skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The one for Square is off just 20% from the private round vs. Dec. 31st close. It hasn't really moved that much. Way too soon to assume it's under pressure. Most of the valuations gains were made in the years leading up to the IPO, as companies are going public later and later. That could explain why some of the post-IPO gains seem stunted.
that is exactly my thought as well.

when I say face value, its like knowing that to throw a punch you should have the thumb curled outside your fist and not in because you risk breaking it on impact, though I have never tested it myself.

I find as you said, the more experience you have the "easier to absorb...unpracticed knowledge."
Spend the 30 seconds required to read the ancestor comment explaining what it has enabled WRT prompt toolkit.
It seems ridiculously simple to me. Let's define wealth equality as 100 people all with 100,000 dollars a piece. Rather than having a small group of people either in a board room on the top floor of 85 Broad St. or a small group of communists allocate resources, let everybody use their money as a vote to decide how to allocate resources. People need to eat so some money will be spent on food. Most people will need transportation so money will spent on cars and trucks. In order to prevent running out of money people will invest some of it. Several people will purchase farm equipment and start growing food, individual small businesses. Others will create an organization and pool their money together to build a factory to make cars because without cooperation none have enough to cover the startup cost. People are rather stupid so there will be losers and some are smart so there will be winners when it comes to return on investment. There needs to be inequality, it's natural. Nobody needs to starve but people who are better at deciding how to allocate resources should be given more even if they decide to invest in a bigger house and a boat. This works until that small group of people in the board room at the top of the building at 85 Broad St. decide to allocate all the resources to build more houses than everybody else needs and bigger houses than they have resources to maintain. They are able to do that because they consolidated all the voting power of money into their control once a threshold is passed.

Keep the inequality. Some people will make better decisions and then others. The people who make better decisions for example investing the money into research should be rewarded with money and the ability to decide how to best further allocate it including buying a bigger house for themselves or hire a house cleaner because they are busy innovating. There are no problems with that. The problem happens when they become too powerful. The way to prevent that is a progressive tax. In this case, make it very hard but not impossible to get above controlling 1,000,000. No one person and no small group of people are better at making decisions than a large group of people. That is what I mean by wealth equality is democratic. Perhaps, it is better to say there needs to be a wealth equilibrium rather than wealth equality.
That would be great, see https://github.com/botwiki/botwiki.org/issues/35

Also, I only saw the title, not realizing the OP only asked about projects started in December O:-)
As someone who was a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s both A Colder War and Missile Gap appeal to my morbid fear of, and powerful fascination with, all things nuclear warish :-)
Mark Zuckerberg's 2016 personal challenge
Gnome Tali and Random Numbers
I can't help but feel like this is the inevitable conclusion for a society that's obsessed with working and financial success. It could be an interesting premise to explore.

When a number of employers and the government don't value ensuring a healthy work/life balance, or even employee's health, how do you keep that same behavior out of the minds of people running school systems and classrooms? How do you ensure you create a school environment where children and adolescents don't experience burn out when the working world they are prepped for embraces and/or encourages it?

It seems to me that the more we ask employees to work long hours or in crunch mode, the more we're asking our children to do the same... just indirectly.
Of course one of the interesting things about ships is that they spew their particulates over the ocean where rains knock them out of the air and into the sea.

But the wierd thing is that in terms of cargo tons carried, the larger ships pollute less only because the marginal cost of fuel of carrying another container is lower than the marginal cost of adding another ship.

So the crappy polluting ships are having an unknown effect on the oceans but having less and less of an effect as more and more cargo is carried by fewer and fewer ships.
Early work on attention models is done by Itti, Koch, and Niebur. [1,2]. It's called "saliency" and I think Denny would consider this more along the lines of what the concept of "attention" should be (considering his own words/reservations in using the term). Koch is currently studying neural correlates, Itti is still working on this topic though. Niebur is into the neuroscience part of it (nematode expert).

There is a lot of neuroscientific work on attention, really a lot! Overt and covert attention. Microsaccades, very small eye movements, with already a bunch of possible functional roles. Almost everything we know about the brains of little kids is by studying where they look at and where they pay attention to.

Structure-wise attention models can be quite simple. The structure that is often seen is a WTA (winner-take-all) network with subsequent serial inhibition. The first winner is inhibited, so the next winner can come on stage. This is the same system as Baars has in his global workspace theory [3]. It is also the same method as in mundane RANSAC models [4]. That's a workhorse of computer vision in which a consensus/voting model can be used to have data points voting for higher-level structures. When one structure is detected, votes for it are removed, and the next most salient structure can be voted for.

[1] http://ilab.usc.edu/bu/

[2] http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~yazdan/pdf/Itti_etal98pami.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Workspace_Theory

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANSAC
Driverless cars are colliding with the creepy Trolley Problem
My guess is that Pinterest will have the most to prove in 2016 among the Unicorns. By far the biggest social network in terms of valuation with the least proven source of revenue.
Look at the list of features that pymux has that tmux doesn't.
> the wealthiest among us will enjoy disproportionate access to the latest technology, education, healthcare, influence etc

What exactly do you intend to do to change that? If you start everyone at a baseline level, some of them are going to be smarter, stronger, savvier or whatever, and will be more successful, and thus wealthier, and thus have greater access to whatever benefits that wealth can buy. Even if you zero everyone out each generation, genes matter.

Unless you are artificially suppressing people from rising above mediocrity, you will have some that do better than others.
Ad hominem is quite explicitly attacking the person who made the argument, and not the argument itself.

I believe the fallacy you're looking for is 'fallacy of relative privation', but even then, we're still not there. Fundamentally, the issue is this:

The fear is that the microphone could be used as a listening device. From the current factual information we have available, we know, at this time, that:

1) Law enforcement agencies can and do use cell phones as listening devices, both in intercepting calls and remotely enabling the microphone.

2) It is not possible to see all traffic that is flowing through your cell phone in many cases (iPhones, non-rooted Android phones, etc)

3) It is possible to see all traffic that is flowing through your home network. If it is encrypted you might not be able to determine the specific contents, but you still have the technical possibility to see when communication occurs

4) We do not currently see any evidence that the Echo performs any sort of recording or transmission of voice data outside of when the 'wake word' is used.

You'll notice nowhere did I say these fears were completely unfounded - just that there is no evidence to suggest this is occurring, and that if it were occurring, we would not be without ability to detect it. But by the same token, these selfsame fears, that an electronic device can be used to listen in on you, are 100% confirmed to be true with cellphones. We know that they can be used to listen in on you. Therefore, if your concerns are your electronics being used as a surveillance device, then cellphones are a clear and present risk and should not be owned.

And if we're throwing around fallacy accusations, and your argument is "We shouldn't have remotely accessible microphones and cameras around, because they'll be used as surveillance devices", then you're participating with a classic slippery slope fallacy - but I don't think all of the fallacy talk is particularly productive, either.
I'm writing a metroid-like game for Sega Genesis in C and 68k assembly. Probably nobody is going to play it.
Reminds me of : this one by George Carlin
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0MKBdD2FGA
The Evils of the `For` Loop (2009)
We definitely do have remote engineers. But I think management wants to move toward on-site. So unless you have superhuman abilities, probably not.
Test runner in Rails 5
Good idea! I suggest you send an e-mail to hn@ycombinator.com
Does anyone reading this happen to be familiar with Linux compatibility within the current Fujitsu ScanSnap page scanner line? (Stross mentions specifically the ix500 model and Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android compatibility, as does the Fujitsu product page.)

I looked into them a number of years ago; at that time, I was left with the impression that buying a higher end model was desirable if not necessary for full(er) support. Something to do with TWAIN support?
How amazing is it that nearly every problem encountered with those early devices has been solved in the intervening years?
> It's funny math if he thinks Amazon is buying him for $100, when he's the one supplying the $100.

I think he means they've bought his loyalty. Or the 'prime' factor clouds purchasing decisions in favour of Amazon as the convenience and breadth of products is enough to make them the default choice.

I've been a Prime member for a few years now and I certainly do notice myself thinking Amazon first, anything else second.
We don't. It's best to just leave it up to the mods.
If it were explicit, it wouldn't be "sub" text. You really do need to know a bit of context about the state of high school & higher ed admissions before the phenomenon they talk about makes sense. The NYT is kind of notorious for running editorials that only make sense as far as why they would be running, and at this particular time, if you have these pieces of information.

Stanford is 1/4 Asian, plus another 9% "international". UC Berkeley is about 40%, plus another 10% international. And as I said, it's about competition for the elite slots at those and similar places. Look at, eg, the student body composition at very "hardcore", high stress schools like Thomas Jefferson HS, or Gunn HS (recent subject of http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Why-are-Palo-Alto-s-ki... ).

The parents of students in that kind of environment are the intended target of this editorial. It provides them with a coordination point.
> underfunded education

I was sympathetic to your argument until this part. It varies by region, but we spend what seems like a fortune on school. DC public schools spent over $18,000 per student in 2010 [0]. That's more than my state college tuition. Where does that money go?

[0]: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/finance_ins...
A saas performance testing tool that lets you run real-browser load tests and reuse your functional tests for load testing.

http://browserup.com/signup

The idea is that machine-hours are cheaper than man-hours, and the hardware to run real browsers is cheap enough that for non-trivial apps, it often makes more sense to run real browsers.
Sometimes I think introducing the black bar was a mistake. Now every death has to be judged as to whether the person is "worthy" or not of a black bar. This caused a lot of tension in the threads about Ian Murdock's death, for example.
This RFC was the result of a long discussion that took place in many forums over the course of several years, so it's tricky to summarize. Here's my attempt:

1. Memory safety is Rust's number one priority, and if this were a memory safety concern then Rust's hands would be tied and it would be forced to use checked arithmetic just as it is forced to use checked indexing. However, due to a combination of all of Rust's other safety mechanisms, integer overflow can't result in memory unsafety (because if it could, then that would mean that there exists some integer value that can be used directly to cause memory unsafety, and that would be considered a bug that needs to be fixed anyway).

2. However, integer overflow is still obviously a significant cause of semantic errors, so checked ops are desirable due to helping assure the correctness of your programs. All else equal, having checked ops by default would be a good idea.

3. However however, performance is Rust's next highest priority after safety, and the results of using checked operations by default are maddeningly inconclusive. For some workloads they are no more than timing noise; for other workloads they can effectively halve performance due to causing cascading optimization failures in the backend. Accusations of faulty methodology are thrown around and the phrase "unrepresentative workload" has its day in the sun.

4. So ultimately a compromise is required, a new knob to fiddle with, as is so often the case with systems programming languages where there's nobody left to pass the buck to (and you at last empathize with how C++ got to be the way it is today). And there's a million different ways to design the knob (check only within this scope, check only when using this operator, check only when using this type, check only when using this compiler flag). In Rust's case, it already had a feature called "debug assertions" which are special assertions that can be toggled on and off with a compiler flag (and typically only enabled while debugging), so in lieu of adding any new features to the language it simply made arithmetic ops use debug assertions to check for overflow.

So in today's Rust, if you compile using Cargo, by default you will build a "debug" binary which enables checked arithmetic. If you pass Cargo the `--release` flag, in addition to turning on optimizations it will disable debug assertions and hence disable checked arithmetic. (Though as I say repeatedly elsewhere, Rust reserves the right to make arithmetic unconditionally checked in the future if someone can convincingly prove that their performance impact is small enough to tolerate.)
But there is an easy way to test that. Is pollution abnormally high close to a congested road? In some places that is unequivocally true, and altering the outputs of vehicles will make the air safer in those locations. That is not a placebo.

Also, the entire purpose of a chimney is to spread the emissions over a larger area...

> the dispersion of pollutants at higher altitudes can reduce their impact on the immediate surroundings. In the case of chemically aggressive output, a sufficiently tall chimney can allow for partial or complete self-neutralization of airborne chemicals before they reach ground level. The dispersion of pollutants over a greater area can reduce their concentrations and facilitate compliance with regulatory limits. [0]

It is certainly true that stack emissions can have a significant health impact (for example coal power stations in China). But there are also places where the effect is less significant as the ambient level is considered to be safe. Vehicle emissions can cause local levels to be much higher.

I agree that certain sources are popularly ignored, but that is not a reason to also ignore vehicle emissions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimney
I also come from a previously communist country and I disagree. The world isn't so black and white. Progressive taxation is not equivalent to a centrally planned economic system. I've had state owned utilities and privately owned utilities, and I absolutely prefer the one that is subsidized by taxes and answers to voters. There's a huge difference between that and having state-chosen academia in Moscow decide how much electricity our city requires. Taxes on wealth and propert subsidize that.

I don't care how much money someone makes off a search engine company, but taxation should incentivize affordable housing and discourage the creation of wealthier landlords. Rent is not valuable entrepreneurship. Controlling the township's electric or water company is not valuable entrepreneurship. At least the state answers to the citizens it services, and has less of an incentive to be driven by profit. Let's have higher taxes in order to create a social safety net and pool of opportunity for the rest of the people.
CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.4 RC1 Available
What you really need to look at is how did they grow up?? A household that values education??

Plenty of immigrants from early 20th century that came to the US now have successful kids/grandkids because they valued education.

Computers are now cheap and you can get lots of free knowledge on the Internet and at the library (MIT has free classes).

There are no excuses. We need to stop with the victim mentality if we are ever going to progress.
Nice paper about an old friend, the Meta II paper. This is another one of those papers everyone who is interested in programming and languages should read and understand.
Just started it this weekend, but a git remote + LFS proxy for Perforce designed around ease of collaboration without requiring a central 'git-to-Perforce' gateway. Yes, it's a fairly large project, but the time spent implementing it should be small by comparison to the years it'll add to my life.
Why Switching to AWS May Cost You a Fortune
Uber's endgame is to roll out globally with an attractive platform for users and an enticing offer for drivers, gain a dominant market share in as many markets as possible, then steadily replace all human drivers with self-driving cars. This will happen over the next several decades.

At that point, the company will maintain service centers for their fleets, whose maintenance costs will be low enough to significantly increase their profit margins. Those larger profits will, of course, flow to the relatively small number of shareholders instead of being distributed among a larger human workforce, as they are currently.

Listen to Peter Thiel. The endgame for superlative companies is monopoly.
> Absolutely a first world problem

I don't understand this statement.

Doesn't this mean it's a problem every developing nation will eventually face?

Wouldn't it be nice to have already figured out a solution by then?
> (And yes, if you send me a big shipping box in which I have to dig through the packaging chips to find the product, then you probably paid close to that for shipping, but that really wasn't necessary) //

At work I often ship ceramics [in the UK] - none of the couriers will insure it, the reason I'm told is that they all use overhead conveyors and so all parcels have to survive a 2m fall. Perhaps that's part of the reason for "overpacking". Another could be that it's observer bias; occasionally they run out of smaller boxes and so use a large one (necessitating lots of filler) and these occurrences get reported.
I agree. I wish Google would build their own echo. The ability to do things like manage a calendar, text people, and all the other "Ok, Google" functions through an Echo-like device that also does what Amazon's Echo currently does would be fantastic. Alexa can't even tell me what is the stock price of Amazon and can't give me the current temperature without prattling off the entire weather update.
Ask HN: What's one book you've recently read and enjoyed?
My New Year's resolution is to read one book every week this year. I'm currently wrapping up
The Man In The High Castle and just finished Ponzi's Scheme (I loved it, thanks
icehawk219 for the recommendation).

I'm looking to fill up my reading queue. What's one book you've recently read and enjoyed?
Just finished a fun year off concentrating on creative code type projects (and travelling) -

Many improvements to shoebot - (A cairo port of nodebox).
Experiments in graphics for python
- started a midi mapper / OSC controller in kivy.
- learned about bezier curves.
- wrote various music vis experiments in shoebot and nodebox-gl.
- wrote a couple of simple VJ apps and actually VJd with them.
- Experimented with building native android apps using SDL.
- Did numerous opengl + shader tutorials (and contributed fixes).

Currently finishing off a sort of 'leaderboard' of chapters for a book writer (to choose the order of the chapters).

A bunch of other things
- vext - a way to use libs like Gtk from virtualenv)
- time learning about 'boring' stuff, testing, packaging etc.

It's been quite a bit of fun ... hopefully when I start back at work can use some of this knowledge and not be just 100% back on the backend work.

Doing all this has been really good, and if you are a contractor and have the chance I'd recommend doing something similar, have been very lucky !
I don't understand how estate and capital gains taxes are regressive. Estate taxes (in the United States at least) only kick in on inherited assets > $5M or so (< 0.2% of estates). Capital gains are AFAIK assessed as normal income for short-term gains (so, progressive) and as a flat (neither progressive nor regressive) rate for long-term gains, and even then, only for people with actual investments, which excludes probably the majority of the poor.

When I think regressive taxes, I think things that are flat fees, or else things like fica, which cut out after a certain income.
I'm writing http://codecaster.io, a tool for teachers to help students in software development classes. Been working on it for over a year and been using it in my classes. I'm looking for other teachers interested in using it so I can get feedback.

I have plans for pricing, but before I can approach that, I need more data on how people will use it.

For technical folks, it uses Phoenix and Elixir, and a lot of JS.
Zero spoilers in my replies, I think. The order book has nothing to do with winning the levels, just for fun.
Sounds like you're saying the problem is poverty. That is also what PG is saying. If you want to increase the opportunities for the population as a whole, attacking the income of the rich is not obviously a good solution.
I made an image upload site powered by Urbit around Christmas. It's currently very barebones (just image uploading and a feed), but I plan on adding voting and fun stuff like that. Being able to leverage Urbit's built-in identity system and having all messages between browser and server be strongly typed is awesome.

https://github.com/chc4/urporn (the name is tongue-in-cheek, please don't actually use it for porn)

For fun, check out https://github.com/chc4/urporn/blob/master/home/ape/porn.hoo... and see if you can actually figure out what the hell is going on :D