skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's over the life time of the panels, which for most installation is quoted at 25 years.

The 0.06$ figure only works if you actually keep them for the 25 years, most people do not live in a single home for 25 years these days.

The figured also does not include potential maintenance that needs to be conducted on the system, as well as part replacements for most installations I've seen only the panels were insured for 25 years and again only against an internal catastrophic failure, which usually only kicks in after 50% drop in efficiency.

Other parts like the inverter, wiring, mounting frame, regulator bank, power storage might very well fail within those 25 years, and most importantly 25 years is more than the life time of most composite roof tiles these days, depending on the environment you live and your roofing in you might need to do roof maintenance every 5-10 years and usually replace the roof every 20-30 years.

And this is without taking into effect environmental affects on the system like salts in the air if you live on the coast line, hail and frost damage, and the potential very likely obsolescence of the panels them selves.

I'm a huge supporter of solar, but I'm not a supporter of residential solar, not at this time for sure, if the panels become very cheap to make to the point of becoming carbon neutral and breaking even say within a year (heck i would even take 2-3) sure, but even then it's still most likely be much more efficient and so environmentally sound to have them in a central location where hybrid PV and Thermal solar panels can maximize the amount of energy gained per surface area while providing a system which is easier to maintain and upgrade.
Hey, Sam! You recently announced HN is being split off from YC. What changes will we see to the site/community in the next 6 months?
You're confusing the order of operations for this pepper middle man. He can't place an order for peppers contingent on me buying them. He has to buy them or not. Ignoring this key difference fundamentally misrepresents the risk he is taking and the utility (price discovery) he is providing to the market.
It was a joke, for a similar acquisition made last year.

Never mind.
Amazon Web Services Announces Acquisition of Elemental Technologies
Great work. It's a counter-example of my meme where few learn from the past of our field. The author dug deep into the topics to find whatever he could. The author mixed that with incredibly different way of looking at things for a truly original work. The author focused on the right areas to prevent bottlenecks where it counted. Probably the best work I've seen on databases in a while.

I expect plenty more to come from this.
Hi Sam I've used this site forever it's cool. But I'm not like these other guys who want a job or to make a startup I just like tech news so my question is what is the best kind of coffee, as in what's your favorite kind.

My top pick is called "Black Cadillac" it's from a local shop and also reminds me of the modest mouse song of the same name.
I'm sorry you feel that way and will try to correct it. Can you send me feedback on the functionality that's not working as well now in Meldium? There's definitely some edges we're still working through and I'd love to make sure we make it awesome for you asap. You can drop me an email as well (boris at meldium dot com)
Browser plugins saving me from having to copy/paste are a huge win in my opinion. Prevents me from accidentally copy/pasting things and makes for really nice login behavior.

I'll look at some of this tonight thanks!
Name the most influential person in your life! I'm really curious!
Or, you know, behavioral things like activity patterns, which can be quite heavily influenced by culture even at the level of a family, without being genetic. Or gut flora, which, though there are good reasons that they can tend to be quite closely similar in families, are environmental rather than genetic.

"X seems particularly common in family" does not imply "X is genetic".
So you'll be using the clipboard to copy and paste passwords on Android, which is (I believe) much less secure.
I'm currently on H1B, if we get accepted, will my working visa be a problem?
What’s the Optimal Team Size for Workplace Productivity?
Lyft currently pays more, because that's probably last thing that keeps them alive. Many drivers work for both, if Lyft would pay same or less then what would keep them there?

As for the negating point, this is not something that happens instantly, but if you want an example then look at restaurants. There's even special minimum wage (currently $2.13) for jobs that receive tips.
> Loss of a 5k car + loss of opportunity/investment returns of 25k over at least 5 years

This, but minus the value of the car you now have.
1) No specific advice--we fund lots of companies whose products target far-away markets and are particularly interested in doing so. The only different question we might ask you is "How will you handle being away from your users for 3 months?"

2) We have funded companies that have raised more than $10 million, and they've said they still got a lot of value out of YC. If anything, it's usually the existing investors that have a problem with it.

3) Standard deal, BUT we buy common stock, so it doesn't trigger any anti-dilution stuff. Most investors understand that YC is mostly "sweat equity" anyway.

I might come to Brazil for New Years!
Yes, and in order the markets to perform this function they needs lots of active participants with differing investing time horizons. Without market makers markets tend to be very inefficient at their job.
I think you misunderstand OP. You're confusion backup generation (what you mentioned) with full time petroleum generation. Small towns aren't running their own coal plants, and the only geographic region I'm aware of running petroleum generation is Hawaii, which is why their power is so expensive, and they're moving to solar and utility scale battery storage at breakneck speeds.
Hi Sam. What's an example of the most heretical research YCR might pursue? Just trying to get a feel for the scope.
We will connect you to lawyers that can help, but it can be a real challenge unfortunately :(
Hi @sama

TELL US MORE ABOUT Y COMB RESEARCH

What area of research will you be conducting?
The cloud.gov platform is built on top of existing tooling and platforms (Docker, Cloud Foundry, AWS). It's possible recommendations and documentation for quickly deploying sites and services using these platforms is lacking, or changes too often to be provided as a supported, recommended solution to a large set of small teams.
Not this year, but we will next year!
Actually 25 years is a pretty good match between roof and panel lifetimes.

It doesn't matter who lives in the house, or for how long, for payback costs. Solar panels are no different from the rest of the roof in that department. When you sell the house, its value is estimated from the age of the fixtures, and that all comes out in the price.

But I'm with you on the central-solar issue. Its got to be vastly more efficient to create a planned installation, than to slap solar on every roof in the neighborhood.
Did you read our winter 2016 application?

Thanks :)
I tend to use all 3 of the browsers for slightly different things so having plugins would be ideal but I suppose I could slum it with copy/paste as long as I follow the password/login route to reduce the chance a password gets exposed.

I forgot about my nexus tablet but android is the other thing to have a look into.
We will not invest in something that we think will be bad for the world even if we think it will make lots of money.
I spent 15 minutes trying to figure this out the last time they popped up on HN. It's surprising to me how difficult this was to find out. I think it was buried in a FAQ somewhere.
It doesn't make sense for Americans to oppose this treaty. We already live under most of these IP rules with no hope of relaxing them. Extending these profit protections to other countries will mainly benefit American companies and improve our economy.
They are not calling "random" numbers. They are buying lead lists from telemarketing firms. I would bet they may even have demographic data on the people they are calling to be sure they are dialing susceptible people (the elderly).
The different versions of keepass have always confused me -- what's the difference between 1 and 2, and why are both around? What's KeePassX, which is linked on the Download page for Linux, and does it support YubiKeys as well? Other than all the confusion that surrounds it, keepass looks quite good to me.
Your use case is a tiny minority which doesn’t provide enough justification to increase the complexity of the default, for complexity being _very_ expensive.
How involved is YC going to be in 3D Printing?
How long does it typically take the YC team to review an application?
How will the size of the W16 batch compare with previous batches?
>a few years ago scientist had everyone avoiding the sun

I'm somewhat doubtful of this claim. If anything scientists would have everyone avoid sunburn since skin cancer and cataracts.

Tans looking good are a recent phenomenon: A couple hundred years ago light skin was a sign of high status since you could afford to stay indoors instead of having to work in the fields, so light skin was deemed to be more beautiful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color#Social_status...
Besides self driving cars, what robotics applications do you see as fundable now or in the next few years? Thanks!
Most Recruiters Don't Care About Your Cover Letter
No huge surprises here, but probably Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk have done the most to influence my thinking about investing and technology.
It seems to fail (in funny ways) on actors that are not in Parks and Recreation.
Really nice to have architects talking about this key piece of infrastructure. My wished-for future of the skyscraper:

- main street social conditions that can exist at the 10th...nth floor, ideally connecting buildings together

- trees, gardens, connections to nature

- fostering more flexible construction of office and housing space

- allowing for new forms of mass transport and automated delivery
What are your views on the singularity and transhumanism? Do you think a day will come when we'll have to somewhat trascend our human existence in order to keep up with the pace of tech advancements?
Could you tell us more about YC Research? Such as (but definitely not restricted to);

- Initial starting size

- How you will be picking researchers

- Any particularly novel initiatives/methodologies that will be encouraged

- How you will measure the group's success
Yet humans have eyes and can see they are fat. They have the instinct to know what type of body looks healthy or unhealthy. Also every human knows that eating less food will reduce their weight. Whether we have the ability to change our habits is another question but is unrelated to my proposition.
Cool; thanks! Didn't consider all that.
For us, activity isn't the factor. We were all pretty sedentary as kids.
If gut flora is environmental, then that's a no-go since we span 5 states.
So in our case, genes is the winner so far.
The problem is that many senior citizens, especially men, will fight tooth and nail against this. They have a self-image problem. They can not see themselves as frail and vulnerable.

I lived through this with first my grandfather, then my grandmother.
Hey Sam! Best actionable advice you can give to a room full of entrepreneurs in 60 seconds?
Hi Sam, I was wondering how one can get involved in helping out at YC during the batches. Sort of a role where you can work and help out the companies with any questions / requests they have. Basically additional hands on deck for the YC partners.
Hi Sam -- do you think YC has a role or responsibility in addressing social issues in the bay area or the US?
What was your first personal investment like?
What makes you qualified to run Ycombinator above any of the other partners?
Hi Sam. Do you have any regrets when it comes to certain companies you turned down? If so, can you give any examples?
Are you ready to talk about which domain you intend to start with for YCR?
Hi Sam! Best actionable advice you can give to a room full of entrepreneurs in 30 seconds? Thanks.
Couple questions regarding YCR:

1. Will the model be group-based where there's a head PI setting the research agenda for a group and researchers working under the PI? If so, what level of independence do you expect individual researchers within a group to have? I.e. is it more like the academic model with postdocs enjoying a fair degree of independence, or more akin to national labs where the research agenda is reasonably fixed and everyone is expected to contribute to the same research program? Or, are you coming up with an entirely different model?

2. In general how hands-on will YCR be in terms of intra-group management?

3. Do you expect to subscribe to all the major publishing houses so that YCR researchers have access to journals like they would at a top-tier university?
Most ML models will only work with what they were trained on. In this case only actors from parks and rec
Taking into account that Google "happens to be" the largest ad company around, it is hard to not see this as a defensive move to protect themselves at a time when the disproportionately negative impact of ad-tech has put their business at the mercy of adblockers and native apps.
My plan is to have my B compiler (https://github.com/aap/abc) spit out PDP-10 assembly eventually. It would be a perfect fit since B assumes word addressed memory.
@sama Would you call yourself a statistician or a visionary?
Sam, we launched Asqway app on 29 September this year (https://itunes.apple.com/app/asqway/id1039694793?ls=1&mt=8) and we have been extensively talking to our initial users, we have gathered user’s feedback and updating Asqway app accordingly. Next version of the app will be released in 1 week of time. Up till now we have almost 50 users. So my question is, shall we wait to get more users (I mean at least 1000 users) and then apply for YC Summer 2016 batch or apply now for YC Winter 2016 batch?? What’s your recommendation? Do number of users for the start-up product counts while applying for the YC?? Also, we don’t have monetary model at the moment. So what will you recommend in terms of having monetary model for the start up? We are measuring our growth on the basis of daily active users. Thanks Pratim
Based on the post it was only trained on those actors
It honestly hugely varies. Sometimes 2 minutes. The longest I've ever spent on a single application (where I had to do background research) was probably an hour. But I try for my normal cadence to be 6 per hour.

Some applications that are really great or really bad are reviewed by only one of us, most are reviewed by about 3, and the ones near the cutoff are reviewed by a lot.
Do startups, and if so how, need to execute differently in today's frothy funding environment?

What are some technologies that excite you?
There's actually rather good browser integration for KeePass now, I just switched a few weeks ago from LastPass.

Check out http://keepass.info/plugins.html (I use PassIFox and ChromeIPass via KeePassHttp)
Not a complete answer at all, but it looks like the former CTO of stripe, Greg Brockman, is going to be involved[1]. I assume to start they're gonna look at people close to the YC network?

[1]https://twitter.com/gdb/status/651825359340507136
Are there technologies or startups that you haven't funded, despite the team/tech/product/strategy being great, simply because it was a decade or so too soon? (For example: funding VR in the early 00s vs. funding VR in 2013, etc.)
Yes that is one way they make money but not the only way and not even the most effective way since they are splitting their profits with anyone that can compete with them and there is only so much to be made.

The fact that there are multiple issues with high frequency trading is one of the reasons it ends up being so polarizing. It ends up being an ambiguous term that sometimes means something that is a natural result of decentralization, and sometime means techniques that would be grating to most people's common sense of what should be legal.
Wow, that would be great! Please, let us know if we can help in any way during your visit. Lots of interesting things for you to see in the Brazilian startup ecosystem. We are close to São Paulo (where Embraer, the 3rd largest airplane manufacturer in the world is located). Regards
@sama - Based on my friends who have previously applied to YC .. it seems as if applications submitted in the last 3-4 days before the deadline, don't really get reviewed.

When submitted early, they would notice YC related views to their website and Youtube video. Unfortunately, when submitted close to the deadline, there were no views.
Hi Sam, you have previously mentioned in an interview that University of Waterloo comes to mind when you think of a school that produces great YC alums. As most of these founders were unproven and untested individuals at the time of applying to YC, what qualities do you feel has made the difference for them throughout the program?
I actually did an evaluation of password storage services recently and chose LastPass over 1Password for a couple reasons:

1. 1Password is SUPER expensive for what it is. You really pay for the fact that it looks nice and integrates well with mac.

2. It has no enterprise level features (This is for my organization) such as user management, access logging and fine grained roles and sharing.

1Password might be good for an individual or a small team, but it's too simple for anything beyond that.
I guess it will depend on the size of the distro project backing it. Gobo, by "virtue" of being a small group, can't provide a large store of pre-compiled packages. Thus one at present have to rely on compiling on ones own.

That said, once compiled a binary package can be produced by simply creating a compressed archive of the content of /Programs/app-name/app-version (an official binary package is a bit more involved to ensure compatibility with the latest released iso).

Beyond that i am not quite sure what you are asking.
What are some of the biggest pain points you see early YC companies struggling with (esp. during batches)?

Are there any unsolved problems for growing companies you wish someone would apply to solve?
Hi from Chicago @sama!

You guys have been talking about your investments in HW startups.

What are the top 3 things that you look for in a hardware startup application at YC?
It is frustrating that this beautiful ship is relatively unknown considering the fascination with all things Titanic.
http://www.ssusc.org/
Surely Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos could free up a few million from petty cash.
I tried this image:

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTY2MjQ2MzAwOF5BMl5Ban...

And it suggested Nick Offerman :)

Cool exploration though!
The FBI can compel ordinary people to hand over literally anything while also preventing them talking about it to anyone, including their lawyer(NSL). Pretty sure they can compel police departments to do hand over whatever they want.
that means there is a annual subscribtion? i can't find any indo about that on thier site.
What do you think about the economic disruption that is being caused be increased automation? As we develop broader and broader forms of automation, it seems like that disruption can only increase in both speed and quantity.

What can YC and Silicon Valley as a whole to mitigate the problems this will cause?
One of the things that differentiates us from other programs is we don't have outsourced 'mentors'. The advice you get during YC is from the full-time partners and a small group of part-time partners.

I think this is important to maintain--we give good advice largely because we think about advising startups all the time. Bringing people in and out to do it occasionally hasn't worked that well for us.
Will it cost the companies using these call centres anything?
Let's Buy Delphi
Close. We're very close. Renewables and electric transportation gets us very far. Automated farming and 3D printing or automated assembly of housing will be the last step.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson
Hi @sama. We've recently seen Google and NASA among others open their patent pools to startups. What are your thoughts on this, and YC's stance on intellectual property?
Hi, Sam. Big fan of YC itself, the blog, and your tweets.

How long, or to what sort of benchmarks, do you think a startup engineer should marinate in the startup scene before being taken seriously as a technical founder?

And follow up: Do you give extra consideration to an application for founders that have been employees at another YC company prior?
Losses due to burglary, by contrast, are around $5 billion a year. For comparison.

Which is probably more relevant than AAPL's net profit.
I saw several people from 18F present at Code for America Summit the other week, and my understanding is that the regulatory overhead involved in launching new government tech services (something like 4000 pages of relevant regulations to comply with) is so large that it's usually a boondoggle. Part of what they are doing is building services with that regulatory compliance built into it, so agencies don't have to slog through all of that for every little thing they want built.
IMO not all that LogMeIn is a good/bad company, it's that LastPass was sold. Their (your) data is being moved from one company to another.

It's certainly possible that LogMeIn stays hands-off and LastPass continues all operations exactly as they did before, but then why would LastPass sell?

LogMeIn paid $x money for LastPass, and they intend to make $x + $y money for it, by doing things that LastPass was either unable or unwilling to do (otherwise, LastPass wouldn't have sold).

Usually this means that LogMeIn is going to try to "extract more value" from the customer.
Any advice for single founders applying? (other than get a cofounder...)
Market research survey could you help?
> well, you can get an even better ICE with relatively simple improvements.

You really can't. Note the VW emissions scandal. We've already hit the wall regarding how much energy we can squeeze out of a unit of liquid fuel (most of the energy gets wasted as heat).
> how do you justify exchanges like CHX, with approximately 1% market share?

What needs to be justified? It is competition and decentralization.
Unless it changed, you have to think about Angular 2 as a complete new framework that has nothing to do with Angular 1. It sounds like it's just an update but it will really be 2 different thing (just like angular with react or ember, now you can add angular 2 as a new one), I don't know why they kept the name.
It's worth noting that a healthy weight accompanied by healthy exercise doesn't necessarily prevent heart disease. There's this perception that those at risk are overweight, and that isn't necessarily true. If you look at a country like the Philippines (and probably other similar countries) you'll see plenty of people at a healthy weight who live an active lifestyle that are at extremely high risk of heart disease. They appear healthy from the outside, but there's high rates of smoking and probably not the greatest dietary habits.

And, I don't mean to detract away from what you're saying. Eating a healthy balanced diet is the most important way to prevent heart disease.