skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Link FB Open Graph Page to traditional FB Page
Anyone know if there is a way to tie a traditional FB Page to the Open Graph "Any URL is now a Page" setup? My startup has been running with the traditional FB Page and built a small fan base through our traditional Facebook Page. After adding the "Like" button, we now have a new, second page that is mapped to our URL. The issue is, we are starting from scratch with the new setup (the Open Graph URL generated Page starts at zero Likes and there seems to be no way to link the old Page to this new one). Can we tie the two together? Thanks.
I listened to a podcast where Jason was a guest not that many months ago (2-3 perhaps). He wasn't aware of the concept MVP ("minimum viable product") which kind of surprised me.

Sorry, don't remember the name of the podcast.
Interesting idea, but it was a UX nightmare. First thing I expected at least a subtle hint to use the arrow keys, instead of a click, spacebar or enter button to advance the slides.

If I advanced past the first slide using the arrow keys, and then came back, I had to press the back button 5 times just to get back to HN.
You do have to keep in mind that Calacanis and YC are to some extent in competition, so it's not like he has no stake in making YC look bad and 'warning' potential YC applicants off like this means they'll have to go elsewhere.
makes him more worthy of respect

From people like you perhaps. In which case, knock yourself out.

I do agree that TWIST maintains a high quality of guests tho.
Unfortunately the recently passed financial regulation, while containing some good provisions, doesn't do enough to put the genie back in the bottle.
Sure you can. That's unassailable logic. Every person earning minimum wage is a datapoint that you can use as evidence. How many people do you suppose are earning minimum wage right now?

Technically, to demonstrate that, you'd need to demonstrate that the minimum wage level is an outlier in the overall wage distribution. That should be very easy to see if we had a histogram of how many people earn a given wage, but my Google-fu is failing me on that point.

There are two things an employer can do when considering an employee who they would prefer to pay less than minimum wage: either pay minumum wage, or don't have that employee. There's some cutoff as to which choice the employer makes. You can guess one way, as you do, and most minimum wage earners would be substantially harmed by the removal of the minimum wage. You can guess the other way, as grandalf does, and most current minimum wage earners would be either entirely or near entirely unaffected. Without numbers, either one is still a guess.
Yeah, but I think your philosophy prof was suggesting that useless distinctions are the stock in trade of tiny minds.

For instance, a web client that allows you to use IRC protocol is generally Just-The-Same-As-IRC. Putting it on the web doesn't do anything really different, except maybe that one doesn't have the inconvenience of installing IRC software.

But let's say that you had a really good help channel for your website, but that users of your website didn't typically find their way to IRC. Putting an IRC client right in the web page itself, configured to go straight to this help channel, is suddenly more of an innovation.

I don't know how to phrase this right, but there is a knack of noticing material distinctions, rather than useless ones. Maybe it's in noticing when certain limitations have been removed or added.

Maybe the real problem is that we're often unaware of how limited our world is, and what is doing the limiting. Perhaps the only way to notice when limitations have been removed is by sheer luck or that mysterious force called "creativity".

You couldn't have a mind that was constantly probing every tool for every limitation. Could you?
I guess with Dave Winer's post this topic is getting overdone and it's an older post. But there does seem to be a lot of noise around about startups and age and gender, especially with Arrington's post on Techcrunch this morning too, and I've been thinking about it since see the original post and pg's comments yesterday.

And, as I'm working on a startup but well out of my twenties, and have a co-founder who is a woman PhD student in the research lab in the computer science department at CU, we probably have a disproportionate number of discussions about age and gender in startups.

So with that disclaimer out of the way...

I think this is interesting. I believe absolutely that YC funds the best people out of those that apply as pg says. Judging the best people out of thousands of applicants would I imagine be difficult even with great judgement. But why would YC not choose the best possible people?

pg is quoted above saying "Off the top of my head, I'd say that older founders are more likely to succeed."

So if

1) the selection team reflects pg's view that older founders are likely to be more likely to succeed (and I think based on other comments I've read that's based on them being more persistent/tougher/resilient), and

2) the age distribution of those selected is the same as the age distribution of the applicants,

then there must be a counterweighting factor that offsets the view that older founders are more likely to succeed. Otherwise you would expect, all other things being equal, that older founders would be disproportionately represented in the selected teams, assuming likely success is one of the determinants of the "best people".

The higher risk and difficulty of maintaining a desirable lifestyle on a ramen income therefore likely have two impacts:

1) Fewer older startup founders apply as noted.

2) The perception of older founders as being more likely to succeed is offset by the perception, conscious or otherwise, that they are less likely to succeed on a "just enough" level of funding.

If this is true, I doubt it's a conscious selection bias, and there's nothing wrong in it. It's just a reality that these factors likely are going to impact any judgement of who are the "best people" for YC's purposes. The older founders selected are likely to have been standout candidates, like all the others selected.
Anarchism only works if everyone is honest and peaceful.
Not everyone is honest and peaceful.
Therefore anarchism is a naive governmental/philosophical system.

Also, on the internet, people steal shit from each other, hack in and destroy people's systems, commit fraud (phishing), and threaten to kill/harm one another all the time.

Thank you, but I'd rather live in a world where there exists an entity that protects property rights.
Is it possible that you are confusing the context with the specifics when it comes to the sport analogy?

On the aspect of practice, why is practice from the ages of 6-21, 15 yrs any different than practice from 15-45, 30 yrs. The answer may lie in what you say, "programming is considered clerical work". That being the case it becomes the responsibility of those currently in the profession to make sure that those who are in the stages of making a choice are adequately aware of it. Tho, it would make me sad if that were truly the case. I do not believe that to be the case.
Recreating Afghanistan in the UK
>I just do not understand restaurant portion sizings.

The food is a very small part of their costs.
They can double the amount of food for a cost of $1, charge an extra $2 AND have many more customers for their great value!

It's like selling home PCs with a 1Tb drive, most users don't need it but it only costs them $5 more than a 500Gb drive.
In the video Jason also states why future Ycombinator startups participating the facebook socializing of your product is a bad idea. You can watch it here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWJAkjF9qnY#t=1h14m43s

Jason main point is that its a bad idea because facebook has a history stealing good ideas.

I disagree, not that they haven't done that or that there aren't other concerns, like facebook or twitter changing there platform policies. But worrying about any competitor stealing your idea is often a premature concern when you have other things to think about like whether you have a good idea, can you execute well on that idea, how will you get distribution and will people use it.

As Steve blank would say, "You should be so lucky to get to a size that you have a competitor thinking about you".

You should watch this clip Jason.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6USgPkfsVJM#t=25m55s

and thanks for TWiST, I enjoy it alot.
I love the idea of this, but I'd have to tweak the execution of the desktop version to make it work on commercial projects. The massive width and low number of columns would only allow for chunky and unsubtle layouts. Fine for a couple of marketing pages but not so great for most polished apps.

The reason 960's 12 column works so well is because 12 is the lowest number divisible by both 2 and 3, so you can have the page divided into halves, quarters, thirds and so on, plus you can double the columns to 24 without losing ratios if you really need to get fine-grained. 8 is a bit less flexible.
Yeah, you have to work hard and be intelligent to reap the benefits of society. That sounds like a feature, not a bug.
He has a vendetta against Facebook and Zuckerberg. I think that's a far more overwhelming factor than any competitive feeling toward YC. My impression is that he's generally positive about YC itself.
>I certainly do not have the answers

Perhaps the hip young trendy 20 somethings at startups wouldn't dream of discriminating against somebody black or gay - but they don't feel comfortable telling a 50year old what to do. Or worse finding that they hired a 50year old that knows more than them.
>You're correct in assuming that it's difficult to extract correct conclusions from a psychology experiment, just like with any other science.

In psychology it is much much more difficult to tease out "correct" conclusions than in, for example, physics. This is a result of 1) the complicated nature of human behavior, which is not subject to (in comparison) simple mathematical formula; and 2) the unethical nature of trying to measure the effects of bizarre environments on children in order to analyze development.

This is what you said right afterwards, of course.

But the fuzzy sciences face challenges that naturally make them less rigorous in the scope of their conclusions.
Seriously? I want to know more.
Calacanis is an attention queen. I really wish I could down vote this.
That's a good point. I've also considered a stats focus. My limited experience with ML suggests that linear algebra is pretty important too but certainly statistics is fundamental to both.
This is mostly Jason Calacanis doing linkbaiting.
The WSJ article cited in Arrington's article:

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/addressing-th...

It's one thing to aspire to focus on small-scale businesses that benefit a local area / community (as do most female entrepreneurs). It's another thing entirely to focus on some kind of ambitious VC-funded enterprise that's visioned to scale big / globally from the get-go.

Ambition is an interesting animal.
There are a multitude of ways that an anarchist society deals with crime: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI5.html#seci58
Weird Science votes all the useful people off the island
Ok but what if someone with talent and experience will deliver you value worth three times "startup pay" but only wants twice it. I'm sure you would have no argument about hiring them as the economics speak for themselves. So hiring people based on whether they will accept exactly 1 x startup pay is a limiting tactic unless you believe that its not possible that talent and experience will actually deliver that much extra value to you - in which case there is no argument.
Particle simulations would be one example.
What about the cost of incorporation and getting a Merchant Account?
Were the ENIAC's programmers really "programmers" in today's sense of the term, or were they more like compilers, while program designers or systems analysts (not sure what the contemporary term was) were closer to what we would recognize as programmers?
A change by facebook that is actually an improvement
Yes it is.

You're saying person A is to blame, at least a little bit. And you're wrong. Person A is just trying to learn. Person A is doing everything they know how to do in order to further their knowledge.

They asked. They googled. They spent an hour trying to figure it out on their own. Why didn't they just ask person B again? Because they got shut out the first time. They got a response that told them "fuck off, you're not worth my time. i'm busy" instead of "Sorry, you should read about using PXE to netboot from the BIOS". They just said "use pxe". If a person doesn't know about pxe, they sure as hell don't know that it requires BIOS settings.

Person A is doing everything he/she can to learn. And Person B is being an obstacle.
Advice for a gap year
Hi everyone,
I'm just preparing to have a gap year (beginning in 2 months) and I'm collecting ideas (like studying Russian/Japanese, martial arts...)

As I spent 10 hours per day developing software, I hope not to get "learn putHereYourFavouriteLanguage" or "get certificate in x/y/z" ;)

Thanks in advance.
You're preaching to the choir here. What you're not going to be able to demonstrate is that, in laboratory controlled conditions where literally every calorie is counted by a scientist, and all variables are taken into account (e.g. hyrdation levels) that one kind of calorie leads to a "metabolic advantage" over another and lead to more or less fat loss or gain given adequate protein. This would be a kind of holy grail discovery.

What is undeniable is that any study where people self-count their caloric intake has a ton of potential problems which have been demonstrated over and over again. People are notoriously terrible at counting calories in what they eat.

It is true that sugars have certain metabolic effects, for example with insulin, that will make you hungrier and crave more. This makes it true that they should be avoided. Basically I think we're on the same page if you're willing to scratch the "obviously".

Another point is that the amount that doing weight training raises your metabolism is extremely overrated. I don't have the hard data in front of me but I think if you look up how many more calories you burn by gaining a pound of muscle, you will be shocked that it isn't that much. This is one of those "everybody knows" facts about fitness that everyone believes but isn't really backed up very well.
I re-summarized my thoughts on this topic at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644559. I think people should look at performance through the lens of fluid intelligence and crystalized intelligence.
Yup, you’re definitely right on all counts there. The idea is the main “product”, so I’m glad people are liking it. Most people will probably end up customizing the column counts and exact layout widths anyway. :)

Personally, I chose 2->5->8 columns due to how well they happen to fit into a 24 px baseline grid, and because they’re parts of the Fibonacci sequence, meaning they’re easy to divide into harmonic layouts. 12 just never looks right, and 16 is far too unrestrictive.
#8: why do you need to pay to run a survey?

Two things that help speed up surveys are buying targeted traffic and offering a prize as incentive. I got 300 survey responses in 3 days with $75 in Facebook ads and a $25 Amazon gift card
jason is making it sound as if he personally knows someone who made this mistake. i think you're claiming the same, and based on how many (few) acquisitions facebook makes, it's possible that you both know the same person who feels they were "trapped." can you say who it is, or did you intentionally leave out the name of the person you know?

edit: sorry if i misread this part to imply it had to do with facebook: I sort of watched this happen with a friend's company.
How To Launch In 10 Steps With Less Than $2,000
For one thing, though scientific, any conclusion is going to be rather soft if it's drawn from one study where human beings self-report calories, and where the difference in weight (2kg) is within the variance of how much our weight can vary within a single day.
I don't know anyone who's been scammed by Facebook. I like Facebook.
I'm sorry, but even on HN I feel it is appropriate to reply to this jackass with only two characters: FU [Edit: the downvotes be damned]
Person A is doing everything he/she can to learn.

Except ask what PXE is. If they had done that, Person B would've known that they needed all the help you're talking about, but he didn't because Person A didn't ask. People aren't mindreaders.
There is a correlation between attitude and age. But this is actually a question of attitude rather than age per se.

If I couldn't get a job programming I'd do it for free. Heck, I'm working on a startup so I basically am doing it for free. It's the thrill of making something other people find useful.

From the people I know and have worked with, the older the programmer, the less likely that attitude has survived.
With due respect, pg:

The game of building a facebook dependent start-up has many possible outcomes but we could break them down this way:

1. Destined to lose. Nobody wins, not FB, not YC, not founders. All three parties joined in making a mistake. Oops. Boring case.

1a. Destined to win barely. Maybe YC finds a break-even exit. FB is incrementally helped. Maybe the founders are happy or maybe restless. Boring case.

2. Destined to win big by unique, non-replaceable opportunity. E.g., Founders have an exclusive contract with Bob Dylan and their product is going to go big... they can stay independent. They've got an "f.u." contract with Dylan. FB wins a little on the margins of the revenues of the new firm. YC and the founders win really big. The only problem is, such unique, exclusive opportunities are rare.

3. The start-up OR AN UPSTART COMPETITOR (most often Facebook itself or a better "friend of FB") will win big and it's winner take all. This is half of the case that has Jason Calacanis' panties twisted. FB can often (we presume, act as if we knew to be true) brute force the firm out of the market by replacement or force them into an early acquisition with the threat of replacement.

There are two sub-cases:

3a) Facebook's dominance as market-maker cum market-player is hostile towards YC and the start-up. FB wins. YC and founders essentially break even or worse.

3b) Facebook is in a cooperative mode (e.g., FB invests products and services in the YC firms and then dominates by friendly acquisition or similar). FB wins big - low stakes and high return on their perceived value as market maker. YC wins non-stellar but more reliable returns: a respectable interest rate on 20K outlays. That's a sweet spot for YC (they aren't playing the lottery, they're managing a fund). Founders get, in effect, a very modest bonus and then either a (likely crappy, per Jason) job or just a nice bullet point on their C.V.

Uncompressed, Jason has a reasonable concern I think. There's a new case where founders barely win and wonder if the struggle was worth it, while YC and FB are quite happy.

And, nobody asked, but I think YC's fundamental mistake is interest in funding FB-related start-ups at all. The problematics of letting one particularly odd firm create and dominate a market like that are such that I think YC should generally shun the unfathomable risks and complexities.

I see the deal as YC submitting a bit to FB's domineering tendencies because by submitting on these terms, YC does OK and the founders aren't creamed. A better solution (in my biased view) would have been to decide just to not fund anything that cares about FB's actions at all.
Seems like you didn't read the article past the "The answer is obvious but only once you see it" sentence.
I had the Kindle DX but sold it to get the iPad. Its extremely easy to put pdf books on it, plus i can listen to music and take notes.
$20mil from a company that isn't public yet isn't as good as it sounds. Who knows what the vesting terms are as well.

Yes, it's still a lot and there are ways to sell the stock but that's assuming they even get $20 million.
Linkbait or not, just because you don't plan to act against your own interests doesn't mean your actions won't break that way in the long run. Your heart is pretty clearly in the right place, but you're not good at hearing criticism.

The FB/YC thing looks like a net win for YC companies, but it's just not valid to say it isn't at all fraught.
That's a fallacy in the broad sense. I've had investors who had very different goals for my company than I did. Investors, YC included, are after liquidity events.. plain and simple. As a founder, that's not always the case (and the desired timeline is almost always drastically different).

In the YC case, as a relatively small (very) early stage investor... they might very well benefit from a lot of very quick exits. Before additional investor dollars and the resulting dilution that accompanies it. It's plausible that this deal with Facebook is designed to achieve that. Essentially giving Facebook early insight into these companies and that ability to pick them up for cheap ($2M-$10M), which might actually be advantageous for YC.

I'm not saying that's what is happening here. I really have no idea. I'm merely point out that Calcanais might have a strong point.
That argument is frequently made to deny the existence of any form of discrimination. Note that it would have applied to say, black people in the 1950s in the USA.
They already do it. Note the "Any additional instructions?" field in the page you linked to.
That's cool :) Good luck! I'd really recommend getting involved in your local anarchist collective (which from Google seems to be this one: http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/8085). Actually, shit, after a bit more Googling, that place seems to be dead. That's very sad. If a new place pops up though, try to get involved if you can. I've really, really benefited from getting involved with Seomra Spraoi, which is a similar type of place in Dublin. Being able to be around people who understand your basic assumptions in life, in a fun and sociable environment, has done so much to keep me sane.
Would really like to see articles it links to via the reference links if it runs into another recently edited one. Actually any information that will begin to connect the articles, edits, and users together.

Cool demo and thanks for writing it.
Try placing a higher value on your time and energy. If something isn't worth an upmod, how is it worth a comment?
> You can't easily reheat fried fish the next day as a leftover (well, I can't - any tips?)

For things like that I suggest a toaster oven. Put it on 350-400 or so and put the food in long enough to get hot. Works well for most fried foods, pizza, and other things that don't microwave well.
This is based on the difference between theory and practice. QC is still theoretically secure, but the equipment isn't perfect. The attackers overwhelm the detector and basically "pwn" it, making it click whenever they want.

Here's an in-depth explanation, plus a how-to slide presentation and live demo from the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin (it's in English with a heavy German accent): http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/events/3576.en.h...
That doesn't really make sense. A YC-backed exit that nets a "nice signing bonus" doesn't move the dials for YC, and the perception that YC is a farm team for Facebook and Google hiring doesn't help them either.

I don't know if this is what Calacanis is saying (I kind of doubt it), but the risk is that YC is acting against interests inadvertantly. And, again, probably not so much by Facebook stealing! your! ideas! so much as by creating a single locked-up railroad track for bizdev, putting FB at/near the center of a startup's solar system.