skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The unsuccessful founders weren't stupid. Intellectually they were as capable as the successful founders of following all the implications of what one said to them. They just weren't eager to.

Startup founders should read 'The Denial of Death' (http://www.amazon.com/Denial-Death-Ernest-Becker/dp/06848324...)

Of course, as a founder, you could make it a point to embrace the reality not just of your inevitable death, but also your startup's inevitable eventual death.

I say this because I'm guessing a lot of the things pg says to the least successful startups involves the reality that their startup will die if there are not quick and radical changes to some part of the business.

I'm sure many physicians must have this problem when talking to their patients who smoke, binge-eat, do not take their medicine, etc.
Just a quick Google search, but here's an article about Fort Lauderdale removing their cameras.

http://www.browardcountyduilawyers.com/broward-county-dui/fo...

It's also not really a libertarian no government issue, because red light cameras are basically privatizing traffic enforcement.

It's no secret that companies sell these systems by promoting them as revenue generators.

Furthermore, there are plenty of other ways to decrease red light violations. The most effective is to increase the duration of the yellow light.

According to this report "Straight through violations drop 92 percent after yellow lights are extended by one second in Loma Linda, California."

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/30/3055.asp

Here's some more info on increase yellow light duration.

http://blog.motorists.org/6-cities-that-were-caught-shorteni...

The reason that more cities don't do this is because it leads to a massive drop in revenue. In fact here is an article on 6 cities that were caught shortening yellow light duration to increase revenue.

http://blog.motorists.org/6-cities-that-were-caught-shorteni...
Which brings up a relevant point: It is very easy for an organization to undermine the resourcefulness of its employees. Indeed, this is so common that one may eventually come to expect it.

That's why this story is as much of a story about Tim Cook as it is about Sabih Khan.
Is it necessary to find something negative in git if you want to highlight a limitation in mercurial? (That can admittedly be worked around with extensions)

The author makes a point that git's more transparent approach makes certain things easy to implement and consistent. To reiterate his example, stashes are just objects in a place where they won't be found by default, but they still work with everything because there's no magic.

The second example shows that git trusts that the user knows best what to do. If you want to reset a branch to a certain commit, git allows you to do it, and because the data model is not hidden git can simply expose the needed operation (reset branch pointer) as is.

For the most part, git has neat porcelains for most operations nowadays, but the UI is sometimes a bit weird because it started off as nothing more than a set of tools to manipulate a DAG of content on disk. In my view this ended up becoming one of its strong points in comparison to other DVCS.
Since it seems to be impossible, from a technical standpoint, to prevent piracy, then maybe we have to accept the free rider problem and produce intellectual property on a public basis. One option would be a grant system, as is used in scientific research (solving the free rider "problem" that anyone can read your paper and use your research).
Prior to forming my startup, I worked with an educational book publisher (low level books; K-8) for about 10 years. I continue to meet and consult with their marketing director/production manager on occasion, because I enjoy their business so much. I can tell you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the factors listed in this article will have little to do with whether Apple disrupts the textbook industry.

The purchasing process in education is unlike any other I've seen. The evaluative process is run by educators, not technology people. Many in the process really don't have any clue about what they're buying. They've already spent millions of dollars on very expensive "closed" systems. Further more, there aren't a lot of open systems even available. That's not the way education vendors work. Look at SMART (makers of the SMARTBoard). They have a lockdown end-to-end on everything from tools to content, they're crazy expensive, and completely proprietary.

Even with my experience selling to schools & libraries, I couldn't tell you if Apple will be successful disrupting the textbook industry. School buyers deal with a large number of stakeholders, and the decisions are made based on what's hot now. Apple has tremendous awareness, and there are certainly buyers for whom that will play a factor, but predicting success in the education market is far from easy.
The ability for 1/2 the people on the planet to distribute content without meaningful cost barriers is vary new. It's caused people to create and publish far more interesting content in a single day than you can consume in a single day. We are transiting through a tipping point where locating and filtering content is becoming more valuable than creating it.

Consider, on average do you enjoy reading HN posts? In what ways are people compensated for creating them how is copyright relevant for that compensation?

PS: Imagine a clearing house where authors pay random people to read their works in the hope that they might simply up vote it and even paying those who down vote their content.
@pg Coming from an outsider looking in, I wonder how much of the issues is with you and other YC mentors. I know you have an incredible amount of knowledge but how you impress that information on people is very crucial. I wonder if the process of sharing your knowledge with people needs some refining.

Watching you do office hours and other interactions, you often make the situation uncomfortable to people who are already unsure of whats next. When you ask them a question, you cut them off as they are trying to explain what they see, only to try and answer the question for them. This has been feedback from many who have experienced the YC process.

There are people like me who have built a company and held true to our vision. We make money and we know how to run our business. We have applied to incubators not to have someone tell us what to do, rather to get advice from people who have experience similar challenges and the apply them to our structure. Granted there are groups coming through YC that don't have that experience and those people need some direction. But for both sets of groups, they want you to actually listen to them. When you bring them in for their hour each week, listen to them. The wall is not that they cannot communicate or motivated to take down leads. They are put out because every time they try to communicate they feel the door is slammed in their face as if their thought or idea doesn't matter.

In a recent blog post I wrote "When people feel comfortable, essential and free to be individually themselves, a person can become a solar flare of focused energy that fuels the world we call business." So make them feel like they are not only essential to their company but that you actually care enough to listen and hear them. People going on rants are an altogether different issue, but sometimes people need to just talk out loud to work their head around an idea. As a matter of fact, you are one of those people! But you have to give people the sense that their voice is relevant in the direction they are taking and not driven. Give people time to understand why your suggestions should be heavily considered, so they can figure it out for themselves.

Again, this is from the outside but maybe it is a place to start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation discusses this issue. There are a fixed number of seats, but you collect together by party. So if you formed a new party (say the Hacker news party), people all over the US could vote Hacker News. And the intent of the system is that at the end of the day, if x% of the US population voted Hacker News, approximately x% of the representatives would be Hacker News reps.

The difference is that people self-identify to group together by party, instead of location. So your rep would then be the Hacker News rep. Problems with this system involve fragmentation (you end up with dozens of parties and nothing gets done). Imagine instead of one Ron Paul voting no on every issue, every congressman votes no on every issue because they are all so fragmented. You need a civilized bunch of people who actually believe in consensus and giving ground to get things done (good luck with that).

Look, we all know the US electoral system is broken. It's designed by a group of dead guys, who were smart and forward thinking, but they didn't know of things like Arrows Impossibility Theorem or mechanism design. If we got the smartest 10 guys alive today to design a new constitution from the ground up, we'd surely do better. But of course that's a non-starter. And I've surely destroyed the conversation by not adhering to the current convention of mindless hero worship of the founding fathers. But face it, the constitution is obsolete. It is over 200 years old and aging and creaking. Will Wilkinson's take on the original Fareed Zakaria article here is probably the best Piece I've read on this issue: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/04/co...
Open Content Undergrad Mathematics Curriculum
I just wonder why they didn't say it was made up -a joke with no basis in reality. Just some poetic license.

Would that be worse than admitting/pretending they actually saw a file called cat.jpg? If there was such a file, it could have been a JPG for catalog of some kind, etc.

I think they are responding to people's first expectations and that there was actually a file with the image of a cat. I doubt it and think it was just an attempt at being funny which backfired and they felt they had to take responsibility for the perceived breach of trust and that any other explanation, even if truthful would have been seen as a weak excuse.
Ask HN: Solutions for sending large volume of emails in a social network
Assume you are Foursquare and you want to send e-mail notifications to your users when

* someone adds you as friend or confirms your request

* someone comments on your check-in

* monthly newsletters etc.

Therefore if you reach more than a few thousands of users, mail deliverability will become a problem. I'm looking for solutions to my startup with almost the same use cases. My criteria are deliverability (sent messages are not considered as spam), low cost (per mail).

First solutions that came to my mind are:

* local mail server setup

* Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

* other solutions?

Any experiences on this issue?
Hard to go wrong sampling David Axelrod...
A very good mentor of mine once put it succinctly: when thinking about a problem, he said, "don't start with the barriers." Don't frame the thought process as "Here are all the reasons why not; now I need to figure out why." Instead, start from a place of "Absent all barriers or obstacles, here's what I would like to accomplish." There will be plenty of time to address obstacles, but it's best to be energized by them when you get there. If not, you'll see every obstacle as a crushing defeat.

If this sounds new-agey, well, perhaps it is. It's a mindset thing. But mindsets can be extremely critical. There's a huge difference between someone who sets out to succeed and prepares for failure, and someone who sets out to avoid failure and hopes for success. The former will exhaust every option to circumvent the obstacles; the latter will almost look at the obstacles as vindication of a deep-seated suspicion that he's wrong.
Your explanation is correct, only you got scoring direction mixed up: initialy radio buttons for scoring are checked and have zero height, when "enemy" is clicked, corresponding score input is unchecked, gets height set and pushed numbers panel down.
I've made an illustration: http://jsfiddle.net/72bbx/
The difference is that there initial height is non zero—just to make radio buttons visible.
Have you uploaded the PDF to http://www.virustotal.com/ ?
The music store is a very obvious example of Apple using a price cap.
Sure, but nowhere near as profitable as for the bank, which was saved from near-certain collapse. If you are in a negotiating position like that, you work it for a lot more than the USG did.

Specifically, you have the moral obligation to negotiate that position for the benefit of citizens at large. The government did not do even really attempt to do that, which is a political crime for which there has not yet been a reckoning.
See geoffschmidt comment and also there: http://jsfiddle.net/72bbx/
First person shooters suck a lot [and it's hard to innovate]
That certainly reflects my experience: I have a problem...

Mercurial: there's an extension for that!

Git: you can fix that just by adding --foo bar:buzz --derp herp to the commandline lol RTFM
Maybe we're just not gerrymandering finely enough. If you got down to single-house precision, you could have congressional districts that are just free culture people, or pro-family, or whatever. You couldn't do this in the old days with paper ballots and door-door canvassing, but you could make it work now.
AWS S3 Data Transfer Performance Benchmark
There are lots of apps that let you track your weight, blood pressure, BF%, periods, blood glucose, diet, calories, exercises completed, etc and you don't hear about problems with those kinds of apps. You can also make a generalized version so it would be an equivalent of a digital notepad, that happens to be really suited to what a Crohn's Disease tracker would need.
Linux Adopton Trends 2012: A Closer Look
Was there ever a software company, or music artist, or movie studio that decided not to put out a product because of this so-called free rider problem? Just curious.
Just for you (seriously, I just made a separate repo because of this post):
https://github.com/VincentToups/shadchen-el
A great deal of this article seemed to be concerned more about flexibility than resourcefulness.

"Like real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness often means doing things you don't want to. Chasing down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions."

"My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours, they've already decided what they're going to do and everything I say is being put through an internal process in their heads, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and creates a rationalization for doing so."

This sounds like a testament to the lean-startup movement, where success is more dictated on the ability to iterate on user feedback rather than being stuck in one static idea of what your business is or is meant to be.
This:

My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours, they've already decided what they're going to do and everything I say is being put through an internal process in their heads, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and creates a rationalization for doing so. They may not even be conscious of this process but that's what I think is happening when you say something to bad groups and they have that glazed over look. I don't think it's confusion or lack of understanding per se, it's this internal process at work.

is precisely what happens with students, too. A few weeks ago a former student wrote to me about career choices and whether she should major in biochem or English, because she'd struggled in biochem classes. My girlfriend was a biochem major, so together we wrote a thorough response that turned into an essay called "How to think about science, becoming a scientist, and life" that should go up soon. After spending a couple hours on the response, we sent it, and I got back an e-mail from the student saying. . . she's going to go to law school and "become a judge."

So all of the considered reasoning and description and discussion was merely "put through an internal process in" her head. Experiences like this teach me why a) a lot of professors aren't eager to interact with students and often distance themselves from students and b) why writing "How to get your professors' attention, along with coaching and mentoring" was useful, if only for the relative handful of students who get it: http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2... .
They have been doing that for many years.
Not in large scale though, only for the crop of the cream.
You are merely restating the problem, not putting forward a solution. That's not really adding to the debate.

Copyright exists to solve a genuine problem. When it was conceived in the 18th Century, is was explicitly to encourage and reward the creation of new works (such as Windows 9) that would enrich the public domain.

Few people would argue that the problem has gone away. The current debate is whether the copyright mechanism is still a viable solution.
Who is opposing Dianne Feinstein?
Dianne Feinstein is up for re-election this year. According to Wikipedia, she has no serious opponents. However given her continued support for PIPA, is she really the person who should be representing the interests of Silicon Valley?

I think not.

The only question is whether there will be a serious candidate opposing her for people to vote for.

Is anyone running against her?
Wouldn't be monitoring all the user-generated content a requirement once SOPA gets to work?
Yes, this allows CloudFlare to man-in-the-middle your SSL connection. Of course, that's exactly what it's designed to do.
On cake and piracy
Megaupload shut down; company workers indicted
Intel offers optional warranty protection for CPU damage via overclocking
Some are activists. Most are simply conforming to new social norms.
37signals has morals.
We certainly don't want all OSs confined to closed hardware like OS X.

Ubuntu (and open source in general) works because of inverse-free-riders, "free helpers" we might call them. That seems to be a sustainable model, but it likely won't work for annoying grunt programming - note the poor driver support in many Linux distros. For some tasks, someone needs to be paid.
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-11-07-wuala-security.ht...
Between 1980-1998, almost 8,000 small banks were acquired by larger institutions in the US.

Incredible.
Landing page design inspiration: Dropbox and Grovo
Just to be clear, Swizz Beatz is married to Alicia Keys, not P-diddy.
For me it's not that I'm hard to talk to (I like to think?!), it's that I'm just not great at forcing a conversation. I think of this particularly in terms of VCs, like PG discusses.

I think I can handle most things, but the real detail of negotiating funding, or even being "forceful" enough in a first impression worries me.
"""I'm also not sure that the detention of captured combatants and the execution of a native citizen are quite the same thing"""

Actually, the "detention of captured combatants" is worse.

Those "combatants" are not soldiers, and a lot of them are innocent (see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8472804/... - http://www.amazon.com/Five-Years-My-Life-Guantanamo/dp/02306... and lots of other examples).

Even the guilty ones are held illegally, with no due process, no formal allegations, and against the US and international law.

Furthermore, most of those are not americans, but captured citizens and residents of another country.

The equivalent would be Iranian army guys coming to your house in New York, Montana or whatever, abducting you arbitrarily and holding you indefinitely in some hell hole. For some reason, the US considers it legit to do the same to citizens of other countries.

Now, in this particular case, Iran is in the wrong. But it's not like his status as a programmer or the porn accusation BS are the reason they are executing him. They probably see him as a dissident, or they have some suspicions in him being a spy or something, that they don't reveal.

Which reminds me: which country, based on lies they told regarding the existence of weapons of mass destruction, invaded another country, causing thousands of deaths and massive instability in the area, including unleashing hard core fundamentalist fights?

Suddenly, one guy being executed in Iran seems not that important, doesn't it? Or are tens and hundreds of thousand of deaths OK when US does them, and bad when some foreign government does them?

Moreover, it's disgusting how this kind of stories are played and orchestrated by the media not out of concern about that one guy (if that was the case, the concern would be shared to other guys in the same situation, including in Saudi Arabia and the US itself), but to turn the people to justify some incoming invasion against Iran.

Does the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and hundreds like him justify an attack on the US?
Since it's been demonstrated not every Linux screen locker is vulnerable, how about changing the title?
Sounds like executive intelligence coupled with a willingness to take personal responsibility if it fails - that's why they chase up the implications. Hard to talk to can also translate into talking to users. The paradox with startups comes in building something very much for yourself, but also very much for other people: possibly a similar maturity in talking to others, requiring a mental leap of faith.
At first I did worry that the problem was on my end. That is always one's initial assumption when people don't seem to understand. Maybe I wasn't clear enough, you think, and you try again to to explain it a different way.

The reason it seems unlikely that the problem is on our end is the correlation between being difficult to talk to and failure in the outside world. If the problem was on our end, we would experience difficulty talking to both successful and unsuccessful startups.

Incidentally, if all you've seen is "office hours" on stage at a conference, you don't really know what office hours are like. Office hours onstage at an event are about 1/4 as long as real office hours, and with people I've never met before. So of course they are all over the place. Office hours at events are more like YC interviews than YC office hours.
So, who else just downloaded more courses than they can possibly manage to watch?
It's an interesting debate.

But may I eat your cake and still have mine?
For example, I go to cinema to see local movies and watch local tv series on legal services, but torrent american/english films and tv series (the main reason is that there's no way I can get them legally and in time - american services refuse me as a customer). Same with books.

This way I have my cake and I ate yours, and it's not obvious to me how it's not a win for me.
How often would schools like to get new books?