skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is just as cheap to put my R&D in Berlin as Greece (especially somewhere like Athens). It is cheaper to put my R&D in a place like Albania. Hybrid developed/developing is a great model, but you want your dev center to be cheap for opex, have a large number of skilled people available, probably a place where you have a personal connection, and such. University towns in the midwestern USA, Eastern Europe, Israel, India all make sense for people for that.

Greece has high unemployment, undeniably, but also has both high costs and high risk, and a really small technical workforce. That's not great for a startup.

I don't disagree that if I were Greek and in Greece, a startup would be a lot more attractive than remaining unemployed or trying to get a government job, but it's inaccurate and unhelpful to say Greece is objectively a good place to do startups vs. practically anywhere else. One of the keys to doing a startup successfully is to be honest with yourself about unpleasant things.
FWIW, the "Looks crap" part probably is well formed grammar for British English speakers.
Why is your USB so Slow.
If you are making $50k/yr, or even $100k/yr, you cannot invest in startups; professionally-managed startups won't take investments from people who aren't Reg D accredited.

Even if you were accredited, virtually all startups are closely held and selective about who they'll take capital from.

Private company equity vehicles are one of the least attractive asset classes you can hold; they're among the most illiquid and volatile places you can put your money. Startup investing works almost exclusively for people who can (a) afford to spread money around lots of startups and (b) have startup investments be a small part of their portfolio. That's a description that matches very few professional developers.

Your exposure to the upside of startups is going to come from starting or working at startups, not from investing in them yourself.
I think I'd be lying to myself if I thought that his stroke of luck and success with Reddit didn't give him more resources than myself. He's had the good fortune to be given more resources than many people, I think it's great he is saying he wants to use them for good.

Not being an Einstein or a Tesla is no reason to just fold up like a lawn chair and pack yourself away. I'm using my substantially more limited resources to do the best I can, I'm glad someone with a bit more is doing the best he can.
"The first employees of all the startups I know personally have gotten very good deals."

Can you elaborate?
If you're talking about eternal September and the decline of quality you might want to look at forums with heavy handed moderation or a paying userbase. For example the Something Awful forums have a pretty good signal to noise raito.
No, that's not the flaw (although it is true).

It can get 96mpg. It can go 100mph. It _cannot_ do both simultaneously.
The future: Quadcopter UAVs recharging your smartphone with wireless power
It's not a solved problem on the web merchant side.
As someone who used to be a janitor I can tell you exactly why most people don't care about them: 95% of the time they're not employees, they're contractors. Every office I've worked in has contracted out the janitorial work to a business that strictly does office cleaning n days a week.
Cost analysis of copyright screening on YouTube
It's not even a crappy graphic. It's just eyecandy for social news sites and blogs to generate traffic and backlinks.
1. I don't trust "centralized" solutions to anything and an "eugenics institute" dictating what the best traits are seems scary even to me!

2. Yes, amplifying possibly unfair advantages is a nasty side-effect of this, but in a "mostly clean an functioning" capitalist society with not that much corruption, mafia and stuff this could be mitigated (I even goes the US comes close enough to this... by comparison on a global scale).

3. I don't think this will "put us at each other's throats"... poorer people to which the tax is targeted at should feel more motivated to have a better life, like swimming pool and better sports car than to have kids... or we'll need to fix this with more "pro-consumerist propaganda"!

4. And about positive versus negative feedback/motivations... I might have an overly "dark" view of human nature, but I think only negative/pain/punishment will work for those that need to be discouraged in having children (benefits might make the other change their minds and have more children but my intuition tells me it won't work - yes, we need some sort of controlled social engineering experiment to check this assumption, of course).
Sounds great in theory, but that assumes that every engineer is spending time every day monitoring all of the accomplishments by every other engineer just to make sure everything gets valued appropriately. I suppose the answer to that is, "Well, you (or somebody) could tell everybody that you did this wonderful thing," but then you're right back in the position of having to do self-promotion to get recognition for your work.
First Stem Cell-Based Therapy Gets Approved – In Canada
Ketamine is considerably less dangerous than heroin, since it does not inhibit protective reflexes like breathing and coughing.
What is the differnce between vision and mission?
Stroke of luck can be equated to being in the right place at the right time, which is often how people rise up through the social ranks.

Plus the guy built something and developed a user base that can only be described as obsessive. That's no luck, that's good talent. What have you done today?
I'm pretty sure the Wendy's near me that has a few Zagat sticks on it has text that clearly states what category (Fast Food) it was highly rated in. Besides, going into Wendy's I know they are rated differently than a sit down restuarant.
Yup - this system gamifies reciprocal altruism, creates cliques and circular thank-you unicorns, and generally sounds de-motivating by quantifying the exact dollar value of a thank you.
I wouldn't so much say the default is supposed to be low quality so much as the less interesting/technically savvy people don't change the defaults so those are the reddits they read/post to, leading to clutter.
Whitehouse petition to update the PACER system for the modern web
>Could you please provide a link to the report? 50% click rate is insanely high, nobody has that. It would be very interesting to know how Facebook achieved such miraculous performance.

He is not talking about 50% click rate.

That is, he's not talking about 1 ad.

He says that 50% of FB users have clicked on ads at some point in their FB use.

Which might, or might not be true, but is not the same as "50% click rate".
There are lots of reasons they /should/ have more respect. But my whole point was that I don't think they ever /will/. Putting a high touch endeavor like financial dealings on top of a no touch venture like a social network is dumb. Basically, looks like you and I agree.
Two things:

If there's a 50% chance of a positive outcome (which, obviously, is an extraordinarily high chance), aren't you getting a ($100k50%) / ($50kyrs) risk-adjusted payout? If so, you should just take the $100k.

And, this analysis assumes the company doesn't go back to the VC market for capital; when it does (most will), you have to factor in the (strong) risk of dilution. We're also glossing over other risks, like participating preferred stock for investors.

I got a great deal from one startup, watched people get a reasonable ("worked out to the equivalent of years of good-but-not-amazing bonuses") from another, had a positive outcome from one that was still under what I would have gotten from salary, and nothing from 2 more. Equity is a decidedly mixed bag.

If you have the choice (and in this market, developers do), opt for money over equity. If you can mentally partition the "extra" money into "investment" and invest it for a return in something more liquid than startup equity, so much the better.
autoimmune diseases? grains?
Lose your belly fat for summer. Summer beach body
Don't focus on Zuckerberg. If you think Facebook was just luck, pick someone who you think succeeded by skill. Would you invest in their next company at a $20M valuation?
Money and experience alone mean nothing. The ability to learn from that experience is what's important. Based on track records in other areas where they've been slow to learn (privacy) I'd expect they need to fail a minimum of 4-5 more times before they have any prayer of getting it right.
The biggest take-away for me is that we are changing the way we do... pretty much everything.

Two things I noticed:

1. There is a big shift towards convenience and broader participation.

2. An increasing proportion of our activities are conducted through smart phones and tablets instead of going somewhere or using a device specifically designed for a given purpose. Many activities are becoming "just another app" and losing their traditional context.

Finally, there's a cautionary message about US debt. The disturbing chart of US entitlement and interest spending vs. revenue. At the current rate, in 2025, the government will be spending more on entitlements and interest alone (NOT taking into account government spending on defense, education, etc.) than they have revenue.
It seems to me that A/B (or A/B/C/...) testing as described by btilly, and epsilon-greedy multi-armed bandit optimisation as described by Steve Hanov are two points on a continuum. In A/B/... testing, you're exploring 100% of your traffic, and eventually you declare the test "done", and start exploiting 100% of your traffic (sending it to the "best" slice). You have the advantage that during the exploration phase, your assignment of users to test slices is completely random, uncorrelated with anything else. In the epsilon-greedy approach, you're exploring with 10% of your traffic, and exploiting the current best-looking choice with 90% of your traffic. The trouble is that now 90% of your data is coming from one slice, and which slice it's coming from could vary over time. This means, as Ben points out, that your choice of slice could be 90% correlated with anything else that varies over time.

One approach would be to ignore the data from the 90% exploitation; that way, you only get 10% of the data, but its slice assignment is completely random and uncorrelated with anything else that might be happening. The trouble is that now you're running an A/B/... test on only 10% of your traffic, which means that it will converge 10x slower than if you were running it on 100% of your traffic.

However, it seems to me that the extra 90% of data that I've proposed ignoring isn't that useful, because it's only coming from one slice at a time. What you really want is to get more data from the slices you know least about. I suspect there are reinforcement learning algorithms that take into account not just the reward rate for each slice, but the current level of certainty with which the algorithm knows the reward rate, so it can collect more data about the slices it knows the least about, and stop collecting data about the slices for which it already has a fairly accurate reward estimate. The question is, are there such algorithms that can also handle non-stationary reward distributions? And how much tuning and tweaking do they require?
Your asterisks have messed up your text formatting. Use a dagger or a number instead.
> When the patients received ketamine, their depression symptoms significantly improved within 40 minutes, and remained improved over 3 days. Overall, 79% of the patients improved with ketamine, but 0% reported improvement when they received placebo.

So they only checked up on them for three days. Bipolar depression is generally chronically recurring. Sufferers will feel "better" for a short period of time, and then slip back into depressive mind-states.

This would be much more interesting if it was a longer-reaching study.
Accompany those with the classic How To Lie With Statistics.
Unbelievable.

Alexis spends the majority of his resources (read: time, money, presence, influence) doing things that are not for profit. One big one was heavily campaigning online and offline against SOPA in December and January. SOPA not passing was definitely something good for society -- because it could have handed de facto censorship abilities to corporations.

As for Reddit, as a forum for internet activism like fighting SOPA I'd argue that it is bettering society in many ways. Perhaps the majority of Reddit is cat pictures, but some parts of it can be a tremendous force for activism.

"Making the world suck less" is a tongue in cheek way of saying he's not out spending his well earned millions (Reddit wasn't an overnight success; Steve and Alexis put in work to make it work) on blood diamonds and ferraris. If he wants to say that instead of "I'm spending my time on philanthropic causes" why the fuck shouldn't he?
The twelve types of hackers
Designer/developer Ethan Schoonover (Solarized) on The Setup
This is a good question, and the truth is there actually isn't much of a middle ground between a few hundred dollars/month and thousands or tens of thousands.

The reason is purchase process. Any purchase above a certain about usually has to go through the procurement department at a large company, which means that any sales above that amount become very expensive. That's why there's such a big gap in software prices.
1. Almost all startups are 4 year vesting, 1 year cliff, with 1/36th vesting every month after the cliff. INSIST that the founders all be on vesting; walk away if they're not.

2. At the seed stage, issue all your equity to your team. Dilute by issuing more shares. Assuming your founding stake will get diluted to 1/2 to 1/5 of starting number eventually. Each round will probably dilute you 20-40%, iteratively (seed, A, B, [C, D], IPO) -- of course you might exit before that.

3. I'd be reluctant to do 60/25/15 if the industry expert is just going to be passive. There's a good equity calculator at http://foundrs.com/calculator/index.php It came within 2% of how my company did equity. It depends on a lot of factors.

4. Depending on the city, TechStars has a mixed reputation. TechStars Boulder is apparently pretty good. Depends.
I don't mean to be ageist, but I think it's disingenuous to call yourself any kind of guru at 18.
>You're completely ignoring the working memory argument I'm making.

I'm not ignoring it. I said I don't buy it. I generally don't believe that
you need visual compactness to to point of being cryptic to make use of pattern
matching. I'm not saying this is necessarily easy. Neither is choosing good
variable names in programming, especially at high abstraction levels. But
that's no excuse for not doing it.

The other thing is that mathematicians will finally have to accept that
they aren't the only ones who need math. It's not, for the most part,
a "field for experts" (to paraphrase you) which only those who are willing
to become experts at it are allowed to understand. It's a beautiful science
with lots of appliance in almost every other field. But it's inaccessible
as hell in large parts due to mathematicians with your attitude.

I strongly believe that math can be made more accessible and more
"user-friendly" for people who aren't experts at it. It will be hard to do
that without sacrificing its tremendous power and flexibility (which I am
totally against in software, as well). But it must (and will) eventually be
done.

Take note, by the way, that the accessibility problem is less and less
important the more specialized the math you are doing becomes. I don't really
care if some hyper-abstract field of math that a few dozen people in the world
are even able to grasp the basics of is arcane and cryptic. That's something
only experts will care for and if they are fine with their niche field being
overly cryptic, so be it. What I'm concerned about is math in general.

I firmly agree with the position that math should not be taught as an
appliance, because that is missing the point. However, it's downright fatuous
to ignore the fact that math has appliances, and that therefore, a lot of
people will have to learn a subset of it. To excuse bad practices which have
survived by virtue of no one questioning them with nothing but "it's optimized
for edge cases (experts)" is a cop-out. It ignores the problem.

I also find it funny that I already met with such vehement opposition for just
proposing meaningful variable and function names. That was just an example.
There are a lot more problems to be solved. Stuff like "this is trivial" or
"left as an exercise" as a way to avoid writing out cumbersome, but nonetheless
important (for non-experts) parts, the general terseness of mathematical texts,
including the parts in plain English. I could probably find more.

Let me conclude with this: Math as a whole has accessibility problems, just
like a lot of CS and computer stuff. Flat out ignoring them or even asserting
"it must be this way" is incredibly ignorant. And we need dialogue to do this -
not condescending "there is no problem" rebuttals.
Yes and neither does my girlfriend nor my parents. Is that really a common thing? FWIW, I only use my cc every few months.
Of course it is still on the moon ))
It was lost and forgotten in 71, but rediscovered recently:
http://www.space.com/8295-lost-soviet-reflecting-device-redi...
> Now of course that equity is risky. It still might not be a good deal, unless you think you have at least a 1 in 2 chance of success.

Don't startups fail at a rate of 90% or so? All of the sudden that $100k/yeah in equity looks not as great.

Now of course most owners think it won't fail. But then even out of those that are rational, and understand they will probably fail, a large % will still try to convince the first employee that the startup won't fail.
Of course early stage startups aren't judged by business fundamentals.

Your argument is fully general against valuing equity in any early stage business ever at any price. It equally says that the investors are "gambling" and the founders are "gambling", as much as anything about employees.

Yes, everyone who is being paid in equity is taking a risk. It is possible to attempt to assess that risk. The key to being an early employee is bringing an investor mindset to the table: do I think this company is going to be successful or not?
How to cool a datacenter?
Yes, this may have been true 10 years ago when installing everything meant getting the source , setting compile flags for everything to work together and updates were applied manually.

These days I can have Ubuntu , Apache , PHP5 , Mysql and Wordpress all working happily on a VPS in under an hour.

On the other hand there are other considerations like maintenance , security and scaling that it might be nice not to have to worry about.
Take a look at the previous sentence for context:

"I've tithed since the day we sold Reddit, because I believe wealth is a means to an end, and wealth has never made me happy, only comfortable. And I want to stay hungry. I really believe my resources are best used to help projects that make the world suck less."

Yes, luck has had a tremendous impact in my life. Meeting Steve, getting into YC, starting reddit w Steve, breadpig has been going really well ($200K profits donated so far), and hipmunk for that matter has been going swimmingly thus far.

I'd personally love to hear that a 23yr old inventor of post-it/jelly+peanutbutter combo/facial hair remover was using her resources (wealth) to make the world suck less. That'd be awesome. I don't see how that's any less awesome than an NFL 1st round draft pick or a trust fund kid doing the same thing. I'm a lucky person who wants to see more lucky people in the world.
10% might be a good rule of thumb if the old adage that "9/10 startups fail" is somewhat accurate. Is $100M the average exit though? Anyone have that data?
Ask HN: Study a combination of computers and biology?
I want to study a combination of computers and biology? is that possible help ???
Hats off.

Parse is the first of all these backend-as-a-service startups to face and solve the biggest problem in the web context: user authentication and data security.

By offering a full signup service with email verification and user-level control over the database they have eliminated perhaps the most redundant piece of work that just about every web app has had to implement.

Lock-in is of course a concern, but that hasn't prevent some AWS services from taking off big time. Perhaps in the near future one will see an open source project that offers an off-the-shelf backend with a Parse-compatible API, much like what happened to S3 and etc.

Pricing on the other hand is a concern, particularly if your service requires background workers that constantly update the database -- every update is an API request hit, and one can only wonder what they charge beyond their Pro account.

Overall, I think this is a huge step in the right direction. Because it's the 21st century and one shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every time one writes a new web app.
Build a 3d Rubiks Cube with HTML5 and CSS3
Fleeing authorities? He's under house arrest with a monitoring anklet and has to sign in at a police station every day. The authorities know where he is every second.
It's not supposed to do that!
It's supposed to have people with "higher levels of" positive traits like intelligence, self-control, imagination to have more children then those with lower levels (and also to improve the chances that children get raised in families that can afford to offer them good education - so it takes care of the "nurture" part too, not just "nature" - and yes, this means that such a social engineering strategy would be more than just eugenics).

People predisposed to certain disorders usually have less offspring anyway... so nature does a pretty good job at this without help (ever seen a person with a severe mental illness having more than a couple of children, even by accident?)
Yep. Just like in the story. Steve built reddit, I doodled the logo and did the non-tech stuff.
Ehh, those 66% don't have enough money to be worth selling to anyway.
"There was a time when building a cutting edge web app meant wasting hours setting up a Linux server, days installing MySQL and Ruby or PHP, and months slaving away writing backend server code. Web development was nasty, brutish, and long. It sucked. But that was the past. Parse is the future. And it’s here today."

Never ever present your product from talking nagative about something or someone else. The only thing this kind of presentation makes me think is "Gee - didn't they have anything good to say about their product?"
As the article states, his ideas have a history of being successful (though he almost certainly has a hell of a lot of unsuccessful ideas that we haven't heard about). I think that's what "moron" was referring to.
Here is a summary of the article.
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2012/02/cap-12-years-later-...
By the time a NoSQL "database" is ready for prime-time, it will have all the features of a real database.
I heard through some friends that Swedish start-up Klarna is actually using your Facebook profile to evaluate probability that you are a real person. If you pay online using an e-mail address that has lots of friends on Facebook then the overall risk of the transaction is considered lower.
according to local press, yes.
http://bit.ly/KSxULR