skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish there was a "reply to multiple comments" button, because there are about eight where the reply should be, "well yeah, it's a Twitter conversation". People are expecting PhD-level discourse over people tapping out messages on their phone while they're using the bathroom. This apparently leads to disappointment. :)
wait, you don't provide drugs and women? i was misinformed.
I think Apple considers the inability to close apps a feature, rather than a bug. The idea is that you should only be concerned with what app you want to be using at any particular moment, and let the system take care of which ones are still in the background.

I have been using multitasking heavily since I got iOS 4.0, and I don't understand the complaints you have. Could you be more specific about what causes you to need to close 10-20 apps at once, or the workflows that cause you to be troubled by the inability to explicitly terminate apps?
When Smart People are Bad Employees
I don't think Paul's point is that YC is incredibly valuable because of the support network, although that is definitely a factor. Its that you won't get screwed around by investors as much and simply in terms of seed/Series A valuation differentials between YC and non-YC companies (all other things being equal) you'd probably be getting a better deal (in terms of equity ownership) even if YC's average valuation was 50% what it is.
Yes, if you make your product selectively crappy in order to undermine competition, it’s an antitrust problem. Microsoft making Windows not run on DR-DOS is an antitrust problem. Microsoft making Windows fail at multiuser security is not an antitrust problem.
Which is why we invented http://foundrs.com, which is a way to have your cake and eat it too. Don't pay any taxes until your business takes off (at which point you should incorporate), but have a good founder agreement in place so that the compan doesn't explode during takeoff :-)
FaceCash: Fat Wallet Commercial
Ignoring the search term being sent, browser and computer info is ALWAYS available to the target site, that is not something Google can even stop. Browser send information on who they are, JavaScript allows probing of what is installed, how big the screen is and all of that fun stuff.

So I don't see how that sentence is even fair at all, Duck Duck Go might stop the search term from being sent (and as a webmaster I'd hate that as it makes it harder to figure out how users are getting to my site), but they can't stop browser and computer info from being sent.
And revenue? Will we see more begging for money this year?
This thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2054847 discusses WakeMate's recent safety recall of chargers. There was some discussion there regarding whether YC is a good match for hardware companies or not, given its small investment and YC's lack of experience with hardware.
Where's the scam? The vampire squid is involved.
The majority of web apps do at least one thing extra: they try to correlate user data to provide something more out of it (be it Google for improving search, be it facebook for providing social related suggestions, aka. ads)

This seems cannot be done at least in the current stage of Unhosted. I don't see how this can be done with encrypted storage that the provider can't do a lot even with polymorphic encryptions.
Yeah, but not making the bad bets is a good idea.

Big mistakes, so far:

- startup has no lead investor
- startup is raising too little
- generally, not having an investment thesis

Curiously, I've been working on taking stock of my angel portfolio as well lately, though it seems gauche to talk dollar numbers.
Unfortunately his best interviews are premium access only.
> the only two apps that work are Safari and Maps

Coincidentally, those are the only two apps I tried, and they both immediately worked, which caused me to (incorrectly) conclude that everything would work. So much for random sampling.
IHMO this is classy, smart marketing on your part. And it happens to be championing privacy concerns. More power to you.
With respect to #2: Even if you have a strong network already (barring a previous exit) you could probably get at least a 6.4% (1/(1-.06)) bump in your Seed or Series A valuation just with YC's brand in this funding climate.
It is a long article and requires some time to digest. No comments is a good thing that implies people do take time to read. I am still in the progress of reading ...
I'm surprised that the average investment is actually that small. (Yes, we've been hearing of this trend overall, but still, ~30 companies per million?) Is an average of < $38K all that companies want/need, or all that they will take?
Has anyone seen a similarly authoritative guide for those of us stuck on apache?
You're arguing that printing money reallocates wealth, which it certainly does. But it does not create wealth. New dollars created from thin air do not also magically call into existence new goods and services. It's simply more dollars chasing the same goods and services.

Either that, or counterfeiters also create wealth.
Out of charity to the parent post, he probably meant "the Ruby ecosystem" by Ruby. The larger Ruby world (and especially Rails, which he seems to have in mind) is a place where a tutorial released a month ago for Rails 3, ruby 1.9.2 and using rvm is already out-of-date in a handful of small but confusing-to-a-newbie ways because there's been a new release of cucumber & rspec and people now adore Haml and shun erb.

I've been using Ruby for about 2 years. Before that it was Perl (and still is Perl sometimes now). The difference in the speed of API changes to "major" libraries and tools in Ruby versus Perl seems striking to me, but maybe I'm still too new and need to absorb more. (Another quick example: try to find a book on Ruby - even one on Ruby 1.9.x that doesn't treat Test::Unit as the default test runner in Ruby. Sure, they might mention Minitest, but then they all keep using Test::Unit in all the introductory examples. Argh.)

It may be a misperception, but the pace of change in the larger Ruby ecosystem sure seems breakneck to me.
Talk dollar numbers... I think I'd be safe in saying, we're all ears. :-)

The problem with bad bets is that they take money from your good bets. If Paul's only bets were Heroku and Mint, he would probably have a much larger return.
I'm all for targeted ads, when I am looking for products and/or services to buy.

99% of the time im on the internet, I am NOT going to buy stuff. I'm going to forums that I attend, getting email, working to help that ubuntu works better (by bug reports and fixes), and researching on more stuff that I can do in IT
Would be better off donating to these guys or at least getting them to help ... http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
I've heard this idea before (maybe from myself? haha). I think it's great!

Why not just do a smartphone app? Or an RSS feed reader that speaks your feeds? Then you get the GUI from the smartphone too. Or could be an all-voice interface for when you're in the car...
> When you deposit money in a bank, they create 9X the loans of what you've deposited.

Source? I thought what they did is loan out 90% of what you deposited.
it prevents me from ever clicking on a short link that will take me to somewhere evil

There are plenty of ways to trick people with links. For example, you can register a domain called not-hardcore-porn.com, and then put porn there. Or you can just poison some upstream DNS cache, and then facebook.com goes to phishing-site.com.

The Internet is very insecure. Short links are the least of our worries.
I use it pretty much all the time, though mostly the "double-click home button" to fast switch between applications. Most apps seem to support fast switching (where I don't have to wait for them to re-initalize), though a few don't.

Otherwise it is helpful if I'm doing AirPlay to my speaker system from Pandora or the iPod... or if I'm downloading in the background (app updates or podcasts, or whatnot).
Since my goal was to learn without losing too much money, I generally made smaller investments. (and of course there are other people investing, so the total round could be $1M or more)
"Printing money does, currently, make us richer."

Assuming that printing dollars results in a net transfer of wealth from foreigners ("them") to citizens ("us"), sure. But the "us" I was referring to was "people who hold or use U.S. Dollars" (or dollar-denominated assets).

Printing money is wealth transfer, straight up, in pretty much the same manner that an individual counterfeiter transfers wealth to himself.
+1

Yes, Google is a machine learning company. And any sufficiently advanced machine learning technology is indistinguishable from AI magic. :-)
Yeah i just loaded this in my iPad. Reminds me of browserling.com. We put an iPad in your iPad.
Functional Jobs
The Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages
Talk about obvious sarcasm...
...so how long did it take before your copy of The Incredible Secret Money Machine was ripped off :-)
The ~> operator is the only one you should really use in your Gemfile version strings. Never >=

See this post by yehuda katz (bundle developer): http://yehudakatz.com/2010/08/21/using-considered-harmful-or...

You can actually use `bundle update` pretty safely with judicious use of ~>
"A professor at a cathedral school for most of his career, Gerbert of Aurillac was the first Christian known to teach math using the nine Arabic numerals and zero. He devised an abacus, or counting board, that mimics the algorithms we use today for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. It has been called the first counting device in Europe to function digitally—even the first computer. In a chronology of computer history, Gerbert’s abacus is one of only four innovations mentioned between 3000 BC and the invention of the slide rule in 1622.

Like a modern scientist, Gerbert questioned authority. He experimented. To learn which of two rules best calculated the area of an equilateral triangle, he cut out square inches of parchment and measured the triangle with them. To learn why organ pipes do not behave acoustically like strings, he built models and devised an equation. (A modern physicist who checked his result calls it ingenious, if labor-intensive.)"
PacMap (GPS Pac-Man for Android)
I'm impressed that there is still room to eke performance improvements out by fiddling with the base data structure, the original author has been working on refining it for quite a while*

* http://t-t-travails.blogspot.com/2008/07/treaps-versus-red-b..., http://t-t-travails.blogspot.com/2010/04/red-black-trees-rev...
Yes, avoiding bad investments is definitely good. However, I think people have a natural cognitive bias towards loss-aversion, which means that we need to be careful that we aren't focusing too much on that side of things (e.g., we should focus 20% on avoiding bad deals, and 80% on not missing good ones).
What this product needs is random polling, such as asking you between specified intervals a specified question such as, "what is your mood?". This would prevent selection bias and probably yield surprising insights about times of day.
This reminded me of the Ignite talk David Cohen (TechStars) gave on the math behind angel investing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54vmDhBImkw

These are GREAT returns when you remember that most angel investors lose money. But I'm not surprised Paul is doing well. It's obvious that his motives are in the right place and he's been hands-on with enough technology that he understands this stuff better than most. Paul is a huge asset to YC. This just goes to show (again) how lucky YC are to have him on their team.
Reddit Gold is not really "begging". They allow you to set your own price for an enhanced set of features. While Reddit Gold is mostly about expressing your support for Reddit, it's not a straight up donation, and Reddit didn't spend two months with a banner at 25% screen height with a bearded kn0thing or ketralnis staring down the userbase.
Grokking Thomas Kuhn’s "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
I actually like the big letter design because I think it emulates minimalism. If you have big letters, you have to avoid putting other crap on the page, and it gets you to focus on the one message (as opposed to a bunch of other things on the page)
Would be nice to hear what you have learned from those six companies two of which are dead and four are zombies.
Amazing World of Insect-Wing Color Discovered
Ask HN: Any advice for non-founders in a sale?
The company I work for is looking to sell. Sorry for the anonymous account, but I'm sure you understand. No one (not VC, not anyone) outside of the founder and co-founder has any equity currently. I am a salaried employee who reports to the founder and has been around to see growth from <20 to >80 employees and ~$1M to >$15M in revenue (>$8M in profit). It looks like the most likely purchasing parties will be private equity firms. The founder has told me that I will be offered equity (from the PE firm) as part of the deal. My questions are:

What do I need to do to protect myself? I assume I need a lawyer to look at any deal I'm offered, but what kind of lawyer?

I'm aware of the concept of dilution, but what defense does one have against it?

What kind of % should I be looking for to make it worth my while?

What else do I need to be looking at #s wise besides %?

What kind of experience will I be in for going from completely private company to one that is majority-owned by a private equity firm?

Are there any books or people that can shed some light onto the whole practice?

Thanks so much for any input.
I think the poster is talking about re-deposits and how, recycled, that can end up being a multiple of what is deposited.

Example: you deposit $1000 in a bank with 10% reserve policy ($100 set aside as capital reserve of the bank).

Bank loans out $900 to customer for new office furniture; then that money is used to pay the office store, which is another depositor at the bank - which then counts as another deposit, 10% of which is set aside as reserve ($90). Another loan of $810 is then made, etc.
Title's wrong. Growing by 300% means Reddit would be at 1 billion pageviews. Grow by 100%, you get 500 million. Grow by 200%, you get 750 million. Grow by 231.6%, you get 829 million.
You'd have to write something on your server that does this, and expose it to your client JS via a local URL.
You're right in this whole thread tptacek. Thanks for explaining it.
pg posted that he was changing this to 500 back when he was experimenting with changing the display.
If you bought gold instead of stocks is 1929, you'd still be ahead of the game now in 2011. Remembering that gold is just another currency - it just keeps pace with inflation and there's no return on it long time - makes one wonder why to 'invest' at all. Just save the money. In the right currency, that is. Like gold.
"the re-use of irradiated fuel and is able to boost the usage rate of uranium materials at nuclear plants by 60 folds."

Say again? That means you use more uranium...
> A full-featured RSS reader feels a lot like a mailing list

Yep. I read all my RSS feeds in my mail client, claws mail. The feeds display on screen just like a mailing list. Plus you get the benefit that most email clients have such as deep searches, filtering, etc.
I missed that until now--interesting. Is DDG an affiliate of any other websites?
the jailbreak option is the official multitasking, the unofficial multitasking is the one provided in the cydia repository, which in my opinion is better. Multitasking along with game center is unavailable to 3G users. Which is crap, especially now that there are games coming out that are requiring gamecenter logon.
So you can touch while you touch?
Ditto that. My first programs were in assembly on the 6502, and I'm thrilled to see it getting this attention. I'm just sorry that I don't still have the KIM-1.
This kind of claims has been heard in France as far as I can remember it. I don't know how technologies differ between French technology (super-phenix) and chinese ones, but I would be warry about the claims before seeing concrete results: fast breeder super phenix was supposed to solve most issues with civil nuclear usage, and it cost a fortune without producing electricity anywhere near reasonable cost.

Thorium-based designs seem more realistic and useful, I wonder why this is not investigated more: it is more common than uranium and produces less nuclear waste than uranium-based designs. The US has a lot of it, Europe has a lot of it so it makes sense for countries like France to look at it, etc...
Gondor - effortless production Django hosting
If I lend 20 bucks to my friend, then he lends it to his friend, who lends it to his friend, that's the same kind of multiplier. The total outstanding loans is $60. I really don't get what people make a big deal out of this. I guess it's b/c they aren't economists.
That's not all the companies want/need. Paul is most likely one of several investors for each company he invests in, probably through convertible notes which are becoming "the norm": http://paulgraham.com/superangels.html
> "With the new technology, China's existing detected uranium resources can be used for 3,000 years,"

Another failure to consider that energy demands grow pretty much exponentially.
History is written by the winners.

You don't get reminded about the 50m valuations that got paid for companies that fizzle and die.

Hindsight is 20/20.
Marissa Mayer on Google’s Failed Groupon Bid
Doesn't work for me :-/ It shows the unstyled text. Using chrome 9 beta
Kinda scary that I see myself in that list - mostly example 1, reason 1 and 2. OTOH, it's a bit heartening to read "sometimes these people actually make better CEOs than employees" - just hard to get most people to take you seriously when you start off at the bottom (not impossible, just typically harder to do than simply getting hired in at the top).
I was more of a Diggnation fan than I am of this style of show (it reminds me of Carson Daly's new interview format), but I will say that there were some good takeaways from this episode. Especially the one about getting a sketch or prototype made as soon as you have the idea, and then showing it to someone. I have a "brilliant" (and I use the term very loosely) idea that could be prototyped in a day probably about once a month, and I usually buy up the domain name. I usually get started on the code, but I never end up finishing the prototype because the initial excitement wears off after a few days. In the few cases where I was able to actually finish a prototype and show it to someone, I was motivated enough after that to keep improving it.
https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en... makes it look like Digg lost about 750,000 daily users over the last year, in the same time Reddit added 500,000.

Obligatory disclaimer, not causation, FSM pirates vs global warming correlation silliness.

Still, instructive to see how quickly you can destroy your own brand and boost a competitor.
Cool. You said something about adobe cirrus on the FAQ. Can you explain more how it works?
Sloppy arithmetic proves useful for computer chip
Might be able to peel out the BCD stuff from the 6502 to free up a little additional space and approach communication between cores kinda like the "handshake bus" GreenArrays chips use: http://greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB003-100822-...
Snarky answer: It's only great for those at the top.

I should prefix this by saying

There are two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about, and the ones that nobody uses.

This applies equally to governments.

The merits of different economic and governmental systems is a little offtopic here, but I'd suggest browsing some wikipedia pages for some alternate opinions:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism#Criticism_of_capitalism

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism#Economic_th...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Economics

Etc. This won't really answer your question, but it should start to formulate a few questions in your mind, and by pursuing them, at least lead you to why others criticize capitalism, even if you disagree with them.
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html
> I've never understood the desire to...

My friend drives me crazy whenever he uses that phrase. He says stuff like: "I've never understood why people like kettle chips." - while I'm eating kettle chips!
Sounds condescending. Yes, I am crazy for eating kettle chips. I make no sense whatsoever.
Embedding Lisp via Lua
pretty cool! hope it comes out well
I use it all the time, primarily for messaging applications like gTalk, Facebook Chat, AIM, and Skype.

I also enjoy when Facebook alerts me when friends check in nearby.
Cancer test that can spot one cancer cell in a billion moves closer to real use
I like to think of it as refining the "wheel". In some cases, it's about the visceral experience of having built a "wheel". Not all creations are a function of utility.
"I am not saying that Google is actually doing it, but it is scary someone has the capability to do it"

Uh, eddieplan9, you know that ISPs not only have this data but also your identity? Or that some ISPs sell that data to metrics companies? Here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/03/isps_selling_cl/

It's always strange to me that people worry about Google, when ISPs have a superset of the data that Google sees, plus your identity.
Yes, sorry I was unclear. There are always other investors.
iPad I think... see OP's response to another reply.
Not quite as simple as business vs. leisure, but I agree that the only reason they'd chose Dec10/Jan10 not Dec10/Dec09 is to make the stats look more impressive.
True E-Mail Filtering Comes To iOS
Loved this article. Thank you for sharing.
Not only does Safari work, it uses this user agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10"
There ought to be a browser plugin for the paranoid... surely someone must have tried to make one?
Here's the inevitable Twitter cripple-fight between me and Dan:

http://bettween.com/tqbf/dakami/Jan-03-2011/Jan-04-2011/desc

Here's what I think happened:

* Dan wrote this DNS proxy thing for DNSSEC (which, don't use DNSSEC, it's evil) called "phreebird".

* Phreebird uses libevent, which tends to produce zippy fast servers, so Dan benchmarked it and found TCP was faster than UDP.

* But Dan made a bunch of mistakes with libevent and, in fairness, BSD sockets in general; in particular, he only events the read side of the conversation --- his writes block. Since the socket buffers on the TCP side are spread out across a bunch of sockets, and there's only one UDP socket buffer, the UDP socket blocks a lot.

Dan says that when he says TCP is "faster", he means "it gets better throughput, even though it may not get better latency". Now, I think "latency vs. throughput" is a refuge for scoundrel arguments, but just to make sure, I checked, and if you wail on Google DNS with a TCP connection, you cannot in fact clear 1000 queries faster than if you firehose it with UDP. This just makes sense, since TCP has congestion control overhead and strict in-order delivery and UDP doesn't.
"That said, finding the next Google and buying a 1% stake is my current billion dollar plan :)"

Facebook, Google etc.. did not go through incubators and they were not started by "established entrepreneurs". If you are looking for a 1% stake in the next google do you think that your preference toward companies that go through incubators will cause you to miss the next big thing?
Paul Buchheit Looks Back At His First Years As An Angel Investor