skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stumbled across Y Combinator a couple of days ago after the story on slashdot. I must admit, it drew me in instantly. Being shacked up for 3 months developing an idea for a start up with little worry about living expenses is everyones dream isn't it?

I live in Australia and I have an idea for a startup (which, oddly enough, has to do with internet dating which I was delighted to see is mentioned in one of the library articles) but I will readily admit the neither I nor my co-founder have any idea where to start. I am due to finish my Engineering degree in November and currently work 4 days a week for a local Engineering firm. As you can imagine this doesn't leave a lot of time for development of my idea or research of how to go about a startup.

Given such circumstances, a program like Y Combinator seems like the knight in shinning amour to me and I'm sure to the "kids" you are talking about. Its not so much the cash they inject, its the guidance and readily available support they offer which to me seems almost invaluable.

I can therefore see why there are people preaching that Y Combinator is "The One True Way To Do A Tech Startup". While I myself am not quite ready to make that claim I can clearly see where the logic behind these remarks resides. Judging by your comments BitGeek, you clearly aren't a "kid" but someone who has some experience in this field. I envy you and have a lot of time for any alternate routes for a startup like mine you care to suggest. But for now, from a 22 year old kids perspective that has done only a little bit of research, Y Combinator definitely seems like the best road traveled for my startup to be a success.

All I have to do now is apply, fly to the USA and be accepted, simple huh?
There may be such a product coming up - it was mentioned on macrumors.com. Incidentally, I hadn't noticed their buyer's guide before - very cool: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Comment URLS don't support the https protocol. https://DoesNotWork.com vs http://DoesWork.com
From /etc/services:

netstat 15/tcp

Now I feel like an old guy - I remember when you would occasionally find people leaving that open.
I'll tell you.

You ignore your public. You write technical essays about engineering or social things, but you never address the people you want working with you. You never write a blog entry that makes you (or any of the other founders) like real people who also care about those that are not as clever as the ones you pick.

So we sit out here on the curb and think - ah, the cool kids are in this lovely clubhouse with their mentor making cool stuff and going to become millionares. While we sit out here watching through the window.

All we see now is the business poker face of ycomb. It's no longer Paul giving money to kids to startup, it's a money making entity with a stern - you don't belong here, go away attitude.

That's why there is the minor backlash. You are too busy to talk straight to the normal people, and they resent being left out.

What can you do to change this? Try to be less perfect. Appearing vulnerable makes you human, and it makes people empathize with you. Then they make an effort to understand the why of your decisions.
Guitar craftsman: "You don't get there by secrets"
Unfortunately, the link is not to full text (anyone have this?)

This is well worth reading though - a profile of one of the world's finest guitar makers. It's got some great discussion that's worthwhile for anyone who is making something. Here's a quote:

Stradivari seems to have carved his violins so the tops and bottoms rang with the same note when tapped -- an F below middle C. But Parker had given up on easy prescriptions. "Everyone has a secret recipe," he said. "Everyone is trying to do scratch-for-scratch reproductions of ancient instruments. If you had any guts, you'd make a nice new instrument and let the world beat it up for three hundred years." He lifted the board again, flexed, and tapped. "You don't get there by secrets," he said. "You get there by doing ~everything~ better."
And then people will complain about how YC is so secretive. Frankly, there's no pleasing some people. If people didn't care for YC-specific statements, what are they doing reading this site?
SmugMug: Investing in a speedy site pays off for users
It's all about opportunity costs. Neither the world, nor Linus would probably be better off had he started a company rather than hacking on Linux. The world, and PG, are probably better off that he pursued Viaweb rather than some earlier version of Arc. But it's ultimately up the individual to choose what they want most. This site and PG certainly promote one route, but sensible people realize it's not the only thing out there.
If I absolutely loved the opportunity, then perhaps, but I've never encountered any deal like that.
People just don't like to hear the truth, and then they try to avoid listening by just calling it "arrogance". I think PG is just taking some short cuts in his reasoning here and there, and people who can't follow get frustrated by that.
Apple is the only company in the world that can charge $200 more for a different color and make it seem like it's a worthwhile upgrade.
I guess it is a parody? I think carbon credits are a really harmful idea...
this guy killed his credibility by using AliG as an avatar
Glad you said that, because I was really wondering about this article. Did I miss something, or is the only recommendation for anti-trolling the disvowelling? That's really meager for such a long article. He just goes on and on and his only answer to trolls is "learn from the troll-whisperers" - yet he doesn't name any troll-whisperers one could listen too.
I hate to see these kinds of discussions happening now that YC is taking off in the press. YC puts out a lot of free content and value into the community already. Unfortunately YC does not scale well. And why should it? It was created at the pleasure of the former Viaweb team and JL.

From my limited perspective, the following is what I see as something that may help counter the feeling of exclusion.

In the community of PG followers there seems to be a desire to 'belong' somehow more officially, if nothing more than to make conversations easier. News.YC I think helps quite a bit, but when guys in this niche community have to describe themselves it often comes out like this:

"I really like to read Paul Graham's articles and talk with other guys that like to read his articles."

"I applied for YC and was rejected, but still like to associate with the other YC rejects."

Both of those general statements just sound pretty lame when you try to tell your girlfriend (imaginary or real ;) about this little club of startup guys you're involved in.

Despite it being totally arbitrary other than to just make conversations easier and reduce exclusionary feelings, it might be useful if there were a more defined way to refer to this yc-affiliated-but-not-officially-part-of-community-of -like-minded-startup-guys.

Then those in the community could refer to their involvement in terms that doesn't sound like a fan club and isn't focused on a failed YC application.

Ideas?
Funny toy for startup founders :)
Great response from Linus. A textbook example of FUD [Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt].

Here's the positive:

The lame CIO's who believe the Microsoft FUD about linux and decide to go with Windows as their platform will inevitably have a brain-drain of their A-level coders. Once the A-level coders are gone, it's all down hill from there. Their code-base will turn into a Huge Ball of Mud, everything will slow to a crawl and their competitors will eat their lunch. Natural selection! Darwinism at work in the wilds of Corporate America!
The $100 laptop (also known as the OLPC--One Laptop Per Child project) is not based on Squeak. It's partly based on Linux (the OS), but the stuff users see is largely written in Python. Squeak is on the laptop as one of the things students can use. I think the main reason it was put on there was for its eToys facility, which allows kids to draw objects on the screen and then program them to do things, to create their own simulations. It also has some games that run on it.

It's on there as part of the open source spirit of the system as well. Since Squeak reveals all of its code in Smalltalk, once they learn the language they can explore it and modify it however they like. The same goes for the Python stuff.

Re: Croquet

Yes, Croquet is written on the Squeak VM. It's actually based on a modification to Squeak, called "Tweak".

IMO Smalltalk is worth checking out. I've been doing so. There are different paths you could take with this. The basic level you can explore is the Smalltalk language itself. There are online books on the language you can read. There are some hardcopy books that cover the higher levels of Squeak. There's Morphic, which is the window manager for the Squeak desktop environment. There's eToys, which is a more abstract, but easy to use, scripting environment. Then there's Seaside, which is a web application framework for it. There are no books for this. The best source I've found for it are blogs that focus on Seaside.

Seaside uses some advanced programming constructs to create a programming environment that's unlike most other web frameworks out there. I haven't used it directly yet, but from what I've read about it, it's really nice. If you get into it you probably won't want to go back to what you used before.
Switching to Mac to be an Indie Developer
Did you read the link? I don't see where it mentions anything about unit tests.
As an outsider in the UK who has no intention of applying, I agree that there's a "clubby" feel to YC. However, I don't think that's a bad thing; that's part of the benefit of being in a good beneficial club, just like any society.

Cure it of that and it will be the lesser for it.
'... Do you know of a service that does this? ...'

No but there are plenty of aggregation sites that collect third party contributions via RSS or ATOM. I was thinking about this the other day (how do you gather contributions to sites uniformly) and came to a number of conclusions:

- standardised way of presenting/marking up a contribution

- easy way for companies to implement this painlessly

- some way to extract this information from many sites

The conclusion is if you want lots of companies to add this one approach would be to design, spec a microformat ( http://microformats.org ) allowing sites to markup contributions easily in a standardised format. The data could then be mined without little effort from the third party company

SERVER SIDE

Each contribution could be marked up in a site allowing where a user is identified. Then A) a user to be identified, B) users contribution is marked up C) contribution meta-data can be marked up.

CLIENT SIDE

Read a site, parse the page markup looking for contribution data.

THIRD PARTY SITE

Allow users to register and list sites they have contributed content. The site then checks the third party sites, checks if the user is valid and extracts the contribution markup on these sites. The aggregation of contributions for many users could then be displayed, exported etc.

The idea of collecting contribution data relies on using a public standard tag (micro format) markup that third party sites could apply, users individually extract and more importantly allow third party companies to harvest.
YC make it clear that those that aren't picked may have the best ideas, or be the best people; i.e. that YC are perfect at picking.

It seems like you depend too much on YC's verdict as a judgement on yourself. If you had more deserved confidence in your own ability perhaps you'd see their actions differently?

pg's articles talk to "normal" people all the time.
Fendoo: Social Bookmarking for Smart People
i wrote a stupid obvious comment about its blatant resemblance to facebook and tried to delete it. anyhow.
Facebook has done a shockingly good job of handling their growth and it was mostly young hard core unix hackers that did it. You can't argue with the results.

Just be honest: you're angry at Facebook because you think they wouldn't hire you due to your age. Just like you're angry and jealous that YC is making "kids" (as you call them) rich by giving them a huge headstart.

You indirectly compare yourself to Mozart. Claim to have an amazingly great way of developing, but of course don't say anything about it. Flatly claim Facebook developers are "clueless" and your methods are "superior". You're too much man, I already have Comedy Central.
Twitter is interesting because it makes SMS a "scale free network". See: http://www.thefeaturearchives.com/topic/Networks/Email__Scale-Free_Networks__and_the_Mobile_Internet.html
Um... You know that most modern operating systems include a calculator application?
Give them more advice and guidance on the submissions page. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=20487

Drop karma. Still have voting on threads and comments but don't collect that up into a public karma for an individual. Karma is clearly a motivator for some compared to peer respect from posting a well thought out comment. If ones comment goes negative it's more likely to be upsetting if you think it has hurt your karma, whereas without karma you'd just take it as feedback that people, or even a clique, don't agree. You'd be less emotive in replying.
A taller text area box for entering comments. Say double the current height.
For no good reason, indeed.

The guy behind mp3.com didn't seem to do to badly. ;)
Excellent point: in a real discussion, you want to have people who disagree, whose opinions differ.

But if you condemn any variations in thought as trolling, then the resulting community of fan boys/Kool-aid drinkers is just as bad.
Amazon s3 is something I plan on using this summer to bring price down. The responsiveness of the service isn't good enough for me to just throw all images into it, but just putting the full-size printable versions in s3 could be used to cut costs a lot.

How it's different from other services becomes obvious in the demo; sorry I broke it, but take a look now. You'll see that how the photos are organized and presented is different from all the other sites. I think it's much more suitable for people whose photos tell a story, e.g. kids growing up or people traveling.

I used to have much more text on the "about" page that explained differences, but I ruthlessly cut it down because people don't read.

I used to not have a pricing link on the front page, but everybody asked how much it cost. Generally people new to photo sharing exclaim how cheap it is. And it is cheap. I charge by usage, not by limit, so it can be very cheap if you're not using a lot of space.

I'm very focused on simplicity. Existing photo sites are focused on the photo enthusiast, who will be spending a lot of time on each individual photo anyway. People with little time but lots of photos will benefit most from ourdoings.com.
I really need a good regression test. I tested the demo after I changed it, but later I made non-demo changes and didn't test how they affected the demo. Actually as I made the change it should have occurred to me how it would affect the demo. I need more sleep.

I fixed the demo early this morning. Please have another look.
Quick impressions is what I'm after. Don't worry about sounding negative.

Your feedback on the front page is definitely useful. The only part of your feedback I'd push back on is taking pricing off. Everybody was asking me how much it cost before I put that there.

I'm using the Kawa Scheme compiler, which on some benchmarks was 200-300x faster than SISC, the fastest interpreter. I don't need to bring in Java libraries all that often, and Kawa's FFI syntax is plenty good enough for me to quickly write a Scheme API, as I'm sure I'll do with s3. Basically all I'm doing is translating form inputs to data, and data to HTML, with escaping where appropriate and lots of conditionals. I've already got the perfect language for that.

I fixed the demo early this morning. Please have another look.
How response times affect users (Jakob Nielsen)
I know that a lot of people reading this will busy working on their own startup.

But it would really help me out if you could give me your opinion on Fendoo.
I just tell my wife that there's a lot of good knowledge and experience here to exploit, enough that it's well worth letting my own knowledge and wisdom be exploited in return.
"While we sit out here watching through the window."

There's nothing that stops you from making cool stuff while sitting outside on the grass. I was rejected by YC, but I just figure I need to work a little harder. YC is not the ultimate verdict on the success of your startup.
Microsoft charges patent infringements / Action against Linux, other open-source software may be difficult, experts say
More Americans go for cell phones, drop landlines
DOJ: Make "Attempted" (Copyright) Infringement an Offense
Vidmetrix: Video Analytics for a New Generation of Marketing
I'm still kind of confused. Y Combinator has just one success - Reddit. Everything else has either failed or is To Be Decided...
Sam - it clearly is. By the looks of your blog you're 21. You better get started!
Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog
The Only Way is the Wrong Way
Little confidence in Microsoft patent quest
Great quote:

"If everyone tried following their bliss everyone would be trying to get to the same place at the same time. It'd be a fucking traffic jam. But since no one likes going into the negative there's more room for opportunity - less competition, less traffic."
MySpace responds to states' request for sex offender data
TLC and E! try out Web-only shows
Computer chips designed to mimic how the brain works could shed light on our cognitive abilities.
One factor is that anyone who has the mojo to start a company at all will probably do it sooner in life than later. And few people will start more than one succesful company.

Arguably, the same thing happens in science. Great fundamental discoveries are most often made by brilliant scientists in their 20s.
Yes, of course you're correct (on both counts!)
"Speed pitching"
Yes, until more YC companies show they can stand up on their own (not everyone is going to get acquired, after all), the "burger" (build-to-flip) criticism is going to stick.
They don't generate revenues, and more likely than not, have no plan to generate revenues.

They're made to be acquisition targets.
3 Reasons Your Website Does Not Make Money
World's most maintainable programming language
Since it photo-sharing site, I really think you need to invest in a designer to improve the look and feel. You need to come up with a logo....
I am going to be frank:
Don't think "YC Reject" is going to save you. I would reject you too.

Your site still sucks. "MAKE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT" I don't want a shitty photo sharing site. Have you used smugmug, flickr and even picasa web albums (my current favorite). These sites are close to perfect and you will NEVER catch up with them. They are easy to use and I don't think it can egt any easier.

Change you business plan/application to do something else. Do social networking -- (jokes)

PS: Keep your invites
This assertion has little to no scientific or mathematical basis.

Here's how you too can make up a sensational headline:
1) Start with an assumption
2) collect data points that prove your assertion -- leave those that don't out of the calculation.

There is no 'right' age to start a company. No age is too old.

-KFC was started by Col. Sanders when he was 50 something.

-John Warnock co-founded Adobe when he was 42.

There are many more examples, but those are only a couple off the top of my head.

EDIT: The comments in the valleywag piece contain a few more examples like Jim Clark.
Well one cool thing they have is that you can call in and leave a rumour and some fancy voice recognition tech will convert it to text and submit it. Has that been used much by any other websites?
Y Combinator Room on Meebo
Hi everyone, - I added a room on Meebo which might faciliate some real time conversations. See you all there!
Am I the only one who parsed that URL as "wait errant"?
hi, yeah this used to be a mailing list signup that i restructured for the beta invites. It has some quirks, such as the required confirmation email. But the service is free to capture emails until you use them to actually send out emails. So no this is not the best solution for a beta signup, but it does the trick.
Learn How to Go BIG by Going HOME!
As does Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=0.05+*+1000000
Paul Buchheit:"Don't Be Evil"
Respect for the courage conveyed in the article.
Financial arrangements for a temporary cofounder.  What should be done?
Hi Paul. Since you are the person at Google who came up with the "Don't Be Evil" motto, could you please explain what that means? I am genuinely curious and have no intention of badgering you about this. Thank you.
There's a possibility that I may be able to work with someone for a limited time period -- making him a temporary cofounder.

What sort of financial arrangement should be done in this case?

Since all I care about now is getting users, perhaps some merit-based scheme taking into account the number of users he is able to attract to the site might be workable?
How to find a co-founder online (a success story)
Ok, fair enough -- but the site is still only a few weeks old, and the way I understand it, watching Justin's life through his hat-cam is not the whole point of the business model. There is more to come.
I can't believe you just said "parsed" instead of "read"
"Maybe if you took time out of your day to email a principal and offer some equity in exchange for mentorship/help, you might get some."

Tried that, didn't work...
That's an interesting article. And it rebutts the point the blogga was making:

Entitled Three ways to build an online media business to $50m in revenue, the article does the math: At the $1 RPM (CPM/CPA/CPC) level achieved by most general sites, you need 4 billion page views/month. At the $5 RPM level achieved by demographically targeted sites, you need 800 million/month. At the $20 RPM level achieved by highly targeted sites, you need 200 million/month.

That's a high bar. This may be why more entrepreneurs are going for low-investment sites that don't need an exit but provide "lifestyle businesses" for their owners. (More on that another time.)

Who needs $50 million?? I don't. (I, unlike the original article's author, am not a VC.) Hell, gimme $5-6 million total and I'll be delighted.

Then again, there are a lot of untapped, underserved niches. Most of the Web2.0 sites, in my estimation, are nerd-oriented. There is plenty of room to serve more 'mainstream' niches (yes, I see the irony in that phrase).
What were the errors?
Reddit was profitable before it was acquired.
Sun storage not so good for web startups.  Steer clear.
Young or old?

Rock music: Young is better.

Classical music: Old is okay.

Software business: Young is better.

Manufacturing business: Old is okay.

Mathematics: Young is better.

Literature: Old is okay (actually, better).

Chess: Young is better. (I could probably beat Fischer by now.)

Contract bridge: Old is okay. (Don't laugh--Gates and Buffett play).

Revolutionary conflict: Young is better.

Invading Russia: Old is okay.
There's a lot more to this story. If they gave up because the CEO re-wrote to bio page and took down the links to old issues of the mag then they're gave up too easily.