skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stumbled upon Fuller while doing research for a college class. His story stuck with me.

From Wikipedia:

At 32 his daughter died, he became bankrupt, and almost gave up. Instead he By age 32, Fuller was bankrupt and jobless, living in public, low-income housing in Chicago, Illinois. In 1922, Fuller's young daughter Alexandra died from complications from polio and spinal meningitis. Allegedly, he felt responsible and this caused him to drink frequently and to contemplate suicide for a while. He finally chose to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."
I share your opinion. I think there is a much bigger opportunity to solve niche problems in niche markes that require very specific, high-quality solutions. Going into these markets doesn't look so attractive at first, especially not to the crowd on HN, since it isn't connected to building highly scalable web apps that are built on cutting edge technology. Instead it can be done with a traditional lamp setup on a non-cloudy virtual root server with 2gigs of ram.
Also, why this isn't a topic here on HN is because these niche markets are mostly not at all tech-related, meaning you need some actual knowledge of things outside of the tech scene. Many people here lack this experience.
I am glad about this though, it leaves much room for experimentation, it's approachable with mediocre programming skills and you can grow organically with the actual demands of your customers. They are also very happy to pay for my product....
Sure, really we'd be better off replacing them all with something designed along the lines of XMPP but by a modern committee focusing on a few limited features.

The idea of it being a single non profit site seems terrible in comparison.
I wish I could mod this up a hundred times. PostgreSQL people themselves have been playing into the hands of corporate FUDders with their incessant and inappropriate peddling. MySQL is not your enemy, MS SQL Server is. Oracle's software empire as a whole certainly is your enemy. Show some solidarity with a fellow open source project!

MySQL and PostgreSQL represent two very different implementation philosophies, and being able to choose between them according to taste and merits is a good thing.

Most of us have suspected that the MySQL project itself was going to die as it was acquired by Oracle, in the same way Open Office died when it was acquired by Oracle. This is a company where good software goes to expire, either due to a deliberate intention or gross incompetence I can't say but I suspect it's a mixture of both. However sad that may be for the MySQL (or OpenOffice) brand name, the code itself lives on and continues to evolve within a rich open source ecosystem.

Hence, sensational and petulant "RIP $PRODUCTNAME" articles are unnecessary. There is no threat to existing projects based on MySQL or any other successful open source project for that matter. Not only will this stuff be free forever, it will also continue to grow and be developed on its own.

The corporate assassination of open source projects will only work if we let it, it's a purely psychological game.
Two ideas struck me from the book.

First, thinking like a technician is different from thinking like a manager is different from thinking like a business owner. You may have technical expertise, but that doesn't in and of itself teach you how to manage a business or how to build a business. Sometimes you have to switch hats. You'll almost certainly have to learn the difference between performing a skill, managing people, and building a business.

Second, building a sustainable business requires you to create good processes which allow you to get good results from average workers. Gerber calls this the franchise model. Even if you don't want to build a franchise, he argues that the technique works--this means getting knowledge out of the head of the one or two fantastic employees you have (the ones on whom the business relies) into documentation.

I ought to write up longer thoughts on the book. I found it frustrating to read but valuable nonetheless.
This is pretty cool, but it also represents one of my main beefs with the HTML5/CSS standards and their past, current and future direction. That is the substantial amount of cognitive friction involved in doing many relative simple, even sometimes common things.

Implementation of often basic UI design concepts and interactions can quite often require some serious contortions of the HTML, CSS or both (though very fortunately, less and less the HTML). CSS is designed around being exceptionally flexible but nonetheless, there is no real consideration for usability or common patterns and use cases (or for the poor souls who may have to wrap their heads around these styles later on). I think in the end this is leading towards some pretty ugly legacy issues.

Sadly, I have no real solution here so I'm just bitching. I sort of see why we are at this point, and I don't currently see any way that a somewhat haphazard standards definition process can possibly focus on usability. Perhaps someone else here does?
You don't have radioactive iodine floating around. Radon doesn't asbord into your thyroid glands.
Maybe keeping at it and deploying the beer hack - a very good marketing tactic, really - what made Y! make up their mind. Anyone that dedicated is bound to at least get stuff done.
I'm 21, admittedly not much older than you. Incidentaly 17 is also the year when I really started programming (I had fiddled in html/css and php before that).

What I found that is that learning tend to accelerate. The more you know, you faster you'll learn new things. So go out and learn, anything, it doesn't matter. Don't get bogged (like me) on searching for the perfect language or framework or whatever.

Also, build things. For some reason I'm very appealed by the idea that you can learn something out of a book. But looking back, doing stuff is always the best learning experience, and it also tends to stick a lot better.
Did you guys bootstrap Swagsy?

Russ
This is great! I added it to our homepage because olark has been great, so hearing the voices of our customers would be great too.

I did a quick custom button on our page and put it alongside our twitter and fb buttons (http://www.doublerobotics.com), but it would be nice to have a well designed/branded widget that fits nicely with social buttons.
tl;dr determination, creativity, and a good product demo.

If you copy those things, you'll have a good chance of getting into YC.

If you copy "Send Garry Tan beer," you'll look like "the guy that didn't have any original ideas, so he copied Apoorva" :)
GPL is restrictive. It may be unacceptable to put GPLd apps on the App Store because of Apple's regulations, for instance. It makes it impossible to integrate Pixar's new open-sourced code with Blender, because the licenses conflict.

Sure, the problems are caused by the contradictory licenses, but GPL is part of the problem here.
Something I wrote about those a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360330

I took the time to recommend some books that were very specific to the thread at hand, that I had taken the time to read and evaluate. Getting a few extra dollars to buy more books with, that costs those clicking nothing, seems like a mutually beneficial transaction in that it makes me more likely to read some interesting books I can recommend in the future.

So: yes, they were. If you don't like them, don't click on them. If you think my account is a spam account, created for the purpose of spamming HN with affiliate links, feel free to report it to Paul Graham.
Being responsible for the update would take years off of my life. One slip up and you've thrown away 2.5 billion dollars.
You think the difference between interview and no-interview with a seed fund is "six pack of beer"? That doesn't sound naive to you?

My read was, the difference here was between the idea of a business being discussed on the Internet, versus an instance of the actual real-world execution of that idea.
It doesn't seem impossible to get a connection with people inside YC. The OP, for example, asked YC alumni for some introduction.
Maybe YC's way of selection is just a way to weed out people who would simply send an application and wait, instead of being pro-active.
I actually saw this happen once. A system admin (we'll call him Rick) I worked with had failed to get something installed, and it was going to cost the company thousands of dollars. (Not 10s of thousands, though.) The CEO/Owner told Rick that if he didn't get it installed within 24 hours (the actual deadline, not made up) then he was fired.

Rick installed the software (which took most of the 24 hours apparently: remote machine, hard to work with the hosting company, etc) and then quit, effective immediately. He was jobless for a while, but he eventually got a better job.

He really should have had it installed before that, but it wasn't his only job responsibility, and the system was really, really unstable at that point. Emergencies were a daily occurrence.

I stuck it out with the company. I wanted to have a few years experience on my resume before looking for another job, and they hadn't yet done anything like that to me.

The company's HR policies were pretty much exactly what you'd expect, after that occurrence. I managed to avoid most of it, but even simple things like vacation time were really painful.
"Dedicated enough to send a six pack" is not a very strong signal. Probably don't everyone start sending gifts to yc now.
Please note that the amount was $211 million
Percona has done a lot of work to enable MySQL to take advantage of SSDs, work that hasn't percolated into mainline or MariaDB.
This was interesting and helpful. It wasn't clear though how much this was directed at Acqui-hire vs Soft Landing. It seems most of it was Soft Landing focused?
It is really weird. For six months the CEO didn't notice anything bad in the work place, no bad things happening that would make him think that is something is going very wrong.

Than, by chance, he notices that one of his employes isn't doing something he asked, for six months. Then he thinks "wow, this guy is ruining my work" and threatens to fire two workers if they don't fix it in 24 hours.

From any perspective, the OP came off looking really bad, and I doubt that people will feel better in such a work place... especially when word spreads that if you make mistakes you can be fired in 24 hours.
Link to Hipset: http://hipset.com
Most consumers are not used to buying online services that don't have a physical component. We're used to free. And when there's a free alternative, not a lot of people will be paying for a slightly better paid version.

If you want to sell stuff to consumers, it's important to have a physical component. And it has to solve a very very crucial problem like losing weight.
Yeah, I would have quit on the spot, too. Even though I agree with his overall message, and e "or you will be fired" is implicit. All he needed to do was say "making this a great place to work is my one goal" and any reasonable person would have jumped on it.

I wonder if their corporate culture at the time was so dysfunctional that threats were necessary for any response, in which case quitting is a great move anyway. Or maybe he is just trying to appear more badass for dramatic effect in a story.

(It's kind of like every time I had a rifle on a sling in a war zone, I never had to threaten anyone. You only threaten people when you have no power.)
I'm not so sure. I'm more inclined to believe that agriculture was probably the reason vegetarianism. I'd rather eat vegetables predictably than wonder if I'm going to be able to hunt my next meal.
Fuller was a crackpot and he definitely sounds off his rocker in the video. Maybe he inspired some things, but I don't understand why he gets so much positive attention. Geodesic domes are horribly impractical (prone to leaks, difficult to use their interior space). Three wheeled cars are dangerous.
That is what $1800 gets you.
This is pretty cool. They are coming up with ideas for their tag line and people in the chat room are coming up with some good ideas.

"Team up with your customers"

"Give back to who has your back"

"Who's got your back?"

"Backly is an application that provides a platform for bands, startups and big companies to reward their fans with insider and exclusive info, contests and awesome swag."
Is it possible to downgrade back to 4.4? 4.4.1 seems to crash often now when stepping through my code.
Mindfold[1] was a very good suggestion. Great for people airbnbing as well.

[1] http://mindfold.com/
Dedicated as in contacting all Y! partners. Dedicated as in running up against a wall and finding a way around it. And it really wasn't about the beer but generating interest in Instacart.
I've actually noticed that citizens of the US need to provide their SSN in a huge number of situations that I would never need to provide any kind of government identification.

The closest thing we have to an ID that every citizen has is an IRD number for the purposes of tax. You would give that to your bank and your employer so that they can pay tax on your behalf, but even that is optional. If you don't provide it then they will assume that you pay tax at the highest rate.

Compare to when I was staying a friends house in the US and heard him give his SSN to the phone company when he was troubleshooting his internet. I find it baffling that you would need a government issued ID number just to form a relationship with a phone company.
That's a great example of the power of demonstration. Showing someone what your product can do, as opposed to what it will do is about 10,000x more powerful.

However, this sort of begs the question, if you already have a successful product, why give up a significant amount of equity to an incubator? To help sales?
"It is remarkable that so much attention has been given to the radioactive release from Fukushima, considering that the direct death and destruction from the tsunami was enormously greater. Perhaps the reason for the focus on the reactor meltdown is that it is a solvable problem; in contrast, there is no plausible way to protect Japan from 50-foot tsunamis."

It's amazing to be able to take such an arrogant attitude. The outrage regarding the Fukushima disaster is exactly that there would have been no fallout if not for several human errors leading up to the disaster -- and the lies and misinformation following the disaster. There is a complete and justified lack of trust in the government and the industry -- and no indication that there will be no further accidents -- whether induced by natural disasters or just poor maintenance.

So yes, over engineering does indeed work -- and is a necessary measure when dealing with potential radioactive fallout -- but even then accidents do happen. I've seen people claim that the fact that human error is behind this and other accidents "proves" that nuclear power is safe -- this is of course rubbish. Human error will always be a big risk factor in any engineering project.

The author also ignores the fact that Japan has done an unprecedented job of mitigating the damage tsunamis can do -- but that the effort had been scaled towards what was assumed to be the likely threat -- a tsunami smaller than the one associated with this earthquake. He implies that this effort was for nothing -- which isn't true. It simply wasn't effective along large parts of the coast as it should (could) have been.

Consciously allowing a potentially huge risk -- the long time destruction of farmland and populated areas by radioactive contamination -- versus not mitigating all possible natural disasters and risks of war -- is a false dichotomy.

The problem with nuclear power isn't that a lot of people might die from cancer -- it's that generations might be affected by a single accident -- and will be burdened with containing spent fuel for longer than human civilization have existed.

Finally, if it turns out that geothermal power is a viable alternative -- then it should be possible to fulfil Japan's energy need without any risk of nuclear fallout.
By doing this they're selecting for people that have a strong understanding of social interaction. That's understandable, social interaction is the fundamental skill of business and I wouldn't expect many startups to succeed without someone who's very, very good at it.

On the other hand YC can't teach someone to hack, but it can teach advanced social/business skills (or help a strong technical team find a non-technical cofounder) so maybe they should take that into account.

On the gripping hand they have plenty of applicants to choose from. Why spend resources sifting through the purely technical teams when plenty of applicants already have both sides covered?

EDIT: P.S. Instacart looks awesome though, so purely for personal benefit I'm glad they got in.
Is there a reason to link to a cut-and-paste instead of the original at http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1729.html ?
Inconvenient truth hiding behind the excitement about educating girls.
"I think this is a fair price for the joy of retaliating against junk mail. Plus, it costs me time and money to deliver these postcards."

What work is on your end? It appears that Sincerely prints/ships it, and the $2 charge is to pay for that.
Does not work with girls. When they say "No" - that usually means "Yes, but later" or "Yes, but you'll have to work on it". So I would not take "No" for an answer here too ;)
I know this has been discussed a million times here, but: "Connect with Facebook". No thanks, tab closed. Sorry!
pg talked about this last year before Startup School. The gist is that they are always modifying their methods for acceptance and that sometimes, they miss founders who later go on to be successful elsewhere. Indeed, pg said that because they have a massive amount of historical data (i.e. previously funded companies) they use this to guide their selection process during each batch.

I've applied 3-4 times over the years. We got the interview once a couple years ago but not accepted, and had a phone call with Harj early this year but not the interview.

So the point is that while knowing people who know people is useful, it's not necessary. The team is really looking at who the founders are, what kind of stuff they've built, how they get along and more. This fellow pulled the strings he could and was impressive enough that it worked. Final thing to note is that he's a solo founder. They almost never accept solos, because it most often takes a team to be successful. This guy was exceptional himself, and he proved it, which is why they accepted him.

(Note: I don't know the founder at all. These are just my suppositions based on previous experience and encounters with the team.)
Retaliate is misspelt in the subheader.
What age range are we talking about? 17? 15? 13? less than that?
The integral dependency on FaceBook for this service makes me wonder if this is built with the goal of eventually being acquired by FB.
I think you're kind of missing the point. He didn't just send a six-pack of beer, but rather he sent a six-pack of beer with his own product. I don't think getting food delivered to their offices is going to help your pitch for a new way to share photos.
fire with fire? i like the post card art!
two criticisms; the whole idea is a bit hypocritical (sending more spam) and doesn't address the underlying issue of spam mail. Have a place to sign up for a "do not spam" list on your website and give users the option to "F JUNK MAIL" for $2.00. Also, I think you should make the price $1 because sending a post card has a known price and it's quite easy to do so offline. Why should they use your service and pay more?
And yes, you can easily get a public link to any voice feedback you receive, and post it on your testimonials page. But I would check with the sender first obviously.
Show HN: View a random tweet from somebody
TL;DR: YC's formal application process is broken. The new application process is to send beer or other gifts directly to the YC partners.
I like how you use "perceived" to modify Linux's deficiencies but "frothing-at-the-mouth" to describe individuals whose perspectives differ from yours. It's just so nicely objective.
Assuming you keep track of this area, are there any other interesting projects out there?
I think it's more to do with wanting to use Facebook's API to go viral.
This is just version 1. We launched with Facebook connect only because that was the fastest way we could launch it in a usable way. When you connect, we grab the artists you like on Facebook to generate your personal feed. There will be other ways to sign up soon!
A history of Olympic logos: From London 2012 to London 1948
Data Center Knowledge posted detailed video tours in April 2011, when the Prineville data center opened:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/18/video...

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/19/video...

Robert Scoble of Rackspace also posted photos and video from that initial tour. Since then Facebook has held two media tours of the facility. It's not rare at all, but the media that are just now gaining access are using the usual overhyped headlines to attract eyeballs.
BTW: For those wondering, we have not yet turned on the Facebook Open Graph Actions. It will not auto share with your friends when you look at content right now (and when we do turn that on you will have the ability to easily turn it off).
FYI for everyone who keeps asking what is backly. They seem to be repeating something along the lines of:

"Backly is a way for a business to reward the supporters of their business, by backing us you get an incentive"

http://backly.tumblr.com/ - their blog
> However, this sort of begs the question, if you already have a successful product, why give up a significant amount of equity to an incubator?

I think the idea is usually that the extra cash on hand right now and/or the networking and direct help you get from the incubator will help you grow your product so much faster that it's worth giving up the equity. In this case specifically, the capital could go to starting the same proven service in a few other cities, instead of somebody else becoming "InstaCart for Atlanta". Or maybe the most valuable part will be advice on how to scale out to other cities.
If you're logged in, you can go to http://github.com/home to see it. We are super excited. :)
You really should delete that comment. It's entirely inappropriate. When a woman says no, she means no. End of story.
Does it matter? Just go out there and create a company, be successful etc. Need money? Go work and save it. I moved back to my parents house and saved all my money so I could bootstrap my startup for over a year. It was tough (especially on my relationship with my girlfriend) but we worked through it.

I strongly feel the biggest reason a lot of people apply for YC is simply to get funding. I even noticed this vibe when I met a few founders at Work at a startup.

When you put your own money on the line you'll find you'll be hacking your way to make money in any way possible. You won't have much of a choice.

Ignore this post if you're already doing these things :).
Agreed. I got rid of my FB account years ago.. and can't use it. What a shame.. least they can do is add a link below to sign up the regular way. Don't give me "we don't got time" excuse.. this isn't like building an iPhone app but not an Android version
Why do you take it as a given that the founder's priority is the team? As a founder you have different stakeholders. Perhaps your investors have been with you for years and your team just joined, or the opposite. Like the article says, you can't generalize regarding the employees.
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