skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Calls of "Americas glory days are over" were heard over and over. And yet here we are today.

Yes, here we are today.

With the economy in a bad shape, jobs that wont be coming back, a huge public debt, a crushed middle class, fewer prospects for the younger generations. And Japan, who faced a similar shakedown, still going strong, but replaced by China as a main US competitor. A country, who, unlike Japan, is not under supervision, but a superpower on its own.

I guess people were expecting something like complete ruins or some post-apocalyptic landscape to consider decline a real thing? It's not like somebody comes in and in a couple of decades steals peoples houses and things. It's that slowly, their status and prospects is declining over what it used to be. It's not something you can watch happening in real time, like a fire burning down a house. It's more like watching paint dry. It's slow, but it does dry.
Interesting that the article on wealth concentration (linked from the article), doesn't mention Piketty (yet). It needs some work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_concentration
If you think keys in a safe is a good idea, ask a Googler about the legend of the Valentine safe. Short version: nobody was able to get into the safe and a locksmith had to come drill it to restore a critical service.

It's also a cautionary tale about testing your DR occasionally.
Now I have to figure out who you are. :-)
...then there was the new server room that was built with one of the 'big red buttons' conveniently placed behind the pull cord for the lights.

Why, yes...a couple of times...before a perspex arch was less-than-hastily fixed over the button..
I like HipChat but I really really wish it integrated with an irc client. I've spent hours trying to get a good experience with BitlBee and, well, it's anything but smooth. The single biggest thing they could do to help me and my coworkers out would be to allow our IRC clients to connect to the service. Other than that I love it.
I was watching a show the other day where they discussed their mapping of Benjamin Franklin's social network (who he communicated with, where they were in the world, etc). They showed some of the process and it appeared to involve some Excel workbooks with hundreds of sheets and terribly normalized data.

I can only imagine the amount of work involved in trying to extract any sort of useful information from the raw data in that format. I run into stuff like this all the time.

All I could think was that given a day and a Postgres+PostGIS server someone could have probably saved them entire man-months of their time...
> There's no "Home" key on your phone that instantly takes you to the top of the page

On iOS: tap on the system menu at the very top of the screen.
I don't think Java applets are integrated using NPAPI?
This is really quite amusing, considering what a stellar track record these agencies have.

Being more generous to S&P, the more time goes on the more you should notice how far removed the prices of things have become from what you might naively assume based on more classical methods.
It's actually F9.
F5 opens the Go To dialog box.
> The theory that colleges are primarily about signaling is something I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say.
>...I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say.

If it's really true that a majority of people believe this but don't say it, then society is consciously making crazy decisions. One implications of the signaling theory is that it recommends ending essentially all public subsidies of higher education, and perhaps even penalizing it. In particular, the entire student loan debt (>$1 trillion, or 7% of US GDP) is a waste.
I enjoyed Randy Komisar's "The Monk and the Riddle." The core message I took away from the book is that that your passion should not be just for "entrepreneurship" or "start-ups" but rather how an idea or company can make a real difference to people.
This is a ranking on credit or debt, not stock.
S&P bothered to rate the stock offering

You missed something in the writeup>"Tesla,... raised about $2.3 billion in March selling convertible debt"
I tend to agree with you, with the caveat that you can't have this philosophy and sell your customers 99.999% uptime[0].

[0] http://www.joyent.com/products/compute-service/features/linu...
A captcha is better than nothing.
I wouldn't call Hipchat's OS X client native; it's Flash (Adobe Air). The Slack's desktop OS X and iOS apps, while they are html based, are an order of magnitude nicer to use.
Procrastinating writing a JIT? http://dynamorio.org/
Not saying it's not impressive either way!

Good point that the question is much less valuable from the perspective of YC partners. From that perspective, all that matters is that the companies perform well in the end. It matters more from the perspective of the applicants. Though even then, because the costs of joining YC are low, it's probably not a big issue for many people.

Agree the success rates would be hard to compare. You'd need to have some other proxies for eventual success besides profits.

Excellent point that if you can show you significantly helped the most successful couple of companies (which account for 80%+ of the value), and there were no other large successes among the people you rejected, then the job is done. You've shown YC increases the expected value of the companies you select.
This is pathetic. Either S&P knows something that everybody else in the world doesn't, or they've got an agenda here.

Not to be a biased Tesla fan, but the explanations given in the article don't seem to merit such a bad rating.
It works! Check this out. [0]

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Developer_pho...
Let's focus on reducing the acceptable words in the English language! Take false moral high ground! Then tell everyone they are oppressive moral reprobates! If everyone feels bad about being male or white (or both!) then surely no one will notice that the true oppressor is centralized power structures! IngSoc Double Plus Good! Choco-Rations are Up Today AND I'm FEELING FINE.
It's not just the donations. It seems likely startups produce lots of economic value by developing new products, and the extent to which you do that is somewhat correlated with how much money you earn. That's another reason to consider the non-risk-adjusted average outcome.
3dfx Oral History Panel [video]
It was more amusing that Tesla's PR implied you cannot understand their "value" using only public information.

"The rating was “developed independently by their analysts without any feedback from Tesla on our growth plans,’ Liz Jarvis-Shean, a spokeswoman for the carmaker, wrote in an e-mailed statement."

Good thing TSLA is not a publicly traded company.
Yeah, but the problem is when you honestly didn't realize calling a halting shutdown until the server doesn't come back 5 minutes later and then you review the terminal
Fnordcredit – Open Source Credit System.
PHP isn't just for the big iron in the sky. I've used it for a web portal on networking equipment and it was a perfect fit.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Your operational philosophy complements your SLA goals, it doesn't force them.
"Turn your history on"

Me: No thanks, I disabled it long ago although we all know Google prob logs all of your IP activity (ad targeting and stuff)
God exists. CIA waging war on me. Stupid fucks.
"limited demand for its products" - LOLDAFUQ. Tesla's cars are a highly sought-after brand, something like the iPhone of automotion.

IIRC Tesla is still having a huge backlog of orders, worth half a year or such, with new orders coming in every day...
> Can you give any detail on what the end result is? What kind of data do you end up with in redshift, and what kind of queries?

I'll have to get our BI team to create a follow-up post.

In a lot of ways its the most interesting part of this project. I'm not entirely sure what data we can share; I'll push to get something out.

> What kind of data do you extract from mixpanel?

The mobile devices push user interactions with the app as events to Mixpanel. We pull that data daily into Redshift, and this allows us to run historical reports and discover patterns of user behavior within the mobile app.

> Is all this running continuously, or different schedules for each worker? Any of these event based rather than schedule based?

The Extractors are Schedule based. So with Mixpanel for example we do a daily dump around 4am (once all the Mixpanel data is available for export).

With our Rails events we push them to IronMQ and the scheduler kicks off workers every 15 mins to pull them off.

The `Transformers` and `Loaders` are event based. So the Extractors would kick them off when they have completed their work.
That's an interesting pick, as it touches on exactly the issue I ran into in my last startup: getting customers, getting traction but finding myself unmotivated by the problem being solved. Not seeing myself doing that for another year, let alone the rest of my life.

While I was working on my previous startup I actually started asking myself how other founders kept themselves motivated while dealing for really long periods of time with the same industry and similar set of problems (even if they are approached with multiple hats, like engineering, marketing, finance, etc.)

Thanks!
Well, it could have 20 times the features, but since it doesn't have the "crown" (the user count), it's still a wannabe in that regard.
Haven't read the book yet (as I just heard of it from the post), but sounds interesting. I am also currently working on a piece of fiction with some similar themes, and was wondering if you could share some thoughts on how you manage references to real world entities and technologies in the story? What sort of balance did you find between history, science, and fiction?
What absolutely killed HipChat for our team was the fact that its not possible to use HipChat for multiple teams. Need to be logged into multiple accounts at the same time (i.e your own team and your client's team)? Not possible.

Their suggested solution is to use multiple different clients (i.e. one native, one browser) at the same time, which is beyond ridiculous.

I dont think that I have seen any uservoice votes above 6000 for any other product request before (see http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/sugg...).

With no solution in sight, moving to slack or flowdock was a no brainer.
Our less-than-savvy Financial Director took it upon himself to restore from tape the bought ledger files to a live system after a slight mishap. Unfortunately, the bought ledger files all started with a 'b' and he managed to restore them to the root of the -nix system instead of the right place, so he mv'd b* to the right location.

All was well until a scheduled maintenance restart a few weeks later and we (eventually) discovered that /boot and /bin were AWOL.

Edit: He had access to the root account to maintain the accounts app (not my call)
What's hilarious about it ? They are right.

The big auto companies definitely aren't as nimble in adapting to technological change but that's because they are operating on a completely different scale. Tesla would be no different if was actually selling in more than a handful of countries.

Companies like Toyota have the money, clout and scale in which to absorb any risks and change in the future. Tesla doesn't.
How is a non-technical person supposed to execute a POST request with an attached file to Knod?
Me too, but we know Google (like facebook, etc) probably logs all of your IP activity... that's how ad targeting works
I never use it, but you can toggle between showing formulas and showing values with CTRL + ` (grave accent) (http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/excel-help/display-or-hid...)
Who cares about binary firmware blobs? How is that any different than device firmware burned into an EEPROM, written to flash, etched into ROM, etc?

Hardware is full of software. The line you create in the sand is arbitrary.
I didn't say everybody believes it, but I think a lot of people do but generally don't say anything because the idea that education is always a big value-add is a touchstone of public policy.
Given that it's no secret that S&P ratings can be purchased, I have to wonder who the highest bidder on this rating was.

I'm not a tin-foil hatter, nor is this a pithy comment, but it comes so far out of left field that this question must be asked.

Rating agencies need their own ratings agencies. S&P would be listed under the "Complete Garbage" heading.
Not wasting but you'll think you're a functional programmer, hit Haskell, then realize you were barely a functional programmer.

I used to feel as you did, until I started thinking more mathematically; the idea behind composition and clarity. Erlang has amazing properties but Haskell can, honestly, do much of it better and faster and safer.

Erlang has Dialyzer and type annotations and quickcheck. Use it all religiously because your Erlang programs will get big and messy fast.

What made me switch? STM > message passing actors, Haskell's type system is incredible, and the libraries / tools available are also pretty amazing. Programming in a way that encourages me to think mathematically is just so much more natural, personally.

Composition + a strong type system is an incredible experience. If you want more personal war stories we can do it over email?

I've built very large and performant Erlang software in production and very large and performant Haskell software in production for two of my own startups.
That's a great point. If you read this article and think "Now I'm going to apply to YC and do good!", you've probably got lower chances of success than the average YC founder.

That's one reason we point out that the expected value mainly depends on your chances of being the next Dropbox or AirBnb, which probably involves having a huge passion for fixing a particular problem.

On the other hand, I don't think the information should have no impact on decisions. For instance, I think someone at college could read this, and set themselves on a path towards becoming the type of person who makes a good entrepreneur. They could learn to program, hang out around startup people, try out their ideas. They could find a problem and become passionate about it.
"...limited demand for its products"? Not in Orange County, CA.
Can't you definitively say this about any smaller player compared to their larger counterparts in any market whatsoever?

I think there must be something more than the inherent and apparent structural reality of big fish/little fish.
Yes. Every company I've worked for that had established (read not startups/not tiny) companies as customers could never use any thing like this due to contracts saying we won't be storing/transmitting their "stuff" on servers we do not control. [everyone hand waves email delivery but we can't use something like gmail].

These are tools for small / startup companies were you need something to just work and don't have resources to spend on anything but getting "established".
What we really need is an open, standard hardware platform, not a browser based mobile OS that creates a closed consumer platform anyway. With browser OSs, the vendor can target the native platform, and app developers are stuck with second-string HTML+JS.
Yep - the way that flowdock handles multiple "flows" and the nice simple interface was the selling point for us. Slack has a bit of a nasty interface that is just not "clean" enough.
I think the parent was commenting on the irony of this statement considering that the big US automakers were recently recipients of a large government bailout precisely because they couldn't "successfully adapt to competitive and technological displacement risks over the medium to long term".
I think it's fairly clear that NaCl is suggested only as an alternative for applications with needs not yet supported by open web technologies:

Most use cases that previously required NPAPI are now
supported by JavaScript-based open web technologies.
For the few applications that need low-level APIs,
threads, and machine-optimized code, Native Client
offers the ability to run sandboxed native code
in Chrome.

And accepting that, NaCl is free and open source that is publicly developed, so I don't see any of the implications of your argument working.
Pardon my ignorance, but what does "unsolicited" imply in this context? Who normally solicits a rating?
It's possible to over-apply pg's "submarine" essay. In this case the press is actually reporting on a newsworthy event.

Pg even notes this outright in his essay:

> Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
>Companies like Toyota have the money, clout and scale in which to absorb any risks and change in the future.

Yep. They also have the government's backing, so if they fuck up in terrible ways and start to go under, the government will just bail them out with taxpayer money. Tesla doesn't have that sort of safety net.

On the other hand, one can argue that this is actually a competitive advantage for Tesla. They basically have no choice but to succeed. There are no well-greased politicians to come to the rescue if they fail.
I'd have to agree. If you look at Tesla's revenue and compare it to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_automotive_companies_by...

You'll see that even the smallest on that list(BMW) has more than 50 times the revenue that Tesla has.
Most disheartening is the way Zeev Suraski pleaded for votes against the size_t/int64 patch in a mail[1] titled "A call for help (urgent)" because, I quote, it "negates months of hard work". That was only a few days after Zend's secret project had been uncovered.

The size_t/int64 refactor has been going through several iterations and RFCs since 2013.

[1]: http://news.php.net/php.internals/74268
> You could start with a fork.

Of what? The entire Chromium browser?
I agree that they should provide context to that statement...but I also think that they should allow for the possibility of the opposite. Tesla isn't strapped down by legacy costs, processes, and contracts that larger/older manufacturers are. This, I would think, would provide them with the benefit of moving faster in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
Usually the business model is the company pays the credit rating agency to get their debt rated (hence the classic conflict of interest situation). Unsolicited would suggest this was not the case.
Hardware Whizzes Solve a Big Smartwatch Problem: Your Fat Fingers
Woohoo! I was wondering whether to buy more TSLA. Now I just have to wait a couple of days and buy it on the cheap.

They've got plenty going for them in the future: New humungous battery plant, new more reasonably priced mass-market car, the most advanced electric drivetrain in the world (which they can license out), the ongoing scale out of charging points, and they still can't make the Model S fast enough to match demand.

I can't really see where S&P are coming from on this one, but I'll take free money when I see it...
NaCL is open source, the papers and documentation are all open, the build tools are all open. The only thing it's not is standardized -- and that's not Google's fault.

Apple and MS are vested in their platform plays, and Mozilla has been playing a comparatively weak technical game for years.
So, a lot like indie games?
> the system of commercial surveillance that draws on government records, shopping habits and social media postings

Also, your cable television viewing habits. Probably your Internet viewing habits (as seen by your ISP) and telephone habits as well. "Consent" in those cases are called "terms of service" in common parlance.
Can any HNer give some background on solicited/unsolicited ratings? I imagine solicited ratings come about when a company knows it is going to tap into the credit market and needs something to show to investors. How often do unsolicited ratings happen? What is the impetus (and from where?) for the agency to conduct the unsolicited rating?
Uber launches in Salt Lake City: free for 2 weeks
Concerns about this seem overblown to me. I get regular comparisons as I have a tablet device that's not linked to any account and also use more than one search engine or browser. I find a marked improvement in the quality of results when I'm logged in, particularly when I'm researching legal or academic topics where I'm more interested in primary sources and long-form article coverage than in (more popular) blog and mainstream news outlet coverage. The other benefit is the personal blocklist, which automatically filters away a vast range of stuff which I know to be crap.
Was there actually a password requirement change? Entering the first 15 chars of my (previously set) longer password actually works. I assumed they were not properly validating (and truncating) the input. In any case this is not confidence inspiring.
Tech moves fast. Sure, Moore's Law yadda yadda, but sometimes it's hard to get a sense of what that really means.

For me, what's astounding is thinking back on all these business wars in tech in the 90s that seemed so crucial at the time. Half a decade later, one or both sides were absorbed, dead, or irrelevant.
TSLA is on the NASDAQ... or did I miss the sarcasm flavor?
So, you want to come to Brazil for the World Cup?
No, and if you think that's what getting NaCL running will take, it explains a lot about the quality of Mozilla's technical output.

First, the NaCL runtime and tools are NOT tied to Pepper. You could take those as-is and have the hardest part of the stack done.

Second, Pepper is NOT a complex API, and anyone arguing that it is completely nuts. It provides basic abstractions around sound, 2d/3d rendering, etc. If anything, it's a relative simplified SDL equivalent.

If that's hard to implement/integrate into your environment (including thread safety issues inherent in its support for threads), that says more about your browser's architectural issues than it says about Pepper.

This small API surface area should be implementable as a thin shim on almost any sane browser stack: https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/pepper_stable/c

There's just not much there!
Kickstarter: Mysterious Benefactor or a Manipulation?
Given the way that one hand tends to quietly grabass the other in prestigious U.S. financial organizations and large corporations, we should probably narrow the title to "unsolicited by Tesla".
Sorry, I meant if I can find an open implementation of PAR3 I'd use that.

zfec looks interesting though.
Concatenating the contents into a JSON array is an excellent idea! I'll get to work on that.
Standard & Poor’s is taking great pains to defend its “A” rating for Lehman Holdings Inc.

The rating company fired off a report Wednesday asserting that the recent collapse of the investment banking firm was a case of negative market sentiment — whether or not grounded in fundamentals — creating significant difficulties that led the company to the point of failure.

“In our view, Lehman had a strong franchise across its core investment banking, trading, and investment management business,” S&P stated. “It had adequate liquidity relative to reasonably severe and foreseeable temporary stresses.”

The ratings service insisted that looking beyond the current downturn, the firm had good earnings-generating ability. “We believe the downfall of Lehman reflected escalating fears that led to a loss of confidence — ultimately becoming a real threat to Lehman’s viability in a way that fundamental credit analysis could not have anticipated with greater levels of certainty,” said S&P credit analyst Scott Sprinzen.

http://ww2.cfo.com/banking-capital-markets/2008/09/rating-it...