skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a good reasons why people are rejected."

Yes there is - because they aren't the best of the best.

I don't see a reason to sugar-coat it. Being rejected means that YC doesn't think that you're one of the 50 or so best startups who applied. Nothing more, and nothing less.
PAX = Passengers
How many companies that reapply get accepted during the next batch?
YC employees have boosted stats, it makes sense to me as this is their business
So pay it back with interest. The point is to avoid forcing the valuation question into internal tactical decisions, which is what you're doing if you issue shares to offset deferred salary.
Website-Building Platform Squarespace Raises Another $40M
You are absolutely correct. I made a mistake in not mentioning these potential pitfalls.
This is why I always say get it in writing. If it's not written, it doesn't really exist.
Hello Web App: Intro to building web apps with Django
By all means, just make stuff up. :)
Thanks for the game, man, it's fantastic.
Seems there is a great deal of interest in this; I hope you'll add some contact info to the publicly-visible 'about' section of your HN profile so that people can get in touch!
I love the premise of this, but consider me sceptical...those are some pretty bold claims for a brand-new database.
Sure. I'd agree with that I guess. The counterfactual theory is that YC has something to tell you -- but that suggests there is something to improve per se. But that's not quite right. It's not that you did something wrong it's that you didn't have quite the elements to be right.
I want to think this is some sort of protest over the treatment of the girl, but I actually think it's just some more kids wanting their 15 minutes of fame.

I hope the girl doesn't get in a lot of trouble. All they needed to do was to get someone to talk to her and tell her it was a really dumb idea.
I have no idea what you are referring to with boosted stats, and I don't believe they exist.

I would say the biggest cause of this is likely the hundreds or thousands of people who applied to YC and are watching HN to see if any replies have gone out. This topic answers their question, so they upvoted it.
Most cities are broken IMHO since they value automobiles over people. I want to see more cities that put the commons where you actually can interact with others first and foremost:

* walking and biking are valued over cars
* vehicles within city limits are only used for delivery of goods.
* instead of a network of roads, we have a network of greenspaces[0]
* more plazas and parks (Medellin has done a pretty good job here)
* one massive park in the center of the city (e.g. NYC and Munchen)
* located where precipitation is not a problem
* cars are only for inter-city travel and stay outside the city (Freiburg)
* Lots of sports in the city (Rio de Janeiro and Sydney, Australia)
* People that need to move bulky things often live/work at the city periphery.

[0] This idea taken to its logical conclusion: http://www.cidadedemocratica.org.br/topico/2755-ecos-na-pais...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places
Virginia's Department of Taxation used to have a pretty decent online tax website. It was shutdown because of lobbying such as this. There was a year when no free online filing so I took the extra effort to do a paper return that year. Even FreeFilableForms are run by the Free File Alliance which is part of the group that lobbies against the IRS and state taxation departments from doing their own filing websites for personal profit. So they make sure that their own free filing options are just good enough to be barely acceptable while making their paid (for filers with income over ~$58k) options seem much more attractive.

Between this and intentional complexity of the tax system that hinders making the IRS more efficient and hides true tax rates that corporations and higher income people... I dunno, it's one of the blacker marks against America in this aspect of policy.

But I've without doubt decide I'll try as hard as possible to never, ever pay a company like that to file tax returns.
Here's a free idea for a future YC application:

"We've made the easiest way for reviewers of web submitted applicants to write notes on those applications and share them with their colleagues and applicants. Our customers include the most exclusive universities, accelerators and employers who were once mysterious and opaque about their consuming application processes. They've found that once they start using our service their applicants, team and other stakeholders learn more and make better decisions faster. They get more high quality applications as both parties get more value out of the application process."
That seems unfair to TurboTax. I have found it to ask you about things that are beyond the form it is filling out (and then upsell you on upgrading to the other version) and I think it does a great job with educating you about how you can lower your taxes. If you want, you can avoid their fees by filling everything out through the program and remembering the relevant information when filling out the form manually.
The number of medical students is wholly irrelevant to the conversation at hand. We currently have more residencies than medical students, so spots are filled by foreign medical grads.

However, in about 2-3 years, there will be more American medical students than there will be residency spots. Still have the same problem: the bottleneck in training is the residency.

So, blaming the AMA or AAMC for keeping medical student numbers down is pointless. They are not the final gatekeeper for the creation of doctors. Residency training is that gatekeeper.
Not at all, and in fact it heartens me to see this. The young haven't yet been socially worn down into worrying about being punished for things that should not be crimes. Mass protesting by kids is one of the few ways we might be able to roll back the ridiculous draconian punishments for victimless "crimes".
It's not accurate: They are making the same mistake as in other recent HN articles, that the entire certificate (1k-2k) is listed on the CRL.

It's not. It's serial number, a timestamp, maybe one or two other things. 10,000 certs is maybe 40,000 bytes on a RL.
Founders absolutely do vest. If your cofounder demands otherwise, run don't walk.
The most charitable interpretation would be that they wanted to scare the shit out of her and make sure it doesn't happen again.

It also sends a message to other stupid teenagers: if you make a bomb threat at an airline, there will be a SWAT team at your door.
Higher level languages inevitably come with built in semantics that the programmer takes for granted, but can't be synthesized directly to hardware. In C, it's the function call stack. In Haskell it's higher order types and recursive data structures (and more). You could in theory create some runtime package that you'd compile to hardware for your program to be synthesized to, or "run on".....but then you'd just be making a straight up computer, wouldn't you. ;-)
A molecular approach to solar power
It's not from scratch. We have about 100k lines of HBase in there. I am sorry if that isn't clear.
Is the 10c/GB/month a hosted-mode fee, or the commercial license when running the open source package yourself?
I love Racket but I have only ever had the same experience with DrRacket. I don't know what it is trying to do, but it brings my modest laptop to its knees.
There isn't anywhere near enough information to ascertain whether neighbors noticed.

I have no idea who my neighbors are. If they weren't actually here, in the building, I'd have no way to contact them whatsoever. That doesn't mean I don't notice Airbnb tenants.
I get your point, but come on, don't a few of these seem like they might be a bit too close to a real threat? And in the process, require more work to disqualify them.

@AmericanAir the bomb goes of in 3 hours
— Alden Fernandez ♥ (@AldoFernz) April 14, 2014

@AmericanAir I have a bomb under the next plane to take off
— Army Jacket . (@ShyyLicious) April 14, 2014

@AmericanAir I’m gonna bomb your 737 jet
— ▲ demi ▼ (@ddlovatosteddy) April 14, 2014

@AmericanAir You really seem to not care that i’m about to bomb your plane that’s headed to Paris. Btw, my name is Ahmed.
— Allie (@ComedyBatman) April 14, 2014

I can't say I find those tweets to be that funny. I'm probably not outraged, but I'm definitely not amused by it.
Forget candidate N and the difficulty of discerning nuances. That's just pretending no information is available, so it's a made-up argument. Let's not pretend. Just tell them what the very top candidates had. And if they are a middle candidate and not a bottom one, also tell them what kept them out of the bottom. If they're in the bottom, tell them about the top and the middle. Clues for what is promising and what is not.

We're talking about spending a few minutes sharing words that could positively alter the course of decades of people's lives, if they hear the right thing. Seems like a decent courtesy to pay the applicants, if there's no real reason not to.
Yes, but the Etoile neighborhood is rather sterile if you ask me, with the big streets and lack of businesses. There is the Champs-Elysee with car dealships and over-priced cafes, and then the other boulevards with embassies and high-end apartments. It's all pretty and well done, but who's to say it wouldn't be a vibrant, diverse older neighborhood like the Marais if they'd left it.
hosted mode. All the software will be open source. We will be on top of Amazon.
In practice, this is exactly what happens. Many hospitals have a mandate not to deny treatment, so many people come to the hospital (especially to the emergency room, where care is known to be more expensive than non-emergent settings) and simply don't pay after the fact.

I don't know how to solve this, or whether it's fair, but it's pretty universal if you talk to people in healthcare billing.
I got that part, but a decent part of it is new and unproven, right?
I don't think that idiot kids should be encouraged to communicate threats. Not in America, anyway. Why? We also have a crazy gun culture. That sort of thing can get you killed. Besides the fact that it's very disrespectful.
But yes, please be skeptical. I can't wait for you to see the tests though. I bet you will fall in love.
Feynman describes being rejected by Bell Labs several years in a row for an internship, and each year coming back and cheerfully taking the tour. He finally got the job, but the war intervened. His attitude towards rejection seemed pretty constructive.
I used to boycott TurboTax because of this. But then I realized that Intuit is just playing the game. Why wouldn't they do everything they can to sustain their business (well, a sense of moral decency, I guess, but that's a big ask)?

The real root of the problem is of course our broken political process.
I still get email from Mint time to time but I've disconnected my bank account. It just didn't feel right, giving away such a crucial information when the local bank already provides means to check your financials. Do I really need to know minute by minute my spendings? Am I spending so fast and so much that I have to watch for my account being emptied on a third party app that is granted access to such intimate data?
Well, it makes obvious what should already be obvious: that tweeting a threat is extremely easy, so without any additional information, the credibility of such a threat is extremely low. I don't know anything about the laws or policies around investigating terrorist threats, but I would hope that early in the process there is an attempt to estimate the credibility of a threat.
Intuit has spent $11.5 million lobbying the federal government...

$10MM seems like a pittance. That's like what...2 minutes of superbowl ads? Can you really buy legislation for this cheap?
Just moved to the US last year, and used Turbo Tax to file my tax returns. It was alright, but in New Zealand, we don't generally have to jump through all these hoops.

I guess it would be nice if there were a free alternative to TurboTax, but at the same time, I kind of don't really care, so I'm happy to let them get away with whatever they're doing. I know Lobbying isn't illegal in the U.S., and I don't think it's all that immoral either.
Ask HN: Next Steps After YC Rejection
A large number of startups are going to receive a rejection notice from Ycombinator today. To quote Sam Altman, "Best of luck, and don’t give up."

Many cofounders are looking at huge corporate salaries vs. barely making ends meet trying to start a company. There's a lot that they don't know and a lot places they could use a ton of help.

For everyone who doesn't make Ycombinator tonight, where are other places to get help as a startup? (More than just alternate incubators, though I'd love to hear about those as well)
So this is an improved hbase or something completely different? If the plan is for analytic workloads, what is the query language?
Boycotting TurboTax is in your OWN best interests, is it not?
For such a mission critical application (hardware design) my mind is blown by how laughably bad the HDLs are when compared to modern programming languages. Chunks of the languages aren't synthesizeable, and which bits are/aren't are not consistent across vendors. There's also IEEE standards that nobody reeeally seems to care about too much. Additionally, it's not clear from a syntax point or a types point whether or not the code you will be writing is synthesizable. You just need to "know" ahead of time. It's terrible! It makes this whole field really obtuse and hard to enter from a design standpoint.

The field really needs some fresh blood or dare I say "disruption". I'm glad people are trying to make things better.
The idea of a twitch.tv stream sounds interesting, with viewers throwing small problems at the coder to solve as they fumble around with a new language.
What a bunch of fud.

> You say there's no evidence that customer data was affected, but the heartbleed bug leaves no logs, so that is not re-assuring at all

Well, if they're looking for people making use of the data received by the exploit that is re-assuring..

> You've said before that Mint servers are being updated, which suggests that it was exposed. If this is the case, have you gotten new SSL certificatess? (this is extremely important see next point)

Almost everyone was exposed. I'd like to know they have a new ssl cert too but not because of why you want them to.

> Even if I take a personal precaution and change my Mint and bank account passwords, if a hacker stole your cert at any time and you haven't gotten a new one, all my accounts are STILL vulnerable no matter how many times I change the password. This is because they basically have a permanent back door into Mint until you get a new SSL cert.

No, no they don't I don't think you understand ssl at all.

> Basically, if you don't answer the following questions, we have no choice but to STOP USING MINT FOREVER in order to secure ourselves. 1. Was Mint EVER vulnerable to the heartbleed bug (which has existed for 2 years) 2. If so, has the SSL cert been revoked and a new one acquired?

Good, stop using it, you're taking up security analyst resources to answer your stupid questions instead of letting them make sure everything is solid.
I am trying not to think about it n work instead. At this time, I am trying not to panic :D
> I don't really want the airline making that assessment because they don't have the people/experience/knowledge/training/ability to accurately assess that threat.

Is it really that hard of an assessment to make? Is the threat from a Twitter account? Yes? Okay, is there any reason to think the Twitter account is controlled by someone with the intention or ability to carry out an attack? No? Okay then.
anyone else..? https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1q...
What about Canada? Seems like we live on the same region yet we are always left out.
The best businesses for money laundering are those where your sales aren't directly related to the amount of stock you need to buy, and where the customers typically pay cash. Online games and porn sites fall into the first category but not the second.
> I don't see a reason to sugar-coat it. Being rejected means that YC doesn't think that you're one of the 50 or so best startups who applied. Nothing more, and nothing less.

True, but that's sort of ex post facto justification.

Theoretically, ten startups could apply and objectively be equally qualified, but YC may still pick only one. The key is that without completely exhaustive criteria for admission (which would not be practical), it's impossible to determine what defines "best" and how to become one of the "best".
For one thing, it's probably a crime to make a terrorist threat regardless of whether you have the intention or ability to carry out an attack.
Nope, it's a long-winded way of priming people to think this kind of activity is perfectly normal to ruin peoples lives over.
Same in Canada, usually 4~5 days.
No, you won't have to re-download the revocation list every time you open a web page. That would be ridiculous.

But if you want to be really secure, you might want to check the revocation list every time you see a new certificate.
That's a great way to think about it. We want to push it back into the HBase ecosystem as well. Users can use tools like presto and impala to access the data via sql.
Do the browsers actually use revocation checking?
> Well, someone has to pay the salaries of medical trainees. Who would you suggest do it?

Our options are: government, students, and hospitals. Government has demonstrated an inability to manage the market. Hospitals don't have a good reason to pay students. Therefore, it has to be the students.

> [paraphrasing] But then students will have to borrow even more! Costs will spin out of control!

You're assuming the inflated education costs that are a direct consequence of the government paying for graduate medical education will persist indefinitely when the government stops paying for graduate medical education. Medical schools currently sell an artificially scarce commodity. Prices will decrease if we allow supply to increase. New schools will be built to handle the influx of students if necessary.

If college grads find the cost of medical school + graduate medical education unappealing, medical schools will have to look for customers earlier in the pipeline (college + med + grad might be too much, but med + grad won't be).

> [anticipating an argument] But it's still an awful deal for current college grads.

Easy: pass a bill saying the government will stop paying for GME in 10 years. If GME funding was an actual roadblock and not just an excuse, AAMC will announce lifting the supply controls in 10 years (I personally suspect they would have to be strong-armed into this, but that's another argument). Medical schools will anticipate the ability to increase supply of seats in 10 years and will build out as necessary so that when the deadline hits, the new pipeline will be ready to go.

New grads of 2024 wouldn't be screwed because they would have already had a chance to price the new policy into their decisions. For instance, if they wanted to be a doctor they might have worked (perhaps in a medical-related job) for 4 years in anticipation of accelerated direct-to-med-school programs opening 4 years after their high-school graduation.

Yes, there would be a market shakeup with winners and losers, but nobody would get the rug yanked out from under them in a way they could not have anticipated and planned for. Realistically, that's the best we can ask for.

> [another anticipated argument] But then our doctors won't be as good.

Give certificate-granting entities partial liability in malpractice cases. Then they'll be forced to price their actual opinion on the matter into their admissions policies.

I'm not qualified to determine where the lard should be cut, but I find it difficult to believe that there isn't a lot of it in the lucrative monopoly we see today.
Fair enough. Plenty of new code. However, the design isn't a research project. It's actually pretty conservative.
This happened in the Netherlands. I don’t think anything much will happen to her. The police showing up and asking questions is enough of a deterrent. The only irrational overreaction I could think of is being put on some no-fly list. That would be awful.
None of these things are relevant in most HDLs implemented as DSLs in high level languages. The point of most of the HDL work in Haskell (for example Lava, and Bluespec) is to provide primitives to talk about hardware and to use a sane language as a way to manipulate them to build larger specifications. It is embarrassing that people use tools that allow you to write un-synthesizable code.
Stifling Innovation: Regulators Push for Flintstones Future, Not Jetsons
This makes me wonder how much of the government's incompetence is from companies lobbying for the government to keep its old ways.
What is the benefit of joining YC? If you are just making a profit and reinvesting some of that into the business, do you have an advantage of joining YC? Why should you give up a piece of your action?
The problems of HFT, Joe Stiglitz edition
Introducing Steam Gauge: Ars reveals Steam’s most popular games
I'm sure that their lobbying helps a little but that's not really what keeps our taxes complicated.

Lots of conservative/anti-tax/right-wing/libertarian types see the difficulty of doing taxes as a feature, not a bug because it makes people hate taxes in general and more likely to vote for Republicans/fiscally conservative politicians.
Yes, in many scenarios you can buy it for even less. Corporations donate $50k to 200k to 10 to 20 senators to push their legislation.
I also file my taxes on paper and I do all the calculations manually (well, in a spreadsheet). Even though my tax situation is far from the most complex, it is more complex than TurboTax can handle. Also I like to keep tax preparation painful as a reminder of the burden that the ridiculous complexity of the tax code places on me.

That said, I do agree with Intuit here. I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that the government is capable of making software to either provide a service similar to TurboTax or to correctly pre-calculate your taxes. They don't have the technical expertise so they'd have to contract it out. We saw how well that worked with healthcare.gov. They are not incented to "find every deduction" like a private tax preparer is, quite the opposite in fact. They also simply don't know enough in many cases. They don't know what my self employment income and expenses are, for example, until I tell them.

The only way that government can make taxes easier is to simplify the tax code itself.
That depends on how good you are at filing your tax returns. Intuit is lobbying for a complex tax code because that reduces the likelihood that you can actually do your taxes on your own without losing lots of money or getting in trouble with the IRS.
YC Summer 24 Interview
Have you heard back yet? It's 7:20 PM PST and we still haven't heard any news.
So you don't care to be made a fool of and be made to pay money to file your taxes?

In Canada the BS is similar however I'll make sure to never buy the software from TurboTax.
The situation would be much more manageable if browser vendors provided an online service that quickly allows individual certificates to be checked against the latest revocation list from all trusted CAs. There should be no need for each user to download the full revocation list, since most people will never visit 99.9% of the websites in that list.

Until now, revocation lists were small enough that this was not a problem. But it's probably time to fix that.

There are already third-party add-ons like Perspectives that check the certificates you see against those seen by other people. Chrome already knows which Google certs are valid or not. There's no reason why Mozilla, for example, shouldn't make something like this an official security feature of Firefox, too.