skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What concerns me about this YCReject project is that is for people who didn't even make the interview process (apologies if this isn't true, this is to the best of my knowledge).

I consider the YC interview process to be a useful filter. Anyone can apply to YC and anyone can be rejected. I applied 2-3 years ago and was rejected. Last year, my cofounder and I got the interview but didn't get into the program. To me, getting the interview means that the YC folks thought there was something interesting in the proposal, but decided not to fund the company because of limited space for the round or the personalities of the founders.

If YCReject was oriented at people who got the interviews but not the program, that would at least be an interesting signal. It might tell investors that these people garnered YC's interest and might be worth a second look. However, I don't see how letting everyone who's application was rejected into an alternate program provides any kind of useful filter at all.
What do you want to do with your programming career, or what do you think you'd like to do?

Going to college with your major choices will teach you computer science, and you'll pick up some programming along the way. Conversely, going to work for a startup will teach you programming, and you may pick up some computer science along the way.

It depends upon what kind of programmer you want to be, and what you enjoy doing.
I would've figured you for one of those people that knew LaTeX well :)

Personally I don't really like scribd especially if I'm supposed to pay them and the powerpoint presentation format isn't a high selling point.

But maybe this will net you some dinner money, I'd be interested in the results.
That's annoying, but it only seems to cover tap detection by accelerometer where I was thinking of tap detection by audio click, which definitely seems plausible from a quick test of the sound recorder.

Also it only covers finger swipe detection/direction determining, where I was also imagining gestures from holding fingers a few centimeters away, such as scissoring two fingers, thumb/finger flick, two finger scroll movement, two fingertips touching, etc. A quick test with the iPhone camera suggests that might have to be too carefully positioned to be practical, but should be possible at some level.
I agree with all your points. My gripe is basically that, in most discussions I've seen about the failings of schools, the problem is always "identified" as being a failing of the teacher. It's taboo to raise issue with students own internal motivations, environment, home life, etc. We need to be willing to point fingers at everyone involved.
Important to keep in mind that when Hitwise/Comscore/Nielsen/etc. measure "Microsoft/Bing powered searches" they're including a LOT of searches that never leave MS/Yahoo's sites. If you do a search on MSN Autos or Yahoo! News or in Facebook's web search, for example, those are all powered by Bing and count toward their share.

Contrast with Google, where very few searches on Google's entire network lead to another page on Google (most of that traffic goes out to other sites like those we own/control). Thus, while 30% of web searches may be Bing powered, the Statcounter numbers are the ones I'm much more inclined to look at as a comparison. 8% for Bing and 11% for Yahoo! seem like plausible figures for outbound traffic sent from those engines.
I'm not sure if hitwise includes this, but there are separate metrics tracked that do not include this (including it is silly). An interesting point however, is that the clubbing traffic is small, and never really goes up. So the basic idea of the article - that bing is still growing in share - is true, regardless of clubbing.
Is anyone concerned about travelling with an encrypted OS - but not a shadow one - and upon decryption, being accused of only decrypting a shadow OS? How would you prove that you're not hiding something?
> it's limited flexibility make it easier to maintain.

I prefer added flexibility combined with convention over configuration. In my experience, Java teams deliver less functionality implemented on top of more complicated infrastructure at 2 to 5 times the time it takes for a smaller team working on Django to implement slightly more functionality.
Japan to raise Fukushima crisis level to worst, same as Chernobyl
I was just thinking the same thing - why doesa Firefox insisted on installing updates just when I open it to use it (which really is exactly when I don't want it to be doing it). Why not do the updates when I close it down?
Run iPhone Apps Directly From Your Browser With Pieceable Viewer
Indeed. I'ts already turning into a "my language is more scalable than yours" contest, here on HN. If it was normal posturing and trash-talk, that'd be fine. But engineers are going to suffer for this --- their well-thought-out arguments for one platform over the other are gonna wash to big site chose A over B. We will use A.
I would have said it's more focused on tightly customer development from my experience, despite the name. Of course, that's a part of lean startup methodology, but I tend to associated lean startup with many of the development techniques such as continuous deployment and rapid A/B testing which isn't necessarily feasible over the weekend (although I've seen some pull it off well.)
Untenable Student Loan Loads
It's definitely still in use to some extent--anecdotally, my feed still bustles with life. It has always been a rather niche community.
Meebo's Revenue Tripling As Meebo Bar Reaches 165 Million Uniques
Indeed, the YC rejection letter says basically this. (For the benefit of other readers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2422032)

The problem here is that everyone is looking at acceptance/rejection as bi-implication when it's not. Getting in implies you're probably good, but getting rejected doesn't imply you're probably bad.
Given this and their recent decision keep Honeycomb closed-source (albeit temporarily), one might draw a conlusion that Google only embraces open source so they can leverage it for business advantage.

Not saying that's the way it is - but it's important to keep in mind that they are not always the 'do no evil' company so many blindly accept them to be.
Because you don't end up breaking code in trivial ways, eg if you have a method that takes a string and change it to take an int it's fairly easy in a statically typed language to figure out all the places you broke the code.

Large teams should be hunted down and broken into smaller teams, it's a stupid idea to have such a large team anyway.

The biggest problems in Java are not static typing (although inferred typing is much better). They are the lack of first class constructors, functions, unsigned types, operator definition and overloading and closures. The one actual feature Java has that no one else has is ironically one that is also one of the worst things about Java: checked exceptions.

When java lets me write something like:
let (|>) x y = y x
is the day I'll consider using it again, btw the above code is the pipe operator which lets you do things like this.

"Hello World!" |> puts
It's not just the quantity of queries, it's what the application does. Twitter needs to do specific things very quickly(in this case answer search queries). You could look at a more general high-traffic site(like Facebook) to find a different approach(highly optimized php compiler). I don't think looking to such a large team on such a large project for a role model is beneficial to small teams, they have different considerations and abilities.
Ah. I knew 1.0 didn't support redirection, but I didn't realize that 2.0 came out on 1983 (really? That late? Wow). And it's very cool what you've done so far.
This drives me nuts. I am in grad school and had to go buy a TI-82 because my stats professor was convinced that a TI-81 was completely different than a TI-82. I dropped $125 for one course and I now know that I could have used what I had.

Further more. I had to buy another antiquated calculator for my finance class that cost me $75.

In the modern world, I should have been able to buy each of these for about $5 as an app on my phone.

Don't get me started on the bookstore and textbooks.
Large retail companies have "buyers" or "merchants". You want to contact them. Product samples, schedule calls, and be prepared for face-to-face meetings which should be Goal #1 (that's where you will close the deal). If you don't already know - Ask them how they view their average Consumer, then prove to them why those Consumers will love your product.

Make the risk as low as possible for them. Fund the inventory, fund the advertising, etc. - these are things they will try and negotiate. In the end, business is business. If they think their Consumer may want your product and the risk of trying it out is low, they may just move forward.

Bonus:
The chain typically goes like "assistant", "associate", "buyer", "manager", "vp" jump in the middle (or lower if you need to) and work your way up.

EDIT: Also there are Vendor Rep companies that have these relationships. This may be something you want to consider.
After doing a few bigger talks and being pretty nervous before, I really wish I read these tips - great down-to-earth advice.

The Ignite talk on how to give an Ignite talk was also worth the while.
Articles like these always make me glad I attend a very affordable school and will graduate with zero debt.
Thanks for keeping an open mind! :)
Tell that to Home Depot or Notre Dame..
Listen, sheep means what it means. When the shoe fits...
> Actually, while we're at it, if we have a choice between an excellent and a mediocre professor, why don't we take the mediocre guy for less money and spend the difference on marketing? That's a sound business decision, because it will lead to more profit.

Profit is at most 10% of revenues. Why do you assume that that 10% has more effect than the 90% that goes to expenses?

In fact, non-profits are notoriously lax wrt expenses. They often cost more to deliver the same services.

Which reminds me, why are you assuming that it's better to spend 2x as much on an "excellent" professor? Sure, it's great for the folks in her class, but what about the folks who don't get to take a class because you spent all your money on excellence?

Or, if you like, what about the folks who can't afford that class because you spent so much on the professor.
It's going to come down to determination of the group, and it's hard to gauge that in an application or interview process. I'm in the process of gathering more information about groups that applied to YC/TS/500 that were rejected but eventually became successful. If you know of any, please let me know. allan@ycreject.com
Which two birds would this be? Learning and free? Captcha and translation? The page is almost 100% content-free, nothing can be derived from it.

Anyone have a blog link where someone (anyone, really) says some more information about this?
Chrome is currently the crashiest app on Lion seed builds (yes, even more than browsers that have more users on Mac). Maybe it should disable itself?
I agree. I have gained back some very productive hours be enabling the procrastination setting in my profile.
That's a good point. There certainly were/are other projects that could have fit into the same nitch Linux ended up filling.

But what are the alternatives to RepRap? Makerbot maybe? Any others?
I guess it really depends on what college. At my school, which tends towards the theoretical, Scheme, SML and Prolog are part of the core curriculum.
Yeah that was always my thought as well -- if anything he certainly is named to be an astronaut.
Google is doing the same thing with A Google a Day: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383379,00.asp
"This is accepted due to the cost savings of not paying for insurance, 401k contributions, etc."

Probably more about the liquidity of the arrangement than those things. Not always easy to hire and fire as needed whereas with a contractor/freelancer you can take someone on board for a particular job and then not use them again.
This post is good in all, but I have one question: There are other ways for becoming exceptionally good except the OP's "pyramid" way?
The theory guarantees optimality to within a constant factor. I've seen some pretty big constants, though, so in practice of course you have to actually measure how it performs on a representative workload.
First page of Infinite Jest posted on Y Answers, gets negative feedback
Unfortunate name – it reminds me of the pyramid scheme, under which the vast majority of people lose more than they gain. Perhaps a clearer name would be the Single-Benchmark Method, though that doesn’t sound as interesting.
Yes, I think it depends on your target audience.
Depends on your situation. It sounds to me like you would like to work more for the experience than for the money (otherwise I'm guessing you wouldn't have much of a choice.) Just start school and code in your free time. In fact, why not do your own star-tup(s)? People have this image of a start-up but really any business which could bring in many on the side is great. Build something small that could bring in $100 / month. Then keep building so that you can hit $500 / month. Keep working your way up. Maybe that's one site, maybe it's a bunch of things.

I would rather have 10 different income sources which collectively pay me as much as my day job than put insane hours into one start-up which I'm hoping will be a home run (or working for one and hoping for the same.)

You might be better off picking one major and getting out as fast as you can. I'm not sure how much extra school would be required for the double major, but it would certainly cost you in time and money. That's time you could be working or coding.
Yeah, I know it's widely accepted (I grew up being bombarded with Spy Kids 3D Volume 72 advertising throughout my whole childhood). I'm just of the opinion that it doesn't leave much room for consumer understanding of advances in 3D technology by dominating the terminology.
$0.50/day could pay for an EC2 micro instance... :-)
I would recommend you pair up with someone technical who will help build the solution and provide guidance to learn the technology if that is what you want. If you are located in the Dallas area email me.
How does your incredible services fee not count as taxable income?
I don't think the goal is a filter at the level your thinking about. The real question is simply is are YC rejects a better pool to consider than the random ideas they are already receiving.

On the upside, they are looking at a pool of people that got it together enough to apply to YC with 1 or 2 ideas, got rejected and still want to give it a go. That means they are a least willing to push back a setback and not simply spamming ideas looking for money. On the down side, some of the best people / ideas have been removed. Overall it's probably a better group of people and ideas than would apply to a less well known funding source.
I have also not yet read the paper, but to your point about SSDs -- SSDs are definitely good for random reads, but for random writes, it seems like having an append-only structure would help avoid write amplification. If you do a lot of small random writes to an SSD that will be slow and reduce the disk's life drastically.

(That said, I'm no SSD expert, so I might be way off)
Really? That's pretty cool, I used to be a developer at merge.fm, would love to talk to the Indaba guys if you could drop an intro. My site's: http://roshfu.com if you want to make sure I'm legit first :)
My ATT iPhone would only work with an "iPhone" SIM, not another ATT SIM. This was a first gen iPhone though. I don't know if this has changed with more recent iPhones.
I wonder if you'll be able to remove the ads later - like if you get the version with ads you can remove them by buying amazon prime later on or something.
This reminded me of something that happened to me the other night: a friend handed me what looked like a rum and coke (but was actually a Trappist beer) and said "try this".

My first reaction was one of revulsion, because my brain was expecting a mixed drink. After he told me it was beer, I tasted it again and found it very enjoyable.

Funny how expectations can completely alter your experience.
OSM doesn't own volunteer time. If the volunteers find Googles platform & terms more pleasing, then more power to them.

However, if the original article is correct in that Google misleads volunteers, then I hope his post helps correct that.
Ask HN: Looking for feedback on my rate (iOS/Android)
I'm currently a junior studying computer science but for the past year and a half or so I've been doing a decent amount of short-term mobile contract work.

Here is some of my previous work:

* Venmo for Android - https://market.android.com/details?id=com.venmo

* Wolfgang's Vault for Android - https://market.android.com/details?id=com.wolfgangsvault.concertvault

* Battlestar Galactica Bobblehead App - https://market.android.com/details?id=com.laan.BobbleFanSyFy

* Philadelphia Concert Hub for iPhone - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/philadelphia-concert-hub/id315859665?mt=8

I'm wondering what I should charge per hour.

I'm thinking of raising my rates for new clients but thought I should check here to see if anyone has any input.

Sorry for such a vague question and for not listing my current rate, just want to see what answers I'll get to see if they match what I'm thinking.
However, I don't see how letting everyone who's application was rejected into an alternate program provides any kind of useful filter at all.

If you don't see any value in this group, just don't invest in any of the companies... other people might, most won't. The market is - in the end - the only filter that matters. What is there to be concerned about?
Getting rejected doesn't in itself imply you're probably bad, but it doesn't imply you're good either. And if all an investor knows is that you're a founder or team that wants to do a startup, the odds are that you're no good. The problem is that the prior probability that you're good is already very low, not that the conditional probability that you're good given that you're rejected by YC is any lower.

So the real question here is, can these people learn to first evaluate their applicants, and then support the ones they fund, anywhere near as well as YC does? I think the YC formula is not going to be anywhere near as easy to duplicate as they seem to think.
Getting into college doesn't limit you. Apply to some places you'd like to work anyway. There's no cost associated with seeing if startups you'd like to work for show any interest in you. That college admission will still be there if they show no interest.

Send some emails. There's no point in us telling you to go and try for a startup if nobody is willing to hire you.

I don't say this to be harsh.

When I was going into first year University, I was working for a startup doing tech support and I was pretty sure that I was amazing.

I wouldn't hire the kid I was when I started in University. He was smart, ambitious, and knew a few things, but he didn't understand business and he didn't understand that there's a whole lot of programming that goes beyond SQL statements.

During University I started my own business and learned a lot both in and out of classes. I'm graduating in a couple of weeks, and I've got a good business ready for me to focus on it.

The time I spent at school has helped me enormously, but only because I've been working as hard as I can to make the time worthwhile.

Startups are hard, you have to be a good to great programmer to participate, and sometimes the ambition isn't enough without experience to back it up.
First Orbit offers a glimpse at Yuri Gagarin's spaceflight 50 years later
I love my TI-89, which I got ~7 years ago for college physics/astro classes, and still use fairly often when the need arises, typically once or twice a month. I find the interface of a physical calculator to be far superior to a more general purpose machine when facing the tasks its built for.

However, I also think they're way overpriced for what they are. I think a lot of the price is just 'because we can'.
Some of these sound pretty shady, but many are just deferring taxes, not avoiding them. "The Bountiful Loss" technique in particular will reset your cost basis so you'll end up paying more tax later when you sell for real.
Clickable links:

* Venmo for Android - https://market.android.com/details?id=com.venmo

* Wolfgang's Vault for Android - https://market.android.com/details?id=com.wolfgangsvault.con...

* Battlestar Galactica Bobblehead App - https://market.android.com/details?id=com.laan.BobbleFanSyFy

* Philadelphia Concert Hub for iPhone - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/philadelphia-concert-hub/id31...
Ask HN: Question for the medical Dr(s) here
I just realized that there are several medical doctors on HN.

I have had a very simple app idea bouncing in my head for the last week and would like to discuss it with someone who has run or is familiar with running a practice about the viability of my app.

If you want to help me out email me at imechura at gmail dot com

Thanks,
Ian
Word to the wise: when you go to college, figure the costs, and figure them good.

Then, figure the benefits, and don't take the Humanities degree unless you are independently wealthy or are okay being under your debt load for years and years.

It's a lousy system, but don't bias your strategy towards being a barista for years.
Here is a vid talking about how the fuel rods shattered/melted:

http://vimeo.com/22209827
Yeah, definitely... At least it should be :)

However, I've been closely observing this space for the last 2 years (from both: infrastructure engineer and application developer perspectives) and I'm a bit disappointed with the current state of art.

Unfortunately, majority of the existing PaaS providers are "cloud" equivalents of "one-click installers" and/or "managed hosting" from the web 1.0 era... Pretty much all what they are doing boils down to daemon installation and provisioning. They are also charging for unused (but allocated) resources, which should be forbidden in the cloud era.

Of course, there are some exceptions :) Two of them being:

- Google App Engine - pricing per CPU-time and bandwidth usage, with horizontal auto-scaling based on request rate. But they took it a bit too far with their Datastore, to the point that you need to write apps taking it into account from the beginning.

- SQL Azure - highly available and fault tolerant version of SQL Server.
A quick search on http://searchyc.com/pg+disagreement gets me the following pg comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness." - pg, 1150 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347 "Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement." - pg, 852 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691 "IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score." - pg, 665 days ago
This is awful.

They're basically playing chicken with legal costs. Usually targets veer first. This time the trolls did. If neither veers, someone (maybe everyone) wastes a lots of money.
A lot of people don't seem to be making that same choice. According to the article, we're already talking about debt forgiveness. There won't be a correction in the system until consumers choose the affordable options. You don't need to spend $50k/year to get a great education.
Dot-Coms Begin to Blossom in India