skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Placeholder Template Tag for Django
How Apple.com will serve retina images to new iPads
Are you trying to say the iPhone changed nothing? It wasn't an innovation and innovation stopped the day Motorola invented the "Mobile Phone"?

Sure, the iPhone is a mobile phone but it's no way any more similar to what Motorola invented than how similar Motorola's mobile phone is to the original landline phone.
I think you want another thread. If not, that's a very elliptical comment :-)
Does anyone know if high school students qualify for academic pricing? I'm assuming they don't, as most places that offer a education discount only offer it for university students, but maybe I'll get lucky.
Wrong thread perhaps? :)

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700635)
The title is sensationalist and inaccurate. What AT&T is doing is trying to get out of their judgement, through negotiation, with the side-benefit that if he enters into said negotiation, it would happen under a NDA.

They're threatening to terminate his service because he tethered, and violated the TOS.

I think the clamant would be crazy to take them up on it, but that's another point entirely.
Half the time, that leads to auto-generated stub articles about small towns in the middle of nowhere.
Chrome has a built-in task manager that takes this into account, as well as a slightly more hidden "Stats for nerds" link in the task manager that gives total memory usage. It's just genuinely very memory hungry once you add up all its processes.
A Plea for the Right to Parody
I think this is awful .... I'm sorry, you'll have to excuse me, I'm a bit of a romantic when it comes to startups and innovation.

Sure, people who come up with an idea to do a start up usually change it midstream, but they actually come up with one and set out to achieve it. If you can't even think of something to work on, then I don't think people should be falling over themselves to give you money to just come up with something just because you're 'smart' ... it just seems to commoditize and cheapen the process in my opinion. Plus if it doesn't work out, now they have the easy out ... "It wasn't even my idea".

Yes, I know the founder of Yelp got handed $1 million to come up with something and they got Yelp ...

Yes, I know I haven't done this day-in day-out for years like you guys have ...

but it still upsets me. maybe I just need to give it 5 minutes.

I'll sit down now.
Great call. The people you're funding are worth a lot more than the money they're being given. Ideas being a dime a dozen, you're obviously funding the people more than anything else.
If I remember correctly reddit founders originally applied with some mobile app idea and even if their idea was rejected they got in anyway. I wonder if there is many more cases like this.
The Problem With iPhone Lockscreen Wallpapers
Yep, there goes $1500~
Not being able to come up with an idea seems to be contradictory to the prior observation that founders needed to be 'endlessly resourceful'?

Recognizing pain points and opportunities seem a vital entrepreneurial skill to me, but then again there's no harm in applying the scientific process to verify assumptions.
After I wrote my first book, I was told, "Live on the advance. Go to Hawaii on the royalties." By which the speaker meant, "Don't count on success."

I dare say there is a complement in startups.
EInk Refresh Hack Makes Nook Touch Real Tablet
Andy is a good guy. He was young an naive. He was wrong and he fessed up to it, and he said he won't do it again. Cut him some slack.
AntiSpec pressures Mailchimp to work for free
I'd wager about zero, with a zero per cent rate of success.
That's actually why this is great. There are low-value startups out there because naive people start companies that aren't good ideas. Meanwhile, great founders realize their ideas aren't that good and don't build companies. YC is going to find those people, help them curate their ideas, and get them on their way to building meaningful companies. It's as far from predatory as you can get. It's giving great people the tools, resources and support they need to do big things.
I really don't think there is a place for traditional encyclopedias anymore, digital or hardcopy.

Of course we still want and need curated collections of information. But I fail to see the value of large collections of information that say a tiny bit about everything. I think the real value comes from knowledgable experts curating information about their niche. Which in my experience is not at all what traditional encyclopedias were (I'm 24).
Did you even read the article? The Reddit anecdote is _in_ the third paragraph.
He was suggesting that if price increased $50 per year, then this year it would be a 2-day event for $200, or $100/day. Then, since this year is a 3-day event, $100/day * 3 days = $300. Or, to look at it another way: the cost per day went up $25 between 2010 and 2011. If we assume the same increase per day this year, then $300 makes sense.

Percentage-wise it doesn't work out, but there is a (possible) method to the madness.
This is what I call cranking up the rates. Here comes the bottleneck. Great to see YC iterate and scale like a software startup should. The haters will say this is irresponsible but I think it's simply brilliant.
Weren't there a couple of guys from Toronto doing something tangential to eBay that fit this profile (non-programmers, successful exit)?
Good run, guys.
Wasteland 2 is coming, but only with your help
This is already what happens. Changes have reinforced and will further reinforce the status quo and ensure that only the mega corporations will be able to play.
On the bright side, now all Google has to do to defend against antitrust claims is link to that post.
Lets see if we can get some use out of this thread:

What countries DO NOT SUPPORT SOFTWARE PATENTS?

My probably guess if China..any others?
The problem with Bootstrap is people don't treat it as a framework, they treat it as a theme. If people want to use Boostrap they can and should do custom themes that don't look like the tutorial. But they don't, they include the css/js, set some 'row', 'span4' and are happy with the result, because the navbar, forms and buttons are fancy startupish.

Simple conclusion: take advantage of the technical solutions Bootstrap provides and ffs put some work to make it look at least a bit original and branded.
Out of curiosity, how many groups (without an idea) are you going to fund?
The cost of a 2 million dollar yacht may also be justified, but that still explains why not more than a few thousand are sold a year.
> Capitalizing a letter, substituting a symbol, moving your hand's position on the keyboard, or repeating a letter are common things to do. A dictionary word that has had one of these things done to it, for purposes of password strength, is still a dictionary word.

For single-word passwords it can be approximated this way. However, for anything longer, especially a natural language sentence, misspellings makes a big difference.

The OED documents 171,146 words in active use. Assume that every word has at least two simple mispellings. Suddenly your dictionary becomes 513,438 words big. This is a linear expansion, but it's in the exponent since you're taking permutations. That's a big deal. Some mispellings may be much more common than others, so you can bias your dataset accordingly, but it's still a huge expansion.

> You cannot ever trust yourself to be random; the only things you can trust to be random come out of random number generators.

This is true, but neither really here nor there. The entropy of the passphrase is already so great, and then is expanded exponentially with the addition of misspellings and substitutions, even if the distribution of those is biased.
There Is No Silicon Valley Formula
It's interesting how gradual history can seem, even when we're in the middle of huge changes. Online sources of information just kept getting better, too slowly to really notice, and print encyclopedias seemed less and less relevant, but it wasn't until today that this really hit me. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is no longer being printed. That's kind of shocking, though in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.
Google Research is alive and kicking: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

I think you mistook Google Labs with Google Research, Google Labs was sort of a playground for engineers more than a research division. Google Research is as serious as an academic division is inside a big company.

I'm not in any way affiliated with any of both, though I know people who interned/work at both. In fact I would take Microsoft Research over Google Research if I had to choose a "favorite" one... but I'm just clearing a common misconception with the Google Labs closure and people thinking Google closed their entire research division.
I'll give you an alternate viewpoint...

I've been involved in a lot of companies, I can code, do (simple) multi-layer PCB layout, server-admin, tons of real-world business experience, can go in cold to a group of hundreds of people and present almost any topic and manage positive or negative audience feedback under pressure.

I have an idea (submitted in the past, denied, still working on it though)... But, YC might frankly have a BETTER idea for me. Or together we might be able to identify an exploitable market.

I see this as kind of YC's version of an EIR, and frankly I think it's cool and will likely produce several successful projects.
We've heard/read countless stories of YC companies pivoting, but I can't find any hard data on it. I'd be curious to know what the pivot rate is for YC portfolio companies during their funding cycles; given this change, it would seem that the rate is high-ish, but I'd hate to presume anything.

Just curious.
For a company that exists to stand up for people getting paid fairly for their work, it seems hypocritical to expect the opposite from their suppliers.
My intuition would be that this is a bad idea. It seems that requiring teams to bring an idea to the table isn't valuable because of the idea, but rather because it filters out those too lazy to come up with an idea.
For me the important thing is caring about what you're doing, not that it was your idea. Certainly that's my experience working in a startup-esque non-startup.

I know YC wouldn't ever say "right, here's your new business plan", and I suspect the aim here is to be able to find ideas that these idealess-founders will be passionate about.
It's already being done. I stumble across books like that in Amazon from time to time. The reviews usually give it away.
I have no source to back this up (I tried):

Didn't the airbnb founder(s) have little/no coding experience?
I attended I/O twice in high school and received the academic pricing without incident. I do know that not having been 18 either time, I had to get my parents to sign some sort of a waiver form, but it wasn't a big deal.
Not a superconducting cable, but this is a great read:

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/
My gut feeling is strong and very similar to yours. But, I have learned that when something bothers me this much it usually it means I'm not looking at it correctly.

I don't know what happens when you take smart people who are confident they can solve problems and give them problems.

Maybe they can actually solve them, maybe they can't, I have no idea, but I look forward to watching it and seeing what happens.
First, please don't force your ideology down my throat. Specially, not through guilt. You are better than a Viagra salesman or a priest.

Second, please don't dismiss my own fucking problems as ``first world'', as if you know shit about other people's life. Again, you are not a douchebag, so don't behave like one. Yes, I know there are Foreign People suffering now. They can suck it up. We are all grown-ups now, we have problems too, and we have to take care of ourselves. We can not spend all of our life feeling sorry for others.

Third, you don't understand very much about hedonism, morality, philosophy or living. Let's try to be humble and not spit "morally bankrupt!" at every lifestyle with which you disagree. For example, Kant didn't arrive to the conclusion that, to be moral, he had to give all his belongings to the poor. Figure why.
Why would you want to use a remote service instead of just installing the software on your local machine? Most software is quite small and it would be much more reliable this way as it wouldn't rely on a network connection to a second machine.

Seriously why would you not want to install pygmentize? It's Python, so it runs everywhere. The Debian package is 332 kB, so it's not wasting disk space. What possible motivation do you have to pay someone a fee to run it on their computer instead?
What if one has plenty of ideas, but they're not sure which one to pursue? Would this be the proper channel to apply to?
I guess loss of flagging rights might be due to flagging highly upvoted articles. Maybe searching for less popular articles from these spammy sources, and flagging those, would be a viable strategy.
That if you equate resourceful with having ideas.
230 KV many-hundred-amp power cable failure & repair
Is this being upvoted?
I think it's pretty clear from context that the OP meant static typing.

Since he's being a dick about it, I very much understand your desire to pedantically point out his error of terminology. Unfortunately, "strong" typing is a very overloaded term, which has never had a widely agreed meaning amongst either academics or practitioners. There are generally two camps: "strong" === "static", and "strong" === "no dynamic coercions", and neither is technically incorrect.
I just tried setting mine to Bing and I'm not getting an infinite scroll, just a small "More results" link
So what will be the plan for these people?

If they've known each other for, say 10 years, and still don't have a startup idea they want, it seems like it will take more than 3 months, I think that's the Y combinator length, to get an idea that they are truly passionate about.

Note, I'm sure that smart people can come up with many ideas in 3 months, it's the becoming passionate about it part that I have a hard time seeing.

I'm guessing that people become truly passionate about say 5 -10 things in their lives, it seems odd to suspect that they'll come across the idea in such a short time and then be able to act on it in time to take advantage of Y combinator.

What am I missing?
I think in this case it is more accurate to label it as a parody. It sets up an exaggerated scenario that is clearly ridiculous, but it is only far enough from the current tulip mania to strip away some of the artifice. It's more akin to the I.T. Crowd (but with more verisimilitude), in which case we are exactly the right audience for it.
Read Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s IPO Letter
Of course it's serious, and it's not (IMO) massively different from VC's that have EIR's, essentially founders just looking for the right "idea" to come along.
Show me someone who is qualified to be a founder but happily shrugs about his/her utter lack of ideas... and I'll show you someone who should be in a corporate sales job making $600K per year, not someone who has seen a glimpse of the future and is driven to make his/her vision a reality.

Hmm, maybe selling companies to investors is a form of corporate sales after all.

Most successful entrepreneurs have ideas that seem bad for various reasons. YC's focus on critiquing founders' ideas (PG's sneers about mobile/social/local) suggest that YC is very confident that it knows which ideas will work and which won't.

In terms of predicting which companies will be successful in 10 years, nobody would ever have sufficient hubris to claim such foresight. But if the goal is to sell a company to VCs in 6 months, it's not hard to have a pretty good idea of the market dynamics.

Personally I'd rather see YC post "drafts" of business plans and let would-be teams start their own incarnations of those businesses and apply to YC with them. At least then it feels more like an authentic entrepreneurial spark than a search for pedigrees the VCs will buy into a few months down the line.
That is a surprisingly fun little read. I normally don't like that sort of thing. It worked.
The type of moral code that I have described is more constructive both for civilization and for the individual.

As far as Darwin or simple propagation, our science and technology have taken us beyond natural human evolution.

The pursuit of fun without regards to positive social change or individual growth does not create medium or long term benefit for the individual or society.

Generally moral codes which explicitly take into account social responsibility are more beneficial for society. The current state of affairs in our consumerist capitalist society disproves the common belief that individual interest magically translates into common interest.
Creighton replied, ”Senator, what I was—first, it was a default, not an exclusive. So if you go on your I-Phone, I think it’ll probably take you about 20 seconds to download another app or a different search engine.”

Comments like that make it seem like these guys don't really get the internet...
None of them ship Oracle's JRE, and they haven't for a long time. The usual licensing mess.
I, for one, think this is misguided. While I agree that team is one of the most important important aspects to consider when funding a startup, I fail to see how a team without a vision or an idea will have the passion necessary to stick with it.

Even though many companies pivot to ideas nothing like their original, the original shared vision by the team is what keeps it together and unified.

I have no doubt that there are groups you could hand an idea to that would go at it with gusto, I just don't think most will.
Spoil it for the rest of us, whydontcha'
Most places you can buy tetracycline for people, too, OTC.
That's a real shame. I guess I had better look around to see if I can get one. There's still nothing comparable to an encyclopedia for being able to browse interesting topics that are reliable.
Okay, thanks! I might attended I/O in that case. Just have to make sure it doesn't happen at the same time as my exams.
its a PDF download, shouldn't be a problem
What if the apps that 'win' SXSW are no longer the best apps at SXSW?
Browsing their website, the print edition costs over one thousand USD. It is listed as containing "over 65,000 articles"

The most expensive software edition is $40. It is listed as containing "Over 100,000 articles"

Surely it doesn't cost over a thousand dollars to print 32 books?
The form doesn't work for me. When you go to the 'no-idea' landing page - http://news.ycombinator.com/apply-noidea - you are then sent to the regular application form - http://news.ycombinator.com/s2012form

Is it broken or am I missing something?
There was still some demand for the printed books, and apparently it was enough to generate some profit. They really are beautiful-looking books. You couldn't decorate your study with Encarta.

On a related note, according to Wikipedia (!): "Microsoft had originally approached Encyclopædia Britannica, the gold standard of encyclopedias for over a century, in the 1980s, but it declined, believing its print media sales would be hurt; however, the Benton Foundation was forced to sell Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. at below book value in 1996 when the print sales could no longer compete with Encarta..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta
First of all, calm down.

I think people disabling JS for security should be willing to accept the downfalls.

"where the default installation of even many existing heavily used browsers, for both personal and business, have everything except html and stylesheets disabled, especially for new sites"

I don't know what you're talking about here. I've never seen a default install of any browser (on a desktop) except IE in Windows server have JS off by default

"where some/many people may wish to choose to use your site in its most bare form possible, including command line users"

I will grant command line users should be accommodated where they will be expected to be a large proportion of your users (linux install instructions, for example) otherwise, give me a break. Why should I take my time working for .01% of users using a command line.

Now, I don't think this means that people should be using JS when it's not necessary, like if your page is mostly text. But all of the use cases you cite are a small minority of the users of most sites.
I'm conflicted by this slightly. On one hand I see it as a great idea for great minds to come together, and on the other hand like it was mentioned, this seems to create a lot of additional "noise". Meaning more applications that require reviewing over others with solid ideas.

What are exactly the merits to determine "good" untested founders?

My other question is, which has been eating at me slightly is the trend of the startups I have seen come from Y Combinator being "extremely" similar to each other. Of course there is going to be overlap, but even the backgrounds of founders are largely similar creating this trend of "hive" mind ideologies for startups. Is this intentional?

Overall, I'm curious to see how it will turn out either way.
Apple drops Nvidia Kepler from large numbers of laptops
While I agree with your position on a non-JS fallback, I cannot even remember the last time I installed a browser on any machine (OS X, Windows, Linux) where Javascript was not turned on and enabled "out of the box". The smartphones I've used (iPhone and a galaxy S) also both have JS "out of the box", so the parents comment isn't far from the truth in my opinion.
Pure entertainment value. Either that, or grellas is operating a voting ring...
I use Sass with Bootstrap without a problem. If you're the kind of person that has a hard time moving from one preprocessor to another, consider whether that's a VERY STRONG argument to go with something like Bootstrap, because it solves a lot of other problems that you could lose whole days or weeks to.
> Harder to be original. Because we all start with the same base.

That is so not true. What is easy is to use the basic theme to build out a prototype of your app. Customizing will always be harder, but then again, it's been hard to build out a well-designed site since the very beginning.

To say that it's hard because it comes with a default theme is to not understand.
Haha, I vpvote you even it's for the wrong thread. Nice comment.
What if I am a single founder with an idea, would I be paired up with those without ideas to make a team?
Is it just me that can't view the normal YC app after viewing the "no idea" app?
remember that "people" are not one single entity. some people are pissed at apple for abusing patents. others love apple. the people who are pissed at apple are pissed at yahoo. yahoo doesn't have the fans that apple does though, so the overall tone of the internet comes across as more negative.
Thanks for all of the insults. I must have really touched a nerve. Maybe you will consider your lifestyle and world view closely.

You almost imply that Kant wouldn't have a problem with hedonism. That doesn't sound very educated or well thought out.
This could work.

To make an analogy, PhD students usually don't have a project to work on when they start and if they do, that usually changes. Yet many of them become excellent researchers and leaders of their field in the future.