skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love this idea, because it addresses the two fundamental issues at play here: the social and the financial. Considering YC as a single entity, the optimal funding strategy must take into account both the power law on returns and the prestige of the program. If YC loses its place as the most prominent and well-respected startup incubator, the Dropboxes and Airbnbs of the future will either forgo the application or suffer from lack of investor interest. If YC limits itself to only those companies that have an extremely high chance of getting funded, the outliers will never find a way in.

Let's say that p_accept is the probability that YC accepts the founders of the next Dropbox. YC itself cannot optimize for p_accept because of the factors mentioned above: instead, it has to optimize for p_apply * p_accept * p_fund, the product of the chances that those golden founders will apply to the program, be accepted, and find the funding they need to grow and thrive.

With the hypothetical YC / YC Black Swan split, the original YC can optimize for p_apply * p_fund, and YC Black Swan can optimize for p_accept. Not only that, but since all Black Swan candidates would have started as applicants to YC, Black Swan's p_apply would equal that of the original YC. Numerate investors with the same sense of the power law as pg would take care of Black Swan's p_fund.

Thus, all the prestige, cultural appeal, and midsize exits would derive from the original YC, but all the power-law returns would emerge from Black Swan.

So, pg, new business model?
I forget where I read it but it was something along the line that penalizing the buyers of prostitution has a larger impact than penalizing the prostitutes themselves. By killing demand you end up getting rid of the supply.

Here's a paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2057299&#...
Honduras to build private cities with their own police, laws, government, taxes
I have a couple of leather Eames shell chairs (bright red ones; I can't find model examples of them anywhere on the Internet). They're good for slouching with a laptop, but I prefer my IKEA Markus at a table.
This still means you would be counting 5 lines whereas I'm just specifying what line to delete to.
it's a great idea - i like it
This is exactly how many VC work. They will only fund projects that involve people they know. Those people are almost always ones who have a history of past success. It's simply a way to manage risk with minimised effort.

Deal with people you already know.

If the project turns out to be a dud, the past history of success of the people involved negates any arguments that it was not the right decision to fund it. No one is going to question that the people involved were not "winners". They had proven that already; that's why the project received funding: because those particular people were involved with it.

To use an oft regurgitated title: "No one ever got fired for funding a project that involved [insert so-called born winner name here]"

Just for fun: How about Andrew Mason, the guy behind Groupon. How far do you think he would have gotten by taking the YC route? Is he a "born winner"? Groupon made some investors very happy.

One might wonder why no one can tell us who the "born winners" are until after they've had some "victories".
Base it off listening habits?
Here in the UK none of the banks seem to let you pull out your personal finance data, bank statements etc as a raw data format and use it that way.

For example, I do 99% of my grocery shopping at about 3 shops. So if the data was available it would be trivial to write a script which totals the amount I have spent that month on groceries and graph that against previous months.

The only way I can do this is to go into the banks website and manually add these figures together every month. This just seems like a terrible inefficient way to do it.

It would be great to be able to just go through my bank statement and say "oh , Steam. That's an entertainment expense, so in future put that into a bucket called 'entertainment' so I can see what that is as a percentage and track how it changes". I could also see blips in things like quarterly expenses (utility bills etc) and plan for them accordingly.

What would be truly awesome would be to apply some stats and ML to it and say "If I make large purchase X for £Y in August what is the increase in probability that I will fall into arrears come Christmas based on my historical spending patterns"

If I was feeling cynical I might think that banks don't really want me to plan my personal finances too well. They would rather I mess it up now and again and have to apply for credit.
I've been working on a side project in the area for a while now. I think what you say with the boxes is pretty sensible and similar to how I see it - all I'll add is that its not just the 'bottom' that needs to be text-based. Some things are just best represented by text - even when you are looking at them in high level or abstracted (especially names of things, numbers, human-use things like addresses, etc.), whilst other things really need no textual representation at all, even if we are familiar with them that way (loops and other control strucutres, as well as graphics [say no to hex-based RGB!], etc.).

My advice is if you want to make it - just start. I farted around for a while thinking 'someone must have done something similar before and have some recommendations', but never really found much helpful (just alot of noisy people pointing to 1970s visual programming systems that failed for reasons that aren't really applicable to a modern project).
Ironically in some jurisdictions prostitution is illegal but making porn is legal, so in a reverse of your comment, an illegal act can become legal by simply filming it.
My point is that Apple was doing very well without having to resort to patent claims/protection - when it came out with the iPhone, it was a success not because they had patents for it, but because people were BUYING it willingly. People buys things and do not care what is protected by patents or what is not. As long as Apple make desirable devices, why do they need to resort to patents ? They already have a significant advantage on the supply chain side that nobody else can reproduce so far. There are many ways you can protect your business without having to take the patent claims to court. It's very obvious.
Yes, that sums up what I meant.

Also, if you look at browser stats even today, arguably IE has an "unfair" share of the market -- but such things are hard to be certain of ("What is a 'fair' market share for the now much, much improved IE browser?").

The biggest thing MS did was probably to give away the browser for free, subsidizing the development of the browser, with profits from windows licences. That dumping effort effectively killed the market for (paid for) browsers -- eventually even Opera gave up charging end users for its browser.
fumar suggested guest playlists - it might be a good way to get bloggers/tastemakers to participate while keeping it simple.
I had no idea they stopped doing that! That seems a pretty serious change of model, I'm glad I know it now.
That's because the analog market has natural logistical limitations for copying and improvement.

I cannot OCR a paper book I own, make modifications to it and then publish it on the web. Nor can I photocopy that book and give it to friends.
This law regulates exactly the people and companies who would otherwise have sent out massive amount of spams if not for the existence of the law. The fact that you are seeing spams from random strangers (the hacked accounts) is a testament to how well this law has work in curtailing the spams companies with lots of resources can send out.
Really enjoyed his book (Designing Interactions, see www.designinginteractions.com). Here's another article about him:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/technology/william-moggrid...
On Mturk you upload a spreadsheet of the urls. Set up the "hits" so as to ask the worker to go the url and try to find a contact email. If they find the email they enter it in the "hit", if they find a contact form, they select contact form, if there's nothing they enter in an X or something else, you can decide. For just an email you can pay anywhere between 1-3 cents. For 300 urls you get this done in a day usually. You can put in filters for the quality of workers, I usually keep them pretty strict. You are suppose to go back and check the quality of the workers and approve or reject an answered "hit", though for the $3 - $5 that you'd be paying for this, it's not worth it, just approve all. After the turking you end up with a spreadsheet of all the urls and emails.
> "Editors are the bureaucrats of the StackOverflow ecosystem. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy [3]. "

So, SO is turning into Wikipedia…?
See also: http://console.fm if you're into EDM.
Stop Measuring Code in Bytes
I remember drawing a similar diagramme - the x-axis was the "agreeability of the trade" and the y "realised yield". Bottom left quadrant (disagreeable and low yielding) is eccentric crap and top-left (agreeable and low-yielding) is bubble land. The bottom-right (disagreeable and high-yielding) is where that magical alpha lives while the top-right (agreeable and high-yielding) is not sustainable in an even remotely efficient market - it quickly devolves and when overcrowded becomes a bubble (many people thinking it's disagreeable makes it agreeably disagreeable).

That we can accept and reject trades (or ideas) based on their agreeability, or dispersion of opinions, is not often considered as a metric. So long as the difference between eccentric crap and alpha is difficult to discern and costly if one goes all in on the wrong bet the uncertainty should be dealt with by diversifying across only disagreeable trades.

As a former quant trader who left a large bank and found the centre of Silicon Valley uncannily similar to the heart of Wall Street, this essay is illuminating. Wall Street is being too conservative, consigning itself to blindly jumping between mediocrity (low expected return) or bubbles (strongly negative expected return) in the top two quadrants. Just like Silicon Valley, though, at its edges it allows itself to be different. It's interesting seeing how similar mantras, based in sound financial theory, change in their aesthetics as they cross domains.

It's telling, though, that the concept of a "black swan", implying a tail event generally unforeseen by the relevant population, is met with trepidation by much of Wall Street and corporate America yet seized with zeal by a select few.
If you'll read my comment again, you may notice I'm talking about the specific claim that child pornography laws enable child rape. That is a claim I feel is without basis in fact.

The issue you're talking about is one I agree with, as I've noted elsewhere[0].

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496072
If you could pull that off without discrimination that would be an awesome idea. It may cause somewhat of a North/South Korea kind of thing but if it can be done it would be a great data collection exercise that investors, founders can really learn from.

Would be interesting to learn why the black swans have done better then the normal batch, or why the normal batch did better or why it was a 50/50 split.

You might even learn that because a startup is considered as a black swan founders in that group work harder and thus have a higher success rate. This would really put into light debates about how much intelligence vs hard work may effect success rates in the world of startups.
I agree. The amount of response bias in this survey will tend to be absurd. I suspect most people who use facebook and/or twitter won't bother with answering this. There is no good reason to. I also suspect that people who don't use facebook or twitter will also be indignant about the fact that they don't use it and will make a point to vote against them. Heck even I have done similar stuff before. From the outset this survey isn't going to work if the methodology is not correct
If we define harm as being to actual children (not religion/impure-thoughts kind of harm), then the only argument is that future children will be harmed, because the viewer of the porn will have his sexually deviant longings for children reinforced and then, one day, will rape/molest a real child.

Personally, I do not buy this argument at all. I think it is very likely that virtual child porn (comic, animation, CG) prevents molestation overall. Because honestly, what do men do when they watch porn? Mainly, jerk off. And then once that's done, the urge is substantially dissipated... and so the subject would be less likely to put themselves at risk committing a sex crime against an actual child (something I understand a lot of molesters also feel guilty about).

So my hunch is that virtual child porn is probably a net positive. But I doubt we will ever get good data about this, and anyway it is one of those issues where logic isn't so likely to prevail.
I have my Lenovo Thinkpad docking station on my desk with the living room's 50" plasma plugged into it along with USB cables for my phones and the Lenovo's mini mouse.

I tend to always work at the desk and during the day (when the fiancee is at work) I use the plasma as a second screen - mainly running an Android emulator in it or Spotify.
Just curious, YC people - let's say that an eccentric billionaire asked you to "invest" in things that would have the greatest impact on the world, even if they weren't profit-generating enterprises.

Would you have invested in Wikipedia? Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb project? WikiLeaks? Linux?

I guess I'm interested because it's not clear to me that any of the founders of these things radiate "winner" in the same way that you seem to look for in your founders. Or maybe they do?
Does epigenetics qualify as a science. That needs to be established first.
Just want to put a shout out to a company run by some good freinds of mine, Pocketsmith [1]. They've got a really good product that is by far the best that I've used (the ones I've been able to use - Heaps, Xero Personal and a couple of bank ones here in NZ all suck). They're linked up to yodeley as well, so they get bankfeeds from all over the world.

[1]http://pocketsmith.com
Missing from the list: Knoll Life Chair

http://www.knoll.com/products/product.jsp?prod_id=188

I tested most of the other ones in this post, and liked this one better.
I think Code 2000 came first.
Okay, you dirty, filthy, rotten chicken bastards, ANSWER with THOUGHTS or STOP the voting attacks, you dirt bags.
For those with vanity URLs and GMail - the trick I use to manage unsubscribes better is to enable 'catch-all address' and registering for new accounts by their URL and TLD, e.g. news_ycombinator_com@URL.com, or kennethcole_com@URL.com, etc.

Two benefits - 1) easier to remember my login per site and 2) if I start getting spammed as a result of my info being shared with third-parties, I can attribute the original offender to the e-mail address.
Yes, I should have been clearer in my previous comment: What I meant to say was that I see what the previous poster meant, and I was wrong.

However, if someone wants to do something similar in Python, here are how you would (have) to do it. I didn't mean to say that it was the same - or as straightforward.

This is also why I linked to the r(estricted)python examples with pypy -- because they give you more of the power to define a whole language -- but that also isn't the same as being able to do it within the language itself.

As for meta-programming, I have always meant that in the sense of lisp macros, not simply chaining some cleverly named functions.

I'm still not convinced it's a feature I would want in Perl -- but then again, I don't particularly like Perl, and I don't use it -- so clearly what I think of it doesn't matter: I'm not the target audience for Perl features.

Thankfully we don't all prefer the same tools :-)
Skipping the above process is clearly worth something! Though two months is too much, even in Manhattan.
"How do I rename a file in the GUI?"
Click once to highlight the file and click again to rename it. No need to go into the "get info" menu.

"How do I turn off the sound when I turn my machine on?"
Mute the computer before shutting it down.
Cssdeck | Single Element Pure CSS MacBook Pro
Really impressive !
A macbook pro created with a single element.

What's your think about ?
It would hurt founders' perceptions but wouldn't actually decrease any individual founder's chances of success.

In a world where potential founders are making a choice between YC or doing the startup anyway without YC, sure. But the world is more complicated than that, and I'm sure there are plenty of potential founders whose decisions are informed by what they hear from YC.

[...] split up the batches into two groups, YC Classic and YC Black Swan [...] People could take the Black Swan offers as rejections if they wanted.

This sounds like a very good model, in that it would separate the "is this something YC wants to invest in?" axis from the "does Paul Graham think that I'll succeed?" axis.
eBay and Google stock is available for anyone with cash. You'd have to get acquired with pre-IPO stock for it to make a difference.
That's for a Core i7 Retina MacBook Pro and the 13-ish W power number includes the screen. The 6W number for Fluffy2 does not.

Still an impressive hack though.
Here is what Bessemer said about PayPal when they passed:

"Rookie team, regulatory nightmare"

http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio
Africa has plenty of plucky innovation to solve local infrastructure shortcomings, but I think the author is talking about a finance "killer app".
$4K of Real Basic / Studio tools for $399 ending 10th-15th
I'm a very, very big dude (6'2" and around 375lbs). That combination means that chairs are generally too small and too brittle; my last chair ($300 or so) lasted less than 6 months. Then I discovered this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000PWGZKW/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=ih...; (Warning: referral link)

It's large enough to accomodate me very comfortably, it's built like a tank, it's adjustable to hell and back, and it's less than $400. The casters that come with it seem to be solid as well, though I replaced them with a set of nice rubber ones that would glide a bit better under the weight.

It's held me well for around 6 months now with no sign of letting up, and I have very few complaints (namely, that the headrest adjustment is done via discrete notches rather than a continuous adjustment). Can't say enough good things about it.
How about freedom to pick employers and projects?
In the article he says:

"All of these lists were doubly-linked to make it possible to add and remove elements from the list in constant time — O(1) — without the necessity to traverse the list looking for the element to remove — O(N)."

It seems the implication is that one is parsing over the list already. When parsing over the list, if you do a comparison that indicates the node should be removed (i.e. if the unit's health is below 0), you do not have to traverse back through the list again from the beginning to get the relevant pointer from the node before the current element in the list, since you already have the pointer to the previous node in the current node. Likewise for insertion.

But I don't think, strictly speaking, it's possible to have a linked list that actually has a lookup time of O(n) .
No-one has ever suggested that SO rep alone should be used solely to judge someone's skills when hiring. Then neither would the contents of your github or bitbucket repo (after all how do you prove that the code in the repo is yours?).

SO rep is just another small nugget of information that may be useful to potential employers, and if said employer is using the SO careers site, your Careers profile is linked to your SO profile page.

I mention in my "other activities" section of my CV that I participate in the site, but I certainly don't make a big deal about it, and especially the rep part.
> silently storing "corrupt" data (which I can fix by hand as soon as I discover the bug) is better than throwing an error back to the end user,

I think this statement might be a good test if you want to predict which camp they will fall into.

I frequently store enough data that fixing anything by hand is a large task and my experience with these types of errors is that this silently corrupted data (no need for quotes, that's what corrupted means) is sometimes corrupted in a lossy way, so you can't fix it by hand or in any other way.

Even if you can fix it by hand and it's not lossy I still find the fail fast philosophy is right most of the time, I want an error logged so I get notified and can fix it even if that means that an end user sees an error (there was one after all).

I might be biased having had the experience of exactly this type of mysql error destroying months of data that was the result of very expensive marketing because no one noticed until they tried to analyze it. Mysql was silent and our testing had missed it (if it had thrown an error our testing would have easily found it).
What kind of Eames? The Eameses designed many different office, lounge and moulded plastic chairs (see http://www.eamescollector.com/furniture.html)
It's not so much the design. Rather, the image quality is very low, like it's a fully compressed JPG? Just save it as a GIF or PNG.
I'm not the only one but it's a very small team at the moment. We have ambitious goals that we're aggressively working towards though.

Tumblr content can be quite diverse and often contains arbitrary user-inputted HTML, numerous inline images, etc. It's non-trivial to render but as I mentioned, we're working hard to provide an even better mobile experience.
> And if one doesn't like that fee, one can go find another copy elsewhere.

There is no sweat of the brow copyright in American law.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:No_Sweat_of_the_Brow...

http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat092303.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

I mean, just so you know.
Sorry, good point - I meant the Herman Miller Eames Lounge and Ottoman.
I remember having this exact issue when trying to do something fairly basic with selenium (I was trying to pick it up, so it was something akin to "hello world"). Sadly, it was too long ago for me to remember exactly what my problem was, but when my coworker who does regularly uses selenium got back the next day he helped me fix my problem in about 5 minutes.
Having people pick over every detail of what I write is something I like about HN -- it forces me to think more carefully about what I'm saying, and on a few occasions (tptacek, I'm looking at you) has even prompted me to go back and write further blog posts about specific points.

Of course, my blog posts don't get nearly as much attention as your essays, and I don't have the problem of having people try to draw attention to themselves in the hopes of being remembered when applications are considered for the next YC round.
Mobile Safari is very slow with things like CSS3 transitions even with translate3d, in addition to limitations such as click-delay, so right now things can look the same you are right, but they can't react or perform equally, I have never touched native app development as a basic rule, but things need to improve to feel closer to native. This missing link in experience might be driving the native conflict.
Please link to your ToS and Privacy Policy on the sign-up page. I had to google to get to your ToS and couldn't find your PP at all.
So someone closes one question and you decide that's it?

You know, there's a flag link under every post. If you thought a question was wrongly closed by the community or a mod then flag it and explain why. Nothing is irreversible.
I wrote a program in assembly a few weeks ago to do this exact thing.

It can spawn worker threads to speed up the summation. I have a quad core CPU, so I've set it to 4. If you have a different number of cores, you can modify line 8 to change the number of workers it will spawn.

https://gist.github.com/3369946