skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not about principles, it's about efficiency. 30% (if that is the number) is a huge markup. That's a lot of money that could be being spent on research and is instead mostly going to the shareholders of five publishing companies[0] . A few years ago, Harvard was spending about $3.5m on journal subscriptions[1]. That's about a million from one (admittedly big-budget) university alone, enough to cover the financial support payments of nearly three PhD students.

Part of the core business of universities is the production of research artefacts. Why shouldn't that core business also include making those artefacts available to others? Why not a subsidiary owned by a consortium of universities? Why not an organisation like EPSRC or AHRC, or even a national pan-discipline service provider?

Profit is what's left after the expenses have been taken care of. Salaries are an expense. Workers earning a salary are not making a profit, they are being remunerated for their labour.

Subcontracting to private companies is a good thing when your need for their services is subject to surge, or when your need for their services is so low that the overheads of DIY are prohibitive (Don't set up a whole in-house printing and binding facility just to do your glossy annual report, don't hire a full-time cleaner to keep your 5-desk office clean). If you are paying another company to provide a full-time, predictable service that is strongly aligned with your core business, then that is wasteful.

[0]http://phys.org/news/2015-06-companies-academic-publishing.h...
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-univ...
I am pretty sure we will see a better terminal come out thanks to this new Linux sub-system or whatever they decide to call it.
In the case of the big publicly traded companies, I have been assuming that this was simply a way to securitize the large overseas cash holdings in these companies. If the stock market values the overseas cash holdings as though they were local reserves, then the companies can effectively pay some of their biggest expenses (local employees' salary) with the investor's collective belief in the overseas money.

A strictly rational market might price the book value of that cash at its face value, less the tax burden of moving it to where it would be used. But I don't think they are being rational overall: The potential future tax liability is not counted as a liability, and the company's management is also being given a multiplier as a reward for keeping all that cash (ex, trusting Alphabet/Facebook/Apple as investment firms of sorts, expecting returns greater than the investor's next best alternative). That's really weird to me, since I would expect that to count as a discount against the company for holding onto it as opposed to paying some of it back to the investors through dividends.

The net effect is that means that it costs the company somewhat less to pay its people in stock than in cash.
Class action lawsuit attacks Tidal over 'Life of Pablo' exclusivity
So few people make bank from tech stock that everyone should literally ignore this anecdote and operate in life as if it is not true. This is like saying you're not going to buy that $2.00 lottery ticket, then being mad when someone else wins the lottery. Do not buy the $2.00 lottery ticket.
> (...) not Signal's weird "link your phone up to your MacBook" solution

What are the properties of this solution that you dislike?
There is also a class at MIT under the same name: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-098-street-fightin...
That's fine. I don't care what you do with your self-built binaries once you manage to build them yourself. But too many firms have no infrastructure in place to do that. They wait for upstreams to synchronize to fix security flaws that they could fix directly.
> Vice isn't a website for children.

Vice isn't running the ads:

"The ads will not carry Vice branding and will not run on Vice properties. They won’t be shown to people in the US or UK as both countries have strict rules prohibiting tobacco advertising."
The "multi-level" programming (simple graphical, complex graphical, text) was really neat to see.

It seems like an attempt to improve on Lego Mindstorm, since that's another "teach programming using robots". So that brings to mind a question: has there been any educational studies to see if mindstorms is a good program? Does it actually deliver on having kids who are interested in STEM vs. schools that don't have mindstorm? That seems to be a key study to determine if Root is even solving a real problem vs. just speculative problem solving.
I don't think Vice has a monopoly on clickbait headlines.
Came here to write basically this. Ben spoke really highly of Bill in his book, mostly about how good of a person and friend he was, not because of his business skills (which Bill obviously had as well). I remember the section where he describes meeting Bill, and how though he had any impressive history of success, the achievement which impressed Ben most was one Bill's companies that by most definitions "failed" yet every employee spoke of it as one of the greatest places to have worked in their lives.

I felt sad seeing the title, but my heart definitely sank reading the final sentence of the post....
I agree, the number of shares is of less consequence than the total value as the price of each companies shares varies wildly. If they all got the same number of shares, I would choose to work at Google with a $790 share price rather than LinkedIn with a $40 share price.
Ask HN: IaaS/PaaS providers for India region
I am working on a mobile app for the Indian subcontinent and I need to locate an IaaS/PaaS provider for the backend. Anybody have any first-hand experience with deploying on such a platform? I am trying to minimize network latency.
> How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them?

By not granting any copyright to publicly funded work. That doesn't actually prohibit a publisher from charging readers for access, but it would require them to charge the market price for publication of digital works out of copyright. Then we see if competition can significantly drive down costs.

Which we all know perfectly well that it would.
Javascript clock? You can get an entire animated 6502 CPU. Maybe it could be used to run a browser, to render the clock :-) http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/
Stephen North
You seem to be implying there is something else they could have hitched their wagon to that would have worked better. I can't see any, and you don't seem to have any better ideas, so it seems like you're effectively criticizing them for trying to exist.
Hah. I actually had the 10-in-1 Junior Electronic Lab Kit here:

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1975/h104.html

I had an recurring fascination with electronics, but didn't really grok analog stuff until much later. Digital stuff and programming really caught my fancy, and has never let go.
Because newer cars are hardly ever stolen? The bigger issue is items being stolen out of vehicles, not the whole thing being stolen.
Realtime single-molecule..DNA sequencing..using..tagged nucleotides on..nanopore
The Github page says William Durand is part of the company.

A nice surprise and some fond memories: he has been the mantainer of Propel ORM for several years.

I miss Propel and I feel thankful for it. Propel had is own problems, but it was the fastest and sanest way to develop the db layer I've ever used.

I wish you good luck with your new venture, William!
I credit my 150-in-1 kit (and the 8th grade buddy who let me borrow his until I got my own) as part of the ancestry of a career in software development. Not just for what I learned about electronics, but what I learned about experimentation, and what I learned about constructive play.
You can't get very far in life if you assume every acronym you encounter is irrelevant to you if you don't already know what it stands for.
Make research accessible Publish, read, and vote on research paper summaries
You can't have a convincing cloud story without CDN. I'm an Azure guy but Google's investment here is clear. I'll take that bet.
That seems like a bargain for the level of assurance they provide. Two such locations with fail-over is median cost of a single, IT worker.
Without meaning to slight those who have the latter ability, I think that building your problem-solving muscles, as I believe that this book tries to encourage, is far more important than building your mental-math muscles. (I say this as someone who takes pride in my own very limited capacity for mental math.) While these muscles are not totally unrelated, it is possible to be good at either skill and poor at the other; and, to the extent that it is necessary to choose, I had much rather live in a society of people who can solve problems well but ponderously slowly than one of people who can find lightning-fast answers, but only when others have already asked the right questions.
I wonder if you had a look at what I consider your largest competitor, Facebook Messenger. What are the pros and cons of wit.ai compared to LUIS, in terms of quality, performance, ease of setup?
In the specific case of RSU's, there is another advantage to the company: In the event of a downturn (where revenues and stock price are correlated, which they usually are), the company automatically cuts everyone's salary. Krugman is a big fan of talking about the influence of the Zero Lower Bound on nominal wages and price deflation. Giving employee's a large fraction of their salary in stock offsets those difficulties somewhat. If the tech bubble bursts, the large companies may not have to lay off as much labor to stay afloat, since their per-unit costs will automatically go down.

Edit: The article touched on this briefly, noting the disadvantage to the employees in the case that their particular firm does poorly while other companies in the market are doing OK. I'm specifically talking about industry-wide downturns. The ability to cut everyone's salary this way may keep unemployment from soaring as high as it would otherwise.
I think people's replies to this thread are commonly confusing ascending without modifying source with ascending without reading source (even though some people have answered correctly). Just to clarify the two different issues, there is only one person known to have ascended unspoiled.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.roguelike....

However, people frequently ascend without modifying or tampering with the code. Essentially all of these people have been spoiled by studying source code or spoiler files derived from it (although some people study spoilers extensively and some people just consult them for very specific topics). You can see ascensions in real time every single day by watching other people play on nethack.alt.org. Especially on weekends, there will be several victories per day!
Then I read complaints about how the owners (shareholders) of the company are making pots of money and the employees aren't, and how brutally unfair that is.

BTW, 20 years ago I read a statistic that Microsoft had made 10,000 millionaires just in the Seattle area alone. In the early 90s, an acquaintance would refer to his car as his "quarter million dollar Oldsmobile". I finally asked him what he meant. He laughed, and said that he'd cashed in his MSFT stock options to buy it, and that was what the options would have been worth when I asked him.
Why does the logic of "taxpayer funded research should be free" suddenly change when the publisher is a non profit? If that logic is valid, why is the $500 million fine?

I should probably have said "similar charges" as I said later. Reducing the margins to nothing can at best reduce the cost by 30% or so, which I doubt would satisfy most open access advocates; given that, the real concern has nothing to do with publishers' profit.
Anyone tried this? Could you integrate only certain components(and customize them?) with existing laravel application?
When bureaucrats won't accept the outcome of a vote on a trivial matter, is it any wonder that people no longer feel motivated to participate in more serious political issues? What this comes down to is that the minister and his deputies don't want to deal with the momentary political embarrassment of officially launching a boat with a silly name, so ministerial ego requires snubbing thousands of people who voted in good faith, notwithstanding the somewhat childish humor on display.

I actually think it's a good name; Thomas the Tank engine has been a rather successful global cultural export for Britain, and Boaty McBoatface could have done the same for British scientific endeavor. After all, Charles Darwin made many of his intellectual breakthroughs while sailing around the world on a ship named after someone's favorite breed of dog (HMS Beagle). If a ship with a silly name was good enough for King George IV it's good enough for today.
> nobody watches people getting into a crash and becomes convinced to try it themself.

The disclaimer at the beginning of every episode of Jackass must have been for drama then.

http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/2800000/Jackass-Disc...
"it's already one of the fastest" ... wouldn't we expect a new service, with lots of empty cache tables and available free ram, to be faster than the established players?
Huh? In typical rock, the bass drum is on 1 and 3, and the snare drum is on 2 and 4. Think "boom...bap...boom...bap". 1 and 3 are the downbeats and 2 and 4 are the upbeats.

Maybe you are thinking about counting eighth notes on the high hat -- in that case the bass drum would be on the first high hat hit, and the snare would be on the third. However the counting should always be on the quarter note, i.e., two high hat hits per count -- "One and two and three and four and."
The thing is that employee stock options really can be a bad deal. Sure, you can point to plenty of people that have gotten rich off of them but that doesn't change the fact that so much that can go wrong. If you're trading a salary for them that you could be saving and investing today you should be aware of the risks, sadly it doesn't feel like a lot of people in the industry really are.

- Company fail? Oops, not worth anything
- Company succeeded but sold for under whatever the last round was raised at? Oops, not worth anything - it all goes to the preferred stock holders
- Raised a huge round at a great valuation? Too bad, you can't take any money off of the table like the founders probably can. Also, any options you now exercise are 'worth' more and oops, you just triggered AMT and now owe a bunch of taxes for income that may or may not ever exist and that you most certainly can't access yet
- Company went public and the stock shot up? Great... unless it tanks before your 6 month lock up period is up and you're stuck with a tax burden you can't afford to pay

Layered on top of this is the fact that a lot of the decisions that have real, tangible effects on the above are totally out of your hands (things like how much dilution your company takes on). Even if your founders go to bat for you the investors have very different incentives than you do in all but the totally ideal outcome.

My point isn't that people should avoid accepting options but that they should be viewed as a nice perk along the lines of someone buying you a big stack of lottery tickets. I've had too many friends comparing offers between companies multiply what percentage of the company they'd be getting (if the company is even telling them this) by the company's current valuation and treating that like it's money in the bank.

By all means, trade salary for the opportunities that working at a small startup could give you (like responsibility, an opportunity to learn, coworkers you like/respect, etc...) but be _very_ aware that what the company tries to sell you RE stock is a reality viewed through the rosiest of glasses.
I believe this would create a bad incentives structure. You'd penalize the author for people getting hooked to the book (and therefore getting into the 'flow' and reading faster), and encourage scammers to just linger on pages (probably making the scam even easier).

Plus, lots of significant ambiguities to solve: user is reading a page, gets up to do something else, forgets Kindle open. How many minutes do you bill? This might be solvable with the proper signals and rules, but I believe this is far from trivial.
Web host 123-reg deletes sites in clean-up error
And this is why i find the concept of a dual axis political sorting better.

One axis is economic, the other social, with the traditional left-right divide being mapped to the social axis.

Here is the tricky bit, that once you start mapping liberal and conservative on the economic axis things tend to reverse compared to the social one.

So quite often social conservatives end up in the economic "liberal" (or laissez-faire) end.
Link to Archived Course on EdX.

https://www.edx.org/course/street-fighting-math-mitx-6-sfmx
Any GPS clock you are going to find in NY4 is going to be sufficiently sophisticated to check the GPS signal against its internal oscillator in order to check for validity. It can fall back to the internal oscillator if the GPS time looks bad.

The other reason this is unlikely to be a problem is that network time protocols break all the time (oops someone did a maintenance and broke sync with the master clock). Lots of real world trading code has sanity checks on the time.
> the Government has committed huge amounts of funds to HS2, which is yet another line out of London running in parallel to existing lines

FWIW, HS2 is mostly about increasing capacity, hence why it is parallel to existing lines. It moves intercity travel off the very busy WCML, which is near capacity, and is projected to remain near capacity after the opening of HS2 due to increase in commuter services and freight on the line.
That is beautiful. As someone who tries to browse without JavaScript as much as possible, and so frequently sees screwed-up layout, I instinctively scrolled down to see the 'real' content before realising—no, there it is!
I use Instagram as my own personal diary of pictures, but I don't set my profile as "private" so anyone is free to enjoy my pictures, or not. I don't give a shit.

If you start adding hash tags to your photos, that's when you're chasing the validation game and it becomes everything I hate about social media / facebook.
Not really. Even in a world where HFT is limited, cross connections provide consistent connections between trading entities. While AWS provides over-the-Internet or "black boxed" networking on a best efforts basis, Lucera's connections are point to point.
Given where we usually park it, of course it's not valuable.
Oh, I know the downside. I've had plenty of stock options in various companies over the years that panned out to sand. None of them paid off. But I'd still do it again.
Thanks for sharing that. When I say "kids" I mean young people. That Vice is using its knowledge and leverage with youth for the tobacco industry is what angers me. My original post is getting downvoted, but maybe your comment will shed some light on what is happening.
I can't reply to the post underneath yours but I very much agree with you and for me the reason I don't want the "link your phone to your macbook" solution is because my phone and it's number are very much not going to be permanent.
I do however have an email address I intend to use for a very long time.

I was actually looking for a chat solution earlier today and neither telegram nor signal fit the bill for these very reasons.

I want telegrams nice-looking apps, with signals security. Could I use WhatsApp? Maybe, but Facebook owning it makes me uncomfortable.
Because unless the thief brings a spare ECU with them, every car made in the past 15 years won't start without the correct key present.
Ooh, very interested indeed. Thank you much.
> This is targeted squarely at the Marissa Mayer's of the world not the average Google employee.

You miss the point of my "Oh, it's Wall Street scrutiny..." comment. If it were government scrutiny, we might see changes in how the current value of the stock of a company that's not publicly traded is reported to its employees.

At the "startup" I used to work for, I got stonewalled every time I asked for the valuation (whether current or near-to-medium-term expected) of the stock options I had been offered. Friends at other startups report similar stories.

Requiring companies to keep up-to-date information about current and expected future stock valuation, shares issued, & etc would be nice. Requiring companies to disclose that information on demand to current or potential future employees (along with where in the queue the shares that one is either being offered or are currently holding are) would be another nice step.

I get that keeping this information up to date might be a hassle. On the other hand, just how the fuck do you raise money without this information? :)
It might have been done without making a few people obscenely rich, though. That could have had the added benefit of less tooth-and-nail resistance.
We're more familiar with drew, but apparently drawed is a thing. [0]

On another note: who claimed that 10,000 hours of practice leads to creativity? The author says that

>This wealth of research on creativity contradicts the notion that deliberate practice is the sole-- or even the most important-- aspect of creativity.

but this is the first time I've heard of anyone having this idea.

Later down the piece we see

>I have immense respect for Ericsson's body of work on deliberate practice, and do believe that deliberate practice can help you get better in virtually any skill. However, I also believe that an accurate understanding of creativity is important for how we recognize, nurture, value, and ultimately, reward it, across all sectors of society.

But again, it doesn't seem like the author is disagreeing with Ericsson. Am I missing something, is there something in Ericsson's book that would make it clear that Kaufman is not simply attacking a straw-man? Maybe it is from Gladwell using creative people and groups as examples in Outliers?

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/drawed
Probably each CDN does it differently... but the one I know about does the second.... so it goes LB, first webserver on random node, and that first webserver knows where to grab the content from the second webserver on the proper node that has the content.
It's possible to make one implementation for a type that supports multiple orderings, at the cost of another indirection [0]. This turns O(N*M) implementations for N types and M sorting orders into just O(N). (I'm not counting an inline anonymous function as a new implementation.)

In practice, it's rare to need to sort a slice more than one way.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/infogulch/5db15e5ae5cf073f1088033ba4...
Just liquid soap, or bars too?
If we're talking RSU's sure, if we're talking ISO's not so much.

I would certainly agree with you on the RSU front, although there is the other twist that some companies, like Google, don't equate RSU's 1:1 with actual shares, they can go up or down depending on other factors. So you can have 100 RSU's that convert to 1 share or 200 shares depending on how much your manager likes you. In that case it really doesn't matter if the stock price goes up or down.
Those old ones are still the ones being targeted, they're now worth something again [0]

0: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35716456
I don't think that's sufficient. AFAICT it at least implies runtime checks? [1]

(I'm aware that these checks can be made very cheap, like JIT compilers do, but they're not zero-cost like compile-time monomorphization would be.)

[1] I mean if you want to avoid segfaults w/e.g. "No type checks".