skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know I'll get downmodded for this, but I sure as hell wish this day would come: built-in ad-blockers in all major browsers.

Why? For selfish and honest reasons: For one, I personally don't like ads at all, I prefer the real estate on my monitor much more. Second, I will probably have to start paying (just a little bit) for services I really like. Let's see... I'd pay for google search, flickr, reddit, gmail...

And Internet will be free from all this ad-revenue-fueled noise. And entrepreneurs will be more focused on building things people want to pay for.
And Google will still be #1 simply because people (I believe) will want their services: search, gmail, maps, online docs, etc. After all we've been paying Microsoft for stuff we didn't really need for years.
It seems that if ads go away, so will free content.
All those companies/merchants advertising their products/services through adsense wouldnt want their ads blocked by IE. Google wont be alone in this fight.
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Wordsworth Responds (Strategy Letter I revisted)
"... I won't be able to do anything full time until 2011. ..."

try the delicious model, build product, refine to user requirement. Then create company around product ~ http://joshua.schachter.org/
FR-041: Debris by Farbrausch (amazing demo)
Paul Graham is so good, his keyboard only has three keys: 0, 1 and Return. No Backspace, because he doesn't make mistakes.
Your odds are small, indeed. You will never be as fast as the other guys and if you have an amazing idea and something worthwhile, you'll be overtaken by your competitors very quickly. You have to jump in fully and mind the business from the start.
It's kind of funny seeing my name next to Paul Graham and Saul Klein. I'm a little out of my league, but I just so happened to say exactly what she wanted to publish. The only former Y Combinator startup founder I know that went on to work for Google was one of the guys from flagr. Yes, I know that most Y Combinator companies now are founded by college graduates.

My first mainstream media PR hit would've been a whole lot better if she would have said "Kevin Fischer, founder of www.hivgene.com." instead of Kevin Fischer, Y Combinator reject. Maybe next time.

(to anyone wondering, she saw some posts of mine on a thread comparing Y Combinator to Techstars on the Techcrunch forums and emailed me for an interview. 22 minutes on the phone.)
Yes, that wasn't a smart thing for David Cohen to say.
Oh noes! Write your congressperson!
All lambda expressions terminate in logarithmic time when evaluated in Paul Graham order.
Paul Graham is a general algorithm to solve the halting program.
You never know until you try...
Paul Graham Facts
Paul Graham is so good, he yelled at the hackernews server and it fixed itself.
Real hackers use Atbash.
An algorithm for symbolic integration [pdf] (did you know that such an algorithm existed?)
Yes.

It's also possible to learn the guitar parttime and play golf parttime.

If you want to be great though, you probably have got to work harder than parttime.
This was just addressed today by Josh Coates of Mozy.com who talked to a small class of CS students. He said, "if your idea is good then there are six other guys out there working on it full time. If it's not good then don't work on it."

On the other side I just finished the Chapter in Founders at Work on 37 Signals. David Heinemeier Hansson created BaseCamp and he only spent 10 hours a week on it. He was the only programmer working on it too. Designers did help out but they only gave a third of their time too. But he said this lack of time was the greatest gift to the development of Basecamp. It helped focus his view on what they needed, and it forced them to make tough decisions about making less software all the time. When you have a lot of time you just get tempted to try to do it all, or at least do too much. So maybe if you don't try to do everything and just the essential then it might be a gift too.

37 Signals embraced the constraints that were forced upon them.

So the short answer to your question is . . . it depends. But it's still a question that needs to be asked.
Thank you. That was very informative. :)
That is one of the worst company names I've ever seen. I guess start-up names aren't that important after all...
Masters of Design
I dunno... there were 25 bids on that auction. Unless we are missing something, there might just be that many stupid people out there. At least enough to support you and me.
You're welcome, aptly named QuestionBoy. Thanks for asking the question in the first place. :-)
Paul Graham Facts
henning:

- Paul Graham is so good, Arc is Blub for him.

- Paul Graham is so good, he does just simply walk into Mordor. And then he checks into a hotel.

Xichekolas:

- Paul Graham is so good, the parenthesis match themselves.

- Paul Graham is so good, it's hard to defun him.

ptn:

- Paul Graham is so good, his keyboard only has three keys: 0, 1 and Return. No Backspace, because he doesn't make mistakes.

iamwil :

- Paul Graham's so smart that inside his brain is another brain.

-Paul Graham once matched /(x+x+)+y/ in logarithmic time.

rms:
- Paul Graham is a general algorithm to solve the halting program.

dfranke:

- All lambda expressions terminate in logarithmic time when evaluated in Paul Graham order.

breck:

- Paul Graham is so good, he yelled at the hackernews server and it fixed itself.
thanks for the input. i was a little too focused on developers.
This baby is truly awesome. I just think things should be more balanced out; there are too many positive feedback mechanisms that make the game go bonkers.
AOL used to have "unsend," which allowed you to take a message you sent out of a person's inbox if that person had not yet read it. I thought it was a nice feature.
Paul Graham could get Hurd to work
Are we already moving on from traditional social networking?
Some quick late night thoughts.

Attend to deep impact. Most of your impact will be on the "leaves" of your impact tree. Not in the people you directly affect, but in those they then affect, etc. Magnitudes, branching factors, scale. Force multipliers.

Be fruitful. Like when planning a research career, choose appropriate problems. Good sized, well timed, well formed and motivated. You don't strictly need to be first, but you only get credit for things done earlier or better than if you had not participated. And only for that marginal improvement. Just being there doesn't count.

Leverage. If your not leveraging your strengths, you are waisting your time. The entirety of your strengths. Relative to other people. The world is full of important things which are not getting done because the warm bodies with the odd required mix of capabilities are busy doing other things, or sometimes haven't noticed. Different people have very different sets of low hanging fruit. Attend to yours.

It's a project. Requirements, analysis, outside review, planning, testing, management, postmortems. Engineering, science, academia, all have things to do which increase the likelihood of a successful outcome. You can skip all the ones you don't like. Not. Some of your low hanging fruit will require visits to places you really don't want to go, but are good for you.

Opportunities exist. And often go unnoticed. It seems 10 million primary school children in the developing world either will or won't have laptops in 2008, depending on whether order 100 python good programmer months choose to spend time on it in the next half year.
Confessions of an ex-publisher
Paul Graham eats breakfast!!!
James Hong: On going (NOT) Free...
This seems to be a recurring theme with Lisp implementations. Reddit switched from CMUCL to Python (threading); Vendetta Online switched from SBCL to Erlang (GC/memory leaks). Other people have hit major snags e.g. with Haskell/GHC runtime bugs (Wager Labs; switched to Erlang). Use a massively complex runtime, hit bugs that can't be fixed (in a start-up timeframe, anyhow)?
I instead just stopped. That's when I went full-time working on Virtualmin.
What is the best Ad Network?
I'll looking for an ad networking for a site of mine. Could you guys share some of your rates and experiences?
I've always found religious prohibitions on "usury" to be particularly disturbing. My parents are from Lebanon and are familiar with people who've gone through life with only cash transactions. The tight-knit communities there make things easier for people who won't pay interest, but even so, it must cool growth. Saving up to buy a car or a house in cash is no small order, and forget about entrepreneurship. (I wonder if applying to YC would be verboten...)
If more people used LISP runtime systems, then the bugs would be found more readily. Thus leading to fewer defections from LISP to Blubs.
Paul Graham's tears have been acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum.
Here's a list of what people get from yc, roughly in order of how important I think they are:

1) pg/yc's advice and connections

2) other smart hackers' advice and connections

3) a complex package I'll call moral support. This includes the validation of their plans, committment to working full-time, and some other less important factors.

4) being able to say "I am funded by yc"

5) publicity

6) money

1), 4), and 5) are hard to replicate well, but I don't think it'd be hard to do them better than an angel (depending on the angel). Angels are also useless at 2, and they take more equity. I think there's a lot of value in even mediocre yc knockoffs, and that we'll see a lot more of them in the coming years.
I believe it is possible to do the startup part time. In fact, if you spend a good deal of your time planning the right actions to make while you're actually working on your startup, you may see better progress than if you're working on it full time. This would simply be because you would be acting in a more intelligent way.
It really does not matter much if you are doing it part-time or full-time except for the time it takes to get the first release out.
I have been working on http://www.onista.com for almost a year now and I am doing it mostly in evenings and weekends. Bear in mind that I have one and half year old kid who takes lot of time away from me (Off course I enjoy it a lot).
Recently two more friends joined me and we are pretty confident on launching in November.

Based on my experience I can say that, persistence is what matters. If you work full-time and are not persistent or loose focus then you are not going anywhere. If you work part-time and are persistent and focussed then you will win. May be it will take more time than usual but you will get there with better results.

So I would say, yes go ahead and work part-time on your idea, but be very persistent to spend whatever extra time you find on the idea.
It would be good idea to find group of friends who can work part-time with you. (I did that it does help a lot)
All I can say is wow, I wish someone would print 300 million copies of that and mail it to every man, woman, and child in the country.
I'm pretty sure xkcd just jumped the shark. Please don't let YC news jump the shark on the same day.
I thought YC News jumped the shark when it stopped being Startup News.
Doesn't mean you have to add to the problem :)
Not necessarily -- some organizations would patch it themselves in a private branch just to maintain an edge, assuming they have the expertise in-house. I've done this before with GPLed libraries. That's assuming you can even track down the problem -- Vendetta Online couldn't pin it down well enough to submit a coherent bug report (in fairness, SBCL is a monstrosity; just as a comparison, how many Rails developers could track down CRuby bugs?).

I wouldn't call Erlang and Python Blubs.
10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of
Facebook: What If More Is Less?
Well, a) that, and b) I think the reason this site jumped the shark, if it has indeed done so, is that it tried to start with a bunch of random business people as a community and turn it into a hacker community, rather than starting with a bunch of hackers and getting them interested in startups, which is what it wanted to do. What it's left with is a bunch of random business people trolling about random crap.
Yeah, but do you want to make money ripping off stupid people?
Paul Graham can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
Paul_Graham(R), the well-known Registered Trademark, has finally found how not to die, and integrated and evaluater for this into his brain/organism.

So there's really hope for Arc to be finished in his life time, now!
Three keys are redundant.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ajwatson/cat-powered.gif
I have a small amount of experience raising capital. Very small. Earlier this year, I was working with a group that was able to get face time with some serious players without going to extremes. That said, we had some pretty good connections that we were able to leverage.

I should probably caveat all my posts with something like this: "I am not an expert. I haven't started any companies that have made it to incorporation. Why are you listening to me?!" ;-)
Anything but the Church Numerals is below him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_numeral
Zenter had hardly started so there couldn't have been many conclusions you could draw from traffic data. It comes down to does it make the whole better. Google wants to move quickly into a web based presentation system, so now they have some new employees and some extra code to draw from.
One thing I have wondered is if enterprise software (like CRM and ERP packages; process automation stuff) is actually helping the common man. The theory is that all this enterprise software makes large companies more efficient by cutting their costs. Then since these large companies are so competitive, they will pass on the savings to the consumer by cutting the prices of goods/services. Thus consumers can more easily afford higher quality lives.

But it seems like in the past 20 years, prices have stayed the same or gone up, employee salaries have stayed the same or gone down, but executive pay packages have sky rocketed. Does this mean that all the innovation and "wealth" created by enterprise software is just making the rich more money?
yeah it looks like biz dev is more important than the tech part in your case... good luck and let me know when you've launched - I'm pretty curious
true. nice name for it :)

I had urchin back on an old host, i liked the way it showed referring pages.
Are you really ripping them off if they value the product at that price and are buying something they would have otherwise never heard of?
Paul Graham is so good, he does not recurse. He uses the y combinator - in Continuation Passing Style - with both hands tied behind his back.
It's a much better deal than buying MS Office at Best Buy, which apparently happens all the time.
Is all of that "progress" you mentioned really a good thing? I personally don't think I like the idea of all of my public activities being monitored and indexed, whether I'm doing anything wrong or not.
This site has always been populated with hackers and continues to be populated with hackers. Where are all these random business people you speak of coming from? Y Combinator is intended as a program for hackers and this site was made for YC to get a better sense of people applying to the program. If that happens to include some gasp business people, so be it.

There's always software discussion taking place here and if you don't think there's enough, then start a new thread discussing what you think is appropriate. You still have the power to make the site better by contributing worthwhile content. Relevant humor isn't banned here by any means... though I admit that the idea of a Paul Graham Facts meme is much funnier than the facts themselves.
Yeah, that would probably work as long as I don't have tough competition that can work full time. So when I release, I have to release pretty complete and bug free, and it'd help if the product was very hard to reproduce without knowing the internals. I can probably do those, since I currently have a year and a half of comp sci research ahead of me (getting a masters).

Any recommendations on especially pertinent fields? I'm planning to look at SOA type stuff - intelligent agents, evolutionary algorithms, systems architecture, etc. I'd like to throw some Godel in there too, but can't really see the applicability yet.
The rate of ship jumping is accelerating. First, diggers jump to reddit. Then redditers jump to proggit. Proggits jump to hacker news. Where next? Soon it'll be a new social network site for every new thread. Then we'll need a meta social network site, and so on.
I don't see why we should be hard on him for this.

However, if the other sites continue to explode and hotornot sinks into obscurity, he's free game.
I do think a meta social news site is a good idea. It would just be a recommendation engine that fed you links you like from across digg, reddit, news.yc and beyond.
Paul Graham is so good, he's not falling for your WFP ass-kissing attempts.
Paul Graham was written in lisp that itself was written in Paul Graham.
Paul Graham is the current continuation.
interactive python unleashed
Ask YC: Have any girls applied to YC?  Any get in?
There must be some Caterina Fakes and Sandy Lerners in there, right?
In my experience, that is obscenely slow..

Not practical whatsoever.
Not so stupid, I'm sure there are a lot of people who judge the quality of software by its price.

The more I look at this auction, the more I'm in awe of it's dastardly brilliance. You don't actually get anything from the auction, you just get emailed a link to a special "download site".
Well, you could just discipline yourself to save outgoing emails in your `drafts` folder for a bit and read them again before you actually send them. That's what I do for most emails and it works pretty well for me.
That is a good advise.
I'll give it a try.
Anyway, one of the reasons which brought me into this post is the fact that I use Gmail, with Gmail, there is a short-cut for 'send' by hitting <tab> and then <enter>, It happened more than once that I typed this sequence without any intention to send the message and ptooof! the message is gone. I simply wanted a new paragraph but the message has already gone. I am afraid this one has not been proofed by your suggestion.

I couldn't understand what do you mean by delaying messages. I never meant to create a delay but an ability that my server will withdraw the message from the recipient's server if I asked for it and the recipient has not yet been aware of my message, that is, didn't logged in to the server since I sent or something alike .
I bet the reddit engine could be adapted to do this. If the rating system could also rate items for you based on the interests of those who rated the page, where the rating value would be a function of the similarity of interests to yours, then it would no longer be eternal September. The only thing missing would be a meta commenting system, similarly constructed.

That the system would be based on existing networks would ensure the cross pollination of ideas between different interest groups.
The bulletin board system at my college did this. Quite handy and very missed once I left.
The delay function is useful for other things too...
Paging tongue-ass extraction to item #60357!
>Because the news feed is the stream of activity from all your "friends" you get bombarded with irrelevant information.

Facebook does have settings that let you adjust the kind information you get in your feed, you can ban people from your feed if you want.
Think of the tripple-down effect.

(Interpret at face value or sarcasm as you like.)
Yes. Luckily, often enough there are lots of loopholes in the religious laws. Just think of Islamic Banking.
Taking the Startup Plunge
Tech Startups: A Safe Bet
iRobot previews ConnectR telepresence unit
Paul Graham is so good, he will skip this piece of news.

Paul Graham is so good, his DNA has an implementation of Lisp.
Apollo alpha
The word farms of the web
The growing number of websites that mix and match low-quality articles produced by amateurs in order to generate traffic is causing concern, reports Danny Bradbury
Attention management
"positive network externalities:

http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics...

One of the reasons we try and convince other people to use our tools.
Radio Forgets to Pay the User First
Paul Graham is so good, good was defined as (+ Paul Graham good), and implemented with tail recursion.
Have any boys? Generally, I thought that applicants were done with college.
jamglue.com has a girl founder: http://www.jamglue.com/people/divya

don't remember anyone else though. maybe shoutfit had a girl founder too.
Agreed. Adwords are auctioned, which means the top ads have the economic incentive to pay most (the ad may be important for smaller share of population, but to pay off more). In regular searches popularity alone wins, $$$ value is not part of the equation.

I live in Bulgaria, btw ;)
The best ad network depends on your site type and results. In reality you need to check which is the best network for YOU. Google Ad Sense can be good for one site but bad for another. The issue here is try and see. There are others ad networks that might give more infromation like ad brite, and etc. (I can give you the full list if you like of most of the known companies). If you are a forum on a certain product (such ipod) you might need to check other sites that are more designated to this kind of product. All in all it is just depends on what is on your site...and your traction
Paul Graham is so good, he always tips using $2.56 cheques made out by Donald Knuth.
Good question! This is a pretty bad problem.

Marie from heysan! was the only girl in the winter program 2007
10 Reasons Why It's Better to Be a Software Tester
Is This Health 2.0?
Paul Graham was a hacker and now is a businessman.
XML Sucks (a.k.a. Why S-expressions Are Better)
Something sounds fishy:

"Every dating site i know and talk to tells me they are dealing with the same issue. Markus at plentyoffish seems to be doing a good job of fighting it, but tells me it gets harder and harder every month to maintain."

If Markus can deal with it as a one man team, how does James and his crew of hackers not have the resources to figure it out?
There have been 5 female cofounders. Marie from Heysan, Divya from Jamglue, and Michelle (with a company from last summer that hasn't launched yet) are the women still involved with their startups.

I hope more women will apply for funding this fall!
Languages: we may be easily misled by analogies, but still, I'd try to defend my point: you are forced to use SQL only and only because the DB infrastructure can't understand your (presumably imperative) way of describing operations on large data sets.

But you are just wrong arguing that relational databases are glorified arrays full of pointers and examples of premature optimization.

I think the relational concepts are just a subset of what you can do with various kinds of collections in imperative languages - arrays, sets, maps. For example, I can have an array of records describing users, each of which incorporates a set of groups a user belongs to. In DB terms that's 3 tables (users, groups and membership) with one-to-many relations between them. Either way, we are describing the same concept of users and their membership in various groups. So why bother having another language?