skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've disagreed with things PG said in the past, like this:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/04/26/ideas-are-worthless

I also think some of his "startups are the future" thinking is naive in that it excludes many fields of endeavor where far more significant amounts of capital are necessary to get anything going.

But I wouldn't have any problems telling him the same thing to his face, over a beer. From what little I know of most people on this site, they all seem reasonable enough that I'd quite enjoy talking with them about a variety of things, even those we might not agree about.
I think you gave what should be the correct answer, but unfortunately, I think in practical terms, it is not the current answer for this community.
Because those are the terms that VCs offer, and the YC program is organized around getting a VC investment
I thought it was a full list initially, but now it's too late to edit.
Traffic Stats for the Top 20 Social Bookmarking Sites (May 2007)
You're pretty much right. The problems really start when you work in an enterprise but you are on a very small team (no greater than 2, but almost always just me), and your boss wants it done in Java for no real good reason.

Another problem is that using most Java frameworks is not as simple as including a JAR in the classpath. They require different amounts of config files and boilerplate start up code.

The ultimate problem is that when you've had a taste of metaprogramming, real closures, or some other feature that Java lacks, you find it extremely irritating to lose that power just so that you can say you wrote it in Java.

PS. Limewire is a client Java app (or at least loads and looks like one).
Linus Torvalds Responds To Microsoft Patent Claims -- Linus Torvalds -- InformationWeek
Truemors Launches
Manhattan Story Mashup - Pervasive Game
http://www.storymashup.org/ Official Site.
http://research.nokia.com/events/storymashup.html Nokia Sponsor Site.

I have a new found interest in these types of games. I think they are great fun.
Map your mind
It was getting spammed so hard for the last 1/2 hour. It is way to easy to post whatever you want. You dont even need any account.
A vendor telling you it's a good time to buy his product is newsworthy?
Not a vendor just a guy who wishes he could buy a new laptop ;)
I am waiting for solid state disks, LED displays and fancy stuff like that to make it into the notebooks - maybe that could help you endure the wait, too ;-)
Why would I have to confirm my email to get an invite code? If I receive an invite code and use it I've effectively confirmed my email. Further, I just got an email and followed a link back to your site so I could... ...do nothing. Not sure that makes me too excited to click on the next link you send me.

Worth rethinking.
Yeah a built in flash drive, LED display, and the rumored built-in 3G modem would definitely push me over the edge. We'll probably see some of that stuff at WWDC next month. Of course a Macbook Pro with all that would cost close to 3 grand so it's a tradeoff.
I don't see what the point of complaining is, though. Everyone knows what the terms are, so do your own calculations, and if it's not worth it to you, don't apply.
Trolls typically reject the value system of the host site, so they aren't deterred by negative karma. It's just a number, why care about it?

I think Reddit's system works reasonably well: enough downmods and the post is simply hidden. Trolls do care about attention; if they don't get it, they (usually) stop wasting their time.
I haven't really seen that on this site. There've been times when I've disagreed with PG and my comment has been rated up far higher than PG's response was, eg. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=20249
A few ideas:

1) If someone is downvoted, don't allow them to post for a set period of time. It seems angry people post a lot in succession, especially if they get voted down. More time to think and cool down.

2) Have a short timer (five minutes) stopping you from replying directly to someone who replied to you. More time to think means logic gets to fight emotion for longer and hopefully win over. I like reading strong arguments until they degrade into emotional monkey flinging.

3) Check for votes for or against a person over a set time frame as well as testing for variety. This would stop people who get a real hate on for someone and downvoting all their comments to torpedo their karma.

4) Force people to enter a reason when they downvote. Just a simple one line reason that would only be read by the moderators. Having to stop and think about why you are making a decision and justify it to someone else would cull a lot of the punitive downvotes. It would also provide you a place to start a dialog with people who aren't adapting well to the site.
Truemors - just like Reddit, only for rumors and people are spamming it like crazy
Firstly, that's not my impression of YC. Reddit took only angel funding before being acquired. Very few of their startups actually seem to take VC: the ones I can think of are Loopt and Scribd. Most use angel capital only. If you actually had paying customers at the end of the 3 months, I doubt YC would object to simple revenue-based growth.

Secondly, what do you propose instead? Most banks will not give bank loans to revenue-less Internet startups, because they have no guarantee of being repaid. Bootstrapping off savings is ideal (it's what I'm doing...), but not every idea is bootstrappable.
There are so many errors in the launch of the site. It might rank as one of the worst launches ever.
I read raves about Yahoo Store long before I ever heard of Viaweb or PG. If a best-of-breed web app used by thousands of businesses is a "crappy start-up", we need more crappy start-ups. I think he forgot an S -- they were Scrappy.
Disclaimer: I don't really like Cory Doctorow very much.

This article seems very much like a lot of what Mr. Doctorow produces: it shows a lot of promise (in this case by suggesting that he has a silver bullet to the Problem of Trolls), but barely attempts to deliver.

There's no 'there' here! Does he suggest even one concrete thing we might do? If he did, and I didn't see it, fine, I'll eat my words. From what I could tell, he a) told us what we already knew about the problem, b) told us what other sites have tried unsuccessfully, and then c) tries to tell us about being a "troll whisperer" -- something about removing vowels and some other vague "techniques".

There is no 'there' there.

Incidentally, if you're ever tempted to read a Cory Doctorow short story or novel, expect the same thing: a premise that may seem compelling on the surface, but with prose that has no substance. (You might accuse Thomas Pynchon of the same thing, but at least that guy can write well. Cory writes with the subtlety and beauty of a chainsaw.)
Re-reading my post, I noticed that someone could say this:

"the only hackers who need Java are the ones who cannot exist without a lot of predefined structure"

about Rails as well. The difference is that Rails does not force structure on you. It just makes it super-convenient to use it. Java, in my experience, seems more heavy-handed.
There were a couple YC members at the recent Boston startup meeting (Tsumoki was there, and I think Dropbox, and possibly one other that I didn't catch the name of)..They didn't seem clubby or standoffish at all. Really, they seemed like pretty approachable, frighteningly intelligent, and generally decent guys.
4-5 years ago, a friend was entering the CS program at the University of Washington (AKA Microsoft's back yard). He picked up a spiffy new dell laptop. A month or so later, he sold it and bought a powerbook. A disproportionate number of the CS students used Macs back then, perhaps even the majority.

So, I'm guessing, yeah, they are pretty popular in SV too.
As someone who's double majoring in Economics & Commerce with a double concentration in Finance & Accounting while simultaneously pursuing a masters degree in Accounting, YES you might say I'm brainwashed.

However, society brainwashes us all in some way - don't you think?

====================================

OK, let me try to condense 4 years of finance education into few paragraphs, so that I can point out the fundamental errors you're making:

First, you have to understand the capital asset pricing model (CAPM): E(r) = B(Rm + Rf) + Rf

E(r) = Expected return; B = beta = the risk of a firm; Rm = the market risk premium; Rf = Risk free rate

OK, so the capital asset pricing model basically states that the riskier the investment, the higher the return the market will demand. This makes sense. Investing in McDonalds is much safer than investing in Justin.TV, because you're almost guaranteed that McDonalds will be around in 5 years.

This is why VCs demand a 30-40% expected return - because there's a very high risk the companies will fail. This isn't "unfair" - this is how the stock market, and the rest of the financial world, works. When you buy a stock, its price has been shown to correlate to the expected risk. Higher risk stocks earn a higher return, as predicted by the CAPM.

Now, I think you're confusing debt with equity. Of course you could take out $15,000 of debt for 9%, but you're entering into a contract to repay it. If you don't, they get your house, car, etc. This is why the debt isn't as expensive - the bank knows they're getting their money back, one way or another. The bank is using the same CAPM calculation, except with a lower beta.

Finally, if you choose equity, you obviously will want to go with the firm that values you the highest (and gives you the best deal). The argument I was making is that YC already values these startups at a very high level. It's not very often that someone will value 3 months worth of your work for $332,000K [($15K/5%) x (1.5^0.25)].
I agree that there was no 'there' there, but just the promise of a 'there' got my subconscious guessing what it would turn out to be, which was enough that I didn't feel my time was entirely wasted. A little like when you see a bad movie, knowing its going to be bad, but you enjoy it just for the set-up it gives your mind to play around in. Doctorow's writing is just good enough to do that.
According to the presentation deck, they have 3 DB servers. It's not clear to me what each of them do, but one of them apparently gets activity logging writes, and the other is a slave that they use to do analysis queries on that data.
By the time you're at your YC interview, you already know all of the terms of the deal except for one variable: the percentage of the company taken by YC. So if you're accepted, PG calls and gives you this one piece of missing info, and you and your cofounders get 5 minutes to decide whether it's acceptable.
The solution to these types of problems seem so obvious to me that I want to startup a company around it. I am trying to prove out my idea right now. If anyone is interested (joining or funding), let me know.
Truemors: A Lesson For Web2.0 Startups ... Celebrity Is Important.
Historically the companies that bragged before they were successful imploded the fastest.
Hi Paul,

There are lots of benefits to doing debt in a seed round. We discuss them in detail here: http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/debt-benefits

Here's a summary from the article: "Convertible debt is often the best instrument for a seed round. You can close the debt cheaply and quickly and then turn your focus back to your customers. That's good for the company and its investors since speed is a major competitive advantage of a startup. If you or your investors are veering away from convenience, low cost, and speed, you are missing the point of seed stage debt!

"The seed stage is the worst possible time for the founders to negotiate an equity financing. The company is nebulous, the founders are inexperienced, and the company is starved for cash and time. The team should be testing hypotheses about their business, not negotiating complicated term sheets."

See the article for details: http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/debt-benefits

A cap doesn't determine a valuation. It just sets a cap. Setting a valuation implies buying preferred stock, I assume you don't want to buy common stock in the business. That means negotiating investor rights--that is a pain in the ass. (I've never seen this but I suppose you could defer negotiating investor rights and just say that the seed investors will get the same rights as the eventual Series A investors. Anybody want to chime in?)

A cap can be closer to the founder's high minimum expectations and avoids a long road show. A cap avoids setting a high valuation and then doing a down round in the Series A. A cap avoids setting a low valuation and then being unable to substantially increase the valuation if you do a Series A soon afterward.

If you want more of a reward, we suggested increasing the discount. A 50% discount guarantees you a 2x paper return on your money. A 40% discount guarantees a 1.7x paper return. You can also have the discount increase over time.

As always, our hacks are generalized and should be tailored to the specific circumstances. And your deal is mainly determined by your leverage, nothing else: e.g. every deal that closes is a "good deal".
The job market is pretty much like the used car market. There's asymmetrical information. The seller knows all about the product, the buyer knows nothing. What happens in these markets is that the buyer is willing to give about average price, since he knows nothing about the product quality. This way, high quality products are pulled from the market, pushing the average quality down even more, and so on.

To say this in a simpler way, if you are better than average, it's not worth applying for a job, because you'll get a lower price than what you're worth.
Thank you for pointing the annoyance of this out to me. I will remove the email confirmation step.

The invite codes will be sent out personally that is why you did not receive it instantly with the confirmation.

Thanks for the help, We will adjust this.
Google Patents a Method for Ingame Advertising
See SonicLiving.com, a great site that is somewhat similar and I use daily.
Yeah this is also my personal favorite of what I have seen so far.
Maybe he cares more about his creation (not to mention his reputation) than his equity...
Sour grapes, it sounds like.

"Paul Graham & Co. take equity at an extremely low valuation.

Because the company is not worth very much when it's only days or weeks old. So?

"watch Justin.tv and you'll see a business in free-fall"

Huh? What makes him say that? Justin.tv has been live for a few weeks now. Free-fall?

"The number of visitors required to have an advertising driven site that is profitable and viable as a business is staggering"

So not true. You don't have to think very hard to come up with examples (dooce.com comes immediately to mind), but what I really want to suggest is that the post author read The Long Tail. You do not need a huge, mainstream, "staggering" audience to make good money, even with Google AdSense.

"... says another start-up was sold making it seem like a huge deal that closed. Except it's not. That other start-up is called Kiko and it sold for $258,000 on eBay to Tucows who will surely find it was a waste of their own money."

Tucows thinks otherwise, and seems to have pretty good reasoning. See

http://blog.tucows.com/blog/_archives/2006/9/5/2297315.html

where they say: "What was the value to Tucows of the time and the certainty? ... What was the value of having it be good for sure? Even if we threw it away in six months (not that we plan to do that)? What I can tell you for certain (and you'll be able to hear more details in an upcoming podcast) is that it was more than we paid!"

"Get Duped. You get 5 minutes to decide."

You should decide when you apply. If you don't know by the time you get the phone call, that's your fault, blogga.

"Ruin Your Health."

If your health is ruined by Lean Cuisine, then you would have died in college when you were subsisting on Top Ramen.

"Hurt your Family."

No one is forcing you to leave your pregnant wife. Hell, no one is even encouraging that.

"Become Pinocchio ... You pretend secrecy is important when you need to cover up a bomb or lack of actual interest from an acquirer."

That would be no different than any other company, except that this post's "evidence" that YC does this is scant and misrepresents the facts.

Blogga, PLEASE.
Yikes. Well, one can only hope he writes up a postmortem of this launch as a "lessons learned" review.
Auto down-mod posts that start with "Uh, "
Is 30 too old to start a company?
What about listing some specific reasons why YC companies aren't real businesses, so we can get a thoughtful discussion going here?
Would you broadcast your OS process list live?  Would you like to see other people's process lists?
Unlike broadcasting your computer display say, there is less of a privacy issue with process lists. And maybe people can learn something from each other's process list broadcasts.

For example, you can get some idea as to what your friends are up to all day, what sorts of tools they use, etc.
To be honest, this doesn't interest me in the least. It fills me with deep unmoving apathy. I don't think that the information gathered would be useful outside of an initial voyeuristic kick. Overall statistics might be neat as well, but not on a continuing basis. I'd much rather have an actual discussion about tool usage and work flow.
You'll find tons of process lists on virus support forums. Some people would be helped if they could check their processes against a clean list if it could help them discover problems and have an easy way to fix them.
I guess alot of people, including this guy, are openly questioning "validity" of YComb's startups. Since everything they do is so trivial, can their creations be considered "products with value"?

My personal issue with YComb's approach is that they actively (via this site, for instance) promote engineering mediocrity. Remember posts "PG made me drop out of college today!" ? I have seen several of those. Web 2.0 is all about this: cheap&quick high-school level programming project done over a weekend, polluted with google ads with mandatory "blog" attached to it.

To me that is sad, There is nothing "glamorous" about it. My major in school was AI, and our professor used to dream alot about more powerful hardware that was supposed to become a reality soon. Well, it became. And for what? To run 8 Mongrels with some quick&dirty Ruby scripts converting contents of 4 DB tables into nicely looking HTML with roundeed corners? What a waste...
my process list looks something like this:

1) firefox
2) top
3) a hundred processes owned by root. boring.
That got me thinking: why not use bayesian filtering for trollish comments?
A mining algorithm could be used to identify interesting events/trends in your computer usage.

In fact, it would be fun if the service were to make predictions about what you will do next. People could then watch live to see if those predictions come true.
Also, this might encourage open source developers as they would know when others are using their software.

Imagine for example something like http://twittervision.com/ that one can monitor with respect to certain apps.
Union Square Ventures Job Board
This is like PG's post on his blog, "Microsoft is dead". Don't declare stuff dead so soon. I still remember Byte Magazine declaring "Object-Oriented Programming is Dead", and within a month, "Unix is Dead". Both deaths were greatly exaggerated.

Re: Java, it sounds like the excitement has died, but neither Microsoft nor Java are anywhere near dead. In fact, what has really died in the computing world, besides coding in machine code/assembly language, punch cards/paper tape, and teletypes? And aren't we thankful for that? It seems like every other computer interaction idiom is alive and well.

Some things don't stay dead forever, either. Dynamic languages could've easily been declared dead 13 years ago, without exaggerating, but they've been making a resurgence recently.
Make a word replacement filter.

If someone is causing problems just word-filter their name into something embarassing. Or take a word they use frequently in their posts and word-filter it into gibberish.
That is a lot like the programming gui for the Lego Mindstorms system. It seems like a good way to get kids interested in programming if only to bridge them to working with actual code.
Or see http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ . The point is, if you're not talking about games, Microsoft is basically irrelevant to the way that the majority of people use computers.
Beautifully written. Not just a nice article, but I'm going to look more into using the button element now.
Real world Rails: Caching in Rails
Paul, regarding the statement

"I'd rather wait 6-12 months to see what you build, how successful it is, and how well your team executes, and then decide whether or not to invest."

doesn't this assume the angel investor has the option to invest in either the convertible debt seed round or wait and invest in a series A? Who says the entrepreneur is going to be as interested in the angel money comes series A, once the application is launched, momentum is underway and the deal is becomming more interesting to other investors? Is not one of the benefits of an early seed round to an angel, that of access to an exciting team and concept before they take off? And yes, if the team really executes and delivers a huge valuation come series A, the angel gets diluted. But they got in on a big opportunity with a discount, with a greater liklihood of participating again in series A. Maybe this isn't ideal from an investor standpoint, but isn't this still interesting versus waiting on the sidelines and potentially not particpating at all, if you believe in the idea?
My suggestion?

Paul and Paul, Robert, Jessica (and whoever else): Try to help each of us, here at news.YC - those who arent part of the elite club of YC funded startups.

I dont see any of you helping any of us (those not in the club).

What if NOBODY were to apply to YC - would you have this fame and book sales and NY Times interviews? No.

You owe your institutional success to us. You are standing on our shoulders.

Furthermore, the structure of news.YC is not conducive to the rest of us helping each other. (Nevertheless, I can say I received valuable input from dpapathanasiou, goladus, npk etc., and I tried to provide the same to whoever asked).

You have an elite samurai school with yourself as the master and the rejects hanging from the outside gates trying to peer in.

You can do whatever you want. But if you are disliked, it comes with the territory.

I had an intriguing thought today: we come to resemble those we demonize.

You loathe Bill Gates (in my book, he has reformed into a saint), but his early interviews...
point 1: Yes, except that I've had comments downvoted to 0 and then upvoted to 2... you shouldn't be penalized for an unfair downvote. Point 4 will eliminate some unfair downvotes. No one (except me, maybe) will admit to downvoting someone because of an ideological disagreement.

Point 2: OK, except it will sometimes be annoying.

Point 3: Yes, but it will be tricky to optimize this algorithm.

Point 4: This is the best suggestion to implement immediately.
You should submit this to Reddit.
A service to keep track of your contributions to social sites -- thus giving you something like a blog of your contributions
One way to reward people for their contributions to all sorts of social sites is to somehow make a list of all those contributions in one place.

Do you know of a service that does this?