skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does YC see a problem with founders being the technical developers?

When I saw their bio when this was announced a few months back, I did scratch my head a little. One was a PhD in computer science, the other was a researcher at ARM.

None had a media background.

I just wish people stop thinking that journalism is a technology problem.It doesn't matter how good your platform is. This hacker culture of thinking everything can be solved with guru developer skills needs to stop.

Here are some qoutes from that letter:

"If I could rewind and start again then I believe the pitch for NewsLabs should have been simpler and much more realistic: we will build you a technology platform and strive to work hard for you as programmers... but we cannot magically generate you an online brand or guarantee traffic."

"It seemed like we had the right parts (your writing and our technology)..."

This is why Mark MacLeod, in a recent post on his blog startupcfo.ca, said that one of the traits for a successful founder is domain knowledge:

"Lets look at domain knowledge first. This is not about having studied or otherwise artificially gotten to “know” the industry. This is about coming from that industry, having lived it, knowing the players and knowing the pain firsthand. There is no substitute for this. You can’t fake it. You either come from the space or you don’t."
I use the noguchi filing system (http://www.lise.jp/noguchi.html). Basically, it's just an LRU for documents. No categories, no filtering, just insert everything on the left side (whether it's new or something you just accessed).

I think any filing system you use needs to have O(1) no thought required inserts because inserts are so much more common than reads. I'm willing to tolerate a bit of time looking for what I need (though I can usually find everything fairly quickly) since I only do it a few times a year.
Attachment is the root of all suffering. The subtlety is that one may want but clinging onto that desire and not letting go creates pain.
Sorry, live in wrong state, and I don't code in C. Though I'd love to pick it up, can't be harder than java or javascript, just some things you take for granted like references vs pointers have to be deliberately thought of until they become second nature. O well lets wait till the kids move out and I have free time to pick this stuff up :)
Tesla Motors IPO, Day 1
"... and most undergraduate students as well."

You are seriously out of touch with reality. Well, if you want to be a programmer, you can be a programmer right after high school, and there's no need to spend $30K per year to learn Java and Turing machines. Maybe you, too, have fallen under the spell of PG almighty and believe that "making something that people want" is sufficient to be a sucessful entrepreneur. After 10 years of trying and failing, you may come to the realization that playing the "all or nothing" game usually results in... nothing. Now you're on your late 20s, your high school friends who had more common sense are getting married and having kids, and you have nothing to show. Since you believe you're better than the ones who chose the easy path, you go "all in", hoping for that ever-elusive IPO that will make you rich enough to stick it to the system. In the process, you will have wasted your life chasing a dream.

Programmers tend to think that having coding skills is all that matters to make it big. Problem is, the barrier of entry is very low in programming these days, and if a high school kid can outcompete you, you're probably playing the wrong game.

People who live in the real world understand that universities sell credentials, not knowledge. Such people understand also that an undergraduate degree is little more than indoctrination, a process through which obedient employees are created. Most organizations need obedient employees, they don't need "creative" coders. Sorry, you're not a special & unique snowflake, and the world does not owe you a thing. It may suck, but being in denial won't help.

An undergraduate degree serves many purposes. For one, it indoctrinates you, which sounds evil, but is a necessary evil. Second, it allows you to find out what you like and what you don't. Third, by doing what you like and meeting like-minded people, you end up realizing who you are, not by introspection (fuck that new age BS), but through action. Fourth, it allows you to network with people from all walks of life and the most various fields. Fifth, it provides the skills necessary to accomplish something. You can stay 4 years at home studying by yourself, but you'll go crazy before you accomplish anything. Being in a structured environment for 4 years is a much gentler way of building a skill set that actually matters... just as long as you stay away from sociology, psychology, "womyn" studies and other such distasteful insanity.
Yes, mturk is the backend.
Amazon links can monetize it.
How to Price BI Consulting Services
It'd be a step up from what I'm making with contracting (and comparatively expensive), but this is Europe, and I'm clueless with regard to cost of living in the bay area.

Besides, where else do you get to work on problems like that? But judging by the other responses on this thread, my idea of fun doesn't seem to be widely shared.
The way Hulu seems to repeat ads seems a little absurd, especially given that a web service can track identity and ad views in a way that broadcast cannot. A couple impressions of a funny ad can have the desired effect, while 20 views of the same ad can backfire and end up creating a negative impression of the brand. Seems like it would be in the interest of both Hulu and advertisers to make a better effort to mix it up, especially if they want to replace traditional broadcast rather than merely supplement it.
Urban Airship sends half a billion push notifications
Here's the problem as Gary originally stated it, and as the article quotes it:

> I have two children, one of whom is a son born
> on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I
> have two boys?

You say:

the problem as stated in the article is that you know one coin is going to be a head,

No. The point of the article is that you don't know how or why you are given this information.

Suppose I toss two coins until I get one that's a head, then I tell you that I have two coins, and one is a head. I've complied with the problem as described. The probability that they are both heads is 1/3.

I was there when this problem was posed. I was in the room when the questions were asked, and Gary clarified. I had lunch with Gary afterwards, and he said it was deliberate that it was ambiguous.

It seems to me that you're missing the point. Perhaps you should explain clearly exactly how you think the situation arises where the information given is as described.
I haven't worked as a "programmer" or "software engineer" for a few years, but looking at GlassDoor.com for evidence, $125K seems like a pretty good salary. Is that an unrealistic salary for a programmer today? Are you referring to the greater rewards of being an entrepeneur/founder?
That's definitely bootstrapping. Arrington and cashmore didn't raise a single time. Sure their current success took years, but even where they were at 6-12 months afterwards could show they were on the rise.

If you're not making content people don't want to read then you're doomed regardless. It's like making an app people don't want: push it and fund it all you want, you're probably fucked.
That was funny to go pen & paper to do the reversal of the linked list, C style, like in the old days.

(aka, Java coding is tasteless)
Just to be clear, Flash on Android is fully capable of rendering Hulu's videos. Many people are doing exactly that by changing their user-agent.

The "problem" is that apparently mobile devices have to be licensed differently, and presumably more expensively. Which is, I presume, why you have to pay $10 a month to still have to endure ads on your iPhone.
That makes me sad because I've never made more than 1/3 of that as a developer in Vancouver.
I totally agree. The OP came with a great way of simulating certain states of the external environment for the purpose of tests and completely independently of the implementation. This decoupling seems uber cool.
I do this kind of work daily. I work in drivers, protocols and other operating system places.

No need to denigrate folks who do (or don't do) this kind of programming. Its just the difference between an applications programmer (who codes state-transitions for large state machines) and system programmers (who create those libraries everybody else uses).
I can edit it if you have suggestions...
Blink vs. Moneyball - Anything's Possible
Oh the timeliness of wp: Interesting how many features of those Dubai items are still described as "will be completed in" ...2008 or ...2009.
It's easy to be dismissive, but your criticism would probably be a good deal more constructive if you provided an example of an application where this division does not apply.

I've often thought that the recent emphasis on functional languages stems from the fact that webapps are where a great deal of innovation has been coming from lately. The design of the HTTP protocol makes it particularly straightforward to think about server-side code as a series of stateless (ignoring the database) transactions. The "model" of inherently* functional tasks as compilers and inherently procedural tasks as interpreters does a good job of crystallizing this idea.

(* When I say "inherently" functional or procedural here I mean tasks that lend themselves to being expressed cleanly one way or another.)
In my experience, "getting stuff done" in the academic world isn't about making money for the business owner. It's about teaching students. So I think your statement is a little unfair. Network admins, DBAs, and developers have to keep the infrastructure working so people can teach, and students can learn.

Try explaining to a student that you lost her transcripts, or explain to the government how someone got in and got 10,000 SSNs from your database.

The challenges are the same. But it's a lot harder when you can't hire the DBAs who know how to stop that kind of stuff cos you can only pay $50,000.

And there's no shortage of under-qualified IT "professionals" in industry. If you've ever done code audits for others, like I have, you know what I'm talking about.
World Cup-related allusion: Which is why I'm not surprised at all that Argentina's team is playing its heart out for Maradona. The man may be a lunatic and borderline incompetent as an organizer, but he has the domain knowledge and knows the pain points of winning a World Cup as an Argentinian side better than anyone.
I like this point. At VoltDB, we like to think we've removed a different set of features than many other scalable solutions, leaving a product that is useful for a set of problems that might not have a great option right now.

That said, VoltDB's architecture was built for in-memory and horizontal scaling from day 1. Based on hstore (http://hstore.cs.brown.edu/), it's not simply a removal of what's in existing systems.
You can do this today with Adobe ConnectNow.
It's a bit ironic that the link you refer to is actually broken. Thankfully the site suggests a viable alternate url (by adding a file extension), but pretty funny in context of the content.
This insecurity of dynamic linkage is a very interesting topic and I never considered it seriously before. Thanks for pointing it!
I wish I could understand the mentality behind this. "Wait, there's a site where you can go video chat with random strangers? I've gotta go on there and show off my johnson!"

Followed by 10x as many people who thought "I heard on the Daily Show there's a site where a bunch of people go show off their cocks to random strangers. I've gotta go do that too!"

On second thought, perhaps ignorance is bliss.
Good, except for the cheap shot at The Wealth of Nation at the end, which is called out in the comments.
Dead so soon?

The article concurs quite well with my own attempt to use Chatroulette. Some of it was quite funny - people staring with bemused expressions - but at least half of it was porn, and it was the porn element which put me off.

However, like the Monty Python sketch this genre may not be dead yet. If they could separate out the porn into its own category, so that it's not appearing unexpectedly on screen, then this kind of random chat via webcam might actually be a fun experience. Social networking sites might want to consider including some similar component, as a way of making new friends.
Its about benefits. 125k is quite low for high risk jobs for the awesomeness you require. My job offers the same salary with significantly more stability and not so insane requirements.
Michael, I think there is a pretty big misconception about affiliate programs and MLMs. MLMs can definitely be super shady; especially when there are startup costs and stupid fees.

In the context which I am discussing (mainly for bloggers) I believe it is a good strategy and should be used in most circumstances.
Charlie Mungur: Economics: Strengths, Faults, Interdisciplinary Needs [pdf]
These are the kind of questions where I might draw a blank if asked out of the blue, but I make sure to bone up on before going into any kind of technical interview.
I had a math teacher that got mad when I used the word "intuitively". Probably because most people don't understand that when your intuition doesn't match the mathematical result you have to hit your intuition with a hammer until it does.
That's an applications-programmer answer. But who did you think wrote java.util.concurrent? The article is by someone who needs systems programmers, who do algorithmic work, not applications programmers, who put together large state-diagram code.
Exactly. Here's an example:

http://www.noozhawk.com/local_news/article/042110_bed_tax_up...

Santa Barbara, which is a medium-sized city at best, generates over $11M a year in TOT/Bed taxes.

Do you think they're just going to sit by and let people eat away at that revenue? No way. They're going to have "Richard from accounting" monitor AirBnB and other sites–and start threatening people. Maybe they'll give them an option to remove their listing or register and start paying taxes. Since no one will want to go through health and fire code inspections or worry about taxes, they'll just remove it.

That's all speculation, of course. But enforcement can't be too difficult (at least, not on the RIAA level).
Interactive Oil Spill Map
"Please allow ourselves to introduce ... ourselves"

Upvoted for the funny Austin Powers reference.
Maybe we should get a beer together and discuss implementations :)
What I wrote is not wrong unless, when you wrote:
"So given 2 children, there are only 3 possibilities ...
boy, boy
girl, girl
boy, girl"
you are asserting that in the absence of any information about the sex of either child, 2 boys is a 1/3 probability, instead of (1/2)*(1/2)= 1/4.
Paul was kind enough to include me in a prelaunch mailing list of journalists where he discussed his vision.

At the time I have to confess I was not convinced Newstilt was the right product at the right time. It was an interesting vision (in a nutshell: to have journalists establish their own brands and syndicate content more directly to publishers/websites) but I did forsee traction trouble:

- Firstly because I felt journalists would have difficulty "getting" the new concept EDIT: by this I mean there was far too little content coming into Newstilt, I'm guessing because the writers didn't see instant returns and therefore gave up. As the email says Techcrunch took dedication and unfortunately for Newstilt they needed dedicated writers aiming for the same vision, hard to find.

- But mostly because publishers and websites would be resistive and negative about this concept (or simply uninterested).

I actually think it is a good model. A few years ago myself and others tried to form a similar style collective for UK tech magazines. It was a very hard to sell and ultimately failed because it was so radically difference.

I suspect one of the major problems was that it is such a different approach to media that it put many people off.

I've come to the conclusion that, for this sort of thing to work, it has to be built by journalists with both the contacts and the ability to placate both of the above problems.

(also, taking a honey moon in the first few months of a startup is never going to end well!).

Good luck Paul and Nathan - I really was rooting for you and it sucks that such a cool model never got off the ground.
He seems sincere--maybe he'll be another Grigori Perelman.

Check out his nudity policy: Naked twice, in the clear; naked thrice, outta here!
I think he will retire. That is the last speaking engagement in the page.
Tesla Closes Near $24: Elon Musk Goes From Broke To $672 Million In One Day
I had a great system for the kind of documents that you will only need in the far future, or not at all, but for which it would be a major issue if you actual need them but can't find them: tax stuff, receipts, statements, bills...

For this kind of documents you want to minimize the probability of loss, minimize the time to file them, and are not too concerned of the time to retrieve them.
For this a drawer is perfect: just put them in the top of the drawer, and do not use this drawer for anything else. It does not look very professional but is very effective:

- It takes 1 sec, thus diminishing the probability of not doing it and losing the paper.

- Documents are organized chronologically, so you can find what you are looking for quite quickly. Just be sure to religiously keep everything in chronological order.

Once per year, transfer the drawer’s content to a folder. If you fill up more than one drawer per year this system might not be good enough for you.

Alas, my gf did not see the beauty of this system, and insists on having a highly sophisticated and complex storage system that I think is strictly inferior on every account.
In my experience, it is actually better to be nonchalant about wanting to work for a particular company. People respond better to you if they know you're interested yet have other options.
You must not consume much legal media if you think paying money entitles you to no ads.

* $10 movie ticket - I see ads before the movie

* $70/month cable - I see ads on every channel but PBS

* $50 sport ticket - I see ads all over the field

* $60 Pay Per View - I see ads all over the place and the announcers spewing ads whenever they can
Actually, I'm going to stop now: http://xkcd.com/386/

It's pretty clear I won't convince you.

Let me leave you with these questions:

If I toss two coins until at least one shows a Head, what's the probability that both are Heads?

If I roll two dice until at least one shows a 6, what's the probability that both are 6's?

If I spin two roulette wheels until at least one shows a Red-23, what's the probability that both are red?

Are you sure?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that while I, too, often feel a burning need to understand my fellow man, this is one mentality I'm just not feeling too curious about.
This is exactly the kind of answer we're looking for.
This actually made me feel better about what I do know.

But then again, my course work included a course in operating systems where the main project was to write the multi-threading architecture, system call infrastructure, virtual memory, and file system for a bootable x86 OS. I went to Virginia Tech but the course's origins is Stanford.

Best class I ever took.
Unless you think Michael Phelps is a failure because somebody will someday beat his record, I would posit that yes, that is success.
HN specific linkbait title? Y Combinator was only mentioned in one sentence.
Search for and download those product manuals and put them in a digital shelf. You never look at them, anyway, do you? Most manuals can be easily found on the web these days.

Unless I plan to resell a small electronic, I don't keep the manuals. Small electronics I keep the box, manual, everything, but in a box in a closet. It does help resale vlaue.

Otherwise 100% agree. I'm just amazed you're a scanner, but you keep paper manuals.
Accused Russian spies lived perfect Boston lives
This advice that a successful founder has domain knowledge runs contrary to what's said of PayPal though.

From a recent thread in HN: http://primitus.com/blog/why-did-so-many-successful-entrepre...

PayPal had a strong bias toward hiring (and promoting / encouraging, as Keith mentions) smart, driven problem solvers, rather than subject matter experts

I doubt there's a hard and fast rule.
If its a good idea, then it will find its champion and its moment in the sun ... eventually.
Joy can't exist without suffering.
I can't shed much light on this, but my younger brother hangs around the 4chan-type crowd on the net and those guys are always on Vent coupled with video chat of some kind. More than once have I glanced at his monitor and have seen some guy jerking it. I can't figure out what it is about these people that compels them to do this.
Some useful tips for managing memory in R
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2010/06/tips-for-managing-memory-in-r.html
I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and I have earned trust in the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken to the Messiah.

But, I have never gone to college.
Redfin speak up about Tracey Foley
Similar experience here. A shocking number of people simply can't code. I started giving people a "simple" whiteboard programming question: write code, in any real language (i.e., not pseudocode,) to print out the permutations of a string, and give me running commentary on what they were doing. The idea was, by watching them complete a simple coding task that would require a couple of iterations of design and a little bit of "debugging" at the end, I could get a feel for how they attack problems.

In about a dozen interviews, nobody did it. The problem was way too hard. By the end of the cycle of interviews I had started giving lots of guidance to the candidates: asking them about permutations that their solutions would miss, asking them how many permutations their solution would print, asking how many permutations a string of length 2, 3, or 4 might have, and when they got stuck, telling them what they had right and when they went wrong. Nothing really helped, though.

Perhaps it's not really so shocking. Maybe's it's just too hard in a one-hour interview. I thought it would be easy, but then again, I've never had to write code in an interview. What is shocking is how poorly people floundered. I'm pretty sure most of them couldn't have even reversed a singly linked list. In the end, I gave the best marks to the candidates who:

1. Asked whether it was okay for duplicates to appear in the output.

2. Wrote up a roughly correct (syntax errors and off-by-one errors aside) implementation of their first idea for solving the problem and explained how it worked.

3. Understood when I pointed out permutations that their solutions would miss.

4. Were a good sport about being asked to solve the problem. (Actually, nobody who failed this criteria did remotely well at the others, so it's somewhat redundant. I mention it because I was surprised that people would get crabby about being asked to write code in an interview.)

Three or four of the candidates, out of about a dozen, managed to meet all four criteria. These were people who passed a phone screen! Even worse, some of the candidates who failed one or more of the four criteria above apparently shined in their other interviews, claiming to have been in charge of designing and implementing significant systems.
Yes, it will.

Something like it is on my back burner still (after 3 years - which in my mind makes it a great idea).

One way it could work is for a site (or a collaboration of sites) like Tech Crunch to create a network for aspiring tech writers - and go from there.