skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Companies of that size will typically have biannual 409(a) valuations done by professional valuation firms in order to establish the ''fair market value'' of common stock. This value becomes the strike price for employee options. Usually this is done for tax purposes, so that the IRS doesn't come in later and accuse you of under-pricing. In my experience common stock is valued around a 30-70% discount to the latest preferred stock (but can fluctuate on a case by case basis), with greater discounts seen in small companies (''we could go bankrupt at any time'') and lesser discounts seen in more mature companies (''we're going to IPO for billions we're just not sure if there will be a 2 or a 10 in front''). In the case of Jet, I'm just guessing at the fair market value at the time the award was made based on the published investment round valuations.

<< (if I offer you $1 for x% of your company, is the company now necessarily worth $1/x?) >>

Great point. Secondary market transactions have to be included in the 409(a) valuation analysis and this caused a lot of problems for companies like Facebook who had active secondary markets (with rising prices) even as they tried to keep option strike prices low to recruit new employees. I am not an expert but I think the short answer is that if you buy $1 worth of stock then it can be ignored as a non-material transaction but if you buy $1 million then it has to be scrutinized along with all similar transactions which would be collectively factored into the formula for ''fair market value''.

Another minor point - when calculating return in this case, you have to adjust for the fact that this guy ''invested'' $18k but wasn't able to count that money towards his basis in the stock or realize long-term capital gains treatment the way a typical angel investor would have. This means he will likely pay an extra 20% in Federal taxes, which lowers his LTCG-adjusted psuedo-angel-investment return a bit further.
It's not just wanting the message to be different. It's that it is now very difficult to figure out how to even change the message.
Seems unlikely that America would import "no degree" Indians to work in tech
Yes. This. We have so much invested in SourceForge including scripts, a whole Wiki and tons of history. Ideally we'd move to GitHub one day, but it'll be a sizable project. There is already a mirror of the code on https://github.com/kichik/nsis and hopefully more will come in the future.

As for SourceForge injecting adware, they only do that to dead projects or projects that volunteer. NSIS is neither. Many people approached me asking to bundle their stuff, even outside of the recent SourceForge efforts, and they were always swiftly rejected.
I agree, your bias is funny. Tomato taste is heavily influenced by a property called BRIX which can be objectively measured. The mass tomato farmer probably doesn't even own a BRIX meter while I can obsess over getting the perfect reading for my variety and picking the fruit at the exact right time.

A dedicated artisan can beat even an expert mass producer every time.
I think the canonical example is Zynga.

[0] https://medium.com/halting-problem/zyngas-offices-now-worth-...

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/zynga-to-sell-its-san-francisco-...
You are right my mistake. However it seems to me that the Haskell community lays more emphasis on purity and the OCaml community takes a more pragmatic approach - but this distinction may be superficial for practical concerns.
Thanks for the DSP link. The book looks interesting.
Computational kindness and the revelation principle
4 Key Considerations for Co-Founder Agreements
By extension should every device I own require me to have access to the source code and output data?

Not a rhetorical question.
There need to be people to actually look at all the footage. More telescopes is not really enough. And there is significant effort involved in amateur astronomy. It takes a long time to learn all the tricks to pull the data from the photos and videos, and lots of time to edit each photograph and video using the software tools available.

Besides that, there are rather a lot of objects of interest. The Herschel catalogue contains 400 objects. The NGC catalogue contains thousands. Then there's comets, asteroids, planets, the sun.

Universities really aren't well enough funded for the kind of investment that would be needed to cover everything. Given that they are already spending millions on big telescopes, that's quite clear.
It was the year I graduated. Never found an entry level CS job. RIP career.
I'm not sure its possible for evidence demonstrating innocence to be obtained illegally, since it would usually be obtained and presented by the defense.
I feel obligated to point out that having to "just" do that is kind of really insane. Making the default provide effectively useless information (nobody's gonna scroll back to read that motd for an IP address and it sure doesn't replace running htop for system info), and then making actually fixing the original mistake difficult and annoying, is not a good look.

Also, as the sibling notes, this kills MOTDs entirely, not because for some reason we need to bolt this whole contraption together and then not really document it at all. Ubuntu!
Researchers find brain's 'physics engine' predicts how world behaves
Yes, tomatoes.... But do you grow ALL you own food?

I certainly still do a lot of parenting for my daughter (I don't outsource all of it!), but I do use external daycare, just as I am sure you buy food from places besides your garden.
Latest Free Mascara auctions
Chiara Mazzucco of Bold Self and OutlierHQ Watch Out
What the F*** Are Trump Supporters Thinking?
I've heard Karen give this talk in person; it's quite moving.
Tech Book Face Off: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning vs. How the Brain Learns
True, but Fastmail has addressed this. I'm not sure that their argument completely holds up, but here's what they have to say about it:
https://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-i...
Needs signup to read.
If they made me king the first thing I'd do is make plea bargains illegal. If a crime isn't important enough to take to trial, then it shouldn't be prosecuted at all.
It's also self-modifying code that bootstraps its own compiler.
Evernote: http://www.businessinsider.com/evernote-layoffs-2015-9
This article would more accurately be named the CSS :visited psuedo-class is bad for your browser history, not blaming it on the mix-blend-mode property.

The same idea has been done before, except more cleverly with the color property and captchas:

https://frantzmiccoli.github.io/visited-captcha-history/
The code to the Jeep Grand Cherokee is closed source, yet security researchers (and now thieves) have been able to take complete control over the vehicle via simple protocol sniffing and reverse engineering. Closed source is no safer than open source.
I kind of agree with this quote from the article (even though the article slants against this viewpoint):

ultimately I should be able to replicate your findings and you should be able to replicate my findings, otherwise it’s not science, it’s bullshit."

I absolutely, 100% support searching for alternative methods to help people who are drowning and suffering in addiction, but if a method doesn't work, there's no point in following it.
How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer
I don't think we're far enough in yet that we can call it only "slower deflation" versus a pop. Things happen slowly, and then all of a sudden.
Considering that some population forecasts are assuming a peak population in the not to distant future, I'd say, yes, it's sustainable.
Senior staff in pretty much all organisations are given some latitude with respect to performing tasks that they believe will be beneficial without needing to produce a specified cost-benefit.

We have one-on-one catch-ups with staff, we have all-hands meetings, we visit clients, read books and articles, attend industry functions, issue press releases, meet with potential investors, etc.

There's value in all those things, but very rarely do we need to account for the fact that we spend time on them.

Senior engineering staff need that same freedom - it should be totally appropriate for them to make that call that "I'm accountable for the technical quality of this code, and I've decided that this needs to be done".

That requires some sense of business acumen - there needs to be an appropriate balance of technical investment to business investment - but that's part of the role of being a senior dev / tech lead / architect / whatever-your-organisation-calls-them.
I'm curious -- why is that? Marketing agencies/consultancies set up on prime real estate in order to impress clients, whereas software companies typically wouldn't care so much about location?
> Since package.json.is is primarily a code editor, it’s not really well-suited for small screens.

> Please check us out on a larger screen. :)

> Email yourself a reminder

WTF? You might not know this, but my phone is equipped with advanced pinch-and-zoom technology you may not have seen before.
Ask HN: If you found an easy way to factor large numbers, would you tell anyone?
Justice in America is available to anyone who can afford it.
Do you want to control the device, or do you want someone else to control your devices?

If you're OK with someone else (who probably doesn't have your well-being anywhere in their list of priorities) controlling all of your devices, then the answer is no, you are not required to have access to the source code and output data.

EDIT: I didn't realize this was such a controversial statement. I stand by it, though; even as I knowingly own many such devices myself. I can certainly see, however, how I may want more control over a pacemaker than, say, my phone.
I am really surprised they don't have a high availability setup for their database, etc being a fortune 500 company. Hours of downtime is serious money for them it would seem. Well if they did have such setup, it failed.

Even a bootstrapped startup could get a MongoDB Cluster or something similar going in multiple datacenters.

The power company Tweeted about it also. https://twitter.com/GeorgiaPower/status/762662968572215296

So I guess it was a power outage only at their place...

But the whole idea of not having working redundancy in a multibillion dollar business really makes me question their story.

So not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I do think there is a possibility they got hacked. And if that hunch is true then calling it a power outage instead of admitting it is a insult to our intelligence.
Here's an interesting idea. What if addiction is not something that falls on the binary classification of "choice|disease"? What if it's some other kind of phenomenon?
Ergo, the rise of Trump.
I can't say I am a big believer in the whole concept of juries, but that is a minor thing compared to other facets of a terribly flawed system such as the use of forsenic pseudoscience, eyewitness testimonies(which are unreliable), and more.
Decent article about using machine learning to analyze politics with a really really terrible title and a partisan tone. For anybody else who was put off, go ahead and click through.
Philosophy -

She doesn't know the code that's running on machines inside her body.

I don't even know the code that's running my heart.

And yet, I trust it.
Working fine for me. Partial outage?
I usually worry about the same thing -- starting and ending years getting cherry-picked to make headlines -- but this time the first graph I could find (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...) makes it look like 2005 is about the same level as 1998, definitely not the height of either bubble.
They are not sound in the context of human welfare.

We do not allow food companies to hide the ingredients of their products, because we know that companies (in the interest of profit) will fail to inform consumers about the dangers of eating unhealthily. Similarly, we do not allow meat producers to leave their meat ungraded because it endangers their "competitive advantage" - we understand (empirically) that doing so leads to food contamination and otherwise preventable disease.

Your choice of proprietary medicine as a counterexample is an interesting one. The pharmaceutical industry in the United States has a long history of "protecting its competitive advantage" at the cost of individual welfare - consider how frequently "reformulations" of the same base chemical are patented to continue milking a lucrative product that could improve the lives of thousands if genericized.

Perhaps even more pointedly, consider the fact that we deem it acceptable (and necessary) that the FDA step in and regulate the release of new drugs. Is there a valuable distinction to be drawn between the sort of regulation and evaluation that the FDA does and the sort that would be possible if programmers could openly evaluate medical devices?
Welcome to HN. Don't bother with the sockpuppet accounts next time. This sort of thing is quite likely to get upvoted organically; there's no need to cheat.
This was essentially the Ph.D. thesis project of a good friend of mine in grad school:

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~assassin/index.shtml

Each of the telescopes is an off-the-shelf commercial telephoto lens hooked up to a CCD, for a total cost of ~$100,000 per telescope. I'm a little fuzzy on the details now, but I think they have something like four cameras on a single mount, and sites in Hawaii and Chile with plans to put another mount in South Africa (or maybe Australia?). The eventual goal will be to have continuous coverage of the sky, and new images of any given patch of the sky every ~3 days or so.

They made a bit of press a while back for discovering the most luminous supernova ever, ASASSN-15lh:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASASSN-15lh
With or without a warrant...?

EDIT: Not sure what's up w/ the downvotes. There are well-established ways for regulatory agencies (whether FDA, FCC, etc) to obtain firmware for devices -- and it almost always involves a warrant under extraneous circumstances -vs- proactively receiving proprietary code.
1) The software in a pacemaker is not a competitive advantage. The hardware and rights to distribute to hospitals are.

2) Open and closed are equally vulnerable. Closed may be even more vulnerable, since security researches have to attack a black box and can't run ordinary code linting tools.

3) Liability after update is a good question, but one which can be (and is) solved with traditional contract agreements. See cpap machines.
Do we still need autoconf in 2016? Systems are becoming more homogeneous with the spread of Linux, GNU, and common programming conventions.
i don't think 'halting problem' is a real news source
Transmogrifying destructive habits into `disease' is public policy, and there is far too much establishment invested to tolerate this blasphemy. One can easily picture the furrowed brows of our elites as they quietly note the names of the latest additions to the unwritten list of pariah.
> We are experiencing an issue right now, have identified the problem, and are implementing a fix.

From http://www.redditstatus.com

Pretty impressive to identify and start implementing a fix within 10 minutes.
Depends what you're building. Which leads us to the worst (meta-)aspect of Agile/Scrum these days, which is that it's the industry's current favourite hammer and so it gets used to bash every single problem. Now, hammers are quite versatile, but you have to know when to bash, when to use the claw, when to lever or just nudge things instead of swinging.

The moment you start getting dogmatic about your process is the moment your decisions start being driven by something other than your actual needs at hand. And that's the moment when you start to produce a bad product.
Researchers crack open unusually advanced malware that hid for 5 years
Seeing in the Dark is a great book on citizen science in astronomy.

https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Dark-Astronomers-Discovering-U...
> High barrier to entry? The barrier is lower than it ever has been.

I agree with you, but everything is relative. It's expensive to produce a custom microprocessor, but it's cheaper than it's ever been.

> Any nut-job with a few weeks of training can make a shitty website with PHP or Node.js and have it instantly accessible to the most of the English-speaking world.

The barrier to entry can be much lower than that. Someone without any programming experience could fork and deploy a Node service in 60 seconds if the tools were designed for that. I think you and I are just putting our parameters for "low" and "high" in different places. You are comparing Google (cathedral) to entry-level programmers (bazaar). I am comparing a random engineer in your company (cathedral) to one of your customer support staff who is requesting a copy change (bazaar).

Two totally separate conversations.
...Wait. That sounds a heck of a lot like Linux's leadership model (although Linux has somebody on top as well).
At my first job (94-97) we were writing a (16bit) Windows application that was a relatively slim EXE and several hundred DLLs. This wasn't necessarily the mainstream approach, but it was supported just fine by the tools. What didn't really exist was a mechanism to safely use DLLs from 3rd parties, and sometimes even from MS. DLL hell was very real, but shared objects in any system will always have the same challenge. You are at the mercy of the module writer not breaking binary compatibility without bumping a version number (or part thereof)
183,000 * $66 / .06 = $200 million, not $2b.
None of these are particularly compelling reasons IMO.

> 1> Loss of competitive advantage

Patient safety trumps business considerations. Skipping clinical trials would be a major competitive advantage (lower costs, quicker to market etc.), but we don't allow that for the same reason

> 2> Open source is not necessarily any safer (heartbleed bug ... )

I'll agree, in so far as saying making it open source doesn't necessarily make it safer. However, it should, at worst, be no less safe - the requirements on the manufacturer (testing etc.) should be the same regardless

> 3> If software for the pacemaker is allowed to be updated like that on a computer, someone will update it with buggy software that can cause adverse side effects.

You can open the code but, for example, required a signed binary before a device can be updated. The openness of the code and the openness of the device itself are linked but separate issues.
I have served on a jury and it is a powerful experience. It also made me want to stay far far away from any trouble with the law ("the wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine").

That said, the judges in this article come across as juvenile and thoughtless, being concerned about how boring work is without trials. How about the poor defendant who takes the plea deal even if they feel they are innocent, just because the stakes are too high? We hear a one mention of such a case, but the rest of the focus is on the poor judges and clerks who are bored or not paid enough ("my kids didn't go to camp"!).
This is the typical "disease" of South and Central American democracy. Voters want to have a Northern European welfare state. And who could blame them? But they don't have the economy they need for a Northern European welfare state.

Eventually Maduro will be replaced in a coup, or there will be a communist revolution. After a few years the government will transition to (mostly) free market democracy again, and we'll see a repeat of the whole cycle.
The latter has undergone far more testing than the former.
Ok, so this is not a hackathon. There are no prizes. We pay you to work on an idea, and then after the weekend that is it?
Did you read the paper at all? It's pretty accessible. The main component is ultra high energy microwaves, these are generated by relativistic electrons accelerated beyond the front of the step leader before it hits the ground. When those electrons penetrate through matter they can release microwaves as they decelerate. They can also cause ionization of the air as well. And these phenomena feed off one another. The microwave radiation then gets trapped inside a bubble of plasma as a standing wave. This is a quasi-stable phenomenon because the microwave energy heats the plasma and thus maintains its own confinement.

Interestingly, this model seems to explain the vast majority of observational evidence related to ball lightning, including some of the more bizarre occurrences. It's also testable. The easiest way to test it would be making use of 100GW class microwave emitters, which are just a touch beyond the state of the industry today but should be available soon. And that should make it possible to determine the accuracy of the theory and, if it proves accurate, to further study the properties of ball lightning.
except code running your heart was built over millions of years and code she mentions - created by company in years - see the difference? :)
Reddit's servers are down
The author refers to twitter as "San Francisco's second-largest tech employer". What company is SF's largest tech employer?
Yea it's got some cool genetic algorithms.
Good point. AMT has caused no end of heartburn around Silicon Valley and everybody should be familiar with it.

One of the two major Presidential candidates (who shall remain nameless) has proposed capping itemized deductions at 28%. I think this idea is more or less a bipartisan compromise acknowledging the political impossibility of eliminating specific deduction categories (e.g. mortgage interest, health care expenses, property taxes, state income taxes), each of which has a very loud and vocal special interest lobby. If passed this would be an effective tax hike felt very acutely by option holders of acquired companies resident in high state income tax States (in other words, entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and New York).
My bad! I read a biographical article on him and that was what was said. Sorry I can't edit it. :/
It's natural for compassionate people to prefer to characterize addition as a disease, because it gives a powerful argument for treating people with addiction compassionately. But this is deriving an "is" from an "ought".

In fact its very common in this kind of discussion to see an argument like "If you believe <positive statement> then you must support <morally abhorrent policy>". But mostly the morally abhorrent policy doesn't actually follow from the positive statement, and if the person making this argument were forced to accept the positive statement, they would not in fact support the policy. In this debate

<positive statement> = addiction is not a disease

<morally abhorrent policy> = people with addiction don't deserve any sympathy or help
10 be dumb
20 goto 10

you're all idiots.
Kepler's 'Alien Megastructure' Star Just Got Weirder
How hackers broke Pokémon Go’s anti-cheat technology in four days
Sure - why not ask patient for paid subscription for privilege of using pacemaker? Somebody please think of the investors...
You really think defiant children are like the black knight from Monty Python? That if a violent six year old is given a good slapping, he'll continue being violent ?
Salesforce according to this: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/techflash/2016/...
In theory, open sourcing pacemaker software make sense, but in practice, the pool of people qualified to review and edit that software may not be very large. Most people would still be depending on someone else to control their devices in any case.
Heavy duty symbolic math, say calculations in General Relativity or Feynman diagrams.
I remember back when HN wasn't full of anti-intellectual jerks. Those were good times.
I tired to reach developers with question whether they plan Linux release or not, but got no response. So not really looking forward to it.

Everspace on the other hand looks quite promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HvpLe-2ijk
A small library that allows you to 'pipeline' Ruby invocations