skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A lot of the ideas on the backlog are bad ideas, and you merely wrote them down to avoid hurting the feelings of the people who thought them up.

I love how candid he can be sometimes. In my experience, this is true of about 30% of the backlog.
It's another string to the bow - so why not?

Have a quick look over the screen casts. If you're familiar with those tools you'll map the concepts pretty quickly.

http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/
Do we really want a Facebook Want button?
Microsoft acquires multitouch company Perceptive Pixel
>>Seems like you went on your own sweet tangent.

Okay that might have sounded a little mean.Sorry having a pretty tiresome day :)
Startups fail for a lot of reasons. We'd have to do a fair assessment of the percentage of failures compared to the industry as a whole to really get a feel for whether YC is successful or not.
Agree totally.
I guess what I'm trying to say is - If you want to make a dent in the world, do it before you have kids. It aint easy afterwards (although it's not impossible)
People say that hindsight is 20/20. No. Hindsight is speculation with the benefit of never being able to be proven wrong.

Having read this "what we should have said" article, I'm suspicious that if they had done everything differently like they suggested, that they would have still come out to the same result.

Why? Because the idea of an article with a revision tree and multiple current versions is naturally confusing to users. No matter how nice the formalism is. Until you can start to think about and present things in terms that the users can "get", you're going to have a serious UI problem that limits adoption.

And even once you have that version, you still need to be able to compare and contrast it to things that people are familiar with so you can talk to people who don't "get" it yet.
This is one of the best post-portems of a YC interview. Thanks for being so open. And also, solid advice!
The IITs are definitely overhyped however there is no doubt that there are some real quality minds in there. That said, there isn't a great deal of research required to understand why fresh grads in India don't do startups. It's just common sense. Here are some of the top reasons that I can think of right off the bat:

1. It's too risky. The reason I went to IIT is so that I can get a stable job at the end of it. Why would I throw that away now with a Startup ?

2. I don't know how to do it. There is no startup eco system in India. There are some changes happening in Bangalore recently but India is such a large country that if you're in another region, you are pretty disconnected from what goes on elsewhere.

3. I have a job lined up that'll pay me $35,000/year. A lot of IITians have jobs lined up for themselves (especially the good ones...). Why exactly would they want to invest their time and effort in a Startup - the equivalent of starting from scratch - if they can take the IIT badge that they have earned and get a head start on everyone else while climbing the corporate ladder ?

4. I want to pursue studying X/an MBA/something else.

5. NO ONE in society will understand why I didn't take the $35k/year job and decided to work for NOTHING for at-least 1 YEAR of my life. OMG! DEATH AND SUFFERING!!! Indian society is tough. If you decide to 'do a startup' your parents will hear no end of it from their relatives, neighbors and even colleagues. Most Indian kids can't put their parents through that kind of crap, unfortunately, that's how society works. Everyone will STFU once your startup makes $1M/year but until then prepare yourself for constant nagging. Basically, in India if you work for X multinational corporation then your parents get bragging rights and everyone's eyes widen with wonder... Sad, but true.

So in conclusion, I'd like to say that it's far more likely for people who are NOT from the IITs to work on startups in India. The risk/reward ratio for IITians is perceived to be MUCH higher because of all the options laid out in front of them already. Choice is a bitch :P
Ernest Borgnine
I don't see how this is different from a Google doc, where you have one doc owner and you can set permissions so that other people can view, edit, or only leave a comment?
I can understand taking over an abandoned mall to make a "Zombie Theme Park" like was done in the UK

http://www.zedevents.co.uk/the-mall/

but 200 acres is pretty big, and outdoors makes everything more complicated.
It's interesting that he discusses due dates as a motivator and as a way keeping everyone synced up. This is something that Udacity later dropped. I wonder why they dropped them and whether the change is having the effect they want.
In my experience it doesn't really become clear whether the ideas are good or bad until they've been written down. For this reason I prefer a two-stage backlog, where the first stage is for definition and the second stage is for the ideas from the first stage that you decide you're actually going to do, just not right now.
I find it far far easier to gain (Beach) muscle than to lose fat

I find doing things much easier than constantly not doing things.
That's silly. If you buy a phone from Media Markt you aren't going to Media Markt for support, you're going to HTC, Apple, Samsung or whoever made the phone.
Versatility of fuck - OSHO
If you're using has_ancestry merge can let you do some amazing things just by adding .merge(path) or .merge(subtree) to a query.
I started out with a bit of a running dialog format, but then realized if I was looking for a job, I'd appreciated bullet points and the usual "Requirements" and "Responsibilities" sections. Any specific suggestions to make it less vanilla?
Let me nitpick on two other things:

1. Your blockquote color is basically unreadable if you're not young and/or have perfect vision.

2. If you want to excise marketing jargon from your life, you can start by dropping "action" as a verb.
Your WWSHS version suffers from two major problems. First, it identifies (arguably, muddily) a pain point while offering no solution. I need a robot that does my dishes in a big way, but I doubt your startup has a product that addresses that need. Second, you're suggesting that a VC needs your product as a customer, not as an investor. What VC's really need is to make money for their limited partners (PG is perhaps an exception here, but that's beside the point). A gold-plated golf club cover that measures wind speed (oh and makes a damn good cup of coffee on the side) might be needed by a particular VC, but it says nothing about whether or not that's likely to be the basis of a reasonable investment thesis.

What you describe sounds like a big hairy problem and you haven't even begun to address how your product/offering/team are going to tackle the problem.
Now you are talking. Although co-founders are hard to find... especially outside the big cities.
I've looked at outsourcing and it feels a little like quitting... I LOVE programming - although I'm not the best.
Thanks for the SEO tip... Already noticed that, and it is on my list to fix up.
What part of Linux "is not deemed" a success did you not understand?
What's the actual alternative to assuming that some kind of crypto is feasible ? Physics informs philosophy.
I think if I'd been PG I would have said "So, it's like Google Wave?"
Although I have a Windows 7 machine sitting next to me, and while I consider Ubuntu to be my primary operating system, I still use XP for much of my work. XP will for a very long time be the OS I most feel at home with. My comfort zone. It reminds me of back in the day when I was clinging onto Windows 3.11 for dear life -- never wanting to upgrade to Windows 95. Memories.
This is the current consensus among the best performing tech companies. Close off your ecosystem and own you content end to end. That is the best way to monetize.

Not saying I agree, just saying that is the emerging zeitgeist.
Writing non-English identifiers in a programming language that is based on English keywords seems wrong to me anyway. I'm not an English native speaker myself, but I accept that the international language of programming and source code is English.
Hmm, my analysis (writing as I go):

- Too much "fluff"; his response sounds like a marketer not a builder

- In the opening two answers he basically contradicts his description; "co-authored notebooks" vs. "one author for a given note, and a threaded conversation around it". It's confusing.

- The alternative opening is even worse; I still have no idea what problem your solving. You just gave me a marketing pitch..

- The alternate answer for "Who needs what you’re making?" is better - but immediately begs the question "how are my labels necessarily effective for both myself, and the YC alumni" and "How do you know the YC alumni don't have their own tag system which they apply as they read emails" or even "sounds handy, but how are you overcoming the convenience factor associated with email"

- Any sensible listener will realise that a) and b) are not the only choices (this is a variation on my last bullet point) and be concerned that you are limiting yourself to only those outcomes.

- It also seems risky to pitch such a personal use case on a supposition. The "problem" might already have been effectively resolved for YC's communications.

All in all it reads a lot like a business person pitching to an engineer. One that is attuned to the problems of "gloss", and is looking for disruption and good engineering rather than a glossy pitch. I get that all the time and it is off putting. It strikes me that the key problem is you possibly don't speak the same language as pg.

As with other commentators; even with the revised answers, I'm still not sure what Rocketr is beyond a note taking app with social features.
> Why is it a bad thing that someone was willing to pay money to make Java fast.

I guess there's someone who wants to pay for that.

But I don't think it's money well spent. The Java bytecode is not designed for or suited to fast execution and it's a bad intermediate representation for computer programs to be compiled into native code. The Java byte code was designed to be easy to interpret and was designed at a time when a memory access was faster to execute than an ALU instruction (on cheap h/w where Java was originally intended to be run on). Those days have passed and we should move on to better intermediate representations for computer programs. Like LLVM IR.
Thank you: And it really is a team effort - without all of the volunteers, including myself PyCon wouldn't be possible.
There wouldn't be, its a (TM) not an (R).

A (TM) is for an unregistered trademark, you own the IP of it though your use of it in the marketplace. This is what they have, and in fact anyone could have. In reality the (TM) is there to indicate you intention to protect it.

An (R) is for the registered trademark, as the name suggests you register it with your local trademark authority. It provides grater protection and is easer to take people to court over the misuse of.
> In the US, many car manufacturers take a different approach. The security key is provided by the manufacturer, not the on-board computer, so you can't simply walk up and re-program a key.

And the consequence is that a replacement key costs $150. No joke.
A Machine To Pick Startup Winners
This is incorrect. They aren't just there for redundancy, they are there to account for gyro 1 vs 2 anomalies (drift).
Thanks anyways, I hope you find something interesting to work on! :)
Don't Cry for Hollywood Yet
Ask HN: Taking HTML/CSS skills further: from websites to apps. How?
I'm pretty skilled with front-end work however there's a huge difference between making regular websites and making desktop-UI-like applications, e.g. Grooveshark.

I have trouble building applications with fluid UIs that resize as the browser window changes. Does anyone know of any books, information or guidance about these kinds of skills? Advanced front-end work, basically.
Sleep is important and I do try and get enough. But it is like an illness/addiction... the highs, the lows. Sometimes I have so much energy for it... you'd have to drag me to bed. But the mornings are low points.
I guess to be truly successful you need a plan, a direction and you need to be 100% sure of it.
Correct. It doesn't proof much, but that they previously had a buggy robots.txt.

Usually these posts are accompanied by a declining traffic graph for Bing referrers. That would give us more proof and a timeframe to work with.

The post gives two options for their absence in Bing results: a fault at Microsoft or as a punishment. With their history I think a fault on their own part is a more likely option. I can't rule that out.
For OS/X it looks like TexShop has an update also: http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/

I have written several books using TexShop - love it.
It's interesting how many people see PG as the test of their company's viability (did he get it, didn't he get it?) when what really matters is what the customers think. Did they get it? Did they not?

All this handwringing over a post-mortem with PG, and I rarely see the same with regards to customers. Customers are walking from your site, failing to respond to your marketing, failing to convert, choosing competitive solutions, etc., and where's the post-mortem?

This is a valuable lesson. Not about what to say or not to PG, but rather, how much a poorly crafted value proposition or explanation of your product can instantly and quickly turn off your customers.

Make your products easy to understand, easy to purchase, and easy to get value from, and you will win. Make it complex on any of those fronts, you will lose.
Totally agree.Furthermore kids that age (17-18) are not supposed to be solving 5000 math problems for some stupid entrance exam.

Personally I flunked IIT Mains because with my ADHD I could not get myself to study more than a few hours every week.Also at the ripe age of 17-18 I did not have enough drive or ambition to stop doing the things kids love to do (chasing girls, watching movies, loafing around etc etc.) But then I am actually proud that I did not give in to the IIT bullshit and did whatever I wanted to do. You will never get that age back no matter how successful you are!
> It's surprising how rarely we encounter good critics in our lives

Don't say that, or I'll keep being this way. :(
Pathological skeptic here. Being critical, challenging ideas, and evaluating possibilities is something that makes people very uncomfortable and being honest can burn a lot of bridges, no matter how nice you are about it.

We live in a very lonely world, and most people would rather shut their mouth and damn the consequences that have a healthy argument. It's cold comfort knowing you're right when no one wants to listen.

We are born into a cruelly honest world. Children, before life beats them down, are cruelly honest. Somewhere around that first full time job and the first pregnancy scare, all of the piss is taken out of us. We don't want to be judged, so we don't judge others.

It's a very sugar-coated world to live in.
I wouldn't call it a solid advice. Others on the thread have already noted that the problem isn't really in not driving the conversation. It's how you differentiate and make it easy to grasp what you do. I find both advices in the end of OP blog post to be misleading.
It should also activate a big red sign in the controls that means: "The new key will be usable in 3 hours"; so if you actually didn't changed the keys, something is wrong.
Ok fair enough, but considering that gulags are known to us via old propaganda stories and prisons are part of the modern human rights (intellectual) blind spot that most affluent western people suffer from, it's not surprising that you consider them drastically different.

In my opinion, the notion of almost certain rape and being locked into a cell with a violent individual in a system where violence is tolerated is about as cruel a punishment as one could possibly inflict. The worst psychological torture combined with brutal physical subjugation.
Given the granularity in timing (i.e. 0.000 sec) you are looking for, I don't think active would help; and, the tags are certainly more expensive, though reusable.
Not everyone thinks like that. Besides when a person wants money for survival larger view of the economy is the last he will care about.

All I'm saying is people who work their whole lives to get their kids a decent education and those kids themselves are most likely to take a safer path in life. Because they want all their sacrifice to result in a better life. I am not saying start ups don't offer that. But start ups are often risky and ridden by failures. Who would like to be in a situation where they see their parents slog their whole lives to put them a decent place, and now as kids they waste all that by failing in things whose risks they understood pretty well. In such cases, will the parent lives, their work have any meaning?

Now imagine a situation if your basic education, food, clothing and shelter are more or less taken care of. You have good medical care. You don't have to take any risks to just survive. You know if you fail, you always have some basic things taken care of. The infrastructure is there, there is lesser corruption and bureaucracy to worry about.

When you ask why people are afraid to take risks its the former reason.

In the latter situation risk only has a time value, and nothing much.
Does it really matter that the hacker doesn't know which hash belongs to the user? He will still be able to do a dictionary attack using the same method you use to login.

Wouldn't this just make dictionary attacks easier? Now the hacker doesn't have to find one exact password but has the option to match any of his dictionary passwords to any of the password hashes.

I know that there are hardly any collisions and that in practise this wouldn't really change a thing. But in theory the dictionary attack would be faster this way.
Russian Space Propaganda Posters
For anyone interested, check out the Implementing Lean book:

And the rest of the Poppendiecks' books too. They're all good.

I have to say, there's way more wisdom in the more mature 'lean' world than there is in the trendier 'agile'.

I'd disagree with that. Its just that agile has suffered the curse of becoming popular - so there are lots of folks/tools out there who have the label agile, but none of the meat.
Commit to the day job? It is a square peg in a round hole... It would be hell for the rest of my life. You can't quit... It's well documented.
You need to make a dent in the world.. If it doesn't happen then I'll have to die knowing that I tried.
For $300 I expect...

Good thing it's $200 :)
Exactly. I'm actually fascinated with these kind of tools - I have logins for Workflowy, Trello, Asana, Evernote, Simplenote, Orchestra etc. - and I have no idea how this differentiates itself.

What PG zeroed in on is the primary problem here - you are in a crowded category and you need to show a lot more awareness of competitive positioning.
Did you read the "What Twitter could have been" Dalton Caldwell blog post¹ last week?

¹ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4185757
The Olympics and WAN Traffic Prioritization: Are You Ready?
Why are so many of the commentators entirely missing the point of @drupeek's article? Folks - this isn't about screenshots, whether to blog or not, grammar, or market segments. I know Andrew, and he's really not in need of most of the advice being offered to him in this post.

His point is about pitching, breaking through the noise, and controlling the frame while you have ten minutes with an type-A personality. We all need to learn how to deal with this, and Andrew's making a valuable contribution. A lot of Andrew's advice reminds me of a book called Pitch Anything - I highly recommend you read it.

The book is mostly about two things: using stories to capture and excite the most basic parts of the basic human brain, and controlling the frame of a conversation in order to make sure your story is heard by an audience which is naturally hostile. I believe anyone who's pitching deals should take a look.

In conclusion, please stop patronizing Andrew, and contribute something meaningful to the conversation.
Acknowleding the Language Barrier in Business Development
Sadly, I'm Back On LinkedIn
[1] finally explains to me why so many new languages like Scala and Kotlin and Go use the right-hand side declaration syntax. And it also automatically aligns multiple variable identifiers in one column.
Like I said, I don't know if vanilla is a bad thing.

Personally, I think your biggest problem is going to be that WordPress is a hunk of shit and the people who would make good first employees don't work with WordPress because they don't have to - I, personally, have done about at least 50 WordPress installs but I use it as little as possible because the codebase is a festering mess.

I don't know how to get around that problem, but if you figure it out I'd be interested in hearing how.
A couple of years ago we did "Bug Bankruptcy" at my old gig. We then instituted a policy: either a bug was worth fixing RIGHT NOW (or reasonably close to it, say after you finish working on your feature) or NEVER. Bugs that were re-reported by users we would move up our mental immediacy list. I like it because it didn't require a fancy software solution - just the group memory. It worked really, really well, and we continue to use it today.
I use Kubuntu with a single user shared with my wife. Profiles mean we can easily have different FF set ups. I could do this through separate users but dont want extra administrative overhead.

I've heard of others using this as a way to keep a slim browser but still have a swiss-army webdev browser for working with.

It's not the profile system that was broken it was some user settings that were dragged in through the upgrades from version 3 (when I last replaced the profile).
iOS 5 has a far less buggy memory management system (strong/weak vs strong/unsafe_unretained). You may not realize this is a killer feature, but it is, it makes your apps function in cleaner ways, and allows more functionality to be correctly done done with less work.

Additionally, the UI is tons easier to correctly customize, making apps more colorful with less custom graphics, making apps smaller. This means more apps can be downloaded OTA, and apps can have more stuff in them before hitting the OTA limit.

Supporting iOS4 causes both of the above to be missing. I don't even want to talk about iOS 3, which makes it so you can't use ARC and Blocks, two of the things that make iOS dev much better today than it was 24 months ago.
So this means I can get my hands on Windows 8 in August. However, the more pressing matter is when I can get my hands on a Surface tablet.
He's killed it himself by taking so long on it. :/
Yes, but I disagree. I think it is actually better positioned than Facebook to build a big business. Twitter can advertise against breaking news, sports, celebs - a ton of eyeballs. And they don't have the obstacles around privacy and personal data that FB does.

That being said, I think they are making a myopic decision by shutting out their third party clients. A ton of innovation has come from those developers and they could easily find ways to integrate them into their advertising plans.
I'm seriously considering leaving VZW after nigh on 10 years. because Unlimited:40 => 2gb:60 is a deal breaker.
For what it's worth, Clojure has implementations of Phil Bagwell's HAMT-based hash-maps, vectors, and sets. These are absolutely amazing data structures, and offer functional updates, a list-like API (O(log_32(n)) for most operations, which ends up being less than seven operations in practice, which is similar enough to O(1) for most programmers).

I'm not much of a common lisp programmer (mostly sticking with scheme/racket and Clojure), but I don't think they've been ported to Common Lisp (yet), so the claim that Clojure has better data structures than Common Lisp, while somewhat a matter of preference, isn't entirely unsubstantiated.