skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Never! I have had 2 problems with my Ipad, 3 with Iphone - 3 times they just couldn't help and rang someone else for advice and on the other 2 times, they just replaced the device on the spot. (backlight flickering Ipad and I can't remember what was wrong now with Iphone, but IMHO, easily repairable with the right parts).
Of the twelve startups founded since 2007 that have reached a billion dollar valuation, two of them were funded by YC and another of them was founded by a YC alumni. It's crazy to say that's a bad outcome.

It's a mistake to think getting into an accelerator is about getting access to VC. VCs are probably the most connected people in the startup industry, pretty much anyone with a good startup can get an intro to any VC they want within two degrees of separation.

The point about pivoting is particularly wrong, a substantial number of YC funded startups have pivoted during their YC period and raised successfully on or before demoday.

Someone who argues mentors are no use while you're in the process of building your startup has obviously never built a startup.
I think China has an advantage here. While most Chinese have only one (or maximum two) children to support, the average number of children is higher in India. It chinese parents can afford to spend more money per child on education and I think on the long term this will result in a higher education for the average person.
I apologise, but the pedant in me can't help but point out that your capitalization "BitCoin" is incorrect. For talking about the network and software, use "Bitcoin". When talking about the currency, use "bitcoin", no capitals, as one would with "dollar"
You know changing font size in the browser is still legal, right? :)
Installing And Using OpenVZ On Scientific Linux 6.3
So, If I write a blog post about Framing Effect I will get lots of karma points too?)
my theory is that Python ended of being used so much in scientific computing because of what it lacked :) I mean weird stuff that put off "brilliant non-professional programmers" (ie. scientists, engineers and other domain experts that thought themselves how to code). All other languages have tons on these things: Ruby has blocks that make people write functionalish code, Perl has ...tons of weirdness. Python just looked clean and easy to learn and lacked "weird shit" :)
"Some may express concern that the Free Universal Construction Kit infringes such corporate prerogatives as copyright, [etc.]. [...] the public is legally allowed to make 3D prints that mate with proprietary parts, especially in cases (the “Must Fit Exception”) where a piece’s shape “is determined by the need to connect to or fit into or around another product”"

Further down he notes that this only holds for private and non-commercial use.
1) Yes. It's true of angel investments generally too, the top companies form a disproportionately large percentage of the value.

2) Yes, you basically need to do cohort analysis for meaningful results.

3) It depends what you mean by "most seed accelerators don't matter", certainly there's a big drop-off in quality in startups as you go further down the rankings of seed accelerators and VCs pay less attention to them. That doesn't mean that the accelerators aren't adding value to the startups though.
Certainly not since they only try to hire the cheapest workers and let neo nazis intimidate those workers and do the security.
Jeff Bezos is scum.
What's evil about it? You can simply build the older generation makerbot. It's no different than what Apple did with FreeBSD and NetBSD by way of Next, apart from the fact that Apple did not actually make FreeBSD or NetBSD.

Anybody, including Makerbot could make a commercial successor to Makerbot.
You have pointed yourself what you are lacking. You should be loving programming, not liking it.Be passionate about it. If you love something you would invariably be pulled into doing something with it. You don't have to build something spectacular to show to others. Start small, write small programs that do one specific thing particularly well. For example pick any linux utility commands and try to write it in your choice of language. Just start with whatever idea you have, if you start coding the project, I am sure everything will fall in to place. Like a great man once said "Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it"
"Come and hear how we’ve built an international team of developers to tackle the problems of resurrecting a poorly-understood, gigantic code-base extensively commented in German, with no unit tests, a tangled build infrastructure, and twenty-five years of un-paid technical debt."

Looks like a project I worked on. It's eerie how similar it is (and no, it was not an office app, it was something different).

At least the comments weren't in German, but there were a couple of ones in Dutch. (Not that the comments were of any help)

No unit tests: CHECK. Twenty-five year of technical debt, CHECK. And now we're supposed to make it work in a different platform

So thank you, but I don't plan on touching a monolithical piece of old C++ ever again. Not even with gloves.
and a high portion of freeway driving, which minimizes the opportunity for regenerative braking, are the most adverse conditions for any electric vehicle.

Alright, what am I missing? People Who Should Know keep making this strange claim that you get more energy from regenerative braking than not braking at all. I don't understand - when you're braking, you're only reclaiming energy you put there by accelerating in the first place.

I would have thought that freeway driving would be fairly ideal, since you're at a steady speed and basically only need to overcome air and rolling resistance, whereas if you're regularly using braking, you're also having to reaccelerate, plus you're losing energy in the form of heat and possibly sound.

I get the idea that adding regenerative brakes in the first place will increase your range, but I don't see why your range would be shorter because you don't get to brake. Am I missing something somewhere, or am I expecting too high a knowledge of physics in my car reviewers?
It is "most likely", learn proper English first!
When applying for a retail position, I had to write a user script to get my application to submit.

It really is terrible. I got the job, at least.
Coanda and ground effects in Formula 1
Overload is as much about establishing a baseline. Even under "perfect" routing, the problem is that you need to know what load your system can cope with.

You need queueing to a certain extent since a queue will absorb spikes in the load and smooth out the sudden arrival of a large number of requests in a short time. But excessive queueing leads to latency.

One of the "intelligent" routing problems is we have to consider something more than queue length. We need to know, prior to running, how expensive a query is going to be. Otherwise we may end up queueing someone after the expensive query while a neighboring dyno could serve the request quickly. But you generally can't do this. Under load, such a system would "amplify" expensive queries: all queries after the expensive one in queue will be expensive as well.

This is why I would advise people to move to a model where concurrency happens "in the process" as well. It is actually easier to dequeue the work off the routing layer as fast as possible and then interleave expensive and cheap work in the dyno.
What frustrates you ? Why does it ? Why is it that way. Ask the why 5 more times. You'd pretty much get at something to work on.
I had both Fisher Technik and lego, and combining them in one project required some serious fiddling. I'd rigged my own connector pieces, some lego blocks with the stubs cut off glued to some fisher elements. Even without a 3D printer, if you want it badly enough and you can afford to sacrifice a few pieces there are ways to get what you want.

When I was a kid fisher technik was considered better than lego but far far more expensive. There were analog electronic and logic blocks and it was (far) easier to make functioning machinery with Fisher Technik than it was with lego (back then the lego robotics revolution had definitely not happened yet).
What is the best weight-potential ratio for startups?
If you look at Musk's graphs where the caption says "At no point did broder drive at 45mph" with an arrow pointing to a 50mph segment, the immediately previous (yet short) segment was at 45 mph. There are a few other places where Musk uses quite a bit of poetic license in interpreting the logs, too. I can't say whether or not Broder's notes would have corresponded to this particular segment, but there was indeed a point where he was travelling at 45mph.
Can you list these 12 companies? (Which one was founded by a YC alumni?)
Isn't labeling axes the first rule of graphing? This is bad.
Very interesting .. I think Facebook Timeline solves this problem to a certain extent (hiding posts that the algorithm deems as unimportant rather than deleting them).

I wonder how you could apply this to twitter. Most tweets don't really generate conversation / retweets (atleast for me), but I still would consider them interesting reading .. say 5 years from now?
For French readers: 'Etch-a-Sketch' == 'Télécran' (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cran_magique)
Business Week also did a profile on BGI

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-07/bgis-young-c...
I was thinking about this, and I'm not sure what the rule is.

On the one hand you have 'Meccano', 'Playmobile' and similar, when referring to collections of brand items.

But on the other hand, you would refer to a single brand car park as 'Toyotas' or a collection of single brand laptops as 'Lenovos' without anyone batting an eye.

I'm with you - 'legos' sounds stupid to me - but really I need someone more formally trained in grammar for this one :)
If you're not going to do it I will.

People frame things in a different way to make it sound good all the time. "If you can crank out this code by EOD you're going to be a hero." versus "If you can crank out this code by EOD you still won't get a raise until next year."
Maybe mods could post the original title and their change as comment for people to vote on as feedback. That would also mean we would finally know who the mods are...
Ah yes, but after a generation, a pidgin language (if passed on to a speaker's children) turns into a creole language, which is comparable in power, vocabulary, and expressiveness to any other language[0].

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language
You just need to practice. Don't worry about making money in the beginning, just about making something people will like.

I once was at a place where i couldn't really think of anything but i constantly pushed myself and worked hard to try to spot opportunities; which can either be "unmet needs" or more commonly needs that are poorly met.

Anytime you are using an app that makes you do more work than you need to, you have a side-project idea right there.

The key is not to think-up an idea, but to notice opportunities.

Here are some of my ideas that you can play with if you like:

Grouper for Founders - will probably make business networking easier and a bit more fun (Goal: meet 3 founders every week)

A hosted crowd-funding campaign builder - think of selfstarter.us for people who don't know how to code. Like a kickstarter that you can host on your own domain. (apparently crowdtilt is already working on this but that shouldn't stop you or me or anyone)

Blog Comment Platform - disquss is good but there is a lot of room for improvement. Something that works like HN comments would be ideal.

Project Management for Individuals - Basecamp can do this built it was designed for teams i would really love one designed for individuals and i am building one as my side project. You can do this too.

A Blogging platform that provides a pre-existing audience - I had this idea before quora released quora blogs but as quora doesn't allow you to use your own domain name, there is a great opportunity here.

A habit Tracker - most apps that help you keep track of the habits you want to form are decent at best. Make a better one.

Life Tracker - this was inspired by a blog-post by Dustin Curtis (on his original blog dcurt.is) that has since been taken down. It's basically an app that will help you keep track of how much time you have left to live based on your life expectancy, how much you have lived, what you have accomplished and what you still hope to accomplish with the time you have left.

A twitter for video - yes it sounds stupid but keek.com is becoming popular; go figure.
OMG Just have seen Ledger comes also with an emacs mode! Sold.
Let me know any thoughts you have on this :-)
'Productivity' is the efficiency of creating product. You'd be drawing a pretty long bow to suggest that most people would call 'having fun' product over 'something that provides value'.
It won't help much for several reasons:

Context switches are expensive. Very expensive. So your system runs overhead in the operating system. And you need to spawn a process per request.

Pooling processes is a problem as well. If we only have 4 workers in the pool, then we have to queue requests on one of the 4 workers. But we don't know how expensive those requests are to serve, a priori. Even knowing the queue length or the queue sojourn time won't be able to divulge this information to us, only help a little. More workers just push the problem out further.

If you want to be fast, you need:

The ability to switch between work quickly, in the same process.

The ability to interleave expensive work with cheap work.

The two main solutions are evented servers: Node.js, Twisted, Tornado (both python); and preemptive runtimes: Go, Haskell, Erlang (of which Erlang is the only truly preemptive). I much prefer the preempted solution because it is automatic and you don't have to code anything yourself.

There is a strong similarity to cooperative and preemptive multitasking in operating systems by the way. Events are cooperative. Do note there are no more cooperative operating systems around which you use on a daily basis :)
You should figure out how software can apply to the problems they had no idea software could help with.
Maybe you can also explain the term hellbanned and its origin? Neither the FAQ nor the guidelines explain anything... Further, some of these hellbanned comments seem benign?
January Side-projects: What, Why and How.
Somehow your comment reminds me of the American public education system. It enforces a rigid, highly structured, linear way of thinking. It is very much rules-based. In fact, we spend much of our time learning rules vs. how to think.

The notion that a single construction system is better fits with this. It expresses a desire to eliminate variables, clearly define the rules, create a very tight system, etc. But, I think the statement that it forces you into more creative problem solving is exactly backwards. It may encourage resourcefulness, which entails some creativity to be sure. But, it asks "what can be done within a confined, limited space?" vs. "what can be done if there were virtually no limits?"

As Americans, I think we need to improve upon the latter style of thinking. It is the source of true invention and creativity vs. mere innovation or improvement upon existing creations as encouraged by the former.

Maybe this is, in part, why we see so many copycat startups and businesses built upon some iterative improvement to an existing process or idea. Instead of always asking, "how can we do something slightly better?", we need to ask more, "what else can we do?"
Yes, PG talks about it here http://paulgraham.com/swan.html
Pirates and Wikileaks Share Battlefield In Aussie Election
Hey sfard, how do i reach you?
Mega as well as Bitcoin have both a very liberal philosophical foundation by strengthening personal property rights. Bitcoin helps preserving and moving wealth without government intervention and Mega helps preserving and moving data without government intervention. In times of increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional democratic processes, this is the right thing to do. Note that legal and morally right is not always the same. This is a basic premise your our TV tells you every day (e.g. Jack Bauer illegally torturing suspects or Robin Hood stealing from the rich). I believe that both Bitcoin and Mega make the world a better place.
The video is of someone driving directly to it. The driver ignores the first right in favour of the﻿ second then takes an immediate left and right to where the the charger is.

The video makes it seem as if the charger is easy to find, but only if you know where it is already. I can't see how anyone who has never visited that station before would be able to make the same bee-line for the charger without circling the parking lot at least once.
How the Liberated Pixel Cup changed gaming on Linux
Our startup is brand spanking new and based in Spain! Codekai:

http://codekai.com/

But unfortunately we're not hiring right now. We definitely are interested in who is hiring though and these are the places to look...

InfoJobs is the #1 job portal in Spain so it also has all the corporate job offers:

https://www.infojobs.net/

Domestika is where cool companies post jobs ads, especially from Barcelona:

http://www.domestika.org/empleo/oferta

Until very recently Wiseri had a very good thing going with any sort of tech job offers from serious companies but it looks like it's all over. Their Twitter accounts still come up new offers though: @Wiseri and @Currofile.

http://www.wiseri.com/

Marina Zaliznyak founded Wiseri and she's on top of the startup scene: @marinazal.

Also check out Madrid StartupDigest (Barcelona StartupDigest too) and participants in incubators like Wayra (Telefonica).
Shakespeare Invented the Emoticon
You're talking about how long he charged for?

You're prepared to take Musk's interpretation of his logs (which we know were wrong about whether the car would move or not - the flat bed operator corroborates Broder) over Broders notes.

I'm familiar enough with logs telling you things different to what you expected to not think it's all that cut and dried. In fact, our QAs use stop watches and keep notes, and we trust those over what the software thinks is happening for certain kinds of issues.
My best advice is to pick a problem or project you're passionate about. My first product started as a side project that grew from 3 things:

1) an increasing love for JavaScript

2) a desire to build really fast web apps

3) I needed a tool for certain aspects of my freelance business

Given those, I decided to make an initial investment of 3 months and build an app to attack those head on. It's 2 years later and I still use the app every day; I even turned it into my company's first product.

So in my case, I fell upon my first idea after 7 years of professional experience. I didn't always love JavaScript, I didn't always care about how fast web apps are (or aren't), and it wasn't until I went freelance that I wanted to build the tool I mentioned.

An idea will come to you, but it may take time to fall upon a problem you decide is worthy to invest in. What I wouldn't do is pick any problem out of a hat and spend some of your life's hours on it. At a minimum, you should have some level of interest in the idea itself.
I'm no expert on this, but your 20% number seemed pretty low:

According to this, the tesla regenerative braking is just as efficient as the motor is at acceleration. Result: up to 64% of the original battery energy returned to the battery.

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/magic-tesla-roadster-regener...

And this page about the Volt suggests that the efficiency might get up to 70% in some situations.

http://www.designnews.com/document.asp?doc_id=235313&dfp...

This is confirmed by measurements which show pretty much all hybrid vehicles get better mileage in city driving than in highway driving.
Most of my side-project ideas come off the shelf...

They get there after normally when discover a way to solve a sub-problem that has relevance to my msin focus [at that time].

I know I couldn't be any more general...
V8 and PyPy are similarly fast runtimes, but this benchmark tests libraries against each other. Not particularly relevant, especially as at least two of them are known to have slow IO.
I used to struggle with ideas. The initial hurdle wasn't coming up with them, it was recognising that I had them in the first place and then recording them for later. Here's what worked for me:

1. Buy a notebook. A really good quality notebook. You need to like how it looks, how it feels in your hand.

2. Buy a pen. A pen that you love writing with. Pick your colour, decide on whether you want ink/gel/pencil. It needs to be a reliable pen that you love to write with.

3. Carry both with you as often as possible. Look for gaps, problems, optimisations, new uses for existing things, and, finally, anything you see that is really awesome (this one is just as important as the others). Write everything down. Try not to filter/dismiss anything, if it doesn't seem significant now it might 6 months down the track. The goal here is to be mindful of what's around you.

4. Once you have a really good idea (you'll know when it happens) then build it.

Number 1 is the most important step in my opinion. I use fairly cheap pens (that I love) but consistently overpay for notebooks. I tried lots of stuff in the beginning but I needed a 'good' notebook (I think I paid around $25) to get me consistently recording stuff. I think that this was because writing things down almost was a rewarding experience in itself. I suggest avoiding apps (in the beginning at least) for this reason.

There's something about the tactile quality of writing and the flexibility between being able to immediately write, draw or flowchart that technology just can't replicate. On top of that, you're much more likely to remember something when you read it in your own handwriting than when you see it on a screen.

I'm more than confident that you have lots of ideas at the moment, they're just not hanging around long enough to be actionable. That said, if you're still stuck I have a few that you can get started on ;-)

Also, if you just want ideas for side projects rather than a business/startup/plan to save the world, just look for programs with cool features or functions and replicate them. This seems to be a commonly recommended path in visual design and I don't see why it won't get you started. You'll learn a lot and probably start having your own ideas for new stuff along the way.

Hope this helps!
I have around 30 decent ideas that I can implement myself, 5 of them are very high quality, one of them already got implemented by somebody else, and was pretty successful.

I'm a developer too, and I simply can't find time to implement, unless I quit my job. Since I get paid quite well, it's a pretty hard thing to do.

The tricks to figure out ideas are

1) Read about other non-computer fields, read forums, articles, etc.

2) Talk to people of various professions.

3) Write down ideas as soon as you have them, or you WILL FORGET.

There are also futuristic ideas, things that I KNOW will happen. They are the most profitable, but I either have no idea how to implement them, or need a shit ton of money. For instance, an artificial high resolution eye, artificial kidney, heart, spleen, liver, etc - ALL of them are multi-billion dollar ideas, but they are very hard problems and will require a lot of financing.