skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not all Bloomberg users are traders though, and that's where I would try to challenge them. I worked on software for many years that was used side by side with Bloomberg. Many of our customers were Bloomberg customers as well -- although our software was a bit more niche and we didn't hit the heights that Bloomberg did. But when I doubted if we were in the right business, I would look over to Bloomberg and convince myself that the money was there for the right products.

While Bloomberg has almost any conceivable piece of data in real time, what they were missing was presentation. For instance, if you wanted to make a presentation to your board which demonstrated your value as a money manager, you'd have to leave Bloomberg to do it. That's how we were able to share space with them. But I've heard rumors they are moving in this direction now.

I also agree with the author that the data is really the lynch pin. Some commonly used data can be very expensive to acquire if you are able to get it at all. For instance try finding out what stocks and weights make up the Russell 2000 index (and then legally redistribute that data). We were fortunate in that we got in the business when data vendors were willing to negotiate with small software vendors. And much of the value we offered was in those accumulated contracts.

Once those contracts are in place it is very difficult for either side to cancel them without pissing off their customers. For instance a couple years ago FactSet and Morningstar got into a spat and FactSet's contract to provide Morningstar data wasn't renewed. All hell broke loose on both sides. They made a deal. Data is pretty big chasm for a startup to cross. And users are particular about what data vendors they use, even for nearly equivalent products.

There have been some reasonable exits in the financial software business that don't get much play in the Valley. For instance BlackDiamond sold their reporting package (again presentation) to Advent in San Francisco for about $70million and eVestment has been taking on investment and growing like crazy. But neither of those companies competed head to head with Bloomberg's core business. But they are big enough markets that I could see Bloomberg wanting to grow into them.

In general, if you want a slice of the market that Bloomberg is in, I don't think it would easy to do it head on over data. You have to outflank them where they are weak, and hope to chip away at their mindshare that way.
You might be working in a scenario where you can't just look those things up. You have to code them through. Learning them then through general concept AND THEN implementing is too much. For instance, if you work in the embedded domain, you won't have the liberty to use public / standard / open source libraries.
If Agile is the ability to respond to change then it's obviously a matter of good craft because software has never been made pliable with a magic methodology wand.

Of course you'll never hear a consultant talk about that, because there is no shortcut to good craft. So they'll usually resolve to violate the root principle of Agile upfront and focus on tools and processes rather than on individuals and interactions.
The difference between AAA and indie is several hundred full-time content creators and millions of dollars worth of marketing.

One area Epic win here is that by making their AAA-grade engine affordable to individuals they'll end up with a lot of budding game developers self-trained in Unreal. This creates a sort of lock-in: AAA studios are more likely to chose Unreal because it's easier to hire people with Unreal experience.
Why should YC be involved in areas where it has no experience?

The money YC gives is minimal, so the main benefit for YC involvement is experience. If YC has nobody who has expert knowledge in biotech, it would be waste of everyones time to get involved.

Another thing is money. Most science startups need more than just people with PhD's willing to live with ramens. They need lab equipment, samples etc that cost tens and hundreds of thousands dollars.
#00dd00 4lyfe
Capitol Hill's IoHouse gives Seattle hackers a place to call home
HN came in March of 2007.
is there a cryptocoin for that yet?
Wow, that's a pretty big hire -- congtratulations!
"We’re especially interested in preventative healthcare, as this is probably the highest-leverage way to improve health. "

I think the best preventative healthcare is a population (I almost said cohort (yikes)) that is educated enough (with all that entails) to make better short term and long-term decisions for themselves, including developing the desire to become and stay healthy, to know how to weigh the risks of activities, to know how to find information for themselves and evaluate such information with a critical and logical mind. This would also go a long way in helping our political process.

Is this a tall order? You bet. Beyond horizon, but desperately needed.
While I think some of the claims of consumers about the car were overblown, and the testimony of a few consumers who basically claim the car caused them to speed down the highway (what you never heard of using the emergency break) was more amusing than "scary", I think that this does show how as software starts to do things that could threaten a consumers life that we need to have solid protocols for how that is dealt with.

Do we say "nobody use your toaster until the firmware is updated" or do we do the traditional recall thing and offer an exchange to those who registered their product, or do we go full in and use the internet to say, "your toaster will not work until it is updated".

We see some of this in Windows 8. It routinely says you need to install the update in the next hour, your PC is going to reboot, do so now or later. This is an attempt to keep your computer safe even if it creates a bad user experience.

Should cars do the same thing? Should Toasters? How unsafe does it need to be to warrant preventing use?
A tower of you might say, biblical, proportions.
Google is like a file organizer for the web.
I have had this exact thought for a while - use a bunch of cameras to compose a virtual third-person perspective of your car.

No more blindspots.

As it stands our local CubeSat team apparently want to try high-bandwidth radio - I'm suddenly on that side as long as we include a pair of stereoscopic cameras.
the kid's dad was right. I've done construction, drywalling, welding, and even retail. It is HARD. Your whole body aches at the end of every day, you become prematurely aged with injuries to your knees, and your back, and your elbows. Yes, I've put on nearly 100lbs, and I sit in front of a computer all day, but I'd rather do that than wear out my body and dull my mind by putting together fiddly bits on an assembly line all day
I'm too slow to read the pop ups when combining doges. Still looks great otherwise!
Dear Hacker News: Stop with the 2048.
Growth Hack 3: Influencer Outreach
Theneeds is more than ‘yet another personalized news feed’
People don't just suddenly drop their prices dramatically for no reason; this move is directly as a result of how well Unity is doing; and how big name studios like Blizzard are taking it up.

...but hey, I would be 100% not surprised to see the guys from Unity pull a similar
'cheaper but with profit share' for pro licenses.
Or the recursive link, if you want to give it a try ;)

http://www.theneeds.com/read/n3359400/Theneeds-is-more-than-...
Link with no paywall:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
900 Workers Have Already Died Building Qatar’s World Cup Infrastructure
Fair point. The original argument was advocating non-fractional though.
This is the exponential function, 2^x. Where the independent variable is the number of walls jumped. For instance, after 30 jumps, your score/tile reads 1073741824, or 2^30.
Remember the Bloomberg terminal snooping controversy from last year? Reporters at Bloomberg News had access to terminal meta data that allowed them to view user contact information and monitor login activity.

When the activity was disclosed, Goldman and a few other banks were trying to figure out ways to replicate some of the features (including chat). I'm not sure where those projects stand today but my point is that their biggest clients desired to sponsor the unbundling of some of the terminal's core features.
I don't read it as narcissistic either, but I do think it's written in a way that acknowledges and then pushes aside the narcissism present in the world. It seemed like a downright practical way to cut to his point without being misunderstood.
Plowing $150M into a car company before making a sale isn't remotely reasonable.

Why not? After all, it resulted in Tesla.
Some emergency brakes are electrical. All automobile brake systems are hydraulic, and can overcome the engine even at wide open throttle.
So, you're not friends with him them?
To match the original, it shouldn't double.

It should add 2 to the tile 90% of the time, and add 4 10% of the time.
One way to approach this is to say something like: "I have a selection of (simplified) problems we've faced recently. They're representative of the sorts of issues you would be taking care of if you join our team. Let me walk you through them one at a time and we can discuss. We'll start just by verbally going over them, then either move to a whiteboard or to a workstation to dig into them a little deeper.

The goal here is to see how well we can communicate with each other as well as your ability to actually do the sort of work we need done."

Imho, there are only three things you really need to know about the candidate:

1) Will this person fit into the current team with the minimum of fuss?

2) Can this person do the job professionally and in a timely way?

3) Is hiring this person a financial risk we're willing to take?
A times B times C equals X. If X plus $1.2B inquiry settlement is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Re: B&W <-> Religious debate spectrum, I agree with you. You don't want to host arguments, but the current approach is a bit overly rigid. The "which X is better?" is a question that probably should be shutdown, but "what are the differences or strengths of X versus Y?" is a question that hopes to be objective, might have higher-than-normal risk of descending into a debate (but won't necessarily), and from what I've seen, will probably get closed. I suggest tolerating such threads until they show signs of devolving.

Re: Startups issue, in that case, the Area 51 page for Startups is wrong. It says:

"This site has been Closed
...
This proposal didn't have enough activity during the beta."
This is a great introduction to Stoicism for the modern world. The author takes quite a few of the concepts and updates them through a 21st century philosophic viewpoint (mainly through the use of more rigorous logic behind the scenes).

The best update comes with how one should deal with things one can and cannot effect. He updates this from two to three: things you have no effect on whatsoever, things you have some effect on, and things you have total control of. Earthquakes are one on example of the first - no idea of when they are coming and one just has to do her best to deal with it. The second involves dealing with other people: one can control what one says and does to another, but no control over how that person reacts. Third, one has control over oneself.

There are a few ideas in there that I think don't pass modern studies of sociology/psychology - the chapter on relationships , in particular - but otherwise a very compelling read.
You're assuming a lot there. I had to use the official source of the data and that was Reuters for around 80% of it. Bloomberg did provide their own feed for some of these cases which I ended up using as a backup in case Reuters failed.

I didn't write this on the previous comment but I had much more joy working with the Bloomberg API than with the several Reuters APIs (like DataScope Select - how can a new API be like that?!).
> But if that's the case for the US, what's stopping a thief to send money to an exchange like Bitstamp, buy BTC, withdraw it and then reverse the fiat payment in a similar matter?

Sending money to bitstamp requires an international wire transfer (SWIFT), those (usually) can't be reversed.

Its ACH payments which get reversed so easily (ACH is a domestic network, all in-country). That's why TradeHill shut down after a fraudulent $20k Dwolla payment, all Dwolla deposits/withdrawals are through ACH. And that's why Coinbase has to be so careful with which customers they allow to purchase bitcoins, all Coinbase deposits/withdrawals are ACH.

> And while it's true that on Bitalo you have to handle the fiat payments yourself, but it will be often faster to get BTC that way than to send it to an exchange, wait for them to process the deposit, and only then buy BTC.

Speed of a first purchase is one thing. But I'd guess that the main reason people keep funds on an exchange is because they want to day-trade, pick up cheap coins with a lucky limit order during a flash crash, or have the option to panic sell in a split second (not even a one hour wait for 6 confirmations). That kind of trading is only possible on an exchange with a limit order book, not an OTC marketplace.
Front End Ops Conf 2014
I've been using a forked version of this Chrome extension. Looks really nice

https://github.com/imkevinxu/hacker-news-plus
Python 101: An Introduction to Python’s Debugger
The emergency brake is not powerful enough to overcome the throttle. Additionally, I'd love to see if your reaction in an emergency like that would be any different.

Humans react very irrationally even with training. It's easy to sit in your chair and say someone did the wrong thing.
Here, have a karma.
How about Super Mario Bros?
"Secret" app: Here's the open-source Android clone after 50 days
The people making comments about killing the engine is a monumentally bad idea. If the car has a conventional key ignition, turning the key even to the accessory position can engage the steering wheel lock. Without a running engine, you could lose power brake and steering assist. Not all power steering systems are hydraulic, some are pure electric and some are electro-hydraulic. The majority of braking systems are assisted by a booster driven off of engine vacuum. You have two or three pedal pumps before the vacuum is gone.
The Area 51 page certainly makes it look like it was shut down for that reason. It says it didn't have enough activity, and provides a summary of the activity that is all "Excellent" except for questions per day, which "Needs Work".

Perhaps it was shut down for another reason, but that's definitely not how the Area 51 page makes it look.
Spot on. A VC will fund something really risky and innovative if and only if they think they'll likewise make a larger profit from it compared less risky ventures. But as pointed out by other commenters even this risk-taking is limited.

Ventures like SpaceX and Tesla that have a long lead time and (at least in these two cases) are loss-making at the start probably wouldn't get YC-VC funding. Or at least they wouldn't get anywhere near the level of funding they'd need to get to profitability point.

I wager that for some of the really big world-changing projects we simply have to be willing to fund it as long as necessary, taking an extremely long-term view. And for this, VC funding is probably not going to be enough. Both Tesla and SpaceX needed to take in public (read: Government) funding to keep going.
Thanks!

That bad boy has been sitting in our office for a few months now and it never gets old hearing it every time someone goes to the bathroom or something =)
I'll propagate it.
There's no such best practice. Cache is trivial.
Factset's main defensive position it that they have direct feeds from most of the money managers and can do attribution analysis on their trade data overnight. That might not be as hard as getting the market data Bloomberg has, but still a pretty big step.

Also the performance attribution that FactSet provides requires constituent data from the major indexes. Money managers are particular as hell about their indexes, so you can't just provide generic indexes, unless you first convince them that the generic indexes have value. That could take years.
Hi, I'm an engineer at Kensho (mentioned in the linked post). As the author mentioned, we're targeting the analytical insights space to start. We're ~25 people[0] who aim to revolutionize access to complex, meaningful financial analysis in a way that is intuitive, fast and meaningful. We also read HN, and I'm happy to answer questions.

Matt

[0] http://www.kensho.com/#team
Just don't do what? Receive the information you are sending them?

If you don't want someone to have this information, the sensible thing is not to offer it. I cannot conceive of any way in which sending the information and then yelling at the recipient for receiving it is "more correct" than just not telling people things you don't want them to know.
http://phenomist.wordpress.com/2048-variants/
There is no HN cabal...

(Sorry for the other-other-other-site reference)
Like the Flappy Bird phenomenon.. it will slowly go away.
Dish Fined $250,000 For Blacklisting Whistle Blowing Employee
Hooray, a new batch of insanely rich lawyers.
Or it's the logarithmic function lg(x), where the independent variable is the score and the dependent variable is roughly proportional to the number of times you've clicked.
Those of us on the Board don't like to brag.
Sunglasses
Sunglasses
From what I've heard from the Oculus folks, it won't happen any time soon. Your eyes move way too fast for a VR system to react to them.

It will happen eventually, but it seems like we need cameras/computer vision systems/drawing pipelines with an order of magnitude lower latency for that to actually work.
The PC revolution was still occurring even for people who didn't have Internet Access.
Toyota's fault humans react irrationally. Got it.

They stepped on the wrong pedal, it's that simple. Oh, and they weren't an American car company.
Pure R&D without the need for profit. That gives you whole classes of problems you can look. Especially longer term and higher risk projects
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=any+key
Udacity has a model in which every class is self paced and they have not deleted a single one since uploading them.
If i were to place a bet on how the game gets changed for EV it is a battery swapping model like that explored by Better Place. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place

They went belly up but there is something intuitive and compelling about the model.
Many games on PS4 do NOT run at full 1080p resolution, they are rendered at lower resolution and upscaled. And on top of that, several games on PS4 do not run either at 60 fps. Performance wise, the new consoles are not THAT great, that's why the Occulus Rift team has been specifically said the new consoles will not be good enough for where they want to take VR.
Node.js CMS and web application platform built on express and mongo.
Ex Microsoft staffer arrested for allegedly stealing Win 8 trade secrets
I really thought Agile was cool. Then I endured pointless meetings, meaningless planning estimation and observed how people make a career around preaching Agile. I quickly observed the real goal of agile is not to produce software, but rather to get people to use agile. Agile is about selling the cult membership, not actually doing anything interesting.

Not surprised Agile was developed in Utah, the home of the best MLM schemes.
Really? Can the janitor respond to a warrant being served?
The original works of Seneca and Epictetus are also surprisingly applicable to modern life, and their problems are surprisingly relatable. I recommend Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life" and Epictetus's handbook in modern translation.
I think another company ate their lunch, unfortunately. Came out with a similar product for 1/2 the price and 2x the range. That company also makes other EVs..
> Sure, picking up Perl now... but I wish I'd been learning about advanced parsers instead.

Fwiw:

Perl 5 is no slouch in the parsing department (via CPAN modules, including partial backports of some Perl 6 technologies).

Perl 6 directly delivers a powerful but relatively easy-to-use parsing environment with its composable grammars and rules (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules).
The author's credentials are impressive, but it's not a very good debunking, IMO. The whole point of the original article was that an electrical fire could have happened that disabled a large amount of the electrical transponders or navigation system.

This author argues that, given this scenario, the pilots would use the interface "with a button press" to know where the nearest airports are; that they would have radioed ATC; that they would have used autopilot! Yet the whole premise of the initial theory was that much of the electronic systems were in failure mode.

He then handwaves detailed discussion of that aspect away: "Even with a large majority of the aircraft's electrical system depowered certain key components would still operate on battery backup, and I venture to guess that includes at least one radio."

I think the important thing to discuss in these speculations is not what the pilots did or didn't do with perfect knowledge and ability, but what they thought they were doing with the limited knowledge they had available to them.
I thought HN was just a holding area for people not cool enough for lobste.rs anyway?
I personally use it for generating CSRs and private keys.
As a former Goldman Sachs Invesment Banking analyst, we used SNL for bank and insurance data and Bloomberg. CapIQ is pretty unreliable and so we never used it.
Both amazing, but I think I prefer Epictetus' Discourses to either one.

I'm not a big fan of Guide to the Good Life either -- mostly because I think it takes a very profound (and by no means simple or obvious) set of ideas and reduces it to a kind of intellectual fad diet.

For something weightier, you might look at the works of Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a Way of Life and What is Ancient Philosophy?), both of which contain excellent discussions of stoicism.
Iterative development is the only part of agile that's right. Everything else in agile is just fluff built around this.
Is it just me or does naming a plotting lib after a common prob/stat concept seem like a bad idea. Makes it a bit of a pain to search for information about.
Sheryl Sandberg has received a lot of press coverage, most of it pretty positive, for her book "Lean In".

As COO of Facebook, she must have known a great deal about what was going on... it would be very interesting for me, given her talk of leadership, if she were asked some questions about this....
Love your username. Can you speak the language?

Re content: the loper-os.org guy is working on foss lisp-based hardware. Check it out.
The only distraction I have is HN which is efficiently managed with the maxvist and minaway options. I don't read my work email constantly since it's not that busy of a communication medium.

At work I have two 30" monitors and they are awesome. I spend almost no time managing windows or having to switch between 'virtual desktops'. There's always a comfortable amount of space to keep a browser and it's dev tools open without comprising on what I need to see.
> what you never heard of using the emergency break

Put yours on, put it in drive, and you'll find that applying throttle will likely easily override the emergency brake. It's there to stop the car from rolling down a hill, not to fight the engine.

Hell, I once drove my parents' car about a mile without realizing it had the brake on.
If I was in a film, The Power of Friendship combined with Plot Armour would fix me right up.
There's one significant catch, which is a limited ability to look around by moving your eyes rather than your head.
This is huge. Congratulations to Coinbase and to the Bitcoin community in general. To the latter because the risk he's taking means he believes a lot in Bitcoin which is exactly what the currency needs to survive.
Huh, I never noticed the flagging on comments before.