skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are plenty of dumb lawyers out there that passed the Bar just fine. What it sound like is that the law schools have lowered their standards to keep admissions high to compensate for the lower applicant numbers, with pretty much the results you'd expect. And that we could see this coming by examining admission rates and last scores three years previous.
Ask HN: Chrome New Tab with 6 Tiles?
Has anyone else noticed this behavior? It is driving me insane. When I open a blank new tab I am given the usual screen, but I am shown 6 tiles of my most visited sites instead of 8.

Here's a screenshot:
http://imgur.com/gMgU6y6
Agreed - it just feels nicer to read fewer longer emails - sort of New Yorker vs CNN tickertron.

Of course writing them is a pain so it's an investment. Considering I just gave a friend the "you must write long articles and build an audience" advice, it's amazing how badly I take my own advice...
This pre-investment spike for startups reminds me somewhat of the pump and dump marketing tactics of a more mature company looking for a sale or an IPO. I've been in companies that have done this: go overboard trying to game some unsustainable metric, such as top line traffic, until you don't have to anymore. If you have done digital marketing for awhile, you can come up with dozens of ways to "grow" your metrics that appear sustainable on the surface but have some kind of catch that makes it impractical long term.
I serve Wordpress over SPDY 3.1 all the time. Not sure if that's close enough to HTTP/2 to be comparable, but I don't see how HTTP/2s capabilities will solve the following problem:

And that is I still need to wait 100-200ms for PHP to spit out HTML from index.php, 100ms for the client to receive it, and another 100ms for a list of prioritised requests for dependent resources to come back. How is that not a "real HOL problem"?

If you treat a request as referring to a bundle of resources rather than a single response then you can solve all that by allowing the client to send a lot more metadata about its current view of the whole package. This frees up the web server to respond with logo.png, funkystyle.css and bloated.js, or a freshness response, while we wait for PHP

The only way a user-agent can solve this under HTTP/2 is to request a bunch of related resources it knows it needed the last time, at a low priority, and hope they are either needed, or unneeded but unchanged (as to not waste bandwidth). And you know, a pipelined HTTP/1.1 client can do this just fine by prefacing its primary request with a bunch of If-Modified-Since requests.

And sure, you can build a webserver that can parse HTML out of PHP and do HTTP/2 PUSH, but again that's a waste of bandwidth if I have these resources cached.

That's why I think it's time to move away from a simple request, response and cache model and start thinking in terms of bundle synchronisation and dependencies.
I had an idea 5 years ago for a company. When I had built the right experience and the legal environment changed to support the business I left my job and pursued it relentlessly.

We added a few people (part-time) raised a little money, but ultimately we couldn't get the product market fit we needed to feel comfortable that we could grow and keep our integrity (we were a financial product). A few weeks ago I shut down the business and I'm about to find something new.

The fact that I lost a year of income is completely irrelevant vs the regret I would have faced had I never made the leap. Even without YC my network has strengthened considerably and I learned more in a year than I thought possible.

I have read a ton, watched all the startup school videos, talked to a lot of founders and tried to understand how to do this well. The fake work problem is real and even while paying extreme attention to it, often times I would waste a few hours doing something that would not increase the probability of success.

Code and talk to customers. It's so, so crucial.

Starting a fast growth company is not for everyone, but for those that want to do it, YC's information is gold. Thanks for everything you guys have put out.
Sure, it's an ethical quandry to play with an unborn child's genes, but keep in mind, these children will be born to the same parents who elect to modify them. A parent who wants to genetically modify their child is a parent who has plenty of resources to raise a child, and plenty of good-will toward their child to the point where they are trying to intervene even before the child is born. These children who are genetically modified would likely grow up being sent to piano lessons, math tutors, and little league.

So what if they're genetically modified to be good at these things? That's a child who will grow up with a leg up on the world already. This is the next step of our species evolution.
I believe this could be a problem in general, but I keep thinking about a recent high profile failure from YC - Homejoy. They had a number of problems with their platform, but from what I've gathered through the press/blogs is that they focused too much on (geographical) growth after their $38mm round at the expense of fixing issues with quality and their business model (costing them retained users and continued local market growth). I think this is an outlier to Sam's theory, but it also provides some food for thought.
I think by "outlays" parent was referring to net income, i.e. take home pay plus benefits. There are outlays however. An office for a start. Most likely at least a part-time assistant. Computers/subscriptions to various legal services.

In addition, a 40 hour work week probably translates into something more along the lines of 20 billable hours given the inevitable variation in case load, personal time off for whatever, ongoing education, etc.

Basically, it's the same reason that any consultant-type job (which a small law practice effectively is) has to charge hourly rates that at first blush may seem pretty high just to translate into the equivalent of, say, a $100K salary at a typical corporate job.
Startup Builds Prototype for Floating Data Center
Mortgage/rent/utilities, food, clothing, transportation, etc.

Probably similar to your outlays.
BI makes a lot of implicit subsides explicit. If someone gets a tax break that adds up to 1k/month and you replace that with a check for 1k/month and do away with their tax break it's no net change in there cash flow. All that you’re doing is acknowledging a tax break is equivalent to a cash handout.

If we decide that 12,000$ is enough to live on then it calls into question why people get a larger payout from SS on top of a large tax break from low incomes.

Add it all up and a 12k BI costs less than SS + all other tax breaks and subsides. But, people rarely think of tax breaks as a subsidy so there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on this topic.

PS: Another way of looking at it is to consider the Canadian government spends less per person on healthcare than the US government while covering their entire population. Presumably the US government could do the exact same thing which makes it a worthwhile thing to consider.
And the countless people whose lives were saved by medical research might disagree with yours.

"Playing God" simply means changing the universe to better suit our needs. It is a synonym for "maximizing human agency", and it's a damned good thing.
The fact that the very developers of Angular have stated that Angular 2.0 will not be backward-compatible with Angular 1.0, and the reason why Angular 2.0 is being made is because the operating assumptions of browser capabilities when Ng 1 was made have changed radically.
Monitoring InfluxDB with Scout
This sounds like a good article (from the title), however my company seems to have bulk-blocked the .xxx TLD. Out of curiosity, why did you put your blog on the .xxx domain?

Unless you are talking about open-source boobs, or something. Then I understand completely.
I'll admit to not finishing that - it was cool to see Patrick geeking out about the impressive tech he's been working on, rather than marketing, though.

Good luck, guys!
My guess is that I could say the same about every profession/person.
Many tech companies were lead by non-tech guys, but most were so flash-in-the-pan you don't even remember them. My father consulted for several would-be tech companies during that time, all led by business types, that didn't last.
Well I will treat it as I did "TCP/IP illustrated" - buy the whole thing, read most of the middle one and keep it on the shelf for a few years nagging at me guiltily.
Introducing Improved Performance Dynos
Aquaponics is one closed loop option for acquiring organic nutrients for the plants. You can read more if you Google "organic vs synthetic nutrients" and click the first link by The Grow Scene. They explain it pretty well there and in only a few short paragraphs.
TOR comes with an .asc file of the same name that provides the signatures. They even provide instructions for how to verify:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/verifying-signatures.html.en
Your response is orthogonal to my main point—which is that services will be the new channels, and they will have much more power than they did under the cable regime.

The mega-services at Netflix/Hulu scale will definitely by CDN capacity direct from ISPs, but that in no way means that these ISPs are gatekeepers with anything near the power that is crumbling from the grasp of the cable companies today. That would only be the case if the ISPs defeat net neutrality and become as evil as possible about restricting outside content to reach their users, and frankly if they twirl their mustache that hard consumers will revolt and regulation will come down on them like a ton of bricks.
That's not data mining, that's a clear and expected result from lowering your admissions standards. If the problem was the test, than everyone would have done worse.
Seattle native here - this is only sort of true. Miami, LA, and Houston have a worse gender split[0]. My guess is that you're probably running in tech circles and hanging out in neighborhoods where locals don't live.

http://blogs.seattletimes.com/fyi-guy/2014/05/13/sorry-guys-...
Maxwell: dump mysql binlog events to kafka as JSON
I think a lot of your replies and central argument is very thoughtful, but the one thing to consider is that successful startups are the result of unreasonable exertions of will, unreasonable amounts of luck, and an unreasonable amount of risk.

If it were reasonable, I don't think the value created would be so great.

While I don't disagree with your points on a macro, startups are very specific entities, and their success is contingent upon founders (and team members) who are willing to do unreasonable things. And also be extremely lucky.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/12/3d-printed-pl... "Airbus plans to have 3D printed components in the cabins of its A380s by the end of 2012. Its Eurofighter Typhoon military jet already has some internal 3D printed components."

Of course, those might be comparatively boring parts, like radio covers and plastic ducting. You won't be able to 3D print a working jet fighter in your garage for at least 5 years, maybe more :)
Isn't it easier to take risks when you are younger?
So even if it's not sustainable, wouldn't it be better advised to do something with fewer chances of success early one in life ?
You do realize you need money to do what the OP said, an unemployed person with no BI income is not the same person with BI income.

If I have a basic income, I would love to go out and do something productive, take classes to benefit myself to get a better job. I have a few family members who doesn't have a job for a few years and they cannot take any free classes, they all cost money, especially the intensive technical courses.

I would love to go to the arts and stuff but the moment I step out as an unemployed person with no income, it will only incur expenses I can't afford. Rent, Bus fares, food, clothing and so on are vital expenses that I need to save for, I can't do that with no income. I've met people who can barely make any profit after paying their expenses.
If you're looking at overall traffic, combining mobile, tablet, and desktop/laptop, that's probably in the ballpark of correct, but that simplistic measure isn't something I would allow to drive too many decisions.

If your site depends at all on user generated content (even comments), one active desktop/laptop user is probably worth hundreds or thousands of screenboard users. On my non-corporate-facing sites, IE is still 30+% of desktop usage, even though it's only 5-10% of overall usage.

Also, if you provide an untested experience to your IE users, you're probably bouncing many more users than you realize. Very few people return to a site that doesn't work in their default browser.

nb: I'm typing this in Chrome on a MBP.
I read it, and look forward to more!

I signed up for a tech-heavy game-ish thing, so I expect (and welcome!) tech-heavy content.
What kind of bar was it?
Offtopic, request to viewers:

Please don't downvote without explaining why, responding, etc. I'm not asking you to debate the OP which you desire to downvote, but to simply explain why. Feel free to preface it with "I'm not going to debate you, or even reply to you, but here is why i downvoted you:"

My reason for wishing this is, in areas that another viewer (myself, in this example) is unfamiliar with the topic at hand (law, lawyers, and etc) - a downvote can often be confusing. Is what the OP said non-factual? Are they bending the truth? Or is it simply a hot topic?

Anyway, i could go on, but i'll likely end up wandering. Thanks for reading.
NUM – Insanely Hard Math Game v2.0 (numapp.co)
An actual drop in average scores is probably attributable to a different phenomenon in law schools. Traditionally, law schools would teach classes to prepare students for taking the bar exams (which ironically has very little to do with the actual practice of law) and there has been a major push back to curb bar based teaching for a more practical approach so instead of teaching how to pass the bar they teach how to practice law.

Additionally, the actual score to pass both the State Bars and Multi-State Bar has generally increased state by state in order to keep the number of licensed lawyers artificially low. Example, in Florida the passing score is 136 but 10 years ago would have been 131. Those 5 points are not arbitrary they keep a lot of people out and/or force them to retake the bar at a substantial cost. Some failure can be attributable to the historical increases in the passing score, but not in significant drops in average score.
The test server does not actually make sure the h2 test is using h2. If you are using a client that does not have h2 support then you are just using the fallback code on the server and testing h1 against h1. An iphone is a good example :) (but it may be using spdy instead.. lots of variables)
I'm sorry, you're right. He starts designing on his notepad, which is really important.

What I meant was that he started using the computer at 6:30, which is very interesting to watch, because he's very quick with illustrator.
"So how can startups avoid this slump? Work on real work."

Simply working hard does not guarantee any path to success, at least in the world of startups. You can work extremely hard, do no "fake work", and have really great product and the vast majority of startups will still fail. You need a great deal of luck as well, ie. #rightplacerighttime, and that's something that isn't admitted by VCs whatsoever.
Most of the comments here assume that this is a story that eventually had a happy ending, but I'm not 100% sure that's true.

Google eventually did find its business model in AdWords, of course, which moved the company from the fringes of the online advertising market to its heart. But the logic of advertising as a business model eventually led them to have to reject a lot of the things that early Google held sacred.

Back in Ye Olden Days, for instance, that if you looked at Google's "Ten Things We Know To Be True" manifesto (http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/), you would find a flat statement that one thing Google would never do was provide content like stock quotes and weather reports. Why? Because being the place people went for stock quotes and weather reports was how Yahoo did things, and early Google went out of its way to let you know that it was not going to be Yahoo. Yahoo was a big, messy, unfocused portal; Google was laser-focused on one thing and one thing only, search.

But then came advertising, and suddenly the logic that had led Yahoo into all those niches led Google right into them too. The advertiser's dream, of course, is to be in every last place where people turn their eyeballs; and things like stock quotes and weather reports aren't sexy computer science problems, but they are looked at. So Google quietly dropped that language from the "Ten Things" document and started Yahoo-ing themselves up.

Fast forward a decade-plus, and like kudzu, Google has slowly expanded into a million niches nobody back then could have foreseen. It's in my maps and my phone and my TV and my car; it's everywhere.

In other words, Google found success by becoming the thing they originally positioned themselves as never wanting to be. Which turned out to be a pretty good business model! But it's also one of the hardest pivots in the history of pivoting.
This is an excellent blog: "Focus on growth and never lose momentum. Momentum cures everything. "

I have one question: What to do if your growth flatlines even if you work super hard? How to approach that problem? (I know that there is no simple solution for this - but what would general approach to solve lose of momentum).
It is really good to see Go's garbage collector claims backed up in the real world. In my experience GC pauses are a real problem, I hope this really works.

As a niggle, it's a shame when people report averaged latencies. Since latency is almost certainly not normally distributed averages are of little value. The percentiles are good.
Would be great to eliminate IR35 hassles.
> So you haven't changed things much for people at the bottom, in exchange for a massive tax hike.

A massive tax hike combined with a simplification in government should result in larger revenues. If things don't change for people at the bottom, who did they change for - all that extra money has to go somewhere, holding all other government spending constant. Presumably the lower middle classes ended up the recipients of this massive tax hike, in your perspective. But this is just a function of the progressive tax curve; it and the fixed payment can both be adjusted to achieve a particular redistribution.

The more interesting thing, to me, about an unconditional fixed income, is that it changes the nature of work at the margin. Benefits don't turn into poverty traps if they're unconditional. Incremental part-time work doesn't come hand in hand with the risk of losing your benefits. I think employment overall, and productivity, would increase.
Amazing. I remember sending Jeff Atwood an email to join the beta in 2008, voting on the name and logo, all that early excitement. Now its a programming institution. The knowledge of the community has gotten me out of more binds than I want to admit. Joel and Jeff deserve so much credit for their vision and execution. And the community of course!
Comments like these are not appreciated not because they're wrong, exactly, but because they're useless and irrelevant.

Imaging we have a coin that I claim is biased. (Just pretend that front-page story about how it's impossible to bias a coin didn't happen.) I've flipped it dozens or hundreds of times and nearly every time it comes up heads.

After I've done this for a while, I start saying, check this out, I'm pretty sure this coin is biased. I provide my data to support the claim. But it's an ongoing investigation, so I'm still flipping the coin, and it keeps coming up mostly heads. Every so often I publish a confirming tidbit, like, "I just flipped the coin 5 times and every time it came up heads. This is even more confirmation that it's biased."

What you're doing is basically taking that statement and saying, that doesn't mean anything, a fair coin would produce 5 heads in a row 1 out of every 32 attempts.

Then I do another experiment, flip the coin four times and each time it's heads. Your reply is that it's meaningless because a fair coin would reproduce this 1 out of every 16 attempts.

Another experiment. Six heads. You say it's meaningless, because a fair coin would do this 1 out of 64 times.

And we keep on going. With each announcement you point out, correctly, that this specific, individual result could pretty easily occur by random chance. And yet each of your responses is useless and misguided, because it ignores all the other results.

Setting a new high is not remarkable. Doing it repeatedly starts to get more interesting. Doing it while average temperatures have been rising steadily for over a century is more compelling. Put all the data together and, while each little piece can be said to mean little because it could have happened by random chance, the sum total is highly compelling.
Front-end and DevOps/Backend developers needed for new MIT/W3C project
This reminds me of the movie "idiocracy", where the protagonist got his law degree at Costco.
There are genes associated with intelligence, they are what makes humans so much more dangerous than any other creature on earth, and octopi so much more interesting than fish.

More to your point, there are some intelligence genes that some people have and other people don't. They don't solely determine IQ, it's a complex interaction of environment, diet, education, personality, etc., but that's not to say they don't exist.
Are you a Star?
Just anecdotal evidence: The two e-mails y'all have sent since I signed up have caused a pavlovian response, I literally left my office and sat down on a couch to read your last e-mail the second I saw it in my inbox.
Until 2006, understanding the Earth's climate was an explicit component of NASA's core mission statement. The exact phrasing that was removed in 2006 was: "to understand and protect the home planet".

So, yes, NOAA != NASA, but I think the parent comment was still spot on.

REF: http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/...
"Stay focused on building a product your users love and hitting your growth targets."

How can you grow without a product users love? Say your retention rate is nowhere where it needs to be yet, isn't it counterproductive to work on getting more users when you those users won't stick around?
Eh, I was an engineer in the bay area, and now a mommy in the bay area. I've seen the imbalance both ways in the exact same city. It's just a matter of your habits.
This is my first time posting on Hacker News.

Can I just say that you should be very careful about describing your contracts as "Bulletproof".

There is honestly no such thing as a bulletproof contract.

Secondly, telling people that "top attorneys" drafted the contracts is meaningless. That strikes me as just pure throw away marketing speak.

There are many things to consider when drafting this type of agreement and I'm just not sure that your description of the service should give freelancers great comfort.

Just my two cents. I do love the idea and know first hand the importance of having a contract in place.
Its crazy as just a few months ago the thesis convergance for much of Silicon Valley was that investing in 3D printing was very much 2014...Sure this one has faster builds but given that they aren't first movers and have substantial competition, it's surprising to see so much capitol being pumped in. Perhaps stratesys or one of the other big guys will want in so the investment makes sense?