skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to overcome the Startup emotional roller coaster?
Hi guys, I moved a little over a year ago to SF trying to make it with my newest startup idea. In the beginning everything was roses and daisy's. I arrived to the beautiful San Francisco for the first time, participated in the Techcrunch startup alley, 1 month later I was accepted into an accelerator based out of Washington DC, the accelerator didn't work out as planned and I had a problem with one of the portfolio managers. I am very early stage and very undercapitalized meaning that I have no money to offer to potential cofounders. To make matters worse I broke my foot falling off a stage during a hackathon in september which caused me to lose my part time job serving in a restaurant. And now I am bunked up in my friend's place 1 hour away from SF. I truly believe in the concept of what I want to build, but lately my roller coaster of emotions has made me doubt if my Startup Idea really has potential or if it doesn't and it has also put pressure on me to make a decision on what to do with my life.

I am really going through some heavy self doubt and its eating away at me. I feel like a failure and I have my family back home (Guatemala) counting on me, i don't want to return to them with my "tail between my legs" having failed in what has already been over 1 year of trying to woo success into my life. I have also run out of money so the pressure is even bigger. (P.S. If there is any startup here in need of a badass business developer please let me know)

Has anyone in this forum gone through something similar? How do you overcome these negative emotions and overcome this feeling of helplessness?
I don't see any mention of his brother on that page. Am I missing something?
(OT: how do you see your separate upvotes and downvotes?)
Anecdata:

My father is nearly 70, and still writes & maintains those horrible departmental VB+Access apps. He started in his late 40s, having noodled around with spreadsheets & databases since the 80s (from whence my fascination with this stuff stems).

Sadly, the world of VB & Access is so alien from my own that we can't even talk shop.
A clone of a clone. Threes is a fantastic game and deserves this publicity.

That being said, this is a pretty well done clone clone.
Apple's laptops are RoHS, so the melting point of that lead-free solder should be even higher than 183 C.
the system where you can help pay down the debt by printing money?
There are elements that are definitely Ponzi.

This weekend I played with altcoin mining. The goal of course to figure out how to turn those coins into money I can spend. Aside from maybe LTC, no one is taking altcoins for payment or exchanging for fiat; you convert to BTC on an exchange like Cryptsy, and then sell the BTC on Coinbase, etc.

At present, you can mine with the same hardware you could use for BTC 3 years ago, so it's attractive. Eventually, though, you'll run into the same issue as with Bitcoin: difficulty increases. If you use a Multipool, you get around this by shifting from altcoin to altcoin, based on profitability. (usually a direct product of coins with lower difficulty, which tend to be newer)

In general, all alts will increase in difficulty to the point where they're no longer profitable; the only way multipool mining can be profitable over any period of time is new coins coming out. That's pretty much the situation we see today. Eventually it'll collapse, as most Ponzi's do.
"Information wants to be free" doesn't justify that you should ignore their copyright just because you can easily ignore their paywall with little consequence to yourself.
That's been happening for a while now. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k12ALBjQ7zM
Or 4x 4TB drives (at ~$180-$250 each from a quick newegg search), at ~15 hours if you can connect all of them at the same time, or ~60 hours if you need to do that serially (assuming 75MB/sec, which I often get - are you sure you're actually getting 150MB/sec on your LTO-6 tapes?)

At about a quarter of the price of the LTO tape drive alone -- data can be recovered anywhere for the next 20 years or so (I have tapes from 2002 that I was unable to find a tape drive for in 2007, but I have a pair of 15GB IDE disks from 2000 that I checked last month and are still readable).

At $60-$80/2.5TB, ($24/TB) LTO6 does have an advantage to disk ($40/TB) if you have hundreds of TBs to backup. However, because of the cost of the drive itself ($3000), you only break even after 200TB or so. And if your drive breaks (or you need to backup in one place and recover in another, as is often the case with DR plans), you break even only after 400TB or so.

Since approximately 1998, hard drives for backup beat tapes on capacity, price, access speed (drives are random access!) accessibility (an external universal SATA/IDE can be bought for $30 or so, but you already have the connections on your motherboard so you don't even need it). I haven't been able to find anyone with a convincing argument for tapes - maybe you have one?
Maybe Monday morning is finding me too pedantic, but this is similar to Threes (http://threesgame.com), not just like Threes. There are some pretty obvious differences, from the movement of the tiles to the requirements for tile mergers (multiples of 2 rather than 3). The comments thus far do not make that distinction.
FORTRAN is an amazing language for some very specific jobs and is still a great tool for a specific job. It's fast does scientific and numerical calculations incredibly fast.

I haven't touched Fortran in 20 years though :) I loved me Pascal except the semi-colon key broke on my keyboards.
As a long time Mathematica (MMA) user I can say I am confused and bemused as to where Wolfram is heading. They have their fingers in so many pies its hard to work out whats going on.

Recent Wolfram marketing on MMA/Wolfram language seem to be aimed at consumer, Facebook and Hedgefund users rather than their traditional base in the Sciences and Engineering.

There are plenty of pretty short examples, but the MMA kernel grinds to a halt when pushing into larger problem sets. The CUDA and Parallel processor commands are limited and haven't really been updated in the last few years (pushing you back to other tools).

Developing on Workbench is anything but a joy and without even considering speed one is better off developing on a regular programming IDE for programs requiring multiple libraries. The notebook interface just doesn't handle large programs well.

While functional programming is wonderful for some things, it is incredibly hard to debug with the current tools and effectively provides a level of self obfuscation when used exclusively.

The Computable Document Format (CDF) is a nice idea but the licensing terms are too restrictive for any commercial work. At present CDF also has a pretty slow, buggy interpreter.

All that said MMA is a great tool for early prototyping and a wide range of analysis, you just need to consider switching to something else if you get over several pages of code or utilize more than a few of your own libraries.

Like others have said, there are lots of tools out there and a combination of them will still be needed to produce the best outcome after the release of MMA10 and the Wolfram Cloud.
Blood-suckers in Brooklyn: how the old world medicine of leeches survives
It's similar, but different. With Threes you combine 1s and 2s to make 3s, then similar numbers to double them. Also, the tiles in Threes only shift at most one spot at a time - with this game, everything's flung to the other side of the board.
who cares about your fancy pants arguments when it doesn't even pass the smell test? It has a lot of strikes against it: 1) deflationary 2) slow 3) energy hungry
Perhaps I could ask you a simple question, then. How would you value a Bitcoin?.

I am not looking for a precise answer, but a rough range of what it should be worth.

It should be possible to do this for any financial asset.
I don't see any entry from the pilot's brother on there. Am I missing something?
Beta Boston Launch
An increase of 40% in 7 years is about 4.9% per year, which isn't so terrible when you consider (i) that this period includes the largest financial crisis for fifty years (ii) inflation.
HelpAround app brings sharing economy to consumer health
Because there are less lawyer than engineer. You can't outsource lawyer from different country.
The tessel looks pretty cool but $99 is a lot for a development board.

For $35 you can get a Raspberry Pi with much more power, network access out of the box, and the ability to run node. I don't see how the tessel can compete with that.
Hey, author here! I'm pretty overwhelmed that this made it to the top of HN without me even thinking of posting it here :)

I made this game as a fun weekend project, inspired by another game called 1024 (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1024!/id823499224) and a spinoff called 2048 (http://saming.fr/p/2048/). I did mine to add animations to the latter, which was a bit hard to play without them.

I discovered Threes only today, and I had no idea it looked so similar. I searched a bit and it appears as if 1024 is also inspired by Threes, so my game is probably the last of a long chain of clones :P

The code is also open-source. You can find it here: https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/2048

Feel free to ask me anything, and thanks to everyone for the attention! :)

By the way, my highscore is somewhere around 6000. Admittedly, I'm quite bad at playing my own game :P

EDIT: Make sure not to get addicted!

EDIT 2: The game now has swipe gestures and vim keys support (added by @rayhaanj)!
> For someone whose life obligations preclude selling everything and living on a beach in Thailand or Belize for a year, how do you evaluate a career reaching its midpoint? How do you keep programming fresh? How do you market yourself as someone who solves problems instead of someone who transcribes ideas in the language du jour? Or do you leave programming altogether?

I had a similar tack in my career and have been asking the same questions lately. I wish I had some of the answers.

At this point all I can offer are some coping strategies if you're still thinking about leaving programming (at least for a while):

Buy a cheap house and keep your living expenses low. If you want to leave programming and open a bakery you'll at least be able to keep the roof over your head and food on the table. Who knows, maybe you'll be happier?

I've been thinking about opening a brick-and-mortar retail game shop and writing on the side.

I still keep sharp. I cannot give up programming. I'll read something about sail design, consistency analysis, topology, or constraint propagation and for the next few months I'm knee deep in algorithms and data structures while trying to maintain polite conversation at the dinner table.

But in the morning it's all about configuration scripts and CRUD apps and copy changes in templates.

Other hackers have jumped ship... jwz comes to mind.
Nothing? I'm prepared to buy as many bitcoins as I can @ $1.
You are not even asking the right questions. The most important one is the supply of alternatives to Bitcoin.
The southeast has three major tech hubs: the Dulles corridor in NoVA, the Triangle in NC, and Atlanta. They also have quite a few good schools with big graduate programs that feed into the market (VT/UMD, Duke/UNC/NCSU, GT/Emory). The software work in these places is often some integral component of a meat-space product, and that meat-space product is often in a complex problem domain in which the specialization of a PhD is valuable. For example, if you're developing software for a UAV, it's valuable to have someone with domain experience in control theory. The specialized domains in D.C. are often defense related, in the Triangle it's often bio-related although quite diverse, and in Atlanta it's often logistics-related.

Certainly, Silicon Valley has tons of these sorts of jobs too. Google is full of PhDs. But the ratio of specialized domain products to consumer products seems to be higher in the southeast. And as a result, my perception is that the market's valuation of PhDs is higher. It's quite common to see companies in that market where not having a PhD is considered a severe liability.
Lead with AngularJS  Disruptive Music Company in New York, NY
Edward Snowden Live
He probably made a mistake evoking Ponzi's name (although he never actually called it a Ponzi scheme, which it clearly isn't). But I think when people bring up Ponzi and bitcoins, the idea is closer to a bubble mentality where adopters are buying bitcoins to profit, not to use it as a currency ("bitcoin isn’t means of payment as few transactions in Bitcoin. And given its volatility all who accept it convert it right back into $/€/¥"). This, at the moment, is correct from what I can tell - it's much easier to spend cash than bitcoins on legitimate things. People aren't getting bitcoins for, say, the same reason an American going to France will get Euros.

There may be theoretical technological benefits to crypto-currencies, but they don't practically exist for most people who want to legitimately spend their money today. The only useful application I've seen so far are the microtip dogecoins on reddit.
The system I have in mind will require all information to be open unless the order to be kept secret unless signed by a randomly selected federal judge. The government should make the case to keep stuff under the lid.

After all the judges go trough a lot of vetting and rigorous confirmation process so probably they do have enough clearance to be kept in the loop.

But the person that keeps the information secret should not the one that makes the rules what is secret.
Ponzi's not really the right word for either thing.

The huge growth of debt is a sign that inflation has been too low for too long in too many places. As long as the ECB and the Fed treat 2% as scary-high inflation, paying back debt becomes far more difficult.

To start solving the debt problem, the central banks should start targetting 4-5% inflation for a decade or so, and allow it to go a little above the target, rather than trying desperately to hold it down to less than 2%. This would reduce debt while encouraging investment and economic growth, which would bring down unemployment, which would help pay off debt. It's a virtuous cycle.

In contrast, Bitcoin is a deflationary currency. Deflationary regimes favor hoarding, make it impossible to invest, and ultimately benefit only the wealthy. Reasonable levels of inflation on the other hand favor economic growth, investment in real assets, and they favor the productive working class over the idle rich.
Facebook can't hire good engineers because good engineers don't want to work there.
EBay Asks Shareholders To Vote Against PayPal Split. Icahn Claims Incompetence
From the article: "With the additional funding, the founders plan to now focus solely on developing Ionic further, with plans to improve gestures and animations, plus roll out mobile services in 2014 that would make using Ionic a viable alternative to native app development. Areas of focus include things like analytics, notifications, and testing service. These would help the company generate revenue from its free platform."
Bitcoin is a scarcity-based currency, it's kind of a deflationary spiral, people save and don't spend their bitcoins.

We desperately need a digital currency, it's the future... How could we solve this issue ?
Here is a D3 based SVG analog clock dashboard
https://my.infocaptor.com/dash/mt.php?pa=world_clocks_using_...
DIANA
Wow, I had forgotten about everything2 and c2... c2 was the first open-source-ish project I wrote code for.
Look at the top 5 companies requesting H-1Bs between 2010 and 2012. All are outsourcing companies.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/top-10-companies-request-visa...

These companies typically exploit their workers with lower pay and threats to send them home if they don't play ball. Or are employing people to offshore jobs.

The "good" companies that use H-1Bs are a fairly small percentage of the number of visas issued.
There are lots of reasons why Black-Sholes doesn't work. Also lots of reasons why incentive problems cause people to misuse financial models. But that doesn't change the reality that our lives are dramatically changed as a result of them.
Gmod Funny Moments – 3D Glasses
I find that hiring practices can often discriminate against those who grew up poor/not middle class.

I remember someone writing about how they hired saying things like "I look for evidence of interest in technology from a young age." Well, I had tons of interest in technology from a young age, but my resume can't reflect that. I didn't have a computer until I was about 13 or 14 because we couldn't afford one earlier, even though my parents really wanted one. I think our school library might have had one computer for the whole school, which was not available. I certainly couldn't go to expensive tech camps or the like, we couldn't afford it. I did get all the science books from the public library and read them as much as I could. I didn't start programming until college. I get very very positive reviews from all the jobs I ever worked though, but my resume might be passed up because I didn't have the opportunities others had.
I also find it more to be intellectually boring. When exercising, I don't feel as if I need to use my brain any more than what it takes to actually move. Compared to me sitting in a chair and reading/writing/studying. As listed above, I could be doing it wrong, but that is my biggest deterrent to exercise- it's boring as hell.
Show HN: Introducing Sonical
good luck with your public statement.
This mobile operator wants to charge $2.50 a year for access to Facebook
It does, however, make it inevitable that it would happen.
how does this measure up to Intel XDK?
A fellow kindred spirit. That is also the point that jumped out at me and made me wonder what in the hell society has devolved into.

The disciples of Rand spend their money on the strangest things.
Fab! Certainly interests me. I've signed up for the announce list. I don't work for a startup but we're pretty small and "start up" like.
Article seems relatively balanced to me. And I don't think we should fault Ackman for shorting a company he's lobbying against. But having publicized too-close ties w Representative Sánchez, any change in his Herbalife position should me met with serious suspicion. This isn't an article about the ethics of shorting & lobbying, or nutritional supplement pyramid schemes vs. Wall Street -- it's about insider trading.
I agree, the paywall being easy to ignore with little consequence to oneself is not what justifies ignoring their copyright.
at times like this i wish the supporters of bitcoin hadn't wedded themselves so thoroughly to libertarian ideology. they've turned this into a ideological debate when in fact it should just be treated like a cool new technology that could benefit everyone. i say this as someone who thinks bitcoin has the power to change the world but also believes that markets need regulation in order to prevent massive destruction due to volatility.

that said roubini is completely wrong about btc, just like krugman, and both need to change their thinking about what constitutes a currency.
Google Apps Referral Program
I get a blank screen....
Malacoda – Daemon framework for Python
Debt creates more money, so the existence of such a large amount of debt indicates that printing some more money would be a good idea, and that central banks and governments have failed to print enough money to power the economy at the rate it requires.
The Principal of Least Power; in this case – CSS
Yeah, it's not even like doing that would make the protocol more human friendly... IRC is already trivial to do by hand, telnet makes a perfectly serviceable IRC client.
Hopefully that continues as I have been flying a lot all over the place the past month and none had it, not in the EU nor in the USA. Only in the top tier seatings. Maybe just bad luck...

Besides that ; I need devices with 'infinite-ish' battery life because battery life really really sucks.
ndespres is referring to this instead:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Ben_Charles_P...
All fiat currencies have the potential to be Ponzi scheme.

Our current system is a Ponzi schemewhere you can help pay down the debt by printing money?

This shifts wealth up.

numbers don't lie.

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

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-09/global-debt-exceeds...
An interview about what online stores and local butcher shops have in common
Updated!. Thanks devx for feedback.
Reminds me of something an early web-server software development company Roxen did for one of their clients, a watch manufacturer, circa 1995/6.

Basically they were rendering an animated gif on the server and streaming to the browser, so that the watch told the correct time, but the hands appeared behind the glass of the photo-realistic watch.

This was when most sites (not that there were many!) only had rudimentary static graphics, with the odd flashing "under construction' sign.

I googled, but couldn't find any reference to it, although Roxen the company still seems to be going, with the Roxen Web Server having become a CMS platform.
Sperm-inpsired bio-bots powered by beating heart cells
>As a bonus, it can also improve your skills in your existing languages.

I'd actually say that doing so is the easiest way to grow stylistically as a programmer. Each language has their own way of doing things. Some of those things are done really well, others, well, not so much. If you've never dipped your toe outside of the core language pool, it's tough to know just what those things are.

Every language I've ever learned has opened my eyes to a new way of doing things. As a guy who cut his teeth on Python, I'd say that I didn't really "understand" hardcore OOP until I picked up Java. You just don't see that every-noun-is-now-a-class style often in Python. Closures "clicked" when I picked up Javascript, and really deep lambda use didn't really sink in until I picked up Scala.

I had, of course, always used these things in Python, but only on a surface level. Exploring an environment where some small feature of your primary language is the big common feature of another is very eye opening. You pop out the other side with tons of new knowledge and usage patterns.
Body shops typically lock employees into restrictive contracts where punitive relocation "costs" are levied if the employee leaves before the contract is up.
Out of curiosity, I'd love to hear what your Google Analytics graphs look like! How long to people spend playing it?
> For me, so far no. I'm currently making the highest salary I've made yet in my career. I've been here for a year and a half.

all in all from that i can take you have been always paid the current market salary, hence later years equals the highest paying.
Github Organizations
None of his observations are wrong, how they are uneducated?
>Which is the bigger Ponzi?

Who cares? It isn't a contest.
Depends on your distro, I guess.

Arch has python -> python3, so it's quite rare that you'd have a python2-foobar package but not a python-foobar package, unless there was no python3 version.
10 minutes is farther than I got... I only now realize after the first run how to play the game. Dang, that can get addicting.
Completely unpersuasive.

Bitcoin, or some other digital currency, will enable the selling of wisdom (different than information) in a free market as Ted Nelson originally envisioned when he coined the term "Hypertext", which isn't what the current web is, btw.
Nice, only thing I don't like in the game is that I do better scores just doing (repeat((left or right once) + (up till it doesn't work anymore))) than when I think about my moves...