skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's unbelievable to me, too. It basically means the government can both violate the Constitution and absolve itself for the reason of "national security". To think how that would have gone over in the 18th century!
You're right, there's room for improvement in the signup process, to show the user something more useful and enticing after signup but before email confirmation. A couple of you have mentioned it. I'll work on it.
Ideas look niche when the companies are starting out. As Peter Thiel says, you first want to dominate a small market.

Most great companies were derided for focusing on a small niche when they first started.

I think the average age has risen something like 3 years over the past 10 years. Part of it is that we're funding companies in other spaces. I bet the average age for founders of Internet/mobile startups hasn't moved much.
You probably won't be able to afford living without roommates. But the rest, is certainly feasible on a 100k+ salary.
Hi Sam. If the company applies for the second time with some progress made, is it treated differently, like "Ahhh... the same guys. Let's see what they have done since last time"? Does it matter at all?
Actually I'm happy with making markets more efficient. I have no problem with affiliate marketing in general. I was more referring to the fact that some of the things he was marketing were scams.
Why working remote became a part of my life I don’t want to miss anymore
Yes, though not if you live the lifestyle many engineers at startups choose to :)
It is pretty funny these years, cause app(qml, for example) really wants to be web, and web(single-page-app-like web) really wants to be app.
But I don't really know if we want to build a moral theory upon my gut reactions to things. My gut reactions are probably inconsistent. They are optimized by experience, culture, and evolution, not for things vastly outside the scope of common everyday situations.

I know I'm not a 100% selfless altruist. I don't donate all my money to charity and I'm not going to risk going to prison to sabotage a power plant. But that doesn't mean I can't aspire to being more altruistic or want the world to be more utilitarian.

Almost all of EY's posts are about how your gut reaction to things is often wrong, inconsistent, or leads to outcomes you probably don't desire. E.g. Scope Insensitivity (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/) where people will pay more money to save 4,500 people out of 11,000, rather than 4,500 out of 250,000.
Without knowing much, this does come across as very hypocritical of them to do this to you. It seems like the type of attitude that would be frowned upon by the YC community.
Maven finally escapes from XML
This particular exploit relies on Native Client, which is concerning since it is on by default and is hard to disable.
I can't give up my current life to run a startup that I have to move away from family for 3 months for YC.

I have always wanted to do YC, but just can't family wise. Is there any chance YC is looking to invest in companies adhoc wise? I know and understand you sell the process. Thats what YC is all about, but the simple fact that Im in VA and your in Cali makes things soo much harder.
This is either hilarious or everything that's wrong with the white male dominated world of software.
There's a well known theory that non-competes stifles innovation and in particular CA's ban on these has allowed SV to flourish.

There have been moves afoot in MA to enact a similar ban, although recently it seems to have been somewhat defanged through lobbying by the likes EMC (despite still being protected by copyright, trade secrets and patents!).

What are your thoughts on this; if MA is able to pass a ban on non-competed of any substance, how do you think it'll change the startup/VC scene in Boston.
Hello Sam,

Any plans to open up a YC hub in Mexico. The startup scene is in an infant stage but it seems to be growing very fast. 500 startup is already funding companies here[1].

Thank you!

[1] http://500mexicocity.com/
You should familiarize yourself with that feeling so you can recognize it later; it's the feeling of falling into an inferential gap. (The thing might be worthless, true, like Scientology. I usually find that resolving confusion is worth my time, though.)
I don't find lobsters scurrying behind my trashcan though.
So, most sites won't work, and the ones that do work will still be vulnerable? Awesome.
We don't have outside investors, so there isn't fee or carry.

Our returns are very good (triple digit IRR) but still mostly unrealized.
Most people fund ideas, some fund founders. What do you think about funding dreams?
​The best Chromebook ever: Google's 2015 Pixel
What are your thoughts on drug use among the entrepreneur/tech communities?

Specifically modafinil, amphetamines, psychedelics.
Call me a naïve optimist, but star trek. Sure maybe not warp drives, but cheap safe nuclear energy, instant fabrication, life extension, portable universal health diagnosis, post scarcity economies, holodecks. While these seem like fantasy, just look at the advancements made in technology in the last half 40 years since it was made, the web, diagnostics on a chip, 5th gen self contained nuclear reactors, 3d printing, Watson for doctors, increased global living standards, the list goes on. Sure it can be easy to moan and speculate on all manner is distopian futures with things like gfcs and terrorism plastering our news. But you only need to go back 100 years and our world would look like star trek to people of that time. Who knows much better things will get with another 100 years of technologic advancement.
Please don't side track this thread with salary discussion in bay area. There are plenty of HN threads where this has been talked extensively.
"Kimiko: My next project, which will be an audio-only project, will be to record the Chopin Préludes on a Pleyel piano that Chopin himself actually played."

Sounds very interesting. I wonder if there will be any attempt to reflect the performance styles current when Chopin was writing. It would be fun to try to match the acoustic of the first performances as well perhaps.

One way of recovering some flavour of performance style is through students of the composer who recorded...

http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/studies/chapters/chap6.html
Yes. If you reapply with the same idea, the first thing we look at is progress since last time.
there better be a cute little guide-bot who shoots flares at bad guys
Its not an ad hominem attack. Saying Stallman's arguments are wrong (or, in a weaker form, that they should be dismissed) because of the tactics similar to those of the LaRouche crowd similarity would be ad hominem.

Saying that Stallman's presentation of his ideas is, in fact, alienating to people who aren't already converts, and that the presentation's similarity to LaRouche extremists tactics is helpful in understanding why that happens (whether or not it should happen) is tactical criticism.

There may be a problem with it, but it isn't even remotely ad hominem.
Funny I found that today https://onfido.com/blog/using-cpus-elixir-on-raspberry-pi2/
I recommend teaching them web app security (CRSF, SQL injection, etc).
Everything except the student loans, yes.
If you have student loans you'd need to get a roommate (or two).

Source: I live in the Bay area, and got a job at bigco but a salary similar to 100k. Almost no education loans (under 5k), but about 40k of loans for parents back home. I paid it back in a year and a little bit more.
I think it means he (sama) took a flight to be at the guy's office first thing in the morning, to wait for the guy to show up at the office.
Kind of interesting how many people would rather eat bugs than not eat meat at all.
But kudos to them for working the word 'artisanal' into a story about eating insects
I interviewed for a company once that had different kinds of offers, ranging from low-salary/high-equity, to high-salary/low-equity. I thought that was an interesting idea :D They had 5 options total, and the middle option wasn't awful. I'd like to see more of this in the valley.
Would you or any other YC partners consider making a trip out to Georgia Tech to give a talk? We don't get too much love being in the south east, but there are many hundreds of talented engineering students here that would benefit greatly from hearing about YC and the startup world in general.
A prototype helps a lot.

Traction helps too, but we tried not to get fooled by graphs. In fact, I always ask the other interviewers "would we fund this company if they had no traction at all?"

To fund a company with nothing built and no users, we have to believe 1) the idea is great and 2) the team is unstoppable.
Isn't that what ideas are?
That sounds upper-middle if not upper class to me ;-)

Disposable income going into high-risk investments after securing an excellent education for 2 kids - if the rest of the middle class were so lucky, our entire next generation would be pretty well-positioned.
"Server Error (500)" on any query with accents in them. Try "Brasília", for example, Brasil's capital.
I notice you didn't actually say at which point you would prefer torturing (10^100)*X people for Y years each, over torturing X people for Y+0.0000001 years each, for X and Y at least 0.0000001.

(You may assume you don't know anything in particular about these people, other than that they are adult humans.)
No, not just you, I found it pretty hard to keep on track with it. Not often I say that about New Yorker articles.
Thank you! Why would you say 4 or 5 person founding teams are a big problem?
Did you try talking to the customers you already had, or folks who did not sign up but were in the same demographics?

I'm currently building a tool for writers and emailing writers individually (sometimes, even buying 30 minutes of their time) and talking to them has been really insightful.
Zoho knows how to inform about update of Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
It's crucial to always clearly show and explain changes in important docs like Terms of Service and Privacy Policy whenever they happen. I don't want to dwell on details of these particular changes in Zoho, but want to applaud the way they're expressing the change, which many companies should learn from.

You get following message upon signing in:

Hi

We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Please take a few minutes to read and understand them. To help you understand, we have summarized the changes and provided a comparison of the current and the previous versions.
These changes will take effect on April 19, 2015. If you continue to use Zoho Services after April 19, 2015, you will be governed by the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

[1] Revised Privacy Policy
[2] Summary of Changes to Privacy Policy
[3] Comparison

[4] Revised Terms of Service
[5] Summary of Changes to Terms of Service Comparison
[6] Comparison

---

[1] http://www.zoho.com/privacy.html

[2] https://www.zoho.com/privacy-summary-change.html

[3] https://zoho.com/privacy-policy-changes-28102010-19032015.html

[4] http://www.zoho.com/terms.html

[5] https://www.zoho.com/terms-summary-change.html

[6] https://www.zoho.com/terms-of-service-changes-16042010-19032015.html
The only one of those (not counting caffeine) I've tried is modafinil. The side effects are weird, but man do you get a productivity boost.

Personally, I'm scared to screw with my brain chemistry too much and am supersensitive to psychoactive drugs of any sort.
perhaps (obviously, completely) personally it was a failure, but the title was referring to making money online. Maybe the failure isn't connected to that specifically? I dunno. I mean I mostly agree with everything you said, just trying to point out that he did in fact make a decent amount of money online whereas a lot of people try the same types of things without making anywhere near the amount of money he did.
The End of Internet Explorer and Premera Healthcare Breach
Dawn of Orion
YC has been branching out with it's investments with companies in areas like charities and biotech. But it's as of now a small percentage. I understand predicting anything into the future is mostly an exercise in failure, but what do you think YC's mix of portfolio will be like in 20 - 30 years?
> When you work at a startup, you're acting like an investor but investing your time instead of your money.

True, except:
(a) An employee can probably only work for one startup at a time, and begins vesting after a year. That's like asking an investor to bet on at most 1 company per year.
(b) Employers tend to give substantially less detailed information about their business, financials, etc to prospective employees than they give to investors. We have to make our choice very carefully, but we often have to make it with less information.
(c) And after we've chosen, and vested, we do also have to invest money to exercise. If after that point things go downhill, we're out on money, but also years of our careers.
You could at least explain why you're downvoting? Is it

* Suggesting this is a fishy case of copyright infringement?
* Pointing out a powerful political group has been attacking the song since it came out?
* Disagreeing with their half-baked critique of the song?
* Or maybe because I noticed that they're now celebrating the verdict?

This is a discussion board after all.
My wife and I live in Oakland on ~$160k a year, own a home, and live a relatively lavish lifestyle. So yeah, I'm in a "worse" situation then I outlines and in reality, in the upper class of quality of life.
I think it'd be good to do this, but that the startup scene is really broken in Boston for many other reasons. I'm not very optimistic this would be enough to fix it.
Iranians, history, and Nowruz
Well, actually... http://i.ytimg.com/vi/z54da6-fz94/hqdefault.jpg

Okay, so it's a coconut crab, not a lobster, but...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_crab
Work at a YC startup!
Lobster is 100% bug to me - huge yuck.
Straight hustlin'!
For comparison, this is the 8th grade common core standards for math: http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/8/introduction.

Whereas the 1912 version only required basic arithmetic and trigonometry, the 2015 version requires, additionally: rational numbers, exponents and radicals, systems of linear equations, and basic statistics.
I was surprised by how few OS/Browser combinations were tested. For instance, I'd think that the OSX + Chrome population is pretty big and I'd (selfishly) like that combination tested.

It feels like, just the fact that this competition and other bug bounty programs exist, means that the big companies here have gotten over reputation tarnish and know that the patch is worth it.
Thank you Sam for your feedback. I totally agree: YC should not be the only reason for you to start what you want to build. And I had no pb submitting applications to other accelerators. That being said, YC is considered as the best of the best by many :)

In a nutshell, I guess the answer is no, it can not be confidential.

Thank you for your answer and time.
Yes, Elm has a "time travelling debugger" though I haven't really used it.

http://debug.elm-lang.org/
Hi Sam,

I'm currently a highschool junior and the co - founder of EnerScore. I'm aware that YC has a semi-preference for younger founders as you said so yourself, but I wanted to know how YC might view me being this young. Will it count against me in my application, or is YC more focused on the product itself?
There is not a single day that passes that I don't thank, silently and sometimes not, Linux and the distros it spawned (regardless of my own preferences). It must be clear by now that Linux OSs have recaptured and prolonged the spirit of the "personal computer" idea, which is basically to put the user in control of the machine, or the individual in control of something really. I can't be thankful enough for the hundreds or thousands of talented individuals who made that happen and still do. I think they deserve more praise than they get.
I can accept they provide a faster, safer, cheaper and more comfortable service than my Colombian taxi service, and that's probably true for most countries, including the USA.

But can you really use the ANY word?

That's a tall order.
What happened to all of the accounts cheering EFF donations on? Someone steal your sweet-roll?

As it turns out, skirmishes with the US Government using US Law aren't very successful. You can pretend you gain awareness that the laws are completely bent out of shape, but you must also become aware of the motivation and morale that was lost. Whatever we've won being aware that the law will not help in this case, we've lost in self-censorship and awareness that to truly stand against this system can very likely hurt your professional and personal well-being.

Very little will be won by skirmishing with the redcoats in the open fields. This will be realized soon enough; why else would we have so many years of media invested in developing such a deep emotional connection with the word 'terrorism', which can now so broadly be applied. As always, the masses are a day late and a dollar short.
I think he was making reference to the DOM rendering in the twitter website which used to be on client side until recently when they have switched back to server side rendering. But, it's very similar to pre-rendering React components on the server then mounting it so it might not be a total waste, that was a fad that didn't make a lot of sense for the time though.
Obligatory archived copies of above mentioned pages:

[1] https://archive.today/Pw2gr

[2] https://archive.today/2lHs7

[3] https://archive.today/gc1Gu

[4] https://archive.today/knFJg

[5] https://archive.today/8BFxh

[6] https://archive.today/9EkxY
It's still not exactly what people want in terms of exact options and color: no less and no more. There are people willing to wait.
On the slightly less dark side, we can probably assume that this class of exploits is so valuable that nobody would use it against a large number of people at once in an ordinary way, like sending out spam emails or comments with links to build a botnet. That would likely result in it getting noticed and patched quickly, for very little return on investment.

These types of exploits are probably only used by very well financed organizations in carefully targeted ways, so as to justify the huge cost of finding them and keep them unnoticed and unpatched for as long as possible. See the recent stories on the Equation group-associated malware. You and I are probably safe enough, but somebody like Edward Snowden better be very careful where he surfs.
Out of fairness, the partners can't really give you feedback. You can reach out to alumni, though.
Proper audits don't get much publicity.
Anecdotally, I was rejected by YC and in the following year my startup has grossed over $100,000 and is acquiring new users at a stable 20%+ MoM. Point being YC is a nice-to-have, not a need to have.
Any yet every time JavaScript blocking extensions are mentioned, it gets ridiculed.

edit: case in point, someone posted about it right before and it's downvoted. Good job!
So good to see another affiliate go through details of his experience. I've been in the space for almost 10 years now as well, and looking back I have a ton to relate but just haven't ever really written it out.

I never got into some of the things he did, and it did definitely hold my peak revenue back. I went down a different - and much more technical - route and had a more consistent income over time.

The big thing that most people don't realize is how the "churn" will get you in the end. At every moment as an affiliate, it doesn't matter how good you are - the offer you're running or the network you're buying traffic in can kill your best campaign in a second, and there is little/nothing you can do.

For example, I had an AMAZING search site for the food & bev space with a major beverage company as a client. We made a ton of money for them and they loved us because we were super-white-hat and never had issues. But after 5 years the parent company of our client killed the entire affiliate program.

It didn't matter that we were their top search affiliate - we were a drop in the bucket for a multi billion dollar company. The campaign ended and the site is dormant for lack of clients to work with.

This churn gets affiliates all the time. You have to stay one or more steps ahead of it and constantly be searching for new methods to succeed. In the end, I looked at that game and decided it was no longer one I wanted to play with the rules as they were.
I was making $100k and was able to find a small apartment in SF AND save about $2k a month (granted, I've finished paying my student loans). Not needing a car, and the ability to walk / scooter / public transport everywhere for relatively cheap, is a huge money saver! My half of the rent each month, as of today in SF, is $1300 ($2600 for the whole apartment in SoMa), but you need to take into account the money I'm not spending maintaining a car (which can be costly in the city, especially w/ parking).

As for health insurance, you'll more than likely find a job that offers that. I had great health insurance, the company had some neat perks like a gym membership, free lunch and dinner at the offices, and permission to work from home pretty frequently.

I think if you are anticipating $100k a year in SF, you'll do fine!
Do you have time to elaborate?
Thank you and I did. I was just wondering if there is already a certain penalty towards me. 1) Only founder 2) Owner of another company....

Thx, for your prompt answer.
Enjoy the rest of your AMA and have a great weekend!
Take the percentage increase over the "classic" optimizer, multiply by total hardware costs of the hosting provider. The result is the dollar figure that it will save the company. Now your sales pitch is "Our software costs $X and will save you $Y > $X", which is a familiar and usually successful enterprise software pitch, since it is pure cost savings from the POV of the customer.

The tricky part is getting integration costs down to < $Y - $X, which is why the most successful enterprise products tend to be turnkey solutions like CloudFlare or AWS that build off already existing APIs. New programming languages usually fail because there's a massive hidden cost in learning the language and rebuilding the ecosystem that is greater than any potential savings the language could offer.
Apple Force Touch for Developers
Have you ever considered funding enough to attract people who have financial obligations, such as kids, a spouse and a mortgage? It seems like a huge, untapped, resource that no one else is going after.
Let's not be racist, the thoughts of a 20-something Chinese woman can be just as racist, we just don't get as many of them on Reddit. Or maybe Reddit does have a thriving subreddit of racist 20-something chinese women, I've stopped being surprised by the existence of some niche subreddit.
It's just unfamiliarity - you would have the same reaction to a prawn if you hadn't grown up with it. And many outsiders would have a similar reaction to squid cooked in its ink (Spain), half-rotted herring (Scandinavia), or even just strongly flavoured blue cheese (everywhere). For that matter, lots of people feel icky about fresh tomatoes.

It's not likely to become something which is mainstream overnight, but there are large parts of the population in the West who actively seek out different experiences. Or, to put it another way, the food market is heavily segmented by interest, class, age, location (national, regional, and metropolitan/rural), and so on. In the short term, you're likely to get movement into early/adventurous adopter parts of the market.