skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It'd be interesting to see just how much code is behind Twitter.
I personally have had enough of Microsoft's business practices, DRM, security, constant updates and hype, and have been reviewing alternative operating systems. I have settled (with full knowledge of the Novell Microsoft "agreement") on openSUSE 10.2 for the time being and so far have been very satisifed with the results. The Vista driven "leave all your obsolete hardware at the end of the driveway for garbage pickup" mentality doesn't wash. SUSE is running just fine on an old 1Ghz Athlon. I urge others to try some sort of current Linux distro (try more than one) and experience it firsthand.
Math For Programmers
reddit's review of YC companies
Well, one obvious solution would be to do something else, not to retire. Is retiring really what people aspire to, these days?
At least you got to meet the Y team and the other cool Y applicants.

Keep working on your startup and best wishes!
Viaweb source code: I want to see!
I love this quote from one of the comments:

When life gives you bubbles - take a bubble bath
ok, I'll pick my 4 favorite, its just that giving them away seemed boring :)
That's great! Well, at least for those of us on here who have a medical background.
This second bubble was made possible by better web programming tools and languages -- everyone becomes a PHP/MySQL programmer nowadays. These tools weren't that affordable in 1990's.

Technology made many things easier, like copying books and music, automating everyone's tasks, etc. But it also made programming itself a lot easier. Programming improves everyone's lives and it improves itself too. So bubbles are inevitable (as well as inevitable are some oscillations).
I doubt that the guy who wrote this understands what "bubble" means. I think he means "boom", and booms are not fragile -- not like bubbles.

Truth is, this guy needs to read PG's essays.
Facebook Moves into Twitter Territory
It was actually very easy to justify the valuations of many (but not all) internet companies in the first "bubble" although not by naive net present value calculations. The key is to model scaling up as a call option on a future larger version of the firm; you only get the larger version if your company ends up valuable. With a standard checking account type model the only ways to increase value are to increase cash flows or decrease your discount rate, but with an option other avenues become available.

For example, the lower the strike price of the option, the more valuable. So Webvan = enormous initial outlay = high strike price = bad, whereas two college kids in the Yscraper = low strike = good. Another way to increase the value of an option, and I think this is the critical one for the first boom, is to increase the uncertainty of the value of the underlying asset i.e. the hypothetical larger version of the company. In the boom, that uncertainty was huge, we will all be buying pet food online next year, will Google manage all commerce of any kind in five, etc.

So, interestingly, the very fact the wisdom of the crowd had no clue what Web 1.0 business should be worth may have driven the high valuations in the first place.

In the second boom it appears 1. Strikes are lower, 2. Uncertainty is lower = affect on valuations is ambiguous. That's basically the conclusion of article as well as I see it, just approached from a different viewpoint.
Google - the world's most cost effective brand
A family friend has been working on some project designing medical systems for future manned space missions, specifically to Mars. I think it's funded by NASA but not sure. I wish I had his brains!

I wonder if YC has gotten any space based applications?
I would guess that they liked the applicants (based on the applications) and wanted to see if they had any other ideas that they would be interested in pursuing.
Anyone know if YC's recordings of the '07 startup school talks are online?
Partial vs Full RSS Feeds-A Business Case
Greenspun has interesting things to say on occasion. It's a pity he feels the need to be such an ass:

"The folks who work at a non-profit organization are very interested in drawing a salary higher than their skills and working hours would command at a for-profit enterprise subject to competition. They are not especially interested in efficiency or accomplishment. "

I know several people who work at Cambridge nonprofits. They all earn about 1/3 what they could at comparable for-profit jobs. They do so out of a sense of passion for the mission of the nonprofit. Their lives have more purpose than, say, tooling around in airplanes.
A bubble can only be identified definitively in hindsight i.e. after it has burst. If it doesn't burst then its just industry growth.

I think the lessons were learnt the first time around and because the stakes are now comparatively very low the chances we are now currently in a bubble seem remote.
Yes, I agree that these types of tutorials can be useful, and they should probably exist in some kind of "tutorial repository" associated with different languages. If that was the intention of the person who wrote it, then their time was time well spent in terms of how much they might help others.

Part of the feeling I get out of these submissions, though, is "Hey, our platform is just as good as RoR/Arc/x because we can do what they did this easily." I was trying to point out that such activities are not really accurate depictions of how good a given platform is, because much of what makes a language or platform good is being able to "think in the language", to develop your design and ideas as you go. Once you have a solid design in mind, you could use just about any language to implement it.

That's why I thought it would be more interesting for someone to develop something new using a given platform, and show the kind of work that gets done that way. For example, pg often writes about how good Lisp is for writing programs when you're not sure of exactly what you want to do yet. It would be intriguing to see someone use a similar approach with their platform of choice, recording the process, in order to show how flexible it is and what kinds of issues come up from the very start. For example, how much re-writing occurs when a very small change is made? Does the platform provide enough abstraction capabilities to make the underlying implementation transparent?

As I've been reading On Lisp lately, I'm finally starting to get why pg likes Lisp so much. There's just something cool about being able to write macro-defining-macro-defining macros, and it turns out that it can make the development process much more liquid. Do these platforms (like PHP) support similar levels of abstraction? Judging from "For example, to display the time elapsed since a site was added, you could use: $time->relativeTime($site['Site']['created']), now that is awesome!" I think not, because there are definitely implementation-specific details there that hamper flexibility and would be better off being abstracted away somehow.
That first bubble was a "boom" until it bursted.

And what exactly he's supposed to learn from PG's essays?
Or they didn't realize just how directly the new company would compete with their existing portfolio company.
everyone becomes a PHP/MySQL programmer nowadays. These tools weren't that affordable in 1990's.

They're free!!! And they're widely available now which is why everyone becomes a PHP/MySQL programmer.
1) start another company
2) start angel investing
3) start coaching younger entrepreneurs how to change the world

This is what i want to do after i've started and exited my first startup
"Tom is Not My Friend" - How long does it take MySpace users to unfriend Myspace founders
What's your favorite entrepreneurial quote?
I have 2

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." ~Goethe

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." ~Theodore Roosevelt
socialism, risk aversion, retarded labor laws, few adequate computer programmers, tiny private equity market, most startup investors are not well-connected outside their immediate environment thus add little value
the question is: do i want someone to hold a large chunk of my equity who does not care about making money? me thinks not.

secondly, you state having your own startup. if this is not a shitty startup it will absorb all of your free time.

what makes you think your lack of time, apparent lack of connections, and lack of interest in financial gain would be a good deal for an entrepreneur?
Timing was bizarre - I just wrote a column about why entrepreneurs should NEVER retire!

http://www.gobignetwork.com/wil/2007/4/16/3-reasons-entrepreneurs-should-never-retire/10133/view.aspx
YC application benefits?...
Love the Roosevelt quote.
I'm sure most of the people applying to YC did it for the contacts/network and not for the money or at least for some sort of valuable feedback from pg et all.

I was really surprised to see that the rejection e-mail we've got was an automatic "for all" message, when at least I would have expected some sort of feedback (even something like "your app/idea sucks, do something else").

The YC team must have made some sort of comments and side remarks for every application and if those are encoded in 0s and 1s then it would help a lot of the applicants to find what those remarks were. I'm even interested in the place we've got in the final rating, but I'm sure the guys on #31 would be very upset to find that out :)

So, my question: it is possible to get something like this? At least for future rounds...
Agreed.

A quote I found (don't know any off hand):

If you think you are beaten, you are. If you think you dare not, you don't! If you want to win, but think you can't, It's almost a cinch you won't. If you think you'll lose, you're lost; For out in the world we find Success begins with a fellow's will; It's all in the state of the mind. Life's battles don't always go To the stronger and faster man, But sooner or later the man who wins Is the man who thinks he can.  Walter D. Wintle

Link: http://www.zeromillion.com/entrepreneurship/quotes.html
I thought about asking too, but there were 420+ applications for this round and it might be not enough of a tradeoff to provide that feedback.

Other than the obvious problem of people using that information to try and "game" the application process, if I was accepted I would prefer to have YCombinator's full attention trained on helping the startups out and less on providing feedback to those who didn't make it.

EDIT:

I realize that sounds greedy. What I meant was that I didn't get accepted and I'd rather see YC spend their energy helping those who did get accepted.
I dunno...I think the first bubble was a boom through 95, 96, and 97. Netscape, Yahoo, Amazon, Craigslist, EBay all had real products that made money and changed how people did business. It didn't get to be bubblicious until about 1998, when people started getting venture funding for pet stores.

It was right around 97 that people started crying "bubble!", and I think that we're at about the same point in the economic cycle that we were then. Tail end of the midcycle phase. Assuming the housing bust doesn't tank the economy, the real bubble years are still ahead.

If we are in the midcycle phase, it's still a good time to start a company. Capital's not flowing freely enough that anyone can get funded, so those who bootstrap good ideas now stand to profit handsomely when money managers seek to pull all their capital out of the failing real estate market and into the stock and startup market.

It's not time to worry until VCs start giving out $15M to any idiot with a business plan. You don't want to be that idiot.
There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart...pursue those.
(Anonymous)

(found on the website of Dr. Dan Garcia, UC Berkeley)
the company form you would typically choose is actually the Ltd. rather than a partnership; there is really nothing special to it, you can self-incorporate online for a few hundred EUR and will only need a mail forwarding agent

having gone the AG (company by shares) route before i would agree the legal expenses associated with the traditional legal forms are insane, plus you need a significant minimum amount of founding capital upfront

being in Innsbruck right now (for non-startup reasons) I wonder what brought you here?
Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can acheive. - Napoleon Hill
Presumably, it would be owned by Yahoo now.
Hey BrandonM, I am a big fan of CakePHP, the only problem with Cake is the lack of documentation, that's why i wrote this tutorial. I believe in giving back to the open source community, whether by writing code or writing tutorials. Also you make a good point about procrastination, guilty :), I will also give Lisp a try, especially that more developers are adopting it now.
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

-- Winston Churchill

You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas.

-- Paul Graham

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

-- Voltaire
NIKE " JUST DO IT "
onstartups.com scores a 98%
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ycombinator-StartupSchool
I put together a service that takes a URL and spits back the dominant hexadecimal values used. It doesn't work on all pages, but give it a try to see what I mean.

I've found it to be useful for when I see a site that has a color palette I like and I don't want to have to take a screencap and use the eyedropper to get the color codes.

Try putting in news.ycombinator.com
or
myspace.com, etc.

Link here:

http://www.todotoh.com/rgb/rgbanalysis.aspx
If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

-- Abraham Lincoln
I'm so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my bedroom and was in bed before the room was dark.

-- Muhammad Ali
Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.

- Plato
This website seems to cover what you asked..

http://www.ryancool.com/
We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.

- WH Auden
I'm looking for examples of great interfaces done with Ruby. I want to see visual/graphical stuff that goes beyond dropdowns. Maybe tag clouds taken a bit further?
i can ask
A few more...

Fortune favors the bold ~Virgil

You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them. ~Michael Jordan
"Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic." -J. Sibelius (composer)
Good Migration - Found+READ
Free Django book
Don't know if it's been posted here before but I thought I would share it seeing as there's been a lot of Django/RoR comparison these days.
Maybe it wasn't so much the business ideas as the greed that made the bubble burst. Most bubblers just wasted so much money on consultants etc., which really wasn't necessary. Since I heard this time around people are more careful, maybe this bubble won't burst.

Besides, I remember Ray Kurzweill writing that the Bubble wasn't really a bubble. The companies that really created value created so much value that they compensated for the ones that went bankrupt.
Sorry, I didn't mean "affordable" exactly in terms of money. The tools became much easier to use, which means a better learning curve, which means saving programmer's time, which means money.
waleedka - what is your email address?
Still, there was one clear and strong sign of a bubble before it collapsed: most public dot-coms gave zero dividends, or actually a tiny symbolic sum close to zero. That was a signal for any smart investor to make money now and run away.
Dividends don't mean that much: Microsoft in its dominant years (when they had 40%-plus margins and were raking in the cash) never paid a dividend (they did so only recently).
"Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming."
-John Wooden
It's their official documentation in a way -- sorta. I had some minor gripes with it while reading through, but for the most part it is very good.
More to the point, most public dot-coms had zero earnings, which is even more of a signal for the smart investor to take the money and run. Over the long run, stock prices track earnings. Zero earnings = zero stock price.
To paraphrase a famous college saying:

"Read the five posts above yours; read the five posts below yours; only one of you will have a successful company."

Do what I do. Don't worry about retiring :) But if I did hit it big, I'd probably do astronomical research.
I'm brand new to Python/Django so I suspect it will be a great way to get an overview that I might not be able to piece together so quickly otherwise.
Do it.

Do it right.

Do it right now.
Kyte.tv Launches-Everyone Can Have A TV Channel Now
As far as I know Microsoft always did pay dividends, always, and never stopped doing that. Can be checked easily.
Not at the moment, and I'm too busy now to write it, but there may be eventually.
Not exactly. Dividends is what attracts investors (well, real and smart investors), while stock prices is a measure of people's desire to have shares, as well as their sympathy towards that company.

In other words, stock price is a matter of auction, while dividends is a better indicator of whether your company can make money or not.
"You make what you measure."

(from Hewlett and Packard via Joe Kraus)
Godel disproved this.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - Henry Ford
No, the first time MS ever paid a dividend was in 2003: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/104643_microsoft17.shtml

Not paying a dividend is not unusual in the tech industry.
(Paraphrasing, possibly not exact quote):

"You only need to be right once"

-- Mark Cuban
Except that for this round pg said you don't need an idea in order to apply. That implies that they'll help decide on an idea if they like the founders, so an idea conflict should be resolvable by switching to something else pg et al. have in mind.
I was wrong, sorry.
Awesome. I'll definitely download these. I was actually looking for the videos though - they had a camcorder set up in the back. I'm thinking they might've not released it...
Success is not a place at which one arrives, but rather the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey. Alex Noble
Thanks - I thought it was a pretty nice tool.

I'd be extremely interested to see their algorithm.

I wonder how related it is to the SEO type page optimization calculators - it seems not much. My "seo optimized" sites have a lower ranking (30-60) than my highly trafficked site (80).

According to the page: The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over a dozen different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.
Recent trend: Increase in email bankruptcy
at least I would have expected some sort of feedback (even something like "your app/idea sucks, do something else").

This comment -- http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=14882 -- in response to this article -- http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/04/american_idol.html -- might give you an idea why they won't provide more specific feedback.

But I agree with you: a more specific feedback would be better.
You're over-estimating how much time they can spend on each of the written applications. There were hundreds.

I was impressed to learn that Paul personally speaks to each group that makes it to the interview, but is not accepted into the program. He does just what you're asking: explains why the group wasn't chosen and what they can do to improve the odds in the future or with other investors.

And, as another response to your post mentioned, there is no benefit to YC to enabling groups to game the application process. Everything, everything, everything you need to know about the process has been documented by Paul and many of the groups who've been through it (both accepted and declined).

But I'll sum up:

Build something people want. You need to prove you're building something people want. A "proxy for demand" is necessary if you're inventing something new, or evidence that users want what you're building rather than your competition if it already exists.

Be capable of building what you say you want to build. Link to a website or product that's in progress, or at least a website or product that you've built in the past. I get the impression from my brief exposure to the process that one of the more frustrating things for YC is seeing a smart group with a good idea, but without the obvious ability to execute. This is why they've discontinued requiring an "idea" on the application. Just prove that you and your team can build great things. If you don't have that evidence...why would they choose you when there are dozens of groups that do have evidence of building great things. This isn't school where each project stands alone. Show them your track record. There's space for it on the application.

That's pretty much it for the early process. Then you've gotta pull off a demo for the interview day, and show extreme passion for building a business. Very few no-demo groups make it into the program, and I believe the percentage is shrinking (and I suspect the ones that do get in without a demo have a long and fancy track record--I bet Zenter would have been in no matter what because they have a kick ass track record of building things people want, but they also had a killer demo that they'd built in the weeks prior to the interview). It can be partly mocked up, or carefully orchestrated to avoid the bugs, but they'll see through wholly fictional demos so don't try to fool them--these aren't your typical non-technical investors.
nostrademons gave a fine answer to this.

The fine point here is: there is a difference between a boom and a bubble. Boom == increase in activity supported by actual innovation. Bubble == increase in activity based on marketing fluff or other unsustainable models.

PG talks quite a lot about this kind of thing; in particular, he points out that a boom can sustain for as long as there is innovation (wealth-creation) to support it, and that there is no reason the economy can't support, say, 1000 people working on startups rather than 1000 people working for IBM.
He might have disproved it as a complete axiom but I see the value of this quote in that things must be conceived and believed before they can be acheived.
"Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night." -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The problem with conventional databases
PayPerPost acquires Zookoda
I'd choose JavaScript instead, since it already has most of what he explained.
I like the potential ability to enable a truly wireless home environment where electronic devices all use wireless tech in place of physical cables. Speakers would be the first thing I would want to receive wireless power in addition to the wireless data signal.
So what we need is a DB that stores itself completely in memory and only writes to disk every Nminutes?
No, it can write continually, but in a sequential fashion.
"For sequential access, DRAM is about 62x the speed of disk -- it's slower, but only by a few orders of magnitude."

Shouldn't that be "it's faster"?

Excellent post otherwise, btw.
I think he meant the disk, not the DRAM, is slower.
"The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain

And simple to express:

Err

and err

and err again

but less

and less

and less."

-- Piet Hein via Don Knuth and Ryan Brush

http://toomuchcode.blogspot.com/2007/02/imperfect-approximation-of-perfect-code.html
I just read up on memcached, now I get it. Very nice ;)
This issue is fundamental to the current web 2.0 startup approach of fast and cheap feature development. It becomes more and more about marketing, branding and user experience and less and less about engineering.