skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* YC gets:

- $2M more to invest in startups (more money can't hurt and they clearly enjoy what they do)

- Sequoia investing in YC makes YC that much more trustworthy in the eyes of a lot of potential investees and potential acquirers of their startups. Also YC's reach in terms of potential acquirers and potential round 2 investors probably increases.

- It gets YC startups almost all the advantages of having Sequoia as an investor without the dilution of a large Sequoia investment (eg: opens a lot of doors for the YC startups to get their products in the marketplace.)

* In return for $2M, Sequoia gets:

- YC acting as a filter / very high quality pipeline for them

- Early access to YC deals (though not exclusive)

- Most likely, great returns on the $2M itself in the long term.
Testimonials are mostly real (from what I know), exchange free copies for testimonials (and use the good ones); use 'personal' testimonials over again, rather than 'product specific' testimonials. Those are just a couple tricks.
I read it that they wanted to expand their operations, rather than they were running out of money.
What alchemists got right about chemistry
Why setting goals can backfire
My undergrad thesis, written four years ago, was a taxonomy of anti-spam systems. Since then, every anti-spam system that I've seen both (1) falls neatly within one of my categories and (2) fails to account for the problems I identified in that category.

This idea is an authentication-based system, because it relies on identifying the message sender in order to prevent spam. Among other things, it fails to account for identity theft.

For reference, here is my thesis: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/download/?file=thesis.pdf
surely if Sequoia or Ron Conway rang any YC startup today the startup would fall over themselves to meet?
yes, although not necessarily for the same reason your stating. cartoons are a medium i enjoy in many different forms because what is depicted isn't restricted by what can or can't be done on film.

there are some great serious movies/shows in cartoon form that couldn't be done on film due to the restrictions of reality/cgi/etc..

and for that exact same reason, there are some great humor-based cartoons that are funny because of the absurdity introduced by removing the limitations of reality.
Is this the first step towards a YC IPO?
Wilq32 javascript particle system
Indian Americans: The New Model Minority
I think it's a general consensus that Erlang does not handle dealing with strings very nicely. If Reia can abstract those problems away then it will probably gain a lot of traction. Probably much more than Lisp <del>For</del> Flavoured Erlang, unfortunately.
If nothing else this is an interesting view of the problem. However, changing the vast sea of legacy systems based on the crusty SMTP protocol is a nightmarishly large task. Lately I've been enjoying things like Twitter which are not bound to the old push methods of yore. :)
Does Incubation Enhance Problem Solving? A Meta-Analytic Review
That line "a postmodern style that would make artists like Robert Rauschenberg proud" makes me shudder.

It gives me the sense that, like many designers, they are in frustrated-artist mode. They don't care so much about what Mozilla needs as their personal desire to make super-sized gorgeous graphics that wow their colleagues.

Believe me, I understand the motivation... but I don't think these designs are going to help Mozilla.
I know someone who works for a ~1 billion dollar fund, and he says that mailing out (legit) quarterly reports on time is a 10-person job. So there's no way Madoff falsified a 65-billion dollar fund by himself.
It's not an online community but the UK Government sponsored website is excellent:

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/

They have a great tool which takes you through the process of making a personalised list of starting-up tasks (the business start-up organiser)

Nick
Copy & paste ux for iphone 3.0
That's actually a good idea which I did some research into around south east London (I live near Canada Water/Surrey Quays)

Southwark council to have a list of libraries that offer WiFi:

http://www.southwark.gov.uk/YourServices/LibrariesSection/fr...

I haven't tried them yet, as I haven't begun my work-at-home stint, but will definitely look into them for a change of scenery once in a while.
pg, will you please comment on this?
The problem is, Sequoia or Ron Conway need to have heard about the startup for them to call it. By investing in this fund, they not only get to hear about it before others but also get to monitor each as it grows, find out more about the co.s than other investors, which would help them make a better decision on whether to invest directly and at at what valuation.
It's already a part of Google Analytics. Launched a couple months ago. It's the "visualize" button near the top of most pages.
Hey, that's very interesting, because I currently am working on a startup idea of my own, and today just about 2 hrs back, I wanted to enter our database with some random content (this is to do with multimedia stuff). And I chose cartoons. Not sure why! I find them creative, amusing, absurd, logic(&physics)-defying, and of course funny! I could have chosen anything though ... I think there is a synergy between hackers, sci-fi and cartoons!
Twitter search visualization tool
Chicken or Egg? Starting up in a cataclysmic environment
How much did they rake in from reddit?
I just wrote this application to visualize generic twitter searches on a google map. I'd love any feedback that you can offer.
It is not really clear how is it structured, but it seems that Sequoia will own equity in the new startups funded by the YC-managed fund. In this way YC or that new fund won't need an exit strategy.
Is this not about setting the wrong goal, as against setting a goal itself?
"..and forces entrepreneurs to build a startup that can make it as a business from day one."

I think the conclusion borders on comedic. Only a miniscule # of companies should not be thinking of this way.
Jobs Are The New Assets
BuzzerBall - Online Basketball Manager
It's a repost after he reorganized his site. I'm not too sure why that means everything must instantly be reposted here.
Certainly. But by saving you allow someone else to consume what you have produced, and you refrain from consuming things yourself. This permits businesses to invest in future production even if you don't personally do it.

Investment is a consumption, and it does involve risk. But to say that Americans in general need to take more risk with their money is rather foolish if you ask me. Especially when the aforementioned savings rate is at a paltry five percent.
odbc database error
The website was in such a format that made it impossible to take seriously and read. A Billion Dollar Industry does not become irrelevant in a year.
No Lie MRI being offered as evidence in court
This is a dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516038
Setting the goal was not the problem here: the problem was the way they chose to achieve that goal. Building better cars might, rather than doing everything to sell crappy ones, would have had a much better chance for success.
That's a really ignorant statement. His foundation has been doing unprecedented work in treating diseases and education. They not only donate a lot of money, but oversee it's spending and design programs out of their pocket. None of it is just simply a tax write-off.
It would also be pretty cool to try and bring in some professional service providers, like accountants; solicitors and bankers, to provide advice and access to services.

BusinessLink has been mentioned, but I have yet to find the quality of service to be matched to the breadth of services offered.

I do like the idea of a real tech startups vs the rest of the world kind of feel. Maybe we could get a meetup arranged somewhere fairly central - Oxford? Anyone up for this?
I think the OP was making reference to the fact that you can connect atoms without regard for valence.
This article made me realize that goal setting is really a specialized case of "beware of the metrics you set". Whatever you decide to measure is always what people focus on, so you need to be darn sure you're measuring the correct things or you end up with huge distortions in people's behavior.
So, as a business model, I get this feeling that it won't fly. Hadoop is a great tool if you need to deal with data at the level that a top 50 site would need to. But at that point, wouldn't you be able to hire someone full-time with a six-figure salary? Consulting tends to work better for firms that can't afford to hire someone as staff - and those firms tend not to be of he size that would need such a scalable data architecture.

Heck, even sites like Flickr (39th most trafficked), Wikipedia (7th), Wordpress.com (36th), and Craigslist (47th) are still able to run off MySQL. It just seems like businesses of that size would want staff and smaller businesses wouldn't have the data to justify it.
But what is productive use?
Venture capital funds (which is what YC is very very roughly) don't do IPOs because a public company has to produce returns every quarter with some degree of regularity and VC returns are always very very skewed. I can bet YC will never do an IPO.

More importantly, you typically do an IPO to raise money for your operations. VC funds raise money from private investors. So it doesn't usually make sense for VC funds to do an IPO.
MBTA Sux - capturing the public transportation zeitgeist
For those who don’t know, the MBTA is Boston’s public transportation authority, running subways, busses, commuter rail, and the like.

To say the least, many people are unhappy with the way it is operated. So, as a subject near and dear to my heart, I decided to make MBTAsux.

What it is: grabbing twitter messages and posting them in a format that allows easy skimming, in addition to extracting some data from the text.

The things I’m interested in:

* Rudimentary sentiment analysis, i.e. how are people feeling about the MBTA right now?
* Location tracking. I want to figure out where people complain the most. Control that for the “size” of the stations (Park and South Station would probably win the popular vote here).

Things I’ve yet to implement that I think are essential:

* Submission form, and a mobile version of it. You know, for people who don’t use twitter.
* Map. Alas, people are not really mentioning their exact stops when they complain. So there is a really small percentage of twitters coming in that would be mappable. This brings me to the next feature:
* A nano-format for complaining about the MBTA on twitter and other media. Something like: s:kendall someone just played the Marseillaise on the hanging pipes #mbtasux

How I wrote it:
o Python
o Google App Engine
o Latest version of the code will be released soon under a BSD license.

Enjoy!
Sending out legit reports must take manpower to collect all the data. But fake reports might be easy to generate semi-automatically.

I'm sure you're right, though: a lot of people must have been in on it, and he's covering for them.
Do you find the wax ones better than the foam ones? The foam ones are comfortable and convenient, but they don't block enough noise. I'm particularly bothered by nearby speech, e.g. in a cube environment.
"I’m finding that every geek gathering is full of asshole MBAs, groupies, and their wannabes."

Someone please explain to me how MBAs show up at geek meetups of any description. I would think stuff would be way too oriented away from money for them to show up. Maybe I'm just crassly stereotyping too much.
For those who don’t know, the MBTA is Boston’s public transportation authority, running subways, busses, commuter rail, and the like.

To say the least, many people are unhappy with the way it is operated. So, as a subject near and dear to my heart, I decide to make MBTAsux.

What it is: grabbing twitter messages and posting them in a format that allows easy skimming, in addition to extracting some data from the text.

The things I’m interested in:

* Rudimentary sentiment analysis, i.e. how are people feeling about the MBTA right now?
* Location tracking. I want to figure out where people complain the most. Control that for the “size” of the stations (Park and South Station would probably win the popular vote here).

Things I’ve yet to implement that I think are essential:

* Submission form, and a mobile version of it. You know, for people who don’t use twitter.
* Map. Alas, people are not really mentioning their exact stops when they complain. So there is a really small percentage of twitters coming in that would be mappable. This brings me to the next feature:
* A nano-format for complaining about the MBTA on twitter and other media. Something like: s:kendall someone just played the Marseillaise on the hanging pipes #mbtasux

How I wrote it:
o Python
o Google App Engine
o Latest version of the code will be released soon under a BSD license.

Enjoy!
What do you use to calculate the Rage Meter (and mood in general)?

I've seen mood calculation before on ConceptNet:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/conceptnet/
Yes.

Less succinctly: potentially both.
Lenovo lets iPhone meet netbook: creates mini netbook with touchscreen
Mint hits 1M users
Speaking from 3 years ahead of you, you're going to begin feeling like you've lost things a lot more.

I swear old age starts at 5 years old, because I can forget the most simple things, but last night my wife was asking me the demographics of Canada and I nailed like 7 out of the top 10 in the right order through guessing alone, just because I have a lot of knowledge to base my guesses off of.

I had a clarifying moment when I was 15, which I believe is the point at which I reached maturity and quite honestly I feel very little difference at 21 than I did at 15 except for experience. I simply realised that the one thing I wanted to do in life was write, and that all the BS of school was transitory. That summer, at 16 I started working as a reviewer and was the first person at the company to get an excerpt on a product, however I left when the politics started interfering with the job. It was like, depending on who the product came from you had to add points to the review. It wasn't so much with movies, but with video games if one was coming from EA it was virtually impossible to badmouth. The final straw came with Oblivion, the preview material was so flawed the game was inherently unplayable without cheats (the whole, a rat can kill a lvl 30 thief because they stupidly made all the creatures level too).

After I left I switched from writing short stories to actually going for the goal posts with a novel. I've ditched a lot of projects, simply because I outgrew them in the process of writing them. I threw out an entire months work because it wasn't original enough for me, and from my experience humans have a very limited ability to see outside of the box when they're focusing on something so if I released it wasn't original then so would everyone else.

My honest advice to you is find someone with a valid opinion on writing (in my case it was my editor, who I became quick friends with) and get them to be brutally honest. Take every single word they say to heart and then feel free to ignore every fucking word if it doesn't help you. Do this with as many people you can trust and get them to be honest and if they don't provide criticism they're not helping.

People often avoid hearing the bad things about their work and people often avoid saying bad things about it, but you need to hear every single criticism no matter how irrelevant it actually ends up being. If it doesn't help you immediately, it will eventually because once you're published your work is open to the judgment of millions of people. It also helps with denials, lots of agents/editors can be helpful, but don't be surprised if you get a standard denial letter... I once got one when I emailed an agent asking what genres he was currently accepting submissions for, which was exceptionally funny.
Unfortunately, I don't think that stimulating production or innovation is a good idea either.

When you just stimulate production, it is true that production will increase but not in a way the consumers actually want. The evidence for this is that production has been stimulated (along with consumption) for a long time due to artificially low interest rates. The housing boom is a boom in production of houses.

"booms" in general are caused by the illusion that there are more savings than in reality exist - i.e. lowered interest rates, easy loans, etc. This causes the business to over invest, thinking there is enough in the way of resources to do so, and the consumer to consume more, thinking the same thing. Unfortunately, because the lower interest rate does not coincide with increased savings the businesses soon find out that there are not enough resources to complete their projects. This is when the boom starts to stagnate. In the late '90s, the scarce resource was programmers and IT employees, who were increasingly hard to find as businesses continued to hire them all for new internet projects.

Artificial stimulation is a very bad idea in either case, consumption or production. It is especially bad when you stimulate both at once.

However, I don't think you have to worry about innovation too much. Especially in this period of economic decline, people will be able able to innovate even without stimulation ;)
I think that will happen with any broadly-defined "geek" social group.

The nerd club at my college was hugely slanted towards roleplaying and anime, so I felt sort of like an outsider caring mainly for computers and video games. An electronics nerd would have zero fun, but then again, it was a liberal arts college, so what do you expect?
Basketsim.com ::: Basketball manager
How the Linux kernel works
Yeah, but that doesn't make nearly as interesting a headline. :-)
Gates spends about 0% of his fortune for his personal pleasure. He's not on the beach surrounded by bikini babes. He works hard on his current mission, and he deserves our respect.

His wealth is invested either in growing businesses (a good thing) or through his foundation to improve the world (a very good thing.) It's not clear that he could grow the foundation much faster than he has -- they're trying to do something novel and you can't just grow that from nothing overnight.
New & free sync tool for your files
Use bithub to share and synchronize your files on as much computers as you like. So your files will be always up to date, no matter where you are or which computer you use. This service is fully free and there are no hidden costs, annoying advertising or spyware
Much of the advice that matters (basically how to make something people want and how to let them know it exists) is pretty international. I don't really see the need for UK-specific start-up news.

The world is getting more global, not less. If anything, I'd suggest that someone think about how to reproduce the "start-up meetups" effect without needing to actually meet in person. Now that would be interesting - expand the size of the village, rather than contracting it.
Yeah. The front page is in an odd state today.
Indeed. I didn't say that risk was bad, necessarily. Rather, encouraging risk to avoid a non-existent paradox of thrift is a dangerous thing. Personally, I think that the news about people losing less money at casinos is a good thing. They are much more likely to be able to invest it in worthwhile endeavors having not lost it ;)

Also part of the problem is that everyone was consuming their present and future income (negative net savings rate) - as opposed to some borrowing and consuming the present savings of others. As such we were actually consuming present capital and reducing our future income, as evidenced by the recent downturn.
I have a pair of RCA HPNC300's, they weren't all that expensive and their noise canceling works great. I even wear them at home, they can cut out a lot of background noise as they clear a lot of the bass noise that tends to overpower other sounds.

I used to fly a lot and they worked amazing, it really helps when you don't hear the rumble of the engines.

The only problem with the HPNC300's is that they're on-ear headphones and as I wear quite thick-armed glasses once every few days the headphones just really pile on the pressure. If you don't wear glasses then I don't imagine you'd ever have a problem with on-ear, although personally I'm also looking for a good pair of circumaural (over-ear) but I don't really have a need to spend money on them now. When I got my current pair of headphones the price difference between noise canceling on-ear and over-ear was just shit stupid, it was like double-tipple the price for equal dB reduction through the noise canceling and not simply being a $400 pair of ear protectors with earphones built in.
Not in my experience, the example given was a "link exchange request". These go on all the time over email, and work pretty well.

Perhaps it's just me, but I often prefer dealing with people over email/IRC/etc than face to face for a lot of things.
Certainly. The two things are rather related: if you remove the appearance of danger, people will get themselves into more tight spots. It's amazing how many more people with four wheel drive get stuck in mud than normal cars ;)
It's not something they would rush into for the reasons you point to, but it's not unheard of (e.g Harris and Harris), and if the goal of YC is to maximize the number of companies they can fund then an IPO may make sense at some point.
Data Mining Moves to Human Resources
Why - are you writing an essay on the topic? ;)
There are different sorts of MBAs. My mother's was focused on computers and tech, and though she's since moved out of that field, at the time she was quite the geek.

Having an MBA doesn't make you a bad person. It's just that MBAs more than many other degrees will attract a high proportion of the "make money and intimidate people" crowd. That's not exclusive. I know computer scientists who are equally clueless about what they do, but who think this degree will make them rich.
Data Mining Moves To Human Resources
I was hoping someone would have an idea just on whether it makes a difference to have his business as my partner or to instead have him and his existing partner as direct partners in my new business.
'If trees are made us using Leaf, Node, and Empty, tree "leaks" names, which is a disaster because lots of things have leaves, nodes, and empty.'

Non sequitur? Where is the problem. Try

> data MyMaybe a = Just a | Nothing

the compiler won't complain about a name crash with the build-in Maybe-Monad.

[Sorry, accidentally downmodded the parent-comment from 1 to 0. Slippery fingers.]
Yeah, Harry Potter's definitely an escape. There's a psychotic mass murderer who leads a fanatic cult into a school and has them killing droves of people, an 18-year-old attempts to kill a group of students just to take a treasure from them and ends up burning alive, a man spends a lifetime obsessed with a woman only to lead to her death and get killed by a snake.

For what it's worth, I've got quite a few female friends who don't get treated necessarily like stereotypical females because they quite clearly aren't. Maybe I'm just in a lucky part of the world, but I haven't seen females get discriminated against much unless they invited it on themselves.
Pligg.com maybe?
BMW DesignWorksUSA designs ultimate gaming rig
GTK+ 2.16.0 arrives
But we don't have messages. So I'm not certain quite how that would work.
GPU Kernels as Data-Parallel Array Computations
Currently there is only one mood tag "angry", which is handled with keywords and some simple rules. With more data, more complex and interesting rules can be derived.

Then the rage quotient is calculated, i.e. what percentage of people are angry (actually, it takes the number of angry posts in the sample and divides by half the sample size). The quotient is then mapped unto a list of verbal descriptions. This means that I can add or remove description as needed.