skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article is about propositions for how to ideally structure a company, not the range of possibilities.
It would have been interesting if they tested the drugs as well, to see how they chemically compared with the domestic ones.
So, with private stocks, who decides on the symbol?
* blushes * fixed.
JSON is almost the simplest untyped text-based tree serialization format that could possibly be designed. In terms of complexity, XML and YAML are closer together.
"Bill Gates the software prodigy". Ha-ha. A PR-fuckup that unfortunately found its way into the minds of journalists who should know better.

In the 80's many books have been written that point out nicely that Microsoft is just a bunch of criminals. They didn't do anything to make our lifes better.
All your Google services at one place
Enough so to go from robber baron to philanthropist.
Maybe to prove it was previously posted?
I thought being rich was having liquid assets, not a billion dollars in stock that would decrease in worth as you sell large chunks of it.
That's a good example of what I meant in my earlier post. More generally, I didn't like the "low-cost" approach to things like travel and accommodation.

Partly, that smacks of treating employees as nothing but "human resources", a term which is forbidden in any company I own, BTW. It ignores the massive disruptive effect you are having on their lives by expecting them to stay away from their home, family and social life outside of office hours.

Even without that, if you're sending an employee to conduct business in person at a remote location, you're surely committing a lot of time and money to whatever it is they're doing. It seems a no-brainer for me that you make travel arrangements that minimise the hassle to them, book comfortable accommodation, and provide some sort of catering/recreation budget so they can relax when they're not working. Otherwise, you just spent a lot of money to get a valuable member of staff somewhere, and then you made the member of staff tired and stressed so they aren't at their best anyway. How does that make any business sense?
The only thing that happens when you're rich is that you can help more people. If you were not helping people before (whatever that means to you), you probably won't do it after.
You're in good company with Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 1900s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[12] Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use.
Ha. Well, I don't know if I'd describe myself as terrified or shouting, but I take your point gladly. I wasn't being facetious when I said I hope it's a parody that's gone over my head.

For the record, though, the "wrong crowd" was referring to your suggestion that I should step back from the discussion (presumably because you found my comment too forceful or emotional), which I took as your main point. I meant that if your sentiment is shared by others, it could be that that form of argument isn't appreciated on HN. I'm not quite condescending enough to suggest it's the community's fault if I don't get the joke. ;)
It depends... Google can say (and can be truth) there were prediction algorithms that analyzed your e-mail and they acted on that!
Did you watch all the way through? When Severo hits the market they explain that about 1/3 of the coca leaves sold at the market end up being manufactured into cocaine. That really doesn't sound so bad...
http://kiva.org/

You can help people now, and as a bonus you generally get your money back too.
Rapture Group's Web Site Disappears
I couldn't watch, the video wouldn't play. I'm not saying it's bad (it's no heroin or meth), just remarking on the phrasing.
We Use Math
The Next, Next Big Thing Is Obvious
Didn't he 'invent' airbnb?

[UPDATE]

I find it interesting coffee was his 'gateway' drug and self-dosed amphetamine usage allowed him to perform at a higher level. In that sense, amphetamine usage is much better than caffeine.

He was not addicted to amphetamines. Most coffee drinkers are addicted to caffeine. How many caffeine addicts would go a month without caffeine for $500?
FTA: "The customers get the products they were paying for (albeit counterfeit versions)."

They're fakes!
In my experience a lot of users, those that know more than nothing but aren't quite adept enough to not get malware, know how to selectively delete their history.

That's no to say that dodgy porn sites are the only vectors. In fact I find the most common vector for viruses these days is stupidity. The nastiest viruses to remove are the ones that can't install themselves, spread themselves, make no attempt to hide from antivirus, but have a whopping huge payload ready for whoever will run omg_awesome_kitten_pic.jpg.exe (which they've downloaded from Limewire, or Bittorrent, or has been IM'd to them over MSN).
Coca leaves are not a narcotic, when consumed in the traditional form (chewing or in brewed tea). Caffeine, tea, and tobacco are more addictive than chewing coca.

As you point out, coca leaves can be processed and refined to make cocaine. Analogous to how corn can be refined into high fructose corn syrup. Chewing corn all day won't give you diabetes, but drinking high-fructose corn syrup regularly will have negative effect on your health.
And how much money can it really save? If an employee doesn't travel often then who cares about a hundred bucks a night for a moderately-priced hotel, and if the employee does travel often then it'd have to be completely intolerable.
Is this question really that hard to answer? I'll take some stabs:

- Dalton (school) for the kids, and a nice donation to the alma matter to assure legacy status

- Museum board memberships for the wife

- A vanity career in writing, photography or abstract art

- The best therapist money can buy
Consider tablets and desktops versus notebooks and smartphones. Biggest impact is on notebooks whose vertical real estate is at a premium. Second are smartphone because of their form factor. As far as tablets and desktops: You can rotate your tablet and you can use a big monitor (or rotate that too if supported).
One thing I can think of is picking a date to golf on should probably be a calendar with a AM/PM toggle next to it. It's a bit hard to grok by glancing at it right now.
Oh, I know, a friend of mine worked in Bolivia for a summer and they chewed the leaves. I think they induced a sense of euphoria, but nothing too dramatic.
"I remember reading somewhere a startup having a bell that they would ring everytime a sales rep closes a sale."

The engineers in your office would HATE this. Imagine, you are deep in concentration developing the latest feature and someone rings a bell. Distracting at best, detrimental to morale and code quality at worst.
No, they're generics produced to look like the brand name version.
Solve education. Use the results to solve food & energy.
The other flaw with the IT dept. is that they make The Right Way™ too hard, time consuming and long winded. If people can get significant time savings by taking shortcuts then you system has a flaw.
Here you go: http://xorswap.com/

The search I did to get there: http://searchyc.com/submissions/interview+question+overflow
مشاهدة مباراة الزمالك والمقاولون العرب بث مباشر 21/5/2011
Best UK SEO conference wrap up, rap ever.  
ASCON, Search, Social Media and Analytics. Short Wrap up presentation about SEO, Analytics, Search and Mobile presented at Presented by Neil Walkerat #sascon @theukseo www.seomad.com / www.sascon.co.uk.

Here is the full version with presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1BoDuyaDtQ
If I recall correctly, didn't the IPO of Google use some unconventional structure, like a reverse auction or something? Anyone remember the details?

Anyone know why this isn't done more often?
America seems very rich, but I never see anyone actually making anything.
Facebook's Acqui-Hires Over the Years
CCTV cameras aren't as large a privacy breach as having something about you published in a paper, since on a CCTV the number of viewers is usually zero or one, and they usually have no interest in you beyond your presence at the location of the CCTV camera at a certain point in time. In fact, I suspect that CCTV footage of, say, someone entering an adult store would fall under the privacy law and would not be legally re-distributable beyond the owner of the store (this is pure speculation though, but it does at least provide an example of how the two apparently conflicting policies could be resolved).
ASCON, Search, Social Media and Analytics. Short Wrap up presentation about SEO, Analytics, Search and Mobile presented at Presented by Neil Walkerat #sascon @theukseo www.seomad.com / www.sascon.co.uk.

Here is the full version with presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1BoDuyaDtQ
Mafia Wars Numbers Drops To Lowest Level Yet
Android is direct threat to Windows and Mac
It's shame that in the entire video, not one concrete example was given about the application of math in a real world profession.

It's mostly just "Yes, math is cool! You can do so much with it!". This is what my teachers always kept telling me, but it never registered because it was presented in a very abstract and meaningless way.

What would have convinced me was concrete applications. Something as simple as defining and understanding the algorithms required to make a simple Pong game work. That would have inspired me.
Start a spaceship company.
Look at the back of your iPod. What does it say?

"Designed in California".

Who do you think takes a larger cut of the $500 you pay to Steve when you want one of his phones? The people that designed it, or the people that snapped it together (or pressed go on the machine to build the parts)?
I guess people downvoting me somehow haven't heard gun control laws?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law

There quite obviously ARE legal issues to do with owning guns and knives, not just the misuse of them. For example in England you can't even carry a knife around with you legally, with just a few exceptions.
When I read: "Give your money away" as an item in the list, I clicked "x" on the window. I was expecting advice on how to keep the money, not on how to blow it all like an idiot.
And when one of those hosted services goes down, just as you are trying to generate the shiny new presentation for the new investors...

Access is nice. But putting all your eggs into the cloud isn't a good idea. And how the heck are you ever going to run grep on your google docs?
Yeah that's how I felt about the whole video but I think this is just the introduction. Maybe the future videos will show people at work. They could talk to a video game programmer who takes them throught the process of displaying an object in a 3D space (no code just the idea) and show them it's pretty much the stuff they are learning right now but more advanced. Then interview a carpenter, the carpenters I know do a lot of calculations during a day. It can be considered low level math but I think the point should be to show that there is no safe place from math ;p
Wanted: gender-free job ads
Manufacturers make them shorter because they are sold on the size of the diagonal. A 4:3 screen with a 24" diagonal is 14.4"x19.2" = 276.5 square inches. A 16:9 screen with the same diagonal is only 11.7"x20.8" = 243.4 square inches. Even if the retail price changes proportionately to the area, manufacturers come out ahead because each manufacturing defect only affects a 240 sq. in. product instead of a 280 sq. in. product. Smaller screens mean less waste, which means cheaper (more popular) product and higher margins.
I won't pretend I can follow all the implications of that scheme, but it looks like all files are encrypted with an unchangeable hash of the file as the key?

So that all the RIAA has to do is provide a sample mp3 and then DropBox can see who has AES(F, H(F)) stored. Only the files with user generated unknown content can remain mysterious to DropBox, widely used files cannot.

And since you use aes(f, h(f)) you can't change the encryption key on any particular file.

And since the client software needs to use the local DB and since they have the list of files you uploaded, they have most of the plaintext known if they want to try to decrypt the DB maliciously.

But if they do want to, they can leak the password you type in to themselves anyway.

Also, how would this scheme interact with DropBox's differential upload and revision tracking feature?

ZFS does encryption and deduor too, so yes it is possible, but secure trustable ecrypted DropBox where they also do the encryption part?
Ok, so lots of things to tackle here:

1. The commenters seem to imply that java is probably not the most appropriate language for cs1, where syntax considerations often overpower practical concerns.

2. Bright students that 'get it' are not the baseline, they're the exception. It's the other, intro level students that the class/recitation/curriculum should be catered towards.

3. Many (if not all) fields of study 'get hard' in college (i.e. physics, pure math, etc). The problem in this case is one of students being improperly tracked (i.e. curriculum failure).

4. Intro CS courses vary wildly in expectations and ideology. This set of courses seems to focus on 'practical' considerations that are probably better suited to a separate 'software design' course. It's possible that this 'survey' is actually too broad and not focused enough.

5. The music analogy is cute, but fails to consider that intro cs courses typically only succeed (and attempt) in getting students expressive (i.e. jibbering toddler) rather than elegantly fluent. This is why many post-cs1 students generally can solve problems using their new toolkit, but often solve them naively (it's like a toddler that says the wackiest things)

6. Confusing "programming ability" with "computer science" is problematic overall, i don't know that anyone would want to spend four semesters "programming" but i've know a bunch of people that enjoy the theory=>pracitce :: state machines => regular expression 1-2 punch. You can do quite a bit of fascinating cs in a logic/philosophy class as well as in a complexity theory class without ever touching a computer. I know, heresy, but it's true.

I think finally, the issue here is confusing "computer science" with "software engineering." I think java's a great language for software engineering, it's got all the stuff builtin to teach those concepts, but as a language for sketching, i'd probably use python.

People often make this mistake in teaching javascript because built in is the ability to manipulate the dom which, while eminently useful, is also basically a whole separate language/paradigm mess than 'javascript neat.'

And this is a hard question to be confronted with in any case: what are you teaching and why are you teaching it? Neither of those seem to be fully addressed in the author's description of cs1/2.
CSS is the worst.
And this seems unnecessarily verbose: nth-child(1)
Not true at all. Many people would be much more willing to give once basic expenses are taken care of (60k-100K annual income).
It's a fine strategy to do if you are very paranoid about your privacy. However, using a VPN that you switch every year or so, and using something like www.disconnect.me, to not load every Facebook Like button, would do much more with only the setup time (< 1 hour a year).

or you can do what a friend of mine does: signup as a 12 year old girl from Texas for every service out there. :-)
COSS Express LLC
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I'm hooked on caffeine and cigarettes, I'd give up both for a month for $500 easy!
fund the thowra.
I'm actually thinking of taking my stuff off the open internet and setting up my own email server in my, gulp, house.

GMAIL, Facebook, Twitter and Lastpass have all had serious hacks in the past couple of years. I think the in vogue status symbol in the next couple of years will be to create your own cloud service in your closet and back it up to the cloud encrypted.

There might be a cool startup there: home cloud systems that leverage redundant broadband connections (dsl + cable + fios) in your home that are harder to hack. They would be harder to hack because they are not part of the tareted BigCos right?

anyway, just an idea... "google docs server for home"
If you're serious about charity, you should be reading http://www.givewell.org/
I don't think it's fair to assume that Google routinely and casually violates the privacy and trust of their users.
Are there any high profile examples of people who didn't change their lifestyle much at all?
An interesting observation. Obvious but not, at the same time :-) On the flip side, this is an interesting way to discriminate in your hiring practices without being explicit about it. I wonder to what extent you could take it.
Let's take Dropbox for example.

They save a lot of costs by deduplicating copies of files, and it makes file renames/moves/shares really easy for them. Therefore, they wouldn't have the incentive to destroy that advantage: That's one of the major scale advantages they get for covering so many users.

With that said, they could offer that "by default" to premium users who already pay for the service to simplify their lives and keep their more profitable customers happy.

What are everyone's views on that, from Dropbox's perspective?
How the heck do you run grep on your Word docs?
Probably, but the problem is if they didn't change much they are probably not high profile. The millionaire next door type of thing.
IPOs are good for the ego because it allows founders to liquidate their equity without selling control of the company to someone else. You will need to cash out eventually. Dividends may not be lucrative enough.

Also, eventually your employees with stock options and investers will want to see liquidity to stick with you.

Finally, you may not have a choice. A company must become public after it has 500 shareholders. This can happen if you have enough investors and enough employees exercising their options early (presumably because they have left the company).
Explosion at Foxconn Factory That Makes iPads
Also: with all the 'blah blah' that you hear about companies taking uncomfortable decisions due to a "fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximize profits", taking this sort of hit seems quite askance.
Freedom Box could be heading in exactly that direction ... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html
College level music studies are more difficult primarily because they have to be. As the program gets easier, enrollment can tend to go up because the pool of people who both want it and can do it becomes larger. College music programs have to cut their pool size down by raising the bar or they'd be flooded. In terms of intrinsic difficulty, well, in a way they aren't that different; anybody can pick up an instrument and with effort attain basic fluency, anybody can pick up a programming language and attain a basic level of fluency.
At one time, Warren Buffett would have been a perfect example, but I think he has a private plane now, which dilutes the impression a bit.
If Visa or MC wanted to fix this, they would merely need to issue a small number of "fraud" cards world-wide to various people who would _only_ use it for suspected frauds.

Instantly flag the merchant acct, bank acct, open a report, all while looking like a legitimate sap buying from spam.

I look forward to my "Death-card, by Visa(tm)" in the mail.
Couldn't this be done with a simple map function? Not sure the exact javascript but in ruby it would be as simple as:

favourite_drinks = authors.map { |a| a[:favourite_drink] }

Internally I'd imagine the language will have to loop through the json anyway. Are there any other benefits I'm missing (apart from of course the nice css-like syntax, which is perfectly valid).
Is this how the rest of the world hears us?
It's quite possible to be high profile because of what made you rich, not because of how you spend money. Bill Gates would still be known even if he lived in a $1500/month appartment, drove a car worth $500 and left all his money unused in a bank account.
The "problem" with the startup world and the Valley is that the people with the most money or the sexiest story have the loudest voice. So in this case it's the investors or people who made huge exits, and they get to influence what's cool and not cool among the young kids. Mega-successful founders think that they know the recipe for success, the same way that lottery winners keep telling that "you have to keep pushing and one day the big win comes to you". Investors are some of the same, plus, well, they can't make money on people like you, so what's the point in even talking about it?

But don't despair, my friend, - people like you have a community: http://www.micropreneur.com/ Note that it's paid forum. I'm still reading the book ( http://www.startupbook.net/ - endorsed by patio11 ) right now, and when I'm done I will join that forum, too. I already met the author/organizer and he's totally the kind of guy who would attract the kind of people you want to rub shoulders with.

There's also going to be nice conference for people like you: http://www.microconf.com/

I am attending, and so should you. Doubting your own sanity is the single biggest risk factor in your micro-business.
He sells MSFT shares in blocks of 5,000,000 (~$125 million) regularly... including 4 times this month (~$500 million).

I very much doubt he regrets selling those shares.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=msft
Companies do do that. The first sale is called the primary offering, and ones that come after are called secondaries (or follow-on).

I'm not sure if LinkedIn will do that, but it's common among small companies that are capital intensive.

Usually the goal is not to capture the fluctuation in short-term price, but rather the long-term appreciation from demonstration of potential. For example, if Tesla sold everything when it IPOed, it would be unlikely to get a good price for it, not to mention it doesn't need all that cash now so it's somewhat wasteful. But if it sold half then and sold half in early 2012 or so, it will be able to (hopefully) get a better deal in the second chunk.

Back to the issue of short term mispricing, companies like Google hold open Dutch auctions so the actual price is very close to the fair market value. I don't know why LinkedIn didn't do that but I suspect it's because it wants to keep good relations with bankers.

I hope that answered your question.
The real question is why more companies don't follow Google's lead and use an auction for their IPO. That lets anyone buy if they want to and lets the market decide the price.
Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?
Well, school's out for summer, but the learning doesn't stop. Jobs and internships aside, what personal projects/goals do you hope to accomplish during Summer 11'?

---

I just had my wisdom teeth (all four) removed, and to help pass the time I've been working through Zed Shaw's 'Learn Python the Hard Way'. My end-goal is to have a few Python/Django projects in my portfolio come September.
It could be, yes. `map` isn't built-in on all browsers, though, which I think has hurt its use. i.e., most people don't think about it, so it doesn't get used as often.
Bay Area Maker Faire - today and tomorrow in San Mateo