skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Asking them to remove their main source of revenue? That's going to fly...
I meant that, if you submitted your application two weeks ago, and they had already reviewed it (and probably made a decision about it); and then you resubmit today. How would the re-review happen? Do they compare with your old application to see if you changed something important, or do they review it again as if it was submitted for the first time? Not that it's important; but just wondering.
website thumbnails website screenshots from thumbnailspro
> If you're a startup in a place with relatively few startups, you have a real shot at attracting the top programmers locally, because you're the only game in town. In the Bay Area you're competing against Google, Facebook and all the rest.

Are the "top programmers locally" likely to be as good as the "top programmers" in SV? (There is some top talent outside SV, but it's not everywhere and SV has a critical mass in almost every domain.)

What does it say about a biz that can only attract/keep top talent when it's competing against the junior varsity? How will that biz fare against a biz that does attract/keep top talent when competing against top tech companies?
We submitted our final version late last night.
I was hoping to get a cofounder's commitment by today, but I submitted it anyway last minute.
I just find out we could be late on submission, We find out Y-combinator 3 days ago.

I think we submit an hour late, Made a mistake calculating the time zone from Sydney. Hopefully our application will be considered.

Yours.
The backlash of it all will be even more apathy, which can be pretty dangerous. "We're all going to die anyways." Hence, a vicious cycle.
Sorry about my previous snarkiness. Consider this a less obnoxious bug report: I again attempted to add a location. It appeared to work, but the final screen (following "We've recorded your info...") spits out:
"Error...

Array
(
[prev_page] => 18
)

Array
(
[welcome_res] => 3
[when_res] => 3
[city_res] => 5
[other_city] => New York
[not_there_yet_email] => elided@notmyemail.com
[zipcode] => 10010
)"

On the up side, I think the design is slick and appealing. This will be a great page once you get the kinks worked out.
I'm very jealous!

My quit date is 6 months away.

Trying to get enough money together to live for a year or so first, but towards the end of each week I get more and more tempted to hand in my resignation.
so have I - it was freezing cold. :P
I hope you aren't pitching a timezone app.
I'm planning my escape in great detail, like a prison inmate who has been wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in a cubicle. I already made it out a few times before but was recaptured. Armed with my greater yearning and experience I'm determined to make it out for good. Even if it does take another 20 attempts, I will willingly bloody myself on the corporate barbed wire fence that confines me. One day I will escape and spend my time roaming in the open green grass of fulfilling hard work, intellectual curiosity, and irreverent exploration. Oh yes, I will be free.
DHH responds to being called a "potty mouth"
"I'm allergic to people who willingly and without irony use the term "potty mouth" in adult conversation. The notion that a word like fuck can make your brain curl up and cry like a toddler is so pathetically disturbing that it makes my skin crawl. It has the plastic smell of a barbie playhouse and the repressed insecurities of casual friday khakis."
I see what your say saying, but essential you knew the information you were entering was very important to you, that you wanted it saved. You chose to do it offline. The functionality was built in from the start, so I chose to use it.

Regardless, Cheers and good luck with your application.
Plumbing the Depths of Our Archives
Yes, I think his response can be summarized as, "It's not true because I don't want it to be true."
I submitted my app today too. I had my idea two days ago.
GigaOm Show#12 - Google's Marissa Mayer (mp3|4)
Of course there is more at stake for them which should make them more careful. But whether someone reads the text in the UI is not in general a measure of cluefulness. In fact smart people may be even less willing to read anything because they assume they don't need to.
The Right Kind of Stupid (Newsrooms using Twitter)
After i submitted my application I went back to read over it again and I noticed only one of the three YC names were left in the fields for cofounders YC names and the list of YC names of who will move to the bay area. I am 100% positive all three names were there when i submitted the first time because we went over it a few times before hand. (I spent a few years as a video game tester so i noticed it was missing immediately) So maybe there is a problem with the app if these fields have consistent missing info.

I fixed the fields and resubmitted so hopefully the problem was corrected for me but just a heads up for YC. It might be worth looking into.
The article also points to the following story "Experimenting with Twitter: How Newsrooms Are Using It to Reach More Users" on Jacob Harris a senior Software Engineer at NYT. Well worth the read to see how Twitter is being hacked ~ http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=128918
Not everything that can be counted counts...
This is very slick what you have done! As opposed to most MySpace customization websites, I don't feel dirty while I'm using your system. Haha. Kudos to everyone involved!
Your point isn't addressing the fact that this guy is right more than everyone else, most of the time.

Also, what's with the "women" comment?
Zombo.com - YC applicant - feedback wanted
This is just a prototype, but wanted to get feedback whether we're accepted or not. What do you think?
Ask YC: Has anyone else here worked in the video game industry?
Just curious...
the thing I'm curious about is how he accounts for irrational behavior, since game theory typically assumes that all parties behave rationally
left my job at microsoft today to focus on my startup. leaving feels like i just took a huge dump.

i learned a lot there. but their approach seemed to be: throw more people and money at the problem. (please see "mythical man month".) whereas at the startup, its all my code and it mostly fits in my head.
you're in for sure
Haha, no offense, but you guys sound like high school teenagers that just got done with their big exam, and the application for entrance for college.

If you don't get accepeted, move on and finish your idea yourself. If it is good, and the execution is good, it shouldn't matter if you get accepted at yc or not.

So, no matter what happens, don't get discouraged, but keep going.
Shrinking Memory in the Age of Gadgets
the unknown unknowns are known at zombo.com
When I applied for the last summer funding round, I typed up most answers in emacs.
Why is everyone acting like this is a mature platform?
Well that's a weird name for a website. Tudou means potato. I'm still not fluent, but their slogan "mei ge ren dou shi sheng huo de dao yan" means something like "everyone is a director," or maybe closer to "everyone lives the life of a director." Any native speakers that can translate that better?

In any case, this will be a great resource to help me become fluent.
I used my tuition money to live overseas for a year, and I just got back. I haven't really run into any problems yet.
Auto flash plus sound ftl. Thank God for Flash Block.

...Am I the only person reminded of a lame circus announcer?
None of you have heard about zombo.com before?
thomasptacek, I read the submarine essay, and also googled for the "survey" trick, but I cant find it.. can you provide a reference?
Well, I like the domain name. :)
Circles are the new rounded rectangles.
Ditto. We had a draft in about a week ago, but without a demo. Didn't finish that until about 6:00 PM today.
I thought everybody knew you can do anything at Zombo.com. Anything at all. You're a shoo-in!
Yeah, I have worked for several game companies, started an own and currently I'm working as freelancer on a video game.
Yaw, I shoulda mentioned the way CampaignMonitor tracks that... I amended the post via the comments.
I graduate from college way into CG. Oddly I'm not into video games. After some exploration though I found that people in that industry are over worked and underpaid. I found other uses for CG instead. Not really an answer to your question but there ya go...
I was feeling quite confident about my team's efforts. Now I'm not so sure.

This, my friends, is web 4.0, and a lesson for us all.

That said, I feel worthy of being beaten by such a worthy competitor, something clearly at the pinnacle of not only computing, but human evolution.

Kudos to you, Zombo. You have bested us all.
overworked and underpaid is exactly why I used to work in the video game industry.
A fairly boring interview, almost every answer was just the standard PR blurb. It's such a shame Larry/Sergey follow the Willy Wonka style of reclusive genius. It would be really interesting to know what they're thinking.

I am loving the new GigaOM show. It's helping to make up for the total lack of new VentureVoice interviews. Hopefully they'll extend the time to a full hour and do more in depth interviews.
It just gets better every time I visit.
Why is 3D better? I'm not Superman. When I want to go to a local business, I don't fly there.

It always amazes me how geeks will ooh and aah over any 3D interface. But the three-dimensional world is extremely inconvenient for conveying most sorts of information -- there's occlusion and perspective, which hide and distort information. The one thing a 3D map does convey is the height of buildings, and sometimes the shape, but it's not clear that this is worth the costs.

Even if it were true that 3D gave you more useful information, there are no interface standards for 3D navigation.

Full disclosure: I work for Upcoming (http://upcoming.yahoo.com/), also in the events and local search business. But honestly, this isn't me slamming the competition; I have ranted about 3D interfaces for years. I think UpNext is impressive, but maybe there's more appropriate uses for this technology than local search.
Our parents got through the Cold War with "drop, tuck and roll," just fine. Plenty of British kids got through WWII with air-raids every other day. The more we treat children like fragile little eggs, the less able they will be to carry the torch.

Who said that children shouldn't be anxious? Was there ever a single moment in world history where children had nothing to worry about? Fear of real danger is as healthy a thing as I can think of.
This is my favorite thing in the entire universe.
Sorry, my fault for being incoherent. Look for the word "coup" in "Submarine". Viaweb injected a factoid into the, uh, press-o-sphere. Reporters love new factoids.

What I see work, over and over again, is companies manufacturing surveys or studies that come up with numbers and metrics about the market, like, "20,000 enterprises are deploying technology to stop the Storm worm". Some companies will do annual press releases about an official-sounding report they generate, like, "Weboopia's 5th Annual Twitter Study Concludes 4,897,489,281 Messages Delivered Over Twitter In 2007".
"... A fairly boring interview, almost every answer was just the standard PR blurb ..."

Damn. Haven't listened to it yet. Hoped it might have been similiar to "Nine Lessons Learned about Creativity at Google, 21Mb 47Min" ~ http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=155...

"... I am loving the new GigaOM show. It's helping to make up for the total lack of new VentureVoice interviews ..."*

Stanford has a good selection of tech/entrepreneur pod/vidcasts ~ http://edcorner.stanford.edu/
What reddit taught me about startups: making money (really?)
I like the clean, minimalistic design. While the voice explains the purpose of the site quite nicely, you need a tagline and a clear written explanation as well: if the user doesn't see the value proposition in 3 seconds, they're gone (and what if they have their sound off?)

I also like the fact that you don't have to register to use your site.

I'm afraid the collaboration and social aspects are somewhat lacking - you should focus on those.

I can see the market for your site, but do you have a solid business plan to monetize it?

(long time fan of zombo.com)
Yeah, I work on HeroEngine (http://www.heroengine.net), a MMO platform. The guys behind it are really smart, and I'm lucky to be able to learn from them.

If you're interested in game development, the single best thing you could do is hang out in the IRC channel #gamedev on the server irc.afternet.org and learn from them. There are a surprising number of excellent developers in that channel, so even if you're not interested in game development you'd probably find it worthwhile anyway. Just wait for an interesting conversation.
Ingredients for Web 2.0 Success (Alexis Ohanian and Aaron Swartz at Barcamp 2006)
HAHAHA... awesome
Just mobile games for a while. And of course my erotic puzzle game ;-)
Yes, I was in the industry for about three years, on the web side, but in the industry nonetheless.

Overworked? Underpaid? Yes, even if you're not making the games. My guess is that they get away with it because so many people want to work in gaming at any cost.

Yeah, I still think about hacking a game together from time to time. The emerging casual gaming market is pretty fascinating. One of the alternate ideas on my YC app was a game.
They are arguing different points.

The first point being that startups do best in Silicon Valley.
The second point being that startups can succeed elsewhere (Europe).
Verizon users: Get ready for more mobile ads based on your call history
The process can be rational even if the actors are not. Think of evolution. People who pursue successful strategies (even if they do it for irrational reasons) will be more successful (by definition).
oh, gimmie a break. I survied communism, a revolution, in 91,another one in 97 *where I participated throwing stones at corrupt police, then rationed food, staying in line for bread, playing with guns, Ak-47 granades (I was only 16), coming to the US finishing high school, and getting a full academic scholarship, actually finding a job in 2003 in the middle of the bust, that was willing to sponsor me for an H-1B, working my ass off, and eventually moving to SF.

I think difficulties shape a person, hopefully for the good. At max, you will get a bunch of emmo guys, trying to be vegetarians and anti-comformist, mainly b/c they have nothing else to do in suburbia.

little stress in kids is good, so they don't become to complacient, and take everything for granted. A country filled with silver spoon fed kids, has no bright future.
Why Paul GrahamaEURXs aEURoeThe Future of Web AppaEURX Essay is wrong
YouTube lets users map videos onto Google Earth
Closer to "Everyone is Life's director". It sounds pretty nice actually. Their name is kind of out of ordinary, but I think potato has more of a humourous touch to it in Chinese. So it's a lively name.
Yes. I was in R&D of a game company, worked on console game titles (PS, PS2) and CG film productions. Also did some technology demos at siggraph.

Overworking---well, you can't avoid occasional crunch time, and because of the nature of game development, you sometimes have to face the design being overturned and have to rework development. But how far it goes largely depends on the team and/or the culture of the company. I know some who were deep in crunch time for over 9 months to meet the deadlines of monthly milestones; but also I know some who were able to leave office 6-7pm most of the time.
Wikipedia's move to SF motivated by cold, hard cash
the name means potato, like couch potato. the slogan says "everybody is life's director". i looked around at the site and i would say more than 3/4th of the site is of pirated nature. but hey, being a chinese company i doubt they care.
I've been in the game industry as a programmer since 2000. I read this site everyday, but I'm not submitting an application to ycombinator, so maybe I'm not the audience for your question.

I wanted to reply to the overworked/underpaid thing, because you read it a lot on non-gaming hacking sites...it's like parents tell their baby hackers to behave, or they'll have to go work in the game industry.

If you're talented and not willing to accept shitty working conditions, you won't end up in a sweatshop. Lots of good companies treat their employees very well, both in terms of work conditions and compensation. Game houses on the West Coast are abundant, but there are some very good ones in the East (Epic being one of the brighter lights there), and middle (Raven and Human Head in Wisconsin, id in Texas, many many others), so don't feel like you have to readjust to a Californian way of life or living expenses.

The rough equivalent of sweatshops _do_ exist, but these aren't as rampant as you would think, even at places that have been (in)famous for them, like Electronic Arts.

Aim for smaller, privately-held game companies. They tend to be most satisfying to work for. If they get bought by EA or Microsoft (or Activision, or 2K, or, or, or...), jump ship when your options vest. Very few people seem to be as happy after the acquisition, but there are always exceptions.

If you are a generic coder with no identity within your company or project, jump ship immediately. Before the interview, if you can. :) Most places won't have you in the spotlight at all, but are very good about making everyone feel like an important contributor to a team. If you don't feel like that, you should get out, because the work is always challenging, but it doesn't suck unless you feel like a cog in a machine.
Anyone else reminded of Asimov's Foundation series? The whole (fictional) science of psychohistory was based upon game theory and rational choice - the idea that, given enough humans in the universe, all the irrational bits would cancel out and human action would be completely predictable by mathematical equations.
Web Startups: Silicon Valley's New Components
well, am i missing something? There is a about minute audio-only intro which just tells me i am at zombo.com. Nothing else. whats the point?
altough, without headphones (i tried first) this is even more confusing..
/Toni
the audio is annoying, like one of those greeting cards that start playing music...at least there should be some way of turning it off.

I was on the website for about 3 seconds and closed the browser due to the music, and alas, will never know what ZomboCOM does!
OTOH, it's a given that in any group of fortune-tellers, someone will be right more than everyone else. Unless there are other rational-choice theorists with similar track records, this doesn't tell us much about the validity of rational-choice theory itself.

One of the things that made Warren Buffett's "The Superinvestors of Graham & Doddsville" so credible is that he listed a whole host of investors who all used the same strategy yet invested in different companies, and they all ended up beating the market by a large amount. It's not enough to look at what the leading practitioner in a field does, because he may be leading by luck. It's also not enough to look at a group of leading practitioners who all take the same actions, because luck might favor those actions and leave them all well-off. But if a group of leading practitioners all follow the same principles yet take different actions, and they all do well, there's probably something to those principles.

Same reason why you should never just trust Paul Graham - he could've gotten lucky with Viaweb and just been in the right place at the right time. However, when he articulates the same principles as Marc Andreesen and Paul Buchheit and Caterina Fake, all of whom have gotten rich under different circumstances in different time periods, there might be something to them.
I was going to link to the Wikipedia article on it but apparently the Wikipedians have dubbed zombocom not notable.
i am not sjure about 20+ hour spurts unless you include the most valuable time for coding: doing something away from any computer.. coding in you head. I think pg has written about it not too long ago.
For me, this coding in your head continues and gets re-forumlated, stored as pseudocode in my head until i can write down the full the implementation in one step.
This way i sometimes come to 48h+ of work (including dreaming of code;-) which is just 10percent pysical hacking at a keyboard.
/Toni
I hate you guys...i didn't know she had a dick.
Yes, I spent about 3.5yrs in it. I can't really agree with the underpaid/overworked thing; the pay was fair, and the hours not unreasonable.

I left the industry because the idea of spending 2+ years on something that may-or-may-not pan out, with no way to tell before release, was beginning to get me down.

I realize startups are sort of the same thing, but I think they actually offer earlier feedback and greater opportunities for recovery than games.
umm you can't skip the audio. i got bored and left. and you shouldn't play audio w/out the user clicking something to start it. they could be at work, it could be 4am, etc
Even there, the theory failed, because it couldn't anticipate "the Mule".
This was a fascinating article (although the font size was headache-arific).

How do you think he implements his "models"? I was thinking of using a glorified General Problem Solver to list our possible operations (elect this person, elect that person, do this, do that) in order to reach an end goal, the equilibrium. Maybe? Ideas?
I don't find ZomboCom or this post linking to it at all funny.

Furthermore, I doubt even user zombo developed Zombo.com or that he/it is a YC applicant.

I saw this site many months ago and it hasn't changed a bit.

These sort of time-wasters can damage goodwill on this forum. Good for April 1 and that's about it.
Just to add another data point -- I was interested in the games industry, and interviewed around a bit. I turned away because it looked like overworked/underpaid was the norm. Some people (like icculus) said that wasn't necessarily the case, but even they acknowledged it was the norm, and it's hard to be sure of what you're getting into when you're interviewing.

This agrees with the obvious economics at work: games are sexy, so programmers are in greater supply, so their value goes down.
Ultrahigh-speed Internet2 gets 10x boost in anticipation of particle collider for physicists
I did a stint at a company who had bought it, and no one was using it. All the developers expressed disgust at its user-interface, and management didn't care what they used so they ended up writing their own.
And, while it's harder to find, you should look for negative evidence as well. People who articulated and stuck to the same principles, and failed.
European policy makers - or at least the ones I've been exposed to - generally have their heads pretty far up their asses in terms of the modern world. The nordic countries seem to do things a little better, however, they have some fairly strong reasons to not throw open the borders. Citizenship in those countries is the most valuable thing a lot of the poorer people own.
I think this article and your comment can coexist under this thesis: the things kids are worrying about are increasingly more bogus. My personal opinion is that bogus problems have a powerful negative effect on people. You've lived the life of a street dog and grown up lean and strong, while these kids are living the yappy dog life and growing up neurotic. (I intend that as a compliment to you.) They're optomizing for nonexistent variables. The article touches on this idea:

"Researchers found that pupils in schools which tackled the problems they worried about, such as those with eco-clubs and recycling schemes to teach children about environmental problems, were happier."
Ah, internet2. Anyone remember i2hub?