skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(part III)

But my real mistake - in my own opinion - was not so much being under-funded, as it were my own personal issues. Personal issues that prohibited me from from reaching out to investors. Issues that prohibited me from creating a team that could cover for my many shortcomings as an entrepreneur. An inflated sense of ego, I would never allow myself while working on someone elses dime. A bloated sense of self-entitlement leading to arrogant "Fuck it! We'll do it live!!!" type decisions. I am asshole, tremble in the presence of my lack of introspection.

It has been an immensely valuable learning experience, in a very real, pragmatic "this doesn't work; this does" kind of a way, but my most valuable lesson was: I am not an entrepreneur. I do not possess the qualities needed to run a company. Maybe I will someday, but if I don't, I'll survive. I also dreamed about being Captain of a Star Cruiser, and I survived not fulfilling that dream :)

I am definitely not done with start-ups, but will focus on a supporting role. I am Beta, tremble in my supportive presence ;)

If this post can inspire some of you to share your stories of failure, I would feel some value has come out of it. And long as this post may seem, I haven't really described any specifics of my road to failure, but I'm very happy to field any questions this esteemed community might have.

My Failure-app: http://openpanels.net

Thanks for letting me ramble!
Active Admin 0.5.0 has been released
You can try http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=441 as well
Haskell's Either type is conventionally used exactly like that--pretend that Right val is Just val and Left err is Error err.

The reason it doesn't have those names is because it is more general; you can also use Either to model things like early termination. The generic names just make it clearer that it isn't exclusively for error handling unlike exceptions. In other languages using exceptions for more generic control flow is considered poor style, but in Haskell using Either for non-error cases is completely reasonable.
For me, the website does a terrible job of intuitively explaining the proposition.
Not sure I understand it entirely, but an exchange for under-utilized capacity is not a replacement for the current monetary system.
FB can grow either by increasing it user base as you suggest, or by monetizing it's users better. So if it say increases usage by 5x and monetization by 5x you are looking at a 25x multiplier. Will this happen, I have no idea.
I thought Wikipedia hates sites like this. The do more harm than good.
طريقة شحن موبايلي من النت
"A blunt dose of awareness would go a long way in helping people understand the situation."

You seem to confuse corporations for citizens.
Why not spend the afternoon figuring out a freemium vs. paid model, 15 minutes to setup Stripe, a few days setting up an LLC/Inc + Banking account all the while integrating?

Worst case you're out a few hundred bucks for the company formation, best case you start making money.
Are you serious about college algebra? in France this is taught in middle school
Trees are connected acyclic graphs, so knowledge could be both. ;)
It's all supposed to be in the contract. If it's not, then the most likely court scenario is that the IP is owned by the client, creator would have rights to display it, but their work would be considered a service.
I think "easily readable" is quite a stretch, but I do like the new format and the fact that they're putting effort into improving their ToS. It looks much better than that of most places.
I've been thinking about this for a while, in more general terms. Last year I had an issue with my eye. I bumped around from doctor to doctor (including one eye specialist) for nine months, for at least half of that period on two different antibiotics and a ten minute a day eye cleaning ritual. Finally when nothing seemed to be working I was bumped up to an eye doctor at a bigger hospital two hours away. Within a minute of seeing me, he had a diagnosis. It involved no medicine at all, cleared up the problem within 48 hours, and still seems to be working fine nearly ten months later.

My thinking is that a properly programed medical diagnosis expert system probably could have figured out the issue by the second or third trip to the doctor. Further, my guess is that a nurse who has been properly trained to use such a system would be at least as accurate as your average doctor.

Unfortunately, my next guess is that any such system would be opposed by the medical establishment and quickly sued into non-existence by patients it made mistakes on (even if the rate of such mistakes was significantly below that of normal doctors).
If that's true statement, then there should be evidence, right? I don't have a citation, but I do know that there have been several studies of jury effectiveness. A cursory look at a few of them seems to indicate that they are effective.
Cleaning Services London
Worth to say thou that the real price was 42$ in fact. I bought via my bank and I could not get a trade confirmation for days (even big banks like UBS did sue about this) so it was more 42$ than 38$ for the few unlucky :)
That's a good maxim to live by, but lies come in different flavors. Are they not improving conditions at all or just not in the amount they claim they are? Are they just throwing all the recycling material they get in the dumpster or they recycle less than claimed?

I expect the latter in both cases, which put them in a better ethical standpoint than many competitors, who are just as readily patent trigger happy and actually use minor labor and recycle nothing at all.
ResumUP beautifully visualizes not just your resume but also your future career
Whether or not "finding another way to connect with merchants" or connect merchants with users is "important" is pretty subjective, wouldn't you agree? Considering that the most well known options out there have essentially degraded into yoga/spa coupon services, and have left both vendors and users pretty dissatisfied, I'd say there is plenty of room for improvement.

Also, have you considered that it may be a different class of problem solver with entirely different skill sets that should be solving these "real problems"? I think that trying to find a way to better connect vendors and customers is a problem that I could potentially solve. Getting people into outer space? Not so much.

Furthermore, I would argue that overall, something trivial like facebook has had a greater impact on "the human experience" thus far, than Space X or Tesla motors. Maybe not a popular opinion, but it's probably true.
Wikipedia is a dense oriented graph, no wonder it has many cycles. What's the big deal?
Don't blame the jurors. They're just regular folks who are earnestly trying do their best as though they're performing a civic duty. In reality, they're being played like a fiddle.

Instead, blame the f'ed patent system, the lawyers who exploit it for every last dime, and the companies that wield patents as a weapon against competition. We've come a very, very long way from the true meaning and intent of intellectual property protection.
Okay, I feel crazy but I definitely thought the IPO was $50, or I'm positive that I read that somewhere. Looking on google it seems like that was the expected price jump on the first day.
The bigger picture is that factorization is decomposition. Depending on the domain, that can mean different things.

In geometry, factoring a polynomial in x and y decomposes its curve into a union of subcurves. The curve of xy = 0 is the union of the curves of x = 0 (vertical line through origin) and y = 0 (horizontal line through origin), so the curve of xy = 0 is a pair of crossing lines with a double point at the origin. Similarly, a complete factorization of f(x) decomposes the intersection of y = f(x) and y = 0 into a union of points (the linear factors). But what about irreducible quadratics like x^2 + 1? From a geometrical perspective, they're an algebraic nuisance that goes away with complex numbers.

In linear time-invariant systems, a factorization of a transfer function corresponds to a serial decomposition of the system because of the convolution theorem. The most interesting case is when the system is recursive, so that the transfer function is a general rational function (a ratio of polynomials) and you have feedback loops in the block diagram. A parallel decomposition corresponds to a partial fraction expansion, which is based on division and factorization. These decompositions can also be mixed, so you can take a transfer function that is a ratio of sextics, factor them into a pair of cubic ratios (serial decomposition) and then break each of those halves into partial fractions (parallel decomposition).

In calculus, the partial fraction expansion lets you integrate all rational functions once you know how to integrate functions of the form x^n for any integer n, positive or negative.

I could give more examples, in probability theory (characteristic functions and moment-generating functions), in combinatorics (generating functions), in the theory of linear differential equations (the Laplace transform diagonalizes shift-invariant operators like differentiation, so differential equations become algebraic equations), etc.
I understand that the meaning of species as it stems from Linnaeus is unlikely to be useful in the DNA age

Actually it is more useful than ever.

Genetically there is no line in the sand between one species and all others. That's how everything evolves.

Only practically do you have a chance to draw a line in the sand between two groups of animals. And keep in mind it is possible for A + B to have fertile offspring, and B + C too, but not A + C. Freaky, but that's biology for you.

That's why a practical kludge like "fertile with itself, but not with others" is the best definition to use.
I would say that the discriminant method is taught at the same time as factoring, when we prove why this "b^2-4ac" is so interesting.
It's clear why computer enthusiasts who oppose the current software patent system (I count myself among them) would see things this way, but I put the word "Legally" in front of that sentence for a reason: to the law, there's no such thing as a "conflict of interest" in support of the law. The law is the law.
Seems like there is an even older link here on HN
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584896
In an article from 2004, the author of Freakonomics argued that we should do exactly that: "Should we punish juries that get it wrong?"

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2003/0...
That's just as much Samsung's fault as it is Apples. They could have dismissed this guy or any other juror, possibly without giving an explanation, or they could have argued that he wouldn't be impartial.

It bothers me that we seem to be attacking the jurors as if they were appointed in this case via back-door-meetings between the government and apple. Didn't Samsung get the opportunity to interview the candidates? Were they allowed to remove potential jurors from the pool? If this was the jury they all agreed on then the people to be angry at is Samsung's pool of lawyers, not the jurors they selected (or rather, jurors they didn't dismiss).
Profit seems to be priority. Innovation led to this profit.
Apple=innovation
What keeps the stock up is the idea that one day they may do something other than ads, and sell something to their user base.

I don't know if there is an example of a public internet company that was able to transition from being an ad-base business into selling stuff. The closest may be LinkedIn, who's selling recruiter tools and premium memberships. However, LinkedIn had been doing that before the IPO, as a relatively small company.

I'm skeptical that Facebook can pull this off in a reasonable time frame, but shareholders who are psychologically anchored to the IPO price are probably more optimistic.
ASK HN: Jobs for Foreigners in the US
How can a Lebanese (foreigner to USA) software developer, (currently working in the iOS field, but with fairly diverse experience) get a job in the US.
I am interested in the paper-work side of it as well as applying to jobs, interviews and so on.
This app seems to use similar paradigm to Campaign Monitor's superb template builder, going slightly further even and providing a completely blank canvas from which the user can create and design an email. I think this can work really well in some scenarios.

For us we've found that the workflow for creating a professional HTML email is more often that a marketing/design department create a design and then the web department receive a PSD or TIFF that they have to HTML-ify. I think web apps like yours are really targetted at a different kind of user and workflow where the assumption is that the web department will be designing and buidling the email from scratch within one tool.

The one thing we wanted to avoid with Mailrox was trying to reinvent Photoshop or Illustrator as part of a web app. This means that providing a blank canvas to create an email was never really part of the grand vision - most professional designers are not going to give up their Adobe products without a fight. What we wanted to do was focus on creating a tool that does a really good job of letting you take an exisitng design and turn it in to bulletproof code. All this without actually having to code and faff about with tables, layout and multiple painful trips to tools like Litmus to ensure client compatibility. With Mailrox all you have to do is slice up an image and export it ready for your favourite mailing list app. It's dead easy.
> The fastest way to increase hiring and salaries would be to produce fewer graduates ...

Yes -- this kind of manipulation is often seen in medicine, where professional associations of doctors do what they can to reduce the supply of new graduates.

But absent the above effect and ironically, in spite of the clear economic value of technical degrees, they're difficult seats to fill within a university. My theory about this is that students don't understand economic issues until after they've graduated.
I had seen your earlier comments and asked Googlers how hard they thought it was to change projects. They said they hadn't ever encountered another company that made it easier to change project than Google does, and wanted to know if you had encountered such a company.
i started with "The Tyger" and got this:

The Tyger
William Blake
Romanticism
Industrial Revolution
United Kingdom
Britain (placename)
Great Britain

shrug apparently, william blake is indisputable.

m3mnoch.
Because I'm passionate about what I do for a living and want to practice it daily. I'm also passionate enough to share it with others. But when sharing it with others becomes a full-time job, you no longer get to practice it. 80% practicing, 20% sharing is a pretty good ratio in my book.

Plus being a teacher has become an institutionalized career, full of needless bureaucracy that in many cases sucks the fun out of what is fun about that job.

I think Google could try something out in this space as a way to attract more talent, maybe by allowing employees who are parents to set up a school taught by other Googlers in their 20% time. If I had a kid already, I would definitely want to join Google if it meant my kid would be taught by the really smart people that work there.

FWIW, I worked as a teacher for 1.5 years. English language teaching to ~11 year olds for 6 months and presentation skills to graduate students for 1 year.
http://human.io/docs perhaps?
Announcing Enyo 2.0.1
That depends entirely on the specific contract and the jurisdiction. There's no automatic assumption of copyright transfer in the UK, what you have is an implied license to use (normally). It's quite possible you would be justified, although I'd take issue with the word "stole".
That's one of IBM's plans for Watson: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/ibm-watson/
Pretty silly - the sewage treatment company could use willows if they worked in bulk. Instead they use settling and digestors. Still open-air in our town. Sludge is used as landfill and sometimes fertilizer/soil amendment. What's the difference?
OK, and this game http://spu.co/get-to-philosophy was played at least as far back as August 2010.
I agree, I doubt anybody that doesnt have a law degree would really know how to interpret any of these laws in a normal environment with google to help, let alone being on the jury of a high publicity dispute like this with all that added pressure
GOTO's use in Fortran has continued to be deprecated for several decades.

One might say that they are not Fortrany in the way that conditionals are Lispy.
Mayan EDMS development source code back online
Here's a link Eric's "Don't be the Ice Cream Glove" blog post: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/09/dont-be-ice-cre....

(I remember it well. It was one of the articles I used to test on of the iterations of our book generator when we were first producing http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned. I must have read this 100 times :).
Are there any interesting/useful engineering applications of the recursive ones you mention?
You're making the assumption that a vacuum can't be wrapped in your hand.
Though I'm thinking a simple perforated tube which sucks the air out would act as a vacuum.
Cool stuff I hope you go on with it! Also worth to check out "The Mouth" from Native Instruments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzyr66QhrOw
I went to lengths to not give an actual judgement here, and you come back at me personally. Awesome job.

Again, do not rely on that which was to judge that which is. Do your homework and don't assume things are the same.
Critical Vulnerability in Java 7 Patch Hours After Release
Has any other country gone the same way, even without going as far as providing a consumer version ?

In Germany, there is the "Merkel-Phone", a.k.a Simko 3, which is based on Android: http://www.ikuye.com/?/projects/SiMKo/

According to a tech talk by one of the developers, they are running several VMs to achieve separation: a BSD derivate for the network access, and one or two Android instances for private/office use.
Nice!

Although that does make me wonder... what if Government organizations had to use something like Kickstarter to get funding?
Nice demo, but I think it is an incorrect asumption that the first link is to a broader subject. For example, for Perú it says: "It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil" So Perú->Ecuador left me with a big wtf..

http://wikiloopr.com/Peru
Preaching to the choir. :) But my point is that I doubt she will have experienced enough of that to miss it.
In my experience the 18 months 'rule' is much more a guideline than a hard rule. I've personally seen a number of cases where someone transferred much sooner than that for a variety of reasons.

If you approach situations like this in a constructive and professional manner, the company will go to great lengths to find a solution. At least that's been my experience.
Ask HN: Where I can find the equivalent of an extension for another browser?
I wonder if there is a site where you can find the equivalent of an extension in Firefox to Chrome and vice versa.
Connectify Dispatch - Ass-kicking the network for Automatic Failover Protection
> they own the work

Depending on the contract. If there's no explicit copyright transfer, chances are that they don't.
Thanks for your perspective. I should have mentioned this is a software engineering position.
You may say this but it is wrong to believe this. The discriminant is not taught when factoring is taught. Indeed, any quadratic can be factored over the complex numbers but this is beyond the students' mathematical prowess at the time we teach factoring. It's why we say to beginning algebra students that x^2 + 1 is prime but we show college algebra students that it can be factored over the complex numbers.
Hi all! Author here. Didn't expect to see this on HN so early this morning :).

Lots of good feedback, I'll try to answer some of it collectively here.

HN readers who can spit out the quadratic formula in their sleep aren't the real audience for this article :). It's someone googling "Why are we factoring all the time?".

A high-level question needs a high-level answer before diving in. I'm not a fan of "Because that's where the graph touches the x-axis" because it again leads to... Why does touching the x-axis matter?

My intuition is that we have a system and we have something we want it to become. The trick is to track the difference as its own system, write it as interlocking parts, and break any of the parts.

"How do we break a chain?" => we break any of the links. Intuitively, that's what we're enabling when we factor an equation into a series of multiplications. I'm probably going to continue to reword the explanation, but that is fundamentally why we bother rewriting as a series of multiplications.

On rigor and simplicity: guilty as charged. I believe you need to become intuitively comfortable with an idea, even if slightly incorrect, before getting into the nuance.

We tell kids a cat is a furry animal that has claws and a tail. Later, we refine to say they're all descendants of a common ancestor. Later we say there's this thing called DNA which holds genetic information, and all cats have DNA in common.

See this article for more:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/developing-your-intuitio...

I go into the 4 rigorous and common definitions of e, something which confused me (and many, many engineering students) for years. But approaching with intuition it all snaps together.

Again, that's my teaching style though! It's been very successful for me and other students. Rigor is always available on Wikipedia and Mathworld if you need it.
Brazil Enacts Affirmative Action Law for Universities
True, the "wikipedia loop" itself is not a new discovery. But still, congrats for coming up with a nice GUI to demonstrate it!
Hi Lmm,

Thanks. There is no exit plan for the current business. The goal is to have someone to run the operation which a salary + bonus based on business performance.

I don't think it is odd to insist on complete control on a proven established business growing 30% month by month.

If I can built a MVP and proven it, do I still need technical co-founder? What do most people do at this stage? I can't imagine people like Paul Allen or Bill Gates were doing all the coding when Microsoft is grossing $1.3 million with 13 employees in 1978.
How OS X Won and Linux Lost the Desktop
Software Controversies For Fun and Discussion
This is the first time I've heard someone say that a jury can set a legal precedent. I thought only judges, or courts of judges can do that in any meaningful way.
To be clear: yequalsx said Anyone who thinks of using x-intercepts to explain this probably has had some College Algebra. The topic in the article is usually covered in Beginning Algebra. So x-intercepts are taught in middle school, but the idea of using them to explain this particular problem probably wouldn't occur to someone with such little experience.
Cloud Fundamentals Video Series
As someone who lost vision in their left eye during their teenage years from a paintball accident, this kind of news is really, really exciting. It sounds like we're a bit far from this being viable as the patient can only see certain lights and shapes, but it's certainly a great stride.
Ask HN: Any "Rockstars" + Developers Out There?
If you are the mythical "rockstar" developer, that's great but if you are an awesome developer that also wants to be a rockstar, even better.

I'm searching for a technical lead (full stack developer)for my startup focusing on social musical instrument discovery.

If talking about guitars and microphones, or even trombones and kazoos is almost as exciting as talking about API's and git repositories, then we should talk. Take a look at the MVP at http://tonall.com.

Want to talk more, get in touch - brett@tonall.com
http://wikiloopr.com/Antidisestablishmentarianism
Damnit - you're comment made me snarf coffee all over my laptop. :-)
Yes. Dr. House, MD.