skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's an elephant in the room: nobody really knows how many valley companies exist solely because of revenues that are diversions of this river of money. Startup-servicing startups. Hosting. Metrics. Food delivery. Recruiting. Hell...there are hundreds (if not thousands) of companies just doing advertising services, alone. Everyone fixates on the unicorns that are doing big revenue numbers, but the regional effects of those redwoods are tiny in comparison to the "robust ecosystem" of mushrooms that grows in their shadow.

I often wonder how much of Facebook's revenue (for example) consists of valley startups trying to micro-target indifferent consumers. Pretty much any time I look into a VC-funded consumer company, I find that they're spending money on Facebook ads, Google ads, mobile ads...you name it. When that money dries up, the "ecosystem" of ad services takes a huge hit.

I'm sure there are consumer companies that have organic growth, but it's hard to tell when there's so much money sloshing around. One King's Lane, for example...they were buying ads like crazy. At their peak, they had big, unicorn-y revenue. They're probably going to sell for a fraction of their total investment, and have never been profitable [1].

Meanwhile, the theoretical market cap of all current private-market unicorns ($300-$500Bn, depending on the source) is something like 10-20x the market cap of every IPO issued in 2015 (~$30Bn) [2]. It's pretty clear that the economic status of San Francisco is at least correlated to the huge influx of VC money since 2012, and that a lot of the resulting value is creative storytelling. I don't see why people are so confident in a soft landing if that same money goes away.

[1] http://recode.net/2016/01/06/one-kings-lane-once-valued-at-9...
[2] http://wolfstreet.com/2015/12/22/ipo-window-suddenly-closes-...
If you think MSG got a bad rap, try selling chocolates garnished with lark's vomit.
This is a dupe: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20Neural%20Algorithm%20of%20....

Submitters: it's a good idea to check HN Search before posting.
Something like this happened in Virginia in early 1992. At a certain point, the jackpot/(cost of buying all numbers) ratio was high enough that an Australian business group swooped in, hiring volunteers to purchase as many tickets as possible. They only managed to cover 5 million out of 7 million possibilities (ran out of time), but they still won the lottery, winning a $27 mil jackpot.
> Rust is not (yet) the way to go.

Not sure if that was intended, but that was one epic pun!
Yeah, that's a good point - I have heard "signal" used more in this context in social sciences, like "dog whistle" in politics. But it'd be nice to come up with something clearer and just as pithy.
you are the only cadet to pass the kobiashilotto test.
Sooo I hit the $50,000 after only $2,000. Apparently that is almost 1 in a million. Scary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary
"Quick Pick" numbers are not generated at the store. Regardless of if you pick the numbers or let the computer do it, your request is sent in real time back to a lotto office where the real ticket is securely generated (with a TRNG if you so choose). The local terminal then receives a bitmap to print out.
Right, which is some bullshit. I mean, they cheated. Yes, it is mathematically provable that a random walk will eventually touch 0. That would be the case even if the lottery was strongly positive expected value.

They ask you to comment if you won. Their program guarantees you lose when it terminates -- even if you hit the 1:292,000,000 odds.
"Negative lottery as a service"

Customers (drawn from the rational HN crowd) pick lottery numbers and pledge not to play the lottery for a period of time (selectable from a really cool animated dropdown). At the end of the period we mail them the amount saved on tickets or, in the unlikely event the numbers actually came up, lost by not playing.

As premium paid service, infinite period of time with physical printed yearly reports and cool framed diplomas to hang on the wall.
4. You're much more likely to learn and grow professionally tackling problems you likely wouldn't otherwise face (or at least at a higher rate).
Please don't post acerbic dismissals to Hacker News. Substantive criticism is fine. But sarcastic signalling basically has no place here.
When I referred to sampling I was talking about the joint distribution of all pixels (hence "space of images"), which would work fine. But I suspect predicting distributions is impractical, it may be better to use methods that sample directly without ever explicitly finding the distribution.

You do need a source of entropy to perform the sampling. This amount should be more than a minimum given by how precisely you want to sample from the continuous source, related to the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the distribution.
It's interesting that the comparison of the Gini coefficient between Sweden and the United States wasn't mentioned as one of Ezra's errors. Since, as far as I can tell, PG is talking about wealth disparity, generally, in his original article, and only mentions income inequality when talking about the "pie fallacy".

Most of the money the founders and early employees of a startup end up making would never be considered income (right?) and therefor not skew the Gini coefficient?

Anyway, seems like an error to me, if I am wrong, please help me understand what error I am making.
Also an extra edge to get you over the line - make sure you have a license to sell the tickets to yourself. Usually the vendors (newsagents, shops) etc that sell the tickets get a commission on each ticket ranging from 2% - 10%

It's the real free money part!
As all of them would now have to pay for legal, accounting, recruiting, HR, customer support and other services that used to be shared as well as negotiate their own real estate leases, server purchases and data center leases, how many of these tiny pieces would generate enough cash flow to sustain themselves a few years down the road?

If the business is ad-supported, a bigger player can negotiate better rates for their combined inventory, a smaller player is relegated to AdSense and similar.
For those interested in the anthropomorphic principle, this paper by Wald might be interesting:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0507094v1.pdf
The Digital Library of Babel (https://libraryofbabel.info/) was posted here a while ago, which is a tangible way to search through this space. The library comes from a book by Jorge Luis Borges, which has all possible books, meaningful and not. The people in the book are searching for books with meaning, but the chance of finding one is really small. The digital library lets you do the search electronically. Kind of fun to play around with.
Static Analysis of Unreal Engine 4
But that's the thing: research and learning are unnecessary. Just change your behavior. Which is easier than people think. Just do it.

As far as this card goes, it's spot-on. I would put "pay off your credit cards" at the top of the list. You should not invest a nickel until you've paid off all your credit cards (and any other debt where you're paying more than 10% interest).
Delphi is very alive (I'm moderator in a Delphi forum). Think this way: Delphi/FreePascal have almost all the market for a Pascal-alike syntax for them alone.

With the C-family you have a lot of options.

Also: Nothing beat Delphi at doing RAD apps today.
Even then don't you still have only 50% chance of winning as none of those numbers might get picked?
I guess no one is trolling the personal attack ban hammer, at the moment.
> I realize that other forms of energy generation are all subsidized in various ways, so it's clearly not as serious as my above interpretation, but still, it doesn't speak well of solar.

If solar had even a tenth the subsidies that coal and oil have gotten for the past decades, it'd be on every rooftop by now (especially the nice flat commercial rooftops) and we'd have as many concentrated-solar facilities as coal plants.
Unless your goal is to maximize joy.
People will pay for Flickr Pro accounts (Flickr was profitable due to this). People aren't going to pay for Tumblr.

EDIT: I've previously said on HN that I'd like to buy Flickr and roll it into a benefit corp/non-profit sort of deal. I firmly believe that Pro users can pay enough that Flickr can self-sustain itself.
In most cases, it takes many months or years of unpaid work before you can even get VC funding or revenue of any type for your startup. And most startups fail before they even reach that state.
KMS is not a centralized secret database -- it's a hosted Hardware Security Module. There is no way to store your service's secrets in it for later retrieval, unlike the solutions listed in the article. I suppose an argument could be made that it still provides a single point of failure, however the risk level of KMS and the SLA it provides is far lower than what one might encounter by maintaining their own server cluster.
You say that like 3-5 wouldn't already be insanely good. Even 1.1 would be a huge decrease in pollution. 0.4 and it might still be worth it due to fewer casualties and the ability to safely multitask.
Have you ever worked on consumer software?
T-Mobile's line is pure marketing BS to make what is basically QoS sound like something more advanced than what it is. It's not like we've never seen this sort of reality distortion before have we?

The EFF is right that it's throttling and T-Mobile is right for not wanting to call it throttling for very obvious reasons. And It is also "adaptive video technology", the EFF seems to think that term has any predefined meaning but it doesn't, T-Mobile literally made it up.

I disagree with the EFF's assertions about opt-in vs opt-out, they seems to not want to accept reality and why T-Mobile is doing this. T-Mobile, and anyone who isn't AT&T or Verizon, is very bandwidth constrained because of the way spectrum is auctioned off. They are trying to maintain acceptable service for their customers but can't if everyone is streaming 1080p video from the internet. While throttling is usually a poor decision for bandwidth management, persistent streaming is an exception where it helps. By turning this on by default, they're freeing up a lot of congestion. Most people won't know or care and those that do have a way to turn the service off.

That being said, T-Mobile isn't just degrading service, they're offering you incentives for accepting the degraded service. If you don't want the offering, you can turn it off easily.
How much did he have to pay to insure those bets?
Yeah, and it requires a bit of timing to buy correctly. The chart for ND[1] shows the variance of price in a season. Buying when it is really cold is not a great idea. Also, getting the larger tank allowed keeps you from having to do a refill in the middle of the winter.

1) https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W...
Put another way: the proposition is that the current definitions of those words might not be as useful as they once were because assumptions implicit in them have changed.
re: "He says I think modest changes to the tax code will derail technical progress. But I don't think that. Larry Page's Google stock is worth billions of dollars. It would take way more than modest changes in the tax code to change that fact."

Oddly, this might be construed as an argument in favor of (or at least not against) more progressive tax rates: in the end, it's not going to stop people from getting rich.
Would not work unless it ballooned into 10 figures. Lump sum taxes would take most of the gains away and that assumes you are the only winner.
Perhaps don't put your system in the path of a proton beam? I've had a large test suite that consistently used 8GB running for three years without ECC RAM. Any bit flip would have been caught by the test suite. My conclusion is that bit flips are entirely exaggerated (probably by the hardware industry for obvious reasons).
As I stated elsewhere (and prior to you posting this comment), I meant if you are in the right lane going 65.
"How to C in 2016" Don't.
> scalable app

Well no, but certainly an app that can handle 100K hits per 24 hours.

SSL is essentially free now, not everyone needs wildcard. Backups are easy, analytics are easy. Email is hard - but there are services.

I guess it's about tradeoffs. If you spend a few hours (really, half a day should take care of the above. I've done it!) you can save $250/mo.

If that isn't worth it for you it isn't worth it. 2000K+ a year is definitely worth it for me!
Not really, a proxy fight is when activist investors persuade a majority of the votes to support their vision for the business.
One of the most enlightening moments I had when working with engineers vastly more capable than me was the disproportionate amount of time they spent planning and designing versus coding, and how much faster they moved as a result.
Hello there! Awesome feedback :)

Although perhaps I exaggerated the name of this thread (sorry, I'm new here), the repository DOES say it's an opinionated guide!

Also, these are not rules, these are my guidelines and recommendations!

When I say right or wrong, I mean based on the styleguide itself!

Tks for the feedback!
Well, yes, that's pretty much always required, but I'm interested in hearing more specific requirements.
That's the conventional wisdom. I'm just not sure it is or has to be true.
"How to C in 2016" Don't. C has outlived its usefulness. It's time to move on to more expressive languages. The fact that buffer overflows are still a thing in 2016 should be an embarrassment to the industry.
> Why should they pay retail?

Obviously under completely free-market conditions, they wouldn't. But under those conditions, power companies would burn nothing but coal and nobody would have any solar. Coal is really cheap. Retail net metering is society actively meddling with the free market to mitigate a societal ill, and forcing big polluters to subsidize cleaner energy. I don't see a problem with that.
IMO pg was off base with the Economic Inequality article (while not entirely incorrect I found it somewhat crass), but at least Mr. Graham's article was admittedly describing an agenda of self interest.

On the other hand, Ezra Klein is a "liberal" sycophant who is far closer to the elite he pretends to antagonize than he is to the proletariat he pretends to protect. I'm quite sure that when he talks about ending inequality, he doesn't mean giving up the ivory tower and insider connections that he enjoys for his own ends.

This is the same guy who suggests that you don't even bother reading the constitution and questioning if the government is taking away too much freedom, because it is over 100 years old[1]. Real "liberals" are thinkers and truth seekers, not boot licking media personalities who try to baffle with bs.

[1]: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/12/30/wapos_ezra...
The "smart money" wants them to sell their real estate and return the cash to shareholders who can then, if they so choose, invest in real estate directly rather than through a convoluted corporate holding company that was never designed to be a real estate company.
Just make sure to send the government up there first.
Not everyone can run node or V8 on their embedded microcontroller.
Sounds like he's not parking in a garage. I could see that leading to higher rates in some ares of the US.
okay, i'll see your nuke loss and raise you one 000000 nuke launch code :)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2515598/Launch-code-...
How can you know their feelings, if you do not know the reasons for their feelings? Empathy as understanding someone's frustration requires you to first know that someone is actually frustrated (otherwise you are just imagining).
Well, it sounds like you'd be at least $9 million richer than you were before. And gambling losses are tax deductable, up to the amount of your winnings, so if I understand tax deductions correctly wouldn't you be taxed only on about $200 million of the cash payout?

https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc419.html
https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/Taxes-101/Can...
Researchers find a way to decipher some words in the mind before they are spoken
We are leasing hardware, and we are leasing a lot of OVH (in addition to a number of smaller providers). OVH does a good job, and if you build your infrastructure to load-balance around failure (which does not happen often), you'll hardly notice it. Often we get an email from OVH telling us that support techs have been automatically dispatched to a node which we hadn't even alerted about yet. Docker is basically a miracle drug for this kind of thing. Our hardware costs are less than half of what they were with EC2. Huge savings.
There is a mode of adulthood that is dangerous and worth mentioning, which is a kind of hard-hearted acceptance that the world isn't fair, life is full of suffering, and there's nothing you (or anyone) can do about except suck it up and keep going. There's a kind of grim determination to continue despite not wanting to. Maybe it's because you have people depending on you, or maybe it's because you're just very stubborn. To some extent, I associate this mode with the opening scene of "There Will Be Blood" when Daniel Day Lewis' character is injured and spares not a single moment on despair, or self-pity, and gets himself out of a miserable situation, against the odds.

In this mode, there is little time or urge for compassion, or play, or joy. You are a cog in a large machine that values you only and precisely according to your economic function, who's body participates in multiple overlapping patterns of decay, and that's it. Maybe, if you're religious, you can look forward to a happy afterlife (and indeed one can imagine the role of religion in such a person's life is to offer a reason to not act out on the rage that inevitably underlies such an existence).

Almost everyone on HN is lucky to not have to endure this (or at least, for any length of time). And indeed, startups cannot succeed with that grimness. You must maintain your sense of play and joy, I think, to be successful in this space, because this is the most playful and joyful part of the economy! We make stuff that makes people go "ooh" and "ahh", and how can you really do that if you're an adult?
I somewhat agree with Graham: economic inequality is not intrinsically the problem and startups are not the problem.

The problem IMHO is rent and profiteering off taxpayer subsidies, both of which more or less force me to pay tribute to the rich.

I don't care one bit if someone else is infinitely richer than me as long as I don't have to pay tribute to them or otherwise be lorded over by them. I would not care if (hypothetically) there were people alive today who were biologically immortal cognitively enhanced cyberpunk demigods with control of wealth flows in excess of present-day US GDP. In an abstract philosophical sense it seems likely that such sentient entities do in fact exist somewhere in our vast universe and I don't see how this likelihood impacts me at all. There are also (statistically speaking) probably a minimum of several hundred million to a billion people smarter, healthier, and better looking than me.

What I do care about is being forced or at least heavily pressured/coerced into paying tribute to those who are above me economically.

A prime example: housing costs are insane and this is partly a result of rich people from around the world parking their wealth in real estate and extracting rent in exchange for little to no investment in anything productive. In general, idle rent extraction is a social ill and should be taxed to hell and back. I would support cuts to capital gains, employment, and income taxes and large increases in taxes on property speculation (non-primary residences) and other non-productive rentier activity. (We might distinguish between productive capitalism and rentier capitalism, though it's hard to draw an absolute black-and-white distinction.)

Other examples of tribute include the many cases where public insurance is used to back-stop private losses while private gains remain private, such as the 2008 bank bailouts or the government paying in part for the cleanup of BP's gulf oil spill, and cases where taxpayer subsidized research and development is privatized for exclusively private gain (and patented!). How many huge companies have been built on the back of government-funded research? (The fact that so much wealth is built on the back of public research and public infrastructure is a common argument for progressive taxation.)

A huge reason I've lost my faith in libertarian politics is that the 2008 bailouts convinced me it's a scam. The rich advocate laissez faire until their wealth is on the line, at which point they become socialists. It's clear to me that for the poor and middle class to forego the use of government coercion is for them to engage in unilateral disarmament. I've heard today's economy described as a casino in which public funds are used to backstop the losses of the highest rollers, and that seems fairly accurate to me.

It's not transformed me into a conventional liberal though. Personally I don't think anyone on the present-day right or left has a clear path out of this. Both sides advocate things that would make the problem worse.
alloca isn't so bad if you have stack guards, which Microsoft has used extensively for a long time [1]. Historically Unix has lagged behind here, however, and so alloca is a security risk on Unix, which leads to the "alloca is evil" advice.

There is also the fact that you permanently lose one register in your function (ebp) if you use alloca(). This is important on 32-bit x86 but is rarely discussed.

There is essentially no implementation difference between VLAs and alloca().

[1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wb1s57t5.aspx
He wasn't parked in a garage before either. If the cost of insurance is based on risk, the fact that a tree falls on your car doesn't increase your risk. If anything, the risk in the future may be lower as presumably that tree isn't going to fall on the car again.
>I feel like people think if you're in YC you're a sure bet.

Did not mean to imply I feel YC makes success a sure bet, that is obviously and demonstrably false.

That said; non-monetary resources made available to YC companies are 'mostly' available to every startup? Really?[0]

-Regular founders dinners(networking, helps with initial traction)

-Free legal counsel

-AWS/Azure credit well above what the respective companies offer non-yc startups.

-Being YC alum helps with future funding rounds.

->but even YC companies that raise smaller-ish rounds fail all the time.

Yes...Of course they do, that's the point of VC

Yes blog posts and AMA's are great learning material, but I'd argue they aren't nearly as valuable as regular 1on1's with the people that wrote them.

I'm not trying to say YC is a magic bullet or that YC alum 'have it easy', it's hard as hell to create a successful startup. I am saying that there are not-so-trivial advantages to being incubated at/by YC

[0]http://www.fastcompany.com/3042861/the-y-combinator-chronicl...
agreed - i'd doubt that PG is vehemently against progressive tax rates.
A couple of times a year.
Because we are talking about offsetting credits here. In most schemes the power company won't cut you a check, they just run your bill down to zero (assuming you overproduce for the entire year).

By paying wholesale when you have excess yet charging retail when you don't they are effectively charging you _their_ profit margin on _your_ own electricity.

Solar customers already pay the grid maintenance charges. Even if we assumed the utilities were entitled to some compensation for providing this service to solar customers it certainly wouldn't be the spread between wholesale and retail rates.
Much like Sears spinning off their significant real estate holdings from an unprofitable/dying business before the real estate gets dragged down, too.