skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A powder gun like the one used in Harp and a gas gun like Sharp both work in the same basic way – expanding gases. The lighter the gases molecular weight, the faster it expands in air. Gunpowder has a molecular weight of 22, slightly less than air at around 28, but ignited gunpowder is incredibly hot, so that’s why it expands so quickly. The hydrogen used in gas guns, however, has a molecular weight of two so expands extraordinarily quickly in air.

I couldn't understand from the article how the hydrogen was being used in a "gas gun". Since pure hydrogen doesn't ignite, wouldn't we care about the molecular weight of the oxidizer as well?

It turns out the "light gas" is important just for it's low molecular molecular weight. It's never ignited, and one could substitute Helium for Hydrogen if one wanted. The gas is a second stage in addition to, rather than instead of the gunpowder. It's like a spring-air gun, but instead of spring you use an explosive charge.

Here's Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-gas_gun

And here's some PVC experimentation:
http://www.chrisfenton.com/2-stage-light-gas-gun/
> Are you really not aware that Cuba is a dictatorship?

I am, but I live in the US: we have illegal drone strikes against US citizens, NSA wiretapping against US citizens, and so on (the glasses are rose colored for some). Every country has its human rights issues.

Cuba may not move towards democracy as much as we'd like, but quality of life can still be improved for its citizens in parallel with political reform.
When doing a hard tech startup, how can you show traction/product-market-fit to investors before your product is being sold? The cost of going from crude prototype to sellable product can easily be in the 6-figure range, so how do you break this Catch 22?
That's not a reasonable requirement. You simply can't write rules that apply to every aspect of day to day life that may be relevant for situations you may have not even anticipated might happen.

You can try, and that's typically what organizational policies aim to do. But once you've set a policy, pretending like it's some sort of infallible divine guidance is asking for failure. Good security policy needs to always be reacting, always considering whether the rules they've set are still a net gain in the security of the system, given that they're operating in a real world of real people with real behaviors that may not have been accurately predicted.
Would YC fund a weird startup idea if its just in the idea stage but the founder has a good track record?
Goddamnyoupeople! Thanks!
Sam if you are a semi technical founder (you have coded before but not recently enough to build your product) and you have to get a cofounder but have the choice between one you know and will be able to climb mountains with but has the same dilemma vs a technical cofounder/employee. Who would you choose to go with? The one you can figure it out with or the one who can basically do it for you?
Not quite the same. It's more like, cooking rice takes 20-30 minutes of time and attention (not total attention). A rice cooker turns it into 1 minute of attention (pour in rice, water, wait, remove), but takes about the same time.

So the question is, is it worth it to get in my car and drive 6 blocks, park, and go into the shop, or just walk the 6 blocks? For that distance, it's almost break even on time, but the driving technically requires less effort on my part. Anything less than that, walking is clearly better, anything more than that and driving is clearly better (well, in my case there's nothing after 6 blocks from my place that I'm interested in that isn't at least a mile away so 20+ minutes walking versus 5 minutes driving/parking).

If you use a rice cooker strictly for cooking rice, and don't do it daily, it may not be worth the cost/space.
Wildcards are not variables. Wildcards don't get expanded in quotes. Variables get expanded in double quotes but not single quotes. $@ obeys all the same expansion rules as all other variables. Command substitution with both $() and `` follow the same rules as variables.
sounds like Wakie, but with more of defined(known) social connection as opposed to complete strangers:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wakie.andr...
Personally I'd love to drop support for MySQL but we have a few too many organizations that only run MySQL _and_ want to use GitLab. It would be a waste if said organizations wouldn't be able to use GitLab.

The approach I tend to go with is to make queries perform as good as possible on PostgreSQL without using too many PostgreSQL specific bits (which would make supporting both DBs more difficult), while making sure they still perform good enough on MySQL.
To be clear, it is still a plugin for a ~$5000 application.

Nonetheless, thanks Google for lowering the bar for entry into professional security work!
I've heard a lot about the areas you're most passionate about and YC has the famous list of markets, but what areas are you least excited about and why?
It's easy to do a good job running an organization that's winning, and very hard to go a good job running an organization that isn't winning.

Takeway: if the company isn't doing well, figure out whatever short-term things you can do to get momentum. Ignore other management advice.
I find tying my income to stock highly motivating :)
I wondered what your thoughts were on the apple / fbi situation ? How would you expect startups to act if they found themselves in a similar predicament?
I think that you should have a call for programmers right in your kickstarter. Not saying it would have worked in this case necessarily, but having someone actively interested in the project is a great asset.
I think the concept is healthy narcissism.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_narcissism
Would YC consider subsidising child care costs for participating founders? At present, the infamously high cost of child care in the Bay Area makes YC out of reach for most founders with young children.
Favorite Beer? Why/not?
There's nothing stopping you indexing multiple columns with different dictionaries either :). And indexing works beautifully with multiple weighted columns.

The related records point is true though - indexes don't help if you're trying to implement multi-table search. Although then I'd argue a materialized view (refreshed with triggers) might be better than putting more columns into one of the data tables.
It may be zero sum or not zero sum depending on different situations.

If all employees values transparency and fairness and would rather have a lower but more fair pay, them the transparency may work.

However, the employer typically derives more profit per unit of work if they employee makes less. Also, if you are a good negotiator or you are the type to always threaten to leave if not given more pay you benefit from the opaqueness. If the company has a lot of good negotiators it may make sense to be more transparent to keep the overall wages down since no one can exercise that benefit.

There are probably other factors such as supply and demand beyond individuals at specific points in time which need to be taken into account (surge pricing?) we need someone for this project now, so we will pay them a premium even if we would normally pay them the same as everyone else, even in consideration of long terms costs this may make sense.
If you dissect any low-end appliance, you'll notice that they are almost always have very simple mechanics that work by mechanical physics in lieu of computing where possible. Sensors and electronics are expensive in the context of an appliance that needs to be produced for less than $3.

You can make a coffee maker that can deliver water at a precise and adjustable temperature, but it's going to be a lot more complicated (thus expensive) than a cheap one that relies on a tube, a one-way valve, and the behavior of boiling water.
Let's try a different method then. Is Dropbox's valuation in line with their business fundamentals? Supposedly, no:

https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/dropbox-valuation-bubble/
Mr. Altman, can you tell us about your morning routine?
What is innovation? 15 experts share their innovation definition (w. quote pics)
I can't believe that they'll maintain both in perpetuity. The Windows edition will probably become the official version the moment that it's feature complete, and the Java version will become the "legacy version" that's never updated again.
Many of us (myself included) go to a nice hideaway somewhere far from the bay area to read applications so we can concentrate. So I wouldn't pay much attention to the timestamp. That said, given the volume of applications we receive and the relatively small size of our partnership, we do have to spend a regrettably short amount of time on each application.
Sam has answered this question in various forms and fashions on several past occasions and I thought you would like to know what he said at those times. But feel free to be snarky and swear at us instead.
Don't get me wrong; I have no problem with that. Its not fair (or very useful) to compare a successful multi-billion revenue company with a startup.
I'm not defending the companies per se, but perhaps they are worried you will be particular and awkward to work with beyond the points you discussed with them. Simply because truly difficult people rarely advertise this up front, they may feel they'd rather avoid the risk.
Same with

- pinterest: some collection of moms in middle america

- twitter: SF Tech & SXSW

- facebook: ivy league colleges -> colleges -> high schools -> the world

- snapchat: so-cal teenagers
For cheaper meats and many vegetables, a pressure cooker is better than a regular pot, a crock pot, or a rice cooker.
>From the perspective of the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, we in the US are already in a post-scarcity economy.

Not quite, we are post-scarcity on the production of those items, but the economy hasn't caught up with it yet, which is why so many in the US severely lack one or more of those necessities .

As William Gibson put it, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed"

>Many of the poor in the US live more comfortable lives than many in less developed countries.

I would be surprised if you mean the US can't or shouldn't strive to provide better for its citizens ~300 million citizens until all other countries are caught up for the rest of the 7 billion people on Earth, which leaves me unsure about what you're trying to communicate with this.

>It's unclear why they are entitled to a particular standard of living that is rather generous by global standards just by virtue of their living in the US.

Clarity here depends on your perspective. From the perspective of humanity as a whole you are absolutely correct. From the perspective of citizens within a country the government's (ostensible) purpose for existing is to provide for their quality of life either directly by use of collected taxes or indirectly by facilitating socioeconomic activity.
There's a lot of information on the Internet about how to do this, but obviously you should talk to an immigration lawyer.

It really sucks and I think it's a stupid system, but there will be far greater obstacles on your path to being a successful founder.
What a shocking surprise Cringely has no earthly idea how tech companies actually get things done. He's becoming more irrelevent every day, thankfully.
PIRs measure temperature changes, not motion. I set one up in my kitchen and it got very confused whenever I turned on the kettle or the toaster. :)

Sharp make a range of IR distance trackers that are more useful for checking whether or not there's an object/person in front of the sensor.

https://acroname.com/articles/sharp-infrared-ranger-comparis...

Adafruit sell one of the short range models, but the GP2Y0A710 is better for domestic applications.

If you're clever you could probably track the level of multiple WiFi receivers in an area and watch as people and pets change the distribution pattern. I think there was a commercial system that did that.

It sounds quite hacky and potentially unreliable to me, but I haven't tried it in practice.

I would have expect some kind of domestic super-RFID system to have appeared by now, but it doesn't seem to. There are issues with RFID and longer ranges but they should be solvable, and the potential market could be huge.
Has YC lost the love for functional programming or are founders on such a foundation well regarded?
Ha! The natives of Hawaii would engage in mass fights to the death every generation or two, when starvation threatened the whole population. Enormous armies would push against one another until one was pushed entirely off of a cliff, killing everyone (10's of thousands). Then, plenty of food for another 50 years.

"Garden of Eden"
#teamapple
Hi Sam, two questions.

1). When do you wake up?

2). When do you go to bed?
Note: this is a new trailer different from the one released a month ago. HN discussion on that trailer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125982

Stephen Tobolosky is a solid cast addition.
Interesting question. I don't know enough about topology to say for sure, but I would think it's the kind of abstract thinking that autistics are good at, rather than the kind we're bad at. (See my reply to mchahn for details on that.) We tend to perceive individual properties rather then gestalts, which makes us good at picking out details but bad at synthesizing those details; my brain readily puts, say, a donut and a pipe into the category of "things with one hole through them," so it's an easy step for me to understand them as being topologically identical.
I'll add my $.02 for LinkedIn.

Sr Software Eng at LinkedIn in CA.

$165,000 Base

$25,000 Hiring Bonus

$300,000 Stock (25% 1st year, then quarterly for the remaining 75% over 3 years) ($300,000 at the time, now it's only about half that).

10% annual bonus.

Male. Native English Speaker.

I can also speak to a friend here all the stats are the same except he got a $35,000 moving stipend instead of a hiring bonus.
In your personal opinion, what will be the next big thing in technology is it AI ? do you have other thoughts ? Thanks for your time.
What should we (smart, technical people) be doing to stop Trump if he makes it to the general election? While it might not be the best fit for YC, have you thought about adding this to your RFS page?
I'm male, a native English speaker, and worked in Seattle around 2013-2015. I was already in Seattle, so I didn't need to move. I was an SDE1, though I came in with a bit of experience (~5 years).

My base pay was right around $100k. I had a $20k signing bonus the first year, and something effectively similar for the second year (though less cash and some stock was thrown in).
Hey Sam,

YC companies seem to have a similar "look and feel" about them. Do you agree with that? Do you think this is a good or bad thing?
> I'm on a H1-b visa and I'm basically in prison

I know this is an exaggeration, and I'm fully aware the current visa situation in the US could be better, but I really take issue with the sentiment of your statement.

You're being afforded an enormous opportunity here, and should not compare it with being in a prison.

Think about it -- you clearly decided your home country was not as conducive for building your future as the US may be, and therefore applied for (and accepted) a visa. Now it's up to you to prove value in allowing you to remain in the country. A visa is a privilege, not a right.

Literally billions of folks around the world are never given this opportunity.
Also FWIW most states are at-will employment, and can fire you for no reason
Yes, and in the years since HARP, there have been a few rocket-assisted projectiles developed (though none which have been intended for space launch).[1]

I should also mention that unless the projectile was fired at or above escape velocity (intended to leave the Earth's gravity well), it would require some onboard propulsion to 'circularize' its orbit (and avoid crashing back into the Earth on its first time around).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-assisted_projectile
We used to give founders $20k. Part of the reason we upped it to $120k is so that founders with higher personal expense structures could do the program.

But we're an investor, not a company. It's important to us founders run their own companies and make their own decisions, and so we try not to build too much of our own infrastructure.
I read the entire article. It's better to be emotionless... at least sometimes.
In your last AMA you mentioned something about doing a YC batch in a foreign country. Is that something you are still considering?
I've encountered a fair number of people who blindly set -eu on every script as a matter of course, as suggested by the author here. While this article goes through a bunch of the pitfalls, in my experience people often fail to account for the many (sometimes unintuitive) ways this can cause an abrupt exit. Sometimes stopping halfway through is just as bad as continuing under false assumptions, particularly if the script is so simplistic that it isn't obvious to the user that it exited midway through.

I almost never use -e, and as a result I have to stay vigilant and test return codes all over the place. I prefer that to the kludge of forcing everything to return zero and I think it produces overall better results. Ultimately you want to handle an error, not just abort, and -e doesn't do much to promote handling properly.
Ah ok, interesting :). We were weighing up exactly these kind of tradeoffs a few weeks ago, and the benchmarks we did put the 2 approaches more or less neck and neck, so maybe PG has managed to optimize things a bit? Or, our search is over hundreds of thousands of rows, so maybe things only slow down in the millions and above...
Microsoft Using Minecraft to Improve Artificial Intelligence
> UBI removes the risk.

It raises the floor on how bad things can get, but it absolutely doesn't eliminate the risk.
Introverts at Work: Designing Spaces for People Who Hate Open-Plan Offices
I think there will be many, but yes I definitely think AI will be one of the most important.
Interesting thoughts. With the HPN-SSH patchset, do you reckon that would be useful to keep enabled for someone using faster than 1GbE hardware?

Only, asking for my home network, as I generally use Infiniband there - the adapters are super cheap on ebay. :)
I'm sure a lot of decisions were made by him, specifically business related, that aren't visible as much as product features, but that sarcastic comment made me chuckle.

It reminds me of my brilliant designer friends who have done amazing work at small startups helping create ideas/features/UI for companies them grow from seeds of ideas into big, successful businesses. When they switched jobs to some of the bigger companies in SV (FB, Twitter, Dropbox, etc), they always seem to struggle to mention anything tangible they managed to accomplish during their tenure (all of them left left for startups).
Yes, we are considering doing something along these lines later this year, though we haven't made a final decision.
One thousands times, that. Noisy office layouts are a non-starter for me. Fortunately I've been working at home, or in a small office of friends for 20 years now. But back in the day I had to have the most remote, unpopular cubicle by the fire escape to get anything done at all. Just to have some peace to think.
Where do you see YC in a decade?
How will you know it's there?
At least one other link in this thread has some good ones.

Mostly I just do some sort of meat and rice + vegetables combo. A very simple (and customizable) chicken recipe:

Can't recall exact amounts, but you can play with the ratios of meat:rice.

2 chicken breasts, cubed (1"-2"), marinade

0.5-1 cup rice

Sautee the chicken (don't need to finish cooking it, just get it white on all sides), put it in the rice cooker. Add the rice, stir it in. Possibly some vegetables (steamer tray for this as well). Add 1-1.5 cups water (depending on amount of rice). Turn on the rice cooker. Wait. Eat.

You should be able to do this with other meats but you may want to cook it more prior to adding to the rice cooker to make sure it's done (I've done this with sausage, haven't tried pork yet).

Easily customizable, just add your favorite spices and vegetables.

Soy sauce + hoisin sauce makes a nice marinade, sauté some garlic and ginger before sautéing the chicken. Water chestnuts and a bit of sesame oil when cooking.
From The Article:

> But $7500 in the hole is not much cost to start a technology business.

Unless I missed something, it doesn't sound like they paid the developer much at all.
Twitter valuation given revenue growth... what say you? Buyer here?
Adventures in Go: Accessing Unexported Functions
You implicitly assume that the employees would all (or net) make more money under a more transparent system, and I am not sure why. It may be true, but some may also accept smaller raises if they know most coworkers are at a lower salary. I can imagine a number of effects that transparency may have, and do not know their net impact.
Is Peter Thiel still a part-time partner? Does he come around the office?
What exactly is my bias you detected in my statement?
Tech needs to run a candidate in the next election.

I still am hopeful Trump will not win the general.
Do you have advice for people running agency-style businesses?

What do you hate the most when working with such entities?
Now that I've thought about it more I think you're right, it probably was schizophrenia
Should people who bought cheap houses in foreclosure in the aftermath of the financial crisis feel a little guilty? I think so: you're getting a good deal because of a bad thing that happened to someone else. Obviously, though, you shouldn't feel as guilty as the guys who caused the housing collapse in the first place.
What did you think was the most interesting feedback or update on OpenAI since announcing in Dec?
Show HN: Metaculus crowd-prediction engine.  Feedback?
Not in perpetuity, but until it is there the Java version will be further developed, and there has been no indication at all when this might be the case. I'd expect the console versions to be integrated before they touch the main one.
Considering how much the school you attended is a proxy for your race, gender, veteran status, socioeconomic status, etc., it would be incredibly dumb for them to say anything different.
I am from germany. I have never seen a S-Class taxi.
Amazon actually does allow SQL Server. The poster saying it probably didn't was influenced by the fact that Azure, Microsoft's own cloud solution is an AWS competitor.

To your own points:

SQL Server is as proprietary as Oracle
SQL Server is cheaper than Oracle
SQL Server is being ported to Linux in 2017 :)
The motivation for censorship doesn't really change the result. 451 is at least more honest than 403 would have been.
Can confirm, none of those people know how to cook rice in my world.
> Cuba is a disaster because of Communism, not the US embargo.

Lifting the embargo will make that even more obvious to those who still don't get it.
And so indentured servitude would complete its reemergence in America.
You can usually find some intermediate milestone to prove to investors you're more than just a talker.