skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have suggested that Silicon Valley is successful, in part, because workers accept a notion of "long-term compensation" [1]. Long-term compensation, perhaps better called maybe-someday compensation, requires SV software engineers to work for relatively less (factoring in cost-of-living) than many other skilled professionals, with hopes that they'll be rewarded with a big windfall in the future.

With the rising cost of living in SF/SV, young engineers are expected to shoulder much the risk of startups while putting their long-term financial stability on the line. All in hopes of maybe-someday being compensated. And let's face it, the lion's share of these rewards will not be passed to these workers who put all their eggs in one basket, but to financially-secure VC's who have hedged their risk across many companies. If this is how SV works, do you truly believe this is a strong foundation for the industry? Obviously it's good for founders and VCs, but I'm considering the perspective of engineers.

We seem to be enjoying go-go years of investment and profits, everyone is starry eyed, and the system is working. What happens when the present-day strain on workers exceeds the allure of maybe-someday compensation? Also, why shouldn't talented workers move to an industry that provides guaranteed compensation for hard work in real time?

Of course, start-ups have a much different risk profile than banks, consulting agencies, large corporations, etc. And as a result, the long-term compensation model may be a necessity. But in the end, it sounds like SV works because there's a large supply of people willing to gamble on their future financial stability.

[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/why-silicon-valley-works
I came here to ask the same question. I started working on an idea of my own and I have many friends who are very talented but none that really seem to want to commit to something risky and obviously I don't want to force someone to come if they are not interested in taking the risk with me.

This is the main reason my next application to YC will be solo but I am certainly open (and would prefer) a partner.
Feedback on the Go Challenge Solutions
I saw a presentation by Slava, where he mentioned plans for official Java-drivers (among others).

Are there any news on this front?
Hi Sam, you wrote a blog post about China last month. Do you see YC China in the plan in the near future?
in my opinion, after starting multiple failed companies and one that seems to be working so far, individual founders are the exception that prove the rule.

at the end of the day, it's just a ton of work. even very very hard working and smart people are not physically capable doing this much work on their own - in terms of actual output founding a company is like 6 or 7 fulltime jobs' worth of deliverables, shared by 2 or 3 founders.

if you're a single founder, i think you'd have to raise money very early and make some key hires quickly in order to succesfully do it. from what i can, that's usually the case with single founders who were previously part of an all-star founding team that had a good exit.
Is nobody paying for Linux bugs or weren't any found?
What are some of the best things that you've seen non-tech co-founders do during YC?
Show HN: Getting 10x Developers 10x Pay
I have openstack installed on an old sever, I just throw up images when I need them.
Lobster is a bug; it used to be 'ick' and now its 'yum'. The ick factor is cultural. No reason the OP can't be right - if bugs are tasty, and some people start eating them, and then more people, they could easily become a regular thing.
Dunno if you have been asked this already,apologies if it's a repeat, are you going to do a yc in Dublin, Ireland? You should we are awesome
>Oracle isn't privy to what you're storing.

Do you work at Oracle? Are you 100% sure this is true? Have you audited all the hosted 3rd party solutions for the Government, and interviewed every employee to ensure that they aren't privy to your data? Have you ensured that all code written for the US govt has no cryptographic errors?

The claim that the US Govt. shouldn't use google analytics because Google can read their data is hardly any different than arguing they shouldn't use managed Oracle solutions because some Oracle exec has access to their data. Where does it end? Should the US Govt. now spend and build their own analytics infrastructure? Should the US Govt. write their own databases? Print their own silicon? And what about everyone else? If a US company isn't trusted by the US Govt to keep data secure, what about insurance companies? Or Healthcare companies? Should these companies too, be also printing their own silicon? How is this a solution?

If the problem is privacy, the solution is to create processes that respect privacy. Sitting in the dark because electricity might burn your house down is not a solution.

And God forbid that the Govt coerces Google to share data on how people are using their own servers and that they are already making public.
$2M is not really affordable on that income, actually, so most likely the home was purchased for much less and appreciated significantly in value.
Latin America Is Quitting Smoking, and Africa Is Taking It Up
Are you already combined several startup's ideas into a one that has more potential to become a unicorn?
Why do you think this is better than dynamic equity splits?
1. Device powered health
2. Enterprise security
3. Streaming video
I don't know about "forgotten"... certainly it was unpopular for quite awhile but composers at least always knew of him and his work. Bach was one of the only older composers that Mozart admired, for example.
.. running inside another virtual machine just to be secure from guest-to-host escape vulnerabilities.

Repeat as many times as necessary based on your paranoia levels. Inception.
It's a personal choice for workers. If you're an engineer and you want a guaranteed $250k per year, go work for a financial firm. Nothing wrong with that decision. Everyone gets to make his or her own.

Engineers at startups make $100k+, sometimes much more. I don't think people are being asked to subject themselves to unreasonable financial strain.

It is indeed "maybe-someday" competition. When you work at a startup, you're acting like an investor but investing your time instead of your money. If you choose well, the upside can be pretty crazy.
Show HN: Audubon – Automatically get a screenshot of any tweet
It should ask for your wife's phone number and let her answer for you.
Investing time and money into iOS is a risk. Period. This isn't new. Anyone who gets yanked out of the apple's walled garden knew it was a possibility before said investment took place.

It's hard to feel sorry for anyone who gets put through this.
My understanding is that would violate the rules of the competition. Though of course if a competitor were to do that, odds are no one would find out.
The use Oracle Database because it's the provides the best solution.
This is why I don't think in terms of money buying happiness... it clearly doesn't... but it can rent it for a while.
Yes, you do. We always ask how long the cofounders have known each other.
> True it is a scary web but how many of those exploits have relied on default settings and Javascript to run?

Layout (just to name one non-JS subsystem) has been responsible for a lot of vulnerabilities too.
Had you not been accepted into YC, what was your plan of action?
https://soundcloud.com/mia-riker-norrie/classical-rap-pdq-ba...

From the early 90's, a take on how hard is it live on six figures on the Upper West Side. (I coincidentally happened to listen to an old cassette tape with this, and then read this thread.)
The lovely choice:

1. facebook where the NSA are checking on you

2. faceskibook where a Russian hacker is going to own your pc
This definition is a bit leaky. For example, the executive who lives month to month live in a luxury penthouse "has" to work to pay his mortgage...but has the option to not pay that mortgage, save for a year (or two), stop working, and live off wealth. I wouldn't call someone with that option "working class".
>It's a discontinuous function (in my opinion).

There are a finite number of possible brain states, far less than the 3||3 number. All possible "feelings" is likewise less than that.

You need to be dividing all possible feelings of pain into two groups, and asserting that the absolute worst of the first group (containing dust specks) is incommensurate with the absolute best of the second group (containing torture).

At some point you need to say that you'd pick specks even over 1 minute of torture, even over 1 second, on which I think most people's intuitions would stop saying that. Or you need to find some point between 50 years and 1 second where it become commensurate.
I can answer this one because I've been watching it from a unique perspective. Every year the median founder age tracks my age. Since I first started hearing about it in 2009 or 2010. This year they are 29.
The answer is always no.
Thanks sama and mbym. As a confounded solo founder waiting for organic cofundity, this is nice to hear.
The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, especially with JavaScript frameworks you can run on the server to render the initial page, which then gets wired up to the client-side application. i.e. "Isomorphic JavaScript" [1][2]

[1] http://nerds.airbnb.com/isomorphic-javascript-future-web-app...

[2] http://isomorphic.net/
10 top Internet of Things investors
Make it clear in your application you're going to spend 100% of your time on this new business.
Never played the game, never had the computing power as a kid.

Hmmm, I wonder what the completion rate for high cost games on Kickstarter is... (some googling later)... It's near 30% apparently...

http://gamerant.com/kickstarter-video-game-failure-rate/

The staff seems to have a hearty pedigree, the goals seem attainable, there are some smart statements about limitations. They might just pull it off. Might. I wouldn't bet on it. Why? Just feeling grumpy.
> I've personally tried a few distros of Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds.

Is there some Intro To Linux we can point just people to in order to avoid things like this? The "GNU slash Linux" conversation is wearing pretty thin but it should be common knowledge at this point that the GNU project did 10 ten years of work so Linus could add the kernel and have it be the first completed system.

Should we point to Revolution OS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c)?

Should we point to GNU's page about the issue (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html)?

Without getting into any finger-pointing, it's just history and we should all know it.
Yeah after reading the article I am slightly less skeptical - the headline, as usual, war promising way too much.

That said we are going to look at a timeline of decades rather than tomorrow. I mean Tofu has been around for how long? And it is still somewhat of the beaten path.
That's true, but I would love to hear a specific theory on how using data from Wikipedia would create an antitrust problem :)
With over 2B users, Facebook is a marketing heaven
whats better these days?
Get to revenue faster or build something that more people can use and generate revenue later?
Hi BinaryIdiot, I am free and available, I am a TernaryIdiot, we could make a team!
Here's the current status of ads, as I understand it:

On iPhone, you only see sponsored posts if you have not purchased Pro. When they rolled out ads initially to iPhone, Pro users saw them and complained, Reddit said it was a bug, and fixed something on the backend to prevent them from being shown to Pro users.

On iPad, you see sponsored posts even if you have Pro. As far as anyone can tell, this is intentional.

From the first 10 posts on /r/AlienBlue:

----------------

How to: Refund Alien Blue after Sponsored Ads Decision

I paid for no ads!

Has anyone else gone back to the old app?

Why are they monetizing the app before it even works properly? They have to know what the userbase thinks of this...

No ads! No test ads, no real ads, NO ADS!
I think it's because startups have to make small changes to their idea several times per day. Very short cycle times do best with in-person interaction.
That's survivor bias. Earth looks in equilibrium to us because it changes very, very slowly... and we happen to evolve to make the most out of the current set of conditions.

But I'd bet that to the living organisms of the Cambrian period, the current state of our planet would look like a complete (though slowly improving) wreck.
Broken Windows: Why Music Release Strategies Must Change
It's remarkably close the Space Station Freedom design from 1987, nearly 30 years ago.

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/spaeedom.htm
That applies to more than just bugs. Given a long enough timeline, anything nutritious could become culturally mainstream. That doesn't guarantee that it will.
You didn't read the article. I can tell because my initial reaction was much like yours, but after reading an article all about cricket flour I realize it doesn't matter to the topic at hand. What obstacles there are to serving people whole insects are perhaps not wholly absent to serving them as an invisible ingredient, but are certainly greatly less.

If insects are going to be introduced into the American diet, this is exactly how it will start. And may well end; I could easily see whole insects never going mainstream. But... they don't have to.
Honest question on how profitable Y Combinator really is.

What is Y Combinator's average portfolio return before management fees and carry?
As a follow-up, do you think it is unethical to use AdBlock?
And you thought chicken farms were disgusting...
> helped you indirectly by investing in reddit ...

... which is THE weapon of choice for anyone serious about honing their lack of focus and procrastination skills :)
As someone else mentioned, this is actually built into Curl with the "--libcurl file.c" option.
We'll start developing one pretty soon.
You can follow the progress at https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/3930
can you send me an email?
That sounds a bit creepy. How did you know which guy it was and what flight he will be taking? To track him like that seems creepy.
FYI seems the download contains the correct license, but not the website. Might be an error.
So what's a good approximate metric for the possible damage if something does go wrong? Some function of fixed operating costs and customer turnover? Driving away a customer that you'd expected to keep for another 10 years is a bit different than if you'd only expected to keep them for a month, and losing half your customer base is a bit worse if your fixed costs are 80% of revenue vs if they're 20%.

The example had two cases, at opposite ends of this. Are there generally accepted not-too-heavyweight ways to calibrate procedures for cases that are more in-between?
0) Binary computing 1) Ternary computing ~ Quantum computing
I had a rather tough time with an affiliate venture that was a short term success followed by scaling up and ultimately failing.

Nothing nearly as seedy as skinny pills, but I ran a service that would alert people when "hot, got to have it, out of stock everywhere" items were back in stock at online retailers. It was a great system that grossed about 45K in the first three months with little work.

I had started with one product and a simple website, so after the initial success I doubled down. I spent two months creating a site that would allow me to add more products, a subscription management system for users, and added a bunch of retailers to my web scraper.

I also calculated how much revenue I made per user to figure out how much I should spend to acquire more users. Based on the result I started aggressive spending on Google adwords with the expectation of future affiliate commissions.

But then the retailers caught on that I was earning commissions on items they could barely keep in stock and the gravy train came to an abrupt halt with no warning. I turned off the adwords just in time to break even. If it wasn't for Amazon.com staying true, I would have been in the red.
Talk to users, and tell us what you learn from them.
How can it be 2 different people, why don't you speak in 1st person and use 'I'?
I think it's worth observing that the FSF position--absolute as it is--is by construction incompatible with any other motive.

It seems like the best that can be done, for now, is to have congruent means. :)
On evaluating applications: assuming you're looking at a solid team and a seemingly good idea, how much does having a working prototype and early traction help a startup's chances of getting into YC? Is there some level of traction that makes any application a shoo-in? Are there categories of startups that you won't even consider without demonstrated traction?

On the flip side, what does it take to make you consider a team that has nothing built and no users yet?
That particular startup is building rockets, so no.
UTF8, no length limit, no parsing into pieces (first/last etc).
Thanks for checking! That repo appears to be the original source release, unaltered. IIRC there are some non-free bits in there that Parallax missed. (They discuss this in the interview in README.TXT.)

Anybody remember DEVIL, the 3rd party Descent Level Editor? :)

Descent was my first exposure to hacking. I'd hex edit save-game files and give myself 255 shield-value.. ;)
Oh. That's (IMHO of course) an even worse anti-feature, since I use my feedreader to archive interesting stuff from RSS feeds, and removing things after a few months kills that. But I can see how it makes sense for some users, and is a way to limit costs for a hosted offering.
What if the feedback is 'we think the market is too small'. It seems the way to improve is drastically change the product (/pivoting), or is there another way?
Hi,

thanks for doing this!

Do you think VC money is viable option for long-term (e.g. 30 years) business models?

What would be your advice (if Bootstrapping is not an option)?
I agree 100% and as soon as my company stops supporting IE9 I will be pushing for using pushState and more single-page app-ness.
I was going to work on my startup either way. I had a plan B investor that would have been not nearly as good.
For reference he is reverse engineering the Dream Cheeky USB Mini RC Car:

http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Cheeky-USB-Mini-Car/dp/B000XGQ9L...
An early stage startup will typically have the great majority of ownership in the hands of investors and 2-3 founders, with maybe 10% allocated to engineers at 1% max for any individual engineer. Do you see this ever changing where engineer #1-5, for example, wouldn't have a 1-to-20 or even 1-to-70 equity imbalance with the founders?
Guys congratulation, RethinkDB continues to impress me with it's features and how fast you ship them.
>Engineers at startups make $100k+, sometimes much more. I don't think people are being asked to subject themselves to unreasonable financial strain.

Is $100k enough for a person to live without roommates within 20-30 minutes commute from said startup? Eat healthy food? Pay student loans? Have health insurance and build savings?

I'm not from the Bay Area- this is a serious question.
You can buy some on Amazon today for $40 a pound: http://www.amazon.com/JR-Unique-Foods-Cricket-Flour/dp/B00OM...
I think most of the YC funded startups have good ideas, but some of the more recent batches (past three years) seem to have a much smaller market than the earlier batches.

Has there been a conscious decision to move to more niche markets, or has that just been where the chips fell?

Also, why has the average age of the founders YC funded slowly been rising?
Has YC funded any Roku/Chromecast apps before?
I am surprised that Chrome OS + Chrome isn't an option. If it provided uncrackable, that would be good theater; and if not, still very useful to Google. Unless the possibility of tarnishing its reputation outweighs the benefits...
The big problem is a 4 or 5 person founding team. That's a high bar to get over (but possible, one startup I really like in this batch has 5 founders).

Be so good we can't ignore you.
Hi Sam,

Does YC take any position on founders in a long-term, personal relationship, e.g. married? Has YC funded companies with such founders? If so, can you say anything meaningful about these company's success or failure?

Note: I'm specifically thinking of companies with two founders.
Whatever is closest to matching all the other systems you have to talk to, or expect to have to talk to.

compatibility > correctness

Humans are more fault-tolerant than computers.
> The problem is that ESR and the "open source" people have a fundamentally different understanding of software freedom than do the FSF.

No, if you read the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition, you'll find that there understanding of software freedom is pretty much identical.

Their ideas of the moral purpose of advocating for software freedom and/or the most effective tactics of advocating for software freedom differ, certainly.
Probably fine if you're not planning to hang out with the faux-elite in the Meatpacking District.
It would only take a generation to change that.
"I still wonder if affiliate rapper dullspace ever got a record deal"

I'm not sure, but he did get into YCombinator
The supply can't just be produced out of the blue. There isn't enough land in San Francisco to build a whole bunch of housing. The key is to expand out of city or create zones in city for affordable housing.
There is still some level of aesthetic consideration given to industrial equipment.

Compare the sleekness of the cab and bodywork on a new frontloader with that of an 80's model.

New: http://s7d2.scene7.com/is/image/Caterpillar/C10346217?$cc-g$

Old: https://core-assetnation.netdna-ssl.com/auction_media/57245/...

Most industrial machines have reached a point of utility that there has to be a way to signal "this is the new one" because we are wired to think that "new" means "better".
I'd consider it a hack. It was improvised in a short amount of time, and with limited resources. Sam shouldn't have gotten the deal, but he did! I'd say he beat the system. Which system? The Universe.
Will there be info on them coming soon?
Congestia genitala TRATAMENTE NATURISTE
People have been publishing this article every few months for as long as I can remember.

They may well be an efficient form of protein but... squick. Basically.
Microsoft Windows: 5 bugs
Microsoft IE 11: 4 bugs
Mozilla Firefox: 3 bugs
Adobe Reader: 3 bugs
Adobe Flash: 3 bugs
Apple Safari: 2 bugs
Google Chrome: 1 bug
$442,500 paid out to researchers

Looking at these figures, am I the only one who think competitions are not the most effective method for finding bugs? Of course, 21 bugs is not small and $442,500 is not much, but when you think those researches spend months of their time for finding those bugs, wouldn't it be more appropriate to use that money on proper security audits? (I know it will cost more but would be more effective overall?)
Any idea what the MSDN tree view used in the 1998 timeframe? I know it loaded the contents on demand when you expand3d a node and I remember it doing so using an automation object with CreateObject.
Going to go with Blade Runner, with the way we continue to treat each other all we need is another intelligence to be a dick to.

Total Recall, Elysium, Robocop, Idiocracy, and Gattaca all see to be influencing our future too.
They are rigid solar panels mounted on Kapton tape. There's a fan-fold mechanism to store them for transport - exactly like old tractor-feed printer paper.

They can fold them back up, and they are an in-space replaceable component but there's no reason to ever do that. It was done once to move the P6 truss from a temporary position on top of the station to the end of the wing, but this resulted in (repairable) damage to the solar array.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bTcodL0awg is a good view of the retraction.