skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Back of the envelope calculation: Suppose a typical group spends 3 hours filling out investment-application paperwork per investor they're pitching; investors take 1 out of every 20 applicants; and a startup wants to take money from 5 investors. Then they've just spent 300 hours -- over a month -- filling out application forms, and it's probably going to be 2 months before they can focus on something other than raising money again.)

I don't think it makes sense to say that because investors take 1 out of every 20 applications, a given startup has to pitch 20 investors. The average might, but that isn't necessarily a meaningful number. Some will pitch 1, others will pitch 40 before giving up.
I think it'd be great if YC published a standard note that has the cap (with both a dollar and percentage) that accommodated rolling closes like y'all did for the Series AA docs. Given that this is now the new hotness, it'd make seed investing even more efficient, especially for startups outside the Valley who may not have relationships with up-to-the-minute legal help.
Cloud Computing: Google Wave's Failure: 10 Reasons Why
Probably just a coincidence, but -

http://gantto.com/

http://preceden.com/
My money's on Yegge:

"I used to have lot of open, long-standing concerns about the future of programming and productivity, but my sabbatical last year finally brought me some clojure."

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/07/blogger-finger.html
Hogwash.

Looking past the author's insulting and sophomoric use of "geek" as a derogatory put-down, let's get to his claims:

> The "US is behind on broadband" thing is a myth.

Yet no sources are cited. All he does is wave his hands about how Mossberg is the only one saying it, and everyone is just a regurgitating idiot. Last I checked, this issue has been around for a while, and is supported by a lot more voices than Mossberg.

Then he starts going to a straw man - claiming the regulatory angle is fundamentally undemocratic, and completely ignores the fact that existing telcos operate with a government-granted monopoly, making internet service fundamentally not a free market enterprise to begin with.

> "At the root of this anger against the ISPs is that they want faster Internet access and they don’t want to pay for it"

I'm not sure how much more ignorant this comment can get. My internet service at home experiences frequent lag spikes up to 3000ms, yet I have to just deal with it because no other ISP can operate where I live (this is a city thing, not a building thing). Quit pretending there's a free market when there is none.

> "since I’m about as geeky as they come"

I'm not sure how this can be, since he seems to claim to be a geek, yet he uses the term in a derogatory way and pisses all over the demographic frequently in the post, portraying them as entitled children, and blind sheep following the Mossberg prophet.

So let's summarize: straw man argument, appeal to ridicule, argument from ignorance (i.e., there is no problem with ISPs because the studies claiming problems are allegedly problemtic), appeal to emotion (the pointless linking of this to "democracy")... is this a high school rhetoric class or something?
I'm sure some people on HN would find this app useful, but how on earth has this submission garnered 39 votes in 22 minutes?

I hope their aren't "pay $50 to get your post to the top of HN" services cropping up...
YC W10, not S10
It seems the purpose of the class shouldn't be to give concrete tools. The purpose should be to spark their interest in technology so that they stick with it and think about how to leverage it in their setting (rural America).

Specifics are hard, but here are some guiding principles I would follow:

* Creating beautiful things should be easy

* Introduce them to new technology using content they already understand

* Focus on actually building stuff, not case studies, lectures, papers, papers, reading, etc.
Schmidt: "Maybe We Can Get the Same Success out of Chrome OS" as Android
To provide the opposite anecdote: my corporate desktops have always had Flash, if nothing else but to allow Flash video tutorials, etc.
What would you use to represent money?
And all the 2nd year med students must finish their remaining three years without "opportunities for efficient, mobile, and innovative learning." Condolences, class of 2013.
Discussed here 6 days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1561364
Sounds like they're hosting the prior art themselves.
I ordered a Nexus One to Norway a couple of weeks ago, and I had to use a proxy delivery service; Google only shipped to US addresses. So I think this is unchanged.
Mixpanel (YC S09) - Introducing Android Mobile Analytics
At the time, the industrial revolution was rapidly pulling people from the agrarian life to the factory life. Factory owners knew they'd need more and more people who could sit around, day after day, expressing no individuality. Politicians recognized the economic benefits the factories were providing. Together, the current US school system was born.

Here are the real questions: Current industry leaders recognize the education system is not training knowledge workers they way it could be. Do politicians recognize the economic value of the knowledge economy and will current politicians and business leaders come together to build a new education system that meets those needs? Of course, 125 years ago, there wasn't an existing bureaucracy that needed to be torn down first...

The first country to get that right is going to thrive. A country like Costa Rica could do amazing things.
Five great apps for your jailbroken iPhone
It would help keeping the index size down (well... distribute it at least) and a lock on a shard will not influence the other shards. I asked a few months back if I could just run several shards on a single machine and keep the locked area smaller that way, but the general consensus was that it wasn't a good idea because of the overhead. Other than that, the lock is still there...
They're just as incompetent as everyone else then, not some sort of angel gods!

I suppose however that the article illustrates a very good approach. Trial and error. Some things will fail, some will work, you do not know until you try and a company so big like google can afford to try. As the article makes it clear there have been plenty - well I can only think of google maps and ok maybe Android whatever that is - successful products.

They really should however focus on their core business which is search and advertising.
The article finally convinced me to install leechblock for Firefox. In my day job (finance - corporate actions related) we finished our busy season a month or so ago and I cannot remember the last time I sat down and coded something. 2 months of working 13 hour days hardly inspires you to come home and do more mentally challenging tasks. Time to get back on the wagon!
If you'd actually read the ruling, you'd know that the evidence presented for this was flimsy at best;...

The evidence doesn't need to be anything other than flimsy to constitute a rational basis. Courts are not supposed to evaluate the facts at all, but should merely determine if there is any rational basis for the law given the most generous possible interpretation of the facts.

"[A] legislative choice is not subject to courtroom factfinding and may be based on rational speculation unsupported by evidence or empirical data."

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/92-351.ZO.html

http://volokh.com/2010/08/05/more-on-whether-the-facts-matte...

If the job of the courts was factfinding, a huge number of laws would be eliminated. For example, could you prove in court that the Bush tax cuts, obamacare, minimum wage laws, gun control laws, or any other law are beneficial? I rather doubt it.

As long as one can imagine a scenario in which health insurance is related to health, Obamacare passes the rational basis test. And as long as one can imagine a scenario in which straight couples make better parents than gay couples (even if only in a probabilistic manner, i.e. 95% of straight couples are fertile compared to 0% of gay couples), then Prop 8 also has a rational basis.
Thanks, this is a good data point. Yes corporate users are definitely our audience. The users we have talked to so far have had Flash or were able to get it. The reason we are posting is to get different points of view, so this is useful feedback.
As always, we'd love to hear your feedback about our library and anything you wish you could track on your Android apps. Thanks HN =)
Video looks decent enough. I would see this as a difficult feature to get people to know about. Preparing Gantt charts for presentations seems to be a niche enough market (project managers, IT consultants, managers, etc?) that you might have trouble getting them to adopt this tool. Certainly would be very difficult to get them to pay money for it.

Seems more like a feature you'd expect from a web-based project management software than something stand-alone. Is that your intention here? License the technology/tools to a service like that?
Holocartoons: Iran's digital attack on the Holocaust... Your thoughts?
Dear HNers,

I try my best not to submit political stories, but I just came across a news article on this site, and wanted your reactions. I greatly value the HN community for its critical approach and its sane debate practices on almost any issue, so I'd like to know what you think.

Even though my father's side of the family is Jewish, I believe I'm quite objective to think that the Holocaust has been very well documented. I can understand the discussion about the implications and entitlements the Holocaust may or may not lead to (read: Israel), but it really boggles me that people may actually believe those events didn't take place.

Which takes me to the next question. Do you buy that Ahmadinejad actually doesn't believe in the Holocaust? Or is it just politically profitable to take such position publicly on that side of the world? In find it more puzzling because in the seventh question of the 2006 Spiegel interview http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,druck-418660,00.html :

SPIEGEL: Of course we are entitled to write about the findings of the past 60 years’ historical research. In our view there is no doubt that the Germans -- unfortunately -- bear the guilt for the murder of 6 million Jews.

Ahmadinejad: Well, then we have stirred up a very concrete discussion. We are posing two very clear questions. The first is: Did the Holocaust actually take place? You answer this question in the affirmative. So, the second question is: Whose fault was it? The answer to that has to be found in Europe and not in Palestine. It is perfectly clear: If the Holocaust took place in Europe, one also has to find the answer to it in Europe.

Wouldn't it make more sense, carry more political weight in the Middle East and the rest of the world, to drop the first question, the absurd suspicion regarding whether this atrocity took place at all, and instead reinforce the argument "Europe is guilty; let it pay (cede land)"?

But hey, maybe Ahmadinejad does indeed believe the Holocaust is an invention... I'm really puzzled about this "revisionist" movement, let alone coming from Iran's president.

Thank you and cheers.

PS: The page wouldn't load now. I saw some "cartoons" at http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1291537.
This was one of my favorite briefings at Blackhat.
Yeah, that site is neat. Our current goal is to build interactive presentations for different sets of schedule data, so not quite the same thing.
1) I hope the final product will be OSS
2) To keep spammers out, we could enable a karma threshold parameter.
3) As about UI, I've always been looking for an excuse to look into SproutCore ('course, this is free) or Atlas (which does cost).
Note: Read with caution; digitalsociety.org is a libertarian soap box.

Telecommunications infrastructure has capital costs that prohibit disruptive newcomers. The established players have the power to charge (and profit) at whatever rate they choose. Unless there is regulatory pressure, they will never focus on service over profits. Relative to the rest of the developed world, our throughput rate to consumers is far from excellent[1]. We need better service for citizens. It is true that the US's large size makes the country costly to wire. This is precisely why government intervention is needed to bring our connectivity up to the level of nations with similar standards of living.

Skimming the author's other posts, he seems to miss the mark on so many issues. (Indeed, visiting the homepage is like stepping into a crazier, "Twilight Zone" version of reality.)

Personally, I would like my Internet connection to come from a public utility. Roads are public, why not fiber?

1. http://www.oecd.org/document/54/0,3343,en_2649_34225_3869010...
Dear HNers,

I try my best not to submit political stories, but I just learned about Holocartoons, and wanted your reactions. I greatly value the HN community for its critical approach and sane debate practices on almost any issue, so I'd like to know what you think.

Even though my father's side of the family is Jewish, I believe I'm objective enough to conclude that the Holocaust has been very well documented. I can understand the discussion about the implications and entitlements the Holocaust may or may not lead to (read: Israel), but it really boggles me that people may actually believe those events didn't take place.

Which takes me to the next question. Do you buy that Ahmadinejad actually doesn't believe in the Holocaust? Or is it just politically profitable to take such position publicly on that side of the world? In find it more puzzling because in the seventh question of the 2006 Spiegel interview http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,druck-418... :

SPIEGEL: Of course we are entitled to write about the findings of the past 60 years’ historical research. In our view there is no doubt that the Germans -- unfortunately -- bear the guilt for the murder of 6 million Jews.

Ahmadinejad: Well, then we have stirred up a very concrete discussion. We are posing two very clear questions. The first is: Did the Holocaust actually take place? You answer this question in the affirmative. So, the second question is: Whose fault was it? The answer to that has to be found in Europe and not in Palestine. It is perfectly clear: If the Holocaust took place in Europe, one also has to find the answer to it in Europe.

Wouldn't it make more sense, carry more political weight in the Middle East and the rest of the world, to drop the first question, the absurd suspicion regarding whether this atrocity took place at all, and instead reinforce the argument "Europe is guilty; let it pay (cede land)"?

But hey, maybe Ahmadinejad does indeed believe the Holocaust is an invention... I'm really puzzled about this "revisionist" movement, let alone coming from a president.

Thank you and cheers.

PS: The page wouldn't load now. I saw some "cartoons" at http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1291537.
Checkout this thing I made posts are generally popular at HN... coz they cater to all the startup and hacker mentality.
What do you have against flash as far as this tool is concerned? How and how much would having such a tool but entirely in HTML5 influence your buying decision?
Definitely not any of this (sorry). Who cares if you know affiliate marketing? Young kids pretty much already "get it" in the same way that you didn't need to touch our parents about how grocery stores work.

If I were teaching a class on technology/entrepreneurship, I would have teams of 2-3 people come up with a real idea, implement it and market it over the semester/year. Sure, they'd learn things in the lessons along the way, but applying it is what makes it meaningful.
You missed the point where they found major sites wide open and extracted credentials for gowalla, bitly, and poked around PBS.

Bad gowalla, bitly, and PBS operations departments. Shame on you.
From what I understand, those videos have been well-exploited.
Ok you can import from all the current tools but what about exporting to them?

This can give people the confident that I can work on this on my own but when I send the file to somebody I can send them in a format that they know (also, good for trials, I will try it but what if I don't like it, I will have to redo all the stuff in my fave s/w again)
We definitely didn't pay anyone for this privilege.
The grammar of probability calculus works fine. Causal inference is simply a missing data problem as described by Rubin (1978). The potential outcome view dominates statistics literature for good reason. Why invent unnecessary new operators?
Yes, and poor defaults are a problem with the OS.
Probably better to test software on Joe Schmoe than give you code to break right off.
Adventures in performance tuning on Google App Engine
Research: Weird Works When It Comes to Passwords
"...founder Max Levchin did the best out of the sale, making a comparable sum to the one he made from PayPal...[for] a total of $39m."

Given that PayPal sold to eBay for $1.5b, doesn't $39m sound too low? Does anyone know how much he made from PayPal's sale?
Absolutely, the Python program cannot replace the prospectus for the reasons you describe.

However current practice is that the prospectus also describes, in legalese, the rules by which you determine what happens if party XXX becomes insolvent, or what happens if 84% of mortgages are repaid, 10% are prepaid and 6% are in default. And then there are multiple scenarios supplied to clarify people's understanding of how those rules work.

There is a cottage industry that basically consists of taking these prospectuses and creating computer versions of them. This is called reversing a deal. I've seen these models take anywhere from a day to a week for simple models, and for complicated ones outside specialists may need to be used. These models are considered valuable property, and so a given deal may wind up being reversed by multiple people. These created models often do not agree with each other or the servicer.

If the prospectus continues to contain the authoritative explanation, then this activity is still a necessary sanity check. If the script is definitive, then this error-prone step can be greatly streamlined and automated. Getting rid of this expensive activity strikes me as a very good thing.

Disclaimer, I used to work for a company whose main job was reversing deals, and then keeping models up to date as the cash flows came in. I did not work on that side of the business, but I've seen how important it is.
Show HN: swytch.net - my attempt at a social network
I've just launched swytch.net, a little social network I've been working on for a month or so. It's nowhere near ready for public consumption but the core ideas are there and I'd be interested to hear what others think. Here are some of the things that I think differentiate it from facebook and co:

1) multiple profiles: having one set of "friends" from all your different social circles limits you to sharing only what you're willing to share with the entire group. On swytch, a user can have a separate, distinct profile for each social circle.

2) robust privacy: each profile is either public or private. Content is either open to anyone or restricted to your followers. There is no third tier - you don't have to worry about friends of friends accessing your data. Social networks need stronger, simpler privacy - not more privacy controls.

3) private by default. I think the perception that users don't care about privacy is way off the mark. Users don't always know about privacy settings and their implications but that's not the same as not caring. On swytch, everything is private by default. On private profiles, nothing but the username is revealed to non-followers.

4) location: sites like foursquare and gowalla offer this but they're too gimmicky. I think they have to be because their entire service is based around location, they have little else to offer. However, location data combined with updates, photos events etc is very useful.

Please kick the tyres and tell me what you think. There is no landing page yet but you can sign up here (only a un & pw are required):

http://www.swytch.net/sign_up
Have them come up with an idea that they believe they can implement on their own, but with your guidance and advice. Something that will bring real money in the door quickly. Even if it is only $20, it is better than lofty goals that a high school person might not have the maturity to follow through on.

Do not let them try to build a Google competitor or something similar. It is unrealistic for them. Have them engage in some kind of e-commerce and use something like PayPal where there is a chance that money will actually come in the door. Have you local newspaper do a story on you and the class participants, maybe following their efforts over time in the Sunday edition.

Form groups of 5 students and have them come up with ideas that you put on a list. When you have 50 money making ideas on the list, break into groups of 2 and let them try to implement the ideas they think will work. If more than one group of 2 chooses the same idea, that is called market competition.

I think they need to learn to bunt, before learning how to hit home runs. If you think they will all hit home runs and work to make no money, I think they will be discouraged and it will be a negative experience for them. Probably not what you want.

Maybe some will discover that this industry is not for them and go on to own a restaurant in your town. I think that the lessons learned can be applied to any business.

I think you should include some examples of companies like Zappos that sells shoes as well as companies that develop and sell software or provide SAS.

Also instead of case studies (that’s a lot for kids to focus on and digest) do PowerPoint lectures and also "make them earn" the privilege of learning how to use PowerPoint to make a Pitch Deck on a special Saturday lecture at the end of the course. But of course they can all attend, it's just a ploy to get them to focus hard on the course work that you can dangle over them during the semester. The carrot works better than the stick.

Also, you should have one lecture about, accounting, taxes and legal entity formations where a CPA comes in and answers questions. Also explain what a Corporation is and why Delaware might be a good choice.
Since this was also reported a few days ago, is there an update to the situation?

Have the original app developers made any comments? Anything?
1) If you have collapsed a rollup and it contains tasks with precedents for other tasks, then the rollup needs to have the lines added.

2) If you collapse a rollup, it should still be draggable in time (left and right) and this should move all tasks within the rollup as one thing. The first task seems to have that functionality, but that's not intuitive.

3) Why can't you drag up and down since you have move up and move down?

4) On the date picker... DD, WW, MM, QQ, YY, ALL... but where is financial year? Or rather... custom iterations (fortnights, financial year, reporting segment, etc).

5) If I stuck this on a web page... could I give it data somehow? Could I provide it with some XML (since I note you allow save in that format) via JavaScript?

6) Colours... but yeah you're getting to that. The templates... they're kinda ugly but you've got the right idea and people will want to fit them to their own company scheme.

7) Your zoom buttons need a "Return to default".

8) It's got to be said... but you really need to allow XML import from MS Project files.

9) Keyboard shortcuts. Think of the power users... they should be able to create tasks with the simplicity of moving through Excel... this is what your competition is. So they need to tab to go right (rather than next active control in the tab order) and return should go down to the next row.

Those are some starters :)
Poll: Where Are You Right Now
Just completely out of interest.
Caffee/Bar/ ...
Somewhere Else (please state if you wish)