skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. As others here have said, the distinction between middle and upper class is exactly that the upper class do not have to work.

And if you think $250k of job income in the Bay Area makes you upper class, all I can say is, if you were in that situation you would see how ridiculous that idea is. Housing is so expensive here that for most people, the bigger their income, the bigger their mortgage. And with a mortgage, you're tied down; you don't have the freedom to quit your job just because you feel like it.
VCs invested more than $4bn in February and 1 business got a quarter of it
Buy the Macbook. I have working on getting a Dell developer edition. I picked up a release older than current of a 15" Macbook Pro from Best Buy for ~$500 off MSRP. 512GB pcie SSD, Core i7, 16gb of ram, retina screen, etc. Cost be about 2.2k. I haven't regretted it. I price this machine against current non-apple w/ linux support and I am still looking at ~3k for them. In addition, their batteries aren't as long as this Macbook. Do yourself a favor, the Mac is the cheapest price for the hardware and it's faster because the SSD is PCI not SATA. (That said, expect that WWDC will include new Macbook Pros and whatnot). BTW, my coworker uses a 13" Air. He uses it for VMs and development. I only got this Mac because I had a requirement for discrete graphics and video editing.
"Does this place exist?"

Seriously? I put in the capital of a G7 nation and I get "does this place exist?"

I mean, I know this is a joke of site, but that's so lazy it hurts.
I may or may not of applied to YC before; I decided to tell all of YC founders working at the same company ahead of time for this reason. It can get at least a little complicated when some of them are managers... of people applying.

Most of the YC founders ended up helping us with the application, and it wasn't a big deal, but I fully understand this feeling.
John Perkins is a conspiracy theorist and sort of a nut job. The building of Naypyidaw was done by Burma under the orders of its leadership. The World Bank did not have to twist anyone arms to get this White Elephant built.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perkins_(author)
I hope this is not a dumb question, what method are you using the estimate the worth of the ones that have raised with SAFEs?

If the answer is that you made guesses not backed by calculations, then how long have you been writing down your guesses, then going back periodically to compare them with valuations calculated from exits and equity rounds?
Senate Intelligence Committee Advances Terrible Surveillance Bill in Secret
This works OK when you have direct relationships with the YC Founders -- but when you are only tangentially connected in a big company... It is hard to know where rumors go.
If the product is good and if the product has a single co-founder, what are the chances of getting accepted?

The reason is that I live in a place where it's very hard to find a good co-founder and I don't want to team up with the only options that I have. I don't want to make wrong choices.
In my place, people tend to join companies and look for jobs rather than start companies.
Thank you treeform for your answer. I agree that if this would be possible this would be the best way to go.

Unfortunately all the founders are not the same, and mine are not opened AT ALL to these kind of initiatives :)
Pinterest Announces the Machine Learning Models Used in Their Home Feed
Thanks for a thoughtful answer. I'm with F# regardless of its particular merits (I'm lucky enough to have the privilege to write F# when the other coders here work in C# as it is), but I wish you the best of luck with your project.
We do have some alumni help us review applications. There is a chance the founders of your startup would randomly see your application.

HOWEVER, you should not only start a startup if you get into YC. If you're into this startup, you should be doing it whether or not YC funds you. It's a big red flag for us when people only want to work on a startup if they get into YC.

Also, in general, if you're planning to start a startup at some point, talk to the founders of the startup you're currently working at. They'll generally be very understanding.
Nice, now it only needs some scripting language. I am sure you could invite something in a few days....

WTF?? Please please, just start over!
Arguably car aesthetics peaked in the past too - perhaps in the 1960s (e.g. Jaguar E-type). Certainly it is somewhat a matter of taste, but modern car designers also have restrictions that older ones didn't, such as pedestrian safety requirements.
I also don't like this on Yahoo and Foxnews.com.
Finding User Sessions with SQL
>"The time limits and race dynamics are theater."

That makes more sense. Otherwise, this is movie-script-like hacking ability.
I don't agree with a lot of your other posts, but I think we're on the same page here. When I watch the youtube video where Boston Dynamics demonstrates the stability of Spot by kicking the robotic dog all I think is, "Don't kick the dog bro". It's machine intelligence descendants are going to judge us, or maybe they won't care and will kill us all of anyway.
We are excited about teams applying for anywhere in the world! A huge percentage of the startups we fund come from outside the US.
Grandparent is not talking about the weather.
For what it's worth I live in Europe (though I am from the states originally), and I don't see what's the matter here really. Space looks to be reoughly evenly distributed between cyclists and walkers. Of course, most of the bridge is used by rail, but I imagine that was a design constraint.

I'd love it if the bridge were wider, of course, but even so this seems a lot better than the usual treatment cyclists and walkers get.
> "It also said that the additional information needed was just too secret to serve as a basis for a court decision about whether the constitution has been violated. As a result, the District Court found that a “full and fair adjudication” of our clients' Fourth Amendment claims would require consideration of evidence covered by the state secrets privilege and would risk harm to national security."

This is pathetic. This country is seriously fucked.
What do you think about a location-aware, food truck app with social login?
Look, Stallman doesn't care who he alienates. He doesn't care if you disagree. He doesn't care if he offends you.

That's what zealots do.

But as creepy, and petulant, and obnoxious as I tend to find him, I'm grateful every day that he's out there, because there are things he's right about, about which he's pretty much the only person with any visibility or credibility at all to say something.

More to the point, he wouldn't have that credibility if he compromised and made his position more palatable.
S̶o̶?̶

Fuck it, I don't give a shit. It's painfully lazy headline writing like every other commercial site on the web and it has made Hacker News as fucking useless as the articles it links to...
Hello Sam,

Amid a never-ending war between anti-AI and pro-AI , you've recently shown strong positions( http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1) about it.

As an 'AI applicant', I can't stop wondering whether such position could influence an application decision.

What's your take on it?
We will fund a company with 1 founder, but the bar is very high.

Have you thought about working at a startup first as a way to meet potential cofounders?
And yet you posted this to the internet. Some people never learn, I guess.
One reason is that you'd need to prove that the lastic impact is in fact zero. 3^^^3 dust specks is enough for one of them to rub something in a wrong way that rubs something else in the wrong way that gives a person cancer.
In his shoes, I would definitely call it a complete failure. It was certainly very educational, but failure nonetheless. I think his failure lies in equating making money with success.

The purpose of commerce is to help us create value for one another. But there is a bunch of activity that uses the same tools that is essentially parasitic. The reason his income streams kept blowing up was that people eventually decided that they were better off without him involved.

He could have spent 10 years building products that were creating value. He could have spent 10 years learning the tools and techniques necessary to make the sorts of thing where customers can't get enough. Instead, he spent a decade as a leech on the ankle of the economy, getting scratched off and reattaching himself.

I could have gone the same way. In high school I had a job doing telephone fundraising. It turned out to be basically a scam, with ~12% of the money collected even going to the non-profit, and therefore even less being spent on actual beneficial work. There was a lot that was appealing in the work: smart, funny people; great challenges; getting paid in cash. But eventually I came to realize how morally bankrupt it was. I got lucky in that it was much easier to see how what I was doing was worthless.

So now he's basically starting over. And good for him, I say. I think this post is incredibly brave, and I wish him the best of luck in making something so useful that customers are clamoring to hand over their money.
http://caniwearshorts.today/?location=Qu%C3%A9bec

^ will trigger an error
Yes, no disputing that the note was friendly and helpful for John!
I wasn't claiming that viable companies can't use or produce free software. I was just claiming that the fact that one can use a free editor to write some code has nothing to do with whether the company producing the editor is viable.
There aren't 3^^^3 atoms in the universe, let alone people. I think it's absurd to complain about a system not holding up when stretched far beyond the boundaries of the universe.

If you decrease the number to even the number of humans that ever existed/exist/will exist, then it returns to being negligible in relation to torture.

The problem with an if -> then, is when the 'if' is flawed, it doesn't really matter what the 'then' is. The human mind can't grasp 3^^^3 dust motes because it doesn't exist in any meaningful way.
Guess what? More people are living in peace now. Just look at the numbers
The reason Indian students collaborate so much is because the way Indian education system works, hustling students survive better. Students who can read, share and gather information with peers always tend to do better than lone geniuses.

Also, the population ensures that there aren't enough resources for everyone. So, everyone learns to share. A lab project? Share!! You want to do a survey? Form a group and do it. Want computing resources? Share it with others in that time slot. Participating in competitions? All of them are team based competitions.

This is a cultural difference. Nothing else. Also, it's not like all the Indian kids are homogeneously helping each other. They all have their own cliques and many students don't want to share their solutions with other students (Indian or not). Many want to find a better solution.

The solution is simple (something the CS reps in my school implemented with great success). Make homework and (some) tests incredibly hard and encourage team work.

Some of the programming projects we had were so complex that the class had shared forums where we would solve problems right under the nose of the TAs and the prof with full visibility. So, while the code would be individually written, problem solving in the abstract can be a team effort.

An example of how to make them harder would be to deliberately introduce bugs in a codebase that you deployed for a homework. This teaches them how to find solutions and debug.

Sure, some students will chill until the last moment and try to gather answers from friends. But, most students who worked their ass off would never share their solutions (mostly to get themselves up the bell curve). A lot of students will try to make their solutions better by improving on the shared common answer but never revealing it to anyone but the grader.

For exams, we had open book, open laptop, full internet access tests. In those tests, all students would log into chat box to discuss answers. But the questions were tricky and needed speed to solve. So, being on the chat just made sure students are wasting time. The only people who could finish those tests were students who knew what they were doing.

I know this is not ideal in the US. But its a strategy (if used sparingly) that works really well. To be honest, it makes students be super prepared and study real hard so that they can complete tests faster, yet know that they can rely on their friends to get them some info if they happen to forget it.
Does not work on Chrome, not sure if proxy related to work or not.

Chrome version 41.0.2272.89 m
Thanks. Appreciate the feedback. Already implemented :-)
I had my foot hovering the brake in case it was going to not stop in time. When I say it "breaks way too late" I mean it comes to an abrupt halt, rather than a gradual slow down like I would normally do. There was no chance it was going to run into the car in front of me, but it wasn't too pleasant for drivers behind me
This is NOT true - IMHO you havent seen https://extensions.gnome.org/. It allows you to customize everything right upto the alt-tab behavior [1] and access to D-BUS for core OS behavior [2]

If you really want to see where Gnome is going, please do check out Fedora 22. That really is the showcase for cutting edge Gnome (unfortunately, its not Ubuntu/Debian)

[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/
[2] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/937/laine/
This is a nice example of a statistically significant effect that has negligible predictive value, but that is sold precisely on that value. The title of the paper--"Why Susie Sells Sea Shells at the Sea Shore"--is clearly intended to suggest that implicit egotism results not just in a statistically significant effect, but a usefully predictive one.

But the questions of where Susie lives and what she does for a living are not answered in any ordinarily meaningful way by the effect the paper identifies.

If I have a coin with a few percent bias toward heads, it would be easy to prove this in a couple of hundred flips, but if I were to say every single time it landed heads, "That's because it's not a fair coin" people would look at me funny.

And yet we do this all the time with far weaker causal factors: every significant weather event in the past decade as been reported as "due to global warming", even though we can be pretty sure that even without global warming there would still be weather, including extreme weather, and even people who take the detailed results of climate models more seriously than I do don't claim they predict shifts in extreme weather event distributions that are detectable on a decadal timescale.

Moral: we should be cautious about jumping from a statistically significant effect on distributions to a usefully causal account about individuals, even when it is pretty likely that correlation does imply causation, as is the case here.
Data escrow services?
I'm looking to buy data from someone on the internet for a reasonably large sum of money. I've never met them -- they seem reliable enough. They want me to send them the money after which they will send me the data. Is there any way to make this more reliable? Is there an escrow service I can use? Any past experience with this problem?
> Just think about how many engineer-hours Twitter flushed with that silly #! kludge – and then when they switched back, saw an 80% improvement in page load time.

No hours were wasted, and they didn't really switch back. They're just using HTML5's History API on browsers that support it now. Essentially the same mechanism under the hood, just prettier URLs for it.
Even if the company is only a few weeks old, we look for signs that the founders are determined, getting things done week by week, and improving quickly.

If it's just an idea, then we look at what the founders have done in the past. Most people don't magically start doing great things for the first time when they start a startup.
Yep, Montréal blows up with a unicode error.
"Just Google it."
Any publicity is good publicity?
Also usually AWS doesn't turn attack into revenue, they push customer up the "support tier" (gold/platinum whatever they are called now) and strip the DDOS traffic from expenses as much as possible. Those tiers are quite expensive though, but are fixed support costs more or less.

My general point is: AWS is a business, and it operates as one. There are no hollywood style bad guys sitting there in cubicle dungeons on chests filled with gold thinking how to extract money, quite the contrary. It is understandable that customer cannot pay unlimited (from customers perspective) charges, but AWS pretty much incurs them, as customer being ddosed is consuming resources that would be otherwise be sold to others, or engineer time that would be put into developing new features and attracting new customers.
oops, thought it was a simple short peptide... refolding from inclusion bodies is still kitchen chemistry, although it probably wants some expensive chromatographic cleanup regardless of how it's made. since pancreas is essentially a waste product, maybe it's easier to do that and the switch to recombinant insulin was for consistency/better analogs.
Thanks! That's why YC is the best. They understand Top Ramen founders.
I am an extremely patient investor. I just invested in a company that I believe will take 20-30 years to work.

If reddit gets to a billion users, which I believe it will, the company will have many, many interesting monetizations opportunities. It's on its way to become one of the great monopolies of the web.
I don't use it (I just read reddit in mobile safari) but I will pass this along to the reddit team.
> I wonder if satelites could just put the heat in some not-more-needed stuff, gas or something and simply shoot or launch this stuff to the space.

The astronauts actually did that on the moon! Their spacesuits used sublimation of water ice for cooling.

Your limitation is coolant mass. The useful life of satellites is often linked to the amount of propellant they have left; you'd have the same problem with your proposed cooling system.
Show HN: Ingerchat – Live Sketching as Chat
Off the top of my head:

- no aerodynamic concerns
- extreme weight concerns for launch
- each component is a one-off custom module
- it's a life support and research vessel
- a smooth cover would make it harder to work on components during space walks
Dylib hijacking on OS X
It would be helpful if we could get the temperature in Celsius.
What are the chances of getting funding if I want to focus on my home country (Brazil) as my main market?
Maybe it's just my internet connection.
Linda Liukas's Process in Writing Hello Ruby
Twitter: Nine years and counting
As a backer of Linda Liukas's Kickstarter for her book Hello Ruby, "a children’s book that teaches programming fundamentals through stories and kid-friendly activities," I have been getting updates on her progress. I recently received her 18th. This one details her process over the past year as she has built the book. It's fascinating and (not surprisingly) delightful. I really liked how much she learned from multiple iterations over a single drawing, and from her editor. I can't wait until the book is released.
Parents scaling a multi-story building to help their kids cheat on an exam
How was your meal at Delifina the other night? Just kidding :)

I don't really have a question, but my girlfriend and I were seated next to you and I wanted to introduce myself and thank you for your insights, writing, and contributions to the startup community, but didn't want to disturb your meal. Now I have an opportunity. Thanks!
No, you can just say "we're still figuring this out, but here is about what we're thinking".

Leaving this question unanswered for a long time is a sign of badness, though. It's important to resolve this quickly and move on to the real work.
Red Lady cave burial reveals Stone Age secrets
Greg here with fatberry, would love to chat about this! Email first name at fatberry?
Getting to “Yes” for Corporate Innovation
Yea, we did see issues with a small number of users behind a symmetric nat, which is usually found at work. We're looking into ways around this and we're open to suggestions :)

However, you may still be able to send files back and forth if both users are inside the firewall.
What is the ratio between the businesses that YC funds that have revenue and don't have revenue? What about having a significantly large amount of traction (i.e. few thousand users in the first week of beta)
Hey sama! From the YC founder's profile application:

> Please tell us about the time you, <username>, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

I am so much longing to know, why a "non-computer" system? There are so many things I could have boasted of but can't because of the "non-computer" thing :P
It's disingenuous to characterize moral disagreement as ignorance. Eliezer is aware that people think the torture is worse and of the arguments they make to justify it, he simply thinks they're wrong.

Why does he think they're wrong? Probably because the resulting decision theories are exploitable or inconsistent in well understood ways when operating under uncertainty. If you prefer 10000000000000000000000000000000000 dust-specks over 1 tortures, then you should prefer to continuously blind someone with dust specks over taking a 0.0000000000000001% chance that they will torture someone. The odds that any given person is about go crazy is more than 0.0000000000000001%, so... better blind everyone. In an uncertain world, setting the badness of dust specks to ε is equivalent to setting it to 0... and setting it to 0 means the "optimal" solution to the system will probably involve throwing a whole lot of dust around. If you want a decision theory that doesn't go around blinding everyone with dust specks, or worse, when given your preferences then you must compromise on torture.

> A system that is optimizing a function of n variables, where the objective depends on a subset of size k<n, will often set the remaining unconstrained variables to extreme values; if one of those unconstrained variables is actually something we care about, the solution found may be highly undesirable. http://edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-the-myth-of-ai
any plans to host a Startup School conference in Asia ?
Competition is a tricky concept. If there is competition, that can be seen as verification of the concept, but at the same time it offers valid counterpoints. If there is no competition, it might be because the idea is so hard that nobody else has figured it out or so unpromising that everyone else dismissed it.

What role does competition play in your evaluation of a startup?
Hysteresis will solve this over time. This only works to a maximum extreme, then it snaps back and there is nothing the minority party can do to retain power other than a physical coup 'd e tat.
How many current college student YC companies do you have?
Here's the first lecture among many from FSU on Offensive Security, it looks like they are going pretty indepth, I started watching first few recently. Very relevant for those who want to explore how exploitation is done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk3rp53b2NA
Maybe we do and maybe we don't...