skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like you're moving along quite nicely. I realized that I will not finish my PhD in time for the deadline, so it's been postponed 1/2 a year.

At one point, I toyed with the idea of submitting, just to receive feedback, but thought it would be somewhat unethical. Good luck all.
> For example, YC "investments" have a predominantly benevolent motive

Ah, I'm not going to give you that one. YC is in the game to make money. Whether PG needs it or not, likes helping college kids or just needs something to do, the fact remains YC's primary purpose is to make money for itself.

>Investments measure their success against the market. Charity measures its success against the world.

That's an interesting take. I tend to agree. I think that the OP though was trying to compare investing's indirect "trickle down" benefits to charity's and concluding that investing had a greater net impact. I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's a compelling standpoint.
Kids' creativity and problem solving abilities are significantly underestimated.
Google Custom Search: Setting The Bar For Vertical Search Engines
> I guess with the iPhone a lot of the customers are first time apple customers, so they don't know how the system works.

I think this is exactly the problem they had with dropping the price of the iPhone. That and the fact it's been on the market for 2 months.
Thanks for that link, that was very informative. I think that the point Iacobucci makes about vertical vs. horizontal was very interesting. Not sure how I feel about that.
"This is largely because people give away money stupidly"

But is that an accident of history (people care more about making money than about giving it away?) or a characteristic of charity? From what I've read, less than 1% of the increase in standards of living during the last 200 years can be attributed to charity. Given the number of fortunes that are charitably disposed of, giving money away rather than investing it is akin to making your target group worse off so you can feel better about yourself; it's selfish and destructive, and but for a trick of language, it would be blatantly uncharitable.

See also: http://slate.com/id/2110817/
It may be the largest bottleneck (although I had thought light transport was), but I wasn't talking about bottlenecks, I was just observing that this was not the clearest way to summarize the concept of raytracing.
the British brought their institutions

Shopkeeping. Checkmate.
I'm experimenting with a couple of ideas to see if one has potential. If so, I might consider applying in October. I've received lunch invites from a couple of investors to chat further, but I don't need the money yet. I believe that I should take investment only after I feel confident that the idea has a good chance of success. I can experiment with ideas on my own; it's much faster and I can change direction quickly if something doesn't look like it's working. If I do apply to YC, it'll be for the community and the support, not the money.
What??!?!?? Explain your workings please.
:) Enslaved
Okay... hey, what did you get for #6?
I thought it was good. I posted my info.
Robots - I think they have invested in a robot startup (http://www.anybots.com/) and share office space with them.
Nah, but I would work on WiTricity if I could.
I've been reading Fake Steve Jobs too much. I expected a "Bokay, cheaptards?" at the end.
"The Grameen Bank invests in projects, but its primary goal is to help economic development, and it only turns a modest profit."

http://www.mises.org/story/2375

That's a very, uh, charitable way of looking at it. Perhaps Grameen really is what he says he is -- someone who happens to want to make the world a better place by lending money at payday loan rates to extremely poor people. Or perhaps he's running a very large loan-sharking operation with a great PR presence -- the latter would explain why the company lies about its profits and offers loans to people who spend them on consumer goods.

"I don't do it for them, I do it because I don't want to feel like an asshole. Yet most people would still consider this charity."

How very democratic! You make yourself worse off, and substance addicts worse off, but that's okay because it lets you lie to people so they'll like you more!

"Investments measure their success against the market. Charity measures its success against the world."

Damn. It's like Brian Eno meets the State of the Union address: melodious, uplifting, and meaningless. A better version: Charity measures itself according to the labor theory of value. Markets measure themselves according to relative value. In other words, charity is a petty outlet for do-gooding impulses that can't be satisfied by doing a measurable amount of good.
Actually, Sony has a pretty neat e-paper ebook reader.

See - http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/itpd/reader/

I played around with one and it seemed to be pretty easy on the eyes.

I would port all of my physical library to an e-library. The convenience of such an idealized device would probably obsolete the book.
Facebook's Power Studied
Anyone applying again who was previously turned down? I am also curious of what YC's opinion is of groups who would like to re-apply?
We didn't invest in Anybots. Trevor, the founder of Anybots, is one of the YC partners and let us use part of his building.
Vancouver, BC
At least he didn't call it "Top 6 Ways to Fly With Style" or something egregiously linkbait-y.
I am. Rejected SFP05 and SFP07, hopefully 3rd time will be the charm...
What happened after rejections? Have you ever launched your products after being rejected?
Turned down in the interview stage?
No, didn't get an interview, both times.
Do you mean this #6, "What is your company going to make?"
lol
I think you should defintely apply. YC application process in itself is another way to experiment and get feedback.

and how did you get lunch invites from investors? That sounds very promising.
A) I didn't mod you down.

B) No one is forcibly stopping you from expressing your opinion. We can even still see your comment. Whining "look at me I'm being censored" when people disagree with you is dumb.
After SFP05, I took a realistic look at the product and my ability to complete it before competitors did and decided not to pursue it. I took a job with another startup instead, first finishing up a long-time volunteer coding project I'd been working on. It turns out the product (web-based collaborative editing) would've had a market, but I probably would have been crushed by Google. They folded similar features into Google Docs not long afterwards.

After SFP07, we continued working on it. We launched a side project (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18233) and put about a month of effort into that before deciding it wasn't worthwhile. We also launched an intermediate milestone that we'd mentioned in our application, which is linked in my profile. It's had the same lack of success that we predicted, though I was of course hoping that there may be an off-chance of it taking off. (We did it that way because we need the functionality anyway for the main idea, so might as well package it up and get feedback while we work on that.)

Well, some subset of "we". We had applied with 5 founders, and PG immediately shot back an e-mail with "too many uncommitted founders!" It became apparent that he was right, so the 3 that were not really into it left a couple months later.

Curiously, our schedule in the SFP07 app would've been nearly dead-on had we not done the 5-week side project. We were initially planning to launch Diffle in late April; it actually launched on June 1. Then we were going to prototype the main idea between then and the start of the SFP; we actually got our first prototypes done during the first week of July. Progress since then has been slower than we anticipated, mostly because I kept the day job through the summer (I'm in the process of quitting now, and really would recommend that anyone in a similar situation quit as soon as they have an idea - it's not worth the hassle of ensuring you own your own IP).
Cocktail Party Clustering
We can do it in the real world (or RL as some prefer it), so why can't it be done in the virtual one?
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2007/07/13/...
> Would you consider applications where the "exit" strategy is just to make money from customers and pay out dividends to shareholders

Apparently Wufoo is already profitable by making money from customers...

http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2007/07/yc-alums-visit-...
whoa, small world. baratunde uses my email-management software. this is probably a bad day to tell him we're gonna limit it to 5 emails a day and axe the 'export' function...
How you mod me (or not) is your perogative. However, I think the practice of modding people down on a piece of pure opinion is about as dumb as it gets. I make a habit of modding up anyone in the ditches (0 karma or lower) who made the 'mistake' of expressing an unpopular opinion. Why silence opposition?

Save the downmods for posts with poor quality.
Sounds like a lot of fun.
wow thanks a lot for sharing your stories. I think the 3rd time will be the charm for you. It sounds like you've learned a lot from the two previous submissions.

Good luck!!!
Screen Shots And Feature Overview of Delicious 2.0 Preview
For a guy who has no information about himself on his site's "About" page, you're awfully comfortable with other people publicly posting lots of data about themselves. ;)

Seriously, though, I know that form is based on the YC application, but YC doesn't make applications public.

Asking that much is going to make people who would otherwise fill out that form hesitate (it's one reason I haven't posted there myself, for example).
That's a bit dramatic. How does downmodding "silence" you?

I think it's time to add another principle to the evolving news.yc list of house rules: don't add comments that do nothing more than complain about people downmodding you. This whole branch of the thread is a waste of pixels.
Her name is danah boyd.
More links from outside decrease pageviews per visitor, because they bring in more visitors.
I don't know how anyone did in the first place. You have to look past the big shiny numbers.
I agree this little detour is pretty wasteful, but while we're on it, I might as well clarify. The silencing comes by way of a disincentive to post your opinion, at least until it's clear that no one's going to downmod you for it. How powerful that disincentive is hinges mostly on how much you care for your karma. Even if you don't care at all, it's an expression that the community's not really welcoming you/your opinions. Ultimately, I think it leads down the path of group think, but maybe that's too dramatic as well. Anyway, I'm more than done here. My apologies for the derailing.
If someone cares about his karma points, it may discourage him for commenting again in the future.

Maybe the best solution is to eliminate the "leaders" page and each user's karma score from public view.
I am so pissed that my million dollar cancer treatment has come down in price to $500. I mean, sure, I got treated two months ago, and I would be dead right now had I not, but that wasn't the point. Living is nice, but what I really wanted from this cancer treatment was to live while others who couldn't afford it died. I guess there is some small consolation in the fact that a lot of people died during a couple months there, but this whole thing just pisses me off. I don't know if my slight, smug satisfaction at their deaths was worth the million bucks. On a normal technology schedule, I would expect at least a year of deaths; didn't Apple know we were counting on that? I hate you Apple.
I usually find that the community sorts itself out anyways. I mod up a lot of posts I find at 0 points.

If I get modded down to 0 or -1, it usually gets back up to 1 or higher. If I didn't, I probably deserved it.
I'd do it just to try flying on an Eclipse.

That flash on their frontpage was shocking though. Thank God for adblock.
Launching A Revolution In Health
Because buying an iPhone was a life or death decision. It's really not that serious, but this is not a good analogy at all.
Steve is brilliant! What can you get at an Apple store for $100? A keyboard, a mouse, or a gift card. This $100 store credit is going to end up selling MORE Apple hardware because everything is so expensive. People get to feel all warm and fuzzy again and Apple makes more money. It's amazing.
it was still funny
Can Lisp do What Perl Does Easily?
Erik Naggum on why Perl sucks :D
an external hard drive?
Basically the iphone had a $200 smugness cost built-in that provided way more than $200 of smugness, so all the smug seekers made out well--for a while. They forgot to factor in the fact that the smugness thereby provided was contingent on the absence of a near-future "now who's smug?" award for those society deems "not so smug as an early iPhone adopter," which, a some short time after all the shaken chicken-bones had settled, is exactly what happened.

Let's say the iPhone was given free today instead of just price-reduced: that would make you even angrier! Imagine the gall--other people getting things! Why, if we carry out your logic to its conclusion, you'd be happy if people had to pay more tomorrow than today, as though taking from others somehow justifies and internally authenticates your existence.
I see what you are saying. For example, I posted this link which I think is an awesome read for everyone on hear, and it got squashed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49579
Read it people, read it!

But I don't think there is any karma whoring going on. I think PG articles come with a pretty safe bet of being a good read. Whereas you aren't sure what you are going to get with the others. Im assuming pretty much everyone reads the PG essays, and thus there is more discussion to be had. Whereas I would like to know the proportion of people who read all the other links submitted, as opposed to just their titles.
Great story! Could it be that young people are fearless, ingenuous, and know what they love with nothing to loose?
its going great, hope to have it submitted by the weekend.
last term was going to be too hectic.

This round the timing feels right!
Yeah I'm not a Zuckerberg fan, but for some reason I keep reading about him.
We're working on it now. :)
I really don't like telling that but your new project (Diffle) hardly is a startup at all! It's a nice website but it's nothing new. You need to solve some real problem.
I can just hear the suits convincing each other that consumers would pay "as much as $4.95" for NBC's shows, getting pumped up about how great their future in downloadable content is looking.

And then when this number gets mentioned to Apple and comes out in the media to universal ridicule, everyone is like "what are they smoking?" and they feel really awkward and hurt about it.
Missing (from) Links: great idea for the expansion of HTML syntax
"I think there may also be a general reluctance to post things which are challenging or negative for fear of either being downvoted like crazy, or looking bad in the eyes of YC if you have plans to apply."

There's a line between being challenging or negative and being hostile. I've seen pg prune hostile comments, but never challenging or negative ones (and I've made quite a few of both--I don't think I get a special pass because I have a YC funded company). And I also strongly doubt challenging pg or anyone else here with a well-thought out argument would have a negative impact on applications for funding. There are plenty of strong personalities in YC companies, many of whom are not particularly intimidated by pg--I strongly doubt the YC folks have a problem with that, at all. Not being cowed by challenges from your investors and advisers is probably even a necessity for success, and pg has mentioned it in several talks and at least one essay.[1]

Of course, that doesn't invalidate your argument. Maybe folks are hesitant to challenge folks for fear of hurting their chances with YC. It's a mistake to hesitate for that reason. But it's entirely possible that people do.

1: Search for the word "adult" in this essay: http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html
It's not hard to find what you love to do.

It's hard to find the money (or enough of it) to do what you love. For entrepreneurs, it's hard to love what you do when you're working for someone else.

The only 2 options that are left:

- find investors / take out loans

- quickly ramp up revenues to support your entrepreneurial lifestyle

These are a lot harder than people might want to believe, though I personally have not tried to find investors yet. (just heard/witnessed the horror stories)
The fact that the author is from Berkeley is a good hint ;)
Note the date. In 2000, Perl was, by far, the leading scripting language (and language for the web). I'm certain that if this rant were written today, it would target PHP, and possibly even Ruby and Python. Ironically, perhaps, modern Perl is more lisp-like than any other mainstream language (aside from JavaScript, in some ways), and so this article merely says, "Mainstream languages that come pretty close to Lisp are brain-damaged and you'd have to be a particular breed of crazy to use it for anything."
@dcurtis

http://www.oceansalive.org/eat.cfm?subnav=fishpage&fish=...

Not only is bluefin tuna overfished and in danger of extinction, but it's extremely high in mercury and PCBs as well.
And then it's not like people who allready own an iphone are going to spend money on an iphone or an ipod...
So it's a great way to get new consumers to start buying products like the apple tv or macs....
[ascend to soapbox]
[begin sermon]
I like to think of news.yc as a social learning machine. It would be nice to see karma computed more as a function of the contribution to the community rather than pure popularity. In terms of information content, the PG links are going to be low because almost everyone here would have read the article regardless.

Seriously, is the 100 karma points gained through linking to a pg essay worth as much as the 100 earned through 10 informative (in the classic suprising sense) links? We seem to be converging to this eigenvector [a(1) a(2) ...a(n)] where a(1) == pg_essay_link, a(2)== mattmaroon_essay_link...etc.

The reason I believe pg converted this forum to hacker news is that the learning machine was stuck on the search surface in a local minimum and he wanted it to 'learn' new things. We can't learn more if we reward behaviour that is not truly informative. He could put a damping coefficient on karma obtained from known links, but a better bet would be for the community to not reward the links as much.

I have done my share of dumb, uniformative submissions and will try to make better contributions in the future.
[end sermon]
[get off soapboax]
Cleantech 2.0 (the new venture capital buzz)
What is the air quality like in Mountain View?
Trivia: Scorecard was created by Philip Greenspun.
In the end, Karma ends up rewarding activity. I'm not any better or smarter than anyone else here, I just surf the internet a whole lot.
I love his rant. There are so many colorful expressions in it that even if you don't agree with what he says, you can enjoy how he says it.

Here's another my favorite, Erik on C++, from 1998:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/917737b7cc...
Dude, I've seen your website. You are going to change the world.
California Air Quality Maps

San Jose: Moderate
http://airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=airnow.displaymaps&Po...

http://www.airnow.gov
That's what we're going for. :) My partner Josh deserves more credit than me because he's the actual biological hacker but we complement each other pretty well.

Our make or break moment is in the next couple months as we launch. Here's hoping...
He is referring to: http://reddit.com/info/29qac/comments/c29rpx

Summary if you don't know the story: aaronsw wrote web.py, founded Infogami (yc funded) and merged with Reddit. Then he had a falling out with spez and kn0thing (original founders of Reddit). When Reddit was rewritten, web.py was not used.

I personally like web.py. Any of you using it for your startup/projects? (May be we can swap tips) If you are not using web.py for a particular reason, can you please share that too?
Awesome. He's convinced that using a language (C++ or Perl, depending on the rant in question) can cause damage to ones cognitive processes! He is a colorful one.

I'm pretty sure I'd feel dumber after having worked in PHP for the past six months on our new website, if that were true.
this strategy is about gaining and maintaining market share. 'pleasing customers' is merely a pheripheral initiative to the overall strategy of market share.
jobs is an innovator, but he does it by sticking to old school traditional business strategies.
i wouldn't be surprised, if sometime in the next decade, apple is accused of 'bundling', similarly to microsoft with IE and windows. apple has been gaining market share little by little in various industries. once their share reaches a dominant position, its products will become dependent on each other. until they reach that position, jobs will be the nicest guy in the industry.
I'm very interested in Europe. Can people from such cities please comment about their city live, both in terms of lifestyle and hacker enviroment (education, peers, industry, finacials, etc.)?
The application process has taken us longer than I thought it would because it has made us question whether there really is a market for the idea. Yes, it does help to solve a problem, but we don't have a working product to get user feedback.

So for the past couple of weeks I've set the application aside and have focused on administering a market survey, so most of my time has been on the right wording for the test.

Hopefully with the help of social networks, email, WOM, etc... We'll be able to get a large enough sample to help us understand if we're heading in the right direction. If so, we'll submit our application with the survey results.

I am sure, though, that upon reading the questions, the person taking the survey will know quite easily what our start-up will be doing... which can be good and bad. Our positive spin on this is the survey will be our public declaration that we are up to something.
This may just be my recent experience talking, but I think the problem in corporate IT is an excess of formalism.. or Religion. You have the "Enterprise Architects" running around thinking that if you abstract everything away, that someone will be able to grok the whole process and eliminate redundancies and magically you'll have a better organization. Then you have the Agile people, and the Six Sigma people, and the RUP people, and the IT Governance Nazis...

Add to that the typical corporate risk aversion, and the "nobody ever got fired for yet another kick-off for a new initiative with a Three Letter Acronym," and what you end up with is vast overspending to deliver very little value.

Naturally, this kind of bullshit is a huge disincentive to innovation. If you actually had a good idea, there are so many obstacles to trying it and getting things done that the smart people end up grinded down and flee for greener more flexible pastures. This not just for the average developer who has an idea-- it goes all the way up to the C-suite.

For corporate America to fix this, you need CTOs and CEOs who are willing to be ruthless about paring down ridiculous initiatives and barriers to getting things done. Radically simplified IT governance, along with a genuine attitude shift towards accepting non-zero risk, is what will enable corporate IT innovation.
Agreed. It's basically a bunch of functionality that we needed anyway and could do relatively easy. Hence, we pushed it out. http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=Og6Bd3JpZu
I currently live in Edinburgh. Unfortunately I'm much too tired at the moment to attempt an elevator pitch on its behalf but I will say that I think a hacker would be very happy here. Hope that helps.
Steve is too lazy (in the good sense) to have ditched web.py for anything except legitimate technical reasons.