skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, not to finance competitors. There are maybe 3 or 4 companies that matter in defense, each making many billions while others get an order of magnitude less. So, no...there is no funding competitors in defense. There isn't much competition to speak of.

But this is not to say the machines Boeing makes are not amazing.

My comments are from working on military contracts. They're enough to make a reasonable person run for the hills.
I think I was unnecessarily unclear - let's say we're talking about buying eggs. Suppose I'm willing to pay up to $3 for a dozen. That doesn't mean that I should buy them if I find eggs for $2.99 - I should keep shopping around, because grocers can profitably sell eggs for $2 a dozen, so I'm bound to find eggs closer to the $2 mark. I need to take into account what would be reasonable for the other party when deciding if a deal is reasonable, not just the limits of what would be reasonable for me. If I'm stuck, and everyone is selling eggs for $3 a dozen, then it matters whether that's beyond my personal threshold or not. If I only note how close a deal is to my personal threshold, without noting whether the other party would be likely to agree to a more favorable deal, I'm liable to get ripped off, unless I have no leverage for negotiating anyway, and I can only take it or leave it.
Indeed. Also, didn't France already try to make a google killer? That I haven't heard much lately implies the fate of this program.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/12/21/HNquaero_1.html
"
The French and German partners involved in a consortium developing future search technologies, Quaero, went their separate ways because of differences over technology, according to senior officials at the French agency funding the research.
"
Fruits and breads are expensive because of how much time it takes to obtain them. You have to buy them fresh every few days, which means taking time out to visit the supermarket.

And there are many cases where healthy is more expensive. A tiny bottle of pom wonderful is $5, where a huge bottle of off-brand soda is $1.50. Breaded fish sticks are a lot cheaper than a fresh salmon and a lot easier to prepare.
Which of the following would you prefer:

1. A flower from your sweetheart?

2. A warm puppy?

3. A properly formatted data file?

ANSWER!
I would want this guy making a few million, if he doesn't steal them. His waitressers and waiters can quit anytime if their alternatives are overall better.

(Kudos for being able to imagine a Paris Hilton with brains.)
Perhaps if the Military used my product, they would be less wasteful :)
Sad really that so much money will go to waste. There are some amazing hacker entrepreneurs in Germany -- many of them move to the US. Giving 165 teams $1m would have resulted in at least one billion dollar company (and probably more like 20) even with incompetent decision-making.
Loopt secures $8M of a $12M Series B round
I think there are algorithms that solve simple IQ tests like that. And how would the non-consistent UI work? Not use http Post anymore, just do everything with AJAX?
A $165 million kiss of death
Germany and other rich EU countries are spending quite a bit of money in helping the poorer members converge (a spectacular success case is Ireland). I think the benefits of that will be seen long term.
The long term is already here - the results: high unemployment, stagnating innovation, financial crisis in the public sector with unfunded liabilities. Germany is now lengthening retirement age, raising taxes, lowering benefits, etc to try not to go under. And the high unemployment is really a big deal - it is giving rise to a growing rightest (ie neo-nazi) movement in Germany, and I think to Islamic extremists in France, etc.
If you downmodded the above post, I would be interested to know why. Feel free to email me at the above username @goladus.com if you do not wish to post publically. Put "ycombinator" in the subject line.

I consider it succinct, informative, and accurate; if there is a problem with it I do not know what it is. I would be happy to clarify if there is any confusion.
The vast majority of the developers at Google don't produce anything great. Lots more of them could, but not inside a huge bureaucratic company.

Holding 90% of the best engineers in the world "hostage" with six figure salaries and great perks is a good way to slow them down. I think they're scared of being blindsided, since that's what they did to Yahoo & co.

Google should be more brave and set them free. They can easily stay the best at snapping up early-stage startups. They already do this, but it should be their only strategy. Google should almost completely stop hiring direct.

I guess this is really just "Hiring is Obsolete" from a slightly different perspective. That it might be evil of Google to jealously "horde" hackers out of fear.
Solving that test is indeed pretty simple, I think its O(n^2) give or take. Even if it was n^3 the value of n is so low it isn't restrictive. The benefit is that it is relatively uncommon (not being targeted), and it is more difficult than the average captcha (less likely to be targeted). It is also resistant to brute force (many captchas have the answer to them included in the question, this one requires some parsing and solving, not simply trying words near the captcha randomly). This captcha is not perfect, but I think it is better than most current captchas, and it is deliver neutral (doesn't penalize the impaired). Thus it seems like a step in the right direction, but is not a final destination by any means.

By non-consistent UI I mean breaking the "Name, Email, Webpage, Body" paradigm. I think a good (although certainly harder to implement) example of this is http://www.djangobook.com/en/beta/chapter01/ . If you click on the little tabs/indexes on the side of the page a little comment box pops up that is relevant to the specific position. This UI is sufficiently different from a standard commenting system that a standard form filling spambot would be clueless. This is only an example, but perhaps it helps explain my idea of diversifying a bit. Other types of spam bots would not be affected, but perhaps similar changes would make them less effective as well (your example of using Ajax is a good possible example).
That's exactly the problem, a reward in the face of repugnant behavior. I wasn't going to respond, but I found this comment pretty depressing so I have to ask you: You seriously believe being rich is a license to be a douche? Or that everyone's allowed to act however they want to food service workers, or the people that guard you while you sleep? Or anyone at all? What if, for example, someone had to be a waitress to save up money for college? Sure, she could start a business, but what if she has literally zero money and no contacts, and she was just born like that?

What's depressing is how often people don't think of other people.
Microsoft Startup Zone
I had good results with doing an own small modification to our forum software. I had never done anything with PHP before, but knowing enough c programming that was still done below an hour (finding the right place to modify was the only hard part).

I think the point is not which modification I made - nothing that was much different from some other usual spam-prevention mods which are in use. The trick is that no spammer cares about a single site enough to work around a custom solution.
"At Microsoft, we know that our success depends on yours" - We will need to steal your idea so we can stay in business...
TechStars in Boulder
The money will not merely go to waste. It will actually harm German startups. A lot of smart hackers who might otherwise have started or worked for startups will get drawn into this doomed project instead.
Don't think so. YC model is biased towards college students or recent grads. Most of these folks we are talking are already working. They end up moonlighting than going for YC.
Brainchild?

https://www.gtldna.net/
Don't know if I would like being required to work in a big room around a desk with a bunch of other people.. Good solid brainstorming is useful, but not when I'm actually coding. For that I like to be in my own world with the headphones on.

Sounds like TechStars is more like an incubator setup in this regard.
Being rich in this case wouldn't be a reward for his attitude, but for solving the problem of people who want secure, usable backup systems.

I'm not saying being rich would entitle him to any particular behaviour; they're orthogonal things.

About the hypothetical waitress, either she could find another job to pay for college, or otherwise her ability to go to college depends on cperciva getting rich.

There are other examples where you could argue that raw capitalism may not be in the general interest. Think, for example, of real state; that's more of a zero sum game. In my area, rich foreign people are buying most of the real estate for summer houses they'll visit once every other year or so, while locals have a hard time to find a first accomodation due to pumped prices. Many people have to migrate to save up for a house here. Since the utility of that real estate is way lower for the foreign rich than for the local poor, I claim that in this case raw capitalism is reducing overall value.
Being a huge sports fan, I am used to people apologizing after the fact and blaming the media for "misrepresentation" and taking their comments "out of context." However, I do applaud Seth Levine for at least addressing the issue. While the context of the comment in the USAToday article was addressed at YC, it did seem strange that Seth would blast the same model for which he contributes via TechStars.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, since to me it does seem reasonable that his comments were taken out of context.
Why hire so many people? How much value could a 10,000th hire add to a company? Google won't tank, but it may have to lay off a lot of people. It stands to reason that may contradict their "don't be evil" philosophy.
Especially upon re-reading the article, it looks to me as though the reporter (no doubt trying to present 'both sides of the story') began a paragraph with "But the limits of Y Combinator's model remain unclear" and then shoehorned in Seth Levine's comments without much regard to what he was really saying.
That makes a lot of sense. I was just accusing Google of doing the same thing world wide. Do you think there's any difference between them hiring 5k developers they can't really make use of and what Germany is doing here?
I think they should leave each team to figure out their dev. process. Not all teams work well under a conference room type setup. The should allow teams to choose if they want to work under that setup or not.
Email interviews are boring, and worthless. Sorry folks, but if you don't want to be misrepresented, do a better job interviewing. What you THINK you said, and what you said are very different.
Joel: Learning from Dave Winer
I've noticed these things get harder and harder all the time. In the end it will be like a test to block humans out.

Of course, the only thing you really care about when someone/thing does a captcha is that the, uh, thing won't spam and that it will give you money. This problem might go away if someone succeeds in designing a system for making micropayments with a much smaller granularity than Paypal.
What the non-Lisper sees
I'm OK with captchas being difficult and even annoying. However, I leave the site if I have to try more than twice.
A Subversion User Looks at Git
Ha. Do you have a take on the "let's have all the startups work in one big room" decision?
PG's Arc Lessons
This is the first time I hear about anything like this... maybe I'm behind on it but this is going to be awesome for clothing designers, small shops etc. I'd use it if I was a one man show...
_none of their employees "go bad"_

This won't happen to you? Okay. I trust you.

_never confronted by a subpoena_

If you get a subpoena for a passphrase for a client, you will give it up. Yes you will. Now, if someone was holding terroristic bombcodes or whatever and REALLY didn't want people getting them, they ain't backing up anything online. The same people who need real security aren't going to be uploading their data anywhere .
10 Ways to be Productive with Your Blog
Spectrum auction could revolutionize US telecoms
Google to bid.
...But more than likely just reinvent something that Guy Steele wrote a paper on in the seventies. ^_^
Videntity.org releases completely free OpenID registrar!
Their Company ideas don't seem great.

Its interesting how they focus on stuff like office space etc. instead of focusing on the product as close to 100% of the time as possible.
> Email interviews are boring, and worthless.

How so? Because the feedback time (i.e. follow-up questions) is too long? In that case, IM/chat should solve the problem.
I think that's a mistake. It's hard for programmers to work in such an environment, and it makes the founders start to feel like employees.

One of my rules of thumb for dealing with startups is to use Viaweb as a test case. And even if I'd have been willing to do it myself, there is no way I could ever have gotten Robert to dutifully show up and work in our investors' offices.
Yes, sorry, I meant good outcome.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269
If you live in SF or Silicon Valley, it is obvious that Google's hiring was out of control last year.

I'm sure everyone living here, and working with a startup here can give an example of at least 1 person Google has hired recently whom they would never call in for an interview at their startup. Since I do a lot of the hiring work at my startup, I've seen 20+ such people get hired by Google last year.
Yes, for most founders hope of future happiness varies linearly with the number of shares-- at least, in the region of the number of shares they have. If someone gave them 10% more stock, they'd feel 10% richer-on-paper. (There are anomalies at the extremes. E.g. if you got 100% of the stock, your cofounders wouldn't be motivated, and that would decrease the value of your shares.)
Own the laptops that built reddit.com ("luck not included")
"It's like a Web 2.0 startup kit!" Yeah, that plus YC funding.

It's awesome that they're giving the proceeds to charity.
I guess I'm talking about specific program compliance and not macro-economic effects. I agree with you about the latter.
That is a billion dollar question: how do you get the military to buy my awesome product. The answer is usually absorb the culture and lower your productivity.
this is accurate! coming from a non-lisper...
And a dig at Lisp. :)
ICFP Programming Contest 2007 (just started, ends monday)
The contest looks interesting. The task is to convert one picture into another and you must do so by using a string of DNA-like tokens as input commands. There is a complex set of rules dictating this process.

I have only skimmed it so far, but it looks like a constraint satisfaction problem, and it looks like a lot of hardware would be a bonus. Lisp might actually be a good tool for this although I'll stick to something more comfortable if I decide I want to take it on.
No ad-lib, too much opportunity for PR rewrites, spin, etc. People are much more interesting in a conversation.

Yes, IM is much better.
I agree. It may seem funny to think that google is better off paying them 100M for their company instead of 150K in salary - but presumably, google pays that much for startups because they're worth it. Hard to believe that a 150K house plant does all that much direct damage to google (wall street expectations aside, their numbers were pretty excellent) - but the opportunity cost of keeping an office fern from growing into a redwood may be very high.

assuming google gets to buy them out...
News like that make me hate paying taxes so much :-(
The news of this thread seems to refute that. Living in Germany, my impression is that the government actually thinks it can generate value by raising taxes.
2 Pennies and a Tootsie Roll
It is scary, but I think true.
The True story of Ooma
So the usual answer won't work - but I'm not sure what will.
well I am not sure if this story is really true but a sensationalist title makes a better read ;-)
Google Invests in 3G Startup
...A femtocell is a home base station, a low-cost, low-power 3G cellular radio system that sits in the home or office, feeding calls and data sessions back to mobile operators' core networks via broadband connections...
FYI Google doesn't pay incoming engineers anywhere near 150K.
Blake Ross on the Facebook acquisition
that's supposed to be "unbiased"
Finding the right balance between brevity and hygiene isn't easy. Sounds like the implicit variables / macros issue is resolving on the hygiene side. I look forward to hearing how that works out.
Transparent human detection could be achieved with face-detection in a webcam with controls to ensure the stream is live.

Face detection is a solved problem, and accessing webcams from a browser is solved.
http://www.merl.com/projects/FaceRecognition/
http://youtube.com/my_videos_upload

If I weren't busy with another idea, I would suggest someone work on this. It could also be used for a secure login if done with face recognition, which is fast maturing.
"I trust you"

"If you get a subpoena for a passphrase for a client, you will give it up."

Not if I don't have it. This is the point of strong security -- you don't NEED to trust me, because I am not technically capable (nor, unless I'm quite mistaken, is the NSA) of decrypting data backed up using tarsnap.
Oh, I think I just understood this phenomenon. In C/Java/etc. if you see more than two levels of nested parens you know at a glance that it's code that's hard to follow. No wonder people's alarm bells go off when they see Lisp. If they could just relax and learn it, they would find it isn't so hard.
Startup Weekend In Hamburg 22nd/23rd September
An idea for a Startup Weekend got huge amount of support in the German sphere in a short time and will happen in Hamburg on September 22nd / 23rd. The goal is to bootstrap a business idea in just one weekend. If this succeeds, the organizers would like to expand this to other German cities as well as other European places.
captcha's can be necessary and definitely reduce spam, but some of them are so cryptic i can't even read them.
I was all getting ready to bid until he mentioned it came with a Creed CD. No sale.
"The vast majority of the developers at Google don't produce anything great. Lots more of them could, but not inside a huge bureaucratic company."

I'm not sure what qualifies you to make that statement. Do you work at Google?
i do need a new laptop.
Ycombinator invested in Parakey? Was that public knowledge?
OK, so these people found that when they switched from being vague and telling the truth to being specific and lying, that they got more useful feedback. Did they try to isolate the two factors?

I think saying "ourdoings.com does X" when it doesn't yet would not help my relationship with potential customers.
Economics according to Google
I just got one of the Dell ones with Ubuntu preinstalled, and am pretty happy. Cheap, not fancy, but pretty fast and seems like a nice workhorse.
Hey, give us some credit! Humour me on the "smart hacker", but this German search founder will steer well clear of the government projects...
I'm still trying to figure out how someone would end up with a Creed CD to have to get rid of it. It just doesn't make sense. Did Alexis or Steve pay money for it? Was it thrown through their window by Diggers in retaliation for building a better social news site? Was it left behind in the apartment they rented in SF? Did Scott Stapp seduce Alexis and leave it on the nightstand in the morning? So many unanswered questions.
The True cost of an iPhone and others...
Being smart with your money is about fully understanding the financial choices you make and seeing the entire picture - the true cost and total cost of ownership when you commit to a device, transportation, pet, or even a child.
I did the same last month. I also happy.
Aren't these the same Arc lessons that have been available for awhile now?

Just because something is posted over at reddit that doesn't mean it has to come here...

;)
Let me answer that for him. Google has X great products and Y employees. (...etc)
I wonder how much that iPhone is worth...
It looks like Paul Buchheit is becomming quite an Angel Investor of note.
I must admit that one caught me by suprise.
Maybe more suprising is that they took on so much funding already. Definitely beyond the small seed level. I wonder what kind of valuation they had at the time.
Some helpful advice: the people that decide to buy your product aren't the same people that will use it.
Maybe the idea is to keep excellent people away from their competitors, even if they don't really need all those people in the near future.
Open Library goes online with public domain book collection
100% agree - I never saw the rationale for the government making risky investments, just because purportedly nobody else does. Imagine your bank adviser telling you they are going to put your money into high risk investments because nobody else does. Yet if the government spends our money like that, few people seem to realize that it is basically the same thing happening.
You can also drop by the Boston OpenCoffee's - a lot of young entrepreneurs and YC types. It's in cambridge every thursday. www.opencoffeeclub.org
Creed sucks so bad that burning one of their cd's wouldn't be cool. Not even for charity.
We actually took little funding at a high valuation; we just spread the love among multiple investors to benefit from different perspectives.
One way to be transparent to normal users, as long as your site uses javascript anyway, is to do a javascript (or flash, I suppose) hashcash implementation. If javascript on a typical browser takes 45 seconds to work out a solution, then that's enough to prevent spambots from just implementing it without driving the amount of spam they can send out way down.
The same thoughts I had as I jumped over from reddit to here. Though the discussion on reddit (http://programming.reddit.com/info/280e9/comments/c028101) does once again raise the age old topic that people seem so fond of (at least over there): bashing Arc for 'not bringing anything new to the table'. Though, as you point out, I don't think this particular article really needs to spend a few days on news.yc since it's kind of dated and seems an awful lot like a copy-over from whatever is posted on reddit, I would like to know about this.

I know that Paul's offered that Arc is terser - to the point of having the terseness standardized. I really do see the value in that and don't share in the "just make CL macros" sentiment that seems to pervade people lately. In fact, I'm excited to perhaps someday be able to use Arc. However, I WOULD like to know what Paul (and other commentators, though again there are more over at reddit so far as that goes) thinks about the vitriolic remarks. Are they even worth paying attention to? There always seems to be wanton backlash against things that get posted to sufficiently large news sites (Slashdot, reddit, etc.). Yet it also seems like a legitimate matter to consider, though it could just be the case that the public-at-large doesn't see the entire picture for not having access to the language. So, thoughts on this phenomenon, anyone?
The high valuation's not entirely surprising. Given that, then, Facebook must've ponied up some serious f-you money/equity to get you guys to actually sell...
Isn't that people in Silicon Valley (especially those who work at Internet companies) never stick with their companies more than 3-5 years? (except the execs)
Could Facebook Become The Next Microsoft?
Amongst all the noise today over Facebook's acquisition of Parakey, little has been said on what the acquisition means for Facebook in the broader sense.