skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you have any interest, I highly recommend reading this. It's not marketing fluff; it has a creative and (seemingly) complete vision and well-thought-through planning, and is clear, concise, and detailed. Maybe someone who follows these issues closely will already know much of it (or maybe not; I have no idea), but it is an education for me and by far the best thing I've read on the subject.

For example, the three phases in the title are defined not by physical locations or technological developments, but by dependence on Earth:

* Earth Reliant

* Proving Ground: R&D in 'cislunar' space

* Earth Independent

Maybe that's old news to space geeks, but it's new to me and shows an effort to carefully conceive of the mission.
Hi Sam,

Please list your 3 most favorite book for Entrepreneurship, business. I'm an software engineer but have very little entrepreneurship experience.

Thanks
Does YC ever raise capital from outside investors like a traditional company, or is the equity you take from companies you fund liquid enough to sustain YC?
You have to learn how to do this. If you can't get good at explaining what your product does, you will struggle in all aspects of your business. Make this your number one priority (though also consider that if people have a hard time understanding what you're doing, it may be a sign that it's not a good idea).
Unless you are into Bassnectar and the like... ;)
I'm not. Who has time to fully comprehend (and act upon) this? Especially when we're already working >50h a week to maintain household status quo. It's hard to focus on the state of society's infrastructure when I'm spending every waking moment working to maintain my own. Yes, I know what is at stake, but one avenue is a long burn and the other is a short fuse. I'll tackle the more pressing issue first.

Disclosure: I work in the netsec industry and only signed this because HN brought it to my attention in the rare spare moments between my daily tasks. To use an analogy, I feel like I can't worry about putting out the forest fire if my house is already on fire in the midst of it. At the same time, I'm throwing money at someone that says they'll help me free up more time to do the forest fire fighting. We'll see if I've made a grave mistake in how I prioritize things.
Thanks for your input. One quick question, learning curve for angular and react will be?
Wikimedia, Zipcar, Fitbit Are Among IBM Watson’s New Neighbors
OK, I don't know how it works then.
> One of the things that AMP allows is to know that is it save to prerender a page. Documents can be instructed by a viewer to e.g. only load resources visible above the fold and absolutely no external JS.

Which begs the questions: Who prerenders and on what criteria?

Assume page A which has a link to AMP-forked page B.

Does that link need rel=prerender for every browser? Does one need to query the AMP-ness of every page one links to? Does one need to be Googles page cache to link to AMP-pages and get in the benefit of prerendering?

Or is the prerendering implemented in the AMP runtime? Does it only work if page A and page B are both AMP-enhanced?
Petitions don't do anything. I donate to the EFF and Demand Progress instead.
The president can change many things. They choose not to because there is a cost. Of course, checks and balances with legislators and the courts, but the executive branch has tremendous leeway in executive policy and action. Obama could order the NSA to stop tapping domestic fiber and they would. He chooses not to because he doesn't want the Washinton insiders to attack him. This is our country, not the career politicians. It's not a cliche, it's true. Those of us who are voting citizens should realize that politics need not be a Hegelian compromise, elect people that affect positive change, and punish and vote out those that don't.
Hey Sam! Much respect. Sometimes when I watch an interview with you (such as a recent Stanford class), it seems like the discussion is very one-sided. I don't perceive you normally as stating your opinions authoritatively, but I fear that many are afraid to contest your claims or disagree with you, even in violation of their own beliefs. My questions are first whether you have noticed any kind of mass-submissiveness to or blind acceptance of to the YC Philosophy, and second, who do you think are the proponents of the most compelling contrasting views?
Hey Sam, I am very interested in hearing more about the office hours initiative ran by Michael. Do you guys plan on scaling that up? I strongly believe in democratizing access to people and believe YC is doing this with all the effort it has put into Starup School , Fellowship and all these programs. We are actually building products towards the goal of democratizing access to people so very expected to hopefully work together
View my donation as seed capital. I expect we'll commit $100M+ to some projects over time.

We do have plans for collaboration with some institutions for our first group.

Open to anyone great! No PhD required.
Have you ever been to HK, if you complain about housing prices in SF, try to get 1 bed room apartment in HK, worse try to go for a run there and see what happens to your lungs after some time.
This was 2007, but Paul Graham describes Boston VCs as being slow to act, so they stopped doing Demo Day out there.

http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html
Hi Sam,

Do you have any suggestions that would help non-technical startup employees get visa entry to the US?
Western Union is not exempt from KYC requirements. Most agents of it, however, sound something like "the owner of your local bodega." They'll satisfy themselves of your identity, either via personal knowledge or asking to see an ID. They'll then ring up your transfer. The person on the other end of the transfer is "Some person in Jamaica." That doesn't automatically scream FRAUD unless you say "Lottery" -- the overwhelming majority of Americans wiring money to someone in Jamaica are, in fact, supporting family or friends there.

Fraudsters also tend to get pretty decent about instructing their marks to structure payments to avoid the obvious controls, for example by using mules [+] or by striping a $5,000 transfer into multiple smaller transfers on different days to different recipients controlled by the same operation. This is explained to the mark as something like "Oh, different tax bureau than last time" but it's operationally to avoid having velocity checks tripped at WU.

[ + ] Witting or unwitting co-conspirators who receive money in their own name and then forward it to the criminals, often for a cut of the profits.
Hi Sam, what skills would you learn today to maximize your "founder potential"?

Web/mobile development is kind of commodity already. One can learn nuclear physics, but it doesn't feel like you can hack on it a lot.
> Boeing and the ULA are not SpaceX competitors. They're a last gasp attempt to keep the existing pork/gravy train of cost plus contracting and congressional district graft in place.

No, Boeing and the other ULA members (both as ULA and separately) are SpaceX competitors for (particularly) government contract work, what you call "congressional district graft" is part of the game they play to maximize the value and duration of those contracts (to make them politically hard to curtail), but aren't what they exist to support -- you've got what is being served and what is serving reversed.
That's what makes it truly exciting to me: it seems like a lot of smart people have been putting serious thought and consideration towards what would/will be required to have a realistic shot at colonizing another planet.
I'm curious how much cost is added to the flight to Mars if they build a tether/rotating system on the spacecraft to simulate gravity. Seems like too much of a health risk to forgo this and spend years in micro-gravity, although research is limited on the topic (the first two men in a year long study are at ~7 months in space).
> Those "separate applications" are still tightly coupled to the main, and therefore they share the complexity/attack surface concerns.

They have no access to systemd-init, only to an API presented by it (as does every other application if they so choose to use it), and thus this statement is incorrect. A bug in one of those applications cannot magically get access to systemd-init (which I'm assuming is what you meant by "main" here).

> If your system gets pwned, does it matter to the user if it was via the "systemd" binary itself or by one of the official "systemd-somethingd" binaries (that have no other purpose other than interoperation with the main app, developed by the same people) that come with every OS using it? Had the distro maintainers not shoveled an extra ~670,000LoC down their throat, they wouldn't have been pwned.

It absolutely matters! A bug in systemd-init can do much more damage than a bug in timesyncd could. Also, I really don't care about your anger towards an open source project, please refrain from expressing it to me if you'd like to continue this conversation.

> If systemd wants to replace my freaking cron, DNS, ntp, and logging daemons, and the majority of in-production deployments use the application like that, I will be evaluating the application's complexity against how it's used in the real world.

You may want to create a separate post somewhere which compares the SLOC of all the applications systemd attempts to re-create (choosing perhaps the most popular from each) along with the complete systemd package, but I personally wouldn't have any interest in it since it would be a factually correct comparison.

> sysvinit doesn't attempt to replace resolvconf, ntpd, crond, and syslog-ng. systemd does.

That's exactly right, but systemd-init doesn't attempt to replace those either (besides syslog-ng (journald), which I already mentioned as being fair to include with the SLOC count)*.
Yeah, I like that spot too, this region is also pretty active in the gamma-ray-spectrum.
Is there a web version of this? It's too bad if all this great information is hidden away in a PDF, which few will bother to open (even on HN, and fewer in the general public) and which I'll probably be unable to find in the future. I found the following website, but my initial impression is that it's lacks a lot of the great material in the PDF:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/journeytomars/index.html
Interesting. It feels like people disagree with me all day! I've noticed that the best founders are the most likely to disagree (and have well-reasoned arguments).

I really hope I never get to the point in life where people stop disagreeing with me.
Every city gov needs to issue such kind of app. Congratulations to the folks in Detroit.
Canada perhaps (specifically Kitchener-Waterloo)?
Which came first: Hacker News or Reddit?
Well if everyone buys property and owns it I think he could find enough demand for property to be able to sell his property and invest it in something else with returns.
That's not true in this case. Like most trade deals, this one is through congressional-executive agreements. That means Congress will get an up or down vote for the deal.
South America?
Since you said 'both', can you elaborate on another point ( apart from the fact angular 2 gonna change angular 1 versions )? That might be helpful for us.
Wildlife Thrives Within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
Do you think ycr will host public lecture series for interesting research topics?
It's not really a ML model - just LBP features...
California Approves a Sweeping Digital Privacy Law
Google is also eating up the open web.

It use to be that Google had lax standards for music lyrics sites, but now when you search for lyrics you are likely to get a "universal search" result for Google Play.

Google is getting out of the game of providing people free traffic so you not only have the ad-supported model failing AND the free traffic going away.
Would you consider opening a branch of YC in Manchester, UK? Huge amount of talent there being wasted in banks and consulting companies. Low living costs, excellent universities, large pool of engineering talent, growing startup community.
I'm mid-application for the YC Winter 2016 cycle, but I'm concerned because neither my cofounder nor I come from a technical background, yet our idea is technical. Do you see this as a deterrent to being accepted?
What are some qualities of a CEO that you wish to look for in a startup founder?
After fifteen years of living here, I've concluded that a large part of the traffic woes are brought on by the general driving habits of the residents themselves. Can't properly merge (speed up to the flow of traffic, please), can't stay out of the left lane, and huge gaps are often left because a driver can't be bothered to push the accelerator (exacerbating the jerky stop-and-go). Seattle doesn't need more roads, Seattle needs to learn to operate their vehicles (though Seattlites will tell you it's the immigrant Californians; talk about denial). Contrast to, say, NYC where it appears to me that everybody just wants it to work and if you're screwing it up for everyone else you get a horn and a finger. Which, despite stereotypes, doesn't seem to happen all that often (disclaimer: never lived there, visited lots) because everyone else wants it to work, too.

That, and they should have said "yes" to federal light rail dollars forty years ago. Now we're stuck with a tunnel that I'm becoming increasing convinced is never going to get finished.
According to the article they had to disassemble floor and wall to get access. So definitely not a simple sweep-up job.

I know the family in question. They're both competent and frugal (they save so they can donate heavily to charity). They wouldn't spend $38k without good reason.
Can you expand on your tweet that said you don't think selling software is a good business? Why isn't it a good business? What makes it so tough?
Yes.

Though I'll remind everyone that literally anyone can apply to any YC program. One of our biggest differentiators is that you don't need an intro to talk to us.
If nothing else, it acts as a filter of "will power" and dedication for the selected startups...

I keep hearing that, and I have never agreed with that sentiment and doubt I ever will. There are lots of good reasons for people to not want to go to SV for 3 months that in no way reflect on their commitment / will.
Where outside-USA would make the most sense for YC NONUS 1.0? Or at least, what factors would go into the decision?
Sort of complicated. The short answer is yes, we do have some outside investors.
I'm thinking of making the switch.

Question for you and others who have migrated from LastPass to 1Password:

Were there any sticking points? How did you go about moving over your password database?
I have problems with the mobile also but there is nothing else that compares. Android has the standalone app and the integrated keyboard. Autofill with the keyboard doesn't work like the web browser, but you can still copy and past the individual fields. Is there anything else that has a good standalone mobile app, and has good keyboard integration?
Um, are you sure anyone is unequivocally against it? I literally just saw an email from the NDP containing this:

> For all these reasons, the NDP will not uncritically accept the TPP agreement that was negotiated by Stephen Harper in secret and which could re-write many laws against the interests of Canadians.

> We will push for a full review of the details of this agreement. We will consult Canadians and stakeholders. We will measure it against the needs of Canadian families and communities, and test it against the long-term interests of Canada.

> Only Tom Mulcair will give this agreement the scrutiny it needs. Only Tom Mulcair will fight for our jobs, our families and our communities and stand up to a wrongly-negotiated trade deal.

> Thank you again for your interest.

> All the best,

> Canada's New Democrats | Le NPD du Canada
True, I donate to the EFF though not Demand Progress(yet)
that can be easily explained by image recog algo finding all your photos barefoot, also NSA can use Facebook to catch the thief after he posts selfie with the stolen goods.
We'll agree to disagree (I don't mean any offense). SpaceX exists to drive the cost of launch services down. Boeing and the ULA exist to profit. My opinion, of course.
Well, now I have to admit confusion. I downloaded it and poked around, and it seems to be put together pretty well and has all the features from Uber. My best guess is that they started in a place where taxis were generally "good enough" already and didn't market it as hard, but it definitely competes well along the dimensions I gave before.
SHA-1 may be vulnerable
Didn't recognize L'il Sebastian. Total Fail. =)
We used CLU when I took MIT's Software Engineering class. I think we used pclu ("Portable CLU", which translated to C.
I think threatening to ban all secure communication in a psychotic unrealistic policy position and having important "serious" people like the director of the FBI push for it isn't really intended to get it codified into law, rather to elicit responses like yours -- it's designed to massively push the Overton window against privacy so that we can feel okay about how bad things currently are -- at least the insane unrealistic threats that were thrown around weren't followed through.
Hey there. Do you mind if ask what's your startup?

Just out of curiosity; I'm Brazilian too :)
I don't really think you can learn this from books--you need to just jump in and do it.

You might find some of these videos helpful: http://startupclass.samaltman.com
Coming in WordPress 4.4 – A cryptographically secure wp_rand()
That's definitely weekend reading for me.

Right after grading these tests...
I wonder if parental income maps would be an even better match. I've heard that when one is raised as an obese child, the chance of reaching a healthy weight later in life is very slim.
Is there anything YC could do to help YC companies with housing? It's not trivial for teams during YC to get housing in SFBA, but they have enough upside to put up with a lot, and usually figure out something.

It's really hard for employees 1-N, especially at sub-market salaries, but without 10% equity stakes, to move to SFBA. It pretty much restricts you to people already-here, people who will live college dorm style, or people who are already well off. Too much of the money raised goes out the door in salary (taxed) to pay for housing.
Those teams definitely exist in agencies (GSA included), but we (18F) are managing ATOs internally for our projects, and are working on tooling to clarify, simplify, and automate the process. https://github.com/18F/control-masonry/ is our first project around this.
You probably have a high tolerance to the chemical concoction, so you get some pain-killing effects but not enough for a full-on high. I'm guessing the tolerance is both genetic and induced from the high amount of training you do.
Why? I click on the link and it opens in the browser like any other content. Except that it's easier to download.
* crickets * (after 40 min on the front page, but it's there!)

How does HN, a hotbed of libertarian free-market worship that also reveres smarts and science, respond to this?
The relentless progress of domain-specific machine learning over the past year.
Visualizing Machine Learning Thresholds to Make Better Business Decisions
reddit by a lot.
I wish we had proper data, like the number of problems fixed before the introduction of the app. So that we could see how effective the app actually is.
That actually works rather well. You should add the toolbar button though, then it works like LastPass.
Do you have any research papers to show that mental activity delays onset of dementia illnesses? So far what I've seen has been poor quality studies or early investigations. So, it might help, but we don't know yet.

The part I was mostly querying was about money being protective. It probably isn't. rich people probably get dementia at the same rate as poor people.

https://www.nia.nih.gov/alzheimers/publication/preventing-al...

> Unlike age and genetics, certain health and lifestyle factors associated with Alzheimer’s disease risk may be controlled. Scientists are exploring prevention strategies to determine whether or not things like exercise, diet, and “brain games” can help delay or prevent Alzheimer’s disease and age-related cognitive decline. They are also investigating how certain medical conditions, such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes, influence risk for cognitive impairment.

> So far, studies have not demonstrated that, over the long term, health or lifestyle factors can prevent or slow Alzheimer’s disease or age-related cognitive decline. Similarly, clinical trial results do not support the use of any particular medication or dietary supplement to prevent these conditions.
Crowdfunding a $50,000 media startup
https://github.com/18F/CMS.gov-developer :-)
Yes and the bit about 'predatory HFT' is backed up with an article which has no information about what constitutes 'predatory HFT', it merely repeats the words in a small annotion. The article is more about the regulatory concerns over dark pools.

I'll tell you why they use dark pools. On the open market, if you sell lots of shares, buyers will see that, and drop their bids. Likewise if you put in a large bid, sellers will raise their asks. In a dark pool, institutions can move large blocks at a given price without market forces interfering, and reduce trading costs.
Home inspectors are by and large useless. They exist because the laws say they must exist, but they don't have a strong regulatory body making sure that they're competent. Once the house is sold they're gone.

For the most part they're just yet another guy who takes a cut whenever a house is sold.
We like that.

We are looking for impressive people. I think intelligence is somewhat fungible--if you were great at one thing, you can probably learn another thing.
https://data.detroitmi.gov/browse?q=improve+detroit the city also has a bunch of other open data sets they publish now
Liberio is shutting down
A nice positive feedback cycle!
Why I’m (sort of) leaving the Chinese Room
Failing Unicorn

Trade Quality for "Features"

Focus Gone, Footgun
What kind of tasks your data scientists are working on?
I read in an article that you are planning a trip to India towards the end of this year. It would be great if I could take your through an unique tour through the city which you plan to be in. I would love to shed light on 'Design for Culture' and explain how there are few startups actually designing businesses around unique cultural behaviors.

If possible, how can we make that work?
Why SQL is neither legacy, nor low-level, nor difficult,  but simply awesome
>> which I'll probably be unable to find in the future

Could you elaborate on this ?
This sounds obvious but "have a good startup". If you can show us you're making great progress as a solo founder, we're much more willing to believe you can handle it going forward.
> HFT is fiercely competitive

For the incredibly small minority of people who can engage in it, and who enjoy special rules, maybe. For the majority of the people who's money is actually extracted by this system, it's an exclusive club.

> Without HFT, bid offers would be wider. Fact.

The majority of people who just want to save for retirement would prefer wider bid offers instead of having such a large chunk of money extracted from their future bank accounts. Fact.

The other reason why HFT is non-competitive is that you cannot go and start a market with your own rules without being deeply in bed with the government and the financial status quo. HFT is forced down our throats by a system that calls itself capitalistic but thrives on enjoying custom-made loopholes in heavily-regulated statism.