skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a longer dataset from PriceWaterhouseCooper's VC funding data:

https://www.pwcmoneytree.com/HistoricTrends/CustomQueryHisto...

My interpretation: 1999-2001 was, obviously, a completely different beast. While there was a bit more investment in 2015 than 2014, it was variable by quarter over the last 2 years and just looks volatile rather than bubble-y. What I focused on, and believe is the most important thing to notice, is that the number of deals hasn't really changed. Any spike can be attributed to larger investments per company/round. The reason I see this as more important is that the reach of any "bubble" to the downstream dependents of VC cash (data analytics startup land) likely wouldn't extend as far as the end-of-the-world crowd likes to suggest.

Outlook: I think this year will be more telling than the last as to whether or not funding in 2014-15 was just volatile or if we're actually making a move towards 2002/2009 troughs. I struggle to believe it will trending upward from here. I'd like to think the VC world is slightly more cautious (which is likely why we've seen the recent volatility).
I get the Mars part but they could have the walls to be fail safe at least on Earth. It's not like they will improve the design only if the rocket falls over and explodes. They would still have to land it up straight, while having some sort of "no wall touched" target (or award). Not to mention the money they save if not every fail is also a complete loss of the rocket. p.s. Money left is also good for future Mars missions.
They made you memorize the red-black tree algorithm?! Why? The whole purpose of a reference book like that one is to not have to memorize it. If you need to implement a red-black tree, you just look it up (I have done exactly that, with that book and that algorithm).
The counts would be a lot higher I guess, if I searched for book titles instead of links to a particular shop.
> I always think "wow if I was a woman or if I was black I would think that that is the reason they are looking at me".

This statement imagines what an imaginary person would be thinking, and implies that it represents the thinking of billions of people.

I wish my subjective imagination was so reliable. Think of all the time I could save studying facts, improving my analytical skills, and most of all, learning from and listening to other people who have different perspectives and experiences than I do. 'I imagine, therefore they are.'
Manhandled
I like to go to places like upwork or elance and seek out people in the US with low rep that haven't done a lot of jobs. A lot of times those people are ones for big companies that are stuck in a situation that need a quick hack put together. Do a good job and you get put on their 'list' for future use.
Use posix_spawn not fork and exec, then at least the OS may not allocate twice the memory, eg the BSDs will not.
it depends, most gigs are on-site but there are exceptions.
You may also like:

"Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite"

http://nationalinterest.org/print/article/dead-souls-the-den...

"Debates over national identity are a pervasive characteristic of our time. In part, they raise rhetorical questions, but they also have profound implications for American society and American policy at home and abroad. Different perceptions--especially between the citizenry and the more cosmopolitan elites--of what constitutes national identity generate different national interests and policy priorities.

The views of the general public on issues of national identity differ significantly from those of many elites. The public, overall, is concerned with physical security but also with societal security, which involves the sustainability--within acceptable conditions for evolution--of existing patterns of language, culture, association, religion and national identity. For many elites, these concerns are secondary to participating in the global economy, supporting international trade and migration, strengthening international institutions, promoting American values abroad, and encouraging minority identities and cultures at home. The central distinction between the public and elites is not isolationism versus internationalism, but nationalism versus cosmopolitanism."
I always found this somewhat amusing, encountering it enough.

Email to someone. Suggest meeting.

Someone's email, CC you: assistant, schedule this.

Email to assistant. Let me see when X is free (cc you, person).

Person's reply to everyone, you and assistant: tell so and so, let's do X at 2pm.

Assistant's email (cc you, the person you were talking to): we'll do X at 2pm.

I think somewhat the same about why travel agents are dying out, having to tell them exactly what flights you prefer and where, and how to not screw up your layover (and be able to easily reschedule when they are not around), it's usually far faster to just do it yourself.
I've been contracting/consulting for a couple of years now. Most my contracts have come through referrals (of friends) and sometimes recruiters. However, I was able to start my contracting career thanks to a contract that came through Toptal. This allowed me to quit my job and do this full-time.

Here's my list of resources that I would be looking at if
I needed to start looking for a contract immediately:

Boards:

- Authentic Jobs: http://www.authenticjobs.com/

- StackOverflow Careers: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs?type=contract&allowsre...

- We Work Remotely: https://weworkremotely.com/jobs/search?term=contract

- Angelist: https://angel.co/jobs

- Github Jobs: https://jobs.github.com/

- Hired: https://hired.com/contract-jobs

Networks:

- Toptal: https://www.toptal.com/ (I'm a member of Toptal's network)

- Gigster: https://www.trygigster.com/ (haven't used it yet)

- Crew: https://crew.co/ (haven't used it yet)

Offline ideas:

- Approach companies at Meetups

- Meetups, meetups, meetups

- Pitch on forums

- Work with contract agencies

- Become a subcontractor

It also helps to work on branding yourself, blogging, and integrating into communities (like HN!). Generally, just becoming an authority on a topic and allowing people get to know you before they work with you helps a lot. Kind of like patio11 has done for himself around here. Then people start coming to you instead of the other way around.

I would also highly recommend looking at DevChat TV's Freelance podcasts for ideas, they're really great: https://devchat.tv/freelancers
HN - http://hnhiring.me/

Remote OK - https://remoteok.io/

Stack Overflow - https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs?allowsremote=True

LiquidTalent - http://www.liquidtalent.com/

Working Not Working - http://workingnotworking.com

Hired - https://hired.com/contract-jobs

Gigster - https://gigster.com/

Mirror - http://mirrorplacement.com/

Metova - http://metova.com/

Mokriya - http://mokriya.com/

HappyFunCorp - http://happyfuncorp.com

Savvy Apps - http://savvyapps.com/

Clevertech - http://www.clevertech.biz/

Workstate - http://www.workstate.com/

AngelList - https://angel.co/jobs

I know you're just asking for sites and not approaches to finding contract work, but getting in with a very promising early stage company through contract-to-hire [that allows remote] is probably the most sustainable way to go.

Doing one contract project after another at an hourly rate just doesn't scale well financially and finding a next decent client can be like pulling teeth.
> ...thus my observation that cities are not the center of the universe - they depend on the whole ecosystem just like everybody else.

It goes both ways: cities depend on farms and farms depend on cities. Neither can sustain its way of life without the other.

>And, here's a secret, every farmer has land and can have a garden. They will eat no matter what.

Here's a secret: not every farmer owns land. There are about 6 million farm workers in the US and about 3 million owners of farmland.

About half of farms are owner-operated and about half have a landlord renting out the land to a farmer or farmers.

The landlords actually have fairly concentrated holdings, with roughly 8% of the landlords holding half of the rented out land, or about 25% of the total amount of farmland.

In a situation in which farmers refuse to grow food, these landlords would lose their rents and have a very strong incentive to A) kick off the farmers who refuse to grow and B) get someone to grow food since the prices of foods would have gone through the roof.

These farmers will starve.

> Sure they need that oil and gps, to produce enough food for 10,000 people. But they just need their hands to feed themselves. So no, they aren't going to starve, or even suffer very much.

They need oil and gas for things beyond food for themselves. Heating and cooking, for instance, require a good bit of firewood. In colder climates it can take many acres to keep warm. Even in the Southern United States it can get cold enough to kill during the winter.

Many wells are deep enough that they require pumps to get water out. Guess what powers them? Electricity. Since lots of farmers own land in places that couldn't be grown on without irrigation, such as the desert, things are going to start sucking really quick.

Electricity also powers refrigerators and freezers, which enable food to keep for much longer periods of time and reduce the risk of foodborne illness. Without trade, are these farmers going to have access to salt to cure meats? Are they going to know how to properly store food without any refrigeration? They certainly won't have the ice cutting industry of the 1800s.

Gas also provides the transportation to get medicine, clothes, blankets, seeds, tools, pesticides, and fertilizer. Without cities, farmers would also not have accurate weather forecasting, something that is quite important for them.

TL;DR I think you vastly underestimate the difficulties of subsistence farming without modern technology or the benefits of trade between cities and farms

Source for statistics: https://www.census.gov/prod/1/statbrief/sb93_10.pdf
at Toptal you can set your own rate in advance
I read that to mean "half the price of 6TB of DRAM" which is likely to be fairly expensive, though still impressive.
Tiny bank, huge ROE: WebBank’s Fintech hidden recipe
I have a friend who is an EA and has worked for many of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. She makes well over 6 figures and she loves her position. Her employers value her greatly, so she was able to command very good compensation packages including stock options, etc.
There are a couple of things you didn't mention.

Contracts
Do this. Get familiar with contract law and make sure your customers execute one that's favorable to you getting paid. Also, ensure you assign at least a license to the client paying you to avoid any problems down the road if you intend to reuse code.

Big projects
If you intend to tackle big projects you usually need to deal with net terms. Find an invoice factoring company to help you cashflow those deals. They base interest on the loans on your clients.
I started reading the site trying to learn more, but then an uninteresting popup blocked the its content. As soon as a went to move it out of the way, another popup blocked even more of the content.

In my opinion, these site behaviors lower the tool's value proposition because signing up for emails about the product doesn't meet the acute need - scraping - that drove a visitor to the site. It might be better to offer site visitors hospitality.

It sounds interesting, but I never got to the point where I could learn that it was a Chrome app or how it worked.

Anyway, this might make a good "Show HN" if you are looking for additional feedback. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Good luck.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (Martin Luther King, 1967)
When I read this article in light of the just published numbers showing that 32 people have a wealth equivalent to half the world's population - I have to ask myself, is worker training the right solution to the jobs and wage problems? To me, it obviously isn't, and ignores all the real root causes for loss of jobs and wages.

After a career in Silicon Valley, I've worked with several multi-billionaires and many multi-millionaires. They all use offshore accounts to hide both corporate and personal income - effectively transferring huge wealth to themselves. To me, we first need to make these "tricks" transparent, so that we can identify the problem properly. And that is a technical problem - we need laws and software to track all these currently invisible wealth transfers.
>Quotas and salary thresholds to get visa approval are much higher.

In Singapore, this is partly (or more than partly) due to a strong, rising anti-foreigner attitude that has caused much formal protests from the locals. The government has allowed the free hire of foreigners to take the nation to a point where nearly half the population is from other countries, and this has finally weighed thin on the others.

It's certainly not a unique problem: many nations (certainly the U.S. included) are having problems convincing the locals that foreigners/immigrants can be a good thing for the society. But it's up to that society to decide.

I lived in Singapore for several years and enjoyed many parts of it, but I agree that global success for any company based there would absolutely require foreign talent.

The last 2 years in particular have seen a significant change in the government's open-arms strategy for foreigners to work there, and it is now much harder indeed.
> travel seems like a weird black hole for entrepreneurs.

Not that weird at all actually -- it's an easy to understand business with an overly-complex buy flow they think they can fix. It's the kind of problem that many entrepreneurs are likely to have run into themselves and said "Well I can do this better".
here is a case that I have to use !, maybe I'm using it wrong, please correct me.

so I have this "member" in a class

class XXX: UIView

{

var member: BBB

init()

{

super.init()

self.member = BBB(self.frame)

}

}

if I do this, I got the error that self.member is not initialized before super.init

if I move it to before super.init, self.frame isn't available.

my solution to this chicken-egg thing is putting a ? after "member"
Any chance your mother-in-law might be interested in giving advice or mentoring? As I mentioned in a previous comment my wife has been desperately trying to rise up the ladder but has been shunted (none of which has anything to do with her effectiveness or capabilities).
I want to visit, but I don't have anybody to go with me, and nobody to see there... so I'd just be wandering around by myself.
I know a Jewish family that, in the middle of the 20th century, changed their last name to something not associated with Judaism so that their children could get into college. Imagine having to hide your religion as a way of life, treated by society as if you were hiding a dirty secret.
How is CruiseSheet doing?
Lazy Man’s Guide to Airbus and Boeing stand-off, and the crown winner for 2015
I take your point, but OpenSSH is almost a counterexample. The OpenSSH team's goal is to make the best possible SSH daemon for OpenBSD; it's a nice bonus that they can make a portable version as well. They're doing this as part of the broader OpenBSD effort. OpenBSD is a cohesive, relatively small (for a full-blown operating system!), independent, and tightly focused project; they are in a better position than anyone to introduce a new language. Plus, they already have a track record in throwing away old software and replacing it with something entirely new [1] [2].

You're right that languages with big runtimes would probably not be worth the cost, and new languages like Rust and Go are still too risky. But how about something like Ada or Modula 2? Both are well-established (virtually ancient) languages with mature compilers, small runtimes, and proven use in systems development.

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/papers/httpd-asiabsdcon2015.pdf

[2] http://www.openntpd.org/
Show HN: ScriptCat – Like Pingdom for ports
This demonstrates some cool CSS properties, but please never do this in production.

The resource overhead of just one "thumbnail" will be insane, and your mobile users will hate you.

This "thumbnail" can then do anything a website can, like alert dialogs and location requests.
> "... and the one i am missing."

New Zealand.
I like to think that with these videos SpaceX is also making a very worthy contribution to more realistic movie special effects.
Why do you prefer lua?
Apart from the limited (aka 'hideois') color palette, limited character set, and limited resolution, the original format had an extra feature that made it challenging to design pages: spacing attributes.

What that meant was that, whenever you wanted to change color (text and/or background), you _had_ to insert a space in the page.

So, for example, showing text on a background Dutch or German flag was easy, doing so on a Belgian, French or Italian one could not be done nicely.
> There's no 32-bit runtime for Swift. When that requirement is lifted...

You probably don't know/can't say, but is there going to be a 32-bit Mac runtime? Apple has spent zero resources improving the 32-bit ObjC runtime over the last decade, to the point where it's called the "legacy" runtime yet is still supported.

I expect a 32-bit Swift runtime would also require a modern ObjC runtime, but it seems rather unlike Apple to spend any resources now on 32-bit Mac (when they've decided not to for the last 9 years).
I suspect that WWDC this June will be the beginning of the end for 32-bit Mac apps.
Right up until the day that you unexpectedly have to drive somewhere that is (a) at the limit of your range, (b) not accessible otherwise and (c) doesn't have convenient chargers.

This is interestingly close to the Kozmo/PeaPod/whatever on-demand grocery delivery problem: as long as you only have to service high population densities, you can make a profit. As soon as you try to handle suburbs, the costs of providing service increase at a rate larger than the square of the radius you are trying to serve - and nobody wants to pay that, and the urban core won't subsidize the suburban outliers until you've already dominated the market.
Yes the problem is my wife is not in silicon valley and although she makes plenty of money (6 figures or so) she is tired of not having a more important role. She has effectively been type-casted.
I thought the community would get a kick out of this. Talk about abstraction!
Fortunately for entrepreneurs, this idea seems to be catching on.

Unfortunately for consumers, it seems that the user experience is stuck in 2007. I still can't find a good app which allows me to plan a full trip at once, especially when I haven't entirely decided where I want to go yet. As someone who travels about once a month, I'd love to see something better than Kayak.
HAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHA

people are waking up to your trickery. You are conman. Take your shit coin and shove it up your bosses ass!
It is the implementation which matters, or rather, the observable consequences of the implementation, which in effect form part of the interface of the abstraction - they might not be intended, but they're there. Those are what we call leaks.

The abstraction i was thinking of was byte arrays, which are provided by the language, rather than anything higher-level. Many languages have byte arrays which guarantee that you can't read past the end, and can't read values that you didn't write. Java would be one example.
For Debian and Ubuntu servers: Mandos (http://www.recompile.se/mandos)

Introduction here: http://www.recompile.se/mandos/man/intro.8mandos

Disclosure: I am a co-author. (Yeah, yeah, we will switch our certificate from CACert to LetsEncrypt. Soon. Ish.)
Just click on the web link right under the title (within Hacker News).
Wow, I had to change the brightness and contrast setting on my monitor just to read this article. What is the strategy behind this darkish font against black background? I wish more websites geared towards a reading audience actually provided a nice reading experience.
I'm curious, if my variable "a" is indeed null, and when I say a!, what will happen?

will it be a runtime error? like a memory access violation in c++?

what's the benefit of adding !? if it generates the same access violation runtime error?
> The average joe goes on one or two major vacations in their entire life

That might be true for the US, but it is def. more common in Europe, where people go on trips every summer.
I used to use org mode when I did everything on my linux desktop, but I stopped when I got a smartphone (and later an iPad).

I loved org mode.

Does anyone have a good solution for syncing one's org mode files to an iDevice and then using it (or even better, editing it)?
Have you ever considered using the AGPLv3 for the Community Edition, rather than the all-permissive MIT license?
Hey everyone! I built this tool to email you if a new port opens up on your site to prevent you from accidentally opening yourself up to attacks.

The tool is free, but you are limited to a single site right now. If you want more, shoot me an email and I can increase your site-count.

If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to talk! I'll be on this thread, and my email is in my profile.
Could speed of an object be determined with two front facing cameras?

If you knew the distance between each camera and triangulated plus a little math could speed be figured out?
Mandatory Philosophy Classes in Brazil an Attempt to Teach Justice
It's vague, because it's a high level idea. I want to earn more than I can by time, therefore I have to get clients to start thinking about how much value they are getting and paying for that.

Practically I've had success recently by charging weekly. I keep this rate deliberately lower (about half my old full time consulting rate). Then I send them a weekly report along with the invoice every week. They get to see exactly what they got for the money. It usually takes me 15-20 hours to deliver enough value for the weekly rate.

So there are lots of things to try. Small changes in billing can have a large impact on your relationship with your client.
There's really not much to see here: a screenshot, a price list and an e-mail signup page.

To convince me to spend $10 per month, you'd need to tell me how I can profit from using your service. You say there are alerts for when I should buy or sell - that implies some kind of algorithm that knows when a stock is underpriced or overpriced.

- Who created the algorithm, and what experience do they have with investing?

- What has been the performance of this algorithm over time? Does it beat buying and holding an S&P 500 index fund? (If you're selling an algorithm that's never been tested, why should I be willing to test it on my own investment portfolio?)

- Is the algorithm aware of tax implications (long-term vs. short-term capital gains)?

Also, there's no privacy policy. Potential customers are going to want to know if you're going do stuff like sell their personal information to a brokerage, etc.

Finally, there's a typo on the home page: "when you may should sell".
In my personal experience just inhibiting subvocalization resulted in increasing my reading speed to around 300 wpm. With other techniques (using peripheral vision to read multiple words per "shot") I got to around 440 wpm. All this based on the tests in the book I used.

The book[1] claimed you could reach up to 1200 wpm by doing all the exercises, I never got to finish all of them.

[1] "Superlectura veloz" (fast super-reading) - Carlos Quiroga
sounds like sex ... the best way to get a date is to be out not looking for a date.
Trees, mountains, and the absence of other people is good for my soul.