skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great news. Your product was validated by the market and your competition continues to validate your position as the best of breed. Way to go!

Don't think of these talks as acquisition talks, at least not yet. Use these inbound messages as an opportunity to develop your own business development / M&A skills, as well as a great way to increase your network.

Validate the person reaching out to you. Are they are gatekeeper or a dealmaker? The strategy or BD guy 3 years out of school is a great way to spin your wheels. At large public companies, deals get made or broken at the greater than or equal to VP level. If you are dealing with a gatekeeper, use them to get to the decision maker, but don't sink to much time into the relationship. Once you get to the decision maker, build a relationship without opening up the kimono completely...this could be a future hire, acquirer, mentor, connection, etc.

As far as protecting yourself, there's no great way. Diligence will bring your company to almost a standstill, you'll damage all your metrics in the process and your employees will notice that something is going on; that's just how it is. You need to figure out, generally, if you have a walk-away number and if you are in a position to get it. The best way to do that is talk to a range of people that might know (VCs, other entrepreneurs who have sold similar businesses, investment bankers, etc.).

Here's a secret they don't want you to know. If they are coming to you, in any serious way, they don't feel that great about their current position; so you shouldn't worry about them, just keep doing what you've been doing.

Lastly, if you have multiple serious acquirers, hire a professional team to get you through the process. Find a investment banker with expertise in your area and talk to their clients; bankers are expensive, but good ones are worth their weight in gold. Also, find an attorney you trust that has done this, with companies like yours and companies like your potential acquirers.

Good luck and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. My info is in my bio.
Yes, it's a fundamental limitation. Changing colors means moving tiny bits of magnetic dust, and the amount of charge needed is based on where they currently are. This takes more calculation than just running electricity through a light, which can be done regardless of whether or not you were running electricity through it a moment ago. This extra calculation will always take more time, unless the simpler tech reaches a fundamental physical limit like how fast power can be cycled without something melting.
Intellectually, you're on the entrepreneurial path, with a purpose. How you emotionally defend yourself is also part of the entrepreneurial path - we work more hours for less money (on average) because we "control our own destiny" which implies of sense of ownership over one's life that you can't get elsewhere working towards someone else's bottom line. That's probably a myth, but it's an important one for maintaining our psychological health while under the stress of under-delivering. Don't be confused here - as an entrepreneur, you will ALWAYS feel like you're under-delivering, whether on time, or on traction, or on product, or on revenues, or on team, or on awareness... That's an unfortunate part of the path. But it's also an important part of the drive to improve the product, improve the team, etc. Entrepreneurs unfortunately also have a high rate of depression - I'm not adequately versed in those personality types to make any assessments as to why. But as an entrepreneur, I can tell you that, personally, I face that stress every day and yet carry on because I feel like my work is important. I'm not building follow-on products - I'm trying to build first-to-market products, also with a purpose. So either that purpose has to carry you through these tough defensive discussions and resulting stress, or that purpose isn't sufficient, and you'll drop the product and/or the title entrepreneur. If you're going to own your own path, you either do it wholly, or you don't. Trying to figure out a middle path will kill the average person. Don't be average.
I agree. Ken Thompson put it like this:

> I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing.

In my case at least this is mainly the case for quick edit, though he probably felt this way in general.

A full account by George Coulouris about em, a visual enhancement of ed, is more enlightening:

> By the way, 'em' stands for 'editor for mortals' - I christened it that after Ken Thompson visited our lab at QMC while I was developing it and said something like: "yeah, I've seen editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them, I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing".

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20080103071208/http://www.dcs.qmu...
Yes I left out the part about steady state condition as well as absolute zero temperature condition, because those are boundary conditions (constant conditions) that don't involve time. My point is about an integral over all time.

And yes the definition of "universe" is something I define as "a closed system that doesn't interact with other systems", which is also a consistent definition even if the multiverse theory is correct. If two things interact then they are by definition in the same universe.
D3 plays really nicely with React already. I'll try this out, but not sure if I'd switch.
One of the differences is that decomposing happens in the form of Methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas (21x as potent as CO2).

Capturing and burning the methane "downgrades" the potency of the emissions, now only emitting CO2.
I shared this with my partner as I often (somewhat jokingly, somewhat seriously) say that I'm not depressed, just realistic.

But then she has just published a paper about non-reproducible psychology papers :)
I don’t know exactly how to represent that in Big O, but I think it would look something like O(WTFxN).

If WTF is a constant, then O(WTFxN) == O(kN) == O(N)
> I'd guess mathematicians must not suffer from that problem

In my experience (both myself and what I've seen in other successful mathematicians), there is a lot of truth to your guess. I'm also a number theorist (and know Andrew, for what it's worth). I enjoy concentrating on something for a very long time, to the exclusion of everything else. I try to organize my life so that I can "retreat to my home office" and stay there and work as long as possible. The thing I struggle with is forcing
myself to take breaks and stopping concentrating, since I can get way too obsessed with finishing one thing, to the exclusion of everything else. Balance is hard. An extreme fictional example of too much concentration is featured in the recent movie "The Accountant", in which the (autistic) protagonist very obsessively concentrates on an accounting situation, and is incredibly frustrated when real-world circumstances distract him from doing so.
Sarcarsm? In some cases you can just do sanity checks on your inputs and use larger number formats for doing sums. Depends on the use case.
Level 9: Builds rudimentary computer out of off-the-shelf parts, on a table covered in breadboard and DIP-switches, programs C compiler by hand on the DIP-switches with a hand-carved wooden stylus, and bootstrap-compiles the full-featured compiler and OS kernel for commercial computer hardware from painstakingly audited source before proceeding.
To err is human. Beyond the scope of simple, small, toy programs - "doing it wrong" is not a choice, it is a statistic.

You do have choices to make in terms of techniques and tools you can apply (assuming you're aware of them) to modify the statistics, but you will not be perfect in your application of them, and the tools were not written by perfect people either.

There's another choice here - how high you set the security bar for "deals with hostile data off the network". Ekidd chose to set this bar high enough to rule out C. How high do you set it?
Next up, the BBC report on how Barron Trump wants to build a 10 mile high luxury office tower block, in gold.

It does amaze me that the BBC report on these stories without providing the helpful information provided by you, do they think their audience only know Boeing and Airbus? Why do the brain farts of the 1% get an airing?
I'm also flying solo. Email in profile, hit me up and I'll be very happy to help. At the very least, with constructive criticism and friendly advice.
> You also need to know the right people (connections) and be very lucky

Not sure about 'being lucky' but 'knowing the right people' is very true.

After Marissa Mayers took over the reins of Yahoo, she went on a 'buying spree'. Several of her acquisition were questionable, including an app called 'Summly' - a seemingly simple app that "summarized news" that she purchased for Yahoo, by paying 30 MILLION in ALL CASH deal.

Even the algorithm that it used to summarize wasn't his own. He outsourced that work (the core functionality) to http://www.sri.com/

It was later revealed in a Forbes or BI article that this '15 year old teen hacker genius''s family (either mom or dad) and Mayer's husband were buddies at Goldman Sachs or something of that nature.

Related reading:

Yahoo Paid $30 Million in Cash for 18 Months of Young Summly Entrepreneur’s Time => http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-paid-30-million-in-cash...

Here's What Happened To All 53 of Marissa Mayer's Yahoo Acquisitions => http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-may...
That's a very good point. I've tried to be as modest as possible when talking to other people (e.g. "I'm working on a small software project" rather than "I'm building the biggest, best thing!"). I tend to roll my eyes when other people say stuff like that. Presentation is very important, though, and I'll certainly keep that in mind. Thanks.
No one has mentioned it yet, but I've found Google Domains to be quite pleasant.

No fuss, and the pricing is reasonable. They do email forwarding, and a few other things, but otherwise is just a basic registrar/dns provider.

Since the whole SOPA/PIPA fiasco, I've been moving all my domains from GoDaddy to Google Domains as they expire.
A gentle introduction to the graph data structure
1. The easiest thing is to give commentary from the sidelines. Ignore them.

2. Making the product, simple or complex is the easy part. The hard part is making a business out of it.

I'm in a similar situation to yours (creating a company, bootstrapped, solo founder). It's a hard ride and people who can truly support you mentally is important.
But you learn more this way, linked in is just frustrating!

A company that tries to be clear on everything is Google, but I still find they morph so rapidly that their documentation is often 2 or 3 generations behind.
If you're meant to be a programmer, you won’t give up. You will get frustrated, but if you're determined, you'll keep trying. A bootcamp can't give you that motivation.

Some low-cost coding lessons on Code School, Treehouse, NetTuts+, Udacity, Pluralsight, or Launch Academy are also a good option, and they cost far less than does a bootcamp.
MooCs are also a good way to find out if you like coding. If you're still coding on your own after a MooC, then you might be interested enough.

Try building a new application every day. Jennifer Dewalt, the founder of Zube, did this and blogged about it. With each new project, she added to her portfolio and gained new skills. Quantity trumps quality when you’re learning. Just build lots of things.
If you're looking for hosting info, my startup tracks twitter sentiment of many of the big companies including GoDaddy. http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare/

GoDaddy still hasn't recovered from Bob Parsons and all the drama around super bowl ads, sopa, elephants, etc. Not sure how they ever get past that, at least in the WordPress space their product is technically pretty decent.
I'm not sure if you use tmux, but the way I do it is to open a new pane below the original, edit what I need to, and then close that pane when I'm done. The original screen remains untouched.
That really is a genius idea.
I am not sure I understand what you are suggesting.

Are you suggesting to think of the spline-like curve as a function that with domain [0,1]. For simplicity, let us simply say that original curve is defined between 0 and 1 on the x axis, so t(x) gives you the curve without additional work.

If you simply change the domain of t to be [0,a], then you have (trivially) produced an otherwise identical function (call it t') with a different endpoint; but I am not sure where the scaling t' by 1/a comes in. If you literally mean take t'(x)/a, then (unless a is 1) that is clearly a different function. If you mean take t'(x/a) then you have arrived back at the original function, but compressed along the x axis.

As I mentioned above, simply changing the domain without scaling does "work". The problem is that it is not obvious that the resulting curve is "spline-like". Admittedly, to my knowledge, "spline-like" has never been formally defined. However, we defined a spline by the fixed points through which it passes.

For example, suppose t(x) is the spline-like curve under discussion. We should have t = SplineLike((x1,y1),(x2,y2),...,(xn,yn)). Where SplineLike is a function that takes a set of points, and produces a spline-like curve that passes through said points.

Now consider the curve t' = SplineLike((x1,y1),(x2,y2),...,(a,t(a))). That is to say, take the previous set of points, and move the last point to somewhere else on the resulting curve. For simplicities sake, make the additional assumption that (a,t(a)) is still the rightmost point.

We are looking for a higher order function SplineLike such that t'(x) = t(x) where t' is defined. Additionally, SplineLike should produce functions that "feel" like a spline. Since the splines we are talking about are quadratic, a reasonable criteria for this is that the resulting functions are continuous, and have a continuous derivative.

Providing a way to go straight from t to t' does not provide any insight to the higher order SplineLike function; or even if such a function exists.
Bill Clinton and the Meaning of “Is”
> An uuid has less change of clashing: Its 128 bit vs 80 bit for ulid.

Actually... that's 80 bits for the "random" part of the ULID, which only disambiguates within the same millisecond.
I've seen those as an HN lurker. I just like the idea of a central repository like this one.
Is anyone discussing _reliability_? as in Google/Apple/etc are making this move not just "to be green" but to ensure that they do have power without being subjected to the whims & issues of providers when they're just one of many customers? When you have literally hundreds of millions (billions?) of customers, you want to ensure your own resources are absolutely reliable (within your, not someone else's, requirements).

It's like me wanting to put solar panels on my roof: I'm not so much interested in cost savings, but want to ensure a massive grid failure doesn't take my household with it.
Yeah clearly if we just get a little bit more elitism and condescension in the software communities of the world the problems will go away!
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (admittedly end 2015)

Very good closing of the Hugo&Nebula Award series (Justice, Sword, Mercy) exploring the questions of identity and consciousness of individuals, androids and hive minds on the background of a galaxy spanning social, political and military struggle.

Yeah and I second the 3 Body Series by Liu Cixin - that is one for the ages too.
Nearly Free Speech is best-in-class in just about every way. If anyone wants an overview of the service, I wrote an article about them a little while ago: http://winningwp.com/nearlyfreespeech-web-hosting-review/

That review is on a WordPress-oriented site, but it includes screenshots of the interface, which might interest some of you.
I use both Namecheap and Gandi, a couple of my observations:

1. Namecheap has a really low API limit which caused me problems when using the DNS challenge to renew Let's Encrypt certificates.

2. Their API has to have clients whitelisted by IP, which is a pain when renewing a LE cert from a dynamic home IP.

3. Agreed, their redesign is awful.

I used Gandi recently to get around these restrictions and:

1. Their web UI is truly awful and confusing

2. They don't have the same IP or rate limiting restrictions on the API

3. Their versioning of zones is a bit confusing

4. Their propagation seems to take an age longer than Namecheap. When the latter worked each LE challenge took a couple of minutes, with Gandi it's more like 20 minutes each.
The ?key is part of the email tracker- I get mine emailed to my inbox and presumably OP does too. But the /238544 looks like a landing page. It's some sort of route- presumably for tracking- but when you leave the number off you get a 404 (I try to strip anything superfluous before posting).
I might trust a video chat today to verify an identity, but only because it would be a relatively new method. Definitely not in a few years if it ever took off. It's already possible to forge a talking head and fall back on "sorry, bad connection out here in the field" to hide glitches.
Hmm.

I think if you try posit a canonical definition of the word 'Hacking' here, you're going to have a bad time. The community decides the relevance by voting.

> The status quo is established by the actions of large-scale corporate and political actors

Then isn't it important for people to learn about the status quo? Especially given it's moving so fast. Without this article I would have probably considered a startup doing the same to be cutting-edge, disruptive and most definitely 'hacking'. Now we all know where the bar is set.
Sorry, I thought most people knew Bombardier the airplane maker, but maybe I should have kept that info.

In any case, Bombardier (the company) and Charles Bombardier don't seem to be in any business relationship...?
Not to be glib, but this is true in much the same way as secure http. Really the only way to do it properly is to control the root key for your organization. The chain of trust starting with the vendor you got the computer from is bonkers.
The document you link specifically states protection mechanisms put in place to prevent this from happening.

They will still have a significant vote, but a long long way from a majority on any key issues.
Read "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future", and realize that even the best people overcame enormous struggles to bring products to market.
I agree to that. The hard part of hiring is that it is a lot of customization for the specific environment of a company.

Hence my message. Talking about his past and future career, mine and the company's plan is the best thing for me to do, because I'm pretty that the other interviewers have not talked much about that, if at all.

And I'm confident that the hardcore technical interviews have been done. They don't need me to make it harder, except for a few select senior candidates. A for loop in a few languages written on the resume is enough (and it's fun for candidates who have "assembly") :D
Wow I really enjoyed reading your first paragraph. Thanks.
Guitar Guy the Comeback
That's most likely true. Most libraries are horrible to install and configure and only make sense to the people who wrote it.

I gave up on learning PHP and Laravel recently when I went to install Laravel and they recommend Homestead. So I went to install Homestead, but they require Vagrant. Of course Vagrant requires VirtualBox, and VB can't find my kernel source code on RHEL 6.5. Okay, so let's skip Vagrant... Okay, now I need to install Composer instead of Homestead... what's this? SSL operation failed... failed to enable crypto... operation failed in command line code...

Yeah I give up. Yeah, I could take the time to work through this nonsense, but I shouldn't have to. Getting multiple layers deep of having to install dependency A to satisfy dependency B which satisfies dependency C is not my idea of fun.
That was bad and you should feel bad. :)
Just to expand on this, maybe a job board should tell you what the interview process is like. Whether its take home test, whiteboard, in person project, etc.
YC's Winter Reading List
NASA's First Standard Spacecraft Computer (1984)
Who would destroy the world
Depression can occur regardless of economic or social situation.
We need to go deeper...
Yes, it is opt-in, which is good. But I feel that for a casual user "use and store your location" doesn't fully get across the point that it's going to track your location in near real-time and make inferences like "this place is your home" about it.

And this is a general problem - people share all kinds of private information about themselves, without full understanding of the kind of analysis that is possible on that data these days.

I personally don't have a problem with the tech (and I've used Latitude way back, so it's not like any of it is new).
I really love this. Not just the technology but the attitude; it's a demonstration that our workflow can be much simpler, but without cynicism or academic snootiness. Thanks for showing us that the web can be a dev-friendly platform again!
Apple to Start Publishing AI Research
Kill Process by William Hertling: http://www.williamhertling.com/books/#kill-process

It's near future and the technology isn't that far-out. Most of it is either very real already or at least very believable from today's point of view. So, maybe technically it doesn't count as sci-fi but it's a really great tech thriller anyway.
In an ideal world we could detect those patterns programmatically but as you hinted, there is the question of "when is it considered a dark pattern and when is it only clever marketing?".
In a nutshell:
- Unsupervised Learning (GANs)
- NLP (JMT, DCN and GNMT)
- Community (OpenAI, Partnership on AI, Open Source tools)
i must admit, i was unaware that this is used so commonly. that changes things, of course. and i don't really know what to suggest as an alternative... review is ok. or, "a look back"? "lessons learned"? "experiences from building..."? or perhaps drop it altogether, "My Voice Controlled Smart Mirror" sounds sexy enough ;)

naming is hard.

anyway, just to be clear, this is irrelevant :) nice work!
Ethical Hackers Rating in November
Grid shifting takes 30-80 years and is usually only partial.
More specifically, $20k is the MAX award. The minimum is $100.
Normally just lurk, but decided to create a throwaway to pile
on love for NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

If you're a no frills, I know how DNS works, don't annoy me with marketing and gimmicks type of hacker, this is the registrar for you.

Switched to them in 2009 (crazy to see in my email how long it's been!). I get an email when things need renewing, and an email when there is some stupid hoop ICANN requires me to jump through, which to be fair has only been like 2-3 times in 8 years.

I only manage 10-15 domains at any given time. If you have more, I don't know how well this works with huge numbers, but for my load, they work perfectly.

I've used GoDaddy, Ghandi, and others. I prefer the minimalism of NFS by far.

That link again! (call mr plow):

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/
> barely explored

That's what I hated about the second half. It's like inverse Ringworld - you know how the world was built, and why, but you don't know much about the inhabitants, and your tour guides aren't very interesting, either.

I liked the first half - it was interesting to read about them solving problems, even though the problems - and sometimes the solutions - were atrocious.
Thank you for the report. It has been auto-detecting fine for me, but I will inspect what seems to be issue. Feel free to open an issue on GitHub for easier tracking!

EDIT: What is your system language?
Clojure takes a remarkably stable and additive approach to maintenance and growth. Graph for it is here: http://imgur.com/a/rH8DC
Yes, and this being a field that you can filter by.
Thanks for the info, I'll look into it. Could by any chance open an issue on GitHub with some more details?