skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I posted my napkin estimate of YC's incremental impact in another comment[0]. It's not perfect, but it's a potential starting point.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5597216
At Viaweb we used to name them after Tintin characters.
I agree that it's a big deal. But I think a lot of people are reacting to the images of the graphs, not to the actual numbers that the graphs represent.
> And consumers are not thinking in terms of encrypted sync, they're just thinking in terms of "I just want to do X, why is it so hard", and so I can't see this (very nice) solution really solving the problems that consumers have, that will make them prioritise security.

I have a use case that is pretty common among my peer group and BT Sync has been the best solution I've been able to find. In a nutshell, I need to sync large datasets across multiple computers.

Dropbox: expensive

AeroFS: buggy, used too much bandwidth, and slow

Sparkleshare: uses git which chokes on large files

Git Annex Assistant: didn't work reliably on mac

rsync/duplicity/unison: needs extra logic for detecting file changes

I also think the "Dropbox replacement" idea is a strawman created by the TorrentFreak article. I've never had the impression that BT Sync is trying to replace Dropbox. It is just trying to do p2p sync with a great interface and some nice features such as read-only and one-time secrets.
Lying in estimates is pretty much a necessity, there are always a lot of unknowns going in. One of those essential people-management skills is to lie and fudge with enough art so that you don't lose too much face when they turn out wrong.

I never deliver an estimate with any measure of confidence in my words/tone, and I always have a short list of things, made up or no, of things that might push it back.

If someone were to try to nail me down and is expecting me to put my credibility on the line with a hard estimate, I'd say, "let me get back to you on that after I do some research," then promptly forget about them and look for another project. There are enough reasonable people in the world to work with that I don't have to put up with unreasonable ones.
Steve Blank has a high rate of Self-serving bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias

I don't know if he is doing it consciously for self promotion or he really believes it. Entrepreneurship is always about grabbing opportunities and that is why it is difficult for entrepreneurs to plan ahead. Scientific management was a reaction to limit the chaos and improving success. To label that as "traditional method" and everything else as "lean startup" is very awkward and malicious.

Pretending to be the innovator of a process and taking credit for something without mentioning Krafcik, Womack or Deming is strange.

I still find Steve Blank rather questionable.
Gandalf,Isaac,Einstein
I like this article a lot. I have always thought it very shortsighted to strive for the life that men have. The tradeoff that many men make (more time working, less time with family) are advantageous from a biological point of view, but, frankly, they are terrible from a moral point of view.

As a result of our biology, many men have this insatiable appetite for advancing our careers. The reason for this appetite is to build wealth, fame, and power, which then enables us to attract more mates and, hopefully (from our genes' point of view), have more children. Now, this is not to say that men sit there thinking about how working over the weekend will get them more future mates. No, instead, we just have this blind urge to work and that blind urge gets us into a situation that enables the other stuff.

While this may make a lot of sense from the point of view of our genes, in my opinion, it doesn't make sense morally. To me, a person should work enough to be comfortable and spend the rest of the time building relationships with the people they care about. I just can't see a justification for choosing money, fame, and power over nourishing and building your relationships. And, knowing that attracting mates is the whole point of working in excess of what's necessary to meet basic needs, I just can't understand why anybody would want to adopt that strategy.

So, coming from that point of view, while I completely agree that women who choose (or need) to work should enjoy the same opportunities for career advancement that men do, I think equal emphasis should be given to increasing the respect that we, as a society, have for the roles that women have traditionally played. That way, women can be women (whatever that means to them; as a man, I cannot speak to this) and be respected as equals.

As an example of what I mean by respecting the roles that women have traditionally played: at the company where I work, we recently had two women give birth. They had _NO_ maternity leave. Any time they took off was either sick time, vacation time, or unpaid. To me, this is unacceptable.

So, to go back to my earlier point, it is important that these two women have the same career opportunities as men, but I think it's equally important that we respect their roles as mothers by creating an environment where they can spend an adequate amount of time with their newborns, without having to worry about whether or not the bills will get payed.

Note: I am a straight, white, and male. I have not been thinking about these issues for a long time, so please elevate me if I'm getting things wrong.
AMD cards dominate Nvidia in pretty much all password hash bruteforcing algos, even those that do not rely on bit rotation (bit_align). See
http://golubev.com/gpuest.htm for example. It is true that another instruction helps in more cases (bfi_int which I talked about at http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=43) but in general, AMD cards have a lot more raw integer and floating point compute resources (execution units) than Nvidia cards.
yeah I think a Goal can be to "try" and release something by the end of the month but making that a hard deadline puts unnecessary stress on a team.
The cool thing about using SQLite as a basis for sync is that it leverages all that we know re: RDBMS merging, syncing and conflict resolution at scale. And, from a skills perspective, leverages our team's existing knowledge in SQL.

We have use cases where mobile devices may be offline for minutes at a time (in hotels and conference halls where wireless is either sketchy or un-usably slow). I can definitely see us using this. I may check out the Couch thing as well, although we use Cassandra for NoSQL scenarios.
You must not use controlled crying techniques until the child is at least 6 months old - that's about the age that children can cry voluntarily.

Before that point the only reason they cry is to tell you that they need something. To stop them crying you have to address that need. They're either hungry, or cold, or hot, or have trapped wind, or lonely.

There is plenty of conflicting research, but I chose to pick the research that supports my point of view. (Which is all supporting 'attachment parenting'.)

When you do start the technique it is NOT 'just leave them to cry'. The child cries. You go in and calm her without taking her from the crib. You then leave before she's gone back to sleep. If she cries you wait one minute, then go back in and calm her, then leave again. If she cries you wait 2 minutes. You repeat this, adding a minute on each time.

Sometimes she might not settle at all. You can stay in the room. Don't make eye contact. Make loud sshhhsss noises. Pat her on the back. Don't take her from the cot unless there's a need to.

It's important to set aside 2 weeks for this process. Usually it doesn't take that long, most children settle in after 2 or 3 nights. But you must be consistent.
Strange as it may seem, some emplyers value their employees and replacing someone after ten years is going to be a hell of a lot more expensive (in terms of lost value an retraining) than 8 weeks paid leave.

Besides which, you'd probably get screwed in an employment tribunal (IIRC Australia doesn't have 'at-will' style employment like the US)
That would only be a 1% gain, hardly worth jail time. You would need to be playing options to make a 1% swing worth it.
Mine is the setup with One Piece characters as OP mentioned. This also includes my dev computers. Our setup is thus:

Prod for my LLC is Luffy since he is the captain.
My desktop is Zoro since the desktop is the most powerful computer I have.
My laptop is Usopp since I work with it the most and I sort of identify with that character.
Another client server is Franky because that client was weird.
A client server I setup once is Robin since that name wasn't taken.

Each character is sort of vaguely descriptive of the machine they name.

Another scheme I worked with once was physics words for movement. The dev machine was impetus, staging was acceleration, and prod was velocity.

I once got burned with putting funny filler text on a live production site. Naming servers creatively is a safer way of having fun that is also more subtle.
> ok, missed it, checked again. UDP, TCP - yes. TLS - not yet?

tcp + tls is a one-liner I haven't added

> Does Dendrite tail? Can Dendrite consume/scrape some existing/old log files?

Yes, dendrite tails/follows, with optional backfilling.

> Did you use some internal queue in the design, like rsyslog is doing?

Since you're using existing logs, all we do is maintain a pointer into the logs on disk. When we start consuming more transient data (e.g. perhaps we poll jmx for you), we'll have to add the queue.

> I am confused here a bit. So Dendrite is like StatsD on steroids?

Dendrite is "tail -f *.log | convert_to_json.pl | nc" on steroids.
Who would care? People who want to disrupt the US economy with minimal effort and resources. The terrorist 'incubators' around the world are certainly buzzing right now.
I'm guessing their TOU covers this, and that the AG won't be able to do jack about it.
Imagine if Gandalf acted the way managers and clients do with time estimates when he sent Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom.

"You haven't destroyed the One Ring yet? Why not? You said it would be destroyed by Friday."

If you trust your people to carry the ball as far as they can everyday until it is in the end zone you will get better results.

This is why in my consultancy I have stopped giving time estimates except for very small projects. I take 50% upfront and 50% upon completion so our interests are aligned.

The time and stress of estimates are just not worth it in software development.
Some 22-year-olds are pretty badass, so I wouldn't underestimate them as a group. You're right, though. VC, except in certain bubble chambers (e.g. Stanford's CS department in the '90s) has this a weird paradox where you're either too old to raise money or too young to get an introduction. YC solved that, which is commendable.
Hey! Can you spare some career advice for an aspiring aero engineer that wants to work on the software side of the rocket? If you could share what you would consider is a good path to follow to get to where you are right now, I would really appreciate it. I am a programmer at heart but even that could not pull me away from my love of space ;) so I decided to study aerospace engineering first.
I know of at least 5 firms who would have the means to make a big profit in a rather stealth way and all of the infrastructure needed to minimize execution risk (to the point that it may be negligible)... Just because you cannot do it or that it is hard for you, do not assume it cannot be done or that it is (as) hard for everybody...
Ask HN: I want to build software for robots. What companies do that?
I wonder if the Mars Rover team is hiring ..
Can't agree more, this is a great mantra for someone not having to pay the businesses bills.
Well, that description totally sold me on BS. That's like everything I want.
The figures are accurate. It used to be enough to properly fund people, but now it's a nominal figure. Each company gets an automatic investment, if they choose to take it, of just less than $100k.
a) Fair enough b) Do you really need that, or does it just feel nice to see it? If they weren't wearing the t-shirt would you really not think of it? If I put up a poster in my kitchen saying "Eat!" then I would often notice it when it's completely relevant, but that doesn't mean it's a useful poster.
That comes with experience. It's nearly impossible to teach because the right way to break large tasks into small ones depends on the task. It can always be done, though, because the act of programming itself involves breaking large things into small things, then smaller things, then smaller, ..., then individual lines of code.
... except if Facebook is firewalled at your workplace. It's OK, I also can't play Jurassic Park Builder. I'm used to it.
What about crashplan?
Terms are everything. It's not hard to get money. It's hard to get money in a way that doesn't make you angry or miserable on a regular basis.
Lazy thinking. Although deadlines should be avoided as much as possible and should be viewed realistically (shit happens), lots of things that depend upon the shipped product need to be planned well ahead of time, and can't easily be changed.

Such deadlines aren't there to annoy engineers, they are there because a lot of things need to be coordinated to happen at exactly the same time and place. Software is a means to an end, rarely a goal in itself.

Also, the "it ships when it ships" leads to an attitude in which nothing ships at all. Even if it's no hard deadline, people need a target in which they can frame their effort, especially if it's a joint effort. Nothing is more frustrating than really wanting to get something finished but your coworkers on who your work depends want to do something else. Without a fixed timeframe as a joint reference, it's very hard to stay in sync and make joint progress. I've seen it kill productivity more than unrealistic top-down deadlines.

Finally, there's no excuse for not making the effort to get better at estimating. I've seen well gelled teams play planning poker, give exactly the same estimates independently and hit their targets perfectly. It's not an exact science, but it's not dark magic or wild-ass guesswork either. It's a skill you can hone, especially as a team.
You can auto-sync high-res photos in Google+, too, but it ounts in the 5 GB free storage you have.
MuleSoft Buys Programmable Web From Alcatel-Lucent
I think you have your facts wrong. The topic I mentioned about the Google Docs user being summarily ejected was discussed here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5591133

The link you submitted was a genuine scammer issue which was reported by users and dealt with correctly by Google.
I don't agree with the final point, "There are or course other ways of forcing file downloads, such as adding certain configuration to your .htaccess file, but I think server-side solutions to front-end problems should be avoided whenever possible."

If we are trying to FORCE a download, then this really is a server-side issue. If we want to give the user the choice, then it is a front-end issue.

The crux of the article is all about taking away the user's choice ... and so a server-side solution seems more reasonable per @jrochkind1.
Currently the supply is limited to 3600 per day, so if they did take all their orders and 'premine' for a day, they could at a maximum make about a half a million dollars a day (at the current trading rate). Note that if they started selling half a million dollars a day worth of bitcoin, they'd see the prices drop to less than $10, making their daily profits to around 50k. At that point, it may be more profitable just to ship their product. If you did buy one of these ASIC miners, most people don't realize that as soon as customers get ahold of them, the difficulty is going to go way up, since the hard limit of 3600 coins would be reached earlier in the day if it didn't. So, if they had 1000 customers, the most each customer could get in a day would be 3.6 coins... which at today's rate is $468 per day. Not too bad, but what would it cost to get that kind of hashrate? If it's $10k, then you'd have to mine for 21 days nonstop just to have it pay for itself. That's assuming the difficulty level would stay the same, which it probably wouldn't since the other players (BFL, etc) would release their products, thus decreasing your daily haul. Also, if everyone who mined coins sold, you'd look at a depreciating value for the currency, so your 3.6 coins might only be worth half as much.
43% of women = 21.5% of total population, 11% of men = 5.5% of total population, so you're talking about approx 27% of the total population are concerned.

Bad statistical reasoning is 150% of the problem here. ;)
The OP is talking about a 2 month old baby.

> Babies cry. If your child has a clean diaper, isn't hungry, and doesn't need to burp [...] in a room by themselves.

Children under 6 months probably shouldn't be in their own room, and you should try to work out why the child is crying.

It is rare for a child under 6 months to just cry if all her needs have been met. Colic - babies who cry for no apparent reason - is incredibly stressful and is distressing for parents to cope with. The parents might need extra support and learning extra techniques for rocking. ('Tiger in the Tree' or swinging the legs) or baby massage techniques.
At a past job we used named of ski resorts (killington, okemo, snowbird,...). Although I always though it would be interesting to choose a music genre and go big - like 90s rap stars (2pac, jayz, Wu-Tang Clan, ..)

Just my My 2 cents -

Pick something that has a meaning to the person running it and some what relates to the organization.
With what terms? What's the valuation and how bad are the liquidation preferences, board concessions, etc.?
This analysis doesn't seem to account for the investments in and opportunity costs of, YC failures. Example: a company that takes $10m over three rounds and then dies.

Also, it seems to assume that without YC investment none of these companies would have been founded, and that no other investors contributed. They seem to be giving YC credit for the entire valuation even though they invested a tiny fraction of funding.

Finally, they seem to be double counting: estimating market valuation and then adding the effects on the economy. Those amounts are not exclusive.
Are there any open source clients for that?
> You can't lie about something you don't know

Sure you can. You can use made-up regulations, bring up something scary-sounding that actually has no bearing, anything that the client can intuitively grasp that isn't, "I don't actually know this particular python library and I know it will take me 2 weeks before I can adapt it to the app."
DigitalOcean plans to stop emailing root passwords
I'd really love to see a spreadsheet with all this calculations. (Or better, an online html5 virtual rocket calculator tm.) With some default data (usual payload weight, fuel price, orbit speed, ...) and you can choose how many stages and haw much fuel each stage has and the spreadsheet calculate the total price of the mission.

You have a lot of information, but I understand that putting all of this in a xls would be a lot of work.
The government will get their money. Pay now or pay HUGE penalites, fines + years of interest. Anyone who thinks the government wont control this is CRAZY. I am longtime buisnessman and know how the IRS and Government work. Lets not mention going to jail for trying to avoid taxes.
I'm curious to see whether technologies like BitTorrent Sync (and similar products like Space Monkey) gain traction. One cannot deny the importance of backups, especially as we begin storing decades of our lives (photos, videos, etc) online. On the one hand BitTorrent Sync offers a beautiful vision of purely decentralized backups. On the other hand, it requires a critical mass of users to survive (and the number of users must grow as the amount of data in the system grows).
Call it economically improbable. Right now you could maybe get 51% with a 10-20 million dollar investement in ASICs. If you took control of the network and started forging transactions, bitcoin would no longer be useful and all those coins you stole wouldn't be worth very much.

EDIT: I vaguely remember the Linode hacker mention that a more reasonable attack possibility would be if you slipped an backdoor into the popular bitcoin client libraries, and then it could be used to steal.

edit2: spelling.
role-colo-index, e.g. wwwsf27.domain.com

i'm boring as hell.
That is indeed the average amount invested by YC. As stated below in recent batches there has been the startfund blanket investment which used to be $150k and is now $80k. Technically speaking this blanket investment has nothing to do with YC and is given as uncapped convertible note (basically the best possible terms).

To address if this is enough, I'd say you'd be surprised how much you can make things stretch if you absolutely have to, but most companies also raise a small amount of money after YC's demo day as well to help them continue. You can think of YC as a startup bootcamp at the end of which you have to prove yourself to get the opportunity (further investment, usually) to continue on. With the startfund though, you get more than those three months to do so.

In short, yes, YC invests $20k and produces $6.1bn in value across the alumni.
Unless it was launched more than 2 years ago, then the Google+ app had it first.
akzidenz grotesk
freedom comes with responsibility
Agree.
But was trying to understand if an individual hacker was behind this or an actual big financial organisation.

I was of the opinion that an individual hacker would still be classified as an average investor. He/she might not have had the tools to benefit from the end result. not sure

A big organisation, on the other hand, would be much better placed to exit a position based on custom algos and deeper integration into the markets to buy and sell positions.
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The analysis is clearly slanted, but the quoted numbers are based in reality.

YC indeed only invests enough money to keep the founders from starving for the first few months, and offers all kinds of support and advice to help them get going. After that, lots of other investors are willing to invest more dollars, but YC does not.

The billions figure is an estimate of the aggregate value across all companies. Most of which is concentrated in a handful of stellar successes like Airbnb and Dropbox.

Attributing value is hard to do. Obviously not all of these billions are the result of YC. But without YC, much of these billions in value would not have been created. So the quoted figure is an upper bound for the value of YC investment.

If you want a lower bound, YC itself takes just a few percent of the company, which can get diluted in later rounds. It would not be worthwhile to be in YC if YC did not provide more value than that. That figure is ballpark likely somewhere around $100 million (could be off by a substantial factor either way).

There is a wide range between, and many, many values in that range could be argued for. In fact many people not in YC claim to have received value from trying to get into YC, and from reading about YC. So one could even argue for figures above the upper bound that this article uses. (Not very tenably in my opinion, but the argument can be made.)
What am I, a physicist? Jeez, boffing a few orders of magnitude like that is pretty bad, and it's too late to edit.

I meant kph, which was HOPEFULLY obvious from context.

I'll just leave this here: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2679
up to two. you can also have one, or possibly none.
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