skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, transaction fees are a big problem. One possibility is to not pay any fees: currently, there is a social convention that if all outputs are 0.01 BTC or larger, and so if we're not mixing too many addresses together, we can do the transaction for free. But once the intrinsic benefits of mining taper out, one would expect transaction costs to eventually become non-zero.

In this case, the transaction fee will have to be paid out of another wallet, not subtracted from the BTC involved in the transaction. Furthermore, this wallet must also be anonymous (e.g. to get anonymity, you must have some anonymity to begin with). But an important concern is how to pay for the transaction, when the size of Bitcoin you are anonymizing is about the same amount of the transaction cost anyway! One mitigating factor may be that it is really easy to find lots of participants willing to perform this mix, so a few benificient participants (who ostensibly want to be able to mix things) pay the entirety of the transaction fee for large, mini-mixes, and then uses the results of the mini-mix to pay for their bigger mixing.
Well this took a left turn, but I can't resist commenting any time I see a claim that free will is an illusion.

I'm not very enamored with the viewpoint, and especially in this quote the matter-of-factness with which it is presented. I believe it comes out of the hubris that a particular variety of rationalist has about the nature of knowledge. Some people only want truth to be the things which are tractable by science and are in a hurry to reduce the possibilities to materialism and determinism in pursuit of this goal. They trot out all manner of superficial evidence (such as this brain-activity-before-awareness study) that is nothing more than affirming the conclusion in the face of such overarching philosophical questions. When confronted with the possibilities borne of dualism or other philosophies they invoke Occam's razor and denounce such arguments as irrational appeals to the "supernatural".

In my opinion, these people are just bad philosophers. It's no different than a theologian coming in and trying to hamfistedly do science with a preexisting agenda. You can't do good philosophy if you worship at the altar of science—you need to be a bit more comfortable with the unknown and indeed unknowability.

For me personally, the reason I can't dismiss free will is simply because of consciousness itself. The fact that I am aware of my thoughts is to me more valid evidence of free will than all the logical machinations that someone can contrive to support the opposite. Even if the universe is deterministic and free will is an illusion, it doesn't mean we can predict anyone's actions, and if we can't do that then what does it mean to say free will isn't real? Maybe chaos and entropy also don't exist, but if we can't compute them then they are a perfectly secure "illusion".

Ugh, I'm sorry to waste my time and yours, but it really really bothers me when people demonstrate so much smug hubris about such a wonderfully large philosophical question.
Perhaps I have not pushed OO to the limit but for the most day-to-day tasks I've ever done, OO state is hardly the issue unless you have to write a paper or explain something via state-machine or whatnot.

Request -> App Server -> Processing -> Response -> End, no state lingering around...

I do understand what you're saying but I believe the era of complex OO with states is declining, at least at web-development level...
Correct, the usual problems with Sybil attacks still apply: the point is that the attacker doesn't gain anything from faking addresses.
Facebook acquires Mac, iOS developer Acrylic Software
There is a patent on that: http://www.google.com/patents/US5621671 "Digital simulation of organismal growth." Draw your own conclusions.
Seems consistent with what we're seeing in this case. Very hard to imagine any VC greenlighting this sort of "it's the principle" litigation; very easy to imagine a founder doing so.
Uggh, I'm tired of people using that word so casually and where it doesn't apply.
object["method"](params) is just an alternative syntax. Normally you would do object->method(params).
Considering just how expensive everything has become, maybe the employee's can use that $300 to fill the gas in their tanks all the way up!
No, you just have to stop reading Hacker News because they don't know about SolidFire, Calxeda, SeaMicro, Azul, SandForce, Violin, Fusion io, etc.
He is not giving away his salary but the bonus. All CEOs of major companies make more money through bonuses and stock options than just salary. This guy gave away his bonus away. Not sure I have seen a lot of that. To contrast see this guy who virtually destroyed Acer and still took away $43M - http://allthingsd.com/20120622/ousted-acer-ceo-gianfranco-la...
Homeopathy!
As much as the talent behind software drove the acquisition, Sparrow also had some very solid, semi-innovative features and a sophisticated IMAP engine that are now valuable technical/IP properties for Google. I would be very surprised if they open-sourced anything from this acquisition.
In a free market transactions needn't be limited to simple currency for product exchanges. They can come with whatever strings, of whatever enforcability, the parties place on them.

So here a buyer had an expectation of future development and upgrade, some of them perhaps to be paid for. They invested time and attention learning a new interface and functionality, thinking those upgrades would provide returns on that time invested. Investments like that are how communities are built.

I know squadoosh about the small app market or Sparrow's marketing. But if there are a lot of buyers with expectations like that, then I think you have to speak to those when you are selling or yeah, there is an implicit agreement there. If Sparrow disclosed future plans or roadmaps then the agreement moves toward explicit.

Such obligations aren't enforceable, and what's customary within a market is obviously fuzzy. But that doesn't mean those obligations don't exist or aren't ethical.

Again, I know nothing about this case -- but if there was some understanding that the company would this, that or the other, then it is worth wondering about the ethics of a large company doing an acquisition, to hire people, in the knowledge that the deal breaks some tacit deal with a community.
Launching a new startup that sells hardware is more difficult, due to the increased capital requirements, but I don't see any reason to think that it can't be done, IF you can identify a legitimate need and produce a solution for that need, that creates value for the user. Whether or not you need to write in Assembly I don't know, but if working in C floats your boat, just imagine all the "things" you could build that might - for example - embed an Arduino to solve some problem.

OTOH, if you don't necessarily need to get all the way down to the hardware, but just want to solve hard problems that go beyond doing CRUD webapps, there are all sorts of avenues open to you. AI / machine learning stuff, systems level programming for middleware, VOIP stuff, and gosh-knows-what-else. Just keep your eyes and ears open, think outside the box (yeah, yeah, I know, cliche warning), and keep looking for opportunities.
Which brings up a great digression: the app store gold rush has left us in a situation where it's no longer feasible to sell high-maintenance, low-market software directly to consumers. Consumers will buy games and media in high volume, so you can sell those at a discount. But email clients? Photo apps? Nope. The only way to make that stuff is to sell it as some kind of "cloud" service where you make your money on eyeballs elsewhere. And even then you generally can only make it big that way as part of a larger product suite (c.f. Instagram).

I'd look to the open source world for good geek tools, honestly. I think expecting people to sell them to us in the app stores just won't work. No one will buy this stuff at the $50/seat the developers would have to charge to avoid the Google and Facebook buyouts.
I love Jerry.

I saw an older documentary and it was very surprising to see him as a huge stressball before jumping on stage.. but he always delivers
Thank you Dr. Obvious.
With open source it is often the same. I am looking at you Mozilla Thunderbird.
Human cells may have tens of times more forms of proteins expressed from these 23,000 genes if you take into account alternative splicing of pre-mRNA and many other post-translational modifications. These are all processes which prokaryotic organisms like M. genitalium generally lack.

Even when we look aside from the level of DNA/RNA there are huge differences in morphological organisation of eukaryotic cells when compared to most prokaryotes: dynamic compartmentalisation of cytoplasm, different types of cytoskeleton, vesicle trafficking, complex signal transduction networks instead of usually simple two-component regulatory systems... So the simulation of whichever human cell type could be much more complicated than one could initially thought.

I don't want to sound too much pessimistic, as someone with background in both CS and molecular biology I'm truly excited about this, but I still had to cool myself down a little bit after reading the article. I can't wait to read the original paper.
> This is a bloody social news site, as trivial an application as it gets.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. It's a fairly complex transactional system.

> One man can write a half-decent one in a week.

No, one man can write something that resembles a social news site in a week, but building a good one that scales takes a bit longer. :)

> And for ramping it up, even the scaling roadblocks and tricks are old news by now to the web building community in general.

That one I'll agree with. Their initial scaling problems should be fairly well understood.
I've often wondered: are human faces more variable than most species, or are human brains evolved to be particularly sensitive to those variations?
Because you really don't get all the benefits of a native app with a web app. It's getting better, the gap is closing, but it will be a while before web apps are an enjoyable an experience as a native app. I think Sparrow was actually a good proof point of that.
It's a dead and despised brand and they're going to have one hell of a time trying to resurrect it. I doubt they can.
There will always be a need for people who understand the details. Having said that, building demonstrable product quickly is more important in the early days of an enterprise, so developers really need to be able to switch from one to the other; working at a high level of abstraction early on, when you need to move quickly to disrupt and / or capture a market, then move to a lower level of abstraction to optimize and tune the enterprise to make it more efficient within it's niche.
I concur. Just look how many people prefer a Twitter client instead of visiting the website.
How government will surveil your data "in the cloud" (ETSI-draft)
Unsubscribe from the defaults and your experience will be much improved.
Again, you're conflating supply and demand with contribution.
Fair enough. I can't promise I'll stop reading HN (I probably won't), but do you have any recommendations for other websites that cover more hardware-based solutions? (I do read Hackaday, but that doesn't exactly count, although it sometimes gives me an interesting idea or two.)
It is our responsibility to do what we can, some can do more. Do not belittle those that are doing what they can.

We must encourage the wealthy to give back, and snide remarks are certainly not encouraging.
imo next version will be 1.0 because they are on the fast releasing period
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If they changed their workflow to incorporate the product, they invested.
I don't think that would even fit on the board.
Yes, that is exactly the problem. Is that really so hard to understand?
every odd version is unstable
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So, if I'm understanding correctly, you'd be looking for a particular market/industry insight in a business person like that. You'd be looking for experience, deep understanding and successes in that industry.

Is that more or less correct?

It also follows that without any track record, it's really hard to trust that a "business guy" will know how to contribute, and so you're taking someone on faith alone. It's kind of like hiring a developer who can't prove that he's ever written code before.
Great article. Thanks for the coverage :)
I think we're good on digg. It had it's run, arguably way overhyped. Let it go. :)
I don't understand the point of talent acquisitions. Couldn't you spend half the amount of money you would have buying the company just giving the developers enormous signing bonuses to come work for you? Why buy out the original investors in the target company when it's the developers you want?
As much as they solicited.
Bold plan: opening 1,000 MHz of federal spectrum to WiFi-style sharing
It reads as if you're more interested in stamping out cliches rather than if the cliche is true or not in this instance.
Oh, I didn't mean to say that I need to write something in assembly or C per se - I've done some Python programming on an embedded interpreter, too. My point is that I like to stick close to the hardware.

I agree with your other point, though. Although I definitely love working with hardware, I'll still take the avenues you mentioned over developing web-apps any day.
It's called being an adult (after adjusting for your exaggerations).
Sorry, but this is wishful thinking. Being acquihired is not going to affect any individual's future ventures in any meaningful way. You might scrutinize every new service's ownership before you click sign up, but you are not even a blip on the radar.

It might be true that overtime this will erode customer's confidence in startups in general, but so will being shut down because the founders are starving. And it's not like major corporations are guaranteeing products for the long-haul either.

Basically, the whole computer industry is one big case of buyer beware. If you really care about your data use open formats, open protocols and free software whenever you can.
Yes, for "testing purposes" - queue Dr Evil animated GIF in 3...2...1.
These are not the success stories of Sparrow, but 3 that I recall that when purchased went dark in some form, to (possibly) re-emerge less than their former selves.

http://etherpad.com/
http://arstechnica.com/business/2008/01/jaiku-users-flee-to-...
http://techcrunch.com/2008/02/27/it-took-16-months-but-googl...

Its not to say that this acquisition is not a great thing for the Sparrow team, or that Gmail may someday improve (UI wise), but it is an unfortunate trend for users when a great small / niche product is absorbed and obliterated.
Peter Thiel thinks VCs are biased against big ideas: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels... .

(This is in response to the grandparent: "VCs aren't preternaturally biased in favor of lightweight companies, but the people who are doing heavyweight stuff don't have the time to become "real founders.")
Possibly, I'm just commenting on the logic that 0.9 is followed by 1.0 (or 1.9 by 2.0, if you want).
You mean like JavaScript? Not sure why it's not listed there next to Pike.

var f = []
f['push'](2)
// f -> [2]

Pike also has the more familiar object->method(params) syntax.

It's actually a pretty useful bit of syntax. I've been using it recently when combining multiple objects deserialised from json.

var report = [name, dob]
var person = { name: 'Andrew', dob: '1980/03/23' }
_.each(report, function(prop) {
console.log(person[prop])
}
"We absolutely HAVE to update this stuff as it's just stupid to continue programming in the dark ages"

There might also be security issues. I've found that's sometimes a good rationale - if I've got code that will only work in PHP 4.1, and it's gotta work for the next 5 years, probably rewriting ('wholesale refactoring') is a much more prudent choice, even though it's "a complete rewrite". There will be no security patches for the underlying language - building on a platform with known and 'never-will-be-fixed' security holes isn't a good long-term strategy.
Quantitative Investing in Startups
Can you explain what you mean? I think I have an idea, but I don't know if I'm thinking what you're thinking.
Dropping out saved my life. College was not for me yet I was constantly told that I had to go to school. Glad people are realizing that's not the only solution.
Women have been able to simulate those for a while now.
No, but if there were a more profitable basketball league than the NBA they would have got him for sure.
"It's very expensive."

What I don't understand is why more companies don't band together to share the cost of fighting against a patent troll. The article lists more than a dozen companies being sued by this patent troll. If they banded together their cost would be a fraction of the cost of a solo fight against a patent troll, while the patent troll would have to bear all the cost of proceeding with the suit.

It seems to me that if more companies did this, it would shift the balance of power away from the patent trolls, and make then think twice before proceeding with a lawsuit, especially if their patent is weak.
Finally, there is an opportunity here for other iOS developers. [..] Sparrow is still tough to beat, but in a year or so, it will have fallen by the wayside, and that’s when the opportunity really shows up.

Totally. That's the up-side. But let's imagine a great client does turn up and it's from a group of developers who hate acqui-hires.

They realize they need a recurring revenue stream so two situations (of many) might play out. The first is they say upfront their native app is $5/month and people poo-poo the idea of paying a subscription for an app or its traction is otherwise dampened. The second is they sell an app like normal but then try and introduce a recurring charge later on and suffer the ire of their users (we've all seen the "ew, profiteering!" sneers).

There's surely a "nice" solution somewhere here, but it seems Sparrow didn't quite stumble across it. Who will or has?
I haven't fully thought this through, but why can't the protocol just be redefined so that the transaction incentive came out of each individual un-mixed input? Each party transferring a token would designate a fraction that goes towards the incentive. (Of course the quanta difference would would suck for multi-layer mixing, but I'd think some conventions could solve this)

BTW what are the specific resource requirements of SMP sort using currently accepted crypto primitives? I didn't get into digesting the linked paper just to see if they were working towards something feasible or if they required akin to one public key op per boolean gate.
Rand also liked Victor Hugo and Mickey Spillane.

If you're at all interested in her aesthetic principles, give The Romantic Manifesto a try--it's an essay collection, and quite short (by her standards at least--about 200 pages).
Do they write any software?
How about - when a company sells you something for $, they are open to be bought by a bigger company (or possibly a smaller company with debt)
Perhaps, except that hypothetical code-hungry orcs are imaginary and have nothing to do with anything while the value of any of my very real examples is well understood by pretty much anyone. (Though - if you'll forgive me drawing further from our mystical beastiary - trolls might be an exception?)

Edit to explain why I'm so dismissive:

I think that it's a fairly accepted axiom that specified and documented projects are easier to maintain than the alternative. Likewise with code size versus feature set. I think it's self-evident that teams that communicate in natural language (even if only via a ticket system) are more functional (or at least more tolerable to be a member of) than teams that do not.

Deriving my claim from these seems reasonable enough, to me, given the context of the discussion (a comment thread of a relevant topic on some website a minority of people care about).

Not everything is science and while it might be nice to have 5-sigma data to reinforce my opinon, it fortunately doesn't need to be so reinforced in order to be valid, or even valid to be worth sharing.
Is this something you can really plan out from the beginning?

Yes, people build companies to flip all the time. Many/most of them don't make the front page of Hacker News.
I think OP might be a little late to the party
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There are some, but they are from NASA. A more interesting question is what happened to India's promise to release all its Lunar low-orbit reconnaissance mission data to the public. Or why there is virtually no data coming from Japanese mission of the same nature. Both with hidef ultrazoom cameras mind you.
> If you permanently eliminate the CEO position, there is multiple orders of magnitude greater impact to the company.

Has this been actually measured?
Because he gave his bonus to 10,000 employees, not 1 other random employee.
So if we ran this simulation for 4 billion years would it pass the Turing test?
Brooks has repudiated that claim, though. See for example the first question at:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/350008/The_Grill_Fred...

Also, if we're going to link Joel articles from the decade before last, let me add this one which is merely ten years old, and elaborates the ideas from the previous:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html

All that said, I think there are things to be learned and gained from rewrites.
My wife is going through an intensive one-year college ESL course with an emphasis on writing. This was my first encounter with the rigid structure of American college essays. Initially I found it silly and counterproductive, but I have since softened my stance. My wife, despite having a degree from a top university in her country, had hardly any practice writing essays even in her native language. Because of that, she has had her hands full just worrying about her ideas and how to express them in correct and idiomatic English, so the fixed structure has been invaluable for her--it helps organize her thoughts and removes one whole class of tricky decisions from the writing process.

Think of it as training wheels. Once you don't need the formal structure anymore, you can and probably should stop using it.
I don't think that it's cynical at all to consider that. I wish people also would stop jumping all over someone just because they raise a particular possibility for consideration and debate (noting you prefaced by saying "cynical wondering" to lessen the ire of anyone who might jump on you for being cynical.)

One issue though. I wonder what the tax aspect is of getting a 3 million dollar bonus and giving it away.

The story says this:

"The CEO of Lenovo, Yang Yuanqing, recently received a fat bonus of $3 million. Rather than stuffing that big bonus away in his own bank account, Yang Yuanqing gave it away."

So by "recently received" Yang received the money. So that is a taxable event (assuming US). You can't receive money and not pay taxes on it no matter what you do with it. (Even if you throw it in the trash can it's still taxable).

To answer my own question the story might leave out an important detail. That the CEO had the right to the money but said "disburse to the employees instead". That's the same thing but lacks the tax implication as the money was never received. But it would lean more toward your "cynical" view. (Good thinking by the way).
You shall know Google by its trail of dead—a Sparrow user’s lament
With digg, there are descriptions for each link (besides the title). Might seem like a minor thing, but I still miss it on reddit.