skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. Pace Nassim Taleb, this is where the Fat Tonys of the world take the Dr Johns to the cleaners.

Dr. John (he of the bag lunch and the actuarial degree) says "well, the reporter says that Seo actually planned on using the proceeds from one policy to purchase additional insurance on the other factory. So this must be the scenario, and we should take that as a given." Well, as I wrote above, even with that assumption, the article's math is still wrong.

Fat Tony (of the Brooklyn accent and custom suits) says "This Seo guy isn't covered nearly as much as he thinks he is. If the two earthquakes happen on the same day, he's screwed. Heck, they'd better not happen less than a month apart ... have you seen how long it takes an insurance company to get a policy written up? If he thinks he's gonna have that second policy the next day after the first earthquake, he's dreaming." And he's right. The reporter has misrepresented the solution in some fundamental way -- either it didn't play out like this, or it's purely a hypothetical deal.

So which error is more egregious? I dunno; both aspects of this article bothered me when I read it. Not only does the reporter almost certainly misrepresent the terms of the deal, but he doesn't even get the math right on the terms he presented.
Of course they lie, why do you think they're called girlfriends:)
Are you blind? I said except for asian markets.
Are there going to be any changes heading into the Winter '08 program?
Will the median age go up? Will dinners be held on a different night? Did the large batch (19 groups) work out OK?
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." - Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Cool, thanks for the reply.

Well, if consciousness/free will an illusion, doesn't the notion of illusion require a consciousness to be having the illusion? And why does it make sense to say we have to act as if we can choose to act in order to act, if it's an illusion?

Yeah, I know the arguments in the end tend to boil down to: we're just matter, therefore all intelligence is AI, QED.

But, can we go the other way? AI is logically impossible, therefore we're not just matter. That's why I'm interested in the purely logical case for AI here.

As for whether it is meaningful to say we aren't just matter, it seems so on the surface of things. Most of oure concepts that we use to communicate aren't material, especially if consciousness is an illusion. I.e. there is no such physical thing as 'red.' Yet, we still seem to communicate quite effectively, even better than when restricting ourselves to purely physical terms.
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I like your app knewjax. Do you have a non-technical co-founder? If not, I suggest finding one, especially one deeply mired in underground rock culture at least a superficial knowledge of Web 2 dot oh.

1) You're advertising on YC news, hit up MySpace and even Anywhere.FM - people that are into music. They're gonna be your butter.

2) Don't spam, but WRITE WRITE WRITE. If you submit interesting content to people's blogs, they WILL check out your site. You could just be one blog post away from getting traction.

edit: about 10% of blogger accounts have a post dealing with people's favorite music. Google's blog search would really help you in your promotion.
What are you going to do next? There are plenty of good answers, just pick one and go with it.

This sounds similar to what happened to me in April. I have a few suggestions:

Get physical exercise.

Get sleep. Meditation/yoga might help. Avoid alcohol until you get things straightened out. Avoid caffeine if you aren't addicted already.

Find cheap, healthy food to eat.

Change your environment. Move, or at least rearrange your house or apartment. You almost certainly have unresolved problems related to your girlfriend and your old job, and it's a waste of time to dwell on them. It's really hard to let go of those if your habits and routines don't change as well. Once you're back on your feet, you'll have plenty of time to decide what problems are worth going back to face.

Spend time around people, even if it's just walking through the supermarket.

If you absolutely have to rant, write it down and tuck it away somewhere for at least 3 months. Don't send out anything you might regret later.
Is there a point when one has learned enough basics of music production to be able to produce arbitrarily good music?

Yes.
Getting Git on Mac OS X
At least in terms of thought experiments, it makes no sense to me. Think about it like this. If I can copy my consciousness and place it in a different environment, then I should be aware of that other environement at the same time I'm aware of this one. But for this to happen, information has to be transported from both locations to eachother in no time. While pretty awesome if true, the laws of physics don't allow for this, as far as I know.
Performance of anonymous functions in naive Javascript implementations
How to speedup your web site
someone forgot one thing good about ubuntu

its getting the linux name out there, and more people are looking at adoption of linux. (not many) :) just because you think your to fucking good for it doest mean its shit, if you really where a linux user you would be running slackware, or maybe LFS or Gentoo fucking fedora please.
Can I tell you something?
- Losing your job where they treat you badly. Don't know if there's anything better to happen. It's a wake up call and it means you are on the way of finding something much better.
- Losing car is not like crashing with it. Stopping on a freeway is not as bad as other things.
- Lost phone. Every now and then you really need that to realize how hooked up you are and in what constant stress you are. It's time to think about it for a minute and get a new phone.
- Lost girlfriend. It does feel bad at the moment, but if you think about how much you care about your previous girlfriend, you'll realize how much you won't care about this one after a while. Besides, don't you feel free now?
- When a friend is telling you "sorry, can't help" it can only mean one thing - be grateful you actually realized the true relationship. This opened your eyes, which is good and you will know the be careful with this person.
- Wake up? All of those were wake up calls. And all that happened was for good, so cheer up bro and get a drink with some friends
when you get to fed up with the music you are already hearing to, and if you are a person who can create music, thats what you will probably do! Paul Oakenfold rised to the elite of DJs when he started writing music he wanted to hear!

that sounds familiar when you create an application for what people want! but I think its a totally different way of creation needing different sources of inspiration.
Are you hosting your blog on Blogger? Read this cautionary tale.
Really? That makes me da man (from reddit):

3 points 1 year ago by greendestiny

You know what'd be really cool is a inkling market on the first YC company to get bought out/go public. I'm buying a craptonne of clickfacts if it gets setup :)
If we reveal our idea in our YC app and don't accept, would YC possibly recommend it to other, participating teams?
Add Cover Flow effect (including reflection) to images on your webpages (JS & canvas hack)
Because your selection of truths carries a message in itself. Compare "Bush, a Yale graduate, started a war" to "Bush, who didn't fight in Vietnam, started a war". Both statements are true. In our case, the message is more subtle, but it's still there, and it seems ego-oriented and unnecessary to me.
The Myth of Software Estimation
You can become a good player by learning what other people have played, so those would be your building blocks, Consistently creating good new music is a very rare gift, Most players (at most) create a somewhat unique style (which will include a lot of building blocks created by others) which they rely on heavily for their whole careers.
Listen.. Stuff like this tends to come in waves. You'll get a huge influx of shit, but more often than not you'll get a long period of awesomeness afterwards. Sometimes it takes awhile to show up.

You'll be stronger for this whole experience. Just devote yourself to what you like.
Power of the Marginal Video - RailsConf 2006
I spent the time to find this, so I thought I would share. One of my faves. Enjoy.

Link is below (Warning: this is 250+ MB and meant to be downloaded)

http://downloads.scribemedia.net/rails2006/04_paul_graham_fu...
A copy of your consciousness is just that, a copy. Imagine that the entire body is copied while we're at it.

So then there are two separate copies of you, interacting with the world. There could be 100 copies. They have the same set of initial conditions they are operating under but they won't all see or do the same thing, the different consciousnesses are still products of their environment.
Cant blame the user though. We may need to clarify this somehow.
This is really good advice, that is the real target market and those are the users who would eventually become our community.
What sort of music are you interested in? Are you talking about sound production, performing, composing?

The main difference with composing is that you are usually writing a program for a real person to perform, not for a computer to execute. This means that writing music is less exacting, but can also be more subtle.

The other big difference is that you aren't usually writing music to solve an external problem. With music, you have to invent the problems you want to solve. You might say "I want to hold an F# in the alto line for 4 measures, while moving all the other voices in a chord progression that adheres to the following restrictions..." You just make up the conditions on your own. Software, in contrast, almost always solves a concrete, defineable problem (even if you don't know what that problem will be when you start coding).

With performing, the biggest difference is that it's real-time action and communication. You have to train physically in order to be good, and learning bad habits is disastrous. Code-reading and being good at using an editor are more analogous to music performance than software development in general. With writing code, it can be a good thing to write 1,000 lines of crap, if you learn enough not to make those mistakes again. Making mistakes while performing just leads to more mistakes in the future.
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I can't help to wonder if it will take off. Facebook now has Google's attention!
I don't say this to be mean, though I'm not sure I can phrase it in such a way that it doesn't sound so, but I don't see any bad luck in the story above, other than maybe timing. It appears to be the results of a bunch of bad decisions unfortunately reaching their boiling point all at once.

It's important in times like these to take stock of all of the decisions leading up to this crisis. It sounds like you made a lot of mistakes, as we all do. Learn from them and you'll be the better for it, and in time you'll view this as all as one big opportunity.

You didn't lose your job, you quit, so that may or may not have been a mistake (in fact, it may have been a mistake not to do it sooner) but either way it certainly wasn't bad luck. What it will turn out to be depends on what you make of the opportunity. Get another job you hate and it was a mistake, find one you enjoy and it will turn out to be one of the best things you ever did. You have the choice there.

Cars almost never die completely with no prior warning. I certainly don't know the situation well enough to be sure, but I'd be willing to bet you ignored some serious signs. That's a mistake I've certainly made and learned from.

Losing a phone is usually due to carelessness. We've all done something like it. That one's essentially valueless as a life lesson, you already knew it was bad, and there's only so much you as a human can do to prevent such things from recurring.

The relationships are the tough ones. It sounds like in the case of the girl you trusted someone's words rather than their actions because it was the path of least resistance. That's always a mistake. Yet another we've all made.

Just like a car, relationships never die without plenty of warning. There's a good chance you saw the signs and willfully ignored them. Learn from that.

The only thing left to do now is learn from each mistake and turn all of these annoyances into opportunities.
I'm strongly urged to one-up you (because I could, believe me) but what's the point? You're either going to A) Buck up, or B) Get some Xanax. That's about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo
Unless you're desperately short on connections, the correct answer here is, "yes."
Its not the same in terms of its incrementality. Generally a beat or a melody for one track wont really work for another, but it can. I don't think parts of music can be encapsulated. Still I find making music similar to coding in terms of creativity.

I think in all creative pursuits you can get very very good by consistently seeking to do better and gaining insight into what you do. If you're always thinking about the next layer of meaning and trying to stretch you'll achieve great things.

I just made the comparison in this blog post which hasn't garnered much yc interest: http://greendestinyonyc.blogspot.com/2007/08/creativity.html
When do you ignore your users?
Quoted in Getting Real is a passage by Jef Raskin about avoiding "feature blight" (http://jef.raskincenter.org/unpublished/widgets_of_the_week....). The passage suggests too many features is a bad thing and that the best way to avoid that pitfall is a very real and constricting deadline. My question is that once you've launched and you're able to afford a more liberal deadline, how do you keep feature blight from creeping in?

37 Signals was noted here recently for refusing to implement suggestions until there's a critical mass of users looking for them, but is that the "best" way to combat this issue?
See Timbaland, Pharell/Chad Hugo, Rick Rubin.
How valuable are designers to a startup team?
Compared to the value of having coders on a team, how do designers stack up? Is it common to have a designer on board, or to just a design firm? Also, have the majority of teams accepted to YC had designers on the team, and if not, what have they done? Perhaps pg can best answer that last one.

Thanks.
Cheer up, tough it out man... I'm sure things will look up soon.
Define 'works'. If you mean it's not perfect, then I agree. But it's still VERY possible to build websites in Rails that support unicode all the way down.
There are a couple approaches to making music, just as there are a couple approaches to writing code. The classical approach is that you have a melody in your head and work backwards from there. The other approach is to improvise - more like jazz, where the musicians are playing off each other and the audience.

In code, the classical approach is akin to the waterfall method. Design it all up front. Build it with statically linked tools. Hire programmers like an orchestra, based on their ability to follow the score. The iterative approach is more like jazz. Write a little bit. Bounce it off other people. Write a little more. A conversation. Duck typed scripting languages are great for that.

And then there's interaction design. This is more like a band leader who 'gets' the audience. Or, at least, someone who the audience 'gets'. This is isn't working backwards from a tune or forwards from a set of building blocks. It's a bidirectional search.

On a more pragmatic level: it takes about 1000 hours of playing with any tool to become arbitrarily proficient. Another 1000 hours of playing with people to become arbitrarily 'good' (give or take a zero or so).
Ask News.YC: Does anybody want a forums here?
Maybe this has been asked before, but would there be any interest in having a Hacker News Forums, for general, casual discussion as opposed to just commenting on news posts? I think of HN as a community rather than just a place to read interesting stuff.

If there's enough interest, PG, maybe you could add that component to the site if you have time?
From the application form:

"We don't make any formal promise about secrecy, but we don't plan to let anyone outside Y Combinator see these applications, including other startups we fund."
That's very uncanny in that it is the exact same phrase that comforts me after a string of bad luck.
It's unnecessary. You can submit items without links. So if you want a discussion that isn't about a news item, just pick a topic and submit it.
The hckrtrckr site (N.YC/Google Maps mashup) says location-based forums should be up within days.
Didn't Trevor Blackwell once try something like this?
I'd love to have a graphics/HTML/CSS/Flash designer for my most recent project. Neither myself nor my partner would be willing to trade much equity for one though, if design was all they'd contribute. Between the two of us we have enough design sense and skill to create beautiful-enough minimal designs. I think any good hacker can do simple and effective design if they try.

Earth-shattering graphic design is out of easy reach for most of us, but designing simple to use interfaces doesn't take much more than careful thought and a desire to do so. A big part of what designers do just isn't necessary in a startup where the founders actually care about making things good already. Designers are often essential at larger companies, where the employees aren't motivated enough to give a lot of care to things like ease-of-use, flow, and beauty.
To play devil's advocate, what if YC folks have already thought of the idea you had(and obviously did not pick you for reasons other than your idea)? See, it goes both ways.

Bottomline: it is very difficult in this environment with start-ups launching left and right to claim ownership of a certain idea, even between two parties.
we found that having a specialized graphic designer who can't do any coding wasn't very efficient for getting things from idea to prototype quickly. having someone who has an interest in design and good UI but can also hack is the ultimate - that's worth trading generous equity for.
really? They had forced abortions and internal passports that dictated where in the country you could live? And the US government ran tanks over people who protested?
Woops! You got me. I got carried away. I'll only admit being half blind though, because I'm willing to bet that "emerging markets" will eventually visit the same cycles of soft development that are taking TechCrunch headlines now. Brazil is not a question. Vietnam/Thailand... ok that's SE Asian.

Turkey is a possibility. A little west of India are others. East European countries like Slovenia. Alright, maybe the effects aren't immediate enough to be obvious like South Korea, but new markets will appear and you might just want to do something about it if you have the chance.

I guess I failed to back myself, oh well. I don't need to change your opinion though. Whatever works.
Who is YC user PortLAN? -- He is hilarious.
He is funny but he doesn't list contact info: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=portLAN
Pure eloquence. Tip my hat.
My favorite line: "Don't use web standards because Jeffrey Zeldman told you to."
Nobody died. It was a good day.

Sorry if this sounds trite, but I'm being sincere. You're alive. You didn't lose, I mean really lose, anyone you love. I read somewhere that numerous studies indicate that people get happier, on average, the older they get (I'm apparently not old enough to be happy all the time, but I'm hopeful)...I suspect it has something to do with a growing understanding of what really matters.

Jobs don't matter. Girlfriends, that you know don't love you, don't matter. Phones definitely do not matter. Cars do not matter.

Your health matters. The health of your loved ones matters. That's about it. Everything else is just scenery.

In short: It looks worse than it is. Get some rest, and when you wake up tomorrow, it'll look a little better. In a week, you'll wonder what all the fuss was about. (Yes, I've been without a car, insurance, and a steady job, with $30k in credit card debt, to boot. Hard times come and go pretty easily if you're learning from your mistakes.)
I got the impression that the YCs had discussed the idea my team applied with before we had applied. This only helped us land the interview, because they knew we were trying to tackle a big, important unsolved problem.

They certainly haven't launched a company doing what we wanted to do and no other YC company has, so you really don't need to worry about them stealing/sharing your idea. It's just not worth it for them.
Truly excellent web design is never found in such lists. A good webpage, especially something as simple as a blog, makes the text easy to read and the structure of the site easy to see, and gets out of the way. It's more or less a solved problem by now, and seeing a bunch of good web designs is like seeing a bunch of good spoon and fork designs.

The stuff in this link is impressive if the aim is to look like futuristic Macromedia Fireworks mockups from five years ago.
That addresses the question partially. It says they're not going to do anything short-sighted and evil like others might.

I think it's wise to trust the YC partners not to do anything intentionally nefarious, but to assume the worst of their unconscious minds.

When smart people read hundreds of ideas its got to cause a huge swarm in their heads. Most of the ideas get immediately buried in the unconscious. There's a definite chance a YC applicant's idea could eventually emerge and find its way in into a YC-funded company, in some form.

I definitely don't think this is a reason to not submit your application though. Everyone is going to know your idea after you launch anyway. If secrecy is your biggest asset you're in so much trouble this is a trivial concern.
You're going to need good design. It's best if your founding team has some design talent, but if not, you may be able to get by with hired guns. But in that case you'd better have someone else who can evaluate the quality of the hired guns.
The majority of YC companies have not, but it's a huge win if you do. pg places very high value on good design (with good reason). And YC companies have much better design by the time they leave, if they have their eyes open and half a brain. Every YC group has at least one rock star designer. The best known is probably Kevin Hale from Wufoo/Particle Tree, but other seriously good designers have been involved.

So, early stage, it is valuable--maybe not valuable enough to have one as a full partner with equal equity, but maybe.

The reason I say possibly not is because I know many of the "rock star" designers from YC companies now, and at least a few aren't feeling very important to the process or involved in the day-to-day development (and some have packed up and gone home). If you can't foresee significant design work throughout a long period of time, maybe an equal partner designer isn't the way to go.

So, great design is a huge value. It's up to you to decide if it is worth an equal stake (it's almost certainly worth some equity, if you can get someone good to work for equity and don't have the 10-15k it'll take to hire a good designer for a couple of weeks), and whether they'll be twiddling their thumbs in six months.

As Harj said, a designing hacker (even if the hacking is fair to middling--if the design skill is really strong) is a champ worth her weight in gold.
I've got good news and bad news.

First the good news: Good designers aren't interested in working for equity in your brand new wholly unproven company.

Now the bad news: Good designers aren't interested in working for equity in your brand new wholly unproven company.

Good design is far more expensive than you think. And I believe you've severely underestimated it's value in a startup. (I've historically done so, as well. But I learn eventually.)