avebear

That’s great advice. I admire pg for pushing for that, both in the YC applications and in his writing.

I’ve had fun and built interesting projects based on harvesting tweets. As some other comments suggest, data collection is an important and hard skill that most tutorial projects ignore. If you can show 0) you came up with an interesting question, 1) had the idea to get this data, 2) harvested the data successfully, 3) formatted and cleaned it, and 4) ran appropriate algorithms to look for the answer to your question, you have everything you need from a portfolio project (even if the data doesn’t support your original hypothesis!).