skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Satire: Stanford Unveils Entrepreneurship-Free Dorm
They mention returning items from ISS. Does anyone know if this is the old standard method of using a parachute and dropping into the ocean for recovery?
Good luck to everyone who made it to the interviews! Wish I could be right there with you.

Our team consisted of one senior developer, a creative director and a visual marketing specialist. We're all in our late 20's and were planning to relocate from the east coast.
How much does the Internet contribute to the economies of G20 countries?
Presumably there is some software to be installed as well, but yeah I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the press releases of 170 million Google Drive users come out!
either the link is broken or the post got removed
Dutch Attack Against The Pirate Bay Apparently Works Better Without Due Process
Jesus man, have some dignity. You're whoring that name around here like nobodies business.

Edit: Double-Jesus on a stick! I counted ~6 of YOUR references in this one thread. Pretty unimpressive.
Tea: A Disney Original Programming Language
Rejected. I'd love to know what you others are building. Started an "Ask HN" post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850089
Actually, the Google Videos version that originally launched was nothing like YouTube. Google Videos was originally made to search closed captioned TV, not to service user uploaded content. Also the original Google Video did not actually let you watch any videos.

Google changed to copy YouTube's style of video hosting after YouTube already gained traction. The version of Google Videos that people are familiar with came out after YouTube. The version of Google Videos that you're talking about died.

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-01-25-n90.html
In the same way they're the most famous.
> Tests don't magically help you invent features/work around introduced issues in 3rd party systems.

Uh, yes they do. You want a unit or system test which covers the case where an external system is down or returns something that you can't parse. Something like:

# code to take third party thing down
# eg. mock out lib and return nonsense (unit tests)
# or add an /etc/hosts entry (system tests)
assert "Sorry, but that feature is unavailable." in page.content

Now the entire app doesn't asplode, and you can wait until 9am to fix it. Follow up is to make sure that you're on whatever mailing list tells you when changes are coming.

The only case that this doesn't cover is when it's a) an essential part of your app, which b) you aren't paying for and c) they don't have a mailing list, in which case wtf? you need to find a better 3rd party library/service.

ps. Look up the "chaos monkey" - it's very enlightening :)
10x is a big claim for a sample size of 1.
Rejected :/. Given the experience was useful.
Impressions From The Pirate Parties International Conference
LinkedIn Will Outlive Facebook. Here’s Why
Okay, but email is a highly competitive business. Competition doesn't mean you don't make customers unhappy, it just means you're judicious about how/when you do it. Any time you have to balance customer needs with abuse mitigation and legal compliance, you're going to have to do some things that make some customers unhappy in the name of being able to provide the wider service.
I watched (the rapture) from a train in Japan on my iPhone while heading to a hot spring!
Announcing the Windows 8 Editions
Right, but (anecdotally) many won't because of dilution / board control issues that come with raising VC. Raising 1.5M in notes / AA may be enough to hit profitability.
sounds familiar. Exactly 4 times :)
All the big guys suck. But,

Google will assign a real person to talk to if you have more than ~30M views / month or something.

Paypal requires lots of paperwork here in the EU, sometimes their staff will make mistakes or ask you to provide information twice.

Facebook is horrible. In one case, when asked about something simple as their billing address, they gave the wrong answer (causing reporting problems). Their developer support is generally a real pain.
On the other hand, the .NET Framework is vast and offers a well-implemented, well-documented and supported set of features that in other platforms required open source projects. Even so, there are established and active projects such as Castle, Mass Transit and NHibernate.
I'm building http://moodstir.com and http://kothpoker.com. If the idea's shortcomings weren't the reason I was rejected, it was likely because I'm currently a solo founder. It seems like there are a lot of awesome teams applying and that alone is hard to compete with.

I would be happy to meet up in SF with fellow failed YC S12'ers.
My demo wasn't tried either (I checked everyday), nor did I have more than 4 pageviews of my video, most of which are mine.

Good luck and don't take it hard.
So my issue isn't that Amazon is waiting patiently to pump up their prices once they have enough market share. It's more that having no competition is dangerous in itself.

(Sorry for second response to same message.)

It seems like your beef shouldn't be with Amazon. It should be with the rest of the industry for failing to compete. Otherwise it's like complaining that Apple is dominating the smartphone industry by delivering better products -- that's what they're supposed to do.
Could someone post their rejection letter? Didn't apply, but I'm curious what it said given some of the responses here.
Rejected (No idea category)

I ran our application past several YC alumni who gave it a thumbs up, and some of them even +1'd it behind the scenes. I thought our application was quite impressive. Even that wasn't enough to get an interview.

Good luck to those of whom have been invited for interview, and of course those whose haven't! :)
Congress Rejects Buffet Rule
It's true you need to compute the kernel dot product between every example you see and every example in the support set (every example that ever previously evaluated to signed margin < 1). Whether it's online depends on your definition of "online" . It's definitely not online in the sense of using memory independent of the number of examples, since you have to keep around the support set. I think there are results showing the support set grows linearly with the size of the training set under reasonable assumptions. However, it is online in the sense that it operates on a stream of data, computing predictions and updates for each example one-by-one. It's also online in the sense that its analysis is based on online learning theory (e.g. mistake / regret bounds). A lot of learning theory papers use "online" in the latter two senses, which is confusing if you expect the former.
You have no idea how much time I spend fake-working in the office. If I have to build something new, it usually gets done within a certain time range (that could be over the course of a day, several days, and I often dabble with it at home. Once it's done, it's done. I have to fake-work for the rest of the week.

Now, I guess I could manage my work habits so that project takes the span of a week (not working late, not taking work home), but I haven't been able to figure out how to do that. If anyone passes by my desk on fake-work days, I look like a real slacker asshole.
If it is not open-sourced, one can be sure that it has a backdoor for governmental agencies
Try the "Staunion" brand fake Sharpies - worked well for me ;-) . Some fakes can be better than the real thing (There was a fake Syma clone mini-copter I kept buying more of because they were better than the real ones in particular ways).

In countries with poor counterfeit product policing, consumers learn which fakes to buy, or which sellers to trust. Just like buying LSD or Ecstasy :-)
We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.
Please don't take it personally. The applications we receive get
better every funding cycle, and since there's a limit on the number
of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot
of genuinely promising groups.

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know
we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group
to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that
we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall
just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

We're trying to get better at this, but the hard limit on the number
of interviews means it's practically certain that groups we rejected
will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate
it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn
from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Team
Problems with Florida's Science FCAT Test
I remember seeing the teaser for this project about 3-4 years ago back when I was still messing around with Blender. Blender has only gotten better since then and I can't wait to see what they produce.
Congrats guys! How much?
Not accepted. Our video got 15 views, does that mean anything? Heh.

Rejection letter:

"We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.
Please don't take it personally. The applications we receive get
better every funding cycle, and since there's a limit on the number
of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot
of genuinely promising groups.

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know
we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group
to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that
we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall
just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

We're trying to get better at this, but the hard limit on the number
of interviews means it's practically certain that groups we rejected
will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate
it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn
from our mistakes."
Since there is no driver, it will probably be Google Cars (tm)
>This is typical libertarian claptrap, from the Skilled White Male litany.

No it isn't. That's straight-up Socialism. The phrase who you might think would tend towards free-market/libertarianism doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Writing great code means making it easily readable and understandable by other developers. If you want to show off your quirky syntax skills, for god's sake play perl golf or attend at obfuscated code contests.
If they're the only ones, then they're the least famous and the most famous at the same time.
Does YC gives you any kind of explanation for the rejection? Or is it just a no?
Taxes and Cheating: A Behavioral Economist's Take
Don't know I applied as a team and still got rejected, ummm passed over. Should I take that more personally :-). Actually they have quite a tough job to do in reviewing so many applications. I the e-mail was actually almost too nice. It would have been helpful if it had some quantitative data as in what each person thought of it as in. As in a score or something even such as, we liked you but your idea really stunk, or no technical co-founder, or don't give up your day job.

Actually open call here. I am very interested in hearing any ideas that didn't get accepted. I hope to modify my site in the next day to allow a discussion on this and to talk to others. Y-combinator is a great way it seems to develop concepts, but not the only way. If other rejected ones are like us then we should really talk to each other. Feel free to e-mail me at joshua.smith@i4edge.com. Better yet here post on this page http://www.i4edge.com/ycombinator-apply-list/ ‎
To find a boring, well-paid job.
$30,000 in Data Visualization Awards
I think that it would be more transparent if they made this perfectly clear to gmail users when they are signing up rather than relying on them inherently knowing this (or reading it buried somewhere in the TOS). I doubt that the majority of Gmail users (or just Google Account holders) realize this.

I'll say this, though. If a majority of your customers do not realize the full implications of what their terms are with you, then you are either:

1) Actively trying to prevent your customers from learning about the terms.

2) Relying on the general naivety of your customers.

3) Incompetent, in that you're not doing your job of letting your customers know what they are signing up for.

If more people were fully aware of the fact that their Gmail account could be randomly closed at any time, without notice, but still used the service because they accepted the risk, then it would be a different story.
Samuel L Jackson & Siri: New Verizon iPhone Ad
I believe that programmers shouldn't have to work support "sometime in their life", they should be working it at their current position. Sometimes it is all too easy to throw the problems over the fence to a tech ops (fancy name for sysadmins?) or the even worse -- the dreaded app support team. Having to live with the decisions your code makes can hopefully only make it better.
It just says "sorry".
Git Presenter: the easy way to present code
Does anyone see the irony in referencing Star Wars in an article on taste. Not to mention the cinematic blasphemy of indirectly comparing Kurosawa to MS Powerpoint!
We're building http://HuntersDB.com - a big-game hunting database with search, data and maps.

This process forced me to ask myself the tough questions and for that we are better.
Previous Dragon Capsule recovery (and it was only once before) was parachute to ocean landing. [1] So presumably to limit the number of things being tested on this flight to a reasonable number they won't try to return it to land.

I am very hopeful that these guys succeed, and will be impressed as hell. Elon is not kidding when he says it is 'tricky.' Although I think the speed thing is over blown (17,000 MPH, wow! except you're both going about 17,000 MPH and you're both going the same direction, so relative speed is more interesting) But you do have to navigate there, rendezvous, and dock.

If successful they will have duplicated everything in Gemini and next up will be the Mercury program (first manned missions) :-)

[1] http://news.discovery.com/space/spacexs-dragon-capsule-retur...
That's part of the "odds that it will be dropbox" calculation. It's also why we invest primarily in founders and not ideas.
From what they explained that means that the application itself didn't motivate them to open the demo/video.
Sorry to hear.
Didn't apply to YC but interesting idea. I thought of the same idea but there was one fundamental problem I couldn't solve. That is, the text on the side is too distracting. I hope you can think of some ways to solve that problem!
Basic Fairness, Shared Sacrifice is Not Romney and Republican Intent
Quick note: According to reports Draw Something from OMGPOP was generating $250,000 in net revenue per day. That's a lot of money.
He's referring to the .NET base class libraries (System.* and others). Microsoft releases the source so you can debug right into it.[1] The BCL is far from "open source", it's a "read only, nothing else, not even compile" type license IIRC. But you can step right into the C# implementation of most of the shipped-with-.NET libraries.

1: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-...
Oops, you're right, the server never sees that.
Ask HN: Who did or did not get an interview applying in the "no idea" category?
You are fortunate not to have any pre-existing conditions in your family and i wish you not to ever have any. If you were to develop a serious condition while on individual or or a small business(<10 people) group plan, you will eventually be priced out of your insurance by your carrier raising your rates. This risk is generally spread out over large group such as a big company with several thousands of employers such as Google and thus their medical costs are same regardless of your medical history.

Furthermore once you or your family member develops a "preexisting medical conditions", you may not be approved next time you decide to to from corporate plan to individual. My wife was denied by one carrier for having chronic migraine for which she was taking prescription drugs and not seeing a doctor more than once a year.

With a current state of healthcare/insurance, I will only be able to leave my current employer and start a startup for as long as COBRA and CAL-COBRA allows. After that I will be forced to either join a larger company or have my family be without healthcare if a carrier decided to deny us coverage for preexisting conditions.
搞笑图片
I think this is a great idea. One suggestion would be a process for nominating or voting on speakers from the HN community. If you send someone an email saying you've got 100 people who've said they would love to hear them do a podcast, that could be a great way to get them involved. It could be nice to have a mix of regulars who do well and guests (especially guests who have some relevance to a big story from that week).

Thanks for working on this!
A relevant graphic/talk from a board I found on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/the_edge/Long-wave-boom-and-bust-cycle-...

In it Steve Jurvetson (a Draper Fisher Jurvetson VC) shows the cyclical nature of capital, and how we seem to go from a PE boom and bust, to a VC boom and bust every ~7-10 years, with recessions interspersed in between.

YC appears to be near the centre of this new growth period, bubble or not, and is hence probably a beneficiary of the long term swings in global credit/capital.

Guess we'll just have to see how it plays out.

I hope it isn't that, and we have great companies, with solid business models (profit/revenue), without the mania that we had before.

But who knows, with the JOBS act passed (last week), and the consequent relaxation in securities regulations we may have sown the seeds of an unpleasant moment in the near future.

Talk:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2288

JOBS Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startups...

JOBS Act criticism:

The Consumer Federation of America characterized an earlier version of the legislation as "the dangerous and discredited notion that the way to create jobs is to weaken regulatory protections"

Criminologist William K. Black had said the bill would lead to a "regulatory race to the bottom" and said it was lobbied by Wall Street to weaken the Sarbanes–Oxley Act.

"gutting regulations designed to safeguard investors", legalizing boiler room operations, "reliev[ing] businesses that are preparing to go public from some of the most important auditing regulations that Congress passed after the Enron debacle" and "a terrible package of bills that would undo essential investor protections, reduce market transparency and distort the efficient allocation of capital".
There are already rumblings of Google selling off the Mobility hardware
No ideas for the API Mashup Contest?
To late? People replace their phones frequently. The mobile app market is diverse and vibrant, with frequent new players and products.

If new ecosystem can not develop then Windows Mobile was just as bad a choice as MeeGo.
Where did you see the mention of SSDs?
We received our rejection letter as well.

We are building a centralized platform as a service which allows vacation rental home owners and property agents to launch and create their own marketing website which they can manage from a single location. Property owners can also receive marketing and exposure on any number of sites. (We're placing more emphasis on enterprise rather than the social side that AirBnB went down). ie Agents can launch their own marketing website, manage their own property portfolio and run their own branding. Kind of like how you can launch your own Desk.com website and create your own knowledge base... on our platform you can do the same by managing your own catalogue of properties and revenue share with other advertisers who might make a booking on your behalf.

The enquiry management, booking tools and payment facilities are all built in. We haven't launched yet. Which was why this cycle would of been the best fit for YC.

http://rentivo.com/how-it-works

We will be launching soon (so no demo is available), but in case anyone knows a designer send them to the post on Baby Unicorns and Rockstar Designers I wrote this morning.

http://rentivo.com/blog/baby-unicorns-and-rockstar-designers
Awesome! They listened to feedback and killed off the mess of SKUs. Now only if they'd allow disk encryption (Bitlocker) in the basic SKU, so non-Pro users can use the OS instead of having to install TrueCrypt.
http://cl.ly/3P3M3p3l1w002n220o1i
I love that Apple doesn't make me choose between editions. I paid $30 and I got the new OS. Did I get the upgrade edition? What features did I pay for?

No idea. I got it all, for $30.

I didn't even want to read the whole table for all the features of windows 8. I just want Windows 8.
While it would be great for founders to get quantitative and qualitative feedback from PG & team, it would be a pretty daunting task for YC partners to give a well thought out answer to the 1000+ groups.

While 1-2 sentence answer from YC could help out your company, it could open up a whole new can of worms that causes some groups to say, "but wait.." or "good idea, we can pivot...".

Their nice rejection letter is probably the best result the non-interviewees can get.
I don't think we can afford a guaranteed minimum income unless it's too small to live on or health care isn't included. Health care is expensive. Right now the system works (in every first world country) by transferring money from young, healthy people to older sick people. Give younger people the opportunity to slack off, and a great many of them will.
We applied with http://www.musicfilmcomedy.com :).
SEO can be a nightmare if you're going totally single-page (you really have to go with a solution where you can render your javascript templates server-side if someone directly requests a page); though we've found that bounce rates go down considerably when navigating between pages is near-instantaneous.
What kinds of issues do you mean?
I know it was just a "for instance" but there is a .NET implementation of Lucene, open source and everything. http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/

The point being, "no open source community", "license costs" (see bizspark), the "MS is a desktop stack" are all popular myths that haven't been relevant for years.

But your point of well defined, independent services is spot on.
We built http://embark.at - the easiest way to buy and sell cruises online. We're a marketplace that connects people that like to cruise with travel agents who have awesome unadvertised deals. We have a demo video at http://embark.at
Thanks for your answer.

I think your idea is good and has a lot of potential.

Don't get me wrong. I understand what you say, but still I'm not sure I get what the relation with YC really is. To me it doesn't matter if I make it into the startup world with or without YC, it matters if I make it. And YC is not as important for the funding, as much as it is for the advice and the experience.

They could help you avoid making mistakes.

Best of luck with Persona! I think I'll sign up.
Ex-MSFT, AOL Exec Gounares Tackles Datacenter Software with Concurix
They give you the best reason for the rejection, which is quite frankly that there were a tremendous amount of outstanding applications.

While YC represents the cream of the crop, it's probably most attractive to aspiring founders who want to carve the path of least resistance to success.

The hard truth is that YC's format makes it the most useful for teams that have the best ability to leverage the strengths of its networks and advice. Technically savvy, with obsessive work ethic and the ability to iterate quickly and constantly.

The response was apt, others were a better fit. None of their reasoning should be interpreted as your team, demo, or product won't be successful.

Best of luck to all of you!