skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both amarcus and ProblemFactory are incorrect - the link only lists companies that were rejected by YC and went on to do well. Furthermore, as recently as a few years ago the terms were less fixed - YC would call to make companies an offer (although it was stated that the offer would usually be 7%). Even further before that, it was possible to negotiate with YC. A rumor (completely unconfirmed) that I heard somewhere on HN is that Sam Altman was able to negotiate Paul Graham down.

I personally met one company that turned down YC. They've since went on to raise more than $1.5MM. They thought YC wanted too much equity.
Robot 'learns to keep going with broken leg'
To take an opposite tack. I grew up in the suburbs. I've always wanted to go back to the suburbs.

Specifically I want a house similar to the one I grew up in. It had a pool. It had a semi soundproof family room on the opposite side of the house from the master bedroom. That meant my sister and I could have our friends over for slumber parties and stay up all night and basically make as much noise as we wanted and not bug our parents. My dad could practice his instruments (guitar, bass, drums) and not annoy the neighbors. We also had a garage full of tools. And we had a large dog.

Since I left I've only ever lived in apartments. I haven't been able to listen to music or watch a TV at what I consider a "good" level for an action movie where you "feel the explosions" etc. I've resorted to headphones when I'm by myself but that's not so fun when guests. I've never been able to play Dance Dance Revolution or Just Dance or any other video game that would have me making noise on the floor. Rockband Drums and Rockband singing is out of the question as well. Having a big dog with no yard seems kind of cruel in some ways so I've never had a dog.

So yea, +1 for the suburbs.

At the same time I like the city. I like being able to take public transport. I like all the variation, restaurants, events, museums, meetups, bars, etc. I hate the cookie cutter suburban shopping centers with their same 10 stores every 5 miles (one Bed Bath and Beyond, one Best Buy, one Tilly's, one Michael's, one Target, one Walmart, one Payless, etc...

Other than being rich enough to buy a house in a city or a penthouse it seems unlikely I can have both.
It's most definitely not the goal to suffocate the inhabitants, no, and the goal also isn't to have the natural humidifiers living inside create a tropical climate ripe with microorganisms and stuff. Yes, you want to avoid excessive air exchange because you'd lose a lot of heat that way, but tightly sealing a house would be a very bad idead indeed. If you do make the outer envelope essentially airtight, that gives you very low energy consumption and is part of the passive house concept, but then you need active ventilation, which obviously implies a hole in the envelope, and thus will keep the pressure inside equalized with the pressure outside (modulo a small differential caused by the ventilation itself).
The cost of carbon offsets is apparently less than a penny per kWh. This is barely anything in comparison to the price of the electricity itself, so it doesn't matter whether people are in actuality paying the true cost; they might as well be. Such a world would look almost identical to our own.
How to Handle Any Type of Complaining Customer
It's not even funny, how it reminds me this story by Ray Bradbury - "The Pedestrian":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pedestrian

* http://www.unz.org/Pub/Reporter-1951aug07-00039
Ah, I understand your point better now. You're comparing scope vs. scale as an engineering bottleneck. That does make sense, simply because number of engineers need to increase linearly with scope, but not necessarily with scale. Put another way, scalability problems are a subset of scope problems.

Still, I get the sense that the government threw way more money and engineers at this than necessary. The fact that a few relatively small "repair teams" could join the project after development and fix all the problems, makes me wonder if those problems really needed to exist in the first place.

Perhaps it would have been better to group these 1000's of engineers into smaller groups of ~100, and have them compete with each other to implement specs in the fastest/best way. Pay each engineer a base salary, and then allocate the remaining money to a bonus system that incentivizes fast and quality development.

All that said, I'm talking out of my ass. :)
They want to be a more powerful version for power users.
I've really been enjoying the new podcast they're putting out. Some great interviews with big (and not so big) names.

www.raspi.today/category/podcast/
Startup Socials Summer Mixer SF August 2014
IDF soldier brags about killing 13 children
Readable Code: Name everything
Startup Socials Mixer San Diego August 2014
For many types of powerplants, a significant amount of heat is generated as a byproduct, sometimes even causing significant expense of cooling the plant on a large body of water, such as the nuclear plants near lakes.

That system can also be designed to provide hot water (both as a water supply and as heating) for a nearby city, and many cities do so, it's cheap and efficient.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration for some description if you're interested.
Can anyone chime in as to what Propeller does (did)? Looks like they shut down the site as part of this? (probably an aqui-hire?)
Thanks for the clarification - I did not realise that companies are/were able to negotiate the offer.
Would you say that Tunisia is safer than Morocco? I visited Morocco a few years back and loved it; I wanted to extend my trip to Tunisia, but I was told by a few people that I wouldn't be as safe there as the larger cities aren't as focused on tourism as, say, Marakesch, Tangier, etc.
Why I Love Indies and You Do Too
Well how about we get in front of city council and advocate for some changes? I've done it in Ann Arbor for a city park and people really do like it when local geeks and other folks not usually going to these meetings stand up and have something to say.
The FCC will not oppose Sprint having dropped any Internet access package. Sprint is free to do that.

Net Neutrality is not about how a company forms their products for their customers. It is only about (backbone) providers trying to extort money from companies which happen to send traffic through the pipes of those providers, because their customers asked for that traffic. Providers, offering QoS based access is not a matter of Net Neutrality.
It was Google Chrome (36.0.1985.125 build 283153).

I've checked again today, and now I don't get a SSL warning. I am pretty sure I've never visited your site before, so I don't think it's caching on my end.
Flipkart is NOT a profit making company as of today.
That was an incredible talk, Paul, many thanks!
GDP (USD)...population...per-capita GDP

US.......15.68T......313M.....$49,965

UK.........2.44T.......63M.....$38,514

China.....8.23T...1,351M.......$6,091

Nigeria....262b......168M......$1,555

India......1.82T...1,237M......$1,489

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...!
Lots of the fundamental research is being done in the UK. Both academic (eg at Oxford) and also industry led.

The fact that no major consumer automotive marques are British doesn't mean there isn't a very strong auto industry in the country.
No, see the answer from aeturnum: use the online calculator, enable falout. You'll have to zoom out the map: the area of the effects is approximately as big as the state.

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&l...
Responsive Website or Mobile App: Do You Need Both?
It's an air to air Fujitsu. I'll check on the model when I get a chance.

Most of our winter weather hovers in the mid 30's, day and night. We get occasional cold spells in the 20's, but it's rarely in the teens and I've seen single digits once in twelve years here. I don't think it's ever been below zero here.

It was interesting to get used to the heat pump just being on low all the time. Our monitor stove would come on in bursts, and you'd notice a steady heating/ cooling cycle throughout the day. The heat pump just puts out a steady, slightly warm airflow all day long.

I'm not sure how heat pumps behave in colder climates. Our landlord did not remove the monitor stove when he had the heat pump installed, and it was nice to know we could fall back on the monitor if the heat pump was not putting out enough heat. You might consider leaving the propane system in place this winter if you do try a heat pump. It might just give you a little peace of mind about not having an issue in the middle of a cold spell.

Feel free to send an email if you're curious to ask more.
They provided higher level tools to create iOS and Android apps without programming. The co-founder @clayallsopp is prominent in the RubyMotion community.
See my other answer here, it's not so simple as you believe, as soon as you consider the fallout.
If you take on funding, let along through multiple rounds, your backers are going to want an exit. That's VC-101.
Maybe there should be some way for nomadlist to allow people to offer these?

I could surely come up with a plan where you get mobile internet, access to a coworking space and accommodation if you want to come to Tokushima, Japan to "sightsee" for a month and even meet you at the airport, as I know some people who have a coworking space here. I'm sure others could do that for their own cities.

Not sure what a reasonable fee would be? Would probably take a whole day to organize this for someone, although it sounds fun to meet people.
Electric blankets can burn you and the whole house down and do not use the same form of heat transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer. They just should not be used.
Cocoa farmers trying chocolate for the first time
On the other hand not having Michael Jordan-like talent would be a good reason to discourage a teenager from practicing basketball for hours a day at the expense of their studies.
The smoothest con man that ever lived
Some context in this Wired article on Wisdom 2.0 conference, http://www.wired.com/2013/06/meditation-mindfulness-silicon-...
I'll happily agree that some of the HN comments are rude and dickish.

> I run several websites that are English only because I lack the resources and motivation to run an international business right now. There are also plenty of successful Chinese only websites.

Adding support for other languages is a lot more work than adding in support for correct weight and height units.
If you haven't seen any category theory, you might be interested to know that the diagrams the author draws are valuable and important in modern pure math as well. Those last two diagrams totally capture the idea of what a product or variant (coproduct, in math terminology) is.

In general, there are a lot of algebraic structures whose essence is captured by some diagramatic property like these, such as tensor products or fiber products. They're called universal properties. Unfortunately the wikipedia page looks pretty poorly written, but you might find it interesting nonetheless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_property
Ask HN: Is email marketing valuable even if nobody opens your emails?
I just finished cleaning out my gmail inbox of all the emails I receive from services I signed up for at one point or another. Many of these are from services I actually use, but I could care less about their clickbait subject lines. "5 tips for paying us more money! Deal ends Thursday! Stand out! Take the next step!" etc... etc...

These emails are incredibly annoying. If I open any of them, it's an accident. But because some of them might contain important billing updates, I need to quickly scan through the list of them when I clean out my inbox. This takes five seconds and I barely think about it, but I am subconsciously reading the brand names of all the companies emailing me.

So this caused me to wonder: Is there value in email marketing even when your customers aren't actually opening your emails? Is it worthwhile to send emails multiple times per week simply so that they are registering your brand name in their head?
> And I prefer PHP as I can code websites without the need of frameworks

That either means
A) you re-invent the wheel every time you start a project or
B) you have your own implementation of commonly used items (your own framework)

I personally would rather have a framework vetted & maintained by thousands of other developers than one I put together myself.
Europe Startup School 2014 Videos
Take all the affront you like, it's true. You can indeed get around the cities kinda-sorta okay on public transport, but if you can't even rent a car on occasion, vast swathes of the country are effectively off limits.

Compare this with, say, Japan or Germany, where you can reach any point in the entire country quite comfortably on public transport. Now, given its vast size and the low population density outside the cities, I'm not saying it's feasible for Australia to ever have Japanese or German-style PT... but for better or worse, that's the situation today.
YMMV. My first memories start as a trickle before the first year growing to a torrent starting from 12 months and forward. My sister hardly remembers anything before the age of 10. :-)
Why Amazon Is Pouring $2B into India, in Three Charts
Start with Arduino to see if you might enjoy robotics. Arduino is easy to use, reliable, cheap, and there are lots of books on how to make robots with it.

It is "real" electronics -- the skills you learn with it will be directly applicable if you want to try more advanced boards.
Bootstrap Responsive Dashboard demo
Fairfax isn't too bad here, but it's getting worse. They are shedding journalists and photographers at an alarming rate. Their online offereings are becoming more click-baity every week.

The ABC and SBS have both had their funding slashed and are in the middle of a poltical ideology shitstorm, with many serious people (MP's & senators from the coalition) calling for a complete governace overhaul or even selling off both of them.

Recently the ABC won a coveted license to be able to provide an english langauge news service inside China. The incoming goverment scrapped it completely because they don't like it's perceived anti-conservative bias.
> searching for a needle in a haystack
> searching in a haystack for a needle

wait, what's the difference?
wow, just wanted to say it's an awesome post - so much useful information in a really comprehensive and easy to read format. well done!
In the seventies and eighties you just didn't see Japanese cars on the road in Michigan. The Big 3 execs all drove each others products but never a Toyota or a Honda.

They could see on paper they were losing market share to the Japanese but it didn't seem real to them until it was too late.

Reading Scoble's comments about not seeing Windows Phones until landing in Seattle made me think maybe the same market blindness is possibly happening to the Microsoft execs.
You're reading the word 'sufficient' in the wrong way. Sufficient to demolish calories, not sufficient to be healthy.
If you still want to come, please send me an email to seb@saunier.me and let's talk!
Mediawiki is better for storing/retrieving UNSTRUCTURED data
So tell your friends to stop driving.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Accounting
There is an anti-privacy demographic on HN, ex - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111288

It makes sense though, so many people run companies that sell, exploit, mismanage, abuse user data, or outright ignore privacy issues that it's bound to leak into HN as well. It's unfortunate.
Alamofire – Elegant Networking in Swift
Doing good for mankind always has been a heart's desire for me. The idea that I might just need a few years more practise is what keeps me working hard. If something innate is required to excel I simply don't have it, though. Therefore it would be really painful if the 10k hour rule doesn't apply.

The logical conclusion for me therefore always has been to believe that more work will result in way better results. Maybe the "obvious" part is where your own confidence/talent comes into play.
I don't have any problem with the acquisition but it seems like every single one of these inevitably includes "It's been an incredible journey" in their message. Surely people can be a bit more creative with the phrasing.
At least with the original Lytro camera I have, "never misses focus" is rather overstating the case. When the pictures come out well, they're stellar. But that constant f/2 aperture means the depth of field is minuscule, and it's surprising how often it takes pictures where none of the focal lengths you can choose from is particularly compelling.
This should probably link to http://greekmythcomix.wordpress.com/comic/deaths-in-the-ilia... instead of the comic's front page.
Shape of Space is a really neat book.
I think the key is "deliberate practice" -- google it; but here's an OK article: http://www.fastcompany.com/3020758/leadership-now/why-delibe...

But before learning about 'deliberate practice', I had first heard a saying that "practice makes permanent". You have to practice with the actual intention of getting better and perfecting your technique, otherwise you're just strengthening the old habits.

Some context for the rest of the text: my hobbies are aikido and an old Japanese sword art, so I practice sword cuts a lot (wooden sword, no target -- yet).

Deliberate practice is hard, it's taxing, both physically but also mentally. It requires not only that you focus on what you're doing but also consciously focusing on how you're doing it. By focusing on what and how simultaneously, you can draw a causal connection between the result (what) and how you achieved it. If you're not satisfied with the result, then you try to modify the "how" in a variety of ways until you feel the result has gotten better.

This is mentally taxing and absolutely not fun. You're watching yourself making mistakes in real time, the mind wants but the body cannot (yet). Sometimes you even need to get a fundamentally new idea about "what" or "how" in order to break the (current) barrier. Suddenly an advice that you got from a teacher a year ago, and which didn't make sense then, makes sense NOW.

And after having practiced for a while (usually up to 50 min; different exercises), I notice that I have reverted to "blind" practice, that I can no longer focus on "how", regardless how much I try. That's when I stop, regardless of how much "real time" has elapsed.

---

Trying to write ten thousand different sentences will make you a better writer than writing the same sentence ten thousand times.
I bought your Math & Physics book a few months ago. Only got a chapter or two in thanks to time constraints, but I really enjoyed the approach. Hopefully I can finish it in the coming months. Cheers!
That's really cheap. A better price than I had found before. https://click2mail.com has been the company I've been planning to use in the future for postcards. They have a 6x9 postcard that prices about $1.08 if you send more than 4 or so. They also will print a letter, put it in an envelope, and mail it at about ~$1.25 per page, if I remember correctly. But, still, for a 4x7, lob is a great price!
I want to learn decent amount of HTML/CSS/JS to beautify and improve the usability of my webpage. What would be a good source to learn these things?
I developed some Opencart and WooCommerce extensions (payment gateways, product feeds). They've been generating ~$600-800/m for 3 years now. Not completely passive due to some service emails, but overall a very good ROI.
This is a well documented phenomenon:

http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
Children don't form memories of their early years? How do children in their early years recognize their parents?
Excellent landing page! Love the use of typography! And, the animated gifs make it quickly obvious what your app does and how someone would use it. Best of luck!
The rise of the infographic that is actually harder to comprehend than the tabular data it was designed from is horrible, horrible, thing.
I guess I just don't see it as this binary situation where you either have to be the absolute best in the world at what you do, or you're not contributing at all to mankind. And that's the feeling I often get when people discuss these kinds of topics (not that I'm implying I get that feeling from your response specifically, or if I do I'm probably overlaying it with other discussions I've had on this topic).

I personally think one can excel from hard work alone. Maybe you can't excel to the degree of a Hawking or a Jordan in their relevant fields, but does that necessarily invalidate anything you have achieved? There's always going to be someone better at X than you are, for some value of X, at some particular time and place. I see an unfortunate possibility of unrealised potential if people - particularly young people - get it in their heads that if they can't be the absolute best at something then they may as well not even try.

Additionally, even Hawking or Jordan don't operate in a vacuum. What about all the people that have supported them over their lives, all the people they learned from, who - in isolation - the world might consider to be "lesser" people. Would Hawking/Jordan have been able to do what they've done without all that support?
Would your friend be kind enough as to open source his letter wording so others may benefit from this approach as well?
A Drone Saved an Elderly Man Who Had Been Missing for Three Days
Three makes company?

I'm in an older (~1930) building in Belltown and have only heard my neighbor above me one time (I think a chair fell over or something). Honestly, the biggest source of noise for me is outside in the summer months when I leave the windows open.
Got my B+ yesterday, and it is much nicer than I expected. The fact that all ports (especially USB, HDMI and USB power) are on 2 sides is so pleasant in practice. Previously the cables were all over the place.

BTW I've seen the B (without the +) on sale as low as 19 EUR - just in case anyone was on the fence about getting their Raspberry Pi...
What makes you think I don't use Rails? I use whatever I think fits the purpose at hand. I sometimes use Rails for a project, sometimes I might use Node.js and other times I'll use PHP. It all depends on different factors like budgets, time, the task and team (if any).

Frameworks and languages are a lot like databases. They all achieve the same thing, they're just all slightly different and good for different purposes. I sometimes use MySQL, other times I'll use PostgreSQL, sometimes I might use a graph database like Neo4j or other times I might even use something like MongoDB.

The Rails community has been around a lot longer than Laravel's community, so you can't even compare them. The only community worthy of being compared to Rails is Codeigniter's and at the peak of Codeigniter's popularity, I would argue Codeigniter had the bigger community. Laravel is a mere couple of years old, the community is already pretty strong. Lets reevaluate soon when the right amount of time has passed and then see where the community is at. You only have to look at the amount of Github stars to see how popular it is.
Anecdotally, you met a lot of people who had health insurance they never actually used, and which wouldn't cover them for anything if they needed it. Those are the people who's plans were discontinued.
Just Launched: Auto-Scrolling News Aggeregator
Introducing the Internet.org App
On techcrunch I've seen both disqus and facebook. Lately, I've only seen facebook. Not sure why that is...and maybe I'm wrong for thinking I've seen disqus on their system. I really wish they'd drop facebook.