skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As far as I am aware, every single economical system in history has produced wealth inequality

Check out the Islamic perspective on economics and finance. It sets certain restrictions, while keeping many things open to the requirements of the society: no interest, shared risk, the population is responsible for the poor, etc. while still allowing the opportunities to acquire wealth.

It was during the days of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz[0] that it was reported that there were no more poor people left to take Zakat[1], because everyone did their duties.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_II

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat
I think you mentioned somewhere that you are aiming for early-career researchers, not so much for established group leaders. Being an early-career researcher myself (postdoc), my first thought was that your program could easily turn out to be a trap. At first, it looks like a fantastic opportunity because freedom and independence, etc. However, I'm sure that you are looking for high risk / high reward projects. So there is, by definition, a very real possibility that some of your funded projects will fail. What happens with the PIs of those projects? It will be very hard for them to return to a more traditional career stream in academia because they will lack a strong publication record and teaching experience. Researchers are in this respect different from start-up founders, because a failed start-up is not the end of the world and you can start over again. In contrast to that, there are usually no second chances in academia, at least not at that career stage. So it seems that you are asking people to stake everything on one card. My question is: How are you going to manage the individual career risks associated with this approach to science funding?
By quietly upvoting it while smoking some weed to quiet their cognitive dissonance.
The last two books I read were Sapiens and The Supermen (given to be by @dang). Highly recommend both.
Do you personally work 'startup-like' hours everyday, or is it a little more relaxed? 8 hours/day?
> He should stick to black holes.

I just want to point out the shallow stereotypicality of that remark. That's all.
The best way to do this from what I've seen is to meet people at school or at work that seem interested in building things. Work with them on interesting projects, and see you seem to work well with.
Policies are always for now.
> Right. The usual counter is the following: "This was predicted every time we had technological upheavals, and it never happened. Therefore it won't happen this time either."

Which is, of course, false in its premise -- it happened with the technological developments which were happening alongside the development of the economic system which would become dominant in the developed world of the time, which would later be named "capitalism" by its critics, and was mitigated to a certain degree (but not, by any stretch of the imagination, solved) when capitalism was largely replaced in the developed world with modern "mixed economies" which limit the capitalist property system through the adoption of redistributive and socialized regulatory mechanisms while retaining the capitalist arrangement in outline (in the developed world, this approach has prevailed, for now, over both retaining -- or reverting to -- capitalism without compromising its structure and abandoning its property structure outright.)
It takes a while to get started but interesting stuff really starts being talked about (as far as Perl 6) around 25 minutes.

The stuff about Tolkien is interesting too, but I could see some people being more interested in the Perl 6 stuff.
Too early to say. We really won't know for another month at least.
Hi Sam. If you have a startup that is relatively easy to launch with traction and the one which is hard to launch and without traction, which one will you choose? And how important is to have users?
I work in a similar environment where the product is brilliant but the environment is miserable and toxic. It makes me wonder if that's the kind of culture that is actually required to drive innovation. I hate to think that way, but sociopaths really seem to get stuff done.
Cooking with Glass: How Pyrex Transformed Every Kitchen into a Home-Ec Lab
Show HN: Medium (JS channels library)
:)

Quote feeds don't work that simply. you still have the following issues:

1) Your quotes are slowed down as the gateway is spammed so legitimate quotes are delayed to you as well as everyone else. So you are still blind as to where the market is just like everyone else.

2) The quote feed doesn't just say, "hey a new order was added and guess what, its yours!!"

You still need to parse the entire message to determine if the order matched one you sent, and even then it won't say its yours, it could be someone else putting in the same 100 share order at the NBBO. I'll admit this can be helped if you have your own number at the exchange to identify the order sender, but then this only applies to exchanges that release that information and even then you still need to parse the order to find out if its yours, so you're basically back to square one.

Now you might say, well then I'll just submit orders far away from the market so that I can more easily identify them as my own, but by doing so you've already outed your self as a quote stuffer and its game over.

It's one thing to rapidly CFO your orders to keep up with the NBBO and changes on other markets, its another to rapidly CFO orders out in the weeds. The latter will get your direct access yanked if abused.

So ignoring your own quote spamming is almost impossible as you still need to assume every order might not be your own.

FPGA's don't help at all here, except to make the parsing faster but they do that regardless of if someone is quote stuffing or not.
Did you miss this in the article?

> In addition, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a “back door” in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed any government access to our servers. And we never will.

As for Dropbox, is Condoleezza Rice still on their board? http://www.drop-dropbox.com
Hey, CEO of MotionLead here (YC W14), feel free to reach at arthur -at- motionlead.com, I'm currently in Paris.
A lot closer to none than 10,000...
No, this is: "but then I don't know what to advocate for"

Everybody "knows" that things should be changed, but nobody knows how and to what.
It depends on the market, however I think that scarcity will end up being manufactured. Just look at the diamond market -- one or two companies effectively monopolised the entire market and rose the price and value of their product through creating artificial scarcity. I don't like the idea of this (I hold the idea of Iain M. Banks' The Culture[1] as the ideal civilization), but I think that it is required for capitalism to remain a viable system post-scarcity.

I suppose one other way to do this (That would hopefully be outlawed) is the creation of a virus that wipe out all the natural sources of a product (I'm thinking mainly of foodstuffs here), leaving a single company the owner of the plant/genome/whatever. The idea is explored in one of Zach's comics: [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

[2]: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2834
It is known that Elon Musk has characteristics of Aspergers Syndrome. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/04/0...
> The compiler especially is as basic as it gets

Which is fantastic. Nobody likes the bazillion options GCC has.
I don't like the announcement and I hate how they've done it. Under the signature on the blog announcement, they've added 13 paragraphs in the HTML source to bury the comments off the page. On OSX Safari and Firefox, I see no way to add new comments. Way to start as a new dawn. I wish I hadn't renewed recently.
I think the OP meant the use of ML to predict and individual committing a crime, and jailing/arresting them based on that.
Indian housemaid's arm cut off by Saudi employer, woman's sister says
> Decreased spreads; trading is much cheaper now than it was before HFT.

By how much? And is HFT the cause or is it merely correlated?
1)I made a comment elsewhere that I felt that YC (and you in particular) had it's hands in to many pots and appeared to be doing to many things. With all of the things that you are doing (yc research just added for example) how do you feel that you will be able to keep up the high quality base purpose of YC?

2) You just gave 10m to fund YC Research. Was that because no other partners wanted to get involved in the project and in order to get their agreement (and show how important you felt it was) you decided to put your own money where your mouth was? It just seemed odd to me that it is a YC project yet you put your personal money in it (is the reason for the question).
Sounds interesting. Link?
It's true. They have a little shell script that you run once and it adds their plugin to all the installed Chromes, Chromiums, and Firefoxes on your machine.
Hi sama,

First of all, thanks for the 10 million dollar donation for YC research. That's an amazing gesture, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the scientific research model get completely disrupted - it's in a terrible state and it needs a big shove.

- Given your donation, what are your thoughts on philanthropy?

- Most of your advice is for founders, however, what should an employee look in an early stage start up when deciding whether to join? Obviously, the decision is much easier if the company has started growing exponentially, but before that?
The ability to wiretap was a side effect of the POTS. But a side effect doesn't need to be a required feature of future technology. There's a good argument to be made that there's more rights in our constitution for protected and private speech by individuals than there are for the government to have access to it.
Actually UNIX kind of plays the role of C runtime, but when the time for standardizing C came, they could only make into ANSI C features that were common across multiple hardware and OSes back in the late 80's.

So what was left out of ANSI C, is what became POSIX. Making any OS with ANSI C + POSIX compliant compatible with the original UNIX systems.

But unlike other programming languages, on C's case the evolution in terms of standard libraries stopped there.
Have you seen any info on where to get started with the Lua kernel scripting? This sounds like too much fun!
Fine, physics in general, then? I mean he's still my generation's (20-30-somethings) Einstein, great thinker, but Einstein had a lot of bad ideas about socialism and governance too.
If you spend much time online and do not have a job involving a lot of travel, it would get logistically challenging pretty darn fast to not ever visit the same coffee shop twice. Furthermore, jumping through hoops to make sure to avoid going the same place twice is, itself, weird behavior that some people might notice and wonder about. Most people frequent the same local places because it is convenient, even if they do not become "regulars."

I agree that a prepaid data card and mobile hotspot is a much better plan.
Personally I'd want to take my family with me if at possible. One of the reasons we upped the amount of money we give companies was to help make this possible.
Individual patents are a corner case that's hardly worth sneezing about. They typically come up in these sorts of conversations in the same way that, say, Monsanto will cry about protecting small farmers while proposing rule changes that let it get away with whole new classes of abuse...
Many people suggest showing drafts of YC applications to founders of YC companies. The whole point of the exercise is to help founders pass the YC filtering mechanism. I feel like it's a waste of everybody's time.

Instead, I am asking YC founders to do quick office hours with us and refer to YC if they liked what they saw. (which I have no control of).

Am I doing the wrong thing and going to get rejected for not polishing the application enough?
You as a network are starting putting hands into matters that are under control or direct influence of politics, very big corporations, state-driven industries and even geopolitics: AI, energy, medicine, automation, food, space and so on. It is not dropbox anymore. In 20-30 years, your boost may lead to the disruption of human society as it is organised now.
If you can't determine that this word problem is a Pythagorean qaudratic, then you might ought not to be sitting a "Higher Maths" exam.
What are best self-hosted password managers right now? The only one I know of is KeePass2

Something I can serve from a VPS that works on most platforms.
Post scarcity isn't much of a boon to society if it is constrained in the hands of the few. Especially if power is derived from scarcity.
Y Combinator has a record of supporting innovative ideas which come from the relative margins of the tech community, beginning with its invention of the startup accelerator as a concept.

- Do you feel that Y Combinator's increasing visibility has helped your mission to attract a wide range of applicants beyond established tech industry insiders?

- How do you manage the risk that your corresponding increase in competitiveness could lower the chances of acceptance for less polished but still innovative applications from people with fewer industry connections?
Surely there is some improvement to be made by automatically parallelizing map and filter functions, and for side-effect free languages, automatically parallelizing functions that do not share state? Maybe this is more on the compiler side than the hardware side, but wouldn't this potentially provide a significant speedup if you have a lot of cores to take advantage of? A speedup that you can't get from procedural programming languages?
Self-taught to start, then I took an amazing CS course from Georgeann Kepchar in high school who is one of my personal heroes.

I guess I'd recommend the same path--start studying yourself, and find a great teacher at some point.
I wonder if anyone makes a phone with LEDs for all hardware functions, like some laptops have LEDs which light up whenever anything accesses the built-in webcam?
While I'm not happy that long-read pieces like this go uncommented, I'm glad I can at least find these here on HN where the signal-to-noise ratio is sufficiently high.
Dashlane treats passwords shared with you as second-class - you can't access shared passwords in their web app. So I would avoid Dashlane if you're seeking a solution for your team.
Hi Sam,

I'm not on the shortlist of anyone for "smartest people in the field", but I have a keen interest & passion for research. I suspect there are many people like me. Do you anticipate that YCR will have a track for people like me to participate, or will it be aiming for the creme de la creme as a rule?
Reading all the creepy anecdotes in the thread ...

Possibility 1 :
Facebook is snooping on your conversations.

Possibility 2:
Their machine learning algorithms are getting creepily good at predicting your wants and needs.

Both are scary.
I work a lot. But I love what I do.
That's what I intended to ask, my question wasn't clear. Is there a way someone could contribute to the YC community as an outsider? Ideas welcome.
Congratulations to the NetBSD team!

The new blacklistd sounds interesting, are the plans to make it available on other operating system as well?

Is anyone using NetBSD on a "Orange Pi" board (AllWinner A20, it's mentioned in the release notes so I guess it will work)?
What about the "Orange Pi Plus" (AllWinner H3)?
These boards offer a lot of performance for the buck.
Zigging from clem's zag, let me put this another way. There absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt will be major political issues that arise from off-planet habitation.

But, to be honest, not particularly all that more major than any number of issues that arise on Earth all the time, and we generally muddle through them. It'll be a long time before anyone would have any reason to start a shooting war over an off-planet resource.

And science fiction has been predicting the near inevitability that eventually the off-planet colony will demand independence anyhow, a position I see no reason to modify or disagree with, personally. The structural forces in favor of that outcome are just overwhelming.
As the economists say, 'human wants are unlimited'. If one thing isn't scarce, something else will be.
I'm inclined to agree, but I have two questions regarding that:

1. Aren't government positions notoriously underpaid compared to their private-sector counterparts?
2. Doesn't that mean that "government software" would end up being written by below-average developers and be significantly worse than private-sector software?

Not that #2 isn't possible/likely/a fact under the current system depending on who you speak to.
YC used to be in Boston for half of the year:

http://old.ycombinator.com/ycca.html
AdBlockX, an all-new content blocker
Leaving this here: https://twitter.com/DatLoneWolfLife
probably the right choice (unless you are a netbsd or pkgsrc contributor).
Hi Sam,

I have a number of ideas for companies which I would like to explore, but I am constantly hamstrung by the fact that I don't have the technical skills required. I wouldn't go so far as to say I am non-technical (I'm a bioengineer transitioning into data science) but I certainly am not a developer per say. Do you have any advice on how to find potential technical co-founders?
"It happened"? What is "it"? (credit to parent for being unhelpfully ambiguous as well)
Any book recommendations for really early stage entrepreneurs? (The best thing to do is execute, but a book or 2 will never hurt).
Hi Sam,

Thanks for doing this.

1. What do you consider your best professional accomplishment?

2. Have you ever visited Israel?
Can Cinder, the World's Most Precise Griddle, Replace Sous-Vide?
Which begs the question - how does one avoid living an expensive lifestyle in the bay/SF?
Sadly yes. That's why I'm not suggesting you ask your older relatives to do it. If you have to ask, it's too late. My point is that you should prepare yourself mentally for doing it later in life and be cool with it.
its been a while since I did this math, but isn't it just about taking a derivative and finding the relative minimum/maximum points of the function by where the derivative = 0? (I was on the engineering side of CS, so haven't touched calculus since my undergrad days).
Not only do they not have a Linux client, but their web client is super limited - it won't give you the passwords that have been shared with you, for example, and you can't register an account through it (on Linux I literally had to install the iOS app on my iPhone to create an account, have my colleague add my account to the team, and then once I could finally log in to the web app, even though it showed me on my team, it wouldn't give me any team passwords).
The article title doesn't seem as deceptive as this post title:

> Partial Victory: Obama Encryption Policy Rejects Laws Mandating Backdoors, But Leaves the Door Open for Informal Deals

Compared to:

> Obama Encryption Policy Rejects Laws Mandating Backdoors

It also doesn't sound like a full on rejection, as new information might cause him to change his stance:

> “will not —for now—call for legislation requiring companies to decode messages for law enforcement.”
I am not sure but as a long time delphi developer I'll be watching carefully.
I really lucked out big-time on the parent lottery.

My parents were and are incredibly supportive of anything I was interested in. But they were never "hovering". That's a great combination.
Higher level languages (and libraries) seem to be defining the portable interfaces for a lot of what software needs to do now, which helps but essentially seems to punt the problem at the operating system level.

I guess portable interfaces may just end up needing to be defined over non-portable interfaces, and C may end up not being practical for anything that needs to be portable.

Higher level languages aren't bad, and it would probably be a good thing if a language like Rust became the de-facto for low-level. My feeling is that C is still the simplest to compile though, which I think is an advantage.
Yeah! My thoughts exactly - and if they did representative scaling into the visual light spectrum based on the range you decided.

Anyone got an API for this?
Indeed. In 1979 I was part of a small group of students working with Professor Irene Greif on designing a public key authentication system (very hard, as I understand it it took until 1985 to get it right), and she was part of the LCS group that used CLU. Coming from a Structured Programming background, it indeed occupied a nice space there (although LISP was more fun).
Yeah, to me this just looks like a case of false positive pattern recognition, given the relatively tiny number of conspiracy-theory-style complaints about it.

All you need is some more or less benign targeted advertising by local exterminators (for example, "age 22+", "females and married couples", "single-family dwelling", and a zip code the exterminator knows have had lots of bug complaints) and somebody happening to glance at their phone after being spooked by bugs.

(You may be creeped out by Facebook knowing what type of dwelling you live in, but that's a separate issue.)
I hope I'm not the only one who thought the headline was someone trying to be hip while saying 18 year old female. (Dr Evil: I'm hip, I'm cool. I'm with it!)
So the solution to #2 is to be "one of the good ones"? To not talk about important facets of yourself to avoid offending petty people? Fuck that.
Well, they didn’t care about expansion.

But you have to know: My region had a dozen of these apps, all competing with each other.

So, the only reason why people used uber was that sometimes it was cheaper. But that only because they ignored the laws.

German Taxi market is a seriously free market, and uber can’t compete fairly.
Seems like it's mostly a philosophical difference. Two directions to the same goal.

http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-...
When incremental gains are no longer worthwhile, institutions will no longer invest in the infrastructure. As long as the profit gained > costs, they will invest in infrastructure, to the benefit of the tech industry.

And you're right, we don't need market makers trading as fast or as frequently as they do, but they see an opportunity, so they go for it, and we benefit anyway.

I'd personally be happy with 10 second execution, but if I can get 1/2 second execution, why would I complain?
> a quantum effect that's visible in very large systems

Well, in a certain sense, chemistry and solid state, and the very existence of atoms are also macroscopically-visible quantum phenomena.

You do a science class with kids in school and show them static electricity, little pieces of paper dancing in an electric field - that's quantum. That's electric fields interacting, which is an exchange of virtual photons, which is a quantum phenomenon.

We really are jut waves on the surface of an ocean of quantum phenomena.
I was the one who wrote that question to Stephen Hawking. Now that it's been brought up here, perhaps it would be nice to ask the question here.

How does HN feel about technological unemployment?
From 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979705.