skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some people don't actually have that money. It's all a money merry-go-round of debt and credit and weird financial instruments and shell companies in tax havens. It doesn't take much for it to all go wrong.

(http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswomanfiles/2012/06/19/the-...)

Or the money isn't liquid. It's in a huge private funpark, or IP rights that aren't making much at this moment.

Michael Jackson 'nearly bankrupt'
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4342255.stm)

For a small (tiny?) number of people their estimated worth or their position on some 'rich list' is equivalent to HN karma, or reddit karma - meaningless but strangely compelling.

William Gibson[1] has a nice take on the super rich. Those weird families cloning each other and living in space colonies or engaging in high concept 'pranks' against their enemies.

[1] Bad form to mention the competition?
Absolutely. I think that everyone who receives one of these questionnaires should select "I don't want to answer". If the majority answer that it becomes meaningless.
HTML5 hidden Attribute
Microsoft Asks China to Stop Piracy at Four Firms
Working With Cookies In Javascript
How to Encode Video for HTML5
I did that once as well in Minecraft.
The 8 Worst Things About iOS 6
How many points do I need to get downvoting rights?
Growth is the litmus test, but the article seems agnostic about how you achieve it. Do you go full on psychological predation like Zynga? Or do you make a tool that is undeniably better than the competition by orders of magnitude such as Google? The article seems non-prescriptive on this point. But, if you do not achieve growth by any means, then your company is dead by definition, so you should probably be measuring it.
Code at the Human Scale
I'm not quite sure what the phrase means to the author after reading the post. Is he/she referring to the standard (and less vulgar) software engineering concept of eating one's own dog food? If so, it seemed that the article went off in a bunch of other directions after that, amounting basically to the main idea that startups should work hard. If not, a definition of the term would be helpful to know the lesson to be learned from the article.
> When it comes to access to medical technology the world is remarkably flat: the poor struggle in this as in everything else, but the wealthy have no more ability to buy a way out of aging (or heart disease, or cancer, or any of the other conditions that attend aging) right this instant than does anyone else. What they do have is a far greater ability to create a near future in which rejuvenation biotechnologies exist and are just as widely available as any present day clinical procedure.

This is a surprising paragraph. I'm not sure how you're defining "poor".

Illnesses of old age are a "luxury" that poor people don't have, because poverty related illnesses kill them before they get chance to be old.

Access to chemotherapy or radiotherapy or surgery is much easier for wealthy people than it is for poor people. (Although variations in cancer survival rates across wealthy countries shows that it's not just cash that makes a difference).

And rich people may not fund research into illnesses that affect them, but pharma knows where the money is. Compare the amount of money spent researching erectile dysfunction versus malaria.
Replication - Introduction to MongoBD - Part 12
Teenager’s birthday party turns into a riot after leaving Facebook invite open
Faster Evolution of the Web
2 year ago it was 500: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853529

It may have been increased since (2 years before it was 50: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438936)
Facebook drops photo tagging in Europe
I read an interesting claim in a book about economics recently: that Wall Street wasn't an industry, but a monopoly.

The argument was that in a normal industry, companies in competition with each other benefit when a competitor goes out of business. Other firms step in and snap up the opportunities. But with Wall Street, the whole network of companies needs a government bail out to stop their wholesale collapse when one company gets into trouble (eg. Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers). Thus they are not really an industry of competing companies, but should be seen as a single monopolistic entity.

(of course they are filled with competitive people, but think of how departments and employees within the same company compete with each other)
If such a pill was invented it would be used maliciously to spike those unrequited loves.
The Hidden Inheritance Many Parents Already Provide
You can tune Facebook's privacy settings to whatever you want. So you don't need to share everything to everybody.
AJAX Web Apps In iOS 6 Are Sort Of Broken
Your longer sales cycle should bring in a lot more revenue for each deal you finally do close. Growth is about revenues not just # of customers.
Wow a real-life John Henry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_%28folklore%29

(though I suppose the legend is based on amazing real workers)
Replica Sets - Introduction to MongoBD - Part 13
Five predictions on where gamification is going next
The lesson is "mix a well-known concept with some profanity to produce a vaguely intriguing title that will get your shitty startup attention on Hacker News".
I'd say "my mom/sister/dad/cousin" is not going to host this themselves is a tricky assumption. I can imagine a world where my mom creates an account with a service that kicks off an EC2 instance on her behalf without her even knowing it. Want to build a facebook that scales cheaply? Make every user bring their own server. On top of that, make "bringing a server" as easy as a registration process.
That would possibly be true if people had no other way to socialize. Just because Facebook exists doesn't mean that older ways of communicating have all died; the real world is still real, and you can talk in it.
It might help to verify Maps label's language configuration. It solved my English - Spanish labels problem.

Settings --> Maps
Beautiful and Amazing Digital Artwork to Inspire
Understanding Facebook integration on iOS 6
Google yanks free music service in China
Smooth running, but the flocking behaviour just doesn't quite feel right. The boids overlap/collide and just don't feel to "flock" correctly.

Do they have awareness of the other boids around them?
This is heavy handed, as is the client using this type of negotiation tactic. It's not healthy to respond this way.

A better solution would be to respond: "Well, my rate is based on my experience with XYZ and because I've been in this industry a while. A lot of developers out there aren't interested in this kind of thing and don't understand what you're going through. Honestly, I hired a couple myself last year and it took more effort than I saved just trying to get them ramped up."

Then just smile and leave it at that. Sometimes the best response is to make your point and not get into a conversation about it.
See Python Run - Free Visualization Tool
" The team realized that users had insufficient thoughts around what Fray was about in general."

Dear author, The reader of this blogpost also doesn't have a clue what Frey is about...
Cool! I notice that you have both lil brother and google analytics enabled on bits.shutterstock.com. Do you have any kind of a read on how they stack up against each other?
Testing Python and PostgreSQL on Windows – Basics
I have no idea what Fray is and i looked and tried clicking on a few things to take me to their app or product page and couldn't find it...
Ny my reckoning, the only way that Realtors (agents) help you is by bringing you deal opportunities you wouldn't have had otherwise. If those are good deals (e.g. they improve the price relative to others), then they are worth a commission paid if it can cover the price improvement.

But if they can't (and the paper seems to suggest they don't) then it might be better to avoid using an agent and arrange a deal yourself.
It's a great way to perform GDDOS (geographically distributed denial of service) - set up a chain of shell companies, each in a different jurisdiction, with 100% ownership down a chain of 100 companies. Cost will probably be in the small hundreds of thousands of dollars (for a chain length in the tens to hundreds; much cheaper for shorter chains)

There is no chance anyone is ever going to "pierce the veil" on this, or figure it out - anyone who wants to do that will have a cost 10 to 100 times higher than setting it up -- because to get to the owner, you will have to piece the veil for every link in the chain, meaning you'll have to employ competent lawyers in every jurisdiction.

(Consider: in any single jurisdiction, veil piercing is 10-100 times more expensive than incorporating in the first place; so just amplify this by setting up multiple layers)
Are you trading your time for money, or are you trading your expertise for money? If the answer is time, you might as well find a decent paying factory job and make widgets all day.

The thing is, companies don't want to write software, they want to fix business problems. Writing software is just a path to that. So yes, you may charge more but you also have experience with their business and you've been there, helping them solve their problems (at least I hope you have).

It's a hard pill to swallow, but a client that won't consider the quality/history versus cost argument isn't worth having. They will continuously second guess you and you will spend more time managing them than getting work done.
Dev releases HTML5 Blank for WordPress
I can't wait to read the next installment where our protagonist offs himself over this betrayal.

How embarrassing.
Incredible, period. Some pictures for everyone who is curious but is too lazy to search:

http://www.theindianblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/d...

http://images.jagran.com/inext/Inext_p_SC_2Powerof1.jpg

http://photos-g.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/406442_35385902...
Google PageRank is Chaff
Here he is standing next to his road: http://s3.hubimg.com/u/3993454_f520.jpg

And a video about this original Minecraft player: http://gktalk.blogspot.de/2011/08/man-from-gahlour-dashrath-...
Why Linux on the desktop is still struggling
The iOS 6 Review: Maps Thoroughly Investigated and More
Yes, they do. They're not meant to completely avoid each other, theoretically there's a Z-axis that's not visible.

Try increasing the collision avoidance importance in the options and decreasing everything else. Generally, playing with the sliders can result in completely different behaviors.
Don't you mean dog food?

http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/dogfood.html
Some Early iPhone 5 Adopters Report Odd Screen Issues
Hip Reddit’s founder talks up Hub, gives tips
I would have never paid any attention to Ramit unless he came with Patrick's seal of approval.

The problem is that I shudder inside a little every time I hear the word 'info product'. The whole industry is beset by frauds and hucksters, and I think that generally people are a little skeptical when they see yet another person making claims such as "I will teach you to be rich".

Ramit provides great, actionable advice in his content. The problem is that he sells himself the same way as everybody in his industry does. It's things like the way he speak to his sales site that puts a small part of me off and puts me on the defense.
Ah OK - yes some better behaviour can be adjusted, maybe tweak the default values a bit?
You Won’t Believe What Built This Underwater Crop Circle
>Karunamon puts the rule of law above all other considerations

What the everloving hell is that supposed to mean? Don't fucking join the service if the rules bother you - that too is an option.

It seems a lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too though, It takes some level of arrogance to say "Screw it all, I'm going to do it this way, ToS be damned", then get caught breaking those rules and suspended or somesuch, and then complain that the suspension happened.

Do not join $service if the rules of $service are offputting to you. That applies to every service ever made on the internet or real life. It applies to Facebook, G+, App, Twitter, a church, a discount club, or quite literally any other service.

Furthermore, if you join $service, and your account has action taken against it for breaking the rules you agreed to and said you would follow, you shouldn't complain. You did lie about the whole "I will follow the rules" thing.

Rule of law is a different matter than the terms of service for a web app. Breaking laws in real life has a great deal more negative consequences that getting your Facebook account deleted. One of these things is relatively minor, one is not.
I don't understand why he chose restaurants and barbershops as examples of non-startups. Both make things lots of people want, and some of them are big chains that have wide reach, so they fulfill criteria a and b. Either these are startups, or there are more criteria pg didn't include, such as rate of growth - even the most successful chains usually have 10 years or so from the opening of the first store to becoming huge (inter)national chains.
pg listed writing novels and tech startups as "high-beta" occupations.What are other high beta and high alpha occupations?
Great post. I am in South Korea. I could be imprisoned for the the things I have written here about Samsung and their owning family.
GitHub redesigns its developer profile pages with a much cleaner ...
Lot of insight, but I'd rather breath outside the bubble and build a slow company, and I'll still call it a startup - http://www.fastcompany.com/3000852/37signals-earns-millions-...
>so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.

Is nobody familiar with the privacy settings? Facebook has lists, G+ has circles. One for family, one for acquaintances, one for close friends, one for business. Guess who gets to see the pictures from the house party and who doesn't?
The backlog is definitely not being handled in order. I signed up a year ago with my person address and never got back. For shits and giggles, I signed up earlier this year with my work address and got the invite after about 5 months waiting.

Still never got anything on my personal address though.
Three JavaScript snippets for your web design toolkit
Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed
The Matrix:  Should You Leave It?
I think he meant that he _was_ making games in high school but is now "old" (e.g, 50s).
Gabriela, cravo, canela e…cacau - Roteiros no Brasil
An english captioned version of the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z57-0Pb4IZw

You want to have TWO videos running in parallel because the captions cover the whole video at times.

Also, I noticed that he's wearing some sort of white "bandana" with writings, can anyone care to translate it if it's readable enough from one of the pictures posted above?

---
Improved phrasing.
This is what I did a few months ago http://cssdeck.com/labs/ckosol2k/1

But yours feel much better.
One of the irritating things about money is that its value, and the extent to which you can top out your use for it, very much varies according to your passions.

For example, both Charles Stross and I are creatives with a passion for telling stories - but the media we strongly prefer have pretty dramatic effects on the utility of money for both of us.

He mentions having already effectively topped out on the utility of cash for him - as a novelist, there's a limited extent to which more money helps him fulfil his passion.

By contrast, the utility of cash for me tops out around the $300m / yr mark, that being the cost of making and marketing a top-end feature film every year. Below that, there is definitely utility in every dollar as far as Doing What I Like goes - although of course diminishing returns still apply.

And for some people - like Elton Musk, whom he mentions - there is effectively no top end in sight. If your passion is to get to Mars, you really don't hit a point where more money wouldn't be helpful.
To Stay Relevant in a Career, Workers Train Nonstop
It's still 500
iOS 6 users: Settings - General - About - Advertising - Limit Ad Tracking - On
I passed 500 a couple weeks ago and that's when I got downvoting. I've limited my down votes to comments that were inappropriate or offensive. For a comment like this isn't a lack of up votes enough?
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone shares secrets with Ottawa audience
Teller (of Penn & Teller) and The Honor System
The difference is you only use a realtor when you are buying (or selling) a home. Realtors don't talk to you 6 months after buying a home and suggest putting in a pool or a sun room to add future value to the home. As a manager/agent during your entire career and not just during job searches, that would be info you would get (how to improve your asset, your marketability, a promotion or raise). An agent may show the most obvious value during a negotiation, but the guidance provided between job searches will help maximize future earnings.
I like to look at it this way. I recently submitted a Show HN post where I talked about how just going step by step will benefit you in a great way and how you can build on those experiences. The pyramid metaphor is a nice one.
The way I think of "random variable" is that it's an attempt to move toward a stateless world (a la functional programming) so we can reason about it.

What we actually observe in real life is a sample from the corresponding distribution. The "random variable" concept (a function over a sample space with a probability measure) is the stateless analogue that is more usable in abstract reasoning. In probability, we don't care about the specific values the variable actually ends up producing, but all the values it can produce and how likely each is.

In the observed world, it's unknown (pre-measurement) and appears to be random. In the mathematical world, it's a function over a sample space.

It's a mechanism to reason about randomness by (though the magic of probability) taking the randomness and state out.
The second one was a hoax.
Well, it's a 700k interpreter and runtime. It isn't slow for simple things, but only because JS is really fast now. Interpreters are usually 5 to 10 times slower than whatever they are running in.

http://hashcollision.org/whalesong/examples/raphael-demo/rap... isn't bad

http://hashcollision.org/whalesong/examples/boid/boid.html is a little slow compared to http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Courses/Games12/Tutorial1/Phase1...

Some of the low framerate could be frame timing (whalesong could be using setTimeout poorly), but they seem to use about the same CPU.
$15 / share is a fair valuation given Facebook's cash flow profile and top-line decelerating growth.

Said back on 19th May (the day after FB's IPO):

"asset managers [do is] look at Free Cash Flow to Equity, not Net Income. On a FCF to Equity valuation, FB IPOed at +220x.
Even at a generous P/E or FCF/E ratio of 25x, Facebook's Free Cash Flow needs to go from $450m to $4,000m in the next 24-36 months. Do you think that is possible? After looking at their infrastructure needs I think not."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002988
But that wouldn't make sense either, the post isn't about them using their own service in any manner.
Apple seeks U.S. Samsung sales ban, $707 million more in damages
That was just her publisher doing that without her consent.
John Hunter (of matplotlib fame) Memorial Fund
TomTom got thrown under the bus and there were so many other players involved in making the failure. There are tens of companies that contributed to the data all of whom have gotten little exposure/blame.
How do you feel about Samsung's behavior?
Unfortunately dividends are double-taxed relative to cap gains/interest/etc. Until that's fixed, we won't go back to the era of companies returning money to investors.
Ask HN: RealName.com or CompanyName.com
I'm categorizing and relocating some of my work and am ready to launch my own web corner that will serve to showcase my past projects and my services. I've noticed that some use their real names for this whilst others go under their company names (presumably self owned). I'm still undecided on what route I should take and would like to read some opinions from the HN community.
Consider an alternate universe with far worse odds: 1 startup in a field of 100,000 makes $100 billion, the rest make zero. Expected value is $1 million.

Should you be one of the 100,000 founders who "rationally" choose to buy a startup lottery ticket for $100b?

Well of course! If you could live for long enough to run through thousands of iterations of the startup game, that is.

In the real world,
- Founders are typically limited to 1 startup at a time
- It takes time - years perhaps - for a startup to fail
- Founders can do only a few startups in their lifetimes

Given low odds like 1%, with < 10 iterations per lifetime, expected value is the wrong metric. From a purely financial POV then, it appears only rational to do growth startups
- If you are on the investing side (a "parallel" entrepreneur, running tens or hundreds of iterations in your lifetime)
- You are a founder (a "serial" entrepreneur) with reasonable financial security and none of your life goals would be irrevocably damaged by the most likely outcome - a string of failures.

(There are of course several non-financial reasons and payoffs. For instance, an Idea takes demonic possession of you, and the only way to exorcise from your tortured brain is to do a startup..)
I didn't recognize the demand until I began hearing from independent consultants asking for advice or talking about abandoning their business because they wanted to focus n coding and not marketing and their 'brand'. They liked the work they did, but not the work of running a business. Likewise, engineers in full time perm jobs were asking for career advice on a regular basis - not just negotiation, but whether to stay hands on vs manage, whether to get a certification, to take pay cuts for a better tech environment, etc. The answers depend on the candidate's situation, but I became a trusted advisor to many. I gave this expertise away, and I think a model exists where an agent would do these things and more. May sound 'frothy' now, but its a new idea.
A customer is someone who pays for your product, and you pay Google by paying ad impressions as long as you use the service.. Ad impressions are a valuable good that can be exchanged for money.

You being Google's product, that they sold, would imply that Google is guilty of slavery, and that you are now the property of the buyer.
SPDY header compression only compresses the headers. Bytes in the body might be vulnerable to a similar attack if the server is doing gzip compression, and that would be a fun extension to the attack, but headers and body are never compressed together.
They don't even make a firm stance in saying that it's worth $15/share. With decelerating growth and the fact they can't figure out how to monetize mobile I have no idea where they figure FB is worth that much. A 47x multiple on these guys is a joke.

This recent rally is akin to a dead cat bounce. Nothing in the market goes straight up or straight down. We'll be seeing sub-$15 soon.. Consider it a x-mas present.

Actually while we're on the topic.. the Dow is getting close to 14,000 again; our high from 2008. Don't be surprised to see a double top on the markets and then a sharp retrace afterward.
I'd be interested to know the volatility of these growth rates. PG talked as if the might be fairly constant over the course of one or two years, but my gut feeling is that they'd be anything but.
You say "traditional", I think you mean "designated" (or "specialist"). Designated market makers also received certain privileges, but in turn are obligated to maintain an orderly market.

Historically, not all market makers were designated market makers.

Some HFTs (e.g. some branches of Goldman) do act as designated market makers, receive these privileges, and are obliged to continue trading. Others do not. Same as always, just with machines replacing people.