skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this amounts to complaining that an enormously successful company is using their money to do something you think is inappropriate. tough shit, it seems to be THEIR money. they can do with it what they want, as long as it is legal.
i wish i could shake your hand
>Why would blackwater violate a contract with a paying customer?

Because their other paying customers, who pay them much more than you do, will compell them to?

>Power is not zero-sum. Trade is positive sum. That is very, very basic economics.

Power is zero-sum when we think of it as a percentage of "total power". It's irrational to think of wealth that way, because people care more about what a dollar can do for them than what percentage of world's wealth that dollar represents. With power, there is no such distinction. What your power can do for you is directly proportional to what percentage of "total power" you have. If there is a new actor and his power increases, everyone else's power (averaged out) decreases proportionally.
the iPod Touch as a web development platform
Employer:
US Airways Group

Position:
Co-op Propulsion Engineer

A Boeing 757 leaves somewhere traveling at 500 miles per hour. A ball bearing falls out and the engine blows up. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field (A) multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B) then multiply the result by the average out of court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of the recall, we don't do one.
I took a similar path - violin for 9 years, then switched to guitar when I was about 16 (to be cool, of course). I didn't completely drop the violin, but guitar was my main instrument for the later part of high school. But then I picked the violin up again for All States my senior year, and kept doing it for college. Surprisingly it's violin that stuck - I still play a couple times a week, while I haven't touched my guitar in close to a year.

I've also dabbled in a bunch of other instruments - 3 years of clarinet in middle school, enough viola to play and (barely) read music, picked up a fife and tin whistle in Williamsburg, reasonably fluent on bass guitar, and I've been trying to teach myself piano over the past couple years, with only slight success.
Sorry, ma'am. I happen to healthy and male, but with above average melanin. Trust me, we are aware and very glad you exist.
I play the drums and I played snare drum in high school marching band. I wish I owned an electronic drum set, I'd enjoy writing some beats sometimes.
The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club!
So how did those 3 startups work out?
News Corp's $1Billion YouTube killer already sued
This will be one entertaining company to watch.
or is it shareholder money? Do you want your stock money going to their pet projects?
Hey transburgh, send me an email, I have a question for you about Gobig.
Really cool feature.. going play with it some more.
Hi prime,

Good luck finding a cofinder. I'm not sure that YC will like this idea, but it is definitely an impressive "think you built."
I have to say I don't find this all that surprising. It's rare to come across a slum without a television or radio--at least in Bombay where I grew up.

While television and radio are relatively old things that took their time before reaching the slums, it's amazing how fast the cell phone has penetrated even to the poorest of folks in India.
Thanks. Just to be clear: this isn't about my 'feelings.' It's actually about having a successful startup: one major reason people fund startups is because they think the founders have the right characteristics that will make them succeed. They're looking for a certain type of person, not just an idea. Through its posts and comments, this community shares a mental model of what type of person makes a successful founder. Having that image be of a particular gender negatively impacts those of us who happen to be women or who have women in their startup team.

This example from Founders at Work struck me: Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, related an anecdote where she and her partner, who was also her husband, met with a VC firm. Caterina didn't fit the VC's mental model of a founder. After the meeting the VC told her husband 'not to bring his wife to VC meetings.'
YC wants female founders. You should apply.
You broke the second rule...
Are You An Egomaniac? 10 Questions with Author Steven Smith
Guy Kawasaki does a quick 10 question interview with Steven Smith, author of "egonomics: what makes ego our greatest asset".
Clearly this guy is outside his mind. You might have a bad experience with a few white, black, poor, or rich people, but this certainly does not mean they are all the same. I have experienced similar situations several where people ask me stupid fucking questions or make ignorant comments just because of where I am from. I usually do not respond to such low level of maturity and knowledge and the few times I do I make sure they leave the room felling way less intellectual than I am (although I am not so smart, maybe a little bit). Sorry you got screwed by poor people, but not all poor people are the same. There are several stories we can tell about rich people screwing other rich people, in fct I am sure there are more of those cases than his.
29 (but 30 5 weeks from now).
...no.

What about kiva.org?
I asked all my academic friends, and I've come to the conclusion that it is a pedantic distinction. But it's useful to have two different words for the two separate concepts :)
I really hope this is a joke... even then it isn't funny.
Cool, congrats to you too. And you're so right about the interview. Want to post that on the blog comments?
senior systems engineer. that was the last full time job i'm ever gonna have, i don't care what it takes.
Creator of Hotmail plans to found new Indian city
I remember in an essay you wrote a long time ago (I think the one about "doing things you love") you said that if you've found something you love doing, then the "concept of spare time will seem mistaken". So you love working with Y Combinator, but still have spare time? :-)

BTW I really liked that essay and if you had any new thoughts, a follow-up would be great.
It is precisely because there is risk involved in giving a loan that there is any profit to be made. If the legal system actively enforced repayment through debtors' prison and the like, there would be no basis for interest.
The list was crap, but the semantic web isn't. It's really just the idea of putting machine-readable data on the web, which isn't a particularly crazy idea.

It doesn't even need any new tech; you could do the semantic web with XML, microformats, JSON or any structured data format. RDF, SPARQL, etc. just make the job (a lot) easier.

The only problem the semantic web has is that everybody seems to think it's this crazy complex concept. I'd love to know where the marketing screwed up.
10 Articles That Changed My Life
>After the meeting the VC told her husband 'not to bring his wife to VC meetings.'

Another data point clustering around vc ineptitude. Why are the fools always employed as gatekeepers?
Building Self-Aware AI Systems
Bandwidth Could Be New Global Currency
If you had read more than the first two paragraphs you would have realized it was satire.
Regarding the subprime fiasco, it should read "This is what happens when you build an entire industry based on tricking people into borrowing more than they can afford!"
Forty Unusual Websites That You Should Bookmark
19. Started the nerd club at 18.
Owner?
Thank you, this helps me a lot.
Frickin' hilarious. Through thought #1, it's just a bit wry and tongue-in-cheek, but by the middle of thought #2 -- "I trusted these people to get their teams of lawyers to vet anything before they signed it" -- it's high satire. I laughed out loud at its continuation: "Turns out, if you're poor, you don't need to pay lawyers. You don't like the deal you just wave your hands in the air and moan about how poor you are. Then you default."
"In a few weeks, [your facebook listing] may be found through search engines like Google"
Really cool article. I wish there was some site that recorded the most interesting things these kids did with the computers. I'm curious to know the limits of what they can teach themselves.
He needs to get his website redesigned first... frames inside the menu?
advice: taken

we increased the line spacing, toned down some of the colors to make them easier on the eyes, and fixed the job board iframe headers.

thanks for all the great feedback!
I've seen this before. I really like the presentation style.

The conclusion is what you expect: building apps with Django, Ruby on Rails, TurboGears, and Plone is faster and less annoying than with J2EE.
IILWY is sort of interesting, but every woman on the site seemed to either be married, in a serious relationship, ugly, or someone paid to join.
I read the entire thing and I had no idea. I've a habit of leading people on to see how absurd of a thing I can get them to agree to. Like go to "conservative" club meetings (in college) and see how many people you can convince that Arabs shouldn't be considered human. Or why people that can't afford health care obviously don't deserve it, or how they ought to be forbidden to reproduce, etc.

It's scary.
I resent you for karma whoring. I wish I'd come up with it sooner.
I resent you for karma whoring off your previous karma whoring. I wish I could be as shameless.
ah i see - yes i was referring to hotness ratings and he was referring to numerical ordering. interesting ideas - i definitely think numbers help "parse" the text...
fixed now...
good call...tough to squeeze them in there since we're putting a premium on # of stories per view though...
what about digg? ;)
Is shoutfit no longer?
The examples you use as counter-arguments to my approach are not really counter-arguments, but deal with a different issue than what I was talking addressing in my last response. I was talking about finding music based on personal preferences. Your counter-examples of "making out with my girl" or dancing "at a club" are group situations where group preferences are most important.

You are right when you say that compilations like "Ibiza Club" or "Ellington for Lovers" make a lot of money: so does selling Muzak (the background music in supermarkets and most commercial spaces with music). Background music is the ultimate "genre" that is compatible with group preferences: no one is offended... but at the same time, nobody really cares.

I agree with you that musical preferences have more to them than "people like you also like"... this would disregard the reality that people sometimes do categorize music by situation/mood, categories like listening to music to dance, exercise, study, make-out, host cocktail parties etc.

But as I suggested before, domain specific categories of music do not have to be mutually exclusive to personal preferences (currently they are). Let's say your goal is to have romantic music. Why not use a "people like you also like" function bounded by the category of romantic music? This way you could get romantic music, i.e. music everyone thinks is romantic, and romantic music that you like as an individual. Even better would be to use a "people like you and your girlfriend also like" function within the specific category of romantic music :)

"Also, with all the choice available, it's easy to overestimate people's desire to even HAVE choice." This is pretty fatalistic don't you think? I think the explosion of choice online frustrates people because they KNOW something is out there that they will really love, but they can't FIND it. This screams opportunity for a website to act as a choice agent to direct people to the music, video, merchandise etc. that they want but can't find themselves among the infinite choices. Infinite choice results in infinite search costs without a decision agent.
Us poor people aren't too dumb or disorganized to burn the Hamptons to the ground if pushed too far.

Note: this is the same guy who wrote Moneyball, which is an interesting book about applying a bit of reason to an insane market (baseball recruiting).
Who would you not tell your great idea to?
It's an entrepreneur's job to get out there and hype their ideas. But prudence and good judgement still apply. I received advice once to not fully explain my ideas to a large corporation because they have the resources to develop it quickly and/or without me. Who would you not tell your idea to and why? Any horror stories of "bad judgement"?
Until you get a cavity ($350 and up for a filling, these days), or need new glasses (ditto), or have get some minor infection, and have to visit the doctor for a course of antibiotics (easily $200, not counting the cost of the prescription).

I'm not saying that it's impossible to survive without health insurance -- just don't underestimate the costs of seemingly minor medical services.
Ugly. Seems they have a case here.
Unlikely they will win. Even if they win they lose goodwill.

Prediction: out of court settlement, followed by decline in NetApp revenue and profitability. Four years later NetApp is bought by or merges with another company.

StorageTek was formed in 1969 and started selling their disk systems in the mid-70s. The company was started by former IBMers and they have over 600 patents. Considering they were shipping a virtual disk and snapshots product 4 years before the NetApp patent was filed, prior art seems likely.
8) Would you consider applications where the "exit" strategy is just to make money from customers and pay out dividends to shareholders, all else looking good?

9) Did you get any of these? Few, many?
You've also gotta draw the ID and holograms yourself in photoshop, pixel for pixel. That's gotta be a dozen hours for each ID.
You are getting asked to increase the spacing between lines anyway. Good luck with your decision. :)
Lasers baby, lasers.

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Powers:_International_Ma...
I have a friend who almost got a felony conviction b/c of fake ids. But that was the 80s. These days, I don't think you'd get a plea.. identity crime is a way bigger deal.
While you guys talk about age, i'm going to continue my focus on my end goals !
Third sentence, first lie. Talking about beautiful women, the author says:

and maybe if I get divorced or become a widower, I can have sex with them

The truth is, he wants sex with them. Right here. Right now. I didnt read any further.
Godspeed and good luck!

(Alas, you're still 76 keystrokes behind the guys who took 2 to state their age.)

P.S.: 32
They sure are shouting their ass FIT ;)
means Paul graham is a crock of bs
Yeah, crime is a bad idea.
Good question. Well, at first i told the world every single business idea i had in mind, not thinking anything of it because of my insignificance in the world, but boy, did i learn a very valuable lesson.You just remember that there are SOME multi-billion dollar company's out there who don't care about little bobby boo and will do anything just to capitalize on their own agenda's.

-cough-

IBM.
This post is crying out for a bar graph based poll.
intern at yahoo sunnyvale, developing http://yodel.yahoo.com
The Best of Web 2.0 Websites list
No, the search problem is not solved. When I look at the referrer logs of my site, I find people coming from as high as the 100th search result page of Google. My experience with searching on the Internet also leads me to believe that search needs to get better and better. A lot of very interesting things are happening in the search field; vertical, social, etc..
But, I will have to agreed that the major Search Engines are extremely good at the present moment. I use Yahoos Search API on my site, and am happy to fiddle around with their API's rather than build my own crawler (although I have real people adding links).
I upped your karma points because I thought your comment was witty, but mostly because we're applying to YC together and Paul Graham says it might help our odds :).
looks like a defunct YC'er.

As pg said in one of his essays - they probably "stopped returning his calls".
Well I guess he beat PG to founding a town[1]. It certainly makes sense to do it in India where his money will go so much further than in the US. What's crazy is that he's trying to re-create Silicon Valley. If that's a goal it seems like he could do a better job by just investing all that money into a bunch of new startups.

"We have three major goals for the Nano City: To re-create the Silicon Valley, create state-of-the-art infrastructure, and do all this in a fashion that is self-sustainable and exhausts natural resources to the bare minimum," said Bhatia[2].

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006

2. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/263937.cms
Senior Software Engineer at a large co. that was still somewhat connected to its startup roots. Then it got acquired by a huge co. with a real stifling culture and it was time to leave.
On the plus side, I made good money during that period, and managed to save a bunch, so now I'm using that to bootstrap my own startup.
attention to detail.
Kiva: Help working poor entrepreneurs in the developing world
Well, there would still be a basis for some interest, because the lender could make more money on their capital by using it for another purpose, such as buying T-bills or some other security with essentially zero risk. Intuitively I'd think that part of the interest charged on a loan is literally just to "rent the money", preventing it from being used for another purpose; the rest is to account for the possibility that the loan might not be repaid.
I'm wrong. I upped your points because it was funny and I know you. Doing it for YC points is just the most shallow pathetic and pointless reason which sometimes seems like THE reasons because it makes the other reasons seem like niceties or excuses.

I don't think we are our worst thoughts. Sure guys think about sex every 3 minutes but we're not a bunch of women clubbing apes. We respect the people we're with and we care about their interests. We treat them as such.

I think honesty in relationships is hugely key, but only constructive honesty. Telling someone only what they want to hear is doing them a disservice. But scratching every itch that comes into your head is equally unhelpful. Criticism is something that needs to be thought out and analyzed before handed out (or received). In my experience initial critical instincts often tend to be based on societal norms, prejudice or other forms of unoriginal thought.
This might be amusing if it weren't badly-written to the point of incoherence.
> By poor, I mean anyone who the SEC wouldn't allow to invest in my hedge fund

This dipshit classifies everyone who doesn't qualify to be an Accredited investor as poor? Wow.

He also thinks its the poor people's fault for taking sweet deals that were offered to them? If you look at it from an economic perspective, all they had to lose was the property on which they took out the loan and a bad credit rating, but their credit rating sucked already anyway. (Granted, this may have emotional consequences as they foreclose and have to move out, but that doesn't really impact the economics of it.) In contrast, the lenders are losing their investment! Isn't it the responsibility of the lenders to invest in, uhm, sensible investments?

OK, I should stop bitching about this troll's obvious flamebait.

[EDIT: after reading the rest of the piece, I see that this is satire. he sure got my blood boiling as I read it.]
almost 26
as opposed to the conventional: The Life Going Nowhere, Slowly, Movement
"... received advice once to not fully explain my ideas to a large corporation because they have the resources to develop it quickly and/or without me ..."

Don't believe everything you hear. Large corporations are about as likely to take your idea and run with it as an Aircraft carrier doing a 180.

Why? Momentum.

Momentum means ability to take a new idea on, think about it and execute. It also means being able to communicate the idea to Learned leaders then asking permission. So by the time it gets there your most likely to get someone with a business degree [0] making a snap decision on some hypothetical tech idea. The other thing is most large corporations area of expertise is probably not hacking (MS, IBM, SAP all have hackers but management is still the problem).

Also telling someone about an idea is pretty lame because ideas are worth, well nothing. But a demonstration of and idea that works? Demonstrating something will spur others to do something ... maybe throw large offers your way.

I did read a post here some time ago of someone mentioning an idea (to a trusted friend) who then created a coy, hired outsourced coders. So demo first, shout second. Shout loud.

[0] Phil Greenspun mentions this in FOW, Ch24, P238 where the head of Wal-Mart, Kevin Turner had but one business degree. This doesn't mean he's not smart but it takes years to train in tech. Is one general are of expertise enough?
Working down at the video game plant. Had done some years at different developers, then found one that was kind of small but ambitious and very talented. They got bought by the big publisher and eventually the wheels came off. Good pay, great royalties, but I like the broke-ass startup life better.
It's back up now so the original title makes no sense. Shoutfit was returning an apache error message for a few hours.
The key piece of evidence that it's satire:

"Michael Lewis in Berkeley, California"

They would crucify him there if he really meant what he wrote;-)

I didn't find it particularly entertaining, though.
His personal preference is for Plone/Zope, which I find to be much more intimidating and confusing than lightweight enterprise Java.
Move over mod_python, here comes mod_wsgi.
I like what they do with microfinancing in india. Give someone a little bit of money to start a simple street business, i.e. food vendor, and only give him a bit more if needed to help his business run. The real problem is throwing money at problems without much thought. We westerners have done this way too much.
I think the whole concept is rather flawed in that the truth is usually not so clear cut. For example, when he sits down with the editor, it might be true that he would like to have sex with her, but it is also true that he doesn't want to piss her off by being rude. So which truth wins? I think the human mind should be given a break here: we are not all of our thoughts. The mind should be allowed to think most of what it wants to think, but we are only those thoughts that we decide to act upon.
Emacs now has multi-tty in CVS HEAD
The journalists you describe are just following the golden rule; make something people want.
31. My first startup was at 22 though.
I didn't mean to complain about the presentation or judge their service. On the contrary, it was interesting to get a peek at it.

One good reason to date online could be that you don't like to go to bars to meet women. Perhaps it's the setting there, or the kind of people it selects, or the N clearly smaller than on the net.
Perhaps this forces them to tell the world more themselves.
I guess that's true in most industries - women had to work much harder than men just to get their foot in the door, but eventually perceptions change - when there are enough women there to change the (mostly unconscious, I think) perception.
I think that there's a good chance for a change here. I know very few female hackers, but they tend to be really good - I guess it takes being way above average to be able to penetrate a group that's predominantly the other gender/race/views/whatever. However, if you do have the ability, and the tenacity to survive in such hostile environment, you probably have a better-than-average chance of success.
Those all are current trends, not future
I second IShowU. Just do a fe test runs before really recording it. Check your audio levels and watch your final output size.
Apple Applies Pricing Pressure
An analysis of why the Apple Event helped improve the dominance of Apple's iPod and iPhone.
Creating Powerful PowerPoint Presentations
I'm 23!