skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Contemporary Westerners constantly underestimate a human's ability to commit unthinkable atrocities under the right conditions. I don't know if it's our education's fault. Maybe we just don't bother to ever emphasize this point. Maybe it's too uncomfortable of a subject to deal with.

This last century has presented a rich buffet of historical options to choose from when looking for examples of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter. Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, you name it. Maybe even a relative or a next door neighbor in our very own US of A, sent to the wrong Vietnamese village at the wrong time. That seed of pure horror is in all of us, and it's ready to rear its ugly head when the conditions are right.

I don't think as a species we've quite figured out how to suppress it.
Actually, we just literally reversed the SQL queries for the emails we sent out for accepted/rejected companies – and then didn't immediately realize our mistake.

It's been a pretty tough day here at YC but we're all really happy with the final decision we came to!
hahahaha that really sucks. Well, I think its gonna be an interesting outcome. Im excited to particpate and see what happens.
Wow! Thanks to YC for this opportunity. The valley is in no way perfect but its these sort of moments that make you excited to be in technology. I'm sure one of the companies that did not make it initially will earn the $10,000 credit.
> Stadium for one purpose

how many of them now are actually one purpose? Local example is AT&T Stadium (also known as "Jerry World") which in addition to the occasional Dallas Cowboys win also hosts a lot of UIL sporting events, high school football playoffs, motocross, monster trucks, rodeo events, and a bunch of concerts.

Nearby Globe Life ballpark has... well, baseball.

> And I've never seen a zoo threaten to leave town unless the city agreed to pay for a new elephant habitat.

Never seen one threaten to leave, but I've seen them threaten to close down exhibits.
For everyone. What are you talking about.
> As the world ignores the ignominious 500th anniversary of the buying and selling of slaves between Africa and the Americas, historians uncover its first horrific voyages

The word seems to ignore the Arab slave trade of Africans even more, despite it being twice as large. I wonder why.
The Malaysian PM was quite conciliatory in his remarks.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/20/asia/china-malaysia-mahathir-...
> Quitting wasn't that hard. And I still think about how great I felt when I smoked. I may smoke again in the future but for now, I appreciate operating in the real world without any crutches.

I think cannabis is an amazingly useful and versatile drug, but there was a time in my life where I was high pretty much constantly and although I wouldn't want to do that today, I actually think it is more useful - as a practical tool - when you have a high tolerance.

I find that when I don't have a tolerance to it, the feeling is pretty close in resemblance to how I feel when I've had way too much coffee - at that point I can't really do anything requiring complex thought. I have to do something pretty repetitive, so I find myself cleaning or just walking, maybe working out. Still useful for something, but that's about the extent of it.

At any rate, I find that the best part of being high is when I'm on the downward slope of the experience. Then I find I am more relaxed, productive, etc. I feel that I have gotten something of physical benefit from the effects.

So ... I really don't usually enjoy being stoned anymore. But I think cannabis is a more versatile tool than people give it credit for, and should be thought of that way. I'm not saying it shouldn't be used recreationally, but rather one should consider the right way to use it in context of the desired effect. Because the range of possible uses is actually pretty large.

I guess what I'm trying to say is - I think it still deserves a place in your medicine cabinet :)
Jenkins is "heavyweight" but Postgres isn't?
It's probably for the best since there are things far worse on that list than Hackers.
OK, how about 22 caliber?
This is a great post, thank you.
Will the course materials also be available to those who did not apply?
I feel like that one of the spirit of YC is try something new, well done. I still have a question, can I join the class on Tuesdays? I mean be a live audience. We're willing to give up $10k, and ask no questions in the class.
I often combine idempotence with the command-query separation principle (CQS) by making it so that queries are idempotent. This tends to encourage simple, predictable code.
While some people might be reacting based on simple entitlement, I suspect that for the majority this triggers a strong reaction because it is a warning sign. If Docker were a big company, it'd just be part of the normal drift toward customer abuse. Because Docker is still a relatively small company, it looks like a desperate attempt to stay afloat through increased monetization. The unintended side effect is that it makes me less inclined to purchase anything because I don't want to bet on a sinking ship.
Don't forget to share the results with us!
Just saw this. Hah!
For anyone curious, the answers are:

- 15k applied

- 4k were accepted

- 11k received false acceptance emails
household life skills that everyone should know. cooking, cleaning, laundry, yardwork.

things that are surprisingly lacking with youth these days, in my experience.

and with mine... "there is more to the internet than Google/Gmail."
Yet, going by a scan of people on the train last time I caught it, heaps of people seem to find money for iPhone Xs at almost the same price point.

If you're sufficiently dedicated, even with limited funds going for every second or third iteration of halo products can be a great strategy. That way when you get it you'll have the absolutely best there is and a couple of years down the track it'll still be great but maybe it won't quite do Ultra anymore on the latest titles.

The 1080TI transformed my experience of my X34 Predator (it even paid for itself through timely sale of mining profits) which does 3440x1440 @95hz. I certainly wouldn't mind the new card but I'll wait for the next one after that minimum.
Does it mean competition for 100 10k was between 4000 and now 15000?
A bold and compassionate solution, that only YC would have the guts and integrity to do. Well done.
Since everyone is in now, are the spots that we signed up for in the live in person classes still available to all?
Again, I am explicitly not making a semantic argument. I made my point about citizenship clear, and it does not depend on any particular definition of the word “American.”

I am saying that the choice of legal definition of citizenship is arbitrary, not that it is poorly-defined. Legal definitions vary a lot from country to country. Again, I’m saying it’s a bad choice for the threshold at which a government should protect and care about an inhabitant of its jurisdiction.

> claiming they shouldn’t put American citizens first is dubious at best

That’s precisely the claim that I’m saying is extremely dubious. How is it reasonable to say that people who fit the precise definition of citizenship in US law (usually through no choice or action they made) should be prioritized over other inhabitants of the same country? I agree that this is a common belief, and I’m challenging people to justify the belief.
Is there a HN guideline about this?
Yep. We do a little bit of that already with our normal batch applicants, but with the wide net of Startup School there may be more more data available that would be interesting to correlate with long-term success. I think it would be so valuable to have a rigorous study of the factors that correlate with startup success – letting founders know what they should optimize for is an important part of the value we want to provide!
Where is this favorable-to-corporations regulatory environment? Europe? UK? Australia? Canada? I'm having trouble thinking of a single western democracy that has a looser regulatory environment than the US. But I'd love to be educated.
I've had good experiences using celery-beat to replace crond. It lets you use all the good parts of celery without much work. http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/userguide/periodic-t...
The Backup QB Who Gets Paid a Lot to Never Play
Good on yc. Now I’m disappointed that I’m just auditing the course this term as I bet the forums will be a very interesting place with this many teams.

Best of luck to all.
The "commute from hell" story is now a well-established subgenre of perseverance porn. (see also: "Her six-hour commute each day seems crazy, but her affordable rent is not" http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-commute-...)
I typed in "modern art" and it looks about right.
In what way is it not? I'm really curious actually
I look forward to a future where the web has separate <ad> <tracker>, and <drm> tags.
Would standardize all this garbo and make blocking components much easier.

Can anyone just write an RFC?
Those deals aren't offered by YC directly but from talking to sandslash I think we're going to try to get the companies to agree to that.
Very true :)
Sent an email. Thank you.
Exactly. Notice how no one in the story has clean hands, even the reporter who knew that paying below market rent in cash without a lease meant that something funny was going on. It's not that hard to avoid shady business (though in fact, I laud the reporter, and maybe even Eddie and Rosa, for squeezing a bit of blood from a stone).
Sounds fun! Anyone move to IC engineer to tech VC without being part of a startup exit?
There will be an application process open to all SS participants for the in-person class (unfortunately our room has limited seating). We hope that everyone who wants to will be able to attend at least one lecture in person!
Garry is saying the 2008-version of him and his company wouldn't get into the 2018 Y Combinator, which may well be true.

But a version of Garry who'd been born 10 years later and grown up/started his career in the time since 2008 would very likely make it into YC.

The reason founders/companies applying to YC now are so much more polished and formidable than those of 10 years ago is that everyone's had the benefit of the past decade of startup knowhow being so much more widely available and easily accessible than it was back then.

All the blogs, books, videos and living case studies playing out for everyone to observe, along with vastly more powerful software development frameworks and technology platforms, means that everyone now has a much more solid foundation from which to start their own thing.

So whilst the bar may be higher, the launch pad is also a lot higher.
You’d think after 10 years they could claim the property through adverse possession and clear up any “cloud” over the ownership.
I'd welcome an extension that would mark links to websites that block EU web users. It's quite annoying to click links only to be told "fuck off".

Anyway it's not so simple, as links are not what they used to be anymore either on many websites. All those shorteners and opaque tracking redirects... bleh.
You're lacking in creativity.

It shouldn't be too hard to put a face to the victims: take a look around you. This kind of disparate fraud impacts all of the non-beneficiaries. That includes me, you, your aunt and uncle, etc. etc.
The US system is definitely more clever than the Chinese or Russian imperial systems. I mean, some people even believed the Ukrainian coup wasn't done by the US.

There's this great documentary called "Germany after the war" which bears attention to people who wish to understand how the world works. West Germany ... pretty much as overt a satrapy as East Germany was.

Basically, China is the jailhouse thug that enslaves you for a carton of smokes you borrowed. The US is the Hollywood producer who achieves the same ends through more subtle means.
The people consented, and benefited from, that state of affairs. In a democracy, that means the people can answer for the actions of their leaders. Although I concede reality is far from being as simple as this, to some extent at least we must hold the electorate of the US responsible for the actions of the government of the US, no?
Hi everyone! I went through SS last year, and I was going to email them suggesting this exact solution.

Know that trying to decide 1000 out of 15000 startups is incredibly challenging, especially given the fact that the application asks for very little data. So don’t ever think you weren’t meant for this, because it is a school program and everyone has the potential to dominate. This isn’t a zero sum game.

As for startup school, there are two critical things: being accountable and having a support network. Everyone will get those things which is great. I’m not trivializing the role advisors play, but YC noted that everyone will get access to advisors in the forums. Some startups will find them a useful resource for specific problems, but you don’t necessarily need them every single week; indeed some startups waived their five minutes some weeks.

Congratulations! Now let’s get to work! :D
People who do this stuff for money, do you like it? What was your background going into it?

I've been playing with toy projects for making compilers and interprets and it's so cool! But maybe that's just the honeymoon period.
Yes! All the videos and content from the course will eventually become public for everyone – we're trying to optimize for maximum impact.
Jay Gatsby was a criminal. That's gray. It's hinted and perhaps likely that he was a bootlegger. As that was legal before prohibition and after, it's hard for me to morally judge him a criminal what with his character never having been charged and convicted of any crime.
I initially received the rejection letter, to be followed with the letter of acceptance. Good to know that the letter of acceptance wasn't a comforting reward! The startup I've applied with is not the one same as my username.
Yes. I wasn't arguing against Flatpak, just the impression that Linux was unstable. Personally I'm very much looking forward to Flatpak or Snap taking off... I run Debian stable on my main system and there are always a few packages I have to personally backport.
Chocolatey is in the same space as the AUR (Arch User Repositories) in my opinion. It can be a hit or miss, but usually a hit. The support is fantastic when there's a bunch of users consuming the project as many users will contribute fixes to the package (e.g. packages for devs like node, cURL, git, etc). On the other hand, less popular packages will occasionally suffer from bitrot, though that all depends on the maintainer and whether or not the package has been configured to update automatically upon new releases.

See also https://chocolatey.org/docs/package-triage-process#package-i...
My mom browses Reddit now. Luckily I made her use adblock.

The CEO actively instigates political campaigns and stirs up drama on Reddit just like every news site does. I hate politics; I don't work for free.

Besides, I learn more from one comment here than thousands on Reddit. Most of it is memes and meta-jokes, there's little information anymore. It's the antithesis of efficiency, times change.
How can I get started early in helping with this data?

Serious question. Is there anything I can start doing/capturing that would help?
I would have to agree with this. I don't know what state of the art Jenkins is in now, but our company does infrastructure as code. I don't think Jenkin's would pass muster. I think we would see the UI as a major liability as time goes on. If we ever needed to migrate off the instance of Jenkins or a plugin is no longer supported, or a million other things, Jenkins is a rather large deployment for running scheduled tasks. There would be too many specialized things installed or hand manipulated for us. We already had major issues with another company basically hiding a lot of packed crap all over the place, so infrastructure as code has helped a lot.

We ended up writing 114 line typescript job scheduler that uses Mongodb as a store. Mongodb provides the atomicity of scheduling (find and modify). Beyond that our UI is Robo 3T. The job collection has 4 simple states.

Any process can write a job document with the earliest time the document can run. It is also scaled with the rest of our application: more instances, more jobs that can run simultaneously.

But... I can see in shops that don't have this complexity yet, Jenkins might be just fine.

Edit to add: We decided against using another data source like a Queue which is something we would have used a long time ago, but we're already at an infrastructure complexity point where it would not be worth it - we already have Elasticsearch, MongoDB and Mysql so adding a AWS queue or rabbit would be out of the question at this point unless it provided a massive functionality we would need for something else.
Fresh college graduates have not paid taxes yet. Every legitimately employed worker pays taxes regardless of citizenship.
can we also increase the 100 slots for the 10k grant, to 400 slots?

because it used to be 4000 startups and now it's 15000!
It goes on

> In the spirit of the original Lisp DEFSYSTEM, it compiles and loads software...

ASDF stands for Another System Definition Facility.
Ask HN: Would all selected Startup School startups get advisor?
Or, is it only for startups (around 4000) who got into "Advisory Track"?
Mainly we just didn't build the course's functionality or navigation with that volume of users in mind. We also want to make sure we provide a great experience to everyone, whether their group has an advisor or not. We're going to be working very hard over the next week making sure we're able to do that for everyone.
> I think it's hard being at the top and maintaining global order. You get blamed for everything and you get credit for nothing.

Being at the top (say, a superpower in today's world) means you enjoy at least an order of magnitude advantage over any other country in the majority of interactions you might have with them.

If you think of maintaining global order as helping to maintain that lead, then not getting credit for anything really doesn't factor into any of the decision-making calculus.
The one comment in the story about a couple making a combined $1M per year not being able to afford a house seems a bit off. At ~$83K per month pre tax I think you can sort the $10K per month mortgage for a $2M house.
Great response, cheers!
This would be great for the hiring thread. It's not great here; the rule is, YC companies get to post job ads here, and everybody else shares the monthly hiring thread.

The site isn't a democracy but I'll "vote" anyways: no exceptions for the super well-known teams. Slum it in the hiring thread with the rest of us, Google. :)
As someone who was critical at first of the way the situation was handled, I have to say that YC has been exemplary in their followup.

The response from all of the YC folks in the threads was respectful and empathetic, and didn't try to make excuses or shift the blame. They just took the heat and acted with honor.

I think we've just learned our first lesson from Startup School: how to handle a bad situation with grace, and recover well.
Where could reddit's userbase go? The only other site like it that anyone has heard of is Voat, and reddit's userbase would never go there.
You're trying to encode all objects in the universe into 20 bits. It's fun, and oddly doable. Try it and see:
http://www.20q.net/
Do these people who you talk with know the specs?

Do they know if tensor cores in the these processors are just good for interference or are they similar to the more pricey models (floating point precision)?
Is there anyone else here for whom cannabis does zilch? I have tried smoking pot on two different occasions and it did not have any effect on me aside from disgusting smell. To answer usual questions: it was real pot - everyone else was high as a kite, and I followed the advice on proper inhaling technique.

Similar things with opioids. I have been prescribed percocet and hydromorphone for strong (but non-chronic) pain. Pills took away the pain, but I never got a sense of high or euphoria that would make me want to take them again.

Alcohol works just fine though.
Lots of people.

The hype around "ti" is unreal. Now they're changing it to "RTX" and "ti". /shock /awe /s

To me, it's pretty clear NVIDIA is cashing out.

Have you not noticed the market slaps the word gaming on commodity hardware along with a bunch of christmas lights and people happily pay a premium for it.

Gamers aren't the brightest bunch and a $1000 is the right price point when people are gladly dropping that on a mobile phone now.

Sure compared to a few years ago I'd agree with you, this market? this hype? No.
Nice job James Bond-ing the solution. Totally the right call.
Experienced something similar in Phi Phi last year. I was snorkeling in an emerald green lagoon, when a pile of plastic garbage floated into me :(
We're definitely experimenting with different ways of opening YC's benefits up to a larger group of companies. Startup School is one initiative of many that we're trying.
pseudo science comes to Minecraft.

.. Golf Clap
There’s another obvious pattern if you look at enough profiles
They basically built sidekiq enterprise. Way to go.
Cornell University did a similar thing one year, needless to say, they did not resolve it the same way.
Thank you so much! I was feeling terrible earlier today and your comment really helped.
I live in a town that's a haven for hiding illicit funds in luxury homes (cryptocurrency fraud). There is a vacancy rate of about 5% - housing costs are up greater than 5% as the vacant homes' impact has a compounding effect.

I bring this up because it highlights an underlying trend shared between the article and my anecdote: fraud conducted in supply/demand markets hurts buyers and generally legal participants.

Even if your deal is 100% legal and proper, the supply/demand dynamics have been altered by those committing the fraud and you're getting screwed.
As an independent, I'm given two choices every election to pick from. I like neither and hold my nose as I vote for the lesser evil.

Do you feel I should be held responsible for the actions of Trump given:

A) I didn't vote for him.

B) I didn't really want to vote for Clinton, but I did.

C) I didn't have a third option with a realistic chance of winning the presidency.

D) The "lesser evil" voting strategy has been my life since I turned 18 and I can't really stand either party.

If you answered "No", you just admitted there is no true majority in the US since this is how a third of the electorate votes.
This is such a cool idea! Does it scrape reddit, or use the API?
Some people are shady af. Author should come here and explain.
There’s a huge difference between saying “we will have something in the future” (duh) and saying “we have absolutely nothing for the next year and a half.”

The latter gives your competitor the freedom to ask any price the market will accept without having to worry about a competitor undercutting this price in some near future.
I'd suspect that there are some pockets within YCs funding resources that will open up to this experiment.

It would be foolish for the tech industry as a whole to not take significant raised eyebrows at what can come out of this.

Surely there will be some "holy crap we couldnt have predicted this to happen" moment in store for the world to see now...
eg. 40% of VCs went to Harvard or Stanford, so therefore if you want to be a VC or know VCs, you should optimize for going to Harvard or Stanford.

/s - because much of the data you'd have on such early stage co's is identity-based, and therefor chock full of bias.
Yep – having a community of peers available to hold you accountable for your progress at regular intervals is huge. And we're going to be working overtime to provide a great Startup School experience for all the participants!
Y-not Combinator?