skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that i never see addressed concretely for me is this:

assuming I dont want to raise capital unless i really really really really have to, assuming im doing not b2c, assuming I actually am friends with a number of people who've done YC, etc etc

then why YC?

Unnuanced advocacy makes me nervous (and thats all I typically hear). Every single time in my life where I have taken unnuanced, uncaveated remarks on face value, it has blown up in my face. There are many fine businesses that have been certainly enabled by YC, and many that have not been.

Is YC suitable for businesses whose risks have been shifted to be strictly of the "can technology of this caliber actually exist?" sort, rather than "explore the business premise, do an MVP for the tech" sort? (admittedly, one challenge with sophisticated tech is educating folks about it!).

I guess I'm asking for nuance in why. If you can't give me nuance on that, why should I trust your advice on anything more complex?

[edit: to be clear, if someone convinced me, i'd totally apply to YC, just not sure if it makes sense for me]
Very few common user tasks can be solved more efficiently with an FPGA than with a CPU or GPU.

CPU gives you speed in computation. Except for a custom ASIC, nothing can match a modern CPU in single thread speed.

GPUs gives you parallelism. You can get thousands of decent CPUs in cheap boards today.

IMHO FPGAs main advantages today are bandwidth and auditability. But neither are very important in most applications.
Pushing to Ban Online Gambling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BClen_movement
Octave is awesome! Keep up the good work.
At university everyone was begging for Matlab instances from the licence server, while I had 6 instances of Octave open :)
I interpreted the "multiple non-residence ownership taxation" as more of a non-landlord tax.

I met a fellow back around 2002 who owned twenty houses out in Arizona. He had never actually seen any of them - he just owned them as an investment. Also, since being a landlord was too much hassle and legal liability, he wasn't renting them out. The houses just sat vacant and he intended to make his money on housing prices outpacing inflation.

The theory behind the tax is that having large numbers of houses sitting around empty is a poor use of resources. By increasing the property tax on unoccupied houses, the owner is encouraged to rent out the units, increasing the overall housing supply and thereby decreasing rents.
The ones who create and like the "IF THIS PAGE GETS 500K LIKES, FACEBOOK WILL CHANGE BACK THE NEWS FEED" page.
Lockitron can't even build their own Lockitron. My order has been delayed around 6 months now :(.
Xamarain Introduction
That's why the team behind the Paper app were smart to make it a separate app instead of a redesign. They know the consistent negative user reaction when facebook redesigns.
Considering that the synthesis is a PN-hard problem (I think so?), how much better is your 1995 design in a 1995 FPGA synthesized with a 2014 CPU compared with a 1995 CPU? Is there a huge difference?
The information is out there, though, even if not everyone reaches the conclusions that you agree with.
Didn't Cyrix cpus have some fpga in them, that would be dynamically assigned to any repetitive code that the cpu was busy doing?
To get started with FPGAs just download one of the free IDEs and have a play. You can buy dev boards for under $100 to get some feedback that what you are doing really works.
Managing Millennials in 2013
http://www.thecrmprocess.com/2013/02/22/managing-millennials-in-2013/#.UzSdsKiSygQ
That information has a much higher chance of corruption while in transit, and the bandwidth is low. People can't broadcast photos and videos through whispers for instance.
Higher risk for consumers, your credit card company can't back you up if you never receive what you paid for.
Two years in the trenches building Hotels.ng
This lines up so well with what I've been thinking. If your goal is to get into YC or some other VC thingy or get some high-level contacts or something of that nature, then you are probably thinking all wrong. Start by building something and getting some customers, then find out what else they want. If you can't get any customers at the un-funded scale, then funding isn't likely to help you much.

I bet every investor out there would much rather fund the guy who says "I built this website with this basic feature set, got a few dozen customers and X revenue. My customers want these totally doable features. If you give me $Y, then I can hire more engineers or whatever to build them." than the guy who says "I have a really cool idea that I haven't done anything at all with yet. Give me $Millions and I'll do something awesome".

If your goal is to get funded, you're much more likely to get ignored. If your goal is to build something awesome with whatever is at hand, then the investors just might come to you.
Never used version control on your code?
The interesting bit would be reconstructing the right face memory rather than one of the interviewers.

Actually, there's an obvious scifi plot: investigator is a serial killer but excluded from memory extraction because the witness just saw them (again).
Yes, but you had better be sure that's what your compiler is going to do, before writing code like
`result := array_append(result, new_element)`
inside a loop.
I've never worked at Google and I can respect the sentiment, but it seems to me that if you are a skilled designer that Google's massive audience and experimental capabilities can cut both ways. It means that you have to prove even the most minor design changes, but it also means that you have the ability to really prove your work is helpful and not fool yourself.

If you make a few small wins you surely can build up the credibility to take bigger steps -- the catch is though in my experience bigger steps never improve metrics anyway and are a waste of time since you end up having to throw more work out. I would kill to be able to run a 0.1% test on a large change and not disrupt things too much, while still getting statistical significance. Few places other than Google seem to have the traffic to do that.
Microsoft is after the business users who will throw the subscription on expenses without a second thought.

Maybe a few years ago. I'm not sure how many CIOs are still drinking that Kool-Aid today, though.
Yep, we're listening, and it's actively being worked on. See this: http://msopentech.com/blog/2014/02/25/vagrant-and-hyper-v-pr..., and there's more like it still to come.
I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home windows machines are probably roughly comparable to a Chromebook insofar as actual day-to-day usage is concerned. Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. All the apps most people I know on windows use are web-based. This is anecdotal based on my observations, though I'd love to see hard data in this department.
This is interesting in respect to @harrf's comment above.

He says, "Given an existing user base, on average 30% will hate any given change to their user experience, independent of whether the that experience is actually worse or better."

I wonder how @harrf's number would play out over time as users adjust, get used to, and accept changes the way many Apple users do. I'm not convinced that designers always know what's best for users, but I do think it sometimes takes a little while for users to catch on to the long-term benefits designers are designing for.
It will be interesting to see how YC continues to evolve. In the early days it seemed like it was all about early, early investing (come to San Francisco and build your product, we're betting on you as a founder) to today where 50% of the open slots are no longer even available to these types of startups since they are taken by established companies.

Seems similar to how things like the Olympics evolved. At first participants had to be amateurs but later they started letting in the professionals and the amateurs could no longer even qualify. Good to see that there is a concerted effort at YC to continue to fund the amateurs but I can only assume that will be harder and harder to justify in the future.
Just to clarify, by context, I was referring to how free he is to express his opinions. Outside of the workplace, he can say whatever he wants short of what the law allows.

In the workplace, anti-discrimination and harassment laws do not make him free to express his opinions.

>> If he is biased against gays, a concern raised by helping fund the removal of one of their civil rights, people can be reasonably afraid that this will eventually affect them in the workplace.

I would think this concern would be true of any manager who has a fundamentalist interpretation of a particular religion too.
What stood out for me from this piece:

> 38% of venture-backed founders are over 40 years old
One, at http://www.hassleme.co.uk has a free, simple and painless email reminder system - "we'll nag you via email at semi-unpredictable intervals" (of N days, plus or minus a few).
indeed. same goes for all the Jobs stories.

nobody under these people seem to get anything right. they have to be torn to shreds and spoonfed by the great lords to "see".
> many neighborhoods near me already have a shortage of parking (street parking is constantly full), and the zoning only calls for 1 spot per unit. Reducing that would just lead to more problems, and probably parking tickets for residents.

End free long-term street parking. You don't have a right to a parking space that the everyone without a car has to pay for in taxes.
This seems like very circular logic. There are not many single-family units available to rent to ELI (Extremely Low Income) renters for <= 30% of their income. Right, if there were then you wouldn't call it ELI.

To look at it another way... Plot the price of every rental, sorted by price, X axis is percentile, Y axis is price. ELI is defined as the Xth percentile price times 3.

You want more cheap housing? State it another way, you want to encourage investment in cheap housing. Land is scarce, housing has lots of fixed costs, renting is a massive risk to the landlord.

One interesting catch-22 is the stronger the renter protection laws, the more risk to investors who would build and rent these units.

There are a lot of ways to make this area less risky for investment. Better legal frameworks to deal with problem renters. Better tools to select reliable ELI renters. Better legal framework for using these tools to screen renters. Better tax incentives for renting to ELI tenants (subsidies).
Especially when the price of entry to ASIC land is relatively low by industrial standards - http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how-much...

eg for something very simple you can do it for thousands or tens of thousands...but in that price range it's probably still more economical to implement in software or do it discretely with SMT unless you are very sure about the existence of a market.
With the Xilinx ISE toolset I am currently using (which Xilinx is deprecating in favor of the new Vivado toolset) it parallelizes/multithreads poorly. I understand that the place and route algorithm is based upon simulated annealing, in which you make small random perturbations to the current layout configuration, measure whether it is better or worse, and sometimes retain the new configuration, and sometimes roll back. This gradually evolves the system to a configuration which maximizes some objective function, avoiding getting stuck in a local maximum. It has traditionally been a challenge to parallelize this sequential algorithm through design partitioning because of placement and routing interactions between the partitions.

In some flows you can do a coarse floorplan of your design and route the submodules separately and then stitch them together. I imagine this is how the very largest devices are implemented in manageable design iteration times.

I don't usually worry about that, though. Since my design is just so many replicated tiles, I tend to do design iterations of 4- or 16-processor elements to test the impact on clock period / timing slack. That usually takes 2-3 minutes per design spin. Only once in a while do I place and route the whole chip to confirm some change doesn't impact timing closure.
Dokku guy isn't screwing around anymore
Serious dokku implementation.
Society DOES consider gay relationships inferior in many places, unfortunately.

Discrimination exists, and this same "different name" concept has existed, with socially damaging results, in the past:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal
I don't know that that was a smart idea actually. The problem is now they are in a precarious situation. They have forked Facebook's UI in a way that makes it incredibly hard to A/B test. How does Paper get beyond being a niche experience? What was the point of building it if that wasn't the goal?

The only thing I can imagine is Paper is meant to be a playground, where they can experiment with new UI, have a place to innovate tooling and the design process, and then maybe roll much less ambitious versions of it piecemeal into the main facebook experience. It's not a bad strategy but it comes with a lot of downsides. For example, they can't really kill it at this point without massive outrage, so it's a maintenance burden for what amounts to an experiment. They also aren't able to sanely compare metrics between Facebook proper and the Paper app due to selection bias, etc.

It is cool though, and they probably did learn alot of tactical skills while building it. The question is can they take what they learned and built and apply it in a way that really levels up the main experience.
Hey there, founder here: Downtyme was made in Boston, and we'd prefer to keep the beta local in order to market effectively to larger student organizations. Naturally, the app is most useful if your friends/teammates/whoever else is close to you uses it as well. By remaining in Boston, we can have more control over the groups that interact with it.
I think Gladwell wrote about this in one of his books. And what happened? Orchestras started hiring more women. And, I'm guessing, better overall musicians.
Tripping: Kayak for Airbnb/Homeaway/VRBO?
Compared to Bezos, they probably are morons. That doesn't mean they aren't probably still well above the average person in terms of skills/intelligence.
so...we can eventually create games and movies by imagining it without the need to do it by hand and input it into a computer
Github the code?
You need 1.2TB SSD for sure to train the complete ImageNet dataset. The data is loaded into GPU memory only one batch (256 images) at a time. But the loading part will be the bottleneck if you use a rotational disk.
The assumption here is that we know, because we're geniuses, what a good user experience looks like.

That's aggressive.
They haven't taken down the Internet, just a couple of sites. Information can (and does) still easily get in and out of the country. So my first thought was, it shouldn't really matter that much.

However, on second thought, while information can still travel freely, the question remains who to send it to and who to receive it from. That's because people have outsourced their social graph to single remote entities (case in point: Twitter). They could still communicate with everyone, but have made themselves reliant on a single point of failure.

Of course none of this refutes your point -- the Internet isn't magic. But I think the powers that be are very reluctant to through out the baby with the bathwater.
This is a really cool alternative to the $179 lockitron. Nice job!
I can't quickly tell, but does/could this support a mortise lock? If Lockitron did, I would've ordered one years ago.
Features and Compatibility of Samsung Gear 2
If you are one of those who is aware of everything that occurs Release within the technology world, then surely you must have noticed that the great wave of momentum devices are “smart”.
"how much better" -- I didn't understand, sorry.

Even with 18 years of x86 performance advances, it takes much longer to PAR the large FPGAs now than it did back in the day.
If you had an HOA, you would. If you're renting, it's not your property to police.

If you want to protect yourself from AirBnB, there are ways to do it.
I don't have a project site for it. I became discouraged after this whole ordeal and I let it slip away into obscurity. Also, when I put Gimpshop out there, I didn't really know how to code, so updating the source to stay current was a huge undertaking for me. Since then, I've become a self taught programmer. I know Ruby fairly well. I've built a couple of non-trivial Rails sites and within the last 6 months, I published my first iOS app. Gimpshop was a fun little 'prank' that got bigger than I ever expected. Sad what it has become, though.
Haha pretty soon we'll be measuring something new every week!
I already never leave my feed—and all they've done by streamlining it is make ads a full third of the screen. Ads for me, a 22 year old, to bulk up, grow my hair back, certain for any male over 55 to like.
There's a subtle distinction to be made here. The argument is that a better user experience was abandoned in favor of a worse user experience that generated more impressions per user.

It might be true that users would have an immediately negative reaction to change; I suppose it's impossible to know for sure. But that doesn't mean that the new design wouldn't have been better at providing the functionality that Facebook purports to offer.

Even if you're right, there's a similar long-term-vision vs. short-term-incentives situation. The overhead of having to "learn" a new system (which is already and would have remained fairly passive and simple to use) becomes less reasonable to hate when amortized over years of improved performance.

I don't really use Facebook much and am agnostic about the extent to which one site or another would better serve users. It's ambiguous to me what Facebook truly sees as its function / purpose anyway, so the criteria is murky here.

But the argument in this article isn't necessarily assuming anything about what users want, rather it purports to know from a design perspective what will ultimately serve them better.
I agree with what Jacob says about Jitsi. It's great, but just isn't user-friendly enough.

I assume that all my convos and cam chats on Skype are recorded [1] - so i try to push my contacts to jitsi. But every time it's so hard to walk people through setting it up correctly.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam...
It is because people like me are in the process of switching over to iWork because my on the go platform is an iPad. I am still in the middle of the transition, and this will make me reconsider.
I am certainly not expecting compiling HDL to be the same as compiling software, as yes it is drastically more complicated. However, compile times are growing more than linearly with respect to the number of gates (or logic blocks) that are in each FPGA. Whereas software grows linearly as the programs get larger. Also you have the other dimension of getting your block timed, so it can run on the FPGA at a guaranteed frequency. This is definitely a non-trivial problem, but one that I believe would be better solved by some hackers if there were a "GCC" for Verilog FPGA synthesis.

In my opinion there is very little for the manufacturers to gain by keeping their bitstream formats proprietary and undocumented. I don't think there is a competitive advantage, as all the manufacturers are pretty much doing the same thing. And their FPGA block diagrams are already open and documented (you can see how many flip flops, clocks, and muxes are in each logic cell, how the routing works, and where the memory cells and other units are).
Reality is weirder.

People now crave for HDMI on their devices even though it has less color than the previous analog offerings, or if it has the same amount of color, less frames.

but everyone thinks HDMI is good for them and will never buy anything without it. DRM helmet has won.
"Mutated."

"Malleability" is the property of transactions that aspects of their serialization format can be changed without invalidating them. Actually changing transactions is called "mutation", the past tense of which is "mutated".
Software Management These Days
But the 1/(1-n) equation is still true no matter how many alternatives you have. The only change is if you have an alternative, say 10% for 1M from some VC, then you would ask yourself after I got 1M and the help VC, would the investment from YC still help my startup grow 6.4%?

I think you are missing my assumption in my OP "in the early stage of a startup". In fact at that stage of startup, even if you have a better deal than YC, you might still want to do YC (so you would take both two deals) because even after your take the better deal, YC can still gives your startup >6.4% growth.
You should check out Berkeley Biolabs if you haven't already: http://berkeleybiolabs.com/
That's a step in the right direction, but don't make us use Hyper-V when most of us are already using VirtualBox. That's one more thing to add to my stack that is different than my tooling that works with all other operating systems I test on. Most developers using vagrant use VirtualBox. Now I have no problem if you make things work with Hyper-V, but please make things work with VirtualBox as well. Does hyper-v even run on Linux or OS X?

PS that link isn't loading for me.

PSS if you are an MS engineer working on this stuff, can you please contact me via the email in my profile. I didn't see an email in yours.
Therein lies the beauty of these types of posts. They allow the reader to fill in the gaps with their own conclusions without the author risking actual opinion.
Dave McClure responds to being called "shady" on Secret
As long as the lock/unlock control is a 180-degree (or less) turn it should be fine, though from my understanding most Mortise locks would not fit this criteria
I keep thinking about building something like this but the thing that ours me off is the possible implications in the case of having to claim on insurance if someone robbed my house.

I have very little doubt that the insurance company would take a dim view of my front door lock being connected to the web, and leap on the chance to deny any claims on the grounds that the intruder could have broken in via my code, making it equivalent to leaving the door unlocked when going out.
Because it sounds cool. Waiting for the market to fix things is boring when you could "hack" them instead.
HN is the HN for Biotech and all tech and everything else. Nobody buys tailored newspapers.
Living based on ethical rules is always a daunting task if one want to do it "completely".

People who are vegetarians by ethical choice can easy find themselves eating meat. Be it from candy, to supplements to medicine. Then there is bioplastics, which while should be eaten, qualify as something a vegetarian might found unethical to use.

It is good that someone sacrifice so much to try living by their believes. It would be so much worse if ethics did not exist at all.
I wonder why Xilinx choose to use the j32 CPU in this example when they have better designs like the MicroBlaze, with about same size but faster and able to boot Linux.

EDIT: Oh I see. Microblaze is propietary and didn't exist back then.