skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found that quote to be the most interesting bit of the piece as well.

Obviously it's in every company's best interest to hold a monopoly position in a large market. It's that strong self interest and drive to do whatever it takes to be #1 that I think YC is generally looking for in its founders, rather than a truly brilliant or unique idea. Ideas are cheap, execution and grit is rare. This will be increasingly true for the new biotech/hardware startups that YC is looking at - grinding away in the lab for a shot at a patented monopoly position is the name of the game.

It's just interesting to see the goal of becoming a monopoly stated so bluntly as the end goal of every company that comes through YC. It clashes a bit with the hacker ethos of doing something because its intrinsically cool, interesting, and not expected to scale. Seems like YC is entering a new phase as a larger, more mature organization.
The ideal state in capitalism is for businesses to be interchangable and suffer perfect competition in order to maximise the consumer surplus. This is different from the ideal state for capitalists, who obviously want a monopoly.
Using a terminal in windows was a horrible experience when I had to do it for a (fortunately brief) project a couple of years ago. But I think the real problem isn't the lack of a decent shell; there are already several shells out there that, while not as nice as their modern Unix equivalents, are at least usable. The bigger problem for me was the terminal emulator. Awful fonts, worse rendering, crappy copy/paste, limited size, no split screen or tabs, etc etc. It truly felt like being back in the 90's, although I'll bet that even in the 90's the Linux terminal emulator experience was better than Windows is now.
And that's exactly my point. It doesn't have to be this way.
> I mean, I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but certainly similar things have happened.

Could you list some?
Stay tuned :)
On the other hand, Lightbend is so generic and bland, while TypeSafe, at least for those "in the know", has a nice technical ring to it.

I guess bland & non-threatening trumps meaningful in enterprisey software. Still, very disappointing, especially if it signals a lack of focus on Scala.
For better or worse, this just locks you in to crappy airlines.

I spent 7.5 years in a full-time travel job. The perks (other than occasional upgrades on redeyes) did very little for me. I wound up using miles just for last minute flights.

I did used to get a big laugh out of people (usually junior consultants) who confused airline status with real social status.
Is it any better than VX ConnectBot?
Affordable cummute-sharing app service for commuters launches in Vancouver
Which would prove advertising works. The irony!
Without trying, Snapchat gaining ground internationally and surpassing Twitter
How much runway does Docker Co have for the number of employees on staff?
This is still how web searching works. I have no idea why you would think otherwise--at its core Google is still fundamentally an indexing service, and you use indices by figuring out which words may be in the documents you want to read and then finding the documents containing those. Without doing this, it becomes impossible to distinguish documents which are what you want from documents which describe what you want (and which often refer to something behind a paywall or in a private or non-digitized collection).
Chicago adds computer science requirement for high school graduation
A puff piece would be if some tech reporter wrote about the wonders of GCP.

This is the Spotify team, and they've clearly put their money where their mouth is by actually making the move.
New Release of Minio Client 'mc' Adds Support Free BSD and Solaris/Illumos
What about a C compiler written with C++?

If it helps any, `getaddrinfo` is actually part of POSIX and not an essential part of C.
Paul Graham would disagree with you on that definition of Poverty. In his world poor people can wake up one fine day and start a business.

Aaron : What drove the decision to go start a business?

Paul : Poverty.

Aaron : Poverty.

Paul : I was tired of being poor. I was working as a freelance programmer, and it was this sort of boom/bust thing where I would get money and then I would run out of money, and then it would be a disaster, and I just got tired of it. And then I thought, “I’m just going to work until I won’t run out of money.”
Is the Blockchain the new ‘killer app’ big breakthrough?
What's the difference from their own
Docker Cloud (ex tutum)?
The Met’s New Logo Polarizes Opinion
It's possible, Windows 98 has drivers for the NE2000 network card we're emulating (https://github.com/copy/v86/blob/master/src/ne2k.js). However, currently the emulation isn't accurate enough, Windows 98 refuses to use it.
Our family has taken this philosophy as well and you wouldn't believe the animosity we have gotten from it. People calling us selfish for asking for no gifts, or getting upset when we get rid of the stuff they do send even after we asked them not to send anything.

Quite baffling till you understand that giving gifts is the only way some people know how to express themselves.
First steps into Kong on SmartOS
RallyBound buys Chorus to build campaign management apps for nonprofits
I've written a report about it for a class last month and it may help you have a better understanding of Swarm/Kubernetes/Marathon: http://armand.gr/static/files/htise.pdf
How about git bash from https://git-scm.com/downloads?
Is Eclipse (Scala IDE) better than IntelliJ now? About a year ago people convinced me to switch to IntelliJ because Scala IDE was totally unusable, full of spurious compilation errors and useless refactor that introduced random symbols instead of doing its job.

So has the situation been reversed now?
a friend of mine is working on a company like that.

http://sharesy.co
> There will always be pockets of population with high fertility,

What makes you say that? Is there some underlying principle I've failed to consider?

> I have hard time picturing how that could lead to the complete extinction of mankind.

It's simple math. Below-replacement fertility leads to extinction. More people die than are born, and since the original number is finite, the end number must be zero.

If you think that will not happen, what you're imagining is that the fertility rate will either rise at some point in the future, or at least plateau at whatever number leads to a stable population.

Why would they rise? If you grow up in a world where everyone around you has few children, then you grow up thinking/feeling that few children is the way things should be. You have few yourself. You might even have fewer than your parents' generation... but you'll rarely if ever have more. On average, you'll never have more.

Even in the fertility hot spots, this is true. They're above replacement fertility still, but each generation has a lower number. It's not exactly some sort of hidden trend, it's pretty basic.

> at the very least among highly religious communities.

It looks like the children of these communities break away from their religious upbringing at a higher rate than their pious siblings can replace with nephews and nieces. Especially in those religious communities that are unable to achieve a healthy economy... the FLDS communes that dispose of their sons, the ultraorthodox jews in their own self-imposed ghettos where there is little employment to be had.

> Even if as you suggest reproductive behavior is transmitted,

That's a little silly of me, actually. It must be the one behavior pattern that isn't transmissible.

> and simple natural selection will always, in the end, favor the reproductive behavior

The natural universe has no favorites. It does not preclude this sort of extinction. Those few who buck this trend will be starved for adequate mates at some point, and will raise their own children in a culture that ostracizes fertility...
What would be the choices now? Most references to alternatives suggest Haskell.
As for the data that came from dbpedia, we took all events with a some kind of a date and location that have the rdf:type http://dbpedia.org/ontology/MilitaryConflict. This seems to include all events in which the military was involved. See our blog on how we gathered the data: http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-of...
contribute a pull request?
Fascinating post. Parallel thought: should he be deleting old blog posts to keep his online collection of things decluttered?
You might EASILY mistake this pig for a sheep
I realize this is a good way to maximize value for investors, but is this a healthy way to grow new companies and build a better society?

It's complicated, but for startups the answer is Yes.

If every auto company merged into one monopoly, society (other than the shareholders) would be worse for it. This is why anti-trust legislation exists.

If startups create things that never existed before and wind up owning the market for a few years, society benefits. This is why patent protection exists. (Yes - it's abused in software, but that's another story)

It's certainly not black and white. As a buyer, I may say "I'd rather have service X from many providers than one provider, but I'd rather have it from one provider than not at all."
All in the brain? (A response to Stephen Fry)
Salesforce signs a definitive agreement to acquire PredictionIO
Are there license issues around this project? I doubt Microsoft would care to put the resources into enforcement of windows 98 licenses but I am just curious about the legality.
Dear Yelper, Get Off My Lawn
Writ in Water: The enduring mystery of John Keats’s last words
You are so clearly misrepresenting the views of the author, he never at any point wanted a personal thanks from Bernie. His grievance is with people such as yourself who make success and hard work into a crime.
Perhaps this is a generational thing. When I was much younger, I was also minimalist. My key possessions were the things I could carry to a new apartment, plus a massive stash of books at my parent's house.

Nowadays, I have a house myself, and have spent >15 years converting bare terrain into a garden. I still enjoy travel, but enjoy being grounded in a space I've created myself. Now, my key possessions are good tools: a beefy rig for 3D rendering, a pro-quality camera, some essential garden kit including BBQ, log splitter, leaf blowers, lawn mower, etc and some good general purpose cooking gear (e.g pans and knives). This is my 'essential' toolkit of stuff.

Ironically, I would now find it much easier to part with the majority of my physical book collection, since apart from a few nostalgic items (first hardback edition of The Lord of the Rings, etc) most of this stuff is in the cloud.

Your mileage may vary, young grasshopper.
"Not everyone who disagrees with you is wrong" sounds philosophically deep until you realize that in practice the people most commonly resorting that argument are climate change sceptics and flat earthers.

Because if there was a better argument than that to be made then that is the argument they would be making instead of resorting to the thing that can be used to justify anything.
Marketing blog spam is the new puff piece.
> San Francisco-based Zynga is putting its San Francisco headquarters office property on the market for sale, according to sources that track the sale of office buildings in San Francisco.

They're going to lose out on the fact that everyone stuck on 101 headed onto the Bay Bridge has to look at their billboard, sometimes for long periods of time. It's definitely prime property that they're giving up.
So much this! I am in the exact position and facing the same issue. For me going back full time to my homeland and buying a ps4 seems like a good idea, but I have to keep reminding myself that these comfortable things ultimately just drag you down and end up owning you. I too will plant roots 'somewhere' someday, and that to will be an adventure. Good luck in finding your home!
From the about page:

"Game is being built with powers of Node.js and HTML5."
Nice writeup. You might consider creating an HTML version for people who are cautious about opening PDFs.
Why did you choose Pi? And not e? (see what I'm doing?)
This is true one of my favorite wines is 5 bucks a bottle.
Austin: No Place to Go but Up
Multiplayer solitaire (analog version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJoOom3f5mU

This was my favorite card game to play with my family as a kid.
Introducing Vega-Lite 1.0
And here's me fighting with running Android ARM code on x86 ... I wish I had more time.
I'm not aware of any services with the simple API you're looking for (neat idea), but there are a lot of more complicated solutions.

What are the key/value durability requirements? (OK to drop values now and then, or does it need to keep them until the end of time?). Need backups? Do values expire, or do you have to expire them manually? Since you can't enumerate or search, how do you delete things? Allowed sizes of keys and values, between bytes and terabytes? How far should it scale? Shared namespace, or namespace per user? Do you need a latency guarantee? How low? Are you gonna use it for something important and need an SLA on the availability of the service as a whole?

A couple of "nearby" points in the solution space:

Amazon S3 is a KV store where the keys look like filenames and the values look like files. High durability, good scaling, pretty high latency. You could also obviously paper a KV store on top of ElastiCache or DynamoDB, which are going to have different properties.

Going low-level and implementing your own in say, golang would probably be the most fun though :p

Hard to say if we could use a SAAS KV store at work without a lot more technical detail on the solution. I'm having a hard time thinking of an app where you'd want a KV store, but not need a database or NoSQL store which you could use instead.
Giving and receiving the consumable gifts is the best I think, and I'd rather give/receive cash than gift cards as the extreme version of that. I generally wouldn't consider clothing a consumable item though -- I wear socks until they have holes in them, so it surprises me that you wear out 5 pairs a year. I was successful in a "no clothes" policy for several years, but apparently I need to renew it since over the last few for my birthday and Christmas I've gotten several wool socks from more than one party that I really don't like... They don't fit my feet well (they're "appropriately sized", but don't fit well for the same reasons Nike shoes of my size don't fit well), I wear them as a last resort if I somehow run out of my clean regular white cottons that last forever. The wool ones are the first to go in the donation heap...
Very interesting list, but perhaps it is meant to include some hardline former members of the SED?
If primes derived from pi are not suspect, then that surely goes for primes derived from 1/pi, e, sqrt(2)... as well? What about bit order, byte order?

The problem is that there are lots of small choices involved in picking "nothing up my sleeve" numbers and deriving data from them. Each small choice may seem trivial in isolation, but taken together, the parameter space is so large that you can derive virtually anything from "nothing up my sleeve" numbers.

Bernstein et al. made a point of exactly this in the paper https://bada55.cr.yp.to/bada55-20140722.pdf by deriving the string "BADA55" from "nothing up my sleeve" numbers.
They should pass a law mandating air filters for grow houses if the smell is that bad. I see no reason why they shouldn't be regulated like any industrial operation. And since smoking outside is illegal, cops should actually ticket those who do it. Legalization is good policy, but it should be enforced consistently and properly regulated.
Coworkers might be another good trust network to build off of. It also has the benefit of you essentially being required to know your coworkers, while you aren't guaranteed to know your neighbors.
The overall quality of Ask HN questions is pretty hit or miss compared with other submissions in the News section. Often times there are Ask HN questions with no context, that border on spam, really aren't asking a question, or would be better served on Stack Overflow.

so I guess what I"m saying is that I'm not particularly surprised by its speed, because a lot of the stories submitted to deserve to decline quickly
My understanding is that "Ask HN" questions have a different "gravity" and sink more slowly. That said, I suspect that the average quality of an "Ask HN" question is not much better than the average non-spam submission...maybe worse since meta-discussions are fairly common and lead to dull comments like mine here.

Even non-meta questions can be rather lazy...I mean a couple of throw away sentences that don't provide much context suggest that it's probably not that important.

For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11160872

Versus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11149361

While I don't think of "Ask HN" as StackOverflow, there's something to the response "What <code> have you tried?" and the idea that a two sentence question doesn't necessarily deserve a long detailed comprehensive answer.
It's nice knowing that a powerhouse like the Gates foundation is working on clean energy. In my view, that's the most important problem that society is facing right now.
"Seeing" is the process of constructing meaning from the raw activation of the light receptors in your eyes. That's why optical illusions work. After all, it's simply patterns of ink on a page - why should you see things that seem impossible? It's because the image is designed to get your brain to construct a particular meaning out of the image.
I agree, this is annoying:

> On a side note, pot is the #1 thing that people want to talk about when I tell them where I'm from. In their eyes, CO == pot.

OTOH, it beats talking about that guy shooting up the abortion clinic and seems to have mostly supplanted memories of Columbine or New Life Church... So it could be worse (and for a while was).

At least for a little bit we can all talk about Peyton and whether bud light is really any better than coors.
I beta tested the mobile app, great tool for keeping an eye on stats/crahes. Highly recommended.
My tv is a tool. I use it to watch Netflix.
Civilians are now subject to an unprecedented level of surveillance. It would be a mistake to underestimate the probabilities of abuse of personal and private information. The 'justifications' for spying are as endless as the means for carrying it out; in 2001 it was Al Queda, today it's ISIL and tomorrow it will be something else. Exactly how these surveillance programs are implemented is beside the point. The results are very clearly a loss of privacy and freedom of expression. Whether or not you're likely to become a security threat will be left to the interpretation of bureaucrats rummaging through your Evernote entries and text messages.
Not a grand piano AFAIK (which might be difficult to get into the first class lounge on a 747--not sure what sort of access there is besides the staircase), but they did have a piano bar: http://unroadwarrior.boardingarea.com/2010/07/21/the-747-pia...

g
> "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Opposed ideas does not always mean that both ideas have the same level of validity.

Some ideas are provably wrong. "Depolarizing" allowed climate change denial and anti-vaxxers, for example, to gain a following because we didn't stamp them out quickly and strongly.
> What do you mean by privileged elevation (I'm talking in the context of a web app)?

For example, prior to changing account settings, reauthenticate the users, regardless if they have a valid session.

> I like it too. But what about delays in receiving emails (when I suggested this approach to some customers, they were worried about that)?

Combo of email & SMS.

As Bruce Schneier has written, security is usually a trade off of user experience.
Anyone tried to make a plan9 in browser?
Upvoted you, of course it doesn't. But if we are talking about "pot candy", can you say that you just like the taste, as you can with alcohol? Never tried it, maybe you can, but now I guess that smoking pot or eating pot candy involves getting high more or less.
As an employee how can you get these details? and how should you act once you have the information?
I've never been a business globe trotter, but I travelled every 2 weeks in 2014 between Ottawa, Toronto and Washington DC. That equalled about 10,000 "air" miles or about $50.

Whoopety doo.

In the mid-90's I was travelling about once a month between the midwest and the coasts. That was enough for a couple round trips in "air" miles.

These days it's barely worth it to be part of the programs (I am, but the "perks" are way less than they used to be).
>I thought farms were responsible for the most generation of CO2 and pollutants?

That's true for intensive farming with machines and powerful fertilizers and so on. Many people in Africa practice subsistence agriculture which is much less efficient.
Expert Party Promotion Ideas, Tips and Tricks
Tell HN: HN and Slack Office Hours with YC Partners this Friday
YC Partners, Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell, will be doing online office hours on HN this Friday (Feb 26) at 11am PT.

We'll put up a new thread that morning and if you'd like help with your startup, post a top-level comment with a one or two sentence description of what you do and the first thing you'd like to talk about. The community will vote, and Jared and Trevor will answer the top questions.
The total number of immigrants (i.e. foreign-born persons) in the US is at 45 million right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_immigrant...

About 11 million of those are illegal/undocumented immigrants. The remaining 34 million are people on visas, people with green cards ("lawful permanent residents"), and naturalized citizens of the United States. This does not include the children born to them, who are natural-born citizens, and are thus not counted as immigrants.

45 million is 14.3% of the US population, which might seem high, but if the list on Wikipedia is sorted by % of population, the U.S. is nowhere on the top of the list. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Singapore, etc. all have more immigrants per capita than the United States. And gulf countries like the U.A.E. and Qatar have the highest.
Maven is a hug step backwards. SBT has its issues, but maven is god awful. Going forward though on new project, I plan on using Gradle. I find it a lot easier to work with than SBT.
Rowhammer is a very good point. Hrm.

Rowhammer is basically mitigated if you don't let untrusted processes run CLFLUSH, right? That's sort of orthogonal to your choice of programming language (which might be your point, but then, I'm not sure I believe that Erlang or unikernels solves this either). It requires a world in which you've got something Native Client-like wrapping all userspace processes, which definitely seems like a good goal to work towards, and also seems easier to implement reliably in Rust than in C.
There's crazy genetics happening here, which I certainly don't understand enough to explain — I'm not a botanist, I just write software for them.

But wild bananas do have seeds. There's a picture of the seeds of Musa balbisiana [1], one of the ancestors of cultivated bananas.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_balbisiana
Jared will also be doing open office hours on Slack from 2-4pm PT on Friday (Feb 26). If you'd like help with your startup, but want your questions answered in a private setting, sign up here by end of day on Feb 23:

https://apply.ycombinator.com/events/13.
It's also the name of a Python devops tool http://www.fabfile.org/
I really appreciate that a document like this is public. It would be very easy to send this out via private email list or internal wiki. Cheers for sharing!