skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the purposes of this discussion we should dispense with the word "startups" and replace it with "new businesses". Since 1970 the rate of new businesses has been falling. Gee, can anyone else think of reasons why that might be besides immigration and housing rates in the bay area? What a bunch of navel gazing. Perhaps there is a causal connection with population age? What about other factors? What if we zoom out a bit and look at general workplace productivity factors and the impact of technology? Yes, that old crusty stuff they are currently using which you don't consider technology. It's actually a lot better than how things were done before, and before that, and before that too.

And what about the rising number of old companies? Look at different industries such as air travel, raw materials, and manufacturing. What I see is Standard Oil all over again, consolidation, incremental optimizations, with a little anti-competitive behavior thrown in to boot.

That's sometimes the problem with us programmers, especially the more naive amongst us. We often believe that File &gt; New is the answer to the world's problems when incremental optimization often is more pragmatic (and as the market shows us, more effective). It isn't sexy but it "works".

I don't know much about Home Depot but I'm going to guess that they got as big as they did (mostly) by introducing optimizations into the marketplace for home improvement products. They are not a monopoly (such as taxi services) that was created by and protected through legislation and can dissolve rather quickly (like it did in Houston this week) with a change in public support.

The tech "startup" community should stop looking at companies like Wal-Mart as evil and start to respect and marvel at the massive amounts of muda they have been able to eliminate from product supply chains. Just because they don't use Node.js doesn't make them disruptable (yes, I'm aware Wal-Mart actually does use Node).

</rant>
I think the EFF has been pushing this idea recently.
IBM opens a new era of computing with brain-like chip(4096 cores)
Is this the next Reddit?
Most likely by way of Quil (https://github.com/quil/quil). Using quil in your ide of choice is a dream and a remarkable improvement over the native processing env in terms of interactivity with the sketch.
I don't. I put the password in the SSID, as a form of a captcha. Any marginally intelligent human would break it, but an automated system sniffing out unprotected wifi won't.
Huh, thanks. Somehow I'd either never noticed this or completely forgotten.
Single Sign-On vs. Centralized Authentication
Wow, the memories and the pain. Its weird because I spent enough time in Azeroth that I think of it as a 'place' and as a place with fond memories that I cannot go back to as Blizzard has moved on, its oddly painful for me. It was the only game where the social aspects were as fun, or sometimes more fun, than the game play.

That said, I worked at NetApp when WoW first released and their architecture at the time was these blade servers talking to oracle database instances that were using EMC SAN boxes for storage. We tried to convince them they would have less down time if they converted to Oracle over NFS as Oracle had done in their big data center in Texas.

As an engineer it started me thinking about the whole 'world as a database transaction' sort of model of things. How that got built, where did latency matter, where did it not? What could you un-do and what had to be at-most-once. And then the scale of that with respect to localizing transactions when actors (characters) were within scoping distance of database changes. Quite the interesting challenge.

Oh and the 'weird custom board' on that blade is a compact flash to IDE adapter. The blades booted from compact flash.

EDIT: Hmm, not CF adapter, going back and looking again I think that was the NVRAM card which allowed them to recover transaactions after a server crash.
SIM cards/trays are not physically accessible and sturdy enough to make that practical as a daily activity.

A "family" plan across both phones is more likely solution.
cool B-)
Etch a Sketch emulator for Android
Well, there are some people who think this way. Likely there are many of them on HN. However, watch any presidential race in the US and see the rant about people who mooch off society by not "working hard enough." I come from a red state and that's what I hear around here all the time--terms like "welfare state," "freeloaders," etc. and beyond.

I do appreciate the hope that more and more people are coming around! That's all we can hope for.
Show HN: Angular Phonecat Tutorial in React JS
I used this guy a year and a half ago: http://www.vonglitschka.com/5MinuteLogo/index.html

Loved the result. 5 USD for that kind of talent. Unbelievable.
Here's the most recent one: http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/6-b.s.-stories-that-foole...
For a BtoC product HTML style I'd say: attractive.... For BtoB, SaaS Product: Plain or HTML but very light.
>"But customer service itself is a human problem."

...Says an unnamed academic who, in all likelihood, hasn't worked retail in the 21st century.

Tho, you'd think they'd go to a grocery store once in awhile & be subjected to the customer service atrocity that is the self-checkout. (Or touch an ipad barista at a coffee shop, or patiently repeat "speak to a representative" to an automated telephone system...)
I agree, and I think it's especially hard to observe the complete lack of Borders and Barnes & Noble locations remaining and say things haven't changed all that much. For the big players in the music and movie industries, even if they're still profitable, but had to completely change their ways of doing business, doesn't that count as disruption also?
This is an important and increasingly pressing question. On one level, you can ask 'what will we do with ourselves' - that is, to give our lives a sense of purpose and so on. To me that's easy - we already know how people like to entertain or amuse themselves, and beyond simple consumption and hedonism it's also obvious that people are happy to do some kinds of work for self-fulfilment rather than efficiency - eg gardening when you could just buy food or flowers from a farm, washing dishes even though you could get a dishwasher, painting for pleasure even though you could take a photograph and/or have the image printed or repainted on canvas. In short, I don't worry about how we'll occupy our time.

But I do worry about the question of how people make a living in these conditions. It's not enough to say 'basic income' because absent a massive economic shift most robots are going to be privately owned, and the owners of such capital will ask why they should donate a large volume of their profit to support non-productive individuals. Put another way, I'm not sure that the arrival of technological abundance will necessarily be accompanied by optimal social structures in the short term. A sudden and drastic acceleration in social stratification followed by unrest sems to be a far more common pattern. A luddite backlash is also a possibility, and a stronger one than usual given the factor of AI, which some people seem to have an atavistic fear of.
> and nobody would want to go back to doing any of them.

there are what, 7 billion people on earth. there is probably somebody who would want to go back to society of manual labor.
agreed, "just business" is a horrible cop out, and it's sad that so many people buy into it even when they are on the getting screwed end of the equation.
Yes, you're right, I missed that.
You can't drop the original traffic using the library. You could capture it, modify it and send it though. That + some iptables rules to drop the original traffic would be sufficient I guess.
Ask HN: How much should a bootstrapped startup ask for an acquihire?
I've seen numbers thrown around in the range of $750K -$1.5M per employee, but this seems to be for VC funded companies correct? If you are a bootstrapped start-up with very little debt, 2-3 co-founders, but with no revenue or customers yet, what should be the per employee price for an acquihire?
Thanks for the pointer. Found a design thread that's been going for a year, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0, but no implementations. This approach seems to have the same challenge as Tor or email encryption, i.e. convincing everyone to use it.
> However, double entry accounting gives us an audit trail because it tracks how assets are moved between accounts.

Ah, makes sense. My understanding of double-entry comes from history rather finance. I read a few articles on Italian history, specifically the Medici family with Florentine banks and hand-written ledgers. I'm not an accountant, in practice it makes more sense as an audit trail.

I guess you could stretch the metaphor further and say that a SCM + testing gives you the equivalent of double-entry. However in practice, I've never had much trouble convincing anyone to use a SCM :).
>Without a map on my phone, I'm forced to learn how to get around my city.

To each his own, but I feel like that's kind of overkill. I use maps to find new destinations, but it really only takes a small number of drives to that place (often relative to the distance traveled and how often I go to that area) to memorize it. Eventually, it's more work to open the app than it is to go by memory. For me, using Google Maps is indispensable for learning new areas. I see no reason to make it harder for myself. Not ever getting lost is nice too -- what if you end up in an area you'd rather not be?

If your goal is to challenge yourself, then it would seem like a worthwhile pursuit.
Why is this comment downvoted? It's the only one in the whole thread that has some proper information in it and not just emotional pitch fork grabbing.

Alupis is absolutely right, startups are volatile and it could have been worse. That this was legal means this was probably the only right option for the founders.

Making hires at an early stage is incredibly important, imagine this startup has only a few 100k in the bank. They can hire maybe two to three persons, and that's hoping they'll hit on more funding later in the year.

Imagine you were a founder of that company, and you had hire this COO, and then something changes, or a pivot comes through just when the COO is flown in. Your investors all say you should discharge him, so they can hire someone that might save the company.

How can you even suggest this is unethical? This guy goes work at a startup in a state where it is legal to fire someone at will.
I don't think that's the narrative Microsoft was going for.
So they got rid of you because you had an equity stake? And by giving up your equity they could keep the money for themselves... yea, you got screwed.
What kind of help or advice are you looking for specifically? Your post doesn't make it clear what you'd like help with. i.e. finding a new job, negotiating a severance package, revenge, moving on, how to best pick up the pieces with your professional network, etc. I'd like to help, but I'd be guessing if I offered any specific guidance.
Illegal immigration is completely orthogonal to the topic. To run a startup, you need to be able to operate your business legally, which means the founder and employees need to be legal.
Really cool mobile porn
She goes here: http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl...

She does live at home. If she lived at school it would be about $17k
These things I know. WoW server reimplementations are pretty monolithic and that causes a lot of problems on heavy loads. I know of a private server that's working on having some "load balancing" to avoid that.

What I mean by this is that currently the only way to have lots of players playing at once in the same realm is to buy very expensive hardware. That plus the amount of DoS attacks you receive if you are popular means that having a private WoW server online is anything but cheap.
Making diskless servers work is too complex for most admins, so blades are generally sold with disks. Blades are generally cable-less and share power, cooling, and networking within the chassis.
I envy you greatly. When these were put on sale a freak snowstorm happened to hit the northeast and me and everyone else around had no power for close to a week. I was after one of the more populated servers (Kil'jaeden) and my phones battery just didn't last long enough to get that final bid in. I still regret not just putting in a higher bid earlier that day.
I think there is a real difference between an automated loom replacing humans for one particular task, and a highly dexterous robot that can replace humans for any task requiring manual manipulation.
>'What's the definition of a blade?'

I'm not sure there's any hard and fast definition.

Generally, a blade is going to share power at least, likely network uplinks as well. Diskless configurations are common, with some sort of shared storage being used, but local disk is finding its way back into blades via SSD.
I assumed it was just a platform to help start-ups utilize Google products. I didn't think it was a formal incubator (I maybe wrong).
The first Unix machine I used had 768k or less and was a 6 or 8 MHz 68000. It's still bizarre to think that we had 12 users on a TRS-80 at once, via serial terminals. Even more bizarre, my first *nix was Microsoft Xenix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Model_16.2C_Model_16B.2C...

A few years later, we had a lab running Apple A/UX on either the Mac II or Mac IIx. They were barely usable as small XTerminals at 640×480 8-bit color.
You Probably Don't Need an iBeacon
Given the "(1987)" tag, I was expecting something vaguely prescient about drone warfare. I was delighted to be wrong.
Enough to make it worth your while, what that means is entirely up to you.
I'm going to assume you meant "most of the time you don't need integer overflow checks", because that makes more sense with the rest of your comment.

I couldn't disagree more. If you look at real programs, overflow would be a bug for the vast majority of the integer arithmetic instructions. Therefore overflow checking should be the default. Wraparound overflow is sometimes useful and should be available but it should not be the default.

For example, http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/overflow12.pdf finds that there are ~200 instances of overflowing integer arithmetic instructions in all of SPEC CINT2000 (many of which are bugs). Every other integer arithmetic instruction in SPEC CINT2000 (orders of magnitude more than 200, of course) should never overflow; overflow would definitely be a bug and overflow checks would be useful in catching such bugs.

See http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1154 for a more complete argument. I really hope that if an ISA really does become "the standard ISA for all computing devices" as RISC-V aspires to, that it supports integer overflow traps.
That's assuming that the leak is from a single source (single business or website).

Is it conceivable that if you aggregate all leaks it would equal the 1.X billion number referenced?

The location of hundreds of thousands of WordPress and similar CMS sites are well known and constantly hit by botnets trying to bruteforce passwords and waiting for site admins to leave a site un-updated, I'm sure they get compromised all the time. I operate several honeypots just for fun and have a list of thousands of sites with malware on them and undoubtedly have had their databases stolen. Then everyone who runs a site (or has sufficient permissions) who is in that hacked database can have their site hacked, and the chain continues. If you delete the malware but fail to fix the security hole, the malware will be back on that site the next day.

Why does your Canary site not include larger leaks like the Adobe leak?

I think sites like yours are very important for protecting people's online security. Data mining is fun and being able to offer a service to help people stay safe online is a win-win.
Time to put on your helmets and rev your CI! I wonder how many patch releases it will take before it is widely usable.
Yes, which is why they paid him 6 weeks. I am sure in the papers there there's a "no lawsuit" clause…
> and nobody would want to go back to doing any of them.

I'm sure at some point in the recent past you could have found some formerly employed factory workers who would disagree. It's true, jobs replaced by automation tend to be jobs that people would rather not do, but the loss of employment itself is a different matter. A crappy job is better than no job at all.
If it's useful: if you're in the UK, most of the networks here will provide you with a blank SIM, and perform a SIM swap, without account holder verification.
I'll be making a prediction here. Coders will be mostly replaced by AIs before automated cars will have become a mainstream.
FillText: generate JSON datasets for testing or demonstration purposes
Major restructurings of society tend to evoke violent resistance in some sectors.
"Honey! This stray dog has a USB drive attached to its collar, maybe its information about the owner, plug it into your PC and see."

The evilness just makes me shudder. Next up a USB stick that has a rat treat in it, when you push the stick into a USB port that pops the rat treat out of the top. You train a bunch of rats and then leave the USB sticks around your target's facility.

There are some fun fiction ideas in there, that is for sure.
I think this will be a hoot to play with my cousin starting out. Clojure is a bit more elegant than processing's language, but with the awesome ease of drawing of the processing frame work.

And the documentation's purple prose is just fantastic!
Heroku Operations Hackers vs. Heroes
If you like processing, checkout p5.js[0] (released on HN yesterday) which is a pure javascript port with some other differences[1].

The main goal of Processing.js is to execute Processing files in HTML5, but not necessarily to write native HTML5. It supports a mixed syntax of Processing and JavaScript, where the JavaScript is not really meant to be consumed by the end-user. Processing.js is a port of Processing to JS, using regex to convert Java into JS. It is a good tool for those that want to run simple sketches on the web, however, it is quite opaque. It can be difficult for someone to understand how it works, how to fix things when it doesn't work, or how to modify or extend the library. As Processing.js says on their website, "it's not magic, but almost."

[0] - http://p5js.org/

[1] - https://github.com/lmccart/p5.js#how-is-this-different-than-...
> Not sure if the firearm he mentioned qualifies under the restrictions of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.

No, pistols were generally unaffected, with the exception of the 10-round magazine limit. Sigs are generally double-stack pistols, so ten days after that was published he'd have only been able to buy used magazines.

> In any event, you are severely underestimating the federal government's general tolerance for "obscenity" and speech that is potentially objectionable. Honestly, if John Waters can get by fine, so can this.

It seems to depends on the particular speech and the administration in office at the time, no? I'm quite aware of the theoretical and practical protections offered by the First Amendment, but publishing an implied, detailed threat toward a small group of people you work with today is unwise to say the least.

> Loved the jab at the left, as well. Such a descriptive term.

I actually meant no offense by it. In 1994, gun control was a core issue for the Democratic Party.

It seems readily apparent that "the left" and "the Democratic Party" are nearly synonymous when speaking about elections at the national level.
Both the Trinity test and Fat Man were implosion type weapons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Implosion...

I don't think Little Boy's design was tested prior to being dropped on Hiroshima.
"irresponsible" -> "unresponsive"
You are correct - I was just kidding about the Turbo button.

I was actually going to add in a quip about the 486 "DX" with the math coprocessor (vs the SX which didn't have it) being cheating too initially.
If your question is how do you evaluate whether something like this is a joke, then why don't we start by considering the fact that Shivers has a distinguished and successful track record of a capable scientist and advisor that spans more than a quarter century?

A joke written 20 years ago does not erase this.

It's really this simple folks: it is irresponsible to go around say dumb things like "never take this person as an advisor because they are literally crazy" when we have demonstrable proof that they are more than capable in that regard.

I don't see why this is controversial.
I think you should think about it as a multiple of what you would expect per-employee were the company to hire everyone off the street. So if you would get 10k options / employee off the street, what multiple of that is it worth to get the full team.
That has not been the case historically. So far, when automation has removed jobs, better jobs have been added to the economy in the process. Among the poor in automation heavy economies obesity is a more common problem than starvation.
Then why do so many authors keep using a publishing house? This is the same tired argument used for the music industry on HN.

Yes, publishers do provide a value. Also one of the best selling books of late is a 700 page non-fiction book about finance, which reached #1 on Amazon's non-fiction list, published by Harvard University Press.

Saying that all publishing is just mass media crap is a just plain false.
I cannot read the article or watch the video without enabling Javascript.
I agree with your overall sentiment. BUT, regarding Wal-mart, Home Depot and other large corporations; they certainly have benefited by lobbying for a better economic playing field for very large corporations. They also have attained their success and market share through innovations, optimizations and seized opportunities. I see it as a lot more complex than Wal-mart is "evil" or not. My position is that it just isn't that simple.
http://sf.funcheap.com/ - Great resource for activities around SF

https://twitter.com/Events415 - Start-up mixers w/food

http://www.7x7.com/ & http://sf.eater.com/ - Great resource for new Shops/Resturants

SF Craigslist (Tickets) - Find events (sporting, concerts, etc) for less then face-value
Ugh, posts like this make me sick.

JUST BUY AK47! It was made exact for dirty hands and bad gunpowder. You think you can improve on design? You think your M16Z8Vblahglahblahs better?

YOU KNOW NOTHING JOHN SMITH!
Hi I am the author of this post,

I'm going to be knocking around if anyone has any questions, as I think you all deserve a finished post.

If anyone wants to contribute or have a look at the code it is all hosted at https://github.com/tombooth/painting-in-clojure

Tom
I make the opposite prediction. I think there will be more coding jobs in 20 years than there are today.
I love this thing. full computer, i.e. install ubuntu and go, yet it's way smaller and more powerful than a raspberry pi.

https://store.gumstix.com/index.php/products/620/

the problem you will run into is wifi eats a lot of power and makes a lot of heat
Spritz reading technology now available Huffington Post's mobile site
"The work that robots can't do," just like now.

Rewind this conversation about 150 years and ask what the steel-drivers will do when the steam drill puts them out of business.