
Does reading this raise your chances of success? - xx

======
pg
It ought to. Among other things, one ought to get first wind of new trends
(including potential competitors) on a site like this.

~~~
python_kiss
It depends on how you use this site. You might've noticed how the top users
tend to post articles and spark interesting discussions while new users tend
to post news. As a startup founder, you are more interested in analytical
articles rather than news. For news, you might be better off subscribing to
other sites for a larger scope (i.e. TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, and
KillerStartups). There is no shortage of news.

Good analytical articles, however, require that users swipe through their rss
feeds, find an interesting piece, and post it here. The value of yc.news, in
my opinion, is in the articles that other startup founders find interesting.
And that alone makes this place worth your time.

~~~
e1ven
I completely agree WRT purpose-

YC is much more useful to bring up things that you might not have thought of,
or to hepl you understand the larger issues, rather then the minutiae of
what's going on in 2.0 News.

One of the uses I've found is going back through the articles I've upvotted,
and used that as a source of links to send to the team, so we're all on the
same page about things, such as UI elements and the like..

While I get a lot out of the site individually, beign able to point to a
study, or other people who have written about some of the issues is a
persuasive tool, and one that helps to ensure that we have a better product
all around.

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eli
Piece of cake.

Ok everybody, split into to equal groups. Now, group 2, you're going to have
to stop reading. Check back in a year and we'll see which group does better.

Edit: On a less snarky note... I don't see how reading different viewpoints
about startups could be a bad thing.

~~~
ynot
I love you, eli! You think like me.

But one would have to pay me to join the "stop reading" group =)

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xx
Im kind of a startup person. I run a young company. Lately im reading the news
here on a regular basis. Apart from being fun, i dont know if its of any use.
What do you think? Did you ever learn something that had a positive impact on
your business by reading stuff on the net? Is reading of any use? Or is it all
about acting?

~~~
nostrademons
Reading and keeping up with the news is kinda odd. 99% of what you read is
absolutely useless. It will never make a difference in what you do, and you'll
probably never use it. However, that remaining 1% can save you *huge* amounts
of time or open up massive opportunities.

Just a couple examples where procrastination has changed my life.

When I was 16, my family went shopping at the Tanger 2 supermall in Riverhead
NY. I hate shopping. So, I did what I normally do: I found a bookstore,
grabbed an interesting book, curled up on the floor, and read half of it by
the time my parents got back. On that particular occasion, the book was "Learn
Java 1.0.2 in 7 days" or some other tripe like that, the year was 1997, and
the Java wave was just taking off. One book led to a second and third, and
then a whole shelf full, and eventually an internship at MITRE corporation.

While on the job, I was asked to learn Perl. A couple years later, immediately
after high school graduation, my math teacher's wife was starting a company
and had an immediate need for some Perl programming. In the year I spent at
that company, I got to experience a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers, 3
different business plans, all the tribulations of a startup, and eventually an
ugly VC takeover.

While slacking off at that company because I had no work to do, I found
Fanfiction.net and the Harry Potter fandom. I read a whole bunch of fics, then
my workload picked up again and I promply forgot about it. I went back to it
during college, and ended up joining FictionAlley.org, which was just starting
at the time. Over the 4 years that I volunteered for FA, I saw it grow from
2,000 registered users to 100,000 registered users, from one machine to three,
had my first experience managing teams of software developers and got to take
my first major project from conception to completion.

Separate thread - at an internship after my freshman year, I was goofing off
at work and reading Ward's Wiki. I ended up getting pretty involved in
housekeeping there after the internship ended, and struck up a few
friendships. One of them led *directly* to the startup I'm currently employed
at, via a couple of internships.

Now that I'm co-founding a startup of my own, I'm finding that all the
different internships and threads and so on pull together. I know what to
expect in terms of growing a community. I've had experience with 2-3 different
technology stacks (and found they all suck ;-), but at least that led me to
one I'm reasonably happy with). I know all about scaling concerns and breaking
an app out over multiple boxes. I've got some experience in judging whether a
business model will fly or not. (I think our business model sucks, BTW, and
really doubt it'll get us off the ground, but we've gotta start somewhere.)

All of this came, in some way or another, from procrastination.

Incidentally, running a startup seems much the same way. The vast majority of
stuff you do is worthless, but the 1% that pays off really pays off big.
Unfortunately, you have no way of knowing what that 1% is until you try it.
People talk about how Bill Gates got lucky with the IBM deal - the thing is,
Microsoft had a zillion balls in the air at the time, and if they hadn't
gotten lucky with IBM they might very well have gotten lucky elsewhere.

~~~
paul
What is your startup?

~~~
nostrademons
Probably the worst (= most overdone) business idea in the history of the
planet: internet games + social networking. Well, second worst. Worst would
probably be "Find gold in California."

Launching within a month, hopefully.

------
jamiequint
Reading opens your mind to new things. Just because you can't see the direct
effect reading has on your thoughts doesn't mean it has no effect. It gives
you better perspective so you can see things from a different point of view.

Reading has different values other than perspective as well, it gives you
conversation capital so you can better relate to others.

Obviously for reading to be valuable in these ways you have to read the "right
things." I tend to prefer books over blogs if I'm trying to learn something
specific (but blogs are great for keeping up on current events and getting
different perspectives than the mainstream media), because it gives you focus
and a single thing to remember. How many blog posts can you remember from a
month ago?

------
iamwil
Like everything, it's a balance, right? All study and no practice is just as
bad as all practice with no study. And sometimes, if you internalize something
that you read, you won't often remember where you read it from, so you think
you came up with it yourself.

That said, I think it's good to keep yourself in check, since we all probably
are pretty voracious readers, and will keep reading, even if it's stuff we
already know, just because it's a new article. My recent motto is to produce
more than you consume (if it's quality stuff).

~~~
xx
Maybe. But maybe the opposite of all you said is true.

Balance might be not good to be "beating the averages". Practice to the
extreme might be better. How do you know that balance is better?

~~~
veritas
Not true. Practicing incessantly will make you excellent in one category.
Reading, learning and continually evolving will make you better across
several.

I can stick my head in the sand and keep programming PHP, but thanks to the
web and reading, I have an interest in design, AJAX, and most of all Ruby on
Rails. You can choose to be insanely good at one thing, or just good at
several. I'll take the latter since its more flexible.

~~~
xx
Being excellent in one thing is often cited as a key factor to success. For
example by Google: www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html "It's best to do
one thing really, really well"

What insights do you have to proove the makers of the most successful tech
startup wrong?

------
PindaxDotCom
Raises your chances of success? Don't leave your success to chance. Hardwork
and perserverance. Sure, a lil luck wouldn't hurt, but don't count on it.

As for this site, its fun to read. Keep a critical mind though, because there
simply is no magic formula, no hard and fast rules. As Morpheus might say "The
rules can be bent, sometimes broken".

~~~
xx
You can start a startup without chance of failure? How many did you do so far?

------
danielha
Reading the news from news.yc keeps me more productively in tune than any of
the other places I might browse to.

------
dawie
It doesn't lower your changes..

~~~
xx
Proof?

------
awt
It raises my motivation level.

~~~
xx
Yes, thats the main reason, why I read too.

