skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been hearing a lot of talk about entrepreneurs moving AWAY from Silicon Valley too due to the overwhelming competition for talent and sky-high cost of living. Not to suggest SV is going away, but I wonder if you'll start seeing some activity in "tier two" cities that have solid infrastructure. I'm thinking Raliegh/RTP for example. Even Google is exporting some of it's operations to make finding talent easier. Again, not refuting the importance of SV, but wondering if there is an opportunity to build elsewhere with similar resources being exported.
Five alternative business models for the music industry
Why Facebook isn't Google, in 100 words
How does this prevent a heterosexual male "seeking women" from being matched up with a homosexual male "seeking men"? If you pair those "seeking men" with those "seeking women?" I imagine your users may be upset if this confusion is a possibility.
"The world has suddenly discovered an entirely new business model for the music industry"
My bad, I must have missunderstood what you said.
Animals reproduce and I doubt many of them are religious. Actually, I didn't realize anyone merely had kids because they thought it was their religious duty. If so, I feel sorry for their kids.

Not sure what this has to do with hacking, though.
China's Tudou.com Bigger than Youtube?
Some things to check in your YC application
A surprisingly large percentage of people fill out the application form incorrectly. Most of these mistakes we can deal with, but there are two things you really want to get right:

1. In the question asking about the details of each founder (name, age, education etc), one of the things we ask for is an email address. Do please include one. If we want to ask you questions about your application, or invite you for interviews, we need to be able to contact you.

2. In the questions asking for the YC usernames of all the founders, and of those who will come to CA if funded, please make sure that these fields contain nothing but YC usernames (not proper names), and that the second is a subset of the first. It's amazing how often the first field contains fewer names than there are people whose details are supplied later, or (more strangely still) the second field contains a name that is not in the first.
I second that. I've blocked Reddit (even programming.reddit) because it's a productivity killer for me. Coming here still feels work-related and gives me a tremendous motivation boost, and I'd like News.YC to stay that way.
You know, it only takes a few people posting completely off-topic things to ruin the board for everybody.

Just sayin'
> The beaches in the Bay Area are FREEZING COLD.

Eh, they're quite cold but not unbearable. Trust me, I know -- I've swum from Alcatraz to SF :-)
I agree that the terms are silly and abused, but unfortunately we seem to be getting stuck with them. I'd love to have better ones (know any?), but for now, you have to admit that people at least know what they refer to: things that'd otherwise be too ambiguous. These over-simple terms aren't bypassing consensus, they are a means to consensus-building.

As to the earlier comment, the whole point of the essay is that we need to look at fads as if they are bubbles, users as if they're investors. See Davenport and Becks 'Attention Economy' as well as Mark Anielski's 'Economics of Happiness'. And to see the where I'm eventually trying to lead, see David Warsh's 'Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations' and the 2005 World Bank paper called "Where is the Wealth of Nations."
I don't know if this was my client acting up, or perhaps an unconscious mouse movement, but I've been trying to update the application for a while now. For some reason the update button isn't working (is the server hosed? Is the internet cafe that I'm at breaking?) but when I checked the two fields you mentioned, all but one of the names were eliminated from each (and the intersection was zero).

(Edit: I was using commas instead of spaces, which might account for the weird behavior. Does YC search the usernames for each token? Because then only the last names would have had no comma, and so they they would remain)

So, I can't really remember if it was just me, but it's possibly a bug...
$3.00 per active user? That's how much a facebook app is worth.
The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters (And we're all stupid voters.)
What do you mean by "isn't working?" What happens when you click on update?
the quantity part maybe true and I could be wrong but I just feel there's not really many of them that are nuts enough...
people there are too conventional and practical, which isn't all bad but it's just not as conducive for innovation

Atlanta doesn't get many Christopher Klaus's - and they typically leave, while the list goes on and on in valley... the culture in Atlanta is just too different.
Well, it says "loading" and "waiting for YCombinator". It does this for an arbitrarily long period of time. It's quite possible that the network providing wireless changed something which breaks AJAX, because since this morning I can only get Gmail to work in HTML mode here. I think that this service with used all across the bay area though (it's called Freeva, I think), so that might explain why many people are having problems.

Edit: Does edit work? I wonder... Okay. Apparently, yes for here, but not for another post I made.
Good luck to everybody.

Gracias totales!
It's the same server (in fact, the same process) you're submitting this comment to.
Of course we check for reciprocity.
Well, I suppose we can do what the batman movies, or Gundam series do. Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman Begins. Gundam Wing, Gundam Turn A, Gundam Seed.

Web. Web Social. Web Ubiqu. Web Singularity.

I guess most hackers don't like the term web/bubble 2.0/3.0 is because it's overloaded, and hence, imprecise. Thus, ripe for exploitation by marketers, which generally have a bad rep with hackers (sometimes with good reason).

I think the author just means "the next evolutionary step of the web" Just as when people are talking about 2.0, they just mean that the web now was far different than it was back in 1996.
I've noticed that when I was editing the application and left the window open for a long period of time (maybe 30 minutes - 2 hours) I would find that clicking 'Update' would return an error. I'm not sure if Refreshing my page helped, but when I clicked the back button my application would be saved. I only remember it from the trauma of the prospect of losing my data. I thought it was a time-out issue.

This happened to me a while ago, I would say late August, early September.
Reading, comprehending, and filling out an application should be the first way to cull people.
FWIW, I got a server timeout earlier today when I took just over 30 minutes to start on my application. It looks like it is easy to lose your cookies just under normal use.
Can you give some concrete examples please?

To me, it seems that the average user has to know less and less about the underlying web in order to use it to do things. Perhaps you're talking about people that build tools on the web?
I have pressed the submit button!!!

Was there supposed to be a confirmation that it was recieved?

Just double checking, peace of mind really. Thanks for the motivation and continued inspiration YC.
We do treat it that way. But today I came across an otherwise promising application that didn't have any email addresses in it. I had to call them on the phone and leave a message telling them to add their email addresses. Obviously this does not scale.
I don't know what those YCers done, but I think raising enough capital to get E-2 investor visa would be the surest way now. It used to be possible to go through H1B before, but it became too tight. The actual amount of money you need to raise depends on each case; I've heard a rumor about something like $100K minimum, though it may also depend on the immigration lawyer to handle it. Absolute requirement is to show that you have a prospect to be big and hire lots of US citizens eventually.
There was also a lot of value in filling out the application. I had my cofounders write their own version of the application, so that they internalized some of the values -- they even came up with several ideas while doing so (and merging wasn't so difficult as I feared). We've written and rewritten our pitch and our mission several times now, and it's starting to get very good. It was definitely helped by the need to put it into YC's format -- now we have a punchy answer written for all of the common questions.
vim is good, so too is emacs. But I learnt the hard way why vim has one edge that emacs does not, size (I could be wrong anyone know of an emacs version thats <1Mb). If you know vim at command level you can pick up vi which allows you to edit all but the smallest systems that require tools like "ed" (installing openBSD http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT230736.html )

If you want to understand more about editors on Unix systems try reading "Raymond E., The Art of Unix Programming, Chapter 13, Complexity, A Tale of Five Editors" ~ http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch13s02.html
Request PG: Please cc co-founders on emails regarding questions
If you have questions regarding the application, could you please cc everyone in the team on it? This is to ensure that whoever sees it first has a chance to respond - and you have a quick turnaround time. Thanks.
What it means when you get an "expired link" when submitting an application
It means you ignored the instructions at the top of the form about clicking on update regularly to save your work. We put this in bold face and people still ignore it. You should click on update as regularly as you'd save a file when editing it: every few minutes.
"... I came across an otherwise promising application that didn't have any email addresses in it ..."

Is the application via online form? Would it be scalable to verify addition of email address on submit?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66604
I've been resisting adding lots of structure to the form so that people can email drafts around when working on their applications.
I got that error quite often too, "link expired".

Save regularly, then it works out alright.
Future of Web Apps Conference Review
Thanks. "Save your work every 5 or ten minutes" might be a little more clear for numbskulls like me than "We recommend you save regularly by clicking on the update button at the bottom of this page. Otherwise you may lose work if we restart the server." -- Saving regularly to me just means every so often when I think about it. This may vary according to the intensity of what I'm doing. And restarting the server does not sound like a normal occurance, so the instructions were taken as more of a general warning that a specific immediate threat. After the first loss, I saved in a much more regular manner.
Nice. I like those suggestions... But wouldn't it be more fun just to steal movie titles. How about The Web Identity > The Web Supremecy > The Web Ultimatum... did I get the order right? Anyone remeber the 'Ernest' films?
It now says resubmit, good luck with your application!
Automatic cameraman: automatic camera control by tracking voice signals
Prof. Yoav Freund of UCSD is working on a system for moving a camera around by tracking voice signals. When it hears a voice signal, it tries to move the camera to focus on what it thinks is the source of the audio.

As you can tell it already works pretty well.
Hi Paul,

Did you ever read Joel Spolsky's guide for User Interface Design? Users don't read anything. You need to design your UI with that in mind.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062....
nah, I am still working on my web 2.5.1 rev C application

Yet another article about web 3.0, blah.
What's interesting is that Chris was one of my roomates at Tech in 1993. No, I didn't join him at the time. Ouch.
Most environments for writing text have an autosave. There's a PeriodicalExecuter, in Prototype, where you can run a javascript command every n seconds, so you could do a form.submit every 5 minutes or so, to avoid the timeout issue, if this starts becoming major.
I agree. Berkeley beats hands down all other clown towns in the Peninsula. It actually feels like a real town (more similiar to Cambridge, MA, or Someriville than anything else). It has great food (i mean really good, cheap), and it is walkable to a certain extent. There is mass transportation to SF.
SF would be my first choice, then Berkeley second. The rest of the Bay area is a big soul drenching Strip Mall Wasteland.

Palo Alto is not that bad, except the smug attitude of the people there, and it is so expensive. It doesn't really feel like a town. More like a suburb, with one main avenue (university ave.). Nothing too exiting.
fair warning: the business model

1. port useful web app to fbml
2. ???
3. profit

hasn't worked very well. at least the top 50 or so apps seem designed solely to be viral and center around communication or self-expression. sugar, not vitamin.

clutterme appears more utilitarian and (imho) doesn't fit the mold of the typical viral facebook app. we came to the same conclusion for what we're doing and have made our facebook app strategy much lower priority -- and when we do facebook apps, they won't be straight ports of our main app. just something to think about.
pg: do you read apps that are not submitted?

If so, it could help to have a delete button for people like me that went through the process just to see what type of questions you were asking.
To what, launching a startup?

Anything that takes away 40 to 60+ of your most productive hours each week should be considered in the running.
That's all fine and dandy on the supply side of H1-Bs wanting to come over here & companies who want to hire them...

But where exactly would the financing capital come from to allow all these would-be entrepreneurs to quit their jobs?

I can see the headlines now, "In light of the recent downturn in the sub-prime angel investment market... "
:(

My application had my full contact info on it so I guess it can't be mine.
I had filesystem corrupted after 3 months or so.
"We recommend you save regularly by clicking on the update button at the bottom of this page. Otherwise you may lose work if we restart the server."

Implies one would only lose work is when the server is restarted - an event that usually doesn't happen multiple times a day.
"... I've been resisting adding lots of structure to the form so that people can email drafts around ..."

Maybe there should (a few) mandatory fields (contact email + phone + first name + last name) like a login. Leave the rest unstructured. You don't need your life details, just a username and email address that uniquely identifies users and allows contact.
for games that isn't very good news.
Do the verifications upon submission only, not on saving. There, problem solved!
I suspect this might be a bit of a test in itself...
Another interesting point that was made at FacebookCamp2: if a facebook app is taking more than a week to make, it's probably too complex to succeed. Pretty much all the presenters said their apps took up to one week to make.

Which just serves to support your point, I think.
It means you didn't take the application all that serious. I'm sorry, but it really wasn't that hard to scroll all the way down and press update.
Oh yeah for sure. We already have a quasi ClutterMe facebook app hacked together, it's not viral at all, like 65 users, 3 active.

We decided to make something a lot more sugary. We'll see how it goes. I'd say what it is, but that would just spoil it.
Good point, I'll put that in there, I think.
"odds are you can't skip down to the local coffee shop to get a feel what other startups are doing."

Just head down to Octane one day. I can guarantee that at least one person there is working on a startup.
I'm pretty sure if you don't read and follow instructions for applying to something, it means you should be disqualified. Not other way around of having Paul Graham pander to everyone.
"... Almost four in ten would-be entrepreneurs are too scared of failure to do anything about their business idea ..."

I'm not sure this is phrased correctly. Firstly I'm an antipodean and also a keen observer of American style entrepreneurship. I wouldn't characterise UK Entrepreneurs as "scared" or "fearful". ( I'm not sure if the article is specifically tech orientated) I can give several examples to kill this straight away

- tbl (though to be fair, tbl is not specifically "business oriented")

- pg

- Cal Henderson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Henderson

- James Dyson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dyson

to name but a few. What do they have in common? Well firstly they all hail from the UK, second they are anything but scared entrepreneurs and thirdly they are mostly working outside the UK. My theory is that it's the reserved, risk adverse, steady-as-she-goes business culture that rewards a conservative approach to making money and punishes those who try to make a go and fail. Startups are risky. The chance of failure is high. But get enough startups working, tweak the parameters to help them along you increase the chance of success.

The situation in Australia, a descendant of UK business culture has a similiar myopic view of how startup culture works. It's a familiar pattern in Australia (and from anecdotal observation in the UK) where great ideas flourish in the abundance only to be killed by culture unable to capitalise for whatever reason. Be it lack of foresight, marketing, courage or as the article suggests inability to suspend, "the fear of failure".

So in short it's the culture, not the individual that is fearful. Place the individual into a culture that fosters, encourages and supports entrepreneurial activity (namely US startup hubs) and see what happens.
Hm, our Polycom VoIP video conferencing system did that back in 2000 already. It did work well, I have to say.
$750m in cash and stock... not bad.
It's actually a carefully designed method to screen out candidates who take showers, use the bathroom, or eat food.

/Fast hands make less beatings.
Sorry, I know it's pretty fuzzy. I don't know if there are any examples until something starts going wrong (IF something starts going wrong).

You make a good point about the average user needing to know less and less. Which is great, I hope that continues -- and I'm sure it will...

But that also means that users may not be developing any kind of knowledge capital or competence -- unlike the people who build tools.

Developers don't just build tools; they also build their own knowledge and skills at the same time. And their knowledge and skills are specifically 'invested in' (or to use another metaphor, 'married to') those tools, platforms, and applications that they develop. The fact that developers have invested so many years learning to master PHP, Ruby, etc, makes those tools even more valuable -- it makes it less likely for developers to leave them behind.

Whereas the value of web sites and applications to users doesn't necessarily follow the same curve. The fact that it's becoming easier to use means they don't have to make any kind of an investment -- maybe it's just something they do to avoid doing work. After two or three years of using MySpace, how much value, equity, or affinity has been created between MySpace and the user?

My example in the essay was that right now MySpace is doing pretty well, but its value is more in the people using it than the site itself; if users start spending less time there and go somewhere else, like Facebook, they might merely follow each other.

The question to ask is, What would users be leaving behind if they left? What might they follow?

Here's a concrete example: retail rewards cards. (But I think web users are as easily fooled by those kinds of schemes.)

Obviously this is a work in progress. Thanks for pushing me to develop my case.
I think (but haven't looked into it recently) that tbl is doing pretty well from his stake in Akamai tech, so I'd count him as an entrepreneur.
You're not even thinking about it correctly. The question wasn't whether or not it was hard, it was whether or not people -- good people -- actually did it.

I would hope that at least some people were thinking harder about world domination than about whether or not they needed to scroll down and update. Since I've been personally burned by forgetful webpages before, I wrote everything in a text-file. In the process of copying, pasting, proof-reading and reformatting, I just barely tipped over the timelimit, however long it was. Argh. (Luckily, the back button wasn't so forgetful as in, say, facebook.)

An investment firm that would turn down an otherwise great opportunity to make money due to some small mistake like that is making a mistake.
"... he map stays current in three ways (maybe more but this is what I get): data feeds supplied to UpNext, manual entry by the UpNext team and by user updates. Did you notice that the pizzeria on 48th and 2nd avenue is closed? Go edit the record which creates a community of users to help keep the tool updated. ..."

One area where this application kills printed maps is a concept called "ground-truth". Ground truth is where you manually check that what is on the map really exists on the ground. It's boring, time consuming but imperative to get right to make something useful. The web2 interaction, "Oh this shop has shut-down, I better add a tag and new description" solves this problem somewhat.

Nicely executed Rav.
Didn't work with my video card.

Interesting that you chose Java. I haven't looked at web 3-d technologies in a while, but was the thought that VRML was too clunky or outdated for the users to like? I guess you could also create micro-videos and serve them up and cache them a la google maps, but that would require a real google-like file system.
Study reveals stressed out 7-11 year-olds: School tests, global warming, terror = anxiety
Automatic CameraMan - Explanation of how it works
Ask YC: Did you wait until the last day too?
I just submitted my application to YC today. Just wondering, how many others waited until the last minute!
Being Stupid And Litigious Is No Way To Go Through Life
Believe me, I know this is true for users in general. But I'd hoped it didn't extend to people who applied to YC.
Be charitable and call it optimism.
I waited until the last day to finish it and resubmit a final version.

I submitted my rough draft early because I did not want my idea to be overlooked or not given a fair chance.
Facebook Petition: Increase page width for app developers
I wounder how they handle the resubmissions! If you resubmit, do they do a 'compare' with the older version to see what's new, or do they not start reviewing until the deadline passes.
Will you give it a rest?
ok. did that use commodity off the shelf hardware?
Believe in magic, you honkies.

Uh, is that really the word you meant to use, Kevin? =)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honky

Good luck, everyone!
my guess is an over write.
there's a bug for the scrollbars, it overlaps other windows.
I talked to that guy, he wants to sue:

Google, Conde Naste, The Poster of the image, and Tech Crunch.

I think he might win!
Compete data confirms Facebook traffic drop
My guess is that the team worked off s2007 app and missed the addition of email as a requirement.
Knowing the significance of good copy and subtle changes is invaluable. Almost any site that hasn't put thought into their registration flow and copy could be tweaked in a day and increase signups by 20%+. The same kind of thing absolutely applies to email. Realizing this and making it a part of everything you do is a so valuable that it pains me when friends don't get it (but brings me joy when competitors don't).

FYI: Tracking "opens" is inherently inaccurate. An invisible image "beacon" won't automatically load on a great deal of mail readers.
rms needs to let pg be positive during this time. So lets lay off minor details when so many other things are more important.
1) job
2) sleep =(
I submitted weeks ago, but I was up most of last night finishing getting our demo ready.
sorry, it is rested.