skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I negotiated poorly and only ended up with about $97k total compensation in my first year, and by my third year it was about $120k.

The stock seemed like a mind-game to me, but it did work out to about 10% YoY increases in total compensation.

It's also inaccurate to characterize the stock as a one-time grant. The initial grant vests over four years (weighted on the last two years) typically you receive more grants after performance reviews, which vest over two years (again weighted on the second year.)

So in practice, you get a grant of 200 shares at signing, but by the end of year two only 50 have vested. At that point you have at least one performance grant, so you're probably getting shares vesting pretty regularly, at least four times a year.
What are the main differences in your mind between Techstars and YC
How can I get an internship at Y Combinator?
What sort of growth would you look for in a social net applying to YC Fellowship & YC Core?
>Is it silly when people complain that the NSA is breaking the rules that everyone else has to follow?

Yes, I do think it is silly. Now that doesn't mean that the NSA should have no rules and have free reign, but to draw an equivalence between the NSA and an average person (that would justify them being bound by the same rules) is just absurd.

>because Clinton wasn't just breaking some internal State Department rule.

The issue regarding the rules isn't about classified information, its about private servers. That is a rule that she is absolutely justified in re-writing on-the-fly even if a lowly grunt would be thrown in a hole for doing the same thing. Just to be clear, her private server does not inherently endanger classified information. People have been conflating these two issues to the point where no one can speak clearly about it. That classified information was incorrectly sent to her private email is an entirely different issue.
Firewatch: One month later
"Seeing emotion didn’t make my life happy. It scared me, as the fear I felt in others took hold in me, too." Reminded me of an excellent death metal track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUVPIknZ9ao

Lyrics include:

The thing that scares me most /
Is the fear I see in others /
And the thing that really
frightens me to the core /
is when I see that fear in you
>Dorsey has changed some of Twitter's core features since he returned to run Twitter permanently in October. Twitter has added "Moments," which allows users to easily find tweets about the day's biggest news stories, and changed the shape of its "favorite" icon from a star to a heart.

And now Twitter will keep the thing that made it unique. All kinds of innovation going on over there.
>This last one is increasingly optional in the post-Cold War geopolitical climate.

Considering Russia and China are casually annexing territories, its pretty obvious this framework no longer exists. The UN made sense when the security council members had some incentive to use the UN system, but when their foreign policy is to circumvent international law at any opportunity, then its easy for them to sidestep it. Autocratic states ultimately can't work with democratic ones. Its unfair to expect one group to 'follow the rules' and another to go off willy-nilly when it serves them. There's no enforcer here, they're supposed to be voluntarily enforcing themselves and obviously that's not happening.

I won't even go into how easy it is for democratic nations to game the system either. Bush's run up to Iraq had all the hallmarks of the 'legitimate' UN: a debate, an airing of evidence, a vote, etc. Ultimately, it was just as hollow as an autocratic state annexing territory and telling everyone to piss off.

I suspect the UN has long fallen into pageantry and will never recover. It probably made sense to keep the US and the USSR from nuking each other, but today it lacks purpose and any real spirit of participation. It now exists to bully smaller nations who don't have a permanent seat in the security council, and because of that, it will never go away.
I made my point less clear by trying to be concise. I just meant that in a lot of ways the influence of the United States isn't limited by its borders.
"When I was younger, before learning to read people, I read descriptions of Aspergers and it sounded much like me. Now when I read them it sounds not very much like me, because a significant component of those symptom descriptions involve poor social skills."

I've met a lot of people who describe themselves in such a way.

I think the problem is that the DSM relies on very arbitrary and subjective behavioural signs to diagnose a lot of what it considers a mental illness. That is something that really annoys me about the psychiatric profession. I would be quite keen to see a more mathematical and objectively grounded theory of mental disorder than the vague, hand waved criteria that we have now.

In your case though, I'll quote a character from the Rosie Effect (an amazing book by the way which you might enjoy reading) who said that the main criteria is... pathology. If you are able to maintain an adequate lifestyle (job, education, family, friends) then you're fine. It's only when those "autistic" traits interfere with your life and preclude you from reaching your potential that they're considered abnormal and a diagnosis is apt.
If I see a job ad, hear from a recruiter or whatever which uses either rockstar or ninja, or anything along those lines I immediately stop listening/reading.
Hi Sam, I always wondered how someone so young could become president of YC (and do an awesome job at it). Or would you say it's actually a prerequisite?
> the real story will be whether or not the shares actually sell.

As the saying goes: There ain't nothing that price won't fix.
I see more of HN than anyone else does (probably by far), and am pretty sure you're falling prey to the bias of generalizing about HN based on what stands out to you. It's not that the comments you're observing don't exist; it's that we all have a Maxwell's Demon in our heads who routes obnoxious bits to one compartment of our memory and unobjectionable bits to another.

Your claim about SV is also far from true, in my observation; the opposite is much closer to true. Generalizations about HN and SV often go hand in hand, and that's another fallacy: they're two worlds that overlap less than you'd think, and also conflict.

---

Edit: a later name for this Maxwell's Demon analogy is the 'notice-dislike' bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

More on 'demons' here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
can I apply to YC alone or do I have to have a team?
Hi, do you often invest on pure consumer product with no business model but great traction ? Thks
xenophobia is big part of this myth. in the future, mail wife will be the only way to get into US
Applications are only for an already developed product/prototype ? Or can we apply apply to present an idea ?
I feel like we all dogpiled on you. You're right.

Haha, I love a good dogpile. Lots of people have strong feelings about their appliances, and that's wonderful. I worry a bit about eating too much rice, so I value some friction in the process. De gustibus...
While I am not interested in the specific project, If/when I have kids, I would gladly pay 7500 dollars to have them excited and apply themselves to a project with real world business.

To have the realizations the struggles and successes of such a project, and have that under their belt before they graduate high school is a wonderful achievement.

What a great project!!
I use set -e or not based on the needs of the script. Many times I want the script to continue and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I don't set until partway down the script so the top isn't strict. I wouldn't want to set it on every script.
If you drink any amount of hot drinks, the water boiler is worth it. According to the manual, the 3 liter version draws only 38 watts maintaining 195F/90C water (after the initial boiling cycle).
"vacuum" and "sucks". Get it? :D
There is such a thing as a fuzzy if. Even fuzzy sets have cutoff points.

If rice_is_not_done_yet is more than 90% false and rice_is_overcooked is more than 10% true stop cooking it!
My experience has been that "front end" or "back end" often implies a web dev shop. This isn't always true, but it's generally the case
What's the probability on acceptance for those who are applying the second time? Is it progress or right fit that you mostly look for?
There are actually different justifications for your examples above. For example, we don't let people starve because we consider any person, by mere virtue of their existence, as worthy of food. The same is not true for education. We consider the societal effects of an educated populace and workforce as valuable enough to justify the money we spend on it. UBI is not at all more of the same and it absolutely requires justification for its immense cost.
I think I recall seeing something about the Fellowship and Summer programs being the same application but last I looked I couldn't find where that was mentioned. Is that still the case?

I feel like I'm a bit between in that I have a product but haven't closed my first customer but hoping to real soon.
It's why I like computer games.

It's why I learn programming languages way faster than real languages.
Interesting from a couple of angles.

First, there's this widespread handwaving around getting the very detailed map data that is at least useful for even limited autonomy. At one level, it's a solved problem that that doesn't mean it won't take a huge investment to collect all this data.

The second is the idea that this mapping data may be a source of competitive advantage for individual firms working on improved assistive driving systems followed by autonomy--initially under limited circumstances. On the one hand this makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, it means that a lot of work probably ends up getting duplicated.
One of the weaker lead quotes I've ever seen.
Presumably the buffer is longer to make the system more robust by avoiding spurious detections, not because of some fundamental limit like the Nyquist rate. You would need to set the buffer size experimentally.
FreeBSD – a lesson in poor defaults
You can definitely apply alone, though we recommend having a cofounder.

Startups are very hard, and very emotionally draining, and so it's really helpful to have someone else to share the workload with.

That said, we fund solo founders every batch.
Yes I wonder if this is a little short sighted. Currently Uber needs to hire drivers who use their own cars. Once self drive vehicles become available they only need the cars. Given that most peoples cars spend the majority of their time parked, waiting to be used, that is an awful lot of potential cars for Uber to rent. I'd be very interested in having my car earning money while I'm at work or asleep.
Yes, it's the same application.

I'd recommend applying for both.
Pretty interesting. It's like a cloud version of Tableau almost.
Banksy Unmasked Through Criminology Techniques
What would be the front end in your example? You'd just be "a developer".

I tend to avoid jobs which self describe as backend as I have no interest in web development and my experience is if it is listed as "backend developer" that it's probably too geared towards web development for my tastes.
Hi Sam. Ours is an education marketplace (Pyoopil), still looking for a product market fit. Any advice for us? -- now that you guys have acquired imagine-k12. Will there be a special focus on ed-tech startups?
NativeScript is targeting UWP, not Win32/WPF. The UWP API's are way better and C#, C++, and JavaScript are supported out-of-the-box. But if you go the JavaScript route, only HTML is officially supported for UI. You can get native-looking widgets using WinJS, but the XAML framework is the real deal. XAML sits directly on top of DirectComposition, so no DOM\Webview.
I think they should have done something. The 140 character limit might make Twitter a unique experience, but 140 is quite low. I think they could have bumped it to 220 at least or 240.
I recommend it every time this topic comes up:

https://github.com/google/crush-tools

"Big" data on the command line.
Maybe I'm underestimating, but the code seems trivial. There's lots of examples of PID control for Arduino that one could use as a staring point: https://learn.adafruit.com/sous-vide-powered-by-arduino-the-...

Someone who knows what they are doing could probably write rice cooking logic that works pretty well in a couple days, and a beginner (like me) could almost certainly get something working in a couple weeks. There'd always be room for refinement after that, but I can't see that the code would be a limiting factor.

But likely you've hit on the real reason there isn't much competition on the low end: making an inexpensive fuzzy logic rice cooker is easy, but if it started selling well you'd probably be sued out of business for patent infringement. I now feel silly for overlooking this obvious explanation.
We've funded many companies on their second (or later) application. Dropbox is a well-known example.

We do look at progress since the last application, but mostly because we like effective people. Great founders get stuff done.
Thank you for sharing!

I started a discussion for Google salaries here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314449

If you have a chance, can you send the link to your colleagues at Google? (-:
Hey how do you talk about a culture-centric problem to a foreign investor/accelerator. By culture-centric I mean in terms of the festivities and celebrations that's localised to a place.
I am not surprised if Uber is going in this direction. In fact, looking at what Uber has done so far , Uber has already planned for this sort of future in 10-20 years.

Look at what Uber has done:

* Uber buys Nokia Here Maps for their map part and for their street imagery part.

* Uber hires robotics department.

* Uber knows today's business is supposed to be the transition phase to going into a zipcar like car-on-demand service.

There aren't too many data points here, but the only thing I can glean from this is Uber wants to have robotic cars to pick you up and drop you off and will plan that future by storing street imagery, instead of that LiDAR based method the others are doing.
A glimpse of the future through an augmented reality headset – TED Talk
YC has a giant application pool. This makes it very difficult for very early stage companies with no revenue / users to compete in the application pool.

As a company with no revenue / users, How can we best stand out against those that do have growth / users?

I understand that companies can apply for the fellowship. But what does a company lose by getting into the Fellowship over Core?
>Startups are very hard, and very emotionally draining...

^^^ This cannot be communicated emphatically enough... most people have no idea how true and real these challenges are.......
Yes! It's harder to build a product that people love than it is to figure out how to monetize it, so we're happy to take the risk there.
I don't know about performance but the windows ecosystem sure is buggy inside, or at least stdout says so. One time I needed to work on a driver and I enabled kernel debugging. My console immediately started spitting out a steady stream of warnings and errors which continued forever. This is before I touched anything.
> I just don't think that being "horrified" at the excesses of only one extreme on the ideological spectrum -- whilst remaining indifferent (or willfully oblivious) to the skeletons in one's own ideological basement -- makes for a particularly useful or instructive view of the world.

But the opposite, shrugging one's shoulders in the face of the explicit, obvious failure of a mode of governance and saying "well, who are we to judge really, these other guys did something bad once too," has its own faults. Namely, if we can't point at how Chavismo has played out so disastrously in Venezuela without getting uselessly entangled in whataboutery, what rhetorical tools do we have left to use the next time a charismatic socialist with an authoritarian streak starts getting close to political power in a democracy?

(Any comparison with the current political situation in a large nation whose name rhymes with "Bunited Bates of Bamerica" is, of course, left as an exercise for the reader.)
I wrote library for shell scripts with design goal to work properly in strict mode: https://github.com/vlisivka/bash-modules
Are educational projects viewed mainly by IK12 or by all YC partners? What about hardware educational startups, do they stand a chance? IK12 only got software startups so far, so...
IBM people would be the first to tell you that the mega-rack "Watson" is not the IBM Watson * suite of various products. They said it just needs a few U of rack space.
No. If you are already comfortable in PgSQL, there is no need to use SQLite.

You will see PostgreSQL will come in handy once you get beyond the initial import stage..

PostgreSQL's type system will come to your aid . SQlite essentially treats everything as string, which can turn nasty when you get serious with your queries etc.,
Why would it be in Daimler's interest to push driver-less cars? Their sales would go down in the long run.
I need a technical co-founder to build a platform and I don't know any developer, what can I do ?
1- Search for one ? Any recommendation for the steps to make in order to find the right man ?
2- Or ask a web/mobile development company to build the platform ? What do you think are the +/- of this case ?
> That probably means no worse than O(N^2),...

We don't even have a quadratic-time algorithm for matrix multiplication (and it's obvious that O(N^2) is a lower bound).
Apple Engineers Say They’d Rather Quit Than Help the F.B.I
How do you see online education growing? Will there be more bootcamps or is it really possible to build a university entirely online?
20 year old Linux applications work just fine too, and it's still faster than NT.
I just find it weird that every time "the cloud" comes up on HN, people defend it as hard as they can, like running servers yourself is some voodoo magic to be shunned. Usually with examples of "well, X is only saving $56,000/month with this switch away from the cloud! surely they're making a terrible tradeoff in an increase in employees!".

The answer is no. People do these calculations before moving stacks. The cloud is where VC money goes to pad Amazon's bottom line. AWS is insanely overpriced if you actually sit down and do the numbers. I'm our company's part time sysadmin on a bunch of bare metal servers, I spend maybe 1-2 hours total per month kicking things/filing hardware replacement tickets/etc.

I don't understand this mindset against learning the entire stack. You should understand hardware, network and OS. Maybe I'm too old.
How do you personally figure out the difference between a petty problem vs. something actually worth solving?
What if the company were to be acquired?
I've noticed that Google is better than most with online applications. I managed to interview 2 years in a row (intern, college student) having only applied online.
This is 100% false.

Minecraft has a 'Windows edition' that is written in C++, and a main version that is in Java. Both version will continue to exist, and be updated, AIUI.
Predictions of a post-scarcity economy are overblown. From the perspective of the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, we in the US are already in a post-scarcity economy. A "comfortable" living, though, is eminently relative. Many of the poor in the US live more comfortable lives than many in less developed countries. 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.
The bigger story is that Dropbox is trending down in general. Look at Google Trends[1] for Dropbox searches. I used to have files. But now I don't really have any files. I use Spotify for music. A collection of streaming services for movies and shows. Google Photos for my photos. Google Docs for storing my spreadsheets and "word" documents and Google Drive to dump some useful PDF files. I don't pay for any storage service anymore.

World has changed since Dropbox came out and it has become less relevant. In my case it is completely irrelevant.

[1]https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Dropbox
I disagree. Cuba has still not paid for assets illegally seized without compensation during the Revolution, nor made any other substantive concessions. They are free to do that as a sovereign country, but we shouldn't be trading for our own stolen property.

Personally, I want nothing to do with Cuba so long as the Communist Party, that did so much harm to my and my friends' families, is still in power. Their profits from this opening will be used to strengthen the totalitarian apparatus and to prevent the Cuban people from reclaiming their freedoms. They did the exact same thing in the 90s. Their former sponsor (the USSR) went out of business, so Castro liberalized enough to secure his own ruling coalition, then promptly reversed course after achieving that.
I'm guessing he means a "Real-time Operational Database". This seems to be a generic term for system like a data warehouse that contains current data, instead of just historical data. If you are taking the output of a Spark flow and storing it in Postgres or MongoDB or HBase for applications to query, then those could be considered RODBs.

Since this is Amazon, I suspect he is referring to SPICE (or their internal version), which was released last fall as part of AWS's QuickSight BI offering...

"SPICE: One of the key ingredients that make QuickSight so powerful is the Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (SPICE). SPICE is a new technology built from the ground up by the same team that has also built technologies such as DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Aurora. SPICE enables QuickSight to scale to many terabytes of analytical data and deliver response time for most visualization queries in milliseconds. When you point QuickSight to a data source, data is automatically ingested into SPICE for optimal analytical query performance. SPICE uses a combination of columnar storage, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware innovations, machine code generation, and data compression to allow users to run interactive queries on large datasets and get rapid responses."

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2015/10/amazon-quicksigh...
Depending on the job descriptions, I'd say you'll probably need to be able to describe how you would analyze common problems (i.e. how do you do a cluster analysis, how do you ensure it's statistically significant, etc.)

You might even be asked to do case studies, analyze some data and present the insights. It depends on the culture of the company and what role you'll be undertaking. I would say that it doesn't help if you are great at presenting.
Do you feel even though there is a massive influx of startups seeking funding, there is a lack of real innovation in the market?
The main thing that surprises me is how someone can be a tech journalist for years and then try launching a product using someone else's trademarks, and not expect to get a cease-and-desist.
Hi Sam. How many of accepted startups are side-projects before entering YC?
Echoing other comments, the importance of "proof" in math has not been universal even in West. For example, the rigorous definition of derivatives[1] was not given until 1817, 130 years after Newton's Principia was published.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(%CE%B5,_%CE%B4)-definition_of...
It's also a good idea to check your complex scripts before run with awesome shellcheck tool.
http://www.shellcheck.net/