skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: YC App – Apply with current or new idea?
Hey all,

Been looking at accelerator applications recently and wanted to get advice from the HN community.

I have a startup that i've been working on full-time for the last 1.5+ years. While the business has great engagement #'s, it currently does not have a very large user base (in the few thousands) and the startup is facing tough business issues. On top of that, I applied to YC with the same idea in the last round and got rejected. However, it is a business and industry that I spent significant amount of time understanding, networking-in, and developing. As a result (especially in the last few months) there is extremely good clarity on how to succeed in the market along with potential resolution with some of the business issues in the next few months (most likely after the YC application is due).

On the other hand, I have another startup idea which I have a prototype and some #'s on product/market fit, but not much more than that. The idea however has less foreseeable hurdles, wider initial audience, and more interest from friends to form a team. Of course, given it's current state - there is a lot more assumption with this idea than actual fact.

I am in a bit of bind on what to apply with to YC and other accelerators at this point. I am not sure how many of you out there have faced a similar issue trying to evaluate opportunity costs. Should I apply with my current idea or my new idea? Or should I apply with a team for my new idea and add my current idea as backup? Interested in getting advice.
Just because it's still being maintained does NOT mean it's not antiquated and does NOT mean it's a good use of taxpayer money.
So, anecdotal. Got it.

But let's say we accept it. We still need data on the "relative drama" of male-dominated industries. And considering this includes industries like finance, law and policing, I think you might be surprised what the answer turns out to be.
This looks much better than a "traditional" helicopter style drone that Amazon is demonstrating. Interesting that Google picks this up as well, probably we are going to see lots of drones doing deliveries in 5 years.
Self-interest. In order to preserve the continued success of the Alcor company.

In order for people to continue buying cryogenic services, the company would have to be able to demonstrate that it's actually doing what it claims to do (keep the bodies frozen and stable). As soon as that stops, nobody would ever trust them with any business, ever. And as soon as revival is possible, it becomes the cheapest option, versus incurring the ongoing costs of preservation.
> but don't really work if you dig down into the details.

Don't really work? There is no evidence that you can be brought back from cryopreservation, but assuming that it might one day be possible doesn't require throwing out all the known physical laws of the universe so it's hardly a religion.

Cryopreservation is not based on faith, it's based on a little bit of optimism. It's not a religion.

Edit: qualified on the amount of optimism required
Frankly my point was more about the immune system.
Of course, the empty set not "nothing": it is an object.

A set which contains the empty set contains one element, so its cardinality is 1.

If the empty set is nothing, then the set containing the empty set would contain nothing, and therefore its cardinality would be 0.

Speaking of 0, it's the additive identity element in number theory, and 1 is the multiplicative identity. Neither of them are nothing. The connection between 0, the empty set and nothing is that the empty set contains nothing (no elements), and its cardinality is 0. There is also a connection to propositional logic: we can universally quantify a negated predicate to say that nothing exists which satisfies a certain property.

One question is, can we work with an actual nothing which is not "wrapped" in the empty set.

We could try to postulate a nothing object such that when a set is constructed which contains that object as an element, it is the empty set (and still has cardinality zero). Just like every set has the empty set as its subset, every set has the nothing object as an element.

This nothing could simultaneously serve as an additive identity, and as a multiplicative identity: a plus nothing is a, a times nothing is a. (This works in Lisp, by the way: (* 42) is 42, and so is (+ 42). We can pretend there is a second operand there after 42, and that operand is nothing: it doesn't extend the length of the argument list by one. Also, nothing plus nothing should be zero. Nothing times nothing should be 1. This is needed so that (a * nothing) * nothing is equal to a * (nothing * nothing) so associativity of multiplication is preserved. (Lisp is with us here again: (+) -> 0, (*) -> 1.)

It's a matter of going through all the grunt work to see whether the formalism can be used in a way that is consistent: does its presence lead to theorem-wrecking contradictions.

The question of whether we can work with an "unboxed" nothing, of course, does not address the philosophical question. Any formalized nothing that we use is actually a something: a syntactic and semantic concept denoting the idea of nothingness. When we think of it, we are not thinking nothing; our minds are not blank. It is not wrapped in an empty set, but it's still boxed in a framework. We can have variables that hold nothing, and so on.
The other side of the story:

http://www.alcor.org/press/response.html

(Unless your point was that Larry Johnson isn't a believer, in which case touche. But he parted with Alcor a long, long time ago.)
Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor#mediavi...

Why?

Read this:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/26/the-first-trillion-dollar-s...
Time Warner Cable Outage Causes Widespread Routing and DNS Impacts
I think its a great workaround even though HN could have something like it (follow etc).
Personally, I think cryonics is a pipe dream right now. But I completely respect and empathize with the wishes of Hal Finney to put hope into a future life, possibly without the burden of ALS that he was forced to deal with for a significant portion of his life.

If he had the means to do it, and it gave him something while he was still alive, than I would say it was worth it to him.
Well Cryonics is one of the few where the afterlife is back here with the rest of us. There was an interesting story where these people were revived in the future but were basically welfare cases without any of the modern implants and conveniences and no money or credit to get them they were unemployable. Then there is Woody Allen's "Sleeper" :-)
Another good example is the "love" riff, from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet overture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2jKeYuPvjM#t=9m2s

And Chopin's Funeral March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEX1dYyvmig
The Formula for Getting Things Done
Process + Execution + Consistency = Done
>Many emerging-market cities, from Istanbul to Lagos to Mumbai, share similar characteristics, good and bad.

hmm... Istanbul, Lagos and Mumbai are each the largest city and main commercial centres for large developing countries. Detroit less so.
Show HN: Product Hunt Realtime Notifications Extension Built with Their API
> Cryopreservation is not based on faith, it's based on optimism.

So is religion, when you get down to it. But the optimism comes from belief in an unknowable deity rather than in future science.
The Exploding Market for Smartphone Apps That Transfer Money
I agree. Stop selling yourself short.
There were suppose to be 50 healthcare.govs. Unfortunately, the intransigence of some Republican governors have left us with more states than intended falling back on a Federal solution.

One of the governing principles of the ACA was that the states would be afforded the ability to experiment with their own approaches to meet the law's guidelines, the other states could replicate what worked. Would have been a wonderful opportunity to try 50 differnent ways to bid, design and build the same system...
There we're suppose to be 50 healthcare.govs. Unfortunately, the intransigence of some Republican governors have left us with more states than intended falling back on a Federal solution.

One of the governing principles of the ACA was that the states would be afforded the ability to experiment with their own approaches to meet the law's guidelines, the other states could replicate what worked. Would have been a wonderful opportunity to try 50 differnent ways to bid, design and build the same system...
> Achievements that Internet companies seem to pull off effortlessly are tougher than Mars probes for federal agencies.

Survivorship bias.
This article is patently wrong in its data representation. And by the way, the data is from 2010. It cites a "citizen's budget report." Rent for a typical household in NYC is $14k? Where can you rent out an apartment in NYC for $1160/month for a "typical regional household"? This is completely absurd. Are these "regional households" different in family size across cities? Is that normalized for in these graphs?
How is this "Total income for a typical household" computed? Is that an average or mean? Even then, with a $20k housing and transportation bill with only $62k of income, how is that doable? In NYC, a $62 income only takes home $42k, $20k of which will go to housing and transportation, if you only take public transportation and it is always available to you. Get real.
How do you drink your coffee? If you sugar it, you're not dealing with just the caffeine.
That sounds...great? You just described urban renewal. It's got to start somewhere, it's not going to happen all at once all over the city.
Thanks folks; I brushed myself up on this thanks to this discussion.

An interesting feature of some dedicated password hashes is that the salt input can contain encoded parameters, such as the number of rounds or maybe even choice of algorithm. This means that we can "future proof" a hash to some extent, while allowing it to support existing old passwords, while increasing the number of rounds for new passwords. A plain message digest function doesn't have these features, needless to say.
Thanks. Appreciate the positive words.
More than just Switzerland. From the Wikipedia euthanasia page:

Jurisdictions where euthanasia or assisted suicide is legal include the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Estonia, Albania, the US states of Washington, Oregon and Montana, and, starting in 2015, the Canadian Province of Quebec.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia
> Well Cryonics is one of the few where the afterlife is back here with the rest of us.

I would argue that that's not the case. See my other comment here, contrasting cryonics with reincarnation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8239950

> There was an interesting story where these people were revived in the future but were basically welfare cases...

Some religions have two versions of the afterlife: there's heaven, and then there's hell...
Natural sleep cycles vary not just by person but also by age. There is some evidence that a small community with 0 to 70 year olds will always have someone awake. Which would seem like a likely survival adaptation. Which suggests sleep cycles may relate to more than just biological need.
Istinye kiralık forklift
Black bar anyone? I think he is very worthy of one.

Either way I just set my topcolor to 000000. Seems it doesn't take hex triplets.
Social Entrepreneur Brings Solar Power to Rural India
Google Authorship Was Only a Test
Rack Metrics is dead, long live Rack Metrics
Both have the potential to be both good and bad.

If you are trying to promote some sort of ancap/libertarian approach lets just stop here that view is in my mind as naive as a communist view and there is no basis for those kind of moral claims.
If you just visited the downtown area, some would argue that you didn't see the "real" Detroit. I might be one to make that argument had I been to Detroit in the last 15 years. Tell you what, could you do me a favor and catch a bus up to around 6 Mile Road and Woodward Ave. and let me know how things are looking? :-)

(Seriously, though, unless Detroit has undergone some hard-core gentrification in the last decade, please don't do that.)
Google's 'Project Wing' is a secret, drone-based delivery system
>While it's convenient to score people on intelligence, and nice to believe there's a simple scalar ranking, there's a growing body of research showing that it's just not the case.

Did anybody ever really think it was? Or is this just a strawman put up by people who are opposed to IQ rankings on either personal (waah, I didn't score that high) or political (waah, group X doesn't score very high on average) grounds?

The idea of general intelligence makes about as much sense as the idea of general physical fitness. That is, quite a bit. It's useless to ask whether [famous basketballer] is more or less fit than [famous footballer], but we can usefully answer the question of whether [famous footballer] is more or less fit than [random dude].

Similarly, if we're an organisation that wants to select people for physical fitness (like, say, the US marines) we could make up a test and a score (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marine_Corps_Phys...) which in some way quantify an individual's physical fitness with a numerical score. The tests used are somewhat arbitrary and the precise ordering you get on this scale is different to the ordering you'd get if you used a different though equally sensible set of tests, but this doesn't change the fact that "physical fitness" is a real thing and that this test is a reasonable way of quantifying it. All reasonable measures of general physical fitness will give highly correlated results.
>2 working on projects related to said design

Why is this included? If two people are working on the back end for a widget, and the designer spends 3 days changing the colors of buttons and types of sliders on a widget, why does this mean that the two people working on the backend aren't making their usual progress in the meantime? Maybe they lose a few hours of time to integrating the design changes, but a few days?
we use both books at our Coder in 90 online bootcamp at coderin90.com
I'm not sure I buy the premise (that you can use the cost of transportation as another index of affordability) but I do agree that 'affordability' is the combined cost of food, housing, and transport.

That said its interesting that a place like Mountain View would be both more affordable housing wise and transportation wise. Does anyone compute the local minimum of those three chunks?

And at the game last night (go Giants!) it struck me how the differences between San Francisco (mostly a live in night life kind of place) and San Jose (mostly a work a day not so much nightlife) had their residency cycles inverted from each other. Making me wonder if "urban bedroom communities with restaurants and shopping" will be a thing here in a decade or so.
Hey,

My network is non-existent as it's mostly local businesses, never really networked with other entrepreneurs or developers.

Any advice on how to leverage meetups or what I should display for my portfolio?
Natural monopolies are indeed possible and they are indeed of course harming people. DeBeers being just one example of that.
Caffeine naps are my secret "crunch time" weapon. It's astounding how effective they are - it feels like a reboot. I wake up feeling like I've been out for 8 hours. The effect only lasts for a couple of hours post-nap, but it's often enough to get you over the hump.
Hi Joyce, what I'm really interested in are the details you promised in that first blog post:

We’ll be releasing a paper soon
documenting and exploring a
provably-correct version of this
algorithm.

When should we expect this paper about Stellar's consensus model to be made available?

Thanks.
I disagree. The difference being :

locally installed non-free web app

app: not yours (BUT: communication between author and app is impossible if you want it to be)
data: yours (meaning you can delete it)

remotely installed non-free app

app: not yours, and you can't prevent the author from updating their app under your feet. And the author can do nearly anything, meaning any encryption on your data is useless.
data: not yours (meaning the author can read, change, delete, and you CANNOT unless the author, and anyone with a global root certificate (like Saudi Arabia, dozens of companies that have committed breaches of trust, ...) can mitm you, and gain the author's access to your data)
Mac Chrome: When I’m Sixty-Four (Bits)
In your "See Also", you missed my favorite UV+Lua combination: https://github.com/richardhundt/luv/tree/ray (note the branch). It too uses the Lua coroutines but has a specially-built scheduler. How does this compare to that effort, specifically, how are the libuv event loop and the Lua coroutines combined?
This link on Groovy was subbed 9 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8195501
I am a bit surprised, the review process I participate in would probably automatically reject the review; there is a legal check and one other whose name escapes me done with software that is really restrictive on words you can use. So I doubt these would arise in any company which has a robust legal department, you just don't do that anymore especially in writing. Mandatory HR meetings, too many electronically signed HR type docs, and it all goes the same way - offend certain groups and your not going to receive any support.
There is a potential reason:

There is "drag" resulting from tides whenever a body is rotating faster or slower than the orbital period. (First approximation: actually there are weird things like orbital resonances. Mercury for example.)

This drag becomes much more prevalent when the body is asymmetrical - say, when a large body just hit it. (Again: first approximation.)

As such, one could conceivably say that the moon was rotating faster than it is now, and the impact slowed it down enough that the drag in the meantime was enough to tidally lock it to Earth sometime between the impact and now. (Or slower, and sped up. Same thing.)

Although I don't know nearly enough to know how large the "window" would be of rotation rates that would tidally lock in the amount of time between the impact and now.
Again, not all of it:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uybffw4llGM/T6V0rxjth5I/AAAAAAAAAY...
Well, the whole idea of cryopreservation is that it's a hedge against the progress of technology. One can't be sure we'll ever get to the required level of development (in my belief, we will inevitably, if we won't destroy our civilization beforehand), but it's still better than Just Dying, and - as opposed to religious afterlife vision - it's clear that restoring a cryopreserved person is possible in principle.
Privacy is a factor, it's just not the factor that drives most decisions around consumer software (at least mass market adoption). It's true that Facebook and others have emphasized privacy, but they have not compromised the user experience. Projects like this are challenging because you're forcing some behavioral changes for additional security.
Show HN: Open Listings is hacking real estate
Hmmmm ... so perhaps my analogy wasn't quite right. But there's still the fact that you simply can't get a burger looking like the ad from any Mc Donald's store I know of. Surely that's fraud?
There's also a fun Star Trek TNG about the crew finding a spaceship with three cryogenically preserved people from the 1990s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_Th...
Thank you for your thoughts. It makes a lot of sense to work for a large company, see how things are done, and then apply these to either my own company or a startup I join.
In my view it is exactly equivalent to just dying until it has been proven otherwise.

> it's clear that restoring a cryopreserved person is possible in principle.

Is it?
That may be so, but it unfortunately can't be determined from this study.
Data Science Weekly Newsletter – Issue 40
Similarly, there's nothing turkish about "Rondo alla Turca" by Mozart, as illustrated hilariously by Igudesman and Joo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNtYYuWILNE
I think it's nuts, but I don't know if you can call it a scam when apparently sophisticated people are demanding it.

My old friend Hara Ra (né Gregory Yob -- yes, the creator of Hunt the Wumpus) had it done when he died of cancer in 2005. He was well aware of my opinion about it. Anyway, I figure, it was his money, and if it gave him some comfort in dying (of cancer), maybe it wasn't that badly spent.
A reasonable definition of death is "loss of consciousness and vital functions in a way that is impossible to reverse". By that definition, Hal Finney might be dead now but nobody really knows for sure, because the reversibility of current cryopreservation techniques is unknown.

Just as in the case of someone who falls into a coma from which they'll probably never wake up, both mourning and hope are reasonable responses. I don't think it's fair to slam this announcement for choosing to put more emphasis on hope.
Any time cryogenics comes up I'm reminded of this story from This American Life:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/354/m...
I heard a little of the backstory on this riff on John Hodgeman's judge podcast. good stuff.
It is amazing that no cryonics company seems to have investigated this possibility seriously. Well, the cryonics itself seems to be really under-developed, as well.

I am planning to sign up for cryonics ASAP (as soon as I can afford it), and I would really prefer that stand-by and active shutdown were readily available options, but I'm afraid I would have to do all the research and preparation by myself, if I want it to become a reality.

OTOH, the existence of a company Suspended Animation http://www.suspendedinc.com/ gives me hope. How could a company carve out a market for itself, selling additional services for cryonics, which by itself counts less than 300 patients preserved over its 47 year history - I don't know.
There is luvit, too
Google? Is Alcor selling cryopreservation of companies now?
Had I downvoted (I didn't) it would have been because I didn't see any shock in her article, real or feigned. It was clear that the effect she found was the one she was looking for.
Premining and instamining (where they just start the coin with x coins in the devs wallet) are fairly common practices among new cryptocoins. They are usually frowned upon by the community but not always as the coin developers will sometimes keep a 1-2% for use promoting and developing the coin. Which most people consider fair. An 80% premine like bytecoin is ridiculous.

It is very easy to tell if a coin has been premined by checking the state of the block chain for the number of outstanding coins. The coins with large premines are usually outed withing an hour of their release.
I think it's exactly the other way around. Cryonics/singularity is only similar to religion on the surface, but if you dig down into the details, you realize that there's no element of faith, only reasonable extrapolation of technological trends and a hedge against progress.

I'd say that quite a lot of opposition to those ideas is religion-based. I.e. if you can't believe that a cryopreserved person can be revived in principle, then you must either disagree with modern infomation theory or believe in vitalism.
I agree with you. SF is just showing supply and demand in action. On the demand side it would be smart for companies to give up on trendy SF and look elsewhere in my opinion. Is it really worth it to be there? It makes sense for so many reasons with how high taxes are in California and rent in SF to move. I hear there are many companies moving to portland.

Regarding SF. they ought to relax the building regulations to make it easier for people to expand their homes, build guest houses to rent out, re-zone areas to allow people to build in higher density etc. This can help increase the supply of houses and drive down the average price to rent.