skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest change is in the volume of applications. We've dealt with it by getting more partners, and relying more on alumni reviewers.

BTW, Harj acts as a catch-all only for the late applications. He reads on-time applications just like the rest of us.

I don't know yet what effect the Ronco/Yuri announcement will have. It probably won't change how we rank applications.

All the other new YC-like organizations don't currently affect what we do at all, that I can think of. A while ago we complained because some of them were giving people exploding termsheets that expired before the recipients had a chance to come to their YC interview, but that practice seems to have stopped. Now everyone seems to coexist peacefully.
Want More Traffic? Fix Your Product
Excellent. Thanks Google, you have just saved my sanity.

So can I disable the chrome plugin now? Will it remember the sites I have already blocked?
Rare malware targets routers running Linux
I don't think it's my responsibility to ensure third-party companies' business models work. I have a TCP pipe open to a remote web server; however I manipulate the data after it has come out of that TCP pipe is up to me, providing I don't violate copyright etc. Trying to prop up businesses in spite of economic forces - free-riding in this case - is usually pointless. Economic forces are too powerful; it's a waste of effort. It's better to work on more sustainable models that aren't as weak.
If you were interested in funding a single applicant, but only if they had a co-founder, would you reach out and tell them that or would you just toss the application in the reject pile?
Only if they've been burned so many bridges that they can't do further work for the firms they've worked with in the past.
> Being able to disappear/discard history has significant downsides, too.

Yes and no. You can remove something from history if all holders of the copies agree with that. You can't forcefully remove anything from anybody's history if they don't actively cooperate.

So no malicious data loss possible, but an agreed-upon cleanup is.

Nb., in SVN only a central repo holds the full history. Should the admin remove some changeset, there's no way to check, or prove, that it ever was there. That is a (formal, legal etc) problem in certain situations. With Git, once you've fetched a changeset, it's there, all yours (till you explicitly remove it).

In SVN, should a malicious blackhat break in and add backdoor to code in a central repo, noone will notice. In Git, correctness and consistency is ensured courtesy of SHA1.

In Git and in SVN you can alter history. In Git, it's either `everybody agrees' or `somebody notices something went haywire because changeset chain doesn't match'. In SVN, it's `I trust the central repo with everything, fingers crossed'.
When you saw others not using Lisp and matching your productivity, you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought. The egotistical part is ignoring other possible explanations. Maybe those people are just really smart, and don't need all those nice Lisp features to help them think. (I personally benefit a lot from macros helping me think.)
All hail Apple's remarkable machine (and we're not talking about iPad 2)
True enough, but conversely if such a system were already the norm, people might say 'I can't imagine just leaving a job and severing all ties, not caring who replaces me, keeping no stake in the future of the workplace/company I put so much heart&soul into.'
Besides, this is some high quality stuff. This is real hacker news.
FLA to HTMl5 is not flash in the iphone. Was this written by a 10yr experience flash developer?
How about a bunch of us pay $5 to do that? Kickstarter project?
Actually I had 2 co-founders. The trouble was that we eventually run out of money and they quit. I stayed. But I was forced to start a construction company in order to make some money and I grew it from $0 to 500k in sales. But damn it! I'm a programmer! I want to write a software. I really think that if you're seeking for exceptional people than you should give a chance for exceptional single founders too under some conditions, of course.
I will take the remote kill power that google has anytime over the restrictions by the apple store.
"Tenacity is about holding on to the goal, not to the path."
Great insight. I've met Perry and have to hand it to them for sticking it out and fighting in a very tough space.
http://covestor.com (Perry's startup)
Once McK consultants reach a certain level, they tend to work with the same clients over and over again.
this is pretty amazing. i love how you've maintained the power & simplicity of a physical whiteboard.
Python in your Browser
You don't mention the amount you got, but I suspect it's much more than I ever got or currently earn (which is a lot for me (19, always been unemployed)) but I feel this line relates to me:

"there was no sense of ownership on the expensive items"

This is something that I absolutely hate. I have money I don't feel I deserve because it wasn't through hard work and because of this when it comes to buying something I don't think "I have to work x hours for this, is it going to return enough value to me that I am willing to work x hours for this?" as I do when I earn money, I think "I have money why not?" and this really causes problems. I bought an iPhone a few days ago because they seem cool, I already own a nexus one that works perfectly fine, but because I didn't invest any time into buying it I don't really care for it.

Humans are weird...
The point here is to know your friends. The ones you have had good times with, and that might have been a cause of your success. They certainly deserve it. You are also going to give a tiny portion and it's going to be a loan/investment.
Wow. Can't believe how quickly this was added to Google Search, rather than it remaining a Chrome Extension for a long time. Glad to see it, though!
OT: Followed the books link. The author seems like a pretty shady character. Got his wife to write a glowing Amazon review of his book, under a misleading name.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2PELDZ9QQX0C3/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt...

Makes me wonder how he came into that money he mentioned at the start of the Billion Dollars post...
More than once I've heard the sentiment from (independent) managers that people focused on salary and raises tend to be less than great as developer/engineers.

Probably to some degree they were feeding me a line of BS (subtly suggesting that I not negotiate aggressively), but sometimes knowing the personnel in the departments there was probably some truth to it too.
I see a ?s2011 at the end of that URL. Has this document changed at all from when you originally wrote it two years ago?
I would also love to see SIP connectivity for Google Voice. That said, the discussion seems to center around the if, and not the why. I suspect that the reason that Google hasn't offered SIP support already is regulatory:

Some time ago, AT&T accused Google of violating telecom regulations by blocking access to certain high cost numbers[1]. Google was able to defend against the accusation by pointing out that they did not actually provide a telecom service, as usage of Google Voice required a normal phone line[2].

I suspect that if (once?) Google provides SIP support, this distinction can no longer be made. What would be the difference between Google Voice and any other SIP provider?

[1]: http://www.att.com/gen/public-affairs?pid=14048&goback=g...

[2]: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/09/response-to-a...
If the spammers and content-farms were the Empire, this would be like blowing up the Death Star. Brilliant.
If they baked the server's public key into the device and encrypted data with that, then only the server would be able to access the raw card data. This would prevent the device from being useful for anyone but Square. It may not be worthwhile to do so, but it certainly isn't the illusion of security if your concern is accessing the raw data.
The codec is still exactly the same, they released a new SDK.
On Twitter, no one can hear you scream
We do accept exceptional single founders. We've funded several of them. If you're so determined that you started a successful construction company, you could be one.
all the projects I observed in the telecoms world seemed to have a senior developer doing nothing but merging images for the duration of the project.

Envy had a few pathologies, but I think there were pathologies in the projects as well.
Task Aware Reminds You To Get Things Done When You’re Nearby
Since I do not leave particularly super-smart comments as patio11, jacquesm or edw519 do, just remember this username.
Pffft. Real men just implement everything in NAND gates.
Ask HN: What are all the cool hidden features of HN?
I recently found about http://news.ycombinator.com/classic which only includes posts from long standing/high quality users.

I think the only way to get to is is directly entering news.combinator.com/classic into the address bar. What other hidden features of HN do you know about that are like this?
Seems like this correlates well with the red/blue spectrum of voting preferences.
I'd be nice to see those two data sets visualized together.
Dropbox Mobile: Less Secure Than Dropbox Desktop
Have you ever had a situation where you had to negotiate multiple offers? How did you negotiate to get the highest possible offer from each?
Surely you would reconsider for $10,000 per day?
I'd guess the only change was to change the reference from 4 partners to 6.

Footnote 2 sounds a little stale.
Could you maybe share some posts in which you've described your previous self-employed successes? Anything which gives readers an idea of how you went about creating a business would probably be of interest to HN readers. Even if it's only a moderately profitable life-style business, it would still give ideas to those who want to take the path less traveled.
I am certain that disciplined sleeping habits had a lot to do with it: absent the discipline, I would have often gone to bed around two or three in the morning, gotten less sleep -- or less quality sleep -- and, were I to have maintained this haphazard schedule, would have never been able to have set my biological clock to the necessary 10-6 sleeping schedule required for the three days of the exam itself. Beginning at 8AM, we had to be there by 7-730 or so, and I had to allow time for an adequate (light) breakfast.

Obviously I didn't mean to exclude the value of the actual studying, I'm just saying that studying -- without proper sleep and sleeping schedule -- would have lead to physical and mental and fatigue. And the nature of the bar exam material makes it virtually impossible to adequately perform on a sleep-starved mind.
Great to see a conference focused on self funded startups. Nice idea guys I hope it is a success and better still if I can be there.
Credentials don't mean too terribly much unless you're looking at a star who has hit multiple home runs. Sure, their advice is great because you know there is some well-earned experience in it, but that doesn't automatically make everyone else useless. I don't like separating people between winners and losers. There is so much valuable insight to gain from people who haven't succeeded yet and those who have flat-out failed, if you only listen to winners, you're only getting part of the story.

My friend works at a bar so I go in there twice a week for lunch. I've been going for years so I've gotten to know most of the staff. When I ask them what their plans are for the future, no one says to be the best waiter around. These people get looked at as waiters, but that is not how they view themselves. They are in-transit, they are on their way.

When I look at someone like Sebastian, I see someone who is articulate, intelligent, and genuinely helpful to people around him. I like those qualities and that makes me at least willing to check out what he has to say. Other people have different priorities and that is fair. But I'd rather look at the person rather than just the body of work because behind every great success is someone who was a nobody, perhaps even your waiter.
Build a simple web crawler with Scala and GridGain
Review of new iPad competitor - the Mead 100
IIRC, the phone stack live completely outside of Symbian itself (I'm not sure how this looks in something like Android). So each vendor attempting to deploy a phone would have to provide their own telephony stack... I worked on at least two memorable projects where they just couldn't make that work.

Now Nokia has put out hundreds of models of S60 phones, each largely sharing components. I would imagine that their telephony layer was rock solid. I have no idea if the assertion in the article is true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. Nokia has always "gotten" the phone side... it's the UX side of a smartphone that has always vexed them.
Great article. It is easy to get caught up in the chasing the best presentation, but if you don't have a great product and the information to support it no one will listen.
Ask HN: Where have you found your startup colleagues (friends)?
I have a startup idea and I don't want to work on it alone. I miss analysis, discussion with someone who has same opinions, but different point of view etc. The problem is I just don't know anybody who would like to work on it with me or just discuss about it in private with skills I need (programming, startup awareness). How did you find your programming friends and colleagues in your startup? I don't mean hiring, but a friend.

It's not as funny as it used to be at the beginning after a while when you work alone. So the question is? Where did you find your programming, startup friend?

For those of you who would like to work with me on a project which in final stage will work with search engines and affect daily internet experience of a internet user (search experience, bookmarking much more different as we know it now) you can always send me an e-mail or contact me via GTalk. I'm 21 years old programmer who loves to hack in Python and use Django,jQuery for the web stuff. That's why I prefer people with Python/Django, jQuery skills.

Anyway, I'm still glad for each opinion and advice.
I think it is great that they have picked a fight with a competitor.
AOL Will Cut Up to 900 Jobs as CEO Armstrong Integrates Huffington Post
Just as an FYI, you're violating state and federal laws.

Not kidding.
You almost seem like you are setting up Ted Kaczynsky = Richard Stallman. We have anti-tech, lives in cabin, and extremely dogmatic.

Perhaps next we will have GPL with logic bombs sent via email...

Yeah, it was a joke. Still,seriously any strongly dogmatic organization will exhibit obvious inconsistencies of common sense, while holding to the logic they ascribe to.
I was a Quicksilver junkie for a bit, but these days Spotlight covers the majority of what I need and works on any Mac.

Also notable - Quicksilver and Alfred still appear terrible at explaining WHY you would want to use them.
Surprisingly became a cluster overnight. From a Dell Mini 9 netbook on Debian, i'm controlling a Debian media center, android build scripts on another Debian box, connected to two android devices, and the Mac is on the network too, running some FFT stuff for my radio hobby, and they all have shared access to the NAS and some lighting controls. I like to think this evolved all out of need or something, and that I'm not overdoing it on equipment, heh.
Does getting the interview, but being rejected, in a previous cycle hurt an applicants chances subsequent times?
We wouldn't want someone to get a cofounder just for our sake. We want them to want to themselves. And if they wanted to and could, they already would have. So there wouldn't be any point in telling anyone to go get one.

When we fund single founders, we usually suggest they try to find cofounders if they can. But we can't force them to, and not all do.
Ironically, $40 (the price which is set initially) is the highest (average) price at which Square is cheaper than VeriFone.
> you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought

No, What I concluded was that Lisp might not give other people as much leverage as I thought it would.

> Maybe those people are just really smart

You can't have it both ways. If they're really smart but nonetheless choosing not to use Lisp then there's probably a good reason.
I'm a single founder with an idea and a very early mvp with no traction but an idea on how it could be positioned/modified to be an interesting startup in a pretty hot area. If it moved forward (through YC or elsewhere) i have a team that i could put together that i think could then really move it forward.

Have you ever said 'we like you, and we think the idea has potential... put the team together and we'll back ya'?
fangs dripping with tiger blood!
Show HN: Kind of Street View within buildings
You can; it's called "yearly performance review".
That's some nifty navigation you've got going on there.
Farmville Creator Worth $1 billion
What do you think of our new team page? (type "dance" for party mode)
People have cell phones with cameras - just take a picture. Nobody would think it strange that they have a cell phone in-hand while walking around.

What sort of encryption would you think they could do? And how much larger and more expensive would it make the reader? And where would it get enough power to perform the encryption (which MUST be asymmetric to be secure, or the key can be extracted from the device)? They'd lose all semblance of interoperability between devices, add a battery, add significant cost, and all to fight a bogus claim and do nothing to prevent someone from buying a standard, unencrypted card reader that isn't under fire.
Watch Seth Priebatsch Launch LevelUp & A Couple Things to Think About
Microsoft’s Ballmer: Xbox, cloud computing can help energy crunch
Is that a criticism? TheDailyWTF is a big site - some stories feature incompetent women, while most have incompetent men. Big whoop.
>The idea is the person who's desperate for money is more likely to provide a cheap service, while the person who's not is more likely to provide a top notch service, because he has more respect for himself and would never want to be caught delivering garbage.

huh. see, my thought is always "We're the phone company, we don't care because we don't have to." I know many people go through great pains to avoid dealing with the phone company. Do you use AT&T DSL? I use sonic.net. I mean, yeah, T owns the layer1, but the whole experience is quite a bit more pleasant when I don't have to deal with the T.

I've heard some people explain that companies, generally speaking, prefer to deal with other companies that are similar in size; It makes sense to me, at least in cases where I expect non-automated customer service.
Sure, always consider the source. Then again, considering the content, I read: You don't make much money from ads on a blog, and you can often get more money out of a deal by asking for it. You don't have to be an SV baller to convince me of that.
It's like turning down someone because you're taken. It goes from nods to nudges pretty quick.
No, that would help the process but the process doesn't have to be frictionless nor without transaction costs. It just takes a little longer to transition, but you should still be able to see the process in motion.
Thanks for stealing my idea.

Jerk.
Have Startups Become a Fetish?
I think you mean payment processor. Verifone (and its systems) are actually the gateway.
> Yes and no. You can remove something from history if all holders of the copies agree with that. You can't forcefully remove anything from anybody's history if they don't actively cooperate.

These features also make it very easy to make mistakes with your own local repository, and propagate those mistakes upstream (even if they can then be detected and resolved), which was the original poster's point, as I recall.

> In SVN, it's `I trust the central repo with everything, fingers crossed'.

In reality, this isn't an issue for organizations, and decentralization introduces a considerable amount of complexity that confuses most users. Businesses already rely on the correctness of centralized resources and have straight-forward processes to monitor and maintain them -- be it accounting data, a centralized CA, their corporate directory and payroll system, or SCM.

Ignoring the fact that this level of validation largely unnecessary -- if I were going to modify subversion to institute better validation of data, I would implement PKI signing of commits, not decentralization of the repository. Git has some support for this, but honestly this is not very high on the list of most organization's priorities, and largely only matters more for open source projects, if at all.
> Your second paragraph about accomplishments.

What I imagine is troubling to most is your claim to entrepreneurship skill, but your lack of anything derived from it. 2009 and 2010 were both losing years for you. June 2010 you only had 9k in the bank (related post about your goals for the next few years).

Especially since this community is based squarely on entrepreneurship, I think "money talks, bullshit walks" is especially relevent to the typical HN user.

Also, probably not the same for most people, but I do not understand much about your first paragraph filled with many extra details that don't excite me (full ride to umass, 65k this year, paid cash for everything in Boston, etc). I dont think that explains who you are (well, some might say braggart) or what you're about.

I have never met you, but I know many users here have and every single one vouches for your credibility. That is something I believe in.
Sure. Actually, I'd like to write on business more, but I find the quality of writing on business already is pretty high. I try to cover uncharted ground with my writing, but a lot of my stories are pretty straightforward and mundane.

Like, I once hired a sales guy on salary with no commission. I recommend that you don't do that. He would work pretty hard, but after he got a sale then... nothing would happen for like a week or two, it's like he was "done" - or something. But anyways, that's commonly known and understood, writing about it is just reinventing the wheel. For sales people, pay them mostly on results if possible, not on base compensation.

If you ever have anything specific I can help you with, drop me a line - I'm pretty open to people reaching out to me, much moreso than average I think. I take a lot of questions, spend a lot of time with people to lend a hand. I try to do that for entertainment time instead of surfing the net or playing games or watching tv - so if you ever have specific questions or I can help you, drop a line. If I have experience, I'll share it on what you're working on. If not, I can try to call some people I know and see if they know. So yeah, drop a line if there's specific questions and I can help.
This is HN. Anybody who works for a big corp is evil. Anybody with an MBA is evil. Anybody who is over 30 is evil. Anybody who goes to an Ivy league is evil. Anybody who does management consulting or finance is evil.

Which part of that did you miss?
It's actually odd. I've had pretty decent windfalls come my way a few times and after it happens, all the crap I'd wanted so desperately while I was broke, suddenly wasn't that important. Case in point: I found a blue '69 Chevrolet nova at a pawn shop for $3,000. If I was broke, I'd have stayed awake at night dreaming about that car and "saving up" for it. Yet I had more than enough at the time to buy it outright, and prepay all the fees it'd need for the next year. But I looked at it and had no desire at all to get it. Same thing happened with a luxury watch I was looking at. REALLY wanted it when I couldn't get and once I could my attitude was "I don't need to spend $8,000 on a watch." I guess when my big one comes, I'll be ok. Just my $0.02 on the subject.
The value of the Newton to iOS is not in shared technology (obviously, that is next to nothing), but in what Apple may have learned about the market. That is probably impossible to quantify in any way.