skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You seem to think investors are some sort of ATM

No. I don't seem to think that, at all.

Let me explain it again, just for you.

A common problem for startups seems to be dealing with investors who say they're in and a week later they're out and then later they're in again and then out, etc.

As a start up you'd like "commitment" from an investor because if an investor claims they're in and then they're out, it would be immensely frustrating right? It means you can't commit to hiring that great developer or rent that office space you so desperately need or pay yourself some salary for a change.

You might have met with an investor a few times and at some point they "say" they are very interested and they'd like to invest $100k in your idea. If you then explain to them that you'd like them to sign a commitment agreement to see how serious they actually are. If they sign it they can still change their minds, it will just cost them x% of the proposed investment. If they are not willing to sign it might just show that they're not actually interested after all, they just like to keep you around just in case something else falls through.

It's just business right?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-alr...
The last technical section raised a question I've never thought about: when the mining runs out in a hundred years, how will new blocks holding transactions be added to the block chain?

My intuition is that there's a difference between the proof of work for the purpose of the block chain versus mining coin that's glossed over in this article. Any description I remember seeing conflates the two. Is there something more going on there?

I suppose then transaction costs will necessarily rise to cover the discrepancy, though it seems like an efficient market so they'll probably just replace the reward.
Other way around. One of the options engineers receiving the mailing have is to go to the hearing and present their opinions on the settlement to the judge.

Most won't, but with 64k plaintiffs, most of them long-winded, it'll still need to be a patient judge.
Or even just wifi access-points on telephone poles.

Municipalities can be dumb and captured, but when a few innovate, and then the laggards are embarrassed, deeper and more interesting change will happen, compared to anything that can happen through a DC/FCC/DNC/RNC lobbying process.
As defined as: "has at least left a comment on YouTube". I'm not sure I'd count that as "active G+ users".
If one can solve a tridiagonal linear system in JS that is totes doable in a psuedo physical way: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~whmin/Wang-2007-SGS/Wang-2007...

The Thomas algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tridiagonal_matrix_algorithm) and that technique could probs make your dream come true.
When's the hyperloop coming?
Only Nixon could go to China; only Obama could establish a tiered internet.
Major Linux Problems on the Desktop 2014 edition
The core of the Citizens United decision was that becoming a member of a group (ie: Corporation) did not abrogate individual rights. The implication is that groups of people have the exact same rights as individuals.

I think there needs to be a corollary in terms of responsibility.

Of course, the entire raison d'etre of modern corporations is to indemnify the members against responsibility for the actions of the group.
You say that as though those things are exclusive, rather than complementary.
cpeterso got the idea from other Mozilla employees. The "he as offered to stay as CEO" grew legs when employees started responding on the governance newsgroup to people complaining about the firing. One person (Yoric I think) said he was offered a position. Then it grew to offered to stay as CEO. Then it grew to "Brendan even got angry about being asked to stay on" or some such statement. It's a classic case of incremental additions to an originally incorrect statement.

Brendan set the record straight and after that the official Mozilla line was clarified. The FAQ was updated to be clearer after Brendan made those comments.
How does something like this usually go down? What can we expect from Amazon?
I guess that's kind of the point of App Engine.
I love the enthusiasm.

This read like a tech version of a Scooby Doo episode.

A great mystery solved with a little symlink.
I have not badmouthed the new CEO Mozilla at all. This is a thread about the new CTO. Note that I don't criticize the new CTO for his religious or other beliefs. I criticize him for not having the people skills to perform his job.

Given the age of your account and the contents of your comments I don't think you're one to throw stones.
There are a lot of people who manage to live in the bay area on far less than $7500/month. For example, it's very affordable to live in Oakland and commute in on BART.
You're forgetting who has the power in this relationship. It's the people with the money. Remember the Golden Rule? "He who has the money makes the rules".
It would entirely depend on the ecological niche it's exploiting. Ebola's preferred host (currently unknown, though bats are suspected) isn't human. Though its symptoms on humans are catastrophic, it may be asymptomatic to its primary host. It's effects on humans being only coincidental.
Can anyone tell me what would be the problem with just having a law "no law is allowed to be passed preventing any individual or entity from providing broadband service to any other individual or entity"? And how said problem would be worse than the current dismal arrangements?
Living in a re-purposed warehouse, subsisting on ramen and not knowing whether you'll be able to pay for food tomorrow seems like a very high price to pay just to be physically close to something that mostly lives just as an idea in these young people's minds. If anything, it strikes me as a terribly dismal existence for not a whole lot of reward and enjoyment. The most ironic thing is that the people who reap the most benefits of living in the Valley are the ones working for big established companies.

I think it is more probable that many people who decide to do this do it for the lifestyle and for the image they associate with the "startup" life, the same way some people decide to live in hippie communes. It's just a lifestyle choice.
The Way We Build the Web is Changing
The amount of BTC that gets "mined" when a block is created is orthogonal to the difficulty of the proof of work.

Blocks will continued to be mined at a constant rate (in mainline BTC, 1 per 10 minutes) indefinitely. The proof-of-work required for the next block to be considered valid--basically, how small a percentage of the hash search-space your hashed block has to land within--is based on the difference in timestamps of the blocks that came recently before it; effectively, the faster blocks make it into the chain, the harder it becomes to mine another, and the slower blocks make it in, the easier it becomes to mine another.

On the other hand, the BTC that the miner gets from a block is basically an implicit transaction included in the block, and acts just like any other one signed inside the block, transferring a given amount of money "out of thin air" into the account of the miner. Like any other transaction, the validity of this transaction for any given amount is a matter of policy set by the consensus of the network of bitcoin clients. The policy on the BTC network for how much money is valid to claim in an "out of thin air" transaction is a function of the block's timestamp/blockchain depth; as more blocks get mined over time, the amount of money it's valid to claim in the sourceless transaction in your block diminishes to zero. These implicit transactions will still, technically, be happening every time a block is created--they'll just be for a below-quantum (1 satoshi) amount of BTC, and thus discarded in accounting.

In the distant future, blocks will still be being mined one-per-ten-minutes, but their timestamp/block-id will translate into them no longer having any implicit value. They will, however, still have the explicit value of the transaction fees invested into them by the transactions they sign.
You ask in what way are your comments abusive. I believe you to be trolling because of your style of argument. You say things like [1]:

"Gert (and his supporters), do you also hate women, blacks and jews as much as you hate gays, and do you agree with Brendan Eich’s support of Patrick J. Buchanan and Ron Paul?"

In that entire comment you bring up unrelated issues involving US politicians as if trying to direct supporters of Mozilla and Brendan of being supporters of that view. People discussing with you then have to address points like that or be seen as supporting it. It's a classic trolling technique to do this.

I also find statements like the following abusive [2]:

"Apparently the people who warned me that you had such a thick skull that no outside information could get through and affect your thought processes were correct, and that makes me sad, because I had more faith in you."

In that comment you bring up the Mormon religion which I have no idea what that has to do with Mozilla or the Brendan Eich saga. Again, classic troll misdirection.

[1] http://blog.gerv.net/2014/04/your-ire-is-misdirected/#commen...
[2] http://blog.gerv.net/2014/04/your-ire-is-misdirected/#commen...
IBM unveils Power8 and OpenPower pincer attack on Intel’s x86 server monopoly
Free some, jail some others...Degrees of guilt, impact of their crime and all.
Yep, the Medallion Rug Gallery. (I see someone else already linked to it.)

The coconut bra thing is clearly facetiously phrased, but I think it captures a fundamental truth of Silicon Valley in 2014, yes. I suspect that if you had that degree and even a remotely plausible sounding business idea, you could walk into an investor meeting alone and walk out with seed money. You probably couldn't literally walk into the meeting with a coconut shell bra and perform improvised bird calls, but the point is that such a person could half-ass things to a much greater degree than someone without such a degree could.
either a quick out of court settlement (which is most likely what the plaintiff is hoping for) or they will fight it since its not very likely that the low volume sale fyretv will be losing customers based on confusion of amazon's firetv
The first version of Sharepoint was a portal server built on Outlook/Exchange. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharepoint#History

Another product team pages evolved from Frontpage server extension. Both products merged to what is known as Sharepoint 2003.

Most of the functionallity is still in Outlook client. You can also sync Sharepoint sites with Outlook and access your document libraries offline.
Almost certainly repost prevention... I tried to add this article yesterday and was upvote 4 on the previous link. It just didn't get the random boost it needed to make it to the front page.
A US dollar is a commodity that has a useful value, too: it can be used to pay your US taxes or settle your debts with someone who has to pay their US taxes.

If the US announced that it would also accept taxes in bitUSD, and sold a few biT-Bills in exchange for dollars...
Yep, should've made that clear in my original comment.
NY Times Publishes Fabricated Evidence to Sell WW3
Sure, I could spend my expertise living frugally in one of the world's most incredible cities... or the company I am helping out could help me better by providing me with a simple room to live in inside a house near their office filled with other like minded people.

I am an expert programmer, I don't want to spend my 3 months in San Francisco in a hostel just to help the greater good and save a few bucks.
Linux PDF presenter with notes seen only to user
Why this startup is better off in Tokyo than in Silicon Valley
I'd have thought a state granted monopoly is something Americans would oppose strongly enough to prevent such laws? O.o
Bitcoin-mining malware reportedly found at Google Play
Tech giants settle no-poaching court case
26. Never ask users to download an app to do what they could do on your website.

27. Your mobile and full sites should have similar layouts, so users used to one won't get lost on the other.

28. Content/functions on your main website should also be available on your mobile website. Otherwise, users will search for things that aren't there and become very, very, angry.

29. Avoid using popups as they are harder to close on mobile devices. (Really, you shouldn't be using them on your desktop site either.) It is especially dumb for popups to ask a user to fill out a survey on their satisfaction with your site before they've started using it.

30. Switching to the full site should be easy and obvious. Do not attempt to thwart this functionality.
The same :-)
The secret to ‘nearly unbreakable’ encryption was hiding inside the human body
If Netflix were to make their users' devices upload as much data as they download (even junk data which would be discarded at by their edge routers), would they solve the problem of the in/out data imbalance, and thereby be able to take advantage of free peering (with no bandwidth cap) with Comcast?

I suspect this wouldn't be the case, and the outcome would still be about their bargaining position and the negotiation process.

Can anyone with knowledge of these types of negotiations comment?
> I'm pretty sure you can't even post to G+ using the API.

And you're pretty wrong. You do that by posting App Activities via the Moments API (which the user controls the visibility of using Circles, just like any other posts.)

https://developers.google.com/+/api/moment-types/
These come in a number of different types with different semantic properties, with a generic fallback type, and a publicly posted process to request new types.
Technology firms settle suit brought by technical workers
Most of the people who work at startups are salaried employees. So what's your point?

As for your third option, it's called self-employment. It demands that you fight for every scrip, scrap, and slice, but the reward is high: it's one of the best and only ways to get paid what you're truly worth.
A friend of mine was a trader of some long term with a particular bank and, because of his length of service with the bank, had to receive a few month's notice of termination.

They terminated him and made him come in to work to sit in a featureless room with only a table and chair -- no computer, nothing. He'd rather stay at home and garden or whatever, even it meant finishing up early, but they wouldn't let him. He always said that he must have seriously pissed someone off in HR.
Gosh, Perhaps Next Time Don't Appoint a Lobbyist to Run the FCC?
Hammer.js, Ext, Flex,Sencha Touch, Google Maps and more ... for Java Developers
Agreed, I just came to comment on that sentence as well. It's presented with no argument or references so it's just hyperbole.
I read the article first, and thought they were referring to another older HN thread on this topic. Thanks for pointing this out. It's a bit hard to believe (and insane) that they're updating their article real-time. And they've not even marked it as an edit.
"We'll be featured in Wired in 3 months!" It probably helped them.
Yes, definitely! Then scientists might be considered interesting human beings.
> This is precisely why "What's your runway?" is such an important question to ask before you accept a job offer from a startup.

Let's say you did ask the question and got an as-honest-as-you-can-expect answer. (two months, but we're soon to close a million-dollar round) How does that really help you make your decision? You could look at them and try to judge whether they might make their round, but you're probably better off in Vegas.

If I've read the article right, runway doesn't mean what it used to mean anymore. You can keep raising small amounts of money for a good while before investors will give up on you, and even if the company ends up folding, you're still working and getting experience and making connections.
> the guy was too busy partying with random celebrities to know what companies Google Ventures was even invested in.

Where was it shown that was the case? That's just your interpretation. In fact, that's just your interpretation of the author's interpretation of the author's friend's interpretation. You list that out and the ridiculousness of the article becomes evident. In fact, I'm willing to bet that was the author's goal. To make you think negatively of this particular VC by inserting random innuendos.

I'd certainly agree that the engineer does not know anything about payroll. And that doesn't matter. He's there to build out technology. Presumably the people who started the company are experts in payroll systems. If the author had met a wantrapreneur who had never worked a day in his/her life and wanted to start a payroll company, that would be the absurd situation the author is clearly looking for.
> Exactly which behaviours seen during that scandal do you think should have been illegal or were borderline illegal?

I wish you the best of luck with this argumentative approach -- I've been trying it for weeks, and no one on the other side appears to realize that legally or socially preventing what happened with Eich and the Mozilla community would be far, far more destructive to discourse, speech, etc than what happened here. The position itself (that what happened to Eich was somehow wrong, in a sense that can be well-defined) is internally inconsistent.
Whatever positioning source it's using, my phone can place me within around 20 ft while it's in my closet. Not perfect, but about the same accuracy as anywhere else in my apartment.

But yeah, if you're in a city with huge buildings blocking GPS signals and 50 floors of little apartments stacked on top of each other, then a rough street address may not help enough anyway.
Tim Cook Auctions Charity Lunch Meeting at Apple HQ: $100,000
I'm not part of SV culture, so I didn't read it the way you did. I did find it funny that the guy, on his first ever job, was so excited to disrupt payroll. There's an irony there. Or the guy who's going to make doctors obsolete.
It's basically just stupid. Lots of people with little to no exceptional talent or skill thinking that they if they just grind it out long enough they'll strike it rich with their mediocre business idea. In NY these people are called naive and stupid. In SV these people are called bold risk-takers.
That and slamming consumers is what the power companies do (here in New Zealand). See the commerce commission report (2009 - and there have been large price increases since) that found profits unreasonably high. http://www.comcom.govt.nz/dmsdocument/192
How to install multi-nodes in OpenStack?(Tutorial)
Where's my access to an RSS/Atom feed of G+ posts?

Where's my access to pushing content from another network or platform onto G+?

Other than Data Liberation, were's my ability to extract content from G+?

It's a fucking silo. Always has been.
Is net neutrality dying? Has the FCC killed it?
The settlement was $324million for (64,000 class members and the attorney fees).
Netflix presumably was paying Cogent a lot of money for all those 10Gbit uplinks. Now a few cross-connects and BGP tweaks later, a traceroute shows Netflix packets leaving a Netflix server and going more directly onto Comcast's network. I can only speculate that they turned on some dark fiber to build cross-connects between their cages and Comcast cages. Maybe they were already in the same building...

How much did Netflix's Cogent bill go down? How much of the "work" that Cogent was doing is Netflix now doing themselves? How many hops of the traceroute are owned by Netflix, and how many hops by Comcast?

When I rent a rack in One Wilshire in LA, CA, it comes with power, cooling, and a network link. When I pay let's say $1000/mo for that 1Gbps link, it's not just the link from my rack to their router that I'm paying for. And when I send 1Gbps of packets up through that link, it's not just CoreSite at One Wilshire carrying the cost of delivering those packets.

At some point, yes, I do expect Comcast to get their "fair share" of that $1k/mo. If Comcast is PAID zero dollars for delivering that 1Gbps, then I want this free bandwidth gravy train to propagate all the way back to me. Comcast, please sign me up for 10 of those free 10Gbe links you're giving out, ok? Just tell me where to rent space where I can get those free 10Gbe cross connects to your network.

But then, you can also flip the perspective and ask the question, why doesn't Comcast have to pay for all their bandwidth? Shouldn't they be paying $1,000/mo for their Gbe's?

So why does bandwidth cost money, or more specifically when should bandwidth cost money? Price, as always, is just a means of efficiently allocating scarce resources. Price can only possibly be zero if there is no scarcity. Is it possible there's no scarcity of bandwidth on Comcast's network? Now that would be comical!

I think the answer lies partially in another development. Ask Netflix to chart the cost in terms of Watts and Rack Units to deliver 1Gbps of video streams. My theory would be the cost in terms of space and electricity to generate 10Gbe of video streams has dropped orders of magnitude. This means bandwidth will be an increasing portion of your bill no matter what. It also puts more pressure on scarcity of bandwidth when the ease of which you can generate 10Gbps of useful traffic is down to just a few servers.
this was just out today. done by nicholas levin.
Solution: stop freelancing and build a product.
Netflix's blog post lays out the argument here: http://blog.netflix.com/2014/04/the-case-against-isp-tolls.h...

(The relevant quote is: "(1) [Transit Networks (e.g. Cogent)] carry traffic over long distances and (2) they provide access to every network on the global Internet. When Netflix connects directly to the Comcast network, Comcast is not providing either of the services typically provided by transit networks.")

Netflix is questioning the premise of your question by suggesting that Cogent and Comcast are _not_ providing the same service. I find the argument fairly compelling, though I'd be willing to hear counter-arguments.
at least some publicity for FyreTV....and maybe a settlement since looks like they were first.
Sure, but it doesn't have to be that way. Something built around multicast groups could be used to stream multiple people the same content in a drastically more efficient manner, and then it could be stored locally on clients for time-shifting purposes.

If you're trying to optimize for efficient use of limited bandwidth, unicast transferring of identical content to many many people is pretty wasteful. I think Netflix would argue that network links should be getting bigger and fatter to render the point moot, but given the streams are also getting bigger (we didn't always stream 720p everywhere, did we?) that would certainly take a lot more investment than what's happening now.
No, that's not idiomatic Haskell code for an application. Foreign.Ptr (and companions) are hardly ever used in normal Haskell code unless you're optimizing for that last bit of performance -- and even then I'd be very hesitant about using it because of the lack of bounds checking, etc.

FWIW, I don't Don Stewart[0] would consider that idiomatic either. He just knows a bit more than the rest of us about how to squeeze more performance out of GHC-compiled code and was willing to use non-idiomatic code to do so.

Also FWIW, personally I don't think language shootouts are very informative most of the time, but... IMO they should at least use idiomatic code -- otherwise they tell you even less than they already do about what real-life performance is like.

[0] Just an example, I know he didn't contribute the particular benchmark you linked to. He did contribute a few of the other programs AFAIK. I think the following sentences also apply to (essentially) all the Haskell shootout contributors.
sounds interesting! who is this guy? or he prefers to be anonymous?
The tools in question, and the OS in question, bear little to no resemblance to unix or its tools. Blaming unix for the monstrosities that it inadvertently spawned isn't really fair.