skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's outrageous - no way is AirBnB "worth" more than Hyatt hotels!!!

not crazy

1. go look at Hyatt's financials. Back in 2010 fiscal year Hyatt only generated $66M of net income. Why? Because hotels generally have high operating leverage (i.e. high fixed costs) and low margins, so small downturns in demand for rooms can have a large impact on profits. And frankly, AirBnB is helping depress demand for hotel rooms.

2. now think about AirBnB's business. They take 3% of every booking and they probably have low incremental costs (just additional server capacity).

The article below says they booked 12-15M in rooms in 2012. At an average of $100/room night (probably conservative) .. that's ~$1B in bookings with $30M going to AirBnB.

http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-billion-revenues-2013-...

We know AirBnB has grown rapidly ... and in the article they say they think they can serve 100 million in bookings per year ... which would equate to revenue of $300M. You can start to see how AirBnB could in fact produce as much profit as Hyatt without owning hundreds of properties.

Finally, don't bet against companies that combine economies of scale and customer captivity. I'd say that AirBnB has customer captivity because of the difficultly of establishing 'trust/credibility'. Once a user has established that credibility at one site I think they're fairly captive.

Anyway, time will tell. It's going to be fascinating to watch.
> Type-level meta programming is still confined to using templates though...

Which there is less of need for this, since we have better type deduction in C++11 and 14 as well.
My point is this accidental selection bias doesn't depend on the crowd- you could just as easily make this mistake if you are 1 person in a room by yourself. Some examples of what I would call unwisdom of crowds might be the biasing feedback effect a prediction market's current price has on people's judgement, or how those with the most money (or the with the smallest marginal value of a dollar) exert a larger influence on a prediction market's predictions, if they are implemented that way.
Ideally a database might be maintained of every time the lights/sirens are operated. Then different officers could be compared, location or time trends could be noticed, operation could be associated with incident reports, etc.
Could you explain a little for the 99% who won't join those mailing lists?
Success can build a culture of arrogance that will destroy a company
So for 1400 years of bloody, hatefilled history they steal a plane full of Chinese citizens to teach Malaysia a lesson? I'm probably just ignorant, but I'd have to guess that that level of risk isn't worth blind rage without furthering some agenda.
Yes, that's what I think and what I thought I'd been saying. What of what I've said indicates otherwise?
I guess this means that if I want to get the most out of my games I'll have to "upgrade" to Windows 8.1. Not super excited about having to configure away all of the metro garbage.
Beautiful Women Drag Men Around by Their Schlong Jeans?
Isn't that one of his points? Quoting the article: "Every early stage company thinks it has reinvented management."

If I understand him correctly this means that we should look back at prior research of management and draw inspiration from that instead of "reinventing management".
Spoken like someone who's never driven an oldsmobile.

The automobile industry has consumer protection laws that force manufacturers to honor warranties and emission control systems.
Centralized research labs give researchers the opportunity to look at different ideas across the company and connect ideas. This is almost impossible if all researchers are siloed in decentralized research groups.

Also, there's 'why can't we have both?'. In honesty, Google, like most tech companies today follows a hybrid model. The public statements of executives are not to be taken as gospel, because their primary audience are the company's shareholders. In reality, you have PhDs in Google X working on moon-shot problems (product focused or otherwise, they are long-term projects) as well as in direct P&L divisions. Centralized research labs also have their own versions of P&L metrics (e.g. number of papers published, product $s resulting indirectly from research, number of patents, etc.). Financially, centralized research labs working on moon-shot problems are a hedge against short term fluctuations and gives companies an opportunity to pursue long-term trends. Also, in companies that have both, there is nothing to prevent researchers from moving between centralized research labs and decentralized when opportunities present themselves (e.g. product commercialization/scale-up project resulting from research). I think it is dogmatic to pursue centralized or decentarlized exclusively.
Guess it's easier/quicker than using allmytweets.net to get to your first tweet
Ask HN: What is money?
How would you explain the concept of money to a 5 year old? How about a 17 year old? A 30 year old?

Do you subscribe to the classical economic theory that money is a "medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account"?

Do you have any other ways to look at money?
Take a look at the Ghost blogging platform. It has a few quirks, but it's very simple and fast. I've enjoyed using it for the last few months. https://ghost.org/
> Standing to work has long known to be problematic, it is more tiring, it dramatically increases the risks of carotid atherosclerosis (ninefold) because of the additional load on the circulatory system, and it also increases the risks of varicose veins, so standing all day is unhealthy. The performance of many fine motor skills also is less good when people stand rather than sit.

> The key is to build movement variety into the normal workday.”

http://saveyourself.ca/articles/chair-warriorism.php

http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html
that was fascinating. reminded me a bit of the protagonist in grossmith's "diary of a nobody", but without the petulant self-absorption masquerading as modesty. the author has genuinely sat down and thought long and deeply about who he is, what his strengths and limitations are, and how he can best work with other people, and he's a great writer to boot.
Frankly, I'd rather he leave it to Bill Gates.

Going to Mars may be sexy, but stomping out Polio makes millions of lives better.

Its hard to realize that, I suppose, when your life is in the bubble of a limo. That's honestly what makes Bill Gates second act so amazing.
At least to date, Microsoft stresses the "TypeScript is just JavaScript." New language features are added to ES6 and then wrapped with types in TypeScript.
Right, void* is used quite a lot for "generic" data structures. But I'm not sure that's what he meant. The reason I said "only" was that from my own experience, most C data structures are tailored for a specific use and so I don't see void* too much in this context.

And may I ask why you say "typedef" is unsafe? It is merely a type alias, like e.g. Haskell's and ML's "type", or isn't it?
I think it's valuable to own your own domain vs. being at the mercy of Medium / Tumblr etc.

Blogger has free hosting, and it's easy to use.

Another good option is Wordpress. You can get an account set up (it's basically turnkey) on a full-service hosting provider such as Mediatemple.
Just Ask, by Lincoln Murphy
Oh god... so much wrong with this.

Tabata workouts have always resonated with supplementary fat loss workouts - workouts you do in addition to a regular strength program. They're always recommended to be done with front squats because of the full body demand, as well as relatively light weight required. Doing a 4 minute push up tabata is not going to tax your entire body nearly as much as a front squat tabata.

I figured that in a place like HN that has the wherewithal to understand that things like fitness are not quick-and-easy fixes, that they take a lifetime of eating well and exercising, and yet we're still plagued with the "get rich quick" schemes. There's no shortcuts to a healthy body.
> cryptic and ancient standard

Cryptic and ancient?! IEEE 754 is the behavior implemented by the chip in the computer you're using to browser HN with right now.
How I built the same MVP 3 times, across 3 continents in 3 weeks
gtalk is still the default IM in pretty much everyone I know from different social circles. Even fb messenger during work hours I tend to see pretty much everyone in gtalk while fb is very sparse. And don't get me started on whatsapp, I don't know a single person who uses that, and nobody seems to even be aware what it is when I ask around. I guess they all have different use cases. I for one have been and will stay with gtalk.
seriously? it's an excellent piece of writing and not all that long; just go read it.
Good ego masturbation for project managers if nothing else. But personally, I don't think hiring dunces for programmers or whatever else would be a right answer for startups. You only want boring, regular people for boring, regular work. For extraordinary tasks, you need those with extraordinary talent. No one else will do.

The narrator in this story... how good is he at his work? All that I can gather from it is that he hired the wrong guy and then continued to allow him to make wrong decisions. If anything, he did more harm for the company by trusting someone who hadn't produced results. The character he's speaking down to and writing off is only acting within his ability, his experience, and his competence. It's really quite funny!
You haven't seen flappy 2048 yet, huh?
Ask your favourite developers to use OpenGL instead. Even xp users get the latest version of OpenGL.
Most truly revolutionary companies have some "gray areas." The hard part is navigating them smartly and coming up with a clean solution.
Is anyone actually using Google Compute Engine? I haven't bumped into anyone using it and would love to hear what the real world experience is with it.
He bends the meaning of words like 'brilliant' a bit and clearly lives in a time where there are no such thing as protected classes (e.g. medical) but there's a lot of value in remembering that most people develop wealth by managing risk, knowing our limits, and finishing what we start.
Hack money out of politics: Democracy Hackathon (March 29-30 San Francisco)
Pretty much. Donate to improve science, perform basic research, etc.

Why on earth would you donate to a for-profit? It makes no sense.
It's possible to leave money to both. I'd prefer that over being lopsided.
Guy is supposedly the best in his field but doesn't get any work done. Boss gives him free reign before seeing results and ends up disappointed.
Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute the original SQLite code, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.
Although I get the thinking behind it if all wealthy people did this it would just lead to the privileged having better lives and no progress for the poor. A larger inequality gap.

I think Bill Gates has the best plan for the wealthy. Targeting specific problems (Polio, Malaria etc.), solving them, and vastly (and quickly) improving people's lives with the aim of bringing people out of poverty.

I don't deny Musk could do fantastic things with that money that would benefit some of humanity but it seems more important to me that we get those in poverty out of it. That's more important for humanity than building the hyperloop or going to Mars. For even the middle classes life is pretty good. Get everyone up to that level.
Great post! I browsed your site some more, and found a video of a presentation you gave. Asking for the close is killer. In retrospect too many of my first couple of calls ended with... "So uh yeah, I'll email you I guess."

Me and my cofounder have been doing test-runs of sales just to test if there was interest in our market. We made a note to take time out of developing to call 20 vendors a day. Some things we found:

1) Doing cold alone is nerve-racking, doing sales with a friend is actually pretty fun. It's almost nostalgic of crank-calling people as a kid. You can joke about the interesting run-ins you have with vendors. My cofounder and I grab snacks and just spend an afternoon calling.

2) We rate each call with "likelihood ratings (1-10 rating of how the call went). These are just qualitative ratings about the disposition of the caller on the other line. Every 50 or so we take note of what language improves the mood, and what turns people off. This way we're consistently improving our pitch.

3) Early on we let the initial tone of the calls dictate their end result. Too many calls ended more abruptly than they should have.(because we perceived that the other end was too disinterested to sway.) But we quickly noted was that many of the vendors had the same objections. It was an easy fix, just come up with a list of simple, logical retorts. There's many calls that we talked out of a ditch. -It's like when you solve yourself out of a cluster-fuck in 2048 :)

4) I'm not a very extroverted person, I don't have a marketing background. But I've actually come to like the calls. The first call of the day is always the hardest. The initial dip into a chilly pool is unpleasant, but you get over it much quicker than you would think. I talked to many interesting people just through cold calls. At first I scoured my network trying to find someone to delegate this task to, now it's part of the daily work schedule.

5) Ask for the close, just let them say "No". Don't dance around it. In the bigger picture who cares that one person said "No".

TL,DR Technical Cofounders can operate telephones; thus they can make sales calls. Make a structure, log objections, find patterns. (It's fun.)
I get the feeling Larry Page will outlive Bill Gates by a couple decades.
Discussion about programming languages with the author of Kotlin
C++ attempted to fix type safety issues in C.
Seconded. This shows an amazing lack of empathy on the part of Page. I love science and technology, they move society forward. But we shouldn't obsess exclusively on progress while ignoring the people who are born without access to health care and schools let alone access to the cool new technology we build.
But inconsistency is consistent with PHP's philosophy ;-)
Firefox 29 beta arrives with Mozilla's user interface overhaul Australis
The "one million" number grabs some attention, but this isn't that special in my opinion. Doing 3333 writes/sec per node is not that hard with Cassandra, actually it can be much faster if you use a setup with fast local storage and split for example the data disk from the commit log. The Google article reads as if they used network storage and 1 volume per node, both are bad ideas for Cassandra as documented by Datastax.
I disagree - I think we're talking about two competing philosophies.

DHH / standard-Rails seems to encourage you to fit things into Models, Views or Controllers. Models got too fat, and so Concerns were introduced. This is problematic, because you still have massive god-models, but now their code is split between a dozen different files, called "Concerns". The main problem is that by making ActiveRecord models the core of your application, you generally give each model too much responsibility & too much knowledge of its associated objects. This means it's very hard to break down & recompose the different functionality into new objects. A model only functions correctly if all of its associated objects are present. This is tight coupling.

The alternative view is to introduce several new single-responsibility objects like Interactors/Service-Objects (and Policies, as here) which should contain the core of your application's business logic. These Service Objects are the opposite of concerns - they do not extend the API of models. They exist to control the interactions between the models. The models become dumb interfaces that deal with data validation and persistence. Because they know hardly anything about the other objects in the system, and have very limited APIs, they can be passed around easily, and re-composed into more complex interactions. They are also incredibly simple to test. The same applies to Interactors - they should be broken down into small units of behaviour with very limited APIs, which can then be passed around easily and composed into more complex interactions. This is loose coupling.
Could this be feasible?
I am not a graphics / engine programmer but I know a decent amount of what goes into programming a game, and I have to call "suspect" on the claim that low level graphics API programming was heretofore only available on game consoles like the Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Xbox 360 and Microsoft Xbox One!
"Patent Pending" is a marketing term for "Patent not happening."
>Going to Mars may be sexy, but stomping out Polio makes millions of lives better.

Right, both are trying to better man kind in their own special ways.

Its a do we solve 1st world problems or do we remember about the rest of the developing world. As I grow older I struggle with which camp I am in.

Mars and an electric car do sound good...but conquering deadly pathogens and diseases sound awesome in a different way.
Swiping would work great. For desktop users, how about control centered around the center hexagon, such that clicking one of its adjacent hexagons results in a shift in that direction?
Wrong. Squatting is the new standing.

http://bitehype.com/screw-your-standing-desk-how-about-squat...
Sounds like people are starting to take Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" to heart (although I guess Page would only be going half way). It's kind of exciting actually - I think this is the first time in history where enough wealthy people are going that route that we can observe how well things work under that framework.
In An Attempt To Beat The NSA Google Encrypts Inter-Server Gmail Traffic
I had to re-read that a couple times. Commas are helpful!

> Its hard to realize that, I suppose, when your life is in the bubble of a Google limo.
Best sacrifice in the history of chess
Twitter might have some legacy Rails hanging around, but it's a beastly Scala system these days.
My bad. I've seriously never worked at an office that's had one or seen them sold anywhere. Guess I should travel more.
How We Used Our Own Product to Triple Our User Base in 30 Days
Exactly. Government is not limited to some tightly-controlled definition conveniently suited to your anti-government rhetoric. It includes almost all means of organizing society. The only social structure that doesn't function as government is unenforced anarchism, which doesn't allow for market freedom because the powerful simply take from the weak.
Considering Gates is almost two decades older than Page that's a pretty logical conclusion. But Gates foundation will likely outlast him. With the kinds of things he's doing it seems pretty simple to layout a plan for after he's gone (e.g. next we solve HIV, then clean water, then etc. etc.).
"Spoken like someone who's never driven an oldsmobile."

I actually have.

So please explain what you are trying to say.
A hand drawn map based on OpenStreetMap data
Fuck you Larry Page you evil Bond-villainesque bastard.
At least go says in their official docs, when posting/searching for the language, use "Golang"
Without access to the dealer's financials, how do you know what their profit/loss even is? There are many variables like land/rent costs, local wages, etc. that could have a dramatic effect on profitability between seemingly similar dealers.

Also, having recently purchased a new car, I noticed that every dealer specced them slightly different, so you couldn't easily compare the vehicles one to one. Something as simple as the color of paint changed the price by hundreds of dollars. Not an insurmountable detail if you are careful, but you really have to do your homework.

Not to mention that it becomes a massive time sink. Given a typical programmer's hourly pay, in many cases it would be more economical to pay out more money and get back to work than spend that time looking for the savings.

So, I do agree that shopping around can net you a better deal, but for all the effort required, I question if it is worth it. I'm going to very sad if I can't buy my next car online (and I hope it will drive itself to my door).
Show HN: Visit tracking for Rails
But that misses the whole point of why the "wisdom of crowds" actually works when it does. To wit; the individual biases and estimation errors can tend to cancel out. This is exactly the opposite of the demonstration, which is a systemic, biased estimator.
One is oriented more short-term (polio), whereas the other is more long-term (not putting all our eggs in one basket).

Both are good.
Greater efficiency, more ways for devs to optimize their games. Should see some FPS improvement with dx12.
2048 is the new NSA.
Elon Musk sure must be flattered, what with being considered a modern day messiah and all.
Using Trello to Track and Manage your Reading
i'm guessing this lets them both build on top of box2d and experiment/iterate more rapidly than waiting for patches to be integrated would.
Why Do High Frequency Traders Never Lose Money?
I've tested it, network latency is by far not as good as for example Rackspace Cloud. And tool-support is very far behind Amazon and OpenStack. Basically Google Compute Engine is something that might have had a chance years ago but at this point in time it's quite pointless because it has no upsides compared to existing far better established solutions and is behind on features, documentation, tools and user-support.

And I expect that not to get better soon if nobody is using it...
Every time I see this, I enjoy reading it. It is a good reminder.
I think Bill Gates is going to have enough billionaires already giving their money to his foundation.

I like the idea of at least a few going in a different direction. Letting Elon Musk throw billions at an audaciously big goal because he has a record of achieving and society might benefit as well.
I'm going to need you to explain exactly why you think an association of otherwise independent and competing dealerships is a "union".
To me it seems he has basically ranked Larry Page > Elon Musk (or he'd have given the money away already) and Elon Musk > Bill Gates.

I don't agree, but it is his money.
>> "Its a do we solve 1st world problems or do we remember about the rest of the developing world."

I agree. Mars is very cool to me and something I'd love to see. BUT my life is already pretty good. There are millions whose lives are short and horrible. Bringing their lives up to my current life standard seems like a more logical first problem to solve than making my already nice life better while theirs doesn't really progress.
Well, until you start looking seriously at existential risk. Then you may realize how many orders of magnitude more humans will be helped with similar probability by spreading to new habitats.

Page lacks not "Empathy" itself, but rather the "Locality of Empathy"; his temporal discounting of empathic investment appears much lower than Gates'.
> dealers are forced middlemen

"Forced", in that they force themselves upon you.
Fight censorship and spying in Turkey
The stated reason for going to Mars is to create a backup population for humanity. If a major asteroid impacts earth (or any other Extinction Level Event) then potentially every human will be as dead as those killed by Polio.
Saturn was similar in some ways

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Corporation
I’ve used VoiceCloud (http://www.voicecloud.com/) for the last 5+ years. Would not go back to regular must-listen-to-your-3-minutes-of-rambling voicemail for a second!!