skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My 2c. Netflix was trading near a 40 P/E. This usually implies that the stock price is based on a belief about a huge future growth and that they would continue adding large numbers of subscribers every month. When they reversed the trend, they could no longer justify a high P/E, so the stock switched to be priced as a slow growth and riskier stock at a lower P/E.
Outrage seems like a funny response to a price increase for a no-lock-in, non-essential entertainment service.
I think the distinction you're highlighting is between the people who start the giant companies of the industry, and the people who keep those companies successful. Everyone knows that Noyce/Moore/Grove built Intel, not many people knows who runs it today.

The '50s computing leaders (mostly academics) are in their old age, the '70s leaders (academics and businessmen) are heading into retirement (except for Jobs unfortunately), and the later leaders (Google, Facebook) are still going strong.
Fixed, much obliged.
Bring on November
> To actually think "the most important lesson about economics is: One must consider not just what is seen, but also unseen." is incredibly naive, plain silly and quite stupid, to be blunt.

Really? When I read that sentence, I cannot be sure it is false to begin with.

First, the statement isn't completely vacuous. In many domains, we are making measures to see if we are "doing well". Then we forget that "doing well" and "maximizing the measured criteria" aren't the same thing. Sometimes, we even game the system, so the two become wildly different. This is what LessWrong calls a "lost purpose"[1]. Obvious examples are the GDP and the grade system in schools.

Now, imagine for a second that you don't follow that lesson (which, I repeat, often happens). Could you do economics well enough to do more good than harm? Hardly, in my opinion. So maybe that's not the most important lesson, but it's close.

[1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/le/lost_purposes/
They would be able to increase the resolution, sure. Why do you think otherwise?
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. I expect it to climb back, and will probably be putting money into it when the panic settles.
Cancelling a recurring service is generally no more difficult than saying, "please cancel my subscription quick so I don't have to charge this back."
They upped their device count to a whopping 50. A lot of those users (myself included) are simply sharing accounts.
Look at the bright side - at least they have one!
If you really need to include your "paper" as part of your presentation and not as a separate document (due to constraints of SlideShare or whatever), you can attach your paper as an appendix at the end of your presentation, so it doesn't interfere with your presentation proper.
I totally agree that this is lack luster reporting but I imagine it may spark an interesting conversation seeing as many of us have expected the "education bubble" to pop and this may be an early indicator of it.

There have been no reports yet on US universities other than Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management stating that they've seen a similar decline in their MBA program.

I fully expect to see a lot more of these sorts of figures in the future but I would be pleasantly surprised if they were paired with a surge in enrollment in math and science degrees.
hah, might be the only real use for bitcoins so far!
Steve Jobs: When salespeople run tech giants it's over
A Reddit politics story. Flagged.
> how the governments just let it happen.

In this case, it's pretty clear the U.S. Government is instrumental in making it happen, not allowing it to happen.
Ways To Avoid Overwhelming Your Employees
Ask HN: Suggestions for my Cancer Research initiative?
Hey Guys,

Over the past year, a bunch of my friends and family have had some major involvement with cancer. One of my cousins just finished her Chemotherapy for melanoma and my Aunt was able to get through her Chemotherapy for breast cancer. Another one of my friends was also diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My mother currently has a spot of melanoma on her nose that could cause her to lose it or need serious surgery.

All of the ordeals really got me thinking that I should be doing more for the Cancer cause, especially since I currently have a stable job with some time on the side.

I’ve developed a site called CureCart.com which basically offers all of the items on Amazon.com at the same prices, only I get a commission for every sale. I split half of this commission with cancer research funds (So far only the American Cancer Society). The reason I only split half right now is because you can only get a tax write off for 50% of your income. If I donate more, I basically end up going negative after taxes (Theoretically I could donate 85% and break even after an estimated 30% tax rate, however, I have been using the other 50% for Google Adwords and Facebook ads). I have made a total of about $50 over the past month at a commission rate of about 6% per order.

I really think that this idea could go big… why wouldn’t people want to start at CureCart.com and get the same items/service from Amazon.com while helping others? I’ve spent a good chunk of change on advertising without much luck. It has been quite difficult to get visitors to my site and I have actually spent much more of my own money on advertising than the site has made.

Do you guys have any ideas on how I can get my site out there any better? I’ve contacted about 150 non-profit organizations in hope that they would want to be featured on my site in return for donations, however, most of them have said that I need to have had a company that is at least a year old. I’ve also formed an LLC in hopes of attracting more non-profits to feature them but I’m afraid that will take too long.

I appreciate any comments/suggestions. Thanks!

-Jeff
I'm not saying that you should hire people without education in hopes that you're randomly selecting a future legend, I merely intend to point out that the policy of shredding every resume that doesn't have an Education section is a very wide buckshot that doesn't actually help much of anything. You should evaluate candidates on real, relevant criteria, not arbitrary "lines in the sand".
I have never ever ever heard someone say that it's ok for a car to just blow through a red light. Just now, equalarrow made the implication that it is ok for bikes to go through red lights at their personal discretion.

Do you have an example of "someone using <vehicle> did <unsafe thing>" where it wouldn't be considered way more egregious if someone did it in a car than a bike?

I think it's possible you have a flawed perception because everyone accepts that it's absolutely not ok with cars, while tons of people argue that the same things are ok for bikes, then there is significantly more people complaining about bikes because most people that run red lights don't go around talking about how they know better than the law.
Can I run jasmine on testling?
The most important thing to Not take for granted during college
My thoughts exactly. $1-$20 a month might not be much, but if I sign-up to something and it takes me half a day of jumping through hoops such as making phone calls then it ends up costing me a lot more than that, not just based on time (and how much I think my time is worth), but also in raising my stress/frustrating levels.

Let me know and can click 'cancel' anytime, no strings, no hassle and you'll probably get me on impulse purchase. Don't : Good luck getting my money.
The Lisp Interpreter
IME what you said is true, but only once you're talking to the manager of the manager of the person you originally waited on hold 25 minutes to talk to. And this is your second call because the first one got dropped randomly after 20 minutes on hold.
A New Luxury Real Estate Website Design for Glenwood NYC
Curiously while this news is bad for Netflix it is really really bad for someone else: cable & satellite TV providers. Customers now expect to be able to watch whatever the heck they want for about $10 a month.

While I don't fit in that category, I do expect to watch whatever the heck I want. I no longer have any tolerance for television commercials or waiting until next week for a new tv episode (might as well wait until its over and watch the whole season.)
Quizipedia - A Quiz Site For Wikipedia
How To Succeed In Small Business
The point was that we already have solved the problem of "where do we spend our time given that all options have costs"
In that case, I think 3% is low.. 12-15 hours a day including weekends are founders' hours.

Unfortunately, I think you've lost most of your leverage. The time to negotiate was before you did all the work.
Ask HN: Istanbul Startups? Where are they?
I'm flying to Istanbul on Saturday and wanted to meet with some local entrepreneurs. Tried to figure out any meetup/wiki/venture capitalist portfolios etc. - but nothing. it seems there are barely any startups!? would greatly appreciate any pointers or suggestions! want to do video interviews like i did with sonar at twentystartups.com - thanks so much guys.
It is crazy to compete with google

But crazy is good when combined with a good entrepreneur and some traction
Love is more than a four letter word .....
It amazes me how someone can actually write such an almost insultingly ignorant US-centric article (the headline alone is hilariously idiotic) on this subject and not for one second pause to think: "wait, what am I doing?".
Cue is a public domain gestural icon system
Between Gates, Zuckerberg, Larry and Sergey, Torvalds, RMS, Knuth, and a few others, there're still plenty of icons left and so I don't forsee your scenario happening anytime soon. I am generally an optimist, and think the number of icons to come is far greater than those who have come and gone.
Here's a recent interview with him -- an excellent way to understand his perspective on the future of programming languages:

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/mccarthy-elephant-2000
Amazon introduces new Kindle eBook format and makes a major misstep
Thanks. I totally get what you're saying re: tone too. Thx.
Colrd.com
John McCarthy: The Robot and the Baby
Yeah, that's what I said. People take stuff for granted sometimes.
This is what happens when your app gets featured in the iTunes App Store
PG: "It seems to me that there have been two really clean, consistent models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model. These two seem points of high ground, with swampy lowlands between them."

We lost founders of both in the last couple weeks. Ritchie for C, McCarthy for Lisp.

What's cool about the paper Paul is talking about here: if you start with car, cdr, cons, quote, cond, atom, eq, and a notation for functions expressed as lists, you can write an "eval" function reimplementing the language. The rest can be built on top of it.

Graham calls this an "axiomatization of computation". The notion of a Turing machine was already well known before McCarthy's paper, and is its own fundamental description of computation. Then came this high-level language which constitues a new one. It isn't "THE axiomatization of computation", just "AN axiomatization of computation".

PG continues the story in a later essay, "Revenge of the Nerds":

"What happened next was that, some time in late 1958, Steve Russell, one of McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition of eval and realized that if he translated it into machine language, the result would be a Lisp interpreter."

"This was a big surprise at the time. Here is what McCarthy said about it later in an interview:"

"'Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval..., and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into [IBM] 704 machine code, fixing bugs, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today....'"

"Suddenly, in a matter of weeks I think, McCarthy found his theoretical exercise transformed into an actual programming language-- and a more powerful one than he had intended."

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

Pretty cool story :)
Wow, they are going through some serious gyrations to figure out the rates. You're right, that is some serious chaos. If I get their figures right (kinda hard), it seems like the number of jobs available is greater now than in 1900, but that might take a while more to verify.

nice find.
I apologize if I mischaracterized your company's hiring process -- there was no disparagement intended. On the contrary I believe it is intriguing, and given your company's excellent reputation it appears to work well.

It also appears that we're definitely at a communications impasse. By "project work" I was referring to steps 3, 4 and 5 from the career page you referenced:

3. Web app challenge

4. Custom protocol challenge

5. Write a fuzzer (including automated testing)

I'm open to any other descriptor for those steps that you care to use. I most sincerely apologize if "project" implies too heavy a meaning.

And by length of time I was referring to the answer to question #1 directly below those steps

"This looks complicated. How long does it take?

Not that long! We work hard to minimize the amount of time we demand from candidates. We'll be 80% of the way through before you're ever asked to come on-site. We can usually wrap things up inside a few weeks. "

I personally think it sounds like your process is designed to optimize around keeping the technical screening as short as possible while still maximizing the information you retrieve -- which I think is great. It's certainly a much better use of everybody's time than say, Google's multiple all-day committee interview/quiz show extravaganzas are. If I misunderstood the FAQ and the process does not, in fact, take a few weeks, I apologize.

I'm not sure if it's you or I that's going out of our way to be obtuse regarding best hiring practices, but I apologize if I brought any offense or disparagement to you or your company. It wasn't intended.
I'm left wondering whether this increase was due to (a) being memorable/different, (2) having personality and "fun", or (c) drawing the user in with motion association.
Great news guys! I'm going to make sure my team finds out about Testling.
Thank you for the feedback! Much appreciated, I'll work on expanding that in the page and show some demos.
The US government doesn't take kindly on organisations threatening its monopoly on causing deaths of informers and collaborators.
Even if we completely accept what you are saying, I think there are a couple reasons why that doesn't change anything.

We don't allow people to risk their own lives. We force people by law to wear motorcycle helmets and seatbelts (ignoring a very few number of states). That doesn't at all improve the chances for other people to survive. You aren't considering the fact that a bicyclist causes injuries to people who aren't them. There are plenty of scenarios for this, cars swerving into incoming traffic, into a utility pole into pedestrians to avoid a cyclist. Way more people die from swerving to avoid animals than from hitting animals; even hitting a deer isn't likely to kill you in a modern automobile, but swerving into a tree to avoid one will.
One of the most intriguing parts of this endeavor is utilizing GitHub's issue tracker - https://github.com/jquery/standards/issues - to openly discuss and debate topics that the standards group should be lobbying.
The best potential outcome of this would be accelerating potential copyright/IP reform. Netflix is destined to die unless they can find a way to diversify; as you said, the rights holders want to cut out the middle man. The overhead requisite in old-world rental chains like Blockbuster is sufficiently prohibitive that the media companies did not have an interest in supplanting that market, but now that Netflix has proven the viability of online delivery, apparently media companies don't think it prohibitive to set up some servers and stream reruns.

Netflix perhaps should consider transitioning from a consumer-facing service to a white-label technology provider, developing things like the recommendation engine, rental and streaming platform, etc. and licensing to media companies as the basis for their several services. Unfortunately, I think the unified collection in services like Netflix is going to go away as media companies' greed drives them to try to take their own slice of the pie, probably resulting in fewer subscribers all the way around and potentially a resurgence of brick-and-mortar video rental, where, it appears, media companies still are not interested.

All that said, $300 was grossly overpriced for a company whose entire existence depends on the benevolence of a handful of major media producers.
Let me see your Lisp implementation. Here's mine.
I know what he mean, but that's not what he said.
And it is one of the primary reasons why bugs exists, you mean something, but program something else.
I thought of that, and pretty thoroughly ruled it out both by testing on my super-spiffy badass link (100mbps synchronous over microwave ala webpass.com) and my girlfriend's spiffy 8mbps adsl2+ link through Sonic, neither of whom have a reputation packet-mangling like comcast.

Being a network-geek, and having been really bored one weekend, I took my macbook pro, and my girlfriend's macbook air (both of which have this problem) to a cage at equinix that I'd built out for a customer a few years ago. That network is equipped with a pair of cisco 6509's with sup2-msfc2s (old gear, but perfectly adequate for the task at hand). Each router has 3x 1gb uplinks to different providers (internap, time warner, and level3) running BGP. All of three ISP's peer directly with Netflix's AS. The problems persisted whether I was behind my routing, or statically routing by grabbing an IP on the /29 stub network each provider gives me to establish the bgp connection).

I tested both from behind my routing, and for fun, from my testing subnets (the stub networks) which statically route through their respective uplinks. Plenty of bandwidth, no mid-level ISP to insert QoS wankery. Same problems.

As for owning the movie, did that even come up in my previous comment? If so, then forgive me, it's not something I care about. In the rare instance (3-4x per month) where I want to watch a movie, I just want it to work. I don't want it to pause every few minutes to see a "buffering" screen. That's three steps backwards.

The commonality between both laptops is that they run os x( one on snow leopard, one on lion). I suspect silverlight is the real culprit, but I don't care. The solution would be to allow customers to buffer large chunks of the movie (20-30%) or download the whole movie before playing. Instead Netflix (probably due to being hamstrung by their agreements with content providers) tries to be too clever with variable bit-rate encoding and ruins the viewing experience. (even one pause is unacceptable in my book, let alone the 5-10 I often had per movie).

Whenever I discuss this with others, some people have similar quality problems, some people claim it works perfectly making me wonder if it's platform specific. Out of curiosity, are you running Mac, Windows, or Linux?

Also, the silverlight client has ridiculously bad volume control, I never quite understood why that is.
> Life is too short to get your blood pressure up about this sort of stuff.

Likewise next time you see a car cut in front of your bike, just let it roll and don't let the rage get to you.
If any of those people die before October ends I'm blaming you directly.
Right, I completely agree with you, sorry if I didn't make that clear. That's why I pointed out London and Paris - they are making efforts to be more cycle friendly and it shows.
It seemed appropriate to post this today. Did this while learning lisp about two years ago. Nothing special, a pretty straight forward implementation of the original LISP paper written while reading the paper, basically.
It's difficult to describe the feeling when it clicks and the eval function comes together. All of the complexity of writing a language and an interpreter, reduced to what is basically one function that fits in a page. That is mind blowing.

Edit: I realised this works as a homage to Dennis Richie as well, as it's written in C. I did use glib for some support functions, other than that it's ANSI C.

R.I.P.
Thanks, I didn't know about [] as an alias for glob(). Also, while you do need the .each in the [] version you don't need it in the glob() version.
I went to the library.
Companies will find ways to delay you as long possible: http://i.imgur.com/G0qlu.jpg
"less than a morning Starbucks trip"

I wouldn't think that a comparison like that would work.

For one thing there are
many people who feel they are pissing away
money on Starbucks, or feel
some guilt (I myself spend about $4.00 per
day and sometimes twice that.
That's at least $1500 per year. I don't want
to be reminded of that, especially when business
is off.)

(So you are making a comparison to a potential
sore spot. You want a positive association. Comparing
to Starbucks but without mentioning price might
be an example but that wouldn't make sense
for your product, right?)

Now, to sell it's product, Starbucks (or any premium
brand) doesn't make comparisons to what other things
costs. They make you feel special in some way
by the product or by the experience or create
some value that justifies the price.

Making comparisons is good though if
you are saving people money.

Have you tried raising the price and offering an unconditional
money back guarantee?

"Cancel at any time and owe nothing".

That seems to work with many things I've seen that cause
people to be fence sitters as long as the price is high enough.

Seo book does that (p1 for seo and search engine optimization)

http://www.seobook.com/
This is interesting. jQuery started as a way to smooth over the variations delivered by different browser implementations. So by it's nature it's goal is delivering a better experience for developers using JS.

The tension i see is that browser implementations by their very nature are a deviation and departure from the standard. jQuery is a repair process on someone else's broken shit. So, jQuery has lots of anti-patterns for how things shouldn't be done, and some of the workarounds that are actively in deployment.

It'll be interesting to see whether this injects a voice for sanity and practicality into the discussion process, or whether this will just make conversations about standards more vociferous.
> pedestrians have more of an ability to take evasive action

Except when they don't, due to mobility problems or having pets with them or other reasons. Expecting anyone to jump out of your way when you come barreling down the sidewalk is going to hurt someone.
I wish they had went with M-expressions, I'd be able to make Obj-C and Lips jokes at the same time!
My first thought about a jQuery standards team was that they would rate plugins on "adheres to jQuery interface standard". Too many times I grab some contributor's plugin for adding behavior to primitives, only to find out that they taint the namespace unnecessarily or depart from jQuery's query-and-return model and require invasive workarounds to conform. jQuery is really flexible; many "plugins" are not.
It's gotten better, but I used to call up my bank and ask for a new debit card once or twice per year rather than having to deal with the hell of canceling various services.

It was fun to that the same companies who made cancel-ling impossible would call me up to tell me that billing had failed.
http://github.com/fogus/lithp