skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got two rejections when on the job hunt: one told me that their policy was to not discuss the reason any candidate was rejected and the other gave me very general reasons that I didn't find helpful (and were probably chosen by the recruiter because they weren't actionable). Even though they weren't very usueful, in neither case did it make anything worse, so I say go for it.
Didn't write the article about startups as a whole, but the seed stage game. I'm sure many similar things do apply.
Very. An anonymous acquaintance of mine was a frequent partaker until he moved to the USA, when he gave it up immediately (penalties in the US are far worse than they are back home). Didn't seem to have any trouble at all, no cravings, no withdrawal, nothing.
It's the same as anything. I got bad grades in college for spending my time contributing to open source projects. Probably more useful than getting high all the time... but just because something can be misused or overdone doesn't mean it should be a crime to use.
Nice to see a mainstream (ish) news outlet include some debunking of moon denialists.
Firefox 3.7 Windows Theme Mockups
If I applied, I would definitely make a video, even if noone looks at. PG has mentioned multiple times that it's statistically helpful. If it comes down to you and some other guy who didn't make a video, I'm sure the extra effort is noticed.

Sounds like a good risk/reward profile for my effort to me.
Just ask a large portion of our parents' generation.
This is an old(ish) essay, but I enjoyed reading it again.

A couple thoughts...

" A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]"

I wish it were a choice between loving my work and an expensive house. Then I could just live in a more modest house and not worry so much about money. The problem is, just living modestly with a family in places like San Francisco, New York, or London takes everything you got and then some. I suppose I don't strictly have to live in SF...

"[3]... Parents move to suburbs to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull and artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced the whole world is boring."

Or worse, they look for trouble to make their lives more exciting. I grew up in SF, and while there was still plenty of risk-seeking behavior (of the bad kind) in high school (inevitably), there was so much that was interesting to get into that other things, like a meth addiction, seemed less interesting. Just anecdotal, but I actually think that moving to a boring suburb won't just convince your kids that the world is safe and boring, it may backfire and give your kids a world that is boring unless they find a way to make it unsafe...
It would be great to see previous successful applications, if they don't mind. (Unsuccessful ones would be interesting too but that might be weird for them.)
I'm not privy to anything, as the only thing I have to do with YC is posting here.

However, I acted as a technical adviser to some investors during the first dotcom boom in the 90s. Even in the face of specific requests, there were a shocking number of people who started their responses clearly intending to go into detail, and ending up with a heavy dose of hand-waving.

Having since moved on, I still do hiring and see similar problems with people being unable to read and comprehend simple instructions. There is a shocking amount of _bad_ out there; it just gets worse when people are looking for money.

As an aside, I was being generous with the 80% guess. Anywhere else I would have figured the garbage submissions to have crossed the 90% barrier.
JSON's syntax, at least, is defined. Also using JSON implies that extra stuff will be ignored and missing stuff rendered as null rather than causing the parser to crash - it's a forgiving format. Meanwhile it's a lot lighter than XML/HTML. And of course, I'm envisaging use of the "Accept" header to pick a format. Browsers ask for HTML. API users might ask for JSON.
Wonga seems to be just the payday loans business "on the internet"
Consider in contrrast to Zopa (http://uk.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/), on the grounds it's more innovative as it fosters disintermediation (or a close facsimile - there is still a cut for Zopa), which gives real benefits to both lenders and borrowers.
Illustration art
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So as little as $300,000? Unless the amount was much greater, I'm betting there've been far more expensive Javascript mistakes.
If you're doing REST, browser-readability is good. It allows the API to be remotely explorable, self-explanatory, something a prospective user can test-drive with no investment in client code. Plus of course, it's a damn sight easier to test during development.
The amount of effort that gets "wasted" per unwatched video is probably relatively small. Per the video instructions (http://ycombinator.com/video.html), producing the video really shouldn't take much time at all (my guess is less than five minutes for a group that a) already has well defined goals and b) has a macbook, where there's almost no overhead to record a video).
Additionally, the very act of making the video is likely beneficial to the groups, by forcing them to solidify their ideas enough to be comfortable talking about them and by having them practice giving an elevator pitch about their idea.
"The first thing I notice when I look at an application is the username it was submitted under. If it's one I recognize for making thoughtful comments on Hacker News, I give the application extra attention."

I was actually surprised by this. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense, but I would never have even thought of this.
The Impact of Facebook's Payment Platform For Virtual Goods
Insightful Magic Hat Award.
Thanks pg! I was worried that entering too many secondary ideas would almost appear as a drawback. As if the team wasn't truly dedicated to the idea they were submitting the application for. Its nice to know the team itself is more important.

Also, I'd love to know what percentage of teams have business people, rather than 100% hackers
The Evolution Of The Honda Accord
Common Financing Mistakes: Over Capitalizing Lifestyle Businesses
Unfortunately the wayback machine does not archive the comments: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://news.ycombinator.com

It would be interesting to run something like the stupid filter on comments rated > x for all comments today and for all comments not long after Startup News was renamed Hacker News. I'm curious to see if the totality of comments would show a significant difference in the stupid score as determined by a simple bayesian filter.
it creates the culture as seen in the office space movie "in a given week, I do about 15 minutes worth of work".

Take a simple form, and a programmer in a corporate environment will tell you that it'll take them a week to finish. That same programmer, working for themselves would finish that same form in a couple of hours.
Interesting relevance to the Marx view on productive labour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_and_unproductive_lab...).
I see you are subscribing to philosophy of no planning required and only one take. I once spent about 3 hours to do a 1 minute pitch.
I would say it's the same as giving up an addiction to over-the-counter pain killers. The pills themselves aren't chemically addictive, but by the time you're "addicted" you have a mental reliance on the pain pills to make you feel better. It's the same with pot - you know it makes you feel good, so once you've had it a few times, you're more likely to tell youself, "Hey! I should smoke some pot!" As long as you're also ready to say, "Wait! I'm giving it up!" there's no physical need for it. It's just that you're used to the idea of taking it.
Yet another one of a long stream of articles from the NYTimes insulting Wikipedia. They should add a "Disclaimer: we consider free information online to be a competitor, and hope it fails" to these sort of article.
What is the difference between physical and mental addiction?
producing a half decent video, even if it is only 5 minutes worth of production is a lot of work.
On the other hand, maybe you don't want to help people submit better applications, because you can still only select a few of them. As the overall quality increases, it becomes more difficult to select between poor and high quality work. At least in the case of my intro bio students, essay 1 is always terrible and therefore easy to grade. I give them lots of tips, etc., for essay 2. The essays all improve, but I still have to assign the same mean grade so all their grades are the same. Basically it just makes my life harder.
It seems like you could work around it. Have a function eval that evaluates each function called. Each function is modified such that it returns either enough information for eval to make the tail call or the value returned by the function which eval would return.
I think there's a lot of groupthink going on in the Silicon Valley echochamber. The examples I came up with were just on the top of my head, not outliers in any way. Here are a few more just for kicks.

fogbugz, Alcatel/Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Avid, IBM, Ubisoft, Research in motion, Sierra, Kazaa, Joost, Dell.

The tech-world doesn't revolve around Silicon Valley. There are actually other tech hubs, and there are important tech companies being started in other parts of the world. The valley is important, but not that important.
99% of audio/video is wrapped in HTTP, so if 99% of the remaining 1% is UDP, it hardly matters. But yes, Anagran supports UDP.
yes, but the issue at hand is the fact that MS, the M$, released code under GPL. it's huge no matter how you look at it.
That is being greedy and unwise. Once Linux fully works well like Microsoft wants with Windows that gives Microsoft the door for them to say "Well your system is fully interoperable with Windows already, we are coming out with a new version that breaks that functionality and you will no longer be able to use the system like you have been, why don't you just switch to Windows on all of your machines and save yourself the hassle". It will take a few years but Microsoft is in business for the long haul, they will feed Linux just enough to hang it.
One thing that I think isn't regularly considered is the 'hemp' side of the issue. Hemp is an incredibly useful material, and if it was more widely available, it could really benefit society. I saw an article a while ago about how good it would be when used in construction, but that it probably won't happen because of how hard it is to obtain hemp.

So aside from the medicinal, economic and social factors, the industrial sector could be benefitted greatly by increased hemp availability.
First, porn at the rail con. Now, touching. When's it going to end?
I agree; How does one go about learning how to do that?
Virtualization: Should Windows host Linux or should Linux host Windows?
Physical addiction of all narcotics is way overblown. The inability of "dependent" users to stop using drugs, including alcohol, is way less about physiological issues than it is simple habit.

Contrary to what they show in the movies, alcoholics and smack heads do not writhe around and wail when locked up away from their fix.
Isn't this also an admission that the application process is a bit broken?

I think a lot of people would be open to submitting their application to others first, to help flesh out the weakpoints. On the menu bar, can we have "new", "threads", ..., and "YC applications"?
Wal-Mart to measure pollution and water use of everything
Another source for a good explanation, even if long and sometimes self righteous, is "Fooled By Randomness" by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. He's the author of another well known book called "The Black Swan"
EngineYard SHA1 contest begins
I feel like this is a really good point but am having trouble coming up with many concrete examples. For example, I've felt like every declarative attempt at game AI has been absolutely horrible.
The financial engineering is not a problem at all. I just asked the two questions that spawned these posts because I was interested in what type things Lisp was being used for. Google and Wikipedia are good, but not nearly as helpful as a direct answer from some people responding directly to questions I've posted.

I spent a good deal of last year and most of this year ripping apart both GSL and QuantLib in an effort to teach myself numerical programming. My plan is to just keep pace in Lisp with my MSFE program. Since at least the first few months of the program are likely to cover things I already feel comfortable with, the plan is--listen in lecture-->go home and code it up.
Well, you are missing his point. Opera could have used this opportunity to get the "major hardware supplier" to add Opera support to their admin tool.

Instead of simply being insulted by the company's software, they could have basically bought support for their product from this "major hardware supplier" for free.
Interesting idea. Thanks.
Startups: Provide a Killer Executive Summary
Why would Opera want to support a company that actively does not support Opera?
And if you haven't been following, the contest is here:

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/programming-contest-win-...

and an interesting thread on using NVidia's CUDA to crunch on it (with code) is here: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=102349
I agree this would be very helpful, but I imagine they're would be a lot of effort on censoring things like personal info, other ideas. I think for example I would like to read just how the successful ones described they're accepted ideas.
I both agree and disagree with this comment.

To start with, Windows 7 is great but XP was pretty solid for its time too so I'm not sure that Win 7 signals anything other than the fact they've had a new hit.

However, there are segments within Microsoft that are working hard to get some momentum for what might otherwise become a stagnant behemoth of a software company. These cases are seeing Microsoft compromise old values in an effort to create something new (for instance this as you've said and ASP.NET MVC as another example).

Obviously it's all for profit but it's a good sign that it is still profitable to innovate, even in a company whose established popularity and size would typically mean that it stands to gain most from focusing on the "whole product" (e.g. support etc.) if we take Moore's chasm viewpoint.

Whether we have Apple to thank for this I'm unsure though. I guess the marketing efforts of Apple to make it cool have put a lot of pressure on Windows in the last few years. Whether the way to beat this marketing attempt by Apple is innovation is a deeper question.
People where less productive in 1960 because they lacked modern tools. The most striking example was how the onboard computer’s memory had to be hard coded by hand. Someone had to literally manually set each bit of program code by hand. Imagine if you needed to double check that your compiler acctually wrote the correct bits to disk.

It was also the first trip so R&D took a huge amount of effort.

Finally, everything had to be constantly reviewed so we did not accidently kill 3 people while the world was watching.
i think wikipedia does a good job of explaining it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Varied_forms_of_addic...
Also, because newspapers compete head-to-head with television news organizations in the online world. I think this was one of the major original reasons why the newspapers felt they had to go online for free in the late 90's.

TV news organizations have much less concern that free online news articles will cannibalize their profit center.
AntiRSI: http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/
This would be the largest legacy system overhaul ever attempted. God help us all.
I gave it up in an instant after smoking almost daily for some time. It didn't hurt, wasn't even uncomfortable. But I missed it, like I miss the beach after returning from a vacation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Varied_forms_of_addic...

Essentially the difference is physical withdrawal symptoms versus mental ones (cravings, irritability, sleep issues, etc..). The line can definitely be fuzzy, and many addictions span both categories.

In the case of pot versus physically addictive substances, such as alcohol or heroin, a heavy pot user forced into cold turkey withdrawal would not get the shakes, diarrhea, sweating, nausea, seizures, or death, that can happen with withdrawal of physically addictive substances.
Yes, you would expect that. It would be completely reasonable to expect that. But this is not the reality of the situation.
There are a lot of industries the Net should 'kill.'

Take health care technology for example. At the end of the day electronic medical records are just getting data in/out of a system. The Net, or the web, is great at this. You can make this adequately secure and distributable and scalable across the globe with little or no setup expense.

The key is getting the good-old-boys to except and institute change, and this requires a large effort in educating.
Physical dependence results in withdrawal symptoms that are physical: headaches with caffeine, shakes (and much, much worse) with alcohol.

Mental/emotional dependence results in withdrawal symptoms like depression and anxiety.

One could argue that mental/emotional withdrawal is just as physical (as it results from imbalances in neurotransmitters) as physical withdrawal.

One could also argue that the only serious withdrawal symptoms out there are from alcohol - arguably one of the only drugs whose withdrawal symptoms you can die from.
I am not contesting that what you say is technically possible, but that would be a bad move from Microsoft considering they are threatened non-stop with anti-monopoly suits.

Also, they don't need to change Windows, just the hypervisor. Though it would probably break other OSs too, not just Linux.
ThumbTack Color
Gruber quotes Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

A beautiful quip. This really hits to the heart of old media's problems; there are so many jobs in so many media giants devoted to advertising, distribution, and management that have suddenly become somewhat unnecessary and even counterproductive when operations are moved online. But good luck finding a man among them who advocates giving himself a pink slip.
It makes the assumption that everything that can be known about a system is already known

No, it does not. I'm not sure where you extracted that from in my comment.

Also, if you are aware that your environment was terrible, it seems presumptuous to assess the benefits of pairing in a good environment. I assure you there is more than teaching at play.
I agree with all your points, but none of them have anything to do with how "REST" something is.
Physical addction is what science calls simply "addiction". "Mental addiction" or "psycological addiction" is a device to call addiction something that isn't, like "addiction to the Internet", "addiction to work" or "addiction to sex". Then you sell some snake oil to cure it.

Edit: OK; downmod as much as you please. Psycological addition will still be bullshit. Instead of looking at Wikipedia, that sometimes has no other choice to reflect some idiotic homeopatetic or obviously biased opinions, check what others are saying right here.
Perhaps not, but serious alcoholics can die from withdrawal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_withdrawal_syndrome

(siezures, delerium tremens, and excito-neurotoxicity)
For those who skipped the details, its a bunch of drivers to make Linux work better under their hypervisor. I think this is a smart move from Microsoft, both in the short and in the long term. It scores points with the open source movement, it scores points with their clients who run Linux over Windows and in the long run they gain leverage over what their users really run (Windows, not Linux).
Alcohol is dangerous more often than it is addictive. If you like to drink 10 beers and then drive around, but just once a month....
As someone freelancing to unrealistic deadlines, studying full-time (overloading courses), working full-time, trying to develop a couple of start-up prototypes, maintaining a healthy relationship etc. this post really hits home. Looking forward to the continuation of this story.
Seconded, heavily - and also the repost, for being just what I needed to read this morning.
One could also argue that the only serious withdrawal symptoms out there are from alcohol - arguably one of the only drugs whose withdrawal symptoms you can die from.

Citation?
The buttons look nice. Can't say I know why "Tools" has become so important or what happens when I click the "Page" drop-down but I'm sure it's all very cool. Unsure why there are two stars for bookmarking but I'm sure there's a reason too. I better be able to enable a fixed "close tab" button as an option or plugin. Finally, where's my toolbar and home button?
Morality of having to pay for gov't/ANSI standards, data?
http://www.wpc-edi.com/content/view/400/199/
I'm working on a startup in the healthcare IT space and in order to support medical billing you have to have these ANSI standard data transactions. As a programmer it seems immoral to have to pay for these data standards. I don't see any advantage to the general good to keep these standards private and provide barriers into the healthcare IT market that desperately needs innovation.

How do you come to terms with common industry practices like these that just seem wrong?
I think cash is involved, but I'm thinking more along the lines of sales tax and state budgets. I don't think the tobacco lobby is quite as strong as it used to be. The FDA just got the right to regulate the nicotine content. And I'm not sure the tobacco lobby was ever quite as powerful as you seem to think it is today.
The opening of a frontier means that the adventurous idealists go there first.

Once the possibilities are clear, those who seek fortune over adventure follow suit.

And after the tide has turned, only the most emotionally attached, deeply-rooted or unable to adapt remain in the old places.

In any case, those left to turn off the lights are unlikely to be the most reasonable.
School-Shooting iPhone Game Removed From App Store
I think you analogy with grading papers is flawed. Sure, it's easier to grade bad things than good things, because you don't have to look too deeply, but YC does not have to assign mean grades. They are reading in order to find useful information. If all applications become more concise and useful, that is a net gain, even if it makes the choice of who to interview less obvious.
I call bs. Sure, the chef needs to go listen to other chefs about cooking, technique, ingredients, whatever. But I bet that same chef can go to non-chefs about things like book keeping, marketing, what customers want, etc. Further, plenty of restaurant owners, restaurant workers, restaurant enthusiasts and/or people who eat can totally get up in front of a chef and say: hey stop making crappy food no one wants it. Or even "this food that you are all making used to be trendy and clever, but now that everyone is doing it, its just sucky and boring. Here is something cool instead".

Bringing the analogy back around, it is pretty arrogant for developers to think that the only person that can speak about the end product is another developer. Sure, I wouldn't listen to a marketer about what framework to use, but I sure would when it comes to declaring aggregators old-hat and sucky.
When they're not moving, they look very real. As soon as they start moving, they look terribly fake.