skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now we are talking!

We have zeroed down to what prevents people from taking risks or being happy or being content. Its about slowly walking in debt traps which never go away all your life.

As a kid you are fearless, because somebody else takes care of your finances, you feel no pressure, stay happy and do what you want. Once you grow up, in your teens you take inputs from things around you and try to be like the richest. What you don't realize is that such a life 'loaned' not 'owned'. The day you go to work, you spend your salary like no spend thrift did before.

You change your iPhone every year, because everybody else is doing so. You buy everything from credit from clothes to toilet paper to car. Sometime later a colleague purchases a home and due to peer pressure you just trap yourself into a 20-25 year load on back breaking interest. You pay taxes on property and everything you own.

By the time you are done with all this you are too old to even enjoy what you have. Meanwhile you spend away your whole thinking of clearing the loans, trapping your self in never ending fear 'What will happen if I don't' clear the loan/ or if I loose the job.

This greatly reduces your ability to flexible and agile in terms of taking risks. This also kills your pursuit of happiness, because all the while you are worried of doing something out of compulsion regardless whether you like it or not.

The thing important here is to fix a upper limit and have some attitude for gratitude. A heck lot of people work a day of manual labor and go home with happiness filled in their hearts. While we worry about not having some X gadget which some colleague has. We complain about vacations et al.

Not tying happiness with money can help you get a lot of things in life with little stress.
No USA service, either. I would have considered Spotify, but I went with Pandora because of this limitation.
I agree with @ajju. The article claims to be unbiased but "isolationist" and "cookie cutter" are neither objective, nor appropriate ways to describe the YC process.

Not only have I formed amazing friendships through a very adequate amount of time with the other YC founders in w2011, but I've slept on their couches, gone out drinking, and leaned on them for plenty of support, as have they with our team. What I got by being "isolated" was an even stronger bond with my own team, which I wouldn't trade for anything.

As for cookie cutter presentations, when you're presenting 40+ companies, investors simply cannot sit through 8 minute presos. More importantly, PG doesn't cram you into a room with 800 people. He breaks Demo Day into several events. It lets you mingle with nearly every single person you want to after your pitch. It also means that, if you have one bad presentation, you didn't mess up for the whole group. It sounds like TechStars gets through that by having you practice a lot more, but I have to agree with PG that it's not a good use of your time and I don't recall any of our companies having a hard time presenting very well.

At the end of the day, TechStars sounds like an incredible opportunity. While a comparison might be helpful in choosing which one is right for your company, I think anybody should consider themselves lucky for getting into either program.
I know the op and based on our conversations if he came across as being critical of or putting down YC, that probably was not his intention. While he was in techstars we talked about the differences and he had a very high opinion of the way the YC program worked.

I read the article as an attempt to state the differences between the two programs from his point of view, not as a criticism of YC. Since he's not participating in this thread it seemed like people were jumping to the defense of YC by attacking the article. That knee jerk is unfounded.
The most expensive part in all that story is how taxpayers would pay for maintaining prisons for these fraudsters.
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Guido van Rossum: 21 Years of Python
The very basics of a Startup Idea
I started Blurb.FM last august. Got some early traction and press, link: http://venturebeatprofiles.com/news/view/blurb?article=28735... (behind a paywall now.) Here is an archive of the emails: http://twitter.com/blurbfm

I had to close it down because the workload became unsustainable pretty quickly (i was running another startup at the time).

My advice would be that you know your content generation strategy very well and make it work in such a way that you don't get burnt out.

I would also suggest that you offer an incentive on signing up. People don't normally like to sign up to newsletters that are just newsletters. I offered to plant a tree for every person that signed up (cost was only $1, i would earn double that from ad revenue in a year and that's when the trees would be planted.). It worked really well, i had an almost 30% conversion rate.

Also do as many things as you can to get people through the door and establish momentum. No other business needs more momentum to build than email newsletters. Word of mouth is king.

Hope that helps.
Recent episodes are not always free. I was using the free only version until "HuluPlus" episodes started showing up that I wanted to watch. I pay the $8/mo and I watch about 4-5 shows that I have subscribed in my RSS feed. Seems reasonable. I get probably 3-4 episodes per week for $2. Cheap entertainment.

And Netflix doesn't work on Linux.
It's important to trust the people you work with, and to be able to rally them to your banner -- but my personal experience hiring close and not-close friends has always been bad (luckily so far only on the work side, it's never damaged the friendship).

On the other hand, a friend who does a couple hours of favours doesn't cause a problem.
The success of the startups speak for themselves. I am not sure whats the records are, but the article talks about Techstars being in a variety of cities and meeting alot of friends and having a huge Demo day.

In all honesty I feel like YC is just straight up and too the point. They don't need to work in an office, if you like a startup you'll go hangout together. They don't need to hype the Demo day, they just need the right few people in the room.

Techstars seems to have people from all over the place, which I prefer not to have. If I want to meet people I want to talk the the ones in the valley, because they understand.

I haven't been in either program, but follow both and YC just seems to wipe out the unnecessary old school corporate things. TechStars seems like you better be a social butterfly and talk with everyone even the ones that don't know anything about.

More mentors does not mean better. I would take 2 really good mentors over a 1000.
They are popular so I tried it, but I didn't find their sorting helpful. And their login process is annoying.
Come to RacketCon July 23/24, 2011 in Boston
What are they going to be doing? Does either one have any business skill at all? Is there any reason to believe they are capable of running the business while you handle the development side. Is one of them a designer, or an expert on the subject-matter?

If not, then it's really just a guy with an idea and I'll give you 10% to build it. That would definitely be a no for me. I'm probably approached about once a month by a friend who has a great idea for a website. They don't realize that I have way more great ideas than I have time to build them.
I read your comment here. I read your entire post again. I read your comment for a second time.

I'm sorry, I still have the same conclusion.

If international students competing for places is a factor, it certainly isn't the major one. I would still assert ability to pay is a much bigger factor.

But then in my second glance at your post I also notice it is a puff-piece to cross-promote your tutor search business.

Well, isn't that self-serving?

Whip up some FUD around competition from foreign students to make guilty-ridden parents pick up the phone and open their wallets for private tuition for Junior. Overly highlight a need and then jump right in with the solution, how helpful of you.

And of course, you are not going to comment on the fact that the exorbitant fees for Ivy Leagues are keeping smart kids out because your whole business is built around serving the affluent privileged few who can afford to provide tutoring for their children (and thus probably those fees too). Most of America can't.

If it wasn't for the fact I don't have kids and I'm an example of why a university education isn't vital, I'd be upset I'd just given your company undue attention from this thread.
"In order to have altruistic behavior in a group you need to spread a gene that promotes such behavior..."

This premise seems to be taken as fundamental dogma in the evolutionary theory community, but perhaps should be questioned. Here is my (layperson's) counterexample: a species might have a gene that switches between whether an individual is a drone or a reproducer over the course of their life; a switch like that could thrown early in the development based on ambient hormones or whatever. If the individual is not a reproducer, they don't spread their own genes but they help the hive or whatever.

I think there is an unexamined assumption guiding contemporary evolution, that ALL behavior must be explained by genes ALONE -- in the case above, lifetime behavior is determined by an environmental trigger, even though the set of possible behaviors is determined by genes. This dogma seems, well, silly and wrong.

(Throw in cultural behaviors with outcomes like longer life and more offspring, and the classical system completely falls apart.)
That looks like what people should be using these days; good stuff.
It depends on the kind of investor. Buffett makes investment decisions irrespective of taxes. A day trader would obviously be affected by short-term capital gains rates.
You fill out a form when you begin employment that specifies how much to withhold: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf
The tone of this letter, combined with grellas' comments above, give me the troubling feeling that Apple is not certain they would win. Only two arguments are made, one based on terms we're not privy to and as grellas pointed out you'd expect them to quote if it's solid, and one based a doctrine that the Apple license is extended to the app developers by virtue of the app developers using the licensed product, but there's enough ambiguity in the law in terms of what software "contains" (for lack of a better word) other software that I don't think I would have a hard time arguing that the app instances are still legally separate instances of the patented capability. I could argue either side pretty forcefully if I wanted to.

IANAL but by lawyer standards this strikes me as very, very tepid. If I were an app developer, I would at least feel a bit better that Apple has acknowledged the problem and has taken some position on my side... but I wouldn't feel much better.
But that doesn't mean that you couldn't be a designer if you really want to spend the time working at it.

The OP is saying that a lot of people take the "I'm not a designer" label to heart and think they could never be one.
In that scenario, I'd put my cursor over the last tab, and middle click 6 times, possibly having to move the cursor for the last one or two. Or, I'd more likely have tabs 1 and 2 pinned as app tabs (probably gmail and pandora, in my case), in which case I can flail with any close tab action without problem.

Also, I browse with browser.tabs.closeButtons set to 3, which gives me a fixed-position close button at the end of the tab bar. (And on my laptop, I close tabs with a gesture that doesn't require me to move the cursor at all.)

Delayed resizing is a neat feature, and one that Firefox should copy, but it is not as critical as you make it out to be.
Is there anything more to this than "um, we, like, use warnings and stuff". Worthless. If anybody else but somebody from google would have posted this on their blog, it would have been justly and summarily ignored.
haha not porn, but it is a guilty pleasure. any ideas?
I recall something exactly like this on HN a few weeks ago, public with a unique URL for each wall, except it didn't have shared mouse pointers. What was that post?
I starting using Dropbox while in college so I could sync all my school work with great ease. Now I have 82.25GB of space (72.9% used) and I mainly use it to backup my iTunes library, pictures, and projects. While rsync would work as an alternative, I just go with Dropbox because it's dead simple to use.
Children of recent immigrants lead America's scientific competitions
I don't think I'd call YC isolationist. We did something almost every week outside of YC with other groups. I still talk to the people from our batch. I don't think I'd want to work in a shared office space personally, it would encourage too much work/life separation for that stage of the company.

I don't think spending my first month in meetings with mentors sounds very good either. You enjoy your mentor dating, I'll stick to working on my product. Your customers will tell you far more than any mentors ever could, I'd rather spend the extra time with them.

We left Silicon Valley. I don't regret having made the decision at the time, it allowed us to stay afloat until we raised money and then hit profitability. Now that we're scaling (19 people and growing) though it makes it very, very hard to find good programmers. We often ask ourselves if we should possibly open up out there too. I'm not really sure if Tech Stars being located somewhere else is a good thing or a bad thing on the whole.

You might get more "attention, focus, and exposure" from/to the Tech Stars founders, but from the press and investors you're way better off in YC. I don't think I can even name one Tech Stars company, seriously. As far as I know nobody is giving Tech Stars companies convertible notes sight unseen.

I don't know where he got the impression that YC doesn't focus on demo day. I can't tell you how many times PG said it would be the defining moment of our entire lives. (I'm exaggerating but only slightly.)

They certainly aren't interchangeable. One is Harvard, the other is Sheboygan Community College.
British Lawmakers Join Fray as Twitter Tests Law
Question: why do you use the phrase 'exclusive private beta'? Are you going to be evaluating and rejecting the majority of prospectve testers? If not, 'exclusive' is just meaningless marketspeak.
A Hippocratic oath for the Internet
WRT NYC, there's probably a big advantage to the less competition for talent. When you're recruiting out of college, NYC is probably as easy of a sell as SF, if not easier, and you're not fighting Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, etc. for those same people. A lot of people choose where they want to live and then where they want to work, especially programmers since a guy with a CS degree from MIT or CMU can get a job anywhere.
amazon cloud player is fast enough to stream songs to my 3G droid without skipping.
> I'm sure I'll get over those longings soon

Your getting over those longings will probably coincide with when you start working with C++ again.
Rdio is the best US alternative to Spotify IMO. Come with a free 7 day trial, which is how I got hooked.
Besides their existing partners and infrastructure.
I recommend pointing people to this excellent comic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1995#c...
Paragraph that sums the article: An attorney with the corporate law firm Latham & Watkins informed Castro that EMI owns the U.S. trademark for the word "entrepreneur." With 2,000 lawyers in 31 offices around the world, Latham polices EMI's intellectual property aggressively. The firm even instructed Castro to surrender his domain name to EMI. "If you fail to abide by these demands," the letter said, "Entrepreneur Media will have no choice but to take appropriate action to prevent continued use of an infringing mark and domain name."

Looks like an app store issue! How can a business trademark a single English word that effectively describes the industry?
Thanks! :) Any other thoughts about the funtionality?
wrt. meme "what happens to Asian overachievers when tests end" - the Intel's competition isn't a "test":

>But the largest number of Intel finalists -- 16 -- had parents who hailed from China. Ten were born to Indian parents.

from http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_17209589?source=pkg :

>...Liu explained how he used computer algorithms to identify immune system pathways activated during organ transplant rejection.

Also interesting side effect of H1B, may be even more important than the original H1B itself:

>The results are evident in Silicon Valley classrooms: Children of immigrant parents, particularly those with skills-based H-1B visas, are abundant in the top tiers of academia.
That's way cool! Is that rigged up to change the tempo for beatmatching?
As someone who has never done either, but has done startups, this doesn't make Techstars sound that attractive to me. Seems to make a lot more sense to focus on building your company, and save the schmoozing with 30 other entrepreneurs for happy hour.

Mentorship sounds great either way, but you might want that from someone more aligned with your market (not that it's bad to have advisors skilled in startup growth). Saying "you're going to spend the first month in meetings instead of building your first product" sounds like really the sort of thing you probably left your BigCo job to avoid, no?
You'll have to come to find out. :) We don't bite, but the language is addictive ...
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New mobile Web Google Maps highlights sorry state of native iOS app
Three traits of successful entrepreneurs
>Delayed resizing is a neat feature, and one that Firefox should copy, but it is not as critical as you make it out to be.

How on Earth can you possibly say this? Besides it being a matter of opinion, it's highly lauded as good UX (which I believe and have heard numerous other Chrome users swear by), and you can't possibly know how often I use it or how frustrating it is to use Firefox with it's default behavior.
Experimenting with TOAST Compression and Performance (PostgreSQL)
Apple actually has a license for the patent. So yes, but in a much more direct way than you suggest.
That's in there also, yep. The prototype is aiming to recreate most of the usual tricks. It gets a bit hackish. Release TBD, hopefully soon. A teaser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NiMMSyk9GU
Unfortunately, you've really jumped the gun here.

I'm a programmer who isn't so hot with design. But I certainly know how to use a program to layout objects;
that's trivial to learn on the grand scheme of things.

What I (and other non-designing devs) don't get is how to know what "doesn't work". I have at most a fuzzy idea of what are considered good and bad designs, much less how to produce them.

One of the biggest issues is the lack of feedback. With beginning programming, you are getting constant feedback from the computer. It even tells you where you are going wrong (line numbers, variables, etc.)

Design lacks such an objective feedback system. Sure, there's the times when your friends will agree that iteration B is superior to A. But actually getting feedback on what to do next? Pretty tough.
Single page:

http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/11_22/b42...
Yes, we have one and use it infrequently to process event sales, whereas the vast majority of our sales are online.
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The Roman empire analogy is upside down - the 'web apps' are the Romans, and the 'native apps' are the Visigoths. Three years ago the momentum was with web apps - nobody was developing new 'native' apps. That has all changed.

Even websites whose content is perfect for a browser (eg. newspaper and magazine websites, real-estate listings, train timetables, etc) are producing native app versions of their product. How does the author explain that?
"your first month will be spent mostly in meetings rather than intensely focused on building your actual product. That's almost certainly not the case with YC."

I can definitely confirm that.
As I mentioned in another thread on the topic, although not exactly equivalent just yet, our startup is working in the similar space: http://www.happybuy.com/

We are looking to innovate in the online shopping space by providing additional layers including price tracking, recommendations and price predictions. We followed SparkBuy and thought that their search interface (using facets etc) was well done and took ideas from Kayak (and others) into the broader/general shopping space.

We're looking at improving our search interface along similar lines in the future so I'd be interested in thoughts of previous SparkBuy users how our site compares - and any other comments HN'ers may have.
Thanks for clarifying! You are a great asset to the community here.
would be really interesting to find out
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Interesting. Couldn't find any post of it. If someone remember the name or post, please reply here. Good to know about similar products. :)
Any reason your tests used HTTP/1.0? It is likely that most of the time is spent in connection establishment and you may not have tested the server.
Having lived in both SF and NYC, I would say NYC is more expensive IF you live in Manhattan. If you live in Brooklyn (which is not a bad 'consolation' prize since the bars/concert halls/people are great), it's pretty comparable.

I also found it much easier to find designers because of the agencies/firms that choose NY as their HQ. Living in SF now, I'm still trying to find where they hang out.
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Dynamic columns as a bridge between SQL and NoSQL
Possibly true given that startup employees tend to also not mind being Google / Facebook employees. However, don't discount the Wall Street / financial industry pull. For hacker employees, median cash compensation in finance dominates startups.

Plus, the number of hacker-friendly finance firms doing heavy recruiting seems to be on the rise (as a first order approximation, that's any finance firm run by mathematicians or computer scientists).
"When you're recruiting out of college, NYC is probably as easy of a sell as SF, if not easier, and you're not fighting Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, etc. for those same people."

If we're talking about programmers, I think you're also fighting with Wall Street and $$$'s.
Entrepreneur Magazine is the exact match domain of the magazine world. Because of the name entrepreneurs will always read it, but the content is rarely good enough to be worth buying or even shelf-reading.
Some of these I already plan to add to the app (or have them). But I will give Reeder a spin and see what I can learn from it.
God bless the accountants. This reminds me of a great quote by Warren Buffett:

“If stock options aren’t a form of compensation, what are they? If compensation isn’t an expense, what is it? And, if expenses shouldn’t go into the calculation of earnings, where in the world do they go?”