skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is also research that suggests that getting a regular flu shot may increase the chance of getting H1N1, so it's possible that the interaction between the various flus and vaccines is more complicated than we thought.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/study...
"They've agreed to (a) stop reading any application that seems like it will compete with something their startup is doing or plans to."

You could have an answer-by-answer reveal button, to see who stops reading and when. That'd remove the temptation to break this rule. There could be post-submission round-up by to see if the trust was actually there.
My 2 year old 15 inch ThinkPad T61p is 1900 x 1200 which is 150ppi. And honestly I don't really want a higher ppi. Software that does not let you change the default fount size becomes almost unreadable. It all comes down to viewing distance and the further you sit from the screen the less useful high PPI becomes.
Does YC not run a risk here of falling into a reinforcement loop where each generation gets more and more "perfect" from the POV of the current generation, leading to highly specialised but unadaptable individuals a few generations down the line?
I feel like this is going to work against me - in a really serious way.

First of all, I really liked knowing that I had a one in three chance of a woman, Jessica Livingston, reading my application.

I liked how the application felt like a college application; they judge you based upon your potential and what you've done in your circumstances, not like an investor who says: "What experience and traction do you have?".

I totally trusted PG, Jessica + TLB to see my potential and tailored my application to the rubric they stated on the website--looking for outstanding "outside of the box" people.

Having entrepreneurs, who may not be as used to thinking outside the box of "who is a good founder?" will be more biased towards founders like themselves - i.e. male coders.

This comes as a very sad surprise to me. I have a feeling I'm going to be treated as I usually am by the men in technology - which is an outsider. I know that there are VERY FEW female YC founders and I know that having male coders looking at my application is going to totally work against me, if for no other reason than they don't relate to me.

[edit: I sincerely apologize that my comment has generated so much heat. I wanted to raise a concern, I'm sorry this got out of hand.]
Schwarzenegger swears and gives a hidden finger to the California legislature
The author is incorrect about Linux TRIM support. The kernel has been supporting it for nearly a year, and ext4 currently supports the TRIM command.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-kernel-adv...
> Right, well first we have to decide that the products and services created by cap-and-trade are a good use of our country's talent and resources. That's an entirely separate debate, but once we've already decided that then the broken window analogy no longer applies.

Um, no. The broken window analogy applies whenever you artifically impose costs. Let's rewrite the above to see why.

Right, well first we have to decide that the products and services created by the increased need for glass cause by the glass-corp smashing windowsare a good use of our country's talent and resources. That's an entirely separate debate, but once we've already decided that then the broken window analogy no longer applies.
"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.

You're twisting an out of context quote to provide a stupid strawman worthy of attacking with your worldview.

... these "investments" don't make any economic sense absent artificial costs, aka a govt mandate.

There are real costs to pollution (pollution is not 'artificial'), but those costs are levied against communities (and world) without any recourse against those who externalize them.
Good observation.

I have to say that I find Java generally distasteful, but I feel the same way about UNIX. An "OS" for my applications that is just some OO code I interact with would be much better than random shell scripts that talk to other random shell scripts via unstructured one-way text pipes. Turtles all the way down, indeed.

Of course, UNIX is trying to fix that too... so it will be interesting to see how this evolves.
Quick and easy podcasting with an iPhone 3GS, GarageBand, and Posterous
Having read through the first third of the paper or so, here's some thoughts.

I'm not convinced by the fact that showing 'possibility' of zombies is enough to eliminate physicalism. The argument they use is too slippery for me to grasp, but it basically sounds to me something like this:

Skeptics think that the laws of physics are sufficient to describe the universe. It suffices to show that magic is possible, and then skepticism is false. This is why opponents of skepticism do not have to point to actual cases of magic being performed; it is enough if such things are possible.

Second, along the lines of conceivable -> possible, here's an interesting thought experiment.

I can conceive of an immovable object. An object such that when it is inserted into our universe, it can never be moved with respect to some frame of reference. Such an object is much easier to conceive of than a zombie.

I can conceive of an irresistable object. This object is such that it moves with constant velocity relative to some frame of reference, and its velocity can never be changed.

I find it hard to accept that the possibility of such concepts can be used to show anything useful about the universe.

Further on, I found that the best counterexample included was that of Daniel Dennett, who compares the idea of consciousness against the idea of health - to quote the quotation:

Supposing that by an act of stipulative imagination you can remove consciousness while leaving all cognitive systems intact — a quite standard but entirely bogus feat of imagination — is like supposing that by an act of stipulative imagination, you can remove health while leaving all bodily functions and powers intact. … Health isn’t that sort of thing, and neither is consciousness (1995, 325).
<end quotation>

Finally, it's nice that they went out and mentioned all the issues with semantics around the concepts of 'conceivable' and 'possible', because that was the part that feels like it wants to give me a migraine.

Last thought:
One of the ideas was that whatever it is that distinguishes us from zombies does not exist in a physical sense. But we have devices that can read our thoughts - or at least show that our physical state is changing while we think.

My MRI shows brain activity, therefore I am.
What does this have to do with jQuery?

edit: by that I mean it's useful without jQuery. It's already been added to Narwhal server-side JS package manager: http://github.com/kriskowal/underscore
Comes down to the fact that IQ has a high correlation to your offspring's IQ (although regression to the mean happens there) and to your income (although incremental increases in IQs > 130 make no difference to income, the professor effect). That being said, it is clear to see why if your parents make more money you get better SATs. Of course there are other reasons too, like more stable families, more attention (because higher earners have less kids), more access to books, more mathematically inclined parents that can help you on homework, but in general, these things all come back to the parent's IQ.
But presumably average score for each group is used. I wouldn't think the difference in average score between the 200k group, and the 220k+ group would be great enough to cause that (and I don't think there'd be too many data points the farther you went out to have much influence on the average).

Unless they were using some type of weighted average for each interval and then skewed the $200k group by adding its weighted average in with the intervals beyond it, then averaging that. Which wouldn't surprise me given the appearance of the chart.
I too am worried about being judged by YC Alumni, much like I worry about being judged by geeks in general. Even though I'm a geek myself (coding for 2/3rd my lifetime, Ph.D. in comp sci, etc.), people usually mistake me for an artist, and that works against me initially. (Later on, when they get to know me, it turns around and they're like: "Oh, it's good you're so well-rounded", but only if I can overcome the initial prejudice.)

The YC application reads like they want to judge you based upon your potential and breadth of experience. I focused in my application on showing my diverse background, and how I don't fit into a standard mold. My concern too is that YC Alumni might be subconciously be like: "We look for people who don't fit into a standard mold, but only ones that fit into a certain mold of not fitting into a certain mold."
I've never understood why that's an argument, or why talking about qualia and consciousness depends on having them, any more than a program that prints "ouch" when you stop it feels real pain.

To me, there just seems to be an undecidable knot there that can never go away, even if you say it doesn't exist like Dennett and others.

Another thing that never gets said is that questions of consciouness are really questions about solipsism in disguise. The real question isn't whether what it's like to be my neighbour is different than what it's like to be someone who died 100 years ago. The only real "obvservable" difference is that it's like something else to be me.
This is really great news for regular ol' Facebook users. I'm glad they realise how spammy all the apps have gotten and are doing something about it.
I haven't seen any side effect data aside from the oft-quoted 1 in a million instance of GBS and occasional anaphalactic reactions.
If you really think that math is both necessary and sufficient for success in finance, get into commodities trading and show us.
A bit of a sidenote.

Way (way) back in the day when geocities and angelfire were the only free ways to have a website they kept putting ads on peoples pages.

This led to a bunch of different scripts and hacks being created that would hide the ads. There then seemed to be an ongoing battle between the hackers and site devs on how to insert html code that couldn't be hidden via JS/CSS/HTML
I don't think it says anything about importance. I think if you polled YC alumni, you'd find a healthy number of them applied in the last two days.
What about all the people that aren't coming there? Perhaps your technique is an adaptive algorithm that learns to keep people who are already there, or something like that.
I know it's verboten to talk about HN on HN, but it's fun clicking refresh and watching people upvote and downvote my comment. Talking about male prejudice in the tech community really gets under people's skin, including my cofounder bravura who said that maybe I shouldn't have posted and rankled people.
Maybe. My guess is there is a correlation between {income and emphasis on education} and {emphasis on education and SAT scores}. It looks like you are saying at some score the SAT becomes something of an IQ test and IQs are more evenly distributed. I'm not sure that is the case.
I understand this concern, but just wanted to say I've observed far less prejudice at justin.tv than in my previous job, which was a company of more than 1000 employees, with lots of HR policies against that kind of thing.

It's been my experience that YC startups are generally much closer to actual meritocracies than the average bay-area tech company.
59 points? Color me surprised…
I feel like this is going to work against me - in a really serious way.

Perhaps because of the chip on your shoulder?

Edit: Your concern of being judged poorly by the alumni screeners is showing the same bias you expect the screeners to have. Do you really expect a small cohort of people who have made it through multiple levels of PG vetting to be so small-minded? YC hasn't shown itself to be so lacking in vision.
I'm getting my PhD in Machine Learning right now, so I'll try to give you some ideas.

First of all Machine Learning will be useful to you, because you'll understand much about statistics, data mining, optimization and efficient programming. If you don't get to work on an ML project in industry directly, some of the enabling techniques might come in handy.

Now, ML is also interesting for industry. Google is essentially a Machine Learning company. They use statistics to evaluate and display data, be it website ranking, recommender systems, or whatnot. Some goes to some extend for MS, Facebook and Yahoo.

Now, there is also increasing demand in the computational biology community for ML methods. Pharma companies are producing terrabytes of data that will need to be analysed with intelligent algorithms, so that might be an interesting direction to consider.

In times of unlimited data access, studying how to teach computers to learn from data seems like the right thing to do.
I call a 7/100,000 chance of death a moderate risk, not miniscule. Also, the 1/3000 chance of contracting pneumonia might be an incentive for some people to get the shot. Further, those figures are estimates based on the current virus. It is possible that the virus will mutate to become more deadly (I have no data on how likely but I've read that H1N1 mutates easily).

Also, those figures are based on one year. If you don't get vaccinated and don't contract H1N1 this year, what are the chances that you will get it in the future? My figuring leads me to believe getting the shot is the rational choice.
You've been on HN for 8 days. Imagine you were on it for 800 days, and then take your average comment mark, that's how you'll rank regardless of what makes you you.
I'd like to hear how you went about training them. That alone is interesting.
Well, last time I had an immunization, I went into a coma, so it's a pretty easy choice for me. Otherwise though, I'd have though it'd be a no brainer.
that's probably true, hell Yahoo told Google to go screw themselves when they offered to sell them their tech.

But the things asked in the application make you get pretty specific. Most people have trouble doing that for investors, let alone potential competitors.

+ it's not like they were told this before hand. They wrote the applications, thinking that pg and his team would review them.
It includes Wifi, which I was pretty suprised about.
It looks like the dedicated GPS manufacturers are in for some trouble. They're getting murderized on Wall Street right now.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091028-714636.html
It's actually possible to predict someones SAT scores with decent accuracy by knowing nothing other than their zipcode.
long time lurker, short time commenter
It looks like many people are scared of someone stealing their ideas. Startups are not a zero sum game, we can all create wealth.

Also, if you are scared someone else will out execute you on your own idea maybe you need work on your execution and dedication.
Looks like Garmin is tanking based on the android announcement
One thing I'm curious about - I don't see user research on the list, the closest ones to it are the customer support and maybe the market research as well. Does your designer cofounder run usability tests? Or do you all take the 37signals approach and rely more on a combination of your gut instincts and customer feedback?

Just to disclaim my bias: as a designer, I've slowly dropped the more esoteric UX/interaction tools like card sorting or mental models over the last 2-3 years as I've focused more on startups but usability testing is the one most resistant to being dropped and I still see it as pretty much the gold standard of design feedback.
Being Successful as a Distributed Team
So far I've only dealt with one press release that involved a product release. We hired a PR company to write up the release and then we did the final tweaking for the tech details.

The experience that I had was that the press release itself garnered little to no direct attention. We had one reasonably well known blogger pick up on the story and his short piece on our release gave us more referrals than anything else. I would say that in the end it all just depends on your product, how big your market is, and how interesting the release is to your audience.

I think that putting effort into getting relevant bloggers to cover your product would probably get you a lot more traffic. It's also sometimes worth looking for 'net communities relevant to the product you are releasing, creating an account and letting them know about the product (in a non spammy way)...

For reference:

Here is the initial press release: http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS139735+10-Ma... (slow but definitely there!)

Here is the blogger's story: http://space.canoe.ca/gadgetguy/blog/view/345232

Here is the actual product info: http://www.intrasitesearchsupport.com/
And Hacker News uses a dialect of Lisp. Point?
Yeah, you could interpret it the other way if you wanted to be contrarian. E.g. A rich family is a family with good genes. But that seems like it would be too categorical for a 15% difference (maybe, what's the min SAT score?).

What makes it striking though is that the average(I assume?) test score isn't higher than 580 at the >$200k level. Granted, I haven't done the SAT's in 20 years, but that's certainly not genius territory there.

It leads me to think that the carefully cynical hypothesis is the more correct one. :-) 15% of your SAT score probably measures your _proximity_ to wealth.
jQuery doesn't support classes on its own.
There might be a plugin for that.

Taking from my own experience (I built rather big Adobe AIR app with jquery) if you need classes (and all the stuff that comes with OOP) you are better of using Prototype or MooTools.
When you reach certain size of an application written using jQuery maintenance becomes a nightmare
Just replying to say that anyone who read the original article should go read this - it meticulously lays out why the idea of p-zombies is utterly incoherent.
That was a really good article

Put another way: Sure the Chinese can learn a
thing or two about original Web ideas from the
Valley, but the Web 2.0 generation can learn a
lot about monetization from China.

and it goes to explain with an example with a Chinese version of match.com
I expect them for better or for worse to reinforce what they've already seen at y-combinator.

As I said, I don't think they're going to relate to me.
I'm not scared of H1N1, I'll take a chance of the flu over the shot. Since I work mostly from home the odds of contracting the flu are lower for me anyway.
Trust is a risk. Illusion really isn't an appropriate term.

Although in this case it's a somewhat peripheral issue, I realize there are other issues.
I really love web development in Scheme. Granted, that's only things on my site, which don't depend on money or anything -- but they were really fun to hack.

But your comment regardin OAuth is poignant. I kinda wanted to implement it, saw the specs, and decided it would be too difficult. On the other hand, since my software is one-of-a-kind, I don't get any spam at all.
Yes, you're correct: people don't like being accused of being prejudice, especially in a community like this which prides itself on being open minded.

Your gender isn't important here. Whether or not you're an entrepreneur with a plan, is.

EDIT: This discussion really belongs in another thread.
I know that there are VERY FEW female YC founders and I know that having male coders looking at my application is going to totally work against me, if for no other reason than they don't relate to me.

Individuals tend to internalize negatives. If you tell them that they aren't going to relate to you because they're men, they're going to internalize that and have trouble relating to you.

There is plenty of overt and veiled sexism in technology -- much of it, you can't control. However, if you come into every scenario projecting an assumption of sexism, that's likely what you'll always find.
Startup Meetup @ Stanford on Fri 30th, 5pm
I felt it was a rational choice and did get mine today. My local healthcare centre in Stockholm were giving it for free and I just had to fill in a form and roll up my sleeve.

I asked a nurse earlier if they had given shots to all the people who were in high risk groups already (didn't want to deprive anyone) and she said "yes last week, but you taking a shot is protection for them too". Easy choice for me.
In Romania (Brasov - in the middle) we're paying about $14.7 for 4 mbps so that red splodge is a misleading indicator.
Yeah, I actually live in Toronto and there was news coverage for days after that explosion...

I can see your point about LPG storage tanks. It's interesting how many dangers lie all about us in the modern world but we either don't know about them or simply ignore them...
Well, this seems like an 11th hour announcement, many of the applicants might not be watching HN at the moment and may not be able to exercise their right to "unapply" before the deadline.

But those are problems for the fainthearts who get deterred with this kinda announcement.

For the rest of the bravehearts its 'ok', they should feel like they are at day 1 on the market and its all bare now. Just that they should gear up for a much quicker launch in case of a possible rejection, which they anywayz should be - "hope for the best and be prepared for the rest/worst".

Let's face it, trustworthiness, bias, plagiarism and wisdom are all human traits.

@PG: Just a thought from a novice. This kinda late announcements/disclosure may taint YC's image like those "conditions apply" advertisements. An announcement early on would be better. I hope you are not doing this intentionally as a first filter for the applicants and hence reduce the load of applications automatically.
Everyone has biases. Theorems in machine learning show that you cannot generalize to new circumstance without bias.
"Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room." --William Hazlitt

tianaco is just saying that she worries that YC alumni will have the wrong bias when confronted with certain applicants of broad experience outside what they expect. Let's hope that she is wrong.
http://amcharts.com/ is one example I can think of. You can use it for free if you don't mind "charts by amcharts" in the corner. This makes it possible for free personal use, as well as the ability to try it for free, but if you want to use it on your business site or software, most would surely pay the fee.
Well, one downside is that they don't have ATMs all over the place. Some are in a [group](http://www.co-opfs.org/public/locators/atmlocator/index.cfm) that offer free withdrawals for any member of a credit union in the group, but they're harder to find than, say, a Chase ATM.
I think this sums it up best. It comes down to trust and you either trust YC or not. If anything, this is a good litmus test for them.
Since the beginning, I have found this sexism. People are VERY hesitant to talk about it. I always hope it will go away, but when I consistently walk into meetings and men will not look me in the face and they re-ask my male partner the same questions they ask me... well, you learn from past experiences.
Yes, they should inject bad genes in the interest of preserving the species.
Event is free so you can just show up with your friends, but if you can please RSVP, so we don't run out of beer too soon!
Not only that, but the shot is being said to only be 90% effective. So even if you get it, you're only reducing your risk from 0.007% to 0.0007%, not zero.

But, I'm in a country where you don't even get the choice anyway (UK). You get the vaccine when the NHS says you do - and regular healthy people aren't allowed it yet.
What to find in South African
South africa is becoming one of the most popular and fascinating destinations in the world. Picking your South African Accommodation will definitely influence your stay in south africa.