skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author mentions 10+ years experience at running startups but according to the blurb he's 26.

It also looks like he was doing consulting work to pay the bills between his 3rd startup and Carbonmade... for a full 18 months. That doesn't make much sense to me. How can you first sell 3 profitable companies and then go back to consulting for 18 months while trying to bootstrap a new company?

I can only guess to the explanation...

I also question some of his advice. "Your first dollar validates your product, your business model, and everything else" contradicts my experience. So I'm a little skeptical.
based on average exits for series A funded companies

Is that counting all the series A funded companies which never exit? $100M sounds about right to me as an average exit size, but only after excluding non-exits.
Not to be too condescending, but it's pretty obvious you haven't studied information security at all (let alone read Schneier's work?). Saying someone is "only" an "accomplished cryptographer" really diminishes what is required to have the mindset that makes you a good cryptographer, amongst other things.
Most likely, yes. Openly offering to purchase unreleased prototypes etc. is pretty common in "tech/gadget" media, and does not constitute theft on the buyer's side, which obviously is the case when in a concealed fashion fencing/trading something that you clearly know is someone else's property. This is de facto international law.
History is pop culture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assume_the_Position_with_Mr._Wu...
I'm in the process of switching from academia to industry. I'd say that all but one of my mentors take this point of view.
Approaching 1 billion documents in MongoDB
F**k deadlines
We run into the same issues here in Chicago. Rent is so high that having a co-working space is just as expensive as leasing your own office--the ones that are cheap aren't much better than working from a home office.

I really think these spaces need to be non-profit and supported by the workers that use it. If you insert a for-profit entity, it just doesn't work...
I guarantee you that no statistically noticeable number of new Mario players ever managed to play for 5 minutes without figuring out that the mushroom made Mario more powerful.
These are the standards-compliance unit tests that the Microsoft IE team submitted to the WC3. Obviously they're only submitting tests that they already passed, but since they focus on passing standards that they claim are important to web development, the tests are probably worth something when combined with other benchmarks. It doesn't mean that IE is standards-compliant on the whole or compared to other browsers, but it does mean there's at least some evidence (albeit biased) to support their claim that they're focusing on standards they consider important rather than benchmarks. Whether these standards are important for real-world applications is something I can't speak to.
>By making an admittedly weak effort to return the iPhone to Apple, Hogan – in the eyes of the law – committed theft.

That's the thing though. Gizmodo did in fact return the iPhone to Apple without complaint, in a timely manner. Posting the information to the Internet is an unorthodox way of asking Apple if they want their property returned, but it ultimately has the same result.

If any crime was committed by Gizmodo, it is theft of trade secrets, not theft of the device.
I hope they are elitist. Elitism is good and elitism is true. If they keep people from attending or speaking who "aren't quite good enough" (as the linked techcrunch article alleges), then so much the better for them for holding up their standards.
This!

The entitlement of success that seems to follow from attending college is what's broken. The expectation that you will get a cushy 9-5 job in return for that diploma is what's broken. It in essence is a laziness of the mind, an unwillingness to chart out one's own path, the very idea of which is quite unacademic.

Totally spot on. I have friends with this exact mentality. From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters. Luckily nature has corrected itself for millions of years.
It's exciting, for sure. Although, I do have to remain skeptical that it will happen as soon as the author hopes. These sorts of changes require so many companies, organizations, and people to change their tools across the entire spectrum of computing..low level hardware, compilers, and possibly programming languages. Then there will be tools to cross-compile existing software onto these new architectures, and those tools will undoubtedly have a host of bugs of their own.

Nevertheless, if and when this happens, it's going to be FUCKING AWESOME.
I also considered building something along these lines - which is why I contributed to this project.
Believe It or Not - A critique of the new atheism
This is largely because people don't come from China to major in Women's Studies, Philosophy, or Anthropology. They come to major in things which will reward, with nearly 100% certainty, a career immediately after leaving school which pays excellent wages by Chinese standards.

(A very minor portion of the whinging about US academia is about degrees which formerly lead to very well-paying careers but have been coming under pricing pressure, such that they now merely are comfortably middle class. This is the case in many of the hard sciences. Most of the whinging comes from holders of degrees which prepare them fabulously to whinge and not so fabulously to do anything else.)

(Full disclosure: I have a degree in making things and another degree in making things up.)
Of course TED is elitist. Not elitist enough anymore for some of the founders, trust me.

Looking in from the outside it may seem that attending TED is simply a chance to view live the talks given there (many of which are informative and genuinely interesting). This is like saying that going to MIT is the chance to listen to the MIT OpenCourseWare lectures live.

Going to TED, much like going to an upper echelon school, is not about the content/education alone. That's a big part of it, but the value is really the attendees. TED is about elite networking. Many of the talks are interesting people that TED attendees either want to meet or that add perceived value to the event.

Tossing videos up online is great. I love some of them. But that's as much promotion of how elite and awesome actual attendance is as it is "giving back to the online community". Attending TED (while less exclusive than it used to be) has greater positional-experience value (conspicuous participation, establishing social dominance/hierarchy) if the rest of the world can look into the windows of the TED restaurant, breath fogging up the windows, while you order foie gras (or the TED equivalent of duck liver, Malcolm Gladwell).

(for the record I enjoy elitism, foie gras and malcolm gladwell, though not necessarily in that order)
How Dr. Seuss would prove the halting problem undecidable
Actually, it's the other way around; it sounds like they are talking about having lots of processors literally physically spread amongst the data. That's sort of more Erlang-y, although it isn't actually Erlang-y either. Erlang pretty deeply assumes homogeneity of the computational units it is accessing. (It does allow you to start a process on a given node, and that's a start, but the VM's strategies for memory management and copying on a given node would have to change quite substantially to cope better. Or map one node to each processor-in-the-memory in which case I'd expect too much copying between nodes to occur without a lot of care taken by the programmer, sort of fighting the language the whole time. Erlang lets you control where processes run, but not directly control where data lives beyond that.) Basically this future seems to be NUMA writ large, and while an "Erlang-inspired" language may be the way forward, Erlang itself would not make this transition without substantial changes. (Might be feasible, though.)

But Javascript as it stands today is even worse off, as are most languages. We don't really have much that could cope with this right now in a clean way. (Anyone know a language that really handles NUMA well? And I do mean a language, not a library for C or something. Something slick, not something that merely "permits" working with it.)
Just to be clear, these are tests created and submitted by Microsoft themselves, so it's not so surprising that IE9 passes all of them as it otherwise might be.
...or is there some subtlety here that's missing?

Nothing subtle about it really. They are only presenting tests in which IE passed.
let's say someone steals your car. I buy it from them, then brag about it on the internet. I then realize I've drawn the attention of law enforcement and I "return" it to you in a "timely" manner. Is it theft? I mean, my bragging about riding around town in your car is an unorthodox way of asking you if you want it back.
This weak horse argument is completely specious as International Relations professor Stephen Walt explains: http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/04/22/horse_feather...
At least in the military you're serving a higher purpose than 'maximizing shareholder value.' Assuming, of course, that you're not employed by Xe.
Academia, Job-Hopping, and Facebook
The lazy* man's guide to hitting the HN front page:

1) Pick something topical.
2) Find a post about it on HN.
3) Take the other side of the argument.
4) Be sure to mention the key word in the title.
5) Congratulations!
6) Check your page views.

*in my opinion, HN is remarkably good at avoiding this trap. there's more nuanced and substantive discussion here than anywhere else. when bait does get through, there's usually someone in the comments to call it out. good job, guys!
lifetime medical expenses are accrued in the last few years/months of life

When my mother got terminal cancer, the last few months of her life became her most valuable. Those last days were scarce. In a way, they are infinitely more valuable than all her other days, because she knew at that point that she had a finite number. Until you are given a terminal diagnosis, you feel infinite, and perhaps -- with the innovation in life extension -- you actually could live forever. Of course accidents still happen and with more days to live, the law of large numbers kicks in, so we'll probably never live forever, but I digress.

Point being, the last days are the most valuable and the treatments to keep us alive under terminal conditions are expensive. It's expensive to fight death and few want to die. Most believe not dying to be the most important and valuable thing in their lives, so it is understandable that the last years, in general, cost the most to keep.

The only alternative to this situation is to embrace death. Make it normal. Make it not scary. Treat the emotional aspects of dying rather than the conditions that cause death.

We are a long way from a society like that.
How on earth is Canonical turning off would-be Linux users? They've finally made a distro that has a reputation (deserved or not) for being usable by the common man. How is that anything but good? You think Linux would greatly benefit from being more of a geek ghetto than it already is?
> You can even see it in things like the government’s long-term programs, for example Social Security — who in the hell in their right mind would start a long-term program without an appropriate plan for funding it?

A politician trying to get reelected by spending other people's money.
Guy wearing the V-neck in both images?
This is a great point and is the reason why most established companies have a standard contractor agreement that they never change that has a work-for-hire clause, along with the NDA and IP language, and a formal statement of work that specifies payment schedule and acceptance criteria.
And I don’t care. If I were part of the elite that’s what I would do, too. That’s what elitists will do no matter what and I have no problem with it. It’s nice that they publish some videos in the process.
Your point is valid, but the need to compare to Apple and the reliance on the standard "Google relies on testing too much for its own good" is wearing thin.
IPad can double as skateboard
> Unless he had amazing protection from someone senior and powerful enough, he would be dead meat.

You wish. It would be awesome if incompetence was that easy to cull.
A successful string of smaller terror attacks would absolutely inspire fear and impress donors. The trick is that it would have to be a string. And carrying out many small strikes is a huge practical challenge as an "other" operating in a foreign country.

After, say, the third pipe bomb in a middle-American mall/starbucks/bar, every single American in public would be watching anyone vaguely different-looking at all times. So the campaign is far, far more likely to be snuffed out before it got far enough underway to be considered a 'success' to allies and donors.

So I wouldn't expect to see anything like that from Al Qaeda unless/until they figure out how to deliver their device via a mechanism that: 1. isn't immediately obvious as a terror device 2. doesn't expose the 'secret' of the method after the first few attacks.

e.g. Malvo's run was only as long as it was because no-one was looking for a sniper firing from a vehicle and there was no evidence left with the victim indicating the camouflage.
I hereby suggest that we pronounce these things as memri-stors rather than mem-ristors.
Probably the best thing you could do is have a moderately well advertised way of wangling your way in despite doing badly on some or all of the usual measures.
I agree with you about the job situation in academia. I think he has a point about talent becoming lawyers, bankers and doctors being lost, though.
> Posting the information to the Internet is an unorthodox way of asking Apple if they want their property returned, but it ultimately has the same result.

You're high as a kite.

edit: I think your comment is best read in the voice of Fat Tony.
Depends on what you want to achieve. If you leave out the dimension of static vs dynamic typing, you could get most of Haskell's benefits by making your Scheme pure, and confining side-effects. (Monads are one solution for this, but not the only one. Have a look at Functional reactive programming, or see how Clean uses linear typing.) You could probably hack most of the pureness stuff together with macros in an already existing Scheme.

Purity by (strong) default makes it easier to combine your programs. Lazyness can help, too, but I am not completely sure whether you should make lazy the default. Chris Okasaki's "Purely Functional Data Structures" argues for needing both lazy and strict evaluation to guarantee asymptotic run times.

Have a look at, say, Software Transactional Memory to see what purity can buy you. Combinatorial parsers are another interesting application in Haskell; however they should be easily implementable in Scheme, too.

Please have a look at how http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/smk/redblack/rb.html uses the type system to statically guarantee the balance of red-black trees.

Please pardon that I mostly talked about the `how' and not so much the `why'. I hope giving some examples might not totally be in vain.
Nice post overall, but his point about poker got me thinking about when I used to play:

> In poker, there are simple rules you can follow to put yourself ahead of 90% of other poker players. One of my favorite rules revolves around removing any attachment to the value of poker chips. When playing poker, the chips in front of you have absolutely no value, they’re just a medium for you to win chips from other poker players. Most players don’t play their A-game because they’re trying to “make the money” and don’t want to risk losing all their chips (which they end up losing anyways).

This is a good strategy to get from being a beginner to get a more skilled place. You should be playing stakes that you have the bankroll and emotion to be able to play reasonably aggressively, make correct plays, and afford to lose at. So, this is decent advice going from being a new player who is afraid of losing his money to thinking of the chips more abstractly and playing correctly.

However, play is considerably different at higher levels, and you should take and process information accordingly. I haven't followed poker so much recently, but when I was playing David Skalansky was generally considered to have written the definitive guides on playing well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sklansky#Books

Hold'em Poker for Advanced Players was one of the most incredible books I've ever read in my life, and though I don't play more than a couple times a year, I should probably re-read it at some point because it teaches you how to think.

I read Hold'em Advanced before Small Stakes came out. Reading Small Stakes was even more eye-opening - Skalansky came right out and said something like, "You shouldn't be using advanced plays at lower levels, instead you should adjust to the quality of opponent."

It was huge - I'd been trying to make elaborate, tricky plays in low stakes games and getting killed off of it. Small stakes talked a lot about managing your own psychology against bad players, and then just play hands that make strong hands, and bet for value a lot. Adjusting my play downwards let me absolutely destroy low stakes games after that.

I've never played incredibly high stakes, but at mid/high stakes you've got to think about folding to a 3-bet on the turn even with a decent hand sometimes. Small stakes you should only be betting if you want to be called, and then probably should call down after that. Calling down in a mid/high stakes game is going to brutalize you, but you should generally only be putting yourself in a position where you want to call down in a low stakes game.

Anyway, I agree with the general sentiment of the post, just wanted to riff on cards a little bit after reading that. The main point is abstracting the money considerations away is good for becoming an intermediately skilled player, but considering the stakes is valuable again at the higher levels of play.

And definitely check out Skalansky if you like cards, poker, game theory, or math at all, they're really marvelous books.
Huh? Quirks mode is never going to change; by definition, it is to maintain backwards compatibility. If a webpage was coded back in 2000, we don't want to break those pages simply because a more modern version of the browser is available.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode#Overview

If you want to check for a browser version, there are some best practices around it. This should help: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/03/12/site-compatibili...

In summary, use object detection when possible, and if that does not work for you, use something similar to:

<!--[if lte IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" src="ie.css" />
<![endif]-->
Blizzard to Integrate Facebook into StarCraft 2
OK, I guess then I just have different preferences. I find Haskell much more bearable than CL in terms of beauty.

Scheme is nice, too.
How does it feel to have a company other than Google create tests specifically designed for the features they implemented?
I see that for now they dropped the location widget under the search box.
Just because you sell your company doesn't mean you want to invest all of the money into your own startup. It seems like he wanted to make sure Carbonmade had a proven model before he invested additional time or money into the idea.

Pushing that aside, I think a lot of the advice he gives is very relevant and applicable to bootstrapping startups.
Water droplets at 2000 frames/sec
Note that many people from the middle east can pass for Hispanic. My family is Egyptian and I occasionally get cab drivers who start talking to me in Spanish because I look Puerto Rican. But I agree with the rest of your comment.
Warning: Your cell phone may be hazardous to your health
This author doesn't seem to have researched his piece very well. Take the shield law argument. He says:

The problem for Gizmodo is that the shield law has a specific exemption when the police are looking for evidence that the journalists (in this case, the Gizmodo editor) themselves committed crimes, as seems to be the case here.

But almost every investigative reporter breaks a law when doing their job. Woodward and Bernstein received documents that were unquestionably stolen. That's receiving stolen property (not to mention violation of a bunch of laws regarding state secrets)

The argument against Gizmodo is whether the story "served the public good" as established by the precedent. NOT if they committed a crime themselves.
I agree about cherry picking but I would not call them full of shit. The reason being that every product when being developed starts with a limited set of features and then goes on to start new features once the old ones are complete. May be they are at the point where they have implemented everything they are testing but not other stuff hence no tests for them.

Note that they never say that they are most standard compliant browser. They specify the tests they are running and the % of them being passed.

Disclaimer: I know I might get down-voted for this but I work at MS(not in the IE team though :) ). Of course, my opinions are my own and not my employer's.
First internationalized top-level domains now live
Thomas Sowell had a good comment years ago about why international students come to colleges in America. It's not just because they like the colleges, but also because they like being in America. For most students in the countries that send the most students to the United States, simply being in the United States is an immediate step up in several aspects of lifestyle, not least of which is more freedom of speech.
I played with this idea a full year ago. The ability to own your own data and share it out as a web service or data host. There would be no need for a centralized server, and it would provide many competitive opportunities to host what I came to call "identity servers." This would create innovation as each value added provider can experiment with the direction.

I won't be the first to call it now - but I can imagine the popularity of decentralized architectures catching mainstream attention. Git is getting popular, vs say SVN or CVS.

Remember, the internet itself is decentralized.
Obviously Microsoft only presented tests that they have passed and at least one other major browser has failed. Still this is free QA for the other browsers so there is not much room to complain.
Squirmy Words: "Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like bananas"
Flag silently. (Comments about flagging contain no substance either.)
If it makes the author feel any better, the kids that went off to "save the world" are mostly doing much less good than they imagine.
The set of {good universities at which to study computer science as an undergraduate} is a partially ordered set.
The IRS doesn't care if there's an agreement, when it comes to determining employee vs contractor. The rules are very clear:

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.h...
Yes, but it's only for companies that get series A rounds from good (= top 50) VC funds. There is a huge mass of lame VC funds below that whose returns are negative. But since we don't intro YC startups to bad VCs, it seemed reasonable to use norms from the good ones.