skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is one of the best posts I've read on Hacker News.

I love how you're open about your numbers. How you (debatably) made mistakes, and how you recovered -- and how I remember when you launched DomainPigeon :)

Keep up the great work, and tell more stories.
A lot of sound techs who record outside rock these I've noticed. I have a pair and they are quite nice, durable, and sound pretty good. I picked mine up for like $60, which is very reasonable i thought. Comfortable and are sealed, so you can tune others out and the music in.
> She describes a world where there's no difference between men and women.

Reminding us that if you want an escape from reality, fiction is your ticket.
although we can all think of an edge case.. (especially if we know how the sample is biased)

eg: a gender survey in the general population that transgender respondees do not answer -- ends up with a 99% sample size (all but the transgenders) -- and thus gives a pretty significant bit of data on male:female ratios, etc..

Agreed in principle though.
Here is an idea:

Assign the unused go:// protocol to redirect to your own url shortener and create a firefox extension to handle that for the user.

go:google

go:ABCDEFGHIJ

go:QX9RHG03WA

There you have it, the shortest shortener ever.
Naked on the Web
Just think of how many parts of a normal person's day suck. These guys put some "Apple" and some "Whole Foods" into hand soap. Every boring product out there is vulnerable to a similar attack as consumer attitudes towards aesthetics and the environment change.
I've got the HD212. (when doing some renovations recently - I found it cut out more sound than my dad's old protective ear-muffs)

I'm not particularly an audio buff - but I reckon these sound great!
I don't watch old-school cartoons much, but I do enjoy shows like Family Guy, which has quite a bit of absurdity itself.
I find it completely unbelievable at this point that one man could execute a fraud on this scale for some 15 years or more.

Just producing the paperwork that was sent to each investor on a monthly basis would be more than a full time job. Add to that the lengthy SEC filings, etc.

And he was not working full time - he spent a lot of time schmoozing either in NYC or Palm Beach.
Experiment comparing patents and markets
They should also be nofollowed or the link will still help the spammer's pagerank. Any links in a comment having score < 0 should have the rel="nofollow" attribute set.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp...

edit: nevermind, demallien's solution is superior, in that it prevents accidental clickage.
I was talking more about the fact that it took a few hours from seeing an opportunity, to finalizing the deal. Outside of SV, it would take a few weeks just to arrange a meeting. And chances are the company would end up passing on the partnership because they don't want to trust a fresh startup.
I can see how this might be a problem.

But before we dig into this problem, let us pause for a moment and reflect on the age-old terrible plight of the tool developer. Twitter developed a tool that could not be spammed. So the users went busily to work, layering a spammable protocol on top of it. And now those users demand that someone figure out how to keep the spam out of their spammable protocol. In the meantime, Twitter gains a reputation as a system that's filled with spam.

Perhaps it is time for a corollary to Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: "Every social application evolves until it fills up with spam. Those that cannot be filled up with spam are replaced by those that can." Though I guess Doctorow proposed this theory years ago when he wrote All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites:

http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt
The lower capacities have become cheaper in SSD, however that's usually because hard drives rarely get too small. A 3.5" is always roughly double a 2.5", so if the largest 3.5" disk is currently 1TB, then the biggest selling 2.5" is likely to be a 1/2TB, which are the ones I generally look at.

However, I've already been looking into the SDD vs HDD and I'm swaying towards the HDD. I've already seen multiple USB flash failures, thankfully none were carrying data I didn't have backed up, however in a couple of situations we've got lucky; my wife's 8gb flash drive decided to fail when she needed it for college, so I had to load the back-up of her entire disk onto my FTP.

The USB flash cost $20 for 8gb, which was an introductory price as it's now $30 again. It had a 6 month warranty and failed a little bit past that line, the other one she got at the same time is running fine so I'm not going to call it as purposeful failures, but good warranty placing. However, for 4 times the price we paid, AKA $80, I've seen 160 gig 2.5" HDD with a warranty of 5 fucking years! Assuming flash drive sizes double every year for a similar base price of $20 then it's going to take at least 4 1/2 years for SSD to match the HDD and I'd have complete warranty on the HDD!

So IMO for portable storage, I'm not touching the piece of cheap crap flash drives. I'll stick with real technology, with real warranties that haven't failed me once since before the 3.5" floppy disk was released!
Sean Randall On Making Twitter More Accessible With Jawter
There are many projects underway to improve the accessibility of Twitter. There is the web based Accessible Twitter that is doing an awesome job. However, recently I read about the work of Sean Randall that turns the JAWS screen reader into a Twitter client. I hooked up with Sean Randall to learn more about Jawter.
On systems design by Jim Waldo (2007)
Question for paul: your limiting factor is not money, but time, right? Are you just going to say yes to more interviewees or will you interview more startups? Will YC alums take a more active role between funding and demo day?
Heck yeah. South Park, Family Guy, The Simpsons, The Ghost in the Shell, Sailor Moon.
I really don't understand this. Why would YC want to manage a fund and investors? Is it more likely to get Sequoia to invest down the road?
I know here in Bristol, a lot of things happen around Open Coffee Bristol, Bathcamp and the Watershed
"Design can’t make a bad site good and makeup can’t make an ugly woman beautiful. That is unless you’re drunk on optimism or alcohol."

Design can't slay the usability dragon alone. Well-said. I liked your article because you didn't even come close to saying 'X ways to succeed' but felt like you shared the highs and lows and mediums of startup.
I think this could be a way for Sequoia/Ron Conway to find good companies ahead of other investors. This way, they'll know all about the current crop of YC companies and will be able to spot the winners from day 1.

After all as investors, pg would probably have to report what companies he has selected for the program
Looks to me he is a honestly sad man.
Madoff is going to spend the rest of his life broke and in jail. For someone as rich as he was, he didn't live that swanky a lifestyle, and gave a lot to charity. Meanwhile, fantastically greedy people like Buffett and Gates are still out of jail and enjoying what they do.

Dishonest people with an insatiable need to be loved and accepted should read this. Unfortunately, they're generally told that their instincts are virtuous enough to compensate for the harm they cause, just as greedy people are told that they are so evil it negates the wealth they create.
I don't think his time (or really, all 4 YC founders' time) was the reason YC started small. YC is an experiment, and you don't want to fund 100 startups at once if you're not quite sure what you're getting into. Now that they've learned from several cycles, they can start to scale up responsibly. At the same time, you don't want to start too small and inhibit the learning process.
PHash.org: OpenSource perceptual hash library
So if he was not greedy, why did he started the Ponzi scheme in first place?
There's a few brits in #startups on freenode. (Myself included)

If you're into advertising revenue, I'd again recommend http://www.affiliates4u.com/ Tons of good advice there.
Extending Lua in C
Bill Gates and Buffet don't live that swanky a lifestyle considering the size of their wealth, and the amount they have pledged to charity is unprecedented.
I'm on #startups - I'm ttx.
good info, big timesink:

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f103/

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f4/
Great for the money, but in my personal experience they become really uncomfortable after about an hour. It's kept me from using them as often as I would like. Maybe I just have a weirdly shaped head.
http://www.kubelabs.com/phpdug/ if you like digg style forum.
Definitely not true for eBay as their account would immediately be closed for violating their code of conduct. I doubt amazon would allow this either.
Agreed, but it's way slower at building trust. Especially compared to the opportunities people have in the valley to socialize outside of some deal-making session.
Here's what I think: Short domains are nice, but in the new web, people search for things. So brands are necessary, and if your brand is searchable, the site is good, no matter how long it is. For example "I will teach you to be rich", is a pretty long domain name, but it's an excellent name to be found on a google search.

Add a new section to your site that scans books or other sources, and constructs sentences made up of 5 words or so, and offer them as domains to be registered. Maybe that will work better. Example: "Itwasadarkandstormynight.com"
Defying mobile advertising shortage, Boston's Quattro Wireless raises $10 million C round
Grid Based Design Toolbox
Real IT Video Blog - Jeff Discusses Localized Sites
The World's Largest MMORPG: You're Playing it Right Now
Rails 2.3: Templates, Engines, Rack, Metal, much more
good work. great post. keep it up. what are you doing next? improve domain pigeon or move on?
Will it help in reviving the economy?
The statement was drafted with the help of his lawyer, undoubtedly, and according to people who heard it delivered in the courtroom, the expression in his voice and his demeanor didn't match his words. There is also evidence from the federal investigation in his business office that suggests the scheme went on much longer than Madoff has admitted. In other words, the confession is just more lies to cover his ass. I have less respect for him than ever after reading the statement.

And it's ludicrous to compare a guy who steals from a charity for Holocaust survivors to leading business founders. Madoff is as completely venal as anyone who has ever been convicted of a business crime anywhere.
Ask 37signals: How does 37signals use its own products on a day-to-day basis?
I also worry that it will hurt YC companies raising angel/VC money after YC. If these angels and Sequoia pass, won't other investors think that something is wrong with the company?
If you're in or near Oxfordshire then you should take a look at http://www.oxin.co.uk/

Of course, there is also the Europe-wide: http://www.seedcamp.com/
I'm not advocating a ban on that sort of thing. I think that codifying it into some sort of law and forcing it upon everyone else would be the dumbest thing possible. What I'm suggesting is that people like you and I should shun that kind of business behavior voluntarily. It's more of a moral thing, like not being a patent troll.
Only because their fortunes are equally huge. They could give a lot more. Looking at Gates, I feel like his foundation is nothing more than a shelter for his money, he only gives just enough to meet the legal requirement for a foundation and invests the bulk of it to keep the fortune growing.
At Austin Meeting, Seeking Exposure for New Tech Products
The SSD taking over the HDD is based on the preposition that everything stays the same, but the game is going to change and we all know that. Digital distribution is beginning to hit big, I mean look at NetFlix on Xbox 360 and iTunes.

I haven't bought a CD in over a year and when I did it was because it was one of my favorite bands. How long is it before I'm saying the same thing with DVD?

SSD might pick up some niche uses, but there's a reason people have wanted mass storage, which is that programs are progressively getting bigger and so are all the files we store. I remember thinking a 400x300 pixel image was big, now I think a photo smaller than like 2000x1500 as small. In 5-10 years I'm going to think anything smaller than like 10,000x7,500 as pathetically small. Equally, I'm going to think any video that's not at least 720p isn't worth having, because by 2015 companies want UHDV to be released displaying at 4320p. When my video is taking up 32MB per frame I don't want, I'll need maximum capacity still.
I don't know. On one hand I've invested about seven months into this project and it feels like a waste to move on without having done much marketing or anything like that. On the other hand, I'm somewhat bored with it and really want to learn Python. Maybe I'll do both for a while. Not sure.
Gay People, Come To Rails
Perhaps twitter should restrict its content to tweets about Erlang for a day or so.
aren't you over thinking this? YC simply took fund to expand their current operations.

Sequoia merely put money in, its like thinking the people that put money in the Sequoia funds get involved in who Sequoia finances.
Use It or Loose It
Well I mostly agree with Brandon, and frankly even as I was writing my post I felt that Nynaeve and Moraine were the best of the bunch, Nynaeve particularly.

But the arguement of "but they ARE reckless ignorant kids" only works for the first couple books. 8 books in women are still running around saying Rand/Mat/Perrin is a wool headed moron who will only make things worse if left to his own devices, despite each having shown their competence time and time and time again, while the women's meddling caused things to go pear shaped just as often.
I guess it's a simulator in that the bond angles and lengths dynamically rearrange as you add new atoms or yank on existing ones. I'm not sure the results are accurate (compared with density functional theory, Hartree-Fock, etc.), but it looks pretty cool. I assume it's doing some sort of force-based algorithm with an integrator.
Visualising the Haskell Universe
I'm quite fond of my Sennheiser PX100's. They're cheap, exceptionally lightweight, and outrageously comfortable. Plus, the sound is quite decent (on par with the Sennheiser HD280 Pro).
16 ways IT can do less with less
The Game Business Is A Year From Irrelevance
UW-Milwaukee Study Could Realign Climate Change Theory
Nanocapacitors with Big-Energy Storage
I guess they don't have enough cash in the bank to keep investing half a million dollars twice a year with no mostly returns for 7+ years (typical time for a start-up to become valuable).
The map definition that OP uses doesn't look like a pure tail-recursive one:

; map-kuro5hin : (X -> Y) * (listof X) -> (listof Y)
; http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/17/93442/8657
(define (map-kuro5hin func a-list)
(cond
[(null? a-list) null]
[else (cons (func (car a-list)) (map-kuro5hin func (cdr a-list)))]))

In a simple substitution model it unwraps to:

(define sq (lambda (x) (* x x)))
(map-kuro5hin sq '(1 2 3))
(cons (sq 1) (map-kuro5hin sq '(2 3)))
(cons (sq 1) (cons (sq 2) (map-kuro5hin sq '(3))))
(cons (sq 1) (cons (sq 2) (cons (sq 3) (map-kuro5hin sq '()))))
(cons (sq 1) (cons (sq 2) (cons (sq 3) '())))
(cons (sq 1) (cons (sq 2) '(9)))
(cons (sq 1) '(4 9))
'(1 4 9)

In this model it uses stack to store the result list. Of cause an actual Scheme implementation might perform the calculation without using stack.

Here's a pure tail-recursive variant:

; make external definition to allow unwrapping demonstration
(define (map-iter func lst result)
(if (null? lst) result
(map-iter func (cdr lst) (cons (func (car lst)) result))))

(define (map-tr func a-list)
(map-iter func (reverse a-list) '()))

That translates to:

(map-tr sq '(1 2 3))
(map-iter sq (reverse '(1 2 3)) '())
(map-iter sq '(3 2 1) '())
(map-iter sq '(2 1) (cons (sq 3) '()))
(map-iter sq '(1) (cons (sq 2) '(9)))
(map-iter sq '() (cons (sq 1) '(4 9)))
'(1 4 9)
Hmm, legal question here, since I don't know exactly how this deal is arranged. Is this a fund in the traditional angel/vc model, or do they just now own a chunk of Y Combinator? And if so, do they therefore own a small chunk of past YC companies still in the portfolio?

If so, it would seem my startup is now partially owned by some of the many angels and VCs who turned us down, which will really kill some of my revenge fantasies :)
As a writer I'd agree with your statement. I've also read a lot about young writers and there are very few specifically for this reason, not necessarily for a lack of creativity but for the inability to produce something believable.

How can a 15 year old write believably about relationships, or going to a bar or club, or any of these things. Experience can easily be transposed from one place to another; aka, you don't have to get kicked in the gut to know it's going to hurt a lot, just like you don't need to win the PGA tour to write how great it would feel to win it. However, if you've never won anything or felt any sense of achievement, it has to be exceptionally hard to write convincingly about someone winning.

I think this is why most writers begin appearing in their 20's (I believe it depends on region, I've seen more early-20's writers from the UK, where you graduate high-school at 16, than from the US, where you graduate high-school at 18) when they've had many formative experiences and they start experiencing the real world. When they start to see hardship and all the rest that comes with adulthood.
Just because spam is an "old" problem doesn't mean it's not solvable. For example, if someone were to build a working prototype or something that demonstrates to advertisers that a pull method actually works better for generating sales/ interest/ revenue than spam, companies might be more willing to invest in infrastructure conducive to pull.

Spam is "profitable" because of the low cost of spamming a bunch of random people at once. I think the article is making the point that there are alternative low-cost solutions which can be targeted more precisely to an audience that is actually interested in the source of the "spam," thus making it much less annoying.
I'm a little baffled by the 3rd redesign and FutureRuby's (http://futureruby.com/) choice of using a Soviet Russia inspired design. I get that they have a futuristic edge to them, and that this is considered cool. But the connotations these designs can imply may make it really difficult to get approval/funding/adoption by gray hairs.
This is a common fallacy, that investment confers some sort of validity. It doesn't. It means only that Sequoia et al. think Y Combinator's model will work. They don't have a crystal ball, and the model is no more or less likely to work than if they found $2m on the side of the road.

I've thought it will work (for them anyway, not for many of the competitors) since before I went through it, but I don't really consider this validation of my belief.
Vanilla integrates with other AUTH systems fairly easily.
Fashion robot to hit Japan catwalk
I used to use AudioTechnica ANC ATH-ANC7 Noise Reduction headphones. I found that the active noise reduction doesn't really work in an office setting because there is some serious leakage when active. The noise reduction feature works great on a train/plane/coffee shop (anywhere there is lots of ambient noise) though. On a train, it cuts out the rumble and smooths it out so there is very little oscillation (e.g. no rumble but some low frequency sound).

Now, I just use my RadioShack headset with boom mic. The ANC7's are bulky and tend to hurt my ears if I wear them too much.
Investors who have a history of writing checks to YC companies tend to get previews ahead of the rest as it is. Still, for only $2m (a paltry sum for the VC and angels involved) it's well worth the good will.
I though this would fit into the discussions on how to recognize good people (engineers or business guys) that has been going on here in the last day(s).

I personally think it is important to have people who are able to think outside of the box. But they also need to be able to integrate into a team and work with others. Otherwise, in the long run, they will hurt the business...
only because he got caught.
Random Password Script
In this tutorial you´ll learn how to make a simple php script that will display random password every time you click "Generate Password"
An excellent point about the ext4 developers demand for an fsync and its effect on disk spin down.
Book Review: Pro Django
I get that they want to talk more about their principles, but ever heard of "show, don't tell"? If Mozilla really is a vibrant community, then the front page should demonstrate this by being useful to that community. Links to all the things that Mozilla developers do, or mailing lists, or whatever else.

People know when they are being sold. These web page designs are trying to sell. The "product" is that Mozilla is better because of its principles and because there's a community. I admire Mozilla a lot, but... newsflash: NOBODY CARES. Users don't care. Developers sort of care but they know about Mozilla already. If they are looking for donors, perhaps some deluded people think "community" is automatically great, but I'd think it would be more effective to talk about success stories and how provably influential Mozilla is. Once the potential donor is fished in, then talk about why this happens at Mozilla and not at Microsoft.

Even as a marketing website these designs are not very fresh nor do they get to the heart of what makes open source different. It's like someone said "global community" and the designer thought "global... global... how about a globe?" and "community... community... I know, constructivist graphics reminiscent of 1920s communism!" These designs are clueless about what a real software community is like.

I did like the watercolor backgrounds, though.
I'm not involved in this, but I was considering it:
http://www.the-hub.net/index.html
there's a London-based startup community, there's a massive warehouse near Caledonian Road with cheap rents & a good vibe. I don't know what the other London sites are like, nor how extensive or useful the 'international' element of the organisation is.
I agree with frantically hiding newsfeed items, there must have been 20 people I forgot were in my contacts that popped up into my newsfeed, I'm not a huge fan of it - but it really undercuts Twitter.
I agree, it's not as if the UK has a shortage of startups, but there does seem to be lack of a community ala silicon valley.

I think creating a better community could have a significant positive impact for startups. Especially in terms of things like figuring out which professional service providers (accountants, lawyers, banks) provide the best service for startups.
The article states this is a third fund owned by Sequoia and managed by YC. More than likely some of Sequoia's investors got intrigued and wanted to get into the YC game, but didn't feel like taking their money elsewhere because Sequoia has been good to them. Best of both worlds.
I went to two meetings here in NYC. Met some great people and had a great time seeing what other hackers were up to.
I keep assuming all the layoffs combined with the onset of winter were to blame for things kind of petering out.
It was a particularly weird time to keep momentum going for anything, but it'd be nice to get together again.
I'm glad some links to similar groups have been posted, I hope to check them out.