skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? Wildly inconsistent with this for example?

http://ycombinator.com/party.html

Till recently the two main bottlenecks in YC were my time and the size of our space. Which is why we recently hired Harj and expanded the orange room by a third. I'm not sure what the next bottleneck will turn out to be.

As I said in another comment on this thread, we approach scaling YC the same way we approach scaling software. You can never predict what the bottleneck will be till you hit it, so you just fix them as you hit them. If we did eventually hit a bottleneck that we couldn't fix, in the sense that if we continued to expand, the startups we funded would start to do worse, we'd stop expanding. But we clearly haven't hit such a bottleneck yet, and my experience of scaling stuff makes me cautious about predicting exactly where it might occur.
The title says "Guidelines" but the page itself calls them "REQUIREMENTS" and says you have to email Twitter for approval if you want to deviate from them.

If it's really their intention to enforce this on all Twitter API users, then I think it's a huge mistake.
We are really happy with Clear. I use it less than everyone else, but we've got people all around Chicagoland using it. What don't you like about it, besides the price?
Translation: I am convinced beyond help that Google is evil, I am trying to find any and all reasons to point out how evil they are. However, currently I am out of ideas.
I don't think I'd call these criticisms so much as _reasons_ why Chinese is so damn hard (for a Western speaker). It’s not like there's anyone around who designed the language to complain to.

Anyway:

Reasons 1-5 aren't about the many languages used in China (if French & Spanish are different languages, then I consider Mandarin & Cantonese to be different languages). These difficulties are due to the lack of a concise phonetic alphabet (like the roman alphabet used in English, French, Spanish…, or the hiragana alphabet used in Japanese). If the Chineses languages all used a common (small!) phonetic alphabet of some sort, many of those difficulties would dissolve (and there is no particular reason why that could not be done, technically, except that it throws out a huge part of their culture). Even if only Mandarin existed, those first 5 difficulties would remain.

Edit: OK, so using a phonetic alphabet would mean that each language would be written differently... except that this is already true, essentially. You can actually write in Cantonese in a way that a Mandarin speaker could not understand (using the same characters), and there are those who do this. I think he says this in there (I read this a long time ago), that the Mandarin writing system is just that; Mandarin. The whole country knows how to read it (without necessarily knowing how to pronounce it), so it's more about the non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese people having 2 languages that they use: their own for speaking, and Mandarin for writing. Using a purely phonetic alphabet may make this bi-lingual usage more difficult... or not. The existing writing system is already pretty painful, whether you're a native or not (though natives have more time to get used to it before they're expected to be able to use it, I suppose).

Reason 6: this isn't like reading Shakespeare (Modern English, though an earlier version of it), as far as I understand. It seems more like trying to read The Canterbury Tales (Middle English) or Beowulf (Old English, more like German than English, really). You're completely correct about it not being relevant to practical usage of any of the Chinese languages, though.
And Achilles never really overtook the hare right ?
I agree with you. I enjoy having people peer into my private life, which is why I have an online presence under my real name. But most people don't want this, for whatever reason, and it's not Facebook's place to decide for them.

Nobody should see anything you post to Facebook until you explicitly allow it. It's the only reasonable default.
The prices the military pays are indeed high. However you have to be able to justify every last penny of the cost. My understanding from a good friend who used to be responsible for costing such projects is that when you're submitting competitive bids versus other contractors that are gaming the system, it becomes very hard to submit a bid you'll actually make a profit on without gaming the system yourself.

He may have just been justifying his own behavior, but I don't think so.
What has happened is that the bell curve has shifted (a little bit) to the right.
The are talking about biofuel. The point is that no matter what you want to do, there is no point in doing it by artificial synthesis. You can always engineer one of the many bacteria/algae/whatever already present in nature, modifying something that already does what you want to achieve, just making it better.
So are you saying you're just trolling...?
That it is novel somewhat surprises me. I thought it was commonly known and accepted that it was in large part German banks that were being bailed out when bailing out Greece. Similarly, as I understand it - and have long understood it, since perhaps 2005 or so (I'm Irish) - the property bubble in Ireland was driven by historically low interest rates - only easily possible with an influx of foreign capital denominated in Euro. Inflation in house pricing was so extreme that relying on it became an accepted way of becoming wealthy. Now, in Ireland, lots of people are pointing fingers, blaming politicians, banks, property developers, etc., but the real theft was by the property owning middle class themselves. When people wonder where the money of the boom went, they need only look to people who owned houses.

And another problem with house ownership - especially in English-speaking countries - is that it is seen as politically damaging to enact policies that cause house prices to fall, because it reduces the perceived wealth of the middle class. But this very same dynamic is what causes people to be upset, screaming that teachers and policepeople can no longer afford houses on their wages, ergo wages must rise, first time buyer tax rebates / etc. and other stupid policies that just serve to push up house prices even further.

It's all pretty depressing, and makes one despair somewhat of democracy.
The techerati's frothing over new Google announcements is goofy. As if GOOG is some saviour from an indescibable hell. The view from here is already amazing.

Everything is amazing and everyone is pissed off. I'm think most of these people cheering and jeering need to spend some time naked, bare assed, with a bone through their nose and then see if this still matters so much to them.

And BTW. No, GOOG is not leap frogging. Hyperbole deluxe.
"You're confused. Rubyists didn't sink your project. Bad programming (and management) did. They would have fucked up the project in Java or Haskell or Perl or anything else."

I'm not confused at all. Rubyists sunk the project, plain and simple. I actually still like Ruby, because I had a chance to do some cool stuff with it before our inferior rubyists wrought their havoc, and I agree that had we had decent management, they'd have been fired.

My only criticism of Ruby is that because it's easy, it allows vastly inferior programmers to program, which lowers the bar drastically. I believe that a number of the other senior developers there won't touch ruby at all now, I'm not one of those.

However, given one of the jobs I received e-mail about, I'd say that the salaries that rubyists can get puts them in the worst of both worlds -- it attracts people who want to be cool, and people who want high-paying jobs. Plus, it's easy to learn badly, which sets the bar very low.
My company does UI/Design and usability testing for developers (as well as development for designers/ad agencies).

Although I tend to work more on the development side of things I can tell you that finding competent, knowledgeable designers who understand how to create usable interfaces that will help increase conversion rates and still look appealing to the target market is no easy task.

We interviewed about 100 designers before we found a few that understood that design needs to support business objectives and solve business problems (like how do we get more sign-ups directly from our home page?)

Many of the designers out there are simply focused on making websites/interfaces that look good but don't actually support business objectives or customer needs.

The best designers take a problem solving approach instead of a purely aesthetic one. So when interviewing them be sure to ask plenty of "problem solving" type questions. This will help you weed out the "artsy" types from the serious designers.

One more piece of advice: stay away from sites like 99designs etc since the only designers on there seem to be ones who are just starting out and have very little experience solving real world problems. 99Designs may be great for small mom and pop outfits (think local deli, florist, etc) but it doesn't work well for serious start ups that will need to launch with an interface optimized for conversions.

If you are looking for a rock solid design team that also understands the development process, give me a shout. We're currently wrapping up some work for another incubator.
I've used both daemontools and monit in anger. For a single server that I'm not particularly concerned about, monit has been more than sufficient and convenient. The web interface to see what's going on isn't bad either. On the other hand, it can send me annoying blizzards of emails when things break.

For the next project, I'm going back to daemontools, for a multitude of reasons. Between the /service directory and the svc command, automating stuff is ridiculously easy. I can get the active health check stuff by writing a ten-line script that does a much better check on a server than the generic checks monit provides. I can get emails when bad stuff happens with logcheck.

Daemontools is just so goddamn unixy.
Not that they're evil. I use Google for a bunch of stuff - personal email, search, adsense, analytics, and have for years. I just think it's a bit of a fallacy to protect us from 'someone else' knowing about us given the penetration they have into most internet users lives.
Risk and reward tend to be correlated, at least in efficient markets. And since there are so many startups to choose from, all desperate to get programmers, there's a reasonable hope of getting market price for your risk.

The startups presenting at Workatastartup range from established companies 5 years old to startups from the most recent YC cycle that are currently run by single founders and are looking for people to be de facto cofounders, in every sense including equity.
The Digital Download Is Dead
I actually did this for the purpose of pasting tweets in Campfire chats - http://jazzychad.com/twitter/14450770448.png

php + gd + mod_rewrite. super simple.
This company is a good reminder to folks that "minimally" is only one of the words in the now-sacrosanct "minimally viable product." You still need the other two, or else you will surely piss people off.

A demo, a YouTube video, or a web form hooked up to Paypal is not a MVP. At least, not in my book.

Edit: Too harsh? Maybe, but knowing people who ordered this thing and are annoyed that it still hasn't shipped tells me there's a lesson to be learned here.
I agree. Although I hate Apple myself and have been a linux user, I still think Mac OSX is an exceptional OS for personal use.

Having said that, I HAVE worked on Windows 7 and it is by far the best OS Microsoft has produced and if I had to use it, I would.

MS Office is nice, I use it on my Mac.
Yes- I'm getting SD analog channels + HD Local Channels (which the FCC mandates they carry in the clear), although there are CableCard PC tuners out there, and from what I've heard, CableCards are available from Comcast (I just refuse to pay $50/mo, or whatever it is, to get the digital package). I also use my Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender to watch stuff I've DVR'd in the bedroom. I don't see how this is really doing anything different than what ReplayTV was doing. Maybe it's just that there aren't enough people doing it to have drawn the ire of the media companies...
Who is this for? Why?
Keep your idea to yourself, make some actual progress toward making the idea real, then share the initial results with the people whose input you want. Rinse and repeat.

http://sivers.org/zipit
Think about how impossible it would be for the young to get a job if they had to compete against people who had been doing a job for 50, 100, 500 years.
I think it is mostly because of a very limited number of sites that seem to spin very large amounts of yarn out of a very limited amount of fibre.

There is hardly any substance to any of that stuff. Why X leaves facebook, why famous IT personality (in their own minds) Y has ritually burned their iPhone and will now use the one and true Android and so on.

Case in point, the current #5: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367616

We could lose it easily, not to mention the 'Today is draw the prophet day', because that so brought out the best of HN.

Maybe it's time for some stricter flagging.
OWN Entertainment show on The Oprah Winfrey Network
Singing Made Simple
Anyone can learn to sing or improve their voice and gain valuable self confidence. I teach others how to gain control of their voice, develop pleasing tone, quality and develop that star quality. Learning to become comfortable with our voices is inspiring and uplifting. It is our most personal form of self expression which will help us succeed and advance in any area of life. I also want to bring valuable inside information for those who desire to move into the entertainment industry.
Thats awesome! Now all you need to do is get it to conform to their guidelines :D
Notice how point #3 says hashtags should be linked, but in their reference image the #TweetUp hashtag isn't linked.
The problem is that we have no evidence that any planet/moon/etc. that we have discovered can support the level of ecosystem required for humans on that planet to be self-sufficient.
I did it back when I was working remotely with the Twitter API team. They didn't seem to mind :)
this is a really great idea
To get more users: it should work on Linux; interfaces with Python, etc.
Hmm, interesting question, but so much harder to calculate, however bogusly. Paradoxically enough, the answer there would be the fewer, the better, because the spread of YC alumni to companies they didn't found tends to happen through startups dying or getting acquired in small, early acquisitions. Ideally all the startups we funded would go public and the founders would still be working for them 10 years later, like Larry & Sergey are. In that ideal scenario the number YC alumni were involved with would reduce to the number we funded.
It has been a long time since I have used it, but I see that http://freshmeat.net is still around.
Additionally, 8 (and somewhat 9) are the only ones that apply to speaking/listening to Chinese. The rest are fully restricted to writing and reading.

I only spent 6 weeks studying Chinese so I'm sure I have some misconceptions, but speaking Chinese (and to a lesser extent hearing it) were actually pretty easy to pickup. Most of my classmates just threw up their hands and quit on intonation, but it's not THAT hard especially if you're just speaking slowly. This might have been a consequence of short study of the language, but grammatically I thought it was vastly simpler than Western languages particularly in respect to verb conjugation.
I think part of the problem is how serious people take themselves. HN is a reflection of all the personalities of all those that take part in it and it exhibits a tendency to pretend to be very busy making millions of dollars, whereas actually there seems to be more interest in which celebrity is using what gadget.

If that's the choice, then I'll take the humorous post of Daniel any time over the Fake Steve jobs item currently on the homepage, at 131 points and 124 comments it must be really important, or the latest joelonsoftware or sethgoldin post that is going to make us all millionaires.
The one nit I've always had is whether third-party apps/sites link the @ symbol when attached to usernames. I prefer unlinked @ symbols (as seen on twitter.com site), but even so, search.twitter.com links the @ symbol... how consistent.
Anecdotally, the "nonexistence" of Chinese grammar is very refreshing. Speaking in Chinese makes you very aware of the grammatical infrastructure of English (especially polite English).
Market for Location-Based Services is Heating Up for Startups
You should also carefully consider the ethical implications of extending human life indefinitely.
It summarizes/ranks links being discussed on Twitter, not simply by looking at the tweets, but by visiting the destination sites being pointed to. It was written as a testcase for software I'm writing for streaming realtime financial data (prices and graphs) to modern browsers, but I've grown fond of it since. It's for people curious about "what's cooking" on Twitter.
There are always multiple parts to an idea. You can often share some of the idea to get feedback while not sharing all of it.

Some things to consider withholding are long-term goals, tricky algorithms, novel monetization strategies, and markets you've researched and have confidence are under-served.

It essential you safely expose as much of the idea and the work you do as early as possible so you can learn. But don't let anyone tell you that ideas are worthless or that there aren't people who will profit from good ideas that spill out. There is a reason, after all, that we have a patent system. "Ideas are worthless, its all in the execution" is as much a lie as "execution doesn't matter."
A number of Da Vinci's "inventions" were really just predictions of things that were invented much later (like his helicopter).
I moved somewhere where I get 0 bars on either of my AT&T phones anywhere within a half mile of my house. I called them, but they claimed that their map showed that I had coverage, so I couldn't get out of the contract. They also said they would be adding another tower soon. A year later I got an email that they'd added a tower, but the service quality did not improve.
Maybe someone should have showed the Diaspora guys that article.
or mia maya
It's not fair to compare execution speed of Android apps and iPhone apps. There's always a tradeoff between faster development time in a higher level language and getting better performance in a lower level language, which has been debated to death on the nets for years.

The fact is, the same code runs faster on Android 2.2 than it does on 2.1. That's not bogus, it's an objective measurement.
Why turn linkable, copy pasteable, screen readable HTML into an inscrutible image? Maybe they could make embedding simpler, but I think there are betterr options than turning it into an image.
Do you cover Microsoft PinPoint in the book? From what I understand it's supposed to be an AppStore for Azure.

My company has a .NET app, which customers deploy on their own servers. It would be great if we could offer an easy way to buy the app and get it automatically deployed on Azure. On customer's Azure account, of course.
I got hooked to hackathons recently(most notably on the winning team of the startup bus and on stage after the chirp hackathon). Here's my advice:

50% is Smoke and Mirrors.

Usually you wont be able to release an actual product in two days. You will be able to release something that's ingenious, adds value for some people, looks enough like a product and is packaged so that people will try it and give you feedback.

On coding: Don't write tests, don't review code and just go for it, be super productive. Don't pair program (unless your goal is to solve some very difficult problems in two days. In that case: good luck).

Finally, you'll be surprised how much can actually be achieved in two days :)
Monit seems to be the currently preferred solution in the Rails world. I use it on many different sites with no problems.

I've also used daemontools in the past and never had an issue with it, either.

I've heard good things about god, but I've not used it myself. (Now there's a sentence that could be taken out of context.)
New Android 2.2 Froyo API: Log.wtf()
http://twictur.es/ started doing this ages ago. I use Propane (http://propaneapp.com) and before 37s added styled tweets it used to automatically generate them.

I'd love to see twitter support this natively. I know I saw a js version they made somewhere, but it was kinda broken (had static relative times, ages of js to copy and paste, etc)
I think that was a good description of Apple Computer, Inc. Now that we live in the post iPhone world of Apple, Inc., they seem to be behaving quite differently. Their strategy seems dominated by short term market share grabbing in the mobile space, rather than long term product innovation and higher priced products.
There are also too many meta-posts, which is why I almost killed this one.

Yes, there have been a lot of fluff posts about Facebook, Apple, and Google lately. These posts are not so harmful in themselves. The problem is that they are too easy to upvote.

But it often happens that HN gets stuck in a rut of some particular kind of stupid story for a bit. This causes people who haven't been through one of these cycles to say that we've jumped the shark. (This belief is such a constant we should considering making it the site's tagline.) And then things return to normal.

It may happen that one day things never return to normal, of course, but based on experience so far I'm inclined to give these runs of bad stories time to run their course before worrying about them.

I have been gradually adding protections against fluff posts. E.g. "Ask HN" posts like this have for a long time had an automatic penalty applied when being ranked on the frontpage. I'm always mulling over other things I could do. But we're definitely not out of options.
Apple helps Google - FTC approve acquisition of Admob as Apple launches iAds
Sorry, I wasn't trying to say they solved the problem. They say exactly what they do and don't do.
USA only? It redirects me to http://www.google.co.uk.
I would like to see more programming and hacking on Hacker News again. Lately I've been seeing programming articles floundering in New and never making it to the front page.

Bit of a shame, really. It used to be I only needed to go to HN to get my fill of technical discussion. Now I'm not really sure where else to go. Perhaps someone has suggestions?
I think that's setting a low bar for "prediction" next to dated predictions like "In the next x years, we will be able to extend human lifespan by y years every z years."

I don't know that anyone can reasonably object to the theoretical possibility that an individual human life could be sustained indefinitely.