skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps you missed this part, but I actively work magick and do divination. That puts me on the hated list for the christian nutjobs, and most christians in general. And Jews. And Muslims. According to Wolfram Alpha, that's 49% of the world.

We pagans aren't trying to get 'pagan laws' in place, nor are we forcing our will on others. In all, we are trying to get government to honor the first amendment: get religious practices out of schools (and government in general) . We do that by demanding equal access to that of christians.

And frankly, you come across as a militant hard atheist. I do not accept any argument from Dawkins based on tautology. Please prove YOUR viewpoint as true. I'll do the same when you do.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28population+of+Christ...
Thank you Larry. You are right. If Fred didn't like what we were doing, probably he would have not sent a formal "cease and desist". He is not that kind of guy ;)
That wasn't what the previous commenter was saying at all, they said both 'probably' happen at the same time. It's a classic example of a contradiction used to hide cognitive dissonance, and being used to reinforce each other when they should cancel out.

Women are empowered creatures who are just as capable as men, but also horribly oppressed and in need of special consideration.

Socialist ideology is dangerous and a threat to the stability of society, but also horribly naive and completely ineffective at achieving change.

These sort of things always belie a more fundamental truth underneath, which tends to be emotional and usually just as simple as "you make me feel uncomfortable".
This. It's not (necessarily) a matter of scam, I just want to keep my activity in different parts of the internet segregated.
Isn't this an example of the winner take all phenomenon?

It seems to me that both Dropbox & Facebook are example of companies pursuing good ideas that lots of other companies were also pursuing. They just happened to be the ones that executed the best (and possibly also had the best luck) so they were able to win the market.

If this is the case then your job as a funder of startups might be to try to identify the companies capable of out executing everyone else on a good idea that a lot of people are working on.

This is much different than the great idea that looks bad phenomenon that pg discusses in his essay.
You're trading short-term convenience for long-term flexibility.
And it most likely makes no difference at all, because everything is wrapped into packets of a fixed size, much larger than 43 bytes.
>"isn't that the easy, uncreative, uninnovative part?" Yes, building usable experience is innovation, and yes its very important.

If you consider that to be innovation, surely offering an equivalent product at a substantially lower price (as amazon is doing) involves just as much innovation.
Although only about 1 percent of the computer-using population chooses to run Linux, the competition provided by Linux has had a positive effect on proprietary OSes, which benefits computer users who will never run Linux.

One example of this beneficial effect is the appearance of the netbook. Only after netbooks running Linux gained significant market share did Microsoft consent to license Windows to netbook makers at a price that made any sort of sense given the low retail price of the netbook. If Linux has not been an option for the early netbook makers, it is likely that hardware makers would never have been able to persuade Microsoft or Apple to consent to allow the product category to be created in the first place.

An argument can also be made that without at least a small fraction of computer users running Linux on their desktops, Linux would not have been able to capture the hearts and minds of corporate decision-makers with the result that Linux use on corporate servers might not have exploded the way it did in the late 1990s and first years of the 2000s. Certainly, Linux activists claiming to understand the thinking processes of corporate execs were saying at the time (late 1990s) that Linux needs desktop users in order to be taken seriously by mostly-Windows-desktop-using corporate execs and IT managers.

I will concede that at least some people (particularly, perfectionistic people like me or people who are easily annoyed) by will waste less time learning how to admin their machine if they run OS X than if they run Linux. And I will concede that the time and effort of these people would probably result in more social good if it were spent earning money and donating that money to a philanthropy than if it were spend learning how to adminning a Linux box. But that does not detract from the fact that if all you know about a person is that they run Linux, they're doing more "expected good" (a statistical term) for the world than someone who all you know about them is that they are a computer user or an OS X user.
Selling based false pretenses is unethical and potentially illegal.

Perhaps Amazon should have policy that sources are referenced, contributions described.
What's the probability that Bezos would have answered this email and not some other email?
There's lots of books, you can find RealWorld and Road to Logic online too (not sure if RtL is legit)

http://alexott.net/en/fp/books/#sec7

and tuts

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Learning_Haskell

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Category:Tutorials
overflow exception is plausible (it overflows anyway but the question is whether the system will let it continue). Performance timing without validating your results is, well, not worth anything.
At the same time YC doesn't mind those businesses and certainly ha a lot to offer them. Just when defining success of the fund as a whole these businesses at comparatively little to that.

Granted when they initially pick your business it is probably by because you explained what a great lifestyle business it will be.
There's a similarity to Thiel's analysis -- that few outliers provide all the returns -- but also a difference: PG seems more comfortable with the idea that early on, the ultimate winners are completely unknowable, and so 'many trails' (diversification) is absolutely necessary.

Meanwhile, throughout his lectures, Thiel seems to emphasize that with enough focus on the right people. important projects, and right 'secrets', outcomes are not as random as they seem... and both individuals and investors must concentrate on some big bets rather than endlessly diversify.
I do care about would-be founders' opinions, but surely I don't have to use every essay I write to convince people to apply to YC. I've already written elsewhere about the founder's eye view of YC (e.g. http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html). This essay is just an exploration of the strangeness of startup investing as a business. The goal is not to convince anyone to do anything.
By definition, every huge success has a strong growth strategy :)

That said, it often isn't obvious from the beginning. When I met Dropbox at YC, I don't recall them having any great plans for how to grow. I think that was discovered later on.

Also, that often-repeated Craigslist claim about AirBnB is actually false. They got very few listings from Craigslist.
If someone bought a couple adjacent houses in the neighborhood where I grew up, knocked them down, and built an 10-unit apartment building in it's place, it would have certainly rented, but it would have imposed unwanted change (traffic, appearance) in the community in which it sits.

I could see replacing "single family" with some sort of density restriction (people per acre?). What a home entails is not simply a dwelling + piece of land to its borders, but the community in which it belongs. Communities have generally decided that a predictable nature here is desirable, and thus have enacted zoning restrictions.
When Britain still was an empire, they didn't just complain endlessly about the weather. A little rain didn't deter anyone from cruising around in their Morgan...
That is the confusing part, Amazon talks about 'selling' it and he talks about 'managing copyright'. So it seems like they are talking about two different things, tied together by the liability of selling someone else's copyright protected material. I was looking for the response that said,

"Yes this stuff is available for free on the web, and it is available for free in this kindle book, I've just collated it into Kindle form to make it more accessible for people. All of the rights holders have explicitly allowed this use."

So that was my source of confusion.
http://www.ls1gto.com breaks this rule.
New products can and do disrupt market trends, especially in such a huge market.

> sounds like they are going after niche high-end tablet markets (those who want Office + a keyboard), , and higher-end tablet markets (though who want to run Visual Studio).Completely opposite direction that at best will be a successful ultra-book.

Niche in this market mean at least tens of millions of people. Not to say that the Surface Pro will succeed(pricing is important as you say) but the laptop/ultrabook market is still much bigger than the tablet, both the install base and sales.
Are you saying you would use Amazon if they do what the Internet mob tells them and publish the book?
Reviews aren't very good, otherwise I would be all over this.
Thiel had a nice way of approaching this question in his CS183 class. In assessing a venture's probability of success, think in terms of calculus -- and not statistically. Since many of these founders are charting new territory, the standard deviation in this sample size of 1 will be infinite. Statistical analysis can't happen.

So instead you treat it as a calculus problem. The metaphor Thiel used was that of space travel and the Apollo missions. You assume you know exactly what's going to happen and behave as such. In a nutshell, "no-one would want to ride in a statistically, probabilistically-informed spaceship."

It's a hard task spotting black swan founders (so instead you just leave yourself as open as possible to them). But the conviction of calculus (in them and in you) is almost certainly a necessary ingredient.

You could stretch a Wilde one-liner around this: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
Absolutely correct. When prices go up, newer tentants end up subsidizing squatters who are paying below-market rates. If rent prices were variable then the market would be more liquid and the total supply would be higher, and thus new rentals would be lower.

I guess it's nice not having your landlord jack up your rent each year (and landlords can't price little grannies out of their homes). But you also get stuck in one apartment because the cost of moving keeps getting higher.
Are you using chrome? Try using a different browser...
There is a serious problem when "pretty much any system" excludes both Debian and Mac OS X, and I don't know which others. The "python2" symlink is frighteningly recent in the Python world, and some of us like to support systems other than the bleeding edge. It makes me kind of skeptical that you read my post, because this was the main point of my complaint.

My point is not that it's hard to get Python scripts to run on Arch, my point is that I shouldn't have to do any work at all.

You can see a summary: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/ (note it's not yet been accepted)

"Until the conventions described in this PEP are more widely adopted, having python invoke python2 will remain the recommended option."

"This feature [python2 symlink] will first appear in the default installation process in CPython 2.7.3."

Python 2.7.3 was released in August 9, 2012, slightly over one month ago. That means that if you are running a Python 2 that is more than one month old, you won't have the symlink unless you make it yourself, or your distribution provides one for you.
Great post. I hope that by "idea", what is really meant is a more general notion of "some kind of weighted average of the idea, the context, the team dynamics, and an estimate of how capable they could be in the execution".
:( I've been living with roommates for a few years in SF. I want to move to a 1BR place I guess it won't happen till the bust happens.
>>I think chalking up [Apple's] success to "innovation" is missing the point

I didn't chalk anything up to anything.

I noted that you were smoking something strange -- probably found at a marketing department -- when you wrote that the iPhone/iPad was as innovative as the Amazon "sell the razor cheap, earn money on the blades" strategy...

Just because lots of people had been trying to create pads, but failed. (Because they were innovative?:-) )

You didn't touch that simple point.
Nicely said. I'll have to give you that. I used couch surfing a few years ago and distinctly remember thinking I should redo the site for them. I may have even written it on my profile.
ImageOptim is essentially a wrapper for, among other tools, PNGOUT.
> "The Texas cities (Houston, Dallas) have some of the most pollution this side of NJ. They're like LA without the culture."

Much of the pollution in North Texas, (from traffic, cement and power production), is due to the influx of people from the surrounding states, the coasts and overseas by the looser regulations attracting businesses.

Eventually I will probably move elsewhere. The pollution and the allergy environment is wreaking my health. Traffic is a crazy mix of over aggressive yuppies, over careful illegals and commercial trucks. The water system is stressed and the deregulated power system is over priced and in decay to increase profits.
Nobody ever likes it when the wrong kind of people move into the neighborhood.
Somewhat obvious, but the law should be the last port of call for advice. The real plea is to do the right thing by your customers. If they don't want your email then let them escape instantly. It's then more likely they will have a good feeling about your company for any future interactions or reccomendations.

How are we, for example, feeling about Linked In these days?
This same idea was discussed in CS 183, the power law:

http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels...
When evaluating whether a law is just we shouldn't worry about whether we are likely to run afoul of it unjustly ourselves, but rather what percentage of the people who are prosecuted under it will be prosecuted unjustly. And in this case it seems possible that that percentage might be unacceptably high.
There should be value in increasing the class size if (a) the number of applicants increases and (b) the average quality of the top applicants remains at least constant.

During YC's history so far, we know (a) is true and (b) seems anecdotally to be true.
Yes, that's what I meant. And this was evident far earlier than them performing many of their own songs. I suspect both John and Paul were simply rather dominant forces in their own way, but it wouldn't really explain allowing George to sing lead as much as he did.
That is an interesting area of Copyright Law as well. You do in fact own the copyright on your new 'work' even through it was derived entirely from this previous book. Good examples of this are the classics like Homer's Odessey which is available here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Odyssey-Homer/dp/0140268863 the translator and their publisher put some work in getting it from Greek to English and voila, new work.

The issue that Amazon was cracking down on was folks who went to Google Books, found some work like *"The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla, With Special Reference to his work in Polyphase Currents and High Potential Lighting" and then downloaded it from Google and uploaded it to the Kindle store [2], [1]

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=bhrreukJiLgC&printsec=f... is the Google Books version

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Inventions-Researches-Reference-ILLUST... is the Amazon Kindle rip-off version.
How 5 Top Bloggers Made The Financial Jump To Self Employment
I agree that the idea someone was to walk around a tree in a park and witness a rape in exactly that context is laughable, but the idea remains. If someone was recording their entire life from a first person perspective, and they did come into the situation to witness a violent crime be committed where possession of a recording of that crime is a crime in itself, what does the law say about the presumably innocent bystander?

CCTV cameras have the implied usage of security, that's why an alleyway camera's recording could be admitted as evidence against the suspect, but not the owner of the camera itself. Google Glass is a recreational device. Hardly anyone has one right now, but the idea sits with the idea that people will wear one for fun to capture fun events they participate in, which turns the argument around in the case of someone inadvertently recording an event that the mere possession of the recording is illegal. In a black and white situation, if someone had a recording of child pornography on their Google Glass device, the idea that the device is designed to record the events the wearer participates in for recreation or enjoyment already gives the notion that the wearer enjoyed recording the event. This argument is fragile in logic, but within the current state of the laws, it is sound. Lawyers will descend upon the owner of the Glass device and paint him or her as a pedophile who purposefully recorded the event for later enjoyment. It will be up to the person who recorded the event to defend themselves against false accusation and against a law that claims that, since he/she is in possession of the recording, they are guilty of possession already.

> Laws are typically not designed to cover future eventualities.

Have you read much about the PATRIOT act and how it's being applied to gather an analyse communication channels in order to thwart crimes and attacks before they happen? Because, it seems that many of the laws enacted over the past decade under the guise of National Security are designed to prevent crimes before they happen. Just as much as "think of the children", "national security" is just as much a hot-button topic designed to allow leeway into the legal process of finding and convicting "bad people" before they do bad. I'm far from an Alex Jones kind of guy, but there is plenty of evidence that the US government is actively surveilling it's populace for exactly the reason of preventing future eventualities.

Earlier this year a man in the UK was denied unsupervised visits with his own daughter after he admitted to downloading music, but receiving unwanted child pornography instead. No charges were filed, but it sure messed up his situation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-17274848
You can also use it for math expressions, type in URLs to quickly open them, search Google and Wikipedia. It's completely changed the way I compute. The only time I see the app tray anymore is when I accidentally make it spring up from the bottom with my mouse.
Experiment: How unpredictable are you?
Did Dropbox appear to be a bad idea at the time? I seem to recall that the market was pretty crowded when Dropbox launched, and that everyone was expecting Google to announce a "GDrive".

Or does PG mean that the idea can seem bad because the market is already very crowded? I remember talking to William Morgan about the early days of GitHub. He knew the founders from Powerset, and he told me that at the time he thought to himself, "Really? Another hosted version control startup? That seems like a bad idea."
If you were designing a new city from scratch, this makes sense. Much like in software, cities have "legacy systems" to deal with. In the case of homes in San Francisco, "air rights" had largely been priced into properties by way of historical architecture limitations (lack of elevators, then earthquake resilience).

What the zoning restrictions have done is serve as a mechanism to allocate air rights. Effectively, properties come with the air "in front of" them, not "above" them. This is reasonable, and consistent. I doubt anyone bought low-lying property in SF with the idea in replacing it with a skyscraper, but most people up on a hill definitely paid for the privilege. A shift in pricing of air rights would cause a dramatic market shift from the previously existing condition.
Show HN: WiFi chat. Chat with people on your Wifi network.
https://github.com/crizCraig/Wifi-chat
Can you afford to fund 100% bad ideas?

Assume you could separate the funding vehicle from the YC reputation, having it as a separate unassociated entity.

That is, assume the "reputational" cost could be managed. And no one would accuse you of being "insane".

I liked this essay. I think it's sufficiently honest.
Coroutines are a big part of the Mono .NET based Unity 3D engine. Very helpful but less powerful than multithreading, although less problematic.
Windows has a perfectly serviceable array of shortcuts available on keyboard that don't have the custom Windows key. The 'windows key stuff' is mostly fluff.
The analogy breaks down for most things outside of software (even hardware, to a degree), because the basis for the argument in favor of free software is the four freedoms[1], which are themselves mere extensions of the rights of purchase.

If you sell me something, you cannot tell me that I can't modify it for my own use, for example. You as the seller can't tell me that I'm not allowed to resell my textbooks, or to modify the frames on my eyeglasses, or to hire my friend to fix my vacuum cleaner.

Proprietary software licenses do do that - the main difference is that is a non-rivalrous good; I can redistribute software without losing access to it myself. Because of that, people think it's somehow 'wrong' to say that I should be allowed to purchase a program and then resell it to another person, but if you look at it the other way, that's no more 'wrong' than purchasing a physical good and then reselling it.

In the South, it used to be common to sell property on the condition that the purchaser never sell it to a black person (I think they still used the term
Negro or 'colored' then). If I remember correctly, that was first deemed illegal in certain parts not because it's horribly racist, but because it violates the principles of first sale: you've sold me something, and now you can't tell me what I'm not allowed to do with it.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Most of the studies I've seen say that cocaine is roughly as dangerous to the user as cocaine, but that someone using alcohol is much more likely to end up harming others.
Yes, Dropbox was in the Google category of bad ideas: there were already lots of similar things. Success turned out to depend on execution. Dropbox was the first application of its type that worked sufficiently well. But that sort of thing is hard to predict.
I'm curious if this would affect how you give advice to founders. For example, let's say a team is working on an idea that isn't working out. If you had two ideas or recommendations in your head, one that seems intuitively good and one intuitively bad, would you ignore the intuitively good idea in favor of the intuitively bad idea because it seems that the best ideas start out as bad ones?
Debugging SASS in Webkit
Well, the way you should think about it is that in order to become big successful businesses, Airbnb and Dropbox needed to have incredibly strong growth strategies. Airbnb struggled for many years before hitting a solid growth strategy (which is far beyond CL) and Dropbox tried tons of other user acquisition strategies before realizing that the double-sided reward system was their way to go.
But it wouldn't be good to have the punishment for jaywalking be decades in jail.
I live in SF and the other option I actively consider is Austin. Fairly accurate statement (but as the other comment said, Dallas and Houston are miserable). Honestly, the income and opportunity in SF is still larger, so I stay.