skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I noticed a few mistakes. I only skimmed this, so there may be more, but these were the obvious ones:

1. "Y Combinator invests 5k + 5k per founder in exchange for 6-10%
equity."

Should be 11k + 3k per founder in exchange for 2-10% (but almost
always 7%).

2. "According to PG, every partner reads every app over a period
of about 10 days."

The partners no longer read every application. Alumni reviewers do a first pass.
Better to start from the fact that a partner reading applications will read
70-100 per day, and do the math based on that.

3. "Oh god yes, we think of ourselves as just utterly terrible at
picking these terms."

The "terms" must be some kind of transcription error. Teams?

4. "They truly would love to have every single company they fund
be a "winner" even if there weren’t as many mega companies."

This is the exact opposite of what we think. We're looking
for outliers. That's why we like
to fund crazy ideas. There's nothing we like better than funding
an idea that has a small chance of succeeding, but will be huge if
it does.

Of course, once we accept a startup, we want it to succeed. But
that is a separate question.

5. "The unofficial YC slogan is "Make something people want.""

That's the official slogan. (The unofficial one is
"Never a dull moment," referring to the fact that with
so many startups there is always something extreme
happening on any given day.)

6. "My thoughts on the demo are actually that it doesn’t play a
major role in YC’s decision."

The demo can matter a lot. It depends on the type of startup.
If you're in a situation where you ought to have something to
show for your work so far, it's bad not to. And no matter what
your situation, it helps greatly if you have a great demo.

7. "Make sure you try your hardest to get some recommendations."

Actually it would be better to expend that effort on your company
or the application. Don't spend a lot of time spamming YC alumni
trying to collect recommendations. They don't carry any weight
with us unless they are very strong. We can tell the difference
between a recommendation that's being made for our sake (because
the alum thinks it would damaging for us to overlook the application),
and one that's being made for the sake of the applicant (e.g. because
the alum is benevolent and they begged him to recommend
them).

8. "PG has started to re-imagine YC as an institution."

It would be more accurate to say that I've started to talk openly
about such things. The imagining started surprisingly early.
My head... it just did an ess'plode. Kudos
Groupme is like instant messaging for a group. SendHub is much more like email.
Or just failover to full page refreshes, like we do at gdgt.
Wow.
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
I would not use it for UI work where I want a system style UI, with native components. Something such as Titanium Appcelerator is better for that.

I would not use it to make a website UI, that is for HTML / CSS.

I do use it for games. I do use it for server side programming. I do use it for complex Javascript (including games).

It's write once, deploy smartly. Of course I can't write a server side program and then have it run on my phone, that doesn't even make sense!
Ask HN: Review my business, Printavo
I ran a screen printing shop a few years ago for a while and realized that using many different systems to keep our shop running wasn't the answer. We used Google Calendar, Bamboo Invoice, Highrise, Paypal and email which lead to tons of data redundancy and plain 'ol inefficiencies.

After specking everything out and gathering a bunch of initial feedback, I began designing the interface and looking for coders. That didn't work out too well so after a year of that nonsense I bought Michael Hartl's book and started learning rails.

Four months later I was ready to start building Printavo and three more months later I had 90% of it done. To help with the last 10% (Stripe, Paypal and some other bugs) I hired a freelancer (shout out to Kuah!).

Just went live last night and I'm focusing more on the marketing end now.

I wanted to get your guys' feedback on everything, thanks!

http://printavo.com
"One person who contacted AppleInsider said that changes to the price of air cargo through DHL have signaled a major planned Apple shipment from China to the U.S. Evidence of this can be seen in a 'big change' in shipping costs, as Apple has taken up freight capacity on flights from the Far East to America."

One person?

"The information was corroborated on Monday by MacRumors, who also spoke with sources in the shipping industry. They indicated that shipping rates rose as much as 20 percent in one week as Apple has taken up available capacity at 'premium rates.'"

Corroborated... By MacRumors.

What is this, TMZ?
I don't think we'll have 2 gigabyte codebases..
Motorstorm RC on PS Vita will be free tomorrow
I don't understand why everyone here appears to be "on the side of" the carriers, google, apple, etc. The app developers give a smartphone a sizeable part of its value (half? more?), and they're getting screwed because the other players hold a strong position.

That the carriers and makers invest a lot only means they get the chance to screw the weaker players, not that they deserve the bigger part of the pie, that argument is absurd.

Does nobody see this?

I commented on this situation before in this other thread too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3635861
IPIX was a photo-hosting service for E-Bay and various other sites in the late '90's -- that was a very big chunk of their revenue, I believe, and sounds a lot like Chute's product area as well.

It looks like E-Bay discontinued the IPIX integration and brought all that in-house, effectively killing IPIX's main cash cow (which was already anaemic after the dot-com crash). See this article from 2003: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y03/m09/i22/s01 . I wish the YC company best of luck in addressing this similar market.

I think IPIX' original product idea was a special camera to take 360-radial or 360-spherical photos and let people host those images on their website. Web clients needed a special plugin to view the results. Using these became popular on various real-estate websites for a while. It looks from IPIX website (http://www.ipix.com/) that that's their main focus again.

A former IPIX employee, Adam Sah, took some rudimentary log-aggregation tech he built for monitoring the IPIX servers, got permission to start a new company, and founded Addamark, now SenSage (http://www.sensage.com). They implemented one of the first columnar databases to minimize large-scale log aggregation storage space (logs take 2.5% the space required in a traditional DB) and to speed up queries. Many other companies are adopting this strategy (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS). Here's the columnar-database patent: http://www.google.com/patents?id=q4d4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...

I worked at Addamark/SenSage for almost 4 years, it was a very good experience.
I hope Yahoo Games will still be around because that's the only Yahoo service that I use nowadays
original article: http://allthingsd.com/20120305/yahoos-new-ceo-preps-major-re...
Democracy will never work because it can only work if EVERYONE is educated enough and by default humans are notoriously stupid and unaware of their own stupidity.

In this case, I would not call it stupidity - I would call it inherent, (very human) instinctual biases and tendencies in dealing with contradictory thoughts in your mind.

Or what most of us understand as cognitive dissonance.

I would imagine this tendency probably arose from as a result of natural selection ranking flight or fight instincts very highly. Those who were not able to ignore or rationalize away what made them feel uncomfortable [which cognitive dissonance invokes in us] probably ended up dead very quickly out on the savanna while hunting or gathering.

However, on a personal note, I am actually very optimistic as more and more people become aware of our inherent human limitations, we can grow and become better individuals and create better social constructs to overcome our group tendencies.

Unfortunately, it would probably take a long time. Probably not in our generation.
Not much, no. Are there any resources you'd recommend someone at my level look at?
I would like to see when the documents have been litigated and under what circumstances. But of course that information is really hard to come by some times.

That being said, if they invested their time and energy into taking the output of the Superior Court docket and documents used there and the arguments made for and against the documents. Well that would be a really cool service.
Is there something in the water? I'm dropping off the corporate map that week as well. Best of luck!
Having run several arms rooms in my day I find it hard to believe that weapons are being smuggled out. The accountability (down to the individual bullets) and multiple layers of oversight at all units are probably the only time I have seen government control done right.
"Your idea is not original"

And if it is? I think I'm the only one building a weather network with cell phone sensors :).
Did it just stop working and redirect to an ad? I was in the middle of battle..
I wonder how much of the articles view is biased due to being a PMC. My experience in the actual army are more like cobrausn than the authors.
Congrats on the launch!

I'm curious about the previous project - lifegrams.com - I was talking to my OH about a similar idea just a few hours ago.

Would be interested to see a lessons-learned for the previous project. Was it successful, if not as successful as hoped, why not, how much traction, what could have been done differently, etc.
> Since when does being married preclude getting a phd? I know multiple married phd candidates...

1. I don't think there are any part-time CS PhD programs, so I'd have to quit my full-time job.

2. My full-time job brings in 3/4 of the income and my wife isn't in a position to earn much more than what she's earning now, so we'd have to suffer a big drop in income.

3. The big drop in income (even if I get a TA or RA position) would force us to move from our home to either university or an insufficiently-sized (that is, insufficient for us + the children we plan on having in the next ~3 years) dwelling.

4. My wife has no interest in earning her own PhD and doesn't want to work while raising our children. Furthermore, I don't want her to work while raising our children.

I don't think it's possible to do without being a selfish arse.
Learning Clojure: Drawing Axial Trees via Bracketed L-Systems
No link to WaPo Labs :(

http://www.wapolabs.com/team/
really slick and impressive site
Clickable: http://printavo.com
tbh you can get away with '95 and early graphics as "retro" - these are more like those you might find 5-7 years later, and i don't think they cut it.
From what I can tell, this would be better called "Zencoder for photos", not "Twilio for photos".
Ah, but there is a reason people also write NodeJS in haxe. You get compile time checking, code completion etc. And clean Javascipt code at the end ...
You should have a privacy policy if you're going to collect emails, even if its for something as simple as a waiting list.

It would make people who signup feel secure about giving you their emails and as we all know people who have explicitly signed up are probably gonna have a better chance of being your potential customers.
I find these logistical details strangely fascinating. Still, I'm having a hard time believing that the iPad3 will account for enough of the shipping traffic (they aren't that big!) to have such major impact on rates.
So working backwards you can see that the system failed to protect the rights of minorities.

I think you mean that it failed to protect the rights of some minorities.

But even at that, the system provided a framework through which those deficiencies could be address, while at the same time minimizing "leakage": as much as I complain, it appears that we've gained a lot more in human/civil rights than we've lost over that time.
and I wonder how many of that handful would realize that paying by check has even larger issues?
When I finally stopped acting like I had to race through my talk as fast as humanly possible, I finally started to calm down and actually focus on what I was talking about. The water trick is a good excuse for you to pause from time to time and take a break without it seeming awkward or forced.
Deaxon › software design
and even worse, the revenue for developers is totally skewed: those publishers that end in in a top 25 do well, the rest not. My guess: top 5 % does 90 % of all income.

Publishing apps for a living is hard. Better to move to build apps for existing companies and become a services agency that charges by the hour
Maybe it's just that they don't want that one page cached as they may update their scripts, images and stylesheets.
And for that css-file, I think that whenever they change the css, they'll just give the resource a new address so cache is only invalidated when there are actual changes.
Ask HN: Is this a reasonable outsourcing plan?
I just finished Start Small, Stay Small, and it convinced me to give outsourcing development a second look.

(Skip to the last paragraph for the straightforward question, if you like).

Background: I have no training as a developer; everything I know is self-taught. I'm halfway competent with PHP, using that to build "custom" WordPress sites with a designer partner for our clients. I've long had an itch to build a web app (or two or three eventually), and am starting to put things in motion. I have an idea that I'm researching (niche CRM, essentially). If I were to build it, my thinking right now is that I'd build it as a CodeIgniter app, since PHP is what I'm most familiar with and CI seems like a good framework choice. However, building it myself would take several (likely 6+) months, but really double that plus 20%, right? :) I'd be learning as I go.

I'm wondering if a feasible outsourcing plan would be to hire an "expensive" PHP consultant/developer to turn my basic outline/concept into a detailed spec, and then use that as the basis for outsourcing to a cheaper overseas developer, possibly using an expensive dev as a QA check along the way and/or at the end. Do you think this is a good and viable plan to outsource development?

I realize there's MUCH more to a business based on a webapp than just the development. For the sake of a clear/concise question and discussion, I intentionally limited my question to just that topic, however.
Is Ice Cream Sandwich out yet?
Reminds me of a very stripped down Robotron. Which means I'd better close this tab and never come back lest I lose another three months of my life to this game.
I pointed him at Splunk's career page and said if anything is a good fit for his SO, send me the information and I'll forward it internally.

No general advice, unfortunately :)
Serving static websites for free with Heroku and Stasis
There are no ads on heyzap.com and no redirects on that page, maybe you clicked on one of the footer links while shooting? :)
Now this is smart.
He's describing the euphoria that always accompanies a bubble atmosphere. In this case, it's a start-up bubble. The same exact atmosphere went on in the late 1990s, just with bigger rounds and fewer micro companies.

Money is sloshing around, and nobody wants to earn 2% on long term junk government paper.

$500,000 isn't what it used to be, literally, but it buys a lot in the way of a web start-up now. If that $500k is now really $250k in 1999 terms, it's buying more like $5 or 10 million in 1999 terms (when it comes to the infrastructure needed to get a web start-up off the ground).

I'd normally say the start-up bubble would continue until the next economic melt down dries up the funding, but the funding levels driving the start-up bubble are so low, it's hard to see what will slow it down short of government regulations (they're working on that).
Did he actually contact GitHub directly?

Didn't he just post issues/comment on the issue in rails/rails?
Ah, this is material for a "captain hindsight" meme. "If you didn't want your founders to party it up, you shouldn't have pointed a fire hose of money at them"

There may be "hard work" going on in the start-up world, but you'll have to seek it out. For every "serious" start-up you'll find 5-10 Zynga/foursquare/etc... clones.
* We have about 30 people with the commit bit; at any given time I'd guess about a dozen are active.

* "Even 100k" implies that you think a six figure salary is reasonable for programmers. This is true in some rarefied echo chambers likethe Bay Area where programmer salaries are overinflated, but it's far from a universal The majority of our committers don't live near San Francisco. Actually, I think most live outside the US these days. I don't believe the median salary of a Django committers is 100k -- though for my fellow committers' sake I hope I'm wrong :)

* I only wish "being a core Django committer" was some magic "Get a Great Job Paying Six Figures Card". No good hiring manager assumes that "has a Django commit bit" translates to "among the most skilled engineers"; I only wish I could pull down "much more than" 100k based solely on my Django status. It's certainly a good time to be a Django dev, but while being contributor might help you get your foot in the door, it won't land you a salary increase over your peers.

* None of us get paid to work on Django anywhere close to full time. We get paid to do other things; we're lucky if we get a few hours a week to hack on Django as a side project. This again shows that our value in the salary marketplace isn't linked to our willingness to volunteer time to Django.

* Finally, this whole silly exercise assumes it would take "a year or two" of ALL of our time to get Django onto Python 3. That's laughable: it's mostly done already with perhaps a couple of man-months of activity. There's nowhere near 20 programmer-years worth of work; suggesting such is simply insane. Toss me that 100k you're bandying about so easily and I'll have it done by May :)
How To Build a Business on Facebook: Lessons from Brand Networks
RazorSQL is excellent too, and connects to lots of different databases through jdbc.
Bill Gates Pushes UN on Food Productivity
Gates was somewhat critical of agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Food Program, calling their efforts poorly coordinated with insufficient focus on measuring results.
Could this be a move to make themselves more attractive for a M&A perhaps?
One point which I really was hoping to see covered in the OP article was timing.

Timing as to when to apply based on your startup's current roadmap.

We've been working on our startup for several months, will be ready to "pre-launch" beta right around the time we submit our application.

This leaves us in somewhat of a schism. A lot of discussions that I have briefly had with other entrepreneurs mention that they have either:

A) Just come up with an idea and are in the beginning development stage; or

B) Are already launched and are starting to pick up solid traction.

We are going to be in the middle of this, and will be starting to "pre-launch" at the beginning of next month with a solid MVP. So we would actually have quite a lot to show you in this application.

And then secondly, when it comes to the application, what do you prefer, direct links with logins to a live demo, or a 2-3 minute demo video of our startup discussing how we will plan to penetrate the market with our application.
You might not care about a user's message because he only sees his pet feature, but you only see your pet project. The customer isn't always right, but what they teach you at college about stupid customers not knowing what's good for them isn't true either. Interesting stuff will happen when you find the balance between their and your "don't care" points.
You may have hit the limit on online tutorials and books. It's likely time to go to user groups and reach out to experienced peers feeling generous (looking to devote a few hours to helping you out).

Due to the nature of this forum, you probably won't get a magic solution to your slump -- you're past the point of cookie cutter magic bullets, which is a good thing.

However, my one piece of quick advice might be to, rather than just copy code, copy it and then try to understand _why_ those lines are there, even in the libraries and frameworks you use. You likely know what everything does at this point, but if you take it to "next level", you'll eventually be able to start making things from scratch.
This is by far the longest 404 i've ever stayed on
Fab’s focus on designnwas perhaps the best “pivot” of all times
IPad 3 will have 4G LTE networking
Twilio has now achieved Kleenex status in the tech community, nicely done!
Best response so far right here. Added comments:

- DIET: consume as little in the way of simple carbohydrate as possible. Eliminate sugar/HFCS, refined flour; up your intake of whole natural foods, healthy protein, healthy fats. Try taking Omega 3 supplements and see how much better your brain works on that fuel (I take three per day).

- Spot-on about meds.

- Task lists: I'd add if you're overwhelmed, a common state for an ADHD sufferer, "pick one thing, and do it."

- Sleep schedule: I beat myself up for over a decade for my inability to stick to a sleep schedule. Ultimately I'm better without one. I cannot possibly adhere to a 24-hour schedule, so if you have this in common, simply learn to live around it. I'm much better off for accepting it.

- Cardio: For optimal physical health and wellness, cardio and weights are needed. I do more like 1hr cardio 5x per week but do whatever you can.

- Persistence in all this.
the seasteading institute is not only for libertarian countries. The point is to enable experimentation and competition in governments. One group of seasteadders can create a commune, one a voluntary society, one can create a dictatorship...
Won't this just be another leaky abstraction[1] in which the remoteness of the data will be impossible to ignore[2]? I like the idea of a transparant local LRU 'query'-cache for a remote database[3], but I fear Hibernate-like (or Haskell-like) problems in locating performance bottlenecks.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

[2] "A Note on Distributed Computing" (http://labs.oracle.com/techrep/1994/smli_tr-94-29.pdf)

[3] Please correct me if that synopsis is wrong
Isn't twilio working on allowing web apps to receive MMS messages? I assumed this is what Chute is intending to do.
From his past comments, my bet is hes on the udacity team.
The project has moved here: https://github.com/antirez/load81.git
2) Investment? how about the time all the independent developers put in all the apps you can download? how's that for an investment? Free ride you say? is this some sick joke?
If you're going to do that, at least go the whole hog and avoid assignment/comparison bugs:

if (true == someBoolean) {
// code
}
That does not make sense. If they update that page, then it'll get refreshed when it expires.

For the CSS file, some browsers are buggy so it really should be set to "Cache-Control: public".

See http://www.acunote.com/blog/2008/07/why-you-should-use-cache...
Is HN negative by design? (2011)
The Continuing Evolution of Facebook
CBS takes a 30% cut on all app sales
Working With SGen in Mono
I wasnt confusing private browsing / offline mode, and I do understand that private mode ensures that data is temporal, but disabling the feature, instead of just cleaning it up when the use leaves private mode, just means another edge case for developers to have to handle, or for them to just ignore private mode, which doesnt make sense for a lot of 'desktop' like apps in the browser
Let me call a guy whose an expert in kidneys and see what he says.

...

Looks like, in this market, the best I can do is fifty bucks. This kidney has a lot of wear and tear. If it were in mint condition it could pull a lot more.
"You can't argue with me, because you're on HN"?