skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did not complain, I merely pointed out, in a fairly neutral tone, for other people like myself, that this article is not hacker news. That you chose to interpret it as a complaint is your problem.
Unintentional, really... I was just pointing out, in a neutral tone, that this wasn't hacker news. It was an informational note, really.

Also, looking at the other comment threads, it seems to me that there isn't much genuine discussion about this anyway.
He isn't whining in the least bit. I think it's a perfectly fine Sunday night article, given how apparent it is to anyone reading TC's article comments how many people are especially critical of YC companies and YC itself.

It's true that YC companies receive more exposure than similarly-early non-YC companies. Well, that's one of the benefits. With YC acting as some sort of filter for minimum quality, blogs like TechCrunch know there's at least something worth looking at.
> How many things are there that are interesting to everybody here?

I know this one! Hacking and startups:-) My concern is not 'uninteresting' at all, but the slippery slope that reddit went down, where a trickle of genuinely interesting articles on politics and economics became a flood of crap.
I think part of the reason for the Y Combinator hate is that the valuations YC offers are so low and it's not clear whether YC significantly helps the teams it funds. Wait, don't throw those tomatoes, let me explain!

The valuation YC offers -- a median of 250k for a two-person team -- would be absurdly high if it was being offered to any team of two recent college graduates; but YC doesn't make offers to just any team. YC only picks the best teams (about 5% of applicants if I'm remembering the statistics correctly)... and it's not unreasonable to expect that the top 5% of teams are worth far more than average.

Similarly, the chance of a YC-funded team succeeding (for whatever definition of "success" you choose) is much higher than the chance of a non-YC-funded team succeeding -- but this doesn't necessarily imply that YC is helping the companies it funds. It might just be that YC is very good at picking winning teams.

This isn't to say that YC is making all of its money by taking advantage of the people it funds, though: Simply by selecting those top 5% of teams, YC provides a very valuable service -- distinguishing teams which have a 50%+ chance of success from those with a 5% chance of success, and encouraging the teams with a 50%+ chance, is certainly economically useful; and the profit which accrues to YC as a result of that is not qualitatively different from the profits which any other smart investor makes by figuring out that a stock is undervalued -- in both cases, the investor is doing work to increase the efficiency of a market.

The economist in me wishes that we could experimentally separate the selection process from the 3 month YC program in order to determine their relative importance -- but somehow I doubt the YC crew would be interested in running an experiment where they either (a) pick good teams and only fund half of them (in order to determine whether the teams they identified as good were likely to succeed with or without YC), or (b) fund a "good cohort" and a "bad cohort" of applicants simultaneously (in order to determine if being funded by YC is enough to make anybody successful).

(In addition to the difficulty of running such an experiment, the YC crew might not want to have this question answered: They probably don't want to be confronted by teams saying "well, were interested in being funded at a valuation of $200k -- but knowing that YC thinks that we're a strong team has resulted in us increasing our self-valuation to $800k".)

But in the absence of experimental data, the question remains open, with all the attached room for anti-capitalist hatred: Does YC help the teams it funds... or are they just shrewd investors?
That is insane. Bravo, Limelight. Too bad the open web can't get it done yet.
I don't know if it'd ever get as bad as reddit... PG's a smart guy, but he needs to give us a sign of how he's going to deal with the problem. A shoe, say, or a gourd...
I guess that's why Vista doesn't have a start button.
Ouch. I really shouldn't have typed that much. I'm supposed to be resting my wrists.

Pre-emptive note to anyone who replies to my comment above: I'm not likely to respond to anything you say, but please assume that I'm not being an idiot.

/me wanders off to find some ice for his wrists...
Actually, I am very amused by the technological creativity that such groups demonstrate. It not only requires a strong sense of aesthetics but supreme coding skills as well.

But, surprisingly, such groups are not very known in startup world. I don't really know whether startups and demoscene should related in some manner but I find it odd that such a connection does not exist.
Rather than hire a sales guy, the CEO should hire underlings.

Wins the cretinous statement of the day award, imho.

Don't hire underlings. Hire team mates. Especially in a start-up.
about the headset, but more general:

If you feel the need to explain your logo (as in "Just in case anybody can't indentify the red thingy") then it still needs some work.
Ask HN: Top 10 Hacks of All Time
Summary: memcached is not a magic bullet.

Well, if you believed it was, I guess this article is useful.
A lot of people didn't really like JS much because of the negative association with crappy implementations in browsers. Also, truth be told, to me it's not a very exciting language - I suspect that a lot of other people interested in 'cutting edge' type of things felt the same way, and the 'staid, solid, enterprisey' crowd was pretty happy with Java, which leaves something of a gap.
Thank Heaven for Tiny Dresses
Erotic sexual experience whilst wearing floral dresses
A Quick Look At The History of 800 Numbers
What we call today as toll free numbers or 800 numbers are used for generating business by companies all companies including small, medium and large companies alike and they are also used to provide presales and post-sales customer support for various products and services across the globe.
The Slashdot article is old (year 1999) but still lists some cool hacks such as CC, Perl, and even AK-47.

Am wondering which all hacks would you rate as top 10 hacks of all time? Mine would be:

Karma System,
Python,
Hacker News,
Y Combinator,
Electric Guitar,
Google,
Firefox,
Hotmail (it was a pioneer in web-based email),
APIs,
Wikiepdia
The whole intuition thing is rather questionable. You learn how things work and then you get used to them. It doesn't matter much whether it's an apple icon or a start button. Neither shouts "shutdown!".

It's much more important how much work frequently repeated actions take once you know them. No keyboard shortcut can ever be intuitive in the sense you could have suspected what it does without learning about it. But it's quick and you can remember it. That's what counts.

Are regular expressions intuitive? No, but just imagine you had to do pattern matching with a language full of very intuitive words, like SQL or COBOL say :)
I guess it's because almost every windows user is familiar with the button in the lower left corner nowadays. It's been that way for almost 13 years now.
Why the UK can become the global hub for mobile
Camping in Bare Neck Cove
teenage sexual adventure results in marriage
Let's look at a more complex example. Assume "page" is a list of strings. We want to get every word on the page (exact whitespace treatment and tokenizing behavior isn't important; just the gist)

Python:

(word for line in page for word in line.split())

C#:

from line in page, word in line.Split() select word

I think that translates to:

page.SelectMany(line => line.Split())

The Python is a bit confusing; the first C# example is much easier to read. Verbosity is traded for understanding. It is a careful balancing act, but I prefer the balance in C# in this instance. (Don't get me wrong, C# and Python are by far my two favorite languages, I love them both)
...and 1.5 times more Haskell job ads, little did I know.

From the submission comments: http://mult.ifario.us/p/there-are-apparently-lots-of-haskell...
It doesn't appear to be as simple as that. Some new articles are accessible but others are not. It's confusing.
Especially when you realize that the graph is for growth in postings and not number of postings.

In other words, if there was 1 Erlang posting one month and 15 the next, that would be a 1400% growth. At the same time, there could be 400 Lisp postings and then 500 the next month (100 new postings as compared to 14), and that would only be a 25% growth
I agree. In a lot of cases it's a mistake to cater to inexperienced users by making your GUI 'intuitive'. The bulk of your users are intermediates and power users. A user interface should cater to those people and gently nudge beginners in the same direction.

The old word interface (not the ribbon) actually did a pretty good job in this. Beginners used the menubar to do things. The options where accompanied by icons ("ooh, that's the same as the one on the iconbar.") and keyboard shortcuts ("What happens if I press Ctrl - S?"). The user interface doesn't get in the way of power users and teaches beginners and intermediate users.
I think the explanation usually is more emotional and less analytical. People start to dislike anything that gets a lot of publicity. Everyone is susceptible to this to some degree, but some people more than others.

As for the question of whether we help people or not, I don't think many people who know what goes on inside YC would argue that we didn't improve startups' prospects by 6.4%, which is what we have to do to earn our keep. Considering the amount of effort we put into it, we'd have to be pretty ineffective not to manage that.
The Dark Underbelly of Holy Shit
There are lots of places for general-purpose news. I think HN's strength is in specializing.

However, what are you really proposing? How is the topic list enforced? What does PG think? If you intend to use after-the-fact methods like complaining to people who post offtopic stuff, that's just going to make things unpleasant.
I see this as a knee-jerk solution, but once these educated children see the western world, they will not want to stay in Zimbabwe; to force them to stay is tantamount to indentured servitude.

I've been thinking about possible solutions for Zimbabwe, but there aren't many. The first step is to remove Robert Mugabe from power and, probably with international help, instill some sort of civility and credibility in the government there by appointing a just governor. But there are no protections against what happened to Mugabe happening to the new president/ruler. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Orwell said.

In the short term, Zimbabwe is kind of screwed. They have a hyperintelligent criminal dictator, a mass exodus of their most intelligent and rich people, and inflation so high that conducting business is impossible. And the government there doesn't seem to be doing anything drastic to fix these problems.

It's sad. More than ten million people live there in extreme poverty. And just ten years ago, it had some of the highest standards of living in all of Africa.
Not mine. News for hackers ought to be more than just industry linkbait. It ought to be somewhat above trends and hype.
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=erlang%2C+haskell%2C+lisp%... makes Ruby looks rather more healthy.

Better steady growth than sharp spikes and high volatility.
Having a giant K instead of a start button doesn't make much more sense, but its on the same place, so if you know what one does, you have to be pretty stupid not to figure the other one out.
JS has been around for a while. Web developers's have known it for a while.

Have they? What was the biggest JavaScript application you deployed five years ago? For me, it was maybe 5k, and did nothing more than some basic form validation and content hiding effects. And now? Well, our biggest will be including almost all of ExtJS which is I think about 400k, compressed. jQuery is ~60k, compressed. Our use of JavaScript is definitely not declining. Is yours?

I think it's only in the past two years that the work of the JS library developers have proven that large JavaScript apps are plausible. They've also smoothed over most of the browser compatibility issues--which are no small part of the historic tendency to avoid doing any heavy lifting in JavaScript. Browsers are also getting better about those issues. That standardization plus quality libraries has made it more reasonable to "write once, run anywhere" with heavy JavaScript usage. Despite the cynicism with which the phrase is usually uttered, it is still a very valuable trait in a language.

I don't think AppJet has played any role in JavaScript history to date...but they might, as they're very smart fellows. Far more important players include Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Adobe, and the Open Source library developers. And, of course, a few other YC alumni have been major contributors to the JavaScript juggernaut: John Resig of jQuery fame had a YC-backed startup before joining Mozilla Foundation, and Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt started YC-backed Parakey.

Anyway, it's not that I think JavaScript is perfectly suited for all tasks--or better suited for any particular task than X language. I just think it is well enough suited for most tasks (including a few for which Ruby, Python, Perl, Haskell, Lisp, etc. never will likely be at all suitable for...like the client-side of rich web apps), and the friction of switching between multiple languages, and the interoperation cost and complexity, is high enough, that JavaScript could pretty easily become the de facto standard language for web apps. And, since most of us can agree that nearly all end user apps will eventually be web apps, that means most apps.

Again, I really wouldn't want to bet against it. I'm glad I happen to find JavaScript to be a very pretty language. It has some rough spots, but overall, I don't mind working with it. It's biggest problems, I find, are caused by the DOM and its not quite comfortable connection to JavaScript.
"... with all the attached room for anti-capitalist hatred..."

In some ways, YC represents the purest form of the capitalist ideal - people risking their OWN money and resources to help develop a productive enterprise, and then reaping the rewards if it's successful (presumably the YC founders are risking their own money and their time with the startups they fund...).

I think most people reserve their anti-capitalist vitriol for things like hedge funds, where the managers of said funds can get insanely rich taking risks with other people's money.

I find the YC model very hard to hate.
Well here's a question for you:

1) Does Canonical operate a usability lab?

2) Would Ubuntu developers pay any attention if it did?
There are some ways to separate the selection process vs. YC input:

The startups offered YC-funding, who declined it... how did those guys work out, in comparison? (although the offer itself is an important YC input).

Also, the YC guide says they they decline funding to many very good applicants (because YC has limited places and they go to the very very good applicants). It sounds like these guys would have been selected, in some other batch... YC knows who the "almost selected" guys were and could do a comparison.
Wow! I can't wait for the future to become the present!
I think the article is OK overall even though a few points are not very well phrased.

As for image attributes: while they don't accellerate loading files, they enable the browser to render properly while images are still being loaded, so the user can start scanning the text immediately without elements bouncing back and forth.
YouTube Restores Video of Pro-Tibet Rally Over IOC and China Screams
Definitely agree on point 1, though I think it might work itself out in surprising ways. CouchDB speaks JSON natively, for example.

On 2, there are solutions to this problem based on closures, and basic politeness (YUI uses the YAHOO. prefix, while ExtJS uses Ext., and they can co-exist in one browser). It's not perfect. I'd like to see Perl-style package name spaces, or similar--nothing obtuse like the new PHP namespace support--just very concise and simple but powerful. I, personally, don't think Java style encapsulation and object border defense is all that important...but maybe enterprise users will (though Perl does OK in the stodgy banking and finance world, so it shouldn't be too scary for them).
g you're right, I wouldn't turn to them for advice on design or architecture.
So your solution is to comment on the article thus driving it up the page?

oh wait...
Maxklein, I have an idea for you. After you write something, read it again and add "you idiot!" to the end. If it sounds like the tone is compatible, then rewrite what you said until it is polite.

Anyway, with respect to the topic: you're suggesting that there is the possibility of a higher level of knowledge beyond what we can observe with our physical eyeballs. This is a fallacy that goes against everything science stands for. Science is the platform upon which you build models that describe the physical world.

For example, if we witness the effects of gravity occurring over and over in many experiments, then we can create a model of what we saw: the Law of Gravity. Then we can make the assumption that whenever there is mass, there is gravity. So far, it works. If something can be physically shown to break/violate the law, then it will be reexamined and the model will be changed to satisfy the new information.

There is no evidence of anything above or beyond the physical/theoretical models of science. To suggest there is implies faith.

Are you religious, maxklein?
the original post on Sarah Lacy's blog is atrocious, I can see why MA responded...
Unforgettable moments
Maybe because the demoscene is more connected to the computergame industry.
sorry about that. Thought that was my server.
Pouring Our Heart Into TechCrunch50
Yeah, this is certainly an interesting topic in UI design. When Microsoft had the problem of people not knowing what to do when their computer started up, they relabeled "system" to "start" counterintuitively rather than building a progressive disclosure system into Windows. It may have been better to put a little hovering popup bubble that pointed towards the system icon and said "Click here to start" the first few times you started up (or until user testing showed people had learned what to do).

In later versions of windows, they had a whole window with tons of options pop up at every single startup. In Vista, the window has useless computer information, like how much RAM you have. They not only confuse beginners, but they punish intermediate and advanced users until they find the little checkbox that says not to start it every time.
"People start to dislike anything"

In the case when journalists are those who "dislike" and not people, someone could think that their motives to write something bad are not so innocent, if not directed by someone who pays to create a bad impression.

Although to be honest the majority of press I see about YC is really positive.
Most YC companies seem not to be technically revolutionary, but applying existing technology to solve real problems (not a criticism, an observation - after all, there is great opportunity there for making money).

- Are there any technology-based startups funded by YC?

- A proxy could be patent applications: how many YC startups have filed for patents?
Note: Run in production IFF you want a DOS opportunity on your hands :)

This is a perfect example of why not to use regular expressions to validate email addresses. It likely (1) still misses some edge cases, (2) is nearly impossible to verify, and (3) is exponentially expensive (see 2).
Maybe because those things are taught better from life?
Great article about Twitter, Valuations and Metcalfe's Law
PG - I think no matter how well or how often you try to explain this point, the real haters don't understand the derivation nor the impact of the 6.4% figure. If they did, it would be a moot point!
This article has many factual errors in explaining how CDN's (Akamai & Limelight) work. FYI: I used to work for Akamai.
So are you saying that companies in general should never give refunds, because there is a faint chance that there will be more refunds than purchases (which seems logically impossible, btw.)?
The Trouble with Twitter
"The App Store puts my product directly in front of EVERY SINGLE person who is capable of using it. Let's not understate the value of that."

Isn't the internet doing that already, anyway? How is Apple advertising my app to everybody with an iPhone? I don't think they can do that in the long run. Sure, as long as there are only 100 apps, it looks like that, but if there are several thousand, I don't think every iPhone user will see them all.
Tolerating Transient Failures in Distributed Database Systems
Social Books site Ugenie Bought by Lulu
It's interesting how the slogan of Mao's "Hundred Flowers Campaign" is widely used as a metaphor for healthy competition fueling innovation and progress of a population, while the campaign resulted in violently silencing most of the dissenting voice.

Some therefore conclude that Mao had anticipated this outcome and used the campaign as an entrapment to identify critics and get rid of them.
when two companies (zenter, omnisio) get bought off Google, another one (reddit) got an acquisition offer from them, others get funding from Sequoia, others from Atomico etc I think the role of YC it's pretty obvious and enviable from competitors, and although the statistical increment for success due to their aid may be 6% I think for better ideas/execution is really a lot higher.

none the less it's obvious by now that YC at least acts as a proven talent filter which I think is highly desirable by VCs
I love how Josh posts here. Redeye VC or Grassroots VC?
Journey to Python Part 2: Input, Output, and Documentation
"Remember, these startups are usually 2-3 people with little more than an idea. Generally speaking there are few other investors who will be willing to invest in them until they have some sort of code written or an initial product out the door."

That's not exactly true. I think majority of the startups were launched or had extensive prototypes before they joined YC.

This makes sense, because it filters out the people who are too lazy or not motivated enough to build an amazing product. (But it also filters out very smart and motivated people with awesome ideas who are too busy, as many smart people are.)

In any case, the risk that YC takes isn't quite as big as investing in two kids with a pipe dream. All of the founders seem to be carefully selected for their propensity towards success.
Technical Trees
Nothing worth speaking of, but I made lots of mods, and despite years spent in real recording studios I still find a tracker to be lower friction for sequencing than "real" sequencers. When I was a kid with a C64 and later an Amiga, the demo scene was about the only software development I had any exposure to...so it certainly had an influence. But I think if I could go back in time and give my earlier self a gift, it'd be a UNIX system with proper development tools.
Experiment with faster-than-light "spooky" quantum effect at 18km
There's an old 1997 article that explains this kind of experiments and their possible applications in a bit more detail:

http://www.cebaf.gov/news/internet/1997/spooky.html
I don't understand what you are trying to say. Why shoul it make a difference if you want to maximize correct guesses across all questionings, or across one questioning? I don't think it does - the answer is always 1/3.
The Jizz Hut is Open for Business
cum dumping gangbang orgies
maybe to make it nicer-looking when the taskbar is on the side of the screen? http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/20/55055.a...
I could post a taser story. Would that jolt you awake from your bad dream, perhaps?
REST Questions
Replying to you and swombat http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=lisp%2C+haskell%2C+erlang%...