skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Intuition? Hell no, before reading TFSTTE, I would have done exactly the same thing. It's only because I was fortunate enough to be exposed to that that I now know better.

I can say that in my experience reading Four Steps or The Lean Startup and actually doing a startup are completely different things.

Absolutely, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. Note that I didn't say "OMG, you guys suck, if you'd just read this book you'd all be millionaires and dining with Zuckerberg now". But the whole "Do a big-bang PR launch before you've proven anything" is textbook "how to fail as a startup", if you believe that @sgblank's stuff is valid.

I thought I had the whole lean startup thing down, but I've messed up so many times.

Tell me about it, we learn more everyday. I'm not saying any of this is easy, mind you. It's just that this particular example jumped out at me for being such an egregious example of such a common and well-cited mistake, that it's a little hard to believe.

And hey, I haven't proven anything yet, so nobody should feel any particular reason to care about my opinion. I'm just a guy who's a bit drunk, sitting in front of the computer a little bit bored before bedtime, and blabbing about stuff.
Back in the real world, the web is not inevitable. The alternative to HTML5 DRM is for vendors to turn away from the web and HTML5 altogether.

The web is still open by default, versus other platforms being closed by default. The best architecture is to support fine-grained plugins with well-defined semantics than just some big black box <object> element that could be running anything.
I'm so torn about this.

As a shareholder, it's great news for me. But as a member of the tech industry and generally idealistic guy, it hurts to see them bending to the calls of the finance industry.
Is it though?

Take this example, there's really no reason for me to do anything EXCEPT that the upstream dependencies have been yanked. Now I need to do a bunch of porting.
> Atheistic religiosity is still religiosity

Right. Replacing one form of blind adherence with another is not an improvement.

There are people who have no blind adherence to anything. It is possible, and we need more of them. That isn't something IFLS can help with.
There's must be a natural ratio, the population size is finite!

Divide the number of women who want to be in tech by the number of people who want to be in tech and you have the ratio.

But yes, we obviously have to do some work to figure out the numbers.
Shouldn't that be what we're striving for?

Much though I really hate to admit this, npm and the node community are on the right track here.
Calling "copyright protection" a straw-man is in itself a straw-man.
The coolest thing about Counsyl is that it's taking the tech startup philosophy and ideas and applying them to biology. Software is eating the world, and Counsyl is bringing that to a new--and very important--arena.

An added benefit is that much of what Counsyl does does not depend on the actual biology behind it. I attended one of their infosessions at Berkeley, and I remember a whole bunch of jobs like managing supplies and billing that are simultaneously nontrivial and unrelated to the actual domain. I've never much liked biology personally, so that's very promising.

If you want to work on something meaningful but don't really like genetics or medicine, Counsyl still seems like a great option.
Consumers don't care about implementation, they only care about the content, and until they do, suppliers of content hold all the cards.

There is nothing to be won by resisting hooks for DRM in the browser however appealing it seems to take a principled stand. The content suppliers will gleefully go with native apps, flash, silverlight, even Emscripten-cross-compiled codecs. With content consumption going mobile, the push for native apps is even stronger.

Really, all you'll do by resisting this, is teach the majority of consumers who don't know any better that the Web sucks, and all of the enjoyable things they want are to be found on iOS or other proprietary locked down distribution platforms. That if you want apps that deliver the stuff you are interested in, you have to look outside the web.

Back when Chrome proposed dropping H264 support, I was infuriated, even though I fully support WebM as the mandatory to implement codec. I don't think "purity" really serves the platform, flexibility does, and the best way to register you don't like DRM is to simply stop consuming any and all media which uses it. Not just Web media, but all media that's DRMed.

A DRM free HTML5 spec is not going to force Hollywood to allow you to play Games of Thrones on your open source Linux browser.
I didn't say anything about anybody sucking. I just find it surprising that this particular scenario is still happening, that's all.
I've heard many times that Google's 20 percent time is going the way of the dodo. Don't work at Google or anything, just heard you really have to push to get it now.
If you're getting a salary you simply aren't taking that much risk.

You can't argue that employees get a salary and thus don't deserve as much reward, but simultaneously argue that even though founders get a salary, because it is below market rate they deserve more reward. Both parties are getting paid below market rate.
I don't see why the marginal value of profits drops to zero. Profits fund bets on the future. The bigger the profits, the bigger the bets that can be made.
Show HN: Personalized Product Discovery
As someone who studied biotech (with an agricultural focus though), who now works in software, this is a very exciting development. Ah, to live in California! I do love Tokyo though.
My co-founder and I only just started paying ourselves this year, and we've been paying our employees good wages ever since they started, last year.

So yes, some founders will forego a salary (like us). Others won't. We pay ourselves when the company can afford to pay us, but we always pay our employees first.
> How would that be achieved without a law?

By changing people's attitudes.

> The goal is really to remove obstacles that unfairly exclude some people from the field. I don't think that will happen all by itself. If if could, it would.

While legally provable gender discrimination is an issue, I think the bigger issue is changing people's attitudes. I agree that can't happen all by itself, but I do think it can happen without laws. Call me optimistic, but I think all these discussions on Hacker News (and other places) are part of what will change things - that is, people arguing with each other, hashing stuff out, and moving forward. It's a slow, painful process, but, in my opinion, it is the permanent solution.
> Noone will force you to browse websites that use DRM.

If you want to stay legal and watch their content, you bet they will. Major networks will require their distributors to use this DRM. Sure, you don't have to use their content, but the point of fighting it is that we want to use their content and are trying to prevent them from this step.
It's for the same reason they use MySQL instead of Postgres.

Hey, as Scott Adams would say, "at least there's a reason"!
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2000-02-13/
The primary difference is that we're performing a clinical grade test that gives our patients actionable information. We only test for autosomal recessive disorders that will affect the health of your children. Unless you've been tested before, you don't know if you're a carrier. If both parents test positive for the same mutation then your child has a 25% chance of being born with the disease. This information allows you to make an informed decision about how to bring a healthy child into the world. (You have a few options once you have our test results -- in-vitro, adoption, or a normal pregnancy if the disease is manageable).

23andMe gives you SNP mutation results for many more genes that may or may not be associated with the disease that they report. They do a pretty good job of curation, but their SNPs do not guarantee your future disease status. Knowing that I have 2.3% higher odds of getting diabetes later in life is not going to meaningfully impact my day-to-day life, I already knew diabetes runs in my family, after all.

23andMe is great, don't get me wrong (many of us at Counsyl are 23andMe members, including myself), but they provide a different service for a different market.

Our test requires a doctor's prescription and we include a free genetic counseling session (from our own licensed genetic counselors) for all patients. Finding out that you and your partner are carriers for a serious disease can be a big surprise and cause a lot of confusion and stress. We have great GCs to explain the effects of each disease and how they could manage it in a child, if they choose to have a normal pregnancy. We're more than just a SNP testing lab, we want to give you all of the information you need to have a healthy pregnancy.

disclosure: I am a software developer at Counsyl, currently working on insurance automation and internal tools for our support staff.
It depends on the level of 'sharing.' If it's just statistics (e.g. 10% of people that use our service have discovered X disease), then I don't know how much of your privacy is pierced.
"it's just walking, after all"

I read that in the common dismissive tone that I hear regularly and cringed. I'm not sure it was your intent but when higher-ups try to ascertain the level of complexity/work with little to no knowledge of the problem, these sentences fly.

Having been one of those managers, I understand that they're largely trying to be optimistic and justify their own demands but as a project drags on, it depresses the hell out of me.
This has been my experience as well. Late stage startup is a lot better, since they can pay well + give you stock options that MIGHT work out if they IPO WITHIN 1.5 years of you joining.

Timing is really important here, keep in mind the 4 year vesting. If they did not IPO within the time frame, find another one.
FWIW this product fits my use case perfectly. I want to sync lots of data, but I don't want to pay for Dropbox because I really, really don't care if my stuff gets into the "cloud". I just want it across machines. Currently I use AeroFS, but this looks spiffy and might find a home on my hard drive.
I confess that I understand very little of this. Can someone explain what does this mean in layman terms?

I did understand that Apple is going to invest more money in its own shares, as a result of which, the portion of Apple, Inc. owned by other investors will be reduced. However -- what does this imply? Is this a general pattern that companies follow at some point in their lifetime?

Again, I apologize for my lack of knowledge in this domain.
Because the screen version is not as readable on a screen as the print version.
It's still a proposal at this point. It should be opposed, obviously.
I don't work at a startup. But, there is a big advantage of working at a startup over a company like Conde Nest.

Conde Nest is no longer growing rapidly which means...
That the only way to move up is for people to quit or for you to out politic your coworkers.

Contrast that with a rapid growth company, lets say one that IPOs in 10 years, yeah, you get a payout, but you also should get a huge increase in salary and responsibility over those 10 years.
This really feels like a smaller version of the American story. Corporate boards make large investment gambles, stock market tumbles, the regular people end up paying when it all goes south. Nobody on Cooper's board has been asked to step-down for the decisions that led to this crisis.
Those numbers seem pretty off. No employee gets 10%; I'd be surprised if any got 1%. From what I can tell it's closer to 0.1 or 0.2% when you're past say the first 10 engineers.

The "acqui-hire" exits seem to be around $50M; a really good case is $100M.

In that case, you have some chance of making $50K to $200K over 4 years or so, or $12.5 - $50K a year. If you say the chance is 10%, which is indeed wildly optimistic, then you come out to $1.25K to $5K a year, which is essentially negligible. It's nothing compared to a virtually guaranteed bonus at a large company.

So I'm not disagreeing with you, just providing what I think are more realistic numbers.
> I thought tech mas about metocricity.

I couldn't tell, at first, if the last word was supposed to be 'mediocrity' or 'meritocracy'.
No, they don't. They implement ECC by re-purposing some of the existing RAM to hold the parity data. Enabling ECC reduces the usable amount of memory, and also can hurt performance. It offers some improved reliability, but it's nothing like a real server-grade memory system.
We alumni have actually asked basically the entire board and the Cooper president to step down. (Edit: though I don't believe we've made an official petition yet. I'm sure that'll happen soon.)
We can build or we can destroy.

I believe in building, because, despite all those who would destroy and tear things asunder, we builders continue to make progress. Bit by it, piece by piece, the world is becoming a better place.
One of the biggest problems in higher ed shows its face here: increased administration costs[1]. It is ridiculous how bureaucracy has insinuated itself so thoroughly and, as a result, has driven so many costs up, especially during a time when people should be getting more productive thanks to technology.

1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-paid-25...
I'm inclined to believe that culture matters. A lot. I bet it swamps any effects of in-group favoritism. Of course, "culture" is hard to define and even harder to design good controlled experiments to test. On the other hand, I'd be interested to see the results of something like the authors' IAT testing, but looking for "hidden" responses to cultural traits (value of work vs. leisure, family vs. friends) rather than racial images.
What is the level of alumni donation like at Cooper Union? I would think a free education in architecture or engineering (I can't say the same about a free education in art) ought to have some real economic value, and allow some alumni to pay it forward to keep alma mater financially sound.

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=19...
According to Cooper Union’s president, Jamshed Bharucha, it currently operates at a $12 million annual deficit. The number reflects several factors: ... most significantly, $10 million a year in payments on a $175 million loan the school took out a few years ago, in part so that it could invest money in the stock market.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why meaningful bank regulation is long overdue. The signs of the present crisis were there to see for anyone with eyes in 2005: in that year my ex-landlady, who was from Bushwick, one of the poorest parts in New York, bought five rental properties with no-money-down loans.

Let's have this again: Bank of America found nowhere better to invest than in this clueless lady that perceptibly could not run her rental empire successfully, and they loaned her the funds anyway.
You'll be getting .1% or less if you are a new grad joining a early stage startup.

For new grads, I recommend either doing their own startup, or join a large software corp.
Internet cred applies to pen cred surprisingly. If you go down for hacking and do not become an informant, you will find job offers inside the pen for teaching other criminals comsec so they can run their outside drug operations. If they can read about you then it applies to your standings in the pen hierarchy.

That's why prison is never rehab for hackers. They just network with the street criminals and come out super criminals with full cred like Max Vision or the software developer kid here where I live that did a bid for bank fraud, met some gangsters in prison, paroled as a ranking member in their violent dial a dope crew and police have been unable to break up the gang since he joined and took over the comsec and allegedly money laundering for them. They accused him of being able to leak the whereabouts of rivals to his own gang too by social engineering the media and police, plus hacking their blackberries. Strong security knowledge + violent criminal pact with bikers = not good
This reminds me of the beginning of Bob Martin's keynote[0] at Ruby Midwest 2011[1]. I don't agree with everything he said, but the code organization point is sound.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkDN78P884&t=6m39s

[1] http://www.confreaks.com/events/rubymidwest2011
> Considering the USA has actually had the fertility rate drop below replacement levels recently

The USA is not a closed system. If Americans want a lot of kids, the most ethical choice is to adopt many of them from overseas.
Here's a slightly different question.

If I've posted a picture to my personal timeline, can someone post that picture on their own Facebook pages without giving me credit? Can they even modify the picture (add a slogan or whatever) and do the same? I think the Facebook TOS allows both of these:

https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms

Is that how you read it?
Modified to support touch, Vine video: https://twitter.com/wyz/status/326808367437848576
I wouldn't call it "caving" in on music. In a large part Apple effectively blind sided them, I'm sure if given another chance, the RIAA would never let iTunes exist.
To my understanding, women's involvement in early computers was largely as operators and for data entry. In other words, menial labor. It would be easy to retrospectively recolor this reality, if one wanted, as our understanding of what it means to "program" a computer has changed. Today a programmer writes code, back then a programmer manually entered code written by someone else. Recall the term, "PROM programmer" (burner). A PROM programmer certainly did not architect code.

I could be wrong, of course.
It's a way of "giving money back to shareholders" because buying their own shares on the open market means that they inflate the stock price on the market by buying the existing sell orders out there.
Consumers don't care about implementation, they only care about the content, and until they do, suppliers of content hold all the cards.

In this case, forget consumers. Once in a while, something is more important than appeasing the masses.

A DRM free HTML5 spec is not going to force Hollywood to allow you to play Games of Thrones on your open source Linux browser.

Neither is a DRM-infested spec. Instead, you have uninformed consumers Googling for "how can I watch Game of Thrones Season 2 Episode 3 online for free", getting infested with malware, but still watching the show for free.
Different treatment alone isn't enough to make something problematic, it's when the discrimination serves to perpetuate some sort of broader injustice that it becomes a problem. Discrimination without systemic injustice is just harmless capriciousness.
You actually need above market salary at startup since there is no bonus or anything else.

A 15% bonus + 401k match + ESPP + yearly stock grant can easily equal 40k+ for a junior (1-3 year exp) employee.
If you don't mind 2d and are ok without competitive multiplayer, AI War: Fleet Command is a really good take on the RT4X genre.
Question, is this also the case if I'm part of the founding team? I'm not a founder but I'm their first employee.

On another note, the learnings, experience, and connections I gain in the startup compensate the low salary I'm getting. This is my first real job. And I think I'm getting a lot of knowledge in terms of technology and management side.
Indeed. Vendors won't be forced to make a HTML5 version - on the desktop the formula that's allowed them to provide browser plugins hasn't changed, and on mobile they're already making an iOS app and an Android app because today, apps provide a better experience than websites anyway. Sure, your niche mobile platform will be left without any way to experience the content, whereas if not for DRM they could provide an HTML5 player as a least common denominator, but it probably doesn't have enough users for them to terribly mind.

That's not to say that HTML5 EME addresses this, just that nobody is going to be forced to use HTML5 in any case. (It's possible that a proprietary but common CDM standard could be created to allow the least common denominator on mobile, since the regular route of browser plugins won't work there, but that would be its own can of worms.)
The Foundation of All Things Bitcoin
>...it currently operates at a $12 million annual deficit. The number reflects several factors ... most significantly, $10 million a year in payments on a $175 million loan the school took out a few years ago, in part so that it could invest money in the stock market.

In case you were wondering what is the real cause of this event, 85% of the problem is due to an ill advised stock market gamble.

Which brings me to my hobby horse; why are stockbrokers, financial advisors and investment bankers able to collect such huge pay? Y'all should stop feeding these leeches.
What this means is that each share owned by the public will represent a (somewhat) larger share of Apple. If Apple buys back about 15% of the company (about what the $60B plan they announced represents at curren price) then what was previously 85% ownership of the company will now be 100%: about a 17.6% increase.
Lots of execs go on and found the next startup when the deal closes.
Are you referring to the GOG.com versions, or originals? GOG will actually fix the games so they work in newer windows versions[1] For games where that's not feasible (older DOS games, for example), they wrap it a small GUI config and some sane defaults for dosbox.

I've actually taken to buying games I bought in the past (and in some cases still own the media for) specifically because it's supported better, and their digital game shelf allows me to download and install what I want, when I want (and it's cheap, I'll pick up 4-5 games for less than $3 a piece on their weekly sales). They've definitely made a fan of me.

[1]: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/11/26/gog-com-announces-windows-...
I was referring to the pre-seed/angel stage. A lot of founders bootstrap, max out credit cards, etc to pay for startups in the very early stages