Why we made this site

http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html

by pg • 19 years ago

166 58 19 years ago

jmzachary3• 19 years ago

Thanks for the rationale. I'm most interested in the ARC aspect of the site.

Zak2• 19 years ago

I don't think the fact that the site is written in Arc makes the site itself any more interesting. Arc is interesting, as is the fact that it's to the point where it could be used to make this site.

bootload3• 19 years ago

'... I don't think the fact that the site is written in Arc makes the site itself any more interesting. ...'

I do. I'm pretty sure the site, layout & idea have been inspired by the defection from lisp to python ~ http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

As the site progresses it proves a point. That "Reddit" could have continued in Lisp had they persisted and that "Lisp -like languages", can still cut it.

pg8• 19 years ago

It does in a sense, because it makes it faster to add new features.

ninwa2• 19 years ago

Really? I was most interested in the role that news.ycombinator.com is going to play in their application process. I think that it's an absolutely great idea and not only helps Paul but start-up-would-be's as well.

ninwa2• 19 years ago

This comment added through the comment page of a new news story. Note: If you came from the news story, click comment up above. : )

jmzachary3• 19 years ago

Yes, really. That's not to say I'm uninterested in the role that news.ycombinator will play in their application process, too. Once word gets out, it will be very interesting to see what kind of traffic is posted and how the signal/noise ratio changes.

jwecker2• 19 years ago

OK, here's the question, pg, is this site actually running on a lightweight webserver written in ARC, or did you tie ARC into apache or something for the application logic and storage? Or did you use ARC as a markup language? Just curious.

pg8• 19 years ago

The server's written in Arc too. I wanted to learn how to write one.

jdroid2• 19 years ago

You've filled a hole reddit was starting to dig(g) in my life. Thanks!

whatsreal• 19 years ago

HaHa! Yes thank you Paul, I was just about to swear off of Reddit for good, and this is the tipping point. I will probably still visit there to get my inane fun for the day, but I wont spend time looking through 4-5 pages of backlogs for the good articles.

lupin_sansei• 19 years ago

Yes everyone I know has bailed from reddit. Too many alarmist political , Bush bashing, boring articles. Not enough interesting tech links.

budu32• 19 years ago

Yah, I think alpha geek crowd is getting diluted. It's beginning to reflect the tastes of the broader population. I think they need to work on their recomendaton engine to cater for individual preferences

timg• 19 years ago

To take over the world? Well this will help out y-combinator and the whole startup community for sure.

sharpshoot2• 19 years ago

Why don;t you make this invite only - if it truly reflects the values of Y's and their friends who are starting up why not do that. That way you preserve the signal to noise ratio. I'm only on here cos Kulveer and Harj are doing Y combinator - meaning that other UK young entrepreneurs who are good can get on it.

Zak2• 19 years ago

I think the purpose of this site is (partially) to get a better idea of who to invite to things like Startup School and YC interviews. Making it invite only would be contrary to that goal. I think the S/N ratio will stay pretty high simply due to the nature of the people YC attracts.

pg8• 19 years ago

Making the site invite-only would be the opposite of what we want. One of the goals of this site is to discover smart people we might not otherwise notice when they apply for funding. Doing things through connections works well in the VC world. Because of the large investments they make, they're more conservative. But in the seed funding business you need to be aggressively democratic.

henning• 19 years ago

I take it this place is basically startup/tech entrepreneurship-related stuff rather than being like programming.reddit. Great, another social news site I'll check compulsively.

staunch• 19 years ago

I'm extremely excited about this site. Startup stuff has always been by far my biggest interest in Reddit since it launched. As Reddit has grown my interest has faded considerably. Long live YC News!

ced• 19 years ago

Since community-building is part of the goal of this site, could you include an optional "location" field in the profile? I'm interested in getting in touch personally with other people in my area.

jdroid2• 19 years ago

If I bought yspace.com would you use it?

volida• 19 years ago

I up-voted a comment by mistake and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove my vote. One of the main reasons I was visiting Reddit in the beggining, was the high probability to find start-up articles and a place for discussion. So, this site is defenetely going to be my new point of reference, and for lots of others too.

papersmith2• 19 years ago

>I up-voted a comment by mistake and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove my vote It'd also be nice to have ajax for voting, so we don't have to re-scroll to find where we left off.

bootload3• 19 years ago

'... I up-voted a comment ...'

don't up-vote *before* you commit a comment. News wipes the contents of the edit box.

jpedrosa• 19 years ago

Fairly awesome! Thanks for the unique resource. If I could I probably would like to put most of these links in my personal bookmark. Nice interface. Nice change. It's good to hear that Arc is coming along also. :-)

jng• 19 years ago

Just a little bit of graphic design wouldn't hurt, really. In any case, congratulations on the launch and I'm sure it will become an interesting hub.

pg8• 19 years ago

Yeah, I know. The site is at least simple and functional, but we should (and will) make it look better soon.

jmzachary3• 19 years ago

Please don't. I vote for the simple, straightforward design you currently have.

jhenzie• 19 years ago

Paul, can we play with arc, go on, please, you know you want us to really, go on mate, have a heart. <smile/>

budu32• 19 years ago

Steve Yegge hinted about the next big language. I think he meant javascript. Arc has some serious competition. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html

papersmith2• 19 years ago

Damn it Paul, you beat me to it. I slapped together a reddit clone last summer in reaction to its diluting startup content, but I went on to travel for a month and have been procrastinating from finishing it up ever since. Nevertheless, I really appreciate that you are opening this to public.

bharath• 19 years ago

So the basic premise of your writeup is you are trying to judge how smart people are based on what they submit to this site and the content of their comments. I am not so sure I agree with that. It seems to me that starting a company requires dedication, technical smarts and technical vision. All that a good comment or submission tells you is that the submitter spends a lot of time surfing the web and is articulate. Unless you have solid reasons to believe that the two sets of qualities are strongly correlated, I am not so sure you should be even consider using this as a metric. Having worked in Silicon Valley for some time now, I can say that some of the smartest people around here have inadequate language (and by implication -- commenting) skills. Quality of people's resumes are likely to provide a stronger indicator.

pg8• 19 years ago

I hope we can tell the difference between people who are smart and those who are merely articulate.

(We all have a lot of experience dealing with hackers, after all.)

jadams4• 19 years ago

I think the problem is that there are a lot of very smart people who are good at talking and generating ideas, but not so good at implementation.

If they're not regularly "going dark", they may not have the focus to succeed at a startup.

jadams4• 19 years ago

Interesting. Perhaps they should be performing traffic analysis to see who's busy, and who's not?

I love to debate (reddit has saved my wife a regular earful), but I can't imagine surfing when I'm really "in the zone". I tend to do more directed documentation queries and explicitly avoid sites like reddit where I'm likely to become mired.

So yeah, for me posting frequency is inversely correlated with how busy I am. On the other hand, all of that reading, researching and debating generates a lot of new ideas.

kentbrew• 19 years ago

Please, may we have a mashable feed of some sort? RSS probably wouldn't work, but a JSON object would....

jamiequint• 19 years ago

I love the idea of a founder/soon-to-be-founder based community, awesome!

danw• 19 years ago

Out of curiosity are the passwords kept hashed?

pashle• 19 years ago

Paul cares about his users. He makes stuff we want. He always replies to emails. His influence reaches far beyond the Americas, across the pacific, to the island continent that I call home. Thanks mate, you changed our worlds!

Mistone• 19 years ago

comments on relevant sites is a good way to validate a persons ideas, domain knowledge, and thoughtfulness, but my main contribution's have been to TC, AVC, Flickr, and others, so I get no benefit from that here. Maybe a hot idea for a simple web 2.0 startup would be an aggregation tool of all comments by a user across the sites they use. Could work well with OpenID.

Maybe I'll add that to the question in the application that asks for "any other ideas you've considered" :

000• 19 years ago

test 123

Why we made this site

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