skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you put your location in your profile please? It would be great to be able to search for HN denizens by city.
It's been something of a reoccurring dream of mine to control my server remotely from my cellphone.

I spent some time making my backend cell phone friendly and it was one of my best ideas ever in terms of productivity enhancement. Although actually using the web service on my cellphone costs me about $50 extra month (grrr), the ability to access customer records means I can handle 90% of support inquiries through my cell phone. This means that I can make productive use out of the 2 hours a day I spend on the train. Yay for reducing dead time.

Now if only I could do Rails and Prawn development on the phone...
Are we sure Tim Ferriss is totally sane?
Yes there is. There are a few methods of converting a trained nn to a decision tree. It's actually a better way of training decision trees for some problems.
Moreover, a response to the Krueger and Dale study's methodology by Avery and Hoxby in the article "Do and Should Financial Aid Packages Affect Students' College Choices?" National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA), 2003 showed that Krueger and Dale aggregated their data in a way that tended to underrepresent the advantage of going to the better college for ALL students, not just low-income students. So if you carefully read the Krueger and Dale study, you can tease out an advantage to the better colleges that they admit is especially strong for low-income students. But they might have found an even stronger effect size if they had analyzed their data differently.

Anyway, yes, for low-income students who manage to get admitted the lesson from all studies is clear: go to the best college that admitted you, and take advantage of your opportunity for an elite education.
One small typo. Your site asks for beta testers to enter their iPhone UUID. I think you mean their UDID.

Looking forward to the beta test.
With the proviso that its going to either take a LOT of time or using Conversion Optimizer, I suggest taking a look at Google's (AdWords) Content Network. It is far and away the most effective advertising I am able to do, consistently clocking even AdWords on google.com

I'm told that experience isn't that common.
New Delhi, India
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

Any other 'sconsinites?
Both can be true - you can improve specific mental abilities by practice even in old age, but your overall mental performance will probably decline.
"Regarding YC, I believe they offer a ton of value beyond the money."

I'm sure they do, but finding a co-founder who is a programmer just to get into their program seems rather ass-backwards if you ask me. I would much rather own 100% of my company, hire a programmer to do that work, and use my time to make my own contacts.

If you think you have to move to the Valley to make these contacts there's nothing wrong with moving. People always brag about it being a common everyday occurrence to meet and chat with VC's there anyways. I don't know how true this is, but that's only because I've never been there to experience the environment firsthand.

And I'm not belittling the value of YC in any way, I'm just reminding you that there are other ways of doing things than the ways you've conceived. Whether or not they work for you is up to you to decide.

I have a very independent outlook on life and business, so even if this might work well for me it doesn't mean it would work for you or others. I would actually love to partner with the right people in a new venture, but I won't take the time to seek them out because of two reasons:

1- I know I can be successful on my own without them, and if I take time out I will have to sacrifice the progress I'm already making in order to find them, and ...

2- Given the unreliable nature of the task of finding a reliable 'partner' I feel it makes more sense for me to just stick to what I've already started, and just keep working on it myself.

If the right partner comes along for me that's great, but I won't lose any sleep over it if I have to do everything myself. I get a lot of support from my wife anyways, and it's probably better support than I might get from another kind of 'partner'. This may be another reason why I do not agree with some online claims that having a co-founder is so important to the success of a new business.

On the other hand, I was launching new ventures years before I met my wife, and going back to "doing it all myself" simply doesn't phase me in the least. I am not one of those folks who need someone else around to keep my energy and focus, that's all. For better or worse that's just the way I am.
you're legally allowed to use it to grow yourself an apple tree.

Legally, sure (modulo plant patents). Practically, you can only do it as long as you don't mind it being a crab apple tree. (Apples tend not to breed true; if you want a tree that is sure to produce edible apples you have to get it by grafting.)
Boston. Would anyone recommend an IP lawyer in or near the city?
Just got back from Melbourne, (Toronto, ON), loved it and will return, and I just kept thinking 'If there was a start-up culture in Melbourne, I'd move there in 2 seconds!' - and now there are 6 responding to the thread, :)
And if you use some of the lightweight window managers (Awesome, XMonad, Ion), they've all pretty much decided that the Windows key is the modifier to use for all window-manager shortcuts. Every app gets to use Ctrl & Alt however they like. Win+key is for the window manager itself, and is very convenient.
Yo soy de Talcahuano, Chile
Bangkok, Thailand. just moved from Burbank, CA. Kuala Lumpur is where I would like to do my start-up. It's nice meeting you.
Critique the argument not the person.
Tech Jobs Search Results across the net
RMS says that proprietary software is evil. He makes those developing proprietary software feel bad for making a living. His endgame isn't about choice to be free, it's about everyone making free software.

If he had the power, do you think he would outlaw proprietary software?
I think that SAAS was inevitable anyway. You just can't control what people do with their own machines, unless they're not really their machines in fact, and that makes SAAS one of the few ways to make money from software in the long run. The main effect that Stallman had was to push openness farther and faster than it otherwise would have gone at this point, and to make FOSS a legitimate alternative to completely closed systems. The SAAS world is still better than the world in which the IP regime managed to turn the freedom to read into the war on drugs 2.0.
I clicked on USA as I am located in the Bay Area, but I am from India (had come here for BS in 2001) ... I would consider myself International, unless you meant where the most readers are physically located/residing ?
Nonsense.

> Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs

That means "in some cases", not "in all cases". Logical fallacy on your part.

> ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs

Here, GPL'ers contradict themselves (for both senses of "free"). GPL code can, technically, be non-gratis. And GPL code can be used in non-GPL programs (you just can't distribute them easily).
I think you just volunteered.
Depends on your product some. You might also look into MySpace advertising-- it's wicked easy to try out in their beta ad manager, but I find that the CPC is pretty high for toying around with at first.

StumbleUpon seems to be a good one for interesting/clever sites in terms of conversions, and the effective CPC is around $0.05.

With Adwords, there's some fun things digging through and finding keywords your competitors aren't really looking at. There's also a lot of people overlooking keywords in unconventional ordering of the words.
"it is of absolutely no surprise to me that quick thinkers have higher IQs and I don't understand why it should come as a surprise to anyone else."

It's surprising to me because I do fairly well on IQ tests (top 2%), and yet I think more slowly than most people, and I have friends who are at least as intelligent as I (it seems to me) who are even slower than I am at figuring things out, but they do eventually get there, and often surpass me. It takes me longer to find the correct answer than many other people around me in almost any situation where they do find the correct answer. The difference seems more like finding the correct answer more often, rather than more quickly. While quickness of thought can provide the illusion of higher intelligence, I don't think it can have much to do with it in the long run; it doesn't matter how much you speed up a dog, he'll never figure out lots of things a chimpanzee can figure out -- intelligence seems almost orthogonal to speed to me.
Carriage Clocks Afficionado With Modern Tastes
Ai. Once more a journalistic report that confuses having a high IQ with being smart. This is not the current thinking among the best researchers on human intelligence.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

As the current researchers put it, you can be "intelligent" (= score high on IQ tests) without being "rational" (above reference) or wise (below reference).

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Beyond-Flynn-Effect/...

But this idea goes back a lot further, all the way to the beginning of IQ testing. Lewis Terman himself wrote, "There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a particular intelligence test. A subject's mental age in this sense may not coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability, mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking, a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales." (Terman & Merrill 1937, p. 25)

Ian Deary has very trenchant comments on how poorly understood "ability to think quickly" is in his book Looking Down on Human Intelligence: From Psychometrics to the Brain

http://www.amazon.com/Looking-Down-Human-Intelligence-Psycho...

But, really, the obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like that is the article by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.

P.S. I saw another news story about this research announcement,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126993.300-highspeed...

and it included this interesting paragraph:

"Just because intelligence is strongly genetic, that doesn't mean it cannot be improved. 'It's just the opposite,' says Richard Haier, of the University of California, Irvine, who works with Thompson. 'If it's genetic, it's biochemical, and we have all kinds of ways of influencing biochemistry.'"
Auckland, New Zealand here.
The Trouble with Twitters
Advice to Summer YC Applicants
Not much of a mailing list here... basically every two months or so myself or Ed think that we should probably have a meetup and then we email other people to figure out times that work.
I think Steve Yegge's JavaScript2 mode could handle that...

http://code.google.com/p/js2-mode/
TitleTown U.S.A--Green Bay, WI: shoutout to Milwaukee, "sconsin"
For me, I run Ubuntu on my netbook. It's nice to run a similar editor when I'm away from my Mac.
I just moved to the DC area last summer.
What I think about RMS's hatred of closed source
While I appreciate those fighting the cultural battles for individual freedom (GOOG's history pretty much confirms for me that being a big requires exploiting the consumer), Stallman's message is unfortunately crippled to me as a programmer. Free software is better in almost every way. It is easier to install, possible to fix, increases the wealth of every owner of a compatible computer, lasts longer (defined by running on more generations of computer), and is often more popular and better known than proprietary software. Yes, software should be free.

Where this becomes useless is in his demonizing proprietary software, because even though proprietary software takes many of your rights away, it has some great benefits. Since it doesn't have to be free as in beer, a person can quit their day job and focus solely on writing that program, leading to better designed and better implemented software. It also creates a stable brand that people can evaluate, and clear responsibility for issues. Without a means of monitizing software, we probably wouldn't have the fit and polish systems that we do.

I love free software, but there are two RMSisms that bother me: 1) The GPL is actually less "free" than a BSD style license because of his campaign to promote free software. 2) His view is entirely supply side (except for the roundabout means of creating personal wealth by forcing others to use the GPL on their software) to the point where it seems to me like free software has to fall out of trees or large corporations (which I would rather due without).

RMS: I love the idea, but I want to see more!
Altgate: Obama Shoots Down 90% Tax Bracket
Bangalore!
The value that people deliver to the world should be a good determinant. :-)
Perhaps you could hold early interviews the first weekend in April for people who meet two conditions:

1) You are already interested in them, and would have interviewed them anyway

2) They have other offers on the table with early deadlines, particularly mid or late April obligations
HaiKu Error Messages
Oh well. Maybe I should just say "Here's what I learned as AI at MY University and your mileage may vary".
True, but it's the easiest to measure, and so it is.
How Toxic Assets Turn To Gold
How do you suppose one would measure "value"?
It is a big improvement over what they had; I think they present what they do now more than ever: the black box says we help work -> via four products.

I expect a website to do one, maybe two things well. I'm a hard sell on three. The middle doesn't do much for me. It's a content stack and I have to _study_ it to glean meaning. Buzz, about, client vids, etc. My gut says this is filler. Now given the last few days with Google's data/design approach, I'd love to see a heatmap and numbers. :)
Wonder who the nefarious "other organizations" are..
Adwords has worked for my business. You really need to invest time and money into it. It was only after my first $3k and 3 months that I started seeing it work.
The concept is great, but the restriction that Twitter puts on the number of queries you can do an hour makes it reasonably non-useful for on-demand tasks like restarting the webserver.

It has the seed of a great idea, though -- everyone has a Twitter client on their phone. You can sit down to any browser and issue commands.
Just so you know, if you plant an apple tree from an apple you buy at the grocery store you will likely be sued for patent infringement. Though, it's probably sterile anyway.

So, the idea of a "free apple" is a pipe dream.
Sleep in a Spanish Castle - $55/night
I don't think it would fix anything to change our schedule. If we moved our interviews earlier, they'd just move theirs even earlier.
The guy planning to install GNU/Linux (He didn't mention the GNU part) on a Virtual Machine. lame...
'If there was a start-up culture in Melbourne, I'd move there in 2 seconds!'

Whilst it's not huge, it's certainly growing. Silicon Beach is a community pushing technology innovation in Melbourne (and the rest of Australia). You can read a little more about it here: http://melbourne.siliconbeachaustralia.org/about-2/ and here: http://www.rosshill.com.au/article/silicon-beach-melbourne/
I'm in SF, but my sister lives on the Bellarine Peninsula. I've spent about 6 weeks in Australia and love it. If anyone has info about startups hiring in Melbourne or Geelong I'd love to hear about them.
New York, NY
Really love the idea. I'm sure you will get loads of attention from the hiking community. It's a great niche to target too - I imagine its quite underserviced with lots of enthusiastic people who can help promote your site.

Something to look out for: the site seems very processor intensive. Using IE7 on a Core 2 6400 1gb ram the site becomes unresponsive and CPU is pegged at 50% - 90% each time the map is moved/zoomed.

Full screen map seems to be a killer. Maybe anbother way to display info such as large static map where you choose a region and then a smaller interactive map overlaid?

Also - is this a hobby project? If not how are you planning on monetizing?

Great work overall though.
"If he[Stallman] had the power, do you think he would outlaw proprietary software?"

This kind of hypothetical question is not a valid argument.

"If you were starving to death would you become a cannibal?" Should we put you in jail now if you answer yes?
Currently Google Adwords (Google Search only) and Microsoft's Live.com. Those two are the only options I've found worth bothering with for B2B software at this time.

We tried Yahoo: It's a complete waste of time and money. Ads were always edited by Yahoo staff (requiring frequent e-mails to clarify the service we were paying for), bids may be changed at random, the interface is a nightmare kludge and there is no way to opt out of Yahoo's 'partner network' (which seems to consist only of spam domain landing pages), so bidding a keyword to the top of the Yahoo search results guarantees a load of expensive visitors from click-farms. I would love to advertise on Yahoo's search result pages and will do so the moment Yahoo Search Marketing is taken over by a competently run organization (Go Microsoft!).

We tried Ask.com: You'll receive a tremendous number of visitors on your first day, all from spam domain landing pages. There is no way to specify "place my ads on Ask.com search results only" (which I'd genuinely like to do), so money given directly to them is wasted. Crazily enough, you can cancel your Ask.com advertising and opt into using Google's "Search Network" instead. That will put your ads on Ask's search results without having to deal with Ask.
(YC asks people to decide that day whether or not to accept an offer from us, but we do this because at that point they already know all they need to, not to pre-empt other offers. There is no other seed firm that decides after us.)

If another seed firm did set its decision date a few days or weeks after, would you then give teams more time to decide?

That would be incredibly gracious of YC -- indeed beyond what I would expect of the category leader. But that seems to be the implication of your parenthetical.
Mexico City. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
We use jabber for this. It's realtime, easier to secure, doesn't rely on a third party, etc.
I believe the answer implied was "the market"...
You mean for spherical TV? Taking your 20x estimate, it's due mid-2015:

log 20 / log 2 * 1.5 + 2009 = 2 015.48289
Can you put your location in your profile please?

Done. Minnetonka, Minnesota here. It's interesting to see that you are in Taiwan now. That's where I learned everything I know about being entrepreneurial, which is not yet enough.
PG made an interesting analogy to the college admissions process. How long until we see an "Common App" for seed firms, and a common decision timeline?
I think it says a lot to get through the first round at more than one organization. Even if you took the risk and declined the first offers and ended up with no offer, you gain confidence in your idea(s) and an ice breaker to angel investors (who you'd have to actively find).

That you ended up with no offer could have just been a matter of chance: there were 33 strong companies and only 28 spots so decisions had to be made. So if the other organizations aren't willing to be reasonable, maybe taking the chance is the better choice.
"Using this tactic in a stage where funding happens synchronously is not very ethical. It would be like colleges doing it."

I'm sure pg is aware of how colleges do this, so for readers for whom this cultural reference is not clear, I'll mention that in the United States the most competitive colleges to get into have a joint agreement (through their membership in the National Association for College Admission Counseling) to announce their decisions about whom they will admit by April 1st, allowing admitted applicants who are admitted to more than one college to wait until May 1st to decide at which college to enroll. It's not a perfect system by any means, and I am endlessly fascinated by the peculiarities of college admission in the United States, but it does give all students a month to compare offers.

"What can you do if you find yourself being pressured to decide before you're ready? We advise approaching the situation with confidence. If your startup is going to succeed, you're going to have to learn how to push back against people who try to take advantage of you. So try negotiating."

This is excellent advice. Most of business is negotiation. It's never too soon to practice negotiating.
I have a hard time browsing without the mouse gestures, the ability to get back closed tabs easily, the notes panel... but as useful as they may be, they're not features that are immediately obvious to someone coming from IE. I can understand the switch wouldn't appear that appealing.

It's a bit like Emacs and friends: powerful tools which may have a distinct advantage in some field, but also carry a fair learning curve before you see the benefits.
I am not sure I know enough about your LED Christmas lights to be helpful, but we are working with newer (and orders of magnitude brighter) lighting-class LEDs which are not really the same thing. Our startup's core technology resides in low-cost embedded intelligence, and multi-channel control of high-power LEDs.
Environmental Correctness For Our Projects And Programs
For many years now, the debate over global warming and environmental consciousness has raged. This debate has become deeply embedded into the political consciousness, especially in the United States, but also elsewhere in the world. One thing is for sure: this debate will continue for a long time to come, and it will be a long time before any claims are proven indisputably accurate. So, thequestion is, how can we incorporate environmental correctness into our projects and programs?
Downtown San Jose.
Cool. I'd be curious to know some of what you picked up in grad school. Care to elaborate?
So what are the entrenched companies or products that people think are right to go after? Funny that the article is about Paypal, because that's one I wish was still innovating.
Analogseo.com - A Search Engine Optimization blog 
A SEO blog helping you understand the complex methods of search engine optimization.
I'd be interested in a demo if you manage to round up a crew of people. If you're around for a while, or plan on coming back, you might get a better response doing a demo down at Tech Shop. http://www.techshop.ws There are more hardware hackers down in the valley than there are in The City.
Very interesting. I have discovered an incredible number of interesting books on social sciences that have changed my beliefs about very fundamental issues through Aaron. Punished by Rewards was one. I am just beginning to read "Explaning Social Behavior" and this one will probably be next.
Its not the font types/sizes/weights/colors that bothers me about the site. That all works - very well.

Its how much damn text they have on there. Too much information being displayed with too much scrolling. Moving the left column over to its own page would make me like the site much more.

I really hope this isn't the next trend in website styles.
Just ask around who the other seed firms are, and look at their web pages for their deadlines. Since no other seed firm decides after YC, the answer is pretty much: all of them.
I'm near DC too. Anyone in the area drop me an email.