skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if I use bitcoins to buy something and then the vendor doesn't ship it to me?

I fully expect this is part of the user experience Stripe will sell. If I buy something through Stripe using bitcoins and get stiffed, is Stripe going to tell me "too bad" when I complain to them?

No, they won't, because Stripe isn't suicidal.
I think that it's a good strategy for Microsoft to make its software run on other platforms. This isn't the 1990s anymore where Windows is the dominant platform. It's not even the early 2000's with the "I'm a Mac vs. I'm a PC" meme. Now there are multiple popular platforms (at least in the consumer market), none with clear dominance, and meanwhile Microsoft's software only works on their own platform.

They have to compete now, and their software should sell on its own merits, not because of platform lock-in network effects. This will make Microsoft a better company with a higher quality product.
Grepping a huge file (80GB) any way to speed it up?
Out of all the news coverage showing the search crews manning the planes, never once did I see anyone wearing sunglasses. Wouldn't polarized glasses actually help with reflection/glare?
It comes from large investors: often university endowments or public pension funds. These groups are called the "Limited Partners", or "LPs". It's usually a small percentage of those investors' overall investment portfolio.

When there is an exit--a sale of stock--most of the money goes back to these LPs. The money is (more or less) split like this: the LPs get their investment back first then, of the gain, 80% goes to the LPs and the rest goes to the company managing the venture fund to split up as it pleases (this last 20% is called the "carry".)
My white male neighbor made a version of his resume with a different name to appear as an african-american female and got many more responses for his education/childcare related applications.
Would have been nice to know the product in question, so he could relate concrete examples of how Bezos is meticulous in his eye for detail and customer experience. I mean, it'd be neat reading an article talking about the first prototyped version of MayDay, and how Bezos laughed about it in the first meeting, transforming it to what it's become today.
VC's are typically raising money for their funds from even larger funds -- ie hedge funds, private equity firms, endowments, pensions, etc. Any funds with a lot of capital that are looking to diversify. These larger funds become LP's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_partnership) and generate a return typically at the end of some time period -- something like 5 years. So any money from acquisitions/IPOs etc will be returned at that point.
Doesn't the presence and popularity of adblockers and anti-trackers give these morons a sense that what they're doing isn't wanted (pushing advertisement everywhere)?

It's sort of like telemarketers and do-not-call lists: if you're such a huge horse's patoot that people pass laws against your behavior, it's a huge hint to change that behavior.
No, Word and Excel started out on the Mac and came to Windows later. I think what you're referring to is, there was a deal in the '90s where Microsoft helped out Apple, which included investment and maintaining an Internet Explorer Mac port (this was a much bigger deal back then). This gave the company some breathing room. At the time Apple was circling the drain and everyone assumed that they would be out of business in a matter of years if not months. This was the same era as Microsoft's antitrust suits, so what Microsoft got out of it was a (very weak at the time) competitor that they could continue pointing to as evidence that they weren't a monopoly.
Marc Andreessen discusses BitCoin on Freakonomics
Why is it that for some people political correctness - something which tries to make people respect one another more and be nice - is the devil.

You have the right to say almost whatever you want. That doesn't mean you fucking should, does it? There's a big difference between the two
I have yet to see any iOS app doing a reliable job in even just displaying Excel and Word documents.

A long time ago I thought that LibreOffice or Pages were close enough, good enough to not need Office, but in reality there is still some random document once in a while that has the history messed up, or the layout hides a part of the text, or images are not at the right place. It might be 98% OK, but you can't always afford to give up on the 2% of information your are missing.

Forcing Office users to give a sensible version of the files when sharing is the best solution, but having a native iOS version of Office for when that's not an option is invaluable.
And even if they are, how often do you send documents to people looking for edits in a situation where you can't assume that they have access to Word? It's pretty much standard issue.
The interesting thing to do is to look at the progression. Project spark is a huge improvement over little big planet 1 both in graphics and game variety , and maybe programming model/power. Why won't this kind of improvement continue , or maybe there will be some collaborative model between spark and some framework ?
> because growth is nearly the only thing that really matters, if you can't get growth, then you should probably hang up your boots and retire from founder life.

Lifestyle businesses are not failures. If you're making enough money to live on from your business, and you're happy, then keep doing it, even if your business isn't growing.
That's a pity, like Ksplice
No, it's completely different from sales tax because while the company will have slightly increased costs (usually ~2.5%), they will also move significantly more inventory which will allow quicker reinvestment cycles, and thus more growth. This is the value of credit/debt in general: assuming everyone trusts everyone else transaction volume can greatly increase. And that trust comes from the credit card companies.
There is a documented instance of him supporting treating gay people, including Mozilla employees, as second class humans.

You expect employees to keep working for a CEO who doesn't consider them equal human beings?

Why do people keep pretending this is a valid political view? This is about vicious hatred, and if he can keep that under control I admire his discipline, but no employee should have to work under that threat.
Talking points thus far:

1) Waaah this isn't tolerance!!

2) People (meaning Brendan Eich) are allowed to have their personal opinions. (note: "Brendan Eich should not be Mozilla's CEO" is not an acceptable personal opinion.)

3) This is a witch hunt, political correctness run rampant, etc
Yes, this would be amazing. C# and F# are great programming languages, and it would earn a lot of developer goodwill if Microsoft decided to officially support the effort to break these languages out of the Windows ghetto.
> no one is not influenced by those around them

You are correct, but not everyone becomes just like those they choose to be around. Everyone can learn from and influence others, but that doesn't mean "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."

I would have preferred a title along the lines of "There is a good chance that you may become who you choose to be around".
> the companies and their wealthy investors are profiting from exploiting their communities and refusing to play by the rules. That's a point of pride among the tech titans, who speak proudly of the "disruption" that they create and adopt vaguely libertarian anti-government postures when it suits their interests.

Ok I don't think when an entrepreneur says "disruption" he means "exploiting my community." The community wants Airbnb and Uber, that's why the pay for them.
More than half the Bitcoin supply is in existence right now, no one person owns any significant percentage. Except SN.
And what stops the customer from filing a bogus complaint, same as they do now if they use a credit card?
VCs' portfolio companies often raise debt. This is called venture debt and the lenders are banks like Silicon Valley Bank.

VCs tend to have a love/hate relationship with venture debt. On the one hand, it means they suffer less dilution as the company grows; on the other hand, it means their investment gets riskier just at the point where they are finally de-risking the company.
This article should be retitled "Government wants a piece of the pie"
I just googled "open source scrobbler", and came up with http://libre.fm

For those looking for a replacement audioscrobbler, there you go!
Sometimes you have to vote for the lesser evil. It's pragmatism. Choose between the person who will try and stop gay marriage from happening by enshrining it in law or the person who won't actively stop it (or someone who has no chance of getting in). Seems quite obvious.
Well yeah, maybe you'll like Clojure better. Different style as I've said.

I'm playing with Haskell as well. Cool language, the ecosystem does suck a little.
Nice - make a Firefox Extension and I'll be a daily user.
I enjoyed the depth that "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" went into. It was written by John Resig, the author of JQuery.
I agree with you. I think it is both ethical and important to do this kind of study. I'm just speaking from the perspective of existing human trial data--I think it will be difficult to find a significant difference in outcomes.
Word and Excel started on the Mac as Steve asked Bill to provide them for MacOS in 1984 or so. Windows was not a viable platform until at least 1989 but by 1992 Office was complete and on its way to domination.
Take a look at the video/demo of the Snapper toolset built on top of btrfs. Might give you a better feel for maturity level and the tooling that it enables: http://snapper.io/
In the past GIMP was the winner of my personal disproportionate swearing award. That all changed when I started to use Calibre for ebook management. Calibre is far and away, the worst UI for "best in class open source software."
Venture funds are "General Partners" that manage a pool of capital on behalf of "Limited Partners" or LPs. Limited partners in a fund this size are usually pension funds (CalPERS), university and not-for-profit endowments (Harvard, Brown, MacArthur Foundation), and maybe high-net-worth individuals.

So A16Z raises commitments of 1.5B from all of these people who have a lot of money that they want to grow. Those people deploy their capital to VC, to Hedge/PE funds, to timber, to public markets, to bonds, etc.

A16Z aren't actually given a pile of cash though, instead A16Z does capital calls on an as-needed basis. Then A16Z deploys that capital to startups and other companies over the life of the fund (often ten years with some extensions).

Most venture funds operate on something like a "two and twenty model" meaning that every year they get 2% of the funds value for operating expenses. In A16Z they have a huge staff of designers, recruiters, BD experts, etc, that help their startups. The 2% goes toward things like that.

The 20% is carry, which is earned as a percentage of net income. So let's say that A16Z invests 5M in a company on a 10M pre-money valuation. A16Z owns 1/3 of the company. The company sells for $30M the next day to Facebook. A16Z now has $10M dollars. They take $2M of that for themselves and then they distribute back to the LPs the other $8M.

(This is lacking a lot of nuance like side funds, but I hope it's helpful).
Staff at Mozilla call for new CEO Brendan Eich to 'step down'
How can I get in on the class action lawsuit?
It's plausibly deniable that you're contributing tithes specifically to take rights away from gays. It's hard to deny that if you're contributing to Prop 8.
Democracy in action.
Thanks for posting this Sam!

If anyone thinking about YC has any follow up questions, happy to answer them here. It truly was an amazing experience for us.
Developers must demand freedom!
"Information wants to be free" doesn't apply to North Korea because they never had access to the Internet as we know it? Information is only dependent on the Internet insofar as the Internet is a transmission medium. Other media exist even in NK- print, broadcast, word-of-mouth.

Information can be exchanged freely by whispering voices.
The context of the discussion was a bitcoin card vs a credit card. Cash has nothing to do with the conversation we're having. Don't move the goalposts.

But I'll play the moving-the-goalpost game. For in-person transactions they have some similarities. They both have no chargeback or consumer protections, but we're receiving goods immediately so thats not a very large issue. Cash is instantaneous, unlike Bitcoin. Cash doesn't have exchange risk. Cash doesn't have transaction fees, while Bitcoin does. So cash is actually superior for an in-person transaction.

If I'm going to do an in-person transaction and am not going to use my card, why would I not use cash? If I don't want to carry cash, why would I not use my card? And if its an online transaction, then chargebacks are definitely something I want, even with a trusted merchant. So whats the use case for bitcoin? The OP proposed one use case; I assume that there are people who find that valid. It is not a case that interests me, personally, and that prompted my response.
To my understanding the main thing that causes myopia in children and contributes to age related vision deterioration is insufficient bright light. You simply have to clock up an hour or two outside in daylight every day. Even very brightly lit rooms are a fraction as bright as the outdoors on a cloudy day.
Few sites can make a subscription model work, advertising is the main income for most.
The Mill is closer to a queue machine [1] than a stack machine.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queue_automaton
It's really not that bad. Stripe would presumably offer you a full ledger showing the exact time and price of all the Bitcoins you used.

There are some things to be skeptical about, but the IRS hasn't made Stripe's use of Bitcoin any harder. They have to keep super-careful records anyway.
Journalists Don't Look At Traffic Numbers
Yup, exercise your eye muscle does wonders.
OP here – this is a tool we built for doing really fast metagenomic classification. Happy to answer any questions if folks have them.
Just curious, are there any reports/posts of people or companies who think that Y Combinator was not worth it?
>the last thing I would want is for my house to be surrounded by people who won bidding wars just to own property near me.

That's hypocrisy. He's repeatedly gone on record stating that he believes peoples' lives should be fully open and shared.

But he doesn't want his own life to be open and shared?
Salsa20 could be replaced by almost anything -- the requirements for the mixing function are very very weak (basically just that there's no short-cut to iterating). But Salsa20 has an advantage in throughput, which matters for maximizing the amount of memory you can use in a given amount of time.

Asymptotically speaking the best function there is the one which maximizes [B/s software output]^2 / [B/s hardware output].
Apparently lots of people (still) don't know about it but there have been free browser versions of Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote since 2010. They were recently rebranded from Office Web Apps to Office Online, along with easier access directly from office.com. Here's the relevant HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302221

If you publish/upload the document to OneDrive (7 GB is free) you can send the link to anyone and then they can view and edit the document for free in the browser, just like with Google Docs.
"ANDREESSEN: It’s a little bit like dogs watching TV. It’s like, it’s all very interesting, but like whatever until another dog shows up on screen and then the dog freaks out. Economists, like this stuff is all like, whatever, technology, geek, nerds whatever and then “currency” is the flag. And so the minute the word “currency” shows up, all the economists perk up because if there’s one thing economists are all experts on it’s currency… And they look at it and they say, “Oh my god, people are paying $600 for this thing, it’s just a piece of fake digital currency, people have just lost their minds.” I don’t think that they are looking at the underlying substance."

Golden --- if a bit dismissive.

Its natural for entrenched systems to resist change, but as MtGox has demonstrated, the incumbents are not without their sources of value.
i wonder if anyone will actually leave mozilla if he stays.
Also worth reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wash_symbols

The external link list gives nice examples for symbols in different countries.
Considering Apple's Cloud apps are still in beta, that would be unfair. I can't edit my KeyNote presentation in the cloud at the moment, so yeah.
Regardless of one's opinion, how can you have a serious discussion without mentioning the benefit users get from these products? That's what drives the whole thing.
I find this attitude bizarre. How can they know what their audience is interested in or not?

I agree that writing silly thinks like "Top 5 Cute Cats That Are Friends With Justin Bieber" to get traffic is absurd, but you need to know where your readers are most interested among genuine topics of interest.
According to WP, it started as a Xenix application, made its way over to DOS (to compete with WordPerfect or WordStar IIR), then Mac, then a few other platforms before finally ending up on Windows in 89.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_word
There'll be a crowd along in a bit howling about censorship and intolerance and how we shouldn't judge people on their beliefs. I wonder how many of them would feel the same if Eich had donated to a campaign to illegalize interracial marriage.
Exactly. A lot of players have one great year, it's the ones with consistent careers that stick out.

Also, Zuckerberg's recent purchases seem more like defensive measures than investments. Seems more like Gates than Buffett.
This is a ridiculous comment. Governments should be entitled to a reward for schooling these people to wealth, for likely funding their growth (as people) and health, for protecting them from criminals, for collecting their trash, for cleaning the streets around their office, governments (despite many government workers) don't just sit around trying to extort businesses, they're trying to fund a happy future.

I'm not saying I agree with the article in its' entirety, but there is a solid reasoning behind taxation.
Topcoder Algorithm Tutorials
It's an interesting story to relate, but it seems to be missing details that could really flesh it out, and it ended abruptly.
For most miners at the present time this is not true. The reference code does not do this, and most mining pools are running something close to the reference code. (And furthermore, most such txes will never transit the network in any case, because most nodes will refuse to relay them.)
Pretty much anyone that has ever built something has been there. You either built something in search of a problem (i.e., something no one wanted) or failed to reach the audience that did want it (a marketing issue).
New Google Adsense Alpha Dashboard
The dashboard can be found here: https://as-dashboard.appspot.com/.

More information at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-adsense-reporting-dashboard-18316.html.
I don't necessarily think the comparison with Warren Bueffett is the most interesting thing. More that Facebook is going to become a tech conglomerate with many companies, rather than an engineering company like Google or Microsoft or Amazon.

I think that lines up with a lot of things about the situation; not least that I find it impossible to imagine "Facebook the website" dominant in, say, a decade in the way it is now.
Visual Revolution of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
Individuals can freely choose a taxi cab over Uber if insurance is a concern for them.

Individuals who are not concerned with insurance may find that they should have been.

Governments should not make it their job to protect individuals from every bad choice they could make.

Why is this concept which is so simple so terribly hard to grasp?
Because "code it if you know how or pay someone to code it" is not an answer when talking about software and lack of features, even if it's OSS.

OSS software is built by its community of developers, not by its community of users (even if those overlap a little, the second is many orders of magnitude bigger). So when someone criticizes it that it lacks feature X, telling them to "code it" themselves is not really helpful. They already know they have this option. If they had the knowledge, inclination, interest and time, they would have done it already. Not to mention that even if they tried, community politics and roadmaps might be against their wanted feature.

Can we accept that someone is free to criticize a piece of OSS software without being obliged to fix it himself?
Can you elaborate a little on how you got to that maximization? I am not sure I understand why you're squaring the software level.
Hasn't Office always been available for the Mac?
Some interesting read on A16Z.

The keys to Andreessen Horowitz's success (February 15, 2013) [1]

Ben Horowitz on quality of good founders to be CEO (Mar 14, 2010) [2]

Mark Andreessen interview on Bloomberg about their strategy (Feb 28, 2103) [3]

On the Charlie Rose show about feature of Facebook (Nov 11, 2012) jump to min 15:00 [4]

Insights into their investing strategy based on 20 of their investments (Oct 17, 2013) [5]

Investment syndication patterns (Oct 3, 2013) [6]

Ben Horowitz presentation at DLD Conference on how they choose an investment (Feb 1, 2013) [7]

[1] http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/02/15/andreessen-horowitz-t...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/notes-on-leadership-jobs-gr...

[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/video/67149794-andreessen-interview...

[4] http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60150320

[5] http://digitalmedia.strategyeye.com/article/WvR0QuYTcU/2013/...

[6] http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/trends/sequoia-a16z-investmen...

[7] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-andreessen-horowitz-choos...
asp.net is open source, and it should run on any CLR.
You can no longer view cat videos in Turkey
Where did all of this moral relativism come from?

What Eich believes goes against basic human rights. This isn't some argument about tax rates.
Tarsnap is extremely low cost as it is for the service it offers.

Edit: in most HNers opinion.
I wouldn't want to work for someone who donated directly to political campaigns that were against me.

You don't want to help make someone else rich if you have good reason to believe that they will spend the money on making your life worse.
list vs. lists
>> Of course we can. It's the government that can't.

Is that true? I'm not American or a lawyer so I don't know what workplace discrimination laws are like, but I would assume that in many western countries, you can't legally discriminate against or harass workers or fellow employees based on their beliefs.

This opens up a legal question to which I don't know the answer: Where would these "step down" tweets tread legally with respect to workplace harassment?
I would assumed this is covered by patents from Google.
I believe that's what they're doing, with the "free to view, pay to edit" model.
$1 trillion student loan debt widens US wealth gap
My bias is showing. I have a deadly condition and when doctors wrote me off, I began trying stuff. I didn't die. I got better. So I was kind of speaking from first-hand experience, which tends to be kind of biased. I generally read as a Shirley Temple-esque optimist type, not because I am naïve but because I know firsthand what can be done when things can't really get any worse so you decide to try "the crazy thing".

Take care.
For what it's worth, my opinion on that is the exact opposite. Colin's blog post was enlightening and clearly just his own opinion.
They aren't that naive -- it's one of very many systems to exert control over. Their issue is that Twitter doesn't bow to pressure in the same manner that CNN Turkey does.