skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Venture Capital firm, or VC firm, is the company which manages Venture Capital. That's the colloquial meaning of VC and amusingly leads to phrases like VC money.
Would anyone care if Lenovo or Dell was selling outdated computers? Hell, they probably are. Do we have different expectations for Apple? Is it because they are more of a luxury brand? Why does Apple have an obligation to update their hardware every X years?

Also from what I have seen prices of MacBooks seem to have been going down quite a bit.
That's hundreds and hundreds of MBs you are downloading. It should never change, so it hardly seems a critical piece of functionality.

I guess someone could build it, sort of like the datasets you can download in SciKit or R, or the trained models in NLTK/Spacy.

In-fact I've almost come the full circle on this and think it might be a good idea.

Weird - I didn't think people on the internet could change their mind.
To clarify - convincing telecoms to offer a subset of the Internet for free on mobile devices (because it will lead to more customers) is different from telling the telecoms that they should give away complete access for free.

The second one isn't and never has been a realistic option.
Plug its estimated mass (1.43 solar masses [1]) into the expression for main sequence lifetime [2] and you get ~4.1 billion years. But we don't know how old it is (the prevailing assumption seems to be it's old enough to have settled into staid middle-age behavior, making its variability harder to explain [3]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852

[2] http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/M/Main+Sequence+Lifetime

[3] http://www.americaspace.com/?p=87801
No, it isn't reasonable. You can buy a "741" op-amp IC, and it's the same circuit on the silicon as it was in 1968. It's just "newly made".

A new pair of jeans isn't going to have some amazing new development compared to the pair you had 25 years ago. Same YKK zipper, etc.
Show HN: Handpicked game tutorials to jump start your gameplay
> what to do?

Treat him/her as a normal kid.
actually, read the post - the point isn't about ROI, but absolute dollars. A VC (human) can't do 25 deals because they can't sit on that many boards.
Read this as "Apple should stop selling four-year-olds computers" and I was like hell yeah they should! Get those babies on Raspberry Pi's asap.
On the micro level, maybe, but what about the macro level? As in, "most boys have trouble being interested in anything very early in the morning," or "most boys have trouble being interested in anything after sitting for an hour."

Also, your reply implies we can just "make" MS/HS boys be interested in subject matter, which is kind of not how interests work. If boys are consistently under performing, it s a worthwhile venture to figure out which factors contribute to the performance, as well as which negative factors can be mitigated with basic changes (starting later, class length, etc).
With a Bluetooth keyboard? Surely?
Could you elaborate on the last point (law requirements for local storage) ? I can think about many cases but I'd love to know about a real one.
Singing the praises? Here are some quotes from the piece:

> it’s an open secret among Apple employees that the “101” still sells surprisingly well — to a nearly tragic degree, given its age and mediocrity.

> Geeks like me often wonder why anyone would still buy such an outdated machine.

> I’m right there with everyone else who’d strongly advise against buying this machine for most people who’d ask me
Your "easy" thunked laziness is horrendous. Not only is it unusably verbose, but it relies on mutable reference updates. Doing this properly is a non-trivial problem that really requires language support. GHC has a whole infrastructure around thunks, sparks, blackholing, etc.

It's also much easier to make a strict Haskell data type than it is to do this ML hack you've proposed. You either annotate the module as STRICT or you add a few exclamation marks in the data definition.

And again, strict languages don't actually solve the totality problem:

def foo(x):
y = collatz(x)
return y

y is not bottom. Great, but you've gained nothing. This computation might still diverge. All you've done is kicked the can a foot to the left.

To actually get any interesting benefits of bottom not being a value, you need a totality checker, and at that point you might as well use a lazy language with a totality checker.

An actually interesting solution would be to distinguish between data and codata at the type level, which would provide the same compile-time guarantees as explicitly deferring computation without the awful syntactic overhead. It still wouldn't solve atotality, but it would address all your concerns.
They become sad after 5 years, I guess.

http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2016/03/21/apple-hypocritical-...

"There are over 600 million PCs in use today that are over five years old. This is really sad, it really is."
Because the computers get slower with each OS upgrade. At some point this catches up and the machine feels slow. CPU's might not be improving at the same rate but GPU's are. iMacs, for example, use a mobile gpu on the desktop. i've goto a 2010 iMac and it's slow because i didn't opt for an ssd at the time and got a painfully slow 5400 rpm drive.

People buy because they don't know any better. Wait until every new Mac in the fall has USB C connectors.
Or they price packages as a marginal cost on top of the ride-sharing service, and offer steep discounts for people who share rides.
Have you ever bought a TI calculator?
Here is another post which might go some way to explaining my defiance of the Nordic data-hero Mr Rosling:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12197054

I love Han's charts too, I do appreciate the significance of growth for the world over the past few centuries but I just can't sit and as one fellow said: "lie back and allow the movie of the future to unfold".

In the 70s with OPEC, the Club of Rome, there was a lot of feeling in the air that we were plateauing, even declining. That turned out not to quite be true, but nonetheless it was some kind of important inflection point where something started happening or stopped working. If 2008 was a similar inflection point then it is time to consider the possibility we may be going into a stall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stall_%28engine%29) instead of progressing.
Very much written from a man's perspective. Methinks a mother would write something quite different.
How does this compare to the implementation in the "BoomFilters" library?

https://godoc.org/github.com/tylertreat/BoomFilters#CuckooFi...
Ask HN: How do you adquire basic cumputer literacy?
Hi,

So here is the backstory. My mother's supervisor sends her an e-mail with "texts" as a jpg image. My mother's works with computers mostly involve pdfs and office documents.

When she tried to open the jpgs, which she thought where pdfs. She contacted me because "it wasn't working".

Would she had carefully read the screen, the info was there. Then she would have need to install an image viewer. That is what I would have done. But, how do you learn that that is the solution?
When Saudi Arabia and Iran are both nuclear armed, how long before one of them strikes first, even if it is at or through a proxy?

The Iraq Iran war was filled with incalculable human tragedy and horror, of which both sides were perfectly willing to accept. Both the people who chained children together and forced them to charge machine gun nests and the people who mowed down children chained together from their machine gun nests.
"VC money" is more specific than "venture capital".

Venture capital refers to any capital provided to a venture. Some of this may come from a venture capital firm. That would be VC money. Some may come from friends and family, lenders and strategic investors. The latter are providing venture capital, but are not commonly referred to as venture capitalists.

This distinction is useful because VC firms structure their investments in ways that are better suited for some companies over others.
I wish I could down vote this.
Don't take it the wrong way. It looks like a nice start. I just wish for better reversing tooling, and am merely giving a critique that if this was to replace IDA for me, it'd have to provide something that IDA does not.
Huh?

VC does mean "Venture Capitalist", and they are the company that invests on behalf of LPs (financial institutions) who give the VCs money as a "fund."
No, the article linked to a study that claims that girls perform better with sleep deprivation than boys do under similar circumstances.
I think many of the problems you are talking about comes from declining PC sales.
Yup, Marco's take on this is a good one. (I bought a 2012 MBP in late 2015 for many of those reasons.)

One thing that is often overlooked is that the trackpad click is much better on the 2012 than on the Force Touch models. There is a really satisfying click, mostly because it has so much more room to travel. That was a big part of my decision to stick with the 2012 over any 2015 MBP or MacBook models. I feel about the 2012 MBP Trackpad the same way some folks feel about a Model M or Das Keyboard.
If you invest $10M in a company and get back $12.5M after ten years, that's a 2.3% annual compound return.

You would have made nearly twice as much (with virtually no risk) if you had bought a government bond with the money instead.
Maybe patch binary ninja to allow it? ;)
If you say so.

My iPad collects dust, only modern apple products I regret buying.
One could also use it to verify membership (or non-membership) in a set without having access to the set.

Suppose I have a secret list of websites from whom you shouldn't load ads. I can then just publish a bloom filter which you can use in your browser to see if a web request should be allowed or not, without having access to the original list. I know this is contrived, but hopefully you get the idea.
I've still got my 2010 17 inch. Upgrading to an SSD removed all of the performance issues I was experiencing and personally I'm not buying another Mac until they have a new 17 option.

If this thing ever dies on me I'm just going to switch to Ubuntu.
Many people who are asking or hoping for an update to the non-Retina MBP are missing an important point. Apple already has released an update to it with newer CPUs, and better screen, and thinner, it's the Retina MBP.

The non-Retina MBP is effectively discontinued because it's largely replaced by the Retina version, and has been for many years.

They still sell the non-Retina MBP (in one size only, no 15") just for few people that absolutely need a built-in optical drive in their MBP for some specific reason.

The non-Retina MBP is not meant for the general public. If you walk into an Apple Store without knowing anything, the chances of you walking out with one is less than 1%, it's hard to find and store employees will recommend something better for your needs.
I don't think it is a different business model. I think it has been the business model from the beginning.

Having a multinational, on the ground door-to-door delivery service really is a moat.

I'm in Australia - hardly the poorest market on earth, and FedEx outsources delivery here.

Uber has both ends of the delivery service covered for a huge majority of population centers, and I think they are one of the few companies that have that.

Yes, I completely concede there is that small airfreight thing to figure out, and that isn't trivial.

But the only way the money that have raised makes any sense to me is if they do have some kind of defensible advantage, and I could see it working for them in the logistics market.
Stand up against the stand-up
UMirrorMaker: Uber Engineering's Robust Kafka Replicator
What kind of ancient computer is your mom using that she would have needed to "install an image viewer".
great post but it misses several important dynamics (in addition to subtler effects):
1. LPs invest in multiple VCs - they have their own portfolio effect.
2. not even VC investment is equal -- there's 10-50x difference between their largest and smallest bets.
3. there's non-financial benefits to being an investor in Uber (and doubly, for being able to say it publicly). There's no benefit in saying you're an investor in the stock market. Subtly, if you're a top VC and NOT an investor in enough Uber's (and only investing in unknowns) then LPs and entrepreneurs don't take you seriously.

These effects combine to dampen the effects you mentioned. Consider FriendFeed - small $50M acquisition by Facebook, but given its non-financial impact, do you think the VCs regretted the investment? They'll make their $$$ somewhere else, perhaps the entrepreneur's next startup... which turned out to be quip, acquired for $750M last week...
They have not stopped. The new Macbook came out last year. A leisurely schedule of new releases perhaps. They are not doing bad in terms of market share. 7.5% Q4 15 vs 6.7% a year earlier global share. I think that's probably their best ever?

http://www.macrumors.com/2016/01/12/4q15-pc-sales/
Are the jeans going to be antiquated and unsupported soon after purchase?
Thirded. It still works like a champ after 4 years. No issues.
We have a local law that talks about research data[1] and its movement. The problem is if some security issue happens in the cloud, it is likely to leak documents and I am a bit worried about the wording as it applies to liability. Storing them locally and have a data breach would be problematic, but at least defensible

1) Basically, no data may be shared unless approved by a local institution. Its legacy from other groups taking the data we generate and writing grants to get money that never benefits the local people or institutions. A long, long story that someone should write a book on.
I didnt have a problem with facebooks effort, till I saw the patronizing ads they put out. Zuck read India wrong or maybe it was Marc - either which ways India will be closed for anything like this for facebook now.

Maybe Zuck needs to work harder on his Chinese, not that its going to help when that mirage unfolds.
Very cool, but the selection is pretty arbitrary with not really any of the classics in there. Probably licensing issues?
I guess I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend.
If you read the post, the whole point is about ROI.

Also, I'm sure a full-time VC could sit on 25 boards - that's why some VC's have a chauffeur to drive them from meeting to meeting.
This is a bit of a middlebrow comment that we tend to unfortunately find at the top on HN.

What measure of time do you use? Hour, minute, second, month, day year? Those are pretty arcane. The first four are pretty arbitrary, and existed way before America.
I don't think Apple care about their desktop OS and hardware anymore. It has been stagnating for a while already. I suppose recent rise of stats for global Linux usage can indicate OS X refugees who are fed up with that stagnation.
Does anyone know what the chances are that Nintendo will force a take down of this? I know they tend to enforce their rights very strongly on YouTube, not sure what their track record is for these matters outside of that.
I find this argument inadequate. The conclusion may be true (that most venture funds lose money) but this article does a poor job of elucidating why this may be the case. There are many directions we can approach this from.

First, to simplify, instead of talking about an A and B and having 25% ownership after these rounds. Let's assume $10M is invested in the A for 25% ownership ($10M on a $30M pre-money valuation / $40M post-money.) Of course if each of these companies exits at exactly $50M and money just sits there for 10 years then the returns will be garbage. But in reality if you're investing at a post-money of $40M, very few of your companies will exit at $50M.

What actually matters here is what happens with money after exits. If money is returned to investors immediately, then what we want is to solve:

$100M * (1.12)^Y <= .25 * (exit price)

For example, if ONE company goes from $40M post and exits at $562M after 3 years, and then this money is distributed back to investors, then investors receive .25*$562 = $140.5M as a return, which is more than 12% per year for these three years ON THEIR ENTIRE $100M investment. (This assumed no subsequent dilution but you get the idea.)

If money isn't returned directly to investors then it needs to be re-invested. The point is, of course your venture returns will be poor if you just place your cash under a mattress post exits. The math becomes much more favorable for the VCs with realistic time assumptions.
Location: Netherlands/Ireland;

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Javascript, HTML5, CSS, Less, Java, REST, npm, bower, grunt, AngularJS, Serenity, Selenium

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F8Awk3rfyDg3O16h7vlTt3Xa...

Email: ionut.pistol@gmail.com
I agree with your point, but you are vastly overstating the return on government bonds. Current yield on the 30 year is 2.31% and everything with a shorter maturity is way less than that.
a very important distinction that needs to be mentioned every single time
This was also the topic of last week's Radiolab

http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/
They're certainly expensive ($350), but no-one who finds it helps with their Carpal Tunnel (like me) would say it's overpriced. Think of its price in the context of medical devices :)
That's a if they're updated in the Fall. Rumour had it several lines would have been updated this past spring.

Anyone who buys a MacBook Pro today, before whenever it is the line gets updated, will be happy with it, which is of course a good thing. (Outside of being hit by hardware issues or something)

When the line is updated, you probably won't notice a performance difference between the current model and whatever the next one is. The time of huge improvements with every processor upgrade has long since past, the RAM speed will not be that much different and it will be using solid state storage at again about the same speed as the current model. This is why people will keep their hardware longer.

A lot of hardware upgrades are now coming from when the hardware no longer supports the latest OS. Sierra will work with MacBooks going back to 2009, and they had upgradable RAM and storage so even those laptops will be able to run the latest OS with performance that is acceptable to most people.

All of this means that Apple is going to have a slower cycle for hardware bumps since the cost of a rapid cycle probably doesn't bring the revenue spike it used to.
That wouldn't make sense without the hardware (where hardware includes the Amiga itself; a modern PC doesn't have composite video output suitable for combining with other composite sources).
Yes my 20 year old TI84 still works fine.

Do you really think a new Mac is like a 20 year old graphing calculator? How about an iPhone or iPad? Nokia phone? Am radio? Is a Tesla different from a Ford model T?
They don't typically sell new computers this outdated.
Perhaps they already have most of the customers that want to spend the money a Mac costs AND want to buy from Apple. There is no way for Apple to swap market share with Windows unless they sell a Mac for $300 and I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't want to sell at such a low margin.
Incidentally, the MBA 2012 is a great Linux machine. It was used by Linus himself for pretty long. Near flawless support, except for a somewhat unstable wireless probably due to a bad quality antenna and/or Broadcom driver.

So when software support gets phased out, you might be able to get a few extra years on Linux if you wish to do so.
So why isn't there an organization that distributes the risk of startup failure across many companies (kind of like how insurance distributes the risk of catastrophe)? That way, one unicorn would satisfy everyone, and all the startups that failed wouldn't matter. (I say this as someone who knows nothing about startups and VCs of course...)
On the Growth of Dollar Shave Club to $1BN Acquisition
Why do you think they ever could have done that?

Telecoms aren't giving out free internet access out of the goodness of their heart.
GE CEO Jeff Immelt says all new hires will learn to code
Facebook isn't interested in getting India connected to the internet. They want India connected to Facebook. Google benefits from increasing the population of general internet users, but facebook's business model does not benefit from this to the same extent.
And personally, I think that we passed the point of adequate specs for most purposes 8 years ago.

I have two MBPs. One is a 2008 that is beat to hell at this point but still functions pretty darn well with an SSD and maxed out RAM. It's good enough I've been able to do most day-to-day development with it and audio production up through this summer. If it were effectively invulnerable and weren't eventually going to stop receiving OS updates (or if security/compatibility weren't a concern), I could conceive of using it indefinitely for most work.

I also have a 2012 that is still adequate (though, weirdly, sometimes worse in terms of locking up, not sure if that's the later version of OS X or no SSD). I bought it not because I needed anything newer, but because I didn't want to be stuck searching for a replacement when the 2008 fails. And perhaps interestingly, I bought it used because Apple has decided to no longer offer a 15" model with a matte screen that's upgradable anymore.
Modern economics no longer believes the Broken Window Fallacy is actually a fallacy. The theory goes that when inflation is low, low unemployment can be resolved by taking a tiny pinch of wealth from everyone in the form of inflation and paying a person to do what the free market considers a worthless job (like breaking and then fixing a window). This capital now transferred to the previously unemployed window repair person will then be correctly invested in the free market by their demands, the same as if they were truly gainfully employed.

We see this theory applied to roads being repaired before they truly need it, shielding regulations and subsidies for businesses the market has punished, even education subsidies that push people into fields where there is little demand.

But at least there is plenty of opportunity for graft and corruption.
Sharing Servers for International Friendship Day
My biggest criticism of this analysis is his wild overstatement of the benchmark return. Where in the world do you get 8% safely in equities and/or real estate? It's more like 3-5% because the world is awash in capital with precious few places to put it into play.

Which in a way would support his main point more strongly: venture returns are inevitably coming down from 12% to 7 or 8% annually.
"general lack of complete disdain for customers"

Except for the whole Windows 10 malware fiasco. They just couldn't help themselves it seems..

Would have probably upgraded all the computers I manage if they hadn't been such dicks about it. I'm sure they'll find new and interesting ways to break Windows 7 out of spite now but it is what it is.
Absolutely not true. If anything, El Capitan improves performance.
Any particular reason why there is no debian packaging for it? Debhelper makes it so trivial to package things these days.
> Because the computers get slower with each OS upgrade.

It seemed was a time in the history of OS X (up through Snow Leopard) where the reverse was true, and it's certainly not true that the OS must become less efficient with each iteration.
Why Bad Ideas Refuse to Die
>we just cannot justify it anymore

Have you looked at total cost of ownership? From the ‘Every Mac we buy is making and saving IBM money’ - IBM article:

"Just 5 percent of IBM’s Mac using employees need to call the help desk; In contrast an astonishing 40 percent of PC using staff call the help desk."

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2998315/apple-mac/every...
We used this story in our security awareness training. Great approach.
how about slack? a lot of people are using it
Seriously. This is an application available on every OS since at least 2000.