skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I've managed to get a Linux box to recognize the Command key as super when I plug in an Apple keyboard. Some apps seems to look for actual scancodes, though, rather than for what X11 tells them the mappings should be.

My experience was pretty hit or miss, and mostly I ended up with an mismash of semi-random keybindings which is sort of the opposite of what I was shooting for. On the Mac developers have done a remarkably good job of adhering to a consistent set of shortcuts (down to things like Command-, for preferences).

The other issue is that most apps don't make it straightforward to bulk re-assign keybindings from Control to Super, and last I checked it was impossible to turn off menu accelerators for Gtk+ based apps (e.g., Alt+F to bring up the file menu in Firefox).

Most of the time what I want is to map Command->Super and Option->Meta, and have Super replace Control in all GUI app keyboard shortcuts leaving Control available for command-line apps, in general.
“Gog And Magog Are At Work In The Middle East,” Bush Told Chirac
Can you honestly not tell the difference between Facebook and Geocities?

Also, the fact that Dropbox and Facebook were "unoriginal" is exactly what made them seem like bad ideas at the time. I saw Dropbox present at demoday, and the main question on my mind was, "How is this different from the million other attempts at online file storage? (xdrive, etc)".
To add to that: I think XCode is the most powerfull IDE I've ever used when it comes to coding c/c++/objective-c.
History tends to get rewritten by big successes, so that in retrospect it seems obvious they were going to make it big. For that reason one of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it.

As a thought experiment, I would love to hear what pg and team would have thought about the following companies, had they applied to YC before they grew in popularity (assuming YC existed when they were starting out):

PayPal, Twitter, Pandora, SalesForce, Instagram, FourSquare, and Pinterest. And perhaps a few others as well.
There will be several self professed disagreements posted here citing very specific situations.
Any tips on making a bookmarklet work this well? I mean code-wise and ease of testing
How long do you use a standing desk at a time? After a while, my back and legs start to hurt and I need to sit down.
Sure it can for different people. Some people's preferences are innate, others arise through life experiences.
Or associated with your other github projects...oh, wait.
Keep in mind that free books on the Amazon/Kindle store are still sold, there's just no charge for the sale.
I could be mistaken, but I believe the Federal rule sets the age at 18 for defining child pornography, and I believe that rule preempts state rules.

So even if it's legal to have sex with a 16-year-old in Texas (under State law), it's illegal to produce, possess or distribute pictures of that child (under Federal law).
"Books Were the First Open-Source Software"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-roberts/books-were-the-fi...
All they want from you is pageviews. Just come up with something that has a high chance of getting them pageviews.

A probably easy angle would be, "Rejected from YC, now Bigger Than Jesus". A well-baited hook for HN and bonus SEO on YC.
I still shake my head with AirBnB, a total ripoff of couch surfing. For it to be comparable in any way, shape or form to the innovative and beautifully executed Dropbox boggles the mind.
If you don't like living in a high rise, don't live in a high rise. But don't force the market to build single family homes by zoning choice land areas as single family residential. The point of zoning is to keep industrial areas separated from residential areas. When you use it to prevent multi-family development, you're foisting some urban planner's idea of the character of the community on everyone else.
Is it possible that this is simply just the effect of a Bell Curve (i.e, the normal (Gaussian) distribution of a field)?
There is going to be nothing that will "explain" why or which companies could be the big winners. Trying to is falling into the narrative fallacy trap Taleb writes about.

Best strategy is to "win" in other ways, and let the cards fall where they may.
I agree with that, but I do think there needs to be some amount of effort that justifies putting out a new "edition" of the book, so to speak (which it sounds like you're doing). What Amazon is having problems with is large-scale automated stuff that doesn't bother to do good formatting at all, like the folks who are just repackaging Wikipedia articles, or PDFs directly from Google Books. I'm guessing Amazon just doesn't want to put in the resources to distinguish those cases.
That's good to know. I'm currently on a t400s, and I was wanting to upgrade to the X1 Carbon, but I hadn't seen anything about it on thinkwiki yet.
If I had the time, I would do a bunch of research into trying to determine what made Dropbox, Facebook, AirBnB, et al, succeed in their markets. I assume the answer involves the founding teams, but what traits did these founders have that others did not?

I don't have the time though, so if any bloggers/journalists are reading, this could be an interesting article, or even book, if you get enough info.

Whether or not this info would actually help another team become successful is another story though.
Read the book. http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness/d...
The tablet market, at this moment, is going the other way, to include devices that are cheaper, a bit smaller, and more oriented toward pure consumption (Nexus 7, Fire HD, iPad Mini). This market has lower margins but the potential for lots of sales even beyond the iPad today.

Now Microsoft comes with Surface (Pro and non-Pro), 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. I'm not seeing mass appeal, but a lot of that will come down to pricing.
I think the reaction was because you put Python in a broadly negative camp by infering ctype extensions are required for any sort of performant code. Its actually relatively uncommon to use ctypes and most developers who use Python know this.

Python is a great general purpose language and is used as such. No one would be silly enough to solely rely on it in highly performance sensitive environments (IE: 3d renderers or high frequency trading). Just like no one would be silly enough to write an entire CRUD web app in C.

The point is, Python isn't broken and claiming that it may be because you read a short article on a Python feature got you the negative reaction.
d5j

delete five from where you are- inclusive
And, if one of the arguments is weak or preposterous, your opponent can tear that one apart and ignore the merits of the position. It is a persuasive pet peeve of mine.
The Texas cities (Houston, Dallas) have some of the most pollution this side of NJ. They're like LA without the culture.
Efficiency isn't just a global "urban planner's" idea. It actually is a different type of life.

Increased density, for me, means that my commute is a 5-minute walk as opposed to an hour-long drive. There is a small grocer in the middle of the commute, where I can stop in and make a 2-minute effort to buy a fresh chicken breast and broccoli to cook for dinner.

Being able to live without owning a car is a plus. Owning a car is a pain in the ass, with regards to maintenance and expense. Between Zipcar and easy access to taxis, I have no problem getting from Point A to Point B, and I never have to get my oil changed or a tire fixed.

Having a yard can be a plus (beautiful, room for kids to play tag, etc.) or a minus (mowing the grass is either a chore or an expense).

It is disappointing, as another example, in that I can't call some friends, plug in some guitars and rock out.

Choosing a place to live is a series of tradeoffs. There's a reason why, even at the extreme high-end, there are still options. Given an 8-figure housing budget, one can still choose a farm with room for horses, a suburban mansion, or an urban penthouse. Growing up, I could drive a half hour and see all 3.

From a policy perspective, the US probably overly subsidizes suburban living, but there's no reason to declare one style of living as best for everybody.
I think that's the exact opposite of what pg means.

pg is basically writing http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels...
The counter-intuitive nature of startup investing is a big part of what makes it so interesting to me. In most aspects of life, we are trained to avoid risk and only pursue "good ideas" (e.g. try to be a lawyer, not a rock star). With startups, I get to focus on things that are probably bad ideas, but possibly great ideas. It's not for everyone, but for those of us who love chasing dreams, it can be a great adventure.
I would prefer to use only open source, but I am not technically literate enough. I have used both Windows and Linux for 16 years, and had been using Linux more and Windows less for the first nine years. Over the past 7 years, since getting on the Internet, I have mostly used Windows, because I have not managed to get any of the Linux distros I have tried to work over a dial-up modem.
Even if it is sold for $0.00, I wouldn't expect that to remove Amazon's issue with it. Whether or not the book is generating income, the person who "published" it does not have demonstrable rights to its contents.
As a consumer of many public domain books on the Kindle, I find Amazon's policy good, except when they let the publishers of the paid versions game them.

For example, the "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" (http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Sherlock-Holmes-ebook/dp/B0...) is a public domain book, but their free public domain version has been "under review" for months, while paid versions continue to be sold for 99 cents and up.

This is pretty crappy behavior, IMHO. I know they don't make any money from PD books, but there are a lot of Kindle owners that enjoy PD books, and scammy tactics like this detracts from their reputation.
Whether calling c is "required" depends on a few things. The relative importance of run-time vs programming-time, the nature of the problem, etc.

I've been doing scientific programming in Python for 4 years, and I've never felt I needed to drop to C (though I was aware of the option.)

The hard computing for most problems is done in calls to a few libraries that wrap highly optimized code from lower level languages. So matrix inversion, arithmetic on arrays, etc are just as fast in python as in C or Fortran.

If your work can't be done using library calls, pure python is going to be much slower.
Quoth pg: It would hurt YC's brand (at least among the innumerate) if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out.

Paul, you're sounding like a venture capitalist who is worried about whether he can find investors for his next fund.

I would posit that the people whose opinions you should care about are potential founders; and that their primary concern is themselves, not the performance of a fund (oops, I mean class) as a whole. You're damn right that it would hurt YC's brand if 70% of each class didn't survive past Demo Day -- because for an individual founder, success is pretty much binary, and having a 50% chance of becoming a millionaire is more attractive than having a 5% chance of becoming a billionaire, despite the 100-fold reduction in mean wealth.

You may be in in the business of farming black swans, but if they're all you worry about you'll find that all the swans end up laying their eggs elsewhere.
I never inferred that ctypes were required - in fact, I explicitly did the opposite. I asked if it was required for performant code. See the part of my post where I said "To regular pythonistas: Is this a common issue with Python, or only in the author's contrived scenario of summing a ridiculous amount of numbers?"

I also never claimed that python was broken.
Best strategy is to "win" in other ways, and let the cards fall where they may.

So you're saying that the probability of picking up the big winners would be the same if YC accepted applicants at random?

Edit: I have sympathy for the Black Swan theory, but I also believe that the startup market is way more tractable than, say, the CDO market – that there do actually exist investment strategies that will increase your chances of hitting the billion dollar jackpot.
I used to think airbnb was a direct for-profit, money grubbing ripoff of the pure-of-heart couchsurfing. Then I tried to use couchsurfing this year. Their website is virtually unusable. It looks like it hasn't been updated since 1995. They have a horrific profile system and verification process. They have one 500,000th of the audience they could have.

If you stagnate, you will be eaten. Just keep swimming.
Zoning is a local government issue, not "some urban planner's" issue. If a community wants its own zoning to change, it can get its own zoning changed. What zoning prevents is someone from buying a piece of land in a community and foisting unwanted change onto it.

Edit:
As an addendum, I'm not referring to the "wrong kind" of people. I'm referring to too many people, or a facility with drastically different traffic patterns. Ignoring the "wrong kind" of people thing entirely, I could knock down a few suburban houses, and replace them with super-luxury furnished condo-townhowse-type things that would sell for the exact same as the surrounding neighborhood. This still would be a major change to the community, both in appearance and lifestyle.
This is a "Show HN" post, right? Presumably you came here looking for feedback. So far, essentially all of the discussion is of the name.

You might think it's funny. Your primary school friends might think it's funny, too. But it's not really getting you anything, right?
Innovate on the experience, not just the features dammit! I'm really tired of hearing this refrain that Apple is not innovative because all they do is take existing features and put them into....a package that people can actually use!? But then "isn't that the easy, uncreative, uninnovative part?" Yes, building usable experience is innovation, and yes its very important.
There's a pretty interesting lesson for potential YC candidates, particularly the ones that get turned down, here.

When you interview a startup and think "they seem likely to succeed," it's hard not to fund them. And yet, financially at least, there is only one kind of success: they're either going to be one of the really big winners or not, and if not it doesn't matter whether you fund them, because even if they succeed the effect on your returns will be insignificant.

What this means is that YC is not looking for sustainable businesses, but homeruns. Which is entirely fair, that's the business they're in.

But you and your startup are in a different business: Your measure of success isn't the same as Ycombinators. If your startup ends up making you a million dollars a year you will probably be very happy and rightfully call yourself a success. But as the post points out that won't be enough for YC since they need to fund a lot of other startups that will inevitably fail out of their minority share. Thus they need a much bigger success.

If you get turned down for YC it might well be that your idea is just a sound business idea that YC doesn't consider just crazy enough that it might make them a billion dollars. But that doesn't mean that it won't make you a million.
"A Demo Day where only 30% of the startups were fundable would be a shambles. Everyone would agree that YC had jumped the shark."

The reason that angels and VCs show up is because YC is providing a service for them, so from their perspective you would have jumped the shark. Each angel only has so much money to invest, and VCs feel it's necessary to provide value-add in other ways, so because their ends don't scale I'm having trouble seeing this purely mathematical strategy benefitting anyone besides YC. If there were a way for follow-on investors to benefit in a way that helps improve the overall startup ecosystem then it makes a lot of sense, but I think that's a case that needs to be made that this essay didn't touch on.
> I read the emails and their responses seem perfectly acceptable to me
That's probably because you are not the author of this book. Just try to be a little more empathic with this guy: he wrote the book, he did a valuable job(presumably, I'm not an arch linux user, and I looked through the book very briefly).
I can see very well that response like "This type of content can create a poor customer experience, and is not accepted" makes him feel exactly the way bis post describes.

If Amazon doesn't support free licensed content, it's time to start doing so.
That is a very interesting exercise.

I feel pretty sure we'd have been impressed enough by Max and Peter to fund them regardless of the idea (which initially had almost nothing in common with Paypal).

I knew Ev before Twitter so I'm sure we would have funded that.

Pandora I know nothing about, so I can't guess there.

SalesForce I'm pretty sure we would have funded because Benioff radiates "winner" in much the same overwhelming way that Zuckerberg does.

Instagram is the one we'd most likely have missed. It all depends when we'd talked to them. They were a kind of overnight success in traffic. If we'd talked to them even a day after they launched we would certainly have said yes. But before that it might have seemed too speculative.

I don't know about FourSquare. I've never met the founders and don't understand the business.

Pinterest we definitely would have funded, because Ben is a two time YC alum (with different companies alas). We knew he was good because the first time he was part of a startup that as an experiment we didn't make move to California. As Demo Day approached, they were in terrible shape. But Ben swooped in at the last moment and gave one of the most convincing Demo Day presentations.
Does it matter?

I remember hearing PG comment that as a founder you need just a few million from a startup. That's as true today.

Perhaps the relationship between exit valuation and wealth created is elastic. If the goal is to make wealth, perhaps lots of 10-100M startups has a bigger impact on society than a couple of billion-dollar startups.
A confusing situation - do I have the facts right?

Amazon is ok with publishing public domain works. However, this is not a public domain work so it doesn't matter.

GNU Free Doc License, just like GPL, doesn't care if you charge money or not; only that you pass along the content when you distribute and that you don't add restrictions on what people can do with the content.

Amazon states in their rules that they won't accept freely redistributable content unless the submitting author is also the copyright owner.

Author does not explicitly state that he is the copyright owner in his response to Amazon, which explains the rejection.

Author does correctly state that GNU Doc License allows redistribution even if you are not the copyright owner. Thus he may have been trying to make a political point that it shouldn't matter if he is the copyright owner or not since he has the right to redistribute, for profit, from the license?

In any event, it doesn't matter since Amazon's stated policy is not to accept works in this precise scenario. Why, I don't know; but it is their right to do so.
Why I Feel Like A Failure, Even Though On the Outside, I'm A Success
So is there value in increasing the class size every time around?

If there's only one winner in a class, at best, does it matter if the class is 10 or 50? 50 isn't going to give 5 winners, is it?

Is the idea that 50 gives a 5 times higher chance of finding the 1? Is that really true, though?

Would focusing on a smaller number of potentials actually be better for finding the 1? Thinking through the scenarios more thoroughly?
If your company is successful, at some point you are going to hire people who are much smaller or much bigger than average. (I miss 2m by a few fingers; one of my coworkers is almost a half meter shorter.)

At that point, it is vital that you remember two things:

First, chairs are cheap compared to salaries.

Second, an inflexible policy is an impediment to working at your company.

Don't set a policy like "We buy Aeron for everybody." If you have an esthetic issue (don't laugh, some companies do, I've worked at one) make the policy "All chairs are black". Pretty much every chair can be ordered in black, and nobody outside your company will ever notice a chair that they someone is using at their desk.
I was unaware that Catholics get paid less than Protestants in the startup world.

More on point, our cultural norms are a little funky. I don't feel really that their should be any degree at a university where there are 20x the number of male students than female students. However, in the computer science world, this is probably the case. This isn't from direct discrimination, but as I said, from cultural standards. Perhaps we should try to be more welcoming to women in the technology field in general.
As best I can tell, success = luck * skill.

The big successes that I've seen all have exceptional founders, but that's clearly not enough. Timing is a huge component as well. Often a good idea will fail simply because the market or technology isn't ready. My own experience with Gmail reflects some of that. When we decided to write the whole frontend in JS, everyone said that it was a bad idea doomed to failure. It had been tried before (e.g. desktop.com) and had always been a disaster. They were right about the past, but wrong about the future. We released Gmail right around the time that browsers were finally getting good enough, and were were very careful to keep our code as fast and slim as possible.
What strikes me about Dropbox and Airbnb more than anything is that they had incredibly strong growth strategies.

* Dropbox used rewards for more storage, as well as its fundamental file-sharing tools, to encourage users to sign up their friends and family.

* Airbnb gamed Craigslist [1] to encourage property owners to signup on Airbnb. With a strong supply of rental properties, Airbnb was able to build a true case for its value in the minds of travelers.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craig...
Trust me, we interview everyone who passes a phone screen and has a promising resume. It's just that so, so few of them are actually women.

I actively pursued an acquaintance of mine to try and get her to work for us, as she was just graduating from a top engineering undergraduate school and was an actuary. Sadly, she took a position in NYC (understandable).

We're very strict on hiring, so we do interview many candidates for each position that opens up (we have plenty of open positions now that we can't seem to fill).

If we set an interviewing quota, it could literally take us years to hire someone for a mid-level developer position simply because we would get no applicants or no referrals from recruiters that were women. It's just how it is. Very sad.
I am not Mike. But I use a standing desk. It took me a few weeks to get fully adopted, but now I can stand (or move in place) for several hours, if necessary. Usually I take short breaks though.

And actually, the ability to take short breaks and walk around is something I really cherish. Removing the (small) barrier of needing to get up has really helped.

But you can not read too much into my experience report with the standing desk: I took up weightlifting at the same time I got my standing desk, and so it's hard for me to say which change was responsible for which improvement.
Sweet, thanks a bunch.