skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why landing a flying, fire-breathing Red Dragon on Mars is huge
//Slowly, over time? It's not as though $600B cash is exactly out of reach for Apple

You do know that the cash Apple has in its balance sheet belongs to its shareholders and that Apple can't use that to buy itself and go private?
HP's Latest Chromebook Is Premium and Affordable
I did not suggest that they have little agency around population control. What I suggested was that aliens will continue to want to have children

So you suggested that their civilization as a whole had little agency around population control.

Beyond that, if you have effectively infinite space and resources, there's no need at all to have even the slightest bit of population control.

You're forgetting simple geometry. Space empires can only expand proportional to n^3, while their population could potentially expand proportional to k^n. Also, in a situation where there are multiple star-faring "species," a hegemonic, exponentially expanding entity might well be viewed by others as worse than obnoxious.
Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian will “appcast” the new Reddit app at 5pm PT
All Carl Icahn has to do it is tweet, he does not even has to go to CNBC.
I'm sure they are, but for some reason they used the term "public domain" which is a concept that only exists in a few western countries. And talking about how "the original code is free" misses the point that nothing stops someone from enslaving users using your software. While we may have different world views, arguing that you like permissive licenses while stating that you care about perpetual user freedom is having your cake and eating it.
Really good stuff from Mark Suster. I remember a time when this would have been at the top of the HN front-page, instead of the latest general news story from the NYT or whatever. Too bad that the Eternal September finally got to HN, despite pg's efforts. Still, the "old" HN had a good run.

As for the article itself... the one metric that he didn't mention explicitly, but sort of indirectly alluded to, is CoGS - Cost of Goods Sold[1]. CoGS is directly related to your per-time profit margin and can explain how you can have the scenario he described where revenue exceeds customer acquisition cost but you still lose money.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_goods_sold

Edit: to be fair, the front-page is actually full of fairly interesting stuff ATM. But man, is there WAY more "general news" most days, than there used to be.
From what I can tell, that assumes the market wouldn't take those increases in cash into account, pushing the market cap up proportionally, which doesn't make much sense.
Just as another data point, on my system (fully up to date arch) it's half and half:

$ file -i /usr/bin/*grep|sort -k2,2 [17:59:42]
/usr/bin/grep: application/x-executable; charset=binary
/usr/bin/igrep: application/x-executable; charset=binary
/usr/bin/pgrep: application/x-executable; charset=binary
/usr/bin/msggrep: application/x-executable; charset=binary
/usr/bin/deepgrep: application/x-executable; charset=binary
/usr/bin/pcregrep: application/x-executable; charset=binary
/usr/bin/lzgrep: inode/symlink; charset=binary
/usr/bin/lzegrep: inode/symlink; charset=binary
/usr/bin/lzfgrep: inode/symlink; charset=binary
/usr/bin/xzegrep: inode/symlink; charset=binary
/usr/bin/xzfgrep: inode/symlink; charset=binary
/usr/bin/egrep: text/x-shellscript; charset=us-ascii
/usr/bin/fgrep: text/x-shellscript; charset=us-ascii
/usr/bin/zgrep: text/x-shellscript; charset=us-ascii
/usr/bin/bzgrep: text/x-shellscript; charset=us-ascii
/usr/bin/xzgrep: text/x-shellscript; charset=us-ascii
/usr/bin/zegrep: text/x-shellscript; charset=us-ascii
/usr/bin/zfgrep: text/x-shellscript; charset=us-ascii
/usr/bin/zipgrep: text/x-shellscript; charset=us-ascii
let sql = `delete from order_lines`
` where order_id = ${orderId}`;

Without a lint complaining about a missing semicolon you wouldn't notice this bug.

This has happened to me with a rather more complex query.
The thing that gets me about startups is how shallow and timid so many are. They're entering densely crowded markets with very little differentiation, or they have no path to monetization that I can imagine. It might just be that I'm stupid and the founders are much smarter than me (that happens sometimes), but more often I think, no, I'm not stupid, that idea is stupid.
Greenland’s Ice Sheet Is Melting So Fast, Scientists Thought It Was an Error
I think you're forgetting about PayPal.
Ultimately what is Apple going to do with that 230 billion? Sitting on a hoard of cash is no benefit to the company or investors.
Rust used to work that way, but it was changed primarily to visually distinguish between enumerated variant names and variable bindings in patterns. e.g. match foo { none => ... } and match foo { non => ... } having completely different interpretations was confusing.
> How then do we deal with population growth when people don't die of old age?

That's a great future problem to have, and it's the same problem that people brought up at the dawn of the age of antibiotics. Our lives have gotten better for it.

Who knows, maybe by the time immortality is possible, Earth won't be our only home, so population will be less of a problem.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/

"A common objection against starting a large-scale biomedical war on aging is the fear of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation). This fear is only exacerbated by the fact that no detailed demographic projections for radical life extension scenario have been conducted so far. This study explores different demographic scenarios and population projections, in order to clarify what could be the demographic consequences of a successful biomedical war on aging. A general conclusion of this study is that population changes are surprisingly slow in their response to a dramatic life extension. For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million). Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time. Thus, even in the case of the most radical life extension scenario, population growth could be relatively slow and may not necessarily lead to overpopulation. Therefore, the real concerns should be placed not on the threat of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation), but rather on such potential obstacles to a success of biomedical war on aging, as scientific, organizational, and financial limitations."
Hitler was quite the orator. Had you been there, you'd have been cheering.
I hung onto mine... Thinking this might be the catalyst to sell the few that I have.

It's a shame they have such a toxic environment and backload their stock grants. It would have been nice to be able to get rich and retire young!
When I was younger, I decided that failures in schedules were failures in management. Now that I am older, I feel that failures in schedules are failures in management. Not failures in technology.

As patio11 mentions elsewhere in this thread, schedule crunch, except for the very first time, is a deliberate decision.
How do you know that? Bitpay allows you to keep a percentage as Bitcoins rather than converting them all to USD.
Then I'll invoke Occam's Razor. A simple filter explains the situation more cleanly, and doesn't need the addition of a wild-sounding mechanism that affects evolution that's attached to inflation.

Furthermore, if it has such a powerful and pervasive effect on evolution, why haven't we already discovered it in our studies of evolution to date? We live on a planet chock full of evolving life.
Did that. Look at the mess you (we) have made already.
StarWars.io Domain Up for Auction at $1
Harnessing stellar output might not be that interesting. Power density inside stars kind of sucks (about that of a reptile) and stars have bad failure modes.

You're probably better off disassembling the suckers and storing their matter in a sensible way, rather than have it sit there, burning. Stars are kind of like trash fires; maybe we should be looking for less energy in a type III civ, not shielding.
I believe you mean "complex". You can form a bijection between the reals and the complex numbers by interleaving the digits, as any Google search can tell you.
Learn how to be confident
agreed, idea sunday was awesome. removing it was really really dumb.
The question shouldn't be "is pie chart X better than bar chart Y for making point Z?" but "what is the best way to express point Z?"

In this case, the given bar chart was a poorer way to express the point. Here's a text diagram which I believe is more informative than the give pie chart, though I have some fencepost errors due to character alignment.

[ A │ B │ C │D]
0' ' '12 ' '24

A variation is:

AAAAAAAAAAAABBBBBCCCCDDD
0| ' ½ ' |1

or if you don't want to count the letters, here's a variation with an explicit count:

A B C D
[----12----][-5-][4-][3]
0| ' ' ' |24
They may be, but the stock price benefits of the activism persist after they leave. [0] The shareholders (many of whom are employees) do benefit from their activity.

For every case of an out-of-touch activist damaging a great company, I see many more companies where the management is looting the value at the expense of the owners.

[0] http://www.columbia.edu/~wj2006/HF_LTEffects.pdf
Maybe you can explain the mechanism by which salaries (or hourly wages) absolutely 100% keep up with actual inflation and purchasing power. I know plenty of folks that suffer from prices that rise faster than their 2-3% COLA.
Do you have specific examples of Rust features you claim are unnecessary?

Rust would not work at all with the borrow check as a separate tool, by the way. It would be comically easy to write broken code.
Or as I've recently taken to calling it, the GNU+ACM Software System Award.
How much of it is actually in the US? That might be a factor.
>You do know that the cash Apple has in its balance sheet belongs to its shareholders and that Apple can't use that to buy itself and go private?

Not really true - what exactly do you think the current stock buyback program consists of? Apple is using it's cash to buy it's own stock from the market.
Uh oh, they're doomed! DOOMED!!!
Let us know when someone successfully revives a frozen rodent. Until then this stuff is just idle speculation, on par with worrying about the "fallout" from an alien invasion.
I love this advice. Very pragmatic, from someone actually on the receiving end. Sales pitch for B2B applications, especially for large customers, is a fascinating challenge.

I wish it didn't need to say "Don't make me watch a nine minute video face to face", or "Don't be chatting online during our sales meeting", but I suppose some people haven't learned manners yet.
My understanding from reading the article was that the roommate (aka flatmate) fell through before renting an apartment, so she rented the cheapest 1-bedroom apartment she could find with the expectation that she would move when she found a suitable roommate.
Nobody at YC would balk at your applying, and all would probably encourage you.

If you're worried about a YC alum at the partner company seeing your application, reach out to YC - I'm no longer involved in the software, but there may be a way to ensure your application isn't seen, or bypasses alumni review completely. I think something like this may have even happened before.

That said, if you get in, you may lose the partnership. Only you can evaluate how disruptive that will be for you and if it's worth the risk.
The title was changed from:

Stallman Recipient of 2015 ACM Software System Award

To:

ACM 2015 Technical Award Recipients
Interesting insight, Apple's market cap is $600 B while it has ~$250 B cash/equivalent.

So net of all their businesses valuation is more like $400 Billion? Less than Google and Microsoft?

Anyway I don't think it is unfair for an investor to want company to pay dividends when it has no good use for that cash. Remember, Carl Icahn was the guy who spun off paypal from the sinking ship that is ebay.
1 minute to heart attack
> If you get stocks granted as a bonus (most of us do),

Or by bonus do you mean just the amounts they give you as regular refreshes?
Another perfect emergency corridor on a German Autobahn
Actually companies do this all the time. Buybacks are often used to prop up the price of shares in short term, or reduce dividend obligations. Apple could borrow the $600B at dirt cheap rates and go private asap. 20 year loan repayment. might be cheaper than trickling itself back to private.
Go is less safe due to the "Off to the Races" problem, but there's a legitimate debate as to whether that safety loss matters in practice.

Common Lisp and Golang use GC, which exacts a performance cost in some scenarios. Go also has highly dynamic semantics (e.g. with defer) which have unavoidable performance overhead, especially in an AOT compilation setting.
The intent of the COTS contracts was to procure launches for much less than the usual price by providing up-front payments in exchange for a block buy of future launches. Seems to have worked great. Commercial companies sign contracts like that on occasion, when they don't like the prices from their current suppliers.
As an American citizen, you have the responsibility to get educated about the simple facts and not ask of others to do that for you.

Laura Poitras is an American citizen too. Is she credible enough for you? Can you tell me what are her thoughts on the TSA?

No? Do you even care? If you do care, then put the effort to learn what is already accessible to you. Otherwise what's the point in engaging in discussions with comments "oh yeah you read it on the Internet derp derp"

Here, have a freebie from Bruce Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/hacker_detain...

EDIT: it seems, when facts come in, downvotes are cast! Ouch. It burns
I love Futurama, but come on. The only thing you're going to learn by watching that show is how to write a funny TV script.
That's a great future problem to have

It always looks like that from the "before" side of things.

Our lives have gotten better for it.

That is the historical trend. But it's only a trend, so beware of inductive reasoning. It's not firmly anchored in any kind of mechanism or theory. There are reasons to believe that immortality overlaid on a capitalist free-market system might be horribly dystopian.

More likely, horribly dystopian and utopian all at once. In fact, I'd say the Bay Area is already horribly dystopian and utopian all at once.
because I have said that assuming that Musk's main goal with SpaceX is not to send the supply (or astronauts in near future) to Space Station. His main mission with SpaceX is to help create a self-sustaining city on Mars. It seems to me he is using government's space contract money to pay the bills till he achieves his main mission. In that sense, I'd say that Govt is helping him and not the other way around.
Warren Ellis' excellent Transmetropolitan touches on this as well.

[0] - http://amzn.to/1Tzbd5T
Considering Amazon is able to constantly expand into new retail fields (like groceries), launch a cloud services business, launch own its internal logistics business (that is the 2nd largest provider in the UK now) says to me the Retail business is probably more profitable than the media would have us believe...
What does "appcast" mean?
It isn't generating cashflow, but it can still be benefiting the company as a risk buffer. Cash to live through downturns, or purchasing new companies, or financing capital outlays for the production logistics which would be impossible for other companies.

That last one can be huge - if none else can build certain components for the same cost/volume as Apple then that's a key competitive advantage.
Just to play devil's advocate -- density isn't everything either.

Plants on Earth play an incredible optimization game. Water is necessary not just for chemical metabolism, but because throwing it away is an essential part of the internal material transport systems of a plant. Evaporation in the leaves creates a relatively lower osmotic pressure in the higher levels of the plant. Between capillary action and the slight but insistent pull to replace evaporated water in the leaves, plants have a pumping mechanism with essentially nil energy input: minerals and nutrients gathered in the roots just ride on up with the tide.

Stars may be a similar story for efficient fusion. Sure, with sufficiently advanced technology, I can make inordinately denser energy sources with less boil-off. But do I want to? Maybe letting the brute physics of a gravity well do the job simply has unbeatable efficiency -- just like evaporation as one end of a pump for plants on Earth is clearly no comparison to any motorized pump for volume, but for cost-effect, nothing else comes close.
Why do people link to basic stories like this behind a paywall? If WSJ has an original piece out, fine, but this could've come from any one of a thousand sources.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/amazon-sal...
Google gives me zillions of hits on "cost of windfarm is transporting the blades". The first I looked at is http://windpower.sandia.gov/other/031428.pdf, which computes costs of transport in the 6-7% range.

The second I opened is http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/61063.pdf. From a quick glance, it has transport costs at around 10% of capital costs.

Of course, transport prices can go up a lot by increasing transport distance or by changing location. Tops of mountains or densely populated areas may be way more expensive.

I do not rule out that transport costs in some cases are way higher, but I don't think it is generaLily true.

And that Jerome de Paris text may be on http://www.theoildrum.com/user/Jerome%20a%20Paris.
> How many tech companies last decades?

Amazon is at 2 decades and going strong. Any reason to think they won't last a long time?
Really? What about Jurassic Bark[0]? That episode is extremely sad and precisely about the fallout of being cryogenically frozen.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Bark
I'm assuming it's like Twitch, but for less interesting content.
Apparently its supposed to mean broadcasting the screen of the app live..
I know this is massively simplistic, but a lot of people were predicting the downfall of Apple as soon as Steve's cancer was revealed to the public. A lack of freshness is starting to creep in to their product line. Cook is great but as far as I know he isn't really a product guy. He needs someone like Ive to come up with new products, and maybe Ive needed to be babysat by Steve for the magic to happen. Apple can't support its current valuation without making new products that are in some way drastically better than their competition's so people will pay the premium price.
Google stronger than Azure?
Even at 1.0, Vivaldi closes in on the cure for the common browser
Is there interest they could earn on that cash?
A pilot landed an aircraft after a collision with an object he believed to be a drone, following four confirmed incidents of drone near misses at UK airports in recent months. Media reported the incontrovertible fact of the aircraft landing and the pilot's presumably good-faith belief it was a drone. The BBC even put 'drone' in inverted commas in their original headline.

You are seriously arguing that this amounts to "lies" and should be suppressed?
if by unhappy chance it turns out that some of the quantum details of the brain's state are important to the mind, then it's possible we may simply never be able to copy a person.

I should think that such a circumstance would mean we wouldn't be able to copy a consciousness while being able to copy the mind. Of course, this would bring in to question exactly what person would mean.
Russia to stop pricing its oil in dollars
Your condescending attitude is worse than being rude. Your ignorance is astounding too.

BTW, I left you the, surprisingly hard(took me 3 minutes) to find, evidence you asked in the other comment.
Share buy back is one thing. Going private using share buyback is another thing. share buy back cancels the shares that are bought back and that enriches the value of all remaining shareholders. to go private an individual has to buy back shares so his ownership gets to 100% which involves a lot more than a company using it's cash in balance sheet to buy back shares. not the same thing.
There is that joke about Cobol - just wondering what could motivate people in the future to actually wake you up. Some skill only you have? Maybe Cobol really isn't such a bad bet.
Del.icio.us has been down since it's “migration” on Sunday
Stateful mixins in Swift
As a teenager in the 80s, (as a joke) tried to buy condoms. Guy wouldn't sell them to me said I was too young.
WSJ subscribers probably don't even think about the paywall when they share it here, since they are already logged in. But that is what the "web" link is for. If you see a known paywall site, always just click on the web link.
I think most people know competition is good for the consumer. I'm saying, competition is also good for the companies themselves. Often in tech you see one company, its employees, or its users lambasting the competition. It is self defeating to wish away all your competition. It is a rare company who can continue to innovate in the face of having no competition. Right now FB doesn't have much competition in the US for its core product -- helping people connect with their friends

Perhaps this is just a recent revelation for me, and talking about it helps form my thoughts. And maybe I'm wrong about FB. I don't use Snapchat or Instagram etc. My sense is that FB is far ahead.
Possibly, but somehow I would have to convince somebody to let me try.
> The catch 22 here is that it is hard for people to innovate around API specifications when they are so hard to get!

Yes, this is exactly the problem which I try to solve with my collection.

> Per the SDKs ... what if there was a NPM.org or rubygems equivalent of high quality SDKs that get automatically generated whenever I push a new API specification?

You can run the same tool on API owner side you don't need to publish your spec for that. I did a couple of interviews with API owner and they fear to loose control over SDKs, Docs, etc.

> Curious if you are able to share how much work it is for you to get access to the specifications in order to make this possible?

No, it's public info since my entire work is open-sourced under MIT license. I try to make process automatic as much as possible, so it starts from scraping. For example, I scrape Github for Swagger specs: https://morph.io/IvanGoncharov/API_specifications
When I need to filter test, example, etc. APIs and find specs for real-life APIs. But get spec source is just first step, I need to fix errors in it(~80% have them), get additional info(logo, link to API key registration, etc.).
But most time consuming is update them every day.
My update/convert/validation scripts not ideal so I need to manually inspect all changes.

> ould you have spent a lot more time on making cool integrations vs mining specs?

Actually not I learn a lot from it, for example, you can fix all mistakes in API owner specs. Instead, you should give them a tool which will automatically inspect API spec and output errors/warnings/recommendations/hints. Together with my friend we working on OpenAPI/Swagger linter.

If you want to discuss more here is my Skype(ivangon4arov) and Hangouts(ivan.goncharov.ua@gmail.com) or APIs.guru public chat https://gitter.im/APIs-guru/api-models
No hiring experience. I would be interested in that, although it seems as if nobody really knows how to do it.