
Why we made this site - pg
http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html
======
jhenzie
Paul, can we play with arc, go on, please, you know you want us to really, go
on mate, have a heart. <smile/>

~~~
budu3
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>

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ced
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.

~~~
jdroid
If I bought yspace.com would you use it?

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

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

~~~
bootload
'... everyone I know has bailed from reddit. ...'

what about 'programming' or 'joel' sub-reddits?

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bharath
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.

~~~
pg
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.)

~~~
jadams
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.

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staunch
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!

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danw
Out of curiosity are the passwords kept hashed?

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volida
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.

~~~
papersmith
>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.

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henning
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.

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pashle
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!

------
papersmith
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.

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

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jpedrosa
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. :-)

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

~~~
ninwa
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.

~~~
jmzachary
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.

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

~~~
sharpshoot
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.

~~~
pg
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.

~~~
sharpshoot
Paul, in that instance as a way to identify smart people it makes a lot of
sense for it not to be invite only.

But it has triggered my thinking about how to create dense communities around
diverse knowledge areas. So it would be cool to do this with scientific papers
and get people to register with university email addresses to generate trust
and preserve fidelity. I know digg and reddit are pretty mainstream but
allowing people to create specific knowledge networks on this platform would
be cool. Where its an industry group or networking organisation it would be a
great way to pool knowledge and if need be preserve the value of the
information by requiring users to be trusted by at least one person.

~~~
lucks
It is interesting to point out that Reddit already tried this platform for
comments on scientific papers. arxiv.org has long been acknowledged as a
forerunner to scientific e-publishing and is in fact a one-stop-shop for many
subfields of physics, computer science, and almost all of mathematics. We
thought it would be the perfect place to try to do something like what you
suggested: to use a Reddit-like interface to collect comments and discussions
on scientific literature. So Reddit set it up at arxiv.reddit.org.

As you can see, there is not much happening. In fact, the main lesson learned
here was not that a reddit-like platform is not ideal to this type of
knowledge pooling, but that the scientific community is in general skeptical
about this type of information sharing. We did not require email address
validation for logins (hence the spam you can see up there), but we did talk
about it with a lot of people and there were good arguments on both sides. I
talked with physicists, biologists and mathematicians about using this type of
site, and the replies were mostly those of insecurity about sharing incomplete
ideas: both because they might be wrong (and not many scientists like that),
and because if they were right, they would rather keep it to themselves and
publish it.

Actually Paul Ginsparg, the creator of arxiv.org, kind of warned us before we
launched that it would take mostly a huge grass-roots effort to get scientists
going on something like this. He was right, and from listening to some of his
stories about how he started arxiv.org, it apparently took him over 5 years of
grass-roots convincing before it took off, despite being clearly a very good
idea.

If you are interested in scientific knowledge sharing, with an eye towards
collaboration, check out openwetware.org, which uses the mediawiki wiki
platform. Note that they actually do require account authentication, so have a
lot less spam issues at this point. It seems like a wiki platform is more
easily adopted for scientists (although still hesitantly), as the subreddit
oww.reddit.com, which we tried to push to the openwetware community, has not
taken off (this time because of concerns that Reddit is a company.)

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

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Mistone
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" :

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jng
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.

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

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

~~~
bitdiddle
I second that, I love the minimalist approach. Reddit was much like that in
the beginning.

~~~
danielha
There's minimalistic and then there's insufficient. I'm all for keeping it
simple and functional, but a little aesthetic snazz can contribute to the end
goal.

I couldn't find the 'Reply' link for a moment -- and I'm not even THAT blind.
;) Looking forward to that update!

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000
test 123

