skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hackers Remind That iPhone Is Still MyPhone
It seems to have stopped working (at least for now).
Alfalfa -- or Semiconductors?
There is really no content in this article. I'm a little disappointed.
Acquisitions: Why venture capitalists love your mom
I have a couple friends who live there (hi guys) but OMG, THIS IS THE LEAST NEWSWORTHY STORY EVAR!!
Facebook Rival ConnectU.com's SQL injection vulnerability: a story of pathetic hubris
Closing the deal: Lessons from selling a website
The CEO of Ning (Pmarca's startup) is female.

http://boardroombroads.blogspot.com/2007/07/eyes-on-you-gina...
Our team is just two guys. My co-founder is a rockstar hacker. I wouldn't call myself a rockstar designer, but I'm taking care of all that stuff (graphic design, UI, copywriting, etc.) as well as marketing.

I've always liked designing things, so even though I'm no rockstar, what we've got is good enough (read: design that won't be noticed by the user--not horrendous, not stunning).

If I was just doing business stuff and my co-founder had to do design as well we wouldn't be getting anywhere fast. Good design takes time, but it doesn't have to be flashy. Find someone who understands usability (Fitts' Law) and knows HTML/CSS. Like everyone else has said, if they can hack, even better. I'd also add that if they like the b-side and understand what hacking involves (even if they can't do it well) they will be very useful to the team (read: deserve full equity).
He quite explicitly says that ugliness (quite apart from simplicity) actually has some advantages, like earning the trust of a certain class of users.

It's fine to disagree, but to suggest that he's "confused" when he's stated that so clearly is kind of condescending.

I think he may be right, and I think the "ugly == trustworthy" idea is also lent credence by the hideous ads in small newspapers, in "Coupon Clipper" type mass-mailings, ugly signs for small local businesses, etc.
This would avoid the perils of the PE land grab, and I don't think that licensed architects would try to force software "architects" to go through the architecture exams.

The downside - I think this title is an attempt to add status by distancing a technical person from the pedestrian act of writing code. All in all, I wouldn't want to work for an architect who doesn't code. I've seen it, and it's ugly.

It's frustrating that "programmer" was denigrated and has come to mean a person who, without any sort of creativity or judgement, types code to spec all day. I have never met anyone who did this, and I have my doubts as to whether it's really possible, but I have met a few people who needed to believe it to justify their existence as "architects".

But if programmer is a bad word, and hacker is too prone to misunderstanding, then "developer" will have to do.
Sounds like Vogel was an important predecessor of Borlaug.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orville_Vogel
"All the ads?" The ad count is way, way down. Where they used to have a dozen mini-banners, they've now got one big square box.
"I recognize that 4x revenue is a lowball offer and she probably wouldn't take it. But a standard 10x revenue seems way too risky to me in an emerging market of teenagers."

That's a risk of any early stage acquisition. If you're strongly risk averse, you aren't doing this kind of deal. Every tech startup at this early stage has dozens of unpredictable variables, but when you have a strong cash flow, explosive growth, and plenty of users, the value goes way up.
Where'd you get the "accepting 25" number? Just curious. It seemed like 19 was a bit overwhelming for them this time. But since the CA office is bigger, and there are more former founders out here that would be able to relieve some of the advisory role pressure, they might be willing to bump the number up again, assuming enough of the applications are good.
I'm certain that's a bad idea. They were overwhelmed by the 400+ apps they got last time...I don't think they'd take kindly to someone gaming the system and forcing them to read an extra 20 apps (I'm pretty sure the round file would be the only one seeing all of your applications).
When "pretty" equals "childish", ugly will of course always win.
Jason Fried: Working closely together ain't productive
Here, look how many ads there were just a few days ago:

http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/5483/boingboingoldschooll...
Webtogs: Diary of an eCommerce start-up
For all of CO2's bad rap, it is a known quantity, and its effect of the atmosphere is largely non-disruptive. The potential for releasing billions of kgs of hydrogen into the atmosphere, well:

http://www.physlink.com/Reference/AirComposition.cfm

...there isn't much of it, and I'm not sure we can predict what will happen if the amount goes up 100 fold.
I went back and made it more obvious I was kidding. But is there any hacker serious about being an entrepreneur and working on a project during the Winter session and beyond?
Why wait for someone else's approval? Don't leave your fate up to someone else's whim.

And don't forget there are many, many other investors.

[Edit: Also don't forget you can set up Google ads on your own; or have actual paying customers. You may not need any investment at all.]
>> And, worst case, if all of the markets she deals in dry up over the next three years...she still makes enough to retire comfortably on (and a lot more than a measly 1.6 million).

This thought makes the last few sentences in the article a bit offensive:

>> Just a 17-year-old and her big dreams in a pink, pink, pink world full of promise. And if they don't come true? Well, there's always college.
DO NOT STORE PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT

DO NOT STORE PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT

DO NOT STORE PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT

DO NOT STORE PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT

Obviously, this still needs to be said. Every modern database has an encrypt function that you can build right into the SQL string.
You make a surprisingly random assumption (500 apps) and then base your entire post around statistical interpretations of that assumption.

Bravo!

You should become an economist.
> Can we apply as single hackers who don't care about which project we take on?

Not to be YC specific, but just in general, who would want to invest in someone who doesn't care?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372

Certainly not hard evidence but the limiting factor seems to be good applications, not how many they're able to accept. That's a great sign.
These things _did_ occur, but they are not the cause of the demise of the Native American.

The mere _arrival_ of Europeans, who carried diseases to which Native Americans were not immune, doomed them. These diseases were rapidly spread to any who traded with Europeans and thence to the innermost regions of North (and South) America. Most Native Americans died of transmitted European diseases long before they had any any opportunity to glimpse a "white man".

The Native Americans were so decimated by the time of the massacres and reservations that entire tribes had to migrate and merge, losing their unique identities, in order to merely survive.
Ok. There were 435 applications for this summer. I assume that YCombinator's traffic has been growing steadily and that more hackers have been captivated by YC, so therefore more will apply. 65 more probably isn't too far off the mark.

As for the other assumption that YC will accept more than they did last time, I'm basing that off of Paul's words.

Can I still become an economist?
Depending on the price and the functionality of the browser (support for java, etc to run my web app), and the networks that support it, I would too.
Contact me.
Maybe even more than 500. [link eludes me] But somewhere it was written that the Cambridge session was the unpopular session. And since May 2007 YC has been featured in Newsweek, in addition to getting a groundswell press from each individual company (eg. Weebly in Time).

I'd bank on about 700-800 applications.
Court orders movie pirate to switch to Windows
He has made up this elaborate theory that ugly sites sell because they're ugly, when Occam's razor says they sell despite being ugly. Thinking that muddy can accurately be called confusion.
Google Building Mobile OS
Faulty software in a life-critical system can kill just as easily as faulty mechanics or faulty electronics. If society considers it important to license mechanical and electrical engineers for particular jobs why should the software case be any different?

The idea that licensure would keep the most talented people out if the field is absurd. Talented people by definition will find it easier than average people to meet the standard.

Most likely licensure of software professionals would play out similarly to that of electrical engineers; most practicing electrical engineers in the USA are not licensed as PEs. You only really need an EE PE if you work in the construction industry or for the government.
> somewhere it was written that the Cambridge session was the unpopular session

If anything it's the other way around, because fewer people are free to try something new on Jan 1 than June 1.
Sorry for the lost of your girlfriend. I can only quote Joaquin Sabina.

"...Y una manana comprendi, que a veces gana el que pierde a una mujer"

"...and one morning I understood that sometimes you win when you loose a woman"
MySpace runs on IIS? Really?
We work hard enough evaluating applications that we can probably claim our choices are more than whims.
It's doesn't seem that far off. It would be surprising if the ratio was as high as 1:10 or as low as 1:30.
I am interested, please contact me at pbnaidu@gmail.com
I disagree with him. Professional looking web site is yet another step higher in delivery of "quality feel" your business may either project to customers or not.

I am inclined to think that craigslist, ebay an plentyoffish are rather exceptions. Every single one of them has very significant reasons to explain their success. So significant that design got irrelevant.

Certainly there is more to succes than a pretty looking HTML/CSS, but saying that ugliness sells is just wrong.
"I should do something for people my age while I can still relate. You can't do something like that without an investment, since you have to be able to support servers costing hundreds of dollars and not annoy users with ads until you can figure out the best way to make it work."

You can do something for people your age, see if they relate, and then take investment when you need to scale. Apparently, it's not hard to get investors if you're so snowed under with traffic that your servers are busting at the seams.
Zen, Betty Crocker, and end-to-end testing
Yeah, good question. And why do so many big websites have utterly crazy URL structures? That PC Mag URL above is among the worst I've seen. What's with this?

/0,1206,l=213934&s=25234&a=213919,00.asp

instead of

/2007/08/top-100-undiscovered-web-sites

I guess it's the website revision systems (CMSs) they use. But it's still surprising that big CMSs haven't caught onto nice URLs.
Elephant Math
Wow. Nothing short of epiphanic.
Depending on someone else for emotional support, in my opinion, is a luxury with great risk.

Wise words.
Engadget has also picked up on the story:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/28/google-is-working-on-a-mo...
So how does she make all that money? Advertising? Contracts she's won?
All personal evaluations are subject to whims. An investor does or doesn't like the idea; does or doesn't like the people. Cisco was turned down by 70 or 80 VCs. Nobody has a crystal ball, and at the end of the day, you guess; the dealmaker or breaker is frequently some arbitrary factor.
This is a pretty neat list, although I would think meebo and kiva are more "discovered" than the others. I agree with the amie st and indeed picks. But more than five food related sites? And is whoissick.com? Social networking for the sick; maybe there's value in that...
I've been offering this service for Hecl for something like a year:

http://builder.hecl.org/
"What I'd like" isn't the same as, "here's how I can make money for you". That's what it boils down to with almost all investors; minus ones who are okay with sinking in money regardless of profit to scratch a personal itch (of course they're probably going to micromanage in that case).

> it is more important to have a good team, than a specific idea or a specific market

Ideas are certainly easier to come by; executing is the hard part. But there's no such thing as a generic "good team". If they don't have a feel for the particular idea then they are not going to execute as well.

If there is a lack in passion there is a lack in results.
"Elaborate?" His notion is, if anything, radical in its simplicity.

Websites, advertisements, et al. do not exist in a vacuum. If websites "sell despite being ugly" then the whole design business is a scam, and at the end of the day you've got a much more complex situation to explain. What does Occam's razor tell you about that?

The point he's making is that design sends a message. Certain types of "bad" design included. And that certain types of "bad" design send a message that may actually appeal to some users. Is that really so elaborate, so confused?
On Particletree, Chris wrote an article about the role of design in business in regards to how it affects morale and motivation at Wufoo.

http://particletree.com/features/the-importance-of-design-in...
Joke about how software developers are hired
In some ways I feel compelled to agree with his point, even though almost every thought in my mind goes contrary to that.

People trust the Wall street journal which has a fixutre of using Times Roman for most of their articles. I think it would advantagous at least intially for some sites to jump on that where their content depends on trust that the site has not yet acquired on their own. Ugliness (if you want to call it that) may work over a bubbly fonty web 2.0 site.

At the same time I agree with brlewis expectations idea of the user. If I wanted to put my photos anywhere it would be a disney like bubbly, fonty like site.

But all this is just a view on what works initially (or on first glance), afterwards it still up to the site to retain and grow their user base. And thats based on content not ugliness or beauty.
Y Combinator Companies Didn't Like Boston?
Did any of this sessions YC group enjoy the city of boston? Im a Boston native and out of everything I have seen so far it seems that the overall feeling was that Boston doesnt make the cut and most of the YC companies will be moving to the Valley. Is this mostly based on investment opportunities. Or your experience here as well.

Did you guys even really have a chance to go out and have a good time in the city?
Sequoia Capital to Yale: "Invest or else"
Yes, I like the story, it is inspiring. But 70 points are a lot. Is there a top-10 list of most voted stories?
This is cool. So you turn your simple Hecl scripts into Java ME code? Do you use Sun's reference WTK for the emulation?

Supposedly the deal with Sony's new service is it uses the ACTUAL phone hardware connected to actual networks to test on. You must reserve timeslots or something like that, but then when you are testing (via the browser), you are seeing what is running on the actual hardware on a real wireless network. And you will soon be able to test on phones not yet released too.

But the deal is it costs money.. And I'm not sure how much. Might be too expensive for a small startup.
What's the best startup story you ever heard?
doesn't have to be about software
Ugly and conservative are not the same thing, in fairness to the WSJ.
James Dyson's story is one of the most interesting startup stories I know. Trying to sell your technology and everyone ignoring you...

http://www.bestchoicevacuums.com/dyson-story.html
" Apparently, it's not hard to get investors if you're so snowed under with traffic that your servers are busting at the seams."

Yes, I know the hypothetical. However, I'm talking about reality. If YCombinator is an option, I'm going to take it.

1) I'm leaving my desktop app available so my current customers, 93% of whom of 153 survey respondents say they love it, can access it. I already know I can deliver software that makes people happy enough to pay money for it. I'm just creating a free version and getting it up to distributors to see if it can make even more people happy than I can imagine.

2) Finding cofounders on News.YC for a web-based app the team agrees on.

3) Applying to YCombinator.

4) Working as long as it takes to make a lot of users happy.

PG, Max Levchin, and other investors favor teams who are dedicated and flexible versus one specific idea.
I really appreciate these comments about webpy.
I recently started using it and I love it for its simplicity, but at the same time I wondered about the advantages/disadvantages of its "anti-framework" philosophy against the full features of a mega framework ala Django, Pylons or TG.

I still find it very appealing, because 99% of the time, it is used for common, simple websites. And in these cases, its simplicity pays off.
I like that I don't have to fiddle with multiple files or configurations, since everything can be contained in a single file in a very clear way, and just adding "web.run" to your script converts it into a running website.
The emulator I use is an open source one (linked to from the site).

Obviously, they're providing something that is more specific to their hardware, but the general concept is certainly not that difficult.

Hecl is an interpreter, so I don't really need to turn it into anything, just wedge it into a .jar file that the emulator can digest.
news.ycombinator.com/best
I liked the previous (~4-5 minutes in) version of your comment better. ;-)

Anyway, I also think you're right in doing all of the above. And it looks like you'll find your cofounders, judging from other responses to your comment. Good luck with that.

I'm just saying that even if the investors (including YC) say no, you can still build something, see if people want it, and then get investment. You don't really need investors to start something, nowadays, and when you do need them they'll usually be there.
"You don't really need investors to start something, nowadays, and when you do need them they'll usually be there."

Thanks, but like I said in my post, I would rather get an exciting team together, get the legal and accounting stuff out of the way, and build a trusted relationship with an investor, and put to use what I've learned over the past 4 years. And none of those people work for free.

If it's possible to take care of all that stuff right away, it makes life very easy.
I'm sorry you've experienced lack of passion in the past and want to share it, but I can't help you here. I have no idea what that must be like. I'm looking to take my 4-year-old lone adventure with one product, to a great team effort on something even bigger, always forging ahead without waiting for a perfect opportunity.

No matter how many times you post, the team means more than an idea. Ideas can be changed a million times once you're incorporated, invested, have a prototype, and user feedback. PG, Max Levchin, and others prefer a team versus an idea.

Again, thanks for sharing your experience.
I threw a party over the summer at my place in Cambridge, and there were a few of us who actually went out often. But we had gone to MIT so we knew what was fun. So, yes -- it has everything to do with investment opportunities. There are a few companies planning to go to New York for the music companies. (This includes us)
Yes, they were running coldfusion until about 2 years ago, at which point they switched to a hybrid solution of Blue Dragon (ColdFusion running on .NET) and ASP.NET.

http://highscalability.com/myspace-architecture
I agree with nostrademons. Make YC a sideline, not a destination or starting point. There's great power in taking charge for yourself.

If you don't feel compelled, it's because your goals aren't inspiring you. You need bigger goals. Possibly getting accepted to possibly work with unknown people on an unknown web app is not interesting enough to capture your imagination.

You have to think of something you really want, something that grabs you, especially if you don't know if you could do it or if it's even possible at all.

As for 5), have you heard of Pollground?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator

That said, some great ideas seemed stupid to "experts" at the time; just trust your own gut feeling, not anyone else's. If you don't have a gut feeling, then you probably don't understand what people want in that area and should switch to another one (or steep yourself in the original a lot more).
A Comparison of Push and Pull Techniques for Ajax [pdf]
Cool. Yeah I was hoping you guys got to go out a bit. Thats cool that some of the music companies are choosing NYC. Makes sense. Which company are you with? Reble is that still the name?
Guy Kawasaki is sorely mistaken. I do know all of those applications (illustrator, photoshop, dreamweaver, flash, etc) and all of those languages (javascript,actionscript) and did learn them on a pc.
Are you intentionally using the phrase "subject to" to obscure your logic? It could mean "likely to be affected by", or it could mean "dependent on". The meaning changes completely.
If you ask myspace or ebay, not very.
Reddit did it. There's a valid user happiness story to tell there, when you can actually give a person back the password they were using.

What you really mean is, don't insert user-submitted content into SQL queries. And in reddit's case, don't keep user data on local storage.
Freedom. And money can buy you a lot of freedom indeed, unless it has lots of strings attached.
It's not like Microsoft's web stack sucks. Obviously C#'s not en vogue, but it's a fine way to put together a website. There's actually some really good stuff in there, and they've had the presentation/code-behind separation in since before people though it was a good idea.
Respectfully, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Very good article, some of it is reiterating things I would take as a given, others like the bottom up market size estimation are very useful points that are easy to miss when caught up in the hope and dreams.
Does anyone know if you get some feedback when you apply early?
I'm not actually arguing against licensing software developers in principle. It may eventually make sense - though right now, I think it would be premature. What I'm most opposed to is licensing under the ABET/FE/PE path. I'm not sure if you've looked at the exam before - I'd recommend browing through some sample FE tests at the library or bookstore. Think about what they're testing, and what you think it takes to write extremely secure, stable software. The overlap is tiny. Software development also has something in common with mathematics. Should we require everyone pass an exam based on Real Analysis, Group Theory, and Topology to write code? That's only slightly more absurd than requiring that they pass the PE exams.

As for talented people... well, there are ways to get around the ABET degree. But if we license under the FE/PE route, physics majors will be at a disadvantage, and math majors will face major hurdles in sitting for the exam. So I definitely don't think that it's absurd to conclude that licensure would reduce the talent level in the field if that licensing is based on the PE route. Again, this isn't an argument against lisencing in principle, it's just an argument against favoring civil engineering majors over math majors where it comes to writing software.
I think everything went exactly right. Most people who use Ebay know it like the back of their hand, simply from experience. Gradually adding new stuff isn't stressful for users, compared to a redesign, and rocking the boat is the last thing Ebay wants to do, considering that their only advantage over competitors or potential competitors at this point is momentum.
Some of those companies should have thought more about their name before setting up shop.