skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Otherwise: draw up Plan B. Doing something else doesn't mean you can't return to your fantasy sports platform later on.

Agree, with a little twist: "draw up Plan B, get a job/do freelance. Doing something else doesn't mean you can't keep your fantasy sports platform in parallel."

I agree also that this is in no way related with how much you believe in yourself.

This thread about a paper called "Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Using Wage Earnings to Support a New Business" might help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8269808
> Failing silently should no be an option.

In this case, by my standards, it already is. Some relatively unrelated bit of code is later failing loudly.

> This is a case where the best is enemy of the good.

Neither best nor good happened in this case - so I'd flip your terms around. The best of intentions and standards prevented good.

> The patch should log a warning/error and avoid the crash. It does not preempt an optimal solution, by traversing the file tree, being developed afterwards.

On this we can agree wholeheartedly. That'd be a great followup changelist in lieu of doing the optimal solution, assuming the latter is too time consuming.
Nestle's Exercise in a Bottle
Souvenirs of a Literary Alchemist: Gabriel García Márquez Archive Goes to Texas
Seems fairly obvious. A lot of web startups need little more than an MVP to be effective for proving the concept or even gaining users and revenue. Something that can probably be put together in 3 months.

Being able to do this yourself - a skill accessible to anyone who coded for a few years - seems like a better alternative than haggling over 120k/yr developers and dealing with the struggles of no product / no dev / no money. Either of those factors could lead to gaining the others. So instead of having none, you could be the dev!
Virtualization as an operating system design feature predates that entire chart. A lot of the hard problems in the Xen/VMWare research related to implementing virtualization on a processor architecture (x86) that was extremely popular, but didn't actually support virtualization. Which is just the kind of stagnation he's talking about, I think.
This model sounds a lot like the Moody's/S&P ratings-agency game. The failure of the ratings system is one of the critical components identified as causing the 2008 financial crisis.

I strongly dislike the mis-alignment of incentives, where the ratings / approval group is paid by the company seeking approval. It has proven disastrous in high-money systems, and I wouldn't trust it for pharma, which has shown similar ethical outlooks as finance (that is to say, little matters except profits).
These types of questions seem disingenuous and defensive.

You're asking it because you've heard other people ask similar questions in similar circumstances, not because you really want to know -- even if it wasn't pretty obvious[1], there are plenty of resources out there if you search for them.

1. Since most founders are male, if you compared what they want to what the typical founder wants, there wouldn't be anything interesting to talk about!
One solution: get out of the house! :-)
We were a group of tech/dev parents struggling to get our daughters and sons interested in creating things with code. At home it was never the right time… So, we started a special family-oriented time, a kind of picnic/party for coding with our kids.[1]
We set aside 3h, 3h and half, on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, invite other families, gather in a friendly place (science center, cultural center, company office…) and have fun programming together and eating cakes :-)

We started 3 years ago[2] and never stopped!

(We have one recurring challenge: find good tools and (French) documentation to help kids that excel at Scratch or other 'kids languages' make the jump to Python or javascript. CodeCombat is not up to it, for example. That's why I personally started a generative art workshop for young kids based on Processing Python Mode, not Scratch.)

[1] http://codinggouter.org
[2] http://ils.sont.la/post/kids-code-and-cakes-coding-gouter-pa...
a similar story: David Brin got a C64 for his son, because he thought that would be a better tool for learning how to code.

"Why Johny can't code"
http://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/
Imagine how the human race would progress if we didn't operate as slaves to a system of arbitrary tokens that we invented to facilitate trading.

No I don't have the answer - I ain't paid enough to work on that.
For once??? Most of the articles written ARE about males. Unless it specifies, as this one does, the default is males.

"Why should we be catering to women?" Why are we currently so heavily catering to men?
On the one hand, because women sort of run the narrative these days.

On the other hand, YCombinator is a private startup incubator and can do whatever the hell it wants. If they want to cater specifically to lesbian Alaskan Muslims, it is their prerogative to do so.
Liberal arts (classics/literature in foreign languages) and mathematics (the foundation of computer science) are complementary fields of study. People who understand both tend to have a significant advantage over their entire career. Right now, you wish you were more specialized, but if you someday want to broaden your technology career, combine disciplines into one career or lead people, you will probably be thankful for your background.

I suggest reading some biographies of famous computer scientists to help understand how few of them had a specialized background, and how many of them had a rich, liberal arts education that may or may not have incorporated computer science.
Yeah, there really are more, provided you define "more" right. They form a topological space, and the rank-2 tensors are a 9-dimensional space versus a 6-dimensional space for the outer products.

Alternatively, any matrix whose determinant isn't zero is a non-dyad.
Here's Elon Musk's Plan to Deliver Internet Access to Billions
What kills me is that this sort of mystery is not in any way necessary. The planning methods from, e.g., Extreme Programming, are 15 years old. So that nobody else has to suffer like this, here's my 30-second intro to a basic version:

Everybody sit down at a table with a large stack of index cards, all of one color that isn't white, and n+1 sharpies. Talk about the product. As you go, every time something buildable is mentioned, write it on an index card with a sharpie. 3-7 words is enough; the cards aren't documentation; they're just tokens representing conversations. Every card should create business value that is visible to all stakeholders. No "set up the IDE", no "learn node", just business value cards.

After 30-60 minutes, put the cards in strict linear order of business desire, ignoring technical dependencies. Now take a bunch of cards, write "RELEASE" on them, and insert them into the order every time something shippable is necessary, including investor demos, user tests, private betas, and the like.

Next, look at the top 10-20 cards. For each one, ask the developers if it will take a week or more. No wizardry needed, just gut-level estimates. If the answer is yes, tear up the card and replace it with cards that are all smaller than a week of effort. Congrats! Now you have a plan that is enough for developers to get started. Make a permanent home for the cards on a table or wall with three columns: backlog, working, done.

Each week on Monday morning, everybody should sit together, look at the backlog, and take an hour to discuss everything that will likely get worked on. During the week, when people start on a card, move it from "backlog" to "working". When everybody agrees that it is completely done and the business value is has been demonstrated, move it to "done". And the end of the week, sit down together again, review how it went, count the cards completed. Protip: keep the number of cards in "working" as small as possible.

After a few weeks, the business stakeholder can look at the number of cards completed each week, look at the backlog, and make reasonable guesses as to how long things will take. And after a few weeks seeing the team deliver business value each week, they'll have a good notion of how effective their team is.

There are nuances (about which I'm glad to answer questions), but that's enough to get going. I've built a number of products this way and helped others do the same. Please, founders: adopt some simple short-cycle iterative process. It's not hard, it doesn't take long, and it will save you immense trouble.
Kind of like how independent rating agencies were performing due diligence and properly rating securities before the mortgage crisis right?
Unless you're doing linear algebra (or really care about memory usage), you almost never need to use a matrix in R.
Can someone help me understand what the new reforms are?

I have seen a lot of countries offer "entrepreneur" visas. And all of them are highly unrealistic and out of touch with reality. Standard requirements are masters, sometimes phd, have 500K euro funding and the like, able to employ 5 people within a year (!) and so on.

Policy makes clearly don't understand what makes startups work. I think people should be allowed into a country as long as can show proof of funds, a business plan (more like a statement of intent) and the progress can be revisited every year for visa renewal. Anything else is absurd.
The intelligent way to reduce power consumption for a radio is to not leave it on all the time. Instead you batch up requests and do them all at once. For example, a phone OS has a special push notification system to so that status updates from different apps will be delivered to the phone in the same radio cycle.

This is fundamentally different from a world where you assume always-on connectivity. It's more like the old pre-Internet days where email and Usenet were stored and forwarded.

If you have a compute task to accomplish on a phone, there's a tradeoff whether doing an RPC versus computing it locally would use less power and have less latency. As phone CPU's get faster it becomes more feasible to do compute-only tasks locally. This also increases availability.

So I'd argue that the trend is more towards offline computing and data synchronization protocols, not always-connected computing.
Yeah those are the famous ones, but what's much more likely is that you're not going to necessarily be working on a project with as wide a footprint as any of those, and you're probably not going to create a bug that's quite as harmful as any of those either, but you're still going to cause memory-management problems for your project if you start out writing C.

No one's saying it's impossible to write memory-safe C code, it's just exponentially harder, and when you're not 100% sure of your use case and exact performance needs, you're going to spend a lot more time than you want to making C do only what you want and nothing else.
Yes, Google fiber looks great right because they are only in a couple of markets. Building out nation wide would cost a lot of money and time...

Google already runs most people's cell phones, search, browser, email, mapping service, etc. so it seems to me being one's ISP also potentially could be really bad.
Clinical trials are essential not just for safety, but to show efficacy. Most drugs fail in expensive clinical trials due to lack of efficacy. The reason the number is so large is because Pharma companies have to pay for all the drugs that failed, just to get one successful one through. I work in biotech and there are TONS of very smart people trying to make this more-efficient. It's a very hard problem -- making drugs is not easy.
Anand's play improved vastly during this WCC. In retrospect, he should've drawn the 11th game and pressed Carlsen with white pieces in game 12. Magnus played well but it appeared that he wasn't as prepared as Vishy for this match. Every champion eventually gets dethroned by a youngster. The new generation of players including Caruana, Karjakin, Nakumara etc. will pose a bigger threat to Calrsen than old-timers such as Vishy, Gelfand and Kramnik.
You rewrote an entire 30K line app in a weekend?? I have a side project that I really need to rewrite and I keep predicting it will take me weeks. Maybe I should actually give it a try.
You'd need to be careful about the incentives. UL does a good job of separating compensation for testing and development of standards.

In the other direction, paying for ratings is how we got AAA-rated subprime CDOs.
Seems kind of like how many people wish they'd found their significant other, or their dream job, earlier in life. They would have found happiness and fulfillment sooner.

I started programming at 14 and I think it had a huge influence on my approach to problem solving and learning in general, so maybe some people also see that and wish they could have experienced that influence from a young age, too.
Popcorn Communications
Regin Security Response by Symantic [pdf]
As someone who used to play with debugger implementations a bunch it's nice to see some articles digging into this.

Only feedback I would give is to remove the shadow on your text, I had to manually disable the shadow before I was able to read :).
I've never found that to be a problem in practice. Do you have an example where it's bitten you in practice?

(Also you should use UTC and not GMT)
Four Ways the Accelerator Landscape Will Shift in 2015
If they wanted to back up this claim "...from the start I've made sure YC had an environment that is supportive of women," they would provide affordable childcare.
Intrestingly it seems that the functional version he proposed is much faster than the OO version. http://jsperf.com/oop-vs-ramda
Meh, that's a GPO setting. Don't turn it on if you don't like it. Bill Gates isn't holding a gun to your head here. Hell, its not even turned on by default!

AD can handle long passphrases. Granted, its cryptography only considers the first 14 characters, but I've read case studies where shops have moved away from complexity to minimum 14 characters and suddenly things like password resets become a thing of the past. Turns out its easier for humans to process "mydogsnameismrmittens" vs "M1tt3ns"

I've tried long passphrases in embedded devices like cameras and routers. Most of the time they can't handle it. Don't knock AD as being the bad guy here. Go after the nightmarish cockup that defines the security of consumer embedded world.
git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD | tail -1
Easily Merging Pull Requests
The Future of Promise
Not defending (or attacking) this practice, but a lot of crime-fighting techniques are made to work against stupid criminals, of which there are many.
You could always do it right with `location.replace`, but that was never as common as it should have been.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Location.re...
This is brilliant advice :). Thx
This.

Keeping minimal viability isn't just about the software itself.

As a founder you have other problems than dealing with people that don't give you money or even cost you.

Every person who contributes to the product is a possible help and a possible problem.
Maybe they are attempting to include all dialects.
My thought pattern on lexical scopes in javascript is that they're essentially a new object off of the prototype of the parent lexical scope. At least they have very similar properties.

In a new lexical scope, a new variable of the same name as one accessed via closure means I lose reference enclosed variable. In the same way, a new property of the same name as a property in the prototype chain means I lose reference to that property somewhere up the chain.

I have a suspicion that it's all linked lists of hashmaps under the hood, though I haven't checked the source. At the very least, prototypical inheritance and lexical scoping can definitely both be implemented that way.
there is a need to form a committee of such policy makers who can understand the startup culture, have funded startups in the past, or preferably have started startups themselves. Then only can they understand the kind of policy reforms we need to make it easy for foreign nationals to come US and start a start-up.
Just looked at the config on my file server and it turns out I'm booting FreeBSD in this way. I have no idea why I thought I was bootstrapping from UFS (possibly because I still had to manually create a boot GPT partition and since forgotten why?)

Anyhow, thank you for the correction :)
Yik Yak, an Anonymous Messaging Startup, Said to Raise $62M
I really resonate with: "Do not make things easy to use, make your components and abstractions simple to understand."

And not only for AngularJS but as design principle.
> Sorry, the UK's ISP situation is not much better.

Sure it is. There's competition, semi-regular speed upgrades, if I don't like my ISP I can take my business elsewhere. As a result, I'm currently on an entirely unlimited plan with no throttling, and no angry letter if I download more than some hidden limit. My understanding is that a significant amount, if not the majority of the US is unable to do that.

> the government thinks they can force-regulate things like a "porn filter" and content filters

They could do that in the USA already, monopoly regulation or no monopoly regulation. Monopoly regulation is practically entirely separate from content regulation.

In any case, they only regulate that the porn filter and content filters must be an option - I've certainly never had such a thing on my connection. The only sites that are blocked for me are blocked under court order. This is practically equivalent to regulating that ISPs must provide a free copy of Net Nanny to all customers to use if they so choose, it's just done on their end rather than mine. (Also, hilariously, there isn't actually any regulation on this - ISPs are currently doing it willingly.)
Somewhat more than that: http://www.azulsystems.com/sites/default/files/images/c4_pap...

Including a read barrier variation and batch VM remapping operations (change a bunch of large pages, only invalidating the TLB once at the end).
Use atexit to register a handler that setjmps back to main.
The financial ratings agencies have government monopolies essentially, they have special status (NSRSO's). Not easy to compete with government monopolies. If more agencies could be ratings agencies maybe some would have thrown the bullshit flag in time to prevent what happen.

Not to beat a dead horse, but if you remember the mortgage crisis was due the government incentivizing subprime lending and having fed rate too low for too long; creating a bubble in housing. The ratings agencies themselves were accomplices, but not the sole problem by any stretch.
Because men aren't responsible for children in the same way women are?

Your comment is incredibly sexist.
Yes. There is a very high probability that everything that gets written in the early days will be thrown out. If the company fails, then there's no benefit in being in the hip language of the moment. And if the company succeeds, both scaling needs and the vast amount you'll learn about what your audience really wants mean that little of the original code base will likely remain.

If today I were putting together an MVP with an eye toward getting funding, I'd only use things that somebody on the team knew very well. Learning new stuff is great, but it means you will be unpleasantly surprised a lot more often. Those WTF delays really add up, and they often come at the worst time.
This article is a reprint of a summary of a press release based on a study, with no link to the actual study. Recent experience has lead me to be very mistrusting of things like that, so I poked around. I didn't find the actual study, but I did find some slides (http://csdd.tufts.edu/files/uploads/Tufts_CSDD_briefing_on_R...) about it.

$1.2B of this reported cost is "opportunity cost", based on the fact that you could have taken the money you would've used for drug development and invested it elsewhere... at a 10.5% real rate of return. Which is a rather questionable assumption.

Practice epistemic self defense: go to the primary sources!
Indeed. In this era of jury pools being trained by forensic procedural shows to want nice animations reconstructing everything, it is very good for us all to hear how hard it can be to reconstruct the past. Even on things that seem like they should be easily knowable, like "was there a pay phone near the Best Buy or not?"
this sentiment is the reason we need to publish things like this.

only about 11% of the founders we fund (and our applicants) are women (and this is a fair amount higher than the percentage most other firms fund). it's a big untapped pool of potential founders, and we'd like to continue to get the message out that women can start startups and YC can help.
Create stuffed animals from kids' pictures
In my experience, FP in javascript leads to easy to read, stylish code that runs far slower than more traditional code. I have benchmarked the array builtins, underscore, lodash, and fastJS vs a simple set of nested loops and the for loops blow everything away. I love FP, I've been doing my side projects in Haskell for the last few months and love it. But when my Node server responds noticeably slower because I'm consuming a database query with functional patterns instead of loops, I use the loops. I still use FP where I believe it fits and provides benefits, but I'm not married to it when using JS. The point is, is I keep seeing people pushing FP in JS really hard and no one every says, "Warning, you are sacrificing performance". The performance hits don't matter much of the time, but sometimes it does and everyone pushing FP seems to push it like if you're not using FP in JS you're bad and you should feel bad and that's just not true.
This is very cool! makes me want to take a vacation... if I didn't have a 5 month old!

I like that i can almost 'sketch' out possibilities with the tool. reminds me almost like a vacation planning version of hipmunk in that sense. I like UIs that are flexible like this.
I don't think affordable childcare is a women's only issue. Men have children too.
Charted
Ping me – I might be able to help: I run a (new but fast-growing) consulting co, work for equity, have fantasy sports on our project wish list (you have to have a unique take, though).

That said, I think the top advice here is good.

(My contact info is at the bottom of 10x.co.)
I dropped by their office once when I had some downtime on a business trip in the Valley. In the lobby, I couldn't help but notice preeminently female-oriented magazines and mused to myself if perhaps this supportive environment had gone too far. Not a single Sports Illustrated in there.
FAA to require pilot license to fly drones
It's already illegal to move stuff like child pornography over the internet, and you'd find few objectors to the legal shutdown of sites engaged in obvious criminal enterprise eg a download-lotsa-warez.com or stolen-credit-card-data.com or recreational-cocaine-supply.com.

As was pointed out in an earlier thread (I think to you, but perhaps I'm misremembering) it's reasonable for the President to include a qualifier like 'legal content' in order to avoid headlines like 'Obama supports child porn?!' in the sensationalist media.
They have their own police service with over ~3500 employees, and ~1000 armed agents. It doesn't get more governmental than that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspection...
Insane! Words with friends is insane!