skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with this theory is that in the hypothetical midwestern city you describe, there is no incentive for anyone to pay Silicon Valley salaries. Everyone can live on less money, so that sets the baseline. Premiums or discounts are applied to that based on the rarity of the employee's skill set.

If you're running a company, you have a limited amount of capital to work with. Your pay scale is determined by the markets you operate in - the prices competitors are paying for employees, and the prices competitors are charging for their product or service. You can't just say, "Well, I'm generous, I'm going to pay a million dollars a year to all of my employees." You'll be bankrupt in a month that way.

The real estate price inflation you describe is a side effect of this process, not a main element. With the exception of situations where external capital enters the system to finance a bubble, as in much of the US and Spain in the early 2000s, it's the sign of a healthy local economy where functioning businesses can employ large numbers of people because they're all generating enough cashflow to do so.

The alternative scenario -- Detroit -- is far, far uglier.
To level the argument, let's just say that everyone has the same skill for a position. You can probably assume that there are a lot of equally qualified 'A' players who have applied at Google, Valve, Facebook, etc. So what sets all of them apart? Off the top of my head, I can only think of two things: personality and looks.

While I can't comment on the personality of the author, from the picture in the article it seems as though she is attractive. Is that enough to set her apart? Would she have seen the same possibilities if she wasn't so attractive? Would she have seen the same possibilities if she didn't have the novelty (not sure what to call it) of being an attractive, capable woman in a male-dominated field?
And that was disable via software in a recent scandal with schools spying on kids:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9158818/Pennsylvania_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_...

On the laptops the LED was hardwired to camera power but the software go around it by momentary activating the camera and taking pictures.

You would only get a rather slight flicker occasionally.
Vesting is hard enough with groups of people working together on a common project. How would you solve that problem with a group of different companies, each with different incentive systems?
This sounds great, but why is it a kick starter project? If the claims they're making are reasonable, it seems to me that, for instance, Google would be more than a little interested, and could easily cough up $750K. What am I missing?
I would hope so with how long it's been around.
Which is unfortunately a very new version compared to most distros. CentOS 6 for example has only 5.3. Debian Squeeze, 5.5. Ubuntu Precise, 5.9.
A long time ago, I was once a Microsoft intern attending a party at Bill Gates' house. At that party, a high-ranking Microsoft HR employee told me that it was Microsoft's goal to have twice the percentage of female interns in their program than female CS majors.

For example, if women only made up 10% of college CS majors, Microsoft wanted to have 20% female interns.

I replied that, if that were their goal, they would most likely have to lower the bar as compared to a male intern, or else pay the female interns more, give them more perks, or purposefully interview fewer qualified male interns.

My argument was that if Microsoft's hiring bar was the top 1%, most likely only 10% of that candidate pool is female. So, one must either drop the bar for females, interview more females in that pool than males, or somehow double the chance that a female in that 10% of 1% accepted your internship offer. However, in those days almost nobody rejected Microsoft offers, so that last route seemed difficult.

The only way to maintain equality of pay and skill without purposefully rejecting male applicants is to spend a huge amount of effort finding more female applicants than male applicants in that 1% and persuading them to apply. But that's still not really fair, as that really implies that recuiters pay less attention to males, e.g. spending less time and money finding them and recruiting them.

The HR representative got very angry, but couldn't articulate why.
Apparently (at least some types of) electrical tape are transparent to near IR. (That sure took some revisiting of assumptions to diagnose why the rotation sync was no longer working)
I really dislike when scientific theory is presented this way. You imply too much when instead of using phrasings like "We have evidence that suggest X" you say "X happened."

> The seas and lakes dried, the rain stopped, and that... was that.

We think there was water on mars, therefore it is true. Is it too much to put a disclaimer somewhere that explains this is the current consensus but we have more to learn? The truth is that this story is riddled with assumptions, and readers need to know that.
This is such an important issue, and it affects bottom line! - a recent Forbes article highlighted that companies with more women at senior levels earn upwards of 33% more on important financial metrics.

Global research group Catalyst recently interviewed 325 American chief executives and 10,000 female executives around the obstacles to womens' progression into senior leadership roles. 52% of women cited male stereotyping, but only 25% of the male chief executives identified it as a problem - so there's definitely unconscious stereotyping at play.
Considering that it's a new protocol, why not try to solve that old problem? At the very least, they could allow you to disable email-based password reset in favor of printed code. That would be a smart thing to do.

You would get a random code or several codes you print out and put into a safe place. If you ever forgot your password, you would dig it our and supply to the website to trigger a reset (which could include or not include email-based verification). The codes would only be usable for passwords resets.
San Francisco is the only major city in the US where you a) don't need a car and b) there's no snow. Apparently, lots of people highly value these (and other) factors, enough so that it cannot be as cheap as Philadelphia or Boston.
It's not a question of what would be nice. It's a question of supply and demand.
It looks like the good stuff is from here: https://github.com/django/django/commit/70a0de37d132e5f1514f....

It's been weird to get into Django and see hacky solutions like the UserProfile/get_profile() stuff (and django-registration and South being required for most purposes), and it's great to see this make it into Django.
This is awesome! really excited to try it out.
Yes, by levelling accusations of "malware!" at every download not distributed by Microsoft itself.

SmartScreen Filter is a product-disparagement lawsuit waiting to happen. I hope I hear about it in time to pile on.
Something doesn't make sense here. Don't firefox and chrome use the exact same blocklist made by google? It says so right here: http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/safebrowsing/

So why do their graphs differ so much?
Actual reports are here, downloadable as PDF:

http://www.nsslabs.com/reports/your-browser-putting-you-risk...

http://www.nsslabs.com/reports/your-browser-putting-you-risk...

The methodology is (vaguely) described in the first document. The click fraud result was very interesting, it seems that Chrome just doesn't address it at all. Of course I suspect the majority of click fraud goes on in Google's ad network, so Google has an incentive to ignore it just as Microsoft has a reason to catch it.
Nice summary, thanks. If Mars never had time for life to develop, that would be a sad thing. We could have had neighbors. In some ways, Venus is even more sad. It's much closer in size to Earth with much higher gravity than Mars, which I think would be better for human colonists. But Venus is a mess, so that's that.
I'm sure this is going to come up repeatedly: what can they offer me from an eCommerce perspective that Amazon can't? Like most social network benefits, I think friend recommendations, which I can and do get in real life, are overrated and useless for the majority of my purchases.

The gifting idea is quaint. But to be full-on eCommerce site, well that's yesterday's news.
IE9 is a solid browser, and the pop-culture IE vitriole, while clearly having roots in important history, is getting tedious.

</rant>

Firefox needs to step its game up here. Although frankly I'm surprised that the browser manufacturers don't share their blacklist data.
How Sans-Serif Typeface Styles Affect Readability
This has existed for years... and been structured.

http://ebexchangefunds.com/ is one popular one... :-)
Ask HN: Is being loud good marketing?
You know the drill.

A million Facebook posts, gigantic blogs with fancy graphics, getting their friends and their friends of friends to blog about them which eventually causes them to appear in Gawker and TechCrunch. The whole loud package.

Is this a good marketing strategy?
It is easy to rail against employers for showing the complained about bias against minorities and women. And doing so is clearly against the law.

However playing Devil's advocate it is justifiable by the fact that hiring decisions are naturally risk adverse. The difference between a perfect hire and a merely good one is typically not that big. The difference between a hire that works out and one that does not is huge. It does not take many wrong hires to destroy a working team.

If you've ever been burned by a hire where a person did not work out for reason X, then you're going to naturally think 2 and 3 times before making a similar hire. I personally have seen a couple of situations where a black person had credentials only because of affirmative action and did not deserve those credentials. I've also have seen multiple cases where a woman gets hired, gets pregnant, and then you lose that employee in a painful way.

Can you really blame an employer for leaning towards being risk adverse in this situation?

(Turning it around, if everyone else is discriminating to an unfair degree against a specific group of people, a company that merely discriminates less will enjoy a competitive advantage. A while ago I ran across a fascinating study of how much better South Korean companies that were willing to hire women into management do than ones who are not. I've seen no data either way on whether the USA is past this tipping point for women in various professional careers.)
World of Warcraft Has Lost Its Cool
This is going to turn Facebook into the Amazon for gifts. They capture you exactly at the right point, can (eventually) give pitch-perfect recommendations, and can get the checkout flow down to be completely painless. If they execute on this well (and I expect they will) I would guess most gift purchases will be happening on Facebook in a few years.
nope, but I can guarantee you that organizations do.

You're a government agency (lets say, state of california), and you have hundreds of departments and thousands of messages:

Would you rather register a twitter username for each department? Or would you install a StatusNet instance for each organization and let them maintain control?
You link 404's. Did you mean https://github.com/converspace/specification? Looks interesting.
I feel similar about the omnipresent blog format: why should everything be final once posted, and everything have to be temporally organized? Old-fashioned "websites" felt better when you don't update often, and you post about more timeless topics.

But for the reader there's a definite advantage: you know exactly what has changed, and whether a site is updated regularly. I have a small blog, and on some entries I maintain changelogs manually. I suppose the best would be for Wordpress and the like to offer the ability to link to cleanly-formatted diffs (ala revisions in google docs).

(and just a heads up: I think your link should point to http://converspace.github.com/specification/... your link gives me a 404)
I did not see that article, but would be interested to. Do you have a link?

The only research that I am aware of along those lines was specific to South Korea.
Deeper thoughts aside, what kind of good friend says that to someone?
CSS regions in Chrome Canary
That was the first thing that came to my mind as well!
Not stupidity, necessarily. Just laziness.
Hey man! I didn't quite understand your argument, but in this arena looks shouldn't come into it. The greater weight attributed by some people to women's appearance is a form of unconcsious discrimination. I appreciate you weren't sure what to call it, but the 'novelty of being attractive' doesn't sit well with me. She has the novelty of being highly skilled - that's what counts :)
Interesting, but I disagree.

(1) You can't assume that there are a lot of equally qualified A players for those companies. In fact, those companies struggle to hire enough qualified engineers.

(2) You're assuming that those companies, if they were presented with multiple qualified people, can only hire one of them. In many cases, they would just hire all of them.

(3) You're assuming that, if a company has to decide between multiple qualified people, it would use personality or looks as a dividing factor. Obviously, the people aren't actually identical, other than looks. The companies could instead decide based on a preference for public universities over equally ranked private ones, or what city the people are from, or whatever. There are many differences between people.

(4) You're assuming that attractiveness would help someone's candidacy for an engineering role, and not hurt it. If you were talking to two people -- one was a very attractive woman and one was a very unattractive woman -- which would you assume is more technical, if you had to bet? You'd probably bet on the less attractive person.
Apologies for the snark, but if my goal was to maximize expected return, I think I'd probably not do a startup at all and get a nice salaried job with a government contractor. Startups are risky! And it's hard enough for me to judge the risk/reward of my own startup, let alone someone else's.

If I wanted to take out some risk, I'd rather cash out some equity using more traditional means and putting it some place safe (or at least different), not other startups.
This is a really good question.

Not necessarily Google, they are famous for not investing in other people to do engineering, but it seems like a modest amount of money to get something that should be fairly widely applicable.

Of course if it is widely applicable and this investment gets to company what it needs to take off, well the folks who gave them the money aren't really going to benefit in a leveraged way. (No equity)

Perhaps they were hoping for a 'raspberry pi' like response (which would be hundreds of thousands of units) and be able to do a sort of stealth funding round kinda thing. No idea of course, but it would be a sweet result if it worked out for them right?
This very ladder-pulling-up is written into law as rent controls. Although typically presented as a way to ensure that widows and orphans are not priced out by gentrification, rent control is actually a tax on 'people who have moved recently': landlords can and do get stuck with permanent tenants for decades who are now paying 20% of the market rate for their apartment, sometimes less than what it costs to even maintain the apartment. To compensate, they have to raise the rent as much as possible when a unit becomes available, to make up for the cost of carrying the far-below-market units with the permatenants. Anytime you move into or within San Francisco, you're subsidizing the people who haven't moved recently.
I just carry a small notebook with me to the gym. I note the reps and weight, and any subjective notes about what worked, what didn't, and what to aim for next time.

Takes a few seconds to fill out in between reps.

I'm sure there are useful, simple apps, but you don't need an app to track.

As others mentioned, tracking lets you make sure you're increasing your lifts. I never progressed consistently until I started tracking, and slightly increasing each time.
That doesn't mean that people don't care. I certainly wouldn't able to remember the birthday of all my closest friends, but I do care and am glad to be reminded. On the other hand, there are of course a ton of bday wishes from people who probably don't really care, but is that really a bad thing?
Did Microsoft commission the study?
That cartoon is lampooning the MBS pooling that let agencies rate bundles of loans as AAA even though all the underlying securities were more risky. Bundling actually does reduce risk, but in the case of the mortgage meltdown of 2008 it was missing the forest (systemic market-wide mispricing of loans) for the trees (slightly reduced risk).

In this case, the founders already are invested in the dead cow, and so it can make sense to diversify to reduce risk. It's doesn't increase the value of their shares, it just makes the overall portfolio less risky.

The analogue to the MBS fiasco would be if the U.S. hit another depression, the whole YC class would be likely to flop, so the diversification wouldn't help, but in "normal" market conditions, the whole group would benefit from the few winners and get a payout in more scenarios.
Yawp. Fast factsheet here: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html

For starters, the remaining atmosphere on Mars is extraordinarily thin. Go to the top of Mt. Everest. Then go four times higher than that. That's the atmospheric pressure at "sea" level on Mars.

It's apparently relatively easy to determine atmospheric composition from afar, and of the atmosphere remaining on Mars, 210 parts per million is water. I have not done the math myself, but I'm assured the total "depth" of water left is measured in microns.

It's really dry. It's really cold. And we'd pop like a balloon stepping outside.

As for how much water is frozen below? SHRUGGGGGG Anyone could make a career answering that. The biggest confounding factor is that the planet is substantially covered in dust, many meters thick in places. It makes remotely sensing what's underneath a real pain in the ass.

The most solid answer so far appears to be "there is a nontrivial amount of ice below the ground". Think "enough to fill the great lakes".
I think you're referring to the warning about unsigned files? Signed code generally improves security, incidents like the Adobe cert theft are rare. My only complaint is how expensive the certificates can be. Then again, if they were cheap or free we'd just start the cycle of fraud all over again.
Hey man, here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswomanfiles/2012/01/26/the-...

"Companies with more women at senior levels earn upwards of 33% more on important financial metrics. Failure to resolve the obstacles that keep women from these roles means executives are leaving money on the table."
Have you ever seen a white person not be good at their job? Yet you don't associate their failures with their race. Why do so with black people?

Also, read the studies. Black people and women actually have a harder time getting a job. So by your logic, of people getting jobs that they may not be the most qualified for, you'd be better off hiring women or black people. They have to be more qualified into to be seen as equals.
Where do you draw the line? What kinds of crimes would result in shock and concern from the public, media, etc?
Based on the comment I wasn't sure if you actually downloaded it. If you didn't then it's hard to "judge a book by it's cover". I agree that the price looks high for what you would expect, but without actually reading the book I can't make that type of assertion.
..really? well, thanks for your thoughtful contribution to the discussion. i hate to shoot-down such an insightful and well thought-out point but a quick check [1] seems to refute your claim. in fact (oddly enough) it appears that, not only do people use it, but a majority of people do.

i honestly don't understand all the hate around ie.. my experience using it on a day-to-day basis has shown it to be a stable, fast, and well-designed (and apparently quite secure) browser..

[1] http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qp...
I think that is a perfectly good marketing strategy but is not necessarily the best sales strategy.

You can be as loud as you want, with mentions on any number of websites, but the key is getting potential your customers to notice.

If your potential customers are reading Gawker and TechCrunch, those mentions demonstrate your product's value and you can provide an adequate means to convert those eyeballs into paying customers then I would by all means go with the loud route.

If your customers aren't reading those sites or you aren't comfortable with your ability to convert I would invest the time and energy into a more direct and targeted approach to your potential customers directly.
Stand-out quote:

in a sense, trading any of your company for other companies might be a negative expected value play

In general, insurance is a negative expected value. After all, that's how insurance companies make money: by charging more than they pay out. The key with insurance, however, is that it is purchased to cover a catastrophic event. That is, all the money you pay into it will hopefully be more than the money you get out of it but if you end up needing really expensive medical treatments or your house burns down you need to be able to afford to move forward.

With founders and the "founder failure insurance" there is significantly less of this, though. If you fail you don't get an immediate payout, or even a guaranteed payout, failure is not a catastrophic event (in the sense of needing a lot of money fast) for most, and it's actually possible to do well and make money from this.

Really, a more honest way of describing this is as a bet that you will lose, though that's not a complete picture, either.

Intriguing idea nevertheless and something I'd consider if I were a founder.
That is not true. It is based more on reputation. May be you should first learn more about it before spreading misinformation : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/05/17/smartscreen-17...
I'm not a scientist, just a pithatician. I have no formal or informal education in this matter and my understanding is strictly derived from pleasure reading. But I think there's enough evidence to back up this general narrative without throwing asterisks everywhere.
Hasn't the whole massive multicore thing been floating around the server space for a few years now? I remember HP Project Moonshot and Sea Micro and a few other projects to built multi-chip ARM servers. However, I don't recall seeing ANY benchmarks that demonstrated that they were any more efficient, per watt, in a REAL application, than the x86 competition. I would really like to see such a data point. I guess now it's being sold as a novelty to let people play with such a technology, which is fine I guess.

The CISC vs. RISC days are long over and the battle between the two architectures is a bit silly at this point since the gap between the instruction set and the underlying implementation has gotten quite dramatic. Claims that RISC chips are inherently more efficient may have been true in 1995, but I don't see this holding water today.
"Creativity is not art, skill, or luck. Creativity is a problem solving skill"

Either it's a skill, or it isn't.