skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"they're beneficially aligned with the future"

how's that divide between the rich and poor going? The fed has been upwardly redistributing wealth especially dramatically for the last 40 years since when the Nixon closed the gold window. I suppose if you think creating a kleptocratic state is beneficial for the future, then your statement rings true.
Involving people to treat their pet with current medicine looks like borderline impossible. If people think their dog will suffer they will skip that.

And research funding is probably conservative, since mice is the 'less bad' idea, money flow this way. Some competition may help changing habits.
How Hackers Took Down the Ukranian Power Grid
I wouldn't be surprised if Etsy is acquired now that the share price is beaten down. Seems like a good fit for eBay (it would provide much needed relevance) or Amazon. It's a good brand name, but not much else.
> The Google hiring process emerges as the most difficult, while you can apparently just walk into IBM and take a desk, since the difficulty factor at Big Blue is less than half that of its nearest stablemate, Yelp.

That's not at all what the graph says (although with the ranges chosen, that's what it looks like). IBM shows a difficulty of 2.7, and Yelp shows a difficulty of 2.9.
We're presented with two differing views of inequality.

PG uses his unique experience in funding and producing thousands of companies, resulting in a real dent in the economy.

On the other side, we have a journalist who demonizes the PG and backs up his view using academic statistics.

If you feel statistics from certain academics have more weight to you than pragmatic experience from the likes of Paaul Graham, by all means side with the journalist's view, and advocate for reducing inequality by reducing wealth and startups.
Ha! That's the only image I used on the page. I changed the mouse pointer to be the image of the car. I'm really surprised you can still change the cursor to an image.
Cherrypicked vs. cherrypicked.

The only way to settle this is for someone to make a weighted index of tech IPOs in the last n years.
> What are you trying to prove, that it wasn't profitable?

I'm trying to tell you that your chosen definition of "profitable" is utterly meaningless in a discussion of economics, but you have completely closed your mind to this idea. You don't seem to understand inflation, interest rates, opportunity cost, or the difference between accounting profit and economic profit [1]. Therefore, I can't proceed with this conversation.

[1]: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
this is only surprising if you are also out of touch with reality

I wonder if we can quantify a higher incidence of surprise in the Bay Area startup scene?
I think an important step is to identify the critical pieces of work that need to occur in order to maintain whatever standard of living a basic income is expected to provide. Then, you need to somehow ensure that the work that is needed to be done is actually done.
There is an air of defensiveness to pg's original essay. It's saying "Hey, we are producing extreme inequality, but we're doing it by actually making valuable stuff, so don't blame us!" And his solutions, which are generally ignored by the critics, make sense. But, as this article points out, he missed a core assumption - in his defensiveness about the productive inequality of Silicon Valley, he missed that the vast majority of the growth in inequality comes from nasty rent-seeking behavior. He acknowledged that such behavior is dishonest and kind of criminal, but he failed to acknowledge its scope. So the WP article has a fair criticism here.

Unfortunately, the WP article also couches its fair criticism in the usual point-missing, inflammatory finger-pointing crap that most critiques of his essay have done. It could have risen above on the strength of its facts, but it chose the mud. Sigh.
I find your assessment of what he said to be generous, but even in that, he's still a multi-millionaire saying, "Sure, let's fight poverty but not in a way that affects that the rich (people like me) are getting richer."

If he was half as clever as you're trying to make him, he would have just focused on the "underlying causes" and left the rest alone.
That's a hard problem to solve and very valuable. If you make progress please email me, ryan@flexport.com. I will connect you with a bunch of potential customers, including the largest importer in America who asked us to do this for them.
Bill Clinton rape accuser blasts Hillary for presidential campaign
Saying "it's not about envy" doesn't actually demonstrate that it isn't. There certainly isn't anything besides envy hiding behind the notion of a "fair share" of someone else's property.

Just own it. There is nothing wrong with being envious despite attempts to shame people for it.

And bear in mind that no problems are ever solved if you refuse to acknowledge what they really are.
I honestly think PG and the WaPo writer are in agreement: encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship is good and shouldn't be targeted by new regulations, rent-seeking behaviour is bad and should be targeted by regulators.

For PG, the former (startups) is clearly a huge source of wealth, whereas the latter is just a proposition. In the quote you cited, he literally qualified the idea of corporations engaging in anti-competitive behaviour with "if", as if this is some unproven supposition. It's clear he thinks startups are the larger effect.

For the WaPo writer, rent-seeking is most of the inequality growth and startups are a small piece. But this writer has some data to backup his assertions, while PG doesn't. I understand where PG went wrong - he's a startup investor. He's surrounded himself with startups for the last decade. Intuitively, he overestimated their impact relative to, say, banker bonuses, something he doesn't encounter regularly. That's natural.
Their lock-in is their network effects. Airbnb has a huge selection of locations in many major cities around the world. Uber has an incredible number of drivers and riders on the system globally at all times of the day. Competitors will have a very hard time replicating that.
I see in later replies that this was for a previous study but it would be pretty interesting to find a mab that had any oral bioavailability.
Twitter's able to monetize; it's just not able to sustain user growth.
Send notifications from the cli using well-known or modern services
When all the academics say the same, than maybe some should start listening. But it is of course easier to denunciate other opinions.

<Irony>Also many academics in Europe say, that climate change is happening -- shame on Europe! What academics from Europe say, must be wrong!

And of course "leftist views" are also wrong all the time. Don't listen to those that are called leftist or similar in Fox News or other trustworthy channels.
</Irony>
No - he's asking people to correctly identify the problem first.
Fun to see an article here from Business for Scotland, a pro-Scottish independence group.
FCC International Bureau Removes Cuba from the Exclusion List
Indeed this would seem to be the case. I don't know how well this translates to a country like Finland, where there are a lot of social programs/controls in place already. I would really like to see a strong analysis of the inflation consequences of UBI.
I'm the founder of a startup working on free software applications.

Making money off free software infrastructure is hard, because infrastructure is meant to be used by developers. A developer knows (or can learn) how to implement, manage, and maintain your piece of free software infrastructure, so how can you convince a developer to pay you for support?

Applications, on the other hand, can be targeted at non-developers. These users can convince themselves or their bosses that your free (as in freedom) application is worth paying for, so you can make it run smoothly and let them focus on running their business.

The only solution I can think of is for free software infrastructure developers to set up foundations which can take donations, and for application developers to support the infrastructure projects they depend upon.

One of the best examples of this is the Django Software Foundation. I made a donation last month, and I haven't even started making money.
TSLA is a different beast, I think should be excluded. The rest are fair.
Is there a database of statistics on starvation in the US? Genuinely curious.
> That has always been the VC-funded startup model.

No it hasn't. Intel, Apple, 3Com, Compaq, DEC, and Lotus are all companies that took venture capital to get started. They are also all companies whose business model was "make things and then sell them for more than they cost to make" instead of "aggregate a lot of eyeballs and then figure out how to make money off them later." There's nothing special about venture capital that requires one model or the other.

What's changed is the underlying need for venture capital in the first place. It was originally needed because the things startups wanted to make and sell required a huge up-front investment to get started -- building fabs or factories, hiring lots of engineers and programmers, etc. There was just no way to bootstrap a business that needed so much cash up front, so VC money made businesses possible that otherwise could not have ever gotten off the ground.

Nowadays the cost lots of that stuff that people had to expensively do for themselves has been commoditized down to nearly nothing, so nobody really needs VC just to get started anymore. What they need VC for is to get big faster than their competitors, in order to muscle those competitors out of the marketplace. And VCs need horses to bet on, so when all the horses are running the "get big fast" game, their money is going to flow towards the companies that show the best possibility of getting big fast. Which is to say, companies that make stuff and then give it away for free.

And there's a prisoner's dilemma element to that -- if you are the one VC who's still interested in funding companies that make stuff to sell at a profit, your investments will get clobbered by competitors funded by all the other VCs who are giving it away. So you have to play the game, whether you want to or not.
1) You want to know where the shipment is
2) You want to know what's inside the boxes
3) You want to know its customs status
4) You want to be able to re-route it in real-time to move the goods to adapt to customer demand.
> I don't expect Tim Berners-Lee to agree to this, given he was the one who championed DRM at W3C in the first place.

The W3C is in a somewhat awkward place, really. To some degree, the W3C is beholden to its member organisations, and if they want to do something it frequently happens. That said, it's easier to refuse to work on something than to work on something the majority of members don't want (HTML comes to mind there!).

> Also, I don't expect Mozilla to do anything useful, given they went along with it so easily. But then, I haven't expected anything much of Mozilla in a long while.

I think people vastly overestimate how much influence Mozilla actually has. Look at how long Mozilla held out against H.264, and all that did was cause them to lose marketshare (because plenty of HTML video simply wouldn't play in Firefox) with no affect on the web as a platform.
GoPro's stock still has positive EPS and a healthy EPS
I believe almost everything in the public education "stack" should be open. That would go a long way toward equalizing the opportunities available to students and staff in public schools. There is plenty of funding available for education-related products, but most of that is steered toward private companies. The quality of these products is often abysmal, particularly in the UI/ UX area and interoperability.
At that rate you can buy a really nice superautomatic coffee machine, say a Jura Impressa J9 OneTouch, and break even in less than one year. The ROI would be huge; not only are you saving money after just 9 months, you're saving the time of the person doing the coffee run, and people get fresher and better tasting coffee. Whenever they want.
When I was a teenager back in the 90s, one of the first people I met online was a bulimic girl from Indiana with a distorted view of her body. I was interested in programming and taught myself to write scripts for the Windows IRC client mIRC. She would constantly mention how "fat" she thought she was. I would always dutifully respond "No, you aren't fat", naively thinking that might help her condition.

One day I decided to automate this process. I created an event handler when the word "fat" was said that would perform /msg $$1 "no, you aren't fat". However, I failed to add a variable delay in seconds, so it was quickly obvious to her that it was automated. She was a smart woman, so she wrote a simple loop like:

while(1) { /msg redwards510 fat }

and executed it. This would cause us both to instantly get disconnected due to "Excess Flood". I decided to disable it after that.
That's incorrect. Wall Street thinks the Alibaba stake, Yahoo Japan stake and its cash holdings are worth less than their face value - as is always the case (see: how EMC's VMWare stake has always been discounted historically). For numerous reasons, the most obvious of which is: investors can never realize the entire face value of those holdings, so they never give a $1 to $1 value to them.

We can simplify this really fast: give me one example of a public company of even remotely similar financials trading with a negative market cap in the last ~30 years in the US equity markets.
So the artist's impression of the supernova from 10,000 light years away is almost equivalent to the looks of our Sun from Earth. So do you think that this would heat the planet the same amount as our Sun heats the Earth?
Buy your house before you quit. You may get a lot of extra costs along the way before you get the ball rolling.
TOP 10 HackerNews posts per year using Google Big Query
I honestly have no clue how someone can claim to be schooled in economics and yet be so wrong.

Have you been hiding away for the last 7 years? There are so many objections to central banks its difficult to know where to start, but just one question, you truly believe any group is capable of making gross monetary decisions that affect billions of people didn't we go with capitalism because markets beat kings?
The article has some good points, but it has some weak arguments, specifically its "evidence" for correlation between executive pay and union membership as evidence that workers are paid less, that's somewhat of a jump. Also, there's this

> Total venture capital funding remains well below late-1990s levels, even before you adjust for inflation

You mean the dot-com bubble???? Not the best thing to compare to...

Regardless of these, the article makes a good point, specifically with the 86% of income gains that are "not explained" by entrepreneurship...may be the goal shouldn't be attacking income inequality specifically as much as it should be rent-seeking.
Tesla is worrisome, but they backed off some on the automation. Everybody else who has Tesla-level autodrive (NHTSB level 2, or lane keeping plus radar cruise control) has sensors to make sure the driver has hands on the wheel, or is at least in the seat and looking forward. Tesla didn't put that in. Hence those scary Youtube videos.[1]

Cruise (YC 14) is just scary. They still have that advertising video online [2] that totally oversells what they can do. All they have is lane-keeping and smart cruise control, like the other entry level systems. It's automatic driving from the "move fast and break things" crowd; they're from web and app startups.

Google is being cautious and testing heavily. But they're spending enough money to test fast, with many cars on the test track. That's the auto industry way of doing things. It takes money, but not decades, to get it right.

The CEO of Volvo has the liability issue right - when in autodrive, the manufacturer is responsible. If you can't accept that, you shouldn't be doing this.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-autopilot-fail-video...
[2] http://www.getcruise.com/
That's at the extreme. Sure people will always be jealous of the rich, but there's a big difference between everyday jealousy and getting your house repossessed by the bank that got bailed out with your tax dollars a few years earlier after said bank contributed to the financial recession that caused you to miss your mortgage payment and sink into a spiral of debt and payday loans.
In the case of periodic invoicing but you haven't crossed into the billable threshold.

Let's say you get 2 hrs of support per month free, after that it costs $100. If you don't use the full 2 hrs, you'd get a $0 invoice - but there may still be detail and record of work performed (which you would want)
Ah, but would they make more money if they didn't have to spend money on DRM? It costs to implement or license. It creates extra work even if you license it. If your DRM causes damage you might get sued. If you're found out that you're installing malware/rootkit you will suffer bad publicity. You have to pay money to upkeep the DRM servers. You have to pay support people to handle calls when DRM causes problems for your customers. Anyone who paid money will have to deal with all these issues knowing that people who downloaded it from pirate bay don't have to. I remember when Morrowind came out and if you downloaded the cracked executable you'd get a few extra FPS because it lacked DRM.
Why do you think that inequality is driven by the Laffer curve? (I'm not a fan of laffer curve arguments either) Prior to 1920 there was basically zero income tax, and it's hard to argue that in the preceding era, especially 1850-1920, inequality was on the rise. Hell, one segment of the population OWNED another segment of the population.

If you ask me, inequality is generated by the regressive theft of wealth from the poorest segment of the population by a state-run policy of increasing the cost of living. This artificial increase also drives the middle class into various forms of asset-based investment which effectively socialize corporate risk, while disproportionate amount of the gains go to the "capitalist" classes.
Sometimes, ideas become accepted because there is so much evidence in support of them that it would be perverse to believe otherwise (e.g., the Earth is round).

Other times, however, ideas become widely accepted, even entrenched, without any real evidence. Such entrenched beliefs often arise because they support particular political or moral agendas; if the beliefs are falsified, the moral agenda will be threatened.

The academic views on inequality fall firmly in the latter category.
I have a feeling they track you with your Android, and notice when no one uses a particular road, and can check if it's under construction.
Great read. Its incredible what we, as a species have been able to achieve in the last 2 centuries. I feel like we are where scientists were with computers in the 1950s. We are starting to see the big picture, but its wide application is still decades away.
It's pretty hard to produce new viral games at low cost in a consistent fashion.
Matchmaking here seems like a challenge—you're dependent on already having a big network, with the right kinds of people in it.

There are a lot of ways for it to go wrong, eg business competitions, hackathons, etc.
> Are those people you mention actually productive now?

Well, kind of, but only enough to pay rent and eat.

But that's my point, individuals like this, who only work the bare minimum to just keep existing and have no drive or motivation to achieve more, are very likely to just not work anymore at all since their basic needs are now provided.

At the moment, they at least work somewhat. This helps keep local businesses running (even if just barely). With a BI, these folks stop all production and resort to their ideal lifestyle of not doing anything.

It's a little naive to think these individuals will suddenly change in light of all this new-found free time, and run out to create businesses or new things.

We can examine lottery jackpot winners for evidence of what many people would do if they didn't have to worry about money anymore (they do nothing in large part).

I just don't see any scenario where a BI leads to increased productivity like what is being claimed.

In contrast, I can foresee unemployment rates increasing, as fewer individuals participate in the workforce at all (to no determent of themselves, since their standard of living is provided free of cost). This will ultimately put strain on the system since not enough production is happening to offset this behavior, which will lead to drastic measures like dramatically increasing tax rates more and more.

I just don't buy the argument that giving someone a free living without any expectation of productivity in return will lead to a net increase in productivity.
I know. God we, as a species, are very dumb.
There is an article[1] about finding out what location at google maps user is looking at, based on observing TLS packets and nothing else.

If task at hand is to match encrypted connection to a smaller number of alternative (say identify accesses to popular place, like gmail/facebook login page, etc), same technique of observing packet size distribution over time should probably work quite reliably, and cgiproxy will do nothing to hide it.

[1] http://www.ioactive.com/pdfs/SSLTrafficAnalysisOnGoogleMaps....
At least when it comes to economics, the actual leftists are definitely on the fringe.

I don't mean New Keynesian partisans like Paul Krugman. Actual Post-Keynesians (particularly Kaleckians and MMTers) and Marxians are rare, though perhaps growing as a result of the aftermath in 2008. Nevertheless, the Great Depression also had major economic cults emerge like the Townsend Plan and Social Credit which since receded.
Also, Wayfair hasn't seen a huge appreciation and TripAdvisor has been around since 2000 (admittedly, Yelp was founded in 2004). And HubSpot and Wayfair are based in Boston, and have been relatively underhyped.

Facebook, however, has been demonstrably successful since going public, despite the massive SV hype. Zuckerberg and his team deserve full credit for delivering on a successful mobile monetization strategy and making some great acquisitions (particularly Instagram, given its acquisition price and its estimated valuation now.)
Info about the backdoor: https://github.com/alerj78/lucky7coin/issues/1

So, basically, someone re-released a new, modified codebase for an abadoned coin, and they ran it on their servers without proper isolation, so the backdoor could access their other wallets?
i'm using java fibers (https://github.com/kilim/kilim) for a database

for anyone interested in using fibers inside a java webapp, i just wrote up a quick survey of async java servlet performance: http://blog.nqzero.com/2016/01/asynchronous-java-webserver-h...

(based TechEmpower plaintext benchmark, but limited to java async)

the model is that you use async in the server, and then bridge to a fiber implementation and then complete the async response when the fiber completes. for handling high latency low cpu processing on the server, this technique allows handling a huge number of connections
Spacewalk terminated due to spacesuit water leak
Great business, great model, simply overvalued (expectations exceeded reality). Probably a winner in the long run IMO.
It's very common here in the UK to use "guys" with zero connotation of gender. My daughter's gymnastics teachers (an entirely female class) uses it, my daughter's dancing teacher (ditto), my wife with my two daughters, my female employees with our group as a whole.. I veer towards "folks" to play it safe and in respect of people I know who feel strongly about it, but it's quite a modern American concern in my experience.

I find "gang" an odd alternative to suggest in language delicate contexts (i.e. where "guys" is already causing offense) considering it relates to crime.