skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel in the urge of commercializing it, the builders have forgotten or wondered away from its primary goal.

So, thinking about what its goal could be
(1) Connecting professionals of same interest - to some extent it has succeeded but not fully
(2) Help recruiters find authentic talent - it has failed
(3) Help expert employees to build credential portfolio/profile that can be trusted by future employers - It could have done a lot on that front but doesn't seem to be

Some of the feature I personally used and felt frustrated because of its incompleteness:
1) Adding professional contact - for many of us, colleagues are from different companies e.g. client side team working with us on the same project. There is no relevant option to add these contacts which would say "worked together on a project"
2) Polls - Don't know what's wrong; may be many things, but never got it working as I could liked it to be.
3) Status update - why does this site need one? Have you seen a single person posting updates regularly through this feature and telling people what he is working on?
4) Travel Info - What's the point? If you are travelling to a city, what was the site expecting? People would come receive you at the airport? Or schedule a business meeting with you without any prior talks? Or plan something like that? Would you find time, if so?
5) Misused by HR people.

My observation is it tried to do many things without having a clear goal and so haven't succeeded in any of it. I am not measuring 'success' by number of active users but how well it satisfies those users with everything they want to achieve through this platform. Whether it failed or not that's a debatable question; but some focused business goals and then technically making the site 'usable' would help it a lot.

One credit that it should definitely get is trying to do something for which there is a great real-life need and no other better alternatives.
Cool idea and wonder those who use the web based system would their personal URL be something like facecash.com/mcdonalds ?

Overall its web based and my online bank account has been hacked into, thus I never do online banking through the web anymore only through bank's official iPhone app. If the banks can not keep us secure how do you plan on securing payment information entered into your system?
hmm. Then that's really contradicts this post.
Since all partners don't read all the apps, about how many applications does each partner read and each application gets read by how many partners on average?

Two more questions that are unrelated by don't merit their own thread:

There's a focus now on the maker of MinoMonsters because he's the youngest entrepreneur you've funded. Who's the oldest entrepreneur you guys have funded?

Have you ever funded entrepreneurs that are related? (e.g. parent/child, siblings, etc.)
Japan-Ticker: 20.03.2011
Not at all. Plenty of YC companies fail. The founders go on to do another startup, work at facebook/google/etc, work for another startup, or raise a family.

And also, there are plenty of non-YC companies that succeed. I've not asserted otherwise.

This is advice for you only if you're already convinced of the value of YC. If you aren't yet, there's other blog posts to cover that.
All the usual ways. We encrypt bank and credit card data, hash passwords, etc. Nothing is 100% secure but you can try your best.

The fact that we use your facial image to effectively authenticate you at the point of sale, which is the whole reason for building this POS system in the first place, makes the system a good deal more secure than anything else out there for retail transactions.
This is the specific part of linkedin that I don't get. Why do I have to make my resume open to the world? If I have something that I am realy proud of then I agree I will put a couple of sentences about it. But the whole resume?

I do see that people painstakingly keep it updatesd so I'm sure they get some value from it. It's just that I don't understand what.

Maybe not having to ever look for a job is the cause of it.
Hi guys,

I apologize. It was my mistake I was using the wrong mail.

Thanks,

Jose Vigil
RoamTouch CEO
Moving to El Paso.
I think that for the average startup your chance of success would improve in a statistically significant way but this would be really hard to quantify as if you get into YC you were probably already more likely to succeed on your own anyway.

It also depends a lot on how success is defined, in the return on investment for investors or in how it effects/improves the founders/employees lives. Getting a talent acquisition and working on something awesome at Facebook or similar could be a big success for the founders even though there is little there for the investors.
I'd second this. I have read recommendations for a lot of people but have never put any value to it. It's almost always You scratch my back, I scratch yours kinda thing which causes me to questio the credibility of the whole thing.

If a person needs to ask for such references and publicly use them to sell themselves that tells me that I probably don't want to hire them.
Personally , I am big fan of YC. However if the idea is good and execution is great , with or without YC , you will succeed .
The reality rewards action.
Well-written article. Thanks for sharing!
On one hand I admire Groupon's tenacity to do their own thing when they flipped Google the bird for their acquisition offer, but realistically, I seriously can't see how they can survive for another 2 years tops.

Groupon claims their database will give them a lead based on consumer preferences, but it's not like Facebook and Google don't have a clue either. I give Groupon a very slight edge here, but not enough to warrant long-term stay.

Groupon's huge overhead with their sales force may be their strength now, but if the recession has taught us anything, it will cripple them in the future.

Also, from local businesses I have personally talked to, sometimes Groupon sets them back so far that they brink on near bankruptcy. The massive amount of volume some businesses get with almost 0 profit margin has closed many smaller stores that have tried Groupon's service. The lack of repeat customers is what absolutely kills these little guys.
Awesome write-up, gonna review our application one more time to make sure we hit all those points. Thanks!
If it were limited to being rolodex then probably I would get it. But the public resumes, the recommendations etc make the people using it look phoney somehow.

A genuine question to people here who do hiring: Do you really use the resume and referrals to shortlist a candidate? I don't.
I've experimented with https://github.com/gfxmonk/python-readability but it's extremely slow. There's a decent fork called decruft that is a couple orders of magnitude faster http://www.minvolai.com/blog/decruft-arc90s-readability-in-p...

Decruft also has a couple bug fixes to python-readability. They both need a lot of work, though. You'll have to do some spelunking to figure out how to actually call the libraries correctly.
One of the better posts on the subject.

So ... wanna review my app? :)
Zenith - A film by anonymous released on BitTorrent
I don't care what they're attempting, if they're hosting user content and storing user information then security needs to be a focus. Gizmodo certainly wasn't attempting security and that turned out quite well for all they're users didn't it? When you provide a service, no matter how trivial, there are basic commitments you sign up for, tumblr hasn't quite failed those commitments yet but they've come unnervingly close.
See this answer by Harj on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Would-Y-Combinator-invest-in-a-company-...
Apple updates App Store guidelines
The numbers vary depending on people's circumstances. I think last time I read about 800. We all read all the top ones.

I'm not sure who's the oldest. There have been a few in their 40s, but I don't remember their exact ages. I know we've funded people with kids older than the youngest people we've funded.

We've funded brothers, cousins, and married couples.
eh, one of my (much smaller) competitors attempted this. They were larger than I was when they attempted it. Now, they're smaller than I am; so much so that they are talking about selling the company to me.

I mean, I'm sure you can do it, but it's difficult enough to maintain one brand, without trying to pretend to be two different companies.
Facebook Beta 2.0 For BlackBerry Now With Chat Feature And Much More
Maybe use HTML 5 local storage if an internet connection isn't available, then sync up with the server when it is?
> Maybe not having to ever look for a job is the cause of it.

Then you are living the dream, my friend. :)
Maybe we need more introverted politicians... Seems like nowadays being a politician is more about kissing babies, and accepting bribes^Wdonations than about trying to do something meaningful with their time in office like:

- Make an attempt to understand the laws that they are passing and their implications

- Cut 'riders' out of bills

- Try not to make laws that only benefit lawyers (so ambiguous that there will be multiple precedent-setting cases before the legal grey area is gone).

> It might not be a pretty world, but at least it's
> balanced (to a decent degree).

How so? If we accept the idea that extroverts are in the CEO / politician / sports star / etc positions, then you have to accept that the extroverts are the ones the hold all of the power. If the introverts are 'building the next Facebook/LinkedIn,' that gives them relatively little power: 1) politicians can make your product illegal 2) there are relatively few success-stories that give founders enough money to be considered in a position of 'power' (how many failed Facebooks are there for every Facebook).

I'm not throwing in on either side of the 'this is reality vs this is fantasy' argument, but if we assume that it is reality, your idea that it's balanced doesn't seem to hold up.
Ask HN: Contractor/wholesale database sites?
Hello HN, I am essentially looking for sites that "connect" me to companies, people, products. Any sorts of sites relating to this would be helpful.

I'm looking for:

-Sites that provide me a list of companies to do business with. Any product is fine.

-Sites that provide me connections to products to sell in wholesale.

Anyone know of any?

I would also like to contact you in private for further questions.
> How can you have someone that doesn't like talking to crowds be a politician

Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge. (Possibly. He wasn't averse to press conferences, certainly, but he certainly cultivated the image of being a, in his words, "solemn ass" and was pretty universally known as a reticent man.)

> someone who avoids cameras be in the entertainment business

J. D. Salinger. Thomas Pynchon.
I don't think that at all.

I think that if I got into YC it would be an amazing experience, I would learn an incredible amount, and I would meet and hopefully become friends with a great number of very interesting people.

That's why I want to do it.

But I don't think for a second that YC will make my company a sure bet. Just how I don't think for a second that I can't be successful without YC.
Everything I could tell you about your application, I've written in the post. :)

The only other than I'd add is to write less. Get to the point. Clear language is indicative of clear thinking (something I'm still learning myself).

It's easy to slide into formal writing because that's what we're all use to in college, but it'll kill you here. Use short easy words. Use simple sentences. Cut out words that don't get to the point. You don't have to explain everything. Just explain the crux and the core.

I know, easier said than done. I'm a bit sheepish that my post was so long, but I cut as much as I could in the time that I had.
As a single founder who just submitted their application this article makes me happy. If this kind of attitude and traction is what they're looking for then I think I do have a pretty good shot.

Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.
Well its really only from an advertising perspective, the advertiser and the network. From the end users perspective they get the choice, if they really want targeted ads they can always turn the third party cookies on.
I don't really think that the post implies that belief at all. This line in particular demonstrates the number of people already IN YC who are still rather unsure about things:
"one of us remarked that looking at everyone else in the batch, they're still in disbelief that they got in at all, and a bunch of us starred the comment in agreement, even those batch mates that I think are amazing"
here's my advice: don't ever accept "no" as an answer.
I've found it mostly useless, sure I've visited these websites I'm getting ads for everywhere but I already know the company exists and I'm basically just getting a "we exist!" type ad.

An example would be hipmunk, I think they would probably be much better placed try to use banners that offer deals through retargeting. I already know they exist and have been to the site, the ad that I now see because of that doesn't give me any further information.
I'm curious: how did you extrapolate from Wil's points on how to be a successful YC applicant that he also thought all YC companies are going to be successful?

These are qualities for successful founders, not successful companies. There are a myriad of reasons why a startup might fail. Having founders with the traits outlined in this essay helps prevent the founders from being one of those reasons. That's why YC looks for these traits.

Since YC screens applicants, they can select the ones they feel are best suited for success. Based on past experience, those with the traits in this essay are the most successful. Minimizing the founders as the source of failure means YC might have more successes, on average.

As pg said, even YC would be surprised if their "success" rate is more than 50%. Being accepted into YC doesn't guarantee success... Creating a successful company is hard!
I've never gotten any use out of LinkedIn. Maybe my network just isn't big enough but the only messages I ever get are recruiter spam and job offers at dodgy hedge funds. I've had much more success recently by adding 'PS - I'm currently looking for work, check out my resume' at the bottom of my site. It gets much more visibility and its seen directly after reading a blog post about my work.
Certainly, but what I opposed was the generalization "great things come from those willing to break the law". It's an attempt to create an association with something that is generally agreed upon being something good, and law breaking in general. It's an association that does not exist, logically.
I'd say that having a single production for each precedence level is a more common technique in recursive descent, but it that can be slow because every factor needs to be parsed by recursing through all precedence levels. This technique avoids that, and can parse factors straight away before going into the priority checking loop.

Delphi uses this parsing method for expressions, and is one of the reasons it's so fast at compiling.
You bring up a very good point, but if we take the politician example, I view extroverted as engaging with the public and facilitating what the public needs.

Maybe what's wrong with the political system boils down to false promises and inability to effectively determine what the people want. That is an introverted quality (lack of proper social communication). The bad politicians who pass crappy laws are more a testament to the people who vote for them anyway.

And there's no reason to suggest CEO's are anything like public figures. In fact, I would argue a good many of them are introverts. If you view their respective companies as teams, then introverts shine just as well as extroverts do in team settings.
You assume there is a known, before the fact, relationship between idea size and idea outcome.
Bringing ICP into a Feynman topic, I never imagined...

> I don't know how many physics or calculus classes ICP has taken, but let's assume the lyricist has a PhD in Physics. It's not an unreasonable assumption, to presume knowledge rather than ignorance.

Why would you assume something so ridiculous as a PhD in Physics when a short trip to Google can give you a good basis for inferring their education, especially when your main argument (ignorant people criticize people for assumed ignorance) doesn't rely on their intelligence, but the intelligence of the critics. (You're assuming ignorance in the critics just after you assume knowledge in the band! Why can't everyone who criticizes the song have a PhD in physics?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_E._Clark - "After graduating from high school, Clark took classes on music production at the Recording Institute in Eastpointe, Michigan, and soon got a job at the The Disc Ltd."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bruce#Early_life - "Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge."

The other guy's page doesn't say, but one can infer a similar status. Also: "Bruce, along with his band mate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen."

For myself, I find the lyrics of ICP's song head-shakingly depressing. Their anti-science line that others cite reminds me of a strawman:

"Quantum physics is all probabilities?"
"Well, you have a vector field of complex numbers..."
"Complex number?"
"Real number with an imaginary component."
"Imaginary? lol"
"Anyway, you take the squared modulus of a complex number and get something that looks like a probability out of it."
"SHUT UP TOO COMPLICATED IT'S MAGIC".

I won't go so far to say I fully understand Maxwell's equations; I can write them down and do stuff with them and prove correspondences with Coulomb's Law, Gauss' Law, and the electrostatic simplifications, but I still need a couple more months of digestion before I understand them.
That sounds wonderful, actually - a nice way to combat the "fire and forget" mentality there that I've encountered.
If someone claims to have code that can distinguish between apples and oranges it's much easier to check the claim than to reproduce the experiments the physicists did.
Design Thinking for Social Innovation
Bonobos Are Genetically Closer to Humans Than Chimpanzees Are
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If you read his Lectures in Physics you can enjoy at length that same first-principles, hands-on, everything-is-open-for-explanation method. It's not good as a first physics text, but really fun as a second one.
Amazon just told me my pre-order was cancelled because the book was discontinued by the publisher. There must be some kind of misunderstanding?

I am in Germany, so ordering from Amazon seemed to be the fastest and cheapest way to get the book. But now I'm considering ordering from Manning.
Do you worry about giving your email address to websites? Worry no more
Traditional disposable email address services give no long term ownership and control over a disposable address i.e. they expire or are available for anyone to use. 33Mail seeks to solve this problem by allowing users to have their own personal disposable email address service.
Why would you want to keep your resume a secret? That's like making a great website and telling Google not to index it. Do you not want to be found?
Ghostbusters on C64 was the best game ever. If Lion won't support it, I just won't upgrade.
Ask HN: Affordable and reliable hosting for static pages
I am planning to get a hosting service for a client. we are not using any kind of server side programming and the server will just serve a couple of static html, pdf and flash files. What is the most affordable (while reliable) hosting that we can get?
LinkedIn is a service that allows recruiters from companies you want to work for to pay for the privilege of contacting you. What's not to like? You don't need to cultivate a forest of connections and recommendations and other profile doodads; just update your resume once in a while.
I think the point is that if those 3 things (working on a team, communicating with others, leading others) are what we start selecting for as the most desirable skills for engineering students, then we effectively have started selecting out introverts and selecting in extroverts. Granted these skills aren't limited to extroverts, but it's much more common to have extroverts with those skills than it is to have introverts with them.
While I agree with what he said, and find it fascinating, I can't help but feel that he still didn't answer the question.

"Why do magnets attract iron only" and "why can't objects intersect" are very interesting questions and I think about them sometimes. He kinda hinted that the explanation for both of them is related to the same basic principle, and that hint is very insightful to me, but I still wish that he went to a bit of depth and explained it a bit further.
"If you're arguing against standardization in parts"

Oh, very much not.

I'm more commenting on unnecessary overspecialisation instead.

Unnecessary for non-commercial applications anyway - I understand why Apple chooses to put difficult-to-use fasteners in their products, if for no other reason than to minimise fraudulent warrant claims, but there's a whole different set of motivations if designers are going to use the equivalent of "open source" for digitally reproducible home-fab ready "object" files.
<steve_jobs> Commodore64 software? Running on *my* platform?!
* steve_jobs deletes X11.app from MacOSX_Lion_RC1

[ Yes, I know that Jobs didn't send the email, this is just in jest. ]
s3 / cloudfront
Hi,we are launching a service exactly like the one you were referring to. You can try the API already. Check out the docs https://sites.google.com/site/thinkersrus/products-1/science... and the demo
http://www.thinkersr.us/demo.html
Groupon has very big profit margins and lots of cash. From the article, Groupon charges "half of the discounted price of a voucher". So if the merchant has a deal for something that's $20 and requires 1,000 people to accept, then Groupon's income is $10,000.

That also means the merchant's profit margin must either be at least 50% to break-even on the deal after paying Groupon or hope that people buying the deal don't show up to collect it. Otherwise, the merchants lose money.

What it comes down to is that Groupon can't charge those types of margins with increased competition, nor will merchants be willing to pay 50% of the deal to Groupon as they increasingly realize the deal isn't profitable for them.
This is what I'd suggest too, with the proviso that the most likely "single point of failure" moves from being some technical decision you make to being the credit card it's paid for with. At ~3c or 7c/month it becomes easy to forget you need to update the expiry date every 3 years...
Very much enjoyed reading this. It is certainly one of the best posts in this topic. Good job.
I watched it. Not bad. Unnecessary sexual content and language would be my main complaint. Acting seems strained, but just like Anakin seems like a whining twerp in Attack of the Clones, these characters seem a little stiff and emotionless. One could argue (in both cases) that the character is supposed to be a twerp or stiff and emotionless and the actor did a decent job.
and Howard Hughes, though mental illness likely played a substantial role.
I recently started using Omniauth & Capybara like this. It seems to work easily enough even for a relative testing novice like me.