skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whether you agree with it or not, Xcube makes thoughtful reasoned points; you are just name calling and trying to silence critics.

There are tons of supportive comments on this thread. Tons. Presumably these are all people who have exactly zero first-hand knowledge of the situation. They are taking Seth at his word that this is an honest description of what actually went down. I hardly think it's obvious that he did this all for the sake of educating the rest of us. He could just as easily be trying to control the narrative as his startup implodes - a very common trait of founders in his position.

This guy clearly made more than just a few "mistakes" - some of the things he outlines here persisted for months if not years... and most of this is just an artful description of what "in plain English" amounts to lying to the public, his team, his co-founders, and his investors for a very long time.

So personally, I have to ask: what makes YOU (and others on this thread) believe what he's saying here? How do we know there's not more to the story?

I agree with others that here that we should all hold our judgement, and our praise, unless we hear more than just one side of the story.
> 2. I think people can reasonably disagree here. An example: a potential customer asks a sales guy during a demo "...and will we be able to export a list of our users?" Answer: "yes, absolutely". The customer signs. The sales person then runs to dev team and says "we need to build this export functionality before they launch". Did the potential customer think that feature already existed? Probably. Is anyone being hurt? I don't think so, so long as the export functionality can actually be built before the customer launches.

I'm not OP, but you still don't get what's wrong here. You're still lying. Why not say "Not yet, but we have a great dev team and we would gladly add this feature in for you before launch." It's honest, and frankly sounds more impressive to the client.
To me, the strict definition would be "purely self made". But I guess it's reasonable to say that a company that has been around and very successful for 8 years, without external investment , is bootstrapped.
That sucks man.

I used to work at a client site where they wanted us to list all of the tools we used (as software developers) because they didn't want us to use these "computers" that we were using, in their offices on their network, and instead they wanted us to all code using citrix dumb terminals.

I no longer work at that client site, or for the company that sent me there.
So, can we call this a fruit salad tree?
Not sure I understand, it looks perfectly fine on my box.
Neat!

For those interested in this sort of thing, a couple of other libraries with a similar range of uses:

https://github.com/hyperopt/hyperopt
https://github.com/JasperSnoek/spearmint

Would be interested if anyone has any thoughts on how these compare (I've been quite impressed so far by hyperopt but haven't tried the others yet).
> They don't invent crazy new things.

I remember reading something about McDonald's chefs. As in, the people who design new menu items. One of them described it as a really interesting job, because you have to take into account things like 'what is the world supply of this ingredient.' I forget what their example was, but they had built something new, and they had determined though sales projections that McDonald's would have to purchase _the entire world supply_ of this ingredient for it to work out.

Or, consider things like the McRib. If I remember correctly, McDonald's only offers it for limited times because they have to wait until the pork market is cheap enough that they can turn a profit.

I worked at a pizza chain, and our chefs often had to make new foods work with the ingredients we already were stocking, at least, as much as possible.

There is creativity and invention in fast food, it just works under a very peculiar set of constraints.
The biggest advantage to self-driving cars that I see is that I can drive a car into a city center, drop myself off, then have the car wander aimlessly through the streets until I need to be picked up. The cost of the gas is almost certainly cheaper than the cost to park would be.
The question then is, do enough people zipper merge, and do people really have a proper understanding of fairness? A lot of the driving population may not be acting rationally, or even have enough awareness to comprehend the big the picture. Cars put people into their own bubble, where quite oftenly only their needs are being considered.
List of lists eh.

Now I want to write a Trello knockoff using homoiconic clojure.
Yes, AirWatch was bootstrapped and was founded in 2004. They raised a huge round 200 m in 2013 I believe. IT was sold to Vmware for 1.6 B dollars.
My impression is that shingles is technically "reactivation" of the pox virus; i.e. you need to have had chicken pox first.

I was referring to cases where someone has received the chicken pox vaccine but still gets sick with the chicken pox later in life.

Granted, it also looks like the vaccine is made from actual virus? So maybe it is shingles after all. I don't science enough to say.
This 2008 article in Wired[1] changed the way I merge forever and it has paid off when I drive in Chicago's endless construction and traffic.

[1]http://archive.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-...
Isn't this putting all your eggs in one basket?
Oh, God. Trust me, the swiftness or tardiness with which insurance companies replace their Guidewire stack will have nothing whatsoever to with Gosu.
I wish some of the "exit only" lanes would change to be zipper-merge-able-- in SF, think about the 7th street exit on 80E just before the Bay Bridge-- two empty lanes!-- and lots of "cheaters" whereas with a zipper merge everything would move faster.

IIRC California officially endorses early merging, though?
Light weight remote execution using libuv
Agreed. Zipper merging has been standard practice in New Zealand my whole (28 year) life. Except we call it "zip merging" because "zipper" sounds awfully foreign around here. I didn't know there was another way to merge until I read this article.
Well I'm reaching back pretty far but I believe Standard Oil was mostly debt financed in the early days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_oil . The company grew with the oil industry. In a growing market, slower growth allows less aggressive financing.
It's possible with central tracking servers if you de-hype-ify that number to say <500ms. With a decentralized network it's not possible. Even trying to achieve this would result in completely insane exponential bandwidth overhead and consummate issues around vulnerability to amplification DOS attacks.

This is why we have no huge-scale meshnet. As the network's size increases the bandwidth required to maintain the network's routing tables increases exponentially, not linearly, until no bandwidth remains for actual traffic.

If this is solvable it will either require a creative redefinition of the problem or a fundamental innovation in mathematics, probably in the realm of graph theory.
GoDaddy was entirely bootstrapped before a large chunk of it was sold to private equity firms in 2011. The founder self-funded it based on a $MM sale of a previous company, though - so they're awfully nice boots to be strapped up by. :)

As a result of being bootstrapped, the 2011 sale single-handedly put its founder, Bob Parsons, on the Forbes billionaires list:
http://www.forbes.com/profile/bob-parsons/
I am giving the reasons why I think so, if you disagree, you can point out what is wrong in my line of thinking: AIs are more likely to care for self-preservation (in some way), because AIs that don't are less likely to exist (since they die earlier), while Gods could have other mechanisms for survival (such as being immortal right off the bat).
Every five years or so I decide to give whatever editors/IDEs are in vogue a decent shot, to make sure I'm not missing out on anything (better still is to work along side of someone who is really productive in a radically different environment, like acme). Usually I come away from it with a few tweaks to my emacs configuration, but I have yet to be compelled away from emacs.

For example, I gave Visual Studio another shot recently (VS2013); and I mean, I read books on using it productively, I read the various tip blogs, advice for customization online, et cetera; I used it extensively. Unfortunately, I just don't see what people see in it. From my point of view, it's still slow, cumbersome, expensive (for any version with features that are actually useful), much less featureful than (customized) emacs, and doesn't run on most of the platforms I use to develop software. In theory, I could dedicate a few years writing extensions for one of these IDEs to duplicate all the emacs modes I use, but I'd probably never be able to fix, for example, buffer switching, or all the places where the mouse is the preferred form of interaction, or where modal dialogs steal focus (let alone all the dialogs that inexplicably aren't resizable). Meanwhile, the nice features like Intellisense and so on are the kind of customizations I've had in emacs for most of my prefered languages for years anyway.
Locked up FF when I tried it.
Is a reality where computers can store and process e.g. Actual real numbers, inherently inconsistent?

I'm not sure, but from what I remember from Wikipedia, doesn't that allow for computations that can not be done with turing machines?

Iirc, there are models of computation which are self consistent, and can simulate Turing machines, but are such that it seems impossible to simulate in our universe (or on a Turing machine).

If I am correct in remembering this, and if these machines can simulate things with values from a set with cardinality greater than aleph null, wouldn't the argument that we are likely to be simulations also argue that we are likely to be simulations on a machine in a reality capable of simulating with a more powerful type of computation.

Ok I'm going to say that there are many potential hole in my argument.

But I think it might be possible that machines capable of hyper computation could simulate an infinite number of Turing machines in parallel.

And if it could do that, then it should be able to simulate an infinite number of universes like our own (not like it's own probably though).

And as such, shouldn't any argument that our universe is probably a simulation due to a universe like our own containing a large (but finite) number of simulations of universes like our own,
Equally validly argue that our universe is almost certainly a simulation in a universe with greater computational ability than our own?

I acknowledge that this argument has many assumptions behind it, and that many of them could be wrong. I hope this argument doesn't come off as nonsense (preferably just
Misinformed)

Also I suppose the large number of simulations might not be your line of reasoning for your beliefs.

Also, I think there's supposed to be a hiarchy(spelling?) of hyper computation, so maybe the surreal numbers would be a better basis for the argument than the reals?

I'm not sure if my line of reasoning makes sense, but I thought I would mention it anyway.
> "Without enforcing proper merge behavior on both sides, zipper merge just becomes a big Prisoners' Dilemma game with a few defectors screwing all of the cooperators."

Except unlike prisoner's dilemma, it's not a zero (or negative) sum game. The entire traffic flow can speed up if zipper merging is done. The "late mergers" don't have to risk losing their game of "chicken" while the "vigilantes" don't have to deal with the reckless maneuvers of some of the former.

People don't do zipper merging because people are human and drive emotionally [1]. The stereotypes of the conservative early merger claiming the moral high ground and the reckless late merger doing anything to save a few minutes are the cultural results of this mentality.

[1] Another example is the special breed of driver who stops the traffic flow on a major road (which has the right of way) to let someone on a minor cross road or parking lot exit onto the major road, thus inconveniencing everyone behind them for the self satisfaction of having helped the one person they can see.
Man caught defiling a two year old girl
Github Ribbon Web Component
Yeah, that situation is where I see it 2nd-most; first most is people trying to change lanes into an exit lane right at the exit when they're in a non-exit lane and want to exit. Those are lane changes, though, not merges.
It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels.

If I were the Saudis and the petroleum multinationals, I would be pouring money into researching industrial processes that will only be practical once fusion is invented. Then once fusion is invented, those companies would stand to make a killing.
Here's another one: http://speedspot.org/
Redfin is pretty good but is in only select cities. IMO Trulia's interface is superior to Zillow's. One small example, on Trulia you can wrap around when cycling through pix. On Zillow you have to go backwards through all pix to get back to the first one. Trulia is more fine tuned like that. On mobile, the gap between Trulia and Zillow is even wider in Trulia's favor.

Zillow shows lot lines, which is nice. Zillow has better price history. I use Trulia for finding a house initially, and then Redfin or Zillow to get deeper info. Redfin has the deepest data.
Zipper merging is only optimal if traffic is already slowed down dramatically. If traffic is still moving at any kind of speed, then early merge when there is space available will clear congestion faster than everyone driving up to the merge point and hoping that it works out.
I gave up on public WiFis on Starbucks and hotels years ago. I pay for LTE and I'm pretty happy with it. I pay $120 for two lines and 10GB data. For me it's reasonable and I never hit 10GB limit.

For people who travel a lot this website is a great resource.
How Would Christianity Deal with Extraterrestrial Life?
That is a good point and the numbers aren't measuring the exact same thing (on the flip side of your example is the number of applicants to Harvard College who might not attend even if accepted). I didn't intend to reference them as some justification that the two schools are in any way equal. The only reason to really compare the two rates is because they have similar values and highlight the differences between the two schools. The toughest part of the College is getting in, the toughest part of the Extension School is getting out.
>> Zipper merging is the optimal solution. People early merge because they think it is the optimal/moral/better/'done my part' solution.

It is optimal only when the local driving culture allows it to be.

I live in an area where drivers are extremely selfish and the police don't seem to spend a lot of time ticketing bad drivers, so zipper merging typically doesn't work here.
I think you described what I wanted to in a much better and more concise way.

Thank you for doing that.
Shutterstock: http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/bootstrappers-bible-shu...
> I think we are :-)

In fact, I think we agree more than we disagree :)

> I agree there's fat that could be trimmed

Wikipedia has a primer on bank transfers (it sounds like you are already quite familiar with them, but for the sake of reference) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_transfer#Process

Bitcoin basically replaces steps 2-4. A bank just needs to get the Bitcoin address of the receiving bank in a reliable manner (ie. instead of IBAN/BIC) and then the transaction can be made and verified. The regulations are still important, because they hold each end accountable (so if Bob's bank can prove that they sent the money to Alice's bank, which they can, then the regulations make sure Alice gets her money) but right now there are a whole lot of unnecessary regulations for the middle part (steps 2-4 on the Wikipedia page). More importantly, using Bitcoin greatly reduces the number of international regulations and agreements that are required, and those are probably the fattest of all.

So yeah, I would love to see Bitcoin replacing SWIFT/Fedwire etc, but I doubt it will ever replace banks (although it might make it easier for smaller banks to compete). Realistically Bitcoin will probably need to replace credit cards before it can replace SWIFT, though, and we're still a ways off. (You may be interested in this article, if you haven't seen it yet: https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective)
I would expect the very slowest connections to be T1s, which have excellent latency (and reliability) but almost no bandwidth. Then DSL/cable connections, with bandwidth between 5 and 100Mbps. Anything 100Mbps or greater would have fiber, with the correspondingly low latency again.
I know you're just joking, but the thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter I bought years ago has been worth it's weight in gold at hotels with slow wifi and fast wired.
Valve Corporation is valued at a couple billion USD and was bootstrapped using the founders' equity from being early MS employees. It's still privately owned.
I would love to have one of these in my backyard. I find that a single fruit tree produces too many fruit and only lasts a short time of fruit-giving per year. But a free that gives 40 fruits spaced out is ideal.
my first thought as well. The CL160, a Starrluftschiff (rigid airship?) alias Zeppelin, was planned to lift 160t.

I wished there would one fly over me from time to time.
You could just make two exit lanes in that case, and merge them as or after they exit. People exiting at the last minute from a non-exit lane though aren't really merging, but rather changing lanes. And it doesn't really result in a proper zipper merge since not everyone is exiting, so you can't predictably alternate cars.
Officially, yes. But you could still get it to work on your home network outside the US if you wanted to. Just wouldn't get data.
Base Salary is just a tiny component of an executive's salary. It is a PR move. Executive salary is made up of Cash component (which includes Base Salary & Bonuses), & Equity.

Equity constitutes towards almost 99 percent of an exec's salary. There are short term equity plans and long term equity plans. The equity payouts are generally in millions.

Companies have to release a DEF14A (30-40 pages) each year to show Shareholder's how much the Top5 Execs were paid each year.
Why not something like a guillotine? Properly designed and maintained, I doubt you'd get much in the way of botched executions and it's probably the fastest death you're likely to get. Combine it with some sedation if it's decided that decapitating a conscious person is cruel and unusual.
Plenty of Fish? I think I read they were making hundreds of millions at one point, per year, with a handful of employees. That would put their valuation north of a billion most likely.
On FF in Windows, the fonts are extremely thin and difficult to read. I had to zoom in Nolen's blog four times to make it readable.
>> Cars put people into their own bubble, where often only their needs are being considered.

This is so true. At congested merge points in my city, you have people who don't really care about the alternating needed to make a zipper merge work. First, you have people who just won't let people in, and then you have people who will try to sneak into the lane with the merging car ahead of them.
Why I Believe An Alibaba Deal To Buy Yahoo Is Becoming More Likely
The problem with more pairings is that you have a greater chance of identifying the right person because of their additional photos, but that gets offset by the huge number of photos of everyone else in the database that you will now also get lots of "hits" on.

For example, you might get lucky and 2 of the 3 test photos you have match well with 2 of the 5 database photos of the right person. But if you have enough people in the database, you're almost guaranteed to find some random person where all 3 of the test photos match quite well. So it often comes down to how you combine the results from the different test images. Do you take the max? Do you average them? etc. Each has different tradeoffs, and it's a topic under research at the moment ("image set recognition"), but I'd say there are no compelling results yet.

Some personal devices might indeed be tuned for relatively fewer people, but these are precisely the cases that are the toughest: distinguishing between people in the same family, who're all going to look much more similar to each other than random people in a large database.

But there are many scenarios where it might actually be distinguishing between 1000s of people. To take but one example, advertising. On the web, advertising is popular not just because it's "easy" and one of the few ways of successfully monetizing a site, but also because knowing more about a person allows for more targeted advertising which has a much bigger ROI. How would this translate to the "real world?" Personalization is clearly one of the ways to do this, and face recognition is ideal in many respects, given that it works from a distance, is non-invasive, and cheap to implement. (Obviously, there's a separate debate to be had about privacy and other issues, but I think it's hard to deny that many companies are interested in this.)

I'm not sure that face recognition will be used for security purposes like house/car locks, just because it seems like other devices might get you better security sooner and cheaper (like RFID tags used in some car keys now, or some sort of ID from your phone).
Wizards of the Coast was bootstrapped without nearly any cash, in the unusual way that artists had been payed in shares. It was sold to Hasbro for US$325 million in 1999.
I am really surprised to hear Brazil is far removed from backbones, being the most populous Latin American county by a massive margin.
I realize this is a joke, but if it's a reference to Apple laptops, it's worth noting that an ethernet plug literally will not fit on recent models of the Macbook Pro or Air; they're simply too narrow. I'd much prefer a narrower portable to an ethernet port; when I need one I'm happy to use a dongle.
Spanx

http://www.forbes.com/global/2012/0326/billionaires-12-featu...
Downloaded this app with high hopes, but left quite disappointed. Sitting in Downtown Chicago and UI is completely empty except for one other "New User"

I think you should give more consideration to empty states, in particular for metro areas not SF (or where ever this currently has active usage) to encourage new users of your app to generate content. As it is now, I don't know what I should do or why I should do it.
It's kind of a fruit tree salad.
Our models are not (necessarily) nature. The map is not the territory.
I like the idea of #1. But it seems from my experience in the U.S. and Canada, that there is a tendency towards unambiguous right-of-way. That tends to rule out collaborative scenarios where there's no clear "winner" when two cars are competing for the same resource. Which is a shame, because making this collaborative is exactly what will change the mentality (i.e. you can't ignore the drivers trying to merge, because you're trying to merge too).

Even with zipper merging the right-of-way is going to be on the person who is staying in their own lane.

I'm not sure if my experience is regional, or even imagined, nor do I know the reason...I'd imagine it makes assigning blame in an accident much easier, but that's a really crappy basis for traffic rules.
To be fair, the ACE editor has been quite the opposite. Well documented and well supported (on their Google Group, nightwing is VERY responsive).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute
New design on caniuse.com
> P=NP is a mathematical problem. It has nothing to do with Physics.

There are some who would disagree with you. It is quite arrogant to assert that computer science has little to do with physical reality when our constraints on computational capabilities are very much embedded in reality.

Take a look at this survey article, for instance: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf