skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not suggesting that monetary policy is everything. Secular trends, like the tendency for software and hardware to get cheaper, can't be ignored. But to ignore the direct and indirect impacts of monetary policy altogether doesn't make sense either.

Silicon Valley-specific example: Facebook goes public during what many believe is a Fed-supported bull market. Insiders sell stock at close to a $100 billion valuation; it's estimated that more than 1,000 employees get to sell stock worth at least $1 million a few months later. Some of the gains realized by insiders and employees will be funneled back into startup investments as those insiders and employees become limited partners in venture funds or angel investors themselves.

Now consider this dynamic across the entire tech industry. Numerous companies have taken advantage of the IPO window of the past several years, and have been able to go public at rich valuations. Many employees with equity compensation at established publicly traded tech companies have done very well too, and ironically some of the most exorbitant valuations are at large companies lacking earnings.

It would be foolish to believe that none of this has impacted the amount of money being thrown at VC firms, super angel funds and startups through direct angel investment, which in turn impacts valuations, deal terms, etc.

The big question: when the great experiment of the central banks ends, how will this affect the landscape for investments in startups? I have some ideas which may or may not be right, but it's simply not credible to believe that there will be no change. The fact that few investors in Silicon Valley seem to be talking about this, however, suggests that they believe they live in a vacuum completely disconnected from the rest of the economy and global financial system. The last time this happened, it didn't end well.
I could definitely envisage some heavily inflamed tendons and soft-tissue from the weird crouch/walking motion though.
Here's my experience. If you don't have a lot time and not into construction and not a lot of money, don't bother going into foreclosure, flipping, or short term project. People going to court house auction bring in a million dollar cash to bid on foreclosures. They can keep bidding a house up until you run out of your reserve. It's very difficult to outbid them and still make a profitable flip.

For casual investor, the best approach is just buy and hold from the regular market, utilizing long term leverage to gain the profit. You want to buy into a trend and RE has very long trend. A rising tide lifts all boats. Doesn't matter which house you buy. It will go up in price in a uptrend. Also established neighborhood is easier to predict up and down. The whole neighborhood will go up in union. New development might turn out good or might turn out bad, depending on the people moving in.

For RMLS, the regular listings have a lot of information. The regular websites like Trulia or Ziprealty are good. Insider knowledge will not give much advantage because RE is a heavily regulated industry and once a house is listed, the agent has a duty to get the best price.
Nice materials! I just need this.
Make sure you read into your state's laws to make sure you won't get into any trouble by doing work you're not supposed to.

The wording here is fairly misleading. I want to make it very clear that the existence of an unpaid internship does not get the intern in trouble (with the government). It's the employer who would get in trouble (with the government). In that sense there is no such thing as getting "into any trouble by doing work you're not supposed to."
Your confusion is predicated on your glossing over that I said these makers, in direct reference to your statement about "the tech community" being idealists. And in the context of the tech community (as you framed it), the makers who are hackers/founders (as I framed it) are an even smaller subset of the tech community and thus the engineering community at large.
I really like this as a solution for spinning up quick cloud apps and splash pages. I was wondering which other environments you are supporting at the moment because I saw Rails, Django and Node.js and quite a few people I had take a look at it where I work asked the same question.
> Why doesn't Paul Graham start this mythical founders first VC firm?

My question is why would he? I can only come up with two reasons: 1) more money 2) a sense of altruism (we have to help startups succeed even more!)

In terms of the first, YC seems to be doing pretty darn well by the numbers, how much more money do you need? The second is nice in theory, but I wonder if it would actually have a negative effect.

The value provided by an early investor and a later stage investor is different in the same way that young companies need very different things than they do later in life. In the beginning what companies need is largely the same, and so advice and such can scale relatively cleanly (as YC has shown). As you grow, though, what is needed more and more is specific, individual advice - the answer won't always be the simple "don't die".

There's no question that YC (and PG himself) represents one of the most authoritative sources of information on early stage investments, but it's not clear if that will directly translate as companies progress. If not, he'd essentially have to start over, refiguring out what it means to succeed and who knows, maybe he wouldn't be any good at it. Either way, if you tried to master both, I think one of two things would happen: you'd either lose your grip and be good at neither, or you'll "succeed" with the end result being homogeny. You'll seed companies and direct them into being what you want them to be for the next fund. That kind of "vertical integration" easily leads to a rules oriented echo chamber - the exact kind of stagnation that lets some scrappy "startup" come in and eat your lunch.

Could he do it and make it work? If anyone could, I'd bet on him, but I actually think there's value in having YC stay at the stage they are. It's better to have multiple forces at work, pushing and pulling against each other.
That looks like it might be a good 'Plan B' if my funding falls through. But for now I'm aiming for transferable undergraduate studies at an accredited school.
i don't think it plays out like this in practice, for the reason that a government has to at least pretend it's for the people and there's at least some measure of accountability.

the alternative is very, very different and I think libertarians really underestimate how evil and creative and corrupt people can be. there is a reason we have various regulations regarding child labor, for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labor#Early_1900s
http://hackerpublicradio.org/

from the site: Hacker Public Radio (HPR) is an Internet Radio show (podcast) that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. What differentiates HPR from other podcasts is that the shows are produced by the community - fellow listeners like you!. There is no restrictions on how long the show can be, nor on the topic you can cover as long as they "are of interest to hackers".
The building is pretty plain in an off-the-beaten-path location that you could easily miss. I think "nondescript" is a pretty good adjective for it.
It blows my mind that people fall for political windbaggery. Europe seems especially starry-eyed for Obama. It's kind of strange.
Aerospace Engineer wants to own Australia's Subscription Service Space
Total surveillance has nothing to do with the security of the average citizen and all to do with keeping and extending the current elite powers. We're slowly transforming from a democracy to a totalitarian state.
When Blackberry was on top of the world it was economically plausible for them to have their own OS kernel and userland. But the critical mass to support that is very high, and Blackberry may not have that any more.

Blackberry OS also does not have a managed language runtime. It's not an app runtime that's going to attract developers for innovative capabilities or ease of development.

Blackberry does have a messaging and email infrastructure, but the compelling reasons to use it are mostly obsolete and uncompelling to new customers.

Lastly, Blackberry used to be the cheaper "junior" smartphone. But Nokia is somehow selling a Lumia for an all-up price of $149, unsubsidized, in t-Mobile shops, which makes it the cheapest way to get on a cheap T-Mo smartphone plan.

I think they are done. I don't see a way back.
Man sticks finger in a saw to demonstrate his safety invention [video]
I'm not so sure. If Germany doesn't get honest information on the true scale and intention of US spying, they know Snowden will have answers. This is a matter of national security for Germany.

For Germany, this is like discovering their "friendly neighbor" across the street is a peeping tom. The relationship is already compromised.
While I agree in essence with your characterization of the job done by Obama, I do want to point out (again) that it will take quite some advances in physics before we're able to locate the parallel universe where Obama may have been able to shut down the prison at Gitmo.

I think it's hard to imagine the sheer and total resistance to shutting down that prison if you haven't been in the country to see it yourself. I still don't understand the reasoning to this day. But there was never a chance, with the Congresses Obama was handed with, that the prison would be completely shut down.

I don't know whether it's a bunch of representatives attempting to look 'Tough on Terror' or what... but you have to pin Guantanamo on the people as a whole.
That stood out at me as unlikely as well. The hypothesis is essentially that wealth now captured by company founders, which in a previous era would been captured by their employers, explains the majority of the change in inequality. Essentially, that the main reason for increasing income inequality is that people who would've been salaried career engineers in the past are successful founders today. Some evidence in support of that hypothesis would be interesting. For my own part, I would be surprised if shifts in the share of income taken by W2 engineers vs. tech-company founders have even moved the needle on the overall U.S. economy's Gini index.
Dylan Hack-a-thon: July 13-14, 2013
This law didn't get rubber stamped. The first time the government passed the law, it was declared unconstitutional by the german Supreme Court, after Patrick Beyer, a member of the Pirate Party challenged it in court.

Now the government tries to change certain parts to pass it again. Patrick Beyer said he will challenge it again and chances are pretty good, that it will be declared unconstitutional again.
In the initial time where alta vista were seriously co-existing as search engines (on that graph, in the time before they crossed paths in usage) Alta Vista was a little nicer because it really was a much more raw look at the web. If I did a search for 4 keywords in a row, the first ten hits were generally an exact match. (there weren't as many cloned sites etc... so this was a reasonable thing to do)

I miss that aspect of the web.
my guess is they don't know the profit reliably?
That'd be an interesting project to further subvert the unlimited data that carriers hate.
"Not only do I think it is meaningful to compare the harm done by drugs as they are actually used, it is necessary. Nutt's research is from society's perspective - that's why it spends more time on how people actually use drugs than how much harm would be done if they used them appropriately."

The problem is that how drugs are used is almost entirely dependent on the public policy surrounding them. E.g. when coffee was an illegal drug, you had many people abusing it similar to what we think of as a stereotypical heroin addict today. So how can you set future public policy based on the societal harms of a drug without taking into account current public policy, when those harms are mostly determined by current public policy? Especially since the study (and his marketing of it) portrays these rankings as being objective and scientific.

And even if you were to think of it as a measure of societal harm caused by individual drugs, it doesn't even make any sense for that. E.g. there are no objective measures of the number of users, the amount of harm caused per user, the amount of harm each user causes to society, etc. It's only the opinions of a bunch of random people about these things. How is this supposed to be more accurate than getting actual data?
I think Snowden and/or Wikileaks would have thought of that before leaving HK. If the Russians have anything, it's encrypted blobs.
I was thinking of the interior. I guess you're right considering the outside of the building. However, that's like almost every building in the valley. Sand Hill Road isn't exactly an architectural tourist destination, either.
Javascript Audio – A simple tracker [Tutorial]
I'd love some kind of posting on FTL: on why it was introduced, what constraints it has, what it enables Superconductor to do that couldn't be done with a general purpose language.

Did you give any thought to trying to intake JavaScript itself as the target language?
You might be right that big VC will take the biggest hit, but from what I can tell, a large part of the market for $100K investments exists precisely because you have so many individuals who have done well in the Fed-inflated stock market.

When the number of people with $100,000 to throw at twenty-something founders fresh out of college drops and/or interest rates rise to the point where you can eventually get a 5-year FDIC-insured CD yielding as much as investment grade corporate debt in 2012, the impact on the angel market might not be insignificant.
Since I can't find a way to contact you, wanted to say: thanks for this.
He could've shut it down a dozen different ways, had he wanted to. He's expended zero political capital on this issue.
The laws underlying those gag orders are also public, transparent, debated beforehand, etc.

The principle of the gag order comes from the implementation of the law. Obviously the public law itself allows gag orders, otherwise Google's lawyers would tell Google to go ahead and publish them. Gag orders have been around in America, at all levels of law enforcement and security, since waaaaay before all this.
This article contains some bits on this topic.

http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4203/thinking-machine-an-...

Search for this passage: "The idealists, following philosopher of mind David Chalmers (who also comes in for some rough treatment from Dennett), say there is a “hard problem” with consciousness. While accepting that much about consciousness is amenable to explanation by an evolutionary perspective and neuroscience, experience itself will always somehow evade a materialist explanation."
"investors make more money as founders' bitches than their bosses."

Hall of Fame quote right there.
The SuperIntelligence Control Problem
Sounds like the Germans are getting a genuine American experience.
We'll also be releasing the Open Dylan 2013.1 release this week in preparation. We've fixed a lot of things so far this year.
Wow! Of all the "suggestions" on what Snowden should do. This is the most coherent and reasonable on so far.

Throwing his lot in with China or Russia is a very risky move. The only thing they both have in common is a desire to embarrass the US. If Snowden becomes a liability for either of those countries, they will throw him under the bus in a heartbeat.

The best Snowden can hope for is to drag out the process long enough so attention dwindles (and possibly some positive changes occur). In five years one can hope that the US gov't is of the opinion that a strong prosecution is not in their best interest.
Node-Backbone-Require Example Blog
Let's not get overboard.

Europe (alongside EVERY nation that has a respectably digital-ready
telecommunications network) spies on it's peoples.

It's almost a mark of a nation's jetting into the trillion dollar club.

America gets the lion share of the criticism because it has been
bestowed on - for better or worse owing to its capacity for taking
human toll (of its own citizenry) - the uneasy office of the
global police order.

European critics should ask themselves which country constitutes the
majority of NATO's standing forces.

Is it Spain? Germany? Scotland? France? Italy?

You can have your say when your countrymen submit themselves in
(proportionally) larger numbers.

Until then, take a seat.

Source:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjrBO10n8V8
Risc OS is seriously underrated. It's so lightweight. Makes it super easy to play around with low level hardware stuff. It was made at a time when a couple of megabytes of RAM was huge and processor speeds were measured in low double digit MHz so it absolutely flies on the Pi.
Getting kind-of tired of this. When the Snowden "revelations" came out, my thought was "And...?"

Everybody paying attention knew the US government, and all governments, were sucking down all the data they could get. If you don't like it, AES-256 is widely available. Problem solved. If you think bitching or voting (Ha!) is more powerful than encryption, think again.
Again with this junk. He hardly mentions himself. He's relentless on the most crucial issues of humanity.

Nobody's done more for the world lately, but you use your psychic powers to find some supposed flaw. It's like hating the ambulance that came to save your life because it needs to be washed (and it doesn't even really need to be washed). Bikeshed on some other issue! Anything!
Secret-court judges upset at portrayal of ‘collaboration’ with government
"Why doesn't Paul Graham start this mythical founders first VC firm?"

Partly because it would conflict with YC, partly because I wouldn't be good at it, but most of all because I don't want to. I like dealing with early stage startups, because at that stage the big problem is what to build. I wouldn't be any good at advising founders how to organize an executive team, or how to prepare the company's finances for an IPO.

Incidentally, VCs are not nearly as bad as this comment suggests. The best ones are nice people and genuinely helpful. When they take a long time to make up their minds, it's because they're afraid—not just of the risk of investing in a particular startup, but because that startup has to be the only one of its type they invest in.
The slice is the top students, who used to exclusively go to large companies. Now it's not so many. My impression is the top CS and Engineering students can successfully conduct a national job search.
You should make a distinction between what exists, and can be named, and what can be known and explained. These are two distinct categories. There are things the exist and can be explained, but nothing allows us the say that there aren't things that can't be explained.

If what we known to exist and understand can't explain all observed data (our thoughts and inner experiences) than we are forced to infer the existence of something outside our understanding.
Using machines to work side by side with people, future is coming slowly.
I disagree. Obama had a lot of oppertunity here, but more importantly he never intended to actually stop indefinite detention. Rather than go through all the reasons here I'll just point out one of many articles that debunks this reasoning-

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/23/the_obama_gitmo_myth/
Civics class never taught me about "unlimited power," so I'm having a little bit of difficulty getting spun up with the premise.

The conclusion though doesn't share my outlook. The actual activities are not interesting to me. What is interesting to me is insuring ongoing changing activity and new things being tried. Libertarianism fails as badly as most government fails in this regard, permitting the accrual of power by corporate bodies with, like government, interest vested chiefly in their own self propogation.

The role that is unspoken, not what government is, but what I want it to be: to insure no one keeps others from trying actions to better themselves. It's not about actions, about information in acting, it's about being empowered to be able to act, to try things. I see this as a macroscopic look, whereas I see your concerns with decision making, the libertarian/government question, as microscopic, focused on only one particular thing at a time.
"When you go to the bank and ask for a loan they don't convince you to take $5MM more than you asked for. This is because bank loans have become a commodity and they need your business as much as you need their money."

This is mostly wrong. Banks have all the power in the vast majority of business lending situations. The reason they don't throw extra money at you, is not due to the borrower having the power (not even remotely close).

A typical bank only wants your business if it's good business. Their returns are modest on a standard business loan, and they don't like to have even one bad loan if they can help it. They never get a surprise windfall (think: Instagram); the return is well set ahead of time. Their business model is so radically different that it's not very useful to compare to the VC business and its money or style.

A bank doesn't normally convince you to take more money, because they fund very strictly for sound operating practices ideally, because their returns are thin. Their ideal loan is the exact amount a business needs, because that business has to pay on that loan monthly or similar (whereas with most VC that is not the case). The bank loan adds to the operating cost, and has to then be factored into the business equation. They can't afford to lose 90% of their portfolio because one grandslam will make up for it.

Where a bank gets the money it's going to lend out is also radically different from VC, and the conservative nature of that money properly requires conservative lending practices.

And it's not true that banks won't try to throw extra money at you. They do, and I've seen it. But they only do it for 'perfect' customers that present nearly zero chance of default or failure (which describes very few business borrowers).
Right now "the mind is the brain" theory still uses the magic of brain to explain what we observe. Everytime you hear someone saying "the brain does this or that", they act like it's a known thing and the mind is the brain and the brain has some yet unknown and unexplained properties that give rise to "this or that".

So, yeah, magic.
There arent billions of starving people around. Those who do starve, do so not because of a lack of food, but because those who have excess of it would rather destroy it than sell it below market price. GMO wont do jack against an artificial constructed scarcity.
I never had problems with the ARM build personally.
there's prototypical government subsidy and research through universities and then slowly out to private sector, and then there's direct capital injection for start-up from "private" venture capital firm run by the CIA.
How the Joker Works
If you have more than 100 hours of Crusader Kings 2, you know historical reality better than most history majors. Sure one may know history, but do you know the principles of interconnectedness that drove history onwards?

There's nothing like sitting down with a wide set of empirical data for being able to deeply get the genuine causalities. Anything else just doesn't cut it, which is why virtual simulation and general modeling- Engelbart's dream- still speaks such promise to so many techies.
What it really means to be a “junior” developer.