skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a lot of the buzz is meta-buzz, especially here on HN. Like you said, there is no product, just an idea. I think what's interesting is that with only an idea they were able to generate a lot of cash through donations.

I don't think any of us here would expect to just have an idea and then see 170 grand fall into our laps.
As a Droid owner, I'm yet to find needed "third-party utilities" to keep the system in order.
Not any-- only whitelisted codecs work with the <video> element from what I understand. Sure, QuickTime (or whatever) can play it, but that's a different story.
Bogus.
A little nugget of wisdom:

What if you made an app that could take database connection specs, and an Amazon S3 account and then automatically backs up the database for you (wish I had this app).[...] What if you didn't even ask the user if the database was MySQL or MS SQL or Oracle in the connect settings? The app could quickly spin through all possibilities and figure it out for the user. Make the app (and programmer) do the heavy lifting, and let the user (thousands of different users) benefit. That's the secret. My app does lots of brute force searches/checks to relieve the user of having to do that. The competition doesn't.
Or Time Machine :-)
> Why do you want to use your phone as a wifi hotspot? It'll drain the battery.

To have internet access on your laptop when no other source is available... 3G isn't the fastest, but it's secure and available pretty much wherever you are. As for the battery just plug it into the laptop or because you're using an Android phone, pop in your spare battery after you've gotten your work done.
There is tineye.com that lets you upload pictures or use a URL. Tineye tries to find identical images even though they have been resized or altered so I'm not sure if that is exactly what you're looking for.
O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
I like the fact that it uses almost no CPU, even on this ancient Macbook.
I have published a post on What's new in Redis 2.0:

* http://amix.dk/blog/post/19507#Whats-new-in-Redis-2-0

(covers VM, transactions, hash data type and pub/sub commands)
So according to the poll... sampling a touch more than 1500 people... who are self-selected to be in the 'ZOMG FACEBOOK IS BAD' echo chamber...

16% claim to have quit FB.

30% say it's 'Highly Likely'.

30% chose the ever vague 'Possibly' option...

And that conclusively adds up to 60% of ALL 400,000,000 FB users quitting?

Hooray for polls.
I think the real metrics regarding the effects of these privacy issues are going to be much harder to measure. I don't think there will be a lot of people outright shutting down their Facebook account, but instead people will begin to self-censor more and more what they say on the site. I notice myself using the site much less frequently the last several months, and many of my friends report the same. It's actually hard to say for sure whether this is due to privacy concerns, or if people are just starting to get bored of it and realizing that having real contact with their real friends really does matter.
Its interesting, just a shame it works for nobody... er webkit users only and even then it looks glitchy (I used Chrome).
Question is 'Does it actually work?'

And if it does, What's the actual improvement in performance?

EDIT: I'm not being sarcastic, I'm really asking... DOES IT WORK?
The one that appears after you start typing?
I think the reason people are surprised that we fund so many startups compared to other YC-like organizations is that I work full time on this, whereas at nearly all (perhaps all) the others, the startups are advised by a consortium of people doing it part time. When you're doing it full time, it's no problem to advise, say, 25 new startups at once. At least once you have some practice.

Earlier this year we hired Harj Taggar who also works full time advising startups. Since this kind of work scales nearly linearly, we're about as busy as one person would be advising 18, which was no problem at all.
There was another site called Boxscore Junkie using that data that was quite nice. It had scores, detailed boxscores, and pitchFX data. Unfortunately it was apparently shut down a legal threat from MLB.

Link to the source:
http://code.google.com/p/boxscore-junkie/
The reason that's there is historical instances of profiteers selling substandard food to the military.
You know what I kind of like about this post? - before such a post on YC would have been bashed by Apple fan boys... but now after Apple's policy pigeon holed and alienated developers - I'm starting to see a real conversation about some of Apple's issues...
Why Google isn't Great at Everything
it lowers my productivity :( but it's fun
Wow, the backlash is in full swing.
yes as well as a present
Creating a Solar System with Raphael
Ah, but in terms of play hours divided by development hours, this is bound to trump most indie games.
Where will they go? I don't see a potential successor standing by, despite 4 years of half the people I know working on either "the next Facebook" or "Facebook for X niche."
Alien Life May Need More Than Liquid Water to Survive
I am curious as to what the FTC would have done with this had Apple not introduced their own ad platform. Do you think this deal would not have been allowed?
I'd love to tether my phone, which I have a data plan for to my iPad (wifi-only). I don't bring my iPad out that much, that long, but when I do, occasionally, it will be great to have internet access when I want to.

If I wasn't an iPhone app developer, I would mostly likely switch to an Android phone in a blink of an eye. And I have an Android G1 dev phone.
Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard
Its a big reason why I can't do it. I have bills that must be paid. Student loans and they are larger than most everyone I come across.
Java supports global variables just fine -- in fact, most Java code uses far too many globals for my taste.

Multiple inheritance and operator overloading aren't bad, but at the time Java was designed, nobody had any idea how to use them properly. Python 2 gets MI right (though Py3 fucks it up a bit with magical super()), and Haskell provides a clean implementation of overloading, but it'll be years before these improvements filter through to Java (if they ever do).
Clicking on a search result now redirects through the DDG server.

So, Gabriel, if you woke up tomorrow as your Evil twin, you could do click tracking with no further user-visible change of behavior.

Google used to do stealth click tracking via javascript. I have not kept up with whether they still do, but it was that kind of thing that influenced me to switch to DDG.
Unfortunately Flash is currently pretty much unavoidable if you want sound effects in JS games.

I experimented with <audio> tag in HTML5 game few days ago: it's fine for media player type applications (where you play longer sounds with looser coupling to user actions), but it's not there yet for games (implementation-wise, API is ok).

If you need to play a lot of tiny sounds in rapid response to player actions, you are going to get random weird behaviors and cross-browser inconsistencies: noticeable lags, cracking noises, cuts and repetitions.
Nonresponse bias. Next.
Handset makers such as HTC and Motorola check that Android works as it should, and fix anything broken before releasing updates to users. Carriers may also be involved in this process. Also there are much fewer hardware combos to support.

Windows PCs would work better if Dell (or whoever) made sure every update worked 100% and you couldn't install new components after purchase. As things stand now it is impossible to test Windows updates on even a fraction of the hardware configurations out there.
How Catalog Companies will Use the Internet (Viaweb white paper)
It smells like self selection.

IF the sample of the population was not randomly selected by the interviewer (which almost never happens in online polls), then the people most likely to answer were the angriest at FB. The whole thing is rigged.

From my side of the fence, it looks all rosy to FB. From (real-world) friends and acquaintances, many of whom are techies and those who aren't at least are computer literate, only other guy and myself have any concerns. It is not that they don't get it, but that they couldn't care less.

Need to fly. Time to call and yell at my wife for disclosing one more piece of personal info.
When I bought my first Macbook Pro a few years ago, I purchased it for the hardware and intended to use it to run Windows in Bootcamp. After spending a little time with OS X I came to appreciate it and I now use it exclusively. But my favorite thing about it is the UNIX like underpinning. Which in a sense makes it less locked down than Windows.
The way I see it, there's no way to show confidence in the future like putting your own money up. This is great even for people not affiliated with YC, its partners, or YC-funded startups.
The part I found most interesting is the focus GM had on what you could see. NUMMI worked because they could get the type of parts they needed etc but they needed to infect the rest of the organization with the idea before GM could really benefit.
Actually given an incremental dollar to invest I'd always prefer to expand sideways rather than depthwise. It's much more interesting to fund a whole new startup than to give more money to an existing one.

Plus the startups themselves don't need that as much; there are already lots of investors ready to give the next $100k to startups we seed.
No, he's asserting that they're aware that's a problem and that they need to be careful of it.

Some succeed, some fail.

Rather like using pointers, in most ways, which can also cause some pretty unmaintainable messes, but don't if you're really, really careful :-)
It never was necessary to run third-party utilities to keep the system in order. I assume you're referring to the Advanced Task Killer app. See this forum post for example: http://androidforums.com/motorola-droid/18334-task-killer-ap...
Isn't that a conveniently simplistic way of looking at the past 30 years of Apple?
Windows is not nearly as disliked as some thing it is.
That's one reason I no longer live there. I had begun to dislike it by the mid-90s when I moved to California, and when I was back for a visit about a decade later the degree of surveillance seemed positively Orwellian.

I'm a little surprised by how strong and wide-ranging these proposals are, but so far this Liberal-Conservative coalition is yielding grounds for optimism (also in other areas, but that's a more political discussion).
Ask HN: How do you go about finding designers?
Through the plethora of projects that I work on, there always seems to be one general question that comes up: Where in the world will I find someone to make this look good?

Asking around, it appears that this is a pretty common problem. Does anyone have any tips on ways to get involved with the designer community or specific designers?
I find that i'm much more open to subscribing today than I was say 2 -3years ago. The industry etiquette has improved a lot, I actually value 80% of emails I get or they provide some value. (even the endless linked discussions notifications)

But then again, I consider myself a power user. So Who are you targeting with this?
What are your monthly payments? I imagine anything under $500/month is doable (I have $250/month and just quit my job: by the time I run out of money I'll know whether or not my business will work out, and that's really all you need).

EDIT: as a corollary, I'm thrilled I didn't pay off my student loans earlier. They average about 4.5% - that's the cheapest loan you can get anywhere. Treat it like a business loan and use whatever you save to live off of when you're working on your startup :).
It doesn't work that well. At all. Try googling for any of the six ideas the OP listed and see if you can find any if not all of the apps out there that implement them.
Actually they went with "all of the above".
All that h264 youtube video, as well as the h264 support in Chrome and Android aren't going anywhere.

Google is playing for control. Likeliest outcome of VP8 being found infringing is some cross-licensing deal and new patent pool with Google as major stakeholder. They would thus have significant control over the resulting VP8 license costs vs being "just a customer" to the h264 group. Having a compete product thus acts as a powerful check on h264 licensing too.

Google is simply trying to ensure that its business isn't held hostage by someone else. Either they win and no-one controls video, or they 'lose' and Google at least gets a hand on the wheel.
But give a 26 page brownie recipe to enough people and one of them will burn down the house because they missed the instruction saying when to turn off the oven.

There is a common organizational failure mode where new instructions are added whenever anyone messes up, ignoring the fact that the complexity of the instructions is leading to lots of mistakes.
O'Reilly media 5/21 One day only - $9.99 all Ebooks
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Flamethrowing musical sculpture destined for Burning Man
Verging on the off-topic: how are you dealing with mixing persistence and Clojure's STM?
Omar Hamoui's (CEO/founder of AdMob) Tweet in full on the news:
"Whew!"
http://twitter.com/omarh
Paper links Pesticides with ADHD (2010, primary source)
That's just not really the case.

There's almost no way this makes it into a terrestrial cable box outside of a few trial markets. Or with a few small cable providers. I say this as someone who spent 4 years working for a large cable co building software that runs on cable boxes.

There's a bunch of reasons but here's two.

1. The large cable co's aren't generally going to deploy software controlled by a 3rd party. Microsoft has spent years banging their head against the wall that is the large telco with little success.

2. Cable already has a mature cable box focused software stack standard called tru2way which is already getting more traction then Android likely ever will in cable STB space.

The cable space is not normal and they don't make what appear to be rational sw decisions to the internet crowd.

Dish is an outlier and doing everything they can to compete but I wounldn't even count on them going into wide deployment with this.

This will live on CE devices, not cable and satellite STBs.
1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.

2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.

3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.

4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.

5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.

6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).

7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.

8. Because tonal languages are weird.

9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.

An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question.
Posterous's removal of decimal points from titles makes for an interesting permalink :)
How much income would you need? Even with a smallish Series A, you're generally expected to have a pretty crappy salary.

It's kind of sad that startups are a game for people who have a long personal runway (combination of savings and cheap lifestyle, usually), but that's the reality.

No investor is going to be excited to see their money put to work by paying down student loan bills, though at a certain level you can often swing a 50-70k salary. As I understand it, get big revenue or a big Series B round, and you can generally lobby successfully for a non-insulting salary.
I would rather have proper 64bit support for linux....
No Burkas in France
How is it surprising that when a company has to hire out from the global talent pool, rather than the local one, they have to pay a premium?

If the local talent pool were that good (and hence worth the $$$), they wouldn't need to look outside it.

Flip the question around in your head; how do salaries for ex-pat Americans compare to the locals in foreign countries? I bet that an American working in Beijing/Dubai/Hong Kong makes more on average than the local equivalent does. Why? Because they aren't really equivalent.
Obviously the quality should be fine, that should be the default, no need to repeat it in each and every recipe.
You have to applaud VLC. I absolutely love their player. Long gone are the days where one must keep downloading new codecs. I just deleted my codec collection and had about 50 codecs in one directory. They have definitely made my life easier and happier.
Isn't this what we SHOULD be using Canvas for?
It's going well, how about you? (my nick was canuckid by the way, which will probably bring back some bad memories?;-)
Top Most Expensive Things In The World | Top Lists (Ayzor.com)
I knew the EFF's Panopticlick sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. Makes sense.

https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Google is having pretty rad year.
Coming from the hedge fund world, $8.25M seems so small. It's amazing how much it can fund.

What are the requirements for becoming part of the next YC round?

Do you have to know someone already involved with YC?

Does YC only accept investors who are successful tech entrepreneurs?

What about people who have the money through other means and are tech savvy?

Can investors send a proxy who is qualified at helping out?
Supply/demand. Why would YC (or ANY early stage investor) ever want their money to go to your higher cost of living when they have a line out the door of great opportunities founded by people who have a cheaper lifestyle and/or a pile of personal savings?

The answer, of course, is "they'd do it if it was an unusually good startup with TONS of traction." Of course, if you're in that boat fundraising isn't a problem, is it?
I see the same bug. The site says the Phillies' next game is Satuday @ Boston.

They are playing the Red Sox at home and their next game is tonight, not tomorrow.
Investors will question your judgement if you pay yourself more than 50-70k? That's surprising.
Y Combinator Closes New $8.25 Million Fund, Sequoia Is Lead Investor
The title is correctly copied across, but the text of the article makes clear he means "end pointless squabble" not "use pointless squabble".
I'm almost at the point of launching my project -- in point 2, but I cut a lot -- and the things I'm most worried about are:

1. Once it's up and people actually use it, I have to be much more careful about uptime, monitoring, and changing how data is stored. This is by far the scariest thing.

2. Handling a large temporary spike in load when I publish the URL here or elsewhere

3. How -- if I actually knew what I wanted to charge for -- to integrate payment into the application, and what I'm supposed to do tax-wise with the money I'd get.
Sadly, you are forgetting our operating expenses. We calculate it will fund around 240.
I say take the most challenging option as mahmud mentioned. There is a certain level of magic when you are at the forefront of startup and that everything you do shapes the outcome.

This is an opportunity to make a name for yourself.
Are (presumably American?) student loans deferrable? I recall with my UK loans it was possible to defer repayment if some conditions were met (low income I think was one of them).
Microsoft Press titles excluded
Does this mean that we're going to start seeing a wider variety of startups funded by YC? Most of them seem to be consumer facing, but there is a lot of room for innovation in behind-the-scenes software.
What are the compelling reasons to go back to the iPhone?
What a seamless experience! ;-)
Google blames developers for lousy Android battery life
If you have any feedback or if you find any bugs, I would really appreciate it if you report them with the github issues tool.

I should be able to hammer out fixes fairly quickly.
re. 2), while car don't blow up as easily in real life as they do in the movies, when they do catch fire it makes for quite a bang. I'd rather be next to a wrecked electric vehicle than a gasoline-powered on.

re. 6) manufacturing externalities for any vehicle are significant, but burning fossil fuels in a power station (to generate electricity to charge batteries) is vastly more efficient and cleaner than doing so in a vehicle engine. Thus, I think the overall level of pollution is likely to be lower.

It's good to see this partnership; everyone likes what Tesla are about and their vision that green doesn't have to mean weak performance. But the high cost of their early offerings made a lot of people skeptical about the realistic future of electric cars. However, now that so many companies are committing to an all-electric paradigm (Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt) there's enough competition to really drive innovation and offer customers a good value proposition.
Do you have a partner? Narcissism and Business Leadership
Yeah, seems like Facebook is in a position to gain by making some highly publicized moves toward assuring privacy... get that in a couple of news cycles and people will assume it's a fixed-enough problem (whether it is or not).
I think these numbers are a little on the low end these days, if you've raised at least a respectable series A.
Any idea what you would need to do differently to fund, say, 250?
I just played a level with my boss. I'm disappointed it doesn't load up on the droid.
Quality over Quantity:How We Built iTeleport into a Profitable Biz on App Store
Syzygryd is also on kickstarter:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fire/syzygryd
If you believe enough in what you're building that you're willing to ruin your credit... than you have the proper motivation. If you are getting paid well enough to stay financially fat & happy, what risk are you taking? What will keep your head & heart in it after you've hit your first road bump... or wrecked around the first blind curve?

In my experience... everyone can get their expenses lean. Just depends on what you're willing to give up. For those with families that's a bit harder.
You can definitely fund more startups but as you admit yourself, the startups you fund don't give up equity for money. They give up equity for your guidance, network and the whole ethos of the program.

Scaling up the YC experience would be an interesting challenge.
booo! why wont it load on the droid?
Celebrating PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday
Here's a static picture of the same thing, but much more accurate and inclusive:

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?orbits

e.g.,

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ss_inner

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ss_distant
You can already play H.264 with hardware support using QuickTime on the Mac so there is no reason to use a Flash player. The only reason to use a Flash video player on all platforms is laziness.
If you don't mind my asking, is your name easy or difficult to pronounce?

[In my talking to people, I have found, statistically, that people with easy names (e.g. Bill Smith) think there is no demand for this service, and people who either have difficult names or work with lots of people with difficult/foreign names tend to think that this is useful and that there is demand for it.

Also, people who deal all the time with customers (e.g. sales people, realtors, etc) tend to think there is a lot of demand for it among their colleagues.

Of course they could be wrong. And even if they are right, this may not be a good business idea. But I have seen sufficiently high levels of interest in the idea, which is why I got started on this]