skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a neat idea but I can't imagine I'd ever actually use this for real testing. Relying on a third party server for your tests can be a problem. We also have thousands of tests that rely on mocked REST responses, setting them up with Mocky would be a ton of work.

If Mocky could be ran onsite and had a nice API for easily generating mock responses, then I think it would be more useful.
It's an acknowledgement that the early days of a startup don't need to look like the later days. At 42Floors, we met with every landlord in person and then manually typed in every listing. Obviously, we can't do that at scale, but it was an important step to getting our startup off the ground when no one had yet heard about us. Later on, when we had built up credibility, we built web scrapers and integrated data feeds
Great post. It was surprising to see this type of post from a YC alum but I guess it has to for legitimacy purposes.

I agree with almost all the points, but as someone looking from the outside in, I see YC as the most prestigious fraternity in the tech space. What do I mean by this? I go to the University of Michigan; coming in as an out of stater, I didn't know what to expect but I kept hearing this one piece of advice from current students, faculty, and friends that had also gone to big schools: "Find a way to make the school seem smaller to you." I never really understood it but when I arrived at campus for my freshman year, I quickly understood what everyone meant. There are SO many people and it's easy to get lost and have no sense of direction. So finding a community that aligns with your interests is ideal at a place like Michigan--I knew I wanted to get in with a group of bright, driven, and fun kids. One such place was described to be like this by almost everyone I spoke to in the beginning, it was a 'professional' fraternity where about 250 rushed and only 15 got in. I figured I'd give it a shot and went through the process and was selected. When asked why it's so great, I simply respond with, "The people in it make me a better person". It sounds vague, and it is to some extent, but it's true. Constantly surrounding myself with a small group of bright, driven, and fun individuals has truly made me smarter, more fun, and more open. It's been two years now (I'm a junior) and it is the single best decision I've made.

My long anecdote can be paralleled to YC. The tech space, especially in the bay area, is HUGE. Someone starting from scratch can be easily overwhelmed. YC seems to be the best place to get in a group with bright, driven, and fun individuals pursuing quite groundbreaking ideas, assuming you are one of them as well. That is why it is a desired place to someone like me.

All that being said, the aspect of mimicking a YC lifestyle is a great idea, I think all startups should do this and CAN do this given that it is not to expensive to get going.
There is a hotkey editor in labs which you might find handy.

Settings > labs > Custom keyboard shortcuts
Any recommendations for great books on DevOps or iOS Programming?
> If its time to edit the subject of an email thread maybe it is time to hit the big read "compose" button and start from scratch anyway.

This isn't always the case. I quite often want to forward emails and edit the subject for clarity. Having to create a new mail and then copy the content from the previous mail (especially attachments) seems unnecessarily painful.
Probably the same team that has usage data for hundreds of millions of users.
If we assume that English has 65535 words a four word password gives you 64 bits of entropy. Of course the real number of words that you can use for mass generation is 2k (or even less) if we search words that everyone that is standard deviation or two below the mean on the vocabulary graph can use and spell correctly. Spelling is going after the ability to memorize telephone numbers too with everyone using the crutches of autocorrect and other spell checking tools. The moment everyone uses that scheme the people interesting in reversing passwords will move in that direction too.

This is fake security trough obscurity. You can get pretty secure passwords nowadays by just concatenating your username and site domain and md5-ing them and taking the first half. It generates awesome passwords ... until you are the only one using this way of deriving passwords.

The human brain is not suited for remembering long complex passwords. Even less suited for unique for every service.
The Return on Cats (ROC): Can Silly Memes Drive Traffic to Your Site?
Blankets?
Makes me think of a certain incident where blankets that were possibly contaminated with smallpox were given to Native Americans during the siege of Fort Pitt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac%27s_Rebellion#Siege_of_...

Not insinuating that Google is trying to kill you, it was just the first thing I thought of.
Thanks for the clarity, probably best to explain it on your site just as you did here. Good luck with the rollout/launch.
If the US and Europe pretend, as we should, to be shining lighthouses for the cause of freedom and democracy, then for the sake of congruence and principle we should hold ourselves to higher standards than more oppressive regimes.

As for the accusation of "wild" exaggeration; granted, it's an exaggeration, and I should probably stop rabble-rousing someday. Still, nationalistic prejudice? Check. Paranoiac delusions of espionage/propaganda? Check. Lack of any reasonable oversight such as, you know, asking NASA by the phone? Check. Harassment of foreign nationals? Check. If anything is lacking, is scale.
I use ruby [vcr](https://github.com/vcr/vcr) to mock responses. But ordinarily it 'records' an actual HTTP interaction, to play it back latter mock. If you want to mock something you don't currently have conveniently 'live' to record, you can try to write up the serialized recorded request by hand -- but it'd be a lot easier to use this service to mock up a request, then record it with VCR so subsequent test runs don't go out to the network.

I plan to do some of that, as needed. Convenient.
Completely agree. Still clinging onto my old GMail UI for dear life in both gmail.com and hosted flavors.
Liking is not doing something, the same way people commenting on internet forums about something (patents, privacy, whatever) is not actually doing something.
The classic YC example is AirBNB. Brian & Joe flew to NYC every week to personally recruit hosts, take pictures of their apartments, etc.

Clearly recruiting hosts in person, one by one, doesn't scale. But it's okay to do these kinds of things at first because they help you understand your users & help create super-users who will go out an evangelize your product.
I imagine duration and "measured muscle tension" around the eye would work. A deliberate strong wink should be distinguishable from a blink. It can work the same way a long click or long tap works (think about how you cause the icons on the iPhone launcher home screen to wiggle so you can rearrange or delete them)
Barnes & Noble adds Google Play, other services
Monome: refining the way people consider interfaces
"Sell before you build"

This is what I learned from YC. It was from Paul Buchheit.
http://www.data.gov/

Last I checked, it was very much a work-in-progress. Some agencies - like the USGS - had boatloads of data. Others not so much.
If they had implemented DRM for multiplayer access to the server, they would not have failed. Attempting to contact a server and being told 'No' isn't the same as having a connected player. I'm talking Steamworks-style DRM here, which is online logon for multiplayer, requiring authentication against the server and username / password tied to purchase. It works well for that purpose.

If they had used it, those early reviews would not have suffered, and their servers would not have been overloaded short of a DDoS.
Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Mars first, then the electric AT-ST.
I don't think you can really understand what burnout is until you have actually experienced severe and complete burnout (aka chronic fatigue syndrome).

For managers of highly creative and productive developers there are some very simple things you can do to help prevent burnout in your employees: [1] give them interesting stuff to work on, [2] give them freedom, and [3] don't be an asshole. Very simple in theory, but unfortunately most managers fail on at least 2 of the 3.
How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C
It's unimportant, but the recently reintroduced 'monad comprehensions' bring out some nice features of this approach:

fluStatusGivenPositiveTest = [fluStatus | fluStatus <- percentWithFlu 10
, testResult <- testRate fluStatus
, testResult == Pos]
where testRate Flu = percentPositive 70
testRate Healthy = percentPositive 10
5 reasons you’ll regret hiring a PR firm for your startup
I'd say jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj, from a human-interpetation standpoint, has very low entropy, since there is very little uncertainty as to what will come next... This would be evident if password security checkers tried to compress passwords and compare them to the original message.

i.e. "jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj" is 224 bits as a string. Huffman-encoded, you only need 0=j as a code to convert it into 28 bits, a compression of 87.5%. So this is a good way of actually checking the security of a password, if it seems to have high entropy.
Nice implementation. I should check out allong.es.

I got asked "how I would find the prime numbers between 1 and a million" at an interview once. I said "with google" and didn't get the job. I still think that I was right on that one, the first hit on DDG is http://primes.utm.edu/lists/small/millions/ which does the job.

Incidentally you can implement this really nicely in Haskell wher the thunking gets done implicitly so you can say:

primes = 2 : sieve [3,5..]
where
sieve (p:xs) = p : sieve [x | x <- xs, x `mod` p /= 0]

And then you can:

*Main> take 5 primes
[2,3,5,7,11]
I am pretty much back in. Yes, there was some problem last night and some of the lines I edited/wrote got lost when I hit submit. Couldn't login for a long time thereafter, and unfortunately misunderstood the situation.
Yes, you are absolutely right. But sometimes is a good idea to test somes WS requests across all the network, in addition of your locally mocked tests.
I have new compose disabled. It's just more incompetent UI design from Google. Even their search page is bad. There are two menu bars after I run a search including two More drop downs and the poorly named Search Tools which seems to change frequently as they A/B test ever worse designs on me. I was hoping Marissa leaving would allow them to hire real designers.
Any recommendations for ruby related o'reilly books that may be hidden gems? (Not aimed at beginners)

Greg Brown's Ruby Best Practices.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596523015.do
When I look at this, I cannot how complicated it must be to build a world class automobile. Its all the more impressive that this is the first ground up(vs the roadster being an electric Lotus) car from a start up. Impressive indeed!
I changed header parsing last night to make header name processing case insensitive.

Due to an oversight, the first cookie sent was being dropped. As long as your session cookie wasn't first in the cookie header, everything worked fine, which is why I didn't notice (despite testing in Safari, FF, and Chrome). This is also why clearing cookies sometimes worked - it shuffled the order in some browsers.

Sorry everyone.
On a sort-of semi-related note... has anyone here participated in nReduce? The "Open Source YCombinator" that launched to much fanfare a while back? They seemed to get quite a bit of buzz out of the gate, but I haven't heard much about them lately. Anybody gone through the program and care to write up your experiences and submit here? I, for one, would love to read something like that.
IHaveToRespond

> once they're trapped in high-COL areas...

How is anyone trapped in a high-COL area? I understand it can be difficult to leave an area, particularly one with lots of jobs, but sometimes you don't have optimal options in life and you have to figure out which one is the least worst. In this case, the hypothetical person you're talking about is trapped by his inability to make a difficult decision. Nothing more and nothing less.

> Savings/bootstrapping work if you have them, but I challenge you to find a 30-year-old in SV who (a) has appreciable savings, and (b) wasn't lifted by a connection ("acqui-hire" welfare checks count as "lifted").

I am in my early 30s, live in SV, have a liquid net worth in the low six-figures and have never been "lifted" by an acquisition or acqui-hire. I was nearly broke twice in my 20s.

> Perhaps I am a moron for chasing the prestige of the VC-istan and Wall Street jobs, throwing me into a city where landlords win and talent struggles.

You were not thrown into a city, you chose to be there. As you said, you chased "the prestige of the VC-istan and Wall Street jobs."

And please stop this ranting about landlords. People who earned money, invested it in property and generate income by renting said property out are not gaining at your expense, at least no more than the farmer who grew the food you eat.

If your rent is too damn high, move.

> VC-istan (and, to a lesser degree, Wall Street with its bonus system) are economies where, instead of savings, you put everything you have (time, money, energy) into this weird system that distributed outsized rewards, intermittently, to a lucky few.

Welcome to life.
It's an open source project, created 2 days ago. All is possible, this website is just a proof of concept.
And you can fork the project to run it locally.
french, unemployed guy here.

I envy you guys
Offering books without DRM is awesome, but as consumers should also have the right to remove DRM to use works in non-copyright infringing ways. For example, commentary, academic use, parody, criticism, and making backup copies.

At the moment, circumventing DRM for non-infringing reasons is illegal. Which is why Section 1201 of the DMCA needs to be fixed. Join the movement:

http://fixthedmca.org
> I think I will switch back to a desktop email client for day-to-day use and only use the web interface when I'm on a different computer.

I primarily use Mutt because I spend most of my time in a console. I know Mutt gets a bad rap, but it's actively developed, super fast, has excellent (customizable) keyboard shortcuts, and is dead-simple to use if you're already on the command line. Plus, you can bring along your favorite text editor for composition. Mutt also handles gmail labels relatively well.

Furthermore, tmux + powerline + mutt means that I get new mail notifications from the console, and switching to mutt is a key combination away. This setup is particularly helpful if I'm emailing about technical matters, since I can split the pane and view whatever code/data/mathematics is under discussion in the email thread.

(One point of irritation is that bash doesn't seem to fully support powerline.)
Well, how often do people sign up with a different e-mail address (especially the target group of parents and seniors)? You should measure this. Only solve it when it becomes a real problem.

I used to think like this as well, but you're basically falling in the trap of sacrificing usability for 95% while you solve the problem for the minority of 5%. Let's say your conversion rates drop by 25% because you have this hurdle. In an attempt to save the 5%, you're now at a net loss of 20%.
The USB implementation in the rpi's chip is rather... odd.
I would love to see Google design a car with usage data. It would have one door and the trunk would be perpetually open.
What do you use for your existing tests? VCR?
I'm the jackass who downvoted you...it was by accident, I meant to upvote. I just don't have the option to go back on it, sorry.
I'm gonna quote @kevingadd from down below because I can't say it better myself: "The new gmail is streamlined for particular purposes and not for others. You'd think that one of the biggest data companies in the universe would be able to gather actual data about how people use their software and ensure they aren't making it significantly worse to use for subsets of the customer base. Maybe this is what Google actually did, and they decided they don't care about the 1-10% of their users who use gmail for anything other than sending glorified SMS messages to people."

The new gmail is a toy for kids.
I also highly doubt you can make a superior meal, that's a little offensive to people who focus their lives and careers on the art of food.

How offensive; I shouldn't need to pay $100+ a head to get a superior steak, parsnip, and greens; but, like the parent, I've yet to find convenient or suitably priced dining to that of my own cast iron. Granted, there are plenty of styles or meats I don't cook or source as well (eg. sous-vide or braised lamb) and am more than happy to go out for, but it's not hard to imagine amateur home-chefs cooking these dishes. There are entire shows around surfacing non-classical or non-fine-dining chefs.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that attaching large images makes the composer completely unusable. It is so bad it makes me wonder if anyone in Google actually uses the new composer.

They've fixed one bug where the image wouldn't scale to fit the size of its container (i.e. if you had a 3000x3000px image it would render 1:1 as opposed to being shrunk down), but even with the scaling it's still incredibly hard to navigate emails with more than one picture in it. I mean, I have a 1080p monitor, let me use it!
A la Google Wave?
Will Utilities Embrace Distributed Energy?
I understand how some of these changes could frustrate users, but, honestly, the analogy ( used in the title ) of 'Photoshop' being user friendly just doesn't hold water. Also, the idea that every choice in UX needs to fit neatly into some Jakob Nielsen checklist is antiquated.
I don't think developers/designers should blatantly ignore proven UI methodologies, but there does need to be a balance between standards, and aesthetics, or else, an application runs risk of becoming steril.
What do you use for your local testing?
I'm glad you brought this up--I use it as much as any other. Our iteration time for creating a fake mock-up and trying to sell it is only days. We can get through 5 tests in the time it takes to build one of them.
I agree with you. The newest updates annoy me a lot, especially the signature one - I commonly write emails in two languages and I need to check if the signature is the correct one; a pain now.

Furthermore I use the web client to manage all my email addresses, because it is, well was, convenient. Now if I need to send from a different address I have to take extra steps. WHY?!

But what alternative is there?

I'm on Windows 8. The built in Metro mail app is... not that great. Outlook 2013 has some parts Metro, some parts leftover from all the way back in '95. I'm not particularly fond of Yahoo either.
>) Managers are simply not used to negative feedback because they never get it. People will lie to them rather than risk their careers on delivery of bad news.

This may be true for some managers, but I disagree that this is true generally for managers. Most managers (product managers in particular) here negative feedback all the time, from their bosses, their customers, marketing, sales, and other internal stakeholders.

I think one confusion here is that engineers occasionally provide feedback that a feature is a bad idea, even though they may not have the context to evaluate the idea effectively. This is frustrating for a manager, but also speaks the need for a manager to effectively convey that context. In fact, most engineers when provided that context are easily persuaded.

It is only the ones who seem to reject every idea, even when given compelling reasons why the ideas are good, that one begins to suspect may have an attitude problem and not be providing legitimate feedback.
To be clear I meant "Smartest person in the room at platform X". Didn't mean to leave out that detail.

> The reality is that any "lead" role at a startup requires you to be the best in the room at your specialty.

Yes, it requires you to be the best in the room, but before joining I didn't honestly know what it would be like to be a lead (and only) developer for that platform x. After working for a few months I realized that being a lead so early in my career is not what I want. I still have to learn a lot things before I cab be an effective lead and lead a team of developers.
I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. In the early days, I remember being the "No" guy. I saw a million ways things were going to fall apart, but management would just keep pressing forwards. And often times it did fall apart, and sometimes it didn't. But then when you jump into the CEO role/building your own company/being the management, you realize that the world is very much not black and white, and sometimes you just have to push forwards and MAKE it work. Or at least give it a go.

And one big thing you have to understand is that often, the idea the management wants to create is abstracted out, and grows and changes as business needs change, networks are made, and ideas flow. And sometimes thats tough to put into concrete "requirements" for engineers to build. Give them some slack, quit bitching, and just BUILD. You'd be amazed how far that can get you. This is especially true for very large and very complicated systems that are damn near impossible to get right.
I was actually thinking of cases like MMO game accounts - often times the actual game account isn't created until after the game is purchased.
The View from the C++ Standard meeting, April 2013 – Part 2
Relevant post from a few days ago from Tor Books on DRM:

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/04/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-y...
These guys make ElasticSearch painless to deploy in your existing environment. Definitely nice when trying to focus on other infrastructure improvements.
I thought good design was about designing for the extremes, not the mass majority of people that don't use your product to the fullest.
Great piece of kit. For some reference we just put together a listing of 30+ prototyping platforms: http://postscapes.com/internet-of-things-hardware that people have been using for "Internet of Things" DIY projects.
Why isn't there separate SaaS pricing for developing countries?
Developed countries are way ahead of developing countries in purchasing power. Even on the supply side this cost advantage is used (i.e. outsourcing). But on the demand side, this cost disadvantage doesn't seem to be considered. Why?
Yeah I realize that. I hope I didn't come across too harsh. It is a good idea, and I'd like to see it grow some more.
I've never engaged in any of those kinds of practices, but did find them both clever and fascinating when I read about them ~3 years ago. I never thought of them as being illegal until today.

I guess I'm just concerned with the trend. Things we think of as clever today may land people in prison. Its interesting and scary that we might not see it coming.
I can't remember the last Gmail change that was actually an improvement.

In general Google's changes since the Google+ rollout have been 90% terrible. There's been a couple of changes to Youtube that are better (like the really big mode), but overall changes to all Google services have been bad. I feel like they've really lost the plot.
Pretty pictures, but I just like how I can push the buttons on my screen and make the car go up and down. ;)

Actually, when I first read this doc a couple of weeks back, it showed me the reason for something I had noticed. If I have my foot on the brake while changing the suspension level, I've noticed that when I let off the brakes, the wheels shift a bit. Turns out that for the front tires, it doesn't lift and lower straight up and down. There is a bit of horizontal motion as well.