skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Competition is good though. Every time any blogger or journalist talk about a early seed venture company they mention, hey its kinda like YC except for this that and the other thing... Vary good press for YC
kool joke indeed
Presented as a corollary to the Why Smart People Have Dumb Ideas essay http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html
Get familiar with FireBug, by far the best Firefox extension for web development. ( http://www.getfirebug.com ) It's how I learned CSS. If you're interested in the user interface/experience side of design, it'll help you there too. It's got great Javascript tools.

There's a bit of a learning curve, but Firebug seriously changed the way I design and code.

Other than that, do what you'd do to learn any other creative skill -- find examples that you love, and dissect them. Figure out exactly what it is that turns you on and incorporate those details in your own work. Good luck!
So basically Digg does what everyone else does?

I've always wondered if Digg was written using Python or another language instead of PHP, if they could squeeze better performance out of it.
Has anybody tried approaching angel investors with only on-paper-idea? What was their reaction?
Livejournal uses something vaguely similar (a special HTML-y tag that creates an automatic link to a particular user's journal). If you use a known schema like "Getting Things Done" (http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-done/ ), users can represent a task in a hierarchy of Context/Goal/Project/Task (so Store/Prepare dinner/Buy ingredients/Go to store).
Google Maps Integrates User Generated Content-Provides Mapping Data Even for 3rd World
New Study Stickies flash demo showing revised UI and new TeX-based math mode
Wow. I first read that as "high school math exam."
Yup, well there were two bedrooms, and our servers got the larger.

The room we slept in could barely fit a bunk bed and twin bed (which is what we did). Regardless, we had such different schedules, it didn't really matter. Usually when one person was asleep - the other two would be working.
A brand/product can be subtly inserted into film or television. Imagine how ridiculous it would sound if the author starting explicitly calling out products in his descriptions (not to mention the damage to a reader's immersion). Additionally, most ad buyers (the guys who pay for this stuff) probably wouldn't be interested paying for placement lost amongst text on a page of paper.

You can include calling out "McDonalds" in your writing, but it just doesn't sound like something McDonalds would want to pay for. Of course, you could then write an entire novel based around McDonalds, but propaganda is another thing, heh. Besides, who would want to buy a novel about McDonalds? =)
Matrix list of web forums?
Anyone know of any matrix lists of web boards?
[wrong bookmarklet, please delete]
In 7th grade Algebra class.
Patrick from Auctomatic.
Trevor Graham and Paul Blackwell -- nice touch.
Based on my experience, they would probably be no more interested in hearing your ideas than watching paint dry on a wall.

Ideas are worthless. You need to develop something to show someone you're passionate about it. I've tried to pitch ideas on paper (or on a PPT presentation), and you'll never get anywhere. That's one of the most important things I learned, see #3 in my article I wrote here: http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2007/03/10/5-tips-for-students-seeking-vc-funding/
Why doesn't the web site load? I've tried all day. Also, my team was going to submit a YC application generator as our startup, but there was not enough time to make something like that before the deadline.
Hitforge: A different Incubator
"I don't care. They never gave me the Booker prize anyway!"

I think that's a cool quote (she's right, too).
Nice article ! Thanks for the pointer.
If you need a job to motivate you and be told what to do and how to do it, you're not in the top 1%. I think this is a way to pander to his future employees. :)

Isn't the top one percent kind of a large number? Maybe you want the top quarter of one percent? I mean, the majority of software developers probably work in IT doing zero innovation, not in a company that creates software that pushes boundaries.

I definitely think the number of developers who are creative, passionate, smart, fast, adaptive, and good is less than 1% of all software developers. Maybe that's accounted for because he's ignoring those who start their own startups, as they are too good for his 1% formula?
I think what you did was funny, but you should really add the above comment in small print at the bottom :).
Shashi Seth - He Inspires Success, He is YouTube's Monetization Head
Blinkx to IPO
HP acquires Logoworks
"A limousine meets them at the airport..." etc etc - I don't know, isn't that cheating a bit? It's not like people will have the same grand life after being employed by Fog Creek?

Then again, that's probably just life (any kind of deals, including dating). But I would almost be a suspicious - if he is trying to sell the job this hard, there might be something fishy about it? Of course Joel is not just somebody, I am sure it would be very interesting to work with him, but I mean, if it wasn't him...
The DNS might be a bit screwed up for some people; it was only set up a few hours ago.
I try to write for the college student, feel free to search for "tips" I've got several others.
I don't know much about Mr. Spolsky or Fog Creek, so perhaps I am entirely incorrect. I understand he has a lot of respect in the software community, but every time he writes about business it reeks of charlatanism. He seems to do well enough; but, he hasn't quite built an empire.

Being kind to your employees and your customers is a laudable idea, but it is not a business plan.

You also don't need world class intellect to build the software he is selling. This is fortunate, because I doubt his $75,000 could buy the soul of someone great who wanted to work on something important.
Sure, it's cheating, if you think that life is basically fair. But it's not. Making a good first impression is the smart thing to do, even if you stretch a bit beyond "everyday life." Just so long as you don't actually lie.
Because it's busy trying to beta-reduce (Y Y).
"Then I pose a software development challenge. For example, how would you implement a Web-based clone of PowerPoint? This gives me a feel for how smart they are, and if they know the basics of software development."

A trick question, of course. The correct answer is "you don't, since Google will simply release their own which will make yours irrelevant."
Toward the bottom, Om makes an analogy to the music industry where hit factories were created to churn out manufactured pop stars -- some good, some not so much.

The analogy is quite appropriate, especially how many new startups seem to have as much substance as pop songs.
I am actively looking for YC cofounders.

Seriously, please contact me if you are interested (in our project, what we're doing, etc):

nathanatlitepostdotcom

[I should clarify: by "YC cofounders" I do NOT mean co-founders to apply with me to YC. I want "YC people": cofounders who are otherwise involved, inspired by or motivated by YC.]
what ever happened to day2.org?
I've heard 'CRAM' - Capistrano, Rails, Apache and Mongrel.

Maybe CRAMM to get MySQL in there... dunno how you work Linux into it :)
Ram disks (like www.texmemsys.com) for the log device are a way of speeding up traditional rdbms'. They cost a bit, but You get to keep all the 'cool' database features while minimizing the sync log write bottleneck.
Such architectures are also easier to explain to auditors if Your app is of a financial nature.
I am not affiliated with this or any other storage vendor.
--Stuki
Lambda the Ultimate thread on Arc
he hired me for my first job
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software

Also look at the forums section at http://www.opensourcecms.com/. No matrix here, but you can play with the various packages and read others' comments.
I think there's a lot of validity to this model, even outside of tech. I don't get the restriction on non-techies though, is the management afraid of competition?
Our university's ACM Intercollegiate Programming Competition Team
That seems sort of backwards to me. If you're implementing only the strictly necessary there's no room for compromise in either direction. You can't ship with less features than are necessary and you wouldn't add more just because you have additional time according to a deadline.
R&D labs fail at innovation because they're not designed to innovate. They're designed to invent. And they do a pretty good job at it as well.

Without R&D labs we wouldn't have digital cameras, laser printers, the GUI, the mouse, cell phones, pharmaceutical drugs, etc.

If you want a good book on the subject, grab "Open Innovation" by Chesborough. It does a good job explaining why Xerox PARC wasn't able to monetize many of its inventions even though its managers were highly competent leaders who were following the best practices of the time.
This market is probably sewn up -- an original algorithm can be the core of a thesis, while a useful one should be the kernel of a business plan. So you're competing with arXiv.org and YCombinator. Good luck?
By the way, Naval, the guy behind Hitforge, is the real brains behind Venture Hacks.
Are Carriers Killing Mobile Innovation?
Use YUI CSS grid. It's like coding Java SWING Layout minus listener
Got drunk in the same pub on our first day of university
Clearly, they need to be lazier.
SOMA office space + traffic to your prototype site
Not the most effective method of eliciting a response, so far as I can tell. I submitted this same request a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9337
YCombinator Gunners-A Review of all the YCombinator Competitors
Techcrunch's 2 cents about Scribd
I have an even better deal for you. Since you're working out of your apartment and don't need the office space, I'll let you use my spam bot registers and will give you 200,000 fake registrations in exchange for your all your brilliant ideas.

I hope no one here is desperate enough for free office space to send their ideas to an anonymous craigslist poster. Too bad there isn't a requirement for users here to post at least x number of real comments before being able to spam the site.
(wrong link, please delete)
"...in the current generation of pre-Vista Internet programming..."

Plonk
I want to applaud you for emphasizing the "seller" hat. Marketing and sales are REALLY tricky for technical people, who seem to believe that the market is somehow fair...that having a "better" product will naturally result in the customers abandoning the competition and running to your product. Only in the idealist's world are buying decisions made based on features and benefits. In many markets the users of a product or service ARE NOT the same people who make the decision whether to buy the product the product or service. The users and the purchasers may have completely different interests. I learned this the VERY HARD WAY starting a business...sometime better and faster doesn't matter when your competition has a prestigeous brand or the purchasing decision maker only cares about price (since the users are a different group...the purchasers don't really care about making the user's life better).

I would actually separate the "marketing" hat from the "sales" hat. Sales guys want a list of leads to call or visit. They seldom have ideas about how to generate leads. Sales guys can get the door slammed in their face or the phone hung up on them multiple times in a day without needing antidepressants. Marketing people need to go to the therapist when someone hangs up on them but they can figure out how to get a list of the right people for your sales guy to call and they can figure out what word to spend your google adsense budget on.
<title>#{article_title} - Y Combinator Startup News</title>
I just realized why so many start-ups are in the Bay Area... I'm looking at you, San Francisco.
I would actually say they don't fail at it, in much the same way that dolphins don't fail at flying -- they aren't even trying.

After the researchers at Xerox PARC invented, they innovated by splitting off into different start-ups to innovate, i.e. introduce the new product that had already been invented.
What is the IP?
I don't personally have a problem with the name, just pointing out that other people might not react to it so well. Sometimes they can't quite put their finger on it but they know the name makes them uneasy for some reason...

Also not recommended:

Snigger.com for a joke site
MySQL.com going public?
Come on, give us an example we can relate to.
Even worse than the Erlang stack.
What if their terms of that Series A funding are not favorable? You have to take their financing, so you won't have much leverage for negotiations. The only thing you can do is get funded by a larger number of VC firms, so that you dilute their share (since they ask for 1/Nth where N is the number of VC firms).
This is a rehash of one of his earlier articles. He got rid of one of the points of criticism -- complaining about no good resumes, while hiring people who wouldn't have passed his resume criteria being that he goes after them while they're still in school. Catch-22.

Resumes are a horrible way to screen people.

Also, these days the top 1% are probably doing start-ups, or if they're employees, it's for Google or someplace exciting -- not hacking VB code in New York.
Haha, the author doesn't realize Y2 is a joke!
Investigate the correlation between being smart AND evil and being rich.
A whole lot of it. Consider the influence of GMail and Google maps as recent examples.
Many European countries have minimum capitalization requirements for limited companies, as well as high transaction costs (you've basically got to pay the notaries' cartel their monopoly rent) and background checks. Holland got rid of an EUR 18k (!) minimum cap requirement a few years ago, after a court decision made clear that it was perfectly legal to incorporate in England instead. Even now, the transaction costs associated with starting a Dutch BV are easily twice what you pay for an English Ltd., and reporting requirements are more complicated too. The Chamber of Commerce, a QUANGO that is supposed to advise new companies and which doubles as the registry of companies, likes to claim that a Ltd tends to have a harder time raising capital than a BV, presumably because it sounds weird and foreign; but I suspect that the fact that you pay a low fee to Companies House in London instead of a high fee to your local Chamber of Commerce is also part of the reason why they discourage jurisdiction shopping.
To me, a web design expert needs intuition about usability, an eye for graphic design, and the skills to use photoshop to create mockups and then turn them into clean and robust CSS & HTML.

You can bootstrap some of those by starting out with someone elses attractive, nicely implemented templates, but you'll still need some sense of typography, usability & CSS/HTML skills to adapt them to your own app/site.
I am actually talking about providing the tools to a community of users that will create those things to share with one another. arXiv.org and YCombinator address completely separate needs.
But thats how I feel about engineers with great passion who cant raise money, usually because they were born in the wrong country or under the wrong circumstances. I want to create an abstraction layer that allows them to be entrepreneurs.

I like this part IMHO :-)
Which Social Network Site Should You Build?
I don't understand how you answered it. Can you clarify?
Check your competition's stats with Alexa's Competitor
Adobe to open-source Flex
How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions
That is really, really weird. Equity in return for
Digg-spamming, or something like that. The thing is,
how could you even be sure the traffic was real?
Could be a botnet; how would you know?
Fark, one of the earliest social news sites, redesigned
I once suggested an alternative to research depts. Instead have a group that builds tools for the people building products. That way you still get to be one step removed from random customer needs, but you're also helping the guys who do face them.
"and 99% of what we program"

That seems consistent w/the "95% of what we teach" number. As Douglas Adams wrote, a computer "...was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil. ... And the more slow, and dim-witted the pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming."
Founders at work - who would you like to have seen?
Google: A tale of two graphs
Just to play smartypants, small teams are the ones that can afford loose deadlines for the gain in versatility. You have to agree that YC's program schedule results in better resource management, is needed, and so, your claim of "never setting deadlines" as a general statement is false. To make it true, you would need to accept applicants off the timetable. (Actually, how much was the YC program schedule influenced by university calendars?)

As a personal statement though, I totally agree. Assuming a startup team or artist isn't starving, not setting deadlines makes total sense. I remember somebody in high school was required to build up a portfolio of artwork during the semester. It's a rather preposterous requirement, because if there is no inspiration, there is no art. Churning out a portfolio of unimpressive drawings is easy, but nothing is genuine. Alas, people who operate off of schedules cannot accommodate the uncertainty. Universities, for example.

Hell, if I owned a school, I'd try to recruit good students whenever they appear, any time of the year. If you can finish a course in one day, great. If it takes you 10 semesters, great, as long as it's worth it.
Anyone care to go undercover and unmask them? :-)
why to not not start a startup
25 Things @ Google to see before you die
Why? It's already on his website, and there's already some hack if you don't like narrow lines.
Google, of course. I might also have been interested in Microsoft, just out of morbidity. Intel. Akamai.
EU's immigration policy might be changing...

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2398020,00.html
How did you move to the EU? Thanks.
Doom-like Proof of Concept FPS in Javascript
why can't i delete this test post?  just edit, no delete feature?
I know everything's negotiable, but are acquirers really willing to allow the most liberal kinds of golden ejector seats?

It seems way too easy for someone whose attitude undergoes a Swartzian transform to just Office Space it after the deal is done. And it would seem like the more you press for it, the more they suspect it's going to happen.
Building Catalyst Applications Presentation [video]
I came here on a tourist visa (valid for 3 months), then found a part time job & registered to university (M.Sc. in Mathematics & Computer Science).

Once I was registered to university I got a student's visa (valid for 1 year & renewable as long as I am still a student).

Once you manage to get a decent full time job and earn enough money (more then ~43,000 USD/year for Austria) getting an unrestricted work permission and a residency permit is not a problem.
If your goal is to really to communicate and not just insult (which isn't clear) I suggest using something like "elitism", "snobbery", or anything else that doesn't have so much historical baggage.
Interesting concept, but Yikes, is their site low on details.

"working remotely and independently"

"Let us know your funding / salary requirements"

"with help of an offshore engineering team"

I think that having a "guild" of some sort, to share the risks and the success, is a good idea. But their particular implementation seems so impersonal.
Juwo: You're clearly hurt by the feedback you got from your announcement. You were brave to put yourself out there and solicit feedback, it was very respectable and ballsy. But you did a very poor job of accepting the honest criticism (that you solicited) gracefully.

Your outbursts are disruptive and you shouldn't be surprised that people don't enjoy being disrupted. For example: Did you really need to call Livingston a thief? How does that relate to startups -- even if it was remotely true?

Please just stop the bitterness and the lashing out. Put that energy into your product, where it belongs. This is a place of learning, not politics and grudges.
"...felt somehow bad for getting karma for his achievement..."

You're getting YCNews points (karma) for giving us a link to good content, not for the content itself. And of course it's not like they mean much or there's a limited supply.
And I also made the request nine days ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13273 We need more feedback in that feature request thread really.

Perhaps the problem is due to the code starting to emit HTML very early on, before it knows what the title should be, in order to start providing data to the browser. As opposed to building all the HTML for the page before sending a byte.
As I said on the feature request thread, "The HTML header's title should have more page context in it so the browser's Back menu isn't a list of identical titles making selection difficult."

So if I'm viewing a comment, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13273 , the title could be "ralph's comment #13273 on Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator". Just sticking to the thread's title isn't sufficient since I'll still end up with many Back menu items the same as I traverse the "parent" links. Each different page should ideally have a distinct title.
That 'world class intellect' gets stuff done so much more efficiently that it works out cheaper than several weaker coders.
"think about what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don't give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job."

I want to know if that applies to YC. Specifically, how many applicants keep reapplying at every round?

People keep saying that there are "hundreds of great teams" and that your chances of being chosen are correspondingly low, but it might not be really true.
What class would that be?
How do you get "world class intellect" to work on a proprietary bug tracking software, though? I think it is written in ASP, too? (Could be mistaken, though).
Maybe it just boils down to the benefits of advertising: we see the advertiser can afford the advertising, so he can't be a total loser.
It highlights one aspect of Scribd, though: so far all links to Scribd I have seen were to pirated content (I don't think pg's essays are open source). That seems to be a huge difference to YouTube to me. At least YouTube enables people to share their homemade videos, which wasn't so easy to do before. For sharing homemade texts, there already lots of other established mechanisms (ie blogs).

What they have in common is the neat user experience (YouTube videos are the only ones that almost always work). I wish them the best anyway - though I'd rather see PDF and other bloated text formats disappear (and flash, too, for that matter - I don't want to be forced to keep the flash plugin just because all texts and videos come through YouTube or Scrib).
Another possible interpretation would be that being rich makes you dumb... (I hope not)