skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: 2D rendering method via JS? 
My recent project idea requires the rendering of a fairly custom UI to
mimic something similar to the interface of multi-track audio recording
tools. i.e., potentially large virtual surface that can extend far in X
and Y directions that is easily pannable and zoomable. (a la gmaps) and
revolves around placing UI pieces along horizontal 'tracks' with the
caveat that elements on tracks can collapse with other elements on
consecutive tracks.

How would you implement it?

Something I'm throwing around:
* Straight JS and a large table to add/delete rows/columns

* Dynamically generated divs

* Huge canvas rendering

* Generate imgs on backend and update a la Google Maps (not preferable)

* Use something like Cappuccino and follow AppKit-style rendering

I'd love to hear your thoughts.
You are both "well-funded" and "Pre-funding"? 99% retention rate? You've had 100 employees already working for at least one year and only one has left?
I too could see how some applicants would feel uneasy about this decision. Considering these are smart and savvy founders that are not investors in the applicants. Good thing YC is offering the "unapply" option for applicants. For example, the founders of http://www.thesixtyone.com, if they so happen to read my application, a lightbulb may go off in their heads. But as YC has stated, they have agreed to stop reading apps if there is competition. And will keep confidential. Therefore, I will be keeping my application entered. No guts, no glory. Could be looked at as a greater risk has been entered into the equation. But it could actually be a positive thing. I will be taking my chances in aspirations for a strong future partnership with YC.
Not even close to as sexy as unboxing the iPhone! :)
"Well it isn't a guarantee that they will delete the data, just a notice that they won't be liable legally if they do decide to do so."

That's even worse. If I know my data will be deleted, and under what circumstances, I can take steps to address the issue. "We might, potentially delete data, probably not, but who knows?" is kind of hard to plan against.
https://developer.motorola.com/products/handsets/droid/

Dev Specs
That is nice and scary vision of the future.

But consider the remote possibility that depressing gray reality might set in instead.
Let's review your calculation here:

Odds of getting the flu, feeling like absolute crap for a week, losing a week of work, being shunned by everyone I know for two or three weeks because I'm a carrier of the swine flu, but accidentally giving some of my acquaintances the flu anyway, thus prolonging the epidemic: 35%.

Okay, stop. I'm going to the pharmacy for my vaccine right now. [1]

My only fear is that I'm already too late. I'm not feeling so well today.

---

[1] Not that I think it's in stock yet, or anything. But maybe I'll call them.
How many application have you received so far, if you don't mind disclosing that ?
Ask HN: Why do websites for health care providers stink
My healthcare provider's Web site has no search bar and has one page with only generic information about coverage. Why is that? It can't be due to technical reasons.

Why are we such bad consumers of healthcare? Why don't we give the boot to these companies that do such a poor job describing coverage on their Website?
> sky high capital expenditure

Is it really that expensive to string cable? Fiber was laid like crazy all over the country in the late 90s, just not for the last mile. The "last mile" cost is probably all in dealing with the government to get permits and such. In which case government is the problem. They just need to make it easier to build.
Not wanting to have damn cold and hot fever for days on end is how I decide to get the normal flu jab, and the swine flu one when it comes out later.
Ask HN: Are (web) developers now a commodity?
I've had two people tell me this in as many days.

* Are they?

* If so, why?

* If not, then why is there this perception and how can it be changed?
Thank you. I guess I am getting a Droid then. I'm surprised more people aren't commenting on the screen resolution; that's enormous from a usability standpoint.
"First, you're not increasing the cost of goods and energy" ... "While the cost of goods does go up"

An input cost to production (energy) will rise in price. This will increase the cost of goods and services. This is basic economics. This new "market" is a drain on other parts of the economy in both money and talent.
Won't put me out of a job - you've jumped to an incorrect conclusion. I'm not a teacher. I run two companies, and I go out to schools to give talks on why math is fun, interesting, useful, and occasionally exciting. Most of the students I deal with are motivated and interested, but even then, some don't like puzzles, and don't like starting from the ground up axiomatically.

This Saturday I'm talking about the Banach-Tarski theorem, and I'm starting from the result, then wroking backwards, deciding what we need to know as we peel it back. I've found that working backwards from a surprising result can create motivation to understand, but sometimes it causes the students to dismiss the whole thing as useless, pointless and irrelevant.

Sorry, I'm rambling. Reply if you're interested, ignore me if not.
Growing the next generation of computer scientists and business leaders
Twitter adding a new (useful) feature: Lists
Probably from some idiot MBA. Now there's a commodity.
More disturbing is the idea that they will toss any idea that competes with existing startups.

You've imagined this idea. pg has explicitly said on several occasions that they will fund startups that compete with other YC companies, and nothing in this statement contradicts that.
HAH! Stellar.
No, my review was honest. I liked Map Bookmarks, and I haven't used the Driving Directions feature (which we actually cut from version 2). As you point out, I use my standard nick name for my reviews. A Google search for the word andrewljohnson is dominated by me, so when the other poster suggested I would be mortified at being found out... clearly not.

Apple doesn't seem to have a policy on self-reviews, but I'd assume that their feeling is anything goes since they know about companies hiring firms to write reviews and don't do anything about it.
The goal is to use the alumni as a second set of eyes. The way the software currently works, the alumni say either that they think we should accept an application, or that we shouldn't. So if we notice we're giving a bad rating to an application multiple alumni think we should accept, we'll take a second look, and vice versa.
There is a fairly logical chain of events here, and I'll agree that while not perfect causation this is interesting.

Higher SAT scores generally mean better college education (on average) with more scholarships (enabling less student-loan slavery post-graduation), more grad school, better jobs, etc.

People that got an 800 on their SAT (out of 1600 in my day) weren't really on the fast-track anywhere except mowing lawns. The kids pushing closer to 1400-1600 were generally headed to decent schools.
Procr, is the thief of time
Procrastination is the thief of time , thats an old english saying. Better have an end with a shock instead of be shocked till the end of time. An old german saying
People have been saying techies are a dime a dozen for years.

Do you try to put yourself in your customer's shoes and help solve problems? Does your customer know you do this?

If the answer is yes, you're not a commodity.
Mofo and Other Mysteries
The main message of this article is to get out into the real world and figure out what your problem is before you try to solve it. Natural growth tends to avoid wasting time and money.
it looks pretty sexy if you ask me.
I disagree. The biggest change over the last 5 years has to be that we're designing web content for mobile devices in a very serious way.

And that is due to many of the 'moore's law' advances that have relatively little to do with javascript execution. (Small-screen quality, cpu/gpu/memory speed, improved communications chips and infrastructure, etc)
Thank you, I read that wrong.

"Immediately stop reading" read like "Immediately toss".

Sorry.
Websites To Search And Find Code Snippets
"Multithreaded Algorithms" chapter from Introduction to Algorithms
We don't publish application numbers anymore, lest it tempt competitors into a numbers race. Plus the number now would be pretty meaningless, because half the applicants apply in the last two days.
Wait what?

I took the chart to mean that if your parents make tons of money, your SAT score is going to be better, not that if your SAT score was good, you will make tons of money. Not sure where exactly that chart is coming from so I dunno what context the axes are in.
It shouldn't be a problem as long as you select fairly successful YC entrepreneurs who are too busy running their own startup.

On the other end if you select someone who has sold out and is relaxing, or someone who's startup is not doing well and is ready to jump ship, then it will create a conflict.

EDIT: Either ways you guys review mine. If someone finds it good enough, they would want to work with and not against.
The first Android phone I actually want.

Now to wait for my Palm Pre contract to expire...
You're making a very common mistake here. If the barrier to entry in a new market is prohibitively expensive then there is no free market, just a de facto monopoly. By having the local government own the infrastructure and then lease the lines to ISPs who provide actual service, you get competitive rates in service while anyone and everyone can use the common lines.
That seems like over optimizing. Setting up a limited app would probably take longer than just having the four YC people read all the apps themselves.
SVG is probably better than Canvas for an interactive UI with lots of elements that change. SVG has its own DOM, so you can update elements and they will redraw automatically (as opposed to Canvas where you are responsible for rendering a whole new bitmap each time anything changes). Depending on your use cases, something like Primer might simplify things:

http://github.com/mojombo/primer
didn't help GOOG either ;)
Having graded papers in college and worked with a number of professors, peers are often a far harsher critic.

Investors also operate in a big picture kind of way and see a horizon that is far larger than operators tend to see.

It'll be interesting to see how this adds to the decision-making process for PG. I'd love to see the data (even anonymized) about how the peers review compare to PG and teams reviews.
I believe he means that if they come across a potential competitor, they'll respect their application and stop reading. This implies that someone else would then be tasked with reading it. Someone without a conflict of interest.
No, everything else is unchanged.
To Scheme.
Ask HN: Examples of sites with 'customer class' freemium?
Any examples of sites that require registration or upgrading to a premium version for business use? Chris Anderson mentioned 'customer class' as a freemium model, would like to see examples. Main difficulty is obviously enforcement.
Will you still be reading all the applications then?
What? The government would just provide the dark fiber. Service providers would be able to compete over service using the same lines.
everything is sexy to someone--otherwise we wouldn't have craigslist singles
Not to mention that the ability to raise additional money after YC would be significantly impeded by being cagey about the ideas behind the company. Almost every investor I've ever heard speak on the subject has said they simply do not sign NDAs. If someone expects YC to sign an NDA, they would likely expect every other potential investor to sign an NDA...and that's not going to happen.

I suspect that investors not being willing to sign NDAs is at least as much attributable to the fact that people who want random people to sign NDAs have too much confidence that their idea alone has value, and thus won't understand that execution is vital, and likely will not be willing to evolve their idea as the market demands. Well, that, and "idea" people are just generally useless and annoying. So, asking for an NDA is a sign that you're a useless non-starter who won't be able to build a company or compete in the market (because your idea has to be public before you can do anything with it; if you're concerned that your only advantage is secrecy, then it seems likely to me that failure is imminent).
I agree with you here; those are all valid reasons to get a shot. My issue was with the use of the death rates as justification, which is much less reasonable.
What's on the Wire? Choosing the Best Approach to Network Monitoring
I think you've got it right. Mostly because the writing section was added in 2005. So that would mean that anyone who did better than 560 on the writing is making $200,000 a year at the age of 21. And as a 21 year old who did do much better than 560 on the writing section (as well as the other two sections) I for one am not making $200k+...
P.S. This email resulted in this article: http://gigaom.com/2008/10/27/more-money-i-game-developers-wi...
What makes your public option unviable?
Well you are ignoring half of the potential problem.

Even smart people have different opinions: what if an applicant thinks someone you chose to read their application is naive (or worse, an idiot)?

Also seems just plain fair that applicants be aware of their audience.
yeah, like maybe filter out answers to ... "What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?"
"This is why Slicehost rock, they always communicate brilliantly."

Um, ok, here's some counter-anecdotal info: My company at the time had an account on Slicehost, and every so often our instance would just go offline.

No word from anyone, just dead. After some e-mail, we learned that there was some concern of malicious activity, so the image was shutdown. Now, if Slicehost was getting complaints, and were planning on shutting down the instance, why couldn't they give some warning so some action could be taken. Or even say something right after shutting down a suspicious instance? Instead, we were left wondering why our site was not up.

I never figured out just how the instance was supposedly compromised, and eventually left Slicehost for eApps.

Nowadays I use Linode, or The Planet.

I know a few people who swear by Slicehost, but not everyone has a rosey exeperience.
It may be totally irrational, but my gut reaction is, "Some young founder who can't think outside of his or her space is going to read our application and toss it away."

Although I think our company will be massively profitable, our proposal is a long way from glamorous.
half the applicants apply in the last two days

If that doesn't scream out to everyone that applying early is important, I don't know what will.
not necessarily even true--email and telephone are global--its possible the killer execution just hasn't been innovated yet.
don't you just hate contracts?
Of course, if you wanted to hack together a language that compiled a single source to both Objective-C and C++, Scheme would be a pretty good environment in which to prototype it.
If Schmidt is expecting machine translation to significantly improve, it makes perfect sense.

You wouldn't need to learn Chinese for it to impact you. You'd just start getting more and more readably-chinglish results as you search. And if translation services work well-enough each way, it would have an unavoidable impact on products/services angling toward Chinese interests.
For example, the founders of http://www.thesixtyone.com, if they so happen to read my application, a lightbulb may go off in their heads.

Take additional comfort in the knowledge that YC teams are small, and have far more ideas and light bulbs going off in their heads than they have time to implement. Ideas are not in short supply. Time to implement, ability to execute well, ability to connect with markets, and the focus to deliver a compelling product that makes peoples lives better in some small way in a reasonable time frame are. So, even if your idea is brilliant and new, and even if it would help thesixtyone, and even if they saw your application, it's unlikely they would recognize it as a "killer feature" and it's even more unlikely they would have time from their existing product development schedule (which they probably also believe has some "killer features" on it) to implement it in an effective manner.
That sounds like a challenge worth taking.
The article is entirely free of side-effect data. Reducing my H1N1 infection probability from 25% to 2.5% might be worth a poke in the arm, but more severe side effects have been reported. If I had to guess, I'd say the benefits outweigh the costs, but without data for both, that's nothing more than a guess.
Facebook | Startside
Cloud Computing The Concept
Yes, your are right.
i agree, i think weighting results by my social graph would have value
Does anyone know how the software behind this works? Is it some kind of advanced AI? Does it "learn" how to walk?
Free software helps prevent food poisoning
I've seen several. Search for "Personal Use only" maybe? Those are generally the terms I see when I see the licensing model on a shopping cart. I don't know of any offhand but that's probably where I would start.
That chart was totally made in Excel. I'm just saying ...
The proof that they aren't is the fact that all web dev is not outsourced to the cheapest company.
Global warming: Indians decide to make their own glaciers
US DoD snuffs open-source 'misconceptions'
I'd love for a bunch of the YC founders to review my application-- I feel like I've spent the last several weeks getting every smart person (including YC founders) I could find to read my application. Who knows, maybe one of the YC founders will see something that piques their curiosity. It'd be great if this process generated constructive feedback or a partnership opportunity.

A minute or two of mind share from YC founders sounds better to me than 30 seconds from the YC partners.
Rationally the effort of you, personally, going to vote only matters if it changes the outcome. However the odds of a single vote doing that are very, very low. The odds of it changing the reported statistics even by 0.1% are also low. At a national level the odds of doing either are effectively non-existent.

Therefore rationally there is no point in an individual voting.

I know this. But emotionally I feel better knowing that I tried to use my voice, even though logically I know that the act was meaningless. I long ago came to accept that my emotions do not respond to logic, and therefore I have come to let emotion drive my goals, and then use logic to achieve those goals.

Therefore I am willing to engage in a logically pointless activity in return for the emotional satisfaction I derive. Even though I am aware that the emotional satisfaction is illogical.
If by python-supported do you mean lets you run python code?

I use nearlyfreespeech.net.

They don't let you do long running processes so that rules out several frameworks.
> It's unfortunate that it has proved impossible to get a bill through the house/senate without adding various handouts for specific industries or even companies.

Interestingly enough, I wasn't referring to the explicit graft, but now that you mention it....

> What's more, like the dotcom boom it will be one that anyone can participate in, not just those who are well connected to the government or whatever.

Wrong.

Read the damn thing. That's not how it works. That's not even how the theoretical best version works.

Cap and trade is a bunch of folks wandering around saying "that's worth $" and "you owe $". The excuse is carbon, but there's no actual connection between carbon and where those folks utter those sentences and the dollar figures.

Don't believe me? Notice that we're not charging immigrants. We're not charging parents. The accounting for agriculture is impossible.
This demo reminds me of the Dexter robot from Anybots. Here is a video from about a year ago: http://fwd.five.tv/gadget-show/videos/feature/meet-the-human...
A few of the application's questions could be designated alumni-readable and marked as such.
Who wouldn't want the FCC to regulate the internet? They do so well with FM Radio and Television!
Garmin Ltd. - Google Finance
Yeah, I don't know of any similar phones on the market this year that have this resolution or better (except the N900; very similar specs, but not Android). I had a few specific gripes with my G1, and it may well be that the Droid fixes all of them.
Would be great if you share the ammount of visits pageviews you got from NYTimes.com :-)
The only wierd thing to me is that the strength of the relationship appears to gradually weaken as income gets higher (which would make sense), but then sort of jumps up at $200,000. That's surprising, I would have thought the highest would have been around the upper middle class - comfortable enough to be able to dedicate oneself to school, but poor enough to still be hungry.

I'd like to see the relationship between extremely high SAT scores (e.g., 99th percentile) and family income. I suspect middle to upper-middle class students would proportionately outnumber the rich.
Actually it's really not. At justin.tv we already have a list as long as my arm of great ideas that we don't have time to implement. Seeing a few more great ideas from a potential competitor wouldn't make much difference to us in my opinion.
And host your campaign on my site! http://www.obsidianportal.com
I thought the same, which caused me to click on the link they used as reference, which turned out not to work... <insert eyebrow raised emoticon here>
I think he's trying to say that if he hadn't used Twitter to confirm what his friend was saying, he might have spent time mulling around to see what the big deal was. In this case, Twitter was the cure for stupidity ("I'm not going to believe my friend, I'll ignore him!") instead of the generator of it ("I'm helping start a revolution in Iran from my computer chair! Go activist me! Yay!").
To me the question boils down to, "Do you trust YC to have the right people reading your application to make a good decision?" I know that they have high enough volume that it makes no sense for pg to make every decision personally.

What I just read is, "They have found a way to scale higher and while sticking to high quality people who have direct experience with what you want to do."

That makes the answer to the first question a "Yes". :-)
> It will also force incumbent, stagnant industries to invest in research and development, and disperse wealth more broadly, both of which pay significant future dividends beyond simply a reduction carbon output.

"force to invest" concedes the argument that these "investments" don't make any economic sense absent artificial costs, aka a govt mandate. As a result, the resources used by these "investments" would have been better used elsewhere.
I think the jump is because of the cut-off. If the X were allowed to continue smoothly past 200k, the scores might have followed the same curve all the way up.
Where women stand when it comes to angel and VC investing
Even though fears of a pre-facebook Zuckerberg reading your ideas about a new social networking site are valid it seems to me that this more of an exception than a rule.. but it does seem like a valid concern..

The only other thing I would add is that given the rising popularity of YC it seems only natural that PG and friends would like some qualified help.

At any rate, were someone to actually successfully steal your idea, this person would probably be found out and disowned by the community and YC. In other words, there is plenty of incentive for people not to steal.
Just multiply those odds by the percentage of people that qualify as important.