skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Formally, "safety" = "preservation" + "progress". So, using those loose definitions together doesn't fit what I'm referring to.

In particular, "does not access elements outside of the bounds of the array" is not directly a safety property, though it could be interpreted within the dynamics in order to ensure progress. For instance, if you outlaw exception throwing then the types must ensure that exceptional states cannot arise. Else the program can "get stuck" and progress is refuted.

The final point about sorted arrays again mistakes putting "safety" and "progress" on the same epistemological ground.
Rocket Internet's Samwer Brothers Become Billionaires On PLDT Investment
I'm a friend of the founder, it indeed isn't ready yet, although docs should be up fairly soon. It is fully functional, and it is hosting a few platforms in production including http://hackerbracket.com
"Ok, so in the situation that this code is not perfect, which we know it will not be, what code do we run?"

You're going to have to ask someone who works at Google that kind of question.

Not all of the rules are hard-coded. Most of what makes Google software smart is their advanced machine learning, prediction, and AI algorithms.

"Rather, it is what to actually do in the situation that if it does nothing the car is going to hit a pedestrian at speed and all avoidance strategies it has calculated seem to massively increase the danger to the occupants."

Apply brakes, activate horn, swerve, deploy airbags, call 911.

If the pedestrian gets hit, then it was obvious that the pedestrian did something very wrong. If it is determined that the vehicle was traveling too fast for that particular stretch of road (because of blindspots or because it's beside of a playground or busy sidewalk) then adjust the algorithm to look for clues that will make it operate at a lower speed in this type of area.
I wonder if they pick up a phone and ask "Come here Watson I need you."
Most likely $0. If you don't have any traction or investors, what makes you an attractive acquihire target? If it were so easy to throw together a few friends and make a million dollars via acquihire everyone would be doing it instead of applying for a job.

Acquihire is 30% about getting a team with proven ability to execute and 70% about paying back investors as a favor or a down payment on maintaining a good relationship with them. If your dream is really to get acquihired your best bet is to pull together enough traction to raise seed funding and then invest that money in hiring the best engineers possible before shopping it around to get acquired.
Don't negotiate against yourself.

This question is all about how valuable you are to that company. Does hiring the team and getting the technology increase their profits by 10%, 100%, 1000%? How much value are you bringing to the new company?

And don't devalue yourself because you aren't VC funded. Don't negotiate against yourself into saying a lower number. Find out how much you think your worth and come with your thoughts to the table and negotiate with the acquihiring company.
Double-click URL, right-click, open link.
I'd never seen the similarity until you mentioned it. But I don't think so.
Yeah, but ideally, you never want to be in the position of telling people, "oh, this was just price discrimination, it wasn't really worth paying more for."
Acquihires are bought not sold.

Your acquirer will have some sort of price formula they use for these things and will have a price in mind usually. It's also hard to pin down exact numbers as they vary wildly by who is doing the acquiring.

You should dig a little and see if they've acquired anyone of a similar size and peg to that.
http://www.repl-electric.com/
The 5 types of procrastinators: which one are you?
Sure, but is Watson a Six Sigma Green Belt?
Same here. I've been a developer for years and as I've transitioned jobs I've met a number of really good developers. Any time an idea arises that would make a tempting startup I reach out to people I've worked with to solicit the opportunity to work on it together. Every time I've done so, the inevitable decline always has something to do with healthcare.

Once you're beyond your post-college years and have a wife, and possibly children, the risk of a startup suddenly includes the cost of healthcare and risk of not having any. All of us can make comfortable salaries and have money to take risks on our dreams and be protected from failure by incorporation. But that does not translate to the potential medical issues of yourself or your family which would lead to personal bankruptcy and future employment issues.
Why I dislike arrogance/over-confidence
This post reminded me of a recent Nick Corcodilos article:

The reason the labor market seems less efficient is because applicant tracking systems (ATS) and job boards fail to match job applicants to jobs, and instead, stimulate phony recruiting activity by human resources (HR) departments. The employment system is now clogged with so much crud spawned by these databases that even Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen is confused. ATS databases like LinkedIn and Oracle’s Taleo — these darlings of the stock market — are making it more difficult for employers to hire. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/ask-headhunter-recr...

One piece of technology-- often overlooked, good old-fashioned phone conversation. Sadly, a dying art.
Outdoor cats generally don't really get lost, they get flattened by cars or eaten by coyotes depending upon where you live, neither of which a GPS is going to help with. On rare occasions they get snatched up by animal control.

For anyone with a cat, I highly recommend getting it microchipped (in case they get out and happen to fall into that last category) and making it indoor-only. The average lifespan of an outdoor cat is ~3-6 years.
They might have a great technological solution or expertise that the acquihiring company needs. Thus they might be paying for the technology instead of spending time and resources trying to develop it themselves.
Up to 2000 calls/minute. We will hopefully increase this soon.
In general, regular capitalism is best for progress, since government-funded operations don't have the same incentive to succeed, to avoid waste, etc.

However, for something like developing drugs, it may be worthwhile to have more government involvement. The article mentions how drug companies can focus on their profits to the detriment of society. One might even wonder if the Hepatitis C cure was priced so that not everyone could afford it, so the disease wouldn't be eliminated...
Or Go or Java/Scala/Clojure. I would hope these are on the way. I would think Go would be uber easy to support.
Is the correct answer not "the largest amount that the acquiring company will pay"?

I think that this is a question that is impossible to answer.
A Life of Its Own (2009)
There probably is a business in this, but it looks like TheFunded and GlassDoor are already taking it on.

Anyway, there is a solution to this - it's to develop a personal set of red flags and heuristics that you use to weed out bad founders when you talk to them. I have one, and it disqualifies probably 95% of startups that I talk to. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's any way to build this reliably short of bitter experience. The problem with a general "post your grievances" board is that you don't get both sides of the story. I know at least one person who has posted their grievances publicly on HN where I personally witnessed what actually went down, and their account is nowhere close to what I witnessed.
This isn't something unimportant like voting machines; The inspectors do their due diligence.
This is excellent. Congratulations, guys!

Last year, when I first started hearing about Lob, I was very impressed by the cool services people could quickly create using their API. It looks like it's only gotten more popular from there!
"For all we know, the OP sat around and did nothing productive."

Working his network to help get a startup's first few customers at large, brand name companies? I'd hardly call that unproductive. In fact, if they iterate product dev on one of these customers, find that perfect product market fit, and scale; well, I'd say he played a roll in their success.

"Perhaps there were issues the OP is completely unaware of?"

The issue is the manner in which the OP was terminated. The company could be totally justified letting him go, just not in the manner in which they did it.

"you can be terminated for any reason... Does that make it "right"? Well, that's a perspective thing."

One, you can't be terminated for any reason.

Two, we are seeing the perspective of public opinion and unfortunately it is reflecting negatively on YC since people don't have a more specific target. Everyone has a 'right' to choose who they work for.

Three, getting terminated is a little more than just perspective. It is an event which can have significant repercussions for a person: mortgage payments, kid's school costs, etc.
I'd also like to point out that unions would likely offer much greater protection for the likes of Snowden. There would be viable paths to take within the union and would likely result in not having to run off to Russia.
Exactly. Nobody is going to want to manage their own bitcoin holdings, much as I don't keep all of my savings in a safe in my house. So that gets out-sourced and insured, and somebody has to pay for that. I expect it's much less than the credit card's take, but when it's paid for by the consumer it's much different psychologically. Consumers are going to have to get a cut of the savings.
I've been getting a bit more involved with KiCAD and asked a similar question. The problem is that right now there are no OSX developers and as a result the installer is in terrible shape as well as the stability.

Until they can get that sorted out don't expect anything soon. There have also been quite a few massive changes in the code base that don't appear to be slowing down. They aren't complete though and need a LOT more work. The way it looks I wouldn't expect anything for at least another 8 months+, probably even more than a year.

It is unfortunate, but there are only so many people to work on it.
Ask HN: Finding the Right Problem
Hi everybody,

Many entrepreneurs know that to find the right startup idea, you need to first find a problem or pain-point to solve.

So, I wanted to ask the audience: what are some problems you have, you would be willing to pay for someone else to solve?
The API is not the service. The service is solving a hard problem. The API is reading rather simple data from the service in batches. The API's problem is a trivial one.
If you don't have revenue or customers you shouldn't be looking for someone to acquire you. Chances are, if you had a truly disruptive product and you were in the industry/segment that the acquiring agency worked in they would come to you - but if that was the case you wouldn't be asking the question here.
And you're free to sniff my traffic and hack my phone :) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8151516>
Then its not an acquihire.
Models for API driven startups built around public data
A belated thanks. Much appreciated.
How much has doing the startup cost you. If you're bootstrapped you've probably both put personal funds in as well as a salary opportunity costs.

Thats your base.

Now you need to find a multiplier for the opportunity you're giving up. Have fun with it. Say you'd think you could sell your company in 2 years for $20M. Say there's a 10% chance of that happening. That $2M. Divide that by number of founders/employees. There's your markup. Maybe you add some padding to leave room for negotiation.

At the end of the day you need to also find some sort of bottom line. How much are you willing to take to give up to take a normal job (noting you're probably locked in for a year or two)? With my business it's enough to pay off my house. Thats the least amount I'd take to sell my business (not a startup, bootstrapped services)
Check out that hockey stick graph!

What was the big change that bumped up order volume so much?
> Clojure is dynamically typed in the sense that programs are not type-checked at compile time, values are tagged with types, and type errors are runtime errors.

Well, yes, but that has little to do with the way Clojure abstractions work; namely, they're not based on dynamic dispatch, but on OO-style polymorphism.

But BTW, your definition is not entirely complete, and the distinction between statically typed and dynamically typed is not always so clear cut when you're not talking about extremes such as Haskell and JavaScript.

Statically typed languages like Java, C++, C# and Scala can, and do have runtime type errors because they allow casting. They also all have type tags (well, optional in C++). I.e., most statically typed languages don't attempt to eliminate all type errors at compile time. Clojure indeed does very little static type checks (I think only function arity is checked).

Even in Haskell values must be tagged with types, and the type tags are inspected at runtime. Otherwise, pattern matching wouldn't work (pattern matching is always based on type reflection).

> I'm curious why you think multimethods are more limited than dynamic dispatch.

Because methods can't (or rarely do) "appear out of nowhere" or get installed at runtime as they do in, say, JavaScript or Groovy.
I we don't embrace it, we will get a dystopia.
Besides issues like temperature, you'd need to to control for interference from geographic features like hills and valleys. It might work in wide open flat spaces like the prairies of the American mid-west.

If you're interested in this, there was a very good program on PBS's science show Nova a month or two back, called 'the edge of space' or something similar, which involved photography of lightning at altitude and later from the space station, resulting in confirmation that lightning interacts with the upper atmosphere as well as the ground.
There's already a tool that does this. Check out http://www.sanebox.com/.
Agreed; a good company will stand behind a prior offer, within reason.

Twice I've gone back to someone who had given me an offer and said "I screwed up, would you still consider me?" a year later, and had an instant and very positive response. (I had to do a fake interview at one of those, but just to satisfy HR).
Your control group during the trial gets placebos, and you compare how many contracted the thing you're trying to prevent in two groups.

In some ways simpler than the control group getting the best current treatment, in which case you have to compare the efficacy in both groups.
> - Server push support

Couldn't a multi-part document already do this?

> - Mandatory encryption support

Couldn't they just have said "OK, HTTP 1.2 MUST be done over a TLS connection?" Also, didn't the TLS-always idea go away recently?

The downsides also include reïmplementing much of level 4 (congestion management, flow control, &c) and all of the complexity that goes with it.
If it's directional, you can get one direction. Which disproves the N-1 meme that is in so many papers.
You said "with room and board," which implies living in university housing. That would do it.
maybe this is unrelated, but I've always thought that the Winklevoss twins looked like grown up Zach Morris.
Im dying to read the story of going from manual printing to it getting automated, that sounds reallupy interesting.
We All Got Trolled
Just having software that can record and transcribe only relevant conversations, record action items, and email summaries would vastly improve the state of the meetings I attend.

Nothing worse than wasting 3 hours in a meeting and coming out where participants remember things incorrectly and go off in different directions.
Let me just make the token comment minimizing any positive Bitcoin stories, the title of this guys position makes him seem more important than he really was in the economic world. The director of the mint is more bureaucrat than economist. So while him having a positive view of cryptocurrencies is certainly good news, I could see the possibility that supporters of cryptocurrencies will hold this up as a bigger story than it really is.
Exactly. The labels that have been worst hurt by the digital revolution were the least exploitative ones.
Coindera: Bitcoin Alerts
Great work guys. Lob's a great service and I wish you all the best.

Certainly rings a lot of bells here at Pwinty as we both launched about the same time.

Our first ever order arrived sooner than expected and was fulfilled by me running down to the local photo store with a memory stick and them over to the post office. Then spent a few months with a commercial photo printer living in our dining room. We'd drape a blanket over it when guests came over for dinner, but it had a habit of whirring to life at the most inopportune times.

My wife tolerated this wonderfully for a good few months until we had a better alternative!
If people just understood the inverse square law and other related functions, stuff like this wouldn't be thought of as so revolutionary. While I do see some potential for this technology as a product for those that do not care about their home electricity bill, would you really want to have less than 1% efficiency? Think of it this way: You are using electricity to generate oscillating waves in the air, directing that to a receiver, which is then turning that back in to electricity. This has some promise for extremely low power devices (think milliwatts), would you want to have a 500W power supply to charge a 5W phone?

References:
https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/opticalandsemidev/Public/Pu... (39% efficency at 1mm, 0.013% at 10cm)

The best that I've seen (promising for IoT...)
"The authors showed that with these transducers data communications can be achieved at wall-transducer standoff distances of up to 10 mm. Of the many tested configurations, the authors quote the performance of a 400 mW Tx system operating across a 25 mm steel wall. This system achieved a 10 mW power transmission (0.25% efficiency) and a 1 Mb/s data transmission rate. The authors expect that the power transmission efficiency can be increased to 1%."
http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/305/1/012088/pdf/1742-65...
"Mr. Moy’s past work, however, that makes his presence among us interesting."

I don't know why. He was Director of the US Mint: he printed coins. It's a manufacturing business. It has nothing to do with monetary policy, fiscal policy or law as far as I know.

If the Secretary of the Treasury said something ... well, then we'd have a story.
The market for private WoW servers in the past has been a major concern for Blizzard and I'd imagine has been a large motivator in their decision to closely guard their infrastructure design.
I already had an iphone when I started this. But even if I didn't have one, a used old iphone works really well and looks nice without costing much.
We all took title bumps and the company gave us all a +20% raise. At acquisition we each asked for +20% raise & some stock. Retention varied from 12 - 24 months for vesting period.

So, back then (2000) I went from 64k to 76 to 92 in a few months. But then everyone went out of business ;)
Full disclosure: I am the creator of the project.

Wikipedia at least, defines a game engine to be "a software framework designed for the creation and development of video games" and goes on to say "The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine (“renderer”) for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, and a scene graph.".

Azul3D has a rendering engine, and a soon-to-be-released 3D audio engine. Go provides networking, streaming, memory management, threading, and a few Go packages provide localization support. Azul3D also provides 2D physics (through Chipmunk 2D), with 3D physics (provided by Bullet) coming soon. Arguably scripting is not needed, Go has very "scripting-language" like syntax. But you could use the various Go bindings for scripting languages out there today (Lua, Python, etc). Azul3D doesn't have any support for animation yet -- but in the near future it will receive a Blender model loader with support for 3D animated models. AI and scene graph libraries will surely be developed over time. I agree that the engine isn't ready for serious 3D games yet, more work still needs to be done for that to happen as I've already stated. Perhaps right now it just looks like a graphics engine -- but in the future it will get better I promise.

Yes, there aren't any game demos yet. These things take time. Do note that Go's image package allows decoding png/jpeg/gif images (and probably others, as well). Loading 3D models is coming soon.

Concurrency could be incredibly useful in games -- I'm a bit shocked that you'd say otherwise. Imagine having a single goroutine perform decisive actions for an in-game NPC etc. With Go you can literally have thousands of goroutines running at the same time (like coroutines -- only better).

I enjoy the criticism nonetheless, it lets me know where I am and where I need to be. Thank you.
Presumably you would have to do a longitudinal study (could be an RCT or cohort or something else). If I think about it, it seems like studying how long a vaccine is effective for is a similar problem.
>Small businesses are generally inefficient and prone to failure.

Also, small businesses have to make money now, or nearly now, before their angels run out. Large businesses can lose money for as long as it takes for the small businesses to fold, and will still attract investment that anticipates the future monopoly/monopsony pricing possible after all small firms close.

Also, large companies can eat small competitors, or collude with each other (non-competes, patent truces) in ways that exclude the smaller actors.

-----

Edit with a possible Uber future:

Cab companies will start to (continue to?) run their hired business through Uber, and eventually Uber will gain the ability to pick up street hails. Uber will buy Taxi.com and ditch the Uber brand. The new Taxi.com will market itself as a dispatching service for independent taxi companies, but take a large percentage off of the top of each cab ride - and reduce that percentage in markets where independents have managed to survive. They'll also unify through systemwide discounts/customer loyalty programs. In the end, the only difference in the taxi market will be a new middleman, higher + less direct pricing, and lower quality (after you have to take what Uber gives you.)
In that case the acquiring company would be coming to them. If there is a pinch point that bad that an unproven technology would be implemented before it has traction, any wind of the technology to fix it would draw mice.
Adobe + Target + PlayStation leaks alone total over 300 million credentials.

AOL 2004 = 92 million

AOL 2006 = 20 million

Apple 2012 = 12 million

Blizzard 2012 = 14 million

BNY Mellon 2008 = 12.5 million

Cardsystems Solutions 2005 = 40 million

Evernote 2013 = 50 million

GS Caltex 2008 = 11 million

Heartland 2009 = 130 million

Living Social 2013 = 50 million

RockYou 2009 = 32 million

TMobile 2006 = 17 million

TJ Maxx 2011 = 94 million

US DoD 2009 = 76 million

US Dept of Veteran Affairs 2006 = 26.5 million

Yahoo 2013 = 22 million

Those are only the ones over 10 million before 2014, leaving out some foreign hacks like Auction.co.kr (18 million). (Also UK NHS 8.3 million, LinkedIn 8 million, Ebay, Target, LexisNexis)

I promise you that just over 1 billion is about the number of major company leaks that are publicly available. Yes, lots of duplicates between those leaks, but most contain additional valuable data besides just the credentials.

ATT, BCBS, Citigroup, Facebook, Gap, Gawker, Chase, Medicaid, Monster.com, Network Solutions, Nintendo, Sega, Starbucks, Twitter, Ubisoft, Washington Post, and numerous government and academic organizations all have hundreds of thousands to millions of credentials publicly available.