skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They have really stepped up their game. Love the free upgrades.
I just put these events on Google Calendar. Easy to do from mobile phone and searchable.
The Wii was unique, and will not happen again. It was the right place, the right product, and the right time to capitalize on the exploding definition of "Games" and "Gamer". That's over. People have either moved on to their phones/tablets, or they're the type who are still playing with their Wii.

The assumption that those many new gamers would behave like a "core" market was laughably wrong.

As for the portable, Nintendo is the best in the game, benefited from being up against Sony (the worst in the mobile game... they practically assassinated their own platform), and they have the benefit of a built-in market at home.

The Switch isn't a DS... it's not a pocket gaming platform. It isn't as useful as an iPad. It's as powerful as a console. What is it exactly, other than some kind of massive compromise rendered on substandard hardware?

Edit: left out the "isn't".
What are the current in-between steps for YC? What normally happens after application submitted but before acceptance e.g. in person interviews, video interviews? What other steps are involved and what's the reason for them?
To get a better understanding of YC's approach consider the following: there are a limited number of slots, they get substantially more good applicants than there are slots. What this means is that the question shouldn't be "am I good enough for YC?" the question is "am I better than 95% of other companies applying this batch?".

Now if you're YC and you see 2 identical companies and one set of founders is full-time and the other set of founders are part-time, it's safe to say that the full time founders will be given preference because they are more committed, etc.

On the flip side if you had phenomenal founders/company (at an extreme think if Mark Zuckerberg started a new company and applied to YC) being part time is not a big deal.

Unfortunately for you you don't have visibility into your competition for this batch, but you can use previous batch companies as a rough guide.
Valve has made more money catering to traditional video game types than Fee2PlayRobbery#8816732 ever has or will.
Netflix doesn't pay retail prices for AWS.
>The amount of color — the relative fractions of light of different wavelengths — is the same.

I'm talking from the point of the reception. Sensors can't detect it as good, so you get color noise and inaccuracies in low light scenes.
The good thing about latex is that it's pure text. While the ability for nice output might be lost, generally, the intent and content of the document is still extractable.
Yes, you're right. Thanks for pointing that out!
Contributing to Vent: Tips and Tricks
What do you think about conversational interfaces?
I've read the beginning. I cringed a little at the cartoony portrayal of Steve Cohen as some sort of emo teenager. The author clearly hadn't consulted anyone close to him and I had doubts about the accuracy.
Very important. It's mentioned on their site
Regardless of how effective or how it's just "changing the definition" at least it is helping.

Unlike here in Portland where it's just ignored and occasionally the tent cities get pushed to a different area.
Yeah there's nothing quite like horrendous human suffering to satisfy your hunger for sci-fi. /s
Most people wouldn't want to fight and die. Sucks. Also you could end up with some dictator when the dust settles.
I think most grammar nerds who know what an "Oxford comma" is would know that it's optional, and the kind of thing that can inadvertently change the meaning of a sentence. That's how I interpreted the headline, not that a typo was made. IMO the headline did a good job of condensing the issue into something I might be interested in reading without being misleading.
What I see happening is that eventually there will be so much merging of our healthcare systems in the next 10 years that there will eventually be a point where there are only several "players" in any area meaning that the problem of intercommunication becomes much simpler (i.e. Epic, Cerner, and Medtronic).
If you travel a lot, then this is for you. If not, then PS4 Pro with a 4k TV cannot be beaten.

Unfortunately, many "gamer" critics (like Colin Moriarty) are always flying all over the US. So all these reviews are heavily biased on being able to travel easily with this.
Not having task ID's on Asana is really annoying. Especially when you need to ask someone about something but the task name is really long/some really niche specific thing.
Palantir enables immigration agents to look up information from the CIA
Given that you put "General" in quotes, I'm not sure which part you think is bullshit.

If it's the part about him saying it, here's the youtube video[0] of a 4-star general in the US Army (Gen. David Perkins) making that claim.

And he's not advocating for lasers (it's unrelated to this article), he's advocating for alternative options, and mentions cyber and something like "sema?".

As far as could the patriot hit it, I would think the hard part would be tracking it. No idea what the RCS looks like on a quadcopter vs., say, a stealthy cruise missile.

As far as threats for use in asymmetric warfare, we've seen cheap drones that are used for recon, and we've seen them used to drop ordnance.

0 - https://youtu.be/6v7nfB5bV3E?t=14m54s

Edit: here's a link to a picture of an ISIS-modified drone used to drop grenades: https://twitter.com/AlexMello02/status/819259288950624256/ph...
It can screw only to the worse side so I don't care about the true results as long as the lower bound is sufficient enough.
This is largely true in the US as well, but our political parties refuse to update their branding.
Show HN: YouTube bot finds specific phrases/words in channels
Also, it seems incredibly delicate.

Upon finishing the final season of Dexter, I clicked on an episode in the first season to look up something. I jumped to the 18 minute mark and watched about 10 seconds and closed the tab.

Now Netflix asks me every time if I want to continue watching Dexter from where it now thinks I left off in season one even though I spent a whole year watching all of the seasons.

So I have the same concern. If they have a more sophisticated model, it certainly doesn't get reflected in the UI...
Hi Michael, has YC considered funding founders not based in (or able to move to) California?
LLNL Atmospheric Nuclear Tests (1945-1963)
> Maybe that's a good example of how to get right-wing politicians to agree to some left-wing ideals: prove that it will save money and let them lower taxes.

I've certainly heard this argument from the (few) libertarian sources that are considering basic income. They are opposed to "entitlement" programs, but see a (theoretically) cheaper entitlement program as better than an expensive one. (Perhaps they also think that a flat-sum basic income is easier to lower or hold flat than a complex web of social programs. Or I may be being cynical)

OTOH, it can still be a hard sell to constituents. The US has known for at least a decade that spending more on IRS agents would earn more money than it would cost. No new rules, no new regulations, just enforcement of the rules we have. Seems like an easy decision to me, but few politicians, left or right, want to be caught saying we should have more tax enforcers.

Pity.
What are some of the more well known YC companies of the previous 3 years? Some posterchilds like Dropbox and AirBnB were a few more years ago. (from traditional IT category, not FinTech, etc)
Would an employee not have the same flexibility to stay in the Bay Area and work remotely from there to preserve their "options in the future"?
Depends who you ask and whether its business email or personal. Lots of businesses still use outlook or lotus notes and the email is stored on each client. And then some people like to use what they use at work.

When I worked for Nationwide insurance (50 to 60 thousand people) we could keep as much email as we wanted locally, but no more than 100 mb on the server. This is a stupid policy, but it is a common policy.
Thumbs up/down also misses an important metric, for me: the "meh" factor. Maybe something sucks, maybe it's great, but what if it's like...I have nothing to do, I guess I'll watch this show.

You could say "well that's the same as not rating it!" but it's not. I'd like there to be a clear distinction between "I abstain from voting" and "I thought this content neither vomit-inducing nor life-changing."
In the short term, while the technology is still pretty new, perhaps. But that would assume an agility on the part of the people building the targeted missiles that I'm pretty sure only players like Russia and China can offer, and we don't want to get into a shooting war with them, anyway. For most of the other states (or non-state actors) that we might be exchanging fire with, that's out of their reach, making this a potentially very cheap (relatively) and effective countermeasure.

Moreover, if battlefield lasers follow the growth-curve of most other technologies, they will quickly reach a point where, not only is adding power to the lasers easier than adding armor to the missiles, the amount of additional mass required becomes infeasible.
Feedly as a backend to Reeder 3 (paid). Don't like Feedly interface so opted instead for Reeder, much better experience IMHO
After what "fact"?

That seems like a fairly straight-forward statistic based on a snapshot in time (e.g. when you do the survey): Has the person in question been: (a) living on the streets for more than a year, or four times in the past three years, and (b) has a "disabling condition" (e.g. serious mental illness, an addiction or a physical disability or illness)
>I cannot base my beliefs about specific events on my general sense of what kinds of things happens.

Lacking concrete evidence, that's exactly the kind of thing you should base your beliefs of specific events on.
People have said that it's only a matter of time before all horse labor is replaced by machines since the wheel was invented.

Yet it keeps not having happened yet.

What do you think about Wilson's 14 Points, by the way?
In what ways have your criteria for selecting great startups changed or evolved over the past 5 years? (either your criteria personally or YC's general criteria)
I enjoyed it, then I became suspicious, then I saw where the show was going and bailed. There's nothing special about writing yourself into a corner after all.
> This is why I think style guides that disallow parenthetical comments are ridiculous

I've never seen a style guide that restricted the use of dashes for appositives, especially where commas are ambiguous. Parentheses aren't necessary, just write "To my mother—Ayn Rand—and God."
Of course, but how is chronic defined and measured, and how has that changed historically? I've heard that the definition is ever-changing. I read the article
Lets say a movie previously would have shown 3 out of 5 stars. Where does that fit in with the binary thumbs up/down? I think they are just doing this because recently some actors movies are being attacked with 1 star ratings for being politically vocal.
Which I already did 11 hours prior.
Vancouver tried the same thing. The made a policy of eradicating homelessness by X date and the city bought up SROs to put them in and other housing options.

The problem is once the rest of Canada's homeless heard about this they came in droves, often given one way bus tickets by police, so it's impossible to solve chronic homelessness without some kind of national effort. Utah this strategy works because there isn't a flood of people going there like they are San Francisco or LA's Skid Row.

It would be great if governments could have some kind of yearly conference to compare data and strategies to figure out what works/doesn't work at scale.
Forget Coding: Writing Is Design’s “Unicorn Skill”
If you are sophisticated enough to appreciate "foreign documentaries", you should have little trouble discovering them by another means than Netflix rating algorithm. The latter is for the laziest, couch-potatoest audience, and it makes sense to optimize for that.
I agree, but I think "complex simulation" is the opposite kind of product most AAA houses are designed to produce. Most games are far far from complex, to the point of adding on arbitrary mechanics to add a feel of complexity.

After all, complexity requires thought, balance, testing... and again it's just easier to crank out a turd that people will thank you for offering them.
I'm really excited for the Startup School MOOC we are launching soon and excited about all the new software we are building to help the new YC batch and all the alumni. Most people don't realize how much of a software company YC is. We run our own internal mini-facebook, internal quora, and a host of other sofware to track companies and read applications.
Add to that statement a "probably...".

For example WWII started with months of "phoney war" where both sides moved onto a war footing, followed by a short violent blitzkrieg.

WWII is also shows powers capable of exercising restraint, even Hitler, conducting a war he was obviously losing, opted to not use chemical weapons. WWIII could be fought in a couple of hours or it could go on for years with neither side willing to press the biggest button.
There is an open issue, if you have any insight in providing other APIs backend https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/issues/57
Good Job :D
Project: https://github.com/jeaye/value-category-cheatsheet
Scade - Next Generation Mobile Application Development Platform
It's just that the answer to the question posed in the headline is a definite 'no'. This type of silly inquiry into "is Azeri related to Sumerian", "is Georgian related to Chinese" etc. is very common in that part of the world, and is largely pseudo-scientific at its core.

As for ML methods, I know for a fact that modern Bayesian inference techniques have been successfully applied in comparative linguistics and proto-language reconstruction.
I was wondering too, but from Wikipedia[1] :

> enables a programmer to assemble a massively parallel program (both local and distributed)

Mentioning distributed parallel program seems to indicate they do support clusters. The Wikipedia page could be wrong. If it supports multi processes on a single machine it should work on multiple nodes too.

Compared to TBB as you mention : [2] it's only focused on shared memory parallel programs.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaftLib

[2] https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-threading-buil...

EDIT: From the paper cited in Wikipedia :

> As to communication between nodes, RaftLib seamlessly integrates TCP/IP networks, and the parallelized execution on multiple distributed compute nodes is transparent to the programmer.

> The streaming compute paradigm generally, and Raftlib specifically, enables the programmer to compose sequential code and execute not only in parallel but distributed parallel (networked nodes) using the same code.

So it looks like it supports clusters at least over tcp/ip, but it's not hard to imagine another lower level communication protocol on a cluster.

That being said, one reason they only show threaded programs in the paper and in the example could be that the performance and scalability on many-cores is terrible. I wouldn't be surprised if it involves moving a lot of data across the network pipes.
Reminds me of the battle between hackers and Niantic to create scanners for Pokemon Go.
Hello Michael,

Thanks for the AMA

Question: Is there are more stringent criteria for accepting international founders and companies, focused on their local markets?

The reason I am asking this is because most of the companies from India in the latest batch, seem to have a lot of traction and/or significant amount of funding before being accepted into YC. Most looks like good candidates for Series A.

Vs other US based founders and startups in the current and previous batches
This is the same Valve with the "hat" empire, and CS:GO gambling scandals, right?
How is team-member-1 doing?
are you guys considering decentralized web apps as well? e.g.) ipfs/ethereum based web apps
Can you provide some info on how does YC support hardware startups? More specifically, what is a good stage to apply?

We are working on building a demo-quality HW prototype, with the ETA of ~6months. That means we will not be focused on growth, but on tech development. Should we wait until we have a working system and apply to YC when we are ready to scale and grow it (this is our current thought).
There are two factors at play here. First, if you track an individual gamer over time, I think they generally will gradually prefer increasingly complex games. Not necessarily "complex" in the sense of difficulty, but in the sense of depth; as sibling suggests, deeper worlds with more things to explore, etc, even if that exploration is not thinking-intensive.

But at the same time, the market for games has expanded greatly due to in-browser games, smartphone games, etc. Those people are "introductory/casual gamers". Some of them will remain casual, some of them will stop gaming entirely, but I think of those who continue gaming, many of them will come to want something more.

So, in short, the existence of lots of really shallow games largely reflects an expanded market IMO rather than some inherent shallowness of humanity. I share your cynicism in the sense that there are some who will never move beyond FarmVille, and that is sad, but I cannot imagine what mechanism would drive, or what evidence would support, the average individual gamer preferring less complex games over time.
Right. The original thumbs down means being put to death.
There is nothing in that analysis that suggests that the reductions aren't real. Quoting in "The Data" portion:

> Figure 2 shows that, measured by its point-in-time counts, Utah experienced a less dramatic, but still impressive 71 percent decrease in chronic homelessness since 2005. Yet should we trust even the point-in-time counts?

Yes. If you want to challenge them, go out and do point in time counts rather than suggest that someone is lying. In fact, challenging them in the manner that the writer is is fundamentally dishonest, suggesting again that research by its very nature shouldn't be trusted.

> In fact, as Figure 3 shows, there were major drop-offs in chronic homelessness during two separate periods: 2009–10 and 2014–15. If not for these two periods, chronic homelessness in Utah would have increased over the past decade.

Just because reductions appear during specific time periods during a research period does nothing to deny the fact that overall reductions occurred. This is like suggesting that a small uptick in violent crime means that crime hasn't reduced at all over the last several decades.

The entire article is anti-science, as the AEI all too often is. If you want to challenge research, you don't do it by suggesting someone is lying, you do it by using the scientific method. AEI really doesn't do any of that, it is primarily there to challenge research to protect support for conservative ideals while making them seem as if they are well researched.
Amazon Kindle's terms unreasonable and would take nine hours to read
I doubt we're more intelligent than apes. We just have some specialized language machinery that allowed a new parasitic species (memes) to evolve on top of us. We're just apes with a "copy" button in our brains. We look intelligent, but that's just because we're being farmed by memes.

The memes aren't smart either, but the 2-layer system is smarter than any 1-layer system.
Hi Michael,

If a startup has taken a lot of dilution before applying for YC, is YC flexible enough to not dilute the founders but come up with a structure that makes them get 7% through a secondary sale or some other tactic which makes sense for that specific situation?

I have mostly come to the conclusion that the answer is no because YC likes to do stuff in a standard way and there is no room of flexibility w.r.t that aspect of the program terms. Just wanted to confirm that though.
Stock photos of working women are awful. Upload yours to make it better
Yeah... that's a lot of momentum to deal with, in a rail gun. Deflecting it would be hard, and disrupting it would tend to turn the slug into a co-moving cloud of superheated particles/plasma. I'm not sure that's hugely desirable either!
Cycling in the rain is a risk. Cycling in the dark is a risk. Cycling across badly-designed intersections (and if it put you as a cyclist in the kind of danger it wouldn't have put a car in, it's a badly-designed intersection) is a risk. Being on the road without a helmet - indeed doing anything in your life without a helmet - is a risk. In all of these cases one weighs up the risk of doing it against the inconvenience of not doing it.

Maybe we're all "fucking stupid", but by the stats someone cycling without a helmet is less stupid than someone driving, at all. There's this weird, disproportionate cultural obsession with helmets for cyclists and cyclists only.
Speaking as a solo technical founder: I think at this early a stage the most important non-tech thing is to understand your users, and optimizing your funnel so as to get as many users as possible in the fastest, most optimal rate.
> My new salary is just much higher

Let's just talk numbers for a moment, were you earning at least $200k?

I find it very difficult to believe any other metros, especially small cities, could afford to pay a non-senior engineer over $200k in total comp.
What are examples of some good answers to the why question? And some bad answers?
Founders spend the money in any way they choose.
Its stated on the site.
Why not just open-source and continue solitarily working on and releasing his personal fork of it?

As in, Dwarf Fortress: Tarn Edition, with only one contributor, and multiple forks from other people taking the game in different directions, as well as projects that just incorporate the best features from multiple forks into one version.
Uh oh, now they're going to need to re-film the Black Mirror "Nosedive" episode (s3e1) using thumbs-up/down instead of 5-star ratings...
I really like the animations and started playing with them on my side projects
I planned a short vacation earlier this month which involved flights, 2 different hotels, and a rental car. Inbox automatically gave me an itinerary with a timeline of each thing in order with all relevant info (flight times, flight number, hotel addresses, rental car company and confirmation number, etc) on one screen I could look at on my phone. It added my trip (and hotel stays) to my calendar on the correct dates so I could plan better. And it did all this without me asking it to do anything. Literally all I did was make reservations for things. It figured out where I was going, and that the flights, hotels, and rental car were all part of the same trip.
I don't have a co-founder at this moment. But I am working on an MVP that make sense more in India than here in the USA. I am from India but live in Bay area. Can you suggest what is the best way to build this product into reality?
If pay were the only factor I'd take a 20%-30% pay cut to be able to move closer to my wife's family and we as a family would end up being able to save more while actually owning a huge home.
For those interested, Signal doesn't seem to use ZRTP anymore:

> The new Signal voice and video beta functionality eliminates the need for ZRTP. The "signaling" messages used to set up the voice/video beta calls (offer/answer SDPs, ICE candidates, etc) are transmitted over the normal Signal Protocol messaging channel, which binds the security of the call to that existing secure channel. It is no longer necessary to verify an additional SAS, which simplifies the calling experience.

https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-video-calls-beta/

And it's not in beta anymore:

https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-video-calls/