skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As my friend's grandmother said, "They think they're so great, but they're just jumping through other people's hoops." Or as my father said, "Be careful how you treat people on your way up. You'll meet them again on your way down."
What is the specific problem with how this site treats users? A description of the problem and what should be done would be more constructive.
Without blogspam: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/3/76283-gfs-evolution-on-...
I was surprised by the lack of intellectual rigor. It reads like a cross between "Chicken Soup" and "Dr. Seuss".

Examples: the book is 288 pages but only 30,000 words; every other page is an illustration, and most pages are only 3/4 full; footnotes are rare, and usually reference some pop-biz online piece from Forbes or BusinessWeek.

The final chapter (on culture) was very good. It's a topic that doesn't require any rigor to be effective. But the rest of the book was actually one of the more disappointing reads of the last 12 months.

Edit: I'm sorry this is so negative. I really like 37sigs and Jason in particular. Maybe I had too high expectations?
This could be promising. Does anyone know if it might catch on? It love to submit bounties on persistent OSS bugs that irk me every day.
nicely done. I would be interested to see the JS code that you used to help user select the words in cells
As told by Harry Harrison: A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/h/harry-harrison/tunnel-th...
Yup! I think most people are in the same boat. My original intention was "OK, if my 2 cents about this book motivates someone to go out and buy it, I guess Amazon could share a few cents with me" but now I see that this lumps my review into the "sales" and "ad pitch" department.. and that is not what I intended.

In any case, as you can see from my tumblr blog (narekk.com) I do not write or post much. I may, however, post meaningful things in the future. HN readers gives great feedback.
I shook my head when I read this part:

Cost: $88 billion to $175 billion

Why on earth hasn't this project been started yet? We spend that in a few months in Iraq. We write checks for that and just give them to AIG, GS, and MS.

Seriously, what is going on? Why is our country like this?? When is it going to change? Is it going to change?

Should I just move to china? Seriously. I've considered it. Or India. Or even south america. I continue to ask myself, why do I choose to live in the U.S.? Because I was born here? Is that a good enough reason?
Someone tell me we're not there yet.
There isn't enough stuff.

you can consume a blogpost in about a minute, maybe two. during an hour lunch break you can probably finish 20-30 posts. I found that the internet really isn't that big. There's only so many ways to way NoSQL > Sql , or scaffolding is the second coming of Christ, or how to give your VC the perfect handjob.

Even with a billion or two people available to you on the net, there just isn't all that much unique stuff. Ya, you've got 5 reasons your startup failed, but they always boil down to "My cofounder didn't work as hard/wasn't as smart as me/I should have listened to PG."

The internet itself has basically revealed itself to be 1) A great way to buy books, 2) a replacement for your encyclopedia and 3) porn.

The concept that the internet has "more" ideas is bunk. There are just more people.
Stability! No popping ears. Wow... flying is a pretty miserable experience.

If trains were the same price and I could actually use them to get between places, I would never fly. When I was in SF, I couldn't even get from SF to L.A. without having to transfer via bus.
Hmm, no wonder yelp is being hit with lawsuits.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/24/yelp-class-action-lawsuit/
Yeah -- if a native English-speaking adult hasn't acquired a grade ten level of literacy (understanding rules of punctuation, grammar, spelling, composition, semantics, cogent argument), what chance do they have at reading/writing code?

Such a situation would basically be (is?) an admission that the educational/social system has failed to help the individual develop mentally [!] to the level which is probably possible for most people. Which is something that I find sad.
Not formatting exclusively as a blog might help. In Ye Olden Statick HTML Days, sites with mainly essay-like content usually had some sort of organization: by topic, by theme, by importance, or some combination. They often also had a reverse-chronological list of essays on a page called "updates" or "recent additions" or "sorted by date" or something similar, but it wasn't the only or even primary way of displaying the content, and some sites didn't have an updates page at all.

But blogs, including Joel's, display the "updates" page as if it were the main website. There are sometimes other views, like by tag, or on Joel's by topic in the sidebar, but they're positioned as clearly secondary, just pointers into the primarily-chronological blog. They aren't the default display, and posts are still prominently formatted with the date, as if they were journal entries--- on Joel's blog, the posting date is even on the same line as the title, in font that's just as big.
It looks like the poster is taking exception to this(see the left side of the page):

[katerina kastana]

error traffic!donate!we want money!sick of it
katerina kastana 3/13
[MP3IFY CREATOR, DAVID]

dont let the door hit u on the way out. and for everyone else we're getting slammed. enjoy the serv... More »
I agree on the lack of rigor, but I think this was intentionally written this way. I think one of their goals is to disrupt the reader's assumptions on what comprises a business.
> Our idea targets young people (12-25 yrs). Which leads to my thinking, that because they're unfamiliar with it (YC partners too old, would never do facebook quizzes), they brushed it off?

Did you validate your ideas somehow? Maybe some surveys or examples of existing similar apps being successful? Any prototypes?

It is easy to say YC partners didn't get your idea - but it was your job to demonstrate that it holds real value.
Being a dictatorship is not inherently bad for the economy. But as you say democracy tends to be better for your humanity, so to speak.

Being a dictatorship magnifies the impact of the quality of the leadership/rulers. In most western democracies our governments are relatively weak. Their ability to help or hinder the economy is somewhat limited as they generally don't directly control the organizations that make up the economy. On the other hand in a country where the government wields absolute power the government's impact is enormous.

Historically most governments around in the world haven't been great so the countries that have done consistently well are those whose governments have limited influence over the economy ie democracies.

Its not that democracy helps your economy. It just dilutes the governments ability to fvck it up.
I wouldn't consider random cocks "risky and exciting". In fact, that totally turned me off from chat roulette. Getting rid of cocks makes this potentially more interesting and hopefully more successful.
Thank you for saying that. I say the same thing all the time on various websites -- I mean I wouldn't be surprised if you're more likely to be struck by lightning than killed in a terrorist accident. I'm more afraid of getting on the highway.
> Isn't it obvious? Presumably if you cared enough to apply, you care enough to hear why you didn't get in.

It's the opinion of one (smart) group of people who are judging your idea against everybody else that applied.

It's worth something, but your customers' opinions are worth more. Go get those!
Thanks! You can actually check out the JS by viewing http://japanese.trydionel.com/application.js. I must warn you though, I'm not a JS wiz by any means!
> You just have to know where to look (http://www.cliki.net) and how to manage them.

I would argue that if one needs to know where to look and how to manage them, then CL _is_ lacking in terms of libraries. One first has to know where to look and find a CL implementation then to know where to look and find batteries for it.
I saw someone doing it in the logs (possibly you?) and plan to add that. Probably in the next couple of days along with some other changes to the client libraries.
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This sort of feedback is the very definition of bikeshedding:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikeshedding

I'm sure Joel can work out how to raise a husky and keep it happy and healthy without all of us giving our 2c
We won't know if it'll catch on or not until you (and others who are wondering the same thing) offer the bounties and see what happens.
Nationalism is overrated, so I vote for despise it.
That is serious business.
ChatRoulette is no fun, imho, because I don't want to see people jacking off or talk to random 70 year old men. (I tried it two days ago with a friend.)

People who use ChatRoulette say "I'm used to seeing guys jack off." (not just my friend, everyone I have talked to says it) That's a phrase I never thought I'd hear- nor something I want to hear. I wonder what they will say about this site.
I think it depends on the particular kind of pigment. Purple berries typically stay purple when cooked, which is why blackberry pie is still purple, and eggplants stay purple also. Beets turn red, though, since the purple pigment degrades while the red one doesn't.

Not sure where purple tomatoes would fall. Some googling turns up anthocyanin as the pigment, and Wikipedia says it's water-soluble (so would leach out if the fruit is boiled and the water not retained), and changes color based on pH.
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17 countries don't have to agree with each other, they just have to agree with China, which doesn't seem so unlikely when China is volunteering to pay for all of it.
Sweet, this sounds like fun!
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We do fixed fee work at my iPhone/embedded dev shop. One reason why is: Hourly rates tell you nothing about cost. Programmers vary unbelievably much per hour. We'll do hourly after the first contract, but in general, not for the first one.
The comment originally started wtih "Honestly, fuck you." And had a few ranting paragraphs, but instead, here you go:

I adopted a dog and i don't exercise him nearly enough. The other option? He'd be dead. Fucking dead at two months old because people like you think animals need the perfect life.

http://fora.tv/2008/12/12/Mike_Rowe_on_Discovery_Realization...
I'm surprised the article didn't say more about the phenomenon of businesses using gargantuan Excel spreadsheets held together with a Escher-like tangle of macros and formulas. As much as the idea makes "real" programmers shudder, it's one of the best examples of otherwise not-particularly-technical people doing some manner of programming to automate their day-to-day tasks.
Windows provides a facility to move the My Documents folder. It's even possible to use an NTFS symbolic link to move it to a SMB path.
If your argument for why YC isn't worth it is the whole cash/equity/valuation bit, then you definitely haven't talked to enough YC alumni to get a feel for the real value of the program.

OTOH, if you're saying that those who think they _need_ YC for their startups to be successful should strap on some plums, then 100% agreed. ;)
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Many argue, including Hubert King, that oil is running out. He noticed a bell curve of output and predicted the peak of that output would be right around today. He extrapolated data from single wells, to fields to entire nations, correctly was pretty accurate with his predictions and many petrol geologists think we are at or very near the peak and energy will continue to get more expensive as output declines relative to consumption.

By my math, even at current consumption rates we have just about 30 years of oil left: oil reserves divided by daily consumption. That doesn't include the growth rate of consumption and China and India hardly use anything right now per capita compared to the west.
Direct link to the app itself:

http://www.backuperous.com
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I actually submitted this on behalf of the person who wrote the blog post, and do not know him personally :(.
No, I don't marvel at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Matthews

I think any major English language periodical would publish his editorial, which generates more high-brow interest in the English speaking world than in his own country. He has absolutely no influence in Russia today, or for quite some time.

I once had a Ukrainian immigrant barber, who maintained Gorbachev's Russian was very pedestrian, but he had a great English interpretor who could translate on the spot into prosaic English. He (the barber) was very opinionated, and I have never seen anyone make this claim in print.
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Shock therapy was not bad economic advice. It worked extremely well in the Eastern Bloc satellites that tried it, and the general trend was that the more drastic the privatization, the faster the recovery and ultimate rise to European living standards.

In the former Soviet Union, though, 'shock therapy' turned into simple looting. The country was too big and the political system too rotten to actually carry out any program of reform.
It's not about what Emacs can do for you, but what you can do for Emacs.
Wow, Gorbachev has always avoided directly criticizing Putin until now, afaik. I wonder if there's a nice hot cup of thallium in his future now.
First thing I thought of, too.
Its not worse, it's just a silly idea that isn't worth the time needed to make it
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I think/hope he's talking about the latter, in which case I completely agree. It's especially annoying to hear those people who get rejected say that they'll apply again in the winter. They're basically saying that they intend to make no meaningful progress on their start up in the next six months. YC is a very early stage investor. It should be a one-shot deal for any serious start-up. By the time the next cycle comes around, your start-up should be beyond the stage where doing YC makes sense. If your start-up folds, OK, apply again with something new, but these people actually planning on applying again.
Good start, but I think this highlights the reason why around these parts "ideas are worthless". Very very very few people are inclined to actually give 2 specks of a damn about some sentence written in some cell on some spreadsheet.

What I'm getting at:

Show don't tell.

So how about a list of products/service prototypes that people are actually building, and making that a starting point. I'd much rather take 10 seconds to click around on an app, than read text in a cell as noted above.
It does feel like the world is passing us by.
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If it's just bugs, I like the built-in google code or bitbucket ones just fine.
I think you could easily make the case that in order to be able to program you have to be able to verbalize your thoughts to the point that they are unambiguous and that takes much more effort if you are not able to present a coherent argument in the first place. Writing prepares you like nothing else for that because it 'freezes' your thoughts to the point where you can analyze them.
Well done, but I ran into an unfamiliar word: what's 'kombon (こんぼん)'?

Or... is it just to learn romaji-kana transliteration and not about real words?
it's up and running at http://www.couch.io/

funny how TC called it "stealth mode". i don't recall the couchdb guys ever being very secretive about it. they are too relaxed for that :)
“The country was too big …”

So it was bad advice?
I prefer the somewhat more general term procedural literacy to programming literacy. I don't think the main issue is knowledge of particular programming constructs, so much as a general ability to think in terms of, "how would I conceptualize this problem so that I could make a computer do it?" It's things like thinking in terms of repetition, or values or control flow or composition, or even just sequences that I think are the fundamental literacy elements. I think someone who could reliably give detailed instructions in English, with nothing left vague / up to "common sense", would have the basics of the kind of literacy at issue, even if they had never programmed a computer.

More: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22procedural+...
At 100% mission success, and for less than half a billion dollars...
> No security check, no long waits, no cattle herding.

Not all trains. With Eurostar (Paris<->London) there's a security checkpoint with an x-ray and metal detector, along with passport control.
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ycombinator makes sense for 2 kinds of people:
1) people who did not go to stanford/mit/etc. (if you went to those schools and you can't get a meeting with Sequoia, or anyone you want, you don't know what you are doing and should not be an entrepreneur.)
2) first time entrepreneurs who are age 24 and under and thus, do not know what they are doing as entrepreneurs. And thus need guidance.

for both of those subgroups of people, it makes a lot of sense.

ironically, you can only get into ycombinator if you went to stanford or other top university. hahaha... this will get refuted big time by the one or two cases where it is not true; but I'm sure it is largely true.
Safari is a dog for me. Nothing but beach balls on both my machines.
The ideas aren't pessimistic; you're just preaching to the wrong choir. Those aren't startup ideas, those are huge problems that need research and huge amounts of capital. People also need cars that don't use gasoline and a hundred other things we don't have yet.

But breeding dustmites?
Sigh.
Do you then on releasing them into the wild or selling them door to door?
You speak truth python. YC is a good idea when you have your idea, and need some cash/guidance to get started. But once you have customers, even if your not "ramen profitable", you are beyond YC.
Hehe, that's actually a typo for komban! I just quick copied some vocabulary from one of my books to seed the word list and clearly didn't double-check my work :)

That aside, this tool is intended for character recognition than actual vocab study (at least in its current state). I'm hoping to add some new translation support eventually though (straight from english to kana+kanji would be nice).
Sounds like you are at a point beyond where YC makes sense.
I don't think anyone would disagree that, in theory, the ideal government is a wise, benevolent dictator. The primary problem, in practice, is finding such a dictator (the secondary problem, of course, being how to get rid of him when he turns out to be insufficiently wise and/or benevolent after all).

Democracy is actually a pretty terrible way to run things; as Churchill said, it is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried so far.
The problem is we only get one shot at history. So it's hard to look back and assign the right reasons for the failure. It's conceivable that a different set of leaders could have made shock therapy work in the former USSR. It's also possible that no political system could have survived the trauma at that scale.

My point is that it was not obviously bad advice. For the countries that managed to push it through politically, it worked extremely well.
I don't think karma is deserved for either of our posts. They both add to the noise. But I'm trying to reduce the overall noise (in a way which has more impact than downvoting) and you're increasing it. (voters: all the posts in this thread should be at 0 or 1 and at the bottom -- please make it so)
A 48 hr trip would have to average just over 100mph. Maybe, if it's got some pretty limited stops.
That joke is from the Time magazine article, where they name Putin man of the year.
I applied soley for the validation. I really dont want to work in Mountain View
I'm always surprised (but I shouldn't be) by how much effort people go through to keep their house of cards Excel spreadsheet stable and working all while being under the impression that said spreadsheet is lessening the amount of work they do. Working really hard to fix a gargantuan Excel spreadsheets held together with a Escher-like tangle of macros and formulas is not what I call automation.
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Your freelance rate should generally be drastically higher than your salary rate expressed hourly even if you aren't especially productive. You're covering self-employment tax, you pay all your own benefits, and you offer scheduling flexibility full-timers don't and, in exchange, shoulder a huge amount of risk.

You don't need to be a technical person to understand why a former employee would charge 2x their salary freelance. Paying the original straight salary rate would be a total rip-off.
You can very easily live a meaningful, functional (pun intended), and literate life without ever getting into doing system configurations or writing HTML.

If you want to get your word out and communicate, you can do that as long as you can type. Having someone to fix your computer for you so that you can blog isn't illiteracy, nor learning to sign up to Gmail isn't comparable to learning to read and write. Or something else like that: the author was rather vague as for the technical skills he deemed to be required for literate modern life. But HTML "coding" sure as hell isn't one of them!

Being a geek and being literate in "geek" language and thinking is a different thing from living a life. You might as well say that because cars are so ubiquitous and in countries with certain infrastructure they're almost mandatory, people need to know how they work and to fix them in order to be "literate", so that they can drive out and communicate with people instead of relying on more knowledgeable people to fix them for them.
All but the last 3 can't be used during take off and landing, and the last 3 all existed before airline magazines.

There's still an audience there.
That's a very interesting clip - editorializing to raise attention to it, in case other folks miss it.
What we really need is a new label for content like Joel's

Collection of essays?
Ask HN: Feedback on BijectKarma, our YC prototype
As rejection comes with no explanation (understandably, given the number of YC applicants), we'd (unignorant & zaveri) like to ask the critical eyes of HN readers for some feedback. A short description of our idea follows:

BijectKarma is a place where developers, designers, and hackers can request and fulfill services for karma
(our currency). By completing requests, users can build portfolios and form networks while developing an
online reputation. Think of us as Listia.com, but for services.

Prototype url: http://yc.ethanjfast.com