skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple of miscellaneous thoughts on this:

1. When you give titles to people, give them based on how you see peoples' places in a company being in the future, not what they've done in the past. It's incredibly common for people to be really spectacular at the earlier stages of a startup and get put in a position of authority where they start causing problems when the company scales.

2. I don't believe in people having a "level of incompetence". More common is when you give someone a promotion based on their performance in a non-management/leadership job and discover that although they are good at doing who the jobs of the people they're managing, they aren't good managers.

3. Be really careful with giving people titles that imply some kind of authority over their peers. Even the smallest bit of authority can make otherwise pleasant people turn evil.
I looked at the content and bar graph above the fold, and thought "ok, nice." Then I scrolled down and saw the rest of the graphs and thought "holy sh*t!"
I think this is the post that best gives an idea of "Why should you do YC".
I have to say, it's pretty inspiring to see that PG went to bat that hard for the Airbnb guys.
Was I the only one that kind of smiled when reading the emails from PG to Fred pitching these guys? I loved that!
I know it is the Internet and I should be used to it now but when the first two words of the title are there purely as snark to rile up fan boys, I really lose interest in the article.
Anecdotal stories in management and the startup world.
Solution: Stir it. (And check it, and also microwave less; small amounts of food may require single-digit seconds, so don't just smash the minute button.)

There's actually a number of ways to make your parenting life a bit easier if you dig past why you're getting certain bits of advice, then take action based on the underlying facts rather than the resulting "official advice" suitable for parents with an IQ of 90 (and I do not mean that as a joke in the slightest, they are real, and I don't really begrudge the official "advice givers" for the resulting advice). Cough medicine in particular was a real life-saver for us one week when I dug into why we couldn't use it. It turns out that just about the only reason not to give it to your two-year-old is that somebody else ignored the clear directions on the label and either gave them too much or used it on purpose for the sleep-inducing side effect. Solution: Don't do that.
In that case it reminds me of Netflix's strategy... your point please?
He forgot homeschoolers and climate change deniers.

So using his critical thinking skills he arrived at the accepted conclusions of mainstream society? What tremendous value he offers! He could have just told people to watch television.
Nope, same guy. Fred has written a fair bit about him before.
I have read that post and agree with him in principle, but it should be up the end user to decide if they want to use this.

As for ECB vs CBC, I recommend reading https://github.com/shadowhand/git-encrypt/issues/2 which cover both ECB and fixed salts in depth.
GetIE9.com
Life is also too short to eat crappy food.

I kid, I kid. I love in Portland, Oregon, and am jealous of your beers that are more than hops + alcohol.
For users with NoScript, that list is reduced to user agent, IP address, and the inference that none of the other tests were allowed to run.

In other words, they could make it work, but only until they enable IPv6.
Using formal methods, the only place where you have near-perfect assurance of no bugs is between the spec and the code. You can't have a bug-free spec without bug-free requirements gathering and bug-free documentation. You can't have those without bug-free natural language communication. Also, a reasonable spec for a complicated piece of software is itself a complicated piece of code. If you can prove the spec is accurate by checking it against a smaller spec, and that spec against a smaller one, until you've reduced a problem of arbitrary size (say, the Eclipse project?) down to a reasonably human-checkable spec, then you run into complexity barriers. How is it possible to rigorously specify something as complex as Chrome or Microsoft Excel in a spec compact enough that you can certify it is error-free?
"Whole Foods doesn’t stock the best salad topping of all — bacon bits, obviously — in its salad bar."

A better summary: Most things at the salad bar are 70% more expensive than on shelves. However, there are some exceptions which are much cheaper at the salad bar. The optimal salad consists of Mesclun, Olive Oil, Balsamic Vinegar, Gorgonzola Crumbles, Almonds, Dried Cranberries, Sun-dried Tomatoes, and Croutons (per the infographic included with the article), all items which cost more than $7.99/pound (the cost of a salad) on the shelves.

And a TL;DR for my summary: When buying salads, choose items which cost more per pound than the per pound price of salad.
interesting stuff

I was under the impression that YC introductions were pretty much the equivalent of "hey, here are some guys...invest in them"...but here you can see that there is a lot more pressure....bordering on begging
I'd start with BASIC. For real beginners and kids, GOTO is their friend.
http://erehweb.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/goto-considered-help...
I've told this story before on HN, but it's worth telling again.

I rented a room in L.A. using Airbnb. The owner of the room said he made $4000 in 3 months on two rooms that would have otherwise been vacant. If you're making this much money for people you've tapped into one helluva market.
Postgres seems like a good option. Thanks!
If someone still has any doubts about the value of YC, they should read this email exchange. PG is pushing for the startup as if it was his own. He genuinely wanted them (and also the VC firm) to succeed.

Great stuff.
You're really cutting to the core of their perceived value by telling them they're actually terrible at it.

Hah. I just met someone who has some money and an outsourced "team of 10, programmers plus support" in an eastern european country, yet he doesn't know enough about technology to describe things in terms other than web pages, and can't differentiate between what's a solved problem and what's still being researched at Google.

He told me that the thing he called me to talk about, he had requested of his team, and they basically told him, "Well, if you can diagram it, we can build it."

I asked him if he had someone who was technical, not an underling, who he had rapport with and could hash these things out like we just had. I suggested that if he didn't that he would benefit greatly if he could find such a person. (And that it wouldn't necessarily be me.)

I hit him with this to see his reaction, which, sadly, was to puff himself up with his sales. Wrong. I guess continuous improvement is good enough for his employees, but not good enough for him.
An excellent point, though (unfortunately) just because Linus wants the GPL to apply that way doesn't necessarily mean that it does.

As a layman, it seems entirely reasonable that you should be able to inspect the interface of a software product in order to make something compatible with it without your new product counting as a "derived work." If they had read documentation for all the functions rather than parsing the headers through a script would that have made a difference?

Put another way, I'm sure Microsoft asserts that it is impermissible to reverse engineer Windows kernel code, but that doesn't mean they have the power to stop it.
Dabble DB Shutting Down
It's interesting that in the end Airbnb raised from Sequoia, I wonder if lots of other VCs passed.

It possibly shows why Sequoia are the best.
Redis Auto-completion with Tries
Wave Disk Engine Could Be 3.5 Times More Efficient Than Combustion Engines
the most amazing thing is that it took them only 2 years to come to a stage that a VC had to write a blog regretting missing them out.
Every entrepreneur needs a "local"
I don't think calling someone an "idiot" helps them become better.
Your first stop should be to Rails for Zombies (http://railsforzombies.org/), buy Michael Hartl's book Ruby on Rails Tutorial (http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book), Learn to Program by Chris Pine (http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/) and also start learning Ruby (http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby/programming-ruby). Also, sign up to GitHub and Heroku, locate Ruby and/or Rails meetups close to you, follow the Ruby/Rails community via Twitter, podcasts, blogs. But most importantly, start building and deploying apps right away, no matter how small or trivial they may be.

Also, Sinatra (http://www.sinatrarb.com/)
I like the content, but $196 a year is more than I'm willing to pay -- it's twice the yearly cost of an "all you can eat" streaming Netflix subscription.
Drizzle goes GA, From "What If", to "What has"
The Dunning-Kruger effect is how B and C players start startups.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is how people who are involved with startups come to think you must be an "A-player" to be successful.
David Bradley Explains the Origin of Control-Alt-Delete
As far as I'm concerned, this site is like joking about nazis with holocaust survivors.
I saw Jeff Wilcox tweet a bit about this (don't lose him, he is awesome...so is David Anson). Good to hear. I love the phone and I think you guys are doing a good job.
I've been patiently waiting for them to target shared libraries, so I could use it from inside of many different VMs or/and servers, from ruby/python/jvm to apache/nginx. Frankly I just don't see a need for Go executables. What will I do with them? Run in bash?
Very cool. I wish there was a way to make the camera stick to a position or follow the car, it's pretty hard to do anything with the angle changing constantly.
If the only A player you find for a role is an asshole, keep looking -- or be more flexible in your definition of the role.

Sometimes, the problem is the definition of "asshole." For some people, this is "anyone who tells me I'm wrong, even if they do it nicely." Such people are not A players.
Yes :(
Perhaps it's more the comfort factor, but there are people who are tech savvy, but prefer IE over anything else. I have ran across countless endusers who have multiple browsers but use IE8 as their "goto" browser for normal web surfing.
The best result of all of this is clearly that IE2 gets 93/100 in ACID3. Take that, Google Chrome!
I was wondering if it would get in the way of the mythical maintenance programmers trying to figure out what our programs do and how to modify them.

This seems to me to be the point at which your idea goes strange. Why assume that maintenance programmers are interchangeable monkey-cogs with minimal understanding of software development and design? Perhaps we'd have better software if we treated maintenance and ongoing development as tasks requiring just as much, if not more, talent and knowledge and skill and practice as green field development.

(I understand that soi disant architects might disagree, but I ignore architects who don't code.)
What Linus says is impermissible is rather immaterial; he's not a lawyer. What matters is a court's interpretation of the GPL as it applies to the kernel.
Btw, is this related in anyway to Arthur?
What? He was invested in them. Do you think he wants to see them crash and burn?
What an incredible post. Thanks for sharing, pg.

YC absolutely does hustle for you like this, and it's the best kind -- genuine.
Great examples of VCs never saying no directly and of a strange insider be-terse-and-get-out-of-my-way writing style.
I stand corrected. The point of sale devices, the card association IT systems and networks, the bank IT and networks (a worldwide network that predated the 'net), the whole departments of people who support merchants, the fraud prevention measures, the training, the government and card association rules compliance--all integral parts of "the payment networks" are cost free. I should have reasoned backwards from a company's profit margins and realized that these infrastructure costs don't exist, and operating costs are an illusion. I should have also realized that the move into chip cards, the use of heavy-duty encryption, the rapid adoption of contactless payments products, the support for e-commerce in a world where identify verification can be a challenge, exposing the bank to untold risk, all are not innovations, they're just the cost-free hobbies of some rich bank persons.
Thank you for the enlightenment, you smecking genius.
I will now hang my head in shame for speaking out of turn after actually working on these systems for a quarter century and not realizing that it was so inexpensive.
This is sort of a link dump but with some clicking around you should find some good stuff. Good luck!

http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts

http://railsforzombies.org/

http://www.workingwithrails.com/

http://www.railsmentors.org/

http://blog.envylabs.com/2010/12/rails-3-cheat-sheets/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55574/learning-ruby-on-ra...

http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/10/14/stop-googling/
Thanks, I assumed you would have some sophisticated tool that you use for benchmarks against jQuery mobile etc.
As a wholly unaffiliated, self-selected, and entirely unofficial spokesperson, I'm happy to bestow this lifetime achievement award on behalf of the IOCCC.
I'd FUUUUUU on that.
The problem with parenting is sleep deprivation. And honestly, having a high IQ isn't sufficient for attention to detail, like stirring food. I know it sounds dumb, but I know prominent physics professor personally who had made a cake without eggs... and even when it came out looking funny served it and wasn't until people started eating it did they realize, "Wait... I didn't use the eggs on the counter!"

Regarding cough medicine, the issue appears to be effectiveness. Most doctors now recommend honey for babies (older than one) as it actually appears to be as effective. See: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/honey/AN01799

There have also been studies that show that cough medicine may simple have the placebo effect. Unless there are allergies or other conditions, honey just seems like the better choice.
Ars says it was iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3 - http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/03/nexus-s-beats-ip...
Yep, in fact I like this version I found earlier a lot more than the one they went with: http://www.frazpc.pl/b/275384
The GPL does not require you to make your software available free of charge. It merely states that if someone purchases software from you, that you must also provide the source code upon request.
The last time NYT destroyed a politician who had done something illegal was March 10, 2008.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07prostitution.ht...
I'd put it between the description text and above the FREE button. EDIT: It doesn't even have to be fancy. Just words are good enogh: Android, iPhone, iPad, webOS (which will come, I hope!).
the online gift economy does not have to remain limited to digital culture

www.giftflow.org (still in alpha)
How do you focus while depressed?
As many times before, I'm currently in a depression period. While I can find reasons for my depression, as years go by I'm starting to think that it's just periodic and "that's life" for me. I'm in therapy, although not taking any medications.

Many times when I am in such a period I find myself either procrastinating or, when I finally gather the willpower to work on what's important (v.s. some other non-important mind diversion), I'm unable to stay fully focused.

My question is how do you stay focused on tough periods/while depressed? It seems sad when a long investment of time (i.e. starting a business, dating someone, studying) goes down the toilet because of a downturn that I don't seem to have full control on...
TFA, shortened: internet startups focus on processing user data.

This is news?
I find Go's channels a much more natural way to express things than Javascript callbacks, so I've been using it where everybody else is using Node.
VCs often say they invest in team first and idea second but USV decided not to invest in AirBnb despite having no (obvious) reservations about the team or their ability to execute.

Does this mean that ideas are more important than investors really let on?
Tweeting about Twitter's Terms
I know some people that does. One time I installed Chrome in some friend's PC. He has used Firefox and despite he's not a technical person, he understands there is 'more' Internet than the blue E icon.

Next time I know, he uninstalled it "to save up space". It was one of the saddest days in my life.
its at such moments when your good habits are the most important. Exercise, sleep, eat well, take care of yourself
You may be thinking of Cleitus. The Diogenes and Alexander story usually ends with Alexander telling his entourage, "If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes."
WINNING Battlestar Gallactica Browser Game (trailer)
Git-Tfs – Where Have You Been All My Life
Unexpected Consequences in Iterative Software Design
I wish PG could back up my idea like that. What if.. I simply signed Paul Graham? : )
True that is. +1 for the suburban golf loving VC's - at the end of the day, they are successful for a reason.
It seems PG has utmost belief in AirBnB guys from the beginning by the way he repeatedly tries to convince Fred to invest it.

Thanks for sharing the inside story. :)
Not that I doubted it, but this shows that YC are really prepared to fight and defend your corner to help you advance. Great to read.
i THINK that by the time sequoia invested, airbnb was obviously on a roll. i could be wrong though.
Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – “node_modules” Folders
Bits Du Jour seems a little more like a software-specific precursor to something like woot (http://www.woot.com/), with a daily discounted product to buy. Groupon's difference seems to be selling discounted coupons to physical businesses, sort of a mash-up of woot and restaurant.com.
C's designers agree with you about the notation for types and declarations, which was one of the things they fixed when they designed Go.
They didn't use Safari, they used a custom-written app with an instance of UIWebView. For a variety of (purportedly security-related) reasons, UIWebView has always been slower than Safari, but it's especially pronounced in iOS 4.3, where UIWebView didn't receive any of the Nitro upgrades that Safari did.

An argument can certainly be made that UIWebView being crippled is very much a platform negative (I would agree), but the "study" is purporting to represent the speed of browsing in Safari, which is plainly false.
My basic Lisp interpreter was six pages of C, but it's really not usable; it responds to almost any program error (including searching for nonexistent variables) by dumping core. http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2007-Septe...

Darius Bacon's https://github.com/darius/ichbins is a Lisp-to-C compiler written in itself. It includes an interpreter written in C to bootstrap it — ten pages: https://github.com/darius/ichbins/blob/master/boot-terp/lump... — but the actual compiler is only six pages of Lisp.

My somewhat more performant (but less complete) Scheme-subset-to-assembly compiler is more like 30 pages: http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/sw/urscheme/

If your desert-island language is the one in which bootstrapping your high-level language of choice is the easiest, it seems like you'd probably be better off with Haskell or ML.
You still really think he did all of that only because of YC's ~6% stake in them?
I wrote a implementation of Ternary Search Trie[1] in Python and found that for insert/update/delete I could get my performance to be on the same order to one order of magnitude slower than python built in dict.

Considering that Tries offer a great base to build a flexible string matching algorithm off of I consider the prototype a success.

The author's approach to optimizing the JavaScript trie is pretty good but there are still improvements that could be made. I would be curious to see if the Ternary approach could yield with interior node collapsing (like a Patricia Trie) would yield the performance the author is looking for.

Also as @ot noted using 5-6 characters per string is too short for a Trie's strengths to really shine. They work better as the average length of string increases.

[1] https://github.com/timtadh/tst
Touch Gestures on Windows Phone 7
So, can Firefox extensions fiddle with referrer info? I think I just got an idea for a new one.
Love it, but I see 1 problem: when I see something on Facebook like: "I just bought Product X and unlocked a 10% discount for YOU", I presume it's spam. Copywriting is going to be very, very important to this.
Yeah, I think they just fascinate me, and I'm still looking for a good use for them in real life.

I haven't had a lot of cases where I was willing to tolerate errors, but I figured in a word game nobody would notice. :)

One other thing to look into if you're using eval() to parse your json data: A couple of years ago, the flickr developer blog observed that building their data structures with string.split() was much faster than parsing the json equivalent with eval(). YMMV on newer browsers.

http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/03/18/building-fast-client-...
> something like cash back or a discount.

Sounds like plain referral. To me, the key to the Dropbox system is that the referrer is rewarded with more Dropbox. This makes the recommendation more sincere. Another issue is that the Curebit referral seems to occur before customers have received the product, so they can't logically recommend it, in general.

Dropbox addresses my ethical concerns about referrals; Curebit doesn't (based on this submission).
SmartGiving Lets Your Credit Card Choose Your Charity Causes
I think one key assumption that you're missing is that it's possible to have an inferiority complex and a superiority complex at the same time. In fact, Adler believed that inferiority and superiority were two sides of the same coin. That is, people feel inferior and adjust their attitude to the outer world to over-compensate.

Steven Berglas has written a pretty good amount on this issue: http://hbr.org/2006/09/how-to-keep-a-players-productive/ar/1 ...There used to be a free version of this, but I can't find it anymore. Still, the introductory text is informative, and it's worth the $7 if this is a subject that's important to you.

To summarize though, "A Players" are often driven by an inferiority complex that constantly manifests itself as an external egotism because they're constantly trying to seek approval from others. When you work with them, your first reaction will probably be that they need to be "brought down a notch", but this is a mistake that will only make things worse. The key is helping to build confidence and show that you trust their abilities.
This is key, and arguably makes these kinds of discussions to be comparing apples and oranges. iPhone champions design aesthetic and top-down control, whereas Android champions OEM flexibility and a more open and multi-vendor compatibility. So Apple is not scrutinized enough, in my opinion, for the control being the only reason they can pull off their aesthetic. When you are trying to get multiple companies and technologies all working together, a lot more compromise has to be made for sure.
Dude, get out of there. I worked at another place that stole a lot of your developers and they all hated that place. Old media is a dying breed. Get out while you can.
Is this some sort of dark joke? If so, Too soon.
The SaveIE6 campaign was launched on April 1, 2009 and will last until April 1, 2010. A site from the geeks at Pingdom.

it's running a lot longer than it was meant to be. Just like IE6
You won me over PG. I'm applying to YC tomorrow.
Thanks for the kind words! Since the DotCloud team is furiously refreshing this page, now is a good time to ask questions and give feedback! We also have a brand new community forum: http://support.dotcloud.com/forums

Also happy to give out invites to fellow HNers!
"non-unique, non-personally identifiable" - http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/in-open-for-rlz.html