skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Other famous statements, similar to the ones in this essay:

* Go is an easy game to learn; the rules fit on one page.

* Sculpting is easy: To make a statue of a lion, just start with a block of marble and take away all the bits that don't look like a lion.

* Here's a T-shirt with Maxwell's Equations. Now you understand classical electrodynamics.

* That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.

I'm not saying that the essay isn't true. It is true. But learning the first-order approximation to truth is, at most, half the pleasure. Learning the details is the other half.
Thanks for putting it together YC team. It really was a great experience. Thanks for all the hard work and effort in setting everything up and in lining up such a great set of speakers.
Paper here

http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/404

Google Scholar is a wonderful tool.
Make it so good that people tell their friends about it.
I'd say this is a good recipe (Not speaking from a lot of experience, but the theory seems sound to me :/ ):

1. Make it so good people want to tell others about it. It can't be an "hmm, yeah I guess that might be useful later. I'll bookmark it". It has to be a "Woahhhhh I've been looking for this exact thing for years. So have my friends I bet. I need to use this now, and tell my friends what I found". (A hard ask, but it's nice to aim for that 'wow' factor).

2. Make the base product free, and politely refuse donations. Ask people to simply tell their friends about it. I think people kinda feel guilty about having a cool product for free, so they become evangelists for it, and help you sell it.

Having said that, it's good to get something to start off. Look at websites/domains that are related, and have been neglected... Send emails, make an offer, buy domain, get traffic. It's not a sure fire thing - some people still believe domain names to be worth millions whatever they are. But you can pick up some real gems. More likely to be sustainable traffic unlike tc/reddit/etc mentions.
It all goes back to the mentality of loving what you do...if that results in you being the next google so be it. The problem is people set their minds on being the next big thing instead of worrying about what they are doing in the present. DHH is speaking to living in the present and not compromising your ideals.
I can't find it in Gmail, but IIRC one of the Auctomatic guys told me they were on Seaside, and they didn't understand why the whole world wasn't on Seaside too.

I would be working in Seaside if I had more time, but there's the huge Rails job market, the fact that I've been working with Rails a bunch, and the fundamental fish-out-of-water feeling of being without my Unix security blanket. I'm going to the OSCON tutorial on Seaside soon, though, and Steven Baker told me he has a cool Seaside app to show off at RailsConf.

In addition to programming I devote serious amounts of time to acting and music. If programming were my only thing, I would be working in Seaside. I really enjoy Ruby immensely, but Seaside's very impressive. It even makes everything else look a little silly.
The DNS has always seemed like such a fragile system to me.
As Marc Andreessen said, make it so good that people can't ignore you.
_a new web framework called Kiiteh_

I got you a continuation but I ated it.
Don't freak out yet. I can understand that he was able to accept your friend requests but not give you a full reply to your proposal. And if he didn't get it done on Friday, there are lots of people who don't do work on the weekends.

Call him Monday morning.
It was well worth my plane ride up. Much thanks for all the hard work you put into it. I didn't meet many news.yc'ers, but perhaps you saw me, my name is the same as my nick here. Anyways, all the talks were great, each speaker added their own flavor, and sitting amongst people who were like minded and driven entrepreneurs was pretty great. The pizza was really good, too. Thanks again YC.
countless variations of this have already been posted on yc time and time again (I'm going to assume you haven't visited in a while)... I'll give a variation of the same answer:

Ideas are cheap. It's all about the execution. When you start your venture, realistically you probably already have 3 or more teams you have yet to see, working on the same idea; with your current idea - at least u know who you're up against early on (that's assuming the guy wasn't just too busy to reply back). o yeah no matter how perfect your bplan is - it's going to change like everything else

I can go on and on about examples (google vs yahoo vs altavista, facebook vs myspace vs friendster)...
I think psychologically, a model that might work better for works like this: a fixed up-front price ($5?), with a no-hassle no-questions-asked one-click refund of all or part of the payment.

Eliminates risk for the buyer (here meaning, "whatever makes someone hesitate to pay"), but it's harder to ask for a refund than to take something for free.
I'm sure there are people who can shout louder than everybody else, but this may be one of those cases where the best way to achieve something, is to do something else first. [I hate stuff like that. ;)]

If you want to date a girl, you could just approach one after another until one finally says yes (e.g., "My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents."). Or you could improve yourself by learning how to cook or play music, getting in shape, etc., so you have something to actually bring to a relationship. At that point you'll either be turning them away, or you'll have a life and won't care (which can also be an attractor).

Same approach in the technical world. Do you have a blog? Or do you participate in open source projects, or attend conferences, or anything else to demonstrate how you bring value to others?

Another common path is consulting, which basically accomplishes the same thing. Prove your worth to others, and your goal of introducing a new product becomes much easier.

I think sometimes we may care so much about the end product that we have trouble switching from the techie role to the business role. But you have to save some of that energy for marketing, and it may be better to take a more dispassionate view of the finished product (or risk never releasing anything).
Weekend Reading: Amusing Stuff Different Kinds Of People Like
"Another interesting observation was how many people were coding at the event. The crowd was full of true hackers and not people who waste half their days at meetings."

Hopefully not whilst the speakers were actually speaking, that just sounds rude.
I agree, but as I tried to make clear in the article, I've only tried to make the code as generalized as possible. For the memoize class for example, you wouldn't care. For the safe class, you'd definitely write in more exceptions to handle more issues your source might have. In this process, you'd be writing the proper method signature in.

You're right though, I should have made that clearer.
It doesn't talk to the rest of the world the way you're used to.

Well, it can now -- we ported Thrift to Smalltalk for Auctomatic, so that we can easily interoperate with code written in other languages.
Well, anecdote != data:)
This is getting off-topic, but...

A couple years ago my girlfriend and I took swing dancing lessons. Although I normally led, for one of the exercises everyone switched roles; I learnt to follow, and she learnt to lead. That was probably the single most helpful exercise of that class.
I've been following YC for the past several months, though it's entirely possible that I've merely skipped over similar threads.

That said, I am aware of the sort of answer which you've summed up for me. I'd respond by saying that not all ideas are equally cheap (some have only been made possible thanks to years of accumulated wisdom), nor are they all equally likely to have been thought up or worked on by someone else. As a matter of probability, what you say is undoubtedly true, and it's the same response I'd give to most people. Knowing all this, I still believe my situation to be a possible exception.

Let me put this another way: if you don't buy that I'm in an exceptional situation, then let's discuss the matter hypothetically. If SOMEONE was in an exceptional situation, what ought they to do?
"By the way, I simply could not believe my eyes when I saw on average about 20% of the attendees spent a fair share of their time there surfing freaking reddit, slashdot and checking their emails. There was one dude right next to me who had Visual Studio open (yes, a fucking Visual Studio) and kept resizing an empty form non-stop without paying any attention [...]"

Funny another rundown of the event commented that the fact that there were so many people "coding" meant it was a meeting of true hackers and not a bunch of people who waste time in meetings all day. I tend to agree with the former assessment though, this just seems rude.
Wow, what a refreshing startup presentation. I'd upmod it double if I could.
Howard Aiken said "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." I have a similar feeling when I'm trying to convince VCs to invest in startups Y Combinator has funded. They're terrified of really novel ideas, unless the founders are good enough salesmen to compensate."

http://paulgraham.com/googles.html

TheFunded Founder Gives Startups Some Advice:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/03/thefunded-founder-gives...
Great! Turns out this speech was in fact recorded successfully and completely by Justin.tv, but apparently some others like Arrington's were not due to technical difficulties (like I remembered last year.) I was actually very nervous because I made a decision to publish these notes to the public asap, but I was missing out on the first part of Paul Buchheit's speech to do so. Why was I nervous, when surely there would be perfect, uninterrupted video recordings , with full and clear audio after the event? Well...
Hey axod, comment and a question:

I believe Remember the Milk would fall into this category.

Does anybody know how they're doing? Back in March they said they're up to 500k users. I wonder how many upgraded to the $25 Pro account. Two percent maybe? That would mean $250k in revenues (spread among several people over several years). Just something I was pondering the other day!
How much power is used when you do a Google search?
I will, thanks.

I guess the thing that bothers me is that I wasn't even asking him for a full reply to my proposal. It was really just small questions that wouldn't have taken more than a few minutes to reply to.

Given how prompt and terse our initial email exchanges were, I find it odd that he couldn't manage to dash off something very quickly again.
But DHH is hhot...
Thanks to everyone for their advice!! The reason I'm not designing it myself is because I'm not a CS major. I am majoring in marketing with a minor in economics. My job in this whole mess is to market, advertise, organize, and implement. If I could just get the technical stuff worked out (even at a bloated price), I think it'd be worth it. My mindset is... what's the worst that could happen? If I blow it, I'll have one hell of a story to tell at job interviews.
Thanks. Everything said there makes sense. My only problem is that I haven't been talking to a typical "VC": the guy himself is a tech entrepreneur, who's launched several startups of his own and has a great deal of technical capability.
then focus on out executing your competitors and spend less energy on worrying about them. focus on delivering something you can post on yc

if the idea was really exceptional, it would probably have a high barrier to entry (a la good algorithm, high startup costs, ...) and you probably wouldn't be as worried, then again I could be wrong
So many DHH stories on the front page today, is it because DHH is so hhot?
Sometimes I take a week or more to reply to a quick email (even after a "prompt and terse initial exchange").

Just because your email is important and urgent to you does not mean it's important and urgent to me. My world does not revolve around you.

Can't deal with it? Don't email me.
Thanks for the recommendations. I'll be sure to check them out.
in* and better*, last time I post with a drained iphone.
Well then let me put it in yet another way: Can you point to anyone, anyone at all, that has made a substantial amount of money from an idea?

I can't.
The purpose of advertising is to get people look at your product. The product itself is what determines who sticks around as a user and who wanders off to look at something else. I don't seem to have any advice beyond that.
Make sure you have a great blog that exudes passion and excitement about your product. Thats a start. Also, treat every user like how you would treat your mother.
There are image processing algorithms and then there are image processing algorithms, but: we do some very simple image processing in Dabble DB and were surprised by how much library support Squeak had for it.
http://blog.dabbledb.com/2007/04/white--or-green.html
DHH is a great speaker, but he's terrible at math. Every calculation he talked about was completely wrong. Not even close to being right... It's a minor nit, but if he's in front of a computer to build a presentation, you think he would check to make sure that 500 customers at 40 dollars a month is NOT 125,000 a month (for example).
Get "some other people interested" in funding you, just for the sake of creating a sense of urgency for him.
Hi there. This guy is probably very busy. I myself receive emails and sometimes send a holding email when I know I'm maxed and can't reply for a day or so. Also, many people don't work weekends.
Actually there is often room for innovation and improvement in areas you don't expect. I have looked at the yachting industry, and they basically do things the same way they have done them for 100 years. Lots of room for small nimble players. There are probably many industries like that.

Maybe it's worth stepping outside the world of high-tech and applying some of the ideas, methods and innovation from this area to other products.
I remember reading about some guy a while back who's made a fortune by actually selling businesses his ideas...the ones that come to mind are gift ideas sold to Hallmark, and something about increasing label space on bottles of things like aspirin.

At any rate, I'm really not looking for entrepreneur macho speak, e.g. "Ideas are NOTHING! Execution is EVERYTHING! This is SPARTA!!!!" I just want practical advice on what to do. Not worrying about it and pushing forward regardless is one option which I'm giving strong consideration to. But I'd also like to know what sort of legal and other options I can pursue, if I ought to be making any preparations, etc.

You know, when you start renting a place, it's always a good idea to take photographs of it in case there's a dispute later over the condition of the property. Something along those lines.
During stakeholder interviews, I once toured a Lego design facility. The two sound very similar, starting with consumer realities (need, valued attributes, budget) to produce something ultimately creative.
Not true at all, fact is most submissions to Digg still don't generate enough traffic to matter at all. Only if your post becomes popular will it get enough traffic to matter and that is also pretty rare overall, and again easily solved by the standard caching plugin.
1) I have made this mistake before, BUT, remember no matter how great technical or marketing acumen you have, it's a matter of the tiny little thing of execution, heck even more important, if people really want it or not; sorry for re-stating the YC mantra again. If you truly believe you have the unique ingredients for notoriously executing your idea, then don't worry!

2) For the FUTURE: Try to run by your idea to someone who has enough depth and understanding of the market to be able to give you insightful advice and bonus, if they are not in a position to execute your idea. Most brilliant professors fit in this category - it's as if they are clergymen with whom your confession lies safe (be prudent here while picking the professor). Other potentials include notorious media folks - don't give away your idea completely, but be vague enough to get a "feedback" as in you would probably find out if anyone else is remotely close in this field.

3) Pitch a Hotmail - always pitch your second best idea that you don't care much about if it dies completely (as in gets stolen, etc) if the Mr. X investor is paying attention and you know (s)he won't run away with your idea; then pitch your real deal. This is what Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail founder) did until he landed on Tim Draper.
If you substitute "cute girl" for "tech entrepreneur", this story sounds equally neurotic but more cliched. Rather than worry about if he's that into you, spend your time on the other matters. As everyone else has said, if your idea is only as good as its novelty... it is not worth worrying about. If otherwise, keep executing. If all you bring to the table is the idea, without the ability to execute... that's going to be a problem for an investor. Execute does not mean 'attempt to monopolize another individual's time'. While you "wait" for feedback from this investor, and you feel that you're at the "invest or stall" point... be talking to other investors. It does not make sense to have developed an exclusive crush after a single lunch date.
Quoting myself, adding emphasis, "The limit on the amount of muscle mass you can pack onto your body is much higher than most people have the will to achieve." A 700 pound bench press is actually humanly possible, as the record for a raw, drug tested bench is 711 pounds. If you said 2000 pounds, then I'd agree with you; I think that's beyond human capacity. But 700 pounds is within human capacity, and your limit is your will.

As a counter-example to what you said about intensity, check out the video for The Captain: http://www.gymjones.com/video.php

I also like this essay: http://www.gymjones.com/knowledge.php?id=36
The Olympic lifts are great, but I've found they often require a base level of fitness to do them at all. Plus, it's a lot easier to teach yourself how to squat or deadlift than to do a proper clean (squat clean, not power clean).
i couldn't help but think of DHH's / 37 Signal's philosophy of working within realistic constraints when I read this article
Open Deals angel funding application (Is this legitimate?)
Yes, really. Undo probably wouldn't be too hard to implement (this already keeps track of who has voted on what), and it would be a helpful feature. Why can't we undo upmods/downmods?
right, but those are your interests. mine, for example, are completely opposite -- i want to stay home and play with theories

i agree that if you have nothing better to do, and you want to be one of those famous CEO's, then selling out early doesn't sound right. but some people do, in their definitions, have something better to do
It looks dubious. I hadn't heard of them before this. And the reference to 400 angel groups seems misleading, because they're presumably local groups.

Never pay to pitch, basically.
"some guy a while back who's made a fortune by actually selling businesses his ideas... and something about increasing label space on bottles of things like aspirin"

that's a little misleading. yes that guy has tons simple ideas like that - but he did execute and it wasn't easy. He filed tons of provisional patents (cheaper than full blown patents - but not cheap on time or money) and he's on the phone 12 hours a day. Not to mention, he's a master networker.

"it's always a good idea to take photographs of it in case there's a dispute later over the condition of the property."

Unless you've already filed a patent or made him sign an NDA before hand... I could be wrong but there's really nothing big u can do.
I have heard many of the stories of someone that got rich off an idea, but when I have researched them I have always found that either it was an urban myth, or else it was some guy selling something that he had spent ten years in his basement perfecting. If you have sources I'd love to see them.

Oh, and I wasnt trying to ignite the whole idea vs. execution debate, hope it didn't sound too much like it. It's just that I have never verifiably heard about someone making good money off an idea, and so I thought it would be interesting to put forth the challenge.
the book "Blue Ocean Strategy" talks about this design philosophy a bit. "price minus costing" instead of "cost plus pricing" Meaning start with the price and see if its a viable product to build at that price, instead of build the product and mark it up to get the final price. Interesting example.
Correct. Although often execution in his case meant setting up proper terms for a deal and/or having a very minimal prototyping phase, as I recall.

For folks like us, "execution" means considerably more than that. We actually have to develop the full blown product, whereas that was something he very intentionally shied away from doing.
well like i said before if your idea isn't simple to duplicate why worry? if it is simple to duplicate (like say twitter) you should assume that you already have competitors and just focus on out gunning them

"having a very minimal prototyping phase"

well developing good relationships can take longer than prototyping a product

Can you even tell us what the idea is? If not this is just a re-hash of the idea vs execution debate.
Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
Startup School (from Kansas)
Ask YC: Anyone working on applications for Craigslist?
Today I stumbled upon a great program that makes reading craigslist easier. It's called Craigslist Reader and is available here:

http://www.motiont.com/

(My review is here: http://breckyunits.com/?p=52)

A lot of Web 2.0 apps piggyback on the big sites to achieve success (Auctomattic, Facebook apps, etc.). I think this is a terrific strategy because these sites have millions of daily users who have many unmet wants. I was wondering if anyone here has been working on (or know of any) apps that would benefit craigslist users.

I'm not planning on developing any, actually I'm just curious because I use craigslist a fair amount.
Where is the evidence that it is "faster and more efficient than squid"?
Ask YC: Which company's marketing do you admire
Apple, for their slickness, and the cult they can cultivate.

Let us talk about marketing/branding angle only, and not the product.
good point:

not sure about faster but the dev posted some stats

http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgroups.google...
I added a "free" upmod (i.e. one I wouldn't have otherwise given) just to undo your mistaken downvote jrockway.
IKEA to other furniture maker: "Hey!!! We made a table first! You copied our idea. Ours has 4 legs as well. Yours is exactly the same. Take it down now."

Huddlechat was kinda cool I thought :/
I guess it's hard to sell a new brand of chocolate these days, so one has to come up with some innovative marketing, like making up some story about "using satellites to help cocoa farmers" and similar. Sorry for being cynical but I call bullshit on this one.
Well this doesn't seem like anything new to me. We all know that Google, MS, IBM, and all the heavyweights are opening up research centers in China and abroad.

The issue is that it is difficult for startups to get access to the research coming out of those places - thus encouraging startups in the native land, like Zoho.
I'm not sure how this makes any sense for Microsoft. If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.