skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This will be most interesting if it's not about "what to do or not to do", which is what most of the online content about the process emphasizes, and is more about "this is when you should/shoudln't apply in the first place".
Qonvo http://qonvo.me
Is there an online service to check your email address is in there? I didn't get an email from them (perhaps it got stuck in my spam folder that gets auto-deleted weekly), but my credit card got hacked soon after.
This is actually nice looking and has a great purpose. Maybe they didn't select you because there's no billion-dollar exit strategies for education services..? I think it could make a really great product though.
Sold sold. Nice pun :)
I like this metaphor very much. It is much easier to wrap it.
Why write them? Because games are play which is the most vital activity humans, indeed mammals, engage in. Without it, not only would I not have this very alphabet I'm writing in (which descends from drawings), but I and everyone reading this would still be sitting in a bush very practically gathering as many berries as we can to survive.

And as the gaming population becomes older, gaming will account for a larger and larger percent of human play.
Thanks! The YC bump would be nice, but it doesn't really make a difference. Focus on the experience you're creating for your users, and the rest is marginal.
really appreciate the feedback, and i agree.. the feedback needs to skew towards "useful things you can do to improve your site, preferably the easiest things to do"

TBH: they were the first two reviews we got done and that is what the designers came up with.. we wanted to soft launch and improve rather than wait for the 'perfect sample'

we've since run about 10 more (actually getting a bunch of websites to review from HN) and the reviews are getting better so we'll be replacing those samples soon...

one thing that we've seen from these reviews is that there are some great projects out there that need website help - sometimes i think people lose site of the fact that even a small startup can look as big as Apple if they have a decent website.

(also note i'm a dev not designer - we started this idea because i've needed it countless times on projects i've been working on)
I think it's because we expect start-ups to fail, most of them do.

Big companies fail, too, but less often, because they once were part of the few start-ups who didn't fail.

If you want high-end and are happy to live with the risk, you go to a start-up.

If you want safety and are happy to live with a more conservative approach, you go to a big company.

If the big one fails, you feel robbed of your safety.
yc's not about the startup cash it's about the access to influential people
I just saw the same concept 2 seconds ago from google.
https://helpouts.google.com/home

Anyway, sounds like a good idea. Good luck guys.
don't lose heart. YC is not the end of the road for you. keep on trying.
Wow - I could use this. Great demo on the home page.
How do you intend to solve it? If few people are on your site, nobody treats reputation on it as a real reputation. If nobody treats it as a real reputation, nobody will come.
Any chance of this coming to Safari too?
This one: http://adobe.cynic.al/
Cüneyt Arkın :)
There are dumb ideas, and it can be useful to point out their weaknesses in a constructive manner. However, using the word retarded to describe something in a negative way is both childish and derogatory.

Here's an eloquent description of why what you said is inappropriate. When saying retarded, “What we mean is that he is as stupid as someone who is mentally handicapped, and we mean that in the most derogatory sense. The implication is that the only characteristic of mentally handicapped individuals is their stupidity."
Failure is an acceptable risk to move forward.

It's certainly an acceptable risk for Google and other companies like FB - the short-term cost of innovation for Google is pretty close to zero. The long-term cost of reputation is perhaps something they're only now starting to realise.

Whether it's an acceptable risk for the users of these services is up to them, and many of them are deciding it is not, because these services can be so easily closed. Sounds fair to me.

I don't think anyone's forgotten the cost of innovation, they're simply aware that the costs of it are borne by users, not by Google.
Ex-NYC landlord here. I'm glad to see how many people realize that re-rental of a rental property in a multi-tenant building is problematic.

NYC rentals are some of the most regulated in the country; nearly half of rentals are covered by rent stabilization law, which makes it all but impossible to evict tenants as long as they pay rent, and dictates annual rent increases regardless of the gap between current rent and fair market value. Rent-controlled tenants who rent out through AirBnB are, quite literally, rent-seeking -- using their government-granted preference in the housing market to extract a profit.

Beyond that, there are very real issues of security and disturbance of community when strangers are coming in and out of a property. My wife and I lived in our building, and it was like a little neighborhood. People left their boots and umbrellas in the hall on rainy days, and we had a communal BBQ grill in the backyard. If you haven't lived in a super-dense city like London, NYC or Tokyo, it's hard to understand how sacred the interior of an apartment building is.

One way to look at it is that AirBnB is "disrupting" the stale hotel industry. Another way to look at it is that hotel laws and regulations were put in place to put paid to the crush of illegal/dangerous/unhealthy boarding houses that cropped up near the turn of the last century. Stories like laxatives' make me fear that we are headed right back there.
Awesome product! Don't give up hope, I can really see it doing well. One of those links I click and instantly see the appeal and benefits! Great job!
Since my time is limited, I try to keep the scope of the project down to something I can handle. This means I'm currently only focusing on Chrome, but if anyone wants to port the extension to other browsers, the source code is available on GitHub for them to fork.
This is interesting! Why didn't you put simple words correction (as in the homepage) instead of the user having to retype the whole sentence in the exercises?
nice homepage. i love the text on the mission page actually. why nonprofit? can you try selling this to schools? my team also embrace the "learn by writing" concept and recently launched www.dailythem.es -- we are reaching out to English as a Second Language students and schools in Asia to develop something more classroom specific because teachers just don't have time to grade enough students' essays
I'd be a little sad if that were the case. Not because I desperately like PHP (I don't), but it has its uses (and it's pretty prolific), and sometimes that best tool for the job is whatever tool does the job.
Bringing together the functionality of: pylint, pep8, pyflakes ..
He doesn't like the new gmail compose.

I do: it lets me find the parts of e-mails I need to reference when writing an e-mail.
> This article makes some good points but it's missing a bit of history. The reference pixel is defined at 96dpi because that's how Windows treated the screen in the days before high-dpi support. Mac OS treated the screen as 72dpi in the pre-retina days but most early websites were built to look correct on Windows. That's why MS Office fonts look too small on the Mac to this day: 26% too small to be precise.

The only way I can understand this is backwards -- a Windows "pixel" is 1/96 of an inch. (?) A Mac "pixel" is 1/72 of an inch; much larger. Wouldn't a windows font appear too large if displayed on a Mac?
EC2's New G2 Instance Type - NVIDIA Grid GPU
Shut Up & Sit Down: Board game review show and secret project.

http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/shut-up-sit-down
Faster streaming at - http://spaceflightnow.com/pslv/c25/status.html
Thanks! Can't really compete with Google ;).

However, our product is different in the sense that it aims to connect people face-to-face with surrounding local talent.
Seems like collaborative editing is not hot.

No YC interview neither, and somehow related:

http://sharepad.co
One of the bigger questions is international aid.

"Since 2007 India has been the world's largest recipient of recorded remittances from abroad. In 2010 these inflows were worth $54bn (£35bn). UK foreign direct investment in India is considerable, reaching £1.8bn in the same year."

You can't really on the one hand claim your country is terribly poor, and needs handouts from other nations, and on the other play at being spacemen.

Thankfully the UK will stop sending foreign aid to India in 2015.
Whether it's an acceptable risk for the users of these services is up to them, and many of them are deciding it is not, because these services can be so easily closed

Yeah, Reader was closed just eight years after it launched. I didn't even had time to import all my feeds.
I had the wrong email in my YC account. Correct email in my YC application. No response yet. What should I do?

I already registered the (incorrect) email used.
I know the guys behind Jarvis, and they are super cool people! Better luck next time guys!
My take on this is that Google is using Helpouts to figure out - what are the queries people cannot use Google for.
For pop-culture references, I was thinking Matango.

http://www.scifijapan.com/articles/2007/03/22/a-more-interes...
The Big History Project - an online "nearly entire history of everything"
You just need some love. http://love2d.org
One way is to get NGOs to adopt it for their volunteers and to have volunteers get rep from people they help and or serve.
Absolutely. Valgrind is the holy grail of C/CPP programming.
Regarding the peanuts (in case this was lost on others): it's a JPL tradition that mission control open and share a jar of nuts right before the launch / orbital insertion / landing, for good luck. The point, obviously, is that space programs everywhere have good luck superstitions, many of them making less sense than a religious ritual.
You would think adults would be past playing with imaginary friends. But they can't even get over their imaginary enemies.
Did you consider doing the same for code reviews?
I wouldnt have thought the market was huge for this. You mention "Textbooks" - most commercial publishing companies would already have internal version control software, you mention essays? Most students would just use google docs. Where is the target market? It's neither casual nor a power tool. Thats probably why your pitch failed, their is adequate substitute products already in the market place.
"Is what I am doing actually important?" - well it beats Facebook in terms of usefulness.
Thanks for sharing this, interesting. However, why don't you mention Google Docs and Dropbox as competitors? Google docs already does this, and Dropbox seems to be clearly heading this way.
Also, think of all the potential Hitlers that will be just playing your games instead of doing anything mischievous. The more time you make those people waste, the better.
Yeah I used the API but ita a bit overkill just to get this. I wrote a JavaScript function to get the spreadsheet URL inside the sheet but there isn't one to get the worksheet URL.
Yeah, Google Checkout only lasted seven years. I could barely make an account, and it was closed!
Define shit or I will define it myself... that's how it goes.
as a side point, there should be a point where you can comment that "things look good", but i agree the designer should have to comment on why they look good..

we're working out designer guidelines now :)
National security is better served by it going bust?
You should put an emphasis on face-to-face on your homepage IMHO.
yes did consider code reviews.

our thought on this would be mainly for people to check outsourced work is not way out of line.

in a 30-60 minute review you can't get too deep, but you can give a general opinion of the overall quality of the code and whether or not the developers are way out of line.

it might be more a sanity check for non-tech website owners.
It reminds me of the people on state benefits that think a good use of their money is a 52" plasma tv.

On the other hand, I think the stopping of state aid to a country should be celebrated as a positive thing - a "graduation", if you like.
T+150 secs. PSLV Stage-1 separated. PS-2 lit.

T+260 secs. PS-2 separated. PS-3 lit.

PS-3 burn out. PSLV enters a long coasting of 28 minutes, after which 4th stage will be triggered.

T + 32 minutes. Coasting almost done. Stage 4 ignition in few moments. Altitude is a bit higher due to over-performance.

PS-4 started. 4th stage performance normal. Yay!!

T+44 minutes. PS-4 cutoff. Spacecraft separation success :) Spacecraft successfully placed in elliptical orbit around Earth. 300 day long journey begins now.

http://i.imgur.com/NX9MNsF.jpg
Yes, it's like saying "you can have sound, you can have pictures, you can have plays. But god forbid you from mixing them together, because that's like useless and evil". Why do we even have this conversation? Either all art is useless or games are not useless.
View source on HN. Still overwhelmed with nostalgia? ;)
The article also states they switched to sha-256. Best I'm aware, that algorithm isn't adaptive, so they may have just as well used md5.
The application in the application. Upvoted for meta :)
Education, race, age, startup stage, past employment, geography.

I'm sure it be interesting and maybe disappointing.
I used to support bitmessage, but they were unwilling to fix their gaping security wholes.
Because if they wait 18 months the price will be much lower.
Abstractions in Concepts, Techniques and Tools
What is better - Hinge or Tomonotomo - Feedback?
No I have not. On Debian Unstable, I always give the bugs a few months to sort themselves out. Could be a problem in the packages recent dependencies, graphic driver regression, or who knows.

I also want to do some preliminary debugging of the issue before sending in a bug report.
I used to stay in a paying guest accomodation during my first job. My roommate was a guy who had just joined ISRO - we graduated same year but from different colleges. And I also had a chance to interact closely with 2 other friends who were working with ISRO at that time (one was a senior in college).

His payscale started at Rs.8000 per month (in 2001 that was less than $200usd). He was a production engineer. He would be up for next revision of payscale & promotion pending a review in 4 years! He knew that.

I used to wonder what keeps them motivated and I used to constantly question them. One common thread you find based on these conversations is that they are extremely satisfied with work - each of them used to say that what they are working on is UNIQUE that nobody else in ISRO is responsible for. And buck stops with them. They knew that.

That sense of ownership and the way the employees connect to a much larger cause is something unbelievable at ISRO, in my perspective. I used to be in awe of every conversation about his superiors, the work and their perspective of the organization in general.

I think it is an interesting case study in organizational behavior and what keeps you motivated with factors other than just money.

Teaching is another profession I think requires similar mindset. ISRO somehow hires the right kind of people, the employees within the organization are not so flamboyant setting examples for new hires and helps them connect in a way it makes people see contribution to a bigger cause.

Just my observation from what I have seen from close quarters.

BTW, it is also given that he knew they get pension after retirement, medical benefits & all such taken care of for his entire life because he is part of the organization.

Would love to read if there are any case studies on this.
Agreed! Currently our homepage targets UC Berkeley students who want to make extra pocket change tutoring students in-need.

Our full launch is coming very soon and will convey f2f at first glance.

Thank you for your feedback!
...or we could make actual games.
XSLT is a turing-complete programming language. Really, the moment your source XML has a slightly different structure from the target output, XSLT files become monsters.

Programming in XML is never a good idea. It isn't in XSLT, it isn't in Spring, it isn't in Maven. Anything that's XML and has elements or attributes with names like "if", "else" or "while", something went horribly, horribly wrong somewhere. It's horribly verbose, you can't reasonably debug it, and there's virtually no engineering best practices, which results in near-impossible maintenance tasks.

Any modern programming language with a good, consice, XML parsing library is a more effective tool to transform XML into something else than XSLT.

Don't code in XML.
> commercial publishing companies would already have internal version control software

You'd be surprised. I've talked to published authors, and here's the inside scoop: the writing/editing process is often, amazingly, word documents emailed back and forth with hacked up homebrew version control 'systems' and inline comments. Believe it or not. I've seen them. And it only gets worse when there are more editors involved (depending on the content, there can be many).

O'Reilly is working on a similar idea (http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com), which means there is at least some demand by commercial publishers for a system like this. If O'Reilly is working on it, it can't be solved very well.

Anyway, I'm not even targeting commercial publishing, I'm targeting independent publishing.

> you mention essays? Most students would just use google docs

For short essays google docs is fantastic. I don't plan to touch that. But have you tried writing any kind of long-form group research paper (as in, over the course of a semester), especially technical, with google docs or dropbox? I have. It's a nightmare.

> their is adequate substitute products already in the market place

Craigslist and couchsurfing.org were adequate substitutes for Airbnb, Yahoo search was an adequate substitute for Google, and flash drives were an adequate substitute for Dropbox.
The original Monster Truck Madness, along with the original Motocross Madness (with dedicated motion sensitive Microsoft Sidewinder controller), were probably the games I played the most.
Have you considered that you weren’t chosen because of your attitude instead of your project. Your comment here (as well as your name...) betrays a certain... outlook on the world.

It's not just about the ideas, it's also about the team, the people at YC have said as much in their press releases of the past. I would look inward before looking at your project.
@crazytony, if your startup is already working out, influential people will come to you.

Also, where did I explicitly state that YC was only about money? I don't even think you can say I implicitly meant that or assume it was the gist of what I said.
If you have a CPU intensive infrastructure, why in the world are you using or considering cloud servers? Unless these are in use just a fraction of the day?

You can get several times the CPU capacity for around the same price with dedicated servers. And nothing stops you from combining and scaling out with cloud servers to handle peaks.
I don't know anything about UK investment in India but remittances are not international aid, that is money earned by foreign workers.
The time to look at MonoGame will be when they implement the Content Pipeline. Otherwise it is not a replacement for XNA.
Live Modi congratulates Isro after Mars orbiter lift off
Thank you for the support, HN. I appreciate it.

To be clear, I have no intention of quitting. I started working on this project without even thinking about YC as a possibility, driven only by excitement and the desire to see it exist. In fact, I wasn't going to apply to YC at all, but changed my mind at the last minute.

Against my better judgement, this little idea has turned into a full time, 18hrs-a-day-7-days-a-week project (with the occasional burnout day), and I plan to keep working on it is successful or I run out of money.

=]
If you cannot get the DD and ISRO sites, you can catch the live stream at http://www.livestream.com/spaceflightnow
How much is 22 years of penalties on an unpaid $421 CA tax bill?
Generally, I would have simply agreed with what you said. (and what you said is true)

But! Stop complaining at this one moment. And take a look at the achievements of this country's people. They don't have world's best food, world-class infrastructure and not enough money to hire world class talent either. Probably they have world-class corruption in the country.

How many countries achieve this after having these many "core" problems. Salute to the people who achieved this feat.
Which geek did not play for 12 hours one day?
We are a nonprofit. We are a commercial nonprofit, and intend to make a sustainable revenue, so we really don't fit into the nonprofit mold. We probably would have had a better chance as a for profit. The nonprofit app was surprisingly sparse.
I agree, if nothing else because it'll probably need support to work properly, and calling Google's support non-existent would be an understatement.
Make something stand out. It almost doesn't matter what, but I'd recommend choosing something you want the user to click/read. There's practically no contrast anywhere on the page, so everything just merges into an amorphous blob that I can't be bothered to look at.
ok. I listened video and looks like it will be decentralized and it might work.

we still need till they come out with protocol spec, but such thing _can_ be implemented.
Hi, I co-founded a company that works on a similar idea, just from a slightly different perspective (focus on storytelling, not so much the aggregation):
http://memoarc.com/

We should hang out :-)
hey i like your idea but i think there's some things you can do to make it better. i've thought about similar ideas but had issues with how tech would stall in the case with retail/fashion products (the only market I would recommend you start off at).

let me know if you want to talk more.
He does, right there in the section called "Who are your competitors?":

"Indirect competitors: (...), Google Docs, Dropbox, (...)"

Edit: BTW, he also mentions them in the video linked to near the top of the application.
> I would bet money that within thirty years this mission will be entirely handed over to UAVs/drones, since they're cheaper to operate and actually have some advantages over manned fighters -- a drone can turn harder than a manned plane can, for instance, because it doesn't have to worry about the G-forces killing the pilot. But technology is not quite there yet today.

Isn't that time frame incredibly conservative? Think about how much technology has changed since 1983. Drones were mostly unknown less than ten years ago and now they are autonomously bombing targets. I can't believe it will take 30 more years before drones become equally good (and already much cheaper!) than manned fighters. In five years seem more likely.
I think one major reason why Victor's talks are so appreciated is that he shows a deep and serious engagement with humanism, tapping into the same vein as Christopher Alexander, Alan Kay, Jef Raskins, Seymour Papert, and others.
Prices Reduced for EC2's M3 Instances
Is this just a POC to prove that JavaScript can be fast? This is a serious question. I am having a difficult time thinking of practical uses for this.
Becoming Anti-Fragile with Rejection Therapy
Is there an upload limit? Is it possible to share a 5gb file?
The core idea here is that by writing out a complete sentence you learn the context in which a word is being used. For example, if you're learning "There are elephants at the zoo", you need to learn not only the word "There", but also the context "There" + "are elephants at the zoo". Writing out a complete sentence helps bind the concept to the context.
Why are we shy?
Somebody asked Watch Dogs' creator about his take on the NSA leaks