skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ah yes, the old 're-implement the search engine inside the database' project, undoubtedly put up on the board because someone is tired of their get-the-data-from-the-database-to-the-search-engine process breaking constantly.

next on the map: discovering how shitty dictionary management is, the joys of NLP, and abandoning the project entirely because you realize all this stuff has already been solved in 3 or 4 different ways and the getting-the-data-from-the-database-to-the-search-engine process isn't really that bad, and pulling your hair out from customers asking insane questions because they don't understand how search engines actually work and why can't this be like google? can't you just do it how google does it, even though you don't have $100B and 50,000 employees?

i realize this is a product feature but i have ptsd on this topic so i had to vent.
If I remember correctly the tables we ran full text search on didn't have millions of rows, and we used PostgreSQL's simple/basic language (whichever one of the two it was). We did also run a similarity filter (using the pg_trgm similarity() function), maybe we also had trigram indexes on top. I can't really remember.
Its not fair to say, living in America is an accidental privilege. That doesn't credit America with any responsibility for its own prosperity. Its the culture, and the resources of course, that make America the engine of commerce that it is.
I am certain that at least some of them feel this way, especially given how many tech candidates are willing to work in an open-plan setting without even batting an eyelash about it.

But I don't know of any other way to ensure that I can have the adequate privacy and quiet that truly is physically necessary for me. I've just come to accept the fact that this means extremely lengthy job searches for me, and a need to do the really hard thing and reject some otherwise pretty good job offers if they can't provide an office.
You could be 100% correct in your suggestion there. But nothing can come of it unless you can show the tit-for-tat happened and that it broke the law in some way.
Hardware startup question / both yc programs: How many "devices" would you expect an applicant to have in the field w users falling in love for you to feel they had sufficiently demonstrated "customer love traction". Just asking in light of the complexities with small batch hardware. Thanks!
It will still be months at least until we've made research breakthroughs, but we've had incredible success on the recruiting side. I think we're building one of the strongest teams in the field.
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.
Re: Hard Tech is Back

>So, if you’re thinking about starting one, we’d like to talk. And we think we can help

What's the preferred method of contact? I have connections to a "hard tech" startup in Austin and pointed the founders at your blog post.
Life Lessons from a Quiet Billionaire
Good summary, though I think your numbers are out of date: I believe China is closer to 1.4 and India's population is estimated as having exceeded that of China of late.
Direct control isn't even really needed with the right social engineering.

Look up "Xbox turn off trolling" on Youtube.

Or imagine a voice-controlled self-driving car, and a radio commercial loudly saying "Siri, drive me to New York".
>These junior developers also have a tendency to make improvements to the system by implementing brand-new features instead of improving old ones. Look at recent Microsoft releases: we don't fix old features, but accrete new ones. New features help much more at review time than improvements to old ones.

This is true. Windows 7 had an easy way to create adhoc wifi but win 8 removed it. So now I must either use command prompt or install connectify.

WP has too many examples:

Music app has been rewritten multiple times and rebranded almost as many times.

Email has also been rewritten and renamed - new version is slightly better.

The excellent lumia camera has been replaced by a meh windows camera app.

Internet explorer's been replaced by the featureless edge IMO.

Instead of fixing the Skype app (missed notifications, memory consumption issues, performance issues, calls ringing even if the target is OFFLINE, inaccurate notification count...) a bland messaging and Skype video apps were introduced. So we've got three apps for Skype on Windows 10 and windows mobile.

...and many more
I guess you could require a comment on any line with an unquoted variable expansion...
Famous Software in Beta
Does anybody know of an article or book that documents early versions of now-famous software with screenshots, etc.?

I am specifically interested in the types of bugs that the founders of these services chose to ignore while first getting started.

I'm working on a beta version of enterprise software right now. So many bugs. Which ones to fix.
>When women entered the workforce they [took positions] filled by black men, so now black men are in jail.

How are those two things even closely related? Does the "War on Drugs" have nothing to do with it, something that's part of a pattern of racial persecution and sky-rocketing incarceration rates?
Right? I like the one from amznnewgrad: $90k base as a new grad and "needless to say" they declined the offer. Needless to say?

I was hired after a year out of college in 2010 at aboyt $37k and it felt like I hit the lottery. Granted, where I live costs much less than Seattle, and I also make significantly more now, but still not $90k.
The critical question facing our driverless future is liability. Who owns the risk? If the individual owner is liable, you can imagine the upshot - slow adoption rates, high premiums. If the seller/programmer is liable, expect consolidation. It feels like this is the question of our time. To pay for consolidated services - spotify, netflix, uber, Bernie Sanders - or to remain an individual and accept inefficiency as a natural cost of freedom.
How do you evaluate companies that are more technically ( hardware, computing) challenging? If two founders have been working on a hard problem for ~6 months, what are the things you look for since there isn't any revenue or growth?
Probably 404 would best fit the intention of an NSL, although I think 400 would also be defensible.
Sounds suspiciously like you grew up.

:)
This is for backwards compatibility with SMS (text messaging). Only the length of the t.co link is counted toward your 140 characters. Images are the same -- they are uploaded and a link is generated, so when you send a tweet over SMS the recipient can view the image.

More generally, if you think about Twitter's design decisions as preserving SMS compatibility, then a lot of strange choices make more sense.
You're getting screwed, big time. Quit now.

Source: I was hired at Amazon as an SDE1 in 2004 at a base salary of $85,000.
#EricSchmidt2020
>> "the requirement to wait almost a year to bring new medical staff on to combat the ebola epidemic."

Are you getting this from another source because it doesn't seem to be mentioned in the article. It mentions taking several weeks to process the forms of a medical worker they needed to see at headquarters. The recruitment system that may take a year to hire someone seems to be a separate issue. I wish the author had went into more detail on that because it's very vague. What is the hiring process? Are two or three interview spread over a year? Do you have to interview several hundred people for a position? It's hard to place any importance on the statistic without more information.
So, by "100% false" you mean, yes it was re-written in C++ and hopefully no they will not cut off future Java development, but who can say for sure?
Maybe working on AI or energy? I'm not sure.
$5 plan on DO for Minecraft? That Cuberite software better be awesome, because I ended up buying an 8 core 16GB RAM HP rack server just to run a heavy-modded Forge server.
There is a real gap in the market and it is not limited to just hard tech. There are an enormous number of great businesses out there that can’t raise funds until they have a product and they can’t make a product without funds.

The solution is actually pretty obvious - investors have to start investing in businesses that are nothing more than a good concept, especially those of outsiders or non-serial founders. This is hard work though.
When he first started to talk to Gerald Bull, he was Defence Minister or something like that.
Hey Sam,

is YC helping non-tech startups such as clothing industry?
GCHQ intervenes to secure smart meters against hackers
I've coincidentally been on a couple trips with mid- and low-level UN bureaucrats, and when they got talking, this is exactly what they said - the organization is hidebound, sclerotic, and all-around useless.

God, the horror stories - even if they're only partially true, there's no reason whatsoever for the United States (or any other country) to be funding such a broken organization.
Is it a strong criterion that applicants you admit into the program have a (clear) path to building billion-dollar companies? Or do you give more weight to solving important problems? In other words, does ROI trump problem-solving, and if so, are teams tackling niche problems at a disadvantage?
Cars are devalued by mileage because the average car is taken care of so poorly that small damage accumulates into big, irreversable damage over time. For example, waxing wears off -> unwaxed surface pits -> rust forms -> holes form. If you re-wax the car often enough to prevent it from ever pitting, you'll never see rust or holes no matter how long you own the car. Same for most of the other components.

Individual drivers may not be able to take very good care of their cars, but large companies that use fleets of cars can take them regularly (perhaps even every night, as their default storage) to maintenance garages and have them restored.
The one you know.

Having a cofounder you don't know well is usually a very bad idea. It's much more important to trust someone and know they are great than to 'hire' for a specific skill.
I don't look at projects in terms of profit, I look at them in terms of interest and thus motivation, learning potential, and possibly maybe way down the line something like profit. The most valuable input is always time, money is pretty much irrelevant.
preparations for any important event or presentations often lead to feeling exhausted, scared, uncertain... We passed through out day but we had Coachademy, on line coaching app! Professionals can help you to do your best and #begreat. Try it!
Agreed. In addition to still having trouble with tabs and newlines, setting IFS still leaves the other big problem with unquoted variables: unexpected expansion of wildcards. The shell considers any unquoted string that contains * , ?, or [ to be a glob expression, and will replace it with a list of matching files. This can cause some really strange bugs.

Also, an unquoted variable that happens to be null will essentially vanish from the argument list of any command it's used with, which can cause another class of weird bugs. Consider the shell statement:

if [ -n $var ]; then

... which looks like it should execute the condition if $var is nonblank, but in fact will execute it even if $var is blank (the reason is complex, I'll leave it as a puzzle for the reader).

Setting IFS is a crutch that only partly solves the problem; putting double-quotes around variable references fully solves it.
ISO Trump++
I come to this from a test/automation engineering background and I'd like to amplify your last point.

There are a couple things to consider that sometimes become taboo in orgs--but shouldn't.

The first is that you don't need to test everything. I recommend having a great set of those API-level black box tests as an acceptance suite, but at a component or unit level you should pick your battles. If you'd architect for DI -only- to test, that testing had better be pretty necessary, otherwise you introduced complication (and risk) without a lot of benefit. That risk can actually overwhelm any benefit of testing.

The second is that you should absolutely scrap tests of implementation details at the point that the implementation becomes a black box. Tests are like scaffolding during construction, and we don't leave the scaffolding up when the building is done--we do inspections of the building instead. The same mindset should be applied to testing. Different phases need different tests, and too many tests at too low a level of abstraction absolutely cause maintenance and flexibility issues if you're not willing to let them go.

But that's no reason to back off entirely. SOME things need to be unit- or component-tested SOMETIMES. Those things generally benefit from TDD.

It's all about making intelligent decisions. There's a sometimes-controversial movement in QA/test called "context-driven testing" which comes down to there are very few always-best practices, and strategy should be tailored to your problem and situation--not done by rote, book, or prior (read, your boss's or CTO's) assumptions of what's always right. Otherwise you tend to get something more onerous than useful.

The considerations around that approach apply at the low-level test tier as well.
On a slightly tangentially related note, I was astonished to hear a couple of years back that the UK has legislation written in the proprietary dialect of some patented Oracle software:

http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/public-sector/058991.htm...
What? No. There's way more examples, but the ones that most come to mind are the calendars of the Mayan and Incan civilizations. If that's not mathematics, what is it?
I have a feeling the parent commenter knows the rule, but didn't care to follow it. Your comment seems like someone who walks up to every smoker they see and says "Did you know smoking causes cancer?"
How would you get enough initial users for a collaborative learning tool that requires multiple users to be able to offer value?
I've submitted my application as a single founder - not because I want it that way but because none of my friends have the freedom for a venture.

Does YC do match making (if they see a good fit) or this something you need to specifically request on the application?
What do you see as the typical structure of a founding team of hardware companies?
This statement is broadly true across bigCo industry from what I've found, but I'd assign an "obvious explanation" to why: New features are recognized for promos far more than existing improvements. I wouldn't say it's a new vs old dev thing other than that old devs need "broader impact" to justify promos and thus can't really take low hanging fruit, (although I've certainly seen senior devs ramp up significant projects just so they get "novel visibility" even if it's reinventing the wheel these tend to be slower by their very nature and often not as visible as the more top level feature bloat) it seems more to do with the culture of how career progress is measured throughout industry. (A culture that I personally think is extremely broken, but see very little to fixing outside of starting my own company)
Hey Sam, semi technical question here. NIPS, ran an experiments a few years ago where for 10% of the papers they had two completely independent teams of reviewers assess papers and score them - the agreement between the teams was very low: http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html (barely better than chance, actually).

Would you consider doing something similar for YC? Obviously, you already have multiple people looking at websites/applications, but I'd be really curious to see what the agreement is like - and you have some absolutely exception AI/data scientists people at openAI who could crunch all the numbers.
I never got tested but I think so. I had extreme lethargy, sore legs, and bleeding gums that got a better in a few hours after having a bunch of orange juice.
Guess he should solder his own mobo, and pull himself off the ground from his bootstraps, like real startups do.

Or, like most businesses, contract out specialty work and put pieces together into something new.
I don't live in the Bay Area, so I don't have many connections within the YC network. How big of a role do referrals play in the application process?
What about a distributed version built in Google docs?
If you really want to do this, start a Google spreadsheet.
Hi Sam,

I am an international founder. I want to join YC and incorporate in the US. But to avoid wasting time on visa things, I want to return to my home country (India) after YC.

1) Should I mention this in my application?
2) From YC's point of view, do you prefer international founders who want to stay on in the US or those who want to go back to their home country? Assuming they would kill it either way.

(PS - My startup is COMMENT.ws whereas YTERMINATOR.com, UNICOCK.com are light hearted hacks to get YC's attention)
Key words, when they vest.

I walked away with close to 100k on the table over the next 2 years because I couldn't stand the place anymore. Their golden handcuffs are awful.
We have multiple people review each application (except the very good/very bad ones) and we look at the cases where the assessments are very different.

Some of the best companies have the most disagreement, which is why we have implemented our "strong yes" policy--if any single partner wants to fund a company, we fund it. It's much more important to our returns that we fund the next Airbnb than if we mistakenly fund one more bad company.
> Is the way he describes intensely feeling others emotions normal?

I would say that to go from not feeling them to feeling them full force isn't at all normal. I think the emotions themselves are normal, it's just the neural pathways that process them aren't used to it. So they're experienced far differently than those of other people.
I don't entirely concur, but I do think there's a real problem with areas that are hard to test. (As a web developer, I particularly run in to this with client side/browser side testing -- and yes, there are solutions, but they often have imperfections and annoying trade offs.)

I also think the benefits of testing have much more of a relationship to scale (both in terms of system usage/users, system complexity/size, development team size, etc.) and worst case failure risk that's often unacknowledged. (I don't suggest not having tests -- you'd regret that real quick. But I do think the appropriate level of test coverage can vary from project to project and component to component. Outer layers of onions probably matter, more, etc.)
I didn't read much past that first paragraph for basically the same reason. This project failed because nobody involved had a single clue as to how the real world works.

The worst part is that there are plenty of Minecraft server administration suites out on the web for download already. Hiring a rando "developer" (with of course a good resume, everybody in those code farms has 1,000 years of development experience in every language!) you've never met to do the one thing that might differentiate your product is just insane.

The craziest thing is that a Minecraft server manager is not a difficult thing to write. I tossed together a couple hundred line Perl script with a bunch of useful features in an afternoon and ran servers with it for years.
I was expecting more practical demos at TED based on how much hype this has been receiving, but then again there's not much to compare the Meta2 experience to right now. For those interested, there's a better "real world" demo on Scoble's FB https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/videos/vb.501319654/10... (skip to 6:10 to see Meron's brother using the Meta2 to check his email and switch monitors). Overall I'm excited about this, but hesitant about investing in the prototype from my own pocket (at least for now).
What are some of the biggest mistakes you have seen founders make when validating startup ideas and what can be done to avoid them?
Thanks. I actually meant in addition to doing the computation side of things in C/C++, are there any undocumented tricks or pitfalls to avoid?
FEEL CONFIDENT WITHOUT MAKEUP – PinkyPearly
That is the topic of my Ph.D. APL for GPUs.

We've done type inference for a good subset of APL, and compiled it into a small (mostly) functional language. We can generate fused C-code that performs very well and I'm working hard at an OpenCL backend.

[1]: http://www.elsman.com/pdf/array14_final.pdf
Hi Sam.
Will you consider a batch in other US locations? (For example in Atlanta).
It can increase the applicant base due to lower cost of living and will allow a different flavor of founders to apply in my opinion.

I think the next billion $ enterprise startup will be more likely to come from such a batch. People who face enterprise software problems are not always in a stage in life that allows them to move to SF for a few months. YC might be missing out a large cohort of founders who work in enterprise software, outside of the Bay Area, and would disrupt their industry given the chance but are less flexible in moving to SF.

There are many "old tech" hubs outside SF that can generate great new startups. medical IT, medical devices, mechanical and aviation industry, enterprise software etc. Are Enterprise software ideas and founders with years of enterprise software experience adequately represented at YC?
Education-wise, are you able to describe the percentages of applicants with backgrounds coming from top schools versus lower-tier schools?

Being in the Bay Area, I know that Stanford and UC Berkeley tend to have a decent amount of relatively successful launches/founders, but on the other hand I can't say I hear nearly as much about people who went to San Francisco State or San Jose State (or any other lower-tier schools that are not just located in SF Bay Area).

If there is a large enough discrepancy, do you have any ideas of ways to jumpstart or spark other educational communities to have a greater focus on trying out ideas, especially with YC (or other programs)?

Personally, I'm finishing studying at San Jose State and while there is an Entrepreneurship Club, the focus for that side of things (at least from what I've seen) tends to stay purely on the Business college end, rather than other potential high-impact areas (aside from the occasional mobile app here and there).
When you say "most of us are comfortable with the fact that we're different", keep in mind that you are now speaking for many children and adults with autism that are entirely incapable of expressing whether or not they are or are not "comfortable" with anything.

When we read an article like this we tend to think of autism as mostly a diagnosis for the high functioning end of the spectrum, and we completely forget that there is a large percentage of the population with autism that lacks communication skills or the ability to even connect a few words.

Please be careful when speaking for "most" of those with autism. There are many (what percentage is hard to say based on the numbers changing so rapidly) that can't speak for themselves.
Ask HN: Which technical tests have you taken?
Curious about what technical tests people have taken and whether you think these are good or not. Mainly interested in tests for software developers but, you are welcome to add other stuff too which people may find interesting.

It's easy to find questions for interviews but, I couldn't seem to find a list of technical tests.

It would be nice if you could let me know:
-Name
-Difficulty of test or position you were applying for
-Any opinions
Sure, mention it--that's fine with us.