skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps this guy's promoting his book:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/9/e-totalitaria...
No, because if any of these startups make it big, it'll be 6% of a much larger amount (think $10,000,000+). $600,000 is a little more than the interest you'd pay on a $33,000 loan at 6% :)
PassHash – A simple way to generate secure passwords
The problem with a personal guarantee is that the lender will always take everything they possibly can, and a personal guarantee leaves no boundaries. It makes it impossible to start up without risking fundamentals of life like housing and transportation, and almost definitely leads to bankruptcy in case things go south. This is OK for some people in the 18-25 age range when they can just go move back in with Mom, but it doesn't work for people with families, people without a safety net, etc.

Your lender is not risking his house to loan your company money and you shouldn't risk your house either, especially if you have a family. It's not so easy to start over once you get married and have a couple of kids, and it's not worth risking getting thrown out on the street if it means your children are going to be sleeping in the gutter.
Airbnb Taps Facebook, Lets You Crash With Friends Of Friends
The secret coach - Bill Campbell
Belltown actually is kinda sketchy at night these days. South Lake Union has a much safer, 'yuppie' feel to it. For something a bit quieter you might consider east of the lake. There are also some nice neighborhoods (not sure of prices) closer to the university that would still be a nice short commute.
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1. Upload music.
2. Turn on car radio
3. Connect smartphone to car radio
Selective truth != truth. I'd say selectively presenting one side is dishonest. I don't have anything against companies who are dishonest, but let's call a spade a spade: PR companies are spin doctors. They're dishonest. That's not quite straight out lying, but to me the very definition of dishonesty is not presenting all of the truth if you can.
QuoteRobot startup mode funny photo
Sorry, thought I should share this. Not really news, but we just started moving into our office space and had an opportunity for this photo by chance.
In good relationships, as in Makefiles, you have to give each other space, but it has to be the right kind.
Finding Ways To Effective Telecommuting
The Failure of American Schools
Why does this bother you?

Spotify doesn't work in the U.S... so I just don't use it. It's not like my life is that much harmed by it.
This whole argument amounts to "X is different, therefore you should be scared of X". It may hold some water for aliens, but not for AIs because of a very simple reason: it will be us who will create them. We will know more about their inner workings than we know about the inner workings of our own minds. If anything, AIs would be more predictable than humans, and we can build into them any safeguards that we so choose.
Could this be the beginning of a physical world where computers frequently interact to provide rich and useful function?

I, for one, hope so. Can't wait to play with this.
How many computers can you have on your college's network?
After getting hit by a 1-machine per user rule for my college's network, I started wondering about other college's network policies.
It brought up the idea: Do the top CS schools let you have more computers on the network?
So, if you please, respond with your college name and the number of computers you can have hooked up to your username.
Only if we program it perfectly and if its software doesn't get mutated by random errors. The laws of evolution govern all self-replicating things that don't self-replicate perfectly and makes them as efficient as possible at self-replication.
Backends seem overpriced to me; their default backend is a long-lasting process running at 1.2Ghz allowed to use 256MB of RAM and it's priced $0.16/hour ($115/month).

They can shutdown/restart/relocate your backend whenever they want so what they suggest to keep your service live is "Configuring more backend instances than are normally required to handle your traffic patterns" (yeah that's at least another $115/month fee).
That would put Yuri on the hook for what $9 million this time around?
It makes sense though - more people probably stumble across HN while searching for programming answers than through hearing about Y Combinator.

Even those that realise that the top left top left 'Y' image is actually a link to ycombinator.com would be hard pressed to find a link from there to PG's essays.
Svpply, Dribbble, Gmail, and Hulu all started with limited roll-outs.
A very intelligent AI would avoid conflict so long as it thought it would be to its detriment.

Most intelligent beings don't actually "think" about their detriment. Consider the airplane+pilot combination. They don't actually "think" about their specific actions and all the possible terrible outcomes and weigh them. They have simply evolved checklists over time that lead to incredibly smart, adaptive behaviors.

I have no reason to think robots will be any different. Surely they will develop patterns that are highly adaptive, but I doubt they will be entirely, or even primarily based on any kind of thinking or analysis. They will be based on experience, as situated intelligence often is, and therefore susceptible to similar mistakes that humans make.

And to answer your original question, humans don't necessarily think about consequences, but surely 1000s of years of consequences are built into our cultural practices, and humans act almost entirely based on rough-and-ready, contextually assembled cultural practices.
How dare you mention Guam! The US military's decision to move pacific operations there is going to destroy the culture and subject the populace to the sorts of abuses they're guilty of in Okinawa!

Okay, i'm kidding. :)

The real problem with hyperlinking is that it's difficult and time consuming. Wikipedia can kinda manage it because there are thousands of Wikipedians with a lot of free time. The NYTimes is the opposite. They're a smallish organization trying to do original news reporting and research, and put it up online. Time spent deciding what hyperlinks to put where are a distraction from the other stuff they could be doing.

That's why time has been spent on systems like Apture, which are frankly, completely useless. Automated systems can't provide the sorts of editorial control that users actually want to find out more info.

In short, wikis are really hard for organizations to build and maintain, if it's not core to what it is that they do. And they're particularly hard for quick moving targets.
30 Best Examples of Bollywood Movie Posters
I think YC would cut it off if they knew they had reached their limit. After all, they're investing in these companies and want them all to succeed. Overbooking would cost them a lot of money in the short- and long-term.
But they don't have to compete - each startup can all have all the face time they want.

"There's no limit to the number of office hours they can book; startups talk to us as often as they want... The office hour software is designed not just to book slots, but to show us if startups are getting enough time with us. We set aside blocks of time for office hours, and if not all the slots get taken, we know demand is satisfied. (If all the slots get taken, we set aside more time.)" http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html
All of your desires were dictated to you by your cultural backing. But I still think you're intelligent.
As of last batch, which had 45 startups in it, we were able to give everyone the attention they needed, as measured by the results (= most observers thought w2011 was the best batch so far).
while i share your disdain for all things techcrunch, i think in this rare case they might have accidentally reported something with some degree of accuracy. i'd be interested in hearing how they established their valuation and reading more on why large companies make such outrageously big purchases, when it seems the technology wouldn't bee too difficult to replicate.
WikiLeaks' Assange gets Australian peace prize
You obviously have no sense of humor, or you would see the absurdity of what we're both doing.
None of Y Combinators competitors have anything like that to offer new entrepreneurs.

Y Combinator competitors would be foolish to try to compete on the money axis anyway - the cash has always been minimally important. They would do much better by identifying and focusing on YC's actual weaknesses.
Griffiths' E+M book (actually, also his QM book) is a shining star to me, a perfect example of the way introductory textbooks should be written. It ends up being criticized a lot once you get to the advanced level ("Who'd you learn quantum mechanics from, Griffithslol?"), but that's fine. It's perfect, even - if you really need all the gory stuff, sure, go get a copy of Jackson's book, or some 800 page tome on perturbation theory and the rigorous mathematical underpinnings of quantum theory, if you're going into the field you should absolutely know more than you can get from an intro text. But an introductory textbook should be exactly that. Rigor is awesome once you have the intuition down, but it's often very difficult to go the other way (mainly because a rigorous understanding is difficult to achieve without having the intuition first).
Been there, done that.

http://code.google.com/p/microbridge/

edit: a bit of technical background. We all know that most Android devices and almost all phones really only support USB slave. This is mostly electrical, their controller chips almost always support OTG or Host, but they simply do not provide +5v on the USB bus to power an external device.

Hence in order to talk USB with your phone you had the option of rooting your device and use OTG (if supported), or to make the accessory play Host. In the latter case the accessory needs to talk the ADB (Android Debug Bridge) protocol to the phone, which is precisely what MicroBridge did using exactly the same hardware as ADK (Arduino + max3421e USB host controller). The ADB protocol provides byte stream multiplexing over USB, meaning that your USB-enabled microcontroller can tell your phone to give you a bidirectional byte stream to TCP ports, running daemons like logcat, a shell, etc. To establish a connection with a running app, that app simply listens on a TCP port, and the MCU opens a byte stream to that port using ADB.

What ADK does differently however, is that it adds a new USB protocol to Android. It previously supported three configurations: USB storage device, tethering, and ADB. The new ADK protocol is much simpler than ADB and really just only offers a single pipe with just reading/writing functionality. This is much simpler to implement (although ADB wasn't exactly rocket science), but most of all it's much cleaner and doesn't require the user to enable debugging in the phone settings.

ADB implementations have sprung up recently for various microcontrollers, such as PropBridge http://robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?title=PropBri... for the propeller (which also comes in a DIP package btw, really nice for hobbyists), and IOIO for the PIC24: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10585. These people will support the new protocol as well, so I expect there will be quite a bit of hardware choice in the near future.
I'm not well versed in CLHS legalese, but don't &rest arguments count as one argument? One would suspect so since &rest is allowed to be not copied.
I also recommend checking out Audiogalaxy. It works surprisingly well on 3G and is a great way to access your entire music/podcast collection from your phone. I use it all the time.
Storing Hierarchical Relational Data with Nested Sets
Ryan, I assure you that in the US, a typical startup founder cannot walk into the bank and leave with an unsecured $163,000 loan. Businesses with many multiples of that in top-line revenue can't get that loan without personal liability.

I probably agree that 6% PLUS a $32k (zero-interest) loan is not a good deal.

But I don't even think 6% for ~$20k is a good deal for funding.

I don't think the comparison you're making here is fair. Calling it a "mugging" is a bit over the top. The people who mug startups are consultants and do-nothing executive hires.
is this going to suffer from the same problems as increased class sizes? less personal mentoring, for example?

Probably NOT. The bar has been higher in recent batches and as a result, relatively more established companies make it to the batch, as compared to, say, in 2005 - 2007. This benefits both the companies and YC -- the companies benefit by the excellent environment and networking opportunities, and YC ends up making somewhat (again, relatively speaking) safer investments.
Actually we've improved the system since then. Now startups that want to talk can also request office hours, and people who are in the queue get slots first whenever we create a new block. I should add something about that.
Even with companies that have an exit, it might take years, during which the companies could well afford to pay back the money.
Using force to seize resources from other cultures is certainly a common theme throughout history, but this is quickly becoming an anachronism. Raw resources are no longer the main basis for our economy, as they were in 16th century, and modern warfare tends to involve huge costs with relatively little economic advantage.

Secondly, machines can reach resources that are difficult for us air-breathing fragile apes to get to. Why compete over resources on Earth when there are other places in the solar system (and in the galaxy) with more raw materials and more energy?
Cross-platform Note Sync with Dropbox for iOS, Mac and Windows
Google's "Music Beta" Service, Every Thing you want to Know [video]
I think its just a mark of the times. Top talent is focusing on creating new ventures. I think if the quality of businesses is on par with the last batches – and I am sure it is, if not higher – it's not a problem. I assume the talent level is equal to previous years so if the teams submitted their ideas two years ago they would have been accepted. I would focus less on the number and more on the increasing success of Y Combinator.
Obvious retort: YC is not just about the attention of PG and Friends. The summation of prestige, money in the present and, likely, in the future, and YC network alone still put a company in a different world.

Question: Will YC pick people who need heaps of attention just to succeed?
(My) Answer: Probably not. YC people are called "relentlessly resourceful" for a reason. They will succeed somehow with or without hours of coaching and mentoring by the YC folks. This probably translates into less office time than you would expect from 60+ companies.

But I've never been through it, so I don't really know the answer. There are some brilliant people I've met who couldn't do the simplest of things. What little attention a group needs in one area might be made up for in another.

edit: a sentence had no subject.
Conclusion: don't trust A/B tests with small sample sizes, as there's no way that changed raised conversions 108%.
If companies can have cultures then they can also have ethics, as the two are closely related.
This is not what I thought they would be releasing at all. I was hoping that it would just introspect your personal music collection and allow you access to any track that it found that had a match in their music catalog. I really don't want to upload my entire music collection somewhere else as it would take forever and while it's free now there may be usage fees on transfer in the future.
That means ebay is up $1.4 billion on the fiasco:

-$2.6b purchase + 70% of $2.75b on sale + 30% of $7b on Microsoft sale = $1.4b

Not sure if they got any cash from profits, and they probably spent a bunch of money on the purchases/sales and subsequent culture integration stuff.
Not-a-bubble!

Seriously though, there are so many software startups these days. Time to get into something else?
The free quotas will still be ok but only for fairly low-traffic apps and sites (less than 1GB/day, one instance). For everyone else, though, this is a massive price increase and pretty much kills a major part of why App Engine was so appealing in the first place.

Huge disappointment.

e: The part that really gets me is there's now no way to easily transition from a free app to usage-based billing app without paying $9/month up front. If I'm just starting up a new site or app, I'll have no idea if I'll go over the free quotas or not. Now, if I stick with the free quotas and happen to go over, will my site go down? The old model was far, far more developer and user friendly than this.
Texas A&M: 1.
Do you feel close to the limit you can handle? You've said several times you're not there yet, but maybe you have a feeling about it.
You can buy the reference design, or get an Arduino+USB host shield. You can get an Arduino anywhere, I'm not sure if their firmware will fit on a smaller AVR like the 328p. You can get the USB shield from Oleg's site directly (circuitsathome.com).

Sparkfun sells a cheaper version of Oleg's shield, although it seems to be out of stock right now: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9947. Note that this shield doesn't work out of the box with the mega 1280/2560 boards because its SPI pins are located elsewhere compared to the smaller 168/328p Arduino boards like the Deicimila. You can do a hardware hack if you really want, but long story short, just get Oleg's shield.

edit: I've had a look at the code, and I can confirm this will work fine with either Oleg's shield or the Sparkfun shield, on a standard Arduino. So price-wise I'd say about $45 plus shipping from SF when they get their shields back in stock.
Backends are not primarily intended for user-facing traffic

I believe they are more like Tasks on Steroids than a way of having something like a little persistant VPS for your app.
When Zuckerberg is running around saying that wanting to share things with only certain people shows a "lack of integrity" (http://eparnell.net/?p=169), it's not an unreasonable preconception.
4 Must-Know Facts About Vent Pipe Repairs | NJ Roofing Blog
This is introduces an annoyingly complex pricing model, but on the plus side:

- the fees are more predictable;

- $9 a month for an uptime SLA of 99.95% is a pretty good deal;

- apps are still free below reasonable quotas;

- the fast High Replication Datastore is now the default, half the price and free for the first 1G;

- Google embracing app engine as an official product will mean a) more resources will be invested in improving the platform, b) more startups might start seeing GAE as a serious platform (the Backends feature could be a game changer), meaning a stronger development community might grow as well.

Or startups could keep mostly ignoring GAE. But so far GAE is still the only PaaS that offers auto-scaling. All other companies are either crashing our apps on heavy loads or charging us hefty amounts for unused CPU cycles. To me personally and professionally, that makes GAE's pricing and ease of use still leagues ahead of any other PaaS out there.
Airbnb launches Social Connections - stay with friends of friends
Did the grandfather say "and look at the great life it got you!"
Wearable emotive cat-ears controlled by brainwaves
Interactive 3D model of Solar System Planets and Night Sky
Agreed 100%. Every program is different, but trying to imitate YC is not going to work as well.

One area of innovation is to encourage more hardware/software combination start-ups. eg. WakeMate
Center of U.S. Population
For a second I thought 60+ was referring to an age. That would be real news.
Ah, blame the user. Nice. Especially in an age when you can viruses from Flash 0-days served up unwittingly by ad networks...
Oh, two companies that sell antivirus software are issuing hysterical warnings about mobile malware. I can't tell if this is an article or advertising copy.

> now would be as good a time as any to choose an antivirus app.

You don't say...
Check out http://startup-videos.com for great examples of starup videos introductions. You'll also find a page with a list of agencies/freelancers offering such services. Hope it'll help
> it may turn out to be easier than writing an intelligence directly.

Only if you would be satisfied with an AI that could not be trusted to deliver correct results. If you want to know it does what you want it to, you have to code it to do what you want it to. You may copy the building blocks of an organic brain, but you'll have to tie them together yourself.

An uploaded human is still capable of human error.
Go appears to be gain more and more traction. I wonder how long before someone else supports it on their platform.
And I like this one!

I agree completely that the process of learning mathematics is probably highly multidimensional for... pretty much everyone ever. In particular, it's easy to see how formal descriptions can push mathematical generalization forward far before we have a suitable concept of the mathematical object we're describing.

I think we're all (incl. the op) in some kind of agreement here about the didacticism of math. The op didn't disregard the power and utility of mathematical languages — he came from being trained pretty heavily in engineering math, at least up to playing with higher-order differential equations — but instead was, perhaps not directly, arguing for increased metaphorical/physical descriptions in taught mathematics. He's just responding to the rather eye-opening feeling one gets when one starts to realize that math is so interpretable!

I think that's a perfectly fair argument to have. I know that in my own experience, I never understood the joy of math until the day that linear algebra took an interpretation as linear space transformation.

---

So we're just sort of all oscillating here in strong rebuttals of whatever interpretation of the "heart" of math the prior author champions for a while. Which is fun but unproductive.

---

I like the challenge of taking someone from physical concepts and metaphors directly to a mathematical object. I think it'd be possible, and maybe even useful when someone first starts to learn real math, but certainly it's not the most efficient way to become well-read. It'd be a lot like explaining the meaning of, I dunno, Día de los Muertos without immersing someone in Mexican language and culture. A single point of contact can be forced, but you lose so much context and fluency.
Wow, there's some serious lack of critical thinking going on in this thread. Of course we can build intelligence that we can control. Is it a good idea to hook up the nuke switch directly to a giant neural network you don't understand? Probably not. Don't do that. The real concern with singularity has to do with the power it could deliver to the people who control it. Polling science fiction writers isn't a substitute for actual thinking.
A friend of mine is in this list. And he didn't download anything.

(I know for sure because he's a vocal proponent of copyrights)
Good to know. Thanks for clarifying that.
The final link ...

http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/A_comparison_b...
It's going to be a tough sale for Google to convince people to adopt Go for their web apps when Node.js is taking over that scene. With Node I get the best of two worlds: high concurrency and speed -- presumably the top two selling points for using Go with web apps -- without having to teach myself yet another programming paradigm. Everyone and their mother knows some Javascript; good luck hiring help for your Go-based startup.

IMHO, Google could be riding a much bigger wave right now...
What's the thing that you love, but that doesn't pay? Can you make it pay?
fwiw, I've always found google's spam filters too sensitive for my tastes. I use a pay service I like (spamstopshere.com)
I'm curious what your experience has been using the (two|three|four|five).sentenc.es guides?
Do people respond better/worse when you've got that in your email?
My thought is most people receiving this message would view it negatively...