Matt Maroon writes about startups, Y Combinator, tech companies, and the habits of online communities like Hacker News.
HN commenters link his posts on startup interviews and ideas, called well-written and worth reading, and his essay on Hacker News disease.
http://nonhackernews.com/ looks like it expired & got scooped up by a squatter.
See also this post on Matt Maroon's blog about what it was like to run it: http://mattmaroon.com/2008/10/10/nhn/
I wonder if it ended because it was too much trouble to moderate well, and he killed it, or if it withered on the vine and died on its own?
Either way, it suggests that starting a good social news/discussion site is hard work and not just a matter of setting karma threshold high enough.
That said, if you start something, I would definitely enjoy coming to check it out.
I also have felt like I wanted a HN-like forum, in my case, for neuroscience. My network of neuroscience friends & colleagues is probably large enough that I could try such a thing, but I haven't summoned the activation energy, in part out of worries that it would take more work than I want to put in to maintain.
Me and some friends of mine applied for Summer YC too, a few new ideas around online publishing.
Good luck all!
Regarding the number accepted vs interviewed, excerpted from Matt Maroon's awesome post: "[From the interview they] just kept all of the ones they liked last time. I think it was 19 out of 54, but I could wrong there. so you might think you only have roughly a 1 in 3 shot. But if they keep everyone they like, and they like you, then you have a 100% shot. So just go make them like you. Like most investors, they want to."
Full link to the article (great read, recommended)
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=247
Beware of mistaking intelligence for knowledge. If you don't really know anything about the subject matter, you are likely to overlook all kinds of relevant details, making your intelligent solution pretty much useless. If, in addition to being intelligent, you aren't aware of your lack of knowledge, you may get the tendency to think everyone that couldn't come up with your 'obvious' solution is a fool, which leads others to turn away and rant like
http://mattmaroon.com/2009/05/01/hacker-news-disease/
"After a weekend of soul searching, Morey dropped out. Graham presented him with a T-shirt: "Strap on some plums."
Plums strapped, Morey persuaded Agarwal to drop out of Berkeley too."
Does anybody ever actually explain that shirt? One version I read said it referred to the courage to talk to investors, not cofounders (http://mattmaroon.com/?p=263). And YC seems to think it's an important bit of intellectual property (http://ycombinator.com/legal.html).
Well, see point #3 here. http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/
And here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800253
The comments and the moderation are extremely predictable in most cases regardless of technical merits of the discussion. A casual or statistical observation would easily reveal the prevalent biases, even amongst the crowd that prides itself on being objective.
"To put that another way, if Google managed to scoop up just 2% of that industry they’d have more than doubled their revenue. With their driverless car project, I think they’ve got a shot of taking a much bigger slice of the pie than that."
I'd say it takes more to "do it properly", but I'd recommend reading this nonetheless: http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai-company/