skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "delete all of a user's files" example was just one of many. It is sometimes valid to force a crash when the code detects an impossible case (or when you choose not to recover from that case for simplicity). If each component either functions correctly or the program crashes, that can significantly reduce debugging time. There aren't any silent failures from components that simply ignore invalid input.

That said, with procedural languages I try to write code that recovers from all reasonable cases and assert the rest.
I'm pretty sure that isn't the cause, because Patrick has been able to reproduce the problem by generating only correctly formed requests.
Perhaps an enterprising Angel Group can try to package or commoditize the process of making Angel-sized (six figure) investments. I'm not sure the term "Angel Group" would still apply after adopting this model, but Angel Groups seem well-positioned to evolve into this new "new venture animal."
Why stop at 4 day weeks? Let's make it 3 day weeks, or maybe 2 day weeks?
Those things should probably be outsourced. Not having a wife, I mean - although, maybe that would be an idea, too ;-)
"the kind of founders who have the balls to turn down a big offer also tend to be very successful"

Or they tend to fail spectacularly. The more risk you are willing to take the more you will tend to go towards the extremes: One extreme is huge succes, the other is bankruptcy.
You're very welcome :-)

BTW, if you like the article, even briefly... consider subscribing to his feed. Very interesting, very eclectic. He is the author of "Purely functional data structures" which goes into some depth on high-performance data structures. He also write fun things about games and thinking and...

Oh for Pete's sake stop reading my rambingss and read his well-chosen words instead ;-)

http://okasaki.blogspot.com/
This is awesome. Are there other such tutorials out there for ruby?
So the biggest gap is between angels/yc clones and VCs? It appears that there is a far bigger disparity between potential startups and angels who will fund them. This may be hard to grasp, depending on where you sit, but there is still a truly microscopic percentage of the workforce that gets in at the ground floor of a startup that gets funded by outside angels.

This is to say that percentages are what should be considered in measuring "ease" of getting an investment at each stage. 0.001% of groups that desire an early stage angel investment can get it, 30% of angel funded groups can get a successive intermediate investment, 50% of the groups that make it to the intermediate stage can get VC money, etc.
Do you support the "NSFW" class on links?

http://tommorris.org/profiles/nsfw
> The reason there aren't more Googles is not that investors encourage innovative startups to sell out, but that they won't even fund them.

This goes for YC as well. Surely there are some technically innovative applicants that don't fit the mould of web sites to make quizzes or 10-second cartoons or other such dubious acceptees.

Google itself would have been rejected on at least a couple of grounds: project being too big to make much progress in 3 months (crawling the entire web!), and needing too much money ($15k ought to be enough for anybody!). IIRC they got not only the $100k from Bechtolsheim but also a similar amount from Cheriton.

> And yet it's the bold ideas that generate the biggest returns.

Yet YC sticks with smaller ideas...

> It's remarkable how wedded they are to their standard m.o.

This also seems to apply to YC. Small idea, $15k, 3 months, move your ass to Boston (then move again to SV, where you should have been in the first place), standard terms, no negotiation of the offer if YC accepts you.
What size investments do the Angel Groups make right now?
No, NSFW is based on user votes.

I'm not sure how good an idea it is to leave it to the site owners to mark NSFW.
What if the validation code itself contains the errors. It might be a fallacy to assume problems can be solved in that way.
Traditional angel groups have so far been a complete disappointment. They're more conservative than VCs.

But I would not be surprised if a new form of angel
group starts to emerge. There are a couple syndicates of ex-Googlers that look very promising. They have lots of money, and they were all smart enough to get hired as early employees at Google.
It is my understanding that Angel Groups presently serve more to facilitate connections between Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors, rather than investing collaboratively. The size of the investments they facilitate vary (likely to fall between seed/YC [5 figures] and VC [7 figures or +] sizes).
I've been quite surprised by the "get more traction" argument. It's like, if I had traction, what the hell would I need you for! Aren't you supposed to be the cowboys of investing? Sheesh. Tell me my idea sucks, that I suck or that my market sucks, anything but "your company doesn't exist yet so we can't fund it." Sort of a self defeating argument.
Windows users petition to keep XP alive
This sounds like circuit breakers for software. Instead of an over current condition you've got excessive busynesses.
Well, or they fail spectacularly and we turn their business model into a running gag. But then, most "Googles" seem to have a business model that would have been a running gag had it failed.
"Especially in the USA, suggesting that something can wait, or that the morale boost from working less will end up in more productivity angers a lot of people."

"They're out of their minds! They suggest that it can wait and the morale boost from working less will end up in more productivity... Blasphemy! They're just lazy! I've worked 90 hours a week for 7 years, and because of that I'm ill and borderline insane, but IT'S WORTH IT, I'M PRODUCTIVE!!! Sure, I'm chronically stressed and made 3 burn-outs, but I get stuff DONE. Those no-goods can't understand what it's like. They don't understand what sacrifice means! Grumble."
http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/whatisgrid/whatis.html
Do you have links or other info on these guys that you're able/inclined to share?
You're wrong. We care mostly about the founders. And we have funded projects so ambitious that they've taken 2 years to build.
I can think of one other good reason to consult when you're working on a start-up ---- the consulting project that you're working on is something that will teach you something that you need to know in order to make your start-up successful. There's nothing better than learning on someone else's dime. Especially if the company for which you're consulting has some particuarly smart people or cutting-edge resources that you wouldn't have access to otherwise.
> VC firms present an image of boldly encouraging innovation. Only a handful actually do.

pg, can I ask for examples ? I am genuinely curious.
"Any really good new idea will seem bad to most people."

This is a very true statement. The danger that I've seen is so often people think, "My idea seems bad to most people, ergo it must be good!"

How do you separate the seemingly bad from the actual bad? Figure _that_ out, and you'll make something of yourself.
Comparisons to Google are worthless, primarily for 2 reasons:

1. Every logical mind (even within Google) in 1999 would have seen that Google was heading for failure - there was no money in search. They got lucky in finding one -adwords - that worked.
2. Had the timing of their discovery been off, or had the dot-com bubble busted a few months earlier, they would have died.

In saying that, they are useless as a measure of anything because they are such an anomaly that they shouldn't be used as a guidepost to success. In other words: If you were to operate the way Google did today, 99 times out of 100 you would fail. They are the exception to the rule.

Although, PG's comparison to Facebook is apt, as they're also in the same position as Google was. I'll put my money on them being in the majority though.

I did like Paul's point about VC's, but then again, you could extend that to how pretty much any industry operates. That's why innovation is so profitable, after all.
From your previous letter: "We rejected a lot of proposals [...] because the project seemed too big to start on only three months of funding."

All your non-defunct fundees are still "building", but that's not the same as accepting groups you know are going to take two years and a lot more funding right at the outset.

As for caring about the founders/investing in people instead of ideas, that doesn't hold up for several reasons: 1) If you really end up changing the idea so often anyway, as often claimed, the idea proposed wouldn't be grounds for rejection if the founders were otherwise good; 2) Many founders don't have track records, thus you have nothing to judge them on; 3) Some applicants do have track records, but you reject them without reviewing the stuff they've done due to lack of time or other reasons.
I wouldn't leave it to them, but I would allow them the ability to specify it. You could give users the option to only filter based on votes, if you so chose.
"Solved" certainly shouldn't mean "avoided entirely". One way to write good software is to quickly recover from mistakes. So instead of staring at your code while you triple-check each corner case, you approach the problem from the other direction by testing each code path until you're confident that the code runs as it should for the inputs that matter. (Be sure to assert for all other inputs).

In that light, it is easy to see why it can be good to crash for invalid cases. Since you don't handle a bunch of failure cases, you end up writing less code. And since less time is spent in the debugger, more time is focused on the correct task: achieving architectural goals rather than solving structural problems.

After you acquire a deeper understanding of the architecture, it is best to redesign (throw away) your previous attempt. After the second and especially the third iteration you will have written a solid and elegant program in a relatively small amount of time. Programming is about trusting yourself to make decent decisions based on your current knowledge.

As with anything, there is only a finite amount of time to solve a problem. So if you don't have a lot of time then don't fret if your code isn't perfect (or reusable) as long as it works.
Anyone @ the mysql conference this week?
Hit me up maybe we can meet up-
"... You’re not a sharecropper if you’re building around the Apache webserver and the increasingly-large suite of associated software. Nobody owns it, and it runs on anything ..." ~ http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...

Tims right and he's wrong at the same time. What google has done is quite interesting. By commoditising the application server software, & reducing the cost, it means more Startups can quickly move to the market. There is nothing (yet) that I can see that will stop you moving your code & site if you have to later on. A big cost in time & money is setting up your own servers. You can do self hosting but do you have to if it is a time/complexity cost?

The only people who are really squealing are the hardware/software vendors (Tim works for Sun) and ISP's who have effectively taken a pay cut.
Are you guys running your own web server? If so why? It would seem to me that apache wouldn't have garbage collection problems.
This essay doesn't quite sit right for me. My skeptical side constructs the message "invest 400k in YCombinator startups and you will have a piece of the next Google."

I think I see that because I assume that PG is not being hypocritical; ie. VC's should make bold investments -> YCombinator must already be making bold investments.

I am not under the impression that this message is intentional, it just seems that the argument flows to that point.
That sentence isn't in the most recent emails. I took it out precisely because it's no longer true. It was in the rejection email we sent the first summer, and as often happens with text you rarely look at, it stayed around after it had become false.

And by building, I meant two years to launch. There's a startup we funded two years ago that's launching in late spring or early summer.
I second illbuzz.com. Quality prints, and the cheapest game in town for rounded corners. :-)
Five surprising salaries (Astronomers 96K/year)
UN warning on Food Riots
Thanks for everyone's input. To answer some questions and comments being posted:
1. I do have enough funds to last 6 to 8 months on my own if I had to.

2. I'm not sure if I'm going to learn much on the project I am on because now my role is more advisory, but I will interact with potential service providers for my startup.

3. I do think that I have issues focusing on two projects at the same time because I like to do a good job on whatever I'm doing. This also means that there is a good possibility of me spending more than 10 hours a week on the project.

4. We have been talking to a small set of our future customers, and they can't wait for it to launch. And it needs to launch now.

I've made the decision to go 100% on my startup, and not worry about consulting. Someone reminded me how I worked through college and have always regretted it, wishing I would've have just taken a loan and paid more attention, had fun, etc. I don't want to look back at this and say "If I just did it 100%"

Thanks for all your advice and opinions, it really did help.
Better Bass: Skip the Subwoofer, Hack Your Hearing?
Absolutely agree. I know more people who have turned down big offers and ended up with $0 than people who have gone on to tremendous success after turning down an offer. There are definitely other variables involved. But I would guess:

P(COMPANY TURNED DOWN BUYOUT OFFER(S) | COMPANY BECOMES LARGE SUCCESS) = 1.

But the reverse wouldn't be as good a predictor as PG feels.
I think what's being overlooked by the article is the actual development of some good technology -- there seems to be so much focus on the exit rather than what a startup is actually doing.

So many of these Web 2.0 startups seem to want to grab a piece of the pie by diverting traffic rather than growing the pie by offering something fundamentally useful.
Worldwide run on Rice
It's not like it's some massive, bold undertaking. It's one line in an htaccess file.
I agree with your point here. Some ideas seem so radically out of touch, that they actually are out of touch. The founder of Intuit once said that 'your competition isn't other companies, but the way things are done now'. Some companies like to invent ideas about what people actually do. Therefore: observe how people spend their time, and make something that makes that better or more valuable. Then you can make sure you're not making something 'actually bad'!
Food Inflation, Riots Spark Worries for World Leaders
Fear is not to be feared
Conquer Fear and Fear is not your foe
Fear is your friend

My favourite phrase is "sine metū" or "no fear" ~ http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=596798 Most of what you find with Fear is really the fear of failure or unknowns. You can also use fear to your advantage by tempering your (over) confidence.
It still doesn't make sense. You say two years ago you had this max-timeframe criteria; but there's a startup you funded two years ago that has yet to launch. Well, you can't use them as an example of your foresight if they accidentally slipped through your filter, or if they accidentally ended up taking much longer than expected. Fo' shizzle, G.

It's kind of amusing the rejectees not only got a form letter, but a recycled one, which wasn't even accurate!
Poll: After Startup School - [SF] Hacker Launch Party or [PA] StartupHappyDevHouse
We've been planning to have some Hacker News readers over to our office to enjoy some free beer to celebrate our limited beta launch (finally!). We noticed that StartupHappyDevHouse is also scheduling an event right after startup school that looks interesting, so we're thinking of changing the date (or postponing the party until the unlimited beta launch). Please let us know if we should go for the party or the hacking - we're game either way.

[1] http://streamfocus.com/about

[2] http://superhappydevhouse.org/SuperHappyDevHouse24dot5
Meet @ StreamFocus Free Beer Hacker Party in Soma, San Francisco after Startup School
Meet @ StartupHappyDevHouse in Palo Alto after Startup School
TwitterPolls: Easily Create Polls For Twitter
I was hoping for examples of YCombinator companies to go with each of the arguments about success (or failure, but that might be picking on them). That would have bolstered the assertions and made it sit better with me.
You say two years ago you had this max-timeframe criteria

The first batch was in the summer of 2005.
Keep track of recently acquired / funded web startups with CrunchBase's RSS feeds
http://www.crunchbase.com/companies/recently-acquired.rss

http://www.crunchbase.com/companies/recently-funded.rss

Seems like a good idea to keep track of what kind of companies are getting funded and bought. For a wile I was skimming TechCrunch headlines for this info - the CrunchBase feeds automate the process and make sure you don't miss anything.
You guys are confusing competence with confidence. If you're riding a motorcycle really fast, would you rather be confident with yourself being able to control it, or would you rather be competent?

People who go all in are not always just confident, and bold, but also might know what they're doing as well.
I forgot it was 2008. Cripes, I'm getting old.
I think Erlang is brilliant because it keeps Prolog's unification (matching) but discards Prolog's backtracking in favor of procedural execution.

Unification can be very useful in solving some problems. Backtracking is also useful but sometimes gets in the way. Procedural code can be used to do anything that any language can do and students are more familiar with it. So I think Erlang is an interesting addition to languages. And that's without considering it's more practical aspects, e.g., multiprocessing, failover capability, etc.

Nor is Prolog syntax particularly ugly. A problem is that it is too simple, so simple that novices can become confused. Brna, Boulay and Pain discuss why Prolog is difficult in the book:

"Learning to Build and Comprehend Complex Information Structures: Prolog as a Case Study"
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Comprehend-Complex-Informatio...

See the review there by Randall Heltzerman titled "The Most Unlikely Book Ever to be Published".
Ask YC:  online presentation (shareable) software in place of Zenter?
Since Zenter was acquired, and Google hasn't yet moved the product into their lineup, what alternatives are there for online slide presentation?

http://mashable.com/2007/08/12/online-presentations/

Which of these would you recommend to use in its place in the meantime? I just basically need to throw together a slide presentation and then have it shareable by people going to a URL.
I've used iPrint several times. Once they completely screwed up the order (I received somebody else's cards) and once the quality was so-so, but in both cases they were very good at making it right. Overall I'd use them again.
The Last Lecture--Randy Pausch
"... The current system works more than adequately and is indexable as well. ..."

And is subject to breakage & link rot if any of the link structure changes. This happened when the "comments" term was replaced by "item" a long way back. So all the links I collected failed until I checked them. For instance try:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=3754 (FAIL)

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754 (OK)

Clean URI's are cool. They last a long time and just work ~ http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI These URI's smell funny. Having said that it doesn't really effect the running of the site, indexing or searching and require coding changes. But it will bite you at some time in the future.

I mentioned these type of things a while ago ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3671 so I don' think anything is going to change soon.
I don't think either of them have web sites. That's not unusual. A lot of angels and angel syndicates don't.
"How do you separate the seemingly bad from the actual bad?"

Try it and find out.
Yeah, I finally sat down and watched this whole thing last night. He gives some really good advice about achieving your dreams. It goes off on some tangents sometimes, like when talking about the specifics of his student's projects, but its still pieced together nicely, and towards the end it gets good when he really nails down his message.

Is Randy still alive? I hope he's doing well.
iirc, we already had this on the front page, but i'm adding my $0.02 to it:

i read this article, and then heard this (http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1235) this american life which included a piece on astronauts. most astronauts will never see space. 50% of their time is meetings, 25% is training, and the rest is paperwork and public speaking. not all its cracked up to be.
I am seriously having issues visualizing someone saying "this is not a good idea" to google founders. Perhaps I am too young or perhaps S&L were terrible salesmen, but I simply fail to see how come a relevant search seemed like a bad idea to VCs they talked to: and this is not 1995 we're talking here, back when Google was starting it was clear to many that everything was going to be online, and finding stuff will be hard, this is why everyone was into catalogs/portals.

Maybe I am too much of an "idea guy", but in my opinion the reason why there aren't many googles is simply because there aren't many good ideas around. I don't even consider social networking to be of any significant value (I'm with Maroon on this one). In that regard it was awkward to see Facebook and Google mentioned in the same sentence several times.

Even something as awesome as RSS isn't taking off (and it's been like 5 years already), let alone toys like Twitter that only a certain "inner circle" of people are using talking mostly to themselves. Not good enough.

Yes, yes - "implementation is more important", but without an idea there is nothing to implement to begin with. Most startups I know a little bit about seem more like an excuse for smart and driven people to work together: they aren't building anything particularly innovative. An no, they won't become next google regardless of what VCs or potential acquirers will do, it's a very rare case where I don't agree with Paul at all.
http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/news/
Yeah, for being so impressive it fails the 30 second pitch in 5 seconds. Can't figure that out.
I understand, you mean "lighten up." I come here more for the information and insight than the humor, and a lot of that information lives in the comments. We already have Reddit for fluff and everything else, so why clone that here?

I just think sarcasm (like your comment here) and certain strains of humor (the replicating meme, for example) are counterproductive, though I don't by any means wish to discourage original/well-thought-out humor.
"The low cost of starting a startup means the average good bet is a riskier one, but most existing VC firms still operate as if they were investing in hardware startups in 1985."

I don't understand the idea behind this sentence. In this context what is a good bet, a company with certain traits or does this refer to a certain type of portfolio strategy, say one that expects most startups to fail and a few to win big? Also, how does the falling cost of startups make the average good bet riskier? Is it because it lowers the barriers for competitors? Or is it because any idiot can say they're doing a startup so it's harder for investors to know which ones are good and which ones are bad? Also, what was investing in hardware startups like in 1985? Are you saying that VCs today evaluate companies with low capital requirements and high risk as if they are capital intensive with low risk? This has multiple implications, and which one(s) was in your head when you wrote this is not entirely clear to me.

EDIT: Rewrote the last few sentences