skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not in sf or nyc.

a low end (not dumpy, but definitely not high end with a doorman) 2 bed apartment is going to run you $650k in the decent bits of sf and more in nyc.

In sf, you end up paying approx $1100 per month per million dollars of value in property taxes. So $715 in taxes, $300 or so in insurance, a $2500 mortgage, and you can easily be spending $3500-$4k/mo (after taxes) on housing. Using the rough rule of thumb that your salary should be 40 times your monthly housing payment, that's $160K already.

It isn't hard if you're an adult, with a family, or housing obligations, or kids, etc. If you wish to restrict the universe of ceos to relatively recent college grads with no life obligations who are content to pay $1500 to share a crappy apartment, then maybe Thiel is being reasonable.
It's not a problem with javascript so much as a problem with the issue of knowing what code is actually running in your browser.
Yeah, I've used Ubuntu myself for a while. I'm aware of Wine's problems, I meant that for smaller applications it usually works.
I stopped reading when I got to that term, thinking "what's a materialis... oh, right, it's a REAL scientist". Other than that, a fascinating article, I might finish reading it now.
Ehhh, $150k is a rather broad generalization.

I'd say that a startup CEO shouldn't make more than mid/senior level engineers. This allows food to be put on the table and some decent quality of life, while not sucking cash away at the expense of growth.

At the same time, if you're capable of not taking a salary at all, I think it is wise.
Count me in. My initial focus is going to be on the RTP area, and trying to get a meatspace meetup going, that caters to folks of this mindset. But if a new hub for cypherpunk (and related) thought emerged online, I'd definitely join in.
>"Entrepreneurship is simply not enough, when all you have is 18k to work with spread among every single cost the company will have, until it's profitable enough to pay for coders: who are very expensive."

That's the point I got; it's pretty hard to fund a tech start up with a non-technical partner when there isn't a whole of money. Nor can a non-coder do it alone, because he would have to pay programmers. And I agree.

Edit: for civility's sake. Glad the internet allows take backs!
Iran is under an international embargo on military supplies, thought. The GP might be overstating the case or trolling, but I suppose getting the materials to build a replica, communication gear and fuel will be difficult for the iranians. Specially when some western country with the biggest military-industrial complex of the world is angry at you because you broke one of their toys.
Is it inherently dishonorable to talk about values that you aspire to, but simultaneously to acknowledge pragmatically (to yourself at least) that it is not possible to successfully match those values with actions in the environment you find yourself in, due to the mendacity and ruthlessness of others?
See Akka: http://akka.io/
Its also a form of laziness when someone (whether a coder or non-coder) presupposes that some original software is the essential element of their business idea. Barry Silbert had that realization in founding SecondMarket (its in a talk of his on youtube). He was wasting a lot of time trying to get others to build him some extravagant website when somebody told him to just forget about the website, open up a spreadsheet and start making phone calls. So that's what he did and SecondMarket was born.

Its probably similar to the way businesses sometimes expect new software to be a magic bullet that will fix broken business practices.
Erlang is indeed impressive. But there is a big learning curve (at least for me!) and a whole new tool-set to support. It would be great if a Ruby/ZeroMQ based framework modelled on Erlang became widely adopted.
Not only is it hard to do right, it seems like its often even hard to take crypto that's done right and use it right.
Exactly.

Take it all away and you might have a website, but you don't have a product, and you certainly don't have a business.

P.S.

Real Seth Godin?
I can speak for how popular he was during the Soviet Union. As a pre-teen male, you were less than human unless you've read the Nemo/Grant/Island trilogy.
Also, desktop apps don't involve wearing a pager ;)
I don't know what you have in mind for "fixing" version control, but I'm actually working on something like that with a friend.

The basic idea is to diff and merge ASTs rather than long strings. We have some more specific ideas about specific features and advantages, but since we have almost no code yet I won't get into them. We should (since this is actually for school, we have to) have a working prototype several weeks from now, so I'll talk more about it then.

We're not really fixing "version control" per se; rather, we're building a tool that you could use in tandem with existing systems like Git. So we'll help with diffs, interactive merges (maybe even automatic conflict resolutions) and some other stuff but let the actual storage and versioning stay with Git (or any other VCS).

I can't make any promises, but if we get something interesting working I'll be sure to post it here. We actually tried to do something like this for a hackathon once, and it sort of worked, but was really a big hack throughout. Hopefully we'll get it right this time.
Logos - Hair Care or Digital Audio?
You can do that, but as far as I know Erlang (not far, mind you) it takes care of a ton of details for you. For instance to send a message to another actor, whether they are on you machine or a remote machine you just need a PID (process identifier, an Erlang id concept similar to, but not the same as an OS level PID). In C++ you would either need to deal with local/remote differences in message transport (ignoring the non-trivial nature of serializing arbitrary types in C++) or create an abstraction that would do so on your behalf. Second, in Erlang all actors have their own heaps, so their local data is spatially close in memory by definition making actors NUMA/cache friendly (assuming the runtime is "doing it right") heap allocated data passed between actors in C++ wouldn't have that attribute by default (again, you could make it so with some effort, but it certainly isn't free). Third actors in Erlang don't use full OS level threads, so the overhead of spawning say 10k of them is not the overhead of spawning 10k C++ threads (also ignoring that C++ really only acknowledged the existence of threads in C++11). These are a few issues/benefits, but as I said you could do all of this in any language mostly, but in Erlang a lot of the gross/tricky details are already handled for you.
The University of Michigan has a strong startup mentality which gets stronger and stronger by the day. Michigan has had a Center for Entrepreneurship for I believe roughly 8 years now. They've just partnered with the business school to start a Masters in Entrepreneurship in addition to the certificate program they currently have. They also have many other services such as a mentor network for people working on or looking to start a startup as well as TechArb which provide student startups with office space. And all these services are of course free as a student. I'd definitive encourage you to check them out.
It should be noted that the Pam Reynold case, the portions for which she had the out of body experience (OBE), she was technically not clinically dead. Additionally, following entering the light we have no way of knowing what time-frame this occurred in; how do we know this occurred when she was recorded as having no brain activity.

I find myself flopping between the two camps in a Devil's advocate manner - the evidence really isn't strong on either side. There seems to be many questions raised by NDE's, but seeing as we don't even have a firm grasp on what consciousness is, or where it comes from, to suddenly say "NDE's prove an afterlife, we can maintain consciousness when we're dead" is a very tenuous claim.

Until we can say "This is consciousness, this is where it comes from, this is what we believe to be the main contributors" to make a leap of this magnitude concerning a topic we know little about is simply irresponsible.
On a related note, I have heard of quite a few game companies that are using Go for their server side code.
You do realize that with current US interest rates the interest on a 21 day hold would amount to even less than $150[1] per $1mil held - and thats assuming that they could even get Fed Reserve lending rates, which you're not going to be getting from your bank no matter how much money you have with them [2].

Given that that amounts to less than $2600/yr - with that massive assumption that PayPal can even get that rate of interest, do you think that they're really doing it for what amounts to a rounding error for a company that size, or is it, maybe, just about possible that their operational risk might run close to that number as well?

[1] $1mil * 1.0025^(21/360) = 145.6 - assuming A/360, $143.6 with A/365

[2] Current US interest rate is 0.25% - but that's the rate at which banks can borrow from the Fed, not the rate that you'll get from your bank.
HN 2.0 2.0
The short answer is "no, we can't" which every time someone proposes a new scheme seems to infuriate people (as though our inability to actually do it is a value judgement on whether or not it's a good idea).
The PHP Hammer
I see the issue as being that secure tools, such as GnuPGP, are still way too complicated and confusing for the average activist to use, thus people don't bother and use low-tech solutions to communicate for day-to-day protesting. If someone is organising something big and scary, they'd learn to use PGP and use it.
Ding! Ding! Ding! I think we have a winner. It's a self reinforcing effect too. The less people that speak out the less people that speak out because nobody else is.
Being the TDD junkie that I am... Isn't the simplest solution to this problem to write the test first? :-)
On could also see it exactly the other way round: Java's strong typing makes it possible for an IDE to do amazing things, which help you cope with horrible codebases, which in turn makes code viable that would be completely unmanageable in other languages.

As for "Java is essentially designed to be impossible to code without an IDE.", I'd say that's a pretty ridiculous statement given the state of art of IDEs at the time Java was designed and became widely used. They did little more than integrate editor, compiler and debugger.
While I understand remote workers participate less in building the corporate culture, there is no reason you can't have talented developers work for you and supplement your team if you expand your hiring scope to include freelancers or remote workers.
For another pop quiz, figure out by using only the name and the logo (extra information!) whether these companies are in the hair care business or the digital audio business: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/logos.html (Submitted it http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876253 )

It really isn't that important.
A Brief History of Votizen by Jason Putorti
Why Phil Schiller Quit Instagram
Rob Pike and the rest of the (ex)Bell Labs/Unix gang have been on both sides of this for over 20 years: both with Squeak/Alef/Limbo, then switching to using C with libthread (http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/2/thread not to be confused with pthreads, for details see: http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/ ), but in the end having language support for concurrency is something that is really worth it, and one of the reasons the ended up building Go.
The CEO's salary should be the amount that maximizes the startup's chances of succeeding.

For a young/single or independently wealthy founder that's as close to zero as possible.

For a founder with family (like me) that's the lowest amount that puts all concern about supporting his/her children out of mind, so the CEO can focus. That number can really range.
Yes, also yes to the exaggeration bit, but intelligence is just, well, intelligence. A complex "brain" can be about emotional depth, about being able to communicate that emotional complexity, it can be about processing senses in amazing ways or many other functions we may not even think of. That is just the complexity of a certain nervous system though, not intelligence per se, for us what matters is indeed problem solving capabilities which lead to technology.
I assume "beta access" means you'll be providing some feedback as well, which can't apply to the lowest donation level. And I can't believe there wouldn't be screenshots and videos as the IDE develops.
I think what's changed is that the discussions during the heyday were around the technology, which at the time was the limiting factor. The technology isn't really the issue anymore (with some specific exceptions).

The problem with crypto-currency isn't the "crypto", it's the "currency". I think that same phenomena is the culprit for most "cyperpunk-related" discussions.

10 years ago I'd have said that I was really hoping for the "Star Trek" future, but that if I was forced to bet, I'd bet on a "BladeRunner" future being way more likely.

Now I'm old, and I think if I was forced to bet, "Brazil" is a more likely model (the movie, not the country).

But I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing the value of a healthy "cypherpunk" community. I think you can look at a lot of things that came out of the original community and see value there.
Follow your Software Libraries and get notified about new versions.
If you think that most HN readers contribute to open source regularly then yes. I have a feeling though that many don't, despite appearances. Really I'd like that blog post to be a gateway for devs to get involved. I'm from the .NET community where there's way too little contribution. If you give to open source projects, good for you! Now go and get your friends involved too.
I see the issue as being that secure tools, such as GnuPGP, are still way too complicated and confusing for the average activist to use

Yes, I think that is very true. That's why I think two of the goals of a modern cypherpunk movement should be to: A. educate people on how to use encryption and related tools, and B. work on making tools that are simpler to use / easier to understand in the first place.
Agreed - we need to fight against the (quite human) desire to believe regardless of evidence.

There's enough questions posed at this point that we cannot draw conclusions, so I guess we have to be patient and piece it together over time.
Now I'm old, and I think if I was forced to bet, "Brazil" is a more likely model (the movie, not the country).

I'm afraid you may be right. But I still hold out some hope that we can do better than that.
I don't think that matters, in the post JOBS act world (in the US)
You would think that if there were something real here more evidence of "verifiable" NDE experiences would have become available. Instead articles like this are still rehashing cases from 10 or 15 years ago.
> There are ways to get changes made in Big Co.

Very true. I have this book in my head that might one day get written. Title would be something like "Intreprenauring: Innovating within Large Stupid Organizations" with a focus on practical "hacks" for getting stuff done. Probably all been said by Dilbert already though.
Great positive response from the OP -- I saw the critique on the idea at the start of today and already he has made a reply that gracefully deflects most of the criticisms raised about the idea.

Most of us are probably aware by now that some of the features that the OP is offering has already been done. It was pointed out that Eclipse supported docs everywhere, for example. I agree that these are _principles_ that have a much higher purpose than promising some neat features: they will guide and define the development of this product.

I, almost many others, find what the OP is doing very intriguing and I am eagerly watching how Light Table will develop into a product that perhaps we can use one day.
In peer-review, the original authors are redacted, so the peer-review committee's bias is reduced (not eliminated, of course).

When a scientist is funded by the petrol industry, but has a long history of showing sound scientific results, I'd give him my full attention. Perhaps my reading of his results would be biased negatively if I would know his research is funded by a certain industry.

When that doctor publishes an article on his new drugs, I question where it is published, whether there have been similar results by other researchers, whether similar approaches have seen widespread application, whether the author can connect the results logically with other research, whether there has been a good peer review and whether I can understand his results. These metrics give me confidence. The funding of the researcher might interest me, but another researcher with a perfect clean sheet might get his funding in a more black-market way. They say you should follow the money, but generally it is difficult, if not impossible, to find the trail.

This means I question almost everything I read and unfortunately have little certainties. Then again "Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself." -- Wittgenstein
Love the idea but I think a big way to get a ton more backers will be to set better levels for additional languages.

If you think about it $100,000 for python is fairly steep. Not unreasonable, but take me for example. I develop primarily in ruby. If you add a ruby tier, I will back the project. But I think you should make add language tiers and make them a bit easier to reach.

If you do the foundation properly, the difference between adding Python and Ruby should be small. Perhaps if you set Python at $250k/275k and then make ruby and other languages an extra ~$25k you will gain the support of a HUGE ruby audience and open up other big audiences.

Here's a +1 to ruby, and to doing it at much less than $100k.
Printing details of successful tests seems like a good way of hiding details of any failing tests :-\
>> Most people with kids and mortgages get by on less than 150k.

> Not in sf or nyc.

It's still trivially true that most people in SF and NYC, including married adults with families, get by on way less than $150k. Even Upper-East-Side Manhattan, one of the wealthiest zip codes in the U.S., has average incomes "only" in the high 5 figures. Maybe there is a small section of Nob Hill where $150k incomes are normal, but even in most nice parts of SF that's not a typical family's income.

Part of the reason is that in areas where housing is the major cost, the 40x-your-housing-cost rule of thumb is too conservative, and would lead to a conclusion that almost nobody can actually live in the city, whereas clearly many people do. And anyway I believe the usual mortgage-company rules of thumb are 30% of your gross income on the mortgage payment itself, but up to 40% on mortgage+insurance+etc. So that'd lead to $120k in your hypothetical.
Yes, that's part of the reason for this blog post, and why I posted it here to HN. Sometimes you need somebody to stir the pot a little and try to stimulate the conversation.
Under my opinion, what is stupid is people who buys a new smartphone each year because the older one seems no longer useful with the more megapixels and megahertzs of the new one.
I didn't see grandparent post as an ad hominem attack on me. Never would I deny that these companies are huge and that people can have widely differing experiences of them.

If you get into MSR, Microsoft is probably a great place to be. Working on the F# team? Hell yeah. Google has great projects as well. If someone ended up on one of Google's best projects and his Google account wasn't quite opposite to what I've described, I'd be surprised. You experience a radically different $BIG_COMPANY if you end up on the best projects or have someone powerful looking out for you.

For the record, the people I worked with in-person were mostly great. There were some unethical managers I encountered, and it seemed that the quality of people was lower in the managerial part of the organization, but I'd never hold that against the rank-and-file Googlers. I have nothing but good things to say about the vast majority of people I encountered at Google. The problem wasn't the rank-and-file engineers. It was a failure of leadership and a staunch resistance against doing the right thing.

Stories like the OP give us a sense of the average-case scenario-- what people who haven't established themselves yet will get. Big companies can be great places to work if you're an established researcher who has 15 published papers. If you're in that "good, working to become great" category that I think describes most of us, then your odds are best with something else.
Have you talked to any of your professors about research? (I'm assuming you're still an undergrad.)
It's likely more the method of energy generation for powering computers that is potentially (probably) contributing to pollution, which would be affecting global warming than the actual heat accounted for by CPUs..
Don't forget about the time sitting on the tarmac.
Disagree: the reasons why the SR-71 was retired, and the U-2 is scheduled for retirement, are not technical but political and fiscal.
I think the OP is instead refering to the standard disclaimer to arrive 1-2 hours before your flight to get through baggage check, security, and sitting at the gate.
yeah

you'd think they'd want the CEO to be able to 100% focus on their startup

If for example the CEO's wife lost her job...$150K is suddenly not that much for a family. Do you really want your CEO to do consulting on the side to pay the bills instead of focusing on the startup?
Can You Be Your Own Producer?
I highly, highly, highly doubt a CEO with 9 children who needs more than $150K in salary because s/he doesn't have any sufficient safety net will be taken seriously by any VC.
A bit of perspective:

Our technological civilization in the sense of being capable of wireless electromagnetic signaling exists only around 120 years -- it started only ten years before my granddad was born. 120 years is nothing compared to the existence of life on Earth -- at least 3 billion years: one part of 25 millions.

Only around seventy years the humanity also produces nuclear bombs. Now at this moment there are around 5000 actively deployed nuclear warheads in the world, waiting for a press of some button to fly to their targets, every one more orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_wea...

Now the oil reserves, if we continue only to use them without any growth (which is not what politicians and the electorate are used to expect) will last only for next 64 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves

How many years are left to the humanity to enjoy the possibilities of the electromagnetic communication?

We're sitting here discussing most of the time the solutions to the following big problems of humanity:

https://plus.google.com/117114202722218150209/posts/KhMRNmgG...

(the companies) "make these apparati that draw a box on somebody's computer screen. That person then types words into that box on their screen. Then, the Internet Startup uses some computer codes to copy those words onto somebody else's computer screen, so that other person can then read them."
Thats because there is a hell of a lot of coding in mech eng degree now. I actually did a few programming courses in my comp sci degree as an elective that were titled mech302 mech326 and didnt have the equivalent in the comp-sci department (which was disturbing actually).

I think reason being is that before, mechanical engineering was just purely, mechanical engineering, where as now the mechanical engineering degree (in my old uni anyway) was combined with mechatronic, which was robotics, and alot of low level process control type courses that for obvious reasons required alot of programming ... They basically fell under the same department