skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask PG: Bad apples that got into YC?
Hi again PG,

You have talked about a lot of great YC founders. You've also pointed that there have been others who weren't so great. Those who taught you how to do better by not picking founders like them.

Could you please elaborate more on those? Who they were, what were they like, what you learned from them? You sound like a positive fellow who sees the best in people. Why were these folks the wrong type?
The key is to choose the right products to advertise. Most products and services will not see results using facebook ads.

Of the people I've talked with, it seems that advertisements for alcoholic beverages and local food joints have the most success.
Hiring The Wrong Person Is Far Worse Than Waiting For The Right Person
Skyscrapers are also a bad idea, because tall things have a tendency to tip over.
For financial aid
Kind of reminds me of the Quake 2 easter egg / hidden room after the final boss (forward to about 2:55)

http://youtu.be/xCuTQ0pVQQQ
Has anyone done a real break-even analysis on these cars (based on real life performance numbers), including maintenance costs and assuming various fuel prices? Even with subsidies, my hybrid-driving friends end up shelling out more money than I do.

Every statistic I've seen is concocted (including the chevy volt's "infinite" mpg claims way back when).
The Leaf isn't a hybrid... I understand your point, but the Leaf isn't a hybrid.
Disable Social Networks from tracking you~Facebook ,Twitter,Google+
I'm not sure pg would want to bad-mouth people in public.
Could this be because some people (at 120,000 now) are unliking and dropping the count for a moment?
Why not buy a Thunderbolt external hard drive for your photography stuff? Do you need this data to be portable as well or could you live with it just at home?
Yes, it works for me. I advertise an advertising service for small businesses, and target very specifically to people that identify as a specific type of marketer. Each ad reaches only xx,xxx people at most. I've been running the ads since the beginning of summer as the ROI has been positive.
I've ran campaigns for all kinds of products on facebook, and none had a good roi. From what I understand the only real way to make cash from Facebook is to do CPA type things(i.e. enter your email address to win a free iPad)
I am one of those in the article. A few years ago I needed a new car, running the math it wasn't a fantastic deal and I could get a much nicer car (performance, looks, style, sound, features) for the same total price. I also said "maybe the next one with be a hybrid/electric".
How much money I should spend to draft a contract?
My californian lawyer spent around 15 hours drafting a 4 pages contract for my company and charged me $4500. My company publishes and promotes iOS applications in App Store. The contract itself covers relationships between marketer (my company) and developer.

Now every time I want to make a minor change in my contract, my lawyer charges me another $300-$600.

I'm curious if I overpay or not. Does it really cost like that? Please, share your experience.
I live in Ann Arbor (pretty green area) and drive a hybrid Camry so my data may be way off-but around here I see plenty of hybrids. Not as many large cars as my Camry (which btw is a fantastic vehicle only made better by being a hybrid) but loads of Priuses (Prii?) and Honda Civic hybrids. A physcian I know even drives one of those monster Toyota Sequoia hybrids.
Gitolite is also well supported. Gitosis is basically an abandoned project. kernel.org's new git infrastructure will be using gitolite which means you can pretty much count on it being supported well into the future.
Quality Matching for Genuine Singles
Given that your username is 'veyron', I assume that your hybrid-driving friends have shockingly aggressive driving habits.
Wonderful,
Nice to see QBasic there. These days its easier to write for modern High Level languages, as they are easily installed and available everywhere. But the classic and beautiful languages are hard to find and even talked about.

Good and nostalgic memories of Programming with the Basic.

:)
Ask HN: Is anyone else unhappy about the recent push for grid interfaces?
With touch screen devices becoming more and more common among electronics, major operating system providers are beginning to really change the user interface, and I'm not sure it's for the better. Windows is coming out with Metro, a major rework of the desktop interface, and to be honest, I think we can do better.

For years, user interfaces were all about data presentation, and efficient use of space. I could open up the start menu and have a few dozen applications displayed in a list, and easily accessible to the eye. But recently, it seems that interfaces are becoming fatter, with a less efficient use for screen space. Large buttons are replacing lists, big images are replacing text.. Instead of all my apps being in a neat list, my apps will now be on several screens that I have to scroll to. Does anyone think that this new interface can have enough pros to outweigh the cons involved in this change? I feel like Microsoft is just creating this dramatically new interface to spark curiosity in the consumer's eye, to make the customer believe that Microsoft still has a shred of imagination left in the once great company. But to be honest, I feel that Microsoft is creating the world's next gimmick. A ditch effort to turn their sales around in a market that they're losing to Apple. And i have doubts that this interface is really worth switching to for someone who is competent in the user field? Are we on a downhill slope with the efficiency of data presentation? Are we catering to being incompetent? I'm not saying the desktop environment shouldn't change, but I really have my doubts that the grid menu system is the best direction. What are your thoughts?

I'm sorry if there are spelling errors. I don't have my computer tonight, and I typed this out on my phone ironically. Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
I never quite understood hybrid cars other than buying them as an indirect donation to pursue hybrid technology. Hybrids are worse for the environment than regular plain-ole' ICE cars and don't really give you much of an efficiency boost.

Diesel engines are right up there with hybrids in the fuel efficiency game. Take for instance to VW Polo BlueMotion which is rated 70mpg+ Highway. The Passat BlueMotion is worse but still an impressive 57mpg+ Highway.

Also consider that some biodiesel fuels are near 100% carbon neutral (such as hemp-based biodiesels), in that they sequester as much carbon dioxide from the air as they will eventually burn into once combusted.
Hybrids look even less attractive in Europe. For example a VW Golf Bluemotion consumes actually less fuel on the average with highway consumption being significantly less and top of that diesel is still slightly cheaper than gasoline. Even with a vehicle tax rebate meaning 300-500 euros less per year the Prius doesn't seem such a great buy.
Kim Jong II on Google+?
How To Emulate David Wood With Your MLM
All about car here always update
hello guys nice to meet you all~:).. I here to share you how to drive a car~

Most of us want to have a car but how if we dont know the method of driving a car..

now I will teach you how to drive a car...this is only the theory but i hope that will useful for you :)..

first we must have a license right??but i havent teach you how to drive a car so i will teach you step by step~
You've already received a few answers here, but one that seems to have been missed:

Use something other than ubuntu. Although there may be others out there, I'm unaware of any other distro that disables root. Complaining about disabling root is an ubuntu-specific complaint - it doesn't apply to linux in general, let alone unix.

Also, if you don't like using passwords, copy-ssh-id is your friend.

As for apache, I don't play with it much so I can't comment there. It certainly scares me :)
"Beautiful"?!
Could you explain why being a hybrid makes the Camry better? Also, why did you pick the hybrid instead of the standard version?
Let's say I wanted 100% reliable music listening. To do this, I buy a million of the original 30GB Zune media players, create a perfect failover system, so that if the sound from one of those stops for whatever reason (hardware, software, cosmic rays, etc), it'll switch to another one. I even move these Zunes all across the world, with AC provided, and multiple network links linking all of them, with satellite link backups between them.

Then December 31, 2008 rolls around, and a tiny firmware bug knocks out all of them simultaneously for 24 hours. Oops.

Not all failures are independent events.
I'm not sure if you're making an argument for marijuana and cocaine prohibition or against.
I have run a few test campaigns on AdWords and Facebook recently.

I was expecting better traffic and conversions from my Google campaign. The exact opposite happened, and by a large margin.

I received a lot more traffic from Google in a shorter timeframe but converted that traffic to registered users somewhere in the 5% range - I wasn't really happy with that. I believe the root cause there was the words I was picking, it's really hard to pick the right search terms. I don't think I've got it right yet and I expect my next campaign to go better.

Facebook's process is much, much more intuitive for a marketer though. It's easy for me to identify what my specific target market "likes" and then advertise a compelling message to them. The frequency of traffic was lower than Google's but the quality of the traffic was much, much higher. I converted nearly 20% of the traffic which I was much happier with.

I prefer Facebook's targeting as I found it a lot easier and it worked well for me but I need to spend more time with AdWords to determine if Facebook is better for me (It ended up being cheaper, too), but it's been pretty good so far.
Ouch! Awesome apps like this are totally humbling. Congratulations, guys.

If you're still following this thread, amasad and max99x, I have a simple question: how many hours did you two put into this?
The FT app is based on html5. Initially, they had an app, but transitioned quickly to html5. Takes a wee bit longer to load, but barely notice that anymore. The experience otherwise is pretty much the same. And for what its worth, it's the best news app on my ipad.
1) This isn't Reddit. Please don't post silly stuff like this.

2) His name is Kim Jong-il, not Kim Jong the second.
An excellent point. haha. whoops. :)
MSE is an excellent antivirus programme, particularly given the price.

As the article says, it shares its engine with Forefront Endpoint Protection, an enterprise solution used by thousands of businesses world-wide. This is a once-off mistake for an otherwise stellar programme - it happens to the best of us - and isn't indicative of the entire solution.
Maybe it's CityDesk?
Como Perder Peso Rapido
That's what he means by control structure instead of selection.
1. Don't you find this interesting?
2. I didn't misspell...it's also written this way.
NIH or not, I enjoyed reading this post. It showed the simplicity of serving git repos and walked readers through the entire process top to bottom.

Gitolite is a great project and it has many useful features such as branch-level access control. That might be what he meant by "overkill". He simply didn't need those features. I think there's much to be said for keeping things simple.
Doing a little network sniffing this seems incredibly inefficient. Apparently the page is polling the server up to 8 times per second and getting back a 7-800 byte chunk of Javascript. The infrastructure to support this at Facebook's scale is mind boggling. This is the kind of stuff that Websockets was invented for.
Replying to multiple comments:

1) Automation: Yes to automation, but if I'm arguing that a task is needless, automating it does make change that.

2) Authentication: Yes to authorized_keys, auditing, LDAP, etc. I'm killing the local 'login' - not trying to kill security.
Why is this considered so ugly? Is this not the same operation as var x=1, y=2, z=3; which is very, very common for variable initialization?
Trading of securities is a regulated market. The rules about what information is available to the market are a combination of tradition and regulation. But they are man-made and arbitrary. I argue that the current fashions in regulation starve the markets of information and contribute to crises.

I'll give you just one example. Large traders attempt to conceal their identity. This leads to a lot of gamesmanship, as you point out. If this information were released with every order placed then I would argue a lot of volume would dry up and volatility would decrease.
For the record, though, Ubisoft is a French company, not a Canadian start-up.
The most important thing for day-to-day economic health is to make sure no one loses retail deposits

You're ignoring the money market here. I just looked up some numbers, and Forrester research peged the amount of deposits at FDIC insured banks at $6.9 trillion at the end of 2007 (http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/industry_essential_us_r..., although the number of insured dollars is probably a fair bit lower than that due to limits on the size of insurable deposits), while the Institutional Money Market Funds Association gives $3.6 trillion in money market funds. Money market funds are marketed as being equivalent to bank deposits (down to the ability to write checks against them) and many retail investors don't understand that they aren't insured.
EFF is great and I would encourage anyone to donate/join. If you get a chance to attend, they frequently speak at the DefCon conference in Las Vegas, NV (http://www.defcon.org) and field digital rights questions.

They also produce useful info for anyone concerned with digital privacy like the "Surveillance Self-Defense Project". If nothing else, it's gives some perspective on the complicated legal state of data security and communications.

https://ssd.eff.org/
"Hybrid's also have the potential to be confusing" (from the grandparent comment)
Hacking the brain to design surgeries: Perception of lesions.
This experiment shows how we perceive faces with lesions/deformities different as compared to normal faces, and how surgery can lower this perception bias. It can provide powerful insight into how we design surgeries in the future.

Andres
Event 500 and 501 seem like false alarms (I had never heard about them until today). I have a fairly high spec video card (AMD 5870) and when I drill into the log where those events show up, I can see there's been a few of them every day - but I've never actually noticed any performance degradation. I would never have known that they were being produced until I looked into them, and on the basis of the lack of actual degradation, I'm confident I can forget about them.

Video is fine and clear for me across a much larger range of codecs than I've ever seen on Linux (or Mac, for that matter). I normally get no more than 2% CPU utilization for video playback; any HD content I have is hardware accelerated, I expect.

50/100 requests per second is meaningless without knowing the cost of those requests. My machine, if you ignore superscalar architecture and hypethreading, is capable of over 12 billion operations per second. Unless these registry reads have fairly substantial costs, they're completely unnoticeable.

My Windows 7 machine here currently has an uptime of 48 days. I seldom reboot until the Windows Update nag gets the better of me, and I frequently turn off the update service to get rid of the nag. I have 12GB of RAM, and I've never seen this degraded performance you speak of.

I wrote my own print spooler (it actually runs on a different machine) and have a bunch of tray applications: CrashPlan, DropBox, Process Explorer, corporate VPN, occasionally Skype and Steam. Again, I've not noticed any performance drain from these things. Not even games these days are CPU constrained; with 4 cores (or 8 if you include hyperthreading) the only thing that taxes my CPU is video transcoding. There's plenty of spare CPU capacity in games; they seldom get above 30 or 40% utilization.

If you really think Windows is odd in starving the system for non-low-priority runaway processes, try running a forkbomb without ulimits in place on your Linux or Mac machines. But I have no difficulty running Handbrake or SuperPI or similar utilizing 100% CPU but still having responsiveness enough to shut them down etc.

It's extraordinarily rare for me to find myself in front of a Windows machine where the UI is completely unresponsive except in cases of driver conflict or flaky hardware (e.g. a paging error from a bad hard drive will do horrible things). I don't know why you've soured so much on Windows, or what bad experience it was that pushed you over the edge, but when you bring up things like registry traffic and this "event 500/501", I get the impression that you are actively looking for things you think are worth complaining about, rather than pointing out things that are actually hampering your interaction. It hurts your credibility in my eyes, frankly.

(FWIW, I was a computer technician before I became a software engineer, and I've been working with Windows of all varieties since about 1993, including the early (3.1 and 3.51) versions of NT (almost 20 years, scary!). I've dealt with thousands of machines running Windows. And for MS OSes based on NT, problems have overwhelmingly been because of hardware or driver issues, almost never because of OS issues.)
They only have a business because it's illegal in the USA, they kill each other for a share of that rich pie
Good Afrrtnoon America: Blogger: Good Afrrtnoon America - Edit post
pg has previously said that one of the most important things about screening YC applicants is to make sure that they're not assholes. Answering this question with personal information would definitely violate that rule.
Having articles edited and organized for peer review would then make users of those materials pay for a large sum is still unjustified, given that the cost of producing the material is largely not paid by the publisher.

You may say that the cost of getting an article for $25 is fair given the amount of work done by the publisher is fair, but the author, to my knowledge (since I am not an author of any sorts) they don't receive any payment due to these transactions. I am noy paying for the editing and publishing, I am only paying for the content (more true to CS / science fields, where TeX stuff are pretty common)

What really need to change is the journal oriented way of publishing papers, we don't need to have stuff printed these days, as far as my university life went, I have only read one or two articles in printed form because I happened to be inside the library.

As much as computerized content goes, layout and stuff are much more automatic, and by providing writers with better and simplier tools, we may be able to save more trees by going digital.
An innovative business model for reducing medication cost
There are all sorts of chronic disease ranging from diabetes, adhd, HIV, etc. And depending on the chronic conditions, medication costs are extremely expensive.

This may be a stupid questions so please let me know if that is the case. But, I was wondering if there would be some sort of innovative approach to lower the cost of these medications through a flash-sale (i.e. groupon, fab.com, gilt) business model.

I guess the main objective is to find ways to provide expensive medication to those who are in need that would not just benefit the patient but also the pharmaceutical companies.

I came across this website: http://www.goodrx.com/ that is definitely heading towards the direction that I am talking about.

I need all the input/comments I could get so feel free to give me some ideas! Thanks!
I really thought there would be more all electric cars on the roads by now. The pace of car tech is excrutiating. 5 years ago there was all hype that hybrids were just temporary transition models. And here they're still trying to sell these over-engineered luxury green cars.

Where are the affordable, small, city-oriented all electric commuting cars that would actually make a difference?
... -i < 6 is the only thing I can come up with
Did you evaluate using something like Redis for this? It's got an atomic increment command that guarantee's unique ID's and the performance is stupid fast.
But couldn't he answer without giving personal information?
The correct formula that Wolfram should be using here is floor((cur_yr - old_yr)x365.25), assuming you are interested only in the recent past where the 365.25 holds true.

As an aside, floor(365.25x(2011-1984))+138 gives 9,999 days elapsed which would make today the 10,000th day, as stated by Zuckerberg.

EDIT: this formula only works when you begin on a day after a leap day during a leap year, thanks hennypenny
Yes, and that's stupid, and I'm explaining how we made accounts work fine for multiple users (in production, across 100+ servers).
and less RAM is even cheaper. You don't address the point at all.
Greece's failure will invite a sustained speculative attack on Spain and Italy which would probably require coordinated actions between European and non-European (i.e. American and Chinese) governments to stop.

I agree that the crisis is a matter of misaligned incentives, but I include politicians and bureaucrats from pretty much every country in the set of those who have directly misaligned incentives (i.e. not just indirectly misaligned by campaign contributions from wealthy bankers), so I have very little faith in the ability of regulation to solve the problem.
How Apple and Facebook Nearly Fell Out — Over the HP TouchPad
If you do that then you need to keep a mapping of object IDs to shards. You can't store it on the application servers because of race conditions and memory constraints, so each object lookup will require two network trips.

They've defined 2^13 virtual shards, which is fine-grained enough that they can move entire shards between physical servers to eliminate hot spots.
I second the vote for diesel cars/minivans. Much simpler internals than hybrids with comparable (if not better fuel economy). I'd also venture to guess that the total environmental impact including the manufacturing processes is much less too. I wish VW/Audi/BMW/Mercedes sold a decent minivan with a diesel engine here in the US and I'd be a buyer. The VW Sharan gets 43MPG+ (http://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/07/sharan-20100701.html)
It's no coincidence that nearly half of the European cars have diesel engines.
web sockets or, in most browsers, long polling. long polling is easy to implement and they must already have the infrastructure built out since they have chat...silly Facebook.

[edit]
just took a closer look at the network activity. this really is the worst way to implement this feature. polling several times a second, sending back a bloated response, and updating much more of the DOM than necessary. this is just terribly hacky. probably done very quickly at the last minute though.
Hey, I've heard that claim that hybrids are worse for the environment than pure internal combustion engines. Honestly I don't see how that's possible and I've never seen read anything that supports it. But I'm not an expert - do you have a source or can you explain it?
A Physical App Store for a Software Product – The Podio Story
Yes it would be impolite to bad-mouth specific people. But one can talk generally about traits and characteristics with a reflection on mistakes made and improvements to such processes.
It's not less likely, it's just much much slower.
A society with so many ppl that rely so much on alcohol is just a symptom of even bigger problem. Give people a sense of purpose, or better community ties, and the need for "drugs" decreases
If anyone's interested in Prohibition-era America, I would strongly recommend checking out HBO's Boardwalk Empire series for a masterful televised reenactment of that period in history.
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