skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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To clarify, Palantir isn't a data-mining company. Palantir makes tools that streamline the process of analyzing large datasets for professional, often non-technical analysts in government and finance institutions.

Working with founders from acquired companies is not a great way to meet co-founders. First, many will have already "made it" and won't have the same drive that they once had. Second, if they do, they'll prefer to work (and socialize with) with other people who are like them -- other successful founders. Maybe they'll let you be an employee at their new startup.

Palantir is full of people who are itching to start a company, and we'll see dozens of startups by Palantir alums after Palantir exits (it's already happening; see posterous.com). The founders of these companies will have unique experience and connections in government and finance, giving them the option to target enterprise problems instead of entering the over-crowded consumer startup scene.

As far as reputation among Silicon Valley investors, having worked at Palantir will look at least as good as having worked at Facebook or Google over the next few years, especially now that Facebook and Google are already big and successful. Joining Facebook or Google today is relatively lazy; it's not as impressive to join a company that's already hugely successful as it is to join a company and contribute to making it successful. Assuming a choice between Palantir and Facebook, an entrepreneurial person with confidence in his/her ability to make a company successful will join Palantir.
What is the 25% a reference to? Obviously missing some kind of in-joke... ?

And for those of you like me who might wonder what an "accept rate" is, it's the percentage of accepted answers to questions asked by a given user on Stack Overflow — http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/08/new-question-asker-fea...
There is absolutely no money, but it also costs very little to eye-ball an ancient app, and write a spec for it for ungrads to implement.

The universities usually have all the technical know-how they need to sustain themselves, they just need to talk amongst themselves (department to department, campus to campus, or uni to uni.) If CS students were told to make software for other departments; architecture students were told to design study halls, stages and learning areas; art students were told to beautify school buildings, hold performances, educate, entertain, enlighten, etc. All the university would need is just someone to facilitate the interactions, introduce people to each other, and the rest can be done via Redmine or Basecamp.

Some of the projects are insanely interesting. In Australia, I was offered a non-pay gig to work with sensors in the field, traveling to beautiful beach areas and hacking x86 assembly. Universities can afford room and board, but not much else, sadly.
See the Quora question "Why would an engineer want to work at Palantir instead of Facebook / Google / Twitter?": http://www.quora.com/Why-would-an-engineer-want-to-work-at-P...
While reading about Pyjamas I came across a sidebar note that mentioned part of the OLPC team, and wondered "What has happened to the OLPC" - and so had a look.

It seems like they've passed the initial press honeymoon and are settling down into the business stage - "while the days of ubiquitous praise and head-spinning press about the OLPC project are long past, the organization is actually settling into a pace and place where it could make by far its biggest impact in the next few years ahead."

Now it seems like their direction has become a little more political rather than technical due to the effects of new technology on their market. An interesting case study as it is a humanitarian organisation, so does not need to keep its history / direction as shielded as a typical business - “The interesting thing about now versus five years ago—five years ago, we had to build a laptop, because there wasn’t a laptop” geared for the developing world, he says. Now, Negroponte says, it’s possible that “we don’t have to build a tablet. All we [might] have to do is threaten to build a tablet. And what’s interesting is that the key features of our tablet are ideas we want people to copy. So our IP will be as open as humanly possible.”
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TechCrunch goes one step further. Often Arrington will get the PR firm handling the press release to allow them to publish their story a solid 10 minutes before anyone else. If the embargo is set for 9pm PST, TechCrunch often shoots for 8:50 and most of the time they are allowed. As a result, they break the story and get a ton of inbound traffic.
An as-yet-untitled fantasy adventure, where I'm including every cool idea I can fit in there, just for the fun of it. There will be a world with Escher-style gravity, and another place with a fractal tree structure where long-distance journeys happen in logarithmic time, and the characters will have very best dialog I can muster. This time, I'm going to try to use foreshadowing, and avoid expo-dumping.

Good luck, everybody.
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You can make a division regex for arbitrary numbers. Turn the number into unary, then see if it matches the divisor (also in unary) repeated N times with no characters left over.

I know someone posted something like that to HN a while ago.
So you're saying that working at Palantir is a bet on either world governments or the finance industry not collapsing. Given the bailouts and the fact that Palantir is targeting governments all over the world, I'd say that's a pretty good bet.
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How does that work? Wouldn't you need to write several pages per day to finish NaNoWriMo? If we estimate 250 words per page (typical in ordinary-sized books) then you'd need to write more than six pages per day to finish on time. Do you give people very large pages? Or does the name actually mean "At least one page per day"?
Groen makes them. You can order them direct:

http://www.groenkettle.com/commercial_kettles_self_contained...

or from Atlanta Fixture company:

http://www.atlantafixture.com/ItemSummary.aspx?CategoryGuid=...

There's also Cleavland kettles:

http://www.webstaurantstore.com/third2857/products/steam-ket...

or, have an Amazon Prime account?

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
This is like telling someone 3-4 years ago to work at Google instead of Facebook. The people who joined Facebook then, before the brand carried any weight, came out way ahead.
I'm actually doing a variant I like to call NaRaRaMo (national rap rapping month) where I write, rehearse, and record (and post on youtube) a rhyme every single day in November. One so far of course.
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Sure dude!
Listing the APIs before having to sign up would have been useful though. Here's the current set:

* Buzz
* Custom Search
* Diacritize
* Feed
* Latitude
* Moderator
* Prediction
* Translate

It's nice to have a dashboard, but I'd have preferred support for the traditionally painful (quota-wise) APIs like Google Maps Geocoding and YouTube Uploads. Just knowing that you are about 5 months away from needing a Google Maps API Premier account can be quite useful.
Errm, yes, I'm sure the next border guards you meet will confirm that that's what the rules say.

Even GSR on your hands will get you grilled at Heathrow, I speak from experience there.
Important caveats:
1/ Too much exercise increases the chances of catching a cold as well as increasing the severity (there is research on this)
2/ Gyms are full of people and you touch a lot of the surfaces - so that may offset the effect (this I'm guessing)
In my last four jobs, only one company managed to get me my login and email passwords on the first day. Once, I actually quit my job before I had access to all the systems I needed (I used the accounts of my superior for a long time.)

So yes, it seems to be a hard problem.
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There are many books and all but if you want to just dive into it, here is the basic process you can build upon (this is how I design):

1) For every page of your site, list BIG 1,2,3. (Like what you want users to do, and two alternates).

2) Now design around that. Make it easier and obvious to follow your 1,2,3 (If there are more than 3 steps - you might wanna break them into more pages).

3) Remove noise and barriers that come in way of BIG 123

4) Test, test, test & Optimize

It's a very short description of how to go about it. But you gotta do it to know what I am talking about.

The aim is to design an experience around user.

Once you've practiced this at least with one project,you can dive into awesome articles at:

http://www.uxbooth.com/
http://www.uxmagazine.com/
http://www.uxmatters.com/

Just read what interests you, but before - practice the above, so you can relate to what they are talking about.
FYI, The Wall Street Journal stopped honoring embargoes last year. Your PR firm knew this.
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If you're optimizing for SEO, you want unique domains for each one. Google gives a special bonus for searches on .com/.net/.org domains. So if you get bananapeelcompost.com for your new site on that topic, you'll pick up a big SEO boost for people looking for "banana peel compost" on Google.

The downside compared to subdomains is of course the cost of the domains (shouldn't be too high if you're not a spammer), and the extra administrative cost.

Read http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/seo/ for more details on the exact topic you're looking into - he has successfully built microsites and written on the topic.
We (http://grexit.com) are an India based start-up, and just being in the valley is going to be a big boost for us. Being in the valley and with YC is going to be, well, massive.
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I was thinking the exact thing. Even watching the video it seems like they really tried to copy Google's brand... not sure if I can trust anyone that blatantly copies someone's brand.
Well, I'm 2v2 Bronze in a specific team with a friend (we ranked a few months back and haven't played much together.) On 2v2 Random, I'm also Gold.

But I do agree that ranking for larger teams is poor - for example, I'm 3v3 Platinum, and I'm definitely out of my league - I think I ranked their as a result of being lucky in terms of getting good team mates.
Thank you for your advice and the links.
I dunno bout you, but this is the first time I've listened to a police scanner[1] and followed commentary in real-time via twitter. Puts the "real" in real-time. Obviously, SF is one of the most connected places on earth inhabited by some of the most technologically sophisticated people around. That said, this is kind of a taste of how people all over the world will be able to "dial in" to major events as wherever they break. Old world media will kinda be relocated to analysis, recap, retrospective and "professional" oped.

[1]http://somafm.com/sfscanner.pls
Thanks! Those things look serious. I wonder how you clean them.
Sure man! Always happy to help in design, UI & UX :)
Imagine searching through all posts on HN for the phrase "proved my point" anywhere in the post. There is no way other than iterating through all of the millions of posts.

This is not true. Rather, in addition to the document ID, the inverted index stores the position information for each term occurrence, and can very quickly find any phrase of your choosing. While it's possible that this isn't always the default behaviour, all modern general purpose search engines support this.
wow, TCL...is your code based on the OpenACS, or something else?
Good point. It'll be iPhone/iPod Touch apps for now, but definitely want to expand if it grows at all.
Is it just me, or there a new one of these threads once or twice a day now?

From a couple of emails I recently sent out:

"I'd suggest starting out with 'The Non-Designer's Design Book,' which explains the basics of putting elements on a page or screen together in a tasteful way; 'The Humane Interface,' which explains testing and measuring for efficiency and why dialog boxes are often bad and so on and so forth; and 'Designing for Interaction,' which is often cited as a good overview of the practice of interaction design, and I just flipped through it and it seems to be, although I haven't read it."

"If no-one [on your team] is a designer and you don't want to hire one, help everyone become a designer. Buy these books, a copy each for everyone, and make everyone read them and discuss them with each other, cover to cover, no exceptions, everyone doing all the exercises in them."

"After everyone has dog-eared copies of those three books, have everyone pick a different book from this list and buy it and read it and present it to everyone else, and then repeat that until all the books have been gone through: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=114778998560307&to...
Official announcement: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/11/introducing-google-ap...
Thats cool. Sounds like 750words. But, OhLife seems to be something that one might actually follow through. http://ohlife.com/b
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I'm sure Blizzard will Nerf this. Early reapers, well executed, had about a 70% success rate. This has a 80% success rate at least, and is much harder to counter.
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What am I writing? This link to a friend's website:
http://101reasonstostopwriting.com

Unfortunately he abandoned it after only 17 reasons. Perhaps he convinced himself?
I said smoke not smoking. I think you misunderstood.
The first thing that stuck out to me like a sore thumb was the string-concatenation-in-a-loop. Though the author was aware of its consequences he only addressed it late in the article, optimizing relatively trivial stuff like variable lookups first. And then he did so in a rather strange way, instead of adding string fragments to a list and then join()ing them.

Not sure how fast that loop would be in Python compared to the implied loop&join but I sure would have liked to see them compared.
Not in all cases. Universities like Cambridge don't need PR.
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Erm.... Is an Erlang day for Python developing? Just curious because I notice similar Python topics on the front page. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with them. They just seem like odd topics to come up all at the same time.
Starcraft isn't about clicking fast, it's about doing a lot of things at the same time. As you think about the game better you'll do more things faster, not the other way around.
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Not sure why anyone would shamelessly downvote me. I wasn't lying. This sort of thing happens every night.

Just look at Brightcove 5's launch that happened a few hours ago (9pm PST). TC posted their story at 8:50pm, everyone else followed at 9pm PST.
Some companies do, especially if the referrer has an account for the service. This might be hard for one-off sales, but discount codes for additional or add on software could be an option.
That "community" goes by the name of The NSA.
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I hope that one day soon our compilers will be smart enough to optimize simple things like this automatically, so we can focus more on writing for clarity. This seems like exactly the kind of thing a next-gen compiler should be able to optimize.
startups are founded in cycles so I guess you can't expect your program size to be constant.

we are definitely on the upswing part of the cycle atm
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Exactly right, working at Palantir is betting on the status quo.
That chart has been a life saver for me a couple times.
You may find this is the case with a lot of topics commonly considered 'black magic' - the real determinant IMO is whether you enjoy work that requires a high attention to detail! :)
Going from 200/month to 20,000/month is not terribly unrealistic, _and_ "a few orders of magnitude" more.
In software? What data would it run on? Software doesn't do anything without data.

You say it like our personal information is the only data in town.

Of course, any app needs data, but it can be anything.
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You guys are really sleeping at night? :) Best time to work. Otherwise don't worry, be happy about being a pirate. You will eventually meet your angel either from YC or somewhere else :)
I'm not sure it's so possible, considering the dynamic nature of Python.

Consider one of the biggest problems - dynamic lookups. Calling a function like "chr", which is looked up dynamically and found in the global scope each time, takes a lot of time. Just adding a local variable which has the same value (i.e. lchr = chr) already gives a speedup.

How can an optimizer fix this? Technically, a new lookup must be performed each time, since you never know if "chr" has been mapped to something new during the iterations.
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Much better than I had thought they might be, was hearing 7000 UUs a week bandied around before. (that said, with enough churn 7000 UUs could make 100,000+ total users since live).

that said, I wonder how many are repeat users, how many continue to use the site after their trial subscription is over.

not sure what the figures were for there advertising revenue before, but would be interesting to see whether they are making any more profit, especially since they are making now spending extra resource on online only content.
I once found myself writing a python program to calculate Poker hands. It was pretty fun to write - it generated, for any given hand you hold, every possible way the game can go forward, and generated statistics about how many times you win (against 1 opponent only, who could be holding anything.)

The program initially ran for 20 minutes on each hand. I worked a day on optimizing it, and got it down to around 1-2 minutes per hand, so I learned a few tricks to make things quicker. Lessons learned:

1. Local lookups are much faster.

2. Anything that you can somehow offload to a c-loop, makes things much faster.

3. Surprisingly, the fastest construct for building a new list was always list comprehension (e.g. [x for x in calc(l) or whatever.) This was far faster than a regular ol' for-loop, of course, but was also faster than using map's and reduce's.
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People with higher intelligence are more likely to see the world analytically as some complex (optimization?) system. People with lower intelligence will just say "invisible hand" and "free market" and write articles about how people who "get it" share certain political views.
The Mashable piece alone received more than 1,400 retweets.

How many of those 1400 retweets are just bots automatically retweeting anything coming from Mashable? The dark secret of twitter marketing is that the number of tweets can be so misleading because of the bot activity. You'll also see a ton of twitter bots when you get coverage on RWW, and I'm sure others.

And yes, I've actually watched live coverage of articles I'm interested in (e.g. covering my sites) spread and checked out most tweets that came up. It's quite easy for a human to spot a bot vs real user tweeting once you look at their twitter stream. Most are bots.
Seems kind of obvious, exercise strengthens the body and promotes general health. What next? wrapping up warm can prevent a cold? Slow news day?
love the idea, but after trying to ride a 'wide bike' before (with extra large distance between the pedals) I can tell you it's a real pain. it might be an ok position for sitting on a Harley, but not for peddling with any efficiency.

some nice features though, would love to see a prototype made.
Well they should just start reddit again, It hink that's the only community that would be willing to go along
http://github.com/shabda/nanowrimo/tree/master/outline/

I am writing it with markdown and git.
> Iridium could have pivoted

Agreed. One thing missing from the article is that the Iridium satellites only offer a paltry 2.4Kbps for data communications. In 1997 and 98 the business world was still largely on dial-up. Internet access on the road was patchy and incredibly expensive. If they'd pivoted to global data coverage at even 28-56K, I think they would have had a far more significant take up.
What? Why?

Hawala is perfectly acceptable. I use it to transfer money throughout the U.S. because it's cheaper than Western Union, and faster than bank transfer. 5 mins, $6 to send $200.
> Not sure how fast that loop would be in Python
> compared to the implied loop&join but I sure
> would have liked to see them compared.

Why don't you try it and tell us the results?
This is on the back of an TV ad campaign in the UK, so it would be interesting to see how the numbers sustain.
So now he has two accounts he wants to delete.
Just let something slip in your opening address like "we sure look favorably on startups that know how to clean pots" and problem solved
Being healthy requires the combination of a good diet, adequate clothing that suits the weather and exercise.
Firstly, I think YC addresses some of the problems he mentions (i.e., that most people might not be able to get VC money, but have valid ideas that could be made into semi-successes).

But the big problem is this: ideas aren't worthless because they require execution. Ideas are worthless because, before the execution, the idea itself is just not good. It takes executing on the idea and constantly pivoting to get to a "good idea", because when you first think of a direction, you barely understand the problem, and definitely don't understand how you're going to solve that problem.

In other words, the problem isn't a lack of access to resources - it's that your initial idea sucks, and only if you keep refining it do you get to anything usable.
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Always agreed with the first sentence of the post: "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything."

I advise 50% of people telling me about a new iPhone app idea to go and open a restaurant at the corner. You make 4-800K a year, with 10-30% margin: that's way more than what most ideas are worth - given solid execution.

However if I would have hired all these people mentioned in the article: "Management, Marketing, Sales, Legal, Accounting, Technical, Human Resources"
...instead of doing 90% of these by the 2 founders we would be already bankrupt, lol. Focus and execute, use everyday opportunities to gain momentum, be more thoughtful of resources, etc. There hasn't been one day in the past 6 months when I couldn't improve something, find a workaround, etc (by myself, without HR or a lawyer). Just in the past 1 hour I manage to spare $1500 by using someone else's network and resources almost for free.

Think of Netflix & the US Post; Google & Yahoo; Microsoft & IBM; Intel & IBM; Yahoo & Netscape; Facebook & Harvard. What is the common element in their stories? :)
Right, it's a race against time. I think once I destroy my first liver I'm going to go easy on the second one.
Jason, to be fair so did TechCrunch but you still honor embargoes often. Glass houses, ya know.
huh? Potential customer not into you? Time to sue him.
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