From ICPC World Finals to competitive programming clubs to building generalist audio models as the first engineer at a YC startup.
Visit blog.ycombinator.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2013 – Jan 2022
Tech Industry & Business 168Startups 139Society, Policy & Culture 28Career & Management 28Life, Learning & Writing 14Science & Space 5
We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research. We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would…
Updated on 6/5/20 YC Research, now OpenResearch [http://openresearchlab.org/], and its portfolio of research projects are no longer affiliated with Y Combinator. YCR generated important ideas and organizations, and we are proud to have helped them get up and running. They have, in fact, been operating independently…
Today we’re excited to launch an official Hacker News API [https://github.com/HackerNews/API]. [https://github.com/HackerNews/API] We’ve partnered up with Firebase [http://firebase.com] (YC S11) so that the data we’re making available will be near real time, which should be a huge improvement for developers who had to…
I wrote Dropbox their first investment check on June 26, 2007. What strikes me as I look at a copy of the check is that Drew and Arash must have been fairly effective at getting all their incorporation paperwork completed. I often had to chase startups well into July. Little did I know back then what a momentous check…
We have a few updates we want to share on our Basic Income Project [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/basic-income]: Our Research Director Elizabeth Rhodes is joining Basic Income Project as our Research Director. She recently completed a joint PhD in Social Work and Political Science at the University of Michigan…
The HN team members are some of the most thoughtful people about online communities I’ve ever met. So I’m always excited when they have a new idea to try. This idea is simple. We’re updating the guidelines to add: “Avoid gratuitous negativity.” Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds…
We’ve heard from some founders that they’re nervous about applying to YC because they worry they won’t be able to get visas to attend interviews or the summer program. We will hold a day of interviews in Vancouver for founders we’d like to interview but can’t get US visas. We will also experiment with allowing…
I’m the moderator for our Ask A Female Engineer series, and a female engineer on the software team at YC. This is the sixth installment in a series where we ask female engineers questions and share their candid, anonymous responses. In this post, we did something a bit different: we asked engineers to answer questions…
About a month and a half ago I tried the new Oculus and was completely blown away. Even though there were clear rough points – expensive computer, not wireless, limited apps – I was amazed. The next morning I had two thoughts: 1. Because VR games are so physical, gaming will no longer be perceived as an unhealthy…
Ten years ago, Paul Graham said there could be ten times as many startups if more people realized they could try. Thanks to the work he, Jessica, Trevor and Robert helped do, that’s become true. We think there is still room for another ten-fold increase in the number of (good) startups. But even now, a lot of good…
When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I’m leaving out investor because the best path to being an investor that I’ve seen starts with being successful (or failing) at one of these three first. Below…
We’re hosting Startup School again this year. Startup School is a free, 10-week, online course. It’s designed for any startup founder who would like to get help through the earliest, most difficult challenges of starting a company. The course will begin on August 27, 2018 and applications are now open at…
[http://instagram.com/p/qPXemCGEse/?modal=true] Federal Communications Commission 445 12th Street, SW Washington D.C. 20554 July 14, 2014 Re: Open Internet Remand, GN Docket 14-28 Dear Chairman Wheeler and Commissioners Clyburn, Rosenworcel, Pai, and O’Rielly: Y Combinator is Silicon Valley’s premier early stage…
A lot of the advice we give startups is tactical; meant to be helpful on a day to day or week to week basis. But some advice is more fundamental. We’ve collected here what we at YC consider the most important, most transformative advice for startups. Whether common sense or counter-intuitive, the guidance below will…
I’m delighted to announce that Sam Altman has agreed to become president of Y Combinator starting next batch. I’ll continue to do office hours with startups, but Sam is going to lead YC. Why the change? Because YC needs to grow, and I’m not the best person to grow it. Sam is what YC needs at this stage in its…
Today, Coinbase has gone public. We are proud to say that Coinbase is a Y Combinator company and a member of the Summer 2012 batch.
The HN community feels like it owns HN, and we like it that way. HN has become an important institution in the tech community, and though it was initially developed for YC founders it’s clearly evolved into much more than that. We’ve always felt that the best way for HN to benefit YC is simply for it to maximally…
Vincent Chen is a student at Stanford University studying Computer Science. He is also a Research Assistant at the Stanford AI Lab. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It’s not entirely clear what level of mathematics is necessary to get started in machine learning…
Some think the excitement around Artificial Intelligence is overhyped. They might be right. But if they’re wrong, we’re on the precipice of something really big. We can’t afford to ignore what might be the biggest technological leap since the Internet. In an effort to usher in more innovation with AI, Y Combinator is…
Edit: Peter Thiel is no longer affiliated with Y Combinator. I’m delighted to announce Peter Thiel is joining YC as one of the (now 10!) part-time partners. In addition to founding PayPal and Palantir and being the first investor in Facebook, Peter has been involved with many of the most important technology companies…
To celebrate Airbnb’s IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb. What was special about the Airbnbs was how earnest they were. They did nothing half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview. Sometimes after we interviewed a startup we’d be…
We’ve noticed a common problem: founders don’t know what “good” looks like in a term sheet. This makes sense, because it is often, literally, the first time in their careers that they’ve seen one. This puts founders at a significant disadvantage because VCs see term sheets all the time and know what to expect. Because…
Hey, my name is Kyle Corbitt and I’m a software developer at Y Combinator. I spend most of my time creating software to support our founders as they build their businesses. Before joining YC I ran my own startup. When I was in high school, I sometimes got the frustrating feeling that all of the good startup ideas had…
I did several different things while I was working on Hacker News, and these will now be taken over by different people. Kevin Hale (HN id kevin) will be in charge of design. I don’t think he plans to change much about the appearance of the site, but users will be happy to hear he has a plan to make it work better on…
Four years ago, Watsi [http://Watsi.org] became YC’s first non-profit. They’ve since raised over $7.5 million to fund life-changing healthcare for more than 10,000 patients in 24 countries. Today, we’re excited to announce that YC Research is funding Watsi for a project that will study using technology to improve the…