skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you think are the right tools to get these skills ?
Books ? (Which ones ?) University/Online courses ? (Any recommendation ?) Else ?
I also find 140 characters to be too limiting and hate spending more time than necessary to twist my words into something that will save a few characters.

I know that this issue is very important for Twitter as a company, but it's just funny how the existence of a service is so highly dependent on the number of characters in a textfield.
It's a terrible way of indicating "you can hack on this".
Communism failed everywhere... BUT most of those countries have started down the path to a more market driven economy primarily through external trade... its weird to have trade with USSR and China but not allow trade with Cuba at this time.
Do noise-cancelling headphones not work for you?
Probably that most mods are made by decompiling the minecraft server, modifying it and recompiling, or patching the server with the diffs resulting from that. So yes, people are looking at the source, modifying it and distribute their changes, and Mojang has rules to allow that. But it isn't "open source" in any real way.
Would you be looking for anything different in people who applied with a video game versus a more traditional startup service?

Would you expect the game to be very different in some way from traditional games, or does genre/mechanic not really matter as long as a there's a small, passionate group of users growing quickly?
Any news on what the next lab at YCR will be about?
Do you think the recent cutbacks in startup workforces and VC funding will be sustained, or are just a temporary market correction?
One of the perks of using columns is that you can setup multiple columns with different dictionaries and specify which one you're searching against.

I'm not sure how easy it would be to ensure that the index would get picked up if searching on a weighted field with multiple columns specified or if it would require that the program know in advance what those columns were. Would the order matter for the index to be used?

Additionally, a column can also easily included relevant search data from related records in other tables or even datasources if desired.
The only universal job description of a CEO is to make sure the company wins. There are a lot of ways to do that. The one thing that doesn't work is trying to act in a way that isn't your natural style.

If you can figure out what to do, make people care, and communicate clearly, and not be a jerk, you'll be a long way towards being a good leader.
Do you write this based on the article (where?), or on information from some different sources (private?)? I couldn't find such information in the article, while it mentions that e.g. "In August 2013, Mercedes-Benz [...] drove [103 km] between the German towns of Mannheim and Pforzheim without any driver input", which seems to have happened indeed (https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/au...)
Just a shower thought, but if the car makers can make self-driving cars, can't they also implement their own versions of Uber ?

Why would they even sell the cars, when they can rent them out and make much bigger margins ?

Uber's current strength is it's database of drivers, but since we're talking self-driving cars here, that become irrelevant.

It's not like Mercedes or BMW lack brand recognition in the transportation space...
140 characters makes twitter unique. It shouldn't be used as a platform for long form stories. Other platforms already exist for that. I don't want another facebook. Maybe it takes some editing to make your thought fit, but it also forces you to cut out the fluff. I like that.
Thank you! :)

Are there any certain personalities you think excel the most in founding security startups?
And now just suddenly it's back to near the top of the front page. What's going on HN mods?
We're hoping to announce in a month or two :)
Rifling improves accuracy at the cost of speed (and thus range). That's great for traditional guns, where you care more about effective range (i.e. a reasonable chance of hitting your target) than how far away you can send the bullet; but orbit is a big target and space gun projectiles would have their own rockets to guide them, so there'd be no benefit to rifling there.

(As nickff points out, modern tank cannons are generally smoothbore; the current fashion for armor-piercing is solid kinetic darts that need to go very, very fast to punch through their target, and rely on stabilizing fins for accuracy.)
The UN is a joke.

It breaks its own rules by refusing entry to a country with a vibrant democracy and a roughly comparable population and GDP as Australia—Taiwan. Why? Because China has a veto. Consequently, not only will the UN continue breaking its own guidelines and refusing Taiwan entry but it will also never condemn China's repeated threats of invasion.

Similar dynamics play out interests concerning other veto wielding countries such as the US or Russia.
Ah I misunderstood who was implicitly requesting the conversation, that makes sense.
Hi Sam,

What do you think about Social Media Apps that do not use traditional "follow my profile" as a way to share photos, videos and texts?

Do you believe that dividing the profit received from the ads, a model similar to YouTube -unlike Instagram, Facebook and Twitter where the company takes all; can be used to attract content creators in direct competition with these tools already established in the market ?

This could be considered a Disruptive Innovation?

tks
This is a good explainer of the various latencies in the Android audio pipeline: http://superpowered.com/androidaudiopathlatency
I actually very much do want to work in an office. I worked remotely in one position, and while that solved the privacy and noise issues, I did not like being away from my colleagues.

Working with adequate privacy and quiet does not mean the same thing as holing up away from everyone. I still enjoyed talking shop over lunch, jumping up from my desk to go and assist someone with a bug, attending research and tech presentations, and all the other good stuff of being in the office.

I also feel I am not well-suited to consulting because I significantly prefer to work with a more or less stable technology stack, in which we invest time to properly refactor, write tests, and design things so that the system we maintain and grow over time can easily adjust and expand for new business needs and new functionality.

With a lot of consulting, especially in my area (machine learning and scientific computing) you are always at the mercy of whatever technology stack you walk into, and whatever state of disrepair that code base is in.

In a lot of consulting, there can also be unforeseen traps. Sometimes you can get into a situation where a client can require you to come to their office, or work in some other sort of field site situation that is insanely horrible, and you can't get out of it without basically quitting and thereby burning a bridge and negatively affecting your consulting reputation.

Just because I happen to have a strong preference for mental health affirmation through adequate privacy and quiet doesn't mean I am looking to bottomlessly compromise on all the other working standards I have too, such as quality of the work, adequate pay and benefits, and so forth.

Unfortunately, no one has even offered me these other compromises. No one has said they would consider a private office if I accepted less pay, fewer vacation days, etc. They just simply say it is in principle impossible.
Thank you Sam! I know it is early days, but how is YC Research doing so far? Any plans on expanding it?
Therefore any conflicting experience at other universities must be incorrect?
Not neccessarily. I know I pictured a real steeple (One that exists, and I have seen), and I know I pictured an abstract steeple (A rather quaint generalisation); it is simply that I am unable to discern the order that they were imaged in.
Why bother supporting both MySQL and Postgres for the backend? Wouldn't picking one (~cough~ Postgres) simplify things?

From my experience, attempting to support multiple backend stores leads to either crippled functionality, i.e. lowest common denominator CRUD usage, or lots of messy if/then logic to use DB specific features.
Do you think that people will care more about energy efficiency if they saw how much energy a home might use on Zillow?
This is for a new grad in 2014.

* Area: Seattle, WA

* Position: SDE

* Base Pay: $90k

* Signing Bonus: $20k immediately, then $17k paid in 12 monthly installments after you reach 1yr in employment.

* Stock Units: $53k (5% at 1yr mark, 15% at 2yr mark, then 20% every 6 months from then on) Note: this vesting schedule is AWFUL.

Needless to say, I rejected this offer and did not work for them. Best decision I ever made.
Recommend 3 must-read books.
How we increased active Pinners with one simple trick
YCR has published request for research in basic income recently. What plans do you have for future areas of reseach?
Yes, definitely. We do remind founders to sleep, eat well, and exercise, and we have recommended therapists available (and we tell founders this is one of things that it's good to spend money on), but it's definitely an intense program. We try to be upfront about that, and that it's not a good fit for everyone.
Maybe a bit off topic, but from the 3 roles mentioned (Data Scientist, Data engineer and Infrastructure engineer) which one (if any) is better suited for working remotely?
I'm not a new grad, but when I last switched jobs, I had to negotiate very aggressively to even get two weeks to consider other offers that might roll in before I had to make my choice. This was between a number of companies in the Seattle area, both big and small. I'm glad I negotiated to, because I got an offer that was >10% higher than my second best offer, and it came in about six days after the first (of four) offers I got.

I think the problem is that corporations value certainty as much as developers do, so they pressure people to make their choice now, so they can send rejection letters to other candidates, get the ball rolling on HR papework, etc. as soon as possible. For example, let's say an employer interviews 5 candidates, 1 per day, Monday through Friday. They conclude that their best candidate was Mrs. Friday, the second best was Mr. Wednesday, and so on. If they give Mrs. Friday a week to decide, and she rejects them, they might find that Mr. Wednesday has also accepted an offer in the meantime, and so is off the market as well.

That's why employers pressure you accept (or reject) them as soon as possible. They want to know whether you're going to accept or reject, so that they can move on to their next choice, before their next choice disappears as well. It's a way for the employer to minimize the opportunity cost of extending you an offer.
A few freedoms here and there wouldn't hurt. Currently there aren't a lot of things that you can do without involving the state. Merely by removing some restrictions people could sort out a lot of things themselves.
Which also isn't true. The server is under the same EULA as the client. It only is "open source" in so far that Mojang tolerates people decompiling it to make mods, and allows the resulting mods to be distributed so that players can integrate them with their games. Which is more forgiving than other vendors, but not "open source".
There is that. But you can always use it for cooking other things. I've used mine for cooking other grains and pastas (mixed results), and just meats and vegetables. It's a lot faster than my slow cooker, and generally cleaner/easier than a pot on the stove (less monitoring the temperature and reduced concern of things like boiling over, helps that mine is probably too large for a single person but I also try to cook up 3-4 days of food at once for work lunches).
> First we needed a mobile app to administer the server so we hired an experienced mobile developer through guru.com. His credentials were great but maybe it should have been a tip-off when, right after we made the first payment, the developer moved from Europe to India... We were naive. The original development estimate was exceeded in the first week and we were up to more than 8X by the time we pulled the plug. Still the developer kept trying to charge us, eventually sending the project to arbitration, which we won.

This smacks of the client not knowing how to use a developer. Meaning: I can imagine they made a simple (probably incomplete) scope or product definition document, didn't realize where the complexity actually lay, found someone cheap, and then realized that no one had the ability to actually shepherd the project to completion. They knew nothing about their developer -- and she or he knew nothing about them. And they weren't paying that much, really. So it wasn't a huge priority in the developer's life. And maybe the dev was young or just kind of between things and something more important came up or whatever. It actually takes some thoughtfulness to be a professional freelancer. Can be harder sometimes than it looks.

Cheap overseas developer talent is fine. But. There's also a huge value to finding people who you can sit down with and talk to. Meet. Get to know a bit. Professional freelancers will absolutely help naive clients identify and avoid pitfalls from the start. We (professional freelancers) have already fallen into them all and generally have the scars and callouses to know what it really takes to produce good software in a freelance environment. Professionals know how much time and effort it actually takes to do things. They'll tell you if your "I need a Facebook clone next week" project has any chance of success. They'll help you with design and they'll help you understand the trade-offs between money, time, and functionality that all software projects must make.

Sounds like none of that happened here.

Anyway. This just touched a nerve for me. Maybe I'm totally off base.
The guy still writes as if he has autism, too. I think the placebo is just strong, and the confidence he's gained is what changed his life.
I don't really disagree with any of this except for the "5k job that you actually love" bit. I really don't think that's likely to happen for most people. I would argue that nearly all of those "love" jobs' salaries are already low-paid because so many people want to do them (any job in media, writing, music, gaming, etc), or there's just no money there (charities, most work with animals & the disenfranchised, etc). The massive influx of people who can now follow their passion drives the $5k wage down to $0, and what's worse, there literally aren't any seats for people who would even do it for free. And the whole thing falls apart.

I'm trying to imagine what the world would look like if everyone who had a wild hair to be a professional musician or writer went ahead and did it. Good? Bad? I don't know. Interesting for sure though.
So far we have supported AI and basic income research. We plan to do one more group soon, and then potentially one other later this year. We'll share more about them as we get closer--we advise startups not to pre-hype what they're going to do, and try to follow our own advice on that :)
It is actually suggested in the article: "Earlier this week Mercedes rival BMW said it was considering launching its own ride hailing service in what would amount to a rival business to Uber."
What are the biggest CEO lessons you learned from your roles at Loopt and YC?
The problem is the security council states (ie, the big 8) simply abuse their veto to prevent any repercussions of violations.

It's a system without any enforcement.
Allowing political dissent would be a good start. (Are you really not aware that Cuba is a dictatorship?)
Silicon Valley Season 3 trailer
How important are brilliant technical founders in non technical startups (by which I mean the main problem they're trying to solve is not a technical one)?
Approximately what percentage of projects that get accepted into YC are just in the idea stage?
I have to question the phrase in the second to last paragraph, in the context of servers disappearing from the net:

"It’s the final bug, . . ."

Uhhhh.....seems optimistic at best especially considering their experience so far.
I'd love to apply, but I'm on a H1-b visa and I'm basically in prison. How did the other international founders you worked with get around the immigration mess to start a company?
You assume that more information asymmetry always helps the employer; it is also possible that a lack of information makes the employee think they're getting a 'bad deal', because they overestimate how much their coworkers make (possibly due to something akin to impostor syndrome). If Amazon thinks they can find someone of equal skill for less money, they should make the change, and if the employee thinks they are worth more than they can get with Amazon, then they should leave; I really don't understand your (second?) point.

I never said the above-median wages had anything to do with national figures; I meant that depending on what the employee and employer were bargaining around (more likely to be company median wages than national), the comparison would help the employees bargain up half the time, and the employers bargain down half the time.
http://blog.shelfie.com/2015/10/20/24-good-books-to-read-her...
[Sic] is used to indicate that a linguistic malformation or variance within a quotation is being intentionally reproduced from the original source, thus preventing the reader from thinking that the disfluency was newly introduced in the act of transcription. Using it to express your personal opinion on the perfectly grammatical and accurately spelled content of the quotation is terribly confusing.
> I'm not sure that "full text search works best when the text vectors are stored in physical columns with an index" is true

It's mostly based on my past experiences. At my previous gig we indexed quite a bit of data using PostgreSQL's full text search system and we noticed significantly improved performance when using physical columns containing text vectors over just using GIN indexes. It's been a while so the details are a bit fuzzy.
My first couple of programming jobs I was making about 60% of what you made, although I had no degree at the time. I was the only programmer for one company.

You can relax, but you might not want to. My salary has been artificially lowered because every previous company likes to make an offer based on your previous salary, or I've made so little that I had no savings and had to take the first job offered to me every time. It wears on you after awhile, and I probably could have made a lot, lot more money if I made better choices earlier (although I also wouldn't have some of the wide range of job and life experiences also, so there's that).

But every once in awhile it's nice to take a breather, sit back, recalibrate yourself, get your work/life balance back in check, work on some creative things in your spare time, etc. Easier, non-stressful jobs will allow that. So I guess it's wherever you need to be in life right now and how much you need to be compensated.

But if you're not getting challenged at your work, you're probably not learning skills that are in demand and your next job hunt will probably be more difficult.
A few years ago this desire to profit off of minecraft washed over a small part of the NYC VC scene with a few higher profile firms investigating some people who said they wanted to "solve" problems with minecraft. Anecdotally I found that everyone I talked to was doing so because their kid was into it and that they all looked at me cockeyed when I said "you know that doesn't sound like something a for-profit company would be ok with."
I think you're the only one in this thread suggesting that well-off white people simply shouldn't move into these neighborhoods, man.
Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos [video]
Given twitter's popularity, it deserves X amount of attention. Now, the product itself has really few features, so each feature will be disproportionally analyzed, no matter how simple.
Thanks, I had no clue what ETL meant, but the article was probably not directed at my kind.
Checkout http://parrotread.com/yc. It has book recommendations from all YC partners, including Sam.
Ex Amazonian here. I worked as a SDE1 in the Downtown Seattle set of offices from about 2012 to 2014. My compensation was $95,000 base, and about 105,000 once you took into account stocks.
What's the meaning of life?
You need more context to make sense of pure dollar values - in which city/metro-area do you work?
Will your firm ever go public and trade on an exchange?
>Startups are very hard, and very emotionally draining...

emotional draining is not that much but since you are alone, you do not know 'how' bad a situation is and you kind of overthink it and think its very bad and breakdown. While it really might not be that bad.
You might find http://parrotread.com/yc useful. It has book recommendations from all YC partners, including Sam.
1. You are not Sam A. 2. I asked 3 must-read books, not just 24 good ones. 3. The article is published by Kamil Szybalski, rather than Sam A.
UX Testing for a New Product: Getting a Quantified User Testing Report
This is nice, but kinda useless in its current form. Why would anyone want an API for rendering super basic templates? Every programming language already does this.

Perhaps you should do something for the common people, not an API, but a way people would use it, with forms or something like that.
> But, when your goal is to eventually use a fleet of self-driving cars and eliminate the job possibilities for drivers, isn't that a moot point?

The fetishism of "job-creation" is misguided and unsustainable. The purpose of life is not 'work'.

High-availability self-driving Ubers are undoubtedly better for the majority of urban consumers than taxis or individual car ownership.
I think it's interesting that he continually says "we" throughout. As if his kids are really contacting developers and talking with suppliers and mojang lawyers etc. I'm sure they're doing something meaningful like installing the software on the boards and assembling them, but it's pretty clear who is doing the real work
Hmm. One could define DC to be a wave with zero frequency and most equations would work correctly. You often define a value at a singularity as a fixed value because that fixed value is approached as you get closer and closer. I personally have no problem thinking of a wave with zero amplitude.
MRelief (YC W16 Nonprofit) makes public assistance more accessible
That's pretty harsh for not knowing any of the circumstances.

Who said he was at another company for those four months? And who's to say the company didn't just fold in that time or earn someone walking out on them?
I don't know who that was but will second it.
With DOS, win98, linux all running in asm.js inside browser, it should be long before PDP11 code or to run in here too?

BTW, I love to use original Lotus 123 with DOS inside asm.js if someone can use their supper power to make that materialized.

I still remember those "/FS" keystrokes after so many years.
It's easier to get into YC fellowship. - can you put it that way?
Hi Sam, when I applied to YC a while back (2014 I think), I noticed that the video I posted was looked at once after 12am, and the landing page on my website was opened at something like 1am for 10 seconds. With the amount of applications you guys receive that seems inevitable, but it also seems that you would miss a lot of stuff if the reviewers are checking things well into the night. Have you made some progress on that front since?