skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why aren't you applying to Y Combinator?
There are far too many one-sided "here's why you should apply to YC" articles on HN. I'd be interested in hearing why other startups (particularly bootstrapped ones) have chosen not to apply to Y-Combinator.

As for me, angel investing (call YC what you will) just has a creepy "bank strategy" feel to it - to make the most amount of money off those who have the least.
Really? I would certainly hope that's not the case. Relying on customers overspending due to technical deficiency seems like a pretty poor business model.

I'd certainly be happier paying more per pro-rated unit of time that I actually use than I am feeling as though I'm in an arms race to not be fleeced.

Is there really that much revenue to skim off the top? Either way, they're paying Amazon out of those charges.

But I'm not so cynical as to think that their success is reliant on this income.
I think the fact that this is comparable to sports or jazz is exactly the point. While I imagine that you'd have to go back prettaayyyy far to find the time when sports were demonized as anything from an utter sin to a slightly pitiable time-waster, jazz certainly endured those characterizations when it was emerging into popular culture.

The same is true of any number of other media that now enjoy nigh-immeasurable popular esteem: the novel, for example. If we'd had the same educational-industrial apparatus then as we do now, surely some enterprising PhD candidate would have staked his career on studies illuminating the benefits of reading novels.

EDIT: I forgot to mention this - the real question that remains is just how valuable this effect of gaming is in the non-gaming world. And boy is that a doozy of a question!
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today and from
Dentists and doctors are always running late, if you go in the afternoons. They don't like sitting around idly, not earning money, so they set up the system this way.

Most patients are in and out, but a few take extra time, and they rarely know which ones, so they just assume they are all quick cases.

Always schedule meetings like this as early as you can.
Ethics of Code
I didn't see the praise.

What I really objected to was the stereotyping. I know I'm not the only Indian who cares about punctuality.
Yes, it will be freemium, so easy to signup without a credit card for the free product.
This is a byproduct of their time generally being worth so much more than yours. You would not complain if you had to visibly pay for any time a doctor is waiting with no patients.

As for structuring appointments more appropriately, it's quite easy to think of reasons an appointment could take more time than anticipated, and if you had to buffer for that time, you would have to pay for the buffer.
I wouldn't call it begging but demanding. There is a sea of difference between these two terms.

That's why I said the club is not hyper-exclusive. Yes, it is difficult to get covered if you aren't funded but not impossible.
The fact that C can be relatively easily and predictably converted into reasonably efficient assembly doesn't make it an assembler.

All compiled languages are "restricted on the basis of being functionally equivalent to the input code", unless you meant something by that statement that I don't understand. The reason I'm uncertain is because I wouldn't presume that you are asserting that all deterministically compiled, correct compilers are high-level assembly languages.

I would add to what he writes in the article, however (and I did in a comment there): C doesn't model the von Neumann architecture very well. It lets you create data structures just fine, but the capability to create code, dynamically, at runtime, surely the defining characteristic of a shared instruction-data architecture, is all but completely absent.
I'm from the west and I liked NYC at first sight, although I think it'd probably be a bit much for me long term. Boston, though, was fantastic. Now I'm in the bay (still in temp housing, deciding where to live), so we'll see how it goes.

On the subject of horrific first impressions, though, Bangkok definitely fit the bill for me. Perhaps not as big as NYC, but dirtier, crazier, far less organized, everything in Thai (a problem for me, not for them), dogs everywhere, not just bums but homeless starving mothers with a little baby kneeling in the gutter, bugs... jesus, that was an experience.
Well the problem may vary from provider to provider (and country to country), but after observing my wife's situation as a physician in the U.S., I can tell you that many doctors aren't late volitionally.

First, the problem isn't easily fixed. Here's the deal: At her HMO each doctor has a panel of several thousand patients. Each patient visit during a normal clinical day gets a 15 minute allocation with the MD. It used to be 20 minutes at her HMO but was recently reduced in order to increase the patient volume. Typically my wife's schedule is stacked appointment to appointment from 8-Noon and then again from 1-5pm. A couple of time slots are left unscheduled for high priority, emergent visits (if you've got a routine visit, forget it, you'll get something a month or two out into the future).

No as you can imagine, 15 minutes per patient isn't much time. Some patients require more time. With each successive visit, the wait will get longer and longer. This isn't because the doctor (at least some of them) is being a jerk or dismissive, it's because they're trying to do a thorough job with the time allocated. If they can't finish what they need to in 15 minutes, well, she goes over that time. It isn't too hard to realize how screwed up the schedule can get after a couple of tough back-to-back cases.

My wife then tries to catch up during lunch hour because she doesn't take lunch. After working through lunch, she kicks into the afternoon half of clinic hopefully caught up, but sometimes not. And the cycle repeats itself.

The receptionists can't "easily structure" the appointments more appropriately -- at least at the large providers -- b/c they're not the ones running the game.

I'm not going to defend the overall system. That's a much bigger problem and mess that a lot of smart people have looked at and have yet to solve. But I do think it's worth realizing that, yes, many doctors do think your time is valuable and don't purposefully try to waste your time. Many doctors are overworked and are doing the best they can within the parameters of what they've been given to practice medicine and that at some point you might be that person that has an appointment that goes over the time allocated (and when you do, hopefully you'll be happy the doctor ended up being attentive to those needs).

Just hoping to lend some extra perspective (especially as someone who used to feel the same way you do).
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Perhaps the same way dyslectics (sp?) are inconsiderate by always being unable to spell correctly. From time to time, it would be acceptable.

Consider that for the person that is always late, it is probably a bigger problem than for you. She has to endure it in all parts of her life. Assuming that the problem is that she simply doesn't care is as ignorant as assuming that a dyslectic simply doesn't care to learn how to read or write correctly.
I've been asking potential customers this very question, and the overwhelming response has been: AFTER. No surprise, I guess. I'm much more likely to signup for a trial if I don't need to pull out the card.

Earn my trust, give me an app that is good enough to convert, and Let me decide.

My apps don't require a card to signup. I'm now working to improve conversion in the funnel and I want to start with the widest funnel possible.

As for multiple trials? I use email as a unique identifier. It isn't 100%, but I haven't seen any abuse (including the gmail address+whatever@gmail.com tweak). Not sure I would do anything about it if I did. My customers tend to be busy managers who don't have time to game the system. They'll just expense it anyway.
Yep. And actually I'm doing Shift-3 more often now as I often want to jump to the definition of something that's more likely to be backward in the file. It's good to know about ? on the same topic instead of / (backward/forward searches).
I tried out DDG and it didnt work
After reading the "Giving up on Google" post on robsheldon.com I decided to give it a try.

Unfortunately, my first search, "breast cancer", resulted in no relevant results. Searching for "breast" explains that "safe search" is on.

1. Why, in 2010, would something called "safe search" block breast cancer queries? I could understand if it was 1997...

2. Why am I only alerted if all my keywords are on the black list? Shouldnt people searching for "breast cancer" know that 50% of their query keywords are being filtered out?
Car dealers usually take trade-ins. The upgrade model is essentially equivalent, but might need to be tweaked in a legal/technical sense. It would be more ethical than clickwrap agreements that could contain anything.
It's helpful to define what "being late" means. My rule of thumb is 0-5 minutes late is "on time", 5-10 minutes late is "OK but not great", 10-15 minutes late is "somewhat rude" and 15+ minutes late is "very rude".

One thing that annoys me to no end: people who are very early. If I plan my schedule carefully around you being there at 2pm (or later) and you show up 20 minutes early, you are going to sit around for 20 minutes, and I'll feel like an asshole, even though it's your fault.
how did it not work?
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99% of the time it's equivalent, I think it's only when I'm in colon mode that Ctrl-C is not working. Ctrl^[ is another escape. But the sdf trick might be handy.
Yes, I think the difference is that C allows for close interaction to the machine architecture. Normally I don't care what exact opcodes the compiler turns X language into, however C allows me to wrap direct hardware access into the syntax of the language itself. In essence, it mostly doesn't matter what exact opcodes the preceding for loop is turned into, it matters that in the next block I can take that result, move it to rax and rcx and use an intrinsic to execute a CPUID instruction.
One should hire one of the best 3-D printers, and with it, print your own 3-D printer.
It is only easy to fix at the expense of decreasing productivity of the doctor. Because of that, most doctors do not really see this as a problem, let alone one that needs fixing.

The problem is that meeting a doctor cannot be planned perfectly. A meeting might take 5 minutes, or it might take 20.

If, on average, a doctor can serve 4 patients an hour, and she wants to reach that on a 9-5 working day, she must schedule her first patient at 08:45 or thereabouts. Reason: the first patient might be late. That would give her idle minutes that she would need to serve later patients, some of which might take 20 minutes.

Similarly, she must schedule her second patient at 09:00-ish, to have a patient waiting in case the first one happens to take only 5 minutes to serve.

And yes, that appears rude, but mostly, it is the economical thing to do. You can only get better service by paying your doctor more. You will notice that many people who can afford that are willing to do so. As an extreme example, I doubt that the president of the USA has spent much time waiting for his doctor.

For the maths behind this, google queueing theory.
Ask HN: Can I join a startup- advice for a non-coder?  
Here’s my dilemma: I’m new to the tech industry and dream to work on an idea from its early stages. I’m not a coder (although I can understand code) but have great people skills- I communicate well, can make friends easily, have no problems networking, I can manage people, organize projects, have many business ideas (yeah, I know ideas are nothing without execution, but it’s still good to have them), have good marketing skills and a excellent business sense and can do a great job of selling products/ideas that I’m passionate about. While I know enough Java, PHP, SQL to be dangerous, I don’t really have a desire (or maybe ability?) to be a hotshot coder.

My educational background is an MS in IT, a conversion degree focused on project management, web development, DB management and similar subjects, with a BS in Finance and a year of law school. In February I got my first tech job, as a QA for a 100 person company- I chose a QA position for several reasons: 1. it was what was available and student loan payments were due and 2. It is a good way to see a tech company from many sides (I interact with devs, product and marketing on a daily basis). I’m doing well- learning quickly, receiving excellent reviews and taking on more and more responsibilities.

My strategy is focused on learning more about the industry while networking and launching my own non-tech business to get some entrepreneurial experience and hands on practice. I’ve been building a base of contacts by attending various Meetup events as well as co-organizing and hosting ad publisher’s meetup (meetup.com/sfadpub). I’m working with some friends to launch a t-shirt company; we’re about 2 months from going “live.” The hope is to build enough knowledge and contacts to be able to take advantage of an opportunity when one comes up.

Is there more that I should be doing? Should I bite the bullet and focus on improving my coding abilities (at the expense of my networking activities and the time I spend learning about marketing, business development and other areas that are my strengths)? Do ideas/companies in the very early stages even need someone like me?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
JanRain has written open source libraries for OpenID: http://www.janrain.com/openid-enabled

Their free version of Engage is sufficient for basic authentication. As mentioned already, your authentication system will then rely on your site, Janrain's site, and also the 3rd party site that performs the actual authentication. If you just want to quickly get going, you can use their free version of Engage with the above caveats.

If you want to not rely upon JanRain, then you can use one of the OpenID libraries out there. Integration is "relatively" simple, it should take 1 day in most cases.

However, you may want more than OpenID (Hello, Facebook Connect and Twitter's OAuth). If that is the case, then you will have to add support for those sites as well.

It would be nice if there is an open source version of Engage, but there doesn't appear to me from my searching.
Either way, they're paying Amazon out of those charges.

I'd be extremely surprised if Heroku actually spools up EC2 instances the moment you move the slider. It'd be a far more intelligent (and profitable) design to simply make sure there are sufficient resources to maintain the desired service levels with a buffer to deal with spikes in demand.

It should be relatively straightforward to provide service levels that are functionally identical to actually starting each "dyno" or "worker" with a greatly reduced cost structure.

Relying on customers overspending due to technical deficiency seems like a pretty poor business model.

I didn't mean to say they're relying on it, simply that it's adding to the bottom line and it would be greatly missed.
Reading this makes me laugh because today I got a $1400 bill from National Grid for gas and heating. The normal bill is around $40 usually. An interesting phone call awaits tomorrow.
In all seriousness though Heroku should strike a deal since this is your first offense, just like banks will waive fees for you when you overdraft the first time.
Scott Summit got a lot of press after this presentation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lJ8vId4HF8

Not sure where the presentation was held or how he organised it but it's been doing the rounds for a while now.
Perhaps I've been unclear. C has characteristics of high-level assembly language because it allows you to directly integrate direct machine opcodes transformations directly into the syntax of the language itself instead of into the compiler/interpreter. In other words, C has an element of predictability in the opcodes it will generate for a given architecture. The exact opcodes it generates (SIMD, etc) aren't extremely important as long as this capability is preserved.

The fact that C can be relatively easily and predictably converted into reasonably efficient assembly doesn't make it an assembler.

Never said it was.
We have the concept of "fashionably late" in the US, too. A late night party might be scheduled to start at 7 or 8, but people might not show up until 9 or 10.
Read your other submissions. You seem to be really looking for something worthwhile to do.

1. You really need to get a handle on what you understand and like. Without that you will get trapped in doing something because the money is there, but your heart isn't.

2. Retailers sell what their customers want. If you can get ahead of the curve then that is a big win. To succeed at that you need to understand some market segment well and have an affinity for it.

3. The internet makes it very easy for retailers to locate products. Those that don't will expect the representative (you) to beat a path to their door with samples. The big chain retailers will not buy from some bit player.

4. Anybody can buy wholesale. Those that can't have a credit worthiness problem. Do you want to take them on?

5. Those who don't have the space. Well are you going to be running an inventory and then ship in smaller quantities?

6. You did say in one of your earlier posts that you have some considerable capital. You could always fund some excellent ideas by bing an angel investor. That could provide better ROI than shuffling stuff around.
Post length strategy: Which one would you choose, short post or long post?
'bout a month. Tops.
> When you are in this position the only reason to sell is if your company is no longer growing

False. Valuation is not based on a point-in-time analysis of your current revenue run rate or total size of your userbase, it tends to rely much more on first and second derivatives, such as how fast you are growing revenue.

There is a point in a company's lifetime when, if you stop growing as fast (even though your revenues are still growing), you may be worth less while making more money.

Also, there is a lot of risk in running a startup. The landscape can shift under anybody, and evaporate value in a heartbeat.

If a deal is above your target threshold, and you find that is fairly or over values your company, an acquisition can be something you seriously consider, even while you're still growing.
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There simply isn't a 1:1 correspondence between C and its machine code; not in size, and not in functionality.

Any half-decent compiler is going to perform a non-trivial transformation of a big switch statement to make it efficient. The expected performance semantics of a switch (something better than O(n) in the number of cases) rules out simplistic iterated jumps in big cases. The programmer expects O(1), or at worst, O(log n).

But more importantly, CPUs generally have many more capabilities than are exposed by C, and this is where the "1:1 correspondence" really falls down. Assemblers generally have disassemblers that you can transparently round-trip through. That's a little harder in C.

Perhaps you meant a injective relation, rather than bijective? But that's a long way short of an assembler.
Actually my understanding is that investor performance is usually better than the market average, but not by enough to meet expenses. Therefore after market returns usually lose. Markets are not perfect. But the imperfections are small.

There was a study I saw a decade ago about whether any funds produced better results than chance. Due to the difficulty of modeling the possibilities, only mutual funds were considered. So people like George Soros did not get counted. In the end 2 names had performed high enough that, with 95% confidence, their performance was not by chance. Their names were Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett. Peter Lynch retired before he got to the 99% confidence.

Interestingly both Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett recommend low cost index funds for average investors.
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An interesting question, I would approach it like this:

1: what are your interests and hobbies? Go to www.meetup.com and join some meetup groups associated with those interests- attend a few meetups and you're bound to meet others that share at least some of your interests.

2: are you into any type of sports? if you are, join some adult leagues.

3: you can join an organization like "one brick" onebrick.org and volunteer your time in the community, that way you'd get out, do some good and meet people.

4: if worst comes to worst, post an ad looking for friends on craigslist! when i moved to a new country and had my girl leave me, that's what i did and quickly made some friends.
China’s 2nd largest online video site to begin work on an IPO "fairly soon"
I don't think C is necessarily predictable in the opcodes it will produce for any given architecture. The code produced for a big switch statement will differ hugely between compilers for the same architecture; some use binary searches, some use hash tables, some use multiple indirect jumps, etc.

And conversely, there are many other languages that have a similar degree of predictability in the code they produce for a given architecture; Pascal, for one, which is almost isomorphic with C in most practical implementations.
I like this approach (the mental RPG game).

I'd also add that you can start with small steps. For instance, with a coworker, see if they want to grab lunch one day or get some coffee during a break. Making friends sometimes takes time. You need to see if you're compatible with the person enough to be able to do stuff with them.

If you're a hacker or entrepreneur (which I'm assuming b/c you're on this site), there are plenty of meetup groups from startups. This is always a great way to find like-minded people.

If college was a great way for the OP to meet friends, consider a local extension school or community college. Consider a class in some hobby you always wanted to learn more about (photography? ceramics?).

Good luck!
Bootstrapping has some inherent disadvantages: you're working to pay the rent at the same time you're trying to build a successful product, so you have less time to accomplish what you really want to do, and less financial resources overall.

But if you can overcome these obstacles using proper time management, project scheduling and keeping fixed costs to a minimum, you'll end up with significantly greater equity and fewer fingers in your proverbial pie, in contrast to giving up equity and answering to your investors, however useful their input may be.

Bootstrapping a startup requires you have a real-world business model which actually generates revenue, which is more than many investor-backed companies can say. However, a profitable model is not necessarily a sustainable one. You could fill your schedule with client-contracted work and pay the monthly overhead and maybe yourselves too, but it's not the most sustainable long-term business strategy (unless you really want to be doing this forever.)

So you contract/consult to pay the bills, at the same time devoting a reasonable portion of your time to building your own products and looking for your "homerun."
"You wouldn't download a car"
maybe i'm reading too much into your name, but this is nothing to be ashamed of- people go through lows and highs, believe in yourself. you've made friends before and you'll do so again, you just need to look at it like a process.