skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"America's next top model" has only asked for women participants. The criteria for judging male models and female models is different, and the places for them to model (ads, runway shows) is different, so it wouldn't be a fair comparison to have them competing on the same show. Given the opportunity, I think you would find plenty of men wanting to apply for a similar show.

As for the "mathematically better tuned" comment, I've always disliked the arguments that one sex is better suited for anything, especially when talking about the brain. I think socialization has a lot more to do with brain development then sex, and since we've got hundreds of years of gender roles to overcome before we find out for sure, I think we're better off judging individuals, rather then genders.

As for why there aren't more women in startups, or women geeks for that matter, I return to socialization. Bill Gates made it cool to be a nerd for guys, we still don't have a female in that category. A largely successful role model that makes it ok for women to not be entirerly obsessed with their appearence. Maybe when I get my own start up...
yes by 'index.php'. So the point on checking 'slightly similiar' urls is valid. A simple regex on 'index.foo' (path) after the http://news.ycombinator.com (authority) could pick this up.
That's a good point. I just now realized that I haven't paid for any web apps myself (unless you count Skype). Although recently I was looking at PayScale (http://www.payscale.com/), and thought that if I was looking for a job I would probably buy a premium report from them. In this case the $20 report could help negotiate a few extra thousand dollars in salary.
I think how you fix the problem is finding other means to make money rather than having users pay.

The one issue with this is that it smacks of dot-bomb "Build it and they will come" thinking.

Although a few leaders will emerge, I don't think it's a viable theory for most start-ups. You're better off lowering your expectations and sharing a piece of a smaller pie.

Of course, VC's don't like that thinking too much.
Also, a friend of mine used one of the major dating sites like eHarmony, and I think it cost her about $20 for 3 months. As in your example, it seems like the money is worthwhile because it saves time.
To win big, shrink a market.
you might try the Churchill club http://www.churchillclub.org.au ~ there is one in melbourne and sydney
I somehow doubt VC's forget money making.
I think everyone, from the developers to the consumers, would be happier of people like the author of this article stayed out of software.
I had no idea the returns for investors was so low. There has to be more to the story other than a bunch of people chasing the next Google or Microsoft. If I remember correctly, pg said they started yc because it was fun and sort of like a real-life hack. Maybe other investors feel the same way. Or maybe they enjoy getting involved with the latest and greatest technology companies. If I had tons of cash, this type of investing would be a lot more fun than watching my money slowly grow in an indexed mutual fund.
agreed, clearly the discontinuity in the demand is based on the non-price costs, which is why people like the idea of easy micropayments so much. But the psychological difference between free and not-free is pretty significant.
Online Ad Revenue Up 34% Over Last Year
Kind of like, Startup.com
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
Why is that, exactly? Assuming configuring servers is not the core competency, what would be better about a VPS over a shared services?

What you trade off in control you make up for in free time. Granted, as you get larger and develop traffic, the trade off will need to be re-evaluated, but I don't see any major benefits at the beginning.
My goodness, I can't stand The Apprentice -- it progressively gets trashier each season, so I simply stopped after the first.

Paul, if you think Zoodango sounds cheesy, go see Trump's Learning Annex commercial where, in less than a day, Donald will make you rich with his Midas technology. I've also heard he shares the secret to his comb over. Anything for an extra buck. :-)
This is just good for a sensory overload of 2.0-trendy logos.

Any new web service worth a damn should have "Web 2.0" qualities -- intuitive, user-centric, worthwhile data or tools. Maybe this directory will list every website from this point forward...
"However, eMarketer last month forecast that online ad growth will slow this year to 19 percent, reaching $19.5 billion."

I reckon the ad spending is going to exponentially rise once some tiny startup figures out how to effectively advertise to the cellular market. Exciting times!
High Quality Video Advertising
A Django Primer - Creating a Simple Blog Application (The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines)
An untold story UserLand
Here's the meat:

"I learned a very important lesson here, one that my friend Jason Calacanis said at the OPML Road Show in NYC in 2005. If a deal is worth doing, it's worth documenting with a good agreement."
There are more startups forming now than they were back in 1999. The difference, though, is that not as many startups are receiving funding. So while the bubble might be back, it isn't clear how it will burst.
Paul--any chance we can see Dexter at Startup School?
I'm not just saying this because Jason is a good buddy of mine, but this is an excellent walk-through of Django. If you're building a web app and had a nagging curiosity in Django, this one will get you going.
Vitamin is a resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs
I would like a plastic rocket and a pony..
Sure they do. One or all three of them will just buy a startup and rebrand its product.
Gorb: Taking Personal Reputation To A New Low
I think most people who invest in startups do it in the hope of actually making money. And while the average return may be negative, the best investors make a lot. You just have to be honest with yourself about whether you're a good investor.

At YC what drives us to make money is not wanting to be bad at what we do. If all the startups we fund fail, then we look bad, and we are the kind of people who really hate to look bad. That's arguably one of the unseen benefits of YC: if someone takes funding from us, they put themselves in a position where if they fail, we fail. YC is so public that we work much harder to make sure companies succeed than we would if we cared only about the returns.
Believe it or not, some may. Several top-tier VCs have told me (truthfully or not) that some lower-grade VCs know their funds are never likely to make money, and they're just doing it for the fat management fees.
You have to start somewhere!
Worth the read. Don't confuse 'simplicity' with lack of features. Read Simplicity[0] by Joel for an explanation why.

[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html
The Figures Behind The Top Web Apps
"Because of this, the computer programming industry within the United States is an industry with a shrinking number of jobs"

Is this backed up with any numbers? People have been predicting the demise of programming jobs in the US for years, yet it never seems to happen. I suspect because the claim is based on the fallacy that there's a finite amount of programming to be done.
"I think that, if you can't get into a Top 14 law school or a top graduate business schol, then public accounting probably provides a better career path than computer programming."

If you have a desire to make things being an accountant will hardly compare with being a programmer.
"No one cares if you know how to program in COBOL for example. It's completely useless knowledge."

Well Monster lists 1055 Cobol jobs: http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?q=cobol&fn=&lid=&re=130&cy=us&JSNONREG=1
The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site
It's cool how even though there is a lot of noise surrounding advice about startups a bunch of precepts have an air of unanimity. "Release early and iterate" would be one of those.
This is precisely the kind of data I always am hoping to hear about but almost never do.
If that's true then question then is how bad off are you if you take money from such a lower-grade fund. In the long run is it not even worth it to take their money?
Inside Myspace.com
dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1015
Great New Products are Harder to Sell -- Life and Life Only
Y Combinator-like without funding but with advice, connections, and stock in the startup (what would happen?)
Since advice and connections are the major benefits of Y Combinator, why not take on many more startups without funding most of them at all?

I suspect that many people would be happy with such an arrangement and Y Combinator may end up making quite a lot more money as well.
Makes sense to me. But my guess is that time would be an issue.
Sound good in principle but there are a lot of people who want advice. You need to find a way to prioritise who would benefit most from your advice and connections. What better way to decide than to ask yourself "Who would I invest in?". Then you're back at the YCombinator model.

If someone can figure out how to make this work then great. I'm not sure YC will work without you narrowing applicants down and giving them money.

Perhaps instead of having a single team who advise founders you could have a self supporting community. Put all the startups in a coworking/barcamp like environment for a summer and tell them to help each other out and to share connections. It would be interesting to see how well they could do on their own. You still have the problem of where they would get money to stay alive without funding.

[sorry if this is incoherent, I'm sleepy. Will edit to make sense in the morning]
While it sure is generous and I'm sure the founders appreciate it, a couple of months worth of rent and ramen noodle money isn't really funding a company. What you describe is already what YC is- it's just making sure that you are available full-time to really do something about the advice and contacts. :)
Yeah, given the amount YC gives it's as if they just want to make sure poorer founders won't have to get day jobs in the time they've alloted to impart advice.
I don't think the money is the issue here, which results to many companies being funded because of the relatively low cost for them to bring up to life startups, comparing to VCs.

So, they invest enough money to get u going. Their actual contribution is their network and their guidance, which isw hat consumes their time and what everyone applying wants.

So, the quantity and the limit of the "many people" is relevant to how big YC is and how many people they find worthful to invest.
You want a great example of this, look to the man who more or less invented the principle- as I've used news.YC over the past couple of weeks it seems every few days, as simple as the site is, very nice features keep popping up. Nothing disruptive, nothing gaudy, just smooth and steady increase in value. In fact, if you want a great example of a site that's responsive, that knows how to grow a community, that knows how to fill itself with quality community content, that does something people want and does it simply and well... Thanks for leading what you preach.
Thats pretty amazing actually. It sounds like these lower-grade VC's could only be so cynical due to past experience, but if that is the case, who is putting them at the helm of large funds again and again?
Very cool; however, for those unaware, it may appear more impressive than it is...

From what I can see, it is essentially a teleoperated hand/arm mounted on a (tethered, top AND bottom!) Segway-like base. The latter is a well-publicized Trevor Blackwell hack from several years ago. Watch for Trevor from about the 2 minute mark onwards, standing in the background and wearing a blue shirt. He is in front of a massive control panel, operating the robot's hand with an instrumented (haptic?) glove.

To be fair, this is still an impressive piece of engineering. Undoubtedly, it will serve as an important platform for future development efforts.
Your best web 2.0 site design and why?
MySpace.com...because it "works."

/goes back to throwing up.
I would have appreciated if the article covered few common pitfalls and how NetFlix wrestles them when using the fast iteration cycle.
That's exactly how we look at it: the most important thing we offer is advice and connections, and the money is just to pay your living expenses so that you can focus entirely on the startup for long enough to get it properly launched.

It always annoys us when people say YC is a ripoff because we want an avg of 6% of a co for $15-20k. One reason we don't argue (much) with people who say that is that we treat the question as a sort of preliminary IQ test in the application process.
Because (a) putting our own money in is a test of our commitment and forces us to pay attention, and (b) a lot of the founders would be distracted by money issues and wouldn't be able to focus on their startups.
Two hypotheses:

1.) Y Combinator's advice and connections are a limited resource. There are only so many phone calls their partners can make in a day. Y Combinator's business is not scalable unless they generate more y combinators.

2.) Y Combinator's application process allows them to invest in startups that are most likely to succeed. If they spread their resources around a larger base of companies, they would be investing in startups less likely to success. With more failures, their return on investment would fall, not rise.
Actually the scalability of YC is a fascinating question. As hackers we're always thinking about that. And of course as hackers we have ideas about how to do it. We've been gradually growing the number of startups in each batch. But we often speculate about what we'd have to do to fund, say, 1000 startups per year. There has to be some way to do it. Whatever the answer is, it would be something to see, wouldn't it?
The way VCs raise their funds and get paid seems horribly broken. I think most of them hover between borderline fraud and out-right fraud.

YC should kill all the sub-par VCs by scaling up massively and taking their billions in funding away.
I myself rank advice and connections a little more important than the money itself. That's what really pulled me here to Y Combinator in the first place.
YC-organized Startup School supplies advice to a larger audience, along with a chance for connections. I'd also contend that news.yc is another such tool offered by YC.

The summer/winter batches are a chance for picked companies to receive specialized attention. YC can't do that for everybody.
Michael Arrington/Timothy Bray debate on Web 2.0 -- 3/19, Sun in Menlo Park (free admission)
Microsoft expanded quite a few markets before it shrunk the encyclopedia market.
I would not run unnecessary risks just to avoid being "average". Would you?

Sometimes being a rebel-without-a-cause isn't the best approach.
TellMe Networks may fetch more than $800 million in acquisition by Microsoft
The earlier you set up your own servers and take care of them the better you'll be at it. If your seriously strapped for time maybe you can put it off, but it's a skill you want to have.
And what would that be?
Here's a blog post by Aaron Swartz: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rlrr

In there, he proposes that "release early, release often" works in open source, but is less applicable to a wide public who are not expecting something unpolished and incomplete. When you only get one chance to make an impression, the unveiling might need a lot more consideration. Of course, then your product might never even see the light of day because it's been tied up for so long.

This is a different view from that in PG's essay, and it just shows the added complexity in decision-making a startup must go through.
Release Early or Release Big?
Some lead-in discussion in here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=3813
You can't talk about VCs generally because there's such a difference between the good ones and the bad ones. The good ones serve their investors pretty well.

We'd never compete with VCs, incidentally. It's a completely different world from ours. They invest on behalf of other people (or more often, institutions). So while they have huge resources at their command, they have to answer to their investors, and this makes them excessively conservative. We much prefer using our own money, even if it limits what we can do.
Interesting question. It might actually be ok to take money from a firm like that, if you didn't have any better alternatives. You wouldn't have the brand or connections of a top VC, but you'd at least have the money, which is not nothing.
"How I Met My Cofounder" Story?
This is for you, looking for your cofounder. It's a story about how the original two guys in a garage met each other. If you have a founder story, it's my hope that you also share it here, for all of us. From 'The HP Way', by David Packard:

"Largely because of (Fred) Terman's classes, the four of us - Hewlett, Porter, Oliver, and I (Packard) - became fast friends. It is not a coincidence that a few years later this group would become the management team of HP. Our (Bill and I) common interest in the outdoors first manifested itself in our junior year. There is no question that a shared love of the outdoors strengthened our friendship and helped build a mutual understanding and respect that is the core of their successful business relationship lasting more than a half century."

At the start of Dave's junior year as a Stanford electrical engineer, he demonstrated an interest in ham radios that caught Terman's eye. This led to his invitation to join Terman's graduate course on ham radios, which also included Bill and others, who were crucial to starting and building HP. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I hope this story (and the story you have to share) inspires you and the YC faithful, helping you with THE question: how do I find my cofounder?
Secrets of a Master Networker - Keith Ferrazzi
Guy Kawasaki's The Art of Exec. Summaries/1 pagers
This advice is like gold dust. Has never let me down.
5 Ways to SMS for free on Web 2.0
Where IS Guy Kawasaki's Garage Ventures in the pecking order?
He seems pretty well respected due to his writings, but I don't have any sense of what people think of Garage. I recognize a few names: http://www.garage.com/portfolio/index.shtml, but they're not on the list that Paul compiled: http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html

Does YC have a relationship with them?
hoarding your equity like it's gold dust is a typical mistake of inexperienced founders. we did exactly the same and it got us nowhere. when we realised our equity was worthless unless it was held by the right people, with the right connections, things moved far more smoothly.
Adding features is one thing, changing the app metaphor is another. I'd say that the latter has to be right at launch.
"How to scale your community" by Wordpress Founder
I don't know if the visa thing messes it up, but as a generic Canadian you can own American companies with no issues. I believe the issue is in you paying yourself a salary or the like from the corp. However you should be able to collect dividends just fine. It's been a while since I looked into it for myself, so don't trust me on this. Personally I ended up going for a private Alberta named limited corporation for several reasons.

The tax rate starts at 16% if you're poor poor poor like me and maxes at 33% or so total for both federal and provincial. Check into the US corporate tax rates. If I remember doing my research right, you might be better off being a Canadian.
"The problem is what happens when someone else comes along and offers all of your features for free?"

I created Stuff To Do (stufftodo.dedasys.com) as something we needed for work, but on my own time, so I decided to experiment with it a bit. I came up with what I thought was a pretty good separation of pay/free versions: the group-enabled version costs money because if you're working in a group, you're probably in a company, and companies have money...

However, it is also a space that's got a lot of people in it, and while I think I have a few compelling features (the time tracker is the easiest out there) free is tough to beat.

Not sure what I'll do with it, because it's not really the sort of application that lends itself well to advertising (I'd find it pretty annoying to have ads on my todo list).
Why is this here though? This is more of a reddit article, isn't it? What does "How to build a simple blog application using Django" have to do with startups?
Do you still buy computer books?
It'll save you from reading the applications :-))
The one VC firm I've ever actually worked with was all about "go big or stay home." However, they had the pre-launch checklist that included things like making sure the product was complete and a perfect fit for a specific vertical.

If you have an app that can exist in isolation and plenty of money, you can achieve that product perfection (not really of course, but enough to make some money) by conducting formal user-tests, focus group junk, exclusive invitation-only beta-testing, etc.

If you don't have the money or if your application requires or is fundamentally a social network, releasing early and having the very early adopters is the only way (it seems) to get that product to the ripe stage where you can then "go big."

Another nice thing I see about launching with YC's blessing is you automatically get enough buzz to be visible to the early early adopters.
Free: a Tactic, not a Business Model
Thousands of little YC hatchlings would be incredible. I suppose YC news could be seen as one way of trying to scale the process of information sharing. It also covers advice in that you can pose a question to the community and get good answers usually.

Now how could the connection sharing be scaled? I wonder what would happen if someone was to post "I need introductions to VC's" or "Know any good lawyers?" to YC news. Would they get the help they needed?
WikiSeek Launches Community Edited Search Engine
I met my cofounder at 7 in the morning while having a beer walking down "Las Ramblas", in Barcelona. He came to my friend asking for a cigarrette, we started talking, and we inmediately realised we shared the passion about technologies, web 2.0, social networking and Open Source, so in 15 days we had our vision of what could we do to change the world :)

elias
Launching StartUps Everyday
It seems the lawyers take away more money than the development process! eek
Not with all but yeah they do take away a sizeable chunk of the budget. What I want to know is who funded these businesses...
I hope to ride on this soon as I'm still looking for a cofounder :(
Fun exercise- think of a large company- one whose products you know. What new product / package would terrify them? Not just show up as a competitor, but really make them sit down and say "well, we're going to have to reinvent ourselves, because this [whatever] makes our product completely obsolete." For software companies in particular it's not impossible to come up with a product that you could start working on now...
Viacom slaps Google with $1 billion lawsuit
same with "registering" in the first place, even if it is free. Just knowing that you have to make a decision whether or not you can use your real email address, the nagging question of what they're doing with the information, etc...
Deciding on equity % for non-founders
Seth Godin suggests (paraphrased) - Look at an industry as it exists currently.. Think of the Sacred Cows- "This industry ALWAYS....", and then question what would happen if they weren't there.

What would happen if "Enc. Britannica didn't need door to door salesmen to deliver a product"?
Is Computer Science Dead?