skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was assuming by "apply" jsjenkins meant submit the application, since you can resubmit as often as you want. Since we read applications online, we see the most recently submitted version of any application we look at.
is your plugin available anywhere?

I tried just defining a .lisp filetype in IDEA, but it doesn't work because it treats apostrophes as string delimiters.
Up voted to bubble up your question.

In a few places I've seen PG mention that it is preferred that you are not already incorporated, but never that it is a requirement that you are not. The reason for the preference being that the custom legal work costs more for a group already incorporated.

Curious where you guys are in TX... Can you pls shoot me an email off-list? (email in my profile).
Managing Duplicated Code with Linked Editing
At this point half (maybe more) of the startups we fund don't need the money. And in fact the money is a pretty small part of what YC does. It works more like financial aid at a college: it ensures that the people who do need money can at least cover their living expenses while YC is happening.

It sounds like your situation is like Virtualmin's (including even being from Texas). They were in the last winter cycle. You should drop them a line; there's probably an email link at virtualmin.com.
This is a much repeated notion, but I've never worked anywhere good developers are promoted into management. Tons of bad developers end up in management, though...
Developing Lisp without Emacs - what do you need
Step 1) Profit

Step 2) ???

Wait.. what?
The real issue hackers have with members of the Design Patterns cult (other than the ridiculous jargon) is the notion that complex, generalized patterns are ALWAYS better than simple, specific solutions to a problem.
in harvard square:

_boston tea stop_ - on JFK near staples. good wifi, great bubble tea. try the mini dumplings, they are AMAZING.

_b.good burgers_ - good wifi, good burgers/fries/shakes, sorta healthy fast food

_boloco_ on mt. auburn street - good wifi, good wraps, amazing nutella shakes

_darwin's 2_ - it's the new darwin's on cambridge street, and probably easier to find a seat there. amazing sandwiches. http://www.darwinsltd.com/

_petsi pies_ - it's hidden away on 31 Putnam Ave, so you can always find a good seat here. not sure if they have wifi. their coffee sucks, but their espresso is really good. also, the baked goods are delightful. you're likely to spot the famous photographer elsa dorfman eating dinner there.

in central square -

_1369 Coffeehouse_ - best coffee shop in central square. has wifi, but you have to pay to use it.

why do you need good programmers at your coffeeshop? you know you're just going to talk to them on email and discussion boards anyway.

MIT has free wifi throughout their campus. Harvard's wifi is locked down.
Diesel Cafe in Davis Square (Somerville). In the past, a lot of YC folks used it as a hackspot. Not sure if that's still the case, but the last time I was there, I met a couple of (non-YC) guys in the booth next to me who were working on a web app. You can find programmers there.

Unfortunately, the wifi isn't free. And the bathrooms aren't quite as clean as Darwin's. =)
Very Interesting ! can you tell us anything about how well (or if) Arc is converging to a releasable state?
Justin.tv suggestion:  one channel that gives the most interesting video among all other channels in (near) real-time
I have some questions about arc if you don't mind :)

Why 'whilet instead of 'while and why 'aand instead of 'and?
I thought one of your aims was to produces a minimal set of "axiomatic" operators (functions, macros, special forms) which gave the maximum utility. So couldn't these be generalized into a single operator?

Also, isn't ")))))))" overkill for such a simple function, Can reader macros be defined within lisp? (like if you wanted to make } close all parenthesis up to the top level for example)
An obvious way to do this would be to see what sort of viewer feedback you are getting on each of those other channels.

You could show this combined channel at all times along with the currently selected channel.
Well I was just hoping to hear interesting anecdotes. I mean someone must have interviewed at these 50+ companies and might want to share what he legally can here.
Seedcamp: Euro version of YC
Anything that encourages ideological movements among ignorant people is bad, and design patterns do just that, from what I've seen.

I've seen grown men spend hours and hours and hours talking about AbstractFactory patterns. I've seen, to a degree, that your ability to discuss the implementation of AbstractFactories can influence your reputation more than the software that actually gets created.
Justin.tv suggestion: a search engine for clips based on associated chat text
Yes, the chat is pretty noisy data but I think you will get interesting results anyway.
I remember testing something like this 5 years ago. I think they should have mentioned Lapis in the introduction instead of on the last page.
Diesel is the best place I know. The wifi is almost free if you pay by the month.
Is Arc going to support concurrency and/or manycore systems?

The original writing(s) on Arc assumed a free lunch that would continue for decades (justifying a lack of emphasis on scalability and efficiency in implementation, I thought), which already seems kind of naive. You can already buy 8-core systems from Apple, mang. It's the future.
Does lifecasting compete with religion as a way to keep you well-behaved?  Does it also encourage people you meet to treat you better than they normally would?
Comscore's Fishy Facebook Numbers (35+ demographic counts way too high)
It has threads and a way to say a chunk of code should be executed atomically. No more than that at the moment. Nor is there any explicit notion of a processor. I'm not sure how that will turn out.
We're hard at work behind the scenes here at JTV. You'll be seeing stuff like this, and much more, very soon.
They're different from while and and: whilet is a combination of while and let that binds its first argument to the result of the test. aand binds the result of successive tests to "it" for use in succeeding tests.

))))))) isn't overkill to Lisp hackers. Lisp hackers
read code by indentation and rarely notice the parens, especially terminating ones. There have been dialects (Franz Lisp) that used ] to close off all open parens, but it would be a waste to use up a good char like ] to fix a non-problem.
Startups: Are You A Trusted Adviser Or A Responsive Assistant?
Looking forward to seeing the new features!

In case you are interested, other posts on justin.tv:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23508

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10028

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5085
Problem: People are lazy, Yahoo had way too many links on their homepage. While variety is nice, the first impression casual users get from Yahoo is "ok... where do I start?" For that reasons, so much of Yahoo's contents never get a chance to be viewed. To emphasize, Yahoo has great articles and analysis that are fun and interesting to read, Google doesn't.

Solution: Yahoo should change their homepage into something like Google, but add a second search bar with the label "What do you Yahoo to do today?" As someone types into the textbox, related Yahoo contents appear diretly (like the Vista search).

Bottomline: With a simple twist on the homepage, Yahoo does not really have to change much to become more popular than Google.
I like the abbreviations you're using. "w/" in particular is extremely readable. And who wouldn't love a function call (isnt it #\;) in real code. #\; looks a little bit like Perl walked into the middle of your Arc program though.
Pretty interesting, although I'm not allowed to comment on the specific details.
Slightly offtopic, but does anyone know any such places in New York?

I can think of the Tea Lounge (Park Slope) annnnnnd nothing else.
The Nine Best Story Lines for Marketing
Facebook | Do we really need to write our own search engine?
Analysis of a PR hit piece
a sane reason

(though I haven't tried anything else) I doubt it, there's anything superior to the Emacs+SLIME combo
i can only hope that apple is about to pull the same trick on all the wireless telecom providers.
I think that's all you need for version 1.0. All the bleeding-edge concurrency abstractions like software transactional memory are only that: abstractions. Henning is right that they're going to become increasingly important in the future, but as long as you have threads and atomicity as building blocks, you should be able to do all the rest in the macro system.

Just make sure that some concurrency package eventually becomes a de facto standard. Getting C libraries that use different threading implementations to interoperate is a nightmare, and I'd hate to see Arc go the same route.
This is a good article. I've been through something very similar myself. I spent about 5 years as a manager, and I don't really want to do "spreadsheet" management again. I want to own my project, and I don't mind being the lead with a small team, but I never want to be the "status updater" again.

This reminds me of a phrase that irritates the $^%^ out of me - "Better a good programmer than a bad manager." Of course, it's true - better a good anything than a bady anything, right? But here are the two phrases that nobody seems to say...

"Better a good manager than a bad programmer".

and finally...

"Better a good manager than a good programmer?" or is it "better a good programmer than a good manager?"

In many organizations, I'm convinced that the second is true. Bad managers do have the ability to ruin a team, and so you need to make sure that you have a decent level of talent there. But for a lot of companies, especially small ones working on innovative things (read: startups), the top techincal talent is vastly more important.

In other words, if you have someone who could be a great technical contributor and a great technical manager, you're better off with the technical contributions.
Rob's piece is an excellent reflection on keeping to ones integrity, and finding a balance in the role that best fits one's passion. I've been around managers who are proud of their job as a over-the-shoulder screaming maniac, and managers that sleep during meetings. Until designs and projects are clearly defined, and individuals feel capable to independently fulfill the task, bad managers, pigeonholed managers, appear to be the corporate solution.
Yaw, I dunno. I'm not convinced it's a one-size-fits-all strategy, but I tend to think that being out there is a lot more valuable than being stealthy.

The "first mover advantage" isn't much of one. Looking at the top 10 internet properties (by traffic), you don't see a lot of first movers there (people who were the first in their space). Also consider Walmart, Starbucks, the iPod, MS... Not a first mover among them. Not that they didn't innovate, but they were decidedly NOT first.

I don't think worrying about clones is worthwhile. Once you're out there, you've already got a headstart-- it's unlikely that anyone can beat you to launch. And if the only defensibility you have is a 6 month head start with a team of 3, you've got big problems. You win by being the best (and having the best marketing), not by being first.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Can we build a local community out of YC news? Currently YC is focus is the US. For the RestOfWorld, can we have a country/city page that links to a local startup website or a yahoo/google groups page?

This would to some extent help facilitating potential co-founders -- since that's a constant them on this board.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Can we build a local community out of YC news? Currently YC is focus is the US. For the RestOfWorld, can we have a country/city page that links to a local startup website or a yahoo/google groups page?

This would to some extent help facilitating potential co-founders -- since that's a constant them on this board.
The Coolest Hack I've Ever Pulled Off
Making a dialect that is the de facto for multi-core programming could be quite a ruse.
diesel and 1369. neither have free wifi. 1369 used to have free wifi (four years ago), but the laptop lurkers took over so they had to start charging.
Copyright Explained: I May Copy It, Right?
Hrmph. I'm around Diesel a lot. I had no idea that it was a YC hangout. Y'all need to make yourselves visible somehow.
dude, you called your prof gay?!?! Did he let the whole video run? Did the hack include making it impossible to stop the video without unplugging the computer?
My experiment gone startup...
I started this off 1.5 months ago as a project to work on while I learn Ruby on Rails. I think it turned out decently, so I've decided to share it with the world.

Use the invite code "yconvicts" to register. :) Please let me know what you think, I would love some feedback!!

Also be sure to check your spam filters to see if the activation email got caught, I'm still working on that issue (pointers would be appreciated!). Thanks! =)
He probably could have hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete or unplugged the power, but that was it. The program absorbed other keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Either way he was a cool older guy. He had to be cool to put up with 400 teenagers.

I think his biggest reaction was flattery. He was flattered that we made a surprise video for him for his last lecture.
Random startup tip #1: Picking a name
I guess I was saying invent as in "came up with the thing that differentiates it from everything else out there" - in this case, the auction system.
Startup Economics: Decision Making Under Uncertainty
My preferred method is to invite hackers over to my house. There is a big la-z-boy chair located next to a big peaceful aquarium, and a couch too; the free wifi is top-notch, and the coffee is better than most cafes IMNSHO.

Of course, you can't just show up... but if you're interested, find a mutual friend, show up at http://www.mypunchbowl.com/publicparty/ce77a5939ec8e27be083 , or email me to express interest in working at an existing local startup that's developing a new consumer web app.

Shimon Rura

shimon@rura.org
Do you have spf records for your domain set up optimally? It looks like you have 'v=spf1 mx ~all'. You could switch the ~all to -all and turn the soft fail into a hard fail.
Thanks, I've changed the SPF records like you suggested. I'm using my other server as the mail server since I was having some weird issues with the one at DevGrow.

Whenever I would send an email from the DevGrow mail server, it would go straight to spam in Hotmail/MSN. In Gmail, it would go to the inbox unless the body of the email had my domain name in it, which essentially meant all useful emails would go to the spam filter.

I haven't figured out why that is happening or how to fix it, so I've temporarily resorted to using my other mail server. I'm using SoftLayer for hosting if you're curious, but their support seems to be taking a vacation (maybe just from my question?).
Um, did Dan Cederholm http://simplebits.com design this? Because if not, well, you stole his design http://corkd.com/ bud.
I'll reproduce what I sent to tx via email, just in case anyone is curious (I'm with Virtualmin, the company pg mentioned):

We really enjoyed YC. I've talked about it a bit in public, here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234583&cid=19110535

And the blowback from that on YC News:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21907

We definitely didn't care much about the $15k (in our two-founder case), though it did nicely offset the cost of my move (I sold my 350Z at a rather unfortunate price, and found myself spending more than twice as much on rent as I was paying on a mortgage in Austin). And we're not college kids (we're 32 and 33). We were already selling product when we applied.

We viewed it primarily as a really good set of introductions, a good learning experience, and the chance to bounce our product off of the folks who would in the end be the primary users. Our actual buyers are hosting providers, but they buy what their customers want, and everybody in YC is a hosting provider customer, and probably a thought leader in some area of development.

We don't begrudge the 5% stake that YC holds, at all, and I think we've already gotten our equities worth from the deal, and we continue to take advantage of their advice. If it hasn't already been made clear by the above bits and other stuff I've posted on YC News, anybody that goes through YC has a really really good chance of getting funding, if they want it. Nobody who aggressively sought funding has failed to raise it...some folks figured out during the program that what they had was not fundable and so didn't go after more money. Others (like us) are biding our time a bit, as we sign on bigger customers and get ourselves into a really solid bargaining position before seriously approaching anyone. We have lunch with them when they call us (and they do call), but we're not asking for money yet. We'd probably take angel money at this stage, but the VCs zeroed in on us as the only enterprise business in the bunch, so that's who we hear from. ;-)

If nothing else, moving to the valley was probably the best thing we could have done (Austin Ventures is great and all, and they do a lot of deals...but there's just the one of them, versus hundreds of funding sources in the valley...if there's any chance you'll need money, the odds of getting it are vastly higher here), and YC forced me to make that move (my co-founder was already in Santa Clara).
Oh, yeah, we were already a Texas corporation, as well. We dissolved the TX business, and started fresh in Delaware. The structure that YC did for us was a lot nicer anyway. There's a lot of stuff that lawyers in Texas (at least the lawyer I talked to) don't even think about that can be problems later on when funding comes or when options are issued.
"I don't owe a rejected candidate anything ... I don't think this kind of entitlement-thinking will serve you very well."

I'm not saying you are morally obliged to, I'm saying it's the nice thing to do. For me personally, being nice is part of being courteous, which is why I used the more general word before.
Cork'd was definitely a lot of inspiration, but how did I steal his design? The color scheme is straight from http://kuler.adobe.com/ (under popular) and while I totally stole his idea of the character in the welcome box and search bar placement, the layout is different in all other respects. I took ideas from lots of places, including the Expression Engine site - and the logo is simply a modification of a free Illustrator icon from Komodo Design. :)

Anyways, I did send him an email to show him the site and make sure he's personally OK with it, but haven't heard back yet. It was more of a courtesy than anything else for using the similar character + welcome box combo.
Your design -- original (though still same family of shades, etc.) colorscheme or not -- is just too similar. It's obvious you started with his design and built on top of it. Same width, same logo position, same search box, same zebra-striped tables, etc. And those similarities are exacerbated by the use of the illustration and the checkmark icons.
Let's hope so. Maybe they'll do it by allowing native Cocoa development on the iPhone. They can prove that giving developers access to an API better (and less restricted) than J2ME is the way to go.
Nice. I reckon Markdown-style [links](http://link.com/) would be at least as useful, though. (I notice the paren is still included in the href -- I often would like to parenthesize links but then remind myself it doesn't work in News.YC.)

Just curious as to why this comments thread (32768) isn't the same as the main link (32766).
While I'm guessing Dan would most likely be OK with the design, if you think of it this way than I'm guessing lots of others will too. I'm changing a lot of the front page layouts around - I definitely don't want that impression to be the popular one.

Thanks for your input, I very much appreciate it. Check back a little later and let me know what you think. I'm keeping the color choice though, that was the first thing I picked when I decided to make the site.
> constant when called as a function simply returns itself.

I thought a sequence at a procedure position acted like aref, e.g. ("abc" 1) => #\b, right? So the automatic promotion of constant to constant-function occurs only for non-aggregate types?
Is this a troll, or did the author not realize that urbandictionary isn't exactly a reliable resource?

The entry in urbandictionary for "googe" tries to be funny but is clearly fake.

I suppose it's technically possible for someone to name their startup something like "Blumpkn", but I'd say this is a non-issue.

It's a good idea to think about a word before buying it as a domain, but that's common sense.
Uh ohh . . .
Also ensure you've got reverse DNS set up correctly for your domain.
Fake meaning what? Doostang is just a ridiculous name regardless, but it might have served Google well to see if 'googe' had any other connotations (whether or not they're in Merriam/Webster) before putting it in a logo.
Nice look, though my first thought was, "Oh, it's just News.YC with a sweet logo." Has some cool features that News.YC doesn't, but also seems a bit too complicated. Do you intend to compete with News.YC, or try to gather a different user base, or none of the above?
First, the stem of the cherry was intended to be the L, but it's acknowledged that it doesn't look that way.

Secondly, "Googe" doesn't connote anything, unflattering or otherwise.

When I say fake, I mean that people try to invent new words on urbandictionary, and not words that people have ever used before. Don't believe me? Then just click a letter on urbandictionary and read the entries sequentially instead of by popularity.

To sum up: the examples used in the article are completely ineffective, but know what words mean before attaching them to the identity of your company.
The New Web War
See, THIS is the only reason I come to news.yc.

I love the idea of startups, but I've got the wanderlust. During the part of the year where I have net access, I watch ycombinator closely, and I'm not really hoping to see startup news.
It's only common sense if your up-to-date on the current slang. A founder friend of mine from another generation chose the name, tawala - .. yikes.
YouTube Scalability (Google Tech Talk)
Stupid questions alert.
____________________________

In On Lisp, you mentioned that implementing continuations with closures via transformation to CPS could be accomplished by writing a code walker, but that this would be a "serious undertaking" in Common Lisp.

This struck me at the time and ever since as painful, but understandable. Macros aren't first-class objects in CL, so the code you're walking through could be very complex due to macro-expansion, and I could be wrong, but I don't remember if the resulting code would necessarily contain clues that tell us what macro generated it, etc.

Could one assume (and it is definitely an assumption, or speculation, not a deduction from what you've given us here!) that it would be much simpler in Arc? Say, a page or so of code?
Hmmm. I guess I could also ask "What does readall do?" and go on speculating to myself, but the stuff above is what I really want to know. Once I've defined something (macro, function), what does it look like in Arc? Is its structure, either before or after macroexpansion, available to play cute little tricks with?

I'll stop asking questions now. I feel I'm reaching the limits even of assumption and might start getting silly. (For instance: "Could I write a function that let me select nodes within a loaded function using CSS Selector syntax?", but that's just silly so I won't ask it).
Ah that makes sense!
Hope you don't mind but is there any ideas for a loop/iterate/series type macro in the works?