skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm aware. I've started a company in school and my team is interviewing for this batch. The company came out of an idea for a product, and YC seems like a way to accelerate our growth.

At the end of the day I'm going to work on this but there are two scenarios, one where my parents approve of my life decisions and one where they don't. Even though I might not always agree with them I think that even failed startup founders (for reasons you mentioned) are more likely to start more companies because they have gained valuable experience.

[edit] Thanks for the advice!
My take home is this. If we are going to do everything in our power to make these systems work better, then choosing or developing a language that is intentionally designed to draw attention to common security mistakes or prevent them structurally is a damned good thing to look in to. We will also do everything else in our power, but we had bettered put choosing or making that language on the list.
That's fine, but you're beginning to talk about a lot of languages glued together instead of one "master language", I think.
I am actually very pleased to have learned that snippet of useful information!

FYI when I wrote my comment I had just added an attribute to a product catalog that uses [very large number] - [product creation date in epoch format] so that I could have a latest added as the sort order without having to go through the bother of having DESC on my SQL query.

I assure you that only on HN could you find someone that is delighted to know about how 'unix time is not monotonic'... - thanks!
I hear what you're saying but you do not need to compete with SpaceX or Apple to make tens of millions of dollars. If you're bootstrapping, you should keep it simple and pick a smaller target.
Nokia Refocus is quite different.

Refocus is a set of photos with different focal lengths, and a look up table.

For each "pixel" (The look up table isn't full resolution) the look up table tells which of the photos has the most variance (i.e., is the most focused) at that point, and the viewer simply switches the photo that's shown.
Maybe. But it could also benefit from Google's financial backing if it became as big as the author would like it to be. Then it wouldn't matter.

(By that I mean that there would be efforts made to keep it lean. I don't think Google is Microsoft.)
Racket has a documentation system called Scribble.

Which is actually one of the most interesting features of Racket -- that it lets you implement a `#lang scribble` which does not even use s-expression syntax, but you still have the full power of Racket if you need it.

The default `#lang racket` is a wonderful modern lisp, and you can use Racket as "only" that. But Racket is also a system for making languages.
They're for fairly different markets. Go is geared to be a much simpler language that attracts people from Python and Ruby. This results in things like a garbage collector, no pointer arithmetic, no generics, etc..

On the other hand, Rust is geared to be a true systems language where you can implement a kernel and do stuff where you'd traditionally do them in C and C++. Rust provides a really strong type system, strong focus on safety (with guarantees provided by the compiler), better pointer semantics (unique, borrowed, etc...), optional task-local GC where the GC is implemented as a library and not in the language itself (i.e., not implemented in the compiler and no associated syntax).
At my place of work (large, slow) Ember is starting to get widely used. "Google uses/supports it" is instant justification for using it to any layer of management, and I think that's the source of its success. (At least where I'm working people are afraid of using Ember because it's harder to explain/justify to the suits.)

Likewise, I expect at some point we'll be using node.js (probably over Rails/Django) because it's a lot more obvious to 'management' that it's used by large organizations.
Very true. We do this kind of work in VFX all the time to reduce CG rendering costs for blurs that are expensive in 3d but cheap in 2d. Even with access to sub pixel (4x, 8x etc.) depth maps there are always lots of issues to deal with around edges.

But given that jpeg is good enough for most people I'm sure these types of tools are too.
Their SSL cert isn't invalid, it's from CAcert (http://www.cacert.org/).
All you have to do is read the about page, and there is a part two to this series already. Easier to break down the last years of business into segments
>Sure I'm not perfect

But your reasoning assumes you are. You do make these mistakes. Everyone does. And languages that prevent them are not dulling your tools, they are putting handles on them. Insisting that you need to work with a blade with no handle is foolish. Claiming that people who use blades with handles are less capable than you is just plain absurd.
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Hey AT&T, cry me a river.
It's strange that Europe is progressive in some ways, but really takes personal bankruptcy seriously.
Ok, first of all, Congrats on getting an interview!
Second of all, there are a lot of variables you should consider for this decision. If you've done any market research, you may be able to tell whether this is the optimal time to enter the market aggressively, or if you could bootstrap it for a couple more years and make a more aggressive move once you're out of school. The reason for this being, there are still a lot of valuable lessons to be gained at school.

That said, if you feel that now is the most appropriate time for your product to launch (there is demand, the market is educated in the sector) and delaying that launch could/would open up room for a competitor or competitors to saturate the market, then try not to be afraid to stand by your belief that this is right for you, difficult though that can be.

IF all the stars have aligned, you are confident in your product and your team and you get accepted to YC, I'd say go for it. The experience is incomparable, and an education can always be completed later and/or elsewhere. Building your own company is extremely education, and having Paul and Sam and the whole YC as mentors is indescribably invaluable.

Good luck man!
>Absent distortions it doesn't make sense for most people to buy a house -- it's inherently non-diversified, low liquidity, high transaction costs. But American society has for some bizarre reason decided that home ownership is the sine qua non of human civilization and so every level of government intervenes to distort the market in favor of homeownership.

The thing is? Leases are... very inflexible. In many ways, it's less flexible than buying. Here is the essential problem: If I have a rational, profit-maximizing landlord, every time my lease is up for renewal, he increases my rent to what it would cost me to rent an equivalent place elsewhere plus just under what it would cost me to move. On the other side of that, if I take a longer lease, I'm in a seriously bad position if something changes in my life and I need to move.

This is especially dramatic in commercial real-estate, where the business owner is usually asked to personally co-sign the lease, and where there are fewer laws requiring the landlord to reasonably try to rent vacant units to other people. (and where the tenant is more likely to be able to keep paying rent after moving.)

Three to five years of rent is nearly always more than 6% of the purchase price of the property.
Sen Franken looks to recruit Netflix to help kill the Comcast-TWC merger
Not at all... He states merely that if someone has the option to have a control and chooses not to, you should be concerned. Specifically he hits on the fact that some fields can't have a control (sometimes just due to ethical reasons).
Whatever business idea you are working on, and assuming it has the potential to become a money-making business one day, the decision to raise money or bootstrap should depend on what minimizes your overall risks and maximizes chances of success.

If bootstrapping, and if bandwidth-limited, you would be growing slowly while the competition / market could be moving at a faster pace, thus increasing your risks. If this is the case, it may be better to raise money and hire people to increase your pace.

If you raise money, it should be to solve some real and key problem you have that is solvable with money. That problem may be skill / bandwidth, advertising, patenting, whatever. As far as the problem is real (which means solving the problem will reduce your risks considerably) and it is solvable with money, it is better to raise money than to bootstrap.

If you are wrong somewhere in your assessment on what your risks are, where money can and cannot help, how fast the market will end up moving, etc., you are likely to make a suboptimal choice for yourself.
I think, within a certain threshold, it is definitely more financially responsible to bootstrap. Though, I agree with your point about Twitter, etc: if you're a seasoned developer/entrepreneur with a large scale idea that requires serious capital to get off the ground, you can't bootstrap. But for something that is effective at a small scale and can be built from the ground up, the timeline only shifts a small amount (so long as you pursue all marketing avenues available).

I'm assuming that your friend evaluated the risks of fundraising and made a reasoned choice. I don't think it is fair to reason about his venture in hindsight.
Teach yourself to code python
I use melatonin supplements on a fairly regular basis over the past year to regulate my sleep cycle, as recommended by my doctor to counteract Ritalin-induced insomnia. Studies have shown no reduction in efficacy after three months of use, according to Wikipedia[1]. If no change could be detected by that point, then there's a good chance that it's fine for extended use. From my own experience, this has held true.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin#Stimulants
If I am guessing his company correctly, then most development teams indeed do their own pager duty with typical oncalls lasting one week. Some teams have extremely heavy ops load and have support people or even support teams that focus on doing ops and reducing op load.

There are several possible causes of such an unusually high ops load. Maybe it's a failing in that team (teams typically track operation load carefully, as it can serve as an early indicator of something in the team dynamics going wrong), that team might be under pressure from management to push out new features on a tight schedule (leaving less time to get things right, or to fix known issues), they may have had the unfortunate luck of inheriting a service written quick and dirty by one of the VP's favored "get shit done fast" teams (a problematic phenomenon that fortunately seems to be becoming less common), or it may just be the nature of their particular work for whatever reason.

I have seen teams with extremely high operation load get support teams based out of other timezones, so that 24/7 ops coverage can be done mostly by people working during their regional business hours. Why that hasn't been set up in his case, I cannot say.
Debate: Millennials Don't Stand A Chance
This sounds like it works well for Olark.

However, I've seen companies use this to stretch the responsibilities of the development team to include customer support..and not hire anyone for customer support.

It was a disaster and I hated it...and eventually quit because of it.
That's nice, the rest of the world will get on with innovating and AT&T can go the way of the dodo.
From a hiring standpoint, I don't really care where you've interned or where you accelerated/failed/decelerated. In rough order of importance, I care if you get along with my team, if you can think through problems, and if you know enough to work on things. I could give two cares if you have the Paul Graham Seal of Approval, or if you won Palantir's Summer MVP award.

You come off here (as is pointed out by tlb and massappeal) kind of approval-seeking. You should be in business for yourself, because you think that you are better off starting a business than not.

And if your parents don't approve, you need to decide for yourself whether or not to follow their wishes: a bunch of random jerks on the 'net can't really help you there. It's part of becoming an adult.

(Also, I've seen your Github and I've skimmed Outfitly--can you please consider something a bit more useful to attempt as a business? Please? You seem too smart to be chasing vapid B2C stuff).
Interesting... I've never had any problems with DrRacket. What qualifies as a "modest laptop"?
Solar Chimneys Can Convert Hot Air to Energy, But Is Funding a Mirage?
I don't normally do this, but https://xkcd.com/810/
Keyboard is one of the modules. And hot-swap battery.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wvCXOXQ0f7c&feature=youtu.be&a=
محافظ الزلفي يدشن ملتقى صلاتي قرة عيني | اخبارية الزلفي
I'm bootstrapping now and growing organically (as well as keeping the site invite-only to handle scaling slower) and it's been an interesting ride. I know if I could bring on a business/marketing person I could take it to a VC and really start hammering away at it, but I've also gotten past MVP-stage on my own and the service is profitable and steadily growing (aside from fully covering my living expenses) and I have no loans out for the company / debt-free. I keep getting a stage later than I thought I would on my own, so I dunno ... I'm a software person not looking to run a business but work on my own products/services.

There's definitely an ego portion involved I think, but definitely less so than my worry about raising VC debt and losing control of "my baby". At some point I will have to say "this is where someone else more experienced takes over" and I think that day is quickly coming ... so long as I can work on the technical side / features, I think I'm ok with that ... I could not see myself being a CEO because it's just not that interesting to me.
Great comment. Totally agree.There is hardly any detail or practically useful information. Reads more like wantraprenour porn which seems to be every where nowadays.
You won't come to the party? Okay, see you...
So that begins to look a bit like the RSA problem, doesn't it? Find a problem which can only be solved efficiently given some "secret" knowledge – where, instead of that knowledge (the prime factors) being secret, the knowledge is something it's easy for a computer to use but hard for it to recognize.

I'm probably overgeneralizing, but it's an interesting framing.
How to piss off an orthographist
I did skim it, but it doesn't add the info I've described as being useful for this particular article.

Additionally, I don't see details about the 3 business, other than their names. And I'm not sure if you're including ImGrind as one of those businesses. One, Revived Media, has a broken link. iMobiTrax I see is analytics. The third, Jinx Mobile Content, has no URL.
Perhaps something similar to this? https://github.com/deftlabs/mongo-live

edit: Or this? https://github.com/junegunn/redis-stat
I did say "as long as there's a clear, and working, way to turn the sales emails off if you don't want them".

"It's not something that gets me hot under the collar"

Dude, you're emailing the domain's technical contacts, who likely have no say whatsoever in company sales policy. That sounds pretty hot under the collar to me.
Lessons from shutdown of Funding Community: A debt crowd funding platform
محافظ الزلفي يدشن مشروع محطة تحلية المياه بأم الشيح | اخبارية الزلفي
More on Scribble:

Racketeer Mathew Flatt's video on Scribble's concept and the rationale for making it: http://vimeo.com/6630691
How to be a Hero with 1 killer feature
After I realized the reasons behind Twitter's 140 character limit, I started to think if one can express anything within 140 chars. Its difficult, and for the same reason, people use services that let them tweet more than 140 chars (with a link to the service). I have also observed people trying to use SMS lingo to cram their words into 140 chars. I thought it would be nice to have a service that shortens your tweets.

I wrote up Twitlyt (http://www.twitlyt.com).

The algorithm is based on the assumption that, as long as the crammed word sounds like the actual word, it is comprehensible. I have used Python's Fuzzy library to generate soundex codes of each of the words in a sentence, then, I removed vowels from the actual words till I get the shortest substring(?) of the actual word that shares the same soundex code with the actual word.

Right now, it handles URLs and mentions. Let me know what you guys think about it.
Calling out Java for this issue is BS. Java doesn't allow unreachable code. If Java had a 'goto' instruction, that code wouldn't compile because the latter code was unreachable.

The article is poorly researched rahrah for Eiffel. Eiffel is a good language, but not for the reasons the author states.
Or just don't use callbacks and observe the model attributes for changes...
>Having been a webvan customer (mentioned in the article) this race always amazes me. It seems like such a suicide mission.

It's a little like pets.com, I think. A website to sell dogfood is not a fundamentally unreasonable business to run.

The problem comes when you start buying superbowl ads for your dogfood-selling website before you are turning a profit.

Safeway has been delivering since at least the first dot-com, and they are doing okay.

Amazon is approaching this point, but unlike Safeway, they don't come by with a refrigerated truck, so I can't get my produce through them. I would watch them, though; If anyone is going to become the giant in this space, it's amazon.

As a Safeway delivery customer? the majority of the value I see isn't in driving the food the mile or so it is to my house, but in letting me choose what I want on a website, rather than making me wander through an ever-changing labyrinth looking for what I want.

Amazon is really, really good at that sort of thing. The only thing they need, really, is a contract with a delivery company that runs refrigerated trucks.

I don't think grocery delivery is a suicide mission, even same-day grocery delivery; certainly not if you look at delivery as part of your retail operations.
The reason why Backblaze's unlimited backups aren't as much of a problem for me, is I have no desire for more than about 12 Terabytes of backups. So, as long as Backblaze's definition of "Unlimited" is 12 terabytes or less (and, based on their performance with me the last couple years, they are) - we are good to go.

But, I'm pretty certain if I tried to backup a 200 TByte iSCSI array (which appears as a "local drive", and, is theoretically something that could be backed up by BackBlaze) - I'd find myself either throttled, or receiving a polite email from Backblaze suggesting I was using their service in a manner that was not intended.

That's the thing with unlimited services - if you ask enough times, they will always tell you what the actual number is - I just wish they would come out up front and share it.
How about starting with a blog that doesn't need a database so it can survive HN front page? jekyll + s3 works.
IMGrind is our Premium Forum - 4,200+ monthly paying subscribers. Revived Media is our Mobile User Acquisition Network, we provide performance advertising and monetization solutions for mobile content advertisers, mobile apps and mobile websites. iMobiTrax is our proprietary self-hosted mobile ad tracking software, 5,000+ customers. Jinx Mobile is our own mobile content billable offers, our mobile apps and mobile games. That's all 4 of our businesses (not all projects) in a nutshell.
Watch SRI's Nimble Microrobots Cooperate to Build Structures
An overhaul of the battery will jump-start a shift to renewable energy
It's a cool gimmick that would be useful for Instagram photos of food. But selfies will still be distorted when taken up close with a wide angle lens.

It would be interesting to pair this with Nokia's high megapixel crop-zoom.
it's a failed strategy for deterring spammers, but apparently reCAPTCHA has done a good job of training google's computer vision algos. which probably have better things to do than try to beat captchas.
The biggest selling point of Rust is that it allows you to write low-level code with memory safety (so no use-after-free, buffer overruns, Heartbleeds, etc) and without runtime overhead. Right now this is a niche that Rust has to itself, as far as non-academic languages go. It's like having a C++ static analyzer with guaranteed no false negatives built into the language.

You also get nice high-level productivity features like type inference, lightweight closures, a module system, a modern take on interfaces, etc.
One big advantage that Go currently has over Rust is much greater stability, in terms of language and standard library changes.

This means that Go is far more predictable than Rust currently is for anyone who wants to use it seriously, especially for larger systems that will take some time to develop.

There has been talk that Rust 1.0 will be released later this year. Hopefully that is the case, as it'll allow for the stability that'll then allow more users to seriously consider using it. But until that happens, Go is a much more viable choice in many cases.
Limitations of OpenSSL's model of PKI
Love things like this.

Here's a screenshot expanded version of our staff bar on GitHub.com:

http://cl.ly/image/0O0N183x2F44

Most of those numbers are clickable. The graphs button on the left links to a flame graph (https://www.google.com/search?q=flame+graph) Ruby calls of the page. The microscope button is a sorted listing of CPU time and idle time by file that went into the page's render. The template number links to a timing breakdown of all the partials that went into the view. The SQL timing links to a breakdown of MySQL queries for that page, calling out N+1 queries, slow queries, or otherwise horrible database decisions. Depending on the page, we'll also have numbers for duration and queries spent in redis, elasticsearch, and gitrpc.

Our main github.com stuff is pretty tied into our stack, but one of our employees, Garrett Bjerkhoel, extracted a lot of this into peek, a very similar implementation of what we have on GitHub. We use peek in a ton of our smaller apps around the company. Here's the org: https://github.com/peek
What he was saying should be obvious, since there is actual code in the comment he was replying to, and its not what you wrote.
Many out-of-college entrepreneurs want that sweet VC money because of the status associated with it, even if it may not be necessary.... Now it is often the case that one should take/want that money, but to think that VC money is what it's all about is a bit too much and far too common.
Let's just say that it's possible-enough that you should ask a real lawyer about what they think :p
The depth part is actually much easer than you might think and we've had techniques for doing some aspects of it since the 80's if not earlier.

One early technique was to take video form a mounted camera moving horizontally on weals looking 90 degrees to the side from the direction of travel (think looking out the side car window).

Now if you take that sequence of video frames and stack them one after the other like a deck of cards to create a 3d volume. Then you look down on that volume, what you will see are lines of color moving diagonally. Top left to bottom right, or the other way depending on your direction of travel.

These are the image features as they trace there way across the video over time. Things that are close move quickly so have a shallow diagonal. Things that are further away move slowly and have a much steeper diagonal.

Assign a depth to slope, done! Who needs LiDAR.