skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is that with public equity shares, the extrapolation from the price of a single share to the value of the entire company is much simpler. This is for two reasons: first, everybody owns the same security; second, the payoffs are continuous in the market price of the shares.

Neither of these things hold for VC investments. Not everyone owns the same security, and payoffs are NOT continuous in the market price of the shares. This is because of the liquidity preference that is usually part of the deal.

> Valuation is valuation - let's not confuse it with what will happen in the future - just because a company is worth 2 billion today, doesn't mean it will be worth that or more in X years.

No, valuation is not just valuation. I've just spelled out two reasons valuations can sometimes not be directly comparable. That's the whole point.
I've done this before. You're right. The CPU intensive part is the word search itself. Building the combinations and finding adjacent words, which you've already done. The ngram piece is straightforward by comparison. Just compare the domain (with any hyphens removed) against a dictionary of concatenated ngrams. You'll have to veryify that any hyphens occur on word breaks afterwards, but it's a small price to pay for the simplicity of a string compare (or key lookup). You will probably want to load all of your ngram dictionaries into memory, though, or the search will be horribly slow.
It's the density that make Foursquare more popular in SF and NYC but rather the demographics of those areas, modern, high tech centers of urban sophistication. The fly over states are more concerned with the latest developments in pickups and gun racks to care much about checking in at the hottest espresso bar.
Headless Selenium Testing w/ an Arduino Controller (A Pizza Button)
The founder of the company where I work started a "Turkey Trot" five years go to benefit a local food bank.

He took the time to set up a very simple website to register "runners" for the event ($25 is asked per person, but not everyone pays, obviously), and got the permission from the city to have a few police officers make sure participants weren't run over. Truth is, it is more of a community event almost like a parade, where some people wear turkey hats, dress up their dogs in costumes, and everyone has a little fun Thankgiving morning before everyone overeats later in the day. But if you want to run 5k you can. Most walk.

In any event, that first year a few hundred people attended. This year, it's estimated that over three thousand people participated. You can do the math for the ticket sales. Several of us volunteer our time to support this annual event now (I do the postcards & posters). This year we even received generous corporate sponsorships to further reduce overhead costs.

It's only once a year, so it isn't a huge time drain. But the impact is incredible and does help a lot of people in need. If almost every neighborhood could do this...
I appreciate the attention to detail.

> You have to make the swipe feel satisfying; you have to make it ready [sic] accurately enough that it works the first, every time.

I don't think you have to do this. I've used a number of card readers that didn't read my card the first time (or the second, or the third), and that didn't feel good at all. They still collected my money successfully :)
Cops Made Over 1 Million Requests for Cell Phone Data Last Year
This depends on how the liquidation preference is structured. Sometimes each new Series is made more senior than the prior series, so the last money in gets paid first - in that case if the last investor put in $100m they would get it all out before any of the other investors got paid. In other cases, the different series of preferred stock have a "pari passu" preference, meaning they all have equal priority - so in that case, you'd calculate each investor's liquidation preference as a percentage of the total liquidation preference owed to all investors, and they'd split the available proceeds according to that percentage.
At first it felt weird, after a few pages it started to feel like a fun gimmick, and after a few more pages I didn't really even notice it anymore.
Was anyone else a bit put-off that it was the patrol car that killed the cyclist, and not the person driving the patrol car (as it would have been reported had it not involved an officer)?
- I can see where you are coming from. Thank you for clearing that up for me crisnoble. I appreciate it.
not off-topic, maybe just a bit too pedantic.

"The low compressibility of water means that even in the deep oceans at 4 km depth, where pressures are 40 MPa, there is only a 1.8% decrease in volume."

also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_platform#Deepest_oil_platfo...
Live Notes for the Lean Startup Conference 2013 in SF
You should probably read his biography then because you miss the part that starts:

>"Traveling there in secret, Mandela ..." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela#Umkhonto_we_Sizw...

He was arrested after sneaking back into S. Africa, after sneaking out of S. Africa, when someone tipped off the government about his location (he went dark to avoid capture, he was in hiding when they arrested him). He attempted to evade the S. African government and clearly would have avoided arrest by fleeing the country if possible. Note that one of the things he was charged with was "leaving the country without permission".

And just for the record Loki was captured. The imprisonment of Loki is an extremely important aspect of the mythology of Loki which should not be ignored in attempting to find modern analogues.

>The narrative continues that Loki was bound with the entrails of his son Nari, and his son Narfi changed into a wolf. Skaði fastened a venomous snake over Loki's face, and from it poison dripped. Sigyn, Loki's wife, sat with him holding a basin beneath the dripping venom, yet when the basin became full, she carried the poison away; and during this time the poison dripped on to Loki, causing him to writhe with such violence that all of the earth shook from the force, resulting in what are now known as earthquakes. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki
Exactly! In 2010, I swore off of iOS and moved to Android for exactly this reason. I didn't want to be prisoner of a platform where a corporation could decide what software I was allowed to run on my device. I hope Apple's policy will be untenable in the long run.
Posted yesterday (44 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6868398
Does he really expect this to go well in the long term? Tyrants never learn from history, do they?
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"
- I care because it hurts me when Wikipedia needs money, and I can't give to them because I don't have it.
Anecdotal point: I was biking in Toronto recently and I rolled past a cyclist that was just hit by a white van. An ambulance and police car were next to it responding.

I biked slowly passed the van (in a clear bike lane) and then about 20 seconds later after passing through a stop light beyond the accident, a police car flew in front of me, cut me off, and proceeded to park in the bike lane in front of me, making me break hard and go around him.

You'd think while the police are responding to a bike accident call they'd temporarily give a shit about our safety.
Must Watch -- These kids are going to create the technology of the future
Its not irony. Snowden is an embarrassment for the US Government, so it works to Putin's advantage. One of those cases for Snowden where the enemy of my enemy is my (temporary) ally.
Above, you agreed with the statement "You shouldn't force equality, but actively work towards it."

EDIT: My mistake, that was a different user.

Making the effort to consider qualified women is part of actively working towards it.

Maybe it does cost some small amount of extra money, but if you refuse to make even the minor effort of, say, posting to a women's tech board[0] then you are part of the problem.

[0] e.g. http://www.pyladies.com/
They updated it with this comment

> this is a TEST key for local development - NOT an important key
But it _does_ work to our benefit. Sure, innocent people are mistakenly jailed (and even executed), which is a travesty beyond words. But overall the system works, and throwing your hands up in defeat instead of trying to influence the system is certainly unhelpful. You won't start a revolution by kvetching in online comments, maybe you should try writing some letters sometime. They really do read them, and respond to them.
German Postal Service testing drone delivery
Ancient lake on Mars was ‘drinkable’
That hasn't stopped a single one of them from trying.
Kickstarter Watch Scam Project Closed
Updated from last week's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860338

..and it's toast.
If the fonts have been distributed under an Apache license, can you just 'take them back?' I'm pretty sure they're free now.

>Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.
Drones hijacking other drones in midair
It's hard to get right..

One problem is that even if you can make it hard for a script to break, you can hire an guy overseas to fill in captchas for you for fractions of a cent.
Most alternatives have other problems - Things like "Slide this bar", or "Click on the Foo" have been tried over and over and over - They're either too hard for people, or too easy to break.

Keep in mind how good computers are at object recognition these days - It's likely that most captchas are going to be easier to defeat by a computer than they are by a middle-aged person with bad-eyesight.

So what a lot of people end up doing is using things like recaptcha, where Google can add additional heuristics, such as "how many captchas has this IP done today", and vary things up - They can also use a large source corupus of pictures which have already failed THEIR AI, so they know they're hard.

My biggest problem with this solution, however, is that it sends every user's IP to Google - Google has enough insight into users already - Things like Google Analytics/adsense/recaptcha just give them additional touchpoints :/
No why would I?
Or ideally, both. Homelessness is such a fundamentally and universally misunderstood and stigmatized issue that it behooves everyone to educate themselves via first-hand contact.

The volunteering doesn't benefit the organization so much as it benefits oneself, and by extension society at large by removing one more potential spigot of hateful nonsense.
The worker who got the message on the screen slaughters the cow, how can you not consider the worker and his process part of the code as well?
Why do we actually care about inequality in professions? Humanities studies are greatly dominated by women, tech is dominated by men, and so is every other field out there dominated by either/or.
Google catches French finance ministry pretending to be Google
There is some parallel, but ISPs are not commoditized like electricity utilities are. Once consumer-level data is pretty even across the board and companies are only competing for lock-in and price, those kinds of regulations make much more sense.

In other words, let's wait until use cases like uploading multiple HD video streams are trivial before we freeze the current technical expectations and business models.
pretty nice dude!
Comcast in San Jose provides decent speeds, but the connection can be spotty and drops out at times. Also, despite claims to the contrary, torrent traffic appears to be very heavily throttled. Whenever I try downloading a Linux ISO via torrent, download rates will often start out high, then sharply drop to somewhere under 100 kbps.

On a related note, for whatever reason, no traffic on ports 6660-6669 (IRC) can get through, but I haven't seen this problem reported anywhere else. Combing through the settings on the router they provide, there doesn't seem to be anything blocking it on my end.
No, it's not quite that simple, which is exactly the point of the article.

If I own 1% of a company that raises a round at a $2B valuation, my shares are worth $20M, in theory. But does that mean I can sell my shares for $20M? No, it does not.

Even if I can find a buyer for them, they won't fetch the same price that the latest investors paid, because of the liquidation preference. (If they do, either I've found a sucker, or the company got suckered in the latest round.)

If I can't sell my shares for $20M, then they aren't really worth that much. Twenty million is a convenient estimate, but there's a reason we sometimes talk about people being rich "on paper."
When you buy a house you agree to pay 100% of the agreed upon valuation. Investors in Snapchat are only buying a few percent at this valuation.

This is what it looks like to me:

Step 1) Buy 30% of a company at a $5 million valuation.

Step 2) Buy (or hopefully convince dumber investors to buy) 5% at a $3 billion valuation.

Step 3) Tell Yahoo to acquire you for at least $5 billion since your last raise was at $3 billion and you want your dumb investors to be happy.

Step 4) Cash your billion dollar check.
Your biggest security threat? It isn't hackers
Yes, the crushing of "send money via internet" creativity. Without being hyperbolic, the government or creditors are literally stifling this century's Da Vincis.
Water is compressible, which is why we don't use it for brake fluid and safety critical hydraulic applications.
Come on, while there are plenty reckless police officers, there also plenty of reckless cyclists, we don't even know what happened.

It possible the officer hit him, but it is also possible he didn't see the car, misjudged its speed or merge from a side street.

Let save judgment for when we know what happened. And poor officer is right, regardless if he was at fault or not, he has a heavy burden to carry.

If the officer did wrong, I will be glad to see him pay societies price for such a mistake, but until then- I'll just be blown away by the continual lack of empathy and pragmatism shown here.
For anyone interested in reading more on this, it's called the demographic-economic paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox
Very true that this talk did seem to be bias to Clojure. As and Scala user myself, I think his critique of Scala was fair.
Layoffs at stealth payment startup Clinkle
Protestors Halt and Block Google Bus in San Francisco
To save you some reading, the crux of the hack is to consider a weak GPS (etc) signal not as a lack of data, but rather as a source of data in itself: the fact that the GPS signal is weak tells you something about the user's probable location.
Law is a high status profession so of course feminists were interested in training more women lawyers. Now there are a lot of qualified women graduating from law school, and an overall oversupply of people with law degrees anyway, so it's easy to make gender equality a priority.

Look at the gender ratios getting CS degrees, consider how extremely competitive the hiring situation for programmers is, and then tell me it makes sense to put an emphasis on hiring women in particular when you can hardly hire anyone qualified at all.
As I understand it, Ben was following commit rules.
Ack, it looks like a nice product but they need some help with their copywriting.

> "So, you can't use Lightpack with your PlayStation 4 out-of-the-box cause you unable to run Prismatik in SONY ecosystem"
How to Recruit a Good Developer When You Don't Code
Was this developed in Scala?
I find Walmart's decision not to carry music with explicit lyrics similarly tiresome to Apple's quest to defend their users from installing things.

(But both issues are easily sidestepped so I don't care very much...)
This is not correct: http://kafka.apache.org/documentation.html#design

:-)
Virtually all popular local (ie. non-hosted) Bitcoin wallets on Android are lightweight wallets. They do NOT download the full blockchain. They do NOT listen to all Bitcoin traffic. They use the Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) mode. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Simplified_payment_ve...

Apple would have zero reason for banning such lightweight clients, as they consume no more resources than a typical app.
It's a vehicle accident, do we have to turn this into a "f the police" (censored, for the kids) discussion?
Apple can decide whatever it wants, especially if it's protecting themselves from being named in a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
No. Few companies are worth their exact book value. Accounting a balance sheet in of itself does little to tell you the true value of the company. For example, Google's book value is roughly 100B while its market cap (the implied value of the company) is 360B. Why the discrepancy? Accounting rules are strict on how assets are valued and don't (nor are they meant) to represent the future cashflow that can be derived from them. Future growth, intellectual property and brands are basically not included in the book value. When a company gets acquired, this difference is made up through goodwill. This is simply a representation that book value is not a good measure of true value.
Not on HN. We just had the discussion this morning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6872856

From justin66:

"I don't say this very often but I don't think people are as dumb as you think they are. People who think Snowden is a traitor would feel the same if he were in Iceland or something right now."
Bitcoin was not illegal last time I checked.
> This is extremely generous of the Guardian.

Yes. An academic researcher I know has also received helpful cooperation from the Guardian on using some of their code for benchmarking. They're good people.
I believe eplanit is attempting to point out a glaring hypocrisy of Snowden and his supporters.

"Nobody is turning a blind eye to Russia's offences."

Except Snowden. Hence the hypocrisy. Obviously he is there to save his own neck and I get that.

I was pointing out what epalnit was getting at because obviously those commenting didn't understand.
Ads don't give much money per-click. Donations average a lot more money from each person who clicks through.
Even without a fridge, you can replace lots of take-out meals with things prepared at home, just with a container that seals to keep out bugs. A loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. Bananas. Eggs. Canned tuna.

If you have some method of heating, you can add pasta and rice and beans and oats and sweet potatoes and lentils.

If people are really lacking these tools, I'd be happy to write a check to a New York charity that provides them.
In what system are there no failures?
Well the EU is seen positively by Scotland as it gets a fair bit of subvention for infrastructure.

Though go to one of the fishing ports and ask a Scottish fisherman about fishing quotas and You might get a different answer.
Remote areas? I had remarkably little choice in New York City. I lived in Brooklyn and had Optimum Online. I was happy with it, but then moved to Queens and now I had to switch to RCN, because they were in my building and Optimum wasn't. Moved to Manhattan, and had to get TWC, until FiOS was installed in the building.
The cyclist was in the bike lane at the time. More info:

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/12/08/bicyclist-struck-a...

http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php/925411-Bicyclist-hi...
Is it that or its conversion to steam at a relatively low temperature or its ability to rust out the brakes?
So many drones...
This is exactly the kind of knee-jerk entitlement I'm talking about. I'm guessing if connection speeds were 10x higher, you'd still be making similar arguments for why the slower one was also completely unacceptable. I'd love a 100mbit home connection as well, but we don't have those and signing up for cable is a very stressful way to pretend.

As for the current practicalities - first, two of these streams would fit in 6Mbps. Second, streaming is unnecessary for tv/movies, and I'm guessing you don't watch 24 hours of a day - upgrade to a non-streaming setup.
Did you watch the video of the talk? The wording in the summary is a bit misleading.

The Mill does exit prediction on extended basic blocks -- it predicts which branch will be taken rather than if a particular branch will be taken, and it can chain these predictions.
That's not a paradox. It's a misunderstanding of incentives for people of all classes.
RIP Milt. He was one of the good guys.
How do you know they paid for it and didn't dumpster dive for it?
It seems like it'd be even better to have a central agency that multiple non-profits could turn to for this stuff, rather than each one needing their own IT guy (of varying skill) to do it for them individually. A Helper's Help Desk.
Dan Ariely on 23andMe and the Burden of Knowledge
According to the Apache 2.0 license:

>Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.
Surely the reason he is there is because he has nowhere else to go.
Sorry I have to disagree with this. I abide by one rule: if the candidate is good, they get hired. I am not a sexist nor do I discriminate, nor am I guilty of putting women down in any way, shape, or form, especially since before my time so I fail to see how the burden is on my shoulders, and why I should hire someone purely based on their genitalia. I am in no way responsible for what happened before my time.

The reality is both men and women suffer from different things, and it's ill to make blanket assumptions based entirely on gender.

What if the male I'm hiring is less experienced, but extremely poor and almost homeless. What if the the woman I'm interviewing right after is stable, but a woman? How do I evaluate this case?

I think the best we should do is treat both equally, as that's equality and we should all strive to eliminate discrimination amongst each other, not specifically and artificially target one demography that has been oppressed, because there are tons of other causes better suited for awareness than women. What about black people? I very rarely see black people in the tech sector. Maybe we should stop hiring asians and hire blacks instead to level out that inequality? Where does it stop?

Discrimination in the face of equality doesn't change the fact that it is still discrimination, even if it in favour of hiring women. Someone will always end up getting hurt, it's always a trade off.

I have loads of developer friends who are female and they have absolutely no problem getting hired, because they are GOOD. Just statistically, there are less women in this field.

Instead of sacrificing someone else's opportunities in the name of purely gender, offer everyone the same opportunities.

What I do think needs to be done is have more communities focused on the STEM fields to make women feel more comfortable ENTERING it, not EXITING it, they've already committed to the field.

----

See my other post as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875633
That's pretty clever. Cool beans.
Anything that's shrinking. Downloadable Windows Software to edit your photos.
Well we don't really know that do we.
> Why do we actually care about inequality in professions?

At an individual level, it's unfair if people are discouraged or denied the opportunity to peruse their interests because of their demographic characteristics.

At a societal level, we'll all benefit by having more people working in fields where they're most productive.

> so is every other field out there dominated by either/or.

That's not true at all. Some fields are near parity. Med schools are basically 50/50 these days.