skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was just thinking about how it would work for German, which I speak to a certain extent. I suspect that, per-capita, twitter might be quite unpopular in Germany compared to other countries. Do a lot of people use it in France?
> even if the zero itself doesn't correspond to anything physical.

Good point. Zero stones don't physically exist. That is why it took so long for cultures to include zero as a number. I read an entire book about zero (and one each about pi, e, infinity, and sqrt(-1)).
Same happened to me, but the second dentist told I had 16 cavities. That was just 3-4 months after a dentist told I had none.
+1.

This was my introduction to CS/programming and is the counterexample to any claim that C makes for a terrible first language. It just needs a phenomenal lecturer.

The computing environment gets you going with Linux which avoids IDE handholding and the recitations and other helpful videos and the forums all make for a great learning experience, even for people are complete programming neophytes.

Following it up with something like Coursera's Hardware/Software Interface would be a great way of cementing the concepts.
With ‘Smog Jog’ Through Beijing, Zuckerberg Stirs Debate on Air Pollution
For what is worth, I had the same problem with Mail.app on OSX today. Impossible to see what my unread mails were (3 unread mails lost in my 6k mails) and impossible to select all with C-A and mark everything as read.

Also another thing I'm used to in that kind of app, is scroll further than the top limit to update the list.
The hiring process is a bit hit and miss. I know people who had a really good experience, and I know people who said it was a shit show. About meeting Googlers: if you happen to come to the Bay Area, you can't throw a rock in any direction without hitting at least one Googler. Not saying throwing rocks is the way to go, but... you'll get someone's attention :P
The main thing is that we shard YC into small internal groups. I know all the startups in my group in the batch well, and very little about the startups in other groups.
Would you recommend getting cofounders first and then iterating on different possible ideas, or finding an idea that resonates with users first and then approaching people you know about founding a company around it?
Uncertain. There could be other JS-related technologies below the cut - React, Redux, etc.
What are you trying to solve by doing this? Are you planning to run other applications on the same host. Generally it's not a good idea to share host running database with other applications due to different workloads.

If you would want to put multiple databases on one host, probably more efficient would be still to put all data in single instance. I could see this if it's a very small database, then this could work, but then wouldn't you be better off with using SQLite?

In additions when you add containers to the mix you turn a single problem into many, some examples:

- assuming you have multiple hosts, you need to figure out where you'll store persistent data (and you generally want a solution with high IOPS)
- how you handle logging (where you store them?)
- how the applications figure out where your database is (service discovery)
- how you solve replication (and figure out which database is the master)
- how you handle failover
> So do individuals buy or lease self-driving cars in the future? Would they then set up their self-driving car to take instructions from Uber's central dispatch service in exchange for a cut of the profits?

In Uber's perfect world, yes. And Uber will do its best to hide the true costs of insurance, depreciation, regular maintenance, etc. from owners and lessors, just like they do today. It's worth understanding that Uber only works as long as it doesn't own any cars, or employ any drivers. If they switch over to owning some self-driving cars, they'll have to maintain and insure them.
I think in some ways that's true, but then why does it seem to be so congealed and terrible? All of these idealists should make it better somehow no?

Maybe some (not all) of the people in higher positions get appointed through more political, less idealistic processes and gum up the works?

Maybe having an organization that by its very nature needs to cater to so many different world views means that it can't actually get anything done efficiently. Too many cooks in the kitchen.
The UN and many similar organizations in the non-profit/non-governmental/humanitarian/development space simply lack the incentive structure to do the right thing. Add to this the administrative weight of large organizations and you have the perfect recipe for an unbelievable shit show.

I hope that more organization like Watsi [1] or ONE [2] emerge and take donations away from more traditional and established non-profits, but I won't be holding my breath for it.

At the end of the day, the private sector probably yields more positive impact.

[1]: https://watsi.org/

[2]: http://one.org
You're right. It may not have been "Witzelsucht." But it makes me wonder if there's a mild form of "Witzelsucht" that's rampant in the population making people do cringeworthy things.
How Large Are the Startup Seed Funding in Iran
None of us live very long. May as well try to contribute to the future and try to feel fulfilled in the little time you have.
Well, I think it's only worth comparing it to how it was before when someone had a train of thought in tweets. Linking to a single tweet then and telling people to follow it through meant that they had to go to the user's page, to the time it was posted, and then possibly go back and turn on tweets&replies, and then follow it backwards up the page.

I do not think there is any really perfect solution, but sometimes tweets should be connected to each other and much like many other twitter features (lists being the other really notable one) this one is only half complete and wanting of some extra love to make it not suck as much. But, like many of those features, does fill a real need.
Thank you :) and thanks for the AMA.
Modern culture has somewhat weird oral hygiene rituals and poor public awareness of the causes of tooth decay. There’s no inherent reason humans should need to brush their teeth multiple times per day. In many places around the world, people never brush their teeth and most adults keep healthy teeth well into old age.

Dental cavities are caused by bacteria which eat sugar/starch. If you don’t eat sugar, and only eat moderate amounts of starch, you generally won’t get cavities, regardless of how much teeth brushing you do. If you eat lots of sugary and starchy foods, drink sugary drinks, etc., you will be at high risk for cavities, even if you brush your teeth frequently. Applying topical fluoride paste from time to time certainly helps, but not nearly as much as cutting out the sugar.
Wow, nice. Is Level 6 pretty high? What was your experience coming into the job?
> The craziest thing is that a Minecraft server manager is not a difficult thing to write. I tossed together a couple hundred line Perl script with a bunch of useful features in an afternoon and ran servers with it for years.

Just checking, but how easy would that have been for the intended audience? (Mums and dads who don't know much about computing or minecraft servers).
Check out the recently launched site Comparably https://comparably.com/

It is so much better than Glassdoor at dissecting salary data.
Is it true that some VCs get first dibs on YC companies before demo day?
It gets expensive when you want all the bells and whistles, but yes the base model is a little north of a grand.

Thanks for the link to Hopper, I know what i'll be doing this afternoon...
Apple, Google, and Amazon will all make similar offers.

My initial offer from Google was $150k base, ~15% holiday bonus, and came with >$100k in stock vesting over four years, and they give another four-year stock grant each year. I have 7 years of industry experience and I interview well.
I have almost always worked for customers who enjoyed changing their minds arbitrarily and often in ways they swore they would never do.

In the face of grossly changing requirements, I've never had much luck keeping E2E tests up and functioning properly. And people have a bad habit of investing more time and energy than a particular test is worth in trying to keep it working or porting it to the new requirements.

Unit tests are cheap. If the requirements change invalidates twenty of them, you just delete them and write new ones. Easy.
From dang, who runs HN: "about 310k daily uniques and about 10x that in page views"
Care to share any specific ones?
That would be a fun linguistic/NLP project to work on!

Most tweets that I see in English are pushing towards the boundary of the 140 character limit, which suggests to me that it's at best barely-sufficient to express ourselves. If it turns out that, say, most Chinese tweets are in the region of 100-120 characters then that would mean that using Hanzi they can express everything they want to say and still have space left over.

I would be quite keen to collaborate with someone on this.
I still have my "wisdom teeth" and I push back on having them out every time I visit the dentist.

The conversation always goes along the lines of "ohhh, I see you still have those wisdom teeth in there" and then that they are "impacted and going to cause lots of problems." To this day, I haven't had a single problem.

My biggest concern is the effect it will have on my airways -- I have sleep apnea so I'm worried that removing the teeth will cause the size of my already-small airways to become even smaller, causing even more of a damaging effect on the quality of my sleep.
> I've often speculated in my head about the desirabilty of closing down the UN to replace it with a "United Democracies"

You still need the UN as a mechanism by which international diplomacy can get done as much as is possible, including with non-democracies. Every time a decision has to be made (e.g., North Korea, Libya, etc. or worse a war between major powers), we don't want to have to create a new framework and mechanism with new rules.

> I've often speculated in my head about the desirabilty of closing down the UN to replace it with a "United Democracies"

I think that's made much more possible and relevant by the spread of democracy. 30 years ago, it would have been almost exclusively the West. Now there are democracies all over the world; the old world order mechanisms (the UN Security Council, World Bank, etc.) don't include them, and the number and diversity of nations makes the old U.S.-led consensus much harder to achieve. Also, morally, the people in those nations deserve just as much of a vote in world affairs as Americans do - that's democracy.
Fails to mention what is in my opinion the most devious, subtle potential pitfall with `set -e`: assigning (or even just a bare evaluation of) an arithmetic zero. `foo=0` won't do anything surprising, but `let foo=0` will return 1, and thus abort your script if you're not careful.

Also, as an alternative to the proposed `set +e; ...; set -e` wrapper for retrieving the exit status of something expected to exit non-zero (generally cleaner in my opinion, if slightly "clever"):

retval=0
count=$(grep -c some-string some-file) || retval=$?
Tramping the Kepler Track
I didn't brush my teeth until I was 25 and I had no particular problems before or after. Well, I had one problem. My new wife demanded I brush my disgusting teeth.
Very thought-provoking question but you've now completely diverged from the original topic.
Sometimes people take it too serious when you're just blowing off a little steam. It sucks.
Seems pretty clear from the tweet. I've never applied to YC or don't know exactly how it works internally but it seems like they have a feedback form they give to founders to rate the investors that come to Demo day. Based on that they give a score to each investor and they have a threshold. If an investor falls below the threshold they are not invited to demo day. I think the system is a good one.
While still poor writing, in the paragraph a couple up where they start talking about it they say:

"What we hope is our final technical problem "
I was told, 20 years ago, that "in the next few years" I would have horrible pain from my wisdom teeth.

I still have them, and no horrible pain.

I guess it's possible they could cause even worse problems down the road, but for the time being, I think it's not worth the pain/hassle to have them out.
Hi Sam,

You've mentioned many times, more so recently, that YC is committed to investing in hard tech problems. When considering companies solving these problems for the next batch, knowing that often times even getting a prototype ready is a massive undertaking, how much chance does one have applying with nothing more than an idea and some research? And the possibility that it won't generate revenue for 5+ years?
What are the best ways to discover what people want to pay for?
Why would removing your wisdom teeth make your airways smaller? (Other than, perhaps, tissue swelling for a few days after the extraction.)
The most important thing you can do for your career is:

* Accept a job somewhere

* Get promoted (doesn't matter how)

* let yourself get hired away from your current company

Getting hired away from your current company is the only way to get a fair raise based on increased experience. Companies never give substantial raises to current employees.
Agreement I guess. I was thinking of the parent comment including "It's unclear why they are entitled to a particular standard of living that is rather generous by global standards just by virtue of their living in the US. "
Using unicode is 𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜.
Changing Education – How bootcamps outperform a university education
I hope she told the new insurance company about this. Insurance companies protect us from greed in the medical and dental industries. And then they add their own greed on top of it. But they are really the best protection against unnecessary procedures in a field that most of us cannot understand.

Have a similar story here. Went to a family friend who was a dentist, until he sold his practice. The new dentist wanted to do a $600 procedure every six months like clockwork. And I didn't have insurance at the time, so the charges really added up. I wised up after a couple times and switched to a new dentist who isn't in the "drill baby drill" contingent. My oral health has been just fine.
Position: developer, not an SDE though. No oncall.

Experience: college hire (beginning of 2015)

Level: 4

Base: $90,000

Signing bonus: $22,000 immediately, $18,000 monthly over 2nd year

Stock: 200 shares of AMZN (5% at 1 year, 15% at 2 years, 20% every 6 months after)

Location: Seattle, WA. Relocation was included over 2 year prorating.
If you're an adult drinking fluoridated water and your diet doesn't consist entirely of Coca Cola, then indeed you have little to worry about in terms of cavities. Brushing one's teeth twice a day is then mostly a matter of grooming (read: not having bad breath).
> “What did she not want put on a government system, where security people might see it?” the former NSA official asked, adding, “I wonder now, and I sure wish I’d asked about it back in 2009.”

Hold on. She wanted a custom, NSA-built Blackberry so she could check her personal email...and this former NSA official thinks her aversion to checking her personal email on a desktop was for privacy reasons? Give me a break.

My understanding is that when Clinton's tenure began as Secretary of State, the department (and most of the federal government) didn't have developed bring-your-own-device policies, and she specifically requested the NSA provide her a secure device so she could comply with security requirements.

As snowwrestler says, this is a hit piece. It looks more and more to me like Clinton was doing her best to work with ambiguous and incomplete security policies, and the NSA denied her request for hardware that would somewhat ameliorate the problem.

This revelation about the Blackberry request reads as more of a vindication of Clinton than anything else (and adds more support to the idea that what led to the email scandal wasn't really her fault), but this article is somehow twisting it into an attack.

Might be worth adding that I've never heard of this news outlet.
They stand for "Type" and "Priority". I believe they're abbreviated to give you maximum space for the issue title, if you hover over the column header you'll see the full column name - but I agree that's not an ideal first impression.

Now that you mention it I agree that in the "Priority" column in particular it can be a bit tricky to differentiate between some of the values ("Minor" and "Trivial" in particular). These have recently been replaced with some much more easily distinguishable ones in JIRA[0], which I'm sure will make it to Bitbucket soon. Thanks for the feedback! I'll pass it on to the designers of both the JIRA & Bitbucket teams.

[0]: http://i.imgur.com/R4dbC9B.png
It doesn't help that not only does the US not adopt free college and other educational programs to ensure its workforce is prepared for the 21st century going forward (as an investment into the country's future, not a "freebie" - just like infrastructure spending), but it actually gives everyone large amounts of life-long debt through the broken tuition loan system it has put in place.

Then, they export all low-skill (or even higher skill) jobs abroad.

So the low-skilled masses are getting screwed from all sides.
I've been meaning to do an agenda view for weekly reviews for awhile, but my master view works well enough. What I'd really like is an agenda view that approximates a burn down chart and gives me a suggested velocity for next week (or some arbitrary period of time) based on the difference between my effort estimates and actual clocked-in time. A task aging view would also be nice to remind me about tasks on my list that have been idle for awhile so I can update them.

But alas, this is the beauty and curse of org mode. I could do this, but will the time investment really make me that much more productive? Maybe, but maybe not.
The hacker in me cautions those who might think that not brushing is a good idea to save some time:

There are real social consequences in American culture caused by not brushing your teeth. Other people will get offended by your bad breath and yellow teeth (especially those of the opposite sex).

It might be a "weird" ritual, but it's also part of our culture and how people judge you (which actually does matter a lot in society).

Similar arguments apply to things like not bathing and drinking soylent.
Zenefits?
I'm not Sam but I wanted to talk about this anyway. I'm working on a side project that deals in the AI space (would like for it to become a business; we'll see how things go when I launch).

Anyway, Chris's article confuses accuracy with capability and is very strictly talking about synchronous AI agents. But I think there is a ton of space for AI related start-ups that don't fall into the trap he describes.

I'm working on a side project that doesn't work in most of the ways he describes (made it at the Launch Hackathon a few weeks ago if you're interested; website should be launched this weekend but this was my submission: http://devpost.com/software/sim).
I think it would be better if it was offered as "the company will provide X tax-exempt dollars, you, the employee can choose how many of those dollars go to paying student loans and how many go to a 401(k)." I would consider being more paternalistic and require some percentage to to the 401(k) because putting money aside for retirement is an important habit to develop early.

I also agree that this could further exacerbate the high cost higher education.
Can I submit an application while I am still employed by a company?
Tiwa savage doesnt worry that she has been replaced
I think in an interview pg talked about this. IIRC they tried using a sharding approach and failed, and instead just came up with mini YC silos(partners get grouped and handle a group of companies)
> are consigned to a numb jaw or lip or tongue for the rest of their lives.

My wife suffered from this, but the nerve grew back in about a year. When the novacaine went away she was very nervous about this and called the dentist. The dentist was angry, said it wasn't possible, and to not call back. My wife just wanted to know if there was anything she should do but the dentist was obviously covering his ass.
Serious Sam’s Serious Engine source code released
Think of it like a Cygwin for Android. It provides a compatible environment, not the emulation. But it's really enough in 95% of the cases.

Btw, I can post my nanorc just in case anyone wonders how to get more editor space on such a screen on a smartphone.
I think TDD is best in the situations I enumerated because writing tests for single behaviors of single functions is easy, fast, forces you to discover errors that cause your tests to trivially test, and forces you to discover bugs in your understanding of the problem.

Continuous "Deployment", I guess. The term may have existed before I realize, but it certainly wasn't in popular use before this:

http://timothyfitz.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-i...
Hi Sam. What are your views on a venture that would take some reworking or coaxing of the state laws in order to be successful? Example- the law has gotten more relaxed over time and would probably be where we'd need it to be in 5 years or so. Not marijuana related.

Thank you!
I can see what you mean, but as a still-current user I only compare it to my user experience at the present.

Certainly I understand that it used to be much worse, but if it's not satisfying me now, well, I'm keeping an eye out for what will.

It's interesting you note lists as I agree that there's a really good underlying idea there that has never blossomed. Any ideas by how they could be improved?
Ah, Flexport PR again.

The classic work on the history of marine insurance is "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" by Bernstein. This is heavily oriented towards Lloyds of London. It doesn't trace insurance back to the Romans.

Plowing through the reference to Temin[1], there's a long discussion of wheat distribution in Rome. Too much regression analysis applied to too little data. Temen then recaps Economics 101 at some length.

After jumping around through history, Temin finally focuses on the Roman era. He writes "The Roman “company” was a sophisticated information-sharing institution.", but says little about what a "company" meant. The Romans never invented the concept of the corporation. They got close. They never developed ongoing non-state institutions bigger than a rich individual. There were transient organizations such as venture groups, ("societas") where a group of people bought shares in a plan to send a ship somewhere and profit from the trade. The venture dissolved at the end of the voyage when the parties were paid off. (This is where the term "venture capital" comes from.) This is risk-sharing, but not insurance. There was something called a "societates publicanorum", which was close to a corporation, but more like a limited partnership. But the historical references are thin and questionable.[2] Those may have been special-purpose entities involved with the Roman government for tax farming.

The Romans definitely had loans, and to some extent, had banks. The Temple of Apollo sold mortgages. They had the concept of agency, in the legal sense we use today. But the best-known bank of the era (because some of their records have survived)[3], the Sulpicii, was a family business.

None of these references describe an independent insurer. That would be one who, for an agreed fee, will cover a loss, but isn't otherwise involved in the business. The Romans don't seem to have gotten that far.

[1] http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Temin2013.pdf
[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=pJY3AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA159&lpg=...
[3] http://weblaw.usc.edu/centers/clhc/archives/workshops/docume...