skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can say that bee larvae taste like raw almonds and cow milk butter and I eat on sight.
Which is sushi, novelty or mainstream? Or tofu, or non-wheat flour?

Or maybe there's a middle ground where things are neither.
Well, in my case I never considered cheating as an excuse to anything. May be, I was lucky to born in a small country with 3 million people. I left my grades are to be an indication of how and where I spent studying. My grades are lower than the most other guys who explicitly cared about their grades. Even so, no one hasn't given me a shit about my low grades within 3 years of my career. May be because of in the end all what matters is that you do what you suppose to do good enough.
Of course, but that is a very common interpretation of V-shaped marks in cave art [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave#Paintings
Not really, considering the nutritional profile of insects. There are some nutrients you can't readily get from plant-based foods, or only in poor amounts, like DHA/EPA, carosine, lysine, etc. Not to mention all the things you'd normally miss out on with traditional meat, because we're not used to eating the bones and innards of large animals here, but that you get from insects cause you'd eat them whole, so you'd get plenty more minerals, vitamins, and rarer amino acids that way.

I recommend reading this book if anybody's interested in more specifics about insect-based nutrition, and why it's actually more unique and useful than most people realize:

http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Adventure-Eating-Insects-Planet...
Sam, I know you guys support nonprofit startups. But do you donate? Does YCombinator have a program for supporting nonprofits by the traditional means (ie giving them money), or is that something you do as individuals only, not as a company?
Some of the frontloader's sleekness is aesthetic, but it's also more functional, with a better view for the driver and no distracting bars in his front FOV.
I'm a PhD student in operations research interesting in working for a company addressing a global problem via an approach with low probability of success but high expected value. Think Helion, Ambri, Firefly (the rockets), Planetary Resources, Immunity Project, etc. The thought being any one of these companies will likely fail, but if 5% of them succeed, that's hugely beneficial for society.

What advice can you give?
Would you consider funding a startup with an open source product/idea? If so, under what circumstances (if that's even answerable)?
That's the thing though - it's been there for years (maybe not in the form of cricket flour), and it gets hyped every few months, yet AFAICT there's not been any indication of it being any more than a niche interest.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the sector is really growing this time...
It seems like a bad thing that YC has gotten to the point where people stop me on street and ask to take a selfie. I'm not sure what to do about it, though.
"Generally the province of fascists, artists or fascist artists, manifestos are a dying form. It takes gall to have published one anytime after, say, 1938."

I dunno, here's a list of UK election manifestos, and they do still seem to be writing them, if only to serve as a checklist of things to ignore when in power.

http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man.htm
That means that for some amount of time, say X seconds, you would prefer X-1 seconds of torture for one person over specks, but prefer specks over X seconds of torture for one person.

But let's double each side; presumably you would make the same decision if asked again, right? So now you prefer X-1 seconds of torture done to each of two people, over twice as much specks.

Now, unless X is very low, you should prefer X for a single person over X-1 for two people. (If you disagree with this, please give a plausible value for X that makes it false.)

So you prefer X on a single person over double!specks, but prefer single!specks over X. This seems extremely unlikely. Or even if true, we should be able to make you pick torture for 50 years just by multiplying specks another couple of orders of magnitude.

Does this make his argument any clearer?
I haven't had much luck finding the right cofounder despite meeting thousands of people over the past few years so clearly there's a problem. A few months ago I decided that the problem was probably me since I'm far from perfect so I've been spending considerable time on self improvement by working to define and embody our vision, mission and culture (while continuing to hammer away on product).

Is quality the right thing to focus on at this stage or should I just play the numbers game?
No--but we are delighted when founders come here, learn and make connection in SV, and then go back to their home country!
Hi Sam,
How does YC look to foreign applications? Do you have any plan to make improvements for participation of foreigners like visa support, logistics etc.
Of course, the cash vs. equity exchange rate is a subject of curiosity. :)
Family and career both require massive amounts of time and energy. It should be acknowledged that there is no way to fully commit to one without taking away from the other. So you'll have to make a difficult choice.
Defensive JavaScript? Yes Please
Hey Sam,

I'm getting married in July, If I were accepted into YC, is there anything like deferring Enrollment?
The Ocaml standard library is pretty shitty (you certaily want to use one of the many stdlib replacements) but Opam is pretty neat for 3rd party libraries (albeit some areas are a bit fragmented for historical reasons).
Thank you Sam :)
We already have an idea
We fund companies from all over the world. The sacrifice of moving for 3 months pales in comparison to other sacrifices you have to make to start a successful startup.
Follow up question then. Last time we were applying with no product and no customers. Now we have product and customers (even some YC partners and many of alumni). I heard that YC alumni can vote up on the application of the startup they believe in. Is that true? I guess it might help:)
We've done it once or twice, but why not just apply for the next batch?
The tech around banking seems to move really slow. For example, just grabbing your financial data from your bank is really hard right now.

Do you have a lot of applicants trying to fix problems in the financial sector?
Not really. In fact, Kerbals can just bruteforce the problem with boatloads of struts.

But then again, we don't get to meet the Space Kraken.
Wow—that's incredibly useful. I didn't know about it either. Thanks for the tip!
I forgot (d) "Real" investors in the same startups are often getting preferred shares while we get common shares.
We help with visas. But part of being a founder is figuring out how to overcome obstacles by yourself.
I have a friend who is an entomologist, a doctor of entomology no less. He doesn't eat lobster, or any other type of mollusc, on the basis that they filter-feed and will quite happily chow down on faeces, just like any other insect.

Mind you he finds the texture of boiled eggs repulsive too, so it might just be him.
I was thinking about RPython to native code AOT route.
Discover the cafes where hipsters go
No reason really. That's currently our intent. Thanks for the reply!
That seems pretty hyperbolic. There are plenty of reasons to not use javascript.
Which do you prefer most in an application: What the app currently does (or will do in three months)? What the future app might look like in five years? And/or: how it will get there?
Frustrating as well because supporters of the programs like to bring up how they've been challenged in court before so they're perfectly fine and legal. Well, not exactly...
parametric polymorphism also give you "theorems for free" if you choose the right places to put your abstractions.
Strictly speaking, HTML5 did eliminate all presentational elements; formerly presentation HTML4.1 elements retained in HTML5 were redefined as semantic elements.

Many elements (even ones that were always, even before HTML5, semantic rather than presentational, e.g., <a href="...">...</a>) have common default presentation effects in most browsers, but that doesn't make them any less semantic.

I suppose you could strictly separating presentation from semantic by requiring conforming user-agents to apply no styling differences to any element other than that that provided by CSS (e.g., every element would have the same default presentation.) But its debatable whether that gets you anything useful other than purity for the sake of abstract theory.
Show HN: The Internet's Own Boy (still) available under CC on archive.org
Why did it get so cold inside of Apollo 13 then?
For reference -- this is Bullitt County, Kentucky. It is just south of Louisville, and is now a part of the greater Louisville metropolitan area. At this point in the county's history, it had a population of approximately 10,000 people. The Louisville & Nashville railroad passed through the county and had several stops, plus some fairly good quality roads linked the county with Louisville and other towns in the region, so the area was rural, but not particularly isolated. Its school district was well established but generally stopped at the 8th grade. The school system was a collection of various small schoolhouses located around the county. In short, it was probably representative of most of rural America in the early 20th century.

As a graduate of the public schools in that county, I can't say that I received the same rigorous education that the test here indicates was once the standard. It's very strange to me to see this pop up now and then on the internet as an example of "look at the standards we once held our children to".
Small nit:

S-1-5-18 is the SID+RID for "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM". S-1-5 is just the "NT AUTHORITY" prefix.
We build our own tools mostly.
>The more progress you make on the business, the easier it will be to get a great cofounder.

I am not trying to be pedantic...but are they really a cofounder if you've hashed out the idea and made progress on the business prior to their involvement? It's an important question in my mind, because a cofounder typically receives far more equity than virtually anyone else that becomes involved with the business after it is founded, and it also carries legal ramifications.

I have personally been in a situation where I founded a company and created its technology, and when I needed money, someone volunteered to be my "cofounder". He eventually stole my IP, transferred it to a new corporate entity, sold it, and made more than $60 million. I wound up with nothing. While what he did was outright theft, I assisted him in it and made the legal battle infinitely more difficult for myself by declaring someone that clearly had nothing to do with founding the business a "cofounder" early on.
Do you think that YC's batch model will one day be eschewed in favor of something more seamless and less dependent on timing?

One could argue that, for certain startups, the optimal play right now is to launch just prior to submitting a YC application. It takes advantage of the high traction surrounding launch, and avoids applying in the midst of a typical post-launch slump, if timed correctly.
Agreed. Here's the bike and pedestrian part of one of the main bridges for Gothenburg, Sweden: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:G%C3%B6ta_%C3%A4l... .

The US one seems wider.
Isn't cricket feed mostly corn and soy? Seems like it would be more efficient to eat the raw ingredients rather than the crickets.
Sushi in Vancouver or Tokyo? Mainstream. Boise, Idaho? It's all relative to where you are.

Eating insects here is currently novelty. But in many parts of the world, it is a part of daily life.
http://www.livblends.com/ and http://www.soylent.me/ are both YC companies.
Aware this is far from 'news' but I watched it today for the first time and had to say/do something. A real film for our time. A truly tragic story but also incredibly inspiring.
We start right after Demo Day (the 24th). It's possible we'd read an earlier version--if you're going to make big changes, hold off on submitting.
PayPal does not support my country(Ghana).
What do advise a jack-of-all-trades dev who can create pro grade apps and doesn't have a job?
Both. Clearly explain what you do right now, and where you want to be in five years.
Hi Sam,

My cofounder and I are applying to YC Summer 2015. We're both juniors in high school - I'm 16 and he's 17. We're hungry to learn and execute and are both technical, but dont quite have the skillset needed to fully implement our idea(although we're learning more every day) like many technical groups that apply to YC. Will this small hurdle prevent us from being considered to YC?
For human rights, civil society and media working in difficult DDoS threat environments check out these guys, they are awesome ---> Equalit.ie https://equalit.ie/ who run a DDoS project called Deflect - which I think is free for people in those categories of people.
https://equalit.ie/portfolio/deflect/
Where do you see tech in the next decade?
Great. Could you let me know how to change the color of title bars so that it's not a light grey active window on top of light grey inactive windows?
Hey Sam,

I'm working on this idea on my free time but for now it's in an early stage. We believe strongly in it but we don't have yet a ready prototype which means we don't have any structure, users, revenue, etc..

I'm wondering if YCombinator's goal is to encourage people from initial concept or help existent startups to grow and go further ? Knowing our story, do you honestly think we have a chance at this time to be selected by YCombinator ?

Thanks.
This is not surprising. ISS and Freedom are closely related and subject to the same engineering constraints.
(Most) accelerators are the problem here. They stack all the incentives on adding a cofounder no matter what, and none of those that I've closely known would stand behind the idea of "A bad cofounder is far, far worse than no cofounder." E.g. if your original cofounder leaves, they'll lay big penalties on you if you don't refill that seat immediately, even if it's bad for the company.

What investors tend to leave out here is a real incentive for them, as a class. It's far easier to fire a founder if there's two. If there's two, it's often easy to make them turn on each other if they want one forced out. Forcing one of 2 out tends to be much less frowned upon, than kicking out the sole founding CEO and replacing him with outside management. Having 2 cofounders is big leverage for keeping the founders in line.
I think you instruct the judges to visit your website, and then demonstrate that you owned their box within the 30 minutes to win the prize.
Uncertain. The issue is still in the planning phase.
We'll only remove range sharding if we're confident that hash-based sharding provides an adequate replacement of course. It's possible we'll keep both.
I might do a sort of graduate school version--i.e. "How to scale a startup"
> It is harder to breach two layers of security at the same time than one. I think sandboxes are easier to realize than, say, a secure browser.

I'm not questioning the advantages that sandboxing seems to have, in general. What I am questioning is the ability of the development team that couldn't fix Gnome panel for several years to write a secure sandboxing solution, even when relying on cgroups & co..

Either way, I'd much rather run sane applications that patch and pray that neither the application, nor the jail, have any really disastrous bugs.

> This is a vague argumentum ad hominem against a third party. I don't see relevance to my arguments.

Your argument about permissions and sandboxing on Android is that they help privacy because you can feed fake or empty data to the application. I never managed to do that on my phone (but didn't try that hard, either) so I thought I'd see if there was any progress in that field. Xprivacy was the first result that showed up.

The way it does that, apparently, is by extending /system/bin/app_process to load a JAR file on startup, thus attaching itself to every process and replacing any method in any class. Yeah, no thanks. I can't wait to have the first catastrophic exploit in the Xposed framework making every single process vulnerable.

I tried a couple of other solutions a while ago, but most of them ended up crashing or freezing applications.
I can't recall a single exploitable bug in these competitions that attacked the javascript parser. Running the js is a far larger surface area to attack.
I don't remember specific numbers (this was over a year ago) but I imagine it would change depending on the startup. I remember thinking the offers were fair.
Delicious. One of my favorite restaurants in SF!
Making a product that users love.

http://blog.samaltman.com/the-only-way-to-grow-huge
What We Wanted to Do: A Story of Problem-Solving Solutions
Talking to users, and telling us what you've learned from them.
SOAJS
Because of all the 419 con artists. Urge the police to clamp down on them and then maybe--and it's a big maybe--Paypal will start to do business there.
You mean a version of PyPy that runs super fast as regular PyPy but that can also handle introspection? If it were that easy, why doesn't PyPy have that in place already? I think it's a lot harder than it sounds.
Space is pretty much a perfect storm. As if relying only on radiating heat were not enough, you need gravity (or some acceleration) for convection to work. And then simply pumping a fluid through tubes is an interesting issue when the fluid does not know which way is down.
Wanted: Dead or Alive Programmer
Whew, thank god. Cause the Peak Oil guys sure need something new to fret about.

And these things always come true exactly as predicted because, you know, progress doesn't continue along, Moore's Law doesn't continue along.
This has been a problem for a long time... for many decades education has focused only on rote memorization, to the detriment of all.

"We believe that in the passage of time the neglect of these books in the twentieth century will be regarded as an aberration, and not, as it is sometimes called today, a sign of progress. We think that progress, and progress in education in particular, depends on the incorporation of the ideas and images included in this set in the daily lives of all of us, from childhood through old age. In this view the disappearance of great books from education and from the reading of adults constitutes a calamity. In this view education in the West has been steadily deteriorating; the rising generation has been deprived of its birthright; the mess of pottage it has received in exchange has not been nutritious; adults have come to lead lives comparatively rich in material comforts and very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone."

-- Preface to "Great Books of the Western World", "The Great Conversation Vol. 1" (1951)

http://archive.org/stream/greatconversatio030336mbp/greatcon...
Or any kind of meat -- just a fuckin chuck of animal muscle, tendon, gristle, sometimes even skin.

I think there'd be a lot more vegetarians if everyone had to do their own butchering.
I tell founders it's about 50% advice and 50% network value.
Pretty sure I didn't take OS X as an example of how it's done. In fact, I took it as an example of how it's not done, which is why I find it unpleasant that Gnome is following in their footsteps.

> The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to control window layout is just much better.

It's much better when you have your hands on the keyboard. When I have a hand on the mouse already, having to rely on the keyboard is annoying for the same reason why having to rely on the mouse is annoying when you have your hands on the keyboard.
Is that a joke, because corporations are people?
I am Uruguayan and we have 3.3 millon habitants, not 2.7 :P
Online Bitcoin Wallets Using Copay
I applied to YC for the next batch as a response to one of your RFS. I would probably not have applied at this very early stage if you had not listed a similar idea in your RFS. If you believe in the idea but it's still pre-product, are you more likely to give a team a shot at building it at YC?
You're using a different definition than the one I learned in school. The purpose of diversification, as opposed to simply picking the best asset, is to decrease variance.

Given a choice between two assets, or portfolios, one first maximizes expected value. Between two portfolios of equal expected value, you pick lower variance. That's the rational thing to do if you are managing a fund. The whole risk ratio thing arises only because so many investors are trying to build a well-diversified portfolio and bid up or down the price of assets accordingly. Price in turn affects expected return -- the expected value of the asset.
Ellen Pao accused of covering up hubby's lawsuit
For sure it helps to get to know investors over long periods of time.

However, the investors that invested in my company knew me for 45 minutes (YC), a few weeks (Sequoia), and a few months (NEA).

It's important as a founder not to make excuses for yourself. Sure, it's easier to get money if you've known investors for a long time, but it's certainly possible to get it without knowing them for awhile.

In YC's specific case, we don't know the great majority of the people we fund at all.
Correct, in this case it's the most common type of USB device/driver, the HID driver. Many devices will present themselves as HID Devices initially and even communicate over the HID protocol since it is one of the few USB classes that doesn't require a special driver to be written for windows to recognize it (other classes such as a serial device require at least an INF to be installed in order for windows to load the correct driver).
Convincing arguments have been made that it's usually a better idea that co-founders get equal equity than not, to prevent arguments about said split which are much more likely to doom your startup. It's like that point about arguments in a relationship: would you rather be right or be together?

http://avc.com/2011/04/how-to-allocate-founder-and-employee-...

Edit: I see you added that second paragraph after I wrote this out. I'm sorry for your situation, that must've been horrible. However, it sounds like in that situation the toxicity of the co-founder is more to blame than any initial attribution or equity split.
Only those with the very wildest imaginations (which happened to include PG and the founders) realized that Airbnb was entering a huge lodging market. Most thought it was just dumb to think many people would want to stay in other people's apartments. See http://paulgraham.com/airbnb.html