skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Marc Andreesen has an interesting counterpoint at http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-three-kinds.html where he holds up Salesforce as an example of a 'Level 3' platform. Of course, his own Ning is another.
Eh, California isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's crowded, it's expensive, there is insane traffic, and the schools are far below decent.

Sunny beaches and summer fun are one thing... Reality, I'm afraid, is much different.

And I've lived here my whole life.
Had you actually read through or watched the video, you'd notice that you can't just take someone's username and start guessing. They have a second layer that requires "out of band" authentication.

http://www.vidoop.com/vidoop_how.php

Also, it's more like 12 choose 2 but you cannot enter those two easily since: they change all the time and they're embeded in pictures.
I predict that tomorrow someone will take these scores and turn them into a webapp that rates applications. It looks like ycombinatorrater.com is available...
Try living elsewhere, then you'll see how much California rocks in comparison.

I grew up in San Diego, never appreciated it fully until I left.
32 (almost) BS in CS
"Good college +2" seems counter to some of his latest writings. I guess "No Hackers on Team" would be a way greater penalty. I'm curious: why is the bonus for "founded a web startup" higher for a team of non-hackers?
All other things being equal, I would agree with you. I am intimating that, perhaps, all other things are not equal. The guy in the article seems, to me, as though he has a case. I think that the behaviors and statements outlined indicate a hostile work environment. As to the question of the guy in my story, if we follow your logic, that "any smart company will hire him", then we would have to conclude that the majority of the people and organizations that he attempted to approach prior to me are "not smart". I am not so important or well known that I would be very high on the list of your average entrepreneur shopping around his idea. That is why I have to keep an eye on the forum users at places like news.YC, it allows me to potentially contact some bright kids at VERY early stages to see what they are about. I say that so that you realize that this kid tried to go to a large number of places before he was reduced to making desperation pitches to people like me. So I think it is a little idealistic to assume that he would have been "hired", or "invested in", in any case.
What makes you think that the rating software is "automated"? I bet it's just a tool used by the YC partners. It could be as simple as a human-assisted radix sort, so the 1000 applications first get binned into 10 bins, then each of the apps in each bin are further subdivided on a 1 to 10 scale, etc.
It's good because instead of tracking your keystrokes, spyware will have to take screen shots of your web browser whenever it notices a login form in the web browser.

What it might do is solve a lot of security issues as a side effect-- by forcing users to stop using their single password on every web site, which is what many or most users do right now. Although, now they'll just use the same three image categories, unless they really want to memorize many sets of them for different sites, and competing visual authentication systems.

What it really does is allow companies to pay money for showing pictures. This isn't to help consumers, since this forces users to take the additional step of thinking every time they login. It's to make deals with ad agencies.
It's always been less risky (though perhaps harder) for younger people to forsake a corporate job and do a startup. They have less to lose. So if the degree of "courage" needed to do startup is going down, doesn't that suggest more older people with families and corporate jobs doing startups? (not that's mutually exclusive with more young nerds. more startups means more founders...of all types).
How well do you know Prototype? (Part deux)
Agreed. As per below. You probably know that Fred Wilson stirred up the "age of founders" issue a few months back. I'm curious to find some data on age/general demographic trends re: founders.
I've noticed "Made In California" as well, and it's an interesting choice of words for Apple.

It brings to mind PG's counter-example of the iPod to the "Squalor of the man-made bits of America" (in his Made In USA essay). When I lived in Europe, I noticed that general stereotypes of the "USA" differed dramatically from impressions of "LA", "San Francisco", "New York", "California".

When you say "USA", people around the world often think of an economic and military juggernaut. If you say "California", they often think "surfers, technology, Ahnold, the Golden Gate Bridge," and so forth. Various cities in the US also have their own international reputations.

It's pretty clear that the rest of the world has very negative and very positive impressions of the United States, and these can be triggered by how you present yourself. Perhaps Apple is trying to grab a more positive reaction by claiming California rather than the USA? When Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty, there was some talk in England about boycotting US products (pretty hopeless idea there, but it shows the anger). California did raise its international brand by bucking that trend.

I expect the US will regain some of its stature once the current administration is gone, but even if/when it does, I'd expect more local branding. Cities compete with each other more than countries do. What does it even mean to say it was "Made in the USA" anymore? If it's made in Seattle, Sydney, or Barcelona, it isn't made in San Francisco. We may be moving toward a world economy where that's the only thing that actually matters.
"Just about everyone does college"

Maybe just about everyone you know. But not in general.

At almost every company I call on, most of the good jobs are done by college graduates and most of the hourly jobs by non-graduates. The graduates have demonstrated before the first interview that they can take on a major project and FINISH IT.

Not a judgement. Just an observation. When it doubt, stick it out.
Oh, sorry for the profanity, grandma. It's just that when "straight forward" software causes someone to get "ecstatic", my BS detector flips a bit. Sorry.

You will get a lot further in life if you do yourself the goodness of presenting yourself in a favorable light to others.

No doubt. (...wondering if you gave this advice to the subject in his "t-shirt, necklace, sweatpants and all")
Paternity fraud statistics - Hospital for Sick Children - Sick Kids
I didn't find out about either Barcamp or Startup Weekend before they were sold out.

I go to the Atlanta Ruby User's Group meetings and AtlHack (http://www.atlhack.org/).
Darpa hatches plan for insect cyborgs to fly reconnaissance
Arc is anything but a common scripting language.
Steven Levitt discusses pricing.
Interesting case for adpinion.
No, we don't know each other. But we have a lot in common.

I even had an idea a couple of years ago similar to your Wamily thing. I called it "Grupevine". Pretty much a "website in a box" for a group. Groups would associate with each other and a user could easily find and be a member of many groups.

There's a weekly meeting of other "smart people in Atlanta" called AtlHack that I go to. It's at Octane every Tuesday at around 8:30. You should come some time.

I'd like to hear more about your Wamily idea. You can hit me up at erik /at/ subwindow[dot]com
How learning Python made me a better C++ programmer
ActiveRecord: the Visual Basic of Object Relational Mappers  at  Pervasive Code
Was tempted to copy and paste the Bad Match error from my latest project, but then I figured, what do I know about you. Kudos for interesting explanation.
Yes, your chances of success are reduced if you do not get funded by YC. If they're reduced enough for you to quit, you shouldn't be doing it anyways.

I define "success" as being able to quit my day job and work on the startup full time. Anything after that is gravy.

My chances of being able to do that if I'm accepted to YC: 100%

My chances of being able to do that if I'm not accepted to YC: 25%

The 25% is more than enough to keep me going and to keep my inspired. But I'd still have a better shot if I got accepted by YC.
I, for one, am impressed by all the non-CS majors. Didn't realize the idea of web app startups had broken that far afield.
Does your startup have a network,or are you doing it Old School?
All about how we used to be captive audiences but now thanks to Web 2.0 we are actually networks. We interact with the content, hell we create it and publish it too. Just look at YouTube. Good summary of where media should be going, we'll see if they listen!
Atomic Coding.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1078415.stm
AT&T.

I can't think of any other reason that their last update forced everyone to reactivate. If anyone had modifications then the activation failed. Permanently.
Why is there so much hostility toward Joel here? He writes interesting and popular articles and half the comments just attack him for not being substantive or serious enough.
California is a huge state with many different experiences - what city do you live in?

I lived in Pasadena for about a year. Between having to drive forever to get anywhere in dense traffic, the intense smog, and the lack of a cultural core - it made for a terrible experience.

San Francisco, on the other hand, is hard to beat.
Just to reiterate, an idea that goes from 100% to 25% based solely on Paul Graham is not a good idea.

To restate the original point: I feel like some of the people on this forum approach starting a business the same way they approach applying to college, or to grad school. That is not how it works. Your success is not gated on the "grownups" in the admissions office, or the department, or Y Combinator, making a decision about you.

If you catch yourself thinking about it that way, stop. Even if you get your 2 month's consulting dollars out of Y Combinator, nothing else in business works that way. There's no professorship to apply to once you get funded. You actually have to engage the market and win.
I'm fascinated by all the "Google is omnipotent" under-current in articles like this these days.

It makes me think to the contrary, that Google is vulnerable somewhere, and its continued dominance is not inevitable.
"Scientists do not know why the brain starts to slow down past a certain age."

SOME scientists don't. Many do. It's called lifestyle.

Lay off the drugs, eat cleanly, stay active, and live right, and your body can easily serve you just as well as you age. Unfortunately, most Americans are counterexamples to this. Aging doesn't cause us to slow down and lose our health, poor living does, at any age. I have friends and relatives in their teens and twenties who can't do a single pull-up, a single push-up, or carry their own luggage throught the airport. Many in their twenties are balding or have gray hair and can barely make it up a flight of stairs. OTOH, I play bridge with some seniors in their nineties who are as sharp as tacks. Still.

Discrimination based on age is stupid and illegal.

And at a time when anyone can publish anything anywhere, it's a good idea to take all health advice on the internet with a grain of salt. For every study you cite, I can probably google another one with the opposite point of view.

Still wanna race me to those donuts?

Or we can webboggle.shackworks.com. I like the 5x5 board. I'll spot you 5 years, er I mean, points.
I wouldn't say they were implying Google is omnipotent. The following quote from the article pretty much paints Google in the stupid corner as well:

"By buying Skype, the internet phenomenon of 2005, eBay started a bubble. Google, with its purchase of YouTube, the cyber-star of 2006, inflated it further. And Microsoft and Google now appear tempted to add more froth by investing a silly sum in Facebook, the latest big thing."

I just think Google has recently outmaneuvered its opponents (ebay/yahoo/microsoft) and the press coverage reflects that it's temporarily the top dog.
Possibly, but this is the part I was referring to:

"Like Yahoo!, its neighbour in Silicon Valley, eBay may be gored by Google, the ubiquitous search engine. Increasingly, people with goods to sell set up their own websites and find buyers by advertising on Google's search pages. Google has also begun offering online payment and telephone services that compete directly with PayPal and with Skype."

Can Google really dominate all those different areas? The current media certainly seems to think so.
Apple is a company that's meant to be marginalized. They have decided a long time ago, before most of the folks that's buying their stuff was ever born, to position themselves in a certain way. The Ferrari or computers. The Bugatti of design. People just don't get it. You buy it or don't. Their business model works regardless.

But complaining sure is fun right? You stood in line for 8 hours to buy an iPhone? And you call yourself an Apple loyalist? Ha! I have a Lisa. And I refuse to let it die. I'm a loyalist.
thanks for doing the research. i didn't have enough tuki moola saved up to test it out for myself today. maybe this weekend. i have to hear ms. america reading me my email, i mean, c'mon.
Lisp Usenet Classics II
Yeah, but looking at the Y Combinator funding trends, the majority of their companies that succeed are by founders from "good colleges."
Another big advantage for Silicon Valley: Rich (from tech or real estate) parents supportive of playing around with computers instead of getting a real job.
PostgreSQL Replication with Slony-I
Mark argues that we should boycott the iPhone if we're bothered by its being closed. But what if we are already boycotting all the other phones because they're so awful?

Maybe the iPhone is a great phone, even for hackers, in spite of being closed?
Beware: MySQL Quality Control of old and new features is horrible
Ugh, Im tired of Seattle stereotypes. Seattle is a well cultured city, and his generalizations are pretty weak to prove his point, not mention irrelevant. Sorry, I just have to stick up for my home town. BTW, it rains more in NY than Seattle.
I will be at both Atlanta Barcamp and Startup weekend in the next few weeks! I'm really looking forward to them.

I also usually make it to the ATL Ruby Users group. It's a pretty good bunch.
Microsoft Search - "They have absolutely no idea how far behind they are."
If non hackers created a successful web startup, then they must have some other kind of talent going for them, which is a plus since most others in the YC community have the hacker thing going for them.
Central CA is rarely representative of most people's perception of the state.
As a matter of fact . . . I did :)

He didn't call me grandma though . . .

He said, "people don't care about that kinda stuff anymore"

I asked, "If that were true do you think you would be without investors right now?"
I've found that sometimes, people refuse to say exactly what they mean because it's so absurd. So they write vague, pleasant nonsense about how "human rights trump economics." What is that supposed to mean? Economics is the study of what people want and how they get it -- how can it be 'trumped' by one set of things people want. It's a malformed argument. I wondered if the commenter would explain exactly what he was trying to say.
Correlation does not imply causation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

Being a motivated high achiever probably correlates well with going to a good college, and with getting into YC.
Shit. I thought death, disease, revolution, communism (read Acts), fascism (which was an attempt to revive Rome) and war all predated the Industrial Revolution. In fact, the actual research I've read (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html) demonstrates clearly that those are declining as we industrialize. But I'm sure you meant to cite your own source. I'm waiting.

" You are speaking from a position of privilege and assume all share that privilege."

Pleasant nonsense. Why should my status change the validity of my arguments? I have an idea -- let's ask a black high school dropout (http://www.tsowell.com/) if he agrees with me! Then let's decide that an individual's 'privilege', whatever that means, isn't as important as making a reasonable argument backed by data.

"If you were right in your theory, the nation you live in (assuming you're American) wouldn't exist right now."

If I were right in my theory that depriving people of freedom in order to force them to make decisions they're going to make anyway (at best!) is a bad idea? I don't see how my rightness would affect American politics. Do you mean that if more people agreed with me, the world would be different? Are you confusing my perscriptions and historical descriptions? Please clarify.
After visiting Palo Alto for three months when I was five, I lived in Chile for fourteen years. I just got back to Palo Alto two weeks ago, and it's indescribably awesome.
I'm really having trouble following this. You're saying that your odds of success after getting an education are higher than before. But that, uh, getting an education makes it harder to start a startup. You see the contradiction.

Is this like saying "If you're going to be a programmer, you'll do better to buy a computer. But if you buy a computer, you'll have to get money, which leaves you less time to be a programmer!"?
Just imagine the level of job candidates you could be selecting amongst if you were the only one hiring from a population as big as the black community. In any competitive field, employers are fairly limited in how 'racist' they can be in their hiring practices without setting themselves up for a fall.
my karma is gone too :(

It seems like an upgrade gone bad.
Sure, but there are a lot of fields that aren't really that competitive (where you simply hire cheap laborers who basically work about the same), and where the pressure to conform may be higher than the pressure to find an employee that is 2% better than the next guy.
The Fox article talks about protecting kids from "lurid photos", but the first thing I thought when I went to http://www.missamericakids.com/ was, "what, did I click on the right link?"

+10 for PikLuk!
Right, thus going to a good college = +2.
"Increasingly, people with goods to sell set up their own websites and find buyers by advertising on Google's search pages."

Really?
It may rain more in other places - I'd bet that it rains more in Padova, Italy, than my own Northwest hometown of Eugene, Oregon - but the important thing is that it is gray in the NW. Often. It may rain a bunch in a day somewhere else, but in the NW, it will drizzle for a week.
think globally
Fortunately I still have all 3 points of mine.
I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer
This is really cool, thanks. I had no idea about Windylabs and ChicagoBeta. Unfortunately, it looks like ChicagoBeta has flatlined since early summer. Any other pointers like this?

Isn't this the problem Facebook is supposed to solve? =)
A great reminder of the power of optimization, although the problem our startup tends to have is that we never get to that point.

We're always too busy adding and refining features to really take time to measure, experiment and optimize those features in the way suggested. It would be great fun, though.
Yeah now I'm pissed! All my Karma (ex #11 on leaderboard, 1142) , submissions are missing. Plenty of screenshots of mine exist. Boooo Boooo Sup pg?
I lived in Japan for 6 years and found that it's quite an easy place to live in (and I lived in both a rural/industrial backwater as well as the Tokyo megapolis - Tokyo was much more fun). Yes, you do always feel like a foreigner but you also do not feel the pressure to conform to every norm like a typical Japanese person would. There are some signs that Japan is opening up more. For example, when I started working there you had to have your visa renewed every year, by the time I left it was possible to renew for 3 years.
Because his stuff is not substantive or serious enough. His article even cuts off at the end and moves into an advertisement for his software. Tacky.
Ask YC: What mail server do you use?
We are using google apps to host our email services and got our application to send emails out using gmail servers. The limitation to this approach is that we can send only 500 emails per day.

What are you guys using to send emails? Are you hosting an email server yourselves?
Well, it's easy to see why Seattle has those stereotypes. The moment you get there, all of the generalizations are instantly confirmed. It's raining, there's a Starbucks on every corner, and there (used to be) an enormous Boeing factory nearby.
Now I'm beginning to recover old posts from yesterday (yes I keep all posts, submissions). What I've found is past entries are there eg: http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=63249

So maybe the data collected in user?id=foo is currupted and could be rebuilt. It looks like the data is still to be found in edit?id=bar
Why did the Guardian take this really awesome scientific advancement and wrap it in a politically-charged article about fighting global warming?

The ramifications of creating new life-- or a chromosome, in this case-- are far, far more widely reaching than simply to fight climate change.
Google Docs - Free version (Gmail with own domain)
Virgin America is Smart, "Silicon Alley to Silicon Valley"
Did this same conversation take place some months ago, or am I having one wicked case of deja vous?
You're pissed because you lost your e-points on a news site? Seriously?
I am located in Minneapolis and co-founded a startup in 2001 that was acquired in 2004. We had a less traditional funding route -- a single private investor / angel who helped get everything going. We pulled most of our engineering talent from a local college and I used connections with a past professor to cherry pick the best of a couple of soon to be graduating classes.

I'm still living in Minneapolis, but having since worked with a number of people in the Bay area and having traveled there frequently, I can say that the environment does seem quite a bit different.

There are a lot of advantages to being in a "startup hub"... More talent that's easier to find, more people to bounce ideas off of, more access to traditional and non-traditional funding sources, etc.

One advantage to starting out in Minneapolis that we found was that salaries for our first employees were significantly cheaper than what we've heard from friends in the Bay area. In addition, the work ethic here is quite high -- it seems easy to find committed, dedicated employees.

Here's a recent article about Minneapolis being rated the top metro center for business (in general, not startups or technology specific).

http://news.morningstar.com/news/ViewNews.asp?article=/DJ/20...

Here's a startup that I recently found out is in the Minneapolis area -- http://www.yugma.com/ -- I'm at times surprised to learn of all the startups that are more or less under the radar here.

If you have the engineering talent and the funding sources, I think you can absolutely get started in a non-"startup hub". Having said that, there are definite advantages to being in a startup hub.
Microsoft: World, tell us why Google is better than us?
Apple is, once again, big man on campus
Domains: 10 .me domains to rush for
Tiny 'tin whiskers' imperil electronics
Something definitely seems to have gone wrong. We'll figure it out.

Edit: There are some corrupted files on the disk. It seems to be related to the new memory we had installed on the server. Fortunately we have recent backups. We probably have enough to reconstruct what's missing, but it may take a few days because I'm travelling.

Anyone besides kashif, bootload, and ardit33 seeing problems?
I expected number 1 to be "fuck."
Appendix may be useful after all!
If you agree with something, just vote it up instead of replying with something that isn't useful to the discussion at hand.
Well whatever the case, your college didn't teach you statistics.