skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would like to see jobs opened up as well. A lot more people would check the section if there were more jobs in it. It would help the YC companies and they could still be highlighted in some way to make them stand out as "special".

(The question as written is stated with a sense of entitlement that seems distasteful to me.)
> The fact is that the startup process is able to do what big companies are simply incapable of doing.

They aren't incapable of it, they do it too. They just have different priorities. A company's goal is to grow as large as possible. They want to shut out competition.

Both of those reasons explain why they acquire start-ups -- one, to feed the beast. Two, to stop any threat to their gluttonous expansion.

Microsoft's core is still Windows, Word, and Excel. Google's is still the search they started with when they were a start-up (every big company was once a start-up), not any of the start-ups they've since acquired. The core products pay the bills; the rest is filling up the cracks.

The numbers game is of crucial importance because large companies externalize the cost of the selection process. Google will pay a little for dedicated people and a lot for a big audience to sell ads to. Everyone's just still stuck on the old paradigm of either some time-wasting interview process ("what are you interviewing for?" "A job!" "To do what?" "I don't know exactly!") or buying a start-up with a self-selected people/problem combination that already seems to work.

> Why doesn't intense determination to develop something great qualify as a methodology?

I think we're getting a little carried away here with hyperbole. There are few "great" ones, that's not a methodology, although self-deception might qualify. Steve Jobs had an intense determination to develop something great -- the Mac. Hardly anyone falls into that category. Most start-ups now are excited kids who mainly want to make some quick bucks.

And I note the Mac was created BY a gigantic company, by someone who was already rich (and a bunch of engineers on minimum salary -- hey, it's Jobs). It's WHO, not WHERE, and I note design-by-committee-with-endless-meetings has been recognized as a mistake for a long time (Apple III).

And yes, the code does matter.

> Can you spot the contradiction?

No, it's 5 am, I'm up because my neighbor was crashing around, I don't even know what I'm writing. I seem to be talking myself into agreeing with PG.
I would be nice if one of the 37Signals guys registered in YC to give us some lowdown on what's happening at their end.
And I am thoroughly fed up with people who jump to conclusions after misunderstanding something I've written, and post comments using language they'd never use talking to someone in person. (At least, language I hope they'd never use.)

This is covered in other essays, e.g. http://www.paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html
Sorry for keeping talking to myself here, but since this got saved I thought I'd post a bugfix:

http://pastebin.com/d631795cd

My original code was not really R5RS compliant: continuation objects must be called with exactly one argument, unless the receiving end is explicitly expecting otherwise. Gambit C didn't complain, but Chicken did. Now this runs on both.
Agreed. At first glance it looks like a domain-squatter site.
I still think Peter Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence" book plus a good book on Data Mining (someone suggested Frank and Witten above) might deliver more value than this.

As Henning pointed out above , there aren't enough pages to cover even a few of the topics properly. It looks like the coverage is fairly thin and lacking in depth, and is more of a "some basic AI algorithms for the hot topic of the day" type book.

I haven't seen the book yet but the table of contents makes me suspect the quality. "Support Vector Machines" for example are fairly complex beasts. The book has one section (from what I can see on the TOC) about SVMs.

Norvig's AIMA is a brilliant book precisely because it lays a solid foundation for so much of AI. And it is still a very hefty book.
I somehow doubt that this is of the same caliber.

But hey, I could be wrong.

Just a personal opinion and not to dampen anyone's enthusiasm.
Does the book go into any depth on these issues or is the coverage superficial? Is there code? Thanks in advance
what is exactly distasteful about the question? I didn't ask or entitled that YC's jobs section should be devoted for anyone, but instead provoked the subject for discussion for openinng maybe a new open category, assuming this is not about YC news anymore.

not my fault if you want to look YC friendly and pitch with anything that doesn't look like so.
I 100% agree. But there is a dark side of the force in programmers too.

Programming is fun. Bug fixing is not. Selfish programmers, however talented, don't fix bugs.

Filtering out selfish talented programmers is not easy. Yet they probably are the reason why organizations get paranoid.

An extreme solution is to make sure bugs are fixed (somehow) BEFORE new code is created ; selfish programmers won't stand the heat very long.

Fortunately test suites, automatized non regression testing, is becoming popular.
When you go into someone else's house do you say: "So, this is a house with a kitchen right? Shouldn't anyone who comes here have a glass of water?" or do you just plainly ask "Can I have a glass of water?"

It's not my problem if you're a prick, I was just pointing it out in case you cared.
Without being facetious, I'm sure he could pay someone (that is better at transcribing) to do it for less, even if he wrote a nifty app in Emacs to help with the process.
I would avoid answering cause I don't really have time for these, but I couldn't skip emphasizing your choice of your words, which really just shows your attitude on everything, including when reading a simple headline!

negative energy is bad dood! it doesn't help!

p.s.
I suppose Hacker News is a community and not the house of one individual!
I'm a fan of Michael Lewis's writing, but this product placement is just ugly:

She faxed the numbers to insurers, then walked to Au Bon Pain. Everything was suddenly more vivid and memorable. She ordered a smoked-turkey and Boursin cheese sandwich on French bread, with lettuce and tomato, and a large Diet Coke.

Is the NYT so hard-up for revenues they're asking their authors to slip these in?

I can't imagine Lewis wrote that on his own.
Recall of Microsoft Wireless Racing Wheel - TvByDemand | Forums | Microsoft
Life getting gradually noisier
I think a limiting factor for internet usage on mobile devices has been traditionally their restricted interface. The iPhone is a big improvement but there is still more to come.

A friend of mine at a TI is working on pico projectors for mobile devices. Devices equipped with these will allow you to project a high resolution image onto a wall for a desktop-like browsing experience. Really cool stuff.
Make Way for Japan
The Best House in Paris
> I can't imagine Lewis wrote that on his own.

Of course he did. Ever since Ian Fleming, writers have been inserting brand names to add a sort of edgy verisimilitude.
Calling someone a prick probably counts as an ad hominem...
The Internet Is As Dead And Boring As You Want It To Be
more Seo spam...
Well said. Do not ever respond to someone who calls you names. It is also ok to add "panache" to your headline. Everyone else does it, but I would specify in the subject section what I really mean. We do not want to hurt anyone feelings, and historically people have gotten more by asking rather than forcing someone to give it to them.
The NY Times on the iPhone hack
And using the phrase 'ad hominem' probably counts as making people heads hurt...
========================================

"An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the person", "argument against the man") consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim. It is most commonly used to refer specifically to the ad hominem abusive, or argumentum ad personam, which consists of criticizing or personally attacking an argument's proponent in an attempt to discredit that argument."
Is The Internet Dead And Boring?
Iverson's Turing Award Lecture: Notation as a tool of thought
I kind of agree with Mark Cuban. Sure, there are a bunch of new services on the web, but anyone could predict this linear growth in innovation. The thing is, we are not seeing the exponential growth in mindshare and adoption that we saw in the 90's. We are still using the same or similar standards that we used in the 90's as well.
When the internet started to gain interest, it was mind blowing. It simply isn't anymore. More bandwidth could allow us to deliver deeper innovations. Imagine if Gigabit connections were the norm. We could bring massively parallel grid computing to consumers. Just imagine encoding H.264 in seconds instead of hours. Right now we are in a stalemate with the telcos.
I don't see how I have misunderstood you, eg:

"The reason Sequoia is such a good deal is that the percentage of the company they take is artificially low. They don't even try to get market price for their investment; they limit their holdings to leave the founders enough stock to feel the company is still theirs."

If Sequoia took ordinary stock for their money that argument would have some legs. But otherwise, it is self-serving (for the VCs). Once you take their money at valuation X, liquidation preferences and control clauses guarantee that you're not getting anything until the company is worth at least 10X. It doesn't matter whether the founders still have 95%, they've given up control over the outcome that matters to them.

Angels are a different story. I have angel investors myself, carefully chosen, and with a term sheet that is much fairer than anything you'll get from VCs (they can't screw me; I can't screw them).

I used to have some deference for VCs, but after hearing their self-serving arguments and witnessing their arrogance for years, I don't waste my time (being profitable also helps).

Don't get me wrong, we could grow faster with VC money, and I'd do it on the right terms. But these days, if a VC contacts me I always ask them within the first 2 minutes whether they'd invest on similar terms to the existing angels. The answer is always "no". They never have a good response to the obvious question: "how do your terms make sense for a founder?".

As for language, I apologise. I have not used the expression "self-serving tripe" in person with a VC, but I've been close. They need to hear it sometimes.
I hate how the Internet is US-centric. There are many other countries that are more progressive and have insanely fast Internet connection speeds such as Sweden, Japan, Korea, etc. It's only in the US (and Canada) that the telcos are allowed to be complete assholes towards customers.
I thought it was good. Modern architecture is very close to hacking in spirit.
What Do People Want?
I want to build something people want. What do you want?
Shuttleworth has shot this rumor down as well if it needed repeating:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/20
Given how much noise Twitter generates in the Valley ecosystem, I was surprised to find out it only has something like 300-400K users (I can't find a reference right now, please correct me if I'm wrong - Compete seems to support that number though).

To me Twitter is the perfect example of the echo chamber.
The fact that its getting so much debate means at least that there is some truth.
Here is a good essay on determining what is a good idea for a startup. Might give some guidance on what you should build:

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
> But even more importantly, the web is primarily a communications platform, not a broadcasting or publishing platform, those are secondary uses.

Except he's wrong on this. File sharing has always been an extremely popular use for the web. Most of the social networking platforms allow you to publish to a large audience of people you don't really know. Facebook does this to a lesser extent, but that's why it's not #1.
Let's get real. Unless you're going for the asian markets, those other countries really don't matter.
What you misunderstood was that this article was simply about the math of trading equity, not higher level issues like one's personal goals, which I talk about elsewhere.

Incidentally, your specific claim that if you take VC money "you're not getting anything until the company is worth at least 10X" is false. Many VCs, including Sequoia, will let founders sell some of their stock on the way up for diversification. Such deals are usually kept quiet, but they're quite common.
Your statements are wrong because your head hurts.

:)
Why don't they matter?
Trading equity only makes sense in terms of my goals. The founders own 90% of this company. We're not trading equity unless the math makes sense. If your math says it makes sense when it doesn't, your math is wrong (specifically, money has nonlinear utility for founders, but linear utility for VCs, or more specifically, for limited VC partners).

"Many VCs, including Sequoia, will let founders sell some of their stock on the way up"

How very generous of them. They may deign to "let" you sell some of your stock. Come hither dumb hacker, trade that unencumbered stock for paper you don't even have the right to sell. And just to prove how generous we are, we'll let you keep 70% of the paper no one is allowed to sell (of course, we reserve the right to do whatever we please with our 30%).

Be in no doubt that they 0wn your ass, regardless of the percentage of your company they have. Hence why discussion of equity percentages makes no sense unless we're comparing the same class of stock.
First off, I really want to visit this house, mainly to see what sound like very original and clever ways to modulate the space with movable elements. Also, the use of these movable partitions to change the use of the space from business to private sounds intriguing. For architects (and for users who may not realize how it works), differentiating between private and public use of space has always been a fascinating aspect of both life and the architecture that contains it.

As much as I love the use of glass block, the main space looks to have no human scale at all - no attempt to enable the visitor to understand clearly the size of their environment with respect to themselves. The salon looks like a big spatial box - I am not impressed with that. From the article, it sounds like the architect used the surrounding spaces to give human scale, but to understand the full effect, one has to visit it.

On the principles of preservation trumpeted in the article, I disagree. As an architect, a hundred years from now I would love to have my buildings restored to their original design, complete with non-broken and unblemished floors, polished elements that were intended for polish, painted elements intended for paint. The point of architecture as an art form is not to show how old it is, but to immerse the visitor in a world that is both real and idealized.
Facebook to open goldmine of data to advertisers (Huge privacy implications)
How Tridge reverse engineered BitKeeper
Microsoft Office XML Formats? Defective by design
Wondrous oddities: R's function-call semantics
Birthmarking: How to detect and prove GPL violations in Java propietary code
Hack: Revealing Reddit Score for Just Posted Links with FireFox and GreaseMonkey
What about Sun embracing JavaScript?
I'll leave the story for pg to tell, should he ever opt to do so.

I will say that it involved clever abuse of search engines to generate traffic for obscure fetishes (all of them). It might not work today.

Then again, now that I think of it, see http://xkcd.com/305/ for a pretty good summary of half of pg's Plan for Pr0n (the other half shall be left as an exercise for the reader).
Legos that build legos (vid)
I recommend starting by understanding what you really want, and then see if others share your desire.
"A problem with Common Lisp is that you can't make programs with it"
Getting real means they matter.
Machine Learning and The Privacy Problem
Bram Moolenaar: 7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 (vid)
http://dwell.com
Paul Graham and Walt Disney
Here's more of an opinion piece than a convention report. Needless to say, everything here is my own opinion alone and I'm not speaking for anybody else running Penguicon. I like to think that Penguicon is an incubator of Imagineers. This is a combination of artistic and literary imagination with engineering know-how, a word coined by one of my lifelong inspirations, Walt Disney:
They want things to be easy.
Trevor and Rtm and I noticed that there seemed to be fetishists for just about every fetish you could imagine, and many you'd never think of. We hypothesized that there was no possible fetish so odd that there wasn't at least one person out there who would be turned on by it. So we thought we'd randomly generate thousands of pages about different fetishes, and see how many hits they each got from search engines.

It wasn't a backup plan though, just an idea for a practical joke like Trevor's Information Supercollider.
Summary:

Japan is back. ~ A brief guide to Modern Japanese History ~ Japan is back.

And right in the beginning I couldn't help wonder about this: "Sony and Canon, Honda and Panasonic, Fujitsu and Hitachi: throughout the world, Japanese brands are respected and profitable. By contrast, despite the best efforts of personal-computer giant Lenovo and white-goods producer Haier, China has yet to build a single brand that most Americans could name. Japan is back."

Sony and Canon, Honda and Panasonic, Fujitsu and Hitachi were all founded before 1950, while Lenovo is only 23 years old and bought out a chunk of IBM. Scratched my head through the rest of the article. Ok, after the history lesson, I'll take your word that Japan is back. But it seems more like China just got started. And the problems run much, much deeper than just the birth rate.

I was hoping to see something about Japanese startup clusters, haha.
How do you handle claims of neglect from your significant other(s)?
You work on that computer too much, etc?
The L Combinator.
"The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." -pg
Tips for Finding Your Cofounder
To CEO Or Not To CEO?
"the Bank of Japan had lowered interest rates to zero . . ."

The article goes on to say . . .

"The list goes on. Bank lending is on the rise;"

I should think so.

How is this a good thing? To have the second largest economy on the globe giving away currency that is, for all intents and purposes, free? If China were engaging in this same behavior I can assure you the calls for retaliation coming from the financial centers of the US would be quite deafening.

It would take a great deal of time for me to explain this so if you will indulge me, and simply 'take my word for it', I will affirm to you that this state of affairs is sub-optimal for you and I. Assuming, of course, that my audience is composed primarily of non-Japanese consumers. The 0% interest rate is simply one, in a long litany, of less than ideal policies and financial machinations that the article points out.

I will concede that it is possible that the rules of Economics have changed. That, perhaps, this 'New Economy' everyone seems enamored of is real, and works. The article's author will forgive me, however, if my own estimation of the current Japanese situation differs from his unabashedly positive one.
So is there any country around that is still giving away free currency? I should get in on that.
On the topic of metacircular/self referential Lego stuff,

http://www.cefvigo.com/galego/galeria_vilari%F1o.htm

These are recreations of classical photographs with Legos. The funny part about this is that the camera with which the pics were shot is itself built from Legos (barring lenses and a few other select pieces). I have a copy of the book from this exposition, which has a pic of the camera, and some 20+ more Lego pics- a few of the best were left out from the website. I can scan some if anyone is interested.
Take them seriously. If your relationship was healthy before, the fact that you have to be told you're neglecting your SO means you should have noticed a long time ago.
I read _Brave New World_ this weekend. I think Huxley's vision of dystopia is closer to the bone than Orwell's - we see in facebook that people (including me!) want to join what would in the wrong hands be a very effective police-state tool. "Tell us who your friends are."
Find an understanding significant other (preferably before this problem arises). My girlfriend moved to the other side of the continent less than a month after we started dating, with my encouragement, because it was the right thing for her to do at the current point in her career. Obviously there's a certain amount of reciprocity involved -- she'll equally understand if I need to do what's right for my career, even if it makes our relationship a bit more difficult at some point.
Very cool, but I was hoping for something more general purpose, like the Lego equivalent of a molecular assembler. :-(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler
Life is about balance. It's not easy to do, but you need to pay special attention to giving the proper amount of attention, time and prioritization to all aspects of your life. It's easy to get caught up in only focusing on your startup, but it's not a good long-term choice if you want to maintain a happy relationship with your SO as well.
Dapper to Launch Instant Facebook AppMaker
How do you deal with blind spots in your projects?
The CMU SE program in Silicon Valley is exactly like that:

http://west.cmu.edu/prospective_students

I am an alum from this program, and it was the best learning experience I ever had in my life (seriously).
"... Only when I get the entire program in my head (level 0 only), do things get cooking ...This approach reminds me of Jessica Livingston's chapter on Steve Wozniak in "Founders at Work" (required reading). Only when he could get the entire Apple II into his head did it become the breakthrough that it was ..."

The common theme here seems to be succinctness and efficiency in design. The Woz example is a a classic here. The design process clarity of purpose through reduction until it is as simple as you can get it has merit.

So is it the speed of iteration to reach "high efficiency design" be the goal as well?
I personally think it's good that the authors recognize they need to bring in someone else to 'handle the hustle and bustle of starting a business.' However, from reading the article I get the impression that they don't want to put in the long hours and make the sacrifices that are required to be successful startup founders. If I were them I would take this article down before a potential investor reads it and realizes that they 'won't sacrifice their personal lives' to take care of their business.
"... Take on the kind of problems that have to be solved in one big brain ..."

That's on sentence that resonates and is probably a clearer definition and advantage of what working on a "hard problem" is really about.
I agree completely. Web 2.0 isn't about flashy web graphics it's about understanding how to bring users together in such a way that you create something new and exciting. Data-mining is the best way to generate actual businesses from 'Web 2.0' anything that helps people get their feet wet in this complex field is worth while.