skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More recommendations of books that can change our thinking, please...

In the tradition of Darwin and Dawkins, I heartily recommend Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Pinker's always worth reading, and for me this is his best. Broader and deeper than his more linguistic work.
Yeah, that's pretty good.

One of the reasons I gave up blogging is that it caused me to use up topics that deserved more work on little, quickly written blog posts. That's why I wasn't in a hurry to republish this.
AWD (to start) + Rails Way (for the details)
My first reaction upon hearing the name "Y Combinator" was dismay; oh god, the geeks are trying to be bankers now. I had a vision in my head of paul et al. blowing out their retirement, funding LispOSes and smalltalk-on-chip type projects.

P.S. RPG, PG and PG. Any other Lispers with "PG" initials out there besides Gabriel, Greenspun and Paul?
Lost Souls Really Do Wander in Circles
I would be curious to see diffs of these revisions.
I like articles such as this that confirm my belief that nothing is an accident, unless something is too hard to explain, and might then be called an accident.
that was a really great speech, thank you for linking that.
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I second the Venture Hacks recommendation.

In fact, that entire site should be read by any entrepreneur who wants to grok term sheets. Possibly the best resource to dive into the material, from an entrepreneur's perspective.

Read the blog start to finish, then go buy the Pitching Hacks PDF.

Once you want to gain an understanding of the subtleties of terms, and see different terms considered, check out TheFunded.com.
Appreciate that. I am already in the process of trying again.

I think I also found an awesome developer to help out but I just directed him the wrong way.

The problem was I didn't find a co-founder, a person that could share the business and funding responsibilities with me.

Why..? I don't know. There were one or two people that came close but I knew I wouldn't work well with them. It's very important to work well with whoever you partner with of course.

Ironically the people I felt I could work well with didn't really fit the bill in terms of programming ability or skill sets...
I'm not sure if one specific reason would be more important than others.

For instance, I wouldn't want to work on something that I'm not passionate about (incentive B).
However, over the long-term, I also wouldn't want to work on something that doesn't have a reasonable market (incentive A).

imo your description of incentive A is mistaken.Thinking about the target market doesn't mean that "you only really care about making money".

For example, many entrepreneurs would rather work on their startups than on something else that may think of as more lucrative. However, for the business to survive, the business needs to make money and so it a good entrepreneur would also try to understand the target market and think about whether it can sustain the business (and give up the business if it isn't able to make money).
I'm not sure what this even means.

I meant you should actively seek out ways in which you're seeing patterns where there aren't any.
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the number of imitators that YC quickly spawned seems to indicate that this won't just tank (even if YC does itself). It solves a real market inefficiency.
Graham's Razor: If you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't center on you.. (With apologies to Mr. Occam.)

BTW, I think the last line might be better phrased as "See indifference." The ubiquity of causation requires that much/most of the word isn't random. It just doesn't give a damn about us. "Seeing indifference", and how to get past it, is probably also a good starting point for new businesses pondering their marketing plan.
I auto-archive all sales mailing like that to separate folders. You never know when you will need to search for patterns in their communication. Do the same with your competition as well, but read it more actively.

Thanks to this unhealthy hoarding habit, I can produce product samples and quotes to buyers for stuff I don't even have.

I have seen some sites also publish their user growth in newsletters as well; it allows me to study their growth patterns.

Ditto with sales mail that's CC'ed to me. Instant mailing list of potential buyers, for free.
Makes a lot of sense. I'd love to have something like this when comparing products rather than having to spend hours looking through a variety of sources to be confident you have a decent overview of the general sentiment. Makes you wonder about what the next level of SEO would be if this was incorporated into search engine though.
AT&T/Google Voice fiasco is a lesson in emotionally charged blogging
I think that thinking of this as satire is a defense mechanism. Because the turth of what the government does with our money is horrific.
Ditto - especially for this one. I'd be curious as well to know how this compares to implementation. How many YC investees would have pursued their ideas without YC? Is this a core attribute for YC to invest in an idea?

It's interesting though... of all the potential reasons that could have motivated the creation of YC (e.g. alternatively, giving promising ideas a leap forward) the is the one that was chosen. That YC could be the small nudge that pushes smart people to start new businesses and that "we can spring on the world a stream of new startups that might otherwise not have existed."
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When we visit free chat rooms, it is a normal practice to hide one’s real identity and take on some pseudo names while chatting with others. One of the main reasons for masking our identity in free chat rooms is that we do not want our privacy compromised. We do not want people calling us up for various reasons. We really do not know about the nature of the person at the other end because they too would probably be masking their identity
YC is in a position to manage other people's money now, tanking hasn't happened and wont for a very long time. Just look at how fast they have been able to push their startups, like FlightCaster, into the mainstream of tech industry. They have some very influential people listening to them.

My bet is on YC branching out of tech startups and perhaps getting into seeding businesses in traditional industries. I would go as far as to say that they're due for a presidential meeting; if the economy doesn't improve, they might even be called in to testify before congress (remember how easy it was for the l0pht to appear in congress?) a government appearance will put them on the spot.
Ask HN: Control Mouse Cursor with Keyboard?
Anyone know a way to zoom around the screen with WASD (or something similar)? I've seen keynav. but I'd rather be able to move a cursor around than a set of crosshairs. Googling makes it sound like this used to be possible with XWindows, but all of the suggested key combos I find don't work for me (Gentoo + Xorg).
After much bugmenot and cookie hassle I'd recommend the Firefox RefControl add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/953. It lets you set your referrer to http://www.google.com for nytimes.com so NYT thinks you're coming from a Google search and always skips the login page.
It's interesting how "typically American" the Chicago logo is. It actually looks rather like a mix between the Los Angeles and Salt Lake City logos.

And in case anyone is curious, historical Summer Olympics logos: http://www.sportslogos.net/league.php?id=27
And Winter Olympics: http://www.sportslogos.net/league.php?id=64
Me too. At times, I've even thought about switching careers because I actually enjoy socializing with other people yet my other passion, programming, interferes with it
I thought that, of the lot, the Madrid logo really just stood out very distinctively.

I agree that the "M" is a little understated. However, I personally don't feel it's so important that Madrid "owns" the logo at this stage - it'll come to identify with the city eventually if they win the bid and the logo enters the public consciousness.

Alternate logo and real-life usage of the Madrid logo at the designer's site: http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Madrid-2016/182876
Does anyone have audio from this presentation?
> - the problem is the egos and the assignment of credit.

Yep. I'm not in academia, my prior education level precludes me but I dated a lady who was and over the years I have come to simply loathe the infighting and politics that academia has become mired in.

I really wonder how many good or maybe even great scientists leave academia because they're sick and tired of the whole spiel to find a job in some company somewhere.
Startups with non-US founders, by and large, probably don't experience the same level of pain with immigration as startups with US founders. That's because most startups with non-US founders aren't in the US and never have to deal with US immigration policies, which are reputedly the most troublesome in the world.

So I think Maciej's point stands: if you were funding companies that weren't in the US, you would be less likely to think immigration issues seemed to be the single biggest external source of pain for startups right now.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how you could have interpreted Maciej's comment so as to think that your response might make sense. Can you elucidate?
University researchers are quite competitive. Whether the price is money or professional fame shouldn't make much of a difference in that sense. It might change the types of people that choose to play the game though.
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Can you elaborate? I've been thinking about how to do that for a few years.
Or these companies could implement a decent web interface, so you don't have to talk to a underpaid human in $far_flung_poor_country. Or just reliably answer email instead of delivering to /dev/null. Either would do.
I have the impression that some of the modern JavaScript engines lose less than a factor of 10× over the raw power of the CPU. Do you think the CPU-GPU gap is going to widen or narrow in upcoming years?
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And one of mine from a year back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227400
Try Keymouse. I'm not sure if it's freeware though, and it might be windows only.
Adding to that, I recently visited a wildlife park in Australia and there was a Tasmanian Devil in an enclosure which was just running in loops over and over again. I watched for about 10 minutes, fascinated. It probably won't run itself to death for no reason, though.
The shrinking game console: A history
Spolsky: Setting the Right Priorities
Buddhism refers to it as the Two Truths: conventional and ultimate truth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine

It's a very nuanced and often misunderstood concept. Leaning too far to either side (hyper-reification of and attachment to the material world on one side, and Śūnyatā ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Śūnyatā ) -- the emptiness or lack of "thingness" of all concepts -- on the other, lead each to their own problems. Of course, you can get so wrapped up in the observance of walking that line that it becomes a problem, too, which is sort of where Zen steps in with the simple and the absurd.

It all adds up to normality, like you said. I like that.
This gave me the strong desire to learn a lot more about how the Japanese manage health care.
come be a poet
with people around the world
one line at a time

http://haikoo.org
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "demolishing your self" and how you did that? Are you talking about the buddhist concept of emptiness?
If you find "multiple programming language implementations" annoying, chances are their respective communities find you annoying. For your own sanity, if something seems annoying to you, ask if there is a different way to do things.

His problems with Lisp and Ruby are contradictory: he hates Ruby because it has two competing major versions, not realizing what he wants is a standard specification of the language. Yet his problem with Lisp is that "it's big on reference documents".

Pick any Common Lisp implementation and any incompatibility with the specification is a bug.
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Material costs, like all prices must include rent, interest and wages. CC removes rent only on the IP, not on the location the store is in, for example, which still must be included in the final consumer price. Manufacturing books and selling them is commercial activity even when undertaken by an anarchist book shop. The anarchist book shop, presumably works collectively and thus has no external shareholders, and therefore can only have income, not profit. The point of copyfarleft is to prevent value derive from free terms from being captured by non-producing capital owners.
From the designer of the Chicago Logo:

The Chicago 2016 logo blends the colors of the five Olympic rings surrounding the city’s six-pointed star, evoking serene blue lakefront, vibrant green landscape and fiery skyline. It also evokes Chicago’s Games concept—to host compact Olympic Games celebrated in the center of the city, along the lakefront and in the city’s parks.

http://vsapartners.com/news.asp?article=71
I've been using Unix/Linux for nearly 20 years, and I stumbled across the "rename" command about 5 years ago when I was regularly using 5 different operating systems. I typed "rename" and wondered why it didn't do what I expected. I had intended "mv".

Don't confuse them. I used the difference to learn more precisely what happens in a filing system when you do a "mv" as compared with a "rename". It was interesting.

I've since forgotten most of the details, but it occasionally proves useful.
I don't remember the fellow's name, but the anecdote was related in a book about online communities written by Clifford Stoll, and definitely involved suicide, not cancer. But the anecdote he related could have been incorrect...
http://pdfmenot.com/ ?
This is something I would like to show to any one who thinks they are "not a computer guy".
Ok, I see what you're getting at.

"Bias: your pattern recognition is overzealous" would be a great companion essay, which I would love to read. Especially ideas for countering it.

A line from that essay showing up at the end of the "Bias: you think it's about you/your species, but it isn't" essay seems quite.. random.

Sorry.
Scarcity creates innovation.
You use a language with no particular specification and no particular set purpose, and are surprised that it changes between point releases? I guess he's never used PHP then.

Languages divide reasonably cleanly into those that have no published semantics (formal or informal), those that have a published informal semantics, and those that have a published formal semantics. I use 'semantics' here to cover both the usual meaning and the semantic interpretation of syntactic constructs. On this continuum, there are very few with published formal semantics, and a huge number with no published specification whatsoever. I've heard proponents of these languages actually claim that "the compiler is the specification".

So if you use a language where the world view is "we'll do whatever the hell we want and then the compiler decides what it means!" then you can hardly complain when it all gets a bit confusing. That's reason number 77,061 for me not using Ruby.
I went from Slicehost to Linode a few months ago. Linode has faster boxes. I did a one week performance comparison between Slicehost, Linode, and Prgmr (which I should publish...). Linode won by a large margin.
> Although evolution doesn't have to lead to the conclusion that there is no God, we happily assume it does---because then we can all be our own gods, making up our own rules.

That's insulting, and (more importantly) it doesn't seem to have any factual backing. Got evidence? Because I don't know a single formerly-religious-person for whom that sort of thing was even a consideration.

And come on, everybody makes up their moral rules or inherits them from their community, or usually some combination of both. Some of them attribute the results to God, but the difference is minimal.
How can this be missing this:

If you critize your competition, you basically give them a good handle where to improve themselves. You do not want your competition to improve if you want to make money.
YouTube - Jethro Tull - Bourée
I agree with some of the things you said. However,

> Yet his problem with Lisp is that "it's big on reference documents"

I didn't interpret it that way... Mudge said:

> "Most prominently I think of Lisp when I think of multiple implementations. Maybe it's not so much all the parentheses that have caused Lisp not to become a popular mainstream programming language. Maybe it has more to do with the lack of a single solid implementation. I also noticed that Lisp seems to be big about written language standards, while more popular programming languages more or less follow a reference implementation as the standard for the language."

He said that lisp's lack of a single solid implementation is/maybe the cause of its unpopularity. Also, he mentioned 'big on reference documents' as an afterthought (because of the word 'also', I think). The 'reference documents' part is not his main argument.

> "If you find 'multiple programming language implementations' annoying, chances are their respective communities find you annoying."

Its more like an expression of frustration. I doubt a community would find him annoying unless he actively and incessantly bugs them about his 'annoyances'.
A, but its not about the money. If you don't have a value proposition you don't have a business. Is there a pain point that you solve? How painful is it? Where there is a real need will yield success. And I mean success in the interpretation that correlates to your business's or NPO's goal.
For a lot of hackers, the biggest benefit they get from YC is confidence. It happens almost instantaneously. You're no longer working on a project - you're starting a company. Advice, support network, and introductions are incredibly helpful, but they're nothing compared to confidence. If you already have it, you can certainly succeed without YC (although getting in helps). Theoretically, you can just tell yourself "I will be confident", in which case you can succeed without YC too. But for most people it doesn't work this way.

YC gives people the determination to persist against all odds - probably the most useful quality of all. It turns the fear of failure from working against you, to working for you. It's an incredible energy source. I would be very surprised if most successful YC companies did half as well without YC. Not because of the help that YC offers, but because of confidence and determination.
While this makes perfect sense from an intellectual standpoint, pragmatically speaking it won't help you much in day to day life.

Self-centrism, while no doubt obstructive in the search for a cure to cancer can be quite useful when say, asking for a raise or deciding whether to ask that girl out.

I find it quite useful, when unsure about something, to assume the option that is most beneficial to you.

This positive self-centrism could also come in quite handy when starting a startup.
Ethnic cleansing would, by definition, imply the killing of the group being replaced, rather than one group simply outgrowing the other.
But does your website look much nicer? This can be discussed:
http://www.errant.me.uk/

As Abrose Bierce said: "Outdo: make an ennemy".

So, if you outdo all...
The Word "Hacker"
Where is poll?

Chicago's feels great, but I've liked Rio more.
I'm surprised that the original comment here was voted down. It was thoughtful and although I disagree, it expresses a point of view that is respectful.

The Law governing the area you reside in is not magically imbued with moral authority. It is simply a set of rules, some of them enforced, some not, that are backed up by the threat of violence.

When the law contradicts a society's overwhelming sense of morality, conflict occurs and either the law changes or (worse) police begin to refuse to apply the law, further undermining the clear authority of the law.
Is there a working implementation of this somewhere? I remember searching for it a while back and couldn't seem to find one.
Politube, poitical and activist video sharing
The order for me would be CDBA. If I were to to it, that is.
My first reaction to the Chicago logo was 'there they go waving the flag again'. To me it's got a very patriotic look. Of course I got the flag wrong in my hurry to rush into stereotypes about flag-revering Americans.
Despite the criticisms of some of these logos (in this thread and elsewhere), I don't think I would be as embarrassed to be from any of these places as the London 2012 logo makes me feel http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/10/All_London_201...
A few years back cloaking in SEO world was understood to be the process of serving different content depending on the IP address of the visitor(not to be confused with geolocation), with the explicit goal of showing keyword optimized page to search engines and the regular user getting a more user friendly page.

In my book, this is very similar to what Expert Sex Change does. Come referred by Google you get a nice answer at the bottom, come "clean" and you've got to pay for the answer. Very evil.

If you are a big guy (one infamous case was BMW Germany) you can do it, get caught and then recover from Google ban within a week. If you are a small site and get caught don't expect to do so.
According to WHO's Health Report 2008, Taijikistan has the most cost-effective health care in the world.

They achieve the same health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) as the US, but with less than $100 spent per capita, compared to above $2500 of the US.

"For what and for whom money is spent matters considerably. Particularly in countries where the envelope for health is very small, every dollar that is allocated sub-optimally seems to make a disproportionate difference."

Ref: http://www.who.int/whr/2008/whr08_en.pdf (page 30)
A lot of software developers have critical priority inversion, focusing on initiatives which will almost never add value. Without specific reference to where Fogbugz was back in the day, I think a lot of software developers often prioritize improving the product when that should not be #1 on their list with where their business is right now.

In particular, if you have a working product which is salable, and you have a website which is getting 5 visitors a day, put down the IDE and start marketing. Better mousetraps do not automatically collect more mice -- you need to locate the mice, preferably a bunch of ones which enjoy eating whatever your bait is, and then put the mousetrap by them.

(There are circumstances in which development supports marketing -- working on your viral loop for certain species of web apps, or adding something which greatly improves your perceived value in your target market. Don't spend three months to add another bullet point to a web page nobody reads, though.)
Yeah, I was playing with AMD's demos today. They're part of their SDK at http://developer.amd.com/GPU/ATISTREAMSDKBETAPROGRAM/Pages/d...

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