skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I need to edit my wording of that description. It was actually a mix of potential founders, as well as people that have gone through Y Combinator, TechStars, etc.

Amongst the founders that have been through Y Combinator, the "connections to capital" was virtually the same score, "brand and alumni connections" was higher than the overall average, and the other factors were all lower than the overall averages.

The non-founders actually rated "connections to capital" marginally lower than the overall group (YC + others) of funded-founders.
Because of another thread I looked at PGs list of essays and the title of this one caught my eye, reading it about 2/3rds through I read that bit and thought it more than worth posting, it is very relevant.

Too many startup start out trying to be the perfect bride instead of simply focusing on their users and making a great product. VC capital and other 'good stuff' is so far down the line when you set out that you do not need to spend an ounce of thought on it.

Concentrate on your users, that's where they key to any kind of success is. Once you've done that, no matter how exotic your tech choices were you're halfway there. Better to go off the beaten path and make a stellar product than to end up in mediocrity for playing it safe.

EDIT: parent has been edited, this reply now makes little sense.
Would you mind explaining that? It isn't obvious to me.
If you have them in your language the common better solutions to those use cases include:

1. Labeled loop control
2. Exceptions

PHP has #2 and a bad form of #1. In PHP you get to say how many loops to break out of, but not the name of the loop to go to. This makes code less self-documenting and can be fragile when editing code.

Other uses of goto for which substitutes are harder to find are to to make your language a more convenient compilation target, and when interacting with other control structures not under your control. These uses are VERY rare. In a decade of professional Perl programming I have seen each used twice. None of the examples were in any code base I worked with. Two were in the Perl core, the first is that the s2p utility emits gotos to emulate branches in sed, and the second is that the original Switch.pm used a goto to break out of any loops that it happened to interact with. (That one was a computed goto! After all he didn't know how this switch might interact with other switches.)

I would be willing to use goto for nested loops in PHP, but only because PHP does not offer labeled loop control. While I like to believe that I understand when to use goto for other reasons, I doubt I'll ever encounter a serious need to do that in any language.
Perhaps their allocator only allocated and free'd memory in 4-byte aligned blocks, and would mask out the lower bits to make pointers align to those blocks before freeing them?

If you had an allocator like this, you could use the addresses 0 through 3, and presumably the deallocator would mask these all down to zero, and then do a check to make sure it doesn't free 0, and end up doing nothing.
Fair enough, and good point.
There is no food shortage. There is a food distribution problem.
If the bank's software decides to munge some data, no one dies. If your $2K laptop crashes, no one dies.

The cost (both financial and human) of an aviation failure far exceeds the cost of your laptop crashing.
Easy: Majority of the code being written day to day whether it's for the desktop, the web or some other device.

Hard: Running a successful business on the easy part.

I don't care what sort of software you are writing. I'm a business owner. I'm a web developer but my real business is dealing with people, not machines.
Unearned revenue is a very interesting bit of data, I'm all for transparency and all that but you may actually be giving people ideas here. It's a great source of income because essentially you can play 'bank' without any of the penalties, if you can park 6 months of turnover in an interest bearing account you could add 2 to 3% or so to your bottom line.

As for other interesting statistics, one of the more important one is life cycle, how long on average does an account live. If you multiply your number of signups in a given month with the lifecycle you can figure out an upper limit to how far your business will grow organically (without additional promotional activities).
Where would they get all that water? Corn is a VERY thirsty crop, wheras opium poppies actually produce more alkoloids when given less water.
What if instead of segmenting by a surrogate class like sex, we class people by their output. Your performance over the last season sets you in a potentially different class the next season.

For instance, Mike is (height=1.7m, runs=5m/s, scored=45, etc. )
and Michelle is (height=1.4m, runs=4m/s, scored=77, etc). You could even use machine learning techniques to figure out how to initially class someone, and have an appeals board to deal with edge cases.

The real problem is deciding how many classes you want to have.
One step in a direction does not always lead to the next

Perhaps, but choreographing 50 million people (plus or minus an arbitrary number, depending on your country) is pretty tough, even on a good day.
Wanted: A Competitor to craigslist
A testament to the #ruby community: http://bit.ly/whymir

In 2 days _why's projects all recovered and 15/23 have new maintainers. Ongoing progress will be posted at http://whymirror.github.com/
"guys without a college education are getting hired"

While I agree wholeheartedly with the thrust of your comment, I have to say - I think the age of the college degree is in terminal decline, and nowhere is this more evident than on the cutting edge of IT.

I don't think we're quite there yet that we can declare the college degree to be irrelevant but we're close. In my company it's a "that's nice" thing. Like being a boy scout. Very good for character. Now, onto your demonstrating your ability, and showing you can fit in, which is all we actually care about.

If a school-leaver who wanted to be a programmer asked me today whether he should go to college, I would have difficulty answering him/her. I am leaning towards "don't bother". And FWIW, I went to college.
Does anyone know why she was called to have her sex verified?

I'm not a sports fan, so maybe I'm missing something, but it is not in any article I've read in passing.
I think what they're trying to say is that they are abiding by the general principle of not allowing apps that duplicate built-in functionality, because they feel it might negatively impact the user experience of their product. This is a much more defensible (and I think probable) position than that they are singling it out for purely competitive reasons.
How It Works: World's Largest Water Pump keeps New Orleans Dry
Guido: I've abandoned the "don't use tables for layout" meme...
From AT&T's answer, you finally know why all those applications are a problem:

AT&T and Apple discussed a proposed iPhone application from MobiTV and CBS that was designed to stream live video and audio from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. AT&T and Apple discussed the likelihood that such an application could cause substantial network congestion and degradation of service for certain customers on AT&T’s 3G network, especially customers accessing cell sites located near colleges involved in the tournament.
Daring Fireball's take on Apple's FCC response
I don't think they could - hence, one of the many reasons that they don't grow it.

I'm saying that if they had the capability to grow corn, as fizx suggests, then it would be better to use that corn for food, as opposed to biodiesel.
It's a great source of income...

Have you seen the interest rates banks are paying these days? Interest on unearned revenue is non-zero, but not by far.

As for other interesting statistics, one of the more important one is life cycle, how long on average does an account live.

I can't give you any accurate statistics on that, for two reasons: First, the number of tarsnap accounts which have ever closed is too small to be statistically significant; and second, because tarsnap doesn't have any fixed monthly fees, people can leave their accounts inactive forever and never have them die.
We're on a JVM platform as well. Since there aren't many good web frameworks for Java, Rails makes a good fit here.
JRuby can call java too... We have it creating messages on a message queue.

The JVM has no shortage of message queue systems unlike other languages. Any language with the enterprise stamp on it will probably have 50 something message queue systems for it.
For non-Polish Slavic speakers Polish is not difficult to pronounce, just funny. It's very soft sounding and even normal words often have forms that would be diminutive in other Slavic language. So everything sounds like a baby talk.
There are many, many examples, and I'm not sure what you've seen, what you seek to see. ("3D wireframe of a real object"?)

There are various libraries to make different types of "3D" faster to develop in Flash. Each has their proponents, their own best-uses.

Some of the other comments here are weird... better when you clearly bet on your words with your name!
They're pretty good this side of the pond, currently about 4 to 4.5% on a one year deposit. Maybe you could find a way to take advantage of that.
On Health Care and Health Insurance
I think that's what he was implying. As in, TCO is a major decision that goes into a language design, not just some sprinkling of compiler optimizations, usually.
I admire the whole set of questions
So you'd call him frigid, distrustful, arrogant and unfriendly? That doesn't really follow for me.

Edit: You and Guido are in agreement. It's a "feature" in that it visibly affects behavior, whereas an "optimization" would merely make things faster.
I use pdb combined with django's dev server for a similar effect and it works surprisingly well. I'd like to know if there's a way I could get into apache/WSGI though.
There is an interesting discussion going on right now, here:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/baypiggies/2009-August/0052...
Apple’s letter said that “contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it.”

Is this not a blatant lie? I'm sure they were "studying" it really hard before the FCC letter came. Also, how about the other apps such as GV Mobile that were unceremoniously yanked from the App Store around the same time?
I would reccomend looking at 'Proto Value Functions' ( http://www.machinelearning.org/.../070_ProtoValue_Mahadevan.... )[1]; they use eigenvectors of adjaceny matrices for reinforcement learning --- but because gridworld has a simple adjacency martix, the resulting eigenvectors are somewhat human-readable, and the pictures help a lot. If you're really curious, I can probably bang up some python or MATLAB or something.

The essential intuition is that higher numbered eigenvectors represent more local adjacency information --- so the first eigenvector deals with global connectivity (the relative value of i-th and j-th component says something about how interconnected nodes i and j are in terms of the whole graph). A higher eigenvalue's corresponding vector has a higher local gradient, and the direction of the gradient is less constant across the graph (there is not necessarily a monotonic path from node to node) so says less about global connectivity --- but has a higher granularity when examining local connectivity.

1[Edited to warn that Mahadevan's papers are fantastically dense --- and you don't need to understand the paper to gain intuition from the pretty pictures; read the text at your own risk]
My understanding is that you can use both in the sense of alternating between them, but for any given message, it only appears in one place.

From a user experience perspective, this means that some fraction of users will be confused, annoyed, or downright furious that they now have two completely disconnected ways of making calls, recieving messages, listening to voicemails, etc. I think that's what bothers Apple about it.
The company said that 95 percent of iPhone applications are approved within 14 days of being submitted.

This sounds like fun with statistics/semantics. It could just as easily be read to mean that only 5% of apps are approved after a wait time longer than 14 days.
Spirit (Mars Rover) Sol 18 Anomaly
Taking lazy registration one step further and going with no registration at all is a cool concept, as well. If you can center all of your functionality around email (or something else that already provides auth), it's possible.

When App Engine was released, I made an app called Lunchstr (http://lunchstr.appspot.com) just to play with GAE. The app isn't very useful, but the no-login, no-registration philosophy was kinda cool.
a comefrom would indeed be interesting and arguably more useful...
Apple must think the FCC is staffed by morons. They "don't know" how the application works, but it "prevents" existing iPhone features from working, and they need to "ponder it some more."
Remember Cuil? Now It’s a Real-Time Search Engine
... What the hell?

It's like a C# developer trying to reinvent Erlang... Poorly. And using a needlessly verbose syntax.

Just tell them they're Doing It Wrong.
I bet Posterous have spent lots of time tweaking their "parser" to handle all kinds of weird mails sent from ancient clients. And many webapps could need a simple way receive mails from users, without dealing with this mess.

What about joining these two?
Previous thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=649507
That's a moot excuse though. That's a training issue, not manpower.
>it has dropped a "name" in lieu of evidence,

In more formal contexts that's called a "reference" or "citation". Here, if you can't be bothered to google for this stuff: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/

> To wit: it talks about undefined general opinion,

In what sense is it undefined? I'm talking about the general opinion in the philosophy of science. You can check that statement out by reading the relevant literature, if you don't believe me.

>Most importantly, it digresses from what goes on in reality without bothering to consult it. Within the scope of the original statement, which is talking about the scientific method, the community is actively engaged in this discussion: http://www.google.com/search?q=is+string+theory+falsifiable

If you actually read the paper in the first result of that search, it gives a reasonably good explanation of why falsifiability is a very fuzzy and indeterminate requirement. But if you really want to demonstrate that mainstream physics is seriously worrying about questions of falsifiability, you need to give links to journal articles.
My first sentiment is that this had already been done - and done pretty well - by other groups. Collegedata.com has a decent system and makes admissions predictions (though it's a front for a student loan company). Mychances.net appears to be very active in this field, too. It isn't clear to me exactly what criteria they use for predictions at any given school, but they have stated that they use gpa, sat, sat subject tests, class rank, ethnicity, state of origin, legacy status, and sports recruitment. In other words, other people seem to have done a pretty good job of extracting what they can out of the quantifiable data.

I hope it's not rude for me to ask what this new group offers that those two, plus collegeboard, unigo, and a handful of others, do not?
The trouble with that, of course, is that even though tipjoy pleased users they just didn't have enough of them or enough transaction volume since the market wasn't ready.

What does one do in that case? Keep going (bleeding money) or give up? Lots of startup ideas are so bold that they're clearly early for their time.
I can understand the use as a labeled jump for loops, that's handy. Are there other cases where this is useful? I'm thinking along the lines of things like Quercus.
I read a study of classical piano students. The best ones, who were expected to become pros, all practiced in the morning; and there was some practice at other hours -- the same pattern, as far as I can remember. The good but less elite students also tended to work in the morning, but with more variance and less total practice. (This was one of those studies about the 10,000-hour rule and deliberate practice -- I think there were some refs to studies of other fields showing similar practices.)

Everyone needs to find what works best for themselves, but I'm pretty sure now I was just being macho when I thought I did best at night.
I like where he points out that a source gave him info that was apparently bullshit and he says that 'Any future information from this source will be noted accordingly.'
Good point; however, the basic construction of airplanes has remained the same since 1967. Software, unfortunately, changes constantly. Software engineers have become very talented at what does stay constant (just as aerospace engineers have) -- e.g. languages -- however, it is likely the always-evolving libraries and paradigms that cause most problems.
So LFA would be like being an albino?
How to: an introduction to GTK+ treeviews and autocompletion
So apple says they haven't rejected the application which in iTunes connect terms would mean that it is still "in review". So did the Google development team mis-read the status or is Google lying about the rejection or did the media jump the gun or is Apple just outright lying now or what? I wish I had access to their iTunes connect account to see for myself.
It's not a good idea to make widely generalizing comments about something you admittedly don't understand.
But it's not "a lot of work" to implement at all!

All of the standard 'structured programming' constructs (if, while, for, switch, etc.) are just wrappers around conditional jumps in nearly every imperative language. switch even uses labels for fuck's sake!
Sadly, he'd either have to take on currency risk (if his assets are in Euros and his liabilities are in Loonies, and the Euro drops relative to the Loonie, he's lost money that wasn't his). Or he'll have to hedge -- but there probably isn't an arbitrage opportunity there.
Thank you for the informed response.

I think you meant this link:

http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2005/papers/0...

...reading now.
Are you sure Nabokov didn't think about the issues that led to writing Lolita in the years before he started putting words on paper? Maybe he really did put in more effort (e.g., in writing other novels) before Lolita was such a result in such a seemingly short time. Nabokov's autobiography suggests he worked hard for a long time developing his craft.
But if anyone is looking for one practical, low-tech idea that has an iron-clad guarantee of improving software engineering, here it is: pass a law that requires extensive professional analysis of any large software failure.

This is his conclusion, and it's bullshit. Most software engineering failures result from the violation of known principles; basically, calculated risk-taking in a cost-sensitive industry where lives (usually) aren't at stake. Accumulating more and more engineering knowledge won't change that.

Really, just open your ears on any software engineering project and you'll hear that "accepted principles" are routinely ignored. A month ago I heard someone say, quite upset, "We're supposed to be in testing right now, but we're still in development!" because QA uncovered a bunch of bugs that needed to be fixed by developers. Clearly that person sees testing as a joke, a pious fraud, that isn't actually supposed to catch any bugs. Usually most bugs missed in development are released to production and fixed later. Catching more bugs than usual in QA, thanks to an enthusiastic and zealous QA engineer, was a blow to the schedule and will probably result in the project being perceived less favorably than if QA had done a sloppy job. Bertrand Meyer is kidding himself if he thinks engineering knowledge is the cure for this kind of disease.

EDIT: Stepping back, I guess the cost and embarrassment of a mandatory investigation would serve as a deterrent. But the knowledge gleaned from such investigations would be depressingly mundane.
I think tipjoys major problem was simply not being integrated in the platforms they were targeting, not that they did not please their users enough. You have to go through all the gates to score, not a subset of them.

And not having enough users is just as much a reason for failure as having dissatisfied ones.

The market is ready alright, it's just that as a third party add on offering a payment service you have to cross one more hurdle.

I'm pretty sure if the tipjoy principle would be implemented from within the network that it would be an instant smash hit.
> So historically there were fewer deductions to go with the higher rates.

Not so fast. (You even provided a counter-example.) It's no where near that clear-cut.

The Reagan tax cuts were accompanied by a huge reduction in deductions. (One of the biggies was the elimination of the deduction for personal interest.) The result is that how you made and spent your money became less important in how much you got to keep.

We are seeing more "no taxes for {specific company}" shennanigans now, but they're a different class of chicanery as they're basically payoffs to specific people.
I'm surprised that Apple rejects 20% of all submissions. That number seems huge!

We receive about 8,500 new applications and updates every week, and roughly 20% of them are not approved as originally submitted.

No wonder complaints are so common.
Why would someone dress in such a way to turn people away?
Break 3 is really unclear about where it's going to take you, especially if the code is poorly formatted, and doubly especially if you decide later that you want change the code and put another loop in it.
Tarsnap's unearned revenue is in USD, not CAD -- but aside from that, you're exactly right. I can't earn more interest without accepting currency exchange risk.
i like how i got voted down for expressing my opinion and experiences.
The idea has potential, but the real problem isn't deciding how many classes to have, there are multiple problems.

For one, this method may be a lot of extra work to wind up with the same number of, or potentially even more edge cases. And chances are good you'll wind up with virtually the same results for everything but the edge cases.

Deciding what criteria to use is also non-trivial. There are a number of intangibles that may matter. "Women's Champion" isn't the same as "Class B Champion." Saying the "best female" conveys something much different than "best in statistical category F."
Personally, I do not consider writing to be: "the closest we have come (so far!) to perfecting the human interface." In fact, I tend to do it only when there are no other practical options.

I can type far faster than I can write, find it far more natural, and it has numerous advantages. For instance, I can share it more broadly, reproduce it more easily, archive more effectively, search through it more easily, and worry about losing it less (largely because of that archiving and searching).

Even in his particular example, it seems that if he had spent less time trying to decide which of his bells and whistles to use and just picked and used any of them he would have had no problem. (In his situation, I would have left myself a voice note on the phone. If you are used to it, you can do it while walking with very little slowdown.)
Does Eclipse support GIT yet?
You're not psychic, you've honed your sense of prediction w/r/t your intelligence.
Cuil raised 33 million in VC money, I doubt they're going to give up easily. Roughly a year ago they had spent about 25% of that, I figure they have at least another 8 to 12 months worth of operating capital if their burn rate did not change dramatically.

If this does not get them out of the doldrums it will probably fizzle out.