skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really love Valve's story as a bootstrapping company, nevertheless Gabe Newell had a deep pocket after he abandoned Microsoft. Love to read the story of their early days.
A good corporate finance book is going to give you the foundation of all this. If you read a corporate finance book and then start going through the book list, it will make a lot more sense. A lot of the books in his book list assume a foundation in graduate level understanding of finance.

One I would recommend is:

http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Finance-3rd-Pearson/dp/01329...

This will go into some level of detail into all areas.

Once you are comfortable with this material, you can branch into more deeper study in each area.

A lot of trading systems attempt to exploit arbitrage opportunities (however time limited) in the market place. A book like the above will give you a deeper understanding of the stock market and the different financial instruments that are used in the market.

It will also provide real insight into how companies manage their capital budgeting (I have $100 million dollars, how do I decide what to spend this money on this year). Not every company will follow the same approach, but the fundamental concept of net present value is very common.

Once you have a good understanding of the basics then you can delve further into derivatives. It would be hard to get into derivatives without a solid background in what a MBA/graduate level corporate finance book gives you.

As an aside, anyone in IT that wants to expand their business know-how would gain quite a bit by reading a corporate finance book. If you want to know what the executive team spends their time on, the knowledge around capital budgeting and understanding how projects are assessed (ie. using WACC and NPV) is very valuable.
You should have had more questions to have more strategy. That was a pretty easy test... You also gave them an easy way out if it was too hard...
Six Ways to Discourage Learning
Windows 95 Promo Tape
Congrats to Joel and team. I remember reading your post [1] on HN from a couple of weeks ago about how you guys barely had 100 signups the first month. You've come a long way since then and totally deserve the success you're seeing. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387168
If I don't know whether my laptop has been stolen or simply forgotten in some coffee house but I accuse you of taking it because I don't like your politics, that makes me a liar.
Yes. And it is the measure that for example interior designers are passionate about. The problem with LEDs has been their poor CRI, but Philips has been able to produce LEDs with CRI above 90.
Aw I thought it was edgy! Yeah you're right though, the perspective change is bad. I'll change that.

Thanks for the feedback.
The reason that class ranking is not prevalent in US is because of publicly shaming the students who are not doing as well as the other.

This can be mitigated if students are working in groups, and group scores are posted instead of individual scores. This way, a group who is scoring low can help and inspire each other to do well and share the pain (shame)
It depends on which CFL you buy of course. But 90 CRI CFLs are easy to find.

In general "warmer" CFLs have a better CRI.

You can trade off energy efficiency for CRI. This is true for LEDs as well. So if you don't need great color then go for a lower CRI since you'll save energy on the light output.

But because of that, when comparing energy efficiency of LEDs vs CFLs you MUST use a comparable CRI, otherwise it's not a fair comparison.

But I'll save you time: There are no commercially available LEDs that beat CFLs in energy efficiency for the equivalent CRI.
I saw this on a Naruto episode first (http://www.hulu.com/watch/36407#i0,p20,s1,d0), about 6 months before I started college.

For those who don't want to watch the episode, it's a written exam ninja trainees (genin) need to take to be promoted to ninja squad leader (chuunin). Any team (of 3) that has a single member fail will be failed as a group. If any ninja gets caught cheating they will be given a warning, and after three warnings they will be failed.

SPOILER (no really, the episode is great in this context even if you don't like/watch anime much)
The intelligent (but not book-smart) notice the leniency of the anti-cheating-system and the carefully worded instructions to "not get caught", and then find ways to obtain answers from "sources", qualified chuunin who were intentionally planted in the exam hall who knew the answers, or to collaborate with teammates.
End plot summary

I think it's important to teach kids not just the answers to problems posed, but also ways to find them. If it's too easy for them to find answers without rigid rules, it probably means that he problems we are posing them are not hard or thought-provoking enough in the first place.

Edited for a missed phrase
re: "The problem there is that you need a way to make sure when it becomes popular you don't end up with a land grab and all the reasonable names end up in the hands of scammers and squatters, and I'm also not sure how they're addressing transferability and abandonment."

.bit domains do expire approximately every 9 months I believe, unless you spend more namecoins to re-register them using your private key in which case you re-register said domain for 9 more months.

Abandonment happens if you no longer own the private key used to register the domain and/or you no longer make payments into the network.
The authors also presented a talk at Shmoocon 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0JHDr1oT0Y
Add support for multiple cursors (like http://socrates.io), then you've really got something.
I know the "pull of the markets" is strong and my words will likely fall on deaf ears, but here it is:

If you actually qualify for a quant job in today's crappy markets (solid technical PhD is a start; keep in mind your bonus potential is about half of what it was 5 years ago for HFT), please do yourself a favor and pick an industry where you actually get to produce something. You're a decade too late.
I added some comments to the post to explain that the structure of a User Story has already a foot in the solution space. I view this somewhat as an issue.

The relationship between a problem and its solution (one of many) is a graph of states, transitions (decomposition of the problem) and actions (the solution of each transition).

The problem I see with User Stories is that not only we encourage a solution centric thinking but the articulation between the problem and the solution is convoluted (not cleanly expressed as a graph) and often forced fit into a hierarchical tree in tools like Rally.

I have been part of teams who struggle to relate user stories together and I think this is a core problem, there is no clean decomposition possible, like you could achieve with problem statements.

Hope this helps, thank you for your comment.
I wonder when they'll switch to thepiratebay.bit ?

To help make that happen, take a look at Namecoins and the dot-bit.org project.
Research is great except when its results are misinterpreted, its tests are poorly designed, etc.

I could easily redesign the horizontal whitespace test to show that horizontal whitespace matters.

Compare: spot the error

class FruitCollection
{
pubic:
FruitCollection()
: num_apple(0),
num_apricot(0),
num_avocado(0),
num_banana(0),
num_breadfruit(0),
num_bilberry(0),
num_blackberry(0),
num_blackcurrant(0),
num_blueberry(0),
num_currant(0),
num_cherry(0),
num_cherimoya(0),
num_clementine(0),
num_cloudberry(0),
num_coconut(0),
num_damson(0),
num_date(0),
num_dragonfruit(0),
num_durian(0),
num_elderberry(0),
num_feijoa(0),
num_fig(0),
num_gooseberry(0),
num_grape(0),
num_grapefruit(0),
num_guava(0),
num_huckleberry(0),
num_honeydew(0)
num_jackfruit(0),
num_jettamelon(0),
num_jambul(0),
num_jujube(0),
num_kiwifruit(0),
num_kumquat(0),
num_legume(0),
num_lemon(0),
num_lime(0),
num_loquat(0),
num_lychee(0),
num_mandarine(0),
num_mango(0),
num_melon(0)
{
};
};

Now spot the error here

class FruitCollection
{
public:
FruitCollection()
: num_apple(0)
, num_apricot(0)
, num_avocado(0)
, num_banana(0)
, num_breadfruit(0)
, num_bilberry(0)
, num_blackberry(0)
, num_blackcurrant(0)
, num_blueberry(0)
, num_currant(0)
, num_cherry(0)
, num_cherimoya(0)
, num_clementine(0)
, num_cloudberry(0)
, num_coconut(0)
, num_damson(0)
, num_date(0)
, num_dragonfruit(0)
, num_durian(0)
, num_elderberry(0)
, num_feijoa(0)
, num_fig(0)
, num_gooseberry(0)
, num_grape(0)
, num_grapefruit(0)
, num_guava(0)
, num_huckleberry(0)
, num_honeydew(0)
num_jackfruit(0)
, num_jettamelon(0)
, num_jambul(0)
, num_jujube(0)
, num_kiwifruit(0)
, num_kumquat(0)
, num_legume(0)
, num_lemon(0)
, num_lime(0)
, num_loquat(0)
, num_lychee(0)
, num_mandarine(0)
, num_mango(0)
, num_melon(0)
{
};
};

Similarly the rectangle with tuples. I'm only guessing on this one but I suspect if you change it to vectors then

a = Vector(1, 2, 3, 4)
b = Vector(3, 4, 5, 6)
c = mul(a, b);

Is far more understandable than

a = Vector(1, 2, 3, 4)
b = Vector(3, 4, 5, 6)
c = mul(a.x, a.y, a.z, a.w, b.x, b.y, b.z, b.w);

And that the more complex the math the worse it would get. Even for rectangles a larger example that did various intersections and unions I suspect the results would change.
I would argue that popularity is actually a great indicator of the quality of an OS and your experience with it.

I am what you would consider an "expert" (or at least, I can definitely competently administer a linux computer) but I don't use linux distributions for day-to-day computing. The reason is that linux computers, even ones running "popular distros" such as Ubuntu, are considerably more prone to interoperability foibles and installation/updating problems.

The reason popularity matters, even though I have the technical skill to administer any OS competently, is that popularity is the single best incentive to encourage third parties to iron out the kinks on a particular platform. The reason AMD drivers work better on Windows than they do on Linux is not because Windows is "better" by any of the metrics of quality you espouse, it's because Windows is more popular. The reason Steam for Linux is only supported on Ubuntu is not because Ubuntu is "better" it is because it's the most popular distro. The reason to use popular platforms is because all of the little things that require a half-hour of expert time to work around would have already been solved by the vendor who recognized that such issues are worth testing for and fixing for a platform with 100 million users, but not for one with 20,000. That's distasteful to some because it doesn't seem meritocratic and it's out of the control of the creators of the OS, but it's a fact of business, and it does affect the quality of an OS in tangible ways.

As for the "expert" thing, the costs really aren't that different for various kinds of users. The reason I care about this stuff is because the opportunity cost of my time spent solving menial issues that would have been solved by the vendor if I were on a more popular platform is too high. The reason my mother cares about this stuff is because the transaction costs of finding someone who will spend the time to figure out what's going on and fix her computer is too high.
I agree, that another firm may be the best option in the short term. Hopefully, you had a change management clause or agreement set up in your contract, that keeps your current firm from completely ditching you without a proper hand-off. Because it will take you some time to hire a your own dev (This guy will probably be your CTO & co-Founder), you'll need your new firm to comprehend, apprehend and decipher everything your old says. One of you will need to participate in this dialogue and you have to require that your new firms does great documentation (to the point that all three of you understand).

This will not be inexpensive and finding an individual to hire will require more than a stake in your company in a small salary. You may want to consider a reasonable or slightly above stake and an average salary. You're asking a lot of any individual to come into a situation and repair it. At this point, you need this person more than they need you. There are a lot of executive decisions to be made but it goes with the territory of a startup.

You face two huge challenges outside of the dispute with your outsource firm. Hiring a capable individual that can do all that you are requesting now and in the future. Convincing a VC firm that this is not a huge problem.

Good Luck
In American public schools, class ranking leads to public shaming of the students who are doing well...
Fed Ex feels the pain as consumers cut shipping costs
The 'moral' aversion to cheating I believe comes out the very game theory and evolutionary behavior that this post talks about. When society sets up rules and systems, there is a maximum amount of cheating/parasitism that it can withstand before the system breaks down, and everyone (at least the majority of the non-cheaters) loses out (assuming a 'good' system). I think we all know/feel this at a very deep level, and understand that if we want to set up and maintain cooperative systems, cheating and parasitism must be kept to a sufficiently low level. Cheaters and 'goodies' all know this.

That our western civilization morality tends to align with the interests of large-scale cooperative systems is probably no accident. I limit this to western cause I have no clue about any other cultures and I don't want to make an ass of myself.

Of course, this in itself says nothing about the goodness of the system. Cheating a bad system is always an interesting thought experiment. Breaking bad systems and replacing with a new, better one often requires a great degree of 'cheating'. All sorts of interesting things here.
"We don't care, we don't have to. We're the phone company."
Does (somewhat) surprised mean that you know it's kinda spammy and are willing to ride that grey area til it gets shut down?

Or you think it's just a super clever (and cheap) way to get around actually paying Twitter to promote your posts?

How effective it is doesn't enter into the equation really.
Oh boy, rant against how bad the airlines are #832,291,845 made it to the front page! I can't wait for the circle jerk discussion about how bad they suck!
Something like WordPress + bbPress (or your own solution) = DiasporaProject.org?
Corpse disposal costs would be too high, really.
New bird flu strain 'one of most lethal' influenza viruses
There are reasons that using nothing but the Copyheart message to "free" a work is a bad idea. There are very good reasons to be opposed to the copyright regime under which we labor, however. As someone whose professional life has been primarily in the realm of copyrightable works for years, I can attest to at least my own circumstances being such that I would be better off if my professional works were not subject to copyright restrictions -- and those who most directly benefited from them (employers, clients, et cetera) would not have been harmed by that, either. In fact, the rote enforcement of copyrights by some who have paid for my works impose greater costs on them than letting the copyright infringers out there carry on unmolested (edit: such copyright infringers potentially including me, if I were to try to rehabilitate articles that had been left to die in unmaintained parts of tech content sites long after publication).

This is of course not always the case. Different business models have different economic trade-offs. The ethical and even practical arguments against our strict system of copyrights are many and varied, however, and many of them are quite compelling, including arguments related to artist obscurity vs. profits (see any number of authors and recording artists who point out that the major threat to an artist's livelihood is obscurity, not copyright infringement), imperialistic dominance of international markets (Information Feudalism is a well-researched book by academic experts spanning close to two decades' worth of intensive work), and even the overall benefit to humanity of free reuse of works (see Advancement Through License Simplicity -- http://univacc.net/?page=license_simplicity_1 -- for one such argument).

I don't want to waste too much of my time on an Internet Argument, but I figured I'd throw this stuff out there. Rational and compelling arguments against copyright, or at least against strict copyright with any resemblance to what currently applies, do exist.
If your CFLs take too long then get some new ones. Walmart ones are great.

All of mine turn on instantly - if they are not technically at full brightness I certainly can't tell.

Except for those from Feit Electric - those are terrible, don't buy from that company.
You bought a product and it did not work as advertised. The recommended path would have been to have it serviced or return it to the distributor. You could also attempt to install the correct working drivers, as this most likely would not void your warranty. However, changing the entire OS is a very big not-recommended move on a recently purchased laptop that's having such a simple problem.
Hypocrisy can be good if the result is a better world. I.e a hypocritical politician tells people to reduce their carbon footprint, while he wastes as much energy as one man can. If people follow him, then the net result of the hypocrisy is good.

But this is not such a case IMHO. This is a case of using hypocrisy to achieve a personal goal. It might make the team feel better, but it's not because he/she genuinely likes the team, but because he merely wants the team to feel better for business purposes.

That's a kind of "leaky hypocrisy" (akin to "leaky abstractions"). If he/she doesn't genuinely care for the team, it will show in any occasion it can, i.e when under stress, when firing people, at chances of promotion etc.
Well, and Zappos' risk ceiling is incredibly low, with high margins to enable fantastic service. With an airline you're talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars at risk in each customer service occurrence, and terrible margins.

Part of this is just how the market works: if you want to fly on a jet airplane across a continent for a couple hundred bucks, expect a McDonald's level of competency. Airlines are in a perpetual race to the bottom, and the result is cheap travel at the cost of customer service.
I agree for the same reason; however, this is a matter of style and decision makers offer differing opinions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma
If there's one thing I know about other airlines, I know this story could not have happened there, because.... well, I'm having a little trouble here.

I mean, losing your bag sucks, but it's a weird case: how many times a year do you think that someone takes the wrong bag, then takes the effort to call American and let them know, but then fails to actually return the bag?

And it's hardly a case for interpol, either. "Check the call logs"? Yeah, Lebowski, they got four more detectives working the case, in shifts.
In the presence of polymorphism and mutable cells, value restriction (or a restriction thereof) is necessary to establish type soundness (ie that typed programs are safe), so I'd argue that it achieves this goal.

As for this explanation, I'm not entirely convinced. In the first example, seeing x as two different cells depending on the type is interesting, but I have trouble seeing how it is possible to express its semantics without keeping runtime type information. Is System F compatible with type erasure?
Mostly not American's fault. Sh*t happens.
Absolutely.

The real challenge is to propose an affordable LED bulb that can provide at least 1300 lumens.
I stopped reading after the second typo.
"...carry on is already packed to the tilt"
"...have the bag recovered and delivered via currier"
There is a GNOME flavor of Ubuntu. You can simply install `sudo apt-get install gnome-shell`.
I was right: Congress’s attack on the NSF widens
Shocking that AA would be this customer-hostile, but I thought stories of lost luggage/carrier incompetence were old news. This is why I never check bags, and if I did I wouldn't sweat the airline to cover the loss. That's what renters insurance is for.
I understand that. That's not the alternative I want.

Go actually gets by with just one type of pointer syntax. Go is what a colleague calls "being stupid simple", which is really its strongest asset at this point. It eschews a lot of complexity by not trying to be clever.

The problem with Go's pointers is that no thought has gone into thinking about goroutines as boundaries of data ownership. It's simple to share mutable data between goroutines, and it's impossible to verify (manually or by any kind of analysis) that a program is not a shared-everything pile of spaghetti. This, plus mutable data, makes it impossible to safely implement things like Erlang-style remote task spawning.

What I would like in my ideal language is a single pointer type: A pointer into the task heap. However, pointers may only be shared between tasks by copying or by transfering ownership, except for immutable data, which can be shared freely with no overhead other than normal GC/refcounting. With some COW magic you could even make the copying really fast, too. Then all you need is a simple syntax for limited references that cannot be stored, only copied, so that you can actually have functions that work on data efficiently without leaking their pointers anywhere.

Maybe I am being naive -- I won't pretend to be a Rust expert. But this model works pretty well for Erlang. I find that while Rust is clever, it falls into the other extreme and becomes too clever; and being too clever is a kind of stupidity. For example, borrowed pointers sound neat on paper, but then you find you have to dick around with declaring pointer lifetimes. That's pretty insane. It results in a kind of syntax that represents everything I hate C++ for. I can understand that it took a while to decide on a syntax for declaring lifetimes. It looks totally weird and arbitrary. (Quotes are for strings, man!)

It's also possible that Rust just is not for me. :-)
These ideas are similar to the 'personal cloud' concepts being advanced, for example, by members of the Respect Network [1]. Are you associated with them or a similar organization?

[1] http://respectnetwork.com
Forget ads, advertisers would love to be able to pay to increase their follower counts. Like a force follow feature.

Make it $1 for every follower, straight-up no ads or nothing. For $100,000 I can get 100,000 more real human followers on my account. Advertisers would love that better than promoted tweets or bot favorites.

But is that good for the users?
6 Coding Apps for Kids
Yeah, how dare he not be a native speaker of English. The occasional mistake is absolutely unforgivable.
It seems like the topic of QF is appearing more frequently these days on HN. I guess it's a sign of the times after an absence after the implosion of 2008. There also seems to be general leveling off of posts on how awesome working for startups are compared to 2008/9 and the exodus of talent from wall street. Sign of the times I guess. Makes me think we're headed back to the 'good old days.'

This is all a bit depressing cause I feel like the conclusion a lot of society had reached in 2008 was that finance should be boring, simple, and shouldn't attract too much brain power from other fields.
Hopscotch for iPad Makes Coding Kid-Friendly
but this is no ordinary rant, it's from DHH! /circlejerk
There is a difference between Rackspace's right to censor their own blog -- which no one questions -- and the judgments we can make about their moral and ethical worthiness from their having done so.
Trust Your Instruments
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