skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Acquisitions are a way that investors get their money back, so they encourage investors to invest in startups, and by its nature that encourages innovation. Perhaps not as much as random $100K grants given out on the street corner would, but it does encourage company formation and execution. IPOs do the same thing.

I have trouble understanding this paragraph. It seems to argue that acquisitions encourage company formation and execution. So far so good--but what's the definition of innovation in this discussion anyhow?

Perhaps the most confusing idea to me is suggesting that investing in startups does encourage innovation, but not as much as randomly giving out grants would. Is it possible to compare the efficacy of the VC, M&A, IPO ecosystem to those targeted grants or even a guaranteed wage? To me, that is worth exploring.

Instead I fear we get SV press releases heralding innovation in something--anything--other than yet another example of cashing out for the established network of moneyed interests.
For anyone reading this: I was able to find the following:

##reddit-webdesign
##javascript
#html5
Oh, silly me! $18 billion missing from investor's wallets but he's in jail so no harm no foul.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff#Size_of_loss_to_...
Not really true. I know quite a few devices in industry currently sold that support Windows CE or Android as desired.
This question is not even in top 5 pages of Ask HN. can anyone explain me why? There are no flame wars going on here , and people have come up with Good explanations too.
It uses a Myriad 1 processor from Movidius http://www.movidius.com/tango. It's a custom media coprocessor aimed at mobile devices. I found more information about the processor architecture in these slides : http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc23/...

Edit : Video of the talk associated with the slides http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiTaPRtN2yM
> This is a very myopic view that has already caused many deaths. Privacy concerns around medical records have prevented any central database of them from being built, and thus prevented us from saving all of the lives that could be saved by analyzing that data.

This line of reasoning seems similar to arguing that, by not creating a society in which 95% of people live in sanitized hospital rooms and the remaining 5% of people are doctors and nurses, we have "already caused many deaths".

Yes, the fact that people value things like "privacy", "being in large groups where others could be ill", and "moving from place to place" will "cause deaths". But that doesn't mean individuals should be forced to abandon these things for better health outcomes. While some benefits could certainly come from centralizing medical records, I tend to think that benefit cannot justify compelling people to keep their records in a centralized database, in the same way I don't think the health benefits of not traveling justify banning travel. You may not value privacy, but I think that in a truly inclusive society that values the individual, privacy should remain a real option for those who value it.

> There are plenty of concerns about data, and plenty of ways of mitigating those concerns, but a blanket condemnation of any centralized data would hold humanity back immeasurably (and in fact, already has.)

I agree that a blanket condemnation of centralized data is also not a good approach. Each individual should be able to make this choice in a meaningful way, with respect by default that any given person might care about it.
Valuation by which criteria? The asking price of an acquisition, paid in RSU with their value measured in the potential asking price for an acquisition? This seems a little circular.
Why do we love R so much?
I believe he means homogeneous as in "speak the same language, share a similar culture". If you tell a French person he's exactly the same as a German person, he will probably disagree.
Example app:

You can see crowd moving on streets, where each person is a box (or a 3d avatar)... than if other people have installed the same app as you do.. it will show a icon on top of the box representing the person (the phone sends a signal IR, BT whatever) .. or is geolocated by a central server that sync the position of everybody..

Than you can interact with those strangers on the street.. in the 3d box you see representing the person, it may have more clues about that person..

so you can send a message to a girl/guy you liked and ask to hang out with you.. for intance.. its like a people radar..

Can work in traffic too.. so you can tag people in cars around you..

You can create a game, and involve people you have tagged, and give each one a role.. like in a RPG

If you get feedback of the camera too, you can see people with 3d stuff on top.. like holding a 3d gun..or a secret message in your virtual shirt.. it would work like a magical glass

I had this micro idea, a year ago.. this is the technology to make it work.. feel free to use it to create something

just call me for a beer later :)
> there is naturally a rather ubiquitous route around getting blocked: use Tor

How about fuck you? Seriously, don't use Tor for scraping sites. Webmasters can and will block Tor exit nodes if they feel the bad traffic outweighs the good.
One of the things I've been seeking out are the PCB capabilities. I have two boards I need to make, one 4 layer and one 6 layer, the 6 layer having 0.4mm pitch BGA's if I can cost benefit justify it.

I'm not finding that information easily so it's a barrier to me getting past the intro.

Are there links to this as well as a component library FAQ?

Very useful idea though.
Tutorial on how to convert 3D Blu-ray disc into 3D Video
Here is a tutorial on how to convert Blu-ray 3D to 3D video with DVDFab 9. DVDFab Blu-ray Ripper 3D Plus is a powerful Blu-ray ripper which allows perfect Blu-ray 3D Ripping. This ever stronger Blu-ray Ripper saves your energy, time, and money to do more jobs and deals with all your Blu-ray (2D & 3D) ripping issues, so that you can watch any Blu-ray on your 2D and 3D devices with the help from just one tool. You can learn more at: http://www.dvdfab.com/blu-ray-ripper.htm
While there are certainly exceptions the vast majority of startups are not very innovative as far as you are concerned.

The the people in Africa or Asia or Europe who can now bypass SMS charges and bypass the monopolies behind them, a messaging app can be innovative.
NASA DTN Challenge Series
Sydney Australia. I suspect the harbour's beaches are bit warmer than the Donau too.
There are laws about pre-employment background checks; in general they can only be run with the consent of the person being investigated, and the person being investigated must be able to receive a free copy. So you will know.

In addition, the FCRA mandates the following cannot appear on background checks:

- Bankruptcies after 10 years

- Civil suits, civil judgments and records of arrest, from date of entry, after seven years

- Accounts placed for collection after seven years

- Any other negative information (except criminal convictions) after seven years
Note Nestle itself also alters its formula for hot climates like Malaysia:

http://www.nestleprofessional.com/uk/en/SiteArticles/Pages/F...
"Everything is Awesome" in this hilarious tribute to teamwork in the office.
Please remove the reliance of the external app, or make it optional.
Ukraine crisis: Over 100 killed say protesters
I'm most excited to see some real world usage of FlowHub [0] / NoFlo [1]

[0] http://flowhub.io

[1] http://noflojs.org
Isn't he in jail now? And also, which individuals? We are lucky enough to live in a society where "expressing concern" is not sufficient to put someone in jail.
It does seem surprising that they list $150k / yr- obviously this not typical SMB pricing or anything mass market. Although it is not new- definitely seen it before (sorry I can't reference). I think your funny point raises a good question though- what is the value here? The price point is not insignificant, at all. They list 1 billion hits per month as a capability... does this strategy surround scale (which is not an unusual SaaS strategy) where small clients get the tech free and big ones pay- or is there something special here that the masses do not see, like keyword "not provided" data?
So? It's not as if they're collecting less information about you now, or are subject to any more legal restrictions (such as those imposed on credit reporting agencies).
A ponzi scheme is what this system of greed demanded. The same will come to pass again.
Reality Testing and Metacognitive Failure
Why should we want to see him go away for a long time? We shouldn't. This idea of "we got to put this person away for decades" is one of the few areas where I find the European belief (in rehabilitation) to be better (I'm American).

18-36 months, in addition to the fact that he will have a felony on his record for probably the rest of his life, in addition to the fact that his public online reputation is destroyed forever, is appropriate.
Google Maps already has indoor maps.
I think Macromedia Authorware was pretty big for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_Authorware
Are ‘sterile neutrinos’ dark-matter particles after all?
A decentralized solution for that would be to have user's data stored in user's private cloud, encrypted and cached on the client.
It's been done a few times before :) For example, check out the debugger canvas: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/4a979842-b9aa-...

The problem ends up being that you're trading one form of cognitive load for another and it turns out that given our text-centric view of writing code, locality ends up having a lot of importance (which is lost in the model you're suggesting). There are lots of other issues with it at a practical level too. I've never seen an input model that works well with lots of disconnected little editors, for example. How do you navigate between them? How do you lay them out? What happens when the graph is disjoint? How do I get to some point in the flow of the program? What if I need multiple things that aren't directly related next to each other? How do you even determine relation?

After having implemented this in various forms about 4 times now, I'm fairly convinced this is one of those things that makes good intuitive sense, but bleeds to death from a whole bunch of paper cuts in practice.

The one case where this does seem successful though is in the step-wise debugging case. There's a very definite flow, locality matters a lot less, and debugging is an inherently mouse-oriented task - all the things you need for a zoom-based infinite canvas to work out.
In the end not much money was actually lost though. The huge losses you see in the headlines were mainly the fake gains. If you "invested" $1m with me for 10 years and I reported a 26% annual return you would have a $10m account on paper, but the gains never existed and as such were never stolen. People who withdrew their gains were sued and had to return the money.

The scam was told to be $65B, but the actual losses were ~$17B and they have recovered more than half that (over $9B). Additionally the IRS let the losses be written off, so you and I ended up picking up another half of that tab.

tl;dr it was an awfully large scam, but not nearly as large as most think. Less than half the value of an instant message client actually and only a few Instagrams.
Automgen (http://www.irai.com/a8/a8asi_e.pdf) is another one.
As someone who has found a startup, one point I would add is - Make sure you are within 50 miles of where the VC activity is. That for practical purposes means this; be based out of SFO (+Bay Area), NYC (+Boston).

VCs want to fund businesses that reach all over the world, but they themselves must be reachable within an hour or two commute.
> The only way for search engines to get better is to model the mental state of the person making the query.

No. Another way is to make their behavior more predictable. If I type "Chinese" into the search box, Google may tell me about the Chinese language, or it may send me some ads for local take-out places. Either it guesses which I want, or it makes it easy for me to specify what I'm asking; I know which I'd prefer.
Scientists Blast Plans for Nicaraguan Grand Canal
SpaceEngine 0.9.7.1 released
I don't think it's laziness. That can be part of it, but I believe the core issue is a specific mentality these type of people have. They see the world in a black and white. "Us" and "them". Their view of the world has these two (or more) sides always in conflict. So, they effectively view Google as an enemy to fight against.

My theory as to why people act this way is that they do so to give their lives meaning. That, or there is something that makes their life meaningful they believe the "enemy" will take away. For instance "Google spying on my children" -> "Google is the enemy". They see Google, the NSA, Microsoft, etc, as a cohesive group that is "after them".

But in absence of this conflict, or the external meaning that is the cause of the (perceived) conflict, they wouldn't know what to do with their own existence. Religion, alcohol, and hedonism may end up filling this gap.

In contrast, those who have a self-defined objective see the world as a massive system of problems to solve (or not solve). There's no singular "enemy", just a huge number of people who all have their own motivations and ideals. "Google" is nothing more than a tightly-bound collection of humans.
Wikimedia TOU Amendment: Paid contribution disclosure
As a Google Voice user I can't get messages from iMessage, and the sender doesn't get a delivery failure notice.
This isn't the Yahoo! News comments section, please keep it civil.
With due apologies to Mencken, this sounds like market Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be making money. In truth, whenever read closely, the "problems" these proposals aim to solve invariably turn out to be nonsense.

There is one truly good reason to put an end to the HFT arms race: it's absorbing the time and talents of some of the greatest minds of our generation. This isn't just true of HFT, though--it's a problem for finance in general. If we want these people doing science instead, though, we're going to have to pay them to do it. Currently we're not.
Australia's 4G networks the fastest in the world
Let's review...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428382
Every time I see everything2 I am amazed it still exists and even more amazed it isn't just an archive by now. Then get stuck in a maze clicking around for hours.
sorry accidentally replied to you rather than parent comment
OK then, but that works both ways if I can't prove it's not totally good paleo diet proponents can't prove it's super healthy.
>If you see the Valley as another Wall Street-- with a similar corporate ladder (engineer -> VP/Eng -> CTO -> founder -> investor)-- it will piss you off less.

As someone heavily inclined to agree with the headline, I think I agree; acquisitions aren't exactly the problem.

That doesn't mean I'm not pissed off, though. The idealistic mythos of the Valley is so self-indulgent it makes the crap of the "crappier Wall Street" so much more filthy.

But then where does the idealism have to go? Technology can be truly 'innovative'--or, instead of an empty buzzword, Technology can create quality of life improvements and encourage disruptive (:P) egalitarian progress.

Google's doing amazing things. The corruption (Google+) follows too closely behind to be excited about it anymore.
Thank you for taking the time to write that up. Great overview.

A nice tidy orthogonal instruction set is a joy to work with. The x86 ISA unfortunately isn't one of those by virtue of it's history in the marketplace.
Hey Zach!

That's funny, I couldn't find your post-YC round anywhere on the interwebs or CrunchBase. You've done a great job keeping that under wraps (also the revenue piece, WOW!).

I'm excited for you guys and look forward to banking through you in the future.

I agree that sovereigns would be interesting (as would PE/hedge) and I'll point out that we have many of the largest fund of funds on the planet in the bay area (within spitting distance of your office actually).

Best of luck and I look forward to seeing your team prosper in the future.
In Silicon Valley, Indians' dreams have become reality
A couple I'm aware of that aren't in the list:

- Aardappel (visual functional programming) [1]
- Widget Workshop (something like a cross between The Incredible Machine and visual programming) [2]

[1] http://strlen.com/aardappel-language
[2] http://www.old-games.com/download/3399/widget-workshop
Also, it seems like on your landing page that you'd want to emphasize the "instant" nature of the quote. I didn't realize that until user 0xdeadbeefbabe above kind-of mentioned it. I really didn't give it much though, but I'd assumed you were like every other contract manufacturer, and one you upload something, they'll have someone get back to you in a week. When I realized that wasn't the case, I then went to upload something just to see how it worked. Also, I'd make the "quote breakout" in the lower right corner the default option, and someone could hide the details if they don't like it.
The Maduro vote was rigged, how do I know? I happen to have connections who were very close to Chavez. That's the most I will say.
> I'm not saying that Google is evil.

Google probably isn't evil, but is getting naughty.

On Android, they make it so difficult to avoid data collection. One example, which frustrated me yesterday: To access the Play store on Android, you need to enable background data sync. The problem is, there is no indication of what that background data is, and how do I turn it on only for the Play store. The UI is so designed that you can only enable or disable sync for all of Android, and clicking on a given app's name starts syncing that app automatically (there is no confirmation and there is no toggle to turn it off for that particular app).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbS9jZOlQjc

Just saying.
"At that time, if you were an Indian running a company, you tended not to get funded," Shukla says. "And the VC would hint, or tell you directly, that you need to get a regular CEO."

What does "regular CEO" mean?

"A successful white executive," he answers.
I agree, the Kit Kats outside of the U.S. are quite different from their U.S. counterparts. Although, to me, the taste of the Nestle-manufactured non-U.S. Kit Kat bars are far inferior to the Hershey-manufactured U.S. Kit Kat bars I grew up with. This might be down to the difference between those of us who are supertasters and are most focused on flavor, and those of us who are nontasters and are most focused on texture [1] . I notice that the author's points of contention revolve predominantly around texture, not flavor (chocolate heaven for him is "so rich, so smooth, so crunchy"), whereas when I think about the differences in the Kit Kats, my brain is entirely focused on taste and could care less about texture.

Being long-term situated outside the U.S., I frequently find myself wishing the Hershey-made Kit Kat bars were available to buy up and take to the movies here, but instead end up passing over the comparatively less appealing Nestle version and purchasing M&Ms, which mostly taste the same the world over (though I haven't had them in Hong Kong), instead.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster
Why there is a lot of programming courses on MOOCs not a one course about Linux?
A lot of MOOCs offer free courses on programming but I never come across a free course to learn about systems (Linux in Particular).
Dave Barry's Manliness Manifesto
Server Boot Speed | Why doesn’t my server boot as fast as my iPad?
I happen to know someone (through a third party) who grew up with Chavez and was very close to him up until the last few years prior to his death. Early elections were legit, after that they were all rigged.
Silicon Valley has a cash 'problem.'

AAPL - $158b, GOOG - $58b, CSCO - $48b, ORCL - $37b, INTC - $20b, HPQ - $16b, FB - $11b, EBAY - $9b

$357 billion in cash among just the top eight tech firms (cash wise). Those eight firms are generating roughly $100 billion a year in profit, compiling that cash hoard ever larger.

It's not surprising Silicon Valley has acquisition fever. Cash and equivalent yields almost nothing these days. To top it off, the stock market is at all time highs, so stock-as-acquisition-currency is primed as well.
The State of LTE (February 2014)
why do so many of these samaltman things make fp?

okay, i didn't really read this one, my time is too value-generating or something

i'm asking you, not the rest of you cunts

it isn't horrible, if you don't mind about.com-quality tripe
The electoral system itself can be audited and found to be fair. However, it's unfair to:

* Abuse the State's massive control of the media in favor of the ruling party.

* Threaten people, fire them from their government positions, deny scholarships, or otherwise attack people for being against the government(see: Lista Tascón).

* Shamelessly use resources of the State for political propaganda in favor of the ruling party.

* Take power away from elected officials and create alternate institutions to replace them, when the electoral results don't favor the ruling party (see: Caracas Mayor).

* Deny audits after an election, an integral part of fair elections.

* Finally: kill, attack or detain people for opposing the ruling party, which is what's going on as of this moment while we type comments here.

So whether the voting machines work correctly is far from the only thing needed to consider elections fair.

- Another Venezuelan expat
Dropbox Government Data Requests Principles
Whatsapp and Android
It's a cost-benefit tradeoff like anything else. Unfortunately, the costs are filtered through fear-mongering and the benefits are trade secrets, so the debate is particularly ineffectual.

The thing I find most aggravating about it is that the standard for harm for data seems to be "What could a totalitarian government do with it?" and there are very few useful things that couldn't be used for very bad things in the hands of a totalitarian government (newspapers, for instance.) Meanwhile, companies can't reveal all the useful things that are consequences of their data because that makes them vulnerable to both competitors and spam.

So we're pretty much stuck with only uninformed opinions and worst-case scenario analysis, which isn't a rational way to approach anything. The only way I can think to improve the debate is for privacy advocates to focus on actual harm that has actually happened to someone to at least keep things grounded in reality.
In Lectura 7A of SICP[1], Sussman opens the lecture by talking about how programs can be thought of as character-stream descriptions of a wiring-diagram for some kind of machine. And he actually goes on to talk about the notion of visual programming languages (he didn't think they were a good idea). It's interesting to see these screenshots of visual languages. I must say that I agree with Sussman's reasoning for not liking them (difficult to edit them and they take up a lot of real-estate).

[1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
Circos Table Viewer – Circular Visualization of Tabular Data
Argh, this is my phd subject.
Not sure wether this is good (for the lights) or bad news...
What do you think?
"Make your lines however long you like, but not too long."

Thanks for the advice, Style Guide!
While we're building things, we shouldn't lose track of staying somewhat healthy. Exercise, eat well, and sleep.

I never knew of Jim before today. His passing is sad news, yet I'm glad to be joining a community that has role models like Jim.