skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If population ratios are the standard to go by, they are better examples (by that standard) of what outcomes Venezuela could expect than Venezuela is for the US, so offering them as counterexamples in a thread where Venezuela is being held out as a cautionary tale for the US is not inappropriate.
I think you make some interesting points, but I'm not convinced that I agree with all of them.

> I'd be shocked if Dropbox is still in business in 5 years.

I agree that Google Drive, iCloud, Amazon Cloud Drive, Box, etc. are all viable competitors. But (admittedly, anecdotally) everyone I talk to seems to use Dropbox. Personally, I use it on all of my devices.

I also use Box for business-related storage, and Google Drive for presentations, documents, etc. I use Amazon Prime Photos to store my photo roll. I don't think that any of those detract from Dropbox's primary use case of sharing files between different machines. I don't think people think of Dropbox as "cloud storage," but instead as a way to move files back and forth and have constant availability on machines they use.

> Our company actually banned Dropbox.com

I work in information security, and although I haven't banned Dropbox from a network layer, I can certainly relate to the sentiment. You have to remember that it's not just corporate use that caused the Dropbox ban -- your sysadmins also don't want people putting work documents in Dropbox to work on from home, because so many people already use Dropbox in their personal lives. The fact that your organization blocked Dropbox, instead of just saying "we use Google Drive," speaks to the fact that so many people are already happy Dropbox users and would just as soon continue to use it.

That said, I agree with you wholeheartedly that Dropbox, if going for major corporate adoption, will fail in its endeavor. I don't think that Google Drive is the primary competitor -- in my opinion, it's Box. Yes, you have to actually pay for Box, but in many corporate environments, that's not really much of an issue.

Said another way, I predict Dropbox failing in a corporate environment for the same reason they will continue to succeed with personal users: businesses want "cloud storage," and personal users want "easy file share with myself."

Maybe I'll look back on this comment in a few years and see that I was dead wrong, but for now that's where I'd put my money.
The game is totally cool.

It's not just about typespacing. It really tests your eye, eye for compositions and relative distances.

If you can do this ( attain scores 75+ ), you can probably draw, take photos, and assess art.

My final score : 81

I got 2 100s.
What's going to run this whole conversation off the rails is that "leftist", "populist", "socialist", etc. are emotionally loaded strawmen. Politics and economics have many more interesting dimensions to discuss than just "left vs. right".

So asking for an argument against "leftist populism" is a waste of everyone's time because nobody will agree on what those words mean, they'll all talk past each other, and it's missing 99% of the interesting things to discuss about Venezuela as compared to other countries.
Can you provide examples on why Venezuela is a "weak" democracy or has poor rule of law, and specially compared to which other countries for example? Thanks.
Goldman Sachs May Be Forced to Fundamentally Question Capitalism
It is, actually, and in two instances, even.

Type designers use software to automatically create all common kerning pairs and to then try its best to align them on its own, after which the designer goes through them one by one to correct the program as necessary.

The other way this can be used is with any endpoint design software like InDesign, which has the option to set type in the 'metric' or 'optical' modes [0]. Metric uses the font's built-in kerning pairs (if any exist), while optical overrides them with the application's own algorithm.

If you're using a font that doesn't have built-in kerning pairs, though, you're probably better off choosing another typeface than blindly trusting this software in hundreds of pages of body copy. Browsers AFAIK still don't support kerning pairs and rely on their own hideous kerning algorithm, toggled on through `text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;` in CSS.

[0] http://type-ed.com/2013/12/08/metrics-vs-optical/
Oye, chamo. :) My wife wants to visit Caracas with our son in the summer, to see family. Last time we were there was 2008, when the "fuerte" was 8:1 and we witnessed two carjackings. I think it's a terrible idea to go back, even for a week or two. What do you think?
Better than a loss-maker, but that's a low bar.

For all of the employees that received options based on the inflated $10bn valuation, not a good problem to have.

This is the danger of VCs wanting everyone to be a unicorn, and structuring their firms around that mindset. I agree that a $5bn or $2bn company is fantastic. Until those with capital agree, however, founders are almost required to pitch a fantasy.
Every company that starts on credit is spending more money than the money coming into the system. It is rational in a stable society to borrow against future earnings in order to invest in the ventures that will generate those earnings.

The United States can spend according to their projections for the value of US Treasury Bills. US Treasury Bills, in turn, are an investment in the future US economy as a whole. The connection between them is fuzzy and distant but at least in theory the government is run on tax-receipts even though T-Bills are doing so well they are self-sustaining.

Venezuela was borrowing against their own future and their economy was tied up in energy. They are in a different situation.
Some quick feedback. You guys need to offer a "Hobbyist" plan for around $30-60/per month. Otherwise you are really only shooting for a very small portion of Parse users with your base price starting at $199/per month. Then again that just leaves the market open for someone else to offer more affordable prices. Good luck.
In another comment[1] I mentioned I've found use of a work social network valuable/meaningful - I think part of the reason our observations/experiences are so different is that you work in a small company and I at a large one. Not everyone can be expected to make use of it (much like not everyone uses social media outside of work) so I think for it to succeed the company has to be of sufficient size so that the portion using the social network is enough to provide value.

As for some of your specific points:

> Nobody is sitting there waiting for their news feed to update.

I check the feed in the morning and usually again in the afternoon. It's not expected to be something you stare at for eight hours a day.

> Nobody wants to seem like they are slacking off talking on social networks instead of working (even on the work one).

Think that's more of a company culture issue - our use of it is appreciated/encouraged.

> No memes and other fun related things, nobody cares and nobody checks.

The vast majority of posts are work-related but we have plenty of groups strictly for non-work/fun purposes (e.g. we have a group for discussing video games).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11026577
Activision Blizzard sued by Angolan rebel Savimbi's family
By definition no extremist represents the center or the average of their political ideology. But extremists exist and occasionally are very intelligent.
Well... the front page has a big demo button right at the top...
Every time some flavour of socialism fails, out of the woodwork they come: See? Socialism doesn't work, Capitalism is perfect.

Every time some flavour of socialism succeds: Hmm... Yea those Scandinavians are a ticking bomb, any day now they are going to fail. (40 years later)... Any day now...
Pretty sure Venezuela's problems (political, economic, social) pre-date 2013.
p2p lending

create another business or sell a product(Software or real)

real estate

invest in operational efficiency
You simply can't. I'm a 20 something with hella debt. Would love to go out and do my own thing or even work at a smaller company for less money, but more responsibility. Unfortunately that's not really an option for me. My #1 priority is to get out of debt as fast as possible.
This is something that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been working on. They've hired designers have A/B tested different versions of a simplified disclosure forms. You can see examples here for other loan types: http://www.consumerfinance.gov/know-before-you-owe/compare/
It would drop to 80-column text mode, so it depends what font your VGA chipset used there. But the most common one was probably IBM VGA9.
Surjtech. Aka surge-tech.

It sounds like they were trying to be honest at least.
The problem being, how many of these businesses would have won any market share without early VC investment enabling the companies to dump money into customer acquisition at a loss?

Probably a few of them, but I'm guessing some other company with a similar business model would have come along with VC backing and eaten their lunch (sure, that company might then be in the exact same place as the current over-valued late stage companies).

Damned if you do, damned if you don't?
Just a heads up, my workplace McAfee Web Gateway filters this website under the category "Phishing" with a "Medium Risk" reputation. Perhaps the previous domain owner wasn't the most reputable. Not sure what you have to do to get off of McAfee's list, but wanted to mention it as it might keep people from being able to visit your site.
Under Armour’s Gemini 2 sneaker review
> People in US clamoring for leftist populism should take deep look at Venezuela.

Typical political season scaremongering...

Single-payer healthcare and free college education will bring the US to the brink of collapse!
> Share Holder value is its primary purpose

No, it isn't. Corporations are given a public charter which declares its purpose. Increasing share-holder value is a nice side-effect at most.
Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/927/
Fast Dining Startup Allset Comes to New York City
> when files go away.

Can you expand on that? What do you see replacing files?
If you need to write code that runs on your go server and on the client, there's always https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs
This looks great- just ordered my copy. I'm a huge bunnie fanboy, though. :)

Looks really helpful for bridging the gap people face in going from design to manufacture in electronics.
"In 2009, Steve Jobs wanted to pay more than a hundred million dollars for Dropbox. As Houston later told Forbes’ Victoria Barret, when he politely turned down his hero’s offer, Jobs declared that Dropbox was a feature, not a product."

https://pando.com/2012/02/26/steve-jobs-was-right-dropbox-is...
That's assuming college degrees are simply worth the monetary value later on, which isn't true at all. May of the students in my class happily know that their non-STEM degree is worth very little when going into a job, but they value their education very highly and have planned out routes for when they finish college. The value of education isn't something that you can quantify by picking an ROI.
I will do some Nostradamus here: when Venezuela stops being leftist, oil prices will suddenly and surprisingly rise.
I'll see your 40 pin parallel and raise you an 80-pin SCA connector.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Connector_Attachment
What do you mean by leftist? It's obviously a continuum -- many successful European countries self-describe their governments as socialist and it's working well for them.

If you only think of the corrupt and incompetent governments as the leftist ones, it's a truism that their policies are failing.
https://sandstorm.io/get has pricing, FWIW -- just not for the product that we haven't quite figured out yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Tribunal_of_Justice_(V...

Look at how Chavez took over the oil company, and generally treated businesses.

Sweden, for instance, may have high taxation, but it is applied fairly, and businesses are not considered 'the enemy'. Property rights exist and are taken seriously.

I'm actually a somewhat left-leaning person, but never found Venezuela to be a very compelling example, to be honest.
A whopping 59 percent of all online traffic — not just dating sites — is generated by bots, according to the tech analyst firm, Are You a Human.

There's a tech analyst firm that applies the Voight-Kampf test?
> but you can't argue that college students are more likely to pay back loans

Well actually, yes you can. Student loans are not dischargable in bankruptcy proceedings. That distinction is only shared with criminal court ordered penalties.

In other words, they are guaranteed a payback of the loan, plus fees and interest. Even if that means garnishment of your Social Security. But look at the bright side: they do go away if you're dead.

Edit: Evidently mentioning that Educational Loan debt is not dischargable is somehow a very unpopular thing (given my and other karma scores). It will also be a very unpopular thing for the 43 million people with their collective $1.3 trillion in debt. I wonder how many have or will default? And, what will that do to our economy?
I wrote a paper on the resource curse once, examining Norway as the example of how to escape it.

The funny thing is that Norway's system was designed by an Iraqi immigrant engineer.
Noone's gonna take over Yahoo by buying shares right now, since the price of those shares is just a proxy for Alibaba.

If Yahoo gets rid of the stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, then YHOO would properly reflect the value of core Yahoo, and someone with a few billions lying around could gobble it up.
Out of curiosity, have you talked to a lawyer, particularly one who does ADA work? I'm not a fan of how some of them operate, but it might be a good talk in your situation.
Two-Way Data Binding Is Just a “Box of Bananas” in Angular 2 Beta 1
They're only failing because it costs them $35 to produce a barrel of oil, and the price of oil is currently well below that. If it recovers, they'll recover.
As a few others have expressed similar, I can attest to the sentiments in the article.

I may be one of the more informed with my loans, and this is my understanding of the matter.

My freshmen year I incurred ~$26,000 in commercial loans, with $4500 in federal.

This year I got a residency reassignment and now have only $5500 in federal loans to pay for the whole year.

So I may now the approximate amounts of my loans, and I just summed them and found out I'm about $36,000 in debt. Truthfully that's the first time I've ever seen that figure, and damn it's scary because I have absolutely zero knowledge of how I'm expected to repay that. What are my interest rates, how long do I have to repay, how many months after I graduate am I expected to start paying that down?

The issue is that due to the inflation in college costs this is the only way many of us can afford college, and I'd have to say I'm lucky because I am supported for my living costs by my parents. Otherwise I would be in significantly more debt.
I see quite a few HN commenters asking, "why isn't this automated?" Well, it is! In 1994 one of the pioneers of vector fonts, Peter Karow, worked at Adobe on "optical kerning", which inferred kerning pairs for a font automatically. Adobe's algorithm models the whitespace between two letters as a viscous fluid which resists flowing into tight areas. They compared it to hand-kerning and found that neither approach was perfect, but that there were 120% more deficiencies when kerning by hand and 30% redundancy in the kerning pairs. So computers, can and do kern better than humans. However, there are still many poorly kerned fonts around, even digital versions of classics such as Times don't ship with particularly good kerning pairs, so designers often find themselves having to tweak kerns.
The issue is the push back from the politically correct is having a serious chilling effect where even feminist comedians are being no platformed for having opinions that offend people.
The definition of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia is so wide that there is a very vocal minority of people that are able to shut down opposing opinions by being offended on the behalf of someone else.
Take Kate Smurthwaite for example, Because she had politically incorrect views on prostitution and the burka she was denied the ability to speak at a university due to pressure from Goldsmiths’ feminist society.
Politics is explicitly allowed on HN. If you want a neoliberal hugbox go to less wrong.
It's the worst example of government where businesses have more of a voice than people, and use their political influence to compel the government to basically act like a gang or the mafia to shut up dissenters.

It's really a tiny handful of jerks who say, "yes, it's a good thing that we bash little baby pigs heads in, by grabbing them by the hind legs, and throwing them head first into the ground, when we determine they are non-viable. But we desperately don't want the public to know that's how we get rid of non-viable pigs, because we know the public actually has something of a moral conscience, unlike us, and would stop eating our pigs if they knew this is how it worked. And that's just the beginning."

So the question is whether it's the private business that's abridging speech, or if it's the government. If this an extension of defamation law, then it's the former. If it's asking the government to do their own dirty work, then it's the latter. And I think it's the latter.
In GTD parlance defer doesn't require a calendar appointment, it just means 'don't do right now'. Basically if a task takes more than 2 minutes to do but you intend to do it at some point, then it should not interrupt processing, but should be moved from an inbox to a 'trusted system' for organizing and tracking tasks.

Snoozing works ok, but strict GTD tries to build a discipline of not having items re-appear in the inbox. If it's moved to a list of things to handle, then it can be ignored or placed at a lower priority on that list.
You can't cancel student loan debt. There's not even a risk of default.
Beware of NBOMes. Only discovered in 2003, these cheap, fake substances are commonly sold as LSD. Prior to this, a tab of acid couldn't be substituted with an imposter substance. Now it can.

I'd be getting a testing kit, along with trusting your source and all the other sensible checks.

NBOMes won't kill you but they are not without risk. High dosages not recommended. They are not LSD and should never be sold as LSD.

I didn't read the whole article but anyone writing about LSD today should warn against NBOMes.
My field is research biology (in Pharma, not academia where the pay situation is truly dismal), and the jobs are severely lacking. Even STEM is becoming saturated and will soon just be Engineering and Applied Math.
Is your last sentence for real? The government in Venezuela is better described as fascist or at the very least, statist.

And anyway even it were a true stanchion of leftist populism, it does not mean that because one leftist populist country built on oil export revenues went bankrupt, that others will as well.
How does Venezuela offer any lessons for American leftists? I'm not super familiar with the situation in Venezuela, but it seems like they have almost no relation.

The Venezuelan government looks like the old Soviet version of leftism, where dissent is suppressed, everything in sight is nationalized, money is tightly restricted, foreign companies are kicked out, etc.

American leftism is basically, let's raise taxes a bit and subsidize health care more. The two don't look even vaguely alike.
> You don't have a single leftist politic in the US.

We've got a few, but they rarely get much attention.

> Come on, you've got one of the most fucked up healthcare systems in the developed world, precisely because of your right-wing policies to privatize everything - and not a single politician is planning to fix that.

First, "one of" is superfluous.

Second, though, the "not a single politician is planning to fix that" part is false; single-payer has a number of politicians who advocate for it, most notably, currently, Sen. Sanders, one of the two significant contenders for (though not the frontrunner) the Democratic Party nomination for the Presidency.
Uh, no. AES was originally only slated to survive until 2030. Advances in cryptanalysis are hard to predict, but attacks always get better.
To kids my age (~40) it's the only thing I know about it as the [UK] media regularly references "Tinder" and "swipe left" [dismiss?].
I see you've got lots of auto-posting going on social media... have these efforts proven to be worth your while? Did you build up your followings organically?
Google, Facebook and Android seem to be quite popular with consumers.

While undeniably true, it's not clear how much of that is because they produce inherently good or desirable products, and how much is because they are the default choice or consumers are otherwise pushed to them for reasons not related to actually wanting their product.

For example, it's getting harder and harder to walk into a phone shop and buy a regular feature phone so you can speak to your friend who is somewhere else, so you're getting a smartphone by default. If you don't want an Apple one for whatever reason, there is a good chance you're going to get an Android device, even if you had no particular interest in the Android part of it. There's also a good chance that you're actually paying a huge amount of money for that device even though you're not going to use it for very long, but that you don't know how much because it's disguised within some broader contract for access to a mobile network.
> When 95% comes from a single source and that source loses 1/3rd of it's value in a short amount of time then its straightforward to understand why Venezuela is in this situation.

There is more than that. In 90's when the Venezuelan crude was as low as $11 per barrel, the business was still profitable. Now with a price $20 per barrel it is dangerously close to the price of production (when you include refinement which is not an option for Venezuelan oil), so it is not just because the market bump, but also for being inefficient in the business.

>I don't see a reason to bring your political leanings into a discussion of straightforward economic cause and effects.

Because it is relevant, it is not only because economic causes but also because the government policies made this situation particularly terrible. Should Venezuela had better economical policies this would has been just a mere crisis and not a bankrupt scenario.
First, those are companies, not countries. Second, those companies are failing economically, but they aren't failing in their ability to pump oil out of the ground. Whereas Venezuela got rid of the people who actually knew how to pump oil out of the ground, so they got less oil at the same time as falling oil prices.
Defer only means to put off until later. There's no delegate meaning.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/defer
Well said. I've always cringed when people say that (even though I am very liberal). You can argue that 8% is too high, you can argue that it's in the nations interest to give loans at 1-2% and accept that they will lose some money due to default, but the comparison to big banks is useless.

Also, big banks borrow at essentially 0% when talking about the Fed Funds Rate, which is for overnight loans.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's somewhat loosely enforced, but the guideline is there.
Hmm what is HSTS preloading.

I have to catchup on the latest TLS stuff every few months.

So what is the default preferred cipher suite string for Go 1.6 ? I worked out my own a couple years ago and it still gets an A rating on SSL Labs