skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cars are (mostly) marked with license plates on the back. Taxis are also marked with big logos (telling me which company they're from) and taxi numbers on all sides of the vehicle (which are issued by the city).

I usually have no way to know which cars are Uber cars. Thus my point about lack of accountability.

If you're really having trouble understanding how this is a difference in accountability, I think I'm going back to my "anonymous loon" theory.
I'm definitely speaking at least a little bit out of bitterness (our team just got rejected), so with that caveat it feels like YC is becoming more like traditional VC (venture capital):
- extremely low probability of success just due to volume of applications
- no feedback (again, due to volume of applications, and they posted a nice blog post about this, but just stating a fact)
- it seems (I don't have any factual evidence to back this up, would love to be proven wrong through factual evidence) that you need to know someone
- tendency to fund those who need it the least (already-proven user traction or revenue)

YC is a for-profit, private enterprise that can do whatever it wants, and it is in the business of maximizing income, so it would be foolish for the organization not to act in a self-interested way, but just calling it like I see it (and again, it'd be great if there were any stats the organization could release to disprove any of the points above, but I understand that it has no obligation to do so).
> It hurts everyone as the economy shrinks and there's less cash to go around.

Only until prices fall enough that people start spending again and hiring picks up again.

The idea of an evenly rotating economy where everything is great all the time has been thoroughly disproven over 100 years ago. To try and manage the economy to be so is a fool's errand.

Debt has grown ever-so-slightly faster than income for the last 40-50 years and that means future purchases have been pulled to the present for the last 40-50 years. If history is a guide (and I believe that it is) one of two things will happen:

1. People will start to pay down their debt and this will unfortunately result in hardship as debt-fueled growth stops

2. The banks will print more money and the party never stops until the party blows up in an enormous currency crisis

I can't tell you which will happen, but every time we print more money we grow the systemic risk of total blowup. People who argue that we should be doing more to prevent climate change while simultaneously cheering money-printing need to take a good look at their belief systems.
One problem here is that any outcome (warming or no, human-engineered or no) will impact every nation differently. Under current warming projections, some nations will see massive increases in arable land, whereas others will be completely underwater. Even within nations, some cities and regions will see detrimental effects, whereas others could even see benefits (though this is taboo to talk about, which foreshadows one variation of the problem).

It seems naively optimistic to think we will be able to geoengineer altruistically or with the general good in mind. Even the concept of an 'average good' for the earth is a little morally problematic if some nations benefit and others are hurt. When a nation acquires the ability to affect climate at a large scale, it seems likely that it will be used for political ends as much as for net positive outcomes.
>massive geo and atmospheric engineering, nuclear/fusion research/dissemination, desalination and water pipelines, and large-scale laboratory meat production from real animal tissue

These "solutions" are merely a continuation of business-as-usual.

Each will inevitably cause problems larger than it solves, because until it does we'll just view that as "headroom" to grow more.

Desalination is particularly nasty, destroying huge amounts of land (at the opportunity cost of the ecosystem services the site could perform were it regenerated) in order to concentrate power and wealth. This is bad for socio-economic sustainability as well.

Proper rainwater harvesting and storage—or as I call it, "lazy desalination"—is quite sustainable both ecologically and socially, but that's the un-sexy problem: decentralized solutions don't make rich people richer. Try tackling that with your start-up. ;)

Continuous growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Regarding whether you should learn a programming language, which can depend on how large the company is you're building and how busy that keeps you, if you're still at point 0 with an idea and little progress, learning to program can really help.

It also makes finding a programming cofounder easier because fewer programmers probably want to work on the cheap with a piece of a company that may never work out, but they will be willing to work with a fellow programmer as a cofounder on ideas that interest them both.
So basically, you want a systems approach for designing sustainable… everything.

These guys seem to be on to something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
It's not casting away const, the buffer is declared as uint8_t and they are casting that to char... Otherwise known as it should have been char to begin with.
given that my name can be seen as an abbreviation for sainte anne, i tend to get french churches that don't know their own email address.
"So the question is, are there large untapped areas where a phone could be used to interact with ones environment? What kind of day-to-day things could be enhanced with internet connected software?"

This is why I find machine learning and optimization such fascinating areas to watch. At a certain point, we may reach the practical limits of what human gestures, commands, and requests can tap into or do. The machine (or rather, the distributed ecosystem of machines) becomes more and more important in automating X, suggesting Y, and predicting Z.

I enjoy the prospects of VR and AR, especially in an omniconnected world. Those always seem like interesting use cases for a smart(er) phone. But I'm a lot more excited about the non-UI advances that the "internet of things" can bring us. When we free ourselves from the limitations of human comprehension, human attention span, and human neurological heuristics, we can do so much more. To me, the "large untapped areas" are all the things we won't have to tap to access (terrible pun intended). Before we can get there, of course, we'll have to connect all the devices.

At the risk of sounding hokey, naive, or unapologetically futurist, I look forward to the day when kids will say, "Wow. When you were my age, you actually had to touch things to make them work?"
What!? I missed out apparently :(
Well to be fair, even smart people can make mistakes and miss things. But Meteor is open source, so if the person you responded to is going to question the security model, they can look at the actual code and see if there is an issue. That's the best way to prevent security issues, looking at the code for bugs, mistakes, and assumptions.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/30/6876177/windows-10-cortana...
First application, got rejected. Honestly happy it happened now instead of after the interview. It gives me more time to think about what's next.

My startup is movie industry related, so maybe Los Angeles would be a better place to be. I'll post the startup site here when we launch.
Sending confidential information securely through the web
I work at a startup where we help local businesses reply to reviews, update their info, and run promotions. One technique we use is requiring email to redeem a coupon, so the business can grow an email list.
Yeah, and I've used that exactly never. Whew.
I was a "solo founder" type for awhile. If you're an engineer I think you can have your pick of co-founders.

My suggestion, after working on and for startups for a couple decades is that you should be the CEO, find business people to be co-founders, and hire a VP of engineering, or CTO.

It's almost a cliche that there are business guys "starting companies" who "just need an engineer"... but I think the best chances for success - on a high tech startup - are for the engineer to be the CEO, and eventually bring on a CTO.

One advantage of this- the CEO is focused on product while the business guys (COO, CMO, whatever) are out doing the legwork for raising money. I've seen too many companies flounder because the CEO was focused on raising money.

You can learn business, they can't learn engineering. (well, they can, but not to your level in the time available.)
Your assumption, which I think is wrong, is that WPM (or maybe APM) is the bottleneck for most work. I suspect reading/comprehension, problem solving, planning, usability, and access to the right tool, discovery of tools, responsiveness of tools, teamwork... These things are much more likely to be the bottleneck.

As a programmer, I suspect I could probably type the entirity of a days work into the computer in a half hour.
what is the ideal ARM solution that you're comparing with?
It's too bad, I just found a stellar co-founder two days ago. :)

But that's okay, she's going to help out immensely, and it'll only strengthen our application in the Spring.
I'm working on an "escrow"/invoicing site + app for remodeling and repair contractors. They have big cash flow problems and often require homeowners to pay up front (don't do that). Homeowners benefit through better customer service and less risk of a contractor stealing from them.

I applied solo, so I wasn't holding my breath.

Congratulations to the teams that got in. I'm excited to see what you build.
Congratulations!

I do wonder if you...

- Are already generating revenue

- Have lots of traction/traffic

- Sold previous start-ups and or companies before

- Worked at and or working at Apple, Facebook, Google or similar companies

- Ran a successful KickStarter

- Went to an ivy league school

As for us.. I am 39 and this is my second start-up. My co-founder is 21. Our first start-up idea (was a novel idea at the time) has since gone onto being worked on/copied by dozens, including one now with millions of users. We were not technical when we started our first start-up, but did receive a fair amount of attention for the concept.

Overall, I don't think that matters due to the competition you face in applying for YC. I would assume many who are interviewed & accepted can check off a few of those questions I asked above. Though maybe not?

Not sure we will apply again since we applied in April of 2013. Though when we applied in 2013 & got rejected we soon were invited to demo our technology to an entity in the valley. That is an interesting story in itself. Maybe that will happen again :-)

Well we were not lucky this time, I wish you better luck!
Applicant Wows Interviewer with Intimate Knowledge of Company’s ‘About Us’ Page
> One should always bear in mind that there is no 100% secure way to transfer information through the Internet. The only available practically 100% secure way of sending confidential information is Quantum Encryption because it's based on the laws of Nature. In a brief and incomplete picture, in Quantum Encryption one sends info codified in the spin of electrons, but if the electrons are spied by an external agent, their wave functions collapse and the recipient of the message realizes that the message is not secret any more. On the contrary, if the electrons arrive with their original wave functions, then the recipient is certain that the message has not been read by anybody at all.

What?
Those are all things demonstrated to bias hiring, so it's a reasonable question.

Note also that hiring biases don't require anything so unsubtle as making something like that grounds for rejection.
Basically, in order to maintain the integrity of the filesystem state, it is assumed that all NFS operations are only temporarily unavailable, and the system generally waits forever for the server to respond. If the kernel interrupted the operation with the client, the client might decide to act in a way that negatively affects the state of the filesystem.

Of course there's no reason for 'ps' not to build in its own timeout for i/o. It could cause premature failure on loaded boxes, but it wouldn't hurt anything.
For me the essence of the idea that failure is part of (and maybe even required for) eventual success is expressed in Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena"

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
I think the question hinges on whether that incentive is "perverse" or not. (Not criticizing your use of the word, it is the perfect word for this point.)

I believe it is not perverse because saving allows for investing, and is the basis of capitalism- the accumulation of capital that can be deployed productively.

Even if you're just saving on the downpayment of a house- putting %20 vs %10 can save a whole lot of money on a 30 year mortgage, leaving you better off in retirement, etc.
>which parts are okay and which parts are truly evil

I don't know if I agree with your premise here. Why do destructive (or even self-destructive) systems have to have "evil parts"?

These are systems problems, not the type of problem you can solve by taking out one kind of people and putting in another (or technology, or political party, or company, or…).
Popularity doesn't imply something is good. Pure functional programming can make useful things. You are being intellectually dishonest.
A lot of people are missing the point, citing the income WhatsApp has to make for Facebook to make back the money.

What they forget is that WhatsApp was able to serve almost half a billion users with "minimal" hardware. That's what Facebook wants, Facebook will save a lot of money if they can be as efficient as WhatsApp in terms of hardware savings, engineer ratio user ratio. I would imagine that's Mark is aiming for.
Maybe I'll revise what I said, this does look useful and easy.
I really wish more of my friends were willing to use Telegram. It's really one of the best messaging apps that I've used.
This answer is excellent. It's also a great example of how technology just disappears and allows you to get what you want to get done.
My point is more that the talk of Tovald's abrasiveness is largely a strawman. People take selected excerpts of his conversations, show them out of context, and then a tsunami of "what a bastard!" results. Almost every time I've seen this happen on HN, the excerpt is taken from a longer discussion, where he's already spent some time talking to the person in question before 'turning on them'. And then when an article like this comes along, with no offensiveness in it, people just have to talk about his 'issue with being abusive'.

The funny thing is that here on HN, Jobs generally gets a nod for behaving like a bastard ("because that's what's needed to make a good product"), but Torvalds gets demonised. Even de Raadt, famed for his abrasiveness, is accorded respect for it. It puzzles me on two fronts, because Torvalds really isn't that abrasive unless you really push him, and that for some reason, he doesn't get respect that other tech 'names' do for (supposedly) being so.
I think I follow, but if my $1 today is worth $1.10 in a year, deflation, at 0% interest, that is still 10% more value year to year for the bank making the loan. So $360 of money at the end of a 30 year loan, $1 per month, is worth $2,171.32 dollars in the end. That last $1 payment would be worth $209.39 dollars from the starting point. Isn't the loan still worth giving?

My math is no doubt horribly off, but if each $1 is worth more that the end of the loan, deflation, or if I'm instead paying out more than $1 per month at the end of the loan, inflation, why is the deflated $1 worth less in a relative world view.

Is the interest lost from inflation equal the value gained from deflation?
Got rejected. Am a lone founder. They watched my video for the full time so I have that going for me. My website's front page wasn't pretty at all so that probably worked against me.
> If you're failing, you're doing something right.

That seems to be a little bit of a stretch.

I prefer Steve Jobs take - if you're failing, at least someone is making decisions!
Me too. In my case YC deadline just happened to coincide my decision to startup. More than the financial backing my startup would've benefited more by being in YC ecosystem and my feet on the ground presence in signing up those early customers. Might try in next batch. Good luck!

Can't see your email anywhere. Email me?
They were stored in Samara, Russia. Maps say that is in Siberia.
And no growth (or linear growth) is the ideology of the extinct.
In my opinion, there wouldn't be a good reason. Maybe I can find your app directly in the app store, but what the 'Web provides is a human readable (and rememberable) address. Without it, you would need to search the app store or web search for [specific product/app name] (this assumes I learn about your product elsewhere and know that the app exists and how to get it).

I myself want to know as much as I can about an app before I download it, so would always check a website. I dislike ending up on a splash page with nothing but a screenshot of the app and a link to the app store. So I don't feel that any app for any device (or any product that you are trying to sell for that matter) would not benefit from an informative, accessible web presence. After all, I need to be sold on the idea of downloading the app. I confess I do prefer web over native app in most cases as a personal preference.

It is an interesting question, and the one my mind immediately went to upon seeing this. Because, yeah, I'm not seeing how this is a good idea for Taco Bell or anyone really. I will keep thinking about it and would be interested if anyone thinks otherwise.
> The typical case is when you call malloc.

And if there were a proper type-parameterized entry point to malloc (be it a function or macro) for general-purpose contiguous-object allocation, you wouldn't have to compromise the already weak type system with what is possibly the single most absurd implicit conversion possible from a type system perspective just to avoid typing out the type name three times.

I suppose it's more of a language quality issue than a program quality issue, but reducing verbosity by undermining the type system rather than providing a simple "allocate<T>(n)" function, especially in a language that doesn't care about verbosity enough to provide even the thinnest of syntactic abstractions, is just ridiculous.
Follow the money. Who benefits from talking up deflation and who loses. This will answer your question.
The way I look at it, high rates of inflation incentivize debt. If I can borrow at %4 a year (much more than the federal reserve charges, for instance) and then deploy that money productively, I can use the proceeds to pay down the debt with much cheaper money.

So, if I thought the rate of return made sense, I could borrow dollars on my credit card, buy Apple, Google or Facebook stock, and then pay back the loan on the dividends or returns from the stocks appreciation. This isn't even necessarily irresponsible if, say, you bought Berkshire Hathaway, which has historically returned >%20. If it continues to do so, even a credit card rate of %13 will give you a %7 spread.

This is a simple example of leverage and is effectively the same as trading stock on margin.

But, I'm sure everyone reading this realizes the danger- Buffet may die, BRK might flatten, any of those tech companies might not return what I expect.

That's the risk of leverage.

So, in short, inflation incentivizes the risk of leverage.

And that's exactly what we saw in the housing bubble where people with $60k in income were buying 4-5 $120k condos hoping to flip them in a few years.
I'm not conflating the two by any means. Two of the internet's shining sources of freedom are HTML and JavaScript especially when compared to the walled gardens of app stores.

That doesn't preclude other sources and as you've noted, HTML and JavaScripts are Web technologies which are of course a subset of... the internet! Besides, these days not all IP packets are transited equally.
And what makes you think that random outcomes ("natural" outcomes if you will) are any better ? I mean, didn't we stop believing in a benevolent God at some point ?

Because when I look at the green movement, my mind very quickly feels the need to point out that for the green movement to do any good at all with their pushing of nature, nature would have to be good. Nature is not good, nor is it evil, but let me point out that with very, very few exceptions murderers are not evil either (the large majority are furthering their own ends, not killing for fun or morals).
"Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a great German mathematician, came up with this notation in the 17th century when he was still alive." That, and the definition of function made me go through it with different eyes. But very nice to see this approach anyway.
You know I used to keep in touch with people primarily through emails. I don't know when, but recently - most of my communication switched to messaging apps like messenger iMessage and whatsapp. I never thought it would happen. I tripped onto email. Now I realize it's pretty good. I still do pump out emails for more formal writing through and longer messaging, but truth of the matter is with messaging apps I'm in contact with more people with shorter more personalized bursts of information.
The amount of wealth is constant. Just because there is more cash in the economy, doesn't mean anything if it's worth less. You might see some benefit in the short term but only at the expense of the long term. People, and the economy as a whole, should save/invest for the future as much as possible, rather than only caring about the short term.
There are more applicants than YCombinator could accept (or anyone could accept if you look at it in scale). Someone should create a social-media type website for YCombinator applicants (or anyone) to share their stories, meet, interact, network, learn, and collaborate on new and existing ideas. Imagine how many start-ups would be "born" like this. Think of how many great ideas don't get in or simply don't apply, think of how BIG this community could grow to be in a short time - it would grow by itself. Look at what Kickstarter is doing. Think of how many new comers this type of stepping stone would benefit and help achieve their ideas. Starting this community is possible by creating a great website that creatively engages members to collaborate. Let YCombinator (and anyone else) endorse it - first to members of the y-community then others. In fact "y-community" should be the name of it. We all know that out kind already burn with passion, desire and creativity. With minimal guidance from YCombinator it could succeed faster - passionate desires of those not-accepted will continue to burn and be fostered. Eventually, and this is speculating perhaps, if YCombinator becomes somewhat involved, with so many start-up communities popping-up in every city and country, this website, could grow to become the "Facebook" of start-ups. (only it would also be productive :) But seriously.