skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you know why they are acquihiring you?

Bootstrapped or not, VC funded or not, profitable or not, a company's value is given by its potential. This potential will be measured (with different metrics, some of them quite subjective) by both parties, then negotiated hopefully to somewhere in between. In your case, you need to come up with your number by best estimating what the value of your team will be once acquired and assigned your new task.

Ie. you are making a cool AI board but you got no traction (hence no VC, revenue or customers). Now Intel wants to acquihire you to make their next generation of synaptic chips something cool. Just lately IBM closed a deal valued at $100M with a Chinese manufacturer for their synaptic chips. Since they are looking at an internal BP for the acquihire of a $100M potential, a 10x ROI puts you all at $10M. Now you have your own BP that you can use to support your intended price for the deal.

Once you have that potential value, you will want to figure your opportunity cost and BATNA by looking at the potential value of your product or company in X reasonable years. This will be your leverage for negotiating.
My signature has been a little ASCII-art box for years. Probably decades, now. It renders correctly in almost nothing, these days.
I'm concerned that this is one of the great problems that humanity can't deal with, like the tragedy of the commons. Only a small percentage of the population recognizes that freedom from labor is a positive thing. So the way I see it, we have two choices:

1) let the small percentage automate their way to freedom and the rest can join if they wish

2) adopt automation on a wide, institutional scale the way we did with public education and social security

Unfortunately, with the political slant of the country leaning so far towards libertarianism at the moment (government = bad, taxes = bad, welfare = bad, etc) I am becoming more convinced every day that we will go with option #1 and create a two-tier society. The tiny elite today has trouble discerning where unearned income comes from. They don’t seem to care if their capital gains come from a working class or automation. As someone who dabbled in dead end manual labor jobs for most of my 20s, I find that appalling. It’s like trying to talk to someone about vegetarianism who has never slaughtered an animal by hand.

So, these things will probably go the way they always go. A small percentage who sacrifice tremendously for the greater good of society, with the masses riding the coattails of progress glibly unaware of it. I suppose in the end that that has always been the American way, or at the very least, the western way.

Maybe a path towards enlightenment is to picture a day in the near future as we approach the singularity and find that economic gain is no longer tied to labor. It’s going to be a bit like winning the lottery, here and there, small amounts at first but growing larger every day. I will believe that automation has arrived when I begin seeing random acts of selflessness by people who recognize that financially, they have arrived. As in, randomly receiving a call one day that your credit card bill has been paid in full. Or maybe a city receives a large donation for the building of bike paths. Or a solar panel installer goes door to door and gives people free kits to get off the grid and never pay another electric bill. I think small, targeted amounts of money injected directly into the system like that could be quite disruptive.

So in the end such ominous changes could come to pass with a whimper instead of a bang. It could be one of the great advances in civilization that people thousands of years from now look back at in awe, wondering how we ever transitioned from a dog-eat-dog hierarchy to egalitarian anarchy. I guess they will have just had to have been there, witnessing the epic stupidity that we’ve witnessed over the course of our lives. Stepping back from that, rejecting it summarily is not such a hard thing to do. Not if you grok that the other side of the threshold is not just possible, but probable. And then be willing to take a leap of faith and persevere long enough to see it through.
Your comments make one want to ask: if it's so easy, why didn't your parents save up the money to send your sister to a better school?
And another:
http://conservativeorthodoxy.blogspot.com/2010/04/combat.htm...
Copywriter. Long time lurker. Interested in startups and online business models and strategy.
Your point being? I dare say spending most of each day out in a continuous breeze might have some noteworthy effects. Skin disease?
Springer is definitely bad; they're mostly just a service for printing books, stamping their logo on them, and getting them into academic libraries. However, MIT Press is excellent. There's a big range of support and quality control among publishers. Zero Books is also quite successful as a nontraditional quasi-academic press. They've developed a niche style that's popular in a certain audience (academic but readable and short, ~70-100 page books on a specific subject). So authors publishing a "Zero Book" through Zero get a bunch of built-in exposure to the audience the publisher has cultivated, in part through marketing (the brand is known, individual academics often aren't), and in part because readers trust it to do some quality/style control so the books in their catalog fit the expected style.

As a reader I like finding publishers like that because it reduces the noise for me considerably and improves discoverability: browsing http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/new-titles or http://www.zero-books.net/forthcoming-titles.html is actually manageable. With a few such publishers (I follow about 5 semi-regularly) you can keep abreast of a lot of interesting things happening without having to recognize the individual authors or do extensive research on them; I outsource the job of doing that to the publisher.
Gruber's obviously kidding about Apple's wearable device. He doesn't know if that's true or false, but his jibe against the Moto 360 sounds better if he talks about Apple's announcement as a fact instead of a hypothetical.
I'm a sound designer who currently works at Shakespeare in the Park, also in NYC. I'm absolutely fascinated by the Hudson yards project. What exactly is your involvement in that project?
Agreed, even though the url indicates that it is an "about" page, it is somewhat difficult to understand that from the page itself. Especially given that there is no traditional navigation to speak of.
This is the market reacting to malicious behaviour by large organizations. As far as I can tell, in this situation it seems to be working. The court system nor the market isn't putting up with their shit.

I'd much prefer courts handle this than solving the problem by creating a second problem. Which in your example, the unions themselves eventually become too powerful or negatively effecting the job market and upward mobility of smaller players. We would see benefits in the early days then eventually reach by a stasis where everything starts moving extremely slowly and consumed by bureaucratic process.

Then only those embedded within the union system benefit, while competing global markets without constraints operate more efficiently. While smaller players in the job market start hiring less due to the high bar needed to hire union workers.

I've witnessed this first hand as an electrician in my family ran a successful business, until the workers organized into a union and he had to shut it down because their demands made it completely unprofitable (they demanded expensive benefits programs and high wages, keep in mind we live in Canada with public healthcare). The workers lost their jobs and most ended up working for another much larger company. Unions create bigger companies and bigger unions.
That's a great point, but seems like the CEO (or whatever principal is shattering the relationship) isn't being mature, nor thinking objectively.
Nigel Richards, The Best Scrabble Player
It is disappointing that you got downvoted. Hopefully it was an accidental downvote due to HN's poor mobile browsing support, as opposed to someone being unwilling or unable to explain why they disagree with you.
Show HN: Reddit command line script
Maybe it's me but I feel like sort is an overstudied problem. There are much more interesting challenges with datastructures and algorithms.

EDIT: the blog post presents a benchmark on two completely different datastructures (numpy matrix vs python list), it is unclear if any conclusion can be drawn.
Russian hacker data breach How to remember your new passwords
Thanks for pointing it out, you're right! I rewrote the summary (the original is still at the linked tweet). So it's ~1-to-1 (usually, that's what I mean with practical) when it's volatile. And I'm calling it ~n-to-n (again, usually, practically) when it's correlated: mapping ~n correlations in the source domain to ~n correlations in the destination.

To my mind, an ~n-to-1 mapping would actually be a bit more like idealistic Platonic classifying than Wittgensteinian perception (~"we spin perceptual threads by twisting n attributes like fiber on fiber. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some 1 fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of the fibers.").

What do you think? :)
> My point was more that children are adept at overcoming obstacles that stand in the way of play.

I agree with that point entirely, but that does not mean that all children will overcome all challenges. My point is that we should not give up on a child just because they struggle with a shell. The reason I think shells are not the best introduction is that they cannot be figured out by exploration. They require specific knowledge that cannot be deduced because it is fundamentally arbitrary. That information can still be found online, so it is not impossible to discover, but I think it is ridiculous to give up on a 7 year old because they did not like exploring a shell.
Hypothetically if a person did experience myalgia as a direct result of drinking Earl Grey tea and their proposed mechanism is accurate, the treatment would probably involve K+ channel opener with a lower K_d (higher affinity) than the culprit bergapten, perhaps Diazoxide.
That's awesome. Is there an email I could reach you at? Any tips for beginner? I'm very interested in learning ios.
I'm an acoustical consultant. I mainly work with architects during the design and construction of schools, offices, and other public spaces. If you're in northwest US and work for a large tech firm, chances are someone in my group has worked on your space--designing interior acoustic environments and keeping obtrusive noises out.

I'm also a wantrepreneur with a vision to create better calculation tools for architectural acoustics and noise control. I enjoy seeing new JS libraries on here that help fill in those puzzle pieces and reading the perspectives of others on political and cultural topics.
Drones are great in permissive environments, but not ready for prime time. Plus they have an astronomical mishap (crash) rate. In Manned airplanes, the pilot can troubleshoot. Also, air to air combat (dogfighting) and aerial tanking can't be done by drones...yet!
Show HN: CloudPebble adds a UI editor
More details at: https://developer.getpebble.com/blog/2014/08/08/CloudPebble-Graphical-UI-Editor/
I bring my own keyboard and mouse to work. Those are the user's interface to the computers!

Seriously, I've noticed that most of the pain in using different computers come from the variations in keyboard and mouse feel and layout. Using the same mode of keyboard and mouse everywhere (all my home and work computers), make it much more pleasurable an experience.

Some companies offer to buy you the exact model of devices you want.
Are these "good" from a design aspect, or "good" because they convert?
More details at: https://developer.getpebble.com/blog/2014/08/08/CloudPebble-...
My point is that it is not the execs fault for it being expensive. There is an artificial limit on supply. If supply is kept low, the producers (the landlords) usually benefit at the expense of poorer consumers.
Ok, http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx

Doesn't feel like anything at all.
This particular example is javascript/Bower. A fresh clone and build of any javascript project using Bower has a non-deterministic build if it uses Bower's semver capabilites.
IANAL, but this makes a lot of sense. Lawyer's motivations are really really important.
Avoiding Unfortunate Implications
@jethro_tell: "Does your dev box have a bandwidth cap?" and "How often have you exceded your bandwidth cap?" appear to be referring to monthly throughput limits (aka "download quota").
As far as I can tell, don't work for those companies.
The politicians can't get rid of the PPOs, even if they wanted to. Politicians have to get (re)elected, which takes increasing amounts of cash. No cash, no office. If you're out of office, you're out of power.

The PPOs have very large revenues and therefore wield great power in determining the outcome of any move to reduce their influence.

This is regulatory capture by economic interests that don't provide value in the health care service chain. It's making health care more expensive for everyone.
Why is that disgusting? What's wrong with two people freely working together peacefully?
Hey, another geo! I'm guessing you're at New Mexico Tech? (Basing that on the San Lorenzo Unconformity outcrop shown on climbshare... At any rate, you've clearly been out there, even if you're not at NMT.)

On a side note, with climbshare, are you using lidar scans, or are you reconstructing the 3D geometry from photos? Either way, it's quite impressive!
But it wasn't the "mild stimulant" that was causing problems; he was fine drinking a gallon a day of tea without oil of bergamot.

You then go off on some rant about soda; the effects of eating an extra 1000 calories a day are well known. They do not apply to black tea.
Merchants are ALREADY taking a risk with credit cards if, after walking away with a $2000 computer, the guy issues a fraudulent chargeback.

So if a merchant accepts the (non-negligible) risk of credit cards chargebacks, he will accept the (even smaller) risk of a Bitcoin double spend :)
The medical space is so FUBAR'd that I don't see any value in trudging in there as a startup. It's just asking for pain. The industry is not ready for this kind of thing yet, and won't be for the indefinite future.

The whole way we do medicine just needs to be nuked from orbit. The current system we have is one of the most grotesque and tangible examples of human exploitation in modern times. This applies outside America too; your problems don't go away just because your government has given the industry a blank check.

Source: I was a long-term contractor who had options in a medical imaging startup.
Agronomist by training. Have done a number of things including project management for a company doing public works construction projects for around 10 years. Been programming as a hobby since late teens and have no formal CS education.

Recently I took a job as a web developer (I know... career path isn't in my vocabulary, I just do what interests me at the time and let the chips fall where they may). It's my first real programming job.

I built some SAAS applications for farms which I maintain and plan to expand in the future. These apps showed what I can do and helped me land my current full time job.
Lite Bitcoin wallet in go
BATNA = Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement
Thank Microsoft for heavens!

All the point of the page is to present the counter. Nice. Somebody could have put there at least a link to some description of whatever is going to be controlled, so at least my visit to the page wouldn't be limited to seeing the Great Counter of Heavens.
T-Mobile becomes first American carrier to release phone unlocking app
>So this is what economics has done to "going boldly"? No wonder it's called dismal science ;-)

Yes the economist is typically the buzzkill.

To your other point, I think it is silly to think that it would take fewer resources and time to terraform another planet^, than it would be to harden ourselves from disaster. Strike that it's not silly, it's wasteful.

^there are no known planets that are habitable to humans and getting out of our solar system is not feasible for humans given that it is 27,000 ly across
PPOs are the only way right now to get all health care providers to compete for patients.

disclosure: I'm for a single payer system that allows everyone to choose their preferred provider.
Show HN: Tiled HN
Optimization of Reusable Rocket-Powered, VTVL Launcher: Case Study of Falcon 9-R [pdf]
Like most of these things, they're good because whoever is running these sites thinks they're good. They like pretty pictures.

There are a lot of people out there who want to try to justify their tastes by making them sound like they're rooted in some kind of scientific consensus but it's rather rare for that to actually be the case. Designers are especially vulnerable to this and the way that industry jumps on the bandwagon and self-righteously snubs anyone who doesn't do so with them is amazing.

To some of us, a good email is 1-2 lines of pure text, and we'd rather go without the bells, whistles, and tracking images.
I regularly drink 1.5 gallons of iced tea per day, and 0.5 gallons of water, and have for a long time with no ill effects. Of course it's not 25 years, but it used to be 8 liters of diet coke per day, and the acid on the teeth alone was enough to quit.
However, where I think there is some difference is that I'm 6'4, 240lbs and in quite good shape. I think size definitely has some impact on that threshold, and until I see an explicit reason for harm, I see no benefit in stopping.
But I'm stubborn like that and my kidneys could implode tomorrow for all I know :/
Somewhat related: Some who advocate for workplace diversity are suspicious that "culture fit" is often a dog whistle meaning something like "young white brogrammers". I believe that suspicion is justified. At the same time, this post reminds me that company culture isn't always only that. It's rewarding to look at any organization through the eyes of an anthropologist. The idea that mid-size startups are actually closer to religions than tribes, for example, is something I find especially interesting.
We have a great, widely used, highly successful model to handle concurrency. Processes and pipes! It has been used for over 40 years, and it is the base of UNIX. Why do we look for something else? I don't know.
“Balloons” Swift playground from WWDC 2014
Adding an option to shoot yourself in the foot is bad API design and a premature optimization.

For the most part, it is rare to have both fully randomized data and a need to sort it.

One way to test the quality of a psuedo random number generator is to count ascending and descending runs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests. This suggests that runs are hard to get rid of even when your trying to do it on-purpose. The Timsort algorithm expends a little effort to see if runs are present (which is common) so that it can dramatically reduce the effort required to sort. Taking the check out is likely to be a bad idea in general -- "Hey, I'll speed things up by a few percent by removing the check for a high-speed shortcut. Now, give me a raise."

In a way, this micro-optimization isn't much more interesting than adding a flag to indicate that the data is already sorted. "Hey, I sped-up the sort routine by 100% because I already happened to know that the data was already sorted. Another raise please."

Lastly, I question the benchmarking procedure. One uses numpy arrays without any object overhead and the other timing uses plain python lists. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison that doesn't allow you to draw any meaningful conclusions about the relative speed of the two algorithms.

Very few people have crossed light sabers with Tim Peters and won. I'm amazed at how many people think that the first ideas that pop into their head will be better than decades of experience, deep analysis, and careful design. This is mature code, widely studied, and adopted in multiple languages.
In text analysis you can broadly focus either on style or on topic. Stylometry does the former and typically focuses on highly frequent function words; this technique is good at identifying authors. There are various techniques that focus on topics such as distributional semantic models and bag-of-word models; these techniques are good at clustering documents about the same topics together (regardless of author style). I think that in both cases a text can be reduced by the model to a single vector, which could be considered a hash, but in the end what matters is how well the models perform on a task such as identifying authors or finding documents on a given topic.
Compared to a modern fighter jet, drone aircraft are cheap, dumb, and disposable. Satellite control involves many seconds of latency and sometimes communication is lost entirely, especially in bad weather. It is routine and expected for a drone to just lose contact / fail / crash and be written off. You can get away with that since there's no loss of life, but you probably wouldn't want to use a drone to carry a nuclear bomb, for example. You can always just assassinate the Taliban leader tomorrow, but an unidentified or hostile aircraft violating your airspace needs to be dealt with right now.

There is research on planes that could be sent off with orders and not require continuous communication, avoiding some of these issues, but to my knowledge they aren't in widespread "production" use.

An F-18, on the other hand, is an engineering marvel and extremely responsive, agile, and flexible. Pilots can react very quickly to situations and have a realistic chance of winning dogfights with other fighter jets, for example, which drones almost certainly couldn't do.

On the other hand, if all you need to do is assassinate some people in a country without an air force, a drone will do just fine.