skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you think about it, this is actually totally useless. It is much easier to just generate a puzzle on the fly

Serious Sudoku players tend to scorn machine-generated puzzles and regard those build by Sudoku masters as superior. See for example http://www.nikoli.co.jp/en/puzzles/sudoku/hand_made_sudoku.h...

I believe similar arguments are made by crossword fans, though it is easier to understand why in that case.

So I can see the motivation for the application, at least.
Most of the value in YC comes from meeting interesting (read: influential) people, learning a thing or two, and, seeing how important it is to know people to get a job, networking - surely it can't hurt to know people if you're running your own business, I'd even go as far and say it's more important than if you were just on the lookout for a regular job.

It's not really about the money.
+1 - Demo or screencast with 1 click with dummy data.

Note: I know how hard this is and RescueTime should do this too (we're working on it).
This has been covered before, but maybe you didn't see it: YC is about the advice, not the money. And originally it was targeted at college kids, for whom the restrictions aren't that restrictive.
Promises for JavaScript
I've implemented an easily portable library on top of MooTools for writing arbitrarily nested AJAX requests without requiring callbacks of any kind. Long story short, Promises can be composed, AJAX requests cannot.

Instead of:

var result = '';
get('a', function(response) {
result += JSON.decode(response).data;
get('b', function(response) {
result += JSON.decode(response).data;
get('c', function(response) {
result += JSON.decode(response).data;
get('d', function(response) {
result += JSON.decode(response).data;
get('e', function(response) {
result += JSON.decode(response).data;
get('f', function(response) {
result += JSON.decode(response).data;
console.log(result);
});
});
});
});
});
});

You can write:

function example()
{
var resources = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'];
var result = "";
while(resource = resources.shift())
{
result = add(result, get(resource));
}
show(result); // -> abcdef
}

This is completely asynchronous. Notice that there are no callbacks. You write code with Promises as you would write regular JavaScript instead of the atrocity that is the AJAX request ;)
Engine Yard Contest: Starting at an interesting place.
Camtweet is TwitPic meets live video (from Justin.tv)
We built this in about 3 days of work on top of the Justin.tv platform, I'd be curious to hear what the HN community thinks about it. I've set up an invite code so you all can try it out.
Wait, wait... so you're saying that all we have to do to make ourselves live longer as a species, is to not let anyone procreate until they hit whatever that generation considers "old age"? Interesting; I'm surprised this has never been a part of any sci-fi description of a utopia...
Launch Wars: Twitcam Beats CamTweet To Live Video Tweets
Using Lottery Effect to Make People Save
Current: Zen and the Brain

Previous: Gödel, Escher, Bach (still working on that one, actually)
How about someone who needs guidance more than money. Like, someone who is currently employed and wants to do something on the side till it makes sense to go solo and maybe would need funding at that point.
Would YC be interested/willing to consider this model and engage with such founder(s) to help review ideas, business models etc.?
hi. disclosure: I work for Mozilla.

What do you dislike about it?
Such as? I'd usually use "deprecated" to imply what you think "obsolete" implies; "obsolete" simply means that there's something newer intended to replace the older one.
It works for companies, doesn't it? I think you're putting too much stock (no pun intended) in the "democratic" aspect of the idea. I could see it working much better as a way of expressing support and vaguely influencing direction. The stakeholders don't need to make every decision for the design team. That's why there is a design team.
Would be a good model for some television series, too—if budgets could be reasonably estimated and controlled.
We made a leaderboard with the best recent submissions, in case anyone is interested: http://shacontest.doloreslabs.com/leaderboard.txt
I'm sure the standards are the same though.
(The tweets I'm sending to contesttracker have the hamming
distance at the front.)
Arch (and its father, Gentoo)

Say no more. I didn't know Arch was the bastard child of the abomination that is Gentoo. Best of luck with that.
Some of the other languages have capabilities that Lisp doesn't, and while some argue that one can theoretically graft anything onto Lisp via macros, there's something to be said for having them planned as part of the language. Really diving into another functional language (I'd suggest OCaml or Erlang) will influence your programming just as much as learning Scheme has, whichever you use more in the long run. OCaml will get you thinking about when static typing is a useful tool, and Erlang has a refreshingly sensible take on concurrency.

The people who designed those languages weren't ignorant of Lisp, by the way. For example, ML (i.e., SML and OCaml) was originally designed because Lisp's dynamic typing kept leading to subtle errors in an automated theorem prover, IIRC. The influence of Lisp on Haskell and Erlang is also pretty obvious, particularly in the terminology. Lisp is not the end of programming language evolution -- Scheme is just one of the most concise designs so far.
It has worked for the United States as well.
yeah, but then you need orders of magnitude more data for building the dictionary which is orders of magnitude larger :)
As the article points out "live tv is hard". I have a difficult time seeing this work in it's current form because of that. It's just not very interesting to watch other people on cam unless they're doing something trly extraordinary. Porn is the exception of course.

A startup that somehow crowd-sources videomixing of the best stuff and airs that might work.
If Vista Can't Run on a Netbook, Will Windows 7?
Agree, but it depends on what you mean by "idea guy." Is this guy going to make sure that the lights stay on? Is he going to market the company, make the sales calls?

If he just came up with the idea, I would give him a few percentage points and say "thanks." If he is going to be the mastermind behind the execution and the driving force of the company, then I think he is tremendously more valuable, and his equity stake should reflect that.
Greece 92.95%
Cyprus 3.36%
Germany 0.80%
United Kingdom 0.62%
United States 0.38%
Netherlands 0.23%
France 0.19%
Italy 0.19%
Sweden 0.13%
Belgium 0.12%
I rely on my desktop more than I rely on any given server

Sure, we probably all stare at our desktop machines for hours a day, and only poke at our servers for a few minutes each day. But, an hour-long outage of my primary server will effect hundreds or thousands of people. An hour-long outage of my desktop will effect only one guy. I'll spit and sputter and curse a lot, but it probably won't cost me business or customer good will.

That said, everytime something breaks on my desktop machine running Fedora, I think "Hmmm...maybe I should be running CentOS here."
thats why you hedge your bets by buying options
Simplest kind of xss at google? or is it just me...?
Try out Camtweet, leave your feedback:

http://www.camtweet.com/account/login_with_invite_code?invit...

Invite code just for you, Hacker News.
Interesting interview with Allan Klumpp (one of the programmers)

http://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=ApolloComputer
Arch is not derived from Gentoo. I don't know what that guy was smoking when he said that.
So why block them? Why not a message: "This site probably doesn't work in Opera, but feel free to try."?
I'll probably be blasted for this, but I don't believe using democratic principles in a company is a good idea. You need someone with a view of what needs to be done and then you distribute out the work.
A big part of learning to write well is just doing a lot of it. For me it came in two parts:

- A history of long mails with my best friend (literally totaling several thousand pages)

- Blogging – and not the boring vanilla blogging, but actually building up essays

Being able to write well is really an ace in the hole. I mean, think about it – we know who people like Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham are because of their writing, not because of their software. The software just lends them some credibility when they decide to write about it.
I realized after I wrote that about twenty reasons why it's a bad idea. But I think some sort of Q&A could be invaluable, especially given the brevity the answers have to conform to and that knowing the right words is something that comes after a lot of baking with the idea. Without it, preference goes to ideas that can be conveyed clearly and simply at the expense of more complex ones.

Would it be possible for the applicant to chose those HN users and YC alumni who have requested to view it? (With full comment threads and voting.)
how that has worked for you?
Why don't you have a native iPhone app?
Weaver -- further automation for django deployment
It's also easy to lose sight of the fact that the first moon landing was not the first mission shot into space. It was the end result of 12 Gemini missions and 10 previous Apollo missions. That's a lot of spacecraft to build and shoot into space beforehand.
The Greening of the Astronauts (1972)
How to Use Social Media to Pick a College
And the Debian people make sure that the backporting goes smoothly.

I used to run arch. Forget to update for a few weeks, and you could almost guarantee a broken system when you tried. It was even worse with Gentoo.
I don't understand this approach to criticism. You are saying that the cost/benefit equation doesn't makes sense. OK. This has been discussed before and you can expect get the same responses you have heard before and found unconvincing. If you do not think that doing these things (full time startup, moving, taking investment, etc.) are a good idea generally, it can easily follow that YC is a bad idea.

Then you seem to take this in a silly direction. You imply that everyone else (or at least most other competent people) will agree with you. That is evidently not true. People apply. Out of those, some are competent and ultimately successful. Obviously the cost/benefit equation made sense to them.
I agree. However, that's the point. Completely barring Opera means they're certain they won't receive any support requests from people using Opera. Doing otherwise means opening their support apparatus to people using Opera, who might find all sorts of things wrong with the software and not realize it's because the software isn't tested with it.

Of course, given the small number of people using Opera, the question is whether there would really be much of a burden on their resources.
Arch is related to Gentoo in that both offer rolling updates and try to keep you on the bleeding edge. They differ in that Gentoo is a primarily source-based system with binary packages bolted on and Arch is a primarily binary-based system with source bolted on (admittedly, Arch has better source support than Gentoo has binary).

Arch also compiles it's packages for i686, to appease the gentoo-ricers.

Their goals are similar, so you could argue that Gentoo inspired arch, but they are unrelated.
It's really not that unusual. There's a lot of machinery that can kill people and it's all run by software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase
Because sometimes it wasn't immediately obvious that something was broken without looking at the error console. This was a business app and if, for example, a form widget failed to work properly it could result in silent data loss which wouldn't get noticed for a while.
" ...or the actual flesh-and-blood hairless apes who are dozing off in the seminar room while you speak."

Wow. I can understand wanting to keep the audience attentive, but the solution might be, "Don't be boring", rather than "Put on a circus act."

Most audiences want the talk and the speaker to succeed, and give them the benefit of the doubt. A good way to lose a crowd is to waste time with off-topic jokes, visual gimmicks, and show-bizzy patter.
The original Lunar Lander.
The "non-computer" wording is still confusing.

That seems to exclude hacks to computerized systems such as "Profited from eTrade being slow to patch the mutual fund market timing loopholes" or "Flipped laptops on eBay when lots of people used to spell it labtop."
Thanks for the input. The idea guy had the idea and has done some basic research, he has no tech background. I am putting together the tech infrastructure, got the dev, did the research etc. Though because the idea guy is a friend.

I agree that the dev needs to feel that he is going to get something out of it and rightfully so.

Thanks for taking the time to give me some help on this!
well, kinda
That's an interesting definition of a pure business person.
Also worth checking out his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...
I read Multireal, which is the follow up to Infoquake. They deal with a startup producing software that runs inside people, executed by tiny nanobots. The books explore startup culture.
~2750/second on Chrome, same machine, after a while with lots of tabs. (Starts at around 3400/sec with one tab).
Javascript is now strategic for Microsoft
Try using your phone to listen to music on headphones while charging it :)
Did this really work when you tried it? Seems to have been fixed if it did.
You said she's really attractive ... not that she's going to be the person you spend the rest of your life with. Why don't you slow down ... boot-strap your relationship with her with whatever time you've got available ... and see where it (and your startup) both take you. With any luck ... one or the other will take you somewhere. My guess is, once you're there, you'll know which one deserves more of your attention.
FTFA:

"What if marijuana is legalized? No one can say for certain. Using one country’s reform example to estimate what would happen in another is very risky. How countries differ (cultural, social, political, economic) makes a big difference."

"However, the Dutch “coffee shops” example might give us a little insight. The de facto legalization policy in the Netherlands did not, in itself, affect rates of marijuana use among adults or young people. But rates of use among young people increased when the number of coffee shops increased and the age of legal access was 16. Then these rates declined when the numbers of coffee shops was reduced and the age of legal access became 18."

Interesting that no mention of addiction stats are given, just usage.
What does an iteration mean? I can do about 2million shas/process with just the cpu. I think CUDA is much faster.
Success in crowdsourcing project financing
I would be interested hearing about the cost/benefit analysis from YC funded groups after they have been funded and/or moved on.

The only way to move beyond subjective and hypothetical judgements like we're making is (obviously) to measure tangible success. Just like how various scientific fields are painfully aware of 'survivor bias' and maintain journals devoted solely to the topic.
The latest from the LHC
When I was in school here in Canada, we were told the story of the Therac-25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25). Sadly, we're still dealing with some of the problems that plagued the Therac-25 (e.g., poor error messages, arithmetic overflows, simply assuming that software will run the same on compatible hardware, race conditions, etc.) Sometimes I read workarounds to CPU and other hardware errata in kernel modules/drivers. Given the sort of obscure problems mentioned in that code, I for one would not want to put my John Doe on any sort of certification like this. My hat's off to the guy.
Last: The C Programming Language - Kernighan & Ritchie

Current: The Effective Executive - Peter Drucker
It's not really - do anything in avionics or health care and you have to follow similar procedures.

The mistake is to believe that making planes fly through the air and making 140-character text messages fly through the net are the same problem, or thinking that one is "real" engineering and the other is not. I would not want your average Rails developer writing the code that keeps my flight flying. I also would not want your average avionics software developer writing consumer web software.
It's really not even inspired by Gentoo. Judd was always quite clear that Arch started it's life as Crux with a more automated package manager. The ancestry still shows in the BSD style init, the use of tar.gz as the package format, and the almost identical package build syntax.

The only reason people keep mentioning Gentoo around Arch is because Arch is occasionally concerned with speed and they're both seen as nerd distros.
You could make the button unclickable for a quarter-second after the page stops loading.
It implies that the older item is comparatively useless -- i.e. completely outclassed.
"The problem with that is, like much Eastern spiritual thought, it doesn't scale. Sure, we could all be Zen practitioners, but we'd have no fast computers, cool phones, or footprints on the Moon to show for it."

I think what Buddhism preaches is more along the lines of functional minimalism rather that forgoing material production altogether. The idea is to develop a clear mind that can better distinguish between the means and the ends in everyday decision-making.
I like where this is going. If anyone interested in education and the learning process, I highly recommend the work of Alfie Kohn, a philosopher of education, (his work isn't formal and stuffy, it's quite accessible but I don't know what else to call him) particularly a collection of essays titled "What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated?" He deals with a wide variety of topics, and is critical of practices like standardized tests, homework, and negative as well as positive reinforcement. The mental clarity I feel after reading his work is similar to what I feel after reading one of PG's essays.
It's coded in a really interest dialect. Completely unreadable to me, at least.

I wonder what the Shuttle source looks like. I'd imagine its in a higher level language (C?), and that it's likely been rewritten several times since the 70s. It's amazing to me that people wrote this.
Sorry, I had a major typo. I meant to say: "But this one was NOT insulting."
Sort of odd to write this post in English, submit it to Hacker News, but only mention in paragraph 9 that this program is only for Spanish speakers who can come to Madrid for 6 weeks.
It is likely not in the economic interest of these groups to say anything negative about YC, even if they have moved on.
TC	BANKCALL	# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE

I laughed quite a bit at that :)
How is it that you'd had an account here for 179 days, a small bit of karma accumulated, and yet it seems that this is your first exposure to the concept of YC and the sorts of folks who are attracted to this particular startup launch path?
Nice reference to have around but, when I started using emacs, going through the help and writing up my own cheat sheet from it was one of the most useful things that I did!
What you're doing there is not a contract, it's an invitation to bargain (aka invitation to treat). You make an offer, the counterparty can accept, reject, or negotiate, and once you have reached mutually agreeable terms you conduct an exchange and your business is over. There may be an implied contract (eg that the pond has not since dried up) but not necessarily.

A contract, on the other hand, is a forward looking document. It's based on the idea that you'll reach an agreement and something of value will be exchanged to seal the deal (which is why you hear of contracts for $1), but that the exchange will be incomplete until some time later.

For example, if you buy a concert ticket, your transaction with the vendor ends as soon as you receive the ticket, but the ticket itself is (typically) a kind of contract between the holder and the promoter, who promises to stage the event and provide admission to all ticket holders or refund the face value.
I can't think of a single good thing to say about a service that produces low-quality, boring video and spams automated tweets into the ether, but Twitcam's design is kinda nice to look at!

If Twitcam "wins" doesn't that mean JTV really wins, since they'll lose the least amount of money on bandwidth in the long run?
Why not use super-high-altitude balloons for near-space tourism?
IPhone 4G, Google Wave, Google Voice; Collaboration Transformed
It probably works better for niche projects where the participants are well-informed and can agree on most of the decisions, rather than watered-down mass market projects that try to please everyone.

Same reason democracy works better in small countries with highly educated population.
I've had some good, some bad experiences with pair programming.

The best experiences were when both of us were learning a new API and type of program. That's the sort of thing where you are likely to make lots of small mistakes, and it's a lot less frustrating when you have someone else to help catch them.

The worst experiences were when the programs were relatively easy, and there was just a lot of stuff to be done. The person watching gets bored, and the person coding gets distracted.

I feel like if one person is confident they can bang something out, just do that. If it's the sort of annoying programming neither of you want to do, it helps to pair. Hard to have general rules though for such a personality-dependent activity.
I think Mr. Gruber has a very good point when it comes to general news sites, but several specialized sites do quite nicely with at least limited pay walls. http://sqlmag.com/ comes to mind. Other sites take a "freemium" approach quite successfully such as http://www.arstechnica.com .
YC for us was much more about the connections than the money. It makes getting in the door a lot of places much easier, VCs/Angels are big on referrals and YC is kind of an insta-referral to anyone you want to talk to.

The value of YC also depends largely on what kind of company you want to start. If you're looking to start a small shop making $500k-$2M (max) a year in revenue with 2-3 people than YC probably isn't for you because that type of business is not venture fundable and thus the venture connections that YC can get you aren't really worth much. However, if you're looking at something that has the potential to be VC backed scale ($10M/yr+ at some point in the future) then the introductions and connections are necessary and the value of YC is clear.

Also, I would add that I think the YC alumni network has become one of the most valuable parts of YC. There are enough alums now that basically someone has had experience with what you are going through and can offer good advice, imho that is the hardest thing about YC to duplicate.
Ask HN: Which do we have more to fear from: 4Chan or AutoAdmit?
Assume one or the other decided to attack us. Who do you think we'd have more to fear from, 4chan or Xoxohth?
Ask HN: Which do we have more to fear from: 4Chan or AutoAdmit?
Suppose one board or the other decided to attack us. Who would we have more to fear from: 4Chan or Xoxohth?
C-x 4 and C-x 5 are messed up imo
Yahoo Finally Rolls Out New Home Page to the Masses–and, Drum Roll, It’s Good
Autoadmit has a lot more talent and ingenuity, whereas 4chan has a lot more force. However, board invasions have gone out of style on AA.

I'd be really scared if Autoadmit became the officers and 4chan the foot soldiers. ("General Whokebe, reporting for duty.")
Totally did, find it hard to believe myself. Probably some local issue.. screens at http://webting.no/gscreen/
OT: was this that crazy dorm at Cornell?
4chan is scarier. Autoadmit just trolls itself these days. They're all like 30. Even the Great One turned 26 recently.