skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Some simply like the control, autonomy and culture of a startup."

Will people really get the opportunity for that, though? If the idea isn't "theirs" in the sense that it was (more or less) handed to them as something to work on for you, will they feel the same freedom to change or modify it as they would with their own startup? And isn't that flexibility a necessary component for a startup's success?

It's a delicate psychological issue... as students, we've been very much conditioned to respond to an authority figure (teacher, boss), and if you don't want to fall into that role, you should be consciously careful not to.
Joe Gregorio summary of ETech 07 themes ... lots of data,

- distributed

- joinless

- de-normalised

- no transactions

MegaData
I was rejected by YC for the 2006 WFP. I created an app with no funding that didn't make any money, but gave me credibility. As a result, my current (new) project is funded. If it had kept looking for funding instead of just building something, I probably would have given up long ago.

The true ethos of a hacker lies in building stuff. If you get rejected, just keep building stuff!
Brad Fitzpatrick's YAPC::Asia 2007 Presentation on Scaling LiveJournal
I'd agree. The more environments you can work in the better, but often will power is as much about being smart enough to give yourself the ambient conditions you need to succeed as it is about just mandating how you are going to behave.

This only goes so far though. Daniel's probably right that you're in trouble if you require another person to motivate you to do work, but I don't think that's what you meant in the first place.
Web 2.0: The End of the Innocence?
This is exactly what I got from the article, and I totally agree with you that the headline is malformed. What it boils down to is that you should not be waiting for YC funding in order to begin work on your startup. Just work on it when you can, put something interesting together, grow it slowly (i.e. over a period of months instead of some huge launch), and go full-time when the opportunity presents itself.

I also have to agree with the others that the writer of the article kind of missed the point of the environment and guidance that YC provides. But then again, perhaps some of the applicants are only applying because they think they need the money.
How DARE you call me a liar? You work in a PR firm, so you use WORDS. I use LOGIC.

The point of my thread was that the author was being a jerk to Paul and should apologize. When I posted the quote where it's clear the author is insulting Paul, you got all uppity about it.

"your initial comment said that the author should apologize for comparing Paul to the musician."

At what point did I deny that I "compared Paul to the musician?" I never claimed I never said that. I simply replied to you and posted his quote you might have missed where the author said "YC is a waste of time" and also says, Paul is a bull who speaks "shit". That's why I said the author should apologize.

The author obviously meant to say Steve instead of Paul, in the intro. I didn't confuse that part of the article like you arrogantly believed. The reason I compared the two is because the user shows disdain and hate for the YC, so much he even confused his friend and Paul's names, when the two had nothing to do with one another.

You work in public relations so you're probably very good at attacking people. You're a liar and exaggerate by trade.

Do you understand it now? Or are you attacking me just because you're a PR person trying to test your training?
John Battelle reveals adsense revshare split
I find that even though my desktop environment is geared toward productivity (i.e. I can switch quickly between vi, the shell, firefox, etc), I actually get more work done from on campus when I VNC to home. That is, I waste less time doing things like reading random posts on this site, and actually do what I set out to do. Even now, I have a homework assignment due in about 10 hours that I can't bring myself to work on.

So I must agree that at least having some sort of separate workspace must help somehow. I think the real root problem, however, is to layout a schedule for yourself and follow it. Going to an office forces you to do that; writing a schedule down and being committed to following it could feasibly accomplish the same goal.

Note to self: make a schedule.
Oh, I totally get that. The "problem" is that of building languages on top of Lisp, which is really half of the point. The languages that can be trivially built on top of Lisp generally look like Lisp. I would like to be able to use a language with Lisp's capabilities to build a new language which looks completely different.

I'm not really asking for an answer here; this is really just a thought exercise on my part that I thought I'd share.
In fact, I have this question of a couple of website ...
For people on a budget, what makes sense?

So far, the way I've worked it ... I know a few people or friend-of-a-friend.

But what are the better and cheaper web teplate design companies out there?
Giving the Customer Control
I had a sneaking suspicion that that was the case.

This reminds me of something that an Associate Professor at Ohio State said when I was presenting on a mathematical tool that I was (and am) implementing. He couldn't remember the order of operations, so he was having trouble parsing the statement:

(forall x, y in Z)(x >= y AND x <= y ==> x = y)

That led him to ask why should I not just include the unnecessary parens, i.e. ((x >= y AND x <= y) ==> x = y), which then led to the question of where to stop adding parentheses. Finally, he recalled talking to another professor who made the case that having rules for order of operations is a bad idea (because those rules have to be memorized), and why not just parenthesize everything? I pointed out, of course, that he was almost exactly describing Lisp.

That thought, however, led me to consider the idea of making order of operations always evaluate left-to-right, except for parenthesized expressions, which would be evaluated first (in the same manner). Leveraging this idea, perhaps it would be possible to escape the hold of exclusively using s-expressions?

My main goal would be to write a general-purpose language which could be used for writing any other language by using the macro facilities, instead of being forced to write Lisp-like languages as appears to be the case with Lisp. Of course, maybe to get that general, you may as well simply use lex and yacc to write a compiler.

Well, anyways, these are mostly just ramblings, and I'm glad to see that others are interested in this idea.
In Praise of a Blank Page
Many cool articles go missing after a day or two...
Where Search Stumbles
10 Things I Love About the Charlotte Airport
Goodbye to Office? Not Yet
What I said may have come off more stringent than I had intended. Of course there are optimal places; that's a given. I mentioned an extreme case: absolutely requiring very particular conditions to work, an office for example. I'm saying that startups greatly benefit from adaptability, and if you can hack away in your apartment (integrated with living), it likely will be the most productive stage of your company's growth.
Because its new. There is a More button on the front page
zip codes (post codes) & search engines don't mix, yet.
web based tool directions & kinks to be ironed out
Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg
Google Video: Augmenting Social Cognition, From Social Foraging to Social Sensemaking
I agree that the point he brings up would greatly benefit the corporate world, but can the same be said of open source projects or startups? In general, these types of programmers seem to be perfectionists anyways, never feeling content until every possible feature is added. If, for them, the standard is "just right or nothing at all", I don't think anything would ever get released.

In summary, I think the article makes a good case study for the types of production that lend themselves to infrequent releases, but when your production model is based on evolutionary change, I think the "blank page approach" would be a bad idea.
Total gold.

This is true especially today where I think most of us here have totally bought into release-quick-release-often mantra. That is absolutely good. But...on top of that mantra if you add an added condition for quality it will significantly give you an edge from another garage start-up that is on average not that worried about quality as about launching quick.

Now more than ever I think quality at launch matters as a point of product differentiation. Take that extra week to make the user experience better; or hunt out those odd bugs.
Things You Won't See in a Business Plan
Google Seeks Help with Recognition Technology
old but useful insight into old software re-examined to solve hard problems in reading text and interpreting it (OCR) ~ http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr
He said, "I read that thing that Paul wrote saying that anybody who contributes regularly is going to fare better. That's shit from a bull."

All I said was the above, and you started accusing me of editing my posts. Why? I thought you'd say, "OH, I see why you think he should apologize to Paul."
I voted it up because I thought there were some truths in the article that the people whose only plan is to get YC funding could benefit from reading. I agree that the headline is poor, but I still think that there is plenty of truth there.
I read the abstract and -- pardon my ignorance -- decided not to read the rest.

It basically says that, referencing the friends feature, users tend to like submissions made by friends, and thus this type of "social filtering" may be useful in targeting information. The paper concludes with "Promising or perilous, social media appears to be the future of the web."

I'm sure it gets more interesting, but in terms of common sense, you won't lose much by reading the summary I just gave.

What I want to know is how a social network, designed to a certain style, with a certain target audience in mind, needs to change itself to suit its changing audience, based on the socially filtered information the users produce.

The article also mentions tyranny of the minority. One front page, many users. Limited resources. Competition of resources. A useful discussion would be on what kind of design approach would allow more flexibility in distribution of resources.
Does the fact that other companies have started imitating Y Combinator bother you? In one sense, I know this will make it harder for you to get people with the best ideas (but I wouldn't worry about that for at least a few years - you're way too far ahead of anyone else). But for the community, having the ability to get a little funding for a larger number of startups could turn out to be a good thing.

Even if you can work with 30 startups in each session, that is still a tiny fraction of all the applications you're getting. There must be projects beyond the ones you will accept that still have a shot at becoming successful. If other people are willing to give funding/advice, couldn't that be a Good Thing?
I posted over at scribd, but I see the intelligent conversation is here, so I'm going to repost. I hope no one minds:

You're making the right points but drawing the wrong conclusions from them. Yes, users need to be your highest priority, yes you need to have the drive to succeed that is reflected here by not relying on Y Combinator to be your ticket to wealth, Yes you need to get out there and actually DO; actually BUILD. But these are precisely the kinds of people and ideas that y combinator IS GOING TO PICK.

The fact is that Paul Graham says these same points time and time again in his own essays, and so anyone that is applying to y combinator without these things in mind is obviously not very bright. But your conclusion is not very bright either. Someone who really had all the qualities you describe would recognize that while y combinator doesn't mean success or failure, it provides a number of extremely valuable resources (of which money is only one of, and not #1 of, the list). I certainly wouldn't want my competitors to be in a y combinator group that I was rejected from -- that is a bad sign.

To reiterate, good points; bad conclusion.

My first time at news.ycombinator, but i've been reading paul graham's essays for a while now and am increasingly impressed. I'll be back
Delicious tags & machine learning
"What I've learned so far about making yourself a career in writing software"
Basically, given a proof P of a statement expressed in n bits, you can in polynomial time with respect to n create a new PCP proof Q which spreads out (somehow?) P, including the errors in P. Since the errors are spread out, with high probability, you'll catch an error choosing a very small number of bits of Q.

It's like MAGIC... Especially since they don't explain it at all in the article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCP_theorem
The time span cited in that study was an aberration; anyone with an idea was getting money thrown at them. There is also a great big chasm between "still in existence" and success. If you sell-off assets for the benefit of creditors your company can still exist but it would be hard to call that a success.

The numbers I hear from my VC friends is that around 50% are out of business after the 2nd year. They see more of teh picture than I do so I trust they are better qualified to make teh call.

My opinion is that more companies fail because of incompetence than insufficient funding. If you really have a great idea you can make it work. The trouble is that most make some big mistake and spoil the well.

I think starting a company is one of the most exhilarating things you can do. I wish more people would try it. I also wish more of them would try to understand the basics of business operations. This is where I disagree with Paul. I have seen too many $100 million ideas ruined by founders mistakes. Too often the time has past before they can regain their opportunity.

I still encourage everyone to give it their best shot. It's a great ride, up or down.
Not necessarily -- it makes sense.

He realizes that a startup won't magically succeed by being a part of the right group or having the right connections. It still takes extremely hard work, undying dedication to users, timing, etc... YC is only one cog in the wheel, and plenty of startups actually succeed without them -- which might seem disillusioning to some, especially those that hang around these boards too often.

I believe that's what he's getting at, anyhow.
I am also loving YC News - very focused, top-notch content. Hopefully it wont get too popular to the point where we see digg-type spam. I like it just the way it is.
"Some simply like the control, autonomy and culture of a startup."

But those are the people that work for startups, as early employees. And they can frequently make more than $15K from it.

The folks applying to yCombinator are typically those that either don't want to be employees or have already been employees and decide they want to move on. They wouldn't even have a yCombinator app if they didn't have their own ideas. If you want someone to work on your idea, you have to compete with the hundreds of other Boston-area startups that are now hiring.
http://iolanguage.com/
I don't understand; what do you mean? Do you mean, why
is there no More link on the New page?
True, but Microsoft and every startup has a specific set of circumstances that may be exclusive to their situation, whether it be timing (late 1970s), competitive landscape (big slothful IBM), location (being able to live in low-cost Albuquerque and still get clients), etc. To base your entire future around what worked for Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1980 may not be the wisest decision.
I can get to see 150 article links, the more button works for me and can go to 3 pages @50 links each
I still remember wordstar which used to be the word processor around. Then microsoft with its usual glitz and ease of use pushed word and wordstar started to slip into coffin. Now cool tech is pushing MSFT on back foot but they will always copy and get back to clean these new players. So it is to be seen if MSFT is tied down and denied the market share
Hmm. According to that, the theorem applies to propositional logic. Propositional logic is a very weak system; I don't think it can state the Riemann hypothesis.

Edit: I take that back: propositional logic definitely can't state the Riemann hypothesis. PropLog is complete, which means that by Goedel's incompleteness theorem it can't even model the natural numbers, much less the complexes.
As people say that there is a whole lot of space for everyone in search technology. The author is right in pointing out things and it is more or less like understanding limitations of the current technology and is more like a hint for people to get into this and who knows they may get space in search space and one day overhelm google
hmm will tell after the best ones are selected. Not wise and fair to release details :)
I think hiring is the root cause behind this kind of "good enough" attitude. Most companies treat hiring as a chore to be got out of the way as quickly as possible. The people they hire treat their projects the same way. Mediocrity all around.
This past session (w2007) several of us have been working from home (Weebly, Zenter). OTOH, the crystal towers situation is quite nice, it beats any office i know of hands down. Several other startups chose to go to an office b/c they were used to that (heysan), so i think it goes both ways.
Very Darwinian...but if anything else getting rejected should be seen in a positive light. As a time to get to know your users and build something that they will find useful. Just like in PG's essays.
Lessons from the 1990s Bubble- don't get big fast.
Or put another way, perserverance has resulted in business success... for those who had a long term strategy.

The herd instinct is dangerous.

High Tech startups are less likely to fail (though the %48 figure was "companies seeking VC funding" it doesn't break down how many got it. Possibly, those who did not get it had a lower failure rate.)
Haskell vs. Lisp vs Erlang for Concurrency Oriented Programming?
Congratulations! This is the first flame war on Y Combinator. Now let's just Godwin it and be done.
History- Learned Lisp in High School in the 1980s. Since then, procedural (Pascal & C) and then about 17 years of object oriented development.. C++, Java, Ruby, Objective-C.

I am interested in concurrency oriented programming now... and have been directed to Erlang. Others seem to talk about Lisp alot. (I remember enjoying it, but feeling that it wasn't too practical.. but it was only the 3rd or 4th language I learned and I was 17 at the time.)

What seems to be the natural parallelism in Erlang really appeals to me. The 1960s era syntax does not. (I still think in objects.) I haven't investigated Haskell much, or Lisp recently.

If one wants to solve a problem that is naturally highly parallel (like raytracing) what language would you recommend?

I'm open to hearing about other languages than the ones I mentioned.

I'm not interested in careful programming to be thread safe, or mutexes, etc.

Also, I don't really want to start a flame war... but haven't seen many opinions, or specifically an argument for Lisp from a concurrency viewpoint. And if there's a much better language than Erlang out there, I'd love to find out about it now.

And of course, meta arguments by posting links to others advocacy of particular language also appreciated.
You'd be surprised at the kind of basic feedback you can get when you just tell someone your idea. I've heard that PG will respond to emails of this type. I got feedback from Dharmesh Shaw when I told him my idea.

In biotech, I emailed Joerg Poetzsch to ask a question about early stage funding. I got a lengthy response from him. Then, I told him my idea and we've had a wonderful exchange since then -- he ended up writing me a letter of recommendation and said he is interested in selling my product for a percentage of the revenue he generates.

So, if you want basic feedback about your idea, email someone with a blog or website and I promise you can get some feedback. If someone takes 1% of your company for that, you're getting ripped off.
This is far from new, but it is a problem. Ironically, the old school SOAP 1.1 way of doing things (with a header and a post) is immune from this.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't JSON and the script tag way of calling things explicitly designed to DEFEAT the same origin policy? If the entire point of your data transfer method is to make it possible for anyone to request your data, you should only send data that everyone should be able to see =P
It seems you forgot the most important part: your service :)

The UI presents your service, and the scaled out servers power your service, but without the service, all you have are some pretty pictures and a bunch of hardware.

Also, scaling is not a solved problem in the general sense. You have to find ways to elegantly and efficiently solve _your_ problems specifically. I say with confidence that if you aren't willing to be very involved in the scale out of your service, you'll likely design a service that won't scale out.

(For an example of an elegant tool used in scale out, see Facebook's thrift.)

Also, if service agnostic scale out is a small problem for you to solve, I encourage you to get rich by solving it. I'll buy your solution if it works.
Actually, there is a subtle point in the way YC is approaching this whole thing and the person missed the point. Assume there exists a world without YC, how many people will spend time doing something they believe on and make effort to take it to a point so that you can show it to someone? Probably a vast majority would anyway do it. say 90%, what YC is trying to do is - try to squeeze a percent or two of the remaining 10% by making them work by promising them that they'd fund if you come up with something interesting and that adds a certain value to the society as a whole.

So it is certainly a waste of time if - you think of an idea, write an application and decide to work on only if YC is funding it..

But not - when you are working on something or planning to work on something, YC offers you that last bit of motivation to actually go and do it because you want to play the YC gamble.

And it might happen that otherwise, you end up building something, YC rejects you, but you say to yourself, what the heck, I have already done something so lets take it to a logical conclusion (may be 90% will chicken out. but who knows one of those who persisted might be next big thing!!) YC has certainly helped them, who would have been left in "I am planning to do" state otherwise and I think thats what PG is essentially trying to do. Make more people try a stint at 'startuping' and all of this comes at a reasonable cost to everyone!!

To conclude - would the authors' brother have not been happy if there was an "Irish Pub" or something that promised, hey if you send us your recordings, may be we can give you a saturday night and if you get a deal from a recording company, we get cut out of it... (Ouch! I just spit out an idea for some "irish pub" owner, if he's on the list!)
The first thing that comes to mind is cost. You're already paying for the apartment. If you can avoid it, why pay for office space as well?