skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard to answer your question. Yahoo gets a significant amount of traffic (around 500 million users) that it doesn't monetize (it's biggest problem) as well as Google and Microsoft sees merging with Yahoo (combining pageviews and engineering talent) as sort of a Custer's Last Stand / Alamo against the inevitability of Google becoming the premier advertising service on the Internet and becoming the provider of whatever supplants CPM advertising in the future (potentially something that measures your direct influence on people to buy products - Facebook SocialAds just the beginning - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119295)

There are a lot of If's

If Google contextual ads weren't like The Blob and eating up the CPMs of its competitors

If a Microsoft merger with Yahoo managed to arithmetically combine their traffic (pageviews to properties and more importantly, search traffic)

If Yahoo didn't start showing signs of trouble (reorgs, Jerry Yang coming back)

If Microsoft managed to inject some of Yahoo's engineering talent (Yahoo pipes, for example) into its organization (notwithstanding some of the premier engineers + leaders have left/are leaving)
to me most those pitches sound compelling:
Straight forward, tackle a big problem and you know what they're trying to do in well, one line ;-)
No idea about the average (arithmetic mean), but I'd bet that the median is zero...
Patterning Collective Intelligence: Users, Aggregation, and Emergent Service
Plan B?!
so it looks like there many good startups that didn't get accepted. perhaps for the simple reasons of too many aplicants, single founder, bad application writing skills, etc...

Also, many will not be discoraged by this and continue to work on there stuff.

anyway I was thinking maybe we can create some sort of a group and just get together based on the same model as yc. of course without evrything that YC provides but just working with other founder is realy good.

I have some thoughs on how this might work, like we could vote on startups to join in, select a physical place or just remotly, invite experts, pich in in funding for small expenses, etc.. but first I like to hear your thoughts...
Google probably knows (and is aware of) the growth in revenue (if any) and the growth in users (via Google analytics - their "free" competitor to WebTrends). I haven't read the TOS/Privacy for Google Analytics recently but I would not be surprised if there is some legal loophole that lets them look at your startup's site visit data.
Medicine and Statistics Don't Mix
I think you have to take into consideration the TOS, copyright and also robots.txt. If you ignore these then its well within the site owners rights to do something about it - blocking you or further. We always look at the robots.txt file first and use that as our benchmark in terms of what they (the site) wish robots/crawlers to look at
Yeah, exactly. Cute overload.
nature does it better.
I absolutely agree.

The teams most likely to get in are also the ones most likely to be working on their startup already. If you're not going to be working on your startup with or without YC, I suspect your odds of getting in are significantly lower (and probably moreso as time goes by, given the number of applicants and the number that are already started on their project--at least two that I talked to had applied and interviewed previously but not gotten in...they'd been either working on new ideas since then, or had gone on to launch something, and were back for another swing at YC with new or evolved ideas). I suspect at least one of those teams I talked to will get in this time. Stubbornness, self-confidence, risk-taking, and simple hard work are all things that YC appreciates...and they appreciate them because they're traits that lead to successful startups.
Why hasn't Amazon made it easier to build web applications with EC2/S3?

I'm waiting for Amazon to respond with something similar. Just to get an application up and running on Amazon seems to involve delving into message boards (I have EC2/S3 accounts but it's learning how to port my web app is not a priority at the moment)

The premise of EC2/S3 is that you can ask for services/CPU on demand - however Google with AppEngine has significantly lowered the barrier to creating a scalable web app (by handling scaling for you, once you write to their APIs and give them your code [another issue]). Not everyone wants to be an Erlang expert and roll their own scalable code.. (some people just want to be able to build a cool popular app and outsource worries about scaling).
ads are not the solution to everything.
I'm starting a business. (Quit my job in February, in fact.) I don't have a co-founder. Here's my cunning plan.

I build things I find interesting, and search for product ideas that other people are willing to pay for. I talk about what I do. This seems like a good way to meet and talk to the sort of people who are interested in making money by doing the sort of thing I do.

There's been a lot of talk about how not having a CF is a handicap. Let's say it is. You can get started, or not, but not getting started doesn't seem to get you closer to your goal, make you a better CF, or bring you into contact with people who can help you with your business.

It would be nice to have a good CF; a long-time acquaintance with a compatible personality, complementary skill-set, rich parents, entrepreneurial bent, few obligations, etc., but you either know someone like that or you don't. If you don't, it will take years to change that ("long-term") and it seems silly to wait, if you really want to do your own startup.

Sometimes, you have to make do with what you have.
I think there is a common misconception in the startup culture that if you cant convince a friend/buddy etc.. to become a co-founder/partner, your idea is not very good or you are not very good at pitching the idea.

I cant seem to find a co-founder, I am 22. I have many friends who are in tech, many in the bay area. Most of them are just not interested in doing startups right now. Some of them just want a stable job, they are getting paid well. Some of them are just not really into web2.0, someone of them don't have the passion/not driven.

So it is possible that your idea is great and it just so happens that you are unable to find a partner. I am in that boat and I think if there was a tool to find co-founders. There is definitely a good chance of having success in your idea, especially since there are many other people like me with the same dilemma.
What are you looking for/working on?
What was it like to quit your job in February? Were you ready before you decided or did you become ready once you decided?

As soon as my apt. lease is up, I'm seriously debating about: leaving my job, traveling to another country to maximize savings and learn Spanish, code, code, code, put it out there..

Even though I have a good job (and with this economy, as my Mom tells me), I have four or five ideas that I want to execute on. I'm starting to delude myself that I'd be happier slaving away in retail or the service industry (the economy) and coding at nights, working on projects that I am interested on. But I know that if I execute right, that finding a job won't be a problem (it will be a choice - job or startup)
WWJB?
Phil if you read this - Thanks! I decided not to apply to Startup School and this makes me feel better.

The more interesting posts will be your post-Startup School ones [one, two, three months afterwards]. I really hope you are inspired and start a thread on your blog on how you are doing/doing it, post-startup school. Followup is everything.
Try using data from Interactive Brokers.

You can pull up to a year of historical data on FX in minute resolution, and it is free.
will keep in touch, continue work and wrap up another investment offer we have on the platter. release within three months, and and see how things span out 8 )
Haha. Right when I saw the post title, I jokingly thought "it prolly runs faster than real Ruby..." Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.
I think the "paste link" thing means that long messages, that would otherwise appear as floods, are auto-converted into links to auto-submitted snippets of the same text on a Pastebin-like site.
That's true, but why not go and run in those 'right' circles then?
The real quote, with emphasis added:

> the internet itself, in almost all of what's been done with it, is shit.

This is simply a restatement of Sturgeon's law.
Valleywag is a surprisingly good resource for networking events, yes. It's not gonna get you rubbing shoulders with VC's, for the most part, but folks in the valley show up for stuff. Unfortunately, most of the really good parties only get written up after they happen.
OK, true, although I also threw in the aspect that we don't really know how many pairs of glasses we have ourselves. Also, since FJS is fake, I don't quite see how I can pull an ad hominem on him. It's not like I could attack his personal opinion.

Anyway, yes, I admit it, I really don't like his style. He is a good writer, so why does he have to hide behind the FJS personae (since he revealed his identitiy anyway)? Ad hominen or not, I don't want to take any advice from a dishonest person. Give me xkcd over this any day (why does FJS make it on hacker news???).
despite http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/
Yahoo Goes Scorched Earth
Good enterprises is not to give up when you fall. Keep trying and I am sure you will succeed!
I wonder if it would be possible to get some basic quantitative feedback from YC to get a clearer idea about the strong and the weak points of an application, e.g. a rating from 1 to 5 for criteria like quality and potential of idea, fittingness of the founders, progress of the project, potential and risk of business model, etc. you name it.
Risk for YC would be that people try to optimize their application against the criteria and distort somehow the competition.
Good point. Relying on other peoples code is horrible. Has to be done sometimes though ;)
Sorry to hear about the majority which all got a no. Keep your chins up and your hopes alive.

I would not worry about it. It might be time for a reality check though.

Step back and take a look at your idea. Does it have legs. Is it something that people want. Can you monetize it. Don't take your own opinion seriously, ask people if they would use it and see ads or pay for it. If you can't find anyone who would, come up with another idea.

Figure out what it would take to get to the next step. If the answer is a boatload of money or a team of people then it may be time to come up with another idea that has a lower bar to clear. If the answer is a couple of months of working nights for the founders go for it.

One more thing. I've been lurking here for awhile and I see the passion and desire to make things happen here all the time. It motivates me to work harder and make it happen for my project. I think this small community is a great virtual community. We can all use it to push each other to succeed. I know I am. I wonder how many YC rejects will succeed? I'm guessing a lot more than normal.

I couldn't apply with my reality. I'm too old. I need too much money. I can't move. etc...

But it does not matter. I will finish my project and I will release it and see if it has legs.

I can't wait to see more new products announced here by the YC rejects. I'll keep lurking...
"Now if only we could get our parents and distant relatives on, so we don't have to send all those wedding invitations by mail."

How little you understand about women and their universal, deep, and abiding love for all things stationery.
"Readmore" perhaps? ;)
ad hominem can have merit, but only when it is funny.
otherwise known as "if you're going to insult me, at least make me laugh"
The fundamental fallacy of capitalism is that the monetization of an idea is the only accurate measure of its worth.
undoubtedly. in addition the internet is much more important than telegraph, radio, or TV was because it takes a step in the opposite direction: decentralization.

humanities tendency to continue to cluster far past the threshold of added utility is one of our biggest problems.
"An entirely in-browser solution would be so much cooler"

... and slower.
interactive takes precedent over non-interactive in an educational environment.

that said, video games are of a lower order of interactivity than person to person interactivity.
Ask YC: How do you take decisions?
Do you decide spontaneously? Do you try to rationalize the decision process? Do you use certain tools to make decisions? Do you consider it important to document your decisions somehow to understand them later? Do you communicate decisions transparently towards co-workers or employees? Do you see any value at all in rationalizing decisions?
Congrats. A no go for us this time, but we'll rally the forces and try again next time around.
Ask YC: any other European/non-US teams in Moutain View ? 
We'll be coming from Paris.
See you all.
the mercantilist approach to economics is not useful unless you're trying to decode the reasoning behind international politics.
Video on Flickr!
CSS - An Absolute Mess
Unicycling
we need a wikipedia for ______ is generally true. the problem is getting all the knowledgeable people involved with ______ to contribute their time.
you need a limitus test to keep out the dreamers (only people who are actively working on something). but a simple weekly dinner between a half dozen startups could work as a great motivator and forum.
Call me a cynic, but I'm not sure these would stand on their own if it weren't for the language/framework/platform they trumpet.

Would anyone care about campfire if it was written in say php? I doubt it.
it goes hand in hand with anything new really.

all the people without real creative ideas do the following:
old idea + new technology = profit!
or (with credit to Steve yegge) "when all you've got is c++, everything looks like your thumb"
"As soon as my apt. lease is up, I'm seriously debating about: leaving my job, traveling to another country to maximize savings and learn Spanish, code, code, code, put it out there.."

I'm just curious...are their any hugely successful tech startups that went the route of "maximizing savings" to the point of moving to a super cheap country very far out of reach of the tech industry?

I can't help but think that being far out of the technology loop and away from peers is good for literature and, maybe, art but incredibly bad for creating an application that people want to use. There's something about Silicon Valley that, despite the extremely high cost of living, leads to more successful tech startups than anywhere else. Readily available funding can't be all of it...can it?
i like the concept.
Right now, I email myself the small interesting tidbits i find or in some txt file which I later forget abt it.
if executed well, i can see many ppl using it .or atleast me:)
TechCrunch UK - Launching CrunchBase in Europe
I saw this a while back. But I never gotten around to try it out. If I'm not mistaken does this mean I can write JavaScript in Ruby?
http://ted.europa.eu/Exec?DataFlow=ShowPage.dfl&Template...

Quote:
"Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged. However, to prevent disruptions in service to our normal users from bulk downloads of TED data, we reserve the right to check for, and block, attempts to download excessive quantities of documents, particularly using automated or robot-like tools."

... they apparently chose not to exercise that right in this case, the scrape completed last night (all 18 GB of it).
Go Zed!
I've just created a LinkedIn group for Hacker News (unrelated to this thread, but reading it reminded me I was planning on creating it). I'll post the details here and in a new article when it's live. I've also added my LinkedIn profile to my HC profile.
Got a no.

Hoping for some personalized feedback, some intel. When you are first starting out, generally that's the most important thing - since even if you get a "yes", what your going to get besides $5k+$5kN is lots of community and feedback. Cash can be burned through, especially that little. I mean, McAffee has a Stadium and computers still get viruses. But the truth, well, that's a bit more persistent.
I agree with your observations on the size of an ideal (human) group. So does Jesus.
Found Written on an Old Notebook (Caterina Fake)
Notes from Deep Economy
A fantastic talk by Isabel Allende at TED 2007
Eating Beauty
I am curious to hear you relate this to Jesus. Please give me details.
Charles Shultz on Peanuts
There is already a group with 150 members here:

http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&sortCriteria=3...

Does that link for people? I can't figure out a better way to link to it, it is called "Y Combinator News Group"

>The groups directory is not currently open. We are working on creating a searchable directory for all groups. If there are groups you wish to join, you may click on the group logo from the profile of a group member and request to join.

Looks like LinkedIn groups are mostly broken. So this is my profile, you can join the group if you click the group link in my profile. http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=7886605...
Free Hugs!
It's kind of disappointing to see 3/4 of the comments here are an instance of "Have you heard of <insert related language>? Why wasn't it good enough?", one of the questions in their FAQ:

http://www.ikayzo.org/confluence/display/SDL/FAQ#FAQ-Q%3AHav...
He's got a point when he says, "But the health of the Internet demands a counter balance to Google. Yahoo-Microsoft, given the current state of things, is the only reasonable outcome."

I'm not one to much like Microsoft, but they are starting to come to market with decent web products. Combine Microsoft and Yahoo and you've got a pretty big web powerhouse that has a _chance_ at giving Google a run for it's money. That is unless, like the article said, all of Yahoo's top people find new jobs.
This seems a little too primitive. If you want to learn about things like preemptive multi-threading, virtual memory etc... you might be better served looking at something like Minix or XINU. Not to mention that C code is going to be easier to wrap your head around than all assembler.

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/research/xinu.html

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/xsoft.html

http://www.minix3.org/
Hmm, yeah, this seems pretty b0rked. Ok, I'll see if I can dig something up a little more useful.
They look to have done a good job of differentiating themselves from YouTube by being less, how should I say, tacky?
Looks like Jef did it first...

http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/slides/san-diego-...
Wouldn't the declining value of Yahoo over time have something to do with it? Yahoo stock was as high as $30 in early 2007 and was trading at under $20 when Microsoft made the announcement. Certainly the stock price has bumped up but imagine what Microsoft would have to put up if Yahoo was trading at $30 before this potential deal was announced.

Also, we have yet to see what price the Yahoo board would actually sell at. In light of their saggy long-term growth outlook and numerous attempts to run away from the deal (deals or mergers with Google or AOL) a decent stock bump from a News Corp/Microsoft combination would test their sincerity re: a higher price.
If I search for "ralph dos" I seem to get results from all over the place. One nice feature would just be able to get a list of a user's posts.
I'm not sick of XML at all, because I hardly have to write it. I work with objects, and let the serializer output the XML.

I am sick of having to learn new formats though.
I violently agree. I am upset that others dont see this. Hypercard was great, that that is totaly irrelevant now. Is everyone so short sighted and money grubbing not to see it this time? Why do we have to repeat this over and over.
I'm not sure logic will work for your "one pair of glasses". Logic won't help you deal with people because people are rarely if ever logical. As far as awareness of the immediacy of death; well I believe that death is simply part of life - so that won't work for me. Although if you mean awareness of the immediacy of death - as in Carpe Diem - I'm all with ya!
Yes, just include HotRuby.js and write <script type="text/ruby"> puts "wow".uppercase();</script>

Amazing what javascript has been able to do.
anyone that complains about HTML scraping is a pussy. Seriously its trivial compared to what we had to do in the past. I like hpricot for ruby.
We Don't Use Software That Costs Money Here
The Perfect Server - Mandriva 2008 Spring Free (Mandriva 2008.1)
Excellent article, though the headline looked a bit flamebaity at first.

The author's main point: the growth of a network's value can be better approximated by n log(n) than by Metcalfe's n²-n.

Looking at online communities and social networks, I would even go so far as to say that their value function looks more like a bell curve (taking into account negative factors like spam, scoundrels and stupidity). Anybody still on Usenet?
52+5 reasons to go to Google I/O
Microsoft-Yahoo-Google: The vicious antitrust circle
Industrial Control Systems Killed Once and Will Again, Experts Warn
Mr. Know-It-All: Office Pill-Popping, Blog Amending, Pub Surfing
Buzznet: The social site that says it's not a social network
But porting your GAE application to another provider is easy, it won't automatically have the scaling capabilities and the Google login is a problem but mostly they can be easily ported.
Perhaps the best way to find a cofounder is to keep working without one. Build that app, proof of concept, prototype, whatever. Then show it to others. It'll be a lot easier to have a meeting of the minds reviewing your app than talking about your idea.
"As soon as my apt. lease is up, I'm seriously debating about: leaving my job, traveling to another country to maximize savings and learn Spanish, code, code, code, put it out there.."

Why don't you just code, code, code now? If you work 40 hours per week, that still oughta leave plenty of time to get started on your ideas. Even if you only get 10% done, that's a lot better than 0%.
Perhaps a tighter profanity filter would spare us and the editors...
Point by Point Comparison of Lisp and Scheme
If Programming Languages Were Famous Movie Killers
Hacker's paradise? Google Offices Zurich
I didnt apply this time around, but...

You have to realize that while Hacker News may be a community, Y Combinator is actually business. Businesses tend to strive to efficient processes.

Applying to Y Combinator is like applying to any other competition, so don't take the lack of direct feedback personally. If you got a rejection letter, it didn't state things like "You didn't pursue enough extracurricular activities, plus the grammar in your essay was horrible".

I think that what people that werent accepted should do is become a part of this community. Because while you may not get feedback from your application, we will give that feedback, we will give you that support when you are down, we will be the first users of your website, heck we may even be your first competitors.

So, dont drop your idea or stop coming here because you werent accepted or didnt get feedback. It's not personal. Really.

Good Luck!
If it wasn't implicit, I was just pointing out that he led a group of twelve (excluding himself of course), no more.
A Guide to Business Development 2.0
Entrepreneurs : Do a Quality Check on VCs, before you “hire” them
Entrepreneurs : Do a Quality Check on VCs, before you “hire” them
BookMooch: Lessons in solving the problem of ‘free.’
If there is an inherent agility to team-based, distributed free software development, then it will definitely be increasingly hard for organizations with any significant inertia to stay in play once their problem domain has been noticed.

I wonder if that means that companies will either need to become smaller and more talented to compete or work on a project with a high up-front cost or high infrastructure cost over the long haul. The last option because it would be hard to distribute those costs across a free team and then recoup them.
Great LinkedIn profile. Thanks for bringing a smile this morning