skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually quite surprised that HN-ers are complaining about Facebook API, documentation, and quality assurance process. Isn't Facebook the kind of companies where most HN-ers fall in love with?

1) Young founder with visions

2) Hacking culture (to the max)

3) Cool technology (Erlang, C++, Java, Hadoop, HBase)

Every time I saw a Facebook engineer giving a talk or writing a blog, the word "quality" (unit test, test, automation, manual, or whatever) and "documentation" are nowhere to be found.

It's not in the company's blood/gene when it comes to QA process. Maybe that's the reason why they're hiring super smart and super young individuals? to pull all-nighters fixing bugs and pray during the release day?

It'll be super hard to get better in QA because it's probably too late for them: too many hot-shot developers who aren't used to testing (automated or manual). They'll probably hire tons QA and automation engineers, but at the end of the day, their developers will "fix" bugs and throw it over the wall.

Some people might not like the way Google works (too much bureaucracy in terms of code quality), but they work really hard to make sure their engineers are responsible toward the code they produce. It's hard to have that kind of mentality embedded onto your engineers.
re: "YC figured out a repeatable, streamlined formula for a process which was previously a black art. They industrialized the gut feeling."

That's not my understanding. I don't think they have any formula other than "We recognize great entrepreneurs when we see them" - It's not something they can write down in a book and sell to other people - so, in that sense, not industrialized. Still a gut feeling.

I could be wrong though - happy to hear otherwise.
I can't think of much other prepregnancy medicine (absent fertility doctors). It seems like the sort of thing that genome sequencing could revolutionize.
You could also ask the question if the people voting on the bills actually read them. The answer is, generally no. Also, the congresspeople who propose bills sometimes don't even read their own material, because they assume their staff (who actually wrote it) got everything correct. Strange but true.
Why drop everything and move to some other country that you consider better than here instead of taking a chance to improve the country you live in?
I think you have the right goal, FWIW. For now. Because it's about priorities. Especially for a startup.

When you're building a startup, in my experience you want to advance on the narrowest front you can, as you build out the feature set and reach the market. Don't provide 5 ways to do X if you can just provide 4. Or just provide 1. Etc. There'll always be room in the future to iterate and add support for additional use cases, additional integration points, and additional polish. But you generally want to get to market fast, get real users, real customers, validate your market assumptions and business model assumptions, and slow or stop your burn rate before your runway runs out.

Saying NO to some things frees up additional time/money to say YES to others. So you should prioritize.
It depends on my mood and the day. Sometimes I need silence to focus. Other times I want driving hard rock to get my blood pumping. Sometimes I like traditional Irish fiddling and ballads. Other times pop-rock or folk. Really it varies as much as my general music listening does. As long as I know the music well enough, it will fade into the background -- lyrics or no. So it all depends on mood.
Although D has been around for longer, it's worth out that the Go amd64 (aka x64) compiler is the most mature compiler in the Go compiler suite (ARM, x86, amd64) but AFAIK the D compiler is only available for 32-bit x86.
Heaven forbid people be more productive when they could be clocking exactly eight hours like good little automatons.
I went through the program in 2007 in Boulder (the first year they were offering it) with Brightkite.

I'd definitely recommend doing it, it's more than worth it. To answer your specific questions:

a) It's primarily about the team. Assemble a founding team that has a history/evidence of being able to execute. You can do that by either having an impressive resume, or (in my case back at the time) demoing software that you've written, even if it's not directly related to what you're applying with.

There are also a bunch of online resources that answer this question. A select few:

http://nattyzola.com/7-pieces-of-advice-to-techstar-applican...

http://www.seattle20.com/blog/Some-tips-for-applying-and-get...

http://www.nearlynicole.com/2010/05/tips-for-applying-to-tec...

b) This really depends on your experience, but in a nutshell, try to focus on learning the things you have little experience in. For example, if you are a great engineer, but know little about raising money, focus most of your time on that.

Also, my friend Jon from IntenseDebate (sold to Automattic) has some great advice here:

http://jonefox.com/blog/2008/06/08/tips-for-techstars-teams/

Hope this helps,

Martin
Absurd. Upshot is a continuation of what got us into this mess: denial of risk.

He starts with the misguided notion that net debt is zero.
The point of interest-bearing debt is that the debtor might NOT be able to pay the debt off. He then proposes ways to reduce risk to zero, with lenders suffering no consequences of risky loans - a furtherance of policies which got us where we are, determined to take risks then legislate away the consequences.

The system is vibrant because of the willingness to accept risk. To enforce a risk-averse system is to destroy the benefits of risk. Isn't risk the core of ycombinator's purpose? to take risks, and to manage them better than others? The system cannot be cleaned up until the buck stops somewhere, until the music stops and those without chairs leave the game.

Borrowing, in a fractional-reserve system, means that for every real dollar there are tens or hundreds of claims on that dollar. You can't pay everyone off because there isn't enough money - unless the government opts for hyperinflation, achieving the same basic ends thru redistribution of abject losses.
What I Would Have Said at TechCrunch Disrupt
Cost calculation for small businesses
do we have any cost & expense calculation application as SaaS offering for small businesses? Similar to Activity based costing for small business - like Service/Consulting gigs or EBay/Etsy sellers (not the power sellers).
I had no idea ThinkGeek was owned by VA Linux (who has since changed their name).

VA Linux was one of the INSANE 1999 stocks that I remember the best, clamoring to buy in at $200/share on IPO day for a company trying to raise $115,000,000 or so by going out @ $30.00 a pop.

This for a company doing ~$14m gross if I remember correctly.
It seems computer world and pc world are trying to reignite the glory days of ghe Mac vs pc wars with these sensationalist headlines and nonsense stories.

Ill save you the time: in a survey of people using a cross platform development tool, most of the people using it are using it for android.

This is not the app marketplace, where most people make apps for iOS and I'm sure many are keeping an eye on android, but there really is no android platform eprightbnow except for things that don't suffer from lowest common denominator ports.
What should I link? The Tor hidden service? The /. post explains the thing a bit, so why not linking it?
I'm a TS Boston '09 grad. TS bills itself as a family or fraternity for entrepreneurs. Once you get through the program you have friends to relax with, colleagues to bounce ideas off, and mentors to guide you through the many stages of your career still ahead. Whenever I go to events around the country I always check the roster and hope some TS teams will be there so we can meet up. As TS has grown I've been able to do this more and more and I look forward to meeting some of the grads from the recent Seattle class.

To address your two questions more directly
1) This isn't a college application. Don't just apply and wait for a letter to come back to you. Get your application done early and send it in. Follow up with an email or two. Try and meet some mentors and get their feedback. Don't apply in a vacum!
2) Be open to feedback and work hard. Start now. Get your application done early and get feedback as quickly as you can. Basically, do more faster.

Hope this helps,

-- Henry
CBS lawsuit coming...

http://zupher.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/himym508_1.jpg

;)
I used Foxmarks for a long while when I was using Firefox, until Google Browser Sync came along, which has also passed. It was a great idea at the time. In its modern iteration, however, I felt like the best part about it was the inter-browser interoperability. I used it more recently for a time when I was still mostly using Chrome and then Firefox on some machines (such as BSD boxes).

All of the newer browser sync options that I am aware of are in a convenient location--built into the browser. Opera, Chrome, Firefox, et all are all getting bookmark sync options. However, I would much like to see a way to sync easily between the different browsers again. This is what made XMarks useful once it evolved past being only for Firefox. For now, I'm using all Opera, partially so I can keep everything together including my mobile devices.
I'm having a hard time swallowing the whole of the article, based on assertion [A]t the global level, debt cancels out: net debt is zero. So, in paying down debt, one is also reducing credit by an equal amount.

I agree that (credit - debt) = zero. The problem is that credit is not a fixed amount due to the fact that it is leveraged... see fractional reserve banking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

The leverage formula is (1 / reserve) where reserve is a fraction tending to zero. This is a non-linear relationship and we all know that the lim x -> 0 (1/x) = infinity.

If lenders (e.g. banks) hold a 20% reserve, they will "expand" the money supply by 1/0.2 or 5x. If they hold a 10% reserve, they will "expand" the money supply by 1/0.1 or 10x. If they hold a 1% reserve, they will "expand" the money supply by 100x. As the reserve fraction goes to zero, the effective credit part of Martin Wolf's equation goes to infinity.

A lot of exactly that type of lending was being practiced during the "bubble", especially in the housing market where mortgage underwriters were loaning more money than the houses were worth. This was happening before the housing crash - mortgage originators were advertising "we will loan you 100% the value of your house" (sometimes more than 100%).
The wholesale costs of transferring a gigabyte of data are (worst case, buying 2Gbps or more of transit) about 1-2 cents.

This is the very most that any vendor pays, and they probably pay far far less than that.

For storage costs, you could take the storage capacity of a 2TB drive, triple the cost to account for servers, RAID and other overhead, then come up with a per-GB charge per year (drives aren't replaced every year, but then there are power/cooling and other costs).

So a 2TB drive is say $200, triple that is $600, say 1800GB formatted divided by $600 = 33 cents per GB per year.
I'm from British Columbia originally, Half a Day (in the dinner context) is 12 Hours to me. I'll do a sample of the Indians, Canadians, and Americans in the office and get back to you.

This may be another of those "organ-eye-zation" versus "organ-eh-zation" things that pop up form time to time.
I bet you're absolutely right. They have/had an amazing team. As such, 3 months of opportunity cost ain't cheap. And it's VC-backed (I believe). Given the long-term prognosis for the market, why would you spend 3 months in salaries if the upside isn't big enough to justify the the investment? Just return what's left of the cash to the investors so they can put it into a growth opportunity.
I was interviewed by YC, DreamIt Ventures, and Techstars and ended up in Techstars Boulder. Can't say much about DreamIt but YC is all about your idea and a quantity of companies. Techstars is really about the team and quality.

As a suggestion to get in you just need a good idea and more importantly you need to work your ass off! Before I got in I cut my second job to part time, stopped going out, almost lost my girlfriend, etc because I was putting every second of my day into my company. Make sure the other members of your company do the same because it's all about the team.

As for the optimal learning experience... during the course of the program work out of the shared space and be there all day seven days a week. You'll have the advantage of bonding with the other teams and meeting random people that stop by. Also take advantage of all the sessions and meet as many people as you can. We probably had 100 meetings with different people over the summer and I counted only 3 that weren't useful for us.

Either program is great but if you have a choice I would hands down suggest focusing your energy on Techstars.

Good Lick!
Wikis can be daunting to average folks.

If Opzi works like Facebook and Quora -- gently prodding people to answer with feeds and Bacn and Toast [1], and giving logical/browsable forms to activity -- it could get a lot more participation.

The wiki 'titled article' wasn't the end-all, but rather the beginning, of a universe of possible user-built-corpora organizational strategies. And the wiki 'recent changes' feed wasn't the end-all, but rather the beginning, of a universe of ways to report activity to, and stir activity by, interested parties.

[1] See http://ifindkarma.posterous.com/pandas-and-lobsters-why-goog... for definitions of 'Bacn' and 'Toast' in context.
As games evolve, it seems tutorials become longer, more pain-staking, and much more intrusive. Why don't we go back to the old days?
> If South Korea is a better place today, it's because of the Koreans themselves far more than the US.

Agreed. Which makes the inability of the North Koreans to escape from under their repressive regime all the more tragic.
David - I feel he has a weak grasp on many fundamentals of modern technology[1]. His grammar and spelling are the subject of widespread mockery[2].

I must respectfully disagree with your conclusion that he has a strong grasp of the industry, market forces, or direction. I have a good deal of respect for both Arrington and Malik, and I cannot say I have one iota of the same for Siegler.

He is a writer, and he is paid to write. But the same can be said for the people producing articles for Demand Media. MG's prolific rate of content production doesn't inform its level of quality.

[1] A trivial example is this article: http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/twitter-just-ui-puked-on-my... where MG fails to differentiate between Twitter's CSS files failing to load and new features. I could find more if you'd like, but this is one of the more egregious from recent memory.

[2] http://plankhead.com/blog/1146/mg-siegler-destroys-the-engli...
Observing Quora's success I'd say it's a combo of two things:

a) Game mechanics to drive participation.

b) Ability for contributors to be moderated by their peers in a simpler (lazier) fashion than your typical Wiki which is less transparent,
Counsyl has some HNers among them. Congrats to them!
I'm assuming you mean, is it possible he's right?

Of course it's possible. The surprising number of votes would seem to indicate people agree with him. I don't know how many down-votes he's had though.
Agreed. In fact, I'd guess that most computer folk (e.g. IT professionals) use the Google search box in Firefox (via ctrl/cmd K), and rarely if-ever visit www.google.com.
Atmel confirms the Samsung Galaxy Tab uses its maXTouch touchscreen controller
Nearly all have some idea or ideas. Some make it clear that they're not wedded to their idea, which is fine with us, actually.
Amazon launching its own Android app store?
Hey everyone --

This is Rishi here from Counsyl. We're growing fast and looking for computer scientists and molecular biologists. We've have had a ton of success with engineers we've found on HN, so please get in touch!

We're also offering a $5000 referral bonus, so tell your friends -- joinus@counsyl.com.
$10 million per year (I read it somewhere, not sure)
MG is one of the very few tech writers with both intellect, style, and sass, and it's this type of writing that differentiates TC from some tech-content-wasteland. He has a voice and a following, though maybe that following doesn't reside here on HN.

Saying that MG's writing is barely a step-up from content farms is like saying The Wire is barely a step-up from Cops.
We funded some guys from the Central Valley once, with houses and families. They rented a place in SV for 3 months, and they'd go home on weekends to visit their families.
> So as interesting as it would be for you to test my accounts, it means I would have to kill you :)

There needs to be a term for that level of secrecy/strictness when it comes to online identity/authentication. A level so strict that if an identity gets exposed or authentication mechanism is bypassed that somebody, somewhere, will have to be killed.

Now I await eagerly for an HN reader from a three-letter organization to chime in. ;)
Wouldn't he have to be living in WA for a year for that to take effect?
The hardest part to replicate elsewhere would be the angels. You really need them, more than you need VCs, and you can't just call them into being.
It's easy to make an electric car with a useful range, it's a centuries old technology. The hard part is making an electric car that is quickly re-chargeable, reliable, affordable, safe, and has good enough performance to be suitable for routine driving. You can manage a few of those, but all of them together is as yet an unsolved problem.
Especially if your fake FB account is for a lonely young female "nearby" and/or in Russia and looking for a traditional marriage overseas. ;)
We got into TechStars in Boulder in 08, but before that we were couped up in the upper west side trying to make it happen. Had there been a TechStars in NYC, we probably never would have relocated to Boulder. There's something to be said for the fact that the NYC community isn't as swamped with startups yet. That's not to say you'd be completely lost in the SF noise, though, because YC definitely helps with that.
Q: How do you know you're in a bubble?

A: When AOL wants to buy your blog.
In regards to the poor grammar -- I've no doubt they prioritize posting speed in exchange for a more liberal writing style policy.

In regards to his grasp of tech -- I see nothing offensive about your example. He says it's probably a bug, and it was. I think his ability to grasp the implications of tech is pretty solid.

Apparently we disagree, and perhaps I even hold the contrarian viewpoint in this community. At least you can cite your criticisms which is more than I expected. :-)
Thanks for the thorough advice. I dropped out, quit my job, and have been designing and building alone for a few months. I am evaluating a few friends to see if they are as devoted as I am or just looking for a cheap thrill/little fame. I don't see any other direction I want to take in my life besides this dream of mine. I will share it with HN community before applying for feedback.

I will apply to both and try out KickStarter as well. Diaspora got in somehow and went straight to the big leagues.

How is your startup doing now?
Counterfactuals like this are hard to engage in when the company is totally killing it. At the point where they run into trouble in a hypothetical future, then we'd be better equipped to at least speculate about the bottleneck and then hypothesize about the tools that they should have used.

Or do you see some sort of bottleneck issue for them already?
Why is it just PHP and Java? Why not include Perl, Python, Ruby, and .NET?
If other companies know your numbers, they know what's possible. They then have a strong incentive to keep throwing engineering effort at it until they achieve what you have.

It's like how Jobs's visit to Xerox PARC sparked the Macintosh. Actually, Bill Atkinson went beyond what Xerox did - he misremembered the visit, thinking that he'd seen overlapping windows on a computer, and continued tinkering until he implemented them for the Mac, on the basis that Xerox's demo constituted an existence proof that it was possible. It later turned out that there were no such technology, and the Alto used tiling windows like everything else.
It helps a lot. I definately feel a synergy with my co-founder and we both consider this startup a central part of our lives.

Thanks Martin
I gave Dreamhost a whirl a whirl based on a few suggestions off here and though I've only been a customer for a month, I'm very impressed so far. A friend of mine is paying £100pm for a 'reseller' account that has less than I pay $7pm for.

No idea how it scales with the "unlimited" bandwidth/disk space but it's more than enough for me now.

This is a genuine response btw - I'm not gonna give you a referral code :)
A problem with asking someone for their gmail password to sign into malwarenet.org is that it seems very suspicious. Why does malwarenet.org want my password? I bet I can guess - they want to steal my email, find my bank account numbers and identity fraud me. Oh, it doesn't work that way, right right, but how can any one without exceptional technical skills know that for sure? Lots of site spoofing out there.

Hell, opendns is giving me a spoofed ip address for google right now. What is that about, I thought they were secure. What else on my DNS service has been hacked? Bank sites? Probably.
The way they've handled their kindle apps API developer program suggests otherwise.
How long until Twitter is littered with ads?
Thanks a lot for the great advice.

I will start working on that application NOW. I really think TS NYC will be an amazing experience, NYC seems to be the hotter city right now for innovation. I will probably apply to YC too.
I'm not sure you're thinking globally.
In "SYNC: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order" the author (Strogatz) talks about how in a cave environment, people still take naps a little after noon. People are just as likely to be asleep at 2pm as they are at 4am. Car accidents peak around that time. People fall asleep when their basal temperature is at their lowest, and yup, guess what, people experience a body temperature dip in the late afternoon.

Basically, all the evidence he provides points to a built-in nap time. I, of course, take the physicist's side over the physician's...
“Do Not Track” Explained - Opting Out of Behavioral Tracking
It's competitive advantage. Their hardware cost is where their margin is. If they can run a server with half the power/cooling, that's a significant advantage over the competitors. The major cost of a server these days is power, cooling, bandwidth.
Webmail clients don't do mail storage like desktop mail clients like thunderbird/outlook, i.e., there is no "download messages for offline use" option. Some usually cache message data of mails you accessed, but that's different.

Most webmail clients talk to a backend IMAP server which does the storage. The most popular and open format for mail storage is Maildir. So get a local IMAP server running with Maildir and access the IMAP server with http://roundcube.net/

Considering that you have 8GB of mail, I would suggest you go with http://dovecot.org/ and its mdbox storage instead of Maildir, that way if you don't like dovecot for some reason, you can convert from mdbox to Maildir to migrate.

The last piece of the puzzle is to bring in new mails from your mail account(s) to your local IMAP server. For this probably a tool like http://wiki.github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/ can be used.
Thanks for the link and the recommendation. It really does seem like a game changer for a young, ambitious entrepreneur.

I will apply to both and hope one gives us a chance.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. Good stuff to consider and try.
I will give both a try. Either city is great. It seems like both are life changing experiences for young, ambitious entrepreneurs.