skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
give me a break.

Now this is the story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down
And I'd like to take a minute just sit right there
I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air
In West Philadelphia born and raised
On the playground where I spent most of my days
Chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool
And all shooting some b-ball outside of the school
When a couple of guys said "we're up in no good"
Started making trouble in my neighbourhood
I got in one little fight and my mom got scared
And said "you're moving with your aunt and uncle in Bel-Air"
Depends on why you applied.

If you applied on a "Let's see if we can convince Paul to let us come to YC Summer Camp, and maybe we'll be rich this time next year" whim with not a lot of code written...maybe you go back to school and work on other ideas. Try again for Winter with a different idea or more code and a better presentation. Or apply for a job at an existing startup. Some of the WFP guys are hiring (Parakey, Zenter, and a few others) as are the Xobni guys from last years progem--all are wicked smart, have lined up some funding, and would be very helpful to you in your goal of becoming an entrepreneur.

If, on the other hand, you've already written mumble-thousand LoC, and you are within a couple of months of launching, and you really believe in your idea and product, contact some other angels and seed investors. They exist. They aren't as cool as YC, but they have money and they have connections, too. As a last resort, if you're in the wrong city for raising money (anything other than Silicon Valley or Boston), warm up your credit card and give it a go. You can live for three months on a credit card (I've done it several times...I'm on my second company, the first being self-funded and sometimes credit card funded). Obviously, if you've got a family to support the "warm up your credit card" method of funding is right out. Otherwise, just keep your health insurance current, pay your taxes, and live on nothing but ramen and buy nothing between now and launch day.

If your project is too big to launch in that short time, then that's why you were rejected by YC. Winnow it down to the smallest piece that has value and launch. Our project (Virtualmin) was huge (several hundred thousand lines of code, by the time you factor in Webmin and Usermin). But we were already selling product, and figured we were within a couple of months of "finishing" the beta period (we were off by a little bit, as we're still a couple of weeks away from wrapping it up six months later--partly because of the major strategy shifts we made during WFP2007).
The Top Ten Hottest Moms in Search Engine Marketing
You can't really complain about the fax. Getting a merchant account is a sensitive thing so I totally understand each time I have to fax my id with the application. Just part of the process.
Personally, I don't use tag clouds. I have browsed many sites with tag clouds and I view them as mere space fillers.
'... Without the invention of the printing press to make books available to more people, William Shakespeare might never have been inspired to write some of the world's most famous plays. ...' [0]

I was going to reply about 'paradox of choice', 'consequences of non choice' and 'constraints of choice'. [1] But thinking more about it I asked, "would Shakespeare have hesitated in releasing his writing to the printing press?" [2] What about the Internet? [3] Then I saw the above quote.

It's the quality of the words and ideas, not the transmission medium. So make one choice.

Reference

[0] Maggie, 'Printing Press'

http://library.thinkquest.org/04oct/00451/printingpress.htm

[1] Barry Schwartz, ITConversations, 'Less is More, 54m, 25mb'

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail252.html

[2] Shakespeare lived from 1564 - 1616 and the Gutenburg printing press was invented in 1445. So from the time Shakespeare was writing his most important works from 1586 - 1612 the press was over 100 years old. But did he release his works to print in his lifetime?

[3] Wikipedia, William Shakespeare "Asking the question, 'Did he print his works in his life time?'. Found the following observation ~ '... Some of Shakespeare's plays first appeared in print as a series of quartos, but most remained unpublished until 1623 when the posthumous First Folio was published by two actors who had been in Shakespeare's company ...'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
...and so, the diggification (as witnessed on reddit) begins on news.ycombinator...
em's are not shown. check my bio for em ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bootload
Job Boards suck... What would make them better?
The biggest suffer because they are too popular: it's like trying to read through my Yahoo Mail - too much spam, recruiters making huge lists of keywords, etc. It must be just as bad on the receiving end: imagine how many terrible responses you must get to a C++ developer post on Monster.

The blog based ones are more focused, but almost to a fault. There must be a better way for people who don't want to start companies to find companies with similar interests. LinkedIn sort of helps, but there's so many recruiters on there that it feels just like Monster.

Just looking to see if anyone has any thoughts or insights. I've found all my jobs through friends...
hmm bulls eye and thats what we were trying to solve :)
Blank url posts are sometimes hard to follow because the order of the comments is not chronological -- hence, It's hard to find the first comment, the actual question.

It might be nice to have a chronological sort, or maybe, for just blank url posts, to have the first comment always appear first.
It's great that we're all networking - but I'm not sure the news.yc discussion threads are the place to do it.

I was thinking about setting up a wiki to help co-founders post their bios & connect with others in their area...

Anyone think this would be a good idea?
Google Checkout has rates of 2% + $.2 per transaction with no extra/hidden fees.
I'm curious, does a 2-3x increase in speed very perceptibly better the user experience? I can understand a 15 second to 5 second reduction. What about a 2 second to 0.6 second reduction?
What about balancing by faster hardware?

(asking because it's directly relevant to me)
Google Answers takes entire archive offline
I did send my resume some time back. The least you guys could have done was to send me a regret letter.
Get your fouls!
Can you think of variations on the likebetter.com idea?  For example, can you use it to detect cheating in online chess?
NameMyApp.com - An exercise in branding a web-app
Absolutely! I'm amazed at how far ahead this man was thinking... slap some nice UI on top of his workflow and you've got yourself an amazing system that can run circles around modern stuff.
Neat idea, I'll keep my eye on this.
I've been on godaddy dedicated for over a year now, and there's been no problems at all.
Diary of a Teenage Runaway
Really good story. Knocked my socks off.
Is this news for information about startups or for pointing to any of the blog links? :|
Not communicating and collaborating with other "geeks" in Uni, especially being one myself. I had always been interested in doing my own projects at Uni, but never had it struck me that it would be very beneficial to form a group and start something (like a startup?).
the snowball is rolling. i'm interested in pg's strategy for dealing with this.
I got accepted into a Phd program. I'm putting of the decision for as long as possible. Has anyone here managed to do their startup and their Phd.
Sounds like a perfect example of the Inner-platform effect: http://www.answers.com/topic/inner-platform-effect
Maybe we could address cheating in online chess by showing various images throughout a game.

The intuition here is that these images will have some impact on your thinking patterns.

So the idea is to see whether you are reacting as a typical human being would when viewing these images while playing chess.

For example, some images may have a negative effect in tactical positions.

One can have players play a against a computer every once in a while without telling them to see if they are cheating.
I specifically avoided phrasing the article as a "list of X things" for that reason. I submitted it because this article had a mix of suggestions that I found particularly interesting and sufficiently relevant.
Justin.tv is amusing to watch from time to time but I feel bad for Justin sometimes. Just because he's in his early 20's, finding a lady you really like and exposing her to that kind of stuff...must tear a guy apart.

I'm glad he turned his camera off - he respects the girl enough to do so. Very cool.

There are plenty of ways to catch a viewer's attention, their team just needs to think more outside of the box.
A Comparison Between Scheme and Common Lisp
Real Criticisms of Scheme
Ok, this truly piques my interest in Scheme. (If only we could get our hands on ARC!.)
Before the upgrade, if you were to load a page with alot of comments, there was a noticeable delay. That is no longer the case.
This is another classic example of an offbeat topic posted in here. No algorithm or methods can stop these things. The posters need to be more responsible in their postings
1 karma
0 comments
2 submissions to violentacres
Yikes. I'd be afraid of my ISP cutting off service for TOS violations at an inopportune time.
Solaris and Windows have VPS solutions too
oops, see my post to the main topic.
1. Offer money. Seriously, if you need someone to design your web application or do your accounting, don't be too cheap about it. Freelancers are professionals and need income like everybody else. You may not be able to offer market rates, so do what you can in-house, and make reasonable offers for the things you need to outsource.

2. Beg for favors from family and friends. With people you know well, you can get away with asking for favors for little or no remittance. It becomes a team effort. Of course, your friends' goodwill is a limited resource. Spend it wisely. If a graphic designer friend makes a logo for your company, and you lose interest two weeks later, she won't be as willing to help on your next project.

3. Be persuasive. There are great ways to get people to help you out, and you can learn to pitch your request so that it sounds better than "just based on promises." ;-) I'm not an expert on this, but two books that get rave reviews are "The Psychology of Persuasion" and "Getting to Yes". You can persuade people to help you out if you know how to ask. Make it a win-win situation.

I don't suggest offering equity to contractors right off the bat. A friend who will work for equity will probably also work for free, with just a few tokens of your appreciation. And if you're asking someone to do so much work that they need some compensation, maybe they should be a co-founder?

Nor do I suggest getting services on loan. ("We'll pay you once we're funded.") Investors want you to use their capital to do new work and achieve new milestones, not pay off old debt. Employees get impatient when they're owed money. And if you never get funding, it pretty much impedes any ongoing relationship with these people.

Hope this helps -- good luck!
Sorry I couldn't resist to reply. I just checked xobni job page and was surprised that they're looking for someone with C# knowledge. I assume they're building something based on ASP.NET ? (or at least .NET technology)

So right now the list of startup companies that use .NET has grown to 2 in YCombinator? Xobni and Loopt (arguably one of the most successful YCombinator investment).

PG, any thought on that?
Half of the value of this example is the chance to see beautiful code. Looking at it has improved my programming.

That makes me wonder: are there repositories of quality code out there for us to use as training sets? Links?
I'm in the middle of attempting to do a PhD and a startup at the same time but it's damn hard. I basically don't sleep. Meeting with my co-founder has become sparse as my research demands increase and it's really affecting our progress -- especially since I'm the coder. In short, if I want this to succeed, I have to leave, which basically I've decided to do at the end of this semester.
inspirational videos to push you forward when you're down
Here's a commercial I like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No1MxAnHuJM

And a news story that you might recall:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6cOp6EDFlI

A commencement speech:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

Which ones are your favorites?
I'm also flying out from Boston. Where were you able to find nonstops for $600+? Is that the best you could do? All I can find are nonstop fares starting at $800 for my travel dates.
Great Comment:

Anne,

Offering your content or service for free implies that you need to rely on an advertising based business model. If you aspire to build a big online media business (say $50m in revenues) you can do it in one of three ways:

1. If youre broad reach, you need to grow to be one of the top 10 websites in the US by traffic
2. If youre demographically targeted, you need to grow to be one of the top 25 websites in the US
3. If you have content that attracts endemic advertisers, you need to grow to be one of the top 150 websites in the US

Analysis and math that gets to these conclusions is at the Lightspeed Venture Partners blog (click on my name in this comment).
jeremy liew on March 13th, 2007 at 12:27 PM
Flixster Uses Message Bots To Trick Their Users into Logging In
So are off-topic posts completely banned here? Clearly the focus of this site is business and startup news, but I think it's up to the community to decide what ends up on the front page.
More Proof You Should Release Now: Others Likely Have Similar Observations
its a joke from on startup founder to others...fucking relax
While the author focuses on rewriting history books, I think of bigger importance is the lesson that two unrelated entities can come up with the same ideas. It's more important to release first. There are also examples (I forget the specific word for this, maybe somebody here knows?) where people living far away from each other came up with the same ways to cope with nature, without any possible way to know of anybody else's ideas.
Not a video, but... this is the only inspirational thing I have ever read. A blind entrepreneur gets a stem cell transplant and he can see again, but his brain has to learn how to process information.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040401192741/www.senderogroup.com/mikejournal.htm
I would like to see an rss feed of individual user's comments. An rss feed of http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg etc.
There are some crazy good comments.

(Josh Morgan):

The "business model" for many of these companies is to get acquired before their money runs out. If that is the "actual" business objective, as opposed to the publicly stated one, then FREE is a business model because it allows them to grow more quickly.

On a personal note, I don't think this is sustainable or smart for the long run.
Justin.tv on NPR (includes link to audio)
Reddit is there for all other news but this one i think is for startups.
Hi Ryan,
First of all, sorry I didn't reply you in my previous YC post. I was going to but got sidetracked looking in the startup hub thing.

Thank you for the advice. To me Burlingame is not far at all from SF. I was thinking I'm forgoing all the south bay people since it's quite a drive from down there. But from SF, it isn't too far, especially when this location is right off the 101 freeway exit. But more importantly, I was not really trying to suit everyone. Actually, yes, I _was_ trying to suit most people at first. But after not getting much replies, I figure I had to go a different route. I figure that I may have to choose a location first, and then let them decide if that's what they want. So I try to look at different locations available and imagine what I can do with the space. Once I can imagine what I can do with it (how I can setup and divide up the space), I let everyone know about it. Those who happen to be close to that location will be "lucky". Those who aren't will have to decide whether they want to make the commute or try to setup carpooling or forget about it. So if this location doesn't work out (still not too much response so far), I'll see what the next location brings. That may be in SF or further south. Hope you get a better idea of what I'm trying to do here.

oh, yes, this Burlingame location is right between 2 Bart stations, but I won't call them close by since it's like 1 mile away from each station.

thanks again for the reply,
john
Focus on your share price, not your valuation
community-centric content management platform
Yup, that all makes sense. I bet the San Francisco response depends a lot on whether or not you own a car. My impression of San Franciscans is that none of them own cars, and don't want to drive, because my 3 or 4 Frisco friends are like that. If most of your target market does own cars and is OK with a commute, then my hunch is totally wrong. ;-)
Was this what you were referring to in your talk earlier? Heh heh heh...
Partnership agreement sample
There are many articles on the internet where we can read about how important is to start a startup with partner, but nothing about how to do it and how to avoid some mistakes. If you have some links related to this topic and partnership agreement samples, please post them here.
Pretty funny. Either someone did that on purpose to make it seem like Flixster uses bots or the coder is lazy, probably underpaid too.
Microloans for entrepreneurs in developing countries, loans that change lives
MySpace to content providers: it's OurSpace
a/s/l? Xerox patent gives the answer
Wow, I hate all of those.
$50k in funding from YC (or maybe just from PG)? That's impressive. Over twice the typical amount.

What kind of valuation are we talking, here?
Higgins project: anonymous authentication
Definitely learn a Lisp, but I doubt the release version of Arc will still use mz.
I browsed the site for a bit and read their about section. I'm still unsure as to what the purpose of the site is and what specifically does it enable me to do. I read their 'What can you do with Cylive' list and it seems as if they're trying to do a bit too much. However, that's just like my opinion, man.
It was a one-off deal. This startup wasn't in one of the regular YC batches, though their original one (Kiko) was.
This is really relevant from the employee point of view. When the first company I worked for gave me stock options I was content to just know the number of shares I was getting because I did not know any better. Had I know enough to ask I would have found the shares I was given were close to worthless. I'm still amazed how often people don't ask this sort of stuff; without asking a bunch of questions about a company's financials knowing the number of shares you are getting is worthless.
XIOS web operating system
early review of mozilla's social networking tool
Fair enough. Is this the first startup to get that sort of treatment?
Hiring and retaining high quality programmers
Browsing the current and previous loans is truly fascinating. I like how there is a story behind every loan.

Here's a good one.
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=408
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcredit is a good overview. It amazes me that this doesn't get more coverage, especially after the Nobel.

One of many interesting details is that women get the majority of the loans because they're usually far better credit risks.
If your startup is looking for an Asian market, you can try PayDollar. I used PayDollar at Fleur.hk http://fleur.hk/ , which is a WebObjects site I made for a flower shop.

They offer Paypal style redirection but the meat is their API which does not cost extra. The trick part is, you have to ask and you have to implement your own POST routines if you are not using Java. Wouldn't be hard if you are a STARTUP right?

Most Asian based cc gateway only needs CC number, name and expiration date for transaction, which is a "plus" to get you paid. You have to be careful about potential fraud though.
I started out using java with WebObjects for a year, then found Django, never look back again.

Python is a lot better than Java for agile startups.
Here they are:

I've dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you're desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.

I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I'm as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good.

So, that's what I wish for all of you: the bad as well as the good. Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally. And remember that the story is never over. If it's all right, I'd like to read a little something from just this year: "Somehow, Conan O'Brien has transformed himself into the brightest star in the Late Night firmament. His comedy is the gold standard and Conan himself is not only the quickest and most inventive wit of his generation, but quite possible the greatest host ever."

Ladies and Gentlemen, Class of 2000, I wrote that this morning, as proof that, when all else fails, there's always delusion.