skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yahoo Stores rewritten from Lisp to C++ and Perl
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=s...

So if you made it to sell it, you might wonna avoid really unpopular languages.

Ruby compared to PHP have a lot smaller user community, but nowadays, one would never call Ruby unpopular.

So there is a different between unpopular lisp and unpopular Ruby

Lisp is not just unpopular, it's also really different from anything else, so harder to get in to.
Brad Fitzpatrick speaking at Stanford
Salon.com is pretty good too. If you subscribe they send you an email every morning with a link to one article and a short description. They might only publish three or four articles worth reading per week, but the quality of those articles is far better than anything you'll find in any newspaper. There are also almost never any factual errors, unlike the NYT. And also, unlike the NYT, it isn't full of blatant propaganda. (Ever notice how the Times always describes the warrantless wiretapping with the epithet "that begin after sept. 11th," even though their own reporting shows that claim to be false. [1])

[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/14/32927/2778/622/47636...
I haven't attended school in US and I sincerely want to believe that you are right. Although I can't help but notice that international affairs are never the topic of a conversation among my American friends: they're just not that interested, although they definitely know where Kabul is.
In practice, what everyone cares about most (both acquirers and investors) is who has the most users. If you're growing fast, they want you, period. And if not, not, period. So while investors and acquirers may grumble slightly about peripheral stuff like what language you chose, or where you're physically located, or the structure of your company, it's the sort of grumbling people do as they reach for their wallet to pay for something.
I'm also a college student and I think I agree with what you're saying for the most part... but at least for the high school I went to this article wouldn't be an exaggeration.

In high school, one of my classmates couldn't tell the teacher if President Bush was a Republican or Democrat. It's sort of shocking to see how little some people know or care about anything outside their immediate world.

But I wonder how bad this really is? My reaction to the article is that maybe it's not as "sad" as the author of this article wants me to believe... I know personally the world of politics and government isn't too appealing to me. I don't care about reading the huge newspapers and I can't stand the evening news shows. I'm not ignorant - I can answer almost everything he asks in the article - but most of what I do know is just a side effect and not a result of some extra effort I put in to keep up on current events.

Maybe I'm just naive student, but this article doesn't convince me that I'm necessarily missing out on a whole lot.
I have a similar DSL built in Ruby that can be run by by either Mechanize or Watir. I highly recommend Watir if you need to scrape ajax.
basically, they've changed the name each time leadership changes hands.
Yahoo Store was rewritten in C++ by the programmers at Yahoo who inherited it after we left, years after the acquisition.
On three seperate occasions, startups I've had key roles in lost or complicated deals because of technology decisions, including:

* Relying on a nonstandard runtime environment to run an xp codebase on Unix and Windows.

* Using Tcl anywhere in our product.

* Shipping an appliance on BSD Unix instead of Linux.

My markets tend to be different from YC markets. For a web app, your stack may not make much of a difference. Or it might. I don't have data points on people not caring that you're using Araneida to deliver a web app; in every bizdev situation I've been in, the technology stack has been a topic of discussion.
So true:

Those who tune in to television "news" are subjected to a barrage of opinions from talking heads like CNN's demagogic Lou Dobbs and MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Fox's Bill O'Reilly and his dizzying "No Spin Zone." In today's journalistic world, opinion trumps fact (the former being cheaper to produce)
Try this version:

http://www.internetisshit.org/print.html
How did you make it through high school? :-)
only a suggestion but since there are many aplicants, the selection proccess could be done in more stages.
It was Auctomatic. Thats Patrick from Auctomatic. The only person i know who would dare to use an obscure framework and be a major contributor to that movement.
I thought pg once said that there is no limit on the number of groups they can fund in a cycle. I'll post a reference link if I find one.

Update:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9066

[ thanks to http://www.searchyc.com ]
Where I live (Montreal, Canada) we get CNN and I can understand why college kids don't watch the news. It's complete bullsh news. Lou Dobbs is ridiculous in so many way...

Agreed that they could read the news on the net (because who gets the newspaper delivered to their rez?) but personally I feel like reading serious stuff on a screen is dry and very hard to do (much rather like paper).

Just my 2 cents.

p.s. Also, I haven't completely RTFA but generalizing is never good.

p.p.s. It's not because their top of their class they should be more aware of the news, that's BS.
I think both are correct.

Your link indicates that USA has 50+ and
Russia has between 15-24.
The quickest way to get ahead in a lot of poor countries is to associate yourself with the crooks who are ruling it, and get a slice of the money they extract from it.
It looks to me like Google has bought web apps from every stack. FeedBurner was a J2EE app!

If you have a zillion users or a key feature Google wants, I have a hard time believing Python is going to be a major issue.
What about the 60% of twenty-somethings that don't get a college degree? Is their participation in the democracy not mandatory?
He also mentions feeling burned after paying for worthless stuff, so the worth of money seems to play into his argument.
There's no limit on the percentage of groups we interview that we can accept, but there is a limit on the number we can interview.
Ask YC: Has anyone tried MorphExchange for hosting their rails app?
If so, how is it? Is it similar to Heroku?

http://www.morphexchange.com/
What else you call it when a healthy individual takes pills, sometimes a combination of, that are manufactured for ADD patients?
you're talking about a huge acquisition here... if you want to sell the company for 5-15 million, language will matter a lot more.
This is about the limit on interviewing, not funding. Maybe the selection process after the interviews _is_ "like a grade in a class."
So this is the first scalability bottleneck you have hit?
Yes, and at that stage we do give detailed, individual feedback to everyone.
This seems like a good idea on the surface, but in practice I don't see how it would work. There are only two real categories of information being collected, the information about the idea and the information about the team. And it doesn't really make sense to separate the evaluation into two different phases since the variables are multiplicative; that is, if the value of one is zero then the value of the whole equation is zero.
Summary: The number of good/compelling ideas+team >> Available spots
I think that the reason people want to know is not that they are looking to be graded, (they already have,) but that they would like to know how to do better. They want to improve their chances of getting in next round or succeeding while going solo. It seems to me that a "why I wasn't excepted" would be the first piece of advice I'd get from YC.
Would it be possible to see an example of a stellar application? You'd only have to put it up once, and it would help all of us understand what we're up against.
"using".
This seems to answer the recent questions about movements and competition for YC. With 200-250 rejected applications that are "pretty good", there should be more than enough material for XCombinator (where X!=Y) to work with.
"Abusing" is a subjective opinion in this case.
Maybe its not that he's exaggerating the issue completely, but college students (myself included) are used to being connected to a source of information somehow; a quick google search - phone call to someone at the worst - and we can get any bit of information we could want (slight exaggeration here but the point remains). As a result, we don't place as much importance on rote memorization of daily events and occurrences.

While I can personally answer the questions, I do see the viewpoint from the people around me who look at the questions he was asking - "Who else is a democracy?" "Who's the SoD?" etc - and go "Thats on Google/Wiki, why bother memorizing it when I can look it up just as quickly?" And honestly? It's comforting in a way to know that I'm not going to have to remember random bits of information if it doesn't interest me.

Is it depressing? In a way. But its the modern world for millions of people and it's not about to change anytime soon. Instead of giving an irate tirade on the issue, maybe it would be better for them to talk to the students and try to look at things from our point of view (grew up with technology and basically always connected) instead of the one they have/want us to have (technology is an aid to help us, not a crutch to rely on)
For the record there is an OpenCoffee club in Russia: http://opencoffee.ru/. There are no upcoming events probably because everyone is too busy to meet. :)

There are also a number of startup-style conferences in Moscow, the next one being RIT: Russian Internet Technologies: http://rit2008.ru/ (all in Russian, ha ha, because that's their core market)

MS and Intel are scouting Russian hackers and startups with the intent of supporting the startup culture as well: http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2008/03/14/043.html
It's the current one. There have been others we hit and overcame. We used to review applications printed out on paper, for example; now we have software for it.

We also have software for keeping track of all the startups, for communicating with them, and for generating all the documents for startups we fund. We'd have ground to a halt by now without these apps.
Noah Kagan: Viral Techniques of Tagged.com
I think we can just look at who's been accepted in the past.
true, but what i was thinking is that way you would know which one failed. your idea, your team, etc...
Time spent learning (and possible improving) an open source tool is time _invested_. I will be able to carry on getting a return probably forever.

Time I spend learning commercial software, even if it is shorter, is more often wasted or time/context limited.

Which do you think is more useful to me today... the 100-200 hours I spent learning Access/VBA or the 300-400 hours I spent writing a bunch of library code to talk to Postgres? I still reuse some of that 8 year old DB glue, but no one has asked me to develop anything for Access 97 in quite a while :)
I am sure that the vast majority of us use/abuse drugs. To what extent is the only question.

For example, after years of avoiding it, I have quickly settled in to the caffeine routine. Coffee in the morning, occasionally a soft drink in the evening. While this is hardly risky behaviour, it is drug use.

I personally would consider using different drugs more regularly. Jet lag really can be a killer, so I would take something when travelling if there was a good option I was aware of.

Personally I am strongly against certain drugs being prescription and unavailable to informed individuals. It makes it seem like these drugs are entirely safe when prescribed by a doctor and unsafe if people get them through other means. I have some heavy painkillers that were legally acquired but not prescribed by a doctor, and I use them in a very safe way for my occasional intense back pain. I know many people on the same pain killers who take them in an irresponsible way as prescribed by their doctor.

It is a topic that I think we need to try and avoid looking at it with such a narrow vision. I also think a lot of illegal drugs are no more dangerous than legal drugs, but that is another topic.
Mental enhancement?

Scientists aren't athletes. Discovery isn't a zero sum game. If we want to go by med labels, I think we should remember that rationality isn't the great driving force of American drug law.
Execution not just Exit
also read that scientists that drink beer are dumber and produce worse research...
Worked for Caterina :)

http://www.caterina.net
Sure, but that only gives you information about the people and ideas you're competing with. It doesn't give you information on how to present yourself on the application, which really is the bottleneck when conveying information to YC.
control-D'ed
Ask YC: YNot? Lemonade from Lemons.
Don't we have Google for that?

I'm not kidding. This is a serious question.

Let me anticipate the obvious counterargument by acknowledging that anyone who wants to have a basic discussion of world events needs to know these facts, off the top of their head, because without them you can't reason logically about the news. But that brings us back to the original problem: Why would American kids want to have a discussion of world events? There is almost nothing in American journalism to inspire them. The published news in the U.S. is propagandistic, sensational, vapid, unenlightening, and often flat-out false -- and that's the New York Times and the Washington Post! The situation on CNN or (god help us) Fox is far, far worse.

Without any motivation to know the timeline of World War II, it becomes a piece of trivia: A random fact that is not especially useful. The ability to memorize trivia used to be considered a sign of intelligence; Google, Wikipedia and the iPhone are going to change that.
I think comparing Postgres to access is a flawed comparison.

It would be more fair to compare Access to OO Base, and Postgres to Oracle in my opinion and in which case the decision of which is more valuable to learn is less clear.
If you think you were rejected unfairly and that your idea is a good one, then build it. PG is telling you that many didn't get rejected for any defined faults or voids in your app. There were good ideas and good applicants, and some were just a rung above you. If anything, that's more encouragement to pursue your idea.

So you got cut, big deal. It happened to me before, and it happens to hundreds every year. Just move on and be productive. In my case, I realized I needed to get more into coding, and get a better grasp of everything, which is what I'm doing.

Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, Digg, Revision3, Ustream.tv, Qik, Meebo, Delicious, Twitter, Craigslist, HotorNot, etc. all are successful/profitable/growing in popularity and all did it without YC.

If you're confident in your team and idea, stop asking for feedback, you already got the best feedback you could get, that there's 'literally nothing wrong' about your app.

Congrats to who made it, and congrats to who didn't, it's a kick in the ass that should launch you forward.
Good point. I think I did a pretty poor job on mine.
Or, maybe, we just need to focus on building companies that make, you know, actual money and what not ...
Andrew Chen: MySpace versus Facebook by unique users - Winning in the US, Losing internationally
A VC's perspective of NYC, entrepreneurs and PSDs (Poor, Smart, and a Desire to get rich)
So why don't we tell people why we didn't invite them to interview? Because, paradoxical as it sounds, there often is no reason.

Maybe I'm trying to read tea leaves, but did the "You are the only founder" boolean play a bigger part this time around since you received so many qualified applicants?

Working full time as a solo founder for the last four months (and 13k LOC of Java later), I understand why you would be hesitant to give the nod to a solo found. The work is overwhelming, but some folks can pull it off if they have the right support network and determination.
Conceptshare announces API
What about a simple traffic light feedback: green for the accepted ones, yellow for the pretty good rejected ones, red for the rest. At least it would help to see if someone is on the right track...
This is nothing new. http://amphetamines.com/paul-erdos.html
Knowing where the Hacker News readers come from is interesting. Does anyone have enough karma to setup a poll for the ages of readers?

Thanks
Of course. But I see it as a neat proof of concept rather than something practical (even after reading the comments at the link), so I don't see speed as an issue... may as well go all the way ;)

I AM also curious how much slower it would be, since this version is faster than regular Ruby. I suspect the size of the JS files would be a bigger issue than the speed.
WWW-II, also known as "Web 2.0", was a term coined in Q4 2005 by Tim O'Reilly to describe a new generation of participative internet applications.

;)
Cool post. Should be titlted, "A New Path to Liqudity" because of the interesting "private liquidity markets" - I've never heard of one. And it seems these have not been discussed before on news.YC. (at least, GSTrUE, oaktree, or OPUS-5.)

Does anyone have experience with these markets? What size company does one need to interested a private equity investor?

ps - If these markets look to be a major pathway to liquidity, it would be great to hear about them at startup school. :)
Exactly. Thousands of Valedictorians don't get into Harvard every year.
or ⌘-D for Mac folks.
While keeping vast amounts of data in your head isn't worth it because of the internet, it is certainly still important to know this stuff off the top of your head.

The more that you keep in your head for later means that you have more information with which to provide a context for other information.

An example: I've been reading Noam Chomsky's book on the Balkans, and I remembered a few things he said. When I saw that Kosovo declared independence via the BBC I had a better understanding of how important that was. This type of stuff doesn't happen when you're sucking info from the internet on demand. When I see some news article, I don't lurk around Wikipedia for an hour researching it, I skip it.

FWIW, knowing is still important. The internet does not replace your brain. It replaces books (kinda).
Yes, thats interesting... I wonder if they want to keep it quite (by making this info hard to find) or the developers of the API didn't think it through...
Sun has been the most ardent corporate supporters of Rails. They were even before JRuby.

Plus, Sun isn't really a big dog in the acquisition game.
Amazing. Now he must do one with super heroes.
And Software do decide who gets accepted of not. :-)
I disagree when he says that the chief evil is inequality. Poverty, yes, is a bad thing, but to say that inequality is the chief evil is to imply that it is wrong to be wealthy. I don't think that's what he means, (he would be an obvious hypocrite if it was,) but it's what he's saying and it has implications about social justice that I think are very dangerous.

The problem with the third world is not so much that wealth is unequally distributed, but that it (the third world) is not currently in a position to produce wealth the way it could. This is a problem that needs to be rectified, (and sooner or later will be,) but it is not so much a matter of social justice as of genuine philanthropy.

That said, he's right, there is a lot more that we could do to help out the rest of the world that we don't do and we should take this into account. The problem IS that the problem is so complicated; simply giving or redistributing wealth won't cut it and might even hurt matters at times. I think that we'll figure it out sooner or later.
The internet is much like the world. When you look at it as a whole...

It's shit.
I dig the idea for sure. I am constantly jotting down "memos" or lyric scraps/ideas for projects etc. in my black berry notes deal and I ALWAYS forget they are there til I write another one. I really like the idea of broadcasting your idea to a group of people immediately as well and I definitely see it as different than email. Keep scratching!
It's worth noting that the buyer, Live Current Media, is based in Vancouver, BC. Anecdotally, that area seems to have a large number of Smalltalkers.
I think it's getting more difficult everyday to get people interested in audio. Unless its music or some sort of premium content such as a quality podcast, I just don't see people getting excited over it.
How Do You Spend Your Time?
It's not your generation or his sample, its a problem that affects everybody, he's just writing about it because he happens to be a professor. How else do you explain that 30% of americans can't remember the year of the 9/11 attacks?
http://www.pensitoreview.com/page/2/?p=2665

The problem is people just don't care. Whether you're talking about the environment, tech research, civics, history, it doesn't matter, they just don't care.
What kind of class was this? I'm a junior in high school, and I've known the meaning of rendition since 6th grade. I and 90% of my classmates know the answer to all those questions. For college students to be unable to answer these kinds of questions...well they live in a hole. Theres no other explaination. What school is this? Case Western Reserve University? What kinds of people attend this school?

All this article has revealed to me is that the quality of students at that particular University is quite low. I mean sure, perhaps my standards are high coming from a suburban area where the population is 20% Asian (high education standards). But seriously. 11/18 kids can't tell you Kabul is in Afghanistan, where we've been fighting a war for over a half decade?
The concept aside - the logo needs some work; white text on white waves, hurts the eyes.
OK. But how do we build a better news service?
> because them having written no code

I'm curious as to how it was determined they were one of the best when they hadn't written anything yet. It seems a lot of proposals with code and demos got declined (not even looked at in some cases) but in this case a proposal with no code, which has essentially already been funded and done by your group... gets an invite?
Then let scientists take whatever drugs they want. Pot, heroin, cocaine, PCP, LSD, peyote, mushrooms, Vicodin, whatever. Taking prescribed medication for a use other than for which it was prescribed is illegal. So, by your logic, what's the difference?

The untold story is why do scientists feel the need to take medication to (temporarily) enhance their cognitive capabilities. I conjecture it is oversupply of them competing for fewer dollars and fame-producing discoveries, and/or most of them really aren't that smart to begin with (despite passing tests to get advanced degrees).
There's actually a common misconception about Scheme being lexically scoped only. You have to dig very deep into the Scheme literature to find it, but Scheme actually requires both dynamic and lexical scoping of variables depending upon the way they are defined.

Almost all variables in Scheme are lexically scoped, the exceptions are variables created by a "(define ...)" statement. The reason for this (which is spelled out in "The Art of the Interpreter") is to support defining recursive functions.

So, for instance, the following should work in pretty much any Scheme REPL:

> (define foo 1)
> (define (bar n) (+ foo n))
> (bar 2)
3
> (define foo 2)
> (bar 2)
4

If "(define ...)" statements actually created lexical variables, then both calls to "bar" would return the same result.
Interesting that storm and kraken are also both based in Russia.
Commoditizing Your Complements to Increase Demand for your Product
Ruby and Git Roundup: Rails, Rubyforge, APIs