skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My general sense with keto and the carbs-are-evil philosophy is that it's a handy solution for relatively quick weight loss. It really does work for that.

But it's not at all clear if shunning carbohydrates is a healthier option in the long term, compared with a more diverse diet with similar total calories. As you suggest, there's considerable evidence that grains are not evil.
NASA's moon-orbiting robot crashes down as planned
OTOH, if an investor bought 0.5M shares at $x, and then said "but I want MORE shares", AirBnB could reasonably insist on a higher valuation for the next 0.5M, since the buy-side excitement is so high.

Supply vs Demand is tricky....
Not having any financial debt means you probably have rich parents. That sounds like overpaying up-front to me.
For tougher treatment of complex math subjects I really enjoy matematicalmonk's Khan Academy style videos:

https://www.youtube.com/user/matematicalmonk
Why? Worst-case AMT rate is 28%, worst case income tax rate is 39.6%. If you have a choice and means, you want to pay AMT.
And that's why in the latter case, an early stage startup may not be for you. You join later, with a higher salary, when it has stabilized and looks to be going somewhere. And without the risk, you don't expect the equity to offset it. Pretty simple, really.
On the other hand, Norway, Sweden, and Finland are all above the line, meaning they have higher GDP per capita than predicted. The only nordic country below the line is Denmark, and they are barely below the line.

Oil revenues make such comparisons tricky at best. You would need to consider the hypothetical case of a New Zealand with lots of oil to sell, or a Norway without any.
Why Rich People Feel Poor
Can a mod change the date? It's a repost of his original answer from 2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20110416041922/http://answers.on...

There's been a lot of discussion since, including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445447 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3489719.

Also, at the time, Dan Shapiro argued against it here: http://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-about-Joel-Spolskys-a...

I also think the share distribution Wizards of the Coast (Pokemon, Magic the Gathering) accidentally used was interesting: founders had no shares, and worked their way up into the single digits, which supported small, individual investors, but it's probably not recommended if you're planning for traditional investment: http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-2-wizards-of-the-coas... and http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-3-wizards-of-the-coas...
I simply quoted what GP said. (S)he stated that the author doesn't care about the blind, my argument is that the author doesn't have to.

But you're right - I shouldn't have said that as I what I really meant is that the author decided that the blog post working the way it works is fine for people who can run Elm and therefore one shouldn't really expect that he'd cater to others.

While I'm pretty far from blind, I don't have all that great eyesight myself, so I can (at least the smallest little tiny bit) relate. I should have said what I said in the previous paragraph instead of what I said in my previous comment and I apologise. Thanks for calling me out on it.
No, market cap = # of shares * last traded price. It's what the last bozo believed the value was, which varies widely depending on the bozo. Then you have the bozos who are trying to guess what the other bozos will do. At some point the market cap will be right, but only for an instant.
CIA torture architect breaks silence to defend 'enhanced interrogation'
How many startups with $1 bln+ valuation are there in KC?
Some cities are really nice places to live with unique resources of their own. In Pittsburgh, for instance, there are fewer interesting software jobs but a beautiful city with a lot of exciting non-technical things going on, a healthy ecosystem around Carnegie Mellon, and very nice 1-BR apartments in the best, most central and walkable parts of town for $800/month. Not everything needs to circulate around the moonshot opportunities of the VC ecosystem.
Stuff like this is going to scare a lot of people away, sadly.
That makes sense to me, but when I think of cultures that are big on umami I don't see a lot of obesity, so I'm not sure if the point connects fully.
I agree. I'm a fan of "the price is the price," with all of the various overhead expenditures being factored into that price. There's not a line item for their app developers, nor a charge for their server hosting...
Most people don't know how to renegotiate, and by the time they need to do it, they've negotiated their compensation at some other place and are giving a 2-week notice.

Founders/management need to be proactive about this. Good school of thought on this is Andy Rachleff of Benchmark / Wealthfront https://blog.wealthfront.com/the-right-way-to-grant-equity-t...
The hypothesis I've heard that supports this point of view is that your language center is single threaded. You can either comprehend in your native language or you can comprehend in a different language, but not both. That said, the value bindings are arbitrary. So when you are naturally a single language person (aka an American [1]) that language binding monopolizes the language center. And trying to go through it to learn a new language is like trying to learn to program in C by using the C pre-processor. Everyone I know though who knows 3 or more languages has said that after 3 its much easier. I have heard people compare to learning "binding arbitrary sounds to language" rather than learning a new language.

[1] Old joke which goes - "What do you call people who speak two languages? Bilingual! Three languages? Trilingual! One language? American!"
he's not a kiwi though
A proper solution involves solving the 'Willpower Issue'. We want to address the problem in a way that can be nearly invisible to those who want to spend their willpower and intellect elsewhere. As someone in the nutrition industry, I spend a lot of my time considering what I eat, but we also have to solve the problem so that everyone can eat healthy without it having to also be a full time hobby.
It's based on survival. If you have survived two years, there's a much better chance you will survive for the next two years, than the chance of two additional years of survival after only the first 6 months.

The longer you have survived, the more mature you likely have become. This means you go from a demo, to a prototype, to a working product, to having a pilot customer, to have paying customers.

It's certainly true that some companies get tons of money without really being a mature company (especially in these days). The investors backing them are really pushing for a moonshot, so they invest tons of money and expect to spend the money quickly. Those are cases of less mature companies basically playing the lottery, and I'd agree it's pretty risky.
> in UK a pint at the pub is a routine social occasion.

This minimizes both the alcohol consumption and alcohol consumption to excess in the UK.

For instance, Britain ranks 17th in the world in terms of total alcohol consumption - just below Russia. [1]

More importantly, binge drinking rates in Britain and Ireland are the highest in Europe :

> "A Europe-wide study found that although the British are not the EU's most regular drinkers – only consuming alcohol an average of four times a week – they drink the most at one sitting." [2]

When combined, this data paints a slightly different picture than a nation of tempered well-acquainted drinkers who just hang out with a pint or two.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_co...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7616405/Britain...
Private company valuations of companies based in VC are far than companies outside the valley, even with the same revenue/profit/growth potential.

It sucks and doesn't make economic sense, but that is what I observe
>Many processed food products are protein-poor but are engineered to taste like protein.

I think MSG may be the culprit here. In college I worked in a large Chinese restaurant, we didnt use it but many people would ask if we did. It go me thinking so I did little research. MSG gives the taste called umami. I started looking through my pantry and many items I snack or junk food items contain it.
Because as bad as it is for early employees, it's even worse for founders. Founders may expect for themselves to work without pay, if times get tough. Employees should either get paid or the company is done.
Umm that's a whole bunch of pulling numbers out of thin air. The 50-10-10-10-10-10 progression is proportionate to what exactly? The article would sound just the same if he recommended 75-5-5-5-5-5 or 40-30-20-10 instead.
Always mount a scratch monkey.

http://edp.org/monkey.htm
Dang it, now the NSA knows about this for sure!
Selective vs. Elitist
Agreed. Maybe I should offer a "free rides" app, but charge a gas fee, a driver fee, and an administrative fee.

It's not even clear exactly what this fee is supposed to be covering
your city search is broken ... i type in gibberish ("asdfasdfasdfasdf") and get a Django error dump. Srsly ... this should be fixed asap. I'll say one thing about your clientele they rather have things work good then look nice. But both are important, welcome to the web.
Social Hacking For Introverts
So don't use a dollar-for-dollar IOU. You can pay interest.

What you're trying to avoid is bringing company valuation into totally mundane cash flow problems like "who pays for plane tickets to first customer meeting".

It's a sign of very bad founding team cohesion when the founders look at each other as negotiating adversaries. Founders should prefer solutions that have a quick and intuitive sense of fairness over technical solutions that attempt to ensure fairness.
I've seen companies strategically fire people to get out of option awards. Or grant very generous options, only to plan on firing the folks later. Very shady business.

I've become a bigger believer in cash. Unless you TRULY believe the vision.
Sure, I'm in my mid 40's, married, bunch of kids, full time job. I've been involved with (failed) startups and side projects. I've also made a few things I'm proud of even if not hugely successful. Having a family definitely brings more pressure and time constraints but also a lot of benefits. It's not the end of life if you don't make it big in your 30's.
1. Investors see it that way when they participate in later rounds at higher valuations. When you disconnect from "market" it creates serious problems.

2. Skills risk, being at the top of your profession globally requires constant focus and professional support. The atmosphere at a very small company is hostile to this level of focus by necessity. It has a dulling effect.
What if I want to opt-out of paying the "Safe Rides Fee", does that mean a car with three wheels will show up piloted by an unsavory character?

This is a really puzzling move by Uber. I would expect for their core brand promise to be safety, not an add-on fee.
A non-insubstantial amount of Singapore's GDP comes from tax evasion and money laundering from corrupt businesses and individuals.[1] Most corrupt Asian wealth is stored or laundered through Singapore. From Ferdinand Marcos[a], Robert Mugabe[b], Suharto's closest advisors[c], the Chinese princelings[d], Burma's military junta[e], Russia's oligarchs[f] etc etc.

This is in addition to their 'legal' tax avoidance-derived GDP. In 2012, Apple did $14 Billion in revenue in Singapore, which was more than they had in the rest of Asia combined, yet they didn't have a single store or manufacturing center in the city-state.[2] Microsoft actually beat Apple to setup a Singapore-based affiliate for the same purpose.

I'm curious to see how they fare in a decade after these sources of 'income' are greatly restricted in the global crackdown.[3]

One of these days, I'm going to devote a few hours to calculating how much of Singapore's GDP / Tax base only exists due to their status as a tax haven.

[1] - http://www.icij.org/search/node/singapore

[a] - http://globalnation.inquirer.net/95743/pnb-gets-marcos-loot-...

[b] - http://www.icij.org/offshore/mugabe-crony-among-thai-names-s...

[c] - http://www.icij.org/offshore/billionaires-among-thousands-in...

[d] - http://international.sueddeutsche.de/post/74093618828/chinas...

[e] - http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/singapore-a-friend-indee...

[f] - http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/036282b4-be65-11de-b4ab-00144...

[2] - http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/24/us-singapore-tax-i...

[3] - http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-singapore-bank...
Agreed. At the very least, this is poor wording.

"I'm going to opt not to have a safe ride."
Essentially, the price that people are willing to pay for a food is less sensitive to protein content than it is to flavor and mouthfeel. If you reduce the protein content of your product from 80% to 75%, and replace that with an additional 2.5% sugars and 2.5% fats, people will probably think it tastes better, and they will eat more of it because of that and because the lower protein content (according to the article) does not trigger a satiation response as quickly.

People will pay more and eat more, while your materials cost goes down. What profit-seeking product manager wouldn't make that change between eyeblinks?

The only possible pitfall is losing customers concerned enough about nutrition to determine whether your product still has the best health value per dollar. If you have ignorant consumers or copycat competitors, that's hardly a concern at all.
A few points;
.25% seems low but;
a) How close is you hourly rate to what you would get normally?

b) Are you learning tech that will set you up to make big money?

c) Are you gaining insight about the industry that will set you up to be a co-founder?
Completely off topic, but I'm this post made me realise that Sam Altman went from programmer to enterpreneur to financial guy. This post has very little ado with what he once started doing. He's a partner (and president) of an investment fund now, a pretty odd career move once you take the pink Silicon Valley glasses off.

This entire post is about finance. Not about business, not about products, not about customers, just finance. Personally, I understand just about half of the entire post.

To be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing. I envy Altman for understanding this (and for running YC at an age younger than mine, but that's another thing). But that's not my point. What I wonder about, is whether this is inevitable for successful enterpreneurs.

Is the path programmer->enterpreneur->finance the obvious one? Sam's path might've been odd, given that his startup wasn't the next Facebook, but you see the same in startups that are the next Facebook, such as Facebook. Zuckerberg used to be a PHP hacker and now he's this NASDAQ CEO. I'm not sure about Drew Houston but all I read about Dropbox recently were acquisitions.

Does growing business make you a finance guy, or do you need to be somewhat of a finance guy to grow a business? I'm really curious which is the chicken and which is the egg here.
Think of it like this--if they waited to ship the release until it was stable enough for corporations to use... then corporations would still take four months to evaluate it, so they'd only start using it was it was four months more stable than necessary. It's a bit like cooking a steak: if you wait for it to look medium-done in the pan, it'll actually be well-done by the time it hits the plate, because it'll keep cooking in its own hot juices after you take it off. You need to take it off when it looks medium-rare, if you want to serve it medium.
A lot of the comments here seem to be missing the key point. The question is not whether immersion is a good thing or is better than classroom. The question the theory set out to investigate is what does it take for someone to become an outstanding learner of a foreign language, even when older. Why can some people do what is widely regarded as being impossible, achieve true native level fluency when learning >18?
> An optimal diet includes a mixture of foods that provide dozens of different nutrients in appropriate amounts and in the right proportions.

I wonder if we're any close to understanding what these "right" proportions are, and whether they are at all close to what is recommended by the USDA (which I believe is 45-65% carbs, 10-35% protein and 20-35% fat).
Yes, the security is terrible, but that's not my concern ... that is, I just assume the security is terrible and that everyone understands that ... it's just a given.

The real issue is the complexity of "smart" systems and how that complexity grows exponentially as you connect them together. It's just a rabbit hole you can never climb out of.

Or, in the words of _Normal Accidents_, a book everyone should know well, tightly coupled systems with interactive complexity fail in a predictable way that you should expect. Add some production pressures (perhaps in the form of your wife needing the thermostat to raise right now) and you're sunk.
It seems somewhat surprising to me that Airbnb, which doesn't own a single property, is somehow worth more than the entire Hyatt chain, which owns more than 500 properties and employs 75,000 people. I guess I just don't understand how valuations work...
FizzBuzz, pseudocode variant.
You Don't Read Code, You Explore It
"(ketchup; bbq; anything with sugar)"

Sadly those don't even have sugar in them for the most part, it's all high fructose corn syrup these days. HFCS along with trans fats have been linked to inflammation and should be avoided.
It depends on what you mean by value; if you mean the price someone is willing to pay for them this is clearly not correct -- otherwise every out-of-the-money option would sell for 0.
Finance allows diversification in ways that operating (programming, marketing, etc.) doesn't. One usually needs to either (a) make money operating or (b) gain experience marking to either (a) invest your own money or (b) invest the money of others.

(at least in private markets)
There's another effect of the ten-year exercise window.

Remember how Facebook was "forced" to go public because so many people owned stock? (http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-sec-will-force-facebo...). Well, if there's a ten-year exercise window, some of the people will hold their options and not exercise them. My -- albeit limited -- understanding of the situation is that those people are not counted as stockholders. They have options, not stock.

So the ten-year exercise window is also good for the startup, because it delays the time until the startup has to publicly disclose its financials.
This changed all at one and all of a sudden under the Baby Boomers. Young people left home earlier, travelled the world, experimented with drugs. Let's forget that the Baby Boomers were responsible for psychedelia, the protest movement and flower power.

I'm puzzled how people can make generalizations about a group people born over a range of 18 years. While the notion of "generation <foo>" is dubious in itself, claiming that someone born in 1946 has a whole lot in common with someone born in 1964 seems especially silly.

What I've found is most people, when talking about "boomers", really mean the subset of those who might have plausibly attended the first Woodstock festival.
Testing AngularJS apps with Protractor
Why do people smoke when they know the results?

Why are people running surpluses?

Food is much more readily available and convenient. Look at all the food you can buy. Then look at how much of it can be stored at room temperature, needs no preparation, and has a long shelf time. Then add in all that you can buy that stores in your refrigerator, does not need to be prepared, and has a long shelf life. Lets take it further, look at all the food you can buy, that you store in your freezer, that you prepare by sticking it in a microwave for five minutes.

The abundance of food combined with an excess in idle time, namely the result of a forty hour work week or no work week, leads to over consumption. I always love the farm comparison. Growing up it was eat before light, a big lunch, whatever you grabbed off the tree or stole from the garden, and a big dinner. As a kid if we weren't doing chores we were running off with friends to a game, fishing, or forever building that fort. These days its inside till mom/dad gets home, food everywhere, and an XBOX/PS4/Etc.

Then go look at the people you work with. Its pretty easy to tell why some are overweight. Lunch out every day at the fat festival around the corner, that place that serves 1200 calorie or more lunches for seven bucks. Usually a good chaser for that double donut and coffee with cream breakfast (or bagel with cream cheese). Then those little snacks in the desk.

Its simply calorie overload with nothing but idle time. Hell these same people will make fun of the fitness/diet "freaks".

TL;DR

Idle Time, Endless ready food, results in calorie overload
Show HN: Kangaroo, smarter teams through anonymous feedback
One one hand I'm happy to see the web able to do more and more. On the other hand, I worry that as we turn the browser into a platform with all these client side capabilities, browsers will become big complicated messes.
This isn't actually a new improvement, just a 'hardware' implementation of a really old technique. You can get the twisting action with any normal axe, even if you're a barefoot girl:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fWo0P0MdJM
Maybe they shouldn't resort to expulsion for something kids have been doing for half a century anyway.

I'm not saying they should allow it blindly, but I feel like getting kicked out of school is gonna do more damage than the weed.
Risk accumulates as the company operates. A risk faced by a layer 3 employee is also faced by layer 2 equity holders, even if they've left the firm.

Founder equity also compensates the founders for more than the risk that the company will fail and zero out their contributions; it also implicitly covers the upside risk of the founders, which upside was demonstrated by the fact that the founders created a company and presumably could have created others (or done something comparably lucrative) instead.
Podcast: Google και οι 200 παράγοντες SEO
The only part I would disagree with is the assertion that learning a second language "isn't really different" than learning a native language. My wife, who has a masters degree in theoretical linguistics and teaches English as a foreign language, has spoken to me several times about the differences between first and second language acquisition.

(Many ESL teachers are simply English speakers living in another country, but many of them are also like my wife, doing what is essentially applied linguistics.)

Other than that, I completely agree. The notion that you are simply doomed to only have one language after the crucial period is exaggerated, and the key to learning another language is immersion.
I'll start by saying that I didn't down-vote you, either. I appreciate the feedback that you have been giving our community in recent weeks.

That said, I have said the following before, but I will repeat it here. These launches are important, in a time when, "[...] in the U.S., I think there has been an under-current feeling for the last several years, that could perhaps be paraphrased as, "Where are we heading, as a nation?" I think it is easy for us to lose touch with the pulse of the nation when we are head-down in code at a start-up or elsewhere, but I think this feeling is real. So, this is perhaps at the root of at least some of this passion and excitement. It perhaps affirms, in some way to us, that the collective "We" are still builders." [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4024834
Paul Graham talks about people who "live in the future" -- in a specific area of their lives, they see clearly that some change is coming long before everyone else catches on. It seems the trend towards legalization of marijuana is one such area -- it probably is one of the next gold rushes. (In my opinion, 2 other such areas are virtual reality and the Rust programming language).