skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. I tend to subconsciously ignore all ads on the page, but it was still somewhat irritating. IMHO, the content was readworthy enough to bear the ads and horrid design however. Wonder why Cisco thinks buying a collection of semi-related (at best) social networks will make them consumer centric.
What a bunch of bullshit. Some people have to work in order to pay for college and can't risk not having the money to pay for tuition.
Microsoft search chief leaving to form startup
NYT covers social book catalog startups.
Venture Capital Journal (offers 14-day free trial)
Comparing Seattle to Silicon Valley.
"God Wrote in Lisp Code" mp3 file.
Paul Allen's new startup: 6" x 5" computer, runs XP
I just thought I'd post a link to this song which you might think of as the Y Combinator theme song.

Here's a direct link to the .mp3:

http://www.prometheus-music.com/audio/eternalflame.mp3

It's also available on Amazon for free after logging in:

http://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Flame-Wrote-Julia-Ecklar/dp/B000099SW3
O'Reilly Radar  Why I Joined the MySQL Board
Seattle's Clearwire does IPO, gets market cap of $3.2 billion.
Seattle startup scene blog - several posts a day.
The Challenges Facing Internet Video
Do Your First Startup While You're Still a Student
'Dashboard' of Seattle venture scene: Upcoming and recent IPOs, VC, layoffs...
Why Niches are Better
Opsware acquires data center software startup for $60 million.
Annual Social Entrepreneurship contest - cash prize!
Facebook is referred to as an imitation of MySpace. Of course, Friendster was earlier, but really--they're all just online Frontpages, aren't they? (I've never used any of them, actually.)

About Flickr: "so we built a lot of features that were deliberately viral."

Ugh. A raw FTP server has half the features of Flickr, and 95 percent of the features that actually matter. It's reading panegyrics about upload-your-photo services that trouble me: Are we all just hacks? I mean, it wasn't so long ago the entrepenuership meant building railroads and auto factories. Now--you can be a millionaire if you use the "
The Truth That No One Telling You About The 1 Million Digg's Users
Should we worry about Techcrunch?
In the FAQ and in the application form (I hoped there was some openSSL at least), Y Combinator makes it clear that they keep confidential within the company your submition.

But should someone worry about Techcrunch? I am asking this because as I recall sometime in November/December announced Y Combinator funded companies (e.g Talkito) and what each was doing, before their launch.

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:qKT9Ef8omkQJ:www.techcrunch.com/tag/thinkature+talkito+%2B+techcrunch&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3

How and why they have access to this information?
Shouldn't this information remain confidential at least until the first 10 weeks that they present?
Absolutely agree. Not to say that something bigger can't grow out of the niche. You see that all the time.
I respectfully disagree. I went to the Boston event and had to put in a lot of work to network with people, since there were no official events or time within the program set aside to meet and talk. Admittedly, my schedule didn't allow me to do a post-school dinner. I'm not shy about chatting people up, so I did made use of the time I had and met some cool people. But I wouldn't recommend it as a networking opportunity. For one thing, nobody knew each other!

But it was great being there in person for the in-person experience, which was gratifying and good positive reinforcement. That said, I didn't apply this time because I'm really really busy on a feature launch for my startup and it didn't seem like I'd get that much out of it as far as the networking aspect.
Michael Oxley admits Sarbanes-Oxley was a mistake
There are danielha's and python_kiss's popping up all over- the "new" section is drowning! ;) [totally kidding btw- these two have killer submissions]

Seriously, though, there should be some kind of reward for wading through all the noise in the new section. (yah I know I'm as much to blame as the next person. I do try.) And you know, maybe it really is time to be able to "bury" posts- three votes you're out or something.

upd: just did a quick calculation- 4.5 submissions per hour and speeding up rapidly. Could just be that time of day though.
Has anyone released software through Cnet.com? Please share your experiences and opinions!
AskJeeves used to provide users an option to search using AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, and a host of other search engines. Consequently, AskJeeves always felt like the "natural starting point".

Similarly, Michael Arrington builds trust by often mentioning Om Malik (GigaOm) and Richard MacManus (Read/WriteWeb) on his blog. I suppose it leaves the feeling that "He can't possibly promote a rivals blog without having a better one himself!"

Ironically, a few weeks ago, Scoble mentioned that bloggers are geedy when it comes to linking (he mentioned Engadget/Gizmodo as an example, and that sure did piss them off). I think I will go ahead and forward this study to him :)

That said, I would be interested to know how they conducted this study. From the looks of it, it seems they simply compared a site's worth versus # of outgoing links. The fact that we agree with the study might just be a placebo affect.
Thoughts on using news.YC (please contribute, please read)
I plan to follow everyone's advice posted in the YC comments and to release it at Cnet.com
(see http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1945)

Any experiences and opinions good/bad?

1) On my software, distributed via Java Web Start, I plan to add a "Donate" button that clicks to a paypal page. Anyone have any experience with that?

(is paypal the best option? this seems to be a horror story site http://www.aboutpaypal.org/)

2) Is it necessary to have a "dont sue me"/I Agree button?
Any recommendation?

LOL, I have never done this before.
thanks,
Anil
Moderate submission volume + high volume of intelligent comments = very nice site to come and visit for a while.

High submission volume + no comments or hundreds of one-liners = might as well set up a news aggregator.
I automatically click on a submitter's name if I don't recognize it. If that submitter has only 1 karma point and is obviously new to the site, that submission gets extra special scrutiny- meaning if it is even remotely promotional I assume it's spam.

If you want to jump into the community here, esp. if you've already been lurking for a while- don't do it by doing a submission (unless it's a killer submission)- add some nice comments please!
Well I think we're at the former right now. Probably need a few more comments per post, but that will happen I think.

What we want to avoid at all costs is what happened at Reddit yesterday with the impeachment business. That's no good. I know they're working on it (spoke to them last night) but it was annoying there for a while.
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1945
There is a similar "karma" system on my social network, and one of my users suggested that we limit the amount of karma a user can receive within a give day. On YC, it makes sense to limit the submission volume according to the person's karma level. Someone with high karma is unlikely to be spamming the site.
The word karma in the context of this site has two meanings to me- one is that if you give a little of yourself and write a thoughtful comment or needed submission then you'll be rewarded. The other meaning to me is this- give a lot of it out and it'll come back to you. So if you care about karma, be liberal with it. (and I'm not talking about moderating this comment up).

If there is a constant flow of karma, it's much easier to see a differentiation in comments. There's nothing more irritating to me than seeing a comments board full of great thoughts and lots of responses where everything is either 1 or 2 points.

[upd] - and, of course, the old slashdot rule- focus on modding up- have a very good reason to mod down. Sure wish the digg community had followed that rule (back when I still used it).
Well, there's also signal-to-noise ratios. There are some people who have high karma by submitting dozens and dozens of sites knowing that one or two has got to stick. To me that degrades the quality of the site as much as spam does. I guess your solution might solve that in a round-about way as well.
Has anyone noticed that submissions tend to receive more points around 4 to 10 am GMT, Eastern Time? Posts that I make after 9 pm usually remain at "1 point" throughout the day. This probably has something to do with the Silicon Valley's working hours.
This, combined with a burying system to get rid of junk stories, could clean up the 'new' section substantially. It would also be useful to factor snr into the computation; the nature of the karma system, which makes it more advantageous (at a marginal level) to submit a story than a comment, encourages a shot-gun approach to submission; SNR would combat that.

EDIT: Ha, points to jwecker for posting about SNR while I was writing about it.
I was pondering this phenomenon earlier today; it would be interesting to do a quantitative analysis of post and moderation rates (this would require access to the backing database). I have noticed that there tend to be definite hot times, and that posts made outside of those hot times tend to never get modded.
One thing I find interesting about news.yc is the relatively small set of active contributors to the comments, and their rather high availability: case in point, this thread, which is feeling to me rather more like an ongoing conversation than a /. style shout-fest.

Anything that can be done to encourage this feeling of intellectual discourse is a win, in my opinion.
I can tell you that at least for me that's when I try to read a chunk of new submissions regardless of existing score. Once something has a couple of points it is much more likely to continue to grow if it is worthwhile, but it takes slogging through a lot of crap sometimes, it seems, to find that underrated 1-point submission- even though there are plenty of them in there.
I would abstain from complicating the user experience, though. In my experience, posting a topic has much more potential in gaining points than writing *thoughtful* comments. A good strategy to rise above that ranks is to post a bunch of interesting links; upon achieving high points, the user can then take a defensive stance by defending his or her opinions through posting comments instead.

The point is, from a user's perspective, there is more to gain from posting topics than comments.
I'll be honest, I've not been nearly so good about doing my time on the 'new' page. In your experience, are there any strong patterns in good submissions? What I'm getting at is basically: are there any views on the new submissions list that would make finding the under-rated ones substantively simpler?
That is certainly the status quo; I would ask, however, whether it is desirable. I think the system should provide more incentive for thoughtful comments, or at least some sort of disincentive for shotgun-style submissions. It is difficult to build karma by posting lots of comments; you have to put the effort into generating good content to get karma. The same should ideally be true for submissions; the difficulty, of course, is that since the content of submissions is generated by someone other than the submitter, simply posting lots of them /will/ eventually result in a karma-boosting hit.
Good point. On an unrelated note, however, your comment reminded me of another note I want to make: If your post is in response to a comment- please make sure and thread it. Because the site shows comments in the same nested level in different positions (either random or rotating or something, I haven't figured it out yet) each time the comments are loaded it gets real confusing if the comments aren't threaded correctly. There's plenty of horizontal space in the site's design so we shouldn't be reluctant to use it. The alternative, of course, is to quote what we're replying to.
Copy-paste from my reply to jwecker: "From a user's perspective, there is more to gain from posting topics than comments." Top users are more active in the discussion because they are already high above the ranks. The top user doesn't have to spam the site to gain karma, we already have enough.
Sorry for mistake, I was just playing with new bookmarklet :-(
Advice for entrepreneurs negotiating venture capital term sheets
Cain, if you're looking for up to date startup news, it is better to simply subscribe to rss blogs. Here are a few good ones: TC, Mashable, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, OnStartups, PaulGraham, Startup Reviews, The Startup Journey, etc.

On YC, it sometimes helps to simply sift through a user's past posts and comments.
This is an interesting notion; there is an implicit assumption that the low-karma user has something to lose by posting comments. Am I missing something here?

I do see your point, though, wrt top users not spamming the site. That's largely why I liked your idea of throttling submission rates based on karma. New users should have to develop karma by being useful, rather than just prolific.
That's a tough q. for me- I generally have to just open 3 or 4 of them and make a decision of whether or not to up-mod it then do it again sometime later. Two kind of related thoughts, though, for those who don't spend a lot of time working on the "new" page:

If you concentrate on the top of the new page and like a submission and mod it, it will get exposure near the top of the top page and get some real good input usually, so that's the best place to start- just look at the 3 or 4 submissions at the top of the page and spend a few minutes.

Nevertheless, there are some amazing submissions that because they don't get a point in their first hour of existence (because everyone is eating lunch or busy submitting their own etc.) end up moving clear down the list without anything. If you want some good karma (the real kind) spend time with the 4 or 5 at the bottom of the list giving belated deserved credit for some posters.
I doubt any of the companies were too worried about getting some pre-launch buzz going through techcrunch.
Financial centers are bad for software start ups.
Exactly, the user with low-karma is better off posting topics than comments. Comments don't receive nearly as much points as topics do. Even worse, comments require far more thought than blindly submitting links. What is the economic gain the user with low-karma receive from posting comments? Not much.

I know I suggested it, but throttling submission rates based on karma might not be fair to the end users. Once a karma-archy is established, the rich will get richer at the expense of the poor.
Well, I certainly hope that news.yc users are a bit more than Ricardo-programmed economic optimization automata. :)

One solution to older users having a perpetual advantage would be to implement some sort of aging of karma, or at least of the karma value used to determine throttling. Such a thing would actually be a win in terms of SNR--it doesn't really matter how karmic someone was a year ago, if they have only made low-quality posts/comments in the past month, they should be treated (in the submission system) as a low-karma user.
We had a similar problem on our social network where users abstained from giving karma to thoughtful comments. Consequently, we coded an algo to add "+0.1 karma" to every user that gave another person "+1 karma". That was enough to take care of the problem.
MySpace Age Verification Bill Proposed!
Why becoming a publisher isn't worth it (instead, make the publishing tools)
What we need is more incentive for active discussion among topics instead of a flurry of ho-hum links. The community built around the "news" is the most compelling part of YC News.

Incidently, the project I'm working on relates to this in many ways.
Another idea I mentioned elsewhere- if a story gets to the bottom of the new page without any up-marks at all it adversely affects the submitter's karma.
"[...] constant flow of karma [...]"

I like how you put it because I've always thought of "karma"-type points in social networks as money -- social currency. We want to stimulate the "economy" by having an active exchange of karma through the community, encouraging more and more discussions and contributions.

python_kiss's comment about limiting karma is also an interesting thought. Inflation is something to ponder about in this analogy.
All business is a niche business. Startups must put a conscious focus on segmenting their market to a small but sustainable size. I have emphasized the significance of this in my earlier articles:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/6_startup_lessons_2007.php
http://m4th.com/Articles/Article.php?Article-Title=Anatomy-of-a-Successful-Social-Network
I can see where we're heading with this idea. You're right -- to gain noteriety (karma), a user could easily engage in submission abuse. Submit enough links and enough will get upmodded.

Points, or karma, could be rewarded based off a ratio of useful contribution to total contributions instead. Such a system would encourage a user to make sure his contributions to the community are good. This would be beneficial implemented in any crowd-generated news site.

While not another news aggregator, our project is addressing similar types of issues in other channels. I am loving the applied relevancy to here already.
not so far as I know... don't know why it got marked dead.
Putting the Fun in Functional
I think this should remain neutral. Ignoring a submissions DOES indicate its worthiness to a point, but sometimes things get missed. Only a true down-mod should degrade the submitter's reputation.
lol! Here is a nice dissection of ads I did for another site cluttered with them:

http://shuzak.com/img/Temporary/SpammingUsers.jpg (The ads are highlighted in green)

An excerpt from an article I wrote on user experience that seems relevant here:

"One thing I particularly dislike about Web 2.0 startups is their Web 1.0 approach towards displaying advertisements. It shouldn't take an Einstein to realize where Google ads are appropriate and where they are not...Note that there is nothing wrong with displaying ads as long as it makes sense to do so. If you have no ads on your site, you will not make money off of it. If you have too many ads on your site, nobody is going to click on them.

It is unfortunate that nearly every social network spam's their own users with unwanted ads. The users are less likely to notice advertisements as the frequency of ads increases within a site. Even worse, because the users are so used to seeing ads popup, they might ignore them even when they do make sense [6]. Usability should always be prioritized over revenues. When a user chooses to spend 20 minutes of their life on your website, they could be spending that time anywhere else, but they chose your site. Don't reward their loyalty with spam [7]."
I'm not a fan of threaded nature of comments. It's done to faciliate exactly that -- commenting, and does not provide for a proper discussion environment. It's difficult to follow a discussion from start to finish when popular comments are placed at the top.
Moore's Law 2.0
Is Web Advertising Doomed? (Video)
lol! Like you, we rss hoggers don't sleep either :p I think most posts on here are a result of users aggregating through rss feeds to post whatever's hot on the web.

Bury should work fine (perhaps it should only be accessible by top users to avoid abuse). Another possible solution is to survey the user's past behavior to create a collaborative filter. The filtered news could then be displayed in a "Recommended" tab. As yc.news grows to a certain critical level, this might just become a necessity.
Nice, looks like I can relegate my own YC news bookmarklet to the bin since yours works better :)

Coming next: A 'YC this!' button to add to your own blog posts! (kidding, unless there's actual demand?)
tteach! School 2.0. Interactive Online Knowledge Sharing (coming soon).
Here's one I ran across earlier today. It's the full monty -- he runs his startup completely on EC2.

http://niblets.wordpress.com/2007/02/16/how-i-set-up-my-ec2-instance-for-rails-litespeed/
News Workspace Tool
I disagree.

I thought it was one of the best events for networking with other hackers that I have ever been to. Everyone there was knowledgeable as well as driven and energetic. I was up until the wee hours of the morning on both nights talking shop with other entrepreneurs and programmers. I actually met my company's co-founder during the first startup school.
What would happen if you could patent ideas?  Would we see more novel startups?
One could make the argument that more people would be willing to pursue more novel startups with the protection of an idea patent.
isn't one of the things that makes the US good for startups the fact that we have one large unified market? If you only read this post you might think it would be better to start in a European country. I guess the takeaway would be, you can turn your limitation (relatively small home market) into a strength (use your niche)
I genuinely believe if you could patent ideas...the world would be a dangerous place. With regard to more novelty - not a chance. If the idea is good enough, do what you have to do to make it happen.
I think Startup School is a great opportunity to meet other hackers and, hopefully, form meaningful relationships with like-minded peers.

I'm from Los Angeles where the startup community is generally lacking -- the idea of "entrepreneurship" is somewhere along the lines of things like starting an event planning company or making indie films.

As a result, I'm really looking forward to Startup School as a chance to meet potential co-founders.
I would reduce the size of the headlines that are links; I think that's what gives it a lot of the squatting-site feel others have commented on.
I don't like this concept of patenting ideas. Coming up with a great idea is just a small factor of making it successful. It seems that this would result in a crazy amount of patents that would mostly never amount to anything but act as a safety to the idea man.
The fact that the Banner market advertising collapsed is beside the point. Little guys could never afford banner advertising in 1999, as Yahoo's minimum cost was something like $10,000.

Google offered something which little guys could afford, was more relevant to readers, and attracted higher clickthroughs, so Google's Adsense would have done very well even if it did compete with Doubleclick in 1999.

To use a cliche, Adsense gets the "long tail" of advertising.
An addendum, stimulated by dinner with dfranke: under certain assumptions about the growth rate of the community, karma ages without any algorithmic intervention: as the community grown, the number of moderators grows, and so the mean and maximum moderation per post increases. As a result, new post are effectively weighted relative to old posts.

The problems, of course, are that there is some fixed point, and also that news.yc may not fit the growth model that makes the above true for a community like Reddit--and that may be a good thing.
Also is there any evidence that Google picked up lots of out of work engineers after the Bubble? On the contrary Google seems to have attracted people away from other companies.
You obviously haven't watched the IT Crowd: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=it+crowd&search=Search
This is Y Combinator. We *like* fixed points.
I think what makes the US a good market is that is has a large general market, which is strong because its size produces more opportunities due to bigger niches not due to sheer size and certainly not due to homogeneity.
Web 2.0 companies face a problem: too many users in the wrong countries
I've never used Digg, but from what I read of them, their burying system is working out rather poorly. Burying a story on Digg requires an O(1) number of votes, so anything controversial gets buried even if 90% of users agree that it's an excellent article. A simple up/down model like Reddit's seems like a better idea, but see the top-level comment that I'll have posted in about two minutes.