skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
XP is receiving less and less support, and the time for when it will stop being supported altogether is coming up fast. Linux on the other hand is being continuously worked on.

A more fair comparison would be to ask if he was still using the same distro without doing any updates from the same time the last update to Windows XP was released(which still isn't even fair because it assumes that the updates solve the exact same thing, which they are clearly not).
My thoughts...

- What does a builder sound like? Aren't we all just trying to speak to customers? Are builders naturally better at that?

- "Co-authored notebooks" and "one author per note" are not contradictions at all. They speak to entirely different units (notes and notebooks).

- While you are correct that you and the startup may have different systems for categorizing, that's exactly the problem we're trying to point to. The siloed nature of how we capture and categorize information.

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

Thank you for the feedback. I know it took time to write.
I agree with the first paragraph. I think it's good to start with "X is a solution to the problem of..."

Onto the second paragraph though....

>I don't really see a problem with PG driving, I see a problem with not being ready to clearly and concisely differentiate. How is it different from Evernote and how is it different from Wikipedia should be completely anticipated ready-to-handle followups with great one-sentence answers that focus on the customers.

The basic fact is, the more you can be the one driving the more you have the opportunity to ensure everything gets framed in the way you want it to be framed.

In a recent discussion, Pg here emphasized the need to seem formidable. I would be surprised if people who seem formidable are not in control of the conversation.

Look: You are going there to make a pitch. There's nothing wrong with answering questions, turning aside concerns, and the like. But you need to pitch your business, not be reactive.

What this means is that the original author is right on one critical thing. he didn't know what story he wanted to tell. He didn't have a solidified, crystallized core he wanted to communicate.

I keep coming back to listening to the oral arguments of the health care case and how Paul Clement addressed the concerns of justices. He'd listen to the question and come back with an answer that more or less let him pick up exactly where he left off and go where he wanted to go. Agree or disagree with him on the issues, he seemed formidable..... And he was totally in control of his message.
Tech Entrepreneur Camp for Girls
Still not sure if this helps me, but as others noted it sounds like Wave. If it actually is, I'd pay for it today in a heartbeat. While wave didn't reach the critical mass google wanted or needed, I suspect there are enough users that a small startup could make a few bucks with it.
Overall, I like it: it's straight to the point and simple.

Two improvements I'd suggest:

- It'd be good to have a bit more detail about what day-to-day responsibilities are. How much of the WP work would be designing stuff vs. coding? Will there be any server admin?

- You need to indicate something about the money. The benefits look great, but don't add up to much without knowing whether I can expect a mickey-mouse rate or not ;) For the same reason, I wouldn't apply as the ad currently stands.
It doesn't affect your objection to MaleKitten but not all types are occupied in Haskell. You are thinking of kind * By contrast,

{-#LANGUAGE DataKinds#-}
a :: 'Nothing
a = a

and

{-#LANGUAGE MagicHash#-}
import GHC.Prim
a :: Int#
a = a

don't typecheck, though I cant say I understand the ins and outs of the latter.
MOBITTO: LIFESTYLE MOBILE APPLICATION
Assuming you're a developer, why would you have clung to 3.1? NT was available then and was considerably better operating system for development.

I maintain an XP partition for when the corp I work for require mandatory training (ethics, insider trading, workplace safety etc) but there's no way I'd ever consider using it over Ubuntu for development. I suppose if you're coding in python then the underlying os makes little difference, the abstraction level is so high. Personally even in python missing the unix toolset is a primary reason to stick to unix-like operating systems. I couldn't imagine not having sed, awk, grep, vim, wc etc. I am aware of ports and even the Cygwin environment, but it's just a lot easier to skip the whole thing.

Speaking as someone who started his career on hp-ux and since then included probably every major unix distribution both proprietary and open source, having an intimate knowledge of unix has served me well. Windows has finally caught up and (despite still getting the path delimiter wrong) is now a robust and usable operating system. The two worlds have merged, unix added curses, then x, and now looks as pretty as anything else out there, meanwhile windows added multitasking (yield didn't count) and ever wider addressing, a native tcp/ip stack, support for larger drives and so on.

Unlike you I have no good memories of windows 3.11
Focusing on your blog post more than your pitch, do you think it really adds value to your message to use gratuitous language like "shit the bed" and "f*cking". Dave McClure and Brad Feld have made it in to an art form but they've already made it. It doesn't add any value to your message but does distract from it. Your blog post suggests you haven't learned to carefully focus the words you use in your message for maximum positive impact.
It wasn't until I read Neal Stephenson's Anatham that I could finally pin a name on this logical fallacy: Diax's Rake. "Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true"

http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Diaxs_Rake

As "failure is not an option" is typically used, it's an "abandon all logic and evidence and punt on faith" mode of operation I see far too often, in which the meaning isn't "we find it acceptable to fail", but "because of our blind faith in some belief, we set the possibility of failure as zero. Particularly in various business inspirational literature and Republican Party military, foreign, economic, energy, and environmental policies.

Articles such as this one make me wish for an option to downvote, rather than simply flag, submissions.
I always just blamed the systemic paralysis of sf bay government caused by poor design of the intersection between public power and private power over the commons.
It takes the same approach to productivity, that news.yc takes to news.

They are, in fact, very similar in that regard.
It ALWAYS makes sense to run your idea by the people who are living with the problem or feeling the pain firsthand.

As smart, talented, experienced, and helpful as PG is, for many (tho not all) of the problems that entrepeneurs claim to solve, he doesn't live that pain or understand it.

While PG may be able to understand at a conceptual level the pain points of a pizza shop owner, he probably hasn't felt the pain to know what pizza shop owners really struggle with. What is truly necessary versus a "nice to have".

Isn't the whole concept of the Lean Startup and the Customer Development methodology to test your idea with "normals" and not proxies, no matter how influential or gatekeeper they might be?

If YCombinator and PG didn't exist, how would you do it? Let's order some pizza!
Works on Firefox 14 just fine.
You're right, that is really off-topic.
As someone apartment hunting in NYC I appreciate this. If I wasn't my feelings would be pretty mixed.
Trello is now half million strong
Being a Mac user myself (now), I enjoy windows XP every time i have to use it. On todays machines, its just snappy as and has a certain bare-bones feel to it. I love that.

Then again, I hate configuring XP, it is a horror.
From what I've been learning about sales in the past year or two, this advice is disastrously wrong not only for YC interviews, but for sales in general. If you ever drive in a sales conversation, it should be to dig out what problem the prospect is interested in solving.
Not only sleep, but exercise, too. If you're not working up a sweat a few times per week, you won't sleep as well and you'll be less healthy.

Try sleeping 6 or more hours per night. Spend half an hour 3 times per week exercising (it doesn't matter what: run, lift weights, swim, bike, etc). Take that time out of your side-project time. No, you won't have as much time to work on it, but that will be a good thing, you'll have to change how you work.
"Rocketr bridges two worlds that could not be further apart right now – how we ..."

This is also an entry that is trying to sound nice to the listener. Use wording that doesn't try to look nice, only give facts straight. it will sound more pro (because shows you only care and focus on facts) also you will get a more candid discussion. (because your entry was candid in the first place, without adding an artificial tone)

One of the VCs that I talked to had the harshest comments about my presentation but his tone was so candid, it felt like he is the one that cared the most, gives the best advice, and I also thought he was a really cool person to know.
4) Nobody said they had to use the OBDII port for this.

4a) Nobody said that OBDII ports had to work while the alarm is armed.
Wholeheartedly agree. You simply can't drive all the conversations that happen about your company and product. If your success is determined by your necessity to drive the conversations, you're going to lose badly. The interview with PG notwithstanding, you have a company to run and marketing and sales to tackle -- the latter two of which are notoriously hard to control the conversation.

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. But if you can't, then it's going to be tough.
Hi Eric,

In the interview you didn't answer the question posed. Could you please answer it now?

"A typical digital camera captures one image. Isn't what you're doing, in a sense, capturing a thousand different images with each image?"

Am I wrong in assuming that there is a matrix of 9 images which is repeated across the sensor? It was my impression that each microlens was superimposed over a 10x10 array of pixels, such that the entire matrix covered a 30x30 pixel area, and there are 108x108 microlens arrays, for a total of 104,976 microlenses?

I admit that I was wrong in my choice of words concerning focal length. I meant that within each matrix of 9 microlenses, one of them doesn't bend the light, while 4 of them bring items closer than the unbent light into focus, and the other 4 bring farther items into focus.

With that, your software creates 9 different images that focus on light coming from objects 9 different distances from your camera. Is that correct?

I never said there were only 9 microlenses. In my original post I said there was a repeated array of 9 microlenses. Each type of microlens is processed into one 'layer'. Is that wrong?
How the EU & Canada Are Using CETA as Backdoor Mechanism To Revive ACTA
Duma eyes controls on foreign ownership in local Internet companies
Drones invade domestic airspace and your privacy
And there are starving people in Africa, too. All that you suggest is already being done in Detroit. Personally, I think I would be bored after about an hour like you say but it would be really cool if they could pull this off.

The Detroit area (including parts of Detroit proper) isn't a complete wasteland. There are a lot of people in the area that want to have a little fun in their life, like anywhere else in the world. There's nothing wrong with that. If they pull it off, this would attract people from all over the region (and I'm sure far beyond), which can only be a good thing for the economy.

FWIW, I don't think they'll pull this off, especially for $145,000, but I like that someone's trying.
That's do you'll have the details close by. Otherwise the operator is left hanging when you have to go look for information they need.
Agreed. More often than not, CSS that doesn't explain itself (margin-top: -43.1px;) is bad css.

That's not to say CSS comments are useless, but they should be helpful, not necessary.
My roommate and I both have Toyota trucks. Mine is much more than a decade old, his is almost two decades old, and as a consequence there are parts that are starting to wear down. Like the ignition switch.

There have been many times I've called him up (or vice versa) and said "can you bring my truck to me?" Even though the keys are not compatible, that doesn't matter anymore. His could probably be started with a popsicle stick. Mine can be started with something slightly resembling a Toyota key. The only reason they haven't been stolen is a combination of the fact that they're not worth any money, they have nothing of value inside them, and they're manual transmission (so chances are a US thief wouldn't be able to get away in it).
What you need to know about Cloud Security
> Also above you said Clojure "probably" has better data structures than Common Lisp. That is unsubstantiated.

It is my understanding that Common Lisp lacks the vector and hash maps that Clojure has.

Sorry if I got it wrong. I am more a ML guy than Lisp.
Well said. Frame control is a crucial skill, and most people seem to know very little about it. Curiously, I only became aware of the concept, and started studying it, when I start hanging around some of the "pick up artist" guys. Turns out the PUAs dig pretty deep into psychology, storyteling, salesmanship, and related fields, trying to figure out how to connect with women. And, regardless of what you think of their aims in that regard, reading a lot of the material they recommend takes you in some interesting places. These guys got me studying Cialdini's Influence and a number of related works, which have been very influential to me... and in a way that has nothing to do with meeting women.

This is not to say that everyone should rush out and jump into the PUA scene, just noting the (seemingly obscure) connection between that world and some of the areas that we all find interesting. It turns out that understanding influence, constructing narratives, frame control, etc. are important skills in many areas of our lives.
The AFRON "10 Dollar Robot" Design Challenge
"We live in a very lonely world, and most people would rather shut their mouth and damn the consequences that have a healthy argument."

And most people would rather not listen to criticism and prefer sugar-coating so it doesn't hurt their feelings, aspirations, dreams, etc.
Heck my car got stolen once with a screwdriver. I'm sure it took all of 30 seconds.
So does 3taps gather data with humans or what?
Yeah, I went back and forth on it quite a lot. That said, the law protects this sort of thing (facts can't be copyrighted, and that's all PadMapper is showing from CL), and it seems like a pretty large net loss for the world if this isn't continued. But I'm obviously biased.
Some of it is plain-old resistance to change. Much of it has to due with a loss of productivity for a period of time while I get used to what has changed. Sometimes the latest version of my favorite editor contains some change to the UI that I wish had never been made. I always fear there will be a change like when Microsoft switched Office to 'ribbon' toolbars. I completely gave up mastering new versions of Office after that. They threw away years of learning.

I still use Ubuntu 9.x partly because I'm not stoked about the new window manager. Though I'm going to install it anyway because in Ubuntu terms I'm ancient by now and apt-get has become pretty much useless at this point.
It depends on the license. Apache and L/GPLv3 both have explicit patent grants (GPLv2 does not). Most of what Nokia released was LGPLv2 I think.

But regardless, I think there's a clear good faith argument to be made there. Telling the world "use this great stuff for free" and then suing them when they do it certainly seems counter to the spirit of good faith patent licensing.
Sounds to me what he is asking for, halfway through 2012, isn't unreasonable. Not only isn't it unreasonable, but most large online retailers do just what he is asking, an expected ship date and the ability to revise billing. Why has Google, one of the world's leading tech companies, failed to implement such important and simple features. How much faith am I to have in Google as a retailer of consumer electronics if they can't even get this right? I expected this when I purchased the Nexus One on it's release, but I expect better 2.5 yrs later.

And how asking for these two simple features make him an "impatient, the customer-is-always-righteous" customer is beyond me, unless you happen to be a Google fandroid who believes the company can do no wrong.

Nexus 7 seems to be a great product that many people are excited about, the first truly worthy competitor to Apple's tablet monopoly and why you have to besmirch one such consumer when he points out a weakness in Google's consumer facing service paints you as the self-righteous *ss, not him, imho.
My understanding is that they use the Google cache.
Sounds like if they got a second go at it they still would have muffed it. Bad times for Rocketr.
He just reinvented Kanban: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_%28development%29
"We want random access to your thoughts, not to listen to a single path through them, prepared in advance."

You can have both.

Without having true insight into exactly what information you hope to take away in 10 minutes, I would think that a cohesiveness to the order of the information, the pain felt by the potential customer, and a picture of that customer - are all valuable inputs.

My suggestion is that startups put that information in order themselves.
Regarding the recommendation to "Just quit." You should. But not the side projects, quit your day job. Put a deadline on it, for your family's sake, if you don't have sustainable income from your new business after the deadline, go back to a day job and put the side-projects on hold. You shouldn't have a problem finding another day job if you're good (and if you're not good, get good first, then quit).

You'll need savings and a supportive family to do this.
Talk with them. Explain the situation. Write a journal so you can show how you feel over time. Your family will support you, but first you'll have to make a good case. It's a risk, quitting, but if you have some savings and a supportive family, you can do it.

It'll also force you to build a business, not a hobby.
Just a quibble: the news:ad ratio for most print papers also runs about 20:80. There are exceptions for some subscription/newstand-sales driven publications (The Economist, the WSJ pre-Murdoch), but that's been a pretty solid rule of thumb for the past 30-40 years or more.
I'd settle for .00 but if I'm not mistaken the Olympic level reports .000 with some type of active transponder:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb_UXJVK7iM
But does Common Lisp allow multiple implementations of those data structures to exist in the same program actually allowing programmers to utilize the best tool for the job?
The last few places I've acquired we're through padmapper aggregation of CL posts, so when PM got the C&D, I felt compelled to email CraigsList asking them to implement a fee-based API as it would be a win-win-win for everyone involved. Sadly, no reply.
Looks like Kogan only serves the UK and Australian market, there's no support from the US. Perhaps this is a ranking correction to delegating Kogan pages to UK or Oz specific searches rather than global or US.
How so? We just learned a ton by way of this thread. I would say that's a huge win for Rocketr.
You can skin GTK widgets, but it's like putting lipstick on a pig. For truly native look you would have to reimplement most widgets so that they follow OSX HIG.
You keep saying this, but what does it mean? What is social note-taking, exactly?
Can 3taps get me the content of the NY Times website via indirect means, so I can publish it on my website? I did a back of the envelope calculation that a lot of people are losing time by having to go somewhere else to get that content, and it's pissing me off.
What is the most hard to understand piece of C++ code you know?
Isn't that done in the application process? Assuming the applications are read and prepared carefully?
"Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited"

I think this covers Google cache or any other method of gathering data. You're still in violation of their Terms of Use even if you find a clever means of getting around it.
'it' isn't plural.
The problem with analytics I've experienced, is that they often aren't actually good at picking out the something they're targeting. They're actually good at picking out something like what they're targeting. When I use Pandora, I just get hollow dopplegangers of bands I like, not bands I actually like.

That said, and no doubt this will be controversial, I think there's great potential for Moneyball style statistical analysis of programmers. (Though there are significant organizational and cultural issues involved.)

The reason why stats work in baseball, is that there's ample empirical data: baseball players are up to bat, or have a chance to catch a ball again and again. Like baseball players, there are certain actions that programmers do again and again -- namely commits going to production. If one could get accurate stats on a large enough population, with automated metrics for function points and bugs, it should be possible to produce meaningful stats on programmers working with a given technology.
I avoided vista for similar reasons of not wanting to be alienated, but when I installed the win 7 beta I loved it instantly.

The most visible feature: No more ridiculous searching through the start bar. Everything was just windows-key + some string + enter

windows-key "sub" enter = sublime text is opened

windows-key "ch" enter = chrome is opened

windows-key "control" enter = control panel is opened

Going back to windows XP after using Windows 7 was a nightmare. It felt so unusable.
Cool and all, but with the rules on downloadable interpreted code I can't imagine this being super useful.
As a satisfied padmapper user, I'm glad to see this, but somewhat troubled at the same time.

The original hubbub about Craigslist pulling padmapper's access, regardless of your stance on Craigslist's actions, was to me a cautionary tale about building apps around external APIs. (See the Twitter drama of the past weeks.)

What happens next if Craigslist does the same thing to 3taps?
Wife, family, children, friends, good times and good people, are these things not important to you?

Guess I'm not an entrepreneur, I'm going to enjoy myself and the world can go hang.
That's a very good attitude - you can never lose if you learn a valuable lesson and keep on trucking. You only fail if you give up. Somehow I don't see that happening ;)
What do you mean, direction? It can already orient itself, it's the primary use of the electronic compass that they are also repurposing.
Why startups condense in America?
http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html