skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to agree that this was done too recently. The one linked above is still active (meaning you can still comment on it).

This is an easy way to get a lot of karma points and shouldn't be exploited. Just my .02...
When launching a new version of our website earlier this year we ran the numbers for the previous six months and found that 10% of our sales were not only IE, but IE 6. We're a small manufacturer that sells direct to customers and that 10% more than covered the extra time developing and testing for IE6. There was nothing sexy about the task, but none of use were willing to walk away from 10% of our sales.
I think this is the opposite of how I prefer things. I much prefer higher-content, lower-iteration-speed email. Someone sends me 3-5 paragraphs that clearly and thoroughly explains an idea, and I respond within a few days with a response that I've had some time to think about (bonus: this exchange is now preliminary documentation). Trading 5-sentence emails is way too much iteration overhead imo. If I need that kind of communication, I'll get on IM or meet in person.
If anything, the valuation of a YC session has to have risen over the past couple years, because the alumni network is so huge. Meanwhile, the YC terms don't appear to have gotten less favorable. This point pretty much has to be the opposite of true.

(NB: and I'm a YC skeptic).
Let me repeat: "If we could reduce dropout rates to 0%, it would be worth $22.9k/student (again, over 12 years)."

Suppose a student costs $8k/year. If spend 3x more to reduce dropout rates to 0%, and we achieve the hypothesized increase in income, we are wasting $170k per student (i.e., we are spending an extra $192k to avoid a $22k loss).
EDIT: An HNer says without evidence that my coworkers suck and gets upvoted; I come to their defense and get downvoted? What strange world is this in which baseless accusations are encouraged?

> Just cause your coworkers sucked doesn't invalidate the point.

My coworkers don't suck. In fact, I've yet to meet a technical person here that I can confidently say I'm smarter than.

> I challenge anyone to write good code in a new language after 2 weeks of learning it.

I've taken your challenge and passed. Are you calling me a liar?

> Also, if you claim to know the semantics but not the library of a language, you probably don't actually know the semantics. Corner cases matter.

Libraries are molded by semantics, and not vice versa. It's certainly necessary to know the libraries in order to be proficient in a language, but it's not at all necessary to know the libraries in order to know its semantics well.
Mozilla Open Web App prototype
Beautiful Bedroom Interior & Ideas, Designs Bedroom Wallpapers, Photos,
The bedroom is the space that we spend the most time in. Like it or not, we need to sleep to be able to function. So why not make it your personal haven with the use of interior decorating. The bedrooms are the most important space in our homes and should be a place to rest, relax, and refresh. Bedrooms are the primary place of relaxation, where we all retire to take a good sleep and refresh. Some bedroom color ideas show how amazingly different a room can look with a fresh coat of paint in a modern or trendy color. It can help if you have an interesting base from which to sprout your unique bedroom set ideas as well. Designing your bedroom without the help of a bedroom set can be daunting. View the largest selection of traditional bedroom wallpapers and free bedroom designs, free bedroom Wallpapers, Pictures and Photo Gallery And olso find oriental bedroom Wallpapers.
Python is now Python 3
Startups are what the founders make of them. YC is just a stepping stone.
I'm 100% in agreement. When I wrote that article, I meant "collective code ownership". Sorry for the confusion.
That's a ridiculous overgeneralization. You need metrics for your own site, you need to know the expectations of your users, you need to judge how much time and effort supporting IE will take for your app, etc.
If you want to do it, you haven't thought it through.
Maybe you should actually try the app before you judge it. There are better and there are worse tools to work with, believe it or not.

Besides Burroughs there are literally hundreds of people that tried it and love it emphatically:

http://twitter.com/#!/iA/favorites

They're not all idiots.
Right, GitHub has it, but Git doesn't, so companies that can't host their code off-site (for legal or other reasons) won't have this feature.
> We can't really justify much effort (it's usually large, too) to accommodate 2% of users.

I totally understand and agree with this sentiment. I do find it rather ironic, however, that developers today are using the same arguments for ignoring IE that were used for ignoring Firefox users 5+ years ago. Firefox users made a huge fuss about sites that were IE-only, and now many of those same users are returning the favor.
I agree with the main point here. I'd like Twitter more (and find it more usable) if all the context/meta information (links, hashtags, references to other users--@replies, etc) were separated from the content itself. 140 characters is not a lot and they are frequently wasted on giving context instead of original thought/message content.
Minecraft forum and wiki have 60m page views a month, 13% are Internet Explorer: http://i.imgur.com/m1WVO.jpg

I figured this might be interesting for some of you, although we're less technology...
I can't track it down right now, but there were allusions made on HN awhile ago about at least one person who wasn't thrilled with the program. I'm pretty sure there aren't no bad experiences.

That said, I've gotten to talk to a lot of people who have done YC now, and everyone I've talked to --- against pointed questions from me! --- has been thrilled with it.
Why Do We Sear Meat?
Which brings up a good point: Where are the Javascript IDEs?
Want to write for Android? Good luck. Ask Tweetdeck how many versions they had to develop to get out on as many android versions as possible.

Yes, why don't you ask them: http://twitter.com/iaindodsworth/status/27813709366
If they didn't sign because they thought they would win and didn't want to share the prize then it's a lesson in humility!
To work, I think the only option is H1-B (unless there is a trade-agreement like NAFTA for Canadians). But I think a Bachelor's degree is required. Do a quick check with an immigration web site. Good luck.
"I have a few websites that automatically make new posts."

Making a bunch of autogenerated sites has its risks. For example, if you were just taking a bunch of MP3 names or Hot Trends queries and then scraping twitter for mentions of those phrases and slapping that all up on a website with scripts, that tends to cruft up our index with autogenerated content that users complain about and that violates our quality guidelines. Likewise, if all you were doing was scraping Twitter for phrases like sad or heartbroken or heartless and throwing that scraped Twitter content up on a webpage with a script, users would also complain about that autogenerated content and it would violate our guidelines. Would that be helpful insight?
Unapologetic Rules for Startup Success: Grumby Author Andy Kessler
Not really. As much as I love vim and Visual Studio, I use them because there's nothing better.

I'd love something better (maybe someday I'll care so much that I'll sit down and write it myself).
Well, when you say link farm you can be talking about ones used for either positive or negative purposes. Link farms used to improve a sites results are always setup in a pyramid format so that any penalties that occur from the practice are not passed on to the "important" sites.

http://seoblackhat.com/2009/07/10/link-pyramids/

If you check the backlinks of many mainstream sites that compete for common keywords (anything pharmaceutical or related to gambling for example) you will see this sort of thing setup. However, as this is still a tricky practice, most sites will make sure that they are never getting more than about 1/5 of their incoming links from their pyramids.
"I don't own an iPad" — but you know better than those who have used it for hours and hours (http://twitter.com/#!/iA/favorites)...
It's very slow for me. And when I hit the keyboard buttons my browser brings up the search page prompt.

(I'm on Firefox, Ubuntu)
I used it for years and finally switched away in disgust at the performance. NetBeans is very similar but much faster.

(But still terrible, in lots of ways. I've yet to meet an IDE I didn't hate)
Thought: We hear about retired politicians, officials, and law enforcement officers speaking out against the war on drugs (and particularly marijuana) all the time.

How about someone growing the courage to talk about this when they're actually still in government? That might be newsworthy.
Internet to Surpass 2 Billion Users This Year
Way to succumb to confirmation bias (EDIT: I actually meant outcome bias, thanks for the correction), article. If they won, they'd lose 600k (I'm not sure where the other 200k went, for a total of 2.5m). If they lost, they'd win 400k.

They would benefit from this only if they had less than a 40% chance to win, which, from the looks of it, they didn't. From their view, it must have looked like the other teams tried to get them (who were almost certainly going to win) to hand out some of their cash to them.

It was a rational decision, and they did make the right choice given the information available at the time. They could have been charitable, but that's not mandatory.
1Password. Use Dropbox to distribute.

This has provided much more incentive to use different passwords for different services.

I would go a step further and start using different email addresses for each site too.

1) You can track where spam comes from
2) It helps combat (somewhat) the email matching/tracking across multiple services.
Now they just need to miniaturize it 10^9-fold and we'll have our molecular nanotech.
I don't think you can count 'rejected by YC' as a 'negative experience'. It's pretty much the definition of 'non-experience'. It's like saying that the department store experience was bad because they wouldn't sell you a lawnmower at half price when you asked them to.
> simply because it turns the teacher's day into a drudgery.

Those words were put into my mouth by yummyfajitas. My complaint with DI is that it focuses on repetition and memorization rather than comprehension. It's great that a child can see a word on a test and recognize it then bubble in the correct answer because then we have "achievement." It's result though is meaningless if the child doesn't know what the word means.
I don't own an iPad, but even thinking about the angle, that I'd have to look at it from while it rests on my lap, hurts my neck.

The iPad's form factor is exactly the same as reading a book or writing on a tablet of paper, two activities that have been going on for centuries. Not that reading and writing are the most ergonomically correct activities, either... but the notion that the iPad is contributing to a new form of neck pain is a bit ridiculous.
If the front page story yesterday is anything to by, wait a couple more hours.
This is the comment I left in that post:

--

Why? We geeks gave twitter it's success. We stayed faithful to them even when better alternatives (pownce, jaiku, plurk?) appeared. We endured the fail whales. We forgave the lack of features and we built apps and invent smart hacks to compensate for it.

Now you are suggesting that Twitter should kick us out so the Justin Bieber's fan doesn't get annoyed?. Screw them! They'll fly to the next cool thing in a year or two anyway.

We'll stay if they treat us with respect.
OOP is a concept. How it gets implemented changes to concept. For example, some OOP systems using message passing, others do not. Some have single inheritance, some multiple, some use traits, some mixins. Some are class based, others like self are prototype based.
The gap between high school grads and college grads without advanced degrees is ~$22k. What percentage of students that make it through high school successfully will then go on to college? It isn't 0%.

This also assumes that the educational buckets are "drop out, high school, college, and advanced degree". What do you think happens if we substitute "college" with "trade school"? What percentage of students will learn a formal trade if they complete high school that wouldn't if they had to get a GED first?

You also ignore the externalities of high school drop-outs; for instance, what percentage of high school drop-outs end up in prison? Note also that juvenile prisons are spectacularly more expensive than adult prisons. Are you hoping to stipulate that the burden to society of supporting drop-outs is wash against the competitive advantages given to people who complete school?
I remember hearing a quote from a professional football coach after one of his players died during practice in part because of the extreme heat and intense regiment that day: "You have to know the difference between pain and injury".

Sometimes your body wants to stop just because it's hard, but your mental faculty recognizes that it's ultimately best if you can resist. Other times, it really needs to stop.
I'm really not surprised that you missed the context all together.
Use unique IP addresses for sharded asset hosts
Agreed. For high traffic communication as this link implies, email is obviously not very efficient, unless you favor that much work. In person meet-ups, IMs or IRC chat for your company, are all better ideas if your time is more valuable in other work environment aspects.
I don't think YCs goal is really the big exit on their companies, but helping more companies get to the next stage of VC and to this end they seem to be quite successful.
Ask HN: Please review my Telephony API (maziesoftware.com/api)
This is my first attempt at creating an API and would appreciate any feedback. Thanks!

http://www.maziesoftware.com/api/
It's not like a one way trip is unprecedented in human history. Many of the Europeans coming to North America did it one way to conditions that were very much more primitive than the old world.
As a concrete case to discuss, what about something like http://poeet.com/

I made this over a weekend. And the people whose poetry is being captured love it. But it is auto-generated in the sense you're talking about.

It actually went down for a bit and I got a bunch of complaints, enough that I got it back up relatively quickly.
I'm sure there are hundreds, but I really want to know how many are serious and what their motivations are.

I applied this cycle because I need to be somewhere where big ideas + execution are considered the norm rather than where I am now, where web apps seem like a thing to put on your resume to get work at a bland company writing Crystal Reports on business development ROI.
Sure, but that's a big if with no corroborating evidence.
I did admission at a liberal arts college, and IB didn't even impress us. It certainly wouldn't impress me in trying to hire someone. I want someone with enough sense to know that high school doesn't belong on the C.V.
Thinking Clearly About Application Latency, Yield, and Capacity Planning
I don't debate library usage (reuse!), but I teach mostly theory, with code snippets to present algorithms concisely.

There are many tools to solve a problem, and I want to educate on a different layer. For instance, in sorting alone there are many sorting algorithms, I don't expect someone to interrupt me with "just use quicksort!" when I'm teaching bubblesort. There are lessons to learn in both, but it's a bit presumptuous (or at least, there are less smug ways) to assume ignorance, and not intention.
You can buy unlocked phones in the states, as well, but they obviously bring a much higher up-front cost. It doesn't change the fact that manufacturers want their phones to be subsidized by the carriers in the US. They're not going to build a separate "more open" version for the rest of the world because it's simply not worth it.
And then there is that black thing that puts it at an angle...
>I've taken your challenge and passed. Are you calling me a liar?

I'm calling you not particularly self-aware. After a year of coding in that language, the code you wrote after 2 weeks will likely look like crap to you. Unless that language is so domain specific that there's no room for design or so derivative that you can apply another language's style 100%, you almost definitely still have more to learn after 2 weeks.

RE: Semantics, that's all true, but if you don't have enough experience in the language to even say you kinda know the library, you probably don't actually grok the semantics. For example, Java, can you tell me the difference between volatile and synchronized as it regards the memory model without looking it up? What's a happens-before relationship and how is it relevant to those keywords? What's the transient modifier do? Transient's pretty irrelevant these days but if you can't answer the first 2 questions without going to google, you don't know the semantics of Java.

As I've gotten more experience, my estimation of my own knowledge has consistently gone down. I think it's a good approach.
I have been using drugs when I was young as well as being a distance runner and, well, runner's high is very similar to artificial intoxication. In fact, nothing I've ever tried has given me the same level of intoxication and euphoria as a run over 70 minutes long. There are studies that show similarities between a runner's high and opioid intoxication but I never tried opioids so I can't tell anything about it from experience.

The problem was that I quickly became addicted to running, I would feel extreme depression if I didn't run in the morning and I would often go for a second run as I was craving the pleasure. During my two years of distance running I fantasized about becoming a social outcast who does nothing but runs. Which is what I was, actually. I didn't have many activities aside from running.. I was eventually kicked out of the job I had because I had to go for a team workout in the middle of the day, which screwed up my job performance. Friday nights, Saturday nights, and Sunday nights were spent pounding the pavement.

And I wasn't skinny either, 40-50mpw with workouts sky-rocketed my appetite so I would go on a "Runner's diet": eating everything that was edible. I have lost a lot of weight since I stopped running :)

This might be a controversial view but I do think that running can lead to addiction and even though it's more socially acceptable (not to mention cheaper) than, say, heroin, like any addiction it has its downsides.
I think it depends on definition of 'geek'.

I doubt many hackers use twitter. It's for self promotion mainly, or consuming that promotion (Being a fan). Something I don't think most hackers are interested in.
They get the population median income. Without having to have acquired any skills before joining, all training and living costs are paid for after enlistement. Base pay is still far higher than minimum wage work. I'd say the problem in this specific context is undeniably CHP salaries being artificially super inflated above the national median income in a market inefficient manner that does not reflect supply of people capable of performing the work.
I'm thinking of making a business to deploy ubiquitous services with the help of collaborative wiki-tagging products. Or maybe generate Facebook-driven architectures using leading-edge ROI. Or maybe deploy frictionless services accurately via venture-backed cloud-funded models.

Do you think YC will like these ideas? ;)
If you got rejected you never were in a position to make any negative experience claims because you have no experience.
"Generation X" doesn't tell me a whole lot about when you grew up as it appears to encompass a range of 20 years of births (1961-1981 according to WP). In the US (and I'll focus on the US because I think that's where the reverse application guy is from), the unemployment rate reached a peak of 10.8% toward the end of 1982, due largely to the monetary stabilization policies of Mr. Paul Adolph Volcker. In 1981 it was in the 7's and it was back down to the 7's by 1984. A bad recession, yes, but it led into an era of extended low unemployment rates (all the way down to around 5.2% in 1989) until the recession of the early 90s when it jumped back up to 7.8%. This didn't last for long, as the greatest period of extended prosperity the US has known in a long time dropped unemployment rates to the 3's, 4's, and 5's for much of the 90s. For a while there in the 80s and 90s, members of "generation X" actually came out of school with a better chance of landing a job than most graduating classes in the history of the US.

In Canada, things actually happened to be quite a bit nastier then than they are now:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/Unemployment-Rate....

Now look at the current era. I graduated college in late 2007, at almost the exact moment hiring froze in almost every industry. By 2008, you'd be lucky to get a job if you had 5 years experience, nevermind zero. By 2009, the unemployment rate had jumped up to 10%, a level the US had not seen since the early college graduation days of "generation X". In 2010 we've seen moderate levels of hiring, but no sustained push. Now those of us who graduated in 2007 are looking at possibly a 4th year of sluggish hiring.

So again...I maintain that young humans, in general, have less humility than they should (primarily because they don't know the difference between "good" and "bad"), but this level of humility in the application process (however you can even measure that) probably varies heavily on market conditions. If you graduated college in 1981...my condolences to you. You had it rough there for a few years. But try to keep in mind that there are lots of people out there right now who are in the exact same boat.

And with regard to "being worse off than your parents", I don't think there's a young person alive in the US who isn't at least partially bitter about the massive debts your generation and the ones that came before it have left us with, all while being bragged at by older people about how amazingly humble they are. And let's also not forget that your generation isn't "worse off" than your parents if you're counting by measure of inflation-adjusted income.

Also important to note: this kid wasn't getting responses from employers after going the humble applicant route. I had the exact same problem: people just wouldn't return my calls. So if he does have a lack of humility, it's a direct result of not having a job in a poor economy.
Driving Down The Cost Of Solar, 1366 Technologies Raises $20 Million
How would it be useful to me, if I spent my time scrutinizing and debugging the code output by the tool?

I'm sorry, but this kind of inconsiderate, care-free attitude about bugs is an obstacle to me as a developer, to the brink of being downright offensive. Assuming of course we're writing code which is more complex than Hello World.

All I want, as a programmer, is a tool which aids me in reading, writing and manipulating code, without getting in the way. A clone feature is completely useless to me; a proper IDE has (or would have, actually) a library of code that I can choose from for my purposes, or perhaps would let me choose from my own snippets I've written in the past. Simply letting me drag a function to the point(s) in the code I'd like it to be called and then placing the necessary #include directives and/or the necessary compiler/linker options, and perhaps taking care of some parameters based on default values, a conceptually simple task, seems like science fiction to vim or emacs.

It's utterly stupid. The article is right on. We're wasting our time on syntax errors.

We don't appreciate our craft.
For those of you who quit and then returned back to the work force, did you have any difficulty finding work or explaining the gap in employment to potential employers?
IPhone Spy tool available for sale in Cydia Store
I think you can assume it's not unless mentioned explicitly.