skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This should be required reading for anyone thinking of starting a business, of any sort. Personally, I have been through a couple of co-founder business startups over the past 30 years, and can agree with everything that Garry has pointed out in the article. Communication is key.

No doubting that a co-founder can make a big difference to the gargantuan task of getting a business to build momentum. It is one of those times when 1 + 1 = 4. But it is vitally important that both (or more) co-founders keep the same vision and goals at the forefront of their minds.

In both my previous cases of co-founded businesses I ended up with the case where each of my co-founders had massive life changing things happen to them personally (My first co-founder had his wife end up in a wheelchair for life). I look back now and think that things could have been handled very differently and perhaps the business could have made it through. I am not naive enough to think I was completely blameless in those situations, but every time I look back on the events, I can see that clear communication could have solved things, as well as taking emotion out of the equation so things could have been examined in a more rational manner. Really wish we had someone step in as a moderator back then.

As an aside, I was an early adopter of Posterous, and loved the platform. I was sad to see it go, and I wonder 'what if' Garry and his co-founder had resolved their differences - would the company ever have continued for far longer that it had?
Sheaf Theory: The Mathematics of Data Fusion (audio starts at 10:44) [video]
You actually can, but the smell has to be strong, such as the smell of an armpit after not showing for a few days. (Not that I would know anything about that... sniff sniff)
How tight is the launch window for rendezvousing with something in orbit? A second? A few milliseconds?
It's good that the equipment is so sensitive that we can detect this sort of thing. I suspect they'll take maps of the readings and eventually trace it back to the source.
I had reached a point where I couldn’t agree with my co-founder over the future of the company.

That's the real problem. When looking for a co-founder, I think it's very important to choose one who shares the same vision about whatever you intend to build. If a potential co-founder doesn't agree with the direction you wish to go, keep looking.
If I have a hugely valuable payload, why would I entrust it to a company that has a reputation of launching when they shouldn't?

Scrubbing a launch is a much smaller deal than blowing up and losing the payload.
Swift changes are harmful if you are building a product with a budget.

I don't have any problem with the fact Swift is churning. I think its healthy for the language to be improved. I think it's great that there is so much open source activity and enthusiasm around it.

But I also think Apple have been premature about pushing it for sample code and WWDC talks. And some companies have adopted it too early given their resources, constraints and objectives.

Yes it's a lot of fun from an engineering perspective to be on that bleeding edge. It's not so much fun when your boss/client/own business has a tight deadline to ship something, but then you have the extra work to migrate your code to the latest Swift changes.

edits: fixed a couple of typos.
you might just want to kill one strain of bacterium that live in the soil and around hens, not actual complete sterilization.
Their email address is already attached to all of their commits, so I don't see why this is supposed to be interesting.
If fixed properly, it would open the door to non-string types - like, you could have a type that's entirely opaque to tcl, just a void * or whatever, accessed only through functions. This might even actually end up being a step up compared to "proper" tcl...

This would push the line count over 600, but I bet it would still come in at less than a nice round 1,000, while making the thing a lot more useful.

(I have a side project that's starting to feel like it might need a scripting language. And I always liked tcl. Must... resist... rabbit holes...)
Yes, in some places, but does it matter? Pick the best tool for the job. I use Unity(hobby), Xamarin and ASP.NET but also Java, PHP, Clojure, Python, Haskell, Purescript, Q, Lua, C/C++, assembly and others in the same quantity. Depends on the task.

.NET is easy to defend when you need to integrate with traditional enterprises; Java and/or .NET. We work with banks a lot and 'modern' sounding tech is not all too popular with most IT deps 'in the basement'. That would be fine if it would stay put on our systems but as they need to host internally and work with the source code, Java or .NET are the tools for the job. C# and F# are great languages anyway and now open source. Note that F# or Clojure.NET etc are also not always options as big corps usually have (old style) C# and/or Java guys.

Guess depends on the location and the market; I would suggest .NET for a b2c social media startup for instance even though it would work well. Everything works well but then I would guess you might have issues finding your next gig in the same horizontal.
I initially downvoted, undid it, then wrote this reply.

A fleet of many coal plants operating normally kills more people than one nuclear plant accident. A nuclear reactor that is bombed during war (or otherwise suffers catastrophic loss of containment) is not environmentally cleaner than one coal plant of comparable capacity operating normally. Nuclear power is safe by the numbers, but you have to use the right numbers.

If reactor containment failed more often then reactors wouldn't be any better for human health than fossil power plants. It's because they are designed and run with such care that they have such a good environmental and safety record, on average. I was reacting partially to something that you haven't said that I've heard all too often in discussions like these: reactors are so safe, we should get rid of these burdensome regulations so they can be affordable too. It's the "burdensome" attention to detail that makes nuclear so safe. If the nuclear industry had the same cavalier cowboy attitude to safety as the coal mining industry, it would be an environmental disaster.

But you didn't actually call for deregulation, and just making a poorly worded numerical comparison isn't enough for a downvote. I apologize for that.
I live in Italy and most supermarkets only have refrigerated eggs with Carrefour being the notable exception and I found it weird when I first saw eggs outside the refrigerator
Yeah, I mean they're both undesirable outcomes given a competitive market, but one is "sub-optimal", the other is a catastrophe.
I'd imagined so. I was surprised by that affirmation as it does not seem very obvious to me.

I guess that one thing that might get confused is the cultural shift of enabling debt accumulation without direct relation of shame with the seller to the actual buying possibilites.
I would agree, I'm still puzzled tho, because vaccine works but is not used for economic reasons. So we Europeans, mostly don't vaccinate and don't refrigerate (let's forget the health care and say it's the cheapest), but in the US you're paying for an entire cold shipping infrastructure anyways, which doesn't strike me as "cheap".
Not the GP, but I note it's difficult to, say, take some code which uses package xyz and substitute the source-compatible package abc without editing every file. e.g. Try compiling a large project with a custom version of 'os' swapped in. (e.g. To add tracing, or simulate random I/O failures.)

Some package management systems can decouple what packages are called inside the code from what they're called outside.
Are you saying Linode has no API for provisioning new nodes?

https://www.linode.com/api
Milk used to kill a lot of people yet many would drink it without issue for decades. So, your sample size is a little small in the grand scheme of things.
Prospectus Documentation Causes €7.5B Global Covered Bond Programme Loss
I feels crappy not to have an absolute answer.
"Anyone can call" ... i hope the howard stern crowed dont get wind. With public events you have to filter incomming information. I assume that "anyone" actually means spacex people on the team. He isnt watching twitter.

Think of someone shorting stocks. Even a one-day delay can impact all sorts of companies. A good prank call could make a real difference.
Firefox's "less extensible" seems to be "more extensible" than Chrome's.
I hacked that $20 cat feeder into a $50 fully-featured cat feeder
We went with good old Heroku and Redis for the real-time Elixir component. It isn't a full-blown OTP setup by far, but we just needed stable performance with many websocket connections, for which it didn't even break a sweat. We have set up OTP clusters for other projects however, but that's a story for another day.
note to self: this extension changes the text in textareas ...
Speaking of bias: the Daily Beast, Politico, and NPR are defined as centrist.
So "anyone" actually means those on that line ... not the engineers at home watching on TV and certainly not the general public
Conscious robots? Fact or fiction?
Italy here and I've always refrigerated eggs. I didn't even think about it: fresh food goes into the fridge bu default.
Not at all. Operations are relatively cheap, but when you amortize the capital costs that get dumped on ratepayers, it's not cheap at all.

That's not even including the costs associated with decommissioning that eventually get dumped on the taxpayer indefinitely.
This person very good in club. Five stars.
The problem with proposals like this is that they paper over the fundamental problem:

Time is an input variable and really should be part of the API.

The problem is that sometimes you want the end user to have control over time and sometimes you might not want the end user to have control over time.

If I'm on Linux, I certainly should not be able to manipulate the "time" of the communication stack in order to send faster/more aggressively than I should be allowed.

If I'm on embedded, I really want to be able to manipulate the "time" of the communication stack depending upon what I am doing.
Golem investors' thoughts on GNT's 100% overnight price increase
For me, I have requested the same since the beginning — just allow me to modify the UI with a markup language.

Or I'll fork, merge all upstream patches down, and work with that.

Currently I have to rely on the AutoHiDPI addon because firefox is otherwise unusable on my system (linux with two screens with very different DPIs).

I also asked for a way to get tab thumbnails done, and to replace the entire bookmark and omnibar system.

But no. Now I'll have to fork Firefox to get a usable browser.
"Thoughts" isn't quite what is being lost. Instead, you've still got the neurons that understand how goals relate to motor operations, and you've still got the motor neurons, but they've lost the neurotransmitter "protocol" (the calibrated receptivity-weights on the synapses connecting them) that allows them to communicate.

For me, an analogy to speech helps: a baby learning to speak must learn not just language in a high-level sense, but at a lower level, they must "learn" (i.e. calibrate neurotransmitter receptors attached to motor pathways) for how strongly each muscle in their vocal cords should respond to a given low-level phonemic motor-intent-signal from the brain.

If you didn't talk for years, those calibrations would drift, and although you'd remember what it was like to talk, you'd have to "learn to use" (i.e. calibrate) your vocal cords all over again.

The interesting thing here, is that this "calibration" (or lack thereof) continues to cascade through the entire graph of neurons: think backpropagation in machine learning. Motor-neurons that have nothing to talk to lose their ability to talk; and then the motor-intent-recognizing neurons find the only thing they had to talk to (the motor neurons) are now silent—as good as dead—and so they no longer get reward-trained and lose their receptivity-calibration—and on and on, back until you reach whatever subset of neurons is still doing things that achieve "rewards."
From your point of view, everything is clear, because you are the author: you know what you are doing, why, etc.

But for a visitor of your github like me, even if I do a lot of Python, it's hard to understand quickly what it's about.

As I don't have 10 minutes to spend for each ShowHN, a video would be great to understand what it's about :)
Blog Enhancement Suite: http://blogenhancement.com

It's a growth tools suite for bloggers (as explained on the landing page.) Right now we're in pre-launch but we're launching in late Feb / early March (a couple weeks).
It's awesome because:

1. It gives bloggers social/growth tools never before accessible.

2. It provides a new/different source of revenue.

3. It can replace the redundant/impractical "timeline" widgets offered by FB, Twitter, etc. Those currently act more as a glorified social channel promoter than anything actually beneficial to the blog itself.

4. It's free (for the basic version).

5. It's powered by Snapzu, our Reddit/HN like voting community platform.

Would love any feedback, and am open to answering any questions. Cheers.
Your argument is a strawman.

The alternative is generally natural gas, not coal. With some exceptions, coal is generally a legacy technology.
This seems informative:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3vcoxh/why_spacex_h...

Not super tight, but they don't have a lot of leeway either.
Depends on the orbit and the fuel available anything from seconds to hours. A fully loaded Dragon will have an "instantaneous" window, but with spare fuel for corrections during launch it can be an hour or more.
Something I thought about is because you're representing vulnerability disclosures on the blockchain you can cryptographically prove when bugs were first brought up and when they were fixed.

So re: forcing the vendor to patch software.

When the contract is formed the vendor can specify a section for collateral that he gets back progressively from good behavior (I.E. fast patches.) If the vendor fails to continually patch software within an acceptable time-frame, the smart contract can be made to automatically use some of the vendors collateral to hire security auditors (or donate the money to a pre-defined DAO for researchers.)

This thus signals to customers that vendors are willing to stand behind a certain level of quality assurance for the patch release cycle. Whether or not a vendor will abide by this - I have no idea. But it may be that in the future good researchers will only want to work with vendors whose responsibilities within the industry are represented by a smart contract that will protect them from bad experiences. So vendors may end up being brought on board with this too.

I'm not sure what you mean by the attack issue, by the way. You can specify within the contract a reasonable time-frame for exploits to have been disclosed before they were revealed to give the vendor time to patch any problems. Obviously any researchers who want to work on that software will have to agree to the terms of the smart contract before they start. So everybody is in agreement with disclosure time-frames, payment rates, etc.

Thanks for the awesome feedback :)

By the way, you just gave me another idea. Originally the section for private exploit markets was more focused on the deep web. But it just occurred to me that there is actually a legitimate reason to use zero-knowledge proofs in this protocol for the bug bounties. Namely that the existing model depends on having to wait for an exploit to be fixed before a researcher is paid and they might not want to wait for that.

So to prove to the network that an exploit works without disclosing it (and thus frustrating the vendor) you use a zero-knowledge proofs. Thus the network can validate that the exploit works without getting access to it so that the payment can be released earlier even before the vendor has finished the patch.
I've bought eggs that clearly have been marked as washed in Sweden (and this producer says they wash all eggs, http://www.kronagg.se/vaara-produkter/tvaettade-aegg/).

It seems it is legal to wash them but you need an approved facility for it as it can contaminate the eggs.
$2 Trillion Federal Reserve Bank Forbidden Documents Exposed
the professional skill-sets are secondary to personal chemistry. if the founders can't communicate it doesn't matter that they complete each-other's skills.
Yea his style parodies are my favorite. Frank's 2000 Inch TV[1] is a song in the style of REM and Waffle King[2] is like a Peter Gabriel song? I think that's what it is either way great talent.

Also about the Dare to be Stupid song this is a fun tidbit from the wikipedia article[3] of the song:

Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh stated in reaction to the song that: "I was in shock. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. He sort of re-sculpted that song into something else and... I hate him for it, basically."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glFVXpz_abQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8t4Smunp1U

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dare_to_Be_Stupid_(song)
I think a bigger predictor for co-founder conflict (and, conversely, eventual success) is a common background and similar financial situation. If founders are from very different backgrounds, have very different home situations or have strongly differing financial situations conflicts are almost certain to arise, much more likely than simply because of a tech/business split in responsibilities.
I am working on an open source project that makes building cross-platform mobile apps as easy as writing ONLY a JSON markup https://www.jasonette.com

I did a Show HN about three months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879179) and was so grateful for all the great constructive feedback I received, it really encouraged me to keep evolving the project. And I really have come very far since then.

So I thought I would share what I have achieved so far:

1. The original release was iOS only, but so many people told me I should build an Android version, so I did. Now both iOS and Android are completely open source on Github and they both use the same JSON grammar. Here's a recent post where I talk about how I designed the JSON-to-Native mappings on both iOS and Android: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-to-build-cross-platform-...

2. I've implemented functional programming in JSON. Yes, a function in JSON. I had to come up with a JSON grammar that can represent all aspects of a function like invocation, arguments, callbacks, call stack, recursive calls, subroutines, etc. If you're interested, check out the post I wrote about this: http://blog.jasonette.com/2017/02/15/functional-programming-...

3. I've implemented a "require" for JSON, so it can be used to parallel process multiple JSON objects from different sources, which I think is great for people who want to build a mobile app for their decentralized apps. I personally think decentralized apps will take off in 2017 and going forward for many different reasons, so this means a lot to me: I wrote about this here: http://blog.jasonette.com/2017/02/17/require/

These are just some I have worked on personally, but the REAL cool part is that the community has really picked up and many people have been contributing to the project. And I think THAT's the main reason why it's awesome. The fact that some nobody with no track record can just release something that resonates with enough people and anyone from around the world can just jump in and help. This is my first ever experience with an open source project and everything feels so magical to me. I hope to update you guys with even better news in the future!
Commander One Free dual pane file manager for Mac
Thanks! I'll take a look into the CSS problem - since the autocompletion for location hasn't been completed yet and the API backend is still in it's early days, this can sometimes be thrown by bad location - perhaps try with just a postcode or something like that?

Thanks!! :D

Matt
Camera made from 32k drinking straws takes pointillistic photographs
That vastly depends on the kind of company though. Most YC startups especially are about automating some sort of inefficency in the real world (see: paper based workflows).

I know YC is getting in to hardware and other areas, but most startups they are likely to fund are going to be an efficiency play. It's what they know best statistically.
Moonshots seem like they would go through YC research.
There are exceptions to this rule like Boom which was in my batch.

By definition many startups aren't actually about "tech". Yes as companies grow they will have mild scaling problems, but what determines whether users stay or not ends up being design or a big focus on a problem being solved.

The one caveat I would mention here would be infrastructure startups (disclaimer: I run one and am therefore highly biased) where you have things like databases,containers,AI platforms,.. where the technology vision matters in terms of appealing to a technical user base or where merits are based on the technology solving a real problem.

That being said - even something as "hard" as an AI startup: The model building isn't even the bulk of the work, after you build that it's mainly about UX, which firmly puts them in the same bucket as most other kinds of companies, even to the point of these companies just "adding AI" so they can raise some money.

That being said: Statistically startups are hard enough as it is, and the bulk of them to be efficient businesses are mostly going to fall in to the bucket I just described: using a bit of software to make a process in the real world more efficient.
It wasn't an abort, but the Mercury-Redstone 1 had a "T-plus" stop time [0]. It attempted to launch and the engine shut down immediately after lift off. It didn't explode, the escape rocket jettisoned, the capsule deployed its drogue, and the the rocket settled back on the pad untethered [1]. It came to be referred to as the "four-inch flight".

After considering some risky ways to deal with the fully-fueled rocket, flight control ultimately decided to wait until the LOX boiled off. Chris Kraft declared, "That is the first rule of flight control. If you don't know what to do, don't do anything."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_1
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O4V7JfeTSU
Computus
> I don't know why that's particularly problematic; incremental builds are mainly useful during development, not for making releases, which is where reproducible builds are desirable.

I don't know for you, but not having to chase bugs that would only show up in an incremental build (or symmetrically: having bugs hidden by the incremental build that would show up in a clean build) is making "reproducible builds desirable" in my day-to-day development...

I would design any incremental system to provide this guarantee from the beginning.
Thanks! I wasn't aware that now the API supports root SSH key on creation. Maybe I missed it last time I checked :( Updated my comment.

It would be great if Linode exposes on the Web UI :-)
Yup, this is one of the developers that took it serious [0]. You can see, he started preparing in August of 2015. If other developers did that, this info wouldn't be a problem.

[0]: https://github.com/lidel/ipfs-firefox-addon/issues/20
Note that if you try to read this off the original scout.ai site (on Chrome), it clicktraps you from navigating back out, so do it in a tab whose context you don't care about.

That alone is enough for me to choose not read the author at all.
> Just curious... If they had no prior programming experience, why was go 'different'? Different compared to what?

Probably compared to what they were shown in university/bootcamp/whatever.

'no programming experience' could esily mean 'no professional programming experience' which is very close to 'no programming experience'.

I am enrolled in a computer engineering course, and I can tell you the amount of code we get to write is ridiculously low.