skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best description of Durian I've read: "It smells rank to the unaccustomed, like someone mixed rotting bananas with unwashed feet and baby poop, but tastes quite a bit better."

They do taste good, I can attest.
Insights from 6 hours of YC Mock Interviews
Fab to Lay Off 50, Unlikely to Hit Revenue Target
http://js1k.com/
The (New) Entrepreneurs Are The Future
WARNING: Could there be some kind of script attack ? My Safari browser freezes with 'foo' alert message from this site and it has placed itself as default website so whenever I reopen safari it freezes again.

Let me know if you know how to fix this.
Vinod Khosla bets big on big data
Facebook Messenger 3.0
I can't for the life of me figure out why you were downvoted for this comment.
There is so much more that could be done in American Football, within the rules, that Rugby Union takes for granted. Onside passing is one.
Styles and Graphs - Spreadsheet GNU GPLv2 : http://www.simple-groupware.de/cms/Spreadsheet/Home

Keep thinking I need to convert this to JS: Spreadsheet formulas that build web applications - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oogKKfbRyMQ (2 Min)
awesome - thanks for the links
I'm not sure anyone ever claimed snapchat was "secure".
remove this urgently it has been hacked.
With more notation, some readability is lost again:

Let x, b, c \epsilon C:

x^2 + b x + c = 0 => x = (-b +- sqrt(b^2 - 4c)) / 2
Nice, I've done quite a bit of work with Leaflet. My experience is fairly basic though so I'm looking forward to this!
That's a knock off brand (Huy Fong makes the rooster bottle) but likely will still be pretty tasty as there's more than one kind of "sriracha".

The brand difference is analogous to ketchup: Heinz vs everyone else - tastes a bit different but noticeable if you're used to it.
So they would approach is like they already do for downs 1 through 3? It's not a trick, it's using all four downs to your advantage, vs wasting a down giving the ball away.
He (also) turned down google as well for someting like $8B, then got MSFT to invest in @$15B before taking it to $100B and an IPO. So this is a very good point.
I think I crashed it (ie: Chrome hard lockup on the tab) with this:

=location.href='google.com'
That's what they do already.
Scott McNealy: sold Sun to Oracle for $7bn

[Yes, 20 years later from the point in time I'm talking about.]

Steve Case: sold AOL to Time Warner for $164bn

[$3 billion isn't cool. You know what's cool? $164 billion is cool.]

Ev Williams: sold Blogger to Google for an undisclosed sum

[Obviously I was referring to Twitter.]

John Sidgmore: sold UUNet to MFS Communications for $2bn

[Brainfart -- I meant John Morgridge.]

Ross Perot: sold EDS to General Motors for $2.5bn (in 1984 dollars!)

[Yeah, but that's when $2.5 billion was real money.]
Teaching Creativity
Note to web designers: don't enforce a minimum width on elements which are hidden on overflow. I had no idea there was a way to sign up or login because the links to them were not visible and there was no scroll bar and thus dmunoz's comment didn't quite make sense.

Edit: Actually, you've got a slightly worse issue... as I resize my browser window, as soon as it reaches ~1000 (1024?) pixels the header jumps and the buttons disappear outright, even though they would fit on the screen just fine. I don't really care what happens to the buttons, but there is no indication elsewhere on the page that one can make an account.
Some of those taxi regulations are easy to implement and generally a good idea. Some of them are merely protectionist schemes designed to maintain an oligopoly.
I'm happy to say that I'm uniquely qualified to help you.

I have a BS in Computer Engineering and a MS in Electrical Engineering, with a specialty in VLSI and microelectronics.

While in school, I had to design a microprocessor, one transistor at a time. Great experience, by the way.

I will summarize this process from a Top-Down approach, in case you're a CS major. (Note that engineering is Bottom-Up!)

- C/C++ gets converted into Assembly Language.

- Assembly Language gets converted into bytes.
(One or more bytes encode each machine instruction and data)

- Each machine instruction takes multiple clock cycles to execute.

- On each clock cycle, a "microcode" (a.k.a. Register Transfer Language) moves data around.
(The order in which data are moved from one register to another is controlled by a Finite State Machine.)

- Each finite state machine is composed of sequential circuits and combinational circuits: multiplexers, decoders, etc.

- Each sequential circuit is composed of some type of memory element : flip-flops, latches, etc.
(Sequential circuits can be static, quasi-static, or dynamic. In all cases, they are composed of combinational logic with feed-back.)

- Combinational logic is composed of CMOS (MOSFET) transistors. In the past, we used BJTs... and they're actually making a comeback.

- Transistors are arranged in such a way as to perform logic equations: Inverter, NAND, NOR, etc.
(Look up a CMOS Inverter to know what I'm talking about.)

Pretty easy, right!?!

I want to encourage you to look at the following references, in order.

(1) CMOS Digital Integrated Circuits by Kang and Leblebici --the best digital VLSI book ever
(2) Digital Logic Circuit Analysis & Design by Nelson et al. --tough book on digital logic, but pretty good
(3) Computer System Architecture by Morris Mano --works its way up from logic design (K-maps, etc.) to state machines to assembly language

And now, I'm going to through a curve ball at you: Any algorithm you can implement in software, you can also implement in hardware.

How is this possible? Hint: Think of Finite State Machines.
And then look into ASIC and FPGA design of digital filters and digital control systems.
This is amazing. Now if only they took over email too. Facebook should completely pivot into an identification and messaging platform.
>and has a similar CPU speed (1.3GHz)

It just has a similar clock speed. Not similar performance.
I would love to read about who/how is blocking XSS and censoring!
Virtually every super-successful tech franchise company got big offers at this stage.
GMail is facing outrage
Seattle Police Department Disables Its Mesh Network Over Surveillance Worries
Awesomeness - thanks so much. I'd seen the title of this course, but had no idea that it addressed exactly what I wanted. Human help (still) beats a web search.
I think the question is the reverse: not what program implements the VM but which programs run on it and what are they doing? at least that is what I'm asking.
I can understand why people are hostile towards utilities for trying to change their pricing. However, keep in mind that utilities are some of the most regulated private companies in our economy. Their rates have to be approved by the government. They are allowed to make a profit, but not a big one. If they start making losses, then the lights are going to go out ...

For those who have suggested going off the grid, keep in mind that even in sunny California, we do have a rainy season. I've reviewed my friends' electric bills with them, and even those with quite large PV installations are still net consumers through most of the winter. To make it through, you'd likely need a generator (dirty, loud, expensive).

I think the bigger issue here is that people have made long-term commitments (20 year lease agreements) to finance solar installations, counting on net metering and a continual increase in power rates. If the utilities change the game, you're going to screw over a lot of fairly well-off consumers (vs. the mean), which doesn't usually go over well.
> I never thought of bytecode as its own class with its own identity before.

What do you mean? How did you think of it before?
Well, if you want the strongest, rawest and purest version of the RealPolitik WeltSchmerz; you should start with the basic texts.

Hobbes, Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Rousseau. If you are really a glutton for punishment go on to Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. If you are wanting a slightly more americanized version; Howard Zinn's "A People's history of the United States" is a good and fairly accessible book.

A couple of Wiki pages that might point you toward other resources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck

Just remember that actual history is messy and not necessarily rational and that any interpretation ( including mine ) of historical events is more wrong the more sweeping and all-encompassing it is.
Next-gen HTTP 2.0 protocol will require HTTPS encryption
Except human psychology doesn't work that way. You will have lost something that has a value of approximately $500. It will feel like someone just stole $500 from you.
Very interesting I was not aware unsupervised pretraining was a distant second to availability of data and Flops. So really, deep learning is essentially the same old MLP of recent peasant like status (90's). Stacks of backpropagating perceptrons with the ancient logistic regression on top - now with more stacking! This makes sense.

Machine learning is really just a form of non-human scripting. After all, every ML system running on a PC is either Turing equivalent or less. An analogy would be something that tries to generate the minimal set of regular expressions (that match non deterministically) which cover given examples. The advantage of an ML model vs a collection of regexes is many interesting problems are vulnerable to calculus (optimize) or counting (probability, integration etc.)

So like good notation, the stacking allows more complicated things to be said more compactly. But more complicated things need more explanation and more thinking to understand.
> I honestly doubt 99% of consumers care

But the decision to purchase this will be made by businesses. Are you equally confident 99% of businesses won't care about literally 100% of their corporate information sitting with Amazon, which in the past has shown its willingness to subject international customers to US pressures?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/amazon-and-wikileaks-f...
My math career turned a corner when I started exercising in college. I would take flash cards of all the formulas I needed to memorize and just burn through them on my runs. I found that that was one of the best situations for me to learn the tools I needed to approach problems.

It was kind of by accident. I knew I needed to memorize the formulas, but I couldn't find a situation where I could sit down and do them without becoming anxious and distracting myself.

On a run, there is no alternative. The eventual runner's high helped me memorize things even more, and I found I'd associate the mental high that comes with working on a math problem for a long time with a runner's high.

I'm super exited to share this wisdom with my kids. I wish I knew this secret when I was in high school.
Facebook is an outlier among outliers though. You shouldn't really use it as justification for anything.
Oh, that's me: http://jsfiddle.net/sy85U/31/

Just a very quick, crude little hack.
I don't have time to look for the cite now, but I've read a proposal to build electric traction railways up some steep slopes in SoCal, then load up cars of rocks, mine tailings, slag, etc. The trains would head up the mountain at night when electricity is in surplus, then back down in the daytime when demand is near peak.

Seems outlandish, but the calculations predicted very high efficiency and comparatively low cost per MWh of storage.
No, because these laws arguably hinder economic success in these industries.

The success of the internet, which is largely built around open protocols, and open source, would indicate that perhaps copyright/patent maximalism that forces a "get permission first" culture is not a good idea.

For an extremely detailed argument on why copyright and patents hinder innovation in general, see the book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Boldrin and Levine. You can find a copy on the internet using, e.g., Google.

For a more story-based exposition, see the "This American Life" episodes "When Patents Attack".
US govt intel researchers to ‘radically expand’ facial recognition capabilities
For me that pdf chapter example was very hard to read.
Thanks for this post! I'm 36yrs old and now I'm even more pumped to get better at programming and start reviewing my MATH.

I just wanted to share to you guys that this morning I really feel bad on my way to work (I'm an iOS developer). I told myself if only I'm really good at math maybe I could have use a lot more algorithms for my apps that I was making. All I can think of until I got to the office was math math math math. And I admit I was envious of other people who are really good at math.

Now I'm not envious anymore! Thank you Mr. Matt Waite!
I did not know that, thanks! It's hard to imagine SnapChat in such rarefied company as the ones you mention, but I guess that's the point - there was a similar time in all of those companies' pasts, hard though it may be to recall it now that they are successful.
This happened to me too.

My cofounder quit the day we got our email to interview and wouldn't budge no matter how much I tried to reason, cajole, or beg him to change his mind. At the time I played a weekly poker game hosted by a bunch of YC founders and I still remember walking in with two bottles of champagne in my hand that I bought before I got the breakup text and announcing "guys, I've good news and bad news and reason to drink either way".

I don't blame him at all. We had built up a ton of great chemistry working together for 6+ months but it was on a startup that flamed out with a firesale acquisition and he wanted more stability, especially with his wife grueling away at a residency to pay for their mortgage.

I still think it was a mistake though and not just on his part. He was my Woz and I would've gone to greater lengths to get him to stay if I truly had the Jobs zeal.
I'm trying to remove the location.href thing outta there! Annoying!
So what's this line of code?
That sounds like a good start, but I think you have to go much farther. Unless an economic model takes into account holistic human and ecological outcomes, its not relevant. You need to integrate physical science, psychology, and other real sciences and measurements. And then measure things like inequality and overall human well-being. Then make a serious effort to maximize human and ecological well-being.

If I were an expert in how bubbles formed in water and spent all of my time thinking of ways to maximize bubble growth by sucking gases out of the water in a tank, I would be good at creating aquariums with large bubbles, but probably end up with a lot dead or sick fish.
What's the size of your short position?
You're saying that they should care because if Taiwan was part of China, it wouldn't be a free country anymore. I am saying that this is false because neither of the two main parties wants Taiwan to fall under the control of the PRC regime, which is what makes the mainland unfree. What the KMT wants is for Taiwan and the mainland to be reunited under an ostensibly democratic regime.

This is, of course, unlikely to happen unless something changes drastically on the mainland, making it somewhat of a pointless debate as far as Taiwanese politics is concerned. Unless the PRC invades Taiwan or collapses, there isn't much of a chance for reunification. What the whiteshirts want is to refocus attention on issues that affect Taiwan in the present day.
You know what would be cool? Injecting this modified version to all clients, so that everybody act as a censor.
The play stops a lot less often and for a lot less time, and there are no ad breaks aside from at half-time. So you get a whole lot more action per hour.

The 15 players stay on the field for the whole game, although 5 (about) can be subbed out (and can't come back).

There are four ways to restart: kick-off, Scrum (big men push), line out (thrown in from the side), penalty, (kick for goal, kick for touch or chase or tap and go), and free kick (same as penalty but no shot for goal).

The players run a lot - it's an aerobic and power game combined, which also means there is a role for players of all shapes and sizes.

The cost of playing is a ball - no pads required. It's also a lot safer as there are a lot less head injuries, as the protective gear in American Football just makes players feel safe, while increasing the impacts to the head..

The coach does not dictate plays - the players decide what to do when on the ground. It's a lot more fluid.

You can see the players' faces and bodies as they play, rather than just the coach.

It's played between countries at the top level. We have a world cup that's a genuine world cup.

It's now an Olympic sport at the 7s level.

and so on
The actual sense of the title of this
thread is just not true. My experience
is that plenty of information technology (IT)
VCs are plenty eager to talk seriously
without any introduction except an e-mail
from a startup founder.

What I learned, to my great surprise, is
that apparently the VCs are under some quite
severe constraints. So, they are forced,
from whatever, to ignore essentially everything
about a project I learned doing projects
in business, academic research, and for the
US DoD.

Instead, for an IT project they
want to see, as about the second thing,
some running software. That there might be
a lot of crucial work before such software,
work that makes the software itself trivial,
just is not in their experience and is nearly
always way beyond their nearly always
rather meager technical backgrounds.

So, for the
running software, they want to "play with it",
likely essentially to look at the user interface
(UI) and estimate how well many users will like it.

For more, they want to see some forms of
'traction' which apparently they use as a
surrogate for accounting data traditional in
commercial bank lending or private equity
investing.

For a deeper look, they like simplistic
'patterns' based on past history
of IT VC taken fairly narrowly.
So,
they have a fundamental problem seeing
or evaluating something that is really
new, even if, say, the US DoD problem
sponsors could see the power and value.

So, I have a list of 40+ VCs eager to
"play with" my software when it goes live.
I got an introduction to none of them and
for each of them just sent e-mail. They
responded with e-mail and at least one
phone conversation. They are impressed
enough with the 'market', the 'technology'
to the (meager) extent they and
value it, and the goals. Then they just
want to see it working, hopefully also
with 'traction'. How much? One VC
firm said 100,000 unique users a month.
With my site that might be $12,800
a month in revenue at which time,
with my low 'burn rate' of
a sole proprietor solo founder,
I should be on a nice path of 'organic'
growth and still 100% owner.

Yes, my situation is not 'standard',
but neither are successes in the VC
business.

The VCs need to learn how
to look at and reliably evaluate work
that is new, typically just on paper;
US research academics and high end
US DoD problem sponsors can;
VCs cannot. So far maybe that lapse
has not much hurt them. But, generally,
gotta tell you, the VCs are way, way
behind the leading edge of US
science, technology, and entrepreneurship.
Sleek, simple UI. Too bad no Windows Phone release just yet.
> There are still too many inconsistencies between abstractions with overhead and without making it a C++ replacement if anything.

For example?
> In a programming context if you today reduce all your variable names to single latin letters and all your function names to single greek letters, you will be widely mocked and reviled.

Serious question. What do you think is the general impression of APL programmers? =)
30 Photorealistic 3D Renders
Note that this is not a decision; it's not by a core team member.
I don't think most utilities have a beef with shaving off high-tier consumption (well, I'm sure they miss the revenue, but they are not stupid enough to go back on years of telling their customers to conserve).

Their bigger concern is net metering, by which I can sell them solar power during peak hours at their retail rate of, say, $0.45/kWh and then buy it back from them at, say, $0.06/kWh at night, or maybe even 6 months later in the dead of winter.

Not paying for power you didn't use is one thing, but using the power company's own transmission network to arbitrage its rates with no fee does seem long-term unsustainable. If the current rates reached their ultimate conclusion, the power companies would have to make massive, massive investments in storage systems capable of buffering months worth of demand, as their net revenues trend towards $0.
This is a great point, and for advertisers it seems absolutely correct. In part because the purpose of the use and her mindset and the advertisers are in synch. Perhaps somewhat similar is linkedin (now worth ~$20B). FB, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter have emerged to be far more disruptive socially as communications platforms. This puts advertsing and the user experience at something of a conflict in terms of functionality (& ignoring here the privacy/data collection debate, which is a different issue). So the reason snapchat is 'hot' right now to FB and VCs is this disruptive potential to entities with deep pockets.

What is interesting, IMHO, is to see if the network effect is really critical, or if the service can be repicated by a thrid party. What I think we will see soon is that people will maintain a network on one site and not necessarily use it; they will turn to other platforms to communicate on an ad-hoc basis. The ad-hoc platforms will have significant value, but wheras instagram and twitter were additional platforms for audience aggregation, the next wave will be service layers where you communicate to your network by "porting over" your contact base, as needed. The only reason I'm bothering to ramble on is that I'm not sure FB wins the game buy buying out SnapChat. That worked for instagram, which had a sticky network and people didn't leave it. For SnapChat, the whole premise is LNT...so why feel stuck to it? Once FB owns it they will track the hell out of everyone using it, so the LNT value prop dies. But the demand will surely remain if the service can be cloned.
Hey thanks for the feedback. We are working on it!
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/23/world/americas...
Ah, I'd heard about this class, but mistakenly thought it was on Coursera - where I couldn't find it. Thanks much. Go Bears.
Maybe others can reply for the other names in your list, but at least Larry Page tried to sell the tech behind the Google search engine to all the major search engines of the era. None of them wanted outside tech (NIH syndrome, etc) and thought their stuff was "good enough". Based on that, if one of those search giants had offered Larry $3B, what do you think he would have said?
For most home solar installations, this would dramatically skew the financial break-even for solar installation.
The kernel, not the userland. Writing for Dalvik is very different to writing for GNU/Linux.
This is NOT a comment on Facebook or Snapchat or any other company I'm involved in --

You're sort of right. The other part that fills in the logic is "what is the value of business X to acquirer Y" -- seen through the eyes of acquirer Y -- business X when it becomes part of Y.

When Y buys X, X's opinion or the market's opinion of what X is worth is only one input. The more important input is usually what Y thinks X will be worth as part of Y. That is hard to understand from outside of Y. I am aware of deals where the purchase price was way more than X thought they were worth, but Y still got a bargain -- and every other permutation you can imagine.

For this reason it's very hard to have an objective view of what X is worth in the abstract -- the takeout price in an acquisition depends on who is buying it at least as much as any other factor.
44 Incredible Beta Startups and Webapps for Design Inspiration
The regulation in medicine (patents) incentivize investment. The reason for no cancer cure is not for lack of trying or investment.
How big is your NASDAQ index short?