skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I am unqualified to speak about Mark, and in fact, I didn't, I stand by what I said. nickb made an arguably general comment, and I made an arguably general response. I apologize for the ambiguity, but--

It's very easy to point a finger at a general response and say "that comment is aimed at this guy," because this guy is the tallest tree in the forest. But the comment applies to the whole forest.

I have no doubt that Mark is deserving of his success. Mark worked hard, Bill Gates worked hard, Warren Buffet worked hard. The kiko guys worked hard too. And if kiko took over the world, they would be invited to speak everywhere, and they will have things to say, and reporters will scribble down what they hear as if deities are speaking, when every person's interpretation of the path to success does not work for all others.

I believe the truth in what nickb said is right here. All instances of success are a mixture of factors, but somehow they are read as a result of one. And as such, as a general principle, I certainly believe that arrogance is always unneccessary, regardless of who you are and what you have achieved.
Ages when they started what they're famous for:

Mark Zuckerberg: 20

Max Levchin: 22

Paul Graham: 31

Steve Wozniak: 26

Mitcha Kapor: 32

Donald Knuth: 24
reddit now doubleplusgood
Google's April Fools' Day joke
Why was Rails only possible with Ruby?
ITConversation using Amazon S3  for Infrastructure-on-Demand
The Other Road Ahead
follows on from a point I made earlier ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2866
Look at the screenshots. They are trying to build an OS and a whole office suite at the same time. Why don't they leverage existing web 2.0 apps?

Has anyone tried to implement X11 on the web?
Direct infolink: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html
Good for them, but I agree with Eisner. Justin.TV is content, and content is still king, whether or not it includes audience participation. The web is a revolution in distribution, and in lowering the barrier to entry for content creation.
Personally, if I was ever in this situation I think I'd go for a mindless job like becoming a Starbucks barista or something. I find it's harder to have good ideas at home after doing something that involves thinking all day.
An anonymous study at the institute where I am revealed that 10% (IIRC) of scientists confessed to perpetrating a "serious misdemeanor".

My feeling is that the situation is not much different now from, say, in the 18th century. Some day, we'll be able to do formal reasoning on the data and findings of researchers, and we'll spot [some] mistakes and contradictions automatically. Until then, peer-review is the best we can do, and its emphasis is much more on form than content.
I don't get it. If you (YC) choose not to fund a startup after the interview, it's because you think that you will not make money out of it. Why would TechStar fund them? They already tacitly acknowledge that they cannot do any better than you.
If you look at the PyPy project you'll see that it's possible with Python to spot that foo is always an integer within a certain scope, thereby allowing short-cuts when dealing with it. They're also using the excellent LLVM framework to JIT the Python byte-code. It's not replacing the CPython interpreter anytime soon, but it is doing interesting stuff.

URL: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/index.html

LLVM is well worth a look, BTW. Now that Apple have seen its benefits and are providing a workforce it's coming along in leaps and bounds.

URL: http://llvm.org/
Arg, I didn't notice that you can't run a database. I'm not in that program yet.

Maybe I'll just keep everything on S3 as key/value pairs and then use the Queue service to make it all happen. It'd be fun anyway.
This is just another cool thing happening to reduce the cost of new software apps. Salesforce.com has the same thing with Apex. The only bad thing there is that they tie you a bit too much to their technologies (Java/Oracle). They have adapters for other platforms but it still runs on Java/Oracle.
CenterNetwork Asks For Video Reviews from Startups, YouTube Responds
A topical music video about "progress":

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zwAk6yusvFY
Web page readability: Green text on yellow works the best
Workspace Launches Web based FTP Access
Great life story, lee. My husband and I are bringing our children along for the journey as we work on our start-up.

We went through the start-up stage with another business before we had children, but we won't think of postponing this start-up because of our kids. It is hard work to combine starting up and parenting, but being parents while working a traditional 9-to-5 is hard work, too.

We have found that we are happier when we are being creative on our own, regardless of income level. When we're happy, the kids are happy, too.

They have adapted well to everything we've thrown at them so far. And we are encouraged by their go-with-the-flow attitude.

In the end we want them to understand that you make your own life. The best way we can teach them this is to actually do so ourselves....and that's what we are doing.

Sounds like that's what you are doing, too.
Inkling guys re-writing their app in Lisp, job posting for an Arc developer
How do you give users privacy in your web 2.0 service?  Do you use client-side encryption?
April Fools'?
Sure are. We're melding ec2 instances to s3 as an actual filesystem.

-Steve
fooworks.com
TiSP is obviously a joke, but I thought Gmail Paper (http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html), also "announced" today, is better, and more like the style of their prior April Fool jokes: it's subtle enough to get some people thinking it might be true.
I hope they will be happy with older applicants given the "8-12+ years lisp/arc experience" requirement. Do you know anyone who has learned lisp (or any functional language) at a young age?
The real lesson here is that there's no such thing as an "off the record" remark any more.

Even in the most informal of gatherings, there is someone blogging or video recording (Justin) everything said.

It's probably going to lead to more canned/cliched talk in the future.
You'd do well to look at today's date.
BTW, if you are looking for a superstar coder, it's probably more important to find someone who has been programming since the age of 12 than to find someone who is young.

I suspect that even older programmers who started young are much more productive than younger programmers who started years later.
It's a joke, and I'll bet some older people (e.g. who have their secretaries print off their emails for them -- no kidding, I know people like that) will think it's real, at least until the part about the "96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum".
Ah, you need to join my YC founder's team first...

(Actually, I'm not applying to YC, but I am working on something in this area.)
Speaking of April fools, I convinced some people that I was giving up on startups and computing altogether to pursue a career in law.
Startup Meme: Tahiti is Microsoft's Answer to Desktop Collaboration
Launch Traditions: Let them eat cake
I for one do not understand why FlickR sold itself so cheap. perhaps because the M&A had not picked up by the time Yahoo! bought them?
What's Caterina Fake doing in Yahoo!
I really think people like her create a lot more value when they are starting a new company, and not when they are working for a giant like Yahoo!
Web Application Framework - PHP vs Java?
They tell a compelling story that's interesting & new and fits in with the zeitgeist. That's really all that PR is.

Right after I graduated high school, I worked for an all-teenage dot com. We were a dozen or so high schoolers, ages ranging from 15 through 19, building a "teen content" site with indirect venture funding (we were a wholly-owned subsidiary of a venture-funded startup). This was the summer of 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom. The NASDAQ had just peaked, but nobody knew it yet.

We got picked up first by the local community newspapers, then the Boston Herald, then the local TV news. Then we ran out of funding, but we continued getting press inquiries for several months after we were technically out of business.

We had a $20k PR budget (which we inflated to $50k whenever we talked to people), but we never spent any of it. Instead, our (18 year old) PR guy would just cold call newspaper editors with "Hi, this is Trip Guray, I'm at an all-teenage startup called inAsphere.com, and we have a story you might be interested in." If they weren't interested, fine, we'd say thanks for your time and try someone else. If they were, we'd send them a press release over e-mail or arrange for an interview.

Press coverage tends to snowball: if you get a story published in a community newspaper, you're much more likely to get picked up by a major metropolitan newspaper. If you get picked up by a major newspaper, other major newspapers will go after you. If a bunch of newspapers are interested, TV will soon be too.
I know this can get into a hot debate - like anything else there are pros and cons for each. But my question is really simple. When building a web-based application/service, would you use PHP even when you know that the application can potentially become huge and scalability and maintainability can become a nightmare if the application is written in PHP?
Test - my posts are not showing up..
Ok - I think there was some delay, that's all.

How do I delete a post?
Why would a VC firm specializing in oil/energy invest in an internet startup? VCs generally have specific areas they invest in.. if they don't "Specialize" in internet, they won't invest in you.
Is there a separate holder for reporting bugs?

Here is the problem I am facing. I m trying to post a link to http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/earlystagevc/2007/03/web_20.html - but when I submit, it takes me to another posting for which the URL is http://earlystagevc.typepad.com. So, baasically othe system thinks that I'm trying to update the old posting or something, and it ends up not showing my post.

Try submitting this.:

URL: http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/earlystagevc/2007/03/web_20.html
Title:
Web 2.0 Bust?
If you need a beta tester... http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
Clipperz: New password storage application
Next year on April 1st they'll follow Reddit and rewrite in Python.
What is viral marketing? (original article by Steve Jurvetson)
How do you market your startup? (VentureVoice Startup Workshop)
Funny you say that. She's currently leading Yahoo!'s technology development group, and is behind their internal "startup" incubator, Brickhouse. Their first product was Pipes, which is actually quite cool.

So the "giant" seems to agree with you there.
One thing that's not clear to me is if the internet communities still work if you take away some of the inherent anonymity that's associated with someone's online persona.

In the extreme case, where every online community is tied to facebook, imagine being able to click a user name and find out "real' information about a person and his friends. It might make people less willing to post.
Why are those your only two options?
TISP - The wireless, broadband, nanobot supported ISP of the future. Today. Through your toilet.
I can't read anything on the web today without being completely skeptical. Argh!

This is one of the better ones though.
Well, lots of people learned Logo fairly young. :)
Startup Meme: MSN Live Earth Becomes Livelier
The seed business is national. Almost everyone who applies to Techstars will apply to YC as well. Since I honestly can't see any reason anyone would prefer them to us, that means their destiny is to fund people we reject. The best startups we reject are the ones that make it to the interview stage.
Yeah sorry about the Jajah/Vonage hoax. It's all in good fun though. No need for smacks.
This is a very useful piece of software!

While doing usuability tests is a great way to try to figure out what people are going to do with your software, the users are always going to be acting differently because they know their being watched. They know that they're supposed to be figuring it out, so they try to be "smarter" about how to do things.. As a result, they end up not giving you the sort of real usage information that you'd like.

The real problem with this is the privacy- While you have all of this information anyway- You're not learning anything new, it's corrolates it in a way that users are unlikely to be comfortable with. Image if the headline read "Microsoft secretly recording all users who use it's site"

It would get major play, even though they already have all that information in logs.

I think that something like TF is certainly useful-
Hell, imagine being able to forward Dev specific users gettng confused, to try to prove a UI point..
We (service providers) just need to come up with a way to make it fair.
Don''t get me wrong - I didn't mean to say she isn't doing anything "cool". However, the fact remains that one can be so much more innovative and nimble in a "real" startup. Given a choice, a truly smart person would prefer to work for a cool starup vs Yahoo! Brickhouse.

The level of motivation one has in a startup is simply not there in a public company.
You have to start somewhere. .NET is out because IMO Java is more open standards based than .NET. PHP - because it's fairly quick to learn and write in addition to being fast.

I haven't looked at all options yet, but I'd like to get more opinions on Java vs PHP first. You are welcome to suggets more.

PS: Friendster rewrote their site in PHP (from Java)
Update: It doesn't track people across multiple pages. That makes it -substantially- less useful.
If they had left out Arc more people would have fallen for it.
This is in the same category as astrology. 'The Brain' got less than 50% things about me correct. It said that I like dogs better than cats, not true. It said I like to work individually, not true... I prefer working as a part of a team.

The premise that pictures and the choice of pictures determine anything about yourself is simply silly. I have different experiences than someone else. I have been to and seen different places than someone else. Different imagery will provoke different emotion in different people.
Unfortunately, usability is as much about practical use as anything else and so if green text on yellow increases readability but bores most users to leave the site it's bad usability:)

-Zaid
What scientific proof do Pairwise folks have that this works? They should test it and verify it before you use it for something important.

You might as well hire a psychic to test potential cofounders... I think you'll have the same success rate.
I had a Logo class in 4th grade (10yrs), which led me to Scheme the next year. So, yes, it does happen.
Will grant $ from a non-profit foundation preclude profitability?
I have no experience with grant proposals or grant stipulations and nobody I've spoken with seems to have an answer.
Would it be possible to get a grant with terms for developing a software tool that I could then sell as a commercial product?
One suggestion was to apply for a grant with language only about researching the effectiveness of a tool, and then use the funds to develop the tool.
If they had left out Arc, it would have actually been a good idea.
You can't run a database?

What's the point of this, then: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry!default.jspa?categoryID=101&externalID=519&fromSearchPage=true
Salesforce.com Apex--Similar in concept to AWS
Reaching critical mass is becoming harder. What are some innovative ways to expand your user base?
startup matchmaker: build a service to recommend and facilitate startup mergers to make it more likely they would succeed
I did come across such a site but can't remember where - didn't bookmark it as it hadn't been executed very well.
Using JS to detect exit page?
I was going to post this at Dev Shed, but I figured out that we probably have a lot of really smart people here, too.

Does anybody have a clue on how to figure out where a user went to after they left your site; basically a way to figure out the user's exit page?
The problem here is that it's much more tightly couple to their platform. They have a "Java-like" language and a SQL dialect that goes against their Oracle database. Still cool though--and another example of a way to lower development and operation costs.
This reminds me of the business card scene from American Psycho. God, I love that movie!
About 300+ teams have applied to TechStars so far. I am guessing for YC the number is at least 500. From this large pool, only about 13 teams will be selected by Y Combinator. So I am sure there will be some good startups even within the ones that are rejected by Y Combinator.

TechStars could also judge their applicants on a criteria different from Y Combinator and catch good startups where YC might not.

The word on the street is that most startups, however, wouldn't choose TechStars over Y Combinator. First, the initial investment is lower. Second, they aren't original nor do they have the reputation that Paul does. In the end, though, it all comes down to which program maximizes success for startups. For that, David had this to say in an e-mail "Our investors have funded several hundred companies over the years, far more than Y Combinator has done. Y Combinator has Reddit to point out. Our founders point at Newsgator, Technorati, Feedburner, Dogster, and tons more as examples of our past experience."

I don't think anyone hates TechStars, but startup's would have had more respect for them if they had at least taken Paul's permission for rewording and copy-pasting the questions :)
Issues in Structuring Relationships Among Members of the Founder Team
G4 Acquires TWiT
Some April fools fun.
I want to charge for my service. Should I take the time to integrate with Authorize .NET or should I just use RightCart?
This past week I listened in on Werner Vogels' ETech 2007 speech and he said, explicitly, that EC2 is not suitable for high performance, large scale, databases. My database is more than 10Gb in size. You can't have that large image on EC2. I guess you could get away by hosting some tables there that:

a) don't take up much space,

b) don't change much and

c) don't have to have the latest data.
Using RightCart will allow me to release sooner, but I will be locked into RightCart
Beautifully said! Fully agree with your assessment.

PS: Wish PG would implement friends feature so I could track your comments.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=sbcl&lang2=java

It varies but SBCL has an edge.
Integrating Authorize.net shouldn't be that much work. Usually getting the account approved and setup is as much work as the integration. Without knowing too much about RightCart, I'd say go with Auth.net if you want to do it for the long haul and want more control.
I love the comment about telling an adult from a kid. I'm 25 and many a times I just feel my peers are clueless, or should be more mature than they should. Maybe I'm just thinking too far ahead, but the same goes for dates that I go on. Dumb clueless girls actually turn me off (even if pretty). My friends think I am kidding when I say I am attracted to women a little older than me because they assume I am a gold-digger. But I'm not, I just like their maturity over girls my age.

Anyway, for the longest time, I couldn't really describe, I didn't have any solid metrics on how to explain to a friend, why I think a girl is mature/inmature. It's not about the age.

I think your point about pulling the "I'm just a kid" card totally makes sense. Kids tend to wait for something to happen (reactive) -- wait for their mom/dad/boss to tell them to do something, they need to be prodded, at which they will say "do I really need to brush my teeth now?" and groan. Adults are they ones who anticipate the next move, planning the strategy of where to go next, looking out for potential pitfalls and coming up with ideas of mitigating (proactive).

I guess I just am attracted to driven people, and dislike pessimists. I've seen plenty of people in college and in corporate who pessimists/downers like that, because they can't come up with new ideas/strategies. So by shooting at ideas of their peers, and bringing their peers down to their level -- they get to maintain the status-quo.
Not to nitpick or anything, but in the essay:

"If you're smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to start a startup, you probably are"

I understood what the last line meant, although it may seem ambiguous to some. It could easily have been interpreted to mean that if you think you are stupid, that means you are probably correct that you are stupid, and shouldn't start a startup.

But what do I know, I'm no linguistics expert ;P
If it involves story and gameplay, I'm interested. If it's just virtual worlds and interaction, then no. But I'll check it out, thanks for the tip.
Dude, you were already voted down when I saw you. I ain't mad atcha. To prove it, I've upvoted you to cancel it out (you can't change existing votes on News.YC currently). And don't forget to visit begthequestion.info!
Older programmers are more productive than younger programmers. I think the perception that goes the other way is based on teh confusion of measurements of productivity.

Zuckerman measurs productivity as lines of code generated, or worse, new classes generated. Kapor (I presume) would measure productivity as number and difficulty of new features correctly implemented.

It seems that in the late 1990s, and since, the number of "programmers" who are not hackers has risen dramatically. Hackers started programming at 12 because they were technophiles.

I have actually worked with a jock "programmer" who was proud of the facct that he didn't have a computer at home-- he left all his work at work. He was an extreme case (And he produced lots of lines of code, but not a lot of functionality)... but the trend seems clearly there.

Apparently programming has become a prestigous career- and this has led to the rise of defensive tecniques like unit tests, and otherwise organizing projects around the assumption that your "engineers" are idiots.

FWIW, all the job adverts that say "Rockstar" or "superstar" or "coder" in them - I immediately filter out because I assume they were written by someone who had no clue what a strong engineer looks like. No engineer worth their salt wants to be called a "Coder"- this is a derogatory term. Hacker is the word that they really should use, but the people who say "rockstart" are people who do not know that "hacker" means something other than one who breaks security on systems.

I see the word "rockstar" and I immediately know they are looking for someone with lower skill than I have. This is not arrogance-- its just experience with HR types.
My gut feels the same. But its also easy not to worry about ssl and certificates and stuff