skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The OSes include codecs, but will Firefox use them?

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTML/Element/Video
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/04/firefox-html5-video-wit...

(Extra credit for the word "gnutarded".)
I feel as if rejection here shouldn't really be a motivating factor! There should be so many reasons above proving YC wrong to be a motivated entrepreneur. But whatever gets you going I guess...
I spent 20 seconds on that page but was unable to understand what dashler is about.
How cool is it that acceptances and rejections are discussed publicly?!? Bravo!
What would be interesting to know is the comparison of rejection/interview/acceptance across the various programs.
if $$$ is a problem, can either bum around relatives and see if you can convince them to give you the loan or get one of those 10-30K @ 0% APR for 9 months credit card offers.

That way you'll be able to do your thing
I usually attend its a great meetup. Although i think the bayarea is a bit boring compared to NYC..make it really boring
The YC Passed Phase 1 thread
So...who got in? and if you can say, what are you going to build?
f459a7d636ac85cdcd680b135bcfc521++
Thanks for the feedback.

Without the video it's very difficult to explain. If you care to go back, follow instructions in the "get started" box on the upper right.
Thats the MD5 we got as well with the website. Oddly, when I did `echo "We're sorry … Y Combinator Staff" | md5`, I got a different sum (f807496243cc18b53929b313c410f64a).

//edit: The website seems to strip out blank lines, while echoing it doesn't. Solves that (trivially minor) issue I suppose.
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The big problem for me had always been speaking anxiety. I was terrified to get up in front of people and talk. And then, suddenly, I was not. I have no idea how to induce this change in others, but I assure you that it made a far bigger improvement in my speaking style than any change in intonation.

If you want to do what the article says, just listen to someone British for a while and then try reading some words aloud, enunciating carefully. Try to be as "accentless" as possible, whatever what may mean in your area. This becomes habit after a little while.
I think second to the valuable networking opportunities YC provides, the money that could be spent not worrying about rent and the bills for at least a couple months is not insignificant. I know personally it's not a huge deal to have that money and we're continuing regardless of rejection, but that kind of money could possibly shave off a few months of development time where I don't have to worry so much about classes and contract work to pay for stuff at the same time, while I would also have an opportunity to work in person with the other developer in the group...someone who lives across the country from me (but that I've gotten to know well over the years online).

I know we could get $10k+ from other sources, but when it's not from a venture firm like YC and it's instead from our own savings and from friends/family like we have considered before, it's a lot harder to accept.
I'd be shocked if the emails weren't all identical -- even if it only took five minutes to compose each email, that would be a week of work.

And after all, for 99% of applications there's really no need to say anything different. For the 1% where some extra explanation is useful, they can send separate emails later.
This is pretty cool. How come stuff like this gets 3 points and TechCrunch speculations get >30?
Correction: you haven't beaten the 18/19/20/whatever year-old shits...yet. Give us a few years to be 24 :)

Age does matter. People of different age have different priorities, bottom line. Our 52 year-old has children our age and is much less concerned with the exciting opportunities engendered through YC and much more focused on just getting the business off the ground with something to show for it.
You mean the Hollywood that is filled with lots of crime and prostitution and illicit drug dealing where there aren't any tourists? ;)

(Sorry, I live in LA. Can't help it.)
I was thinking there might be a few strata of e-mails... like "sorry" then "sooo close" then maybe a "waitlist" e-mail if some other group drops out.
Psh, I dunno what you're talking about. I think Hollywood and I mean Zac Efron and Miley Cyrus and all the stars.
It's entirely about experience, and the threshold for each person is different. And as experience goes, there's always new challenges. You might not be nervous now, but I bet if you got put in front of a large enough crowd (think Obama-sized) it would come back. But even then it's about experience, you learn to make it work for you.
Rejected (again).

But the frustrating part is feeling like my application wasn't read. I mean they didn't even check out my website?
The site seems to map purchases down to the individual address of the customer (you just have to zoom in a while to get there). As a potential zappos customer, I can't help but feel a little weirded out that my order information is so public. I can't really think of any real security violations (other then a really convoluted phishing app), but it'd be interesting to see if they can even legally report this data under their user agreement policy
Credit cards aren't a good idea. After 9 months, if things don't work out, you have some really high interest debt.

Why not just save some money for a few months (or however long it takes)? If you want it badly enough, waiting shouldn't be a problem...
Really? I guess I use facebook and twitter in different ways than you.

For me, facebook is about connecting with people from high school, sharing photos, and keeping tabs on random family members.

Twitter, on the other hand, is about communication with core friends and keeping track of companies/services I'm interested in.

The two are very distinct for me, and I really appreciate the separation.
If you want to learn how to speak without doing potentially stressful presentations in front of audiences that matter (professors, bosses) or spending $$ on Dale Carnegie courses or not-too-effective audiences (your cat), I highly recommend Toastmasters.

Toastmasters is highly effective because most everyone there wants to help you improve your public speaking skills. It is an environment for learning and failing without consequences. You can't learn public speaking without an audience, and the Toastmasters club audience is probably the best audience for newbies starting out (e.g. the experienced speakers there emphathise and help you because they were in your position months or years ago)

If anything, you will learn to stop using fillers (umming/ahhing). Pauses ... can be so much more effective). Why? Because someone at each meeting sits there and counts everyone's verbal fidgeting. What can't be measured, can't be improved. Add in public shame and that goes a long, long way. To this day, I am shocked at people two/three levels above me who obviously never worked on their verbal or even non-verbal tics. If you practice, Toastmasters builds unconscious competence in eliminating certain things that may distract the audience (umming, arm swinging, clapsed hands).

The best part of Toastmasters is called Table Topics - where you have to give an impromptu answer to a question. 1-2 minutes. Like some public speaking opportunities are, off the cuff and unrehearsed.

After every speech you give, members will write encouraging comments and feeback on little slips of paper. I still have those little slips of paper in an album somewhere. They still make me feel good. Our club had a video camera - I had all my speeches videotaped. Wow, the camera does not lie - my posture sucked and I rocked my arms [all distractions from your speaking]. And, it is clearly visible to see the progress you make from speech #1 (your icebreaker) to #10.

I highly recommend finding a club that you like (not all clubs are alike) - especially one where no one from your workplace will be (a freer environment to learn public speaking).

I dove into the Toastmasters program. I put a lot into it (VP Membership, mentoring, contests) and got a lot from it. Lastly, I've made some friends (mostly entrepreneurial) through TM that I would not likely have encountered in my normal life. TM brings together some pro-active individuals.

Book recommendation (the best book I've found on public speaking - great because it has so many different viewpoints/perspectives) : http://www.amazon.com/Speaking-Secrets-Masters-Techniques-Pr...
Even the best application will max out at [choose-your-pessimism]% chance of success. Apply elsewhere and often. And apply for YC again next time. Max out quality and quantity of applications for funding. If it's a good idea, you'll get your money/support you need.
That's actually quite shitty.
It probably isn't the actual address. GMap just doesn't allow you to put fuzzy points in, I have had difficulty with that before.

So if you did try to trace down that person you would be knocking on a random door asking about a shoe they don't own.
Hmm I have no background but how can they determine what a 'term' is for the purposes of frequency without some form of tokenization unless they are using an arbitrary maximum length on 'term' sizes and are eliminating small terms.
Would you have preferred "You use a niche browser on a niche operating system which our analytics indicates less than 1 out of 10,000 visitors use, accordingly, we're spending our engineering resources elsewhere and I would not expect resolution of this anytime soon. Toodles"?
I would never do a hackintosh for anything I was serious about, its not so hard to get going but you are bound to run into nasty driver problems.
Moral of the story: keep most of the country as a control group for a while. It's the scientific way.

Seriously, this article wouldn't apply if only the government meddling was on a smaller, more controlled scale.
70% usage of Zappos is women.
I have no doubt that YC provides great networking opportunities. My question was in direct response to nanexcool's comment that the cash would have given him the chance.
Does your startup have a business model? Can you try to grow it while generating revenue at the same time?
I think the pessimists are missing one thing. India and China's economy, while hurt, still have positive GDP growth. While the US might continue to crater, 2.5 billion people are going to have higher standards of living next year, and the year after. That didn't happen in the depression.
Unless the process has changed, nobody has been accepted yet -- they've just been shortlisted and invited to the final interviews.
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first time applying and first rejection. i am a little disappointed, i feel very passionately about my idea and was hoping pg+co would be too - but ah well, it's going to happen anyway to happen regardless. best of luck to all and hope that everyone moves forward with their ideas as well.
Yep, I loved that - cracked up every time he pointed out a bug.

A great book on Romero and Carmack's journey at id: http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu...

Kind of unrelated, but the second time I watched it I was struck by the fact that there's hardly any cursing by John Romero or anyone watching him play.
Tips for hacking your speaking skills:

1) Most importantly, practice it out loud. Do it about 20 times and you'll be comfortable enough to deliver it with only glances at note cards. 90% of being nervous comes from not knowing what you're going to do or say.

2) Second most important, make it relevant to your audience. Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation with someone you knew wasn't interested in what you had to say? It's the only thing that to this day still makes me nervous. I've given network neutrality speeches to college students in liberal arts programs, and the thing that works here is heavy use of metaphors. I had the single most attractive girl from class walk up to me at a bar later that week and she told me that she told all her friends how serious network neutrality is. I was baffled.

3) There are actually a set of rules you can follow, giving presentations can be seen as more of a science now (even the part about making your presentations entertaining is written in there). Take a class in school, or two. You really need to learn how to get up in front of large crowds and talk confidently about something. Don't let fear be your reason not to do it.
If you are smart, you will be able to succeed anyway. Somehow it escapes us that companies can be built without being in SV and knowing everyone there. Sure, it would be a heck of a lot easier if we were there and did make connections.

I'm not sure what exactly lead up to this scenario, how MS was able to talk with IBM execs, but you have to give MS credit for securing this business deal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcWjOodAtoE

I hope that some of those who weren't accepted will figure out a way to have a ragingly successful business. It would make for a great story.
touche, I changed the title
The ONE thing I never liked was the corny part where they did joke of the day. It's not funny when you're there trying to give a joke. It's like asking someone to tickle you.

Other than that, Toastmasters is really good. Don't need it if your school gives classes, but it never hurts.

By the way, I can vouch for Owen's speaking abilities =)
Picporta - Automatic Image Understanding
Things like this go hand-in-hand with Time Warner's bandwidth capping, etc.
Just keep in mind all the now-famous-and-fabulously-successfully people who faced rejection -- often repeated -- earlier in their career.
Sure sounds like open source. Many eyes, comfortable/safe environment, continuous improvement. My club (http://ottawatoastmasters.com) has another impromptu speaking opportunity called "As I See It" which is closer to actual debating than Table Topics (2 people argue for a topic and 2 against, there's a 1.5 minute preso from each, then a 30 second rebuttal from each). I'm totally addicted to that part.
Thanks. I'm always game for a good debate. As I mentioned, my thesis-in-progress (T-minus 3 months...fingers crossed!) is in a related field (evolutionary dynamics/computational biochemistry), but I used to be more involved in protein structure/bioinformatics back in the day (worked, for a time, in the lab that maintains ecogene.org).

The last debate I had regarding convergent evolution of protein folds got rather heated. This is one of those classic problems that can't be approached without some amount of hand-waving, and depending on which way you wave, you can arrive at different results. In some respects it boils down to Levinthal's paradox, except with evolutionary moves in place of topological ones. The one big unknown that you would need to find before you could make any sort of educated approach at the issue is what fraction of all possible protein chains of a certain size have stable, fast-folding structural minima. If that number is high, then short hops from one to the other could very likely result in convergence.

As for the SCOP/PFAM part of the story, the 25-30% "twilight zone" for sequences yielding related structures has a counterpart with structures that are topologically related but with low (or I've even seen cases of essentially no) sequence identity. That is, if you look at a group in PFAM, then take all of the members with structures in that group, gather all of the corresponding SCOP groups, add the members from the SCOP groups, then for each of those look for related PFAMs or other sequences...essentially, what you're doing is a structure informed PSI-BLAST (sort of what ESPRESSO is to T-COFFEE).

Now, if you attempt to fill the gaps from lack of structures by running each of your sequences through something like Skolnics TASSER threading algorithm, and using the best predicted folds to grow your group, this is how you can use distant sequence and structure homologies to construct "master" fold groups. This is, roughly speaking, how the 800-1300 number is arrived at.

Admittedly, the more structures we solve and genomes we sequence, the better this sort of technique will get. In many ways, this is biology's analog to cosmology and the big bang: we can look further and further out into space, but at some point, we can know what happened any earlier than some small time after the big bang without recreating those conditions. Likewise, we can sequence and solve more structures, but I don't doubt that at some point we will hit a wall and need to start attempting to recreate abiogenesis.

Interesting times!
Imagine the possibilities if we gathered all the troops (rejected troops that is) and brainstormed one sweet startup. Not realistic but how cool would that be?
[Warning: Spoiler]

> Of course, you can't offer the guy infinity dollars. So the interviewee is forced to either settle on a real world number—as much as the player can afford—or delve into marginal utility theory

I don't think that as much as the player can afford is a real world answer, unless it means as much as the player can afford to lose. There is a 50% chance he'll walk away with $1. As Wall Street have proven, it's not about maximizing expected returns, it's about optimizing returns within bounds of acceptable risk.
Note that the opinion considers this exact analogy, on page 13. The question in this case is whether Google's product placements on search result pages cause "consumer confusion." The distinction between this case and the shop is that, with product placement, according to the court, everyone knows what's going on, so there is no "consumer confusion." In contrast, does everyone know that a Google ad resulting from a search may be unrelated to the search? Maybe we HN readers do, but the question is whether the "average consumer" would.

Nevertheless, the court did not go nearly so far as the above commenter suggested. All it said was that Google's product placements were potentially more confusing than the prior 1-800 case. The product placements might not be confusing nonetheless.
Where is the search box on Hacker News?
Rejected too here. =) But, the disappointment feeling is not as huge as i thought it would be.

Maybe the YC process itself has been beneficial in terms of helping us refining the idea, and also maybe because we have agreed to give our best shot on it, and whatever happen, we'll keep charging ahead. After all, Colonel Sanders got 1009 rejections and still came up as successful entrepreneur.

So, please wait for our launch announcement on HN sometime in short future! Good luck all!
I'll be moving to the bay area as well, wish I could have been getting the experience of the YC sessions, but this sounds great
Lifehacker - Is Thunderbird, Desktop Email Dying Out?
Maybe next time you could give them a [yourwebsite]/yc URL so you can check the server logs and be sure one way or the other.
Well, I don't care whether its a motivating factor or not. I'm simply not letting it act as a demotivating factor.

Looking forward to all the "YC reject: launching xxxx " threads in the coming months!!
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Yeah, but I was guessing nanexcool's reason for saying that was similar to mine and it turns out I wasn't too far off ;)

I doubt many people are just going to give up right now after rejection even (and especially) if they had a good idea, it's just that YC would have helped a ton.
Does anyone else feel as if the rejection letter did nothing but fuel the fire to get moving on their Idea? This might very well be a good thing.
But the API is HTTP and the news stories are syndicated across a hundred different sites. How do you limit the crawlers under this scheme? It seems like any serious attempt to limit crawling will require major software redeployment, cooperation of crawlers, widespread authentication, or some combination of these. Is there actually a feasible way to do this without breaking the web?
> You really need to learn how to get up in front of large crowds and talk confidently about something. Don't let fear be your reason not to do it.

One hack. Go to a large public meeting and force yourself to ask a question at the microphone. That is a form of public speaking.
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Wow, this is great. A web app ABOUT the contest. How meta! Seriously though, we are really honored that Wired would support the contest like this.

And just to clarify, the entries were not limited to GPL: "All software you write has to be licensed under the MIT, New BSD or the GPL family of licenses."
Reznor's Innovative Run Continues With Nine Inch Nails iPhone App
Hard to see how it could be a good thing. The added desire te succeed, if any, will likely be short term.
with deliberate symbolism if you catch it

Your business consists mostly of gambling halls?

You know that someone has stolen the operating funds for your entire organization, but you must keep it a secret lest all of you lose face?
At one point I remember having every form of input device I could find hooked up to AutoCad when working as a plans architect (high class draftsman/flunky) A huge GTECO digitizer, two touch/membrane keypads, The IBM keyboard (one with twice as many function keys...) a mouse and a trackball and I still wanted more! Sigh...
I think that we all wish that we could get the YC sessions, but we actually have a lot of cool people show up to our meetups that you can talk with and learn from. I always have at least 3 or 4 great conversations that I learn from.

We have guys who're working on their 4th and 5th startups. We have guys attend who have exited and are looking for the next go around. We have startup owners that have been in business for several years.

A lot of guys are just starting out on their own, and are interested in feedback on their apps, or whatever they're working on. And, people generally buy pitchers of beer, so if you're broke, you don't have to worry about it. :)
Really? Five times?
The blog world seems to thrive on rhetorical flourishes (like Paul said to mainly to get attention and page views).

Using Compete/Quantcast stats as the only measure of success of a startup does not seem fair. Friendfeed has fewer users, but I notice that the users active on Friendfeed seem to be a lot more engaged (conversations, likes etc) than a typical Facebook/ Twitter user. I'd rather grow slowly by adding engaged users which is what Friendfeed is doing. They seem to be in for the long haul, which is a refreshing attitude (different from a lot of other companies who are looking to add as many new users as possible quickly and then sell at the first given opportunity).

Either way, Twitter and Facebook are not direct competitors to Friendfeed, atleast not right now (Facebook might be some day).