skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Did you apply to YC s2008?
And if so -- what was your idea? (c'mon they're worthless anyways til you actually execute :) )
Glad I did it this time... I almost did it last time.
I hated setting badness = "yes"
I was a big pylons fan until about a week ago. I had go take another look at Django this week for my job and for some reason it feels better. I recommend walking through the tutorial. You'll either like Django or reinforce your preference for Pylons.
I hope to apply in the winter.
Good luck to everyone that applied!
Call me stupid but I don't get the whole "People love my product, but I don't know how I will make money..."

HOW IS IT A BUSINESS IF YOU CANT MAKE MONEY?

I tend to take a more traditional approach to considering my idea's as businesses. If there is no cut & dry method of monetization I don't waste anymore time on it.
Language Adoption and Lisps
I'm glad I did it this time as well. Whenever I fear rejection, I remind myself how sad I would be looking back if I didn't I try.
a great list for those who don't speak English as a first language!
The solution to the conundrum: don't know != can't.
I'm not a real math guy, but I believe you solve these with a technique called asymptotic iteration. So for sufficiently large k you can assign an initial guess at x (which I label x0). Then plug that into the original and repeat:

x = k * ln x

for large k (and x):

x0 = k

x1 = k * ln k (plugging in x0 in for x)

x2 = k * ln (k * ln k) (plugging in x1 for x, etc...)

x3 = k * ln (k * ln (k * ln k))

x4 = k * ln (k * ln (k * ln (k * ln k)))

x5 = k * ln (k * ln (k * ln (k * ln (k * ln k))))

As this technique is asymptotic you can determine the error as it decreases with each iteration (usually just denoted as a big O of some small function). I tried this with k = 30 and the values of x I calculated were:
30, 102.03, 138.75, 147.98, 149.91, 150.30 respectively. To double check... 150.30/ln(150.30) = 29.9845.

Hope this helps.
From the article: Batching

An acquiantance planned to start a business making kites. He planned to use an idustrial glue and designs which required gluing on both sides. He devised a technique where he could batch 10 kites in the time it would take to make two kites sequentially.

Likewise, on a train, I overheard two jewellers discussing one of their mutual acquaintances. Apparently, the fellow discovered a lucrative sector of the market (US$900 white gold bracelets). He was making them in batches of 50. He would warm his soldering iron and repeat the same step 50 times. Then he'd repeat the next step 50 times. He didn't care the first few bracelets were bad or if he'd make a mistake because he'd still have 45 or so perfect examples when he finished. Its boring but its very productive.
I don't know about you, but I'm counting the hours until April 9.
I think you might be mistaken...e.g., plugging in k=0 yields x=e, but if you put x=e in the original equation, you get k=e.
why wasn't "make something people want" on there?
Yes, this is not correct. This would would mean x asymptotically approaches e as k increases. However, if k = 30, x should be nearly 150. See my other post for more details.
Google putting up fence and gate to keep execs from leaving
It's an "MTV" framework: http://www.djangobook.com/en/1.0/chapter05/#cn16
Anyone else notice that Browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace is broken or know how to fix it?
Nice Numbers for Graph Labels
#2 is interesting. I don't know what might happen if you ask to see your potential coworkers' code during an interview, but it could be a great way to avoid landing on some train-wreck of a project.
http://www.google.com/trends
Reminds me of:

Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account."
www.housingninja.com

A student housing site, we have a alpha/beta thing going on in Cornell.
allow users to bet on trends and you got yourself an investor
I hear that! We first submitted Sunday night, but ended up making tons of changes at the last minute to better explain our idea. That application really forces you to drill down to the essence of your idea, which is an awesome exercise in itself. Good luck everyone!
The count down begins!
The count down begins!
Who will make it? Have what it takes, and take what it has: versatile, speed, perseverance critics, lonely, aggravated, anxious, blank, confused, crappy, happy, creative, determined, energetic, disappointed, excited, surprised, productive, crushed, depressed, exhausted, thankful, rejected, engaged, ..., and more. All at once, and unordered, all coming fast.
Who knows? I don't know; I never really experience it. I can only imagine. People never get use to it.
I guess for now, we have to wait and see who's going to be part of the Ycombinator family.
Make GMail Prettier With This Kick Ass Skin
Part of me will be counting, but I know I'm doing this venture regardless. The money is not the key for me. It's a matter of whether I can get the extra advantages YC offers, so I'm trying not to focus on it too much...
Badness = yes was painful. I wished there was a box to justify yourself ;)

To answer ericb's question, I feel exausted, having worked all day then decided to apply and filled out the form in less than three hours. I always do these things at the last minute, I don't know why, but its worked out for me in the past one way or another. Hope pg excuses my grammatical errors!

Either way, ferociously trying to get across the core of the idea double-quick was a great exercise.

Good luck all!
Maybe you should've applied for a journalism internship instead :)
Thanks, never head of this before. Found this FAQ after reading your article:

http://exchanges.state.gov/education/jexchanges/private/swt_...
I switched mostly because of the large collection of apps (= plugins, in other framework terminology) available for Django. The admin app gets most of the attention, but it's way more than that. For example, there's an app for built-in CSRF protecion. There's one for a comment system on any type of object, and another one for threaded comments. Generic tagging and voting apps. Instantly generated RSS (yeah, I know Pylons has this too, but it's built into the framework and not a 3rd-party add-on) or Sitemaps. There's an OpenID plugin. A way to automatically generate robots.txt files. A couple different forums, and a blog. (This is huge: in past projects, one of my biggest frustrations has been getting 3rd-party forums to interoperate with the site's custom authentication scheme. Django lets you use one user model for all components.)

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoResources#Djangoapp...

Some other things I liked about it: I thought that Django views were conceptually cleaner than Pylons controllers, with fewer global variables needed. I thought the templating language looked cleaner than Mako as well, though less powerful. The admin app saves me lots of time for mundane tasks that I'd probably just forgo otherwise. I could get used to the ORM - don't particularly like it, but as ORMs go, it's quite nice. I really like that it comes with authentication, sessions & user models built-in. I liked that it was well-documented.

Some things I thought Pylons did better: I think Pylons packaging & deployment is much more mature, built on setuptools, Paste, and eggs. I like that I don't have to use an ORM, and that it's loosely coupled in general. I like how Mako lets me define template functions directly in the template.

Also, Guido blessed Django as "the" Python web framework at SciPy 2006. So far, the rest of the world has basically ignored that pronouncement, and I haven't really heard anything further about it. But I thought that it was generally more prudent to be on the same wavelength as the BDFL.
I agree with some of the comments that blog post received, the 20% personal time for ideas is fine as long as the ideas/work you come up with is a potential money maker for the employer. If you are going to work on your startup idea during that time :-), then I'm not sure how many people would be willing to let you do that.
I only have 3 things I need from an employer: 1. good co-workers 2.challenging work. 3. Salary worth the time+effort.
Don't call me an old fart - I am not that old.
James Randi anecdote on Feynman
From the article: It's not a company, it's a cult, and frankly I can appreciate that because we're a cult too

Satirising two large companies so comprehensively in one sentence is brilliant.
is it in cooperation with the university?

will you have admin control for the school or totally independent?

school housing huge market, but also very big problems with liability on University's end if they have no control
It is still editable....
I once worked a job moving and scanning data from an old paper archive to some custom built software. I developed a batch system which allowed me to spend around half the day browsing the web. When I left, I recommended a fairly smart friend as my replacement, but it turned out he didn't get batching and was fired two weeks later for being overwhelmed with the work.
One guy, a film scanner, OCR and a lot of disks = 6 million pages of historical newspapers on line.
Crashed 3 times today during development use... back to 3b4 for me!
Me too. I will do my startup regardless the result. But it would be so good to have YC on my site.
Well done, and thanks for sharing that here.
And that reminds me of my CS professors who used file timestamps to determine if you submitted by midnight. The TAs were the ones who checked the assignments and they got around to it .. eventually. Clever man that he was the prof gimped the "touch" binary on that system to accept no arguments. Sadly for him Stevens includes source for a simple touch program in "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment"
Do you have the screenshot's you used for the first version to get feedback?
Fortunately the server didn't melt down as feared, even though a large percentage of the applications were only submitted in the last hour.
Oddly, I feel like playing old-school Counter Strike.

I put in some extra effort, polished my software a little and put the latest dev version of it online for the YC people to see as a demo. But having done plenty of work the last few weeks, I felt like relaxing, so yesterday I played CS for the first time in about 6 years :)

I'll still keep working on this regardless, but it'd sure be nice to be able to work on my stuff full time instead of the part time effort that it is right now.
It would seem more prudent to already be looking for the next funding source. You'll need it whether YC works out or not.
What was the total number of submissions?
This is great feedback. We just redid the homepage, but I totally agree. It is not coming across like I had hoped. Thanks for your comment. Truly appreciated. Can you make any suggestions for what you would like to see on the homepage. How can we make it more clear?
"I don’t mention Common Lisp here because, again I stress personally, I hope we stop encouraging it’s active use."

Keep hoping.

"I consider [Common Lisp] [...] over-engineered for almost any other scenario."

Pretty broad claim, in what way is CL over-engineered and for what particular scenarios? And how does that justify discouraging its use?

Sounds like someone is looking for excuses not to get busy learning a language in depth... Seriously, if you don't feel like learning a language, fine. But don't criticize that which you only understand the basics of.
Relieved, I guess, but this time feels a lot more anticlimactic than the last 3 times I've applied. Possibly because I really don't expect to get in, with the badness=YES field this time. (My cofounder quit last week.) I figure it can't hurt to try, but really I've just gotta keep hacking until I have something people want, and then it doesn't really matter whether we're funded by YC or not.
Or building your product. Much easier to get funding if you don't need it.
Is this real? It's a strange article. I see dominos.py referenced but not defined. I'm pretty sure that doesn't come standard with OS X.
Hmmm. Maybe I just got april fooled.
extremely excited!!! Counting the days down as well...
Hi. I acknowledge that this wasn't well defended. Honestly, I didn't know many people even read my site and I certainly didn't post the article expecting it to make it's way to Y-Combinator. It was a personal draft that I was going to touch up tomorrow but I have a 5am flight so I'm going to sleep for now. Suffice it so say I plan to learn Common Lisp and tried to stress in the first paragraph or so that these are personal inexperienced opinions. I'll try to give it a fair treatment later on when I'm able. Call this an early impression.
Makes sense. I will put that on our list of things to do. Thanks
That's sick. Works in FFb4 as well. Over time it may get tiresome, though.
So did I.
Shame that AdBlockPlus isn't supported in it yet.
Trouble in conference land: TechCrunch50, DEMO happening at the same time
The Fentix Cube - an electronic emulation of a Rubik's cube
No April fools, the script is here: http://random.noflashlight.com/scripts/dominos.py
Of course, but why waste time on something you "don't know" will work.

Why not optimize on time and go with something that will work ( that can make money ), and save those hours spent on the "cool free thing" for later (aka your own time). It's just one less problem in the future.

At least in my opinion. I mean viaweb had idea of how they (you) were going to make money right?
Out of curiosity, do you take into account when they started filling out the application (perhaps when a first draft is saved, or when new users signed up)? We started filling it out about a week before the deadline, and I'm pretty sure we didn't submit it until right before the deadline.
I mostly meant the gaming part and the industry of SEO 'experts' who are involved with that. You are obviously right that search engine traffic is great. However, it is a waste of time focusing on doing "everything you can" to rank in the search engines, instead of for instance, working on making a good product in the first place. Search engines today usually use a QA feedback loop to figure out what ends up being the most relevant result for people. So if your site is good and the best, it will rise to the top anyways.
We've stopped quoting that now that we have competitors, because if that became a matter of competition, it would tempt people to do bad things. (E.g. you could encourage single founders to apply, knowing you were unlikely to accept them,
instead of telling them frankly that they're less likely to be accepted without a cofounder.)
Thanks!

Excited, but no time to rest just yet. Next deadline is the Android Challenge, which is creeping up way too quickly.
what about for non-students? :/
One thing that seems problematic is having too many trends. How do you plan on motivating users to discover added but unknown trends on your website so that they might be able to see the light of day?
why waste time on something you "don't know" will work

For the same reason that I'm willing to fly to any large airport without knowing for sure that there will be a taxi waiting. There almost always is. And there almost always is a way to make money out of anything a lot of people find useful.
I mean solving for x in terms of k. I know k and want x.
What happens to edits you make after 10pm?

We noticed at 10:15 that we had omitted my username from the list of people who can move to boston for the summer. I fixed the typo, saved, and resubmitted, but did it count?
Great article I found on /. a few years back which I still find relevant today, Cult of the NDA:

http://www.frozennorth.org/C509291565/E1939404619/

"To all those entrepreneurs with innovative, unique business ideas who want to capitalize on them before someone else does, I have one piece of advice: Get over it. "

You have a lot to gain by bouncing ideas off of friends and getting some honest feedback. Why deprive yourself of that?
Yeah I got it to the x^k = e^x form, but that is where I got stuck. I was just hoping there was some trick to pull at that point that I couldn't remember, but extensive review of my logarithm/exponent rules was getting me nowhere.
Hackers' Paradise
Psssst. PG. While no one else is listening: listen, man, I love you, and I wouldn't bother to nitpick but you're an accomplished writer and everything. It's 'til. A till is a garden tool.
Summer 2008 funding
We're excited already! Hope we'll make it! :)
Two definitions. http://www.answers.com/till&r=67

>USAGE NOTE Till and until are generally interchangeable in both writing and speech, though as the first word in a sentence until is usually preferred: Until you get that paper written, don't even think about going to the movies. • Till is actually the older word, with until having been formed by the addition to it of the prefix un–, meaning “up to.” In the 18th century the spelling 'till became fashionable, as if till were a shortened form of until. Although 'till is now nonstandard, 'til is sometimes used in this way and is considered acceptable, though it is etymologically incorrect.
This is a repeat of this exact page: http://random.noflashlight.com/

I know you linked it, but it seems better to submit the original.
I noticed after turning my application in my server logs 69 hits from a new URL news.ycombinator.com/x . This is the same URL for our Y application.

Makes me wonder is PG telling those not being considered in a subtle fashion via the x? Anyone have a news.ycombinator.com/y in their server logs?

Good luck to everyone!
> My cofounder quit last week

Hey I understand how difficult it must be for you. Be cheerful. Giving you man2man moral support from here. Arc in JS = awesome. Keep having fun.
Also note that nostrademons has written code in more frameworks than most of us web programmers have ever heard of. Just saying.
I hope that's a joke, I haven't seen so much EFFORT put into a bad site before.
No, it's independent, the housing listing are ones from local landlord and sublets from students, not university housing.
I'd be interested to hear how/why/where Django is cumbersome.
Actually that helps a lot. I was writing a basic Sieve of Eratosthenes to generate prime numbers, and was using that equation to estimate an upper bound on the size of the sieve array if looking for at least k primes.

Or more simply, if I wanted at least k primes, x would be a loose upper bound on the numbers I would have to look at.

So in short, approximation is good enough. I wrote the following to implement it:

def approximate(k, times)
return k if times < 1
return k * Math.log(approximate(k, times - 1))
end

For values of k I am looking at (1E4 up to 1E9), recursing 10 times approximated to within 0.01 of the actual value, which is definitely good enough for what I need.

Thanks everyone for your replies. I'd still be interested in an exact answer, but at least this solves today's problem.
Actually there has been a SQLAlchemy branch for over a year. Last I check it had stagnated - not enough interest.
> There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world's smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently. Really.

I've been saying this for a long time and I really believe it. At least borderline evil. It seems to me there's nothing doing more damage to (web) technology than Google hording many (most?) of the world's greatest hackers and severely under utilizing their abilities.
I highly recommend submitting your startup and or attending if you can!

We were also in the DemoPit and from it received our first pieces of press.

We Demoed on the 2nd day, but both of us wore our startup Tshirt and had rented tablet PCs with EVDO cards/service (best to bring your own Internet) to show as many people as we could on the first day.
I agree with nearly every point you've made here, except that you're not considering cost. Remember that I said:

"You might say this is overkill for a new startup, but when we can get all this for $50/year or less..."

DNS is the most straightforward and undifferentiated service you'll need to run your site. There's little distinction between competing providers unless you're looking for massive capacity or exotic services. I can get all of the points I listed from EasyDNS for $20/year.

I can't think of another service, with the possible exception of email, where the benefit/cost ratio is so high. And as long as those random dudes are in the full time business of running DNS, I'd much rather have them do it than someone who's not a expert and has a much longer, higher value list of things to concern themselves with.
I'd have to second this. The Pylons project doesn't seem to suffer from the NIH syndrome that the django project does, and because of that, they're free to choose best-of-breed tools for every scenario. I think the fact that turbogears 2.0 is going to be based on pylons is a great win for both projects. It really gives you the feeling that if TheGreatestTemplateEngineEver or TheTransparentestORMEver gets invented tomorrow, these guys will be the first to support it. That kind of unashamed blatant code thievery deserves some respect. ;)
I just stumbled upon one of pg's essays the other day. It lead me here. I had an idea that I plan on working on anyway, unfortunately I had no time to put a demo together. Only thing I have is a partially working db with no front end. Also, I wasn't able to dig up a co-founder. Hopefully they think it's a great idea.

Good Luck to all of us!
Good point. We have been debating if we should limit the number of trends a user can be in on. We were thinking 15 at once. What do you think?
You are correct that individually it often doesn't make financial sense to litigate and attempt to recoup small loses, even if due to outright fraud (that is, 'violating the terms'). But often enough outright fraud will come back on the wrong-doer not just with lost customers, revenue, and reputation, but also with a devastating class action.

My larger point here is that outright fraud is relatively uncommon. In most cases of alleged 'predatory' business practices (such as the original post), the company is acting well within the clearly stated policies that the customer accepted in advance.

I hasten to add that having the right to do a thing does not necessarily make exercising that right wise or prudent.

Ikea, for example, would clearly be well within their rights to charge more for umbrellas on rainy days than on dry ones. But in fact, they do just the opposite - they charge substantially _less_ for umbrellas on rainy days. That endears them to their customers.

Similarly, I have a friend who loves Capital One. He fell behind on payments to all of his credit cards, and whereas some creditors had phone banks in India calling his house 11 times a day, Capital One was apparently quite civil. They made a polite courtesy phone call, then basically left him alone. Each of his statements contained a polite letter that offered to reactivate his card if he could make a minimum payment. And they did _not_ jack up his interest rate, even though they had every right to do so.

Morality (as opposed to law) is about more than not infringing on the rights of others. And virtuous action that is imposed by force ceases to be virtuous, as it is not freely chosen. Corporations don't exist in any meaningful sense - only the individuals that invest in and run them do. So these truths of ethics are as applicable for companies as for individuals.

Free of regulation, markets will choose the firms that provide the highest value to customers. Virtue and honesty are components of that value - though customers are free to weigh those against their other desires, such as a lower price. And in the age of the Internet, no company can hide duplicity for very long.

All too often, regulation provides incumbents protection against the upstart competitors and tort liability that make free markets work.
Another post pointed me at the Netflix prize http://www.netflixprize.com/ the other day. Got me to thinking what other programming contests one could make money from. Bit of a long shot, but then a start up can be too.