skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has YC made a solid argument for zero feedback policy?
"Unfortunately we can't give you individual feedback about your
application. This page explains why:"

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

I have read and understand the reasons stated for not being able to offer feedback, and I understand that YC owes nothing to applicants. However, the explanation offered does not fully support the claim that it can't provide feedback to applicants.

The reason boils down to "there often is no reason". Which implies that sometimes there is a reason.

Similarly: "From that cutoff down to about the halfway point, the applications are pretty good." Which implies that fully half of applications are not that good, presumably for reasons which could be easily identified.

Feedback options remaining which wouldn't be precluded by the reasons stated include:
1. Your group was/was not in the "pretty good" top 50% of applications
2. Your group was rejected mainly because of ABC (or there was no clear reason/weakness, if that is the case)

I of course acknowledge it is the prerogative of YC to withhold feedback for any reasons they choose, and they have no obligation to share that publicly. But if they choose to make those reasons public, it is reasonable to expect them to contain sound logic.

We appreciate that the YC team is very busy. It seems that they have already done the heavy lifting of evaluating applicants, but perhaps distilling that into feedback would be a substantial effort. I can't make the judgement of whether it is in their best interest to give feedback when possible, but I suspect I am not alone in believing that any feedback would be beneficial and much appreciated. Unless there are reasons not stated, I hope YC will reconsider offering some form of feedback when possible.
It's a useful compromise for the OS to make, but does not belong in CSS. If I'm running on a non-native resolution, I expect the image containers to scale on websites to fit the images, which they won't if the browser overrides my 1.4 pixel pixels.

Whatever did happen to screen pixels, anyway? Did non-native resolutions die with CRT screens? It's nice to have a unit for 0.27 mm-ish, but I'd really have more use for a pixel.
Application Intros, might be useful. https://www.youtube.com/results?filters=month&search_query=y...
I'm sorry, how can you check easy passwords with bcrypt? Hell, checking just one password per account, assuming bcrypt takes around half a second (what most reasonable implementations take) would take two years. If you want to check the 100 most common passwords for everyone, that's 200 years right there.
Really like the editor of the penflip.
Amazon Developer Select - Optimize your apps for Appstore and FireOS
That wheel still works with basic built-in drivers under Windows 7 for me, Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback Wheel USB was built rock solid.
Even unused code arguably adds to the overall complexity. But maybe that's what he meant, yeah.
Beware of the Google Blacklist
They forgot to mention cereal encoding rings.
That's $480 per month. That might be competitive against AWS, but a 16gb Linode is $320 and 16gb Digital Ocean is only $160. Why would I want to pay so much more for Rackspace's? Or is this only for people who don't know that services other than AWS exist?
But you don't get all the benefits :( For example, Xubuntu (IIRC) won't even have a Wifi widget for setting up your network. If you mount a pendrive, how do you access? You have to open a a file explorer or you won't see it... etc.
"Simple" and "easy" mean two very different things [1].

[1] http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/11/11/simple-versus-easy/
ISRO has commercial wing called Antrix corporation. Just search for the scientists and top officers involved in the scam exposed in 2011. The given link is from The Hindu, most reputed daily in India.
Anything with a good consistent rhythm and beat is good for me. I particularly find that (surprisingly!) liquid Drum & Bass helps get you in 'the zone' of concentration.
Introducing C++ 11 through game development on the RaspberryPi
Every single time India does something in Space, the bigots come out from the woodwork: but India is so poor! Let them solve poverty/hunger/education/water/toilets/ice-cream first, and then worry about space.

When JFK pledged to put a man on the moon in 1961, the US did not even have the Civil Rights Act[1]. Millions of blacks lived in poverty, and were denied basic rights. Schools were segregated. In large areas of the South, blacks were denied the right to vote. There were lynchings. People were being killed just for demanding the right to vote. And Vietnam War was picking up steam.

And you know what? The US still said that getting a man on the moon amidst all this was a worthwhile goal.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
I can't remember where I saw it before but ever since then any instance grates on me: describing your product in terms of other product.
- GitHub for writers
- Facebook for Pearl Divers
- LinkedIn for Horse Whisperers
- Twitter for Ornithologists

Merits of the idea aside it really turns me off, smacks of a lack of creativity, a lazy route to explaining your product benefits.

Very superficial I know, it may be just me.
Yeah, Reader was closed just eight years after it launched. I didn't even had time to import all my feeds.

The issue is how easily these services can be closed, not how long they last, in fact if they last longer it's worse for the users involved if they are suddenly shut down. Now free services for life doesn't seem like such a good deal, because the terms are that they owe you nothing and life may equal 2 months, 1 year or 10, it's impossible to know.

I didn't use Reader or participate in the Reader drama and feel it's a bit over-egged, but there is certainly a reputational cost to closing mainstream services or modifying them without consulting those who use them as Apple, FB, MS, Google, Twitter et al do regularly. This doesn't really apply if you have 10 users, but if you have 10 million and an ecosystem it can become important.

Building on top of these platforms like FB or G+ is in my opinion very risk for other businesses, so depending on something like helpouts is a huge risk for the people who might use it to actually sell/provide services and build a reputation, but very little short-term risk for Google.
Belgian Lab Brews New Chip Recipe
You may think that you're blowing peoples' minds with that "you're the product" line - but if you're literally selling your skills then that is the whole point - it's a positive!
This is the public release.
> Why do you think there was no YC interview? Any retrospection?

Video was too long, automatic rejection.

I'm kidding, who knows. I'm thinking a big part of it was probably due to being a single founder, but there are likely other reasons.
I find it ridiculous too. Just take it as a cute HN excentricity.
You should consider http://coinmd.org then. They're cheaper and seem to give really good advice so far. It's anonymous for doctors though, so of course, there's a risk in that. However, I read through their faq and find their policy of selecting and working with doctors quite convincing.
What the bloody hell does Modi have to do with this? Modibots now want to steal the limelight from the scientists of ISRO. Disgraceful!
This is actually recommended by YC:

"One good trick for describing a project concisely is to explain it as a variant of something the audience already knows. It's like Wikipedia, but within an organization. It's like an answering service, but for email. It's eBay for jobs. This form of description is wonderfully efficient. Don't worry that it will make your idea seem "derivative." Some of the best ideas in history began by sticking together two existing ideas no one realized could be combined."

http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
Cachmachine
I used Rackspace back in 2000 for my first startup after our existing hosting solution could not take the load.

This was a huge mistake!

Rackspace canceled our contract without warning and without the ability to get our data. Their customer care was extremely rude and completely incompetent. I will never ever host anything again with Rackspace.

Luckily we had external backups and were able to purchase our own hardware and install it in a local Boston data center.
Rethinking organisatoins: Hat-tips from open source and decentralization.
The answer is, they are, but we have aging airframes that need to be replaced now. That is basically the F22/F35 right now. The F15/16/18's won't last forever, and most early block number airframes won't survive the transition to drones.

This is really no different than past fighter replacements. Like the F80->F86->F104->F4 etc... (i'm intentionally skipping planes). Actually the F4 is a great example of where the accepted "future of air combat" was proven wrong. As it turns out missiles weren't the best idea for the only armament on an aircraft. Drones may end up in the same category and we still want manned fighters, we might not yet want to go whole hog into as yet unproven territory.
While I'm by no means a fan of the US health care system, it seems pretty wasteful for high-value doctors to be wasting their precious time travelling to see patients.

Perhaps videoconferencing could be a good option for simple cases (viagra, sleeping pills) while a medical pick-up system could be instituted for patients requiring in-person consultations, but lacking mobility or the urgency required for an ambulance.
I'd guess that airbnb is pretty heavily invested in not getting the cops called to any of these clearly-professional places in New York right now. Have you tried doing the whole executive email bomb requesting a refund for yourself/anyone else you can get together with there?

Edit: and if that doesn't work, you should absolutely report the landlord to all relevant authorities when you leave, probably including the NY attorney general currently chasing airbnb.
The Who, What and Why of Big Data - Infographic
Ask HN: Letter for visa for YC interview
The good news is that we got selected for the YC interview, the question is - will they issue an invitation letter for visa/immigration formalities? We would be coming over from India.
Right. Its similar to the distinction between installing Xen yourself on a dedicated server versus using a VPS provider.

I am actually working on a service where you can easily deploy VPSs that have Docker installed on them with a control panel for conveniently managing the containers. I can then have features like a menu option to move containers between VMs and automatically creating DNS and proxy configuration for container-based virtual hosting. I.e. you click a button on the container and just type in the sub domain or domain name next to the public port exposed by Docker and then that gets automatically set up so you can access that service on that container through a domain name.
100 bits of entropy takes around 10^26 seconds to crack [1]

Even if you somehow managed to get a botnet of 100 million machines, it would still take longer than the age of the universe to brute force it.

Security of 3DES is effectively 112 bits [2] if random keys are used. Although as I said, this is assuming adobe weren't completely stupid (and reused one or more of the keys, or used non-random keys)

[1] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/209/zxcvbn/test/index.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES
I don't think that would work. Bitcoin miners only need a small header (the root of a hash tree, essentially) in order to mine, but you need the full contents of the block in order for it to be broadcast into the honest network.
SEEKING FREELANCER - Berlin area preferred, remote is okay

JAVASCRIPT DEVELOPER: We're a Berlin-based online advertising company seeking a skilled Javascript dev. Specifically, we're looking for someone to help us build a challenging project using a modern web development stack (ExtJS, Laravel/PHP, AWS, Git)

EXT JS 4: Experience with the Ext JS 4 MVC framework is a big plus.

Contact: echo bmFiaWxhQHJlZHBpbmVhcHBsZW1lZGlhLmNvbQo= | base64 -d
How original. A comment mentioning reader and wave on a new Google product announcement thread. Can we move on already? Innovating companies try and fail a lot, like any startups.
I agree that this is pretty silly, but to those asking about ie 11, it doesn't detect ie 10 or 11 as "IE"

MSIE ([0-9]{1,}[.0-9]{0,}
CV Dazzle: Camouflage from face detection
> [ http://www.lorenburton.com/ ]
> [...] I posted the site to HN and dropped a "share on twitter" button on
> the bottom of the page, racking up tens of thousands of hits and hundreds
> of tweets. I was in touch with Joe Gebbia (thanks pg!!) within hours, who
> expedited the interview process, and I flew to SF the next morning. Though
> I didn't get the job [...]

Wait, what?! You made http://www.lorenburton.com ... and then didn't get a job at AirBNB? Goodness gracious. The job was for some frontend stuff, right? You seem pretty good at making frontend stuff, I can't imagine why you didn't get it.
Everyone has rituals. Read them here: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/space-mission-supe...
> or SHA-2

Nice try, General Alexander.
Thanks! They were drawn in Adobe Illustrator.
Thank you! I'd think India has one of the most diverse range of cuisines in the world, much of which is lip-smacking good!
I would be very skeptical of statins. An actual MD who disagrees with you: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/statins/statins-everyone-...
I have a solid history of failing remarkably. Good lessons learned, though.

To be honest I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was completely unprepared and under qualified, and it was my first job interview ever. I bombed it.
Antrix is ISRO's commercial arm. The engineers who work for ISRO have no connect with it.
They have deprecation policies in at least some cases. They may not be unconditional guarantees but they're still just risk factors to be evaluated individually. I have no problem with the risk averse avoiding any services for their own reasons but it's gone beyond that in many cases here on HN to pure FUD. In any case, you've taken that clause out of context.
^^ What he said! +1
Most of it burns twice ;)
Do you have a link with more information on how to go about getting this done?
Steve Jobs explained Customer Development pretty well
Is that Steve Ballmer?!
They say in their question and answers that they don't help with visas...

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

Also, congrats on the interview!
This campaign is 3 years late.
I know what he means about teaching - I do a lot of systems (embedded) stuff, and love (well written) C++, but the course I did on it at Uni was awful. If that had been my only exposure to C++, I never would have wanted to touch it again!
Personal thoughts (trying to channel pg with a huge stack of applications to get through - I imagine the guy who first applied Naive Bayes to email spam being quite comfortable making snap decisions over small variables):

This guy seems smart, but not outstanding. Idea is decent but not amazingly novel. I feel like I've met both this guy and this idea 100 times before.

Solo founder without an amazingly impressive background. The t-shirt website is really cool - but sadly these days it's not that novel an achievement. "the t-shirt that I was selling didn't even exist until weeks later" - come on, everybody here's read the Lean Startup/4HWW. Again for the "AirBnB' feat - he wasn't the first person to do something like this.

Again, this isn't a reason to say 'no' - he's clearly smarter and more entrepreneurial than 95% of the population - but as a solo founder he needs more than that, he needs a strong reason to say "yes".

Onto the idea itself. His early traction is pretty impressive - I wasn't sure if writers would be interested in a tool like this. My main questions are a) how do you balance power and usability for users who might find version control hard to understand and b) is there a significant reachable market of people who would pay for this? Lots of little competitors suggests that this is an idea many people have had but not necessarily with a significant market.

For YC it makes sense to reject, for loren, the most interesting card in your hand right now is the feedback from publishers who face this problem and don't have a good solution - worth focusing on them and building an MVP for their needs (if you're not already). It might help to partner up with a biz dev guy who has experience in that industry who could help hack around the slow procurement processes that are likely common in that industry. See if you can get some smallish publishing house on board as a demo user.

I note that an existing YC startup "Kivo" is also doing "Git for the masses" though they're in a more lucrative space (Powerpoint).
Science is Awesome, Science is Broken — I.M.H.O.
Those added features make for simpler code - I mean, almost anything that does string handling or requires dynamic arrays is way easier to do in C++.
UK's aid is more to massage UK's ego and keep your british raj hangover going than to help India. A rocket launch in 60s and then a nuclear test in 74 should have taught you what importance India gives to this aid. Even our parliamentarians are on record that we don't need it. But well...

Besides, I suspect that except in cases of natural disasters, most aid in general is a not-so-subtle bribe to buy influence. We can see front-pages demonstration of these facts quite often, all you have to do is follow the itinerary of John Kerry.....

As for remittance, I think you have misunderstood the meaning of the word. So let's ignore that part of your outburst.
Obligaciones de los productores de residuos
Thanks! We just need the invitation letter and not help with Visa per se. All of us have worked/lived in the US before so the Visa shouldn't be a problem, just that we need a letter to make a case for the travel.
> it's for the turnaround time on built-to-order machines

Isn't this only true for the US market?

IIRC, the US accounts for about 50% of their sales, so I doubt it would be that.
Religious rituals tend to have a more developed sense of internal consistency, and a framework or at least a rationale that makes several different rituals fit together. Simple good-luck superstitions tend to be more ad-hoc. (All IME)
Another bit of data which is suggestive, but again not exactly the right thing, is consumption data by income bracket:

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt

The actual right data would be consumption+savings by income bracket, but I don't know where to get the savings data.
The game Jia based his 100 Days of Rejection Therapy on is here: http://rejectiontherapy.com
Yeah, very cool. We should at least swap stories at some point.
English is not my first language, and I also find it useful. Maybe it could be worth having a look at other 'segments'( students learning english?)
> 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 think an important bottom-line to this is that using an application you do not own, on a system you do not own, is not like running a program, it's like having a service done for you. Despite the web application misnomer, Google Reader was a service more than it was an application.

So all the other rules that apply to services apply here as well. The commercial entity behind it can simply decide to end it -- just like a restaurant can decide to stop doing deliveries for whatever reason, including the manager simply not wanting to do it anymore.

This isn't a disaster to anyone. It can be quickly turned into a disaster if you start basing your whole business model on it. Like when you decide to start a food delivery business that receives orders for restaurants that don't do home deliveries, but you only take orders for one restaurant and as soon as that closes, you're out.
Design for Continuous Experimentation (why you should avoid infinite scrolling)
That pricing is the "performance 2" group. The "performance 1" group starts at:

$0.04/hr for 1 GB RAM, 20GB SSD system disk, 1 vcpu.

That is about $30/month. More than Digital Ocean but a much cheaper entry point than the prices you listed.
That’s probably due to a known issue in pdf engines improperly handling fonts. Even Adobe’s own InDesign 4’s built-in pdf engine was plagued with that bug. [1]

In the sample pdf, only the regular font gets messed up by affected pdf renderers (pdf.js in FF, …). That font is TeXGyreTermes-Regular, and it’s the only CID (composite) font. In the source, that font was an OpenType font (.otf), which, during pdf-creation, got converted into a CID double-byte font, resulting in messed-up Identity-H encoding. (CID double-byte fonts are really meant for huge Asian charset fonts, only.) Likely, the pdf engine used, wrongly assumes that all Unicode encoded fonts (.otf) contain huge Asian charsets, and thus converts them into CID.

I guess most newer pdf renderers know to handle the issue, while the renderer used in FF e.a. doesn’t. The quick fix, at pdf creation, is to avoid fonts being converted into CID at all.

[1] http://forums.adobe.com/message/1289456
I think outlandish statements are a seen as a technique by powerful people to get their message across. I know a guy who is very successful and he makes wild, speculative remarks and sometimes he is very wrong. It doesn't seem to affect his credibility.
I was about to say you'd fit well in Europe, then I saw you are a Brit.
My comment still holds, if you see what I mean ;)

It's really something cultural I guess but I can only feel the same way as you do.
Snowden is Dead
As tweeted by Russian Internal Minister
Here, I'll help you with that

Sozialpflichtigkeit des Eigentums can be roughly translated as "Social duty of property"

"Eigentum verpflichtet" is more or less "Property committed (to a duty)"
"It's a legal structure that exists to generate profit."

There just might be differences in the behaviour of an organisation that generates (and maximises) profit over the short term and one that generates profit over the long term.

The latter organisation may have to pay more attention to the 'social obligations of ownership' than the former, including the training and skill level of its workforce.
Appreciate the feedback. The challenge seems to be wrapping a revenue model around what amounts to a feature (context). The obvious play is to provide the common utility (backup/storage) which puts me in competition with the big dogs and storage is a bad business when you really get into it.

Originally had planned this as an app but took the idea to a startup weekend competition (we won) and mentors there were pushing me to find a monthly revenue model.

Now that YC has came and gone I may revisit simply building this as an app.
I had a Pentium III with S3 savage, the thing ran anything, I remember being pleasantly surprised when I could play hardware accelerated Need For Speed 4 for example..
Indeed. A simple language leads to complex code. And code complexity is the thing that needs to be avoided, not language complexity. You could write a Turing-complete language with a single instruction, for instance "subtract and branch if negative", and it would probably be the simplest language in the world, but writing anything nontrivial in it would be horribly complicated.
Not everyone can upgrade to IE11 unfortunately. I'm on vista and stuck with IE9 so I don't even bother.