skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Does this mean there is a default kernel driver on the interface and we must detach it

Yes. Sometimes, and most prominently: A lot of cheap gizmos register themselves as "HID" (human interface devices) which is a class normally reserved for keyboards and mice. Windows, Linux, OSX, ... have default drivers, and the HID protocols implements a channel for arbitrary data to be passed to/from the device (/dev/hidraw* in Linux). In turn it allows people to talk to the "USB rocket launcher" providing a simple executable application, without needing to register a driver.

If you want to talk to the usb device using libusb (or the python bindings) you have to unbind this generic driver. You can either do it from within libusb, or for example, in the sys filesystem.

For a USB ethernet adapter (which I happen to have laying around):

$ cd /sys/bus/usb/drivers/ax88179_178a
$ ls
(...)
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Mar 20 20:33 2-1.1:1.0 -> ../../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-1/2-1.1/2-1.1:1.0
(...)

...so it's bound to device 2-1.1:1.0 ...

$ sudo sh -c "echo 2-1.1:1.0 >unbind"

...ethernet interface is now gone, I can, theoretically, now talk to the device using libusb.

Another example: Some programming cables for microcontroller development (similar to, e.g. the Arduino stuff) might have use a standard USB-to-Serial bridge chip. But as you have to talk to it in a non-standard way you'd have to unbind the default usb-to-serial kernel module and talk directly to the usb device.
Reddit is well on it's way to becoming a dominant monopoly on the web, however there's a (subtle but important) difference between being a platform for free speech, and promoting hate speech.

If there are a billion users, but they're horrible people (eg /r/coontown), is that something you will look back on and consider as having been worthwhile?
Unfortunately, if history of human species is any indication, only War makes Declaration matter.
Could you elaborate on what external factors and/or internal improvements are driving you and the team to again develop a larger number of companies per YC batch?

Is the scale-up going well?

Background:
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/05/05/y-combinator-...

Thanks!
Scribd faces setback in lawsuit over Accessibility
LS7 is 15 years, LS5 is about 30

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsat_program
> I would call 112.5 low for the tech industry

Depends on location.
in Mexico ten years ago cigarettes used to cost 14 pesos, very heavy taxing puts them now at 45 pesos, 3.2 times more, its target price for the next five years is 100 pesos, or ~7 USD with current exchange rate.
How much do you think moving to the valley improves the odds of a startups success as opposed to another city, say Atlanta or Raleigh on the east coast?
Count me among those reeling in disgust: XML is unpleasant to work with, XSLT just adds layers of complexity on top of that.

I wrote transforms for the few cases where I needed straight XML-to-XML conversions, but anything of complexity I retreated to a "real" language. It's obviously a personal choice, but I find working in XSL/XML like running through mud.

The success of JSON is due in part to the low signal-to-noise inherent in XML, and maybe XSL's low popularity is likely due to the necessary complexity of dealing with unnecessarily noisy data.
I sometimes daydream about a present where YAML got there first.
I'd suggest that the ability to perform a subversion of the will of a foreign state is a necessary adaptation, preventing a nominally democratic state from sliding towards aristocratic, oligarchic, or plutocratic governance.

The ability to increase freedom in a foreign state is related to the ability to prevent a decrease of freedom in your own.

Inconvenient websites help uphold the duties of the fourth estate when mainstream media outlets have seemingly abandoned--or at least heavily de-prioritized--those duties. It is important for all governments, not just those with sketchy human rights records, to know that even the mightiest machine can be taken offline by a single wooden sandal.
Great! That would be an amazing resource saver and enabler for scientists as well as small companies, incentivizing the use of AWS, as opposed to in-house built systems.
Not even remotely objective, but a decent enough propaganda piece that highlights the major high points of the Pixel.
Ternary Operators Considered Harmful
Parker Conrad of Zenefits was also still a solo founder in his application video. If a founder intends to add a co-founder before the batch starts, how much does that impact your view on them as a solo founder during the application process?
These single-page apps are becoming pervasive but they are also fundamentally breaking the internet. Here are some common ways in which they are broken:

1. History is screwed up. You wanted a back button that took you back to the content you were looking at? Sucks to be you. The content you were looking at was dynamically loaded after ten different buttons you clicked, and now that the page is loaded fresh those button clicks are gone. Good luck finding it again. This especially goes for any of those infinite scroll websites: those should die.

2. Tabs don't work. Hey this link looks interesting, I'll open it in a new tab to look at later. Oh wait that was actually a JavaScript link and what often ends up happening is you end up with a blank page, or the same one page app loaded with it's initial content.

3. Save page doesn't work. You can save the page and pull it up and everything works because the JavaScript fetches the content. But there's one problem: I was saving that page to view on the bus where I have spotty internet if any. Sucks to be me.

4. Accessibility is broken. Oh, you're blind? Arthritic and have trouble using a mouse? Well, sorry, we had to size things in a certain way to make the animations work and tab order was too hard to get working, so I guess you can't use my website. Sucks to be you!

5. Security is broken. If you app loads content from a server that isn't yours, you can no longer verify security.

There are solutions to all of these problems but they're very difficult and 90% of one page apps don't solve these problems because they don't care.

I'm not against one page apps on principal, but a one page app standard that doesn't address these concerns is only going to make them worse. Unless we can solve these issues I'm against any one page app standard.
> 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.

I fail to see how the first part of this sentence implies the second.
Thanks for the AMA. You haven't answered the hardware related questions in this thread yet, so I'll try: do you think you'll see the day when YC funds a hardware startup that develops custom ASICs or semi IP for licensing? If so, what type of startup would be a good fit for YC?
Not all non-get rich quick schemes are startups.

I think what people here are saying is that given the obvious level of effort you (I assume you're the author) put into this, you could have put serious dents in a few patio11/rob walling style saas or other small product businesses. I understand there's money to be made chasing various arbitrages in online advertising, but those get plugged over time. Plus a product business would make me feel better about what I spend all day doing.
He is an amazing speaker and an even better marketer. But every time I get lulled into signing up for his newsletter I have to unsubscribe after a few months because the amount of self promoting fud is unbearable. But even he admitted that a lot of his readers skip straight to the "buy" link because they like him so much, so I guess the ratio of value to promotion can shift noticeably once you have the audience
> The general online audience has matured over the past 10 years, and most people have an excellent filter to avoid clicking ads, which includes affiliate links.

I would disagree. I've found a lot of people - especially in tech - have this mindset. The opposite is true, most notably due to the success of giants like Facebook (for people clicking on ads) and huge affiliates like RetailMeNot (a public company).

The difference is that the most successful affiliates have realized the right call to action is _value_ (for white hat) or that they can use the "magic pill" (for black hat), and as such the market has changed drastically.

> But if you are adding links and talking about products solely because you want those nickels from someone clicking it, you are not helping your audience, and they know it, and they will react accordingly.

Why does wanting the commission also entail not helping your audience? You're making a conclusion that isn't valid here because you assume that 100% of affiliate links (because they are placed to earn money) add no value for the visitor. Smart affiliates know that if you want the commission, you have to make it valuable.
I definitely think chicken farms are disgusting (and I've been a vegetarian for 21 years for that reason among many others). Cricket farming, on the other hand, I've considered trying. I'm not entirely confident of the ethics of eating bugs, but it's so vastly superior to the environmental disaster and suffering caused by eating meat, that I think making bugs a part of the average human diet is a net win.

If it tastes good, is healthy, requires less land/water/resources to products, and leads to lower meat consumption, I don't see how it can be a bad thing.

Unfortunately, costs are still very high. I'm not sure why that is, given all the hype about "bugs are a low cost protein!"
justification refers only to adjusting intra-word and -letter spacings, your example shows hyphenation only
Could the Death Star Destroy a Planet?
How senior is this guy who makes 100K? Is that out of college or 5/10 years? How tough is the competition?

I appreciate YMMV, but I'm asking on behalf of my brother, who is graduating Columbia CS soon. We've got family in the SF area, so it might be a good choice for him to head over that way.
Progress would be the world acting.
There are just so many good companies applying. As long as we can keep upping the quality bar, I'm happy for us to fund more companies.

I think there is good chance that there are more than 1 billion-plus dollar companies in the current batch.

YC is fundamentally a network, and so the value goes up O(n^2) with the number of good companies.
I don't think that's true at all. The trouble is the aspirin is free. Node, jQuery, Python, pick-your-language-or-framework, almost all are free. The point of the article is that if you want to make a pain killer, it better be vicodin not aspirin. And even then, if it's a large enough problem, likely someone who can offer it for free will make slightly-less-good-but-free vicodin.

I think for infrastructure as a business to work you need to find a sweet spot of: 1.) a serious pain point 2.) for a large number of customers who do not have the resources to solve it themselves, and 3.) that is hard enough to solve that it can't be solved by a quickly hacked together product. In particular to 3, one example I can think of is a problem requiring a very complicated but powerful user interface.

Oh, and then you actually need to solve it, track down the customers and convince them to pay for it. Overall it's a tough needle to thread.
The slide the have, also says that on mobile devices it must not be possible to turn off secure boot. Which on the one hand, can probably help make them less desirable to steal; but on the other hand, means no playing with non-MicroSoft OSes on those devices.
All hail King Musk
At least 10x.
Just clicked "view source" on this page out of curiosity. I feel like I just traveled back in time to 1996.
It's not 21 bugs. Anyone can find 21 bugs. It's 21 bugs that enable/facilitate Remote Code Execution. These are some of the worse of the worse. $442,000 is a steal to get these identified and fixed.
I agree about the harshness here. I'm surprised and a bit disappointed.

Affiliates are often very secretive because the barrier to entry is extremely low, and as such they don't want to reveal what they do or how. That he took that step, even in retrospect, to post it publicly is to be commended. Why not reveal the workings and the lessons he has learned? Let's value it for what it is.
We're social animals. There's an amount of discomfort (maybe not large) I would be prepared to undergo to help someone else, and I find myself thinking that others "should" also be prepared to undergo such an amount of discomfort to assist others. Given the choice to accept a dust mote temporarily in my eye as part of a huge crowd in order to save another person from torture, I would gladly accept that, and I think all reasonable people would too, therefore there is no number of people such that I believe the utility of dustmote vs torture turns out in favour of torture.
http://www.ent.iastate.edu/misc/insectnutrition.html
http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/21/why-eating-bugs-is-goo...
Why don't you have a prototype? That'll be an important question.

That said, we make most of our money backing companies at the "initial concept" stage, so we'd love to hear from you.
Um, other than the grammar portion this seems pretty much what 8th graders were expected to know in 1999 when I was in Washington?
Parker and I spoke about a cofounder then. He was very receptive to adding one, and that helped his case.
The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)
Hi Sam,

I am just about to send my application for the summer batch, but before I do I would like to know your opinion on founders who are not both sharing a programming background, especially considering that we are in the sketching stage? Also, do you think there is any chance to compete against other startups that already do have an established product?
This is exactly what I was getting at, glad someone else saw that. I didn't see posting relevant credentials that are easily found through usernames containing PII to really be doxxing because it's "self-doxxing", and the fact that those credentials are relevant to the discussion.

This is the problem I have with HN moderation, they have rules that they selectively enforce but it's all built on their heuristics which they never flesh-out. Neither of us can go to a page on HN and run through a checklist to determine if content in a post will or will not be considered flaggable/bannable because it's a "closed source heuristic" if you will. There are guidelines sure, but the enforcement seems very wishy-washy and selective.
We might do something like rolling admissions, but the advantage of the batch model are huge. It's so helpful to the startups to be around other startups at roughly the same stage.
So this is why I'm getting 5-10 recruiter calls a day this week.
In one of my 1st year engineering classes we put together similar models in MATLAB Simulink. It was a lot of fun, and we gradually built up the model until it included the coriolis effect, and accounted for different air densities at different altitudes, all of which are important if you are firing an artillery round 20km. Our results matched up well with tabulated data from real rounds.

The Wired article that doesn't even account for air resistance is a little disappointing.
Indeed, and the storm clouds are gathering.
They point to population growth as a contributing factor, yet they never suggest anyone do anything about that.

How about free birth control to anyone who wants it? How about permanent birth control to any adult who wants it? I'd say free to anyone below some income level since the middle class can afford it anyway. With increasing productivity we don't have jobs for all the people anyway, why not encourage making less of them?

I'm not talking about mandates or government deciding who reproduces, just having them help folks that would prefer not to have kids to not have them. The solution doesn't always have to be more regulation.
what is the kind of traction that you look for in companies that you fund? Is it an absolute number or a consistent week on week growth for a few months in a row?
If anyone wants to get into this game, I'll sell you edible-insects.com and https://twitter.com/edibleinsects :)
Scaling up the number of people in an organization and maintaining innovation is always, always hard.
Then perhaps the problem is with "modern" sites superfluously using JS. The majority of sites that I've come across from casual browsing (usually via Google search) don't need it to display the content I'm looking for, and when I do find one that does and Google's cached version doesn't contain what I'm looking for, it's almost certain that I'll just move on to the next search result.
First thing is to see if the company has a bug bounty/responsible disclosure programming. If so make sure that what you have done falls under said program. Otherwise it is not worth the risk to you. If you still feel motivated to do so, let them know through anonymous channels or contact a well know security researcher who will be less of a target if said company decides to take action.
Hi BinaryIdiot!

I am also looking for a committed group of people to work on a start up with. Please reach out to me at leannesawyer2007@gmail.com.
With everything said about the 'economies of scale' of launching startups in Silicon Valley, would do you think of startups in English-speaking developing countries? What are your thoughts on monetization(70%+ don't have bank accounts), market size(most use dumb phones) and relevance(i.e. Another whatsapp/facebook/airbnb? what for?)?
Is it common that you fund startups with big/growing competitors?
Totally depends on the startups. In general it's good to monetize early, but there are very important exceptions. This is the sort of thing we have to give individualized advice about to every YC company.
I grew up in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa. I speak in general that eating insects is a delicacy and is favoured as a snack most of the time.An example, the [1] mopani worm is an excellent source of protein and is increadibly cheap in Southern Africa.The guts are removed, cleaned and dried in the sun before being packaged for sale. They also taste delicious once fried in butter and mixed with vegetables.

It might be a novelty right now in the western world but its been years of tradition in African or Asian countries.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonimbrasia_belina
We Are Frighteningly in the Dark About Student Debt
Yes Shoemaker does both well - however beyond the superstars, there's a huge network of "how to make money online" websites/people whos income dwarfs those who are actually practicing the concepts.
Hard to disable? Just open chrome://flags and click Disable under Native Client.
I predict that will happen in the non-distant future.
The article capitalizes on a popular foreboding about resource limits with a thrilling "ick" factor, but it's premise is unsubstantial.

I once met an ancient Jewish gentleman who, due to poverty, had been forced to eat lobsters as a youth. In that day they were considered on par with rats as a food source (not to mention they were forbidden by his religious culture) and he had never recovered from the experience, and still considered them revolting.

I can relate: if it became popular with the youth of tomorrow to broil rats and serve them at market price, I'd probably never get on board.

Like insects, Lobster was once a cheap and common food resource. Money could be made by packing and shipping it of to places where it was exotic and unheard of to the majority of people, and so it's image was specially crafted to make profit.

But unlike insects, lobster had the advantage of a fresh market. It was only viewed as the food of impoverished immigrants in port cities where it was common.

The vast majority of the market, at least in the USA, considers insects icky to look at our touch, let alone to eat.

More substantially, I think any serious study would find that people's eating habits rarely change based on broad, even minded assessment of future resource limits. Current rates of meat consumption are a good example: we know it can't last, but few people change their diet so that their great grandchildren can eat more chicken.

I do think insects will be a food source in the future, but that will be because a clever marketer discovers the killer bug that is both exotic and delicious. In general I think it will be a very long and slow process by which everyday insects like crickets become palatable to the status quo.
I wonder whether bookies would accept a bet on Windows becoming open-source within 5 years?
Furthermore, I think, HID is the only standard device class that can work on Low-Speed USB (1.5 Mbit/s) which allows only a control and an interrupt endpoint.

Every other class (including serial ports) will need at least Full-Speed USB (12 MBit) increasing the cost of the USB Rocket Launcher by 10¢ ;-).
Another small nit: Every Windows installation has two built-in accounts that can't be removed (but can be renamed!): Administrator and Guest. It's just that they're both disabled by default (since Vista I believe) and there's no easy GUI to enable Administrator while there is for Guest.
I think startups are not well-suited for open-ended R+D unfortunately (hoping to do something about this). The best time to move from research to a startup is when you've developed technology and have a plan to make it into a product people will want.
How frequently do YC companies pivot based on feedback/inspiration/etc. from the program and how does that affect your view of the founder/team?
With all the talk of water running out in CA and the world, I am wondering why desalination is not part of the conversation. According to Wikipedia:

"Supplying all domestic water by sea water desalination would increase the United States' energy consumption by around 10%, about the amount of energy used by domestic refrigerators."

Is this true? If so, why isn't desalination happening on a massive scale in CA?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Considerations_and...

EDIT: The Wikipedia sentence I quoted was not clearly written. It should have said "supplying all household water" not "supplying all domestic water." Far more water is used by farming.
Were you not a startup from the s14 yc batch? Title says w15
MULUDU the Rapid Heating Tap Electric Water Heater, Mixer Risk of Electric Shock
Hard to believe this is nearly 20 years old. I remember reading about it in Wired magazine when it first came out. (This is when Wired was worth reading, which was also a long time ago.)

Unfortunately it hasn't aged well, not least in that seeing that a manifesto was issued from Davos puts a very different spin on it today than it did back then.