skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But to say that 40% want to leave would imply a considerable number will overcome whatever burdens one has, particularly in the US where the youth tend to be fairly geographically mobile in general compared to most of the world. If you told me 40% we’re displeased with the US and fantasize about living elsewhere, then I’d say that’s more realistic. But to actively want is another matter.

I don’t think you can fairly compare the the unification of post-communist East Germany and everything that it implies (secret police, Cold War, differing economic systems and promises of prosperity, fashion, etc) with the US vs Canada, especially saying it was less different! Canada isn’t that fundamentally different in day to day life!
> There is intrinsic meaning in:

No, there isn't. That just happens to be closer to the notation you were taught in elementary school, so you're more familiar with it. If you were taught s-expressions in elementary school (and this would actually be a really good idea) you would say the exact opposite. In fact, once you understand s-expressions, all other notations seem awkward and arbitrary. That's actually the reason that Lisp persists, because it's a kind of natural "local maximum" in notational idea space. It just happens to be one that very few people ever reach because of the damage done to them in their primary school education.
I'm in the same boat for non-electrical tools. It's hard to buy expensive tools, particularly sockets, that I'll probably misplace or forget somewhere before they actually break.
I wonder how techniques like this came to be. Was there a single "genius" bee that thought of this and convinced the others to give it a try? Bee brains are so tiny, how is advanced behavior like this possible?
I don’t think so. It managed to recognize an old baby picture of myself and the only other pictures of me are as a mid thirties adult.
Thanks for the clarification. It makes sense that if you want to perhaps contribute to the project or even just self-building it you'd pick a stack of your preference.
What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning
Many podcasts actually do offer this, either via a Patreon or something like Stitcher Premium. One podcast I listen to (and subscribe to their Patreon) has mentioned that only ~10% of their listeners subscribe and that ads are a much larger source of revenue for them (even doubling subscribers wouldn't make up for this gap).
Yes, but network topology is orthogonal to the type of cable used. We could have just as well used coax for modern switched connections.
I don't work in neuroscience, but I've taken a few courses in undergrad. I'll chime in until a professional can answer your question more definitively.

There's some evidence that the left and right brain hemispheres have their own desires and goals, based on some studies conducted by Roger Perry in the 1960's. Sperry received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his split-brain research.

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/roger-sperrys-split-brain-exper...

Aside from the left-right split, I think there's a large category of well-supported models that conceive of the mind-brain as modular, but with sub-units dedicated to basic processing tasks (memory retrieval, sensory integration, etc.) rather than being fully-formed, discrete "personalities" in themselves.
https://www.reddit.com/user/James_Damore
"Whoah, this would explain a lot.

I can't verify its authenticity, but the OP is correct that I was one of about 100 employees that knew about Dragonfly. I also did report several legal issues in Search that they probably haven't fixed. Other parts of the post include knowledge that only a Googler would know.

u/TiredOfLying4Google please contact my lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon."

----

https://www.reddit.com/user/Humble_Explanation
"I'm a Googler and can confirm what the OP has said about Memegen, Damore's performance and knowledge of Dragonfly, and the BS reasons given for cancelling the Town Hall."

i wonder just how legit this is, if it is really legit, then damn this exposes alot.
Ops isn't a problem until you're successful, the taxman won't come after you if you have 10k in revenue, customers won't complain if you haven't sold things to them. It really isn't something to worry about now, at all. Get stressed over not getting any sales, that's what should be freaking you out.
If you can't sell - should you really attempt to be a solo founder? If you aren't strong enough to 'own the feature-set' and work with potential clients now, will you be the right person to run the company later?

This is a provocation/question - not a statement of fact btw!
The Content Monetization Revolution and Patreon
My point is that you don't see people spending extra to see private doctors in Canada despite it being a generally wealthy nation. There is more at play than the original suggestion that high spending is simply a function of being a richer nation with more money to spend on "extras" like short waiting times.
How many "over valued" "Amazons" died? Compared to the Unicorns like... well... Amazon?

It's like saying "All houses built in 1900 are built SOLID because look at all the 100 year old houses that still exist" and then completely ignoring all the 100 year old houses that don't exist...

Hell, look at the companies that were undervalued. GIANTS! Companies that will never fall... like, say, Blackberry and Palm?
Should I Tell My Husband I'm in Love with Another Man?
The US is also 40% of the world wide revenue which is probably a more important figure.
> was a basket containing Amazon.com, pets.com and all the rest overvalued?

Yes. This has been extensively studied. Almost every investor who deployed new capital in the late 90s lost money on those investments.

> as long as AMZN was >= 20% of your basket

You’d have to torture causality to come up with a portfolio that would have made sense in the 90s and would have been 20%+ Amazon. It wasn’t even in the top 10 most valuable public companies by market cap [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_...
Other commentators have touched upon topics like building, selling, networking etc.. So I won't repeat those.

My advice is to first and foremost firewall your personal assets. It will save you a ton of regret and headache later if things go wrong.

- If you are in the US then start by forming an LLC (or Delaware C corp if you have the funds) with a separate bank account.

- If you are in the services business then get business insurance (quite affordable actually).

- Buy domain names. Also set up a time line for when you may want to register a trademark if that applies in your case.

- Create all necessary document templates ahead of time, for e.g. NDA, contracts, IP assignment etc. depending on what is applicable in your case.

Some additional advice :

- Never make verbal promises or handshake deals especially when you are scouting for a co-founder, contractors, or employees. It doesn't matter how well you know them.

- Avoid, to the extent you can, offering equity for services or deferred compensation. In the early stages it is quite possible that you will be using contractors. If you do then make sure the written agreement terms are solid and unambiguous.

- Read books like Deal Terms, Term Sheets and Valuations, Venture Deals, High Tech Startup, Founder's Dilemma, Fools Gold etc.. and become very familiar with the concepts and terms. I can't stress this enough -- be well informed!
- Thoroughly understand cap tables and how they change over time/events.

- Read Getting To Yes (Harvard publication, if I remember correctly). Will help you with your negotiation skills.

- Consider startup incubators if that helps in your particular case. But be careful and understand the terms carefully. Some incubators will take a non-trivial amount of stock in exchange for very little.

About co-founders :

If you are passionate and/or good at selling your idea it is quite likely you will attract co-founders. Do not rush. Take your time to get to know them within the context of your startup regardless of how well you have known them personally.

- If you can try to work out a try-out phase with potential co-founders. But be very careful and make sure both parties sign proper agreements and are very clear about what they are getting from each other.

- Personally I am not a fan of part-time co-founders. If someone wants to join they are either all in or out.

- Please read Founder's Dilemma (Noam Wasserman).
Yes, Sonder is a word in German which means "special", as in the German term Sonderweg which is the German equivalent of "American Exceptionalism" ("German Exceptionalism", I suppose).
It has always amused me that NTFS and NT Kernel are both case sensitive when it comes to filenames. But WIN32 emulates the case insensitive legacy behavior because people won't fix, or can't fix legacy code. That said applications can properly opt into POSIX semantics.
Seems interesting, I will try it.
If it is working I may finally listen again to radio in my car after having stopped it for many years.
People already choose the Internet (Facebook, Fortnite, or reddit) over their real-life communities, just consider how they allocate their time, Internet wins by a big margin.
Costco's average customer is definitely higher income than the average American, although I've seen different attempts to quantify this. The first result from a Google search gives me this: https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/17/who-is-costcos-fav...

A couple of factors act as a "filter" that makes Costco less worthwhile for lower income shoppers:

- Buying in bulk requires a bunch of cash up front, which not everyone has.

- Buying in bulk normally works best for families, and individuals with families have higher average incomes than those that don't.

- Costco stocks almost exclusively mid- to high-quality food and products. Shoppers may be able to have a lower grocery bill by buying lower-quality store-brand products elsewhere.

There are obviously individual exceptions, but these factors drive up the average income of a Costco shopper.
Wow, can't access the technology review in incognito mode...
Selling/customer development is a skill you can learn—and absolutely must learn if you want to hack it as a single founder. The real trap is staying in your comfort zone.
Yes, but then Palm had a higher market cap than the rest of 3Com, which owned 80% of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com#1997%E2%80%932000
Where do you see this 60k/year figure? Estimates that I'm don't even come /close/ to 60k/year for a WeWork space.
Ask HN: Advice on acquiring clients for private beta?
We have built a solid MVP SaaS product (targeted to SaaS companies) but are struggling to obtain private beta clients. We are targeting 30-100 employee SaaS companies. Recognizing every situation is different, what successful approaches have you used to obtain private beta clients?
I'll never, ever be able to comprehend this. It sickens me to the core.
Buying online and picking up from a store really isn't that advanced of a concept.

You're right. Service Merchandise build an empire around it, just by mail or phone instead of computer. Other stores did it, too. JCPenny comes to mind. Even some local and regional chains.

Amazon and others think they've invented something. But once again, it's just SV re-inventing something that worked last century.
Right, web apps aren't websites. The distinction is pretty sharp when you move from a simple static old fashioned display to Amazon tier complexity where money is being transacted, log in information stored, orders updated, and a million more things besides.

The big question is if the internet and its primary portals, the desktop browser and the smartphone, will reach the end of their tether. The only thing I could see replacing it is neurotechnology of some sort, and that seems so far off and so difficult to commercialize that it's not something web developers need to worry about any time soon. Or perhaps quantum computing becomes commercially viable and simply shoves digital computing aside, negating the need for those skills completely.

Another alternative is that the web radically changes unforeseeably and new practices instantly antiquate everything people are learning now, which is a more frustrating and realistic possibility and also something that is bound to happen. Given how difficult it can be for many people to learn these skills, and given how much knowledge one must integrate to be a productive developer, this is an upsetting potentiality and one that is bound to happen eventually.

Not every field carries these risks. Law practice isn't going to change fundamentally in the coming decades. And some aspects of coding can be exhausting and demoralizing to learn. Past generations of coders have had their skill sets rendered null and void and it will probably happen again at some point to this generation.
Yes.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that even current nuclear causes less deaths per GWh than anything else including solar, it’s also the only power source currently offering humanity a self-made extinction apocalypse.

(Also the heat mirror was debunked twice by Mythbusters, as referenced in your own link).
Inside Facebook's 'cult-like' workplace
I consider myself politically and culturally progressive, tempered with a wide but reasonable streak of pragmatic. So enough code phrases: I usually vote Democratic, even though I'm a strong believer in broad rights to bear arms.

(I wasn't going to make this a political response, but it's sneaking in, so here goes.)

To directly answer your question: I generally support the right of most citizens to carry properly registered weapons if they so choose. At the same time, I've read (can't cite them right now) studies that show carrying a weapon greatly increases the chance that a given criminal conflict will escalate to bloodshed. If I recall correctly, it even makes the bearer statistically more likely to be seriously hurt. If accurate, this invalidates the whole reasoning behind "arming oneself for defense". My personal experiences and observations mirror this finding: statistically speaking, it is almost always safer to not carry than it is to carry.

More to the point: I would personally rather be seriously injured in a criminal conflict than remain uninjured if that required me to kill someone.

(In case you haven't noticed, I'm not a fragile snowflake, quite the opposite.)

Of course I'll state the obvious: in both of the incidents I reported above, things would very likely have been worse if any of the people on the receiving end of violence had been armed.

So...why do I support the right to bear arms? It's not really about the 2nd amendment for me. I just tend to default to freedom unless there's a very compelling reason not to.

Guns are here in the United States, and no matter what, they aren't leaving. The only way for gun regulation to have a material impact on gun violence is to somehow get rid of most of them, which isn't going to happen.

There have been and are now many countries with many guns that don't have anything like the levels of violence that we experience in the US.

Guns aren't the fundamental problem. In my opinion, the most fundamental problem we have as a society is that we're extremely afraid. Inappropriately afraid. This problem isn't only in US, but it seems to be especially concentrated here.

There's a million nuances that I must gloss over in order to complete this reply in a reasonable amount of time. I'm very much not emotionally tied to my thoughts on this issue, as so many people are, and I'm quite open having my opinions modified with strong evidence based arguments.
Good spot.

> University of St Andrews in Scotland

Although the Monzo card makes me think this work also happened in London
> How will they defend their valuation if the self driving project doesn't pan out?

They’re already profitable in New York and San Francisco.
Membership at Costco is like 60 dollars a year. Not saying it's doable for everyone but its hardly something 'you need to have a good amount of extra money' to afford.
FWIW I couldn't get Sway to compile on a totally vanilla Debian installation.
Start there, learn English. I know so many potentially good devs that cannot be hired at good paying companies because of lack of English skills. (Speaking of Mexico, btw.)
I've used words from that dictionary as part of regular conversation. If that doesn't make them real words, I don't know what does.
Shitcoin is not going to drop to zero immediately (as in 24hours) giving attackers plenty of time to to cash out.
In the brief period I was running my own company (with a friend, not solo) the product we sold was largely unbuilt, or were selling features we hadn't yet built.

We were the 'technical creatives' and with an idea and a cost, and went out to find people who we could sell it to to enable us to build it and make it better for all the users. As our product was video crossover - this was a little easier as people are used to paying for a video before you've made it, but video was actually a very small part of what we were offering - and sometimes not at all.

But selling things that have been bukt yet shouldn't be impossible, or even hard - as long as you can show a track record of delivery.
I should have wrote that it's just one factor, but at the end of the day, people opted for lower priced goods rather than the service that Sears offered, which I assume was partly due to the decent compensation they provided.

Another example of a low wage industry where paying employees more doesn't work in the grand scheme are hotels. People like to stay in newer, renovated, upscale hotels. Well if one hotel pays more than it has to, then it's owners save less capital with which they can purchase other land and build a new hotel on, or to renovate an existing one. So the hotel owners that pay the employees as little as possible and work them as much as possible end up with more money to invest in new builds or renovations, and customers end up going to those hotels, while the hotel that paid its employees well will lose business.

Unfortunately, good customer service only goes so far, especially when your clientele can barely afford it and they readily chose to forego it to save money.
Clothes are probably one of the bigger things. General grocery items, especially produce. Things that are a pain to return (large appliances). Things you usually need now (hardware/auto store parts).

I will say, I try to never buy monitors online... I've just experienced too many that die prematurely and would rather have someplace I can take back to the same day. My current monitor is actually a 42" UHD TV. I had bought a monitor in that size (40") but it was DOA, and didn't want to wait the round-trip for a replacement. Not the first time I've had monitors die young either. At least they don't weigh over 70 pounds anymore.
Is Uber still using capital to pay operating expenses?

[Edit] Doesn't Uber subsidize vehicle leases for drivers?
The membership fee keeps away many poor and lower-income shoppers. They just aren't going to pay to shop somewhere. They go to wal-mart, aldis, dollar stores, etc.
I don't have any citations, but I do seem to recall reading articles saying that if you had bought and held a conventional sort of basket of dot-com stocks through that whole era you would have come out quite well.
Status releases desktop client alpha
Le Monde.fr – Actualités et Infos en France et dans le monde
Isn't that a big shift to expect given gold's track record as a store of value going back to almost the beginning of recorded history?
Normalization is a separate issue, you can normalize and then use the C collation order.
I've seen descriptions of this strategy before, but this particular article lists way more concrete examples than I've seen before, which makes me wonder if it is now the default across the entire tech industry at all times.

Also: the strategy seems to depend upon a "greater fool," or just high risk-takers to fill in the complement with what is ultimately low or zero profit product. How can we guard against being that high-risk fool?

I mean, from the article, IBM tried to commoditize all of the peripheral makers by publishing standard interface documents. But then they ultimately lost out when Microsoft commoditized the entire PC by licensing their OS to other PC manufacturers. IBM didn't quite see this coming. They were out commoditized.

OTOH, you look at the way Microsoft was paying app developers cold hard cash out of pocket for listing apps in the MS mobile app store (which ultimately failed) and you see that MS was out-commoditized by Google/Android/Play Store.

So how can anyone be smart enough to spot the loser(s) in advance?
I've always heard it explained as a problem of margins and inventory. Sears would turn over their inventory 4x a year with a 30% margin. Walmart would turn it over 8x a year with a 15% margin. The "discount retail" approach worked really well because customers saw the lower prices. Walmart had a world class logistics organization, and made smarter decisions about what products to stock.

I'm not sure where I read this but it may have been Clayton Christensen, or Shark Tank ^_^. In the context of disruption, Sears was making the right decision in chasing the higher margins.
I am extremely wary of n=1 reasoning. It ends us being confirmation bias. We look at Sears, note that they pay more than Walmart, and say that paying employees more either has no effect, or is harmful.

But are we also looking at the thousands of businesses that pay their employees terrible wages, but go out of business?

Businesses are complex systems that defy the search for simple explanations. That won't stop humans from trying, though. We all love the idea that there is some simple Eureka! idea that explains everything.

In this specific case you're talking about wages as if all other things are equal. All other things being equal, if we pay employees more, we lose business to lower-cost competitors that pay employees less.

This is like saying that if all other things are equal, a restaurant that pays more for its ingredients will lose business to competitors that pay less.

Of course, as managers, our entire reason for existence is to make sure that all other things are not equal. If we pay more for ingredients, we have to build our business around turning those more expensive ingredients into a better customer experience and perception of value.

And the same goes for paying more in wages. It's our business as managers to turn that into value. If we can't, are the wages the problem? Or is our mismanagement the problem?

Looking at the comments about shopping at Sears, I am not seeing a lot of "Everything about Sears was great except things cost a few cents more." I'm seeing anecdote after anecdote about how poorly it was managed.

Under the circumstances, if I wanted to cut wages at Sears, I would have started with their managers. If they're going to manage the thing into the ground, why pay them more than you'd pay an intern in an MBA program?
Sears died because of Lampert, that's the beginning and end of the story. While they were far from perfect, post-Kmart "acquisition" both the service and stores became garbage and he used Sears as a personal slush fund.
For 2015 I listed out:
"Gold markets"
-Big data (with emphasis on things like Cloudera (~$3B co), Mesosphere)
-SaaS with an emphasis on APIs and Dev Tools
-Genomics

And then a set of markets I thought would be smaller or binary. Full post here: http://blog.eladgil.com/2015/01/hot-markets-for-2015.html

For genomics in particular, Illumina is now a $40 billion company while Exact Sciences ($9B), Invitae ($1 billion), 23andMe (a few billion) and Ancestry (a few billion) are all in the market too.
But can it see through clothing?