skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh..ease up. He's pretty much just repeating their criteria verbatim, which are relevant regardless of what the strata names are. If they're prepared to fund 1,000 companies they think are _really_ likely to make it, I think that implies there's no need for strata. The only way 'close' would make sense is if there were a cap, otherwise I'm sure they'd still accept a not-quite-ready idea they really, really liked.
You do: you can spend $600 for a Mac Mini, or you can give up percentage of your sales.
Honestly, I don't see anyone driving this thing. It doesn't make you look any less silly than a Segway.

If anything, this makes me wish we'd stop throwing money down the drain that is GM.
Depending on you wear your shuffle, the proposed design could be downright embarrassing! (I can imagine a variety of situations where it would look like I'm itchy or compulsive.)
"Imagine if this company had been hosting its service on Amazon EC2 or at Rackspace or on Google AppEngine. Would the FBI seize every one on Amazon's/Rackspace's/Google's data centers? Could you imagine all of Google's services being down for weeks or months because one of its customers is being investigated for maybe violating some contract for a few thousand dollars?"

Wouldn't happen. Google has the corporate muscle to make the government do what they want.
mirror: http://s3.amazonaws.com/01981/index.html
It's run by: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Ben Franklin Technology Development Authority. (http://www.benfranklin.org/about/index.asp)

Which I believe is a government sponsored organization though, I'm not 100% sure -- it isn't clear to me where they get their funding, but I think its from the government.
"The question is, do they benefit from these eyeballs?"

This was essentially the theme in Branding is for Cattle, an interesting book, which examines the idea of getting "known", and what leads people to take the next step where a business actually profits.
That's exactly what happens. The "travel agencies" that give this false information are like scouts, they constantly hunt for poor people who will fall for this. It is common sight at the New Delhi international airport to see workers going abroad in batches. Most of these people have never been out of their villages before. They sit on the floor in groups and are moved through the security procedure by a "manager" like a herd of sheep. They all seem happy and filled with hope.

It's a global scam where the idea is to make money out of slavery and ensuring profit to every person in the chain, from the sheikh to the so called "travel agencies" and take away the right to complain from the only people who may complain.
If your idea is a good one you probably don't need the "seed" program anyways.

I think it's really useful to go through the selection process. Lots to be learned even if you are not selected but keep the focus on your fine tuning your idea. The only thing that really matters is what your ultimate customers think not what they think at YCombinator or TechStars.
I'm not sure if things have gotten worse, or if I've become more aware of things as I get older.

I'd modify your list to be a little more finely grained (although this might be more KSA specific than other Arab countries):

1 - Members of the royal/ruling family/clan/tribe.

2 - Arabs (Sunni)

3 - Arabs (Shi'ite)

4 - White collar expats (westerners and what you point out as educated immigrants)

5 - Blue collar workers (muslim)

6 - Blue collar workers (infidel)

Our family has lived in the middle east (at various times, my father worked for Saudi Aramco and what is now called Honeywell), and the stories seem to be getting worse over time, both in the slacking-off of the natives and the abuse of the menial labor. The money is very lucrative for western white collar workers, but I'd have a hard time collaborating with the abuse.

Part of the problem is that the locals don't feel that they're bound by any contract they sign (and the Arabic language version is the definitive one, in any case). Consequently, foreigners tend to get the dirty end of the stick. The stories of workers getting shafted are quite often the results of this.
Yi sounds like a good alternative to Vi and Emacs: the philosophy of Vi, with the extensibility of Emacs.

The catch? It's written in, and it's extension language is, Haskell (which is why I've never used it.)
However, it's also easy to imagine someone taking a class and discovering he simply wasn't interested in it (or thought it was complete bull), only finishing the class to get the credit. It is silly to judge people by an occasional C amidst A's.
Agreed, I was hoping this article would contain the distribution of divorce rate vs. age, which I found at: http://www.divorcerate.org/

Interestingly enough, the divorce rate is highest for those who get married between the ages of 20-24, 10% higher for women and 27% higher for men than the <20 category.
It's not a question of being able to "afford" dropping out to work on a startup, so much as it's a question of what you're willing to give up to do it.

My parents made less than $30k combined when I entered college in the late 90s. I dropped out after my freshman year, worked as a restaurant cashier and temp for about six months, then managed to land an entry-level media production job at a startup. Since then, I've slowly clawed my way up to a decent development gig at a major systems player in Silicon Valley, all without the benefit of a college degree, or any major financial support other than my own earnings.

Even several years after I first "broke in" to the industry, however, I've had entire years where I made only a few thousand dollars. If you're willing to live in shared housing, eat a lot of cheap stir-fry and soup, and occasionally suck it up and ask a friend or family member for a couple of hundred bucks to make rent that month, you can weather some pretty drastic changes in your income.

Regardless, after a decade or so of working as a developer, I've found that the lack of a college degree matters less and less. Am I less likely to be on the short list of folks to get promoted to upper management? Almost certainly. Does that bother me? Not really. I like writing code, and am happy to continue doing so until something else seems more interesting.
Market for whole-disk encryption Mac software
What is the market for whole-disk encryption software for the Mac? It seems to be cornered by PGP right now but I wonder if there's room for another player (me).

Yes, I can write the whole thing, EFI-pre boot prompt and IOKit driver included. The question is should I?

Thanks, Joel

---
http://linkedin.com/in/joelreymont
Debuggers strike me as having two distinct use cases, which I think is backed up by the discussion here up to this point: There is the trivial case where you are stepping through code to find a relatively simple problem, and there is the case of the horrid, horrid complicated bug in a complex system with lots of things going on at once. (In many cases, this complexity is fundamental; "remove as much as you can" is a good idea but you're still often left with a complex core.)

The first case can be a crutch if you allow it to substitute for understanding, but it can also enable understanding, particularly code you didn't write. (Nothing beats that; not looking at the theoretical design, not reading the docs, nothing.)

The second case is a different thing entirely. Maybe some people are fortunate enough to be working on simple enough problems that there are simple solutions, but despite my best efforts there are certain places that just can't be simplified, and when they have bugs, oh my.

So, what do I do? I use a debugger about once a month. But when I do, it saves me multiple hours per use. If I worked in a more complicated domain, it could lean even more heavily on the debugger's side. (I would characterize my work as modest complexity on the grand scheme of things.)
I totally agree with you.

We were evolved to be rational, but only in the environment that we evolved from. The environment we have now is far from small hunter-gatherer tribes, yet we are still equipped with the same rationale mechanisms. Hence, it's not working out perfectly.

Maybe if we restructure our society to simulate what it once was or at least some parts of it, we can better utilize our rationale mechanisms.
A larger part of the problem is that the prevailing custom in that part of the middle east is that contracts are not binding on the natives. They're binding on the foreigners, but there is nothing you can hold the native to. Furthermore, the Arabic language version of the contract is the prevailing one, and the foreign language version is meaningless, should it end up in court.
>> What do you get if you photocopy a mirror?

> Black?

Are you sure? Why? Can you prove it from first principles? It's an interesting challenge - prove that a well-designed photocopier must give a particular result.

> I don't understand your first bullet point about turing machines. Can you elaborate?

This would be a lot easier if I took considerable time and drew pictures to illustrate. Without, this will be a bit of a slog. I hope it's helpful ...

So. It's possible to construct graphs such that a valid three coloring results in behavior equivalent to actions of a logic gate. For example, suppose your colors are called "0", "1" and "#". Take a triangle and color one vertex "#". Label the other vertices "in" and "out". Now you have a "NOT" gate.

You can feed the output of one gate into the input of another by identifying the vertices. This allows you to build combinatorial circuits.

Now take some instance of any NP problem. (technical terms. A "problem" is a collection of "instances".) A simple example to understand is factoring. Clearly any alleged solution can be checked in polynomial time simply by multiplying the alleged factors and seeing if you get the right answer. Hence the problem is in NP.

So given an instance N - a number to factor - construct a TM to multiply two numbers and check if the answer is N. If it is, output "yes". If not, output "no".

(There are details about what "output" means for a TM. These can be done.)

Now construct the combinatorial circuit that mimics running the TM. Note, it's polynomial in in size because the TM is poynomial in size and runs in polynomial time. (There are details about how that can be done.)

Now we have a graph which, if you color the input vertices with a factorization of N, results in the "Yes" vertex getting the color "1".

Force the color of the "yes" vertex to be "1" and find a coloring. (How to force a given vertex is a simple technical trick.) If you succeed, then the "input" vertices must hold a valid factorization of N.

Thus we have constructed a graph to emulate the TM that multiplies, and run it backwards to make it a factoring machine.

This proves that 3-coloring is "harder" than factoring. However, the construction goes through for any NP problem, and hence 3-coloring is NP-hard. Given that 3-coloring is also itself in NP, that shows that 3-coloring is NP-complete.

Does that answer your question?
Through private investment? Lowering of taxes?

I personally don't think it's great that cities take money from me by force to fund companies I may or may not think are viable. I love what these seed funds are doing, and their is no reason a private one like YC couldn't be created in PA with those restrictions on keeping people there etc. Hell, you could make it an optional tax that citizens volunteer to pay -- just like we do with campaign funding.
"In a coordinated raid today, the FBI seized machines from the three data centers that Suspicious Enterprises, LTD. was using."

Extends with little difficulty to the international case, too. I'm not sure geographic dispersion helps much with this.
I'd rather go be a Somalian pirate or something like that.

I read somewhere that the conditions in Somalia are so bad that becoming a pirate is the most sought after career option for young men. They believe that even European jails would be better than living in Somalia. OTOH if you don't get caught/killed, you live like a king. bunglows, booze women!
Joel Spolsky wrote a post called "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" and the title is true. Especially for those of us that are unfortunate enough to live in countries with strange squigglies that the Internet doesn't quite think belongs there.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
It's pretty good. I think he makes some logical leaps in order to tell a better story.
I think they will be driven out of business by HTML5 after some time. WebKit is already on Android, iPhone and Palm Pre. It's only a matter of time before Blackberry and Nokia succumb too - they need a web browser and they can't afford to create their own. Microsoft is the only one that is questionable here.

So I say if you want to see the future of cross-platofrm mobile development take a look at HTML5 and the WebKit (the latest and greatest is in iPhone OS 3.0) The javascript speed is improving rapidly, CSS animations are built-in and you can store both code and data locally. No PIM access yet, but if that gets solved then that's the end of the road for form-based native apps and maybe even some of the simple games (and until then there is PhoneGap).
...or in speech or gesture recognition. http://www.media.mit.edu/speech/papers/1980/bolt_SIGGRAPH80_...
A new mobile Gmail experience for iPhone and Android
The focus of this article is 180 degrees off from where our focus needs to be on this subject. Cheap energy is the life blood of the world's middle class. The notion of "limits" is extremely aristocratic and will ultimately spell financial disaster to anyone who isn't an aristocrat.
That's really cool, I'd never heard of either of these sites before. Too bad I'm on the east coast or I would definitely apply for this internship.

Now I'm looking for internships closer to home on SnapTalent.
I suppose. But there's a difference between "mathematical potential payoff" and how much I will risk on the flip of a coin. And as far as I can tell, the amount I pay has no effect on the odds or rules. So, three bucks.
Comparing to my bicycle what I'm using daily all year long this is just a fancy overkill. Good luck but the original Segway even had a style unlike this.
They seemed to be about as in sync as any other game of this genre. Your eeepc might be part of the sync issues.
I don't think many people need whole-disk encryption; for the vast majority of situations, encrypted home directories are sufficient (and support for this is provided in OS X).
Completely agree with you modoc, I worked for JUST over minimum wage in a family owned business when I was 17-23 before interviewing for an entry level support position with my current company. I was a run of the mill PC tech who got paid hardly anything at the time (had two kids & wife to support as well) and I never felt I was having a hard time "making it", dare I say, I was happy.

I worked hard, picked up programming, and spent nights/spare time working on a program for our branch office, with the intention that I wanted to move up to corporate and be a full time programmer.

I busted my tail working, stayed motivated, gained experience, and when the app I wrote for our branch made it into the right hands (this was also planned, just had to wait for the timing to be right) they 'apprenticed me' into a .NET position, on the notion that I showed the right character to be a good employee and worked hard. That was several raises ago, and I'm still moving and improving, and getting serious real world experience in the field I want to make a career out of.

I grew up watching my Dad work 10-12 hour days at a company we owned, I was fortunate enough to have parents who always pushed us to achieve anything we wanted (and modest enough to never make us feel like we were anything more than middle class, there was money there, but instead of taking it for our pleasure, my father would reward employees and let it stay as profits for the business).

When I left the nest, I severed all financial ties with them to make it on my own, with my own independence. So I wasn't driving a car paid by them, or using a cell phone paid by them, or any of that.

The reason I got the first PC tech job even though I had a recreational tech history of computers and 5+ years of graphic/web design experience? Because I interviewed well and my former boss saw potential.

The world is full of opportunities for everyone, just look at the examples here. Such a wide range of people with different stories and experiences.

College is great, but I don't regret not going. I learned growing up how to teach myself through reading, research and practice, and I learn things faster that way.
Readable: JS app to make web articles readable.
That's a nice comparison - basically lists the reasons why I started looking for something better after writing 2-3 vim plugins... (it only misses the problem of integrating vim with external commands)

But then I found a really nice piece of software - Yi. It's a vim/emacs type (yes - both!) type editor. It's written and extendable in haskell. The keymap is implemented as a parser on user input, so keymap modules include vim (with modes / simple ex mode), emacs and others. The code is very easy to understand (I actually learnt haskell while patching it for my needs) and includes most standard features - tabs, buffers, editing, some syntax files... even basic ghci shell :)

It's not "ready" yet, but I would say it can be described as a "usable beta". If someone really likes the vim idea of editing with modes and is disappointed by vim's plugin model, then Yi is definitely worth a try.
"How to break the iPhone app store rules and still get your app accepted (every time)".
Try `echo -n ...`
Or, you could get a bicycle.
Podcast with Timothy Fitz(IMVU) on Continuous Deployment
But how in sync is the genre? :-) That's part of my question.

However, it now seems the eeePC is the main factor, as it's straining at some other points in the UI.
Ant inspired Hexapod robot
20% of self-made billionaires parents hated them between the ages of 17 and 23.
A tiny bit on topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9g3b65yi0g
Scribnia hiring for the summer
Scribnia is a web application that enables users to review and discover new bloggers and journalists. Our site is currently in private alpha (http://www.scribnia.com) and we have received seed funding from the Philadelphia accelerator DreamIt Ventures. We are looking to bring on a talented developer for the summer. The programmer will receive $5-8K for the summer, an equity stake in the company, and an opportunity to present to investors at DreamIt's Demo Day. We are looking for top-notch programmers with experience in building and scaling web applications. A full job description is available at http://www.startuply.com/Jobs/Summer_Web_Developer_982_1.aspx.

For those interested, please submit your resume to jackgretz [at] scribnia [dot] com and we will set up a phone interview within the next week. Scribnia is in private alpha but applicants (and others from the HN community) are welcome to submit their email address at Scribnia.com and we will provide an alpha code to grant you access.
Except for the classes in the JDK. That gives you networking, file I/O, string processing, regex, Swing GUIs, JDBC, ZIP compression, some XML processing, among other things.

Even by itself, that is better than most Lisps out there, if not enough to make a Pythonista happy. The problem with this stuff is usually the painful verbosity of Java necessary to use it, but you can wrap away that pain very quickly with Clojure.

I do take the point about needing to fiddle with the classpath for any other Java code you want to use. But for me the Java classpath system holds up better than most other software deployment mechanisms. Usually, you just download a jar file, drop it on your classpath, and it just works. I think jar files are an unappreciated success story of the Java ecosystem. Clojure has functions to easily add jars to the classpath at runtime, which is even better, but I find it does not always work seamlessly for me.
Gmail for iPhone and Android Gets Slicker, Adds Offline Capabilities
Community-funded reporting:

http://spot.us/pages/about
We took our rejection 2 years ago as a wakeup call: If you can't sell yourself to YC, number one thing you need to learn is how to sell, period. Because "how to sell" part will start matter more and more down the road, approaching "how to code" in importance.

If you couldn't sell yourself to YC, you may not sell to your customers either, or other investors, or future employees, etc etc etc

Learn how to sell. Your idea is probably fine - 95% of YC-accepted companies are building tiny incremental improvements to existing products.
From quotes like this

"It’s great if you are the kind who learns by sitting passively on a chair listening to someone."

it's clear you don't understand what happens within YC.

We don't have classes where people sit and listen to
us talk about stuff that they could, if they were
sufficiently diligent, find by searching in Google.
Nearly all interactions we have with startups are
about their specific situation: things like
what features to build first, when to launch, what
to say on the frontpage, how to deal with specific
investors they're talking to, etc.
That's not that surprising, if you take into consideration that the percentage is still higher than the average in the population. It's only interesting if you assume that going to college is a must for any success in life, but that position is so ridiculous that you don't need any real data to refute it.
Thanks for the response. I'll probably be emailing you my resume and a few questions later this evening once I get my resume cleaned up a little.

And thanks for offering to answer any questions I have. I find it a huge complement to know that I have direct access to a company's founders. One of the reasons I just signed up for SnapTalent, a company I have never heard of before, is getting a response from sharpshoot a few minutes after I asked a question.

I have played around on your site a little bit after hearing about it on HN yesterday, but I really wouldn't say I have much of a relationship with your site after visiting it a few times. So one of my first experiences with JamLegend is finding out that you are willing to answer any questions I have, and that created a lot of good will toward your company.
Hey there - email me Sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com if you have any company requests. We want to help you get hired!
Smellr: It's like Flickr, but for your nose
Right now I wish I knew of a Pickaxe for Python.

Also, I want a MacRuby book.

On a slightly related note, how does the Kindle do with programming books? I am thinking about picking one up to use primarily as a reference screen.
whenever you have the choice between worrying about what will happen, applying to a program, preparing a presentation, or making progress on your product… always choose the latter. Keep coding. Ignore the distractions. You’ll end up ahead.

You've got to eat somehow. Not everyone's lucky enough to have the resources to code in isolation for months without thinking about business development. Plus when you finish coding and have to present, you've missed out on valuable practice opportunities ;)
To be horribly blunt - vastly more people posting and commenting care about the web frameworks.

I'm generally a sympathetic person, but I have no interest at all in hearing complete strangers complaining about not getting mentoring and money for their start-up. Most businesses fail very early (including the one I started years back), and most of them don't get these sorts of benefits.
SlickEdit 2009 released. Adds Python, Perl, and PHP debugging