skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congrats! Me too (I start at justin.tv on Monday).

The most important piece of job-seeking advice I can think of: You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. If you don't ask hard questions, and pay attention to the answers, you risk taking a crappy job and regretting it.
But would the Digg of music be enough? iJigg, which is something like that, launcher earlier this year. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/18/jigg-that-music/. Although it doesn't seem to have moderaters with real music knowledge. But even if it did, that wouldn't be enough to make results relevant for everyone because the criteria for relevance is an individuals concept of "good". Sure moderators might know what is "good" for certain audiences, but if results are organized in a digg-esque fashion, it becomes a top-ten list, meaning that no matter how good your moderators are, they can't generate recommendations that will be "good" for individuals (and the strategy to appeal to the largerst number of individuals is to appeal to the lowest common denominator, which one could argue radio already does well.)
TAGLINE- Say what it does right next to the logo. Or as a headline.

SCREENSHOT - Show what it does, first thing. Show a screenshot of the data collection screen at a table. Next to that (not in a flash sequence-- two pics), should the admin interface, etc. Something like BlinkSale's home page, mebbe? http://www.blinksale.com/home

Overall tho-- nice niche, pretty design.

Congrats!

Speaking of the logo, I'm not sure how much the "it" part of it is clear. I'd go with a simple wordmark.

URL with a dash isn't wonderful, but I know how painful domains are.
Its seems that search (at least text search) is more or less a solved problem. Trying to innovate in the search space today is more or less as futile as trying to innovate in the operating systems space about 10-12 years ago. Noone really cares given that the state of the art works quite well.
I always wondered if boso getting into YC had anything to do with the founders having gone to Oxford.
[4] At the best colleges you learn more from other students than from your professors. You should be able to reproduce this at almost any college by making a conscious effort to find smart friends, instead of leaving it to chance.

I.e. the benefit of going to an elite college is that you get almost for free something you have to work at otherwise: knowing lots of smart people.
New iPod Touch Makes Us Drool, Itch with Desire
The new iPod Touch is out, complete with touchscreen, Coverflow and all the eye candy you can imagine. The big surprise: it has Wi-Fi, with Safari and YouTube built-in. The hardware design is amazing --it's not like our mock-up, but we want to hold it, touch it and lick it just the same. Even more now that is real.
ha, this is true. i go to rutgers for 4k/yr after a certain ithaca ivy wanted 43k/yr or whatever it was, so i get to keep a college fund's worth of seed money for whatever i do post-grad. and the "elite college" types i meet in the summers are no better-educated than me (and incidentally, drink a lot more...)
CrunchGear Live: The September 5th Apple Announcement
oh, I wasn't trying to say that school wasn't useful. I don't think you can argue that school is useful. I was just trying to say that I agreed with pg's point that it depends more on the person, rather than the school.
Ah. I guess being in the footnote made me think it was more of an offhanded comment than a major counterpoint to the premise of the essay. Perhaps in an edited version, this should get its own paragraph.
It also gives you the data you need to continue testing this theory.
This comment contradicts PG's theory that hackers can learn what people want. I agree with PG, and this exercise would help us, not only think more forward, but to think in terms of what everyone wants, not just hackers.

In response to the other comments, the article would have to have a special title, so people would know to reply with only solutions. And I think it would get a greater response if it was posted by PG on a limited basis X once a week.
that's an interesting idea. the one line + variying lengths + static lengths produces some issues for sure.
Man, whoever downmodded me... it was just a lame attempt to be funny...
that's an interesting idea, but we're really focusing on "industry" news for the private finance world. specific company news is a huge box we don't want to get even remotely close to. the only reason there are specific companies mentioned in our news is because there is some sort of private finance move going on in relation to them. the goal is for the site to be a place where pe, m&a, hedge, and vc folks can keep track on the buzz in their industries.
I think I see what happened. When you read, "Colleges differ," you took "you wouldn't be missing much" as the context. This is largely due to "So it is with colleges."

Earlier, in "Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs" I think pg intended "a bit" to communicate that what he's saying about exclusive clubs is less true for colleges. Humans read differently from computers, and those two tiny words are easily lost. "So it is with colleges" dominates.
We've thought of it. Unfortunately insurance cos don't have any provision for investors wanting to do this. They'd only talk to us if we made all the founders YC employees, which would mess up things for future investors, acquirers, etc.
Athletes also largely got pre-approved by the department they were applying for

As ridiculous as this is at a fundamental level, you know damn well that the athletic recruiters take long, careful looks at all the potential players, unlike the academic recruiters.

basically zero correlation between college GPA and value created for the company

I'm a GPA skeptic myself, having blown off every class (including the important ones), but this is easily explained: If a company puts weight upon GPA, then any low-GPA students they happen to hire likely had some manifest achievements that got them in. Such achievements are more important than GPA one way or the other.
A few thoughts:

What about searching? I might want to see all articles with Citigroup in the headline for example...

Why not add regular news as well - news that affects the finance world? Actually, on a totally different topic, it would be really neat to create a site which somehow reads the news and correlates it with stocks that could be affected. For example, Apple's ipod news caused shares in SNDK to get whacked (the ipod nano's didn't use as much flash as SNDK investors hoped).
I still think a feature like the one I stated would fit in perfectly. With a feature like that, I would most definitely be inclined to register with your website and check it on a daily basis.
search feature is linked to on the right side in the "this site" box...

someone above wants stock news too...not something we want to get even close to though :) toooooo much info!
i would sign up too :)
My employer offers health insurance and other benefits through Administaff, a company that specializes in HR outsourcing. Perhaps if YC arranged for Administaff to handle all of the companies it invested in, it could get some kind of volume discount.
I was amazed initially (though that quickly faded) how few truly "smart" undergraduates there were at MIT in the 9 years I hung around there. I put smart in quotes because I really don't like that word, but I don't have a great substitute either. Obviously they were smart enough to get in. But most were significantly lacking in at least one necessary area to be labeled "smart" IMO (often several), including intuitiveness, creativity, being a self-starter, analytical thinking, breadth and depth of knowledge, intellectual curiosity, etc.

Putting exact numbers on it is difficult due to the self-segregation at MIT and subjectivity obviously at play. However, I would say perhaps 30% fall into the seriously lacking category, another 30% in a substantially lacking category and another 25% in a good but not great category (perhaps lacking only one major thing). That leaves only 15% or so of people I came across I would say were "smart" in the sense described above. When you move to people with the essential qualities necessary to work successfully at a really early stage startup, I would say it drops to 7% or so. I'm not saying found one, just work at one as one of the first employees. When you move to people with all the founding qualities, the % probably drops to 1-2%. I know this first hand after trying to start companies with people in the "smart" category.

The above has really hit home other times as well. Here are two more occasions. First, when graduating, 62 people in my class out of about 1,080 (~6%) were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. I was shocked at a) how many of these people were my friends at MIT; b) how many of these people I had come across (given that I didn't meet all 1,080; and c) that this list included pretty much all of the people I had previously labeled "smart" myself in my class that I had come across.

Second, my wife taught statistics at MIT for several years. One time a kid came up to her complaining about an exam grade and told her it was not possible to have gotten an A on this exam. He said all his friends studied real hard and yet they all ended up with Cs and Ds. To which she replied, actually roughly 30% of the class got As. The point is, they were completely self-segregated by "smartness" and didn't even really know it.

All that being said, an MIT degree really does go a long way in terms of impressing the average person/company. I have done independent consulting and applied for jobs where they basically stopped researching me when they saw MIT. That is the rule, not the exception. And that was in Boston. Now that I live in PA, it seems even more shocking to people to come across someone from MIT. Given the above, and in agreement with PG, this behavior is unwarranted. I of course am thankful, but it also annoys me that so many people are free-riding on the name.
Apple unveils new iPod with Wi-Fi
I like this a lot. It's much more professional than http://digstock.com/ , which never really took off.
I won't argue that the athletic recruiting isn't a bit ridiculous, but in general the academic standards are probably more fair and transparent than the regular admissions process. Each team has its GPA published each semester for all to see, and in general the number of recruits a team is allowed to bring in is highly dependent on whether or not the previous recruits have been succeeding academically. Of course each individual athlete is also highly monitored, and if GPA dips below a certain level then it's even worse than if you were a normal student. Not to mention the random drug testing that no other students are subjected to, the prohibition against putting certain types of photos in your Facebook profile, the mandatory diversity/alcohol/sex training sessions, etc. Apparently it's no longer even allowed to smoke cigarettes or use any other tobacco products.

That being said, the NCAA bureaucracy is still lame.
User generated content wants to be free on the Internet
When I see non-idiomatic Ruby code, it tells me one of two things. The first assumption I make is that whoever wrote the code is not a Ruby programmer. That's usually the case.

I've been using rfacebook lately and this is definitely the case. I'm constantly going back to the rfacebook source to figure out how to use it and every time I come across code that strikes me as highly unrubyish (what's with all the gratuitous "return"s?).

I did not know facebooker existed. I will be looking into it very soon.
In response to your first paragraph, I think more people should obsess about where there kids go to kindergarten.

Not obsess about how a selective kindergarten will help them get into the right college, but about whether the environment will suppress creativity, being a self-starter, and intellectual curiosity, as most schools do. Unfortunately, schools that nurture those qualities usually cost money.
This is one of the few benefits of a single-payer system.. It might actually encourage entrepreneurship, since healthcare is so prohibitively expensive.
I love it. No development, just come up with a name that makes sense and post the link for the article. People can leave their ideas for a business that solves the problem in the comments. The top vote getter wins ice cream.
We don't have enough data yet to prove anything by research paper standards, but that doesn't mean I'm saying nothing. We try consciously to ignore where people went to school; that is not standard practice; and moreover this is something I'm claiming we've changed.
I resent him for creating a "difficult to learn" lifestyle that conveniently requires people to spend $2,800 per workshop to learn. The reason I resent that is because I'm jealous of how much money he makes.
Fame/Reputation building seems key motivating factor for user uploaded content.
It's also interesting how many universities kick ass in little obscure research niches. I had never even heard of Chalmers until I learned Haskell.
The new real iPod looks just like the old fake iPod
Just Make Great Stuff.
How to Find startup Capital
Register now to read this article? What are they thinking?
PG: have you noticed that a) GPA matters (at any school); b) that GPA matters at so-called elite schools in particular; c) any other consistencies with regards to college activities and/or honors, e.g. Phi Beta Kappa, having had started clubs or groups, etc.?
Besides the issues you have with how he's popularizing/selling his ideas, what do you think about the concepts he's presenting? Are they useful, dangerous, morally superior/inferior?
No flash on the iPhone. However, it has been officially confirmed by someone inside apple that there WILL be flash support soon. If the touch iPod uses similar software, it might become available for it also.
Yes, I have to agree that the technology behind justin.tv is quite interesting. Right now, it seems like it's only used by a bunch of exhibitionist and egocentric persons in a real TV fashion, but it will probably end up being used for more interesting stuff (like, say, a sailor racing across the world).

On the other hand, they'd be stupid not to go where the money is (that is, were all the MySpace generation kids are).
Where the Web 2.0 Stars Were Born
I think your experience is atypical. Most people I know who work at startups, myself included, got their job through a personal introduction to one of the founders. We have one employee whom we hired from Monster, but he wasn't specifically looking to work at a startup; he just applied for jobs that sounded interesting regardless of the size of the company. I don't know anyone who has gotten a job at a startup by sending resumes to twenty of them and getting lucky on one.
Solar Flares and Global Warming
NASA Study Finds Increasing Solar Trend That Can Change Climate
you don't have to promise not to run ads. but ads are a drag on your acquisition of users, and the quality of your site improves with the number of active users -- so are you doing a disservice to your early users by running ads?
One of my biggest motivations for getting rich is so that when I have kids, I can afford to home-school them.
Presumably, your data can only show that it doesn't matter what school you went to, conditional on being accepted by YC.

That is a completely different statement than showing that it doesn't matter what school you went to. Your article appears to me like it is conflating the two.
Yes, it may be a factor. I like the idea of large projects undertook by individuals or small teams (because I'm always impressed by human creativity), but they are rare indeed.
Isn't CA thinking of doing universal healthcare anyway?
I generally believe that most people with money are generally not stupid. Why, if that is the case, I hear so often that VCs more likely to destroy companies they fund by imposing their control (via puppet CEO for example)?

Just asking...
Great movie. It became my nickname when I took a construction job the summer between high school and college :-).
Get Lost Password?
I just changed computers and realized that I didn't know my password. Is there a way to reset it? Or should I just retire the account?

(I didn't see any link for this...)
I see no indication of how many comments a story already has.
I'm not sure that journalists are that stupid. It's just that the politically correct ones who just repeat what they're told advance their career and the ones who seek the truth usually end up pissing off someone and being censored, harassed, etc.

It's the same pattern we see everywhere in our societies: if you act like everyone else, don't question authority and don't take risks, you won't have any problems.
Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics
I've read recently that this same study was repeated this year (don't have the link), and the result dramatically different given the recent findings on the solar impact of global warming.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.B...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030321075236.ht...
http://www.aip.org/pnu/2003/split/642-2.html

Studies:
http://www.standaard.be/Artikel/Detail.aspx?artikelid=B18307...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070801174450.ht...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070801175711.ht...
SFU one of Canada's best universities? Care to elaborate? I always thought that Waterloo and University of Toronto were the best.

Of course, Canadian universities seem to vary less in quality compared to institutions in the US.
Also, there doesn't appear to be any indication of who submitted a story.
well, my proxy of "digg for music" is only a jumping off point.

It would have to be organized differently.

That iJigg thing is garbage, for now

I would strongly recommend reading Scott Karp's pitch for Publishing 2, a "journalist-powered news aggregator":

http://blog.publish2.com/2007/08/14/introducing-publish2-net...

The key with these communities is seeding them with, OMG, domain-specific talent.

I can imagine a social platform where various DJ's, music supervisors, musicians, etc, could be the curators of long long long playlists [organized by mood, genre, style, time period, lyrics, whatever] that are tagged with a bunch of metadata [enabling them to be recombined easily].

Non-curators can suggest tracks and gain authority by having them added to curated uberplaylists.

Or something like that ;-)

The key is knowing your ass from a hole in the ground about music...really. Not just thinking you have good taste...that's how all the media execs (that all tech people hate) got into this mess in the first place.

Anyways, I'm already on this, if anyone is interested further you can contact me ;-)
thanks! digstock really is focusing on stock specific news though. our focus is on private finance news.
The Sexual Relationship Database - An intriguing startup
I detect a start-up opportunity.
While I don't think this is a particularly good idea--as pg pointed out, you have to be an employer of people to insure them in any reasonable scalable way, because that's just the way the world of insurance works right now--I do think that this (not just insurance, but all of the boring crap like that) is perhaps the biggest single pain point of building a business. In the first months or year or whatever it takes, you don't have enough to pay for the problem to go away, but you can't ignore payroll, insurance, income taxes, franchise taxes for the corporation, basic bookkeeping and accounting.

I'm not even sure what kind of person to hire for some of these tasks. Obviously an accountant is expensive overkill for payroll and bookkeeping, and the accountants I have known outsource it. Administaff doesn't seem to like very small companies (or at least they charge as though they don't like them). The online services I've used for payroll have ended up with me doing most of the hard work by hand (they're glorified calculators with all the percentages already punched in, but they don't handle actually paying people or getting the taxes paid).

And, of course, no one should ever be without health insurance for any period of time. It's just too much risk. But I haven't found health insurance to be the hardest part to deal with: just call up Unicare. They provide individuals with reasonable health care plans for reasonable price. I pay $84/month for a crappy plan (but I'm in good health, with no bad or dangerous habits, so I just want to know that if I go to the hospital it won't bankrupt me).

Also, as for aston's point, you might be surprised. Group health insurance is much more expensive than individual plans for young healthy people (most of what YC funds). I looked into it and group insurance for me would cost about $280/month, vs. the $84 I'm paying now. The insurance a company buys for you has to deal with pre-existing conditions, dependents, all ages, etc. and generally doesn't even discriminate based on smoker/non-smoker status. Of course, the group rates I was looking at were for a 2-10 person company, while YC would be covering 50 or so people, so the rates might be considerably lower at that scale.

Anyway, it's not a bad idea for YC to do something about all of these stupid but necessary aspects of business. The days I'm doing bookkeeping or payroll or taxes are days that are really painful...I can't think of anything in my day to day life that I hate more. I'm now in a position to pay someone for them to go away, but I'd have to find that someone or someones...

But that's just me complaining. ;-)
Just add it to your monthly expenses -- apply to eHealthInsurance.com and get either short-term insurance (cheaper, doesn't cover normal visits) or one of the PPOs.

The only trick is you don't know exactly where you'll be living at first, so if you could use YC's address to get the process started then you could apply and get accepted before you move so you don't have a gap in coverage.
Arrogant Googlers tempt the gods
Isn't it ironic that Peter Norvig touts this view, but works at google? I've heard that GPA/pedigree are one of the key decisions for hiring?
oh yeah, another point is that the giant uberplaylist aggregator thing doesn't need the actual music, just links to where to get it...

the problem for peeps is not ACCESSING the music, or SAMPLING the music, it's finding tracks that are good...

FOR A PARTICULAR SITUATION

music choices are circumstance-driven, completely
This is why people like dogs better than other humans. They have more tact.
doesn't this website seem like a giant plug for the author's books? the author's suggestion is that, if you don't have any former investors or family & friends who will give you money, you should buy his ($90) book. smart startup, indeed.