skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is what FFI is for, right? Native structures do whatever they want. When gluing to C code, you use your FFI primitives to express the interfaces; and the structures which are expressed there are made to correspond to the C layout in some way.

You generally don't want to be constraining how data structures work in a language so that they can be handed off to C code directly. (Unless perhaps you're writing a language that is nearly a C dialect or something.)
Government basically exists to maintain the status quo. Anyone who might really change anything really won't get far enough in order to.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
As shares of private companies are not floated and traded on a daily basis, the data points would be hard to collect.

Some venture firms have access to information on some companies, but it's unlikely that one party has all information on all involved companies.

Moreover, many valuation drops are simply not documented due to negotiating parties disagreeing on price and then parting their ways. As there's no investment event, there's no valuation peg to declare it a down round, just the sentiment, which is what author is trying to convey.
- they automatically fill login forms in browser. Nicer than copy/pasting things around and more secure: there's malware stealing clipboard contents, and you can also accidentally CTRL+V your password in chat window ;-)

- Excel has larger attack surface than purpose-built password managers. Have you checked Excel doesn't leave behind recovery copies of your passwords file in c:\windows\temp ?
Two questions:

* Would you consider investing in a company that invents a toilet paper holder where the TP can only be inserted in the OVER position? This is a huge problem world-wide that should be solved immediately. The market is huge! B2B, B2C, you name it, there's toilet paper!

* All seriousness aside, do you have any advice for building an app that has no clear money-making potential? I've had this idea brewing for years, but no matter how much I think about, I have no idea how to monetize it.
Hi Sam,

I'm a graduating college senior, and I've accepted a job at a very big company in the tech industry. Right now, it makes the most financial sense for me to join a big company and pay off my debt quickly, but at some point in the future I'd love to scratch that entrepreneurial itch and apply to YC.

How do I maximize my time at a big company to gain relevant skills to keep the possibility of a startup open in the future?
Why companies want to track their logos in your photos
To add to Sam's take, I'd say the real benefit of joining a startup is the opportunity to work closely on a problem that you care about. Do you want to expand your POV and learn new skills? Do you want a high-degree of personal responsibility for your work? Your role will change every 6 months, as the company's priorities do.

Compensation and relationship dynamics are crucial, of course, but your success and experience will be largely determined by how much you want to take ownership for your work.
Many won't say no, because the advantage of having a government willing to look out for their bottom line is far too large to ignore for the sake of a few users.
So your saying angular is not the right answer from the perspective of Angular 2 or from your experience in Angular?
Back when I first signed up for LastPass, the killer feature for me was that it worked on my BlackBerry Curve. The fact that they made versions of LP for damn near every platform is what sold it for me.

I don't have a BlackBerry anymore, though. Now might be the time to jump ship.
Isn't Twilio more about making sure your 1099 employees can't start a relationship with the people you have them do work with?
Any plans for an international college tour?
I don't really know but I'm surprised people liked using the thing to begin with. Always struck me as junky.
There's something really odd happening with i18n on that blog. It recognizes my primary browser language as German and hence displays menue items and the right side bar in German. So far so good. However, it also partially translates the actual text into German, i.e. for some sentences the first word is translated while the rest remains English:

- Zunächst, we (LogMeIn/LastPass) have no plans ...
- Zweitens, this acquisition provides us ...
- Seitdem, LastPass has grown by leaps ...
So its complicated...

They are all "real" and very useful in different ways. Its important to remember that they are all maps of different thing depending on how transparent the things they are mapping are. For example the dark clouds in the optical are nearby cold / dense clouds of gas where stars are forming. They block almost all the visible light from the stars behind them. If you want to study star formation (my PhD) you can learn a lot by looking at how they absorb light, or you can look at a different wavelength and look inside / through them (microwave).

You have to remember that the maps are measuring how bring sources are (at each wavelength) filtered by how absorptive the stuff along the line of sight is (at each wavelength). In the same way that images of far away galaxies are looking back in time, images at different wavelengths probe different distances and temperatures in our galaxy, but in a much messier way.
Along with that there is an added efficiency to in person meetings, if everyone works within a mile of one another.
Have you found the cure for cancer and now you're wasting time while waiting for the FDA to approve it?
Looking at who you accept now and some of YCs biggest hits, its seeming like your earlier investments (Dropbox, airbnb) probably wouldn't make it through today's YC filter. Do you guys think this is an issue, if so how are you working to correct it?
> Would you even drink human milk designed for human babies as a grown adult?

Well, no, but I wouldn't eat human muscle either... but I'll eat a cow's.
Or in the midwest (Chicago)?
1. Never say never, but no current plans (and honestly, it might make more sense to do something outside the US next). The hardest part would be convincing some of our partners to move out there, or finding new ones we could train out here first.

2. Not ready to talk about specific areas, but I promise they are interesting ones :)

It will be super super easy for our researchers to collaborate with outsider researchers because of our IP stance!
Hone in is so common that it's now listed.

To hone is to sharpen or to perfect. You can hone a blade.

Home in is the phrase that has more widespread use. A missile homes in. It probably has roots to do with homing pigeons.
You are free to set up your system as you wish. I also don’t advocate for removing options. I’m asking for a simple default. Simplicity is very important. If you can’t explain what you are doing to your parents, it is not yet simple enough.

Don’t misunderstand simplicity for triviality for they are not the same. We need to make non-trivial problems simple.
Do you have anything against Spaniards?

I have seen lot of Spaniards applying to YC and they got rejected/ignored with awesome projects.

Do you even read all applications? Posted applications with all urls tracked and we saw 0 clicks... How can you judge our product without testing it? Did you even watched our pitch?

But in the other hand, I saw a lot of stupid companies backed by YC (Uber for X, Airbnb for X, Tinder for X, Y for X startups) I don't mind about it, it's your money, just asking for solid reasons.

This is going to blacklist me for YC but I don't care.

Kind regards, Alex.
Its a public record in the US iirc so there isn't a "need" to mention it as the insurance company can look it up. They can also do so with various tickets/violations. [e.g. moving violations]
It seems like YC had done a great job on standartizing YC startup documents that protect both founders and investors from each other and promote cooperation. Are there any plans to do the same thing to standardize contracts for early employees?

(i.e. shouldn't early employess, investing their under-market salary/time receive the same conditions/protection of their investments as VCs?)
Hey Sam!

Just wanted to ask:

1) how does being a single founder eventually impact the dynamics of a company?

2) any heuristics for finding the one metric that matters to optimize on?

3) any tips for projects less iterative and more focused on a "complex coordination" modality

Thanks!
The miners shot down the four proposals to increase block size, even the tiny 2MB increase.

Increased competition to get in on the smaller blocks leads to larger transaction fees. Miners benefit from people competing to have their transactions hashed in the next block.

If the userbase scales, the competition goes up and transaction fees go higher. If everyone could get their transactions through on a larger block, they're going to pay almost no fee and miner's make less.
Hi @sama, you've been outspoken about the potential long term side effects of prolonged 0% interest rates. What do you think will be the worst side effect? Do you have any general advice for individuals to avoid the bad effects?
This kind of optimized placement could in principle be done by a sufficiently smart compiler, but no such compiler exists. That's why existing compilers allow their users to control layout by, as you say, relying on an implementation detail.
All good investors know it goes under, thats where the market is.
My favorite of the wavelengths presented is radio, as right in the middle you see a bright radio source that I'm guessing is Sagittarius A, (probably) the location of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*
I like the title. Sounds like a "Do it yourself" tutorial.
Disagree. No one at YC could interview the Airbnb guys and not fund them. I didn't know Drew back then but I expect it would have been the same thing for him.
Turn the tables with the old guard being straight white guy blue collar workers, and the newcomers as gay artists, how do John's rants sound now? To me, sounds pretty much like the old white bigot bitching about how much better it was before "those people" moved in. Just as cranky, just as bigoted, just as cringe-worthy when a gay "artist" says it.
I was sure this would have something to do with deploying the new IoT service to the employee population. Heartbeat monitoring, personal moisture sensors, hygiene detection services, etc. all pushing up into AWS and ultimately to a dashboard for an HR analyst.
The ability to roam onto a different network? Yes, T-mobile doesn't cover everywhere, but has roaming agreements to fill the gaps in coverage.

There's a caveat that data roaming is pretty restricted. My wife visited Bozeman, MT, and was limited to, I think, 10 megs of data, which went very quickly. On the other hand, in the UK T-mobile had unlimited but somewhat slow data at no extra cost.
For stock compensation, yes!
> my co-founder Kevin and I bet on how many people would download the app its first day in the wild. Kevin guessed 2,500, and in an especially optimistic moment, I went big and guessed 25,000. The next day, the realist in me couldn’t believe I had hit it on the nose.

That seems outrageous and amazing. Systrom had only ever worked at Google and then Nextstop, how could he have possibly had a network that large that early on to get that many people to download it?

How can someone reading this possibly think they can get 25,000 people to download their app on day 1? I feel like I'm missing something here.
Developer here, obesity is strongly correlated with race, ethnicity, educational attainment. So, yes, income and poverty play a key role, but are not the sole determinants of obesity. The obesity map doesn't look exactly like either a poverty map, or a race map, or an education map-- it's a synthesis of how those factors influence obesity. See the home page http://synthpopviewer.rti.org/obesity/ for additional background on how the data were created and be sure to look at layers depicting significant clustering of the results.
@sama thanks, I will have to give it some thought as to how to monetize it.
I wrote a blog post yesterday that covers a bit of how we're using GraphQL at my day job. [0]

[0] https://blog.jacobwgillespie.com/from-rest-to-graphql-b4e95e...
This is an interactive step by step introduction to our new SQL style query language.
I think this makes an interesting observation, but I don't agree with the conclusion about "crab mentality".

Flip it into an experience that many people experience in their lives, they buy product X and they pay $Y for it, then due to circumstances they don't control, the seller decides to start selling that product at $Y-$Z dollars, a big discount. The original buyers feel "ripped off" because the seller changed how they valued the product, without changing the product.

There has to be a real name for it, but I call it value dissonance. Where the value you assign to a good or service is suddenly different than the market value. Everyone who bought a house in 2007 experienced it in 2009 :-(.

Work output is just as much a good or service. And you consciously or unconsciously assign a value to it based on what other work around you "gets" as salary. So if you change what you pay one set of people but not everyone, you introduce this dissonance. And it can be hard to process.
It wasn't an actual bill, it was an SEO guy trying to trick me into thinking I'd already hired him for my new company by sending me something that looked like an invoice for services rendered.

Whoever sent it is still an asshole though.
Limited to the US for now but maybe not forever. Someone in Canada should start something similar!

Yes, very happy to collaborate with outside orgs.
Considering the fact that we are more than 1-billion people with booming economy (some redtapes are there but..), do you have plans for purely India (/subcontinent) specific programmes in near future?
We've agreed as a country that the ability to get a warrant in the case of probable cause is a good thing. How is this not just maintaining that?

I find it hilarious how often privacy advocates manage to forget that we've had this conversation before, and while the government can and has overstepped in many ways, lets not throw out the ability to investigate at all along the way.
Hi Sam, I read a post of you guys saying that a lot of founders think they're too early to apply to YC. That's my case. We're just in our first thousands of dollars in revenue, and honestly when I think of YC - no matter how much confident we are with our business - I believe we don't really stand a change against other applicants. Any specific advice/thoughts on this?
The best things you can do there are meet great potential cofounders, and get better at writing software.

Also don't get sucked into living an expensive lifestyle when you get that high-paying job--this has killed many people's once-promising futures.
Indeed. And it's absolutely understandable. Our seniors have been productive members of society for long decades, and as they reach their old age they suddenly find themselves not needed by anyone - the society doesn't want their services, their sons and daughters have already started their families and have little time for parents. No surprise they'll fight tooth and nail to keep the last bits that make them feel human - holding responsibility for their own actions, managing their own resources.
That's awesome.

They want to give money outside any specific research initiative? That YC brand is strong!
My homegrown alternative to password managers like LastPass and 1Password: An encrypted zip file.

The zip contains

* encrypt.sh

* payload, a folder containing subfolders, password text files and other personal information.

To "unlock", extract the zip.

To "lock", run encrypt.sh.

Make sure that the extracted data won't get backed-up at any time. I just came up with this a few days ago. Let me know if you have any concerns about this.

Here's the encrypt.sh:
http://pastebin.com/DudVinms
What Is the Right Customer Service?
I'm coming to visit soon! We fund more and more Indian companies (they come here for 3 months and then go back to India).
Great report, thanks!
One of the basic arguments of this piece is that skyscrapers have a lower environmental impact than low and mid rise buildings, but that's not necessarily true.

The city of Seattle released an updated report for 2013 data on their mandated city wide energy benchmarking. http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/OSE/EBR-2013-re... I would suggest that these results may not translate well to the rest of the world, Seattle's climate is so mild it's a bit of an outlier.

Based on the data collected, mid-rise housing has a lower Energy Use intensity (EUI) than high rise housing, see page 33. Figure 22 on page 51 is also interesting because it looks like the high rise multifamily also has a lower variance than the mid-family. To me that implies there is less room for design improvement, more of the buildings are grouped around the median higher EUI. EUI is the annual energy use per area of building, typically kBtu per square foot in the states.

I found these results somewhat counter-intuitive from an Mechanical/Energy Engineer point of view until I thought about it a bit. Ideally a tall dense building has less exterior area per interior area and hence lower heat loss/gain, but in reality skyscrapers tend to have substantially more glazing(windows) than mid rise and the energy load impact of windows is substantially greater than opaque walls, say R-5 to R-20.

Also, a high rise provides the opportunity for sophisticated mechanical systems with energy recovery and efficient systems, but in reality sophisticated systems are complicated, often poorly implemented and difficult to maintain leading to excessive energy consumption.

Everything can always be designed better in the future, but I would suggest the data doesn't necessarily support that the density skyscrapers bring improves their environmental impact. Granted I'm not taking into account any of the external factors like reduced commutes, transit density, infrastructure density, etc.
I hope you understand that the thievery has been happening for centuries, millennia. There is no other way to gauge real supply and demand than to put buy and sell orders into the market yourself. HFT is doing at ultra-high speed what human market makers do all day long, and have been doing forever.

Now, possibly rightly, market makers in general, through the ages, have had a bad rap. They are indeed trying to get more information than the average joe, with very clever, and risky, techniques (see below) and skimming him after having done so. Nevertheless, you must remember, that without these people/machines taking these risks, you would not have a continuous market in which to trade. You'd have a much more stepwise price action and much more risk. They're providing s service.

Perhaps most controversially, being a good market maker means having some capital, so that you can wear a loss which is entirely possible during your price discovery. Thus, market makers who make money, inevitably already have money. This doesn't help their cause.

But the idea that HFT per se is the problem is wrong. If you don't like HFT, you don't like finance, period. That may be a legitimate view, or not, but the two are inextricable. They are not different one from the other - HFT is simply Amazon doing what Barnes and Noble does, more efficiently (without the monopoly aspects - HFT is fiercely competitive).

Without HFT, bid offers would be wider. Fact.
When Amazon Dies
One is welcome to ship an Asterisk implementation of it any time one feels like doing so. One has not shipped an Asterisk implementation. One may underestimate to which degree ideas, revolutionary or otherwise, are improved by actually shipping concrete instantiations of them which actually work.

Incidentally: NoMoRobo gains some utility specifically because Twilio exists. A trivial example: phone numbers have a history to them. Most customers of Twilio want to buy phone numbers with a relatively clean history, i.e., ones that were not widely distributed prior to their life with that customer, to avoid misdirected calls or e.g. reputational issues. NoMoRobo wants precisely the opposite -- they literally ask Twilio to provision them with phone numbers which are otherwise unsaleable to customers, for example because those numbers are actively getting spammed to death. (Twilio has an entire team of people whose job is telephone number quality. Things you wouldn't have guessed existed in the world, right?)

This works great for NoMoRobo's use case, because a phone number getting spammed to death is perfect for them -- it lets them cheaply capture a lot of phone numbers which one has a high confidence are spam rather than ham.
Ah, im on mobile. Let me try chrome
1. Europe? :)
This is somewhat anecdotal but with the latest iOS and Facebook app versions, Facebook doesn't even show up on the list of apps that have requested to use my microphone. Unless they found some exploit to bypass Apple's restrictions and use my microphone without even asking for permission, I seriously doubt they're listening to users.
So it could write the files to any location. But how to tell the application it should now look in a different place ? That's probably impossible to get every developer to do.

Symlink everything?
Or Portland. There are lots of tech companies and startups here, as well. Obviously, not at the same scale as SV. But something like YC would be great, up here.
a) Definitely not.

b) It's possible if something was deeply wrong in an application we wouldn't even watch the video, but the counts never seem to work. Sometimes if an application is clearly a no after watching the video and reading the text, we don't look at the product, but it's rare.

c) Barcelona is my favorite city!
The Cyber Activists Who Want to Shut Down ISIS
LogMeIn has many years of experience securing their remote management software, something that has incredible potential for malicious activity. They seem like a good candidate for keeping LastPass secure, based on their reputation from a technical standpoint.
Ah, interesting, thank you.

I always thought that it should be home, but heard it more often as hone, so I figured there must be some etymological history I was unaware of. Apparently I just had a bad sample set.
This can be a good hack around the broken immigration system, if it ever happens!

No matter how good the founder or team is, an idea requires at-least 3-4 months of nourishment to crystallize into something promising.

Unfortunately, on H1B if one quits his job, he needs to leave the country. Around me, I see many good ideas by good people not being pursued because of this.
Im not Sam but I was similar to you (planwise) when I graduated. I would urge you to be very careful if that is your long-term plan, it is very easy to develop a lifestyle around a comfortable low-risk paycheck and say, "I'll do it down the line". 5-10 years can fly by very quickly in those situations, still at the same place doing the same thing. You will never have as much free time as you do right now, and if you have an idea you should pursue it with vigor. -Signed, an old man
A new stackalloc operator for reference types with CoreCLR and Roslyn
The downvoters don't understand how federal contracts work- maintenance will be bid to the usual suspects, with the downward spiral that entails.
AFAIK most credit cards (Costco AMEX) will insure your car rental and luggage during travel. Out here in California and probably at most popular airports, the only things they look for are large dents.
Hello Sam,

Which application questions do you think best measure determination and flexibility of founders?
Ergo, why projects that provide encryption tools are so important.