skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of legitimate criticisms to be made of YC and of VCs in general (please do not take this as me going "there is nothing wrong in the VC world at all", because I absolutely do not believe that!), but I don't think excessive academic elitism is one of them. If anything, I think they're quite a bit better about avoiding that elitism than the average you'll find among organizations of comparable wealth and power (compare top law firms, leadership of more traditional companies, politicians, etc). This isn't my strongest opinion - I've never done any proper formal study of the question - but your impressions contradict my own experience living in that world.

I used to be part of the leadership team for a YC company. Here's where the four YC founders I know off the top of my head went to school: SUNY, Oxford, Epitech, Tufts. Only Oxford among those is truly elite, though the other three are good schools. The one who went to Oxford (Harj Taggar) is a bit of an odd one out here, since they were a partner with YC itself first before founding the company that I know them from. Granted, three of these were founders many years ago, so perhaps this has changed, but one (the Tufts alum) got funding only about a year ago.

I looked up a few other founders that are second- or third-degree connections and found the same: a handful of truly elite schools, a peak in A-tier-but-not-truly-elite schools, and a handful of no-name schools like my own alma mater. I expect that that's a reasonably representative distribution of where you find extremely smart people, and especially smart+motivated ones.

As for this bit:

>> And often those who did get in went to Stanford, Harvard, etc. and don't even have a product - sometimes they don't even know what they're going to build yet.

YC is pretty explicit that they try to pick founders, not ideas, most of the time. That approach is all over the Startup School videos, for example; they don't exactly make a secret of it.

>> but the numbers I've read online that most VCs want to see are not realistic - or if we were hitting those numbers I wouldn't even need a VC, we would be able to fund our own expansion.

Growth demands, both realistic and unrealistic, are a much fairer criticism IMO. They're the primary reason I haven't sought VC funding personally (from YC or otherwise).

Out of curiosity, I'd love to know more about what you're doing - I checked your HN profile but it didn't have a link or anything.
I would rather have an Internet where I don't hear anything from anyone trying to monetize my attention.

The current Internet hides those people - who I assure you still exist - who are trying to share knowledge for free.
Children often ask questions such as "Why is there something rather then nothing?" or "What happened before time?". These questions often cause great mirth for any adult in earshot.

You can choose to draw one of two very different conclusions from this statement.
You make a compelling argument as usual.

Even with all the questions, it's not a lot of effort, you're right. I apply for the diversity visa every year and that's more work for maybe, oh about the same chance of success?

> I don't know where you got that idea

Admittedly I haven't seen a large percentage, but of the founders I've seen speak, all of them had a certain charm. Granted, there's a bias where people with these personalities put themselves out to be seen.
Rebranding the war department to the "defense" department is some of the best gaslighting ever pulled off.
The business plot [1] was the potential inflection point in the USA where fascism could have enveloped the nation. (IMO). We got lucky. We STILL are getting lucky.

This stuff is why businesses need to be equally owned by the workers that do all the work. That power and wealth is diffused throughout the population, not concentraighted in the hands of a few men with fewer morals.

The inequity of our way of life is a existential threat.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
HVM2: Run Python-like programs in 10000's of GPU cores
>how it becomes the next $100M household name

Unfortunately this is too low for a VC/YC. The min valuation they are looking for is around $1B
Very interesting. I am a pretty heavy YouTube user (and arguably should pay for YouTube Premium), but I have found that this Firefox extension always successfully blocks ads: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-for-y...

If you're open to switching to Firefox, it might not be a bad option!
Wages for fast food workers compared to those of the people ordering the food.

In most countries the wage spread between minimum wage and average wage is a lot lower than the one in the US. It makes no sense to automate something that your customers are happy to pay for.
This is not specific to women/minority groups nor coding. It's closer to the typical "content creator"/media/influencer grift, just that these minority groups seem like a more fertile ground for this kind of person to break into than starting from scratch.

People who are good at a particular skill/craft just do it and call it a day. They don't have time to talk about the craft because all their time is spent doing the craft and making money.

People who are less good, or outright incapable of doing the craft instead try the content creation/influencer angle, where success is defined making it look like you are successful at the craft, regardless of whether you actually do it.

The odds of success in media-related roles such as content creation or "influencing" are so low that any craft will on average pay more, so if you are actually capable of doing a craft it makes more sense to do it than merely talk about it, therefore I highly suspect those who lean towards the talking angle do so because they can't actually succeed at the doing angle.

The craft can be coding/software engineering, AI, or even old-school trades like woodworking, electrical/plumbing/etc. As an example, there's a UK-based electrical contractor with a YouTube channel with quite high production value, expensive top-of-the-line tools, etc that is even selling courses/workshops about running an electrician business, and yet recently it turned out that their actual business was sinking and they had to lay people off - good on them to have the balls to admit it but it shows you the truth behind the whole operation.
> Only Ford or Lincoln haters

Your mistake here is assuming that people are comprised of "haters" and others.

I couldn't care less about Lincoln. I own a Navigator. My partner drives it 99% of the time. It was just the first example that came to mind.

I think Tesla's are overrated for their price - the Model S has (I haven't been in one in 18 months, to be clear) luxury euro pricing for a build quality that is in many cases worse than an econobox Hyundai or Mazda. I lean on the dash in my Audi and it doesn't bow or flex or creak or make me worried that some plastic is about to break. It did in the S. My butt fell asleep after a few hours in a Tesla passenger seat. "Do not use a car wash if the vehicle will be in direct sunlight". Windshields not glued on, at all. Entire brakes missing. Different tires on all four wheels. These aren't teething issues, Tesla is more than two decades old at this point. And doubly so when your CEO gives interviews that have him saying with a straight face, "At this point, I know more about manufacturing than any person living on the planet."
I'd be lost if it weren't for `tldr` on my terminal.
Also KeePassXC, what a life-changer digital safe.
Oh YC definitely funds solo founders (and always has - Dropbox was one famous example, and Renderlet is one that comes to mind from this recent thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39907845). See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092556.

The way I understand it is: cofounder is preferred because it's so much harder without one; solo founder is second choice; worst is pairing up with a cofounder you don't really know because you think you're supposed to.
The Belfare Center for Science and International Affairs has a nice report (https://www.belfercenter.org/thucydides-trap/case-file) indicating this is a good predictor for conflict (and lists examples that you can use).

Although, I'll definitely agree with you that all points in history are unique. Thucydides Trap shouldn't be understood as predicting the future using the past (that's absurd by definition). That would be a reductio ad absurdum, but it isn't what foreign policy scholars are actually arguing here.

Instead, it's a description of set of incentives that shape the relationship. What the individuals in power choose to do with those pressures/incentives on the relationship is absolutely a different question. The point the "foreign policy elite" in the United States are making is that it has strong incentives to agitate for a fight with China, before it becomes an competitor (as opposed to a "near peer competitor" or "pacing challenge" - the current language).

I suppose its worth clarifying. Do you deny that there are such structural elements of the Sino-American relationship? Or is your argument wrt Thucydides Trap that it isn't deterministic? Or something else?
> I don't understand how it'd work out: too little BTCs rewarded per block

The math only works out if value of bitcoin continues to increase in value, at least a constant 25% annual return, year after year (on top of inflation).

If the price of bitcoin ever stabilises (or worse, drops) over the long term, then the security of bitcoin will go down, until eventually it becomes viable for someone to launch a 51% attack.
I still don't understand your point. If you have some disagreement with certain philosophy of science writers, I can certainly understand, but my point is that philosophy is exactly the interplay of the deductive frameworks and the induction "in the trenches" as you say. The process of philosophy is the interplay between the to, as neither aspect of that dichotomy can be demonstrated it's own.

Empiricism cannot be justified without a reason-based framework, and that deductive framework is by definition arbitrary, and needs to map to empirical findings.
Perhaps in the bay area, but in a red state I experience pretty much the opposite atmosphere. I don't tell people I'm a lefty generally because I'm fairly certain most of my coworkers are right to far right (and many express those opinions freely).

We are in a pretty politically charged environment right now. Opinions and temperatures can run hot against the out groups.
More like "without knowledge of the particular choices made by prominent biologists".

The roots of "animal", "fungus", and "plant" are completely arbitrary; anything outside the chosen root can be called a "protist" (many marine "plants" are counted as protists nowadays).
Maybe take a look at the other fork, Redict?

https://redict.io
I'm curious. Do you have a summary which goes over that without having to read a dozen articles?
I am not a Physicist, so please don't rely on this, but my understanding is that this comes down to the frames of reference in special relativity.

If you're in a car on the highway, an observer standing still outside the car sees you moving at 50mph, but an observer inside the car with you, sees you not moving at all, but the world rushing past at 50mph. These are two different reference frames, and the second one is called a rest frame - any object can be considered to have a rest frame of reference where it isn't moving at all. Any object that is, which has mass.

Massless objects are always observed to be moving at the speed of light by any observer in any frame of reference. This is one of the most mind-bending parts of relativity, but it ultimately connects to the part of special relativity where speed affects time - the faster you go, the slower your clock runs compared to things moving slower than you, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the closer your clock gets to zero. Massless particles only travel at the speed of light, and thus have no clock, therefore they experience no time.

I hope I got that right, but even if I did, I still don't feel like I actually understand it at all!
Git 2.45 Landing Code for SHA1 and SHA256 Interoperability for Repositories
> He [He Jie] was slightly behind the three African runners as they approached the end of the race but they slowed down and waved the Chinese athlete ahead as they gestured towards the finish line. The four had run together throughout the race of just over 13 miles.

> Mnangat told the BBC that the trio ran as pacemakers and were not competing.

> However, the committee said pacers would not have been allowed to participate as specially invited athletes without organisers' approval.

https://www.reuters.com/sports/athletics/china-revokes-win-h...
That game is quite something. Triply so when it’s played wrongly like Vinesauce Joel did.

https://youtu.be/nFDsHXSAzs8?si=iN_x-yR5FC9gCuIf
> I don’t personally think that other animals will have a verbal inner monologue in the way that I do

I find it funny that this article and the quotes within state that humans have a "dense internal monologue" as if that is some requirement of the species. Some quick Googling indicates that people with internal monologues might only make up 30%-50% of people [0].

There are frequent Reddit posts with some variation of "TIL people [have|don't have] an internal monologue" full of comments of people from both sides, and a significant portion of people who don't have the classic internal monologue, but something in between instead.

We can't even begin to truly describe our own minds, how could we possibly know how all species would think?

0: Hurlburt, R.T., Alderson-Day, B., Kuhn, S. & Fernyhough, C. (2016). Exploring the ecological validity of thinking on demand: Neural correlates of elicited vs. spontaneously occurring inner speech. PLoS One, 11(2), e0147932. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147932
> whatever he's getting, it's probably not enough.

I mean, all YC employees get to participate in the fund, so he's got a small piece of every YC startup, including the ones that he helps with Launch HN. So in a sense he has a lot more control over his comp than most employees.
Where can I go or what can I read written by credible people (not autodidacts and conspiracy theorists from the internet) that makes the case against anthro-caused climate change, and puts the arguments in context with the pro-ACCC people?
Hopefully this will help resume work on a better High Availability code. Where one could have a cluster of 3 ValLey servers, with a superior HA protocol.
Musk said last November they had capacity then for 125,000 trucks a year. Are you saying he lied to us?
I don't accept the bargain of an ad supported internet. If I had to choose between ads and not seeing the pages, I'd go with the latter. There is no such thing as a good faith actor with respect to advertising. If someone is making something worth paying for, they should just charge for it, I'm happy to pay for stuff I value. Advertising corrupts everything (the "you're the product" cliche) making it never a good deal as a user.
If you got blocked like I did for some reason here is the working Invidious link

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=VCiXu6S6vEw
I don't have citations for you but I don't think it's anything like a "personal preference" - YC has tons of data on this. But it's fine to apply as a solo founder—many do get funded; and you're quite right—the risk of picking a wrong cofounder is also high and is not something one should do lightly (e.g. just to try to improve a YC application).
A PES file converter written by Linus Torvalds for Brother embroidery machines
So is the problem with strings that Rust internally uses null-terminated (and if so, is there some way to make that safe), or that the OS inevitably uses null-terminated so you have to handle that at the edges? Because the latter is... kind of inevitable, unless you want to completely throw everything out and start over.
> For a truck, stainless might turn out to be a pretty good choice. Fingerprints will always be problematic, though.

I dunno, I've never been much of a gearhead but the few times I've owned a truck I didn't really care if there was moss* growing on the damned thing. But those were pickups, and I used them for pickup things. I dunno how to square that with the notion that a truck is ruined by a fingerprint.

* for those of you who don't live in the rainy bits of the pacific northwest, this is not an exaggeration
> ...and this makes it incredibly unlikely Bitcoin will ever be outcompeted by a government or private market alternative.

The premise of the article. I don't believe this for a second.

Imagine the delusional hopefulness one would have to have to believe that something will, for eternity, not be superseded. Nothing in the history of humanity, or even life, remains unsurpassed from it's inception. Yet somehow this thing is unbeatable.

There are cryptocurrencies out there that meet all of the criteria that is laid forth in the article as the reason for this conclusion. True, most, I'd say almost all, don't, as the article does point out, but some do. So what's the secret sauce that makes those currencies incapable if it isn't simply these criteria laid out? Is it magic? Is it some emergent property we have yet to comprehend? If so, why not say it in the article? No, the article says those traits are all you need to draw that conclusion and yet, there's no compelling reason why that's the case. It's hand waving.

The criteria not mentioned is network effects. But we know, network effects are not an insurmountable obstacle. So the conclusion still does not follow. Those criteria are a must, and network effects make it incredibly difficult to supersede bitcoin, but not impossible.

I say the opposite: bitcoin's demise is inevitable. Not because I don't like bitcoin, don't believe in it, think it's a scam. I am a bitcoiner. But because nothing lasts forever, bitcoin isn't perfect, and there are people out there trying to make it better that aren't getting their PRs merged and/or making it to consensus to become a part of the network software.

I can think of at least one cryptocurrency that is better than bitcoin in every way, that meets all the criteria in the article, but just doesn't have the network effects. And to surmount that, the technical superiority, the benefit to the user to switch has to be so compelling that network effect diminishes. It's not enough to be marginally better, it has to be astronomically better. Maybe that one I have in mind doesn't have that, but you can bet that one will be made that will have that eventually.
I am not sure what the point of this is, except for vague handwaving and attention seeking behavior.

I don't see how sentience or consciousness has anything to do with anything.

Even admitting animal consciousness still leaves you a very long way away from anything like a framework of human rights.

Second, even if they aren't conscious, you should still take ecology into account. I don't think Redwood trees are conscious, but that doesn't mean we should go chopping them down without any thought.
No, I'm serious. There's no portable filesystem metadata, and while a few kinds of media files have facilities for internal metadata (e.g. EXIF and ID3), most don't. A file name is the only non-content that is easy to keep associated with any kind of file.

The syntax is definitely an imperfect compromise, but most of the things I use this for have titles that frequently contain spaces (books, papers, music, etc.) so quoting would be necessary anyway, and I made myself a Python package to help with escaping and do other utility tasks like normalizing ISBNs.
This is true, but those games were noted at the time for being crude and offensive. There was actually quite a bit of dislike for all of the above, and they were seen at the time as the exception rather that the norm.

I can think of the occasional bad-taste joke in an adventure game, but I don't think it was ever as pervasive as is implied.
There was a fairly benign protest, from what I can tell.

Whether you agree with the rationale or not, those staging the protest have come to a conclusion that Google, through the services they deliver, is aiding the killing of innocents.

Is that unreasonable to protest? Sure it might make fellow employees uncomfortable, but is that not the point?

It's not disputable that tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men have been killed by Israel? Is it?

That your organisations capabilities are likely to have been used to kill those people feels like something that should make all employees think about the company that employs them, it is sort of relevant to all employees, is it not?
> To imply that any car is designed and built in such a way that it can only fail if physics itself fails is rather arrogant

You're putting words in my mouth. All I'm saying is that direct physical connections between things are much more reliable and straightforward than software connections between things. Of course no system is perfect.
Redis holds such a special place in my heart. It was the definition of awesome, open-source software. It always felt like Redis was THE definition of open source. The fact that the license has changed is heart-breaking.
Win32 is straightforward and easy to use until you get to COM stuff: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/common...
Like the top two comments being in support of Coinbase's mission first declaration?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24610267
I am sure you are already doing this and the "what their pain point is" phrasing of this post is only for succinctness. In my experience, asking a practitioner about their pain point is seldom the starting point for an unbiased conversation. It can often lead to a freezing of ideas while they try to look and find such pain points, but
more importantly here, you are asking them to have identified the problem in a way. Far more effective would be to completely eliminate the word pain point and focus on descriptives like longest or most error prone task, only as confirmation ,after observing for a while.
Again I am quite sure from the later description of your question that you are doing something like this, but putting this out there to emphasize the importance of it.
The compensation package was approved by the shareholders, not just the board, but then the judge didn't like the disclosures for the shareholder vote and invalidated it. Musk obviously didn't like that and is now behaving in the usual way, but whatever. He's going to put it up for another vote and the shareholders are going to approve it again or they won't.
"Could you train someone to do your job in a month?"

Yes and no. If they are an employee, then most likely yes. If they are a contractor, my experiences tell me they most likely will not learn it fast enough or well enough.
If a party could control the irregular tide of Bitcoin’s value rising and crashing, then it holds a means to stimulate or impoverish whatever economies rely on Bitcoin. This could be particularly attractive for parties who want to avoid formally declaring sanctions or for situations where sanctions might not be effective.

I would see a 51% attack as a nuclear option, since it could take a while for cryptocurrency users to once again believe that the network is secure, but you could imagine a situation where there is geopolitical conflict with a country, the people in that country adopt a cryptocurrency due to fiat currency collapse, and then it becomes useful to induce a cryptocurrency collapse as well.

Edit: oops, might have added this comment in the wrong place.
Yes, this is how classic software works. It can download updates in the background, just like e.g. web browsers do. It will be more performant than web apps.
We are an early stage startup, $75K ARR (not a lot), 3 engineers, partnership with Accenture in 3 countries, working with top tier brands and got rejected 3 times.

We will apply again.

Would someone be kind enough to review our application?

Thank you so much.
Why would I sell my code to you guys when I'm already giving it away for free?