skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting.

Is there some self-selection going on where founders that think they can do more with less go for YC instead of someone else? Do people of the "first, let's buy aeron chairs, then we can worry about deciding what to make" mentality even know that YC exists?
i surmise it's the rate at which an article/comment gets points that determines its ranking.
It's called 'the ransom model'. It has been used for plenty of things, including the open sourcing of software (most notably blender).
I need not read your post, nor try your app. Keep going man... this is a great and long overdue idea.
Agreed. That is my current plan exactly. I'm heading off for 3-6 months in SE Asia to spend travelling, living cheaply and studying math & machine learning with the goal of coming back to the States later to either pursue a graduate degree or a gig doing ML/analysis.
Among other things, the personality bundles up the intangible aspects of the product in a way that helps potential customers figure out whether they love it or hate it.
By offering more services you will be confusing your customers and leads
Sorry mate but that was not a very good explanation using too many non-layman's terms, isentropic, freestream, parasitic drag, etc. Wikipedia does better:

"When an object passes through the air, it creates a series of pressure waves in front of it and behind it, similar to the bow and stern waves created by a boat. These waves travel at the speed of sound, and as the speed of the object increases, the waves are forced together, or compressed, because they cannot "get out of the way" of each other, eventually merging into a single shock wave at the speed of sound. "
s/prosperity/posterity/
This is awesome. Anyone know how to link someone to a specific location that I found with this?
A tun/tap device is a way to write a user space network driver for a piece of hardware to make it look like a network device to the OS. ie: you could make a serial serial cable look like a network device.

What this blog is asking for is a different way to access network resources so instead of calling a function like socket(some_ip, some_port, SOME_PROTOCOL); (which is a gross over simplification for the typical way it is done) he wants to be able to say open("/net/some_ip/protocol/some_port", "rw");
Hyperinflation, Part II: What It Will Look Like
One benefit of kernel on kernel virtualization is system calls can be optimized straight through, reducing context switching - better than a hypervisor with custom drivers.

I'm not sure that's what is going on here with KVM - but the principle makes sense.
I doubt much will change, actually. I'm guessing most people applying to YC have some kind of idea in mind, and apply with that idea; I know I have.

I doubt reading the Facebook RFS is what triggers someone to apply to YC.
20 years ago? Really? Months? In 1990?

Not that this has anything to do with 'ease of programming'.
The "click here if you want to sue us" gag on the legal page is cute, but now I'm thinking about all the possible reasons someone would want to sue you.
While language does not limit or boost what is expressible, conceivable or knowable it does impose a default in how we structure the world and what details we take in as important. There was a fairly interesting article in the NYT recently that goes over this. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...

What I found interesting were the accounts on a particular tribe of Australian aborigines who had an amazing sense of cardinal direction - instantly knowing north from south regardless of orientation due to a language based on geographic instead of egocentric directions and the Matses people whose precision in relaying past events would make a Vulcan logician proud.

Intrigued I researched this concept to be evidentiality and epistemic modality. Enforcing such reporting precision into the grammar seems like it would combat sloppy thinking. I wonder if someone raised in such a language would have an easier time creating proofs, programming or studying subjects like bayesian probability or philosophy. I wonder how marketing would work in such a default. I bet statistics would not be a form of lying in that culture.
5 indispensable IT skills of the future
No, it's my way of telling you you're a clueless idiot. And yes, it works for me. It's hard to present a position to someone who doesn't know how to read.
That's narrow minded. There are some great Java programmers. It's just that they don't have the same priorities that you do.
There are some interesting ideas here, but it feels unfocused. I suspect that collaboration is where the really interesting opportunities are. To my mind, version control is simply one possible feature you can offer to make collaboration more fruitful.

A lot of companies have interesting offerings in this space, but I haven't seen anything truly compelling yet. Perhaps the most direct competition is bundled with the tools themselves: for example, FL Studio has [edit: had] Collab and Ableton has Share.

You also support LMMS. But few if any serious musicians use LMMS; it's just not a high enough quality tool. Even if you are targeting people like me -- dedicated hobbyists -- you're still more likely to want to target Ableton and FL.
Yup. The confusion, I think, comes from talk of sonic booms always being discussed along with mentioning an aircraft passing the sound barrier, going supersonic, whatever...

There is, I believe, a sudden change in aerodynamics when an aircraft passes the sound barrier - it IS a barrier of sorts. Aircraft had the power to pass this barrier, the problem was they would no longer fly correctly, or they would rip them selves apart, or some such thing once they hit mach 1.0.

People naturally got the idea that this phenomenon was related to the sonic boom itself.
Ask HN: Startup stopped paying my salary
My first job out of college was for an "internet media" startup right across the street from school. Long story short, after a few years they started running out of cash. Salary started coming a few days late, then weeks, then a month. At the point when they owed me 2 months of salary, I quit and started looking for a new job full-time (which I found after a couple months, thank God).

Whenever I talk to the founder, he typically says they have "potential investors" and the money should be coming in a few months. I'm not as stupid as I was, and I'm sure that no money is coming in. Who wants to invest in a startup that hasn't been profitable for 5+ years and has back salary obligations to multiple employees?

I can survive without the money, but it's still a pretty good chunk for me so it's worth it to me to put in effort to retrieve it. Problem is, I don't really know how to approach it. I see my options as being: 1. Go to the law; 2. Approach them aggressively; 3. Forget about it.

I've been thinking about filing a wage claim with the state (California), but I would rather settle directly with the company rather than go through the state. I can't really forget about it because it's a decent chunk of change.

There is a little twist, and that is that my experience with the founders and officers was very good up until the point they stopped paying me. They took us out to nice lunches and bought us the first iPhones on launch day (even bought me a new one when I dropped mine). They sent me all-expenses paid to WWDC, Google I/O, OSCON, and SIGGRAPH. I essentially got my career started at that company. It was my first job as a developer, and when my boss left I got promoted to "CTO" and got to hire my own small team. This is one of the main reasons I haven't really "gone after them". I don't really want to screw them over, I just want my money.

Any advice would be welcome. Thanks!
> "Move up the ladder into management, architecture, or design"

The ability to convert detailed specs into code is a fungible commodity. Management, architecture and design, on the other hand, are areas of software development where you need multiple complementary skills; technical ability, good communication, understanding of your customers and industry area, an ability to influence others, etc. People like that cannot easily be replaced, hence the higher price. In some cases technical guys appear to need those things too, but that's just because they're unofficially doing the job of an architect, manager or designer.

> Even though you may be highly experienced and wise, employers aren’t willing or able to pay an experienced worker twice or thrice what an entry-level worker earns.

Define wise. That sounds a lot like "capable of being an architect/manager/designer". If you're capable but resisting the promotion then I'm suspicious of your claim to deserve more money.

I agree with you that an experienced coder will be more productive than a less experienced one. But I would also say that 20 years experience will never make up for a lack of natural ability. I've interviewed programmers with decades of experience who failed the most basic of our technical tests (think FizzBuzz). I'll bet for every old timer who's excellent and just wants to stay a coder, there are 5 who are just below average and have never been offered a promotion.

I see the issue more as a failure by the good experienced coders to differentiate themselves in the marketplace than a conspiracy against old people. If you've been doing something for 30 years but all you're selling is "5 years python experience" just like everyone else then why should I pay you more? Tell me why you're worth more. Convince me you're lack of promotion comes from a passion for your craft and not just down to a lack of ambition or ability.
Great idea, even though I'm not a musician. What I'd really like to see would be a completely versioned filesystem like on VMS.
Image-Line dropped support for collab, and people are sad [1].

I agree that I need to support Ableton and Cubase. I'm going to start working on more studio support right now.

As for LMMS, I suppose I supported it just for fun. I've contributed to LMMS, and compared to .flp, support for it was dead simple.

[1]: http://forum.image-line.com/viewtopic.php?p=176830
Votes divided by the age in hours to the gravityth power.

Although, the current algorithm is probably slightly different to combat spammers.

http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L262
I find it to be waste of time when people put conscious efforts to listen to more classical music and to educate themselves about it.

Music is usually considered to be an intellectual endeavor like art and science. But there is a crucial difference for music. Science and art (at least the best of it) give us new insights to the world we live in: ideally we understand things and people more as a result.

But the ultimate purpose of music is a physiological/emotional response, something utterly subjective and that does not enrich our objective understanding of the world. In this sense, music should be considered to be an indulgence like drugs, sex or delicatessen food, in all but the delivering mechanism. Not that there is something wrong with them, but these are pleasures, not a meaningful activity.

Thus the whole notion of the special kind of music that bears higher value is of no more sense to me than, say, meth of higher culture.

Life is too short for it. For me if you can avoid listening to something, do it.
Oh, if every sentence is true then the combination is true. But true or false is not an exact property of a sentence, it's a fuzzy property of a sentence in a particular context. For example the meaning of "good founders are tough" depends on what's good and what's tough. The meaning of tough could be "doesn't give up quickly", but could also be "doesn't cry when he gets hit in the face" or many other things.

So take this blog post. The entire meaning of it hinges on the meaning of "wimp" and "though". And while the reader could fill in a meaning of these two words that makes the blog post make sense, many readers here seem to have interpreted it with a different meaning than was probably intended by the author. For these readers the blog post reads like bullshit.

A sentence in a text can influence the meaning of another sentence. For example:

"I don’t think there is anything particularly new here. PG says that the definitive description of good founders is “relentlessly resourceful.” I’m pretty sure that “toughness” is a big part of that. Can you take care of yourself and get (sh)it done, or are you a wimp?"

This partially establishes what the author means by "tough" and "wimp". But in my opinion it's not clear enough what he means by "though" and "wimp" to conclusively say that the blog post is correct or to say that the blog post is incorrect. It depends on the preconceived notions of the reader.

p.s. so a simple example would be:

"Tough people don't cry"

"Good founders are tough"

Even though both are not false in isolation (but not true either!), the combination is false.
That's not how legislation works. I don't understand why this wound up in the ACA, but it seems plainly peripheral, and anyone voting against the ACA on the basis of this legislative oddity would have earned far more wrath than they're getting now for having passed it.

It's not going to get fixed now because the Republicans benefit more from the impression that government doesn't work than they do by solving any problems. It'll get fixed at the eleventh hour.
It's good they are doing this. Facebook had no business running an incubator - they didn't have the people, the experience, or insights. They just threw money at the venture and hoped for the best. The fbFund program cash really helped us get going early on, but the institutional support didn't work for us, and since the program has been shuttered, I assume that sentiment was shared. The money really is just a small part of one of these programs.

Under the fbFund incubator program, we won a $25,000 grant, and that was the sum total of their support for us. After that, all follow-up consisted of admins with no entrepreneurial or programming skills, demanding documents in the middle of the night. At some point, I got some support from a Facebook developer, but he only replied to one email, and then ignored my follow-up. The whole thing was run like a marketing campaign, and they tended to focus on getting us to go along, rather than engaging us as a partner and trying to help us succeed. I have no hard feelings about this, because the money let us write a lot of code and practice at starting up, but we might still be focused on Facebook if we had more technical and marketing help. Meeting Zuck would have been a good sign too.

Even with YC to look at for guidance, they didn't understand what made YC tick - uniting a community of the best and brightest, under the tutelage of a a great entrepreneur. If you have ever been down to YC HQ (I have once), you would know what I mean. One of the primary reasons we haven't worked on the Facebook aspects of our company for a while now is because of the experience we had as an fbFund company. Also, at the time, the API was extremely immature, as were the docs. I remember just giving up on sending out notifications many moons ago, and I never looked back. I also remember getting tripped up because I tried to follow the rules and not store user names to show in comments, but everyone else was breaking the ToS and Facebook turned a totally blind eye.

I knew some other fbFund companies from later rounds (we were round 1 I think), who got support instead of money, and they seemed to think it was worthwhile. But, I don't know that any of them has a successful business today, so they were still missing something key.

I should apologize, because Facebook helped us out, and this is a bit critical, but I think it's honest and worth posting. The program certainly had good intentions and good financing, but it was poorly conceived. Of course, they know all of this, and Facebook has a reputation for measurement and changing quickly, so that's probably why they are taking these steps to fix things now. They certainly picked the right partner in YC.
Isn't that only from a large community, when I think of documentation I think of a central place to find it and this is why I use python and not ruby. As an aside the ruby docs are annoying for me to use however I quite enjoy the way pythons docs are built.

Similarly when you look at this post you see that rails has "great" documentation through the means of a large amount of differing non-central sites that require some effort to go about finding as well as navigating. Though it is much better than when rails was still young.
I'm taking 6 months off next year to hike the Appalachian Trail. I have a great job that continues to challenge me even after 9 years (10 by the time I start) but I just need to do something different for a bit.

Luckily for me, I asked, well in advance (9 months from my planned start date, give or take), and my company said "sure," which made the whole thing a hell of a lot easier. Not paid of course, but I'll still have a job when I return.
Ramen-profitable wages.
Whether or not you choose to call it a "mistake" and how you handle it depends entirely on the business model, image, product, customers, etc....

A recurring service that is purchased, where you priced things too high and saw prices drop off, and then quickly moved it back - telling the customers who paid too much, and who would likely get pissed and leave when they find out you were unlucky represent an opportunity to market yourself - saying "Hey, we over did it a bit - we're crediting what you already paid forward at our new reduced rate, and keep charging you at that rate going forward, we appreciate your business!". If anything, that's going to make your customer who was willing to pay double what you are now charging him happy, and spread the word. Who doesn't like to find out they just got a 50% refund?
"Japan also has a 99 percent conviction rate..."

How it took 7 paragraphs to get to that, I have no idea.
of course reddit is monetizable...all it takes is flooding it with ads

768x90 adsense unit just below the submission title alone would probably make reddit instantly profitable.

and that doesn't take into account the premium google adsense ads.(imagine if a random #1-#5 url title from the top was an adsense ad?)...one that had the exact font style as regular reddit ads. Those just browsing, wouldn't even notice the little gray "powered by Google" text.

then add CPM based ads...maybe something that would play on mouseover...those tend to bring in the big bucks.

or just sell advertising directly for some brand awareness campaigns. Honda, Walmart, McDonalds.

And boom...you got a profitable "community".

So there is no reason for Conde Nast to sell reddit(especially at a loss)...if they were interested in generating more revenue, they could do it at a flip of a coin.

Sure it would piss off a lot of users...but it's not like people would abandon a site, just because there are a few more ads present.
I think there's truth in both these points. That is, some of the vast difference in unemployment between college graduates and those without right now is just due to hiring managers (who are largely college graduates) being more comfortable with the sort of person who has gone to college. Part is due to the more advanced skills required in the modern American economy.

Regardless, this bad recession has dramatically underscored the value of college experience as an important thing for someone who places even a mild value on lifestyle security. Or to put it another way, it is a huge risk to bet that in the future, college experience will stop being seen as important. You might be right. But if you aren't, and you experience misfortune, your expectations are going to be much better with a college degree to wave around than without.
Clarification: One of the properties of partial orders is antisymmetry. This means that for different people Joe and Jack it can not be simultaneously true that Joe is tougher than Jack and that Jack is tougher than Joe. So it seems to me that you explicitly say that this property does not hold.
I missed that about Collab, actually. Interesting.

By the way, how do you crack the FL file format? (Or do you?)
You're doing a really good job of evading the point here.

If your friends are making $100k/yr, they are squarely in the same hiring demo that 40 year old senior devs are.

The whole thesis behind the article you are commenting on is that companies are hiring young because young devs are cheap. You made a comment to the effect of, "watch out, young cheap people can be domain experts too". I think you're mostly wrong, but I'd love it if you were right, and I'm very much putting my money where my mouth is.

I know that there are anomalously capable 25 year olds out there. I'd love to talk to them, too. But the idea that all of Silicon Valley is built around those people rings false. It may very well be built around 25 year olds, but not the weird ones that run High Frequency Trading Engine teams.
We're not machines.
it's because older people aren't as interested in doing startups(in comparison)...and those that are have a lot more commitments that they can't just get up and move to California for a YC session.

If you have less people applying, of course you'll have less people being accepted.
I guess the website is just a advertising channel for that specific book/person and not even a demo...
Yea for sure! Maybe around Winter Break or some time when people would be free! E-mail me (check profile)
So how does the architecture of this differ from something like VMWare?
Forget about it, move on. In the future, when salary starts coming in late is the time to start looking for a job. Better yet, always keep your network open.
I am so jealous.

He's probably the best Chopin player alive today (not that he's limited to that, but I'm not aware of anybody playing Chopin as beautiful as he does) To hear him perform live must be amazing.
If the days of our lives are too short to spend on moving subjective experiences (and I'd put music on the same level as visual art and drama), what should we be reserving those days for? I am not a brain in a jar, though I have long neglected the needs of the animal which is carrying me around on his neck. I've come to think that's a recipe for depression, which sooner or later will interfere with whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.
What do you mean? What for?
> Fact is, whoever is held responsible for succeeding/failing is going to get paid more. Being held responsible sucks and is hard.

Indeed, but let me ask you this: what real responsibility do all those layers of middle management in a typical big software company actually have?

Detailed planning of individual features is junior management stuff. The only estimates that are really worth a damn come from the junior managers, based on the technical data provided by their teams.

Strategic product and project management -- what products and major functionality are going to be built and when they will ship -- is senior management stuff. The technical decisions that really matter are taken by senior managers or executives. Are we going to drop major projects W and X but include Y and Z, given that this means we can ship a new version of this product in Q3? Shall we authorise a 20% increase in payroll budget for this product's team, given that this would allow us to include project Y by that deadline as well?

Obviously in a large organisation with many products, each of which is itself large, there is scope for having layers of management in between so everyone is working on a sensible scale. But you can scale out a pretty long way with just a single layer containing just a few extra managers, and I'm pretty sure that the 2/3/4/5/6 layers you often find in a lot of big software companies are mostly dead weight.