skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PG already answered your exact criticism [1]. He's playing the extreme long tail "black swan" odds.

"I don't know what fraction of them currently raise more after Demo Day. I deliberately avoid calculating that number, because if you start measuring something you start optimizing it, and I know it's the wrong thing to optimize. [5] But the percentage is certainly way over 30%. And frankly the thought of a 30% success rate at fundraising makes my stomach clench. A Demo Day where only 30% of the startups were fundable would be a shambles. Everyone would agree that YC had jumped the shark. We ourselves would feel that YC had jumped the shark. And yet we'd all be wrong."

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/swan.html
What developer tools? Visual Studio? If anything, a Linux desktop is probably where you want to be as a developer (of non-Microsoft based software).
> [...] he assumes the outrage by the high intensity users is proportional to the perceived value

Right, that's the point. This is a common style in economic blogs. They often follow the form: assuming some set of data, what are the economic implications?

> He does describe interesting models/theories, but I don't actually think they're relevant.

Right, they may or may not be relevant to this specific case (Reader), but I still found it interesting to learn about.

> It seems cheap and link-baity.

Hmmm, here we have a distinguished economist, who could no doubt live easily from his university job, instead spends time trying to bring scientific economic analysis to popular topics. Not sure how that is cheap and link-baity.

He does have a knack for catchy titles, though. If you aren't familiar with his blog style, "evil google" probably sounds bad (and emotionally charged), but I really doubt it was meant to be taken literally.
What are the reasons not to follow semver today?
Sometimes, it's an equitable sharing. Sometimes, it's someone exercising power over another and rubbing their face in it. There are times and places where deliberate and literally criminal cruelty to strangers is thought hilarious. I know this for a fact.

You assume human beings always do a good job of treating other human beings. Ask a seasoned police investigator -- not always true. And sometimes, they'll even be laughing about it.
Don't forget the massive advertising and PR budgets that corporations like Google have, vs zero advertising and PR budgets of most open source projects.
Design trends never make a design good.
Someone else suggested it, and I think it works too - consumption tax on everything (one thing I would add is a scaling tax rate of the per goods cost against the median income, so that a car costing 200k might be taxed 10% higher than a 20k one, and I would call the taxation of large purchases at higher rates a benefit) but a tax credit for everyone equivalent to some metric to measure the amount of money it costs to feed / house / heat / clothe oneself.
Sounds like you're a good candidate for Arch.
The best thing libvirt[1] does is to have a stable API from day 1. Over 7 years and counting. In practice this means a couple of things: We have to be careful and considerate when introducing any new API, since we're going to be maintaining it for a very long time. And although we do deprecate APIs occasionally, we keep them around forever so programs don't need to be "fixed" all at once (or maybe never).

[1] http://libvirt.org
Having switched from windows 2000 to FreeBSD in 2001 as a desktop OS, all i can say is there is no benefit if you want something that does stuff all pointy clicky just like Microsoft does (gnome/kde's apparent objective). My desktop is a terminal and browser and pretty much sod all else.

If you don't embrace the whole Unix philosophy and start using it as intended rather than with a layer of glitter over the top, there is no point at all.

I switched because i didn't have to spend as much time piddling around to get stuff to work. Rather than spending hours in VB/VC++, arguing with COM, dealing with horrible amounts of stateful black box configuration and absolutely no composability past defined IDL/COM interfaces, i could glue some shit together that talked lines of text in literally minutes, perform better and still be running 12 years later with no modification.

Productivity waned for a year but once I'd got my shit together I'm doing the work of 5 people in half the time.
I'll be interested to see what measure are taken to prevent spam. This seems like a useful feature, and I wouldn't want it to become the new popup ad.
do people make slides on their phone?
Where Does the Solar System End?
Why not just use Debian testing? After Ubuntu made Unity the default I switched to Debian and was pretty happy with it. AFAIK that's what becomes Ubuntu every 6 months anyway. The biggest Canonical contribution to Linux community has always been fonts, so I just copied all my fontconfig and Ubuntu fonts to my Debian install.

But then Gnome3 happened. And it was far worse than Unity - it killed virtual desktops. XFCE and KDE are not my cups of tea either, so I tried the latest Unity again and was surprised that they've fixed the most obvious issues. So I'm back on Ubuntu for now.
On font rendering consistency across browsers
But the legal dollars do to, if you go buy a new garden hose from a local realtor, and the owner goes and buys doritos with his proceeds, you get the taxes off both.

In practice, you could tax one thing everyone elses (like food) and just wait it out, and all money will eventually route itself back through the taxed exchange. The point of such taxes is to take a fraction of all exchanges.

Though, I'd rather they solve the problem of why a black market needs to exist than try finagling a tax solution on it. You have to go back to the drawing board and ask "what is there a demand for we have artificially restricted such that it is forced onto a black market?" and see that tremendous potential tax revenue for what it is.
Looks awesome from the demo,but I can't sign up because you are classifying my perfectly valid .me email as invalid address.
I use desktop Linux. I mainly do web dev (serverside, Django), devops, and tons o' paperwork (running a 7-person company). I also use it (tho' not the same machine) for leisure, including browsing and the very occasional game play.

For the things I mainly use it, it's very good for me. The tools available I mostly love. When stuck on another OS (Windows, OSX) I feel unhappy with the quality of alternatives (this is not to say that one OS is better than others - just that Linux is better at being Linux than OSX or Windows are :) and workarounds for my preferred workflow which are, unsurprisngly, tuned for the platform at hand.

Stuff I use:

* desktop: linux mint base, but openbox + tint2 "desktop environment"; terminator;
* file management: bash (yes, really)
* dev: bash; git; sublime desktop; ssh; chrome; firefox; virtualbox;
* office stuff: libreoffice, evince; I do have a Windows VM for netbanking (sadly), and the very rare occasion that libreoffice breaks when reading a doc I received
* gaming: bought most of the humble bundles featuing linux games, bought some on linux steam; i'm obviously not a hardcode gamer, tho

When did I start using desktop Linux: when I switched from Amiga :)

Should you? D'oh, it's a tool. Use what you like (and what you need).
The USA calls subsidies a different name but they're still subsidies especially sugar and corn crops. It's do as I say not as I do even if the rules are broken, but it's no shock coming from the US.

NAFTA supposedly has wording about subsidies but the US often denies it I am just going by what I hear since living in an agricultural region you hear this stuff since birth even if you're not a farmer or fisherman.
Blackstone Group, Icahn Said to Submit Proposals to Dell
as a wordpress developer using it as a framework I love this like "WordPress isn’t a platform suited to anyone except those unlucky enough to have somehow become WordPress developers."

I'd love to see his vision of a code-cleanup happen to WordPress.
Well, Debian has git-buildpackage, which creates .deb packages from git repositories, and can use the commit log for the package changelog.

The problem is, unless the upstream dev uses Debian, why should he care?
Not surprising, as the feature hasn't worked for quite some time, despite still being available to configure within your settings. I am disappointed however, because there are quite a few sites on the Internet that I would much rather not see at all, ever again. They are the noise in my search for signal in my Google search results. And the entire point of switching to Google way back in the day was the quality of their search results versus what was available in the late 90s.

Being able to personally fine tune those results myself, outside of what a robot thought to "personally" customize my experience to, was a great feature. Suggesting I use a third party plugin for a browser I don't use is hardly a compromise or a solution, and does nothing for my Google search results on mobile platforms where that plugin is not now nor will likely ever be available.
quantum random numbers are not subconscious.

400Mhz is a little hard for a 10Hz brain cell to synchronize to. Quantumn random numbers destroys your stupiditity in a way even you should be able to understand.

God says...

7:1 My son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee.

7:2 Keep my commandments, and live; and my law as the apple of thine
eye.

7:3 Bind them upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine
heart.

7:4 Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy
kinswoman: 7:5 That they may keep thee from the strange woman, from
the stranger which flattereth with her words.

7:6 For at the window of my house I looked through my casement, 7:7
And beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a
young man void of understanding, 7:8 Passing through the street near
her corner; and he went the way to her house, 7:9 In the twilight, in
the evening, in the black and dark night: 7:10 And, behold, there met
him a woman with the attire of an harlot, and subtil of heart.
Nah, I upgraded a few servers...Didn't see much improvement.

Wait for 3.8, with tcp slow start improvments.
Meaningful versioning (aka "semantic versioning", http://semver.org/) isn't super important for an application. It's super important when dealing with libraries, of which libcurl is.
I'm going to have to test drive Firefox this week. I've been hearing a lot great things lately.
honestly I have not used the API, i've done some web scraping, if you want you can download the database here ;)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pzhqhtk4g23temz/crunchbase.sql.zip
As far as I'm concerned, the best 'nugget' in the article was towards the end, regarding how developers have a genuine passion for their craft, irrespective of monetary concerns. And that they would not change their careers even for a substantial increase in salary.

To me, this counts as an indication that there is something genuinely interesting and comfortable about computer programming (and the logical essence of the activity), perhaps something that is well compatible with human nature.

Especially within the recent context of how the materialistic hysterias – birthed by consumerist systems of ideas – have created so many issues in our economies & societies, I hope this study draws more people towards the "logical side" (where we have cookies).
Surprised nobody has mentioned a Land Value Tax.

http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/21/a-telling-silence/
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/mehdi-hasan/2012/02/land-t...
I built 2 CloudFormation templates to allow you to easily spin up a ton of these things across multiple availability zones. It uses the Amazon Linux AMI that exists in each region instead of the ones listed, and builds up the dependencies and the application on the fly. You can run either of these two templates in any region and it should just work.

Download one of these files:

With a keypair ( so you can login to the host)
http://files.wordsaboutbytes.com/yahoo-messages-save.cf.txt

Without a keypair ( can’t log in locally, but it will run)
http://files.wordsaboutbytes.com/yahoo-messages-save-nokeypa...

Then:

1. Open the console ( https://console.aws.amazon.com )

2. Go to CloudFormation

3. Give your stack a name

4. Browse and select the file you downloaded from above

5. Click Next.

6. Fill in the parameters here ( # of instances, The nick you want to be tracked with at the archive team site, the spot price you are willing to pay, and optionally a keypair if you selected that file).

7. Check the box at the bottom acknowledging that the template will create IAM resources ( used by the host to bootstrap )

8. Click Continue.

9. Tags if you want, or click continue.

10. Review. Click Continue.

11. Close.

This will launch however many instances you told it to, as t1.micro’s, as the spot price you set it to. When you want to stop, you just go and delete the stack in this console and everything should go away.

Running this right now in US-West-2, spread across all 3 AZ's there, about 90 instances total, and cranking through things.
Mortgage interest not deductible here (Canada). Our current mortgage rate is 3.8% so given marginal taxe rate of 46% I would need to have a guaranteed return of at least 8.3% just to match wha I would save by "investing" in my mortgage. You tell me where I can get a 8.3% return over the next 5 yrs, guaranteed. PS here in Canada (maybe exception is Vancouver) our housing market is v stable, in my City house prices did not even dip during 2008 crisis. Yay Canada!
Well ... Linux is acquired taste. But I can think of few points - privacy and security - with windows 8, windows store and ms kindly suggesting to link your desktop and ms accounts (and skype and facebook) windows is becoming somewhat troublesome and moving to a walled garden system.

And also a lot of stuff on linux finally works. And open source toolchains are much more prevalent nowadays and they thrive on Linux. So if your job is not chained to a ms stack and you don't mind getting your hands dirty from time to time and can suffer trough some problems with gaming, there are few arguments against switching.
The “Fracking” Revolution Comes to China
Wow, I've never seen anyone else who knew about White's reality check. Unfortunately, it is patented (US Patent 5,893,069). There's also a related thing called the test for Superior Predictive Ability (SPA), by Peter Reinhard Hansen, which is not patented (afaik). We liked it better for other reasons as well.
[ Paper ] The Ethics of Hacking - CEH - Saher Team
Thank you for identifying that Krugman is both an economist and an ideologue. HN readers identify closely with the former so they often ignore or excuse the latter.
Yes. Being comfortable in meetings most likely makes them more productive.

There are limits, such as nudity, which can be distracting, but it's about being reasonable, and unfortunately different people draw that line of reasonability in different places.
No one owes those bloggers traffic. Certainly Paul Krugman is completely out of left field to suggest that the traffic is a public service.
Are you really surprised that someone like Krugman would argue

"seems hard at this point to envision search and related functions as public utilities, but that’s arguably where the logic will eventually lead us."

That is the "logical conclusion" for people of his ilk.

And I'm not surprised by the first comment that I found on the article:

It is the height of capitalist folly to insist that a profit-seeking corporation is the right form of organization for operating facitilites that become essential global public utilities.

Why of course. This guy is just random article commenter, but you know your average, hardcore leftist thinks the same way. Facebook must come under UN or some other quasi-governmental control. It needs to be controlled. Well, duh...
Revoking Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize would be a public good.
SemVer is great for versioning APIs and the libraries that expose them, but very poor for versioning complex user-facing apps that are composed of many parts. Do you increment the major version when you have a backwards-incompatible change in the Javascript engine? In the layout engine? In the DOM API? In the preferences storage format? In the plugin API? How about if you completely remade the UI (which could be argued is the "average user's API"), but kept all the programming APIs the same? Each release of Firefox is a composite of many parts, each of which may or may not have breaking changes.

I think that what Chrome (and later Firefox) ended up doing is a pretty good compromise. The major version of Chrome is basically "Chrome" - if they ever break compatibility in any kind of major way, it probably will be as a different project. Firefox is the same way.

I know that it'd be great if you could derive deep secrets about the changes in each release from just the version number, but that just doesn't scale to complex projects. Use SemVer and similar schemes where they're appropriate, but don't treat them like they're the only right choice.
How to Think Differently Like Steve Jobs
False dichotomy. I'm sure someone in the entire company has five minutes while fixing the problem to explain to us what's going on.
I really hope they find a way to support native mac os notifications.
Good-faith business failure is fine. It's excellent, insofar as it's a byproduct of something very good: taking risks in a world of convex payoff.

Associating with a Bitcoin startup is a different story. Bitcoin is a sleazy scam designed to enrich people who got in early and sold at the top.

It's not a problem of making a call that fails. That's going to happen in this business. It's the taste issue. Unless they were something else in their YC application and became a Bitcoin startup, they should have known better.
Personal Blacklist is an official Google extension, it just doesn't sync with anything or save to a database. At least for my purposes, I don't need it anywhere but my desktop machine to help out in result pruning (experts exchange, fixya).

Their offered download link doesn't even work for me, it just notifies me of its shutdown.
I have used several shopping platforms and I consider Magento to be far superior to other shopping platforms that I have used – although, at first I was pretty critical of it.

My initial criticisms of Magento (particularly versions before 1.4) were around its performance issues. However, they have improved this significantly and are getting better although like anything, if you want Magento to be fast and scalable you need to have some knowledge of PHP and Web Server configuration so that you can easily optimize Magento’s caching to your particular store(s).

Having said that, some "quick wins" I found to improve performance and scalability of Magento were:

Reduce HTTP Requests - Optimising your theme, cropping your images etc

Use a CDN

Enable Block Caching where it makes sense - have a look at http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/5_-_modules_and_developm... for more details

Instead of using mod_php use FastCGI to Run PHP – if you have to use mod_php turn KeepAlive Off

Delve into the Configuration settings & disable modules which aren’t essential to your store - System -> Configuration -> Advanced -> Advanced

Likewise, some other big/notable players using Magento include:

Warby Parker - http://www.warbyparker.com/

Overstock Deals - http://www.overstockdeals.com/

Gap/Blue Navy/Banana Republic/PiperLime/Athleta – http://www.gap.com
> Google is an advertising company, not an Internet search company.

I would avoid defining a company by its current monetization strategy especially in an industry where monetization is frequently an afterthought (it was for Google).

Furthermore, it doesn't do much to define a company since there are only so many monetization strategies.

What if we'd start defining companies by whether they are "for-profit" or "non-profit" instead? We'd end up with such non sense as "Google is a for-profit company, not an Internet search company." Or with, "B2B" vs "B2C": "Google is a B2B company, not an Internet search company."

If you are going to pick only one thing that defines a company, at least pick something that really makes them stand out (Google - search, Apple - consumer electronics, Facebook - social networking, etc.).
I have been using desktop Linux for a while.

I use it for everything from development to web browsing and even gaming (I don't dual boot). Off the top of my head I can't think of any Windows software that I would use which does not have an equivalent or better FLOSS alternative.

My main tools are:

* Chromium: Google Docs and Gmail

* Sublime Text 2

* The terminal (URxvt, zsh): Vim, Mplayer

* Transmission

I've tried getting back into Windows but it felt like it was missing something.
Finally someone who:

1. Thought through the application/library from the beginning so that new features and changes are binary compatible.

2. Is considerate of the distribution/repository world we live in, doesn't just say "ain't my problem"

3. Doesn't just add numbers to do it.

Good work sir, stay strong curl 7
In the word processing space, the cost to switch providers is much higher because unlike in the rss space, the average user isn't usually technically inclined. It is why MSword persists as a huge market leader, even after its ribbon interface turned it into crap, and there were competitive FOSS alternatives to a hundred dollar purchase price.

Google docs as a consumer use case isn't bad - hopefully you have the brain to know how to get all your drive content and switch when they eventually kill Google Docs as not profitable enough.

The problem is the business use case - and this comes from the popularity in the consumer space. The collaberative features of docs/drive is even more applicable in a workplace environment, and if businesses that hire "less technically inclined" people and have to hand hold them into getting used to it, and are presented with a demand to switch, the transition overhead would be massive.

It is actually a strong business interest to use FOSS because I bet it would cost less to get a junior developer to manage a fork of an old interface / feature that was depreciated in mainline and keep the security up to date than it would cost an actually big business to switch their entire software suite away from a depreciated closed product / one that radically shifts.
How to promote a free e-book to boost traffic and increase sales
Opera's Webkit Pathches
Microsoft is also paying developers up to $2000 to develop apps for Windows 8 & Windows Phone

http://build.windowsstore.com/keepthecash
Starlight (and sunlight) chiefly is thermal radiation. The CMB is something distinct, originating from before there were any stars at all!

Re:contamination, luckily stars in general are fairly sparsely distributed, so we can simply remove those areas. Apparently the plane of our own galaxy does have to be mostly cut out, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_rad...
Not on desktops, they don't. Even if a "bundle" can be considered built-in, should I buy a whole new computer when my monitor breaks?
Garage48 Music hackathon ideas in progress
Amazon has also been collecting NY State sales tax for quite some time now. Does anyone know if Amazon has any physical presence in NY State? I've never received anything from Amazon that has been shipped from NY.

I noticed that items that are sold by Amazon always incur NY tax, but items sold by independent retailers who sell through Amazon's site often don't incur tax.