skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you've cleverly bundled together a couple of meaningless correlations. Yes, there's a grab bag (but, in my opinion, not much more than that) of important technological innovations which have come from large companies, but so what? You still have corporations with large amounts of disposable cash for R&D in a world without monopolies and intellectual property. The handful of innovations you can mention don't really have anything to do with monopoly or intellectual property, they just happen to have come from big companies - and there's really no evidence that those companies would simply collapse by being slightly more cooperative.

The majority of important software innovations have come from the open bazaar, not the cathedral. The Internet; The Web; Firefox, WebKit; GNU/Linux, Unix; HTTP; SSH, SSL, AES; Python, Ruby, C, C++. Thousands of humble open source projects which have been distributed to and changed by millions of users.

And even when large corporations do spawn projects, those that succeed are those that encouraged at least some degree of openness. Android from Google, Java from Sun. Open standards for computer hardware architectures and software have lasted and stood the test of time.

Open code, projects, and standards have more than stood the test of time. We are actually living in a time of unprecedented open source success. The majority of computing systems run on significantly open source code. Millions of Android phones running Linux. Every serious server on the planet running on Apache or NGINX on Linux or BSD. A landslide percentage of users accessing them using Webkit, Blink, and Firefox. That's just the tip of the iceberg! Millions of lines of code are being updated publicly, in real time, by thousands of people across the world in collaboration. More so than ever before!

Sure, maybe some people are a bunch of VC-backed business-savy Steve Jobs-worshipping iPhone mobile app developers now, but it's still sad to see someone say that tech innovation "happens in periods of monopoly" on HackerNews.
I think this is the best publicity imaginable. I can't see any reason why the price wouldn't go through the roof over the next month, but bitcoin prices are tough to predict.
Linux mini-drones jump, flip, climb, and fly
The author is seriously mistaken about game theory. The Nash Equilibrium requires every player to be maximizing their payoffs given what the other players are doing. But game theory itself does not say what the nature of the payoffs are: there is no problem in modelling altruistic players who attach a high payoff to outcomes which are good for everyone and low payoffs to outcomes which benefit only themselves.

The Pareto Optimal is not an outcome which is best for both, since the whole point of this concept is to avoid giving a definition of "best for both". Rather it is an outcome from which no player can be made better off without making some other player worse off. So, for example, for two greedy people sharing a cake, any division of the cake, including one which gives the entire cake to one person, is Pareto optimal.

Anyone seriously interested in understanding what game theory really says and avoiding superficial mistakes in its interpretation should read at least the first chapter of Binmore's 'Playing for Real'.
Probably has more to do with the first cultures that developed agriculture living near large rivers.
> I'm not sure why the author goes out of his way to avoid saying "monad,"

Explained here: http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/about/#banned
How to defend yourself from Facebook’s new browser-spying campaign
Wow. Never heard of this book before, looks like a good read and actually kind of scary that this could be a reality (based off of the synopsis). The thought of the world slowly being swallowed by water leaking from beneath the Earth's surface really creeps me out.
> He waits to see if the applicant throws away the cup at the end. If they don't throw away trash, he says, they aren't a good fit for the company.

Which is absolutely true, whether the test is an accurate test or an inaccurate test.
Ask HN: Cannot copy youtube video description. Recent Change?
I just noticed that I could not copy the video description on YouTube. This is annoying, as frequently I just right click and search about some of the stuff. Can anyone else please verify this? Why would Google do this experts exchange type of nonsense.
There is no security precaution adequate for something like this.

Yes, of course naturally occurring viruses are a major ongoing threat and we need to keep studying that threat to find better ways to counter it. But there are plenty of things we can do in that regard that don't involve actually creating lethal viruses.

I think we have far too many regulations on medical research. I think the current tangle of regulations costs many lives and should be dialed way down. But a free society depends on people voluntarily refraining from behaving like assholes. If we want a free society, we have to avoid behaving as though everything legal must be okay.
Brainstorm HN – A look at my meager domain collection. Thoughts?
439932.com

altgeek.com

askmormons.com

beginnergym.com

bookclubby.com

ecostroll.com

enotify.co

firstlyrics.com

freakingtmi.com

freemuscletips.com

fuckingtmi.com

geekstock.com

gifkingdom.com

givesmecancer.com

halfcupofsugar.com

hosthunters.com

hotmormons.com

lezomb.com

marsordie.com

pumpwatch.com

storknames.com

thongbeach.com

weedoverflow.com
One would think that water's density is smaller than the rock. Why wouldn't it eventually rise to the surface above the denser material if the surrounding rock wasn't solid?
I enjoyed your post. I have a couple of thoughts / suggestions for you.

I got the impression that the underlying motivation for writing the post, and tactic you used for justifying your positions was largely in response to what I would consider the overly myopic hacker news user base. That is, disproportionately white, male, curmudgeoney programmers. I sympathize with your frustration, but urge you not to let their world-view cloud yours, or cause you to search for complicated answers to simple questions.

An example of what I mean:

> I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism.

On this point, I urge you to consider a much simpler explanation: that people are skeptical because there is much to be skeptical of. People like Musk are a rare breed in Silicon Valley. Today's tech "entrepreneur" rarely looks like Elon Musk, someone who genuinely seems to want to do good things for the world. The skeptisism exists because there are a lot of startups doing plain silly things, masked in global do-goodery marketing narrative.

Startups are the new gold rush, today's investment banking. But the west coast has much different cultural norms towards opulent wealth than does the east coast. Put simply, we like to hide it out here, they like to flaunt it out there. Thus, "we're making the world a better place" instead of something like The Wolf of Wall Street.

Still, I enjoyed your post and your choice of using macro-economic theory as a lens through which to view this. Thanks for writing.
You don't achieve freedom through bad software. What the hell? Note that the NSA spying on you is also facilitated by all the complex, buggy, broken software we use.
There are almost no instances where patents turned out to be good for community. Wright Brothers stifled all competition by patent litigation causing US to be lightyears behind airplane tech. Edison similarly stifled lighbulb development causing Americans to pay for bad quality at higher prices than European counterparts. Steve Jobs tried to extinguish smartphone revolution causing funny things like removal of fairly generic features like pinch and zoom.

One would argue that they might not have been encouraged to invent these stuff if there were no patents. Even if that was true, the fact is that they had already ammassed massive fortunes even before they started patent wars. One would expect these visionary geniuses to let go patents in interest of advancing the state of art after they have gotten more money than they know how to reasonably spend. Elon Musk is the only one doing this here on the top of risking everything on fields that few entrepreneurs would dare. Hats off to him.
Some apps are bad but some apps are pretty much on par with native apps.

I guess its just young.
This mirrors advice often given to musicians. Nobody wants to be the best player in the band.
If anyone is coming in from another country and interested, I'm happy to sit down and go through your visa options as a potential founder. It's basic stuff, but you don't need to reinvent the wheel in collecting this information.

E.g. http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/06/11/7-us-startup-v...

Let me know craig (at) politihacks (dot) com
I don't think the "in business to make profits" part is entirely true. Apple and Tesla are both leading examples of companies that are out for something other than profits first. You can say that shareholder interests and publicly traded companies require ... but at the end of the day those are two companies that don't let capitalist dogma drive their path. I wish there were more than a handful.
aaand it's down.
You don't really even need a stream cipher, just random data if you're using XOR. You're right that XOR is trivially commutative, but it is weak to known-plaintext attacks which makes it unsuitable for this algorithm.

Suppose you have a deck { 1, 2, 3, 4 }, I'm alice(A) and you're bob(B) and I'll denote xor with dot. I shuffle it with the first round, revealing

{ A(3), A(1), A(2), A(4) }

and then you shuffle revealing

{ B.A(2), B.A(4), B.A(3), B.A(1) }

Then we re-encrypt with unique keys:

{ A_1.B(2), A_2.B(4), A_3.B(3), A_4.B(1) }

{ A_1.B_1(2), A_2.B_2(4), A_3.B_3(3), A_4.B_4(1) }

Now you "deal" me the first card by revealing B_1. This means that I know that the first slot is card 2. But I also know `B xor A xor 2` from the end of the first phase, which means it's easy to calculate what `B xor A` is. From this, I can decrypt the entire deck.
nope back.
I seem to recall that there is a precedent to this in the microcontroller market in the 1970s and 1980s (and possibly further in the past). Does anyone have link(s) to this business practice.
Please, leave. This is not the appropriate forum for your rant. Start a new thread if you want to have this discussion.
4% and a day and a half is outrageous. You can get < $1000 in BTC on Coinbase instantly if you have a high enough verification level and your friend can sell on an exchange in his country as soon as he gets them (10 minutes) to avoid the volatility risk.
Where and how do I log bugs for Firefox Apps on Android? I'm on 4.4.3 with Firefox Aurora and I installed WikiHow and the Gaia Team Calculator - open WikiHow, hit back and open Calculator and I still get WikiHow. I have to "swipe away" the Firefox app in the task manager to get it to work.
Are people interviewing with more than frameworks these days? A bunch of cycles back, I had one friend—who was accepted—interview with a weekend hack that he put together, launched, and saw it just take off, after being invited to interview for a startup that just wasn't gaining traction.
Everyone I know (hint: they're in the bay area and even if not all techies, they kinda know a bit computer stuff) disable that option (forever, indeed) and installs APKs from their favorite non-Google-Play source.

I'm pretty sure they added this option as an enforcement to use only Play. I would be surprised to see Google adding trusted sources. I do not believe that it's OK to kill competition in the name of so-called security.

On the other hand my mum doesnt know that option yet got Play malware pretty quickly. Go figure.

Think of the Children! :)
Market capitalization is not the same as volume.

For example, bitstamp traded 16 million dollars in the last 24hs. The sale would mean as much as an entire daily trade!
http://markets.blockchain.info/

To put it in perspective, Apple stock trades 71 million avg daily volume. At 90 dollars, its 6 billion dollars a day.

If someone were to sell 6 billion dollars of apple stock in one day, remain assured that the price would tank quickly as well, regardless of apple sales or cashflow or any of its "intrinsic" value.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/quote/nasdaq/apple/aapl
It would be crazy not to. We understand the potential for influenza to mutate rapidly and since there's no reason to believe the Spanish Flu was anything other than the result of this natural storm of mutations so we can conclude sooner or later influenza will hit the mutation jackpot again. We have to do everything possible to prepare for this in advance because once it hits there is precious little time left to save people. By most accounts the vast majority of deaths from the Spanish Flu occurred over a shockingly short period of about 12 weeks. Maybe modern public health standards can slow the next mutation down but I think we have to assume the worst is possible. If we don't do this research now there simply won't be time for any miracles to happen in 12 weeks.
From the way you ask this question, it sounds like you already know the answer.
AMQP is so nice from an engineer's perspective. If shit goes south somewhere in the system, I get a pagerduty alerting me that a deferred queue has exceeded some depth and I can start working to resolve the issue (if a message fails to be processed it is sent to the deferred queue). Once the issue is resolved, all the messages are still waiting in the deferred queue and will get processed as soon as they are requeued, and I don't have to replay nginx logs. Anything that can be asynchronous, make asynchronous and save yourself the headache of dealing with 500s when a component of your distributed system fails.
Like he said, dangerous thoughts. Think warring city-states. Think StarCraft.
Would prefer if webapps were standard and not tied to a unique browser. What happened to standards and stuff? We forgot its actually good?

I want to run firefox webapps on chrome and chrome webapps on firefox, and both of them on IE. Obviously that doesnt work today.
im not sure how much faster it is, as a user, it seems like about the same - but it certainly support a bunch more things.
Depends on the back, but feature back's of run heavy offenses definitely get 40-50 touches.
Russian Bombers Buzz California
6 ways to get your first 1000 customers
The only way you're going to get approval for "improving things" is if you can do both of the following: 1. Build a sound business case that shows that there is return on effort for the startup, and 2. Build a proof of concept that shows HOW it can be done in your environment. If you can't do both, then it will be fairly difficult to sell your company on your ideas for process improvement.
It is quite arbitrary to mourn someone you don't know who
was a relative of someone else you don't know.

However I am inclined to agree, just let it go, if people want to mourn let them mourn, even if it just bandwagon jumping. If you asked Nietzsche, he would probably say they are just mourning their own mortality, ie there is no such thing as a selfless act, they are just doing to feel good about themselves.

And surely it won't be as bad as the Steve Jobs fiasco.
Ode to the Startup Founder
Yeah, my grandma has also run into some troubles when trying to send an email. She had to:

- Investigate which PC she should buy

- Find someone willing to sell a PC at a fair price. This is a problem because PCs get old really quick, and some vendors will try to sell you old PCs at their original prices. I don't know how they expect PCs to be useful if they go down in value so fast. Why buy a PC today, when you can buy it at half its price in a year?

- Ask someone for help to connect all the wires

- Fail to send an email. Learn that she also needs an internet connection

- Investigate which ISP she should hire

- Etc...

With traditional mail, she just writes the letter and drops it in the post office.
It's probably because every blog post that contains the word "monad" becomes incomprehensible to most people that don't already know what they are.

See also: curse of the monad
This deserves more than just an upvote, so:

To faith!

(wow, that was a sentence with low prior probability)
Not sure if there is a marketing company that specifically helps people with Kickstarter campaigns, but there should be.
"Be back soon!" :)
If your theory is correct, people would hoard any resource that is increasing in value relative to something else. Currency deflation is just a special case. It's not entirely clear why "hoarding" is an inherently bad thing either.

Bitcoin isn't inherently deflationary. It isn't even a fixed supply, it will grow for the foreseeable future. For short periods of time it was deflationary as people speculated that it was actually worth a lot more, but that seems to have stopped.

An inflating currency would never catch on. It's a hot potato situation of "I don't actually want to own it because it's decreasing in value. If I do have some, I want to dump it on the next sucker as fast as possible to minimize my losses."
My intuition would be that functional startups are visibly functional; they feel awesome. If you have to ask whether your startup is dysfunctional, then the key fact is that it's not awesome which I would expect---someone correct me if I'm wrong---that your equity is substantially less likely than usual to be worth much. Sure, there are non-awesome companies that succeed, but maybe they're just the rare examples from the very wide pool of non-awesome companies, or maybe they have founders who were good or lucky at obtaining venture capital or had some other special advantage. What's your company's special advantage? Do you have enough equity, or enough pay, to make it worth more than all the other startups you could join can offer you? Did you graduate from MIT or from Nowheresville college, and are they paying you $60K/year or $110K/year? Every offer has to be understood in comparison to its opportunity costs, the other offers you might get.
It's definitely better if you are using Firefox Beta but I've replied below with an odd bug.
A lot of China's construction efforts are due to the government's affinity for infrastructure projects that inflate GDP. The result are these ghost towns, because the cost of a newly built apartment is much, much higher than most Chinese can afford. [1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E

For a chart of concrete consumption per capita vs. GDP per capita:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-21/chinas-ghost-cities...
This is very well done.
It's refreshing to see graphical explanations of programming concepts.
The analogy with tracks is a very helpful way to make the notion of monadic contexts concrete.
Great job!

I'd be curious to know how the author came up with the idea of representing these ideas with tracks, as it is a very fortunate perspective.
That is true that developers betray a lot of information about themselves for being as security conscious as they are, perhaps we can team up for a secure your data day?
Quoting a good but dead comment for visibility:

citrik 10 minutes ago | link [dead]

I don't think the "in business to make profits" part is entirely true. Apple and Tesla are both leading examples of companies that are out for something other than profits first. You can say that shareholder interests and publicly traded companies require ... but at the end of the day those are two companies that don't let capitalist dogma drive their path. I wish there were more than a handful.

-----
Normally we have a scope of what we want to do (ie. Let's redo the homepage and the login page). Then the product team group up and hash out the requirement, which is then sent to the developer. Although there are iterative changes in design, I actually don't know why the changes were made most of the time (they are not because of the implemented demo by the dev, the product team only starts seeing at the same time of QA)
Missing features weren't Microsoft's problem with Windows Phone. You can't ship from day one with all the features whether you lead or follow.

Waiting until everything is there is a recipe for burning out your team and shipping 4 years later, with zero apps in your app store.

No, the problem is there's simply no compelling reason to own a Windows Phone.

iPhone integrates with Windows just fine. It's popular and feels "safe" because there's safety in numbers, and it has all the apps.

Android is doing well, too.

Microsoft had the chance to ship a phone that integrates better with Windows than any third party phone OS could, but they didn't figure out anything interesting to do with, and just shipped a normal smartphone with a trendy UI on it.

Look at Apple and "Coherence" now. This is the kind of shit Windows Phone should've provided for Windows computers. Instead their roadmap speaks about unifying kernels and what not. Nobody cares about your unified kernels, Microsoft. Ship features that bring visible value to users.
Russian Bombers Fly Within 50 Miles of California Coast
I would absolutely love to have an open, accurate sleep tracker. I've had a total of 7 sleep studies and multiple sleep latency tests (narcolepsy, cataplexy and mild apnea solved via a tonsillectomy), and I am constantly dismayed by how poor the space for optimizing sleep is. So much so, that I may seriously consider exploring the space in a year or two to find startup opportunities. Everybody sleeps and everybody would benefit from better quality sleep.
Do you have any way to add Bluetooth controller support on Android? (via Firefox or otherwise)
It doesn't do anything about non-practicing entities because it can't.

I think AnthonyMouse's comment was referring to NPEs that were sponsored by a practicing entity that is subject to a reciprocal license. An effective such license would have to restrict participants from indirectly funding attacks that would be violations of their agreement if they carried out the attacks themselves.
What was Rockstar's business before the patent purchase? Or was Rockstar a shelf company?
Highway To The Danger Zone: Russian Bombers Buzz Coast Of California, Alaska
For a currency with true decentralized anonymity, check out Monero:

http://monero.cc/
I'm from nowhereville college, and the pay is lower than the low end you gave.

Part of the reason I asked on HN is because I don't know if feeling awesome is the norm in a startup: the work is expected to be stressful, isn't it?
Really great post. There's another angle here that has implications around the notion that the Nash Equilibrium is the norm: Path dependence. Getting out of this mess may be less possible because of that notion because how we can proceed is path dependent upon all of us thinking that, underneath it all, Musk is also a shitbag.

We've got a lot of problems facing humankind right now. The stakes get higher every day. Whatever it is we have to do to solve the toughest one we need to do _whatever it takes._
That's exactly what you should do. Being able to influence people and drive a vision forward is another skill you should try to develop, and which seems easier to get started at while at a startup.
Not if E is ideal. The point is that an ideal block cipher is not vulnerable to related key attacks. It should be indistinguishable from a random permutation. Selected uniformly from S_n, where n is the cardinality of the key space.
Facebook is going to sell your web browsing data to advertisers – itechnote
It was actually counterproductive to leave out the context of this guy developing CSS and a link to whatever blog documented the cancer's story. The given explanation was simply adults don't have favorite colors, children do. You're perfectly welcome to have fewer people interested and make the whole thing seem like a pretentious non-sequitur to 99.99% of the world's population, but I guess you didn't think Rebecca deserved better and were simply being incompetent.