skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And you would take that boilerplate response even if there actually was something wrong or they didn't like you. So there is every reason for them to put it on essentially every application which didn't involve felonies
I think a good way to explain the project would be to outline how it improves upon vanilla HBase. I'd be interested in seeing the differences.
I know that it is a nice easy way to get an answer, but the problem has nothing to do with "the left" specifically. You're going to have to move past those media-fueled simplistic demonizations of the "other" side if you ever want to stop being part of the problem.
A lot less than you'd think - the fundamentals of HBase are excellent. File formats, compacting, etc is all solid and the same.

The issues arise during fail over and the architecture of how HBase and HDFS interact. That is where the most changes are, and while it seems scary, I think people will find the changes most refreshing, and cut out literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code out of the write and read paths!
Sam Altman says that all results will be given before 10pm.
Greetings from Oxford!
Thank you for explaining my thought. I'm not good at English.

In my experience, it is quite easy to describing the hardware logic if the architecture is designed well. So, what I mean in "VISIO and Excel are much more important" that the architecture should be concise and cycle accurate. Then verilog coding is just a piece of cake.
Does anybody know of a site that keep tracks of all these JavaScript visualization libraries, or JavaScript libraries in general?

There are lot of great JS libraries, but it is difficult to keep track. I would like a resource for JavaScript libraries like ruby-toolbox.com is for gems.

If somebody has the time, the data could be pulled with GitHub's search API:

https://developer.github.com/v3/search/
Disclaimer: I used to work for Intuit/TurboTax and am now building a product in the same space. On topic: They rightly get beat up for this, and get beat up for their lack of pricing transparency, but somehow manage to always receive a pass on the software itself. IMHO it's pretty atrocious... Sure, the math is almost always right but the math is a commodity. The experience itself is overly-verbose and littered with repeat questions, confusing questions, open-ended questions.

I don't know anyone who genuinely enjoys using TurboTax. I'm surprised there isn't more legitimate competition in this space.
I'm building Quill.org, a web app that provides interactive English grammar lessons.
I think they said 10pm PST. So a few more hours.
courserank was bootstrapped and acquired by chegg
We got into YC only the 3rd time in summer 2011; applied for the two earlier batches. Both of our earlier applications had bad ideas and very little traction.

So, don't give up.
Larry Hastings was the muse for this for sure

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKiySLUrYQ8
This TechCrunch post is a rehash of last year's ProPublica investigation: http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-...

Might as well at least mention this year's revelation, which is that they fund fake Grassroots campaigns against tax reform: http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-g...
I wonder how much benefit the good-but-not-accepted groups would receive from a few minutes even up to an hour of time over the next few weeks (maybe after the main interviews are done).

The benefit for YC would be if these groups then chose not to do something like TechStars, but continued to work on their idea and came back in +6 months. Realistically, if someone is rejected by YC, gets into TechStars and does it, they're unlikely to do YC.

Assuming there are ~300 "on the bubble" groups on top of 200 interviewed groups (out of 2-3k total), it would cost YC basically a month of someone's time to follow up with them reasonably, and then maybe 5-10% of a person over the next 6 months.
where did you see that?
One of the craziest things is, it save their tax department money for every single tax filing done online vs paper.

Paper takes an obscene amount of human hours to process in comparison. Online tax filings should at the very least be free, or even give you an extra tax deduction.
TurboTax Free did a 1040A for me this year. It's not limited just to 1040EZ.

I think they may have adjusted things compared to last year; it imported my data from last year (a new feature), and I thought there used to be a "Basic" product between "Free" and "Deluxe".
I'm more upset on how blatantly racist the initial and other tweets seem.
A way to get around being accused of cloning something entirely is to clone each aspect of your creation from separate and different 'inspirations'. e.g. "The game mechanism from A, the animation from B, the character based on C, the character's sword from D, the character's legs from E".
It started with this

http://www.businessinsider.com/twitterer-hints-of-terrorist-...
I wasn't going to bother reading the source article, up until I saw this excerpt in your comment. Now it is added to my reader. :-)
I haven't finished reading all the comments, but here's my take on the article:

Great for mentioning the prop13-rentcontrol duality, a lot of people conveniently forget one side or the other.

Great for delving into the politics of it all, including the neighborhood associations.

Not-so-great: it was touched on but not really elaborated: why the peninsula (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, the heart of SV) are not densifying to provide housing for the corporations they have. Some of the downtowns are very desireable, but still full of single-family homes. Some of the commercial space could be built up with housing over the businesses, and then these towns would develop even more character. I think the tech industry got a free-ride (heh) in building huge campuses in towns that have little residential growth (and even the towns' resistance to growth is mentioned). Google, Apple, etc, should be pushing on Mountain View to build 10,000 residential unites in the area. It's happening a tiny bit, but not nearly as fast as the companies are expanding.

Most people don't choose 1-hour 40-mile commutes if they can avoid them. But the corporate buses make that commute feasible. I actually wonder if bus transport is reported by the employees as income for taxation purposes, and if not why?

Finally, this issue really seems to stem from regional politics. SF has to compete with suburbs on tax breaks to companies, yet the suburbs can offload all the residential problems to the city. Seems like there should be state-wide rules that make this fairer.
Would love to hear a bit about your story. How many years in business, how the acquisition came about, what your doing now etc.

Also saw in your profile: don't bill hourly, bill by the day. Any blog post or detail on this idea?
It's popular because people think other people think it's popular.

There's no accounting for taste, but, it won't last. :)
What's wrong with confirm/alert? It's built into javascript, mobile friendly, and a lot less buggy than most libraries.
Some high level points written in a rush

- We say we can do failover in a couple of seconds. We want to make it subsecond, but we can't do that reliably yet. In HBase this story is much more mixed.
- We wanted to really reduce complexity, as a result, you can just apt-get install c5 on each node and you are done. It's one daemon, one log file, and that's it. No xmx nonsense, and almost no tuning or config files. I don't know if you have dealt with hadoop before, but the complexity is high.
- Finally we have a much more advanced wireformat. In fact it's advanced by being simple (protobufs + http). As a result clients in languages other than java become very easy, without a thrift client.

In the future expect even cooler features, but for v1 we are just aiming for HBase compat.
How will they let applicants know? Via email?
Wouldn't that be profiling?
Jail them. Every last one of the punks.
Every one of these young people should receive a visit from the FBI. This behavior is not okay.
But why restrict the gov't ability to provide free online filing. If TurboTax can provide an alternative that is better then they can still make money by providing value.
I'm not sure you actually agree with Intuit. They're saying that the IRS and state-level agencies should not provide free online filing services--even though they already provide free paper filing systems.

As far as I've seen, no one has done a movement to ban tax paperers (either online or in person). If Intuit or H&R Block can provide a better website for $39 or whatever, they can. The question is if the agencies in question shouldn't develop their own replacements to paper tax forms.

Can you imagine it was 30 years ago and if, instead of getting tax forms mailed to you every year (or photocopies from the local library for a pittance 5 years ago), you had to walk down to the local H&R Block or other private company and pay them $40 to get the forms they wrote based on the tax code to file your taxes? It's pretty much the same thing.
Fixed, thanks for the early bug report!
If you were running Intiut, would you do anything differently? The TurboTax product is built on the fact that the Tax code is complicated. Of course they're going to lobby against tax reform.
I love the play by play of exactly what you're thinking as you're doing something new. I find them quite informative.
You could still submit on the last day?
People are choosing the 1 hour 40 mile commutes because they want to be hip and live in SF. It's going to be decade+ before the valley is hip. If you're earning 150K plus, do you really want to live on campus? Yikes. No, you are a young, urban professional that wants to dine, go to the theatre, and socialize at expensive bars on the weekends.
>> is there any reason to think the Twitter account is controlled by someone with the intention or ability to carry out an attack?

You can't know that, that's why it's not OK and it's not legal. A threat is a threat. OK then.
I'm responsible for that stuff with HN, and you have it backwards, both about this post and about the site in general. If anyone were "boosting" YC's "stats", I'd know: I look at the data obsessively. And I'm no stats-booster. As for this post, the votes on it look as genuine to me as on any popular story.

Everyone here agrees that the way for HN to benefit YC's business is simply to have the best possible content. So we spend all our time working on the global optimum—how to get quality up—and zero time promoting this or that.

While I'm at it, if any of you have ideas about how to get HN's quality up, please send them to hn@ycombinator.com.
thats insane. huge numbers of conservatives (everyone i know) want the irs gone and a flat tax. sorry to burst your bubble.
Come to think of it, those are the main points we have in the middle of the webpage. I guess we just didn't outright compare it to HBase.
Pretty much all human brains, that I know of, were created by humans.
How A Serial Entrepreneur Is Challenging The Way Startups Launch
Do you know of actual/estimated numbers for human/computer processed tax filings? It would be interesting to see how many minutes of human time are needed for the average paper return. I have a sneaking suspicion that the "human touch time" is not "obscenely high."
Wow, that's a really good idea.
What I really like about it is that with so many rejected applicants per cycle, you can actually determine statistically the impact of giving feedback on later performance. One can make a small investment of time to try it on a small batch, and if it improves the quality of the whole group, a financial case can be made to spend more time on it.

One group of 500 rejected applicants is sent a sentence or two of feedback by a random YC alum (ideally whoever read the application initially, to account for each reader's biases) 1 month after their interview. Another group of 500 is set aside as the control, and is treated as normal. Is the group of 500 applicants with feedback more likely to reapply? Are they more likely to get an interview or get in the second time around?
Tweeting intensifies...

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/us-airways-just-tweete...
Moral decency is not a big ask. It should be the expected default behavior.
Related to your equal-protection observation:

An interesting thought experiment is imagining a policy that allows the eviction of those with rent-control in favor of those who can demonstrate more financial need. I'm trying to imagine how to form this so I can propose it to San Franciscans with rent control when they express ire about techies and the Ellis Act. I'm extremely curious how they will react/respond when they are asked to explicitly acknowledge their position of privilege relative to someone less well off.

Unrelated: Ultimately what we need is the startup equivalent of cities, where people abandon the status quo in established cities and seek out new civic models. Given the right location, I would consider being a founding citizen in a "startup city".
http://www.eirec.com/DPimages/digisqwvtest.jpg
Here is an example of higher sampling rates being useful INSIDE the human hearing range. This example shows transient response. Frequency response and dynamic range are low hanging fruit in high res audio debates. To argue that you can't hear it is a mute point when accuracy is the point, this is a reference quality format. Temporal resolution is the next area to persue if accuracy is of concern. If file size is of concern then high res is not aplicable. What is everyone arguing here? That if they any hear it on their setup it is of no use?
>Okay, is there any reason to think the Twitter account is controlled by someone with the intention or ability to carry out an attack?

How does the person who controls their Twitter account decide that?
There are so many great resources. Being accepted by YC is not "make or break". If your business is viable and you work hard, you'll get there.

But every business needs guidance, we're all in this together, so I love this question.

If you're in the Bay Area, finding great startup advisors is not a huge task (outside of bay area, it may be more work, I don't know from experience). Either way, the goal should be to seek those with relevant experience, and just get in front of them however you can. I recommend the following as a start:
- AngelList (scout out advisors/angels in your relevant industry)
- FounderDating
- LinkedIn

Other notable accelerators/incubators:
- Techstars
- 500 Startups
- AngelPad

I'm not one for luck, so I like to say... Get to work, the world is ready for you!
A computer is a much simpler abstraction and much less leaky than a circuit model.

Yes, in theory a computer could get a high level description of a circuit, and turn it into a very efficient hardware implementation. In practice our computers are not good enough - the same way they were not good enough for compiling high level languages at the 70's, and people wrote assembly by hand.
My theories:

1. Using the same programming language on both sides of HTTP often appeals to a developers visceral sense of elegance, or tidiness, even though it this alone inherently solves no existing problems.

2. It's powered by Googles V8 engine, which means people already associate it with this "super fast JIT" thing that lives in their favourite browser. It must be efficient, right?

3. The crowned alternative is PHP which is slowly becoming Java and alienating, with no disrespect to anyone intended, the less experienced, the "let's just hack a script together" crowd.
keep an eye on http://github.com/ohmdata
C++ was a mess on day 1 due to the decision to build a sorta-kinda higher level language on a C foundation that was never meant to be used that way. The fact that it was designed by a committee and animated by a philsophy of "features, features, features" pretty much explains everything you need to know about what's wrong with it. Does it really count as degeneration when you're born with the defect?

Java hasn't really acquired that much "cruft." The cruft that it does have is mostly relics of really poor design decisions that were made (again) on day 1. For example, the decision to support thread cancellation, which the designers later realized was dumb, has left a bunch of defunct APIs in the Thread class which you're now not supposed to use. I already talked about how the need for jar compatibility (due to the misguided portability religion) led to the generics issues. Java is an ugly language in some ways, but you can't really say that it degenerated: it was that way from the beginning. In fact, now is probably the prettiest it's ever been (not saying much).
Good idea but the implementation is gravity challenged which will wear the plugs and the sockets used over time. It would be better to reduce the length and get it closer to the socket.
Yep haven't heard anything yet
That actually sounds great...hope to give it a try once the OSS version is available.
I would be surprised if they're ranking every applicant. When I've been on hiring or admissions committees, I use a threshold. There's no point in ranking candidates clearly below the bar relative to each other, and there's no point in ranking candidates clearly above the bar either. For applicants on the bubble, it's often easier to decide for each individual whether you should interview him or her or not, and let the final number of interviews be somewhat fluid, than to rank them against each other.

Obviously, one could conduct an ex post ranking based on the decisions, but I wouldn't put a lot of weight on it.

I do agree that one should try to go back and check how the decisions worked out in a systematic way, but it's not obvious that there's an easy way to do it (and by "easy" I mean "a way that anyone will adopt for long enough for it to be worthwhile.")
http://blog.samaltman.com/the-worst-part-of-yc
122 German Law Professors Demanding the Decriminalization of Drugs
Ha-ha, professional historians. Solonin wrotes very much false too. See comments about his book: http://awas1952.livejournal.com/58827.html
Why do they have access to your financial records? Because you gave them the password to your bank account. The consequences of that action were only a matter of time.
Immutability looks too much like hardware.
According to Intuit's 2013 Annual Report page 41 [1] , they had $1.5B in Consumer Tax product revenue, which is primarily derived from TurboTax Online. That is 35% of their $4.2B total revenue in 2013.

They're creating a lot of ill-will for 35% of their business.

[1] http://investors.intuit.com/files/Intuit%20FY13%20Form%2010-...
What do you think of these Ars comments:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/turbotax-maker-li...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/turbotax-maker-li...
At that point, why not just ask them to provide the equivalent of Turbo-Tax on the web and put the code on github? I mean if they are going to compete with software providers, why mess around with PDFs?

The advantage of tax software is not that it does the caculations for you, it is that it leads you through identifying what facts are important to take into consideration - eg. "Did you sell a house this year", "did you move for your job", "did you buy an electric vehicle" and so on.
> and I thought there used to be a "Basic" product between "Free" and "Deluxe".

There is, but it seems like they're not pushing it as hard this year: https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/basic.jsp
Yes, I'd like to think that I would.
I suppose this is just a nerd annoyance, but the false quip about forwarding her IP address to the FBI rubbed me the wrong way. After reporting the threat to the FBI, Twitter could then give the FBI that info. But AA never had that information, and whoever sent that tweet probably just used it as a scare tactic. Saying you have someone's IP address has become this bogeyman threat that more often than not is meaningless.

I know that's not really that pertinent to the whole story, but dammit is it annoying. Promulgates ignorance.
It's far easier to miss than hit, and it gets really grey. Look at any of the mass shooters in recent history. Some of them look a bit dysfunctional, but harmless. Others, not so. Would you REALLY have been able to differentiate shooters from harmless, outcast, social misfits?

It's easy to criticize, that's all I'm saying. Let's accept that this is a difficult situation to be put in, and I think notifying the FBI was the right thing. Whether or not the FBI has what it takes to make the right call, who knows. But AA does not.
If you can't trust them with your financial information, how can you trust that they actually deleted your account?
> I know Lobbying isn't illegal in the U.S., and I don't think it's all that immoral either.

I guess maybe Intuit is just "playing the game" but the fact that our government is being made purposefully obtuse and inefficient should make anyone mad.

If you think "The government is purposefully obtuse and inefficient all over the place", I agree. I'm just trying to fight the good fight one thing at a time.
I should also mention we had to work on our own version of protobufs. It's totally compatible but much faster in java. Check our blog for details. It's already open source!
Is it possible that "taking all bomb threats deadly serious" is actually a poor policy? Arguments against: 1) base rate of airplane-related terrorism is very low 2) base rate of airplane-related terrorism that is preceded by a "credible threat" is much lower 3) can destroy lives of people who should know better (poor Sarah)

Perhaps these teens are engaging in a bit of civil disobedience to protest the current state of affairs. (It seems that Sarah was not, but others may be responding to her plight.)

[edit: formatting]
You seem bitter about something, either as if you were involved with the first Maiden Lane and missed your bonus that year or as if you have vested interests in seeing this new Maiden Lane succeed.

I meant what I said. Why are you reading so much into it?
Here's a good non-exhaustive list of JS visualization libraries:

http://selection.datavisualization.ch/
Fair question. Time to rotate my bank passwords too...
That's not necessarily the case. That's assuming that the admissions process is perfect, which I do not think anyone at YC or any university would even propose.
I'm afraid you missed the point of the article. Tech workers can work from anywhere, and many of them, after trying out several places, really want to live in SF. SF has an undeniable attraction in its vibrant city life.
>Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be.

That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold.

Even your own example does this by assigning a direction to your actions based on how it will impact the child.
Both of those comments seem to come from call center workers (i.e., they mention clocking in, etc).

Each site has it's own culture (and each site has cultures within cultures). Like any mid-sized company, Intuit has a broad mix of personalities and talent levels. If I had to put them on the couch and nail down the core problem it's that they haven't really done anything groundbreaking lately. All the weird management issues you're reading about in those comments are because they're trying to hang on to what they have without moving the ball forward. All IMO of course.
In this vein I've been pondering doing a livestream of a LFS install for a while, just for funsies. I wonder if anyone would actually watch it.
YC gives a usually quite small amount of money for a small %age, however the value is really in the networking and mentorship.
Maybe we disagree on what "the issue" is...
Great idea, especially since everyone always seems too busy to fix an easily automatible task!
Monitoring periodic jobs