skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My facebook account has precisely nothing in common with my real information.

It's all totally fake info that I use to play scrabble with my dentist, who also has a completely fake account.
Ed Felten did a good summary/critique of this article and its responses here: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/finding-and-fix...
My guess is there's a huge sample bias here. PG was probably assuming a similar applicant pool to what YC gets (ie if YC ran a summer in Atlanta, almost all of them would move away after) but the reality is that Shotput's starting pool is much different and shall we say less "serious", by which I mean talented and motivated.

Not too be elitist, but YC is clearly the top of the food chain in the micro-angel funding niche, where the most motivated founders go first. It was the only one we applied to, and if I were doing it over again it still would be. Then there's a couple others a rung below it, like TechStars, and a rung below that with a couple players like LaunchBox and maybe Shotput. (I've actually never heard of them, which is hard to accomplish in this industry, but I'll assume they're pretty decent and it's just because I've been working too hard lately).

So the startup founders move their way down the chain from the top, with the best x% being selected at every tier. At the YC level, you've got the highest quality and most motivated talent pool. At the bottom levels you've probably got the people who either whiffed their way down the chain, or just are looking for one near where they live. If I lived in Atlanta (which I could, it's a great city) and wanted to do a startup but wasn't particularly keen on relocating I might give it a go, assuming the Shotput guys brought enough to the table to make up for the small equity stake.

I'd guess PG wasn't taking that into account with his initial comment. I'd love to know what % of their funded startups have founders who lived within driving distance beforehand.
I went back and looked at this application in our system, and I did in fact give it an A-.

An A- means "I want to interview." An A means "I want to interview, even if Rtm and Trevor don't."

I only gave 2 As in s2007. (We funded both those companies, and both did badly.)
I'm one of the Shotput partners. I'm not sure if the implication here is that we specifically didn't intro our companies to investors from outside of the southeast. If so, that is entirely not the case. Myself and other partners continue to work with our companies to make valuable introductions for them - both in terms of clients as well as investors.

But I'll assume you were speaking in general terms in which case, I think all of the partners at Shotput would wholeheartedly agree.
Why is the parent being voted down? It's a sound point.

This guy was collateral damage of the legal system, a (retroactively) unintended killing while we all heartily support the intended ones. The only thing different is the "retroactively" and even then the analogy holds, if the army bombs the wrong people then realises its mistake later.
> If Clay isn’t surfing (...) then he’s probably watching
> slow-motion videos of himself, which he’s been known to
> study for ten hours straight.

since i saw the first autism movie (monk ?), i had a thought that autistic people seem to be a perfectionist (a road to a professionalism)

i never saw or meet autistic people in a real life. so, the article seems convince me.
This could become a place to look for co-founders and as such, adding search and "am looking for a founder / hacker" option are helpful.

EDIT: do you do email domain matching to determine if a school has been entered? If not, consider using that to normalize data.
I would assume the files would be in both places, but you just happen to point to the cdn for speed, so at least the frontend could still use the same scheme.
Brief discussion from not too long ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=715584

You've got to appreciate was the directness of the answers to questions on the application.
Ah, but this is (retroactively) unintended killing.

Imagine a car being hit from the air by a Predator drone because analysis wrongly believes it's full of terrorists. Intended killing. They later realise they made a mistake a killed some family. Now it's unintended killing. Not much of a difference there by my reckoning.
the two prominent button's

<sigh>
It isn't quite that simple if you're a US citizen. Clinton closed that loophole. You are still liable for worldwide tax for I believe 10 years if the IRS decides you renounced your citizenship for tax purposes.

The US is also the only major country that taxes it's citizens regardless of residence. Yes there is a large deduction, but you still have to file and pay anything over that deduction.

The big thing preventing you from moving your money to say Switzerland is that most international banks including those in Switzerland don't dare to touch US clients for the same reasons as described in the document.
What is your basis for assuming a 100% correlation between a person's desire to move to the valley and their level of talent?
and a frontend made with microsoft software ?
no hacker built this... thats for sure...
Instrument Made From Humans and Conductive Paint
Sony to roll out 3D television next year
I'm not one of the founders, but Paul Boutin covered them for Venture Beat too.
EveryBlock already sold to MSNBC. Based on Adrian's note about trying to keep the site alive (http://blog.everyblock.com/2009/aug/17/acquisition/), I have to assume it was a buy/hire.
How do they deal with interest rate fluctuations?
I didn't mean that you didn't introduce your companies to investors from other places, just that without the mechanism of a demo day you couldn't introduce them, in person, to hundreds of such investors.
Yeah, I wish someone had told me this before. I just didn't know.

However, one of the great benefits of Valley representation is the intros you can get to investors. Those investors tend to be local. Thus, the best situation is to be wherever your lawyers and the investors you wish to be introduced to are. (My Chicago-based counsel intro'd me to a few Chicago-based VC firms and no angels or seed groups. There are precious few of all three here.)
You live in Akron, nobody is going to call you an elitist. :)

Being the folks to come up with the concept and having $2 million in backing from Sequoia clearly puts YC at the top heap. Clearly gives YC more choice. There are however plenty of talented and motivated people in all parts of the world.

And the answer to your question is four.
Tweetvite: An Events Site Dedicated To Tweetups (From Anyvite YC S08)
You're solution is to have a perfect system? That's not possible.

But to torture your analogy more, its like saying instead of having exception handling in your programming, or crash handling in your operating systems, simply don't make any mistakes. All that happens in reality are more serious consequences for the mistakes that do happen.
So... it only count as human if it is a citizen?
Saying RSS is dead is like saying XML is dead, even if you wish it was the case, it still works for a lot of people, and drives a lot of things. I also like my twitter search RSS feeds, fwiw.
5 seconds with Google would have given you http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty which links to multiple sources that have looked into the issue and found that the additional cost of prosecuting the death penalty is significantly more than life without parole. The amount of difference varies with jurisdiction and the methodology of the study, but the differences support the claim.
All of the people that contributed to his execution with their b.s. science and swayed testimony need to be severely punished IMO. Maybe a prison sentence will deter these "experts" from claiming their findings are 100% correct without some sort of scientific proof.

This reminds me of a similar story I read recently about bite mark experts being used in murder investigations... just like these arson experts, they had no scientific proof of anything they concluded. People were still convicted of rape and murder based on their "expert" testimony.
Yes -- for instance, 37Signals is considered a success.
You could try reading the article.

Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson ... was personally opposed to capital punishment... He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas - about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years.
Damn, I wish I was in the position to think that $1500 was a good chunk of money.

Yes, you're crazy, which is a good thing. Embrace it. Do it while you can.
Ask HN: Anyone doing Google Code Jam?
The prizes aren't very awesome this time around, but I'm doing it because I want to get back to codeing after a school term. I'm wondering are other HN people doing Google Code Jam this year?
One Man’s Trash ... (check out the slide show too)
This guy has an interesting take on travel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICrV68KIbg0&feature=PlayL...
Gmail - Inbox - mohsinnaqvi786@gmail.com
You could always seed a Markov chain system with a corpus of your collected emails, IM logs, and writings. Then you'll just seem to be afflicted with posthumous dementia.
And OnLive is a great example of marketing gone wild--the technical information their marketing has put out cannot physically all be true at the same time. Some information I've heard, for example:

1. Their system is powered by a JPEG encoder.

2. Their encoder handles one frame per millisecond (1000fps).

3. They plan to do something on the order of 2.5 megabit 720p video.

4. They intend to have extremely low end-to-end latency.

It should be obvious why not all these can be true at the same time. Furthermore, you'll notice other conflicts even if you start ignoring some of the claims: even if 1) is false, 4) basically makes 3) impossible (ultra-low latency has a catastrophic effect on interframe compression).

So at this point I'd pretty much put OnLive in the "extremely dubious" category due to the fact that their marketing can't seen to decide what their technology actually does.
"he was disturbed by the irony of landfills choked with building materials and yet a lack of affordable housing."

Similarly, grocery stores and restaurants throw tons of food away.
From the comments: "Four companies from Atlanta, two from Boston, two virtual entered the Shotput program. Three from Atlanta stayed. Three went back home, and two are trying their play in SV. One of the virtuals is considering moving back to Atlanta."

People from Atlanta stayed in Atlanta. Why is this remarkable?
you left us hanging: did he actually find & meet Tom?
Percy Pilcher, English aviation pioneer died flying a waterlogged glider when potential investors had been invited to watch.

Talk about a bad demo day ...
There's no way anyone will confuse this with http://twtvite.com/
That's clearly not what was said. The most basic function of government is to protect its citizens. If a government executes one of its own citizens, it has fundamentally failed. You and I may consider many other actions to be failures of governments, but the citizen distinction matters here.
At that point, it'd probably be more economical to just have the universal nanotechnology modify humans to be unable to commit crimes, indeed, unable to think them.

That can't possibly go wrong.
So long as I can claim under time and go home when I'm done with my work for the day I don't care much either way.
Restore Rails Development Databases After Snow Leopard and MySQL Upgrade
That's a fair comment. The domain name (as much as some of you are going to hate it since it follows the whole twit, tweet, etc. nomenclature) is a pretty good one. The interface is entirely different if you compare the two side by side, so yeah, it's possible that there might be confusion, but we've done everything that we could to differentiate there.
Show me one group of programmers who don't trust their standard libraries and I will show you fools who are busy reinventing the wheel instead of getting things done (or beginners just exploring the application domain, still ignorant of the built in functionality of the underlying system. Or they might be knowledgeable programmers who distrust a lacking platform, it's not unusual for PHP, Palm Pilot or Win16 programmers to use custom libraries instead of the standard ones)

Even embedded systems hackers have libraries and API that they port to and tweak for every new architecture and configuration they're faced with.

Your statement about Lisp programmers not trusting standard functions, or at leas your interpretation of Carl's (I didn't read it that way, btw.) is patently untrue.
AnandTech had a great article recently about latency in games and where it comes from. A good PC could have as little as ~30 ms latency, while a poorly optimized PC is closer to 100 ms. Assuming their system is heroically latency-optimized, this means that OnLive is not necessarily that much worse than local gaming.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3601
If you pass through Colorado I can probably introduce you to a couple entrepreneurs: the founders of NetDevil (Jumpgate) and Double Encore, at the very least. I'm also somewhat of an entrepreneur, but just starting out and but a wee little tadpole in comparison to their success.
When I discover someone saying "Twitter is a replacement for RSS" what I actually hear is "I'm a bleeding-edge-fanboy who can't be bothered with thinking about actual use-cases". Twitter and RSS are completely different approaches to content distribution and are suited to solving different parts of the problem.

There are some good ideas behind Twitter, but the actual implementation they've chosen is only really good for stream-of-consciousness content. That will never be a replacement for RSS.
It was predicted that they would all leave.
RSS is dead because some VC firm couldn't capitalise on it, yet Twitter is the way forward?
Beautiful, thanks for the insight into the process.
I myself have long wished people on Twitter would stop writing interesting slice of life comments, and instead link to every single blog post they write.
Summary: Eliminating the death penalty without fixing the trial process will still send innocent men to prison for a very long time.

Hard to do though.
there's less signal, probably less noise (in total), but not sure about relative signal-to-noise ratios. Boulder area is not as software and high/electrical tech focused as SF/Bay/SV area is. More science, eco, and govt stuff in Boulder, in proportion, I think. And definitely a startup scene.
As an aside, it bemuses me how someone does this for every NYT article posted here, when a repeated theme on HN is the death of old media.

Like the NYTs content, why not register? They need all the help they can get.
Robin Hanson's suggestions for what behavior would best exploit living in a simulation are worthy of a debate all in themselves:

http://www.jetpress.org/volume7/simulation.htm

Abstract:

If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happier and more interested in you.
This guy is chock full of invention. Bravo.
Be careful what you wish for.

We don't have the exception clause here in BC; every employee is entitled to overtime.

If you aren't unionised, it's important however to keep overtime and other such laws in context as they apply to your entire job. In other words, if you want your employer to be a stickler with regards to paying you for that 41st hour, they're probably going to be a stickler with other things too, like ensuring you take 15 minute breaks, a half hour lunch maximum. Or even better, making sure you never work a minute of overtime again; sticking you with the worst possible tasks and projects.

It's give and take.

Are there employers that basically break the law. Of course. But there are a myriad of other trade offs that need to be considered from wages to promotions to perks. If everything after all that is still a raw deal, leave.

If you do work for a union though, my condolences.
>> You're solution is to have a perfect system?

No. My "solution" is to focus on fixing the part that's really broken, not the thing that later becomes an issue from that breakage.

That doesn't result in a perfect system. However, if you're not convicting innocent people very often, then very few will ever have the "opportunity" to face execution.
I feel the lack of scalability is what ultimately dooms these worthwhile concepts - while the subject has a passion for it and the skill to make it a reality, transferring that to other people is both difficult and costly.

My grandad could come and fix any maintenance issues around my house for free, but it's hardly a solution to low cost housing.

Edit: Good on him for doing it though.
That a VC firm created to focus solely on RSS-based applications has closed doesn't mean that RSS is dead, it means that a venture built on pure hype (not RSS itself, but the idea it can be immediately translated to cash) is dead.

Opening with 'Three months ago, Steve Gillmor wrote that “it’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter.”' (in about the same way cars replace wheels, I suppose), the article demonstrates how some people have learned nothing at all.

The little RSS icon appears next to almost every URL you browse to (with notable exception of HN..). It's become a basic, discoverable, read-only XML API for most online content. That a couple of VCs didn't manage to make money off some technology they read about in Wired doesn't mean it's useless.
For evidence of the age at which children improve on abstraction, look at Piaget's work. The onset of puberty is when children usually move from Piaget's concrete phase to formal operations. Before that age you need to keep things concrete.

The links you provide don't contradict this in any way, shape or form. My complaint about the proposed curriculum change is that it attempts to teach arithmetic proceeding from definition to result. That goes over kids heads. Children learn better by repeatedly doing concrete operations that exercise the underlying concepts. The examples of Chinese teachers demonstrate good ways of doing that.

In short I'm complaining about pedagogy, not content.

Re-read http://www.cbmsweb.org/NationalSummit/Plenary_Speakers/ma.ht... with this in mind. I don't see children being challenged with abstraction. Instead I see concrete steps that are ignored in the USA being broken out and done repeatedly. Children may not be able to describe composing a mathematical expression in abstract terms, but they can learn to do it. And having that skill makes word problems a lot easier.

And, of course, the concrete skills and connected concepts give them a better foundation to build abstractions on when they are old enough to do that.

A random incidental note. Your links lead me to http://nces.ed.gov/timss/results07_math07.asp which suggests that the USA is not as bad in international comparisons as is often claimed. That said, the USA clearly could improve, and Taipei would seem to be a particularly good country to learn from.
Am I just insecure if crank bloggers claiming that "RSS is dead" make me feel crotchety and out of touch? I still love my NetNewsWire.
That post was from June 2006...I wonder how snarky he is now?
Mercedes-Benz C-Class Special Edition Car Launched in India
Neat idea. But how do you convince your friends to do this?

A: I call heads.

<flip>

B: It came up tails! I win!

A: No, wait, we're not done yet. We need to flip it again, if it comes up tails, we start over.

B: What? No, give me my doughnut!
Color Psychology in Marketing
I haven't registered my alumni email yet. I hate my university's mail servers. Mail always takes a few minutes longer to arrive for some reason. I suppose it would look more professional than zackster/gmail.com. But meh. I have zacharyburt/gmail.com as a forwarding address, anyway.
I thought this was going to be an article about how people with autism browse the web.
RSS as a mainstream content delivery platform for the average user is a concept that is probably dying. People are getting more accustomed to feeds more in the form of Facebook and Twitter streams which use concepts that are easier to understand and use.

RSS for power users (somewhere between Joe Schmoe and Scoble) is definitely not dead or dying. There's a lot of room to improve the end user experience too. Hopefully Google Reader's popularity doesn't detract others from trying to do better.

RSS as a standardized content delivery mechanism for interoperability between systems is alive and well and not going anywhere any time soon. Having a standardized format makes interoperability so much easier. I should disclose that I work for a company that's heavily using RSS in this manor, so my viewpoints may be skewed.
don't use captcha, it's a nuisance, just make an image of an @
We saw the same thing recently, we became cpu bound before we expected to and as the load balancers compensated it increased the load on the others. All we could do was to start turning off expensive features until it evened out again. And add more capacity as fast as we could of course.
The last time I started to register I read the terms and they wanted me to bind myself to terms that they could unilaterally alter and still bind me!

I sent them a note and received a nice phone call from a person that assured me they would never do that. Very impressive customer service, but thank you, no.

To be fair, this was probably 10 years ago and they may have a new policy.
Ask HN: Is version control worth learning early on?
Just spent two hours writing a 25line Python script. First real script, totally happy and pleased with myself. But what do I do with it?

I am planning on storing it in my personal Dropbox so I can edit it or create more on which-ever computer I own, but my question is: would it be worth it to learn Git/SVN now, in the early stages of programmer-hood, or later down the road. Would I benefit from learning/using Git/SVN now? Or would I benefit more from ignoring Git/SVN and just focus on writing code. Thanks.
Second the "focus on the less established".

I suspect that you'll get better stories from folks who didn't get VC funding. Lots of writers try to get stories from people who are likely to become famous or already are, but the others are likely to have better stories.

Also, many people want their story told, not for biz reasons, but because the think that their life has something useful to show other people.

The guy who wrote "The Soul of the New Machine" says that some of the managers said later that having someone around to chronicle the effort improved the experience. He wasn't sure if they were joking when they said that they were going to try to arrange to have a writer around the next time.

In other words, think bard.
Business Turnaround
Business Insolvency Advice, Business Turnaround Services, Business Debt Advice from Aldsworth Black Business Insolvency Consultants Cheltenham, Gloucestshire.
A Database Error Occurred
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Duplicate entry 'University of Washington' for key 2

INSERT INTO `schools` (`name`, `domain`, `students`) VALUES ('University of Washington', 'uw', 0)
> We will be back in a few hours. Someone discovered a security hole. They reported it, but not until someone else thought it would be cute to drop a rootkit in.

If Mister McElroy is reading this: Interesting! Was it a problem with _why's sandbox? (I don't think the original Try Ruby was ever exploited in the short time I kept a tab on it, and beyond that I haven't a clue; but I couldn't find any security commits in a quick scan of the changesets.)

http://github.com/whymirror/why_sandbox/commits/
Luckly half our ops team is in a timezone 9hrs offset from mine, it is extremely rare for either team to have someone woken up in the middle of the night. Sleep is good.