skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has no one been paying attention? This has been fairly widely reported in the press I follow. Of course, in the "mainstream" press, nada on this point.

This is a model that the Administration (Obama, and Bush before him) have been following for several recent trade agreements. They are being negotiated in a very selective and biased secrecy.

In the U.S.:

- Favored lobbyists have fairly unfettered access. From one account, I understand that they can sign on to a site from their own computer and view the whole shebang -- I don't have this specifically confirmed, but the thorough access has been repeatedly confirmed. They attend and undoubtedly influence the negotiations; in fact, there have been strong hints that they are directly writing major portions of these agreements.

- Your own Congressman -- Senator or Representative -- can only access the agreement by appointment to go to a specific, physical room in D.C. where they can view it. They can't bring their staff for consultation and research. They can't take the draft agreement or portions thereof away with them.

- The public -- as opposed to favored, moneyed private interests within said public -- has no access to the draft agreement nor any substantive part of the negotiations. In fact, at at least one point, public access was specifically qualified as a "national security risk". For a trade agreement that will, once passed, then be public and under which we must all live.

Regarding that last point: Substantial arguments have been made that these agreements are being used to essentially legislate while making an end run around the legislative process. They contain language stating that individual countries' laws must be "harmonized" to the terms of the agreement. In effect, you have this trade agreement dictating the country's law.

And in the U.S., our legislators have repeated agreed to "fast track" the approval. Essentially handing over to the Executive, in the form of the Administration and its appointed trade negotiators, the power to enact the trade agreement and thereby the "harmonizing" language (i.e. commitment to change law, i.e. "create" law). And this additionally ahead of the drafting, agreement to and codification of the specific terms and language that will be enacted.

In essence, the Legislative branch has (illegally, many argue) abrogated its duty and responsibility to draft, negotiate, and enact law, to the Executive.

Amazing, how... "compliant" they suddenly get, when there's real money involved for them. And how conveniently they sweep all this up, including the avoidance of the need to specifically, individually go "on the record" e.g. with a vote, under this abused rubric of a "trade agreement".
Those are usually leaky abstractions that don't allow you to do blocking operations with the idiomatic APIs and libraries of the language. You have to use the wrappers provided by the threading library which are typically incomplete and prevent you from using standard tools.
I was contrasting using a mathematical model to simply repeating talking points and poorly thought out assertions (i.e., every discussion about BI that shows up on HN).

Obviously gathering data would be an incredibly valuable contribution to the discussion. I should have been more clear on that point, I guess I just thought it went without saying.
YouTube Capture 2.0, now responsible for a third of all iOS uploads
Tangentially related question:

What's the best country to hang out on with a beach & super fast wifi?

Costa Rica always gets thrown around - but wondering if there's anything better/warmer/cheaper/faster.
I don't know how I feel about the content of the article, but I do know that finding UIFaces is a winner. What a neat service.
Pure CSS, equal-width navigation tabs.
Does sexualizing a gender require that the members of that gender be forced to do something?
TLDR the AWS ReInvent keynote? Here's a summary.
Now I'm confused. This comment says that the stack memory is not allocated by the OS unless actually needed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6728030

Is this not true?
Definitely culture-specific. Freelancers are common in New Zealand, sometimes as sole traders, sometimes as one-person companies (the difference is pretty marginal, since setting up and maintaining a company in New Zealand is relatively cheap). I did it for a little under a decade before deciding I was a shitty employer for myself.
How Much Money Do The Top Technology Companies Make Per Second?
So what's the over under on them creating a Ubuntu workspaces sooner or later?

That coupled with EC2 based infrastructure could make for a very compelling platform.
Neat! Not quite the same thing, but see also this 9-line "spreadsheet" written in Python by Raymond Hettinger: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/355045-spreadsheet/
This seems to be a more and more prevalent model for funding non-AAA games. A good proportion of the games on the front page of Steam right now are "Early Access", which work in a similar manner - funding upfront, continual development.
3.5 years ago is the key. Xamarin has come a long way in the past 12 months, not to mention the past 42.

Developers who know this have grown considerably in that period as well.

On an aside, 90/hr for a competent dev is cheap. I know most people on HN don't make a salary that equates to that but freelancers have an entirely different set of concerns and 90 is low.
https: should use CONNECT regardless of version. For http: the proxy will probably decrypt and then re-encrypt which will allow caching and inspection.
its hard for me to think of an answer to this question that doesn't somehow devolve into an area of 'conspiracy'-type BS.

I really do not know.
That makes sense, thanks for clarifying. So if say there are 1000 client connection threads and they monitor some status and say ping their clients every 5 seconds, on wake-up, it could be only a small fraction of the stack would have to be paged-in. And it would depend how deep the stack was when the thread of put to sleep?
How to copy a hedge fund billionaire’s investment plan
Those valuations are really not that significant. We don't know the motivations of the investors. They are buying a small piece of the company at a certain price, often for strategic purposes other than simply the investment itself. So, if I buy 3 shares of YCombinator at a price that would value YC at $5 billion, because I want to make connections or explore a strategic partnership with them, does that mean PG could sell YC for $5 billion tomorrow? No way.

If Instagram were to sell 100% of itself today, who would buy it, other than Facebook? There are only a handful of players who can afford $3 billion+ for a speculative acquisition of a company with 0 cash flow. They definitely would not be able to IPO anytime soon, and waiting that long involves a significant amount of risk (by the time they are mature they could be abandoned and worthless). And remember, even if you do IPO, you can't just dump your shares right when the lockup period ends, if you're an executive or insider. You need to disclose your sales and if you're still involved with the company and try to sell all your shares, the stock will likely plummet. The best you can do is buy insurance on the value or borrow against shares.

Same goes for Pinterest. Who would all of the company at that valuation or anywhere near it? Other than maybe Facebook, I can't imagine anyone else.
Unofficial Hacker News Streaming API
A Crash Course in Sales Hacking and Deal Closing [video]
UserVoice being DDoSed, currently down
Option B worked really well for Mark Cuban, for example. He sold a company with a <$50M run rate for close to $6B, probably recognizing that he'd gotten really damned lucky. But he didn't take the one-way ticket to Costa Rica; he parlayed his lottery payout into a continuous string of successful businesses.

I'm not saying everyone gets a multi-billion-dollar exit (and even getting there in the first place is fucking tough; certainly a lot tougher than it was in the '90s). But there are worse paths through life than being a serial entrepreneur who's in it for the love of the game.
I feel like a tool for saying this, but getting a B in a calculus class doesn't qualify as "good at math." I was hoping this would be a story about someone bad at math ending up majoring in it. If the author had to put this much effort into it, well, no, they're probably not that good at math.
Dave McClure's answer on what is 500 Startups' business model
A couple of years ago I built something similar, combining RSS, HN and Twitter streams into a single feed where I could save things for later. I thought it was useful so I added a way for it to learn my habits and reorganize items in my stream by importance.

All that effort to solve information overload, and you know what? I never went back to read the articles I saved for later. And the length of the list just kept growing. Filtering down to just the interesting stuff still left too much interesting stuff for me to make it through. Eventually I had to declare "saved item" bankruptcy and delete all the data.

What I leaned was: No amount of technology is going to fix my behavior towards information consumption. Only mindfulness and a change of habits can make a real difference. Without that, these tools just add to the information overload problem.
There's unique factors at play here, like the fact that an early-hire CTO can increase his personal equity stake by 50% a couple of months before IPO by persuading the board that five of the first few developers who've worked at sub-market salaries for the past six years are superfluous to requirements. The whole point of options and a vesting schedule is the assumption that employee number 5 contributes a lot more to the value of the company in those early years than they get paid for it. This system incentivises the firing of people who add proportionally less value to a 1000 person company than they did to a 10 person; i.e most developers, including those who have more than justified their compensation in the past and totally deserve their current salary.
Microsoft isn't buying them because devdiv is not a profit driver for Microsoft. Enabling devs to build for other platforms is not a profit driver for them.

They will only buy Xamarin defensively. If they feel like someone else might gobble them up and they will lose access to dev mindshare around c# and mobile.
hmmh... can't access from a client running Linux, ChromeOS, Android-X86?

largely defeats the purpose if you still need a PC, license.
small sample sizes are misleading. You probably need at least 100 data points for reasonable significance, but if your data is skewed or has fat tails then most likely much more than that
The information that can be gleaned is that they internally value the company at a higher price.

My argument then, is that given that think about their company 24/7 and that they have access to data that I do not that they probably have a reasonable basis for believing that their company is worth more than the offer.

I further bolster my belief that their conclusions are reasonable with the fact that they have to justify their valuation to a board, many members of which represent IRR centric VC firms.

From the fact that a VC backed company rejects any offer you can glean quite a lot of information. Its a fairly simple exercise of "what had to happen?" and "what would you have to believe?".
What's unethical about using sex to sell?

Our society is really fucked up and repressed about sex.

I'm really glad there's a man around to tell my partner that if she wears bathing suits to the beach and a man sees her backside that she's a victim instead of advocating she wear whatever the fuck she wants (including nothing) to the beach.

When my partner and I go to the beach we have to travel an extra 15 minutes because she'd rather go topless, that's fucked up and repressed. I can go around where ever I want with my top off, but thanks to white knights like the writer of the article she has to travel an extra 15 minutes lest a man (who is uncomfortable with naked pictures of his own gender) have to see her tits.

I'd be more impressed if people like the author could look at a woman wearing a bathing suit with out immediately thinking about sex than any blog post he could ever write about how women are sexualized. It's really fucked up that he can't think a woman at the beach in a bathing suit is doing anything other than being sexualized.
Not only do the lobbyists and partners get to influence the negotiations, they are under a 4 year gag order from discussing it.
That is right, the full 8MB or 10MB or whatever of max is not being paged in.

I am stupid. I'll correct the initial comment.

Thanks
Google May Stick a Patent on Your Neck
What are the API limits?
“Men can be our best advocates because the men who don’t respect women do respect men.”

I've never actually said that phrase, but if I did it wouldn't pertain to something as silly as this. Using super beautiful people in mockups or sexualized woman is immature but I'm far more concerned with people who think that woman 'just aren't smart enough to be programmers'.

Maybe this would have worked better in a more specific example. I interviewed at a place where there were so many little things like this that I didn't think I'd be comfortable working there. Sexualized images + servers named after porn actresses + the poster for the company holiday party included a scantily clad woman.
In my case, it really worked the opposite way. When I was an 'agency', I barely had any clients because they didn't feel personal. When I used my name, they were more comfortable and were able to relate more, thus feeling more inclined to hire.
Out of curiosity, what is the problem with that picture?
Friend of mine made a website like this that supports videos and pictures [1]. It's hard to trust something like that, but if you want you could always create your own implementation (see the About screen).

[1] http://expetelek.com/nolimit/
You make a convincing argument.
I realize what they were trying to say and I agree with it; they just stated it poorly. Is it that hard to not use the word "everything?" I suppose it does not make as good of a headline. If you are going to give advice, you need to consider how your advice can be misused. There exists techniques and technologies that are measurably superior to others. Knowing how to recognize them is a critical skill for a competent developer.
I also put "gifted" in quotes for similar reasons.

I picked high school though because most of the comparisons about being "bad at math" start around then. The reality is that I just put in more work than many people and was a class or two ahead of the average student up through the start of university, where I went on to study math (and was at a similar starting point with most other math majors at my particular school).

At the end of the day, I'm just an average fish in the math pond, but it's easy to think you're not as good if you don't see the work backing my talent in high school and base your comparisons for life on that (or even the first year of undergrad).
> You can't honestly expect IT to be the ones that pioneer more ethical marketing practices.

It's okay because everyone else is doing it?
>> When the business is actually just you, it's basically invisible in regards to your tax situation.

Not true. In the U.S. if you create an LLC or S-corp you can pay yourself a salary and also pay yourself dividends (sometimes called distributions). Both salary and dividends are subject to regular income taxes, but only the salary is subject to payroll taxes.

The justification goes like this: if you were paying an employee, you'd pay them a fair salary and then take some extra for yourself as the owner. The owner's payment isn't technically a salary so you don't need to pay payroll taxes on it.

Lots of single-person companies play games with salary and dividends to try to drive their payroll taxes as low as possible. The IRS can crack down on those owners that don't pay themselves a fair salary in an attempt to evade taxes.
Jeff,
Are there any plans to offer something like ubuntu images in the future for VDI? Many developers really don't use windows much anymore, and you could probably offer a more competitive price point when there is no need for licensed software. Obviously we can set up our own stuff using raw EC2 instances, but having a simple solution like this is definitely appealing.
I remember buying two tickets in hope the second one would be a return ticket. Then I noticed you don't validate the tickets at the train and they've already been timestamped. :(
What $250 price point laptop is far superior?
This is the big reason many of the people where I work have simply opted out of the enterprise IT offerings. They use gmail and google apps, policies be damned.
I was hoping to see a lot of comments here. However, I immediately realized why there aren't any. So, I'm going to break the ice and say I related with this, and thanks for posting it.
I think it's a great Idea. But you'd still be using more electricity breaking the Hydrogen than you would if you just used the Solar power direct. Also, not sure how much energy this would require to do at scale.
Remember to clear your rights: Lil' Kim in trouble over "stolen" photo
How many "messages" do copper telephone wires owned by Verizon carry every day? Does that make those wires worth trillions?

How much is "Email" worth? If you could "own" Email, but not have any way to monetize the transport of messages, and no way to charge for the service, how much is it worth solely because billions of messages are transmitted with your service daily?

Since when are "messages" valuable? Come on, who wants to own a Protocol?
Consumption of ultra-luxury items is one way to look at the difference, but another is your progeny. $20M, if spent frugally and invested well, could certainly ensure the well-being of your immediate children and probably grandchildren as well (not if you blow it on vintage sports cars and jets, though). But a billion or two could keep your family out of work for many, many generations
This is a terrible rant written in block-of-text style, to make it seem foreboding.

You're cherry-picking things and describing them in the most difficult way possible. Any mass transit system is confusing at first. Bart+Caltrain are not particularly worse than the average.
So, I don't want to move to Germany anymore? This is crazy.
You are just stating your beliefs.

Did you figure that out from the part of the blog post where I explicitly said "the involvement of numbers does not make an argument empirically correct..."?

The math simply makes my assumptions obvious and my reasoning clear. That's all it is meant to do. And again, if you believe my assumptions are not sensible, replace them with your own and rerun the model.

After you do that, I won't be confused about what you believe.
Anyone who uses snapchat is an idiot. Fortunately, there are a lot of idiots in the world.
Ten cool inventions unveiled at Engadget's Expand event
12 types of social media managers
I have no experience with Akka, but what you write makes sense. Even Clojure concurrency primitives feel weird sometimes when one wants to mix them with low-level Java libraries.

Another option is to do it at the language level - see my comment on Erlang.
I think Jason is overly focusing on one side of the relationship (i.e between the startup and the introducer) when I'd argue in actuality a lot of the value of the introduction depends on how well placed the introducer is to evaluate you.

For example I would rank introducers as:

1) People who are superstars in your field (i.e Peter Thiel if you're a payments startup) or have great track-records in backing super-star companies across fields.

2) People who are experts in their field and the VC trusts. For example if you're in an adjacent space to a current portfolio company, getting an introduction from that portco (or even a reputable non-portco) carries a lot of weight. Or investors who have a track record in your field.

3) People who are customers of your product and the VC trusts. If your customers are gushing about you that makes for a great intro, if a portco emails their VC saying "there's this product that we use and love and the company is raising money" that'll get attention.

4) People who are well placed to evaluate your product/startup and have some relationship with the VC. Similar to (2)/(3) but they don't have to have a strong relationship with the VC. The VC trusts them because of their expertise not because of their relationship.

5) People who are well positioned to evaluate you and your team personally and the VC trusts. So for example people you've worked with in the past who will personally vouch for you.

Below that you basically have introductions from people who (a) Aren't in a position to evaluate your business and (b) Aren't in a position to evaluate your team. So it's basically a case of "we met these guys the other day and they seemed smart and had a nice demo" - i.e. the VC might spend a bit of extra time looking at it as a favour to the introducer but it's unlikely to be significantly better than meeting at an event, etc.

At that level a bunch of other factors come into play. If an investor is super-into your space or if you've got a strong resume/team they'll likely look at you regardless of how you came to their attention.
Chrome. Their services are designed to trample on privacy and monopolize the web
If you're turning down a $3b acquisition you probably have your eye on an IPO right? I'm genuinely interested in where Snapchat plan to go to line up an IPO if that is the case, because their current product seems horribly difficult to monetise - to me anyway, I'm interested to see what they have planned.
I am currently the Director of Sales @ Krossover Intelligence. I have worked with Steli in the past and he is a master of sales techniques. His tactics are efficient and most of all they work.
He's saying he was extremely uncomfortable watching the video, but this is what women have to deal with all the time.

I understand that, but am just remarking that the video just seems like a camp pastiche of a pop song with some men in glittery pants rather than an example of something particularly outlandish. The original seems pretty sleazy and fairly rubbish, but as far as sleazy music videos go it is definitely on the tame end of the scale.

It does make me wonder if the author is actually just expressing a form of puritanism here.
I don't agree with or even like this article, but mockups aren't being sold to the public at large.

If a designer sends me a mockup with sexualized images I am going to be annoyed because it's not professional and I prefer to see what the project might actually look like live.
It's just a matter of what can be done today vs tomorrow vs next year.