skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good counterexample would be Lotus, and possibly Flickr. I'm not claiming PayPal would have been more successful otherwise. I don't know. Many strategies can be successful. Levchin is the one teaching kids that everyone else is "completely wrong", in the face of proof to the contrary.

And there are problems with Levchin's strategy. In the next breath he lamented that it narrowed the company's hiring pool by 50%. That should give anyone pause. His strategy had a direct, measurable cost that could turn into a strategic disadvantage.

There are also serious effects down the road, as today's engineers become tomorrow's investors. If only Brand X people get funded, and hire Brand X people, who turn around and become investors themselves, isn't that a serious problem? You can't adjust your "priors" about other kinds of people if they never get a chance in the first place. Maybe Brand X is optimal, but you don't know, and claiming to know is arrogance.

Kapor has a good essay on this: http://mkapor.posterous.com/beyond-arrington-and-cnn-lets-lo...
Why did Google shutdown Social Graph API
I don't think Google is that attractive anymore for a startup-minded person.
True. But just because I am capable of using HTML doesn't preclude me from being a Markdown user too. A different kind of user, but a user nonetheless.
So, Google Tap is real and it's on iOS, not Android.
Google Shuts Down Patent Search Homepage, Picasa for Linux & More
Pinterests hype bubble has burst
Sorry, I've tried. I found nothing searching for Zune Marketplace. Then I searched around and found this page - http://social.zune.net/podcasts/ but it says "Sorry, the requested page is not available in your region." I clicked 'Sign in' and tried to create an account but it's just redirecting me in an endless loop. Feel free to submit the RSS through your own account if that's possible.
LT using an Air surprises me because of the lack of screen real estate. I dislike coding at 1280x800 (but I'm usually using Eclipse these days). Heavily customizing Compiz has made 1680x1050 bearable with Eclipse, but I prefer the 1920x1200 dual monitor setup.

LT would probably say something akin to, "real men don't use IDEs."

I'll go for super portable when they put 1920x1200 into a 12" inch screen. (I won't have issues with reading at that density.)
The Rise of the Killer Drones
Things are only going to get worse. I believe the restriction for employees to sell their stock expires in two weeks. It should be interesting to see what happens to the stock price at that time.
One could get the lat/lon coordinates from the address of each data point and grid the city in any way you want.

One method to define neighborhood extents could be cultural instead of geographic by crowd-sourcing the delineation. If one can ignore the desire to draw a strict boundary at a major street, you'll find certain 'neighborhoods' spilling out of their original blocks. Perhaps adjacent areas with distinct histories start to define themselves by the same architectural historical context. Or a once strong border between ethnic communities might disappear. Gentrification might creep across a river closing the gap.

These could all be fuzzy-mapped by residents.
Roll Me Up
Proof-of-concept Android Trojan uses motion sensor to determine tapped keys
Or cleaning. On the rare occasion when I clean the house, I find a podcast lets me drift right off.
I do research for the heck of it and if other people think that what I'm doing is useless, I'm ok with that.
That's the mathematician way. The exploration is the end, not the mean.

I'm not trying to convince anyone that my "project" is useful because that's not my project anymore. Anyone can look at it, dissect it, propose new feature, etc...
Now that the thrill of the exploration is almost over, I'm losing interest... but I'll keep an eye on my repository on bitbucket.

By the way, if someone could provide better examples, documentation, etc... I'd be grateful.
Let's just say I'm not much into the "convincing thing". If you need convincing, don't look at me.
I gave you an object. Now it's your job to figure out what to do with it (or just toss it away) ;)
That's because most corporations seem to define experience incorrectly. Experience is not simply time. Instead, I prefer Hunt's definition of experience: "By experience, I mean specifically that performing this skill results in a change of thinking. As a counterexample, consider the case of the developer who claims ten years of experience, but in reality it was one year of experience repeated nine times. That doesn’t count as experience."

Unfortunately, the reality is that most companies equate experience with years; just look at the typical job postings as an example of this mentality.
Agree especially on the drawing. I've been working on improving my drawing/design skills and find it works extremely well to listen to podcasts and sketch at the same time.
I wonder if sometime in the future, we will have exhausted Earth's fuel and metal resources so badly that we are no longer capable of building the tools necessary to make our way into space, including projects like this one.
None of those dependencies are unique to the two vendors. With large amounts of data, most of those apply, even if you're on a fully open stack.
I read the article as being unnecessarily harsh towards picplz to bolster the 'fumble' that was Andreesen Horowitz's 4,000% return on instagram. This article is definitely a non-article and could easily be changed around to say "Andreesen Horowitz has done it again!".
Since there is already two implementations of it in verilog wouldn't it be a relatively simple matter of compiling and loading those unto an FPGA?

Also what is the exchange rate of internet points to HN/reddit karma these days?
That will also help i18n efforts.
> The web has no hierarchy so it doesn't make sense for domain names to have one.

Actually, the "web" does have lots of hierarchy.

For example, Disney has hierarchy that the current scheme makes it inconveient to express. That's why we have disneystore.com, disneycruise.com, etc. instead of com.disney.store, com,disney.cruise, etc.
What Google Images would have looked like in the 80s
Paul Hudak also has a video of a presentation of some of this material at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtmo6Bmfahc
Test I/O performance by timing the writing of 100Mb to disk
You're missing an obvious implication of the article, which paints a stark picture of winners vs. losers. Even when talking about Imeem it described it as being "buried" by MySpace - a word you usually use to describe a loser, not a winning sale.

Journalists, especially those writing for the NY Times, choose their words very carefully and are 100% deliberate in their conclusions, even if only implied through artful diction and innuendo.

This is techcrunch-style gossip writ large and it names names. You think NYT isn't doing this on purpose? We all read it didn't we?
Whoever gets there and establishes themselves first will reap the benefits and set the terms.

Its not a bad thing though. If the Chinese established an operating moon base or started mining an asteroid it might shock the US government into funding more adventurous ideas.
Did Humans Invent Music?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I totally respect your preferences and it sounds like you might not enjoy working at Ridejoy. That's fine - it's certainly not for everyone.

We've found our company morale increasing after implementing group dinners and while we can't directly prove a boost in productivity, we believe there is a link. We thought we'd share what we're learning with HN.

Not sure where you got your "99% of people want" stat but if it's true, then I guess we're looking for that 1%
We actually started with a linear scale, but ended up switching to a log scale. Scaling linearly says, "how much more expensive are the high end homes than the low end (subtraction)?" With the log scale we're saying, "how many more times expensive is the high end than the low end (multiplication)?"

Scaling linearly allows big values to skew the results. Imagine a neighborhood where the high end is $20m and the low end $10m, giving us an absolute difference of $10m. Another neighborhood has a $1m high end and a $500K low end, for an absolute difference of $500K. Scaled linearly, the $10m range in the first neighborhood would appear to be much much bigger than the $500K range of the second.

But if we use a log scale, instead of asking what the absolute difference is, we're asking relatively how much more expensive is the high than the low end. Using our two example neighborhoods, both would result in a 2x difference, and thus both would have the same range of prices.

It's easy to point out where all the most expensive homes are, and scaling linearly does just that. But looking at the relative differences in prices provides a much more useful way of comparing different neighborhoods (or even cities if we look nationwide), because it accounts for the natural variances in prices in different areas.
Building a computer with discrete transistors
> a year or so ago, that was 64GB RAM per database for their Mongo instances. That's definitely more than $1000 a year's worth.

You are mixing data, memory and processing power. In the case Amazon crashes and burns, they need that CPU+Ram+bandwidth etc. near the data.

But to just keep a copy of the data (not available online) they don't need a really beefy server -- just store all the updates from a node, and replay them later at your leisure. 5400rpm will often be fast enough for this purpose (of course, you would need days to recover in this setup ... but that might be ok if past data is not needed online)

Take twitter or foursquare for example: They need everyone's most recent max(4, tweets/checkins in the last day) available online at any given time. But if last years' tweets/checkins are not available online when the system is degraded in case of backup restoration etc -- that may be acceptable.
"not sure I get her beef"

There is a saying in news business "if it bleeds it leads".

The negative angle draws in viewers and readers on certain topics and in certain situations. My guess is that that she decided this angle would get more views and interest.
Unless you're the smartest person in the world. In that case, trying not to be the smartest person in the room is wasted effort. Of course, if you're the smartest person in the world, you already know that.
that's just a fraction of the secrets, but ok
This problem is indeed less severe when the names are defined in a non-local namespace (inside a class, or as globals).

But callback-style often appeals to defining very-local callback code. In fact, it would be anonymous in languages that support it, but it is forced to not only be given a name, but also potentially clutter some namespace (or be written in reverse order).

Consider having every for/while loop, or every "if" require giving a name to the code block[s] within it. It sounds insane. The same doesn't sound insane for library functions, but in my opinion that's really just because everybody's used to this limitation.

When I moved from Python to Haskell, one of the many joys was that I could stick an anonymous code block anywhere so easily.
I'd like to add that all of us at AH are very proud of Dalton and his team, and we are highly excited about the new plan (including all the parts that aren't public yet :-).
Anyway you can add this to Stitcher?
Appreciate your thoughts! We did not set up group dinner at Ridejoy as some kind of mandate which we forced everyone to do - that would be pretty lame.

Instead, this set up has evolved naturally out of our team's preferences. Our point with this post isn't to say this is ONE TRUE WAY to do things, but to share our way of doing things and encourage some dialog around building a startup's culture.
See Berners Lee's regrets:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BCP5023/Sandbox#History)
Spent quite some time working on something like that. (With a rendering backend that can only be described as insanely brilliant. Sadly, that was not my doing ;)

It's a bummer our studio got closed :(
Most valuations are done like that. It is called the comparable method.

Essentially all valuations have 3 components:
.
1) Comparable Method
This is the method you are talking about and it is ALWAYS used. In some cases, with companies with revenue and net income analysts will value things like Dividend/Price, or Price/Earnings.

In cases where small changes in the business model can yield huge changes in Earnings for example, analysts may use other metrics to get a more 'accurate' measure of profitability. In cases of internet companies it may be users, or may be 'content share' or some other metric, and they compare it to public companies like google or facebook.

The downside of course is that no one knows for sure what the value of each 'user' is for the new company. But the upside is it gives the analyst another way to think about a tough problem.

2) Discount Method - First the analyst estimates future cash flow over a specified period using assumptions about how the company will perform. He then 'discounts it', divides the future cash flow by a discount rate, and arrives at a value.

The downside of this method is that the assumptions are very hard to come up with.

3) Net asset value method - taking the companies hard assets and valuing them. (I'm not sure if anyone is doing this, but I would guess that the cost of hiring awesome, top rate engineers is probably modeled and incorporated in the a NAV when making talent acquisitions.

Now, with instagram you might be saying, wait, they don't have a metric that gives them a $1B value. That is the entire reason they didn't IPO rather than sell. Because facebook thought that their were synergies in the deal, whether they be future earned cash flows, or a reduction in negative future cash flows.

Zuck may not have done a model, but he very well may have said to himself...

The buyside (stock buyers at mutual funds and hedge funds) all are asking me about competition, and how I'm going to grow this business over the next 3 quarters (what matters), and he says, for 1% of my valuation, I can probably get a 10% higher stock price at exit.

This is also why Yahoo sued Facebook a month ago as well. They figured the lawsuit would cause investors to balk at the IPO which would cause Zuck to settle it quickly for more than Yahoo could get otherwise.

In the long run, valuations are complex, and so is business. Most programmers/hackers etc. look at the Wall Street Journal and think that everyone is crazy and that there is a bubble. There may be a bubble, but everyone isn't crazy.
Can The Phone Be Reinvented?
5th Ave Frogger
This article editorializes "The company’s deflation has thrown something of a pall over tech companies, and could introduce chop into the IPO waters". Groupon is a special case. Much of their current woes is a new set of questions about their accounting. Ie: http://retheauditors.com/2012/04/07/groupon-you-must-have-fa...
What happened to the code?

If you're not doing anything with it, why not open source it?
It was a calculated bet against Instagram and it left Mr. Systrom livid, these people said. Instagram’s founders never discussed strategy with the firm again.

Curious: To what extent can you avoid disclosing information to your investors, once it becomes clear that they are competing against you.

But Mr. Systrom’s experience with Andreessen Horowitz taught him to choose his investors warily.

Why? It seems like A16Z did the most ethical thing, which was support the company that the original founded for this idea. When Instagram pivoted into a competing position, why would they expect A16Z to back them and bury picplz?

By the time Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in a cash-stock deal a week ago, Andreessen Horowitz’s stake in the company had fallen to less than 10 percent.

If A16Z had half the seed round, then that means that the seed investors owned 20%, diluted. If Benchmark own 30% at the sale, that means that the seed angels must have took >30% of the company at the $500K seeding. Is this correct?
WARNING: RANT MODE ON.

So what happens when you need to have a serious talk with someone for screwing up and everyone's in a terrible mood afterwards? Do you expect them to also join you at dinner? Or is their punishment that they have to pretend to be happy for the happiness manager? Or is their punishment that they don't get to join you, banished to a microwave meal at home while everyone else sings and dances and eats grass fed sustainably raised mutton raised in a westward-sloping Polyface-esque agrarian paradise just north of Petaluma, served on a bed of organic microgreens and wilted white kale and drinks low sulfide wine from the Willamette Valley with just a hint of raspberries on the nose and a dry finish with notes of oak and lavender?

Or does the 1% you're looking for also not ever make mistakes, and gets along perfectly all the time, just like a real family?

The thing about these kinds of blog posts is that they are thinly disguised recruiting / marketing efforts and inexperienced people take them as some sort of gospel - nobody ever talks about the time when the team is at each others' throats because someone (or everyone) fucked something critical up and lost $50k and 2 months of work, or petty workplace politics or sexual / drinking / druggie relationships or any of that - which always creep into this sort of hippy dippy communal meals big extended family type stuff and really just adds more trouble than it's really worth.

I've worked exclusively at startups since 1999 and let me tell you, this shit happens. It all happens, all the time. People throw words at each other. People cuss and get into disagreements, people fuck up, people are very serious about very serious things, especially when TONS of money is involved. Like MILLIONS of dollars of owner and investor money.

What this is - is corporate bullshit dressed up as culture, and it's fucking flabbergasting to me that it's making its way into startups!!!
Khan Academy Partners Up With 23andMe To Make Learning About Genetics Fun
That word that you didn't even care to spell right: It does not mean what you think it means.

An ad hominem attack is "an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it." I have not "pointed out a negative characteristic" of yours except my belief that you are wrong. Even more than that: You didn't really have much of a claim to start out with, just an opinion, which I challenged you to support with detailed claims and facts.

When you failed to deliver on that, I backed up my belief with arguments. That's how discussions work. Don't hide behind words when somebody is inviting you to state your case (remember my first reply to was asking you: "Maybe you could back up your claims a bit better?").

By now, however, you have already lost your case, so just accept defeat and try better next time.
Posting A Facebook Photo From The London Olympics Could Land You In Court
I'll have a listen to their show and see if I can pick up a few pointers. Thanks!
Here's some Haskell code I really like, and I think it would be far less nice in Python:

replicateM 10 . forkIO . forever $ do
..

Which is basically the same as:

replicateM 10 (forkIO (forever (do ..)))

replicateM 10 executes its code block argument 10 times. forkIO executes its code block argument in a new thread. forever loops forever.

So this line basically creates a thread pool with 10 threads, all infinitely executing the given code block.

How would you solve this in Python?
Thank you very much for the thorough reply.

I don't suppose you have an image of the linear version?
"fear of stories like this".

As a matter of fact, Fred Wilson on his blog the day after the deal was announced was asked this by a commenter:

"I was looking for a lively discussion of the FB/Instagram deal today"

To which Fred replied:

"i'm not interested in that discussion really. somehow that takes energy from me. i am not inspired."

As you said "obvious missed opportunities are going to sting"

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/04/life-liberty-and-blazing-bro...
As far as I know the only developer on the core team with a kid is Adam Saltsman, and his kid was born in 2011. I think all of the team members are young enough that they would have been teen parents (12-16) if they had kids born in 2003 or 2005 :).
A bit exaggerated. The direction Android has taken really rubs me the wrong way. The hot new phone is obsolete after 3 months and stuck with an old OS unless you root. It's not a trend I can appreciate the way I did when Android first surfaced.
http://livegrep.com/search?q=fuck
Another project forwarded me by a fellow KPS engineer is the DeltaCloud project from the Apache Software Foundation. An API abstracting differences between clouds.

Not using it (yet), but it's on our viewscope.

http://deltacloud.apache.org/
That is not entirely true. ISO itself is funded by the member bodies (the national subgroups so to say), member organizations and selling standards. This gives the concrete figures for 2011 [1] on page 2.

[1] http://www.iso.org/iso/about/iso_in_figures.htm
Thank you for the kind words.

The "vitriol" is mainly things that I read on Twitter inspired by articles like these. I am not going to link to them, but folks can choose to believe me or not.
Eww Living Constitution. Boo this man!
$1 million for a penny
I actually find this article rather unfair to all involved. It is quite clear that the author seems to have it out for AH - after all, a $100m return is freaking AMAZING for $250,000, and Benchmark made a far lower multiple for the amount they invested.

In the end, I'd say the win goes to AH - they made a mistake, but also didn't exactly lose either.
Apple adopts gimmickry — in new iPhone 4S ads
You're not creating the "correct" culture, you're just trading one kind of culture for another. I work to make money. I don't like it when work bleeds into my personal life. When I leave the office at 5 or 6, I am done for the day. That way if I want to spend my free time thinking about things other than work I am free to do so.

I once read a case about Tom Siebel that said that he required that every Siebel office in every city contain the same blue carpet and beige walls. Employees were required to dress formally for work every day. This was at the height of the dot-com "I wear shorts to work and play ping-pong all day" office culture. When people asked him why he was so strict while everybody else was allowed to have fun, he said something like "Employees come to work to make money. They can play on their own time." I read that and thought "this guy is fucking awesome." I think if culture is too lax, work suffers. A lot of people thought Siebel was a dick, but he and a lot of his employees came out very very rich while most of those dot-com's went bankrupt and their relaxed employees ended up looking for work.

That's why when I see people bragging about places like the Googleplex or Zynga's offices with awesome meals and pods to nap in, I think that their priorities are somewhat out of whack. All that said, everybody is different. Some people love their jobs and don't mind intertwining work and play. To each his own.
Since the sentence (taking down MU's business and confiscating all of their property and money) has already been carried out, I'm pretty sure the FBIAA doesn't care.
lots of startups eat together, look into zerocater and how they started their whole business around this concept. even ycombinator has big dinners with multiple startups regularly. it's not uncommon at all and accepted at good practice by lots of companies. i don't understand why you're making this out to be some negative experience.
See how it bolds "domain names", though? Google is now notorious for this; it will search for what it thinks you meant, rather than exactly what you typed. It's silently adding "name" to your query for you.
Live wallpaper made with genetic algorithms