skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, ask any mommy blogger, and they'll tell you that you've been living under a cave if you haven't heard of Pinterest 6 months ago. We in the tech world live in a very different bubble.

That attitude you're referring to is dangerous as well. It makes startup founders uneasy, and worrisome if they don't experience quick success, while we all know it's a long long road that requires patience, and even some luck.
How to Interview an Engineer for your Startup
Specially loved are trees which spray/release resin.
Except someone else is likely to patent the same thing.

Not if the invention is published or otherwise disclosed in any other form. You don't have to claim ownership of an idea to keep someone else from patenting it.
OP:

One thing is for sure if you don't try you won't have the chance to find out.

Actually, I am going to apply for the new YC round. Think about it, if you are in the same round as I, then we can be the guys with no college degree. The worst thing they can say is "No." The word "no" should not scare you much.

To make you feel better, I was homeless and hitchhiked to San Francisco, I had a rap sheet (that has since been expunged), I dropped out of high school in 9th grade, went to college but never finished and my father was dead and I hardly knew him. Does any of this stuff make me special? Nope. Not at all. But if I am going to try, with all of that stuff behind me, you better damn try.

If you feel you are a misfit. Join the club. Sometimes life is a bit different for others.

Yes, you have a chance. You won't have one if you sit here and ask about your chances though.

That is my "feel good" inspirational for the day.
Announcing the Y Combinator Amex: http://datasyndrome.com/post/19274060089/y-combinator-amex
Exactly the kind of thing ZipCar helps with. That's the real game changer. Self-driving cars might be cool but unless they are shared, they won't fundamentally reshape our experience.
I got sucked in at the beginning also. I admit that I haven't read other fiction stories in the startup genre so it also took me a while to figure it out, except that I did all seem a bit too good to be true.

The fake tweets about vomiting all over the stage were definitely entertaining.
Thanks for the explanation. I still don't think it's a good example in the context of this thread. My impression is similar to onli's:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3699158
Chrome and Mac users really are smarter than IE users
An excellent new take on an old technology. This is not something that would have ever crossed my mind, but I can immediately see the benefit of this type of view.

At the end of the video you see Trees, Buildings, Roads... brace yourselves, the 3D-hacked games using HTML + CSS are coming.
Tuxguy, thanks a bunch for the comment. Yeah CureTogether and PatientsLikeMe exist, but they didn't seem to fill the specific vision for a complete product I had -- which was THE location for people with a specific chronic condition to go. In order to do that, you kind of have to make a place more than a product. And my hypothesis is that making a place for this purpose requires the perfect balance of social elements, health tracking, and knowledge sharing (q&a). I can dig into it more, but the basic essence that as hard as some of the other players have tried, they still have yet to capture any Facebook-esque stickiness to their services. I believe that there is room for health software that does have this property. That patients really identify with, and will come back and use.
'You must use an Android phone to connect to the GoogleSmartCar'

I can't wait for vendor lock in to control what car and what phone I can buy in tandem!
New: Y Combinator American Express
Not according to this finding by the UK Govt: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15351357

"But Sir Scott's 486-page report finds: "In our opinion, there is no significant difference between the probable cause test and the reasonable suspicion test."

"There is no practical difference between the information submitted to and from the United States."
Privacy for Piracy. Exclusive Interview with Suren Ter from YouHaveDownloaded
Django's future, and Python 3
I admire what you are doing, I really do.

That said, just putting my business hat on.. you haven't really proved your vision isn't crazy. The question is: how do you intend to generate traction + revenue? Just having an unique model, and a centralized community isn't going to be enough. As they say: build it and they won't necessarily come. In my eyes, you will need to rely on SEO a lot. The good news is that your site/model is unique in a field filled with a lot of spam. So it shouldn't be too tough to get high quality links.

The other good thing is you don't need a gazillion users since people (drug companies) will pay a lot for a very focused set of users with a specific disease.

But 50 pages indexed in Google right now isn't going to cut it. Not suggesting you go pull off a Demand Media, but you're gonna need some content.
Note that we still got a Vioxx on the market even though we had those tons of regulations in place. There was a similar scandal in France recently with another drug called Mediator. Truth is, regulations do not replace ethics - Corporations knowlingly allowing patients to be hurt should be punished accordingly - there is no need to inflate regulations further and further, this has never solved the problem, just like regulations in the financial industry will not make crooks disappear.
It can easy cost a thousand dollars to print 32 books.

For example, the fans of Jack Vance published an authoritative 44-set of his collected works, printed and bound similar to an encyclopedia. It was a nonprofit volunteer effort. The "reader's edition" was supposed to cost $1250 a set, but the price ultimately had to rise to $1500 to cover costs. The all-leather "deluxe edition" cost $3000.

http://www.vanceintegral.com/
Well, darn. We're just going to have to figure out antigravity.

But for the next few hundred years, maybe we should use those rotating space stations and spacecraft that I remember seeing in books when I was a kid.

http://www.dvandom.com/coriolis/spacestation.html
That misunderstands the problem.

Metrics only get you so far. They don't really tell you why you fail. They only tell you how far you are along your plan to succeed, and whether it is matching expectations.

But if things are failing, they can't tell you why, particularly in an experiment like this. Maybe it is genuinely a bad idea and nothing will make it succeed. Maybe it is a good idea but needs to be gone about differently.

In other words, you can show that you are doing what you think you need to do to be successful, and that you are not being successful, but you can;t show what changes you need to make in order to be successful.

The solutions do require manual labor, but they require creative labor. This area is more art than science.

If I was doing this I would assemble a list of reasons why this experiment will fail up front. I would revisit the lists in a year or so. I would ask which ones played into the problem. I would then ask what could be done about it. But that's me. Others have to find their own ways.
Humans may have to give up on long-duration space travel.
These lights exist in several malls in Australia (and I'd be surprised if they weren't elsewhere).
http://www.roadtraffic-technology.com/projects/siemensparkin... goes one step further though.
At least they had the good sense not to form the Encyclopaedia Industry Association of America (EIAA)--an organization whose charter would have been to sue random Wikipedia users.
No. sorry.
This one is $18

I think the operative word here is "stylish". Obviously taste is subjective, but my first impression for that one was "home detention bracelet"
The startup could use a URL shortener and track individual t-shirt results. Like adsense for t-shirts.
> Solar, bio-fuel, an Arduino competitor, small PMSM motors for the medical industry.

Getting funded for anything including hardware and/or medical stuff is quite hard.
I heard of a company that had QR codes on the t-shirts and paid per scan. (also, if its direct response advertising you can use unique phone numbers, unique web addresses, and other typical tracking methods.)
There is an angle here if you understand the local printer business.
The company I heard about was going to local jersey printing companies and sponsoring/subsidizing uniform and jersey printing for local high school sports teams and was working with brands like RightGuard. By tapping into networks of printers, they could bring major advertisers on board with real scale.
Except one that doesn't ruin your reputation when you take a risk that doesn't pan out?
Yeah, while we should check the numbers, I am pretty sure there were far more poor and starving people 100 years ago, not in total number of course, but in proportion of the actual world population. When is the last time you heard about starvation in China, for example ?
Right, but 10 different people winning $850 in small claims court from AT&T would be newsworthy. It might convince more people to follow in their footsteps.
Tanking a Y Combinator startup does not ruin your reputation. It can help it.
Restaurant: Papa's Burgeria - Free Online Games
As Abraham Lincoln said, "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."
You realize "go forth and build cool stuff" is, in many domains, about a million times easier than it was even just ten years ago?
Which is my point. The point of the post is that YC is a credit card. I am arguing that it's not.
I'd just like to note that, as with the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, the fact that the publisher is no longer going to print future editions does not accurately predict that future editions will be unobtainable in print format.

You just won't be able to get them on Amazon, for 4-figures.
5 Must Have Gadgets and Accessories for Your iPhone
Google has really taken it on the chops these last few years. I remember back in 2006 or whenever the time was when they were the shiznit, and were easily the most admired company in tech. And I remember thinking, let's see how well it goes when everyone is NOT cheering you on and you have a tailwind in your sails. Google is definitely in that situation now.
I think by definition (and having attended an entrepreneurial program at a fine school, coming from an entrepreneurial family, and having hung around entrepreneurs most of my life) I can't imagine someone who is an entrepreneur not having a zillion ideas that they think of all on their own. To make money that is. The problem with most entrepreneurs is that they have to many ideas. That doesn't mean they are good ideas of course (by the definition of YC).
Hobbit bar owner "I cant fight Hollywood".
Think of it as an Amex Black http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_Card
MassChallenge: A Colossal Startup Accelerator That's 100% Free
I think the main reason is because github is so much better then bitbucket.
I decided to tackle iOS as a learning experience. I've put some initial work into a desktop client, but as people have show here there seems to also be a demand for a better iPhone app... So I don't want to commit publicly to either app... But I do want to gauge the demand for either and iPhone or Mac version.
I thought I read somewhere that the django trunk already was ported to py3 and all tests passed?
Microsoft says : "Bing is now as good as Google"
In Australia, where temperatures inside a car that is parked in direct sunlight in summer can reach 70 degrees celsius, and are enough to kill pets and children left in the car, melt plastic etc, trees actually ARE fairly well-regarded by drivers.
New IE10 memory protection features not just for IE
Not really. The AC transformer was the most efficient way to adapt voltages until very recently. The IGBT and GTO thyristors are the technology that makes something like HVDC affordable today, and they are very modern developments.

Mercury-arc rectifiers (the technology replaced with IGBTs and GTOs) were very large and expensive, and also less efficient (even more so before the 1930s or so) so HVDC only made sense for submarine cables (which have huge capacitive losses). With IGBTs and GTO thyristors it start to become feasible to e.g. do an HVDC line across a continent.

As an example the HVDC inter-island was built using mercury-arc valves (it included a submarine leg), but they have since benn replaced with solid-state devices.

HVDC is also a good to tie two separate grids together; since they will be on different time-bases you can't just directly AC couple them.
perhaps YC should think of becoming like a business school. Most business schools charge upwards of 100k for two years, and most students borrow that from the federal government. YC could instead "charge" half that amount, teach all the major business principles that one needs to know in a few months (which could basically be teaching pg's essays to a class audience) with the caveat that all or most of the tuition charged will be returned as seed investments to the students at the end
Fake NATO Official’s Profile Used For Spying,....
I wrote the Cappuccino app along with Ross back in the day... The app shares some concepts, but the code is written from scratch.
The statement "We all use parking lots, and we all kind of hate them," and the supposed "centrality of parking lots in our lives" struck me as odd. Like a lot of people I don't drive to work. I could go for weeks without parking in a parking lot. Their centrality is highly suspect.
The converse of this is interesting to me as well. Now someone with an idea and not necessarily all the hacker chops could apply. The idea being that you pair up the product person with an idea with a technical team that applied (but had no idea).
From the interview: "When visitors search for something on the website, there’s a small pop-up that jumps out and offers you to “like us while you’re waiting”. That’s an artificial delay. We can return results in milliseconds. The pop-up and delay was my idea just to collect more likes."

This is something I'd never considered before—I'm surprised more sites don't take this tactic for other (genuine) searching/loading delays.
Show HN: f.ilter.us [filtered Hacker News]
I made a small application over the weekend that I'm sure has been done a thousand times, but it's a filtering website done for Hacker News and has sorting by points and most recent (similar to reddit and other sites). Was wondering what the community thought, room for improvements, etc. I wanted some way to look at HN on the iPad (ended up using Twitter's awesome Bootstrap), so here it is: http://f.ilter.us/

The code is also available here on GitHub, if that's useful to anybody: https://github.com/maskact/hacker_news_filter
I've been using it for Python with Bottle. Been pretty good so far. Anything specific you were looking for?
There are systems that do this; I've seen a few carkparks where each spot has a red/green light on the roof in front of it so you can tell at a glance where a free spot is. Every point where you have to choose which way ("Up to the next level or check this one?") will give the number of free spots for either choice on a little LED sign.

Westfields Bondi Junction went as far as having an iPhone app where you could put in your car's license plate and it would tell you which spot it was parked in; that caused some privacy concerns and I don't know if it's still available but the technology exists, and presumably the cost is offset by the extra metrics you get by tracking every single vehicle that uses your shopping center.
I would be willing to bet that a 2011 edition of the EB will still be readable by your great-grandchildren but any hard-drives you bequeath them won't.
I found this very entertaining :) Anyone recommend any startup books? Fiction or non-fiction?
Tell HN: I built a push service for HTTP APIs and want beta testers
Hi folks, I'm Justin. About 5 months ago I left my role as CTO at Livefyre to build Fanout, a publish-subscribe service for the web. It can be used to push data in real-time to browsers and other clients.

What makes Fanout special is its versatility. As an API/protocol guy, it occurred to me that existing cloud push solutions aren't well-suited for building APIs. For example, if you want to create and offer a real-time API like Twitter, Yammer, Digg, etc, then you pretty much have to set up your own infrastructure. Also, migrating to or between any of the existing solutions means having to update all client code to match. That's a very heavy transition cost, especially if you have any third-party consumers.

I figured there were probably other developers out there considering the cloud for push but having similar concerns about API feasibility and transition cost, so I've spent the last few months developing a solution that I now feel is ready for some beta testers.

Why should you be interested in Fanout?

Fanout allows for customization of the client/server interactions. This makes it possible to:

* Develop real-time APIs using HTTP streaming or HTTP long-polling.
* Migrate APIs to the cloud without breaking existing consumers.
* Keep using your existing client libraries.
* Avoid proprietary protocols and associated vendor lock-in.

Of course, if you don't want to futz with designing protocol, Fanout additionally has its own JSON-based protocol and complementary JavaScript library that'll let you get off the ground quickly and is on par with existing solutions.

I'm currently letting a few developers access the beta, so if you're interested, please visit http://fanout.io/ and submit your email address. I look forward to hearing from you.
What does it mean to "firmly plan"?
Facebook Cofounder Chris Hughes Sold Jumo for $62K and Five MacBook Pros
Plumber brea
Need a plumber in Brea? there's only one call to make. Call: (714)676-8175 We are standing-by to take your call anytime 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Clearly my car needs a RESTful web services front-end!
Apple's OS X Lion is a resource and security nightmare
But they already do this. When they design clinical trials, they take type 1 and type 2 errors into account. Even if you wanted to accept a ton more error, which would mean a lot more bad drugs on the market and a lot more good drugs off the market, it's still not going to be cutting costs by orders of magnitude or something.
That assumes that the most important thing to a college is present earnings and not potential future earnings. Colleges regularly compete for top students (at a loss via scholarships) in order to pump up their stats and increase their prestige (which comes largely from what graduates do long after leaving school) both of which are intended to increase future earnings. And that is only considering universities from the cynical, profit-driven perspective.
How is a 3 person company profitable with 3 founders and only $6000/month revenue?
Encyclopedia Britannica Consigns Print Edition to History
I came into the development world via anime (years ago). Would you want to talk about some of your ideas? I have always had a heart in this niche.

mikelbring [at] gmail.com
That's partly the reason every founder has kept going.
When it said it was a "short story" that generally means it is fiction....
My family used to own a used auto parts shop for over 20 years. Sold it about a year ago. From what I know, almost 100% of the auto salvage places link into the same database. So if you come looking for a part, I can get it for you. If you call, come in x amount of days and I will have it, if its not already in the yard. Works pretty well, but shipping can get expensive.

As for new parts, the database also allows you to order those, it works out pretty well. There is also a very standard 30 day warranty on parts. I used to mess with people and tell them to up their warranty like the rest of the industry...

At any rate, I would learn some more stuff and then go for it. Definitely lots of room for improvement IMHO. The only thing is there are a crap ton of parts. And some of the compatibility can get confusing.
I use the Compass library which works great with Bootstrap. The recent Railscast also got me testing out the [Bourbon gem](https://github.com/thoughtbot/bourbon) (a similar Sass libary) on a new project along with Bootstrap.
Also, the opposite is true:

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...
"Order of the Stick" comic seeks $58K on KickStarter; raises $1.2M
That's not true. Drug companies can't just cherry pick trials to report to the FDA. The FDA is involved from very early on in the process. Furthermore, if the drug company is doing suspicious things like shutting down trials, the FDA will be even more strict in their requirements for approval.
Several things:

1) They last a VERY long time as measured in "Internet time"

2) It's very hard to find examples of GOOD software patents. They tend to either cover too much (one click shopping), or they are really just math expressed in code (encryption and compression algorithms).

3) They are easy to abuse, since it takes so little time to produce them and the people who grant them don't really understand them.
Maybe I spent way too long at PyCon but I'm getting very weary of hearing about Python 3. Why is anyone surprised, or cheered, or dismayed, or excited, that one of the flagship Python projects will eventually be moving to Python 3 (experimental!) compatibility?

This is a sincere question by the way, just tempered by post-PyCon weariness.
Great news. The two biggest hurdles for Python3 adoption were/are Numpy/Scipy and Django. Now that Numpy/Scipy both officially support Python 3.x[1] and with Django coming soon, I expect a lot of people will make the transition to Python3.x for new projects.

1. http://scipy.github.com/faq.html#do-numpy-and-scipy-support-...
What to Import to Australia
> A game that came out in 1988 and only ever sold 100k units (plus lord knows how many pirated copies).

In those days 100,000 units sold meant a big hit. The original sales numbers for Secret of Monkey Island were in that neighborhood.
ARM Wants to Put the Internet in Your Umbrella
Have You Been Networking Face to Face Lately?
Same for me. PG et al, you might want to look into it.
Larry Page, like anybody else with any chops in the business, understands that the internet is about communication, and communication is about identity, data, and a sharing protocol. If Facebook owns those things, they own everything.

As long as all the users are on one identity and sharing platform you can develop all the open social APIs you want but it's totally pointless. We need at least a duopoly and angry users wanting to share with people not on their platform for any kind of standards to emerge.

You're thinking ad money, ad money, ad money. And Microsoft and others are quite happy to feed that theory with there substantial PR budgets and lack of ethics. But I don't think that's what's on Larry's mind. I might not agree with his strategy, or particularly like Google+, but I think if you study the man you would come to the same conclusion.
Let's just say I am a lot less idealistic about colleges than you appear to be.

The top students who will become prestigious alumni are by and large not the same students who don't know what they want to major in yet. For every Steve Jobs-like outlier you have a ton of executives, accountants, doctors, and engineers who know that's what they want to do. The major-less students will generally either pay for four years of psychology or be successful for unrelated reasons (legacy status and family connections, the occasional dumb luck).

If YC thinks trying to pick out the outliers, the lucky, and the connected from their application pool is worth the trial, power to them.
I have some old sets of books over 100 years old. They're still fairly worthless.