skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alan's org has grown and shrunk in size over time. When I joined in 2009 it was indeed "the majority of engineering" - I think he had something like 5000 people under him when the company was only a little of 20,000 strong, including all of Search, the various search property teams (which were their own departments at the time), Research, I think Commerce, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. Chrome and Android were tiny - they'd just launched 6 months before - and Social and Cloud didn't exist, although they had precursor projects that were under Apps. I'm trying to remember if Apps was itself under Alan; it might've been, IIRC the three big engineering SVPs were Alan, Urs, and Bill Coughran, with Urs focused on platforms & hardware, Bill on infrastructure, and Alan on everything product-related.

Since then I think a lot of infrastructure components have been pulled out of the individual product teams they were supporting and centralized under Urs, the company as a whole has been reorganized along product area lines with each PA getting its own SVP, and many product areas that were brand new then are huge 1000-person orgs. But Google's org chart now certainly doesn't reflect what it was when any given ex-Googler left (not even when I did, a scant 5 months ago; I hear there were at least 2 big re-orgs in the last week).
Ebola.com Purchased for $200K by Marijuana Company
We need more hero-engineers like him. Now he's cool, as opposed to just nerdy (and rich). Bang for the buck, this is going to help STEM a great deal.

Astronaut daredevils: both cool and nerdy.
It would negate a few weeks ago. Now that all the 'Ballsy Apple shafting the carriers' articles are already published, that point is moot.
Inbox doesn't work with Google App domains.

Yay.
Sounds like a lot of research was done on the suit.. and pressure suits that provide useful movement to the wearer are hard. I'm sure NASA will be interested in investigating the suit to see if any technology can be used in other areas. I wouldn't write it off as conspicuous consumption yet, just like I didn't write off James Cameron's marianas trench dive.
Nest Acquires Home Automation Hub Revolv, but Will Stop Selling It
HN FAQ:

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.
Hmm but you can still lose weight by eating low satiety index foods, as long as a calorie deficit is present. This means eating smaller portions of these foods. It just takes more self control because the body "feels hungry" when in fact it isn't.
To clarify, I meant arithmetic operator precedence. Obviously there is still a grammatic precedence below that.
I'll admit Im a little bummed the record was broken so quickly too. It took so long to break it the first time, 2 years doesnt seem like enough time.
I start a company to make cheap autonomous flying cars. I invest $1,000 of my own money and build a working prototype. It looks promising, so you buy 50% of my shares for $10,000.

I just made a 20x return on my investment, and you own 50% of a great opportunity. Who's the loser here that makes this a zero-sum market?

Our autonomous flying cars go into production, and now your 50% is worth $100 billion, and you sell your shares to Elon Musk. Where's the zero sum?
The Prolific counterfeit protection is documented as being explicit (and not the result of an accidental incompatibility): Prolific introduced a check in later drivers which requires a specific response the fakes didn't implement.

http://dreamlayers.blogspot.com/2011/10/pl-2303-code-10-erro...

Thankfully, Prolific chose to simply prevent their drivers from starting with an easy-to-Google code, rather than causing frustrating failures or bricks.

I would assume but honestly don't know that the FTDI random failure code was also intentional. All signs point to intentionality: it appeared in all drivers after a specific version, was accompanied by a change to the EULA indicating that counterfeit chips wouldn't work, and accompanied a lot of messaging from FTDI about avoiding counterfeits.

I suppose someone should break out a disassembler and some USB snooping tools to check for sure.
I think Tor is great. But Tor is inherently insecure, and the easier you make it for "normal" users to utilise Tor the more users who will get caught out by Tor's inherent insecure nature.

You're trading security for anonymity. That's should be Tor's unofficial tag-line.

I don't even need to convince you of Tor's relative insecurity, there is a front page article right now all about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8501557
Additionally, "He is an experienced multi-engine jet pilot and an experienced skydiver." [0] http://www.paragonsdc.com/stratex/
Dealing with “Technical Debt”
I haven't but Lua is frequently held up as an example of an excellent code base.
serial is your bread-and-butter on tiny low pin count underpowered IC's.

The V8's of the micro-controller world are great, but sometimes you have just 2000mAh to get you through a year of operation.
While do agree with your stated facts, and I accept mine was a hyperbole, my point was more on the hidden pitfalls and uncommon language design of javascript.

Learning a language with prototype-based inheritance would serve less for a beginner than a professional.
Using the FTDI vendor ID is branding it as an FTDI product. I would argue that it is even more important than the text printed on the chip since that is the part of the brand that the average end user is exposed to.
> Also, highly skilled English speaking work force. A huge amount of other US firms based in the area.

It's not like English is a problem in the Netherlands, but if you absolutely needed native English speakers then London with LINX would have been a much better choice for a datacenter.
Whole vs hole, but nice typo on my part.

Not all municipalities are booming, I think some form of revised prop 13 coupled with a consideration for impact of household count would be a bit better.
The difference between "going somewhere" for a new product and "going somewhere" for a product with an already large userbase is not the same. When you have the numbers Facebook has getting 0.1% of those users is not "going somewhere".
Then they should say what they are offering. Don't forget: they could give a number, too.
I'm disappointed I still get a prompt to install Flash.
US carriers are so silly. People can easily use unlocked phones in Europe and - this might shock them - the sky hasn't fallen! The usual duopolies are still the same duopolies as they were a decade ago.

You're buying a phone - you should be a allowed to put a different SIM in it and "cheat" on your network. It's not like you won't be paying them if you're in the contract anyway. If the contract ends - then you're free to leave them anyway. So why are they making such a big deal about SIM-locking?
Congratulations. Here are my suggestions:

1. Don't assume they won't flex if you inform them you're willing to work with them only on your terms.

2. Before you start optimizing for terms, however, get as much information as you can about your prospective partners and decide who you most want to work with.

3. Choose based on who you want to work with, and try to use the competitive situation to get you the best possible terms.

When we were reviewing term sheets, we did a lot of diligence, in particular talking to other entrepreneurs who were in -- or had been in -- the portfolios of the funds. Of course you want to understand the basics of how working with that person or firm was, but you also want to get some color on how things played out for the deals that went sideways or failed.

Startups often have bumps along the road, and opportunities present themselves for VC's to take advantage or take the high road. How the partner(s) in question have handled themselves when faced with these options, and how the fund dynamic played into that, will tell you a lot about how things are likely to go for you under similar circumstances.

Good luck!
It's interesting to see Google preserve the Nest name for these business dealings. Tells me they're very aware of the potential concern consumers are likely to have inviting omniscience into their homes.
It would be nice if the legions who decry "illegal immigration" at every opportunity could get upset about this, but unfortunately many of them only criticize in circumstances of a racially-precise nature. Actually even if I got my wish and most of our racist immigration laws were repealed I would still support new regs to lower the boom, in remaining-in-business-threatening fashion, on companies that pull this shit.

EDIT: If you don't want me to be referring to you, then I'm not.
For anyone wondering like I did, that would be 7.75% annual return, compounded once a year.
SLIPPAGE SLIPPAGE SLIPPAGE!!!
Fairly damning, thank you.

Coincidentally, PL-2303 sounds like chip model I have from Prolific.
The Mansfield amendment was deliberate, so yes, it was intended.

The question should be, why don't the non-military projects also not support "silly research"?

The answer seems to be a combination of factors. Since WWII the federal government switched to funding "silly research", instead of industry labs common in the pre-war era. Without a doubt this was enabled by government operations to run the war.

There's also the idea that government should be run like a business, and not waste money on 'silly' things.

Yes, it's crazy that the government likes its "five year plan" style of research, where you almost have to know the answer before you get research funding.
Fountain aims to turn the answers game into a Siri-like smartphone experience
Ultimately it still comes down to the question of whether or not you've got the chutzpah to free-fall for that long. I'm not sure I would.
Yeah... I think I'll stick to unlocked phones and swap out regular, 3GPP-mandated standard SIM cards. I'll know exactly what I get, which isn't regulated by some shady operator+manufacturer deals.
So jump in and help keep it alive... it's Open Source now and an Apache Software Foundation incubator project.

http://incubator.apache.org/wave/
Right. Older cellular iPads supported either GSM or CDMA, so you had to choose at purchase in the US whether it was for AT&T (GSM) or Verizon (CDMA). Newer cellular iPads include both GSM and CDMA.
The unencrypted connection between the load balancer and the backend server would be taking place behind a firewall.
One of the happiest 1 hour of my life this week was watching these Swarms documented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-Pr2tIPkuw
The key point here is that Clojure-style vectors have logarithmic random reads/writes, while Okasaki's aforementioned deques do the same in linear time. Clojure uses the persistent vector by default, so it's essential that people can port their usual imperative vector algorithms and expect to get acceptable performance. Hence the focus on random access.

As to amortization, operations on Clojure-style vectors have pretty much zero variance (modulo the size of the vector). There is no resizing, no reordering, no rotation or whatever, it's just the exact same algorithm every time.
Here you go: Õ (read soft-O)

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation#Extensions_to_th... (basically means ignore multiplicative log factors)

Also, to play devil's advocate, why not say all log factors are effectively constant? Note that 5 * log_32(x) = log_2(x) or to use your example, log_2(2^48) <= 50.
Plus, from a quick glance, it looks like in-sample data with optimisation of parameters around scaling and holding periods.

Fee-less trading on in-sample data. You can get the same return on futures markets with that.
They will probably add it as they go.
Lots of things make me regret not studying engineering, but this certainly takes the cake and the entire bakery.
The best interview questions go like this: "tell me something about your favourite project you worked on". Then it's easy to tell apart people who can and cannot do programming well, if one is a decent programmer himself.
I'm not sure what you mean by "native advertisement", but YC-funded startups are allowed to post jobs (see https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs and the explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). These go into a queue and one appears on the front page at a time, starting around #6 and falling in rank over about 3 hours.
If you pair it with a laser scanner (which won't have any atmospheric interference to deal with on the moon!) you can get a near-perfect depth map without needing to do stereo correspondence (whose accuracy can be thrown off if there are identical features in nearby points - insert joke about all moon rocks looking the same). You could even throw a still DSLR with a telephoto lens on a perfectly calibrated, positionable mount, aim it at rocks in sequence, and get high-resolution textures. For bonus accuracy, have it so that the DSLR mount and the laser-scanner mount can swap positions, so you're getting the textures from the exact same position as the scanner. Send the depth map and textures back to Earth in non-real-time. Program the robot to autonomously explore regions where the depth map hasn't covered. Then on the client side, just feed those textures into a gaming engine or render farm. Bam. That would be a scalable Moon Explorer.
Who likes
Who likes eastenders hollyoaks or corrie or even emmerdale
Listen: The scientific reason tomato juice tastes better on planes
I hadn't seen that yet so thanks for the link. Amazing gains by him!
Sure, you can buy an index and forget it. Or, you can buy the index and then sell a covered call on it every month at 1 standard deviation out of the money. You decrease your basis and earn a monthly income, at the risk only of capping your upside if SPY surged upward. One sd out of the money options will expire worthless 85% of the time. No "staring at prices" required.

It's not your fault if you're scared of options (or scared for the masses). It's because retail investing has been taught and presented totally backwards for 20 years. Options have the same risk as the underlying. They are only more dangerous because they give you leverage. So you trade 1 lots or 2 lots. Your capital at risk in my apple spread example is an order of magnitude less than buying even 10 shares of Apple stock at the then price of 5000+

The retail investor understands rankings and price targets and no load mutual funds and other things we've said are I,portamt. I can teach you vertical spreads in a few hours and that is all you need to use options in your investment strategy.

In a vertical spread I can tell you with certainty that your probability of profit is equal to the max loss divided by the width of the strikes. Max loss is the width of the strikes less the credit you received when you sold the spread. So if you sell the 190-189 put spread on the spy bc you think it will go up, and you receive .35 for the trade, your Max loss is .65 so your probability of success is .65/1=65%. Whether or not that's a good risk to take depends but it's better than buying Netflix because some guy on tv invents a price target.
Show HN: How to use a phone without a carrier contract
Hi HN. Our new app lets you make and receive calls on your own phone number anywhere in the world without paying roaming or long distance charges (over WiFi or 3G/LTE). Calls and texts to the US are $.01/min and we give you credit to get started. It also works for tablets, ipod touch and phones without a contract. The iOS version is available here: bit.ly/youroamios and Android is here: bit.ly/youroam

We would love your feedback and suggestions emailed to hi@youroam.com or posted on HN.
oh maybe I wasn't clear enough about the price. I am willing to pay for quality software I just wasn't sure what the prices are. if you're saying it's totally worth the price then I'm good with it.

just a note: not everyone is from western world, 40 bucks can mean a way more money to someone say in India etc.
I'm sorry, but I didn't care about the Red bull/GoPro marketing stunt, and I don't care about this one, either.

"Oh, but this one fell from slightly higher up than the other one!"

Can somebody explain why this is impressive or cool? Anyone can fall.
Nest? you mean Google?
How is he a hero? What was "heroic" about this stunt?
This is doubly insane given that it's in the Bay Area. I don't know how anyone can live there for under $100k/year.
I think equation 4 is just derived from equation 3. The top bit counts every time before that y_i has taken a particular value y, and multiplies it by the distance of the x value then, x_i, from the value of x now. (Squared and exponentiated because this is the pdf of the normal distribution.)

Here's an interpretation: if there were no noise, you might just count the number of times x took on a particular value and y took on a particular value, and divide that by the total number of times x took on that value. This would give you an empirical estimate of the prob of y given x.

Because there's noise, they weight the counts by the pdf of the normal distribution of x - x_i. So, whenever x_i was close to current x, and y_i was a given y, that increases the probability of y occuring now.
Google yes, but Nest is the acquirer technically. Same with the Dropcam acquisition
It will be monetized before too long, and become available to anyone with $15,000 to spare.
You just be a newer employee.

Why are you talking about this stuff publically at all?
It depends on the city, which is why I ask. You definitely won't get this in Detroit. In Los Angeles, out of the three people I know who own rental properties and have told me the financials, two of them have rent coming in short of the mortgage payments (by 10-15%), never mind the maintenance, and are banking on the value of the property appreciating. With something that is as dependent on sale timing as real estate (I know people who scored deals in 2009, at great expense to the sellers), that doesn't seem like a good choice to put a large percentage of your capital in.
"How true. So they paid $40k in back wages - also trivial."

I think the "triviality" of paying the back wages and the "triviality" of the fine are directly related to each other. $40K / (7.25-1.21) = 662 underpaid hours [1], or put into probably an even better unit for comprehension, 16.5 man-weeks or 4.25 man-months.

This is bad, and in particularly bad in a very revealing way. However, it's not like this was a sweatshop employing hundreds for months without detection, which I suspect the mental model people are reading into this story. While I suspect 3.5K is a bit low, the millions upon millions that I suspect many people are emotionally calling for would also be inappropriate.

[1] Forgive me if I don't fully spell out the units here.
First, I never claimed the markets were or were not zero-sum, only that your attempt to explain was wrong as it mixed realized and unrealized profit.

Second, zero sum requires a definition of utility for each participant. If those definitions vary (and they almost assuredly do) then a reasonable argument can be made that to define whether the activity is a zero-sum game or not requires a commonality amongst those utilities (dollars, for example). This is often not the case in trading (for example, the farmer hedging his crop with a speculator who seems to profit short term).
> the sky hasn't fallen! The usual duopolies are still the same duopolies as they were a decade ago

Prices have definitely dropped though. Mobile telephony in Europe is usually cheaper than in the US.
I always thought "persistent" meant "stored in non-volatile storage" but this author seems to be using it as a synonym for "immutable" or "functional" which seems really weird to me. Is this a Clojure-ism?
> So if youve already got dub and you want to cover more of the map fra makes a lot of sense.

Aye and there-in lies the rub. Frankfurt is a fine second choice and even an excellent first choice. But of all the excellent choices available, why does dubious Dublin have the honor of first choice in AWS EU locations?

It just does not make any sense. Not only it is bad for Amazon, it's very detrimential to AWS users. Given a choice between Dublin and any other major IX location in Europe, I doubt anybody would have chosen Dublin. AWS users just put up with it since they had no choice.
"Most people don't see a threat in a lack of online privacy."

That they don't see it does not mean there is no threat (to both their privacy and to their lives in general as secondary effects of the global loss of privacy).

"It is sort of absurd to think what you do online is private."

I find it absurd that you say that. I chat with friends via our own jabber server, for example, via TLS connections - how is it absurd that that is in fact perfectly private? I find neither the expectation of privacy absurd, nor the fact that that is in fact private.

"Your computer might in your bedroom, but the internet certainly isn't."

I don't get what you are trying to say here. Are you just stating the obvious fact that those people who do transport your data technically can look at it, or are you implying that therefore they have the right, they should have the right, that you should have no expectation of them not looking, ...?

Before you answer, please consider: Do you think the same applies to letters? To phone conversations on analog phone lines?
Why did the title change on HN to remove the money? The blog post still has the dollar amount in the title. Just curious, seems like a weird edit.
20% is a lot.
No I'm glad Outlook is mentioned, I haven't even considered it. I do have one account in there, although it's not the main one.
I'm just thinking if I should move from one big corporation to another, I feel like supporting the small guys. But hey, I'm gonna check it out - thanks for mentioning it.
Also agree. I think your comment adds to the conversation, and you're being down-voted because people disagree with you.

It's a nice side-effect that some interesting space suit research was generated during this effort. The America's Cup produces yacht-building research too, but that doesn't change the fact that it's essentially a pastime that wealthy people throw their gobs of money at.

This article can be summed up with "Executive Has An Expensive Hobby. News at 11."
I'm not sure you should, either.
Alan also wrote a wonderful Digital Technical Note (he used to work at, or manage Digital's Western Research Labs):
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-TN-13.pdf

it's worth reading the whole thing, including the references.
Kind of bound to be the case right? Seems to be the way it works for most records, long gaps then a flurry of records back to back. I'd love to be the first Karman line re-entry.
Glow-In-The-Dark Highways Open in the Netherlands
Too complex.
I'm not sure I follow. Can they not have 12 SKUs and then allow people to put "normal" SIMs in them?
If I am allowed to make a wild guess(wishfull). It is the mennonites.

They have a farming culture. They are very good at building their own communities and Detroit is located next to some of the largest fresh water lakes in the world. In farming fresh water is everything.
In the context of data structures, persistent has a very specific meaning. So it's not really a Clojure-ism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure

It's not a synonym for immutable or functional. A persistent data structure is one that shares structure with other data structures.
http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-...

The animations are here
A trillion anything is staggering 13 trillion is not something I can comprehend!
I've written up a few things about my experiences with RoboVM, including how to use native bindings:

http://blog.puzzlingplans.com/post/100847610651/building-a-c...
Is getting a degree worth the financial cost?
The Beard That Wasn't: Abe Lincoln's Whiskers