skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> YC itself says they can't fund all the companies they want to.

No reason that won't change, and even if it did why would they ever make that public? In other words, they'd say that, even if it were not true.

> I know a number of founders who were rejected from YC and while they don't plaster it on their website, they don't hide it if it comes up.

It stands to reason that there are in a pool that large founders that feel one way or the other.

The HN wisdom is that if you let such a rejection affect you then you weren't successful start-up founder material to begin with but in reality it isn't all that simple.

> YC is not some magic oracle at picking startups.

That must be why the chances of getting follow on investment from other investors is so much lower once you reach demo day /s. YC start-ups are generally oversubscribed, especially when compared to non YC start-ups, so even if YC is not an oracle it definitely is a stamp of approval. Lack of such a stamp after trying to obtain it is a negative signal of sorts. And getting continuity funding or not is another signal of that kind.

> They just have way better dealflow because of their reputation and how simple their process is.

Yes, that reputation is what this is about, and that reputation is in a feedback loop. The process being simple has little to do with it, most start-up accelerators have a simple process.

The big factors are: founder friendly, huge alumni network with vast amounts of knowledge, huge pool of people willing to work for YC backed start-ups, coming to America, large chance of finding follow on investment once you are accepted.

Note how all it would take to make a play at this is to drop one single line from the YC continuity program terms, which is that YC continuity won't take the lead. The existence of that one line is the sign that they are not yet ready for a play like that. But that won't always be the case and at some point YC will be flush enough that they can run their incubator at the next higher level.
John Nash concluded eventually that his hallucinations were part of a conversation with himself.
There have been a few proposals for intercepting Oumuamua in the coming years. One approach is to launch a rocket in 2025 for an intercept in 2039:
https://www.space.com/38919-interstellar-asteroid-mission-sp...
Just as a counterpoint, I'm also in the heart of silicon valley. I have 125Mbps internet, with a few other options available, at a not-unreasonable cost.

I recently redid our garage to create a laundry area, and the inspector collaborated with me to identify the most efficient (and safe and legal) way to implement the plumbing, drainage, and electrical. It was neither confrontational nor onerous; I truly got value from a helpful, knowledgeable person that wanted the project to succeed.

We have more jobs than houses, our local schools are some of the best in the state, I have 3 parks in walking distance and a network of bike paths that run through the city. Miles of protected open space, with trails, farms, and facilities are all nearby.

I'm more than happy to pay the taxes to live here and to support the regulatory regimes that protect all of the above.
Net Neutrality is the default position, so in a sense has always existed from the inception of the internet. Only within the last 10 years have telcoms begun a series of intentional efforts to begin throttling, and manipulating traffic in a way that falls outside of the bounds of Net Neutrality.
> That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios.

This assumption always bothers me. What do you think defines behavior? Is it purely culture, or purely biology? How do you rule out culture when you don't have a culture that promotes equality?
This is so delusional it hurts
Millennials should stop overloading their brains with dopamine. It's the root of all their depression and laziness. Atleast that was the case with me. Life isn't becoming harder, we are just becoming more & more like zombies. Uncreative and lazy.
If robots.txt allows Google and Bing but nobody else, it should be ignored. If it blocks everyone, then I agree. We need to make sure that the next Google has a chance to succeed.
I did a small UX/MVP experiment on this idea some time ago - basically a human in the loop ML model fine tuning.

http://akash.me/interactive_ml
No, the issue is not that extending human lifespans is ethically wrong (it may or may not be, but that's an opinion about research.) It's claiming that people working on such research are unethical people.

A very basic part about good-faith discussions is to discuss the topic at hand and not the people having the discussion.
> made possible thanks to the change in regulations.

And a USPS that was notorious for losing mail at the time.
Facebook for Developers: AR Studio Now in Open Beta
> If you are going to require high-performance

I'm not sure exactly why people bring up performance when tail call elimination is mentioned. Maybe because sometimes it's called "tail call optimization"? Besides replacing a call with a jump, it's more of an "optimization" in the sense that it allows an optimizing compiler to see and optimize a loop. However, CPython is not an optimizing compiler, and it would barely be an optimization.

Rather, tail call elimination is a feature that allows for a very controlled goto statement, and even a computed goto. However, "continue" and "break" seem to work well enough for most cases. Perhaps the strongest objection to having TCO is that stack traces become more inscrutable.
Can't you just block Facebook in your hosts file?
I made this list. Why?
I thought paying a tax firm $1-2k is way overpriced for a small startup without employees and revenue. So I thought there is undoubtedly a website that provides an overview of all forms and stuff that we need to file. However, I didn't find something useful.

So I thought If I'm going to dig and do the research, I might as well share it with all others that probably have a similar problem.

Mind you that this is a specific list for Delaware C Corps whose principal place of business is in California and have few employees, minimal revenue.

It's possible that I've missed or misunderstood something. Just let me know here, and I'll add it to the list.
The short answer is that this definition of addition is defined so that under this operation elliptic curves form a group[0]. There is a field of mathematics called abstract algebra concerned with algebraic structures like groups. I would attempt to motivate them this way: There are a lot of things in mathematics that seem to have a similar structure. You have a set of "things", and some operation that combines "things" and produces another "thing" of the same type. To be a group the elements of this set and the operation need to obey a couple of other constraints (an identity element exists, and elements have an inverse which when combined under this operation produce that identity element). Examples of groups are the integers under addition (identity = 0) and square matrices of a given rank under multiplication (identity = identity matrix).

Why bother with all of this? Since things with this structure abound in math, this turns out to be a useful abstraction. If you can prove some property of groups based only on this group structure, you have proved this proposition "for free" for any group.

Elliptic curves turn out to have a lot of interesting relationships with other fields of mathematics. For example, the proof of the famous Fermat's Last Theorem was actually a proof that FLT was equivalent to (or, implied by) a conjecture about a particular class of elliptic curves. This other conjecture had been proven about a decade prior so proving the connection proved FLT.

The connection to cryptography is less clear. I don't have a particularly good explanation for that except that cryptography is very interested in operations that are easy to perform but very difficult to reverse. As best as we can tell this group operation for elliptic curves over finite fields is _very_ difficult to reverse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics)#Definition...
Not to mention variance within a given labeled size itself. Last time I went shopping for jeans, I tried on two pairs from Levi's with the same cut and labeled size. One was too tight and the other was too loose.
I want to respond with a bender quote, "this is the worst kind of oppression, the kind against me"

But honestly your comment is so vague I'm unsure exactly what you want to be heard from your words

Can you clarify what kinds of oppression you noticed in SF and the kinds you noticed in other places

When you speak so indistinctly everyone is forced to fill the holes themselves

Those that agree that SF is oppressive will fill those holes with their own aggravating experiences and those that see SF as progressive will read your comment as "I just want to tell my coworkers that their lifestyle is offensive to god but SF is too intolerant of me and my wants"
Wow. Its like you have no imagination at all and your thinking is confined to a prison of pessimism and failure. Thanks for sharing!

The best thing I could say to you is that you need to do less talking about stuff you clearly know nothing about, and far more research.

No offense.
Yes. Congress-critters try to have their cake and eat it too by punting to the regulators and claiming to the voters it is out of their hands. Dereliction of duty.

(Not that I would necessarily like to see the horse-cum-camel design-by-committee solution these grifters would negotiate their way too...)
The Tax Plan will pay for itself.

That is an outright falsehood.

"Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), Congress's nonpartisan scorekeeper, predicted that the Senate tax bill would add about 0.1 percent more a year to growth over the next decade, far less than what Treasury says. JCT took into account the economic effects of the tax cuts on individual and business taxes, but not other policy changes advocated by the administration, such as welfare reform. The JCT says the Senate bill's total cost would be $1 trillion after considering growth effects.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/11/the-t...

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/364415-wharton-study-gop-t...
> Whether keeping Putin comfortable should be on our agenda at all is another question of course.

Well, it may be to our advantage to not back him too tightly into a corner. Or at least it may be very much to our disadvantage to corner him too tightly...
They may agree on the spacetime interval but that is of no consequence, since they will still not agree on the ordering. Establishing a single externally consistent order of events for all possible observers is physically impossible, unless the spacetime interval separating them is timelike, a condition that is rarely true of distributed transactions that are happening independently: e.g. Abel puts in money in Spain, Beth removes it in Australia -- do you charge an overdraft fee/interest? (N.B., Abel and Beth may be names of HFT algorithms.)

"Spanner for causal transactions" would be more accurate.

P.S. Not sure what you mean by "hidden communication channels."
Sounds like rent seeking from the optometry business.

I haven't gotten a prescription for my eyeglasses in about 4 years, I get new glasses about once a year, and just buy the $50 cheapies from Clearly.
A no-brainer to me. It was bone-headed to let it get this far. What does Amazon most want to be?

* the company that sells everything to everyone at good prices?
* one of several companies with a video service that has a few nice exclusives
(not the most or best exclusives, either)?

I think it kind of snuck up on them that this was an either/or question and it took some time for them to make the obvious/right decision.
Maybe we should consider "overbuilding" then. Otherwise it just should be a public utility that leases bandwidth to private entities.
It does matter if you want to actually talk about it. If you're just interested in making yourself feel better by calling other people names, then maybe not. But it's very basic human psychology to be less inclined to hear people out and take their concerns seriously if they call you names, and it certainly doesn't signal to me that it's worth my time explaining my position to you.
there’s pure nuggets of wisdom here from Chamath Palihapitiya, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMotykw0SIk&app=desktop
He didn't say anything that was contrary to that. Note that it's the "manager" that didn't "provide a method" in his framing, and note that "manager" is a shorthand for "the teacher's boss, the school board that created the policies the teacher's boss follows, the federal/state governing bodies that created the legislation that governs the school board's decisions, etc etc"
Can you bypass ISPs with a P2P network such as a mesh network?
Ok, you just destroyed any of your credibility. I'm not even going to bother arguing with your other posts.
The deck is stacked against you... don't let the bastards get you down
Photoshop has at least real competition on macOS. Affinity Photo and Pixelmator are fantastic, no-subscription alternatives to Photoshop.
VBA's one saving grace is that it's been available on every company computer I've ever used. Alt+F11 and I have an IDE. It's probably responsible for getting a few people involved in programming.

But it had some serious limitations and some unexpected behavior compared to "real" programming languages. I hope that adding Python to Excel can be my new "guaranteed to be there" language on coworker's computers and get even more people involved in programming.
One does not simply delete their Facebook account.
Or at least that was the already well-known public justification put in the US constitution there at the end of a lobbying process.
Then you offload it to the server, which would require a fee or subscribtion to be feasible to host.
autoconf doesn't detect much of anything by default. A few commonly used, boilerplate macros do a series of test (e.g. AC_PROG_CC, AC_USE_SYSTEM_EXTENSIONS, AC_SYS_LARGEFILE), but for the most part each and every feature test autoconf does was explicitly and individually requested by the author.

The real issue is that people copy+paste autoconf tests from other projects without thinking about whether they're necessary, or even confirming whether they work for their use case. And because people just copy+paste autoconf tests instead of keeping a browser tab open with the (free) POSIX spec when writing their code, most tests people add are for stuff that no longer needs to be tested for (i.e. all the major Unix platforms support most standard POSIX features by default), and lack the tests for non-standard interfaces they actually use.

But there's no easy way to fix such poor development practices. A good start would be if people just stopped using autoconf, as well as libtool, cmake, maven, etc, unless and until it really became necessary. Follow the KISS principle. Keep your build as simple as possible and regularly test your code on at least one platform other than Linux/glibc, such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD, rather than misplacing your faith in overly wrought tooling.

It works the same way on the web. Don't use the latest + greatest feature if you don't need to. Like with performance optimizations, don't add the burden until there's relevant, empirical evidence that it's worth your while in the particular case. Nobody ever magically achieved high performance or strong portability by adopting over wrought tooling before the problems ever presented themselves. Doing so often ends up with the opposite result.
Benefits of Immutability
> this "if you don't work, you can't eat" attitude

It's not an "attitude", it's a fact of life. In order for you to eat, a certain amount of work has to be done. Why should someone else do it if you're perfectly capable? We've already made it a lot easier for you by having a huge economy where you can do all sorts of things that can be traded for food, instead of having to grow all your own food yourself.

The attitude that really needs to be confronted is that the amount of work that needs to be done by some human in order for that human to eat is fixed. It isn't; technology can reduce it. (And in fact it already has, by quite a lot; that's why only about one in twenty people has to work at growing food today, compared with about 19 in 20 a couple of centuries ago.) But there are huge political barriers to technology reducing it further: governments meddle in all kinds of ways that artificially inflate the cost of getting enough food and other necessities. What we really need to do is stop doing that, so entrepreneurs like Sam Altman can use technology to make necessities so cheap that nobody will have to worry about UBI, because anyone who isn't actually disabled or otherwise incapable will be able to earn a living.
>The price of bitcoin disagrees with your assessment.

What does the price of bitcoin have to do with an objective assessment of how well the Bitcoin network is currently functioning?
Pfft! Smart aliens just send a couple of stealth probes, figure out our biology, and in short order program a simple virus that is dormant but highly contagious for about a year and then when incubation is over kills within 24 hours.

Ironically it’s not far off what was done to the Americas.

War is only an option when the sides are more or less evenly matched. We would not be anywhere near evenly matched with an interstellar civilisation.
The article makes a much more limited claim than what the headline suggests:

"the search for alien signals has so far found nothing in the 1.7 to 2.6GHz range"

Scanning continues.
Ask HN: Are governments obsolete?
I'm less bullish on that idea.

The issue is the cost of the service. You have to pay for those servers somehow and for updating the site to the latest versions of iOS or Windows or whatever.

There have been MANY attempts at implementing a 'paid FB' or just a straight attempt to tackle FB outright (Ello comes to mind). None have thus far worked. Not saying you can't try, but talk to the other creators out there first to learn from their mistakes.

Again, the issue is that servers cost money and you have to find the funding somehow. Ads are good at that. Subscription services aren't thus far, but Patreon may be changing things.

Still, with NN out the window now, I'd chill and wait to see how the dust settles.
I last got a prescription about 4 or 5 years ago, I haven't needed a new one since, my eyes haven't changed that much.

In that time, I've also bought 4 or 5 pairs of glasses, I got Specsavers to print off my prescription, and just buy them online.

It was interesting trying to get my prescription from Specsavers. By law, they are required to provide it if I ask for it, but they really didn't want to make it easy. They actually make a loss on eye tests ($30 for 20 minutes of an optometrist), because all their profit is in the glasses, so if I take my prescription elsewhere, I'm costing them money.
I understand taking leadership to change a culture is a difficult task. But when you have the actual means and influence to do it and choose not to do so, you do hold some responsibility for the results.

HN does in fact reflect on YC and Sam, whether you want it to or not. It's their site. And in a different way than Youtube is Larry and Sergey's site (something I at least hope you understand), though even they don't escape responsibility for what shows up there.
It doesn't matter. No matter how convincing your argument is, we can't afford to risk the entire world on you being right. The stakes are too high.

And I think you are very wrong. Aliens don't need to be anything like us. Don't anthropomorphize them. They might have nothing like our morality or care for other sentient life forms. And just see us as a pest and potential future competition to snuff out.

Or if they do have morals, they could be completely alien. When the Europeans discovered the New World, one of the first things they did is try to forcibly convert the natives to their religion. They justified conquering and ruling over the natives to stop their savagery and impose their values and laws on them.
Agreed on the face-to-face point, but YC also used to have very strongly worded language on the FAQ that said, essentially, that setting your startup on the path to success meant moving to SV, due to the strong network effects. I can't find it now (probably because they've updated it) but it pretty closely tracked the language in this PG essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html
> HTML was never intended to be archival

This is about the exact opposite of archival: backwards compatibility. We don’t want to split the web into old web and new web. Having to switch browsers for decade old pages as we encounter them, raising the barrier to entry for that lore of old, effectively sepulchring it from the public.

99% of the web’s users are not going to understand when to switch browsers, how, nor why.
And this is universally agreed to be a bad situation.[1] Do not play word games.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/09/what-happene...
I don't think an abundance of negative, however vivid, intrusive thoughts could leave anyone in a positive state of amazement. Maybe if they were positive?
Yes. I am definitely paid. Totally anonymous. Hard to find any records of me online. Very astute observation.
Is anyone using javascript to write excel macros?

That functionality has been out but a while right?

Do people use it? What do they use it for? What makes them step back and reach for pandas or salesforce instead?

For me, working across multiple excel files sucks right now. Excels handling of datatypes kind of sucks. And pretty spreadsheets that people like looking at and working with have a bunch of annotation in them so you end up extracting the sub tables you need anyway - why not into csv/dataframes.

Tableu makes a lot of this better. Why not copy them instead of giving us another language to cheer about then ignore.

Why not integrate power bi more tightly with Excel and ship it in the basic version of office, then let us script in there?
This is explained in the article: the process of producing cement releases more CO2 than is subsequently absorbed when it cures.
The lawsuits have already started. The lawsuits will be covered by consumer interest groups, tech blogs, and tech news sites. So we will in fact be hearing a lot about this for the foreseeable future.
I as well deleted it off my phone. There is just nothing personal on it anymore. They are also ruining instagram. Too many ads, suggested posts etc. They are morphing it in facebook light. Everything is just bad auto roll food videos, UNILAD shit, and identity politics clickbait sob stories.

The only reason I still have facebook is for group chat messenger during the day, and to keep track of underground parties. One of those chats is moving to discord, and other kind of moved to iMessage. Messenger now has intrusive ads on it as well, I would leave it if I could.
Great read. Despite the damage they caused, there is a part of me that wishes (hopes) that their crimes are overlooked and instead put to use as white hat operatives in an elite super-secret government black program fighting terrorism and solving the world's most pressing problems; not ruining their lives with prison and all the other baggage associated with being branded criminals. Maybe I have watched too many movies!
Thanks and interesting. If you have written up your full system anywhere I would be interested to read more.
I am a big supporter of municipal fiber/broadband as a means to provide enough market competition such that net neutrality regulation is no longer needed.

You bring up a great point though, even if 100 of the biggest cities have municipal internet infrastructure, there are still lots of areas that wouldn't be covered and could benefit from basic NN regulation.

I don't necessarily think the issues are orthogonal, but I do think basic "don't be a dick" ISP regulations should be in place.