skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> more by clever quips than by

I dislike superficial things such as that. The whole smooth talking and celebrity thing is not for me. But in all fairness, the president that is the most like that is Barrack Obama.

One thing that was good about Bush was that he was not very charismatic. This allowed people to judge him by his actions (and no cult of celebrity existed around him).

The cult of personality that you build around a lot of politicians (esp. Obama) will be bad for you in the long run.

> and there was that Contra thingie that he outright lied about

Here is a quote from WP:

> While President Ronald Reagan was a supporter of the Contra cause,[4] there has not been any evidence uncovered showing that he authorized this plan.

I would not be surprised if he did not know what was happening. The CIA did a lot of things that would fall into a “morally grey area” during the cold war. A lot of these things needed to be done.

> Carter wasn't good in office, but after leaving he did incredible things.

Admittedly he did better than Al Gore, but what did he really accomplish? His habitat for Humanity project is for me stupid.

Why would you get foreign volunteers to build a house in a country with high unemployment? The economic effects was not thought through well – it would disadvantage labourers in the country.
As far as we're concerned, they've failed an IQ test. ;)
Hm. The most I've gone is 2-3 months, unless you'll accept a 12 oz Coke every few days as "clean", in which case I've done just about 6 months, once, in 2001.
is there some reason to not use capital letters? some goofy pretension, or a broken keyboard? written on an iphone? hard to read.
>but really people are just using 2, Facebook and Twitter, making Friendfeed unnecessary.

Make that one, since Twitter has only 5-6 million users (about 4 million of whom seem to be "internet marketing" consultants)

I think you're right about people just using Facebook for everything, making Friendfeed unnecessary. In my opinion the same will happen with Twitter - if microblogging hits mainstream it will be on FB's Twitter-like functionality rather than Twitter itself.
Choose Your Own Best Gov-Sunshine App
Of course the YC connections were the first things on my mind. I don't think you can equate them to hard cash. It's just that the cash would have given me the chance to quit consulting and go 100% on my idea. But it's not the end of the world.
Now if we could only see how many skittles they sold because of this?
He explained that the problem was not just one of lifting regulations, but that under the Bush administration and Clinton before him, the SEC and the Federal Reserve did not regulate. Like, whatsoever. When combined with the rise of enormous cash bonuses for executive in the last decade, the incentive for management was to knowingly tank their companies by creating enormous short term profits writing bad loans. That is what he means by fraud: they knew.

Apparently I read too much into your comment, but I thought he was in-depth and informative. The interviewer kept making him explain and justify 'fraud' and other such terms because they're revelation.

If you search on William Black, he has more technical explanations elsewhere.
Can we email them for some kind of feedback about the application?
Rejected as well. No biggie.
We're officially on this list but will move to SF regardless!

PG: can we _still_hang_out_ with you guys on meetup nights. I'm serious.
Congratulations. We got a No answer.
Good luck to you and your team. I personally would be interested in learning more about your application...may be at a later date when you are done with the process and have some time :-)
Yes. I wouldn't want to post all my flickr photos on twitter. I would like to have my twitter followers on FF, and basicly all the twitter web functionality
Of course you can give it a shot. I bet they will be pretty busy, and won't be able to give you a very substantial answer, though.
I didn't want to post here, but alas, I am.

I wish they would have included some feedback.
The city’s health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, has enumerated the results. If the food industry follows the city’s wishes, the health department’s Web site announces, “that action will lower health care costs...

Hidden in all of the nonsense is the scary grain of truth. As healthcare becomes more socialized and less free market oriented, the government will have ever greater incentives to force whatever they think is healthy (at the time) on you in order to save a buck.

Its one thing for the government to warn you that transfats are unhealthy (even by forcing manufacturers to label products as such). Its quite another thing to decide that since they are paying for all or part of your healthcare, you no longer have the right to eat transfats and increase their costs.
I've said this before but I think they also suffer from a branding and design/usability issue. I think FriendFeed is a great tool, there's obviously a lot of smart engineering driving it, packs a lot of utility for marketers/writers/research (strong rev channel), but I think it needs to strengthen it's design aesthetics to compete with the now-consumer web. Their design and presentation just doesn't justify the code; the bar has been raised.
http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

Maybe worth a shot regardless, but from talking to other people I know applied and also rejected in the past few minutes (including myself), we seem to pretty much all fall under that "good but pushed out by the best" category.
Really sux to be rejected. But now I'm more motivated than ever to work on my produt to prove that they made a mistake.
Perl 5 pays the bills :)

Actually, I don't have a problem with Perl 5/Catalyst http://www.catalystframework.org/ for a Startup, as long as you have several people quite good at it. If you know what you're doing, the main problem is finding good startupish Perl devs.

I confess that I don't understand your example. I'm not breaking encapsulation, I'm just verifying that a variable is defined (avoids 'variable not defined, can't call can' error), that it is an object with the method of interest (avoids 'no such method' error), etc.

In other words - I am doing a type check that its a valid object of the class I want with a non-null value on a field that should never be null. Happens all the time. This is more easily defined once in the class in a more reasonable object system. But Perl 5 without Moose has no such thing.

Which would seem to parallel the article. I could just assume that $object->foo will work, but that doesn't work out too well as code grows, because if I want my code to work or at least to easily be fixed, I have to check sanity everywhere possible.
Ah well, got rejected.
Don't sweat the rejection. It's probably very difficult to get accepted to ycombinator. The odds are probably better winning a royal flush or x... than getting accepted to ycombinator. Cudos for the three strikes law....
Would the feedback really matter much?

What really matters is your determination and team. A few hundred words hardly puts them in a position to provide you valuable feedback on those factors.
while i say this is the last time, i'll apply again and make a much more serious effort. when's the next cycle, winter? i'll be ready.
That's pretty nasty, I just know I'll forget to cancel after a whole 6 months have passed and I've amassed 50GB of files I don't want to prune. Nice move!
Thanks for the tip on Mount Oberon. We should provide some way to tweak the geodata. The summits in the US seem to generally be right on peak, but they look a little more off in AU. We got our waypoint data from geonames.org - and it seems to be off there too - http://www.geonames.org/maps/google_-39.067_146.35.html
Don't despair if Y Combinator said no. Rejection reveals your true motivation. The key? Wanting to go on.
Yep! Rejected!

We got our beta up and running this weekend, and we're fixing up bugs so we can expand and planning our commercial launch, so it's not the worst thing in the world. Better to get rejected at 18 when you've never done anything web-related before than to get rejected for the same circumstances at an older age.

Hopefully I'll see all of you posting about your launches on HN! I'm certain I'll be posting in a month or so and I'd love to see everybody do the same.
I would like to know the weakest part of our application. So if it's the founders' experience we can work to improve upon that.
I wonder if all the rejection e-mails had the same text.

Mine started with "We're sorry" and ended with "Y Combinator Staff" and has the following MD5: f459a7d636ac85cdcd680b135bcfc521

Edit: easy multi-line md5 here: http://www.webhost.org/widgets/md5encrypter
It's a good idea but it seems to suffer from the chicken and egg problem that pg has talked about in the context of dating sites: ". . . no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users, which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem."

In this case the chicken and egg problem is persuading legitimate companies that you have an audience for their legitmate job postings and providing protections against external recruiters gaming the system. It's not a trivial challenge.
Haha - if they say it isn't the founders' experience you won't work on improving it?
Rejected for the first time here but already looking forward to next Winter for another opportunity.
As posted above:

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

Condolences to all who have to start the start-up without YC help. It can be done; best wishes.
Sure, other things matter more, but getting feedback certainly wouldn't hurt. Especially feedback coming from YC, because I respect their opinion and tend to think they know what they are talking about.

And, obviously, if I got feedback, I could always ignore it and be in the same position as I am now. I'd rather have more information than less.
I didn't apply, but I'd love to hear about the ideas behind your projects that got rejected.
this is awesome, great post!
There's probably too many rejections to give any feedback. I mean if there were 10,000 to 20,000 groups that applied it would be impossible to send a reason in the email to each group. Besides it all comes down to a numerical rating (sauce for the goose). Kudos to the bird with a golden egg.
yes that's exactly what I meant
Anyone here use boxee and if you do what device/set-up are you using it through?

Apple TV,
Mac Mini connected to TV or a
Desktop PC connected to TV

Something else?
Wish we had launched our beta BEFORE the application.

Good luck to all of you. I think they mean well when they say they make lots of mistakes.
Why is age such a bad thing :) I'm 20 and we also got rejected, but one of us happens to be in her 50s and doesn't consider this the worst thing in the world (or even, the worst thing to happen to our startup).
I also signed up for friend feed (and go check it out every now and then), and it's non-support for openid logins is still a show stopper for me.
I hope you enjoy your move to the Bay area. It's delightful.

And, if you want to get to know some people in the Hacker community, http://HackersandFounders.com gets together every couple of weeks. Let me know you're coming, and I'll buy you a beer. :)
How about getting a friend or family member to set up a new account in their own name and let you use it. In return you could buy them a cup of coffee or something.
People do use 30 plus services. It's just that there are usually Facebook applications that can show that activity on Facebook.
A rejection doesn't mean there was anything wrong with your application / start-up / you personally at all.

All it means is that there were other start-ups that caught their attention more.

You have to remember that they look at this as a business process, and a huge part of that process is "can we make money off of this as well"; it's tough to ascertain that over a video.

Keep on trucking, and I'm sure you'll do fine. It's 90% perspiration anyways.
Yep, same MD5 here.
I think two years ago, the last they posted their numbers, there were 421 applications. This year, I'm just guessing, but likely somewhere between 2 to 4 times that.

They are no longer posting their numbers, so don't ask.

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9066
It's my working folder for all important material and to do that, I needed the extra space. Should try the symlink stuff. That's neat
Safety Tips For Walkers and Joggers
And, just like Obama, he felt that getting rid of all the nuclear weapons in the world would be a good thing.

See http://mediamatters.org/items/200812080009
All valid points, but really has nothing to do with what I said ;)

I was just hoping they could provide feedback, since I assume they make a conscientious decision about each application.
Ycombinator has been known to make mistakes from time to time. Especially youos.
http://www.nplusonemag.com/ Hipster's New Yorker. Less prolific, but makes up with more pretension.

American politics: http://nplusonemag.com/dev/test/drupal-test/obama

Global politics: http://nplusonemag.com/dev/test/drupal-test/?q=defending-dic...

Caustic film reviews: http://www.nplusonemag.com/dark-knight
> The true "results" would be sales data.

I would suspect the sales bump from the traffic increase wouldn't be enough to show up as significant on the Skittles' radar. However, I personally bought 4 packs of skittles last month. Which is 3+ more than usual.

I think what's interesting about this is that Skittles has next to no traffic(40k a month for a year), so they said "let's roll the dice", and suddenly they got half a million visitors. I like that kind of thinking.
Reagan lowered taxes, realized he lowered them too far, then raised them to get revenues back up. Ended up at a much smaller cut than he initially got through. Can't find a best link, but google 'Deficit Reduction Act reagan' and you'll get lots of hits.

But that was a different, more responsible era than the last administration.
thanks for your feedback, what is your screen resolution+browser?(you shouldn't have to scroll down) there are existing players in this space(supercook.com/recipematcher.com) My main motivation to create rp was my frustration with these services. I am experimenting with a lot of ideas for monetization. I am not sure it is legal to display the full recipe on the site. The way the search works is that it sorts by the number of matching ingredients and then by the number of ingredients in the recipe. I find that adding ingredients to exclude helps narrow down the recipes to things I can mostly make. You can also try out the account which lets you limit the max # of ingredients in the search results.
Friendfeed is certainly different from Twitter, Paul - which is why posting Friendfeed comments to Twitter is a bad idea that shows people don't "get" Twitter. See
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550118

That said, Friendfeed is a lot more like Facebook. And in many ways, Facebook has evolved to become like Friendfeed. The social media aggregation and conversation features have a lot in common.
cool.. I'll definitely attend HackersandFounders meetup when I get there!
Speaking from experience, this article is spot-on about it's suggestions. Facebook really does need a tutorial and easy "paranoid" checkbox at registration to simplify privacy settings.
Hack Your Speaking Skills
I think the key thing that will help clarify the point of FriendFeed will be the search and filters. It would be nice to see Yelp reviews only from a list of people you trust with them, or to be able to see who recently went to a concert by checking blog titles, twitter statuses, etc.
I think it would be harder to stop the near infinite loops / long running calls than it would be to make it secure in terms of file access and user escalation.
Thanks. Haven't read it all yet, but looks good so far.
Excuse me, I'm still young and arrogant and want to be rich and famous before I'm 25. Perhaps that's not the best mindset to approach this from.
So you're letting $10,000 hold you back from your dream? For real?
Post your submission on HN. We'd love to tear it apart :)
Actually farming is harder than hunting: it's just that people/acre is much higher for farmers than hunters, and farmers, being tied to the land, are more easily governed, supporting expansionist governments which drive the hunter-gatherers out. But I agree: that was the turning point.
:)

I guess that depends on what you're doing. For me? Not so much as being rich and famous as it is about paying the bills while helping solve problems people have.

Also, you're making me feel older than I should. Please get off my lawn ;)
me too, i would like to make something for posterous
And here I thought they were all just incredibly stupid.

But this is worse, they've ejected rational thought entirely from the policy-making process.

We. Are. Doomed.
Feedback wouldn't necessarily be very useful. The feedback might be a meaningless number such as '42' in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy Deep Thought (which doesn't really explain the result of the question).
Same here. We have a team of 20-year olds an one 52 year-old. The grandpa of us bunch didn't see the same excitement in this opportunity as the young'uns did. Rejection here as well...would have been a heck of a summer in San Francisco, instead it will have to be an awesome 4 months in Bloomington, IN, home of Indiana University!
AP's headlines and first sentences are probably their most valuable product.
A really nice read. But, I really have no experience on public speaking at all. But, I am sure that this is one of the skills that every programmer needs.

Only programmer who can express his idea properly can be considered as good programmer.
A few notes on Dashler:

1) After you add the bookmarklet, open it on any webpage.
2) Highlight text, and it fills it in.
3) Click the window button the right of an menu item to open it in a floaty window
4) Go to the Dashler menu, and you can create your own "Live Bookmarks" based on the page you are at.
5) I'm taking it down at the end of the night.
I cringe to think what the developers at my work would do with threads in the Flash VM. I'd just as soon keep a single-threaded model.
Ask HN: What are Wall Street programmers up to?
I'm presently employed as a programmer analyst at a Wall Street bank. Probably the "best" one--take the quotes as you will.

My question is this; does anyone have anything to share in terms of experiences working through the recession as a computer scientist, software developer, programmer, etc. on Wall Street? For those who are seeking to leave, or who have recently done so (or even not so recently), what kinds of challenges did you face transitioning to a technology corporation, startup, or other line of work? Did coming out of financial services have any benefits? Or have you chosen to stay in financial technology, either at your original employer or at a new one? Why?

I know I want out in some way, but I'm curious what everyone else who either works or worked on Wall Street as a hacker is up to right now. I sort of ended up here by not properly evaluating all the possibilities, so I'm eager to see where there is to go from here.
And with Android, you are still allowed to muck around under the hood, because it's open source. That counts for a lot in the long run.
i got rejected too :)

If someone wants to be a technical partner with me just email me digizal08@gmail.com its a e-commerce company that will make money off the bat.

Plus I at least know a few VCs if I were really serious about funding, I just need a technical co-founder which is why im guessing I got a flat out rejection.
Hey, sixth time is the charm, right?
At which case, I could ignore the feedback.

I don't see any room for argument here: the lack of feedback is a loss of information.
im looking for a technical co-founder,. i think i have the funding bit figured out if i found a technical co founder. at least i know a bit of people wit moola
You left your sql queries for the world to see and this one is a tad bit slow:

SELECT count(DISTINCT domain.id) FROM domain, action
WHERE action.domain_id = domain.id
AND action.user_id IS NULL
AND domain.categories like ' %reference% '
I've been holding off for a few months, waiting for other Android devices to come out. The way I see it, Apple just has the iPhone. Android can run on anything else.
By the way, I should admit that I created this alternate account (with deliberate symbolism if you catch it) just to post this--banks are notoriously image-conscious employers at times, and I've heard some nasty stories about what happens to people who don't maintain their anonymity.
20? You're old, man. You're like leather jackets and top hats. You've seen the 80s. It's like wack.

I'm one of those annoying disciples who thinks that being rich and famous is the totally coolest part of America, and I bug everybody else trying to be it. Either 7 years from now I'll grow up, or 2 years from now I'll totally be one of those hip Hollywood cats.
Our 3 person startup's disappointment at YC rejection is strongly correlated with age. The ancient one in our group (ha) is disappointed but thinks the challenges we've faced to even get started were more problematic than what we're going to miss out on, while I'm sad we're missing out on the connections, and the youngest seems to be most disappointed over everything YC could have given us. It's our collective first rejection, may there be many more until we just bootstrap and get this startup going anyway! :D
Not much. For unicellular organisms, size of genome correlates relatively well with time to divide (which, if you only consist of one cell, is the same as reproducing). This is one of the reasons that bacteria and virii have such compact genomes.

Once you get past the single-celled stage, though, the correlation essentially disappears. Reproduction of a multicellular organism is a highly coordinated team effort involving multiple cells/tissues. For these organisms, "intergenic" DNA will correlate more closely with complexity of regulation (but not close enough to be horribly interesting).
I'm a big fan of toastmasters (it gets mentioned towards the bottom). First they get you to deal with nervousness. Then they train you. It's amazingly painless. All with an organization that very much resembles open-source, UGC, etc.
I loved the YC process. They asked the right questions on their application form - which helped us a lot in getting a clearer idea of the venture. The prospect of an interview also pushed us to develop a demo quicker than we would have (which we just finished - didn't submit before the deadline).

So thanks to the YC process itself, we NOW have a presentation deck ready and a demo and can charge full steam ahead regardless. YC for us would have been a nice-to-have, not essential. We have a fairly interesting idea and a background which included two of us having founded startups in the recent past (one of them being www.alertle.com - check it out for UI design), being speakers of Ruby on Rails and AJAX at conferences, and work experience at other startups and places like Merrill Lynch. And of course, a CS background. We didn't even get an interview.

I'm assuming the calibre of teams accepted would have been pretty extraordinary this year. Good luck to all! :)
Of course not! I'm still going to do my thing! I'm just going to have to continue consulting to pay the bills. That's all I'm saying. The money would have let me work full-time on my startup.
white macbook to TV
Age is seriously but a number. Who cares if your 18 or 52. In fact having a dynamic team with experience people and young people is great. Our company is run by a guy that is in his late 30s and the co founder is in his early 30s and I can honestly say that a young guy couldnt do half the stuff these guys can...

Sometimes age is totally a good thing :) And btw im 24 and on my second startup so I beat you 18 year old shits.