skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(1) Less UI clutter, (2) instant response time, (3) automatic Bluetooth sync with my phone, (4) offline ability (I live in Thailand and my internet connection is not 100% reliable), (5) an easy way to get stuff from my email to my TODO list, and (6) instantly-responding UI.

I like a lot of things about Nozbe.com but it is too slow and I cannot do anything with it using my phone. Also, the fact that you will have to pay according to how many "projects" you have is crazy.
Non-hackers: how to find a co-founder
You still need to be a hacker, and that's a significant barrier if you're not.
'... Simple answer: yes... build a matrix of friends/enemies/etc and iterate over it until you have absolute values ...'

Slashdot tried a model similar to this. The result you still got polarisation of views, short snipes without any real value. I don't think it's simple. Why? You can't change "human behaviour". Anything you do there will be some person trying to find a loophole. Joshua Schachter (delicious fame) went into great lengths in his talk on itconversation about this.

Especially just with an algorythm approach. Though one thing I can think of that did more than anything for me was a points filter (meaning you can simply not view someones comments below a certain threshold ) . A more broader approach has better chances of encouraging (enforcing) good behaviour.

One successful approach I have seen, can be found in the perlmonks (a perl programming) site where users gain karma through numerous means (time on the system, posts and moderation) enforced by a top down 'Benovolent dictatorship' and in effect a hierarchy.

You join the site as a novice & work your way up earning rights through encouraged & enforced behaviour. For instance you have to be a certain level (say level 5) before you can front-page a post. Another level and you can join groups effecting the design of the site. This type of conditioning means for instance users don't have power beyond their maturity. If they do things out-of-line (say for instance random down-modding or excessive referencing) they can be pulled in before the inevitable kitten fights (al-la slashdot) begins.

In time, as a user reaches a certain level (of maturity) certain rights are allowed. So the combination of brute user moderation and a more subtle framework encourages finding solutions to problems rather than /. type brawls.

I don't think mere code alone solves undesirable behaviour in systems. And it would be a good area for developers with a 'psychology', 'group dynamics' background to explore and add more knowledge.
How about how to find a co-founder if you've sent out flyers, list-serv emails and talked to professors? :P
juwo gets downmodded because he posts comments on nearly every article, and his posts are frequently off-kilter or ill-considered. As he says himself, he "must be the worst communicator" (http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15510 )-- e.g., witness the really inappropriate Nazi reference in the title to this thread.

Sometimes I find myself wondering if this reflects a major cultural difference he's just not grasping fully? Or just a strange variation on John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (the "Mahir Corollary?")?
I think a key point from the post is that non-hackers need to make the first move - because face it, you need them more than they need you, no matter how unfair you think that is.
Thanks for your feedback and ideas, guys! To answer your question, there were actually 7 video submissions in the past 24 hours between Google and YouTube alone. Had I known you were interested in videos, I would have e-mailed them to you so you wouldn't miss them.

Had there been a video section, nobody would have thought there were only 2 videos submitted in the past few days.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!
Paying per project does seem crazy.

I'm trying very hard to make sure there's no UI clutter. I'll show my results by April 30th.

#3 and #4 mean a desktop app. I may consider that in the future but right now, web only. Sorry.

By #2/6 do you mean using AJAX?
The big belly, revisited
If you're not a hacker then you'd better be good in marketing and a good negotiator because these are the skills that most hackers lack. This way you'll complement each other, and you'll have something to offer the partnership.
Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15515

Favorite quotes:

http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/1109880

http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/1109979

http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/1110614
Guys, it must have been a lot of work moving over to a different solution but integrity is more than worth it. Amazon needs to get the message that what they're doing is clearly wrong. Ability to mashup different services is one of the cornerstones of Web2.0 and if that ability disappears, so will a lot of value that mashups provide.

Kudos!
Y Combinator Clone in Vienna, Austria launches
Cool. They stole the application too, but I guess they can because doing so didn't hurt Techstars at all. They stole it so badly that I wonder if it's a joke.

"If one wanted to buy you three months in (March 2007), what's the lowest offer you'd take?"

I wonder how long it will be before we see a clone in India/East Asia.
This is particularly strange given that Google's gwt is probably the best way to build ajax apps.

Bold claim, amichail, bold claim.

http://"onclick="alert('Doesnt-anyone-want-to-hack-javascript-anymore?')
Prevent this kind of nonsense:
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15630
not a joke - tried to contact pg a few weeks ago already - emailed them again - but running out of time - if we don't get applications now, we can't launch. if pg says anything in that direction, we'll immediately take it down, and ask people to resubmit new forms because we can't use them. the questions pg asks are great, it just didn't feel sensical to try to reformulate them.

our differenciation is in how we implement it locally, not how we ask questions - the questions just are the same everywhere in the world.

our local hacker club is what we think might make this work - we have a few hundred people sharing knowledge and ideas here. we hope to build up entrepreneurial knowledge and spirit around the metalab, and store it within the collective memory of the people here.
Maybe YC should be getting some percentage?
Techstars stole the app. These guys stole the entire site.
i wouldn't mind giving them percentage, or for that matter, even all of it - we don't care about making money with it - i have my own startup running already. what we want is to attract talent to austria, and make it possible for locals to make the leap.
I believe YC's program is quite revolutionary, both in terms of supporting innovative businesses and also as an educational opportunity; I agree that right now, they are probably the best model to follow, but copying the application verbatim doesn't reflect well on your organization.

For example, do you have any other ideas you thought of applying with? One may be something we've been waiting for. I'd be very surprised if at the first time of execution, you are already so confident about your judgment of the internet startup landscape. It's reasonable to assume that YC really has things in mind. In this case, you are only waiting for things to come into your mind.

If the YC method is good, people will learn from it, and it will flourish. But seeing how yeurope does it right now, I will be wary.
re: attracting talent to austria, can you get work permits for non-EU citizens?
Your life according to Google
i know that this is a big problem, and does not reflect well on us.

we've had some failed startup attempts 4 years ago, e.g. in the area of social sorting. we certainly can't provide the level of depth and experience pg has, but we've been trying our best to learn for a long time now. we're talking to lots of people in austria and throughout europe, and are trying to get more people to support and make this work.

we have been working on getting things going fulltime for 4 years now, but the situation is a lot harder in europe. once there are some successful startups around, we hope to convince them to join the board. we just don't have any people to look up to here, and got to bootstrap somehow.

we've been pretty busy in preparing the ground for this, both with our hacklab, but also with contacts to all kinds of people who might help out with this, private, corporate and political. we even founded an interest group for startup founders (IG Startup), to lobby with politics, and are actively discussing their ICT funding strategies with the respective politicians and decision makers.

our hacklab launched one year ago, after 2 years of trying to finance it, and has a few hundred users already. the problem is the financing option for yeurope has just arisen half a week ago, and if we don't launch now - we might never do it.
we have support by politicians - if the submission is good enough, this might work - can't guarantee anything
The system I pointed out is free from those flaws, for precisely one reason: karma in that sort of system is always relative.

That is, everyone moderates according to their own tastes, and nobody is 'better' than anyone else. It all sums to zero, the only filtering is by individual preference.
Dynamic languages more than just a quick fix
del.icio.us is hard as hell to type. Here is my speculation.

First, "del" and "us" are easy to remember. Now you just place in the dots. So in terms of your memory, the difficult part is in the production phase (typing), not the storage and retrieval.

Second, I imagine most of its initial users were relatively well educated and web-wise.

Third, the lack of .com makes it unique, and at its time, a pioneer. The pioneer always has imitators, and we have seen plenty. Flickr is another one of those "pioneers."

And pioneers don't follow guidelines, because guidelines were based on the pioneers. So much for these tips; they should make a portfolio demonstrating how creative they are, like logo firms do. "Here are some example names we've come up with: 1. Folksonomy..." 4 syllables, 10 characters, and if you type properly, the second half of the word uses way too much index-finger.
I don't know the consequences of posting in a 5-day old thread, but I just felt like practicing my side interest in econ. My only experience with game theory was a half-term graduate course and I don't follow everything you're saying, but my gut feeling is that these definitions aren't important to the spirit of the article.

Suppose you're buying stocks; you choose a portfolio of stocks to maximize your return. Of course you'll make mistakes and pick bad stocks, but as long as you have enough good stocks in your portfolio, you'll still turn a profit (and companies won't come and argue "why didn't you buy my stock?"). The difference between YC and the stock market is that being chosen by YC can potentially increase your value; they are more like the coaches that train athletes. So whatever portfolio they pick will actually end up with a higher value than if it were just left alone. Also, it makes sense to evaluate people by things not so one-dimensional as "ability" (which by gyro_robo's argument we should maximize), otherwise we ignore other possible synergies between coach and trainee, such as similar personalities, that can cause the trainee to train more productively, independent of ability.

The problem with the stock market analogy is that all you need to do is to beat the market, and to do that you just need to perform better than average. Actually YC could do that if all they wanted was to make some money. Perhaps similarly, a sports coach could be lax about picking athletes if the second-best team was way behind. This is where I see the game theory coming in. If there was another team, similar to YC, that was similar in performance, then YC would have more of an incentive to minimize the measurement error. I'm not saying they don't already, I'm just saying it would make sense to do so.

Anyway, I don't know if this makes any sense but the essay is fun and probably a good piece to show to some younger people.
Throw those criteria out the window. Squatting is such an uncreative thing, so squatters probably are unable to "think outside the box."
I have stopped thinking these sites tell anything useful. What do you think of this one?

oi.oio.io

It's up for grabs (as of now), and I bet you'd remember it after a few seconds. It doesn't even need to follow a syllable rule. Too bad I don't have a product to match this name, but I think it's great. If you think otherwise, be sure to explain why.
It speaks well of you that you're willing to address criticism on here. Good luck, I hope it goes well for you.
I'm not convinced the best hackers are found in a university computer lab. When I was in college the only people in the computer lab were IRC addicts who were too broke to afford their own computer! The article mentions "the Woz" and I'm pretty sure steve jobs did not meet steve wozinak in a computer lab.
'The system I pointed out is free from those flaws, for precisely one reason: karma in that sort of system is always relative '

Can you give me some sites that use this (aside from skype)? Can you explain how say person 1, rates person 2 and how the rating is viewed from person 2's point of view? ... or say person 3 observing?
So that I have this straight: You've tried to copy YC's approach and website as closely as possible down to featuring one of their startup's product in the middle of your page and naming your yourself so as to suggest that you're somehow affiliated and you are holding out hope that they're going to be happy (or even just not upset) with this?
You should add a disclaimer to your site that says, "We are not affiliated with Y-Combinator, we just ripped off their name, funding model, and application." Otherwise, people may get confused.
I second rms... but again, you shouldn't skimp on your website and your app, in any way; it's your public face. If you want to tailor the program to local apps, then it needs more thought. "We're looking for great people. We don't care that much whether your idea is the best thing since sliced bread."

How in the world are you going to measure "great"? It's definitely not going to come through via just the 28 YC questions. They have a news site for what it's worth. A monster hacker team that cannot come up with a sellable idea is merely a great team of coders -- nothing but.

And why does politics need to be involved?
I think it's kind of funny that everyone uses the same app. One of these days someone will start a Princeton Review-like startup that submits the answers to all organizations with one click.

btw, I don't know if it's just me but I don't know why people are so worked up over these copycats. When the second university in the world was founded, maybe people accused them of copying the first university, but in the long run it's been good for mankind. Of course, if all the orgs want to talk amongst each other and pay royalties to YC, that might also be interesting.
Many people in Europe have been looking at what YCombinator is doing and how they are doing things. There is no less creative and hacking talent in Europe than in the States but certainly a lack of entrepreneurial spirit and the infrastructures and environment favorable to the emergence of top notch startups. Nevertheless it is well worth trying!

I tried to contact PG a few months ago on the subject of getting YCombinator to participate one way or another in such a scheme in Europe with no success. The YEurope rip-off does not reflect well indeed on such endeavors but you can be sure that other will emerge and hopefully turn some ventures into successes.
Let's take a different look at this article. As a thought experiment, say I'm a non-hacker, enrolled in b-school, looking for a hacker. Now the suggestions:

1. enroll in an engineering school. oops. 2. study CS, or take relevant classes. Ok, I can take relevant classes. half-oops. 3. go to all classes to see the real hackers. Real hackers aren't going to be in "introduction to programming." oops. 4. hang out with admirable hackers. Icebreakers anyone? oops.

Your post presumes a lot of favorable conditions which do not apply to many people your article is addressed to; the problem is left unsolved. It looks like a rather gaping problem, so why not address it? A matchmaking service!

I was told of an annual entrepreneurship program in Taiwan, where small teams of all hackers and all business folks apply via separate tracks. The winners then get matched together. It's quite an intriguing concept and definitely worth exploring further.
'... Groovy has the smallest installed base of the three, due to its shorter history. It does, however, hold one distinct advantage over both Ruby and Python: Its syntax will be familiar to Java developers. ...'

There are some gotchas though ~ http://groovy.codehaus.org/Differences+from+Java
I don't think the advice in the article applies anymore. Who would go to a computer lab these days? I suspect people are more likely to use labtops and WLAN.

Also, I don't think hackers dislike Java. Judging by the number of Open Source projects in Java, I'd say it is popular among volunteers, too (not only people being forced to by their superiors are using it).

I am not sure studying programming is a good idea, either. I would also like to have a co-founder who is a graphics designer, marketing is good, too, generally somebody who gets things moving.
Nice one. This law seems to also stretch quite far beyond the internet.
person 1 allocates one or many positive or negative points to person 2.

person 2 shows person 1 as having higher/lower karma, person 1 shows person 2 as having higher/lower karma.

Person 3 has no viewpoint unless they are in the system. There is no 'absolute' objective viewpoint without taking a stance.

A user with no ratings of anyone sees everyone with the same karma.

All four of the major extended interactions work too. (friend of a friend, enemy of a friend, enemy of an enemy, friend of an enemy)

Another property is that it doesn't matter how many points you use. You may rate someone up or down as much as you desire, or make up your own rating system, whatever works for you.
That's a great perspective.
At least something 50 kilometers away :) Alles gute Paul.
What's wrong with this sentence:

"YCombinator Clone in Vienna, Austria launches!"

Hint: It's not in the first, second, third or sixth word.

You're missing at least 50% of the value of Y Combinator by being outside of a startup center, probably more. Can a successful startup happen outside of the Valley? Sure...but you're definitely hurting the chances of success by a significant degree.
Certainly the value of YCombinator is bringing interesting people together. I don't think the Valley is the only place in the world with interesting people, though.

YEurope doesn't look too promising, though - the cloning approach leaves a negative impression. If they are so cutting edge, surely they would have been able to come up with their own scheme.

Also, they don't say how they will come up with interesting speakers.
They have different aims with this program, they're doing what they can to take make Vienna/Europe better for startups.
take a look at http://metalab.at/wiki/Folder:V5a-en - we've spent years building up a thriving community. we had planned to launch in 2008 with the money from our first successful startups, but half a week ago the opportunity has arisen to start in 2007. we could have spent more time pretending to look different like techstars has done, but what good would that do? we rather launch now and face the critics.

we are openly copying the concept of ycombinator, akin to copying the concept of an university. we are neither trying to hide that fact nor arguing against it. time will tell if our approach works. but a verbatim copy of the implementation in europe certainly wouldn't work, and how such an implementation could look, this is what we have concentrated our thought and deeds on.
Thanks for the excellent response; it contrasts interestingly with the most recent Global Competitiveness Report: (Finland 2nd, USA 6th)
http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/Global%20Competitiveness%20Report/index.htm

I don't know the scene over there. But I'm guessing this is why Wikio got 12M(!) in funding?

To clarify, I'm definitely not calling you unskilled and am not qualified to do so. I'm attacking your copying of a question that implies you have solid experience in the field as a seed funding organization, operating like YC. I don't even know their inner workings.

But public funding + politics + international applicants seems to entail a lot more than seed funding + support. In another message (http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15641)
you said work permits are available if the idea is good enough. Do the politicians have a say in the selection process?

I think your effort is great. Lots of people will be watching; I hope things can go smoothly for you.
I agree that in general it is better to do anything than nothing. Maybe you should just make it a little bit clearer on the web page why you copied YCombinator, and what background experiences you have, to evoke more trust.

Your metalab looks interesting (wish there was something like it where I live), and I think Vienna is a great city (much better than the Valley, I suspect). I wish you success with the venture!
A general question and a specific one:

Who are you? Metalab has an extensive website, but who's behind YEurope? You know that the funding is only a small part of what YC provides -- you won't be able to live up to pg, rtm et al, which is expected, but right now you don't say anything about yourself, so why should a prospective applicant value your connections and advice?

And: One of the things YC does is that it sets up a company for you. YEurope is in Austria. Austria is a country where it's expensive to incorporate (pg has written about how that is one problem for startups in Europe [1]). What are you going to do about that?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html
(Re)writing Reddit in Lisp in 20 minutes and 100 lines (Video)
LinkedIn For Startup Entrepreneurs: 5 Hypothetical Reasons To Join
You're right, Steve met Woz because they lived in the same neighbourhood/street. I agree that labs might be a long shot. Where else do you think hackers might hang out?
As with menloparkbum, I agree that labs might be a long shot. I also agree that cofounders with design and marketing skills would be great to have. Where would you go to find them?
Good points, the article was quite narrowly focused. Where would you go to find cofounders?
'... Person 3 has no viewpoint unless they are in the system ...'
So there is effectively no visible karma? - unless person 3 intersects person 1 and person 2?

That's a pretty good system. How do you measure (unless you have admin on the system) person 1 compared to person 2 and person 3? From the way I see this would it work on a system where a (visible) reward is given out for effort? (I define effort as creating links + comment).

The reason I ask is that how do you encourage users here to add content and create a leader board? I know the constraints are bit tight, but if you solve this it would be worth recommending to features.
Constructive reasons to use Django instead of Rails
here's what I find ...

http://www.google.com/search?q=YBombinator+People+Powered+Internet

then I get ...

- http://bdeseattle.blogspot.com/search/label/ybombinator

- http://del.icio.us/bdeseattle

- http://jott.com

- http://twitter.com/bdeseattle

then finally from another source ...

- http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-bryan-eisenberg.shtml

The name here matches the bdeseattle. I can link bdeseattle to the name.