skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1. Product advice: Paul Graham is one of the most astute product advisers i know.

I am sure this is true, but how many product advisers do you know?

When I look at that last batch of acceptees... I am very surprised at some who made the cut. I'm not sold on YC's judgement. I think they may hit a few home runs just due to taking a lot of swings rather than due to an ability to identify the good pitches, and get lucky that a couple hundred fair pitches are proffered every time. Which leads into the next point...

> Pg and co get so many applications and have so little time to read them that you should expect that the YC partners don’t have any idea what you do

...Which means you're giving ownership to people who don't care enough about what you do in particular to spend time on it; this is a big mismatch if you've spent a lot of time on your project, so their approach is more aligned with people who come in with ideas sans code. They have dozens of other start-ups to deal with, not to mention all the time some of them spend on this site.

So the main value in YC seems to be demo day -- getting a stage to present to a large number of moneyed interests at once, plus the news coverage, so you either get the real investment dollars you need or get acquired.

All the information you get is pretty much replaceable -- you can find it other places -- but YC takes the write-protect tab off the floppy so instead of just you being stuck in read-only mode you can write out information that is seen by people you want to see it.

At least that's what it appears their primary value is to me.
Public Launch of Mediapops.com - please check it out 
So we're finally out of Beta and would love if anyone here would check us out. Our service aims to keep users in the know for new releases of media - Books, Music: Online, CD, Concerts, Movies: In Theaters and DVD, and Video Games: By Console or Desktop. You tell us about some media you like, where you live and what game systems you use and we find stuff for you. Once a week you'll get an email telling you what's new for you.

Thanks!
Cybercrime is a Franchise Model that Scales
How Much Money Does Apple Get From Google?
No, no no no! Not even if it is at 0% interest. I've done this, I'm still paying it off, don't do it.
I think twitter has a play and here's why.....It seems that the immediacy of data is as important if not more than quality or even context.
Follow a twit around a live event and its amazing the shift. Take a normal tech conference, 3 years ago we would go see a few of the blogs that night or the next day. Heck I remember when The TWICE daily @ CES was relevant. Then came liveblogging events, this was cool because it created a feedback loop and discussion. Now with Twitter, the data flow is sudden, coming from all angles. It changes how you experience and event.
Once location specific soc-nets develop and more prominent bloggers leverage twitter as an extension of themselves the mainstream will adopt. Maybe not in the way it has w/ facebook etc...but its too interesting for it not to.
To point 1: YC backs teams not ideas. Smart early stage investors back teams.

To point 2: AT Interview stage, from one application form how familiar do you expect someone to be once you've read 500 forms. This is a pretty selfish viewpoint. Once you get into YC and get to know everyone YC (in particular Jessica) works extremely hard for you and care about what you do.

Some companies like rescuetime and heroku were well past the idea stage when they did YC. So your comments are a bit of an overgeneralisation.
They "care" when they accept you. Before that, not so much. These are problems people have with all VC, not just YC. I agree. If you're serious, bootstrap.
Continuing the reasoning of the original comment: have you funded a lot of early stage companies, or worked with people who do?
I don't think this would fracture the community much and it would probably do a tremendous thing to improve the signal to noise ratio for me personally. Not everyone has the same measure of what is 'signal' and what is 'noise', so I wouldn't want to impose my blacklist on them, and I'm not voting this stuff up anyway, so it's not like I'd be affecting other users by just not seeing some things. Even only being allowed three blacklisted links would be huge for me.

But honestly, not too passionate about this either way, just throwing in my two cents.

Edit: Wrote a cheapo greasemonkey script to do this...
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
The answer to this is probably obvious, but, can someone sell my on why I want mod_rails? What's wrong with the tag-team app server / web server architecture?
We are going to add some feedback that will alert the user to the presence or non-presence of java.
I have a question: does anyone ever do this? Work for "equity"? The math problem on this is pretty straightforward: N hours of design time (especially when the deliverable is HTML/CSS comps) is easy to price, and there's a huge chance your startup equity is going to be worth zero.

Also, just a tip: knowledge of C# and C++ is probably not a plus in a designer. =)
Yes, linkherd.com is broken and abandoned due to me focusing on my real startup. It has the auto-submit RSS feature, and a cool cross-site auto-submit feature too.

If anyone wants my ugly baby, write to linkherd@gmail.com
Actually yes. http://www.libraryhouse.net/web07/speakers/profiles/#sumon_s...
Criticism accepted.
We are a team of highly passionate hackers, we are working to implement cutting edge search technology to make on demand search engines for social, business and mostly ecommerce.

The candidate will have the opportunity to drive all web design and content own the project as much as we do and be part of a great venture.
Sounds like they are just clarifying an aspect of GPL that comes up frequently in FAQ. People wouldn't be distributing Passenger code with their application. They're just using it, like many developers use Linux but don't have applications on Linux bound by Linux's GPL license.
You hit on the exact reason why we started CrossBrowserTesting.com.

We are web developers too and browser shots did not do what we needed. Ajax just does not work well in the model. I think for static shots it does a good job. Our site has screenshots also but you can pick and choose where and when you want the screenshot.
Neat! Do you agree fully with the SnapTalent article about YC?
Don't take "random" to mean "unnecessary"

Any bit of information that I'm not specifically interested in finding is random as far as I'm concerned. That doesn't mean its not important in some way.
You're probably not the target audience. It's meant to ease deployment so it's more like PHP in a LAMP setup.

In the author's words (http://www.modrails.com), here are the main features:

- Deployment is only a matter of uploading application files. No Ruby on Rails-specific server configuration required!

- Built on the industry standard Apache web server.

- Allows Ruby on Rails applications to use about 33% less memory, when used in combination with Ruby Enterprise Edition (optional).

- Zero maintenance. No port management, server process monitoring or stale file cleanup required. Errors are automatically recovered whenever possible.

- Designed for performance, stability and security. Passenger should never crash Apache even in case of crashing Rails applications.

- Well-documented, for both system administrators and developers!
Well for this project, equity will not be worth zero, let's be positive for a minute.

Thanks for the tip, but a designer may have to deal with HTML embedded in C# or C++ code there's nothing surprising about that.
Here's the root link to mod_rails website:
http://www.modrails.com/
I wrote it. I co-founded Snaptalent.
It's harder to convince a quality person to leave a stable position for another stable position than it is to convince them to come to yours from no position despite what perks you may offer.

I think one of the few companies in IT who doesn't have this issue right now is probably Facebook, Google use to be in that position until recently when there seems to be some backlash.

The harsh reality is that there really is a disproportionate number of bad to ok programmers in the North American market compared to good to great programmers.

So I guess getting back on topic. Is there a shortage of developers? No. Is there a shortage of quality developers? Probably.
I have the same - but there are still 2 big problems:

1) Finding new great content

2) Even when 1) happens, I don't update my ipod (it usually stays in the car).
This is a red herring. It's a pack of lies that you can't figure out who to believe.

It is the fatalistic, repugnant Fox News answer: "CNN was lying to you, the damn liberal media was lying to you, so now we throw up our hands and we lie to you from the other direction. We are Restoring The Balance. In fact, that's going to be our slogan. Fair And Balanced."

Buying into this is a recipe for disaster. Some people clearly don't believe it's important to inform their opinionated advocacy with data and events that occurred in the real world. And then some people do.

[Not to start a political discussion, for illustrative purposes only] The other day, my brother pointed out an article to me that showed that Obama took "oil company money", even though he ran an ad saying that he wasn't under the influence. It turned out the article said that Hillary took more oil money than Obama, and was also by oil company employees and their families, not their PACs. So I went to opensecrets.org to learn more about what percentage of the fundraising this "oil company money" was. It turns out it was something like $300K, in a campaign where Obama had $30 million cash on hand this month, not to mention the other tens of millions that had already been raised and spent. So the original expose (on factcheck maybe? I forget) veered dangerously close to mudslinging. [end]

The first thing you can do to find facts is start listening to people who ground their stories in data. Another good thing to do is to listen to people who criticize people by quoting them, by giving them a fair shake (Jon Stewart has made an industry out of just that). Listen to people who care about consistency. Listen to people who are forthcoming about their biases, such as affect their opinion. Listen to scientists.
i'm no fan of the rag - but censorship on a social site bothers me more - do like it dont read it - seems simple enough.
Why Google Announcements are Exciting!
Johnny Lee == the new Jeff Han
Anyone can bootstrap but once you are done do you have an audience with people who if they invest in your product? If not then you have to make a web app that is going to generate an income for you and your co-founders.
> I am sure this is true, but how many product advisers do you know?

I know a ton. Many aren't that good, but everyone thinks they must be a great product advisor. Isn't "idea guy" just news.yc slang for the same thing?
There is little question that the H-1B system is broken. However, there are legitimate reasons to want to limit the number of H-1B's that enter the US. At the simplest level supply and demand means that increasing the number of qualified people who do X reduces the amount paid to those people. The classic example being doctors who have been over compensated due to artificial limits on the number's of doctors for a long time.

If we really want to get the highest skilled workers have company's bid on H-1B's (aka I want ted and I bid 40k/year) and you end up with the most talented / highest value without diluting the job pool significantly.

PS: The other reason to limit immigration is you don't want people to use infrastructure without being a net gain for the economy. Aka If our infrastructure is worth 50k / person then brining someone in that is worth less than that is a net loss for the economy.
There'd be no Unix, thus no Unix-Java mismatch. You'd only have Java tools (such as they are) to manage your Java code. Of course, you'd have different problems.
And if you want to do the same-ish thing with similarly little configuration (indeed, less) with any framework (not just Rails) or even with a non-Ruby language, check out SwitchPipe: http://switchpipe.org/
Two ways to address that problem in the real world:

(1) Use a templating system that uses "designer-friendly" markup. There are lots of them.

(2) Allocate cycles to take static HTML and integrate them into your code. That's what most of my products have done; I want designers designing, not integrating.
Read/write using racetrack memory demonstrated
Great job, man. Informative and inspiring
Mitch Kapor unveils Hands Free 3D!
Mitch Kapor and Philippe Bossut designed a prototypical interface that demonstrates the possibilities for operating Second Life “hands free” without a mouse or keyboard. To make this work, they modified the open source Second Life client to support a 3D camera as an input device.

"For the moment, our objective is to explore the possibilities for these new types of devices. We believe that these cameras will eventually make interacting with Virtual Worlds as comfortable as using a webcam. This will ultimately broaden the appeal of Virtual Worlds by allowing new ways of online expression. It may also attract people who find the current gaming interface too hard to handle."

Read The Blog: http://handsfree3d.com
Wow, and now I feel dumb! I read your bio, but missed the SnapTalent thing.
Twitter's nebulous nature lends to inherent value for many groups of people. It can be so many things to so many different people. If you want to narrow down the selling proposition, then declaring it a new mode of communication would fit the bill pretty well.
Yes. Ban Them.. They dont add any value. All their articles are sleezy and just a waste of time. I wonder why cant they come up with some decent stuff worthy of talking.
Passenger (mod_rails for Apache) launches
The Insider Secrets of Angel Investing
Stumble or Fumble?
Not even if it is at 0% interest

Yes.
Completely agree, we do use template in most cases, but as startup we still have embedded client code laying around that we must deal with. It will be nice to have a designer capable of at least help in clean up.
The bidding for H1Bs system would solve this pretty well. The current laws make it seem as if every H1B is identical - seems counterintuitive to me.
Why things cost 19.95?
Podcasting isn't failing. It's not meeting some people's expectations, but it's not failing. FTA I too get news from a podcast, since my commute may not take me through the next hourly update. With a little effort (and an AutoHotKey script) I get my iPod charged, and it's ready to go when I am. I also get the weekly Maximum PC podcast (rant on, Gordon!).

I don't care much for video podcasts, since I'm driving.
Gartner figures out that the Windows ecosystem is broken
Most of is conclusions are heavily influenced by the unlimited resources factor. It's is also normal in this scenario that the Zerg did better than the humans because they can waste their unit and just rapidly make new ones.
Monetizing Twitter for Business
Phase 3: Profit
Google App Engine Blog: We're up and running
Interesting read about pricing psychology, although its hard for me personally to agree with some of the claims - in the TV pricing example, I'd have probably mentallly equated anything around 5000 to just 5000 and extrapolated from there.
Anyone can bootstrap. Funny.

Listen to what Graham himself says: if you have customers, nobody cares what your pedigree is. Most successful companies don't come through YC. Most funding sources --- top tier VC included --- don't come with real PR benefits. YC does. But it's not proven that you need it.
Setting up apache proxy + mongrels, while not impossible, is also not brain-dead easy.

Also, in virtual private server scenarios RAM may be a hot commodity (slicehost, for instance) -- so in theory this should help you run more rails sites with less RAM, since you won't have to spin up individual mongrel clusters for each domain.
People just love misinterpreting products, comparing them to completely unrelated things and just making noise. That's right. Making noise is the goal. All else is secondary.

Can't people just say "Hey look, here's a new product which IS USEFUL to somebody out there on earth and a damn nifty one at that." That somebody in Google App Engine's case is a hacker who wants to quickly try out his hobbies without worrying about all the mess that comes with managing a web host.

But no. We must compare. And we must make noise. Lots of it.

Perhaps it gives us a way to figure out which blogs / sites to NEVER visit.
My favorite quote from the linked article:

"Google App Engine's ability to scale depends on how much server resources Google is willing to dedicate to the task of running these applications. Google is not going to risk slowing down their primary services for a Google App Engine application. So their ability to scale could very well be less than other companies, we just don't know."

No doubt a $6/mo. account at Dreamhost will scale better than Google.
wow, impressive

Any plans to add OSX as well?
Why Chipotle Does Less (Applies to the Get Real model)
Perhaps. But OTOH the author is pissed off about the amount of noise being generated in favor of Google App Engine as if it were completely revolutionary when, according to the author, currently its only a nicely packaged free webhost with many drawbacks. The operative word here is of course "currently".

edit : The article that the author links to is clearly over the top too so I think this post is partly a very angry reaction to that article.
He is not saying that it will or will not scale better. He is only saying that we simply dont have data to prove that Google will scale better. People are invoking the Google brandname but a brandname shows almost nothing.
The only issue with using "new mode of communication" to try to convince someone to use a service is that a new way of communicating appeals to people who are on the edge, but won't appeal to a widespread audience who might say "I don't need a new mode of communication, my current ones are working just fine."

It is a good point that twitter is revolutionizing gatherings of large groups of people (like at tradeshows and conferences) - maybe that is the way that it will get widespread adoption. Twittering at ballgames or concerts with lots of consumers? It's a possibility.
This article does seem to illustrate the priorities of the Obama-voting demographic. The vast majority of Clinton's supporters simply don't spend their time on facebook, blogs, digg, wikis and youtube.

They should do a poll similar to this outside of a local starbucks as well. I'm sure that will be equally enlightening.
Good point. I think you've changed my mind about the utility of inferencing :).

The difference between querying and inferencing isn't what I was trying to emphasise, though. My point was the difference between being designed for making queries/inferences within a dataset, and being designed for joining distinct datasets.

Querying within a dataset is easy: SQL, XPath, XQuery, LINQ, etc. You can write rules for transforming any data model that you can query.

RDF isn't anything special in these areas (though I do think that SPARQL is an awfully nice query language). What it gives you is a way to link and merge datasets.
Slackware. Call me crazy.
There are so many other ways to finance a start-up, that this should probably be the LAST option...and it's so high-risk that if you can't get money another way, you might want to wait until a better idea comes along that you can get someone to finance.
It honestly wouldn't be particularly good for the technical users either. A large part of why the Apple experience is so polished is that they can test the OS against every combination of hardware the software is specified to run on.
Thx for that -- didn't know about younoodle. I'm on it now! :-D
> but everyone thinks they must be a great product advisor

Saying PG is better than the average random person with an opinion isn't giving a lot of credit.
This is an awesome thread -- thx for this info!

Makes me wish we could vote for threads to become sticky. I'd like to see this one hang out for a while, or otherwise have some sort of permanence.

See you at Bootstrapper!
I think they really need to add queso to the menu to take it to the next level.
Didn't Howard Dean beat John Kerry in 2004 online?
True. Although, the noise in favor of it is also due to complete misinterpretations. People don't realize that the "X of Y" metaphors are rarely very deep; they provide an approximate introduction to a new product, but not much beyond that.
It's rather a shame that this very site isn't good enough for the task you're laying out long-term. Quite a few people have been asking the sorts of questions you've pointed out here lately with good results and good connections made. I sense, however, that Hacker News is going to veer away from that discussion / entrepreneur friendly vibe which may make the sort of community you're discussing a useful addition.
I'll give it a try. I currently use browsercam (http://www.browsercam.com) and vnc into different platforms to test sites.
Normally, I would have agreed but in Google's case, there is so much evidence to believe they will do a better job. Scaling is their biggest technological achievement to date. The reason they are running away with products with such great performance is because of their success in getting things to scale very well.
His general notion is that the operating system is doomed, which is a flawed argument. Microsoft Office / iWork are still vastly superior to Google Docs. Not too mention that the combination of browser and web software still doesn't "feel" right in most desktop software emulation.

You might see some shift towards a truly portable environments but the idea that the O/S is going to give way to solely a web browser is a bit much and likely won't happen anytime soon. Computers do FAR too much with standard software right now. The path to this browser-centric world is 10+ years from now and too many other curve balls can be tossed in between to accurately predict.
The biggest problem with facebook, imo.

All the lovers will come and razz Matt and this comment, but none of them will be able to provide any evidence that facebook is doing anything but spending capital.
Windows’ huge mass will collapse into a dense pinpoint from which not even light can escape
Which irc net is #startups on?
On a random note, this is a really nice looking site design.
The downside to the time limits is that, often, interesting programs get cut off too soon.

Podcasts will get better as better people start doing them.
Yes we are working on it. Hopefully soon.
Freenode. We're discussing Berlin as a place to live in right now :)
> YC backs teams not ideas.

Every team works on an idea. A lot of the last batch are underwhelming:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/14/y-combinator-demo-day-r...

> AT Interview stage, from one application form how familiar do you expect someone to be once you've read 500 forms

If they're flying you in for an interview you're no longer in the pool of 500 forms. If they are asking questions that make it clear they aren't paying attention to the information you've already given them it just goes to show that your grandiose plans are fairly inconsequential to them and they're only tossing their spare change at you.

> Some companies like rescuetime and heroku were well past the idea stage

Companies that have a lot done already are the ones that are going to run into the mismatch I talked about. Here's this great thing you made; now you're giving ownership to people who don't feel about it the same way. There's not a lot of investment of money, time, or emotion on the part of YC. So it seems to me that the exchange is equity for exposure -- basically you've started off your marketing budget at the 6% that YC takes.