skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's awesome to learn about worker co-ops. I was thinking about starting a software development or SAAS company where every person is a worker/owner, so it's good to know they already exist.

Here's what I'd love to do if I ever started my own company:

I start the company with 1 or 2 other software developers and designers. We would each own an equal number of shares. Any new team members would have to go through a relatively intense interview process, but when they joined, they would receive an equal number of shares, which means that our shares would be evenly diluted. And the next time we bring someone new on board, the decision would need to be unanimous.

Since we'd be giving away such a huge number of shares, they would vest over something like 7 years. But we would be giving them actual shares, instead of stock options that you have to exercise with your own cash. Also, keep in mind that that person would probably own more of the company after their first year, than most early employees own after 3. So yes, if we bring on someone new and our company was doing really well, we might be giving away millions of dollars in stock, and paying them massive bonuses in their first month. But why not? If we could pull it off, I think that would be an incredible way to structure a company.

And we'd start all of this without outside investment. Mailchimp and GitHub are two awesome examples of bootstrapped startups. But if it ever made sense for us to raise $100 million, then we'd go ahead and do that, knowing that every single person's shares would be diluted equally.

As soon as we start making enough money, we'd be able to pay everyone an equal base salary. We'd all agree on a budget for equipment, office space, hosting, altruism, and cash reserves, but the rest of the profits would be paid out as monthly bonuses.

We'd also dedicate a very large portion of our time and assets to altruistic causes from the very beginning. Eventually, our company would become a non-profit of sorts, where each of us re-invest our millions, and work on fixing everything that's wrong in the world.

I think that finding like-minded people will be pretty damn hard, but even if it's just ten of us, I think this would be an amazing way to build a company. I don't think this would be able to scale past 50 or 100, but who knows.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant :)
So the people who don't work... what are they providing me?
I'm also running a bootstrapped language-learning site, but focused on Mandarin Chinese (http://www.fastchinese.org/). It's interesting how similar my experience has been. It's tempting to start blogging and do a write-up of my experience like this one, but I'm not ready to take on the overheads that blogging brings with it.

I think one thing that makes language learning difficult is that users are almost guaranteed to eventually churn. Either they reach a level where they have no further need for online learning, or they give up/lose interest.

It's a particularly difficult space right now, as VC-backed ventures like Duolingo have set expectations of irrational business models ($0 pricing/advertising) and are taking a lot of the oxygen out.

I think the future looks a bit brighter. Duolingo as it currently exists seems very far from being sustainable. I see 4 ways that the Duolingos' of the world might go (the "translation services" model is a bit unrealistic, in my view):

1. They'll start charging and become the next Rosetta Stone.

2. Rosetta Stone will acquire them. Probably the most likely outcome given the prominence of Duolingo, the extent that it must be impacting on RS, and the upside to RS if they did acquire Duolingo.

3. They'll fizzle out. According to CrunchBase they've raised ~$40MM and have 12 employees. Their marketing budget must be quite massive, and their headcount is likely to grow.

4. They'll become ad-supported, which would probably make them sustainable but not nearly profitable enough that it would make their investors happy.
I don't think that long-term I'd want any client-code speaking directly to the backend over a generic API. It's far more optimized to migrate to code that sends fewer requests with as little traffic as possible over the wire, and often that means knowing state both on the server and client, which isn't all that RESTful. http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012/05/15/why-rest-keeps-me...

The point is the different design goals: Yes, you can send page after page of HTML, refreshing content that hasn't changed. But we moved to AJAX because that was inefficient. Better to have the browser ask for just the data it needed. Well, efficiency will then lead to either better protocols to bundle up multiple requests or the simpler approach of bundling up data into one request designed for that particular user's session. Hard to put RESTful, meaningful unique IDs on that one.

Of course, the risk you run is one I've frequently encountered in Google Music, for instance. The state graph is messed up somehow and duplicate data or corrupt data starts appearing in the JSON stream to the browser and in the UI. Not much you can do except refresh, logout, or wait for a code update to clear such caches, unfortunately. That can be the downside to "smarter" clients and why even today we have cache clearing and a "force-reload" action.

This is also why automated backend services should use REST for simplicity, and why UIs need to be built to consider network traffic, re-sending failed requests, checking for invalid data, etc.
I don't generally defend Jobs (he was apparently a world-class asshole in general), but the implication in the story seems to be that part of the reason he acted the way he did is because he knew other people in the company—possibly including the two people he had promised 50% to—were potentially listening to the conversation (remember, it was in a cubicle).

In other words, Steve's behavior was at least in part a performance intended to to demonstrate that he was holding up his end of the deal he had made with the developers.

[Of course, the manner he did it in was obviously still pretty obnoxious—he could easily have been much more gracious while still insisting on that number. I'm just saying there did seem to be a concrete reason underlying his actions, it wasn't just him being a jerk... ^^; ]
Is sentience made up of atoms? Is consciousness?
Some malloc() implementations return memory to the OS during free(). Many don't. For example, tcmalloc in its default configuration never returns memory to the OS.

Also, what is "really slow" in the context of nethack? I'm willing to bet that you could malloc and free till the cows come home and never even notice in nethack. I bet the whole program doesn't take up more than a few megs of memory anyway.
Dan'l Lewin mentioned in the article comes across as a pretty decent fellow in this video, and has done pretty well for himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD_CHfiTClg
most probably
Specifically here, for those interested:

http://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/comments/20kdna/mh370_another_...
That venture deals book is about founders negotiating with VCs, and probably mentions the "rookie mistake" of the founders getting stuck with paying for the option pool.

We're talking about something different here - a potential hire joining a company and asking for "X% of the company". If the company agrees to this, then the legal document better not say you got X% of the employee option pool. That kind of shit is obviously going to ruin your employee's trust, because it's extremely fucking shady. I would immediately get the impression that the company/founders are big scammers.
http://paulgraham.store.yahoo.net
It's hosted using Yahoo Stores, which is descended from Viaweb.
What Most American Cities Get Wrong About Entrepreneurship
This is finance. Anon is storing his assets, dealing with uncertainty.

In 'Poor Economics' there was a chapter about saving in West Africa. Apparently the way some people there do it by contributing some money in a pool on a periodical basis and each time the group meets, the pool is immediately given to one member, whose turn it is. So if you are in $10-per day group that withdraws once a month, you can be sure that once every 30 days you'll withdraw your $300, without worrying too much about banks, withdrawal fees, etc.
I realize the game industry won't go away overnight but individual companies will always come and go. The same plan would have been equally plausible with CD stores in the 90's.
I have two questions:
What was your motivation for applying to the masters program and what will be your specialization?

I didn't get my undergrad in CS (instead it was Information Systems) and I feel as if there's a whole body of knowledge regarding programming that I'm totally ignorant of. I've started to think about attending some undergrad CS courses at the local University here and applying to the Georgia Tech program when I'm ready.
how long after threes came out did 2048 appear?
Nevertheless, the favicon that shows on the browser tab is different.
Yeah, this would be great for kids, especially with a good library. Mindstorms really is a great start, and I think that comes down to two things, the physical, and the programming- physical because it's fun making things move, especially things you made, and mindstorms programming is so unbelievably simple in design, and yet so very effective. This seems to grab both parts, it has a nice interface, not too big as to be daunting, nor too small to be useless, and there are tomes written about arduino programming

If you're interested in more advanced mindstorms, check out robotC and similar alternatives. They offer a lot more freedom with coding, so for the more advanced kids, it offers actual code, and a variety of very cool functions.
Wasn't their slogan even at one point basically "like a dial tone"? Hinting at simplicity and reliability.
You're allowed to download video & music, not upload it. Bittorrent also uploads data.
His wasn't an informed comment but it's best responded to with just the links you posted.

Turing seems to be sort of a personal hero to Wolfram, so I'm sure that he'd have some interest in the results in the post.

And for anyone interested in modeling nature with computers more generally, A New Kind of Science is wonderful reading and gives a great conceptual framework on how to go about it. It's sad that the Shalizi review is the first thing people refer to (it's sort of the Huffington Post of reviews).
A psychiatrist cannot differentiate between "any regular person" and "significant degree of sociopathic behavior"?
I hope you are (considered a sensible set)- I hate having a item tied to something permanent, and then needing it again.
So many questions...

- Are "carrier-free" SIMs really illegal? As in, outlawed?

- How do you then choose the operator? Do phones even support such a "selection/login" interface? Or is it a bureaucratic process?

- If the latter, how do you easily switch carriers when traveling between Europe and US?
Totally agree on that! WhatsApp is a solution to a problem/need: simple and low-cost communication with other people. I believe people would get away from WhatsApp and move to another WhatsApp-like platform if WhatsApp was to introduce more complex functionalities that are far from the need it answers to.
BitcoinWisdom: DDoS attack again.
Here is an interesting semi-technical read relating to how Turing's work helps to explain drug-induced hallucinations: http://plus.maths.org/content/uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-hal...
Monte Carlo simulation in general is definitely performance sensitive. If you're averaging over realizations of a process, the accuracy of your estimate typically depends on the square root of the number samples you take. For a given time budget, every factor s improvement you make to the speed of the calculation earns you sqrt(s) more accuracy.

In a high frequency trading situation, if you can estimate a "correct" price faster than your competitor can, then you get to make the trade, and they don't. Doesn't get much more performance sensitive than that.
Maybe I'm weird, but I work harder and produce better work when I have axe to grind, and unhappy. Also, I've noticed that happier coworkers eventually get lazier and more complacent.
It's not normal use of the phrasing but I think the author's meaning is: "Is NPM worth [a] $2.6m [investment]?"

The author seems to think some VCs make investments with limited expectation for a return which I think is mostly wrong (I can easily see GitHub being acquired or IPOing).
The nice thing about using React server-side rendering is that you only have to to implement your rendering logic once and run it in both client and server. While you need to take a little care (client-only code goes in componentDidMount, only require client only libs in client-only scope) it's fairly painless. I have my Python app return json and pipe it through a node subprocess for the first page load.
I'm not sure this is really that remarkable, he just had a personality and got some attention.

There have been high-quality amplifiers around for a long time now and Class T (http://www.google.com/patents/US5777512) amplifiers at that pricepoint are over a decade old. They're very popular with DIY audio guys. I've had my Trends TA-10 close to 10 years old now.

He did something cool, but I don't see it as all that remarkable.
"good artists copy great artists steal"
>"It seems that he was an unrepentant asshole, but I don't think that all of his success came down to just being in the right place at the right time."

Sure.

Again relating this more to what I've experienced than any desire to try and peg exactly what Jobs was or wasn't - I don't think these people are living on luck. I think it's quite the opposite, they're absolutely deliberate in siphoning the talents everyone in their sphere of influence to their own ends. Like other comment here laid out so clearly they're able to take maximum personal advantage of every opportunity.

What being in the right place at the right time would do is present historically unique opportunities and possibly people to pursue/exploit, leading to a bigger sphere encompassing more opportunities.
Note that if there are multiple charges, prosecuting all of them at once benefits the accused as well, who needs to mount only one defense, as opposed to facing multiple trials for multiple charges.

The latter is the case at times especially where federal charges are brought against someone who's been found not guilty on state/local charges within the US. While I understand the tactic, it has significant abuse potential.
Are gorillas using sign language really communicating with humans?
Chinese satellite spots suspicious object in Search for Malaysia's MH370
SMS solves that problem for people who have that specific problem.
Also keep in mind that Jobs and Sorkin seemed to be on pretty friendly terms: http://qr.ae/nS6or
No, we're paying a royalty to Arduino see: http://arduino.cc/en/ArduinoAtHeart/HomePage
Good to know that you can log into HN with an unpatched w3m now. w3m sends "Content-length: " instead of "Content-Length: ", which HN used to dislike.

https://github.com/acg/w3m/commit/5946c2784d4eae46ec06e52390...
Thank you for that link! That was really an eye opening talk.
Thats not his job, he is not a historian. His job is to tell an entertaining story and there is a high probability you will be disappointed.
This bothered me as well. That's a 3.6% error, which is far from negligible. Was the main problem too few trials?
"Could courts even handle a system without plea bargains?"

In a system without plea bargains, the prosecutors wouldn't be able to prosecute as many people, or as many charges. They wouldn't have the resources to go after nearly as many people. The courts would thus have less cases to hear.

Even the suggested system where the prosecution pays the legal costs of the fraction of charges they don't meet would be limiting to prosecutions. I imagine even that would be very difficult to convince legislators to agree to, as it increases costs and hence would reduce the amount of criminals that can be 'put away'.

I find the whole plea bargaining system to be obscene. Prosecutors are basically blackmailing the person into accepting a lesser charge, even if they are innocent of any charge. I remember the first few times I saw this type of thing on tv shows, I thought it was some kind of corrupt dealing: 'surely this is illegal, making a shady private deal between the suspect and the lawyer'.
Nice work!

This is a great complement to the codeschool tutorial [1] it would be nice similarly offer the feature that clicking on the command will auto-populate the virtual terminal. New git users might be more likely to use a client-side GUI where they are clicking buttons rather than typing in the terminal.

[1] http://try.github.io/
Always better not to be the tall grass :)
I too have started learning C++11 recently after having never really had success picking up the language in the past.

Coming from C I found C++ to be really difficult when I tried to pick it up a few years ago. I have since learnt Python,Ruby and C# and now I am having alot more success.
So I really do second your opinion that learning something like Java (in my case C#) really helps a ton.

I also highly recommend checking out the books recommended here: http://isocpp.org/get-started
I am currently reading C++ Primer. :)
Having a different opinion than yours is not an error.
Quizzes are free data mining tools for brands
No, I actually meant that for a particular act, you could be held accountable for one crime committed during the act and that's it. The idea being the prosecutor would pick the most serious charge likely to win conviction and focus their attention on that. I thought it would streamline the entire process and result in a higher quality trial, since attention would not have to be split amongst several charges.

I was thinking of two situations: multiple homicides resulting in e.g. multiple life sentences - this has always seemed like silly theatrics to me - and the situation where e.g. a traffic stop for a busted taillight might lead to charges of driving on a suspended license, drugs possession because the friend-of-a-friend you're giving a ride to had weed on him and threw it under the seat, and resisting arrest because you argued with the cop. I was NOT thinking about gamer criminals trying to execute multi-crime combo moves, or about the scenario where someone was killed and rape was certain but murder iffy.

So overall the one charge approach has a lot of problems. It was a poorly formulated idea and I should not have posted it.

Thanks for attempting to find reason in it, though.
I far prefer threaded discussions to flat discussions. The ability to hide child comments on a top-level comment is a godsend for wading through lengthy threads (so much so that I made a small Chrome extension to automatically hide child comments on HN by default) and threaded discussions force each reply to be a reply to a specific comment which I generally find makes replies more relevant to the topic at hand.
Complete luck. Timing to start out in the right industry, followed by vigorous effort, learning, and experimentation. I also built many relationships early on in my career that I've mostly kept alive throughout the last decades. I've changed careers twice when the old skills/industry lowered the value of those skills. Keep learning - read Richard Hamming's _You and Your Research_ [1]. Keep friends and work hard. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw
I believe there's also some relation to the task/type of job you are doing, if you work alone or as part of a team, etc.
Ah, I'm glad to hear it!
Mild changes to mechanism or community can have profound influences. Look at the trajectories of MySpace, Slashdot, or Digg, as examples.

That said, I'm modestly optimistic for the "pending" policy.
A good point, and LINE also reports around 50% of their revenue coming from in-game purchases, hinting at what the author sees in Kik's future. It will be interesting to see if Kik can replicate LINE's Japan successes in North America.
since npm doesnt scale they will sell private repos to big businesses...kidding. well almost,since the only money to be made with npm is in consulting fees.
How an Under-Appreciated iOS 7 Feature Will Change the World
About a month. Threes! came out on February 6 [1], while 2048's git repository started on March 5 [2] and the game was first published about a week after that.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/6/5361708/threes-ipad-iphone-...

[2] https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/2048/commit/f4d95b66723cd...
I've just been reading the threads and haven't found anything that conclusively debunks this theory. From what I understand, this theory is just as likely as the hijacking one (both have holes that don't quite fit given the current evidence).
The best resources I've found for understanding git workflows are by Vincent Driessen[1] and Atlassian[2].

The Atlassian page is much more comprehensive, and in fact derives the 'GitFlow' workflow from Driessen. However, I prefer his original top-to-bottom representation (a left-to-right time axis seems less intuitive to me - they remind me of a football playbook rather than a waterfall).

[1] http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
[2] https://www.atlassian.com/git/workflows
Well this is sad. I think this sentence sufficiently summarizes the article:

> What isn’t alright by me is a game that releases for free and makes no attempt to make money

Are you releasing work for free? You're an evil nihilist.
Just thought since I have the opportunity I'd mention: My biggest problem with ImpactJS is that I'm required to pay before I'm allowed to try using it.

I've considered it a number of times but each time, that $99 barrier pushes me back towards the alternatives like Panda.js (which I believe is actually inspired by Impact). Not to mention Unity, which is free for some platforms.

If you offered a trial license, that would be awesome, although I understand you likely don't because of fear of abuse.
I feel this is the slippery slope of intellectual property. People, such as this author, are beginning to believe that carving off different intellectual ideas into individual monopolies is a moral imperative.

Copyright is insufficient. The mere idea of tile-moving number game must be protected so the "original" creator gets paid. Regardless of whether the idea is so trivially simple that a programmer can reproduce it as a hobby and feels no need to own it.
Select2 3.4.6 released
FYI, the term is scrip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
TransitingNow TwitterBot live-tweets every known exoplanet transit
I just checked it out for a few minutes and signed up. It looks very nice (lots of attention to detail, I can tell). I'm a native English speaker actively learning Spanish, living in Buenos Aires since November. I'm at the point where vocabulary seems like a bottleneck for me, so readlang may be a good fit.

Since reading/vocab is just one part of language learning (in addition to grammar, speaking, listening, etc), it seems like Readlang could fill this gap that other tools have (verbling, duolingo, etc). See if you can get the attention of some other bloggers in the language learning community, like Benny (?) the Irish polyglot guy (fluentin3months), or even Tim Ferriss. If they blog about it, you'll probably get some good traffic.
Impulse Tracker was used for the soundtrack in a number of computer games too, right? I know for a fact that Deus Ex used .IT files for the music (and that game has a very interesting soundtrack), but I'm sure there are others as well. Deus Ex was ~2000, so we are talking after the dawn of MP3 at least.
InclinedPlane wrote a fantastic post on this exact topic a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4753117
Welcome to the future, where being unselfish is considered evil, consumption is the only good, and sharing is a crime.

As Franz Kafka wrote, "we live in an age which is so possesed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime."