skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In this case the most common misunderstanding seems to be not to realize that present day big companies were once small. You could have pre-empted that by reminding readers that once companies reach a certain size they don't have to rely on making something great to grow bigger, but that if you look back at the earliest history of those companies, you'll find most did. (emphasis mine)

It's hard to call it a misunderstanding when the title of the post starts boldly with "The Only" and the first paragraph starts with "All companies". The premise of there being some universal rule for growth is absurd and requires only a few counterexamples, of which there are certainly many to consider (this page now contains dozens), to be demonstrably false.

By reinterpreting the author's argument with a requalification of most, you've already reached a much more sane argument. But you know as well as I do that this post would never frontpage if it had been called "The Best Way to Get Huge" or "The Way Most Companies Become Huge".

Edit: Or maybe it would have anyway? Sam Altman is a partner at YC [1] and I can't help but wonder if such content gets a boost to frontpage no matter what. After all, people have shown that penalties are applied to a hidden list of phrases and domains which boots them off the frontpage [2], so the same principle might be applied in reverse to certain things. For example, the controversy penalty might be removed for certain domains. I'm sorry, but after reading [2] my faith in the scoring system here is at an all-time low.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman

[2]: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
First Class Functions in C - Because That's Totally a Good Idea
upvote! you had me for a second. i thought "mhhmm.. really? citibank? wow! innovative!" but when i reached the question mark my disbelief became stronger than my gullibility :-)
No Linux? No thanks.
This line from the readme file of his Craft.Net project neatly sums up Sir_Cmpwn's presence within the notchverse:

"Minecraft is not officially affiliated with Craft.Net."
I really wish people wouldn't give this as much weight has it gets, there are so many problems with the methodology:

1. The raw data (answers, in particular the free response text) has never to my knowledge been published.
2. The algorithm used to select schools and pupils taking the test has never to my knowledge been published. (In fact it differs from country to country...or city..)
3. The test itself is taken in many different languages, which language version of the test is used in which country, has to my knowledge never been published.
4. They compare Shanghai, a relatively well off city with entire countries..without knowing the data in 1-3 we cannot know if this comparison is fair or makes any sense at all.
5. They administer the test at different times of the year relative to exam time...some teenagers would have just got back from summer break, others would have been deep revision, preparing for other exams - I would guess this has a statistically significant impact on performance.

Until they publish all the data so it can be analysed independently (and god forbid replicated), this isn't science or statistics...it's busy work.
You can't claim that the Euro isn't a financial instrument just because you don't live in Europe. They are issued by the European Central Bank and national central banks of Eurosystem members, who in turn share the liability (explained briefly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro#Issuing_modalities_for_ban...).

This makes the Euro a traditional currency which bitcoin isn't. That's not to say bitcoin is worthless, since its value is really whatever someone is willing to pay for it.
> I agree that a reinstall is probably more apt.

I see what you did there.
memcpy_s:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dswaw1wk(v=vs.80).as...

edit: I read the link you included and I have to take exception with this line:

it’s a perfectly safe function if you use
it properly

Sure, same thing as automobiles, alcohol, condoms… Problems arise because people do not use them correctly.
"I imagine pilots talked to each other a lot about what planes they liked flying, and they could not have succeeded if those conversations didn't favor them."

With respect to Boeing one of the first things actually was a government contract that they received for the war effort. Then they nearly went bust after the war ended.

This is some of the story. There is also an excellent documentary on Boeing.

http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commercial/boeing_bio/chapter3....
I was thinking the same thing about 4th&short in your own red zone - generally the data points you'll get are from desperate late-game plays where the defence is also not playing to their standard playbook.
You left out the biggest problem with the Post Office - it is often closed when you have the free time to go there.

I've been using private mailbox services for nearly 2 decades now and they have it all over the USPS PO. 24-hour package pickup. They throw away junkmail for you. They will text you when you have a package. They can accept shipments from any carrier - USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.

They will forward mail in batches to another address, say you moved out of state but still want your old address to keep working for another 6 months. If you file a change-of-address form with the USPS they sell that info to anybody with a couple of dollars (like your college alumni association and any other charity you ever donated to). Some will even open your mail for you, scan it and email it to you.

Plus, the address looks like an apartment but it is not your home address - so telling someone where to mail you doesn't also tell them where you live.
I honestly wonder how they calculated the data for this. I was searching through the comments on that website, and one user suggested it might have been through phone calls to centers? I definitely would like to see some sources though.
There are two possibilities. Either you've created a tool which enables people to covertly send messages without being detected, which every publicly-released stego tool thus far has failed to do, or you haven't.

Have you spent much time researching why current stego tools have all failed? The way you're endorsing this makes it sound like you haven't, and you're putting people in danger by pretending like law enforcement is incompetent.

Remember, law enforcement somehow managed to acquire an image of Silk Road's server, even though they were running it as a Tor Hidden Service, and they also managed to recover >100k bitcoins from DPR. All of this was done through forensics. Are you claiming that this tool is secure against such an adversary?

Hopefully someone will write a program called "DissidentXDetector" before law enforcement does. The myth that this generates undetectable messages needs to be debunked before people start trusting this.
No, it does not. Why would it? The point of a currency is to be exchangeable into any other good. That includes dollars.
http://pragprog.com/book/csjava/3d-game-programming-for-kids

(It's not literally just for kids.)
Flipboard reportedly raising $50 million more
And you can take the reboot as a very strong suggestion, depending on your needs and whether there are kernel exploits to worry about (Oracle's purchase of ksplice is yet another reason I hate them). Much of the time (on select systems!) I get away with just restarting the services. Reboots really do bring peace of mind though.
Sure. public at cem dot re
Internet Criminal Economics (2009) [video]
Nice! Line thickness based on distance between points seems perfect for replicating ink. Good idea.
i use followletter just to make it easy for me to discover new articles in one place and keep in records which one i've shared.
That is actually remarkably clever. Spam would indeed seem to be an excellent vector for sending hidden messages!
If Notch was trying to write an API, then sure. If he's trying to write fun games (which he is) then you are dead wrong. Not all code is written for the same purposes.
Yeah, when the OPT runs out you need H-1B. However there's something called the Cap-Gap extension which extends your OPT until your H-1B begins.

I actually got an O-1 because my company got press and funding and I was able to use that as evidence of extraordinary talent .
Getting Chrome Beta for Android did the trick. Thank you for the fantastic tools you Chrome folks are building.
I am an occasional Yahoo answers user. However recently, it has been Hacker News and Facebook for me.
Surprised you didn't rediscover using physics on the pen point. You might check out http://www.graficaobscura.com/dyna/
> and there's no real encrypted chat

What about OTP? One of the easiest things to set up and use imo, users just need to know to exchange key fingerprints over a third party medium (in person being the foolproof way).
truck pumps should not used to fuel cars, their flow rate is way to high and will cause damage if not bathe you in fuel. I haven't ever had an issue find low sulfur diesel on my travels, however I am mostly doing than East of the Mississippi.
Gold become desirable because it is an ideal metal to use for jewelry. That came first and its use as a currency came second. In that sense, it has been used in industry longer that it has been a currency.
At Wharton I interviewed the founder of Jerrold electronics.

Iirc (this was a long long time ago) his Philadelphia connection to Ralph Roberts (comcast) was how he built Jerrold (they made cable boxes).

Comcast of course grew large by starting and getting it's first cable franchise in a small town in Mississippi. Nobody chooses their cable company the cable company chooses you.

(I actually have an audio tape of that interview that I made.)
GPUs are not only out of order but extremely synchronous in general with a restricted memory model that prevents memory stalls. Not only that, but multiple cores share the same control unit, which is why coherent branching across the cores is such a big deal (they all have to branch the same way or both branches have to be executed...).
Hmm, "Death of the Internet Predicted"? Seriously, are there one or two succinct points to this article? Is it saying:

- The author thinks Bitcoin users are either irrelevant crackpots (anarchists/libertarians) or criminals?

- Gold is valuable and Bitcoins are not because digging in the ground is fundamentally more valuable than discovering large prime factors of numbers?

- The author doesn’t like the properties of Bitcoin, or Bitcoin is not useful to national governments because they can’t control it (not a monetary instrument, can’t reduce supply, etc)?

- The author believes Bitcoin is doomed to collapse to essentially no value?

- The author believes people who engage in Bitcoin trading are involved in a Ponzi scheme?

I’m not sure what the point is, but to be fair, I’m not sure it matters. Bitcoin is useful for those who value its properties, and there are many people who do. No one can wave off these people by labeling them as money launderers, anarchists, or Ponzi schemers (which I don’t think is even true); nor will such statements, or analyses such as this article, prevent anyone from trading Bitcoin, buying or selling with Bitcoin, or holding Bitcoin. And since Bitcoins are fungible and becoming ever more so as time goes on, regulations and laws will prove difficult-to-impossible to enforce, in a manner very similar to P2P file-sharing (but with all the technical lessons of P2P sharing now learned).

You might bet against Bitcoin specifically because of one or more technical flaws, but digital currencies in some form, and specifically currencies not controlled by any nation or corporation, are here to stay.
I loved watching a hand forced to remove its gauntlet. We have the power, people. Make noise.
I have never been able to find good data on this, but from what I have gathered, the effect depends on how much you have been drinking (drinks/day), and how long you have been doing it (# of days). It does seem that gathering valid data on this would be very useful, but I am not sure how one could do a randomized control trial, when the express goal of doing so would be to measure the harm done by the 'treatment'.
a blog? I actually expected this to be in a prezi.

A few months ago we launched a [Zoom/Pan] Bug Bounty Program
This is incredibly bad advice. There are enough people who get screwed badly for silly offences. And yeah, once you get a ten year ban, it doesn't matter if you write a cute article on medium and get it on the front page of HN, INS doesn't fucking care.
Generous, Sir. Thank You. I will in return post mine on GitHub when finished.
There's great irony in you saying

> Let's not get personal.

right after saying

> I'm surprised to see someone of Bram Cohen's caliber releasing something like this.
We don't need yet another steganography tool based on texts, we need a steganography tool to scramble data into a pile a fucked up HTML DOM tree.
That's just plain rude.
They are chucking them out one at a time. Somebody linked the Guam TV report and it is also linked through in the NBC article, it shows them doing it.
> Isn't this similar in USA? I mean, looking for a job and doing interviews don't need work permits, thus can be done with a tourist visa.

I think you should be on a B1 visa. The tourist visa is specifically meant for tourism.
This is great. The animations and interactive content is greatly needed in mathematics.

One of my favorite parts of math is puzzling over problems and coming up with solutions myself (even if the solution has been known for thousands of years prior.) I wish this book would set up problems I could puzzle over, rather than just give me the solutions before I knew there was a problem!
Big but I wouldn't say "huge" ... and they did tend to be bigger than the companies they were acquiring (Time-Warner was huge in other businesses before the acquisition spree really started). I mentioned "aggression" in your market as a requirement for becoming huge, but was it also something that led to them being big in the first place? I think there are people who act convincingly larger than they are, and the world grows to fit them.

There are a whole host of business requirements that can sink the process of becoming big. Adelphia failed because the Rigas family aggressively expanded the company, took it public but continued to treat it as though it was still family owned (I shouldn't say more). So the business acumen to run an enterprise at different sizes is important - I've seen leaders fail to hire appropriately, then delegate kill promising companies too. I think we could make a long list of reasons for failure.

larrys:

I'd love to hear your audio ... Jerrold was purchased by General Instruments who was in turn purchased by Motorola. Motorola added Jerrold's set-top boxes, to GI's trunk amplifier and line extenders (and other head-end equipment), then Motorola added both to their cable modem business and that conglomerate was ultimately bought by Google. Cisco purchased Scientific Atlanta who was the main competitor.
That makes sense. At the 36, it is a 53 yard or so field goal. At the outer range of most kickers and pretty low percentage, so you give the ball to the opponent at the 40 something yardline with high probability. On the other hand, its also close enough to be very difficult for a punter to pin in inside the 5 or 10, so even if you fail you only give the opponent 16 yards over a punt.

But the holes at the your own end you mentioned, that makes no sense at all.
Your footnote isn't even right. There are large companies that are large just because they were the only player, got a government contract, funded because someone wanted a visa or had family connections, etc.. Anyone who brings up the exception will usually have interesting anecdotes, if not data to bring it up, or experience making them say it. So your comment is kind of a waste of space whereas theirs will actually be useful. I consider your comment the same as adding sometimes to the end of every sentence. Maybe true, but useless.
I understand your position, and I don't think your definition of "shortage" here is unreasonable. But shortage is a relative term--"short" relative to what?--and by some measures, there are real shortages in these situations. If we use corn instead of labor, for example, we might have a bad harvest one year, and the price of corn goes so high that it's not worth buying for certain products. The market still clamors for those products but isn't willing to pay what they would have to pay given the new price of corn. Your definition, if I understand it, would say that there is no shortage of corn; it's just more expensive than you can pay.

I'd still call it a shortage of corn, because I'm thinking of it relative to previous years, future expectations, the causes of the price change, etc. Rent control or earthquakes cause what many would consider a housing shortage, gov't price controls or bad weather create commodity shortages, and sufficiently generous welfare programs (you have to pay a lot more to make it worth working at all) or explosive increases in customer demand (not enough time for labor to learn new skills) can create labor shortages.

From the perspective of an employer, no longer being able to hire people at a wage that makes them worth hiring can be seen as a labor shortage, while from the perspective of a worker, no longer being able to get a job at a wage worth working for can be seen as a jobs shortage, but I agree with you that, especially if the changes are just the long-term evolution of the economy, there comes a point where it no longer makes sense to refer to something that will never come back as a "shortage".
Exactly.

From the big fat warning box at the top of the page:

> Red Hat does not support in-place upgrades between any major versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A major version is denoted by a whole number version change. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 are both major versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
gcc acts RISCy -- load memory into a register, add registers, store register back to memory.

clang acts CISCy -- use a read-modify-write instruction to add directly in memory.
To clarify: There is not, and cannot be, a universal DissidentX encoding detector. It will always, always, be possible to iterate arbitrarily on the encoding technique, and this iterating is easy to do.
they have already moved away from Java via JNI for some aspects of the game, like openGL 2.0 support.
usually for ion propulsion systems you throw off positive ions and also include a rear-facing electron gun. Don't know the exact details, but if it's throwing off neutral waters, with some proportion of charged waters, those charged waters will find their way back to satellite via coulomb forces, but the uncharged water propulsive component will still make a difference.
Can someone please point me to some tools that are similar to this that we can self hosting? We are in the process of moving to RDS and wanted to start using a web based management tool.
Yes, but is not necessary to fail right now!

Also, you need the right kind of failure... one to bad will have lasting repercussions (or delay things more). Changes get better with a little of experience doing things "normally" and do side things. Eventually then jump...
With all due respect to Sam I have no idea what qualifies Sam to even be opining on this subject without a bit more of a circumspect attitude.

If he was a professor of business or had a long standing knowledge of business that would be one thing. The word "most" would certainly be better but even that goes a bit to far with a subject as large as "business" and "companies".
Yeah, various Blogger themes work fine in Chrome, but break horribly in Firefox on Android. [Though even in Chrome, the performance can be pretty glacial.]

My theory (based purely on using the site, mind you) is that the all the crazy dynamic display stuff in Blogger (before that, it was a much more normal/boring blogging platform) was one last hurrah before the project was relegated to "legacy barely-maintained-mode," and that it hasn't had proper testing in years...

Given that, I think really the best thing would be if they come up with a way to integrate it into Google+ and retire Blogger as a platform. Hopefully they'd add some more features[1] to G+ to keep the functionality roughly equivalent and support the longer-form type of article which is more common on blogs, and keep the domain and blog identities from Blogger around as a thin skin. At least then it would be well maintained.

[1] E.g. better markdown support, multiple embedded images, some sort of easier access to older articles (Blogger lets you browse by year/month), etc.
Check the end of the quote, it says "retroactively".
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6843756
More like they were caught being letter of the law instead of spirit of the law assholes and are backpedaling as fast as they can. The reported exposure of their sourcecode server to external domains was very valuable to security and should have been rewarded.
Business people would think Notch is a good programmer, but what do they know. I'm commenting because I want a link back to this discussion. I wish HN made it easier to find old good stories that I didn't comment on, but I'm not bent out of shape about it. Anyway, programming is strange because you've got the output and the instructions for producing it, and sometimes one can be good while the other is not as good. Anyway blah blah mod me down. I find it unlikely that Notch is purely a bad programmer.
I have been pondering the m-of-n aspect. I think there is scope for a service to hold a single key and to give it out upon request only after notifying the key creator and a set amount of time has passed.

An environment where any 2 of three keys work you could have a paper wallet with one key. The service provider holds one, and the originator of the wallet holds the third.

This would allow a protected paper wallet where anyone can remove the money but you get the chance to veto and take the money out first.
I know HN readers have a love affair with SpaceX but my dad's company is launching a rocket on Thurs at Vandenberg and it should be fun to watch:

http://www.noozhawk.com/article/atlas_v_set_for_launch_from_...
I had an idea (that quickly faded once the last elections were over, and I try not to think about the upcoming hell of another) to try to get a candidate into office based on a few simply premises:
Your elected official will vote the way the majority of his/her constituents decided via individual vote. No takebacks, no frills. The elected person is simply a conduit to the commoners.

The constituents get a text message, email or <gasp> phone call saying their elected official is going to vote on an issue. They get a summary of the issue at hand, written by a third party (like the vote tracking sites use, to prevent sway in the text).

Then, the individual uses their app, or website, or <gasp> phone IVR to submit their vote on the issue.

Shortly after (time period permitting), the elected officially votes the way the majority of his constituents want him to.

Now, do we want all votes to go the way the people want? Do people really understand what they're voting for? I don't really know, but damn, I think it would be more effective than what we have now.
You're correct, but the fees are so low and the delay is so small as to be negligible (in comparison).
Good engineering practise?

1. Lack of documentation

2. Breaking backwards compatibility

3. Opaque error messages

4. Encourages ad-hoc syntax that makes sense to one person (or team) but does not to the next -- maintenance nightmare.

5. Lack of general stability in language and libraries serving to confuse the eco-system.

Hmmm....