skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This meme is particularly viral among game devs. They say "Notch was lucky", but what they really mean is that Minecraft resonated with the market more than they can comprehend. They say "my game failed, and I can't see why, so I must be unlucky", rather than saying "my game failed, because people didn't like it more than the alternatives".

Short of people being forced to purchase it, the only thing that makes a product successful is when people want it. How the product stands on its own merits is dependent on customers knowing about it, and choosing it over the alternatives.

When it comes to games, works in the same genre may not even be competing against each other because of the way gamers buy games. Plenty of gamers will buy Battlefield AND Call of Duty, or will buy Minecraft AND all of its derivative clones. They just won't buy things they don't want.

MMORPGs in the same genre, though, are often competing against each other. People can only play so many MMORPGs because of the time and social aspects.
What percentage of black female CS grads from Berkeley can't get their startups funded? It would surprise me to hear there were many, because the CS grads I've known from Berkeley are very good
This doesn't look awful and by a very large margin. Unconventional - maybe, awful - heck, no. This is as easy to interpret as linear version.
I would in no way say that SV is even very meritocratic. Compare start-up demographics numbers to population-at-large numbers... The fact that commenters like you would read this article, hopefully think for half a second, and then still insist that SV is "very meritocratic" is exactly the problem.
The "products" page, however, does not work: http://www.rsync.net/products/index.html
Care to share some book recs? I'm always looking for new ones.
Extremely slow for me, http://rsync.net.nyud.net/products/ceopage.html works.
UW computer-science superstar Ben Taskar dies at 36
I'm still using gmail but I fear that one day they will do the same thing with new TOS on gmail. This day I even get prompted to create a g+ account every time I login.

Is there an alternative, where I would have 15GB and the option to use my own domain. I'll happily pay to avoid creating a g+ account and have decent space for my emails without managing the security.
I think the OP's point is after filtering out obviously non-successful startups, the chance of success is potentially non-correlated with other "traits", "characteristics", or "metrics" etc. that people often associate with successful startups/founders.

It would be an interesting experiment if YC lower the acceptance threshold to say twice the original batch, and randomly pick from that bigger pool, and see if there's any difference between the ones that didn't make the original cut and those did. (A/B in its finest :)
> It seems clear that FDA does not in fact want to shut 23AM down, but that they do want 23AM to radically change their marketing.

I don't think that's accurate either. I think that the FDA views that 23andMe must do one of the following:

1) Provide necessary evidence to support their current marketing claims, or

2) Change the way they are marketing their product, or

3) Cease marketing their product altogether.

I don't see that the FDA necessary has a strong preference as to which manner of complying with the law 23andMe takes.
In your mind, is it possible for someone to disagree with the article without "exemplifying the problem"?

That's the issue with first-world "social-justice warriors", like the author of the linked opinion piece. If you disagree with their premises on factual grounds, you're labeled as part of the problem. It makes honest discussion impossible.

For example, you completely ignored the point that PG made. You didn't even attempt to address it. You just labeled him as the enemy and went on to make your own point.

He made a good point, but in my mind, he didn't go far enough. Both (American) mathematics and SV are disproportionately dominated by east-Asians and Indians relative to their respective population sizes. Why does everyone ignore this?
Google never should've tried to be "polite" about G+. It's only bit them in the ass and become a repeatedly-broken promise.

The intent here is reasonable: They have dozens of services with dozens of comment engines and user-systems and they need to consolidate that crap into something more coherent. Picasa/YouTube do functionally similar services but one uses video and one uses pictures, so it makes sense for Google to try to make their common-ground more common.

The problem is that fundamentally, G+ was too opinionated and Google leadership was too polite. The relationship should've been the other way around - G+ needed to be more flexible (better support for anonymous/pseudonymous posting) while Google should've moved decisively instead of soft-peddling it so many times and breaking promises to the users that implied that they had a choice about these changes. You can't not-have Plus.

What they should've offered is "I don't want a Plus homepage" and "I don't want to participate in Circles" which is an agreement they could have honoured.
If you define luck as the happening of an event that the probability of not happening is greater than the probability of happening. Then all depends on how well you can calculate your probabilities of success and how much risk you want to take.

Of course you can't be 100% sure that you are going to be successful. But you must try to increase your probabilities as much as you can, trying to predict your probabilities as accurate as you can.

As Laplace said: "Life's most important questions are, for the most part, nothing but probability problems".
What an absurd argument. If you sell baby food laced with arsenic, and babies die, you've committed murder. In a true free market, you wouldn't have a liability shield and would face severe consequences for putting out dangerous products. Just because it's a free market doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want with impunity. And also, the FDA is not some magic fairy dust that will shield you from bad products. Mountain Dew still has BVO in it, for example.
I never thought I'd live to see Marxists attack Math with their class war nonsense, but there you go. Shameless.
no, because presumably a licenced doctor would rely on a test provider that was FDA-approved.
Better examples of autodidact mathematicians are Galois and George Green.
Inside Intel’s 610K Core EDA System
Reinventing the Y Combinator
Do you believe there are a large number of people in {white/asian men}^C who are good at math but unable to progress in the world of math?
Dear google, please add a subscription option to your services - lets say 2USD monthly. In return - no tracking, no forcing and no data collection and totally turned off safe search - I have survived goatse, you have nothing to scare me with. I would gladly pay them and you probably make less from me in our current relationship. Thanks.
Four Months After a Concussion, Your Brain Still Looks Different Than Before
No, shampoos are detergents, which is a chemist's way of saying they dissolve oils and therefore the other molecules and stuff that are trapped in the oils (like foodstuffs on a dirty plate). In the case of hair, that other stuff will include pollution from the atmosphere, salt from sweat, skin cells, bacteria, bacterial metabolic products (some of which cause odor), etc. Shampoos allow that stuff to be chemically freed and washed away.

The equivalent would be not using dishwashing liquid for your plates after a greasy meal. Hot water and friction can do a lot, but it is an uphill battle. In the case of hair, your method might just be "good enough", though. But I'm sure your hair won't get the "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific" response.
But what data causes you to 'tend to believe'?

Probably the same level of data behind the article we're discussing.

If she had started the article with "I'm just basing this whole article on my own biases and no real data, but..." then we wouldn't really have much to argue about.
Wait, on what platform? Chrome? Desktop? What?
What the hell is wrong with everyone? This is (a) interesting (b) unusual (c) clearly has a lot of thought and effort put into it. And all you can muster is "It's so shitty, I'm speechless"? Not a sliver appreciation and empathy. The hell, guys?
Mirror: http://rsync.net.nyud.net/products/ceopage.html
I recently bought a faucet from an online plumbing company. I now find my browsing bombarded with ads for the same kitchen faucet, from that same company.

How many kitchens do they think I have?
I agree completely. The underlying assumption of Schneier's comment is that advertising provides no value to the consumer, which is untrue. Google has made advertising incredibly valuable to the consumer (they're clicking the links, after all!) which is the chief reason they're so profitable.
Sysql - use SQL queries against output of linux commands
That is an interesting question. I still can't think of one better than math and the hard sciences, which in my experience are roughly tied with SV.

The to what end question is easy to answer though. It gets you a lot more attention to claim SV isn't a meritocracy than to claim that math isn't.
Hi, Alan. Yes, many things are not built yet. Nowhere am I pushing anybody to build their business on it yet, but I am looking for hackers and early adopters/alpha testers. I've gone through pains on every doc that I've created that this is early, alpha, needs lots of work--including the 2nd paragraph of the linked-to article:
"InfiniSQL is still in early stages of development--it already has many capabilities, but many more are necessary for it to be useful in a production environment."

Regarding CAP, I'm not addressing multi-site availability at this stage--I want to get single site fully operational, redundant, and so on.

And, yes, to boil it down, it's an in-memory RDBMS using the Actor model.

The most important feature is that it performs transactions involving records on multiple nodes better than anything. This is the workload that keystores functionally cannot do, and which other distributed RDBMS' suffer under. It's also open source, has over 100 pages of technical docs, and is functional enough for people to pound on with some workloads--but not something to put into production yet.
RelayRides Reaches Deal To Make Its Peer-To-Peer Car Rentals Legal At SFO
I'm not worried about the major markets (Silicon Valley and New York) but about the rest.

I am in Minneapolis and my resume has "founder" on it. I've had no problems finding employment. In my current job, it actually helped me get hired: my boss specifically wanted to assemble a team of entrepreneurially minded people. In my previous job, it didn't help but it didn't hurt either. So my personal anecdata says it's not a problem at all.
No, that's Ahl's intentions. Check the previous quote: "celebrating masculine concepts of control, competition, rationality, dominance, etc."

Apparently she believes being rational is a masculine concept.
And what if it's only moderately meritocratic? Or even below average?

I'd love for PG to run an analysis once of what words occur most frequently in flagged posts and their comments.

I don't think you could get a better representation of this community's unspoken biases than that.

I'm also pretty sure you'd find that words like feminism, female, sexism e.a. would feature quite high on the list.
I hear you. But I will point out that they are often just the default option not necessarily the best available.

I learnt that when they stopped supporting their news reader. It forced me to look at what had been out there all along, but I had simply not looked because their reader was good enough. They taught me in this way to look for alternatives that are often better.

For instance, I've come to appreciate the features at:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q= For search.

Google isn't any more evil than they have ever been - they are however huge and it's almost certain that some aspect of what they do will rub lots of people the wrong way.

I don't avoid them like the plague, but I also don't stick to services I don't like and I suggest as much as I can seeking out alternatives.

If you don't like being the product that is sold, leave. If you like the trade for the value you get, than it's worked out well for you. I can't blame them for making an offer you chose to accept.
That's not really a reason. Romania has an active epicenter of earthquakes and the houses are not demolished/rebuilt that often. When designing and constructing buildings, there are also just some seismic requirements, that's all. There isn't any planned obsolescence involved and I haven't heard of much earthquake damage since 1977.
In post-modern Marxist discourse, who is speaking matters more than what is being said[1]. There is literally no way a white male could win the argument. Since he belongs to the oppressive/over class, his viewpoint is corrupted and invalid.

By the way, this is the bread and butter of what they teach to kids in the soft majors in university nowadays.

[1] http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/regiftedxmas12.html
Obfuscated C: ASCII fluid simulation
How does using CDNs to load jQuery, font awesome, and some google fonts give away viewer data to third parties? I'm not sure about the tumblr stuff but I don't see how loading these scripts is malicious...
SV believes so strongly that it's meritocratic, that every successful person believes they deserve it. That's a problem.
Cloud Jobs: Some New Things You Should Be Learning
I understand how you feel. I only learned chess properly when I was around 30 years old. Anyone should be able to at least learn chess to a standard where they can enjoy playing against other casual players.

See my previous comment for my recommendations on learning chess.
Wow, thank you, it's great to hear your story.

Actually, the apology at the end of my post wasn't about Visual Basic as a whole, but the VBX interface specifically. People did use it to build a lot of nifty controls and extensions, but the interface itself wasn't the best-designed thing in the world, and Microsoft eventually replaced it with COM/OCX.

Hmm... Not sure if that was an improvement!
I'm not sure total accuracy is the point. Rather, I think it's about the claimed value being correct. If 23andMe say a test has a 20% accuracy, they should be able to prove how they came by that number.

There's a big difference between telling someone they have a 5% chance of something and telling them they have a 25% chance of something - even though both are uncertain.
They were dead first though. I thought of that as disposing of the evidence to make it look like suicide.
honestly, which explanation seems more likely?
Dropbox Bug putting file in different persons shared folder
Very compelling. I am filling in some of the content gaps for SaltConf (SLC, Jan. 28-30, 2014, www.saltconf.com) and would love to have you talk at the conference. This topic is a really good fit for content I am looking for. Speakers get a free conference pass. If you would be interested, please send a note to saltconf at saltstack dot com and I'll be in touch with next steps.
In-memory distributed database? VoltDB is already way past 500Ktx/sec on a 12-node cluster.

On their site though, it says no sharding and that it can do these 500Ktx/sec even when each transaction involves data on multiple nodes. Does this performance degrade directly in relation to the number of nodes a tx needs to touch?

A simple, straightforward, wire-level description of how things work when coordinating and performing transactions across would be very useful. There's a lot of excited talk about actors, but nothing that really examines why this is faster, or any sort of technical analysis.
Yes - that's one of the assumptions implicit in using flags to pick languages

Let me also add: the only languages spoken in a country are the official languages of that country
Sorry, you're right, I was being imprecise. Obviously, I think (2) is the only viable option here; 23AM doesn't appear to be set up for clinical genomics. But that bias was built into my comment implicitly, not stated directly like it should have been.
About 1985 IBM had a product called TopView that ran a multitasking supervisor on top of DOS and could do real multitasking with the right disk drivers. No protected memory though. TopView was really memory heavy, though -- you gave up at least 160KB just with TopView. Two guys created a TopView clone called Mondrian that ran in just 40K, and ran much faster. Those two guys were Nathan and Cameron Myhrvold. Mondrian was sold to Microsoft and those two guys went with it. Mondrian was a really clever engineering feat.
> I don't want to cause them to say yes when they don't want to just because they like me

But that's the only reason they would say yes. Unless they're just using you as a source of information or as someone who can lend them a thing.

Are you afraid that people like you? That they think they should like you?

I feel that the right response here is to link you to Aristotle's conception of friendship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philia

You seem to have nothing but friendships of utility. Your friends are people who can give you information or lend you things, and who trouble you when they call upon you for the pleasure of your company. That's the kind of friendship a lobbyist talks about having with the local senator.
You said: You are much, much more likely to get funded if you're a young white (or perhaps asian) guy doing an undergrad at Stanford than if you're a black woman studying at Berkeley.

Your data does not show this. You'd need the denominators as well, you have only the numerators.
Also fun is happiness, if you're too happy you're in the red!
So then setup the service to suggest the alternative interpretation.
I don't think that skill with chopsticks is a good comparison. Chopsticks are an invention with an invention date and location that give them a very tangible cultural association to this day.

The traits listed in the article are not skills with a certain tool, they are more accurately described as personality traits. Men didn't invent and popularize them. There is no inventor of self-reliance, that is something that anybody can exhibit. (And even if we look at so called "traditional" gender roles in society, how many single men raising children are there? How many single women? Anyone saying that women cannot be self-reliant is delusional).

If we want to stick with a 'skill with invention' analogy, why not plow? If I told you that somebody was skilled with a plow, would you first guess that they were Egyptian?
We have been in the age of entitlement for quite a while. I don't quite understand why more people just don't do instead of talking about doing. We all have things that we hate and annoy us but most deal with the issue and carry on. I feel that it is wrong that something gains notoriety simply because it is agreeable to a large consensus of people who feel the same way. What is the merit?
An iPhone depreciates about $200 a year. It sounds like these houses depreciate... $10,000/yr? I think the modernization is cool and all but, just wow.
Why not just put a disclaimer like one you'd see on a late night psychic ad service?

"This service is intended for entertainment purposes only."

No disclaimer about medical anything. And people pay more than 99$ for psychic services.
GameMaker Studio Standard Edition Is Currently Free ($50 Value)
Yes, there are too many pesky east-Asians and Indians.

There might be a Jewish problem as well.
They silently activated his account in the background. That doesn't really seem annoying to me. If he wasn't looking for it, or didn't want to become enraged by it, he probably could have just ignored/dismissed the alert and never known better. Right now complaining about G+ is like complaining about Facebook privacy a few months ago. It's low hanging fruit that anyone with a blog can complain about to seem enlightened.
Do building codes & zoning play a role in this?

I've seen some crazy structures in the US, including a castle in Northern Idaho, but they tend to be in places with lax building codes (or lax building code enforcement) no HOAs and no urban zoning.

Just in the start of the article they mention a few things that we be hard to build legally in the US: handrail-less stairs, rail-less balconies, windowless rooms & houses.
Anything that gives Pando Daily less traffic is all good by me.
They should just:

- Start using the name "Google+" only for the feed / social network functionality. Because thats what people think it is.

- Make the social network an optional service.

- Separate the single-signon solution from Google+. Call it "Google Account" or something similar.

- Provide easy to use account identity functionality (instead of using "pages").

- Ask users if they want to keep the existing identity or use their master identity ONCE per service. Respect their decision.

- Allow users to switch to/from using separate identities from/to using the master identity.

This is what the old Google would've done. You know, the one that actually tried pretty hard to do the right thing (i.e. don't be evil). Not the one that is desperately trying to compete with Facebook.
... just tested and works just fine ... just a static HTML page that's been in place since 2006 :)
Perhaps this is due to a more decentralized security apparatus in India?

This is an open question, as I don't know the answer but I am aware that in very large countries it is hard for a central government to control the provinces. Same in China.
twoodfin said contextual, not irrelevant. Instead of adapting the ads to the user, you can adapt the ads to the content of the page they're being inserted on. The ads remain relevant (often more relevant, since targeted ads have a tendency to show you what you already know) without having to mine your personal data.

For example, if you go to Hack-a-day, all the ads are relevant for their user base, even though they're fixed and not automatically assigned by Google's All-Seeing-Eye.
You understand that the goal is to prevent the horrible thing from happening, right? Not to let the horrible thing happen and then try to fix something that's unfixable?
"Sir, you're a bit low on drugs and alcohol" :)
Apple Pays $350 Million to Watch You Move
It's not luck for you, it's luck for entrepreneur.

Your job is to select people who were lucky enough to meet the right people, meet the market, had luck to have enough traction, lived in a country where he could spend time learning and so on...

But when you are entrepreneur, you have to maximize your luck by maximizing number of opportunities.
Ask HN: Best video chat applications for remote working?
I'm managing a remote team of developers at the moment, and my intention has been to use video chat via Skype or Google Hangouts for daily standups, planning meetings, etc.

(Why video? Because the sense of human connection is much stronger, in my experience, and also body language helps a lot with communication.)

However, on both Skype and Google Hangouts, we've had a pretty awful experience so far. Video dropping frequently, hangups, lag - it's not smooth, and it increases the length of each meeting by a measurable amount.

Can anyone recommend a better / smoother / more stable alternative for remote working?
The original title of this submission was "A look at the future of Bitcoin mining".
How so? It's the general standard for an "A" grade in any other subject.
Why "extreme narcissism"?
Those are indeed better examples, though I had to look them up. The history of mathematics is really something I should read more about.
Exactly.

You should write an article on that (:
A good move to master maths? Check out these chess puzzles