skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is interesting how this blog-post directly follows the "The Post-YC Slump" post [0]. One can easily make the mistake of considering time spent on financial statements "fake work", fake work being identified as one of the reasons for the slump.

The fact that there are financial misstatements indicates that there is more need for this type fake work, or perhaps the whole fake work thing isn't so fake after all.

[0] http://blog.samaltman.com/the-post-yc-slump
The point is that at least for a VCS, centralization does largely subvert the distributed aspect. At that point, you no longer really have multiple repositories so much as multiple working copies, similar to a CVCS. Your work model revolves around a blatant SPOF which you must synchronize all changes to.

The Linux kernel is a proper example of distributed workflow.
I am not sure how legit is the source. It would be great if others could confirm these findings too.
The reality is that most progress sits on the recklessness (or even callousness) of those willing to achieve it, and then carries over in the ensuing generations and we take all progress for granted as as inherently good. Probably the Chinese or somesuch government will start messing with generations (and not even in secret) and any outcry won't be much effective. Then, later, science will absorb the consolidated knowledge.
What other synonyms would you prefer using with respect to RMS and his obsessive-compulsive need to denounce Linus and Linux every time as "GNU Linux" instead of "Linux"?
Waterloo represents. :)
Like... YC?
Sounds somewhat like a inverse Lucas Critique...
Not such a great idea, in my opinion.

There are honest and competent people willing to work one day a week as contract CFO. Such a person works as part of the management team and doesn't have divided loyalty (management / investors).
if i wanted something that has limited addons like chrome, why wouldn't I just run chrome, rather than some inferior "me too" edition?

I choose firefox because of the power of its addons, this is a huge issue for me as a user.

And yes, I know that you will be consulting with addon authors about api functionality, but i guarantee tons of stuff is still going to be lost...
It depends on what constitutes 'an element of reality'. Are photons an element of reality?

Depending on the field of science/engineering and the specific application, one might choose to work with electromagnetic fields, photons or a combination of both.

In the QFT framework, a photon is merely a quanta of the electromagnetic field. So photon based or EM field based approaches are just two ways of dealing with problems. Neither is more or less 'real' than the other.
I understand the concern, but isn't your face effectively just as personally identifiable, recorded in far more locations, and arguably much more personal because it can't be easily replaced/changed?

That doesn't make either situation okay for privacy-conscious people like you and I, but I personally feel like MAC address tracking is a relatively minor concern when it comes to privacy.
Glass 3D Printing
Not a physicist, but that actually happens. Depending on the coupling strengths between the various kinds of particles respectively fields and the amount of energy they have, different particles get created with different probabilities. That is why the Higgs is so hard to detect - for every Higgs you produce billions and billions of other particles that are easy to create and you have to look for the one Higgs in all this mess. Physicists calculate the expected amounts of other particles with incredible precision, subtract that from the experimental results and if they are successful they end up with a tiny amount of unexplained stuff.
They launched 200+ cities in the past year right? I imagine those all take money to get started. I'd be interested to see the breakdown of their more mature cities.
Since you're addressing my comment there:

I don't think I'm overly pessimistic. Apart from having been in the game since mozilla suite and having experienced a LOT of things that didn't turn out so well, to say the least and keep it polite and curse-word free...

The WebExtensions API is supposed to be an intentionally strictly defined API with a limited feature set; that just comes with the territory. It is supposed to give you access to a subset of Firefox features/internals. Compare that to the current extension "API": What Firefox can do, your add-on can do, and a lot of more things as well. You can customize Firefox to the point it really is a new browser (with thinks like Tab Mix Plus, Tree tabs, vimperator/pentadactyl) or just keep it (almost) vanilla, as you please. This is a major plus for users.

Sure, for a lot of things the extension team may add a WebExtensions API. But that is limited to what that team deems worthy of their time, deems "useful", and deems "safe". It is no longer up to the add-on developer to decide what they would like to develop, but up to the WebExtensions API gatekeeper team on what they want to allow and what they then prioritize and create the actual APIs.
Adding new APIs you may need will require you nag the team about it, though luck if you don't speak any language they understand, tough luck if they don't care or cannot care because their time is not infinite.

What makes me even more pessimistic is seeing the Jetpack/Add-on SDK after years of development and how it still only can address only the most basic use cases. The number of SDK-based add-ons, even relatively simple ones, that have to resort to 'require("chrome")' is staggeringly high. If the pace of the Add-on SDK and the stability its API is any indication... Time to look for another browser... Except there isn't any comparable to what Firefox still is right now.

And let's not forget: A change like this will break almost all existing add-ons in major ways. Many if not add-ons need to be rewritten in their entirety or at least in major chunks from scratch. Many add-ons will simply not make that huge investment in time required for that and simply die, without readily available replacements and leaving users behind scratching their heads.
I use Firefox because it's open and more pro-user than Google is. And Mozilla's work on Rust is incredibly important too. (Rust manages to accomplish what decades of effort and loads of money on C analyzers and mitigation techniques fail to.) So it's important, ethically, to support Firefox.
Yes, I might reassess that bounty.
I do want to make a distinction between "offloading" and "outsourcing".

That said, you may very well be correct. My point was simply that, if it's a good idea, it's mostly not for the same reason that has the CEO emptying waste baskets.
Why Your Old Emails Matter
> Interesting idea: VCs should have in-house finance folks specifically meant to work with portfolio companies who spent a few days a month for year 1 after investment, or until the company gets it own finance team.

Doesn't a16z already do this, not just for finance, but also for PR, hiring, etc.?
Repost from dead account (not mine):

I worked at the IAEA at the UN in Austria.
The interns there were usually smoking hot women from various countries hired by their bosses to be eye candy.
"...requiring Sony to put in the effort to write an optimized compiler, debugger, and toolchain effort to bring FreeBSD up on a MIPS platform. MIPS is dead."

You have to bring Linux and BSD, which already do MIPS, up on MIPS? Gotta be hard. If it is, they have a new ARM chip (ThunderX) with similar specs. Had to go with what was already proven and more negotiable, though, so that was MIPS.

"You never talk about what an "accelerator" is in your case..."

I referenced Octeon III as an example. Had you Googled it, you would know exactly what I was talking about. Let me help you out:

http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON-III_CN7XXX.html

The prior models, with 16 cores + accelerators, were used mostly in applications that required line-rate processing on applications like stream processing, networking, etc: CPU and I/O intensive. The low end did 24 GIPS peak and supported Interlaken (10+Gbps) w/ dedicated hardware for compression, crypto, etc.

The new models go from 24-48 cores (120-240 GIPS peak), run at 2.4GHz, do 500Gbps max I/O, offer easy integration with application-specific accelerators (500 so far) directly on network-on-chip, and have mature toolchains for Linux & RTOS's. So, you could offload compression, search (eg pathfinding), graphics, crypto, physics... whatever... onto engines that handle it at hardware speed/efficiency while letting CPU focus on everything else.

"like a "Digital Signal Processor". Modern computers already have both of those accelerators built-in. Your funky MIPS architecture doesn't add anything but dev annoyance."

You must have never programmed a Digital Signal Processor. "Funky" and "dev annoyance" are very good descriptions of it. It's like a different world compared to regular programming and with no standardization. There were whole companies founded to build tools to solve that problem. OpenCL made nice strides but it's still not regular programming. Much easier for dev's to program in C/C++, use a good concurrency approach, call a library function (SW or HW accelerated) for specific hotspots, and hit compile.

Of course, if you find that very challenging, you can always handcode several models of DSP to save yourself time. ;)
It would feel less click-baity if they hadn't included the word "Terrifying". Let the reader decide where on the scale of fear the results fall.
Sorry, I more meant it in terms of:

1. What to the investors think the terms mean.

2. What does the service provider think the terms mean.

3. Can the difference between 1 and 2 be construed as a violation of a contract.

4. If 3, is it possible to discern unintentional vs fraud.

I used reddit because it so easily demonstrates the different tiers of the 1% rule[1], except with reddit there are un signed in users, signed in users who don't do anything, only voters, voters and commenters, people who submit, and "power users". I don't know the details now (and reddit has changed a lot), but last I checked they seemed to descend in numbers by about ~10%. This would be a place where you could easily portray a very different ecosystem than reality, intentionally or not, simply by categorizing the users as "active" or not, and how you're characterizing the value you're getting from them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
I'm surprised no one has discussed an aspect of this decision that I find particularly troubling: it means that if there is a serious abuse of the right to be forgotten law, the articles discussing that abuse may be delisted because they mention the individual involved.

I'm against the law in general, but I have to admit there are cases that I find innocuous when considered by themselves. If Google has to delist an article about a private citizen's minor indiscretions, I disagree, but it's small potatoes. But any law is subject to potential overreach, and to combat it, we have to be able to discuss it. It seems that this decision works to censor criticism of the law as well.

As someone will point out, you can criticize the law and be ok by omitting the relevant facts (is that just the name of the individual involved?) but I think it is bad to put this requirement on any critical discussion of the law.
You mean maybe the accelerator? It would be awesome if YC/the accelerator had a bootcamp of 1-3 days talking about this stuff. Because, let's face it, this "finance stuff" is complicated and most of us don't have a clue: it's not intuitive or something that can be reasoned from first principles. Anyway, are we supposed to build product or become focused on learning all this new jargon(is this fake work?) ? Seems like a lot to duplicated effort if the latter is the case. So, it should make sense for YC to have a short bootcamp.

So why wont they? Because maybe it will open them up for liability? I hope that's wrong because they obviously see the need for such a thing, but are too risk averse(?) to provide value there.

Anyway, why are most of sam's post about how stuff sucks/his disappointment as opposed to: this sucks, and here's how we want to try fixing it? He's running the accelerator and this lack of ownership is really hurting the brand.

Sigh. I'm going to get shadowbanned again. What am I saying that's so disagreeable?
Saw this claim the other week, while I've already disabled many of these things, the largest point of concern to me here is the microphone transmission and it's one I've been unable to independently verify or deny. Anyone done any deeper digging on this?
They're using the WebExtension model of isolated extensions with permissions. They're not going to limit themselves to any competitor's API, they'll build a superset by consulting with the developers of popular extensions. Tab Mix Plus being the 15th most popular extension, it's pretty certain they'll be consulted on the new APIs.

Quoting from the announcement:

> A major challenge we face is that many Firefox add-ons cannot possibly be built using either WebExtensions or the SDK as they currently exist. Over the coming year, we will seek feedback from the development community, and will continue to develop and extend the WebExtension API to support as much of the functionality needed by the most popular Firefox extensions as possible.
Or monkeys.
If we're talking about the D-Wave in particular then no, I don't think there's anybody who's going to prefer them for real work as they're not competitive. I'm pretty sure most people are buying them as experimental platforms to play with an emerging technology and nobody expects them to actually be practical.

If we're talking about quantum computers in general, then there's several places where a hypothetical ideal quantum computer with competitive performance would have an advantage. The typical example is in cryptography, where Shor's integer factorization algorithm ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm ) would likely be fast enough to break modern public key cryptography in reasonable (i.e., polynomial) time.
LibreOffice Viewer for Android Full Test Drive -Mobile Expansion of LibreOffice
I totally agree. It seems birds are not dumb enough to do this: https://youtu.be/F4ml61jI5ow?t=207 (at 3:42)
Ether is back!

Well, somewhat. Now it's in the form of Higgs field. Unlike ether, Higgs field does not interact with uniformly moving particles, only those that are accelerating.

Here's a great book I just recently listened: http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Hole-War-Mechanics/dp/031601...

It's by Leonard Susskind from Stanford. The thoughts experiments in the book are just terrific. Loved it.
As if they could, even if they wanted to.
I keep trying to provoke a reasoned argument with a pro-FSF person, this seems like as good of an opportunity as any. You may want to move this to email (my email is in my profile).

> I face backlash from people who see no ethical concerns with proprietary software

I think this could be clearer. RMS himself has stated [0] that selling exceptions is perfectly fine, so even free software zealots do not object to proprietary licensing in all of its forms. I think most people object to proprietary licensing in some forms. This is a case where speaking in riddles and platitudes is not effective policy.

> or who are apologetic to "open source" instead

Again this is a platitude turn of phrase. I support some kinds of open source and not others, as do I expect most thinking people. Does that make me "apologetic"? Am I the problem? No clue.

> Usually it's in the form of some smartass who will redefine the word "freedom" to mean something different from the context at hand

Quite frankly, one could accuse the entire Free Software movement of this, as that is essentially its purpose: to redefine the loaded term "freedom" in a nonintuitive way.

But accepting for the sake of argument the FSF's vision of software "freedom" as the correct definition, I am not convinced it is an actual view instead of a post-hoc rationalization. For example, the FSF claims [1] the RPL is non-free for 3 reasons:

1. It puts limits on prices charged for an initial copy.

2. It requires notification of the original developer for publication of a modified version.

3. It requires publication of any modified version that an organization uses, even privately.

Now my question is this: which of the four freedoms, specifically, give rise to these objections? Because from my POV the RPL not only protects the four freedoms, but does so strongly, for exactly the reasons here that are presented as so-called "objections".

So, the only conclusion that I can draw, is that the 4Fs are a lot of nonsense, a "just-so" story to explain why GPL License is Best License. Freedom is allowed to go so far, but no further, until GPL v4, and then we can go further.

I am sorry if some of this seems trollish or offputting. I promise it is not. I have read probably hundreds of books and essays on this and I cannot find anything that satisfies me that "Free Software" is an intellectually defensible philosophy. This may be because the people who are best-positioned to defend it have better things to do than defend it to me.

I want to like the free software community, and we do collaborate, in a sense, but it is always strategic and not ideological. It just so happens, in cases, the GPL and my objectives are compatible. But the FSF's objectives and my objectives are not really compatible at all. So there is the same funny taste in my mouth from working at cross-purposes that I get when writing proprietary software. It has the same artificiality.

[0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#RPL
I'd love to see it to, but I've yet to see an implementation of EC that wasn't far, far too slow to be used for any kind of performant workload.
The main reason US students lag behind is that there is wild disparity between schools. If you focus on kids attending affluent schools American students do a lot better.
It's not very reasonable to attempt to enforce geo boundaries on the Internet. It's a silly, backwards, approach. It might be something governments are doing, but that's only to be expected of them, always looking to increase influence and control.
If Europe is foolish enough to try then Google will dump them, just like China.
> a very polluted interpersonal atmosphere

Or in other words: Politics.
ah, yes, we should use java.
Wired editors should investigate a valuable technique for clarity of expression: scientific notation.
Oh, interesting! For those of you not versed in the intricacies of playground GBA link cable gaming, this protocol was used to link multiple GBAs, where one would have a cartridge and the others would not, and they would receive the game over the link cable. These single-cart multiplayer experiences were almost always very rudimentary, because as Torgo says, you're loading the entire payload in memory.
As eager as I am to hop on the Windows 10 hate bandwagon, I've gotta agree with you. The author should disclose the original source if nothing else.

At this time, the closest thing to a source is "Some Czech guy did a traffic analysis of data<link to an unrelated disclose.tv page> produced by Windows 10, and released his findings the other day."

This is just appalling journalism if nothing else, and hurts both sides of the case.

EDIT: I retract some parts of that. The link to the source (in Czech) is tucked away discreetly at the bottom of the page: http://aeronet.cz/news/analyza-windows-10-ve-svem-principu-j...
how does this compare to maxwell render?
There's always been jaw-jaw. Whether or not the UN providing a forum has actually lead to any less war-war doesn't seem obvious.
> Arguing that a 5% effectiveness rate is better than nothing is like treating frostbite on the patient’s toe by cutting off the entire leg – no patient would agree to that.

I'm sorry, but there is a litany of reasons that analogy makes zero sense.
It's strange that you think that an investor who owns 7% of a company is "being serious" by declining to do any diligence about illegal behavior undertaken by management.
That's part of why I have code in libcperciva which is shared with other projects -- the new AESNI code in tarsnap was all tested via its inclusion in spiped and scrypt before it came into this tarsnap release.
What if we had more finished libraries?
September 29, 2003

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/sep/29/nation/na-facescan29
What, really? Your source is "some Czech guy?" I mean maybe it's true and maybe it's not, but at the same time an article that presumably doesn't link the original article because they don't want people just going directly there and which might be quoting the most lunatic fringe conspiracy theory is not worth taking particularly seriously. A five-minute search tends to indicate that this guy:

https://systemoverlord.com/blog/2015/08/16/so-is-windows-10-...

hasn't been able to reproduce the traffic analysis on casual inspection.

Edit: Here's what I believe to be the original source of the claim:

http://aeronet.cz/news/analyza-windows-10-ve-svem-principu-j...

And the translation:

http://localghost.org/posts/a-traffic-analysis-of-windows-10
> If Google has to delist an article about a private citizen's minor indiscretions, I disagree, but it's small potatoes.

There's a reason the "slippery slope" is such a popular phrase in legal discussions. What exactly is "minor"? Who is a "private citizen"? Where do you draw those lines? Everything is a spectrum.

In order to arbitrate in situations where there are shades of gray, we need judges. But laws such as this are impossible to bring before a judge due to their quantity, and there isn't necessarily a single party "damaged" by the takedowns, which makes it even less plausible. There is a public interest in having this information, and it's hard to get individuals in a free society to spend a lot of time and money fighting for public interest.

If you're against this law in some cases, you have to be against it in all cases.
Agreed, the sidebar width is overwhelming. On the other hand, if the purpose of the blog is to advertise his services then the sidebar being obnoxious might be the point, however unpleasant it might be.
I want control over what my browser does, not necessarily my operating system.

I'm highly selective over my software as I require it to fulfill very precise goals in the exact manner of my choosing. If it fails to do so, I'll find better software.

For example, I have yet to find an image viewing software that is satisfactory for my usage that exists for Unix distribution. I use an extremely niche, unheard of software that is 'Windows Only'. It's so niche that searching for the name of this software on Google only results in posts of me talking about the software. (I decline to name for privacy reasons.)

My operating system is a platform to run software. I'd hop to Debian or Arch in seconds if I could find existing software that meets my needs. While the image browser is one example, there are more that do not exist to my desired standards outside of Windows applications.

My desire for software that performs certain functions and in the manner I want outweighs my desire for privacy from my government and control over every system of my operating system.

ps:

I know your question was probably meant rhetorically.
Interesting. DownThemAll is currently the only reason I still use Firefox occasionally.
My point is that covering more or less of the nominal subject matter doesn't particularly matter because the nominal subject matter isn't particularly useful itself.
What Killed Smalltalk?
It would be nice to have a version that uses complex numbers and linear algebra instead of spinning arrows. A little bit more math would make it easier to connect with the "grown up" version of the theory.