Hackers are experts at following links.

This guy wrote Mongrel, which is a very solid HTTP server - the most common way to deploy Ruby applications these days. Also he was one of the guys on ruby-lang who discovered nasty bugs in Ruby's threading implementation (everybody else just preferred bitching about "unreliable" Ruby threads and memory leaks)

What can go wrong with startups? You can work on the problem wrong, which is hopefully averted by smarts. Or you can work on the wrong problem, which is averted by flexibility and subjecting yourself to reality checks. If you've got both of those elements, the only thing that can really go wrong is that you give up before you hit upon an idea that's useful.

1) I just resigned from my day job this week to pursue startup ambitions and

2) I am definitely having "oh shit what am I doing" thoughts right now.

So given the timing for me, this kind of inspiration is very moving. As far as how it is written, I would argue that the phoned-in and impulsive nature is what makes this essay so elegant. It is clean and concise, stating the idea simply: dont give up. Anyway, this is all one mans opinion so you are certainly entitled to disagree.

If we can be recipients of messages like this, I don't think any of us not funded by YC should feel like we're outside the club.

"Here's how it works: we convince people to write opinions. And then when someone else reads that opinion, and ranks it highly, we'll give the writer a piece of an affiliate link sale."

There's way, way, way too many steps involved in making a few pennies.

The story that you tell your users (all of them) is very important. Epinion's was pretty miserable.

A buddy of mine said that one of the reasons that Google's a money machine is that it is dead easy for a neophyte web advertiser to set up an ad:

1. Pick some words 2. Pick how much you want to pay 3. Done.

That's the level of story you want to tell.

Measure your story against that.

There were 38 before this batch, 20 new ones this summer, 1 of which immediately merged with a startup from a previous round = 19 in Cambridge.

1) How can a just-now-released essay be influential at all?

2) At least half of pg's essays are better written than this, which to me seemed a little phoned-in. It's not really an essay anyway, but a peptalk. He didn't even have the usual cavalcade of proofreaders at the bottom.

3) The most influential essay I've ever read is the first essay of "Genealogy of Morals".

Their team needed statistical analysis and charts to solve a 60 second response time bug? That's just a total lack of basic debugging skills.

Eliminating all confounding and spending the time to test your application's performance characteristics in a statistically valid way rarely makes sense. If lives are on the line fine, but in most cases the reason for even attempting it do so is bureaucratic. Release early, release often.