skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me fix the previous sentence:

We started $service pretending to care about solving problem that matters to you so that we could extract from you as much money as possible quickly.

I don't believe what startups say anymore. They don't want to solve anything. They want to make something that looks like a solution for long enough that they get piles of money.

Maybe it's understandable, but I'd like they'd be more up-front about this.
I agree from a utility perspective, our differentiation is our ability to determine context about the photos, knowing for example that you were tailgating at a 49ers game rather than simply saying you were at a certain lat/lon on a given date. Once we know that we can supplement the UX with that context.

This is where I wish there was some, even a few words or a sentence, feedback.

We had 8 different alums look over the application and only one raised the competition issues (I think our system differences were clearer when you read the application). Consistently we heard about weakness of my co-founder experience wise and questioning of our 70/30 equity split.

Was it the idea? The team? Possibly the fact that YC has already funded a company very similar to us (Snapjoy) and another recently (Loom)?
I think he meant "rustle up", an idiom meaning "to gather", usually at short notice.
Makes perfect sense to piggyback on the success of DIY/how-to guides on YouTube, but that said, I have idea whether it's going to catch on.

Clearly Google should try this out either way.
> specify sizes in physical dimensions, such as inches or cm.

So a one inch square button on my two inch wide phone will also be one inch wide on my 10 foot projector?
You meant not profitable, right?
> Are you going to announce to your users that your promises will go unfulfilled, and that they can consider themselves shafted henceforth?

What do you think sounds better to users - the above, or the above + "and we're so so happy about this; high five, suckers."?

Also, companies indeed don't get acquired thoughtlessly, but I doubt any single thought went toward users. I'd be surprised if anyone thought, even for a second, that there's a Joe and a Jane out there who rely on their service. Startups have no sense of responsibility for the userbase they built nowdays.
I just realised the irony in that sentence. You're right! What I meant was, we haven't really figured out a product for consumers, let alone the enterprise, for us to be able to go for it. Having said that, what we're now doing is that we have created a beta users group on Facebook and have added quite a bit of people to it (and still are...). What we will be doing is get feedback from them and mould the product exactly how these users sound off there.

Matt Schlicht (Hipset / Tracks.by, YC S'12) gave me the advice to do it and we're just doing that. Working now to roll it out to these users first and listen intently and give them exactly that.
Most likely they would have gone out of business either way because nobody is going to do an acqui-hire deal if their company had plenty of funding or was actually profitable. If I was working somewhere, I'd rather the founders managed to finagle an acqui-hire rather fire everybody.

You're right, though, there's nothing great about it for the users.
I don't understand what you are trying to say here? Because Lenovo already makes phones? Endorsed by Kobe Bryant and Ashton Kutcher.
The easiest way to say « Fuck » to Internet Explorer
It isn't an automatic no. If it was, they would just say that. It is probably an easy no and gets passed by quickly without a really compelling idea/product, some revenue already, past success and you don't really need YC, etc.
In fact, the US Aircraft fleet is a huge sitting duck, just waiting to be sunk. It can project power, sure - but only as a policing tool. In time of total war, the carrier is useless - every potential American adversary has the ability to sink these carriers with cheap, fast weapons designed for the job. There is no defence currently in the field - the laser weapons (only possible defense against supersonic smart ballistic nukes) currently being tested won't make it in wide deployment for another 10 years.

The moment open warfare is declared, America will loose its aircraft carriers, and trillions of dollars, thousands of lives. The only use for the Carrier fleet right now is for America to project its police force around the world.
Apartments don't have 24-hour security. And that is 1 of the reasons I don't use it. The other being corporate discount and frequent flyer miles usage.

And AirBnB is suffering from it's own popularity. Once you get beyond a certain size your audience stops being responsible, early adopters and grows to include everyone and anyone.
Try refreshing the page and you'll get a different sound-track. Made me curious about the implementation.

Interestingly, they are using a custom random function

today=new Date();
jran=today.getTime();
var number=5;
var random_number=1;
var bgsnd="/games/random/bgsnd.wav";
var images="/games/random/intro.JPG";
var sizes=" width=602 height=228";
function randomizeNumber()
{
ia=9301;
ic=49297;
im=233280;
jran = (jran*ia+ic) % im;
random_number=Math.ceil( (jran/(im*1.0)) *number);

if (random_number==1){
bgsnd="audio/intro/yeeha.wav";}
if (random_number==2){
bgsnd="audio/intro/crash_10.wav";}
if (random_number==3){
bgsnd="audio/intro/heybuddy.wav";}
if (random_number==4){
bgsnd="audio/intro/lovethatmud.wav";}
if (random_number==5){
bgsnd="audio/intro/webintro.wav";}

}

And then they run it when the page opens

randomizeNumber();
document.open();
if (version == "n3" || version == "n4"){
document.write("<embed src="+bgsnd+" autostart=true hidden=true></embed>");}
if (version == "e3" || version == "e4"){
document.write("<bgsound src="+bgsnd+">");}
document.close();
Very nice. Client side JS is getting more and more powerful. I've been playing with a JS gif compiler lately and I'm amazed it's even possible.
Did you write a regression test for it? :)
That's an interesting thought. How different would the interactive games landscape be if it was around during the renaissance. If game designers had sponsors that supported their lifestyle.

As I write this, I think this is the utopian vision of crowd sourcing. Creating a new class of patrons of the arts.
Read this answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6673208
Firstly, is* :-)

And, it's http://tapbeyond.com, a personalisation platform that lets people discover content and conversations around what interest them.
> Since this service is paid, I could be netting a lot of money through it, only for it to fizzle out.

But that's true of any service from any company. If I'm a stay-at-home mom making some extra cash on Helpouts, I have a very different risk profile than a doctor who closes down his practice to see patients exclusively through Helpouts. The stay-at-home mom might not be happy about a shutdown but she still "[netted] a lot of money" whereas the doctor might have destroyed his/her career. Every individual/company needs to assess their own risk and take the appropriate risk-mitigating actions.

The point I'm making is that the damages from a Google service shutdown are typically very low or easily mitigated (Google Checkout being no exception) and every service should be evaluated on an individual basis with your risk profile. If the value you are getting from any service is lower than the damages that would result from a shutdown, don't put all of your eggs in that basket; if you do anyway, get some contractual guarantees and be confident that they will be fulfilled.
ISRO stream is up: http://216.185.104.74/isro (needs Windows Media Player).
Disclaimer: I work for Google

A lot of those comments seem to come from people who had a bad experience and I don't think necessarily reflect the average.

The arrogance part is very true, though. Just take a quick glance at mailing lists like industry-info or eng-misc and you'll see a bunch of condescending assholes looking down on past co-workers and competing companies.

Sometimes I wonder if those people get any work done at all as I always see the same names.

Even during internal presentations we are constantly reminded about how Apple is bad and inferior and Google products are awesome, even if they end up being a buggy pile of shit because internal feedback was ignored.

A lot of managers at Google are great engineers and piss-poor managers with no people skills at all.

Among the young crowd who joined the company straight from college you see the ones who think of Google as a religion and will not accept any criticism at all. There's also the ones who think they're still in college and don't understand simple things such as being mature and respectful with your fellow Googlers.

The latter you can see spending a lot of time posting passive aggressive memes on memegen.googleplex.com

I've been here 3 years and have noticed a big change, for the worst. It got so bad at one point that Urs Holzle had to write a 'No Jerks' manifesto calling out the childish and disrespectful behavior that has, sadly, become so prominent.

Sales are considered second class citizens and a substantial part of engineering despises Social and Android product areas and their leaders.

Despite all that it's still the best place to work, way better then your average corporation.

James
It's still not clear if the protocol will support decentralization (private servers)
I like the idea. I think you need a bit better specificity on what exactly is rated.

Best of luck to you and your project.
My guess would be WebRTC or whatever it is google hangouts use at the moment.
reminds me of Daps'em from a few years back:
http://thenextweb.com/eu/2011/04/05/give-your-friends-a-virt...
Use the "man" command in Firefox
These companies might be interested in the patents but not the company. Apple , Google ,etc don't want another company to run nor do they want the bad press that would come from them completely shuttering a company.
They certainly can but the input experience is shit and the piddly little screen gives you a headache.

Mobile gaming is ok for chopping ropes, throwing birds or cutting up fruit but I'd rather have a windows 95 game with a keyboard and a mouse myself.
how rejection letter feels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePQcRspK5z8
You mean they should have stayed at 16 bits?

What would happen to all the characters that don't fit in that case, better luck in other standards?
Can someone explain to me what's the difference between this and a skype/FaceTime session? Because I am confused.
> Or it's a cheap ploy to get people to use Google+

Everything Google's done lately has been about Google+
http://www.inputfarm.com
I was thinking of writing a longer comment but I have to get back to getting shit done.
Start-Up Idea: Evernote for Spreadsheets
ah yeah http://quill.org

HN, we're an open source nonprofit, and we'd like to collaborate with other developers. Check out our code here: https://github.com/empirical-org/quill

And if you'd like to contribute, we've got a few interesting projects in the works, including building a free writing section with NLP! You can reach me at peter (at) quill (dot) org
> Over in .NET land we appear to be stuck on XPath 1.0 forever.

I don't think it's a bad idea, most of the improvements in XPath 2 are the new standard functions which depending on your XPath implementation may be available as extensions (e.g. tokenize comes from exslt, an xpath 1.0 library) but along with that it brings significantly higher complexity and I think the spec has gone from "difficult to read" to "meaningless word-salad".

I really like XPath, but I can't say I was impressed by XPath 2, it loses much of xpath's simplicity with little to show for the added complexity.
Care to post the application?
Ah ok, I should have imagined.

HW companies do not know how to do SW.
Ask HN: How can we improve our software house website?
Hi Guys!

We have decided to quit comfy and well-paid corporate jobs producing enterprise software for investment banks from the City of London to set up a small software house and go back to roots and fun of programming.

We have redesigned our website recently and would like to ask for any hints, especially regarding the copy/pitch, to make it attractive to people located in Western Europe and the US looking for a nearshore/outsourcing company (we are GMT +1) offering quality software development services.

http://codedose.com

What do you think? What can we do better?

If you would like to talk off the record just drop me a line at mglomba@codedose.com

Thank you.
Xtravo Browser (Open Source)
I would think the number of people who are free to do this is significantly higher than the number of people who actually do it.
I remember doing that but it was a shit. We didn't have mobile phones back then as a side channel so the outcome was basically designing a manual protocol in case of failure. This consisted of stuff like assigning who was responsible for calling who when it dropped and what to do when someone else in the house picked up a phone.
http://jarvis.co
yeah, if we had known about all those ideas, we wouldn't have bothered with pplrep. There was another similar idea called "honestly" or something. Our YC application, it wasn't even serious and they asked us to make a video last minute yesterday cause we never bothered with a video. I made one in my dark apartment on the spot. Honestly, if pplrep was actually working out and we had impressive user growth, we'd never apply to YC because $11,000 or what have you for 7% is not something I'd be interested in.
EF Tools Now Open Source
Those people claiming ISRO does it at a shoe string budget, because they reuse yes they do. But we are talking of a factor of more 10 here.

Let me put facts on ground. Go and visit any ISRO campus in India. See the kind of offices they work in, they kind of food canteens they eat lunch at, they kind of buses they travel in and take a look at how much they are paid. I assure you will be shocked. In fact shocked will be a mild statement to make. These people work on ordinary steel tables, with fans over their heads. Eat the 15 rupee rice-curry meal and travel in 20 year old buses. Well forget all that. Take a look at pictures of ISRO available over the internet, they look like to be taken in some one's garage than a space research organization.

Your average MacOS/iOS app development start up has better working conditions and infrastructure than any ISRO office in India. I'm not talking just about the work place infrastructure. Even the working gear, stuff like computers etc.

For the salaries and the net compensation ISRO offers no ambitious well qualified youth in India would be willing to work there- I'm even surprised they have even gotten this far. Note, you are comparing a salary for something like 20K per month with a salary of something like 100K a month Google offers. You get peanuts for building the most important pieces of technology in the history of mankind, compared to building websites for sharing cat pictures.

This is working on shoe string budgets to its very extreme. I hope these people get better funding in the future.

And yeah for those people too worked up about spending some 100th decimal rounding error of India's budget on a mars project. That is doing far more benefit to India's reputation, than a yet-another-scam-infested scheme.
You guys Rock!
Love the concept! Keep at it :)
clickable link: http://codedose.com
> It's really sad we've forgotten that.

I don't think anyone's forgotten; we forgive small companies for trying-and-failing to do something cool all the time. For some reason, though, we (as an angry mob) seem to be incapable of allowing big companies to try-and-fail at exactly the same sorts of things.

(Personally, I think it might have something to do with how ancestral-environment humans saw leaders making promises as mostly a chance to tear them down from their dominant positions.)
http://tapbeyond.com
http://buyable.me - A wishlist that lets you know when products go on sale
Sorry could you explain how I'm misreading it?

As far as I can tell, all natural gas resources has a percentage of Helium. Since we won't be running out of natural gas anytime soon, we won't be running out of extractable Helium. It just isn't extracted right now because the US is dumping their stockpile. By 2015 this should be done, prices should spike because production was stopped and will take some time to restart, and then it'll go back to "normal".
This is an Great idea man! I would like meet up and get to know more about your project.
Here's live webcast from Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DcSDOkDvyQ
It is a 3rd party arranged video chat between strangers intended to fulfill a specified purpose, involving a payment and reputation system.

How is that different than a skype/FaceTime session? The video interaction part is likely similar. But a mere video chat session is a much more general idea than this specific use of video chat.
Wouldn't poke them with a 20' long stick.

When we spoke to their rep about data security and access in the UK they made no guarantees about our stuff being secure from meddling by their own staff or external agencies. They literally told us that we'd be better off elsewhere and refused to comment further.

we're in a position where we have UK data protection to consider and shipping data out of the EEA is illegal for us. Obviously this is still a problem if someone takes it.

In the end we ended up with a wholly UK owned DC and company.
why the email is "optional"? you should try to get emails instead, and build a mailing list of people interested in your product!
The Psychological Power of Satan
>Today, we’re announcing Helpouts—a new way to get and give help over live video.

I'm confused, hasn't this existed for months? Here is an earlier HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6248771
>> "My initial reaction is "cool, but I won't use it as it'll be shutdown soon enough"."

Why? It's not like you have to invest anything into the service (building a network, creating a profile etc.etc.) and it doesn't seem like a tool that is meant to become part of your workflow (e.g. reader). Also, if Helpouts goes away these 'experts' will still be available somewhere - you could schedule appointments directly.
Sorry, but do you realize that the "designer feedback" in your screenshot is beyond useless?

Feedback should be descriptive, not prescriptive. "Spacing is good" and "this is clear" don't really add much, nor does "header?", especially without the designer's thinking.

I think the price point here doesn't make sense for the type of feedback you're showcasing in the screenshot.

Other than that, could be a cool product if done well. I know designers who, with good guidelines, could do this kind of thing really efficiently and well.
I don't see anything -- it just asks me to log in to Facebook!
Having used rackspace for the past 5 years, I'm happy to see some more performance machines in the cloud.

We have quite a CPU intensive infrastructure so will be benchmarking the new performance servers against themselves to see if it is still cheaper to scale out then scale up.
don't mind it, seems like the future will have this
http://uguru.me - We are a team of technical UC Berkeley students graduating in January. We have a couple of funding options but our first choice was YC.

Read more about it here: http://uguru.me/about
Is there a source on the statement that Knuth worked as a consultant for MS Office?
For me, the common sense rule would be: let people contract however they want. Let them talk out or complain/negative-review/sue for any actual abuses that develop.

First of all, NYC landlord-tenant law is so far past the "let people contract however they want" phase that it would be laughable to let AirBnB operate under these rules. Nearly 50% of the apartments in New York are rent-stabilized, meaning that the tenants can't be evicted except for non-payment of rent, and are guaranteed a below-market-rate rent with government-dictated annual increases. It's ridiculously unfair to landlords to allow rent-stabilized tenants to re-rent their apartments at market rate and pocket the difference.

Second, have you ever actually tried to sue someone? It's incredibly difficult, time-consuming and expensive.

Third, there's the issue of moral hazard. A renter whose AirBnB tenant burns down the building is unlikely to have the resources to pay for the damages to the property of the landlord or the other tenants (and is unlikely to even have insurance to cover those costs). Upside always looks better when you know you'll be able to walk away from the downside.
Hi Jesse,

We're looking to develop a few game like elements into our interactive grammar site, Quill.org. Please check it out and let me know if you'd be interested in contributing. We're an open source project as well. https://github.com/empirical-org/quill
If you think it's interesting, better go ahead and use it now then. Otherwise, if it's canceled, you'll never even know if you would have been missing it.
Ask HN: Has anyone done YC Startups selection / rejection profile analysis? 
If I can get some data, I would like to do the analysis on pin pointing parameters that helps you get in YC and what are surely a NO-NO. And my hypothesis is that 80% of decisions are based on objective parameters.
congrats bro!
Personally, I'd love to use this if it can provide context to my photos. No one gets context right. Couple that with discovery and you have a winning proposition.

I don't think the rejection has anything to do with the product itself. I reckon they got a lot of applications this year they wanted to fund that drowned out a lot of the other applications (such as mine, to ally different story though:)).
Tech employers don't care about cheap. They would gladly spend all the shareholder's money, and it is prestigious to o so. Without agency to dole out some else's money and human behavior to motivate it, no one would make a dime. The CEO at my company freely admits that the location is a status and image thing. They do need total control, so much that they would rather import a visa slave than hire someone who can leave at any time.
R.I.P. Mrs. Krabappel
You just caught us with our pants down :-) Someone's working on the site (launching beta this week ;)).
It's still needed from time to time. Sometimes even when there's poorly-ported Unix software that hates being installed in a path with spaces.
Adding parameters to commands is something I've got planned for a future release, just need to figure out an elegant way to do that.

Have you updated to the latest version of Chrome? I have never run into the problem you're describing.
Live broadcast of ISRO's mars orbiter launch
None of that messy actually interacting with a human being in person eh?
Some games can be really stressful though - real time strategy games for my part. But I prefer games that are more explorative and adventourus, like RPGs.
Live youtube broadcast here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DcSDOkDvyQ
Thanks. We are working on an API version of it. http://blog.sekai.io/ Right now we are just making a text->action API so developers can use it to control internet of things, later we are going to integrate voice api if there is a strong need.
That's interesting. So far as I know, the only documentation of the RAR compression algorithm is the official UnRAR tool¹, which (among other things) restricts you from using it to create a RAR-writer. There's also the GPL'd "unrar" based on UnRAR 2 (which doesn't handle modern RAR 3.x archives), and the GPL'd "unar"². Given that this is under the MIT licence, it can't be derived from any of those other tool, so I guess it must be a from-scratch reimplementation.

Well done!

¹: http://www.rarlab.com/rar/unrarsrc-5.0.12.tar.gz
²: http://unarchiver.c3.cx/commandline
It is optional for students, required for teachers. Our focus is on 6th-8th grade, and students at that age often don't have school emails.