skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Today we can use solar and wind serendipitously. They run on top of base power and when they provide power they allow us to keep gas powered generators offline.

Solar thermal+thermal storage could be used in climates closer to the equator. The US ran an experimental setup with 8 hours endurance after sundown.

In the case of cooling equipment, solar coincides well with demand.

You are most certainly right that solar won't cover all our baseload power needs. We don't need to cover it all. We just need to whittle down the unsustainable and environmentally unfriendly parts as much as we can.

Subsidizing winners isn't something the government should be in the business of doing. However, penalizing losers is precisely what we have a government for, and CO2 emitting power is a losing proposition for the future.
It's too bad Encyclopaedia Britannica won't collaborate with Wikipedia. The company could bring their authors, reviewers, content, and experience from a sinking ship to an information platform that is successful but could be even better.
"Your data usage demonstrates that you have tethered your wireless device..." How does data usage provide proof of tethering?
When helping brainstorm ideas with founders, YC takes strong consideration as to what type of startup the team is best suited to build.

We considered switching ideas in the middle of YC. One of the reasons the partners talked us out of it was that we weren't particularly well suited to tackle the new space we were thinking about.
Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250
i dont like bing outlook but i wanted to shift from google for similar reasons. i use binngle.com
He also admitted to tethering according to the article.
I'm not sure why you'd think that. If you take a few examples of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Dropbox... I don't think any of these needed coders to think of.

Obviously having technical founders can have many benefits, including:

a.) Can create technical product yourself, spend less on coders initially (e.g. Zuckerburg)

b.) Some products may need complicated code even for a POC (whereas sites like Twitter, less so. Any mediocre dev could make a badly written Twitter clone)

c.) Easier to think of technical ideas. For example I doubt a non-technical person would think of creating BitCoin. On a smaller level, could fail to think of feature-sized ideas within a company.

I think that, if Twitter didn't exist and I decided to create it, lack of coding skill wouldn't be a problem, as long as I had funding for coders to replace the technical founder's early role. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming I could do what Twitter have done, but I don't think that the things I'd have done worse would be because of technical ability, the same as if I was hired as a lawyer my failings wouldn't be for tech/code reasons.

Edit:

As an example data point, the company I work for is a digital publishing company, creating and managing content websites. Founded by people from hardware distribution industry, and successful - yet I would argue that our core business type is similar to Reddit, in that success/failure comes more from business decisions than "wow, you coded a better website than other people!" (Reddit being better than Digg, for example, is much more than "Reddit is coded better".)
For most people's applications, and in particular for the space of apps for which people pay money, it matters not- one- whit how much different your app looks than Bootstrap's native theme, because Bootstrap's native theme looks better than 80% of all web apps normal people come into contact with.

Different- for- different's- sake is a curse on web developers; it costs more time, more momentum, and more initiative than any other issue I can think of. Get the value working and proven first, then, when people are paying for it, start thinking of how much you'd budget to make your application visually distinctive.

There are exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule.
"Endlessly resourceful" is a broad statement. Groups that are resourceful enough to take an idea/problem (self-sufficient idea or given too them) and expound upon it, is no different than creating a start up, to fill a void or disrupt an industry.
Google Docs in Google+ Hangouts
In many ways, the extradition itself is already the sentence.
Think of how many people YC has seen flow through. Successes, failures, one's they can't predict yet. There are probably certain patterns and traits in the good ones. They've also seen what types of idea's work best with certain types of people.

YC is directly integrated into the heartbeat of Silicon Valley, gaining more insight into where the puck is going to be, far better than any outsider. If they can match traits of a group/person to an idea only they have the privilege to imagine, you might have a winning combination.

The fact that people are complaining about this likely means it's a good idea, or should at least be tested. Occasionally throwing a monkey wrench into the machine is always good practice.

Colleges do this already by accepting smart students who don't know what to major in yet. Who cares if it takes them some time to figure it out? They're smart! They'll get it!
That's a big complaint in modern CS research funding as well; traditional NSF and DARPA funding came in bigger chunks, with longer timeframes and less strong micromanagement of projects it was to be used for (there even used to be completely non-specific "center of excellence" type block grants, which gave a huge pile of money for a group of researchers to use on good research in a given topic of interest to the funding body). Now it typically comes in small chunks with very narrow parameters that have to be pre-approved and checked up on on a yearly basis, which not everyone thinks has improved the quality of CS research.
and it still seems to be rising, not sure how that's happening after the time was reached, maybe some are still completing transactions?
Is this the first step in YC pivoting away being a "seed investor", where the goal is to pick winners? Does PG see the future of YC as being an alternative to post-graduate education where the goal is instead to develop winners and have a stake in their success?

If this model works out, I wonder if we'll eventually see traditional universities funding startups for top students out of their endowments.

Very exciting experiment, if you ask me.
Ask HN: Amazon or Palantir?
Hey HN,

I'm deciding between an internship with Palantir or Amazon and I've been going crazy trying to decide which experience would be better. I was hoping to get some help from anyone who knows more about Silicon Valley than I do(I'm an East coaster). This will be my last internship before I graduate so I'd like to intern at a company where I'll learn a ton of new stuff.

I'm currently leaning more towards Palantir because I think they make some extremely interesting software but I feel like I might learn more at Amazon because they are so much bigger. I have friends that work at Amazon as well. They're both big Java companies so that doesn't help my decision either.

I'd really love any and all info you guys have that could make my decision clearer.
Thanks
I recall reading a story (couldn't find it just now) about how Bill Gates tried unsuccessfully to license the Britannica content to create his digital encyclopedia product. Instead, Microsoft cobbled together assets themselves and built Encarta (1993).

Microsoft proceeded to trounce the print Encyclopedia business by creating a better product that severely undercut the traditional players.

Here we are, 2012, finally Britannica is dead. That took longer than expected.
The latter, although obviously hosted on a MS flagship property.
Actually no. The original application has a place for you to talk about any other ideas you may have.

So pick one you feel slightly stronger about than the others, and then mention the others in the application.

The idea pg is implementing is for people with "zero" idea of what they want to do.
united states foreign policy supports software patents. a large amount of the united state's exports is in the form of intellectual property, and the US government is very aggressive in pushing foreign countries to enact US style intellectual property legislation.

sure, China and Russia can choose to ignore software patents, but if they do they're going to get hit with embargoes and tarriffs when they try to trade with the US.
Wait, aren't ideas worthless?
I agree - I have a lot of nostalgia over this, as we had a complete set of the 1921 edition - reading though that to see just how much the world had changed (and this would have been in the 80's) was fascinating.
I know several people on HN who have successful software (SaaS) businesses who will tell you that this just isn't really the case; that the overwhelming majority of your customers for something like car buying aren't going to finger you as a "Bootstrap user" and then think less of you for it.

It's hard not to wonder whether the fact that you're the kind of person who posts on HN doesn't bias your response to sites like this.

One way to get some real data on this would be to ask your friends to ask their nontechnical friends and relatives for a list of sites they actually paid money at, and then take a hard look at how good their designs really are.
Really? Please enlighten me, what is Google+ (or Facebook for that matter) about if it isn't about advertising?

Because as far as I know, every service that isn't about being so great people would pay for it is about advertising and nothing else.
Can you explain what you mean? I see nothing wrong with the comment.

Also, the internet really is a series of pipes.
I had a 1957 set for nearly 20 years until I gave it to a neighbor in 2004 when I was relocating. He still has it.

It has the Atlas and the dedicated bookcase.

For anything up until the 20th century (e.g. the ancient and medieval worlds), it was probably as good as or better than the current edition - something has to be cut to cover Steve Jobs, the Space Shuttle and the George's Bush.

I will probably find myself another set, but I don't care if it is particularly recent. I can always use Wikipedia if I want to study Pokemon.
Yet $1400 is a reasonable price... There is a distinctive pleasure in reading a printed encyclopaedia that convenient on-line browsing can't fulfil. Old Macropaedia editions are still useful, I prefer their summaries about physics than those of Wikipedia for instance. I'd love that everything in this world were digitalized, but it's not yet and maybe it will never be. Despite the efforts of many people there are huge amounts of relevant knowledge available on paper only, it makes me sad to realise that this obvious fact -and all those sources- are almost forgotten now.
Those statements were made by Google's lawyer.
Not to mention they're just Gorgeous. I had a set I picked up at a thrift store just for the look - Wikipedia's faster, but damn, Britannica had Gravitas.
As a Microsoft employee, I wish this hadn't been posted to a Microsoft-branded website. Other than that, I thought it was an interesting perspective and I loved the money quote:

"I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.”"
Could you describe your workflow?
No, one of the three airbnb founders has a CS degree from Harvard (http://www.airbnb.com/founding-team).
The response to this seems mixed so I think it's worth saying: it's very important for them to at least try this.

The current YC model may have been met with the same response when first proposed (I expect it wasn't even this good, I don't know the history) but all indication is that the model works very well. And if they don't look for ways to improve further on that model, someone else may come in and eat their lunch. YC is a business too, you know.

Besides, if "execution is everything" then doesn't it make sense to not worry about the idea and focus entirely on the team? Even if it doesn't work out, I think there's no question that they should give it a shot.
Several impressive numbers in there.

100 backers at $1,000 a shot.

$38 per pledge.

Oh and exceeding the goal by nearly $3 million.
> And there's no issue with mens rea here, since patent trolls aren't doing anything illegal.

No. They aren't doing anything illegal. They're doing something evil.

Mens rea is the mental state of doing evil. Not everything evil is illegal - for various reasons, some good and some bad. But the mental state is the same.

Your enormous shiftiness around this issue demonstrates clear mens rea. In short, you know you're a bad boy.

Mass murder is evil. Graft is evil. Your industry doesn't involve mass murder. It's just a big graft scheme, that's all. It's not Hitler. But it's still evil, like Hitler.

> But it has nothing to do with whether people should follow groupthink without the capacity to determine whether it's right or wrong.

Anyone is entitled to be right for any reason at all. You're simply trying to restrict the number of your enemies.

Besides, you're missing something here. You make a living sending rockets up. We live where the rockets come down.

The existence of rocket impacts is purely conjectural to you - so you can call it "groupthink." It's a shared reality for us. It's not groupthink that the sky is blue.

Your profession nominally exists to serve our interests. In fact, it serves to suck our blood - when it isn't filling up our days with worthless bullshit. All genuine innovators, at least in our field, despise your rule with a passion. I'm sure many of them would be quite happy to see the entire patent bar in prison, or at least collectively disbarred.

> Indeed, this would have to come from Congress. But it could certainly happen.

No. You miss my point. Not even Congress could do it. If Congress passed a law, the patent bar would simply work around it and continue its present practices.

In other words, the American voter has exactly the same power over the patent industry that the German voter had over Hitler. Ie, at a first approximation, none.

> Is there a single industrialized country that has no patent system whatsoever? That's a serious question... I don't know of one.

Germany before 1877. China now. (Yes, I know nominally China has a patent system, but nobody in China gives a shit about US patents.)

There is only one "industrialized country" today, the US, because every other "country" in the world today unthinkingly adopts whatever comes out of WIPO's derriere. Alas, ruling the world doesn't mean your turds are made of gold - though I'm sure it's been quite golden for you.
Steve Kirsch unveils OneID, a startup aimed at cutting password overload
Like I said in the announcement, one of the reasons we're pretty sure this will work is that we're already doing it. I.e. a lot of the people who applied to YC in previous cycles were applying without a viable idea; they just didn't realize it at the time.

Also (I'm starting to wonder if you read the announcement) we don't hand people ideas. We encourage them to solve problems they already knew about but had been overlooking.
What makes for good prior art? What is the best way to publish an idea or invention so it can be used in a prior art defense in the future?
You think they are paying a fancy Newport Beach attorney in an attempt to get out of an $850 judgement? Seriously?
The general stab of this article is great, but it's a little confusing:

The first few paragraphs bemoan people who are willing to suffer through the valleys to get to the peaks, while the middle of the article is all about how difficult it is to find rewarding experiences and how it usually takes a lot of hard work to see rewards manifest.

Despite his protestations, I think the author does have a sense of "time investment" and is probably often glad he "stuck with it."
Why Bully's Rating Should Be Changed
I'll bet you're not just a patent lawyer, but a good one.
> Bootstrap's native theme looks better than 80% of all web apps normal people come into contact with

Today. The more people use raw TB the faster that 80% approaches zero and you'll get to my conclusion.
Seriously? YOU don't? You've obviously never experienced the Wikipedia death spiral: 30 browser tabs open all on unrelated Wikipedia pages. It was dangerously close to an addiction for me at one point and the amount of random crap I now know it irritates me I'm still so poor at pub quizes. There's probably some Godwin's Law equivalent where once you've opened a tab relating to Hitler or the Nazis, having started off on an article about Bengal Tigers, you know it's time for bed.
You're thinking small. Organize a class-action with him as the lead defendant.
interesting. reminds me of the old adage things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. is this too simple? looking forward to seeing the results.
I'm surprised by how many negative reactions there are here. Some people seem almost offended, presumably because we're turning down people with ideas and funding some without.

This really just reinforces the fact that we fund people, not ideas. The way it works in practice is that we work with the founders to find a good idea that will work for them (the idea needs to match the founder). The truth is that most people have good ideas in them, but just don't realize it. We aren't necessarily providing the idea so much as helping them to discover the idea that they already have :)
Find Solutions Faster by Not Looking For Them
No experiment is misguided as long as everyone is willing to learn from it.
"proponents of large-scale confinement agriculture contend does not exist: an indication that farm antibiotic use breeds resistance that moves off the farm and subsequently affects humans"

I'm stunned to hear that industry is still in denial about this. It seemed to me ten years ago that the evidence was pretty overwhelming. I guess it's just more evidence of the truth of Upton Sinclair's observation.
I loved Tim's (approximate) celebration quote: "I don't want to say this is the end of the game publishing as we know it...... I'm sure a few games will still need publishers." Classic.
I thought google used to be a company of innovation (and still had potential to become better) and now that they find themselves competing with Facebook just brings them down from where they started.

Rant:

A company with so much money, and still no idea what to do with it. Here's a hint, use all that brainpower you waste optimizing advertising machines and make something that solves a problem that many people face using technology? maybe seek to reach out to a new audience? maybe quit sucking on the corporate tit that thinks advertising works in its current form? It's barely working for fb and thats because they dont care about user privacy (facebook actually sounds like a legal phishing company for advertisers, and i rather be shot than to put any of their API's on any site i create). Whatever, sheeps will be sheeps. And google isn't immune it seems.
You're right; I left out the last part of my sentence, which should have read "... and yet still pay money to".

You will probably not pull off the next Foursquare or Pinterest using Twitter Bootstrap. But: you're not going to pull off the next Foursquare or Pinterest anyways.

So think of it this way: this debate has the question backwards. If you're doing a startup for which a major risk of your version 1 is that you built it with Bootstrap, you probably picked a bad startup idea.
> It's weird, but I kinda wouldn't mind having a set of the last Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Yeah, that idea is only nice to ponder, not to implement. I had a 32 volume set of Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls ). They are so heavy! Every time I moved ... the horror ... I'm glad I donated all of them.
Thanks for the link. Here's the full quote (see page 4):

"Thus the "people not projects" principle was the other cornerstone of ARPA/PARC’s success. Because of the normal distribution of talents and drive in the world, a depressingly large percentage of organizational processes have been designed to deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust. We can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also astoundingly in corporate, university, and government research. ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation and ability. They cultivated people who "had to do, paid or not" and "whose doings were likely to be highly interesting and important". Thus conventional oversight was not only not needed, but was not really possible. "Peer review" wasn't easily done even with actual peers. The situation was "out of control", yet extremely productive and not at all anarchic."

Sounds remarkably like YC.
What if we'd like to be part of a group?

Hmmm, maybe I should just hack a yc group matcher website together real quick...
Very true, they definitely should dig a bit into their margins to provide a method of appealing the decision - I think it would actually help them quite a lot on the PR front, so it might be good even from a bottom line perspective.
Class-action lawsuit so the lawyers can get all the money? Also, class-action lawsuits are far more of a collective pain in the ass than just going to small claims by yourself.
For some problems, looking for novel outcomes rather than a specific one may actually lead to finding better solutions, more quickly.
Wow, genius. Good point, it doesn't need to be wireless to look good.
VDBI : Database client for vim
> And yes, on more than one occasion, I've told an inventor that I didn't believe he could get a patent on his idea.

I wanted to highlight this truly remarkable response, which displays the complete prostitution of the patent industry. Imsgine a literary agent saying: "on more than one occasion, I've told an author he couldn't get his book published."

Creating a useful invention and writing a readable novel are acts of human ingenuity on roughly the same level of difficulty. But as we see, the USPTO has lower standards than your average vanity press. So long as you keep feeding the machine, of course.
for the most part, facebook can only target you when you're on facebook. google now targets you across their properties some of which have significant lock in. it's not as easy to escape google being creepy as it is to escape facebook being creepy.
Wow! Powerful validation of the value of the team vs. the idea. Game changing move by YC.
Yahoo vs Facebook: Not The Next Mobile Patent War?
This is likely to impact those of us using Windows instances in EC2. The path of least resistance to access the instance is to pass RDP through the firewall. Probably a good time to start using VPC to connect to Windows instances.
Actually, class action lawsuits can be more easily dealt with, since the lawyers on both side negotiate the terms of the settlement.

A litany of small claims court settlements would put more money in the hands of plaintiffs, not lawyers, and would be available in the news cycle for much longer than a class action lawsuit/settlement.
Why the iPad 2 is Far More Likely to Break than the Original iPad
Not mentioned in the article, but a now common feature of multi-level parking lots in LA tell drivers how many parking spots are open on every floor. I'd like to see the concept extended to indicate where on each floor the open spots are available. This can be done with switching on a colorful light above open spaces or by having an open spot counter in the entrance of each lane.
This is the kind of thing that will make me buy (finally!) buy a tablet. I don't understand why it needs a workstation backend, though. Honestly, as far as I can tell, the tech behind this should be capable of forwarding a physical machine just as well, no?
How will the interviews work?
if jailbroken, do

echo -e "# Redirect Yahoo to DuckDuckGo (for Safari Prefs) \n46.51.197.88 search.yahoo.com" | cat >> /etc/hosts

Then choose Yahoo!, obviously.