skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the contrary. I think a big part of the identity of Y Combinator is a straightforward rationality that would support even more explicit support for the Democratic party. Pragmatically it would be inefficient to give resources to a third party, which leaves a choice of supporting the Democrats, supporting the Republicans, or supporting neither.

The Republicans have been actively, intentionally sabotaging the economy that sustains YC's growth for years now, since the very beginning of Obama's term. YC's success is tied to the success of the American economy in general, as well as other big-picture things that are easy to forget (like having a planet to keep a headquarters on, for example, or not having that headquarters engulfed by nuclear bombs). Republicans do stuff every day to make terrible outcomes for the country and the world more likely.

Democrats have lots of problems and make lots of mistakes. But American politics is zero-sum. Take power away from Democrats and it will be given to Republicans. We should all be doing whatever we can to prevent that from happening, while also advocating for positive changes within the democratic party.

Until the Republican party loses all real power, ceases to exist or radically changes, Y Combinator (like all American enterprises) is more at risk than it should be.

If you're skeptical that this stuff really matters, think about how different the economy, and thus the start up world, could have been if Bush had never been president, or if Obama had had bad-faith-filibuster-proof majorities throughout his terms.
We haven't nailed down the exact API calls that we're going to need long-term so there isn't a policy we're recommending. Currently EC2 and Route53 full access will work, but we recommend creating a new AWS account for security reasons if you have anything else running.
Honestly, hadn't thought about accessibility. Thank you for bringing it up! I'm going to start looking into captioning services.
for chrome? seriously?
> Native English speakers are either overestimating the difficulty of memorizing Chinese characters, or underestimating how comparably opaque English spellings are, or maybe a bit of both.

You seem to be implying that you've provided evidence that Chinese is not, in fact, more difficult than English. Or at least that you have reason to believe that. What is that reason? Is it so hard to believe that maybe Chinese is objectively more difficult to learn?
Before imgur started keeping .png's, I just couldn't use it to show other people what I'm currently doing in my computer.

I share screenshots all the time and it really needs to be done with .png's for the clear image and text.
What tech will allow IoT things to be self-organizing?
What technologies will let things in the Internet of Things discover each other, form groups, and work together in a decentralized fashion?

Our social media grew to enable these functions among people, still an imperfect and evolving process. It's only natural for things to do the same.

What will it take for self-organization sufficient for emergent properties?
Results of the GitHub Investigation
Maybe the messaging is a little off here?

So we have what happened.

How about this scenario instead? An announcement that due to all the serious issues in technology affecting startups, YC is going to donate its facilities to both political parties to hold fundraisers and get to know the people their policies are influencing. The first one is upcoming on yadda yadda yadda Then add some small print about how one of the corporate officers has to endorse any proposed event.*

Then you can all get together and give money to one bunch, never let the other bunch show up, and still get to look like heroes. Instead, we get this brouhaha.

Doesn't look too optimal from a PR standpoint.

*Note that this would only work for one or two election cycles until the gig was up. But still, it'd look a heckuva lot better than what we have now.
The recently deployed AT&T fiber infrastructure for U-Verse is first class and very well built. It will handle 1Gbps+ when it needs to.

But not over CAT-3 neighborhood wiring.

The fact is nobody, not AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, or anyone else, is eager to deploy fiber to each home's "de-marc." It's expensive, time-consuming, and labor intensive.

The last mile is a good place for municipalities to get involved, possibly under some form of revenue sharing plan with the carriers.
Ask HN: What did you think of Silicon Valley Episode 3?
discuss.bootstrapped.fm has some good discussions of bootstrapped businesses. It's very focused on that.
They're not a "DNC fundraising organization". They're a business that happens to be run by someone who currently supports the DNC, and is making an in-kind contribution of the use of their office space for an event.

YC is a private business. Their management is entitled to participate in the political process in any way they choose. If YC's voting interest is OK with an in-kind contribution, that's their right too.

The idea that you'd find this kind of thing shocking is a little surprising, since it's very much the norm across all political parties.

If you'd like to pivot to a discussion of libertarian politics, I'd observe that there are companies that not only play host to libertarian political activist organizations, but also directly and aggressively lobby in favor of their favored policy objectives.
Nope, we go here:

echo "127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hosts
I've assumed similar things, though I recognize the 'turbulence' argument below. In general, it does seem that as one lane slows down a bunch of people jump to the faster lane, quickly slowing that one down.

Regardless, for me the best strategy is to almost never switch lanes. Even when I do switch, 15 minutes later I see somebody that I had passed earlier zipping by me in another lane. There is no value in switching for me that I can determine, and my commute is much more pleasant when I stop thinking about how to get one car length ahead. Whether the lane switchers improve efficiency or reduce it doesn't change that equation for me.

I said 'almost never'. There are a few places on my commute where free lanes are predictable - everyone is merging right to try to get to get onto some interchange, that so several lanes back up, while the people who are trying to stay on the same road can move left and travel quickly. But even then, what are you optimizing for? Maybe 15seconds? Sure, it is more than that in the moment, as you can sit in the slow lanes for a few minutes, but all you do if you move left is rush ahead to the next back up.
Thanks for the feedback! I've just been focused on getting it out the door. Will add PNG output shortly.
> This is one of those distinctions that are likely to be lost on a lot of people.

Not least, the press.
Game Mechanic Explorer – examples for game mechanics, algorithms, and effects
Awesome.

When evaluating MOOCS, I usually have a list of courses that sound cool, but I haven't investigated yet. Once I investigate them a bit more, I put the good ones on a much shorter list of classes which I actually plan to take.

Features to assist this process of narrowing down potential courses after discovering them (beyond ratings) would help you offer a better product than CourseTalk. Perhaps a calendar or multiple lists (interesting, will take, currently taking, finished -- you get the idea).
It's the only system we have. The system can theoretically change itself, but that's not going to happen by abstaining from it.
Well, "don't roll your own crypto" advice has recently been compared to abstinence-only birth control. It sounds well in theory, but in practices is prone to not work at all.

This is because most defects in security come from application developers assembling poorly understood third party solutions in ways that the original authors never intended or even imagined to be possible. Best practices and secure defaults can only take you so far, so there is a genuine need for minimum competence standards, even if those are informal and not regulated.
Wow, just look at all those butthurt downvotes sans open discussion.

Great job, HN. Great job.
Why not something like the Chromecast widget? (http://www.google.com/intl/en-CA/chrome/devices/chromecast/)
You can read more about service discovery on the Flynn site:
https://flynn.io/docs/architecture#service-discovery

discoverd is an API on top of another system. Right now, Flynn uses discoverd backed by etcd, though they indicate that this could be replaced with Zookeeper, etc. due to the mdoular design.
Accepted projects – Google Summer of Code 2014
You Can Survive A Flight In A Jet's Wheel Well, But Probably Won't
I will only switch lanes when I can see what is causing the blockage. If it's an accident to one side, I get to the other. This avoids the mess of merging at the last minute.

Having tested this by noting the positions of large distinct trucks that I can see form a distance, I've noticed that I do get through the jam faster this way.
Are these sorts of services good enough? I want somewhere to deploy my Django apps, ideally I should be able to get a beefy server and deploy every app as a single thing on that server, completely compartmentalized.

The problem I keep hitting is that these things have a tradeoff between ease of use and power. I want to use Docker, but it has no easy way to say "take this file that contains instructions and make everything". You can write Dockerfiles, but you can only use one part of the stack in them, otherwise you run into trouble.

I'm hoping Flynn will allow me to use a database, Redis, uwsgi, nginx, etc with a simple deployment command. Does anyone know of anything else like this?
Very first line of discoverd's README:

It's currently backed by etcd[...]
Running it on your own server: We're currently only providing step by step instructions for vagrant, but you should be able to use the script in the vagrant file on your own host with some modifications on your own hardware. Happy to help in IRC (#flynn on freenode)

Flynn Dashboard: At least some part of this will end up as open source in the not distant future, we're trying to figure out the best strategy for additional tools like the dashboard and what parts should be packaged.
It is exceedingly inappropriate in exactly what way, Ryan? It's YC's space. They own it. What duty do they owe you or anyone else to host or help only politicians you agree with?
I recall some kind of notice indicating that if you wanted a copy, you had to save it yourself; there was no way (or no resources) for them to give you a copy.
Triage eh? interesting word choice.
> No data presented to back that up, either.

It's a book review, not wikipedia. If you want to see the argument made in full, buy the book.
FYI, the "docker.io" repository in trusty points to an older version of docker (0.9.1). I believe the script at http://get.docker.io/ubuntu will install the latest version of docker.
Please feel free to jump in if I'm misrepresenting your language at all! My Korean is personally pretty bad, but I find language features interesting enough and spending the 3 or 4 days it took to learn Hangul made my times in Korea much better (as well as giving me a great admiration for the alphabet).

I remember back even in the mid to late 90s seeing Hanja in the local Korean newspapers, but these days they seem pretty much absent. My wife (who has a pretty good memory for Hanja) laments the inability to figure out homophones sometimes though.

In the North, my understanding is that Hanja has effectively been eliminated for quite a while and things written in the North are pretty much 100% Hangul (as well as some Korean original neologisms to get rid of Japanese and English loan words).
Not playing politics doesn't make you wiser or smarter, it just makes you a schmuck, because someone that plays politics will come around and eat your lunch.

Heinlein once said something to the effect that politics was like digestion. The end-product is as unpleasant, but it's no less vital to your continued well being.

It's especially odd that geeks have a hard time understanding "the deeply political nature of the world." Because they're constantly playing tribal politics around languages/environments/static-vs-dynamic typing...
You mean railway 'track gauges'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1495_mm_gauge_railways#Track_g...
This is very non-scientific and anecdotal, but perhaps worth mentioning:

The reaction of "regularfolk" to AirBNB feels very negative. I'm a very active host of a single unit in NYC (and have had a remarkably positive experience - met some wonderful people, received dozens of thank-you notes and gifts, etc.)

But my non-tech friends and folks I tell about this can't get it.

"You let strangers stay in your apartment? Are you nuts?"

"You're running a gypsy hotel in your living room."

"AirBNB should be illegal. Why don't people just stay in a regular hotel?"

"Why would someone want to stay in your place when they can just get a hotel room?"

It hasn't improved over the past few years either. So although AirBNB feels like a darling of the tech community, a LOT of regular people see it in a negative light. I give the pitch every time I talk about it, but it doesn't get me very far. 'Enjoy this while it lasts'
I don't even know what to make of this. They say there was no evidence but he is still resigning.
I think its attributable to fact that we are social animals. Politics is just the art of socializing at a large scale.
Hi Sam,

So to be clear, you would have rather had this at your apartment and are declaring yourself to be a supporter of the DNC?
Etcd and Zookeeper provide essentially the same functionality. They are both a strongly consistent key/value stores that support notifications to clients of changes. These two projects are limited to service discovery, there are a number of projects that depend on zookeeper (that theoretically could be ported to etcd) for various distributed state management such as Kafka, Storm, and Hadoop.

Skydock (Skydns) and Consul provide automagic service discovery primarily through dns. They use a strongly consistent backend (think Zookeeper or Etcd), to keep track of what servers are active and what applications they run. They then expose a DNS that routes through said servers. So lets say you had a client application that would talk to a node application that could be on any number of servers. What you could do is hard code that list into your application and randomly select one, in order to "fake" load balancing. However every time a machine went up or down you would have to update that list. What Consul provides is you just tell your app to connect to "mynodeapp.consul" and then consul will give you the proper address of one of your node apps.

Consul and Skydock are both applications that build on top of a tool like Zookeeper and Etcd. [1]

Finally all these tools, you can essentially consider "ops" tools to manage the lifetime of application, services and servers "in the cloud". What a developer ideally wants to do is just push code and not have to worry about what servers are running what, and worry about failover and the like. What Flynn provides (if I get it), is a diy Heroku like platform that makes use of tools like Etcd, Skydns, Docker(?) and others. With Flynn, I believe the goal is to radically simplify ops. Another project that I believe may be similar to Flynn is Apache Mesos.

[1] Technically Consul and Skydock, IIRC don't actually use Etcd or Zookeeper, but both implement an underlying protocol to achieve the same thing - Raft, but they could use Etcd or Zookeeper instead of implementing the protocol themselves.
Citibank credit cards login presenting revoked certificate
The approach can just change. If YC wants to come out and say "I support policy XY and/or Z" and I go find the candidate that matches that, awesome!

I'm sick of businesses endorsing people or party via fundraiser. Support an idea, not a person. Let the voter decide the person.
I'm sorry to say I couldn't accept your proposal for a political contribution. Please don't take it personally. The requests I receive get better every election cycle, and since there's a limit on the number of candidates I can consider in person, I had to turn away a lot of genuinely promising candidates.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that I know I make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last candidate to make it over the threshold for consideration ends up being one that I vote for. That means there are surely other good candidates that fall just below the threshold and that I miss even considering.

I'm trying to get better at this, but the hard limit on the number of candidates means it's practically certain that candidates I rejected will go on to become successful office holders. If you do, I'd appreciate it if you'd send me an email telling me about it; I want to learn from my mistakes.

edw519
This is scary.
I was just checking out Jekyll and stumbled upon his blog. Then I came here and saw this.
>>the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment

Isn't that like saying, well the hard proof isn't there but its clear you did do something wrong?
IBM Watson can do most of that today, in specific fields like medicine, and is growing into a general purpose learning and deep Q&A system.
This is a great course, love it and recommend any developer taking it.

Having that said, if all you want is to "switch from imperative language X to Scala", (e.g. from Java) and you want to learn first how to do the "non functional" stuff in Scala, then keep in mind that this course is teaching functional programming first, Scala later. You can do (if you want) very imperative and object oriented style of coding in Scala but this course is not focusing on that part of the language (not because it's bad, but simply because the course is about functional programming)

With that said, go and enroll, it's one of the best coursera courses I took. Great videos, and very interesting programming assignments (many are adaptations from SICP I later learned) and great forum discussions.
>Bad days always happen, mistakes are always made, nothing ever goes according to plan. If you don't fail some of the time, you're not taking big enough risks. Jason's post attracts people that understand this to work for Fab - clearly you're not his target audience :)

Taking smart risks doesn't always pan out, and tolerance for failure is necessary. But failure by itself isn't an indicator of greatness. Carl Sagan put it best:

>But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Calm down people. This event was happening anyway at Marissa Mayer's house. If you think rationally, even if you absolutely despise Obama and more generally the political establishment, you'd be a fool to pretend that they don't exist.

No more money is going to be raised for the DNC than would have happened anyway. On the plus side, the President will hear from the startup community as well as the tech establishment.

I can't see any huge real negative here (and I'm a fairly extreme libertarian). Hosting or even donating to a political campaign doesn't mean you support everything they do. In fact, you often see powerful people donating to multiple, opposing parties and candidates .. it's just the only way to have influence over the issues that affect your interests.
Well German is only hard if you want to get all the grammar right, but grammar is not crucial to intelligibility.
2 free tickets to meet Obama at YC
Start a business, not a startup. You will have much more control and independence if you aren't desperate for funding and growth, not to mention you are much more likely to succeed. Startups(defined as extremely risky, high reward, growth oriented businesses) are not a very rational option for most people unless you have circumstances that mitigate the risk/stress. Also don't start yet another social/cloud/education/trendy thing here business, start something allows you to leverage your unique set of skills/knowledge/interests and experience.

Also, give up early! When you don't think something isn't worth pursuing anymore, figure out why, and don't be afraid to give up and try something else. Not every project is going to be successful and there is no shame in failing unless you have badly/unrealistically set expectations to the people you work with, in which case they are going to be rightly pissed.
I'm sure he wasn't putting that much away when he first started, but as he made more, he put away more into his late 30s/40s. There was also a big real estate boom so some of his rental properties probably beat the stock market by a bit during some of that time. Definitely an above average job as well, but not an amazing one. He probably made the equivalent of about 100k today for most of his career (once he was established, not at the start), like many small town lawyers.
We need movement on visas in Washington and like it or not this is exactly how that happens.
Sans peur – Conseil pour les jeunes
Which is an important distinction to make, especially considering the original allegations were specific.
I mainly play Minecraft and League of Legends, but also dabble in Terraria and Starbound. Played the Call of Duty and Halo series back in my Xbox days.

I'd love to see a game similar to Minecraft, but with more advanced redstone (circuitry) stuff!
RubyMotion Success Story: A Dark Room
Also, I find that truck drivers have a preference for maintaining a consistent low speed, rather than doing stop/start all the time. So I like to get in the slow lane with them, switch to a low gear, and drive using only the accelerator, losing imaginary good-driving points every time I have to touch the brake. Slower or faster overall? Meh. It's a lot less work/stress, which is a good trade as far as I'm concerned.
What I do in crawling traffic is stay in 1st gear at a steady pace and stay in the same lane to reduce the annoyance of starting & stopping so much. You'll notice that large semi trucks do this too. It really benefits everyone if more people did this.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5526574/github-sexism-scan... for a bit of backstory.
English must be pretty damn hard, too. When I studied conversational Mandarin a few years ago, it gave me a real sympathy for native Chinese speakers learning English. Basically, in Mandarin, there are no verb tenses or cases or persons. I go, you go, he go, they go, or I is, you is, he is, they is. You don't know when it happened. Today, yesterday, tomorrow. You get the timing from the context. How hard it must be to understand that it's a different word if I went yesterday, we are going tomorrow, he might have gone, if we could have gone....I can't do more than basic conversation in Mandarin, but studying it really helped me to understand the challenges some of my friends and coworkers have faced.
Using similar language to the asked question :)
They say there was no evidence of gender-based harassment, but I don't see them claiming "there was no evidence of harassment" either. Don't know enough to pass judgement.
No, it's going to happen when the people do something. Unfortunately, the people that have influence are the people that have the money. Money talks, and more money talks louder. Companies and the well-endowed are in the privileged position of having the politicians' ears to complain to.
> The investigation found no evidence to support the claims [...] of a sexist or hostile work environment.

So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? I mean, there was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate. I don't want to get into whether the behavior was "sexist" or not, but I think we can all agree that if what she said was true, the work environment was hostile and unprofessional.