skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like someone who's watched way too much House, frankly. It's laziness, just as much as lying because you don't want to hurt someone's feelings is laziness; it's a different path of least resistance, that's all. There are ways to tell people the truth that aren't brutal; tact and empathy are hard, sure, but that doesn't make them useless or optional.

Nonetheless, there's a difference between caring about people and caring about people's feelings. The latter is really all about oneself; if you lie to avoid hurting people's feelings, you're really trying to avoid them being pissed off at you. If you don't think someone is able to process the truth, better to say nothing at all.
I am a big fan of IILWY and I think they have a fantastic product. That said, the presentation didn't go well.
Grades matter only if you have no other experience. If you want to work on Wallstreet chances are you don't have much experience coming out of school. But after you get the right experience nobody cares about grades. The question is whether or not you can get the right experience in the time you would otherwise waste worrying about grades.
Here's the Real Story Behind Google's Elusive gPhone
chris benoit's brain results - TvByDemand | Forums | WWE
Is there anything else in the blender, i.e., do I have to worry about air as well as the blades?

If not, blender blades rarely reach the very bottom of the pitcher. Lie flat underneath them.
"When I get rich I'm going to take YC's approach and fund about 40 different girlfriends a year with a little money rather than just one with millions."

portLAN...I added that comment to my Facebook page, it was just brilliant.
The reason I say to enumerate the links is not so much for ranking purposes, but to reinforce the visual aspect of the page. For me at least, it's much easier to parse the page if there's some kind of visual cue to help me keep track of where I am on a page.

Also, I've been on the web long enough to have learned to scan over and ignore ads (image and text ads), and a list/block of text without bullets or numbers screams "avert your eyes... ads!!" For example, the main content of the page looks very similar to the Google ads on the right column (with the exception of underlines), while the RSS feeds with the bright orange icons screams "look at me on this page of monotony!!"

I hope this helps. Keep up the great work!
The power of branding in web search
Almost everyone here is a young healthy male. Pretty much the only thing we really need health insurance for is car accidents. If you ramp up your deductable > $1000 health insurance will cost less than your cell phone bill. Your company could give everyone high deductable insurance and agree to pay their entire deductable if they get in an accident. Barring a freakish number of accidents you'll probably save a bundle of money. Of course this doesn't account for people with chronic health problems. But they're not likely candidates for startups anyways.
Yes, problem isn't quite the right word. I originally used 'dilemma', but changed it to be in line with the blog post, I should have left it.

The dilemma, as I see it, is choosing the appropriate abstractions, and choosing when to abstract yourself. For example, SQLA can be used as an SQL kit + a little personal ORM, or using their ORM, or their ORM with Elixir, or their ORM with your own thing, or some combination of the above. Or if you're the blogger, write your own declarative layer.

Not that its a particular problem in the Python world (indeed afaict Python is ahead of the game in this regard), but it is a significant issue for much Python development, worthy of exploration.
The #1 Most Important Resume Tip
... make sure you type your phone number right.

#2 - If you are going to mis-type it, at least make sure to correct it before sending out 25 of them, and agreeing to 3 or 4 phone interviews.

Those are just my two-cents. Take them or leave them, but I will say from experience, it is good advice!!!
I don't think the distinction is quite so clear.
that's basically what you get when you hire a husband and wife team.
Whats the point in making this form of soliciting illegal again?
Will the Massachusetts health-insurance mandate have an impact on SFP '08 founders? If they're considered MA residents, as individuals they're going to have to get health insurance or pay a monthly fine. That maybe wouldn't a big deal financially, but it'd be yet another procedural pain to deal with.
What is the average startup entrepreneur age? ie your age (I am 26 almost)
I've worked for a company that used Administaff too, and it would work out well for a company that needs HR outsourcing. But how many YC startups need HR, much less need to outsource it? We're talking about companies with essentially no payroll, which is the first function of HR that you outsource.

And YC contracting to have Administaff carry founders as W-2 workers has many of the same problems as making the founders straight-up YC employees.
An Interview With Paul Graham...
Hi Mr. Graham, I would like to ask some questions and possibly publish the results on my blog. I thought that YC news would be the best way to answer the questions, that way we can all read the answers right here.

1) Has YC ever considered investing in a not-for-profit start-up?

2) To your recollection, are there any ideas that were rejected by YC that have made it big? If so, can you name them.

3) You seem to be one of Silicon Valley's busiest/most influential/hard-working persons, why all the fuss? Haven't you earned a respite?

4) Have you ever thought about franchising the YC brand?

5) In your spare time, what does Paul Graham like to do?

6) Rumor has it that you studied the Arts in University, at what point did you realize that you were more capable with the keyboard, if ever?

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. They are as much a personal interest of mine as I'm sure they are for many others.
I'm 24, my biz partner just turned 32.
23 and 25.
I think the color scheme is great, although when I try to read the links, my eyes do a magic-eye thing.

Try spacing the items out, and put the vote/category/domain below the headline.
Moonlight: Tim/Miguel on silverlight for Linux
29 and 29
RdfDB : An RDF Database
Semantic web apps based on folksonomic data
Go medium. Going big is too top heavy and going small is too slow in how much can you program on nights and weekends.

Going medium might mean finding a couple of people to help you code and finding some money to keep you going 6 months at least.
Well you don't get it for free, you have to waste valuable years of your life to become worthy of admission to such a place. Depending on how good your social skills it might be easier to study hard and go to a good school to meet smart people.
yes, that's pretty good advice.
43 and 43. (My first startup was at 31. My partner/wife's first startup was at 20.)
My thoughts exactly. At least it will give those outside of the US (or an aversion to AT&T service plans) a chance to enjoy part of the iPhone experience.
well specific company news sounds hard, but you can have something like a saved search filter that scans a full text index for specific words so you can essentially view all company specific news (at least all articles that mention that company).
Black on white text > white on black text.

I won't even look at it long enough to find out what it is supposed to do with that color scheme.
26 when we started, turned 27 in June
Are we talking about Valleywag or the Catholic Church. It really could apply to either.
This shit is fucking truth. I am no saint, but i tell the truth most of the time, when I know it will get me in trouble. I cannot stand fucking liars. It's like being scared of someone or what they are going to do. What you will realize is that by always telling the truth everybody around you will envy you for it.
rest of the team was 24, 24 and 26 when we started heysan
NASA Space Shuttle Programming Language Exposed
Dont forget #7...

7) Are my lips hurting your ass?
26 and 27(me)
1) No. We'd do charitable donations individually, not through YC.

2) I don't know of any, but that doesn't mean there aren't any.

3) I like the stuff I work on. You don't need a respite from work you like.

4) We wouldn't trust anyone else enough. We'd rather see if we can cook up some clever way of doing everything ourselves.

5) Write essays.

6) I haven't given up on painting. But the web has opened a window for writing essays that never existed before, so I decided I'd spend a couple years mostly writing.
This is why Seth Godin champions NOBS instead of a traditional business school:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/04/nobs_the_end...
NOBS maximizes #1 and #2 with little work. Now if only there really was a NOBS. Wait, it's called YCombinator! :)
No. It was because they were obvious ass-kickers.
No, migpwr, I'm a hardass.
Lifecasting will attract a certain initial audience but to me its the least interesting thing about justin.tv They want to be youtube live. The opportunities for small theatres, musicians, sports, awards and presentations etc to create a live event online is huge. The difference between a youtube video that can sort of limp along without context for years to come, and a live event will be very important if they can do it right.

At the moment though, they just aren't set up to make short snippets of content from different broadcasters easily findable.

The distribution of tech is a problem as well. Another random idea; I wonder if they could set up a post based rental of equipment for one off events.
"We used to have a joke in college, that the definition of a college man was somebody who couldn't count up to 70 without laughing." -- Don Knuth, after recommending a 69-bit processor design

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3147833455273735180#...
This may well have been someone kissing up, some of the questions weren't well researched, and this site probably isn't a great place for a personal interview (as opposed to an Ask YCombinator-type open question). All that aside, I would have liked to have seen better answers for two questions.

For instance, it seems possible that a nonprofit startup might be better than a large, existing nonprofit at solving a problem YCombinator's founders care about. And funding a nonprofit startup is not necessarily the same as making a donation. It could be, but it doesn't have to be.

The spare time question might also deserve a more thoughtful answer. After all, the whole point of news.ycombinator.com is that people interested in startups also have other interests. Are there patterns? Are there things to do in one's spare time that seem to go along with creating successful startups, things one wouldn't necessarily expect?
19... Looks like I'm the youngest one... Suckers!
Rails' Unusual Architecture
What happens when you put a PC in the wall of an Indian slum?
Reading through the feature differences between the free edition and the $300 edition, I'm not sure why anyone would choose Komodo Edit over the Ruby project for Netbeans.

I'll download it and give it a shot, though.

Netbeans ruby project: http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson/job/ruby/

Komodo Edit Feature Comparison: http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_edit/edit_vs_ide....
I resent you for being a fake punk. If you didn't care, you wouldn't have mentioned it.
We like startups that have a benevolent angle. But it would be weird to have actual nonprofits mixed in with the regular YC startups. The priorities would be so different; it would throw us all off to have to be switching gears when we talked to them.

As for the spare time question, that was supposed to be a thoughtful answer. That's what I spend most of the time on that I don't spend on YC. From what I've seen of startup founders, there is no pattern to what they do in their spare time. Most have eclectic interests, if that counts as a pattern.
You're right for the vast majority, but Google does make a few exceptions. One of my friends has no college degree but was hired by Google as a programmer almost entirely based on his rank on the competitive programming site TopCoder.
The avg for the last YC batch was 24.5. Range: 19 to 35.
I myself like dogs better than most other humans for the opposite reason: they're more transparent and less full of it.
Leave it to an essayist to assume the audience knows long != thoughtful.
As promised, I have posted the answers to my blog.

http://blog.clutterme.com/2007/09/interview-with-paul-graham...

If anyone else would like to be interviewed feel free to e-mail me at mark [dot] molckovsky [at] gmail.com
Do you have the range for applicants?
24 and 26 (me).
24.5 mean or median?
It's huge. Roughly 12 to 80.
I never tried IILWY. I think, as Blored mentioned, that the problem here is their presentation. At the same time the quality of this videop is poor, so that is working against them. Maybe we need to see a good presentation b4 we can judge. That being said, I still think that online dating stuff is for teenagers and really old people. Anyone in the middle can do fairly ok by wearing a bleu shirt (most attractive color to women), a nice watch, going to a bar and shut up. You will find soon more women trying to figure you out, then you can find online.
I checked it out and don't care for it.

Komodo Edit felt much more like a text editor with syntax highlighting than a full fledged IDE such as Netbeans or RadRails. Although, I suppose you may like it if you're used to using something like Textmate to code in.
You're being pretty dogmatic about what music is...

You may be right that, in some respects, "cultural objects are substantively different than news articles", but not in ways that are germane to this argument:

"The news is largely valued for its accuracy, timeliness, and topical relevance to a reader. Music and other cultural objects are valued for their enjoyment, which is contingent on individual personal preferences."

I addressed this in an earlier response..."personal enjoyment" of music is inexorable from "timeliness" and "relevance."

I get more "personal enjoyment" from John Zorn than anyone else, but I don't wanna hear it when I'm making out with my girl, or at a club.

Think about the success of mood/circumstance specific mix CD's like "Ibiza Club" or "Ellington for Lovers"...

Musical preferences have a lot more to them than "people like you also like"...

Also, with all the choice available, it's easy to overestimate people's desire to even HAVE choice.

Finally, I am imagining a more sophisticated metadata model that is not just about creating categories for things. I don't really have the details on that, though ;-)
I like cats better than humans, because they know to leave each other the fuck alone.
..or read too much Dilbert, for that matter. They both capitalize on the fact that honesty is liberating and hence fun.

My take on this is that tact should be the default in any relationship, but if you have a true interest in it, you should try and learn to what extent the other person can take honesty, and relax protocols accordingly for a more authentic communication. It takes empathy and tact to do this well.

I tend to gravitate towards people with a sense of humour, esp. an ability to laugh at themselves, and avoid fragile egos like the plague if I can help it. Then again, I expect some prudent distance from strangers until I have somehow cued them/welcome them/asked them to tell me their opinions about my stuff.
but how long until we can produce the "perfect" progeny...that is the question. How long until we can eliminate all the bad genes?
Anyway, it is sad that our world is more like the former than like the latter.
Palm Foleo Was a Bad Idea from the Start
Most cats have no empathy for anything. I don't like these any more than lizards or flies. They're cute and fun when they're young and playful though.
Distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs
screencast suggestions?
I'm launching an app soon and think a screencast would be very useful for users. I'm looked at demogirl.com but our users are going to be middle aged men using the service for business purposes...molly's peppy voice probably isn't a good fit. any other good services out there? or any good free software to do this myself? preferably for a mac?
Steve Ballmer Recruits HR Person with a Golf Club
Lisa Brummell tells Business Week how Steve Ballmer "convinced" her to take on an HR position she didn't want by smashing a golf club to bits in her office, during a meeting. Interesting recruiting technique.
This is what happens when you lend money to poor people
StumbleUpon Phenomenon : An In Depth Look At A Social Networking Giant
I know the sample size is small, but how did the +30 people compare to their younger peers, in terms of productivity/execution, dealing with adversity, etc? Any noticeable difference in character due to age?
I recently used http://www.shinywhitebox.com/home/home.html for this very purpose. I did a very simple demo of our application with me talking, merely for the purpose of showing a remote colleague what we were doing. Worked great.

If you go here: http://seankelly.tv/videos/tools-of-the-trade/ you'll see a great post about some good tools. This fellow created a nice cast of different web development frameworks that's become a must-see on the web. Might even post it here as a separate item for folks.
I think you're just rationalizing here. My response would be: sleazy it is, but if it's what it takes to make it succeed, it's your choice to make. Besides, it's not sure at all you'll eventually use ads; they are not the only way to monetize a site. So why move there before it's really worth it?
Better Web App Development--a video comparison of web frameworks [VIDEO]
Yes, it's an online dating site that turns the whole thing into an outright game.

Invites:
http://www.iminlikewithyou.com?invite_code=TOLCR
http://www.iminlikewithyou.com?invite_code=UMKKL
http://www.iminlikewithyou.com?invite_code=IJAHU
http://www.iminlikewithyou.com?invite_code=KKNUF
http://www.iminlikewithyou.com?invite_code=RAJAU
As a devoted owner of three of them, I can tell you that you're quite wrong about that; cats are highly sensitive creatures, and have plenty of empathy. They're also amongst the most conscientiously polite creatures around; if one watches cats interact, there are precise and elaborate manners around interaction, and stepping out of line earns a claw in the nose regardless of hierarchy. (Indeed, one of my lads seems to be personally offended by feline rudeness.) I believe that the former traits lead directly to the latter - to be honest, sometimes I think felines have more highly evolved social interaction than humans.

Don't confuse prey-defeating behaviour with cruelty, either. Cats rely on their senses and have less-than-wonderful immune systems; getting bitten in the face by a mouse could potentially knock out their ability to successfully track their next prey for longer than they can survive without. The elaborate batting/playing is actually defensive behaviour - she needs that mouse to stop moving before she severs its spine.

++ Indeed, I believe that empathy varies inversely with preferred proximity, both between species and within them. Dogs are pack creatures, and the members of the pack will often treat each other abominably; the incidence of sociopathy in humans skyrockets in inner cities; sensitive beings tend to be more empathic, but also to be introspective, shy, reserved...
Sucker? Who's drinking the Heineken? :)
What was your last job?
Why aren't you there. Mine was a jr VB.net dev job that paid about $15hr. I decided that I was better off freelancing for rent and doing a startup than that.
...and if you're listing a cell phone number, make sure your phone is charged and not silent!
The two main differences are that the older guys tend to be better presenters, and more tied down geographically.
You are talking about different things: chengmi talks about 'hotness' ranking numbers at the left of the links, while rwebb talks about the 'votes' ranking letters at the right.

I myself was confused by this AA BBB thing, but I suppose your target audience knows better?
Actually, what you should have asked is "Who can get into a bar or club", since I can get alcohol any day of the week, if I wanted to :)
> It takes empathy and tact to do this well.

It also takes time.
wow - awesome resources. thanks very much. that second one is legit!
This was an example of the power of plain text. I don't think anyone has much doubt about how to find the comments in news.yc or reddit.
Those of us not governed by inane US laws?
I think it would be better to align the vote arrows vertically, like in reddit and here, rather than putting the down arrow at the right of the up one.
I like Rails. Works well for quick CRUD apps, especially when combined with ActiveScaffold.

But trying to dig into the source of the framework is a bit hairy. I'm a fan of AOP myself so I generally like to see it, but I always get a bit confused looking through the Ruby/Rails/ActiveScaffold code. Pylons, TurboGears, SQLAlchemy, Elixir and other Python-based frameworks seem easier to grok to me.
> I cannot stand fucking liars.

Keep your trousers zipped and you'll be fine...

Everybody lies. The most successful liars are the ones who can hoodwink themselves - if you can convince yourself that you don't lie, you have carte blanche to foist off any other bullshit you can dream up on anyone gullible enough to swallow it. As a corollary, one should direct most of one's suspicion at the conspicuously honest...
heh. Sometimes I wish. i mean, since i was 18 (and was in college) I've known kids 21 and up....So if we wanted a six pack it was there. But only once did we ever get into a club, and I never was desperate enough to dish out $100 for a fake
How do Skype and bittorrent achieve that?
For PG: Outside of the internet, what would you say is another disruptive technology platform that is worthy of investigation?
He could always ask them after accepting (or even rejecting).
If I would have had the spare $1300 for the printers + magnetic strip reader/writer plus an oddly calibrated internal risk calculus I would have really been in business.
Uh-oh, another reddit deja vu. xkcd is consistently great, so why don't we all just subscribe to the RSS feed, rather than racing to post every new entry here?
The semantic web platform is still in its infancy. My cofounder is developing semantic web applications for a university's engineering department. They want to use it to catalog engineering parts and allow for an algorithm to determine the parts needed for a project based on set specifications. At least that is my understanding of the project.

Right now, the semantic web is very vaporous because it is an underutilized platform. If the platform is adopted more readily it could allow for software to process data more intelligently for nearly any industry. Essentially, it has potential assuming that it is adopted.

Although, I think it will be a long time before anyone outside of academia or commercial industry will find it useful.
More like what should happen. ;)
Congratulations, you're one data point.
NetApp Sues Sun for ZFS Patent Infringement and Appeals to Hackers to Understand
I've noticed the same thing about top-tier chemists. Grad schools tend to have a good mix of Ivy kids and others, but the most brilliant scientists always seem to come from some mid-level state university or a little liberal arts college.

Success at the highest levels of scientific research takes an odd mix of creativity, intuition, and intellegence that has little to do with academic success in high school or undergrad.
41 (first startup (architecture) @ 30) & 33
Lots of talk about 'healthy white males' and 'guys' on news.yc tonight. I understand women are in the minority, but we do exist.
Correction: I just re-checked the other post I was referring to and they said "healthy young male" not "healthy white male". My apologies for the misquote.
From what I can tell, being a YC alum has similar benefits to being a Harvard (or other Ivy League) alum.
I think the better metric is

age / (# of startups)

in my case: 36/3 = 12