
Show HN: YC's startup advice, organized and searchable - nyrulez
https://ycadvice.com
======
nyrulez
Hi HN,

We are YC rejects (I made it to the interview once!) but have benefited
greatly from everything YC has put out to help founders like us. Since
YCombinator has shared so much helpful content over the years in all sorts of
areas, we decided to put some order around it for everyone’s benefit. The
process looked like:

\- We collected everything YC has put out scattered across different channels
(and developed a system to keep it updated)

\- Categorized it using a hybrid NLP-human approach to uncover key macro and
micro categories along with identifying the people behind the advice. The goal
was to 1. Aid exploration 2. Be able to quickly find the most relevant advice
in any given situation.

\- Our company (Polymer Search) specializes in converting a spreadsheet (or
any structured data set) into a search and insights engine automatically. That
was a huge part of why we decided to tackle this. We used our own beta stack
to create YCAdvice.com. The spreadsheet is linked from the site in case anyone
wants access to the underlying data (free to use).

Would love any feedback and happy to answer any questions.

~~~
dang
You should post about your underlying technology, when you're ready. It sounds
like something HN would find interesting. Feel free to email us at
hn@ycombinator.com and we might be able to help with how you present your work
to the community. This offer goes for anybody—just realize that sometimes
there are long delays before we can get back to you.

~~~
nyrulez
Absolutely - thanks Dang. We have some high level info in the FAQ:
[http://polymersearch.com/beta/faq_ycadvice.html](http://polymersearch.com/beta/faq_ycadvice.html)
and I'd love to go deeper into the process. We'll get in touch.

~~~
ra
Cool - I've requested a beta invite. Nice work.

------
trisomy21
Are you saying that all the YCAdvice data is sitting in a spreadsheet? Other
than the effort to categorize all the content, aren't there many tools that
let you use a spreadsheet as a database? What am I missing here?

~~~
nyrulez
You're right, sorry if my other comment didn't make sense. I was talking about
both the data itself and also the YCAdvice discovery and search interaction
layer on top of that data.

We did first construct the spreadsheet (where lot of categorization was
automatic) but then the real value IMO is being able to understand and make
use of that multi-dimensional data really easily. The goal being to explore
efficiently and develop rapid intuition for anything. The actual spreadsheet
is here so you can see the difference:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xTMF_t_EDG34IjnXo-
ho...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xTMF_t_EDG34IjnXo-
ho7hTuK6atI5Uu-LrPwT_IEOc/edit?usp=sharing)

We are improving stuff so that Polymer's stack can auto-convert spreadsheets
with numerical data and do great visualization etc so it can improve human
intelligence beyond just categorical data which is the case here.

Let me know if I can clarify anything. Thank you for checking it out.

~~~
trisomy21
So the visual/interaction layer is generated somehow based on the underlying
spreadsheet? How are those interface decisions made and how does the UX/UI
change from one spreadsheet to another?

~~~
nyrulez
Hmmm nice questions. So when I was at Google before, I saw a lot of different
kinds of datasets. But I also saw commonalities in terms of not just data
types, but also data abstractions or the kind of stuff people like to do with
that data. The goal (a difficult one for sure) is that can we automate a lot
of that for any dataset so it's still unique and powerful enough for that
particular dataset but at the same time can be done by anyone without writing
code or ton of manual customization ?

In summary, there is a fairly complex process towards making those decisions.
Feel free to pm me at ash [at] polymersearch.com if you want to dig deeper.

~~~
trisomy21
Thanks for the additional info.

------
sharcerer
Great tool to generate slick wikis quickly. So, if I connect a sheet to
polymer then what's the output? the whole website is generated by Polymer
which is then connected to a custom domain? A video demo of your
tool/dashboard would clear some doubts.

Also, in the no-code tools area, people use Airtable with integromat/zapier,
Webflow to make websites. So, in case you do generate the website, then I
think it would be make sense to market/target this as a no-code tool too, it
would gather interest from the no-code community quickly .

------
cesa714
I didn't know YC had so many resources and topics in general. This looks like
a pretty well laid out interface for that. If you don't mind, what did the
categorization process look like?

~~~
nyrulez
Yeah there is a lot of breadth in what YC puts out as we found out ourselves.
Categorization for specific domains is hard since we don't have labelled data.
It's a mix of unsupervised token extraction, clustering to detect significant
concepts along with a human layer to tune false positives and also curate few
topics manually since the process will never get everything right on its own.

We are in the process if scaling it further so we can help create many more
resources for users and their own data.

------
xitang
This is dope! Slick design and tool! How many dimensions of data does it
support? I visit the website with nothing particular in my mind and think it
would be cool to have a sort by popularity type of thing to help me sort
things through. This way I know which resource is most valuable to people and
most liken by people and encourage me to check it out.

------
mvind
Thanks! What a great tool. One talk about product market fit changed greatly
what I prioritize in my start up.

~~~
nyrulez
There are a lot of talks on product and fit in general by YC and they are very
informative. What was surprising to me was how many talks/resources they had
around this and that can lost. I hope you can find some more around that
topic.

------
markfer
Whoa, this is great. Thanks for putting this together!

Could you do something similar to PG's and Sam Altmans essays?

~~~
nyrulez
Thanks!

Paul Graham essays are included and can be found at:
[https://ycadvice.com/?category=Paul%20Graham%20Essays](https://ycadvice.com/?category=Paul%20Graham%20Essays)

If you click on sub-topics after that, you can see all the sub-categories for
his essays :)

For Sam Altman, we have all his startup resources at:
[https://ycadvice.com/?people=Sam%20Altman](https://ycadvice.com/?people=Sam%20Altman)

------
gjbadros
Congrats on this launch -- very cool use of the Polymer tech to create
something of value to the whole community. Thanks!

------
gjsingh2013
Really cool tool. Would be great if there can some kind of sorting based on
time line. like more recent articles etc

~~~
nyrulez
You can look at the Year tab and see resources by year. It's not the same as
sorting but gets you half way there. Nice feedback.

------
yihlamur
Design is slick and mobile friendly.

I specifically like that I can select topics and share that as a link.

------
muratny
Looks great, would love to play with your technology for other data sources!

------
pretzelboi
Looks great. Would be helpful to filter The Who’s hiring threads as well

~~~
nyrulez
Thanks. Currently, we have been focusing on all the official resources from YC
and not so much on Hacker News threads. But if there's demand for better
discovery for Hacker news itself, it'd be very interesting to look into.

------
tejchilli
Really easy to use and definitely a helpful resource. Thanks!

------
twirlybirdstogo
Really slick. Love the resulting UI. +1 for Polymer

------
throw432098
Looks good, what are you using for search?

~~~
nyrulez
It's all custom for now. A mix of tries and graphs.

------
petehorvath
Polymer is a game changer for big data.

------
sprsimplestuff
this is an incredible resource

------
alex_vid
...great job structuring data!

------
sercanesen
This is super cool!

