skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And current birth control methods for women include injections of artificial hormones, dilating their cervix and putting a piece of plastic or metal part their vagina and into their body, and surgery to open the stomach and clamp certain organs shut. Whether or not it's hilarious, those practices are accepted as normal.

Birth control that involves body modifications is anything but casual, but to draw the line of it being ridiculous at when it involves male genitalia is a bit narrow-minded.
I recently completed a 1 week hike through Tasmania. It gets very wet down there, and the exertion of hiking leads to a lot of sweat. So I knew I needed Gore-Tex jacket or something similar to keep the water off me while allowing my skin to breathe. But I couldn't find a way to pay for a Gore-Tex jacket. They are insanely expensive. I opted for a generic microfibre jacket, which wasn't cheap, but was about a third of the cost of a Gore-Tex branded one. To my surprise it was fucking excellent. Didn't get wet and I didn't get any sweaty condensation building up inside the jacket.
I suspect that POS software vendors will make billions of pennies selling upgrades.
Are you suggesting that detecting text from these mediocre-at-best photos is easy or that it's easy to determine which of the two sides is the control photo?
IUDs have side effects. Copper ones can make periods unbearable for some women. Hormonal ones come with the same risks as hormonal birth control. You also have to open the woman's cervix which is a painful procedure, especially for women who haven't given birth before.

IUDs can also make the cervix more sensitive to pain in general. IUDs also can slip out.
I recently wondered:

“What hardware improvements would I want in a tablet? The iPad can already do 3D games, resolution limited more by your retina than the screen, wireless networking, sensors for touch, position, orientation, acceleration, sound, front and rear facing cameras...”

I think you just provided a great answer to that question.

The ability to write, or draw, with a high degree of precision is something I think a lot of people are going to want.
Of course, it also lowers sex drive[1], while causing weight gain, cancer[3], and heart problems[4].

For historical reasons IUDs are uncommon in the US. This is unfortunate. They aren't perfect, but they are relatively cheap, extremely reliable, and remarkably safe. Depending on the type, they also have few or no side effects. Worth considering...

[1]: This one arguably isn't a health benefit, but in many ways it's huge. With a few exceptions, humans are sexual beings, and frequency of sexual encounters correlates highly to a range of positive health outcomes, happiness, avoidance of depression, and strong long-lasting relationships.

[2]: This one confuses people, because it also prevents cancer. Best evidence is that it has a fairly strong protective effect on ovarian cancer, but causes breast and cervical cancer. The net effect on total cancer rates is still unknown; it's certainly not a clear cut benefit though, and it may be a clear net negative. (As always, these sort of epidemiology numbers are a real headache to parse. Comparing a big effect on a rare event to a small effect on a common event is very tricky. Still, anything that boosts breast cancer rates is kind of scary.)

[3]: This one is clearcut. Hormone based birth control causes a range of heart issues, from heart attacks via clots, to cardiovascular diease. We're still trying to figure out how big this factor is, but it's already clear that if you have any risk factors (ie, you're overweight, or have a family history of heart disease) you should NOT be on combined oral contraceptives, and any hormone based birth control is very iffy.
How Not to market an iPhone app
The first sentence is either incomplete or my non-native english parser stumbles and falls. Help me out, please.

Ignore the "this".
I've been mocked plenty for a bunch of reasons and I'm sure everyone has too. When I was a kid I ran up to my mom and said "Hey mom, that kid was mean to me." and she would tell me "Just ignore him." and make me go play again.
Now I'm a grown up and I don't need to go to my mom everytime someone makes fun of me or looks at me wierd. And I sure don't go whinning to the internet.
Given the caliber of people that YC can now recruit - yes, that problem seems like a waste of their talent.
I can empathise with your situation, but I think you're right about some things and wrong about others.

You're right that its difficult for a mortgaged family breadwinner to give up the stable income. You're right that YC's contribution of $20k or even the $150k convertible note from Conway and Milner isn't going to cut it when spread amongst multiple founders. You're right that a typical startup salary is far below what a skilled person would get if they stayed in industry/academia.

Where you're wrong is in suggesting this means your idea won't fit the YC mould. It's clear from PG's essay that he and YC are definitely keen on helping people with radical, dangerous, or expensive ideas. However, they're not going to change the terms to make it easier for you - the terms aren't set because $20k is a lifeline, they're set because just-above-starvation is the impetus for you to work your arse off getting to profitability.

You're wrong in saying that your idea can't be bootstrapped on $150k. It can - either fake the prototype on less money and keep paying yourself, or take a pay cut and spend the money on the prototype. You even say you could build a prototype on $150k if only you could keep your salary too. The point of that $150k isn't to revolutionize the hospital space, it's to build up enough momentum to make it obvious that the revolution would arrive if only there was more money to finance it - and then to lure that extra money in.

I'm not trying to be hard on you. I'm in a very similar situation, wanting to build a consumer robotics company to put an autonomous robot in every home. Getting to the point where we can actually deliver products to customers will take years and millions. With a mortgage, now a baby, and thus just one income, it's a big stretch for me to give up that money. But, if you won't take that risk, no investor will either.

YC's level of funding is the entry requirement, not the lifeline.
Thanks for putting up the application. I could clearly see how you guys aren't afraid to "break some laws" i.e. data scrapping, getting free food, and even weed selling!
No, this is not arguing semantics. A contract programmer and a technical co-founder are two totally different things.
Does that mean pricing psychology would work differently? 19.99 would be out of fashion?
> Recaptcha is worse because it... now also benefits Google.

I fail to see how this is a down-side. Maybe it's not an up-side, but is it actually a loss for anyone?
I agree and sometimes its nice to have an uncluttered interface to work with.

I find it easier to work with a full screen minimalistic editor [1,2] when writing than say word..

1 http://www.codealchemists.com/jdarkroom/
2 http://www.ommwriter.com/
Codiqa - the jQuery Mobile Prototype Builder
I think you are confused about the post I was referring to:

"Um, "best" neccesarily implies a "one or the other" proposition."

How can best be interpreted to mean anything other than a one or the other proposition.
I'm not disputing the author's main point. I'm pointing out a logical fallacy in their post.
If you think something has changed since 1979 then the burden of proof is on you to show what that is, you don't get to just assert that everything is magically different now.
I got a vasectomy, even though I was sad about that, when my primary was reacting poorly to birth control. I wish that this had existed six years ago or that I had known about it. You have the wrong guy friends.
This is exactly what I've been experiencing. It's been immensely difficult to find a technical co-founder so I've resigned to have a programmer build the basic prototype...
Just hit 2500 recently =) mostly in C#/Java and other OOP related stuff.
3 Quick Tips for Writing Tests in Node.JS (after some rambling)
Do you feel confident that if you had seen Altair Basic in 1975 you would not have said the same thing about it?

Like humans, startup ideas all look similarly small at first.
Stealing is a bit of a loaded word. The HFT algos provide immense liquidity to the market by, well, executing tons of transactions every second. This means when you decide you want to purchase 100 shares of a stock, one of the automated machines will try and sell you those shares for a slightly increased price to make a profit. Now the guys doing HFT would love to increase the price by 10% to sell you those shares, but since every single HFT computer sees that buy order, they quickly scramble to try and fill it. As a result, they focus on making a penny or two per share but executing the transaction in microseconds. By lowering their per share profit they can guarantee they will get the trade since otherwise another market maker will step in and offer the shares a penny lower. By executing tons of transactions a second they can make money doing this since they focus on buying/selling a large volume every day.

Back when all trades were performed by people it would be very difficult to trade with high precision numbers, but since the market makers all work on an automated basis, penny precision increases the resolution an algorithm can decide on the price to buy/sell a share. Since the algorithms are focusing on low profit but high volume, they will lower their profit to try and win the trade against the other market makers.

Why is this good for you? Unless you're trading thousands of times a day, you will only pay a tiny premium to the HFT guys as it's a race to the bottom for them (aka the current share price). They are focusing on speed, and as a result they can't spike up the price suddenly as the other algorithms will jump and and take the trade from them. This is the liquidity they provide to the market and also why when you place your order through your broker it goes through in seconds. If the minimum resolution was fractions of a cent that would be the resolution the algorithms would work at, so instead of paying a $0.01 per share premium you're paying a $0.125 per share premium since that's the minimum they can go while still selling for a profit. Before automated trading a real person would have to go out on the trading floor and try and find you some shares to buy. I can guarantee that you would pay a higher premium per share doing that vs having computers race each other to fill the order in microseconds.

Note: I glossed over a lot of information here and tried to simplify it a lot. It should give you a good idea why HFT is good for the individual investor though.
Well sure, and if we wrote programs that have no bugs then we'd never have to debug them. Your position is seriously naive.

Getting an API right the first time is hard. For example, most languages get date libraries wrong the first time (for example, see Java and Python), even with a lot of design effort up front. And most library designers are not that good, especially when they're only part-time library designers whose main concern is writing an app.
I'm not sure if this is actually done, but you can shift the vertices to be centered at the origin (e.g by subtracting the mean of coordinates from each coordinate for a polygon). The numbers are now close to 0 and will have better precision
Google Analytics gets a home page redesign.
As far as invasive surgeries (and birth control) goes, it's really not that invasive if it can be performed in 15 minutes without general anesthetic by a regular doctor. Even IUDs require more time than that.

Would you still be okay with the hormones if they caused you to gain 15 lbs of fat, lose your libido and render your SO unattractive to you? It's not as simple as swallowing a pill every morning and getting on with your life -- hormonal treatments have very real and sometimes significant side effects.
This is news to me. I have never heard/read anything that casts hormonal birth control in such a negative light. Do you have any pointers to more information? It has always been my understanding that hormone based birth control was a huge win for women's health...
I have known several women with non-hormonal IUDs, and they all have reported the side-effect of mild-to-extreme aggravation of menstrual cramping. When the body is trying to clear out, it just doesn't like having a foreign agent that won't budge.

No silver bullet.
His example features actual abolition of an existing coin, not just deciding "well, this ought to be granular enough" when designing money.
It will turn into 19.95 to keep the same psychology. Many stores already vary the last digit to mark the status of the item. Such as 97 for clearance items and so on.
Education Colleges Cry Foul on Ratings
Why Bayes Rules: The History of a Formula That Drives Modern Life
Telling people to grow thicker skins is such a cheap way out. Outrage is an appropriate response to an outrageous situation.

words (as opposed to physical violence) are very curious insofar as they can only hurt you as much as you let them

It's not about the words themselves. It's about behaving in a way that is aggressive, dismissive, and disrespectful.

What's the appropriate reaction to someone treating you in an aggressive, dismissive, or disrespectful way? One might feel aggressed, dismissed, or disrespected (or offended even).

Maybe you're so self enlightened and have such an exquisitely sublimated ego that nobody can hurt you through those kinds of behavior. But it's not typical, and isn't a reasonable expectation for your fellow humans.
I'm suggesting that it's easier to detect text from these "mediocre at best" photos. Classifying objects in a visual space often deal with low quality images. In fact, the algorithms have to deal with the objects they're trying to classify at many different resolutions. While captchas are generally hard to identify even for humans, because they're contorted and confusing, the numbers in these addresses are all standardized numbers in grainy environments.

I would even go as far to argue that if these become widely used, we're going to see algorithmic "solvers" for this captcha in a matter of weeks.
Support is Google's greatest weakness. If they want to be a successful consumer electronics company they need to step it up fast. Apple is leagues ahead of them in this.
I am very confused. The author of the article writes that svbtle could have been the next tumblr. It's like saying my clean design html could have been the future facebook.

I think svbtle has a clean design and a good interface, nothign more.

If my instincts here are wrong, then I have to question my understanding and all the IT experience I have. I might be missing a big part of this svbtle and obtvse controversy.
First, If I am zigzagging - I am thinking out loud here on HN - and am happy to hear how I am wrong. SO please forgive me if I do contradict myself as I am trying to find the best way to articulate my thoughts.

I am fully open to being shown that I am flat wrong.

With that said:

Could you even imagine a seed funding model that would attract Elon Musk? What would it have to include?

This is part of my point. I can't think of such a ridiculously ambitious idea being seed funded.

PG said he wants the ridiculously ambitious ideas - I am saying that such ideas are likely not achievable with the traditional YC model.

So, to the second half of your comment; "What would it have to include?"

I am not sure, but lets think out loud here for a sec:

Given we are looking for the truly revolutionary ideas - what assumptions need to be in place in order to attract, identify, foster and enable these ideas:

First; lets recognize they can come from all walks.
We need to be able to evaluate the ideas, quantify the effort and impact and accommodate whomever they may come from.

Maybe THIS is what the available YC resources should be positioned to do.

"You might as well argue against the whole concept of seed funding"

Maybe I am naive - but what if we change what our meaning of seed funding is within this context -- The seed funding is not for MVP, or first launch - the seed funding is exactly that - to seek out, identify and locate the seed - carry it and THEN plant it.

Again - please tell me if I am just sounding stupid - I am trying to think outside of constraints/conditioning I have observed in the traditional funding model.

Thanks
I've successfully written SR&ED applications myself for businesses certainly less deserving than Tarsnap. We decided the consultants were too expensive and gave it a shot ourselves. One solid week of work for one guy at a company of 10 people netted $30,000, definitely worth the time. All you need is a decent record of work done (I used both github commit log and a bug tracker.)

Unfortunately I expect you'll never get money from a bureaucrat without a little paperwork. Still, you're missing out if you don't even try.
Almost all my traffic comes from searches for "<coursecode> textbook", and heads to individual pages that look like

http://textbookcentral.com.au/26/university-of-new-south-wal...

That doesn't look like an individual page but it actually is; there's a unique link for every dialog. I'll definitely follow your advice and test some ads on small number of pages and see how that goes first.
To be sure. I recall we'd mostly stick with the two strategies I mentioned (words with most rare letters, or words in very common patterns)... then when you're settling into a pattern (and your opponent's first guesses are "x" or "q" or similar), throw in something like "teat" to throw them for a loop.

We did have one minor rule change -- definitely more than 11 line segments to hang the man. If you had a really good word, and wanted to draw out the torture, you'd start drawing in facial features, fingers...

It also adds a bit of artistic fun to the game; you don't even have to be hanging a "man" if you want to get creative; it could be a giant insect, horse, whatever.

It would still be pretty clear who was "winning" by how long the string of crossed-out letters were by each round.
Using Varnish to help with A/B Testing
http://www.betterment.com

- easily invest in the whole market through index ETFs

- no need to do the research and choose which stocks or funds to buy

- automatic deposit set up to seamlessly transfer money every month from my checking into my betterment account and have every dollar invested (no need to worry about shares)

- automatic rebalancing

- no minimum balances/deposits, no holding periods, money is easily accessible and can be withdrawn at any time without penalties

(Disclosure: I work here)
What's so special about the scrotum versus another part of your body? People regularly punch holes through their ears and other parts of their skin, and even get their children to do the same. A lot of parents even agree to or request that skin from the end of their newborn's penis is cut off.
I can attest to this. My wife has a Nexus S and got the upgrade some time ago.
Karateka was truly awesome. Those were truly the days; good games really amazed with their originality and game play.not course there was nothing to compare to but it was magical as a kid. Wonder if my kids will feel the same about FPS?
The line is at surgery, don't act like anyone is saying otherwise.
Since 3/2/2012 I started using Trisquel linux (Was feeling guilty having used non-free linux distros so wanted to pay homage to R. Stallman).

DDG comes as default in Trisquel with web browser, Midori. I usually keep Javascript disabled.

Actually DDG's javascript less search result is in my opinion the best thing I appreciate about DDG.

Thanks for your hard work. I'll see if I can contribute to the project in any way I can.
reCAPTCHA has always checked only one side. The new system isn't any less secure.
Tell HN: minor bug (feature?) of the YC app
If you don't submit a full URL (i.e. http://) in the company URL field, the application appears to swallow your input (at least it did this for me). If you entered your URL as www. without the http://, you should double-check your application.
I completely agree about giving in-depth answers. There's nothing I love more than an answer that relies on either a) stuff I know or can do really well; or b) a bucketload of research. Several times I've went back to answers and edited them, even after an answer has already been chosen, because good answers are way more important to me than recognition.

Completely with you on the "thank yous" being the biggest motivating factor; I wouldn't care about the site if it weren't for those. That said, if you want to get your rep up without lowering your standards, one option for the high-traffic tags is to go for bounty questions. That way, if you give good answers, you get a reward which is commensurate with your time/expertise, and you know that the asker both appreciates the complexity of their question and is very keen to have an answer.
Oh wow so it's not just the while they're in the same session. That's pretty cool. I'll have to think about it though because a lot of the times Amazon is not willing to ship textbooks to Australia.

re: Charging text message. Not enough volume yet, I've looked at many text message subscription vendors and all of them have fixed monthly fees of $1,000 and up.
Kill the Blockbuster
There already exists a great sort of generic API for working with data, it is called a filesystem... expose Google docs as a filesystem rather than making me type special overly-long commands
I'm sounding snippier than I mean to.

YC has a model that seems like it would have stood a credible shot at capturing Google in 1997.

That there are companies more ambitious than Google that wouldn't even consider a "seed stage" is not, I don't think, particularly relevant.

Also: the point of YC is to put fingerprints on the maximal number of successful startups. Ideas from people who aren't inclined to start companies aren't a particularly important part of that. You lost me with "revolutionary ideas". Ideas aren't what's important.
It's only a logical fallacy if you stretch it too far. The original statement was that "it's hard to know what something's like if you haven't experienced it" which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, along the lines of "you haven't had salted caramel ice cream? You don't know what you're missing!"

You distorted that into "unless you are a member of the group, it's impossible for you to understand" which I guess would be a logical fallacy, but that's a different message altogether.
Awesome! Even $10 would have satisfied the intent of the question. It's people who seem to understand the concept but give literally zero that make me want to hit something with a stick.
Good post. Sounds like you have a good head on your shoulders and are doing the right things, so far as the theories are concerned. But as Einstein said "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."

I'm in a similar situation. I would love to hear how people are tackling these problems in practice, and any success stories.
You hit the nail on the head, here. Even if you're in a committed relationship, there's still a need, as a woman, to protect yourselves at all costs from pregnancy if you aren't looking to have a child. That's why many women in relationships will use secondary birth control. (Condoms + the pill, IUD + spermacide, etc.)

Female birth control puts the power of reproduction back in the hands of the woman, which is a comfort for most women. Relying on your partner to be the one safeguarding your body is a tough choice, but is a wonderful choice for, as you said, couples.
Is anyone getting major Déjà vu from this article? I feel like I've read this exact article before, complete with the linkbait title.