skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not simply that investors don't want to take certain risks. It's that some kinds of risks are outside their parameters. VCs are built up in our minds as towering financial authorities, but really they're just small teams of MBAs who are themselves raising money from foundations and pension funds, and the fraction of that capital that they get to work with is very small; a large pension fund wants some exposure to the market dynamics of "venture capital", but no pension fund wants to bet the farm on a Hyperloop.

When you grok how venture capital actually works, it gets easier to see how much less important they are to the economy than they seem. Startups like Instagram emerge from the parameters of VC, not from the whims or me-tooiness of the VC partners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title
Papayas from Hawaii are irradiated before they get to the US mainland. It doesn't mean they become radioactive.
>Tesla and SpaceX are great but I'm not aware of fundamental engineering principles they have overthrown.

No, but it is a pretty good claim to show an understanding of the basics that they supposedly haven't learned.
I think there's a degree of truth in that, especially in very bureaucratic organizations, but I think it's orthogonal to this discussion.

I did a stint in business consulting and rubbed elbows with a lot of certified 100% grade-A sociopaths. In my experience they were not deep thinkers or conceptual thinkers, and thus are actually unlikely to hatch deep long-term conspiracies of the sort that would result in an elite agenda to create make-work. They struck me as exceedingly shallow short-term thinkers who do a lot of bullshit posturing and a lot of social climbing. They don't analyze deeply. They look for opportunities for quick ascension via tactics like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_48_Laws_of_Power
Here's the pessimistic view: the authorities intentionally did this (detained Miranda) to provoke GG into releasing classified documents in a way that the popular press would interpret as "in retaliation"... thus setting up the perception in the public's eyes that GG is acting in a non-journalistic way, in a personal way, perhaps as a personal crusade "against the state"... thus making it easier for the public to swallow the idea that GG is an enemy of the state, not a journalist
> key points (like the issues with thermal expansion) are legitimate criticisms

No, thermal expansion criticism is not careful enough. See my comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238022
That seems a bit of a stretch. Hackers & Painters wasn't a book about startups. It was a collection of essays about topics related to computers. One of them ("How to Make Wealth") happened to be an analysis of the economics underlying startups. But tactical advice about fundraising would have been out of place in it.
This case is stupidity piled higher and deeper!

> Does the IP address actually change when this happens? Some ISPs have their DHCP server assign IPs according to the MAC address of the cable modem, which of course won't change if power is shut off and then turned on again.

My ISP does this. I get a new IP address whenever
I cycle power on my cable modem. And sometimes
my ISP gives me a new IP address for whatever reason.
Maybe their reason is that they want to charge
a little more for a fixed IP address. Or maybe
they have more paying customers than IP addresses
so must dynamically assign IP addresses to
users actually connected.

Yes, if 3taps was accessing Craigslist from
a fixed IP address, then that can be fair,
although not really good, evidence that
3taps was continuing to access Craigslist
after the C&D letter.

If 3taps just admitted continuing to use
Craigslist, then they were, just how do I
say it, s.t.u.p.i.d, or some such? Or,
all a 3taps person had to do was just
go home and get the Craigslist data
from a home computer with a different
IP address. I'm not up on mobile devices,
but I have to believe that they
also use frequently changing,
dynamically assigned IP addresses.

Also I don't like the idea that
there is screen scraping as something
different from ordinary usage;
it's not. The Web site sends the data,
and the data is nearly always stored
on disk by the Web browser. Also
the Web browser can write the data
to an HTM file and a directory with
the JS, CSS, JPG, PNG, GIF, etc. files.
Then the user has essentially all the
data in simple, plain unencrypted
form. Nearly all the data is sent
just as simple text. E.g., likely
the Craigslist data is sent this way.
Then if someone wants to make some
new use of that Craigslist data,
they can easily remove the HTTP, HTML,
CSS, JS, etc. stuff, leave the simple
text, analyze it, reformat it,
combine it with other data,
format it with Word, TeX,
PostScript, PDF, etc., wrap it in some
new HTML, CSS, and JS, and publish it
again. Then it need not be the least
bit clear just where the data came
from. In this case, with little
good evidence that the data came
from Craigslist,
it would not be
fair to search the facilities of
3taps for evidence.

Broadly, the Web site offers the data
to all anonymous users, as mostly just
simple text. In that case, the Web site
should basically just shut up about
what happens to the data they sent.
We have had representatives of three major departments associated with the Executive wing either outright lie or purposefully mislead by omission or redirection in the last year.

Government officials "taking the fifth" before Congress should be illegal. When one branch can stymie another the checks and balances fail.
Did I miss HP turning around and becoming an awesome company again?

Apparently. Have you checked the stock market lately?
A better headline than either the original or the reversion-to-page-title would be:

Maintainer of v8-juice/cvv8: "Sayonara, V8"
1. Why should ANN train at the same rate as humans do? It's not unreasonable to expect that it will learn million times faster than any human.

2. While every single human must go through the 10-20 years learning process, there are no reasons to duplicate that process for AI. Connection diagram and weight matrix could be easily copied between ANNs, so that they can constantly build on top of each other knowledge.
he's been taken way out of context. see other comments here.
Perhaps your background is telling - you don't have a real 'home', hence you don't feel strongly about protecting it. I mean if things really hit the fan in Australia, you could go to Germany, or vice-versa. (Incidentally I have a similar background mix to you - lived in 3 different countries & have different citizenships and am writing this from Portugal, so know where you are coming from ;)

Most people are not like you. They have a home country that they care strongly about and want it protected. If that means killing some terrorists in a desert, so be it. And if a few people in said desert end up getting killed by mistake (and they tend to give benefit of the doubt to the drone operator) - that's war. Perhaps they shouldn't be hanging out near the terrorists.

My point is not to say whether this view is right or wrong - but to explain that the 'majority' who support the drone strikes understand what is going on and are ok with it.
They are classifying their cleaners as contractors to avoid paying payroll taxes and benefits. It's not a completely shady practice on its own, but in combination with everything else that these guys have done (stealing website designs, fake yelp reviews, repeatedly missing scheduled appointments, allegedly not paying their contractors), it definitely suggests that these guys are more Groupon that Google.
> All the research on the subject shows incontrovertibly that 5 is way too young for video games.

First, "all the research" means "all the psychological research". Recent scandals demonstrate that psychological research has the approximate value of astrological forecasts:

http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...

Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."

Second, one would want to compare video games with whatever a 5-year-old would be doing instead. Looked at that way, obviously a well-designed age-appropriate video game might represent an improvement over its alternatives in some cases.

Finally, let's let the parents decide -- you know, the people who ignored all conventional wisdom and decided to have the child in the first place?
The problem with a 150m slippage tolerance is that it means the horizontal dampers on the pylons near the end have to deal with movements of up to 150m, which is significantly larger than the distance between pylons. Maybe that's feasible (seems unlikely, but I'm no engineer), but it's the kind of point that ought to be addressed explicitly.
I think the author makes a good point, to which I would add a couple of thoughts -

1) The danger of too much free time isn't because all of that brainpower would somehow figure out how to topple the system or at least replace its' current occupants -- but would be spent licentiously. Exhibit A - Jerry Springer show guests.

2) The choice of more trinkets over less work has a very strong sponsor -- business itself.
Hum. I got a different impression with regards to the FEM graphs of the beams' stresses. Dr. Drang seemed more bothered by the fact that they were there because it was too amateur, and too much pretty graphs for their own sake, since any civil engineer could do the calculations in their sleep. Not because of technical problems, per se. (Honestly, that might be a social faux pas among physical engineers, and a noob move from Musk, but I'm not a civil engineer nor Musk so I don't give a shit.)

Apart from that, it seems, as I gathered from comments here, that there was a solution to thermal expansion, and that's both not fixing the tube to the pylons, and having the trajectory curve so they can bend safely under expansion. This confusion rose from the ambiguous meaning of "nearly straight tube". The Hyperloop seems to have decent tolerances for turning, so maybe that could work.

But the most solid arguments against Hyperloop, I think, come from the economics side. It's less efficient than a good HSR, like the French or the Japanese ones. It's not SF to LA, it's "somewhere near SF" to "somewhere near LA". Its cost is probably wildly underestimated. It looks as if the only failure modes are either "tubes explode causing chaos", or "crash and die horribly"; not necessarily an exclusive choice.
'Al' in Arabic means 'the'
Why? Because it gives them a good angle to bring additional attention to the story.

Similarly, if a really major news story broke today (a war starting, someone super famous dying, cure for AIDS found, etc.), i'd expect them to delay the release of these new secrets because they wont have the attention they want.
How One Plus One Became Everything: A Puzzle of Life
I would say that establishing a management tree makes semi-sense, since they seem to have a bunch more people working on it from the get-go that you'd usually have. In that case, I can see why they'd want to arrange who's working on what.
>Can you imagine someone saying this to your face?

Yes. And since I am fully aware of my tendency to lose interest in projects part way through and move on to something else, I don't publicize them while they are in the "hey this idea sounds cool" stage. Thus avoiding having people point out the objective reality that I don't finish much of what I start.
Big is relative, of course. I don't think I ever used that feature of Google Reader, and it's unclear how many others depended on it as well.

That being said, of course, it's a great feature to have.
I think a better headline would be:

Guardian to publish about UK's espionage equivalent of NSA program.

This headline paints it as a Britain vs. Greenwald in sort of revenge tone which, though possible, is incorrect. Besides revelations about 100% espionage is not about a tussle between two fighting children right?
This news is showing up at the top of the Most Read page on Bloomberg terminal, but I can't seem to find it anywhere on the web:

Bank of America Says 21-Year-Old London Summer Intern Dies
By Ben Moshinsky and Ambereen Choudhury
Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp. said a 21-
year-old intern died one week before completing a summer
program. Moritz Erhardt, who was on a seven-week pre-graduate program in London, died Aug. 15, Bank of America spokesman John McIvor said by telephone today...
I believe fixed and rigidly fixed have very different meanings in this context. Your suggesting that the tube floats on the pylon(e.g on rollers). The hyperloop paper suggests that it's attached with dampers that are, for lack of a better term, elastic.
I imagine you could purchase some sort of financial product that would pay out continuously to cover your taxes. Basically a perpetual annuity, with some wiggle room built in to account for changes in tax rates and property valuation.

I don't know what a realistic rate would be for such a thing, but probably quite low. So you'd probably have to put in something like 50x your annual property tax payment.
First world problems...

One of the biggest culture shocks I experienced in Delhi was going to the cinema (Die Hard 3, I think). Almost every member of the audience talked on the 'phone the whole way through. The conversations always started, "I'm in the cinema..." and then "deteriorated" into social gossip.
I think the proposal says explicitly there are no longitudinal dampers on the pylons, only horizontal transverse, but thermal expansion shouldn't be a problem for those.
Or Ludum Dare this Friday...
> "The types of your nodes probably don't have much to do with any algorithms you may be writing."

Which is precisely why he wants generic types.

> "Consider your algorithms as functions which act on an interface."

How would he write a function that explicitly expects a graph whose nodes contain ints, and not, say, strings? What kind of interface would that function act upon?

> "you still only have to type-cast/type-switch on getters and callbacks."

The whole point is not having to do that.
Not surprised. Humans have evolved during times of scarcity and are most productive and happy in that situation. When one has zero needs, wants, goals, life loses its purpose.

It takes focus and delayed gratification to create such purpose, however. These values are not immediately apparent to young people. The article is correct that they must be taught by parents or perhaps even society. That is, if we want well-off young people to make themselves useful earlier.
> You can literally get the browser to dump the native assembly it produced when JITting a given function.

You can literally get Chrome to dump native assembly it produces when JITting a given function. You just need to build Chromium yourself, because disassembler is not built into it. It's a dead bloat I guess for 99% of people, even for JS VM engineer disassembly is the last resort. You can get compiler IR from any Chrome build and people do get it. And usually it means that VM itself should be fixed.

People should not need to care about IR or (worse) disassembly. If your code is reasonable it should just work reasonably fast. File bugs if it does not, instead of tuning, which can break as soon as V8 moves left or right.
It's pretty horrible that airports are now used as weapons by countries against their citizens, not even for crimes but just to see what they can find. I mean somewhere, someone in charge picked up the phone or typed into a computer "hold him", there was no miscommunication or misunderstanding here. It was clear abuse of power, just because they could.

By the way, they can do the same thing to you if you live within 100 miles of a US border, you do not have to be crossing it, they can just do a border stop 100 miles in regardless where or how you are traveling. You don't have any rights at that point because of anti-terrorism laws and they can seize things and clone your phone. This is not even remotely an exaggeration.

http://news.yahoo.com/does-constitution-free-zone-really-exi...
Show HN: Unscatter now has an android app
Seems weird they don't expire tokens on password change. I know that Facebook does.
Math formal language is expressive enough to express everything most mathematicians want. The thing is that formal math language wasn't designed as a medium to transfer ideas, but rather as a notation to write them down concisely and make things easy to manipulate. That's why learning from books that are very formal is such a difficult experience, though it gets easier with experience. Unfortunately, to get to that level of experience, you pretty much have to be focused on pure mathematics for years, and if you're just trying to learn some math to get some other shit done, and there isn't any book written in more conversational style (which thankfully usually is the case), you're out of luck.
What I get from your comment is that any time anyone even references a ruling class, you believe they are claiming conspiracy.
I think the seed bubble is certainly annoying, but that's largely angel investors. It's largely folks who made a few million dollars having success in someone else's startup (Google, Facebook, whatever) and thinking they're business geniuses with lots to offer the next generation of entrepreneurs. Many of them are little more than dumb money but think they're adding a ton of value, and entrepreneurs humor them and take the checks. As a result a lot of crap gets funded early.

But VCs still play at the bigger level for more money and most of these me-too startups that get their million dollars go nowhere and get no follow on funding and die. The bubble of seed will eventually go away as these angels realize that investing is hard and they have better things to spend their money on.

As someone who has been involved in a billion dollar project that required up front investment of around $250million I can tell you that finding very large sums of investment for capital intensive businesses with good return metrics is not hard - there's a lot of money that at that scale only has limited options for putting it in play. Sovereign wealth funds alone are desperately seeking out deals at this scale.
Dude, tone down the rhetoric.
Deluxe News!
> He seems to assume that Musk intended for each section of tube to physically be touching, when instead Musk intended to leave gaps between, to account for the expansion.

Because the tube must be maintained at a near-vacuum, it can't be "gaps" -- it would have to be expanding slip joints, maybe like those on the Space Shuttle solid-rocket boosters. So, expanding joints in a tube that, by being evacuated, must bear a constant load of 14.7 PSI and remain airtight?

> ... it seems to me that Dr. Drang has a very basic misunderstanding or lack of imagination.

Perhaps, but on present evidence he's not the only one lacking imagination.
For those wondering which of the many DSP acronyms this is referring to, it's Digital Signal Processing.
Another way is to get the governement to subsidize those kind of work.
How so? The point being made in the blog post is that Musk has a severe misunderstanding of the fundamentals of civil engineering.

That Musk runs a company that has successfully engineered cars and spacecraft in no way makes him qualified to construct the Hyperloop.

Civil engineering isn't mechanical engineering isn't chemical engineering isn't aerospace engineering. These are different disciplines. Being a talented industrialist in one (or more) of these do not imply capability in any of the others.
You would really dig l2met.[1] It is a system that creates metrics from k=v log data.
https://github.com/ryandotsmith/l2met
Emscripten is far more worthy of the phrase 'saved JS dev.'
The governments and intelligence communities are desperate to turn the tide against a person rather than the agencies involved, and delegitimize Greenwald as a journalist. The story is out of control as far as the governments are concerned, and their bluntest weapons are violence (not yet) and character assassination.
You modify the BCLK regularly whilst booted into Windows on the different Win 8 machines you handle? Even when overclocking you'd normally not mess with the BCLK unless you are really wanting to push your overclock.
Exploring VC Portfolio Composition & Traction Metrics
It would be much better to keep it all inside a local VM.
So are you saying there's nothing that the V8 devs could have done to ease the transition?
Unless the meaning of "water" has changed sometime in the past second, water is the liquid form of the chemical substance dihydogen oxide (i.e., H2O). This is the same meaning its had since the atomic components of water were first determined...
That is why it is imperative we have a government that can make investments into future energy and infrastructure needs even if it potentially destroys existing companies in the long run.
If the author wanted to be fair, the title should be "Why Silicon Valley funds SpaceXes and Teslas, and not Hyperloops." And then it would be clear that the answer is simply that Elon is working on SpaceX and Tesla, and not on the Hyperloop.
"I do have a PhD in Having Designed and Built Lots of Shit."

Is that from the University of Life after a time spent at the School of Hard Knocks by any chance?
The ingredient list looks like Larabar + cricket powder.
I agree with others. This article comes across as too negative. There's really no reason it needs to be.
The problem is going to be that the UK tabloids will pick up the Reuters feed and then make it sound like some barmy American is threatening Our Brave Lads. Guardian readers + other 'broadsheet' readers are not the voters who elect governments over here...
No real secret that this is happening. I've heard/seen the evidence from USDA-ARS and top agronomists from industry.

The reality is quite simple: our soils are going to end up looking a lot more like they did in the past (doused with nasty chemicals; stuff that will make environmentalists miss Roundup).

Despite the flaws of GMO crops, our soils in the Midwest are about as clean (in terms of pesticide/herbicide) as they've ever been during industrial agriculture. (Yes, yes, I realize the fertilizer situation is dire -- that is a separate problem and a massive area for research & innovation)

Agriculture is and always has been about chemical warfare. Plant and insects evolve over seasons. The only difference is that now humans are helping plants along. And yes, I emphasize "helping" because I see zero potential in non-GMO crops feeding humanity in the long run. It is one thing to grow tasty heirloom tomatoes in your yard and quite another to produce commodity grain at scale sufficient enough to meet global demand. I hear so many armchair environmentalists equate the two; very frustrating.
Author simply stated this and made it look like it's a bad thing, while I explained why it is as it is and why it is not bad.
This is totally true. I remember having read an article where the author states, that in 20 or 30 years we may look back this time as a time with very little innovation (due to the internet start-ups).

Very few invest in real hardware these days. I am looking for money for my own start up. Diabetes field. No Chance.
Yes, I know. I had it but my config was badly broken so it wasn't doing anything. Whoops.
I think forums fit the bill for most musicians I know - The Gear Page and Gearslutz are two popular ones but there are tons. Both TGP and GS have few "developers" but they are there. Outside of that, the music industry is so fragged that I think mostly there are lots of niche forums. Facebook groups have taken a small chunk too, I think. I'd be up for it.