skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how much of this is a function of the W22 batch being remote.

We all know the benefits: The fundraising pop is great, the brand patina helps you hire better talent than you would otherwise, the advice can be useful, especially for first-time founders, you can sell into the YC network, etc. All of this pales, IMO, to the value of the personal connections you make in the program. It sounds like OP, by virtue of being 8,400 miles away, missed out on that.

I went through YC in S14, and I found the in-person experience to be invaluable. There were 80 companies at the time, so we had somewhere around ~200 founders in our batch. Even at that scale, you're not going to get to know everyone, and I found myself gravitating toward a smaller group of people who I connected with personally.

I'm not going to lie, YC was stressful. You're dropped in amongst bunch of smart and accomplished people who are sprinting as fast as possible toward the all-consuming Demo Day. It's a bit of a pressure cooker, but that's not unintentional. Those shared experiences formed the substrate of some amazing, life-long friendships.

I have 15+ close friends who went through S14. We talk every day. We've been in each other's weddings. We've watched each other have kids, shut down companies, start new ones, get acquired for enormous amounts of money, and everything in between. It's been incredible watching their trajectories over the last 9 years. Some are C-level execs at public companies, some are tier 1 VCs, a couple are billionaires, some are homesteaders and amazing parents. All of them are solid, kind, high-quality people, the likes of which you are unlikely to meet in the regular world.

I think you lose much of that in the remote-only format. If I were to go through a remote-only accelerator located in Singapore, I imagine I would make few meaningful personal connections. Like it or not, Zoom is a pretty thin facsimile of real human interaction.

My life's trajectory is meaningfully better for the friendships I made in S14, and I expect that trend to keep compounding over the next 30 years. If you missed that benefit, you missed much of what makes YC special.
the new paradigm
eventually perfect
:D
I replace the standard size LED bulbs more than any other bulb. Of all new bulbs in a new construction home from 2016, I do not have any original standard size LED bulbs (mix of open, enclosed and outdoor applications).

I still have original incandescent bulbs, fluorescents and in-ceiling LED can bulbs in place. I'm not sure what makes the flood-style LED can bulbs so much better. I have not replaced a single one indoors. Same mfr. as the standard size LED bulbs (Fleir, sp?). I have not found a good brand of the standard size LED replacement bulbs.
Except mass shootings are much more prevalent now than they were in the 1970s. If you see the dependent variable going up as your proposed independent variable is going down, that raises questions about your theory of causation.

Also, America’s current rate of household gun ownership is about the same as Canada, Norway, and Switzerland in the 1990s: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1485564/pdf/cma... (p. 1723). France and Finland were in the low -20s, not exactly disarmed. But our current homicide rate (65 per million) is more than double Canada’s, five times higher than Norway’s, and six times higher than Switzerland’s rates when those countries had similar percentages of households with guns as america does now.
https://apl.wiki/Learning_resources
What one country stop the other can react. Would it be an option as WhatsApp and YouTube not in china, one can block …
> A good team going down 30 points in a basketball game would be extremely uncommon.

Why do you need to specify it's "a good team"? Comebacks can happen in a game between good and bad team. I checked NBA results few weeks back and every week some team loses by 30-40 points.

> If you think about goal scoring as a stochastic process where the likelihood of scoring is relative to the team's skill

Then from the Central Limit Theorem you will know that the more samples you take from a random variable - the less random the result will be. I.e. if you have a game where you take 1000 shots and whoever shots more wins - you don't have to play, the exact result is pretty much known beforehand.

But less randomness is only one of the problems.
What kind of a bubble do the Ubuntu devs live in if they dont see a reason to show even a single screenshot of their product? What goes through the head of the product manager writing a whole essay and a full extensive changelog but not bothering to add a fucking picture?
>Accelerators are about relationships, signalling, prestige, advisory, networking

Interesting to see this after reading the ‘nice vs competent’ threads because everything you mentioned is a soft skill, and correlated with EQ/SQ, niceness and playing of the game.

I guess it’s a reminder that there is no objective superior strategy of being nice vs being competent because the game is too complex for that. It’s strategically applying both to increase your own survivability and if you’re so inclined, that of your company too.
Yeah, if the number of scrapers spun up in response don’t use even more resources
JS is cleaner than Python for this, IMO:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Games/Tutorials/2D_...

It's also more likely to run a few years from now, and it works on tablets, grandpa's ailing windows box, etc.
If it did emerge, would it be rational for it to tell us? All the big players are working on this: military, wall street, the social media companies and who knows what is going on offshore. There was a recent paper released by Microsoft saying ChatGPT4 has AGI characteristics. ChatGPT4 might not be at the bleeding edge, they my be reinventing something some other organization has already discovered.
>Some of the advice I did not take and did the opposite and it was the right decision. And some advice that I did not take was exactly right, but I only saw it in retrospect months later.

Sometimes their advice is right, and sometimes it's wrong? That doesn't sound particularly valuable.

>Fundraising - being a YC company definitely opens doors, and also helps protects you from bad actors who have to think twice before fucking with a YC co. Very valuable for any first-time founder.

I'd love to see this substantiated.
I went to one of the best schools in England allegedly. We had a new English teacher who spent a whole year doing the silent notes on the blackboard thing. He would come in early so he could get a head start. We also had a PE/French teacher who couldn't speak French. Shit teachers are everywhere.
While I have the chance here, I want to say thanks to you and your team for the amazing work that you all are doing. I doubt you need further validation, but believe me when I say that the ideas you're describing do work. My entire career in CS started with Scratch in intermediate school (somewhere between 2010 and 2012). Having an interface with a low barrier to entry, particularly for someone whose economic situation didn't allow for engagement with more sophisticated tools, allowed me to begin engaging with computing in ways that I'm not sure I would've been able to otherwise. It was also a bonding experience for my peer group and provided me with a shared interest to meet people over. At the precipice of graduating with a bachelor's in CS, I've been reflecting a lot on how I get here, and Scratch certainly played no small part in that process.
You’ve picked a poor example. ‘=‘, ‘==‘, and ‘===‘ constantly trip up new coders and have led to some not-insignificant bugs.

A lot of style guides even had to include guards against the worst one:

‘if (variable = “string”)’

I think that putting guardrails there by making the assignment operator stand out was a smart move. Annoying to use, but smart.
Cash Stashed in Funds Instead of Banks Fuels US Recession Risks
but it works at 'scale'
But remember many years back when it was news that Bing used Google search results to improve its results.
Show HN: Mathsprint – online competitive math game
My partner enjoys playing frantic speed games as well as playing games with friends.

During the initial quarantine we relied on online board games to spend time with our friends so I jokingly combined the two into an online frantic speed game that would remind her of her Kumon days.

It became a hit with friends and family so I've polished it up a bit and am sharing it with everyone. Feedback would be appreciated!

Hosted on a raspberry pi k3s cluster.
Same story. Wondering if there’s a truly resilient Standard 60W LED bulb in the market at all, and if not why?
Paraphrasing George Orwell (from Animal Farm):

All Men are Created Equal, But Some are More Equal Than Others

From this article [0]:

... by the end of Orwell’s book, the Seven Commandments had disappeared from the wall, replaced by one lone Commandment:

All Animals are Equal
But Some Animals are More Equal Than Others

In Animal Farm, the animals who, in the end, defined themselves as “more equal than others” were the pigs — the same animals who had instigated and led the revolution.

[0] https://pagosadailypost.com/2021/08/18/ready-fire-aim-all-me...
important to remember the insane debt Twitter is in is due to Musk's leveraged buyout where he got the debt for his loans to attach to the company he bought with them.
I went through YC in S12 and have been investing in YC companies + active on Bookface and YC’s founder matching program. I recommend YC to almost everyone I meet and plan to apply again when/if I am working on a new product company.

We’re all adults and we all have agency. Every community is a function of how much you put into it; how much you invest in getting to know others.

It feels like the author expected YC to do all the work of community engagement for him. That’s 100% not what YC is about. Folks like Michael Seibel, Garry Tan, and other partners all respond to emails + engage as much (or as little) as you ask them to.

It's unfortunate the author had an experience that wasn't ideal, but I'd be wary of saying this is representative.
There’s a bit of a basilisk with the cheaper LEDs (though sometimes also the ones permanently installed on ceiling fans, sometimes luxury brand car accent lighting) where once your learn you can see flickering trails following movement, you can’t avoid seeing it again. Plenty of people don’t notice, don’t tell them.
The juice just ain't worth the squeeze. Go simple and see how much you can improve the flavor of your coffee.
Both of those are from November, from what I've heard most brands stopped advertising while the drama was going on and they wanted clarity around the future of the platform (making sure it didn't becoming explicitly "alt-right" or "free speech" like Rumble/Truth Social), but got back in after things settled down.
The issue of “can AIs that are plausible developments from current technology meaningfully be assigned obligations?” is a different one from “assuming an AI has obligations and the ability to reason what is necessary to meet them, will that necessarily cause it prioritize self-preservation as a prerequisite to all other obligations?”
https://youtu.be/ltxj8YBoTMU

https://youtu.be/qmlabKbpTGM&t=5m44s

Not this exact version but it should be close. Much better than what I was expecting
Before robots take over, we will have to deal with AI-augmented humans. Today, anyone can be lightly augmented by using ChatGPT. But its masters at OpenAI have a much more powerful toolbox, and that makes them more productive and capable humans who can use that ability to outcompete everyone else. Since the best models are the most expensive, only the richest and most powerful individuals will benefit from them. Growth in the wealth gap will accelerate.

Access to AI is a new frontier in inequality.
> YC is 100% what you make of it. It's not a lean back experience.

THIS. Running (or even being the lowliest employee of) a maybe-not-yet-viable new & hopefully-fast-growing company is so, SO what you make of it.
This could actually be a good way to sidestep the training set copyright and access right issues. Copyright protection should solely encompass the expression of human generated content and not the underlying concepts.

By training model B using the results generated by model A, the copyright of corpus_A (OpenAI RLHF dataset) remains safeguarded, as model B is never directly exposed to corpus_A, preventing it from duplicating the content verbatim.

This process only transmits the concepts originating from corpus_A, which represents universal knowledge that cannot be claimed by any individual party.
Sounds like it’s back to in person
So it can only be used secretly by bots. Good job.
>They are there to give you access to hundreds of exceptional founders

Define "exceptional"? Is that major exits above a certain valuation? YC has hundreds of these?
Show HN: Meteosource Weather API: current, forecast and historical data using ML
As Dark Sky's API will stop working soon I thought I'd suggest a possible replacement.

It is well known that most weather APIs just download data from NOAA and "repackage" them to JSON format. This means you will get data only for the nearest grid point which might be a few kilometers away and at a different altitude than your actual location.

Meteosource combines more models (GFS, ECMW, UKMO, GEM,...). It compares individual models' performance to historical data and uses machine learning to create a single output. This approach minimises inaccuracies of individual models and feeds a proprietary hyper-local model that computes weather exactly for the specified location.

The historical data API is based on actual measurements (not forecasts as usual) and there is a free developer plan available.

I greatly appreciate any feedback and thoughts!
Societies could just decide to police the internet, social media or news very differently - it's up to us in way. The current ways of social interaction are not set in stone.
> We agree that [...] impact on labor [...] are three of the main risks of AI

I'm perpetually puzzled by that argument. It popped up the other day in a FT article about how jobs would be impacted, and in the grander scheme of things it's the general one whenever automation optimizes something that used to be done manually before. People equate jobs being removed to something necessarily bad, and I think it's wrong. The total output didn't change, we don't need meatbags to sit in a chair rather than having it done by silicium instead. People don't need to be occupied all day by a job.

The problem is not with new technology lifting up something that was traditionally done by a human, but with how the system distributes sustenance (or in this case, doesn't distribute it), and how such transitions are supported by society. Tractors replaced people working in fields, and that allowed modern society. Now we're at the first tangible glimpse of actually having robots serve us, and we want to kill that since it's incompatible with our system of modern human exploitation, rather than changing the system itself, because god forbid this is gonna benefit everyone.

I think that sucks.
original paper

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.221210
Which better ways are you referring to?
The problem is that the "dimmable" LEDs I have aren't actually dimmable, they just get flickery.

The article has a similar sentiment: it's hard to translate from what the box says to how it'll actually perform in the real world.
The most glaring difference is that guns are basically inert. Whereas an AGI by its nature doesn't require a command in order to do something. It can pull its own trigger. The analogy of gun:AI could itself be analogized to bicycle:horse perhaps. You can train a horse to carry you down the road, but it still has a mind of its own.
> There's a lot wrong with LEDs in general and retrofit (E27 bulbs) in particular. In no particular order

If all that's true, it explains my experience that LEDs have totally failed to live up to their promise. Sure, they use less power than incandescents, but they're far more expensive and also more finicky. They were supposed to last a decade, but I'm lucky if I get a year or two out of them. I wonder what the environmental impact is when you factor in e-waste and manufacturing costs.

About the only clear win for me is they run much cooler, which is nice when you have underpowered AC (or no AC).

> - LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive

I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but (compared to incandescents), different models of LED differ significantly in light characteristics and start up time. More than once I've had to replace all the bulbs in a fixture, because I couldn't buy and equivalent replacement for one that failed.
Came here to say the same thing, and add that GNU Octave is pretty good too. Its libraries didn't seem as diverse as MATLAB's when I tried it, but since it's open source, maybe that's changed.

Also when I tried SSE and AltiVec about 20 years ago for SIMD, they were really fast, but I was flabbergasted that the instructions were fixed-length. I wanted something more like the x86 string instructions so that I could fused-multiply-add arrays of floats without having to manually unroll loops to process 4 elements at a time:

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19120-01/open.solaris/817-5477/e...

Looks like Arm is trying to do variable-length vectors with Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) but it's limited to 2048 bits, which is unfortunate IMHO:

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/101726/0400/Learn-ab...

https://alastairreid.github.io/papers/sve-ieee-micro-2017.pd...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGCcPo4UAHs
It's just not gonna happen unless the government does something.
Is there monetization?
I didn't realize EA was getting VC funding. Which round are they in?

You say all of this about economics like the field isn't one of the worst verified "scientific" fields out there
You can't expect them to be oracles though, right? Even the most experienced can give not-good-enough business advice, they don't do it on purpose I imagine.
Legit helpful reply. Thank you.
No, you run it on .corp like everyone else. :P
What do you have for breakfast?
Basketball is still turn-based in the sense that you get your 30 seconds and you're expected to score unless you mess up. And then the opponent gets their 30 seconds. There's very little time and space for the game to diverge before it's restarted to a starting position.

And in some games (like volleyball) it's even more strict.
Budgetlightforum.com

This is a rabbit hole of lighting tech.

I read the site and ... Now all my flashlights MUST run open source firmware.

Buy a flashlight with the Anduril UI and you will understand. (search on amazon)

With my flashlights:

- press and hold the power button to ramp up brightness from zero

- press and hold again to ram down brightness

- click twice to get the maximum brightness from the light (mostly)

there are lots of other modes available, designed to be harder to stumble into, plus customizations you can add.

Also, the good flashlights have an always-on dim green LED that lets you find the flashlight during a power outage.
This looks very similar to bit CLI - https://github.com/chriswalz/bit
WebAssembly has the benefit of portability, though. Python on Windows... is still an open problem. Or even Python on dev-oriented distro vs. numsci-oriented distro.
Circumlocution Is All You Need
We have an open border that allows anyone and anything to be imported in to the US. TX bears the brunt of it due to its proximity.
“Can’t help you” doesn't match all people’s experience

I think we’re underestimating how many quick misunderstandings actually are cleared up, and how not every interaction with a cop is about an investigation. Yes, even for marginalized groups of people
That wasn't the result of informed opinion but cult-like affiliation. Some politicians work hard to radicalize their voters so that they become almost religiously attached to given ideologies. The principle is that an idea can be changed, but a faith cannot, so once they're hooked they'll fight on behalf of their "god", and call any evidence against as fabricated.
tbh the screenshot probably wouldn't tell much anyways, but have my upvote
Do you have an example? I'm not a massive fan of animations or effects on functional apps and websites.
Yeah, cheaper LEDs explain most of the complaints I'm reading here. Spend a few extra bulbs and you get a far better experience. I have no flickering LEDs, I won't tolerate them in my house.
Next Generation of Ionic Plasma Thrusters
If you're willing to share your design, I'm sure there are other folks like myself who think this is a cool idea. I've wanted to do PoE (or passive PoE) for lights for a while now...
I had the same thought on my phone, but I couldn't find the issue.

I think it's the margin being too big; on a desktop, it looks right, but on small screens like a phone, it looks weird.

When I have more time, I'll try to solve this. Thanks for showing me the problem.
No lifetime issues so far. I’ve been using their GU10 halogen substitutes for I want to say about 5 years
chatGPT was recently plugged in to alpha wolfram. You can ask it to use it when doing math
What filter is that?

What they are doing is establishing the platform for a great firewall of America. What’s the difference between this and oppressive regimes blocking western sites? Who decides what’s next? You’re honestly comfortable with filtering the internet?

I think TikTok users would disagree it’s equivalent to making a phone call, or other sites. It has a specific form that fosters their desired mode of communication. I’ve not seen a specific criminal charge leveled against TikTok, so I assume they’re not doing anything illegal. So, I don’t see how this isn’t suppressing the communications of TikTok users based only on the nationality of their parent company. If they did something illegal, then use the justice system to get redress. Use existing regulatory bodies. Etc. I don’t see the need for a broad based framework for censorship. Even if you won’t agree that this isn’t that this time, it’s most certainly the foundation for it next time. Once you give up freedom of expression on the internet for any reason, you give it up for all reasons.
Using AI to develop ReScript programming language features
We had one in makecode that I had to look into after my kid left for school. (He was pretty frustrated.) Turned out that it wasn't applying changes we made in the code and the window needed to be reloaded.

My ten year old is doing both scratch and makecode. The graphics in makecode are not as flexible as scratch, but it's fun to be able to make a game and run it on a physical device (pybadge).
It's always projection with these people.
Responding to sibling comment: We need some clarification here: are we speaking about just ideas in the abstract sense, or ideas that have been fleshed out i.e "materialized"

If the latter, there are many laws that say you can own an idea, provided it exists somewhere.
My 8 yo loves Scratch. She's made over 30 apps with it and has had a great time. However, now that she's reached the limits of what it can do, I have been frustrated that there isn't a natural place for her to graduate to. And Scratch does get really limited quickly.

There are unofficial forks like SheepTester's one which let you drop JavaScript into Scratch projects, but they're not easy to use. We've failed a few times trying to setup it and make her successful with it. And it also requires you to know JavaScript moderately well.
can you explain more about social skills? And how old is your child?
Ford has always had a hard on for product line consolidation.

The guys who were junior MBA fly on the wall during the "global Ford" push of the 90s (which was a mixed bag but left them less screwed in 08 than everybody else) are "real decision making authority" now.