skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But my question: where is the evidence that tech companies are not able to be profitable with their high payroll costs?

You could look at the growing number of layoffs at post-seed stage companies[1].

Or you could look at startups that voluntarily publish financial information. Take, for example, this one[2], which, as of June, was spending $525,000/month on payroll (equating to an all-in cost of $146,000/year per employee) when it had less than $300,000 of monthly bookings revenue.

A lot (perhaps the majority) of venture-backed Bay Area startups are entirely dependent on investor money to sustain their workforces at their current sizes. Even some of the tech companies in the area that have gone public aren't profitable. FireEye and Marketo are two that come to mind.

Everybody has been trading profitability for growth, and that's a game most will eventually lose.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517445

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10049808
Interesting that Western Sahara isn't mentioned. It actually isn't a country, but it looks like one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara
That same course is now being offered on Kadenze: https://www.kadenze.com/courses/introduction-to-programming-...
Almost certainly not, since the stew is simmering frequently.

Back when I worked from home, I kept a pot of stew going for months. It was pretty nice: depending on the ingredients I added, I could get a French, an English, a German, a Mexican or an Indian flavour, and when I wanted to be lazy I could just let it go down a bit further than usual.
It's interesting that most reactions here are either a)"this is nothing compared to country x" or b)this is an example of extremely negative hardship.

I thought the direct lessons he laid out were excellent, about being ruthlessly honest on what you truly need to be happy, and the freedom that you get from the resulting wealth when combining that with a SF tech salary.

It is a reasoning from first principles on living conditions that not enough people do imo. I think we tend to subconsciously accept the default of more space/stuff=better without making a direct choice on what is the specific right amount for ourselves. Coming to a definition of what "enough" is for ourselves keeps the goalposts from moving as income rises.

Also the point about gaining empathy for the poor based on experiencing a lower margin for error and high cost when things went wrong in this lifestyle was another good observation.
No. That's not what "specialised service" means.
If someone could use your public SSH from say Github and send you a private message that would be great. From my understanding that is not possible. You need to generate and exchange PGP keys before, a major UX issue. Allow SSH public keys to be used and we'll be a lot closer to fixing the secure email issue.
What a non-sense.

We live in the information era, information nowadays is the ultimate power. Democracy depends on the balance of power between the people and the government. If the government has all the data, it has all the power.
Wow. That is insane. Hopefully his employees find a better place and he is never given a position of power again. How the hell does someone get away with not only doing this but advertising it?
Beer, wine and tobacco, at least, aren't necessarily sterilised before consumption. Source: I brew, make wine and smoke tobacco:-)
But they can, it's just not PGP.
Yes, they often are, but it's for a promise of money that would make even a Googler feel like a pauper. There's also less chance of the company disappearing out from under you, and there's a mostly-known end point. It's a very different risk/reward scenario, in which "paying dues" for a few years might make a lot more sense.
I've worked at startups doing 80 hours a week, and currently keep myself strictly under 50 and I really haven't seen much of a difference in the amount of code I am able to ship.

Something about the feeling of having all the time in the world made me less focused I guess. When I have a deadline, and know that I won't be working through the weekend, I tend to still get it done on time.

Also, in my experience. The teams that work 40-50 hours/week seem to be more stable and of a higher caliber than the 70-80 hours per week crowd, but that's just from the 3-4 teams I've been a part of. I wouldn't say it's anything conclusive.
Here's a challenge to the entrepreneurs. Make your employees work 4h/6h per day.

Reduce distractions, reduce meetings, make communication asynchronous, optimise tasks.

Some people would be happier to work from 1pm to 6pm. Some others from 6am to Noon. Emails (or preferably something smarter) can be dealt with at other times

Make decisions depend on the least amount of people possible.
They're getting payed accordingly. These engineers? Probably not:

> driven by passion above all else
I believe end to end is simpler when you control all the ends and can tweak all the software, like they do. There's also an advantage of having very fast processors already provided.
Bypassing DRM has been criminal for decades now, as a result of the WIPO Copyright Treaty and TRIPS.
> While the work can be challenging, the rewards are endless.

The rewards are entirely endful for the people actually doing the work. What a tool.
I live in Austin and have seen many of my coworkers and friends leave for the bay area. Besides interesting work I think there are more opportunities for career growth.

I am in security (but it's similar in many specialties) and while there are very good companies in Austin if I want to to rise become a security architect or director of information security I have to go to the tech headquarters. Companies like Google and facebook may have regional offices but the core innovative security/ai/pl work and executive decision making is being done in the home campuses.

That being said, I would never leave Austin for the SF bay unless it involved a $350k+ salary.
> Tobacco has a healthful reputation? Where?

Nothing serves life and soundness of body so well, nor is so necessary as the smoke of the royal plant, tobacco. —Dr. Cornelius Bontekoe, 1685

Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco. —John Boynton Priestley

[Tobacco] is the passion of honest men and he who lives without tobacco is not worthy of living. —Moliere
The EU has set the minimum standard VAT rate as 15%.
For me it is not about the number of hours. You can be burnt working 10am to 5pm at a corporation and you can be extremely happy working on your own thing and doubling the hours. Ben Horowitz says that the difference between working for a good company and the rest relies on how you feel when you wake up in the morning. In a good company, you know that if you put good work, it is going to make a difference for you, for the company and hopefully for society in general. As long as there is a shared destiny (equity is split reasonably) and people believe in the mission, the work should be fulfilling.
FWIW, I have one of those business minors, and I never got that feeling in them. But I went to a school that's fairly left-wing in general, even in the business department.
Keeping everyone on mission is incredibly valuable, but there is a finite amount of work you can and should extract from your employees.

Employers have a disproportionate amount of influence over the lives of the people under their employ. This should carry with it a sense of duty, or responsibility, to the well-being of their fellow human.
Robot Toddler Learns to Stand by “Imagining” How to Do It
Depends on the country.

In countries that have electricity coming from fossil fuels, it's inherently less efficient. In countries like Norway where everything mostly comes from hydro power, this is completely different.
The idea of including a link to your public key and a link the wiki on PGP is great! I'm going to do this as well. Would you mind showing me how you link to the above mentioned?
Gratisproben Bestellen
I do like lassi, from time to time (as long as it is without "black salt," which I consider an acquired taste that I probably won't acquire anymore) but I mostly drink ayran.

It is best prepared with just a couple of tablespoons of yoghurt (3-4) in a liter-sized bottle of water, with a teaspoon of (ordinary, white) salt added to it. Shake well, enjoy :-)
23andMe's genotyping chip is based on the Illumina Infinium beadarray technology. ( http://www.illumina.com/technology/beadarray-technology/infi... )

There is a nice animation of the technology on Illumina's website. It's a single base extension assay where you have hybridization of a probe, then add a labeled nucleotide where the SNP is that you are studying. For a A/T SNP, if you basepair and add an 'A' you get a green signal, if you add a 'T' you get a red signal. If you end up with a mix of green/red, you have a heterozygous variant.

Illumina has a tech note on the call rate and error rate here: http://www.illumina.com/Documents/products/technotes/technot...
At a minor allele frequency of 0.5% their minor allele homozygous error rate was 0.1%.

The nice thing about this technology is that the more data you have, the better your calls get, and 23andMe has real world data on over 1 million customers. (Illumina tech note used data from 2,000 genotyped samples) I think 23andMe has enough data to know which of the SNPs on their genotyping chip are accurate, but they don't exactly open up their data for public inspection.

If you are a 23andMe customer you can see the improvements to the raw data they have made over the years here: ( https://www.23andme.com/you/download/revisions/ ) If you can't see it, it says things like: "July 28th, 2014. Analysis of our data has allowed us to improve the interpretation of over 10,000 SNPs genome-wide on the V4 chip." When they get more data, they are improving their calls.

Finally, the FDA document about 23andMe's approved Bloom Syndrome carrier test says that "all homozygous variant genotype samples receive a 'no-call' result, since the calling software was designed not to detect homozygous variant genotypes." It sounds to me like they designed the software to ignore and throw out homozygous data.
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/reviews/DEN140044.pd...
Neue Gratisproben
When expressing mathematics, you want to focus on the formulae and underlying principles, not styling and layout. TeX provides a design spec inherently to standardize and provide consistent published mathematical content.

HTML abstracts layout less, and TeX gives you more mathematical creative expression.

I personally like using HTML5 as a rendering engine, and TeX as the "design" spec. I built LaTeX2HTML5.com a while back for this purpose, so I could build all of diagrams and mathematics in TeX, but publish to both HTML5 and paper.
Show HN: The new and improved NubiDo (now also mobile web friendly)
Go-itergen, code generation tool to generate common functions for iterables
Exactly the sort of self-aggrandizing posts we need around here.
Relevant blog from Aaron Swartz (2010): http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/morebooks
Ten years ago some eye specialist wanted to operate on my cataract. Apparently there could be complications but according to him "it would be worth the risk". Sounded like a fun project for him. I passed. I'm pretty much used to my crappy vision and I figured I'd wait ten years to see what happens with technology in this field and then suddenly, BOOM, eye drops! Even right now I wouldn't do an operation unless there was a 100% guaranteed no side effects (with the surgeon signing the guarantee with his own blood). Let's wait another five years and see where these eye-drops end up.

It's definitely just normal "floaters" in my left eye.
The answer is "cocaine", isn't it?
Also Facebook (which has an official onion site to help if your internet connection is suspect) has GPG as a standard part of all user profiles. This would be a much more normal person directory than GitHub or MIT ( yes someone on HN suggested MIT as a mainstream PGP directory)
Science is bad for you.
Anyone on HN know what Signal does for envelope encryption?
AFAICT it's the only crypto app that's OSS and still cares about usability.
Personal opinion tbh. That ass of the car just doesn't look like a BMW ass to me.
We change it when it's sensational or not descriptive.
Translation for those who aren't used to the distorted language of arrogant assholes:

> "...it’s not about work-life balance. Rather, it’s about optimizing work-life imbalance"

Translation: If I use the word "optimizing" in this sentence, the crushing work load I'm about to give you will seem like a rational choice rather than bare exploitation.

> "Long nights and weekends spent away from families are the norm in the startup world. We often chuckle at glamorized notions of the startup lifestyle: table tennis games, fully stocked kitchens and generous stock options."

Translation: We know what it's really like to work in a startup - having families and fair pay are luxuries we know don't really exist. Anyone who expects otherwise is lazy and doesn't fit with our "culture".

> "We work long hours, we are not paid much, and even after raising over $10-million within our first year of operations, we still have a mountain to climb in our efforts to expand this company."

Translation: While you might not be paid much, I hold a majority stake in the company and will be handsomely rewarded for your hard work when the company gets bought. And just because we raised $10 million doesn't mean any of you are getting a raise.

> "We have also ensured that each employee has an unyielding belief in the company’s mission. If anyone in the office doesn’t believe they’re a part of something incredibly meaningful that will truly reinvent banking, they’ll likely struggle to relate to their co-workers and eventually “burn out.”

Translation: I mean... they're going to burn out anyway after working 80 hours every week, but forced belief in the "mission" of the company allows us to squeeze a couple more months of hard work out of them before they finally quit, feeling guilty and ashamed of their perceived failure.

> "Our husbands and wives help pick up the slack on our long days, and our kids put a smile on our faces after stressful meetings. Many of our team members have young families, and we do our best to respect their needs through flexible hours and by encouraging the ability to work from home when needed."

Translation: I mean, I'm not a monster - if someone wants to spend a portion of their 14 hour work day at home, using their own computer and resources, of course we'll accommodate them. Far be it from me to prevent my employees from bringing all the stress of their work lives into their homes.

> "While the work can be challenging, the rewards are endless."

Translation: The rewards for me, that is. For you, the rewards are very much finite.

> "Having said that, it takes a special kind of personality to seek out (and succeed in) such an uncertain and risky environment. At the end of the day, I guess you still need to be a little nuts to succeed in a startup."

Translation: Young, well-off techies without families or hobbies who can afford to live on breadcrumbs and are healthy enough to keep our insurance costs minimal to the front of the line.
My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site
Also non-Apple hardware in the photos on their site.
It lasted less than 2 days when I had a plan like that. Only could change to 100gb since that's all was offered. Now I still go over constantly without trying. The ISP gets congested massively on Friday, Saturday & Sunday even with these limits.
"just the ability needed to put together a shell pipeline to get a job done, or a twenty-line script to automate some tedious task. Imagine how much that would change everyday life."

Well unfortunately like learning a foreign language if you don't constantly use those skills they are near worthless. Especially as you get older. And in one way it's quite a bit different than learning a foreign language. There is a great deal of latitude to make mistakes in, say, Spanish. If you don't have it even slightly correct people can still piece together what you are saying. With programming as everyone knows it's got to be near 100% accurate in syntax or it's not going to run and/or give correct results. I agree that being able to do things in the shell is helpful if you are somewhat regularly doing that type of work. I question how useful it is if someone learns that in high school or college and then needs to apply it to do a task years down the road.

Edit: In other words it's not like learning how to ride a bike or play tennis.
> Make decisions depend on the least amount of people possible.

I would suggest an alternative: make decisions depend on the right people, regardless of their number, and make the necessary information easily available and communication channels not require being face-to-face in all cases, but only the ones where it makes sense. (Which is not to embrace the techno-fetishistic idea that asynchronous communication is the be-all and end-all, but to use it appropriately. Meetings are not an inherent negative.)
Well you can rent them from Hertz!

But also - there is already a faraday company which makes electric bikes in San Francisco.
It's a Canadian company. Gun laws make that much less likely.
Am I correct in understanding that all this startup does is personal loans?

That's it?

That's going to "change the face of an entire industry"? I'm quite certain the bankers at your local Wells Fargo/Citi/Chase branch work 9-5 and underwrite personal loans all day long without working 80 hours a week. What on earth could these guys be working on that requires such an absurd work schedule?

I've done the 12 hour days as an early employee of a startup (and one significantly more interesting than this). I will never do it again. The math just doesn't make sense—I make substantially more money working at a big tech company and going home at 5 every day than I likely ever would at a startup. Why should I give up my personal life and make less money?
Well sure, if you don't have this 1Mbit/sec usage cap then Comcast's instantaneous line speed is pretty great.

Hopefully your competitive market continues.
Does he work 80 hours a week?!
I am truly sorry for anyone that is working 80 hours (with admittedly low pay) and has been convinced it's worth it because of how they're changing some industry. The industry will wait, your family won't.
"And yet, clearly, plenty of people do choose to live in San Francisco."

Well, he didn't choose to live in San Francisco for long. By the end of his four years there, he decamped to Seattle, which seems to be the natural progression these days: live in SF and close a few deals in a tiny space, then move to Seattle into a slightly larger place and be amazed at all of the room you have.
Let's see how the employees feel about sacrificing all that time when the founder has a rich exit, and the employees get crap while he retires in luxury.
The 500-Page Proof That Only One Mathematician Can Understand
Worked for me on an iPhone 6s, iOS 9.0.x. Same issue with auto-rotate, when safari changed orientations, the shadow orientation became out of sync.
I realize this is niche within niche, but having just eaten California abalone last night I wondered if it was affected as well.

The answer seems to be no, that since abalone graze on mature seaweed, they do not have elevated levels of the domoic acid produced by pseudo-nitzschia: http://blog.michaelscateringsb.com/cooking_on_the_american_r...

I'm not quite sure how to square this with reports of massive die-offs of abalone in caused by algal blooms in previous years:
http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=10897

It's a different toxin, but why would they accumulate one toxin and not the other? Or maybe they are just more susceptible one?

Abalone are mighty tasty snails, by the way. We did these coated with flour and black pepper, dipped in egg, dredged in panko, then fried in olive oil.
When you have a culture of statism this is what you get. You elect governments that want to and do micromanage your lives.

Don't blame it on the politicians. You guys elected these people. They're just following the ideology of their politics.
1480 light years away...it's just too far for practical travel on any sort of scale, and I assume scale would be required to "do something" to us beyond taking a glance - and even that seems far-fetched.
I wonder if something similar would be useful for mapping between application models and web services for those models. They're probably different enough that the most useful part would be the idea of modeling the types involved in the operations, but not much else.
Population density can be quite meaningless when talking about floor space to live in.

A city that has a height restriction of half of the other city can have exactly the same floor space to live in per person while ostensibly being half as population dense. And height is just one of many factors. Large bodies of water, parks, large open squares etc... they all can change density figures a lot without any change to the actual space per person in an actual house.

Paris certainly has tiny homes, I've been in more than a few, and they've felt smaller than Amsterdam (where I live) generally. But it's nowhere near the discrepancy that the density figures suggest (e.g. 21k vs 4k, but floor space per person is nowhere near 5x as big in Amsterdam, probably more like 25% or something). There are all kinds of reasons for this, one is that Amsterdam hasn't got nearly as many tall buildings as Paris does, and that Amsterdam's density is understated due to quite significant bodies of water (two rivers splitting the city vertically and horizontally), parks (Amsterdamse Bos is 3x Central Park), lakes etc etc, where nobody lives but that is part of the density calculation, making the actual places people do live denser than they appear in these numbers.
I suspect that due to the well known creative accounting in Hollywood, Avatar returned significantly more than 11x. Top line costs are inflated.
We Know What You're Doing
Cool! Thanks for the link ...

It's a genuinely interesting question (at least to me) what the "next Google" is going to look like. Is there space to build a search engine that surpasses Google (given how fast and powerful Google already is) ?

Not sure if I am just imagining things , but it seems like Google has slowed down a little in recent years. When I type terms in the search bar nowadays (using a Mac laptop) and click the search button, it seems like there is a short (but barely perceptible) pause before the result is displayed. And Gmail seems to have slowed down quite abit too --- is it because Gmail is slow or I have a huge inbox? I seem to recall a time when Google was first launched, everything you did on it was virtually instantaneous. (Or am i just speculating and imagining things after reading this essay?)

Maybe the "next Google" won't be a search engine at all, but some kind of quantum computer skynet system that basically connects everyone on the planet instantaneously through thought processes or a futuristic 3d holographic hardware laptop that displays your screen and keyboard as floating 3d holograms that appear in front of your face , which you can manipulate with your fingers ..

THAT would be really cool lol !
Neither of those are widespread in any population. Quite the opposite, they flare up and then vanish.
> That is stupid. If your salary won't cover decent living then why bother?

I think you fail to see that he'd definitely describe his living over the past few years as 'decent', and likely even much more than just decent.
And yet we get hordes of collectivists that infest HN that say we should try it again...."but it'll be different this time"