skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your board (and VCs by extension) are not the only accountable 3rd-parties... I'd argue that they're not even the best accountable 3rd-parties because they're interests are not necessarily aligned with yours - VCs have limited partners to worry about.

Look no further than your customers for great 3rd-party accountability. If they love and use your product, they will pay you more money and recommend you to others. They should be the only thing that matters. In fact, by not having a board you have the luxury of only being accountable to them.
"The basic power blocks already existed in their current form, were the primary source of money for politicians, etc. since the 1980s [at the latest]."

I didn't notice any changes in this after the post-Watergate "reforms", which happened not long after I became politically aware.

Globalization is ancient in American economic history, was very big in the 19th Century, and e.g. for the world, it didn't return to pre-WWI levels until a frighteningly later time, I can't remember when, but within my lifetime (which I suppose I should point out started when Eisenhower was president (barely)).

And I agree, this is a consolidation period. But I believe it's build on a foundation of sand, e.g. there is not an infinite hunger for US government debt at negative real interest rates, we're just the "least worst" place to put your money for the foreseeable future.
really-executable-jars codifies this as a Maven plugin:

https://github.com/brianm/really-executable-jars-maven-plugi...
Judge Scalia:

http://boingboing.net/2011/07/13/tom-the-dancing-bug-57.html

More:
https://www.google.com/search?q=judge+scalia+site:boingboing...
Blaming the economy of course does not absolve the Millennials from culpability. For example, they voted in droves for the current administration, which at the very least has not helped the economy. Any systemic solution along the lines of "it's all someone else's fault" is highly suspect to me.
Having to convince users to install your fork of the OS really isn't the same thing as being able to run a different native browser alongside their existing software. If the only way to use a browser other than Internet Explorer had been to switch OS then Firefox could never have been created in the first place.
I would also recommended to read Douglas Walton - Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation. Good book for understanding the basics.
People could as easily get killed trying to retrieve a downed UAV after trying to get a shot with the camera from even more remote vantage points. After all, if you can't get a good shot, most people will give up and get different shot, if your $600 flying toy goes down somewhere remote, you're quite motivated to retrieve it.
Excitebike for NES also had a level editor built in.
Plus there's that NeverWet stuff Rustoleum sells now; according to their marketing materials, it actually qualifies as superhydrophobic (i.e. in the same ballpark as the article's leaf): http://www.neverwet.com/product-characteristics.php
Are you including all the damage of the TSA and the wars that resulted from 911?
Installing updates is a complete trainwreck for almost
every product they've ever released and that's one of the
most basic tasks for a software vendor."

Then you haven't used Solaris 11, because in general, installing updates for the OS (and Java and many other things) is as simple as: pkg update

Also, your generalisations about 'no cultural tradition of taking toolchain usability seriously' are simply not true, I can show you plenty of tools where clearly whoever was working on them did care about usability.

With that said, I'm sure you're just venting and didn't mean what you said "literally"...
The key phrase in your comment is: "an abstract idea, it seems to me." The phrase "abstract idea" is, in this context, a legal term of art. It means what the Supreme Court wants it to mean.

If you look at CLS Bank v. Alice, the Court concludes that intermediated settlement is an abstract idea because it is "a fundamental economic principle." So to use your example, data compression (replacing frequently-repeated sequences with a shorter representation) might be a "fundamental computer science principle." But Lempel-Ziv-Welch, a specific compression algorithm, wouldn't be.
You were the one complaining about how: 'Anyone using my GPL-licensed code in their projects must release their subsequent projects under the GPL as well.'

That was the premise of your blog post. I pointed out that this is not true, since you can dual-licence YOUR GPL-licenced code.

You _choose_ to contribute to a GPL licenced project, your own contributions can be dual-licenced by you at your discretion, what exactly are you making a fuzz about?
And this train goes back to the "perceived effort" vs "actual effort" approach to compensation.

Fundamentally, is 60+ hour weeks sustainable, even if you love your job? Many in HN might view burnout, or an unwillingness to work 60+/week, as a personal flaw. But there's also another camp that argues consistent overtime produces a poorer product in the end. Personally, I notice a dip once I've worked 50+ hours/week for a couple weeks. I come into work mentally tired & get far less done.

Sure, an easy approach to compensation is "how much of his time/life did he sacrifice to work?" It's also by far the most common. Additionally, the people who signal that they're working hard in through self-promotion tend to take home more bacon. I understand human beings are emotional creatures, but in the vacuum of commenting on how much people should be compensated for hours on the job in a white-collar brain-intensive task, I think there should be more nuance than "Pay = hours * rate".
I'm guessing this won't be the last place unmanned aircraft get banned. Probably the places they can actually be flown might eventually be fewer than the places they are banned.

In fact, I am guessing as the technology matures and inevitable problems arise because of drones, rather than addressing the problems and working out a solution the first response will generally be....."Ban It!". This might change when/if demonstrable public benefits (beyond a guy taking some pictures) arise.
You have a good point. I don't know if I completely agree, but I can see the merit in it. However, you're now talking about the merits of operators in general, rather than overloading, which is a different thing altogether.
Very nice article, fun and informative.

There are several products that can coat materials to make them hydrophobic. "Neverwet" and "Ultra-Ever Dry" are two. Check out their videos on youtube.
That's what a lot of the commentary I've heard about Splatoon has focused on.

Nintendo took a really popular (and good) genre, the team based shooter, and made it perfectly family friendly. Easy to understand, lots of fun, no exploding heads, no dismemberments, nothing objectionable.
Hey - I'm the author of this piece. Thanks for voting it up to the front page. I love finding cool science in ordinary/everyday places, and am curious to hear people's responses to the piece. Cheers.
Precedent is a social convention; there is no rule that judges have to follow precedent.

And the CAFC chooses which precedents it likes to follow however it likes. Supreme Court precedents have no special power over the CAFC. Just look at how Benson is treated by State Street Bank or Alappat.
I'm surprised the version with pointers was only about 2x slower, not 10x slower as some people bashing Java often suggest. And this despite the fact that shared_ptrs in C++ are generally heavier than references in Java/C#.
Languages should build in all the numeric types you could ever need, but they don't. A lot of languages still don't have arbitrary-size integers (Swift among them).

You see the vast majority of cases not needing operator overloading and see it as useless, while I see the small number of cases where it's really, really good and see it as important.
Probably not all that different from the last one. Economy starts heating up, and the Fed begins to tighten interest rates to damp down inflation. It takes time for interest rate hikes to make their way through the economy, so they keep tightening. Eventually, everybody realizes that money isn't cheap anymore, and moreover, they realize that everybody else has realized that money isn't cheap anymore. That causes a mass stampede for the exits as people fly away from risk.

In the last crash, the economy started heating up in 2004, the Fed started tightening in 2005 and continued through 2006, the market hit a top in August of 2007, there was a slow-motion recession through late 2007 and early 2008, and then everybody ran for the exits in the summer of 2008.

This time, I think the economy started heating up in 2013, the Fed is planning to tighten starting early 2015, it'll take about 18 months for the rate hikes to make their way through the economy, and so I'd expect a crash around 2017.
Do you have thick black hair and an impregnable constitution? Notably though, he was pretty focused on the toxic qualities of tannins, but most recent investigations seem to go the other way (mild antioxidant, mild anticancer effects). Maybe your zealous drinking will take you well past 50?
How would you explain it, though?
U.S. To Open Immigrant Family Detention Centers In Response To Influx
Breaking Bad prequel gets renewed for a second season before first airs
Bagua
Jobs did turn divisions against one another, as when considering whether to build the iPhone with iPod OS or OS X.

Jobs also permitted silos; for example under Jobs, iOS and OS X were largely separate teams.

Neither of those are counterexamples. While Jobs had different units compete, that competition was constructive in the sense of supplying multiple options which the leadership could then choose from. (Toyota also does this.) This is different from the passive-aggressive sabotage one often sees in big corporations.

Also, "silos" were used to foster new development. I suspect they were used to insulate groups from the passive-aggressive fratricide one sees in large corporations.
"Busting her ass at Apple for 6 years might set up a young designer to get taken very seriously if she decides to move to another company, or start her own."

No. Don't take a job under the premise that it has good experience and will set you up for a later higher paying job with another company. That's a a myth. Get better at negotiating your salary now.

You should never take the mindset to to defer your salary in exchange for experience. Get paid what you're worth.
Balzac's galley proofs seem like a testament to a life of dedicated heavy coffee drinking:

http://www.themorgan.org/collections/collections.asp?id=365
I really enjoy typing fast (at least, faster than average) :) http://imgur.com/AUovDJq

I was fresh out of high school, and already doing small freelance web contracts for friends and family's businesses ... my first semi-technical job (other than the aforementioned contracts) was as a phone support person and I knew I was going to have to do a lot of typing; but I'd never been very good at touch typing. So I popped up notepad, and resolved to type everything that our trainer said for the week (or however long the training period was, I forget).

Best investment ever, considering this line of work :)
Show HN: Venmo for donations
You're getting confused by the word "idea." You patent a machine, not an idea. If you insist on saying that you patent the "idea" for a machine, then what you can't patent is an "idea about an idea." Ideas about machines are good. Ideas about ideas are no good. Make sense?
Is there a decent way to calculate valuation? We're starting to be approached with merger/acquisition talk and we're unsure on how to best determine our value in that scenario.

We're a 2.5 yr old company, annual revenue for this year forecasting to $1.1M. (2013 was $360k, 2012 was $60k). We're a team of 5 salaried employees (founders included), bootstrapped, fully employee-owned and steady revenue growth with very low operational costs.
>How could you hack a replacement for a board meeting?

Mastermind groups.
Whoa! The Richest man in Vegas is apparently originally from Innsmouth or Dunwich or maybe attended the Church of Starry Wisdom in his youth in Providence. Seriously, that dude looks like one of HP Lovecraft's human/Old One hybrids.

The confused, "but terrorism!" nature of Richest Man's objection to internet gambling only seems to cement his hybrid ancestry.
How many levels are there?
Miis on their own are a bit weak because they're just a little display object. Their little social network Miiverse holds a fair amount of content though.

Also, Nintendo has said that they won't be allowing you to see customized Miis when fighting other people online in SSB unless they're a friend of yours, probably to prevent copyright (and objectionable content) issues.
Do you believe in your team?
>Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?"

I wouldn't be so sure. I can write and type just fine, but I always learned better in class by listening to the teacher instead of trying to produce a pile of notes. All of the kids I remember that wasted their time writing down everything the teacher said without really listening to them, did just the same with computers or old-fashioned pen and paper.
>... Better, in my opinion, than a "marketing" or "business" degree.

Unfortunately, reality disagrees with you. And it's reality where we have things such as serviceable debt, credit ratings, employment security and obligations.
Definitely worth checking out Apoorva Mehtas (Instacart CEO) talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkmR7TYUt_c&index=7&list=PLQ...
Strange Effects of Rolling Shutter
I think there is something missing in the discussion of the article: Shared pointers are used for shared ownership, where in the example the author is assuming unique ownership.

In the benchmark this requires the compiler to generate code that makes sure that the object was not changed by issuing an exclusive request for the data plus the additional pointer dereferencing.

To check what is really happening I recommend two things:

1) Look at the generated code and see what the compiler issues.
2) Compare object* vs shared_ptr<object>
3) Compare unique_ptr vs object vs object*

My assumption is that unique_ptr will be faster than shared_ptr and have the same speed as object* and that will be a bit slower than object.
Could it be that long ago leaves existed without the wax, and when it rained the leaves were weighed down by all the excess water they were absorbing? Leaves with mutations producing wax were able to recover from a heavy rainstorm better than leaves with no wax.

Picture a leaf in the Amazon, do you picture a big, waxy leaf? I do. Rainforest = more rain = more wax.
I think dashed lines for rays would reduce a lot of visual clutter.

Anyway, I long for the day when someone writes a similar toy for a non-Euclidean plane.
Good idea - but then you would need Norton Commander, which I don't have for some reason.
That's true that we don't let other web runtimes be used on FirefoxOS so far. There are good technical reasons for that, not just "mozilla is evil".

Doing while preserving security would mean that such a runtime would run sandboxed (in the same way we render web pages with gecko in sandboxed processes). For that to work, the sandboxed process need to delegate some functionality to the "main" trusted process, like network access. This is happening through an ipc protocol (we reused the one from chromium) but the messages exchanged are very much gecko specific currently, so a lot of work would be needed to turn that into a more generic ipc embedding interface.

I'm pretty sure that the folks working on Servo would be very happy to plug in their engine there ;)
Like all law, yes, case law is a social convention, but there most certainly is within US case law, quite specific rules requiring judges to file precedent and defining which precedent they must follow (binding precedent) and which they are not required to follow.
Tracking How Far Soccer Players Run
> I think it is awesome that you went from 'no job in your area of expertise' to 'normal income' in 18 months.

I'm pretty sure my outcome so far is 50%+ luck and I don't know if I'll be able to sustain it forever.

> I am looking for clarity on the 'got sick of dealing with it' part. What were you sick of?

Consulting/Contracting work [my only option with $0 in capital] requires soft skills in dealing with people. The majority of my personal failings all relate to soft skills.

1) I've got a tendency to provide too much information rather than too little.

2) I tend to have poor communication with non-technical people [aka clients]. While I could blame it on them, the fact remains it was vital to my income on that course and therefore truly on me.

3) I'm a bit of an odd duck socially, even by programmer standards.

4) I don't have a poker face when annoyed/irritated/etc. I also have poor control over my tone in such situations. Coupled with #1 & #2 this tends to lead to a much higher client turnover than most consultants/contractors experience [I could be wrong, but I don't think so].

5) I was able to get a "normal job" and I prefer it. However, there is still one older engineer who needles me about #2. ;)

> I have never commissioned a survey on it but my experience from undergraduate to career was that there was a 100% correlation between passion for something and top 50% of people who do that thing. Every student I met at USC that was passionate about electrical engineering was in the top 50% of their graduating class, every clerk, salesperson, engineer, gardner, taxi driver, artist, and writer I've ever met who was passionate about what they were doing, did it better than most. That observation has been pretty foundational in my thinking about life and happiness. I would be intrigued to find a counter example.

You may be right. I don't think I'm in the top 50% of software developers, I am probably in the top 65%.

EDIT:

A perfect example of #2:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921042

I wasn't sufficiently clear about what I meant by "market rates" which leads to him launching into an explanation that [I think] he realized was not needed when he basically agreed with another poster about the $ figure quoted in the article.

This is due to the fact I didn't explicitly define "market rates" as the amount the person received on offer in the article.
And keep in mind, those salaries don't take into account the unemployed who have those degrees from those institutions.
For as great as npm is it also has plenty of issues. `npm clear cache` is so common that I don't know why it even bothers with a cache.
I was so sad to hear the news about Outbox. I've been waiting for a Canadian equivalent to appear. I'm also watching this space anxiously.
Id rather use Yo.
67 wpm :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_reactor
This might be better receive don stackexchange
DuPont Kevlar inventor Stephanie Kwolek dies at 90
I haven't seen any evidence that suggests starting a company during a boom economy makes it easier to succeed. It does make it easier to get a salary while failing though (which is better than just failing and getting nothing).
Magazine Advertisers Pay to Increase Circulation Numbers
Ghosted – Hosted Ghost Platform
Vitalik Buterin – on Bitcoin Mining
Mashup Evernote and Dropbox Content With Postachio
Thank to the Tech Block about announcing our Dropbox blogging integration - now you can mash up your Evernote and Dropbox content with Postach.io :)
If it was good enough for the ancient Greeks, it should be good enough for you.
I was born in the 70s and grew up in the late 80s, early 90s. My friends and I consider ourselves 'GenX' though I'm not sure what we are.

I find this article interesting because my friends and I often discuss how lucky we are to have been born when we were. We got off a crazy train right before it was about to take a perverse, fiery decent into economic hell.

In the 90s, college was cheap, and it was easy to get in to. In the 90s, it was cool to be a 'slacker' - and you could accomplish quite a lot, as one. There was hardly any competition and tons of opportunities. With a little bit of brain and a little bit of motivation, you could get into a top school, and it didn't matter much what your grades were. But, it wasn't just schooling that was easier to achieve - everything seemed a lot easier, and simpler.

I was recently talking to an older acquaintance, a person who recently retired as a top executive for one of the largest technology companies in the world. He's about 20 years older than me. And, he basically said the same thing: he was a B-C student in high school and college. He was pretty much a slacker, as I was. We both joked about how neither of us would be able to accomplish much, if we had been born in the 80s, or later.
The text described that term not as a type of French coffee, but as the term the French used to describe Turkish-style coffee.

http://www.languefrancaise.net/bob/detail.php?id=5998

First part means: "Bad coffee made ​​with chicory." Turkish coffee is made with chicory
Video Game Layoff Stories
Consider that my sister started out (without a college degree) working basic jobs until she ended up working recruiting. She's done that for years now, but she's reached a ceiling because jobs in HR ask for a degree.

Any degree.

Communication, Psychology, English, anything.

Now, all that it would take for her to break through is to have some experience in general HR. After that, nobody would even look at the degree. However, there's a ceiling there.

I look at many of my friends who have humanities and Social Science degrees and their real careers didn't take off until their late 20s or early 30s. Does that mean that my friends with Communications degrees ended up in Radio? No. But they would have never ended up where they are without that "any" degree.

IT is a different world entirely.
How so?

Investors put money into a company. Company uses money to pay workers. Everyone goes home happy.

We're already there, only newbies and people who don't know any better are taking a discount on market salary for options. The bulk of the people I know who work at startups are demanding - and getting - market salaries, and the options are of negligible importance.
We just did a late-seed round from a VC firm and didn't set up a board.

Something that has worked for us is doing a bi-weekly Google Hangout that has no agenda. The rule is no one prepares for it, but we just talk about stuff at a high level. So far it's been really helpful. We don't feel unnecessary pressure to prepare decks with stats and metrics on things that aren't important or will be changing quickly (plus I have the key ones memorized anyways), yet we communicate frequently enough that issues can be tracked closely and fixed.

It also works that we had only one firm in the round so coordinating it is easy. Might not work if you have lots of angels or other investors.
I agree this is a bit of a stretch as an example, but yes people do drop stuff on climbers. Still an interesting story and maybe a good sign that even the smallest objects (drones or boulders) can lead to a runaway effect on a cliff. Thankfully though, it does have to be a "one in a million" coincidence to hurt someone.

http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/rock...
Comps and competition. Three lines of enquiry to get started:

1. Compare between buyers (i.e. engage with multiple buyers so you can hopefully choose between competing offers)

2. Comparables

2a. look for recent sales of companies with similar size/trajectory)

2b. look at exit valuation ratios for companies in a similar industry ($ per engineer, price/earnings ration, $ per $revenue)

3. DCF (this is the first method of valuation taught to MBAs, but may not be much useful if your future cash flows are highly uncertain)