skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess the Newsweek article is bringing PG a lot of unwanted attention.

\ "there is no need for a marketing budget when youÂve got Internet word of mouth.Â Of course - build it and they will come right?

In PG's defense I don't think he meant to imply that if you build it they'll come. I think he was emphasising the power of Internet word of mouth for an Internet business as opposed to traditions marketing channels. BTW. It doesn't seem like the above quote was PG's, unless I'm mistaken.

That being said, the author made some valid points. For one, even if the YC hopefully know they gonna accept the offer even before applying, giving them 5 mins to respond, and then suggesting that anyone not responding within that time in unintelligent makes PG come of as arrogant, if not a bully.

Secondly, I don't think PG can be blamed for a YC founder's personal choice to leave his pregnant wife to pursue a startup (this is a far stretch from the true story) and poor dietary choices of YC founders.
Is FreeNet really all that successful? I remember seriously looking into it back in 2000, when Napster and Gnutella and FreeNet were all the rage, and thinking it was incredibly innovative and potentially world-changing. However, back then it had no GUI and required that you search for files by hash code, both of which were showstoppers for me. I've kinda forgotten about it since, because none of my friends use it. The Wikipedia article suggests that it still has speed and usability problems. Have they fixed the showstoppers that made me ignore it in 2000?
Wow,

This guy's whole blog (not just the article) is based on bashing YC & YC funded companies. There are some valid cons to YC Funding: the funding comes at a low valuation, and it is scary to build a company without a clear path to monetization. But this guy basically repeats this over, and over, and over again. Don't expect any enlightenment. Lame.
Essay comes off as a poorly written rant. However, there is a sliver of truth there; PG would benefit from a little more humility. So would the whole program, actually. It sometimes has a very "clubby" feel to it - you're either in, or you're not.

Even though this isn't a big issue now, it might benefit them to address it before YC gets a reputation of arrogance. This is especially important, given YC essentially bashes a thousand egos a year. Even if 1% of those guys start blogs like this, that's bad news.
You're still missing the point. The biggest advantage of YC is advice and connections. (Actually, I suspect an even bigger advantage is a supportive peer group and a sense that you don't want to let your investors down, but nobody's mentioned that yet.) That's worth a lot more than a bank loan, because it's a lot more than money. A bank loan for $15,000 will not increase your startup's chances of success nearly as much as being accepted to YC.
touche, and second time on news.yc. third time, award me a plaque for being officially humorless.
What was your exact quote? Where does the 5 mins come in?
When the Weeblies show up for the meeting, they pull up Maples's Web site and, using their software, clone it almost instantly. Then they show him how he can use Weebly to tweak it easily and even redesign it. Maples's eyes open wide. Later he will explain that at that moment, he was determined to help fund the Weebly team.

How's that for a killer pitch!
dupe dupe
Particletree: Rediscovering the Button Element
Moral of the story: You can dress it up however you like, but there is only one person at the top, always.
Playfulness and Programming
Corkd Acquired by Wine Library Vlogger
Inaccurate title: there are at least 8 missing.

This article gets the amount of funding wrong. I haven't read the whole thing, but if they got stuff wrong that's in our faq, there are probably other mistakes.
Improving Reddit Stories Score Display
The State of Web 2.0 Design
got link bait?
How To Stop Hostile Jerks From Killing Your Social Site by Cory Doctorow
Has anyone read? Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
LinkedIn uses itself to find a CEO.
37signals Product Blog
This is a really good idea. I guess you need enough products though to put something like this up.
I always thought about something like this. This seems to be a more refined vision. I thought some sort of beta registry would be good, I think that chunking down to webapps is a great idea. I called the idea The Beta Point.
Scribd is pretty write-heavy - between traffic analytics, hit counts, votes, comments, favorites, and submissions, they're looking at several DB writes per page view. Good indexing and DB design can make your reads really fast, but your writes are still limited by the speed at which the disk rotates. And if you have a lot of indexes to support fast queries, they'll slow down your writes by some (fairly small) percentage.

You're right though - most of the sites I've been involved with have been heavier on the webserver than the DB. It depends on the application...
Looks like it's coming out in June
They're one of the most popular sites on Digg - not the site itself, but individual pieces of content hosted on the site. It's the YouTube effect - if you build a site that's viral, you grow exponentially, but if you build a site that hosts viral content, your growth rate is exponential.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=22277 ;)
Godaddy was #1 in NEW domain registrations for 2 or 3 years before they EVER made a TV commercial.
Good looking out. I totally missed that. I thought I read January 2007. Are you familiar with any of the contributors?
How to sell debt to investors
The blog is a bit of a rant but there are a lot of valid points. I doubt this is someone who got turned down by Y Combinator though since he/she knows nothing about the application process.

That being said, I think the arrogance is reaching all time highs and Paul Graham needs to get it under control.
I found the actual story more informative: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-linkedin7may07,1,5870712.story?coll=la-headlines-business&ctrack=1&cset=true
Rejected Y Combinator Company, Bandsintown now in private beta! Sign up For your Invite Code
Thanks, I have just been worrying about this recently. The site is now growing to the point where people feel anyonymous enough to get quite rude in comments. I've tried asking them to be civil. Sometimes it works, but not always; and in any case it doesn't scale. So when I get back to the US in June I will try to add some flame-retardant features. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know on this thread.
I'd like to see an AJAX ssh/terminal client. How do you plan to do that? Lots of XMLHttpRequest polling?

I hate that there isn't a way to do some kind of persistent socket connection in browser-Javascript, unless you include Flash into the mix.
What Lean isn't - The Lean Software Enterprise (In response to IBM layoffs)
I'll just throw out a bit of advice for no good reason: Don't name anything after a file format. They tend to go obsolete.
Why? Y Combinator funded companies don't build real businesses.
Can you give me an example of something YC does that seems
clubby, and that we could do differently to cure that?
Thanks for the tip. I'm going to pick one up.
Happy you liked the link. Did you take that course?
Search and Deploy: The Race to Build a Better Search Engine
Jonathan Schwartz: "You would be wise to listen to the customers you're threatening to sue - they can leave you"
Free tool offers 'easy' coding
An interesting article on the race betwen Google (before they got big) and their competitors (ever heard of Clever ?)
I created a YCombinator room to test things out.

http://www.meebo.com/room/ycombinator/
As true as this account may be, It would have been in the author's interest to not reveal it at all online, Since after all he still has equity in the company.
Frankly, I'd see why they rejected the site. It's an excellent idea, and I'm sure it will work if you guys really exploit the entire social thing - i.e, force people to invite other people. But it's an idea that is already out there, which is why I'd assume that ycomb did not want you.
The problem is that success makes other people feel bad, and so even neutral statements get interpreted in the worst possible way, and of course it also attracts haters (such as this 'livinginfirstlife' guy), who will repaint everything to look bad.

This was certainly the experience at Google. I don't think that there is necessarily a solution, though it helps to avoid things that could be misinterpreted, even though that also means avoiding some aspects of the truth unfortunately.
I'm still not buying unless a valuation is attached (his option four). Here is my reasoning:

Many startups are interested in using a convertible note for their early funding. I've heard three reasons:

1. It's less paperwork than preferred stock

2. VCs would rather do a Series-A than a Series-B (one solution is to name this first round "Series-Seed")

3. It lets them avoid having to determine a valuation

The first two reasons seem fine to me, assuming that they are true. The third reason is bad.

These convertible notes typically convert into preferred stock upon the next major financing (presumably the Series-A led by some VC), usually at some discount to what the VC pays (perhaps 20%). Sometimes there is a cap on this conversion price. If that cap would be a reasonable pre-money valuation today, then third reason doesn't really apply, since a valuation was in fact determined.

However, if there is no cap on the conversion price, or that cap is very high, then you are asking investors to give you money today, but not giving them the upside between now and then next major funding (which probably won't occur for another 6 - 12 months). During this 6-12 months you will build and hopefully launch a product and begin to prove it's market potential, or not. That's a lot of uncertainty.

Put another way, I'd rather wait 6-12 months to see what you build, how successful it is, and how well your team executes, and then decide whether or not to invest. And I'd gladly pay an extra 30%. However, if you need the money today, then it needs to be at today's valuation, not next year's.
I think this site has some built-in flame resistance because many of us are trying to facilitate a y-combinator application at some point in the future.

As far as improvements go, I think the lack of private messages hurts the sense of community, because communication is always one-to-many (which is much less personal than one-on-one).

The disemvoweling technique mentioned in the article was pretty unique, but I think the desirable goal is to train the users (us) to stop rewarding hostile posts with karma. That leads to strong disincentives to negative posts, without resorting to any micromanagement.
Uh, no, I'm just saying that their hiring practices are messed up nad thus they often hire good people for the wrong reasons and exclude good people for the wrong reasons, and sometimes hire bad people for the wrong reasons.

Like Zuckerman saying only hire young people-- some of the people he'll exclude that way would have been an asset to the company, and some of the people he will hire because of that policy are going to be a drag.
No, you're missing the point. I wasn't arguing against YC, but against VC money.

YC doesn't have liquidation preferences, and if it did, the multiple of $20k would be so small its not really relevant in this discussion.
I think you'll have a hard time curbing this sentiment because it's a time constraint issue. At some point you have to be exclusionary and focus on a smaller group.

There is a necessary and clear delineation between who is part of YC and who is not. Naturally, people who are not part of the group are liable to feel left out.

In terms of your treatment of the rest of us however, it strikes me as a real stretch to complain. News.yc is a huge step in terms of general community outreach and so far every time I've contacted someone from YC or a YC startup they've definitely been receptive.

So, while I understand Sam's point, I doubt anything can or should be done about it.
My analogy does work, but I wasn't talking aobut YC, I was talking about VC. I wasn't saying the YC model was broken, I was saying the VC model is broken.

This is not an "emotionally charged" analogy, it is exatly correct. This is probably not apparent because people tend to ignore the cost of VC money.

"And judging by the quality of your writing, age is not what sets you apart."

Seems all you got is insults... great argument technique.
Whatever the reason was for your rejection from YCombinator, I commend you guys for at least pushing through with the project and not letting it hinder your progress.

I'm still awaiting my beta invitation.

Good luck with it.
I've never posted to reddit. I think you're confusing me with someone else completely.

You are still trying to make a fallacious argument from authority, and are attempting to insult me for not doing the same?

I'm making my points, and if you will notice, I'm generally rather generous with the person I'm disagreeing with. Unfortunately this is not sufficient, as simply having a differnet opinion is the problem here, and the result is that people make insinuations on the persons character because they have a differnet opinion-- as I called you on and as you have not yet withdrawn, despite being more conciliatory in this message.

Or put another way- the problem is people are offended at someone having a differnet opinion.
That's cult-of-personality thinking. It invovles the fallacious argument "appeal to authority".

If I told you I was Tony Robbins and I was a multi-millionaire., would that sway you? I doubt it because, despite being someone who has been successful at business, he's likely not going to garner respect.

You should evaluated arguments-- technological or not-- on their logic, reason and scientific basis. And this is why those are the only kind of arguments I will make.

The counter arguments, however, tend to be naming "Authorities"... rathre than making logical or reasoned arguments.
That was a completely calm response. PG is engaging in exactly the behaviour he was accusing me of.
I don't see how "namecalling" is keeping a high signal to noise ratio.
what constitutes a negative post?
Thank you... As I had mentioned in one of my previous posts to all the startups, I think rejection should be more motivation for all of you than acceptance. It should push you harder to prove yourself and your idea.

Also invitations will be sent out in batches over the next week or so... But I am looking forward to everyones comments and help.

We have alot in the works, but are very very happy with what we have put together for you.
And right now the winds are not favorable for these startups, but because the winds were in that direction 10 years ago, everyone's convinced that's the only direction the winds blow.

Look at the vitreol I've gotten for pointing out that in fact the winds have changed... people don't want to believe it.

10 years from now, when the US is no longer the dominant place for innovation--- the major growth in innovation elsewhere will have already occured. One would have missed the trend if they waited.

Plus, small startups should not waste money using the old models- they are the ones who can least afford it.

The really cool startups-- right now-- are relocating to former eastern republics. They are saving a lot of money and leveraging the fact that geography does not matter.

But all you'll here in this forum is "You must move to the bay area". Seattle-- not acceptable, even though its the third best place in the US for funding...

Its a totally narrow minded viewpoint, and the winds shifted. The winds shifted in 2000.
How about treating trolls like spam?
"The problem is that success makes other people feel bad"

It's more that success attracts attention, some fraction of attention will always be negative, and the haters tend to scream louder than the likers. I'm still a loyal GMail user, I still visit Reddit frequently, and (despite some quibbles and a rejection) I generally think YCombinator's done a lot of good for the startup community. But you don't hear from folks like me often: we're happy, the software does what we want it to, so we have little reason to speak up. Folks with a gripe, however, are willing to put countless hours into venting their spleen.

That was one of the reasons I left FictionAlley (a non-profit Harry Potter fanfiction archive). 99% of users were very appreciative of what we did. However, 1% were not, and the 1% took up about 80% of our time and attention. When you're not being paid for your work (FA was all-volunteer), 80% is far too much time to spend on people with massive entitlement complexes.

(There's perhaps a lesson for prospective founders here: build anything worth visiting, and people will hate you for it. Not a lot, and not nearly as many as it seems, but you better be prepared for it and willing to put it in perspective.)

The latest fad in business now seems to be "fire your customers" - get rid of the 1% that soaks up 80% of your attention, so you can better serve the 99% that actually appreciate what you do. I dunno if that's applicable to YC; probably not, since they "fire" 95% of their customers simply through lack of resources and the haters come from the people who're not doing business with them anyways. Ironic, that is...
I didn't realize you had a five-minute rule. The exploding termsheet is back in style for the worst valley B and C-list VC dinks.

edit: I'm not saying YC are dinks, but that practice in the valley is very popular amongst the investors you want to avoid.
"I think this site has some built-in flame resistance because many of us are trying to facilitate a y-combinator application at some point in the future."

Yes, but it's also likely that that curve might be linear, and the total number either "hyper linear" or a steeper linear.
Something you wouldn't say in the same way to someone's face.
Best solution for this would be for you to start being neutral and less mercurial in your treatment of people on the forum.

As for me, since you think I'm a troll, you should delete my account. I'll move along... its no fun when for every 4-5 people you engage in good conversation you get 3-4 people who attack you personally, and the site owner is one of them!
How much do you think the founders at places like Digg and Facebook are making? I can guarantee it is closer to $200K than it is $50K.
No, anything that disagrees with the common "community" view... in this case, people's perception of what pg has said.
Avoid public statements about how great YC is, how much it improves the average outcome for a startup (unless you can back it up with hard numbers), and how people would be stupid not to accept it. People who would be interested in YC already know that. People who wouldn't be aren't going to change their minds because you say so.

I think YC's already doing as much as they realistically can to be inclusive, given their business model. News.YC, the Startup School, and Founders at Work were great steps forwards in that regard. But you're fundamentally limited by time and attention, so there will always be people left out. No need to make them feel even worse about not getting into YC.
I think it is also important to note that, on the internet, it is easy to misinterpret intention. The same sentence can have almost opposite meaning, depending on the context you read it and the mood you are in when you do. It is especially difficult if you read sound bytes, which are usually taken out of context in the first place.
Why the "YC says you go to the loan shark and pay %400 for your money" then?
Random, semi serious ideas, from someone who doesn't really notice or care if YC is "clubby":

- Sell YC.news t-shirts, or give some sort of 'make something people want' shirts that goes out to 1) random people on the news site, 2) top karma of the month, something like that...

- Open source the mechanical portions of YC. You obviously can't replicate your experience and time for the world to share in, but are there bits and pieces that could be spun out and made into templates to help those who aren't lucky enough to be able to apply/win a spot. Specifically, I'm thinking creation of the company itself, but perhaps there are other things.

Just some random thoughts...
I'd rather base my opinion of YCombinator on the opinions of those who have actually gone through the program and have an insight and perspective about the program that are much more objective than any outsider's. If there's anyone who'd claim that joining YCombinator is a stupid idea, it'd be those who were actually put through the process.

However, I do have to say, that being rejected from YC and being an outside observer, I do at times feel that YC itself seems to get a bit 'clubby.' One big reason for this feeling comes straight out of pure envy and jealousy for wanting to be a YC member. The other reason deals with the fact that I feel as if the connections/information gained through such a program are ones that no one on the outside has access to. So it's either you're in and you're connected, or you're out and left in the dark.
Put another way- what this forum should be is a place where news is discussed and people provide encouragement and help to other founders. People here should be judged on how they help others, and the reasons they give for their advice.

What this has become-- since you have clearly stated that you judge applications based on how people act here-- is an ideological garden where people are judged based on how closely it is percieved that their statements are in line with the Party Line.

For instance, there are many ways you can fund a startup- credit cards or house equity being two that are more viable now that you don't need to raise millions. But because its percieved by your fans that "Venture Capital" is the only way to go, any suggestions to the contrary are met with derision. This is ironic given that you yourself have argued for venture capital being less important now days.

So, even your ideas are considered "trolling" in this forum ... because ideological purity is a good that you have put forth explicitly.
What I find most amusing about this is guy is how he so passionately bashes Y Combinator on his blog, Techcrunch and probably any other form of medium he can get his hands on. Each time he argues how YC is worthless and irrelevant. The problem being that if YC is so irrelevant and pointless - why spend so much of your time and energy writing about it? I know my general approach to things I think are a waste of time is putting them to the side and spending my time on the things that are in my opinion. Since I value my time as a scarce resource I think that's a justified approach.

The logical assumption then is either:

1) "Livingfirstlife" doesn't actually consider YC to be so pointless as presumably if he genuinely believed that to be true, he wouldn't be so generous as to provide a stream of free PR.

2) He doesn't value his time particularly highly, in which case he's not exactly the type of person I'll be asking for startup advice anytime soon.

Perhaps one day he'll learn that childish tantrums aren't the most effective method for convincing people your point of view is correct.
I like Paul. He is one of rare cases when an engineer, besides being good at what he does (engineering), on top of that also has business smarts and CAN WRITE. That is very refreshing after all this MBA BS in the mainstream media.

As an investor, however, PS and Co is not a very good fit for vast majority of engineers because... because they give you only what... 5K per founder? That is much less than good engineer's one month salary after-taxes. That limits his investments to trivial weekend projects completed by fresh college grads. It's the investment side of PG, that the blog post is bitching about.