skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This answer by Adam D'Angelo on Quora blows my mind:

"What was hot in Silicon Valley in March 2013?"

http://www.quora.com/What-was-hot-in-Silicon-Valley-in-March...

Every one of those blew up.

So I ask you the same question:

What is hot in Silicon Valley in March, 2015?
what is your answers to pgs dont do a startup in your 20s?

is there anything you wish you had done, recommend besides startups?
So you only have to visit a website and do nothing else? And probably assuming javascript is enabled.
Good to see changes support for the get_all command. Look forward to testing this out over the weekend.
Jobs, Woz, Gates stories, as told by inventor of the 6502 Chuck Peddle
Imagine a hardware company doing a research which requires lab or special equipment. Is it OK the leave about a half of the team on site and join YC with the rest? Project lead is among those who can move.
My comment was a bit more general than pure "packet". I agree thats where the disconnect between low lever service provider and customers come - providers revenues and expenses are "packets", while they don't always translate to revenue for customers.

However my note was about general "traffic", if one sells video views for example, and revenues do not grow inline with adjusted to [almost always decreasing] bandwidth costs sooner or later that will become a big problem.
Yes! sendwave.com is one of our companies, and they are doing phenomenally well. They have a chance of being the best pivot in the history of YC.
Does the current partnership explicitly cap the partner count or is there some point in the future where you think it would make sense to cap the number of partners?
I always wondered why real-life space stations don't seem to have the sleek exteriors, pleasing or even consistent patterns, but seem to have a bunch of irregularities, and ugly-looking metal structures of different shades of beige protruding from the hull. How do you explain that?
You say a lot that startups should collect revenue very early. If my startup is currently just a side-project and I haven't yet incorporated, what's the legal concern of collecting payment?

I feel like startups like Door Dash have dealt with this, but I was just wondering if there's anything I should be aware of.
Descent 3 had multiple ships, logos, etc. CTF existed in Descent 2. ...And maybe D1? ... I can't remember! :)
If one read all those headlines and news without proper critique, they would eventually start believing in all kinds of magic, like that one dude can discover race condition exploits in the browser and the drivers in under 30 minutes.
> That said, I nor the people that I spoke with about your talk found you to be a particularly charismatic or persuasive speaker. The only people that seemed convinced by your speech were the ones who had already been leaning towards your point of view to start with.

I had the same impression a few years ago when Stallman came and gave a talk at CERN. I already agreed with him on most of his points, but I didn't expect anybody to change their mind just because of the talk.
How and why will Pebble win, or be one of the winners, in the "war of the wearables". Ie. how will it be a similar to the android/ios platforms of mobile today
Thanks for doing this AMA anything Sam.

As a follow-up, what would you recommend applicants who are in this position do before the end of next week to increase their chances of being interviewed/accepted? (i.e. get feedback from as many YC alum as possible, iterate on their video, etc). Obviously without specifics, I'm sure your answer may be similar to the above, but any general recommendations here?
Where did it explain why? All I saw was that Congress hasn't decided to do so.

(It can't simply be that Congress never closes agencies. It closed the Office of Technology Assessment, to give the first example that sprang to mind.)
Thanks for doing this AMA Sam.

As a follow-up, what would you recommend applicants who are in this position do before the end of next week to increase their chances of being interviewed/accepted? (i.e. get feedback from as many YC alum as possible, iterate on their video, etc). Obviously without specifics, I'm sure your answer may be similar to the above, but any general recommendations here?
Does more than 1 partner review an application? and how do you maintain quality in screening applications and interview teams? Is recommendations from current partners have weight-age in the screening process (from instacart application hack)?
I believe that Stallman is going to be Stallman. He made an incredible contribution to society, but what the free software movement needs with regards to public awareness is a Neil Degrasse Tyson / Temple Grandin / Steve Irwin.
Pwn2Own has a lottery dynamic that the bug bounty programs don't. As for the sub rosa pricing for these exploits, it gets complicated. Among other important details: to maximize your returns you need to be a competent salesperson (you need to have the contacts to sell them to), and the best returns make you at least morally and in some cases even legally culpable for what's done with them.

There's probably some headroom left for escalating valuations for browser RCEs, but they're not like an order of magnitude mispriced.

Also remember you're looking at the subset of bugs with the absolute peak valuation.

(I'm both ideologically opposed to bug sales and not smart enough to get RCE on Chrome, so: take this with a grain of salt).
There's a great deal to be said on message-crafting. Leave that up to more moderate folks, like ESR (and yeah, that kind of tells you how extreme rms is, that Eric Scott Raymond is a moderate).

Stallman and the FSF are basically the platinum standard by which all free software rhetoric is judged. It is of utmost importance that they not bridge one iota. They are the reference implementation for what it means to have truly free software, what it means to value philosophy over culture, and to value ideals over pragmatism.

That's cost them, and yeah, that doesn't make them popular. But you know what? Their track record has been pretty correct. The number of infringements and abuses of power they have warned against have only multiplied--and will continue to multiply.

They're going to lose, of course, because the people they're trying to help don't want help. The people whose freedoms they hold dear forsake them and mock them and sell out at the smallest sign of convenience. It's a forgone conclusion--so, they might as well fail as martyrs instead of salesmen.
We just have to accept the trade-offs of functionality. Things like airplane autopilot systems and medical equipment are probably pretty close to perfect, but that level of correctness in your browser, much less your operating system, much less your hardware - would be very costly.

Even if every computer was running an operating system that was developed as carefully as equipment in charge of people's lives, I'm sure there'd still be vulnerabilities. The low hanging fruit is relative, and there'll always be people cracking computers.
Does YC encourage couples applying to YC as co founders. Is that seen as a negative. One of the co founder is technical and other is non technical.
Some of the advice YC partners give seems harmful because of survivorship bias (Basic for the Altair -> Microsoft). I've seen some people criticise you for it, but I've never seen any of you address it directly. Do you mind doing so now?
Hello! Are partners chosen specifically for each interview (e.g. people with knowledge of the market), or are the tracks split up between groups of partners randomly?
We'd like to lead the Series A round please. We think the integration opportunities with our existing product are endless!

Sincerely, the Yo app investors
Yes, of course. We reimburse travel expenses for everyone who comes to interview with us, and I think it's shameful when other accelerators don't.

I probably would not have interviewed at YC if I had to pay for the trip--I was super poor at the time.
Yeah, like at today's provathon Grigori Perelman proved Poincaré conjecture in under 30 minutes.
Hey, you left debug mode on - noticed it as I tried it with my city (Vác), which raised a UnicodeEncodeError.
There's a Reddit AMA about this happening right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2zpkxx/we_are_jameel_...
It's actually a fair question. But 1) I don't believe substitutes for coal power are immediately available, and taking out a plant would likely lead to many deaths (think: accidents caused by sudden blackout, rural hospitals without enough fuel for backup power generators) and inconvenience (think: areas with interrupted electrical service for months as people try to fix the grid and bring in additional power sources); 2) downsides of a coal plant aren't that bad in comparison.

Note that dustspeck vs. torture example involved 3^^^3 dustspecks, which is more than number of atoms in the universe raised to the power of number of atoms in the universe. It was purposefully chosen as such an extreme number, as to clearly outweight the utilitarian calculation in favour of torture - so that the example could be used to study our moral intuitions.
Hi guys,

Vu, the founder here. I wanted to take the time to thank all of our amazing beta testers who kept coming back to use the app even though there were bugs. You guys are the real MVP! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Email is hard and there will still be some bugs, but our heart truly bleeds for our users. Like whenever we see a crash report, it causes us what feels like physical pain and we'll work tirelessly to address these issues, day and night. Thanks you guys!
Man, serioulsy? This is the worst site I've seen in a while!
The real travesty of the blurred lines case is that data science was not used, from what I gather, at any point. At a minimum, the two tracks could have been compared as to quantifiable similarity using any number of methods. EchoNest, and other recommendation approaches, convolutional neural nets, etc.

The lack of computational methods to abstract and describe the material on either side is particularly bizarre considering the judge's decision to preclude original song material from being played by the Gaye family. I'm convinced that science, rather than expert insider testimony that culminated in a courtroom live-performance jam, could have prevailed.
It may go without saying, but potential market has a lot to do with it as well.

A company like Uber is entering a huge transportation market; Airbnb a huge lodging market. They can be big fish in big ponds. I think there are lots of YC companies in smaller ponds.
Wrong post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238237
p.s. my social ideology is to extract the value of data without compromising identity privacy. Innit is a system that allows users to own and trade in their own data (particularly health and financial data)
Lynx doesn't support images, CSS or script. It does support cookies and redirects (by default it prompts for both). Basically, it renders the bare HTML of the page you open, without fetching external resources. If you find it behaves differently, make sure your lynx command isn't actually symlinked to links (or another text browser with graphical/enhanced capabilities).
I have the same laptop, dell 640m,it is a awesome machine, it still used by my parents! Anyway I switched to a MacBook Pro too in 2010 and I never look back!
>You can do your job with little fear that your boss will want to sleep with you and impede your career if you reject his advances.

No I just have to fear that I say the wrong thing at a conference and lose my job.

>People asking you to mind your privilege don't want you to feel guilty

That is a lie.
This reminds me of the "weather rock" that often appears in rustic campsites.

You remember it, don't you? If the rock is wet, there's rain. If it's swinging, there's wind. If you can barely see it, there's fog. If it's smoking, lightning strike. If it's gone, tornado. If it comes back, duck!
"There is no shortcut for the hard work of building a great product" yet Quality often takes time.. yet the longer something takes to build - the more negative points programs like this give (and tech culture in general)

It seems like speed trumps quality is the standard
Great to hear! Let us know if you run into an issues or have questions.
- How much does previous entrepreneurial success improve your odds of getting an interview? I.e. selling a bootstrapped company for $500k? $5M?

- If previous success is in an industry with a negative image like, say, title loans, does that hurt odds?
I wrote something related: http://blog.samaltman.com/advice-for-ambitious-19-year-olds

If you have a low personal burn, you can jump right into a startup. If you have a lot of personal expenses, you probably need to save money before starting a startup.

As a side note, people sometimes criticize YC as being unfriendly to older founders because we don't provide enough money. I always encourage founders with big financial obligations to save up some money before starting a startup--it'll make things far less stressful.

This is a huge advantage of being a recent college grad--you generally have very little in the way of obligations.
Do YC encourage couples applying as co founders. One is technical and the other is non technical.
What is the most critical element in driving growth for a startup?
I think it still may be - people are posting this around as an additional reading for those who liked HPMOR; number of people who read that fanfic is most likely much greater than the number of people that read the Sequences.
We were in the same situation. But we were completely open with our YC founders and they helped us a lot in getting into YC and with tons of advice. It seems like you are building the relation ship wrong based on some sort of deception. I would think about it.
If we are going to ask for geo-ip features, it could also switch between °F and °C accordingly.
46°F in the midwest is a no? :P
Maybe a more founder-friendly way to rephrase this, rather than an IPO with the public: have you considered opening crowdfunding so that the startup community self-funds the next YC semesters? I'm sure there would be quite some demand.

Implementation could be as simple as a syndicate on AngelList for instance.
SONOS, IFTTT, ECHO, AND LCP HACK
I have no much experience with co-located services so can't really comment on that. I can't go in detail how and what mitigations are applied on AWS site also, as I feel obliged to leave as much weapons on a "good" side of ddos as possible, and knowledge is one of those.

What I remember pushing BGP flowspec updates upstream was thought about as something close to impossible though.
Hi Sam, Is it ok to seek advice from partners and get feedback and improve on the application? Just would like to increase the odds. Thank You.
What's your opinion on accelerators / incubators backed by big corporations such as Wayra (Telefonica) or hub:raum (Deutsche Telekom)?
For hardware cos applying to this batch, the Bolt collaboration sounds awesome.
Since Bolt has super expertise in prototyping, is it an indication that hardware ideas with an idea only Or partial prototype can get accepted?
How can such co.s improve their chances further, compared to software co.s where making a proof of concept barely costs any money?
Thank you for taking the time to answer :)

I have no doubt its biological, but biological processes are inherent to any human activity and are ultimately based on physics as well. Consider even just the absurd number of extremely complex biological processes involved in typing a reply as we essentially communicate telepathically thousands of miles apart right now.

I'm daydreaming about having a captivating discussion with you and Alan Kay in which I manage to convince both of you to help me replace current technology with something that would change this and the world with it.

Any advice on how to make that happen?

I'm leaning towards "stop daydreaming and get to work building it" being the best advice toward that end myself...but then there is all the other things I need to get done as well.

:P
...am I the only person who didn't know that Stallman is a 9/11 truther?
Not to mention the fact that somebody would just go ahead and implement them (security be damned), defeating the whole purpose.
Also, if you don't use Alien Blue (the mobile app for Reddit) then you might not know they have been testing "Sponsored" posts. It didn't take a genius to know people would complain, but the ads are getting A LOT of pushback from users. I supposed you can put this in context and look at how Facebook gets crap for changing anything, but is this really the most creative idea Reddit can come up with to generate more revenue?
Why don't even the best VCs publish returns? Does YC plan to?
Question re solo founders:
"A startup is too much work for one person" and if you can't convince even one friend to join you, that doesn't speak well for your idea! On the other hand, a bad hire/partnership can ruin the company. YC gives signal it really prefers to look at teams than individual applications.
Q: Do you have have advice or rules of thumb re how much time a solo founder should put into finding partner(s)? Or thoughts re how much to prioritise this, vs. just writing code and talking to users to finish initial version yourself?
I don't mean this to be just focused on "getting into YC" but more in general: what's the right way to think about fixing this problem (being a solo founder) vs tackling other things like actually building something initial users can be using? For software ideas surely it is occasionally sensible to make at least a prototype and actually get some users before ever buddying up? Or if I've got this far but am basically still going it alone, am I doing something wrong?
I don't want to work for a company, I'd much rather start my own. And there are definitely some problems I'd like to solve, but I'm still figuring out which ones will actually add value and how to go about solving them. Any advice? If I just applied with a bunch of ideas and the YC team liked one, would it be considered? I'd imagine there needs to be at least some progress but still thought I'd ask.

My relevant background is that I built a social calendaring app with my college roommate and it was eventually acquired by our university. In my eyes, it was a failure that I learned a lot from.
As newyorkersays, this would be much more interesting (i.e. almost verging on moderately) if it wasn't looking up weather alone, but triangulating for local fashion.

Distinctly interesting if it was backed by image processing and machine learning based on public pictures taken in the local, e.g. weighted for probability picture was taken by a local or tourist; season; year...
The Worlds Strangest Apartments – No. 1
So the reason I choose to send a PDF over a Word Doc is total visual control of the end product. If people open word docs on different versions, or with certain fonts missing or whatever, the layout can get screwy and messed up.

With a PDF I can guarantee what the end product will look like on every device, every software version. Even if they open it on a Windows XP machine, a PDF will look the same.

How will this API + HTML5 guarantee the same thing?

(For the record I think this sounds awesome and I'm a huge fan of PandaDoc, but I didn't see anything in the blog post announcement around visual consistency across browsers/devices)
> You don't get somebody off heroin by lecturing them about how they should value their freedom; you switch them over to methadone for a while and let them slowly detox.

Really bad analogy. That's like saying the best way to quit smoking is to start chewing tobacco to give your lungs a rest.
Why Your Early Startup Needs an Infrastructure Engineer
Curl is great, but I also recently came across HTTPie (https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie) which has some nice features for playing around with HTTP APIs (JSON formatting, syntax highlighting, etc)
Would be interesting to use answers based on relative temperatures rather than absolute measures.

It may be be a shorts day in NY if its 60F but not in FL.
Rather than asking such a vague, generic, unhelpful question, ask yourself whether the knowledge you're obtaining from the information you digest (see brd's comment about knowledge vs information) will: 1) Give you more prediction power, and 2) Allow you to later act on this prediction power to take a different action that will have a more beneficial outcome than the action you would have taken without that knowledge.

Taking better actions is the whole point of knowledge. In that respect, some of it (e.g. specific knowledge of current politics for someone who is not an activist and doesn't even vote) can be beyond utterly useless or actively harmful. On the flipside, some (e.g. knowing there is a tiger behind the first door, and no danger behind the second) have huge visible effects (taking the second door, improving survival chances from 50% with zero knowledge to 100% with knowledge of the tiger).
ZoomCharts for ICACTA 2015: March 26-27, 2015
>Transferring documents online is not that hard a problem.

Here's an idea: make your own browser that competes with Chrome for usability, offer a huge prize for anyone that hacks it. It's easy, right?
Open Chopin is nearly done as well, and will be hosted at musopen too.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/set-chopin-free.html
Citizen, you will vote for Democrat otherwise you get bullet. Thank you Comrade.
Uprated because I think the points Alexey makes are valid, having seen Stallman speak. I give the FSF money every year because of what they do, but... Stallman is out there. Then again, if he wasn't, would he have created the FSF?

Stallman doesn't appear to be very open to honest advice, so there isn't much you can do to change his approach.
Lol.

Go nuts. https://github.com/johndavidback/can-i-wear-shorts
Hmm, not terribly interesting without some O() work. It may well be possible to solve the problem this way, but it may still be an NP solution.
Yes, I agree that the anal-retentive nature that these big firms go after copyright cases is reprehensible. And also that copyright law hinders as much creativity and progress as it supposedly serves to protect (especially the dumb shit supreme court decision that computer loading data from a CD into RAM falls is copyright infringement)...

But, technical point, the Joel Zimmerman thing is trademark law, and not copyright law. There is a big difference between the amount of original work and money Disney put into producing Lion King (with or without inspiration from Osamu Tezuka) and how much work it takes to draw 3 black circles in Illustrator and exporting as SVG. I mean, Lion King was based around the idea of "tell Hamlet with lions", which, as an idea, isn't even copyrightable. Combined with the original lines (in fact, even the language was different), original music, original songs, vastly different coloring, different camera angles, mostly different scenes, etc., it'd be a very hard case for any copyright lawyer to win in court.

That's not to say Disney's lawyers wouldn't try their hardest to prosecute if the tables were turned on them; they would and they did. But it's unfair to merely say Disney copyright lawyers are the scum of the earth, when the truth is closer to that all copyright lawyers (and judges) are the scum of the earth - that is, they all labor under what has become a terrible system of laws that, through a select few awful decisions, have come to oppress creativity in the interest of protecting existing corporation rather than foster improvement.
So where's your weather data coming from? Because it says that it's 61˚ here (actual temperature: 31˚F), and a quick survey of online weather services all show the correct figure.
It's a parody blog.
The 60,000 Word Rule–How VCs Become Media Brands