skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Make sure never to say anything like, "I was curious about X - what were some specific example?", though.

That might be too socially functional.
I think what you've really done here is change the deadline from March 3rd to "right before the program starts". Sure, applying earlier is better than later, but that was already the case.
Why not just have more than two cycles per year? Is it because there's a lot of work that has to be done during off-seasons, or is it arbitrary?
I can't help but feel the ffmpeg guys, despite providing a great service to the world, have got a real chip on their shoulder when it comes to all things Ogg and Xiph.

They don't like things that are badly designed. This same chip applies equally to a lot of other stuff, especially proprietary formats, like the utterly atrocious and buggy RealVideo 10.

Xiph gets a double dose, however, because of the methods that Xiph uses to market their bad technology. They have at times posted outright lies about their software and then, once proven wrong, often refuse to recant. Example: the Theora vs x264 PSNR comparison where they "accidentally" performed measurement wrong, making x264 appear 2x worse.

They use the same techniques as many of the more evil commercial companies out there, which annoys the hell out of people who disagree with such techniques. ffmpeg devs believe that open source should be about honesty and good technology, not lies and FUD. Xiph disagrees, believing that "the ends justify the means", creating a practically unbridgeable gulf.

Thus Xiph has spent the last few years spreading absurd amounts of FUD about everyone who they believe opposes them. They have managed to convince a shocking number of people that "ffmpeg is illegal" and that you should use their software instead. Ironically, almost all the FUD in the multimedia space in recent years has come from people who claim to support "free software"! Didn't we spend years criticizing Microsoft for the exact same thing?

And you wonder why people don't like them!
Cassette tapes were wonderful. They were eminently portable and could take certain kinds of beating, but they were also vulnerable. Unknown players might kill them with no warning or remedy--especially in-dash car players.

Making a mixed tape for a crush was an exercise in dj-ing and in precision. Dead space wasn't on; you had to fill the exact amount of time, 60 minutes or 90. Finding some of my old ones, given to me by friends and more, with their hand-drawn, carefully designed label and liner notes, was like finding letters from the past, carrying a heavy freight of memories... ahhh!

CDs degraded the experience by being more fragile and less portable (can't slip one in your pants pockets, for example). With the advent of the mp3 player, mixed tapes and cds died. I miss those things.
Google is a pretty young company:

can you cite a consistent pattern in their past that would argue they would never do so?

(I can cite this: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-03/google-wants-u-s...)

How about this?

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

Why is Google applying for patents? For fun?

HTC was already mentioned in the article: they are young and do not have the patent portfolio to play with the big boys.
HTC technology at the MWC-2010 - Legend, Desire and mini (Video)
What is Esophageal Cancer
I wouldn't want people to think that. Actually it is going to be much harder to get a late application accepted. We'll dutifully process all the regular applications in batch as usual, whereas we probably won't look that closely at late applications unless we see something exceptional.
Body acoustics can turn your arm into a touchscreen
Up above the headline on that page, there are two retweet buttons. The one on the left is powered by backtype. The one of the right is powered by Tweetmeme. There's a monstrous discrepancy between the tracking numbers here.

I really want to use Backtype's button on WindyCitizen, but their data appears to be pretty off here.
pgcrypto is a set of extension functions that are available from within PL/SQL

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/pgcrypto.html

You do need to understand what the functions are doing and it doesn't handle key management for you.
Sounds like another time consuming commitment on top of your ever growing list of commitments. How far do you scale?
I assume that the bar will be (much?) higher for late applicants. I think this is a way to make sure that YC doesn't miss out on the next Facebook. When the bulk of returns are made on the outliers, this makes sense.
Can someone explain exactly what this is? The idea is to set up a posterous and sync it to your gmail, then plug that into as many services as possible so you can send e-mail updates that get pushed out all over the web?

Where does the monitoring happen and how do you know what to monitor?
We've thought about it. We may one day. But there is some stuff that usually happens between cycles, like organizing Startup School. Plus we need some time off. During the YC cycle we are very busy, like the startups themselves are, because time is so compressed.
$100,000 Reward: Y Prize
Inspired by the X Prize, Y Combinator’s “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” and Kickstarter, I am offering a $100K prize in three parts.
Ask HN: How many consumers should I interview for market research of a product?
I am coordinating market research for a friend on a type of consumer drink. We have collected interviews with 40 consumers. We will use the data to develop the business plan. But how many consumers should we interview? 40? 50? 100? Would appreciate some advice on this matter. TIA.
Sounds more like Y Combinator accepts early applications instead of trouble getting applicants.
Google PowerMeter API introduced for device manufacturers
>Does that training include training them on what makes it valuable?

Absolutely. It's essential to using something like this. Otherwise it's like teaching someone how to build a hanglider and not telling them how to fly it.
Actually all I have to do is change the software. Harj is going to monitor the late applications.

http://ycombinator.posterous.com/welcome-harj
Yeah, you have a point, but Alex Payne obviously felt it was misinterpreted, and it's pretty easy to see how that might motivate him to stop blogging (dare I say, be less private online, ironically enough).
The biggest problem is that blogs aren't considered a notable source:

> Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason self-published media—whether books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, personal pages on social networking sites, Internet forum postings, or tweets—are largely not acceptable. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Self...

This makes it really hard to defend open source software against WP:N allegations, since most of your coverage is from these kinds of sources...
Developer Networks
Hi Brad, thanks for getting in touch with us -- we had an issue related to your domain specifically that is being addressed right now in addition to some corrupted indexes that were affecting all of our counts today. Both of these will be fixed very soon and our counts will return to being accurate.
As much as I hate twitter it most definitely is not a reinvention of the telegraph

For the operating system snark I for one am glad the world isn't still using apple II's

If you want the problems solved start working on it yourself it isn't other peoples burden.
That's because critical thinking is an entirely different activity from looking for key phrases. :)
I see a ton of small startups having problems on the legal side of things and they can't pay a couple grand to handle simple things like incorporation, creating terms and conditions, etc.. I wish there were more respectable groups that did this to alleviate the burden on young companies.
Wikipedia also lives and dies by it's reputation. People have tried forking Wikipedia with more inclusive policies numerous times (the code base and articles are open source), and they've all ended up filled with junk.

I was involved with Wikipedia very heavily for it's first three years (not been involved for the last 5 years), and there have been periods when it went through more liberal stages of allowing a broader range of content. The policies they have now aren't something that've just been made up. They're policies that have evolved over a decade of seeing what works and what doesn't.

Non-notable articles often end up abandoned and vandalized for long period. Sure the precise criteria for notability and verifiability might be debatable, but there's absolutely no question that those criteria help make Wikipedia a reliable source of data.

Think about the reason you want something in Wikipedia (rather than just say on a Google Sites page or Mahalo, etc). You want it on Wikipedia precisely because of the reputation it has, and that reputation is in a large part down to the criteria of notability and verifiability.
Jim Starkey: Brewer's CAP Conjecture is False
Wasn't that PSNR comparison problem because of an ffmpeg bug?

And what evidence have you that it wasn't done "accidentally" (your scare quotes). You're clearly wrong if you're implying they didn't retract that claim, as they do so here, in an update to the original page:

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html

You seem to be, in this very post, doing exactly what you accuse them of, spreading FUD and lies about a competitor.

Maybe this feud goes way back, but you're not taking the moral high ground by calling them liars and cheats.
Remember the little holes at the bottom that were there to make a cassette "read only"? You could get around it by covering the holes with scotch tape or plugging them with bits of paper.
...if you give "consistent" a different definition than the one used by Brewer (and others).
Great plugin, although it's ability to jump to the next empty tag was overriding with my tabbing/completion(probably conflicting with SuperTab) - so I remapped that functionality to Ctrl-i rather than Ctrl-n:

let g:sparkupNextMapping = '<c-i>'

So far that doesn't seem to be conflicting with anything...
There are flags that can note the article is poorly written so that noone mistakes it as authoritative in its current state. Indeed in this manner people interested in the subject can be attracted to improve it.
Wasn't that PSNR comparison problem because of an ffmpeg bug?

It was because of two bugs: an ffmpeg bug (signalling chroma positions wrong) and a bug in their testing tool (which resampled the image, something that a PSNR tester should never do for any reason).

You're clearly wrong if you're implying they didn't retract that claim, as they do so here, in an update to the original page:

Interesting, last time I looked they hadn't, but that's quite welcome then. But of course this pattern has repeated itself a dozen times already.
One of the problems I've run into in my current work is that statistics deals with problems a lot like the drunk man looking for his keys under the lamp. As far as I can tell there is one man in the entire world who works on stable distributions (like normal distributions, but with tunable skew and heavy-tailedness parameters), which have been quite useful for me. If you have or believe you have data that has subtle dependencies among the random variables, you could use a copula but multivariate Archimedian copulas are hard to compute with (far as we've been able to tell, at least), copula fitting is a research problem, and copula choice is black magic.
I wasn't speaking from the perspective of what I like. I don't like a lot of games that are popular.

Chinese poker isn't very popular really, you'd be hard pressed to find a casino that spreads it. I played it a decent amount when I was playing poker for a living, but it was more like 4 guys just found an open table and played.

Blackjack's easy because the dealer can play like an automaton, and the game moves really, really fast. If your game could have a dealer algorithm (like Pai Gow) you might be able to sell it as a table game. Breaking into that is extremely hard though.
Sequencing the "Meta-genome" of human bacterial gut flora
I find similar effects from remembering random details of people's lives, as well as creating inside jokes.
Frankly, using the word "clone" is rather insulting to the Reddit developers because it suggests that their years of work (http://code.reddit.com/) amount to nothing more than a trivial programming example.
Indeed the disk space argument is frivolous given the amount of discussion generated around deleting articles, besides which I wouldn't even be sure that articles are permanently deleted. This ignores the cost in time and morale to contributors.
Congratulations on getting married.
The want the whole thing to go away, even if you're in the right, a lot of times it isn't worth suing. Look at Barbra Streisand - some dude took pictures of her beach house, she was upset and sued him over it. So instead of the handful of people seeing the photos, the law suit hit all the news stations and tens of thousands of people saw the pictures.
Not to continue the content-free let-me-fix-that-for-ya sniping you're answering, but "ubiquity" dates back to 1579. It's a nice, old word, not a hack or neologism.

Nonetheless, both words are entirely proper, acceptable, and clear.
He comes out to speak to us students on campus at BYU all the time. He brings a big-crowd because he's very authentic. Even though he's worth like $300 Million, he's very down to earth and real, which I think draws people to him.
Here's one of his talks: http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james-december...
Creativity is not about checking off a long list of small boxes
How to write a really fast parser without going insane
I wonder if those stats include private repos.
A tightly-coupled (whatever that means) cluster sounds like a perfectly legitimate way to scale to me.
I feel like I've read this exact same comment so many times over the past 3 years. If you think something's off topic, would you please just flag it quietly, as we ask in the guidelines?
Pimp my rice paddy
There is not a single creator who does not also consume.
Despite the occasional smile, it came across as a pretty serious working environment to me.
Never be afraid to outsource trivialities.
Php demystifying autofilter
15 Best Password Cracking Tools Collection
an advice to the next person that wants to stop blogging. just stop. really. don't blog about you wanting to stop. thanks.
This is Alex's best post since he bashed SF. All is forgiven, sorry for getting unintentionally inflamed!
Living Without Television
Peak oil compounded by exponential population growth spell the end of cheap oil, in the least.
It says on that on that page.

{{User :OS:Ubuntu Netbook Remix}}
Jay-Z also made a much needed musical commentary on autotune:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.O.A._(Death_of_Auto-Tune)

Personally, I think the hordes of talentless R&B "singers" using auto-tune have completely destroyed its creative potential. I cringe every time I hear it.
Virgin America ditches Flash on its site
I started an inclusionist fork called includipedia -- http://www.includipedia.com/ -- though I've not developed it fully.
Twitter doesn't do my dishes, or cure cancer. It just lets people communicate, like did the telegraph 200 years ago.

Operating system snark - beneath os x and android is unix, invented over 40 years ago.

I do work on it myself, but i'm only one man. If the industry set its goals higher that would make a real difference, and put more money in its pocket.
A Welcome Bunch of Amateurs
I'd love to see such a blog.

With regard to Rob's post, I'd really like to see the templates that power the homepage and the CMS interface for laying things out. Do editors choose the layouts via the CMS, or do you have more technical producers or designers who do that? I'm guessing you're using Ellington, but I could be mistaken.

I'd be really curious to know how the Sun handles getting content into the site and getting it published in a good-looking way. I know that giving users (reporters) the ability to customize a page is both empowering and frightening, and coming up with a system that is as fluid as the one you guys are using is not an easy task.
Shifting gears
To better get the "seriously, apply on time if at all possible" idea across, I'd emphasize that harj is monitoring late apps.

"If you apply on time, all 4 YC partners will definitely read your application. If you apply late, our employee will skim through it to see if it looks promising, and only if he thinks it does will any of us even see it."
If you need to wrap some things in a div, you could also use another tpope plugin: surround.vim. Just visually select the items and just do this: s<div> Also, you can use motions, etc.
As a kid who grew up in the late 80's / early 90's, I'll always have fond memories of the miniature cassette tapes that had singles on them. Crappy quality? Yes. Awful colors? For sure. But it definitely appealed to the 5 year old me.
It looks like it is manually curated to me.

If not though, I'd second your interest on how they determine it algorithmically.
This is why (college) old media is failing
Someone take this idea and apply: iPad Software that mums can use to do some elementary diagnoses on the various illnesses that their children can get, get to talk to other people about it and recommend doctors/medicines.

Or how about this: iPad software that contains the instruction manuals for like every electronic device ever (TVs etc).

Or the simplest, yet best of all: iPad software that, after you weigh yourself, you tap once on it to say how much you weigh. Over the course of the day, it tells you when to stop eating to reduce weight. After a meal, you tap what you just ate (chicken wings) and it adds to your calories.

If I were applying for YC I'd go for that 3rd one. Feel free to use these ideas, I'm not going to make them myself.
The Intel Scope:  Todo sobre el Core i3 y el Core i5
In your view, what are the most common reasons for YC startup failures? I know you've mentioned the importance of having the right team in the past (as well as having a team, as opposed to a single founder). Generally speaking, what else comes into play when a Y Combinator startup fails?
> Non-notable articles often end up abandoned and vandalized for long period.

Yes, but can't we use some other criteria for this than the utterly absurd ones being deployed to destroy all of the articles on open source software? I used to use the Wikipedia to orient myself in that domain, but now it really is practically useless due to the latest round of deletion madness, which is based on the "If it's not mentioned in the New York Times, it doesn't exist" criterion. (For example, I was looking into wikis recently, and found that if I went back 6 months, the articles were much better...) It seems plain that different criteria need to be developed for different domains.

Either the destruction of the `dwm` article follows from the principles being deployed or it doesn't; and either it is worth an article (which it would be simply insane to deny) or it isn't. You don't take a stand on which combination of views you hold, and what the solution is, but only affirm the abstract principle that 'there are limits'.
That's what I usually do, but this time is different. This marks the end of HN as I knew it (for me anyway), and I felt the need to express how I feel about it. You don't just lose something you cherish and stay quiet, that's a very difficult thing to do. You won't be hearing this sort of complaints from me anymore.
The need for immigration reform
Google's Conversion University
Some pollution or environmental damage takes years or centuries to recover from. Desertification and top soil erosion for example.

A decade is no time at all.

What are you arguing? My point was that electronic waste has a high environmental cost, probably more so than farming.
course they don't need to, but if they can hurt HTC, isn't that good strategy?
XKCD's guide to love
whats in YOUR google history? ;)
This does seem right. The really stupid articles -- "Hi I am George Smith I was born in Brooklyn" -- who would defend them?
Well, if it's any consolation, it was just an illusion that the site was good before. HN officially jumped the shark about three months after you signed up:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244937

It's interesting that this too was a complaint about yet another story of a type that there had recently been a lot of. That seems to be the most common thing that causes people to decide that this time, HN has really jumped the shark.

Sometimes sites get onto themes. Lately one theme has been prominent bloggers who are quitting blogging. Don't worry, though. There probably won't be that many more.
i like the second one the best. I'm pretty certain that most of the manuals are out there in PDF format already. Organizing / finding them all would be a bit of work, but it's doable.
They contest 29 different assertions made by the rolling stones author. What didn't they deny?
That makes you look an insufferable ass just the same.
Article Marketing Means Targeted Traffic
I'm sure mturk would take only a few days, even for 20.000 devices.
Tell HN: Atlanta HackerNews Meetup #2 
The last one back in December went pretty well, so the next one is in order.

Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=376015031398

When: Thursday, March 11th at 7:00pm

Where: Rira Irish Pub (1080 Peachtree St NE)
New wordpress plug-in PubSubHubbub
Again, you don't speak to the criteria. It seems that dwm may actually meet the criteria these people are now employing. If so, a principal lobe of the brain of the open source movement is being cut out ... by itself.
"When we started dating, marriage was the furthest thing from my mind. True love will sneak up on you. Let it."

True and beautifully put.
The changing nature of nonprofit marketing
If the post confuses you, I'll try and clear a few things up. This paper is still giving stipends to editors and senior reporters. They can't take even a small cut in their stipends to provide a modest stipend for someone whose skills are exceedingly more marketable than the ability to write in AP-style.
Where do Entrepreneurial Skills Originate?
Skinput - use the human body for finger input using a novel wearable sensor
Yeah, I don't get it, what's wrong with every single open source software being a valid topic for a Wikipedia article. Every piece of open source software is of more interest than any pop singer.
There's a bit of a copyright problem, there- You can't just scan in documents and offer them out as PDF, hoping for the best.

The way early-stage companies sometimes get around this is to allow user-uploads, and then close their eyes and humm to avoid knowing what's in them. See: Youtube, Scribd.
I'm sorry that you see the world that way but not everyone can cure cancer or build robots and to be honest most don't want to.

If you are using any operating system other than the unix invented 40 years ago then I think there is a reason for new operating systems and I stick with my opinion. An airplane is just based on some flying contraption people built 100 years ago but there is a reason we built new ones.
jesh. I went there. That is my college paper. And this disappoints me.

It is a good reflection on the newspaper industry
Mood and Cognition
10 Simple Tips for Launching a Website
Thanks for taking the time to share this with us volomike. It might seem like your complaint is going into a black hole, but it's not.
Hmm. I also feel like if everybody was creative we would be way over-saturated.
Why can't these be webapps? Are there any advantages in making these as native iPad apps?
But why would companies care about their manuals being in users hands? Imagine the app launches first, then starts negotiating with the companies - I doubt that one would get sued.
I was thinking mturk. setup a job for major manufacturers and let it run. need to make sure there's no overlap.