skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm with Daniel.

If you only try things you think have a high probability of success, then you're probably not going to embark on being an entrepreneur period. The percentages of success are very low.

Applying to YC was fairly easy and didn't take much time. There's really only upside to it. The only downside is your ego when you're rejected and the remote chance that your idea/startup would be undervalued.

I also disagree with your final notion that YC is THE yardstick for success. If you read their "whynot" post, it's obvious they go through very many applications and really your idea could be skimmed and rejected quite easily. Also, the companies that have come out of YC haven't ALL been successful (no discredit to those that have been).

Lastly, at such an early stage I think entrepreneurs are always thinking through changes in business/people/idea. That's just the nature of the beast whether YC accepted you or not.
Actually, the authors of couchdb did eventually start a company around it: http://is.gd/aEdvW . I think it's still in stealth mode, though.
The Naked Face
I like your attitude Daniel. Keep on truckin'!

(Frankly, I have qualms working with anyone who still uses hotmail... haha jk.)
Does freedom require being incurious and apathetic about other people's problems? Well, if so, consider that the teenage girls I'll be ogling from my chair at the cafe when I'm a lecherous septuagenarian won't be born for another thirty years. See, now I'm being appropriately selfish, but I'm still interested in understanding why people eat so much and what can be done about it.
I want to see if there's a critical mass of people interested in my nearby area and then I will create the event.
Part of the problem I feel with home-produced video is just the poor quality. A good number of us use macbooks with that awful little camera in the absolute wrong place. It's probably hard to do, but a video camera in the center of the screen would do wonders. And lighting tends to be an issue. I've been thinking of building a multi-pointed light meter (profably in software) and using that to control 2-4 strings of adjustable LEDs that would be to either side, plus maybe the top and bottom of my macbook pro. The idea here is that software could do a good job of adjusting the lighting for better quality.
Hmm. Has anyone tried a purgatory ban (I just made that up). Basically give individual users the ability to never see posts or messages from other individual users, but no indication to the ban-ee.
I don't think anything is wrong with the regular SVN releases but I think this allows them to put out patches quickly to their customers.

The version of SVN in the regular repositories for the Linux distributions is also generally quite far behind. They are distributing the latest version.
With regards to List.map:
List.rev_map is also in the standard library and is tail-recursive, so you can just do List.rev(List.rev_map l) to tail recursively map. Just had to defend Ocaml a little :)
I don't think a rejection means anything at all other than you don't fit what YC is looking for. By itself it's not a compelling argument that "you're doing it wrong".

I met with MTV the other day, they can't wait to use my service. And they're just one of the awesome companies that are very excited about what I'm doing ... YC is a missed opportunity but it's just one of many you can find or make for yourself.
We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.
Please don't take it personally. The applications we receive get
better every funding cycle, and since there's a limit on the number
of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot
of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know
we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group
to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that
we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall
just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain
that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups.
If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us
about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Staff
You're absolutely right about that trait. I don't disagree.

What I'm really saying is that just because applying is so quick and easy, it should not be taken lightly. In fact I think the application process should be made a lot more difficult to attract a higher concentration.

Am I the only one feeling like this? I hold Pg and his team to a high regard. A No from him is different than any other No. So of course I would want the highest probability of acceptance when I send my pitch.
I only use about 40GB on my laptop. I'd buy a 60GB disk for $100, but not a 120GB for $300. They should concentrate on getting the price down rather than the capacity up. They're too expensive.
The plugin engine API is C++. They export a C client API, along with many other client APIs.

EDIT: I just reread the above, and should mention that I didn't mean it to be snarky at all. Sorry.
You don't understand it perfectly well, though. You're not "racking your brain" because loops are better fits to most problems than other approaches -- it's because you're still learning.

That's perfectly okay, of course. It just means it's a little early to start making final conclusions.
Ah, of course. That's what I get for commenting when I'm tired. The only comment that I would make is that the dot notation is very OO, indicating the method on the right is a member of the class of the object on the left. The 'using namespace' in my code was used to indicate the methods I called were static, thereby decoupling them from a particular object.
Bah, since somebody deleted the BDFRAAS entry, I've saved it here for posterity: http://mhalligan.com/best-entry-from-a-hackernews-startup-id...
SpaceX says Falcon 9 rocket test fire is a success
OK here's the event.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=401254911062
1. 0
2. 0 (well, no video)
3. 0 (looking for ip from ycombinator.com)
4. 0

Somehow I'm kind of relieved that I got rejected, as the real fund raising process is kind of distracting the building of the product and business. I sort of used the YC deadline as an external event to set milestone for finishing up the website, which was mostly done now.
Has anyone used the Pogo Stylus? Anyone have any thoughts on the best stylus to use for the iPhone?
When I saw that picture I was actually fascinated to try the dark purple, beet-like carrots. They looked the tastiest to me.

The others seemed mildly less appetizing but still edible, and in fact I've seen white carrots before (they were wild and I didn't eat them, but they smelled nice).
We don't have a set number that we decide in advance. We accept everyone who seems good enough. We wouldn't turn down a group that we thought had a big enough chance of succeeding.
NextSprocket: Marketplace for Open Source Development Bounties
I believe Directed Edge got rejected, kept going anyway, and got accepted a year later. They had already done a bunch of work and had customers in the pipeline, which let them make great use of the network once they were there.
I highly suggest you also talk about the WHY a great deal. I buy quite a few screencasts and knowing your audience is a hugely important thing.

Some of us don't have the programming background to leverage and the why of where you are putting code, why it is better than shoving everything into the view etc is important. 5 minutes would be too short I think for most useful learning exercises. I agree peeepcode does this quite well.

An example screencast that I would purchase would be using authlogic and then adding and extending functionality to fit your needs. Adding lost password functions, user levels, etc. That would give a nice complete view of a very commonly used item and useful across any project you are going to create on your own.
Haim Sokol: Dead letters (Moscow, 2010)
Out of curiosity, what was your idea?
Presumably it's the same idea he's been talking about for about 6 months now on HN; if you go read his comment backlog, he's been pretty open about it.
I hear you... I burnt out in the weeks leading up to the YC deadline. Then the 2 weeks between my submission and rejection I felt like I was in limbo. I'm looking forward to getting my head down and focusing on my product.

Don't skimp on the video next time... Its the one external thing PG says he'll (definately) look at. If they like your vid, they'll probably visit your site. I put links on the vid page to my site, I'd have to check my logs to see if they clicked them from there.
a. I totally agree on Twitter, and

b. That is a nice puppy, Joe but you have to make sure you give him proper exercise. It is not nice to keep a dog like that cooped up in an apartment.
What makes you think they didn't get more stupid? The illegitimacy rate shot up. The savings rate fell a lot. Does whatever makes people fat also turn them into irresponsible parents and poor retirement planners?

My hypothesis is that we've seen a weakening of social norms and pressure, as reflected in the illegitimacy rate and the deterioration of standards for clothing in public. You faced more opprobrium for being fat, bearing a bastard child, or dressing in cheap garbage in the past. Now you can comfortably be fat in public, and wear flip-flops too.
Maybe there making a play on high end storage requirements knowing they can't compete on price/ speed at the smaller end of the market.
The Scientific Conquest of Death
In regards to huskies there are a few important things:

- they need a lot of exercise everyday (like a few hours)

- they need training (not good couch potato dogs)

- they need high and secure fencing (many will try to escape if left alone and to their own devices and they are master escape artists)
More of a project management tool, but I used thymer (thymer.stunf.com/) while putting together a social network for dogs for a client. They would just mark the bugs, I'd comment on it, and we'd have a point of reference for when we talked together.
EDIT -- Totally re-done for clarity.

You're in a conference. The keynote speaker says something cool. You go to tweet it to your friends -- but it's longer than 140 characters. So you key it into your iPad on my app and choose to share it with your FaceBook and MySpace Friends. Over on FB and MySpace, the longer quote appears and has a link back to my web app where the quote is stored.

You're reading a political or science article. About half-way down, the author makes a really cool point -- all the ideas seem to be coming together and this text just jumps off the page. You highlight the paragraph and enter it into my app, choosing also to share it on Twitter and FB.

You're looking for something pithy to tweet or put on your FB status. You visit my app and read the latest quotes from sources all over the world, sorted and ranked especially according to your tastes. Choosing the one you like the most, you upvote it, make a comment, and choose to automatically email it and post to your status updates.

You're looking for the best of the web today. Visiting my app, quotes from much longer articles and speeches are listed, customized to your tastes. Finding one that looks especially interesting, you click the link and go to the longer article, spending 10 or 20 minutes reading the full text.

Your friend hears something incredible at a news event. He quotes the speaker, links to the video, and notifies you by using my app. You visit his quote on my app, make some comments, and vote it up. Soon you and your friend have made several comments -- other people have also joined in. Your conversation about this quote is saved for you to return to when you like.

Finally, you're reading a book on your Kindle or other device. You find a particularly interesting passage. Quickly you copy it out, tag and save it, perhaps also choosing to share it on your status update. Later on, when you are not at your e-book reader, you can visit the web site and view your quotes -- along with the comments from your social network and other folks who share your same interest.

Does that describe it well enough?
0 questions/12 video views/unknown prototype/unknown but video was watched today
The Largest Infrastructure Project in History: Chinese High-Speed Rail to Europe
Square dancing
Zu_Chongzhi got a better one 355/113

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zu_Chongzhi
“Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.” -Howard Aiken
No, really, he isn't. He means it in the political sense. (He's a string theorist, and whatever string theory is it really isn't "conservative" in the sense you describe; not until it starts getting experimental evidence.)

See, e.g., http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/01/massachusetts-brown-vs-coa... . (Or, if you share my opinion that what is called with "skepticism" or "denialism" about anthropogenic global warming, depending on which side the caller is on, is generally politically motivated, see about half the posts on his blog.)
Python lets you use multi-paradigm programming - Functional where that makes sense and OOP for where that is better.

Functional programming is not always the optimal choice. But when it is, it is awesome.
I've done that. They figured it out and twas no fun. Don't fight with pigs, you'll just et dirty and they like it (or how does that saying go?)
"We need to stop rewriting the same things again and again (fail fast! NDAs are worthless! Execution matters, not ideas! Use the right tools for the job!)."

Couldn't agree more. I agree with these ideas 100%, but it's getting to the point where they're all beginning to feel cliched.
The Thin Laptop project
Google ‘99.9%’ Sure To Shut China Search Engine: Report
YES ! Well explained !!!

Processes map well to functional programming, but then when we look at what is being processed, it often has to have state and have specific behaviors. So choosing the best fit abstraction is critical to clean implementations.
140 chars == 1 twyte?
Right ON !

When you get down to the silicon there's only data and instructions to manipulate that data. Everything else is abstractions poured over the top to suit specific application domains.
If you want some idea feedback I have no idea what product your pitch describes. Re-read it twice and still puzzled :)
I disagree that the application process should be harder (noting that I am not, nor ever will be, an application) since it shouldn't require people to set aside time to fill out an application.

What it requires is people to take time to think their plans through very carefully and summarise them effectively. If you have this summary in your head at all times then the important part of applying will always be easy; any additional requirements would just be makework.
Climate change makes birds shrink in North America
Because no one ever shares knowledge for free? I'm glad pg and every other successful person in the world didn't take that point of view.

And when was the last time anyone in the US paid 50% of income in taxes? The highest marginal income tax rate is 35%; FICA (SS/Medicare) is on top of that, but only income up to a certain amount is subject to FICA.
The history of color words is a really interesting topic. For example, in Turkish the word for "brown" is kahverengi, which literally translates as "coffee-colored". Also, turquoise comes from the French word for Turkish, used to describe the color commonly used on Ottoman glassware.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for startups
Any suggestion on which methodologies are more appropriate for startups? Agile? Which ones?
Here's an alternative theory: orange carrots contain more carotene, which is good for your brain, so it's evolution doing its job. (edit: OTOH maybe the red carrots contain even more carotene, but too much carotene causes cancer, so that's why we don't like them ;)
Don't worry. In exchange for their salaries, corporate lawyers have to accept their lives sucking.
I'm guessing that's the case.

We specced these in feb to replace the disks in one of our clusters; not quite economical yet but getting there. When we deploy the next storage cluster in June I expect it will be with SSDs.
My company was rejected from YC W09, but raised $1.5M in VC 2 months later.

We just buckled down, and launched anyways (ahead of schedule!). Once you get users and have some promising data, raising money is definitely doable.
While this particular story is interesting, I don't believe for a minute that it is widespread - it's simply too easy for the curious to spot odd network traffic by checking packet dumps at a routing point. I also wonder about the feasibility of sending traffic that can be routed meaningfully at the data link layer level. The interface with the ethernet chip would have to figure out the local network configuration, because at the hardware level, it wouldn't have access to the OS's network setup.

One anecdote does not a conspiracy make. Now if we had a bunch of different people opening up laptops from different manufacturers, and all finding similar hardware, it would be a different story.
Gorbachev: Perestroika Lost
Don't give up guys...
"Success is a lousy teacher because it teaches successful people they can do no wrong." -Bill Gross #embracefailure
Don't worry, as soon as he gets his shots he's going to doggy day care.
I've been in parts of the world where I had to order bottled water, not for the taste, but because bottled water contains slightly fewer Escherichia coli than the local supply. Ice was out. Demonstrably pure ice sounds like a good idea.
I am not sure if there is a consumer market for SSDs this big. If you have a high-performance online transaction processing app, then this could be great. But if you just have a terabyte of porn, you are wasting your money. Disks (and even tape) handle this workload just fine.

For a boot drive, 30G ought to be enough. I only use 7G on my desktop and about 4G on my laptop:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/ssd-root 28G 6.9G 19G 27% /
/dev/mapper/md0_crypt 917G 331G 587G 37% /home

No reason to pay $3000 for a 1T SSD when a 30G SSD + 1T hard drive will give you the exact same performance for 1/10th the cost. (I have 3 drives in md0_crypt, and so it ends up being as fast as an SSD too. The bottleneck on both disks is the crypto; apparently i7s don't have hardware-accelerated AES, but the i5s do. Grumble.)
I love this concept; an alteration would be to instead change their background to care bears or barney, or something overly obnoxiously loving.
I've been very skeptical of twitter from the beginning, but as time goes some people are emerging that have figured out how to take advantage of the medium. The first is shitmydadsays, who manages to fit a lot of context into 140 characters, the second is Michael Jordan (probably not the real Micheal Jordan) who's great at some bite-sized non-sequitor humor.
I'm not sure you'd ever get purple ketchup even with purple tomatoes. Usually the purple pigments in food disappear after heating them. Do you think that'd be any different in tomatoes?
Me too, I've found a "stone-ground" brown that's phenomenal. I'm forever converted from the yellow stuff.

Generally speaking, though, people buy what's most pure-colored. Just look at what has the most shelf-space at a (normal) grocery store. And add in packaging designs, most of them favor large areas of a fairly pure color. Our food-color connection is pretty strongly ground in and then reinforced all over the place.
It's getting pretty close, with various 32 gigs under $100 and 40gigs and 60gigs in the $100-$200 range.
$130 for a 40gig Intel for example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...
Please DO NOT overexercise a puppy. It is common for people to start exercising puppies way to much early on. They will happily keep themselves busy and tend to exercise quickly and then sleep quite a bit. Puppies need time to grow and their bones harden properly. That is why bigger breed dogs are put on a slower growth puppy formula. You want to avoid causing any hip issues that will be very tough on them later in life.

Please do read some of the better authors on the subject and acceptable levels of exercise for the next 12 months.
I'd believe it if there were:

- pictures of the disassembled laptop.
- a flex circuit instead of phone wire.
- the make/model of the laptop

Sounds like there's a problem in the keyboard-chair interface.
These people will make millions selling page-a-day calendars.
I kinda feel like the guards here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o5APFI6kH0#t=6m41s

(spoiler: Truman Show)
The nice thing is there is a huge backlog of articles by Joel to refresh on or read for the first time. I frequently get lost in his cross-linked articles like so many people do with Wikipedia.

I know you'll still be around, Joel, but thanks for what you've done this far.
Yeh clearly a conspiracy theory of little merit. Just For kicks tomorrow morning I will dig out info on this keylogger and try to find out about it's network traffic - then feed it into all our wireshark dumps from US jobs.

Willing to bet zero results :-)
don't worry... Jared has read everything on the internets.
Ready-to-hand: Your Computer is an Extension of Your Mind
1) Why is this not on the motherboard or chipset level?

2) Why is this not backed up with TCPDUMPs of the call-home?

3) Source? Receipt of the computer/manufacturer/model? New or used purchase? could just be a CEO gone-wrong, or a specific computer monitored (with a warrant)

4) Storing e-mails transmitted over the wire has nothing to do with keyloggers, just FUD.

This is much too vague and unrealistic to be considered news.
I personally wouldn't ban them unless they were actively making it difficult and unenjoyable for other users. I don't mind laughing a bit at a disparaging message, but I have a thicker skin than most. However, what I wouldn't mind doing for the really abusive is grabbing a beer and cooking up something that makes them feel abashed. A personal homepage for their account with something like 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you' plastered across the top. Man, maybe even make the banner randomly draw from a list of trite sayings...'Consideration for others is an important virtue'.

We get a few rough emails/suggestions come through, but haven't had to deal with anything profane. Usually it's something like "This site is terrible, it doesn't work worth crap and I can't believe you have any users". It's almost always something really hilarious that causes it (javascript being turned off, they are using IE6). I respond with an explanation, query for more and try to help. Everytime the person turns their attitude around and says thanks, that we have good service. I am sure that will change when our userbase grows, but it is working well so far.

On a sort of related note, I did have a user put in a name of F YOU (but fully spelled out, yes all in caps). Best part is they were an active and seemingly happy member. I am not for censorship, however, we are currently a small site, so his name might come up semi-often for other users. Enough to drive down the value for other users, which is when I draw the line. I decided to change it to LOVE YOU. It's still there, even though the person has used the site many times since I made the change. They must have a good sense of humour :)
Another nice Panic-inspired office dashboard
Some interesting discussion on Metafilter:

http://www.metafilter.com/90075/If-keyboard-lag-is-discontin...
A big thanks for all you've written (if you're reading, Joel). You've really helped shape my thinking over the last few years.
Any map so far ? They have to go through Iran, Russia or a myriad of ex-ussr countries, I can't see how that's gonna work out ...
"Its main connection to Europe would likely go through India, Pakistan and the Middle East. Although, exact routes are not yet determined."

Can anyone say "IED derailment at 200kph+"?