skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a nice piece and I would certainly commend it to founders for its insights.

Of course, much of Silicon Valley is a living testament to the fact that options can have incredible value for the right cases. Every startup has a rhythm to it and, if you are holding .5% of a "hot" startup in the form of options having a low exercise price, it normally is worth the gamble of biding your time, taking reduced pay, and seeing if the big payday will come. Many founders think in these terms and, if their startup fails to galvanize and moves instead in only fits and starts, will seek to cut their losses and move on. In this sense, the perceived value of the options as seen at the entry point does not turn on what average returns may be for such options considered generically among the entire universe of startups. It turns on more subjective factors such as whether the startup is doing something exciting, whether its key people make up a strong team, whether it has attracted quality backing, and the like. If those factors are there, then founders do not really view it as a matter of average returns across a broad class of startup types but rather view it as a matter of the likelihood of a big outcome for the particular startup being considered.

That said, options can prove illusory in many cases and caution is definitely in order. It normally does not pay to hang in with an uneven venture in the vague hope that it can somehow turn things around and yield a great equity return for your small piece of the company. Among other things, if a venture goes through multiple rounds of funding, the liquidation preferences get to be so great that option holders may easily get a very reduced payout, or even no payout whatever, on acquisition. Also, if you hang around while all your options vest and then leave the company, you typically have only 90 days within which to exercise them or you lose them altogether. That means a cash payout that only increases your risk or, even worse than that, a large tax hit with no cash return if the stock price is high following a series of fundings. Of course, there are (as the author notes) many good reasons to be in a startup apart from equity payout and it may still be worthwhile to stick it out in a doubtful venture for a time owing to those other reasons. But don't stick with a dubious venture based primarily on the hoped-for equity payout in such cases because, in that case, the odds definitely are against you.
Even less known is that in the process of making the first radio controlled anything in 1898 Nikola Tesla made first electronic logic circuits!

http://www.tfcbooks.com/teslafaq/q&a_024.htm

"After World War II when computer hardware manufacturers attempted to patent digital logic gates in general, the U.S. Patent Office asserted Tesla's turn-of-the-century priority in their electrical implementation."
Well the argument usually heard for the government doing it is "they've always been able to watch where you go in public". I suspect that somehow would not fly if it were reversed.

It's an interesting idea. Thanks to smartphones, the people have more cameras than their governments. The governments however have more targets.
The way I read it was that it is surprising that it is there at all.

Apparently a lot of android devices don't have one, and don't have time to collect pseudo random data for their software rng to make secure certificates when you boot it for the first time, which posses a security risk for android devices.

That's how I read the article in relation to recent news.
Yeah I should have qualified that... it's not even math or music, but rather particular subfields and a particular kind of person. 26 is too young too; I was taking that random number from the OP.

Galenson claims there is a human dimorphism between people (or at least artists) who peak young and old (summarized here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html)

Math, music, and chess do have the most child prodigies. It doesn't mean the converse is true, that older people are worse at them :)
Rng-tools [1], mentioned in the article, can use a hardware rng's output as input to the kernel's prng. However, it needs to be configured correctly to avoid potential problems [2].

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/user/tlecarrour/rng-tools.h...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6040975
Seriously. When I first went to the website and read the description, I was like, "why isn't this already funded? They're only asking for $75K." Now I know why.
Show HN: Color Keys- Keyword Coloring for Android EditTexts
Thanks for the questions, a big part of our role is to handle exactly what you describe above. Making sure that the operating partner/developer is acting as they should! We have provisions in our documents to remove them if they're not behaving.

As far as competing with larger RE fund managers, our focus initially is on deals that require $2MM-$10MM of equity, below where the big institutions will look (>$10MM typically), but beyond where most operators can raise on their own.
How much is a law degree worth? One Million Dollars
Legal academics and journalists have marshaled statistics purporting to show that enrolling in law school is irrational. Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre investigated the economic value of a law degree and found the opposite: given current tuition levels, the median and even 25th percentile annual earnings premiums justify enrollment. For most law school graduates, the net present value of a law degree typically exceeds its cost by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The mean pre-tax lifetime value of a law degree is estimated as approximately $1,000,000.
A powerpoint presentation version of the study is available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2270175. The full study is available at:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2250585
I mean I have 7 terminals (many also running screen) open on my desktop - more windows than all other apps combined; and almost all interaction with the OS, by which I mostly mean process and file management, is via the command line. My browser is relegated to a secondary window alongside my service monitoring and ssh terminals.

When I write new utilities, they are usually command-line based. If I can get away with it, I'll put together a bash script built out of pipelines of Unix utilities and various others I've written over the years. I'm reluctant to write for-purpose apps; I try to make them fit into a Unix-style paradigm of streams combined with some command-line options.

For example, I recently wrote a simple video editor to select clips from my motorbike commuting videos. The only platform-specific bit is the video player, and all it does is respond to keyboard commands to navigate backwards and forwards and mark positions, in response to which it writes out text to standard out. I have other scripts which drive ffmpeg or other utilities as necessary to do the heavy lifting of cutting and composing. And to port it to another OS, all I need write anew is a video-playing component. And things like parallelization for efficiency, process isolation for resilience, and job control to temporarily reduce CPU usage (perhaps to avoid overheating on reencode!) are trivial.

For work, all my testing is done from the command-line, much of the code tweaks, all source control, merge resolution, grep / sed / etc. Debugging is usually done with repls like pry for Ruby. Browser at work is primarily used for distraction while having a coffee and waiting for tests to run, or to interact with company web apps.

Things like web browsers (Firefox in my case, because of tree-style tabs more than anything else) are invariant across platforms. If you live entirely in the browser, you don't need to deal with, or even know anything about, the machine's OS. So I don't really consider that use case an interaction.
Levelator [1] does a great job of leveling audio between guests, I'd suggest running it on old episodes too.

[1] http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator
I use the Mechanize gem for rails

http://mechanize.rubyforge.org/
He probably means the global 1% which is ~$30,000 per year, in a lot of first world places that is far from enough to build up wealth without behaving frugally.
Jimmy Carter says America has no functioning democracy
If you somehow claim that doing independent reporting (and reaching independent conclusions) is "spinning," then my attempts at having a reasonable conversation are futile. I will note, once again, that you haven't refuted a single claim I made about the three main errors in reporting on this topic.
One of the first places that I go whenever I am uncertain when fixing my old bike. Great resource.
Here is the translation directly from Google:

Ex-President Carter: "The invasion of privacy has gone too far"

The Obama administration tried to placate Europe's anger over spying programs. Not as ex-President Jimmy Carter: The Democrat attacked the U.S. intelligence sharp. The disclosure by whistleblowers Snowden was "useful."

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was in the wake of the NSA Spähskandals criticized the American political system. "America has no functioning democracy," Carter said Tuesday at a meeting of the "Atlantic Bridge" in Atlanta.

Previously, the Democrat had been very critical of the practices of U.S. intelligence. "I think the invasion of privacy has gone too far," Carter told CNN. "And I think that is why the secrecy was excessive." Overlooking the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said Carter, whose revelations were long "likely to be useful because they inform the public."

Carter has repeatedly warned that the United States sharply declined due to excessive restriction of civil rights, their moral authority. Last year he wrote in an article in the "New York Times", new U.S. laws "never before seen breach our privacy by the government" allowed the.

Carter was the 39th President of the United States, who ruled from 1977 until 1981. During his tenure, he tried to align U.S. foreign policy that is more about human rights - after his retirement from active politics for his humanitarian work, he received the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize .

In Atlanta, he also expressed his overall pessimistic about the global situation. There is currently no reason for him to be optimistic, Carter said, referring to the situation in Egypt, which had fallen into a military dictatorship. He also lamented the growing political divide in the United States, the excessive influence of money in U.S. election campaigns and the confusing American election rules. The ex-president whose "Carter Center" operates worldwide including election monitoring, announced skeptical whether the United States, the standard that applies when reviewing the Center of elections might be fulfilled.

As a bright spot, however, Carter called the triumph of modern technology that would have caused some of the countries of the Arab Spring of democratic progress. Exactly these developments but are endangered by the NSA Spähskandal as major U.S. Internet platforms such as Google or Facebook lose credibility worldwide.
Similar in spirit to SGI's Lavarand [1]

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19971210213248/http://lavarand.sg...
The Robin Hood Foundation, a charity which aims to "find, fund and partner with programs that have proven they are an effective remedy to poverty" [1] in New York City, has built robust metrics, at least on par with the Bill & Melinda Gates and Bloomberg Foundations. They work rigorously to identify where their dollars "have the greatest positive impact". More on Robin Hood's metrics: https://www.robinhood.org/metrics.

Disclaimer: I donate to the Robin Hood Foundation

[1] https://www.robinhood.org/about
Implying you're the target audience.. ;)
It is fascinating to observe the proliferation of technological misadventures federally funded in the past decade+ since 9/11. There needs to be a real legal movement to place limits on these activities. The argument is already lost in many other countries (e.g. U.K.), but we have a fundamental legal doctrine, enshrined in the 4th Amendment, that should apply. That requires real congressional and judicial action to restrain these law enforcement and anti-terrorism activities. Unfortunately, since nobody can yet claim tangible harm from having their privacy invaded, the judicial route seems murky.
Another take on a Browser Notepad
Yes. There is a reason why we fiddle with stuff like leap-seconds instead of simply letting the second dilate ever so slightly, as Earth's rotation slows down ever so slightly, so that there are still exactly 86,400 seconds in a day.

Since 1967, the second has been defined as 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.† The caesium atom is far more consistent than the Earth.

†http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second
>> White people were associated with rich and powerful western nations, so their prestige increased. Black people were associated with poor African nations, so their prestige decreased.

I thought the article might make that point, which would have explained the teaching anecdote, but instead, the author sees the opposite trend:

"Unlike their parents and grandparents, China's youth have grown up with access to information, entertainment, and art from all over the world. Many have consequently come to reconsider stereotypes of black people, and they are in turn influencing the opinions of their older, more "traditional" relatives."

I was hoping he would come back around and try to explain the apparent contradiction.
Wall Street, Dancing, and Being Different
I'm 46. I do agree that I felt smartest around 22-25, I was able to recall stuff quickly and think faster than now and absorb new information faster, but that's just raw calculating ability and short term memory. I have noticed over the years a slow decline, and now I feel about 10% less smart in that sense.

However, over the years I have gained a large array of mental tools, techniques and knowledge that have vastly expanded my abilities. I am a more competent programmer now, as well as a more rounded person. We will see if that holds up for another 10 years.
A few days ago I posted a document regarding NYC's relatively new booting program for cars which have accumulated too many tickets/fines. In it they point out that the system is backed by a team of vans which scour the city doing license plate recognition to find these cars. Obviously the consequence is that everyone's license plate gets photographed, but it's up to the NYPD what to do with that information. The ACLU doc has some stats, but if you want to see the document I'm talking about I've linked it below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6049276

Though Bloomberg and the NYPD hardly have any trouble pushing these things through for the last decade, I imagine one impetus behind ramping these programs way up would be incidents such as the would be Times Square van bomber from a couple years ago. In that case however, the perpetrator had actually stolen license plates from another vehicle (which they learned after finding a VIN that wasn't scratched and the registration didn't match).

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing...
In somewhere like Russia where everyone owns a dashcam it could be very possible.
Why are you basing things off of seconds? The day is a constant defined by nature, I would much prefer a system based around the day. A second is actually pretty arbitrary.
This issue was recently discussed on the development mail list: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-dev/o9i_SbGRrzI/gWvnB...

The fix is to document that Close is called: https://codereview.appspot.com/11432044/
This is a fantastic list. Thank you for the link. I may have seen it before but had long forgotten about it.
"For currency conversion we use Purchasing Power Parity Dollars (PPP$) in order to take into account the difference in cost of living between countries; PPP$ are also less susceptible to short term fluctuations."
That's something I've pressed for here a lot at Kiva, showing how positive your impact is. Last year, we started rating our partners on "catalytic"-ness, which is somewhat of a proxy for impact, and now 33% of our loans are rated highly catalytic. There's some studies which have shown impact both of microfinance in general and some that include our specific partners, but in general not nearly enough studies. And I'm sure with enough data, we'd find that microloans can have one of the greatest impacts, but that there are certainly situations where charitable giving can be even more impactful under the right circumstances. The problem is studies are hard to do right and expensive, and thus it's hard to get data on what is most impactful. From an engineering perspective, I'd love to solve this problem, but it seems to be one of those problems that requires more of an academic solution.
Yahoo Mail is not catching up anymore
I'm not suggesting replacing the second for scientific work-- that would be a mess, I agree. But since it seems the day is already good enough for casual timekeeping, why not replace the non-scientific, imprecise, everyday uses of second/minute/hour with fractions of the day?
An example:

http://golang.org/src/pkg/io/io.go?s=11741:11801#L336

Line 336. io.Copy takes a writer and a reader, but actually asserts whether they implement ReaderFrom/WriterTo, then use their methods, ReadFrom and WriteTo, if they do. (Same thing with the http package checking if the reader implements Closer, and calling Close if it does, though admittedly 'we should be able to call Close' is a much more unsafe assumption than 'if it implements ReadFrom, and it has the right type signature, we can just call that function instead'.)

The reason it doesn't take values implementing the interfaces ReaderFrom and WriterTo is that io.Copy works even if you don't implement those interfaces.

It's an unfortunate and regrettable predicament, but it's not something that comes up a lot. As others have mentioned in this thread, Go certainly isn't a language with referential transparency by any means--the type system provides minimal sanity checking, and the language itself is memory-safe, but it's not trying to be a "high-assurance language."
> Passport information is collected upon purchasing a SIM-card

Not always. You can purchase anonymous SIM too. I did it two years ago on a train station. Price for calls is a little higher this way though.
Working on answering my own question here, in the hopes that this may help someone else down the road. Here's one article that argues against startups going down the "white label" path:

http://www.startupcfo.ca/2012/06/why-i-hate-white-labeling-f...

And another that takes a dim view of pure "white labeling" but suggests co-branding as a valid option:

http://davidcummings.org/2011/08/11/white-labeled-software-s...
BlackBerry Q10 stores your unencrypted email password on its own servers
Sure, but Apple, being sometimes a little overeager to keep the apps they accept "of the right sort" -- ideally fully native, really -- could see an compatibility layer and decide to simply refuse to approve any apps using the bundled Android layer.
Broadcom is a similarly huge USA company in ARM computers & networking, are we sure they haven't been involved with the NSA either?
How cabinet rentals could save the flagging arcade game market
The other problem is that state laws aren't keeping up with law enforcement technology. FOIA-similar laws in Minnesota meant that every ALPR-captured license plate was public information, which I requested to prove a point. I got back 2.1 million license plates (+ timestamp and coordinates) on a USB stick.

Without strong policies and laws, this data is ripe for abuse -- domestic abuse victims and stalking where someone eats, visits, and sleeps, or tracking regular routes of hazmat or cash trucks, etc.

https://tonywebster.com/2012/12/minneapolis-police-license-p...
a) My house is a 10 minute bus ride from UC Berkeley, b) I am plenty familiar with house prices and down payments as it took us two years to find this one, and c) I was talking specifically about a 4-year degree, which is likely to cost more than $60k.
Sometimes they're not very good. Sometimes they're just very expensive.

There are a range of different hardware devices available on various plugin boards. And processors have started to include them as well.

Here's a very old (1997?) examination of 3 hardware devices: (http://www.robertnz.net/true_rng.html) and he has some nice information here too: (http://www.robertnz.net/hwrng.htm)

Here's my list of recent reading, not all of it relevant.

(http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/rng/documents/nissc-p...)

(http://www.paulm.org/random.html)

(http://www.cryptography.com/public/pdf/IntelRNG.pdf)

Build one yourself: (http://www.labbookpages.co.uk/electronics/hwRNG.html)

Here's a list of devices:

(http://www.westphal-electronic.com/)

(http://www.trng98.se/shop/index.php)

(http://www.comscire.com/)

(http://www.idquantique.com/random-number-generators/products...)

(http://www.letech.jpn.com/)

And someone upthread posted a link to EntropyKey.
> Wow, this is pretty unfortunate. Also a very good example of why so many people maintain that Go is not nearly as statically typed as languages like Haskell or OCaml

I'm confused why "so many people maintain that" -- not because its a position I disagree with, because its not really a controversial position such that you'd need to "maintain" it.

Go is, pretty overtly C-like, but with some language-level concurrency features, plus type system features -- interfaces and methods and reflection -- to support OOP (though its definitely not a class-based OO language) and dynamic typing, plus GC, plus filing some of the sharp edges off of pointers.

It doesn't even begin to pretend to be like OCaml or Haskell in terms of strict typing.
I grew up in Minnesota, with a swampy riverbank full of mosquitos in my back yard. I also used to react to mosquito bites, until I took the wilderness survival merit badge class at Tomahawk Scout Reservation in Wisconsin. Sleeping outside in mosquito infested woods, without shelter, also made me resistant to mosquito bites.

I feel the bite itself, but I don't swell up or itch at all. I also no longer wear repellant, except when I'm at an elevated risk for getting wood ticks or deer ticks.
Ex-russian here.

This might be counter-intuitive to many people who never lived in Russia, but: mobile phone service contracts in Russia almost do not exist, entire market model for carriers is quite different.

Carriers don't sell SIM-locked phones for over decade now in Russia. Most common contract features are implemented as pay-as-you-go with extra packs (quite similar to what giffgaff does in the UK). This is probably due to the fact that CRA and other similar financial institutions in Russia are currently in their earliest stages of development.

Mobile phones are usually purchased absolutely independently from the mobile service contract, and almost never purchased from carriers: electronics stores usually offer better prices, and all Russian carriers are happy to sell SIM-only prepaid contracts (also see PAYG model notice above).

So overall you should read this news as: "major russian mobile companies decided that long-term contract model required to sell 'cheap' iPhones in russia is still too risky and not feasible", no conspiracies.
Thanks! All the UI elements were made by my own hand/mouse. It took a while, and a lot of iterations until we had something we were happy with. However, after only dabbling in design before, I'm now totally hooked on making icons, cartoons and microinteractions. Already started work on another illustration project.
Adjust your income by subtracting the annual cost of servicing your debt and wealth by subtracting the present value of the debt.