skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Non-YC founder here as well. Please don't read results like this and think there is no way you will have success as a founder if you do not get into an incubator by this age. Rather, what should be looked at is that YC looks for a very specific profile when grooming their prospective companies. They want young, vibrant, fearless candidates whose idealism allows for a significant chunk of ownership to be forked over in exchange for connections and press. As founders get older, we tend to learn there is more than one way to skin a cat. So you'll see us learning our own ways to network, or get press, or get traction.
I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and i've heard my old market (Raleigh, NC) is experiencing similar issues.
Misleading and incomplete coverage of Apple's 'record' value
I'm too deep in the coder lifestyle these days to say what it is like on the other side, but as an former serious music student, I can offer an analogue.

Anybody who has learned music and studied it seriously can tell you it colors the way you hear all music. When I was deep in it, pop music was intolerable. I liked rock, don't get me wrong, but it was all art/hipster stuff. Before you're "enlightened" with musical performance and theory, music just kind of "washes" over you. You get a beat and a mood but you're not taking it apart. After such "enlightenment," you'll hear it all in terms of time signatures, keys & changes, scales & modes, references, cliches & conventions, etc. Much like being a coder, it is a beautiful, cursed understanding. I'm now fully a decade into "recovery" from thinking I was a musician, and I will tell you I really like not having to think so damn much about my music.

So, if that is at all similar (and I think it is; btw, lawyers are another class of geek that have similar problems to programmers and musicians)...yes, it can get better! :)
I write this as a thankful and proud user of Varnish; which =I assume= phkamp would place as a cathedral type of software. I agree with; quality requiring someone being responsible, importance of code reuse, and the observation of full 10 years of dumb copy/paste (though i believe in copy/paste). Eric Raymond's distinction of Cathedral/Bazaar is somewhat a useless dichotomy, on the problems mentioned. Here are 2 examples how Varnish could do better (independent of being developed as bazaar or cathedral)

1) Varnish does not support SSL, which complicates deployment architectures; and part of the the blame goes to lack of a good ssl implementation to copy from or to write an SSL proxy; https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/ssl.html I find this as an example of why neither bazaar nor cathedral based approaches yielding something "acceptable" in past 15 years, to copy and paste from.

2) Varnish VCL, as a DSL looks as obscure M4 macro language and the functions are not well planned; and another guy (from the bazaar) would design some more coherent language.

=> To my mind the culprit is the scarcity of monetization opportunities for infrastructure components, which pushes talent (candidates for "being responsible") to elsewhere where money is. I mean, nginx/varnish developers should earn 100s of millions; according to their merit. People are making billions by using ruby, python, rails, sinatra, django, debian, varnish, nginx, openssl, and hundreds of libraries for libtool... but their everyday creators don't get enough reward back to feel responsible. Passion and hobby, benevolence or PR are the only drivers for most infrastructure and library development. Some developers lose their faith in a man's lifespan, fight back or quit in full despair.
What does wildcard dns have to do with wordpress sites, I have 5 wordpress sites with subdomains all pointing to one single server but protected behind cloudflare. All sites have their own domain with their own subdomins, like mobile.domain.com or whatever, but has nothing to do with wordpress or cloudflare support, just create new records.
> you need to think in a somewhat mathematical way at times

This is the essence of mathematics; all else is commentary (er, details).
>proves

No, it doesn't. To actually prove love marriages do not make sense, every single love marriage should fail. Anyway, 50% is a pretty damn good success rate, I think. I don't think I could choose someone to spend the rest of my life with correctly on my first time. It's perfectly natural to fall out of love - that doesn't mean that love marriages don't work, it just means that some don't work.
Does this mean we now have a convenient way to speak JMX from python? That would be very handy!
Mass transit is unpopular in all but the largest cities in the US because it's seen as the poor person's mode of transport, and the fear that there may be unsavory people on the bus. Mass transit is also tied to a tight schedule. I used to take the city bus to class, and I left my house an hour before I needed to be at class eight miles away, because I had to switch buses and that left me waiting at the second bus stop for half an hour.

A self-driving SOV designed for personal use won't give much advantage over the current model (except maybe fewer accidents), but if it encourages ride sharing and leased autonomous cars, it would be a net saving.
Is Google is blocking shopping results for vitamins?
Why is this happening? I can't find any info on it? I've tried searching for vitamins, nature made, and such. UK google displays the results but not google. Google won't even show Coconut water.
Please re-render your response in predicate calculus
I agree.

And I think another issue here is that it isn't the case that Samsung attempts to con people into thinking they're buying an Apple device. Even if you get up in arms saying that Samsung/Android copied certain features from Apple, it would an entirely separate can of worms if people regularly bought Samsung devices, thinking they were buying an Apple one.
Debian has also introduced new regrettable hacks, like run-parts's special handling (i.e., ignoring) of files whose names contain a period.
It's not chance, but it was very likely due to market conditions that have little to do with development methodologies or outright code quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi was hugely crippling at a very critical moment.

In a similar vein, PostgreSQL lost out to MySQL in no small part due to:

- PHP supported MySQL out of the box.

- MySQL was slightly easier to get running.

If there's a lesson we ought to learn, it's that market success may be partially or fully disassociated from actual merit relative to other market entrants. We've seen this in commercial software. It would be foolish to think it doesn't apply to open-source.
It's more human. I think it's a better word.
I had a teacher in college that was discussing the math requirement for the programming classes he taught. I was at this point past the classes being discussed. His reasoning for wanting, I think Algebra 1, for Intro to Programming (C++ at the time), was not because the actual math was used in the class. He wanted, as you said, to ensure the students were capable of mathematical reasoning.
Universities are in the business of making money, not education.

I worked for a company in 2004 that was a spinoff of a professor's project to create randomizable equations linked to a text book. Students would get a unique key/ID from their textbook, and log into our system to take practice exams and work on examples. Each question would be unique, and hopefully pedagogically correct.

Textbook publishers loved this idea, especially the fact that it required a unique key for each student. We had all of the major college textbook publishers as customers, either using our hosted system or licensing our software to use on their own web servers. If I recall correctly, we charged around $20-30 per student.

Eventually we were acquired, but I assume the software is still being "marketed" to the students.

The professor's project was funded by a DoE grant, and then he turns around and commercializes it with the explicit approval of the university.
OMG! The 13 guys at Instagram are not going to end up with approx $100,000,000 each. Instead they might get something around $22,000,000 in cash and more than $50,000,000 in Facebook stocks. I hope they can survive on that meager earnings.
I tend to have thoughts that maybe I have a genetic disadvantage that prevents me from excelling from things that I care about (programming, computer science, drawing, etc.), but I would rather die with the illusion that I could succeed in anything I set my heart to, than in to throw in the towel and accept that I'm hopeless. Having that mindset is working out for me so far.
"OP" here. The troll characterization it earned by throwing things like "Mixins vs. Multiple Inheritance" in the list of prerequisites necessary to understand the .each example, plus the strong "indoctrination" rant that precedes.

One could troll the for do construct example to require understanding of operational semantics, denotational semantics and / or abstract interpretation and gaulois connections, plus deriving the arithmetic rules in the calculus of constructions starting from the simple (sic) datatype definition Nat = Zero | Succ (Zero). All while ranting about the indoctrination in the evil ways of Turing machines.
I believe you have pinpointed the issue here. I learned to be more sociable and I'm still introvert. Making the distinction is important. Thank you.

But while having transitions, sometimes I really became extrovert. Mostly I like to hold my issues to myself. But sometimes - with the help of booze - letting go of my thoughts is easier.
I would suggest increasing the compression levels as well. With 4x the DPI bandwidth is an issue, but you don't notice compression artifacts as much.
Adjusting for inflation[1], MSFT at the peak in 1999 would be worth over $800B today (AAPL hit $623B today).

[1]: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
Can you let us download the data and run our own analyses?
Has that ever happened in the history of modern diplomacy? The guards of one embassy sent to invade another embassy? This doesn't sound silly to you?
what you see in the page is only one of the 25 predefined templates available. you can additionally customize the template to any color you want :) using our theme editor. Even more advanced customization is available through CSS :)
What self-respecting Consumer Electronic Startup would sell themselves to Best Buy?
I'd argue that your analogy strengthens my point. In their original form, cars involved people manipulating the mechanical parts as directly as possible (the steering wheel was completely tied to the front axle, the gas pedal, brake, starting crank all directly controlled a single aspect). And yet, we drive cars so naturally. I think using the word natural in this sense makes a lot of sense.
If I never give up and I never get better, despite trying new methods, what does that mean?

Also, if everyone says, "If you failed, you haven't tried enough, despite years of effort", what do I do?
As an investor, you aren't susceptible to anything - the company that takes your money bears risk of lawsuit. In this case, given how it's structured, fundersclub would be at risk.
Agree.

The writer for the story is "A former corporate attorney at Shearman & Sterling, he is a professor at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University."

As such he is looking at what structures could be possible instead of what happens actually in negotiation because you have to get agreement on both sides. While of course he could be correct, (we don't know the exact details so we can't rule that out) there is the possibility that those wouldn't have been terms agreed upon even if proposed.

The title of the story was "How Instagram Could Have Cut a Better Deal". Well they also could have cut a better deal by getting twice the amount they got even with the same terms or all in cash, right?

It's ironic as well since to most outside observers Instagram did quite well.
hiding your real ISP IP isn't that big a deal for pen testers, either VPN or Tor

I don't know many (I certainly don't) who use their real IP when probing sites
I think that saying that car sharing will be limited to the privileged metropolitan residents is short sighted, too. Services like Zipcar don't work well in less populated areas, because the cars are exactly where the previous person dropped them off. Autonomous cars would be able to relocate themselves to areas where they are needed, and could optimize their deployment very well especially if people scheduled in advance.
Baseball star attempted to dodge drug suspension by creating fake website
Not trying to be mean, but it doesn't work that way. "Decent" is relative to everybody else.
This article hits really close to home. After graduating college and getting a job in biotech I quickly realized that I don't want to spend next 30years in front of a lab bench, dealing with FDA etc. so I have been learning to code. starting with Django (i knew some Python beforehand) then I realized I need some javascript, jQuery, git, MySQL. The only difference is that I love it. Each technology provides something that blows my mind.
My experiment started in May and is going while I'm holding on to my lab job. By October I hope to have a portfolio going, I have two apps ready. I really hope it will all pan out.
Sweden does not want him for questioning. They want to arrest him for rape.
It would more often make sense for a consumer electronics manufacturer, not a retailer, to buy a startup. The manufacturer can sell in a variety of channels, whereas the retailer can sell only in their channel (most of the time). The manufacturer has lower margins (because the retailer will take their cut), but I'm willing to bet that they more than make up for it on volume.

So it seems like a CE manufacturer will always outbid a Best Buy for a startup.

I think this is why you don't see Best Buy or other retailers buying CE startups. The only ones available to them would be the ones that CE manufacturers aren't buying and you'd have to ask yourself why they wouldn't buy them.
Digging into /etc (particularly, the scripts that run on boot-up) made me reel back.
I was not aware that Disney's children shows had become authorities on software.
I'm not sure how else to say this, but taking things out of context still does not make them wrong. This is about teaching the concept of programming. If you're learning a particular language, yes, use the idioms. If you're teaching someone how to code, teach concepts that cross languages.
"Windows and Office are actually not examples of cathedrals, because the architectural focus of Microsoft was not on software but on a near-monopoly market."

So, you are defining "cathedral" as "good"?
I was hoping that with the advent of the Retina display, high density displays would lead to a transition back from pixels to ratios but apparently that call was to early; instead we get CSS pixels.
Most users don't, but they have the ability to be swiped, and I've seen some iOS users swiping them around.
How You Feel What Another Body Feels
This model is really helpful, as is the plain English guide also on that page - http://www.foundersfund.com/uploads/term_sheet_explained.pdf

You've made life a little easier for many startup founders with this. Thank you.
What is knock-off to you? A similar product manufactured for less or an inferior counterfeit indistinguishable from the genuine article by naive consumers? The latter was and is still a genuine problem; what is wrong with learning from others' successes? It will always happen to some extent and it's better for consumers if it happens as much as possible.
Rather ironically, it appears my poor choice of example could have done with some more documentation.
I actually found "Mindset" underwhelming and couldn't finish it.

I noticed that I do have the growth mindset... in certain areas of my life. In others I need to remind myself of it. I found Dweck's binary/black-and-white description of "growth" vs "fixed" mindsets to be contrived and unconvincing, and ended up putting the book down, feeling I hadn't learned anything new.
I don't see how you can possibly target the second group of clients with a startup. Organizations in the second category will by-and-large have the following properties:

A) Already have an ERP implementation of some sort. It may be awful, and difficult to manage, but it's there and most likely interfaces some important, or even mission-critical systems in the company. It's much easier to sell to an organization that is transitioning from ad-hoc/manual ERP to a systematic approach than it will be to convince to replace SAP with your new stuff.

B) Be relatively risk-averse. Larger organizations just have more to lose from a failed implementation. In a SMB, ERP often replaces manual process which can be reverted to or extended in case of a failed implementation. At a larger organization, you'll have mission critical processes interfacing with the ERP system meaning that there's very much an "if it's not broken..." attitude.

C) Classic high-touch, expensive enterprise sales cycles. While there are startups which have managed this, it's definitely the harder nut to crack than the more high-volume, but shorter, sales cycle that you'll find in the SMB market.
I meant it as a joke, while also recognising that it would be ideal for being turned into a cluster. It's made me nostalgic about the days when I built Beowulfs at university!
Random Ideas For Sites and Startups #2
As before feel free to take and remix concepts. Share yours too - you never know when someone will pickup pieces and make something great.
Lenen: de goedkoopste hypothecaire lening - Je Geldzaken
OkayFreedom: Simple Free VPN Service.
$300 million for a service that would've been lucky to make $100,000 annually in revenue.

1) Photo sharing => not profitable niche
2) Mobile app => hard to monetize
Creatively Designed USB Drives Pinned on Pinterest
... a rich ecosystem which combines copying with innovation and with less money pointlessly wasted on lawyers.
Mth Sense (YC S12) Aims To Improve Mobile Ad Targeting Based On Your App History
Started in IT in 1980. I'm 50 this year. First FOSS contributions were in Nov 87 (patches to gcc/gdb/emacs for convex machines). This pre-dates any contribution by ESR, and it enrages him when I point it out. :-)

My company ships quite a bit of FreeBSD (as pfSense). Could have gone linux, but linux is a mess (much worse than ports.)

I think OpenBSD is a mistake, at best it belongs as a group focused on security inside the netbsd project, but of course, Theo got kicked out of netbsd, thus: OpenBSD.

I'm also the guy who appointed Russ Nelson the "patron saint of bike shedding." Just FYI. :-) (None of Eric Raymond, Russ Nelson or Theo de Raat like me much.)

The first time I read of 'Cathedral & Bazaar' I thought ESR was illustrating and contrasting the BSD .vs linux development model. Only later did I understand that he was pointing fingers at GNU/FSF, not BSD.
This is a really excellent example of using your own product to generate interesting content as a way to drive traffic back to your product.

Great work Statwing. Can't wait until I have some data that needs analyzing so I can use your service.
Maybe older founders are more likely to have previous experience with hiring full time or freelance employees, and are hence less likely to doing everything themselves.
This article is ridiculous. Even if the deal were for $300M cash only, it would have been an amazing coup. $300M for a company with 30M users and ZERO revenues? They infrastructure costs were pure spending and eating away at cash, and they had no idea how low their user base would drop to if they tried even a modicum of monetization, like ads or subscriptions.

The fact they got 23M shares of FB is simply delicious gravy on top. This means they get to participate in any upside on FB for free. The only thing that would suck is if they were somehow taxed on the value of FB shares when the deal went down, but I'm not even sure that would occur. I'm sure there's a way to structure the deal so that they wouldn't need to pay taxes until they sell the shares.
Yes, it's not like YC is discriminating against older founders. It's more like older founders realizing it doesn't make sense for them since they've developed a network, savings, management experience, etc.

Many of the benefits of an incubator (or even of angel investing/VC/etc in general) are the benefits of experience. No need to spend time gaining something you've already got and certainly no need to give up equity for it.
Why do you think Chrome is eating Firefox's lunch?

Humorous given that both webkit and from that Chromium are largely comment free. What nonsense are you arguing again?

I've worked on FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and an assortment of smaller widely used software projects, including user-facing applications.

"Worked on" in HN parlance means "I did a coop term and wrote some test cases for some irrelevant little utility". Given your comical claims about Linux and Firefox re: Chrome, I have enough information about your skills.
Commercial software can be distributed through the package managers, though you do have to tell the users to add archive sources for those or they have to provide those packages. We do see some of this being done.

One thing its useful to keep in mind, is that the different parent distributions are more-or-less different operating systems. They don't have differences because they are special snowflakes. Comparing the deployment story for trying to write a package compatible with every Linux distribution to Windows 32-bit applications is not really apples to apples.
Breakfast with Google's Search Team
I don't understand why Facebook got rid of so many features that made Facebook as targeted as it was.

For example, I'm in university right now and I would love to have a course application that was in one of those powerpoint slides. Instead, there is some stupid textbox which makes me arbitrarily assign certain text fields that don't help me strengthen my friend network at all.

At this point, Facebook has become so generic to the point where it's boring. I think the same point can be drawn to why their ad system fails. It's too diluted and irrelevant.
He's not saying it makes no sense. He's saying arranged marriages have just as high a success rate, if not higher. Personally, I can see that intuitively as well. Expectations are low, and there's not as much "passion". Not a lot of passion sounds bad to a lot of people, but it's better than having tons of passion, and having it turn sour.
Do investors need to compete?
I majored in math as a undergrad. One thing that got hammered into me by the professors whenever the career choice subject came up was that math is not a vocational training bur rather it's a training of high level abstract thinking and reasoning which can open up a number of career choices. It's a training of ability rather than knowledge. You might forget how a theorem proof work or even what that theorem is but you will remember the problem solving process.

As a proof they showed us the list of math graduates who became lawyers, economists, statisticians, teachers, writers, business admin, and of course computer scientists.
So, define a closure in terms that someone who has just learned what a variable is can understand.

"Just memorize this syntax and do it" is not allowed.