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Title: Some good advice that can apply to any aspiration
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Too much stuff is a bad thing. Everything I owned in 2000 would fit in the back of my station wagon. If it wouldn't fit in the wagon, it was out. Now I'm married, and covered up with stuff. When you get married, it's custom for people to give you more stuff. Most of it you don't need. Or want. But you can't just... | 105 |
Title: Go to sleep 2 hours earlier than you normally do!<p>It's easy to fall into the sleep deprivation trap and think you're getting more out of yourself, even when you're really not. I've always found the need to sleep at all very frustrating, so this lesson is hard-learned for me.<p>I'm still in love with my 36 hour... | 43 |
Title: Peter Norvig does a very good job of writing a spelling corrector similar to the way google's works (although much simpler). This is done step by step in python.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: I just launched FEEDJIT. It took me about 10.5 hours (4pm until 2:30am) from the first time my hand touched the keyboard until I fixed the last bug and went live. I got a question on the Seattle Tech Startup list about how I spent my 10.5 hours. So here's a brief summary....
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: Not sure if this has been posted here or not, but I just came across it browsing Norvig's site. Thought I would share it.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: It was worth putting up with the sycophancy of many of the commenters here who seem to participate only to impress PG, their would-be benefactor...for a while. It was worth it while the stories focused on the niche we are all interested in, startups. The change to more general-purpose news, the attempt to re-cre... | 48 |
Title: aul is a great guy and has built a huge following in the startup community. I have a lot of respect for him and what he has done. Y Combinator is a great story. Paul agreed to share some details with me. Here it is live and uncut.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Rant from Zed Shaw of Mongrel Fame
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Observations about startup life and manager after working for 10 months at a small venture-capital funded startup.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: 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.<p>1) Has YC ever considered investing in a not-for-profit start-up?<p>2) To your recollection, are... | 42 |
Title: I'm 36, married with numerous kids, career blub programmer with BigCo, and I've had enough.<p>Friday I notified my boss I would not be there come March, and this weekend my wife and I started work on our new project (I'd forgotten how well we work together). This gives us six months to prepare our family for lif... | 43 |
Title: "Hi there. Sorry to bother you, but you asked me
to send you an email when Jottit was out for you
to take a look at. Well, after a lot of hard work
by my creators, Simon Carstensen and Aaron Swartz,
I'm happy to say that things are finally ready.<p>Take a look at<p><a href="http://jottit.com/" rel="nofollow"... | 51 |
Title: Post novel startup ideas as comments and see how many karma points it receives. Who knows, one might be developed and you can take credit for thinking of the idea first.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: [With apologies for my long-windedness]<p>This question was inspired by the post regarding the CMU Professor (Pausch) that is dying of cancer and is facing death with an amazingly positive attitude.<p>Specifically, there was a thread started by jaed:<p>"It's sad that we have to be reminded of it, but this just r... | 57 |
Title: 15 tips for kickstarting your web project. Almost 40 shopping sites listed at bottom.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Friday afternoon is Women & Entrepreneurship, a speaker series with sixty girls... and me. <p>Today we had a panel of five women, all at roughly the vice president level of their respective organizations. Three were from Wall Street, one from NBC, and the last from Campbell Soup.<p>As I walked to class in th... | 56 |
Title: For a long time I've treated Javascript as a "second class citizen" and eschewed it in favor of Scheme, Java, Ruby, and (lately) Erlang. Now that I'm managing and coding with not just server-side hackers, but hardcore UX hackers as well, I'm realizing that I would like to become a solid Javascript developer as ... | 46 |
Title: Startups face one primary challenge: To never run out of cash. So when projecting costs, we heeded Guy's advice that "the three most powerful words you can utter at a board meeting are, 'We beat projections.'" This convinced us to develop the worst possible financial model that could still be used to raise money... | 54 |
Title: This is what we've been working on nights and weekends since February, and we hope the site explains itself.<p>We have applied for YC program for this winter and still are waiting for a response, but since the coding is done for a modest ver 1.0, we see no reason to keep it in the basement any longer. Therefore ... | 51 |
Title: Hi everyone,<p>Quick question: what do YC applicants prefer - dedicated servers, co-location, VPS, regular hosting plans or somethings else? Where are they being hosted at? Are there any major hub of startup hosting?<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Recently, a few have asked, "Why apply? X problem would keep me from getting accepted." If you don't mind, I'd like to explain one possible answer by telling you about my experience of applying to YCombinator.<p>I first wanted to apply to YCombinator's Summer 2007 cycle with the intention of making teachers' j... | 113 |
Title: "The new, simple way to customize and control your myspace profile"
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: This is just a prototype, but wanted to get feedback whether we're accepted or not. What do you think? <p>
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Hey, what are the best blogs/websites you read to learn more about good design and usability? I'm sure this could help a few of us here.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: OK, I'll kick things off. In our case, we have a US founder and two UK founders, a further two US employees, and a UK employee.. We started life as a UK limited company, and then incorporated a US Delaware parent co. So now the UK company is wholly owned by the Delaware corporation, and all the shareholders hold... | 48 |
Title: Having been here long enough to witness one funding cycle I'd like to offer some preemptive advice to those of you who aren't invited to interview in a few weeks. <p>For the record, I did apply last round and was not invited. I did not apply for this funding cycle.<p>1). <i>Don't take it personally.</i> <p>YC wa... | 49 |
Title: If you applied for this cycle, please enter your email address in the email field on your profile. You can edit your profile by clicking on the name in the upper right when you're logged in.<p>When responding to applications we use the email address of the username under which each was submitted. So if you hav... | 50 |
Title: "The best place to work, if you want to start a startup, is probably a startup. In addition to being the right sort of experience, one way or another it will be over quickly. You'll either end up rich, in which case problem solved, or the startup will get bought, in which case it it will start to suck to work th... | 44 |
Title: After reading the article on fonts, I thought it might be kind of fun to share screen shots of our working environment. Just remember to edit out anything sensitive!
Upvote: | 49 |
Title:
An oft lamented consern is the difficulty in finding a co-founder. Next to this is the regular discussion of what kind of founder to get, how to know you've got a good one... and all the possible problems that can happen when founders don't agree.<p>Well, I'm am old man at almost 40 and I've spent the last 18 ... | 112 |
Title: I've done some research on how many founders successful technology companies have. Here are the numbers for 100 publicly traded companies<p><pre><code> +--------------------+-----------+
| number of founders | frequency |
+--------------------+-----------+
| 1 | 40 |
| ... | 232 |
Title: I realized this morning what Google's Android initiative reminded me of. Not the iPhone, DOS.<p>If you look at the handheld development market today, it looks disturbingly like the 8-bit computer market from the early 1980s:<p>- multiple incompatible APIs<p>- multiple chipsets<p>- multiple peripheral mechanism<... | 40 |
Title: Is he "famous" for no reason? He speaks at web 2.0 conferences, there are stories about him on news.yc all the time... (Yes, I'm using the word "famous" liberally.) Why? What has he done exactly?<p>Here's what I've got. Feel free to add more. He:<p>a) worked on rss 1.0 when he was 13. woopty-doo<p>b) the... | 48 |
Title: Come on, you know you want to.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: with the exception of programming/technical books, what are your faves? <p>Mine: lotr,ugly americans,the new new thing....<p>
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I've heard the argument (also made by PG) that there will always be room for more successful web startups. Do you think it's true?<p>Sometimes I get the feeling that the internet has gotten too crowded. Every idea I think of, someone else has done.<p>But it's more than that. I also sometimes think that mainstrea... | 44 |
Title: Scalable database as a service.<p>My previous employer Powerset was an early tester, good to see it finally out in the world.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Wishing you and yours a very happy holidays and a great New Year.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Some pretty harsh words...
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: -Get ready for high highs and low lows, and practice keeping yourself in the middle or you'll never get good work done. You're going to be pretty sure your company is dying at least once a month, and it usually isn't. This is very important and very difficult to learn.<p>-Focus on the product, especially in th... | 124 |
Title: I currently consider taking on another job, but to be honest, I am a bit daunted by the prospect of working 8 hours straight, every day. I have times when I work more, when I get into the flow, but what if I don't? Recently I have read more than once in popular blogs that 2-3 hours of real work per day are more ... | 49 |
Title: You're all over the place. Your current karma is over 8000. How much time do you spend submitting links, etc...? Any tips or tricks?<p>By the way, thanks for the hard work in making the site better.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: We are very excited to announce that Anywhere.FM has been acquired by
imeem (http://www.imeem.com), the leading social media network.<p>Since our launch last August, Anywhere.FM has been dedicated to making
it easy to upload, play, and share your music wherever you go. We have
listened to our users and worked ha... | 70 |
Title: Hi! Want to get some conversations going here. How's your startup doing right now?<p>Any planned launch dates?<p>What's your startup anyway?<p>We're quite busy with ours, we were ready to release a beta, but choose to redesign and refactor things again. What about yours?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I am in my early thirties and honestly, I cant claim to have a good background in math.<p>But, I now have a burning desire to learn it from the ground-up.<p>What are the 'canonical' sources for math, both online and offline? I am lost as to where I should start. I want to have a fundamental, intuitive understand... | 122 |
Title: After reading a codinghorror article I came across this in a comment:<p><i>Good programmers also figure out their best method of self-learning. I'm one of the oddballs that reads the entire manual.</i><p>That struck me as interesting. I know I learn in what's probably quite an unusual way. I'd be interested to... | 79 |
Title: Thanks to a fix by Patrick Collison, utf-8 now seems to work right.
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddab... | 45 |
Title: Just wondering how many people here have been self-funding/bootstrapping their projects and how has that been working for you?<p>Personally, we've been self-funding Openomy (http://www.openomy.com) since it began in mid-2005. Overall, I wouldn't change a thing. We now have 50K+ users, a scalable infrastructure, ... | 42 |
Title: Did I forget to say you may be quizzed on this book on the interview... ;-)
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Massive S3 outage. Seems to affect other AWS services (SDB, SQS) as well.<p>Other AWS services are down too ...
EC2 http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19715&tstart=0
SQS http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19713&tstart=0
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I have always wondered what the drivers were behind motivation. I am sure all of us have experienced setbacks and we have had to re-motivate ourselves every now and then.<p>We have been working on a startup idea for almost an year now. The initial days were fantastic, we were totally convinced we had hit upon a ... | 75 |
Title: Any Hacker News submission that is also on Reddit front page need to be flagged for review or hidden until approved by admin. Exceptions would be (programming,math,science etc).reddit<p>While this won't solve all the fluff related issues, it will still do a lot of good I think.<p>What do you think?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Here's my problem, I know, HTML, CSS, and I'm already learning JavaScript.
The thing is that I want to learn about server side programming, Python, Ruby, etc. But I also need to know DB like SQL.
So where do I start?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I’m trying to get a feel for what a single person’s burn rate would be in the valley. I know the cost of living there is supposed to be among the highest in the US. What can someone in Silicon Valley expect to pay each month in rent, food, utilities, car insurance, and gas?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: This is Ryan from Fuzzwich. Check out the screencast at http://www.fuzzwich.com/animator if you have not already. The Fuzzwich Animator is the start and the foundation of our new online animation studio. We're very excited by the new focus and look forward to inviting everyone to animate in the near future. W... | 47 |
Title: The company I am a part of is in talks with another company and I am wondering if a 3-4 times earnings buyout would be fair?<p>Some background: the Start-up is 8 months old, and is primarily e-commerce based with plans to move into corporate and retail avenues. The growth has been exponential, and we have been p... | 53 |
Title: Previously due to work and other reasons (I have a large amount of windows knowledge) I have been a windows user. This week, my first mac book pro arrived.<p>I'm looking for developer tools and tweaks, and cool programs that I'd know if I was a mac regular. On windows I'd point myself to sysinternals programs, r... | 40 |
Title: I started my programming love life with Apple //c. After that, I've mostly used relatively inexpensive laptops running Linux / school PCs.<p>But I am seeing almost all 'budding hackers' nowadays coding on a Macbook/pro. Startup School is full of Macs!<p>pg said that Mac lets him drag and drop code from vim to re... | 45 |
Title: My question is meant to be open-ended and not limited to programming. My examples:<p>Meta-programming, in ruby (the power of code that creates code, being released from the tyranny of typing)<p>Social psychology (Social proof, hacks for relating to people, hacks for appealing to the opposite sex, hacks for readi... | 42 |
Title: Would you mind quantifying some numbers based on the TC front page treatment - before and after?<p>Pageviews?
New users?
Submissions?
Comments?
Anything else interesting?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I'll start it off:<p>- O'Reilly's Python in a Nutshell<p>- A 12" PB (I use my old PB as a more capable "kimble" and for quick SSHing into my servers)<p>- And to preempt the half-dozen comments suggesting them: Founders at Work & Hackers and Painters
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: A collection of some old methods, revisited. After looking back and trying to figure out what separates one [productive] day from the next [unproductive day], here are some commonalities I've noticed.
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: We've made the startup school application reader import karma scores from News.YC, so we can consider karma as a factor. (It is a meaningful one, because it shows your contributions are valued by your peers.) It matches people based on email addresses, so if you have high karma on News.YC and you're applying t... | 42 |
Title: So, what is your favorite startup related quote?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: A Quick Way To See If a website is down for Everyone or Just You written by Twitter developer Alex Payne
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: Since Mary Shelley published 'Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus' in the early part of the nineteenth century, there's been an awful lot of sci-fi written. Which books do you recommend and why?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: My partner and I will be launching our startup in a week or two. We will subsequently be moving to San Jose, CA on June 8th to pursue our venture full time. We will be staying at a great 4 bedroom single home in a fantastic area.<p>Our startup is small, just the two of us. So that means we will have two rooms to... | 68 |
Title: What crazy, wonderful ideas would you implement if your income came from a different source (such as a day job), and, as such, you simply wanted to make things people want, but didn't have the pressure to monetize?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: That's a quote from the movie Gattaca by the main character answering his genetically superior brother's question as to how he beat him in a swimming competition in the ocean.<p>I really like that quote, and thought it was appropriate at a time when YC apps are coming due. Jessica Livingston says in "Founders at... | 49 |
Title: I've been getting a lot of private and public feedback suggesting I stop posting about Hacker News on TechCrunch because it's polluting the community. Do you guys think I'm hurting the site, not helping?
Upvote: | 103 |
Title: Hi, I recently shut down my first startup ever. I am having a really tough time getting over it and starting all over again. A feeling of extreme weakness and failure has taken all over me , clouding my judgement. Any tips on getting back to normalcy would be highly appreciated.
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: the pre-edited version lives here http://blog.auctomatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/bbc6.html
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: I recently read something on A List Apart going against sign up forms, but what about activation emails? Are they a big no no, or a useful tool in the fight against bots? Is there any proof that an activation email actually drives away users?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Prior to coming across Paul's essays I had relegated myself to never being able to have a start up. I'm an Economics major in college right now, and I suppose I assumed a tech start up was for the comp sci guys.<p>Reading Paul's essays along with some other stuff -- like the fact that two of the founders of Auct... | 41 |
Title: T<p>I've been a member of Hacker News (actually Startup News when I joined) for over a year now. I've learned a lot here and been exposed to a lot of interesting ideas. Recently, however, I've often seen the front page have at least 10% of the stories be either more Reddit-worthy or be submissions discussing how... | 42 |
Title: Recently I've been hearing my registrar (GoDaddy.com) getting slammed for domain stealing and other horrors. Though I've never been affected, I figure it's a good idea to become knowledgeable about other best-in-breed services. Can anyone recommend other domain registrars that are great for managing large numb... | 49 |
Title: A picture is worth 1K - 3 * 2^3 words:<p>http://www.hq.usace.army.mil/cepa/pubs/jul00/radar.jpg<p>That's a phased-array radar installation that (I understand) was built to detect Soviet ballistic missiles inbound over the North Pole. Google has more images.<p>The term "Phased Array" has interesting implications... | 62 |
Title: Theory-wise, there's regular languages, context-free grammars, and combinatorial categorial grammars ( http://openccg.sf.net ). But regular + lists seems adequate for most tasks.<p>What sorts of scraping do you find yourself doing?<p>What are your biggest frustrations?<p>What's the coolest hack you've encountere... | 51 |
Title: got a no :(
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I read somewhere that when choosing a language for your start-up you should pick the most powerful language available (e.g. why Viaweb picked lisp). This sounds obvious, but I can't help but feel like if you build a great product using unpopular language X and your competitor builds a slightly (or even significa... | 42 |
Title: Some people reading this are kicking themselves for not having applied to for YC. Some people reading this got rejected yesterday. Some people reading will be rejected in a couple weeks. And all of us have a lot of rejection on the horizon or under our belts.<p>Get used to it. Let's hack the system.<p>Two of... | 56 |
Title: The Department of Homeland Security just extended the Optional Practical Training period that international students gets on their F-1 visa after graduation from 12 to 29 months (for students graduating in science / math / engineering). This should be enough time to get a startup off the ground before having to ... | 56 |
Title: I wrote a "social" site but I'm having a hard time attracting users. What your experiences with promoting your site? Have you successfully started a forum before, and if so, how?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: My friend noticed this: If you login to your tumblr account then manually go to /admin it takes you to the systemwide tumblr admin... wow.
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: Hehe, I made it to TC now how cool is that.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: There's a great online book called "The Hacker's Diet" (http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html) which is a no-bullshit dieting/fitness book written by an engineer with the assumption that the reader is fairly smart and rational. He even has some nifty Excel charts. I lost 50 pounds with his approach... | 119 |
Title: I'm not asking anything, I'm telling.<p>I just wanted to say thanks for organizing this event. Coming from outside the valley, it's a little harder to get access to learn from such high-profile people.<p>I had a wonderful time connecting with different people and hearing their stories and startups. Good luck to ... | 58 |
Title: Everyone has probably read about or seen DHH's talk by now, where he advocates attempting to create small/medium sized, sustainable companies with a simple, direct business model (sell something directly to your customers).<p>A lot of his examples are from 'real world' products (Italian restaurants, say), that c... | 49 |
Title: I know about and have done Toastmasters. Are there any other effective ways to develop my interpersonal abilities, besides reading "How to Make Friends and Influence People" etc?
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: 74 days ago, you said:<p>"the Wufoos are such animals that, on their territory, no one could compete with them, not even Google"<p>I asked:<p>"Can you be a little more specific? Maybe 5 or so bullets. What kinds of things should the rest of us be focusing on to be more Wufoo like competitors. I'd love to be so g... | 45 |
Title: If Android manages to clear the porting obstacles that await it as it's distributed over more than one reference device, and if it manages to deliver a high bar of quality (at least as high as the SDK has shown so far), it could really change the way we live/work. Those are some big ifs ... but some exciting on... | 57 |
Title: If anyone is considering making a YCombinator site search or wants to perform an analysis of historical posts then we've made a dataset available at http://www.xirium.com/ycombinator-news20080424.tar.gz<p>The dataset is 100MB, so only download it if you need it. This dataset may be removed in the next week or so... | 56 |
Title: It has been more than a week since nickb was seen here. Am I the only person worried?<p>He didn't show up in Startup School though he said he would. I hope he is okay.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I am new to Python/Django and have been hacking away happily with it. Any good tutorials out there that google isn't picking up in the first few pages or so? I know it's not as popular as Rails (yet!) to have crazy books with scratch to painted up pretty sites, but any good learn by doing examples out there (bes... | 67 |
Title: Just wondering whether you can provide numbers for the companies you've funded - such as how many of them got acquired, how many of them got VC funding, how many closed their shop, how many are still running well and making some good money etc.
thanks.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I'm curious to find out what grads from CS programs are getting offered. The last post by Spolsky seemed to say that MSFT is offering starting salaries close to 6 figures.<p>s this accurate? Can anyone corroborate? If you're graduating and have offers on the table, would you mind posting a ball-park figure of... | 45 |
Title: I'm looking into software load balancers and so far the 4 that seem to standout are:<p>- Nginx (http://nginx.net/)
- Pound (http://www.apsis.ch/pound/)
- HAProxy (http://haproxy.1wt.eu/)
- Perlbal (http://www.danga.com/perlbal/)<p>Does anybody have experience using any of these, in live production environments (... | 47 |
Title: One of my favorite pieces of classic computing folklore.
Upvote: | 43 |
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