skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's up to you, obviously, but I found the pushiness extremely off-putting. You need to decide whether the core user activity is writing documents or inviting their friends. If it's writing documents, get rid of the invite clutter. If it's inviting friends, well, good luck, but the app is gone from my profile.
I assume, that YC prints out a stack of these applications and grades them on paper. Have the printouts ever looked like crap because of some weird browser thing? If so, is there any chance we could see how the application looks when it's printed?
We rate them online. The application looks the same to
us when we're reading it as it does to you while you're
editing it.
Lisp:Good News Bad News How to Win Big
In the essay "The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups" Paul Graham mentions how it is impossible for business guys to hire good programmers. I posted this essay because it shows why it is impossible and will give business guys a deeper understanding.
Doubt it. There are other companies in Sequoia, and we haven't been there a full month. I could probably tell you who it was though ;)
In Germany it is rather rare that a kid would go to a private school. State schools used to have a formidable reputation, but things seem to be changing. Parallel to a public discussion about rising inequality that has been heatening up in the last 5 years, the level of kids going to private schools is rising, nearing the 10 percent level.
Get your .EDU blog and .EDU text links
I disagree. This is one of the most stupid critiques of rails that I've seen and I just dont think people who voted this story up actually read the article.

Don't get me wrong there are good critiques of rails like from Bryan of likebetter or Django's creator, but this one is just near retarded.

A lot of the author's points you can find in other languages as well (such as pretenders in java or 'x' language), and most of it is just criticizing for either its popularity with startups or lack of enterprise adoption.

I just don't think the author has enough knowledge of either rails or ruby to really comment on it. (Ruby is a clean way of fast prototyping and it can scale if you replace the inefficient bottlenecks with inline C, ...)
Inspiration Package: 60+ Usable & Elegant Designs
I'm just wondering, what specifically about the Mac UI gives you significant productivity boosts?
General question: Should items posted to Startup News be more focused on business than on general coding?

I realize that for many (most?) people reading this site the founders are developers, but often I see things here that are right out of d-zone or programming.reddit.com.
Intro to Amazon Web Services for Ruby Developers
No, it is not.
It is actually more like a Department of Defense, Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) proposal.

Even if you are rejected, you can request feedback on your proposal - and actually, no less than in a meeting.

Whenever I have given a demo or presentation to an angel investor or potential partner; even when it is a 'No', I have gotten some kind of feedback.

It gave me a better understanding of the weaknesses in juwo.

This is more than blindly emailing your executive summary to the VCs - you are not entitled to a reply.

When there is investment in time, effort and hopes, one does expect some kind of feedback.

It is not an application for an award, nor is it an application for employment. Even applying for a University, one has an idea of the cutoff marks and GRE scores.

The YC application is an evaluation of your small business team, and idea.

Big Difference.
how about this?

"we could not understand your idea. please get feedback as to its feasibility from your local university, or someone with experience in the software industry"
None of them uses the whole space of the widescreen. Perhaps the move to widescreen was a mistake...
Someone should have told juwo he's nuts. He could have saved a lot of time and money.
It's not dating.

see
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32488

"And I could imagine that if you would ask them, they might be willing to give you more specific information."

Not so.
How to avoid emails being sent to bulk Folders?
dude, give it a rest. and read:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid_2.html

yc's already given you something better than what you'd get out of a canned one-sentence response: a fantastic resource in which anyone can put up their site and get a lot of feedback, for free, from a lot of smart people. 100% of the "hey news.yc check out my site" posts i've seen, including yours, have gotten useful, actionable feedback and have consequently improved.
Hi Everybody,

We are working on developing Social Marketplace called Onista (http://www.onista.com) and we are in QA cycle right now on our test server.
Most of the emails that our application is generating for users (like Invite emails or registration emails) are being delivered to bulk/spam folders on yahoo and gmail.
Any idea on how can we fix the issue?

Thanks in advance.
I know a technical writer (software) in Bangalore who earns Rs 10K per month (about $200?). If you know of a better opportunity, do email me and I can pass it along.
Nope. Also, it's not a clone in any meaningful sense.
Business Plan development 2.0
"posts i've seen, including yours, have gotten useful, actionable feedback and have consequently improved."

I agree :)
can you tell me why you think juwo is nuts? I am willing to listen, if it isnt malicious.
Yahoo used to have a nice whitelisting program (as recent as 3-4 months ago) where you'd send an application to mail-abuse-bulk@cc.yahoo-inc.com, and that seemed to do the trick for making sure messages went into the Inbox instead of bulkmail. I tried to find the site with the form and some info for you, but for some reason I can't find it now. =/

I did come across this article that may give you some help:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/abuse/abuse-5...

AOL has a pretty good system setup for monitoring and reporting why your emails are getting marked as spam. If I remember right Hotmail has a program where you can pay for priority delivery. And I could never figure out a way to ensure delivery on GMail.
Thanks for the information.
Ae you referring to the form at http://help.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/mail/cgi_bulkmail (This link was at bottom of the article that you gave me). I submitted the form. Hope Yahoo will help us.

Yes, Gmail is really a challenge. I am trying to play around our email headers to see if it helps, but so far no luck.

Will test on hotmail and AOL soon.

Thanks again.
I remember the dude at the Apple store convincing me that this wasn't hackable. Still, the SIM card hack is where it'll be really valuable.
Why iPhone will change the mobile music business
Top 8 'New to the Valley Survival Tips'
I saw your redesign of Jawed's homepage, and I got forwarded by Jawed to this Stanford MBA...=) I didn't get back to him as I think as a hiring email they should at least tell me briefly about their idea instead of just throwing the big names.
User experience isn't just visual design
Agreed. I think it related to point #3 here:
http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2007/07/03/learning-from-the-ip...
Wow, small world huh? ;)
(For those reading this later, the original subject line of the post was "DiveIntoMark unveils Project Zero" or something like.)
No opinion on the "nuttiness" but if you are willing to take feedback:

I did see this in juwo http://www.juwo.com/company.html

I often do not live up to it, but this is important:
The good news about Jesus can transform your life. Jesus died for our sins and rose again from the dead. If you become his follower, you will have salvation (moksha).

For a startup looking to attract co-founders I'm don't think this is very judicious. I'm not saying don't be religious just leave out any mention of it on company sites, that's what personal blogs are for.
I'm not sure what sort of case the author intends to make here. If he's saying Rails isn't the best fit for all possible projects, that's blindingly obvious. If he's saying you should think twice before using Rails when it is a good fit, most of his arguments don't apply.

The one I do think needs some confronting is the "no throat to choke" argument. It's just silly: if you research any sufficiently popular tool, you'll find out what areas it falls short in. If you aren't able to work around the problem as easily as you thought, you'll end up with delays and bugs. With a vendor supported product, you can choke your vendor rep until he helps you solve your problem. This usually takes as long or longer than fixing it yourself, and the result is the same: your project is still late and buggy.
A Case for Erlang
STOP sending emails right away, until you've corrected the problem. Every email that you send now that gets flagged as SPAM is being counted against your IP addresses and domain name. You are making the problem worse in your testing.

Sign up for a Tuffmail account, as well as accounts from similar services. Make sure that the SPAM filtering is set to the MAX for each account. Make sure that the SPAM filtering message headers are turned on. Then, do all your testing my sending to these accounts. Observe the headers set by SpamAssassin and other spam filters. They will tell you exactly what is going wrong.

Send the absolute bare minimum of email that will get the job done.

In particular, don't use email to send invites. I, and other people I know, file invites and similar requests as SPAM specifically to cause problems for sites like yours. I promise you that if I get any email from your website, it will be forwarded to SpamCop and other places, whether or not my friends requested you to send it to me.

Check your IP addresses of your servers to make sure they are not on any blacklists. Similarly, check the blacklists to make sure your domain name itself isn't on them.

Make sure that your mail server has a domain name, a static IP address, and make sure that the reverse DNS resolves back to its domain name. This is needed to get past ESMTP ELHO filters.

Make sure that you have a valid and restrictive SenderID/SPF record in your domain's DNS.

Make sure that the syntax of all your SMTP commands is compliant with the SMTP specification. Make sure the syntax of your messages are compliant with RFC2822, MIME, and related standards.

Ensure that you are using the following in the SMTP handshake (square brackets used instead of Less-Than and Greater-Than to get through the filters on this site):

EHLO onista.com

MAIL FROM:[XXXX@onista.com]

Make sure that the From: header is an address from your domain:
From: XXXX [XXXX@onista.com]

If you refuse to do that (because you want to forge your user's email address in the From: header):

From: Joe Blow

Sender: XXXX [XXXX@onista.com]

Avoid HTML MIME messages. If you refuse to avoid HTML messages, avoid messages with images. If you refuse to avoid messages with images, then embed the images in the MIME message instead of hotlinking them to your site.

Implement the recently-finalized DKIM standard.

Ensure that your WHOIS information for your domain is accurate, up to date, and has contact email addresses with your domain name in them.

Pay money to GoodMail and related services. You WILL have to do this eventually, because you WILL be sending a lot of email that people simply don't want to receive.
See: http://bliki.rimuhosting.com/space/knowledgebase/linux/mail/...
Welcome to Interweb, CA
How to make URLs case-friendly: 301 redirects, or just show the page anyway?
I'm still not aware of that. Ask away. This is a far more convenient place to ask stupid questions than, say, Startup School. (That's what I did. At the first startup school, I asked almost every founder I could get my hands on: "So, what would you do if you didn't have a co-founder?").

If they get your application, and it says "I am from India and can't leave", then by their own rules that's broken, but there's no penalty for asking stupid questions.

How you react, as you come to realize that the question you are asking is a stupid one, probably says something relevant about a startup founder.
URLs are case-sensitive, but on most sites they probably shouldn't be. For example, /users/Ben should work as well as /users/ben. This is true even if you have canonical links on your own site, because other sites may link them wrong, or a user will manually type in /users/Ben because he normally types his name capitalized.

Well, it's easy to just return the same page for /users/ben and /users/Ben, but is that the best thing to do? Or is a 301 redirect the better way? (So that users, including Google, never see the non-canonical URL.)

I notice reddit uses a 301 redirect for the likes of http://reddit.com/user/BenHoyt -- but some other sites just show the page anyway, like http://www.trademe.co.nz/ART/InDeX.HtM -- and still other sites are simply case-sensitive: http://images.google.com/ImageS
Would be thankful for some feedback on new Opinion Polling site, just launched
I would use redirects, the reason is that search engines will catalog the different URLs as separate destinations and thus lower your pagerank for that page, along with their positions in search results. Its best to have only one accessible url per destination.
Way, way too similar to Digg. "Prop It" is painfully similar to "Digg It". You need to create a unique feel in order to attract users to an already saturated idea, you can't do that by mimicking something that already exists.

The site doesn't have any focus. Its just polls on 'stuff'. You need to have focus. You are a latecomer in a busy field that has negligible entry barriers, without focus you won't get any traction.

The interface is slickly done, at least the login popup looks nice. But I know that I won't bother going past a login barrier to vote on polls about stuff that is trivial and not interesting to me (again, relates to lack of focus).

What it comes down to is that the UI is nicely done, but that it doesn't matter if the UI is nice if it isn't something that people want to do in the first place.

I don't think this idea is compelling. The implementation is strong, but I don't have any desire to use your site. I think the best investment you can make is to focus on a niche so that your site is somehow relevant to a group of people even if it is a small group, instead of irrelevant to everyone.
Ease of use, but most importantly, not having to reboot to run an MS app.
I've spent the last couple weeks teaching myself Erlang. The Programming Erlang book that comes out in two weeks is pretty good, and the folks in #erlang have also been helpful. The syntax is generally simple and memorable enough that you won't forget how it works if you take a week off from hacking. All in all it is pretty easy to learn.

I haven't written a huge volume of code yet, although that is partly because the language is so powerful that a lot of programs are only two or three lines long. For example, there is a function that iterates through a list one element at a time, applies a function to that element, and then outputs a new list as a result. This means that 95% of the text processing I've done has just been using this one line code snippet. (This works because strings are treated internally as lists, so you iterate through the string one char at a time.)

I'm not a hacker so I don't have a lot to compare it to, but so far so good.
Really, really slick looking, but not KISS enough for a poll site I reckon.

The main thing I noticed is that the current results -- which would be the most interesting thing to me -- are very hard to find. I reckon some indication of them should be on the home page right there with the polls listing. The run-down should at least be on the poll page.

Also, when I (finally) found the View Results button, the results appeared down about a whole page (in Firefox 2.0, but worked in IE7).

I agree with willarson about not signing up to vote on trivialish polls. Or at least make it much easier to sign up -- I had to enter my religion and 10 other things before it let me past. At most to vote you should just have to enter your username/password/email. I understand why you want that stuff -- for poll demographics -- but it makes it just too hard to vote on a simple poll.
Interviewing with Y Combinator startups?
Has anyone been through the interview process at any of the Ycombinator startups that have been looking for employees. How did you feel about the interview process? If you ended up working at one of these how has that experience been so far?
Get rid of the Prop It button and sort by number of votes instead.

Don't make me register to vote. I bailed as soon as I saw that. Just use cookies to identify users. If you get popular enough that you start to see abuse, deal with it then.

Colors not very cheery.

Titles alone are not enough to explain polls (e.g. Who's the bigger train wreck?) Why not put the options on the frontpage with the title instead of making users click through to see them?
Yeah second this .. loose the registration to vote. I'd love to vote on some of this but just won't do it if I have to register.

I observed that search doesn't work on option's. So although "which cola drink do you prefer? " has pepsi as an option .. searching for pepsi yields nothing. The reason it's important to have this is often I'm looking for what people feel about some product (pepsi/iphone/ubuntu) etc I don't want to guess what the question is.

Also I don't know what your monetization strategy is .. but I would hate to see something influence the choice of votes. like this http://www.betabooth.com/poll/What-Non-cola-Sugary-Drink-Is-...
If you want to have adverts make it non related to the questions asked.
The Importance of Picking The Right Host And How To Do It
Everything else but this, can be changed. This is non-negotiable.
"if you replace ... with inline C.." I think that's part of the author's point Java/Groovy/Grails offer a richer set of tools, now that Ruby/Rails .. don't get me wrong, I love Rails and am an avid proponent, but it is true that many have consumed the coolaid/channelled DHH and have been a little blinded by its capabilities .. not a bad article. Dude has also got an article supporting Rails as a choice .. both posts seem to come at it from a relatively "non-techie" perspective -- more from the Mgr view ...
If anyone tells you Erlang isn't proven and isn't "ready for prime time," punch them in the face. Hard.
If anything, I think this story just illustrates the importance of using small pages which don't require database hits. I've weathered several slashdottings, and my server has hardly blinked -- because the pages which slashdot has directed people towards have been static HTML, and it's easy to serve a 20kB HTML file to hundreds of visitors per second.

Complexity is the enemy of stability -- the more complicated your web site is, the more fragile it will be. For a web site which is always available, keep things as simple as possible.
juwo: give it a rest dude.

ever applied to Harvard, MIT, etc? even kids with IQs off the charts, SAT scores through the roof, etc. get rejected.

It's simply the law of large numbers - YC can cherry pick the cream of the crop of the cream of the crop.
"I think that's part of the author's point Java/Groovy/Grails offer a richer set of tools, now that Ruby/Rails"

Unfortunately he didn't say that in the article.

"Dude has also got an article supporting Rails as a choice"

I hate to be mean, but I hope it doesn't suck as hard as this article ala "rails is great because everyone in a startup is using it"

"both posts seem to come at it from a relatively non-techie perspective -- more from the Mgr view "

geared towards PHBs in a large stale corporation? Again I really fail to see the point of this post on ycombinator

Oh yeah something I forgot to mention - in terms of overcoming a rails app's inefficiencies/problems with scalability, there's also this magical thing called web services (REST, SOAP); you know a rails app could talk to a java or C based app on another server...
SBCL and Common Lisp are gaining users
Why Facebook Is Not A Viable Marketing Platform
The restaurant is noted at the bottom with the comments. Thanks to Kulveer and Jonathan Abrams for pointing that one out, I couldn't think of the name when writing.

I'll probably be eating there tomorrow ;)
How is the grocery store good for water? Water is free if you rent. Bottled water is a marketing scam.
Absolutely right. If the taste of chlorine bothers you, you could also get a Brita or some other filtering system. I abhor bottled water.
heh , yeah technical writers are literature graduates who are basically unemployable. If you know any good programmers in Banaglore making less than1500 $ a month, let me know :-). I know many MANY companies who are finding it impossible to hire even at those rates.
For those interested, I added a yc feature request for a section dedicated to hosting a few days ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32341
I think it would be nice if we could discuss vendors, prices, levels of service, and other pros/cons. For example, the ability to handle traffic spikes is something everyone wants, but I'd rather hear about it from a customer than a from claim on the vendor's website...
Rails has some serious problems, but the article does not address any of them. I would be glad to explain them for $175/hr.
Clean Energy Startup Claims to Violate Conservation of Energy
"Complexity is the enemy of stability..." -- absolutely agree here, and my most difficult decisions have been choosing between those two vars. I guess the problem is how do you build a useful and innovative system and still keep it simple?
How to react is something what you got learn at the first place.Apparently you have no idea what my reply was all about my friend.
Isn't this written by the same guy who worked for a Sequoia backed startup? I work for a Sequoia backed startup - the pay is great! Therefore I don't understand the pathological cheapness described in points 1-7. $150 for a cab, but renting a SHARED studio apartment? The supermarket is expensive but Quiznos and $2 tea at Starbucks? If Safeway is expensive the author is getting the worst compensation deal in the history of Sequoia backed startups...

The part about bikes is weird. Bike stores don't sell a lot of $3000 bikes. Well, maybe in Menlo Park they do. There are a lot of price points in between an $80 walmart junker and a $3000 Colagno. I've owned many bikes throughout the years and never paid $3000 (or $80.)

The final point about office space is bizarre and I am calling bullshit. No startup in the history of Silicon Valley has started a "bidding war" between VCs for free office space. The paragraph doesn't even make sense.
Lesson 1 - Introduction to SEO techniques
The Pmarca Guide to Big Companies, Part 2: Retaining great people
Certification?  Bring it on!
This special function is called map in other languages too :-) Next thing you notice you're using folds...
Instead I'd write a successful application in it. Usually showing people they're wrong is more effective than telling them so.
That would be too late, though?
Most Bizarre People on Earth
Craig Newmark on the eBay/craigslist deal of 2004
The Science of Success: Predicting Hits
Naver.com Beats Google in Korea using a Social Approach
I think you'd be more likely to get arrested for that than proving your point.