skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In that case, what would be the key difference between a clean term vs a messy one?

In my experience, terms with lots of if-then conditionals are the most common flag. The last "messy" term sheet I saw had an unusually long diligence period. Predictably, the investor "found" a bunch of problems at the 11th hour and pulled out, leaving the startup in a financial lurch.

Anything that differs from standard docs should be _highly_ suspect, assuming you can get ahold of some.

As a lower bound, I've never seen terms presented on Shark Tank that weren't off-the-wall insane. :D

> How would a first time founder tell the difference?

By talking to other founders, advisors, and their attorneys. This book was useful when I was approaching the first term sheets I ever saw: http://www.amazon.com/Term-Sheets-Valuations-Intricacies-Big...
I think your criticisms are mostly misplaced.

- Re: "buzzwords...references": I don't see any buzzwords, in fact the word "deep" doesn't even appear in the text. Regarding references, A typical conference paper references cites a bunch of related papers written by people who might be reviewing it. This paper, on the other hand, cites some seminal work from other fields, which is more interesting and enriching for most readers.

- Re: point of the paper. How to design a learning computer that can access a long-term memory storage of large capacity, which can be optimized by gradient descent. (I.e., everything is differentiable.)

- Re: number of training examples is huge. Training neural networks often takes a huge number of iterations, and the problems considered in the paper are numerically challenging so the iteration count is not surprising. Also, just like the regular Turing machine, the "neural Turing machine" isn't the most efficient architecture, but it's conceptually the simplest one that has the desired properties.
My dad got Lyme on the Appalachian Trail five years ago, and still has symptom flare-ups regularly. Lyme has a habit of converting anybody affected by it into an activist, which probably stems from the controversy over diagnosis and treatment of things like chronic Lyme.

Earlier this year I founded TickChek.com, a startup that offers PCR-based laboratory tick testing that can determine whether or not a tick that bit you carries Borrelia (the Lyme disease bacteria) or other tick borne disease vectors with 99.99% accuracy. We've tested hundreds of ticks so far, and most of our customers use our lab results to help decide whether antibiotics or full blood testing is necessary.

Most people aren't aware of tick testing as an option for determining their risk of contracting Lyme, and we're going to be working hard to spread awareness before next year' tick season.
Thank you for referencing this outstanding historical presentation. Perhaps one day we shall get out of this strange amnesia software engineering seems to have as a field (or pop culture as Alan Kay poignantly put it). I find it odd I discover the good stuff only when I have practiced programming over ten years while I consider myself a fairly voracious autodidact.

Why is it that we are offered snake oil like UML, RUP, GoF patterns and other cargo cult or just otherwise trite nonsense when these basic ingredients of proper programming - simplicity, understandability, minimization of labour, difficulty of reusability - seem to come as great surprise and revelation only after working quite some time.

I find the reusability fallacy particularly offensive as a trumpeted design paradigm since it's so hard to get it right, especially since it is often sold as a project feature based on the hypothesis of cost savings. If one achieves practical reusability in ones components, that is a thing to be celebrated, truly. But you cannot say, we shall write this generic domain specific widget _ and make it reusable _ without the understading that this will probably need a lot more design and research than just implementing the domain widget as a stand alone module.
Steve Ballmer on leaving Microsoft, relationship with Bill Gates [video]
The new iPad reviews are in
For anyone interested in global poverty and prerequisites for fighting that, I thought "The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence" was also insightful.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199937877
I've heard that from friends raising outside Silicon Valley, Seattle, and NYC, too. "Shark Tank" terms, so to speak.
Yeah, if people were not already lame enough to try to understand maths in a right way.

btw, suite of similar apps will follow in chemistry and physics now
The supreme court judgement is not random, it is a judgement from SUPREME COURT which proves that even the most respected institution of India knows that there is hardly any problem of dowry. If, instead, I would have just said that, then you would have given me citations from news articles showing 'how bad the problem in dowry is', and then I would have pasted this same judgement to show you the "real data". I posted it to cut short that argument. There is obviously a difference between our perception of self-infallibility and my attempt to cut short that argument has failed. So why don't you show me some "real data" to prove that dowry is a major problem in India against which there is an 'ongoing campaign', because I have shown you already that there is a 'ongoing campaign' in India to match reality with fictional bullshit (that most probably you learned about India when you were a kid) by curbing down the abuse of the exactly same rhetorical argument you presented in your original post. Seriously man, Dowry Prohibition Act was passed in 1969. You are 50 years late to the party. Now we are passing laws to water it down.

Regarding the second paragraph, that whole argument comes from Madhu Kishwar but because I don't have the exact url I will leave it at that.

As per the effects of feminist media upon Indian villages (where, as Gandhi said, real India lives), I would ask you to go through these: 1. http://fathersforlife.org/pizzey/DV_is_not_a_gender_issue.ht... 2. http://www.odsg.org/Said_Edward%281977%29_Orientalism.pdf 3. http://www.rediff.com/news/special/ls-election-madhu-kishwar...
> Highly evolved Apes like us, are simply to big and evolutionarily advanced to be killed by such a small dose of poison.

This completely misunderstands evolution on a very basic level, and is wrong beyond the hope of being salvaged.
DSL Despite Python’s Resistance to Abuse: “Whitespace Is My Pepper Spray”
I am referring to problems like this

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/799790/simplest-know...

I don't think it's easy.
I'm guessing that this is being talked about by people with very primitive/old conceptions of "the network." Janitorial companies can plug laptops into ethernet jacks, therefore they "have access to the network."

Of course, that doesn't mean that they have credentials business applications or databases with interesting data, but that could easily get lost as it percolates up the chain from actual sysadmins to policy people.
I'm not clear on why these services can't be organized by something low-tech and essentially free, like Craigslist. I can totally see the value in establishing a marketplace like this, but don't service providers get final say on which marketplace wins, and won't they pick the one that doesn't treat them like garbage and then charge 30% or whatever?
I've used and programmed an Alto, but only with the Mesa/Bravo environment, not the Smalltalk environment. For some political reason, the Smalltalk environment wasn't made available to Stanford.

The computer itself was a 16-bit word addressed microcoded minicomputer with the microcode in ROM, driving a Signetics ALU. (Most minicomputers of the era were 16-bit word addressed machines.) The portrait-oriented page sized display was pure Xerox PARC; they even made the CRT. There was a mouse, of course, and the original Ethernet interface.

Mesa is a relatively straightforward language. The most unusual feature is that the input to and output from each function call is a tuple of arguments. This input/output symmetry was useful, and has seldom been seen in other languages.

The Bravo text editor was the first WYSIWYG editor with fonts. Amusingly, this was also the programmer's editor. So Mesa programs were written with proportional spacing and boldface where desired. The compiler didn't see any of the formatting. The Bravo file representation was plain text, followed by a control-Z as an EOF, followed by the formatting information. The compiler just stopped at the control-Z.
I know a very successful attorney who would've killed for a case like this back when he was practicing (he's retired now). Labor law violations in particular make lawyers happy because where there's one victim at a particular company, there are probably many more. You'd generally get someone like the guy in the article as a client and start subpoenaing records and checking out their other employees. Then you represent them all and get a huge fscking settlement. Easy money. Remember: juries hate evil corporations that screw the little guy, and both sides know it.

So why don't we see more of these? Because -- and this is according to a lawyer who did pursue a few of these cases and would've liked to pursue more -- most of the news articles are lies or gross exaggerations. The press will write a clickbaity article and play fast-and-loose with the facts. Lawyers will look into it, hoping for a case that leads to an easy settlement, and find that, underneath all the outrage, there's very little substance.
“The Hot Zone” and the Mythos of Ebola
We've had a lot of vendors, like Firebase, approach us at Poll Everywhere over the years. Despite how awesome they are as people, a company, and the huge problems they solve, I've always avoided it getting in bed with any vendor for something that I think is fundamental to a realtime web application. As a result, we developed our own realtime web framework at http://firehose.io, open sourced it under the MIT license, and made ourselves immune to these circumstances.
I wish I could post my "Engineer Bible" but it's FOUO. It's full of all sorts of fun stuff, including improvised demolitions, various breaching charges, and weirdo WW2-era stuff like the abatis [1].

Totally impractical for anyone here but a very entertaining read. There's a lot of math that goes into explosives if you want to do it right.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abatis

PS- to above poster: saw your comments a few weeks back about leaving the Army and entering the tech workforce. I have experience with both. If you have questions or want to chat, my contact info is on chrissnell.com.
Before making suggestions like this and getting the HN bandwagon to support this POV, perhaps we should put ourselves in the startup's shoes?

Forcing an open source on acquisition severely limits your exit options and lowers your acquisition value. In terms of the companies you've mentioned with commercial open source models, none of them are clear successes. All still have battles to fight. Open source is a really hard path to take, and it's littered with dead companies and zombies who's revenues have been cannibalized by their open source creations.

As much as the users feel like startup founders owe them something, startup founders are human like everyone else. They don't exist to be our slaves. Imposing rules like this on companies would result in fewer tools and companies overall as the companies themselves would no longer make economic sense.
The archetypical introvert looks a lot like Kevin Spacey. He definitely plays introverts in many movies.
This attitude permeates businesses in all sectors. It's part of the "we're management, and that means we're better than you" mentality of management. It almost has nothing whatsoever to do with why a company is (or isn't) still in business.
Even if you don't drink or party, just on an available woman basis.
Consider the layout that he applied to the citation sentence, where Word waves a magic wand and leaves some of them italic and some not. The simplicity of WordPerfect and LyX does not do that.

The underlying problem is that Word tries to be smart and tries to guess what you are trying to achieve. He argues that most of the times it is wrong. But even if it were right some of the time, it's very annoying when wrong, very hard to correct, and indistinguishable from magic.

And I don't want to have some unpredictable tool run on the text that I painstakingly created.
I've been following development pretty closely, and I'm reasonably convinced that they will launch in the first half of 2015. I wouldn't be surprised if they missed their target ("before March 21st") by a month or two, but they seem committed to getting a reasonable 1.0 out the door soon.

This was much less clear a few months ago, since they kept coming up with yet another company-sized idea to implement every week or so. But apparently Nick Szabo put the fear of god into them and reminded them that there's no point in designing a perfect system that never ships.

It's worth noting that this blog post is explicitly about ideas for the as-of-yet hypothetical version 2.0. They don't need to figure this out in order to launch.
Thank you, this is the most insightful comment I've read.

People like the whipupitude, because they know it. But nearly every init.d script I've read has bugs. There isn't a testing framework to ensure correctness and even if there were it would be needlessly complex because you'd spend a bunch of time mocking out the filesystem / the process table / whatever else init scripts do.

We know what initialising a process should look like and we should be stabilising this API so that we limit mistakes/bugs.
I guess not, but maybe it's even more damning that this core system component is so much more complex than the previous system, that it sometimes corrupts its data. I'm willing to believe that's not catastrophic, but can someone tell me why it's a good thing for an init system to have corruptible persistent state to begin with?
Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the exercises?
Heh. My brother's wife was starting to look like an Oompa Loompa because of her carrot snacking habit. It was pretty funny, though it doesn't seem to have had any deleterious effect on her health.
U.S. government probes medical devices for possible cyber flaws
Is it an advertisement for YC? Absolutely. So is HN.

It's also interesting. I don't think I'd have gotten much out of the class as an undergrad, but a decade later, I'm learning a lot from this lecture series. Among the things I've learned: I probably don't want to start a startup; I'd rather focus on great products and execution in my field.

I view it as more in line with the Graham/Buffett school of giving back as you go. PG (not BG) has an academic bent, and academics like share what they've learned.

Thank you, YC. It's a worthwhile course.
The Architectural Evolution of Mumbai
Are there any videos of the early Falcon 1 launch failures? A quick google got me nothing.
Personally, this is why I find Ethereum so fun. I don't think anyone expects Ethereum to suddenly take over the world, but it's a really interesting testing ground for a lot of fascinating ideas. If we were trying to identify a spiritual predecessor, it would definitely not be something like the Apple II. We're much more in "Mother of All Demos" territory.

I would honestly be mildly surprised if I was actually making money programming Ethereum contracts in 10 years, but I would not be remotely surprised if I was doing something that owed its existence to the experiments the Ethereum team is doing.
Motion of the poles has sped up quite dramatically in the past century. That 50 km/year is up from almost zero in the late 1800's and 15 km/year in the early 1900's.

So it isn't entirely out there to worry a bit out reversal. Current thinking is that the Earth's magnetic field becomes multi-polar during reversals, but field strength won't dramatically diminish. So if it does happen, it'll complicate some things, and no doubt result in some economic activity, but won't be the end of the world.
While Hemingway may have been a great writer, I'm not sure I want to emulate his health choices.
An individual's contract cannot not invalidate prevailing labor law or collective bargaining agreement. If you do actual work for the company on an interview day, you can sue for unpaid wages.
Chips was one of the first applications I ever used as a kid. It was Windows 3.1, and I distinctly remember knowing how to start `windows` from the DOS prompt.
I was trying to respond to your pre-edit comment about fewer companies being started if we have such rules.

Most people start companies because they love what they are doing, want to make an impact, and to make a good living.

An interesting study would be whether open source startups are doing any better or worse than closed source companies. Do you have any links?
How to succeed in life: 1) Be attractive, 2) Don't be unattractive.

How to raise money: 1) Bootstrap, 2) Don't have a need for VC money.

They might as well have said that in the first 20 minutes instead of beating around the bush. All 3 of them say the best way to get money is to not need it to begin with, i.e. be the twitter guys.
I've had the impression that people who have the ability to down vote are reasonable and well-respected in the community, so it kind of surprises me that these things happen. Maybe down voting just seems lofty to me because I'm not karmic enough to have it.

It's also funny that I talked about being downvoted, and am now a little above 0 afterward, oops. I figured the thread was dying down and I'd respond before it was abandoned completely.
I raised a clean $1M with a YC Safe note from a firm in Fargo, ND of all places. Took less than a month from initial meeting to cash in the bank. Times have changed.
You make many fine points.

Paul Hsieh goes into some ways to properly correct for the modulus effect here (as well as debunking commonly suggested ways that don't work): http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/random.html

Alternatively, especially if you have specifically chosen an LCG because you need the periodicity, you can come up with appropriate constants to generate a perfectly distributed set of integers matching the period of your choosing: http://mathaa.epfl.ch/cours/PMMI2001/interactive/rng4.htm

This second approach not only solves the modulus issue, but can be very useful for things such as parallelizing the shuffling of an array. Your shuffle won't be perfectly random (as in, some sequences will occur more often than others), but it will be properly distributed in the sense that each index will only be used once.
Here is why Marketing is now a collaborative effort
I've seen this notation quite commonly.

I haven't looked at the link but based on your quote your comment about page 14 doesn't look right. The different notation doesn't change the number of times you need to write the operator.

Your new equation is just writing the same thing on each side, but using a different notation. It's like a=a. Whereas their equation is apparently giving an identity.
No discount?
I feel that sort of underlines my point, in that nobody seems to consider that a legally risky thing to do.
Not true. I did a Safe earlier this year with a VC firm in the midwest. Yes, I had to be firm about it but all sides were really happy with it. Things are changing.
He also wrote Effective Java--I'm not much of a Java fan myself, but it's one of the better programming books I've read.
Great work, will sign up to scan my full site. Thanks.
The Next Big Thing Is Privacy
Experimentando con las personas: conexión Wi-Fi en máquinas de Coca-cola
From p. 107:

> Make fish poison by immersing walnut hulls in a small area of quiet water. This poison
makes it impossible for the fish to breathe but doesn't adversely affect their edibility.

Wowzer
You could write someone a letter without putting your name on the outside - this is why I made the point about it being the price of convenience. The content of your conversation is legally something else again.
The effect on the biosphere likely isn't vast. We can't see much effect in the fossil record and reversals have happened a lot.

Far more interesting--as in the case of climate change--is the effect on the economy, which is much more finely tuned and sensitive to change than the biosphere.

The hypothetical timescale of 1000-10000 years is based mostly on the low resolution of the data and the seeming implausibility of much more rapid mechanisms, but as the Wikipedia article suggests there are data that point to much higher rates.

Furthermore, the current theory is most consistent with a multi-polar field during the reversal, which would make magnetic compasses awkward, although probably not unusable. I used to sail in an area that had a large local magnetic anomaly (22 degrees over the course of a few nautical miles) and compasses weren't completely useless, just a tag tedious to use.

So if a magnetic reversal is about to occur there is likely to be a market for a "smart compass" or "compass as a service" that updates daily to your local conditions. Never a wind so ill it doesn't blow somebody good.
These adjustments look so impressive... not.
interesting to see this.
Hot Linux Games Planned for Winter 2014
Also a huge amount of insight and information on this topic here: http://www.povertycure.org
This is mildly interesting, and I don't intend this as any disrespect, but I think the EV on this conversation has fallen too low to be worth the effort continuing it is seeming to require given my other responsibilities.
I couldn't agree more. All we need is Craigslist style verticals (categories of work) and horizontals (cities) + identity verification + a reputation system. The overhead for that could be really low.

The $35k/year/worker support staff would seem to be the only capital-intensive aspect of the business.
Doesn't withholding potentially pertinent information from a criminal investigation constitute obstruction of justice?
Yes. Free soda at work is still common at IT workplaces, my office has an entire fridge which is just for canned soda and gets restocked weekly.
> The stint will include two to three annual visits – Wozniak is due for his second trip to UTS in December – and interactive telepresence sessions with research groups and student projects.

> Students will also be permitted to interact with Wozniak on a one-to-one basis via telepresence, dependent on his availability upon request.

I had a class in grad school that was taught by 3-4 different professors (it was HPC, and each of them was highly knowledgeable in a particular subfield). One of them did the whole thing by telepresence, and it was far from a great experience.

I don't think there's a single factor I can neatly describe - it's just that tele-presence is everything BUT presence. You don't get the micro interactions with the students, you don't get the professor pacing back and forth and scribbling things on the board on the fly, you just lack all those subtle things that you expect from a live lecture.

It's closer to watching a pre-recorded video than to the real thing. Maybe this was particularly apparent because this was a graduate level class, with only a dozen or so students, but still.
The autonomous Google car may never happen
Whilst the direction of the USG and its Big Brother attitude makes me fear for our collective future, it is worth pointing out that it is warming to see that there is a legal framework to challenge these actions.

In the UK... there is no hope. We have no constitution. EU laws that would prevent such actions are overridden with emergency security laws that almost nobody challenges, whilst the 'Liberal Party' don't just stand by, they partake.

Your constitution is unbelievably valuable. I hope you can hang on to it.