skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Richard, I appreciate your theoretical arguments. Consider me the applied physicist who has actually seen the data. :)

On the valuation. Optimizely's pre-exit valuation rose in every VC round since changing the focus of the business from SMB (Series B) to Mid-Market (Series C) to Enterprise (Series D). The valuation of the exit took a hit for reasons that were not the enterprise focus. I could say more here, but consciously choose not to.

The self-serve model at Optimizely was certainly flawed. If VWO was able to build it profitably, that's likely because their labor costs, being based in India, are substantially lower than Optimizely's. Keeping a legion of engineers funded in SF has very different unit economics than keeping engineers funded in India.

Now on your last argument, that self-serve customers could acquire enterprise accounts, I certainly agree. If that strategy were better executed, it could have created a valuable pipeline. But the self-serve to enterprise funnel was sorely lacking, and when self-serve was cancelled, the business benefited financially and migrated everyone to the new pricing model for substantial success.

Its easy to look at Optimizely's final fortunes and link that to the enterprise approach, and I won't argue they're completely unrelated, but there were very different factors that caused Optimizely to fold into EPi's acquisition spree.
It's not an argument about Marx until somebody accuses somebody else of not understanding Marx. It's like the national anthem at baseball games.

He didn't predict it. He predicted capital accumulation. The tight relation between technology and capital in Capital is exactly the mistake he's making. You can't explain the increase in output in terms of capital. This is the fundamental insight of Solow's research. With technological advance, the output of the economy becomes larger for the same inputs.

Marx had heard of finance, since it existed by the time he was writing, but he didn't understand it. Otherwise he would have understood that profits do not exist solely because of exploitation. People have time preferences, and risk preferences. People would rather get paid today, and would rather avoid risk. Thus, profits are required to fund projects with long-dated payoffs, or are risky. Take away those profits, and you see those projects go largely unfunded. That's why the China that took Marx' advice was one of the poorest in the world, and the China that ignored his advice makes up 15% of world output.

The instability of the global financial system is overrated. Look how easily the Fed stepped in this summer and stabilized financial markets.
Those are both modern additions to the language, the latter of which I would say is a necessary part of any formal C education (I always mention "K&R with supplements" as the go-to way to learn C). Thus, I wouldn't call it "outdated" but maybe "incomplete"; all the information in the book is fairly up-to-date-but it is missing things that modern C programmers should know.
I loved Winamp. There's a theme for every occasion and it great attention to detail. I always had it opened to admire the beautiful interface and enjoyed seeing the equalizer movements.
Survival of the fittest: after being at the lowest 10% for three of five years, you get washed out
His paralyzed vocal cords make public speeches hard.

He is still Alphabet board member and employee. His interest has always been futurism and moon-shot projects.
How Close Are We to Making Babies from Bone Marrow?
Awww, maybe he could only get $10B liquid.
In a sense, I suppose. A simultaneous rise in the VIX and the S&P usually precedes a crash. That's why I bought puts 2 days ago.
I agree, I will update the README to showcase it's intended use and value more.

Thanks for the input!
The point is that blindly following market trends, when the market is being manipulated, is not a good thing. Yet it's a core feature of index funds. It's a big potential downside of index funds.

In general, the standard retirement investing advice these days is to invest in a portfolio of index funds -- don't bother with active funds, and don't pick individual stocks! People who take that advice probably expect that they are investing in a slice of ownership in companies that will grow over time, not that they are enabling/following along with market manipulation and being suckered into buying overvalued assets. It makes index funds a lot less attractive as a safe investment for normal people.
> -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50%

Only up by 50%? That's impressive.
It's not so much "emulating" physical goods as it is trying to capture separate costs that physical goods link intrinsically and (mostly) effectively.

With physical media (paper books, boards games, records, film, etc) the cost of creating+distributing copies is so high that it meets or exceeds the cost of creating (or, curating/funding an environment/projects that enables the creation of) the original work. Creation and distribution of physical copies is challenging and profitable enough that creators can be paid by a portion of the profits from distribution.

In contrast, copying + distributing digital media is so phenomenally easy and egalitarian that there is very little opportunity to add value and create profit. So the method of paying creators that is essentially "built in" to physical media does not exist for digital media.
I have wondered the same thing. Make it a piece of data that comes in from the environment or a secrets manager. It’s not bulletproof, but if done correctly seems like it makes the whole hashing scheme a little better.
The inflation in asset values (e.g. equities / real estate / gold).

People incorrectly assume inflation means "the price of everything goes up". The problem word here being everything.

Why? Well because prices aren't merely dictated by supply, but rather supply & demand. Simply comparing inflated money supply to the good supply is naïve, as it ignores to factor in the demand for different goods.

As so, for a dumb example, it's entirely possible to have inflated stock prices but not see inflated sock prices, if all the extra money is chasing stocks, and not socks...
A peristaltic pump is cheaper than the PH probe.
Why you should charge more for your app subscriptions
Can someone please help me
some people mass reported me on instagram i wanna do the same to them but i dont how to code it can anyone help me?
>you can pay in some form to view it or not and happily find some alternative way to enjoy your time. Nobody is forcing you to watch what I make and you won’t die if you don’t watch it.

That's kind of the point. Whether I pirate your work and watch it or I watch paint dry for an hour doesn't affect your bottom line, because you weren't going to get my money either way.
> They’re bcrypt hashes so good job there, but the fact they’re suggesting everyone changes their password illustrates that even good hashing has its risks.

It's good that they suggested changing passwords, though. I have a feeling that if you call them out they're going to go back to "the passwords are secure because they were encrypted".
Technological advances have been steadily decreasing the material costs, not just of cars, but of all forms of freedom. I see no reason why that will not continue to happen in the future. The car I drive today gets about twice the gas mileage of the family car my parents had when I was a teenager, even though it has significantly better performance in every respect; it also weighs about half as much and many of the materials it is made out of can be recycled in ways the materials that old family car was made out of couldn't.

For an even better example, the computer I am typing this on has orders of magnitude more processing power, memory, and storage space for significantly less power consumption than the one I had when I was a student many years ago. It also weighs about half as much and is made of more recyclable materials (and yes, I make use of that: there is a computer recycling center in my town where I take old computers).
Yet the corporate legal eagles will insist on documentation as to bolster their case of such dismissal, if any.
Etsy, Teradyne and Catalent Set to Join S&P 500 [pdf]
Not to mention slavery. In fact a large part of what happened world wide in the past few centuries revolved around the slave trade. That's one example of what happens when market forces are allowed free rein.
Thank god for "INSERT INTO blah VALUES (bleh) ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE boop = 1".

from Corgi
How does the fuel get to the rockets without the hoses getting torn off?
> Why would I buy any stock at all unless I'm making a forward prediction about what is happening?

That's exactly what I'm proposing we should change. We should be trading on a company's ability to make the world a better place. That would align incentives across people in a much better way than earnings reports. It also, incidentally, ensure that a company's profit structure is designed to align with its mission rather than align with some arbitrary earnings report deadlines.

I realize that metrics for this are hard to design, but we're in the 2nd millenium A.D. and it's okay for us to revise how we think about money.

I believe in a future of clean energy electric power, and it's f*ed up that I can't always invest in it because there are times when investing in oil gets me more $ that I can use to improve my own personal clean energy efforts while investing in electric would cause me to be at high risk of losing money, and therefore depend on oil because it's cheaper. That's a really messed up, convoluted system right there.
Well maybe they have similar regulations.

So well it's a bit strange.

Through GDPR applies to any company selling to the EU, the fact that you can easily travel to Switzerland to buy a product due to more or less open borders and import it to the EU can matter in some cases. So to be "safe" I wouldn't be surprised if they would need to put geo-fencing in to be on the safe site.

Due to Facebook repeatedly intentionally breaching or trying to undermine EU (and member states) laws and regulations (because the penalties are lower then their profit) there isn't really much (any?) good-will left with the local and EU law keepers (except in Ireland, because money) .

So there is a good chance law keepers won't give FB any flex when FB is trying to sell a physical product,
a think for which there are much more regulations then for FB itself (like health&safety, proper advertisement etc.). For example they will very likely need to put a clear readable "requires internet","requires a FB account" to be used note on their boxes (and internet sale descriptions). Because a large degree of the usability is restricted without a FB account. Which is something I believe FB doesn't like at all ;=)
The Trump Administration Continues to Erode Election Security
When to stop working on side-projects
As a huge fan of pg (since my early 20s), it feels bad (but also good) to see him so disconnected these days. Most of his Tweets read like the musings of "some rich dude" in an ivory tower (which is quite literally where he lives), whereas back in the day YC and pg's essays were very much "where the rubber meets the road" -- apologies for being a bit metaphorical.

Anyway, I think he's enjoying his well-earned money, life, and wonderful family (which is great), but as far as practical real-life startup advice? Paul Graham isn't that guy anymore.
> Americans engineered many places to be car dependent when it didn't have to.

No, Americans responded to the preference of many of us for more freedom and less crowded places to live, by producing them. You don't get to decide for other people what a proper "balance" is or for whom cars are a "necessity".
CHAZ was the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, not Portland.
Have you considered the possibility that Satoshi was some random cryptography enthusiast of little note who died in a traffic accident? He probably told nobody about his project, and the lengths he went to to remain anonymous make me think he used full disk encryption -- so his family, not knowing his passphrase, probably unknowingly destroyed all evidence of his work on Bitcoin after he passed away.

What makes you think Satoshi had any background in cryptography? Everything about the Bitcoin whitepaper and even the design of Bitcoin itself says otherwise.
I mean, competitive, publicly traded markets like the stocks underling SPY are not manipulated long-term.

Index fund investors are not being "suckered." People who get convinced that they can time the market or pay someone else to time the market are the ones who are "suckered."

> index funds a lot less attractive as a safe investment for normal people

As long as you aren't day trading, I don't see why this volatility ought to even be a concern for normal people. I'm not buying/selling based on 5% shifts in the market on a day-to-day basis.
I'm not sure I understand your point?
...and, actually, I thought I was replying to one of the other comments, not the OP. Would've made more sense if I placed my comment properly.. :-(
It won't generate a reasonable intellectual discussion. Some of the most common opinions on the matter are unspeakable in polite society.

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has this to say on that trouble:

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

You can't have an honest discussion when not everybody can speak their mind.
I mean, small businesses will be getting tanked, but mostly in office districts with very high lunch foot traffic; the assumption of the increased lunch custom is kind of baked into rents and the business model, and commercial leases are measured in years.
> every single day

As a California resident, I would like the option to run A/C after sunset.
I wonder if it makes sense also to deorbit Phobos (instead of exploding a thermonuclear device on the surface per Elon Musk suggestion). The resulting series of collisions might release enough CO2 to create a denser atmosphere.
> It did have tariffs on trade with foreign countries, that's right.

Who else would you have tariffs on? Yourself?

> Tariffs don't automatically make a country "not free market", any more than taxes do.

Actually, tariffs by definition makes it a "not free market". Especially when it is part of a protectionist policy. What does taxes have to do with anything?

"Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth." --lincoln

> Internally there were no tariffs, it was a free market.

What are you talking about? You can't tariff yourself. It would be like stealing from your left pocket to put it in your right pocket.

> Industrial production boomed in the free North.

Thanks to protectionism and high tariffs which kept british/european industrial goods out of the market. "free North"? Where blacks, natives and women were treated like second class citizens?

> The Southern economy was pretty much unable to produce any industrial goods

The South was an agricultural economy. The land, weather and environment provided conditions for year-round farming. Unlike in the north where we had fall/winter that prevent year-round farming.

> a typical problem for unfree economies.

Well china is great at industrial goods and they aren't as "free" as norway. So using your logic, norway must be a slave owning nation? What are you doing?

You just made up definitions, history, facts and confusingly misused the word "free" ( free as in markets vs free as in non-slave ). Are you alright?
pepper instead of salt is a bad idea because if your pepper is leaked the attacker can brute force all of your passwords at once.

The main argument I've heard against pepper is because people are afraid of losing the pepper. It either needs to be directly in your code which is easier to leak, or out of band which is easier to lose.

edit: Does anyone else want to goto waffle house whenever they talk about salting and peppering their hash? Too bad the closest one is an hour away.
Pasco’s sheriff created a dystopian program to stop crime before it happens
Oof, GPU by Imagination Technologies.

Here's hoping their close brush with death opened them to the idea of open sourcing their code.
Maybe a clearly published outline of where their language fits in the ecosystem of languages that are out there. e.g., it improves on these aspects of C++, gets these traits from python, fixes these weaknesses of C, but doesn't improve on X, and Y is something that C still does better.

Or something like that. Then there's something out there and clearly visible that immediately shuts down the zealotry because the maintainers have said exactly where Rust stands, and what they think it's great at, and what it doesn't do. Which seems like the problem: that the zealots are giving the impression that Rust is better than C for everything.
I've had a similar experience with OKRs. The issue becomes how often to review and update? On the surface, OKRs seems like it would be a helpful tool but in practice it seems pretty cumbersome and only moderately useful to guide goal directed action.
Perhaps they meant global consensus?
> I realize that metrics for this are hard to design, but we're in the 2nd millenium A.D. and it's okay for us to revise how we think about money.

It's not just that the metrics are "hard" to design. It's a question of why would I buy stocks based on a company's ability to make the world a better place. What makes the "stock" piece of paper worth more when the company does more to make the world a better place. For real-life stocks, it's the expectation of future buybacks/dividends. For your metric, it's unclear why anyone would participate.
> There wasn't much left to discover.

I'll bite.

Let's take the most banal and fundamental structuring element of common practice harmony-- the root position triad.

Are you absolutely certain I cannot find a 20th century composer doing something so innovative with root position triads that no composer before 1900 could even conceive of using them in such a way?

There are probably more examples than the one I'm thinking of, which is Nancarrow's Study No. 37 for player piano. The thing I love about that example is that it completely undercuts the serialist argument that tonal tropes create an inescapable harmonic push-and-pull that ends up structuring the music, regardless of the composer's will. The rigors of early twelve-tone music were designed to "liberate" the composer from this seeming inevitability.

And in Study No. 37 we almost have a kind of Alice in Wonderland response to that mentality. There are many root position triads. There is a tonal ending to the piece. There are little tonal segments of melody. We have all the ingredients necessary for a piece that ought to be chock full of evidence that the tonal building blocks of the common practice period put the composer in a kind of structural straight-jacket. Well, just listen to it. It ain't that.

So author-- don't be "that type" who repeats high-fallutin' historical myths because they happen to fit the pattern you're going for. Besides, even if that mentality were based in fact it is leads to absolutely insufferable behavior. Ghost of your futures past: "Ooh, I love that song by [The Beatles, Radiohead, Otis Redding, etc.]. Too bad it uses a system already completely exhausted a century earlier. Imagine what it would have sounded like if it hadn't been so harmonically regressive! Oh, I'm hearing it in my head right now and truly it is wonderful. Quick, give me your address so I can send you a million slips to donate to my concert series..."
But if you define the North as "free market", despite tariffs, then in what sense was the South "not free market"?
Using Prometheus's Upcoming Hetzner Service Discovery to Monitor HCloud Servers
The explanation for your conundrum is that the value of fiat currencies is dropping. It's why gold and stocks can both be going up.

And no, this is not due to inflation (Which is near-zero). This is due to QE, and easy credit.
> I believe the poll is polluted by the FUD Uber/Lyft have been propagating (including most recently threatening to shut down with little notice if they didn't get their way in court)

Honest question: what would convince you that a poll isn't "polluted by FUD"?
Employees don't know share or exit price yet. Won't be announced for a few more months.

However, if the OP is speaking the truth about the timeframe he got shares from, he is guaranteed to be up. There are definitely people who lost money on this deal, but definitely not Series A people.
IMO, one of the struggles of the rapid advance of technology in the modern era is that many genuinely new moral situations are coming up. Everybody tries to figure out what should happen in these situations based on somewhat sloppy application of old laws that are arguably no longer relevant and analogies to things that seem related but don't really represent the new situation.

So exactly what should happen with regard to consumption of digital content that's expensive to produce but basically free to distribute? I'm not really sure, nothing that's been done yet seems quite right.

Old-school pay big $$$ to own a copy doesn't seem to work very well, when most of the money is going to fatcat corporations that don't add any value, and "own" in the context of digital services that get turned off or moved on a whim doesn't seem very good.

Piracy channels work great for the end-user, but nobody knows how to get money to the artist and producer when distributing through these channels.

Subscription services seem kind of okay. At least until they either split into hundreds of them and you end up paying even more, or it consolidates into a couple of big ones who exert the same forces, especially regarding effective censorship for lack of willingness to take a chance on something risky, as the old guard did.
> pepper instead of salt is a bad idea because if your pepper is leaked the attacker can brute force all of your passwords at once.

This isn't true, you could simply do encrypted_pw = md5(pepper + md5(password)) or whatever.

Edit: Getting a bunch of comments on this, just want to clarify that I used md5 purely to illustrate a one-way hashing function. In actual practice, you'd use something else (HMAC with SHA256 most likely).
CPI conveniently doesn't measure asset prices.

Inflation has been "stubbornly low" for 20 years while asset prices have outperformed historical averages the entire time.

Asset prices seem to have diverged from the real economy because assets are primarily funded with debt (real estate, corporate investment) which has been artificially priced lower, while goods are paid with earned income which hasn't been manipulated.
> What happens if (i.e., when) 1, 2, and 3 unwind?

Pop.
Sure it can. His use of remailers makes me think he used full disk encryption. His sudden disappearance makes me think he unexpectedly died (e.g. in a traffic accident), and his family probably did not know his passphrase. All evidence of this person's work on Bitcoin was probably unintentionally destroyed in that scenario, and the people who destroyed it have no idea what their loved one was up to before his death (and will never mention it, for lack of knowledge).
missed point 0: Economics.
There are things I can't uninstall or install because some needs python2 and others python3 and uninstall python2 or python3 removes one or the other (notably calibre, and I just read the author won't move to py3 and that he can maintain py2 anyway).

For instance I can't install mycli without removing calibre.

Of course it's most likely possible to get around that with virtualenv or whatever is used at the moment but that's a huge cognitive load just to run some apps.