kalistoga

I was wondering if it was just me or if there are actually a lot of people reading off of the HN firehose on the "new" page (http://news.ycombinator.com/newest)

For example, my everyday routine is: 1. When I wake up, visit HN front page and read. 2. When that's done, visit /new (http://news.ycombinator.com/newest) 2. For the rest of the day, stay on "new" and refresh forever.

Maybe i'm just an abnormal info addict. Was wondering what the general behavior of the community is. I'm especially interested because I'm curious about how interesting projects get voted up to the front page: whether my cool project can reach the front page without asking friends to come vote it up--if it's cool enough, will the people monitoring "newest" like me vote it up and help it reach the front page?

http://api.jquery.com is currently down. I can understand the plugin page being down, but isn't this too much?

I'm just starting to learn rails, and it seems that the mental load that comes from frequent context switch among files is enormous. Sometimes I forget what I was doing while I'm switching from one file to another. I know there are a lot of rails programmers on Hacker news, so wanted to ask:

Do you all have this problem? Or is this something that only newbies suffer from? Is there an effective design pattern that helps you code without confusion?

I just read through the RFS (http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html), which was written in 2009. I'm not sure if YC is still looking for those types of products. More specifically, there's an item that says "Things built on Twitter".

Recently every investor I talked to didn't like products that are built on top of Twitter, and I wonder if YC's perspective has also changed.

I am working on my YC application, but I was wondering if I should even expect to have any chance at getting accepted at YC.

I have experience of building high quality products that had early adopters' attention (was covered on various top tech news sites multiple times), and I bet I have the best answer for "case where you hacked a non-computer system to your advantage". Also I gave up everything to work on the startup, so I am pretty committed. (No going back to school and stuff)

BUT. I'm a single founder. Trust me, I really want to get a co-founder, but I know it's extremely important to find someone who I know will work out well with, so I can't just get a co-founder quickly for YC application.

I am informed that it's almost impossible to get into Ycombinator if you're a single founder. But I also know a few got in. How did those few single founder companies get in?

I really want to get into YC, and I'm doing my best to fill out the application, but it would be more encouraging to know that there's even a chance. Please help. Thanks.