skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that in order to get accepted you'll either present something very, very new or unorthodox, where traction and beating competitors is less important, or present a me-to kind of venture that already has very good traction and is already beating competitors. From what I can gather you have to be on either end of those opposite option in order to get funded.
Julia dev and computational scientist here. (have nothing to do with OP)

The term "scientific computing" is evolving very rapidly and I thought a recent HN post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7692200

did a nice job of describing the differences between two major camps that are starting to take shape. To paraphrase and stereotype: one is steeped in MPI and Fortran/C/C++; the other prefers MapReduce.

Julia isn't going to trounce expert MPI implementations designed to squeeze every last flop from their computations, but we do hope that Julia will be a tool that can both interoperate nicely with existing HPC codes and yet be useful to write new code in.

Plug: I'm organizing an upcoming workshop at SC'14 designed to address scalability issues in high level dynamic languages, including (but not limited to) Julia, Python and R, and hope that anyone who's interested in this emerging area of nontraditional HPC to participate.

http://jiahao.github.io/hptcdl-sc14
Drones as a Service [video]
but I think it would be hard to argue that 50% of costs in running a online training course are administrative... Udemy needs to either offer more value to earn their cut, or optimize so they can afford to take less.

Your comment might be even remotely true if udemy was a not-for-profit company but that's not the case. The goal of a company isn't to have a net-zero sum at the end of the year (no profit). How much did udemy spend on advertising in the past years? Because the result of that advertising is what the OP is going to "cash in" on with his unbelievably high 50% revenue cut. How many conferences did udemy go to as a sponsor/have-a-booth? How many training sessions did they send their employees to so that their website + backend would be amazing fast and available?

Go to Microsoft Virtual Academy, or to Cisco, or to Oracle/etc, and ask them how much you will get paid if they do the same thing as udemy is doing. Go to O'Reilly and ask them, or Lynda.com, etc. How much will Packt pay you to write a book?

Complaining about a 50% revenue share is like complaining about a $49 airplane ticket from NY to Paris. First, you're talking about a small group who need to or have ever flown from NY to Paris, and second your price point is likely 100% lower than the lowest fare anyone else has ever paid. So that leaves one solution: start your own airline and DIY (which is, in effect, what it appears the OP did).
One what?
For a split second I thought the developers were replicants.
7% of first round investment is definitely not 7% of current valuation. Also a lot of that 1B is paper money: the later rounds often get preferred shares and preferences in exiting events. YC got common shares as the employees, and if you are around long enough, you'll know how those common shares are worth in most cases.
We are a BOI company. You're welcome to stop by our office space anytime for a cup of coffee :-)
I think by extension of the Platonic school of thought Western culture has become deeply ingrained in dichotomous thinking applying such constraints to all areas of life (beyond simple science and logic), whereas Eastern non-dualism supposes all things (existentially) being equal. Neither West or Eastern philosophies do a very good job of describing each others domain space and yet they share many similar concepts. Karma (Theoretical) vs Causality (Empirical) is a basic example - they're exactly the same but few Westerners and particularly those in academic circles would admit to such a thing as it undermines Western status quo.
Next Nissan LEAF: more mainstream look, bigger battery (185 miles?)
IOS styled UI for AngularJS mobile apps
I use CityMapper in London an I'm a huge fan of it. Some of the features I love the most are:

- Foursquare results when searching for a destination

- Saving a trip plan to access it without Internet connection (handy when changing lines underground)

- Get me home and Get me work shortcut buttons on homepage

- Underground line statuses

- Rain safe travel options

- Taxi prices for the chosen travel

- Very user friendly design
This is how it would look like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEklVDlqwbQ
My wrists and welcome to them
Actually, the explanation doesn't explain it all.

In Python, variables are references (pointers). `[]` gets evaluated on import time, and returns a pointer to an object (an empty list). This object is then further mutated on the body on the next calls because if you don't pass the parameter, it still points to the same object.
Silly Buddhists. Everyone knows that there are nine possible logic values: false, true, unknown, uninitialized, irrelevant, indeterminate, weak false, weak true, and high impedance. Didn't Siddharta read the IEEE 1164 standard?
One issue in negotiating that I never quite know how to resolve is the tension between two somewhat opposing pieces if advice: never be the first to give a number and use anchoring to establish a price.
> In the end, if computer science education is basically vocational, then perhaps it makes sense to replace Calculus I and II with Rails I and II.

Why do you bring up Rails? If it is in reply to what argonaut said, that is a straw man; argonaut seems more likely to want to replace calculus with logic, discrete math, etc. I.e., other branches of math.
That my have been what you meant, but it wasn't what you wrote in the blog post. And besides, it's irrelevant if it runs "on its own" or not; in fact, technically, only the bootloader runs on its own, everything else has to be loaded by some piece of software, including the OS itself.
YC Expanding Startup School to NYC and Europe
Not sure why I'm getting downvoted.

See http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/03/virtually-no-evidenc...
I've always heard it used to refer to method dispatch, which that wikipedia article also seems to. However, it seems like the Python spec does use it to refer to when variable values are resolved.
Here in Bangalore, I believe 1 mile would be a joke.
We'd certainly be open to that if asked. We practice Complaint Driven Development [0] when it comes to API integrations and the like -- we prioritize what our customers ask for.

For our core experience, we went with a custom agent because that allowed us to viciously simplify the setup process. But we're very much open to working with other tools as well.

[0] http://blog.codinghorror.com/complaint-driven-development/
I dont think this will work... 1 mile is way too low. I guess if you live in the central of a massive city like NY maybe but thats that.
I can see how you would have expected that. I have changed the title, but I think it's too late either way. I'll have to be clearer next time!
Math "tricks" are usually computational in nature (and so not particularly "mathematics") and while it might be obvious how they work to a mathematician, they are unlikely something the mathematician would expect to find in a textbook. (I was a math major for a few years in college, and have a ton of friends who still do research in and around mathematics today.)
Not really - Javascript was designed to be interpreted, and yet V8/SpiderMonkey/Nitro all JIT-compile it down to machine code, sometimes very effectively.
(Just a quick note, don't have time for more now.)

"The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why."

The jump from Kant to Wittgenstein elides the step that was Schopenhauer, who did look East and said some cogent things.
It's the comma that determines an expression as a tuple, not the parentheseis.
"Apple can tap your email and information from native applications (so call history, photos, SMS, etc), excluding iMessage and Facetime (Apple can't even access those)."

Misleading - Apple can extract that data from an iPhone at it's Cupertino Headquarters. Not tap.

Significant difference in that for this LE would have to obtain/confiscate the from you, this isn't remote data extraction.
QuickAnswers.io: instant answers to natural language questions
So they'll probably be one of the first to build this coaster. It's inevitable. :-)
Thanks for the input!

Microniche is the way to go but honestly, it really limits one to the number of topics.
Startup Success: Bootstrapping vs. VC Funding
Urgh, that's my biggest pet peeve.
Haskell code font with monospaced ligatures
A good use case for Haskell is to generate C code in a way that make it easier to assess its safety. See e.g. http://smaccmpilot.org/languages/ivory-concepts.html or Galois' work.
This is completely anecdotal and not exaggerated. I don't read the Metro much. But, I have literally never read an article/headline in the Metro that I have believed.
Freeing your Android device is nothing on whatever the massive 20GB of code running under Windows might be doing at any moments notice. I'd never tell someone to try to run a secure and privacy preserving version of Android while they were still using Windows as their primary productivity OS.
Unless there is an open baseband chipset, there is nothing that tor, or anyone else, can do to secure an android phone[1].

Depending on the implementation of the SOC, etc., the baseband chipset, which can be controlled over the air by your carrier (independently of the computer you're holding in your hand) can have full DMA access to the phone.

Read that again: the carrier, through special over the air interfaces that you cannot be a part of, can control your entire phones memory - reading and writing bit by bit any piece they want. There's no software, or OS, that will save you on a device like that.

Note that not all baseband chipsets are quite as dangerous, but they're all a closed source, third-party controlled device-within-a-device that is run over an out of band interface that you can't control.

[1] ... or any other phone ...
I'd like to offer an analogy: fast food chain franchise vs boutique restaurants. It seems to me that your startup is a boutique restaurant and so is not a good fit for a McDonalds-style franchise contract. However, at the end of the day, running a boutique restaurant is a lot more satisfying, at least in my opinion, and most of the time, more financially rewarding too. On the other hand, you do need authenticity to be a successful boutique restaurant owner, not the attitude "we are disrupting XXX", "we are changing YYY, one ZZZ at a time".
> you literally had to do a lot more than just open your eyes to get that information.

If you are going to get that anal about the use of the word literally, you shouldn't abuse it yourself. And you complain about the quality of comments here.
Sometimes I regret all the time and effort I put into network protocols. Particularly when I look at some new advance and it just makes me sad.

Sure, you could design some new protocol. Except that it could never actually work in practice---the infrastructure will see to that. Instead, it's better to treat a TCP connection with a fixed port of 80 (or 443, if you're so inclined) as precious and slather on some more bandaids until it stops not working at all.
Thanks for the positive feedback. My email address is jheard at msn.com
While presentation is important it is only one part of the overall whole and given the choice I'll take a hideous but well written piece over a beautiful article that says nothing useful.

note: I don't think this is hideous.
Downvote? What are you saying with this downvote?

I am arguing against the blanket statement, "accredited or GTFO." I'm not saying that accreditation doesn't have it's place. However, doing a little research on what accreditation actually is, who does the accrediting, and what the outcome is, statistically, for accredited schools will swiftly prove my point. We don't just have failing schools, we have a failing institution that is, for the most part, accredited.
Somebody needs to make an Oculus Rift demo of the Euthanasia Coaster.
The writer is mostly talking about non-AGI AI, which results in his argument failing to address the point. I don't think Hawking was saying AI (meaning in Hawking's usage, AGI) was necessarily bad, but rather that we should just be careful about preparing for it.
How Twitch Created One of Greatest Breakthroughs in Gaming
this is strange, we'll have a look at it although you should not have any problems accessing it from anywhere. Thanks for letting us know though.
The web filter here at work has that blocked as a gambling site.
Kiwankua – Game is out now and it's excellent
I don't know if the OP will read this comment but coming from India, I can very well understand the kind of circumstances you are in. When you talk about the expenditure they make on you and how you can pay your rent for 10 months, I can absolutely relate with it. Moreover, travelling across the globe and then being given only 10 minutes to understand what you actually do. You may actually have a better chance of getting funded in your own country without all this travel and hassles.

Someday, I would also start my own business and I understand that getting traction is of utmost importance. But, there is another aspect to it which is the fact that some people actually start a business or just run a simple idea for the sheer pleasure of solving a problem and to help others. I think you are on those lines and I wish you all the best to continue working in this direction.

I think your post was very well written and you have actually listed some of the possible issues with their selection process.
This is exactly the argument MPAA makes against people torrenting movies and tv shows, using words such as "criminals", "evil", in an attempt to polarize people who are simply consuming information over the internet in the most efficient way possible, without any 3rd party oversight and censorship, the way information on the internet is always bound to be, the way equilibrium is achieved.

The argument that if you really want this information, they should pay for it doesn't work. Basically, you are punishing people for automating manual labor. The fact that you can hire bunch of people and tell them to manually copy data from the website and achieve the same result means that it shouldn't be any different from automating the process itself.

Terms of service on a website is not the law. If there is something you don't want people to have access to, then don't publish it online at all.
Tkd – Cross platform GUI toolkit for D based on Tcl/Tk
Have you looked at http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Operating-Systems-Andrew-Tanenb...? I have around the house an earlier version, which gets pretty down and dirty.
Pretty much, but precedents set in the "real world" don't always carry over to "on the Internet", even when the correlation is stark, obvious, and indisputable to most people's eyes.
This list is an excellent summary. If tasked with a #11 I'd probably add the slightly more obscure, but still super painful (when you do run into it) implicit string concatenation:

>>> l = ["a",
... "b",
... "c"
... "d"]
>>> l
['a', 'b', 'cd']
Imagine if Google-nest were real...
The author states that Python is smart enough not to reimport a file that has already been imported. Is that not the case here?
Ah, I see, thanks for the followup.

I'm thinking of backing up on the order of 100TB a month, in which case a tape robot starts to make sense financially, but is a pain when it comes to software.
No God In The Machine
The funny thing about your newly defined "trick" is that it would be foolish to rely on such undocumented behavior not changing on the next minor update. :)
Do you really want to devolve this into yet another internet debate on the morality of euthanasia? That's really not the point of this thought experiment.
Android Studio 0.5.8 released
The very first part of the article, "Hardware Selection", covers this point and recommends that the secure device not have a baseband. They use a wifi-only Nexus 7.
How fast is PDF.js?
Delicious is from a different era. I don't know if you all remember, but it was launched and influential when "social" powered sites (see Digg) were all the rage.

The most powerful feature of Delicious for me was the /popular/ page, which showed me at a quick glance what sites/pages were trending for that day. Usually it reflected what was on the home page of Digg, and a few other influential tech sites.

Moving forward, the idea of user generated content & socially powered websites lost some steam (although the concept is still around) and Delicious lost it's chance to make the site into a profitable force online.
In BI, a similar tradeoff between lots of fancy preaggregation, versus optimizing search across the raw, un- (or lightly-) processed base data comes up quite frequently.

Commonly, the choice of approach is dictated by the number of end users querying the same data. If it's relatively specific queries ran frequently by many users, the aggregation approach can be made snappier and save lots of processing power.

But for power users, it becomes a nuisance real fast to be limited not only by stored base data, but also by the somewhat arbitrarily chosen aggregate structures. I'm assuming people doing log analyses of server logs fall within "power users" in most shops. At least I'd hope so :)

As an aside, the Go language (that I'm currently flapping between loving and not so much), versus Python at al., seems to be born of somewhat similar thinking.
Thank you for the tip about pinboard.in - I just moved from delicious, it's must better. :)
In related news:

http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode17.htm
There is so much prorprietary firmware everywhere that can fuck you over.

Your mainboards almost always have proprietary firmware. Coreboot is woefully underutilized and underfunded in this regard.

All hard drives have proprietary firmware, and often have proprietary processors on board. They are for all intents and purposes isolated computers in and of themselves, and nobody talks about how closed they are.

Graphics hardware is predominantly proprietary, even the most open discrete cards (AMD's) which have technical documentation have proprietary firmware blobs. I can only barely trust myself using these on the pretense that others have already decompiled the blobs and found nothing particularly malignant on a few older model cards. Every other manufacturer except Intel and very recently Broadcom with a single model of GPU are whole stack proprietary.

Network radios, as mentioned in this article, are almost always either wholly proprietary or have a firmware blob like GPUs.

CD drives also have proprietary firmwares like hard drives.

All TVs are running proprietary whole stack firmware on internal computers.

Dumbphones also are computers, just whole stack proprietary.

Your fridge, toaster, many ovens, and microwaves, if digital, are also whole stack proprietary computers.

This stuff is everywhere. There is literally no way to liberate yourself. Even Richard Stallman is driving a car with a proprietary on board computer, and probably cooks food in a proprietary Microwave.
How are you going to understand statistics on a level to be able to build programmable models without an education in Calculus?
First Impressions of Snapchat Chat
is this right? it showed me i can bike across water?

screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/OaJUSax.jpg

actual path: https://citymapper.com/nyc/superrouter?start=40.771961874462...
Coffee tasting with The Map
Realistically, I think it would be much better to just use one of those centrifuge machines. I imagine that actually riding this roller coaster, before you faint, would be pretty painful. In a centrifuge you could probably strap in the passenger a lot better and provide much more cushioned seating and neck support so there's no pain involved.
Work life balance: how to be crazy productive without burning out
Not to mention the 2-minute trip up to the peak...
But the "whole pie" in this case was just a few crumbs leftover from Android and iPhone. :)
Single gene that can boost IQ by 6 points discovered
Thanks for the links and /r/cscareerquestions looks like a good resource.
His answers are convincing rebuttals to a superficial criticism. In particular, I can tell you that if this startup can measure that it has a positive viral coefficient, it's already light years ahead of Yelp. And he's right that Yelp has basically no market share outside of a few US cities -- that's why they had to buy a much smaller competitor (Qype) just to get a foothold in Europe.

But to your point, I believe it was a YC partner (or three) who said that big businesses tend to start in a niche where a small number of people love you. If this guy really walked into a room and said "we've got a small, revenue-generating product with a positive viral coefficient and a growing user base", the line "fine, but you'll never beat Yelp" is not a compelling counterargument -- it's a lot like telling early AirBnB that they'll never beat Hilton.

I don't know if that's what actually happened -- there could be any number of reasons why a startup gets rejected after a ten-minute interview that aren't captured in a polite rejection email -- but in general, criticizing small startups for being small is not a winning strategy.
This is a pretty good list of gotchas, but it's important when writing something targeted at beginners to be as precise and clear as possible. Nearly every section here either uses terminology poorly, is slightly incorrect, or has difficult examples.

Python supports optional function arguments and allows default values to be
specified for any optional argument.

No, specifying a default is what causes an argument to be optional.

it can lead to some confusion when specifying an expression as the default value
for an optional function argument.

Anything you specify as a default value is an expression. The problem is when the default is mutable.

the bar argument is initialized to its default (i.e., an empty list)
only the first time that foo() is called

No, rather it's when the function is defined.

class variables are internally handled as dictionaries

As dictionary keys, and that's still only roughly correct.

In "Common Mistake #5", he uses both a lambda and array index based looping, neither of which are particularly Pythonic. A better example of where this is a problem in otherwise Pythonic code would be good.

In "Common Mistake #6" he uses a lambda in a list comprehension -- for an article of mistakes mostly made by Python beginners, this is going to make it tough to follow the example.

In "Common Mistake #7", he describes "recursive imports" where he means "circular imports".

In "Common Mistake #8" he refers repeatedly to "stdlib" where he means the Python Standard Library. Someone is going to read that and try to "import stdlib".
Hangouts doesn't actually really totally use Jabber. It supports it if a Jabber client is involved, but between Hangouts sessions they use some proprietary bullshit. That is why my chat history on, say, telepathy won't show up if I was using the Android hangouts app to message someone.

Also, there is literally no good foss voip and conferencing options. Jitsi videobridge is the closest thing I've found, and that isn't an XMPP standard and isn't supported by my preferred IM tools. Also, Jitsi is an ugly as sin Java app....

I'm definitely going to try putting aside a week this summer to see how hard it would be to implement videobridge in telepathy. If we could get that and group OTR encryption in it, there would finally be a FOSS communication alternative...
De-sensitising the introvert