skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote this as a reply to someone else above:

I think the dust speck argument would be better if first framed as a preference for yourself:

If you were going to live for 3^^^3 lifetimes, would you like to be tortured for 50 years in exchange for one fewer dust specks in your eye during each of those lifetimes.

I think most people would answer no. So the debate has nothing to do with morality in general. Instead the debate is about Scope Insensitivity (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/), that our emotional reaction to things isn't diminished by even infinitesimally small quantities (see also Useless Medical Disclaimers http://lesswrong.com/lw/h4/useless_medical_disclaimers/).

I think I can make that position seem more reasonable if framed another way: Would you risk a 1/(3^^^3) chance at 50 years of torture, in exchange for getting rid of one dust speck out of your eye? I think most people would say yes. You couldn't even get out of bed in the morning if you weren't willing to take even incredibly small risks.

There is a much higher probability than 1/(3^^^3) that you could get in a car accident with injuries that cause 50 years of incredible pain, yet you will still probably risk driving for even trivial things.

And if you lived for 3^^^3 lifetimes and took this risk each time, you would likely suffer 50 years of torture during at least one lifetime.
PM. So I was on the hook for getting the engineers to deliver the extraordinary requests.
One factor in the shape of the station that's not commonly known is actually aerodynamics. The ISS is in a rather low orbit (mostly to make getting there easier) so aerodynamic drag is a noticeable (if small) force.

The station is thus laid out kind of "flat" to present a reasonably compact frontal area. (This also helps with orbital debris encounters.) The solar array positioning does commonly conflict with the aerodynamics, but minimizing that is one of the factors in their positioning software.

The fore/aft view is not very popular, because it doesn't look as impressive, but here's one: http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ISS_Ba...

That's the orientation the ISS travels in--i.e., what "stationary" air sees as it zooms past.
New framework that came out this week,
How about health drinks / food? Do you know if yc would have any interest or expertise to help natural food companies? Like Kambucha is $600M company now.
Welcome – OpenDataPhilly
Very helpful, cheers. "The more progress you make on the business, the easier it will be to get a great cofounder" -- agreed -- and being accepted to YC would itself more than help convince people to join the team also :) I hope there are more Drew Houstons out there with confidence to apply.
I need to book a trip soon. Maybe in May.
I think your argument assumes that economic classes must necessarily be divided into exactly three buckets, therefore there is always something defined as "middle". Obviously there are other ways to define classes that do not result in three distinct classes.
I suspect that RMS' refusal to use a web browser limits his ability to research things thoroughly, and leads sometimes to him accepting the first version he encounters about something as the truth, especially if it supports his presuppositions.[0] He also tends to latch on to things that make his favorite targets look bad[1], even if there's really nothing there to latch on to.

[0]http://lee-phillips.org/StallmanOnFinkelstein.html
[1]http://lee-phillips.org/phoneSupport/
And not a single modern website will run either. If you're willing to disable javascript in 2015, you might as well not use Internet at all.
There's this too: https://www.stallman.org/articles/911-new-investigation.html

But I don't care for the comparison of Stallman to Lyndon LaRouche. That's just trolling.
Is housing the main form of capital that is growing faster than GDP?
It does indeed only work for big sites. It's not the only model, but it was one that is proven and easy to understand.
I believe the footnote states that he changed his mind after having written the article. I also failed to see it the first time I read through, though I appreciate your desire to get the facts out there.
>225k is standard?

100k income per year + 33% for employer taxes, medical/fringe benefits, etc, so 133k.

1.5 years of work at 133k/yr = ~200k payout.

I wouldn't call that low since it already hinges on massively inflated salaries due to massively inflated cost of living for developers in hubs.

That 100k of buying power in SF would come from about a 55-60k salary in my area. (1)

(1) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=moving+from+San+Francis...
It's out of our area of expertise, but again, if we can understand why it might be a $10B company, we'll fund it.
When applying to YC, if you have a four or five person start-up team, if one member isn't able to come to Silicon Valley, but the rest are (3/4 or 4/5), how much does that penalize you?
Is the "uber for ...." market too saturated or do you think there are still problems that can be solved by on demand marketplace apps? Are the opportunities for these type of companies to get accepted based primarily on market traction?

We're a company looking to create 1M jobs with 10 percent being military vets..Do you have any previous history of funding companies founded by military vets?
Here is my understanding. Please correct me if I am wrong.

LATENCY

multi-paxos and raft are equal. It takes 4 hops for a consensus.

fast-paxos gives two-hop consensus when there is no race, which is the optimal.

generalized-paxos gives two-hop consensus for non-conflicting, commutative operations.

genuine-generalized-consensus gives two-hop consensus for non-conflicting, commutative operations and, i think, three-hop consensus for the rest, which is the optimal.

BANDWIDTH

All paxos variants (except classic-paxos of course) allow multiple consensus operations in parallel. Not sure about raft.

STORAGE

cheap-paxos (without reconfiguration) only needs two replicas to support one-node failure; in general, K+1 replicas for K failures.
What time in the process does the demo become really important ? So when should it be ready by ?
> If you're starting an Internet company, I'm more convinced than ever that you don't need to finish college.

For your typical web startup you probably don't need college to learn the technology or the design patterns. But there are certain areas of social science that can be hard to pick up on your own because they are basically oral traditions, and there isn't really an obvious list of books to get on Amazon or whatever. Finishing a degree is still probably overkill though.
They are illustrating the author's contention that Stallman's rhetorical approach is similar (and similarly offputting to anyone not already committed to the cause) to that of the LaRouche crowd, and are presented in pairs with a LaRouche poster beside one from the FSF/Stallman side (the Windows 7 sins is from the FSF, I'm not sure of the origin of the "Swindle" poster but the "Swindle"-as-abusive-alternate-name-for-Kindle thing is something that, per the letter writer, Stallman engaged in in the speech.)
I've been in both sides, but you're right to some extent, one of the main things I need is supported by Gnome 3 by default, the "Windows key" whenever I press it, I expect either a dashboard or a menu bar where I can start typing whatever application I want to run, honestly that speeds up my workflow on Windows and Linux (where it is supported), instead of browsing through categories and reading through the list of software, I just press "windows", type what I want to use "Visual Studio", "Qt Creator", hit enter, and move on. That is my main thing, I do enjoy tiling windows. I know there's wonderful tiling managers, but they get more in my way than anything. If I can't get used to it in an hour I just wont bother.
For the lazy, here's the link[0] where Mark talks about building a site that got students to upload their notes that helped him pass an exam for a course he hadn't studied for.

PG remarked that this was fitting answer for the "Tell us how you hacked a system" question in the YC application and added he has to constantly remind himself its too late to accept Mark into YC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGsalg2f9js?t=6m10s
The numbers that Google refuses to share
Inspired by the fact that Google is "sitting" on tons of data regarding the Android platform that it isn't sharing with it's users and developers, I decided to go get this data on my own.

The following spreadsheet is the result of months of coding the first collaborative, open-source, Crawler of the "Google Play Store". I hope you like the results :D

Project : https://github.com/MarcelloLins/GooglePlayAppsCrawler

Excel File : https://s3.amazonaws.com/GooglePlayStore/Google%20Play%20Stats_2015_02.xlsx
Ask HN: What would be a cool goal setting tool?
Hey guys, I am currently looking into creating a tool to track goals. Those could be either life goals, projects or single tasks.
Maybe some of you guys already use things like trello etc., or just the good old fashioned paper.

To get a rough idea what i'm thinking of, see this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/i5t0ei7iusk95i8/Screenshot%202015-03-20%2019.11.59.png

Would you use something like this?

What features do you think it needs to have?
I think I was the one to say that.

Working in finance is an easier and more predictable way to make a lot of money, as long as you can deal with the deep existential angst the comes from adding no value to the world :)
What do you think about companies which have their main office in SF and engineering office at their home country?

Obviously these companies spend a lot less money on talent and on paper they can get more stuff done with less funding.

What are the success rates of these companies, compared to full SF companies? Is it logical to start to whole company in SF or have a product office somewhere else?
Based on the extensive user agent library of Piwik (https://piwik.org/) DeviceDetector is currently the fastest user agent parser and device detector in Rubyland (benchmarks are in the readme).

We built it for the statistics feature of Podigee, our little podcast hosting platform.
What questions on the application do you look most for and you feel the other partners look at as well?
عيد الأم
What do you think are the most difficult problems, or types of problems, YC as its own organization will face in the future?
One gets made for each batch. Apply!
Hmm. That made me wonder about Apollo 13, where the "crew endured temperatures at or below freezing for the bulk of the return flight" [1], apparently [2] because they had to turn off heaters and electronic gear to conserve power.

The fact they had heaters suggests that the roll wasn't so much to dump heat as to spread it around, to reduce the risk of structural damage from differential heating [3]. That's presumably less viable on a big structure like the ISS.

[1] http://www.spaceline.org/flightchron/apollo13.html

[2] https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20121015080310A...

[3] https://books.google.com/books?id=31GqndM3fk8C&pg=PA419&dq=d...
Actually my decision probably depends on the person. [cough]

But anyway. This isn't even philosophy - it's a digital remix of medieval scholasticism pretending to be philosophy.

The irony is that politics proves empirically that ideas actually can be dangerous and harmful. And some ideas - actually narratives - can be very dangerous and harmful indeed.

There's over a century of "persuasion technology" (Bernays, etc) that exploits this.

Nothing I've seen Y write deals with the problem of politics as a social exploit in an insightful - never mind a useful - way.

Meanwhile real people are being tortured in real ways. What's his proposed rational solution to that problem?
Vulgarisation of what SMM exploitation in BiOS rootkits is about
What We Learned from Building a Global Engineering Team
I am currently applying to the summer batch and I was wondering about my setup. I came to the U.S. about four years ago and immediately built a marketing agency and after a year added software development services to it. We grew rapidly to a stable stage and now I am at the point where I can step back from taking care of the company and let my other partners manage it (We are four partners). My question is, I am applying as the only founder and was wondering if having a company already might be a deal-breaker, due to you thinking that I would not be able to invest 100% of my time into the startup? My reason for not having a co-founder yet, is because I want to make sure that I really add somebody that will 100% benefit the startup. I do have a pool of people available from my current company, but would also like to branch out first. Any thought from you would be really appreciated.
>Transferring documents online is not that hard a problem.

Transferring is the easy part. Rendering them is the hard part.
Why are people so crafty ?
Corbu was all about controlling the details of daily life by top-down commands from central authorities. His ambitions were to wipe out and knock down Paris and replace it with orderly and easily controlled towers and sight lines. Traditional cities with their chaos, entrepreneurship, freedom, variety, and individualism didn't interest him.

The tower in the park required hugely expensive (at the time) commitment to motorcars and freeways surrounding and fixing the limits of mobility for the poor and middle class. Centralised government and hierarchical businesses were needed to manage and planned lives of humans in Corbu's city.

Everything about Corbu reflected the totalitarian age in which he lived. His dreams are the same as the communists' and merit the same fate.
I think he is talking about the expected value vs a lucky chance.

It's like the stock market. In the long run there are no miracles.
Well, in fact the CH340 can be a problem, at least for Macs.

The manufacturer's own driver is unsigned, so for years you had to disable kernel security features just to run it, and with the latest OS X release, it causes kernel panics outright.

There is an excellent third party driver at https://www.mac-usb-serial.com, but the $7 for that (in itself a very reasonable price) start pushing the clones back toward the price range of the originals.
Andrew here. I'm one of the co-founders of Kickpay.

We are enabling anyone to provide capital to purchase invoices (so it is not just for current factors). This reduces the rates (removing the predatory nature). In addition we are super focused on making it an amazing product businesses look forward to interacting with.
ZoomCharts for WebVisions NYC: April 2, 2015
One thing which surprised me about the current YC batch was the average age of the founders. Have you seen a gradual increase in average founder age over the past several years?
OTOH, if you are an upstate New Yorker, the answer is going to be "Yes" far more than you would expect.
What are my premises?

If I don't take info hazards as a serious threat, there isn't anything to sort those statements with.
Microsoft Is Still Making Security Updates for XP, but You Can’t Have Them
This is true, but the developer in Palo Alto has the option to scale back her lifestyle and bank a lot of cash, whereas the developer in Arlington Heights will bank much less cash if he scales back his lifestyle.

Not arguing, just adding more "shape to that curve" :-)
He meant the batch in 2015 2nd half, i guess.
It's a concept coined by Nick Bostrom. Basically, some information can be harmful. As a simple, non-controvertial information hazard, imagine you learned an identity of a covert assasin of a foreign government, and you start telling about it to people around you. Don't be surprised if not only you drop dead, but the people you interact with as well.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Information_hazard
As a long time reader, it seems like the content on Hacker News has been consistently trending towards "lighter" material (more articles about drugs, work flow, business concepts) and away from technical, actually "hacker" material. What are you thoughts on this trend? Is there anything we can (or should) do to prevent this forum from becoming reddit?
<font>, I don't think there's an excuse. we know for sure that it is not out of incompetence but it was probably easier to write at the time and nobody bothered to fix it because it doesn't really matter.

For the <center>, it is probably not the case here as this is just a text based site but sometimes it is easier to center an image by that tag when your site is partitioned in many margins it is not as easy to center some stuff, or you might just prefer to add a tag.

I also like <br>, it really makes more sense to me and easier to write. It doesn't really break anything either.

I wonder how many there are, like me, think that <center> and <br> are actually really nice things to have?
Yes, which is why NoScript allows fine-grained controls. It's not a straight up disabling of Javascript.

You whitelist the sites you trust. Then if any of those sites get hacked, there will likely be a line added like <iframe src="http://evil.com/exploit.html">, or <script src="http://evil.com/exploit.js"></script>. NoScript will always prevent those since whitelists are domain-specific. So unless the malicious Javascript is added 100% inline on the compromised site (which is easy to do, but is done less often for a variety of reasons), you're going to be safe.

And, obviously, you do not whitelist random sites you click off of Google searches or from emails without validation.
Fun fact: Noscript loads and parses all javascript and then just stops it from running against the live DOM. Decreases page render time, sure. Prevents exploits? Don't think so.
Those links lead to 404s, but it looks like it's all on Github as well: https://github.com/drguildo/Descent

Indeed I was wrong that it's all assembler. There is lots of assembler but plenty of C too.
How do you factor in possible technological advancements that could render a company's business model obsolete?

For example, if someone develops a distributed web-of-trust/payment platform, a lot of the value of Uber and Airbnb goes away.

The basic model behind some of these sharing companies can be factored out into (network effects + domain knowledge + web of trust) = profitable monopoly. You can adjust how valuable you consider each of these, but to me it seems like most of the value isn't in the domain knowledge area. What if someone figures out a way to not have all of the value captured by a monolithic entity?
It's risk vs reward. If he had a 50% chance of success, and spent a year on the exploits, you could equate it to 112.5k salary+benefits package (assuming it was a full time job to find the exploits). I would call 112.5 low for the tech industry, especially for someone of his caliber.

Either way, very impressive and well deserved.
Remind me why we need new HTML features?

The web looks and works pretty much how it did 10 years ago. Almost every new feature is just a replacement for an old feature that did the same thing but not as well.

We've gone from plugins to add features to building the features right into the browser. We've gone from tens of megabytes to hundreds of megabytes just to render some text and images. There is literally too much code to audit. I think even kernel hackers would have trouble understanding the complexity of modern browsers.

In 20 years, do you expect the web will be significantly different than it is now? The interface might change, but you can't really innovate on text and pictures.
Find out who is the real Bill Gates daughter
If you consistently take low risks that might result in getting tortured, then you are pretty much guaranteed to eventually lose the bet and suffer. The probability of eventually losing even a small bet approaches 1 if you take it enough times.

Just think of it as if you were going to other people and deciding to take this bet for them. 1/3^^^3 chance of torture in exchange for removing a speck of dust from their eye. I think you would be ok with that because it's an obvious choice for ourselves.

And if you continue to do this for enough people, eventually one of them will get tortured. After removing dust specks from approximately 3^^^3 people's eye. But you are right, there is a chance no one will get tortured. So do it for 3^^^^3 people then and the probability is 0.99999...
Skill definitely plays a role too. If you are smart and experienced enough, you can theoretically churn out a valuable exploit once every 1-2 months on average. At a company, you're generally going to get a flat salary.

Many vuln research/development companies do offer bonuses for every effective exploit you write though, in which case it probably is better to work for such a company than to rely solely on bug bounties and competitions for income. Unfortunately, those same companies usually sell the exploits to the NSA and the intelligence agencies of other governments.
Yeah, it's obviously a joke, but it's a good one!
Do you think knowing YC alumni gives some teams an advantage in the application process and interview?
In my opinion, including a picture of Obama as Hitler (which has nothing to do with any Stallman/FSF statement) raises an already tenuous ad hominem attack to its Godwin extreme. That they aren't clearly labeled is disingenuous at best.
Enable tmux scrolling in iTerm2
Came here to report this for towns in New York and Connecticut with duplicate names. It returned 59* when we are in the middle of a snow storm
I like the mention of Servant Leadership. Really important part of a high performing team culture.
Unlikely. They are icky, unappealing and do not have the "man" quality one gets from real meat.

Food is mostly about taste and convenience today, because we have access to enough of it - insects doesn't really give you either.

In short it is highly unlikely that I will wake up tomorrow and eat insects, nor that the majority in the developed world will.

And yes shrimp may technically be insects. Technically correct does nothing for the ick factor.
I wonder the same. Isn't that the quasi standard way of doing this?
I know there was one aerospace startup in W15 but are space startups out of YC's scope?
Chaning Tatum naked photos
Dunno if this has been asked already, ever think about doing a yc in in Dublin, Ireland?
Hm. Scratches on the stone don't necessarily mean its a 'headstone'. It could have been a tool, used to sharpen sticks or polish points. The cave was inhabited, and the stone's lines took a long time to scratch. Anyway the assertion that the 'v's created by intersecting lines indicate 'female' is a lame reach.