skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I pretty much agree with what he says. We use a different set of tools, but they largely do the same job.

On the "People management" I think that the key thing is finding the right people. I manage our software development team and there is a big difference to being in the same room, or the same building, which I have done at previous startups, with several of the same team members.

You have to trust people and you have to allow them to do the job. I have always tried to hire people I trust to do the job, but when they are anything from one to nine time zones away there is no conceivable way I could "monitor" them and make sure they do their work. If I tried to suggest something like Webspy (as suggested in the article) to "check up on them" I would be first in line to kick myself out of the room. It is all results based. Did you get what you expected at the end of the day/week?

There are certainly drawbacks with not being in the same room. How I would love to be able to round em all up more often and have a whiteboard session (not sure they want that too though... :)). But on the other hand you get very independent and self propelled colleagues instead.

We try to have a group get together every 6 months, but it isn't always feasible, but you really notice the increase in "bandwidth" when everyone is in the same room for a couple of days to a week.

Would I want all of my team in the same town? You bet. Could I have assembled my team or one like it in the same town? With great difficulty. So, overall, we are better of with a distributed team, as the alternative would be to have no team. But it isn't always super easy.
Because those of us who are not going to use it shouldn't be burdened with it.

cat jquery.js functional.js > myfatquery.js and be happy.
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In reply to adrianwaj: Look, if I'm submitting my application with my karma score and words alongside you (+ tianaco's score and words (under your name)), then if words and score are important to PG for the app, do you think I should feel the playing field has been even with the duplicity?

I went through my submissions and they are 100% mine.
I went through my comments and can say with confidence they are 95% mine. The true number is probably higher.

Does that allay your concerns?
Spamming HN from two account eh?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jrossi
If the content of the lecture isn't compelling enough to win out over Farmville for an hour and the content of the test isn't dependent on the content of the lecture, I pray professors don't attempt to artificially monopolize my attention.

Additionally, the idea of a weekly (worse, daily) lecture as an effective means of information transfer for everyone in attendance is pretty silly.

Lastly, my college classes _expected_ that people would tune out a bit, especially as freshmen, since we didn't have the mental strength to last through a 3 hour discussion of a text. 'Attendance' was a fairly fluid concept. It worked well.
Works great for those with a product that can be bootstrapped. If everybody did this, we'd only have quick-win products, and leave the entire field of useful-but-hard-to-build products to corporations.
Wow.

Y Combinator has funded female cofounders before and it is my understanding that most batches have had women in them. If anything, I think they'd almost be more willing to fund female cofounders because there isn't enough data out there to know if or how female cofounders in YC startups deviate from the success rate in a notable way.

Since Y Combinator is about funding startups that are likely to succeed, this is an additional (and I think positive) way to test the methods of picking they've used in the past. Are YC founders as capable as YC at picking successful startups? I think this is a very interesting question.

Y Combinator doesn't make any promises about who they're going to invest in. Trying to hack your way into YC based merely on the chance that Jessica will be reading your application is a bad idea. Calling bias before you've heard anything from YC seems like a particularly bad idea and risks you coming off as entitled.

Spend your time improving your product. If your product is so specific to female interests that a male founder who's reading it doesn't know whether or not there will be a marketplace for it, I'd imagine he'd get a second opinion. If you are rejected, don't for one second think that it was because you were female. It would be for many many more reasons before that one. Remember, most men will get rejected by YC too. If your product is good, continue working on it. Y Combinator would be the first to admit that they don't always get it right and you do not need Y Combinator to have a successful startup.

Disclosure: I was a cofounder in YCS08.
As I recall Jessica wasn't doing the primary phase of vetting applications anyway -- that was Trevor, Paul and Robert.
The more sets of eyes the better. Y Combinator is looking for the best startups which fit their criteria, and any review system which results in them funding a higher ratio of startups that benefit real users in the long-term is all that really matters. Lets keep in mind the actual end-users in all of this. If it's not something people want, then it shouldn't have been funded in the first place.
Ask HN: Isn't there a site that turns one webpage's text into a readable format?
I remember seeing links to such a service some time ago but cannot find it. Searching isn't helping me either. Any help is much appreciated!
Interesting, I'm going to try to make it to the one in Silicon Valley in November.
Nobody's pretending that it's on the market. It's very obviously an article about something that is in the lab. No need to be cynical.
please put in a higher resolution screenshot/screenshot gallery.
Ask HN: Do you recommend Open Office?
I decided not to buy Office suite that came with the laptop when it will expire next week. Are there Open Office users here? I know it opens Excel files. Is the spreadsheet as good as Excel? Are you happy with Open Office as an alternative to Office? Thank you.
As I explained here, the alumni are going to read applications in addition to us, not instead of us:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908585

I'm not sure what you meant about a "one in three chance," but it sounds like you're misunderstanding how we read applications. We don't split them up. Also, there are 4 YC founders, not 3.

The way it usually works is that Robert, Trevor and I (separately) read and rank the applications. Then Jessica looks at the top-ranked ones to see if there are any red flags we've overlooked.
It is called readability http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
I work with a few smart women and find that I constantly have to redirect attention and praise back to them when the two of us are working on a project together. If I had a dollar every time I said, "Thanks, but Sarah really championed that approach," or "Yeah, Sarah really pushed the vendors to meet our price point: we wouldn't have been under budget without her," I'd be a far richer person.

"Wimpy male introvert" is hardly an exceptionally rare stereotype within IT, and 'not being given anything' is hardly the same as 'having things taken away', which I constantly see happening.

And it's not like a few posts on news.yc is a massive time-sink that's 'energy' that needs to be redirected internally.

Honestly, I'm so glad I'm not a woman in IT. Not only do you get crapped on, you get told not to complain when it happens.
Well, I am concerned (not in a personal sense) that tianaco should start commenting more without her gender displayed, and she can then gauge herself in a gender-free environment here on the forum -- the "male coders" looking at her app could've then seen them.
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It's likely a combination of factors. Here's my theory:

Real estate: people tend to time their home purchases and apartment leases to the school year. For families, it's hard to relocate in the middle of the school year, for new college grads, your housing plans were determined by school year and this habit carries over for several years.

Business: for businesses whose fiscal years follow the calendar year, money gets tight right around fall because planning and budgeting happens more or less quarterly. I worked for the Washington Post (Kaplan), and like clockwork every year for 5 years, there were budget and hiring freezes every Sept 1st.

Commerce: combine real estate and business from above and you will get a picture of what people have to spend for the most important season in retail - Christmas.
although some might consider it positive discrimination, you should really get involved with an organisation like: http://www.astia.org/ They have been great to jlees. In fact she is attending the Silicon Valley event next week.
1. Is it possible for an application to be rejected after having been read by just one alumni, and no one else?

2. Are the readers given a specific list of criteria by which they are supposed to judge the applications, or is it just basically anything they want?

3. Trust is great, but do you have any way to find out if a reader approves an application because it is from a friend, or if a reader rejects good applications that are too similar to the application that was submitted by a friend?
I think there might be a slight miscommunication on time scales. I don't believe that any monopoly, except those granted by the government, can maintain its status as a monopoly forever. I believe that in 10 - 15 years the monopoly will lose its grip on the market. It may still be a major player, but it won't be calling the shots. So there is a barrier to entry, eventually someone will enter the market; unless of course the monopoly is losing money or was subsidized by some other entity in which case those using it are getting a good deal -- it cost more than they spent.
No, this thread was a reaction to the announcement that was just revealed. I feel entitled to state my opinion after I spent so much time tailoring my application to a specific rubric. I'm sure you understand.

The fact that my concern is controversial, but perhaps resonates with people, is why it got so much attention.

HN exists as a forum for discussion and I raised a discussion that is germane to this announcement. A lot of other entrepreneurs have raised similar concerns in different ways... which is why this thread is so popular.

I got under people's skin. But for you to call it "whiney" is really out of line.

My concerns about this announcement as just as valid as other's people's as evidenced by the amount of upvotes.
The non-profit I work with is interested in bringing biking to my home town (El Paso). We're first going to create some "artsy" bike racks for local business. Hopefully that'll raise awareness for bikes, and perhaps we can get city council to back us on adding more bike racks/bike lanes/etc.
So you have a little prejudice:) about:

- successful applicants i.e. outside-of-the-box people may not have an idea about who are outside the box people.
- most of these outside-of-the-box people are males an can be simply categorized as 'coders'.

In fact I don't get your problem exactly. I suppose that there can be 2 cases, which is true?

A. You are a 'female coder' and you think that 'male coders' have such a prejudice that a female coder cannot be as good as a 'male coder'.

B. You think that you really are different from these male coders (perhaps you are not a coder), so even if these guys don't have prejudice about female coders, they think so differently from you, that they will not relate to your application.

A. and B. are very different things, and I could not find out what your problem is from your description.
It is miserable parking my bike in NYC and the threat of it getting bent and hit on the sidewalk is terrifying.
I use OpenOffice, and Calc is better than Excel. It has regular expression find/replace, and no 65,536 row limit. It is my favorite part of OpenOffice. I've used Writer a few times, mainly for the PDF export.

For most other uses, I just use Google Docs though.
Adding some randomness could help to avoid over-fitted populations. Then you could prevent to converge to a sub-optimal state and force the system to look beyond of what it seems the best.
It's not about them looking at my breasts. More often they look away from me as if I don't exist at all.
If anything, I think they'd almost be more willing to fund female cofounders because there isn't enough data out there to know if or how female cofounders in YC startups deviate from the success rate in a notable way.

Being "more willing" to fund female cofounders will bias the question of how they deviate from the success rate, no?
I use Open Office all the time and have no problems with it. My wife does proof reading and she has to use Word, because taking a Word documment into OO then exporting it back out again as Word format changes the formatting.

Personally, I only use OpenOffice and have no problems.
Capable? sure. Likely? no.

YC makes funding decisions after a few short interviews and an application, and they seem to do pretty well with those. I would imagine that after working with some founders for months, they have zero likelihood of selecting a naive idiot.
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however, with open data in google maps, a search like that may start to yield results sooner than you think. I did a search via google maps the other day for resuraunts around me and noticed booking info in the popup. It's not far away to get the google maps navigation to leave out fully booked hotels, coffee shops etc.
I actually think that this is a great idea on the condition that PG/JL/TLB/RM still have the majority of the final say. Given the sheer volume of applications, having more eyes can really only help ensure that the most promising startups get the attention they deserve. It also sounds like a great way to pair up new founders with YC alumni who really see the potential in their startup. I know that my co-founder and I personally think that being stealth is overrated/stupid and would love to hear what other smart people think about our idea.

Disclosure appreciated.
My mistake. I spoke to a few YC alums and they told me that RTM wasn't really involved. Thank you for clarifying.
I live in Berkeley and ride constantly. I occasionally have trouble finding a pole to tie my bike to but generally I have absolutely no trouble.

I'd say parking is only a problem in places like New York City and maybe Chicago. Traffic, on the other hand, is something that scares a lot of people.
As an aside, your profile says you're interested in contract work, but gives no way to contact you. Is that deliberate?
is it really newsworthy when benchmarks reiterate the status quo?
I thought mating was the main cause of genetic diversity, not mutation.
While the kernel certainly able to handle hundreds of thousands of threads, the main limit is memory, because by default (in libc) there is around 2M of memory allocated to the stack of each thread.

With the pthread library you can create threads with a stack size smaller than this, but this limits some aspects (think of recursion, local objects etc.) of your program.

My experiences show that it is possible to be happy with 64K stack size in an event driven program if you are careful, so you can run ~500,000 threads on 64G memory if you want to. Nevertheless you'd better design your program more clever and use only a handful of threads and put them in blocking state only when you must :)
That's the part he's most involved in.
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I think your final paragraph is entirely gender neutral and could apply to pretty much any applicant. The point of alums and YC both reading it has already been made, as well.

My point, though: sure, running a company is more about the company than the person, but as a female founder (I can't exactly speak from experience as a male one!) it's entirely down to your personal presentation of the company, the technology, the idea. Sure, people in meetings don't tend to ask what the coolest thing you ever hacked was, but especially as a small company, it's definitely still personal. There are organisations like Astia, which I'm involved with, that help make it easier for women; I suggest checking them out if you're seriously worried about the gender gap. Yes, we do get treated differently, and having to re-establish hacker credentials time and again when people assume you work in marketing gets old. Funnily enough it's worse in Silicon Valley (so far in my experience) than back home in England. Still. There are things that you can do to make life easier, tricks that everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Queen Elizabeth, to female generals and CEOs have all employed. Your cofounders can help too, if you're having trouble because people ask them the same questions, by backing you up wholeheartedly (that could easily be an authority issue not a gender one). It's a rough road but having the chance of a woman read your YC app is really such a minor thing that it's not worth getting twisted up about.
B. I'm not a coder. I feel that most of my accomplishments will not read as well to a coder as they won't identify with them.

That's it. (I have technical co-founders)
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I believe it is important to remember that Arthur Benjamin is referring to High School Mathematics.

To know probability well you need to have mastered calculus.

I won't argue that point itself. However, given that the audience for this mathematics education is High School Students, we won't have to go that far. Regression lines, standard deviations, and Simpson's paradox can be understood without Calculus. Personally, more time should be focused on the analysis and application (again, at a High School Level).
Incidentally, automobile traffic moves about as quickly in the city center as does bicycle traffic. Outside of the center, a bike moves about as quickly as a city bus. (Seems like I play leapfrog with a bus every time I ride down Roosevelt or Damen.)
Looks like Arnold has been spending too much time on 4chan.
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I agree here. I don't understand the big deal about bringing them into your building with you. They are smaller than a person and 10% of the weight. What could possibly be a risk? Why would people even consider it unacceptable to bring your bike inside?

(I have not tried yet at my $new_job. Soon. I know nobody in my department would care, but I am sure security would complain.)
I've come to similar conclusions. Salary discrepancy is another related phenomenon. My observations are completely based on anecdotal evidence, but having had to interview people for jobs, I'm also now of the opinion that women are paid less than men because they ask for less money. In general men asked for more money than we, as potential employers, had anticipated. Women asked for less money. The difference was significant, at about 10% of the salary (e.g., on a $50K position, men might ask for $55K and women might ask for $45K).

Once I started seeing this pattern, I met a girl who was looking for her first programming job out of school. I insisted she ask for a salary figure that I would have asked for in her position. She was extremely hesitant. She ended up asking for $5K under what I suggested, but when the interviewer didn't balk, and in fact gave her $3K more than she had requested, she was ecstatic. She phoned me up in complete disbelief.

On the other hand, I have another friend who's very unhappy in her programming job right now because she asked for so little money to start and now she just gets cost-of-living raises, which themselves have been frozen due to the current state of her company's finances. She knows that men make $15K to $20K more than her doing the same job, and I keep trying to coax her to ask for a big raise anyway, so it's at least on her boss' radar. I'm actually meeting with her in a couple of hours for a little developer meet and greet, so I'll be sure to remind her again :)

The issue of sexism is a delicate one because it involves perceptions. Also, most men today try not to be sexist. Watch an episode of Mad Men and you'll see how far the workplace has come. What sexism is left is unintentional, subtle, and sometimes the result of both actions on the part of men and women in the workplace. If we want to come to a solution on sexism, I think we need to stop thinking of it as something that people do to other people, and start thinking of it as a phenomenon. People are more willing to discuss why something is the way it is rather than feel obligated to defend or otherwise justify their own actions.
Open Office has improved spectacularly over the years. It's very good for people who just want to work with data. There was a time when its interoperability with Office was poor, but that has come a long way. These days interoperability between versions of Office is poor, so there are times when OO can do a better job of reading a file created by a different vintage of Office.
Seriously, this is kind of sad. He says nothing about the merits (or lack thereof) of the bill [1]. Governing isn't all about high-PR issues, and appropriate districting is an important part of making working cities.

1. http://www.totalcapitol.com/?bill_id=9670
rickyyean and I will be there to represent Stanford's Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES)