skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've seen how psychology-driven corporate HRs ruined companies

I'd say that if an HR department has a good understanding of human psychology, that understanding can only help them.

If they only focus on psychology and nothing else, such as the domain knowledge needed to do a great job in their particular business, then they're myopic and liable to do a lot of damage. Perhaps that was the problem with the HRs you describe?

>Would you, for example, fire a good hacker who made significant contributions and turned out to be a psychotic, biased person?

Of course not.

It sounds like you're applying a set of irrelevant assumptions to me, including:
(A) that I would only hire people who are somehow "not biased" (the very suggestion that such people exist indicates ignorance of psychology, not a good understanding of it!)
(B) that I'm so slow as to not have figured out that significant contributions are often made by people who do not conform to societal standards of "normal".

(A) and (B) are not only false, but they imply a poor understanding of psychology, not the nuanced, intelligent perspective that Munger, Marc, me, et al are seeking to get closer to (and we're getting there, slowly, one biased & imperfect insight at a time).
Or use the "Open Command Window Here" PowerToy from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppow...
That would make tagging photos of people in social networks a cinch as you could check against photos of a user's friends. Facebook app?
My thoughts on this matter were summed up today by Marc Andreessen:

In my view, entrepreneurial judgment is the ability to tell the difference between a situation that's not working but persistence and iteration will ultimately prove it out, versus a situation that's not working and additional effort is a destructive waste of time and radical change is necessary.

I don't believe there are any good rules for being able to tell the difference between the two. Which is one of the main reasons starting a company is so hard.
Also, I have my own anecdote.

I worked my tail off for a year in China. I had two other founders/partners back in N. America -- I was the only one on-the-ground, and I was also the youngest & most inexperienced.

I basically stayed there until I was physically, mentally, and emotionally sick. I was living in my office and had no salary (expenses covered, nothing more), a tough schedule (mornings & evenings needed to get back in touch w/ N. America), my first experience in management (6 staff or so), and had almost zero encouragement from my partners, because our expenses only increased with time as we realized what we were really getting in to (China is not exactly WYSIWYG when it comes to business) -- and I had no contact with the main decision-maker, who was the only person with any real experience in what we were doing (for political reasons I had to go through founder #2 to get to founder-investor#1).

I was literally stressed out of my mind. I lost a good portion of my short-term memory (until I quit). I could no longer predict what I was able to do in the future -- no ability to manage my own commitments & performance. Forgot why I wanted to live. Took up smoking.

I kept going as long as I did because I believed in the value of "sheer persistence". I wish I'd taken more drastic action sooner.

My experience was probably not typical, and so it's probably not worth drawing generalizations from it. But -- I'm incredibly glad that I quit. Today I'm learning new things and I'm happy to be alive -- I feel like a vibrant human being again. And I'm still excited about startups... but not to the point of self-destruction.
I'm in the area and definitely down for coding/pizza/beer.
Do you talk to yourself at work?
"Among the things it's useful for is what's called self-regulation: goal-setting, problem-solving, decision-making and planning"
I would guess that they're also about whether the candidate is the sort of person who is curious enough about the way things work to dig into a sorting algorithm and spend a free Saturday afternoon playing around with it, even though it's in nearly every standard library.
As a headhunter (my day job), I can tell you that this would be a real shitty thing to do. Unless of course they've been unethical towards you -- for example, like one commenter said here, trumping up the job description.

Also, as another commenter implied -- you are going to get stronger consideration for the job by going through the headhunter than if you apply directly, especially if it's an attractive position that they receive a lot of applicants for. If they're good, they'll get you a better offer, too.

Be nice to recruiters; most of us are trying hard to provide a valuable service.
i would love to see how much a medical procedure / surgery cost in different parts of the world with the ranking for each medical service provider combined with regular tourism information...
From the comments:

>What a gigantic fail this is gonna be!

Me: Yeah. Just like Youtube.
Is Eeyore Designing Your Software?
I just talked to a musician from Nashville who came to Thailand for some expensive dental work. Saved many $1000's and had a fantastic vacation to boot (I met him in a remote cove of an island, where he was playing guitar all afternoon for a few lucky bystanders...).

Mediocre article, good topic, big opportunity.
Even Apple will be hated one day
We're in Clemson. We make it up to Charlotte every now and then - definitely interested in some sort of meetup.
I had exactly 1 karma point when we got accepted into YC. :)
my brother is a dev in Charlotte... I'll send him this post.
Computer vs. Realtor: Computer Wins. Twice.
Ask YC: Looking for a co-founder
I'm seriously considering applying for funding in the upcoming YC round, I have an excellent idea that is very well thought out (I think...), I have learned how to program so that I can implement this idea, and I'm roughly 2/3 done. Since this is my first real programming project there are probably issues in the form of scalability, security, modularity, etc.

The idea is an online project management/ productivity enhancement tool. If implemented correctly it might even solve the problem of email overload that PG brought up in a comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144127

Since YC seems very reluctant to take single founders I thought that I would look for a cofounder here...

I'm looking for a hacker that knows php (yeah - I know...), javascript, css, and mysql as this is what I have programmed it in. Pretty standard. The important thing is that you are smart and get things done.

I am currently located in Denmark, but will move to wherever the action is - the startup scene here is horrible, and I don't mind seeing the world ;-) I have done startups before, and have always been the glue that keeps the team together - half business half tech kind of guy.

My mail is in my profile if you think it sounds like fun :-)
I wonder if they are able to test for this at sporting events like shooting.
Ask YC: For the love, or the money?
In my spare time, I've been working on a product that has a fair amount of interest around it. I have no doubt that once I get the product finished, the company will be successful and profitable. I see some market opportunities that is making me want to push harder and get done sooner, but with a day job paying my bills, I can only move so fast.

Thus, I think to myself, how about getting an investor or a loan? Loans are pretty much out of the option, as far as I can tell, because I don't have enough assets personally (and if I did, I wouldn't need one!). And when looking at investors, it appears that most of them look for some "big money" event.

But that's the conflict of interest, I suppose. I have no problems making money, but I'm not doing this startup because I want to make a ton of money going public or being acquired. I'm doing the startup because it's something I love, and something I want to be able to use myself.

Inevitably, I resign myself to the double life of my day job and my passion. So the question to everyone here is: what's a guy like me to do? Are there options that would allow me to dedicate my entire life to this that I haven't considered and won't make me feel like I'm selling out?
> for every goal you put in front of someone, you should also put in place a counter-goal to restrict gaming of the first goal

There's a particular perverse incentive that comes from the lack of equity compensation combined with restrictive legal covenants. If an employee works at a company where their only compensation is cash and yet they're under restrictive IP or no-solicitation agreements, their incentive is to...destroy the company. Think about it: the primary benefit they get from working at the company is in learning the business practices and meeting lots of smart people, but they can't use that resource as long as their old employer exists, because of their legal agreements. So it is to their advantage to drive their employer into bankruptcy, because this frees them from their legal agreements (which are with now-defunct entity) and yet they have nothing to lose.

As I understand it, a compensation scheme like this is actually used in many financial firms. Employees are given large performance-based cash bonuses, but also have to sign no-solicit agreements that prevent them from running away with coworkers or customers and opening their own fund. Perhaps this is behind the unusual number of financial firms that get taken down by a single rogue trader or group of traders, eg. Salomon Brothers, Barings Bank, Bear Stearns.

The employees don't even have to consciously think "I'm going to destroy the company." More likely, they're thinking "I'm going to make this enormous bet with company money, and if it pays off, I get to pocket half a billion dollars. If it doesn't, the company goes down and I can start my own hedge fund."
Here's the paper: http://www.scribd.com/full/2359066?access_key=key-2ntxn9tb3u...
Windows is caught between Mac and Linux
Stick with the headhunter. The company that engaged them expects to work with them. It seems odd that they'd also post the position on their own jobs page. It's possible they weren't getting any responses, so they added the head hunter.
How much do you really need? Find some short consulting projects, borrow up to 25k on prosper and get going.
This might be somewhat off topic since you are looking for another technical co-founder to build a product as opposed to someone to help build a company.

At the risk of being presumptuous, I like to offer my latest chapter on how to build a team, not so much on how to entice talents but to screen the wannabes who do not have the staying power to be in a startup.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/03/team-building.html

Good luck. It sounds like fun.
Except commenting isn't the primary purpose of the article. It would be ironic if you had to fill out a sign up form just to read it.

But I'm sure you were just poking fun, so poke away, haha.
‘Digital piracy’ may benefit companies
How would you make this site have a gentler slope? Let the user post a comment and then say "Thanks for the comment, now you just need an account to publish this. Enter your username/password."?

Some of the sites that do "gradual engagement" piss me off when they let me believe I'm about to do something and then surprise me with a sign up form. It strikes me as tricky and I very frequently walk away.

I certainly believe it's smart to let users do as much as possible without requiring them to sign up. I think the idea of signing up is pretty ingrained in people though. If you make it dead simple (like this site or reddit) it's not much of a barrier and it keeps things straightforward.
Not a ton, but I can see myself burning through at least 50k in the next 6 months including marketing/creative expenses.

But that is a good suggestion. Perhaps the answer is to put this project on the back-burner and get some more consulting gigs.
This is rather neat, though the actual paper is less breathless than the wired article. I skimmed through it, and here's what I got:

The algorithm assumes face images have been cropped and normalized, and only has been run on frontal views. Pose variation, detection, and alignment aren't handled by this algorithm--claimed to be a different problem. But it does handle different illumination and expressions, as well as occlusion and noise.

According to No-free-lunch theorem, there is no generalized classifier that performs better than any other classifier on all classification tasks. Therefore, in any classification task, the solution is often tailored towards the problem, and picking features is one way to tailor it. Often times, you can't use all the features available to you, because they could be noisy or using them all can be computationally expensive. This is why people use SVD, PCA, or other techniques to filter out features that affect the classification the least, so you only do classification on features that affect classification the most.

That's why people use some heuristics like picking eyes, mouth, noses as features, as it would seem like that's where most of the information is.

The weird thing being claimed here is that it actually doesn't matter which features you pick as long as 1) feature space is huge 2) you pick enough features 3) you use a "correct" sparse representation of the features

Apparently, they do recognition by trying to represent the new face as a linear combination of all known faces in the database. So if the new face belongs to a person in the database, it can be represented mostly by faces in the database known to belong to one person. If the new face belongs to someone not in the database, then we can only represent it as a combination of different peoples' faces in our database.

In order for the surveillance mentioned in Wired to work, you'd still need to have an annotated database of people's faces built from somewhere. Same with auto-tagging people's photos on facebook. And you'd need more than one photo of a person too.

However, given Louis Van Ahn's method of using games to entice people to do recognition tasks, and facebook tagging, you can create database of people's faces fairly easily.
Strange that I never saw this.

The guy acted like an ignorant douche, putting on a cliched minstrel show. I think you're giving him too much credit calling him hilarious or even cruel . . . try pathetic.
goto main;
Could this model be applied to recruitment?
I was in the same situation and I was able to make progress by consulting and paying outsourced coders on the side, then taking time off occasionally and working on it myself. It was hard but it worked out.
Intelligence doping - Commentary by Richard Posner
Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies?
i really like that idea actually. having a controlled and constant data set, could provide a lot of insight.
37signals is down again...
It starts to get far too regular for a paid service!
Not at all - after all building a product is only the first step to building a company.
haven't read the paper but it reminds me of the work that's been done on single-pixel cameras and compressed sensing
Not down for me . . .
mixmax, I recognize you from your many contributions here and wish you the best of luck. My skill set is very close to what you seek, and I'd love to meet you and talk about possibilities some day, but for the time being I'm completely consumed by my own startup.

When you say "the upcoming YC round", do you mean 4/02/08? If so, I imagine that you'd be better off applying as a single founder. Probably not a good idea to go into business with someone you've only known for 8 days. As a single founder myself, I'd need at least 6 months to a year to get to know someone and work with them before I'd make a commitment. Better yet, I'd prefer someone I've known for years, but the dozen or so possibilities always seem to have some other road block.

Is there anyone you already know and have worked with before that could join you? That way, your odds would be much better (for YC and beyond).

Good luck and keep us posted.
Is the benefit attributable to Redfin or to the selection bias of Redfin users?
Only one comment needed http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com
so are you still working as an entrepreneur or not?
Yep, it's up again for me as well. Maybe I was a bit too fast with my complain but the site was definitely out of reach for my colleague and me for the last couple of minutes.
I have noticed there are much less programming/hacking stories recently and tried to upvote the few remaining even if they are not particularly interesting to me. If this site becomes exclusively about startups, I don't think it would be interesting to me.

Also much more stories where what is said is supposed to be important mostly because of who said it. I believe popularity contests are inherently against core hacker values.
I've seen it actually, and also love that one. Despite Arnold coming off as a cocky ass, he definitely does show his determination when he decides to not go home for his dad's funeral as it would interrupt his training before the event (I think it was his dad's funeral anyways, can't quite remember)
Or think of how you can reduce your expenses.
Yes your diet makes absolutely no difference to the way your body or mind works. Just keep loading those cheeseburgers in mate.
Friends and family is worth thinking about. It's a big responsibility to take on, but if you're really confident and know people who trust you it might be the best option.
Damn, down again, but it seems just for me...

Thanks for the link!
I used to pass by that area every day. The problem is not that the shelter is there, but that the bums are always hanging out outside the shelter. 24 hours a day, there are bums hanging out there harassing people.

I have no problem with homeless people in shelters. But when they're out in the street making people's lives miserable, you have to do something. A robot isn't the best solution, but when the city won't do anything, it might suffice.
"You will find this hard to believe, but I'll report it to you firsthand: some companies turn down the opportunity to get funded."

Not all that hard: my last employer turned down VC financing. And I'm going a similar route with my own startup: I'm not averse to VC financing, but only after achieving "product/market fit". There's no sense taking other people's money for an idea that may not fly, and I can change direction more easily without employees or investors.

I still would like to see actual numbers for the 4 quantities I mentioned. My point is not that you're wrong, it's that without that data, you can't draw a sound conclusion either way.

"What percentage of them get good deals, and what percentage get tranched, 3x prefs, tiny valuation, and loss of the board?"

One of the advantages of YC, as I see it, is that this is far less likely to happen. YC brings bargaining power: if a VC screws over a YC startup, you can bet that YC will not be bringing any future deal-flow to that VC. You don't have this advantage as a lone startup, regardless of how good your product is. Never underestimate the power of incentives in getting people to behave properly.
OpenID currently only speeds up the registration process, not replace it
"Upon arriving at [Google Video], they found a link to share their video and what happened next? They got the form in Figure 13.1."

"It’s only when you want to publish or share your movie that Jumpcut asks for your name and email so you and others can access the movie you just made."

I -hate- the web experience this article describes. If you're going to make me sign up to use your service, tell me. Don't string me along and waste my time.

The point the author seems to be making: let people know what they're getting before you make them sign up. Well, I think Google Video does a pretty good job at that. And I can -view- any video I want to without signing up. Is that "gradual engagement"? If so, why is it being criticized? If not, how is it different?

In fact, the more I think about this, the more the practice counters the principle. The principle seems to be (and ought to be), "Let your potential customers know what they're getting right away." Google Video does that. And if I ever want to go 'deeper' (from watching videos to posting them, or collecting them), I know right away that I need to sign up.

On the other hand, to _view_ the video I've spent the last however long _making_ on JumpCut, I get SURPRISED by a registration form. Plus, why would I need to register to -see- a video. I can understand needing to register to post or save a video, but to see it? I'd argue, then, that Google Video actually does a -better- job delaying the registration component than any of these examples.

And they're up-front about it from the start.
This should obviate the need for RFID implants in our skulls.
darcs user interface is a joy to behold - it's far easier to get up and running than git, and easier on a day-to-day basis. However even on a one man project, I found that darcs performance problems started to bite after a few hundred check-ins (darcs unrecord being an obvious problem). IMHO this isn't a rare problem with darcs - any reasonably sized project is likely to hit this at some point. I also managed to get my darcs repositories into an unusable state several times just by pushing cherry-picked patches between them, which wasn't fun.

I miss darcs in some ways, particularly as getting running with git is a pain in the rear end. Fortunately darcs-git http://ftp.frugalware.org/pub/other/pacman-tools/pacman-tool... emulates enough of darcs user interface to sweeten the pill, and is definitely a good way to get started with git. I've also found that some of the functionality available in git but not in darcs has been very useful (even if it is typically a pain to work out how to use it).
I love the people who anonymously downmod me for criticizing this crap without having the stones to say why they're doing it. Keep 'em coming, I've got karma to spare.
Why would that remove the need for a CAPTCHA? Normal procedure: Register -> write spam. This method: write spam -> register.
From the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sHvWYAzIRo
Yes, you're absolutely right - You shouldn't make a commitment to getting married after having known each other for a week. I thought about putting this in the submission, but that might put some great people off. My thought was to adress the issue in mail exchange, but since you bring it up here I get a chance of saying it up front:

My intention is to apply for YC founding in a week, and I'm looking for a technical co-founder. But I'm probably not prepared to make a total commitment in that time. There are many ways this can be solved. One idea goes along the lines of a contract that will give a co-founder an increasing number of shares as work gets done. This way I won't end up with a no-good co-founder, and a co-founder that actually produces good work won't be cheated out of ownership. This is of course pretty fluid, and there are a lot of details that need to be worked out. Other ideas might be viable as well.

And for the record: I fully intend to get this startup going whether I get accepted for YC or not. And I'm looking for a co-founder regardless of outcome. My belief is that a cake prepared by two competent people is more than twice as big as a cake prepared by one competent person.

There are a few people that I have worked with before that I would love to do something with again. Unfortunately they are tied up. So no luck there...
[nevermind] ---Untrue. Unless your product has already shown considerable traction or you're a startup legend, it is 100% percent certain that they will not accept you as a single founder.

Not making a judgement on this policy, it just seems fair for people to know before they take the time to apply as a single founder.