skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I reading this wrong? It seems like it includes that:

"All the software included in the Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System Team Suite (VSTS) with MSDN® Premium subscription"
http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/BizSpark/Pages/What_Do_I...

"In addition to Developer tools and licenses limited to Development & Test, MSDN subscribers may also install and use one copy of Microsoft Office for any purpose."
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/aa718661.aspx#...
Of course not!

They were all babbling fools as infants.
Two schools of thought on how to gain early traction for consumer-focused startups
Which school of thought are you: "Loop Experimentalist" or "Use-case Driven"?
Have you gotten $25 worth of testing, feedback, bugs, tweaks, etc... out of your average beta tester? I'll bet you have.

If so, you should give them a free pro copy, and ask them to introduce their friends to your software. If your beta testers are a good sales demographic, they probably have many friends who are also good sales demographic folks.
as a customer, i would be very upset if something was taken away from me, unless initially it was clearly labeled a trial (and beta does not equal trial--gmail is still in beta).

could you let them use the pro version they have for free (version 1), and offer them a discount in 6 months for upgrading to Version 2? or offer them a maintenance & support package for a fee?
That's the only MC book I read, and found it to be fascinating.
I will let another PG, Philip Greenspun, answer this far more elegantly than I can manage: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/10/25/will-obama-be-...
Depending on where you are having HR people write the job descriptions is very common - or pro forma job descriptions are common... This shouldn't necessarily put you off. Many large corporates would have this as policy - but doesn't necessarily make them a bad place to work.

Additionally, this article fails to recognise that in a lot of scenarios there are recruitment agents acting as middle-men.. It's happened to me in the past that I'm going for a quite specialised role and an agent has said to me "but you don't have HTML on your CV". Basically they have a list and they're indiscriminately checking it off. Poor - but it's an unavoidable part of the system.

Additionally - having technical people write job descriptions isn't the answer. Technical people could have a tendency to overemphasise specific technical points, whilst ignoring the (more important) fit into the team and other aspects...

So whilst you call them "HR Drones", if you have a good one, they'll produce an excellent job spec - after all - this is what they do.
Technically you don't own FLOSS software either

True: own can mean the ability to do with it as you will, or the ability to exclude others from it. With FLOSS you can do the first but not the second.

If you have a bunch of engineers who are good at .Net, why not use the Microsoft stack to get that done quickly

Indeed why not? Microsoft may be the best a platform if that's what your experience is in. Though it seems to me that most innovations in software technologies seems to be Open Source these days, e.g. Rails, Django, Clojure. The only closed source thing seems to be C#.

Though maybe I am biased because the Microsoft/.Net side of things is something I don't follow -- for example I've no idea if there's a Microsoft/C# equivalent of Ruby on Rails.
I would think blocking wifi access would get ride of most of the reasons for banning laptops in this case.
Running Windows is not the same as being a slave.

Of course not. I didn't say it was.

Is the CPU Open Source? Why is it not a problem to use proprietary hardware?

Open Source processor designs exist. It wouldn't surprise me if in future FLOSS operating systems run on them.

I don't consider proprietary CPUs to be a big problem -- though they would be if they were running some sort of Treacherous Computing system or DRM which meant they wouldn't do what the user wanted.

Windows does not even have that much of a lock-in, or does it?

The lock-in is vastly less than what it used to be. I can develop web applications using a GNU/Linux system with no problems.

If for whatever reason the government or whoever pays for the PCs says so, what do you want to do against it?

It's not for me to tell foreigners how to run their countries (it's not my country). Though IMO if they make themselves dependent on Microsoft, they are not acting in their own best interests.
Nice. I like the suggestion of giving beta users a free copy of software if they found a bug you didn't know about.
I tried a similar approach with the netflix prize, although in that case I fitted truncated normal distributions to the data.
I agree, that's why we extensively use FLOSS. It is nice being use the same innovations that power Google (Guice), Yahoo (Hadoop), Facebook (Thrift).

I have a friend who does a lot of C# and he claims there are some really interesting things going on over there. F#, automatic parallelization in the CLR, FP goodness in C#.

Meh, I'd rather deploy and use open tools and platforms.
I wouldn't say our average tester has given us $25 worth of testing. But some definitely have, even more than $25 worth. Separating these after the fact is potentially sticky.
Social search product Aardvark: Yahoo Answers meets Twitter — but better
7 of the 9 are YC companies - pretty impressive.

Does YC have some particular connection to the Web 2.0 Summit or is this simply a reflection of YC's leadership in the "companies that have developed nifty Web 2.0 sites (with only a little cash up front)"-funding business?
I never found classes valuable myself. You'd be surprised how amazing the ability to read is. Apart from anything else, the spoken word is very slow.
Sorry about being vague. On the election day a small group of us (my fellow co-founders and a good friend) got together a for an election party. Around 8 PM as Barack Obama had enough lead to be the president, Scott(@cscotta) mentioned sorryeverybody.com. It was a website setup to so people could apologize to the rest of the world about George Bush. Since things have change for the better (hopefully) So.. "Following the disappointment of the 2000 and 2004 elections, it seems we've learned from our mistakes. We think that's a victory worth celebrating" We wanted to have a little fun and give back to the community.

PS. This is not a startup, of course. Just something that a few guys did for fun in a few hours.
We did the 2nd Philosophy without all that focus group nonsense.

This

>Build a product that delights some users. Goto market with the same consumers/partners that you talked with initially. Get linear adoption within that target set first, then figure out how to grow exponentially from there.

is roughly accurate.
He gets flack because he applies that skepticism to mainstream views on Global Warming, which many people insist should not be criticized because it is really really right and ought to be beyond skepticism.

Most people get their views on global warming from the media, and our media is controlled by corporate interests who profit from being allowed to dump unlimited CO2 into the atmosphere. If people are discouraged from criticizing global warming, it's not because global warming is beyond reproach but because every individual criticism is picked up by the media and given equal credibility to the scientific consensus.
There is choice for startups and Microsoft is losing it, this new action shows that. Specially server side and web services.
I have no idea why any climatologist would try to dismiss the theory that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas. There's been nothing even resembling a physical theory floated that would contradict CO2 lowering Earth's thermal radiation to space.

As far as I have seen, all serious challenges to the standard climate models status quo either challenge that CO2 is an important greenhouse gas (as physics goes, the evidence for this is remarkably solid) or invoke questions of completeness: things like, have we modeled the effects of water vapor and cloud albedo well enough (we have tried to model the effects, but there are many assumptions on cloud cover that are probably inaccurate), have we modeled how the biosphere reacts properly (probably not, as it is so complicated, and new species would thrive under new environmental conditions), have we modeled the effects of lowered icecap albedo (yes, though we don't have good models for the glacial rate of decay, it's pretty universally true that as the icecaps melt, the solar thermal incidence increases), etc. None of these contest whether or not CO2 is an influence. The question is whether the other factors regulate the earth's temperature sufficiently to cause the CO2's influence to saturate out.

(As far as I know, the climatologist apparently commenting here was actually just quoted person from an article.)

Here's another example: Crichton asks rhetorically 'Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?'

Maybe it would be foolish to buy any particular stock. But the climate isn't a good analogy: it is macroscopic, long-term, average behavior we are interested in. One can instead buy stock in something much larger, the assumption being that it will be worth more in a long time. These are called national bonds.
True.

It's not a great idea to assume that a HR drone will know nothing about the area he's recruiting in. A good HR guy will know all about it. Will know about trends & moods & jobs & projects.

As you say, it is what they do. I know many do it poorly. But I'm sure many do it well.
Nine Web 2.0 Startups Beating The Odds in Down Economy
A Daily Express article about a TV botanist talking about climate change... On HN? Sorry, no up.
Long answer to a short question: (It depends.)

Some things I've picked up from being a beta tester, to running betas, and working at a company that did betas from tens of beta testers to many thousands of beta testers:

- There are groups of people who jump from beta to beta, trying to get a free ride without having to pay for the software (always jumping to the next beta because it's "good enough" if it doesn't meet a high quality bar)

- There are those who go well beyond the extra mile and help shape the products giving insights we never thought of. Those people were worth far more than $25.

One of the teams decided they would give the final version of software worth hundreds of dollars to any tester who submitted one or more pieces of feedback. This worked to:
- Help links between the testers and the company long term.
- Was a fair way of rewarding anyone who at least found an issue or design flaw.

Managing a good beta community takes a LOT of time and resources. At the start of the beta I spent more time engaging with users though the bugtracker/email (which ended up establishing norms) than actual deving, but when I ended up with 3 or 4 testers who understood what I was trying to achieve and try out what I wanted - they were brilliant. So perhaps instead of trying to figure out who should get pro versions and who should not:

- Give anyone who gave you valuable feedback/real bugs the pro product since it's so cheap - but be transparent. Loads of testers feel involved (and feel they have the right) to something so if you are transparent about the criteria then they can be applied to everyone rather than "top" people. Beta tester revolts get ugly and cost so much time and goodwill.
- Find some way of rewarding the top few testers who you have a good relationship with and help your development and product evolution.

Although just about every project has had completely different expectations, motivations and feedback loops so chop and change any advice to suit you. However in every project I was involved with: the testers felt part of a community so don't ruin that.
This is what the article says to do.
The beta version is not free.
Obama wins, America triumphs
Top 10 Traits to Convey in a PowerPoint Pitch
Select a small set of users of different sets (like those who speak minimal english) and and of different age groups and whatever categories you want.

Since you are in private beta and you work on paid stuff. Give them free copies of the final pro. Thats the best you can thank them. That's a lot better than paying every beta tester $50 and of a lot more value and respect to them. If its a good product they would be more than happy to get a free copy.
Java Open source Text Mining and Information Extraction tools
How do I make games?  A path to game development.
The Future of Startups (Jason Calacanis)
50 must read book for any aspiring web developer
Polls Foresaw Future, Which Looks Tough for Polling
i am all for the balance transfer tax of 0.3% its not game-able and its fair TO EVERYONE. i don't like tax policy that discriminates.
> If I have a single unknown variable in an equation, and I have no way of estimating it, or knowing its variability, or anything, then anything I put down will most likely be wrong and will likely be off by several orders of magnitude.

Actually if you know nothing about the variable then you will almost certainly be off by an infinite number of orders of magnitude (log(infinity) = infinity). Saying that you might be wrong by several orders of magnitude implies that you do know quite a bit about the range of the variable.

By definition most judgements are based on incomplete information. Otherwise no judgement is needed. So the argument that an action should or should not be taken because the evidence is not 100% complete is spurious.
Here's an analogy that may be worthwhile. We do not understand the physics of fluids very well. We are not even sure if their standard mathematical representation has general exact solutions. We don't understand the microscopic interactions of turbulence, and in many cases the system has a chaotic dependence on tiny fluctuations in the initial conditions.

However, we do know that in the case of most fluids, with flows of a low Mach number, gases are largely incompressible. There, Bernoulli's equation holds, 1/2 density v^2 + density * g * height + pressure = constant. It might not be perfectly accurate, but it will lift airplanes into the sky!

Bernoulli's equation doesn't work so well at boundary layers, such as those that form on the edges of wings. It doesn't work so well in regimes with a high Mach number, and therefore the air is compressed, such as on the edge of a propeller, or during supersonic flight. It doesn't operate so well under viscous flow. And it can't predict the turbulence which will alter the pressure and density, jostling passengers up and down in the air under rough winds.

Yet none of those things have affected the overall direction of the results. Planes have lift. We do not claim that airplane designers do not understand this. We just say that there are gaps in the understanding. It is not known in detail.

Similarly, greenhouse gas theory was only approximate. Throughout the study of climate science, people continue to add more and more to the simple physical theory, modifying the predictions in small ways. But throughout, some things have been constant. Climate change is driven by energy transfer. Energy comes from the sun, and is radiated back out by the earth. Greenhouse gases make that radiation by the earth less effective. This much isn't contested: the only question the magnitudes.

And yet, people say that 'I don't believe in the CO2 theory' or that 'humans are not contributing significantly to global warming.' This is like people saying that kinetic energy isn't proportional to the square of the velocity, and therefore ignore those insolent 'physicists'. Of course, it isn't proportional to the square of the velocity, exactly. But it isn't far off, and it's a good enough approximation unless we have reason to believe otherwise. How much reason do we have to say that the standard climate models are erroneously showing a significant temperature delta due to CO2? Does anyone anywhere have a reasonable physical or ecological model that could saturate its effect? That could reverse its direction? The most intriguing was variations in the sun's luminosity, but that doesn't account for nearly enough.
YC interview advice
No more politrix please.
Would be a bit more useful if the article actually said something about what it means by 'beating the odds' or how these companies have done so.

Are they making money? Do they have a super slow burn rate? Are they taking advantage of the economy as it is? Have they found sources of funding that haven't dried up? Have they...
Many YC startups are included: Wufoo, Polleverywhere, Posterous, Rescuetime, Dropbox, Posterous, Disqus, Mighty Quiz.

Although if you don't have a business model and revenue for that matter, I wouldn't call you "beating" a recession; I'd call you surviving.
its surprising that people continually choose arguments that are mono cultural. its a big world out there and societies have existed for millennia in a number of ways. its just hard to fathom that in a country that honors the freedom of religion, that we still do not get poly culturalism.
A great post with a terrible Hacker News headline.
sometimes you just want to feel heard.
The 15 Most Successful Y Combinator Companies
where are you located?

currently our interface is all in flash, but we have thought about a browser only option that might work on the iPhone or android as a web page.

we have also talked about a potential plugin architecture to make it easy to develop apps on top of our interface. if you know of anyway for us to get a few months worth of funding for it, we would be open to a number of things for out project.
This is somewhat of a chink in Google's armor (the whole cloud concept really). Managing that many users AND monitoring for misuse of accounts with finite resources is a more than daunting task.

It's never a good idea to store your data in one place that someone else owns, especially when you are one of millions of users. With a free solution you're not going to get the attention you deserve.
I may not be a seriou5 haxxor, but I live in West Palm Beach and co-founded Stormpulse.com, FWIW.

South Florida is very hit or miss when it comes to talented programmers. It's amazing how many people down here still think ColdFusion is the future. My friend and co-worker ('sheats' on HN) came to work with me at The Palm Beach Post after leaving a startup that was well-funded but complete FAIL (no business model, almost no utility, hairball codebase).
Gut Bacteria May Cause And Fight Disease, Obesity
Brothers & Sisters Episodes
Previous episode of “Brothers & Sisters” featured Kitty and her husband Robert McCallister waiting for a birth mother. Next week in “Do You Believe in Magic?”, Kitty’s neurosis will cause McCallister’s chance to adopt to be in danger.
GCC team rocks. I owe them so much...
This is ominous, since The Palm Beach Post (my employer) just put out a job listing for a Python coder to join our group.
"Beating the odds"? The fact they have a business model (or a notion of one) and were launched for little money does not mean they actually make profit in the long run. This article reads like something from 6 months ago.
>As many of you know, I spent the better part of August preparing for,
and co-hosting, the TechCrunch50.com event, which has become known as
"Sundance for the technology industry."

uh, what?

The email as a whole, however, was a lot better than expected. I recommend reading it.
If you have the time and resources philosophy #2 is great.

Philosophy #1 can be successful with comparatively little effort.

In the long run you probably end up with a much better product so while you may no have "hockey stick" growth right away, your chances for longevity are greater.

Sounds like the people who support #1 are either impatient or don't have time to wait for growth.
The point is that climate models are not testable. Bernoulli's equation is a "good" approximation because we know when it fails.

If we're going to rely on climate models to define policy, we should understand what they're good for. You say that 0.5 m v^2 is a good enough approximation until we say otherwise, but the same statement doesn't apply to climate models. The models are complicated, nonlinear, and the scientists running them have pressure to produce certain results.
I'm glad YC companies are getting press, but this list isn't even close. Any article that doesn't have Wufoo in it is dead wrong.
Heh...if some douche wants to waste his tuition by screwing around with his laptop, that's between him and his wallet (although, under the TARP, it's arguably between him and my wallet...grrr).

My laptop stays shut during lectures and presentations unless I have the notes/slides on my screen or need to cross-reference something with another source. Anything else is too distracting for me.
Reading List: Fog Creek Software Management Training Program
Governor of California's not a bad consolation prize. 7th largest economy in the world, and all that. :)
WTF does addher (addmired or whatever) do?

Number 12? seriously?
Or, the forth way.
I flagged this. This is just nonsense linkbait that's probably cut-and-pasted from cruchbase. Just because it mentions YC doesn't mean you have to vote it up.
Success running based on steps here:
http://bc.tech.coop/blog/081023.html

You'll need big.txt from here to run the Clojure spelling corrector:
http://norvig.com/big.txt
"Lost is the same level as most of Crichtons works."

You mean Chrichton's books feature a handsome male character who's shirt is always coming off for some reason or other, and an attractive female character who always seems to end up in her underwear?
Thanks for the advice and good luck, again, to all those venturing out there in a couple of weeks.
nailer: Thanks for the feedback. Is that the point you took away or did you skip reading the rest of the article?

The context of that quote is not about single core versus multi core. It is about the intent of your code. It is a quick rule of thumb. For example, keeping the UI responsive is a goal you have regardless of the cores of the machine. To deliver on that goal you can use threads (multithreading) but that would not be equal to parallelism.

The larger point here is the difference between the term multithreading and parallelism. Post back on my blog post if you have any questions or suggestions on making that clearer.
I don't know enough about Dijkstra to know whether he considers his approach appropriate for all types of programs. I can understand the value for mission-critical applications (like his Apollo example).

This type of software needs to be correct all the time, every time. Adding a trivial feature, like adding USB support, isn't even a consideration (but if it was valuable it would be included in the next generation of the program).
I've been surprised how quickly it comes back. When I was working with a YC company this summer, I had to do some PHP. I was up and running in about an hour and a half - everything was familiar, I knew where to go to find API calls, and I wasn't all that much slower than when I was doing PHP daily. And I hadn't written anything in PHP for about 3 years before then, and had been actively trying to forget the language.
Programs to Let Your Smartphone Help You Shop
GNU releases a new license for Wikipedia
John Doerr’s Advice for Barack Obama: Hire Bill Joy
The microsoft-yahoo-google saga/soap opera continues
Where is Wufoo????? I'd put them somewhere on the top of the list.
Well it's the title of the article - I didn't see any need to editorialize.
Your mis-statement of what I wrote, is appalling.
And what about Auctomatic? Surely their $5M exit to Live Current counts more than some angel dollars and early signs of traction.
too bad. the guy spent three months just thinking about his startup. each week had a point, with specific things like talking to customers, talking to investors. finding out about competitors, etc. i really liked it, but forgot to save it.