skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> experimentation purely on the basis of "This will probably help more people than it hurts."

And why is this bad?
Yeah this guy is a real amateur, probably the worst analysis I've ever read about the shipping industry.
The annual revenue for taxis in SF was ~$100MM. Uber's annual SF revenue is estimated to be $500MM. So Uber has "captured" 500% of the market. Does that explain their valuation?

They're not trying to capture an old market, they're building a new one.
So, your main issue is money in politics.
What?

AirBnB's valuation is 25B. It could make a trivial dent in the worldwide hotel market and crush that valuation many times over.

Uber is 50B. The global taxi market alone is worth many multiples of 50B, and that's not counting all the delivery services, bus/public transit-replacements etc that Uber is pushing for.

I'm not saying these companies WILL capture all of their current markets, but it's ridiculous to say the valuations wouldn't be supported if they captured the whole market.
This is an ignorant view.

Bitcoin is tiny, its measured in billions. How much did the Canadian currency just lose in the last view weeks? That amounts to hundreds of billions of vaporized wealth.
In the video they say that the drug in question is intended to control pain via the endocannabinoid system.

She was also very careful to insist that the drug neither contains cannabis or any substance derived from cannabis.
DataPower now can be programmed with Javascript:

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/iea/content/com.ibm.iea.wdatapower/wdatapower/1.0/xi52/DataPower_70_GatewayScript.pdf
And then they decided to inject adware into OSS installers. What a nightmare that was.
weighted how?
>Ms. Touraine said the drug had previously been tested on animals, including chimpanzees

testing an animals beside being a cruel practice that has to be stopped, is also useless even when the animals are that close to humans.
I work at 18F, but am speaking for myself. It takes about a minute to add a Slackbot response, and posting the article helps us attract better candidates by showing our commitment to a good working environment.
Stating that measuring inequality is measuring the wrong thing isn't the same thing as being right.
Added ZenDesk to make up for TSLA :)
>profit on them.
Nope.
http://gawker.com/here-are-the-internal-documents-that-prove...

Granted that businesses like Amazon are unprofitable, but Uber is not nearly going to be as stable
At first glance, I thought that your website was listing random free items on the internet and that you'd make money with affiliate links. I looked at a few items and they were all given by "MuxMe" so I was really confused as to WHY you were giving free items. I then looked at the about page trying to understand a bit more and there it is, you seem like a genuine nice person giving free stuff away, hoping one day to become a non-profit.

I'm still a bit confused. In a way, it seems "Too good to be true". I would craft a nice paragraph and put it at the top of the page so that first-time visitor understands what you're trying to do. You cannot blame people for thinking that this is scam (Hey I'm receiving emails every day telling me I won $1M).

Also, you realize that if I tell my friends about your website I have less chance to win.. why would I do that?

What's your long-term goal with the non-profit?
BarneySplat was invariably the most popular door game on my BBS (mid-90s). Thanks for that interview link.
TradeWars seems like it would be a great mobile game. The limited number of turns per day mechanic would be appealing for busy gamers who don't want to spend too much time. The new mobile game Subterfuge has a similar feel to me:

http://subterfuge-game.com/
Tom Venuto's Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle
No my issue is that some people have way more money to put in politics than others.

ETA: money and politics are not separable.

Double edit: oh god damnit no I wasn't even talking about politics was I. Inequality allows the people on top to distort markets.
Yeah, people don't hoard us dollars, they hoard T bills and other obfuscated forms of us dollar debt.
I think what was missed was that a lot of people feel inequality is inherently bad, independent of the cause. I think both sides are mostly talking past each other on this one. It's possible for the fact that an entrepreneur getting rich by founding a startup to be a good thing because of the wealth they create while the fact that it increases inequality to be bad. I think most people agree that entrepreneurs getting rich is on the whole net good. That doesn't make inequality inherently good though.
This growth belief reminds me of the trap of focusing on 'what' instead of 'why' as in https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...

It seems stupid to do something just because you think you're expected to do it rather than think for yourself and do what you want to do and think would be a good idea.
Another way to think of this, if you'll forgive my pro-business tone here, say that that 14% who actually create value generate a significant portion of the utility gains (if not income as well) for the rest of us. We could be harming the incomes of the 99% in that case by gutting the 86% and the 14%.

The solution is a scalpel, not a pick-axe. That is one of the possible resolutions stated in the article, which is one that I think is worthy.
Net neutrality: Discrimination, competition, and innovation in the UK and US
Of course they would still care about the super rich. If a tiny tiny minority of the people in a society control the vast majority of the wealth (equivalent to power in a capitalist society like ours) it is ALWAYS a problem. It means you are effectively living in an oligarchy, not a democracy, which is something most people care about.
free float capitalization (e.g. http://www.renaissancecapital.com/index/ipousa.aspx)
With total equality, productivity and innovation plummet, because most of those who are able and willing to work more and/or better resent the freeloaders that enjoy what the actual producers produce without putting in the effort, and become demotivated.

Do they? Most people I know are happy knowing that they're doing useful things. That happiness isn't impacted in any way by other people not doing useful things. In fact, if I'm honest, I'm considerably happier about living in a society with people who opt out of work to live on welfare supported by taxation than people who make huge sums of money but avoid tax themselves. I don't think I'm alone in that (although, that said, I live in Europe rather than the U.S., so that may make a difference.)
Holiday sales were disappointing and the company is planning job cuts.
Addendum: Sticking to pg's solutions, we could address the rent-seeking via regulation, without harming either founders or VCs. It's not that hard to tell the difference between a a liquidation event and a bonus.
When you decide to start a business, often times, you'll be doing lots of things you don't really want to be doing for that business. Like filing paperwork with the state or making sure your taxes are done on time. This stuff adds up and there is a lot of it.

To start a business, you really have to enjoy the product you are building enough to cover the work you don't want to do and enough to no longer do some things you enjoy doing in your life, as you may no longer have time for it.

Starting a real business is a challenge. I would suggest, if you do have an idea, try to build it. If you can build the idea, you might want to consider starting a business around it.
Most things are.
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action [video]
Here's the thing, there is a nice way (well, more than one) to blend highly tuned low-level C code with clean, modern C++. I have to do it: I work on high performance algorithmic trading systems.

You want to keep raw pointers, etc. confined to private class members, initialize memory only within the constructor (if possible), and free memory at the destructor. The user/public API should not expose unsafe stuff. With all this, RAII will give you a nice expectation of lifetime, etc. Plus you're able to use something like tcmalloc.

I often find a difficult issue arises when you have a large data structure that you want to free before it goes out of scope (to reclaim some memory). In this case, adding a "clear" method that frees the internals is handy. The destructor will call clear() but you can call it at any time. No harm done if it's called twice.

The next thing is const-correctness: if you follow it then any C-like code underneath should be relatively safe.

Not using copy constructors is just awful. Memcpy has a time and a place: at the low level (eg; I use it for serializing to a buffer). If you're using memcpy for classes you're probably doing something wrong.

Exceptions are a place where you see a wide gamut of safety. Some people don't use them at all: which isn't great. Others add hundreds of lines of code by wrapping everything in a try/catch. Not sure where I stand here, honestly. There's a point where you're catching exceptions that just aren't going to happen...
K&R is an easy read and it will give you the basics if you want to go further. Just realize that modern production C is different and don't copy-paste this code into real things (they are glossing over a lot of details -- especially with regards to safety).

Next, I'd try "C the Hard Way" which is just as beginner, but is an attempt to make C programs safer (and expose you to some of the glossed over details)
I played a lot of TradeWars, but my favorite door game was a similar space conquest game called Dominion. To my dismay, I can't find any reference to it online today! :(
I really miss the old school of FPS design, where you have hub-based levels that branch out into a bunch of different areas and eventually loop back on themselves. I haven't seen a game using one of those in many years, with the possible exception of the Rise of the Triad reboot.

Maybe these granddaddy designers should get together for a few more games. In my opinion, the advent of linear, cinematic FPSes have ground design work in the genre to a halt. Nowadays, it's all about refining the core game loop and adding eye candy at the expense of broader level design and environmental exploration. Last year, I went back to play Duke Nukem 3D and it was as fun as ever; can't say the same for many of the FPSes that came out over the last decade.
It's a series of filters - you test on animals before testing on humans. Of course some percentage of things that are not toxic to animals have a special toxicity in humans. To claim that it is "useless" means that you also believe there to be a large proportion of candidates which are toxic in animals that aren't toxic in humans.

I don't have the data on this, but, without necessarily defending the practice of animal testing, I suspect that toxicity in animals is a good predictor for toxicity in humans in the forward direction.
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10902323

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10908394
Twitter's YoY revenue growth is pretty respectable. I don't think they've 'failed to monetize'. (User growth, now that's a different story...)
If I'm reading it correctly, this comment not only smears an entire population, but uses a deadly disease as the occasion to do it. That's beyond the pale and will get your account banned if you do it again.

Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
Well, to be fair, Color did not make anyone any money. The company sold in a fire-sale for less than the amount raised; and the only thing that founders / employees likely got out of it was a mediocre retention bonus.

Not to mention, the idea wasn't necessarily worthless. It wasn't any worse than, say, Instagram. We only remember it that way because Instagram succeeded and Color failed.
> I find (black) coffee starts going bitter/sour if not drunk soon enough.

The litmus test of good coffee: is it still nice to drink once it's cooled down to room temperature? If it's undrinkable when lukewarm, it's bad coffee hidden by the fact that your taste buds don't work very well at 85°C. Same goes for people who drink vodka chilled to -15°C, it's to avoid actually tasting the vodka.
Sounds like more Netflix through hotel set top boxes is in the works (e.g., http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2487505,00.asp).
Poor Crassus; he didn't have a phone at all!
All fair points! Though I'd argue that ecommerce has been challenging—Zulilly went from IPO to salvage sale in about a year, compared to that Wayfair's slow but steady growth is a success!

The TripAdvisor/Yelp comp is great—they're direct competitors. TA also didn't really launch in its current form until 2002 so it's not as unfair as it appears on first glance!
Does HN have a swearing policy?

I don't think so. I think as long as you aren't cussing "at" someone, you are probably fine. Personal attacks are not okay. That is not what you are doing here.
Do you really believe that Uber is capturing $500 million out of SF alone? This number is totally unbelievable (and unverifiable), but even if it were true where is the evidence that this is not the result of a pathologically defective taxi market in SF.

edit. The comments on this story sum up the ludicrous nature of this $500 million dollar revenue [1] - $625 per person per year!

1. http://sfist.com/2015/01/19/uber_says_sf_revenues_are_500_mi...
you don't do frequent start/stops, route change midway, conferences with judges/observers/coach/journalists/etc.
What you describe is pure waterfall - you have the preset target/route, you work out the plan and you execute it.
It's amazing the amount shit people will write about government, either they are a shill or brain dead.
Sure, technical innovations and engineering are creating wealth. Building upp walled gardens of capital assets to be traded as chess pieces in the game of dominance over resources does not, that part (and when it comes to y-combinator that is the major part) is probably destroying more wealth than it creates.
Why does it need to be updated? Valgrind is that rare piece of software that always has been working absolutely flawlessly for me.
I would argue that this article may actually harm your efforts at attracting better candidates.

The slackbot responses are equivalent to public shaming for using a widely accepted gender neutral phrase to address a group of people.

This makes 18F seem like a highly PC environment to work in.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 (856 points, 385 comments)
So are you paying for these prizes out of pocket? What's your goal?
Site is down but based on the domain and your description, I like where your head is at.

Limiting it to $1 items might be too low IMO. One place I enjoy browsing is this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonunder5
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906561 and marked it off-topic.
I think the main point I disagreed with are the examples he gives of "good inequality", like Facebook and Google. Yes, these companies are producing value. That's how you make your first ten million. But to make billions, you position yourself as a gatekeeper to something and take a cut of everything passing through the gate. This is no longer analogous to a carpenter making chairs.
Patenting Pedagogy?
> helps us attract better candidates

I'd be curious to know if better programmers recoil at the gender-neutral "guys."
Are you talking about the TV show? I didn't watch it (too busy with college) but was under the impression that it was fictional TV drama.
I am strongly in favor of switching over to y'all, but then again I came from the south.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906561 and marked it off-topic.
The first two methods were dead on arrival with copy ][+'s track copier. It could do whole track copies as long as it could identify a starting point for the track. Later versions were even smart enough to use a simple substitution database, and sector location information (for sectors stored on quarter tracks) to tweak the track data as it was copied. I always wondered how they avoided legal action with that database which asked if the disk you were trying to copy was one of the hundred or so it knew how to "crack".

Reminds me of another piece of modern software still in use by a lot of people, which pulls disk metadata from an internet database for similar purposes.
My thoughts exactly! Etsy seems like a perfect business for someone like eBay to snap up. Though I could see Amazon having an interest, too.
I would find such a bot REALLY annoying. And I have a hard time imagining how others would not, unless they had already tried to put themselves on a guy-less diet.

Since this is a post about "how we work", I would imagine that I would initially get really annoyed, and then be reminded by how it is just a front for social pressure from colleagues/higher-ups. Then when someone asks about how such a reminder has been working for me, I'd just say Great! Really kept me on my toes, such an effective reminder. ...

Not that I even use "guys" that much in any case (or English in daily life!).
Many people tend to think of BI as a solution to a world where scarcity is no longer that much of an issue. In a world where a lot of wealth is created by automation, the picture starts to look different, to the extent that BI becomes not just desirable, but inevitable. At that point, it shouldn't matter too much if those people choose to stay unproductive.

But even now, while those people may not produce, they would certainly still have to consume. So there is some economic activity created. The question, of course, is whether it's enough to support the greater economy and if the incentives to do extra work are good enough.

Also, I sincerely doubt that these people you talk about are the norm. As mentioned in the article, there's certainly evidence that people may tend to get more education, act more creatively, and pursue productivity at a higher rate when they are removed from the fear of poverty – likely because basic needs are met and aren't a primary source of stress.
I see this figure around a lot, does anyone have a pointer to the actual study? I got as far as a book called "Preparing Heirs: Five Steps to a Successful Transition of Family Wealth and Values", no detail on the actual study.
I also read that a lot of Icelanders subscribe to the idea that God kicked off the Big Bang, so the 93% there does contain theists.

Iceland has a relatively low population (~300,000) with the highest internet adoption rate per capita in the world. I wonder if it would be very hard to just poll them all.
> Uber came out of the gate with war chests from investors

How the hell did Uber manage to convince investors to fund them so before they showed success?
That is the basic problem with show and tell with a low-level language.
You either have a simple working example, with a dozen edge cases not caught.
Or you have the usual check-hedge growth around Input and Output - which makes the Code hard to read.
They chose the correct examples for the task- thus they where right, and your expert was wrong.
Comma operator
airbnb has a real problem: VRBO. VRBO is routinely cheaper than airbnb, has been around longer, and doesn't have the legal issues, and has the support of the baby boomers. Good luck, airbnb.
So, basically, get the seeds right, then plant, water, and tend. Don't get crappy seed ideas and try to overcome their deficiencies with some kind of fertilizer. (fertilizer AKA "manure"/bs.)
There are a few! Ice9 used to be pretty good, but I don't know how well maintained it is these days. Cruncher's is well maintained but sparsely populated.

http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/

http://cruncherstw.blogspot.com/

Here's another list:

http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Jumpgate

I think I might just dust off my copy of SWATH and go exploring. :)
FSM may be a better fit for this specific application, though.
It's down again :)
All of these approaches are used to take advantage of the email deliverability rates of large reputable companies that send lots of email. Paypal is a new one, but Hotmail and Facebook have in the past been used for similar things. With Hotmail, you could define a custom "I've changed my email address" message, which would contain your spam message, and then it would send it to up to 5,000 "contacts" for you with near-100% deliverability. Some people automated this, and with that they were able send millions of messages per day. I haven't looked recently, but Facebook's "invite friends" feature has been used similarly in the past.
Just hosting a git repository is pretty trivial. If you want to also have a web-based interface, there's GitLab Community Edition: https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/

EDIT: to just have SSH access to git on a server, see this: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protoco...
down again
I would like a game that is neither a hallway to walkdown (albeit twisted) nor a flat open plane with objects on it.

That is, complex geometry and architecture that seems like it wasn't just designed for the current mission; an open world that isn't full of doors that don't open and windows that don't break. I want a million functionally unnecessary ways to do things.
> stronger measures if you were involved in organising the protest, though.

Burner phones bought in cash from one of the little independent shops we have all over (here in the UK anyway) with pre-paid sims - not a new idea I saw it cropping up in fiction 20 or more years ago but still effective, used for a day or two and then dumped.

Isn't it tragic that the way you have to protect yourself from the state when organising a legal protest is pretty much the same way you would do it if you where a drug dealer or a terrorist (at least a reasonably smart one).
I am curious if the DDoS attacks mentioned in the article are in any way correlated to Linode's recent downtime (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806686). The timing fits...
I think what we need is a metric for government policy that isn't GDP growth. Instead it should be GDP of the bottom X% of the population. I used to think X% was 10% but now I think maybe X=50% or even X=90% might be the right answer. This is by nature redistributive, but it accepts inequality if it raises those at the bottom.

As an addendum I think this metric should be global wealth not national wealth but that's not going to happen in the current world of nation states.
Let's forget the original essay for a moment. Can you help me understand your comment? Why would we want to wave off measuring inequality, but not wave off inequality itself?
I respond to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905733
Food-Delivery Startup DoorDash Eats Its Words in Fundraising Talks
I'm not great at naming.