skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[...] So I sent my friend down the club I had chosen pretending to be my manager with a handwritten letter explaining my successful (and faked...) track record as a master tequila slammer showman [...]

As entertaining as the story is, I'm not sure that I'd count "being an effective fraud" as a skill I would want in someone I was considering funding. Some people may have a different perspective -- I've certainly heard it said that being able to lie with a straight face is a vital skill in business -- but given that the YC motto is "Make something people want", not "Lie to people to get them to pay for what you can offer them", I hope the YC crew doesn't take this view.
I agree. The video is a lil too long!!
Football prank, internet, write a book
A minor meta comment; Good titles really do matter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=103834
11 Features that made Facebook a killer app
I didn't quite understand that, yet I still applied. I just asked for further clarification.
Circumcision is quite possibly the dumbest thing that our society does.
My personal feelings

1. Kudos to the article for calling black people black, and not african americans: (http://davidadewumi.com/2008/01/27/just-call-me-black/)

2. How many black tech startups (or even Y C applications) have been around in the past decade or so?

I'd wager not many, and if/when there are, not much press coverage.

Two key comments to draw out of this article:

. Bringing up a young driver "is so expensive, no matter what your background," Gibbs says. "The diversity side just takes time. You've got to find some young guys and train them."

1. Sports with high barriers to entry (just like entrepreneurship) are by default going to draw smaller minority crowds-- if you can play basketball, football, or baseball for almost free, why do a high-end sport like tennis, NASCAR, hockey or lacrosse?

He's not racing as a "black driver." What drew him to the sport--the speed, his competitive nature--is what keeps him there...If Davis happens to become a black role model, so be it. "But I never really thought about the racial things," he says. "I race because I love it."

2. It's not about race -- the more we see it as a racial thing, whether it be politics or sports "the first black head coach to win a superbowl," the bigger the problem it is.
Ask YC: Are there any black or latino founded startups?
Came across a great post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104728

Although I think the more we focus on race, the worst we are (i.e. instead of referring to Dungy as a coach who won the superbowl, he's the "first black head coach" to win a superbowl), I'm going to break my own rule for the purpose of discussion:

How many founders in web/mobile/desktop applications have been Black or Latino in the last decade or so?

(Or even Y C applicants for that matter)
Not to throw a racial stick into the wheel, but are there any black or latino founders out there applying to Y C?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104919

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104728
I would definitely add a captcha to cut down on the spam.

Show it for every post to anonymous users, and only once for registration for users with accounts.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I wonder if this could be hacked together, browser side, so all links display like that. That would be a pretty neat thing to have.
I wasn't complaining about being downmodded. I don't care about my karma. I do care about why people downmod anti-homophobic comments, and want to understand their reasoning.

(It got at least 2 downmods. If people hadn't upmodded it, that would be more clear. I would prefer if it was still -1 (or less) so that it'd more more obvious there is some explaining to do.).
When I was making fun of Xobni some months ago, I said the next product of this kind would be "a browser plugin that lets you search your bookmarks":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56422

No its here and its called WebMynd. Alright.

Just for the record, here is my prediction: No one will use or remember this project in 2 years.
Hard to take it seriously when some of the articles linked on that page have headlines like "Dog gives birth to ugly mutant creature" and "Aliens caught on tape for the first time." Weekly World News called, they want their articles back.

See http://www.lostcosmonauts.com/ for less tabloidy information.
Least friendly URL ever.
Please don't editorialise in the headline. We're perfectly capable of judging it as idiocy for ourselves.
"The unluckiest russian was Yuri Gagarin: he circled around the earth and landed back in the soviet union." (french humorist Coluche)
Scoble has breakfast with Pervez Musharraf and this article is about Mark Zuckerberg?!
Why is this on hacker news?
I know that I don't know the skin color of the creators of web sites I visit. Also, I just remember MC Hammer being in a promo video of a YC startup, I think weebly. And I've heard he is starting his own social network thing, something music related.
My dissertation involved segmenting and rendering brains from 3D MR images of the head. One of the ways I checked my software was by hacking the head off a cadaver, imaging it, hacking out the brain, and then successfully matching volumes and photographs of the brain sulci from various POVs with the 3D renderings generated from the segmented images. That's probably my most successful hacking of a non-computer system :)
Interesting, but maybe better kept secret?
Well it seemed like a good opportunity to try out Greasemonkey at the time (wrote it for the last application cycle). Just thought the one or other applicant might appreciate it. The bookmarklet somebody else posted might be more elegant, though.

Also I had been looking for word count scripts like that and didn't find any, so maybe it can be useful for other web sites, too (it works for the news.yc comment form, for example).
Speaking as someone who cooks a lot for himself and is very interested in nutrition and proper diet, I have no idea why you're even asking this. Nutrition wise, vegans who play it smart are just as if not more healthy than the rest of us. Finance wise it's often cheaper because lets face it, meat is expensive. Time wise it's no different than any other type of meal preparation, which I believe studies have shown is actually faster than waiting for delivery or going out and ordering at a restraunt.

The fact is that it shows a level of dedication above and beyond what normal people exert. I'd say that puts them well in the running for a startup.
Cool, I've been looking for something like that 114 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62967 ;-)

Since then I have also discovered inkscape, but the Gimp stuff is still relevant now and then.
yep it would be fairly simple to do. The problem with this method is IE6 does not support it and if you are doing client work they are not going to like the fact that it does not work on IE6.
Yes, I know that but we would have to move to US for the summer and thus get visas, which could be difficult.
I don't know if you read that through or not, but...

There was no reason to mention anything about "fags" in your original comment -- it added nothing to the discussion and only detracted from it.
Looks like any Amazon URL to me.
Well, it's kind of like admitting fraud in public (for lack of a better word). It reminds me of the recent incident were some gangsters were busted because they posted revealing videos on YouTube. Moreover, I wonder if some crawler could be devised looking for people admitting their scams on their blogs, and solve a huge amounts of crimes that way...
I prefer reading over watching as I can cover the same amount of material in a shorter amount of time, and it's easier to skim through so I can figure out if I even want to spend the time on that particular topic to begin with. I understand the idea behind wanting to do something other than a blog, since every company has one these days, but video isn't the right answer for me.
Interesting twist on the theme - kind of savage, though ;-)
I've never been to a store where a clerk has checked my eggs -- have any of you? That is something I've always done before sticking a dozen eggs into my cart, since it seems like there's always a broken one in the first box I pick up.
Fraud is the best word you could choose.

In several countries (e.g. Germany, France... don't know about US) this is called computer fraud. And because he did it to sell the goods and make money, some countries would add "professional" and double the punishment.
Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Landed in Deep Water
The example was using awk to pick "Dec" out in the month column whilst pointing out a grep for "Dec" would also match the filename "December" which didn't have "Dec" in the month column. awk's clearly better than grep in this case.

It's not hard to count the column and you can always do a

... | awk '{print $6}' | sort | uniq -c

to see if you've got it right. In fact, a common way to develope the pipeline for a one-off task is to keep appending a pipe and another command to the previous pipeline command. That way, you can see a sample of what's being produced instead of imagining it.

You couldn't have analysed the results of grep, discarding the non-month matches of "Dec" in the time taken to count up to field 6 if the number of lines was at all significant. Don't be silly.

If I did miscount and no lines matched I may be suspicious and look more closely. If some lines matched but on a different column than intended I may notice. I can re-run the command after correction or try the {print $6} idea. How would you notice if your manual* analysis failed to spot the extra result from grep here and there. Would you do your manual analysis twice? Ask someone else to do it too? Or just think "good enough" and use the data for the next stage?
This was a crime. He stole money from the site.
NASCAR need to control their fans, not the first incident where these idoits have caused trouble. They should be banned for life from all circuits. Also is there not laws in the US to make this a punishable offence?, I know in the UK they could of been up in court for it.

Looks like this guy could be Nascars Lewis Hamilton and not because of colour but because he has talent. good luck to him.
Well, it doesn't seem to work for linux systems. So I can't try it. Bookmarking is a very real problem for me and I wouldn't mind paying, say, $10 a year for a good tool. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell your tool won't solve the problem. Atleast that's what I can tell without being able to try it.
I am curious why this got funded though, there is just no barrier to entry, actually, I have no clue why PG funds some of the stuff he does - Fuzzwich is an example. Anyway, I suppose he knows things I don't.
Breakdown of time spent doing web design
Facebook using API to gather user data
True or not, this is a persistent rumour, going all the way back to the 60s. Wikipedia, naturally, has the full rundown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program_conspiracy...).

But in brief: this is just one of a range cosmonaut conspiracy theories which put the 'moon landings were faked' crowd to shame. They're also much more widely believed than their US counterparts (not without reason). This one maybe not so much - but a decent percentage of Russians believe Yuri Gagarin was bumped off by the authorities.

Also, if you hadn't noticed, the article's from way back in 2001.
Lightweight Filesystem based CMS | Floret
Open Source is all about Economics
I'm hoping that getting a visa is easy compared to getting a successful startup off the ground. :) pg's views on this have been widely documented.
We could really use a down-mod button. Also vote on headlines.
Y Combinator: Startup Library
Filing patents when you know that prior art exists should be punished.
SU does send a lot of traffic, but don't let the numbers fool you. SU users are channel surfing, and usually don't stay for more than 2 seconds. Divide the number of users you get from SU by 10 to get it's equivalent in Digg users. And divide that by 10 to get it's equivalent in users coming from a blog post. If you didn't follow that, here is the simple equation:

1 user refered by your blog = 100 SU users
This should disqualify him right away. Bragging about it tells me that he can't tell the difference between right and wrong.
I absolutely agree...

But I was young and I needed the money :-)
I travel very frequently by plane and almost always in economy. At one particular airport that I regularly fly through there's always a really long line for security, except for business and first class passengers.

Happily, my airline offers online checkin and the print out is a PDF file. So I download the PDF file and print out my genuine boarding pass and put it in my bag, then I doctor the boarding pass in Acrobat so that it says Business instead of Economy and I change my seat assignment from something like 125H to 2D to make it look legit. Obviously, my name, flight, date, etc. are all genuine.
Ask YC: visiting silicon valley?
Just read this blog post: http://www.immadsnewworld.com/2007/10/tips-for-founders-doing-their-first.html#links where visiting sillicon valley is being recommend for startuppers.

I have been wondering about that myself, but I wonder, how would it go down to go there? What if I went there for two weeks on vacation, would I be able to make any contacts, go to startup parties and so on? I am not usually the kind of person who makes a lot of friends easily and gets invited to strangers houses while traveling.

Of course, just to see some famous company buildings, hackers with their MacBooks at Starbucks etc. might be inspiring by itself. On the other hand I am worried about becoming depressed by endless roads and "Office Space" sterile IT buildings (you can see I have no idea what SV is like).

Any advice would be welcome!
I wonder how they'll handle people with multiple identities. For instance, on their front page one of the "recently found" photos was of Heath Ledger, in the movie Brokeback Mountain.

Would they be able to identify him as both "Heath Ledger" and "Ennis Del Mar", the character he played? If they supported multiple identities for individuals, would they also support multiple individuals for identities? Like if I were to search for "Bruce Wayne"; would I get photos of everyone from Micheal Keaton to Christian Bale, as Batman?

That brings up a third concern. This application could be a major problem for super-heroes.
"Wow, I could write a book on these, as that's pretty much my one true passion in life..."

I was thinking the same thing as soon as I read the question.
Sorry Cramer, Hacker News isn't about that kind of hacking.
This has been changed so that it has to move in a straight line.
Artificial Heart Finally Ready for Market? Abiomeda's Potential Billion-Dollar Monopoly
That's a very silly article, and it smacks of envy. How dare socialist Europe have countries much wealthier than the United States? How dare its socialised healthcare provide better healthcare? If that's failure, then give me more of it. The dirty little secret is that capitalism is wonderful only in a limited dose. If not tempered, it runs amok and causes more sickness than it cures. Europe recognizes that, and that's what is taught in schools: the truth.
Ask YC: tendonitis at a startup?
I've been at a startup 7 months, and I'm feeling that my wrists are rapidly deteriorating. How would one write code for 15 hrs/day in such a setting?
C'mon everyone - can someone out there please tell me one way in which America isn't completely jacked, so that I might stop myself from jumping off a bridge? Please? Anyone...?
Indeed. I have been on the losing side of alternate-title later submissions more than a few times. However, I think I did search for "unintended" before posting this, and that wouldn't have found your post...
The problem was the clients support staff had root access on all the machines.
thanks foe the suggestion how the hell i forgot that simple thing!!
added now :)
My proudest hack combines computers and the public school system. In 1998, going into my senior year of high school, I really wanted to take Computer Science AP. That year, the AP board was switching the course curriculum from Pascal to C++. Unfortunately for us, the school's computer lab was ancient-- a set of 8088 PCs with no hard drives, with each student given a floppy containing a bootable Pascal environment and all his/her code. The school didn't have any money for a new lab full of computers, and was planning to cancel the course. So I came up with the idea of building one reasonably powerful linux server, and networking the existing PCs to it using a bootable "dumb terminal" disk. Cost: about $2000 for the server and 20 network cards.

Several friends and I worked over the summer to set up our linux lab. It turned out the network card device driver, built for x86 boxes, wouldn't work on these 8088 CPUs. So we bought a big pile of old 386 motherboards with CPUs and RAM from a friendly alum for $200. It turned out the 8088 cases were not standard, with metal bumps that would instantly short one of our new motherboards. So we installed them on top of their anti-static bags, with only expansion cards to hold stuff in place. Everything except the server was overtly cheap and flimsy, like the 10-base-2 coax network we used instead of 10-base-T because it didn't require an expensive hub. But everything was also easily replaceable, and we built extras just in case the usual firm smack didn't fix a broken machine.

Then, on our last work visit at the end of summer, we got some discouraging news: the teacher who was supposed to lead CS AP in our new lab had suddenly departed for a better-paying job at another school district. We finished the lab, wondering how we'd get by without a teacher. The course remained tentatively scheduled and for the first few days we tried to teach everyone how to use the OS and compiler while supervised by a friendly but clueless substitute teacher.

Luckily, we ended up with a much better teacher. Brad Kuhn, a CS graduate student at the nearby University of Cincinnati, came to meet us and knew he was our only chance. Though I'm sure he didn't enjoy some of the disciplinary responsibilities that came with being a high school teacher, he shared with us a deep knowledge of CS and an honest passion for free software. (Brad went on to become director of the Free Software Foundation, and is now CTO at the Software Freedom Law Center.) We hung out after school playing netris and debating when (or if) Microsoft would start publishing free software. There was no shortage of disagreement.

That was ten years ago in Cincinnati, but my former classmates remain among my closest friends. We're now the age Brad was when he took that job. What am I going to do this year that will have as positive an impact on the world as Brad's decision to take that job 10 years ago? What are you going to do?
It's not clear cut, mainly due to a lack of useful data. I don't know much about the labor market in the UK (your link only discusses employment/unemployment in 2007, not the effects of minimum wage in 1998), but I'll discuss the US.

In the US, only 1-2% of workers make minimum wage. If a minimum wage law drove 50% of them out of work over 2 years, it would increase unemployment by only 0.25-0.5%/year. And 50% is a huge; in reality, far fewer than 50% of minimum wage workers will be driven out of the market.

The effects on minimum wage also don't last much beyond a few years, since the minimum wage is not indexed to market wage for low skill jobs (or even to inflation, which is not the same thing). So in a few years, the minimum wage drops below market wage and becomes irrelevant.

This effect is sped up by companies raising prices (since costs rise across the industry, this doesn't cause a loss of market share). This drives up prices, causing inflation, which again reduces the effect of minimum wage.

Minimum wage is mainly just a a propaganda tool for politicians. That's why it's not indexed to inflation: if it were, they couldn't get on TV and say "I care about America's poorest workers" every few years. That's also why minimum wage is kept low; if they pushed it above market wage for the bottom 1-2%, the harmful effects might be large enough to be visible (even if they are questionable, this is not a risk a politician wants to take).
I don't like having everything saved to disk. Hence why I so often use Safari's private browsing feature.
Too late.
I first visited SF as a Yahoo! intern (my first time in CA) and it was quite an experience. I didn't know anyone except for an online friend or two at the time but just driving down the 101 and seeing the HQ of big companies was inspiring. I say just go! Follow all the techie SF-based hackers on Twitter and you'll find some event to go to during your stay.
California's coastline. The views while driving across western states. The buildings in old Boston. Country roads in Pennsylvania.

Oh, you meant it in a socio political sense. Well, in that case...
Get religion about good ergonomics.

First a little story: my wife got carpal tunnel so bad in the 90's, she was barely able to button a shirt for 3-4 months, and had to wear splints for almost a whole year. She worked for a high-tech firm and had to leave the corporate world because of her wrists. Things got a lot better, but she didn't type for 3-4 years after that episode. She can type now for 1-2 hours a day, tops. After that, she has pain.

Hackers are like surgeons: worthless without their hands. Your wrists and hands are your bread and butter. Take care of them.

Get religion about ergonomics. Read up online about it. There's tons of information, try a lot of things out and see if they help.

I use the smart glove: http://www.imakproducts.com/products/smart_glove.htm

Imak ergo beads: http://www.imakproducts.com/Products/WristCushionForKeyboard...

The MSFT natural keyboard: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/productde...

I go back and forth between a track ball and a mouse.

I also got an ergotron monitor arm:
http://www.ergotron.com/Products/DeskMounts/tabid/71/ctl/Pro...
It's amazing how much less my neck hurts, and how much easier it is on my eyes, because I can change the monitor's position so easily, I do it a lot more often.

And, I couldn't quite afford an Aeron Chair, so I went to OfficeMax, and got a knock-off:
http://www.officemax.com/omax/catalog/sku.jsp?skuId=20952042...

It makes a world of difference for my back, and a better sitting posture means that I lean on my wrists less, causing less wrist and hand pain.
You said it yourself... why does this even matter? Brains are all the same color (well for the most part anyway).
Satellite could plummet to Earth
Try going to a BarCamp or some other event. Do a presentation or something too perhaps.
Good idea about Twitter - I am not a user yet, but for SV it really makes sense.
I wasn't able to login using elinks. The error to the POST submission was "Post request without Content-Length." You might want to have a look at that.
Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse -- not Xerox.

And while Xerox PARC originated a lot of the modern windowed/wysiwyg/menued GUI, to say they 'invented' something as specific as 'the original Mac interface' is also misleading.
I'd like to see a move toward OCaml, with regards to that. All the (albeit amateur) game developers I know cling to their C or C++ because of performance concerns.

I tend to think these performance concerns are overstated. However, if they will insist on believing these myths, then OCaml might be the right way to go. Its, generally, just as fast as C++. Often faster. And it has some great libraries for graphics.

Is anyone here working with OCaml?
I actually grew up in silicon valley. I'm not really great at making contacts either. For some companies (especially startups) you might be able to make a call and stop by their offices, or have lunch with some of the people who work there.

My advice is to call ahead and go with a friend. Even if you can't meet any new faces you can always explore the area (SF, stanford + cal ..) and go to hacker events (user group meetings, maybe even a conf)