skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's mostly just not something typical YC applicants are interested... which is really weird, because health issues are going to be a huge concern in the western world for the next 50 years at least.

Part of it may be that you need medical connections to do the much of the work. We work directly with a ton of different doctors/hospitals (for a team of only ~15 devs), and still have issues with building the right things, 510k submissions, etc...

But yeah, medical applications are getting neglected by the startup community at the moment.
I used plan 9 for a while, and I really like it; but when I was looking to use a network filesystem I tried a 9p remote mount between two Linux servers over the internet. I was disappointed to find that it was much much slower and generally performed worse than sshfs, perhaps due to lack of caching and readahead. Perhaps there is some way to use 9fs more effectively with a caching / readahead layer, I guess it would be simple enough to implement such an intermediate server in plan 9.
We can only cut debt by borrowing
> I don't understand why anyone complains about Google Instant.

Google Instant is everything that is wrong with a poor Ajax implementation.

No back/forward history, I've lost count of how many times it kicked me out of the search text box as I was editing a query, and when I try close the tab my browser warns me that I have edited text in an un-submitted form.

It's a complete and utter mess, as far as I'm concerned. The best thing about it is that you can turn it off.

The true power of Google Search is its ability to predict and correct your query text on the fly as you type, but that feature been around forever in my browser search box.

Google Instant is just a very lame (and buggy) gimmick to compete with Bing's gimmicks. If rely on gimmicks to help you decide which software to use, so be it...
A user’s guide to websites, part 1: If it wasn’t broken why fix it?
Eh, lacking an interesting idea didn't seem to hurt Zynga. The obvious answer to "why are you starting a business?" would be "money."
I have heard "POST-INCREMENT COBOL BY 1"
>It is not obvious that the bulk of the resources come from the idled workers. Resources are needed to pay the workers.

The resources are the idled workers. Yes, commodity-type resources are used as well, but there is for example a lot of idled equipment out there as well.
Does anyone else find it odd that two million active users is "not enough users". Most startups would kill for that.
> which allows heavily interactive programs to run across multiple machines with cache coherency fully guaranteed in all respects.

Cache coherency gets increasingly expensive with scale. At some point, the costs exceed the benefits.

The location of point depends on lots of things, but if you're on the other side....

Also, there are many kinds of coherency.
Clojure's target is to replace slow old Ruby

That is very clearly the opposite of what I wrote.
It was over ten years ago and I just don't remember. The development modelling was done by a couple of other guys.

I recall seeing R around, but I don't remember it being used for my markets, which were bonds and currencies. The data sets were very large and took hours to process (pre-Pentium 4); would that have anything to do with it?
I would pay for Xmarks.
But: (defn ^:static fib ^long [^long n]) is really not sexy.
Unfortunately for me, if I fall asleep in the middle of the day, I am going to sleep for 2-3 hours, sometimes longer. Sleeping for less than that is pointless; it can sometimes take me at least 15-20 minutes to get to sleep. And, I'm not sleep-deprived; I get plenty of rest these days, having already burned my body out on all-nighters coding in elementary, middle and high school. I can't do it anymore.
An Amazon Android Tablet May Follow The Amazon Android App Store
I am currently at the BlackBerry DevCon, and have to tell you that RIM is definitely not positioning the PlayBook (so-so name imo) as an iPad killer. They are after a whole new segment of applications here that seems to be envisioned to come off QNX distributed capabilities.

It's very early stages still, but think along the lines of manipulating your BlackBerry's email from the PlayBook over bluetooth or piping a powerpoint presentation to a projector over WiFi.Just completely random examples here, but I think they definitely have the professional/business segment in mind.
That's not how unemployment works. Good luck to them anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency_wages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_demand
Message to "Anonymous", 4chan, and the anti-Scientology militants
I didn't realize we had so many VCs among HN's readership.
Bill Clinton Discusses Climate Change
Another issue is embargo breaking which TC does frequently. A lot of companies have the policy that if a news outlet breaks an embargo, than that outlet _and_ it's parent & sister companies are banned from future embargoed releases. So I'd imagine AOL would have to put a stop to that.
If this hypothetical person doesn't realize that he or she might need some savings to cover family expenses while devoting all or most of their time to a project that isn't generating revenue yet, I am skeptical of that person's ability to successfully start or run a business. Just me?

Additionally if someone is wary of losing their great consulting/contracting fees to start the startup, maybe starting a startup is not for them. Or maybe they just need to plan to minimize the risk that they will be taking. Either way, this is not YC's problem to fix, imo.
Sure; pg@ycombinator.com
I think you've got it backwards. You have to be old or an IT professional (interested in usability) to care about people who don't type. Young people regard the inability to type fast as one of those social problems that will inevitably be solved by mortality, like racism (except they're probably right about typing.) (How could you not type fast if you've been writing your school papers in a word processor since sixth grade or earlier?)
Yes, usually, though we don't insist on it. I think most single founders would be better off with cofounders, but it's not worth taking someone mediocre just to have a cofounder.
Michael Arrington and Tim O'Reilly debate [podcast]
Next article - The Flying Minivan
That's how it appears, but I think it's a misleading view

I think this is where we're going to see companies OS decisions come into play in the next few years; iOS is (very loosely) a subset of OSX, but with a phone UI. There's loads of potential here for it to grow. I don't know much about Android, but I think it's similar.
Fair point, but how about this: they've committed to 3 months anyway, so why not try charging for 3 months? Just don't touch the money coming in during that period. If they reach the end of that time, and it's not working, issue refunds and shut down. There is some cost to this (transaction fees etc), but seemingly minimal compared to other running costs they've already committed to (because if it fails, the number of transactions will necessarily be low).

They might struggle to get people to sign up when there is doubt about the service surviving. But that cat is already out of the bag, and as I alluded to earlier they could also play this to their advantage (charging now is not a money-grab, it's simply a matter of keeping a valuable service viable).
OK, Typekit webfonts have now been disabled for iPad only. The site should work without crashing now. Funnily, the iPhone works just fine.
I don't care much about software patents. If people sue me for violating some patent, I'll publish on bittorrent and move to Sweden or some free country!
You might want to check out my friends music blog - he's the former owner of Neptune Records.

http://www.oystered.blogspot.com/
I use Xmarks and am quite happy with it; it would be nice if they released the code so I could synch to a personal computer.

But I guess there's other solutions out there.
Open Source is About the Differences - Lessons in Apache's Million Code Changes
I was going for the mvp (minimum viable product) more so than a neatly designed site. I think 1 minute per call is too optimistic. I had calculated 2 minutes per call leading to 200 calls per day which is actually $1920/month for the employee. I had used the minimum wage estimation in Ontario which is $10.25. But I can always outsource the calling. So at $8/hr I can bring the pricing down. Thanks for the feedback.
Learn How Hackers Makes a Cookie Catcher : Security alert
I would think that instrumental is a bit more conducive rather than music with lyrics which could be distracting. Yes? No?
Oh yeah, it's totally like being violently threatened and abused by terrorists. That's a perfectly reasonable analogy.

Seriously, when you've been programming long enough, you really stop caring about programming languages. I could build a huge project in VB.Net or ColdFusion if I had to at this point. If there's good reasons for why a language should be used (and PHP has plenty of them that are external to the language itself), then it's immaterial to me.
Opensourcing the corpus would be more interesting but I suppose with their privacy policy this is a no go.
I think melvinram are dmpayton are both right. The entrepreneur only knows there is actual demand for his product when someone pays or makes a promise to pay for it.

But logically the product still comes first. The entrepreneur might take a pre-order on a product that's not available yet, but it must exist at least notionally.

Say you want to buy a kg of rice from me. You might buy it on the spot for $5. You might pre-order and pay me $3 now, and I promise to deliver it in December. You might pre-order and promise to pay me $5 in December, when I'll deliver it (a forward contract). I might deliver it now and you promise to pay me $6 next month. All those transactions are essentially the same, only the settlement details (and risk, etc) change.

In all those cases the existence of the product, or at least an expectation that a specific product will be available sometime, is a pre-condition for the transaction.
I meant half a waking day, cperciva.

Huh. That never occurred to me as an interpretation.

I wonder if this is a British vs. American vs. Canadian English issue, or if I'm just slower than usual today.
I don't think you need multiple YCs though. All our experience so far suggests it's better to have one big YC. Maybe there's some limit to scale, but the optimistic hacker in me would rather prove that by hitting it than assume it's there.
I don't want to give you any control to my facebook account via OAuth, but I'll gladly sign in with my facebook OpenID (if they provided OpenID, which they don't). The same goes for Twitter.

This is a dangerous trend that encourages trading control over your Twitter/facebook/etc. accounts for easy registration on possibly-malicious websites. OAuth is not meant for this, and OpenID should really be being used instead.
Another US only market I can't participate in. We are supposed to be mobile developers who can work anywhere in the world...

Apple have me because of this.
Or Avoiding success at all costs...;)
"For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service."

Not a bad hypothesis, one I see regularly but 90 days to close sure illustrates the downside and value of searching for that monetization model earlier rather than later.
I like MailChimp a lot but always dislike the "monkey" talk. Chimps are apes, not monkeys.
Doesn't it defeat the purpose of YC if you have to raise enough money to pay yourself market salary before you can enter the US to participate in YC?
Lots of companies made electric cars at the turn of last century, Edison was not the only one nor the first.

Electric cars were marketed to women as they had far less maintenance required and were not as noisy or as dirty.

At the same time a century ago that electric cars were available, you could also buy a number of gasoline cars that got 40-60 miles per gallon.
If not AOL, who would be the most likely (i.e. biggest cash out) for TC?
Yep. The only justifiable use I've run across is internal bookkeeping in a class library across an API that doesn't provide space for context and you need lazy initialization.
stays at Y Combinator!!
Nobody's mentioned this yet, so: this is particularly notable because it's "Mitch Kapor's startup" (famous for Lotus 1-2-3). Used to be called Foxmarks.
... and with a kid in the car?
Man, I'm gutted. I use Xmarks every day to sync from my work & windows machines (Firefox) to my MacBook (Safari) and thus to my iPhone / iPad. I'd have happily paid $5 a month or so to use Xmarks and I imagine I'm not alone.

It's really unfortunate that they won't even try the freemium, or (shock!) even the outright pay to play approach. I'm sure with two million users there would have been enough paying customers to create a profitable business.
And possibly create a great opportunity for someone new to emerge and fill that vacant space left by the 'old' TechCrunch?
100% agree. I had that question included in my first draft of my original comment, but figured anonymizing the bookmark data is a very tricky/impossible task so I removed it. See AOL search data[1]. Maybe Xmarks could sent an opt-in request to users and release the data of people who are comfortable with it. I would be fine with it, personally; all my bookmarks are on delicious anyway.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal
For more info than you ever needed on how a penny auction site works see this course project: http://home.kevinchampion.com/portfolio/course_work/si_618/
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Improved New Twitter
This has been bothering me for a while as well. I don't do facebook due to the privacy problems there and general contempt for customer.

Many sites have complex authentication and identity management systems for adding a simple comment. I don't contribute to these sites or return to them, no bookmarking. Too much of a hassle. Studies done by topix and others have shown that authentication does not increase the quality of posts. It's not even clear why comments need to be authenticated anyway. If the visitor is not purchasing something, there is no need to ascertain their true identity.

Look at both the hacker news and reddit systems for a reasonable example of doing it right. Choose a name and password and you are done. For reddit an email address is optional. Both of these sites are examples of places where there is intelligent interesting discourse. The same can not be said for sites with complex authentication systems.
I see where you're coming from. If you're tracking tasks at all, you're doing something right. However, if you use pivotal for task management, you can't estimate how much you'll get done in a day. It's not like a developer can press the start button on three features, even if they want to complete three features in a day.

Our technique is about setting out a good amount of work for the day, and trying to meet those goals. We pull few chores/bugs/features from pivotal and throw them on the board all the time.
Maybe once per cycle. There doesn't seem to be a culture of bad investors; they're all bad in their own ways.
Hiring: Creative Lead Engineer for NYC Social Travel Startup
His plans start at $49/mo. He's in a different league from even Wordpress.com premium.
If a YC startup was to never be acquired, what sort of dividend structure would you think is ideal? What sort of returns would you consider a "successful" investment?
Opzi (YC S10): A Quora For The Enterprise
The GOF book codified design patterns. You should probably read it.
I added the email to my profile. Specifically I'm interested in analytics platforms to help patients manage their health stats. I'm working on something specific with a great team, but I think there are a lot of opportunities in this space. Let data determine health status, where possible.
Getting access to devices client side is definitely going to power the next wave of innoviation on the web. It will essentially remove much of the destinction between a web and native app. It will also put standards based applications on a level playing field with apps using specific API's (eg iphone apps). Well in my opinion at least :)

The big question is how long will it take for most browsers to support this kind of functionality.
The Caffeine Nap
I agree it is tough to be a band in the era of digital music. I’ll have to respectfully disagree about whether or not our venture is foolhardy. We are early days, but the multiple discussions we’ve had with one major label have been respectful and encouraging.
Very said.
TEDxSiliconValley - Leila Janah (founder of Samasource)
Generate random numbers from atmospheric data
I strongly agree with Wolf's remarks. In a nutshell, he is pointing out that the major cause of the current economic stagnation is a lack of cash flow. Deficits can not be increased forever, but absent cash flow then GDP will continue to shrink, increasing the relative size of a nation's debt. Boosting GDP (ideally through sensibly targeted investments in infrastructure) makes debt more manageable, not least because infrastructural investments tend to pay off over the long term.

With a little imagination and selectivity, a situation like this can be a good opportunity to reduce transfer payments and endorse productivity in both the social and industrial sectors.
Amazon understands developers (see aws) and buyers (see amazon) much better than google. They have a good shot at this.
The Epic Movie-Making Adventures Of James Cameron
Upvote for bringing the Tarantino reference to my attention; I missed that one somehow. I'd be hard pressed to find a more perfect analogy for the way I think about server issues.

If you're not familiar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmRTjLRMfU
yes, but the article tries to explain the achieved work to people unfamiliar with Graph Theory or CS; thus in very simple terms and with analogies, they even define what a graph is before proceeding... I guess that's what it meant to be, short and simple press release with a (I'm assuming) follow up with the algorithm itself.
A/B testing is a Bayesian decision problem. Hypothesis testing is really the wrong way to frame this problem. Dynamically it is a bandit problem and statically it's just about maximizing expected utility, where the expectation is taken with respect to the posterior distribution. This becomes especially crucial when doing lots of tests or experimenting sequentially. All the frequentist proposals don't have their advertised coverage rates in these situations. Unfortunately most write-ups seem to be completely ignorant of Bayesian statistics.
Blackberry Playbook Tablet Features Specs Price
I'm sorry but the first paragraph does come across as cultish. It sounds as though he had to write this "rebuttal" because he was flying high after returning from jsconf (I've been to jsconf multiple times and understand this feeling completely) and couldn't let an anti-Node.js post go un-rebutted.

Also, the Node.js "cultishness" here would explain the large number of upvotes...
Bummer, I'll miss them. Foxmarks and Firebug are the two reasons I don't switch to chrome. Maybe I'll look at setting up my own server...

I have to admit, I disabled their google addon as soon as I saw it. I didn't expect it and I didn't really get the point at the time.
Switching To Node.js
TechCrunch Disrupt: The Backstage Pass, Day One (TCTV)
From "build something people want" to "built something people want" to "can't monetize 2 million users."

Any other examples of this?
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 73
Speaking from the perspective of someone who routinely writes his own compilers, and who has extensive experience designing VLSI microprocessors, etc various fancy complicated stuff.

It's also odd that many people after 10 year with Perl have not realized that it has pointers which it calls references. Pointers and references are not so different that they need separate names. There's too much branching of terminology. Pointers are pointers. Even those & things in C++ are pointers as well, they are just a syntactic simplification of pointers for ease in typing. If C++ didn't have references, what it calls references could be implemented in the preprocessor as an alternate syntax for pointers. Oh, references can't be nil in C++? No, they can be if you try hard enough on every compiler I've ever seen.

Lots of people agree as well. Perl has pointers. Call them references if you like. They are pointers.

http://ist.marshall.edu/ist334/perl_pointers.html

This whole sidebar is pretty off topic for this thread though so if you'd like to continue please create a new thread. The post was about finding Perl programmers in LA. Part of the problem is fewer people are embracing Perl nowadays. Part of the reason is that Perl is difficult. I like Perl. I use Perl all the time. I also recognize that, like C++, Perl can be a pain in the ass for people, and there are much easier languages to read and write in which work just as well for things like basic web programming. So as a result people learn those other things more nowadays and not so many adopt Perl. That's not hating on Perl, that's just explaining why the dude can't as easily find his Perl programmers (for whatever lowball salary he is offering, which is not stated) in LA anymore.
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Devs bet big on Android over Apple's iOS
If you enter your email, if it's an email that has signed up, the name field turns into a password field. I agree it's very confusing when trying it for the first time. I also imagine that there are a lot of duplicate accounts around, I know I have a few
Actually, I think that would've been a better name than the PlayBook.

Considering that RIM's marketing it as a "professional-grade" product, Play just seems like the wrong word to use.
BitTorrent or Box Office?  The Geek’s Guide to Fall Film
You should be using http://trafficserver.apache.org/
80k req/sec (small objects)
Aaron --

MG is one of the few TC writers who editorializes pretty liberally in his posts. I appreciate that as it makes it more interesting and it doesn't bother me as I happen to agree with most of what he says. To editorialize successfully requires you to have a strong grasp of the industry, the market forces and what direction it's moving in -- all of which I think he does quite well, along the likes of MA or Om Malik.

You may not like his writing but it's a far cry from a content farm. He's a writer. He's paid to write. That's what he does.

I have no idea why you have so many upvotes, and I guess I'm really surprised so many people agree with you.
Portals do not a tech company make.

Yahoo called itself a media company, and many others emulated their all-in-one portal model with search as an after thought.

Google focused only on their index and their PageRank algorithm to provide the best intent based search possible.

They weren't in a contest with the tech companies. They were just a feature to Yahoo way back when.
Seems like a pretty good product if it launched now, but Apple will soon announce the next iPad which will likely leave many of the PlayBook's distinguishing features in the dust.
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