skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't that were numbers start to kick in?

60 per round @ 10 years is 1200 startups?

Actually, that brings up a completely different question: Can YC scale to the point where you can't remember most of the names anymore?
Obama Acts to Aid Small Businesses
At the same time it has to be about the money too - otherwise it's a pretty silly venture :) (i.e. it is throwing good money at bad ideas).
Here's 10 minutes of your life:

1) RAM is a lot faster than disk, keep things there for speed.
2) "RAM is the new disk." "Or is disk the new RAM?"
3) 5 ads for Java companies.

Nowhere does it say that Facebook is running the world's largest memcached installation. Or, for that matter, that HN is all in memory.
I'm actually excited about this project. Wolfram does the kinds of things I could imagine myself doing if I was smarter.
Mathematica Alpha has officially been initiated into the gaggle of existing semantic web apps, now that it's been referred to as a "Google killer" in a linkbaity headline. Lets just hope it doesnt suffer the fate of Cuil.

All joking aside, I'm really excited to begin playing with this and exploring the possibilities of a live web inference engine. I'm anxious to see what kind of API/developer tools will be provided, and (since it's Mathematica) whether there will be any cost involved. Has anyone seen this discussed anywhere?
Dreamhost St. Patrick's 92% off
I've seen very little evidence, based on Air sales, that it is popular enough to warrant killing.
SBA plan focuses too much on loans
They really do block quite a bit of noise; with music playing I usually don't hear anything else, even in a noisy shared work environment.
Can Amazon Run The Table On Cloud Services?
Unlocked BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 
BlackBerry presentation, Perl Flip 8220 with enormous blueprint and dissimilar multi skin texture attracts all. This is one the winning earpiece ever launched by BlackBerry. Power the passions you pursue with a Smartphone that expresses your style and simplifies your life with the BlackBerry.
It may not be immediately intuitive, but it is simple to find and easy to understand. Overall I am enjoying the system, will continue to explore and give feedback as I work with it.
Your options for EC2 (that I'm aware of) are:

Rightscale, Scalr, Ylastic, Amazon's own console, and now Cloudkick.

But only Rightscale and Cloudkick are cross-cloud.
While they don't break down results by school, the complete report has a lot of nice additional data, including a list of all schools surveyed:

http://www.cra.org/info/taulbee/CRATaulbeeReport-StudentEnro...

I think (hope) this is encouraging news, but it's hard to call it a trend this early
That's where I started, too
Ask YC: AI/NLP for legal analysis?
I believe much of the legal texts in the US, and other legal systems, can be parsed into RDF triples/tuples/facts [0].

Of course people are trying to do this for all kinds of texts, but legal texts have a very specific structure, and a smaller vocabulary, which may make them easier to parse them.

Once we have a set of tuples it would be very easy to build an expert system that could replace a lawyer [1].

The system does not need to be 100% accurate. Each fact would keep a link to the original paragraphs in the corresponding legislature. This will allow people to improve the knowledge base of the system, wiki style. Also, if the system fails to parse a particular paragraph, but can understand the subject, for example, it can still present the particular paragraph when an inquiry is made about the subject. The user will then read the paragraph and enter its contents in tuple form.

Cases that form precedents can be a caveat. They usually are less structured than legislature, so it can

Has anyone tried something like this before? It definitely seems like a market begging to be shrunk.

[0] RDF triples are usually (subject, predicate, object). However, for legal texts (subject, predicate, object, condition) might work better.

[1] Of course, lawyers do a lot of other things, but for the sake of this idea let’s consider lawyers are paid $400/hr just to tell you what the law says.
It's the WSJ noting that the press conference had no content.
Its a little funny though. I learnt programming first and maths later. SO when I encountered functions in maths at school, I thought "oh I already know this stuff".
Ask YC: I have a serious GF, but still want to apply. Good Idea?
Hey all,

I have a serious Girl friend of 5 years and a full time job to take care of all my student loans. $80,000.00 worth of loans. I live over in Florida and wonder do you think if I have a great idea, that I should do this.

I would either have to keep my girl back at home for the summer or take her and our dogs with me.

Do you think its viable to do so? To live on the $5,000.00 for the summer?
I've actually noticed that behavior myself when screwing around in X-Plane with the F-4E; I take off at low-speed, high AOA to gain a few thousand feet, and then drop the nose at full afterburner to use both the engines and gravity to go transsonic, at which point the F-4 can accelerate faster, and maintain a higher angle of climb without losing velocity, due to the "lower" drag at supersonic speeds.

I had figured it was perhaps a weird characteristic of the simulation's breakdown of airframe components, but if that's how things worked in the real F-4's, that just gives me that much more respect for the physics simulation in X-Plane. No wonder it's FAA certified :)
Maybe you should just do instead of saying you wish you were smarter.
yes, but Germany has had re-unification costs and an ageing population to contend with.
Aha, gotcha. So I guess I wasn't missing out on much? (In any event, I think now if I had a Windows machine I'd get Thunderbird, which never struck me as a useful idea last time around.)
Sorry for the unfinished sentence above (a case of noprocrast + getting distracting and submitting). I meant to say:

Cases that form precedents can be a caveat. They usually are less structured than legislature, so it can be harder to parse them. Perhaps the system would work better for non-common law legislatures. However, I believe that even in the US areas like corporate law would be less influenced by precedents.
What’s wrong with this email?
Not unless the dogs are willing to share their dog food with you, lol.
Everybody is over speculating the significance of this. This just means more opportunity for each of us to seize. All of you can continue debating why this is good or bad, but I am going to go finish my YC application.
The git Hater's Guide to the Galaxy
Even if they can't help you, they get excited about you and tell other people who can help you. I'm amazed at the amount of support, help, advice and ideas I've been getting from people even in entirely unrelated fields. Of course, dealing with it all and not following every last piece of fishwives' wisdom is another story... ;)
For all people who say good programmers don't make type errors, here's a counterexample.
Speaking as the owner of a small business, I wish he'd help me by cutting spending, stop talking down the economy, allowing insolvent firms to fold, etc.

Micromanaging billions of "knobs" on the economy is a losing proposition and it creates "regime uncertainty", where folks are afraid that the rules (on taxes, regulation, inflation, contracts, etc.) can change out from under them at any time.
Is posting your application here for feedback in the form of an ASK YC post frowned upon?

Surprised I haven't seen anyone do that.
A lot of it depends on the hardware you're going to use. Assembling a bunch of off-the-shelf components into a new idea (ref: Chumby) is going to be much cheaper than developing your own custom asic's (ref: SiCortex).

My experience over the course of a couple of hardware startups doing more off-the-shelf approach is it would take you about $20-$35MM in total funding for a typical hardware startup doing something semi new/radical.

The hardware design itself can actually be relatively cheap. Packaging (custom tooling for cases, etc.) can easily cost you $20K-$300K (ie: as much as a big Angel round for some software startups). Manufacturing costs are usually a function of volume commitments and timing. So, you are going to be incented to commit to larger manufacturing runs than you are comfortable with to keep the per-unit cost low. Inevitably, after you do this you find there is some trivial but important item you missed, so you end up with re-work costs, or if you're very unlucky a lot of scrapped inventory.

To answer your Tablet PC question, my guess is that you're looking at $10M. There is not a lot of invention there. You'd pull together a lot of off-the-shelf components into a new form factor. Most of your early costs would be sucked up by the design and tooling of the casing and overall industrial design. I'd venture that you'd be $500K into it just for ID and an ME to layout the (presumably) injection molding designs for the case and first mold. Budget another $150K ish for UL and FCC certs (your outsourced factory can help you with a lot of this process). Then you're likely to go through probably $250K in the initial hardware designs and single-unit prototypes. You'll generally need or want 1 prototype for each developer (probably 5-8 in this case), plus another 6-12 for QA, and another dozen or so for demos and for employees to carry around and just "use" out in the wild. If you're making a tablet with an $800 price point, your production BOM is going to be around $200, and total manufacturing costs around $350ish, but your first prototypes will cost you $1000ish/ea at first because a lot of it will be work done by hand, etc.

So, thinking purely off the top of my head, you'd probably take a $1M angel round, a $4M A round and a $5M B round. Since this is a semi-proven CE device and not something radically new, you just need to build it and get it out there, not convince the world why they need it.
Regarding a glaring XSS vulnerability in the comments, Wordpress 1, Clojure 0.
Don’t trust. Just verify.
Is Facebook becoming a new mobile advertising platform?
Isn't it desirable to include Indians in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India
I can't tell if you think the pick and shovel sellers are Amazon or Cloudkick. They're both selling services towards the greater goal of getting your web idea off the ground.

But I agree, Cloudkick looks great!
Aren't YC companies expected to stay in the Valley even after the summer is over?
The Air is thinner, way thinner. Adamo looks more like a cheap Macbook, therefore it should compete in the lower end segment, and price, specially price.
Crawling the web for career data from resumes so your career doesn't have to suck.
Ask HN : What do you look for in a project monitoring app?
We are currently redefining needs for our project monitoring app and we are aiming at collaborative teams (likely less than 10 people) and we need your advices.

Note : We use the term "project monitoring" instead of project management because it answers the question of how the project goes (real VS estimate, who's doing what now, what are the problems, what is being said) in real-time instead of planning it and then never look back at your stuff.
Oh wow awful freudian slip there.
It should read

"I wouldn't dispute..."

sorry, busy morning ;)
For what it's worth, when I am transporting cables, I find I can keep them from tangling by folding the cable repeatedly in halves or thirds to make a longish bundle, then tying the entire bundle in a single overhand knot, as if it were a single piece of rope. I've rarely gotten tangles this way; in terms of the article, I suppose it works because it keeps the string from agitating, perhaps even better than using twist-ties.

I picked this method up from a piano teacher years ago, who used it to keep his MIDI cables in order. The result is a bit bulkier than using a twist-tie to bind the bundle, and I'm not sure how good it is for the cable for long-term storage (since it effectively adds a slight twist at several points along the cable's length). But the method has the benefits of being neat, effective, quick to tie, and not needing additional ties/straps.
Nobody is going to hold your hand when you are starting up.

It would be unwise to have a feature that gives you that false impression.
Escaping is needed when you pass strings to a program that parses and interprets them. That's not part of HN's architecture AFAICT. There shouldn't be any opportunity to introduce a vulnerability similar to SQL injection.
I'm not that much good in maths, I know only school-level maths.

You are fourteen years old. You probably haven't had much good math instruction yet. One of my favorite authors on school mathematics wrote, "The proper thing for a parent to say is, 'I did badly at mathematics, but I had a very bad teacher. I wish I had had a good one.'" W. W. Sawyer, Vision in Elementary Mathematics (1964), page 5. You can find a good teacher by finding good books about mathematics, even if you have never had a good teacher. Many working programmers haven't either, which is why some of them don't see the need for much math background to become a good programmer.

You are young enough to learn a lot of math and to learn a lot of programming. Learning both hand-in-hand will make you a better programmer. One good book that combines both subjects is Approaching Precalculus Mathematics Discretely by Philip G. Lewis

http://www.amazon.com/Approaching-Precalculus-Mathematics-Di...

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=9168...

which alas appears to be out of print, but may be available as a used book or from a library. It teaches key concepts of school mathematics while also teaching functional programming with the Logo dialect of Lisp.

A great place to hang out online to learn math and programming is the Art of Problem Solving Forum, especially its subforum on computer science,

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/index.php?f=331

which is moderated by a brilliant young man I know who is not a lot older than you are.
Perhaps I should stop calling my cofounder my 'wife', and call him my 'raft-mate'?
This is a very interesting article about how "literally" is used to mean "figuratively." http://www.slate.com/id/2129105/
Alltop Launches Personalized Feed Reader That Can Hardly Be Personalized
This has been said already, but I"ll say it again; the maths you need are concepts like symbol manipulation, logic. Beyond that the only math you need to know is related to the problem you're trying to solve with a program.

I'm currently trying to learn a new-to-me language (clojure) and I'm finding working my way through project euler (http://projecteuler.net/) to be very helpful. It might also help you with math ;)
No - but I imagine most do because that is where the investors are :)
Pew Report on the State of the News Media
you shouldn't be asking HN about this, you should be asking your GF about this.
Trying to give clojure some expojure starting a flame war?

Nice try...
It's simple math.

If you come to YC for the Summer will you:

a) finish up with a working product ready to take to the next level

b) at that point then be able to afford to move home or ship the GF out

c) still be with the GF in the Autumn should you not go to YC

d) are unable to get the project off the ground from where you are

Yes? Then try it :)

(err and also: have you asked what the GF thinks? that seems the first port of call... :))
I still don't know what feature they're talking about.
Based on your situation, I'd say no.

Why don't you do your startup now from home, grow it a little and see if its a viable model, and then apply when you start getting some traction?

Because right now you are talking about uprooting your whole life over a 1-2% chance of success.
Man Up. (at the risk of being downvoted).
Cutting spending in a deflationary recession is never a good idea. You want to execute spending cuts when the economy is vibrant and growing, not when your GDP is shrinking and your unemployment numbers are kissing double-digits. If anything, Obama hasn't been doing enough spending on projects that will be putting people to work in the next 1-2 years.
Do you read the Rubyist and Rails Magazine?
agreed 100%.
I wish central planning was exposed as the sham it is. When you try to fine tune things by subsidizing certain things and placing a tariff on others you destroy accurate pricing information that allows entrepreneurs and even consumers from making decisions about efficient resource allocation. You're changed over from "those who supply people with what they want get rewarded" to "those who guess where the government will jump next get rewarded". I've seen it first hand in business sectors that are particularly vulnerable to government intervention such as the housing market.
New and Dirty: Tweet Blogging
We all waste too much time reading (and writing!) boring text. Here is one solution to the problem.
The best tweets from Fred Wilson's conference Hacking Education
http://www.squidoo.com/Hacking_Education
Apply and decide after you've been accepted.
There's always something awesome about reading a guy's blog that's hosted on the engine he himself built.

Excellent post, as always.
The MacBook air is a so-so piece of hardware with a world class operating system. Dell can easily best the Air at hardware but definitely not at software (unless Apple frees Leopard)
LeveragingIdeas Has Two Free Tickets for the Web 2.0 Expo
Deficit spending is based on the fallacy of increasing aggregate demand. taking money from people and then spending it on government projects doesn't increase aggregate demand because you've just decreased demand by the same amount by taxing people in the first place.
How is this any different from normal redistribution? You're redistributing from the private sector to public works contractors. Prove to me that the public works contractors will produce more jobs than the private sector would have with the same capital.

Money is a commodity. When the government prints more it reduces the value of all other dollars in circulation. This inflation is a hidden tax that we will be paying off for years.
Conduit Labs launches LoudCrowd...virtual world meets online music community
Since we find unintended consequences interesting, I'll suggest that Fizzbin (which is a Trekkie reference, natch) will not work as Scott suggests.

Tech support workers are crowded into cubicle farms and pressured to process as many tickets per hour as possible, with managers applying brutal metrics and quotas to them. Their incentive is to get off the phone quickly.

A nerd on the other end of the phone will be perceived as a demanding, chatty customer who will not go along meekly with whatever the tech suggests, but who will instead challenge every suggestion and insist on complicated and time-consuming investigations.

Therefore, I predict that the moment you utter the code word, the tech will get you off the phone by any means necessary, including blatant lies or accidentally hanging up on you in the hope that when you call back you will torture another tech.
In my opinion that's a little bit tacky. I don't know if I'd like people seeing exactly how I answered every application question a week before applications were due, and I don't think that an application post would be HN-worthy. (Especially not if a bunch of different people all posted theirs at once.)

I'd advise emailing a few people that you think could give you feedback. I sent Garry a rough draft of my application, and his feedback helped a lot. Either write to a few HN people (and don't get upset if some people you write to are really busy right now), or join the IRC channel and ask people there.
Natasha richardson in ski accident
Maybe he emphasized a wee bit too much on the reading part. However, there are some good reading material he did point out in the article.

I've always said "Its good to learn from your mistakes, it's better to learn from others'". The only way to gain knowledge of other people's mistakes is to read, network and communicate.
Predator X: King Pliosaur, coming to the history channel soon
It's surprising to see that coupon right on their homepage. Companies tend to be semi-open on great discounts. (meaning, they usually don't get out of their way that much to tell you you can save money)

However, as far as I'm concerned, that works: after looking at the features (pretty much everything seems to be available, unlimited), I'm considering it.

Anybody has any feedback on Dreamhost?
If you can't code, maybe you can manage. I've seen this happen in larger organizations as well.
I thought Wolfram Alpha wasn't aiming to be an "AI"?
Where do you get your sales info from? I've never seen sales numbers for the Air, and I'm curious to see what they're like.

Dell can't use this to compete with the Air. The Air's a luxury product - possibly the only real luxury laptop. It's for people who really, really, really like beautiful things that feel good, and who don't mind the fact that for that you're paying more than you would for a more powerful computer. Dell doesn't make luxury computers. I doubt they're skilled enough to make computers that work beautifully enough to deserve a luxury. Furthermore, you can't "kill" items in the luxury market.

This is more a computer whose form was influenced a lot by the Air. That's it. It's not as pretty but it's still thin, and it's a lot cheaper since chances are Dell will try to sell it to people who aren't rich.
Are you sure this isn't an actual DFW sentence? This sentence sounds like an excerpt from Infinite Jest.
Lamborghini sales are also quite small. The Macbook air is still a great piece of engineering.
Coding Horror: The Hardest Interview Puzzle Question Ever
Lazy staff and no innovation at Twitter
Apture raises $4.1 million for pop-up content tools
The Financial Crisis in simpler terms...drinkbonds, alkbonds, and pukebonds
via e-mail:

The financial crisis explained in simple terms.......

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Berlin. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers - most of whom are unemployed alcoholics - to drink now but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans). Word gets around and as a result increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Taking advantage of her customers' freedom from immediate payment constraints, Heidi increases her prices for wine and beer, the most-consumed beverages. Her sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic customer service consultant at the local bank recognizes these customer debts as valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit.
He sees no reason for undue concern since he has the debts of the alcoholics as collateral. At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert bankers transform these customer assets into DRINKBONDS, ALKBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then traded on markets worldwide. No one really understands what these abbreviations mean and how the securities are guaranteed. Nevertheless, as their prices continuously climb, the securities become top-selling items.

One day, although the prices are still climbing, a risk manager (subsequently of course fired due his negativity) of the bank decides that slowly the time has come to demand payment of the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar. However they cannot pay back the debts. Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations and claims bankruptcy. DRINKBOND and ALKBOND drop in price by 95 %. PUKEBOND performs better, stabilizing in price after dropping by 80 %.

The suppliers of Heidi's bar, having granted her generous payment due dates and having invested in the securities are faced with a new situation. Her wine supplier claims bankruptcy, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor. The bank is saved by the Government following dramatic round-the-clock consultations by leaders from the governing political parties. The funds required for this purpose are obtained by a tax levied on the non-drinkers.

Finally an explanation I understand...