skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This type of question is most relevant to people considering which ecosystem in which to base their company, or part of it.

Having spent 2007-2012 doing a startup in London and the past year doing a startup in Silicon Valley, I've experienced both sides. I also had Silicon Valley investors in the first startup and spent time here every year since 2007.

London is catching up in some areas and you have to break the question down to make it useful. I'd look at the following areas that make Silicon Valley what it is:

Funding

- Not much difference in availability of investors but you'll get roughly double the amount of capital at double the valuation at each stage in Silicon Valley.

- Reason for similar availability is that there is at least an order of magnitude more investors at seed/early stages in Silicon Valley but a similar proportion more startups.

- At seed/early stage, Silicon Valley investors have higher expectations for growth and London investors have higher expectations for business model validation.

- Silicon Valley was much further ahead 5 years ago due to fewer investors in London and fewer startups in Silicon Valley.

- In London the tax incentives for seed investing and VC firms started by successful entrepreneurs (Atomico, Notion, ProFounders etc.) are changing this.

- In Silicon Valley, YC and its copycats are creating more high quality startups.

- At later stages, investors are still almost all American but they are comfortable investing across the pond by then.

Talent

- Proportionally more top people in Silicon Valley than in London across all functions.

- You'll pay 50-70% of the salary for people of an equivalent level in Silicon Valley and the cost of living is similar to London.

- Hiring is an order of magnitude less competitive in London than in Silicon Valley.

Acquirers

- Silicon Valley is dramatically better. London has no talent acquisition market and because all the active large acquirers are in Silicon Valley, they prefer local deals. This feeds all the way down to early-stage valuations which need to be so low in order to tie up with the poor exit market in London.

Ambition and role models

- One of the biggest differences. Mentality of being best in the world is far more ubiquitous in Silicon Valley than London.

- This has serious implications for you as a founder as your ambition levels are heavily influenced by the people you surround yourself with.

Accessibility of a large market

- Most billion dollar addressable markets you can target are mainly composed of the US market.

- For cultural reasons on the consumer side and relationship-building reasons in B2B, it's much easier to win the large markets when starting in Silicon Valley.

Overall London is catching up and one $10B+ success story will accelerate closing of the gap, but there are some structural reasons that mean there's always likely to be gap.

I wrote a guest post discussing the growth of London a couple of years ago, and things have continued in the same direction since: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/27/the-european-startup-ecosys...
Isn't Lodsys strongly linked to IV? As in, they're playing the shell game?
FWIW, Notch hasn't open sourced Minecraft.

Id did open source some games, but only well after the main burst of sales had dried up.

Counterpoint: reddit and HN are open sourced (are they games? they have points...)

Just some data points, not advice.
This got very dark very quickly.

It does make me wonder though, to what extent are we responsible for the repercussions of our actions? Where along that chain did it stop becoming the fault of the businessman, if ever?
That's a very useful 2c, we haven't worked in the game dev industry, so it's extremely useful to get the opinions of folks that have that experience.

If we have our druthers, we'll release 100% of it and include the game art under a noncompetitive license so that anyone (and here we're hoping that includes teachers, professors, tutors, etc) can clone and release their own versions with different content. In a perfect world we would also be able to sync the content created like that back to our servers so that 1) we can give it more attention from the larger community and 2) let others benefit from their experience.

One of our primary interests is in releasing a game that CAN be cloned and is functional from the ground up because that's something we would have loved to have around. We didn't know it was rare for such things to exist, only that we thought it would be a cool thing to do.

Again, we really appreciate the advice, we're still learning this game dev stuff. :)
1. I didn't watch the live stream.

2. The non-retina MacBook Pros are going the way of the old unibody MacBooks (they'll be gone in another year or so). The retina MacBook Pros are $200 cheaper than before. Still, they start at only $100 more than the non-retina models.

3. IMO, something as large as an iPad mini or iPad Air would look terrible in gold. It would be _too_ flashy and stand out too much.

4. Again, I didn't watch the live stream, although I'd be willing to bet it actually _is_ because Steve wasn't there. He was notorious for practicing keynotes.

Overall, this keynote was pretty much what was expected from Apple. Nothing too surprising. They played it safe, which is what they'll probably continue to do until the actual AppleTV and wearable device are ready.
There are a few reasons. For large institutional investors, they have a responsibility to stand behind their decisions: saying "I didn't really understand what it is they were trying to do, but their metrics, whoa!" does not stand up.

And a lot of more conventionally-minded investors look to truely understand what a companies value proposition and product is. If you could invest earlier in Pinboard, or a company which has found a revolutionarily cheap way to manufacture toilet paper - you know which one has a more steady and obvious demand, right?

Although SV, the YC/VC world, operates very different. Just a few ideas.
I'm a UI and motion designer. I use it for curating different types of art that I see around the internet. If I need inspiration for a project its helpful to look through some of my boards for ideas. Sometimes I'll make one-off boards for individual projects also.

I've found it can be helpful for research too as just an organizational tool. For example I'm building an LED display so I've been collecting useful links or cool applications of LEDs on a board.

Here's my pinterest if you're interested:

https://www.pinterest.com/briandegman/
You can have my gmail and password, but only if you promise to spam me and show me ads.
Quora links don't get much traction on Hacker News, and will get a lot less if you don't include ?share=1 at the end of the URL -- this will at least remove the standard "create an account" call to action and allow people to see other content on the page.
Oh, my apologies - I was quite unaware of that project. Interesting - will check it out.
We're not really open source zealots or anything, but Quake did score points in my book for being cross platform back when everything was released only for windows.

For most projects/businesses, there's always a tension between open sourcing and making money, I really hope that we're at a market intersection where it actually makes monetary sense to keep things open.
Woah, that's big. This is Pinterest trying to dominate the market, to be the online curated catalog for women. This space has seen a lot of new players, like Fab and Wanelo. And the nature of the product lends itself to network effects that aren't nearly as sticky as FB's and Twitter's, so while they've seen incredibly massive growth, they can't rely on user lock-in to maintain it longterm. But the traction is there, the intent is there, so now they need to rev their engine to red line to dominate. Fitbit's recent round of funding comes to mind.
Brilliant re-write. If you skipped this link, thinking it was going to just be the well-known tale, look again.
I think the better story would have been of the 2nd fisherman that was approached. Same end result only it would have given a better contrasting perspective.
That's useful feedback highCs, but open sourcing doesn't necessarily select our industry or business prospects. It seems to me we could be open source and high growth, or closed source and slow growth and the two factors are not necessarily causative. Would love to know if you have data to the contrary!
I created Dilbert. Ask Me Anything.
Sales for nerds
I was that asian boy. #mozilla ftw
You could start with his speech writers...

I think it'd be healthy if we realize and stop fetishizing the myth that the man makes the times not the other way round.
I like writing ray tracers, so I use dot product and cross product quite a lot.
The SV jobs comes with perks that eliminate cooking, doing housework and so on. All 3 meals at work, having a laundry machine and a maid every 2 or 4 weeks plus some really basic clean up is plenty enough to keep your house cleaner than the average american. Also avoid commuting by living close to work. You also integrate fitness into your workday during lunch and so on.
Thanks, just for the record, Skritter is still a going concern, but we have shifted our attention over to CodeCombat.
dynamite. sounds like real life. modern greek tragedy.

unless we humans decide to harness greed, and quickly,
we will shortly follow all of the other large mammals
to the mass extinction which we engineered ourselves.

-bowerbird
Best resources to learn Agile Development from a management perspective?
San Diego Hacker News Meetup 47 this Friday (10/25)
'The Writer' Automaton - A cam shaft lookup table
Peeling back the layers of Tor with EgotisticalGiraffe
I was having this exact issue. While fiddling with something else, I happened to have mail.app open on one of those empty smart folders in the background, and did this from the terminal:

sudo mdutil -i on /

Now mind you, it was _already_ enabled. I had previously tried forcing reindex (-E) but that did nothing. No clue why setting 'enable' _again_ made any kind of difference, but suddenly my smart folders sprang to life. I will keep an eye on it, and see if it keeps working properly.
Wired has exactly that in every issue.
Thanks for the kind words pla3rhat3r, we're hoping to release a bunch of new content soon as well as open up the level editor so folks can contribute their own levels, so please do check back! Also, if you kids find anything we can improve, please let us know.
> Please don't mention the iPad as a pinnacle of anything. It is not. It is merely a rehash of old technologies packed into a slick exterior and heavily marketed. It is more a tool of social status than a utility. Compare this to the HP Compaq TC1100, which was a tablet computer released seven years before the first iPad and the specifications of which trumped those of the iPad by double.

The iPad is more than heavily marketed dribble; it was actually usable when compared to the TC1100, and basically "realized the dream" of tablet computing when predecessors couldn't: specifications are shit, usability is king. Engineers often don't get that.

> As for being victims of a constrained Von Neumann mindset, perhaps so. On the other hand I haven't really noticed any non-Von Neumann languages that are too practical for human purposes. Languages like APL and FP are quite esoteric...

CUDA dominates the HPC world right now; MapReduce dominates big data processing. Vector machines and data-parallel pipelines have won big in their own domains. And I'm not even going to talk about relational database, all of which are very non Von Neumann computing models and have been very successful.
Wow this is awesome, I just recently started doing this but in my head, a lot of intolerances and mild allergies can only be diagnosed by self testing. I just discovered that I was gluten intolerant, and perhaps many more. This is going to be quite useful, thank you so much!
Written by Gautam Sivakumar, founder of Medisas (YC W13). http://www.medisas.com/

Great piece! I love the line "A start-up is like a seed, that can be planted anywhere you want. Why would you not choose to plant that seed in the most nutritious soil?"
Gaming IP must lose value over time. It's hard to imagine anybody paying very much for the quake 3 IP now since more advanced engines are available for free.

That's not to say they didn't make many $ licensing it back in the early 2000s. That said in the case of this startup the tech itself is probably not where most of the value is.
US small business loans just got a little bigger
What I see on that page: one hell of a lot of unicode placeholders and not much else.

We don't all agree with a site's font choices.

And at least img made an attempt at semantic meaning and accessibility with alt= attributes. The failure modes for img are actually quite good. There's no such concern in the minds of those who gave birth to icon fonts.
Technology on the Thames
We're actually up to 50+ employees now. Meldium has definitely shaved time off of setting up each new hire.

It's amazing how many sets of credentials we have to manage.
It's amazing how HN, a community supposedly filled with entrepreneurs, is so opposed to anything marketing related.

Software doesn't sell itself guys...honest, insightful posts about the reasoning behind business decisions that directly affect a product's bottom line are really important and should not be dismissed because they contain "marketing speak".
Comments from actual users of these phones would be far more informative. Karma to scott_karana for mentioning his experience with their version of Android.
I tried clicking the little white boxes, thinking they were tooltips, explaining how that part of the image used a particular Pixelmator feature.

Then I realized it was just a screenshot, so I clicked free trial. Same image, but now no site navigation (it doesn't fade in). Refreshed, thinking it was broken. Then it took a few seconds, but I realized you could scroll down, and it had a download button. Why is this so common these days? Full screen images or giant headers filling the screen with no indication of more content? I've had this happen a few times this year. I also just noticed this happens on the homepage too, and it has actual information under the giant screenshot. Sigh, doesn't anyone test these things?
I went so far as to search for "lisp", "scheme" or "clojure", because I assumed I was tired and just missing it.
You're welcome! I'm glad whenever being broadly-read on the internet comes in handy, as it justifies the reading-broadly habit.
That falls flat for custom/vendor classes. It's a fairly convenient route for a device that doesn't fit the other molds using libusb/WinUSB drivers.
I recently had a need for an algorithm that did some pretty complex geographical data interpolation that was faster than the existing implementations. The modern vendor library I was using took about a minute to compute.

I searched through some old archives and found a scanned in PDF of the algorithm I wanted to implement from a late 60s fortran implementation. I converted it to node.js and Presto! The thing takes the exact same inputs, gives the exact same outputs, and does it all in... 35 milliseconds.

With the complexity of the algorithm and size of the dataset I am pretty sure it would have taken a mainframe the size of a warehouse and weeks to compute back then, but it showed me that the underlying data structures and mathematics have not changed in the least.

I have always tried to take it to heart that "we stand on the shoulders of giants" and all that, but this was really a turning point for me over the last few weeks, that many of the greats from the past would make us all look like morons if they were around today.

There are implementations of this algorithm in C, C++, Java, Python, Javascript, and probably others, but they are all at least an order of magnitude slower than the one that came out back then, given the same modern hardware, even in a language that is not exactly known for its computational prowess.
>I hate to say it, but quite a few US presidents have a psychological profile that closely, if not entirely, fits that of a socio/psychopath

The behaviour described in the article is fairly normal behaviour, so no idea where this fits in?

Are we somehow surprised Presidents are just normal people and as such must be psychopaths?

Loving his kids so much he names rubber ducks after them(While taking a bath with someone he cares about) Truly believing a better red than dead future for them at the height of the cold war?

Calling his mistress the see how she is and admitting he's almost crying when she left?

Their world is different but that doesn't mean they are.
And Pinterest is for men! I say this as a guy who "gets" Pinterest, and uses it all the time. There's just so much pretty to browse...

Basically I use it like NotCot on steroids.
Apple's war on pixels
Are blend modes other than "normal" usable in browser SVG yet? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437554
then when I would call him out on it he would apologize. Later he would repeat the same offenses.

Yes, that fits the profile of a sociopath - he manipulated you in order to get you off his back. The question wrt JFK is whether apologizing to her and his staffer was done out of a sense of guilt or was it just manipulation for his own gain. Unfortunately the article does not give us enough details to decide one way or the other.
Online Reputation Startups
We all know the power of online reputation, AirBnB verifications, etc. Are there any startups out there attempting to serve as a central clearinghouse for collecting and managing individual online reputation?
I have absolutely 0 problem with this, as long as a disclaimer is listed like the OP did. I honestly think this is the right way to do it. Imagine though if apache had some major security flaw uncovered tomorrow and the maintainers said, "This is just an open source project. You are free to look into the issue and fix it yourself if you want. We will merge the pull request when we get around to it.". Managing expectations is-- as usual-- everything.
One part of the answer is that they work in evenings and weekends, have I heard from former colleagues who now work at xiaomi.
Go Release Cycle
Not to be ad hominem, but why do these posts advocating garbage collected languages keep making exaggerated claims?

F# certainly is capable of expressing code more succinctly than C++, but 6,000 versus 1,000,000 lines is far beyond what that difference could account for; the code could presumably have been rewritten in much less C++ as well. Nor, in all likelihood, would it "have taken man-decades of work by real experts and cost millions of pounds" to get "better performance"; quite possibly it would to get to near-optimal performance, but compared to F#, it would probably be relatively easy for a skilled C++ developer (and the author does seem to be a skilled F# developer) to get better performance.

shared_ptr has issues, and in many respects is significantly inferior to a real garbage counter, but the post downplays the extent to which idiomatic C++ code avoids use of shared_ptr in most circumstances. You can write Java in any language...

The claim that scope-based reference counting can keep garbage around for longer than necessary is strictly true but seems absurd to argue with, as the time between end-of-use and end-of-scope is usually rather short. The linked post (http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/memory-management...) attempts to illustrate this, but uses a completely illogical/pathological example.
I am going to learn Lua and use it much more now, thanks for pointing this out. As someone said, having 0 based indexes is inhuman way of dealing with arrays, only made some sense in C, others just copied.
Technology is the answer.

All citizens will be required to carry a smartphone or other GPS tracking device that reports their location every 5 mins to a central database run by the National Security Agency. When a new infected person is discovered, National Bureau of Health agents will contact everyone who was close enough to the infected person to have possibly transmitted (given or received) the infection over the previous two months. Those people will be tested and infected people will be incarcerated in National Health Concentration Centers for healing. They will stay their for life, or until no longer infected.

Will it come to this?

What about mandatory death penalty (plus confiscation of all family assets) for anyone who gives antibiotics to an animal or who supplies antibiotics to a farmer?
I was only objecting to the way you presented your criticism: that one category couldn't be a subset of another because the subset seems to lack a feature that the superset has. Criticize for the right reasons, etc.
Nokia's Chris Weber says there's no 'silver bullet' for Windows Phone success
Exactly. I'm not sure if there are many examples, I can only think of Lua; the authors of Lua don't share their development progress, discussion or version history. They don't take patches but may implement user suggestions. Still, the releases are free and open software.
The SEC is overrated and this is the year that they stop being relevant.
Given that a lot of users are technically unaware of what they are doing, it would be akin to firing someone for falling for one of those pop ups that offers to do a free virus scan. If you are a pharmaceutical sales rep and you read that LI blog post, you probably think it is perfectly safe...

I would think the responsibility falls back onto IT to educate users - and to block connections from LI to the mail server.
Yeah, looking pretty... lol...
I know we're not supposed to do this around here, but I'll do it anyway.... HEAR! HEAR!
I seem to make off-by-one errors about the same either way. They are just off by one more or less.
I have read it, and Dijkstra is a good call to authority, but I don't agree.

His opening sentence is instructive: using the 'pernicious three dots', everything is totally clear: with an ellipsis, it's impossible to understand anything other than a closed interval.

It's primary school mathematics that 2 <= x <= 12, i.e. the interval mathematically written [2,12] (or 2,...,12), contains 11 integers. A programmer who doesn't understand that is in a world of trouble as half-open intervals won't stop the inevitable rain of off-by-one errors.

A programmer who actually calculates the size of a list in the way that Dijkstra suggests (specifically, by calculating b-a) is also perhaps acting questionably.
Dijkstra's argument here might make more sense when correctly framed in 1982.

As an aside, if Dijkstra would agree to use a fully-closed interval, his suggested advantage of 0-indexing is eliminated and he would presumably then prefer 1-indexing.
So it's internally inconsistent and inconsistent with the mathematical notation. See, this is what I mean about Operator Overloading - I like the idea but it's actually really hard to see how you can actually do the job consistently and completely.

I also don't find something like:

a = b.dot(c);

especially hard to read. YMMV.
Tragedy of the commons => common anti-capitalist fodder, whether fish, pollution, fur, logging, etc.

Also what is not shown here are the millions of people that were able to eat fish due to its drastic drop in price. The omega balance raising IQs and resulting in more eco-scientists, sociologists, and general income for the government or charities for retooling of bronze-age fisherpeople.
Indeed, I thought it was a repeat, until verifying today's posting date. For reference, here's a variant of the 'original':

http://renewablewealth.com/the-parable-of-the-mexican-fisher...
I'm interested to hear your reasoning for why it counts. Also at what point (age differential, position differential, gender differential) is it no longer unfair or immoral and why. Could we not argue that any sort of imbalance in a relationship makes it 'abuse'. If that's the case almost al social and commercial contracts are some sort of abuse of power.
Monadic i/o and Unix shell programming