skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: YC interviewees coming from outside US
We're getting on a plane from Edinburgh in about 24 hours and flying over for our YC interview this week. We want to make the most of our time out there and meet other startups, angels, find out about meetups etc. I thought it might be useful if I did a public shoutout for:

1) Anyone with a couch or floor to put up YC interviewees
2) Recommendations for which coffee shops are good to work in
3) Recommendations for good meetups over the next week
4) Anyone who wants to play tourguide or chill and work together.

--
edit: from jkaljundi: 5) Also any of the other teams for YC want to meetup?

email me at 'sam at getbloop dot com' and I'll try and coordinate something between us if there's demand.
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Well, I won't be reading that, then.
why not make the code public so we can help?
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I agree. But that's not the case with this PHP framework (as far as I can tell). They use 'MVC' as structure for there code (or as you call it: prescriptive). And then suddenly a lightweight framework is not that lightweight anymore. So again I agree with your descriptions of the web as MVC, but MVC in a PHP framework only... I still believe that's just a hype word.

BTW I don't want to start a flame war about MVC. I just got some question marks about using a PHP 'MVC' framework.
Hi ptn, I would recommend two books for you: The Places that Scare You, by Pema Chodron, and How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. If you send me your details I can send the books your way (my email is in my profile). Alternatively, you could add those books to an amazon.com wish list and I could get them for you that way. I wish I could write more about why I'd recommend those books, but I have to get to work :)

Good luck, buddy.
You haven't played enough xpilot.
My original source was an Economist article about health care from last summer, but it seems to be behind a paywall now.

The Washington Post covers it here:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/05/health_r...
> A tightly integrated state can operate more efficiently than one that tries to regulate companies from afar [...]

Depends a bit on what you mean with efficency.
Save that broken wheel for next time repair ;)
Because in the (European) country where I live, entrepreneurship is not part of the culture. Not once in my entire education did it occur to me that people actually start businesses (despite both my parents being self-employed). Education focuses on skills, society and some culture, but not at all on economics or entrepreneurship.

This counts for any level of schooling, including University. The number of IT spinoffs from my alma mater in the past decade can be counted on one hand.
I'd say that was a sure bet.

I'm really impressed with dropbox. Traditionally I've just used my own Subversion set up. But recently I was having difficulty helping to explain version control to a few fellow university students who couldn't grasp the whole central repository thing (fair enough, these were humanities students I was talking to and they just wanted to know how to keep their thesis safe and to make sure they didn't venture into versioning hell).

As a last resort I recommended dropbox, and it took less than 10 minutes to explain the whole thing end to end and have them all get started. Now all of them are raving about it and recommending it to friends.

What I realise is not only how good the dropbox interface is (pretty much invisible) but also how something that we techies take for granted still hasn't reached the mass market, and how with a little re-packaging and thought around their use case people gleefully buy-in... this is the tech they've been waiting for.

The iPhone app was one of the things that sold it to the students. None of them have an iPhone, but they were all of the same though, "But if I get one I'll be OK".

So I'm sure the android app will help in the same way, as would a Windows Mobile one should that surface.

I'm rambling... just impressed by how effective drop box is at communicating and selling something we've all taken for granted years ago.
cperciva, thank you for clarifying what I should have put in there in the first place.

Anyway, this seems a good overview and is not wildly out with the other literature afaik.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LbTDLa_2opsC&pg=PA26&...

so, 130m tons of salt is supported, 6m tons of magnesium, but 1 ton of silver and 0.02 tons of gold, and commercial extraction seems limited to salt (obviously) magnesium and bromine. I suspect someone quoted the "boring" elements accurately and then upvoted the "fun" elements for you.
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The canonical coffee shop answer is Red Rock:

http://www.redrockcoffee.org/
looks a lot like http://scroogle.org
all search engines started with that level of privacy and they evolved from there for various legal, marketing and technical reasons. It would be interesting to look at DDG's privacy policy in 3 years and compare it with this thread.
One thing I've noticed about a lot of the really successful first stage VC fundings: the deal was done quickly.

If a VC is dragging out a deal more than say a couple of months, something somewhere is wrong.

Caveat: if you're doing something radically new, the time it takes to sell the concept vs. work out the deal probably doesn't count. Wildly successful very fast funding examples that I can think of like Apple and Sun didn't have to sell their concepts (much; first really consumer friendly PC long after the concept had seized the imagination, the disruptive technology of the engineering workstation in an era where computer power was very dear and very centralized).
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The class is great. I'm currently reading the lectures. One thing I wish could improve is the assignments. If you aren't in the class you get no guidance at all. If they include hints to complete the last assignment in the next one that would be perfect. Occassionally I've run into problems and since I don't have the free time to dedicate to completing the assignments I've skipped a few.
I second yanowitz: this is wicked cool, thank you very much; it would be even more awesome than it already is if we had a choice of language. Do you think you could find the time to include Javascript and sh?
seems like only yesterday that the tech world was giddy with excitement over the possibility that palm could come back from the dead, apple-style. now i've read a couple of articles that say they are as good as gone.

i personally wouldn't have ever used a pre, but increased competition is always good, so i'm sorry to see them go.
+1 to the small talk/smiling thing - I did it for a few months when I was in school and definitely noticed a difference in my comfort level when dealing with people.
Techcrunch has the most power today. Actually, they pretty much have a monopoly on covering launching startups before anyone else.

So go with TC coverage as exclusive, and then go with more substantial repeat coverage from other places.

[I have been through that discussion with many CEOs who launched with many different strategies - I'm giving you a quick summary of what could be hours of discussions]
You might try asking the Clojure Google Group (forgive me if you did and I missed it).
Do we really need threads like this? If you don't feel something meets the guidelines, flag it or don't vote for it. There's only one way for people to learn how to fit into HN: the school of hard knocks. People will do whatever we reward them for. Let's make sure we're rewarding them for the right things.
Just to remind people that the NHS isn't the sole provider of health care in the UK - there are plenty of private health care insurers and providers which seem to co-exist fairly happily with the socialist NHS.
What percentage of healthy young people get in car accidents that require them to pay large medical bills, excluding those that are paid by the other driver's insurance? I doubt it's a very large percentage. The fact that something happens "all the time" in a nation of 300 million does not mean that it's likely to happen to you.
Think about China pressuring everyone in their neighborhood to buy Airbus instead of Boeing.

Bad example: 51% of the sub-assemblies in the Airbus 380 super-jumbo are made in the USA. Meanwhile, around 51% of the sub-assemblies in the Boeing 787 are made ... guess where?

(The Boeing/Airbus cross-subsidy cat-fight in front of the WTO has been going on for about two decades now, and both sides are (a) firmly entrenched and (b) have been working for years on "poison pill" policies to deter both the USA and the EU from slapping an embargo on the rival manufacturer.)

One of the side-effects of the current free trade regime (and, importantly, our vastly improved global communication infrastructure) is that it becomes much harder for countries to haul up the trade barriers because complex fabrications come from non-obvious places. (Another random example: the best-selling Japanese SUV in the UK, the Nissan Qashqai, was designed in, and is largely manufactured in ... England.)
I haven't read it, but how useful can it be until we see what, if anything, comes out of the reconciliation process?
Ask HN: Is a SQL Library Application a useful idea ?
Hi,

Summary : would a SQL library application, that gave a central place for teams to store
standardize and share SQL be useful ?

I'm considering creating a SQL library application for windows.

It will either be a stand alone app or an Excel Add-In.

At this point I'm thinking

Features :

- You can add in SQL statements (probably pasted from your SQL client)
- Categorize Statements
- Apply a configurable format (indenting etc) to each statement
- Associate a description with each statement

Would this be useful ?

Cheers
You're not missing much. I've learned that karma is not about the quality of the post, but about how much time you're willing to commit to posting. People with high karma merely post a lot. That doesn't mean they aren't saying interesting things, but it doesn't mean they are saying interesting things either.

Also, I see far too many people repeating the same thing without anything new. It's far to easy to take the popular way out, preach to the choir, and get the karma votes.

Finally, when I do stumble on something and consider sharing it, I usually find it was submitted. In this case, I don't bother resubmitting. It's always amusing when I see the article resubmitted and on the front page days later, with a wittier/more intelligent headline, but oh well.
I think you would use 'editline' for that, no? This is more a minimalist/default/configure can't find anything else solution.
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Wow, that this problem exists in the US wasn't even on my radar. I could understand that you couldn't do a startup because you might be too sick yourself or have to spend time caring for a sick family member, but the financial aspects of it never crossed my mind. Being from a country with universal healthcare completely moves that out of the picture.

Now I understand why you guys on here think this is such a big deal to US startups.
I'm not too familiar with readline, but traditional EMACS behavior is for ^T to drag a character forward, and only transpose at the end of a line.

And thanks a LOT for writing this; as I'm sure you know, the GPLed readline has caused a lot of heartburn for years and years.
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That's bad form if you're negotiating to get an exclusive. You're also less likely to get anyone to cover you if your pitch is general rather than directed at a particular writer or editor.
Historian finds tech bubble that didn't pop (180 years ago)
What is SQL specific about your idea? Wouldn't it work just as well for any type of code snippets?

And, wouldn't most developers want their code-snippet add-in to be integrated into their IDE?
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It usually makes sense not to have insurance against any event that your resources can comfortably absorb. If that were not the case, insurance companies would not be profitable.
Crap, interviews are this weekend? Sigh. I'm flying out to NYC to visit the Hackers and Founders NYC this Thursday night, otherwise, I'd schedule something this Thursday for you guys. If you're around, there's a Hackers and Founders meetup Monday night in Mountain view: www.hackersandfounders.com.

Otherwise, any place on Castro Street in Mountain View is a decent bet, especially the Red Rock cafe. Any place on University Ave in Palo Alto is also a pretty safe bet.

And, if you're just visiting for a couple of days, I always suggest visiting the Computer History Museum. They give great 1.5 hour tours, and it's pretty amazing to see the history of computing, and realize that a great bit of it happened in the neighborhood. At times, you can hang out with some of the original engineers that build machines like the PDP 10 as they restore one to get it working. Did I mention tha they have a working Difference Engine? It's amazing.

Aside from that, as to event lists, email Chris of Brendan over at the Startup Digest: http://thestartupdigest.com/ keep good tabs on what's going on. It would be worth pinging them and letting them know what you're doing. I'm sure they could make a great bunch of suggestions.

There's always a bunch of stuff going on in San Francisco, as well. Pick a coffee shop or pub, and you're bound to run in to someone working in the biz.

Also, I'd suggest you put your email in your profile so people can ping you. Offering to take people out for a pint will often get you quality time with other founders. :)
I don't think a new headline will make it re-submit, it is based on the URL.
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Poll: Do you discourage TL;DR in comments?
I'm asking this because I noticed that someone said that TL;DR is discouraged by HN. Personally, I feel that there are two competing desires that hackers have: desire for detail and desire to conserve attention as the limited resource that it is. Thus, I don't see anything wrong with putting TL;DR in a comment.

But at the same time, is this some big faux pas that I've committed unknowingly? Or is this an opinion that's subject to debate?
Yes! I'll downvote any comment that contains TL;DR
Yes, but I won't downvote a comment for having TL;DR
It is acceptable sometimes, but not others
I don't see anything wrong with TL;DR
That depends on who you are, what you have, and what you want to do. For many people, this would just mean lower credit limits and a delay in house buying plans, if you had any.

The bottom line for me is that, if I were a healthy young person, I would not pay for health insurance under this plan. Actually, when I was a young healthy person, I didn't pay for insurance - I went uninsured from when I was off my parents' plan until I was 29. So did lots of others. The case for buying health insurance is now far weaker than it was then.
The mind works with automatisms and reflexes. They condition the way you interpret any situation, and the emotion you feel because of this interpretation.
The key is to become aware of these mechanisms: don't let them control you.

In your daily-life, inevitably you will interact with other people. At this moment, there might be a little voice in your head (litteraly) saying "Don't do this. It's dangerous. Remember that time..." + flash images of painful past situations. It's your instinct, acting to protect you. The problem is the association you made between people interaction and pain (probably because of a difficult childhood). You need to fix this.

Actually there might be several broken mechanisms acting in different situations.: don't try to fix them all at the same time. Focus on each one independently, then "force" it as much as possible to replace the bad behavior by the behavior you want. It will be hard at the beginning, then easier.

A psychologist might help you identify these broken mechanisms in your daily life. But the key is to gain awareness of them, acting in your head. Some of them could be:

- taboo: being shy or feeling uncomfortable is not a taboo. Talk about it. Everyone enjoy talking about what they are concerned about. This is your life, so talk about it. People will actually appreciate knowing you better, and you might be amazed to see how many people feel the same.

- judgment: people are not judging you all the time. Most of the time, they don't care about you. Don't think anything you do will be evaluated, judged, and blamed.

- perfection: nobody is perfect. Why would you? People learn from failures. If they don't fail, they don't evolve. Don't feel shameful to ask for help. It's very positive.

- right: you have the right to exist. You have to right to make suggestions. You have the right to decline others' suggestions.

It's a long road, but it's worth it. Hang on!
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Why no discussion of the disk drives supporting this database? The write performance dropped to 150 when the disk starts getting pounded as, up to that point, everything was in a memory buffer. Does the temporal partition spread the file over multiple drives? What's the capacity and theoretical throughput of the drives?
I find it disrespectful. If you can't be bothered to read, why bother to comment? If you feel an entry does not deserve your attention, do not give it your attention, and simply ignore it. Actively saying you didn't bother to read what the other person wrote is simply insulting. Make of that what you will.
"because we can't imagine the "unfairness" of a system which doesn't cover everyone exactly 100% equally."

The system in the UK doesn't even pretend to have "100% equality" - if you want to you can go to private health providers and insurers. Very few people do though because the socialized care from the NHS is often good enough.

As for complaints about bureaucracy - I'm always amazed at how little bureaucracy is involved. Only time I can remember signing a form in a hospital was after my wife had a climbing accident and the hospital wanted to keep her in longer but she wanted to go home - so we had to sign some disclaimer.

Maybe I am a socialist or something, but I actually really like the idea of everyone in this country getting pretty decent healthcare that is free at the point of delivery. Of course, I know that I am taxed for it in various ways - but for this I am happy to pay.
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Possibly, but going with one particular blog could very leave you only getting coverage from that one blog.

If your start-up is exciting enough, emailing them all should have them all racing to write about you first.
A good point.

SQL is more likely to be used in different applications than code in an organisation I would say. So there is more use to an independant library location.

Also code is usually in the context of a project / application where are SQL statements often exist in isolation. I think most code snippets exist as part of a code base, but SQL statements often do a single job.

That's what I'm thinking anyway. Not too sure. I guess I shall note you as someone who doesn't see the value.

Good feedback to have.
As a former member of this research group, I can tell you are spouting nonsense and I think you had better run along and read the paper before making derogatory comments. It's just that people and media are far more interested in seeing robots than in seeing software.

FYI: I have spent the last 10 years working on algorithmic scientific method.
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Architect I'd guess. I typically make frameworks that others build on top of. Nice when you return to it X years later and see what bits haven't changed (e.g. the bits you got right! :D)

I also really enjoy reading code (hacker) and occasionally go a bit superhero when time-frames are short and important work is due.
It isn't mentioned here, but hashes are a big win in terms of memory savings. The hash representation for small hashes is very efficient compared to keeping top level keys. You can get savings of around 25% by moving data into hashes with five fields, instead of having 5*n keys. It's made me drastically reconsider how I've been using Ohm, because now I want to encode my models into hashes.
It does serve to mark the passage of time. Thanks to submissions like this one, we don't really need calendars around here; we mark time by the periodic occurrence of RedditFear.

What's surprising to me is that Reddit has made it to the ripe old age of five, yet despite a highly competitive market it still appears to be the gold standard for "news sites that HN doesn't want to be like". Congratulations, Reddit folks, you're obviously doing something right! ;)
Actually, I've always thought it was the other way around. It's a bit like saying "I know my comment is long and you might not read it. Here's a brief summary if that's the case."
It's really weird.

They made a bet-the-company phone for "busy people" that mostly works only in the US and that is locked to a single carrier.

This is incredibly stupid.

Had they decided to sell unlocked GSM phones since day one, I bet they would have a a lot more of them in the hands of their users.
The var statement declares a variable as local to the current scope and the entire current scope, not just from the var statement onward. These local variables shadow any existing variables from outer scopes.

Err, I tested this on Chrome's Inspector console, and I don't see such behaviour. The article says name should be undefined at the time of the comparison in the below code, but it isn't (and I frankly can't see why anyone would want it to be). Is this a feature of my execution environment, or have I just completely misunderstood what the author means?

(function(name){var cmp=name=="tim"; var name; return cmp})("tim") // returns true
I assume you've read it already, but for anyone looking for further reading on Redis' hashes, see last week's update:

http://antirez.com/post/redis-weekly-update-1.html
Having been first on both sites, I can offer a bit of clarity.

Go with Techcrunch if you want to have VC's and other business's take notice of you. Go with Mashable if you want lots of users to read about your product and actually use it. Techcrunch is written for people in the biz. Mashable is written for people who enjoy using the tools biz guys make.

Also, Readwriteweb is a great blog and will likely still write about you even if they dont get the exclusive. Just make sure you save some info thats "just for them", So dont give the whole kaboodle to mashable/tc.
A community's culture is the aggregate decision of the members of that community. If users want it to go one way, then why not? If you don't want the users to define their own culture, then don't call it a community, because it's not.

Additionally, if you feel HN would be helped by having more posts of a certain type, then start sharing more posts of a certain type!
if your in palo alto
coffee shops - university cafe, coupa cafe, cafe del doge, satura cakes
couch/chill/work - hit me up chris@thestartupdigest.com might be able to help
meetups - sign up for thestartupdigest.com! if you miss the issue this monday email me and I will fwd it to you
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