skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Non-random events are generally a lot easier guess correctly at than random events. This is why people will do things like card count or use weighted dice / coins with two heads / tails, etc. This is also why SSL keys are generated from random data rather than weighted data.

I'd love to play the lottery if I knew certain balls were weighted more heavily than others.

If you think non-random events are difficult to predict, give me your longitude and latitude and I'll predict with in five minutes what time the sun will rise tomorrow. Want to bet $1000 against?

The real reason the it is more difficult is because the odds randomly are 1 in 4 billion for the first round, where as a lottery like the 6/49 is 1 in 13,983,816. However, the NCAA is not completely random, it would be difficult to discern what the real odds are but the fact that many players are within a couple games should give you some clue to the decrease in odds given the extra information.

If 100 million brackets are filled out and the realistic odds are 1 in 1.5 billion (given the extra information) then someone should fill out a perfect bracket every 15 years. If you look at the prizes being offered for a correct bracket, it should give you some indication as to the greatly reduced odds that one actually faces. If the odds are really 2^48 for a correct 2 round bracket then it would stand to reason that you could offer a 1 trillion dollar prize for a correct bracket with a ticket price of $1 and still have a house margin of 99.64%

100 - ((1 / ((2^48) / 1 trillion)) * 100) = 99.644

This simply isn't the case. (My math may be way off, I was never a stats major)
Wow, you're no fun. Flexing muscles makes them stronger, you know. And sitting in a chair grows your bottom disproportionately.

Buddha preaches balance.
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Kaspersky gives me a virus warning when I visit this link
Using it with LIMIT makes sense, and I forgot you were doing that.

BTW, you were doing this to avoid using too much memory at the database, but by doing this (assuming it's PHP; you didn't say) you are loading the result set twice into webserver memory.

Obviously it worked for you, maybe the webserver had more free memory.
Your evidence is anecdotal. Don't assume that every company everywhere in every industry deals with the same things that you do.
Yup, that's him. And being his YC classmate I'll also testify the guy is walking talent.
Even if you use vanilla HTML and/or test cross-browser display?
Nobody likes propping up insane petrodictators, but all the good names are taken.
The reason kids are made to do this stuff is so that they get real contact with tangible abstractions. Granted, it is not the best way to force this kind of thing down your throat, but from my own school experience they teach a kid "one orange", "two oranges" first, and then simply hammer them with problems. At no point do they explain the concept of numbers as an abstraction, as in "just one" and "just two".

Kids don't get to internalize numbers, and all of what comes after, because it's all built on more complex abstractions from there on. Come to think, they don't even "get" the concept of "abstraction" in itself. The education system as of now (and 200 years ago) still brute-forces through this very basic thing, and many students just don't come through, which is to be expected.
> Getting profitable is easy. It's the getting big bit which is hard.

Exactly my point, and since the point of most business is to make money that should be the obvious first goal. Getting big is for dreamers, it's a lottery, getting profitable is the sensible goal. Get big later, or risk failing chasing wild dreams.
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That's not the point. We have labor laws in the US because "some people will take the deal."

To understand more clearly, it may be helpful to consider illegal immigration to the United States. The basic problem is that even though US minimum wage is $7.25/hour some people are willing to work for $2/hour. The problem here is clear, even though the workers making $2/hour feel "its a fair trade."

Though less inflammatory, your unpaid internship example is the same. You are flooding the market with artificially cheap labor, making it impossible for others who can't work for free to compete.

Worse, as a business owner, how am I to compete with someone getting free labor while I'm paying my employees like a sucker?

At the end of the day, this "time honored" tradition of unpaid internships is little more than an end-run around minimum wage.
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Note to bloggers: Can we stop living Steve Jobs' life vicariously?
Heck, if it made you giggle, maybe we should use it as our slogan.
Right, it's just deterrence. No amount of signing is going to stop a determined and evil recruiter from just retyping your CV with their buzzwords added. Can't imagine that actually happening, but I am reminded of the employer looking for "pink box testing" experience...
MP3 Encoding Royalty rates on iPhone apps?
I have seen several iPhone applications that support mp3 encoding, and some cost less than $3. The mp3 minimum royalty rates that are on the licensing page: http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/ seem to suggest that such a price is simply impossible IF they are actually paying their legally required royalties, even if just for the patent-only (user-supplied source, probably lame or some such) rate. Are all these apps just hoping to fly under the radar? This seems like wishful thinking. Either that, or I am missing some part of this equation.

I have emailed a few of the creators of such apps asking what sort of licensing scheme they have managed, but none have responded.
It's certainly true that he knows nothing about most of these companies beyond a brief text description. But that is precisely the situation where someone who understood early stage startups would know to reserve judgment.
when using jquery and other google hosted frameworks, i tend to use them from google CDN because a lot of the time not only is it faster, but it tends to be faster for traffic from all over the place. i have a site hosted in hong kong and most of the traffic is from japan, africa, and south america, so obviously the performance will differ for different users. but when i use jquery from google CDN, the performance tends to be similar across users.
Your moral is about forbidding something, not guiding somewhere. Very much like the christian commandments.

And you need to be of a certain culture to understand the "error-correcting" part.
The man going on a journey IS the stranger coming to town...
Ask HN: Finding growing startups?
(I'm posting this under a throwaway account because I am still employed, but looking for other options)

I'm a senior-level developer / team-lead who is complacently working for a fairly established company, and find myself unable to grow and looking elsewhere for opportunities.

Hacker news has a job board, but there is no such thing for the flipside. Does anyone have recommendations for startup-oriented job posting sites that are more in the vein of YC than 37signals/crunchboard, or is this a market gap I should try to fill on my own? ;)
You are flooding the market with artificially cheap labor, making it impossible for others who can't work for free to compete.

You are assuming that unpaid interns would otherwise take the jobs of paid employees. In this regard, you are categorically wrong. Read my post: we don't want to hire anybody. From the post: It's a position "that doesn't exist." Offering to work unpaid is a hack that get's you in the door.
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$ /bin/date +%s

1269411909

$ /bin/date --date=@1269411909

Tue Mar 23 23:25:09 PDT 2010

$

Easy, scriptable, omnipresent. Why would you bother with a web page?
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The tragedy of software development
You're just digging yourself in deeper by trying to poke holes in these companies based on such incomplete information. You really would be wiser to reserve judgment on them. Startups are so volatile, and good startup ideas so often seem bad at first. You're setting yourself up to look foolish by dismissing them so quickly.

What's the rush? Why don't you learn more about these companies before deciding about them?
Offering to work unpaid is a hack that get's you in the door.

Requiring people to offer working unpaid is a hack, that has been outlawed.
Pay an accountant familiar with Utah tax law. It's possible that you owe much less than the state is asking for. You want someone who has been in a business tax audit before, the learning curve can be steep.
I'm a developer with crocodoc. Thanks, that's what we're trying to do! Would you mind sharing the details of your painpoint? Feel free to email if you would prefer not to reply publicly, my email address is in my HN profile.
I feel so old school in the way i take naps.
just have lunch, drink and espresso, lean comfortably on the couch and 20 minutes later (when the caffeine kicks in), my alarm wakes me up, ready to knock out the rest of the day. Well... the rest of the day until the next nap, right before dinner.
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> When elected members of a political party find themselves in opposition, they are not paid to just sit on their hands and say 'fuck it'.

Remind me - did you complain when Dems did that to Bush? (Pre 2006)? You remember - "Disent is patriotic" and all that. Or is that somehow different?

Of cours, the Repubs actually do have proposals. You don't hear about them in the "tingly leg" media, so you'd have you'd have to look elsewhere. Or is that their fault too?
You are assuming that unpaid interns would otherwise take the jobs of paid employees.

Absolutely. But it doesn't have to be within your company. Rather, its a tragedy of the commons.

Lets use my migrant farm labor example again. Many farms in southern California will tell you they can't pay minimum wage and stay competitive with the farms who are using illegal labor. That's because the de facto hourly wage for a farm worker is closer to $2/hour than $7/hour, because of lax labor law enforcement.

I don't think its hard to see how the same is true of programming jobs being taken by unpaid interns. How is my group payment service that pays its employees supposed to compete with WePay that uses unpaid labor?
Here is a python tutorial of how it works http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/pythontutor...
I seem to be missing something. I don't see anything about Go here and the latest version is from January, only supporting C++, Java, and Python.
Your second term is wrong. There are 16 matches in the second round, and you have a 1/2 chance of picking the winner in each, not a 1/4 chance.

The first term (.5^32) is the probability of picking all of the winners in round one (p(A)). The second term (p(B|A)), must be the probability of picking all the winners in round two, given that you picked correctly in round one. Again, that's .5^16, not .25^16.
It did (though less total memory). Significantly, though, the memory use was ephemeral at the application server end. Do the collation, push to a memcache server, server, and die :-)
Protocol Buffers lib in Go, the way they are used at google
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Arrears of pay – one of the worst things for your company
Worse, as a business owner, how am I to compete with someone getting free labor while I'm paying my employees like a sucker?

Remember the context of this discussion. We're talking about non-technical interns - who by definition are less valuable to an early-stage startup. Your argument assumes that your employees are of the same value as your interns. In an early-stage startup, the techs usually run the show. This article began by asking the following: "If you are a non-technical student, and you'd like some experience (i.e.: work) in a startup, what can you do to get in?"

Business owner assumes mature business != early-stage startup founder. The context is different; in most cases the startup isn't even in the market to hire non-technical talent. This robs no-one of a job.
How Popular Tech Companies Got Their Names
The HR dept. at the last company I worked at used a similar pitch based on a "research document" in an attempt to sell the programmers on how much better bench seating in an open floor plan vs cubicles would be for productivity.
Perhaps the "really hard problems" that were submitted & accepted into YC (which PG has knowledge of and you do not) could not be fully solved in 3 months?

I'll bet when Bump came out you thought "Who needs a new way to transfer contact info?" Now they have a partnership with PayPal, and it's clear that their vision is to build the platform for information transfer.

Think bigger. You're judging these companies by their first step on a very long journey.
It'll be interesting to see whether the negative impact of employers trying to stay below 50 FTE employees is offset by the positive impact of people feeling more free to start or join small businesses that don't yet offer health coverage because they don't have to worry about pre-existing conditions when obtaining individual coverage. It's not an obvious calculation either way.
Why not get options in the company that accelerate on a sale / acquisition with an extremely low share price, maybe $0.0000001? That should keep the gov't at bay.
This is the Soviet Union - where public education is free, free, free, as long as you're getting good grades and staying out of trouble.
"is a good reminder that just getting into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't always establish that the published conclusion is correct (or important)."

Which science school did you go to? Science is about the body of evidence, not an individual study. It's about understanding mechanisms, gradually iterating between induction and retroduction to uncover new hypotheses then prove a mechanism over time. It's about gradually building up an argument over many years of research across the field, not any one individual study.

I agree that we need to be careful in interpreting studies (I am a statistician, I should know), but your stance from ignorance adds nothing to the conversation, and in a worst case scenario belittles the efforts of an entire field that you no nothing about, but are biased against all the research you haven't even read from the outset.
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Dang, you're right, my work computer never gave the warning but my home pc did even though they are running the same AV.
Thanks for pointing it out. Would be great if you could flag the story (I can't)
Congrats to the Sinatra team!

I have used sinatra in a bunch of projects ( http://brandpeek.com is one example) and it's a delightful little framework.
This service appeals to me. Nice website and promotional information. Thoughfully presented and seemingly nice support outlets. The pricing seems a bit high relative to what I would ideally wish to pay. Depending upon the nature of the BrainTrust, I might be concerned about security of sensitive content. Can the user data be encrypted? What if a user wishs to end a BrainTrust, can the user data be exported? Nice job! I wish you every success!
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What is a "composition editor?" or for that matter, an "information manager"?
Actually, I was looking for a list of other YC companies to find some that do impress me and Bump, specifically, was one I was planning on mentioning.
I remember reading a while back how Digg had tables with thousands of columns. I know MySQL isn't the fastest, but a speedup for Digg really isn't that impressive.
I'm a co-founder at crocodoc, and would be interested to hear your reasoning behind your "will sell, but will not have too many users" comment. It sounds like you have a specific niche market in mind that you think crocodoc will gain traction in to the exclusion of others?
So say that I'm a student. I take his advice at face value, I find a startup worth looking at, I hop in to help out for no pay. Maybe I do it in my free time, mid-semester; maybe I do it during the summer break. Whatever. I'm enlightened enough to know that I'm working for the education. The business doesn't advertise for it; it's a personal decision that I make to work for them.

Cut to John Doe. John is the son of Mr Doe, who owns a law firm. He spends time off working at his dad's law firm, because he intends to become a lawyer. John is not paid.

If I am told to cease and decease by a lawyer/my school/a policeman - no deal, I'll just stop and say: gee, I was in it because I wanted to learn stuff. Out of my own free will. I can't? No problem - I'll just stop. Ditto for John (though for some reason, I doubt anybody'd actually punish John, or even Mr Doe).

I don't see how I'd get in trouble. His article is directed at the non-technical student, not the employer. (If it was written for an employer/startup founder, then perhaps you're right to suggest that he should disclose that he's giving law-breaking advice. I'd be fully behind you on that one, qeorge, I would.)

But the article's fine as it is. And there's a corollary, of course. Entrepreneurs are relentlessly resourceful. If you're not relentlessly resourceful in figuring out a way to get into a startup for the experience, then you're probably not going to make it anyway.
Neptune may have swallowed a planet
If I was putting my time and money into them and had the same information on them that you do and had interviewed the candidates, it very well may be that I would pick the same companies you did -- who knows. Some of them I can't imagine picking, because the market doesn't interest me.

I'm not digging myself into a hole, I'm making an assessment based on incomplete information, which is all that can be expected of me here and now.

Why don't you stop using all the logical fallacies and insults?
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You should really be sharing your story here so others can benefit (maybe write a blog post if its long)
I don't think its hard to see how the same is true of programming jobs being taken by unpaid interns. How is my group payment service that pays its employees supposed to compete with WePay that uses unpaid labor?

Simple. You'll compete and you'll win (assuming we control the other variables, that is). Why? Well for the simple reason that programming != menial labour. If you pay a premium to have a small group of elite programmers working for you, and WePay has a small group of $0 programmers doing -$10 work - you'll win in the long run.

This discussion is a) not about programmers. And even if it were - b) the argument doesn't apply. You get what you pay for. Nobody is arguing that you should ditch your technical department for a team of unpaid, inexperienced code-monkeys, the same way nobody is arguing that you should ditch your administrative department for a team of unpaid, inexperienced business students.

Startups are too small, and too close to the market to do things like that. They simply won't survive.
Or maybe don't: http://arthurdevany.com/articles/20091028
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When you have incomplete information, there is another option besides saying things that are, as a result, probably mistaken: to wait till you know more before you express an opinion.
He specifically says "this guy was technical"
Sure, Bump impresses you now, but you would've had the same dismissive comments about them on their demo day.

Revisit this list in a year or so and I'm sure you'll have some different opinions and wish you hadn't been so short-sighted.
I usually come to work around noon. And I work at a company with 250,000+ employees.
Public education is free in the United States too if your parents or guardian pay taxes. Whether the parents directly pay for tuition or not is not really the main thrust of my argument. The point is that supportive parents are critical for the academic success of children. If (when) I had the opportunity to ensure my parents would never have to worry about their mortgage or an unexpected medical bill I would take it. I'd send them on a nice vacation too while I was at it. Personally I think it's the least you can do in return for having supportive parents.

Of course, there's a possibility that Perelman's parents were not supportive. But in my experience the majority of gifted children have supportive parents.
It seems rather sick to me, to be honest.

Makes me think I should start working on a service that helps you fake your social network rank.

I have also read several times that this "influencers" theory does not even work.
I wish dinosaurs were still around. I miss those guys.
What ever happened to schools in your neighborhood?

Oh yeah, McMansions.
we have a shared bank account where everybody transfers his share of the combined flat and from this bank account the rent/utilities are paid. takes 10min to setup ONCE and never has to be touched again (until the amounts change but thats at most once a year)
Hah. I remember having a job where my boss would complain about how late I was every day. He said I should come in earlier. I didn't. He asked me if I had trouble understanding his instructions. I told him I understood perfectly, but I just wasn't awake at that hour. He then asked, "so you're intentionally disobeying my instructions." I smiled and said yes.

The issue was not raised again.

(Compare this to my current job, where I got weird looks when I asked if I should be in at 9 on my first day. Little did I realize that this was a place where people came in at 7:00 pm and nobody batted an eye :)
Seriously, you are assuming you know what is in my head and accusing me of being short-sighted -- talking without knowing what I'm talking about... I mean... You do see the absurdity of that don't you?

And for the record, I've built electronic circuits with push buttons and had to accommodate the bounce of the button on the switch, so I do know just a little bit about the difficultly. Compound that with countless phones bumping into each other, perhaps at the same time and the problem is hard.

That's why I am impressed by Bump. It has nothing to do with their potential success then or their current success now. It's an innovative and simple idea. It makes you think, "Wow, why didn't I think of that."

In 2 or three sentences about Bump, it's obvious how difficult the problem is and that someone solved it is impressive.
Is that the Tomcat favicon? lol
For the profiles:

http://venturebeat.com/2010/03/23/y-combinator/
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You can actually just click the little up arrow to give a +1....we don't really need to know that it was you :)
There's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to company name etymologies:

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

Neat stuff.
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I think you can find a lot of people on craigslist, linkedin, dice. There's also sd forum if you are in silicon valley. However, it all depends on what you're looking for - senior developer with token stock options or big founder equity? The latter requires more networking and individual effort.