skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I think we're considering fundamentally different paradigms."

Yes, I agree. I'm passionate about somehow improving the lives and education of the average public high school student. My hypothesis is that the answer is increasing the availability of student-student, student-teacher, and teacher-teacher communication, with the memory pool to store previous content. The internet is a wonderful thing, however programs like Blackboard fail to take into account group interaction. (They claim they do, but their groups are isolated to individual classrooms; I'm talking about networking across the entire world.)

"...but it would need to be developed outside the institutional structure, or your 2) would rapidly become 1)."

Exactly. This is why I feel it can only be created by a commercial entity, possibly a corporation.

Also, I agree that your method of learning is superior, however the entity that creates this must accept that public schools teach in a certain way and change very slowly.

Another problem is dealing with online predators. Any kind of social software created for schools is going to create huge waves of uproar unless people are sure that predators, real or imagined, can't communicate with students. I'm thinking that in order to communicate with other students, you must be a part of a classroom that has at least a certain amount of students and has a certain amount of content. Stifling communication is unsettling, but I don't see another way.
Nice. The voiceover sounds like it's from a 1950s science video, and the dude at 0:56 looks like Napoleon Dynamite. When you get past the superficial stuff, there's a lot of insight here too. It's really interesting to see how Jobs managed his people back then.

"I don't want to hear 'just because we blew it last time, we're going to blow it this time.'" Smart stuff.
My first startup was homebased. It took almost 2 years before it started doing good.

Most canned solutions for homebased businesses are total scams. You really have to conjure up something yourself if you want any chance at success.
"public schools teach in a certain way and change very slowly."

I can certainly agree with you about that. IB has been around for 30 years, and just got any foothold in American 10 years ago. I was lucky enough to go to one of the early public IB schools.
VentureBeat: Look at Facebook
Yeah it's an interesting glimpse into how he rules his companies. With some funny 80s style thrown in to spice it up ;)
Public education is way behind, especially in technology. I just made "my first website" in a CS class 3 weeks ago. And I built it with the same HTML code I taught myself at age 9.

I also am not a huge fan of the amount of "busy work." This is just the work that professors are required to give you to fulfill some degree requirement. Almost nothing I've learned in college has been applicable to any of my business-related work, although I don't think we can hold an undergraduate degree up to much glory.
[This is just about your first paragraph.]

The question is whether that is a problem. I for one don't really think that traditional secondary ed is the right place for teaching tech. Tech moves too fast.

We need to fix the school systems to more effectively cover their domain: sciences and humanities. Technology, however, is best learned as we learn it: free-form, self-directed, online. There is no need to merge that into curricula.

(Note, there's a difference between technology and CS: CS is algorithmics, theory; it's a branch of math, really. Technology is applied: websites, programming languages, things of this sort. Any curricular approach to technology is doomed to constantly lag the tech education available extracurricularly.)
There are two distinct classes of work that are called "busy work". The first is heinous, the second is often loathed, but great.

There's real busywork: work assigned just to take your time, create something to grade. That's crap, it should go away. (And in my collegiate experience, largely has.)

Then there's "impractical stuff": people often malign work they do that doesn't directly apply to the real world, but I think that it is often worthwhile. Consider MIT's famed 6.001: few of its students ever use Scheme, or any functional language, professionally, but the work in Scheme is never the less worthwhile. (Disclosure, I love functional languages.)
A Digg feature that checks if you've already submitted a link twice, or one similar to it (base it off the title of the article, or base it off the description entered by the user).
One thing I'm hoping is that if teachers use the service I described above, they'd be less inclined to create busy work - it would be obvious to the rest of their community that that's what they're creating, and so they'd have an incentive to not do that.

Unless they make all their content private and don't participate in the community, which is an option too.
Mathematically/statistically Alexa never made sense to me... here's hoping someone finds a better way.
I used to be a journalist. I didn't learn much in that career, but I did learn one thing: 80% of reporters have a novel tucked into their desk drawer that they're writing. (Metaphorically, of course - most reporters can use word processors.)

I never personally knew a reporter who finished that novel.
Probabilistic model for measuring success
Sure. Most of what we do isn't based on specific domain knowledge anyway.
P(S) = i/A + j(N/3) + k(1/Q)^2 + x((1/GT)^3)

A = Average age of founders

N = Number of founders

Q = Quality of idea, 0-1

G = Graham Quotient: How hard you'll work, 0-1

T = Taleb Quotient: How lucky you'll get

i, j, k, x: Adjust to fit the sample of 5 famous startups in the news this week

Repeat as required
I am sure there are a lot of management books out there that define SUCCESS, and I am sure they have their respective models to describe the probability of SUCCESS.

I was just thinking about modeling the probability from a startup perspective. Following are the assumptions this model makes -

1. It takes 'n' number of iterations before an idea is a HIT, where n is greater or equal to 1

2. There is a probablity of success associated with each iteration, which implies that there is also a probablity of failure associated with each iteration.. duh!!

Model 1: Using geometric distribution

This is the most conservative and simplistic approach to model success

p(HIT) = Probability of success per iteration

P(SUCCESS) = p(HIT) x (1 - p(HIT))^n

This is simple in the sense that each new iteration does not carry the benefits from the previous iteration

Model 2: Bernoulli's trials based model

This probably is more realistic of the two models

p(HITn) = Probability of success in the nth iteration = P(HITn-1) +/- deltaP

Similarly,

p(~HITn) = Probability of NO success in the nth iteration = P(~HITn-1) +/- (1-deltaP)

where deltaP = Probability of iteration (n-1) increasing/decreasing the probability of success in the nth iteration

P(SUCCESS) = p(HIT0) x p(HIT1) x ... x p(HITn-1) x p(HITn) = 1 - p(~HIT0) x p(~HIT1) x ... x p(~HITn-1) x p(~HITn)

where p(HITn) tends to 1 AND p(~HITn) tends to 0, We need to be deterministic if we have to be optimistic... ;-)

Any thoughts on this??? Do you think this model is right/wrong?? Do you have your own models??? Please do share!!!
Pairwise and Y Combinator: Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?
Good one!!! Did you model this? :-).. interesting... you are saying that if P(S) is greater than 1, P(S) doesn't apply to that particular startup.. its meaningless.. and they should stop wasting their time.. is dat a valid argument to why your metric could be greater than 1?
I didn't find this to be accurate at all in telling me what kind of a person I am. Anyone else take the quiz?
My Pairwise Test Results (not bad, but got the book part wrong)
I think they can do better if they make you look at more images, but for this online version they wanted to strike a balance between that and having people actually finish.
Yeah I can see that. I found that I had no preference in many of the image comparisons so I just clicked one.
Did they simply take the average result from the past YComb people or was there more to it? (btw sorry for posting this topic before you!)
Is this comparison with respect to all Y combinator founders or only with respect to those who have succeeded? Have you identified any personality differences between those who succeeded and those who did not?
Great, another test I have to study for! :-)

Seriously, what impact does this have on getting funded by YC? (I'm sure everyone wants to know the answer to that)
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Gender: Girl

I am too depressed to read any further:) But I did - it only gets worse:

"read books voraciously"...I'm as far from that as you can get.

"a religious person"...tell that to my mom

"have or want pets"...can't stand most pets!
They must be checking a cookie match or something. I can get it. Stupid move not to assume people would link directly to their results page. Let's leave it up for a bit and see if they can fix that.
I've always been fascinated by likebetter.com and would like to see related work. As a start, see this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_fingerprinting
Yeah it's pulling my results seems like. Crazy.
To be honest, not much. We may use Pairwise seriously in the next round, but this is just a prototype.

In particular, we don't care much about the specific metrics this test tries to measure. The Pairwise guys chose those; we had nothing do to with it. When we use this for real, all we'll care about is one measure: how close one comes to the best founders. We don't care what atoms are in that molecule.
Great points! I could have written your same post. I've started a company before and am willing to move my wife and two kids to Cambridge for this. In addition however, my wife is co-founder of my start-up so she's completely on board ;-)

Either way, we're going to build our company. It would be nice to get a three month kick start though instead of having to work around my day job.

Building the company around my day job will actually be tougher on the family but we'll still be better off in the long run. A job for someone with a family isn't all it's cracked up to be. It isn't flexible. I have a long commute. I have fixed pay that doesn't really reflect my time and effort. Stability isn't everything and it isn't what makes a person or a family happy.

There are other ways to take risks with a family. There are extended families etc. Taking risk with a family isn't wrong, it's just something you should think through.
simple oversight. fixing now
paul graham is great
Even if we take it as a given that a test like this can work well, I suspect that test takers will become more sophisticated at choosing images to get desired outcomes.

And so the test will need to get more sophisticated in turn by finding even more non-obvious yet discriminating pairs of images.

This is sort of like the constant battle between those creating spam filters and spammers.
The difference between this and spam is that the cycle time is too long for people to learn efficiently how to beat the system. A spammer can write an email and send it to his gmail acct and know in 30 sec if it beats the filter. We only accept applicants every 6 months.
Future of Web Apps (speeches & presentations)
I found Tara Hunt's thoughts on fostering online communities quite interesting.
Very cool! I didn't realize Pairwise had an actual business model back there. Great job, guys!
Interesting how much a startup was like a big company that far back. Two whole days of meetings? Ugh.
Won't such a test limit the diversity of Y Combinator founders? And so you might get stuck in a local maximum as a result.
New WebOS launches - Desktop On Demand
The accidental 'friend' finder
That was fun, some where spot on, other were a bit fuzzy, a link to my results below:

http://www.likebetter.com/quiz/results?quiz_id=918442805&user_list_id=6
Does it matter what college you go for undergrad?
What is the context of the question? Does it matter for what?
Hey guys,

I am 17 and I posted this because I received my admissions letters this week. I got full rides to every state college I applied but I got wait listed at Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Caltech. I really don't know how to think of this. Can I still start a successful startup? Can I still be more successful than an MIT undergrad? Is there something about these colleges that makes students there better or is it completely dependent on the student's personality, work ethics, etc.. to be successful?

Sorry if the question seems out of whack. I am probably overwhelmed right now by the admissions letters.
I guess I should have added "for a successful startup." Also, if you can tell me how it matters for the comp. science field in general, I would appreciate it.
ok, my observation is that, the GREEN of most attributes is somewhere in the middle (with some nearer to some side), which means that there is a diversity between to those who you are compared, with 3/4 of the samples to define that side. This means that someone can be in right opposite but it doesn't mean that personality is excluded.but be in the 1/4 of the samples. So, with all this diversity, how valid and helpful is this test?

I think the attributes of the test, should be more questions of type, what you do in specific situations, and be compared to what YC would prefer as answer.

update

or am I wrong, and GREEN is the range of answers of the samples?
It won't change your ability to start a startup. It might change how strong a background in CS you get... but again, that depends on what kind of learner you are.

What states?
I got into University of Maryland, Purdue, Georgia Tech, and University of Texas, Austin.
Larry and Sergey went to Michigan and Maryland. Woz went to Berkeley. Jobs, I think, did one semester at Reed. I don't think it matters super much in starting a startup.

Stanford is a good place to go if you want to start a startup simply because it's in the middle of Silicon Valley and thus infused with startup culture (in a way that MIT definitely isn't). But you already seem to have that down.

However, where you go to college can have a great effect on how much fun you have and how much you learn, and that is the most important thing. I'd just go wherever seems to you to have the best intellectual vibe.
I thought it had probably made it up here before... but i had no good way to search, so i thought i'd offer it just in case.

If there was a good discussion last time though, could you link to the original?
We would never use only the test. At most we'd use it to prompt us to take a second look at someone we were about to reject.
Looks like I'll be accepted if I just cross dress while smoking and pulling sarcastic pranks on people:

http://www.likebetter.com/quiz/results?quiz_id=1627867125&user_list_id=6
'You may have someone with a very high IQ but has low interpersonal skill .. cannot relate to other people very well. Cannot understand other people. This can be a real liability for organisations who are looking for leadership .. looking to promote people with high intelligence' [0]

Interesting. I posted a similar post this week on the characteristics found in entrepreneurs ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=7459

'... all we'll care about is one measure: how close one comes
to the best founders. We don't care what atoms are in that
molecule ...'

But testing for characteristics of 'high achievers' then correlating test scores against potential applicants is fraught with problems. Is the correlation against the best enough? [1]

I'm sure you might get some correlation but it's pretty unimaginative [2]. So what could be a better tool? What about direct testing of skill? Wouldn't a better technique be simulation? Why not build a 'startup simulator' where applicants are given tools to simulate tasks they actually will have to do? Then you have a controllable scenario where you really can measure results against successful founders.

You could test

- the conception of an idea

- the building of a (simple) prototype

- quickly find an audience

- find a way to make money off it

Wrapped up in a framework [3] where you test the execution of these tasks you could get a better grasp of the

- skills

- determination

- entrepreneurial audacity

- passion

- humour

- leadership skills needed to succeed.

- risk taking, emotional intelligence

There is a long history of simulators in testing & refining of skills, competency and execution are required. Even Captain Kirk at Starfleet Academy trained, passed (and cheated) on simulators.

Who knows it might even be fun.

Reference

[0] Professor Con Stough, Brain Sciences Institute, 'Director, Centre for Neuropsychology, Swinburne Institute of Technology'

http://www.swin.edu.au/bioscieleceng/neuropsych/stough.htm

[1] But I do like the simplicity of just looking at a simple set of parameters to make a Gladwellian decision.

[2] In a competitive environment the difference between getting the attention of the right candidates could be the tools used to measure how they stack up against the best .. but actually doing something, learning and getting some feedback.

[3] The framework could be a game, or simply a panel of dials. The key thing is you can have a back room with founders, past entrepreneurs twiddling the dials checking to see in RT how candidates handle things like a person leaving, stressing system etc (like the LEM tester in the Apollo missions). It also allows for candidates to learn from failure with less risk & pass on the best decision making skills to candidates that have passed.
Knowing little about any of those schools, I'd say visit each one, choose the one that "feels" right. Look for inquisitive students. College is all about the community. Lame advice, I know, but you know, I only went to one college.
TBH, my feeling about this stuff is that it belongs in nazi research labs and Cosmopolitan magazines, rather than as a screening tool in business where you want the best people. If I was considering applying to anything (Y, a job at a company), being presented with this would disappoint me and set off Dilberty alarms.

Now, this is fun stuff to burn some minutes while procrastinating! Here are my results:

http://www.likebetter.com/quiz/results?quiz_id=1125255845&user_list_id=6

Some things that the test got backwards:

- I'm more a listener than a talker,

- I never smoked (I clicked on the hemp pic because I like intense green :),

- I think I'm more into books than my score there suggests,

- I like mild food rather than spicy,

- I do like and have pets,

- I'm not really that urban. I'm more comfortable in villages or small towns.
This is interesting, I was on the same side in every category, and it seems fairly accurate, although I found some things remarkable far off, most notably "like to read" where I scored a decisive: "aren't much into books."

I found it weird that Y Combinator founders generally fell in the "aren't much into books" category.

Here's Mine: http://www.likebetter.com/quiz/results?quiz_id=509484655&user_list_id=6
I guess you might try applications like these as well:

online dating

airport security

immigration

finding cofounders
Weird. I'm not a smoker, but I was, for a LONG time.

And it knew that. That's really strange and freaks me out. What I once thought was my complicated little unique snowflake of a brain turns out to just be the combination of 21 values.
I would try and find a college that has at least some entrepreneurial initiative. For example, at the Univ of Illinois, they have the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership and the Technology Entrepreneur Center, plus one of the best ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) chapters around. We had Max Levchin and Jawed Karim speak at our last conference, plus companies like Google, Amazon, EA, Microsoft, etc. are showing up.

The only reason I'm really here is to find some CS students to help me startup. But it wouldn't happen without my connection to the school's CS groups.

In the end, I doubt it matters one way or another where you go. As someone mentioned, many successful founders didn't go to ivy league schools. Jobs dropped out after 6 months at Reed. You'll decide how far you go.
I found it relatively inaccurate, but oddly, it was always very precise; i.e. when it got things wrong, it got them profoundly, diametrically wrong.

One thing I wonder is whether there is any logic to deal with confounding variables--for instance, if someone picks every photo that has a bike in it, maybe they just like bikes, and those data points should be excluded.

On the whole, though, the pairwise people have probably as good a shot at anyone at making a not-suck personality analyzer.
That's how I answered most questions. I like chocolate; I like nature; I like neater pictures over complex ones. I have no idea what all that means - may be someone does.
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Austin & Goliath: One unorthodox programmer takes on Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
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Charge your cell phone by air?! Entrepreneur figures out how to do it
"Over the years Meyer has tinkered relentlessly with the program, producing some 140 new versions. His obsessiveness has kept him competitive. While several rival sims have withered in Microsoft's shade -- including Pro Pilot, Flight Unlimited and Fly -- Meyer has kept plugging along. But there are disadvantages to being a one-man show. It's hard to imagine Microsoft coming home drunk one night from a party and accidentally uploading its entire source code, as Meyer did a few years back. "I woke up the next morning and found an e-mail from a friend alerting me to what I'd done. My heart stopped. I had basically given away 12 years of work. I thought my life was over." He was able to remove the files before anyone could spread them around, but to this day he feels like he dodged a bullet. "I don't drink anymore," he says."
Hah! Metal cards are so last century -- I created mine for the millenium. :-)

The interesting thing that I found is that VCs will actually stop talking so they can look at them. Of course, that doesn't last that long. Hahaha.

Also, be sure to warn people carrying them through the new airport security....
As with everything, different implementors may be better/worse at the same thing. I've certainly seen that with my girl (who was in Montessori as a youngster).

Also, no one approach is perfect for everybody. As frightening as it may sounds, some people need more "structure" than others.
This doesn't seem to work at all for me. Its assessment of me seems to have pretty much zero correlation with my self-assessment.

http://www.likebetter.com/quiz/results?quiz_id=1449411178&user_list_id=6
jobs also looks like isaac brock from modest mouse, for better or worse
StartupDAZE is a REAL Tech Blog for the 4.20 Web
Thanks for all the comments, good and bad. They help us refine our test. Keep in mind that we're attempting to figure you out in 40 pairs of pictures. We did this so that lots of people could take it, just to introduce the idea.

A real test would have more like 200 pairs, which is what the YC founders took when we assessed their attributes in the first place.
There is some interesting stuff here about the Economics of Abundance
Seems a little too good to be true, but here's hoping.
If I start a company in grad school, does the school have claim to my work?
I got rejected from Carnegie-Mellon and Rhode Island School of Design - both top design schools. I was pissed but honestly I never associated those rejections to my startup success. Like PG has said in past, startup is more about determination and ability to learn from failure than any specific school or skill.

If anything just laugh off any rejection you get and keep working towards your startup path.
What is objectionable about this comment?
He should come with a towel.
It doesn't matter for a startup. But it does matter if you want a cushy job or want to get into a top professional school.
YC runs orphanage vs. YC as foster parent