skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the user knows what a site does and what they're trying to do, then it makes sense to have a really clean design that gets them where they're going in the fewest clicks. But back in 1997 most of eBay's prospective users didn't know what eBay was, what they were doing there, or what eBay could do for them.

Hypothesis: The less the users know what the site does and what they want to do, in other words the less clear the goal, the less important it is to minimize the number of clicks to reach that goal. And the more experience users have with a site, the more important it is to streamline the process.

I think premature optimization applies to not just code but also design. For example, joining the Wikipedia community is probably much more difficult now even though the meta pages are much more ordered and clean than a few years ago. Whereas when the community pages were a hodgepodge of random crap it was a lot easier to just jump into the community and start contributing.
Job tenure by country
I'm Irish. I don't know how entitled I am to make jokes about the English, but I am eager to.
If clutter made it harder to form a mental model then everyone in Vegas would be lost.

edit: But the reason everyone isn't lost is because Vegas is basically one straight road with flashing lights on the sides. Which is more or less what I'm proposing.

Also, I see your point about the knowledge seeking demographic. Not sure whether I agree or not. For every Jimbo Wales looking to hire a philosophy postdoc, there could be a hundred MySpacers looking to hire someone to clean out their bongs. Or maybe not, who knows.

Also, on a different topic, there should be a way to embed ads for experts onto my blog or homepage.
Happy 1st Anniversary YouTube and Google; Now Move Over a Bit
It didn't mention anything about results or quality at all, which was interesting.
MIT, but it's not really a fair question because the Boston startup scene isn't shaped like a bullseye. It's really two lines, following major traffic arteries. The city corridor is along the Red Line, from Davis to South Station. The suburb corridor is Route 128, from Rt. 3 in Burlington to Needham.

Both of them don't really drop off with distance - Davis (near the end of the red line) is as much of a startup center than Central, and Burlington (the northern end of the 128 corridor) is more of one than Weston (though this isn't really fair: Weston is a bedroom community for all the venture capitalists that fund them). They do, however, drop off dramatically if you move laterally: Billerica and Carlisle are rural bedroom communities, dramatically different from the high-tech industries in neighboring Bedford and Burlington.
It's more like Cambridge is the bullseye. If I were doing a startup here I'd try to get space near Harvard, Davis, or Inman Sqs.
godspeaksto.us
We've been thinking about this idea for a long time. For example, I'm in the market for a platform bed (because right now my mattress is on the floor), but I'm not going to check every day. This application would probably be similar to EBay's "Want It Now" application, but would be more geographically based. It's a great idea, and I think we put it on our YC application (as one of the ideas we thought about).
Google to introduce the Gphone in early 2008
If I could, I would move my start up to SV in a flash. Its not just the VCs there but also the angels, where else can you find engineers who are worth 7 figures and can comfortably work for free or even invest themselves?

But this is an almost exclusively US club if you currently have a start up. It takes years to get a visa and go that route unless you already have, I believe over $1.5 million funding, which somewhat defeats the purpose of the move which would be to raise money primarily.

So if you have a start up in London and are not a US citizen and do not already have millions in funding you simply cannot move to Silicon Valley.

So if you are not a US citizen get a job there for the visa (not at all easy, remember all of this years allotment of visas disappeared on the first day) and work on your start up on the side or get the funding and go.
I don't know much about Queens (I just moved to Canada), so I'm not sure if this is the kind of comparison I had in mind. I was thinking of the comparison between a top regional University, where there may be 1-3 (typically) students graduating each year who could become theoretical physicists, while at MIT there will be dozens. Would you say Queens is a top regional University in Canada?
Share configuration files across BASH, Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP
paul, there seem to be two ways to measure the 'hubness' of cities: volume (ie. overall number of startups), and density (startups per-capita, or perhaps startups as a percentage of the economy). There may be other measures. Which do you think are the important ones?
I rolled my eyes when I saw there were 30 questions, but I actually found them interesting and engaging (helped by the cool graphic design.) That being said, I'd prefer if there were an option to just answer 20 questions and then import my Facebook profile to answer the rest.
Uhm...it's misandry, too (no, that doesn't make the misogyny more acceptable, but at least it's balanced).
Paul Graham and Wikimedia
There's an interesting corollary to Paul's argument that all startups (at least all web startups) ought to move to Silicon Valley. That is, if you're an investor, you're better off looking AWAY from Silicon Valley, since where the action is today is a) much more expensive and b) much more driven by today's fashion than tomorrow's innovation.
3by5.net

cloudrocket.com

liquidmarket.org

insum.net / org

momentumapp.com

trackmomentum.com

wikiphi.com

fuel5.com

fuelfive.com

vrabbits.com

feedocracy.com

drytest.com
Thanks! We're getting close now - first page of upcoming in tech. yeaaah
It's not a pc post; but it still highlights an interesting socio-economic trend... Real post or not, here's the (probable) reason the craigslist girl still can't find her Mr Right:

http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-3210.html

Today, men of power desire women of power...
either way, I found it hilarious
Zoiks. I think the usual YC advice is "take half the text off your front page". Take 95% of the text off your front page.
fuzzwich is like ytmnd 2.0 with style (and now a politics section)
The people behind OkCupid launch Crazy Blind Date
Interesting company that's fighting it's first hard battle:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117979361996510232.html

Seems like big bag chemical fertilizer company Scotts Miracle-Gro Co doesn't like dangerous upstarts...

Fast forward: Terracycle settled
The Irony of Applying to YC
As we were clicking "submit" the other day, I was thinking about what separates the teams that get accepted from the teams that don't. There are a bunch of criteria we're judged on, but perhaps the most important (and the source of the irony I'm talking about) is that for a team to be accepted, it can't need YC.

That doesn't mean, of course, that being YC alums isn't wonderful and helpful and all the rest. What it does mean is that the people who get in are exactly the kind of people who would respond best to not getting in--namely by keeping busy on the company as if nothing had happened.

It's a frequent theme in PG's essays that YC takes people for whom building cool things is a bodily function, not something they need external incentives or security to do. This same irony applies to nearly every competitive application process (e.g. PG's other advice that companies obsessed with getting bought are the very ones that don't get bought). I feel that keeping that in mind is a very useful approach to these things.

And good luck!
Idea Week, Day#3:  Local Ads in Street Views and Map Search
Measured how? Obviously no single computer is going to see that kind of bandwidth, since not even a front-side bus is nearly that fast.
When this happens "Hiring will be obsolete" http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

...because we've inspired everyone to do startups. There will be nobody else to hire :)

We're back to the pre-industrial revolution era. Where everyone didn't hire anyone and had their own backyard industry.

Woohoo!
one of the best things about YC is the peer group and the environment. you get a lot from talking to your new friends who are going through exactly the same thing you are.
The important point is that its not just a charity to whomever wants them, because there are many sleezy people who will just scoop them up. There needs to be some community element, and the person giving them away should know that either the person taking the name has also given away names, or is planning to put the domain to good use.
This kind of situation is prevalent in so many parts of life. I've wasted so much time trying to concisely explain it that I've often found myself wishing there was a simple name/reference for it.

How about "Catch 4!-2".
But, the YC startups themselves seem to be the beneficiaries of excellent PR efforts, appearing in Time, Newsweek etc. Somebody who is equally smart, but not YC-funded will not get this kind of visibility. I just quit from a startup funded by VCs and led by a Harvard M.B.A. While working there, I realized that we were no smarter than our competitors, yet managed to hit the headlines every now and then, for reasons that I didn't quite understand. Since a lot of investors, and at times even enterprise customers display herd mentality, this does make a difference. For instance if on the strength of it's PR efforts a startup manages to make a sale to an enterprise customer, it's valuation does go up, No ?
From the perspective of future YC startup investors, this situation is roughly analogous to the difference between winning an honorary degree verse getting a "merit-based" degree.

People post all the time on Slashdot/Reddit complaining about the unfairness of honorary degrees. That being said, if you're about to go into surgery then which would you prefer, the doctor who earned a degree from the best medical school in the country or the doctor who was awarded an honorary degree from the best medical school in the country? I'll take the surgeon with the honorary degree any day. All the traditional degree signals is that you had good grades is college, and who cares what grades your doctor had in college? I'd much rather go for the doctor whose already recognized as the best in their field.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this exactly, but I guess my point was that the people who are already most likely to succeed on their own are the ones who get the biggest social signaling value from joining YC, if in fact the system works as you say.

edit: The appropriate buzzwords here would have been "selection effects" vs. "treatment effects" (and that selection is better than treatment for social signaling purposes).
i looked at this space/concept a LOT years ago. lots doing .. nothing made it. except for fortune tellers on keen. even google closed up shop here. Q&A markets are free on yahoo because online non-social info is free and low value. high value stuff is service provision (ie. doesn't scale in time) and the good people get good rates w/out messing with internet customers who tend to flake out (just try renting an apt on craigslist). i don't see a way this works, but sure is a great idea.
That's definitely the reason we applied. When they came out, reviews of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan said wisely that for people who want to get into scalable jobs^, the main lesson of the books is to expose yourself to as much randomness as possible and to just get out there and do your thing. Success is built on a small number of big breaks, so you need to put yourself in a situation where your chances for lucky breaks are as big as possible. YC fits into that brilliantly, as does the argument in favor of moving to a startup hub.

^A scalable job, according to Taleb, is any job where given success, the amount of money you make is vastly disproportionate to the amount of time you put in--like starting a company, or becoming an actor or musician. A non-scalable job is something like dentistry, where the amount of money you make always stays pretty closely tied to the hours you work.
So I am coding this now in RoR. I think you're right, there needs to be some sort of karma/credit system to keep the sleazeball squatters away and out of the community. It also needs to accomodate all types of users (selling for cash, trading, and giving away free). Hmmm...
Yeah I know what you mean: the inclusivity paradox: the more something wants to include something else into it, the less that other thing wants to include itself back into it. Or rather, the more a thing wants to include another, the more there is a tendency for the other to want to exclude it.

To equalize matters, a price is set until the two are in balance and a relationship established.

If YC offered more cash and demanded less equity - ie. it lowered its price, then it would be seen as better value to those who would otherwise ignore it for having better alternatives... the Googlers.

Furthermore, in other areas of life, at some times people give up their soul connection to become corporate drones, not knowing the true value of their creativity - yet they think they are gaining...
Also, sometimes establishing a relationship can be mutually advantageous for both but for some reason one wants to 'extract more' - they have to feel they are getting the better deal always and anything they give up is a burden and unjustified. This can blow the deal for both, or else cause a poor relationship unlike the one originally envisaged.
Have you ever worked with a PR firm that was actually worth the money? I've worked directly with 4 in the past and got fuck-all from it, but we're handling our own press now and kicking ass.
Slashdot is a PR venue.
There's a nationally syndicated radio show about your product? That's awesome.
Agreed. Someone please delete this post!
Y-Combinator is an edge. Y-Combinator is a valuable resource; peer review, networking, and heavy motivation. These are things not easily gained on your own. If you really need Y-Combinator to gain success, then you better question yourself and what you offer. Personally, I know my idea will revolutionize the industry it pertains to, but submitting an application to Y-Combinator is giving me the needed kick in the butt to jump on the progress train. It's been brewing for years and tonight I'm excited. I don't need Y-Combinator, but right now I want it!
The wanting of something never creates the appearance of it, but the continued wanting of it. Life is the dialectic of choosing to create and being surprised by what ensues.
i own kyd.net..

use to host free web space on it years ago in high school.. then my home dsl went out and its been doing nothing since. sad story i know.
I agree. You'll have to go where the funding is. Silicon valley is where the action is. If you are serious, you must be there.

This does not mean others will not be successful. But you are fighting the odds, really.
i think that is a great point. people look to incredibly successful people like steve jobs and bill gates, and they hear their stories and think 'hey, if i had gotten that lucky i could've done that too.'

it's not about luck, it's about odds. successful people fail on a consistent basis. the more you put yourself out there the more likely it is that the next time you do you'll get lucky.
this reminds me a lot of ALICE, that program out of carnegie-mellon that teaches java through computer games.

the idea of having fun while learning is really missing from schools today.
Viaweb's PR firm is discussed in the fourth paragraph here: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I absolutely love this idea and can't wait for it to expand. One lil' bug, though: when I finish the "add location" process, I get this message: "Fatal error: Call to undefined function drawError() in [...]date_wizard.php on line 655"
"A scalable job, according to Taleb, is any job where given success, the amount of money you make is vastly disproportionate to the amount of time you put in--like starting a company, or becoming an actor or musician. "

That's a terrible misuse of the term scalable.
I wonder if some of the people complaining about notable items appearing on the front page of Reddit are some of the same people complaining about non-notable items appearing on obscure pages within Wikipedia.
Very apt. I'm saving this quote.
Unless if they are already familiar with Symphony or Rails it might be a tough sale.

I would suggest taking a copy of the system, putting it into another folder and try to re-organize the code in the pages in a way that you are comfortable with and then see if they like it.

That would be a good middle ground solution, you don't want to keep on hacking away on something that will grow out of control but on the other hand they wrote there own framework, which means they really like php.
A culture of social egalitarianism (as opposed to the material kind) seems important to encouraging and developing new ideas. Here's Tom Wolfe on the culture of the places the founders of Silicon Valley came from:

"Back East, engineers, no matter how gifted, ranked below doctors, lawyers, Army colonels, Navy captains, business executives, and professors of English, history, biology, chemistry, and physics. This piece of European snobbery never reached Grinnell, however, nor did it turn up in many of the thousands of small towns in the Midwest and the Far West. An extremely bright student, the one possessing the quality known as genius, was infinitely more likely to go into engineering in Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, or Wisconsin than anywhere Back East."

That's from this: http://members.forbes.com/asap/1997/0825/102.html . It's great.
To rewrite the code or not?
So I got an offer to join a cool new startup today. The founders have been developing the site in PHP using a framework the founder cooked up himself (not a full-fledged MVC job like Symphony or Rails, though).

I took a look at the codebase today, and (at least to me) it seems incredibly messy.

Am I too accustomed to working in a Rails-like environment or should I seriously suggest that we rewrite all the code in Symphony or Rails?

I think I could do the whole thing myself in a couple days, so it wouldn't be a HUGE deal.

Your opinions much appreciated. Thanks.
There is already a free domain swap marketplace and looks pretty good http://www.zuho.com/. Another one wouldn't hurt.
Building cool things != being successful
In fairness (and in context), Taleb is quoting some random b-school guy he encountered. He reuses it, but I suspect he does so that he doesn't have to mess with the original story and/or quibble over definitions.
Google at $1000 a share
Google can surpass Microsoft in market capitalization when it hits $1000 a share.
Google's Internet Plan
What's the big deal with Google and the GPhone, the FCC 700 MHz auction, and net neutrality?
beware the great rewrite.
Two things sprung to mind:

They finally got a good designer.

Are they still using their custom C++ web application framework for building websites? (Which was answered in the negative by revolvingcur's comment, since he got a PHP error. At least they're moving up the abstraction curve somewhat.)
What if I believe being successful == building cool things?
I don't read reddit...
I find that many blogs in my newsreader I still read mostly through YC news submissions. I don't read all the blogs in my reader on a regular basis, and somehow I count on YC news to notify me if something especially interesting appears in them.
word on the street is they're moving to python for some of the back-end (coupla friends work at okc.) and php for the front-end.
If you're helping them write the listing, suggests they simply say what it is they want.

Obviously they could like to contact people. They wouldn't be on the site otherwise.
I was just reading this article and immediately saw a nice parallel. Take a look at "The Secrets of Intangible Wealth" - http://reason.com/news/show/122854.html. It's about a World Bank study of the effect of intangible capital on productivity. One conclusion that can be drawn from the study is that pure application of financial capital in itself does not result in productivity - in other words, it's not just where the money is. It seems pretty clear that startup hubs have a significant amount of intangible capital related to startups. For economic development in general, according to the study, natural and financial capital are actually dwarfed by intangible capital: "In the U.S., according to the World Bank study, natural capital is $15,000 per person, produced capital is $80,000 and intangible capital is $418,000." It would be great if there were a study on startup-related development so we had solid data, but it would not be surprising to me if the effect of startup-related intangible capital in startup hubs was indeed significant.
I imagine they will issue a split well before they reach $1000/share. Unless they have some Royal Dutch-like policy I don't know about..
Quitting job
I knew i made the right decision to leave the corporate-dilbert-like world when asked by a coworker : "why are you leaving this job, now you'll have to learn many new things".
Defense rests :)
Agree. It's like to travel from A to B. You can choose a train to get there in an 3 days or you can choose a plane to get there in 4 hours. YC's money are not critical for my team too, cos we're already building our app. But I can't overestimate YC's value.

Good luck. Make something people need.
If you do not need it, then why try? Maybe you could simply save yourself the anxiety and code some more. I think we ought to stop fooling ourselves. Technically you do not need anything, Heck you do not even need a startup, but if you are applying to YC then you probably need it Now, if you do not make then at that point you do not need it anymore.
The best PR is satisfied users. If you achieved product/market fit, then you don't need all these PR investments. I think.
I know a guy who works there. Says the code is kind of a mess, but isn't that always the way it is?
So true!

Coming from Cornwall (a rural part of the UK) I can't tell you how much we spend sending sales people to the cities for face-to-face meetings.

I liked the bit about VCs from Silicon Valley Vs Boston. I see London VCs, Parisian VCs, German VCs don't even get a sniff. Most amusing, and so very true. I think that may be more evidence for the argument.

monk.e.boy
Likely not:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
They're not going to look on the idea favorably, and you risk pissing this guy off by telling him his code sucks.

I have basically sworn off PHP-using companies, because this is nearly always what you find. It works, but it's a horrid mess that they expect you to develop with rapidly, when all you want to do is take it outside and burn it.