skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Programming language survey
I have the following questions related to an application me and my team have to develop for a chain of supermarkets, for a school subject.

The situation is the following: we are very fluent in developing applications with PHP, but our teacher wants us to develop it in a different language.

The amount of time we have to finish the app, is 2 months approximately.

So my questions are related towards knowing if its feasible, to learn a new language in order to develop a system.

The questions:

1.- Which is the minimum time to learn a new language?

2.- Having learned the language, how much experience is necessary to make a system for a client?

3.- If you know how to use a certain language, and that language is suitable to make an app, do you recommend to learn a new one, or to develop it with the language you already know?

Thanks!
Include your high school gpa and 3rd grade geography bee performance as well.
"It just doesn't cost VC-scale capital for one guy (plus perhaps a handful of mechanical turks) to create a website that makes enough money for that one guy to live on."

vc's don't care about companies on that scale - it doesn't fit the vc model of needing one massive hit to cover the losses across the portfolio so they don't lose anything by missing out on that kind of deal.

launching a web app doesn't need vc money but building one of those massive hits does. since those companies (yahoo/google/facebook/etc) have the biggest economic impact, there'll always be a need for VC's, even if the standard terms of deals changes.
Nothing too sophisticated -- the 18th result on this list had a link to it:

http://www.google.com/search?q=algorithm+site%3Anews.ycombin...

I highly recommend setting your Google preferences to return 20+ results so results like this aren't hidden behind a second page (I use 50).
Definitely. There are a few things to bear in mind...

1. Make sure your landing page is relevant to your keywords. If it is not, Google will give it a bad score, and your minimum bid will be raised, and you'll get less traffic.
So make sure keywords appear on the landing page as you would for SEO.

2. Make sure your ad-copy is good. You can create loads of differently worded adverts, and Google will work out which one gets the best CTR, and show that one the most. So spend a long time experimenting with different wording. It's sometimes surprising what changing a single word can sometimes make. (If your CTR is too low google will also reduce your quality score, and so increase your minimum bids).

If you pick popular keywords you can have traffic coming within about 30 minutes I've found.
Spend a while using the keyword tool, and adding your own variations - as many as you can think of.

When you start getting traffic on some keywords, expand that avenue - use the keyword tool to find other similar keywords.

How many keywords do you have and what sort of sector are we talking here? $5 is quite a lot unless you're doing finance/law etc
Perhaps you could describe accomplishments that require a high level of ability. Perhaps you could include your academic papers, patents, contributions to open source projects, extracurricular engineering projects, or business adventures.

If you can't talk about something like that, I don't think you can demonstrate a high level of ability. Otherwise, do something great or work for someone who can.
Where do YC applicants host their projects?
Hi everyone,

Quick question: what do YC applicants prefer - dedicated servers, co-location, VPS, regular hosting plans or somethings else? Where are they being hosted at? Are there any major hub of startup hosting?

Thanks!
Unfortunately, most companies (Amazon and Facebook, for example) need investors. The differences between what you can do with investment and what you'd have to do without investment are pretty huge, and it seems like you might not win at all without the capital that your competitors enjoy.

Have any YC companies gotten by without investment?
It's surprising that it's taken until now for a formal way to flame people to pop up. You're probably right that most of their visitors will be of the one-time variety. If it keeps going, my guess is the audience will be fairly small except for the occassional post that's particularly incisive or interesting.

Before people get too deep into talk about whether it's offensive, the title is a reference to a bit by Eddie Izzard, the excellent British comedian. It's pretty innocuous.
I personally think the reason a 'massive hit' needs a lot of money (and therefore VC) is for the hardware/bandwidth/infrastructure costs. Those costs have not come down per the proportions that software costs have.

However, services such as AWS should help for all apps right below the 'massive" threshold, which is the vast majority of apps.
In the past I've run campaigns with budgets as small as $60 per month. $2 a day is perfectly reasonable if you just want to get some test users to your site. Of course, I had to pick the right keywords to make this work.
A good friend who knew a fair bit about start-up strategy told me that patenting technology is mainly a defensive maneuver. So, even if you have something patented, I think the latter part holds.
When it does work, it takes about 10 levels for interesting behavior to evolve. However that only happens in 1 in 20 games :-( The AI definately needs some work.

That's an excellent idea about a centralized server. that would make things very interesting.

Fitness is not just lifetime, it's fitness = lifetime + (I_Killed_Knight Reward_Factor)

Reward_Factor ~ 4 max lifetime.

There's not too much special about the formula, or the reward factor, those are just what made it work once in a while :-)
Order this today (it's a damn bargain!) and thank me later: http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321496590/

PS: I do not know the author and I do not own Amazon stock.
Starfish: map reduce for Ruby (a lot easier than Hadoop, especially on config; but more limited)
I think yes and no. Something like the centralized server is a good idea to learn from lots of players. Did you have something else in mind for collecting data?

But I think machine learing is about selectively ignoring information, cutting to what's important. But of course you do need enough information to start with.
1991 I was dialing into a shell account to use IRC. I also ran a BBS from '91 to '94.
I have lived in California & Massachusetts as well as the UK and Sweden. Sweden has the highest taxes in the world according to the Economist. With that comes cheap healthcare for all. My experience is that it is better than both UK and the US healthcare I have been exposed to. Yet the US pays $6100/capita/year for healthcare compared to Swedens $2800/capita/year. And in the US not everyone is covered.

In addition to that we have free schooling, and Swedish schools are not bad, not as good as the top US ivy league, but better than the average US state university. We have very low CO2 emissions, partially due to geography, but also due to extensive investments by local government on biofuel district heating networks. We also have good public transport. Sweden is about the same size as California, but has a superior public transport infrastructure, despite only having 9 million people (compared to 34 million in CA). Nearly all of the Swedish transport system was publicly funded.

On top of this Sweden is consistently ranked among the top countries for standard of living. Despite all the taxes. Now, just like others have said, there is a big difference between different countries in Europe. Bigger than most who have never visited imagine. But high taxes does not automatically mean crappy lifestyle.
Perhaps I should convert it to Flash so people can play it over the web, and then learn from everyone at once. What other ideas do you see?
google has jacked minimum bids through the roof over the last 6 - 12 months. i'm guessing all of your ads are actually inactive right now because your minimum bid is too low and you have a bad "quality score". Their UI is sort of a pain.

login -> click into your campaign -> click into your ad group -> on the set of tabs to the right, click "keywords". here i'm guessing you'll see that your campaigns are inactive and you have to bid between $5 and $10 per click...which I'm guessing will be prohibitive. 9 months ago you just had to bid the minimum and you would end up paying <$1 per click, but now you will actually pay $5 - $10 per click.

the crazy thing is that there is zero transparency into this market. funds try to bet every quarter on google's earnings based on comscore, etc. but they have no idea what the average CPC is doing. it's like betting on Exxon based on car usage w/o knowing the price per gallon.
Interview with Shashank Pandit, Co-Founder of Buxfer
Buxfer is a start-up with the stated mission of helping you "track your money, effortlessly." It started innocently enough as a simple script developed by Co-Founder Ashwin Bharambe to track expenses among his college friends at Carnegie Mellon. But after some prodding from friends and inspiration from their soon-to-be angel investor Paul Graham at Y Combinator, they started Buxfer (a merging of the words "bucks" and "transfer").
SAT scores are actually pretty decently correlated with freshman year grades. Colleges wouldn't use it if it weren't predictive, and so the College Board has put a lot of work into ensuring the test means something. Then again, freshman year grades don't really mean much in the grand scheme of life, but they do mean something, definitely.
On Google I narrowed down to 4 keywords that work best where I get a good conversion rate and I spend no more then .35c per click.

Turn off Google's "Advertising Network" and only advertise on Google search results. I found there "network" just drums up a lot of hits but few conversions.

Use www.adbrite.com. I get better results on AdBrite then I do on Google and I spend less money for more hits and the hits are good quality, it did take more time to narrow down the right sites to advertise on.

Google organic hits are important don't forget SEO.

Try www.reviewme.com to get a blog writer to write about you (don't spend more then $100).
Try Pubmatic. They look at more than one ad-network to increase your revenue.

http://www.pubmatic.com/
I would drill all the way down to the Ad Group level, in the keywords tab and click the customize columns link under the date range and to the right. I'd show the quality score as a column; check all the quality scores and minimum bids.

Then I'd check all the status starting from the keyword level up to the campaign.

Lastly if nothing showed up there I'd go back to the keywords and put my mouse over each and every keyword magnifying glass to find out if ads are being served.

Then if it didnt work I'd call google and ask them for help.

Hope this helps!
My first computer-related memory was some time around 1985 -- I was 4 years old or thereabouts -- when my father decided to keep me busy by sitting me down in front of a VT100 terminal and letting my play trek on the Chemistry department's computer.

But as for the internet? I'm a newbie -- I didn't get online until almost a decade later when I entered the university in 1994.
I will answer the hosting part of your question.

1. get a list of all YC companies
2. get the AS (Autonomous System) number plugin for firefox
3. visit these YC companies to figure out where they are hosted
I put down my SATs - the 7th grade CTY ones, not the official high school ones. I figure that many applicants have perfect or near-perfect SATs, so I wouldn't stand out so much on that basis. I debated taking them off as tacky, but I figure that I've already posted a lot about my experiences on this board, while the test scores and such is new information.

Ultimately, I think experience matters more, but there's a whole other section on the app for "What have you built?" and another one for "What tools will you use?"
Although I am not an YC applicant (I wish I was but my co-founders will not relocate), I am pretty happy with dedicated boxes at The Planet
An idea I always wanted to play with: competing learning agents, where the players 'train' the characters somehow (perhaps specifying parameters, or playing against their creations, or selectively pitting one character against each other...), who then independently fight and learn over time. Then you could have big melees, and try to evolve the most useful/fun behaviours.
The COBOL part made Coke come out of my nose.

The bash part was also brilliant.
You also seem to be "in the process" of getting a website. Some fund...
But this is supported by Paul Charlton who has lots of connections on Linked-In and is in the 'Who's Who of Who's Who' !
vps here. we're applicants though.
Stupid but well done. Nice readable fonts, really easy to use.
Yeah, the interface really really sucks. We actually thought of making an adwords campaign manager for our YC idea (making buying adwords mindless and simple) but if you drill down into the TOS for all the major networks they are anti-competitive to the level of being ridiculous. It took me a few hours to actually figure out the adwords interface and I still don't fully understand it.
We have two servers (for various project sites) both VPS One from RimuHosting and one from Slicehost. Both are excellent, although you pay significantly more for Rimu but they have the best service I've ever encountered with a VPS hosting solution. We also have an EC2 invite but haven't got around to trying it out.
Looks like a very long article with very little content.
Ask YC:  I'm applying to YC with a web app, but I also have 4 facebook apps going on the side.
Chances are that I will also be launching a 5th Facebook App after applying to YC that might gain significant traction. Does YC take a percentage of these projects as well?

*I do not actually have 4 facebook apps. I made up this question.
Have you ever endured MSN adcenter? Yahoo?
Google adwords is a dream compared to them. Also the desktop adwords editor is excellent - makes big changes easy to do.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/
If they are part of the corporation YC funds.
We've got two boxes at The Planet, and we're planning a box at RackSpace, and probably an Accelerator from Joyent. A lot of the guys I know from YC use the following hosts and said at least a few good things about them:

Joyent/TextDrive

Rails Machine

Amazone EC2 (though I also hear a lot of reliability complaints)

Rimu

Slice

There is no major concensus on the best. I've been using The Planet and RackSpace, or the cheaper ServerBeach offering from the RackSpace folks, for many years and have never had any complaints. Service is good and reliable, prices are fair (RackSpace is a wee bit pricier, but they provide good service and reliability).
Somebody please correct the title.
> mostly because the topic is complex and there is no way to properly lay it out on just two pages

Way more complex. You're absolutely right. I think I could write a book about it...

> United States of Europe

I didn't like it very much. It's kind of superficial, and I think he actually gets a lot of things wrong.
If Icanhazcheezburger, yhou can haz cheezburger thoo.
Eliminating wars by designing and deploying a highly contagious brain virus to change human nature for the better
Is such a thing feasible? Would you classify it as terrorism?
1. Two days.

2. Two days. (You'll learn as you go along.)

3. All other things being equal, use the language you already know. If things are unequal all bets are off.
1.- A couple of seconds. But that's for an esoteric language that was a trivial modification of another esoteric language :-). As for how long it takes you, it depends on how smart you are, what your definition of "learning a language" is, what languages you know and how strangely you've used them, and what language you're learning. It takes more effort to learn the language's libraries than the "language", except for really unusual languages.

2.- It depends on what experience you have and how translatable that experience is to the current project.

3.- It depends on whether that language is PHP ^_^

So, to summarize: It depends.

Edit: actually, just read what brlewis said, which is a more useful response for your situation (given certain assumptions about how fluent you are).
Where's home? Working under the table is a horrible way of doing a startup, because you have no legal grounds to go on, and certainly can't do equity that way.

Sounds a lot like Italy, where the high price of doing business forces things underground, thus giving people no legal redress should they have problems. Yuck.
Sounds like a "focus" issue - they're not going to want you to be dividing your attention, especially not with something they're not involved in.
I'd classify it as hubris.
As long as America maintains a comparative advantage in producing startups and printing stock certificates, what's wrong with Americans trading these for stuff Europeans are better at producing, like fancy suits and deconstructionist manifestos?
Taking the list of YC-funded companies from wikipedia, excluding those marked as defunct or sold, resolving www.${domain} to an IP address, and then looking that up via whois, I see:

Amazon.com (presumably EC2?) -- 2

Layered Technologies, Inc. -- 2

NoZone, Inc. -- 2

Rackspace.com, Ltd. -- 2

Software Technologies Inc. -- 2

BitPusher, LLC -- 1

Carnegie Mellon University -- 1

Columbus Network Access Point, Inc. -- 1

Global Netoptex, Inc -- 1

ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc. -- 1

So it looks like YC-funded companies usually have dedicated servers, but there's no single place where they tend to congregate.
I think we would have heard about it if a YC company became a successful lifestyle business without further investment.
It's cute, in a faddish sort of way. Doesn't quite work as a troll, nor as good satire.
The company where I currently work just moved away from Rackspace. Their prices are high and as far as I know (I didn't deal directly with rackspace) we had interesting performance issues due to their networking setup. I wouldn't recommend them but you might have better luck.
i don't think sarcasm is a good way to make any point, and i'm surprised to see the otherwise unflappable marca using such a tactic.
> I don't think most people with good ideas are capable of recognizing whether they are good or really good ideas,

Alan Kay said (more or less) that point of view is worth 80 IQ points. A good team needs people who can see the different angles to other's ideas, and help prod or reshape or prune them.
You have to also realize nowadays he's a VC and runs Ning. I believe, like Mark Cuban's blog, his first interest isn't to disseminate insights, but to server his business interests.
<<I do not actually have 4 facebook apps. I do not actually have 1 facebook app. I do not actually have any hacking skills, but occasionally think about becoming a hacker, applying to YC, and creating useless Facebook apps. Please indulge me by answering my made up questions.>>

No thanks.
I'll buy that a company can be set up so it is dependent. Outside of some special cases (subset of technology and relationships), I think that doing so is usually unnecessary and the "indespensable" label is typically untrue, especially when it comes to biz folk.
the interface really really sucks

I've found the interface very good. I think it took about 15 minutes to go from zero to a worldwide ad campaign. Let's keep perspective.

.......................

I pay about 6 to 10 cents per click. I get about 1000 impressions a day with a very small monthly budget. Adsense, by contrast, is completely worthless...maybe one click every couple months. Make sure you aren't corrupting your view of adwords by accidentally targeting adsense (which google encourages).
Try http://www.clickable.com
I agree. I felt this was one of the weaker posts on a great blog.

The problem with sarcasm is that it allows the writer to frame the opposition in exaggerated, silly terms. For instance, the post derides people who claim VC's are "All stupid, and unnecessary to boot".

Nobody would half a brain would make that claim. Of course capital will still matter, in many cases. But there is still an interesting emerging argument that the cost of server space and programming tools have dropped to the point where bootstrapping has become a real option.

I'd love to see a writer as good and experienced as Marc give me his take on this new trend. Is it a good idea? A bad idea? When would you want to do one rather than the other? This is all lost in the sarcasm format.

But I agree with the other posters here who have pointed out that Marc is just having a little fun taking the piss out of the naysayers. Nothing really wrong with that. I enjoyed the post, but I hope he gets back to his more insightful style in his next post.
Ask YC: Founders and Paradoxes (Paradoxen?)
Dear YC,

I'm trying to figure out how to resolve the following paradoxes.

It's difficult to find a cofounder without funding.
It's difficult to find funding with a cofounder (apparently).

Projects are unlikely to succeed without brilliant people.
Brilliant people are likely to be very busy with their own projects.

For a few weeks, talking to people and getting them interested has been a full-time commitment. I've heard universal expressions of support, and many, many people have offered to help, but thus far I haven't managed to get anyone to commit. The brilliant people are almost all fighting their own worthy battles (or are tied down in Canada, where I come from), while some of the others have impressively bad ideas they treat as sacred.

I have some inkling that it might be more effective to secure some seed funding first (and not necessarily through YC), and try to find cofounders thereafter. For example, there are specific people that I'd love to have onboard -- experts in computer vision. However, they're busy enough that I suspect they'd be unwilling to participate is business things, and could only be lured to work with actual cash.

What do you think? Should I try to apply alone to YC? Should I forget about the 11th deadline and just treat YC as another potential source of funding? Or, might you suggest I aim with full force toward finding the perfect cofounder, hopefully by that deadline?

--Dani
Completely depends on the sector though. Some things fly on the content network (adsense), some things die.
> What is the idea worth?

"The idea"? How about an example of an intrinsically valuable idea that, by itself, is enough to build a biz?

Take google. "Use citations to rank web pages" is not all that valuable an idea. Figuring out how to do so is more valuable (albeit dependent), but still not enough to build a biz.

If "the idea" is trivially executed AND "enough", then it's a big contribution. More likely, it's a signpost.
A Really Cool Style of Commenting
So I've just been getting into Django and came across this. I can't recall seeing context based commenting like this anywhere before, pretty cool.
The formula should evolve dragons which are running away.
He gives higher fitness for dragons which live longer, therefore all dragons which attack the player will be the first which are killed. And giving a big reward for killing won't help much. As only one dragon can kill, all other dragons will still profit from keeping out of reach of the player.

Nice idea, but to impress me it should actually work ;-)
YouTube: The Big Copyright Lie
OK, I think I get get it now. You (and Joel) are right.
By reading your comment I realized that I have a number of coding habits that (in most cases) prevents this sort of error from occurring. But that proves your point that exception-based code is harder to get right.

I still prefer to write exception-based code, but I understand how you could prefer to use return values.
Cool but it offers awful usability.
If I have 10 programmers and they're finishing 10 projects a month, will I necessarily get 11 projects done if I add another programmer? Or, does the result depend on the new programmer and other factors?