skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Racists could try and build in genetic triggers to cause any "mixed race" grandchildren to die in the womb. This is impossible to do in general but someone might try. Imagine someone engineering "Aryan" children whose children must be blond and blue-eyed and will self-abort if not.

If this happens, you'd imagine a cottage industry of gene-drive-removers... and then genetic DRM mechanisms in turn. Not a good time for anyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive
There is also the possibility that a sperm mitochondrion can be transmitted to the egg. Normally it's destroyed, but there's always exceptions in biology.
Not sure if rhetorical, so I appreciate the thought exercise and your approach to a simple question.

If you were genuinely interested -- there's quite a few reasons why YC is appealing but ultimately one thing sticks out.

Farming has a lot of potential for control and subsequently, abuse. You said in a recent blog post -- if I can grow the product either better or cheaper (talking about food/produce), I'll win. With current technologies and my background and experience it seems very likely I will be successful.

YC is one of very few organizations that I trust to assist and embrace the humanitarian responsibility of being a potential global leader.

In a nutshell.
Can you be clearer about minimum requirements? I have an incomplete prototype but I get the impression you want more? It'll probably have a few security issues right now that I need to iron out too.

When to put this on the Internet to show you guys and how much should I have.

Working on this in my spare time is very difficult to get to a point I'm happy with. Maybe I should quit my job?

Be good to be super clear on this...
Nitrogen is extremely common. Curiosity rover found nitrogen that can be used in farming:

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/mars-nitrogen/
Whats wrong with funding a company that has the potential to reach 100M?

Nothing is wrong with doing such a thing. It's just not the business most Silicon Valley VCs are in. VCs are in the business of taking on large risk in pursuit of a large return, not taking on small (or medium) risk in pursuit of a small (or medium) return.

You don't get mad at a butcher because they're in the business of selling meat and not vegetables. Same thing here.
Send robots.
How would YC know if someone is poor when they apply? Just by what school they attended? I don't know the stats but I'd be shocked if the majority of YC's most recent accepted class were from ''Ivies'' (a very tiny population).

I went to school with many brilliant but ''poor'' kids on full-ride scholarships. From my perspective the biggest barrier to them becoming entrepreneurs wasn't that nobody would fund them but rather that the immediate salaried incomes available to them upon graduation were life-changing for them and their families and ''too good to pass up'' in their personal risk-adjusted calculus.
And the negative comments help wipe out a great bit of future competition. If you kill an idea before it gets started, you reduce the risk of it actually working.

Here to the crazy ones.
While I can't argue the shortcomings of js, it's hard to not see most of the argument as a strong stance of statically typed languages that get compiled against those of dynamically typed languages that evaluate at run time. Both types of languages have their time and place and I wonder if bringing that discussion dilutes the discussion to avoid react native.

On the point of community versus big company support I can't help but observe what appears to be anti open source sentiment conveyed as fact. While many of us have seen fads come and go we have to admit the wild success and stability of many open source libraries without formal agreements to maintain them. Everything from Rails, to Django, to jQuery, and Linux distros. There is a caveat here that JS libs do seem to die out faster and have questionable quality but again plenty are also great.

I think the choice of React Native really boils down to understanding the platform and source. If you understand how React Native leverages the toolkits and interacts with the system I think you have the tools you need to make a good decision.

For me I prefer native development where I can easily control and limit dependencies. If I want to hit all devices or most I'll build a great responsive web app. At the end React Native is today NOT a production level solution that will cover android and iPhone devices, android is a separate toolkit.

My rambling is done I suppose. If anything can be gleaned from this it is to understand the risks and be mindful of the costs of adopting a new framework and dev environment. If you are careful, intentional, and lean on smart teammates for help you will be just fine.
Only if you see life as a competition against your fellow humans.
Poor wretched souls of the previous millennia...they all were denied their basic human rights.
The Science of Headline Writing: Does A/B Testing Headlines Work?
Why are you primarily looking for >billion dollars startups?

I would wager that if you take a look at an accurate distribution of markets according to potential you would find a magnitude more small/average markets (that are untapped) than billion dollars ones. And similarly, I suspect that the success rate for those "boring" ventures is much higher than the exciting shiny rising stars.

Question: Why not optimize for companies that are certainly not going to become Airbnbs but will capture the full value of an averagely sized market (say between 50 and 300 millions)? And if my guess is correct and they end-up eating a lot less resources than the soon-to-be-unicorns, you could even optimise for volume.

Is the pay-off (wrt. to the energy spent and success rate) for unicorns really worth it?
Fathom: Reference Workloads for Modern Deep Learning Methods
yep, i do this for yc!

just like the rest of yc, taking care of yourself and your cofounder relationship is DIY but we offers resources to help. i'm an executive coach (with a specialty in startup founders) and our founders book office hours with me when they need support around managing stress/anxiety, troubleshooting conflict in difficult relationships (with cofounders, investors, loved ones, etc), communicating effectively, and generally thriving on the roller coaster of startup founderdom.

i also provide referrals to therapists and coaches when necessary. it depends on what the founder's looking for and what they need.

i'm happy to answer any other questions you have about this.
Samsung consistently fails at software. I honestly wish they would just quit and make their hardware use something more standard.
Does YC ever plan to open a new office/branch in another country (not the US)?
> Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers.

Slapping down dissenting opinions leads to an echo-chamber. One mans sceptic is another's "nay-sayer", I think community moderation (via votes) is filtering high value comments rather well,so specific moderation is hardly required: egregious flaming excepted.

> If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted

Just because you disagree with a given opinion does not make it worthless.
If you weren't confused then something would be wrong. People in the industry get confused by this subject matter eligibility stuff. Alice's tests are pretty vague and leave a lot up to individual judgement on the merits of each case. It's hard to give hard and fast rules.

That said, it's hard to say that any other jurisdiction has a far simpler or better test for software implemented inventions. It's just a hard question.
Since it doesn't make anyone else dumber, weaker or uglier, this mostly sounds like an argument based in envy.
Python 3 for all intents and purposes, unless you're in a field where Python 2 is still prolific (but if you are, then you probably already know that).
Nope. Not even close to what I was saying. In fact, I repeatedly said that I am NOT saying that inexperience people are better/smarter. I'm not sure how you got to that, other than pure determination to believe I was saying that.

This is pretty simple.

Experience makes someone a better software engineer. Smartness also makes someone a better software engineer.

Some experienced people are smart. Some are not. Some inexperienced people are smart. Some are not.

All else being equal, I'd prefer to hire experienced over inexperienced, and smart over dumb. But, sometimes, all else isn't equal.

Given two candidates (P = smart but inexperienced vs Q = dumb but experienced), who would you rather hire?

I, personally, would rather hire P. I can train P and turn them into a pretty good software engineer -- and P will only get better with time.

A process that is a "build this project in 3 hours" test will favor Q. If you prefer Q over P, then that's a great process to have.

If you prefer P over Q, then this probably isn't the right process for you. You might do better with the whiteboard coding/algorithms process -- or some mix of different things.

And, you know, that's okay. All interview processes are flawed. A company should pick one that is the least flawed for their situation, be aware of the weaknesses of their process, and do what they can to mitigate it.

Tech companies are generally aware that one of the weaknesses of the algorithm-focus is that good people sometimes do poorly do to lack of preparation, and that's why they encourage preparation.
Understanding India's Nationalism
There's probably a lot more changes than you realize. I can only assume given your comments you've never worked on problems like this. There's so many benefits you can get from writing an app specifically for low-end Android devices with poor data connectivity.
I'd especially like to see this in the form of lessons learned. Some of my favorite startup pieces are where a founder sat down, told their story, and said, "Next time, here's what I'm doing different."

In the startup world we have to be comfortable making mistakes, but I really want those to be new, interesting mistakes.
Axel Springer chief warns traditional media risk extinction
Most days is just zero as I usually work from home. If I go to the office I cycle for about 15 minutes.
Yeah, but why use another patch on top of a patch where there are modern type-safe languages like Swift. JS has its uses, but it's difficult to debug, doesn't take advantage of all the advances in modern languages design that help prevent whole classes of bugs, and carries a lot of baggage. The only benefit would be universal app development, but even then Xamarin seems like a better choice.
The space race, and lunar landings, along with Concorde were perhaps the last gasp of the post-war optimism and prestige science projects. It was still just possible to justify them for national pride rather than balance sheet.

Quite a change from the 40s and 50s and the transatlantic blur of experimental aircraft - X planes, VSTOL, supersonic, first jet airliner prototype in 1949, Concorde protoype in 1969. Nuclear power was meant to usher in an era of cheap, abundant, clean energy, and science had a pretty positive rep.

I've no doubt the effects of oil crisis and following recession put paid to an awful lot of NASA plans. As they'd proved they could do it, and did so first, I expect politicians saw less point in keep going back.

The arrival of market forces for everything with Reagan and Thatcher will have further limited, seeing plans for space stations and bases shelved and building small probes instead. This was the era of the artists impressions. Of things we'd never see.

Since then it's more about balance sheets and budgets if you want a large project. Military excepted.
Was going to add this. Such an awesome guy and his question was valid albeit goofy.
The article was surprisingly light on details. They didn't mention specific fixes or techniques they wanted to move upstream. They also didn't mention why they thought Linux was architected to be unfriendly for end users. Ubuntu, Mint and Android are way easier to use than windows for example, or do they think that the kernel needs to do something special for an end user that will never see it?

I am not saying they are wrong, but they didn't give me much reason to believe they are right.
You seem to be correct.

However, Numba's type system and syntax is far less expressive and powerful than Julia's.
I think he's referring to the fact that Youtube Red is not available in every country yet.

I think each of these address a very different problem, and completely disagree with him. Trying to bundle all of these things into one big app will just make the app bloated and development painful. Youtube at this point has many different uses (average length videos, live streams, music/audio) and trying to have a one size fits all app is not necessarily the right way to go.

Youtube GO is meant for people who live in areas with poor connectivity. Again, having them download a big 100mb bloated app is not the right solution. On the other hand, people with LTE don't care about the download size and locally sharing videos, so why put that in the same app? Same thing with trying to put Chatting/Livestream notification into the Youtube app, or trying to hack a music player into it.
They'll certainly notice our CO2 contribution to the atmosphere if there are any ice cores left to sample.

Also probably all the plastic in the oceans, until something evolves that eats it all.
I don't know why you got downvoted but I couldn't find anything helpful regarding your question. I found some references to the fact that mars and earth have ~24hr days but no explanation as to why they are so similar. Mars also rotates (on its axis) the opposite direction of Earth which I found interesting. So many questions about our little local solar neighborhood, so few answers!
Custody battles are complicated enough as it is...
> Right. And JavaScript is not that language, unless you are doing web stuff.

Do I hear an echo in here?

"I think mobile development is best done using native platforms. But if you're doing web development, JavaScript is a must."
Ultimately allow us to survive on Earth...until the next major extinction event. Meditation won't allow us to survive a massive meteor impact (which is just a matter of when, not if).
No. 'Verbose' is correct. It's not bad code. It's a simple control flow.
Do individuals have the opportunity to participate in funding start-ups via YC? If so, what type of minimum requirements exist for getting started?

If not then how quickly can the [unrelated] problem below be solved, algorithmically

Unrelated Problem: Given a set of numbers of length n, find a single rule that can map each item x to the corresponding item x+1
This is not new for HN at all. In fact I lurked for years because the community was so harsh. So it's nothing new.
Additionally there is a fork of OpenSSH called PKIXSSH that supports X.509 certificates in addition to keys and OpenSSH certificates. This is useful for using the same credential (certificate) to authenticate using other protocols such as TLS (via TLS client certificate) and Kerberos (via PKINIT).

It supports OCSP responders as well as CRLs.

It can allow or deny access based on X.509v3 extensions.

Using this and a hardware token with an X.509 certificate you can completely eliminate passwords for most cases and have no ability to leak your keying material (barring HSM vulnerability).

Android and iOS devices have historically had little support for smartcards so that's a downside of you use those devices. There's a smartcard framework in Android but I've not used it since 4.x and it was not useful.

Support on ChromeOS, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and *BSD has been a lot more reliable.

Also, this is a fairly common usage scenario thanks to HSPD-12 and the tens of millions of affected PKI users.
They update android but understand the problem Linux faces as manufacturers and carriers don't update the android devices. Many android vulnerabilities come through because of the Linux stack so fixing that would fix a good portion of Android future vulnerabilities
At the very least he summarises for us the YC data and puts forward (for free) the hints, the best practices, the recurrent patterns that characterise a good lot of the most successful startups in the world. He is a privileged but educated observer from within who can also relate with his own experience as a non-stellar performer as a startupper, if you want. A facilitator and an aggregator, isn't he?
Here is Kees Cook talk from the Linux Security Summit, "The State of Kernel Self Protection Project", he makes the same analogy to car safety in his talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMkCKeZ8xZw

All the available videos from the Linux Security Summit are listed here:

https://www.linux.com/news/linux-security-summit-videos
California prohibits pricing based on driving habits like speed. Other states do permit it and Progressive offers snapshot device which does what you describe - offer discounts for safe driving behavior.
I'm a solo founder, technical but my prototype website was built by someone else. The main part of my idea isn't technical (in the sense that Amazon wasn't technical when it first started).

What should I know about applying based on that?

Also, for the competitors question, should I put a list of 15-20 names I made, or choose the top 3 or so?

Finally: I may be able to launch within the next few days. Should I try to launch and wait to apply until I have launch data, or should I apply now? (The nature of the startup is consumer facing and I think I can gain some traction within the first week.)
Not necessarily. Swift uses ARC by default, and you'd really have to go out of your way to do any manual memory management.
We need a jepsen test.
Paywall!
Or, ask two questions, where (on at least one) it's fairly easy to get an inefficient solution, but requires more thought to get a more efficient one.

You don't necessarily demand perfection on this test though.

One mistake that companies make is that they think they want to set a lower bar, so they make the questions easy. But then, in order to distinguish candidates, they basically require perfection. Now, a simple mistake can "fail" a good candidate.

It's better if they make the questions harder, but just don't require perfection.
Can't answer for webdev, but for anything else, python and c++ with some mature library packs (boost, qt, eigen, scipy etc). They are not 'dated' in that tey don't have any expiration date. As N.Taleb points out in Antifragile, the best predictor of an idea's remaining lifetime is its current lifetime.

I like to think of C++ and Python as of concrete and wood: if you are to build houses, you better know concrete and wood. There are more fancy materials and prefab assembly, true, but these are better left for quick and dirty work for now, and used by people who already know concrete and wood.

It's sad Object Pascal has died, it was a good language with good history. C# has some of its legacy, I'd use it more but last time I checked, Mono still has severe performance problems.
I don't remember it, but I wouldn't doubt it. Certainly, both Guido and Larry have made tongue-in-cheek comments about Perl and Python and the (good-natured) competition for mind share. And, features have been borrowed in both directions, and many developers have gone back and forth (I certainly have multiple times across a couple of decades).
5 reasons CEOs should be involved in hiring decisions
>React-Native is not for every scenario

What scenario isn't it for?
There's a slide with all the numbers and even a graph:

https://youtu.be/A1YxNYiyALg?t=1h52s
> I mean, computers and internet access also costs money, so does this mean that the introduction of these technologies presents an ethical problem, because the poorer part of the population may not be able to afford it, thus increasing inequality?

Actually, yes, there are inherent ethical problems here. In this case (computers/internet), the divide it causes is not so large that it cannot be overcome by training, savings, charitable donations, etc. However, "designer baby" technology, if not available to whomever wants it, results in an increase in feudalism to society.

With a computer, anyone can become a programmer as the technology gets cheaper and more widely adopted. Designer babies and similar technologies may not have the same increasing efficiencies with adoption; such considerations should be made.
Crowdfunded Company Will Liquidate as Most Recent Project Fails
We live pretty cushy lives, so it's easy to forget just how difficult progress was at times. Read about David Thompson and what he went through to discover the northwest passage, or any of those guys who did things like that.

Doomed pioneers suffering grim fates in hostile environments is how the west was won.
It's very natural to feel a bit defensive in response to criticism of this nature, which is actually an ad hominem. I don't know that many people would have done better. I think we have to remember that even larger-than-life characters like sama are also humans who feel emotions.
What do they gain from removing advertising from any video? Any money you make is money they make.

Another thing you need to realize is that this is all automated, they don't come and manually remove monetization from your video. Yes, the algorithm could potentially be wonky, but again, it's in their best interest for it to be good.

Everything that has been spouted so far has been senseless propaganda and none of it is backed by any actual facts.
Because it's news.

I don't understand why you guys bother going through these contortions to vilify anyone pro-gay while pretending that you're not actually anti-gay. Suppressing gay rights and gay issues is never about homophobia, it's always about free speech or imperialism or journalistic bias some other buzzword. Do you think you're fooling anyone?
Ah, good times, good times.

I mainly read 68K assembler when reading compiler output, but it was beautifully clear and understandable.
Yeah... Where did you get the idea that it drives the interviewers crazy?

While I'm sure there are interviewers who are opposed to preparation, mostly interviewers support this.
Awesome talk, BTW!
Hey, I applied to YC with a web platform for farmers. Are you strictly wanting to be a farmer or are you primarily interested in helping farmers?
The problem is that while what you say is true over a long period, it's not true in the time period necessary to make progress work.

This is especially biting when you go out to raise money - there is a limited pool of money out there that is looking to be allocated. Sure, some small changes open up small amounts - such as the introduction of crowdfunding - but generally speaking there are more companies seeking funds than there are funds seeking investment.

Said another way the pie grows too slowly to consider the market anything other than zero-sum over the window of time that a venture has.
add

&player=html5

to the end of the YouTube url in Firefox too to get a stutter-free playback of audio (and I suspect better battery life too.)