skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought the key phrase in your comment was: "Your startup depends almost entirely on the thinking and behavior of people", emphasis mine, and I responded to this seemingly wrong idea. I assumed "thinking and behavior" implies some specific psychological aspects rather than "thinking and behavior" in a broad sense.

Anyway, I suggest a thought experiment: let's say we have a successful tech startup of 2 founders, 3 more developers and an accountant. How exactly would you apply Munger's theory of misjudgement in this startup to make it better? (more productive, improve the social atmosphere, better understand customers, etc - what else?) Just 2-3 key points maybe, from the "nuanced, intelligent perspective" you seem to be looking from.
Do you have some kind of metrics for this, do you have inside information, or is it an educated guess?
Wasp with HUGE stinger
I remember your site. It looked very plain, now it looks pretty good! Nice choices there!
it is 100% percent certain that they will not accept you as a single founder

Two of the startups in the current batch were run by single founders when we accepted them. Neither was a startup legend or had any traction.

The odds of being accepted are much greater (roughly 4x) with a cofounder, but it's not impossible to get funded as a single founder.
Yahoo supports Google social network applications
SXSW Report: A Critical Look at OpenID
Actually, his example was the SIMPLE case. It was an enhancement. For a real change, you'd have to add everything needed for regression testing. That would double again what was needed.

Once I was doing service work for a large software house and had to enlarge a dictionary for one customer by 2 characters to handle some of his data. 11 weeks and 4 committees later, my mod was rejected because of impact on other customers. Bottom line: 5 minutes dev work, 50 hours overhead for that change.
Thankyou for the clarification.
There is nothing wrong with downmodding something without also commenting. I do it, and you probably do it too. It's not so much lack of stones as lack of time. It is, however, wrong to complain about it and to insult other users.
I think this insight applies to many life challenges, not just starting companies. Some that come to mind:

* Courting, relationships

* Building a career within an organization

* Some unproven solution to a technical problem

* Building a blog readership

etc.
Al Copeland, a Restauranteur Known for Spice and Speed, Dies at 64
Never would have thought that someone could come up with a better cvs? Really? I bumped into cvs' limitations the first time I committed a badly named file.

Also, making it out like the history of open source version control tools goes cvs -> svn -> git -> hg is missing a lot of history. (Get it?)
Do YC companies have a 50% chance of getting an A-round within 12 months? I guess Graham can tell us.

Off the top of my head, I'd say the ratio is about that, of companies that want to raise series A rounds. Most don't actually want to. They don't need that much money, so they go with angels because it's so much less restrictive.
I made up "aphatic" to mean "not phatic", by analogy with "aphasia".
Fair enough on complaining about it. 9 out of 10 times when it happens, I avoid complaining, but I wasn't able to resist this time around.

I do notice a definite pattern with respect to this sort of thing on race related issues -- some people are quick to downmod, but slow to put themselves out there and have a real debate on the issue. It gets annoying and I'm commenting on it. If people want to downmod for that, you're right, it's their prerogative, but to me it's more likely that they don't want to publicly touch a radioactive issue than that they simply don't have time to comment.

As far as insulting other users . . . who could be insulted? They're anonymous so there's no damage to their reputation. If they took personal umbrage, well, what can I say? They can feel free to say something about it, just like you did.

Anyway, I'd much rather not deal with race related stuff on this site period, but if people are gonna post it, I'm probably going to comment on it. I posted a related story and then deleted it because I'd rather not see a rash of threads on this.
Two possibilities here:

People (speaking in generalities here) follow the patterns that they know and with which they are comfortable. In particular, the mass media which seems to feel that: If it ain't controversial/sensational, make it so (by ignoring major details and/or context). If we can't make it so, we'll not speak of it.

Original thinking does not come easily to most people. One of the easiest way for some people to prove their self worth is to criticize another's work (or attempt to, even if it is about the color of the shed ;) ). The bigger that someone else is, the better. Right now, your one of the big guys.

The price of fame and fortune...
It is possible, and we have done it on jaanix. Take a look, there are no surprises.

You have a guest id with no questions asked that lets do everything on the site. You can keep it forever if you come back at least once every two weeks. You only have to join if you want to have your own subdomain - and we ask you for the name and a password - that's it.
Hrm. Fair enough. I was assuming the "write" step would include something atypical enough to screw up a program that just looks for "blogs" to "comment on." But, that might not be the case for everyone (or even for me).
Evidence mounting: Windows 7 going modular, subscription
It’s easy to make a self-righteous anti-racist statement. They bore me, and I am mystified as to why everybody rushes to be the first to condemn someone whenever they step over a racial line. The correct response to an unfunny idiot performance is to ignore it, not to seize the opportunity to proclaim loudly how non-racist you are.

Also, I don’t think it’s wrong to joke about race. By joking about racial stereotypes, people are more comfortable discussing and confronting the uneasiness they feel when interacting with people from other races, nationalities, and cultural backgrounds. Plus, race jokes are probably more funny because they are so taboo, see Chris Rock, Dave Chappel, et al.

This dude has an execution and taste problem, that’s the story.
I'd think that dental work would be a huge opportunity. When I engaged my dentist, he drove a Mustang. Now he drives a Mercedes.
How does gradual engagement work precisely? If this is based entirely on cookies, which seems to be the only possibility, then: what if I started the process, posted something - my video, a blog post, etc - then got my cookies deleted? Or moved to another computer?
Startup Lunch Initiative (in India): Find prospective startups/employees
OpenSocial Foundation includes many, but not Facebook
Apply to YC?
I live in midtown/closer to downtown Atlanta and know about this homeless problem. It's pretty bad and sometimes the sidewalks can get crowded at night.. even worse is the park across from Coca-Cola headquarters.
Bots won't be able to ab/use a site with gradual engagement, because the whole process would be too difficult for them to follow, I presume. Thus no need for captchas.
Clemson? Me too. Didn't think anybody else lived here. What's your background, you a student?
It's not self-righteous, it's personal. I'm black and I personally find it offensive.

And it's not easy to take a stand against it around here - more often than not, criticizing this sort of thing gets you a lot of anonymous downmods. I'm willing to say something about it, put my real name behind it, and take the downmods. That's fine.

As I said before, I'd much rather these things don't get posted at all on a site I go to for Hacker News, but if they're going to be posted, I'm going to make a comment about it. Staying quiet on it is the same as saying that it's acceptable to you. If others want to do that, fine, but there's no way I'm going to do that. Sorry.
I just finished that incredible book, which I consider the best read of my last two years.

It would be a worthy addition to any entry-evel AI, psychology or cognitive science class.
Britain is world's 7th most stable and prosperous nation - US 22nd
I don't believe there are any good rules for being able to tell the difference between the two.

Experience helps a lot there. YC has gotten fairly good at it. And when we advise people to give up on some immediate goal and backtrack, they tend to listen, because we're usually pretty optimistic.
Also, I don’t think it’s wrong to joke about race. By joking about racial stereotypes, people are more comfortable discussing and confronting the uneasiness they feel when interacting with people from other races, nationalities, and cultural backgrounds. Plus, race jokes are probably more funny because they are so taboo, see Chris Rock, Dave Chappel, et al.

Interestingly, I mostly agree with you. If you read what I said carefully, I didn't call the guy a racist and I specifically said the headline calling him "cruel" was too much. That'd imply that he went out of his way to try to hurt people with what he said. Hell, I mostly like the guy and have posted some of his stuff on News.YC myself.

I think that if you reread my comment, you'll see that even Loren Feldman himself would probably agree with what I said. What he did was a cliched minstrel show. He tried to be funny, but instead he ended up being hurtful and looking like a racist douchebag. He's essentially said as much himself in subsequent postings.

The bigger question is why the black guy is being attacked for commenting on the original video. ;)
Your last sentence sounds like a great example of survivorship bias. The ones who took more risks are all dead ;-)
What will life be like in 2020
As an 80's baby, the greatest technological marvel I can remember is the advancement of the internet. The article listed here yesterday made me wonder -- What are your predictions for 2020? Here's mine:

1. artificial limbs controlled with the mind. There are already advancements in this area, and I am interested where it'd go in 10 years.

2. solid state fuel cells are the main power source for vehicles.

3. 1 Terabyte thumb drives are old news. They are commonplace.

Add your predictions!
White Hat Hackers - New World Saviours? 
From Brand Killer Robots to the YCombinator!

White Hat hacking is the art of designing computer tools, techniques, strategies, concepts, exploits and counter-methods to attack and defend against a bad target on the Internet. It is the art of mounting covert operations, spying and corrupting the evil black hat movement. The art of using the creative mind to see beyond the obvious, to envision possibilities way beyond that of the average computer user.

and read more..
Yet another GIGO ranking of nations according to arbitrary criteria.

The flow of immigration between e.g. the US and the UK is the opposite of what this ranking predicts. Are they proposing the immigrants don't know enough to act in their own interest?

In my experience, immigration patterns of educated workers are the best indication of all of what countries are desirable to live in. The costs of moving to a new country are so high that people have to be really sure before they'll do it.

If people move to Silicon Valley despite the proliferation of small arms in the US or the flow of drugs from Mexico, it's not a sign that they're stupid, but that the weighting of components in this study was wrong.
Just a thought, if you're planning on applying to the round coming up in a few days I would suggest holding off until next time. Your odds will be better because you will have A: a further developed product, B: A cofounder who you know very well and are comfortable with, and C: more time for PG and crew to look at your application.

Of course after you consider the upsides to this, there aren't really any downsides to applying now, even if you don't get accepted. But if you don't get accepted, I encourage you to apply again in the winter round. The problem you're addressing I believe is a good one to solve.
O'Reilly book on "unofficial" iPhone development is sold out at Amazon
> The bigger question is why the black guy is being attacked for commenting on the original video. ;)

We're all #828282 here (oh, except nickb on his 10k day) . You were probably downvoted because your post looked like it was copy/pasted from Digg.
London startup comp has a £1m prize
The math is actually pretty simple.

How long do you need to be without income? How much will you need on Day 1 on No Income to make it to Day Z?

If you cut your expenses to the absolute bare minimum and kept working full time (maybe even adding some side work), then you can calculate Day 1. Then you commit to doing your project starting Day 1. Period. Problem solved.

The real beauty of this plan is that you don't have to pay anyone back, you don't have to share equity, and you don't have to depend on events outside your control (getting accepted into something). Of course, once you have something to show, you can do any of those things on your own terms.

WARNING: When I say "bare minimum", I mean it. No more restaurants, candy bars, beer, hookers, etc. It's very easy to lose sight of this while "good money" is coming in. Never forget: that money is already spoken for.
I thought it was initially just for London, but if you read the rules it states:

Be based in London. Definition includes having a registered office / or willingness to open such an office in one of the 32 boroughs of London, or in the City of London, at which senior management will be based.

So it's all good if you're willing to set-up and move to London.

http://www.londontechnologyfund.com/competition/index.php
Good for them. I'm closing on a house tomorrow in Denver and I have nothing but contempt for the real estate process. I passed on my first house when I found out the selling agent was trying to collect 2x the fee simply because I didn't have my own agent. I finally found an agent who would kick me back 2/3 the fee, since I was doing all the legwork myself.
Isn't it illegal to discriminate on the basis of military service? The guy who asked you those questions may have opened himself, and google, to a serious lawsuit.

IANAL, of course.
There's always a downside of waiting to do anything in a startup: you have competitors. You may not know who they are, but odds are there's someone else out there working on roughly the same thing.

If you're not committed to a particular idea, you can safely wait, yes. But if there is something specific you want to work on, you can't safely delay at any stage, whether it's getting funding, releasing, or adding new features.
I criticized an offensive video and that means my posts look like they're from Digg? I don't think that's particularly fair.
AJAX patented in 1999?
If people move to Silicon Valley despite the proliferation of small arms in the US or the flow of drugs from Mexico, it's not a sign that they're stupid, but that the weighting of components in this study was wrong.

... or, more likely, that the people who move to Silicon Valley have different priorities from most people.
I would rather not wait if I can get going now. Usually pushing yourself into something that you might not be quite ready for means that you have to take responsibility for it.

There are too many hopeful entrepreneurs that think "I'm not quite ready, so I'll do it in a month" - and have done so for years. In my experience it is better to push forward into the great unknown....
Just imagine 20 more one-line posts like yours that call him a "douche" and you can see how it'd fit right in on Digg.

You seem pretty interested in arguing with someone about this guy. I think it's pretty obvious to most people that this guy just isn't worthy of discussion. He's clearly an asshole, what's there to talk about? (that's a rhetorical question).
My current project involves interacting with a chat bot. We could require users to sign up on a form and make sure we have a boatload of data from them upfront before opening up the service to them.

Instead what we do is tell them to add a bot to their buddy list and send it a greeting. In doing this, they've already engaged in the service, and we have created an entry in our users database based on their buddy name and chat network. They can then decide whether supply additional information.

There are lots of ways to lower the barrier to entry if you're willing to change the way you think about online services.
With my first startup I saved up about $30k, then went into "hotdog mode". This is when you cut your expenses down to the point where your only overhead is hot dogs, tap water, and rent/mortgage/utilities. You have no gas expenses because you don't drive anywhere, and no entertainment expenses because you do nothing but code. I could have lasted 18 months that way.

In the first year, I built the software, found two co-founders, and got some favorable press, which led to a small angel round--I actually turned down money in the angel round because I didn't want to give up too much of the company at a low valuation. That bump was enough to get the product launched, start paying ourselves, and have revenue coming in. We later raised real capital, but by then we had a solid product, reputation, and quickly growing client base. I retained >50% of the stock when we sold the company years later.

I've always been amazed that founders will so readily give up their equity just to raise capital, or to get prestigious advisory/board members. Do your startup for the love, but keep your eye on the end-game and don't give up equity unless you have no other choice.
How to Track Feedback Usage with Wufoo
But that has to be offset by how easy it is to immigrate, and it is tremendously easier to immigrate to the US as opposed to most other industrialized countries.

I also think this study is skewed but I wouldn't use immigration as a yard stick.
The age of the Instapreneur
Given the sheer number of things that Apple does, it's not exactly hard to say that at some point in the future, Apple will be disliked.
Actually, arguing with anyone about this is a waste of time. I made one post deriding it, people started criticizing me, so I'm answering them. End of story.

I post technical articles here and contribute tips to other hackers every day; I really don't need you to lecture me about the quality of my posts.
Young inventors working with Brand Killer Robots! 
Story about how young inventors and scientists are getting help from the brand protection blog "Brand Killer Robots".
Microsoft's Bid for Yahoo Is All About Big-Budget Brand Advertising
But they are already, both Google and Apple. Companies are like politicians: don't support them because you like them, but because they can help you. When they stop helping you, support someone else.
Same goes for spending a month finessing your YC application. tptacek's point is that the time spent getting into YC could be better spent building your product.
VCs Adjust to Facing More Competitors for Fewer Companies.
Security Lapse Exposes Facebook Photos
Do you have numbers or is this just anectodal?
I had an idea as I was reading this. Open source seems counterintuitive because it gives away code, which people assume is valuable. As the article says, "How can you build a business by giving away the store?" But what if code isn't that valuable?

More precisely, what if code isn't worth very much when separated from the programmers who wrote it? This notion explains a lot. It explains why source code theft is almost unheard of (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36551) - except, of course, programmers taking copies of their own code with them when they leave a company. It explains why codebases decay so quickly when they're handed off for maintenance, and why rewrites almost always fail when they're not done by the original team. It explains why people don't really buy or sell source code as such.

It also matches the experience of working programmers, which is: most code sucks; other people's code really sucks ("it's all shit", an oldtimer once told me); and it's often easier to write code than to read it.

The best description I've found of this idea is Peter Naur's (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121291). Naur puzzled over cases where, even when code was well written and well documented, other programmers (not members of the original team) screwed it up. His explanation for this is that the program is not the code. Rather, the program is a set of mental constructs (Naur uses the word "theory") that live in the minds of the programmers writing it. Code is merely the canonical written expression of the program, and it's a lossy one: given only the code, you can't reconstruct the theory. Since the theory exists in the minds of the team, if you lose the team, you lose the theory, and with it most of the value.

Viewed this way, the economics of open source vis-à-vis closed source are not nearly so counterintuitive. If code isn't that valuable, then open source isn't "giving away the store" at all. And if what is valuable is the theory of the program in Naur's sense, then open source adds value by extending the theory to a larger base of programmers, something that closed source has tried and failed to do for years.

If open source is value-creating, it's not an economic paradox. It only looks that way because people (especially non-programmers) have a mistaken model of software value. It's not surprising that it would take time for business models and infrastructure to catch up.
Algorithms Are Terrific. But to Search Smarter, Find a Person.
That is a very good question, buyers who use Redfin are obviously more price sensitive and market savvy than the average buyer.
Google faces uphill fight for unlicensed white space plan
This seems like a perfect example of a cartel-esque market that could be dominated by fee-based technology-using upstarts.

Now the case for selling agents making a percentage-based commission is stronger, assuming they actually actively work to sell the home (holding open houses and active promotion).

But when it comes to buyer's agents, the whole idea of paying them based on the sale value is a massive conflict of interest. Why would a buyer's agent be a good faith representative in negotiations if it was in their personal interest that the sale price be higher?

The only reason this has worked for so long is that Realtors collude on the commission (it's 6% everywhere... there is no price competition). They also actively try to control entrance into the profession to make sure everyone tows the line.

To me, a fee-based buying agent makes much more sense. Barring that, at least pay them as a percentage of the difference between the asking and final price. That way if you get the house for $10k under the asking price, they can have 35% of that, rather than 3% of the total value of the home.
It's hard hiring tech people, and most small companies aren't very skilled at hiring people.

My company had this difficulty recently...we posted the job on craigslist and on our site but didnt' get what we were looking for.

A headhunter finally contacted me and offered me a great developer. We loved him and hired him. That was 6 months ago and he's still doing great work for us.

The headhunter got a 5-figure fee on the deal...for what? Probably just helping my developer out with his paperwork and then interceding with us on his behalf. He couldn't have spent more than 8 hours working with us and working with our developer.

And yet, I love my new developer and we would not have found him without this headhunter's help.

Moral of the story: Think of headhunters like investment bankers. They make enormous sums of money (sometimes) and seemingly do no real "work", but they can play a very useful role in the functioning of the market (in this case the "talent" market).

I'd stick with your guy.
Save the Developers!  Stop Using Internet Explorer 6
Ad Networks Are For Losers
news.yc is open sourced now, seems like you could get the job done by removing the hotness exponent, adding tags by medical procedure, and ... that's it?