skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regardless of your moral stance on the issue, it is copyright infringement. How would you feel if someone went around giving away your programs for free, or even worse, the source code if it's not open?
It would be a good idea as incorporation will shield you from being personally responsible should something go wrong and someone sues.

With as cheap as it is to form a company on your own, there's no reason not to.
Should asking puzzle questions in technical interviews be illegal?
One could argue that such puzzles discriminate against certain groups of people without supporting research showing that such puzzle solving ability is necessary for programming.

So should such puzzles be illegal in technical interviews -- at least until the supporting research is done and widely accepted?
More the links to the submissions made and comments so I can mine them for data. For example you have your details over say 157 days.

- http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kingnothing

and

- http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kingnothing

Mine are over 220 and there's a lot of information that I've been intending to mine in my hackerID project ~ http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/hackerid/

That serious enough?
What exactly was accomplished? Is the big deal that they removed a bunch of genes and it's still alive? That article left me feeling like they were just trying to tell me that this discovery is "omg awesome!"
Tip for Facebook developers:  Make sure your app makes compelling use of notifications!
So this means your app needs to be centered around interaction with friends and giving friends a reason to take notifications from your app seriously.
"... We'll figure it out. ..."

The good bit is the historical posts & submissions are still there, just the 'user?id=foo' data is blanked.
I completely understand the difference between correlation and causation. But in the grand scheme of things, the human brain is designed to recognize correlation when developing internal rating systems. You would have to be stupid to not automatically give more clout to a graduate of Harvard than to a drop out of some state university. The state university student may or may not be less qualified than the Harvard graduate, but in the vast majority of situations he will be.

Even if YC doesn't give "real" points to graduates/students of good universities, just the mere emotional response to reading "harvard" or "yale" or "berkeley" sparks an automatically positive regard for the applicant. Isn't that enough cause?

Thus, good college = +2.
Getting a great logo on the cheap: Hold a Contest
I posted about this a few days ago, and thought I'd follow up now that we're almost finished with the contest. Long story short: We're really happy with the results.
Hi5 is working on its own platform for developers, to take on Facebook
Get a home office and a third place (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Place). Having recently left my former employer and taken the plunge, I've found myself strangely having the highest levels of productivity sitting for a few hours at a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi.
British scientists make water defy gravity
"... Yet another article from "Foo" that's a thinly-veiled ad for 'Bar' ..."

HackerNews is an ad for yc, pg's articles and talks are for publicising yc. I think the real difference b/w blatant advertising and the type Joel and pg (Buchheit, Greenspun, Yegge, maybe 37Sigs) is they impart knowledge, useful knowledge. If they did not entertain, inform and question readers wouldn't bother reading their pieces.

But I do understand the continuous 'Fogbugz' references. Maybe it's the geek in you rejecting someone telling you need something when you don't.
It isn't the rating part that's automated. It's just a convenient tool for us to read and score applications quickly.
I really try not to get into these discussions, but what you are saying is akin to 'let them eat cake'.

If you had black only schools run by black people 'in those days', how well equiped do you think they would have been? Where would the black enterpreneur have gotten capital from to provide standard services in his school?
Now onto the white entreprenuer who does have the capital and cares only about providing the best service to paying customers..how would black students have been able to afford to pay for that school?

There is no such thing as a completely free (or perfect) market , governments exist to ensure that the weak don't get crushed by the strong in the society.

Your relationship between racism and prosperity does not hold ANY water either, many of the more successful businessmen in America in the early 19th century were known for their racist views and indeed some of them belonged to the KKK.
Among the most innovative people in America today, I guarantee you will find many with deep seated prejuidices.

Seriouly, your entire post reeks of intellectual dishonesty or maybe you have not had the time to really think about the issues at hand.
</end rant>
Ask PG: What Counts as a Founder in the App?
My team has one team member who wrote a bunch (maybe 1/3?) of the code we have so far and who is very into the idea of working on the startup with us, but who can't work on it very much now because he has a job that he isn't ready to leave. He definitely can't move to California, but he wants to do as much as he has time to on nights and weekends. He will have have equity. My question is, for the purpose of questions on the application, is he considered a founder?
26 + Master's Degree in CS
Postfix (managed by Virtualmin and Webmin, of course).
Should asking content questions in technical interviews be illegal?

One could argue that such content questions discriminates against certain groups of people without supporting research showing such memorizing ability is necessary for programming.

So should such questions be illegal in technical interviews --- at least until the supporting research is done and widely accepted?
Free gmail for own domain
Perhaps one reason why they ask puzzle type questions is because they don't care so much about what content you know. You can learn on the job after all if you are smart.

But that still ignores the issue about whether puzzle solving and programming ability are highly correlated.
Having said that and re-read the article I couldn't be struck by the adverts (jobs & fogbugz) then the left hand sidebar and lots of black text and hard edged images (images of rego screens), squashed text (lots of spaces on LH & RH side).

Maybe nickb is right. The page design also sucks making it hard to read and possibly needs some attention?
I currently run a mail server for a client, though I rarely use it for my own purposes. It's Exim.
16 + High School
It's not just because of the iPod. Mac laptops work better.
A founder is someone with significant equity.
webmail.us, the best.
Probably moreso than most other things you could evaluate, including programming itself. I'd argue that puzzle-solving is more closely related to what you actually do as a developer than writing "reverse a string in-place" exercises in C. After all, what are programming problems besides puzzles?

(Assuming you're working at a firm that actually develops software, instead of handing a template to some code-monkeys and telling them to use off-the-shelf Microsoft or Java widgets and assemble them into something vaguely resemblant. But the latter firms don't really use puzzles anyway. They hire based on degrees and certifications.)
Postfix - easy to setup & better security model than sendmail.
I'm 26. I was in college for two years, studying Physics and then CS. I left to study Zen, in California, and then went into contracting.
The point is this is just a guess. You need scientific experiments to demonstrate this -- otherwise, it's potentially illegal to use puzzles in interviews.
Wow, congratulations.

My picks:

#1:Infinity needs system administrators, by fbarriac
#2: Modern stylized spider web by vjeko
While it would technically be considered a different species (though perhaps in the same genus as the parent species), I wouldn't consider it artificial life. All they did was repeatedly remove genes and see if the organism was viable. They still have no idea how most of the genes and regulation actually work. Simply modifying an organism doesn't constitute artificial life unless you consider dog breeds or other things we've created by breeding. By the same notion, it's not considered artificial life when a new custom chromosome (called a plasmid) is inserted into a bacteria or eukaryotic cell. It's done all the time and has been since the 80s.

All they did was get rid of "extraneous" genes that they don't deem necessary. They're trying to make a designer organism to synthesize/produce compounds. This is one step in achieving that, though it was arguably unnecessary. The hard part is creating genes/proteins to make it do what you actually want. This involves creating a new biochemical pathway (or modifying an existing one), probably creating new enzymes to recognize your intermediates, designing ER and golgi receptors to recognize their finished product and target it for excretion from the cell, creating proper regulation of this pathway, etc, etc. As you can see, it's very complicated. No one has successfully created their own enzyme or protein yet, let alone an entire biochemical pathway of them.
discrimination should be legal. forcing you to hire someone you don't want to isn't freedom.
Not a hacker yet. But I follow the forum. 24 + BA Philosophy.
I don't understand why lucrative alternatives are an obstacle.

That $130k/year makes trying a startup less risky. It gave them an opportunity to save so they can live off savings. It also means that they can recover quickly from any debt they incur.

It also establishes a benchmark for a startup's value creation. If early employees can't reasonably believe that they're going to get significantly more than $130k for their efforts, either the idea/execution is too small or the founders may not play well with others, which causes other problems leading to failure.
I live in St. Paul (just to the east of Minneapolis, for you non-Minnesotans). I love the area, but it really is a harder environment for a startup. My buddy and I had a fun startup back in 1996. We had an OK run for about a year, but we just felt like we were living on a deserted island.

I'm married now with three kids, and if I were to start something again, I would still seriously consider relocating to Boston or San Francisco.
What defines these "certain groups" of people and why should anyone be forced to employ them?

If you think that they'd make superior employees, nothing is stopping you from employing them. If you're correct, that will give you a significant advantage over employers who make the wrong choice. Why aren't you willing to make money from being correct?
17 in second year of community college.
There are anti-discrimination laws in place. The question is with respect to those laws and whether they are violated by puzzles.

In a world without such laws, what you say applies.
> When Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty, there was some talk in England about boycotting US products (pretty hopeless idea there, but it shows the anger).

Actually, it shows ignorance. The US president doesn't ratify treaties, the Senate does. And, the Senate voted Kyoto down 95-0 during the Clinton years.

You got played by Clinton, but you can't object too much because you didn't bother to comply either.
From my perspective it is less about the actual answer and more about the process you use to get there.

Now granted I have read a few studies indicating that it is possible to derive puzzles in such a way that to weed out certain demographics. One could argue the same thing based on what college someone went to and when based on the published numbers from that school and logical analysis. Should asking what college you went to and when be illegal?

As it stands right now, "puzzle solving ineptness" is not one of the groups of people protected by the equal opportunity act.
But it might be that older people are worse at these sorts of puzzles in which case this would result in age discrimination.

Other groups may be affected as well.
A Journey into the Dumb-o-Sphere (or, why Mono isn't threatened by .NET source)
Up to a point, the more VC's ask for, the less leverage the entrepreneur has to make his fortune, and the less he cares.
Doing more with Hunchentoot, the Common Lisp webserver
Alan Kay: Education in the Digital Age (vid)
What do you get when you curry partial application?
Python Magazine - Issue 1 for free! (direct link to PDF)
Should any questions be illegal? We should be able to hire anyone we want for whatever reasons. The market should then decide whether the questions were right or wrong.
Reminds me of http://notalegend.com/notalegend.html - micro-ISV, not startup. Eric Sink is worth paying attention to no matter where you are, despite the valley-centric circlejerking that seems to prevail even here.
Sexy charts in less than 5 minutes
Reading An Excel File With Ruby
New Python Framework: Gluon Web Framework
Any selection procedure can be said to "discriminate" against certain groups of people. Do people need a certain height and weight to be good soldiers? Many army recruitment systems have minimum requirements. Do you need an Ivy LeagueMBA to be a highly paid consultant at McKinsey?

Questions like these often are about the questioner than anything else.
If I were to ask "Should it be illegal for McKinsey to demand an MBA from Harvard before hiring people?" , it probably reveals more about my attitudes than anything else.

What made you consider such an idea? Any negative experiences with puzles in an interview? I am genuinely curious.
Aaron Swartz: How to Get a Job Like Mine
You might want to e-mail Chris Baker at: http://semanticcaucus.blogspot.com/. He's part of the same Open House Project group e-mail listserv that I'm on that discusses opening up government information. He's way into the semantic web and if there are any startups in Ohio, they may be interested in meeting him.
The only thing Joel is good at making is Digg bait.... and apparently news.combinator bait.
The Xobni guys ask a great puzzle if you interview with them. The puzzle makes the whole interview process worthwhile. I hope they are still asking that puzzle ;-)
What sparked your inner hacker?
I was wondering what first interested you all in programming.

For me? My cousin showed me how to use AOL Press back in the day and I started making random fan/rom/emulator websites. It was on from there and I haven't closed notepad since. =P

How about you?
Old, but interesting article on Friendster's demise
Someone must have posted this up before at some point. I'm actually submitting this to check if there was a previous thread.
CNET's list is classic (if that's what you're looking for). It includes such classic one-hit wonders as: Boo.com, Webvan, and Pets.com. It's a good list to learn that spending lots of money quickly on marketing will not make a great idea better.

I would also suggest reading: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070601/features-how-to-kill-a-.... It's cool to see how Friendster didn't win in the war for US social networking (even though southeastern Asia loves it).
Internet Map: City-to-City Connections
Not a YC founder (yet, hopefully), but we work from home. Our rooms are separated from our work area though so I don't know if you'll have enough space for that type of situation. No matter what you do, mentally or physically prepare for work (even if it means just brushing your teeth). Also, remember to exercise.
Although I come from academic background, I have lost all faith in computer science. IMO, people are focusing on all the wrong things. Web 2.0 is a step in the right direction. It's much more fun and creative than academia ever was.

As you might guess, I don't think much of technical interviews, especially the ones with puzzles.
Carpal, I'm new to the YC News circle, but the CTO of the Sunlight Foundation, a guy we're working with, is from Atlanta. He's worked on four startups there, so he has a wealth of experience and may be able to help out. His name is John Brothers, just tell him Andrew Lee sent you. He's about to move to DC (where we've been doing our stuff), but he can probably tell you about things that helped out in his region.
New plastic is strong as steel, transparent
This would be a good question for 'Regulatory Bureaucrat News'.

Or perhaps 'Vexatious Litigator News'.

But for 'Hacker News', not so much.
35 + PhD in chemical engineering
On discrimination laws:

http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html

You'll see a number of groups identified at various points. Lists of them usually start with something like "race, color, religion..." These are known as 'suspect classifications' and discrimination is often not possible except where a suspect class is involved.

Suspect classes themselves have been defined by the Supreme Court via 14th amendment rulings, and include specific criteria that determine what level of scrutiny is applied to the law. If a victim is not a member of a suspect class, then it will be very difficult to prove discrimination. (Though it can happen, for example Gay Marriage in MA)

Companies have a great deal of freedom to 'discriminate'(defined in global scope) in hiring practices, though their ability to 'discriminate'(defined in legal scope) is limited for good reason.

(I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. I also don't think puzzle tests should count as discrimination.)
See also:

http://www.designoutpost.com

They have a forum where you post your prize (usually $100-$300) and parameters, and a bunch of designers compete, revising to your feedback, all in public. Some of the results are very nice.
You're absolutely right: that my use of the word "ratify" was incorrect. The senate does indeed ratify treaties. And the senate did reject Kyoto (which may have needed some work), as you have said.

But one debating tactic I've noticed in people with a weak argument: they go quickly to detail, identify flaws in phrasing, redefine words, argue over procedural details. Sometimes this is referred to as a "strawman argument", where you take your opponent's argument in its weakest form, and knock it down. I'd like to invite you to take the argument in its strongest form, and actually say something substantive.

So instead of "refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty," let's instead say "actively undermined efforts to take meaningful action against global warming." That would be taking the argument in a stronger form, and would give you an opportunity to explain how the Bush administration does not deserve a reputation for undermining efforts to combat global warming.

So... would you claim that George Bush has nothing to do with the America's rejection of the Kyoto treaty, or America's remarkable inaction on global warming in general? And would you disagree that his administration has repeatedly tried to undermine California's efforts to do something about it?

Before we start arguing about votes and procedures, I'd like to hear your big picture view on this issue.
I don't know if Washington DC is a startup hub (it generally doesn't feel like it). Even though we're close to northern VA, we just don't get the same vibe of internet culture. It took the community quite a long time to host a Barcamp here. My complaints have been: It's tough because it's sometimes lonely because we can't share that experience with many others because there just aren't as many web startups.
1) East Coast is oddly dominated by families with control over media empires. So talking about equity is just weird with them because they don't want to give any up (no matter how much their website looks like Geocities).
2) I hate having to explain the "long tail" over and over when I'm trying to explain a wholly different concept. The buzz takes time to reach the East.
3) Although accessibility to capital is generally based on good referrals, it's more difficult in the East because those circles are much tighter.
4) We heard from a good advisor that just being in the Silicon Valley will always improve your chances of success, but we moved out to DC because we're working in the "political sphere." I don't have any reference for comparison, so I don't exactly know what to say about that.
5) That said, since we spend a lot of time inside programming, it probably isn't as different if we were somewhere else. I think as a result of the internet, you can still make quite an impact, but closing a business deal is so much easier when it's in person.
A case for adpinion.
Thanks. We're loving those two, as well (actually, though it's hard to say just yet, those are probably our top two choices right now).
Nice to know. I hadn't heard of that before. While it looks like a pretty high caliber bunch of designers frequent the site and contribute to the contests, the actual infrastructure for running the contests is not nearly as nice as what SitePoint has. SitePoint used to be "just a forum", but they've put a lot of thought and effort into the contests application--it works really well.
My examples were present day examples - so no, the racist ages have not ended, and I would not be surprised if there are some very intelligent very racist people out there.
Start listening at 27 minutes in to hear Levitt talk about "the only person in business I have been able to convince about anything" -- a prostitute. Pretty funny.
For hiring in the U.S., discrimination is legal if it's done on the basis of what are called "bona fide occupational qualifications". This is the legal principle that allows, say, police departments to reject people who don't meet physical standards, or modeling agencies to reject people just because they're ugly.

You could make a good case that success on puzzle questions has a decent correlation with success as a programmer--that is, the ability to solve puzzles is probably a BFOQ for programmers, so it's safe from a legal standpoint.
24 + master degree in cs (french engineering degree)

after 2 years of working finally starting my own business ;-)
We got ours from http://www.worth1000.com.

http://www.worth1000.com/cache/contest/contestcache.asp?cont...
I have to say, I'm inspired by pg's whole idea that the ultimate test of what you bring to society is what you can think up and build, and that barriers to your doing just exactly that, have fallen much lower. I'm still freakin' abuzz over that, together with the fact that there will probably soon be YC imitators, and that YC itself will expand, to make that a reality. Currently I'm contemplating 'which job to do, which would stall my career the least' (I do need one for the short term), but in the medium term even, it may be possible to work on exciting, possibility-busting ideas. Being that life is short, I can't get over the possibility that this'll be the new modus operandi.

This would be at the level of what the early internet hippies promised, way back in the beginning :)
55 + BA Journalism + Third career
You're making a lot of sense; I'm just saying, my experience was that it was harder to hire in the Bay Area than it has been for me to hire in NYC or Chicago, where I hire now.

It's also obvious that developers are more expensive to hire anybody in San Francisco than in Des Moines or Minneapolis.

Also, please note the bias towards founders in these discussions. A tiny team of founders is a good start, but you eventually need actual employees.
Do you consider someone who receives significant equity after the company formation a founder? For example, employee number 3 or 4 or 5?

This has nothing to do with the application, just a question of opinion.
>Past or Recent TechCrunch Coverage +2

Does Mashable count? :p
I wanted to make video games.
What's his job, anyway?
=)

Thanks Prrometheus, we just have to keep on spreading the word.

Update: IE now works a lot better.
Some of those are good! Do they only do PhotoShop, or is vector and option?
They have a $50 listing fee + a charge for extra options. Was Sitepoint free?