skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Unboxing" experiences with Apple products have become a religious experience for a reason

Really? Unboxing my Macbook Air cavalcade of annoyances. First wanting my address and phone number just to boot up, then having to create an Apple account and enter a credit card number just to download the latest updates to the software it ships with. How is that a religious experience?
Agree. My gut says that some founders may look at sexy as a way to shortcut the hard work of marketing and being remarkable, probably not an explicit choice, but I can definitely see how one might lean towards trendy as a way to light up the rockets on market acceptance.
WaterField Designs MacBook Air Travel Express Case
Dropbox seems to be more focused on teams of people working together. Dropbox is more focused on having a "shared folder". Kicksend seems to be more focused on individuals sending large files to other individuals. I could see Kicksend growing fast as the barrier-to-entry seems lower and particular use more focused, and in my experience, they are attacking a particularly more painful problem: sending large files to others.

From Drew's Dropbox YC application:
"# What's new about what you're doing? *
Most small teams..."

Also it's great how their desktop app acts more like an email-client for large files. It might not be as cool as having a shared folder in the cloud, but it seems like a superior path to adoption if the change to people's behavior builds on the way people do things today (attach files to emails).

Another quote from Drew's Dropbox YC application:
"# What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn't exist yet? *
Email themselves attachments. Upload stuff to online storage sites or use online drives like Xdrive, which don't work on planes."
North Port Carpet Cleaning
Is this like a real version of http://jotly.co/ ?
Yup! Thanks.
I'd say that trollish behavior is the only way an idea can really be "stolen".
> If someone ... would you consider it?

Sure, but you'd have to convince me that it wouldn't turn away users who haven't heard of the service. Also, you'd have to show some people that they'll make more money than an ad-supported model.

Example: I'm working on some tutorials on integrating Rails apps with iOS apps. I'm deciding between selling an eBook + code versus just blogging it. If such a service allowed me to sell access at $3 per chapter/turoial, I'd consider it.

All in all, you might take this angle and focus on a specific type of content in order to get traction. Maybe coding/tech tutorials would be a good place to start.

> What must such a service have or offer in order for you to consider using it?

Users + growth

> How do you believe it should work?

That's your problem. Make it easy and people will use it. Show publishers that they'll make more money and they'll get on board.

> Would you accept a large % in fees in exchange for ease of use and removing the credit card barrier?

Definitely not more than Apple's app store (30%). But something below that would be nice, say 20-25%.
They replaced a working product with a broken design.

Remember how tactile the old layout felt? Clicking on a new email link felt like clicking on an new email link

Now, it feels far too much like Amazon.

It's like working on a crappy Nokia phone with a bad touchscreen.

And here's my point: in trying to race Facebook, Google is breaking products that work (worked) perfectly well for 99% of users. That's simply put, Google getting confused.
Is it fair to call YC an investment firm? I've always thought of YC as being an incubator which dabbles in investing -- in the sense of creating wealth primarily via mentoring rather than the initial startup-picking process -- rather than as an investment firm which dabbles in incubation.

I'd be very interested to hear your opinion on the relative importance of the various roles YC plays.
They probably keep track of whether you click the "No, really search for my search terms" link.
GLSLUnit - A unit testing framework for WebGL Shaders written in JavaScript
What are the big mobile problems in your estimation?
A little background on this: I work at Google on the MapsGL effort, and as part of launching MapsGL we decided to launch a unit testing framework we wrote for our shaders. Shaders can get hugely complicated and bug prone, and don't provide a great way to debug them. GLSL Unit hopes to change that.
Depending on execution, this actually looks like an awesome idea to me. The best recommendations come from reliable friends, who say things like, "try the X at Y, it's the best thing on the menu." If it can properly pair my tastes with others who have similar taste, I would love it.
If you are thinking about putting together your own CAPTCHA solving program, as hinted at near the end of the article, keep in mind that it may be illegal to break a CAPTCHA without explicit permission under the DMCA. I'm not a lawyer, though.

More info: http://www.chillingeffects.org/anticircumvention/
The thing to worry about cheap laptops is that your battery life is going to be non-existent. For me that's a deal-killer after having a couple of laptops with excellent battery life, I never want to go back to the 1.5-2 hour days.
ahem ahem Digg V4
I feel in that case, a honeypot field is a better technique. It has approximately the same spam-rejection rate and doesn't hinder your real human users.
But the interesting thing is, I think, how Amazon realised that building a superior delivery network for bits would be just as much of an advantage as having a superior delivery mechanism for atoms was. You buy a kindle from them. Amazon ship it to you. You turn it on, buy things, and the bits just arrive. And Amazon have that process down better than anybody, even Apple.
Fair enough. What if a PE group made you an insanely crazy monetary offer for majority stake?
Do you mean that sort of thing just isn't done? Or there are legal/other reasons why it can't be done?
There's no point in saying that if he was starting facebook knowing what he knows now, he would do things differently ...

The reason he knows what he knows now is BECAUSE he started facebook!
If you don't mind buying an older model off lease, both AscendTech http://ascendtech.us/items.asp?Cc=NTB&iTpStatus=1&Tp... and Tiger Direct http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/search.a... have a few for under $300
Stealthy Classifieds Startup
Where does Google actually say that they won’t read Gmail or Google Docs?
Uhh.. how is that different than the ISS?
Not sure why all the down votes... it was a serious question, and not obvious to me as a Dropbox user why I'd want to switch to Kicksend
Storm does not allow arbitrary state in operators (what Nathan Marz calls "bolts").

Maybe I misunderstand your point, but Storm does allow state in Bolts - a Bolt is just a Java object, so it can have member variables. That's how aggregation (e.g. counting events per user) is done. Of course, if you want a Bolt that scales horizontally, you need to account for the state being split across several instances of the Bolt class; and if you need the state to survive a restart, you need to keep it in an external database instead of in the object's memory.
In an even nicer twist, when I upgraded to the latest model from my original Kindle, the new one showed up with all of my books already synced so I could literally just open the package, turn it on, and pick up right where I'd left off with the old one. This is pretty small and probably caused more by coincidence based on how the system works than actual intent but it impressed me a lot. I've been a big Kindle user since it came out though.

(FWIW, I use mine to buy books that I previously would've got in paperback form, allowing me to slowly begin the process of rebuilding my physical library by pruning out paperbacks and things I don't care much about in favor of high quality hardbacks.)
Benchmarking Cassandra Scalability on AWS - Over a million writes per second
The answer is use other techniques to block spam bots. Honeypot fields (user invisible fields, bots assume to fill in all fields in the source regardless of if those fields are rendered for a user) and timing data entry (no human can fill in a form with a few fields in .3 seconds like a bot can) both are not broken (yet) and do not have a measurable negative affect on conversions.
Single page: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/103283-breaking-and-fix...
Thanks for the idea! Done.
As far as my understanding goes and through comments here[1] Google's other toolbar(s) are also capable of sending clickstream data. The only thing new might be the introduction of UserID as now the +1 Extension has user logged in, but I am not sure how that puts additional risk/privacy concerns.

Secondly, a lot of addons/extensions are actually asking for permissions to all visited pages - it should not be hard to figure out who the current logged in person is, if you do have malicious intent (Scraping opened FB/Gmail web pages) . There is inherent privacy risk in using extensions with a lot of permissions!

[1] http://www.quora.com/Google-Bing-Controversy-February-2011/D...
The flaws of the law are more basic than anything mentioned. How exactly do people expect companies to enforce it? The most you can do is add a couple fields for the user to entire their birthday. The article states 'These findings prompted outrage back in May as politicians blamed Facebook for failing to curb underage usage.' … brilliant. The implication is that Facebook is required to collect data on < 13 year old children in order to determine their real age, only to realize that they've already violated the law.
Using the word outsourcing I believe biases this conversation in a negative way. Another way to title this article positively would be, "You can find high quality programming talent outside the Valley & even the US, which can save your startup cash". Because if you treated them like any other startup employee (part of the team), just working from a distance, and not as an outsourced developer, I think what you are suggesting has a big potential.

To use a headhunter analogy. There is too much hunting in the valley for the best, so go outside, even outside the US to find great talent affordably.
Dark Of The Moon Reveals Logo
1M/1M Ambassadors: Update, Plans
> It's large files that are troublesome.

Not even that, large file transfers have been done for decades.

The real issue is that large file transfers take enough resources that hosts want people to pay for it, but users want it to be free, like email.
YC is likely in the same situation as a famous Hollywood studio: you can buy the buildings and the logo, but once the people leave, the value is gone. So there is nothing worth acquiring.
The Canon Hollywood event liveblog
Is there any way to get a list of the available books without looking on a Kindle device?

It's hard to evaluate just how valuable this will be without being able to browse the selection from a computer.
When the primary use case is reading, then books are to e-readers what music is to iPods.
What To Pack For A Cruise
Stop motion video shot over 2 years with 288,000 jelly beans
It's good to see Rose doing something new and I genuinely hope he is succesful.
Leran to build a website from scratch
104th Roundtable Recap: November 3 – VCs Are Not Always Right
I bet they make money on some people, who just don't buy much from them. But even if they lose money on Prime, they'll make it up on their margins, as you suggest.

There's also a TOS, maybe they have some loopholes - http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_p...

They don't guarantee squat, and not everything is eligible. Also, they can terminate the contract and give you a refund.

I'm guessing that it's pretty rare though. Most people will either buy lots of stuff (Amazon's happy), or not buy lots of stuff (Amazon's happy).
Some of my friends have setup facebook pages for their < 5 year old kids and regularly post pics and comments to their kids profile pages. I'm not sure why they have done this, it's not like you need to reserve their name or anything. It's all a bit creepy if you ask me.
Personal Training Gym in Ealing, West London
Here's what I get:

Input array size is 1024

Naive sqrtf()
CPU cycles used: 54514, error: 0.000000

Vectorized SSE
CPU cycles used: 900, error: inf

Marvelous
CPU cycles used: 21514, error: inf

I'm not sure how to interpret the errors. I had to make a few changes myself for this to compile on my machine.
Right: if you can't say something useful and accurate, please don't post. (There's still a LOT to say, so don't let that stop you from posting at all!) If you post in good faith and are inaccurate, then it's good form to either edit your post to acknowledge the error, or delete your post.

Getting downvoted is one way that newbies learn about HN; most of the time, the downvote comes with a discussion.

(One last note: sarcasm is really hard to detect in writing; we miss the tone of voice and all the nonverbal cues. It's polite to mark a sarcastic response with something that shows you're being sarcastic. Don't count on just the content of your post to show sarcasm.)
This just occurred to me -- sites that use CAPTCHA are probably difficult for blind and/or elderly users. How are sites dealing with this, if at all?
A lot of things could be insanely useful if you skip the extremely difficult step of gaining traction first. No restaurant would be interested in even participating if there aren't a lot of users, Kevin Rose or no Kevin Rose.
Starbucks has processed 20M mobile payments since January
The differences between an orbital mars voyage simulation and the ISS would be that the ISS gets resupply shipments and isn't on a 26 minute radio response delay with ground control.
The article claims that a 1% failure rate is considered too high. Random guessing gets you over 1% success on your example. Making it larger helps, but makes it harder too.

The bigger problem is: where do you get a giant source of kitten and puppy pictures that the spammers don't also have access to? It needs to be large enough that it's not worth it for the spammers to sit down and manually categorize them. It needs to be difficult to replicate because if you're just taking 10K pictures of each from an image search, the spammers can do that too.
Sure, all stories rely on formulas. That's nothing shocking or new. Even the ancient Greeks wrote about how all stories break down into a handful of basic formulas. You could get a computer program to piece together a plot from time-honored tropes, archetypes, templates, and act-based story structure.

Where things get harder, and require a human touch, is in making things interesting. Setting, to a degree. But most important, characters. Compelling, human, relatable, challenging, interesting, flawed, dynamic characters. These elements are much harder to paint by numbers.

Also: style. Very hard to computer-generate an innovative and unique style.

I'm not saying these things can't be done, or never will be done, by algorithm. If modern history has taught us anything, it's that we can never underestimate what technology will make possible. For the foreseeable future, however, I'm still banking on a need for human fiction writers.
Why do they need to access my DMs if I login via Twitter?
Thrun had some interesting things to say about his vision for the future of higher education:

Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone. “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost,” Thrun told me.

The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. “I’m not at all against the on-campus experience,” he said. “I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.”

Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling — and will it last? Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them being worked out already by other online frontiersmen.

“If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher education.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-...
I'm surprised these techniques are still effective, especially the hidden field trick. It's not rocket science to embed a proper Web layout engine into an application these days so the bots should already be doing that rather than working with plain HTML.
A white cane also alerts people in the vicinity - I wonder what the designer's thoughts are on this aspect of the problem. When I saw (what I assume are) the proximity detector LEDs on the front of the shoe, it made me think about some kind of flashing (visible) light-based solution.
Sequoia isn't a Limited Partner of YC, it's a Limited Partner in one of several funds in which YC is the General (Managing) Partner; I presume.
I think the preview thumbnail is a very poor substitute for the 'cached' links that have disappeared. Sometimes the cache link was the best thing for an underperforming website or one that was down. It was simple, everyone understood it, now it's gone. Boo.
Thanks for the link. Has anyone tried this and the Disconnect extension and can share how they compare?
TBA location doesn't help me much at all. What city will it be in, lets start there?
Nail on the head. It'd be nicer if page back/forward were faster though. The latest version is a big improvement and I can't wait for an even faster page switch.
Ask PG: Does YC have any plans to invest in YC companies future rounds?
Seems like the YC 7% ownership after a series A/B/C would get diluted heavily. Often times, Angel investors do the Angel round, just for the option/opportunity to invest larger amounts in future rounds. Would have been awesome for you guys, if you put in larger amounts in Heroku, AirBnB, and Dropbox future rounds.

Do you ever think YC will invest in companies later rounds after the initial 40K and 7%? Though, I can see this being problematic, as you would be 'picking' favorites.
Hi guys! I'm Tom from Scirra and we made Construct 2 (http://www.scirra.com).

This is a great game made with our engine, the author has also made it available on the Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lkiiendkaiacnmggpp...

This game of course deserves it's own post as it's greatly executed, and without meaning to steal it's thunder we would love to show you a couple more excellent games made with Construct 2!

Can't Turn it Off
http://www.scirra.com/construct2/demos/cant-turn-it-off

Trashoid Attack
http://www.scirra.com/construct2/demos/trashoid-attack

We also ran a small competition on our website and there's a bunch more games to look at here:
http://www.scirra.com/forum/users-choice-final-poll_topic458...

Anyway it's really promising what is coming out of Construct 2 now, me and my brother (just two of us running Scirra) love playing games like these that get made! We hope to see lots more :D

All games made in Construct 2 are all pure HTML5, not a whiff of Flash in sight!
Crowdfunding bill passes in the House
How is this substantially different from Foursquare tips though? I get that the focus is on items, not places, but that just makes it harder. The #1 reason why I don't use Foursquare is no one -- not a single person -- I know in real life uses it, despite me nagging them to. If you go even more niche an start checking into items on a menu, you're going to have a tough time finding users who get the full benefit outside of the San Fran bubble.
But you've ignored my point- their redesign has nothing to do with competing against Facebook. They are standardising their design across all their sites, that's all.

I don't understand in what way it feels like Amazon, or how it is less tactile than the old design. Seems exactly the same to me.
Earlier today on HN - https://castle.so/ - upload your files, beautifully. Now this. And I even thought that it was already solved by https://wetransfer.com/
I think that there are far fewer plot devices, character stereotypes, and background scenes for fiction than you expect. There are enough though to have, at least, 100s of millions of possible combinations. And those combinations are where the "creative" novelty of fiction novels arises.

For example, let us suppose that at the end of Braveheart, instead of getting disemboweled, Optimus Prime flys down out of the sky, kills the executioner, saves Mel Gibson, and lays waste to the English forces; thus allowing Mel Gibson to have his revenge and to ride off into the sunset with the English queen. Creative? Sure. Formulaic? Yes!

I think that a few Google searches would reveal lists of the majority of the different story components
A barrel roll is an off center roll, so that part is probably intentional.
I think that it demonstrates that we've passed the era where people
want "a computer" to do things. People want a smartphones, tablets,
notebooks, etc. People are not buying these devices for their raw
computing power, and they don't want the freedom to access all of it.
People want these devices to "work" at their respective tasks.

Apple is becoming the sole gatekeeper of apps to their devices. For
example, after begrudgingly allowing 22 or so "fart" apps into the app
store, they said, "ok, we gave you some fart apps, now you have enough
fart apps, we aren't going to allow any more fart apps into the
store". If some developer comes up with the best fart app ever, there
is no practical way for him to distribute it any more.

I see this as an insane amount of power for one company to have.
Imagine if MS did the same thing with windows. If they did it 10
years ago, they would have been sued for monopolistic practices, but
now that Apple's doing it, and Apple is a viable competitor to MS,
can't MS do the same thing, and now we are stuck with basically 2
companies deciding all of the software that can be installed on 99% of
the computers that people use?

This is a sad future to me.
2 years ... for this? and people are complaining about the economy?
Well, a few months ago I had my go at a service that would use data from people working on machine learning systems so I guess that part is not a big deal. The bigger problem is people are accustomed to typical 'write down the word' CAPTCHAs and yet, they're fed up with them, so anything different would only be more annoying and hardly more secure. It's also hard to think of a challenge type that would have enough combinations for blind guessing to be ineffective and not be of the text-based type we all know. You'd need dozens of kitten and puppy pictures in one challenge to have a reasonable failure rate and no one will be interested in solving those.
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It's not really obvious, but you're free to skip the registration and Apple ID portions of the Mac OS X installation process. I hit command-Q, which brings up a dialog with a Skip button.
Would this barrel roll effect even be possible with a curses interface browser?
In fact a better question for PG would be, would YC license or franchise their brand (like TechStars has done). Except I already know the answer: No.
Haven't tried Disconnect, but use Ghostery and see no need for anything else.
PG said a couple of days ago "I never considered what I'd do if someone wanted to buy YC, because companies like YC aren't buyable. But even if someone wanted to buy it I could not imagine selling it, because I don't need the money and it wouldn't be worth the risk that the acquirer would ruin it."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3178173