skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having spent a few days with him in person, I would say that it's 80% Internet persona. He's a good guy. He's a strongly opinionated guy with an overdeveloped sense of justice, but he's smart, kind, and not nearly as egotistical as he seems online.

But that's just me.
This site made me think of Pyle: "I am ... in a world ... of shit!"
I've been saying that about a friend who took the corporate route while I took the solo route for about 10 years. So far he's making ~200k/yr reliably. Other friends with equity at dot com survivors/thrivers have $1m in the bank. It's not a bad path ;) it's just not for me.
one of the worst things about large projects is the number of developers/teams. if you have too many people, things go wrong and if you don't have enough, projects fall behind. so there is a art to this to create that balance.

Also as a developer, I would apply some programming principles to project management. for example design-by-contract where you create interfaces that define interaction with a group of classes, etc. So you divide groups/people by function, ie UI, back-end, integration, etc. then each group would define what they need from the other groups and what they would be able to produce. you can then develop some process based on those requirements. I think the person doing integration with have the most input into this. he/she has to deal with static pages and at the same time with server side code. so its really an interface himself

Another thing I don't like about large groups is QA. I would not have them at all. perhaps one person that would give demo of the on going project to the clients. if he can give the demo without running to problem and the clients are happy with what they see then you have a QA.

one other note, create a sub group of a select few that really understand and have a good vision of the results. they should meet and review/audit everything and catch design errors before it becomes too late.

and finally don't manage things employees in a company. think in terms of a research project in a univercity. with lead developers as staff and everyone else as students. you can use you imagination as to how this would effect every aspect of your project.

PS: I've also worked on ATG in the past but now I'm working on tomcat and other open source.
I have one of those new fast ones. I watched. It boils.
I think he was mainly talking about people who upload pictures to flickr, not so much those who just browse the content. An equivelent comparison would be comeone who uploads to flickr and someone who is interviewed on NBC for free. In fact the article states this exact example.
http://cuteoverload.com
Measuring Productivity of Individual Programmers
I wish they were made from post-consumer recycled paper...
thats not even bad. take your novel ideas and develop high quality implementation based on that.

the questions is, is he willing to wait and do some quick and dirty impletepemtions just to test the ideas and then do the real thing.

and the questions for you is how sure are you of you novel ideas? it could become costly because eventualy you will have to improve the quality or someone else like google might take it from you and develop it better
David Ogilvy Branding Commandments
So your'e saying my ExxonMobil, McDonald's, Coca-Cola swastika doesn't deserve advertisers? You may have a point.
Yahoo and AOL are closing in on a deal to combine their Internet operations
Ten Killer Tactics for Developing a New Skill
He works for a large software company. He doesn't want to do anything with me at all.
Probably the most worthwhile quote out of all of this was

Checking your sources does not mean finding another website that says the same.
Yeah, they do kind of look like swastikas...

But it would be bigotry to generalize and say all shapes with radial symmetry and four sides are evil.
Thanks for your insight. We'd probably have one team per project, with hopefully the right number of people on each team, staffed based on the LOEs we build during the architecture design phase. Dev team size would probably be 3-6, plus creative, mgmt, qa, etc...

I like the idea of the research project paradigm, as long as we remember the stricter timelines and higher consequences of failure:)

I have to disagree with the QA thing though. It's important to test every flow, in every major browser, on every major OS. It's also important to see what happens when you leave this field blank and submit the form, or put in bad data here, or use the back button and try to do something again. When you're delivering a multi-million dollar project, it can't go out the door and break on IE6 or Firefox, or break whenever someone enters a zip code that doesn't exist.

PS: there are TONS of really really high buck ATG contracts available all over the US right now. If you're interested I know a ton of companies who are dying to find an experienced ATG dev (back end or front end), so feel free to email me.
Peter, what differentiates RubyFlow? I like RubyInside because you cherry pick relevant items and I like RubyCorner because it's comprehensive. Where does RubyFlow fit in?
Tonight's "The Last Lecture" ABC interview with Randy Pausch
Part 1-4 are at the bottom. There are also photos, articles, etc. A nice compliment to the lecture itself (http://tinyurl.com/24x7b6).
maybe you can start on your own and just show him what you are doing. after a while I am sure he'll become terested and join you. but don't push him
ASES Stanford - free entrepreneurship summit/conference at Stanford this week
Part 1-4 are at the bottom. There are also photos, articles, etc. A nice compliment to the lecture itself (http://tinyurl.com/24x7b6).
Sneering is not an argument, ad hominem circumstantial is not evidence. Fail.
"it's important to document and lock down the scope, budget, timeframe"

In order to do any of these, you must first lock down the "big fat what". Analysis. Functional specification. Specs. Whatever you want to call it. Putting any kind of rigorous or formal framework on a project with "fuzzy specs" is a disaster waiting to happen.

Get really, really good at defining EXACTLY WHAT the end product will be. Don't fall into the trap of saying, "That's close enough, after the next prototype we'll know more." That kind of thinking works well in a product business, but not in a service business.

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." - Abraham Lincoln
Yahoo goes nuclear vs. Microsoft: Inks limited Google ad deal; Microsoft fires back
If someone was trying to sell you a new type of car would you want him to know how to drive? Or would it be sufficient if he just thought he knew how cars worked?

The question was specifically about getting the word out to bloggers I don't see any better way to do that than to BE a blogger and reach out to the audience. It also just so happens that being a blogger will make it easier to test out his app and see what is and isn't good.
Tiny notebooks from Dell and HP marching their way to your lap
I'm with you. I considered the possibility of getting a pack for my son. Then I had sticker shock. He'll have to just make due with empty paper and shoe boxes for his fort (a bloxes pack is available for $999?!).
Zombie Computers Decried As Imminent National Threat
20 Percent of Scientists Admit Using Brain-Enhancing Drugs -- Do You?
YC Clone in Singapore?
I Think I'm Going To Be Sick
Google Email: New Optional Benchmarking (sharing stats data) in Google Analytics
Dear Google Analytics users,

We are writing to let you know about a change in our service offerings. If you have logged into your account recently,
you may have noticed that you can now choose to share your Google Analytics data. By providing data sharing options,
we hope to provide you with transparency, control, and new services based on your preferences.

To learn more about data sharing settings, visit our FAQs: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=87515

We're also happy to announce industry benchmarking as the first new feature available to those who opt to share their data.
Benchmarking lets you compare your metrics against industry verticals.

To enable this optional new feature, an administrator on your account will need to make the following selections on the Google
Analytics data sharing settings page:

1. Log into your account. You'll see the yellow data sharing settings box on the Analytics Settings page.

2. Click the "More data sharing options" link within the yellow box.

3. Select the second checkbox to specify that you want to share your data "Anonymously with Google products and the benchmarking service".

You can also choose to share your data "With Google products only" to take advantage of advanced Google advertising products and services
as they become available.

The industry benchmarking feature is currently in beta. Once you have enabled benchmarking, it may take up to two weeks before the categorized,
aggregated and anonymized benchmarking data shows up in your reports.

For more information on the benchmarking service, visit our FAQs: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?topic=13909

In addition to the new benchmarking service, opting to share your data will also enable you to take advantage of new advanced Google products and services
as they become available. We think these services will offer greater insight and sophistication to users who have opted to share their data. However, if you
would prefer not to use these services, simply specify on the settings page that you don't want to share your data.

Sincerely,

The Google Analytics Team
RubyCorner is very good, but only covers a certain set of blogs. Sometimes those blogs post non Ruby content, so there's noise.

Also, RubyCorner does only cover blogs (not counting the video / photo sidebar) so you don't tend to get latest updates on libraries, and links to things outside of the Rubysphere. You also only get one link per hit, whereas on RubyFlow you can bind together a bunch of related interesting pieces in one go, or provide context.

Context is the final part. When posting you can write what you like and provide a little context to the links. This makes it a lot easier for you, as a reader, to know whether something is worth clicking. The problem with sites like Hacker News and Reddit is that you're going entirely on the headline. Sometimes you want more than a headline.. just a single sentence of context or a bunch of related links will do.

Hopefully that answers the question! Effectively RubyFlow's style is a cherry-picked, hand-written for context and quality alternative to browsing the social bookmarking sites, like Ruby Reddit : http://ruby.reddit.com/
Thanks but I quit my last job few months ago so that I could work full time on my own project.

on the QA I guess what I was trying to get to was to not let your developers rely too much on QA team to catch the errors.
Why math can never have a "Theory of Everything"
A "Send this to all your friends" page at the end would've made it perfect :)
I'm curious what part of this sentence says notifications will be sent by April 9th. "We'll review applications by April 9 and invite the groups that seem most promising to meet us in Mountain View on the weekend of April 25-27." I kid, I kid.
Don't forget to check your spam filters just in case! =P. I asked my friend who got accepted and he said that they sent it pretty late and that the email only goes to the leader on the app. Goodluck to everyone!
That strikes me as a nice fuel/air mixture suspended in space. I would not make anything large out of them in an interior space unless they have been fire rated.

They seem about as safe as using cheap egg crate foam on the walls of a night club.
20 Percent of Scientists Admit to Using Brain-Enhancing Drugs
Very cool, thanks for answering. I just checked it out and found a few nice libraries there I didn't know about, so it's already earned a spot in my bookmarks. ;)
I see it includes a link to the freakishly ignorant "Ruby's Not Ready" blog rant.

Not a compelling start.

chris2 (of Rack and Tumbleblog fame) has a nice rss feed populated with announcement posts to ruby-talk: http://vuxu.org/~chris/ruby-talk-ann.rss

Suites me better than filtered content (at least until someone does a good job of focusing on the Ruby radical underground).
I bet being called "the offspring of Jef Raskin" probably pisses off or severely annoys Aza Raskin.

Call him by his name, yeah?
By the way, if you have any ideas for other niches this sort of site could work well in, I'm all ears. The only two I'm personally interested in doing so far are Rails (separate to Ruby) and Python, but I think there's a wide range of people who might like to make such sites themselves.
ugh, sure fire way to cut out anyone who actually likes to build stuff.
Our startup, Feedity - http://feedity.com , generates/creates RSS web feeds from virtually any webpage, for the purpose of content tracking and mashup data reuse.

We scrape public webpages (with an option for content owners to restrict access), and we use the .NET Framework' in-built socket implementation (System.Net namespace) for fetching remote content.

Our biggest frustration was to deal with invalid charset/content encoding of the source webpages. But we resolved it using a custom module. Now everything we parse is unicode (utf-8)!

The collest hack we've encountered while scraping is utilizing the Conditional GET behavior using the HTTP If- Modified-Since header.
Yahoo, Time Warner closing in on AOL deal
Microsoft Said to Be Talking With News Corporation About Joint Yahoo Bid
I say, wrong. That's not how it should be taught. Well, actually, concentration on algorithms is good, but AFAICT, it's only algorithms there.

Part of the reason Computer Science is such a great subject is that it combines theory with practice in such an easy and elegant manner. There's a reason I got into CS before I got into math - because CS (well, at the time, it was more like just Java than CS) gave me an opportunity to make something and see results. This type of response from a subject fosters creativity and interest, and overall makes the subject more motivating and interesting. If you only teach algorithms, all of this is lost.

Also, you've got to admit it, someone who knows all the standard algorithms but can't design one of their own or code/debug it is useless.
Scientists take drugs to boost brain power: study
Microsoft Said to Be Talking With News Corp. About Joint Yahoo Bid
The emails are going out now. Thanks for your patience (and please check your spam folders).

The applications were really good this time. We invited more groups to interviews than we have in the past, but we still had to turn down a lot that are probably good.
big ups for this.
Tell YC: Summer 08 decisions out
got a no :(
I totally agree! Defining what the client wants and exactly how it will be delivered is crucial.
I do not believe for a moment that Yahoo suffers from lack of talent or technology know how in all areas as compare to Google. Going for AdSense send the signal that they do believe there’s a problem with their ads system. Its shows how desperate Yahoo is facing all their trouble, desperate to the point of losing self confidence.

Yahoo problem is not technology, at least not the main problem, the problem is lack of traffic, search traffic which generates revenue from ads, they seems to be failing to recognize it in this move.	They can try what ever they want; actually I think it is a bad strategy, it supports in the mind of their remaining audience that Google is better. If Google is better even in their mind MS should reduce the offer.
Rich Skrenta: AppEngine - Web Hypercard, finally
EMC and Iomega, Acquisition
@raghus -- Make it happen anyway. Use the no for good.
what was your idea?
Paul, call me weird, but I searched Larry Mihalko after you had written about him, and I came across this:

http://www.post-gazette.com/regionstate/19991031newabuse1.as...

Was he a teacher at Gateway? If so, then it says that he was being charged with sexual assault or something strange like that. I wanted to let you have the last word on it, because charges don't necessarily mean that much. Anyways, I would rather take your word that he was a genuinely good teacher (which your post indicates)
For real. Although YC is certainly a great judge of talent and predictor of success, they aren't the be all and end all, and are forced to rely on a lot of proxies/indicators in making their decisions. Give it a go yourself!
Shot down in flames a few minutes ago. At least they sent a well crafted email. I would love to see the specific negative feedback as to why they rejected us, but I understand that it would add to their workload.

Anyway, for me the best part of the YC process was the exercise of completing the application. It was much less daunting than sitting down to write a business plan. It forced me to codify my plans in broad terms, and that has been very helpful.

Now, back to the races.
no also.

'grats to those that got accepted.

Given I couldn't find a co-founder (and I'm aware my own programming experience is limited) I didn't really expect to win. Will apply stronger next time.

But I'm not giving up on my project. I may just take my time with it as opposed to investing all energy in it. I have so many things I want to do and learn.

This will allow the end product to be better than it would be if I hammered it sloppily into existance.

I might even come up with something better in the mean time.
FWIW our rejection was sent to all founders emails.
No for us too. But hey, to be honest I thought I'd be disappointed but I'm totally relieved because at least now we can plan our summer, and we'll be launching soon enough anyway!

We had a huge design meeting today going over how all our user/accounts management stuff should look, then we relaxed with some amazing Thai food, and we're totally pumped moving forward in any case.

I thought the letter they sent was really nice too. If we're not too far along by winter session, we'll certainly apply again :)
Forgot to add a big congratulations to those who got accepted for interviews! See you guys at the top! ;)
Do the decision letters for accepted groups ask them not to post that they were accepted? It seems like, after every funding cycle, no one admits they were accepted in these after-threads.
Well there’s a point here, as all human invention we are far from mastering the use of the internet, we’re still grappling with it. Does it make it shit? Don’t think so, what we do with it define its role in our lives and society. Advocacy of better usage will be much helpful, instead of internetisshit.com maybe makingthebestoftheinternet.com a bit longer name, mail it to friends they wont notice it : - )
Git 1.5.5, "Available at the Usual Places"
Some advice to people who got a no:

I've never applied at YC, but I've got a couple of failed startups under my belt. If you got a no, think about why, and consider it free advice from someone whose opinion you trust. If you disagree, then use it as fuel to work hard - as hard as you can; and show everyone else that when you were down on your luck you put your nose to the grindstone and made it happen anyways.

That being said, this isn't a win or lose sort of scenario; remember that it's a two way street. YC has certain types of companies or founders that they like to invest in; every investor does.

Take a few days for introspection, decide if you believe in what you're doing. If you do, then keep on slogging.

If you got in, then congrats... Start working on taking notes, because I hear you get an amazing amount of information from being a part of YC... even the face-to-face interview portions.
Hmm... haven't gotten my response yet
It would have been nice to get more feedback. It's pretty discouraging when they tell you that they invited more applicants for interviews than ever before, and you get a generic rejection email instead.

Congrats to those who made the cut though.
Seems to completely depend:

Google -- $0 for a long time.

Youtube -- some ad revenues

Microsoft -- $$ from IBM

Biotech -- nothing for 7 years, then $$$
A Tour of Freebase's graph database: Graphd
I also got a no.

It's actually what I was expecting my app is nearly done already www.embought.com and I'm a single founder.

Congrats to everyone that made it. Looking forward to reading the interview recap blogs.
No for us as well... good luck to all who made it.
A friend of mine introduced me to Ogilvy a few years ago. I still remember his basic strategy :
-Have a good product. Say what's good about it. (Once it was successful, Ogilvy's firm used to turn down clients whose products they didn't think were salable.)
And a couple ancillary points:
-Sex doesn't sell, unless you're selling cosmetics.
-Don't let graphics crowd out content.

Ogilvy's Ogilvy on Advertising is a good antidote to marketing stupidity. Even though he dealt entirely with print advertising, it's still relevant.
Got a no as well... I agree that a more feedback would have been helpful to improve our product (or just to know others' opinions about it)...
No as well. I'm a single founder and my app's pretty much done already so it wasn't much of a surprise. Looking forward to hearing about some of the ideas they accepted.
Have you read http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html where Zed mentions being homeless? I worked with him on a project a few years ago and I can't say it was pleasurable. He could benefit from chilling out.
It's OK, I have a firewall.
If your going to have one pair of glasses, it should be logic.

If you get two, make it logic and awareness of the immediacy of death.

Most of everything else will fall out of those two ways of looking at the world.
@raghus - we just got a no as well.

Life deals out a lot of set-backs, but each one contains some very useful information (ideally examined in the rear-view mirror). Despite being rejected, I do think that the self-reflection involved in applying to ycomb was worth it.

Well, back to building stuff!
Microsoft releases 14000 pages of technical docs on product protocols
Sick of XML? Check out Simple Declarative Language (SDL)
Ask YC: what could be done better - next time
Sorry for yet another summer 2008 thread here's a quote from my rejection email.

We realize this process is fraught with error. It's practically
certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful
startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email
telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

what do you think could be done better?

I'm not sure if this is too much to ask but to be able to review our applications, and perhaps have a spot for yc to have left comments. I'd like to know if it was something other than the obvious solo founder black mark.

Also and additional comments box in the application would be nice. I had a few things to say that didn't really fit in anywhere else.
How many beers can you fit in that Computer? -how consumers see their PC
Don't be discouraged. I'm 100% sure my idea is rock solid, I've executed successfully before AND I have a cofounder, but I was turned down. You don't have a good startup-tale without getting turned down a few times. I think of it like this:

me: Would you like to make some money with me YC?

YC: No thanks, we have plenty.
Yeah, unfortunately most of us here were turned down and most of those who got interviews will be turned down as well. That's just how the numbers are.

The more interesting question is how many of you expected to be turned down but applied anyway? I suspect a lot. It's funny that this round their application had a boolean question asking whether you were a single founder, non-technical group, full time jobs, etc. I even half joked to a friend that YC has an automated filter that queues up your rejection letter if the answer is "yes".

This time around I did not expect to get funded, as I don't have a co-founder yet. Funny thing is, this time I also believe in my idea much more strongly than both times I applied in the past (with co-founders) and got invited to an interview. I guess that's why I still went for it.