skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 2. Doniger says that the war was "lawless", but the Mahabharata war was an attempt at a "just" war, as understood in its contemporary context. Deviations from just behaviour are noted and held up as examples of unjust behaviour.

I dont think you are being fair here. Yes you correctly observe that deviations were noted. But it really is in the lines of recognition of horror that by the end of 18 days almost every single edict of a 'just' war had been ground to the dust with Krishna himself instigating / provoking many such acts, bending laws of nature so that those he favors come out unscathed even if the opponents reaction was justified. Several times had it not been for Krishna's divine intervention, the opponents would have prevailed. If I were to count all the violations I would soon lose track, they accumulate a momentum of a relentless avalanche, both sides participating in equal measure, culminating in a night attack on women and children.

So "rules of fair engagement be damned" is certainly not a mischaracterization of what transpired. Yepp! laws were there and agreed upon [0], but once things got rolling they mattered little in the execution.

Deceit, violation of rules and gaming the system, ruled supreme in _every_freaking_single_ contest among the (significant) warriors. Rarely was a contest won solely by mastery of weapons.

So I am unfortunately forced to file this under "some guy on the internet bristling at the thought of a non-hindu commenting on hindu text". I honestly fail to see what is so anti-Hindu in the article.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurukshetra_War#Rules_of_engage...

> Doniger's use of the Abrahamic term "Doomsday" is loaded,

what is your point here, seems a desperate act of clutching at straws.
But who are those other people? Customers or people in the "startup scene?"

Personally I think VCs ought to have a form with a couple fields:

(1) Identify yourself and your company, link to web site, etc.

(2) Describe product

(3) Traction numbers -- raw number of active users of your product

(4) Traction numbers -- revenue, or $0 if you are pre-revenue.

(5) Describe your strategy for increasing #3 and #4.

It'd be pretty easy to screen that for interesting standouts to investigate more deeply. I'd look into anything with double-digit MoM growth.
Unusual apertures
Speaking of reminders, didn't Asimov write (as happens so often now, owing to the fact that we live in the future) a relevant short story about computer generated prose being widely adopted?
That is the book that got me so excited about the premise of Google's Project Ara a few years before it started. I really want that sort of initiative to succeed..!
I personally could go either way on the "net neutrality" thing. With one caveat:

If government doesn't want to back net neutrality, and advocates for "free market", then get fully behind the "free market" approach and allow communities to rollout their own fiber networks.

The cynic in me feels AT&T and other telecommunications companies probably feel they can pull enough strings to get both. A highly regulated "free market" approach that prevents competition and gives them tax incentives / breaks for doing almost nothing to improve the infrastructure.
posted in article comments:
============================

Quote: "Over time, we’ve encountered some remote candidates who want London rates whilst living in a lower-cost country. I don’t mean them any harm, but can’t think of any other term but “greedy”."

Julien, I'm sorry, but if I were considering your company as a potential employer, a statement like this would immediately make question your good faith. Ensuring that I can afford an "identical standard of living" as my colleagues is an extremely questionable principle, even if you were able to actually objectively determine that (which you can't).

What business of yours is it that I choose to live in Berlin vs. Zurich or Bratislava? You wouldn't pay more a person with a severely disabled dependent requiring round the clock care, would you, even though this circumstance will affect her happiness and productivity greatly. You wouldn't be able to pay less a person that lives in a London suburb an hour and a half away on a train. The choice of locale and cost of living is one of principal advantages of working remotely, and it's the employee's decision and not yours whether the net benefit of their arrangement (salary + cost of living + subjective locale benefits) is adequate.

You may think that your ability to hire doesn't suffer as a result of your beliefs on this point, but I suspect that you're (perhaps knowingly) giving up on a category of highly qualified senior candidates that are smart enough to not accept your self-proclaimed bullshit right to decide (conveniently) what compensation is fair based on their locale alone.
Why not just.... not use Uber?

That seems like a massively inconvenient workaround to use a service which really only offers a mild convenience (over, say, a regular taxi).
QQQ was featured on national TV. A junior partner at Firm #1, who happened to watch this feature, reached out to set up an ‘introductory’ meeting. Junior Partner #1 ended this introductory meeting by stating that QQQ was “interesting, but too early” for Firm #1. I was strongly encouraged to “keep Firm #1 in mind for (our) upcoming Series A.”

Having already been rejected by Firm #1 previously, perhaps you should have employed some strategy of your own at this point - display ambivalence about Junior Partner's overtures and make Firm #1 chase you a bit instead of you chasing them. It's a truism of human psychology that people feel more intense desire for what they can't have. Another approach might have been to make it clear that QQQ was a time-limited opportunity and if Firm #1 was not inclined to invest, then the door would be closed to them, forever. Nothing personal or spiteful about it - just the filter that you use to put a cap on your time investment in any given lead.

As written, and notwithstanding some good points, this comes across as 'I have ____ and ____ desirable qualities, so why can't I find love?' And like love, if it's obviously the #1 thing on your mind then that means you must be coming up short. That's a problem because it's difficult for potential prospects to get a sense of who you really are behind the neediness. So if you want investment capital, talk about your organic growth strategy or your vision for employee-owned cooperative, like firms X and Y that found success that way. If the VC wants to talk money than you talk product, if the VC wants to talk growth you tell them you're very excited about the upside potential and then change the subject. Leave first. If you're at dinner (which you should be) let the other person order dessert, then get coffee and the check for yourself. Either pick up the tab or let the VC insist, but beat a path out of there.
React components can be brought into any architecture. Using them with flux certainly simplifies many things, but by the same token, flux apps can be written using other libraries (react based like om, or even full frameworks like angular). The decoupling is good. It lets you try out a component from http://react.rocks/ without diving into a fully architectured SPA.
What interview questions to ask when hiring a Front End Developer
I accept them for services provided over the internet. So far, math tutoring. I spend them on services that accept bitcoins. So far, VPN, Julian Assange's book, a few Amazon books through gyft.com, and a couple of meals at local restaurants.

Seeing your question here and the answers it's getting, sometimes I feel like I'm the only one treating bitcoins like a currency instead of a commodity.
NYC Taxi Holiday Visualization
According to his Wikipedia article citing a French source he may be working on at least one of the other six problems. Seems like he mainly wants to be left alone so his withdrawal from the world is not surprising and may just be a way to fade back into obscurity so he can focus on his work.
The fact that a markov machine can write music identical to that of a human indicates that, perhaps, you are placing meaning where there is none.
Very helpful. Thank you. But then why were they trying to demonstrate efficacy by measuring torque, which I assume is just a proxy for force?
A system which serves millions of users spans multiple machines. It's much easier to scale and evolve your stack if you're keeping it decoupled. Plus if you use something like nanomsg you can keep the services on the same host, and use something like ipc:// for minimal latency, then just switch the protocol and move the service to a new host with no other changes when it's time to scale up.

No matter how good your concurrency primitives, you cannot escape the network. Yes, I know, Erlang is awesome and has excellent distribution and concurrency capabilities out of the box, but you cannot write all the things in Erlang, nor should you want to. Different languages/services have to talk to each other somehow and at some point.
I'm not a VC.

1. Not all startups/business can be venture backed. Venture backed startups are expected to have 10x returns within 5-8 years of financing and swing for fences.

2. If you kill warm introductions then how are they going to do screening? There is so much noise that it's humanely impossible for institutional investors find right kind of signal (i.e. venture backed businesses)

3. Financing is hard in every situation. Be it mortgage for your house or financing your startup.

4. If you build something successful and fits into the definition of venture backed business, they will come.

5. Accelerators YC/Techstars/Angelpad successfully hacked this warm introductions problem by inviting everyone to apply. These accelerators will make warm introductions for you.
I'm just curious - why don't you delegate the cold pile to junior staff and make them do brief (39 min) writeups of incoming proposals? Film production firms (my field) are like VCs in that they receive many awful proposals and only a few of the good ones will actually work out, but they employ people to read incoming scripts and work up short summaries to indicate which ones might be worth their personal attention.
Ycombinator does a great job of abstracting investor emotional shtuff. At the same time, I think 'signals' are bad.

For example, just because a founder is non-technical and ivy league, is no reason to fund them or meet with them. Seen it happen too many times.
Interesting situation. Do we redefine the current magnetic south-pole phenomena to maintain the present compass and mapping infrastructure (in other words, the current south-seeking needle becomes the new north-seeking needle) or do we redefine our maps and naming to follow the current compass infrastructure. (The compass will now point south instead of north, so therefore the current South Pole becomes the new North Pole.)

Almost certainly, we will choose the first option, as it permits the least number of changes. We wouldn't be stupid enough the maintain the compass so that the North Magnetic Pole is located close to the Earth's South Pole in Antarctica. Or would we??
It's a big deal. Say you use a specialized app to track your treatment for some medical condition. By analyzing the presence of that app on your device, a 3rd party can now presume that you suffer from that medical condition, and sell that knowledge to anyone willing to pay for that information.
The silicon valley culture where every VC demands an introduction sucks. I concur.
What structure are we suggesting? This?:

<inputgroup name='kids'>
<input value='Thelma'>
<input value='Ashley'>
</inputgroup>
I can't say about programming DSP processors but for learning DSP concepts, I wholeheartedly recommend this: http://www.dspguide.com/
It's not that simple. There are some situations where you wait, and some where you can go, and there is necessarily a threshold, a point of ambiguity, between them.
I'm a VC, although by no means a "Top VC". (Well, not yet!) I fully agree with the spirit of the post, which is that getting a warm intro shouldn't be required to talk to a VC. What I will say is that most cold emails are not very good. When they are, many VCs, including myself, will reply and meet with the founder and treat it like any other startup pitch. Just last week, I talked with 3 founders who contacted me with an intro.

Requiring a warm-intro is simply an easy way to filter our a bunch of noise. FWIW, I would say that ~50% of warm-intro pitches that I see are good, and maybe ~5% of cold pitches are of a similar quality. About 1/3 of the pitches that I get come in cold.
It's Going Down at #StartupAsia
A mate of mine is behind - http://numbertap.com/

Similar concept but with cross platform multiplayer.
The point he's making is that they don't "know" that warm intros are more efficient they only believe it. There was a time when the most efficient way to meet a significant other was a warm intro. Now okcupid and plenty of fish can legitimately claim to have facilitated thousand of marriages.

I am not persuaded that slave labour associates reading cold emails is more efficient, but there are undoubtedly more creative and lucrative ways to handle the process.
It's pretty simple you need one of two things: Growth or Connections. I you don't want to play the connections game then metrics talk.

Both don't hurt.

As a note: this place (the valley) is small.. you run into people you know randomly and often. You're not going to run into these people or meet people who can help you or that you can help (it goes both ways pay it forward) if you're sitting in your home in Wisconsin or Florida or Oklahoma. Boots on the ground make it a reality.
I wonder how many deals that are already series A size opportunities are out there which have so far avoided the typical tech startup route of picking up seed funding/ advisors which will avoid any introduction issue?

It certainly is possible, such as bootstrapping to early profitability or taking some money from those outside of regular crowds. The question would be I guess is this group big enough that it would make sense for VCs to put people on to sift through the volume of pitches to find those companies?
Is there any automated process by which people can apply for your time? Are there tools that serve the VC space to make filtering easier and to broaden your net?
I was interested in using Crashlytics for my mobile app, but since they are owned by twitter lately I'm wondering if using this library may expose my users to leaked privacy details.
YC's cheque size is $20,000 at max. Most venture firms that have > $100M under management won't write less than $1M cheque. Why? Because that's how their business works. So for institutional investors, it's a huge risk to back someone random whom they don't know. That's why YC is successful.

Nowadays, VCs are rarely the first money in bank. So YC and other accelerators act as a screening step for most institutional investors. And VCs can be successful by writing larger cheques at a later stage. So win-win for VCs as well as accelerators.
My explanation：https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8665721
Again an false assessment. Nathuram Godse was not driven by Gita to kill Gandhi the way ISIS is driven by Koran to kill people. Nathuram Godse and his co-conspiring brother gave elaborate testimony in court and through a book as to why they killed Gandhi. Neither of them driven by religious ideology to kill Gandhi. They goal was political and tied with protecting interests of Hindu community from Gandhi's fundamentalist non-violence.

Geeta is a fairly open ended book. Prior to Gandhiji, Bal Gangadhar Tilak (a philosopher, mathematician and politician) had
written his very popular interpretation of Gita where he essentially calls for an armed rebellian agains the British oppressors.

Wendy is being notorious.
And if the author is reading this - as much as the Princeton domain makes for a nice web address, your site will be taken down COMPLETELY the October after you graduate. (Source: Princeton alum. I disagree with the policy, but even if it were changed it would be unlikely to change soon enough to be relevant to you.) I'd migrate your content off-site sooner rather than later and set up permanent redirects - as well as adding a comment with the new location here in case people find this post on HN! Great content, I just don't want it to be lost!
"It is practically impossible for a talented, but unknown founder to get a meeting with a top VC."

Let's break that into four buckets:

1. practically impossible
2. talented but unknown founder
3. get a meeting
4. top VC

Ok, so what's the problem? By definition, top vc's are going to be the most sought-after, and the ones who have the pick of the investment litter. So it's going to be hard. Real hard. It's going to be, you got it, practically impossible -- but not completely impossible.

If you're such a talented founder, then one of your talents is knowing how to figure out how to get through. If you don't have that talent then maybe you're not as talented as you think? You can sometimes make up for it through sheer persistence -- I don't mean by relentlessly calling the office of and sending Cuban cigars to Gordon Gekko. I mean subtle persistence. Find ways. That are clever. That show you're talented. Securing venture capital is a hack like any other. Make it a clever hack. In my experience a "warm intro" helps but is not necessary. Deep research helps more. Almost all of it is out there on Google.

But I also wonder, why do you need a "top VC" in the first place? There are bunch of smaller VCs who are superb. If your product/service is so great (read: traction, rave reviews), it will get on the radar of investors and media.

Earn your VC, and it won't be practically impossible.
Wholeheartedly seconding this. That book is a low-key gem.

I tried many introductory DSP books. That was the only one that stuck.
Neither Modi not "his" mobs have murdered anyone. Please stop spreading insinuations.
That makes a lot more sense. It would have been nice to include some of the troubleshooting process so people can learn from that too. Thanks for sharing!
That's strange to me. I like to set up synthesizers/sequencers with elaborate feedback structures to create 'interesting' musical output, which I often enjoy listening to for extended periods, especially when it goes in directions I didn't originally anticipate. A self-sustaining structure is its own musical reward for me; I don't feel any less of an emotional relationship to it for not having written out individual notes (though I enjoy doing that too). Rather, it's fascinating to me in the same manner as a growing plant or or other self-directed natural process.
I disabled AirDrop using the "defaults write" command, and now Safari loads things instantly! Holy crap!
Children make touching [video] for mom with rare disease
I think that it is hard to build great products if you raise money first. Success is corrosive.
That's encouraging :-)

We are working on mobile education. I see you investing in Codecademy and AltSchool.

If education+mobile is in your interests, we can get an intro to you. We have ~15 mutual connections.
I think that it is better discipline to raise when you have a product that needs it, rather than beforehand. There are many unnecessary ways to fail if you raise out of order.
Sounds like a ripe opportunity for "disruption."
The war had laws. That few were broken does not mean the war was lawless. The rules of engagement in the Wikipedia article is a mere summary. The original critical edition of Mahabharata published by BORI has even more details. For example how the wounded had to be moved and what is to be done with dead bodies of men and animals etc. The laws mattered and were followed.

Wendy's summary of Mahabharata was as merely "lawless war" is thus completely false.
Regarding the lack of email contact info on VC sites, you can usually find ways around this. For example, the a16z contact page[0] has generic email addresses that probably just point to black holes. But a little bit of creative Googling will tell you that Marc Andreessen's email address is pmarca@a16z.com. I couldn't find Ben Horowitz's or Chris Dixon's, but based on their Twitter handles, I would guess they're bhorowitz@a16z.com and cdixon@a16z.com, respectively.

0: http://a16z.com/contact/
Ha ha, 0.2 pF are strictly RF SMT caps. Probably was 22 pF.
Being Lazy With Class is something like that, but for haskell, and is indeed really interesting to read:

http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/histor...
Ask HN: MacBook Pro alternative for running GNU/Linux
Can anyone recommend a good macbook pro - like laptop for running Linux? I'm looking for something with comparable specs that won't give me too much hassle when installing Ubuntu or Mint.

I found this old post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6714192

but I was hoping someone might have a more current recommendation (although the laptops from that post still look pretty good a year later).
I'd agree, and the portable ones don't give access to raw data so you have to hack them. I wonder if a robust headset will come to market soon?
Oh wow, I am very surprised nothing has been done about this. People in the bay are very politically active.
Too bad it's things like this that make average people think math is little more than arithmetic.
Author has no concept of what it is like to take submissions to anything. As someone who is a member of an investment fund that gets way less attention than a top-tier VC, I'll tell you what it is like to have open submissions:

Almost everything that comes through that channel is complete garbage. It has negative utility to read through that stuff because it makes you tired enough that you might actually miss something good if you see it anyway, and it predisposes you toward negativity regarding submissions (which is psychologically unhealthy both for your quality of life and your relationships with potential investees.)

Our hit rate from open submissions was 0.25%, that is, it took 400 submissions to get one company in which we would invest. And that company is one that likely would have come to us through a more-closed submissions process.

One of the most valuable things you can have as a business owner (startup or no) is an understanding of context. Know what the situation is like for the people you are dealing with. Know why they do things the way they do. This author has not built that experience/skill. He is only seeing things from his viewpoint as someone who wants money. Guess what, this makes him isomorphic to every other random startup founder in which a VC is not going to invest.

Use common sense: VCs are financially motivated to find good companies to invest in! If they think something will give them an edge, they are going to try it. The fact that they don't take open submissions should tell you something about the dynamics of the system. You should listen and understand what that something is, because that understanding is valuable.
I'm always surprised by people who view the most powerful job on earth as an entry-level political position. The hubris and/or naivete indicated by their belief in their qualifications is enough to disqualify them from earning my vote, however much I otherwise agree with their opinions.
The Big Future: What comes after texting?
Give me a RED CROSS on your status page
Just for the record, YC's check had increased to $120k since April
maybe Steve Klabnik will accept this challenge ;)
General problem solving and critical thinking is good mental training. Timed arithmetic drills are neither, and I really should hope that arithmetic doesn't count as "critical thinking" for the majority of the audience on HN.
Question: don't process names usually change between versions of individual apps? Seems a large task to keep all that updated.
More than just peer review, what is crucial is replication of experiments by many. So often experiments are found too difficult to replicate rendering the results unusable.