skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. If you have anything more than $10m in the bank and are still not 30, you'll be too naive NOT to take more risks (considering you don't plan to touch the $10m in the bank).
Possibly so. People have limited time to process evidence to come to a decision. So they seek out the types of evidence that provide stronger signals. That may cause some false negatives, but since you know it now, that's pretty much your problem. No one owes you an investment in your startup.

(I think this is far less of a problem than access to education, as someone in the position of founding a startup is already on a very high tier of agency and privilege compared to the vast swath of society. Also, you're "born with" connections to startup founders at a far lower rate than you are born with connections to universities, in general.)

Great link, though, thanks!
Figuring out how to use a system as designed isn't much of a hack...it would be more of a hack if he figured out how to reconfigure the system to route a bus or train directly past the front entrance of the building he was trying to get to.
There is something to this, but I think it is very easy to discount the amount of work that others put in. Also, these things are cumulative, so someone who has put in more work earlier in their schooling will have an easier time learning the new material than someone who has coasted by.
Impressions: Our first day with the PlayStation 4 is full of surprises
The US copyright system is broken.
> Your second loophole doesn't apply to the NSA (they're not a law enforcement agency), but is a concern for the FBI.

Good to know, thanks.

702 doesn't allow intentional collection of US communications - intentional being a key part, as they are only required to minimize the amount of US communications collected. For example, the leaked minimization procedures includes "[t]he communications that may be retained include electronic communications acquired because of limitations on NSA’s ability to filter communications."

The proposed amendment has no bearing on collection, but would allow querying of the data incidentally collected on US citizens under 702.

"Reverse targeting" is explicitly disallowed by 702(b)(2): "may not intentionally target a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States if the purpose of such acquisition is to target a particular, known person reasonably believed to be in the United States."

From a 2012 Committee on Intelligence report:

"[D]ue to the nature of the collection and the limits of the technology involved, it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under Section 702 authority."

"Finally, on a related matter, the Committee considered
whether querying information collected under Section 702 to
find communications of a particular United States person should be prohibited or more robustly constrained. With respect to analyzing the information lawfully collected under Section 702, however, the Intelligence Community provided several examples in which it might have a legitimate foreign intelligence need to conduct queries in order to analyze data already in its possession."

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/06/25/confirmed-nsa-does-sear...
Yes. They're generally performance and reading nightmares. But this is a very clever usage.
I'm going to guess that Snapchat is a $3B threat to Facebook; I doubt it's actually worth that.
>> 1. Facebook figures Snapchat is worth $3B, and

They probably don't. They are in land grab mode for users, and SnapChat has the young teen audience that Facebook (relatively) struggles with (which, for whatever reason, seems to bother Wall Street). They probably bid far beyond what they value it at currently, assuming they can find a way to monetize it later once they have the users.
And Groupon spurned a 6-billion dollar deal from Google.

Maybe they know something, maybe they don't.
No, it seems like the people manufacturing one thing are being rewarded more than the people manufacturing other things . . . until you realize it's not manufacturing at all. It's resource extraction, which is necessary but still a different thing. Also, why overlook the banks? They might not be totally without value, but they're not manufacturing either. I'd much rather see such a list dominated by people who actually build stuff higher up the value chain, not their suppliers and facilitators.
Also the problem with rental cars is you have to drive down 101 which can be a nightmare especially if you don't know the road, in a cab you can at least sit in back and decompress/prep.
Definitely disagree, there IS a difference between $10 - $20 Mil and $1 - $1.2 Bil
2MB call stacks?

Mine are 10MB:

$ ulimit -s
$ 10240

I can only spawn 200 threads in the worst case and keep them active before system starts swapping. Yes memory space is large by anytime those have to run they'd have to be brought up into the working set.

EDIT: nevermind, _wmd pointed out that stack memory is still virtual and it only be brought into the physical memory as needed.
> So many professors would [...] say things like "...and the proof is trivial" or "...it obviously follows that...", and I'd sit there wanting to shout "NO, NO it's not obvious!"

Agreed. What makes a great teacher is not the depth of their knowledge of the subject matter, but how well they are able to put themselves in their students' shoes and overcome the "Curse of Knowledge"[1]. Unfortunately for students, university professors are usually hired for the former (knowledge & research) and not the latter (real teaching ability).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
AWS Keynote Product Announcements
Making technology that's actually helpful
The number of us who look at the school system today and see it as barbaric and ineffective is growing rapidly...
have you tried mosh? (http://mosh.mit.edu)
Came here to post exactly this.

I was initially excited, wondering how we could leverage this, but now I'm perplexed by: "currently supports streaming applications from Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2."

I would have thought Linux would have been the optimal server environment too.
There is sooooooo much XP still running in most large organizations it is very very frightening.
No way Snapchat is worth $3 bil.
> for their company that has no path to revenue, let alone profit.

This is what baffles me. I cannot understand it for one second.

You literally created 3 billion dollars out of nothing. What can you possibly have up your sleeve?
Have you read the article? He is simply suggesting to get a business license and act as a company, instead of calling yourself "freelancer". Its a pure image/marketing thing, and I can see his point.
Another part of this that SnapChat could benefit from is Facebook's legal team, who are probably the best versed in founder disputes of any team in the country.
> Additionally, you need some hardware to run the client on.

Or, for certain organizations, you can ask employees to bring their own devices. Or switch everyone over to a desktop (cheaper than a laptop) with the understanding that if you need to work outside of the office, you could always remotely log in.
That is a cool improvement. The "focus" and "blur" events do not bubble, so I initially tried to evade event delegation - with respect to legacy event handling (attachEvent) that does not support the capture phase you used.
You're doing better than me. I still don't understand why FB is worth anything.
My (US) house has such a slot but it has been glued shut decades ago so that nobody drops dog poop, or worse, a flaming piece of mail, into it.
Did you read the section I'm referring to? Pay particular attention to the word "intrusion". Quoting:

The Registrant grants an irrevocable licence to NICTL and it’s agents a right to access, monitor and scan any content published publicly including where such processes may involve an intrusion or cause a potential modification of data, providing such scanning is for the purpose of identifying internet security vulnerabilities or the presence of malicious software or content capable of causing harm or disruption to the systems of other Internet users.
I know that my personal experience won't be of much of help to lots of HN-ers who are passed the highschool - early college-age, but I can say that in my case my love and understanding for Maths was inspired by two great teachers that I had, my highschool Maths teacher and my Calculus prof in my first year in college.

Maths is not about arithmetic computations or getting the "exact" answer, is realizing that things like convergent series or Real numbers are extraordinary things, almost magical, as in you somehow get the sense they all come from a different Universe. Sometimes one is lucky enough to have these things revealed to him, like it happened for me.
> What about iOS where you definitely need OSX?

I predict Xamarin Build Cloud.

Devs who want to make WP apps on Mac or Linux have exactly thr same problem, just the other way around. A well integrated, "it just works" cross-platform build solution, straight from the IDE, has a lot of market value and fits perfectly in Xamarin's portfolio, Microsoft or not.
(but as you see, I soon switched to onevent-only approach, naturally)
Lots of comments here about people trying to understand why SnapChat rejected the offer, but I've yet to see much discussion about the other half:

Why would Facebook offer SnapChat $3B? If they believed like most others would, why wouldn't they just ignore SnapChat and let it die like the fad it seems to be?

It's not just SnapChat that thinks they're worth more, Facebook does too.
I think you're missing the point. He's still doing freelancing work, it's just packaged as being the owner of a consulting firm. The difference is subtle, but I think you see it in rates.
Wow. Suddenly their business model doesn't seem so shitty.
I have the nexus 4 right now, this might have to be my next phone.
Viewdocs: Hosted Markdown project documentation
There have always been worries about hosting your data with a 3rd party NSA hyperbole or not. This is why you follow HIPPA standards if they are applicable, or ensure AWS is compliant with a standard you need to adhere to: http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/

Your company will always have to value the risk/reward tradeoff of hosting with a 3rd party and it has nothing to do with secret courts or any other silly end of the world predictions, and has to do with the fact that your data is outside of your direct control.
I feel like that is a valid argument when talking 7 figures. "I'll decline $3 million because I feel 4 is coming". This makes sense because we are talking about real difference making dollars. But the difference between $3 billion and $4 billion to 2 people is not going to make a difference to your lifestyle, maybe your children's, children's, children's lifestyle.
I was one of the gifted math students in high school, and I put in a very little amount of work.

In college, I had to put in a lot more work, but the math still came somewhat naturally to me. I'm pretty sure I still had to put in less work than some of the other college students to reach the same level of understanding, though.

I neither put in as much work, nor reached the same level of understanding, as the 'gifted' college students, though.
I wonder why they skipped the Xmas launch in the USA? Either way, I'm happy to be Canadian for once, this is seriously tempting.
>I've never had to work so hard to find out _what_ license they're releasing things under. I followed about seven links and finally got it.

Microsoft's open source software repository is codeplex. If you go to codeplex you'll find out that the projects that you mention are Apache 2 licensed too.

http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/license

http://entityframework.codeplex.com/license
USC researchers create a virtual human to converse with PTSD sufferers
"It makes infinity times more money than snapchat, but has a thirtieth of the valuation. What is going on?"

A valuation isn't just based on how much money a company makes right now. It's based on how much money the company's expected to make over its lifetime. Snapchat's valuation [1] is based on expectations of high future revenue.

(There was a point where Facebook & Twitter had 0 revenue, too. Now they're both multi-billion dollar public companies.)

These stories always cause scepticism, especially in the HN crowd. It's the most common response ("What?! 4 BILLION!?"), and an easy one (i.e. doesn't require much thought), but it's the wrong one.

Sure, you can argue over the exact number, but let's consider the reverse claim: are you really willing to bet that an app that processes 350m+ messages every day is worth nothing? If not, what would you value it at?

Answering that question requires hard thought; reflexive scepticism doesn't. And if you were really imaginative & thought it through, you'd probably arrive at quite a high number.

For many consumer apps, the path to market dominance involves offering a service for free at first, and then 'monetizing' later on. The whole point of venture capital is to allow that (common) pattern to happen; the result is massive companies - like Dropbox and Airbnb - that weren't always cashflow positive, and that meaningfully benefit the world.

Perhaps it was crazy of Snapchat to turn down $3 billion, and maybe they really are overvalued, but it seems obvious that they are worth a lot of money [2].

[1] Although valuations make great media stories, valuation is really not that meaningful a number for private VC-funded companies.

[2] If you don't agree, consider that both Mark Zuckerberg & the founders of Snapchat disagree with you. So either you're smarter than Mark Zuckerberg & the founders of Snapchat, or you're probably wrong.
No I didn't choose to live next to a red light zone, the zone grew around lower rent residential streets over a period of time. Higher rents prevented moving until better job obtained. Wasn't residents by the way, street traffic shifts around and police sometimes like it where they can see what is happening and contain.
I wouldn't trust a service like this, although I know many people will (or just won't think about that aspect). The main point I'm seeing from this is that it devalues the Snapchat service immensely. I know there are other services offering the same functionality as well. I'm sure it will be impossible for Snapchat to keep them out, and it could destroy Snapchat as they begin to catch on. I'm now less likely to send snaps as I know they can more easily be recorded forever.
Anyone read Blondie24 by David Fogel? I'll have to check when I get home but if I remember correctly, Fogel and his father did this same thing in the late 90's at the University of Hawaii using a neural network to examine mammograms and achieved very high accuracy with it.
The base point of the article is that its all in how you market yourself.
Please Don't Let Curved Phones Be a Thing
Seems like a small range of performance. 1 vCPU? Does that mean one hyperthread? What is that, a Pentium 4 or something? Where are the i7 instances?

I don't see a developer finding this useful at all.
Systematic interaction with a model can be used to learn things about the model whether or not the model is accurate. Otherwise we are in agreement, I think.
I most definitely will. and if my users want to browse your favorite porn site i don't see why i shouldn't let them..
Interesting. I've been toying around with this idea for a while, but inexperience with starting a company is prohibitive enough to prevent action.

How is your current freelance shell company marketed? I'd love to see what that website looks like, and how you advertise it differently.
You screwed up by making money.

There is an actual metric to judge your value by, rather than using fuzzy valley metrics.
Not relevant to OP but I think companies like Snapchat becoming so popular might not be good sign for this society's intellectual health. As already been discussed here, we are becoming a society with very short attention span. I know there is market for all this, but then one could say there is market for face-creams that make people fairer(atleast in my country such a cream is very popular). Imagine if we had a society where a decent SRS(spaced repetition software) extension would have been offered so much wealth.
Fetchnotes: The Go-To Organization, Note-Taking, and Collaboration Tool
They can't take the risk of letting it die. Perhaps that is what MySpace said when thefacebook.com showed up.
> unlike a mathematical model, your words are unclear.

Given that, I would argue that my words are a better model for reality than mathematics :)

> you probably want to alter that until it describes your beliefs rather than mine.

Exactly. You are just stating your beliefs. The fact that you have stated them in a faux-mathematical way doesn't make them any more sensible or coherent.
I thought we were calling ourselves consultants now.
I get the marketing / branding aspect. From a contractor's point of view, though, there still isn't any guarantee that the firm that is you that is doing contract work will do quality work - there is no audit system other than referrals anyway. I wonder why people are more inclined to refer companies than individuals. Do companies incur more overhead for the client?
I think a lot depends on how good of a typist you are. If you can confidently type fast, it's no problem. If you're prone to typos, latency can be unbelievably aggravating.
Did Microsoft invent the Pebble Smartwatch? The answer
It really all boils down to risk management.

If you're a self-identified say, "Ruby freelancer", the value proposition is "I am an independent Ruby developer for hire". For staff augmentation gigs or applying for a FT position, this is all well and good, because whoever's hiring is looking for warm bodies with specific technical capabilities.

However, many companies are looking to solve specific business problems and might not know how. Simply hiring a developer who happens to know Ruby doesn't guarantee that the problem will be solved — it's a huge risk. It's sort of like saying, "all I need is someone who knows how to swing hammers if I want to build my wife and I's dream home."

Mitigating that risk means stepping away from the "<technology> freelancer" title and becoming a business consultant who happens to use e.g. Ruby to solve business problems. On your end, this is going to require less time spent thinking about the technology, and more about the path to solving the underlying problem at hand. From the perspective of a client, this is a much safer bet. And when there's less risk involved, clients are willing to spend more. And treat you more as a consultant. And you'll be happier, your closing rates will go up, etc.
Two things here. First, 90% confidence isn't great, I look for 99% confidence in running tests. Second, this assumes there is a lot of stuff you can test that produces 2x gains when in reality the number of things that do that is very small.

Its fair to A/B test things you expect to produce high leverage changes. That was actually part of the point of the article, no small tests. Focus here first, consumer psych helps you figure out where these opportunities are.

Once you get through these big opportunities though even respectable gains (e.g. 10%) take a lot of traffic to measure. For example, seeing a 10% gain in a 50% conversion rate takes around 2500-3000 visits to A/B test at 99% confidence. Seeing a 10% gain in a 10% conversion rate at 99% confidence takes 10 times more traffic than that.
Are the sticking their noses up at a $3bn offer because they want more money in an acquisition (GroupOn), or because they have a compelling vision for the product (Tumblr)?

Because I HIGHLY doubt the good folks at Snapchat have a vision for their product that is so important that selling out would be wrong. It's snapchat. If it disappeared tomorrow, millions of people would shrug, and that'd be it.

Last time I heard about a big founder snub a gigantic offer, it was GroupOn...and well... http://business.time.com/2013/03/01/groupon-fires-ceo-andrew...
I read the paragraph you highlighted to mean that they (NICTL) are denying any liability for damages to your site and/or data that may occur due to "NICTL and it’s agents" exercising whatever security procedures they feel necessary.

Someday I would love to see a contract without a bunch of open-ended boilerplate.
The current license linked at http://www.nuget.org/packages/EntityFramework/ is the one I commented about.

I'm glad to see they're moving more of these technologies over to truly FOSS.

Which pieces are on which license if you get it from which place?

I'll update the linked comment with that blog post -- I seriously scoured the other press release and couldn't find which license these were released under.
I usually just raise my hand and ask the professor to elaborate. If it's genuinely time intensive, they'd ask me to stop by during office hours.
For companies that trust giant corporations more than their employees.

Fortunately for amazon, I think there's probably plenty of those companies out there.
This seems like a great idea, one that I've been tossing around in my head for a while now. To the skeptics (of which HN has in droves), has anybody ever gone in the reverse direction, ie, from having their own client-funded business to being "freelance"?
I don't understand what this is linking to. Why not link directly to the WSJ?
The double licensing is problem, but this would work nicely with a BYOD policy. You could use your own computer anywhere, but corporate data is still stored in a secure location.
Groupon was offered about $6 billion by Google in 2010.

Groupon turned them down, thinking they were worth more and then went the IPO route.

Now, in late 2013, Groupon has a market cap of $6.8 billion.

Moral of the story? Take the money and run.
A single fixed-route attack destabilizing a network.
No, there is a German IT manager posting about how he can't use it due to EU data protection laws. Nothing to do with NSA spying.

Intelligent discussion about the issues of cloud computing, including data protection laws and spying, is useful and welcome. But posts that basically boil down to "LOL NSA" are not intelligent.
I might be in the minority here but I think snapchat is totally worth 3 billion. And the article says they have a company interested in a round valuing them at 4 billion . If Instagram would have held out longer and not accepted the deal from facebook (They didnt need it the just closed a nice round of funding a couple months before)they would probably be worth North of 6 billion
Thank you for the correction!

I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that the license in the package manager operated by the company who is granting the license would be accurate.
How much risk is worth a 33% return?
If you know everyone's social graph and you use sneaky ways of identifying people even when they are using different computers or using the private/incognito mode of browsers (which is definitely technologically possible) then perhaps it would be possible to serve up "private" erotic photographs only to a subset of users who are maximally disconnected from the people in the photographs.

I wonder how long you could get away with pulling off something like that if you were as sneaky as possible.
Oh wow, adding functions is pretty straightforward:
http://jsfiddle.net/hYfN3/315/
I imagine he just set up an LLC or something to that effect, and made his site look more professional, with a logo on it.

I can't imagine it's that difficult. People do it all the time for all sorts of personal businesses.

I haven't looked into it in-depth as I'm not at that stage yet, but I eventually plan to do the same thing -- although I hope to scale freelancing into a much bigger business if at all possible
Having once looked at an IPCC report, I can tell you they incorporate a huge amount of data. Whether they are treating that data correctly and whether the process is warping the conclusions in inappropriate ways are not quite the same question. In this case, there is no testing of the model at all.