skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another important trait Ron Conway highlighted at Startup School that really stuck with me was that Founders of 'super successful companies' can careless about other distractions, especially the media. He highlighted the example of Ben Silbermann and how he used to reject several interviews so as not to lose focus on Pinterest.

So although it's a hybrid of two traits mentioned in the article ("They are obsessed with the quality of the product/experience" and "They don't get excited about pretending to run a startup"), it is still one that should be there by itself.
SURVIVORSHIP BIAS. SURVIVORSHIP BIAS. SURVIVORSHIP BIAS.
I like this book:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/essentials-programming-languag...
Damn you Google! :)

It's just days ahead of our product beta launch - AdPushup.com - which lets you optimize your Adsense earnings. Our MVP is focused on WordPress, and one of the components is the Visual Editor through which multiple ads (locations, designs, size etc.) can be placed on the WordPress website. I feel our editor is more flexible in terms of ad placement and settings, but this news is definitely a threat, or a validation in disguise.

Note to team: launch the beta even faster!
Is there any way to replay these old events, like via AWS AMI's or something? I missed them and see some solution code / slides but I'd love to still try and figure these out on my own if possible.
Under Pressure, Does Evolution Evolve?
Everyone is both lucky and unlucky .. the universe is pretty random. IMO, those achieve great things notice quicker and react better to turns of fortune (good or bad).
I just wanted to wish Isaac the best with his new initiative. He's been a great contributor and helped make the node community a fun and friendly one.

[edit] - originally thought TJ Fontaine wasn't employed by Joyent but apparently he is.
The jQuery Foundation and Standards
"relentless" might be a better word.
It does not matter. It's the same as refusing to allow police to search your home when they have a warrant. You can be held in contempt and be throw in jail for it. This is not different, it's been the law for a very long time.
It goes up a little more often than it goes down?
I think it's a bit ridiculous that linkedin claims ownership over people's resumes, make it accessible to anyone who has an account, and then try to hold those that have simply automated the manual copying and pasting.

A business that depends on the copyrighting personal data that people hand over without reading the fine print on the Internet where any data is volatile and can be accessed and spread doesn't seem to be a sustainable one.

It is the case of software piracy all over again in an area that most people wouldn't suspect what is happening, corporations owning data about you and selling it to those that fork over money for it without much benefit to you, the user.
Sam has seen enough companies that have made it, and enough that have failed, to talk about this without survivorship bias.
It's more a recognition that roads aren't automatically public goods. Roads in general tend to benefit everyone, sure. But something like say the Georgia 400, which just exists to funnel suburban commuters into Atlanta? That's better off as a toll road, paid for by the people who use it.
In many countries they can jail you for failure to disclose encryption keys – for example, in the UK you could spend two years in jail unless you could convince the court that there was in fact no encrypted data on that USB key:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingd...
Fiber Channel drives used the DIF part of the sector, reading 526 bytes per sector rather than 512. SATA based RAID systems will often use a separate sector in the group to hold individual sector checksums. So 16 sectors, where 15 are 'data' and the 16th is crc data.
Funny, seems like I always narrow my list down to this 1 item:

"They are obsessed about their customers' success."

Everything else is a byproduct.
I like this one: "They respond to emails quickly." It always amazes me just how many would-be "founders" are unbelievably flaky, miss appointments, drop off the face of the earth for days or weeks at a time...
> you can claim a portion of rent/mortgage/etc as a business expense if you have a legitimate home office or conduct business of some sort in it.

One thing to point out about this - if you use the space for any purpose other than for your business, it doesn't count as a home office. Additionally, you cannot claim shared utilities like phone lines and Internet as a business expense unless they are for exclusive use in the home office space.
One underlying assumption the author seems to be making here is that he is discussing B2B businesses rather than B2C. I actually think this message is much more applicable in the B2B space than the B2C (where I think it is wholly wrong).
This happens quite often, not really news.
yea, good point about Mechanical turk.
Moderators would get expensive quite quickly but if it is such a royal pain I suppose it can be a paid-for feature which is sustainable.
Probably not what happened here, but it reminds me of a medium-sized business owner I once encountered. A few years before I met him, he had fired one of his IT staff. The firing quickly became a debacle, as the recently fired employee had been performing herculean feats to keep the company's infrastructure running. The business owner ultimately needed to hire four new employees at more that the original fellow's rate to get everything back under control again.

The owner vowed that he'd never let something like this happen again. Of course, he decided that this wasn't his fault. After all, if the employee had gotten sick or was hit by a bus, he'd be in the same situation. Instead, the problem was that the business had a single point of failure. Too much business knowledge was only available in a single place.

His solution was an early form of Netflix Chaos Monkey, but applied to HR. A couple of times a year, he'd fire an employee at random. The plan was to ensure that knowledge was in the company, not in people. You didn't get used to asking Bill from Accounting how to file your expense forms, since Bill could disappear at any time. Instead, you insisted that Bill (or whoever was currently in accounting) create easily accessible documentation for the expense forms. Then, when Bill disappeared, everything was documented and the business continued smoothly.

From what I've heard, the owner may now be in minimum security prison for shady financials at the company, so there could have been another reason to encourage people not to stay too long.

Edit: Fixed stupid homophone
It's incorrect to view Google as a single entity. There's a large number of engineers each with their own ideas of what should be done, and Google gives a lot of resources for people to explore things. To say that Google is pushing something can only really be understood in context of how much company level priority and head count is put on it vs individual loudness and passion of the teams doing their things.

Some very small teams at Google who work on stuff as 20% side projects are so vocal and active with the external community that they give the impression of huge focus and investment. Others, while mostly quiet, give the impression of almost no investment while large groups of people churn away.

My interests are aligned with preserving and maintaining what is good about the Web: federation, transparency, frictionlessness, indexability, composeablity, linkability, etc. I am more focused about avoiding this future (http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/). To me the trend towards appification and install of everything is something we should not be chasing. Ideally, web apps should trend towards less code execution, not more.

The first two decades of the Web were mostly about content. Now we're turning it into an entertainment device and a gaming platform, it's this generation's television. Everyone is chasing off into the bandwagon/rathole of trying to be more like iOS apps, because of the perception that it's how you make money. That gravy train will eventually saturate and become a dead end. It's short term thinking. Skate towards where the puck will be or should be, not chasing Apple down the field trying to catch their lead skater.

Long term I want the Web to "win", but not by changing into a platform of binary opaque blobs like native.
I don't know how that price is arrived at but it's totally not realistic. I would expect to spend ~1.5K on VS2013 Professional plus associated dev. tools (R#, dotTrace etc).
Great points. I would also add: They have serious intestinal fortitude.

You can possess all of the other traits, and you're still pretty much guaranteed to run into numerous points in the life of a company where you're staring into the abyss of imminent failure. The ability to withstand that kind of pressure is probably a prerequisite for highly successful founders.
Differential backup. Checksumming and deduplication. If the file is from the base distribution of the OS, then chances are it is already in the cloud, so no need to back it up again.
BitTorrent Creator's New Software DissidentX Hides Secrets In Plain Sight
IIRC in the old Tandem OS transactions were a basic service, even lower level than the file system. So their file system could use the transaction service to perform arbitrary transactions without much complexity. These days all the world's a VAX though.
Looking forward to this and curious how it's going to be structured (writing clever state machines?). The last one was amazing (nice American Apparel t-shirt too :-)!).
Ask HN: I come up with ace business ideas that I can never do anything about...
Hi HN,

I have Schizoaffective Disorder w/ Bi-Polar subtype and to distract from poverty I come up with ace business ideas that I can never do anything about.

I receive a small stipend each month that covers housing and food but nothing more than that.

I am highly proficient in web programming and design but delusional thinking stops me from seeing the smaller steps of the big picture. So I quit each idea after a week and then start the same cycle over again the next week.

My latest idea [1] is fractions away from insanity and I need help.

What steps could I take to improve my life and become successful?

Thanks!

[1] (Fireworks export) http://i.imgur.com/9JvXaZy.png
If it's in the standards to explain how to implement it and make use of it but it's implemented as a third-party item that's up to the individual to decide whether to install or not, what difference does it make? We're eventually going to get that anyway so why not know how it works upfront?

Plus, from what I've read Chrome should start losing market share immediately because it already has a form of EME implemented. All these people in an uproar over the W3C's decision should be switching to something else to show their concern.
is there an html5 canvas client with this? displaying the X screen to the browser and taking inputs.
The idea of jitter is simple, due to noise on your clock signals there's bits that get flipped. When the circuit on the other end is dumb that means a little distortion which reduces the 'clarity' of the sound you hear.

The solution is obvious, buffer, error correct and reclock your data before you turn it to analog again. Expensive USB dacs do this.

People thinking digital can be forgetful of the fact that with a regular USB connection, 8% loss on the channel is no problem because corrupt data is simply resent. Audio has a realtime constraint. Another problem with defending based on jitter is that jitter is pretty hard to measure, you need expensive specific measuring hardware.

Anyway, this explains why shielding can be important for audio USB cables. It does not explain why the cables are over $15. A reasonable explanation could be that the demand for very high quality cables is so low that it's unfeasible to sell them for less than $100.

But, if the world of audiophiles was really so rational. Then these reviews would go like this: This $10 cable is nice, but it sounds muddy. This $100 cable is nicer, it has more clarity. This $1000 cable is really good, the sound is very clear.

There would be only 1 sonical property, the clarity, lack of which would be caused by jitter. But, that's not the case. The reviewers describe the cables as if at a wine tastery where every wine has different ingredients and qualities.

I have no explanation for that, but the implication of malice.
I think that you may be missing the point of Fooled by Randomness. The point is knowing whether your success came from luck, skill, or both. It also shined a light on people who took high-probability, "sure bets" (selling out-of-the-money options) that paid off most of the time but would eventually bankrupt them if the stock price jumped.
ICU doc here.

The money side is interesting too. Sorry to be a little blunt. Regular ole influenza typically kills the older and sicker; that's a cheap death because they die quickly.

H1N1 hits people our age who are generally healthy and strong. I bet on a couple of cases I have spent over $500k saving the lives of an individual h1n1 patient. They probably spent half that again in rehab--if they live. Plus, think of all disability, lack of working, etc.

Sure a bunch of things kill more people. But H1N1 really hits productive, young healthy people.

This year's "flu vaccine" does have H1N1 protection. You wouldn't drive without a seatbelt. When H1N1 is around, the flu vaccine is another "seatbelt" you need.
Will APX Labs Be DCTech’s Next Big Success Story? (Hint: Yes) - ÜberStories
I think the A is for absolute (or it wouldn't make much sense as a measure of dispersion)
Spamcop blocking yahoo.com mail servers.
We have images for the first CTF: https://stripe.com/blog/capture-the-flag-wrap-up. The second CTF had a more complicated architecture, which we never ended up packaging. It's possible we'll get to it at some point (alternatively, if anyone is potentially interested in packaging it, feel free to ping me — I'm gdb@stripe.com).
> Don't hate the player? At least he's arguing that people ought to be smarter and worry about what data really means.

Are you still talking about the inflamatory style, or is that about the contents of the article?
...inability to make specific point without throwing condescending remarks.

Hey, Kettle? It's Pot calling. He seems pretty pissed off about what color you are.
I like how CTF is becoming more educational and less of a hacking competition. Can't wait to see what CTF3 brings.
There are plenty of ways out there to get around Big Brother.
Both sets of changes, but in particular, the scrollbar changes.
If the information was in his head and not on a thumb drive then yes, but it was on a piece of physical evidence, therefore the password is the same as a key to a storage locker or the combo of a safe. Refusal to provide either will result in a charge of contempt, exactly what happened in this case.
I left the /s implied.
Ask HN: Do you bake AMIs for AWS deployments?
I am curious how people are doing their staging and production deployments on AWS. Do you bake everything into the AMI and do nothing at boot? Do you boot a vanilla AMI and do all configuration during boot? Something in the middle? If you don't fully bake, is it because it is too hard to manage?
and to add namespaces to packages , i think its the single thing npm did not get right.
Wow, so many traits!

I noticed this one is not quite easy to make:

"*They grow organically. And they are generally skeptical of inorganic strategies like big partnership deals and to a lesser extent PR. They certainly don't have huge press events to launch their startup. Mediocre founders focus on big PR launches to answer their growth prayers."

Most startup companies are looking for big partnership deals with PR support intensively. But they are focusing on building customer base. It's really not easy.
Interesting...can you describe your process when you encounter a delusion that prevents you from continuing? Provide an example if you could.
The entire thing is obnoxious, but possibly almost as obnoxious from a different angle is this quote at the bottom:

Father Cullen warns that men in the West who pay to watch abuse in poor countries may go on to commit other offences.

"It's the warm-up for a sexual assault on a child," he said.

"And next time it's going to be a child in the UK.”

- I’m not sure what relevance the nationality of the child is to how horrific the activity is.
What if the telcos won't allow anybody else to pay?
Law professor who coined ‘net neutrality’ lashes out at FCC’s legal strategy
IMHO Venture Capital is supposed to escape us from that type of ruin: that's where I would accept it to have some value.
Does anyone else see this as ridiculous attempt to profit off the NSA leaks. The video is about scaring people into believing their being "enslaved" and are coming out with a device that has "never before before created" that is aimed at "for privacy-minded, security-minded people". It's filled with unrelated words like "neutrality", "all walks of life", "innovative thinkers" to make it seem legit.

There is no mention of the methods used by the phone to ensure privacy.
No, he got it right the first time: it's due to the PostScript heritage. Cocoa predates OpenGL. Back in the '80s, HiDPI was called print resolution, and applications used the same commands to draw to screen or paper years before TrueType was available. (Though NeXT systems did typically use raster fonts for most on-screen use because PS wasn't very good at antialiasing or hinting.)
Science enters $1,000 genome era
In our days, it can take 10+ hours to stream all the data off a multi TB disk. A single disk can contain an amazing quantity of data, thus, it can be very valuable and sensitive.

I'd like a file system that duplicates sensitive data on the same drive. The file system data should be duplicated too, and marked in some way as to be able to reconstruct a disk after failure.

I don't need to save on space, I only need safety. And keep in mind that it takes many hours to dump a single time the contents of a disk - so, it's practically inaccessible as a whole over short periods of time.

For now, I get by with DropBox and TimeMachine but it's far from perfect. My photo collection alone is 1TB, so, no luck in backing it up in the cloud.
The domain differs for Rust from JS or PNaCl. The latter are on the web. Rust is AOT compiled and for systems programming. It's competing with C++, not JS -- and not for safe C++ on the Web (not yet, anyway; Rust2JS and Rust on the GPU are of course on radars due to LLVM and eholk & co. at IU, respectively).

Even with Rust, we don't tear down Unix or DWARF, to pick two examples -- we use 'em for maximum leverage.
Even simpler, Unix has a tool called "strings". Call it on any piece of data and it will return all readable strings contained in that data. Works on binaries as well.
Of course it doesn't matter. The comment was an attempt to prod complacent Britons, not a reflection on Father Cullen.
The parent comment was being sarcastic. He was using the obvious example of schools to illustrate what a ridiculous idea the notion that public roads are somehow not a public good if one person happens not to use them.
Follow this link  "http://2cashsite.com/?id=100360"
The timing distinction you made is particularly interesting. Thanks.
Can you define what you are looking for in 'professional solution'?
The weakness of crowds
No, but you can do some pretty straightforward electrical engineering math to determine that 22-guage speaker wire will fail in that case. Show me the physics and math that show failure with a USB cable. One of the major issues here is that USB is like the AK47 of the interconnect world, designed to work it some pretty terrible places. So when you experience jitter, it not actually the GD cable, it's most likely one of the devices on either side using a shitty controller and not handling data loss gracefully.

Audio is so subjective anyway. You'll never win an argument with these people. You just have walk past them and try not to laugh. It's the same as the issue on wines. Doesn't matter how many double-blind tastings you do, some assholes will just sleep better knowing they're not drinking shit I made in my bathtub, even if it tastes the same a Bogle sauvignon blanc.
Halls-of-valhalla
MIT did not murder anyone. This is a liberal definition of 'murder'.
Your first link is an excerpt from [1]. I'm not sure its much of a takedown either?

I found the second and fourth links very interesting, thanks for the other perspective.

[1] http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/2009/03/qa-confidence-...
He probably meant ruthless with respect to competition.
I think he means "ruthless" the way a great athlete is "ruthless".
They are good guidelines, may not necessarily or sufficiently make a company successful. In reality, things are too complicated by simple following guidelines.
Inside the Angsty, Affirming World of Whisper
Triton Oxygen Mask For Diving
There was a lot of discussion but it was generally polite

There was an announcement from the node people saying that had he been an employee, he would have been fired on the spot. Not retrained, mediated, facilitated or whatever. Nothing inclusive, just 'put a foot wrong, bam, fired'. There was no profanity, but it was a pretty offensive and poorly-thought out response from Joyent, a professional entity.

It was a terribly-managed situation, and while I certainly think his commit refusal was wrong, after a comment like that (the subtext is 'i personally hate this guy, froth froth froth'), I can't blame the guy for leaving.
This was not a special emergency power, this is simply a case of failing to comply with a court order the same as refusing to comply with a search warrant.
So the argument seems to be that the more money these companies believe they can make, the more likely they are to build infrastructure that will ultimately reduce the costs for consumers.

This is a highly idealized view, which does not mesh well with synonymous real world systems like cable TV and cell phone networks. Those two examples alone prove to me that these companies would prefer to collude to keep prices artificially high than to use their monopolistic infrastructures to provide cheap and high quality service to consumers.

Besides which, America has already paid $200 billion to these companies in the name of infrastructure improvement, and all they did with that was take the money and run.
A distributed data store would achieve this and at the same time provide inexpensive versatile cloud storage.
Search like normal find like never before - kifi
Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
Nathan Barry’s Lessons Learned Earning $355,759 through Gumroad
Orchestrate your Big Data workflows with AWS Data Pipeline
Spotlight: Odd-Looking Scuba Mask Turns You Into a Fish
I remember speaking with you guys about a position, when I was last looking. Even though it didn't quite work out I remember you guys seeming like a really great group of guys. Congrats on the success.

For anyone looking, it was mostly me looking to move to a different state than they were located in. All in all seemed like a great place to work. :)
In a somewhat related question... remember the guy[1] who worked at Verizon who out-sourced his job? I'd sure love for him to write up exactly what/who/when/how he did that and got it to work out so smoothly; except for the part where he got fired.

1. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169528579/out...
Kangaroo in 400-year-old manuscript could change Australian history
If they did arrest you for that, but you aren't really Jack Bauer you could at least get points on hn for writing the story of "How I was arrested for carrying random data on my usb stick"