skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's just an observation. Enter the entries into twitter, then use the RSS feed back into your blog as a list.

That way not only do you get your own content back to your site (remember it's your data) but readers get a good sense of what the chatter for today is related to the rest of your site.
Another alternative is to work 4 days a week, and use the extra day for your startup.
It's ambiguous:

http://tf.nist.gov/general/misc.htm
Fantastic essay. Now I'm all pumped up. As soon as I find a colleague that I want to share an office with, I'll be submitting an application :)
I think it's safe to assume that YC is not trying to trick applicants by playing with abbreviation semantics.

By midnight means before midnight on April 2nd. If this is really turning your world upside down, make your personal deadline April 1st.
"It's exciting to think we may be on the cusp of another shift like the one from farming to manufacturing."

The biggest reason why startups are so much more feasible now than ever before is because of the plummeting costs of production. Whereas twenty years ago it would have taken millions of dollars to do a startup, today a college kid with a powerbook can do one in his dorm room. Every year the tools of production get exponentially more powerful and less expensive.

To play devil's advocate, these same factors that are currently driving startups may ultimately be their demise as well. Almost every tool can be used for both good and evil. A hammer can be used to drive a nail, or also to harm someone. Governments have taken it on themselves to try to allow the good uses of any given technology while regulating the evil purposes. The problem is that every time they try to regulate away an evil, there is inevitably a little spill over that prevents us from using the technology for good. Every time a powerful new technology is invented, we end up losing little bits of our rights and civil liberties.

As technologies exponentiate in both their power and interconnectedness, it seems as if society (at least ours) will go down the road of increasingly restricting freedoms in order to prevent terrorism and other evils.

It isn't hard to imagine that as the costs of production approach zero, so will the freedoms that enable us to start startups. In many countries, such as Japan and Germany, it is so hard to do anything other than the status quo that it is effectively illegal. In Germany the government subsidizes the wages of students finishing school, which makes it effectively impossible to get a job without graduating. And in Japan it's even worse.

If the past is any indicator, the same forces driving the boom in startups are ultimately going to be drivers in forcing people into more restrictive social structures.

N.B. I don't necessarily believe this, but I think it is a serious argument that has never really been rebutted. Perhaps because the guy who proposed the idea was driven insane by it is currently doing life in prison for killing a bunch of people (Kaczynksi).
Do we really need to keep rubbing this in?
It's exactly the "connections" part that doesn't scale. Paul can mention 4 startups on his page, and hint two other apps he uses, but if he would list 20, probably no-one would check them.
Tech's Next Gen: The Best and Brightest
Check out who made #9.

Here's the full article: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2007/tc20070326_934874.htm
Grad school is more friendly only in the sense that you are not constrained to make things that people want.
From my severely uneducated impression of TV shows, I find it very interesting I haven't seen any popular reality TV show in Asia. In USA and every other channel seemed to be a reality TV show of some sort. Even if it's not 24/7 reality, it's always about being off the set and appearing unscripted. I wonder if audiences in Asia simply don't find reality TV interesting; in connection I am interested in the expandability of this market beyond what we currently see, plus perhaps a few more well-executed internet personalities, following Justin (also recall lonelygirl15). They sure seem like an impressive team, but I sure don't seem like the target audience.
So there are basically two factors then:

1) Smart people within YC

2) Smart people applying to YC

So basically you have to find the optimal ratio and then grow both in proportion. :-)
MySpace Generating Over $30 Million a Month
Or, perhaps more to the point, things that people don't yet want, because they're too new and too alpha. Or things that you don't know how long it will take to produce a product with, but which will definitely one day be useful and people will want them. Robots fall into most of these categories at the moment. I don't doubt that one day people will want tons of them, just like what happened with computers, but I don't think the technology is there yet for an Apple-for-robotics to jump in and succeed as a for-profit company. I hope I'm wrong, and if I'm wrong I hope to be part of what proves me wrong, but that's what I think at the moment.
You're talking about Google, right?
Sorry, I missed the previous link about this and thought I got a scoop. Props to the judge for not going crazy and oversentencing, if nothing else. Though my personal view of the criminal justice system is that pretty much everyone deserves to get off without punishment, because the US system of punishment doesn't make any sense and not punishing someone is better than sentencing them to repeated gang rape.
Anyone see Justin from justin.tv on G4?
Consider figuring this out part of the application process.
Justin just finished up on G4. He handled himself pretty well considering the host was sarcastic throughout the whole interview. The "Sex in the City" idea seems like a pretty interesting next step for his company. Anyone else have any thoughts?
Google is welcome to apply.
Sadly I don't use outlook!
A better business model for incubators - innovation by collaboration?
I want to separate what a website owner should do from what he is socially held accountable for. Consider the goatse trolls on slashdot. Slashdot introduced moderation to improve the experience of its users; people don't go around accusing slashdot's creators of writing offensive comments. There is a difference.[1]

That is just what reasonable people think, IMO. I can't comment on legal implications. I am not aware of a legal precedent online, whereas in the old media there was stringent enough control of the medium to be able to hold the proprietors responsible for what goes on it.

Presuming guilt by association is irrational and often unfair, but that doesn't stop it from happening.

[1] If anything, accusing a website owner of writing anonymous comments in his own website would be a little bizarre (I'm not saying anybody made such an accusation).
please see http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=6808 for more.
While writing it I had an idea and blogged it.
I wonder if YC has considered this before.
Stem cell transplant lets blind entrepeneur see. I'm incredibly cynical and this is truly the only inspirational thing I have ever read
The problem with scaling YC is geography. YC is in USA, and we are not. We cant or wont drag our co-founders and girlfriends to YC, so Paul will never get to speak to us or talk to us about our ideas, and we have to waste time funding our own ideas instead of letting YC do it.

I actually filled out a YC form once and never ended up submitting it because I knew deep down I didn't want to move to the USA.
There's also a great Esquire article about Mike. http://www.esquire.com/ESQ0605BLIND_114

It's forming the basis for a book about him due in two months. There's a movie coming out too.
Survivorship bias, or Why you can&apos;t say you can&apos;t
My first ever blog post. Lemme have it with both barrels. Stemmed out of recent discussions about age discrimination.
Yeah and which calender? Gregorian I assume? Hard to know for sure!
They should've called it SKI-combinator.
Probably based on usage patterns.
Seems like such a "me too" move at this point. They should be trying to offer something uniquely great that Google hasn't thought of.
I am not surprised at all.

Social networks are an interesting thing, Myspace in particular, on one side you have the people who actually find people who can help them and contribute to some sort of group project, and the other side where people feel popular and find friends, both of these are powerful and contribute to a lot of page views ;)
As a young startup founder myself, the one point that really drove me to uproot was the monotony of the day to day life in cubeville. I lasted a little over a year - told myself "what the hell" - and two weeks later.. I quit and started my own company.

The primary reasons I left corporate are already iterated in the essay.

1. I'm only two years out of college and fairly young, My living expenses are fairly low.

2. I was bored out of mind. I now know the real meaning of corporate drone and can relate to the movie 'Office Space'.

3. As each day of work passed by, I swear the work made me a little dumber.

4. Nothing to loose. Last straw was when the company got bought out, and the CEO jumped ship with his golden parachute.

5. I don't want to be remembered as a person who was a [insert job title] at Big Company A.
Rub it in? It's a badge of honor in my opinion. rtm and merlyn were both hit by early confused laws:

( http://www.lightlink.com/spacenka/fors/ )
"Overall, the service is excellent!"
Ask Paul: Is "smart" enterprise software interesting?
PG: I laughed along with most everyone else at Startup School after your line about (paraphrasing) "if you're not smart then develop enterprise software, since it's a sales business, not a technology business."

Good one, and definitely some truth. I've spent a bit of time in this field and there's certainly the boring factor with some of it.

However--I'm assuming you'd find it interesting if people took a traditional piece of "enterprise software" (big suites sold to big companies, I guess) and Web 2.0-ified it.

Any comment there?
If anything worth reading came along, I'm not sure how you'd find it on that site... They need to make the content blink or something. Or jitter, that'd work.
"You're a Woz. You need a Jobs."
Today I remembered seeing this on reddit after the last round of YC apps.

The reddit comments: http://programming.reddit.com/info/pzaq/comments
Without seeing the work going into YC firsthand, I can only speculate on the limitations of that end.

However, looking further into the lack of quality applicants, I believe strongly that the failures of the public education system are a direct cause of this lack of applicants. In fact, I would be willing to wager that most applicants are some of the few that 'slipped through the cracks' of the public schooling experience with their minds and ambitions intact. To avoid infringement: this is all covered in Paul's oldie-but-goodie article, "Why Nerds are Unpopular."

And then you have the even higher end (less direct) influences. ie: the modern world diluting the American dream through the 'satisfaction' derived from a big screen TV and a dozen maxed out credit cards. (anyone feel the urge to reread Great Gatsby?). But thats more the realm of philosophers and sociologists.
We do sometimes fund expensive projects. Then the focus is not so much to get something launched in three months but just to build a good demo to take to VCs to raise more.
My understanding is that RTM disagrees, and if I were him I would too. How would you like it if the first thing that most people free-associated with your name was the stupidest thing you ever did in your life?
The See-Through CEO
I like to think I'd be able to embrace it by this point. I do sympathize with the traumatic affect it had on him.

I feel shame the country I live in treated him the way it did. Geniuses frequently suffer at the hands of lesser mortals.
Interesting, its always a wakeup call to see the amount of real world conclusions that can be gleaned from a (seemingly useless) dataset.

An interesting parallel to human psychology as well: often the people you are quite certain have nothing to teach you are the ones with the most valuable lessons for you to learn.
I thought that you'd be chaffed at being copied.
I chuckled as i read this in my inbox the other day. i really hope no one falls for this
Hi, who are you and where do you hang around? I'm surprised to see another news.yc reader in my department whom I don't know.
Be careful not to bet your whole company on someone else's data! Mashups beware!
"which should turn out to be extremely successful" - Sounds like the regular marketing BS. Very patronizing.
Psychedelically Beautiful 3dSkiMaps!
I KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN!!!

At startup school, at the end, Adam was giving some advice of making a bold statement at the start, then scaling it down telling you how you're going to get there. That was great salesmanship, and GREAT advice. Most of what I heard during startup school and from talking to other entrepeneurs was vague ideas, just a jumble of thoughts.

In business, presentation counts for alot. Don't forget this. Ever.
Like I tell people, it has only been 3-4 years since the social network thing took off. We have very little idea where it will be five years from now. Very little.

One thing for sure is that this is not a fad. It is way too big and too outreaching to be a fad. Plus I don't hear people saying "hey I joined a social network" - they just say "facebook me so we can keep in touch."
I'm pretty impressed with the amount of coverage Justin.tv is gaining. If anything else if worse comes to worse and they don't make it big. This will be a precursor for start ups to build a platform from. But yeah I know I said it might be a waste of time but I think I'll be eating those words soon enough!
D'oh! I was just doing my profile, didn't mean to start a discussion. But if you must know...

Psychedelically beautiful 3d Ski Maps show you at a glance the steepness of the slopes on a color scale that's the same for all ski mountains, so there's no more guessing what they really mean by "beginner", "intermediate", and "expert".
"Enterprise" software is a market distinction, not a functional class of software, right? Are you asking if the enterprise software market is interesting if you're somehow smart about it?
I absolutely loathe Y! Mail's new interface. It's suppose to resemble Outlook and Oddpost (Y! acquired them) folks have spent a lot of time copying it. Problem is that Outlook's UI is not that great to begin with. All that clicking and dragging and split-pane views are so damn annoying and slow.

More here: http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2006/12/18/why-splitpane-views-suck/

Gmail has Y! Mail beat even with this storage system.

I also don't trust Y! as much as I trust Google... that China incident just turned me off Y!.
Web 2.0 Media: New Way To Monetize Your Blog - Amazon Context Links Launch Today
Main Page - Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium
Did google acquire stealth startup vutool?
The poor man's blog advertising
Maybe this will give sebastian thun more money to make cars that drive themselves!
Paul, your essays inspired me to quit my job even though I was looking forward to a nice promotion. A couple of years was enough. I'm two weeks into my startup, which I'm basing on a Paul Graham/Joel Spolsky hybrid model. I'm building up capital by taking on some small- to medium-sized projects while prototyping my real idea behind the scenes with a few collaborators.

While my work struggles to find my replacement, I have no problems finding people that A) want to work for me on contract projects, and B) want me to work on their projects (right now there is a queue). I actually work longer now than I did in the office. But I'm not tired. In fact, I have more energy. Additionally, if you normalize my work hours, I am even more productive working on my own. I just generally feel better about myself and am only experiencing "good" stress these days. I encourage anyone who finds themselves agreeing with Paul Graham in his essays more often than not to make the leap.

I fundamentally agree with Paul Graham about the change we are seeing. In fact, my little prototype bets the farm on the premise that this change is indeed happening.

I'm sufficiently capitalized having had a couple of years out of school to make some money that Y Combinator's funding is, quite frankly, an unattractive proposition. Plus, I'm in Toronto and I love the city. I live/work downtown right near the university. I would not want to move. All this said, is there any chance that you will do a talk up here in Canada?
10 MORE ways to create a breakthrough in your life.
I've been seeing these recently and they're incredibly irritating. They're like Microsoft's ill-fated "smart tags". The moment I come across one of these it's an automatic back-button click.
Trains and VCs
I've been going the consulting + startup route, and I already feel the way about "real jobs" as Paul described-- serfs, or slaves. I feel a certain pity for them.
It would seem that - technically - this is due the first minute of April 2nd, PST, since April 2nd begins at 12:00AM(midnight) and ends at 11:59PM.

Honestly, I think anyone worrying about this has too much time on their hands.
That doesn't make sense for the founders, though.

It would be in their interest to take as little money as possible early on, so that they give up less of the company's equity.

Then - later when the business model has proven itself - and the valuation is higher - take on additional capital.

You'll be giving up much more equity if you take a million in funding in the first round, instead of the third.
Congrats, vlad, you actually got his name right this time :)

You're a riot! --star
Does every pair of founders consist of a Jobs and a Woz?

Off the top of my head:
Apple: Jobs, Woz

(pattern match below)

Viaweb: PG, rtm

Google: Sergey, Larry

Reddit: Alexis, Steve

Paypal: Thiel, Levchin

It seems not uncommon that the Jobs, if this theory is correct, can also hack, unlike Steve Jobs.
I don't know for sure of any counterexamples, but I'm also not very sure of the theory.

Edit: GRR! Does this use markdown [now](now.com) too?

Edit 2: Good, it doesn't.
Well he is right of course, Woz needs a Jobs, or at least someone who is significantly part Jobs to get anywhere, designing cool things is definitely an enviable ability, but without someone to focus that ability you have the worlds smartest garbage man.
A sad thing about life is that after squandering ten years on playing in bands and stuff (point 11), if you eventually do get your act together and go to university and then (point 16) take the default route to a job in a big company, happy to make a living at all; after a while, if you have half a mind, you'll end up realizing that you're getting dumber by the year (point 14), but by then you've also stumbled into a family, and a start-up is no longer a realistic option (point 9, 13, and maybe even point 12 has kicked in). But then it's just 25 years to go until you're retired, just clench a fist in the pocket, produce a smile and keep coding for a salary.
Sorry.
Wow, thanks a lot for the link. As someone who has not fully submitted myself to the blogging craze, I had some trouble seeing what it was all about. After reading this article, I am thoroughly convinced that widespread blogging is a very good thing.

I guess the main thing holding me back from publishing my own musings online is the thought, "Well, who is going to care?" This article emphatically declares, "Google will, and all who seek information on you in the future."

Google's stated mission "is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." I find it refreshing to discover that a large corporate entity has actually been able to improve the world in a way not even predicted by a typically lofty mission statement, by giving truth a voice.
PayPerPost VC, Dan Rua, defends the ethics of paid editorials
Back When "Beta" Actually Meant Something
Well personally I find that keeping secrets hurts any relationship, company or personal.

People are bloody minded bastards when they think you are not on their side, but when you clean up your messes and make them feel included they will take a bullet for you.
Wow, that makes "Not just the owner, but also a client" mean a lot more!
Hypothesis: "I'd rather work on hard AI problems at Google than create a startup and bitch about how Safari is not rendering my site properly."

What do you think? I haven't tried either, but working on cool problems ought to be worth something. Most startup work seems rather mundane.
Social Search done well!
Even more Startup School notes (by Kulveer)
What if I'd like to accomplish something, like building an operating system or a world wide web, and don't really care about the money. What if I just want to change the world. Should I start a company and if so why?
Web 3.0 Acceleration
Gabor Cselle: Leaving Google to join Xobni
Another way of looking at this is to realize that beta testers are hard to come by, and one could leverage from the already existing pool of beta testers (53,651). Most startups want to improve their pre-money valuation before going to the VC, the most important ingredient for achieving that is a stable system that is a result of successive relevant iterations of the features. This could as well be part of any Web 2.0 company's road map for the first few months upon going live. It is needless to say that for a VC to be convinced, it is important to have the right kind of users. If there is even a little bit of overlap between the 53,651 web savvy users and the ideal end-user, it is safe to assume that viral marketing will take care of itself. An example that glares in the face is Google. Their systems are the way they are, thanks to their #1 beta testers, their employees. And one could argue that there are other beta testers at various levels, namely the actual end users. This statistic seems to do more good than harm, if regarded positively. The eventual end users of the system could just be an extension of the 53,651 initial users. Go Techcrunch!!!
On Eric Sink's blog, the short story of the inventor of a security mechanism testing it on himself: http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Yours_Mine_Ours.html (in the section "The Best Dogfooding Story Ever"; but the whole article is a good read).
Zurich, Switzerland - you can reach me over gmail.
iPhone Factoids: One Million ... Indications of Interest
Viral mediums, Viral products, Viral Marketing and Viral=Good
Thats something I wrote a minute ago.

Feels like self-promotion to put my own blog post on here, but I am interested in peoples views on it.
This is plain genius.

As an infrequent blogger I do know that one of the hardest things is coming up with good and relevant content, and a post about some new web business that is starting up is not only pretty easy and interesting, but a serious cool factor as well.

I can see this really taking off, and people even fighting to cover stories first!
Well I do enjoy you using the "Viral=Good" thing.
I think a lot of people and advertisers who try to make something viral forget that the entire reason something becomes viral is because people like the content, not because you have some sort of voodoo.

If you want to make something viral, make something good. :D
Microsoft Accidentally Sends Secret File On Journalist, To That Journalist. Oops
Well Alex makes an interesting point, that you would need more skill to get a big return on the little hands, but I still think that if you had a large sum of capital and you were especially good at the poking, that small investments would pay off exceptionally well.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. Asking really for clarification on Paul's comment about enterprise software in his speech. I sometimes think we've gone a bit too much B2C lately, and we're missing out on a lot of opportunities to Make Something People Want, with the People in this case working at big companies in traditional enterprise functions.
Hilarious! While it is obvious for a company to keep tabs on how to act around certain news fiends it is amazing that someone would send those notes to the person.

This is truly a laugh riot.