skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
+1 on being able to specify a folder inside the dropbox as a "server" folder, which means it has it's own ftp address, user, and password settings. Anything dragged there is automatically synched with that account. I thought of this as well as soon as I read that post about Linux support, as this would work with shared hosting without expecting hosts to install dropbox on their linux boxes. And the data would be backed up as well automatically in a third place (the drop box.) And, you'd have access to retrieve an older version of a file. This basically replaces the need for FTP clients if you also add a way to chmod the folders inside the "server" folder. Sam is 100% right.
Heh. That's actually quite funny.
What about this on the download page (also good for a press release.)

Drop Box: Automatically safeguards even your biggest worries, so you don't have any!

What is a Drop Box?

Your Drop Box is a File Cabinet that Follows You Around Everywhere You Want to Go, Across Your Computers, or Across The Country.

Download and start using it today. (link goes here.)

Your Drop Box includes your own Secretary who Files and Photocopies Every Document You Make or Edit, So You Can See What Each Document Looked Like Yesterday, Two Days Ago, or at Any Point In Time. Did I Mention the Secretary and the File Cabinet are Fire-Proof and Wireless?

But, it's all digital. And, it's secure. And it's built to work between as many Windows desktops or laptop computer you use at NO EXTRA COST! See for yourself! (another link to the download.)

Or, access your files at work from a web-based interface! It's so flexible!

Q: Do I have to change how I work?

A: Absolutely not. Any file and folder (Word documents, spreadsheets, family photos, etc) you add to your Drop Box folder is automatically synchronized and saved remotely.

Q: What is the Drop Box folder?

A: It's just a special folder which will appear on your computer. Anything added to it is automatically saved, synchronized, and "dated" so you can go back in time!

Try it now! (another download link) It's safe, it's free, and you can use it on as many computers to share, backup, and keep archived file versions on, as you need to, by registering for just one account!
I really enjoyed reading this, especially given the fact that one of my lingering ideas has to do with catalog generation (but performed much more dynamically than Viaweb).
Work like hell on the idea and see if people want what I'm making. Re-apply in the fall if I still need the help.
If you do this aren't you missing out on all of the discussions about those stories? That's mostly the point here and at Reddit.
Or alternatively you spend 8 years in the military, 4 years in a big national Telco and then you're 33, with a family, and even PG saying you shouldn't start a startup.
my bookmark is labeled "YCN"
I have about 5 different backup plans. Problem is I need advice as to which one(s) to pursue. That's actually the biggest reason I applied. I would ask here and hope somebody good is in the mood to give free advice.
This may be the first written business plan, but the first idea according to Founders at Work was to let art galleries get on the web.
How to Get the Attention of a Venture Capitalist
This the type of thing that is doomed to fail. And it _should_ fail, because filtering peoples thoughts through a machine will lead to everyone speaking the same online, when in real life people do not speak that way!

Blogs are real people with no editors. If you want correct grammar, and fact checked posts, read a newspaper.
Yes, you absolutely must expect someone in the startup to spend a lot of time on UI design. If HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) is not an area of interest to you, your role in the success of the product will probably be secondary.
That could actually be done. The title of the self-referential post could be put through some Bayes analysis to list likely recent duplicates. Those could be presented to the creator of the self-ref post giving a chance to delete right away.
Internet startups [Tappity in this case] not costly to start
I am addicted to YC News
This reminds me of Paul Graham's comment about Powerpoint,

"the stated purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas. Its real role is to overcome people's fear of public speaking. It allows you to give an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of a bright one looking at you."

(from http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html)

I for one would be happy to see it go by the wayside. In most cases, it makes for boring, formulaic presentations. When used properly, it can serve a good purpose, but most people use it for the purposes that pg stated. I preferred the time where people would instead focus on the speech itself, memorizing much of it. That made talks seem much more dynamic and interesting, in my opinion.
Maybe it will get me into trouble at work. If it does, I will just start a starup. Wait, I am starting a startup in any case
What about the site makes it most addictive for you?
I would have to imagine that the interesting hacking comes into effect when, instead of writing the interface by hand, you abstract the interface into code that makes interfaces trivial.

In the words of Jeannette Wing, the two A's of "computational thinking" are "abstraction" and "automation"

(from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/ct-short.pdf)

In other words, interesting hacking occurs when you realize that a certain task can be automated (e.g. writing UIs or administering servers), you create a useful abstraction for it, and then you write the code that performs the task largely automatically.

This is why pg champions Lisp as a great language for startups: Lisp is perfect for building other languages because of its powerful macro facilities, among other things.

I guess what I'm saying is that "startup hacking" is as interesting as you make it. Sure, you can toil away writing similar code over and over again to create various facets of the UI, but the more interesting thing to do is to write the program that writes that code for you.
Why Not All Great Hackepreneurs Get Picked By YC (he offers a Plan B)
Can a language have Lisp's powerful macros without the parentheses?
Check out this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9171 for another idea of a backup plan.
The relevance of the content--its startup-centricity.
I think its because its so dynamic. I am always on here seeing whats new or what changed. It also helps that I am really interested in the content on the site
i have to agree, I find my self checking in many times throughout the day. I never really got into Digg or Reddit because there was so much irrelevancy to the submissions and with so many users it never felt like your posts got much face time with readers. YCom News is focused, comments are honest and not to long, and you get the feeling that the people on the other end are smart and doing really cool things.
In a few of Paul Graham's essays and in some of my own experiences, I have found that Lisp is a very powerful language for hard programming problems, largely due to its powerful macro facilities. These macros give the programmer the power to create entirely new, domain-specific languages without too much difficulty.

I am currently a Master's student and I hope to eventually be a founder, and my question is the title of this submission. I can understand why some people would shy away from Lisp, but I also see how many upcoming programmers appreciate the power of Python and Ruby. I believe, then, that the next big language will be one that combines the macros of Lisp with the ease of use of Python. I think that such a language would be perfect for startups.

I am a glutton for punishment, so my graduate interests lie in programming languages. Here at Ohio State University, there is a language called RESOLVE that a lot of students don't like too much (it's built on top of C++ and is much too wordy), but it does have some interesting concepts built-in that I would like to put in a language of my own. In creating a new language, one of the things that would be first and foremost in my mind would be to ensure it had powerful macro capabilities, so I am interesting to hear your feedback on the viability of a language with powerful macros but fewer parentheses.
The absence of spam and drastically off topic material is a huge plus for the site. We've pretty much stayed on topic, and I think Paul has said they have human moderators whacking bad submissions or comments. The voting helps with that also of course.
Here are eight reasons your prospect can believe in you and your business
Yes, it can.

http://www.livelogix.net/logix/intro.html

Logix is built on Python and compiles down to Python bytecode, so you can use it with Python modules, but it has macros that I think are probably as powerful as Lisp's. It's meant for DSLs.
At least where I go to grad school (Ohio State University), grad school does not cost anything. You either win a Fellowship, you teach a class, you help a professor with his research, or you do grunt work like grading papers and labs. In any case, tuition, fees, and 80% of health insurance is covered, in addition to a $1600-1850 per month stipend. That works out to a respectable $20k/yr.

If you do not get a Fellowship, you are expected to perform 20 hours worth of work per week (which you actually receive credit for), in addition to your time spent on classes and on your own independent research.

In other words, grad school is more like a low-paying job than a cost. You could make the case that you could be working a higher-paying job in that time, but then you are missing out on the flexibility of being a Ph.D., which allows the possibility of being a professor or getting hired for a pretty high income. Additionally, you have the opportunity to leave your mark on the field with your research.

Even more interesting is that Ph.D. work could lead you to your startup idea, as you unveil a new use of existing technology or a new approach altogether which leads to a money-making possibility. Furthermore, if you are exceptionally driven, you may be able to get some work done on your startup idea while attending grad school, because at least so far, I have found grad school to be significantly easier than my undergrad was, because I am taking less "real" classes.
The site has great value for the entrepreneur with both the content and the people posting - a winning combination. (I also admit to checking multiple times a day - usually between hard coding or architecture problems)
The content has the highest signal to noise ratio of any other social content site out there. This is likely because the audience is more focused.
i have to agree as well, which is why i thought it was kinda like the new digg, course i dont really read digg any more.

what i find in yc news: inspiration, fresh, new, professional development, stuff to think about, its almost a good excuse for browsing vs say drudgereport,

i see alot more 2.0 newness mentions as well, i usually go to emilys hub for that

it feels more fresh, and i feel like it matters more than random dude check this out digg like stuff
Thanks for posting that. We're building a DSL for our users and this will get put on the stack of things to look into. We're Python hackers so it's a good find.
I used to check YC News every time I exported a new .swf with the Flash IDE (because it's so horrendously slow and sometimes even crashes the IDE--I figured I'd make use of those 10-20 seconds [which unfortunately often turned into 5-10 minutes of web browsing--AAAA!]).

Now that I've removed that step from my workflow, I check much less often. :-)
You really shouldn't do the parts you don't find interesting. Pay someone else to do those parts. I like internet startups -- imagine what it must have been like to own one of the first printing presses... that's what I feel like when I'm working on a website. Imagine you're writing a novel, except that you know what page every single one of your readers is looking at, and you can talk to them about the page.
Do You Exist? A Frank Discussion of Web 2.0
For one of my MSEE classes at Stanford, I took a business for engineers class taught by a local successful and retired software entrepreneur. I forgot his name. He was paralyzed in one arm b/c of a plane crash when piloting one of his own planes if that rings any bells to anyone. (Guess he was a better businessman than pilot! :) )

Anyway, he would always give case examples from his own experience, and his eyes would light up, making it obvious that this was happiest time in his life. His teaching this class was his attempt to relive his glory days. He never had a family (and was actually ousted from the company so had nothing there), and in a strange way, I think this class was his attempt to have one.

I don't know much about pg, but his viagen references remind me a little bit of this guy. We're all trying to have a legacy of some sort. I believe, though, that of the possible investments one can make with one's time, family is the best and longest lasting one. Keep that in mind, young-uns!
Summary: If you don't get to be a YC founder this time, come work for his startup on his ideas. Same location, same time period, same money, very different role IMO.
Yeah, that sounds about like it. Not hugely appealing to me but I've enjoyed his blogs posts and maybe it would work for some folks here.
YC Summer 2007 Applicants - What did you apply with?
Sexiest company names
What's your company name and what are you doing?
I think that vertical news is the way forward, because its focused
Naming a company is hard - so what are the best names you've ever heard? 37signals is pretty groovy
They have also challenged popular teaching methods, suggesting that teachers should focus more on giving students the answers, instead of asking them to solve problems on their own.

I don't understand how this connects to the rest of the study.
Worst company names
Brain Bakery
This is a reasonably fair characterization (though candidly, I have not worked out all the details yet).

I considered simply making an equity investment (like YC does), but don't have the bandwidth to do something like that at this time.

One of the reasons I didn't post this article until after the YC deadline is that I wanted to make sure people didn't confuse this as an alternative to YC. As you noted, the role is very different.

Not for everyone, but might make sense for some.
I agree, thanks for the link. Unfortunately, I find the complete lack of syntax to make it even harder to read than Lisp macros (which I don't personally find difficult, but some do). Additionally, having to use numbers to indicate operator precedence seems a bit strange. Of course, Lisp solves this by always using parentheses, but I would be curious to see if there is a more elegant way of handling this than the numeric approach (or even the approach suggested in their proposed changes to Logix).
Very interesting proposal. If someone isn't already working on a startup, this would be a great way to get some experience (working for a startup is the next best thing to starting one). Who knows, it might serve as preparation for the winter round of YC.
Has anyone taken any good OCW courses related to startups?
Read Your Way to Business Success
I'm guessing he did, though I may be wrong. The thread title was "...YC app..." something like that.

I don't see how after that video and that post how he wouldn't be accepted unless the YC people have some pre-existing opinions about the future of online storage.
That is a very interesting idea. User-driven broadcasts would have to compete in the "P2P marketplace".

Consider this scenario. Joost is P2P. If I start my own Joost broadcast, I notify my peers of its existence. Those people who tune to my channel then transmit a notification to their peers, with the possibility of their rebroadcasting it.

There would have to be some smoothing out of the protocol, but it could work. It would basically be P2P realtime YouTube.
Agreed, not appealing for everyone.
"central authority is necessary for money to work" - No I don't mean "central authority" just some authority that is responsible for "following the rules" in given market. This can be a company that issued virtual money in online game for example. If participants in virtual world do not trust in the fact that the company will play fair game (e.g. that all participants in the virtual game will have equal power to trade, and that the quantity of money and quantity of virtual goods will grow by some known way.), then the virtual money value will decrease.
Howdy Dharmesh. I think it's a cool idea--good luck with it. I like the http://www.websitegrader.com/ app. I ran it on a couple sites I'm involved with and got some good suggestions.
I'm excited by what seems to be a boom in micro-seed startup financing...what could less charitably be referred to as the YC-app knockoffs.

This guys seems to have a good approach, though, in defining a slightly different niche for what he wants to do. While I would be willing to concede that nobody can implement the YC model as well as YC, I hope there is room for more micro-seed startups^2 with different focuses and different approaches.
I think their overarching hypothesis was that sensory overload decreases learning. Supposedly, by requiring students to listen to a lecture and view Powerpoint slides at the same time, the information actually gets shoved into short term memory and forgotten, because it is too much to remember all at once.

By the same token, apparently, asking students to solve the problem forces them to focus on a specific problem, and it makes learning the concepts (or even remembering what methods went into solving the problem) more difficult, because of the same brain overload.

At least that's what I took from the article. I personally find that I learn best in a class when I listen closely to the professor and take very minimal notes. In doing so, I can focus on remembering what's being said instead of trying to read slides or write quickly. That's why I appreciate professors who put their notes online; I can listen closely in class and then review the notes later on to reiterate what I learned.
I always thought ArsDigita and Six Apart sounded pretty good.
That's the hope.

Though I'm a big PG fan, I'm no PG. My thinking is that my experiment can extract a few more people into the startup mindset (and clearly, there's some upside for me too). In my experience, simply resisting the temptation to jump into big company land is a huge step. If possible, I'd like to make it really hard for great hackepreneurs to revert to a big company job simply because they didn't make it in to YC.
Thanks. This is a pet project of mine (amongst others). Response so far has been pretty good. We haven't officially "launched" it yet, but about 9,500 URLs have been processed by the tool so far. It's a fun little tool to work on.
http://neurokinetikz.com

:)
I think the reason that I like to check it a lot is to see what intelligent people think about the things that I say. So the first important component, in my mind, is that the majority of the members are smart. Secondly, by allowing people to reply to replies and assign karma points (admittedly not a novel idea), smart people can reinforce the parts of my replies that they find smart and ignore the parts that don't interest them.

I think the inability to vote topics down avoids some of the problems that Reddit has encountered, where people camp out and vote submissions down in order to make their own appear higher. I think a more mature (on average) user base helps to accomplish that as well.

Finally, I think that most people must have heard of YC news through either pg's site or through YCombinator itself. Anyone interested in those two things are cool in my book, and should produce good discussions.
There's a recent research project called Farsite which tries to answer these questions.

http://research.microsoft.com/~adya/pubs/osdi2002.pdf
MIT's OCW is indeed awesome, but most mba stuff in my opinion is aimed at working in management for already established companies (middle managers), and less for startups.

A stats course might be nice.
You need to kill more boars to get to the next level, then you can wear plate mail and get your mount. (World of Warcraft) ;)
I would liken this more to Google's summer of code or Joel Spolsky's paid summer internship program.

I think it's really hard to compete with Paul and what he's built with YC. Strong following, great set of people and a very difficult set of benefits to match. If you fit the YC profile, I think that's a great path for lots of hackepreneur types.

But, I think there are still "gaps" in the market between YC and other early-stage investment vehicles (angel groups, VCs, etc.)
These are fairly restrictive languages. What about ML languages, like SML or OCaml, which are not purely functional? Anyone using those?
Are you kidding? Moral gray areas are part of the fun of startups!
I have a few qualms with this app:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Thats a cool proposition, something to consider for those of us who dont get accepted YC. However, I think 99% of the experience founding a startup is from the fact that it is based on YOUR idea, not someone elses. From that comes the insane relentless drive to push the limits. I would have a hard time programming 20 hours a day for weeks on end for an idea I was not involved in creating.

I do think its cool he would be willing to fund your personal idea after the work period. But then you lack the mentoring/community/networking aspect of YC which I think is more important than the actual funding (at least in the very early stages). Best of luck to him though on recruiting some quality hackers.
If you follow Cringley you might have already heard about NeoKast, they are basically trying to do just that. Create a P2P tech for user streamed TV. It could be huge if it has a unified interface and isn't regulated to embedded players on websites.
Check out Jessica Livingston's book. The interview with pg reveals a lot about their early days in forming the company.
I hadn't seen the site before, very cool. My only suggestion would be to offer the necessary syntax when relevant, e.g. for adding meta keywords. Granted, it only takes thirty seconds to lookup, but people are more likely to make the changes immediately before they forget if it's right there.
Techcrunch offers prizes for valid strong criticism
Why don't you "flesh" it out here? Maybe it'll help solidify your idea in your mind, or more than likely, evolve it.

Just throw it out there, even if it sounds stupid in your own mind.
its also simple

in todays el-explosion'ary 2.0 scene simple is usually left out

there are no tags, avatars, profiles, subgroups, contacts, thingamwhos and fake promises
yahoo
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