skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NB: The Vikings would call a king who was victorious in battle and on sea voyages as "lucky".

That said, there is "luck" and there is "luck". In one version you do something stupid and get a huge reward, in the other version you take a risk and manage to succeed.

Julie Leach, who just won $310M on the PowerBall lottery[1], that was the first kind, its dumb to spend cash on lottery tickets, but its awesome when they make you a millionaire.

Larry and Sergey had the second kind, they took a risk that they could make a functional business model out of Search and they managed to do so, so they reaped a huge reward.

In my experience I've met "luck blind" people who can see no difference between what Julie did and what Larry and Sergey did, and people who can differentiate between the two forms. I've also observed that it is statistically more likely for someone who is NOT luck blind to become wealthy than it is for someone who is luck blind.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/06/news/michigan-powerball-lott...
why would you want to be sheltered from such a basic fact of life? Anyway, if it's any consolation, 10m is probably not small change for Sam. His biggest liquidity event so far was 40m for Loopt, so 10m is definitely a considered investment for him. He probably wrote it in an off the cuff manner to set a precedent for the mentality towards the fund. Basically signaling to other investors not to think about putting money up too much since its such a worthy cause
It more doesn't work for our privacy policy since we don't track users.
> You sound dismissive of scientists (computer or otherwise) working on solving practical problems.

I don't mean to be dismissive of those working on solving practical problems! There's a good chance that will be me in the near future! I suppose my concern is more that people working on those sorts of things already have many more options and resources available to them. I just mean to state that if one grants that research without immediate practical application has some (perhaps qualitative) value for society, then the relative impact could be larger if it were focused more towards that kind of research. But of course the downside to that is that the resulting research...has no immediate practical application.

None of this should be taken as criticism exactly since both strategies have their advantages (and it's not my money anyway), it's just not quite clear from the post what sort of research is going to be funded.
> * How can a simple middleman maintain such a massive profit margin for so long?*

They merged with a large owner of venues (LiveNation), so they own the venues as well
> I really don't believe in sanitizing reality. I don't believe in intolerance for the intolerant. It's a nice, easy, euthanistic way to make our own little pure vision of the world.

Are you comparing the internet to reality? Because the internet is not reality, the type of behavior you see on reddit and 4chan may reflect our nature, but it is enabled by anonymity and the complete lack of repercussions. If people behaved the way they do on these boards they would quickly be ostracized by society if not having the shit beaten out of them on a regular basis.

Applying some sort of freedom ideology to internet communities like reddit is not very useful in practice. We have to look at the shape of the internet and recognize that freedom on the internet is not the problem—after all cyberspace is unlimited, you can have infinite communities, and geography is irrelevant. All groups can find a place on the internet, and they will always be able to. We simply don't need to worry about that, and it's silly to wring our hands over the decision to moderate this or that community.

What we do need to worry about is the ability for formerly marginalized sociopaths to hurt other people from the safety of their basement dwelling. Whether it's unending bombardment of harassment or actual physical harm like swatting, we need to get a handle on this. Arguing that hate speech should not be moderated or restricted in any way is sort of like giving equal coverage to crackpot climate change deniers on basis of "fairness".
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/opinion/volkswagen-and-the...
it's meant to be funny, not useful :-)
I'm pretty sure this is just a joke in response to this: http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/21/investing/vw-emissions-cheat...
No, I study for an exam so I can get a degree so I can get a good job so I'll find it easier to have a more comfortable life. It's a purely rational choice.
this is great, I'd love to see something similar to the Kavli Foundation growing from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kavli_Foundation
Looks like? It's definitely a political troll. No question.
>The height of the bubble was reached in the winter of 1636-37. Tulip traders were making (and losing) fortunes regularly. A good trader could earn up to 60,000 florins in a month— approximately $61,710 adjusted to current U.S. dollars. With profits like those to be had, nothing local governments could do stopped the frenzy of trading. Then one day in Haarlem a buyer failed to show up and pay for his bulb purchase. The ensuing panic spread across Holland, and within days tulip bulbs were worth only a hundredth of their former prices. The tulip bubble had burst.

Florins appear to be pretty steady with the dollar...
The repository actually links to phpunit-vw at the bottom under the credits section.

> Heavily inspired by https://github.com/hmlb/phpunit-vw
SEC Finds That Blackstone Charged Too Many Fees
Works on Codeship as well. The process.env.CI is set to true there as well.
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What are the sins of Ripple?

I tried googling but only saw some mentions of "problems with the existing consensus algorithm" which seem to have been remedied with Stellar's 2015 April whitepaper.
Questions VC's ask startups when they pitch them
Oh, I kinda forgot about that... to be honest, I have used that thing once, when it was discussed here, "added" a few people, but it never even came to really talking to anyone over it. So, thanks for reminding me, I guess I'll try it again! [ https://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/version-0-6-... ] (needless to say, I'm not a contributor, and I doubt I could provide much of substance to something like that)

Are there other ways to be reachable semi-anonymously? I don't care much about encryption, since the most "dangerous" things I say in public anyway, but I also don't want to put an email or website address because I've, uhh, learned to behave better here by getting hellbanned a lot, and as such wouldn't want to be tied to an identifier like that should that happen again.

Sorry for endulging, I wish HN had a simple private messaging system, maybe requiring a "message permission request" to be accepted before messaging someone; even restricting it to few short messages that get deleted after a while would be great.
> One can escalate a conflict by actively trying to hurt someone rather than merely repel them or drive them away

I'd say this leads to a situation where you are actively trying to give the attacker more situations that they can hurt you.

> You are suggesting that there is no distinction between the different states. This is nonsense.

No, I'm saying assuming they aren't actively trying to hurt you is outright dangerous. Any street fight can kill - all it takes is the wrong fall or a lucky contact and someone is dead. Assuming the attacker is somehow nice and should be scared away is insane in that situation.

That is what you are advocating.

However you have characterized my position (wrongly as):

> inflict as much harm as possible

Which is NOT what I am saying. I am saying the goal is to end the fight. That doesn't mean giving them a chance to get back up and attack you again - it means ending the fight as soon as possible no matter what it takes.

Minimizing harm to your attacker is counter-productive to that. That's not to say that the only alternative is maximizing harm. That's silly, a false dichotomy, and not what I'm suggesting at all.
....uhhh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_violation...
If you didn't see warnings running code under 0.13, nothing should break per se, right?
And if you see warnings now, that's the stuff that will break in 0.15 but works for now.
So, basically, Google announced a free CDN, if you restrict yourself to a HTML/JavaScript subset that promises fast page load times for users, and invites other parties to do that, too, using the same restrictions?

I also read claims that this is a move against ad-blockers. Is there some truth in that?
this would be useful....if i wrote tests, that is.
Or, differently phrased, achieving political objectives that would have otherwise not been feasible. It is not obvious to me that a side relatively more tolerant to own casualties should enjoy the political advantage. Also, do we discount casualties that the intended targets would likely have inflicted, had they not been eliminated?

In any case, this article is not about merits of drones per se, just about the self-targeting ones. So when you say that "an algorithm chooses the where" -- any reference for that?
Scientists Grow Primitive Human Kidneys in a Dish
Yeah, exactly. We probably will never know, but it is just possible that the most famous case of polio actually didn't have polio at all.
Are you seriously comparing Cuba to NK?

A country whose internal economic structuring during McCarthyism netted them an economic and political blackballing by their nearest trading neighbor (one of the largest economic powerhouses in the world) and all their allies, but which still managed to produce one of the world's best healthcare systems and even send their surplus of doctors on numerous humanitarian missions... how is this even remotely the same as a country that chose to cloister itself and actively deny its citizens rights?

Or have I just been trolled, maybe...
For those that don't get the joke: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34324772
I got here via BBC podcast, the index of these is found here http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/PDBs?page=20.

There is obviously nothing earth-shattering, but the podcast interviews a journalist who has been pushing for such FOIA requests, and points out that presidential style influenced quality of decision making - Eisenhower was confident enough to allow wide ranging debate below him to ensure the best answers reached him, others like Johnson, were too insecure to allow dissent.

I think it suggests, once again, transparency and candour produce the best organisations
The same as who's in charge of their general (physical) well-being: it depends on the circumstances. Of course, it's all a matter of degree. Raping someone is obviously worse than threatening to rape them, but threatening with rape might be worse than, say, stepping on their foot or slapping them.
Could anyone explain to me why they would do this instead of advertising/affiliate arrangements with all the ticket vendors out there?
Would love to know which fields/areas YC will be focusing for research. Is it for only Computer Science? or Physics? Biomedical Science or behavioral economics? or combinations of few fields?

And what kind of ideas/research will be given priority? Will it be bench/desktop based research projects or applied to people lives directly?
The threat of jailtime has always been used to deter crime. It's a large part of the reason people don't commit crime all the time.

People would have no reason not to commit crime if the stakes were "give back what you stole". "Fitting the crime" includes deterrence up to a sane amount. In general the punishment needs to be more than the crime. Say ~5x. Steal $1,000. Pay $5,000 "worth" of your time in jail.
> No one is trying to police thoughts.

Except all the people on Reddit who don't want people to use the word "rape" because it's "triggering".

> Just because there is more than one cultural definition of correct thought does mean there is more than one actual definition.

Yeah, but there's nothing that proves that there is only one actual definition, either. You've literally said nothing here.
Inside NASA's world-class supercomputer center (2010)
I think "we’ll have a process in place to address technology that could be dangerous" is a pretty strong hint, but it would apply about equally well to AI or nuclear, which are already the top guesses in this thread.
This article is missing the context that conservative parties recently took power from the previous socialist government after elections in June.
I read this study earlier.

Searching the Consensus Project from Skeptical Science shows papers such as:

"Gruber, E., & Brand, M. (1991). Promoting energy conservation in small and medium-sized companies. Energy Policy, 19(3), 279–287."

"Boykoff, M. T. (2008). Lost in translation? United States television news coverage of anthropogenic climate change, 1995–2004. Climatic Change, 86(1-2), 1–11."

I am concerned that this paper qualifies social scientists, psychologists, and other soft scientists as hard science climate researchers capable of deducing the possibility and cause of global climate change. What the fuck do they know?

I'm all for believing that there are a majority of hard-science climate researchers who agree that there is human-caused global warming. This study; however, gives nothing close to a true number.
Earlier thread for phpunit:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10341405
This is really cool! I wonder, though, if YCR will accept donations? It will be nice if I could personally contribute to a research project.
[Loong time lurker here. Couldn't help myself from commenting on this one.]
well reducing them by half wouldn't be a bad thing either :) although of course it's more complicated than that, I just wanted to point out that the direction of the effect is rather unclear at this point.
Building an RSS Bot for Telegram with AW Lambda
I love the accessibility and content of blog posts by members of Recurse Center. It would be amazing if scientists from YCR publish informal, yet rigorous posts for newbies.
Davee’s 6.61 Infinity project update – PSP Go
If you want to develop on a Windows machine, unless you just want to do .NET with Visual Studio, you're asking for trouble.

Just install Linux, it's much more user friendly.
The problem is the combination of note length and the actual note. Add in multiple notes played at once and you hit the 3 key limit of most consumer keyboards before most groups would be finished.

Beyond that there's also just the difficulty of mapping between the keyboard and keys, how do you easily deal with the gaps in the black keys, there's enough keys to map one to one with most of a piano but keeping that in memory while notating music is a big ask.
Using Dhaka as the reference point is hilarious. Has the author ever been to Dhaka? It was full a long time ago.
this is the ultimate HN troll. Luv it.
AWS re:Invent 2015: New services and features
> Racism isn't a reasonable position

What do you mean by reasonable? Logical? Acceptable? Natural? Normal? Understandable?

I'd argue a lot of the low level racism and sexism we see on Reddit is entirely natural.

It's natural for a woman who has been sexually abused to be a little bit sexist towards men.

It's natural for a man who has his kids taken away from him by his ex-wife to be a bit bitter towards women.

It's totally understandable that a Chinese kid who has been heavily bullied for years by black kids at his school will have reservations about black people in general. Etc etc etc.
/dev/color
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Can we vote for projects somewhere?
Sockpuppet voting is a bannable offense on HN. Please don't do that.
The founders sold their previous company to Ticketmaster. From http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/19/ticketmaster-rival-ticketfl...:

<<Ticketfly has an interesting origin story, the company’s co-founders sold their first startup, TicketWeb to industry leader Ticketmaster for $35 million in 2000 and then left that company in 2008 to form Ticketfly.>>
That's exactly the point - they're banning behavior, not ideas. They didn't ban all racist or biased communities, just the ones that they saw causing harmful and damaging behavior. Or evading the bans.

And before you demand internal information, just imagine the witch hunt that would start if Reddit had released the evidence of such behavior. That would have caused even more harm, even against innocent bystanders.

The fact that they selectively banned communities based on their behavior and not their ideas proves they are for free speech, but it's not the "bastion of free speech" that some people interpret it as.
New hosts don't take drugs that kill certain variants of the virus, so the version that does best in a drug free environment replicates quickest. That's usually different from the version that does best in the drugged environment.
KSP isn't nearly as realistic as Orbiter, but I personally see it as a good thing because it makes the right simplifications to give even a 10-year old a reasonable chance at developing an intuitive understanding of orbital dynamics.

Said 10-year old won't be able to plot a real trajectory for a rocket/satellite, but giving a 10-year old an intuitive understanding of inclination changes, gravity slingshots, Hohmann transfers, etc. is an amazing feat by itself.
I edited right before you responded, swapping out "completely disconnected" in favor of "does not have to be responsive". The former was indeed too absolute to ever be true.

So yes democracy does create a connection between centralized government and the body politic. It's just a bit of a tenuous connection that addresses only gross problems that are understood (the inherent limitation of any centralized planning) by more than 51% of people.
Paribus (YC S15) is hiring developers to give people money back when prices drop
There's this meme in the startup community of founders making large sacrifices and taking huge risks to keep a startup dream from dying. Just because you take large risks doesn't mean you will be rewarded for them. Much like buying millions of dollars worth of lotto tickets will probably end in a bad outcome.

So instead of rushing with a cofounder to force a brilliant idea out, just keep working on your skills. One of the most important skills is recognizing good opportunities. Constantly refine yourself, keeping your eyes open, and pounce when a good opportunity presents itself.
The quadrupole moment of Venus is much, much less than that of the Earth. For comparison, the relative difference between the radius at the equator and the radius at the pole of Earth is about 0.3%. For Venus it's less than one part in 100,000. However, Venus doesn't have a moon, so there's no third body to cause Kozai-Lidov oscillations [1].

[1]: Actually, this is not strictly true, since the Sun acts as a third body. However, it's so much further away that the Kozai-Lidov effect from the Sun is weak. That's why the Venus Express was able to maintain a polar orbit around Venus.
Ticketmaster interfaces with a large number of absorbed Ticketing services and inventory that they've acquired over the years. Sure selling tickets shouldn't be hard, but try doing it with the number of legacy systems ticketmaster has to work with... especially considering they have so many. Sure they could rewrite a single system, but they have plenty of teams and applications that interface with specific services that they'd not only have to rebuild the system, but make it compatible with the hundreds of stakeholder's applications (ranging from Sports, Theatre, concerts..).
In order to "dispatch" power as-needed, you need buy in from municipal power companies to grid-connect the supply (or generation). As we're seeing (eg. in Hawaii), the power company becomes less-and-less incentivized to permit grid-connections as the rate of decentralized supply (or generation) increases.

What I'd really like to know: How will the power companies adapt to new, decentralized generation (or storage) on a massive scale? Or alternatively: The municipal power companies budgeted their massive expenditures over decades; does this analysis account for all the expenses municipal power companies will necessarily incur (and pass to consumers) if the status quo shifts?
Yes, with the exception of the React.initializeTouchEvents() removal and the ReactTestUtils change I noted.
I'm happy to see a phone in 2015 with a QWERTY keyboard, I only wish it slid out the long side, like the original Motorola Droid series.
You're getting downvotes because you are assuming that the research will be focused on something that won't impact humans in some "charitable" way.

>I think it's very interesting phenomenon that he values this research more than the lives of other people,

It's possible to make a donation to research something that isn't curing cancer for example but still impact the lives of people.
Excel also has a pretty easy to understand xml import,

At my a new gig I've just avoided having to write add 'just one more report' to the fragile homebrew report designer by letting people pull out structured data and make their own reports. Code required was trivial & the risk was super low as we could just use existing API methods to get the XML out.

This has caught my eye though, so I'll have a tinker in the morning.
The Death of Optimizing Compilers [audio+slides]
You are right, and of course in most cases we won't know of such cases, so there is no way to judge how many there might be.

On the other hand, robots would also complicate things for the not-honorable superiors -- for one, they'll lose an option to give verbal orders and then claim no knowledge and blame subordinates when things come out -- they would now need to alter electronic records.

But my point is just that the effect of higher robot involvement is far from clear.
What also fascinates me is the fairly informal, journalistic tone of the writing - "the West German delegates are in for a rough time as they travel to ...",

It's interesting to see what works at the highest levels, and what sphincter tightening evasion is often parlayed around at the lower levels we all swim in.