skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The concept of "fair" doesn't really apply here. YC can use any [legal] criteria they wish. We're just interested in learning what we could do to improve the application, so we're asking for a little more information, if possible. It's not a "tell us why not". It's an "if possible, give us some info to help improve efficiency of the process".
NewsCup looks good though.
"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."

But it's not illegal drug use. You are lumping together taking an aspirin for a headache in with taking ADD drugs illegally to enhance mental focus. Having a coffee is not drug use, despite it having caffeine.

It doesn't matter if you think a lot of illegal drugs are no more dangerous than legal drugs. If you compare the effective and lethal doses of pot and booze, you'll find booze is much deadlier. What matters is the rule of law.
that's a bad sign... thanks for the education about history
Well... yes and no. One of the cool things about a system that lets one person create and grow a company, and another take over and grow it more, and another manage it for stability later on, is that it plays to everyone's strengths. The stability guy might be completely lost in a startup environment, and the startup guy might get bored at a big, stable company.
It takes a pretty big dog to buy MySQL.
Blocking ads is not stealing. Get a better business model.
It is not overworking or overperforming in my 0.02. An ambitious American/Western European/Japanese student would rather to spend their energy to deal with real world problems because in reality, he/she may be able to get much large rewards, in comparison to ACM's award and honor.

While an ambitious Eastern European/Chinese student, the reward from local economy is worthy far less than making a big name in ACM. The same monetary reward from ACM has much higher value in those countries. Besides, after winning the award. It becomes a good add-on on resumes for applications to graduate schools in U.S. or a job at Google/Microsoft/IBM.

I am always amazed that people forget how cheap it is when you are living outside U.S and Western Europe. And the same dollar can buy much more there.

When I think about my uncle in Taiwan who have been spending 20 years to build a company that acquires 20% market share of silicone in East Asia, and its market capital is only $200 million. Any ambitious American/European hacker can make 3 to 10 millions if he/she works on the right stuffs in 5 years. Then you will know how unworthy it is to spend time on ACM competition in US but in China and Russia.
That may be, but that attitude pushes away prospective developers. When I was a budding programmer the only way I knew of to access a C compiler was to use the GNU toolchain. But getting it to work on Windows was enough trouble that I just made the move to Linux. It's been ten years now, and I've never looked back. It's Microsoft's loss.
You can't give suggestions on improvement if you can't pick out anything that's lacking or needs to be improved. That's the point.
Why a Yahoo-Microsoft merger will kill innovation in search
Ask YC: iFund Application Follow-up?
Hi,

has anyone else get a follow up for their iFund application?
Adderall: the Smart Set's Performance Enhancer of Choice
Multiprocess versus Multithreaded... or why Java infects Unix with the Windows mindset
That's the one I was thinking of! Thanks!
Five ActiveRecord Tips
Sorry Allen - but if it's any consolation, I'm pretty sure I added his blog to my rss reader after reading your first submission.
Yes, I agree, but this is the argument that I tried to short-circuit.

How many freshmen in college are in the habit of listening to the BBC? How many have heard of Noam Chomsky in any context? How many have read so much as one book on history or politics, beyond high-school textbooks? Raise those numbers, and students will learn the trivia by themselves, just as your brain subconsciously learned trivia about the Balkans as a side effect of reading the Chomsky.

But the amount of trivia that students know is not, in itself, very important. Indeed, studies which show that "most students don't know where Kosovo is on a map!!!" can be dangerous because they misdiagnose the problem and lead to the wrong solution: Forcing students to memorize maps and regurgitate them on tests, a process which also convinces the students that geography teachers are sadists and geography is a torture device.
A wireless world - Our nomadic future
In other words: entrepreneurs shouldn't ask for permission before building something. (legal matters aside)
Ok. Didn't hurt to ask, though :)
http://gatherer.wizards.com with BeautifulSoup, the only parser I've found that can deal with this @$%^! HTML.
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/
Using illegal as a matter of consideration is ridiculous. Illegal in what country? Why is the drug illegal? Taking aspirin for a headache IS the same as taking ADD drugs.

Having coffee specifically for the caffeine boost IS drug use.

What I am saying is that the rule of law doesn't matter, and as you suggest with the pot/booze example it is often backwards. Booze is much deadlier and more dangerous for personal use than pot, no question when you consider lethal dose.

Legality of drugs would be a small afterthought if I considered taking something like ADD for concentration. 99% of the consideration would be my personal health and safety including long term side effects.
hey, not so hypocritical now - he's only #2!
Then please, just perform the experiment: ask your classmates the 'trivia' questions on world history events and geography.

It's easy. Just be sure to include people you don't frequently talk to -we humans have a tendency to choose as friends those who know and think like ourselves.
Except that there was (at that point) no option to learn Oracle because... it cost money. I was also using Postgres to do very similar things to Access.

This is in a way part of my point about value. You wouldn't get very far proposing to use Oracle to run a five user app, and (although it has been done) only a lunatic would run a five thousand user app on Access. The price, capability and support options of Postgres are compatible with both (partly because it is open source), so you only have to learn one tool, and the time invested it has a longer life cycle too.
> and some were just a rung above you

That's not necessarily the case. For some proposals, "[we] didn't understand the problem domain well enough to judge them". Or didn't have the time to look at stuff you've done; or your demo. Or they liked enough other proposals already that they didn't feel the need to look at your demo. The "stellar" ones were ones that "seemed better" in the opinion of the reviewers. As noted, "this process is fraught with error".
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/makingchoices/index.htm
How not to pitch a venture capitalist (Ali G)
Isn't Twitter for your thoughts?
That was my point. :)

Oracle is to Postgres as Access is to OO Base.

They can both is used to store data but they are hardly comparable so saying that learning Postgres was more valuable because Access 97 knowledge is useless is flawed. By the way up until 2005 when I removed all traces of vba work from my cv I was getting a lot of offers for Access 97-2K work which is almost the same.
Private equity usually requires actual profits -- their plan usually is to take a profitable (or at least revenue-generating) company, cut costs and increase revenue by good management, then turn it out to another private equity firm or hold it and operate it for the income stream. Sometimes they'll spin out a company to take it public, but not at the same huge premiums that VCs want.

You have to be a reasonably mature company for a private equity deal to make sense. They usually want steady income rather than the 10x growth that a VC pays for, and the valuations reflect that.
Doing well in the the ACM Programming competition requires training time IMHO. The best competitors will have strong programming skills and a deep knowledge base of problem patterns and the best way to solve them. I was on the Stanford B team back in the day ('80s), and I know that if I were a student now, I'd use my free time to build a product/company rather than spending much effort preparing for the ACM competition. While some student programmers aren't swayed by the tremendous capitalist forces, I'd be surprised if it didn't have an impact on which programmers made it through campus preliminaries. There's just so many opportunities competing for your time if you're a good young programmer nowadays.

As well as MIT and Stanford performed, I'd have to wonder about student programmers who skipped the competition because they have their sight set on bigger prizes. The same might be said, though, for the other universities even if they aren't entrepreneurial hotbeds.
Freaking awesome. This is a great list! (coming from someone who has 30+ pounds to lose myself)
No one?? Do I need to move to another city??
Why Twitter Rocks the House
Lets hate something; call it "shit" then build something on it. (A webpage) what a douche.

.rb
The advantage of facts in your head is that they can be mixed in with things you already know, provide context for new things you learn, and used to form new thoughts. While any given fact might be easy to retrieve from the internet, I can't use it until I ask for it. And I can't know in advance what the best facts to know are, so I try to put as much in my head as I can.
Slippery slope. Next, a score out of 100. Next, the pros and cons. Next, a full interview.
GitHub now open to everyone. Here is the pricing.
Ustream.TV Takes $11.1 Million Series A
You can reduce inequality by bringing one group up, or the other group down.

Star Wars chose option B to bring balance to the force. Goodbye Jedi.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145749

"The odds of being accepted are much greater (roughly 4x) with a cofounder, but it's not impossible to get funded as a single founder." - pg
One day, you'll have a manuscript to push and you'll really know what rejection is...
It's like the Triforce: if an evil one touches it, it divides into 3 parts, one goes to the evil and the rest go to more deserving souls.

Forgive me...
I don't think it's the money. It's the absence of the need to deal with paying.

For instance, I recently wanted to check out a memory-resident database. Suppose that there was one that costs $50, and one that is free and open source. Like most devs, I don't have a company credit card, so I'd have to go off and ask financial for $50. They'd give it to me (with no grumbling), but I have to send an email, find them, fill out the form, get a req #, and so forth. Even if I do have the right to spend money without asking first, I'm still probably going to try the free one. As a result, I build my mental model around the free one, and then whatever I look at next seems different. The pay one has to be considerably better to overcome this disadvantage.

Everyone else does this too, so when I type "memory resident database" into Google, the free ones tend to pop up first. And when I start wondering how memory resident databases handle resultsets differently from disk I/O, the programmer who wondered about this earlier and wrote an article about it has almost always used the free, open source one (because the code is right there for review, and can be analysed), and uses it to illustrate. Eventually, the amount of documentation for the free/open source one greatly exceeds the one that costs money.

In the end, it's hard for commercial software to compete with open source/free in commodity products. Keep in mind, I'm not equating commodity with simplicity. Linux, mySQL, Rails, Python - these are all way more complicated than most products that sell for money.

In other words, the code that handles supply chain calculations is a lot more likely to sell for money than the database, operating system, and web server used to host it.
very inspiring stuff - I would certainly place myself in this category
P (cehck) S (subjective but check) D (check) -
and the pedigree culture certainly lives on here in the bay area and at leading startups. Its that some hunger and willingness to get rejected that landed the author a job at Bear that needs to be applied to founders and the people that want to work at great startups - without it you got nada
There's demand from decent startups for the YC advantages which outstrips their capacity, per pg's posting. I'm not nuts about the Ynotcombinator concept. I don't see not being in ycombinator as a defining characteristic of myself or a group I would join.

Chiefly, I'd be interested in ways to get to know angels and find good mentors and a social/support group environment for startups. (Startupaholics Anonymous?). I think some of this works best at the local level. If anyone has suggestions for something like this that exists or they'd like to start, I'm open to it and in Boston.
Oh wow!
Illegal in the U.S. Your country may have different rules.

Taking aspirin is the same as taking Ritalin for ADD. It is not the same as taking it for a use for which it is not prescribed.

Logic notwithstanding, the law sure as hell does matter. Try breaking it, getting caught, and doing time.
Learning starts before college. Parenting helps. I heard a noted essayist say once that more parents are more likely to know more about celebrity lives than to know their child's elementary school teachers.
> keeping up with current events is wrong. Don't try to keep up.

To the contrary, keeping up with events online gives you the ability to be proactive about acquiring knowledge, rather than waiting for what makes it though the filter of a periodical or what someone else thinks important; not to mention the bias of opinion pieces. If your periodical of choice sits on a story, or misreports, you will likely never find out about it if you don't pay attention to outside sources (e.g. the NYT sat on their report about the administration's illegal domestic spying/warrantless wiretapping program until after the 2004 election).
It wouldn't work in practice. There are no sharp lines between these categories, and we'd be misleading people, one way or the other, if we insisted on drawing them. It already bothers me that circumstances force us to draw a line between green and yellow, because we're probably discouraging some people who should instead be encouraged. It would be even worse if we tried to draw a line between yellow and red.
"But a third of respondents said they would feel pressure to give such drugs to their children if other children at school were taking them."

Apparently a third of the respondents are big dorks.
Oh, I didn't say that I think he's a hypocrite; I think he is sincere. I just object to an industrialist using language that is subtlety socialist. There is a disconnect there that I don't like.
recent tweet from venturehacks: You don't need permission to start a company. From investors, co-founders, or anyone else.
(including PG, Jessica, and Trevor)
I like the Unix model. Lightweight processes with separate memory spaces, with well-defined interfaces between them. Pipes and signals. Message passing if you want to get fancy. Erlang, with its touted high-availability capabilities follows this model.

Threading is hard. I've written thread-oriented code and process-oriented code. The process-oriented code was far easier to develop and debug. Issues in threaded code are difficult to reproduce and even harder to fix.

I've been on both the OS engineering team and the app development team across several corporations. In a large managed Java environment, the OS team is powerless to stop a runaway process. To the OS, all that business logic is enapsulated in one giant opaque container. The kill -9 and fuser ommands are barbaric ways to manage your sensitive computing needs. Unix broke away from the monolithic style of development, but the Enterprise Java culture embraces it. On the other hand, the app development team can live in its own little world, not trusting the OS and reinventing wheel after wheel.

These days it's apparent that Unix has won the OS wars, at least on the server side. With Unix, you can trust your operating system. Take advantage of it. It has amazing reliability and if you can just work with it instead of against it, you reap many benefits.

Now we just need to convince the app developers that the philosophy of "many small tools working together" is superior to the "one giant tool doing everything". You don't want to be a giant tool, do you?
and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?

Everything I know tells me that this, or similar, is the place:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=FEMKX
His preceding sentence explains it: "It's tempting to ascribe this to the "cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be."

He's saying that if you were asked to guess -- Family Feud-style -- a name for a person who won't pay for software, the obvious term was once "pirate", whereas today the obvious term would be "open source enthusiast". I don't think he means that these terms describe the same person, although it's easy to see how this could be misconstrued as such -- it was my first reaction as well.
My prodding was more along the lines that since there was an order of magnitude more applicants this round and they only had a week to look over the applicants, was it nearly impossible to get in being a solo founder?

I'm a bit annoyed with myself since I didn't apply to the previous rounds. I first read Hackers & Painters over two years ago, ah well!
Visualize the Social Graph around your Project on Github
I think that figure was based on evidence from the previous 6 (?) rounds. I would guess the 4x more likely for co-founders figure holds. pg usually won't throw out a number unless he really means it.
Microsoft does actually give a way a lot of development tools for free including compilers. The only thing they don't give away is their IDE. Even in that case they do give away versions of it that are only somewhat crippled but still very usable.
Realistically, what happens when you try this hard for a job? Is it worth it? Does something bad happen? Is there a reason most people don't do this kind of thing?
What might be useful are comments overall like "we received several applications for online invitation services but nothing seemed innovative or compelling enough to us" or "we received a handful of applications for doing x but, in our opinion, the mobile space is where we think that market is headed". I think you once mentioned that you get a ton of hotel/food review website ideas. You've also indicated that you think the email overload management is an area of YC's interest.

Doing this might help at least some of the applicants get some idea. Not everyone is covered by these comments and no one is forced to take your opinion for it but it just helps to get broad feedback.
I strongly doubt taking Ritalin without a prescription is grounds for jail time in many countries.

Why does it matter if a drug is prescribed or not? Who has the right to establish which drugs require prescriptions?

I believe in freedom. Freedom of thought, freedom of choice, freedom of living your life how you choose. I believe anyone should be allowed to consume any substance they desire. If Ritalin improves your research as many of these people think, who has the right to stop them? They aren't harming anyone else, and are possibly helping.
Yup - YCombinator is simply busy. YNotCombinator is not an anti-group - it's a pro group - simply another channel to communicate your idea, and hopefully find an angel. Some submitters don't even have blogs - so I thought... YNot.

Boston already has some great stuff. MIT enterprise forum, 40 colleges and Universities - pick the talks happening at Business schools. Plenty of startupaholics there. Meetup.com can be lame for this stuff, or good. I like craigslist.
this is great news. I love GitHub and the invitation only plan restricted my ability to collaborate with others (as I could only invite 3 people).
This article does not convince me that Twitter is useful... yet.
But how can you know what to search for?

What if you get the following item in your RSS reader:
"Dalai Lama Shows Support for Olympics" (NY Times)

How will you know the significance of this if you don't know who Dalai Lama is? And you would also need to know about the protests to know why his support is newsworthy.
Thanks, I still have 25+ pounds to go as well :) I think a lot of people fall into the same vicious work/code/sleep or school/code/sleep cycle, especially with startups.
Except the article states many "pretty good" groups were pushed out by "stellar" ones. That certainly indicates something can be improved, in the opinion of YC.

Important distinction between "nothing wrong" (below threshold) and "nothing to improve" (at max score).

When I see some of the groups that have made the cut from past cycles, I'm boggled as to what YC was sold on.
This is an interesting account, as its contrary to most of what I've heard about Bear. At my school, where the majority of students end up working in some capacity for the financial industry, Bear has a reputation as a bit of an old boys club. As this is all hearsay, I'm not sure how much weight to give it.
Good old CGI back to life in Google App Engine?
App Engine assumes the good old CGI is great for large scale use. But do they really use the "start a new process, handle the request, and then die" approach? Do they really have that many CPU cycles to waste on starting a new process for each request? Just curious ...
Appreciate the tips--good stuff. Thanks! I'll keep an eye on what you do with the site. The angels tab is a 404 at the moment, fyi.
These facts and issues simply don't matter to most people. There is an academic-minded "sect" that might consider this blasphemous, but Kabul, the current Secretary of Defense, even the year of WWII, none of these issues come to bear on the daily lives of college students.

Older generations love to talk about how politically/globally minded they were and how they fought against the Vietnam War, but the fervence of their objection was only proportional to what they stood to loose through the draft.

I see a lot of opinion that generation xyz is stuck to their blackberries/iphones/facebook/myspace/etc. and that not only are they ignorant, but that this is some kind of historically unprecented phenomenom. But I just don't buy it -- they're in college (or high school), by and large their parents are supporting them -- maybe when the time comes for them to support themselves some of these issues will become relevant (at least tax raises and cuts), and many of these kids will "get smart."

There will always be those who are diligent and alert -- as long as being so conveys some kind of quantifiable advantage. I don't mean to say that public education isn't important, only that as a society we're no worse off than we were 25 or 50 years ago.
Next: To get into that YC clone in India. You know, the one with armed guards that make sure you don't leave your cubicle before midnight. (Shamelessly copied from the real YC.)
Has anything fairly ambitious been made with bloxes like a house or a bridge?
Too bad this didn't get more points, this is my new favorite learning video source. :)
What does a Series A funding exactly mean? Is it the first funding after a seed money?
worst name ever. seriously misleading.