skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree with everything said here. The "being poor will make them work harder" might apply to other groups of people but the YC company founders are already working as hard as possible -- they are motivated to succeed and do their best.

With 3 founders this $150k is now enough for them to go through their cycle and go "ramen" level for another 6-12 months depending on the costs beyond food/rent of their idea.

Assume they need to start raising money 3-6 months before being out of cash and this gives them a good amount of time to do 100% product work then work with folks on funding without the pressure of "having to get the round done in a week or we can't make rent". With the ability to move the funding along at a reasonable pace some of the members can focus on still building product while one person leads the effort as well.
Oracle owns the trademark name 'Hudson' and so they'd be able to exert a degree of control over the community that they weren't okay with. This vote is the result of a proposal to rename to 'Jenkins,' so they could get out from under the thumb of Oracle.
I forget where I read it but I'm pretty sure as part of their education they have to learn a foreign language. I think they mentioned something about this on vbs.tv they had a special called Vice Guide to North Korea http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-... Where they traveled around and filmed for a few days.
GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring
Not to nit pick, but he was describing the iOS and iPad experience, and not a Mac or OSX. I would say the OSX experience is closer to Windows than the iOS experience. He very well might have had similar prompts if he were using OSX.
Interesting idea.

I'd work on the design a little. The not-in-use buttons (by default, 'Login' and 'Register') look a little bare. How about putting an arrow frame or light green square over them (when not in use). That will help to break up the giant green block.

The text itself could also use a little work.

I would probably cut out the ads too -- I can't imagine that many people would click on them, and their presence drags down the rest of the design. You probably won't make a ton of money from this, so think of it as a marketing tool to advertise yourself, not a way to make a few bucks a month.

Other question:
I'm curious as to how long you've been teaching yourself, and what previous programming experience you have? I'm currently teaching myself Ruby (with little-to-no programming experience) in order to launch a start up.
The offer was just made to them last night.

Actually, the TC article says many of them signed papers at the offer meeting itself.

I understand the offer sounds fantastic, but surely they'd want some advice first?

Obviously they didn't, but it seems a little rash.
They're storing the image off in the...
didn't they have reporters/producers that were so close to insurgents that it was difficult for the U.S. Military to separate where journalism ended and where terrorism began?

The US military has killed a lot of journalists and photographers from many different news organizations around the world. These killings are often not well reported because many of the journalists are Arab stringers and the public and news organizations aren't too interested when someone besides white pretty-boy journalists die, but you can certainly find out about them online. I have seen zero indication that Al Jazeera is any worse in this regard than other major media presence in Iraq.

I believe it was because that I figured that any network owned by a bunch of dictators from the Middle East wouldn't have my best interests, or the interests of the average citizen, in mind.

I don't know how to understand naivete this extreme. I mean, in America, we don't have state run media. We have media that is extremely close to the government [1]. And we have media that was uncritical in the face of a government that started a war for no reason that exterminated a million people. Now, if any of our media expressed some sorrow for their failure to do their job in 2002-2003, or even remorse at the million corpses their failure abetted, that would be one thing.

[1] http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/04/21...
>Shouldn't you be able to communicate any idea for less than $20k?

Not if you're making hardware...well, not all hardware, anyway. Was Wakemate able to get off the ground with 20k?
Self consuming
A lot of people are already stating that most of the mess documented in this post is not necessarily the fault of Windows 7. The OEM is at fault for not installing current versions of Java and Flash. The OEM is at fault for installing Norton crapware instead of a decent antivirus. The software developers are at fault for producing a buggy game, etc. This is all true.

BUT a non-technical user will not know any of this. They will see all of this as the experience they had using Windows 7. If Microsoft cares about the experience users have on Windows 7 they must prevent OEM providers from shipping it in this condition.
I would guess that a few will buy Aeron chairs, but most will either extend their runway or accelerate their growth depending on where they are in the product development cycle. I suspect that it will be a huge net positive because it will oostpone the distractions of fundraising for YC companies by several months or years. It also allows YC's investors to spend more time focused on other topics besides fundraising at the critical first stages. With 150k in hand, technical founders are likely to be more able to delay bringing on the business guy and more able to attract business guys when they do need them.
Yeah I know - probably little ARM chips are light enough and cheap enough to do the image processing shown, on-board, although whether that was actually done live or added after in the video, who knows.
That sounds pretty positive actually. I'm glad that it's working out for you. My impression was looming disaster, I was wrong. :P
San Francisco and Los Angeles have far more in common with each other than either does with Fresno, or Bakersfield, or the far north like Yreka.
"Researchers won’t be able to look at the data, but they will be able to dump their algorithms in and have the box spit out results, which the researchers can then use to refine their hypotheses."

I may be thick, but I'm not sure how much value there's going to be if researchers can't get access to the data. Anonymized data would still be more useful than a black box. I can think of some general things that can be tested, but it still seems like this will be an uphill battle for people wanting to use it.

But... I'm not a maths/algorithm guy, so perhaps this will still be useful to people.
Oracle really hasn't done a very good job of managing open source communities and contributors. It makes one wonder if distancing their properties from open source is intentional. I can't imagine they've been honestly trying to make things work, given their heavy-handed approach.
I was curious about the potential for returns so I considered a scenario: the successful YC companies take series A investment at an average $10 mm pre-money valuation (which is reasonable for a YC company starting off with $150k), and no series B is ever needed before exit. This gives the original investors a 1.5% stake at the time of exit.

In order to return the $6 mm there needs to be $400 mm of exits.

But I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the successful companies wouldn't take additional funding past series A. More likely, any successful company would also take series B funding. Then we'd need to see ~$500 mm - $800 mm to break even.

My guess is that these investments aren't really intended to be profitable. I would guess that they're instead a gateway into future deals that will be profitable.
When YC takes developers and mentors them towards a first version in an aggressive timeframe with limited resources, it's encouraging innovation. When someone comes in and gives a bunch of company they know nothing about $150k each, it's called having more money than sense.
In short: the article bashes Windows 7 because of the terrible experience of managing security, OS updates and software updates.

The main thing Windows lacks is nice package management for external non-MS software and updates. Linux has been great at this from the word go. Steam did this for games on Windows, centralizing updates and keeping everything running smoothly. Apple's new App Store for OS X provides one place where all software you buy through the store can be simultaneously updated. Years ago I hoped Google Pack would expand to a full software distribution system to manage all this complexity for users, but it never happened.
And this is why Apple won't license their OS to hardware OEMs.
Accurate quibble, my apologies.
I agree, but then again I've always been a monarchy-sympathizer.
"cloud-5"? Should have been "cloud-9".
Yea, the drug industry is another one full of evil.
No Automatic Updates for Java or Flash on Mac OS X ...
I believe what you’ll see are more YC companies launching with bigger, more complete businesses. Notice I said businesses and not ideas, or features.

This is probably the real benefit of the 150k. Sure, the money will help to alleviate rent-worries, but it also lets founders tackle serious (more expensive) business problems.
But they aren't investing in companies they know nothing about. They're investing in companies that have made it through the YC sieve. If nothing else, they know that about them.

These are investors with a large number of connections in the silicon valley world. My assumption is that they have some extremely well-informed spreadsheets about past YC company performance.
pg, you've mentioned that you're happy with the development and think it's a boon for YC companies. Did Milner/DST approach you before hand to gauge your interest, or did they essentially do this independently?
I think your logic is generally right, but I'd say in addition to being a gateway into future deals, it's also a guarantee that they'll be in for any truly huge wins.

There's a solid chance that the next Google or Facebook-level company will come through YC, and this deal means they'll get a piece of it.
Except that your average Android user doesn't care about permissions (or even knows what they mean)...
The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
http://www.idc.ac.il/tecs/
It isnt just private repos. I'm seeing it on various public repos on github.
They also sometimes use people who don't know what's going on as the carrier (e.g. children).
Yuri Milner definitely guaranteed his spot in future articles about the '10 bubble.
The same concept can apply to web applications in general, not just iPad.
You're just noticing the difference between a 1000 year old aristocracy and a burgeoning one.

Aristocracy always begins with a way to define the elite. Over time social mobility will decline and people will start to notice that it's mainly the children of elite who become elite. Eventually this will lead to the belief that only the children of elite can be elite. Once this belief is entrenched, it's natural for the new reality to be codified in law.

Do remember that even in England there was social mobility. If you performed a great service for King and Country you would be granted land and title.

Social mobility exists in all societies. Just some more than others. In America we are observing the emergence of a natural aristocracy - a story as old as history itself.
Not only that. Jewish people are not the only Semites. Arabs are Semites too. The word anti-semitic has totally lost all of its literal meaning, much like the word hacker.
>Entrenched aristocracies happen when you have old money that looks down on the "nouveau riche".

That's not the cause of aristocracy, that's the effect.
Also, to watch things on demand, there is a youtube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AlJazeeraEnglish
Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Jewish, but some can be. Just because someone claims an anti-Israel group is anti-Jewish, don't assume that they would whitewash all Israel critics as anti-Jewish.
I don't think there's any issue withing using the same blue. It makes me think Facebook as well which isn't terrible, but probably not the first though you want someone thinking when they visit your site (It doesn't look like you do much work with Facebook). Try a darker blue or a different style to the header bar (rounded corners, slight gradient, etc).
Chromium Notes: Moonlight vs IcedTea
maybe i took "true" too literally.
>Do you think Americans are that stupid that they won't see antisemitism? Do you think we're little children who can't think for ourselves?

Well that's the thing, perhaps those who have had the opportunity to carry Al Jazeera decided not to on the prediction that it would not be watched, and decided to avoid any financial loss by not taking the risk.

>Plus: when Al Jazeera started, the staff was almost entirely made up of BBC MiddleEast service people. So while they worked for BBC, they were unbiased; but the moment they started working for AJ, they became biased and completely untrustworthy!!

No one ever said the BBC was immune from being biased. You're right, it's unlikely that the same people automatically went from being non-biased to biased, so if Al-Jazeera is biased, that just means the BBC had been biased all along.
NorCal would get the worse deal, as it would be stuck with the huge and mostly economically useless part of the state between Oregon and Napa/Sonoma. In addition to the entertainment industry, SoCal would get all the farms and oil fields.

A better option for California would be to secede from the rest of the United States. California could cut taxes and afford to pay its public service workers their inflated salaries (and then some), if it wasn't bailing out the rest of the country to the tune of $50B each year.
Ask HN: should you be 37Signals if there is no Microsoft?
By that I mean: if there is no adequate solution to the problem you're solving, should you still aim to be super simplistic? The market I'm targeting doesn't actually have an adequate solution. There is no overly complex project management tool for me to streamline and simplify.

My potential customers are also essentially users of both; the simple and the complex/feature rich. As such, I'm worried that I will make my product too simple, alienating my "professional" customer base in the process. Ditto for vice versa.

My current thinking: be both super simple and feature rich; just package them as separate products. I.E. Basic Edition at $25/month, and Pro Edition at $49/month. Thoughts?
are you saying you can watch bbc online?
Na i'd take that money any day. First it's good to have Yuri Milner and Ron Conway on your team.

43 startups @ 150k is only 6.45million, which is typical funding for one venture capital company. Except it's diversified into 43 of them, so that if one of them advances to a series C, they can probably get it all back.

I guess the only problem would be if you try to get a Series A from DST, then you might possibly not get an ultra high valuation, but then again, DST seems to be throwing money at startups after their lustful experiences with Zynga/Groupon/Facebook

This just toughens up the next round of YC applications, which is a bummer. But i'm really interested to see how this will work out.
You are reading the comment too literally. It was more of an "FYI" than a rebuttal.
The largest account (Mashable) on Quora is also banned
Even if it makes a lot of sense in hindsight, it's still a pretty radical departure from what's been done before in the funding game. It certainly wasn't obvious to everyone that it was coming.

These terms are a lot more entrepreneur-friendly than what's been the norm, and if they weren't so friendly, it wouldn't necessarily be a no-brainer to take it, and this wouldn't be such a big deal.
If one thinks the market is going to go down and wants to hedge seems another alternative is to go long the dollar like UUP instead of GLD, since the dollar is inversely correlated with the market. A higher dollar makes investing in US companies more expensive for foreign investors.
I think you think 37signals competes with Microsoft. 37Signals thinks it competes with email.
AppFigures is definitely one of those must tools for an iOS publisher.
I think you missed the point- he meant that the fact that you were able to immigrate probably means that you're not the average person. He's right- immigration is much easier if you're rich, smart or both.

Also, I'm offended by your last sentence. You've obviously not immigrated to america recently. I have, and it wasn't easy, nor was it cheap.
PBS is a better fit to be compared to BBC. You can find low-brow entertainment based news in the UK and every other country with a free media. It's not like you can't access quality news in the US and Al Jazeera has to swoop in and save the day.
I've definitely rammed it into a wall or some other barrier a couple dozen times and it's still ok. I'm sure I'll end up having to replace a blade at some point but I hear this is relatively straight forward.
I will pay delicious $100 for hierarchical tagging
One aspect is resources. Do you have the resources to put in 50 features before you get your first feedback from an actual customer (who will provide you with their wishlist of 50 new features you'll might want to implement)?
37 complains about Microsoft all the time, so I just used them. Replace MS with any large corporation that makes "bloated" software.
Great point. I don't have a ton of resources, so it does seem easier to attack the low end first.
How to produce a better circle-map visualization
A flat tax rate, by charging a higher dollar amount to the rich person than the poor person, is still punishing success and rewarding failure, because the rich person pays a hell of a lot more for the same services than the poor person.

I propose that we charge everyone an equal dollar amount, that's surely the only way to be fair - after all, if you go out to dinner with five people and rack up a $200 bill, everyone pays $40, that's "fair".

Right?
In your model you may have neglected to consider that they'll have pro-rata rights.
Northern CA and Southern CA are completely different worlds; they have different agendas and different kinds of people flock to each one for different reasons

I have lived in SF and LA (as well as SD and some other spots) and completely disagree. The metro areas of SF and LA are nearly identical.

Generally the people who have this viewpoint are people from northern California who for some irrational, childish reason hate southern California.

West LA/SF
East LA/Oakland
Montana St./Fillmore St.
Silverlake/Mission
Palisades/Marin
Inland Empire/East Bay
Pasadena/Walnut Creek
Ventura & SB Counties / South Bay & Peninsula Counties

This list goes on. It's practically a mirror image.
Reflective essay- Back To Square One
A reflective essay will have the writer presenting a thoughtful analysis of a particular issue or topic. The manner in which the essay is written depends on the student’s knowledge of the essay type. With proper understanding this essay is possible.
"If we divide up states into homogeneous sections, pretty soon every neighborhood will be its own state."

Some science fiction writers have hypothesized about this for a while. Technology is trending towards empowering ever smaller groups to manage their affairs quite effectively, and enabling those groups to rapidly snap together with other groups on an as-needed basis. It isn't that hard to look out 50-100 years hence and ask what all these massive centralized governments are really doing for us that couldn't be done by much finer-grained bands of smaller ones. (Don't think something like every county fully a nation in the modern sense, think something more like the relation of states to the federal government, and counties doing things like perhaps buying into pre-existing health care plans or something, across a wide array of such issues.) There are days when the US government's current trend toward centralization seems downright anachronistic to me.

I recall one science fiction story in Analog where after significant advances in nanotechnology, the minimum self-sustaining unit of civilization became a single house. It was literally possible to seal off a suburban house plot and it could survive solely on the incoming solar energy and the technologies it had. After the homeowner got in some trouble with the local law enforcement, he has the bright idea of simply seceding from the nation, though various legal handwavery and appeals to the ancient question of the social contract. It was one of those interesting, thought-provoking stories that at least made me think. Yes, I am well aware of the other tradeoffs involved and how important defense and preventing the tragedy of the commons is, the point is not that this is obviously a good idea, the point is that it is not unthinkable that we may indeed be trending towards smaller polities in the future. The outcome of the battle between centralization and decentralization haven't been written yet.
> Importing the solution which contained the web site only loaded the other "actual" project in the solution, unfortunately.

That is what I had feared. It looks like Zeus will need to be tweaked to understand this type of solution file.

> I can poke at it a bit more and see if I can get more into it.

One thing you could try is opening an explorer window and then just drag and drop one of your source code folders onto the Zeus workspace panel.

Zeus will parse the structure of the folder that was dropped and add all files that if finds to the project/workspace.

> One of the first things I noticed: apparently a couple of your regexes are off in C#, for VS2008 at least.

The use of a regexp to identify functions is a Zeus feature that dates back to one of the very early versions and is no longer the primary method of identifying functions.

What should have happened is for Zeus to create a tags database for all the files in the project/workspace and it then uses that tags information to display the function list.

But in this case since the solution was not imported correctly, the workspace is empty of files. As such Zeus reverted back to the older regep approach to identify the functions.

And as you suggest, the regexp that it used is almost certain to be out of date since, it was probably written even before the time of C#.

> it would be immensely more useful to have the class browser have information about the parameters of functions.

Adding the current file (or all the project files) to the workspace should result in a lot more information being seen in the class browser.

The class browser shows the contents of the tags database and if it is not full then it means the tagger is not understanding the code, but for C# that should not be the case.
Their website is excellent. The recently acquired leaked documents, The Palestinian Papers, are fascinating reading.

http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/2011122...

And I just saw an interview with PJ Crowley about Egypt. There is no US reporter that would ever ask such tough questions as the Aljazeera interviewer. No way.

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/01/27-1