skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What was your greatest challenge in financing your venture(s)?
I'm a senior in the business program at CSU San Marcos. In one of these classes, "New Venture Finance," we are to ask a couple of entrepreneurs of various backgrounds about their adventures securing financing.

For this assignment I would most like to hear war-stories, tips, gotchas, or whatever else you might feel like sharing, with regards to how you financed one of your ventures (successful or not, I don't care). If that prompt is too broad, then perhaps you could share a bit about your greatest challenge in financing a startup?

This is a short assignment, and this Q&A is only a part of it, so rest assured I am not secretly trying to find someone to write my paper for me. I've had my eye on the tech startup world for some time (and I read HN daily), so I am personally interested in the discussion that (hopefully) ensues.

Thank you for responding :-)
That's not how you sound in the post at all.
A detailed analysis of the Syrian civil war
>That problem is errors are handled in return values. 70′s style.

>This is one of the things I can’t stand in C.

Having to check error values for every function call is indeed a pain. But C has macros and I think it is a nice and elegant way to handle errors. I personally prefer MACROS to exceptions when writing C/C++ code. But to each his own.

Does anyone know if go supports macros ? If they do not, it is one ugly problem to have!

EDIT I just realized you can write custom exceptions that can provide similar information about line numbers, functions etc. So removed a line saying that was a plus for macros.
Really interesting stuff!
>>In an attempt to erase a $210,000 penalty the utility said the company owed for underestimating its power use, Microsoft proceeded to simply waste millions of watts of electricity, records show. Then it threatened to continue burning power in what it acknowledged was an “unnecessarily wasteful” way until the fine was substantially cut, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

It is ironic that Microsoft is trying to promote a green and caring image of itself, while arrogantly employing these wasteful tactics.
I've read your other posts, and they don't sway me. (And I put my initial "you" in quotes because you'd clearly separated yourself from this particular form of dishonesty.)

As for your "real crimes" argument, BS. You absolutely do not get to excuse one person's unethical behavior just because someone else, somewhere, did something worse. In my day-to-day life, I have practically no ability to bring your prominent robber to justice, nor price-fixing Wall Street CEOs, nor that Kony guy. But that doesn't disqualify me from insisting that my employees or co-workers behave with integrity themselves.

Finally, I don't think I've said anything here to merit what looks like a suggestion that my motivation is "status protection" rather than "integrity" as I said it was. I'm a professional scientist and a professor, so integrity and academic honesty are quite central to my working life. I'm sure there are people out there who do "pile on" only when it's chance to crush some uppity peon, but that's far from the only reason.

(And hey, what's with your final aside about the origins of social status? It's largely true, of course, but what's it doing in this comment?)
Very nice point, right on the money.

I believe I'm correct as no one has yet refuted the central problem discussed. The replies have mainly been justifying it.
I'll jump in and say yes. I'd never trust someone who lies to get ahead, and I'd make sure they knew it. It's sad that some here seem to think honesty is too high a bar; it's really not.
Google Cop/Paste?
Lets see:
Apple -> Did not invent SmartPhone (In fact google invent smart phone since Motorola is part of Google now).
Facebook -> Did not invent Social Network.
Dropbox -> Did not invent File Sync.

So how do you justify your copy/paste comment other than hate?
> The National Review is a conservative publication.

This is a circumstantial attack. I am a liberal. The person who referred me to this article is a well-respected liberal-leaning science professor at a major research university; I do not read the National Review. Still, I found the article compelling and balanced until somewhere around section 6. In my personal view, it's thoughtful and thought-provoking, and I honestly don't understand why you would flag it beyond that you don't agree with its author's political views or with the venue in which it was published.

> The power of government over private enterprises is the ability to guide innovation that may not provide any benefits in the short-term.

If I'm reading the last section of the article right, Thiel seems to recognize this (although it's not standard conservative doctrine), but he also seems to think that politicians and the public are no longer interested in science and takes a cheap shot at "today's aged hippies" instead of suggesting a solution.

> And for Thiel to address stagnant wages without mentioning income equality is so completely disingenuous.

"Mean incomes outperformed median incomes (inflation-adjusted in both cases), and there was a trend towards greater inequality." You're right that he doesn't engage it, and that's part of what makes the last sections of the piece less compelling, but given that this is the first point he uses to demonstrate post-1973 economic stagnation, he's hardly trying to sweep it under the rug.

> Lastly, how does Thiel not mention the impact of corporate donations to political campaigns as hamstringing innovations?

This is not the reason progress has stagnated (if one believes Thiel's main argument). Corporate donations cannot affect funding for universities and research institutes, since those funding decisions are (rightly) in the hands of scientists at NSF/NIH/DARPA and not politicians. Additionally, it's hard to imagine that the kind of large-scale corruption necessary to halt economic growth could go undetected for decades.

The two main questions raised by this article are whether there's a science slowdown, and, if so, why it's happening. These aren't partisan questions (or if they are, the stock conservative answer is definitely not Thiel's), and they made me think, hence my posting this here. The last section seems to be tacked on to appeal to National Review readers, and I'd prefer to ignore it.
Is that a nested analogy?
Coca-cola nails social media by releasing personalized bottles
Success without stress, the marathon way.
It's one thing with chargers, and another with cables. Apple's cables are actually worse quality than the cheap ones IMHO, since putting a proper strain relief on the cable violates Apple's design sensibilities.
yes buy a gram scale and keep it on your kitchen counter then use http://www.myfitnesspal.com/ or http://www.fatsecret.com/ to measure all food

best investment i;ve made trying to put on muscle
LOL - Was I the only one that read this as Clojure - A Launcher For Android!
Good points again. I try not to underestimate poor planning on my part. My tertiary backup is an email attachment to myself. Someone might hack my account to make it inaccessible.

It's interesting to me that people depend on tarsnap, when it could become inaccessible if something happens to the author. Maybe tarbackup is better since at least it's free.
Largest ones I've come across: http://lejournaldelaphotographie.com/fullscreen/1677
Thank you someone for bringing this up. I can't believe how many actual reviews (not just meme's poking fun at iOS6 maps) have missed this crucial point. This isn't about Apple trying to somehow hurt Google by rolling its own maps app, this is about Google not giving Apple full access to their maps.
This is just a terrible, terrible article. It's not actually saying anything.

Here is how I've looked at this and I think most people would do well to do the same.

What are your goals? Are you obese and looking to lose a massive amount of weight? Are you a bit overweight and looking to lose the last 10 lbs? Are you looking to "look better naked"? Are you looking to gain muscle? Are you looking to get better at x, y or z sport? Are you looking to just have a decent lifestyle? Are you looking to maximize your lifespan?

There are others, but you get the idea. Without knowing the goal, you can't know how to eat. There are quite different approaches to all of the above and if you just choose one approach, it probably won't be optimal for the goal you have.

I hate articles like this, they paint every approach with the same brush and you can't possibly do that. Know your freakin' goal and then optimize your eating to support that goal.

If anyone wants some suggestions on what/how to eat, just state your goal and we an riff from there. It really isn't that tough.
No, it doesn't. It's a launcher more in the vein of Alfred for OSX, Gnome-Do for Linux, or Launchy for Windows.
If GPS is unavailable, it reverts to using atomic clocks. As those gradually drift out of sync, the system slows down until the problem is fixed. NTP is not used, at least in Spanner.
VC Take on Shark Tank episode 2
This:

"WHAT you eat is as important as what you exclude — your diet needs to be high in healthful carbs like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, soy products in natural, unrefined forms and some fish, like salmon. There are hundreds of thousands of health-enhancing substances in these foods. And what’s good for you is good for the planet."

can't possibly be right for everyone. I've read (and read the debunking of) plenty of points of view, but I'm fairly sure a soy-based diet isn't right for me, and all of the neatly packaged dietary points of view (keto, Sisson, Mediterranean, Weston Price, veg-*) aren't universal. Nutrition still has a long way to go, and this reads like a brochure.
The issue is nobody knows the truth here. I think the more plausible scenario is that Google wanted something that Apple refused to give (e.g., advertising revenue, user data, etc), making it not so clear cut as "It's XX's fault!"
From the last 10 years its very safe to assume that Apple would never ship anything like this if they are not forced to. I would bet that its Google that wanted to do this more than Apple. I do not doubt that Apple wanted to move away from Google maps but I highly doubt they wanted to do it with iOS6. This is article is ridiculous to assume that. Really bad.
Thanks HN - I've decided to make tunes.io my main focus.
It's only been 2 weeks, but I've gotten a lot of feedback and ideas from the HN community. Then tunes.io was featured in lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/5943782/tunesio-offers-up-a-new-curated-playlist-of-great-music-every-day) and since then I have had tons of positive feedback. How do you guys think I can keep this going and maybe make some money while keeping the original intent alive?
PSY’s “Gangnam Style” And “Gangnam Oppa” In “Architecture 101″
I stopped reading when it compared Google+ to Google Maps. Really? By the author's own measure, Google+ is the result of Google's obsession with Facebook.
Congratulations! A toast to one of the most prominent (and, alas, one of the last, with Wikipedia) non-consumerist-centered tools of the web.
This kind of comment kinda misses the point.

Haskell (IMHO) won't ever be mainstream for much the same reasons Lisp never was (or will be?): it has an incredibly high learning curve (eg [1]).

This is really the problem of the "pure" functional languages. Functional programming is suited to some tasks. With others the fit is almost tortuous. Imperative programming is well-suited to how we think and how we break down tasks.

If you look at the popular languages they're pretty much all multi-paradigm (eg Ruby, Python, Go, C#, arguably even C++/Java) meaning they give you the low-hanging fruit of functional programming while still being in a relative sweet spot of being easy to learn yet reasonably expressive.

Why I think Go has a very bright future ahead of it is that it is the first of these multi-paradigm language to combine all these features:

- easy to learn (seriously, go look at how short [2] is; you can knock that out in an afternoon);

- it is minimal. I LOVE Go's minimal OO model for example; and

- it is statically typed.

If you look at the other statically typed multi-paradigm languages you have C#, which is generally well-regarded... except (Mono notwithstanding) it is very Windows-centric. Java is, well, Java. C++ is incredibly complicated.

The only thing Go is missing is a mode for (semi-)manual memory management. I'm thinking something like Obj-C's ARC (in iOS 5+) and it could well supplant C/C++ for the vast majority of their (already shriking) use cases... eventually (Go has some work to do on speed).

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/377082/how-long-does-it-t...

[2]: http://www.miek.nl/projects/learninggo/
I think it depends on your definition, but broadly, yes, I would say most would count "12" as a word.
> We've all done unethical things. Ethical people call those "mistakes" and don't paper over them.

Not many ethical folk out there. States with sales taxes report that the vast majority of their citizens don't pay use taxes as required by law.
In my experience, Google Maps' Transit coverage is far far greater than "a handful of U.S. cities". It's worked everywhere I've been in Japan, in Singapore, Hong Kong, Sweden, London, Athens...

The beauty of Google's Transit compared to apps maintained by the transit companies themselves is that it supports cross-company travel.
Was already done about a year ago here in Australia:

http://mumbrella.com.au/coca-cola-puts-peoples-names-on-bott...

Not sure about the rest of the world.
for people trying to understand where ilaksh is coming from, i thought this was fascinating:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/bryan2.html If Iran Were America: A Timeline
Learn epistemology (the philosophy of learning).

Most stuff in the field is bad (worse than useless). Start with this book:

http://beginningofinfinity.com/

Karl Popper's books are good too.

Epistemology is the long term route. No instant results, but useful for everything and very efficient in the long run. That's the best way if you plan to learn about many things to be a polymath.

And for discussion of autodidact stuff, ask your questions on this email list:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/taking-ch...

I've already done this stuff. Feel free to email me curi@curi.us
Great question! Self-directed learning is the way of the future. I'm a big fan of Trello for breaking learning goals down into manageable blocks - create a board of your overall goal, then create a list of specific learning outcomes you can tick off as you go (kind of a mash-up of Steven Covey's 'begin with the end in mind' and SMART goals - specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timed). In my experience the foible of learning is distraction, so staying accountable to Trello keeps you on track. Perhaps it would also help to commit to teach someone else, to cement what you've learnt and to stay accountable to your goals; does anyone know of peer-to-peer learning networks like this?
Are all the residents of SF absurd for living there?
Sometimes Torrentfreak takes a snippet of available information, then makes it into a full, long (and excruciating) article, nothing new is added after the opening paragraph here.
> If he had lived for another five years, apple would have a new product. As it is, we're looking at ipad 8 and iphone 11. There are a ton of smart, talented people working at apple, but no indication of focus or vision. Maybe, after a few years of mourning, apple might be able to do something really new. As it is, all those smart people are going to keep doing what they have been doing. That's ok in most organizations, apple is a race car. It's delicate, fragile, and super fast. Also, it's never getting another oil change. let's see how long it runs until it throws a rod.

I am confused but do you know something we don't? How are you so sure that they have no long term focus or vision? As far as the rest of the general public is privy to, the only new products out are the slim 15" MBP and the iPhone 5, hardly enough samples to assert that there is no new product out there and they are only iterating on current products...
PhantomJS 1.7 released (headless WebKit with JavaScript API)
> it can be hard to get that full feeling like you do with carbs.

I feel 100% the opposite way; carbs aren't filling for me at all. I feel less hungry after not eating for half a day than I do after 3 hours after eating something as carb-y as a bowl of oatmeal. YMMV.
this reminds me of the keychains I used to see at highway rest stops that had all sorts of people's names on them. Always wondered who bought them (especially as no one in my family has a "popular" name).
The principle behind Go's design decision is based on actual experience and need to be understood by amateurs.

The idea is quite simple: errors are not some rare special cases, they are ordinary, general events.

That means there are no need to some special mechanism for handling them. They should be handled as ordinary events within common FSM.

There is no contradiction in using the general mechanism of examining returned values to determine the state of procedure execution.

Any FSM requires if (or cond) statements. It is the essence of a program's logic.

The mechanism of exceptions was wrong. It is wrong in Java, it is wrong in C++. It is just a bad design.

The good design is using the same mechanism the underlying OS uses. In case of UNIX-derivatives it is the explicit checking of a return value. Because errors are common and ordinary events.

Amateurs believe that errors are rare, and they will avoid them. This is over-optimistic - in practice errors are of nothing special. It is just an alternative branch of a condition, where a consequent assumed to be a success.
each product team at Apple is different. some pay close attention to duplicate counts when prioritizing radars, others don't.

if instead you wanted to read between the lines: please file a dupe (we have no idea when that will be fixed.) no need to file a dupe (oh cute, you're still running that ancient public build?)
Clearly Spanner is of interest, as every single NoSQL and DB startup has been blogging and making statements about it.
I think a lot of people are missing the point of the article. My take on it is that Apple is, again, losing it's way and the article points out some specific examples. Things like maps and Facebook integration are just the icing on the cake. I just can't shake the feeling that Apple doesn't care about the customer anymore.

With every new OS release Apple has moved toward homogenization of their product line. Soon there will be no difference between what's on your desktop and in your pocket, and I think this is a bad thing. Apple's main strength has always been its ability to attract "makers", however with this new direction I see them turning their back on developers, artists, writers, etc. Maybe that's a valid market and a good long term vision and if so then good for them.

However, for the first time in years I am looking for other alternatives for my future computing devices. And that makes me sad. I've really, really enjoyed (most of) their products over the last 20 years, but I guess like any other company, Apple has run out of steam.
Who provided the data for the "Maps" app prior to iOS 6 again? I've forgotten...

An alternative would be no maps, but as bad as the new maps app is, it is clearly better than no maps.

Another option might be licensing somebody else's maps, but we don't know that they didn't try and fail to find somebody willing or find some somebody willing but with, on balance, no better data than Apple currently has (or slightly better but at the cost of another long-term deal that keeps them from controlling this critical part of their platform).

Maybe Apple really did do this out of hubris alone, but, as arrogant as they are, I find that explanation to be the one that requires the most suspension of disbelief.
Social media interrupts employees every 10 min, takes 23 min to return to task
PyEDA Sudoku Solver
another great recap
Here's an excellent talk on Spanner by one of the developers, Alex Lloyd:
http://vimeo.com/43759726
> (3) They didn't realize quite how bad it was. Just because customers started finding hilarious problems on days one doesn't mean they're trivially easy to find. With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

As a digression: I wonder if the fact that Apple is located in Palo Alto has anything to do with the lack of support for public transportation in Maps? Typically the south bay has a significantly less emphasis on public transport (excepting Caltrain and VTA) when compared to San Francisco. It would certainly be interesting to compare UX experiences of apple devs/testers who commute from SF to Palo Alto vs those who lived close by.
1) In some ways they already do this by collating anonymized crowdsourced data (ex. the overblown debacle over the location cache and the subsequent discovery that they were crowdsourcing traffic data).

2) To my knowledge, this just doesn't happen at Apple for high profile launches like iOS, iPhone, iPad etc. While there are always going to be egos at play in any corporation, the executive team is very solid at Apple and struggles like that just don't get far. Apple demonstrated over and over again that they have no problem killing hardware and software that they feel they must for the sake of progress, or whatever, and you can bet that there's always a team with something at stake when they do that.

3) Given the thoroughness of focus on iOS at Apple over the last 5 years, and maps being a rather major change for a key functionality for iPhones, and any smartphone now really, this seems impossible. What I'm not clear on is why Apple didn't expressly announce the feature as a work in progress, or "beta", that is at the point that it requires real world usage and feedback to bring it up to the standards of, what are now, significantly more mature products.

The Maps app in iOS5 really hasn't changed much since it's launch with the first iPhone while Android, etc. have been able to add features to theirs. My money is on licensing restrictions being the primary culprit behind this and given that Apple's license with Google was up this year, it just seems far too much of a stretch, for the sake of finding any kind of fault in Apple's diamond polished veneer, to assume that Apple had any other intention than wanting to improve the utility of a key mobile computing feature they were otherwise not allowed to do, or were not able to come to agreeable terms with Google when talking about renewing their license. It's unfortunate that it's so significantly lacking in accuracy, but I'm not entirely sure there was much they could do about that before launch beyond removing Maps entirely?
Olympic weightlifting

Coding (i don't in my job)
The more code I see, the lower my estimation of the coder. The mark of a talented engineer is how much code they delete.
Ask HN: Flume vs Kafka vs Scribe vs others...
May be this question has been asked before but I think it is good to consider it again today given that these technologies have matured. We're looking to use one of flume, kafka, scribe, or others to store streaming facebook and twitter profile information into hbase for doing analytics later on. We're considering flume for the purpose but I have not worked with other technologies in order to make an informed decision. Anyone who can shed some light will be great! Thanks a lot.
I had a similar problem before putting it in JavaScript Weekly (which led to this HN submission). Being rather busy, I asked them to resummarize it for me before I realized they had a screencast I could watch instead.. which did a much better job for me than the text on site :-)