skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the cache in case my blog goes down:

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Why is this news?

Well, it's not supposed to be. News is when so-and-so raised a $15 million round from Sequoia-this or Andreessen-that.

Yesterday, we had an interview with Y-Combinator for our video startup, http://giveit100.com. We just had a pretty good launch earlier in the week. My co-founder Finbarr is more reserved than I am - he doesn't like to count his chickens before they hatch. But me, I had practically made myself a chicken sandwich. We'd get in for sure!

A little embarrassing to admit, but I'd already started writing my self-congratulatory Facebook status in my head. "So excited to announce that 100 has been accepted into the next batch of Y-Combinator," I'd say.

Then at 8pm: we got our rejection email.

Ugh.

Here's the Facebook status that went out instead:
-------

So excited to announce that we had our YC interview today and
...didn't get in.

You only hear about people when they succeed huh? I'm way guilty of this too. Only posting the good news on Facebook. Painting an artificially glossy version of my life.

But I better start practicing what I preach. Show my mistakes. Don't be ashamed of failure. Be proud I tried my hardest. Fall 7 times, get up 8.

YC gave us some good, actionable feedback in their rejection email. They even challenged us to prove them wrong. I appreciate that.

Challenge accepted.

----------

Then a cool thing started happening. One by one, people left comments about how they'd failed before.
Joel Gascoigne from Buffer wrote how they didn't get into YC - they didn't even get an interview. People told me about other YC founders who didn't get in on their first try. Drew Houston from Dropbox is one of them.

Overall, Silicon Valley is pretty good about embracing failure. Here, it's not taboo to say you started a business and it failed. I don't know anywhere else like that.

But that's easy to forget when we see shiny headlines on TechCrunch. We're only seeing a brief moment of glory. We don't see the self doubt, the lost sleep. The dozens - sometimes hundreds - of rejections from investors.

We're good at embracing failure - but we could be better. Do the scarier thing. When we stop hiding our failure, we stop fearing it.

"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried."

- Stephen McCranie
I don't think BitStamp or MtGox allow such dark trades. When you put an offer on those exchanges it may match anything on the book. Basically if you want to push the price up you have to make that price available to the masses.
No, that's the point... they held a tab by swiping my card up front, and then didn't need it to close out. They still could have charged it if I ran off.

It's probably like a gas station authorizes your card for a certain amount before pumping, but then actually charges the specific amount you pumped at the end.
+1; getting their 500 page with some info that looks like it's base64 encoded, but it doesn't decode to anything useful running it through `echo -n '[...]' |base64 -d` . Any ideas what format that is?
My other half said to me one day early in our relationship, as I was facing brancrupcy due largely to my business partner....

"I don't care if we live in a tent if I'm with you."

I recounted that line to her when I proposed years later.
You can wonder if they lack moral fibre, or if you lack experience.

Or perhaps both, as in moral fibre is an illusion brought on by lack of experience (i.e., is largely due to the fundamental attribution error)?
YouTube.com is Down
https://www.youtube.com/
In God we Trust, all others bring data”
The ironic thing is that he's a massive outlier: the career he succeeded then failed in was comedy writing, an area where most people "succeeding" are pretty much living on the breadline anyway[1], whilst the vast majority only experience failure. And virtually none of it's down to the economic cycles that affect everyone else! He seems to have fallen so fast because he was so successful: he was rejected for being "too expensive" because he'd been so well paid on previous assignments, perhaps took those rejections rather harder than those more accustomed to them and didn't have the willingness (or perhaps the contacts and early-career experience) to fall back on writing advertising jingles, or humorous radio snippets, or co-writing on a large team, until eventually he was so out of touch with the industry Craigslist was his best option. For the majority of aspirant comic writers, Craigslist is the best option they'll ever get to earn a living doing it. Then again, half of them don't write stuff people want to watch...

[1]for comparison, in the UK, "success" as a comedy writer is getting the equivalent of $8,000 per episode total to write a standard six episode series which makes it onto BBC, and then getting another set of six next year before your show gets cancelled. Needless to say, you can earn less from radio, or co-writing, and most comic writers that aren't also actors have other income sources (and smaller families)
I doubt he cares about other people seeing it. I think he just wants to be able to use Google Maps in his home town without stumbling on his son's corpse.
Nanowires To Rev Up Computers of Tomorrow
Thanks! I've deployed a fix - could be better, but it'll do the job for now.
I don't believe it, sorry. I work with a lot of Russians and all of their travel pics are like this.
Are there places where a newcomer to the Clojure project could help with this effort?
Firefox 25 is currently quite good (with Pentadactyl I hide the address and search bar altogether) http://imgur.com/pSzvcAi

This update will make it worse it seems and waste more vertical space (apart from the really ugly aliased curved tabs).
"Cold Russia" is a most wrong stereotype I ever know (about Russia).
Those guys should hire bodyguards now.
Github Brute-Force Login Attempts
Most of my team is seeing brute force login attempts on our github accounts. I've asked a few of my friends and they're also seeing similar login attempts. I'm guessing this is related to the recent password breaches. I'm wondering how far reaching this attack is, has anyone else seen similar attempts?

I would recommend keeping a close eye on the github security page and turning on Two-Factor Authentication.
https://github.com/settings/security
could easily be encrypted data
Should we also avoid other things that Chinese people are adopting, like rice and smartphones?
Python - The Best First Programming Language
if there are many perfect stores of digital value then bitcoin will be one of many, not that special, and unlikely to dominate.

If there's no difference between digital currencies then the first one will dominate, and the first one is called Bitcoin.
The only sane reaction:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/166182/its-just-gone
Yes, but they say the're working on it :)

> A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.
Yup, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youtube.com
If I were limited to the one most important thing, it would be "How to handle user credentials and data securely."

Your app can fuck up a LOT of things, and maybe you'll lose users, or maybe you'll lose marketshare... but the one thing you shouldn't lose is user data.
The physicist and the social scientist
I live in Romania and it's pretty much the same, however I don't agree with the author. I noticed that many people abroad are genuinely more happy, and speak with excitement about their day. The original explanation provides some mental comfort, but I just don't buy it.
I think you have a great idea and 100 will be a great medium for expression. I was glad to see you at Startup School and bummed they didn't invite you then. Keep at it! I think that they had some good advice and questions, but I'm sure you are doing everything you can with such a small team.
I want to look at giving every student at our school a VPS and I think something like openstack is the way to do it, I'll be hotly anticipating said casts.

I have no idea what I need yet.
It's probably an encrypted stacktrace
The author's story is a great one for a variety of reasons, but the disconnect between his comments ("I had carefully saved and we had lived well below our means", "I had prudently saved and invested during my years in television") and the reality (his $500,000 "nest egg" and ultimate financial collapse) do seem at odds with each other.

I don't, however, think that there's more to the story. A lot of people, perhaps the majority, pay more attention to what they earn than what they keep. They mistakenly believe that their savings rate must be higher than it actually is, and they make questionable assumptions about future earnings.

Ironically, I think this is often easier to do the more you gross. When you don't have to worry about paying the bills, have enough left over to live comfortably and feel that your position in the economy is secure, it's easy to ignore the fact that you're not taking full advantage of your opportunity to save. I guarantee you there are a lot of folks riding today's tech boom who are making the same fundamental financial mistakes as the author, and most of them aren't grossing anywhere near what he was at his peak.
Neat! I'm finishing up a course for Pluralsight on "Game programming with Python and PyGame" that will be released soon and the goal of the course is to create a basic 2D game and I choose to do Breakout as it's fun creating when learning a new programming language!
Rephrase: What should every software engineer know?
Perhaps they're working on some changes to the much-despised commenting system. Either way, this is an interesting development.... one that will have interesting outcomes at the least.

I'll be disappointed if this is just a normal service outage.
Standing Out in the Age of Innovation: 3 Keys To Unlocking Smart Innovation
Someone deactivated YouTube's G+ account?
I think the fairest way to do it and keep readability is to have the minified code be the byte count and also provide the unminified version as well.
Youtube down
David Nolen wrote an interesting blog post about how ES6 generators can be used to create core.async/Go-style concurrency: http://swannodette.github.io/2013/08/24/es6-generators-and-c...

It still doesn't read as nicely, but it's interesting to see how it could work.
This has nothing to do with jocks. If anything, it might be considered bullying people-who-watch-sports-yet-are-in-no-condition-to-play-sports-themselves. You'd think nerds constitute a greater proportion of that than jocks. I don't know much about jock culture, but I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that physical fitness plays a part?
Less than a year post pivot, Spreedly raises another $500K
It is over here.
Not really. Bitcoin got its first mass mainstream exposure around February of this year when it broke its peak from mid-2011, IIRC. Definitely before this month, however.
But some (not all) embedded youtube videos are still working!
Host Your Git Repositories In 55 Seconds With GitLab | DigitalOcean
I would take this guy's account with a great big huge grain of salt. The guy writes for a living. I have no reason to believe his words as written, especially when the facts don't seem to make much sense.

That said, you seem to think that people getting married are rational and completely committed to their marital agreements. Unfaithful spouse statistics and divorce statistics tell a much different story.
Given Google blurs peoples faces, I suspect they are quite happy to blur / remove dead bodies.

So not sure what the real issue is here?

Has he actually asked for it to be removed?
I agree that it is now conventional wisdom, passed down from manager to manager to entrepreneur to entrepreneur without regard from whence it came. But Jim McCarthy is somewhat of a legend, particularly in Microsoft circles, having led the team that created Visual C++ and helping to form the basis for the Microsoft Solutions Framework. Jenny McCarthy doesn't have a husband, and Jim McCarthy's spouse is Michele McCarthy.
+1. Can we continue our lives without Youtube? For how long?
Thank you. Yes we really appreciated how helpful and specific their rejection email was, it wasn't one of those generic forms. Learn from it, iterate, get better.
> A Russian friend of mine explained that it's sort of inappropriate to go around smiling, esp for males.

This is very true. If a male is smiling, it means he is showing his submission and in turn is subconsciously treated by other males as a lower level male. The exact system of hierarchy signs exists in chimps. For me it seems like russians together with some other cultures managed to save this body language component as meaningful way of interaction, in contrast with western way of smiling meaning level zero relationship. Because if you truly can not tell fake smile from real one, the meaning of a smile is lost. That's why I also am not going to ever accept "always smiling" thing, even if I would go to live in western country. A smile should be a sign of affection, not a sign of neutral stance. We have neutral face impression for that. And if you interpret neutral face impression as "something wrong", what are you using "worried" face impression? It just seems wrong to always smile, even considering "brain hacking" thing.
YouTube is down
Their site and API are both down since 2:26pm PST.
> "Why do Americans always have to act happy? It's so fake."

I always tell my Russian colleagues that it's the natural outcome of not having a 3,000 year history of being pillaged by Cossacks and Mongols, and that they should try it some time.
One-time-pads are wonderful. XOR is wonderful too; it's reciprocity is incredibly useful for so many things.

Eyes, however, can't do XOR functions with pixels :)

If you have a computing device, sure XOR is the way to go.

To answer your question, Visual Cryptography allows your eyes to perform the vanilla-OR and decode without the use of any other tools.
You are reasoning that smart and hard working people get these jobs, all smart and hard working people who apply will get a job, therefore anyone who doesn't is either stupid or lazy?
I used to live in this area several years ago. It's really quite a rough area with plenty of shootings and stray bullets to go around. These stories cropped up all the time. I remember discovering at one point that the crime in Richmond was worse than Compton. Not sure if it's still true or not.
I wonder what this encrypted failure message is about.
Perhaps, but the article does say he discovered it.

"Jose Barrera, of Richmond, California, said he discovered the image, visible on Google Maps' satellite view feature, last week."

[Edit] Video says learned of.
Anyone got any tips for making contact? Cheers, Ross.
Both their site and their data API are down.
Here's a nitpick in your UI:

In the upper-right, you have a button labeled, "Submit your Startup". When clicked, you go to the form to fill in all the details of whatever.

The bar that that button is on continues to float above the rest of the layout. When I was done filling everything out, THAT's the button I pressed to Submit my Startup. Instead of submitting, the page was simply refreshed, and I lost everything that I filled in.
maybe they are changing it back
In the absence of specific regulation, everything is taxed by default.
Is this supposed to show up as more expensive in the US? In Canada, it's showing up as only $104.
The Insanity of Our Food Policy
That's why people say it reduces "governmental power", not "law enforcement power". The "government" includes the organization that issues the fiat currency that you use.

You could argue that the increase in law enforcement power would offset the decrease in power from not being able to issue fiat currency, but that would mostly be a silly line of argument to pursue.
In theory, any redundancy in the plaintext helps the attacker. I'll give a contrived example.

Say I encrypt a series of coin flips, tightly packed as bits "0" and "1". If you guess the wrong key (assuming certain encryption schemes), you'll decrypt something that looks very much like a series of random coin flips -- just not the ones I originally encrypted. So you can't "know" if you guessed the key correctly.

HOWEVER, if I encode the same series of coin flips as an UTF-16 string saying "HEADS TAILS HEADS HEADS ...", it's extremely unlikely that a wrong key will decrypt to a correct looking message. So if the decryption result looks good, you know that you've guessed the correct key.
3 times the same submission in a row!
I'll bite:
Look at the map of searches for 'college football' here - http://thequad.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/the-geography-of...
Now look at obesity rates at the county level here - http://www.maxmasnick.com/2011/11/15/obesity_by_county/
That is likely because CBT attempt to focus on your emotions, but rather on your thoughts that cause your emotion. I have not heard of DBT though honestly, and I am far from an expert on CBT, but will have to read more on both now.
Advice taken and implemented. :)
Here's a screenshot http://i.imgur.com/1MdZSPB.png
Office productivity explodes.
Does this mean that it's become more economic for miners? Are people breaking out their GPUs right now to make a few dollars?
I think the reason they're overwhelmingly positive is because they don't care about bubble-bursts and market volatility. They're approaching it from an amoral standpoint & just reviewing the tech. Once they get into the details of mining and supply rules set up by some anonymous benevolent individual I think it may get soured.
Yes. It's a new class of entity, politically and financially. And that means that prognostication and prediction is going to be really hard.

Especially since so many of the possibilities are completely non-linear.

Here's a link to a shared document listing some possible outcomes.

Read/Write: http://www.writeurl.com/text/b7q9kx4x324ldwn732r8/rd29dbbpd7...

Read-only: http://www.writeurl.com/text/b7q9kx4x324ldwn732r8/rd29dbbpd7...

Hop in and make some suggestions.
I'm wondering how easily Groovy will retrofit Java 8 lambdas when they come out. Groovy uses syntax

{a,b-> a++;a+b}

for closures, whereas Java 8 uses syntax

(a,b)->{a++;a+b}

Also Groovy uses delegates to make its closures dynamically scoped, whereas Java 8 uses lazy evaluation for its lambdas.

They're incompatible, both syntax and semantics.
Chinese state television is one of the promoters of Bitcoin. From May: "At the end of last week China Central Television, a state-run broadcaster, aired a documentary offering an overview of bitcoin and its potential benefits. Given the tight controls the Chinese government has over mainland media, this was not just tacit approval from the world’s second largest and centrally-run economy..."

from: http://thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-the-newest-tool-in-chinas...
I'm going with everybody else, it's an encrypted stack trace. Every reload is entirely different rather than small portions changing, so we can assume it's something like AES rather than a simple XOR. If it were a simpler encoding we would see largely similar areas with just small sections changed for server IDs and timestamps. The distribution of the data is for all intents random, and it's too big to be an identifier on it's own, so that's the only logical explanation I can come up with.
Queries like this one are working
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hacker
> not like any of these huge companies are going to pick up and leave and
> build their giant new campus out in the middle of the desert or something.

Or something.

Typically a programmer's daily work product can be moved half way around the world in a fraction of a second, for a fraction of a cent.

Perhaps there should be an addition to Latency numbers every programmer should know:

Programmer drives to work .... 3,000,000,000,000 ns
It's interesting that you mention this, because I hadn't even considered it. This is especially important advice given the insane number of privacy issues going on these days.

Thanks!
You want this other article for that (mentioned at the bottom)

http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/march12012/index.html
it's an autopost? How did you have find the time to write immediately this post?
To be honest, I prefer having a scrolling tab pane, instead of tabs getting so small you can't read their text (I have quite a few tabs open). It should definitely be a user config option though.

You might also want to look into Stylish, this is a firefox addon that allows you to add custom CSS, and apply it without restarting.
> The government creates bubble after bubble

You can't make a statement like this and use it as a premise for something else and not expect to have to defend it as a statement unto itself. Given this is an extreme position you're going to have to have an extremely good argument for it for anyone to take it seriously.

But assuming that the government does cause all "bubbles", why is it understandable that during such times market participants should start behaving irrationally, against their own best interests? Markets can solve anything, except bubbles caused by the government?
Stable inflationary currencies also fail the everyman. If you're smart you protect wealth through investment and 'saving' back in to the fractional reserve banking system scheme. Reality check though... most people have very little savings and zero, or next to zero, investments... and why should they? With the exception of ensuring a good future quality of life with a pension (largely 'taken care of' by your employer) many people have no interest in such investment.

Velocity of money will certainly be lower under a deflationary currency in a highly speculative environment, but nothing gets around the fact that when I want a soda, or when I need to buy a house I'm going to do so, regardless of the 'price' of Bitcoin.

And long long term, why would I, in my day to day life, even care what the price of Bitcoin is against the Dollar any more than I care about the price of the Dollar against the Thai Baht?

Do people living in Eurozone countries still convert back to their pre-€ currencies to get a sense of value?
Because the US already has laws on the books for handling foreign currency, which Bitcoin could also apply? There's noting really different between handling piles of physical cash and bitcoin. In fact, Bitcoins are probably easier to track through the blockchain than $20 bills.
Thank you Jason. I direct a not-for-profit foreign government and private foundation incubator based in San Francisco. We just completed a one-month quasi-accelerator for companies that came to the US. None were ready for VC funding and we made this clear. Despite our best effort to get the entrepreneurs to focus on customer development, many spent their time on VCs and angel networks. They got meetings but not much else. We are going to make sure that all new companies participating in future accelerators read your post.
The anonymity of Satoshi definitely gives the origins of BTC some mythos. I can picture historical fiction a hundred years from now speculating (assuming BTC takes over)
I think it can be easily argues that all marriages are made with imperfect information. Not only do people not know their spouse, but they also don't know themselves. Then consider how people change over their lifetime and I wonder how the divorce rate is so low.

When you get married, you aren't signing up to be a caretaker to a mentally unstable spouse. If your spouse is harming your children, it's your responsibility to get your children out of that situation however possible. There are thousands of legitimate situations that you'd agree are worthy of divorce.

There's a lot not said in this article. It's completely possible that he and his wife weren't well suited for each other to begin with. Roseanne was on the air for nine seasons. That's a lot of time to build resentment and hatred, if that's what was happening. Maybe the two years where he stayed at home let them figure out just how much they didn't care for each other. There are lots of legit possibilities.

It's not as simple as not living up to your commitment.