skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best advice I can give is this: give yourself until the end of the week to mourn. Be depressed about it. In fact, be REALLY depressed about it. Don't sugarcoat it, let it sink all the way in. Get all that negativity and depression out of your system.

On Monday, pick yourself up and work with what you've got. You've got lots of opportunities. Find out what they are and use them to their fullest. Don't let being "rejected" beat you. Give yourself time to grieve then move one.

It's what you're going to do anyway. Just shorten the cycle.
I can tell you've got a ton of emotion behind this post. Hopefully writing it all down helped put it all into perspective.

Not getting YC funding is definitely not the end of the world. There are a ton of reasons why you might not have gotten funding, and many of them aren't really related to how great a hacker/startupper you might be.

There are plenty of folks around here who are going to press on despite the setback [2]. No matter what you do, you're going to run into roadblocks, and part of being successful is getting past them without losing heart. Don't give up now, and good luck in the future.

[1] http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/1350/Why-Not-All-Great-Hackepreneurs-Get-Picked-By-Y-Combinator.aspx

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=11551
The scribd founders don't have it so bad. Think of the inventor of television!
what's the best scalable language?
Denver IDEA Cafe startup support group, every Friday, 2 p.m. at Panera Bread, 13th & Grant near the State Capitol. More info and RSVP at http://ideacafe.meetup.com/1
Funny. But funnier is that this is a pretty Schemey way to solve the problem--iteratively walk down the string to be concatenated and append characters onto the target string.

But it'd look prettier with parentheses...
Skimming the other posts, I saw one or two positive things dragged out of them.

"To get a good review from uncov, you really have to earn it."

K said something relevant a while back:
http://www.roadtoforbes.com/index.php/ksblog/why-the-80-20-rule-doesnt-always-work/

Anyway, even if they ARE utterly impossible to please, they're still telling you outright what you can improve. And an extreme view can sometimes help to put everything else in perspective.
Dinner-and-a-Movie Theory: Why Reddit Gets it Backwards
I discovered that a surprisingly large number of improv and sketch comedy performers are hackers. (something like 15%)
Here's a discussion about the various Lisp options:
http://programming.reddit.com/info/1edrw/comments

We use Lispworks, but if there is a better (especially freer) option, we would switch in a heartbeat. (We don't use Allegro Cache - so that wouldn't hold us back from switching). So far our systems are running very fast with LW - no complaints on speed.
The question should be: if you want speed, is it really worth using lisp? Maybe your time would be better spent writing a c module and then interfacing with the lisp interpreter.

I'm no lisp hater, it's a great language that offers some neat abstractions. But to really optimize code, you have to be intimately familiar with how data structures are implemented within the interpreter. You can avoid this problem by using C.
This was one of the best features of a nice little site that was called myspace.

Let me rephrase this: search by zipcode does this great already.
And, as yet another man has said, "there is no bad publicity"...
Good post. If I understand your point correctly, you're saying that perhaps we should link directly to the /comments page of certain posts on Reddit, instead of telling people to go there and wade through the garbage. Correct?

I still find programming.reddit.com to be a good place to frequent. We had a post about that last day over there actually.
Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

I feel that a lot of people I've met have a startup mentality hidden deep within them, but are unwilling to share it publicly. It's only when you pry a little deeper do you realize they share the same desires that you do. For example, I met 2 of my coworkers at startup school that I had NO IDEA were into startups because they never talked about it at work. To a certain extent, many people haven't come out of the "startup closet".
In Y Combinator, everybody knows you're a dog.
Well I know that Paul has Arc running on MzScheme, and I've found this site to be plenty fast. Not exactly what you asked, but if you haven't started coding you could consider that.
One of my favorite quotes about startups, which I original attributed to PG (due to [1]) but really belongs to Peter Steiner [2] is "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

The big idea is that so long as you're hiding behind the magic of servers and networking, your business even as a young, fresh-out-of-college startupper looks just as legit as any other business on the web. Maybe even more legit, if you put in the work to look super stodgy.

The odd thing is everybody knows all of the YC companies are run by "dogs," and that's where the fun is. In fact, I'd say the human interest story of college kids making millions from only $20k of funding is the biggest selling point for a lot of the YCombinator companies. Not to demean their products, but I can't remember the last time my mom got excited about, say, her Oracle online calendar. On the other hand, Kiko's a really interesting story.

All of this leads me to believe that simply being a part of YCombinator alleviates suspicion of all of the bad aspects of being a dog (lack of credibility, obvious inexperience, youthful stupidity) and also exposes all of the good aspects (mostly, the publicity, and perhaps the fact that you're more in touch with what's new and hot).

In the end, I think this is a net win for folks like me. To what I think will be a large extent, companies doing something obviously YCombinator-like will catch all of the YC benefits simply by association. I wonder, though, if companies that are branching out into new areas who can't manage YCombinator-style support will still have to struggle with being taken seriously.

And I still find it ironic that PG's the main reason something he's said previously is being proved irrelevant.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

[2] http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html
" How can we solve this? "

The real question is who would back the development of this. In startups, no one cares about solving a problem if this solution does not bring in tons of money.

I was thinking about this the other day. What you are describing, problems faced by a social site _late_ in it's life, are not of particular interest to most startups. Why? Because by the point this solution has made any difference, the exit has already come and gone.

(Not trying to be negative, but figure out how this system will make a substantial difference from the beginning and then you'll be set.)
Only in the sense of finite like there is a finite amount of computation that the universe is capable of: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/51924

And, "things to put on the internet" isn't that right way to think of it. Think of: "things to do with people and information". It may as well be infinite.
Basically. Let's say you have one NYTimes article. There might be thirty discussions about this article scattered across usenet and the web. So on average, the best discussion will most likely not be on any one site consistently. The probability that a single set of people will create the most intelligent discussion about a wide range of topics is just very low. So yes, basically, that it would be better to link to the best discussion for each article.
Sad, go back and read the second half of the first paragraph of the email you received. Do you realize the odds of getting into Harvard are better then getting an interview with YC and even then only about a third are accepted. Not having an extra 15K in the bank never stopped anyone from launching a startup.

I bet that more startups are started because of groups applying to YC. It's a good thing you applied, but move on already. My partner and I don't need the money. We applied more for the mentoring and camaraderie one gets spending time in a group setting. Instead of YC we're tapping the locals here in NYC, online and anyone else we can think of to bounce ideas off of, test our application and help get the word out once we've launched.

Go, work, launch. Let me know when you do.
I got my state vendor's license in high school, and bought Magic:The Gathering cards at wholesale prices. I resold them at school at just under retail prices. I setup monthly tournaments in my parents' basement to sell more cards. I would routinely have 30+ people attend.
Best language that scales? Or language that best scales?
I think there's a major problem with this, and it is that discussions come in all shapes and sizes across the web.

Think about it. Some blogs don't have comments. Some sites require you to register to comment. Some sites use flat threading so they are horrible for long discussions. Some of the best discussions are from mailing lists. Is the usual reader going to sign up for that?

No...the current aggregators have it right because they make it easy to discuss content. The problem isn't the medium of discussion, it is the people involved.
The ones that compile to native code:

- Lispworks (commercial)

- Allegro CL (commercial)

- SBCL (my pick)

- CMUCL

- OpenMCL (Mac only)

- GNU CL (not standard-comforming, but works well with other GCC binaries)

- Corman CL (commercial, windows only)

This is just off of the top of my head, please add anything I've missed.

Assuming you're doing web apps:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/352f440baa7aeb94

They (cl-user.net) have pretty impressive results with a single Lispworks process in a production environment; ~3.3 requests/sec, ~5million requests/day, uptime 456 days.

It seems that historically when you want performance+portability+paid-support you go for one of the commercial implementations. CMUCL used to be the choice among free implementations for performance. SBCL inherits the performance of CMUCL, and they reworte some of the layers to be more portable. They had some threading issues in FreeBSD, but they're now resolved and pretty solid after recently passing version 1.0. SBCL now has a pretty substantial user base, so you should be able to get help by just asking around.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/12/web_20_compact.html
online community & social networking super list
jeykottalam, gmail

Thanks in advance.
Cry me a river... I don't get it, why do you need these external motivators? If you are so good, why can't you get your project off the ground by yourself? The trick is to not beg for approval, you want to have the investors begging you to take their investment. Or so I think... but seriously, it sounds like you have been rejected three times, that is nothing. Think about dating - would self-pity and begging win you the favours of any girl? If everybody gave up after three rejections, humans would be extinct by now.

If you are so creative, why can't you find other ways to raise money? Besides, I think if you apply for YC you don't really need money (because surely you could get 15000$ somehow), it is all about the experience, right? If you build your startup anyway, it will be exciting and interesting, too. Who knows, next year YC might invite you as a speaker.
Xobni was mentioned in the main article. Along with the Weeblies and the Zenters.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_5654015?nclick_check=1
From my notes of PG's talk on Wednesday:

12. There are 2 kinds of judgments: Admissions and Grades
If you get a bad grade in a class, but think you did a great job, then you feel entitled to go and talk to the teacher and challenge the decision. On the other hand, that entitlement feeling isn't present if you apply to a college and get denied. This is because in admissions there are a limited number of seats available and a cutoff point at which no more people can be accepted. Like in the olympic tryouts - the top X% of swimmers for a country may get to go to the games, but those below that threshold don't get to go. It's not much different in getting funding - you can just slide off the edge and just not make the 'admission'. When I was rejected by Harvard I thought I sucked. Now I see it as laughable. Have you ever been to the admissions office? A rejection in an admissions scenario is not necessarily a reflection on you. At YCombinator we go through and rank all of the applications, then we take the top 30 for interviews. Recently we looked at some of our early teams and compared how they are doing now with how we rated them in the application process. It was scary! One of our most successful teams was at number 30! Just one more down and they would have missed the cutoff.
And now to choose which one to use! Fun! :P
There were groups in past batches of founders which were non-US citizens.
A beat up van. Ideally RV-type. You can drive around to fish for free wifi.
"He's my cofounder and I don't understand what he is talking about either"

That is so funny!

When I initially read your post two days ago, I was indignant at PG a la "throwing pearls (you) before swine (YC)".

Now I realize - and I dont know if PG would have had this insight - an entrepreneur needs to communicate ideas. I could not even read through your answers, much less understand them!!!
I think linking to a discussion about a topic is better than just linking to the topic but is still flawed. If you think about the scope of what's happening, the scope is usually very tight. At most, the conversation goes on for a few days, then essentially fades away as the topic (really, the post the comments are connected with) slides down the list and gets buried.

Once the post has been fully buried, the conversation has effectively stopped. The thing that would be really great would be to link prior conversations to new, but related topics. Let's say that next week it turns out that Imus made those comments under duress. Some lunatic pointed a gun at him and forced him to say those things. Instead of rehashing all that stuff again, it'd be great to dredge that conversation up as a starting point.

I know I'm not making this very clear. But I tried.
Actually you're likely to write slower code if you start with C, instead of starting with a high level language and then after finding out what is too slow, writing those parts in C.

Except it won't be too slow. Especially if you use one of the popular implementations of Common Lisp or Scheme. They're pretty fast.

More to the point, you're killing yourself on productivity if you are approaching things from a performance-central perspective. My advice to you is to forget C.
Are we in a bubble? Your thoughts
I've had bad experiences with PLT. I used it for my senior project and ended up having to rewrite in Common Lisp because I kept running into bugs in the interpreter. I'm guessing that Arc compiles down to a pretty well-tested subset of PLT, but if you start messing around with obscure libraries or really beat up hard on the macro system, you're asking for trouble.
I still don't know what he was getting at, and neither does he. :)
As recruiting good quality talent becomes harder and it becomes cheaper and easier to build a web application, the only competitive advantage left to entrepreneurs who are genuinely going to create value is savvy product sense and the ability to actually exploit a business opportunity.

I don't believe we're in a bubble (in the sense of a liquidity event) - but certainly the number of people who have never before considered starting a web business who are wanting to give it a go are coming back again.
udai00 (at) gmail.com
thanks.
The best way to find out is to quickly go over a "clean" language and see for yourself. Ideally Lisp, but ruby or python will do if you're impatient.
I've got an account now. Where do I go to invite more people? Do I have to earn invites?
That's a very inspiring way to look at it. I'm starting to feel better :-)
The Power of Small Gestures
Any interest in creating a YC news based app testing group?
What are you doing and which part is the speed bottleneck?

As I've mentioned before somewhere on here, I'm building a blog search engine in Common Lisp. That is indeed performance critical as you can probably imagine and I've found SBCL to work very well.
Is there any interest in creating a group of people who would be willing to help test one another's apps? My group might be ready in a few weeks, and I'd trust users from this board more than other random individuals to help flush out the site. We've got plenty of early adopters and interesting people here that could really be insightful. If there are other groups who would be interested, I'd gladly (p)return the favor of doing some testing or critiquing.
Tiger Woods can benchpress 320lbs
niran at niran dot org

Let's hope there are still some invites floating around here.
I use Hunchentoot as server, but nothing on top of that
So all this talk about accepting "any team good enough" applies only for funding, and not the interviews?

That would mean, incidentally, that anyone who was rejected this round might have been accepted in the last, or might be accepted in the next one.
It's sometimes difficult to fix performance issues in your app unless you know what's causing the slow-down in the interpreter, but that's usually a pain. Lisp is a constructive language, so a lot of time is spent doing memory allocation. Interpreters often optimize that by pre-allocation and such, but to diagnose that you need to know exactly when memory is allocated, etc..

AN example: I was using the python heap module to implement a priority queue with several hundred thousand values. The memory allocation caused by the dynamic growth of the list was crippling the performance. I re-implemented it as a binary heap in C, and it was asymptotically faster.
Question: is saving a few bucks each day by eating pizzas worth the decrease in health (and presumably concentration) that it brings?

I used to bet that good food, good sleep and good exercise would work better for my exams than studying some more.
summary:

Tease investors suck the life out of startups.
God I hope so. I just missed the last one, totally disappointing.
Cool, thanks for all the great replies. Here's a little about what I'm doing.

I've worked in the video game industry for the last two years, and I've been messing around with Direct3D/OpenGL for about 5. I believe wrapping these API's in an extremely high level language like Lisp might speed up creation of a video game by about an order of magnitude, especially if I expose only very high level graphical concepts to Lisp, instead of just exposing every API function.

Speed is crucial. I've layered Ruby onto my engine, but the problem was that if I wanted 60 frames per second, I could only do 16,000 Ruby if-statements per frame. That wouldn't work at all.

Even if the high level language I choose is only 4-10 times slower than C++, that would be fine. Ruby was about 100-200 times slower.

Investigating Lisp, I only require two things:

1) Somehow, I expose C functions to Lisp. These functions take standard types as arguments (float, int, double, char ...).

For example, I might expose, from C:

(Edit: argh, I can't write a star on News.YC. The following should read: "const char (star)str")

void print_to_game_console(const char str);

Then in lisp, I'd then be able to do
(print_to_game_console "Odelay!")

Something along those lines.

2) Lisp only has access to what I expose. I won't get into the boring details, but I'm distributing the Lisp script files for anyone to edit and run on other's machines, so sandboxing Lisp somehow is also pretty crucial. As long as under no circumstances can Lisp access the file system, then everything else is fine.

Thanks everyone!
Shawn
VisiblePath--a lot like LinkedIn, except it's useful
No one has gotten accepted into YC this round yet. For those that got the interview, they are facing the hardest part now. You feel cheated for getting an email, imagine how 2/3 of those who fly in for the interview will feel when they get a call Sunday night telling them they are rejected. I will personally be crushed if we're in that 2/3. But at the same time I know we have potentially a great idea that we can run with regardless of what YC's opinion is about us.

If you think you have a great idea that users will actually want, get up on your feed and go run with it.
The folks who made Crash Bandicoot did something like that in AllegroCL about 10 years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp
send invite to rkmr.em@gmail.com
Great! It worked for someone else, so I'm not insane! Now I just have to figure out how to do it.
"We developed a strategy for reinvigorating Adventure Games- Making them sell when they never had before."
Why is Yelp growing so fast?
i dont get it ... do they do too much astroturfing
When business models are acquisition and AdSense and products are features for MySpace I would venture to say yes, we are.
Blogflux Acquires Commentful
I don't think the successful startups this time round have adsense based business models &/or depend upon acquisition.

For example photobucket has built a ver impressive subscription business and facebook is finding interesting (in addition) to traditional ways to moetise its vast userbase (facebook gifts if projected to make $15m this year)

I just feel the cheaper startpoints mean that there will be sufficient darwinian evolution for the better startups to succeed. We're going to see more failures but less flameouts like pets.com or boo.com which took a lot of money but weren't nimble enough (because of the cost & state of infrastructure) to change direction.

I argue we aren't in a bubble.
The Mises article is incorrect. Grameen Bank's website (http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/) contains audited financial statements. The Grameen Bank broke even in 1984, hovered around the break-even point until 1993, and has made steady profits since then. It made approximately $15M on revenues of $112M in 2005.

That's not particularly impressive from a financial standpoint, but it's certainly not a charity. It's more than most Web 2.0 startups make, after all.
Screw that. I have better uses for my time than stages of grief. Five hours after I got rejected I took a job with another Cambridge startup, with enough equity for a chance at getting rich.
They had some killer stuff in it, from what I can tell from interviews posted here & there. But when Sony bought them they drowned GOAL in the bathtub and ported to their own inhouse platform. Kind of sad.
According to Merc News reddit was aquired for $12M - are they crazy?
Shannon Terry Is Pissed Off, Threatens Lawsuit Against TechCrunch
Getting frustrated for small things? First thing is one must understand that they may be better plans and ideas by better people. The assumptions that my idea is the best is the cause of these problems. When one is passionate about one's stuff, a slight rejection of that angers one. If one things that his/her own stuff is the best then why not be confident enough to keep working on that and may be who knows that D-day will come when you will be recognized.
nandan.naik att gee malee dott comm, please.
SMS Notice or PoorMansBerry: comments please
Yeah, I was going to go there too (update: Making them sell when they never had before."), but didn't want to say the obvious.
invite me plz. thx in advance! :)

nicholas.s.barnes attttt gmail.com
ditto that for tease customers and tease cofounders.
My ruinous experience!
Most of the people I know don't use their web interface to post. They either use AOL IM or most likely SMS through heir cell. That's why twitter.com's number are probably way off.
Have Questions? Here You Can Find Answers
SBCL on linux. Lightening fast. In some benchmarks it even beat C. The thing to remember with lisp is that you'll need to work to get your program to be efficient. It's not too much work but it's definitely something you'll need to do.