skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was watching this comment carefully as I thought I might have to delete it (due to people not understanding the arguments therein). It started rising to +2 or +3, so I stopped watching it. Now that I've checked again, I see that a few downvoters got it down to -1.

Since it is too late, I am happy to explain the thoughts in the above comment. I studied this area of economics from formal sources as well as having exposure to startups.

To summarize. One might think that if, say, a guy might be able to get a pizzeria off the ground, and it's 50/50, if it works he'll make a business with an enterprise value of $20,000 using his $5,000 investment, that's our assumption -- then if he wants to raise his sights and make the same investment, but this time is targeting $200,000 - his chances of success drop to 5%. And if he targets $2M then they drop to 0.5%. And if he targets $200M then they drop to $0.005%. If he targets $2B then they drop to $0.0005%. And if he targets $20B then it drops to $0.00005%. If he targtes $200B then it drops to 0.000005%

But 0.000005% is 1 in 20,000,000. There are 318 million people in America, so by those odds, the number of people in America who are capable of building a $200 billion business is exactly 15.

Yet there are more than 15 American companies that had those kinds of valuations in the past couple of years; Apple alone would account for 3 of them.

So with these kinds of large-scale successes, the risk-reward equation clearly doesn't actually work. And this ignores all of the home-run hits short of $200 billion. Clearly, risk does not increase at the same rate that reward does.

The risk-reward trade-off is just not a model that you can successfully employ when it comes to startups.

---

Secondly (this is not directly related to the above) the world is super-connected. There is 0 chance that if I find a pizzeria run by some guy in the city with 1 location as a small business, that 14 months from now it will have 50 locations that he personally operates. But if you find some guy with 2,000 downloads today from the Google Play store, there is no reason this same guy can't make something else and get 200,000 downloads. That is a factor of 100.

So the whole IDEA of a "small-business" just doesn't apply to online startup-like economies. The only question is whether the guy who made a niche app with 2,000 users is even interested in trying to use his same skills making something innovative and new, which he gets good press for, but which addresses the whole global smartphone audience.

The thing that makes it a startup is this hyper-growth component, like whether he's trying to roll out at that scale.

If someone doesn't understand either of the two (quite distinct) arguments above, or has any type of comments or rebuttal, I can follow up. Thanks for your time.
Can you refer me to the dam in your area?

Anyway, short answer, no it's not 900x for half the power. Power stations are generally measured in capacity, often without mentioning the capacity factor. e.g. you could build a damn that can produce 1000 MW of power, but it is not connected to a river and relies on pumped storage, and have only storage for 1 hour of generating. The net energy generation of that facility is actually negative, a small cost for energy storage. You can't compare that to another installation which actually generates energy for 10 hours a day. They're completely different yet both carry a power rating which is not meaningful for comparing them in the way you'd want to.

I've got no clue whether that's the case for the dam you're mentioning, just giving an example where comparisons can go wrong. I can guarantee it's not 900x for 0.5x though, what it is exactly I don't know but perhaps you can name me the dam.

(in other news, the Guardian article is pretty shitty because it barely specifies any of the variables itself, like say a capacity factor. Read it as a general announcement, not a tech spec.)

That having been said, it IS a relatively more expensive project regardless. But one mustn't forget it includes a storage solution, too.
Clearly the number of eligible partners is also limited by the number of people you can date in one lifetime.
We could say that the phrase "(good|bad) actor" has a high collocation, so that it has a higher likelihood of meaning something specific. Also, we could disambiguate by using alternatives like "poor actor" (bad at acting) and "bad agents" (immoral people).
Hi, I work at Placemeter, the company that produced this map and the technology behind it. Check out our privacy principles [0] and feel free to email me [1] if you have any questions. Thanks!

0: http://www.placemeter.com/privacy

1: david [at] placemeter [dot] com
again, i am indifferent to the righteousness of socrates the man

he was a fierce enemy of democracy

[citation needed] seriously, what are you talking about? democracy the idea? dare i say democracy's platonic ideal? if i oppose a democracy's policy does that mean i oppose democracy?

(which was most definitely not a reviled body at the
time, unless you mean reviled by Socrates and his pupils

[citation needed] show me a source that states the pretyrant governing body that was overthrown that plato states was 'generally condemned' was in truth 'generally accepted'?

Would you have let Socrates continue his teaching
after such events, after one in 20 of the people
you knew got executed by his students

well, yes, but that is because i support freedom of speech

if you want to make it an argument of militanism then i suppose you would have to show that all of these people were students of socrates, stead solely the one noted as critias, and further that their efforts were weaponised from ideas which were planted and sowed by socrates

what things did socrates teach these people that you would actively censor from the public forum?

Socrates believed in there being one correct
answer to any and all questions (maybe unknown,
but still a singular correct answer, a grand
truth), to be provided by philosophers, that had
to be imposed on everyone.

[citation needed] also, if you can explain, if this even were the case, how it demonstrably leads to killing?

I feel leaving this critical context out does
disrespect to the story and paints a wholly wrong
picture

can you cite the context i left out? if i did, it was completely unintended and i encourage any greater context you can lend

i take grave issue with your editorial exposition

stop telling people how they should think and offer up the sources that led you to your conclusions and let people think for themselves
Rhythm and booze: the battle to recruit young drinkers
Too bad about the C++, though; my condolences.

(The original authors should have made the header comment "against the idea that a line editing lib needs to be 20,000 lines of C code, or any quantity of C++".)
Decentralized transmission with no easy attribution on a limited resource is different than posting to a central server via a virtually unlimited resource (the Internet).
Yes, in principle, absolutely. It wouldn't be practical though. The detectors are large, and sensitive to every kind of noise and interference, and you need to collect data, not just take a mere single reading. But, funny story, during commissioning the Chinese officials in charge of the nuclear plant were very conservative about what information they wanted to share with the experiment regarding the plant's operational status, I got to see them with some funny looks on their faces when the physicists told them, and showed them plots of exactly what was going on in the reactors and when.
> If you translate Rust to C you won't gain on speed

Mostly this is the case, but we do give better aliasing info than C in many cases right now, and that can help optimizations. It depends a lot on your use case.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm led to believe at least some problems that would be most naturally expressed with graph structures will require reference counting when rewritten in safe Rust.

Most people use petgraph nowadays for graphs, which doesn't use RC; instead it uses indices, which are roughly the same cost as individual heap allocations. They have more computation for lookups, but the computation is usually folded into the addressing mode, and you get better cache behavior.
Comments critical of Israel are one thing (plenty of those in this thread), anti-semitic slurs are another. This is hardly a hard call. Also the 'masters' here are the users flagging the latter, quite rightly.
What commodity servers have Channel I/O with sustained 90+% utilization without virtual machines? And which support virtualization using software that passed pentesting with source? And which have 30+ years uptime at high volume sites?

Really, because I'd love to buy them. I'd have believed you if you said VMS clusters or NonStop systems. They're not x86 either, though, although a VMS port is underway.
Ask HN: Metal vs. Vulkan?
Is there anyone with any benchmarks on speed?
I think the best thing about this problem/solution is that it encourages people to date more people [as a rule]. ie don't settle for the first one that likes you back
Please Steal Packages Outside My Door
Meat and Morality
That theory doesn't make much sense. If the policy is for preventing Israel from starting wars we wouldn't be bribing them with billions of dollars worth of weapons.
> it was all about Borland compilers

I never said directly I was referring to Borland C, actually it was all about Turbo Basic and Turbo Pascal.

I and a few others did use Turbo C, but we jumped right into Turbo C++ the year thereafter, as we could not envision using plain C after having done systems programming in the other Borland languages.

C was left for programming classes, usually trying to convince the teacher to use C++ instead for projects, sadly it only worked occasionally.
> I doubt refresh rate is going to cut it though

You could probably make it quite usable by running xterm in Tektronix emulation mode. Old school vector displays and new e-ink screens behave somewhat similarly, in that you can add content to the screen without actually refreshing.
Ask HN: Is it reasonable to have job applicants complete a test before applying?
I'm advertising an SDET position and I've included a test as part of the job application.

The test is something like this: I've described a fairly simple json specification in words and requested that applicants submit a cover letter that conforms to that spec. The spec has an optional value called challenge_checkvalue which can be derived by completing a challenge - querying a url with an id between 00 and 99 for json payloads that may or not conform to the same spec. The checkvalue is derived by combining the ids of all the ones that are not compliant.

So it's a decent amount of work. I've deliberately made the number of payloads to check high enough that no one is tempted to check them manually. Validating JSON, even making http requests like that is not something that every valid candidate will have ever done, but I think that these concepts should accessible with some research.

My question is; is this too much to expect people to do before I even look at their application?
Blackbox: International Startups Learn from the Valley
Or limited by how many people you could date in that age range who would likely still be interested in you until you reached a certain age. I have no data on this, but I'm willing to guess that most 23-year-old girls won't want to be dating an 80-year-old man.
Redis is proprietary software? Things licensed under the CDDL?

Let's look at a very easy and very real situation where the (imo) absurd restrictions of the GPL are actively hurting the Linux community:

ZFS on Linux. We have a fully features and powerful logical volume manager and filesystem that you have to jump through hoops to use and cannot be distributed as part of Linux due to license disputes. Software that was originally developed in an entirely proprietary environment that would have never had the source code see the light of day if it was required to use the GPL due to contractual obligations on other pieces of software used.

btrfs, et al, still have not caught up. With a more sane licensing approach, we could have had years of ZoL improving our lives as a default available filesystem/volume manager, and those with idealistic differences strong enough to want a "truly" open version could have been working on btrfs or other alternatives.

You are attempting to paint the world as completely bifurcated, and it just simply isn't the case.
Which satellite would it talk back to? There's no coverage over that part of the Southern ocean. It's ridiculously remote and nobody is out there.
Why?

Just pick it for them. Don't present the user with choices that have no or negative consequences.

Choice is not always good.
What shocks me is that they still lack highly assured endpoints despite IBM's prior work in that area through Karger. The chips were already fabbed. They could cram a bunch in there alongside computd and I/O processors. Run legacy with ttusted code in secure envirinment.

Instead, more features still with same breakable model.
Note: this appreciation is from 2011, when Milnor won the Abel Prize.

It’s safe to say that anyone who wins an Abel Prize is a giant in mathematics.
Yeah, the title should be something more like "How Catherine de Medici Probably Never Made Gloves Laced With Poison" because that's all the article is.

She certainly didn't make poison gloves a fashion trend as implied by the title.
> Don't forget that Egypt and Jordan get foreign Aid, 1.5B$ while Israel gets 3B$

What? Egypt got no "foreign aid" until some post-Nasserite forces in Egypt got together and decided to kow-tow to Israel and the US during the Camp David accords. For Jordan it is pretty much the same thing, from the attacks on Black September on.

The politicians running these countries were bought off to play nice with Israel. This is more or less openly stated in journals like Foreign Affairs. The money to Egypt and Jordan is money being given indirectly to Israel.
I just chuckled a bit at the name of the documentary: _Zero_Days_
> Notice how you're defending criticisms I never made.

I'm not defending anything, You didn't supply clarification of your point. You were asked for clarification, and provided someone else's experience (anecdotal) counteracting claims (which weren't even anecdotal, they were unsupported assertions), and you started out as classifying that response as defensive.

> notice how you assume I don't know the difference between static analysis and compile-time safety.

I said "I also see a lot of rust community members trying to explain where people's assumptions are wrong" immediately prior to that. I thought it was obvious I was talking in the general sense. I don't know what you do and don't know, but I'm not sure why you think it's valid to be upset because someone assumes this one way or the other (which to be clear, didn't happen here) when you've shown little or no evidence yet as to what you do or don't know about it. It may be the rust community stereotyping others, but without stats as to whether the people the stereotype has been applied to have it applied correctly it's hard to know whether it's useful or harmful, regardless of how it applies to you in particular.

> Notice how you assume that I must be generally uninformed or less intelligent because complete faith in Rust's importance is a self-evident truth.

Not knowing something doesn't make someone less intelligent. If you are conversing under the assumption that everyone will assume you know at least the same amount as them about every topic that is brought up, else you have right to be offended, I'm not sure how we can continue. That's not an environment I want to have a discussion in.

> Well, now that's it's happening to me personally vs just reading it. Fuck this community. It's collectively a socially inept nightmare. I'm done with caring about Rust. I was really enjoying it. After today and Reddit, I can't take anymore of this smug bullshit.

All that's happened here is you made statements and refused to back them up while at the same time you called someone else's motives into question for asking for clarification. I think it's obvious what is going on, but I'm not in your shoes. I don't think people aren't trying to be assholes you you (at least I'm not, or not trying to be one), and while you may be upset, I hope you don't leave for good. however you've interpreted my comments, please be aware that not a single one was written with the intent to upset you, or call into question your character or intelligence in any way. I can only point towards my own experience, here and elsewhere, where my state of mind greatly influenced how I read a statement and any replies to me with regard to that conversation, and think that possibly the same thing is happening here with you. That itself may come across as a smug asshole-ish thing to say depending on how you interpret it, or even my assumption that my observations apply to you. All I can do is state that my desire to be helpful after your prior statement is sincere.
There is something that really bothers me about your comment. I think it's the expectation that the universe should care about you.
I see nothing wrong with that, as long as you and your partner are both clear on that point before marriage occurs. The problem materializes when there is a mismatch on what "marriage" means to the two people involved. As long as neither party reneges on the terms that were mutually agreed upon prior to the marriage, the particular nature of those terms is largely irrelevant.
Does appear to be out - https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eglibc/2.19-0ubuntu6.7

apt-get update not seeing it at the moment though, guess its the mirror I'm using.

Edit - working now. I can see:

Version: 2.19-0ubuntu6.7
Even though Vulkan for would be of little gain for the web due to all the security considerations required, a WebGL backend should still be able to benefit from being built on Vulkan instead.

Due to the refinement of the pipeline and memory access, etc. provided by Vulkan, there's a lot of room for optimization.

___

Though on the other hand, even with additional overhead on a Vulkan web API, the improved state management and access to command buffers may still allow for smarter rendering with negligible overhead via JS

Fun times
Well, I was kind of right and you as well.

It was the Lisa that was written in Pascal.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
Patch out - https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eglibc/2.19-0ubuntu6.7
China uproots 9,000 people for huge telescope in search for aliens
>> These companies would struggle to operate with positive cashflows as their products/services and growth hasn't matured to allow for it yet.

Then they would have to do like all of us, get creative and find alternative ways of getting cash.
Credit card chargebacks don't trump contract law. If you establish a contract with someone to pay X and you don't pay X then they could either sue you or send a collections agency after you...

For most businesses if a customer conducts a chargeback even if they believe they're in the "right" they rarely pursue it due to bad PR and that the cost to pursue it may be more than the amount they're pursuing.
When I was in middle school a family friend (and Microsoft engineer) advised me to spend my teens and twenties dating as many people as possible and give every relationship a numerical rating, then settle down with the first person who exceeded two standard deviations above the average.

The advice was mostly in jest, but I think it says something interesting about how tech people look at the world.
Well, the control flow seems complicated at least.
Yes, I could do that but it's hard to get right. I think maybe I should release a SSH server container which has dangerous commands restricted.
The show is everything Big Bang Theory isn't.

BBT makes fun of stereotypes, in the way only outsiders can make fun of stereotypes: The jokes don't make sense, the writing seems to have no real compassion for the group that they are lampooning at all, and I've never actually seen people behave like the characters do.

Instead, SV makes sense for people in startups: It doesn't really spend most of its time making fun of how maladjusted startup workers are, like BBT does, but instead makes fun of the theater we all are surrounded by. By just turning the tech into star trek style technobabble, the show can focus on things that are relatable and real.

Take, for instance, a conversation they have, in an early episode of this year, about the problems of high valuations and down rounds. There were articles written about it that hit the very top of HN, because the conversation was so very real. The craziness you see in the GPs video? It seems deranged, but it's said by a character more than loosely based on Mark Cuban, and it's reflecting the values of the time when Cuban made his money! And his story covers a huge issue in entrepreneurship: Does the fact that you managed to get an amazing exit in one company really mean you will be any good later as a venture capitalist? Were you lucky or good?

If you take away all the laughs, the series tackles realistic problems all the time. So the series is not about easy laughs at the expense of people: It's a story about a culture, that happens to have laughs to make sure people that aren't interested in the culture are still entertained by it. Just like The Wire, it's not a documentary, but it sure seems to rhyme with reality.
You don't need to understand something to destroy it.

You don't need to master something to wreak it.

Sadly, our ignorance is doing both.
Using a long lens has the opposite effect, flattening features (which is why people us 85, 105, even 400!). But there is no "right" answer here, just what works and doesn't. I've seen examples of both from most least types.
>if I don't have 500 thread count Egyptian cotton and down pillows.. its going to be a shitty night.

Its all relative. e.g. In humid countries high thread count sucks. Better to have something super thin that keeps the mozzies out.

>practice sleeping on the floor since that is at least consistently available :)

Bathtub sounds cleaner frankly...
Jeb Bush domain bought by Trump
Random question unrelated to article content: is it just me or does Lithub seem to be everywhere (on HN) as of very recently?
You present that as an objection, but merely repeat what he said.
Excellently written article. Rather amusing too. But I'm left feeling that I don't actually know how this resolved.

(edit: remove dumb question)
Risk/reward is generally measured for a specific time frame, because there is the value of time.
Not intending to start a language war here, but if somebody who has experience with both R and Python/pandas/etc could answer - how's the current state of the emerging Python data/statistics ecosystem compared to R? (not counting all the other differences like R being allegedly weird or Python more general purpose and so on).
It's not a natural portrait lens, true. Great for some other things though!
> the continuing reminder of how powerless we are as a civilization when it comes to the oceans.

That is symptomatic of our child like relationship with the environment. We are deeply dependant but have little understanding or agency.

It is obvious that high fish stocks will allow more catches than near extinction levels. Catching 1% of 1 billion is better than 40% of 1 million. Yet we continue to treat fish as a short term commodity to be exploited.

We may lack mastery of the planet, but that is no excuse for burying our head in the sand. We have a huge impact and we cannot just opt-out of that.
Sports Illustrated puts you inside the new Swimsuit Issue
Me too.

Yes, C++ is as unsafe as C, given its copy-paste compatibility, but at least it provides the tools to program safely (if one chooses to) and the C++ community cares much more about safety than the C one.