skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying the valuation is justified but naughty pictures have proven to be a very, very profitable industry.
Heat indexes in Houston regularly get above 130F in the summer. Sometimes up into the 160s. Check out http://www.srh.weather.gov/jetstream/downloads/heatindex_rh_... and keep in mind that Houston will be 90-100F in the summer with 60-90% humidity.

That's not to say you can't bike for significant parts of the year, but there are definitely days where it wouldn't just be uncomfortable, it would be unsafe, to bike to work in Texas. Add to that that certain cities, like Austin, are also fairly hilly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchdown_celebration
Transportation is still a trade off between convenience and price. I think a lot of the people not living within biking distance are probably also living in an area where public transport is a serious inconvenience compared to other options.

I live in the Cleveland area, and even living in the downtown area, I could imagine it being a legitimate sacrifice to live without a car. While the downtown area is growing in residence and support services, such as grocery stores, are being built downtown, it's still tough. Also, while some businesses are moving their offices downtown, other companies, especially large ones like Eaton, have moved their substantial downtown presence to the suburbs, so the problem is happening in both the residential and commercial side of real-estate. I'd have to imagine many small and mid-size cities suffer from this.

I just don't see a solution that is going to get people to cluster more, given our culture. I think the long-term solution is electric cars and the possibilities that shared, highly convenient, self-driven cars present. So instead of changing behaviors drastically, we use technology to make the required changes much smaller.
For a startup, most of what you'd like to do with your accounts is not 'accounting' as such, but management reporting/forecasting/what-if analysis. When you're big, there are all kinds of tools for that as well; but if you're small then you (or most likely someone outsourced) does your official accounts&taxes on a real accounting package, but for everything else there's Excel.
It's exceedingly difficult and expensive to have two spouses with busy jobs and a small child. My daughter doesn't tolerate daycare for more than 9-3, so my mom lives with us during the week. If my mom didn't live with us, we'd be looking at daycare ($1,300 per month) plus a nanny (maybe $2,000 per month). But I'm very fortunate to have Asian parents who think their role at this age is to help us with our kids and we're not too proud to accept the help...

That being said, I think it's penny-wise and pound-foolish to downshift your career merely because of the cost of childcare. Staying at home to take care of kids is a career death sentence. When your child is mostly independent in 11-12 years, you'll still have most of your career ahead of you, and your earning power will be greatly diminished. I think the stigma against people who choose to stay at home for a few years to take care of kids is ridiculous, but it almost guarantees that you'll be relegated to a second-tier type of position forever after.
I think the difference is entirely explained by WhiteDB's lack of networking overhead, both in write() calls to the OS[1] and creating & parsing network messages. A fairer comparison would be with leveldb and lmdb[2].

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/6/19/paper-megapipe-a-n...

[2] http://symas.com/mdb/microbench/
I would totally agree on the first point about how much of a burden it can be to get any moderately complex Python environment up and running (whether IPython Notebook is part of the install or not.) Unfortunately, it's just not as easy as it should be yet.

IMHO, this is what makes a duo like Vagrant + IPython Notebook so appropriate for creating a minimum barrier to entry. In other words, what you really need is a VM that has IPython Notebook and all of the necessary dependencies installed that you just start up as a guest machine. Then, on your host, you point your browser to http://localhost:8888 and get to work with the the ipynb UI.

The approach I described is exactly what I did with Mining the Social Web 2E, and I elaborated on it a bit here: http://miningthesocialweb.com/2013/08/24/reflections-on-auth...

The cool thing about the way Vagrant works is that you can run a VM locally or you can run it in the cloud just as easily with the appropriate plugin.

There's a video that demonstrates how easy it can be to use Vagrant and IPython Notebook to get started here - https://vimeo.com/72383764
Then you marry them.

And get divorced a few years later once both of you realize that "enjoying each others company immensely" is not sufficient to have a successful marriage.
Why I Didn't Apply to Y Combinator
I noticed that Pages 5 uses a new weird file format, it is a bundle again (not a zipped one like in Pages 4), in this folder is a zip archive which includes a bundle again.

I really wonder comes up with those formats and ideas. You almost wished that Apple had made ooXML the standard file format for Pages 5.
People want to create content, not fix other people's grammatical mistakes.

Hey, I'm the product manager for that work (also quoted in the article). I thought I might mention that we've A/B tested our task suggestion workflow extensively, and the answer is definitively that Wikipedians want to do both things. I can share links to all our research, which is public, if you want.

There are basically two kinds of people who sign up for Wikipedia: those with something to do in mind, and those who want a suggestion of where to start. The evidence we've gathered so far shows that many new contributors like being able to get started and learn the ropes doing something that's easy and not intimidating. They have a positive first experience editing, and then they typically move on to other tasks, having gained more confidence. We are giving people options, not requiring anyone to do N number of grammatical fixes in order to earn badges, privileges or anything of the sort.

I should also note that among more advanced editors, there is actually a popular Guild of Copyeditors that does highly-coordinated copyediting drives on Wikipedia. Not to mention all the peer review for quality that happens in other places. Never underestimate the interest of grammar nazis in fixing your comma usage. ;)
BitMonet’s micro-paywall now supports Tumblr and Blogger sites
19th Century Emoticons
When it comes to what you should use as a replacement, I highly recommend Deluge as a replacement. It's totally open source, really well architected, has tons of adding for power users, and has a slick interface.

It's super robust. I have a server that's currently seeding 200+ torrents (all Linux distros and other freely available material) at a constant 80mbps+ and it is still very snappy, even on the very under powered machine that it's running on.
Agreed. But how can a company that shows pictures for seconds and deletes them make money? And only have one use case or feature?
The irony of these observations is that the obvious strategy for fixing this addresses both problems, of women being dragged down in their careers by the baggage associated with expectations of women parents, and of men being chained to pointlessly demanding jobs: we need to rewire the terms of full-time jobs to be more compatible with family life.
It would probably get a bit safer.
It was worse, the "no window shopping" decision was made less than 4 months before launch (August to September as I recall), and changes were made through the week before launch. The NYT reports 7 major changes in less than 10 months.

And it didn't matter what the QA reported, the site was hell or high water launch Oct 1st whatever they revealed.

As always, those with political power (reported to be the White House and CMS, maybe some of HHS) trump those who have to make it work in the real world.
I will leave the bubble question aside and ask what is the money raised being used for? Infrastructure to do what? Doesn't snapchat delete the photos after the other party sees them? Or this another ad play where photos are stored and some big data program will create targeted ads.
Is this new bikes or all bikes? Headline, charts, and article all seem unclear. Obviously, if used bike sales are included and used car sales are not this observation is completely meaningless, instead of just not terribly significant...
Rand Paul Holds Up Janet Yellen's Fed Nomination, And Dems Should Support Him
Just a little curios do you know how many people died to put initial Sarcophagus in place? Official Soviet count is 31: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_dis... . Amount of people Soviet's threw in action is so enormous that it is silly to think that Japan could have matched anything like that. Especially with more immediate concerns of people not having food and shelter after Tsunami.
This. I once tried to repurpose an old Mac as a karaoke machine. Figured I could use the mac's built-in mic input. Absolutely unusable because of the ~50ms delay. Ended up having to buy a little analog mixer to make it work.
I think FirefoxOS is doing quite well. And as one of showcases of "HTML5 power" for me was this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Bxg1UJVf0
Real Me - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAXSHmsC2qI
By not deploying code directly to the running servers he's adding bureaucratic overhead to the development process rather than getting rid of it. He's putting his people in as active gatekeepers in a way that hasn't been necessary for most web development in a long time.

"This way of working might still be prone to errors, but at least we are not running configuration updates or deploys against resources in production."

If the old method was too fast and lots of mistakes got through then the new process they chose was right for that team. However, treating config changes and deploys to production as if they're toxic in general is kind of disrespectful to the vast number of companies that deploy to prod without knocking over their own website for hours at a time.

On top of that, if the new process is "still error prone" then he just increased the effort required by his team and slowed the overall development of the product for nothing.
Just timing is politically too convenient to do it now:
http://www.activistpost.com/2013/04/obama-approves-epas-high...
Does anyone else find this valuation incredibly ironic given that in 1999 Yahoo! bought Geocities for $3.57 billion?

I mean, does anyone believe that Snapchat is going to ever be a service that brings in billions of dollars in revenue?
>They are also usually not on the latest developments (some schools are better than that).

Please tell me the last new theory in basic science to come out of some place other than academia.
The HipsterNews chrome extension is pretty sweet. I've been using it for 3 months or so
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hipsternews/midncc...
here's an idea: every "n"th image, snap an advertisement to a user. sounds like revenue potential to me.
Well, the OP emptied the Google Drive trash can that it is the same than permanent deleting files on Dropbox.
It's a shame that even after women have attained such lofty positions in society, they are dogged by such damaging and carelessly thrown phrases. As a woman of color myself, I have experienced the same sort of sexism, and at times, racism (sexism easily prevails). I suppose the only silver to this is that when I succeed, it will be that much sweeter.
Nope. Look at the keyboard pad space, much smaller on 11". Unless you have baby size hands, your wrists will feel like they are hanging in the air and become uncomfortable pretty soon.
Webos platforms went down for reasons unrelated the software platform itself. I don't think I ever heard any serious critique of it to be honest. Even Enyo has been separated into its own project and doing ok. I quite like developing with it and would like to use something similar in the future.
Will wikipedia accept a citation like:

[1] Widely-known result, probably in Jackson's Electrodynamics

as enough of a citation to placate the reversion police?
Coca-Cola's valuation is 170 billion. Not only do they not solve any real problems, they actually create them. Same goes for every oil company in existence.

If you want to change the world in a more serious way, SnapChat's valuation should have as much of an impact on your determination as Coca-Cola's.
Are people in the real world signing personal guarantees as a condition of funding? That's not an investment; that's a bank loan.
Isn't that pretty much the same problem with military contracts? Non-technical people making requirements and changes during a project?

I'm not sure how to solve that problem but it's clearly an issue.
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest any quasi-legality of bitcoins themselves. The legality of bitcoin exchanges and bitcoins' use as a currency, however, could be up for debate. Its reasonable that they'd just treat them as an asset and auction them off without needing to take a stance on any legal issues.
How about, instead of git, a git-like (or really, modern version control like) model, rather than the linear, non-branching model that makes "pending" changes and "suggested" changes impossible to accurately convey. While the underlying tech may be git, and that certainly makes it easy and largely natural to the tech crowd, it's also an open tool for others to build proper editors/apps on top of.
It's not as if we can cure diseases or solve poverty by writing code. I wish we could. What is a "real problem that plagues society" that a hacker could feasibly solve? I would really like to know.
What is a Bull Call Spread?
A description of a Bull Call Spread
Knockout is more of a library then a framework.

I tend to use Angular, but recently I jumped onto a project and crunched through some work by dropping Knockout into it. The learning curve is small, and I was able to finish off the feature quickly.
Something that always bugs me about valuations, wondering if someone could explain.

A lot of these investors probably have multiples. So if someone $1m in a company for 10%, and the company sells for $5m, they'll get back at least $1m, rather than $500k.

If investors are only putting money in with these multiples, then doesn't it artificially raise these valuations? If so, is there a measure for the valuation of a company that takes this into account?
It might also be the case that the gender you identify as isn't what's most important, but the gender that 'normal' society perceives you as.
HTTP Status Code Cocktails - Pull Requests Accepted
"Besides the huge piles of investment dough being poured into [these companies], here’s what else [they] have in common: Little to no revenue. That does not seem to have stopped a panoply of venture and other investors from jumping in and ponying up with huge amounts of cash for the privilege of investing in several fast-growing startups, hoping to grab ahold of the next Twitter or Facebook early."

I don't know anything about Snapchat's internal operations or plans, and therefore can't really judge whether the company will eventually figure out how to make enough money from its self-destructing messages to warrant a $3.5 billion valuation today. What I DO know is that whenever investors start "jumping in and ponying up with huge amounts of cash for the privilege of investing" (in new companies with no revenues), there's a good chance that valuations are getting too optimistic -- and that never ends well.

Maybe this time things really are different, but it's hard for me not to see some parallels with the "dot-com bubble" of the late 1990's.[1]

--

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
LibreOffice and Gimp? They are great.
*edit to reply to further down: GIMP opens psd files and LibreOffice opens doc files, you can definitely work with people using Office or Photoshop.
Remember that people scan and not read word for word. Because that text was large, I assumed it was a tagline.

Regardless, prompt attention to feedback is appreciated and a sign of a successful business. Like the design otherwise, best of luck.
The purpose of these big rounds, usually, is founder liquidity.

Snapchat could easily get acquired, making the founders (and early employees) very rich.

But investors don't want them to sell yet. So investors buy a lot of common stock (from founders/employees) at a big valuation, making the founders (aka the only board members who aren't already rich) rich, so that the founders are less interested in selling.

Some of the money goes to the company. But it's not usual for 20-25% of big rounds to go to founders/early employees.
The only way Snapchat is worth $3.5 billion is if they have been secretly saving all of the photos and they threaten to post them all online unless the users pay $100 per photo.
With the highly fluctuating value of bitcoin, who chooses WHEN to sell? And if the FBI must preserve it as evidence until all legal issues are resolved, it could be worth much more, or maybe nothing.
Yes

Some people will try to solve whatever problem they have by searching for a package. Even if this could be solved with a couple of lines of code

Yes, reinventing is bad. Yes, good libraries have been tested, are supported through upgrades, etc.

But I'm very wary of libraries. Beyond the learning curve, then finding out it doesn't solve your problem or it has some stupid bugs, I think it's usually easier to roll your own except for the most mainstream libraries.
People have been screaming bubble for years now. Facebook's IPO was a "bubble." Instagram's aquisition was a "bubble." Pinterest is a "bubble." While we all conveniently ignore that most startups today are generating real revenue and firms like a16z are massively scaling back funding to early stage consumer startups, I hardly think one "bad apple" (if it is, maybe they will come up with some crazy way to make revenue, I'm not a psychic) is a sign of a bubble.
No, the police are doing the policing, and the private companies are supplying the technology.

There is nothing in the article for you to believe otherwise (that the tech companies are doing the policing or any other scenario).
In my defense, the article is heavily referenced, and "60% of filings [were filed] by women in most of the 19th century", when women were still dependent on men. What is your non-anecdotal evidence that women contribute equally or more to relationships?

Marriage is a losing deal for men. It's no wonder we have "MGTOW"s, but no "WGTOW"s.
Where "low" includes "not subsidizing the 50-64 set" if you're younger.

I've seen elsewhere potentially reliable estimates of 16 million policies being canceled out of a total of 18 million (the grandfathering is insanely strict).
Like this. But can you please kill the hellobar?
Reminds me of something I learned at a Startup School:

"Jack Dorsey & Ben Silberman are successful bc they don't care about the outside world...don't care about press." - @RonConway
Like SnapChat's messages, the $3.5 billion valuation is self-destructing as well.
Look at Final Cut Pro X again. All the features people complained about being missing are back in now.
This is IMO the wrong way to look at it. Look at this more like Instagram.

Neither Snapchat nor Instagram are creating new traffic. What they are doing is essentially stealing marketshare and user engagement from competing services like Facebook and Twitter.

Their valuation isn't their revenue potential, it's the opportunity cost to Facebook, Twitter, et al for letting them survive.

If Snapchat is stealing $1bn of monetizable traffic from Facebook, Facebook would be wised to pay some amount of money (<$1bn) to either shut it down or bring them into the fold.

There is some extra valuation here in fucking your competitor over. Acquisition of hot social media companies like this is equal parts adding monetizable traffic to your network (traffic they may have taken from you in the first place...), as well as denying your competitors the ability to do the same.

So, say if Twitter acquires Snapchat, their valuation will be some combination of ${traffic_twitter_loses_to_snapchat} + ${traffic_facebook_loses_to_snapchat} + ${value_in_denying_facebook_access_to_this_traffic}

Whether or not that's worth $3.5bn is questionable, but there is some reason behind valuing non-revenue-generating products with a positive valuation.

The main "bubble" part here is whether or not this is at all sustainable (IMO, probably not). It's pretty easy to create something that steals an appreciable amount of traffic from the incumbent social network behemoths. At these valuations the cost to "recover" these eyeballs far exceeds how much the traffic is actually worth in ad revenue.
Yes, this is an idea we definitely want to try at Wikimedia.

Right now, some of our most popular articles in English are perpetually semi-protected, meaning anonymous or brand new contributors can't edit. That means millions of pageviews are on articles that don't even have an edit button visible. :(

Some Wikipedias, like German, Polish, Russian and others already use a system called "Flagged Revisions", which is an obtuse name for software that instead of protecting a page, delays edits and makes them subject to approval from someone experienced. Unfortunately the workflow for this software is clunky and it doesn't seem to be helping German and other Wikipedias stay vibrant.

I'd really like to A/B test a very easy "suggest an edit" as an alternative. I think it could work, because Wikipedians are already pretty good at staying on top of the request queue, if you manage to make a request on the Talk page. One thing we'd need to be careful of is not garnering suggestions by cannibalizing the people who would otherwise have just edited.
The complaint is that Google Drive's UI is confusing, and can lead to unintentional data loss. Dropbox has a much better UI, and it's harder to lose data by accident.
I can't speak for experiences outside my field, but generally movement happens in the senior academic market by word of mouth alone.
Startup Lab
The study was published six months ago, and at any rate is first mentioned halfway through the article. I don't think it's beyond the pale to suggest that a little birdy whispered in Mr. Simonite's ear, especially since the article doesn't read like it took very long to put together.
Also see the programers cocktail guide - https://github.com/the-teacher/cocktails_for_programmers/blo....
Black Girls Code launching in Miami
Are there any examples of any other companies other than snapchat that are raising a huge amount of money with little to revenue, or revenue potential? While its important we don't repeat the mistakes of the past, I'm hesitant to claim that all of Silicon Valley will burn to the ground because solely SnapChat was a bad investment.
I imagine a lot of users would just leave for the next big thing or a clone of SnapChat.
‘Surface XB’ – Savior for Microsoft’s Flailing Tablets Could Come From Within
I think this is the first time I've seen Gilbert and Sullivan quoted on HN. Bravo, sir. :)
The FBI could liquidate everything in a private transaction with the Winkelvoss ETF or SecondMarket.

https://www.secondmarket.com/company/bitcoin-investment-trus...
In Battle With Amazon, Google Spreads Billboards Across Its Maps
I don't think that's all. People in past generations used to get married well before 30.
I read it more as "by being an expert in this subject I know this is true; by being an expert in this subject I also probably don't have time to find the journal that has the article in question, cite it per Wikipedia's rules, and put it in the article."

Really, a "P.S. I'm an expert" policy?
Pregnancy and the discomfort

Childbirth and the pain

Nursing, lack of sleep for years

Rearing

Out of the above four, three are done exclusively by women, and demand a lot of effort and some risks.

It can be incredibly rewarding to have a child... but also very costly. The man can just leave. The pregnant woman can't.

Biased against men? Please.