skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not the end of the world if you got denied!
I've seen a few posts on here about all the different alternative YC groups found by people who were denied an interview. First of all, don't stop. It's not the end of the world if pg denied you an interview, so continue on making your idea.

His post said specifically said that your idea isn't "bad" just not "exceptional". You now have six months to build a better application. You can work on making the demo better, and spend some extra time to figure out some of the more important questions. (ie. How exactly are you going to monetize?)

I've seen a lot of discussion about alternative YCs. They all sound like a good idea, but what's so hard about bootstrapping? Just spend a few extra hours after work on your project. Get things going nice and smoothly. Who knows, you might not even need YC at all!

I applied for the previous Winter `08, and I didn't even get an interview. My partner and I decided to go ahead without YC. Things have been slow, but we haven't given up yet! (Also, take a shameless blog mention from me. ;) http://fangamer.com )
Investment banking and strategy consulting are two of the most competitive fields to get into right out of college / biz school. Reasons being the pay is ludicrous. What the writer described is not uncommon for people who want to break in the industries and didn't attend a core hiring school.

Is it worth it? Depends on who you are I guess. You are rewarded with high salary and bonuses, you are working with some of the smartest people, but you are still restricted in a corporation environment.

Why don't most people do this? Who knows, may be they don't have the drive like the writer, or they simply don't know about these fields.
That's a compelling narrative and I think there is some truth to that. However, I think there is a more simple explanation to the dominance of Russian schools. Check out this graph on percentage of population with at least a college degree: http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/files/2008/03/kierkegaard.jpg (warning: squinting may be required :)

More educated people means more candidates to participate in ACM contents means higher chances of getting to the top spots.
When most people bitch about inequality, I think they are making the implicit assumption that wealth is a zero sum game. To them, the greed of the rich is why other people are poor. If the rich would only give in to greater socialism, poverty could be eradicated.

Of course, human history largely refutes this, but you get more accolades by believing in what is fashionable rather than what is right.
I would guess the 4x more likely for co-founders figure holds.

Right, my guess is also the same.

My question was so pg could chime in with data since YC has gotten much more popular.
Doesn't he put money towards fighting malaria? That's a "non-sexy" disease, but one that touches a lot more people than others that grab headlines.
Very cool. Good pricing, and ToS aren't hidden/braindead like so many other (private) repository hosting services.
Java does involve many small tools (JARs), but they all get loaded into one VM process. The issue is not modularity vs. giants but how modularity is implemented.
If you really want to do a startup then get used to the rejection thing. Even if you get into YC you will probably have to get funding afterwards. To do so you'll need to make the case that you are building a company that will eventually be valued at ~$100 Million. It's very rare that you'll be able to do that on the first shot. Or even on the 5th shot. I know a company that got rejected 45 times before getting funded. And many more get rejected 10 times. So shake it off. It's not going to be the last time it happens. And some VC's / angels aren't as nice as PG. They will twist the knife after the fatal wound.
I didn't look at the docs in detail, but how do you know they start a new process for each request?
applying programming-talk to startup interviewing...:)
"Times change and men decay"

Since the Greeks, the older generation has always decried the younger generation as weak, ill-informed, and just not up to snuff by the standards of "back in the day."

The truth is, most of my classmates are incredibly informed about current events. They can tell you not only where Kabul is, but also name all of the provinces of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

I think the majority of people have always been a little bit ignorant with regard to foreign policy. And the mean may be especially low today. But this is offset by the upper segment of the population that is better informed than their equivalent at any time in history.
Using Django with Appengine: a port of the Django tutorial to Appengine
Erlang is super cool, but... to be picky, it does and it doesn't share the Unix model. It does in the sense that you don't share anything between processes. But it doesn't because all those processes live in one real process, which is why spinning them out is so cheap. It's also why you have to be very careful about linking to 3rd party libs in Erlang - all it takes is one blocking call, and poof, everything grinds to a halt. IIRC, one defense mechanism they've developed against this is to actually start app linkages up in separate unix processes and talk to them via sockets.
I was rejected, but to be honest, I didn't expect too much. My project is in Panama and is in Spanish, so my chances were low to begin with. But I was happy just to get a chance to participate and a great forum to bounce ideas.

Good luck to all the projects!
I went ahead and submitted my location info, but then realized I had already done this in the past. Now there are two entries for my username and location in your database. You might want to consider only keeping one location per username (or allowing a user to delete previously entered locations).
I agree with what you said. And I also know from my school mates before in NYU that mathematical inclined Russians like to play all those interesting math quiz. Also in old Soviet times, engineers and scientists are treated better for their contributions to build socialist heaven :-)

But I know the tradition in family maybe more important to inspire offspring. Thinking about Robert Morris father was the author of crypt function in Unix, I guess he may learn from his father when he was a still kid to play those games :-)
PG seems like a nice guy and is doing something really cool with YC, but it's not his job to give people advice, beyond the people he picks for YC. Part of 'not giving people advice' probably includes statistics on what sorts of applications are 'hot' in a given time period, which might actually be fairly valuable information that they want to keep to themselves.

If you want advice on your app, post an 'Ask YC' thing here and usually, people will give you some pretty good feedback.
Yahoo is a new front in the Microsoft/Google holy war
Fake Steve has Real Tip: Beware VCs with ‘one pair of glasses’ syndrome.
"The angels tab is a 404 at the moment, fyi."

Exactly!!! ;)
I'm a Norwegian with a Norwegian letter in my name ("ø"). It is simply impossible to enter my name correctly.

Let's say that my last name is "Strømmen" (it's not). Then I can expect my name to be displayed as:

Strmmen,
StrÃ¸mmen,
StrÃƒÂ¸mmen,
Str?n,
Str mmen.
Strxmmen (where did they get the "x" from?)

Please include non ASCII characters in your unit tests, and use UTF-8 on everything.

And another reminder is that not all countries have the same address syntax as you. (+ phone numbers)
Its the first major round of financing from a Venture Capitalist. Typically, it is after seed money, but you could go straight to a Series A without prior investments. Subsequent VC rounds count down the alphabet: Series B, Series C, etc..
Reminds me of this from aaronsw:

But if that's true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

the above is unintentionally funny b/c he made a fortune off of reddit
Let's be honest.

Our culture has a completely hypocritical attitude towards drug use. The people who make the drug laws are either idiotic or spineless politicians, the people who enforce them are sadistic bullies, and the people who support the system are uninformed morons, latent Fascists or nosy busybodies.

In fact the entire drug war is actually a proxy for a cultural conflict between conformist and nonconformist elements in society. It's common for conforming bullies to be enabled to abuse nonconforming weird kids by school authorities. The drug war is that at a huge scale.

A few commonly seen fallacies include that use does not mean abuse. Use can be beneficial (see Carl Sagan, Steve Jobs). Abuse is not always a net negative (see, Paul Erdos, the rock and roll hall of fame). Addicts can function fine in society (cofounder of hopkins).

If some scientist looking for a cancer cure wants to take speed or provigil to help them work, more power to them. Do you want to tell families suffering from Alzhihmers that their cure was delayed because the best researcher was arrested for taking ADD medication to hold the complexities of the disease in her memory as she worked on a cure? How much time should a cancer researcher, using a mental performance booster and trying to find a cure be put in jail?

In fact, I would argue that, for brilliant scientists working on saving lives, the obligation to dedicate themselves fully to their work in much more pressing then the obligation to follow idiotic, racist, superstitious laws. In fact, much scientific progress came from scientific people breaking dumb superstitious laws and societal conventions. See, for example, early researches in anatomy, which the church treated as unholy, or early research in astronomy. So if researchers (particularly researchers who save lives) want to do this, it's part of a long, illustrious tradition of ignoring irrational rules to get science done.

But then I care more about progress and a cure for these things then the particulars of what metabolites are in the urine of the researchers that found it. Maybe I'm deviant confused and unethical that way.
The Microsoft Monopoly
Bah! This is The New Economy. You just don't "get it".
Me:

>> The RDF format deals with "triples" precisely to enable inferences ("syllogisms").

You:

> As far as I know, this is not and has never been true.

TimBL, http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html :

> sometimes it is less than evident why one should bother to map an application in RDF. The answer is that we expect this data, while limited and simple within an application, to be combined, later, with data from other applications into a Web. Applications which run over the whole web must be able to use a common framework for combining information from all these applications. For example, access control logic may use a combination of privacy and group membership and data type information to actually allow or deny access. Queries may later allow powerful logical expressions referring to data from domains in which, individually, the data representation language is not very expressive.

I'm not sure if this quote supports my point of view or yours, or even if there's any factual difference between our views.
If MS blocked ads from Google, they would have to block their own ads too.
Serving adverts from your own servers, especially as plain text, is a good way to make sure they don't get blocked. At the least it will probably require positive user intervention.

It is more work though as you won't be able to deal with a network. The ads might be of a higher quality and more interesting to your readers though.
How would you compare the market their targeting with yours?
Roughly, yes, but sometimes VCs do smaller seed deals that don't count as series As.

Though there's no precise definition, a series A round steps up things up a level in seriousness. It's usually quite a large amount of money (at least $500k, usually millions); the paperwork is a huge binder instead of a few sheets of paper stapled together; the terms are fairly draconian; and the investors get at least one and possibly two board seats.
I'll take care of that. Thanks.
"The idea behind both of these new emerging (and currently illiquid) markets is to provide a place for private equity investors to trade securities with each other. The companies remain private, do not have to file with the SEC, and do not trade daily like public stocks do. When an entrepreneur or investor wants liquidity on a position they own, they come to these private markets, offer their position or part of their position for sale, and a trade is made."

er... can I get a translation?

...I'm not sure my positions are liquidy enough.
The IPhone is killing the internet
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/justin.tv?...
I don't think I quite understand how the two interact, but wouldn't your example work with either lexical or dynamic bindings?

> (let ((foo 1)) ; foo is lexical
> (define (bar n) (+ foo n))
> (bar 2) ; => 3
> (set! foo 2)
> (bar 2)) ; => 4

(Naturally, if instead of set! you do (let ((foo 2)) ...), it gives 3 again. But that's creating a new lexical scope, whereas in your example both definitions of foo are in the same scope, as is the definition of bar. I think.)

OTOH,

> (define (bar n) (+ foo n))
> (let () ; create a new lexical scope
> (define foo 1)
> (bar 2)) ; error: unbound variable 'foo'

My understanding of dynamic variables is that bar would see the value of foo just defined, and return 3. Am I confused?

(Tested with guile 1.6.7, which I gather is pretty old. Maybe that's the problem?)

edit: tested this in perl as well, with local to create dynamic variables.

sub bar { print($foo + shift(), "\n"); }
sub a { my $foo = 1; bar(2); }
a(); # prints 2, or errors if use strict is on.
sub b { local $foo = 1; bar(2); }
b(); # prints 3.
Why non-selection is not rejection
I recalled it from the Campfire One videos on YouTube :|
This was released under a CC-A license and the doc-code for this is available at http://www.42topics.com/dumps/django/docs.txt, so feel free to modify, reuse and share this.
Charles Babbage's masterpiece difference engine comes to Silicon Valley
> er... can I get a translation?

Basically, it's a market where investors that own shares in private companies can get cash for those shares from other private investors without taking their company public and being subject to all the bureaucratic rules that apply to public companies.

In theory, you could also do this by simply trying to find an outside investor yourself, but the hope is that by creating a market, it will be a more efficient process.
That would work with profanity in most cases, but would it work with Fake? How would the moderator confirm that this really is a person named Fake, and not someone who doesn't want to give their real name?
I still don't exactly understand what they are offering? Is there an advantage to using GitHub versus dumping some (yet to be created) virtual machine image on a cheap virtual server?

I thouhgt it has a social network aspect, but I can't see it yet? I really don't want to trash their business, just wondering about the virtual server competition.
no offense, but that's not exactly the most accurate benchmark
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's not useless but it doesn't fully solve the problem. A trial period primarily delays the question and often lowers the quality of the software to make it work. You'll still have to deal with the hassle eventually, and you'll have the additional hassle of finding somewhere to inventory a software key or something similar in case you ever need to reinstall.

The only way to solve the problem is to make the transaction fair, which usually means making it as fast and painless as possible, it means a fair price, and it means top quality software that doesn't involve built-in limitations.

Also, for one-off problems, a trial period might be a great solution for me but not necessarily good if you're trying to sell software.
Just tried it. Very nice and very easy to use. Has some really pretty graphs of your commits as well :) . Their free plan is really good for open source projects.
I can't stand either JVM or .NET: they're both exactly what Eric is saying - less mature, less featured, but nevertheless big and fat operating systems built on top of real OS. If you look at them this way, it appears that your applications are NOT portable (your app will need JVM OS to run on, it wont' run on just Linux or BSD or Windows).

I much prefer Python+C or Ruby+C pair running on POSIX-compatible OS. It gives you performance, portability and higher level of abstraction provided by Python/Ruby and native speed of C. You are also free to decide and pick between multiprocess/multithreading as well: nothing is forced down your throat.

On a side note, I believe that virtualization and especially paravirtualization make JavaOS or .NETOS obsolete even more, since it gives you a real "OS in the box": I can build my system using any kind of most obscure languages I can think of, package them all inside of a Xen image and deploy with a click of a button.
The social networking aspect comes from the ease with which you can fork repositories and send pull requests. It makes it really easy to see what projects people are hacking and it bolsters the sense of community (and easy of code sharing) amongst folks working on the same open source projects.
This Sunday is the contest at my university, I'm participating with two other friends. I aim at solving at least three problems, though winning with any number is welcome too :-)
Math and aesthetics: why to love the pretty proof
I should have said:

"Sun isn't really a big dog in the startup acquisition game."

MySQL wasn't a startup.
> I don't see Yahoo destroying their market value with this 'test', they are just trying to stave off MS.

1. AOL is a giant, worthless pile of crap. Does anyone really think merging with them is going to do anything positive for Yahoo?

2. Yahoo has two sources of value. First, it's an incredibly successful content brand, with sites like Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, and a boatload of others. Second, it's the #2 player and only remotely plausible competitor to Google in search and internet advertising.

Even if Yahoo keeps it's own search team, it won't matter, because Google will really be the only source of keyword advertising on the internet. Even if Yahoo were to own Google in search, Google would still get a lot of the money.

This move would effectively lock in Google's monopoly over keyword advertising for good, and it would mean that Yahoo is giving up on being a technology company to become a content company and embrace the slow, painful decline that befell Netscape, Lycos, AOL, and other companies that lost the source of the value they added to the internet.
Support Group 2.0: Ten Places to Find Help Online
Getting in the Python Mindset: What is Pythonic?
Prior work, though admittedly in unrelated fields.

I don't know if they got an invite--we talked to them before any decision was made. But if they don't have a demo before the interview, I strongly suspect they won't get in--our pitch was not well-received by pg, and only the strength of our demo brought rtm and tlb around to an appreciation of the difficulty of the problems we're solving. And, we have yet to prove that this is a lucrative market--we know it is, but YC can't be blamed for not knowing it yet, since we've had no exit and growth is steady rather than explosive.

But, YC will fund groups that are working on the same problem domain, but not usually in the same round. Since we're a year in the past, I'm sure they wouldn't turn a team down based on where we are.
http://tomayko.com/writings/github-is-myspace-for-hackers
But is there a good reason not to prescribe these drugs to anyone who wants to use them for extra mental focus?

It seems to me that if they are safe for use long term, there's no good reason to ban them.
nickb, nice to see you posting some links :-)
Awesome, thank you so much for this. I'm learning Django now, and I'm using the "Poll" tutorial to create my own app. If I'm ever lucky enough to try it out on appengine, it's great to see how easy it is, and exactly how it's done. Thanks a bunch!!!
Their terms of service still seem to forbid any interesting uses of the search results:

"You agree that you will not, and you will not permit your users or other third parties to: (a) modify or replace the text, images, or other content of the Google Search Results, including by (i) changing the order in which the Google Search Results appear, (ii) intermixing Search Results from sources other than Google, or (iii) intermixing other content such that it appears to be part of the Google Search Results; or (b) modify, replace or otherwise disable the functioning of links to Google or third party websites provided in the Google Search Results."

With those restrictions, it's really more of a widget than an API...
I too am ignorant of things 'git'. Doesn't the "ease with which you can fork repositories" come from git itself?
Blocking ads isn't stealing, nor is it immoral. Those who go to the trouble of blocking advertisements tend not to be the ones who would click on an ad or, once said ad is clicked on, purchase the product advertised.

But DDOSing a site is immoral, and can be illegal. Shame on the author for suggesting it. It absolutely ruins what could otherwise been a decent argument.
Of course it's a compliment!

I suppose if you wanted to worry over whether I'm interpreting your philanthropic effort as a cynical marketing ploy, then you could take it as something other than a compliment...but that's not my intent at all. I think it's both good business sense and a nice thing to do.

"Laziness" is a virtue when used appropriately. I really need to work on my laziness maximization skills...
You don't need to deal with setting up proper security, which can be a little tricky with git. Plus the social aspects. Plus the pretty interface. Plus it's free for most purposes.

I don't use it for work, but I use it for personal projects.
If you use this and have problems ask at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users, and I would like to help
There's a lot more talking going on than doing.

HN is the community that you already want (need?).

If you've got an idea, just build it.

Stop wasting time wringing your hands and creating new groups.
A faxed copy of your ID and an onsite blood test obviously. :)

Seriously though, if someone wants to give a fake name they will, be it Caterina Fake or Caterina Doe so I don't think(short of the joking solution above) you will ever get around that in a way that is generally acceptable. In most cases though you are just looking to filter out the explit and "Fake Name" and "Not MyName" people.
"Probably the reason people expect feedback about why they were rejected is that they implicitly think of this as like a grade in a class. But a test where only a fixed number of applicants can pass regardless of the average quality is not a grade in that sense."

Actually, I disagree with the premise of this statement. I don't want feedback on why I was rejected, I want feedback on my product. Yes, I can see that it is very nuanced and difficult for you to say which idea/product is better than another, and you have your own business reasons for making those decisions. I don't think anyone really expects you to disclose those reasons, and even if you did it would be completely subjective and would just lead to arguments. However, given that, you're only addressing why you don't comment on the relative strengths of the applications and not why you don't give feedback on any individual product/idea.
Comments also move stuff up the list, and when things hit the front page a lot more people read them.