skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And design. Probably not the best example for Dave's arguments.
The whole analogy to sports players is confusing and unnecessary, though it probably attracts more views. He claims that 500 Startups focuses more on teaching rather than finding the best talent, yet Ichiro was already a huge star in Japan before he came over to the Seattle Mariners for a sizeable posting fee. Then, the point about consistently "hitting singles" and getting on base more often as opposed to hitting homeruns is strange considering Barry Bonds has one of highest on-base percentages in league history. The steroid issue that clouded the legitimacy of Bonds's career also muddles the message the blog post is trying to convey; in comparing Bonds with YC, casts YC in a negative light, though probably unintentionally.
Erlang is Erlang.

Go is Go, but golang is handy nickname.
Thanks for watching. We didn't try running Mongo off of SSDs. We're on AWS, and we were using Mongo long before SSD storage was available. I suspect SSDs would help quite a bit with cold starts, albeit at a significant additional cost.
That wasn't how I read the black swan farming piece. From what I remember he pointed out how total returns for the fund are dominated by the black swans. Then he discussed what yc would (theoretically) look like if they were going to try to optimize for black swans but conceded that they wouldn't really want to run yc that way. In a way I think the piece flouted the concept of black swans by saying they were something you could optimize for (which I think taleb would disagree with).

Regardless, the unpredictability of black swans and their potential impact on a fund's returns show the ridiculousness of Dave trying to frame this discussion as "Barry bonds vs ichiro".
If anybody would like a copy of the slides (sans video), I've made them available here: http://rob.by/2012/migrating-to-riak-at-shareaholic
Thanks. I didn't think it added up :)
I have lurked/read hacker news for a few years before creating an account, and frankly, stories like this have always made the front page, MORE frequently in the past if anything.

If you look for an issue, you will surely find one.
Beardsnapper: take a photo upon git commit (linux)
"This distinction means that Apple/Amazon's interests are more aligned with consumers than Google's."

Not necessarily. It simply means they have more incentive tying you down to their 'product' and stifle any competition. Google on the other hand couldn't care less about what device you use as long as you use their services.
Is it a case of HTML5 is a future disruptor, providing platforms don't try to subdue it in preference to Native? A good example is in mobile tech where a lot of apps that used data pre 3G performed poorly because the underlying technological dependencies (the data pipes, memory limitations and processing power) were not ready. Secondarily, the business models were not ready either (pay per MB).

Maybe HTML5 is in a similar position, may work well for web, but mobile app eocsystems are not yet technologically ready for it to be disrupted. We see it time and time again in history where a new tech takes a while before it becomes good enough to break through (CMOS vs CCD), (HDD vs Floppy vs Tape). (Mainframe -> PC -> Cloud)
Is your site broken? There is no demo, no call-to-action, nothing...
I'm afraid there's too much hay to be made from your essay, both because of the content and because the author. In the HN discussion honest (AFIAK) misreadings were rife so it isn't surprising to see someone with an agenda try to pick up the ball and run with it.
That is facebook's biggest mistake?

Is he blind or just wilfully ignorant?
Could it be a multi-player Battleship-style game? A player enters his player ID ("agent number") to play. Once all of a player's assets have been destroyed it becomes "compromised".
If you're looking for unpromising-ness + determination, how do you avoid the thesis devolving into "invest in everyone that's smart and determined since you just never know"?
What justification could they possibly have had for wanting to see your pay stubs, other than looking for ways they could stiff you?

Did you reply saying anything like "I'm happy to provide proof of current employment." ?
The Difference Between “Entrepreneur Friendly” and Straight Up Coddling
Understood, the parent comment is deleted. Also, understood the gist of what you are saying. But the words, as they are written, as a counter argument fail. And by that, I mean his over-broad statement you are replacing with another overbroad statement. What is left, lacks the resolution to differentiate. There is no insight into what makes a good X.

One thing that does make a good X is talent scouting, and being a mentor to a professional going through a rapid growth/maturity curve. There is an art to finding talent and building relationships. There is an art to segueing those relatinships to finding the right fit for talent Z within the developmet system. Art dealers or A&R reps have similar dynamics, its not particular to sport.

So, while this was latent information, it is much more powerful and interesting to determinig the performance of X than your proposed alternate formulation ("think of them as [...]"). The baby goes out with the bathwater.

Institutional investors as a class are not expert at all in this. Institutional investors as a class talent spot from 3-5 top MBA programs. Institutional investors as a class know about working in the system. They may or may not know shit about running a company, disrupting the system, shoestring budget, etc. In general, VCs are not like Institutional Investors as a class. The parts that are similar are hidden from the day to day workings of the founders, etc.

Where you do have merit, however, is in benchmarking perfomance returns. In that case, IIs as a class are relevant. So, ignoring how you generate returns. How big do they need to be to propogate the Firm? You can measure that. But in reality, This is just a threshold metric. Theres not much insight to this. Its not the feasible upper bound if you are studying that, etc. 20% after everything annualized? GTG.

Though in context here, this is not totally irrelevant. So in maths, you might say...how many 10,000x do I need if threshold is only 1.2^n? Etc. Its not clear only one strategy is either feasible or optimal, etc.

But: a strategy can be set in theory to reach 1.2^n.

How do you know the probability of achieving it? If you don't understand the interdynamics of the strategy with the day to day of what makes a good X and what I can execute on as X at threshold probability...you're in trouble. And if you don't know what makes a good X...thats a problem.

And so combine: Path X and Prob X = expected return.

So, to understand Vc you need to understand this problem. PGs post talked alot about this. What is the path and what is the probability to sucess. What do those data look like? what are the hurdles? What are the characteristics of the athletes, etc.

[And for the avoidance of doubt, this is not an opinion on any one strategy or the other, or which of the essays was better, etc. This is how to think about frameworks with enough resolution to be useful for thinking clearly].

____________
If only there was a visa for IT experts, who speak english and french fluently, but don't have a degree/wife/999 years of comprobable work, mostly due to local problems (like hyperinflation, which makes working pointless)...

Whatever, I'm now moving to one of the most beautiful places on Earth. I will probably have to make a living with a crappy php job, but I won't care.
Simply stating that there is no place for this product on the sidewalk

I'm not "simply stating" anything. Most municipalities have ordinances against powered vehicles on sidewalks. It's simple. It's straightforward. It's sensible. It's correct. I'm talking law and you're talking this guy's a troll.

No. Please, please, please learn basic internet lingo before you abuse it. Please?
In computing (X^TX)^(-1) if the number of features is large then it can be slow as computing the inverse of a matrix is slow. Also unless you use pseudo inverse (pinv in octave) you need to take care of degenerate cases. However if you use Regularization i.e replace the (X^TX)^(-1) with (X^TX + lambda*W)^(-1),
where lambda is the regularization parameter
and W is a matrix of the form:

|0 0 0|
|0 1 0|
|0 0 1|

i.e identity matrix with (0,0) set to 0

This ensures that the matrix is now invertible. Regularization takes care of overfitting.

P.S I'm a ml n00b doing Machine Learning course on Coursera so I might be unaware of more practical knowledge of the above. :D
We have an incredible capacity for denial and self-deception. For years, I would periodically drop into severe depression; I would stop sleeping, stop eating, stop answering my phone or email. I wouldn't leave my room for weeks on end; on a few occasions I was so successfully reclusive that people worried that I disappeared or died called the police to investigate. A few times I almost did die; I think the biggest reason I never committed suicide was that I didn't have the willpower for even that.

Years. Call it 6, with bouts every 8 months. One semester of 'A's, one semester of 'F's.

Of course this caused me to fail classes and lost me friends, opportunities and respect. But every time I recovered I thought to myself "Wow, that was awful. Glad I'll never do that again!" I had to lose my fiancée and my funding in grad school before I finally accepted to the fact that this might be a problem. That there might be a cause other than being lazy. Because, you know, laziness makes people curl up in an empty bathtub and cry for 24 hours. That's normal, right?

Thanks to Wil for posting this. It's important to reach out to sufferers as well as their friends and family. It takes a lot to recognize when you or someone you know has a problem, even when in retrospect it's blindingly obvious.
> 1. Stop using recruiters.

If that were possible that would be fantastic, but I've found more often than not, you are forced to go through a recruiter to meet the real company. If you ruled out jobs that aren't advertised directly by the employer, you would miss out on a large portion of opportunities.
>"Entrepreneurs are lonely, but they thrive in a community with others. With a private chat room always on and 15 to 20 members sharing their setbacks, failures, and successes, a thriving connection was created. Live chat was wonderful for creating connections."

Truth, and chat is a interesting idea. Is there a HN IRC that I am not aware of?
If you're the ideas guy--"the suit" or whatever slightly condescending term you're calling us now--I think you're almost always better off learning to program on your own. Once you've learned enough to build a prototype, and are actually on your way or have created an MVP, you've indicated a) that you're serious about this project, b) whether it's viable going forward, and c) that you're not a complete technical neophyte. Most importantly, you've flipped the script to a certain extent -- you can now be selective about who you choose to work with, and you've qualified yourself enough to be an arbiter of quality.

Just my two cents. I can understand why the developers here might hesitate to work with someone who hasn't proven that he's willing to put in the work. But on the other hand, if you're a serious non-technical co-founder, I'm not convinced it's a great idea to just pick the first developer who's willing to work with you. Seems like a recipe for disaster.
OT but g+ urls suck completely.

For a company that rewards good Urls with high rankings, why didn't they even make an effort?
Meanwhile, outside your ego, some of us actually found that useful, unlike all the reposted tech crunch, naive life advice and "how to get funding like a baws" articles.

YMMV
The Few Women Wikipedia Editors Aren't Doing Much Editing
How  to Avoid Natural Reactions that Prevent You from Making Good Decisions
And remember Google doesn't keep that 30 percent cut from the Play store -- it goes to carriers, I believe.
This might be inspirational for you:

http://shelterpub.com/_lloyd/skateboard.html
Knowing you "have a problem" doesn't mean you or anyone understands the problem or what to do about it. And even if you know what to do, doesn't mean you can do it either, the psychological, social or just practical barriers can be impossible to climb.

Medication has a statistical significant effect, but is often marginal at best, and most of the effect is placebo.

And this assumes an accurate diagnosis, and don't count on that, I have had the head of psychiatric care of a major European capital say to me that the science of psychiatric diagnosis is basically worthless, I wouldn't go that far (the split between research and academia and practice is also a huge problem), but is nowhere as simple as some like to make it seem.

People and lives are often much more complex than that and much more significant factors.

Doctors can also do much more harm than good, locking people up in horribly depressing kafkian institutions because they are suicidal is one of the most insane things I have seen in my life.

Imagine what it feels like being locked up against your will, treated almost like an animal, when you have done nothing to harm anyone, and being told it is "for your own good".
Some interesting background - Ceph and Inktank have roots in DreamHost.

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2012/05/04/our-babys-all-grown-up/
No, but you can pay them to work for an hour making an ugly form attached to a database.
I doubt it is an IR remote. Infrared is too directional. Virtually all wireless electric skateboard remotes use RF, typically in the 10-100 MHz range. My electric skateboard remote even has little aluminum pads on the handle in order to use the rider's skin/body as an antenna (!)
What is with the complaints about the "downfall" of quality recently? If you don't like the article, just don't upvote it. Writing a comment for the article about how it shouldn't be here isn't serving any purpose.
Nice marketing idea if this got to be 3rd on HN, my guess is a movie, or a video game as well
It's hard to take this seriously. RightSignature[1] and others have been doing this since 2009 or so. I have no dog in this fight; I use HelloFax and have used RightSignature.

1. https//rightsignature.com/
> If the box is not built with this in mind then it's a potential issue. To expand into the TV audience market you'll need a box that won't make noise that people who are not accustomed to may not like.

I think there's a bigger problem than noise if they want to expand beyond techies and gamers. Ease of installation comes to mind. It's hard to compete against the Apple TVs, Rokus, PS3's and Xbox 360s on that end.
Looking through and mapping the coordinates is very interesting. The ship groups are all in the bering sea and current OSI shows that no military trips are in transit of the straights.
Well they can't change your mind if they don't know what it is. You never commented on the meat of the article, so someone downvoted because of that. It's easy to think of better examples, and the way to debate for learning as opposed to winning is to either ignore non-critical flaws in arguments or even fix them for your opponent.
Taleb not only believes that you can optimize for black swans, but he runs a fund called Universa that does exactly that. Most years it loses money. But in 2008 it had over 100% returns.
"trying to give the impression that 500 Startups is for plucky underdogs, and YC isn't."

Essentially he is saying YC is Hertz and 500 is Avis.

"Their corporate motto is "We Try Harder" It was adopted in 1962[4] (during the tenure of Robert Townsend as its CEO) to make a more positive reference of Avis' status as the second largest car rental company in the US, at the expense of its larger competitor The Hertz Corporation. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avis_Rent_a_Car_System

A well intentioned strategy of "attacking" (if you want to call it that) the market leader in the category. Doesn't even matter if they are really Avis by the way. Why? There is fresh kill on the internet every day. And those "fresh kill" are reading things like that and believing it.
This doesn't seem quite right to me. Yes, if you're going to succeed big, it helps to have a startup idea that everyone else thinks is bad. But this seems like only one of many factors that goes in to succeeding big. I'm inclined to agree with Jared Diamond: "We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure."

I'm not an expert on any of Facebook, Dropbox, or Airbnb, but I've heard about competitors for all of them, including some rather early-seeming competitors. Was being first-to-market really the single, crucial factor in the success of all three? Or is there some other advantage, not related to being first-to-market, that having a crazy-seeming idea brings that I'm missing?

Additionally, Paul doesn't mention another way to be first-to-market: Come up with something so original that few others have thought of it. This could be another way to avoid competition, right? It's not obvious to me that wildly original ideas will always seem bad.

My take: Reality is a complicated place and reliable generalizations are few and far between :)

I don't think we can say much about what it takes to be a big success because there's so little data.
I think one area tech can work with is in the construction inspection segment. Pushing and pulling data through an app about some construction job is something an inspector might do.
True. It took a few years between accepting that I had a problem and finding a solution to it. For many people, it takes a lot longer; some never "solve" their problem at all. But knowing is a necessary first step, and for me, it was the hardest and the one that would have benefited most from posts like this.
Justin.tv, Zuora Founders and VCs are Speaking at Leadership Conference.
Bash your head against the wall and count the stars.
I imagine the argument is "once you add Cloud Code and people start using it to solve problems, you have pretty much re-built Google App Engine"; it means the only thing that separates Parse/StackMob/CloudMine (which now all have this feature) is that they come with a simple default app which provides an HTTP API to the data store that is used by an even simpler client library.
I think they're trying to show that it's easy to cart around at either end of a commute.
The sender gets a notification that you only receive messaged shorter than 500 characters, and you have the option to forward larger messaged to another email address.
I think this distinction is important, just so people are using the same vocabulary.

But genuine question: is there another word we can use which means semi-photorealistic leather, stitching, physically textured, etc. interface? Usually with all that being largely gratuitous?

In other words, if we're not bashing skeuomorphism, what is the name of the thing we're meaning to bash instead? :)
Your and your mechanic are rare. Most people dont even stop to listen to what their mechanic says. They just complain how expensive things are, never bothering to find out why it happened.
Halo 4's coming out soon. I'm betting on ARG.
It looks pretty awesome.
I decline. They don't need to know this.
I think the biggest reason I never committed suicide was that I didn't have the willpower for even that.

One of the most dangerous periods for depressed people is shortly after they start treatment. They are still depressed, but suddenly have the energy to commit suicide, and a certain fraction of them do.

My wife lost a cousin that way. :-(
Did nobody listen to the interview? He said that most mobile users use the mobile web interface (i.e. it is not going anywhere).
Unofficially, #startups on freenode
I could imagine ISPs blocking VPN for personal (non-business) internet accounts.
Since it said he was leading the Android app development (which was released a few weeks ago), I doubt he was involved in the privacy policy changes.
wil wheaton sez, PoP PiLLz ErrY dAy
You can come up with any kind of arguments or guesses about why they don't sue, but the bottom line - they didn't provide any proofs, so their FUD doesn't worth anyone's time, and these codecs can be considered unencumbered and free to use (and that's what's happening to their displeasure).
Thanks, this is exactly what I was intending to convey. Never did I say the Apple lawsuits were my justification for thinking Apple is unethical. I simply alluded that recent patent bullying is one of the bigger public outcries against the company and we are yet to see how consumers will react to it. We are all in agreement that it won't noticeably hurt their sales, but it is also further swaying those without brand loyalty to the company.

I realize if I kept tabs on all large corporation's ethics, in all likelihood I would find myself unable to purchase anything from someone respectable. That being said, despite becoming a large company being synonymous with it losing it's innocence, it doesn't mean that they all have to become porn stars.

Anyone who thinks my opinion is cheery picked or hyperbole doesn't follow the sweatshop labor, environmental destruction, discrimination against customers, etc in Apple's last few years alone. Using other unethical companies (none of whom were tech might I add) to justify their atrocious actions is borderline retarded. We might as well just let murders off the hook because those serial killers are so much worse in comparison, right?

As a consumer, all I'm trying to do is support companies that act the best, even if that means picking whomever is the least undesirable.
or if they realize that the product/company will not become as successful as they though it would be.

I'd put my money on this one ^^, if I had to choose. If growth is 50% month to month founders can learn to "agree to disagree" over a lot of things. Quora was way too overhyped to begin with and maybe they bought their own hype
I suffer from "mild" anxiety, which has lead to some depression. At times, it's hard to go to venues where there are huge amounts of strangers or even the office at big corporation X (it's not so great whenever you feel like you're choking); but I power through it somehow.

I can't get rid of it, but I've found that heavy exercise (ideally both weights and cardio) really helps to mitigate both the depression and anxiety.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/depression-and-exercise/MH0...
Not really. No apps are allowed to link to places where purchases can be made for that app. The purchases need to happen within the app itself, at which point Apple gets a cut. If the app decides not to allow in-app purchases and cut Apple in, it may not link to other places where purchases can be made.
I agree about Berkeley. Looking over the various departmental rankings, Berkeley and Stanford are the only universities that (at the PhD level) seem to be near the top in every discipline.

I'd guess that the absence of a med school pulls down Berkeley's ranking somewhat. When you start comparing research funding and activity, the med schools play a huge role in pumping up the numbers.
Besides the usual "use golang" advice, there is also a custom search engine for Go:

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/go-search

No solution is perfect, but really, is not like C for example is much more searchable.
There was a time in my long ago youth when some friends and I came by access to a voice mail host system.

We made use of many of the unused numbers, some as mysterious messages such at this, others for less cryptic but no less entertaining fake organizations. Then we'd place free ads in the various free weeklies that cover many cities and college towns with the phone numbers we'd set up.

Ah, the olden days. If we'd had the web, we'd have been real trouble.