skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see the YCombinator interview as a minimal test - if you can pass that barrier, then you have a chance at possibly getting your customers to understand what you have and its value.

Disclaimer: I've never been through a YC interview.

I don't think that's an apt comparison. Pg and the YC crew, as smart, insightful and interesting as they are, are still a very small group of people, compared to the world of customers out there. It's entirely possible that you could fail a YC interview for whatever mysterious reason (maybe pg was having a bad day, maybe something to do with pre-existing (and unconscious) biases, maybe you were having a bad day) and still do fine at getting customers to understand what you do and it's value.

In some ways, the YC interview may even be a higher bar: It's automatically an extra stressful situation, and you're dealing with some "type A" personality types who feel some need to control the interview, and you go in knowing you're limited to 10 minutes or whatever. When you're out talking to customers, you may well find yourself in a lower stress situation, with people who aren't necessarily trying to challenge you, etc.

And I think this is borne out by the fact that there are groups who failed to get into YC, who went on to be successful.
It is. But it's widely assumed that they won't remember the application at all by the time of the interview.
Realtime Analytics with Storm and Hadoop
Huh? I never said anything like that, my post simply explains the rationalizations of why an IITian might not choose to work on a startup. I think you read into something but I can't figure out what it is.

All I wanted to say was that there are several good reasons that make perfect sense in the context for an IITian to not join a startup.

EDIT: Great, so you misread and then downvote ? I don't think that's how it's supposed to work =/
I don't know about the affordable part, but there are a number of timing companies that offer very accurate timing within thousandths of a second.

The two companies that are the most prevalent are MyLaps [1] and Westhold [2], although there are some others out there as well. Both of these are active systems that require that each competitor have a transponder on their vehicle.

[1] http://www.mylaps.com

[2] http://www.westhold.com/
"1. Reversing type and variable/parameter name is just aesthetics I guess but it still really bothers me. Perhaps there's a reason (eg parsing speed) but I'd still prefer:
float32 f1
float32 f2 = 45.4
over
var f1 float32
var f2 float32 = 45.4"

I've always found this a nice change.

The first way, you read it as:
I have a float variable, named f1 and its value is 45.4.

The second way, you read it as:
I have a variable named f1, it's a float, and its value is 45.4.

The second seems more natural to me, putting emphasis on your name and value, instead of the type. It is even more obvious when you use the := syntax. `f1 := 45.4` => "I have a variable named f1, whose value is 45.4 (a float)."
Bitcoin Hackathon in Berlin, 13-15 July
Funny enough this suggest that the judge understands the subtleties of design better than the tech-heads at Engadget, who like so many others regularly claim competing products match the design quality of Apple products.

It always irks me when people, especially professional critics and reviewers, call it a matter of taste just because they can't spot the difference. It isn't. Personal preference is a matter of taste, but the difference in design quality between Samsung (or HTC, or Dell, etc) and Apple is objectively observable. Just like there is a clear difference between a TV set designed by Samsung and one by Bang & Olufsen or Loewe.

(Which is exactly why I believe Apple should stop suing second rate look-alikes. If people want to buy Samsung they were never potential Apple clients in the first place, and if Apple wants that market too they should just build products for it.)
Google Open Sources Coding Kit That Lives Online
Bold move. Curious if CL's next step will be to add noarchive tags to prevent google cache content from being crawled.
What does a builder sound like?

"When I write in emacs, it's inconvenient to share that with my team. When I write in the Wiki... well, I don't write in the wiki because it's annoying. I have been more productive doing X, and I think you will too."

In closing, I am trying to speak to customers... not engineers.

That's marketing speak for "I don't know who my customer is". You are pitching to a customer who is an engineer, so you should be speaking to engineers.

Thank you for the feedback. I know it took time to write.

That's what we do here... this sounds hollow.
"It's surprising how rarely we encounter good critics in our lives,..."

It's not surprising at all. Rarely do people really want to be corrected. Indeed, the more they need to be corrected, the less they want to hear about it.
I have a feeling there will be another C+D soon, but since I'm looking for an apartment at this moment, great.

I am annoyed that CL hasn't uttered a single peep about all this. They killed a great app, and didn't even respond to the outcry. A simple 'we don't want to support competitors' would have sufficed, but their silence damns them.
It's not a function reference. It's a deferred call: the call can have arguments.
Going to take a wild guess here, and speculate that you haven't read any Solzhenitsyn.
Not related to the article, but you have a very solid front end designer on board. Beautiful front page.
While neat, and an app I own, it's been on HN 4 times or os
I read that entire blog post and I still have no idea what the product does...
"walk into the room with a predetermined pitch that they're determined to stick to, things usually end badly."

True for sales (as I see someone else below also points out).

I'm reminded of a time in the past where I was purchasing a high end typesetter. 6 figure purchase in today's dollars. The salesman kept hitting on the point of the large font collection that the company had over and over again. I kept saying "what's really important to me is your service program". I couldn't have been any clearer than that. (He didn't have to dig for the hot buttons - I delivered them to him on a silver platter).
We want random access to your thoughts, not to listen to a single path through them, prepared in advance.

OK, obviously this is a continuum, and not a binary thing. But why "random?" Wouldn't you think there is some value in giving the startup founders the chance to present things in the way that makes sense to them, before starting with the grilling? Or is the case that you actually do that ( that point wasn't entirely clear from TFA)?
It's interesting precisely because that mistake is "common" (though I'll admit some frustration that the actual vulnerabilities aren't disclosed, so we don't know how common). It says so right in the headline.

Maybe you already knew this. Maybe you are too smart to make such a mistake (though in my experience, people quick to dismiss "simple" security practices are the most likely to forget them and make this kind of mistake). Some people aren't. And others, like me (also way-too-smart-to-ever-do something-like-this of course) don't actually know much about OAuth and read the link interested in learning more about its security landscape.
GameDev Hackathon in Stuttgart, Germany
Easy to say and hard to do.

TeX distributions are getting more complex and much bigger, while at the same time providing a _much_ better user experience than a few years ago. TeX live for example has the "full" distribution scheme as default and the users always never have to install things found somewhere on the net by themselves. It just works for most people around us.

As soon as you start splitting things up, it's hard for the users to follow.

"We" keep getting questions from Linux users that "package X is not available and how can I install it? I've tried [many horrible things]?" The answer is usually "install package texlive-something" of your distro. For these users the user experience is worse than installing the full texlive.

One really nice thing is with current texlive (> 2011) is that you can get updates between release cycles. This also makes (IMO) the user experience much better but is in contradiction to what most distros need.
And now we can look forward to 20 years of research on very fast runtimes for executing Clojure ...

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=7985...
Do you really want to program? Send me an email. I'll be your mentor.
While I agree in principal that people should have questioned Dani about his/her decision, it is hardly their responsibility to do so in this situation, and least of all the responsibility of the "medical folks" at any stage. The only exception would be a doctor you've asked for a consultation on whether it's a good idea medically, or a psychologist on whether it's a good idea psychologically (more relevant here).

I think one can assume that at the level of this type of irreversible decision, said decision maker has thought long and hard about whether to "reassign their gender" and come to the conclusion most suitable for their own lives. At this point, it's only appropriate for close friends and family to perform a last questioning of sorts before the decision is sought through. I mean, there is a point at which you must make the switch from being skeptical of a situation to being accepting of the situation, or you must exit the situation (burn the bridge, etc). The point of acceptance after healthy skepticism is due to the fact that everyone's life is different, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to any problem. The real trick is figuring out when and how to make that switch.
Lessons Learned From Duqu
I know the GM Passlock II system works this way - not only do you have to wait, but you have to put the car in 'run' a few times during specific times during the waiting process.
Your Cell Phone Is Under More Surveillance Than Ever
Padmapper already received a C&D... IANAL, but i think a lawsuit may be the next step.
Yeah, and I hear Verizon's coverage map doesn't look so hot when you're a few hundred feet under water.
>I’ve been wrestling with whether to bring back Craigslist listings in the search results. I’ve found a way to include them that I’m told is legally kosher since it doesn’t touch their servers at all, but it still seems somewhat dickish to go against their wishes in this, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for what they’ve done for the world. Also, who wants to waste their time in court?

>But then I did some back of the envelope estimates of how much of people’s time and effort it would waste if I didn’t, and it became clear how much less nice it is to waste the time of millions of apartment hunters out of stubbornness or some clearly inaccurate assumption about the will of the community.

Christ, what an asshole.

Translation: "We found a loophole that lets us get around the spirit of what was communicated to us so we could continue to build out our product. I'm going to conveniently step over the moral grey lines of using someone else's data without their consent by claiming my service is better."
Yes, that is correct. I probably should have qualified it as you did, but you are right. I commented down below here somewhere that the whole idea of Lean Startup / Customer Development is to test your ideas and hypotheses with actual customers who are feeling the pain.

This does bring up the idea then that a YC pitch is a whole animal unto itself. I wouldn't have enough experience to know what the main differences are between a YC and a customer pitch, but as you mention here, in the one case you are presenting your story and value proposition to customers who would be personally interested in the solution and directly feel the pain and in the other case to someone who is managing a portfolio of startup companies and evaluating for "fit" and "merit". Those words are in quotes because I don't know what those measures are specifically for YC, and there are likely many other considerations.

I've commented about how the VC process is likewise totally screwed up with investors who neither feel the pain nor totally understand the markets and wield far too much power in the form of the checkbook. AND they underperform the markets in any case.
I really love Trello, I think I could use it in so many facets of my life...but the nonstatements on its future (is it going to be monetized? is it even going to be around in six months? etc.) make me hesitant to really commit to it.
Quite a lot of personal attacks there...

We're all minorities, depending on how you cut the population. The question is whether you let it define you negatively and become a 'victim', or just get on with being happy. People who get offended by words are wasting their energy on silly things that don't matter, and often actually making racism/sexism/etc worse by drawing attention to things that aren't actually there in the first place. Judge people by their actions. Not by words.

If you really want to redefine the word 'marriage', then go ahead. I do not think it's the most pressing fight for those after equal rights though. If I was gay, I certainly wouldn't care, as long as I was free to love who I like.

I'm done here...
I'd give serious consideration to something like:

static/style/foo.css

containing the comment

/* See static/style/foo.css.src on this domain */

since you want the source for the deployed version, not master, and we're trying to make things easy for people grokking what's deployed, not express an opinion about branch naming and deployment practices :)

Publishing the repository URL and/or deployed branch/tag/revision might also be awesome, but it serves a different albeit overlapping set of goals.
I definitely agree with this:

"Walk into the room with a predetermined pitch that they're determined to stick to, things usually end badly."

In my experience, you need to be nimble. But I also think you need to start the conversation somewhere.
Can someone explain to me how this works legally? It seems a bit too convenient that you can ignore someone's T&Cs and use an unlicensed third-party service instead.
This halfway-in,halfway-out implementation is what frustrates me. Those people who are drowning get the same answer "Well, Core Data isn't a relational DB so you shouldn't treat it like that." But yet all of Apple's nomenclature screams RDBMS.
> But it's widely assumed that they won't remember the application at all by the time of the interview.

Really? They're calling you in for an interview and they don't have your application in front of them and haven't refreshed their memory? YC gets results, so I guess if it works it works, but I find it surprising that the assumption is they're going to be unprepared like that?
After reading this I have no idea what Rocketr actually is and what it really does, and from that I infer that nobody in the room understood it either.

I see a lot of statements that apparently should be prefixed with "our vision is" or "we want to" - statements of intent. I don't get the impression that the team actually knows how to build this thing.

Just out of curiosity: are product demos allowed at these meetings? If so, was it done in this case? I think sometimes all it takes is one minute of actual UI presentation to determine whether there is anything of substance behind the idea or not.
All good points. I will surely read that paper, thanks for all your help.
Another difference is that the use of a built-in compass eliminates the need for a badge.
When anyone trying to sell me anything in any way uses my name, it throws up 4 or 5 extra layers of defense. At that point I know you're trying to manipulate me, and you've just made your job infinitely harder.

Having said that, I've tried the trick myself on others and they seem to respond very differently from the way that I do.

So I guess the point is to be very careful of this approach. It might help a little with some people, but it might be a gigantic turnoff to others.
I do not want to sound rude or else, but please, please, work on the design of the app. You do not need to come up with the best design ever but at least don't make it look like a website from 1998. We need all to work a bit on this to improve the general feel of the apps on android. You will notice that also your app will have a download boost. The UI is the first thing a user notices and even if your apps has some amazing functionality it will be judged mostly by that. I know you are a developer, so am i. But now not caring about this is no longer acceptable.

This might be even your first project and i strongly encourage you to go on, but doing the right thing from the beginning is the best way to reduce problems later. As already said you do not need complicate stuff. Just.... fine.
Is it up to the doctors involved to question your decision? I don't think it is. I don't understand someone who would rely on that.
1. The point of hashing passwords is to protect the password itself (the plaintext), so that users who use the same password over and over again (which is most of them) don't see all their accounts opened if one of the services they use has a security breach.

2. Collisions are not actually very likely (understatemeeeent)

3. > He will still be able to do a dictionary attack using the same method you use to login.

Sure, but that's not the point. The point is that validating a hash now requires a lookup into terabytes of data, meaning it's much harder to use ASICs or GPUs to brute-force the site, and the validation may even require hitting disk which is extremely expensive compared to even expensive hashings.

4. It also makes retrieving the data that much harder: a users table is not usually big and noticeable (especially just 3 columns thereof), a terabyte+ of data going out might show up on the network stats.

Note that I'm no cryptographer and do not recommend TFA's scheme as I can't judge one way or the other, but your objections don't hold as far as I can see.

Side-note (and weakness) for 4: on the other hand the retrieval is trivially shardable and parallelizable, so at the end of the day you probably don't gain much: the data from the GPU/ASIC hash-computer is fed into a sharded db server for matching against the hash data, it will have a cost impact but depending on the cost of the hashing function itself it may not even increase the overall operation time.
One easy way to limit the size of the backlog is to let the community itself vote on which bugs and features you should be working on, then add a little editorial selection and take the top (n) to work on. That's what we do at Stack Exchange, anyway:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/?tab=bugs
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/?tab=requests

I find that the community appreciates being involved in these decisions, and often (but not always†) has good ideas of what you should be prioritizing and what issues are true pain points.

† http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/listen-to-your-comm...
The Economist, Then and Now, on Bankers
I have been using the Windows 8 beta on my secondary machine for some weeks. Initially, I was really a fan of metro, but in the end the context switching that a single-task environment requires (yes, I know, you can split the screen) is annoying when doing serious work on a desktop. Taking aside Metro, Windows 8 is really an incremental upgrade for regular desktop use.

I do believe Metro is great for tablets. As a five-year long OS X user (and Linux before), I'd seriously consider buying a Surface tablet if they nail things right: I'd like to be able to use it like an iPad on the road, connect it to a screen and Bluetooth mouse/keyboard at home/work to use it as a traditional desktop.

We will see ;).
I can't see why they wouldn't do that. It's not like the Google cache offers much utility for Craigslist posts to begin with.

Anyway, it doesn't seem right for Padmapper to be doing this, but for god's sake, could people browsing the primary source for residential ads please have a way of doing that with a map?! That's really all anyone is asking for here. Sheesh.
Scientists demo thought-controlled robots [video]
"Builders" have a common language - jargon - about how things work. It's specific and concretely describes the thing in question, usually through implied behavior. Once we communicate what something is, it's easy for us to understand how it can be used. Sometimes, with a few primers, we can figure out the use before we're told.

In other words, don't tell me you have a "delicious, round edible item with just the right amount of firmness and sweetness to be pleasant to eat." Just tell me you have an apple, and I'll figure out the rest.
SPDY vs. HTTP Benchmarks
The best way to explain something is to respond to your audience's reactions; if they are lost, either decide that point isn't important and get to the implications of it or try another tact. Responding to their reception makes your audience felt heard and validated as well as making it more likely they will actually understand what you are saying. It takes skill and practice, but when done well the difference is staggering.

What you should be sure of is the underlying, abstract thing you are describing. You should know the story is "Snow White", even though this time the audience might not care about dwarves and might not be laughing at the funny squirrel bits, but is really interested in glass coffin construction. If you know your idea inside and out, it is easier to find the part of it that this audience right here is interested in, and you know what the important parts are that make the rest of it make sense. Ideally, you shouldn't have to plan answers ahead of time, because the answers are obvious.

The less superficially you know your idea, the less work presentations are to put together.
To me 90% of the fun of living out a zombie apocalypse is taking a baseball bat to the side of a zombie's head. I don't really want to run around and hide all night.
(no expertise here)

How do you get 'inclination' of the field? Is it based on phone orientation? If so then you just opened up a lot more possibilities for position. Also, in this solution the phone doesn't know you're moving. It just sees: magnetic field is changing...

You must have to start it at a specific place, or tell it where you are when you start it (eliminating the 'where am I' use case).
I'm wrong about the sensor, fair point. Though low-level access to its data will presumably need to be available through the device API.

But anyway... Stores actually put a lot of effort into spreading the essentials around, and making you walk as far as possible to find things. It's in their interests that you are lost and browsing all the other stuff that you could be buying, instead of just grabbing that milk and going.
They can, but you didn't say 'fuck' enough.
I won't dive in to argue with you, because clearly that's been done before. I'll just point out that you made that "objectively observable" point without any actual, y'know, evidence. That, by definition, makes your argument one of taste, not facts. Please (please!) stop.
I believe Paul is using "random" (in particular, "random access") in the programming sense of "arbitrary" – the interview is there to dig deeper into the bits they are interested in/concerned about.
Facts can't be copyrighted. But how is an advertisement a "fact"? Can I create a website of all the Coca-cola advertisements over the years, and call them facts?

Ads aren't facts. You're still intentionally copying the CL website without the right to do that. Good luck to you.

Edited: Not trying to start a "copyright isn't theft" debate.
I don't think there's a whole lot of caselaw here, so I think it's all a bit of a grey area. One thing I can say from experience is that judges typically frown on "clever hacks" to get around legal obligations. IANAL.
Intel Recreates Animusic's Pipe Dream Music Machine in Real Life