skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Make sure you pile on the private software projects: without the CS degree, they're gonna want either experience or some proof you can code.

Ironically, plenty of tech departments hire guys who are skilled first rather than having some intrinsic interest in the area they program for. Believe me, some old school companies will hire a CS grad who couldn't spell supply chain over you in a heart beat.

Maybe it's different outside the bay area, but it almost never comes up in interviews much about my passion/prior work experience for _____ they build. Reminds me of a guy who went to work for Tesla expecting a bunch of people pumped to expand green energy only to find guys who couldn't care less: they were hired on technical acumen first, enthusiasm for environmentalism last.
Hurray, here we go again! Uhh no, JavaScript is just fine, baring:

* implicit conversions, which you can get rid of at compile time using TypeScript or Flow.

* lack of explicit ints and ints with more than 31 bits (JITs can give you SMIs, or 31 bit integers for things they can prove are always integer values)

And thats about it.
> one's personal privacy, especially as related to communication, is sacrosanct

Privacy is a fairly modern invention. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think it assumes too much to take the concept of sacrosanct privacy as axiomatic.
Looks like the are going for both 2 and 3 support?

https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli/blob/master/scripts/dev_s...

EDIT:

Nah, only 3. So much for Microsoft and it's legendary backwards compatibility.

https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli/blob/master/scripts/gener...
How do you identify small but fast-growing markets?

Is it a good/bad idea to found a startup in a market that is no longer saturated but also has big players (such as social media?
I'm surprised to see JS described as easier than Python. I'd say it's considerably harder and more complex. The first reason being that it forces you to think about asynchronosity constantly, and that's something a beginner's going to struggle with -- not just the idea that your code won't run in order, but that there are so many ways to deal with it (callbacks, promises, async/await, event emitters) all with their own tradeoffs. The second being that the standard library is anemic, so a ton of what you'd just hit the Python Stdlib for you have to either write yourself or sift through npm to find. Then there's the wildly varying code styles: this person/book encourages the traditional imperative style using loops and mutations, this other person encourages a functional style using folds and maps to do the same things. Prototype-based inheritance is less intuitive than class-based inheritance. There are multiple ways to do everything, even things as simple as variable assignment (var, let, const, implicit global, function foo() vs let foo = function() vs const foo = () =>), weird invisible things that trip you up like hoisting and how creating a global variable looks exactly the same as reassigning an existing local variable. New users will inevitably encounter the multiple competing module systems and either confuse syntax or fret about which to use.

I agree that it's cancerous, and that making the server side more accessible to front-end developers isn't worth all the problems Node introduces long-term. My dream is still a statically-typed version of Erlang.
> Complex in the sense that they were originally thrown together and the results of the program might best be described as "stochastic output", yeah I can agree with that.

Absolutely, they are complex because of poor initial designs, and actually even more complex now due to all the efforts to maintain backwards compatibility...

> Sure, but it sure seems funny that "high quality code" is nearly non-existent in PHP and javascript world ...

jQuery is an incredibly well engineered library by John Resig. I think that jQuery was one of the big technological leaps forward that led to the proliferation of web applications.

For a long time, people thought that cross browser JS inconsistencies and confusing API standards meant that you couldn't build interactive UI applications in the browser. And now they are ubiquitous.

So I guess it depends on your definition of "high quality code". I don't think quality code is about some arbitrary coding aesthetic. It's about results, and it's about what your code does, and how it creates value.
Do you favour companies on your request for startup list? Such as a pharm/biotech company > a software startup?
Figuring this pre-tax isn't very useful. If you were in the (theoretical) 70% tax bracket and you spent 30% of your pre-tax income on housing, you'd starve.
And pointing those canisters at Mars or the moon. Once you've hit Venusian escape velocity you might as well move that atmosphere somewhere else that needs it.

But compressing acidic gasses makes the corrosion problem worse, doesn't it? How do you deal with that?
what is YC's stance on cannabis related startups that take the plant?
A Google Tool for finding xss
The application for YC has recently changed. You no longer ask the question about what is a person's greatest achievement, which was previously said to be the most telling question on the app. Where are you now getting that info on the new app?
I love living in Los Angeles as a single, 20 something, but the thought of trying to raise a family here terrifies me. The median price of a 3 bedroom home is $865,000 which would mean that a large portion of my long term net worth would end up tied to a single asset. When it comes time to put down roots, I'll head to cheaper pastures.
This is also known as the Fallacy of Relative Privation.
To my reading, there are two separate items: a copyright license and a patent grant.
- The former allows you to make copies of the software
- The latter protects you from Facebook claiming patent infringement arising from the use of React Native (aka, Necessary Claims). It doesn't necessarily mean they have such patents but if they do, you are protected.

So if the reciprocity clause in Facebook's patent grant is a problem, all recent MIT licensed software out there without a patent grant would also be off limits.
I believe in the end it all boils down to the fact that JavaScript is a language that wasn't made for the needs of modern day (web) applications, but since it is still a standard, we need to force it into a form where we can have best control over its shortcomings. That's why things like Typescript, Flow and React exist in the first place.
I know this article is about mobile app development, but I think JavaScript would not have the sort of widespread use today if it wasn't for the fact that we use it for website scripting.

So I guess that developers familiarity with the language is what makes it so popular (as in often-used) and is also why we suddenly start using it for arbitrary scripting and mobile app development. The obligatory use of JavaScript in web development led to a whole range of developers growing accustomed to it and now, in spite of its limitations, trying to transfer their ideas to other fields of development.

React Native is just a neat way for JavaScript (React) developers to be able to script UIs for mobile OS's without changing their toolset. And I think for that it's perfectly fine. Obviously if you've never been big into JavaScript I can totally see how cannot make much sense of it all and yeah a lot of the things pointed out are perfectly legitimate. Yet I still think the question whether it makes the language unusable for one scenario or the other is very very opinionated.
Essentially younger are better amiright? Otherwise why are they smarter than someone who actually has real world experience? Is your new grad smarter than Jeff Dean? Or Rob Pike?
The article says post tax but the standard is closer to what you're saying. For a landlord renting a property, for instance, the safe rule of thumb is typically for your tenant to have a gross annual salary of 40x the monthly rent (which for a 2k rental would be 80k gross salary). Using 145k is way too conservative. Similarly, when buying a house, the debt-to-income ratio is calculated on gross (pre tax) income as well and is 28% for housing costs (principal, interest, taxes and insurance), which lines up pretty well with the standard rental calculation.
If anyone has ever tried Anthony Alicea's JS/NodeJS/Angular1 course[1],[2],[3], please let me know if rithmschool's or any other course holds a candle to it. I really really liked Tony's course as it gave quite a deep look into topics, which are usually only attainable from books, while at the same time keeping it very interesting and also contain lots of best practice material and being extremely dense but easy to digest. Do let me know if you guys know any other courses of the same style. If you haven't watched any of Tony's courses, do give them a shot -- they are the holy grails of online education for me. Rigorous -- but not boring or too long.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv_5Zv5c-Ts

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejBkOjEG6F0

[3]https://www.udemy.com/understand-nodejs/?couponCode=LEARNNOD...

Disclaimer: Because it may sound like it, I'd like to clarify I have absolutely no affiliation with Tony or his courses. I just really really liked them.
If you are interested there is an article series on Wait but Why here: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-m... about Elon Musk and his goals with SpaceX (and much more).
Let's say someone is a fresh college dropout and wants to focus on learning programming and start a startup, and apply to YC Summer 2017 in March. What advice do you have on how to go about that?
Determination
Effectiveness
Clarity of vision
Clarity of communication
Intelligence
Quality of the idea
*Potential to be huge
Colorado is calling.
Well, it's a problem with the degree as a signaling device and a problem with the interview process if it repeatedly produces false negatives of a similar type.
I don't think it's unfair. How would you view a person in the 1800s who invested a large fortune in electricity or automobiles prior to certain critical technological innovations that made those things practical. He had the right idea and wanted to move mankind forward but he was 50 years too early. Was he foolhardy? Was he arrogant? Was he admirable? I don't know. Mostly though I think he's not worth giving much of a damn about, and definitely not worthy of some kind of cult of personality of devoted fanboys.
What order do you look at an application -- is the video last?
There are fake GApps that I have tried on experimental devices and they fooled the apps enough to enable them to run. I haven't run these long-term or tried on more than 3 apps relevant to me to say if that would be a good approach.
In no way, shape, or form does this have anything to do with VR
>> A good engineer can write high quality code in "almost" any programming language. It's the coder, not the language, that determines engineering quality.

That's just a platitude, and it's wrong.

Languages with better features allow engineers at varying levels of experience to write better code than they otherwise might.

JS almost forces you to write garbage.
Ability to update your app over the wire with React Native is a massive advantage overlooked in the article. (via Codepush or something similar)

In big companies app releases are a huge problem when 100+ committers and tens of features are released to the same app sometimes within the same app update. React Native has the potential to enable feature teams independently update the app.
Are applications confidential?
Whilst not entirely the answer you're after, I highly recommend reading the micrium book for general RTOS understanding (now in its 3rd version!).

https://www.micrium.com/books/ucosiii/
We do still ask that, and it's still one of the questions I read first. It's on the individual section (each person has to fill it out after the submitter enters their email address).
What do you look for/like to see in a solo founder application? What makes you believe that someone could be successful as a solo founder?
The legal concerns are legitimate, but frankly, I am unconvinced by the criticisms of JavaScript: There are well-known, well-designed tools like ESLint, and if you like types, Flow and TypeScript, which can mitigate the issues. That's more than you can say about Java (COBOL 2.0, now with a bevy of cargo-cult OO that makes things more overly complex), or Objective-C (All the safety of C, with similar OO problems, and a weird syntax that very few people like, and of course, no GC).
> What does it take to be middle class in Los Angeles? That was the question Ross DeVol started out asking himself when he began calculating how much a resident would need to make to spend 30 percent of earned after-tax income on rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles County.

I disagree with the author that this is middle class. A two bedroom apartment is the very definition of impoverished lower class loser, just above homeless.

Middle class means a detached 3 bedroom in the suburbs, with biweekly maid service, two financed cars, health care to the point you don't need to worry about it at all, and buying whatever you want at the supermarket.

What middle class does not include is any one of: a mansion, live in staff, a yacht, full time nannies instead of occasional baby sitters, swiss boarding school for the children, a groomsman for the horse, a pool boy, a cabana, a private plane, or zero income tax.

This is what skilled factory workers and teachers had in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Above them, designers, engineers and lawyers, comprised the upper class, or upper middle class.
Yes! Everybody on this commenting forum that knows about the science or has any technical questions or doubts must shut up. Only adoring reverent fawning must be allowed.
Right. A nuclear reactor generates massive amounts of heat from fission, then uses that heat to boil water (sometimes heavy water for better radiation shielding) to make steam to cause turbines to spin, which generates the electricity. (in fact, fossil fuel burning plants also use this steam-electric model)

If the end goal is to generate heat, then there's no good reason to add those additional steps.
Video first, then the questions about the founders, then the idea, then the traction/revenue, then everything else.
Do you plan to release more details about common visa/immigration issues and how Y Combinator helps with them?
Personally I really like that change because it helps keep one thread from derailing a whole submission.

But I also feel like my karma goes up faster now too, but that could just be in my head.
For ag-related hardware startups that may require frequent in-the-field testing, how will that reconcile with YC's relocation requirement?
I've been primarily a C# programmer for the majority of my career, with probably equal parts dabbling in Ruby, PHP, Javascript, Sql (large sprawling analytics framework sql), and a bit of R.

When I switched to Ruby dev-work though, my tools changed. I found myself writing a lot more scripts for things which I previously would have made a C# console app for, mostly because osx/linux make it a lot easier. Soon I started writing a little Python, and found I was just plain productive (things that might have taken me many hours would take minutes), and now it's becoming a primary language for me. I'm not sure I'd use it for the majority of my work, but it's probably my #2 language tool.
I love the "questions, not essays" shut-down. It's not rude, but it quashes this tendency people have to try and impress rather than to ask a question.

Next time I'm giving a talk: one question per person (want to ask more, go to end of line), and ask your damn question.
What do you like to see when reading the answer to that? What are your indicators for success?
Introducing Bcoin: JavaScript Bitcoin Library for Node.js and Browsers
We do try to talk about this but should talk about it more.

It turns out that most people (and certainly most journalists) want to talk about/write about the success cases.

I'll think about how to best do this.
Agreed. HackerRank works great as an 'initial' filter. The way to use it correctly is to ask people a couple fairly easy questions, because if they can't pass the easy stuff, then you shouldn't waste their time with a full onsite. A person who is at least moderately capable, shouldn't at all struggle with your initial filter.

Save the tough questions for the onsite interview, where an interviewer can subjectively make judgments about their performance.
Hi Sam. Can you explain the process for considering a Non-Profit a little bit more? A friend and I naturally think that we have a significant value proposition in the non-profit sector with everything other than the technical part flushed out thus far.

EDIT: Particularly if there is potential synergy with a business component as well?
I'm not sure what you mean. I don't know any languages where you don't have to define your own node if you want to implement a new kind of tree, and write a bit of code to recurse over it. (In JavaScript the most common tree is the DOM, but you should still be able to build another one if you need it.)

Also, in an interview it's perfectly fine to say you'd use a library, if you know one that applies. (They might ask you next how you'd do it without a library, but you still get points for knowing about it.)

The other thing to remember is that everyone is effectively grading on a curve, and with practice you get better at interviews.
wow that's confusing! Thanks for the links though.
Thanks. I'm now having flashbacks to the summer of 1990, when I worked on a Education professor's research project, creating a math test in a Hypercard stack that presented the question that provided the most information about the testee's abilities, given their previous answers.
that would not have been in France, I think?

I thought it was about Coulomb, though.
For solo founders, I look for extra evidence that the person is really effective, ideally on this particular startup but if not then previously in their career.

It's harder to be effective as a solo founder, so the burden of proof is higher.
It's probably worth pointing out that the rich are already smarter, more attractive, and longer-lived than the poor. I'm not aware of a study testing rich vs poor bodily strength, but given the other results I wouldn't exactly find it surprising if the rich were stronger too.
Right. Web is first target, apps is second. Think of an app you install on device, and apps registering as a publisher can talk to this app to get your subscription status, and not show you ads.

The promise is with sufficient adoption by users and pubs, new pubs will have incentive to do this. Except maybe apps by large corporations.
Man, I'm late posting this, but this is exactly what we're building with Anvil - https://anvil.works

> Superior scripting language

We use Python - on the client and on the server (with rich RPC between the two).

> Steal ideas from GUI-focused languages and toolkits

The biggest such idea is that most layouts should be done visually - Visual Basic had this right, and we've been moving backwards ever since. (The web has three, usually four intermediate representations you have to think through to edit your appearance: Template (->substitution->) HTML (->parsing->) DOM (->CSS render->) visual layout)
Besides, while JS's problems are very real, they're quite exaggerated. It's still a perfectly usable language, even without TS and whatnot.

And unlike some languages used for app programming, an error doesn't have the potential to hand you a segfault.
edit: updated title.
> There is nothing about: part of speech categories, relative clauses, morphology

This is an interesting and deep question. I believe that there are multiple ways to tell the story of a phenomenon. Using POS categories or verb tenses helps us to organize and learn about the medium. It is important for humans to know what a verb tense - in theory and practice - is, to be able to form not just grammatical sentences, but also ones, that express things clearer.

However, there is no rule that says that these concepts must be learned first before you can do anything else. In a sense, I see the (neural) machines taking a step back.

Whereas earlier attempts at language modeling took into account a lot of linguistic concepts, maybe even tailored to a specific human language, the more end-to-end approaches ignore these things and get better results. What can this tell you about the concepts? They are certainly useful and have been established by a scientific community. The machine, as it reads not just tens or hundreds of sentences but billions, creates a mathematical model, that happens to have aspects, that have very useful real world sides to them. A machine that learns a language model - or that learns translation, can teach us new things about words, and ultimately also about the world. I believe this is a beautiful aspect of the current neural renaissance.

----

Kanerva in a preface to Geometry and Meaning writes:

> We think of some sciences, by their very nature, as being more mathematical than others. We even refer to physics and other heavily mathematical sciences as "hard sciences," as if to imply that social sciences and humanities are somehow soft or easy. Another way to see this picture, however, is that mathematics itself is hard and that it would be applied first to sciences that themselves are relatively easy. [...] It matters greatly that the mathematics be appropriate. [...] Mathematics is a tool for coping with complexity. [...] This brings us to the substance of [this] book: the exploration of mathematics that would be appropriate for describing concepts and meaning. The branch of mathematics that has traditionally been associated with meaning is logic. Logic is also discussed here, yet the main emphasis is on identifying mathematical spaces that would lend to modeling of meaning. (http://www.puttypeg.net/book/chapters/foreword.html)
What startup stage would you recommend a company be in when applying?
Thanks for doing this AMA, a quick question...

1. What's the possibility of YC companies doing biz dev with LargeCorp during the 3 month bootcamp? Is this something that YC can help with due to it's large network etc.
> checking one of the cells at the 16 or 32 cell stage

I wonder: How is an embryo dealing with missing a cell at this early? Does this error compound after a few doublings (embryo is smaller)?
Show HN: Rabbitlol, an open source bunnylol clone running on Google App Engine
What are the chances of a Subsidiary in getting accepted to YC? Have you had any case like this previously?

P.S.: I'm talking about a case where only the subsidiary has applied for YC and that subsidiary is making a different product than what the parent company is making.
Across browsers it works only if both browsers are based on the same engine.

- Group1: Chrome, Chromium, Opera, ...

- Group2: Firefox, Tor Browser, ...

- Group3: on iOS every browser is based on Safari

- ...

Though with a backend you could track users switching among Chrome and Firefox by misusing WebRTC to leak the private IP ( https://www.perfect-privacy.com/webrtc-leaktest/ ).
If the switching between browsers happens in a short period of time, the public + private IP is a pretty solid guess.
If you observe and store this connection once you can always track the user switching among the two browsers.
Mars's thin atmosphere does provide significant levels of radiation shielding, such that surface radiation levels are comparable to those in low-Earth orbit:

http://www.space.com/18504-mars-rover-curiosity-astronaut-ra...

The Moon, on the other hand, is baldly exposed:

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/0...
We happen to match up with your RFS for city-related to startups. Do we need to tie this into your RFS beyond checking the box on the application?
What are some examples of adding value to a company that's already raised a good seed round ($2-4M)?