skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What would you ask YC founders?
At tomorrow's London Hacker News meetup we are doing a Q&A session with several YC founders from 07, 09 and 11 sessions. We have received many great questions already, but have room for some more. Is there anything you would love to find out about the YC experience, fund raising or building a successful startup? Please submit your questions and we'll do our best to get them all answered by our panel.

We will be recording the session and you will all get the opportunity to see it in its full glory.

Our panel will consist of:

Pete Smith founded Songkick in 2007 and as COO has scaled Songkick's operations -- premises, finance, legal, visas, HR, hiring, revenue -- from three friends with their own laptops to a team of 25 based in Hoxton and Palo Alto.

Phil Cowans was employee number 2 at Songkick and the company's original CTO, having joined in 2007 and spent some time in Boston during the Y Combinator summer programme. Now in the role of Chief Architect, he's been closely involved in with all aspects of the engineering process since then, from building the original prototypes to scaling the site and hiring and managing a large development team.

Josh Buckley is a 19 year old entrepreneur from Kent, in England. After selling his first company at age 15, he started angel investing. In January 2011, aged 18 he founded the youngest ever Ycombinator funded company, MinoMonsters. He has since raised a seed round from the most prestigious Silicon Valley investors.

Colin Beattie who founded Tuxebo at the end of 2009. As CEO Colin undertakes a 'jack-of-all' role leading product research, design and development, SEM, strategy, financing, HR and strategic partnerships. Tuxebo is a marketplace, comparison site and booking agent for renting things; essentially a cross between ebay and Kayak for renting stuff. It currently focuses on the construction segment of this enormous market but aims to be a single access and invoicing point for all your rental needs regardless of where you need to rent, what you need to rent and from whoever you want to rent it.
>I'm not so sure there are applications which simply cannot tolerate garbage collection.

Things that need to be really seriously realtime, such as aeroplane pilot assistance AI, and medical equipment firmware, I think these cannot use stuff like GC because there is no room for the slightest deviation in performance.
gr8 job! this is going to be a really handy tool.
Debunking Linus's Latest (Jonathan Shapiro, 2006)
Except the lawn is really his.
This whole topic is another thing where Go is a godsend, gofmt has ended all silly arguments over formatting style.
The [London Docklands Light Railway](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway) is also driver-less. However travelling everyday on it, the journey is not smooth. Especially when it starts or stops, the acceleration and deceleration is very jerky. And also the train lurches forwards quite a few times.

Not what one would expect on any train especially an automated train.
Doesn't all regulation stifle innovation? If I wanted to sell a homes in a skyscraper made of papier-mâché, building codes would prevent me from doing that. But that's not necessarily a bad thing: the first time someone leaves their soldering iron on while they're not using it, the building burns down and we have five hundred dead families on our hands. "Innovators" tend to think about the good aspects of their ideas rather than potential downsides, so the government has stepped in to prevent the downsides from being too bad.

In this case, the government is saying, "make any new innovative money transmission system you want, but keep $100,000 in an account so when you fuck up someone's paycheck, they can sue you and you can pay the damages you owe." Not too unreasonable.

Regulation is bad for businesses individually, but it's good for society in aggregate. Progress may be slowed, but it's still happening and happening with fewer horror stories along the way.
>>>The author attributes the agency model to Apple

This is because it was Apple that devised the Agency Model and was the first to propose it to the Big Six publishers as a way of getting them on iOS. This led to Macmillan battling with Amazon one infamous weekend and had Amazon retaliate by removing all Buy buttons from Macmillan books. Amazon soon capitualted, other publishers -- except for Random -- piled on, moving to the Agency Model. When Random finally joined, all their books went up anywhere from $2 to over $7 in price.
Go's syntax is one of the 'dumbest' around, it is extremely easy to parse compared to pretty much any other mainstream language (except scheme I guess).

All the bitching about ';' comes from people that clearly have not used Go or tried to parse it.
You wouldn't see a problem with them copying a job listing from your site, that originally had no salary info on it, and them slapping a guessed salary on the copy of the listing they show to their users? The users aren't told the salary they are looking at in the listing is a guess.
Airplanes still have pilots. I guess busses are safer than cars too.
Ask HN: Can someone please start groupon for airlines?
Hi HN,

Here is one free startup idea for you. Groupon/Airbnb/Ubercab/whatever for airlines tickets. Not another cheap ticket search engine plz.
If somebody will do it I will be lifetime customer (i even ready to become investor if you need some money and have right team)

Airlines tickets sales is one of the biggest e-commerce businesses. I know its very tou to disrupt spaces but i am 100% sure that someone who will be able to do this will be huge winner.

I am frequent flyer and fly between Europe and US/within US few times/month. My schedule is almost always flexible and I am always looking for cheap tickets. There are almost always free seats in plane. I am sure airlines will be interested is some SMART way of selling them for discounted prices.

Most of startups are just search engines for ticket prices. What I am suggesting might be more like demand data analysis => discounted offerings generation thing.
Another way might be doing something like crowdsourcing charter jet flights. Anyways I am sure this space still waiting to be disrupted.
>>>Why should I be that bothered about this?

Because the Agency price-fixing model has led to eBooks not being priced by market forces but by a cartel that supplies over 90% of the existing market.
The post is almost content-free, we all know apple is secretive.

But that website is a work of art, although it does crawl in chrome on my current-gen mac mini.

If the guy doesn't like apple, I doubt he'd have much trouble finding work elsewhere.

EDIT: re-reading, I see that he has.
AFAIU, OpenCL is still a new technology - poised as competition to Nvidia's rather popular CUDA. However, in contrast with CUDA which is Nvidia-specific, OpenCL is an open standard backed by many vendors (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Apple, IBM, Qualcomm and others).

Don't for get that GPGPU is becoming hotter and hotter now that the computing devices blend and become heterogeneous (i.e. CPUs come with embedded GPUs, GPUs doing general-purpose computations, special acceleration hardware, etc). OpenCL is supposed to help with programming these devices.
50/50 Cofounders
Between interfaces and the builtin generic types, I have never missed generics (specially since append() was added to the language), and that seems to be the experience of most people that have used Go for a while.

Still it probably would be nice to have them some day, but it is worth doing right and not worth sacrificing the current simplicity and elegance of the language.
Maybe it's personal flavor of sweet, sweet revenge?

Anyway, it displays just fine on Android 2.3's stock browser.
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"Vig" was famously used by Nathan Myhrvold in an internal memo to Bill Gates in which he proposed a structure whereby Microsoft could obtain a portion of content transactions that occur on the Internet. He used the term "vig" and it's appropriate here.
http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/the-day-apple-beca...
The goal isn't to speak French, it's to communicate with French people.
I have never managed to use css3pie without it totally messing up all my other CSS.
How many unique features does python have?

Unique features in programming languages are rare and often unwelcome (cf. perl's references).
Europe's war on cookies
How to use CoffeeScript in Rails 3.1 with Haml
Get Apple iPad for free with contracts
IANAL, but Australia and the US have a free trade agreement that specifically includes patent rights and one of the strongest arguments against its ratification here was that Australian developers would be subject to frivolous patent troll lawsuits just as they are there.

If that is the case (a big if), I suppose there could be some legal implication in the US, but you'd have to ask a patent lawyer with intimate knowledge of the FT agreement to be sure.
Oh, right, let's talk about oil and US being in Iraq for a second. How is that not a seizure of resources with force?

I didn't say seizing resources was an anachronism, I said it was becoming one.

The Iraq war is actually a good example of this. In the past, the purpose of such a war might have been to seize the Iraqi oil fields, but if that was the end goal of the current invasion, the US is surely the most inept plunderer in history. The war has cost the US almost $800 billion, with no signs that its going to make a cent of profit any time soon.

Certain unscrupulous individuals may end up profiting from the oil reserves of Iraq, but resource seizure is a niche market. It's no longer the main reason armies march.
I am not associated with iFlow Reader.
Very Nice!

Props should also go to http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ who have been doing things like this in the past.

That site also generates the IE fallbacks as well.
Human Aspects of Software Engineering
That's pretty good.

... I think I'll start running it on my email drafts before sending them out.
What does this mean for freelancing sites? Or for services like AdSense where credit accumulates in a user's account till it's withdrawn? Do they have to get a license too?
The point of the article is that the author doesn't like programming languages like C++ and Java and has therefore stuck with C programming. The question the author poses is if Go can replace C for him.

In general, Go isn't meant to replace C but to replace C++ and Java.

Regarding garbage collections Go has the ability to use unmanaged memory although I haven't had occasion to try that, so I don't know how good it actually is.
I think it's sign of our technologically advanced times that the commentary here is so level-headed.

I, for one, can't help having the mind boggled. Cars that drive themselves coming finally coming out of the domain of Knight Rider, and onto actual roads?! That's just frickin awesome! (or maybe I've just been watching this Louis CK clip too often - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk)
Google forms alliance to ensure all Android phones get 18 months of updates
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Namecheap would be one. Have been using it for over two years now after someone recommended it on HN.
Cheerleader Gabriella Pasqualotto thrown out from IPL
Groupon Now as Real-Time Bargain Hunting
And how did he promote democracy?

Didn't Americans democratically elect a government which estimated that keeping diplomatic cables secret was the right thing to do?

Didn't Assange publicly release those cables?

That being said, he certainly promoted freedom of speech.
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That's a bigger issue than Apple though that goes through the publishers, Apple and Amazon and isn't going to be solved by another couple of competitors who weren't really competitive.
Ahh - much better. OK - sorry if I was reading that too literally. 5 is much closer to workable. In that case, I'd focus at least one month just on the project and see how close you are to bringing in revenue. If you're close (within a month or two), keep plugging away. If you get down to 2-3 months, I'd focus on freelance work to get your runway back up to 5-6 months at least.

Others may work differently, and only you can really tell what's comfortable for you. But I've learned that it's much easier to think clearly when there's several months of cash in the bank at minimum.
That's a little overdramatic. As an international customer, I hate the 1-click shopping, because surprises you with obscene shipping charges now and then.
Looks like there are more to this story. The Departure one is really creative :)

http://worrydream.com/#!/Freedom

http://worrydream.com/#!/Departure

Great site, overall.
The title really should be changed to reflect the actual message (or lack of one). Nowhere in the post does he say that he didn't have a good time working at Apple. Nowhere does he advise not working there (like the title suggests).

From what I infer, anyway, his actual message is that he can't show what he worked on at Apple - not that it's a bad place to work.
Could this not be the same thing you sometimes get on the human-driven tubes - for some reason (bizarre safety?) apparently if people lean on the doors they brake suddenly (have heard drivers say that over PA, googled for some kinda explanation but couldn't see anything except speculation).
Not really a representative sample of corporate culture. It's almost three years since my last job, and maybe I can talk about what I did there or get a job in a similar industry as of November.
I bet the first time robots are legally recognised as sentient (not saying they are now!) will be in court for a liability claim :oP
I wonder if making robots drive would bring the traffic death rate down to the one of other industrialized countries.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=deaths+in+traffic+per+c...
And yet individual regret / manslaughter charges don't seem to actually change road death statistics. I'd so love for this to happen; I kinda also doubt it will though anytime soon.
http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=my%5C+%28girlfriend|wife|...

If anyone fancies improving on my little euristique de l'amour that'd be excellent.
Bitcoin miners, for example.

See poclbm.py[1] and others.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Poclbm
The UK Information Commissioner's report on the coming legislation:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/~/media/documents/library/Privacy_and_...

There is no requirement to ask for permission to issue cookies if the cookies are "strictly necessary" for the task, such as for logging into a user account or using a one-click -style purchase. I have the impression that it will principally affect user-tracking systems like Google Analytics and those used in targeted advertising.

Something about the law is unclear to me: the ICO's summary of the law seems only to apply if you store state about the cookie. If you insert Google's javascript to issue an Analytics cookie, doesn't that make it Google's problem, since they are storing the data about the cookie? Which would be kind of harsh, since they have no control of the web page's behaviour. But the ICO report talks of there being site owner's responsibility if they cause the data gathering to happen, which suggests that is the problem of the Analytics javascript embedder.
I'd say they'd need a lot of people answering phones, a good couple lawyers (looks like they'll be expanding their legal team soon), lots of marketing and sales folks (churn must be a problem) and a couple programmers. I'd be surprised if it takes more than half-a-dozen to write page-scrapping robots and keep a job board site.

OTOH, as was pointed out earlier, it looks like a chaotic, noisy environment. If you have that kind of environment, you may need to multiply your team size by 1.5, at least.

edit: from http://careers.theladders.com/ it looks like they are using Java, Spring and are fully enterprisey buzzword compliant (only missing an Oracle RDBMS). If that's the case, you can multiply your team size again by a factor of 3.

edit 2: talking with a colleague from another company (they do a lot of Ruby stuff) I could confirm that our two-week sprints (we do mostly Java in this cell) are too long for them. Your iteration time varies according to the tools you use.
What is Panda update?
I think it could help solve congestion as a problem too.
Maybe cars could book their routes, and the road brokers will maximise for #cars/destination instead of allowing people to keep piling in even after the useful capacity is exceeded.
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My apologies. The excess over your reserve per customer is unlikely to equal the account value per customer. Wait, are paypal under the auspices of the financial regulator? Who approves their reserving methodology?

My spaghetti monster, do they even have to hold a reserve, or can they just spend all your money on the derivatives market?
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I mostly stopped too. I still read the mailing list occasionally, but haven't bothered to download any snapshots.
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1 with Ruby on Rails and 1 with Pyramid.
U.S. Redefines Cyberspace in an Effort to Deny Cyberwar?
Just use a different browser engine on your device?

... oh wait.
Tools like this will force web designers to step up their game, because their magical css powers aren't so magical anymore. I welcome the development.
I wouldn't go as far as to say all regulation stifles innovation. A completely unregulated market may very well stifle innovation also - i.e., when consumer trust of that market is so low as to discourage economic activity. That is a rather extreme case, though.

I think the more relevant point is that all regulations have overhead - even ones that don't charge a $500K bond. This is something governments sometimes seem to forget. No matter how innocuous your regulation, every single one simply adds to the pile of overhead businesses must deal with, and every single regulation contributes towards preventing more businesses from competing in the market.

The balance of regulation is a tough line to walk, to be sure.
So, a new startup comes along, and things are going well. The have new, innovative ideas that satisfy the needs of consumers. They manage to get a few hundred thousand dollars from a VC so that they keep operating for another 6 months. This startup offers a service that is cheaper, safer, quicker and generally more efficient that what is currently available. All of a sudden they'll be breaking the law unless they hand over half a million to the government. They can't find the money. They're done. You never hear about it. Other new companies that might have added value in the marketplace come along, look at the regulatory hurdles, and don't even try.

They might have provided a service that would be beneficial to the consumer and they might have hired a bunch of programmers once they had established themselves. The established companies already in the market would have had to lower prices and become more efficient to compete. Instead, the competition is crushed, you never hear about it, never know about it.

This is what this law is designed to accomplish. Nothing to do with Paypal. Stop talking about Paypal.

Many regulations serve the interests of politically well connected powerful oligopolies in this way. This is just one example. The reason put forward is always that this is some way of protecting you. That, if this regulation didn't exist, these companies wouldn't have to be responsible. In reality, it strengthens the hold on the marketplace of the oligopoly already in place and makes you more vulnerable to them.

Keeping companies out of the marketplace stifles competition. This is not good for you, the consumer.
I do - and someday you may do so as well.

One of the things they are trying to GPU accelerate is improved MRI scannings - imagine taking images for every 1mm and then stitch it together so that you get a 3d model of the area which the doctors can look at from every angle.

Unfortunately that takes way, way too much computer power to be feasible today.
Thats a good find. However "strictly necessary" is pretty vague. Tracking your own users on your site to optimise it for them would potentially be out of the question. Though if you sign up you could implicitly allow it with terms and conditions.

Still doesn't help with anonymous users...
I'm sure he got the idea from the same place, Oink and other such OCD pirates.
Both O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers offer ebooks with no DRM, just watermarking. It might be harder to find commercial fiction ebooks without DRM, but DRM-free is the norm for technical books.
On leaving Microsoft by Sriram Krishnan
For partnerships where the contribution is at all close (i.e. +/- 10%), I think a 50/50 split has the huge upside of getting both partners completely focused on making the pie bigger. I'd much rather avoid quibbling over a few % of share and get entirely focused on building a better business and also feeling the personal pressure to be contributing my best.

If the contribution was wildly different, I think that's certainly a different case.
Eric Schmidt on business culture, technology, and social issues
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Google certainly doesn't encourage people to talk about their work--it's one of the things that puts me off the thought of working there.
Perhaps he worked on his site when he worked there? I don't know, whenever I see concept work like this I think that it is an impressive hobby, but often I feel that perhaps the efforts could've been spent elsewhere, at least for the reasons you specify. I mean it has great texture, but it works like crap on my Chrome here as well.
Really? It doesn't seem to do it for me. Do you have some setting set somewhere?
For some reason the first time I click on the link I get an error "PLEASE ENABLE COOKIES", the second time I click on the same link it works fine!
I wonder how many of these we will see before people started using anonymous prepaid VISA credit cards to purchase non-logging VPN subscriptions from internet cafes, and then used these VPNs to do downloading.

I imagine trying to track that down would be placed into the too-hard basket.
Same in Java, C# and Python. To get the codepoints out or access the nth codepoint you need to iterate over the string if you want your code to be correct and safe.