skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Peter Thiel recently talked a little about this[1] counter-intutive phenomena (that pg states as that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners):

One intuition is that people do not believe in a power law distribution. They intuitively don’t believe that returns could be that uneven. So when you have an up round with a big increase in valuation, many or even most VCs tend to believe that the step up is too big and they will thus underprice it.

Which is intersting, because he actually talked a little to pg about this during the class where he said it:

Peter Thiel: Do Y-Combinator companies follow a power law distribution?

Paul Graham: Yes. They’re very power law

But Thiel was not happy just stating the phenomena, but he also states on why most people discredit it, when he talked about secrets[2]:

The power law secret operates similarly. In one sense it’s a secret about finance. Startup outcomes are not evenly distributed; the follow a power law distribution. But in another sense it’s a very human secret. People are uncomfortable talking about inequality, so they either ignore it or rationalize it away. It is psychologically difficult for investors to admit that their best investment is worth more than the rest of their portfolio companies combined. So they ignore or hide that fact, and it becomes a secret.

The distribution secret also has two sides to it. Distribution is much more important than people think. That makes it a business secret. But it’s a human secret too, since the people involved in distribution work very hard to hide what’s going on. Salespeople do best when people do not know they’re dealing with salespeople.

[1] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels...

[2] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels...
a guy 'radiates "winner"'? Really?

I sincerely hope you're being flippant and don't mean that as a serious answer.
I largely agree, even though I don't like the decisions overall here (in my own opinion, the Peninsula could benefit from more high-density areas of housing, especially near Caltrain and BART stations). I think it's actually not even that far from what the market would produce without zoning, at least under some circumstances. If you abolished zoning today, then lots of things would change, but if the area had been initially developed without zoning, private-sector zoning workalikes would likely have taken its place.

If you look at Houston, the largest city with no zoning laws, the private sector has effectively re-implemented zoning via contract law in huge sections of the city, in the form of subdivisions where the initial developer set up a homeowner's association, empowered via deed restrictions, that implement similar rules about not only density, but even things like what color you can paint your windows. People clearly seem to like living in that kind of community-managed neighborhood. At least doing it via the actual government, rather than these weird quasi-governments, is more transparent and democratic.
Yep. $3,500 gets you a 1br in SOMA where you actually see the sun.
'Digital Downtown' a key part of Austin's economic, tech sector development
> . If paying someone for proprietary software allows me to more quickly or cheaply achieve

You're confusing the tradeoff. The tradeoff is not about money; libre software can be sold as well.

The point in question is whether you should have to (or even be able to) sacrifice your intrinsic rights, such as your right to modify your own property for your own purposes.

Whether or not you paid money for it is irrelevant to that aforementioned right.
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It would be neat if there were a way to save songs for later consumption. As a spotify user, I would love to be able to "star" it so it saves to my account, but I'm not sure if that is possible on the web
Yeah, that's a lot more concise.
The consumer doesn't care what the business model is. Microsoft's problem is that all its entry points into the market are being taken away. If it wants to go cheap it has to deal with the $299 Fire HD and the $199 (sort of) Nexus 7. Apple already straddles $399-$499. Those are brand name competitors with premium products and decent or better ecosystems.

It's not clear what Amazon's business model is. Bezos claims he wants to make money on content and not lose too much on devices, but he's losing money on Prime too. It seems to me Amazon's model is to get as much market power as possible -- ideally a monopoly -- and then charge rents, but I don't see how any such monopoly would be sustainable (at least without the DOJ foolishly helping). The one area where Amazon (temporarily) held a near monopoly was ebooks and this is precisely what it did (it still tries, only more subtly).
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What is the value of all companies that weren't picked by YC? Are there any notable black swans that are known YC-rejects?

It would be interesting to do an analysis of those companies that were rejected by YC, and see how many "black swans" were present in those rejects, as well as maybe relative value of the rejected startups vs the chosen ones to see how effective the YC selection process is.
Anyone know what the two YC companies Ben from Pinterest was a part of?
A native client without a user data sandbox doesn't solve the problem of networked applications leaking private data and spying on the user at all. The code needs to be open source, versioned, vetted, and only obtained via a trusted repository for every application the user wants to run each time it is updated. The user is no longer instantly able to access the latest version of the application by simply typing in a URI.
Why isn't Google making an official Google Talk app for iOS again? Is it because of some limitations of the iOS or they just don't want to make one?
I have the opposite problem. There's one command - I think it's probably <C-w> (split screens in Vim) that I always hit every time I'm using a Mac, and it inevitably closes my entire terminal.

The nice thing about Linux is that I can at least remap these keybindings. On OS X, it's literally impossible to do a perfect remapping of the keys (trust me. I've tried.)

Hopefully I've saved recently (or run the process inside GNU screen....).
dvsscsxxsfewyrbrygtxchdgsbea esqczfrcfrg
Early first.last@gmail accounts had firstlast@gmail reserved for them. Google stopped doing that a few years after launch.
Is that really a black swan, tho? I used the term the other day wrt wearing eyeguards while playing squash (to avoid losing an eye) but think I misused it then, too.
Interesting to observe from that really big successes are better executed versions of ideas/products that exist on the market in a big way already (e.g. airbnb, facebook, dropbox, google) and the reason they seem like a bad idea (to investors) is not because they offer something nobody wants, but because they already exist in a too-big-to-challenge of a way? And that they might also seem bad because their starting point might seem like a niche (facebook).
500 Internal Server Error
The server has either erred or is incapable of performing the requested operation.
It's a PR thing more than an actually-helping thing. For example, the OpenSim developers had a problem where memory use exploded rapidly on heavily-loaded regions running under Mono, to the point that they had uptimes measured in single-digit hours, yet the same regions running the same code and workload under .Net were just fine. Miguel de Icaza's response was to run a totally idle region for 24 hours under both Mono and .Net, produce pretty graphs showing that Mono used less memory, and claim that the problem didn't exist. The developers pointed out the flaws in his tests, but he never corrected his statement or helped to find the actual problem.
Anyone write code in an Eames?
dvsfsvs dfyvdvrdc;.dcsfgzxexsxffdvt.
If it's tied to your email account, couldn't you do a password reset?
I mean it. Have you met either of them? They both seem unstoppable.
On what basis is something "awesome"?

Are the tracks handpicked? If not, what is the overall method?

Why is there no attribution if the tracks are clearly from websites that have recommended the music?
I asked a similar question of paul down below but it seems to me that big successes can come in 2 flavors:

1) Execution driven success in a winner take all market. The idea seems good, but there is lots of competition so it's hard to see how the startup will break through & win the market.

2) A genuinely "good idea that initially looks bad" like you describe in your essay.

It's hard to think back and decide which, now successful, companies are 1 vs 2 because of the memory distortion effect, but it really does seem to me like #1 is more common. What do you think?
This seems to suggest the decision to fund has less to do with the idea and more to do with the founders. We already knew that.

Does this also mean that the "big winners" will not come merely from a pool of what appear to be bad ideas, but from a subset of that pool: bad ideas put forth by founders the VC thinks are impressive? That too, seems somewhat obvious.

Taking it one step further, can you separate the "idea" from the "founder" in assessing the project's chances of being a "big winner"?

Maybe that was the goal of requesting that people should apply to YC even if they had no "idea".

After all, the supply of "bad ideas" is potentially limitless.
any suggestions for better implementation? we're for sure looking for ways to improve.
This tickles my funny bone. Of all the New York-isms to import to the west coast!

So now instead of signing away your firstborn for a studio at a stabby corner of the Mission, it's now your firstborn and 2 months rent for the privilege!
Audiobeta and MightyQuiz.
I think the unproportional returns of the really big hits are blinding investors, and even pg a bit in this essay. Yes, it's easy to look at it from that viewpoint and say - 3/4 of our returns are from 2 companies and 1/4 from all the rest. But it misses a couple of important points - 1/4 of 10 billion is not small change, you would still like to have those companies in your portfolio, all things considered, and second, considering the (very) small sample size - it could've been just 1 company worth a 1/4 of the total or 0. That's how variable it is.

Another thing to consider is that the best teams often pivot into a big success rather than start with it. There are countless of such examples, and it just goes to show that even starting with what appears a relatively safe but limited idea can eventually grow into a huge success. Sometimes founders need to get their hands dirty in the market to realize what is the real opportunity. If you pass those teams up because you think their idea cap is too small, you'll be missing a lot of big hits.

What it all comes to for me is investing in people. People make big hits, not markets. Markets can grow and startups can span multiple markets, but it all starts with the people who direct it forwards.
thought about that - wanted to keep it dead simple, but i might add it.
They're both crimes, but you're much less likely to get arrested if you don't go to the police.
Doug Menuez's Photographs of Steve Jobs and the Tech Boom
Quick aside, there are still (in NZ at least) various conditions that you can attach to property sales. For example, if your property had some native rainforest on it, you could state to whomever you sell it to that they are not allowed to mess with that part of the land (e.g. chop trees down), and whenever they onsell they must also make that a condition of sale.
Wikipedia tells author he isn't a credible source on book he wrote
This sounds a lot like some random FUD that you picked up somewhere. If C dev times are so long, why is it that new versions of large scale applications written C are available so often? An adept C programmer can get an application up and running in quite short order. Quick GUI? GTKDialog is available as are: Win32 GUI API, GTK, QT, ncurses, FLTK, and many more. It is also worth noting that should your customer/employer be willing to use some opensource code in his/her/their application, the amount of open source C code available online is quite staggering.
Hey, I'm an Aussie using PayPal and this is the first time I've heard of this. Where can I go to read more?
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/alerts/alt063.shtm

For the most part, since it costs real money to send real mail, many of the people behind it are inclined to honor unsubscribe requests.
The "haves" in Australia are those associated with mining and construction (since mining demands a lot of infrastructure). The "have nots" are everyone else.

If it's mining, you can put the environment in the "have not" column as well. Mining is devastating on wildlife and the environment.
I think it's exactly the opposite--any language that doesn't allow you to break out to a different language for performance is broken.
I think the opportunity to reinvest in repeat founders is a large, if currently potential, factor. Stripe & Hipmunk being the likely big win examples, but in our batch there was shoptiques and exec.

I expect it will take a few more years but it will turn out to be financially rational to invest in teams with repeat YC founders.
Off-topic, but something I've been chewing on lately: what's it like to have your every written (or spoken!) word analyzed by a bunch of people? Esp. people that you end up having some form of contact with.

It seems like it would be difficult to just have a public conversation about a topic. Do you think about that much when you write?
Edit:

I tried using Grooveshark's html5 web app the last few days.

I thought I might be able to cancel Spotify in which I use everytime I drive (few times a day). Using Grooveshark's web app in the car is NO REPLACEMENT for Spotify, as a playlist doesn't play contiguously and if it does there is a one to two minute delay between each track. Other times between tracks while driving I've had to fidget with the play/pause button to start tracks.

Spotify is the clear winner and I'm happy paying subscriber!
You're missing my point -- I was objecting to the "(at least among the innumerate)" bit. It would hurt YC's reputation among everybody who matters, whether innumerate or not, if 70% of YC companies didn't survive past Demo Day.
My problem is that I weigh 125kg/275lbs and am 2cm shy of 2m (mesomorph territory). I break an office chair about once every two years - they are simply not built to cope with my weight. Thus the idea of shelling out $1k for a chair scares me.

That being said, at my last work there was a significant remodeling of the office space by a designer. As in, the techboys roll their eyes type designer. She was there to customise our area, as long as we fitted into the grand design. So we had these chairs that fit into the grand design. Attractive chairs. But terrible for sitting in, and the seat pan was way too low. I cited my height and kept my old chair. "But it doesn't fit in with the design!" was followed with "We'll get you cushions!" (which were never seen...). Over time, I noticed other staff were taking my lead and going with chairs that worked for them rather than chairs that looked good. Long story short, I like your 'all chairs must be black' idea, it's far better than making all chairs the same.
I'm 6'3" (~190 cm) tall. At my last job, I was having severe leg pain from sitting at a too-short desk, which caused me to sit with my legs tucked under my chair all day. Since there was No Money™ to buy another desk (and I rejected the suggestion that I move my existing desk up on top of a pile of cinder blocks), I blew ~$1000 of my own money on a GeekDesk adjustable height desk.

Despite using the desk for a year and a half, I couldn't stand at it for more than an hour or so without back pain. To me, the real benefit of the adjustable height desk was being able to raise it up to a comfortable height for sitting -- I could finally sit with my feet flat on the floor in front of me!

A few months later, after a company in the university's research park folded, we got to pick over the bones and grab some office furniture. I managed to get a rolling, armless, adjustable height drafting stool. The combination of the GeekDesk and that stool was nirvana as far as sitting in an office goes -- I was able to leave the desk at the same height whether I was standing or sitting on the stool, which made it easy to switch back and forth throughout the day.

One downside to the desk: since most people I worked with were shorter (sometimes significantly!) than me, I often had to temporarily lower my chair and desk so other people could easily see something on my computer screen. On the other hand, it was easy (and rather awesome) to have conversations with coworkers who were roughly the same height as me -- I just stood up, pushed the chair out of the way, and had room for a standing conversation with two other people who could all see the screen.
this isn't the hype machine - its just a very simple way to enjoy some new music with no bells and whistles or distractions.
The problem is that the Command key is also used to do some things that the Alt key isn't on Windows, and there's no way to separate them or rebind the shortcuts (anymore).

Not to mention that you can't remap arbitrary keys in OS X without using third-party software, most of which you have to pay for.

Not that I mind paying for software, but I do mind paying for basic functionality that was present in the last version of the OS.
Interesting, but seems to just look at the US landscape. I think the author would be pleasantly surprised if he broadened his field of vision not just to other developed nations but in particular some African countries to see signs of true consumer finance innovation.
Nice. Looks like it matches up users by remote IP address as visible to the wifichat.net server. I was hoping for some sort of magic where it doesn't need to send to the main servers to chat, but this is a clever trick!
The experience is - in one word - disgusting

Really?

It lacks common denominator keyboard shortcuts and keyboard bindings

No it doesn't. Emacs/bash key combos are everywhere. These are the oldest and most important key sequences in use on any computer. CTRL-A, CTRL-E, META-F, META-B, META-D, CTRL-K - and they pervade the Cocoa/Nextstep text engine. They're everywhere.

It lacks sane default simple applications like a decent terminal emulator

Really? Terminal is pretty awesome in some ways. For example, with the Gnome terminal app, when you resize the window, lines aren't readjusted for width and you end up either cropping lines or leaving a blank space to the right. Terminal seems to be one of the few terminal emulators that gets this right.

Unfamiliar key bindings makes me think twice or thrice before typing

I don't understand this. Doesn't this just mean that you haven't gotten used to it?

How can I skip to end of line?

CTRL-E, like I said. If you're an Emacs nut (and I am) you can even edit the file ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict to make these key bindings work in ANY text field that uses an NSTextField object in ANY OSX application.

There's even a global kill-ring. It's awesome. Clearly there were some real Emacs fans who worked on the original Nextstep text engine.

switching to full height windows instead of full screen windows with the maximize button? Why on earth I would opt-in for loosing screen real estate

It's a 'resize' button, not a maximize button. For many applications, especially those whose content is a fixed or maximum size (like web browsers), a maximize button with a large screen is just silly - you'd waste screen real estate with white or blank borders. What the 'resize' button does is and should be application-specific. For a web browser, it should resize the window to the size of the content. Ditto a word processor. For an IDE like XCode and Eclipse, it should maximize (and both of those do).

This may be only me but, I hate OsX

It sounds to me like you haven't put much energy into figuring it out and finding the best workflow - certainly not nearly as much energy as I've put into learning the esoterica behind Linux abominations like XKB and Gnome 3. And I would never say that Linux disgusts me - far from it. I think Linux is great.
We got lucky. 1.5 years ago, we rented a house in SF for $2700, and the rent was frozen at $2700 for up to 3 years. A friend of ours moved into our neighborhood and is paying $3300/month for a comparable place.

I'm not sure what we're going to do once the lease is up in 1.5 years, hopefully the rent prices will stabilize. I know my friend in SOMA who bought his 2 br condo for $580k can now sell it for probably $800k, and charge at least $4k/month for it. It's absolutely crazy how much rents have gone up, it's as bad as during the dotcom boom, where my rent went up $500/month after the 1st year lease. (I moved out to a worse neighborhood instead of renewing the lease).
Wow, this is one of the best articles I've read on HN in a long time. It's a fantastic insight, and explains so much.

I would kill for a whole series of articles like this, explaining the philosophical underpinnings behind various technological alternatives.

So often, HN comments seem to degenerate into PHP vs everything else, iOS vs Android, OSX vs Linux, MySQL vs PostgresSQL, based on nothing else but people's personal experiences and preferences.

Taking a step back and exploring the why and history behind products, and what problems they were intended to solve, feels so refreshing and educational.

Kudos to the author (Chris Travers)!
> ... as well including the fact that it isn't a victimless crime

I feel like it still is. No child is directly harmed. There are indubitably indirect consequences, but those are unknown and irrelevant. If you search far enough, no crime is victimless.

For a less offensive metaphor, consider drug use. I have no doubt that if marijuana is legalized, people will die because of the actions of inebriated persons. However, because this is only indirect and no other aspects are taken into account, it would be unfair to not call the usage of marijuana a victimless crime.

So I don't deny some children might be molested that wouldn't have been molested without the legalisation of child pornography. However, some children might also be saved from harm (by paedophiles being able to "vent" perhaps). I don't think anybody can know whether the count of children saved minus children harmed would be netto positive (and I don't think it matters, because this is starting to sound like utilitarianism).

In short, some children might be saved, some might be harmed, we don't and can't know. However, because no child would be directly harmed, viewing and distributing is still a victimless crime and some people are of the principle that no victimless crime should be punishable by law.

> Arousal and sexuality is quite a complex thing. It's not as clear cut as we would like to believe. I've tried to find case papers and references for this and failed, but I recall reading a fascinating account by a neuro-psychiatrist on how sex offenders often get aroused while reciting their tales. In some cases documentation and distribution of the act was a part of their ritual and it aroused them as well, so it's not as far fetched as you think.

Granted. However, this also seems true (even more so) for murderers. Anders Breivik no doubt enjoyed the media attention and I didn't hear voices calling for his manifesto to become illegal to spread.