skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are about 144 unicorns right now. If only 10% break out, that's only 14 companies that will really make it.

Doesn't this ratio seem about right for any basket of unprofitable (or even zero-revenue) high-growth companies regardless of valuation? If those 14 winner companies average greater than a 10x return then everything pans out as expected--lots of risky investments together produce a reliable if more modest return on investment.

It seems like the only abnormal aspect is the size of the valuations, but that might be just what happens in a low interest rate environment--too much money chasing too few deals. Whether this affects this success rate of these investments remains to be seen I guess.
Today's homepage and the recent news got me thinking of this old video. Everything is on fire but everything is still going well. Not just well the market and stable businesses are much better now than 2007.
It's more complicated than a hash, but who knows what their proprietary engine uses. Here are some guesses. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-algorithm-used-by-Googles-...

Regardless of how that process works, once Google scrapes an image, they can store some metadata similar to the output of your software, so that it may be used for sorting the much smaller set of images returned by the image similarity algorithm. The top result can then be deemed the "most original" image since it contains the most detail, and the webpage it was found on can get a boost of pagerank or something.
Incredible just how many mobile apps dont use ssl either...
How is plusMonths(1).plusDays(1) obscure in any way? You could show that to my grandparents and they would be able to guess what it does. "+1m1d" on the other hand they wouldn't have a clue.

Length, in either direction, does not correlate to "clean". Clarity and intent does. Clean Coder (http://www.amazon.ca/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmans...) does a fantastic job talking about this, it's worth picking up if you haven't read it in the past.
I think a lot of Europeans suffer over their keyboard layouts. I am Norwegian and a software developer. I hate Norwegian keyboard layout. It makes programming so much more awkward because the {}, [] and ; symbols used a lot in programming are not easily accessible.

There is also a kind of tyranny in how computer companies deal with language. It is next to impossible to get an english layout Apple keyboard in Norway. Also Apple, and I pretty sure MS does the same treat language as a totally binary thing. Like either you write only english or only german, norwegian, french or whatever.

For the non english speakers among us, especially those from small countries like Norway we mix in a lot of english in our writing. But spell checking software isn't really designed to handle that.
>The money injected by the Fed will eventually be absorbed by inflation and the Fed reversing course and raising rates to suck money out of the market. But inflation's been low and the Fed's only done a single, very recent increase in interest rates, so "eventually" hasn't arrived yet.

Do you understand the relationship between interest rates and inflation?
This causes excruciating pain when coding, as you can't type a single ', ", or ~ without an obligatory space after it.

Instead, I usually install the "Pseudo VT320" keyboard layout from here: http://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ , which makes the AltGr key act like the Compose key on a Unix keyboard.

The Mac keyboard is also bearable.
JavaScript web apps are fine, as long as they are "isomorphic", i.e. the front-end code is also run on the server and the resulting HTML is sent to the client, and as long as it's possible to at least navigate to and read all the content without having JavaScript enabled.
I was thinking: Docker. Hmm. Containers. Hmmmm. Xen developers. Hmmmmm. Seemed really boring until I saw " Anil Madhavapeddy, the CTO of Unikernel Systems." Oh... I know that name: it's on quite a few IT/INFOSEC papers I stashed and shared over the years. A smart researcher with a practical focus. Didn't know he was CTOing at a startup.

Yeah, Docker is about to get some enhancements for sure. Maybe some real security improvements, too. You can count on it.
Containers and unikernels: better together
If you find a way to do this, please let me know. For bonus points you should follow Roubaud's principle whereby the code "speaks" about its own algorithms.
>Driving is a privilege.

And yet, at least in the more spread out areas of the US, it is far more a necessity than voting. Why is it a privilege while voting is not?

And as for differences, the basics of consent is consistent across where ever that consent is being applied. That the harms of violations of consent may differ does not change that.
good riddance indeed!

what sucks about AZERTY too is that very common strokes require modifiers

- the `.` (point) requires a shift key!
- for `@` you need "alt gr"
- top-row numbers need a shift. especially annoying if the keyboard does not have a number pad

ugh..
How Behavioral and Contextual Security Keep Your Mobile Information Safe
Why Content Marketing in Fashion Is an Obvious Trend
> if you accept that health benefits can outweigh personal freedom, where do you draw the line?

When they stop doing so, of course. It depends on how much you value different kinds of personal freedom.

I for example believe that it would be reasonable to tax unhealthy food more than healthy food and have people who are overweight pay more for their health insurance. But I don't think that tracking everyone's movement outweighs potential benefits from taxing lack of physical activity.
If you want corporations acting in the public good, form Public Benefit Companies[1]. Until then, there is no reason to sacrifice shareholder confidence or profit potential to make the world a better place.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation
By this logic, every dollar abroad should be worth only 50 cent in the price of a share - after all, that's the real value of that cash after all taxes (contrasted to the accounting value of the dollars on the companies' annual report).
The comment you replied to isn't saying that all corporations serve the public good, it is saying that the grant of limited liability only makes sense if corporations in general end up being beneficial. If they aren't beneficial, we should stop granting investors limited liability.
Development boards are not meant to be "funny", they're meant to expose all the features of a given CPU (or, more commonly SoC).

This is for embedded users, who typically add the processor chip to their own products, i.e. they are not intended to be end-user personal computers for general purpose use.
PE is going to have completely different dynamics as far as industry allocations. I would love to see an example of a pension fund with a 20% allocation to tech. And if you're talking about a federal bailout, this is likely going to be a public pension fund which makes it even more unlikely.
>Surely, they were asked about this by shareholders?

Except it's the hot, new Silicon Valley thing to structure your company as to not give your shareholders any power or voting rights.
Agreed. The JS community has some great people but in general it's very immature.
Currency controls (taxing money movements out of a country) have serious problems. Foreign investment would dry up because they won't want any profits or capital gains taxed on exit. Domestic firms will suffer a severe penalty on trying to invest abroad, giving foreign companies that can a big competitive advantage. Buying foreign stuff would become more expensive, so the cost of foreign made goods would shoot up, also the cost of imported parts and commodities for local industries would rocket, killing domestic industry competitiveness. You'd have to also tax assets and goods moved abroad because otherwise people would buy stuff locally and sell it abroad as a tax dodge. Basically your whole economy would become massively distorted.
> The correlation between the market and seed stage investing should be fairly direct and clear.

The money can only be in one place at a time though. If you pull money out of publicly traded stocks, wouldn't that mean you have more money for angel activities? Although, when the market is way down, that's a great buying opportunity, so is that when angel investors stop putting money into startups and instead go on a stock buying spree?
Announcement in 2014: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.programming.lit...

More on TexiWEB: http://benpfaff.org/uniformity/uniformity-2001.04.27.text
You're right. The concentration of firearms can in no way affect the rate of gun crime in this country.
The economy grows and you get inflation when interest rates are lowered. It shrinks and you are likely to get deflation when rates are raised. The rate lever was getting reduced over the last 30 years and is not at zero. Anyone can see the only way for rates to go is up, and the value of cash is likely to increase in the near future. I honestly don't see any need for mystery in that.

There's also the notion that a companies stock price should be tied to its dividends, or at the very least it's ability to pay a dividend. If you want to buy low/sell high, you're assuming you are smarter than other people. If you want to buy and get income from dividends/profits you are a more realistic investor and will be interested in the P/E ratio. A hoard of cash is going to help stabilize the stock price - market cap should never fall below the value of the assets.
Exactly. They've been doing exemplary work. I especially like that, upon hearing of language-related obstacles, they try to actually fix or work around them instead of throwing up hands and defaulting to C or C++.
I'm not really surprised by this. Starting to smoke and continuing to smoke are bad life choices and indicate a lack of will power and long-term thinking. Yes, cigarettes are incredibly addictive and quitting is hard (I smoked for 6 years when I was a teen and young adult). The same poor life choices and lack of long-term planning also lead to a low-income existence. Not applying yourself in school because you'd rather "have fun now." Not attending college. Not eating healthy foods. Not exercising. Smoking cigarettes. The fact that these things are all related shouldn't be a mystery or revelation. Poor people smoke more because poor people make bad choices in general.
When everybody is thinking that way about capital purchases, you get a deflationary spiral...
I would used a custom connector for the power adapted. Powerline ethernet is slow and messy. Pretty much any laptop uses a custom port anyway so that wouldn't be a problem in itself.

In fact Surface does pretty much that:
https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/accessories/surface-...
except that it comes with a very short cable which makes it unsuitable for sofas or beds.
"Ports of a handful of Linux variants including FreeBSD are well underway..."

When did FreeBSD become a Linux variant?
> Most web apps I work with daily have highly sophisticated in-browser interactions that are built with JavaScript and can only be built with JavaScript: Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, GMail etc.

Highly sophisticated browser interactions? You mean adding a comment? Which you actually just did on Hacker news using zero javascript.

None of those sites need or require a lot of Javascript. In fact, when I use Gmail I have the standard html version set to default. It's much faster and time to inbox is faster.
That $150 trillion - is that book value, or fair value?
AFNOR is France's International Organization for Standardization (ISO) member body. They're also a non-profit.
There is some cronyism in France but I'm not so sure it's the case here.
That's not absolute debt, that is debt relative to GDP as a percentage. Its a measure of, effectively, how long it would take the US to pay off its debt if it forced itself to operate in the green, since there is a limit on how much you can tax out of an economy without causing it to contract, and GDP is a flawed but relative measure of what you can potentially tax.
Show HN: Understand Encryption Quickly for Beginners
Let me clarify what I mean by "JavaScript-free": they don't want any of their employees writing JavaScript by hand anymore, whether it be ES6, ES2015, or ES2020. TypeScript and Flow are supersets, but Clojure (and many other compile-to-JavaScript languages) are completely different.
As a friend of mine said when I was interviewing with her to escape the 100-hour-week death march at the "unicorn" I was at: "You're not a unicorn until someone buys you for $1 billion."

They may be valued at $1B+, but they're not worth that much.
> where do you draw the line?

Somewhere around harmful (not just unhealthy) addictive substances.

(Philosophical(?) question: is it personal freedom when you're addicted?)
How to Redesign an Email Digest: Lessons Learned from Studio Science
x.ai is a Machine Learning company. We'll price at FREE to $9.

Clara is an software powered outsourcing company. They price at $200 to $500
Quantum Computing for Everyone
this is a new one http://www.everlaw.com/
An unrelated question, if I may...

When evaluating a startup in a given area, how do you bridge the gap between your expertise in that area, and that which is required to assess the opportunity?

Obviously the startup founders will always project the fields of gold ripe for the taking, so you can't blindly trust that. Do you only invest in the field you know well? Do you look for behavioral clues? Do you look for your or their peers' decision? Do you look for what's in trend, or counter trend?

It seems like a super tough problem, yet it hardly ever gets discussed...
I used the write up on customer development interviews in the Running Lean book as a starting point. As another person stated below, its all about listening.
Ask HN: What do you think about the messaging hype?
Hi HN,

recently, we have seen outburst of new messaging apps and it seems like everyone is going nuts about new messaging apps and platform. Slack, Messenger, Promtpapp - you name it. It all seems like messaging is becoming new channel for interaction with services of all kinds. Apparently they are trying to follow success of Chinese WeChat or Slack in the B2B arena.

I haven't really seen live discussion here lately about this phenomena. Do you guys think that this is really new era, which can follow similar pattern as opening of Apple's and Google's app stores?
"excruciating pain" is a bit of hyperbole, don't you think?

Quote keys are still in the home row, it is just a matter of muscle memory to get used to "right pinky at home row, thumb at space bar" to get quotes going.

But I am an emacs user, so maybe I just got used to the composability.
Wow, you could embed entire videos with the data: uri, or run entire web apps with inline javascript with Lotus Notes if they don't sanitize it. Or completely breach their privacy by scanning their LAN for webcam URLs or taking screenshots with WebGL textures using Nvidia driver bugs... nods off and dreams
Meanwhile, Facebook's profitability is still less than a percentage point of its valuation!
They need to make being a part of the action as easy as using a hashtag.

People already watch games with fb open on their phone/laptop so not too much behaviour change needed. Just a smooth way to get people to this part of the platform at the right time, ideas:

I would do this by sending a notification to users who support a team page, when their team is about to play...
Can you give me examples of this? Everything I've used regarding NPM has been awesome. Stupid easy to use and integrate.
The smells, the cold beer (ballpark beer "tastes" different than regular beer.
social media thing (just assume it's this.cm. Mine is an experiment and I don't plan on making money on):

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7¹, 8, 9, 10², 11, 12², 14, 15, 16

¹ not counted, as I'm not the first mover

² debatable

edit: I don't think my Idea is an easy opportunity to make money because of the network effect (which ironically makes tick a few of the points), making it hard to gain critical mass. And It's also hard because of the existing, well defended, monopolies and big players.
Second largest mobile operator in Nepal has run out of fuel
Isn't it interesting how "people of color" is a common self-designation for (most frequently) black people, whereas "colored people", literally synonymous, is considered offensive? Of course there are valid historical reasons for it, but many people (probably including GP) don't know about them.

The euphemism treadmill can get quite exhausting.
>But valuations are so frothy right now that it's difficult to tell the strong companies from the ones that won't survive "when the tide goes out."

There seems to be some contradiction here: you seem to say valuations don't matter, but also that you're worried about them. How do valuations prevent you from spotting a good company?
How? If they owe you 10 $ and they pay you 10 $ it doesn't seem like the 10 $ got withdrawn. Quite the opposite actually.
Blank Keycaps is the way.
>Can't upvote hard enough. Applications on the web are amazing, and developers must embrace JavaScript heavily.

So how's it going in JS land, are you guys still reimplementing Windows 3.1's message passing loop and hailing it as a revolution ? :^)

Or maybe you're still busy pulling in literally 10+MBs of code on top of a 100+MB browser to fix the shortcomings of what is a terrible language ?

Or maybe you're busy trying to get performances that matches what a 68060 could do thirty years ago. Oh right, browser vendors had to agree on WASM to get OK performance. So basically, not Javascript.

But hey, I guess it's crossplatform. Kind of.

But promised, once transpilers are good enough, once I can use a good, strongly staticly typed language, once the APIs are stable and the tooling becomes tolerable, I'll join the SPA side.
And they sure as shit won't throw a bone to employees (whose wages have been stagnant for a decade)

Labor rates have been stagnant for a decade -> disposable income is eaten up be inflation -> consumers have less money to spend on new and novel products and services -> there's less incentive to invent new and novel products and services -> there's no innovative companies to invest in -> companies pile up cash in banks, but don't think to invest in their employees
Bringing a Modern JavaScript Build Pipeline
Then they would have to keep stock at the 'dealerships'. They will soon have 3 models, with various configurations. Allowing enough selection for someone to "drive off that day" with a car would require expansion of the dealerships.
> The US has never eliminated its debt, nor should it; that would essentially mean withdrawing the US dollar from circulation.

To the best of my knowledge, the standard debt calculations do not include outstanding currency, though they do include outstanding bonds.
Yep... It was "poor", middle class, and rich people who took out those loans.
Wouldn’t that be hard to write French given that there are é/è/à everywhere?
The trick is, you don't invest during the downturn, hence all the cash hoarding.

You invest after it bottoms out for a while. Macro economies do not recover like a rocket, the window to invest is very large, so large that if you only recognized the bottoming out a couple years later, you still haven't missed the opportunity.
I don't get it. The article does not point out even an attempt to ask the leaders of the said corporations - "Why?".

Its better to ask to get some semblance of their thinking instead of pure speculation.
Your own link says there's no scientific evidence that medical ultrasound does any damage. It just keeps repeating "unconfirmed", as if that has any significance.
I agree with that but you implied poor people were talking out million dollar house loans.
Most of those initiative are not targeted at the consumer level
5 years of WeChat: Journey from 0 to 650M MAUs
If you were planning to donate because of NTP specifically, are you aware of the Network Time Foundation [0] that supports both the NTP Project (the original reference implementation), the Ntimed Project (phk's rewrite), and other related projects?

[0]: http://www.networktimefoundation.org
Agree 100%; I made similar points in a reply to that answer:

https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Uber-allow-customers-to-pre...
Data breach numbers still high in 2015
Isn't that something any website can do right now?
You need more images. I don't see a single image of it in action.
http://www.brienz-rothorn-bahn.ch/en/experience/railway.html
>To me, it seems like some people are looking forward and are excited about a silicon Valley collapse.

There is absolutely this attitude present. I've heard it both in the Midwest and out west in San Francisco and Oakland both.

I can even understand it to an extant, because although I am in the not-a-bubble camp, I am annoyed when I see media and others acting like "Uber for pizza" is a mind-blowing idea.
In real terms, wages have been stagnant since 1981-ish.
One theory I'm currently fond of is that the band of growth where unicorns live ($100mil -> $1bil in valuation) used to be accessible to the public markets, but it's recently only become available to private investors.

This creates weird distortions in investment behavior, because it means investments seeking this behavior have to trickle down to VC or acquisition. This could be way this comes about -- by investing in Google or Apple, you're effectively investing in a 10-year VC fund. Sure they're sitting on a lot, but hopefully they make enough acquisitions with it + "raise" enough more during that time that it looks like the cash is going to work.
Let me know if you have any questions
This is a popular idea on HN and just gets upvoted because people want to agree with this and it makes them happy for some reason, but this article is not a good article. It's basically just a quote. I think any kind of the-sky-is-falling article has the chance to get good traction on HN lately without offering anything meaningful. The discussions in this thread are pretty poor and the article is poor.
So where is the equivalent graph showing the rate of growth of assets as a percentage of GDP?

It's one sided accounting that people love to trot out as a big scary thing. The net worth of the US is growing; what else matters?
What an overly simplistic view of what makes design good (as if that can even be defined).

Taking any advice from a designer at Facebook is a dangerous game to play. It's very likely you work for a company that is structured entirely differently than anything close to Facebook. What makes design "good" at your company is going to depend wholeheartedly on the market you serve (which is not going to be 1 billion people large).
Of course it can be done with page refreshes, but it would be a worse user experience to do so.
Here's a map of where to order your keyboard: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Latin_keyboard_layou... . Also, QWERTY is dominant in Poland nowadays; other options are the Baltics, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Spain.
awesome tool!
You're right that it's probably discounted somehow by some investors, but it's also worth it's full value if they choose to spend it abroad, so it's not necessarily worth exactly what it would be worth if they repatriated it and paid it out as dividends. The discount depends on what the shareholders think will happen to the money, and I don't think anyone is predicting repatriation any time soon.
This is a DVORAK-like layout. We have the same for French-speaking countries, namely the BÉPO.

I tried switching to it, but I couldn't after a few weeks for three reasons:

- I type slower on other's people keyboards when I have to change frequently of layout (I use a Spanish QWERTY layout so it isn't as different);

- My phone doesn't have the layout, so more switching;

- The shortcuts aren't as convenient (Ctrl+c/v/t/etc.).