skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only real paradox on this matter is that UFOs are systematically out ruled as the expected manifestation of ETs.

There is apparently a prejudice on what an ET manifestation should or might be. If there is no match, people mistakenly conclude that ET don't exist instead of calling back into question their assumptions on what an ET manifestation should be.

Most reasoning about ET naively project humans constrains or interests on them as well as our rationale. This is quite naive.

The author suggest filters, I suggest barriers.

The most important barrier is interstellar travel which requires to be able to collect energy somehow during the travel (i.e. from dark matter) or the be able to completely freeze any activity and energy spending on board during the travel (i.e. as do plant seed) and using the destination sun as energy source to trigger to reactivation.

When a civilization has reached this stage, he most probably has become independent of the need to be on firm ground like an earth or so. He will be much more comfortable in a fully artificial, customized and big enough space ship. What I mean to say is that their constrains may be totally different than what we may expect based on our experience.

From this perspective I assume the real value (St Graal) is scientific and engineering knowledge and mastering, and for this, if avoiding direct contact and obvious manifestation can simplify the task, they'll do it.

We have no idea on their constrains, their knowledge and how humans are positioned regarding it.

There are enough facts and data on UFOs however to learn and deduce things about their technology. (i.e. electro magnetic propulsion, very intense magnetic fields, supra conductive vehicle shell at room temperature and above, protecting against magnetic field, etc...). These are not just speculations, there are hard facts justifying them. (i.e light polarization due to intense EM field around the UFO made visible on a photograph), etc.

Apparently very few people really take the time to investigate objectively and in detail the data at hand and the hard facts.
The New New Thing
I have to say that I'm not too thrilled by this move to VMs by everyone in the Ruby world. One of the things that I absolutely love about Ruby 1.8 is that when performance is a dog I can just replace the slow Ruby code with fast C code. Writing extensions is dead easy. With a VM this can ony be a much more convoluted process.

An example (which is a bit Russian Dolls nested in nature) - I recently wrote a tool that takes various modules from a C project with an embedded target, and places them inside a VM to obfuscate the code. Because it's embedded code, we needed to be able to only place selected modules in the VM, for performance reasons, but we needed the transition between VM and native C code to be transparent (Basically, everything is coded in C, but we compile some modules for the VM, not the target).

To make this work, I wrote a tool that generates glue code to cross the interface. Code is generated automatically for both sides of the interface. This requires the use of a C parser, which for performance reasons is mostly written in C. But the high level analysis is done in Ruby, as is code generation, various sandbox management tasks and other peripheral tasks. If I couldn't have written the front end of the parser in C using yacc, the performance would be horrible. As the sandbox is quite large (300 000 lines of code), performance of the parser is a major issue. I don't know how easy it is going to be to port this stuff to the new impls....
I'd say contribute in as many other capacities as possible, like sales, accounting, PR, business dev, etc. Make the final vision a shared one, and don't consider "the idea" to be what entitles you to the fruits of the business.
Sounds like you have some good takeaways from the experience. Next time, it won't be pg making comments but customers. You'll have to work harder to read between the lines, but you'll do fine if you give their suggestions, hints, and concerns the same weight you should have given pg's.
NYT: Who needs another Social Network?
Sadly, we did not make it either. Since I don't have a blog, I'll just say a few things here...

Basically, we did everything we could on our end:

-Had a pretty good demo. We spent a few months working on it part-time and we had the entire thing up and running with enough features for it to be roughly usable and we had some nice mock-ups of the future stuff we wanted to put in. I even showed them that TechCrunch featured one of the UI components (that was released as a standalone widget) done by our UI guy.

-we prepared very well. We met with a few people from the local startup community (organizers of DemoCamp, a CEO and CTO of a local startup, etc) and had them pick apart our pitch. They did a very good job and brought up a lot of concerns which we worked out. People I emailed beforehand said to expect a lot of questions at the interview and to think on your feet, but because we had already gone through this 3 times with the local people, none of the questions during the interview were new to us and we had decent answers.

So why didn't we get accepted? Well, there were simply better teams around that day. The email from pg did give two reasons, but to be honest, they were pretty flaky. The first was the community aspect (ie, it depended on user generated content) and the second our planned revenue stream. We had good answers to these ready since we expected they'd be raised during the interview and plenty of previous YC startups had overcome the same problems. The way I see it, if pg's philosophy is "build something nice people want to use, then worry about the money" and he rejects you because of revenue concerns, then it's basically a nice way of saying "Sorry, I just liked the other teams better"

Of course this illustrates a one of the downsides of the whole startup thing. A lot of the things you do in life are pretty deterministic: if you spend 1hr/day learning Spanish, you'll know it well sooner or later, if you spend 1hr/day working out, you'll increase your stamina or muscles or whatever you're working on. If you work 1hr/day on a startup up.. well, its probabilistic, so all you're doing is tilting the odds in your favour, but you're never guaranteed anything - be it progress or success or whatever. So all the work on the app and all of the preparation for the demo/interview was for naught.

Anyway... it'd be a shame to throw so much work away, so we'll probably work on it a bit more, then release it as a side project or something. At least have a decent project to put on future resumes or whatever.
Uggc: URL Obfuscation Service
OK, this guy obviously went into this experience not wanting to like the mac.

First of all, installation is a no-brainer. Once you click a link for an app, Safari downloads and automounts the dmg, leaving you with the simple task of dragging it into the application folder. How is dragging a new application into a folder called "Applications" counterintuitive?

Second, I've used many macs and I've never had a single problem with the dual-screen setup. This issue was something environmental in your case, I believe.
Unless you use AdBlock :)
App/package management on OS X is pretty bad, especially since there's no automated way to uninstall stuff. Yes, I know that you drag the app to the trash, but there's usually preference files, caches, folders in 'Application Support', etc, that get left behind unless you use a program such as AppZapper to get rid of them. Something like that should be built into OS X.

Although I've only used it on a server (and not a desktop), Debian/Ubuntu's aptitude/apt-get package system is probably the easiest thing I've ever used. It's awesome.
If you are downmodding this, quickly read some craigslist person seeking person posts.

I would guess the majority are just looking for random sexual hookups. Some sort of eHarmony matching for sexual partners would probably be an overwhelming success.
Facebook: Reach and Saturation by Country, Part II
Apps packaged in DMG files is sort of an odd artifact of OS X's past. Early versions of OS X didn't really have support for various archive formats in the GUI, and so the DMG format was the best option that worked out of the box. Now with 10.5 you can use a whole plethora of archive formats. Heck, you can send someone an app in a .tbz2 and it will unpack as expected with a simple double-click.

(I may be remembering this all wrong; someone please correct me if that's the case.)
Microsoft device helps police pluck evidence from cyberscene of crime
Marty, hopefully you guys are doing the startup regardless.
Thanks for posting. But on your probabilistic/deterministic thought, you did get something out of the startup experience. After all, working out one hour per day can make you more fit, but doesn't guarantee you'll make the team on the first tryout.
Yep, the replacement for ASCII art...
Ok! That was hilarious. Though I am still trying to figure out why its on HN???
A reminder of how far Wikipedia has come in the last three years
Who do people trust? (It ain’t bloggers)
Attention, Digital Peasants: the iPhone is Coming
Forget Brain Age: Researchers Develop Software That Makes You Smarter
Agreed. Whoever did that was very patient. Though its great if you are working the examples in Slime, just copy paste, and you are golden!
2 Simple Ingredients That Will Boost your Morning Energy
Heh, I'd never get anything done with all that clutter ;-)
As a kid, I had a few years of Judo training and I have never learned how to choke a person. From my experience, Judo is about catching or throwing opponents off-balance (often with their unwilling help) and disarming and immobilizing them so they can't harm you.

Of all martial arts, Judo is one of the gentlest. I can hardly imagine using it to kill someone who does not really want to get killed.

As for Mr. Sturgeon, misreporting a crime, specially if it's done with the intention of compromising a murder investigation, is a serious offense. I am not sure why the police didn't get him.

And, while we are at it, it is a real no-no do screw your friend's wife.

This case begs for an appeal.
Well. Just wait until Theo's wife goes missing.
Strands Acquires Expensr, Launches moneyStrands
Ask YC: advice for a would-be startup founder living in Africa
i am a hacker living in Africa (Nigeria) and i have developed a web application (for obvious reasons) and i will like to build it up into a business, so i will like to get some relevant advice from you guys that will help me.
It's Official: iPhone coming to Canada this year
What did you do to combat the effect of that "dull jobs numb the mind" study that was on here last week? (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7358863.stm)

I don't think I could stay interested in your n-back test for a whole 20 minutes at a time...
Python Standard Library Reorganization
TechCrunch UK - Every UK VC deal in 2007
accepting patches from an apparently-insane convicted murderer is really, really bad P.R. for your open source project.

Curiously, the Oxford English Dictionary didn't have problems accepting contributions from their apparently-insane murderer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chester_Minor
I think the time is ripe whenever there's a good idea.
Facebook is for college goobers (review of social network transitions)
I agree that, in general, a sentence shouldn't reflect confidence in the verdict. However, given that the US justice system has so many shades of each crime, it's actually not clear either that someone's either guilty or not... they might well be guilty of a lesser crime, which would approximate sentencing guidelines as preferred by grandparent.
Communication is great and all, but don't become a "New Media Douchebag"!
Jakob Nielsen says you're wrong:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

And my own very advanced N=1 research on myself says that too.
I would think that anyone smart enough to build a good prototype would have a drawer full of startup ideas.
This is more realistic in the long haul: http://hashrocket.com/ "Your idea, implemented in 3 days. No joke."

The last time I checked it cost 30k... ideas are cheap and even counting the really good ideas, a lot of people tend to have the same ones. If the idea submitters have nothing to contribute besides the idea, I feel that you're creating a self imposed 'tax' on yourselves.

I guess it's useful to you guys if you think that you're not creative enough to come up with any good ideas on your own.
How to Know if You’re Doing What You Love Most
Ajax Accessibility
Coding Horror: Programmers Don't Read Books -- But You Should
what are the obvious reasons? Web app is amazingly non specific.

you will get more help if you are more open.
FWIW, the researchers say they will be making an English version of their training software available for download here, eventually:

http://www.apn.psy.unibe.ch/lenya/apn/live/anwendung/braintw...
This is very biased toward the considerations of an enterprise datacenter, and thus against languages like Ruby, Python, et alia, that run in their own interpreters, which makes them harder for enterprise datacenters to manage than languages that run in the JVM and CLR, for which tons of monitoring tools and such exist.

Nevertheless, Ted is crazy smart and knows a ton of programming languages, and he has a fair number of insightful things to say about the comparisons here. Just go in knowing that he's not going to be recommending Lisp or Python for the enterprise.
Cute, but throw some %20's at it.
We got rejected last year too. It would be nice to be with YC but, over the last year, we found ways of funding ourselves and changed our business plan. We continue to look for great advice - which is often forth coming in videos, forums etc and networking opportunities.

YC gives -

1. Advice/guidance

2. A little money

3. Networking Opportunities

4. A high pressure environment to get the best out - quick.

Except for #3, we have substitutes for all others. And #3 is picking up too.

So I say, "Go be your on YC!"
Interview^-1
There's Edwin which is Emacs modified for MIT Scheme. It might be possible to modify it to work with another Scheme, I haven't checked.
Wish I could downvote
The obvious reasons are: (1)i wont have distribution headaches,
(2)easy to deploy and upgrade
and the list goes on.
I need advice on IP, business, co-founders, funding etc
I want my OpenID
This video is hilarious! I'm going to use all the little social-network icons to the left of it and share it with my friends.
Why? I thought it was a useful, and amusing insight into the ridiculous nature of social networking, and ties in with a lot of stuff that has been talked about on HN (eg Matt Maroon's posts, and paul's)
Other types of complexity can be handled in custom template tags too.

The easy way to look at them is you could write your own 'filter' or 'count' or any of the tags you see.

However, most of your needs can be met by the built in filters.
There is nothing more annoying than a company that makes you jump through hoops (complex registration system) to get something that they want from you (your comment, which makes their post/site/life better).
Thanks! I'll check it
I don't buy it. Where are you getting your information, or is this just conjecture?
If the majority of investor will minimize the risk they take, there will be more opportunities and profit at hand for those who will dare to take a bit more risks. The good news is that it is much less risk as before.

The other good news is that the economy is much more fluid as before. The market has extended in size (Asian country) and the access barriers is continuously lowering (as for launching a startup). I'm optimistic. But not of the "wait and see" kind ;)
The man knows what he wants.
MySpace developing "HyperTargeting" ad system, claims 300% increase in clickthroughs in tests
Working out is a bell curve thing, whereas startups and wealth and some other things like that are exponential. The fastest sprinter in the world can probably run...what...2, 3, 4 times as fast as I can? But the wealthiest guy in the world is worth many orders of magnitude more than I am, which is exponential, not a bell curve distribution.

Working at a normal company, doing a more or less normal job is more along the bell curve - you can make pretty good money as a top software guy somewhere, but (options aside), you're never going to get that lucky break and make zillions. On the other hand, you might well make more than the startup guy, if he spends a year working on his own thing, 'for free', and then fails.

(See: The Black Swan)
Once or twice a week. Did you catch the part where he said he likes to maintain perpetual sessions? When you leave apps open indefinitely, they are more prone to crash I think.
Wow, you guys can vote this down all you want, but, as they say:

"Ignore basic economic principles at your own risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not."
This article makes a huge mistake that many entrepreneurs also fall victim to:

You and your friends are not the Internet.

There've been studies done on who clicks on ads (one was even linked here). It's midwestern housewives, the same people who watch daytime TV and enter magazine sweepstakes. I don't know a single person who watches Jerry Springer, enters sweepstakes, or uses MySpace over FaceBook, yet those people obviously exist. They're worth billions of dollars.

For that matter, my friends usually don't pay attention to TV or print ads either. They Tivo past the commercials or get their TV episodes off BitTorrent. They skim past the advertisements in magazines. They only look at the newspaper classifieds if they're actively looking to buy something.

A bigger problem for entrepreneurs is that roughly 99% of startups seem to target the same 10% of the market - the part that doesn't click on ads. If your users come from TechCrunch or Digg or news.YC, it's a pretty good bet that they've learned how to filter out ads. Most of the big consumer-web success stories - MySpace, PlentyOfFish, and lots that we don't hear about because they're not plugged into the Silicon Valley scene - succeed because they target a demographic that most of us can't identify with.
And interestingly, he forgot Clojure. It's a decent Lisp, and your ops folks (or clients) can deploy to the existing JVM environment. A pretty good compromise, if you ask me. Oh, and it runs pretty fast.

(I haven't done a Clojure project, but I imagine it might be unpleasant dealing with the usual Java-isms in the libraries you'll have to use. But at least you'll be able to understand the code a few months after you've written it.)
Well, as far as I can tell, the advice that flows freely here is as good for you as it is for everyone else, modulo Africa-specific things, which we may not be able to help you much with. So - do you have any specific questions?
A useful Jakob Nielsen link - thank you.
You make a very good point. I really wasn't looking at it from the perspective of money, but rather the adventure and challenge. (It's probably a coping mechanism, because if I looked at my startup as trying to make zillions I would be constantly depressed.)
Your last paragraph strongly suggests to me that you were rightly rejected.

Here's the last paragraph:

Anyway... it'd be a shame to throw so much work away, so we'll probably work on it a bit more, then release it as a side project or something. At least have a decent project to put on future resumes or whatever.

Translation: "Because one VC firm rejected us, I...suppose...I can still use the incipient startup as resume filler. Or whatever""

That's a loser attitude if there ever was one, and I'm going to guess that VCs look for it.
Isn't it like a box with gear in it?
Right. I don't see how this does not apply to, e.g., an engineer or graphic designer who could create a product but not sell it, or sell it but not create it. These people can't survive except as part of a big company -- and they get that way by either getting hired, or starting a built-to-flip startup and selling out. It seems like a false dichotomy, since these are two ways for the same people to do the same thing.
Well, he's right, though not exactly for the reasons he states.

Display ads are in fact worth much less than search ads, for most web sites. Display ads aren't about clicking, they're about exposure/influence (kind of like outdoor or TV ads without an explicit call to action). There the CPMs are much lower, since they by definition less effective at producing sales. (though they are not completely valueless, since eyeballs without immediate conversions may still eventually convert)

He's also right that most people's idea of "making money on the internet with ad-supported" has in mind the glory days of $4 CPMs on banner ads. We haven't been there since '01 or so. So everyone's economic model is screwed up.

There are only two (and a half) ways to make money with ad-supported content on the internet:

-- 1) Conventional CPM display ads-- but you have to have millions of pageviews a month, and extremely low marginal costs, to make this profitable.

-- 1.5) Conventional CPM display ads, but on a extremely valuable niche site (e.g. a forum for doctors or lawyers). Here, though, there are probably more profitable ways of monetizing than ads.

-- 2) Extremely SERP-friendly content with adsense/affiliate ads: If your content is targeted enough that it appears in a Search Engine Result Page (or if you can arbitrage the traffic through paid search), then you can get visitors who are in search mode (marketers call this "intent"), who will click through to your site, and then click an ad on your site related to their search. Think "mesothelioma" splogs.

If none of these work for you, you should consider alternate monetization methods (freemium, subscription, traditional bizdev/affiliate programs, etc).
I was referring to the exaggeration as the 'kool-aid'. I think network effects are self-evident, it's just that the term 'network effect' has transcended into buzzword territory. No economic principle operates perfectly in the real world, because not all people actually act rationally in the real world.
yes, how do i get funding? or something close to Ycombinator
Terrifying. And the source is only marginally larger than the same image in PNG (15k vs. 13k).
It sounds like the founder didn't really believe in the idea.

I would not invest in founders that aren't passionate about what they are doing.

Find something that makes you excited.
The innovation people are talking about is in taking germs of ideas and making them blossom into full potential -- that includes developing new ideas along the way. Just like Mac OS came from the Star.
So, we shouldn't trust him? :) I think his categories aren't orthogonal. For example, a trusted blogger may be considered, for example, a known expert rather than a blogger.
id make a wild guess and say those already exist in community form on the internets.

for sex the problem is the same as in "real" life, women can choose so i doubt its just hooking up over the internets to get laid...

if guess its 10 to 1 or worse men to women wanting to get laid...

and that 1/10 is not jessica alba.
sarcasm ahead

I have no idea how you delete applications on a Mac either. You have to go to Applications and delete that folder you copied to your Applications directory?

It is much better having an 'uninstaller' that does a half-assed job at removing things from the registry and cleaning up files.

Matt I realize trolling can feel good on the short term but people will give you more respect in the long run if you are sincere.
That's not just YC interview advice, that's advice for life. The ability to recognize good ideas in others is a far rarer skill than being able to come up with good ideas yourself. And, since there are far more others than selfs in the world, it tends to be a more useful skill as well. Even if you disagree with advice being offered, showing respect for the ideas of the person offering the advice by at least pondering it will make the advice-giver feel good about themselves and therefore like you.