skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're reinforcing this point by with even "stronger opinions" but you're avoiding the fundamental issue:

"There's a difference between a person having an unconventional idea, e.g. for a business, and an unconventional theory, which they claim has a sound scientific basis."

Unlike a business proposal, no degree of bizarre circumstance or incredible luck can transform the underlying operation of the brain.

Ironically, you're using a human bias (pushing an analogy outside it's original domain) to argue about human bias. I'm pretty sure 99% of folks involved in this debate are well aware behavioural psychology and the like, so you can spare the "fuck you up" histrionics.
Crowdsourced Digital Bill of Rights needs help
No questions. No video views. Rejected.

I applied as a solo founder, so I'm really not surprised.

In other news, I'm considering bringing on a technical cofounder that can take over with what I've built with my very minimal Ruby knowledge while I handle everything else. :)
Maybe I need to be a little more blunt.

Because of the gross disparity in casualties between the two sides, attempting to minimise perceptions of the conflict as a whole (with a frame of reference chosen for statistical convenience) amounts proportionally to discounting the importance of the (overwhelmingly Palestinian) deaths.

This attitude of "it's bad but we can live with it" is directly reflected in the policies of the current Israeli government with respect to peace.
if they want to email me from an address listed in their profile (and your hn profile is listed in the spreadsheet) we'll be happy to update it.
Oh look another X sucks at blah. I always reverse these sentences to get interesting ideas. What if blah sucks at X - namely, what if jobs suck at finding the right engineers.

Now we're talking :D

This is a problem in HR not engineering - whose sole purpose is to find good engineers, pay them well enough so that they stay, make an environment good enough to keep them happy, and put them on the right projects to maximise value.

Guess how you fix this problem? You go Valve style. The problem isn't engineers, it's HR who can't get their act together.
Unrelated but why can't I pinch zoom on bgr.com's site? They must be severing up a mobile version. I really wish these sites would just serve up the normal non-mobile version.
adding myself to the list of people who think this is absolutely amazing.

the last time i got excited about something like this there were rumors of HTML tags for various chords and tablature signs.

super excited to see this in development!
The points thing has been up for months, why outrage now?

Oh right. Probably the same reason there is outrage now and not in the past few months when 600 rockets have been fired at Israeli civilians.
I GOT 20 VIEWS LOLZ
Actually Satoshi discusses this in his original paper many years back. People will just transact in a smaller unit, like micro bitcoins. The official client has the ability to display your balance in a smaller unit. It all works quite well.
While jamming is criminal behavior, the fcc won't be able to find you, in fact, the FCC have yet to even prosecute a single person for cell phone jamming since it's very hard to find and it's very easy hide jammers because people just think they're in a dead zone or their phone is malfunctioning

Theoretically, it is possible to triangulate the jamming signal by pinging cell phones and finding which ones aren't in the dark, mapping it to find the guy but it could take hours and the damage would have already been done.

oh, and sales of jammers have been going on for years on craigslist, I'm surprised they've just shut it down this year.
A few days after the submission ended I realized that my video wasn't working, lol.
And now for Amazon...
Nice move Mixpanel... now just have to get up to those 10K monthly users!
Show HN: Redface, a reddit-like view of your Facebook newsfeed
> There's a difference between a person having an unconventional idea, e.g. for a business, and an unconventional theory, which they claim has a sound scientific basis.

You sure about that? I thought most business plans were thrown out upon any contact with the customer and morphed in feedback to the customer, after a crazy idea was attempted.

Of course I could be wrong - but it feels like a false division between business and science. Most businesses when they do come out don't have a scientific basis as to why they succeed at the time - just like many theories. You can of course use hindsight bias to make it so.

It should be noted that Einstein was mostly ignored until he was verified by the Mercury orbit measurements.
Show HN: Aufeed, my weekend project turned into RSS Dashboard
In our case, just the one who submitted got the email. As said above, though, just a motivator for us to focus even more on the beta launch.
8 video views, 0 questions, solo founder rejected.
Love what Mixpanel is doing, so we'd like to jump on the bandwagon. Offering our $59 Basic plan for free for life, and 50% off all other plans. Happy to keep startups secure :) Email your YC rejection letter to founders@tinfoilsecurity.com
Hey whatdayaknow, the method I created! Here's a follow-up I published a while back that provides an generic listener method using the technique: http://www.backalleycoder.com/2012/08/06/css-selector-listen...
I get Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 confused all the time (I'm not being sarcastic here, even though it might sound it - I genuinely do! The names are too similar).

As a developer, it also doesn't help that Microsoft made a lot of noise about them being on the same kernel, even though there's hardly any API overlap between them.
I haven't used Backbone.js, but from what I've read there are extensions like Backbone.Marionette for better view and memory management.

https://github.com/marionettejs/backbone.marionette
Show HN: Instant Google Street View
Is it really worth saving?
So awesome. Perfect example of "scratch your own itch" done really well

Like others said, perhaps I should take my guitar out of its case and get my caluses back.
While artillery rounds are falling, while rockets are raining, while drones are killing daily around the globe, a blogger finds out what's wrong with war : gamification. I hope to hear him talk about it on a tech-conference soon.
Coding while drunk is for losers
We didn't get in either this time. But it's always nice having the opportunity to apply to these things.

Would love to see more of the application videos (it might be embarrassing to put yourself out there, but I'm sure everyone here's a supportive bunch and just wants to learn).

Hang in there.
You missed the point of that well-put criticism.

Kurzweil can identify the basic components that make up a working human brain, and concludes that if you put together a similar assemblage of components, what you'll get is going to be a working human brain.

The problem is that we're not sure we have all of the right components, we're not sure of how those components need to interact, we're not sure of what subtle patterns have arisen through evolution to head off design traps that we're not even aware of.

In short, yes we may be confident that we are described by physical processes, and intelligence is an emergent phenomena. But it is by no means guaranteed that when we put our components together that we'll get will be intelligent. Or if it is, then how similar to us it will be.

So far what I've said can be dismissed as abstract hypothesizing (of course so can the bulk of Kurzweil's work), so let me give a concrete example to worry you. Humans have an innate ability at language. If you have deaf twins who never encounter a language that they can understand, they will invent one complete with a consistent grammar. (This experiment has been conducted by accident.)

Other primates have no such innate ability at language. We've managed to teach chimps sign language, but they have been unable to master grammar.

There is a gene, FOXPRO2, that has 2 point mutations between us and chimps. Humans who lack either of those point mutations have extreme grammar problems. There is therefore clear evidence that putting together a primate brain is NOT SUFFICIENT to get language. Whatever it is that FOXPRO2 does differently between us and chimps is necessary for language.

The problem is that we don't know what FOXPRO2 is actually doing differently between us and chimps. We've recently shown that if you put our version of FOXPRO2 into mice, they behave differently. We can catalog the differences but we don't know why that happens.

Now suppose that we wire something artificial together that we think should be similar in capacity to a human brain. Given that we don't know what FOXPRO2 actually is doing to our brains, what are the chances that our artificial model manages to capture the necessary tweaks that FOXPRO2 makes in brain function for language function?

My bet is, "A lot lower than Kurzweil would have people believe."
A big part of startup life is getting Rejections. Let's move on and focus on more important things, products, customers, growth. Let's try again next time.
A look at the first version of Foursquare, released four years ago today.
Yes, I agree.. not to say that there isn't direct investment as well, but at a much smaller scale. We built solar farms to power our offices in NJ (50% @ 1.8MW[1]) and San Francisco, but those direct investments only account for 1% of worldwide power usage.

[1]: http://blog.bloomberg.com/2012-03-14/bloombergs-princeton-of...
I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific state.
I actually think rejection is the key to getting better. I have been rejected before it's no big deal. YC is a big opportunity to progress, but it's not the only way to progress.
Ask HN: How about forming an Alliance of YC Rejects? 
We are AYCR. We are Legion. We do not give up. We do not forget. Expect us !

http://alliance-ycr.kickoffpages.com/
heh I almost messaged you after reading that line. I did a bit of a double take.
I suspect the argument is more along the lines of, "The human brain does not obey the superposition principle." A sentence is just letters, but that doesn't mean that thorough examination of each letter provides you with the knowledge necessary to understand the sentence.

Anyway, saying "It's just atoms" is also misleading, because one also must content with the laws of physics which drive the atoms. Those laws are not yet thoroughly understood, and even with our significant current understanding we still have trouble programmatically predicting protein folding, to say nothing of the staggering complexity contained in the brain.
I am in London if anyone wants to grab a beer
As obviously stated in other threads... I've moved to Angular. Their 'digest all the changes and update the dom once' makes a lot of sense... and it has basically inverse opinion from Backbone. (Backbone has lots of opinion about data / saving, while Angular has more opinion about binding and logic.)
Bummer: Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

free@mixpanel.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
Message rejected by Google Groups. Please visit http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe... to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.
an Employee Handbook has legal status

-- I'd be wary of this generalization. It is more the opposite. If that makes sense.
I'm working on one of those. Beta SDK should be out soon too: http://multiplay.io
Havoc != terror.

Terrorists try to create fear and have a major impact on the populace, most often through bombings and death. Jamming a small (for now) part of our communications infrastructure could be a major detriment to people functioning but no one will fear for their lives.

That does not preclude, however, a Gotham city like scenario where an organization just makes a ton of stuff go wrong all at the same time.

I agree with your first point because if you were to do a cursory glance at what could efficiently kill us in biology you would see how little effort is actually required. Anyone with a little knowledge could pull off a devastating attack using just DMSO and a few toxic compounds.
just got the rejection letter.
In my opinion binding should be included with backbone. Rendering views over and over again is pointless and if it's a form it will lose focus. There is already one binding plugin that isn't being developed anymore. A winner should be picked and integrated.

I haven't created a monolithic backbone application but model relations and nesting could add significant complexity. Adding binding, model relations, and nesting will make backbone look more like Ember which I think they are trying to stay away from.
You know we are a highly technical audience and YC companies can advertise jobs, etc. here, right? I think that post is right, and things like cable TV or Hulu are just squeezing some money out of their product before they pass it on.
I applied with www.bfore.me - It would be great if you guys could show us some love and spread the word. We have just got to keep trucking!
For 2d games the feature set of this engine seems pretty solid. You get a particle engine, tile map editor, physics + easy to use collision shape editor, good font support, plus a nice IDE to visually setup your game. And, it's behavior/component based (like Unity), which is a great architecture for games.

But, what about accessing other iPhone functionality like the camera roll or in-app purchase? The docs don't seem to make any mention of it. Can you write native code plugins?
I got my rejection letter. My project is already built, and has 3000 users. I'm a solo developer, so thats probably why I was rejected. Also I'm 29 years old (started developing at 25). I'm the anti-YC demographic, so I wasn't really expecting to get accepted. The only think that kept me thinking I had a chance was the fact that the application process was actually pretty easy in my opinion. All the loggers out there talk like the application form is super hard, but I filled mine out in under a half hour. The questions are the kind of things you should be thinking about if you're doing things right. The hardest part for me was doing the video. The length came in at 0:56, because I was too nervous to say much other than the bare minimum.

Also, something else I want to say: The YC people really need to fix their application page. The day after I filled out my application, I came back to clean up the grammer, and when I went to click "save", it gave me the "expired link" error. All those grammer fixes down the drain. I never did go back and fix them. That may have also attributed to my rejection. In this day and age there is no excuse to screwing up basic crud :/
Ember.js?
I don't think so. They have had co-founders over 30 before.
MW tells us the scale of the plant. TWh/year tells us the production of the plant.

I've got a good gut sense for what a 3 MW wind turbine looks like, so when I read "50 MW Plant" - I can already envision about how large, and about how many turbines it will have (approx 15-30).

TWh/year doesn't tell me as much, because the plant might be located in a very windy place. Or maybe not in a windy place at all - the data is still useful, but I prefer MW when people are talking about a plant's "physicality".
Oh man, thats gotta hurt worse than getting 0 questions!
jay at jp hyphen hosting dot net

Thanks anyone! :)
I found video experience very useful - I found 200K angels because of my team video.
Share this with other investors - they will appreciate.
There is no easy way to include .js file that are stored on your server.
I just scored a hat trick of rejections :)
Emscripten generally speaking does not produce garbage because it uses a virtual heap. If you profile the demos using a heap profiler like Chrome's you will be able to observe this. The pauses are likely due to bugs in V8 that cause it to recompile a page's JavaScript constantly (it has a lot of them). The cost of those bugs ends up being higher than that of equivalent bugs in Firefox's JS engine because of the way V8 is designed.

Either way, though, if you have a reproduction case for those pauses you should definitely file a bug about it on the appropriate tracker - emscripten's if something is wrong with the generated code, or chromium's.
Switching to anger is a practical way of dealing with disappointment - it makes it easier to move forward and take action... Your comment may help some people get over being rejected and its not like YC is affected by how people they rejected handle things.
That's pretty weird! Do you know if there's any reason why your machine would be running a 32-bit kernel? I didn't think that was still supported on Lion...
I really like the pressureNET idea. I suspect this will be one of the "regrets" investors talk about later among themselves. Please don't slow down!
F.D.A. Posts Injury Data For 3 "Energy" Drinks
No startup, I should think, would get funding by gatecrashing a VC in meetings about potential fundraising for other companies. It's just a stupid idea: you're slapping someone in the face by intruding like that.
Show HN: audiostream, Transcode and Stream Audio to your browser
That's amazingly clever.

If I get you right this beat on the 'dumb' jammer because the power imbalance worked to the advantage of the defender: knowing when to listen for the very short pulse at high power level coming from the transmitter and ignoring its input the rest of the time other than to establish a baseline noise level, whereas the jammer would have to blanket the whole spectrum not knowing when the next pulse would be until it came?

So essentially the only way to break the system would then be to figure out ahead of time when a pulse would be transmitted and presumably the sequence of intervals between pulses was sufficiently hard to predict that this would take much longer than it took to get to the point of the next transmitted burst?
> Hierarchical Temporary Memory

Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo.

He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened.

He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machine intelligence. At the consumer level, this should be as obvious as doing a search on Google. Long-hold your iPhone home button to see pretty good voice recognition, or try Google's and be blown away. Even a little deeper, there are many modern businesses with machine intelligence as part of their very fabric. If you've confused artificial personhood with artificial intelligence then it's an understandable mistake, otherwise not.

A useless distraction.
seems like only the person who submitted it
mobius.io here, we make hardware and were pretty excited when we read http://www.paulgraham.com/hw.html. Got rejected today and checked the server logs, saw nobody ever logged into our demo site. Is this typical or just means that our application was really, really bad?
You could make huge fund money on hurricane preditions - it matters for commodity market. I know guys who made 300M because predicted Katrina. Approach this market!
Yeah -- I knew about the virtual heap arrays, so the GC explanation didn't make sense. I'll dig into it; thanks for the pointers.

I think you're right though. Once it's been running a while, it seems OK; so I think it was JIT compilation pauses.
1. Terrorists value things differently

2. Terrorists are mentally damaged.

3. Elon Musk values things differently

4. Ergo, Elon Musk is mentally damaged (or more likely to be damaged, or this is an indication that he might be damaged, as is implied).

Total analogy fail.

EDIT: Since I can't seem to be able to reply to your reply (too nested): Bringing up the analogy in the argument and finding it curious indicates that there is some reason as to why it even applies, when in fact it is completely irrelevant.
> biggest objection

biggest strawman right there.
No, people have many reasons for pursuing technology. The question is whether the government should encourage people to pour money into unprofitable forms of energy.
I think that example more than anything demonstrates a completely different danger to society comprising two related phenomena:

1. Media sensationalism encouraged by an opportunistic government, engineered to whip the public into a terrified frenzy, and

2. Poorly trained and paranoid law enforcement with no sense of perspective.

I don't think it has much relevance to jamming public WiFi, except peripherally in that news stories like this may do more harm than good.
Is it just me or is HN turning into Reddit?
How NOT to design an email unsubscribe form
They have found and fined jammers of other services. Ham radio operators deal with this all the time.

http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-takes-strong-stance-against-rad...
> Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land

I think Ray Kurzweil would agree with you. That's why he uses language like "the intuitive linear view" and "the historical exponential view" [1]

The whole POINT is that the predictions sound crazy. But the reason why he gathers such a following is because, unlike most "futurists", who make bold predictions for decades in the future only to slink away and hide when the time comes to for a test, Kurzweil welcomes rigorous evaluation of his past predictions. [2]

You can read through second link there and decide for yourself. He laboriously goes point for point and evaluates (in 2010) how he did in his earlier predictions from decades before. I gotta say, it's pretty impressive.

So the reason people listen to him is because his future predictions are even MORE crazy, but it's hard to argue with an 87% accuracy rate. Even his failures aren't WAY off the mark.

1 - http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
2 - http://www.kurzweilai.net/predictions.php
Amazon: Our cloud powered Obama's campaign
With gmail you have a marketplace. Gmail might be nice, but email is a protocol and you can take your business elsewhere. Not so with facebook. They've built what's essentially treated as a protocol, but it's completely under their control. Clearly, this makes it rife for what we might perceive as abuse.
It will be fascinating to see how many iOS5 devices upgrade to iOS6 the moment Google Maps becomes available. Does anyone know how or where this information could be found by those outside of Apple?
We also got rejected http://www.amahi.com though we are ramen-profitable, we will hack growth no matter what :)

A bunch of us applicants are getting together in Mountain View on Saturday @ 6pm for a drink to share ideas/experiences in the startup path.

Email if you are local and want to join.
EDIT: not 8pm, 6pm.
Now you are talking about saving face, not about saving iOS. Maybe he was the best guy for the job and he still couldn't do it.
I find it odd there is no discussion about what Google's motivation/business case is for Ingress. Reddit user Sharper_pmp has a compelling theory that it's an attempt to collect pedestrian route data to compete with Nokia's newly announced turn-by-turn routes for pedestrians. He also brings up instances in the past where Google has created mutually beneficial ways to have people voluntarily build their data sets.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/138res/google_launc...