skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What they want, ideally, is someone who was successful in your space. Second place goes to someone who failed in your space (and in about your size-range). That's why YC is so special--pg & co are willing to give folks a shot that nobody else will.

Having said that, if you are going for the "real thing" VC with $5-10M first-round financing, get someone who's done it on your team. It pays off manifold ways.

Smart VC know that your business is going to change. Significantly. Knowing how to do this comes with experience, inside business experience, that is hard to get except by doing it. An experienced CEO knows how to manage the changes, keep the investors off the backs of the workers when things get rough. And they will get rough.

From a pragmatic perspective, someone with experience already has the VC contacts to call, and knows how to tailor the pitches to each. This is a huge plus when getting started.
you don't, because you don't have enough karma yet. you have to get to 20 or so before downmodding is possible.
How laptops, smartphones and big-screen TVs are destroying sex
Ask News.YC: What are the most useful things Y Combinator provides its startups?
Here's my list (in descending order):

1) exposure to investors at Demo Day (EDIT: exposure to the right people throughout the process)

2) guidance and mentoring (both from principals and alums)

3) forcing you into an intense, focused schedule

4) validation of your abilities and ideas

5) contacts and streamlining the legal/financial issues

6) free publicity

7) a few thousand dollars

Did I miss any? Anyone disagree with the order?
No, more like realistic. It's like how every kid wants to be an astronaut, but there are only 100 in the world. Or how every actor wants to be the next Brad Pitt but very few actors (dozens ever?) achieve that level of success. Creating a billion dollar, public company from scratch is something very, very few people have ever done. Getting rich (single or double digit millions) has been done millions of times and so although difficult, is a reasonable goal to pursue.

And the $$ is probably the least useful thing YC provides. If I had to guess, I'd say the most useful things they provide are (in this order):

(actually turned into its own post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147984
So? They'll just pass the cost on to customers.
Vitamin C has no effect?! That's not what mommy told me :(

Any references?
Hex, axod, :-) means it's a joke!
Comcast Teams Up With BitTorrent and Promises Net Neutrality
On the same token, if you cloned me, and he was sitting next to me and I had to choose who would get shot, I'd choose him. He isn't me because I can't access his thoughts. I think identity is tied to physical and temporal location and is in continual flux, so a clone is never me--it never occupies the same points in space and time. The nerve replacement idea is tough, though. Maybe our idea of identity is wrong, artificial, or too limiting.
If this project was a woman, would you marry her? I didn't think so.

If the answer was yes, you never would have asked the question in the first place. You'd already be working.
Startups (and 37 signals :-P) take note:

This is how to properly communicate contentious design decisions to your users. For that reason alone I'm voting it up.
This is overly simplified, but I think it gets the point across.

In baseball offensive players advance from base to base every time they successfully hit the ball and keep it away from the defense. If the batter (the one who hits the ball) hits the ball well he will go to first base, if he does an even better job he will make it to second base. If even better than that he can make it to third base. The best scenario is if he hit a home run which allows him to run past third base to the home base and score a point.

The analogy is that you can play it safe and go for first base (less risk but less reward) or swing as hard as you can and go for a home run (high risk, high reward). Although it is not as glamourous as hitting a home run, hitting base hit after base hit is a steady way to win a baseball game.
The 102 Best Free Phone Services on the Web
Another program we've been looking at is TechStars (www.techstars.org). Its based in Colorado, which I believe, is emerging as a startup hub.
I would guess that #3 is most important. Amazing what you can do when the pressure is on and the obstacles removed. I also like the "binaryness" of it. Perform and leverage the other 6. Don't perform and nothing else matters.

(The irony is that you don't need YC to do #3. You can do it yourself. So if you don't get into YC, do #3 anyway. It may not be as good as being part of YC, but I bet it would still be a great start.)
By the way, I am very supportive of YC and I am in awe of what is being done within this community. But I can't help but to make the connection. As it turns out, money is also the least useful commodity that the Microloan Foundation provides. The following is out of their mission statement ...

"We provide ... basic business training and continuing guidance ... enables them to develop self-sustainable livelihoods ..."

http://www.microloanfoundation.org.uk/about_us.asp
> A newborn baby, I strongly suspect, contains very few algorithms.

I would say "very few" is going way too far. There is essentially language recognition (Broca and Wernicke's areas), pattern recognition, and a large body of instincts and social skills (via pre-programmed behaviors and mirror neurons) built-in already.
hehe never can tell for sure on the intraweb
For Kurzweil, it's an interesting way of asserting - advertising, if you will - his own confidence in his capacities as a futurist.
Web 2.0 is dead in France ... RIP
For those who did not take French 101, this article basically says that the actor Olivier Martin sued the local Digg (Fuzz, www.fuzz.fr) which was ultimately condemned by a French court for having hosted a link related to the alleged Martinez-Minogue liaison. His total bill: 2500 euros. The site owner has decided to end his adventure for, as he says, "it has become too risky." His lawyer argued, without success, that it is essentially going after all the magazine and newspaper kiosks.
This is what I think matters (in this order)

1) exposure to the right people (not just investors, and not just at demo day)

2) great product advice

3) a fast schedule and competitive environment that will make you work harder than you've ever worked before

That being said, YC mostly provides greater opportunities (and more of them), its still up to you to make the most of that.
x | y	bitwise or of x and y

x ^ y	bitwise exclusive or of x and y

x & y	bitwise and of x and y

x << n	x shifted left by n bits

x >> n	x shifted right by n bits

~x	the bits of x inverted
There is a very big and rather obvious issue of trust with a solution like theirs. I am expected to entrust them with my passwords, essentially creating a single point of failure for a lot of sensitive information. Sorry, can't do. Not even if they were a spin-off of VeriSign.

The only passwords I am willing to share with them at the moment are those I am finding at BugMeNot :)
I am surprised by so many "author is confused" and "author is misinformed" responses. Can't you guys operate on a higher level of abstraction? Aren't we all here dynamic language lovers?

Just listen to what he says more closely, because he is essentially suggesting that strong typing is bad for databases for exact same reasons it's bad for programming languages. Yes, it makes things faster, more efficient, robust but ... (surprise!) less flexible and dumb.

"Duck-typed storagebases" are indeed the future and perhaps the number of negative reactions is the best indicator of how novel the idea is.

I am in disagreement with "semantic web" movement (in my opinion it's already semantic enough), but the storage part is spot on.
Zero startup experience is not a problem for the good VCs, if you seem to be a superstar hacker.
If you used this in source code that I had to maintain, I would curse you every time I saw it.

Just saying.
Great Hackers say no to sitting in a "stupid office" all day!
I'm sure there are thousands, for everything from hydroponic gardening to fursuits. I wasn't saying there aren't good small communities, just that there aren't any except News.YC in the subset of the world that reads the kind of thing I write.
But limiting an intelligence to simply making financial decisions is not the type of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about. What you are describing is much more limited than what "strong AI" is actually supposed to be.

You bring up an EXCELLENT point about robotics being more advanced than AI.
I brought a (semi-novelty) product to market that used aerogels. We were slightly profitable, but the fact that aerogels are irritants derailed our plans for millions. [Our product lost essentially all of its appeal because you either had to handle it with gloves or encase it in another material for safety reasons. Fortunately, we weren't sued before we realized the error of our ways.]

I agree, however, that if you can figure out a way to produce it very cheaply, you can easily make millions. Just the insulation properties alone...it's really an amazing material. And its uses are almost limitless. I have a friend that is working on an aerogel application in the medical field (diabetes-related.)
Oh you mean the old

x[::~0][~-1]

trick to get the last item. Thought that's what everyone uses.
Exactly. My biggest fear is that they will try to assert control where they do not have expertise. If they gave me the control I need to build the software correctly -- instead of just saying I have control but then making unreasonable demands later -- I would feel good about it.
then it's just me. It's probably an old version of flash on ff3 for ubuntu.
Why corporate espionage is getting easier thanks to Business Intelligence Software!
It's not a clear cut win-win to me because, even though I may be richer, I may hate working with these people and my life may be miserable for that period of time. And the 'richer' argument is only in the short term -- what is one year of high salary followed by nothing compared to steady gains in pretty good salary over time?
RE: #1, even when we can simulate the entire brain, how will we know what topology the network should have and what the node nonlinearities should be? 100 billion nodes can be connected a few different ways. Parameter estimation of a dynamic nonlinear network of this size is the real limitation.
Dotcom experience turns Creative Innovators into Security Experts
Apple attempts blackmail with its Irish Staff
Here's our list: http://ycombinator.com/about.html

I don't think Demo Day is the most important. Demo Day was a joke the first time (we just looked at the guest list, and there were 12 people), but Reddit and Loopt both came out of that batch. As well as Kiko, the predecessor of Justin.TV. So it doesn't seem that Demo Day is the active ingredient.

I think the most valuable things the average startup gets from YC are product advice, help in dealing with later stage investors, and the atmosphere/network created by all the other YC funded startups, which now comprises about 200 people.

I suppose by now the YC brand also confers some baseline legitimacy. Pretty much every VC firm will at least give you a meeting, every online pub write about you if you ask them, every startup law firm give you a deferred fee deal, etc.
Open Office 2.4.0. Released With Great New Features
That's assuming that breakthrough research will continue to come out of the United States and Europe, as opposed to China, where human rights purposefully lag without repercussion from other nations.

The major advances over the fifty years will likely come from China for that very reason- the countries that are less risk-adverse will have the greatest technological strides as the frontiers of technology get more and more morally murky.

Is it ok to remove someone's organs and replace them with the mechanical equivalent, knowing that they may very well die as a result? Is it ok to do it with their permission? Without their permission?

France just had a issue where a woman had a rare form of cancer that caused her to look like the girl from Saw with her eyeball hanging out, on top of the whole 'dying of cancer and in excruciating terminal pain' thing.

She was in so much pain, so miserable, and so without hope that she decided she would opt for euthanasia. The courts denied her petition, and she quickly committed suicide on her own.

If we have issues like that with cancer patients, just imagine the issues when we start dealing more with genetic engineering, nano-technology, human cloning, and cybernetic enhancement.

Here in the US, these technologies will, for better or for worse, be held up by the government and our courts as we collectively attempt to wrap our minds around the implications.

In other countries, research will move along, full speed ahead.
Lots of positive stuff without evidence gets praised without being accused of being Fanboy material. This could be a troll or a decent contrarian question, and I think the comments and responses show it was the latter.
Apple iPhone SDK beta 2 now includes Interface Builder
No link because iPhone doesn't have copy paste.
Juicy Auctomatic Acquisition Notes
A quick and dirty analysis of the deal terms, company and who got what.
http://www.launchboxdigital.com/ - based out of DC. Pretty new. Saw them present @ tech meetup in NYC.
I'd be more interested in a horizontal slider, labeled "probability you'll attend." It wouldn't be very accurate for a single person, but you could get some more meaningful group statistics (such as "probable party size" as referred to in the article.)
Well, add connections to the right people and that's about right then. Although the goal is a little higher than sustainable livelihoods.
Capistrano is great for deployment. I'm not sure what you mean by 'building'. These are scripting languages...
How Was This Recursive Image Made?
Translated and summarized:

French site Fuzz.fr shut down by a judge.

Site editor fined 2500 Euros.

Olivier Martinez sued about 20 web sites for writing about his relationship with Kylie Minogue.

Among them was fuzz.fr. Fuzz.fr is a francophone digg clone, thus, the relevant news story was posted by a user, not by site editors. The judge ruled that the site owners must be considered editors.

The site owner decided to shut down the site rather than try to screen every link posted.

The site owner's legal team generalize this case to imply that all user-generated content in France, thus, Web 2.0 itself, is in danger.
Git with Ruby On Rails?
Any experiences you'd like to share on this (especially compared to SVN)? How do plugins (many of which are SVN based) work out?
Wikipedia receives $500,000 from another VC
You don't have to get H1B to apply for EBGC. The H1B period is 2 years. Although it's not guaranteed to be approved for next two years, you'll pretty likely be. The maximum period of H1B is 5 years from what I remember (2 + 2 + 1).
StreamFocus project management software entering limited Beta (by gibsonf1)
He was also working as a developer in an office with you. He may have been wealthy or had started various startups, but he still worked for others in his old age.

There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I would expect from, say, a multi-million dollar CEO in semi-retirement. Maybe more a member of the board or a private investor who works on various fun projects.
This is exactly why health and life insurance is a losing game. Your health insurance company loses money when it fulfills its purported purpose. Life insurance puts you on the wrong side of the bet: you are betting that your life will be short.

I highly doubt that Kurzweil has an HMO.
This looks like it has a ton of potential - looks like the power of a heavier-weight tool like MS Project with the style and ease of use of a 37s app. I'd be interested in trying it but it looks like it might be overkill for one person without lots of projects going on. gibsonf1, what do you think? I don't want to waste a spot in your private beta, I'll look forward to seeing more details later.
I think this is a good example of deliberate design of the right details.

Another interesting take could be to add an optional "If|Unless..." clause to the Attending and Not Attending buttons, for people to clarify their intentions.
I believe this'll only work on machines that use 2s-complement arithmetic, which is basically all of them. Just saying...it's theoretically possible to have number representations where ~0 != -1.
Yes. I've laid out my objections to his timetables here before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142175

I like what his books do in terms of sparking the imagination, but take his claims with the same level of skepticism as I do an infomercial. Another thing is the repitition; if you've read Age of Intelligent Machines you've read Age of Spiritual Machines as well as Singularity is Near.

Some of the predictions of Spiritual Machines have fallen short already: Most people don't use speech recognition to enter data into computers. Granted, he chose 2009 as that target date, but I feel safe that won't be the main method of entry in a few months.
Of course, he'd definitely pick you to get shot!
Google: No kids allowed
True, I think the discussion was about the broader AI, but Kurzweil is all about AGI.
Wouldn't it be possible to create a site that remembers all your passwords but only has them in encrypted form? It would use JavaScript on the browser to encrypt and decrypt the passwords (using your master passphrase) before sending them to the server?
You don't have to travel and just look around, shouting 'Hey! I'm traveling!"... though, that's an incredibly fun thing to do, and you meet a lot of smart, amazing, and ambitious people in a very short time by doing it.

You can work abroad, easy- I'm currently working on a startup in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and I'm from San Francisco. The LLC is based in Delaware via LegalZoom, our mailing address is an EarthClassMail Account, our phone number is GrandCentral forwarding to Skype.

We work from cafes around Buenos Aires, usually camping out in one place the entire day- much cheaper than renting an office, and the food is great to boot.

And, speaking of cheap, let's talk about rent real quick- for an apartment all to myself with an amazing view, internet, utilities, and a weekly maid cleanup included, it's $500 in a great location. At the grocery store it's eight pesos for two big steaks, or, about $1.25 a pop.

The subway and bus are both one peso (1 USD = 3.15 Argentinean Pesos) and I can get anywhere in the city within a half hour or so. I meet lots of very cool, interesting, well-travelled backpackers and expats all the time, and have made plenty of friends with people who are living here for the next six months to a year.

Right now the weather is perfect, sunny during the day, rain at night to cool things off (as Eluvium plays on my MacBook, fading out slowly) as I go to sleep. In another couple of months it'll be winter, weather will still be decent, and I'll be a first class suite bus ride away from a weekend skiing.

I could go on, but, really, travel isn't just a way to relax, it's also a great way to work. Your costs are cut and you don't have to sacrifice as much of your lifestyle as you would in the States.
If you have to maintain my code, I'm sure you'll curse me anyway.
I've been messing around with the SDK over the last few weeks and the lack of a standard interface building tool was annoying but easy enough to work without. Its really the mental switch from Java to Obj-C that kills me when I leave work.

Considering that I spend my days at work using the Matisse builder for Java Swing GUIs, it should be an interesting comparison.
As far as I can tell Clickpass only works with 6 websites. Am I missing something? This is the mother of all chicken-and-egg problems... with no backwards compatibility mode to deal with websites that haven't gone along with a little two-guy startup's big scheme yet. Even Microsoft couldn't pull that off.

Wake me up when it can handle the 200-odd passwords I keep in PasswordSafe for 200-odd websites.
Well, if someone asked you: "Would you like me to transfer 50 million dollars to your account?" - what would you answer?

What would the "certain people" answer?

"No thanks" ?
Python: Twisted 8.0 released
Time and patience.

Also, it's not totally recursive since the top level is different from subsequent levels.
it is? the date on the one i read was march 27 2008.
They are an OpenID provider, so yes you can use them with the 11,000 or so web sites that support OpenID.

Obviously it's a lot more slick if you set things up their way. This is the opposite of a chicken-and-egg problem. The fact that there are so few web sites on clickpass while it's getting so much attention motivates implementors to work with them. It sure motivated me.
I have no idea. I haven't worked with Python in several years. But, I know that both Mailman and Trac are written in Python and they both do stuff with incoming mail...so, there's certainly some python code out their for dealing with incoming mail. That's where I'd start my search if I were in your shoes.
SEC information on Communicate.com/Auctomatic merger
Wow . . . people ought to learn what 'blackmail' means before bandying the term about.
Longevity Industry: Never Say Die
How many sites do you use with "I forgot my password" features that send you email? Email is that exact single point of failure for most people.
One idea: Create two companies, a US company and a company in your local country. You local country affiliate can pay your salary and the US company can pay the foreign company like a vendor.

After a year or so, you will be eligible to get a company L-1 transfer visa.

Or if you don't plan on paying yourself through the company in the first year or so, try to get a visa at another company (perhaps you are consulting for a small number of hours per week?). You wont be an employee of your startup, but you will be the owner.
here you go: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/
That sounds like a good idea. I am already working at another company on a H1-B visa and run my venture just as aside.

To really pursue this full-time, one route I am thinking is to apply to business-school and work on my venture through that. That way, I'll get to work on my venture, have better chances of meeting bright people I can work with, have better access to funding opportunities and also gain a 1 year provision through an F-1 visa that I can use to build a startup. Does that seem like a good idea?
> The truth is Kurzweil and others are fooling themselves if they think this is a hardware issue.

I agree that the state of that software is not there yet from what I've seen, but their workaround for the software limitations is to say we will model a working brain rather than inventing the software. If this is possible, it becomes a hardware issue.
SFLC announces a for-profit, open-source law firm
Take a screenshot of the the original Kubuntu wikipedia page. Scale a copy of the screenshot down to the size of the picture area on the wikipedia article. Take a screenshot of the result; scale a copy of the result down until it's the size of the picture within the picture in the screenshot. At that point, it's probably indistinguishable -- you can't see enough of the 4th picture to even recognize the color of the KDE desktop. This is no fun at all.