skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This post isn’t about how we pitched [...], but rather how we reasoned
> through our fears (and, later, the fears of our investors).

TL;DR: Porn's not any worse than anything else can be.
Scala Async, simpler non-blocking asynchronous and concurrent programming
You're confusing money and wealth. And you saying it yourself, to quote "your wealth increases"

Yes, but this is not the same as making money. You're are not richer in relative terms, than you were. It's only stuff who has get cheaper around.. because people have learned how to produce stuff more efficiently, i.e. cheaper.

And you example with doubling population (in a few years no less) is cheating because.. because you have just added a lot poor people into example.. But, OK. Suppose those of two extra people a person A kids.. But what exactly logic are they not entitled to the whole value of their parent savings?
> When talking about farm help, they may hold a grudge against the animals they are working with. A friend would work his uncle's farm every saturday to help clean up after the pigs. His job was basically shoveling pig poop for 8 hours (or other equally not-fun jobs). It would take a day before he smelled normal again. Doing this kind of work can make some people resentful of the animals they work with.

Working in a call center, I resented every customer I dealt with. At no point did I electrocute, scald, maim or torture them. Not just because of the distance, but because I'm not a fucking psychopath. People who abuse living creatures do not need any defense; on the contrary, they're immoral, depraved and indefensible.
Could you share some of the business details of running a porn site? I've always been curious, but there's not much reliable information. Something in this industry would probably be a smash hit business case.

- Supply chain: how do you source models? How do you negotiate fees? What is the average fee, and how do they charge?

- Are there inter-business politics? Like, will some models refuse to shoot scenes with other models?

- How do models work legally? Do you contract them or employ them if they've never done a shoot before?

- What are your profit margins like, and what are your breakeven numbers like?

- How often do you demand STI testing data? Are models worried about this?

- Are models your main source of COGS? What are your major expense items?

- What are the most challenging decisions you have to make on a daily basis?

- Is porn really a hyper-competitive market?

I've seen business cases from a ton of different industries, but adult entertainment has been completely secluded. Any information would be wonderful :)
Couple things here.

First, corporate profits are aberrantly high for a number of reasons, none of which are likely to be permanent. John Hussman, an analyst whom I respect deeply, has a good discussion of this from the perspective of stock valuations, but the basic point is relevant here. [http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc130408.htm]

Second, while I agree that this is "the story" in a purely journalistic sense, it's important not to get too carried in discussions about relative income distributions and miss the forest for the trees, as it were.

Income inequality is not an informationally useful statistic on its own. Income inequality can be thought of as a measure of the strength of incentives in a system. Those incentives can be good or bad on their own. In 3rd world nations, income inequality is a reflection of the strong incentive to be corrupt and steal. In the closed system of Goldman Sachs, income inequality (among employees) is a measure of the incentive to achieve annual performance targets. In the context of the public education system, it is a measure of the incentive to achieve seniority and bureaucratic promotions. In startups it reflects the incentive to get acquired or IPO. Et cetera.

In the United States, when people say that income inequality is too high, what they're usually thinking is that the wrong things are being incentivized and rewarded. That's a fine discussion to have, and I would agree that certain industries [health care jumps immediately to mind] suffer from deep and severe incentive problems that are reflected when you look at income distributions within those sectors.

But the problem is not the income distribution; it's the fact that income is being distributed unequally for the wrong reasons. That is the conversion people should be having.
Well, there's IE6 Compatibility Mode.
Paypal was already a mature product back then. Literally every major bank already offered custom-branded payment pages and an API to process credit card payments. Why would you bother to build Chargify to offer custom-branded payment pages and an API to process credit card payments?

Well, because Chargify is miles better than Paypal and banks. Maybe that guy next to me has a face-tweet-o-base idea that's miles better, too.
Distributed Weather Network on Smartphones Crowdsources Data for Meteorologists
An expert in farming has a conflict of interest in determining whether using animals for humans is ethical.

Sure, I'd trust a farmer on the most "effective" way to artificially inseminate a cow, but I don't need to study farming to say the instrument known as the "rape rack" is immoral.

I argue they're standing too close to see the big picture.
Geoffrey and Alex are super sharp hackers and awesome people. Here's a video of them demonstrating the project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnBb1wmHj5k
There will be only 21 million bitcoins. Ever.
That's not entirely right. The American Revolution and the Founding Fathers borrowed some ideas from the French Revolution, which would make that revolution the first in line. Yes, it was major, but it wasn't the first.
It's a question of degree. Your savings account with $100,000 in it will probably be worth about $100,002 tomorrow at current rates. The equivalent amount in Bitcoin might be worth much, much more at the rate it's been climbing.
More people use git; I'm becoming increasingly convinced that few of them actually know git.
I have noticed a growing trend of reporting best practices, that attempt to minimize animal suffering as much as possible, as animal cruelty.

I am reminded of Mike Rowe's discussion about castration and docking of lambs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-udsIV4Hmc
Half-joking plug: http://github.com/darkf/possum-ocaml does prefix without parenthesis.
I don't understand this article in the least. The idea that people shouldn't be doing things they want to do on their own time, that you'd rather say "be honest, not everyone is an entrepreneur," than let people explore their potential themselves.. the whole thing is offensive and depressing.

For a lot of my friends, side projects are the only thing keeping their passion for programming alive. You say below "If you're not happy with your job, just quit," as if it's easy for people to up and leave the position they're in. Not everyone lives in a tech hotspot and not everyone actually wants to or can just up and leave their roles. A lot of these side projects are explicitly being worked on so that they can get more up-to-speed with certain technologies with the intent to apply for something more satisfying to begin with. And if there wasn't value in side projects, companies wouldn't have any reason to "own" what you work on outside of your 9-5.

If you're not getting value from your employee because they're distracted or they don't have the faith or enthusiasm they used to, that's on you to sit them down and talk to them about it and maybe figure out a way to compromise; telling someone they can't spend time on their hobbies anymore is a petty response that doesn't look at the real issue at hand. Perhaps the problem really lies in your camp, not theirs. If you're so concerned your developers are going to up and leave to work on their own dream, you need to incentivize them more. Or, you know, get over it and realize that's business and people have other ambitions outside of your own and there's no reason that they should have to stick around to fulfill them, especially if this is the attitude you have towards the types of things that keep them motivated. If you're really concerned about not being able to create your product because your devs are going to bail to do what they ultimately want to do in their life, perhaps you should become one yourself instead of telling them how they can and cannot live their lives outside of your payroll.
lolwut? had it said "ruby" or "python", there'd be a shortage of tear gas and cars would be burning in the streets.
I think that's the first time I've seen "[SFW]", but I appreciate that you made it explicit.
The economy is also not a theoretical abstraction. Wealth disparity has rippling effects throughout society. If it's Pareto efficient that the super rich make 10x more and ordinary people make 1% more, it can still be sociologically undesirable.

What you see is an economy replete with goods and services, but by and large one in which the people getting rich neither make, consume, nor develop the technology to make those goods. It takes a special sort to see all the gains in wealth go to the investor and manager class and argue that this is the proper order of things.
Will the numbers behind volume investing change your thoughts on crowd funding?
> 1. If a new version of git adds a command that shadows one of your aliases, you'd really prefer "git foo" to silently run the new command?

Yes. Otherwise command line scripts will start doing horrible things. It was never intended that you can alias builtins, the only reason you might think you can is because it is allowed in mercurial which I think is a horrible idea.

> `git checkout -- somefile.py` does not have anything to do with checking out a revision.

Of course not. `git checkout` checks out things. You can check out a lot of things. Just because it works differently in hg does not mean it's wrong in git. git checkout does what it says on the tin: it checks out a branch or paths to the working tree.

> I like Mercurial's named branches because I don't need to create a branch for every single commit.

I think the concept of named branches in mercurial are hugely flawed and were the final nail in the coffin of why I migrated over to git. And I never looked back.

> What if you want the current branch in your prompt?

Then you use the underlying low-level commands or even better, you cat `.git/HEAD` which will be even faster. Not sure why for your prompt to look nice you need to have non-cryptic commands. Exactly for things like prompts there is the plumbing.

> gives you the same power as Git and has a UI where "--help x", "-h x", "help x", "x -h", and "x --help" all do the same thing

How is this different from mercurial? If anything mercurial has even more ways to show help: `man hg` which shows the manpage for all the builtin commands. `hg help` which shows a short version or `hg -v help` which shows a long version (which is not the man page). git only has two help pages: man pages for long and short text for short.

> gives you the same power as Git

I have yet to see this.
a thing I've been wishing I had is some sort of price-vs-difficulty comparison metric - you might think, for example, that the dramatic rise in bitcoin costs would mean that mining had gotten more profitable - but unfortunately, the first wave of "Application Specific Integrated Circuits" are being deployed, and they're not even available for sale yet - so the mining capacity is suddenly and dramatically in the hands of a small group of organizations.
But that hasn't been obvious at all from the various charts online.
Unwittingly in this attempt to legislate, they might have found the best way possible to raise moral justification to do farm tapes in the first place.
This is incredible! Unfortunately, Shodan itself appears to be down at the moment, presumably due to traffic from CNN. Awesome nonetheless.
I'm a little confused. Why is there IE6 lockin? Apps weren't built so they could at least be easily upgraded to IE8? Some testing is required and no one wants to do the work?

My memory isn't that hazy. What happened was that people said the software only had to run in IE6 and Netscape wasn't important. Writing "good" web software wasn't important. Simply support Microsoft's IE6 and you're done. If you're still stuck on IE6/IE7 it really is your own fault.
Most of the cases where Blackstone's forumulation comes in are where the justice system thinks its job done after the innocent is punished. Texas, for instance, has resisted the checking of DNA evidence because (in part) it would bring up the emotional wounds to the victim. In that case, however, you are not punishing one innocent and ten guilty men; you are punishing one innocent and letting the guilty go free.
No, they just want you to download a newer browser. Yes, MSFT wants you to buy their products, but that isn't the intention of this site. The only thing this site does is a) promote site owners to warn users of old browsers b) promote users to tell others to upgrade and c) promote recent versions of IE to visitors

But you're very right about the legacy applications. We seem to have been able to at least upgrade to IE8...still not that good though.
Charlie Collier Built AMC Into a Creative Empire Using Mad Men Its Foundation
This was posted over 2 years ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2288550

Edit: Domain was actually registered over 3.5 years ago
2.25 / 10 years
Actually, one of my favorite blogs is http://www.greaterfool.ca ;)

I'm familiar with the greater fool theory. But people buy commodities, currencies and financial instruments on this expectation of increased future valuation. There could be a case made that the greater fool theory is in effect for bitcoins, but it can't be said that it is the case simply because people expect higher valuation in the future.
We may have different images in our minds when we talking about animal cruelty. There are different things people can do to be cruel to their animals and they may do it for different reasons.

Honestly, I can't talk on this subject all that well. I've never had to work a farm, but I've had a number of friends over the years that grew up on farms and I got to hear lots of fun stories about it. Seeing and hearing these interactions with animals may change your opinion on the subject (either to help you understand why farm hands act the way they do, or to make you a vegetarian).

My main point is: being a farmer is hard, the pay isn't all that great. Try to understand what a farmer has to do on a daily basis. See how they look at their animals. Put yourself in their shoes. But to really do this, you need exposure to see what they deal with. This could be in-person exposure or a detailed run-through in a book or documentary.

The media likes to report the scandalous issues about farming, but there are many farmers that treat their animals properly. Don't base your opinions on farming from the few that are cruel.
InDev: Fast & Flexible Replacement For Makefile & GruntJS
then we can expect a cascade of similar legislation banning taping in non-profits (Acorn), pseudo-private areas, etc.?
The French Revolution comes a full 13 years after the American Declaration of Independence, 2 years after the adoption of the US Constitution, and several months after the US Constitution was ratified and went into effect.
This creates a big problem.

It’s a problem because side projects create a talent bubble of people who aren’t fully engaged and are just doing enough at their “real” or full-time job to get by until their startup is up and running.

Let's be more careful about using the word "bubble." Its intent is to imply large size—thousands, tens of thousands of otherwise capable engineers are all expending their thought and energy on side projects instead of making their corporations richer!

Even if this assertion was actually true (it's obviously not), I'm not convinced that there is any large-scale harm to society, or even to the companies where these would-be entrepreneurs are employed.
Why downvote? It's true, and we need to be stealing that somehow.
> More people use git; I'm becoming increasingly convinced that few of them actually know git.

And yet I have noticed that people find merging and branching much easier than in mercurial. Few people understand the implications of named branches in hg.
Ok, I can see that people disagree, however, I point to:

"Python 3.0 final was released on December 3rd, 2008"
I believe you're speaking of CPI-style inflation, or in the case of Bitcoin, deflation.

The rate of money supply inflation of Bitcoin is around 12% at the moment[1]. Until 2025 or so, the supply inflation rate of Bitcoin will be greater than 1%.

I fully expect the exchange rate to fluctuate wildly until a much larger supply of fiat and Bitcoin sits on both sides of the exchange order book. As it stands, a moderately-capitalized trader could throw the exchange rate around at a whim.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=130619.0
Nothing to say about the article, but I loved the format of this:

> However, quite simply, porn is not inherently evil. (If you refute that, you’re engulfed by the Victorian-era hyperbole of the sinful and tasteless expressions of sexuality.)

You can rewrite it in the general form as:

> Assertion X. (If you disagree, you're clearly unreasonable.)

Making an assertion and then following it with a parenthetical over-simplification, and quick dismissal of, an opposing viewpoint. It lets you say what you want, take a quick jab at the opposition, and quickly scurry away.

If you're going to write that kind of a one-off statement you raise more questions about your own understanding of the issue than you answer and you may as well not write it. (And if you don't understand why, you're clearly an unpersuasive writer.)
Business Lessons From Fab’s Jason Goldberg
To me 'humane' simply means that the animal hasn't suffered. Can't male chicks be gassed rather than ground alive? Can't a cow be inseminated naturally, or artificially under a general anaesthetic?
Dupe of http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/08/technology/security/shodan/, I guess it fell through since the URL is slighly different.
I think the first-movers want that effect.

Say there are 1000 people in the country, and WLOG each of them owns 1/1000th of the wealth.

One of them goes away for 100 years and comes back. The entire country is richer: there are more resources, more people, more goods, more IP, more of everything. And this guy still expects to have claim to 1/1000th of everything in the country.

It's extremely obvious why that first-mover would love that system, and try to convince everyone else to go along with it. It's very dubious what the others would get out of it or why they would ever buy in, besides imagining they could some day be the one who gets to exploit the system at the expense of everyone else.
Bitcoin Now Worth Two Billion Dollars
Oh, so it is!

The reasons I wasn't convinced a web-service-based IL optimisation pass would be commercially viable were: loss of determinism in compilation, the law of diminishing returns (throwing 10x effort might generally give only a few percentage points gain), and the idea of parts of the compiler literally being a black box being unpalatable to a lot of people. Also, IP and confidentiality concerns.

OTOH PG's idea was slightly different; it reads to me like he's talking about something that starts with source code.
They should pass a law requiring 24 hr cameras in all animal facilities broadcasting to the web. People who care could monitor the feeds.

If no cruelty takes place and those who care about animals not being mistreated cover the costs, it is win win.
Sorry, you're right, by "the norm" I meant that the majority of meat etc consumed comes from factory farms.

I agree with you that setting unreasonable or unrealistic goals is problematic. Although I personally stick to a 99% vegan diet, I've never been an abolitionist and I think setting reasonable goals and working towards them within the system is probably more productive, such as Temple Grandin's work.

Pushing for legislation like this doesn't make me very sympathetic towards the industry though.
I'm a semanticist precisely for that reason. Due to ill definition of the term "terrorist", it went from "Violent supporter of an agenda that uses scare tactics to demoralize" to "People filming Animal Abuse" or other more benign individuals that do not deserve that description.
Microsoft tried, really. They made it super-easy to set up in Windows 7. It just didn't really help. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/feature...
This divorce is going to be painful.
Well, this is new to me. Thanks for sharing this! :)

I hope Canonical will stick to just getting language compatibility, streamlining and just plain consistency when they finally release rather than helping with government monitoring and censorship. If the government does take the end product and introduce these, there's nothing much that can be done, except making sure the sources are widely available for study.

At least, that would make the officials reluctant to stick blatant examples of monitoring.
what law are you talking about? I'd be intrested to learn more. can you provide a source / links?
Single best is difficult, here are some favourites of mine:

"You and your research" by Richard Hamming:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

"How to design a good API and why it matters" by Joschua Bloch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw

Google TechTalk on Git by Linus Torvalds:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

All talks ever given by Alan Kay, for example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
Take some online classes on programming! There are plenty of free classes you can take online now through Coursera, edX, or Udacity. The classes are offered for the benefit of the students more than anything else, but they do offer certificates (the vast majority of them at least) of completion as well as paced assignments which are graded. This may be more along the lines of traditional proof that you are being productive that your parents are looking for. Additionally, if they are worried about you going to college, most colleges have a process by which you can take an exam for credit for courses which you purport to already be knowledgeable in. It's possible that if you learn the material from an online course, you could end up translating that knowledge to credit wherever you go to school. If you make this argument to your parents, you may be able to continue learning what you're interested, furthering your education, and appeasing them all at the same time.
Interesting questions. I'll touch upon this in a future blog post.

For now, we've indirectly answered some of those points in an infographic we put together: http://paintbottle.com/press/infographic_production.jpg
just because there is an html page being served doesn't mean you can access the control systems.

you're also assuming no one has done it - I have no idea wether or not someone has used shodan for malicious purposes, but that certainly doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
It is perfectly valid and beneficial to have side projects.

First, it lets you experiment with new technologies and frameworks outside of your regular duties. (This can pay dividends to the employer)

Second, it can keep you from code burn out by giving you a creative release. (Also a benefit to the employer)

Third, it gives you freedom to experiment with smaller projects that might not be enough to support a person but create value for someone none-the-less.

Finally, one of those side projects might get traction and create a sustainable business.

Not everyone has the freedom to throw caution into the wind. And oftentimes, even if they do, it is not the best move.
I'm not sure how to interpret your argument. It just seems like your pissed of someone else has 2,000,000 dollars.