skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look at the dropout rates. In undergrad, nationally, and historically, 50+% do not complete the 4 years to obtain a bachelors degree. Of those who go on to grad school, again, 50%+ withdraw without completing their Phd/Masters.

If we as a society are contributing money and other collective resources to make higher education possible, yet more than half of the young people dropout, then it's pretty clear that most of them do not have the "abilities" to succeed at higher ed. However, it is far more likely that higher-ed itself is structured completely wrong. If the system fails most people, then most people are not failures, but rather it is the system itself that is the failure.

Granted it is highly debatable what "abilities" refer to, and what "success" entails. Both are mostly arbitrary markers which will be wildly different for everybody.

I tend to view things from a different perspective—I'm a cheerleader for the notion of the classical Liberal Arts education, and learning for the sake of becoming a Better Fucking Human Being, not for the purposes of some phony job in a phony society performing whatever phony crap those in power have commanded.

By disengaging education from mere financial concerns, my biggest problem with all of this is not that we have thousands of massively underemployed people, but that we have the social expectation that the most educated deserve to be the big shots, manage everything, do little real work, and collect most of the profit just for showing up. Sorry, in this society, you only get those entitlements by luck of birth, inheritance or marriage. Just going to fucking college and earning a piece of paper does not automatically grant it to you.

Entitlement is really what this article is about, but the author can't just come out and say it, because that would piss off his audience even more than his Bell-Curve innuendo. (Don't even get me started on why some of the most entitled people are incapable of acknowledging it, and pretend otherwise). Many academics are outraged that their so-called highest achievements don't guarantee a high status role in society outside of academia. But the truth is that the value of education and learning is insignificant if you're measuring it by economic metrics. And society at large worships wealth and fame. Just because you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Proust doesn't mean you deserve jack shit from society. Even though there is no way in hell anyone could read Proust and not be enriched and transformed as a person in incalculable ways.

This whole article and debate is really an Apples-versus-Oranges false dichotomy, and I'm not sure why I got suckered into writing this long reply. :P

tldr;
Being really smart and highly educated should have little to no correlation to your social & financial status in society.
Awww, shucks. And here I was hoping ET checked in. That would be the first extraterrestrial check-in IMO.
It sure seems to me that the Wii has revolutionized gaming as a mainstream social activity, even if it hasn't really affected "hardcore" gaming.
Yeah Erlang is great for a lot of things, including Comet.
I'm still skeptical about the whole co-founder thing.

Sure, maybe if you're building youtube or justin.tv, and you need to talk to investors or talk face-to-face to potential clients or make deals with giant media corporations gasp then you probably can't do it as a single-founder.

But, there is a large space of problems that can be solved by a single founder.

But I suppose if you're determined enough you won't be bothered too much by people telling you must have a co-founder.

So instead of looking for a co-founder, look for problems that are small enough to be solve-able by you, but hard enough that a big company can't solve it properly.
I cannot say for the legal implications, but surely, just because you don't hide something does not mean anyone can do anything from it, if only from an ethical point of view. There are many situations where you would not want everyone to know some of your actions, even though you do no actively hide them. Something as simple as what you are watching on TV, or which way your kids go to school, etc...
If you buy Snow Leopard today, has the disc been updated with all the security updates since its release? If not, that would have the same issue, that you are vulnerable for the time between you install and when you run system update for the first time.

I don't really see how Flash is special here.
A Short, Simple Introduction to Information Theory
>put your junk in my trunk would be a very sensible name here

Was that irony? Sounds like a euphemism for anal sex to me (UK).
The universe is a construct of our imagination. Individual consciousnesses are incomplete holograms of the original universe. In fact, it seems to me that interactions between humans (piecing together of the universe) are an effect, not cause of the interactions on a lower level.

[5]
I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person who gets annoyed by the many iPhone animations. I want the desired change to occur instantly, so I feel that a few hundred ms of my time is wasted whenever I see a rotate animation, app start/close animation, etc. And unlike on say Android, there doesn't seem to be a way to disable them.
Yeah, great points. Thanks for your feedback! Better general documentation is pretty high on our list right now.

To answer your immediate question: we started as a Heroku add-on, so you might take a glance at our documentation there (http://docs.heroku.com/websolr). It's targeted at Rails applications using Sunspot, so ymmv. We're working on creating and compiling similar guides for other platforms as well.

Seems like it's high time for us to do a "review my startup" post… ;)
YES. Exactly.

Though I think the draw to TC is probably more about building buzz for investors than anything else
Polling in real time always needs to be done in some compiled language. The good folks at 37 Signals ran into this when they launched their CampFire app.

For instance, consider what David Heinemeier Hansson says about Campfire, the chat software he helped developed. First written in Ruby On Rails, it soon became clear that the code that polls to see who is in the chat room needed to be as fast as possible:

"We rewrote the 100 lines of Ruby that handled the poll action in 300 lines of C. Jamis Buck did that in a couple of hours. Now each poll just does two super cheap db calls and polling is no longer a bottleneck. Campfire and a shared todo list is different because they’re not working on a shared resource. There’s no concept of locking. Or two people dragging the same item. So a 3 second delay between posting and showing up doesn’t matter. It does when you’re working on a shared resource."

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/62907

Later they tore out the C code and re-wrote it in Erlang.
AngelList in real time
Are either of these individuals particularly skilled on the marketing/monetization side?

If so I would take the one that can handle that side better.
I speak a little lojban, and I believe it has changed the way I think. My use, construction and perception of tenses has changed, and when I was reasonably fluent I found that I tended to think in lojban when doing math.

Again, impossible to verify, entirely anecdotal, and based on introspection, but it's what seemed to happen for me.
it's not called a forkbomb for nothing
I went to the same meetup, and also found it interesting how many questions about non-technical co-founders there were. I'll share my story about meeting my "technical co-founder".

I studied Engineering Mechanics for 6 and a half years, so I'm not exactly non-technical, but when I finished and was trying to start a company, it had been probably 6 years since I'd taken any serious programming (or taken a programming class), and I knew nothing about web technologies. When I originally met my now co-founder, he had an up-and-running website generating revenue that he had started building at 16, and developed entirely on his own, from scratch. (He stored all user data in a plaintext file until he learned about databases.)

When I first approached him about starting a company, he gave me the same line he still gives many others who ask him to join about being very busy with his own projects. So, I went home and started myself. I remember coming across a page on Wikipedia about "relational databases" and thinking "yes, this is what I'll need." So, I downloaded some MySQL software and put together some database architecture, then made some storyboards in PowerPoint, and came back to him a week later. He was a little impressed, but still said he didn't really have time to work on this.

So, I went home and bought a ROR tutorial book and built the Pragmatic Programmer Bookstore model, then changed some colors and page titles and went back a week later and met with the co-founder again. This time, a little more impressed, he agreed to help me put together a really basic MVP that I could use to pitch investors.

In the meantime, I had met with a local group of angel investors, and was accepted to pitch, at an "angel live-fire" session at an Entrepreneurship Summit in town. So, seeing as this thing was going to be presented to a group of potential investors, we both had a bit more motivation to work kinda hard on it.

Through this time, we became really good friends, and he finally became convinced that I'm not just some random non-technical person trying to start a company, that I'm really willing to do what it takes. So, a month later when we were accepted to a seed program and took investment, my co-founder deferred an internship at MS to the Fall in order to spend the summer on the startup with me, then turned it down completely when Fall came around and things were going really well. I've also learned a ton about development from him, and we've put together an MVP really fast that we're rolling out in a few days.

The point of this story is that if I had accepted his "no" and not tried to do it myself, he wouldn't have joined me, and if he hadn't joined me, we wouldn't have had a demo to show investors, and we probably wouldn't have a startup right now. So, "Learn to Code Yourself" doesn't mean just found a company yourself, it means that you do whatever you have to do to start a company, and if people see that you are that hell-bent on making progress every day, they'll be more likely to want to join you.
I think YC should consider removing the "describe your idea" portion of the application. I can imagine that there's some value in it for the reviewers, but I'm pretty sure its presence inevitably causes applicants to over value it (and under value the people portion). Every time a YC partner gives advice about applying, emphasis is always made about how important the team is (as opposed to the idea). The data might be signaling something here.

If there was nowhere to describe your idea in the application then it would be obvious how important the team is.
A lot of people are saying "hell no, give me a fast machine because otherwise the development environment is going to suck ass.."

Well, this is more a statement about the condition of the tools themselves. We need fast multi-core machines to do the building and developing, simply because the tools blow.

Visual Studio is a dog!

So I think the answer is not just to reduce the speed available to the programmer, but to refine the tools. Too many programmers rely, nay depend, on big fat bloated code tools that still don't really deliver much more than the end results (see recent threads about IDE suckage) .. so I say: "Yes, give your developer slower PC's to code on, but also give them more basic, more efficient tools. Fire those that rely on the heavy bloatware too much to get their jobs done, and promote those who can deliver the goods, no matter the deployment/development hardware restraints you impose.."
This does make me think that you could use the up front cost of sending the package to deter timewasters and filter for quality. If you send a courier for a box of stuff then how're you going to stop people putting excess rubbish out in your boxes and having it collected? You'll be like a high-class litter collector that saves people a trip to the skip (once).

If you get people to pay to send the box to you then you could refund that payment when any item sells? This would encourage people to send stuff that will actually sell.

The postage charge could still be made for your own collections and wouldn't have to be the full charge.
It's happened a lot in history. Surprising I know, but it has happened.
Agreed. When I heard about this, I immediately thought it was some kind of partially-baked (maybe even mostly-baked) package manager.

OSes like OS X and Windows have been missing this for a long time. I'm very curious to see how it will work out for Apple.
Y Combinator's Original Home For Sale
The 20 Most Popular Design Tools and their Users
Ever wondered which are the most popular design tools and their number of users? We did too! So we partnered with Mostash to create an exclusive infographic
And catbook.
Given some of Larry's previous viewpoints (specifically on cloud, although it seems they've done an about-face recently) I think it is easy for Oracle to see Java as just another product. They have vast armadas of user groups already associated with their products, but make no mistake, in their eyes the word has to come from on high what to do with the product. Everyone else just gets to study what they do.
The "doesn't have good library support" factor is mitigated by its "ports" - Erlang is happy to run arbitrary processes in C, Python, Lua, whatever in a bubble and just be the fault-tolerant network glue tying them together.

I seem to be fond of languages that make polarizing trade-offs but encourage multi-language programming: Lua, Prolog, Erlang, awk, etc. Use them when they're the best tool for the job, and when they aren't, they'll happily co-operate. Win win. (Requiring people to know multiple languages seems like it'd be a burden, but said languages can also be a lot smaller because they can avoid being responsible for what they're bad at. And, isn't that ultimately the point of DSLs?)
And now Flash won't be included in the system updater, so now way more people are going to be running back-level versions. Bet that will really help with the crashing and security issues.

This is exactly the reason Chrome moved to shipping with Flash included, and why Firefox now checks the flash version when it starts up. Apple is going backwards on this.
It's because they reused some code to grab the MAC addresses, which was also grabbing packets (which it shouldn't have).
tl;dr:

ABC, NBC and Hulu are all blocking access to their on-demand streamed TV services when accessed on a Google TV box.

ABC and NBC are claim the browser is unsupported (Google TV is Chrome 5 and is supported), although it's clearly them wanting to get a licensing deal from Google and putting up interference in the meantime.

At least Hulu is upfront, and says they don't want to serve Google TV without the viewer having a paid Hulu Plus account.

----

For me this is a net neutrality issue as much as anything else. Bits is bits coming into my modem and into my house. What kind of display and device I want to use to consume the mediaon is my business and not the content providers.
sure do!
Texas sends Amazon a $269M uncollected sales tax bill
How about buying a car with a standard transmission. There is a lot to learn! It actually takes both hands and both feet just to drive it. You can permanently damage the transmission by shifting carelessly. In some cases you can wear out the clutch over time merely by driving with your foot in contact with the clutch pedal. How could you guess that on your own?

Yet despite these warts standard transmissions are quite popular in most of the world, and people get around just fine in them.
Sean Parker: Spotify will finish the job that Napster started
You can pirate Steam games.

You can pirate nearly any game at the cost of loosing "official" multiplayer.This goes all the back to the first Starcraft or even earlier. But you can play on non-official (private) servers. I played pirated TF2 on a private server for a few weeks before my Orange Box arrived in the mail (yeah, old fashioned).
Instead of stacking people up in long queues behind some guy who’s connection fails miserably; Unicorn lets that one guy fail.

I believe that from what I have read and experienced that Reddit uses a similar system. Sometimes if the wireless connection I use is weak and takes too long to send the request after establishing a connection, Reddit will give me a "timeout" message rather than serving the page.
Online Dating; When to strike?
I agree. And why stop there? Let's throw politicians and activists and bureaucrats in jail too. Lobbyists, definitely. Lawyers? Definitely.

Hey, maybe we can kick the whole thing off by throwing economists in jail.

Edit: The point is, Stiglitz is saying let's penalize people for taking ill-gotten gains when things are riding high, and cashing out when things get low. This isn't just a business problem - politicians, activists, bureaucrats, lobbyists, lawyers, and yes, economists all do the same thing. No one seriously suggests clawing back or punishing a politician for making false promises or screwing up the economy, nor anything like that when an economist gets it wrong.
jobs, unless you meant Steve Jobs.
I still have my BeBox, if only because back in the day I got a hell of a lot of good things done with it (reverse engineering of strange file systems, mostly) and without question I can still kick out some fully functional, performant, code with the thing. Old computers may be slow, but there is a hell of a lot of bloat in our computer worlds these days.
Real lesson of the Gap debacle: branding & corporate identity industry's myopia
The docs themselves are fine. It's the solutions suggested in the comments that are an offense to humanity.
Y'know, I agree with you, but I think you're arguing poorly.

one antiquated notation

Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's bad.

that P/E is the only thing that matters

I hate to say "strawman", but strawman. Is it really saying that P/E is the only thing that matters? I think not, otherwise it wouldn't say things like "top line growth in many ways is far more important than earnings per share."

an idea that isn't taken seriously by anyone close to Wall Street or finance any more

Argument from (dubious) authority?

only perpetuated by "pop" finance drivel such as Fortune

Scare quotes and the use of the word "drivel"?
#friendship

Maybe you should ask, if you don't have a co-founder, why? And what would you look for in a good 1st hire/ partner?
If you're in the UK he said, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820423, you can send it now (or maybe tomorrow, it's late). Not soon enough?
#naughtiness

if you are looking for a less than kosher time a founder hacked the system. maybe you should ask for that.

i know personally would have put a more vulnerable answer up there.
> it would be hard for anyone to collect such data on the massive scale that Google did

So collecting that information is only unethical when done on a large scale?
So, these people should be using secure wireless. If I have a loudspeaker playing my phone call into the air, I wouldn't complain that someone else heard it. If I taped a giant banner with my email into the side of my house, someone might take a photo.

If Google cracked my WEP key or something, that would be notable.
>TossitAndProfit

You're going to use a mock porn site to promote your gig?
I think the move from $40 apps to $1-5 apps had a lot more to do with things. A lot easier to buy cheap stuff, and a lot less incentive to pirate.
I never got in to YC, but the pictures made me feel nostalgic. (I'd visited in the fall of 2008 and seen Bill Warner speak.)
That's exactly what I mean - not having access to Steam servers is enough of a carrot that games like TF2 aren't heavily pirated. Some of my friends and I used to pirate a lot of games in high school; someone would find a copy and we all could play. Steam games, however, everyone bought and owned legally.
The purpose of a cofounder is not to help alleviate load. It is to have someone tell you no, that your idea/implementation/justification sucks. They question your moves and make you justify them. Having a cofounder keeps you in check and keeps you from straying too far off the successful path.
Edited. Collecting Jobs would be cooler though!
Is lack of distractions or possessing some financial independence anywhere on the list of what is good for founders? By this I mean -- if there are financial or non-startup distractions, could this be detrimental? Does not having a family to take care of rank more favorably than not? Just askin.
Well said.

There's no one "perfect person" that will succeed, although the article by PG would imply otherwise (since YC only wants entrepreneurs and start-ups that will be successful...hence the application/interview questions).

The key is to use your core strengths to your advantage.
php isn't terrible in general, but it can be the wrong tool for certain use cases, this being one of them. In the same way, apache is also not the right tool for some use cases, this being one of them. your solution works well for you, so stick with it. if you're thinking of scaling up further, also consider an event-driven server architecture (nginx, node.js, etc).
I'm sure they're sending cease and desist notices to a number of galaxies all of the time. They're just waiting for the response before escalating.
There is something wrong with the slideshow widget on the property listing page:

http://eplacehomes.com/company/featured-listings/135-garden/

Whenever I click one of the arrows to move through the pictures of the property, it reloads the page.

Edit: The code shows that the embedded slideshow object is placed within an <a> link. You should probably fix that so that the widget is useable.

<a href="http://eplacehomes.com/135-garden"><br />
<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="400" height="280" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&#038;hl=en_US&#038;feat=flashalbum&#038;RGB=0xFFFFFF&#038;feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Frachaellburger%2Falbumid%2F5527745696588689281%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26authkey%3DGv1sRgCPzy6Me54de1gQE%26hl%3Den_US" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>
</a>
I do wonder whether if the whole "same rate" thing even matters or if its just bullshit that sounds good. Like why is that particular rate more calming? Because it seems like it should?
Even that Mark had two cofounders: Chris and Dustin. And they were all roommates.
Nutrition Myths Debunked
You can add new ones obviously, or if you want to edit any listing I have done for you, email me at <hnusername>@agiliq.com
This is a good example of the maxim that everything should be "as simple as possible, but no simpler" (Einstein).

Sometimes identifying where things have become too simple is difficult.