skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Common perception of Square is that it's unlikely they'll be able to live up to original expectations. Jack Dorsey is no more the next Steve Jobs than Grant Hill was the next Michael Jordan.[1] That being said, if people are still willing to give them tons a cash it gives them the ammunition to make another go at their Moon Shoot, by all means take the money.

So probably a good move for Square, and probably not the wisest use of cash for the investors. That being said, it's tough to find a good home for cash these days thanks to global QE.

As for me, given the choice between putting money in the 10Y notes at 2.6% (pretty close to inflation over the last 30 years), Square, SP500 fund (19.69 PE or 5.1% yield) or putting it under you mattress, I'd opt for some mix of the mattress and SP500 index fund.

[1] http://www.complex.com/sports/2013/05/the-complete-history-o...
Neat! This seems like a really good idea.

I'd recommend focusing on a particular niche of developers who all gather in one place, and who have a strong interest in learning more and watching others code. Game developers would spring to mind but I'm sure there are other even better groups for what you intend.

Then, if you can persuade one or two of the stars of that community to use your platform, you should get a decent amount of starting traction.

Looking forward to seeing how you get on!
I'm not sure what makes this a specifically startup marketing plan. This a very traditional marketing plan template. In fact, I would argue that a startup in the pre product-market fit stage of development would be advised against sticking to a plan like this, since things like positioning, target audience and strategies could change month-to-month and even day-to-day.

But if you were following this traditional marketing plan, I still think there's a very important section missing and that's measurement and testing. This is one of the more important parts of your marketing plan. You should devise your tests with thought and purpose behind them and not as an afterthought.
Show HN: Perunity – learn from humans
Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate it. Indeed, I did a lot of research on home foundry setups and tool building before I started this project, and I am deliberately going slowly and carefully.
What if was simply a choice to face your (own) fears, and the 'loss of power' issue you mention is simply opportunists taking opportunity? Cognitive dissonance in those who make laws banning substances is more likely to be at cause here for the banning of substances.

I don't want to believe people want to keep others from their own choices, but I also know they exist.
My Application for the Harvard’s Senior Professorship of Social Innovation
Thank you. Articles like this are getting really annoying.
Yeah, but they have a special program for Taxi's that allow what they call "self-insurance" where the taxi is insured by a bond or letter of credit with the MVA.
Ahh. Thanks. I realized it worked with the existing credit card processing networks but didn't know it worked with the actual already issued cards--but, thinking about it, it makes sense that it would have to. (Given that it's the actual card issuers that determine credit worthiness, etc.)
GitHub Git cheat sheet (also available in Spanish, French, and Japanese)
That's a pretty myopic view of how h.264, etc, were developed. A lot of work goes into developing standards like h264, LTE, etc. It doesn't just happen by magic. Its expensive to pay experts to research each new iteration of the technology. At the same time, the fact that they must be released as a standard undermines most of the other monetization opportunities, such as trade secrets. Patent licensing creates a unique and very effective regime allowing many companies to work together to develop these open standards, while ensuring that freeloaders can't just use the final specs without contributing either monetarily or in terms of research investment. Without patents I think you'd see a lot more proprietary technologies, with companies keeping new developments secret to try and monetize R&D investment.
It has 42 reviews, total. The App Store only shows the reviews for the most recent release on the first tab. If you go to "Reviews > All Versions" you can see the older ones.
Agree. It's a fantastic book. The "Electronic Bard" (one of the stories in the Cyberiad) is one of my all time favorites. It features a computer that learns to write poetry. (The translation is masterful, too). Don't read it while drinking coffee as you will snort it out your nose. It's brilliant and wise and you're right -- few writers match Lem.
Git Fu with the Command Line
It was a surreal society where everyone had to pretend to be living in an imaginary world. Luckily there weren't too many hard-liners; the jackboot was applied without much enthusiasm after 1956. Life was way harder for the Russians.
Okay, so let's build a petawatt-scale fusion power plant. I can actually think of practical ways to build one if it can be that large.

But that's not going to happen. A petawatt-scale fusion power plant is not going to be economically or politically feasible this century, no matter what progress we make on plasma physics and no matter how cheap it would be per watt.

Every power source has a preferred scale. A fuel cell can be the size of a mitochondrion, but a combustion engine, in order to be efficient, really wants to be at least big enough for a lawnmower, and an efficient fission reactor wants to be at least a good few megawatts.

My conjecture is that a fusion reactor wants to be at least a petawatt, and even if we solve the plasma physics problems, a gigawatt fusion reactor will cost more per watt than the equivalent in solar plus appropriate attached storage - which makes it pointless to work on fusion at this time.
I love the idea. Something like this will happen soon.

There are some games developers who live stream occasionally on Twitch.tv. The results are generally visual, and feedback quick.

I wonder how much they interact with the viewers / chat. If they can take feedback from and incorporate ideas or fixes.

When I've tried streaming, I've found it hard focusing on the chat side and coding at the same time - it's probably a skill that the best games streamers have - that of paying attention to the viewers, being entertaining, and doing a good job.

The other issue is wondering why I would want to stream myself programming? The first thought was to share with others if they might find it interesting. The second was that as a home worker I might like some virtual company, and the third was that of narcissism. All three thoughts were kind of weak, and I couldn't really come up with a benefit to myself from doing it. Nevertheless I think that there is some future here with such a platform!
karmalytics test
I highly recommend the Strugatsky brothers. There's a new translation of "Roadside Picnic" out, that would be a great place to start.

Another good one is "We" by Evgenii Zamyatin. It's a dystopian novel Orwell cribbed from for 1984.
It's pretty weird that both Walmart and Best Buy will probably be required to advertise Apple Pay and yet won't support it at their registers that is going to burn a lot of customers. If they don't want to support the NFC payment movement they shouldn't sell the products that have NFC. They are just going to regret this decision at some point when NFC is the norm and they have to do yet another round of POS upgrades.
Tutorials for iPhone, iOS Developers and Gamers
He didn't post the step-for-step instructions on how to proceed, but only the first bit of that:

http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#How_adopt_module

In short: Make an account, email admins and cc author, then shotgun every place the author's likely to see your intent, then wait a few weeks, and if your efforts have been clear, and the author unresponsive, admins will transfer rights to you.

Typically following this procedure results in the original author reacting, and if they don't, then there's nothing wrong or nerve-wracking about a transfer. CPAN has a big body of history pointing to this working just fine.

Besides, if i interpret this right that the number of rubygem admins is low enough that simply handling such a simple matter would be a problem, then you have bigger fish to fry.

----

Edit: Then again, Benjamin admits that his post doesn't solve:

> deal with gems whose owners are AWOL

Which is the real problem, and the solution to which solves pretty much all other cases too.
I am from xUSSR and happy to recommend Strugatsky brothers. Their sci-fi books are deep, thoughtful and authentic.
Ask HN: Is there a time tracker that will pop up?
I'm looking for an app to track how I use my time at my PC, but annoyingly can't find the thing I'm looking for.

I don't want the RescueTime approach of just tracking apps, because I use text editors, say, for a lot of different things. And I don't want the type of time tracker that you have to manually change task on, because I'll never remember.

What I'm looking for is something that'll pop up a brief question every 15 minutes or so about what I'm doing - I answer that and go back to work.

I know there are such things for iOS and Android, but is there one for Windows?
This seems like a a great idea and a lot of fun. Something I would personally participate in on both the watching and the streaming side. The only concern I think I would have is that of API key / password exposure. It would be up to the developer to be very careful not to accidentally switch to a config file in their editor or whatever.
It is my opinion that prohibition remains in effect because too many powerful groups profit from it. Even small-time marijuana growers in California were against legalization because it would affect their livelihood.

Trade in illicit drugs is estimated at over $300 billion per year or about 1% of global trade. That's huge...and it doesn't even account for the other side of the coin which is the amount of tax dollars that the DEA, your local police and other groups can take control of to "fight" the war on drugs which they don't really want to end. Furthermore, I am convinced that governmental intelligence agencies who need secret money to run their "black ops" do indeed take profits from the sale of illicit drugs. Nobody can prove it of course (well, maybe Gary Webb could have, but he's dead now).

So, I think that arguing from the standpoint that laws are made to protect the public just doesn't work here.
Can't agree enough.

Is there any more recent Russian sci-fi that you recommend too?
A homepage with a loader that obstructs the content (which doesn't need JS to be usable) and won't hide unless JavaScript is enabled... Nice start.
Good luck building something. I am curios where your initiative will end.
Once I saw the title I had a feeling it should be inspired by Notch's stream, which was recently on HN. You also registered your domain about 3 weeks ago.
This is great. I imagine that a year from now, I will look at my dropbox folder and see a ton of stock photos because I forgot about it.
Your crew is probably not paying taxes, and maybe pays less per person than homejoy.
Or else you'll make an offer they can't refuse ;]
My understanding is that in order to make a proposal like this (any change to the syntax or semantics of the language or standard library), the way to advocate a change is to write an RFC. To do so, you fork the rfcs repo on GitHub (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs), and write a document describing your proposal and its pros and cons. Then the community can discuss it, and if there's sufficient interest someone will champion for it a shepherd it through the RFC process.
You might consider overriding the delete/backspace button. I tried to delete a spline and ended up back on hacker news :-)
Taxi drivers are usually contractors, so it's easier to get a job (sometimes as a sub) and its easy to avoid taxes. Think of it as a waiter job without the need to communicate well. Also, because of the off/hours nature, it's a good second job.

Because you have networks of contractors, you can lever social ties to get a job... This is especially important for immigrant communities.
I don't agree with the logic here.

Antico may see some color in the bark that I don't see---say, green.

So she adds actual green paint into her painting, which, of course, I do see.
Interesting thought. One of the challenges will be that they look at stuff like how much capital you have and how long you have been in business.

There are a number of companies that can help you (Lockheed Martin, CSC, and IBM being three) if you find yourself in a position where you have something you need to sell in to government and don't have the credentials to land the contract directly. They do essentially what you describe... take a cut off the top in exchange for doing some of the paper work and taking some of the liability if things go awry.
Java is improving, but it's got a long, long way to go before it can catch Scala. Can you write data types in Java 9 as simply as case classes? Does type inference just work? Is there something as concise as pattern matching? Does it have typeclasses, or an equivalent solution to the expression problem? Can you write DSLs with the flexibility of Scala's for syntax? Can you write tagged types? Even if it has all these features, does it have them in a unified way, implemented by consistently combining some simple primitives, or is it a mess of special cases?
David, a dependency management tool for Node.js projects
IMO, it's a great example of what happens when you dress up fundamental disrespect for the law and society at large as creative disruption.
> There are some games developers who live stream occasionally on Twitch.tv.

That sounds interesting. Links?
I think he could be best compared to earlier authors such as Karel Čapek (inventor of word robot),

I think he would call himself 'futurologist'. Scifi on west was defined by laser-guns and girls in bikini on comic covers. East scifi just adored soviet ideal of future. Hard scifi was recognized much later.

Lem had complicated approach to technology. From his wiki page:

> His criticism of most science fiction surfaced in literary and philosophical essays (Fantastyka i futurologia) and interviews.[24] In the 1990s Lem forswore science fiction and returned to futurological prognostications, most notably those expressed in Okamgnienie (Blink of an Eye). He became increasingly critical of modern technology in his later life, criticizing inventions such as the Internet.[25]
I certainly hope they give these runners some leg-exoskeletons to absorb the shocks or they can say goodbye to their knees in a few years.

Also, I wonder if there is a placebo effect or not...
Moving and re-moving conditionals is our life. Is there a name for that structure? Polymorphic portability.
Nice article. As an unsafe counter-point, a few years ago I came home to my (then) 16 year-old son in the backyard tending to a pit he'd dug, full of a blazing stack of sticks that he was stoking with my leaf blower... sparks flying everywhere. He used this to first melt pennies, then my wife's aluminum cake pans. When I arrived he didn't have a shirt on, because he didn't want to burn his clothes. Ah, youth!
Please spend an hour in traffic, and then an hour In your kitchen -- cooking for a hundred people -- and tell me what is less work.
I sometimes see a flash at nighttime (not accompanied by any sound, though).

My first hunch was that my computer or phone may have been bugged to take a flash photo. But that's hard for me to believe. Maybe it's just my brain doing something weird (or something normal).
what question will pop every 15 minutes

what activity should be tracked
Some manpages have quite helpful "examples" sections, eg. find(1). Usually, if they do, these sections are towards the end, which isn't necessarily the first place you'd look unless you knew that that was typically where they were.

Many manpages, of course, do not provide examples.
Yes, it is. djhworld is laughably wrong.

All the contactless systems Visa/MC/Amex are deploying in the world are variants of PayPass/PayWave which are all based on an international standard and will work no matter what. The article djhworld linked to is talking about how users in the UK won't be able to add cards to Apple Pay because Apple doesn't have any deals with UK banks. If you go visit the UK and have an already-enrolled Apple Pay account, it will work at contactless terminals.
It's definitely one of those web apps where I'd be totally fine with a `window.onbeforeunload` popup asking me whether I really want to leave.
Not really :(

I've heard some good things about Metro 2033 by Gluhovskiy, a post-apocalyptic novel about survivors living in Moscow underground train system after the nuclear war in 2013, but haven't read it myself.
The phones doe a lot more than NFC payments. Why shouldn't they take a customers money just because they're betting that NFC payments will never achieve widespread popularity.
It's only been a year or two since major software is written in JavaScript. Why did you relearn the darling language of the year?
Thanks for the good luck message. Yup it's certainly all very new right now. I'm having to learn quickly but it's something I'm passionate about and it's been nothing but fun so far.
How you can help keep your account secure
That sounds great Leo
Seems like the business could have saved itself. Just have a patio that extends off the bowling lanes and maintains the flooring. (Shrug)
Square Cash hasn't really taken off and its not a revenue generator for the company.

Don't get me wrong, I love the product but I don't see where it as a great business.
I can't read this puff piece without thinking that if PHP died tomorrow, most of the web (WP + FB) would too. Worse is Better indeed.
> Why is it that almost every time I hear about a stupid law on the web, 90% of the time it comes from California?

Because due to its population and economy, and other factors that increase the attention to what goes on in California, you (and the web) or more likely to hear about anything in California than similar things in other states.
I mostly know Czech authors by name. Some are probably not translated to english:

Karel Čapek (pre soviet)

František_Běhounek (part of Italia north pole expedition)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franti%C5%A1ek_B%C4%9Bhounek

J. M. Troska
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

Ondřej Neff (post soviet) and his stories around Clarkes monoliths.
here's a couple

http://www.twitch.tv/ae_play CityBound developer

Notch http://www.twitch.tv/notch (minecraft) used to be on twitch, but I think he's moved to http://hitbox.tv/Notch now
This is a great introduction to Lem & his writings:

http://lib.ru/STERLINGB/catscan02.txt
Where is your stream showing you coding this? :)
This is great on many levels.

1. They are using MPS [0] from JetBrains, a system for constructing tooling around Domain Specific Languages.

2. Markus Voelter is a huge proponent of DSLs and a very level headed fellow. Loved his interview with Laurence Tratt [1] about compile time metaprogramming [2].

This brings benefits of Ada and Lisp with a modern JetBrains style IDE while targeting a C99 runtime. I think being able to sculpt the language to the project can greatly compact the abstraction distance from the problem domain to the code.

[0] http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/
[1] http://tratt.net/laurie/
[2] http://www.se-radio.net/2007/05/episode-57-compile-time-meta...
While I dislike #if/#else/#endif, dynamic libraries rarely exist in embedded systems.

Using many small object files is my solution of choice but it pushes the if/else/endif problem into the Makefile instead.
I don't think that people using potentially dangerous drugs want the drug to kill them, or have a complete disrespect of the law. While alcohol isn't an illegal drug let there be no mistake that it is absolutely a drug in every sense of the word and there is high risk of abuse, dependence, and harm. A huge number of people die each year from the abuse of alcohol. AA exists for a reason and you can buy beer almost anywhere.

But let's not talk about drugs that pose a mortal risk for a moment. Instead, let's focus on the topic at hand which is psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, etc... These all carry different risk profiles individually but overall it is safe to say that risk of dependence or lethal overdose are several magnitudes less than that of alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, or opiates. Yes, there is always the chance of a bad trip and it is entirely possible that poor decisions are made on LSD or mushrooms (if you are making poor decisions while on DMT, it would only be in conversations you're having in your head as you aren't walking about on that drug). I also don't know anyone addicted to LSD.

And while I've heard of few people having life-changing positive breakthroughs while trash drunk on alcohol or buzzing from nicotine, I have met scores of people who have had such experiences on comparatively safe psychedelics.

As you say, prohibition has run its course especially for psychedelic drugs and must end. Are there 'bad' drugs out there? Absolutely! But there are many more positive ways to deal with them through education and resources.
The tools that everyone else usess, skewed to the "new, modern side" would be my guess.
I'm a techie and there's no way I'd consider using NFC until it's as simple as swiping my credit card. If it got that simple though - what would be the point? My credit card works fine.

Do I need another middle-man between me and my money expenditures? Nope. I already have trouble with Amex being overly secure and blocking my purchases at certain sites and locations.
Right now HEVC encoding is slow as molasses as is VP9. If Google improves libvpx encoding and pushes it into the same ballpark as libx264 there's a much higher chance of adoption. VP8 encoding is also slow and I don't know why Google can't manage to speed up libvpx with a team of experts vs the libx264 dev team.
I'm wondering if it would be more readable with actual angle brackets rather than less than and greater than signs.

from_str::<Option<uint>>

vs

from_str::‹Opton‹uint››

Hmm. Those are a little lightweight, are actually angle quotes, not angle brackets. Actual angle brackets aren't available on my keyboard, but would look like:

from_str::⟨Option⟨uint⟩⟩

Jeez, why does Unicode have so many different variations on angle brackets? The above are "mathematical left/right angle bracket", but there's also:

from_str::〈Option〈uint〉〉

Which uses "left/right-pointing angle bracket" and:

from_str::〈Option〈uint〉〉

Which uses "left/right angle bracket"

At least in the font I'm typing this in, the "left/right-pointing angle brackets" look the best to me. It would be really nice if now that Unicode is ubiquitous, we could standardize on keyboard layouts that get you access to more punctuation like this, so that people didn't have to keep fighting over a fairly limited amount of punctuation to use as technical notation in programming languages.
>Polish and Soviet scifi on a completely different level of quality than in the West

That isn't entirely true, Lem praised the work of Philip K. Dick (American)[0][1] and Olaf Stapledon (English).
He has two essays in which he analyzes Stapledon two great works: Last and First Men, and Star Maker[2].

I think you might also be suffering from a filter. The best of Polish writers were translated, whereas you have access to the glut of all American writers. It is probably true that there was a greater number of bad American writers.

[0]: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

[1]: Dick returned the favor by reporting Lem to the FBI as a communist conspiracy against the west. Arguing that Lem was in fact a committee and not a person. Read the letter here: http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick

[2]: http://dpuadweb.depauw.edu/icronay_web/lem%20stapledon.html