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…
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…
[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…
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…
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…
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…
Earlier this year we funded Callisto [https://www.projectcallisto.org/], a non-profit dedicated to building tech to combat sexual assault and harassment. During their time at YC, we helped Callisto send a survey to 125 of the 384 female founders who have participated in YC.1 They were asked if they’d ever been…
If you’re working on a startup or non-profit that addresses any of the challenges discussed below, we’d love to see you apply. News: We’re facing two major issues with news. The first is fake news. The business model for online media rewards the people who get the greatest number of page views, clicks and likes. That…
Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments from August to November. If you see something cool like this, email us at hn@ycombinator.com [mailto:hn@ycombinator.com] so we can add it to the next list. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Listening to The Shipping…
We’re excited to launch Female Founder Stories [http://www.femalefounderstories.com/], a collection of interviews with 40 of Y Combinator’s female alumnae. We asked them about things like how they got started, their experience at Y Combinator, their experience as female founders, and what they wish they’d known when…
I frequently get asked about the changes we’ve made and are making to Hacker News, so I wanted to share some updates. A lot of people feel strongly about HN. It’s an important part of the startup community and we want it to be both the best source of news and discussion about technology and startups and also welcoming…
I’m the moderator for our Ask A Female Engineer series, and a female engineer on the software team at YC. In the ongoing conversation about women in tech, we hear a lot about women leaving companies and even the industry as a whole, so we decided to ask a group of female engineers…
Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments from April and May. If you see something cool like this, email us at hn@ycombinator.com [mailto:hn@ycombinator.com] so we can add it to the next list. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HN users across countries discuss…
In 2018, Pew Research Center reported [https://www.pewglobal.org/2019/03/04/u-s-german-relations-methodology-spring-2018-global-attitudes-survey/] that 57% of Americans believe that children in America today will be worse off financially than their parents. Since 2013, this number has been as high as 65% — even though…
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One of the most valuable parts of Y Combinator is our community. As of Summer 2014, we have funded over 1,400 founders, and as the YC family grows, the continued strength of our network depends on founders behaving well. Starting with this batch (YC S14), we’ll be asking founders to review YC’s statement of founder…
Wade Foster [https://twitter.com/wadefoster] is the CEO of Zapier [https://zapier.com/] (YC S12). Read Zapier’s de-location post here [https://zapier.com/blog/move-away-from-sf-get-remote-job/]. If you are interested in remote work, you can also check out our interview with Gitlab…
Sexism in tech is real. One of the most insidious things happening in the debate is people claiming versions of “other industries may have problems with sexism, but our industry doesn’t.” Both men and women claim this, even though it keeps getting harder to do in the face of shocks like the Tinder texts. We know there…
Here are some of our favorite recent posts on Hacker News. Quantum computers ready to leap out of the lab in 2017 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13317716] A handful of quantum computing researchers bump into each other. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13317716] A large slab of ice is breaking off an…
Many of our founders ask us about how they can donate part of their equity or post exit proceeds, and now we have an answer:Founders Pledge [https://founderspledge.com/]. With Founders Pledge, founders can sign a pledge to donate some portion of their personal equity and then figure out the recipients for the donation…
I’m excited to share an experimental project I’ve been working on at YC over the last 10 months. It’s called Elpha [https://elpha.com] and it’s an online community for women in tech to talk about whatever we want. Elpha has ~1,500+ members who are founders, designers, marketers, software engineers, VCs, women in sales…