skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple thoughts:

* Getting demotivated by statistics is the worst possible use of time and energy. It means nothing that the average reader of this comment has various qualities and abilities that, on average, are about average for a reader of this comment. Every reader is an individual, not an average. Start-ups, like people, and marriages, are so different that you just can't generalize across them in very illuminating ways. This is the same as saying there are many subtypes, and at best you could draw comparisons or generalizations within a subtype. Which is the same as saying if you scope your generalizations small enough and choose your points of comparison wisely, you have a chance of capturing a meaningful pattern that might actually tell you something about an individual specimen. Or you might just be over-analyzing.

* It's possible to create causality and attribute events to your actions, even retroactively -- it's called taking responsibility. You can even take responsibility for things you didn't know about, like an executive or official who resigns over misconduct below him. There is very little we have direct control over -- the positions of our limbs, for example, but only when we are paying attention to them -- but we are expected to exercise whatever indirect control we have. People in high positions of power and responsibility have very indirect control -- hiring the right people, putting policies and checks in place -- but they must accept this responsibility and milk it for all it's worth. When you take responsibility for something, you choose to account for (recognize, pay attention to) the causality between you and that thing. We exist in a vast interconnected web of causality, so it's all what you choose to focus on.

This isn't about disposition vs. circumstances, either. Your disposition and circumstances are both different from other people's, as are your goals, motivations, and strategies. It's about how much weight you should give a statistic about other people when trying to determine something about yourself. As you learn more about yourself and the world, and especially if you pursue areas where you are strong, statistics become meaningless.
The coolest thing about this is the getting started narration. I love Greek mythology!
Edwin Mellen Press Demonstrates How Not To Respond To Criticism
U.S. Navy Funding Development Of Giant Jellyfish Robot
Ask PG: Will HN ever get a search (& memory) friendly url structure?
I think personally, the main advantage of this would be that HN urls that I have saved or that I share with others are immediately clear as to what their content is. What do you guys think?
For the lulz I use neercs. It's the same as screen and tmux, except you get thumbnails of your panes in some kind of taskbar; and most importantly, you can switch between panes with a cube ascii animation, compiz style.

http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/neercs
I use Google to find yahoo answers.
Facebook Users At Univ. Michigan Supported Gay Rights Most In Country This Week
why not find a technical co-founder? have you tried? convincing a technical person to go-in with you will be much simpler than convincing anyone at YC to accept you.
I'm merely balancing out the unduly optimistic powerpoint slides.
Recently single, I took the bait.

Funny story, though: everyone above the fold (eight women) is someone I've either dated or wanted to. The first one? My best friend.

I am lucky my screen isn't any bigger though, because the next person on the list is my sister.
I realize this is purely anecdotal, but my uncle worked for the USPS as a mail carrier in a major East Coast city for decades and saw people fired for really small violations. In one case, a guy with many years of seniority was fired because he stole some spam-mail coupons that a company had mailed to a non-existent address.

I'm not saying the USPS is a model of efficiency and I'm sure there are regional variations on strictness and oversight, but it's pretty likely that any USPS who loses (or "loses") a greater-than-average number of packages is risking their job.

I don't doubt that there are people who'd object to a package marked "ATHIEST" but how many USPS employees would be so offended they'd risk their jobs?

USPS workers often work there for decades and a lot of USPS employees have an eye towards staying there until retirement. They also get good health benefits, a nice government pension, and you don't need a higher education diploma to get hired by the USPS in the first place. A USPS employee is unlikely to have a lot of comparable job opportunities after spending years with the USPS, so I have a hard time believing so many of them would be like, "ATHIEST? Screw this!" and simply punt a package they disliked off of a bridge.
Government Fights for Use of Spy Tool That Spoofs Cell Towers
Legend. It's all that was needed.
Just 18 months ago, the EU said that Cypriot banks were healthy and had passed EU-wide bank stress tests.

http://www.cyprus-mail.com/cyprus/cyprus-banks-pass-eu-stres...

Many think the bank stress tests are a joke and only exist to raise investor confidence. If true, then those people so quick to criticise Cyprus, might soon find themselves sharing the same fate.
The point of these types of stories is that the right mental state is a prerequisite for success--but not a guarantee.

Yes, it's true that most people who want to be President, won't make it. But it's also true that every single person who thinks it is impossible to become President won't make it either.
It's a plain text file that is routinely open in my text editor. (My browser is open all day in screen 1, and the text editor is open all day in screen 2.)
Either that or it's a brilliant and ironic illustration of how fucking inconvenient touch screens are to type on.
Can you expand on your experience with both editors?
> Isn't the answer to that question always going to be that you were offered what you were offered because that was the least amount they thought you might accept?

That would be an answer, albeit a very vacuous one.

From a game-theoretic perspective, you want the most they are willing to pay and they want the least you are willing to accept. But those two values delineate a range, sometimes a pretty big one, and what's really interesting here is where the final number falls in that range.

In real life, the game of negotiation does not have perfect information, which means you can fool the opposing party as to what the endpoints of that range are. That's the main way of pushing the final landing point closer to where you want it.

So there's a lot more to questions like this than these vacuous answers. It's a psychological game, and if their offer was actually the minimum you were willing to accept, you have to ask what else you could have done, either now or in the past, to set yourself up in a position where you could have "tricked" them into paying more than you were willing to accept.
> "obnoxiously negative"..."as if we could have built anything like LivingSocial"

That's certainly implying that the negative posts are both un-constructive and omitting important & obvious context. That sounds a lot like "dumber" to me.
Yes, this is what I was thinking. Obviously you don't have to know everything, but having at least a basic background seems valuable. Even knowing how to code I find it's hard enough to find good developers, especially freelance.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, when I find a minor bug in my app, I can fix it myself and push an update immediately. If I relied on freelance developers, well, crap, it's Good Friday. So very least I'm waiting a few days. And then maybe my developer isn't available to drop everything and work on my project on Monday (or Tuesday)... One of the primary advantages of startups is their ability to react and adapt quickly; running a technical startup alone, without a technical background, appears to give up some of that advantage.
really.. the telegraph? Sparkzilla how come? isn't there a better resource?
Is there a way I can e-mail you? Don't see your contact info on your blog or HN profile.
eos12i body: $675 on amazon [1]

Tamron 17-50 lens: $500 on amazon [2]

total: ~$1100

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Canon-T2i-Processor-3-0-inch-18-55mm/d...

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Tamron-17-50mm-Aspherical-Digital-Came...
How much advantage does that really provide?

If I share an HN link among my Facebook friends, as I sometimes do, a snippet of the discussion is shown, and that (besides my tagline to the submitted link) lets people know what to expect. If I share a link in an email, I generally introduce it to the recipients. What is the use case for changing the link structure of Hacker News? I'm not sure that "immediately clear" is guaranteed by all of the user-submitted titles here, for example.
> Assuming that online dating works magically well for gay/lesbian folks but doesn't for straight people seems like a really large leap to make and also seems really untrue from what I've heard

Of course it isn't perfect for all of them, but it's a much less dysfunctional market than the straight one. Which means there's less of a business model in catering to gays and lesbians there (doubly true given that they're rare.)

And yes, in theory, straight people can date bi people, but again, by not perfectly serving that bi market you cut off a tiny fraction of your clientele. Screw up the straight market and your site is doomed. Which should he focus on?

> What I did say was that the way the site felt it felt like it was designed with a pretty narrow frame of how dating worked

Yes, that's called "targeting a particular market."
I was in the process of doing that then some things out of my control came up and he left the country
If I had co-founded LivingSocial, I would not have considered the last n years of my life wasted, nor do I believe the majority of contributors here would either.
60% of people drop out[0] - before you knew this, you had an 60% chance of dropping out. Now you know the statistics, you can go about exerting effort to end up in the 40% that don't drop out. And that number - 60% to 40% - tells you a little bit about how much effort you're going to need to put in (not much).

90% of startups fail[1] - now you know that, you want to put yourself in the 10% that don't. 90% to 10% is a bigger gap to jump than 60 to 40, so it's going to be a lot harder.

0,1: not actual statistics
They don't really. It all goes into the same membership pool - the difference is only in branding and possibly some smart defaults. The unique branding for subcultures and subgroups is a conversion-increasing trick, it doesn't mean they're really running a bunch of parallel eHarmony's.
I thought about it today while writing a google doc where I was adding HN links - I believe having this would make all those clearer. Though I understand that adding commentary for all links is a solution there.

Also, this would make it much easier to decipher the links I have sprinkled through various notes in Evernote.
"Creepy: Causing fear or unease"

Now, I understand it causes you fear or unease, probably more unease than fear, but just because it causes you those feelings does not mean it causes others to have those feelings.

If this guy has success getting 7,000 people using the site, and only 1,000 of them are actually using it, he is doing a lot right.

If the site had a stellar brand and it was really clear what it was doing, your creep factor would probably lower significantly.

IMO, he should ignore your opinion and keep building. It looks like he is on to something to me.
I think SJ found it natural to just say "OK" because he thought that the person mailing him knew him enough and was mature enough to just need that permission.
In the developer options on Android theres a setting "show touches", though I'm not sure if that'd show up on an external display or only the device...
20 years, 2 kids.
| Just look up the typical lifespan of fiat currency

Enlighten us.
I don't know. They're trying to create a legal contract that binds them and stays valid as long as the duration of the patent. I'd be pretty careful about putting every patent available under that agreement until I was sure that it couldn't be used against me in an unintended way.
I met Aaron when I was on a panel with him at Bootstrap Maryland, before Living Social was big. He was a class act then, and he obviously still is.

Living Social -- more than any other company in the last 5 years -- showed that the DC area startup community is alive and well and can play with the big boys in the consumer internet space. LS almost single-handedly overcame the region's inferiority complex in this regard. I hope Aaron is sufficiently proud of the role he played there.
I coach clients to pay not just what it will take to hire talent, but also what it will take to retain talent. This is a key difference particularly when talking about hiring unemployed candidates that may be inclined to accept less than market rate, or when considering candidates that are obviously underpaid by a significant amount. Market rate isn't an exact science but knowing what competitors offer candidates (generally speaking) is useful information that recruiters could potentially provide.
Visualizers (seemingly aka document cameras) have been the tool used in any presentations of this type that I've seen. Portable versions appear to exist.
It's highly geographical. Cities with a dating "scene" are far friendlier towards online dating than otherwise.

From your past posts it looks like you're NYC-based. NYC is by far (IMO) the best place to set up an online dating shop, since this city is by a very long shot the most accepting of online dating in the US.

Disclaimer: I work for a NYC-area online dating shop.

In many other cities, and in many subcultures and scenes, online dating is still very much stigmatized. I can't help but think that author would've gotten a very different perspective if he didn't choose to interview people at a bar in the SF Marina of all places (read: notorious area for meathead jocks and their female counterparts).
I'm more disturbed by the fascination that we as a species have with gadgets. I think that was a totally-chill-but-perhaps-not-especially-saintly thing for Steve to do.

But... what... show iPad to dying friend?
While not related to the original question, how does YC work for non US residents and Visa related issues? Does it accept/sponsor a few outside the US startups? IS it interested in doing so?
Any plans to support other storage backends? Postgresql and Riak comes in my mind.
Ah yes, forgot about that.
The lottery is controlled purely by the odds, the outcome is stochastic.

Playing my own devil's advocate: C3P0 states the odds for successfully navigating an asteroid belt, but Han doesn't want the odds, mainly because C3P0 hasn't stated the odds for Han Solo succesfully navigating an asteroid belt. Han works best when he doesn't know how often other people fail.
As a long time Heroku user and fan, this is a great thing.

Although I find the normal dynos to be really sufficient for my own work, I can imagine that having twice the power of a normal dyno would be a huge asset for many users, particularly those users who need to do memory intensive tasks (queue processors come to mind).

This is a really huge win for all Heroku users, and I'm looking forward to their continued innovation :)

Great job, guys!
I have to disagree that colleges are the best place to start, from your blog. We actually started all of this at Stanford, talking directly to fraternity and sorority presidents. They all sounded excited when we said we'd taken them out for drinks to get their thoughts, but when it came time to pull the trigger and sign up, they wouldn't do it.

Why? Because the Greeks have it perfectly. They're basically paying fees for students to put together their social life for them. So actually, I just caught myself here: college students might be a good starting point, but Greeks are the absolute worst starting point. They don't need what we're building. And most college students I think would be reluctant to sign up anyway, they have their classes and student clubs they can join. They have a lot of opportunities.

But the problem becomes very apparent as soon as you move and graduate. You don't know anyone. You can't date people from work because that's shitting where you eat. You avoid talking to girls at the gym for the same reason. You're left with the bar scene, which isn't too bad. It still feels a lot more natural for me to meet someone in a bar than online, even though I've met several girls from OkCupid.

Your point about mutual interest addresses the pain of rejection, and agree with you on that. Let's Date is a great mobile app that addresses this perfectly. I guess Tinder is in the same boat, but neither of those actually worked for me. How many people did you meet from using it? I only met one girl from Let's Date, the rest I assume are fake or ended up deleting the app shortly after downloading it.

How was the checkin experiment you ran?
I did say arguably. And Jedi do make other people operate "better", at least from some of the scant reading I did.
This thinking seems to me fraught with dangerous non sequiturs, or at least unproven assumptions. You mention one: on what basis can we assume that the drug effect and the placebo effect are independent? We don't understand the placebo effect. We should make as few assumptions about it as possible.

Here is another. If the drug is approved, it won't be given only to the "subgroup which is less sensitive to placebos" on which it was tested. It will be given to the general population. On what basis can you assume that since the drug beats placebo on the subgroup, it must also beat placebo on the general population?

It seems weird to allow a random sample to be taken from a population that is not the population you're trying to make claims about. Are there precedents for this in other fields?
I'm going to check this out. Thanks.
> But I was much healthier initially than most other patients, because I had different medical history.

That just seems like you need better statistics. More sophisticated cancer-prognosis models typically do take initial health and medical histories into consideration.
I should probably fix that - sent an email your way.
I have heard quite a few cases of people setting up profiles on dating sites to "prank" or "actively slander" a person. Trying to get stuff like this resolved is difficult.
... and welcome to Hacker News, ladies and gentlemen.
Between this article and the beekeeping one, HN isn't making a good showing on the day for scientific literacy.
It's not nearly as simple as that. That might work for a freelancer, but it's not so easy if you're getting a regular job. Even if you could prove you saved/added $X in your last job (how?), most companies will not pay much above what they're paying employees in a similar position.
Run 1992’s hottest games on the Raspberry Pi with the rpix86 emulator
Crushed Dreams and College Decisions
Micro-architecture of bismuth crystals
IT Team, Get Used to Your New Reality
Not to disagree with your sentiment entirely, but my wife, who's career was spent as a laboratory animal vet, is frothing at the mouth over your comment.

Studies using mice are WAY more controlled than you would expect. The mice are custom bred, genetically modified, and have specifically tuned immune systems. They cost tens of thousands of dollars each (this is not a joke). Since mice reproduce so quickly (and is so profitable), these things can be basically custom ordered to exactly your specifications - with statistically insignificant genetic differences between each one. They come with paperwork showing their exact genetic details, they are RFID tagged in some cases, and they are tested repeatedly before being used in studies - genetically and otherwise.

Regarding environment, these animals are kept in extremely controlled conditions. Forced airflow is repeatedly filtered and tested; the water comes from highly filtered sources into each cage. Animal food and bedding is irradiated to kill any microbes, and is generally highly regulated. Each animal room contains multiple "sentinel" animals, which are exposed to the same environment as the test subjects (and controls) but are tested to make sure that environmental factors don't impact the study.

Additionally, each mouse cage (about the size of a shoebox) holds 5 adult mice; racks of these cages connected to water/air contain ~144 cages. A study with only 6 mice is highly unlikely (although not impossible). With such a large number of animals per square foot, and such a high concentration of grad students, studies are repeated ad nauseam - more so than is ever publicized (mistakes do get made).

Again, not to say that your view of this little "experiment" with tape is invalid, but animal studies (especially mice) are way more controlled than you could ever imagine.
Your proposed solution seems really awful. Don't you know that such a power structure (see consumerium wiki about sysop power structure) will inevitably be abused. Also the recent Pycon incident should put some light on the usefulness of a "flag as offensive" button.

Your solution is Hard Security when Soft Security is way enough (refer to meatball wiki for more on these notions).

Not only that but this problem has already been solved a few times, a simple and effective but not perfect solution: a man cannot message a woman until explicitly allowed by the woman. a man can notify a woman her profile caught his interest with a poke-like of which he gets a limited amount per day. There goes the message overload for women issue.

Now remove the heterosexism component and make it so no one can message anyone until explicitly allowed by the recipient and not only you got the message overload issue under control but you get an incentive for people to put some care into writing their profile and reading other's.

There's probably a better way, but this one is IMHO at least an order of magnitude better than your proposition.

The solution is in challenging how we suppose this should work and not in trying to fix those broken assumption by placing additional layers on top of something defective by design.
Wal-Mart doesn't have enough bodies to stock the shelves
From an operations perspective, ZFS is a god-send. Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK BTRFS lacks any significant quanta of improvement over ZFS, merely a "better licensed" non-invented-here mostly duplicated effort with a couple refinements that isn't nearly as well thought-out from the experience of ops folk.

- Online scrubbing rather than fsck, so there is little/no downtime if the filesystem were interrupted, i.e., datacenter power failure. fsck/raid rebuild of large filesystems can mean lengthy outages for users.
- "Always" consistent: Start writing the data of a transaction to unallocated space (or ZIL) and update metadata last.
- Greatly configurable block device layer:
* RAIDZ, RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3, mirror, concat ...
* ZIL (fs journal), L2ARC (cache) can be placed on different media or even combinations of media.
- Send & receive snapshots across the network.
How many companies applied with an idea then said they are not particularly attached to it? I would assume for most people they would rather do that than come off as they have no ideas at all.