skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started with the conviction that I wanted to be the owner of a successful business. I did this at an age where I already had experienced plenty of wonderful ideas. Ideas always come. I never worry about that. What is important is to be in a position to take something and run with it. For those of us who need an income, that means we have to design and build a business that provides for us (and others) while we await the next great idea.

One such way to build a company is to bootstrap a services business and productize. This is a well-worn path to at least modest size. Another way is to create a studio to fire off many ideas and see what sticks. There are more than a few of these right now.

Many companies and businesses are organically conceived and grown over decades. They are complicated. They start with one thing and move into another. They are not neat and pretty. They grow more based on the longevity, character and commitment of the founder than on the inherent brilliance of any one idea. You don't have to have a flash of inspiration which you test and walk away if it doesn't work. Once you employ people and cultivate their loyalty this type of approach is toxic anyway. It may only work in certain little islands like SV.

Many large businesses are built on successive episodes of inspiration, revelation or innovation that occur over decades, with much perspiration in between.

Business growth is like a multi-stage puzzle. Getting to $100k/yr is one stage. Getting to $1m/yr is another. Getting to $10m/yr is yet another. $100m/yr and so on... Business grows as you and your abilities grow.

A creative person figures out how to solve the puzzles, unlock growth and move in new directions.

Everything is possible if you are not beholden to one narrow model of how to start, finance and grow a business. The first key is to know yourself and what you want.
The puzzle doesn't specify how your opponent chooses their numbers. Both your analogies implicitly assume that they are somehow choosing from an infinite uniform distribution (is that even a thing?) but all the puzzle states is that there aren't any restrictions on how they choose.

So the idea here is that the author's strategy is guaranteed not to lose, and may possibly win depending on factors that are not specified.
To be economical, the truck would have to be relatively full, which means dozens of dropoffs, which means the average delivery time is measured in hours, not minutes. With a whole bunch of drones, you can do all those deliveries in parallel.
It's my own bullshit, but I just think that when something comes up like a drug company raising the price of aid's meds from $13.50 per tablet to $750 that we want the ability to point to a single person and be like, "this is your fault. you are supposed to be making sure this kind of stuff doesn't happen." Right now, no one is held responsible. You can't blame the people who run the company. They're just trying to make money like the rest of us. They're following the law. Just my opinion.

> I don’t see how having more representatives will increase bureaucracy.

For the same reason a dictator is the most efficient form of government. It's just how governing works.
How do you measure accuracy? Is this a new baseline?
The Pirate Bay Escapes Block in Sweden
The problem is that it's a false path and the logic doesn't quite make sense. If Ivy league really matters, then you can deduce it to high school, jr high, elementary school all the way to pre-school. Therefore if you're age 4, if you don't get to the most elite pre-school, your life is over, just over. If you make it an Ivy league, then your life is set. If you've been at one of these institutions, you'll know both of these things are false.
Don't Detest Failure, Embrace It
Gates, Zuck, Ma, Bezos, et al. Collaborate in zero-carbon energy technologies
Don't rely too much on quora on the caste question. It is dominated by the privileged. Please read other material that like http://ambedkar.org/ and http://roundtableindia.co.in/ . There a lot more sources as well. The problem of our country is that how hounded we will be if we talk in support of the caste system where the majority are from the upper caste. See the recent trouble with starting a ambedkar-periyar study circle at IITM for an example. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/educat...
Serious question: has any product or service of lasting value and success ever come out of an approach like this? It runs counter to most commonly-held beliefs on how great ideas turn into great products.
The more important thing is that if you live your life like this, it will lead to vast unhappiness, and you wouldn't have been able to have any impact in your life because you think your life is done at 18 and pre-determined, which is not only a horrible way to live, but also completely not true.
I've always thought this is partially why people of mainstream religions are often so scared of atheism: they subconsciously interpret the statement "I am an atheist" as "I do not subscribe to your ethics" and assume the speaker is liable to kill anyone at anytime.
> If they ever come close to hitting the 30 minute delivery it also opens up the entire food delivery industry as a potential Amazon extension. Buying one of these "premade meal delivery" startups could also be an option.

This is my thinking as well. I'm actually surprised they haven't started a small project in a specific area where they're delivering hot meals. It feels like they want to, eventually, sell everything possible to people.

I would actually be surprised if they don't, eventually, buy several of these start-ups around prepared food delivery.
Dr. Strang's linear algebra course is absolutely amazing: http://web.mit.edu/18.06/www/videos.shtml

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Strang
(edited) In my analogy, assessing the universe numerically = opening the envelope to see what number is inside. I think it's a pretty close analogy, and obviously leads to an absurd, nonsensical result: that we can learn something about whether we 'probably' (>50%) are in the better universe, without knowing anything about the value of the other one.
Iosevka, a Code-Generated Sans-Serif and Slab-Serif Typeface for Code
> an Everest-mass black hole, created at rest on the Earth's surface, would fall through the ground to the center of the Earth very quickly (a few minutes of travel time)

Actually, no, it would take about 45 minutes--half the time it would take to make one orbit of the Earth at approximately the radius of the Earth. That's assuming that the hole's motion is approximately equivalent to free-fall motion, which is what you're basically assuming--no inter-atomic forces exerted on the hole.

> gobbling up all the matter within at least a few atoms distance of it's path.

Not necessarily. Even though there are no inter-atomic forces preventing atoms from falling into the hole, the hole's gravity is still very small, so the force drawing atoms into the hole is very small. The hole's passage will disrupt the forces between atoms in the horizontal direction, but those forces are negligible anyway; the main force exerted on an atom that's part of the Earth is in the vertical direction. So the atoms just to the side of the hole's passage will start out at rest, and they will only fall into the hole if the hole's gravity is enough to pull them sideways into the hole in the time the hole passes.

Just to run some numbers, suppose the hole's mass is 10 trillion kg (my rough back of the envelope estimate of the mass of Mount Everest). Its horizon radius will then be about 1.5 times 10^-14 meters, or about the size of a large atomic nucleus. A typical atom is about 10,000 times larger, or about 10^-10 meters in radius. Using standard formulas for black holes, the time it takes for an object to be pulled into the hole from rest at 10^-10 meters away is sqrt(r^3 c^2/2GM), which works out to about 10^-8 seconds for r = 10^-10 meters and M = 10 trillion kg. But the time it will take the hole to cover 10^-10 meters, and thereby move out of the way of an atom being pulled in from the side, is only 10^-10 seconds at a slow speed of 1 meter/second (which the hole will achieve a tenth of a second after it starts to fall), and about 4 x 10^-14 seconds at the speed it will have at the center of the Earth (about 8000 meters/second, the same as low Earth orbital velocity). So pretty much the only atoms the hole will eat are the atoms directly in its path; its gravity will be too small to pull in atoms from the side quickly enough.
> The US represents the largest single language market in the Western world, has a relatively unified legal landscape (especially as compared to the European myth referred to as the “Single Market”)

Coming from Europe and now living in California, I'm occasionally surprised by how in certain respects there is less regulatory conformity within the US than the EU. For instance California has its own, stricter car emissions standards:

> California's emissions standards are set by the California Air Resources Board, known locally by its acronym "CARB". Given that California's automotive market is one of the largest in the world, CARB wields enormous influence over the emissions requirements that major automakers must meet if they wish to sell into that market.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_standard#United_State...

That this regulatory diversity can exist goes to show just how much more important the the cultural and linguistic conformity is to the single market in the US.
Enki: Level-up your dev skills in 5 minutes every day
Same as for working out or cooking, you can always find time.

I cut alcohol years ago and tend to go to bed at reasonable hours: the feeling of waking up at 5:30, getting a good workout and two to three hours of work before you even start to get ready for the office is pretty empowering. It feels like you already had a day worth of productivity in.

So, to recap:

1. Don't drink (or drink in moderation). It leads to late nights, difficult mornings and wasted hours on (often) empty discussions/interactions.

2. Go to bed early. Avoid screens in the bedroom (they keep you awake) and work out in the morning (helps to feel tired at the end of the day).

3. Wake up early.

Where there's a will, there is a way.
Lumpylumpy.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League#Other_Ivies
But it's also possible for artistic works to legitimately have different pieces created by artists in different countries, and still be parts of the same parent company. An objective answer would require internal value accounting of an ultra-illiquid, ultra-sparsely traded good, which would be hard for experts to gauge, let alone accountants.
And this is where being a contributor pays off: if $random_guy comes in and says hey look at this patch, people might or might not and it might get in or might not. It's an entirely different thing when someone we know does the same, for so many reasons. One, there's the whole karma thing. Second, if I know this is not your first rodeo then I will be much more willing to invest my time in it (hint: time is the scarce resource hence the currency in open source world) because I'll know you already have coding standards, obvious API usage etc down pat.
This is funny. You're right. What I thought were Photostreams are actually iCloud Shared Albums. No wonder I've been so confused. However, they used to be called Photo Streams, I believe. Or at least, they used to be called "streams", which is probably why I conflated the terms. I know they were called streams because I just checked my iPhone 4, which is still on IOS 7.1.2, and it says distinctly "Create New Stream". On IOS 8, it says "Start Sharing". I just never noticed they got rid of the term stream and/or changed the meaning. I can honestly say at this point I don't know what a Photostream is anymore then.
really great. Please write blog about this
> Microsoft never had that approach with IE6 - the issue with IE6 wasn't that the focus of development was in the "wrong" place by developer opinions, it's that there was no development focus - it stagnated and received no updates.

Apart from being more power efficient, there doesn't seem to be much user or developer focused development in Safari. It seems to be stagnating
users should be able to paint a depth map
Oh wow, I just looked up their doco, and found the csv and rest connectors. Thank you so much for this. Had I known I may not have built a recent parts database website with harp.js and a weird mashup of php, bash and even a go sitemap script. Dumping out csv files from excel, iterate through said csv files with php and dump ejs files with part (628 in all) then harp compile followed by an s3 sync for all 633 pages on the site. All scripts referenced from one bash file. I felt clever! But won't feel clever when I rebuild my Mac with X number of environments (npm, php, aws sdk, OSG) to build the site. With Hugo and also stout [1] also mentioned here, the workflow is alot more predictable, and binaries could be kept in the project for easy portability.

Also worth mentioning is OSG [2], a sitemap generator written in go that I use in my bash script. It's very fast. This may have some advantages over hugos built in sitemap generator depending on your site, though I think I would use hugos in most cases. Might be useful for others using other static generators that don't support sitemaps and also have other CMS's and carts / forums installed too.

[1] http://stout.is
[2] https://github.com/patrickmn/osg
@dhotson

This is not rendering for me in Chrome on OSX. Is this a known issue?
Violent jerks have no place in a civilized society.
Valet parking.
Modern humans reached southern China more than 80,000 years ago
I'm not entirely convinced that cases (1) and (2) have the 50% probability stated.

We have X, the number revealed to us; Y, the hidden number; and our random number, R. Let's assume we have case (2), so X > R and Y > R, but the relationship between X and Y is not defined. So, X and Y lie somewhere in the range (+∞, R). We then partition that range with X: (+∞, X) and (X, R). Y lies in one of these two ranges. By the rules defined, we state that we expect Y to be less than X. But the interval less than X is finite, while the interval above X is infinite. I doubt that this range distribution results in a 50% chance.

I think that by picking R, we are modifying the probability that Y is less than or greater than X in cases (1) and (2). However, since we cannot distinguish between those cases and case (3), all the winnings gained in (3) are actually lost to in cases (1) and (2).

EDIT: I guess what I'm saying is that X and Y are no longer independent in cases (1) and (2), but are conditioned by R. That conditioning means we can no longer claim a 50% probability for those cases as if we had never picked R.
Wow, that is bad on my part. Here's the complete picture:

Brooklyn: 18
Bronx: 3
Manhattan: 3
Queens: 3
New York: 3
Staten Island: 0

Total New York + Boroughs: 27

Los Angeles proper has population 3.8 million while NYC has 8.5 Million. Chicago has 2.7 million.
I prefer this interpretation. Perhaps we can make a gentleman's agreement to let it enter the lexicon as a homophone.
This article puts into words a conglomoration of experiences and thoughts I've had over and over, but never really considered together as a concept.

"To be middle-middle class, you need to have all the correct opinions.... This requires memorizing endless lists of taboos and shibboleths, which is a conspicuous waste of time. “The news” and the political internet are tools for this. The high cost of keeping track of all that meaningless noise, and the ease of verifying it by asking your opinion of last night’s synthetic outrage event, makes it an effective signal.

To be upper middle class, you need to be able to figure out, on the fly, what would be the correct opinion about things that are new to you. This requires conceptual sophistication: years of study not only of details, but also of ways to think. That is what a liberal arts education used to be for."

To take this further, I think the New Upper Middle Class signaling strategy is to be conspicuosly ignorant of the latest "synthetic outrage" -- "I don't have a TV" is a refrain that comes to mind. "I don't have Facebook" is another.

Then again, I find myself directly in between these two: a news junkie devoted to understanding "what really matters in the world." That is, my signaling strategy is to have the right opinions about the right topics while publically rejecting the wrong topics (and, in a non-confrontational way, the wrong opinons). It's a way to signal opennesss (an agreeable trait) while maintaining sufficient cost.
How is that a "loophole." Multi-national structures seem like a necessary facet of the tax code. And the listed strategies don't seem to take advantage of obscure provisions, but basic mechanics of the tax system: deduction of costs from gross revenues, etc.
Accuracy is measured as min((number of humans that provided that answer)/3, 1) i.e. 100% accurate if at least 3 humans provided that exact answer, as outlined here: http://visualqa.org/evaluation.html.

No, this model is from the NIPS15 paper by Ren et al (http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.02074).
14 Japanese tech titans that aren’t Sony or Nintendo
I tried the Firefox OS Android app on my Nexus 7 (2012). I don't know if tablet form-factors are a target but if it is, the icon sizes need some rework.

My Nexus 7 has a 7" screen and on it, the home screen icons are incredibly huge: at least 2-3 times the diameter of the standard Android App icons and look really out of place on my screen.
I was under the impression that UPS/FedEx are going to merge to form UP/Ex, which will utilize railgun launchers and aerodynamically-self-steering packaging to deliver anywhere in a 100-mile radius from a single facility?
In a developed economy, having kids is financially stupid. Deeply stupid. It costs individuals a ton, but the benefits accrue to society. Classic tragedy of the commons.

If we want people to have more kids, say, up to the replacement rate, then that means subsidies. Cheaper childcare seems to be the main thing that encourages more kids: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21659763-people-...
Was hoping to see Ryan Gosling in a Scorpion jacket make an appearance.
Was hoping to see Ryan Gosling in a scorpion jacket make an appearance.
are you me ?
"$20 billion by 2020"

The Pentagon will spend 150 times this by 2020.

It sounds like they're taking this climate change very seriously...
I think we'll know in a couple of weeks if its going to start on Jan 11th or not. If its not ready yet, it'll be pushed back by a month or two by mid December. That's how the previous postponements were done.
Ooh front page; I guess this calls for a bit of an explanation!

First off - used this code for training the models:
http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

Very very easy to setup and train; highly recommend playing around with your own training data (just a text file!)

This project's code:
github.com/shariq/burgundy

Styled and deployed the website about a year ago at a hackathon; it then used a nice wordlist with hand picked words.
(repo/wordserver/old_burgundy_words.txt)

Few days ago: got the server to start training a bunch of models (~200), with randomized parameters, using the original wordlist as the training data.
(repo/rnn/rnn.py:forever)

Yesterday: woke up at 3 AM after my sleep schedule rolled around, started exploring the output of models trained to different numbers of epochs and run at different temperatures. Subjectively looked at the outputs, decided some model/epoch/temperature tuples were horrible, got rid of those. Wrote a few different scoring functions (just using intuition for what kinds of bad outputs seemed to be commonly occurring) to score the model/epoch/temperature tuples. Got the top ~10 scoring tuples from each scoring function, plus added some additional interesting ones along the way, and then used a pronunciation scoring function (repo/rnn/pronounce.py) to select the top 5 of all of these. Funny enough, the top 5 tuples all used different models and a varying range of temperatures (i.e, not the same model from different epochs, and picking the right temperature significantly improved how well the model performed)
(repo/rnn/explore.py)

Since the models would still occasionally output words which were completely unpronounceable, I put some code on top of the models which would generate a bunch of words then discard the bottom 1/3rd of unpronouncable words. A significant portion of generated words from these models also started with a "c" or "b" for some reason: gave those a high chance of being discarded. Short words were also uninteresting, and extremely long words would occasionally show up: added probabilistic filters for length. Finally, initialization time of LuaJIT is very high, so I had the server keep a pool of words which gets reseeded as it runs out.
(repo/rnn/rnnserver.py)

If you want to train your own word generator and you need some pointers, would love to help: @shariq
French has a central body that regulates (dictates) what is 'French'. English doesn't. Descriptivism vs prescriptivism.
Dictatorships have a massive problem with bureaucracy. They have all the normal bureaucrats and then on top of this they need another whole set to watch the first set. Lean government and dictatorship are not concepts that readily go together.
> A blog, datepicker, and meetup events are trivial to me. They're like the freebies you'd expect in a party favor bag. It sounds more like he doesn't want to work hard, just hang out and talk, make a few small things, and somehow expects that to translate to survival.

You're grossly underestimating the work that was put into open source, writing and running events. I worked 60-80+ hours per week throughout my entire twenties. 20-25 was largely given to coding open source, speaking and running events...all for free.

> This guy might have more potential if he's managed to reproduce and have a spouse. Or there might be some critical flaw there that's blocking his ability to work at Google, and he's stuck without much opportunity.

You're missing the point here. I've had an abundance of opportunities, but decided against working at these large tech companies. I'm from the Midwest was insistent on doing everything the hard way...consulting and giving as much of the time I could to open source, blogging and speaking for free.

Ultimately this article was just meant to be a brain dump of some things I wrestled with along the way. Right now I run a company which sells education, so I've changed my tune in that free is not always doing better for humanity. Arguably I'm making even more of an impact now and also being paid for it...
absolutely, but nobody talks about this. This is simply handing off requirements, contracting them out. Your question can be rephrased as "has any product or service of lasting value and success ever had any part of it contracted out" and clearly the answer is yes. Not everything is built in-house. People don't usually mention it however.

(it's not accepting my edits on the original comment, I am trying to change "aren't worth much anywhere" (which sounds like a value judgment) to "don't command a high rate anywhere.")
Not really. E.g. pursuant to their restructuring, Alphabet companies are required to pay for services they use from each other. Subsidiaries are still separate corporations and it's an abuse of the corporate form to just share all resources with a corporate parent while pretending the companies are distinct entities.
I'm with you, I drink about 15 cups of coffee a day but I do switch to decaf around noon.