skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The instance that irks me the most is Fast Company, more specifically m.fastcompany.com. The subtitle that's highlighted in yellow loads the BG color before the font is loaded and line-height is calculated, so on mobile there's an empty yellow block that then separates and then gets filled with text. For a site/magazine focused on design it's one of the uglier things I see on a regular basis.
> it may take a lot of computational mass to simulate a person

It might be sufficient to simulate one person. The rest of the universe (including all other humans) just serve as inputs in the simulation.
Mathematics is like a fractal, given some axioms it explodes into an infinite set of true equations. No one has to observe math for it to exist. I think our universe(s) could be the same way, given some natural laws, or equations, everything we know is defined to take place. Why would there have to be anything 'running' the simulation.
In total we took 121 calls/meetings with potential investors, and received a check from 43 of them.

To me this is the most important sentence in the article. Just under 2/3 of their meetings, 65% resulted in no deal. That is 78 well placed, well funded, fully informed NO's. In the end though none of those Nos matter.

I think people overlook that aspect and just see the yes'. Congrats to EasyPost for all their success.

edit Since my point appears to be unclear to some: "Don't be discouraged by rejection"
According to their official twitter, "Yes - applicants from anywhere worldwide will be considered."

https://twitter.com/disneyaccel/status/434040445593608192
It would be a leap of logic to assert that we're in a simulation after observing a violation of physics. The first possibility we'd have to consider is that our understanding of physics is flawed. After that consideration (or maybe as a part of that consideration, depending on how you look at it), we'd have to consider the possibility that the laws of physics are not constant.

But why would we jump immediately to the universe being a simulation?
Excuse me for being skeptic, but what is the problem you are going to solve?
Spying by N.S.A. Ally Entangled U.S. Law Firm
486dx33 purchased in germany made by taiwan
This isn't really an attack, is it? I mean, the money still gets from who it's suppose to get from to who it's suppose to get to?

It's only an "attack" if your wallet software doesn't validate against the recommended (iirc: to_addy, from_addy, amount, time-in-tx), correct?
Thanks for taking the time to explain this, I've been curious myself.

Do you know why scripts aren't signed? I don't fully understand bitcoin but it seems like they're an integral part of the transaction.
Note that the $120k funding is broken into $20k cash and the option for an additional $100k convertible debt note.
The Falkenberg blog just prompted me to write on the subject, because it implies that if a creator exists, they are not omnipotent.

http://www.bencollier.info/content/physics-and-demiurge-crea...
ShowHN: Digital Sizzle: Beards In Wonderland – quite proud of this one
Physics and the Demiurge – The Creator is not Omnipotent
You're in luck. I boiled it down from the slightly more comprehensive version that Backbone uses, annotated here:

http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html#section-206

The main difference being that the Backbone version is also copying "static" properties -- properties defined directly on the parent constructor function -- down into the subclass.
BRAVO! I was just going to say the same thing...

My interest in Google+ is the same interest I had in facebook years ago: some site I upload and share my personal photos with people I choose.

Now, I see that:
1. my photos upload automatically from my android to Google+, so I never have to worry about accidentally losing them. (and yes, you can set FB up to do that too)

2. my photos look better on Google+ because it doesn't squeeze the quality out of them like FB does. (and yes, you can somehow get FB to improve that too, but I never even bothered to looked)

3. I can edit my photos right in the browser.

4. It shows me many different auto-awesome features, and allows me to stitch photos and clips into movies in seconds...

5. I don't have to worry about friends I add tomorrow, or next year, seeing photos I shared yesterday!!! If you've had multiple x-girlfriends, as I imagine most folks on HN have... that could be a constant problem.

Those features didn't all come up over night, but somewhere along the line I stopped using FB and started putting photos on Google+
> YC helps founders build companies that are valuable. VCs and angels know that.

It helps for those that don't make it, too. Just going through the application process helps vet out viability (of the idea(s), of the founders, of the tech, ...).
There are enough independent correlates of success that any given successful person will almost certainly be missing one of them, if not several. Writing well is one example. That said, it does still correlate to success, and therefore still functions as evidence. There are too many comments on the internet to act as though every one is equally worth reading. It makes more sense to do a quick Bayesian update on the available evidence and move on to a comment that is more likely to be valuable. This isn't a value judgment about the person who made the comment, it's just pragmatism.
This post is fun, and I congratulate you on raising your round, but this data isn't predictive or useful.

Yeah, "get inbound investor attention" is the worst advice ever; by definition, it's impossible. Trying to make people like you tends to have the opposite effect. It's like telling an awkward 17-year-old that he'll solve all his problems with women if he gets laid by a supermodel.

The fatalism is important. I'm glad that someone on the inside has the courage to point it out. The extremely low rate of success for outbound traffic, especially pre-YC, confirms the fatalistic view of the Valley that is, IMO, the right one. If you're born into connections, you're solid. If you have enough before-age-of-carefulness dirt on important people while at Stanford and got in The Club, you'll never have to raise money; you'll be in the position to turn it away. If you're anyone else, though, the best advice regarding SillyCon Valley is just to sit this lifetime out, because the factors that matter most are those you can't do anything about.
Yes of course!
I'll add you very soon in License file.

And thanks for your great Package Control :-)
You might not need sudo
'The Mystery of the Martian Doughnut' solved by NASA sleuths
in most countries there are different taxation tiers, at that point working more to earn the same salary per hour become even less efficient
The world needs more hard working dreamers like you. If you're able, please keep it up
"Mean" Gene Okerlund lancia il suo nuovo sito – News
>If Plus was an independent startup people would be crowning it the next Facebook and saying that Facebook better watch its back.

People have higher expectations for Google than for an unknown startup. Google has an audience of 425 million Gmail users [0] to market new services to, after all. It's unreasonable to expect every Google product to be Gmail, but that's where the bar's been set.

[0]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/28/gmail-now-has-425-million-u...
the problem with A&E is that its used as a dumping ground for a lot of problems that would have been handled else where.

I few years a go i got sent as an emergency admission to our A&E and there where kids with sprained ankle that woudl have been seen by the school nurse a few yeas ago - but due to cuts schools dont have their own medical staff at all and just clog up A&E
Filmmaking is an area where you work a lot. And then you don't, because you're trying to get work.

But when you're working, to say that it takes over your life is a bit of an understatement. The director is typically putting in 18 hours a day for shoots that can last for months. The crew gets 1 day out of 7 off, but not the director (and the crews typically also work long days—overtime is rampant).

It's a frigging marathon to get the footage in the can, and yet, despite nobody really liking that aspect by itself, almost without exception the end result is to want to do it again.

The same is true for almost everything else surrounding the making of a film. Only the actual screenwriting is done on a relatively slow schedule.

Anyway...
The monopoly isn't illegal, but having one affects the legality of certain competitive behaviors such as dumping.
Really? Every time I see exercise brought up on HN, there are no shortage of people who are praising how exercise have changed their life. And if people are talking about leading a balanced and happy life, having an active life/exercising definitely gets brought up. It doesn't even have to be related for someone to bring it up: "Your dog died? I'm sorry about that. You should try exercising, that usually cheers me up."
What sides are you talking about? Either the line of reasoning (whichever you're talking about) has flaws or it doesn't.

If you're trying to say "it leads nowhere", I sort of agree. But it only "leads nowhere" once you get to the acceptance that truth is subjective. Getting that far is worth it and can change the way a person thinks about many other things.
Some people plain don't like being told they could do things better, it's a matter of ego. You could argue that this negative reaction is inflated by the hyper-social internet culture we're all swimming in these days, where it's easy to compare each facet of your life to the collective's best. Not to mention that a lot of people associate exercise with body image, and that comes with its own boatload of issues.
It's tempting to be this reductive but it ignores context and specifically the implications of the word "plugin."

The context of downloading and executing a full fledged app fits with your implication that the user should know she'll be "owned" by a mistake. (Despite this, Apple offers mitigations in terms of warnings and code signing, but I take your point.)

The implication of downloading and installing something that uses what Apple itself calls a "plugin" API is different. There is an implication of sandboxing, and while you can debate the limits, most reasonable people would NOT expect an iTunes app plugin gets access to naked Apple account credentials.

It's easy to now say "you should trust no sandbox." But practically speaking most of us need to do this all the time. Do we verify all the security of all the Javascript sandboxes we run, to ensure the millionth Chrome update didn't introduce a sandbox hole? No we do not. We trust if the sandbox has a hole someone will blow the whistle. Which is happily what is happening here.
Thanks for the feedback. Just curious, did you see this after you moved/ resized the window or did this happen right away?
> In my experience, if you love technology and tinkering, you should absolutely not work at a startup.

This need not be essentially true. Although delivering results is of highest priority, delivering "right" results is even more important, results that create your USP, results that set you way ahead of your competitors. And that requires right amount tinkering, if you want to call it that. And that tinkering is a lot of fun - to deliver world class results in the least amount of time possible.
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Zina Lahr
Is there a reason that the font fallbacks you've defined in your CSS don't get used by browsers while the prioritized fonts are being loaded? This will take care of the blank page problem wouldn't it? Are there any JS solutions out there for this?
I started to read that article on a browser without NoScript installed. It reminded me why I love it so much.
At least google is becoming more honest about who and what they are.
That was initially the case, but it led to such a bad UX, that it had to be scrapped. Look for FOUT on the web.
So like a ghettoized version of RSS?

Thank you, I'll have the open web anyday.

For the rest, I can use Facebook.
GDS. G+ Derangement Syndrome.
That's the plan.. thanks!
Definitely not a game you'd ask your friends to try out with your phone!
Q: How do you that on a smart phone or tablet?
A: You can't!
"Google Plus, the company’s social network, is like a ghost town."

Completely false. I've been a member of Google+ for 2 years. I have over 12,000 followers, and I follow over 1,000 people. I see a LOT of activity, particularly the kind I care about. Not everyone wants or needs to see baby pictures. In fact, this is one of the things people hate about Facebook.

Regarding the rest of the article, Google+ benefits Google, but it also benefits the user by creating a more unified experience. Google services were a fragmented mess before Google+ brought them together. And you can use Google, YouTube, etc without a Google account.
Nimble Storage CEO Suresh Vasudevan on culture and post IPO plans
> The minimum evidence that we are in fact in a simulation would be observing a violation of physics.

Not at all. A "violation of physics", by which I assume you mean a discrepancy between our picture of the universe and the real universe as revealed in experiment, only tells us that our model is wrong.

There have been any number of "violations of physics" over the decades. We believed that a luminiferous ether served as a medium for light waves -- wrong. We believed that neutrinos didn't have mass -- wrong. We believed that all mass/energy was accounted for by the descriptions in the Standard Model -- very wrong (only 4% is so described, the rest is dark matter and dark energy, with no present explanation).

The simplest explanation for these discrepancies, consistent with lex parsimoniae or "Occam's razor" is that our model isn't good enough and needs revision, not that the universe is a simulation.

It's equally logical (and not very logical at all) to argue that a perfectly running universe, with no anomalies, would constitute evidence for a simulation, on the ground that any self-respecting superbeing able to craft an entire universe, would surely test his code before launching it.
You know what's annoying? Having to wait for JavaScript to download before I can click on a menu.

You know what's annoying? Having to wait.

Waiting is annoying. But at the end of the day, a web without typography freedom is not a web I want, or would value. Especially since I remember what people did when they couldn't have web typography: save it as a one-time use only image.

Sorry, you were saying something about speed?
It doesn't matter, really. If you are at the stage when you have talks like that with your boss, it's clear that you're ready for a change. Be it changing the way your work is managed or changing companies altogether.
To me this is the most important sentence in the article. Just under 2/3 of their meetings, 65% resulted in no deal. That is 78 well placed, well funded, fully informed NO's. In the end though none of those Nos matter.

You realize that most people in the VC-funded world would suck Hitler's cock to have a 35% "Yes" rate, right? That's two orders of magnitude better than what non-connected plebes like most of us face.

If I recall correctly, the average acceptance rate is well under 1%.
From what I have read by searching on HN, I believe Fastmail is really popular.
Has Edward Snowden done the U.S. a great service? [video]
One approach: you look at what the physical laws appear to be, and then ask "What weird edge cases would we expect to see if and only if this were running in a particular type of simulation?" That's what the paper linked to does. It's not perfect, but it's something.
being able to list someone as an investor should be part of your investment agreement. I've only dealt with large firms, not individuals, but it is in all my agreements whether I may use their names.
Yes, until they decide it's not working for them and kill it, like Wave, Reader, Code and tons of others...
i am polishing an app that's "highly similar",
(a.k.a., nearly identical), so... first of all,
let me compliment you on your excellent insight. :+)

your website says "accounts coming soon". and
i'm curious what that means. whatever it is,
i should probably inform you that my app is
javascript that works exclusively client-side,
saving where you like, including your own site.
(with a "last-resort" option to save on my site)
and i will be encouraging people to _take_it_,
for free (as in beer and speech), which means
there might not be much money in this arena...

-bowerbird
Using OOP in JS is not necessary per se, but when writing complex apps it helps to keep things clean.

Say you're working on a twitter clone for example. It'll make your life much easier if there's a "NewsFeed" class that contains an array of instances of the class "News", which when clicked on shows an instance of "NewsDetails". (All of these would be "Views" if you used if you used an MVC framework like Backbone, probably backed by a model class that contains news data like the tweet content, the # of re-tweets, etc.)

You could do all of the above without using objects; it's just that your code will be a lot messier IMO.
Especially noticeable when a site uses it as their main content font, rather than just titles. Countless times I've closed a tab before the font renders (hey, there's too much stuff to look at, not enough time waiting for web fonts to load!).
I have a website[1] that uses web fonts[2]. I have found that if you host the fonts yourself and compress the font files using Font Squirrel's web font generator service, you can get fairly small font sizes. I'm using two font weights (regular and bold) and the total comes to 104kb. Admittedly, that's quite large for a mobile website, but I think it's acceptable for a desktop site.

I've found the font files served by Google fonts are quite large and this is probably because their fonts contain the entire character set. Font Squirrel strips out characters it thinks are not needed.

[1] http://www.interfacesketch.com
[2] The font I'm using http://www.behance.net/gallery/ALEO-Free-Font-Family/8018673
http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847

This comment is a response to a bunch of the comments in this thread, but it didn't make sense to scatter the information throughout the page.

The way lattice QCD [0] works requires a few approximations in order to fit the problem into your computer. You

(1) simulate a universe with finite volume (state-of-the-art calculations have boxes just a few times bigger than a nucleus in each direction),

(2) discretize the space into a bunch of points some lattice spacing apart connected by links, and,

(3) possibly simulate at values of the quark masses that are not their physical values (this helps make a a matrix you need to invert better-conditioned).

Finally, you know what action[1] you want to simulate (that of QCD[2]) and you construct a discretized action that accounts for all of the above approximations that approaches the real action you want to simulate when you take the limits volume --> infinity, lattice spacing --> 0, masses --> physical values.

There are many different ways to build such a discretized action (and they go by names like the Wilson action, the Domain Wall action, the Staggered action, and others), but no discretized action is "perfect" in the sense that anything you try to measure can have errors that depend on how different the volume you actually measured is from the infinite-volume limit, how much having a finite lattice spacing changes your answer, and how much unphysical masses matter.

We have theory that controls how measured quantities depend on these parameters, and thus can understand, via extrapolation, how lattice artifacts change the quantities we measure from the true continuum limit.

You can use this understanding to find out what the answer is in the limit of there being no discretization at all (lattice spacing = 0) and then compare measurements of our world to those predictions. If they match, then the world doesn't really have a grid of points at its bottom, but if they don't match you can find out how finely spaced the grid of spacetime is.

Unfortunately, any simulation you do will have error bars, and so in practice all you can say is "the continuum world looks like this ± that", the practical consequence being that you can only put an upper bound on how different the lattice spacing of spacetime is from zero: "If the lattice spacing were bigger than X then we would have conflict between the experimental observations we made of the universe and the simulation. No such conflict is known, so the lattice spacing is smaller than X."

Source: I am a postdoc doing lattice QCD, and I have met Martin and Zohreh.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_(physics)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics
I think the argument is more like, "If we are in a simulation, it can't have an infinite resolution because that would imply an infinite amount of memory and computational power. We should be able to detect the 'graininess' at the limit of resolution."
Guess it's a UK problem. Works fine here (not-us)
The problem is font-loaders. All of them. At best, you've got an additional http request, at worst a javascript file loads, executes, authenticates and then generates yet another CSS file.

The solution is to make everything as legal as you can, then quietly embed the font files directly into your CSS as data:font urls.
So, err, what other metric than work output (be it products, ideas, bright kids or whatever else you might think of) are you using as the ‘core value’ of a person?
They don't suggest that at all! Can you not read?

The key thing you've just conveniently left out is this:

overtime is only effective over very short sprints

Operative words. VERY. SHORT.

And overtime, in the context of the article and all the supporting literature, is working more than 40 hours.

Worst still, you or your employees then become stupid. Unimaginative. Burnt out. They make silly mistakes.

Does that sound like a place that will foster innovation and greatness? Is that the kind of company you want to lead?

Kid yourself all you want with your 40-60 'optimal'. But don't cite actual research that says quite the opposite of what you claim.
We need far more discussion of this type in this forum, especially because the "FU money" and "technical master" roles are rare and difficult to achieve. These can be ideal scenarios for people, but we need to discuss that not achieving this feats does not equal failure.
No doubt about that, but I still think it is worth highlighting for people (like myself) who pound the ground for funding and get discouraged by all the "No."
Snowflakes don't even have jobs! Lazy crystalline bastards.
No, but "switch to recent applications" is not a basic action.

It's actually an action you might not even use at all -- since you can do it in another way (home and click the app you want to open next).

It's not a common action since using apps is mostly a seggregated affair. Now you use this, after some time you go and use that. You don't usually flip from one to the next all the time.
You make a valuable distinction; Kahneman did not win the Nobel for psychology, and in fact there is no such thing.

But to call psychology a pseudoscience confuses either the definition of science or of psychology. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman spends the majority of each chapter outlining scientific studies in detail, many that he personally carried out, making the text a 500 page atlas of counter-examples.
The main argument as you state it doesn't describe any relation with (nor does it mention) the actual measurements performed.

I think it's fine to consider such an argument in it's own right.

Where I take issue is the subsequent attempt at validation of the conjecture, with the previously mentioned physical experiment.