skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are simply stuck in the current mindframe of thinking. It's not your fault or anything, especially considering that the whole notion of inheritance is rather deeply ingrained in many societies' culture, especially in contemporary America, where we fawn over aristocrats and dream about game of thrones.

Although I don't have the details fleshed out, the effect would be that in spite of what you may believe, the outcome is that the incentive to perform and improve and build would be wildly stronger than currently the incentive structure allows for. What if none of your success was taxed, i.e., taken away from you until your work was successful and you then were responsible to pay back society for all the social, intangible aspects that assisted in your success. You still get to enjoy the fruits of your labor, but you also cannot simply externalize costs and risks, while also not paying your investors ... society at large.

There is something inherently supremacist, hypocritical, manipulative, heinous, and rather racist about inheritance that simply perpetuates the evils of the past and undercuts an even remotely equal chance at life, more often than not simply determined based on race. But please also don't simply focus on the race aspect, because there is a larger issue at hand, that everyone, no matter their race should have the same or very similar advantages or opportunities in life not just the wealthy who happened to win the genetic lottery get to inherit all the cheat codes to life and those who lost the genetic lottery get to inherit all the pitfalls, traps, pain, suffering, and disadvantages.

It is one aspect that is absolutely required for humanity to evolve to the next stage if it wishes to progress beyond the current rather primal state we are still in. There is simply no other way than thinking bigger than the selfishness of giving your genetic mashup an unearned advantage over others of the human race. But like I said, it's only one of several things that have to change for humanity to evolve into the next level. No matter whether all other requirements are met, without that step, we will never evolve past the state we are currently in.
Unfortunately we don't do that--it just doesn't fit our model. Plenty of companies have done YC at a later stage and still thought we increased their value far more than the 7% we take, though.
They're vulnerable if you whitelist them and they get hacked and exploit code is sent directly in the HTTP response. Just like how HTTPS (and HSTS and certificate pinning) does nothing for you if the server is compromised.

If you're careful about what you whitelist, NoScript adds a lot of additional security.
Conditional Validations with Rails
Its a common trend in tech report to mention/place stories in the context of Apple, because they are the largest company in the world (by revenues), and so it drives page views. Even when Apple are only tangentially related to the story.

Perfect example of this right now are all the "Is Apple Pay causing fraud?" news stories. The fraud has nothing to do with Apple Pay. The fraud is happening because banks are doing a poor job verifying who someone is when they are trying to register/activate a credit card. But they all focus on Apple, despite being a minor aspect of the story, because it drives page views.
The Time a 14-Year-Old Invested $50k in My Startup
IIRC the Google researcher discovered the Heartbleed bug when he was auditing the OpenSSL code
Perhaps I should have mentioned I don't think Scala is the perfect language.
Having a speck of dust in one's eye will change the course of life in a tiny way for any given person, true, but unless we're postulating an even more absurd edge case like "everyone blinking at exactly the same time makes a blip in the physics experiment machine go unnoticed and a week later the universe explodes", it's a change that's going to be effectively random and indistinguishable from the general minor messiness of human life.
Diversifying income would be key - AdSense+Private Ad Sales+Affiliate Promotions with your own "products" sprinkled in. That way if an affiliate cuts you off, or Google decides to nuke your account you still have other income streams.

*You can tell I haven't left this market completely ;)
You aren't quite grokking the difference between "huge crowd" and 3||3. How do you deal with the argument from circularity? Are your preferences circular, and if not, which part do you reject?
Actually, butchering has given me a new appreciation for meat and the variety of cuts.

It definitely gets you over the "ew, there's blood in my pack of chicken breasts."
What did you eat for Breakfast?
Are there specs for the 1.3 version? Can you provide a link?

This specific project was engraved using MuseScore 2.0, and their files cannot be opened using MuseScore 1.3.

For me, this is contradictory to the notion of "Open".
No and probably not.
Don't worry, Canada is selling a million litres of clean water for $2.25. That's like $1 US.
As with bacteria, human living conditions will get quite ugly near our population's stationary phase.[1] Exponential growth does not last forever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth
Its first compiler was written in Ocaml.
Wirelessly Powered LED illuminated wedding ring
Please don't let the lack of a cofounder discourage you from applying. It's definitely a huge help to have a good cofounder, but we accept great founders regardless. There's a tendency for people to want to reduce the world to black-and-white rules like, "yc doesn't accept single founders", but it simply isn't true. We are specifically looking for outliers, so any such rule would be a huge mistake (because the big hits are, by definition, exceptions).
As a five-year Redditor, this is an awesome question, but I have two potential ways to better ask it:

1. I wouldn't ask about a billion horrible people. Don't forget that the user number reflects logged-out consumers, and Reddit is still limited to far fewer participants. The demographics of people that choose to make an account and participate are very likely strongly disconnected from the circumstances required to make Reddit a billion-eyeball property. Maybe a better question would be "what can Reddit do to appeal to participation from non-teenaged and non-twentysomething white males who think /r/spacedicks is funny?"

2. I wouldn't ask about his perspective on things like coontown from the perspective of an investment, I'd ask him his thoughts on controversial speech on Reddit in general, as well as Reddit's responsibilities to act in the service of protecting free speech. /r/coontown is only the latest. Don't forget there was /r/jailbait before it and the banning of all Zoe Quinn discussion and subreddits, as well as vast numbers of communities that you and I both will not mention that are even worse than those already named.

(Warning to those unfamiliar with Reddit: please do not investigate things like spacedicks or coontown if you are sensitive.)
NoScript won't actually execute any of the Javascript, though. I am not aware of any historical vulnerabilities from the mere act of loading and parsing Javascript, though they're certainly theoretically possible. It's much easier to secure a parser than a runtime.
Where do you see YC in 5 years? in 10 years?

Some say "the best product always wins." Can you give an anecdote where perhaps the best product did NOT win?

Do you still advocate 10/20/30/40 grants?

Quora participated in YC and this was very unusual. When can we expect to see something posted about how this went?
I remember all this fondly since I became a young adult during the early years of the Internet when I setup up my first Unix system with a public TCP/IP address in 1990 and read Usenet back before endless September. I read the first year or two of WIRED magazine cover to cover.

It seems there is now a four-way breakdown among American techies:

* Mistrust BigGov but trust BigTech
* Trust BigGov, mistrust BigTech
* Trust both BigGov and BigTech
* Mistrust both BigGov and BigTech

And it all depends on your base political philosophy or leanings.

This article is a pretty formulaic example of what happens when someone from the 2nd perspective discovers John Perry Barlow's writings.
It doesn't hurt or help--we fund lots of founders from foreign countries (more than 40% of the last batch was born outside the US).
If someone has an idea or seed of a company, but is only aiming for a mid-high 8 figures as a reasonable exit, would YC consider funding them? Or must it be a shoot-the-moon endeavor? I've written a prototype in use at a large company, and recently found that Oracle acquired a less-performing competitor (yet in market, so not not bad!) product for $20M.

I'm working on my idea anyways, just wondering if YC and the like are a complete waste of time for me. I've got a verbal commit on $120K annual revenue already, but having seed money to focus full time to launch is appealing.
Tough one. I'd probably suggest going to college to meet cofounders.
There is a reason advertisers can't be bothered with people outside of the 18-49 demo
> Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot.

You can, however, regulate it as a Title II utility. That's ok.
We randomize everything first, and then look through each morning to see if some interviewees need domain expertise, and then swap those around as best we can.
My understanding is that the spacecraft was designed to radiate large amounts of heat, with the expectation that systems inside the spacecraft would be producing a lot of it. Apollo 13 shut down much of the equipment inside the spacecraft, which meant that it was no longer producing as much heat as was expected.
I get the feeling that the clarity of the idea and outward, ease of discerning progress are the principle criteria used to distinguish the promise of the team and idea. In the case of progress, especially early progress, being full of'black triangles', accomplishments mostly only appreciated by those in the know, is there much effort put into trying to see that? Or do you more stick to the clearly understandable progress?
The article is about cricket flour, not eating whole crickets. Cricket flour products are already on sale in hundreds of stores. The key is to mass produce the flour as right now it's quite expensive. That's what's specifically addressed in the article, not the issue of convincing people to eat it in the first place.
We ask about when they've done the impossible. You also get a pretty good feel for this after asking someone hard questions for 10 minutes. Not pushing back at all is bad, and pushing back too hard is also bad.
"This sentence is a lie." He doesn't seem to actually debunk the idea, just yells about David Gerard for a bit. Can you explain how it's different from Pascal's Wager?
I'm curious why they didn't include the United States (or some other Western countries) as a reference point/baseline since FiveThirtyEight's audience, much like HackerNews, is probably mostly in Western countries...
Population growth rates world wide have already plummeted in recent decades and continue to do so as more developing countries industrialize.

Current predictions point to stabilizing world population at 9 billion and the starting to slowly drop. In the most developed countries we have seen lower than replacement rates for a long while now.
So you get a small, shared apartment, dinners at work, no car, and $2k/month left to save. Honestly, that's not bad, but I'm guessing you're young.

Consider you're slightly older and thinking of starting a family. Will your income cover: extra food and clothing for a child? day care or maternity leave? saving for college? saving for retirement? a larger apartment for your growing family? a down payment on a house or car? car payments or a mortgage? investment income? Is your company paying for your dinner because they expect you to work at night?

$100k in SF is a reasonable amount of money. But as your expenses begin to grow, you may wonder when your earnings will grow in proportion. Unfortunately, while many industries value their workers more as they grow in experience, the SV software industry has taken a unique stance that experience is actually a liability. Perhaps because the SV software industry runs on the notion of maybe-someday compensation, which is a palatable proposition mainly to the young and naïve.
Can't tell if serious or joking.

Although the length of your post worries me that you might actually believe what you are saying.

Please check out the Bananabread example on mozilla's developer page (just search it on your favorite search engine). Please do not post such comments again, there are people on here that will not realize you're joking.
I would add the very large old codebase in science. These systems gained popularity well before the advent of Python and other more user-friendly/approachable languages, so very large numbers of people in academia are familiar with them and have large volumes of code written for them.

As a grad student you're going to want to solve some problem, and your choice will be 1.) reimplement large segments of the lab's codebase in your language of choice or 2.) build something on top of the old code in Matlab.

I tried convincing my grad advisor to do things in python and not matlab, but no dice. He went with matlab for the problem he (and to as certain extent I) was trying to solve because of these kinds of institutional factors.
In general, no. If you want to apply to YC, just apply to YC. Going through some other program first is a negative--the advice is usually bad, there's extra dilution, etc.
The economics of the podcast boom
I think one of the keys to "controlling" population growth is to bring people out of poverty. Most studies I read, show dropping birth rates as people/nations climb the economic ladder. Education, and health care also play a big part.
Slow growth is bad, yes. A lot of our questions will be about why it's slow and how you plan to make it faster.

We tell startups during YC to shoot for 10% weekly growth in their key metric.
I'm reminded of this comment[1] by screenplay author David Simon:

"Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share."

Total devotion to pure ideology is always the wrong answer, because it implies hubris: that a problem has been totally solved, no further research is needed. People like Stallman, Gates, Rand, and Marx give us clear distillations that are really good as solving some problems, often before others even realize those problems even exist.

As the above quote points out, these ideologies are not final, total solutions on their on. It is the conflict between them that bring the best results. From that conflict a good long-term planning pragmatist can try and pick out the parts that work and fix the parts that don't. Refactoring and bugfixing may not be fun, but they do keep the world working.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-cap...
Simple: cost

As long as it is cheaper to exploit an existing clean water source than to spend the energy, and invest in the massive and in some cases unproven tech and engineering infrastructure to build desalination plants, then that's what will happen.

It's unfortunate, because the cost to future generations, or the biosphere doesn't calculate into our current economic system, and most of the commercial infrastructure is aligned against re-calibration of that kind, because it would cost them dearly.
True, but from experience it is often the case that exploits are obfuscated by being wrapped in one or more layers of JS, so that they are less likely to be discovered by passive scanners.

This will probably seem quite shocking, but I almost exclusively used IE6 for a few years, with JS disabled - and despite frequently visiting the "darkest corners" of the Internet, was never exploited. On the sites that tried, I'd just see a blank page; view the source, and there was a blob of obfuscated JS.
Somewhat frequently, but we always ask why the company doesn't have a prototype.
curiously, looking at the article's graph

https://www.quantamagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/LH...

what i see is that SM generates completely different prediction curve than the experiment results. It isn't just a 4th and 5th bin there SM predictions are different from the experiment results - as far as i see the whole [interpolated] curves are different. The SM generated one is much steeper and kind of like goes extremal with energy increase what is typical for physical theories when they hit borders of their applicability while the experimental results behave pretty well, i'd say even beautiful, into the higher energies. It looks like SM is really due for correction which should also affect its predictions for smaller energies - while may be measurement wise the difference between predictions and results in the first 3, lower energy, bins may be not that big, it is obvious from the curve steepness that SM describes different physics than experiments show, and that the same difference just grows and becomes obvious at 4th, 5th bins...
The published version has one bonus chapter. That's basically it (except for a few small mistakes that were caught after the thing went to print -- http://eloquentjavascript.net/errata.html)
Website Helping Users Circumvent Chinese Censorship Under DDoS Attack
One thing I always think about is if I would take the CEO job at the company if they offered it to me.
You can't do all these without roommates in San francisco (unless you have rent control pre 2011 or so) or Silicon Valley without roommates, but with roommates its manageable to a degree. Keep in mind "start up" can mean pretty radically different sizes with pretty radical mixes of base salary vs equity, later stage, bigger start ups (maybe more aptly, post product market fit, fast growing, privately held technology companies) can pay experienced engineers closer to $150k+ a year which even in an expensive area is a good amount of money. Even pretty small start ups tend to offer decent health care these days.
Why did Reddit's board appoint Ellen Pao as CEO when it was already known she had a high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit with Kleiner Perkins to deal with?

Many capable people could lead Reddit so why choose someone with highly visible distractions? For example, Ellen's husband has been accused of running a $140 million Ponzi scheme!

> "Users lash out at Reddit boss for ‘deleting’ posts on hubby’s lawsuit"

"Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher ran a hedge fund, Fletcher International, that is now bankrupt. He owes millions in unpaid legal bills and tax liens and the bankruptcy trustee described it as a Ponzi scheme.

Fletcher still owns several apartments in the storied Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side while his defunct fund owes more than $140 million in court judgments."

http://nypost.com/2015/03/18/users-lash-out-at-reddit-boss-f...
>> I've managed to fund some of the work by doing other contract work.

To be clear, you are donating your time to the project. There is no other source of funding. This is the same as a side project on top of your consulting gig.
The cost to build desalination plants to service millions of residents would be BILLIONS. Tens of Billions. Money that is available, just being spent on other things...
Thank you for that! What makes you believe that someone or something is an outlier? How much of it is a gut feeling versus observable data, for example?
It doesn't need to be linear, just not slowing super-exponentially. At almost any slowdown rate, specks will still end up worse than torture.
Wikipedia founders AMA
Silicon Valley’s sex workers are being priced out of the city by their clients
Was there any instance where you based your judgement to fund a startup based on gut feeling (due to great founders or whatever...)?

I understand most applicants are great so it might be difficult to differentiate
Apartments in SF now are $1800 / studio - $2200 / 1br.
so...

$100k:
- $30k taxes
- $24k rent
- $12k food and misc
-------------
$34k

$34k is about what you have to play with for investing, transportation, entertainment, fitness, saving, student loans, other debt
Hi @sama,
Seeing the recent developments in driverless car, do you think human driving startups (ours is making money while making roads safer) are not interesting for the long term even if worldwide users adopt it today (96 countries after a Buzzfeed article only)?
Thanks.
Eduard.
When I tried it Netrunner was an abortion. Its first stable release crashed more, both individual components and the whole damn thing, than Windows ME.

Even the name is stupid and sounds like a 10 year old thought of it.
Once again, Silicon Valley is way ahead of the curve.
> massively inflated salaries

Why would you say that's inflated? Engineering is a professional occupation that requires a high degree of skill and education. Much like lawyers, doctors and other forms of professions. Many of the companies that employ software engineers at those salaries are highly profitable. From big names like Google, Oracle, Facebook, Apple and Amazon to smaller companies like FrogCreek, Atlassian, and New Relic. So why would you say they're inflated? Software engineers are employed by companies with real products, that provide real value. Salaries have been at these levels for over a decade now, in fact there was a big dip after 2000 when pay actually was hugely inflated, but within a few years pay rose again to current levels. I'd say when you've been earning a salary long enough at these levels to buy a home and raise a child that it's a stable market rate and not inflated.
> I think there'd be a lot more vegetarians if everyone had to do their own butchering

I know I would be. Of course I already knew I would be if I had to raise my own food.

When I look at it the only way I can eat meat is because I can ignore the fact that it was an animal at the point I eat it.
It is part of the conversation. There was just an NPR Forum segment about it yesterday or so. There are articles about it sometimes (e.g., http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations-large...). This solution often ends up not being pursued because it's extremely expensive and energy intensive not only to desalinate but to then pump the water to where it needs to go, and you also have waste product to deal with. So in many cases it has been decided that other avenues, like conservation, are more economical.
Most closed-source products have very different management styles than open-source products.

If you're interested in the topic, check out the book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" - it talks at length about the different styles of building products (Cathedral generally being closed-source stuff, while Bazaar is generally open-source)
HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9240326
Pirate Party Becomes Iceland's Most Popular Political Party
How hard is it to become a YC partner?
Serves those fuckers right.
That would mean: "every program that processes user supplied data should be invulnerable to hostile input".

Suddenly it doesn't sound so reasonable.
Right but this is not China, we need to follow guidelines as bay area is earthquake prone.
Don't think so. We'll rather have lab-grown meat.
One good use for PhantomJS
Yes - A LOT of pushback. I didn't purchase it, and I don't complain about the ads because I understand they have to make money. I do read the comments on them and they are exclusively sarcastic comments/complaints about the ads existing.

My complaint isn't about the ads existing - it's more a disappointment in Reddit/Alexis Ohanian/YCom/etc in not being able to produce a more interesting business model. There is always so much talk about being "thought leaders" and focusing on really game changing technologies. This is the opposite of that : /