Muslims of these countries by the extremists. How many tourists have decided not to take a trip to many of these countries? How many businesses haven't been set up? How many skilled workers have fled? It's a massive economic damage these people are inflicting beyond the scope of their deplorable murders.
Monadic i/o and UNIX shell programming
You should use GridSpy for the power monitoring ;)

How much did the power monitoring cost?

Also, the background on the graph makes it practically unreadable. You should consider bright lines on a black background.
Facebook + ChatRoulette = FaceRoulette
It's like Chatroulette but only for people from Facebook. No fakers and dirty old men anymore! Give it a try and spread the word!
It's like saying there are roads everywhere around the globe, but not super highways, because it's a huge investment. Therefore you need to be confident it's gonna be used for a long time.
Consider who's setting the tone of the conversation - people with money who want a return on their money. Older folks are not as eager to work for less so they don't make a good investment. Doesn't make them bad businessmen tho. :-)
facebook + chatroulette = instant firefox crash (at least on this box...)
With programmer-friendly blogs/CMS's such as Hyde or Jekyll, I see less and less reason for database-backed solutions and their overhead, at least for the solitary writer/coder on his own site. Previously dynamic parts like comments, pingbacks, and search can all be outsourced (e.g. Disqus for comments). And on top of speed and simplicity, it also seems to me that such systems offer a killer-advantage: the use of real version control systems with one's content. Does anyone disagree?
Show HN: Weekend Project - Japanese Wordsearch Builder
bugs' repeated comments being a perfect case in point. I know this entire subject is hardly HN material, but both myself and the vet sitting beside me would like you all to know that:

bugs repeated advice on exercise would, if applied, make sure that Joel's dog leads a short, uncomfortable life due to the kind of overexercise that compounds the kinds of hip problems that already lead to shortened lives in large breed dogs even when exercised properly. Do NOT overexercise a puppy. Especially a large breed puppy.

That said, don't take advise from the internet. Not even mine. Not even if it is from the vet sitting next to me since, while she may be a vet, this is still the internet. Talk to your own vet about what is right for your dog.
I think this kinda explains why they don't: http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

"It's not you, it's someone else." :)

I found my "no interview for you" email in my G-Mail spam folder a few minutes ago (try a search for "in:spam ycombinator.com").

While I'm a little bit disappointed not to get an interview logistically this wouldn't have been the best time in my life so I'm not too down about it. (I think that's realism rather than justificiation. :) )

All the best to everyone whether you got an interview or not. And, like everyone else says keep going. My plans for world domination will continue just at a slower pace. :)

Oh, BTW, I'm possibly going to be in the Bay Area sometime in July/August anyway and would be keen to meet up with YC/HN people then (I'm in New Zealand currently).

P.S. In case you're wondering, I haven't heard if the team of Bright Bunnies got an interview independent of me. :D Don't forget to check out the blooper reel if you missed it and need a laugh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0ouOkNeBS4
The solution that worked for me the most:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing

Plan out your schedule for the entire day (as detail as possible, i.e. when to have lunch and for how long) the day before and follow it.

The key is to get into the habit of timeboxing. Forget about tricks. There's no easy way out. You have a bad habit of procrastination. It will take much effort to undo that.
The Yelp project did not work out at all well. About 20 customers registered with Yelp and entered positive reviews, but then Yelp deleted nearly all of them. Folks have explained to us that Yelp only publishes positive reviews on the pages of companies who pay them to be listed (flight school owners are famously unwilling to part with money!).

Data points accumulating.
I read Dale Carnegie's book 4-5 times over because I enjoyed reading it.

It really backfired on me one time, though. I was staying in a hostel and some guy was angry at me (it's not important why). I decided to go for the "take the blame, and agree that it's your fault to disarm your opponent who expected a fight". The angry guy really felt like I was patronizing and I didn't give a shit about him, which just made him more angry. Oops.

I was convinced that my Carnegie verbal kung fu was better than that. I made note and next time I'll argue briefly before conceding and moving on.

I also agree with someone in this thread who said that it's annoying when you suspect that these techniques are being used on you. I have a friend who reads those kinds of books and I regularly wonder if he is being genuine when he asks my opinion about something.
Are you using Chrome on Linux by any chance? GigaOM pages never load for me on Chrome 4.0.249.43 on Linux--- they just look like they're loading forever, then Chrome eventually pops up the "this tab died" message. Works fine in FF though.
"Tom, whats frustrating for me is I feel like my partner and I exhibited all those attributes. We don't think its the team, we know our team is strong. So it must be the idea: they aren't getting it."

I bet you 90% of the YC rejects feel this way. I mean, really, what makes you think you're different from anyone else?

The point isn't that you're the same. The point is that you have you consider that everyone is putting their best foot forward and has the confidence in themselves and their idea to try out for this program.

Maybe they didn't get it... but then I'd say that's more your fault than theirs. You have to be able to convey your idea as easily and simply as possible.
This just happened, we applied to this session (S10). We will be building the idea out regardless, maybe even applying to YC again in the winter.

But I'm still frustrated, its just not making sense in my brain and I'm trying to figure out where I went wrong. YC does make mistakes, maybe my rejection is simply one of those mistakes. Or maybe the idea does suck. I'd love to know which, lol.
Too bad, because I'm going to tell you. It will cost $2,200.
I would like to say thanks for the great essays over the years. I started reading back in college before joelonsoftware.com existed (even exchanged email with Joel back in 1999 or 2000 or something) and his writing turned me on to a lot of great ideas and books that I've learned a lot from.

I wasn't sure what Joel's reason for giving up the blog would be, but I agree that not wanting to re-hash the conventional wisdom is a good reason.

I look forward to seeing what's in store for the next 10 years.

Hey! I think this my first front-page post on HN. So one more thing to thank Joel for.
Yeah, someday we'll have high-speed rail in the US. It will probably take at least a decade to get the first one, if not a little longer.

In the meantime, read how GM paid to destroy our mass transit system so people would buy more cars.

http://www.trainweb.org/mts/ctc/ctc06.html
The Silk Road has existed before in history. Times can change. China has a pretty big army after all.
Well you can hit control+f2 and then hit F for file. :)
How did you come to the conclusion that the application was done lightly? That's a big assumption.

I also respect PG and YC crew but I don't take a "no" as being so definitive as you do, I guess. There could be many reasons as he states in whynot. Maybe you don't have the right team. Maybe they couldn't see the vision in your answers. Maybe they didn't see the market.

All 3 of those maybes are subject to change imo. In between applications, your team could've changed. The vision might have become more clear with new news from the industry. Perhaps the market is becoming more apparent due to players entering the market.

I think the "one and done" attitude is more likely to be detrimental. Just because you try more than once doesn't mean you're doing it lightly.
This really should have a better title, like Beautiful geometry Proofs
I can't wait either, but I don't think the first launch is really a major milestone for private space access -- Atlas V and Delta IV both have multiple successful launches already.

The real milestone comes if and when Falcon 9 successfully carries people into orbit.
Works pretty good here! I love the idea! No more naked men :D
Except that sputnik was a proxy for a nuclear weapon. "Look what we can put up above your heads, and there's not a thing you can do about it." High-speed rail doesn't have the same overtones.

Also, connecting 1.5 billion to 700 million is a lot more lucrative than connecting, what, 150 million to 50 million? Nevermind the fact that there are existing high-speed networks to connect with in Europe and China. What a fucking bummer it would be to take a 6 hour train trip from NY to LA then a 6 hour bus from LA to SF.
P.S.A. prostate screening is inaccurate and a waste of money
I agree, but I think it's worth noting that there's nothing inherently wrong with using referral links (if your review is honest and includes a disclaimer).
I know most of everyone rejected feels the same way as I do. I can't speak for anyone else application, but I know my team is smart and determined and has the evidence to show for it. I think the frustration lies is not knowing where we went wrong (which PG actually wrote a little essay about; sometimes there is no reason. Maybe its just a numbers game).

Also, I'm not blaming YC for not getting the idea. I know it has to be clear and concise. I worked pretty hard to make it clear, which is why I solicited the help of 3 YC alumni in reviewing the application.
The secret coach, Bill Campbell (2008)
When I saw the husky puppy, the first thing I thought of was Philip Greenspun and his Samoyeds. http://philip.greenspun.com/

Funny coincidence that he mentioned him in the article, as one of his forerunners. Maybe it wasn't coincidence.
Holy shit, someone just built this?! I just posted this as an idea I hoped someone would steal...

-- Oh, I see via the whois records that it was not, in fact, registered today. Oh good, the world is not insane...
Not to belabor the point, but I know a lot of otherwise intelligent people get working dog breeds without being adequately prepared to handle their need for stimulation and exercise. I care about the welfare of animals and hate to see people get puppies recklessly. It's not "your business" if your choices involve the mistreatment of animals.

I'm happy to hear that Joel knows what he's doing, and apparently has a ridiculously big apartment. :) However, if a comment in this thread makes anyone think twice about getting a husky puppy, then it was worth it IMO. Sorry if those statements come off as nosy, that's not really the intent.
Hard to make it happen politically. India tried something similar, to get gas from Iran in a pipeline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Pakistan%E2%80%93I...
The project has been gestating for the last 20 years with no real movement in the progress meter. And similar to what happened with the pipeline, I expect the US to spring roadblocks all over the place. Even if it cannot convince every country, it will convince enough to ensure gaps in the rail line undermining its usefulness.
Any mention of what the route would be? And what's the anticipated travel time from London to China?
Wow, did not think people would get offended by that. Amazon link has been removed :)
Custom usb - Promotional USB- MY CEO-QQUSB.COM- Promotional Electronics
Hmm don't know. With all due respect to PG and crew, VCs and angels seem to do their homework as well. Actually their initial filters are probably much more restrictive so I guess it would depend on how you calculate the batting avgs.
Clean and simple. I like it. For a more advanced puzzle, you could also put kanji instead of romaji in the "word list" (basically it would be a test of the user's ability to remember how the kanji were read.)

One bug I noticed --- it is showing ぢ for "ji". Except in a very few cases, that should be じ. "zu" should also usually be ず (but づ is not uncommon, e.g. つづける).

If you're gonna keep working on it, EDICT (a Japanese-English dictionary) may be helpful --- the data is freely reusable for both commercial and non-commercial purposes:
http://www.edrdg.org/
Cartoon USB- KAPO Monkey-QQUSB.COM- Promotional Electronics
Wait, you mean this wasn't the standard one: :D

Are you crazy???
This could be hugely popular.
Programming is the new literacy
Jfornear, my review was well intentioned. But I've removed the link anyway.
I've been struggling with this issue of empathy myself. I'm constantly bugged about being very capable of building things for an employer, but having no idea how to make something people want.

How does one cultivate this empathy?
I definitely intend on continuing development on my projects. If you're a YC reject and want to join the community of rejects in moving forward, I'm putting together a group (in SF).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191553
Otsukarasamadeshita! Nice app! I find it pretty useful

What kind of input validation are you doing? It doesn't seem to prevent invalid characters. For example, I put in words with 'q' and 'l'--2 letters not represented in hiragana--and was able to generate puzzles
Hi HNers,

I wanted to demo my weekend project, an online Japanese word search builder. I'm currently studying the language and have been looking for some more interactive educational material than the usual barrage of textbooks. I especially enjoyed the word search puzzle included in my hiragana book and thought it would be fun to recreate it. I've built out support for roman-to-hiragana translations so far, and plan to add roman-to-katakana soon.

As for the technical details, the site is built on Sinatra and hosted on Heroku (using their new Ruby 1.9 stack!). The front-end is jQuery.

Hope someone else finds it as useful and fun as I do!