taroth's comments

the board of overseers has a lighter touch perhaps but also the executive guillotine. even if the latter power is exercised rarely, the will of the overseers is final authority. to be sure the current overseers deserve no doubt in their moral commitment to YC, but as YC grows in influence, wealth, prestige and power, so too do its overseers, and the shadow of moral hazard darkens. actions impossible yesterday become intolerable today and invisible tomorrow.

as someone who cares about the future of YC, i am glad that a mechanism is in place to guard the integrity of the YC president, and i wonder mechanisms are in place to guard the integrity the YC board.

Very cool!

I keep this picture of Elon Musk open permanently in one of my Spaces. When feeling unmotivated or risk-adverse, I'll imagine what he would say if I was sitting in the backseat of the Tesla.

http://imgur.com/4tsZOIf

Site down. Not cached by google. Anyone have a link?

You might hope that we would become habituated to reoccurring noises in our environment, but the opposite has been shown empirically. [1]

The study showed that while regular office workers become habituated to office chatter after 20 minutes of exposure, their habituation resets to baseline after only 5 minutes of quiet (measured via memory tasks). The irregularity of the noise is what kills us.

The only effective solution I've found against ambient ear-shocks is to overpower them via headphones and regular white noise.

Heres an applied class integrating Linear Algebra and Python:

https://class.coursera.org/matrix-001/wiki/view?page=overvie...

This session started on Monday (July 1st) and if you have an interest in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or Cryptography I'd recommend you join us.

Anyone else find the tone of this article to be condescending?

"Let’s focus on how one teenage girl, Jennie Lamere, defeated a room full of smart, motivated, experienced, full-grown men. This would seem to be instructive to the greater argument about women in technology, and besides, it has the added bonus of being -> based in fact rather than opinion <-"

As if the argument for women is based primarily on opinion.

“It’s also important to note that Jennie’s idea is a completely universal, gender-neutral one"

Is it? Last time I checked gender-biased ideas can be just as valuable as gender-neutral ones. Why does Jennie need to 'prove' herself capable of producing gender-neutral ideas?

You are painting a rosy picture of entrepreneurial life in Berlin. That's fine, but entrepreneurship in Germany has several downsides including:

-Less VC funding -Regulations make it distinctly harder and more expensive to fire employees -A less risk-tolerant culture -A completely different mindset around "misses" - if your business fails once, you are labelled as a failure and will have a harder time getting support and funding in the future.

The economist had a touchstone article on this, which appeared on HN the other day: http://www.economist.com/node/21559618

Interesting. Huda Akil is no obscure quack.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Huda+Akil&...

Thank you, your answer bridged a gap for me. Will drop an update here as soon as I apply it.

Your point is that people will only appreciate advice that confers direct results (fancy car->invited to fancy parties). I evaluate advice against where I am and where I am aiming to be, which means that advice that isn't practical now (ie how to sell a company) can still be useful for guiding future decisions.

Perhaps a useful metaphor would be that future-oriented advice is a amplifying lens on the headlights of my business. I can make better decisions, because I can see further down the road.

Working link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KgbmD-Q...

As a college student who likes to pick the brains of entrepreneurs, this post made me feel guilty. I can't really afford their advice, but I need it and value it. How can I provide value to the entrepreneurs that are so generous as to meet with me?

This put Treehouse on the map for me. I have not seen evidence to suggest that Treehouse's $50/month program is any bit more worthwhile than Codecademy's program, but the notion that I could "save" $1,200 ($50/month * 2 years) on education makes this attraction too interesting to pass up.

I just signed up, told a friend, and will probably tell another five people about Treehouse today. Great marketing stunt.

Um, what? Here we have a product serving the needs of teachers, built for "webmasters". How many course-builders out there want to familiarize themselves with 3 coding languages (HTML, Python, and JavaScript), when a easily conceivable web UI could accomplish the same goals?

Google is either throwing AppEngine fluff or a pump fake.

>"Entrepreneurs are lonely, but they thrive in a community with others. With a private chat room always on and 15 to 20 members sharing their setbacks, failures, and successes, a thriving connection was created. Live chat was wonderful for creating connections."

Truth, and chat is a interesting idea. Is there a HN IRC that I am not aware of?

In #13 Networking: >"If you’re in San Francisco looking for a tech job, you’ll want to be using the latest connection apps"

I've never seen this in the LA community. Is this the norm up north?

>The best way to reduce stress is to stop screwing up and setting up your life to increase your chances of success. Successful people don’t use willpower as a last-ditch defense, they use it to set up good habits and avoid problem situations.

To idiomize this great point: Willpower is a hammer, not a shield.

Making a "code" is like building a habit. Maintaining the code might be tiring at first, but consistently caring about others, just like consistently brushing your teeth, will inevitably get easier. If you truly are feeling exhausted/insane after treating people well for a day, its unlikely you think people are worth treating well to begin with.

To summarize: a company is genetically either an innovating "Breakthrough"(Intel, Texas Instruments, Google) or a sexy and shallow "Best-Of-Show" (Zynga, Facebook, YouTube).

As others have pointed out, false dichotomy is false on several levels.

1) Even Breakthrough companies go through cycles of stagnation and innovation, especially in the tech industry. Best-Of-Show Apple in the 90s compared to Breakthrough Apple in the 21st century. Breakthrough HP in the middle of the 20th century versus Best-of-Show HP today. The list goes on and on.

2) Best-Of-Show companies often are innovating within their own domain. Facebook today is simply in a different ballpark than 2003 Myspace with sharing, groups, pages, etc.

3) Best-Of-Show companies can cause massive disruption in adjacent verticles. Try finding a news station (online or offline) that will not reference discussions on Facebook/Twitter.

The author repeatedly claims he is not making "a moral judgment", but that is exactly what he is doing. His opinion is that innovation in hardware/algorithms is more important than innovation in social/games. I am not sure why he is afraid of speaking directly, but hiding arguments in false dichotomies isn't helping anyone.