skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think the biggest problem with any ideal portfolio allocation tool are black swan events (Taleb).

Yes. Black Swans are certainly a problem. It's insane to think that investment returns are anything resembling a Gaussian distribution. In the financial crisis of 2008-2009, people were using phrases such as "a 9 sigma event" to describe the markets.

Wrong! Basically THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS a 9 SIGMA EVENT. Wikipedia gives the probability of a 6 sigma event as 1 in 500 million. So it the epitome of arrogance to think that we're so "special" that we just happened to be alive during a 9 sigma market move.

What it all really means is that the markets do not behave the way lazy eggheads want them to. Everyone understands Gaussian distributions and standard deviation. So they are eager to use that math where they shouldn't.

I'm sure you know all this. But for those people who aren't familiar with Taleb and want to read more, he wrote three pop books about it:

2001 Fooled by Randomness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness

2007 The Black Swan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_%28Taleb_book%29

2012 Antifragile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile

I'm in the middle of reading Antifragile, and I am thoroughly enjoying it so far.
Yep, correct. It really does seem to work out well, and for the company it lets them make sure employees are taken care of but minimizes distractions of managing health insurance for now.
Pretty much every single article written this year critical of Silicon Valley/startups/VCs has used the quote. If anything PG should have addressed it sooner.
You need to buy at least two funds to harvest those tax losses.
>Could anyone be so naive as to think that resembling Zuck would be enough to make a founder succeed? And is it plausible that we, of all people, who'd interviewed thousands of founders, would think such a thing?

I think it's quite plausible that people have biases. Venture capitalists are not exempt from bias. The thing about biases is that people don't realise they have them.
This is such a typical defeatist mentality that I've seen not just in Japan but amongst East Asian engineers. It's treated as some sort of menial job, there's no pride or passion in it's practice, and that's why it's so easy to be exploited.

The market is not the law or the most efficient state, it is easily influenced by large entity or a conglomerate of businesses with the common interest of depressing the costly side of their business.

To say that because the market pays a bit over what janitors are paid seems very much lacking in confidence and quite frankly, self degrading. You won't get anywhere with that kind of attitude, Japan or America.
I didn't know about those attacks. Very interesting. $200k is chump change for a Tor attack from large organizations. It's interesting to compare that number to the $100k prize offered by Russia. A neat speculation is that better attacks require a few digits more to be extremely effective and that six-digit attacks are at the cost-effectiveness threshold for most national purposes.

By "wide scale infrastructure sabotage" I was trying to refer to QUANTUMINSERT, TEMPORA and other internet-scale mass read and write capabilities. It doesn't look like the FBI had to use those sorts of technologies to interrupt the .onion addresses - I'm really happy about that. First because it shows that law enforcement can fight cybercrime without those tools and second because if they were used proponents/supporters would have championed them as 'necessary' or 'inevitable'.
... particularly his long neck.

That detail really could have been omitted. It adds nothing and comes across as disparaging.

If pg decides to edit it out. I'm fine with this comment referencing it being deleted as well. There's no reason for that observation to persist in an article that might be linked to again every time this meme comes up.
Wouldn't a software-laden self-driven car also eliminate the need for a dispatching company?
PipelineDeals provides free CRM accounts to any bootstrap company in the world
Well is US economy on the verge of collapse.

Because I see people putting crazy hours here as well with only 2 weeks or less of vacation time.

> - They spend hours choosing the text of buttons,

Hello bike shedding. Ever been to any meeting with "senior" management. Those people just don't know how to shut the fuck up or admit they "don't understand" so they latch on and start pronouncing orders about stuff they understand -- button colors. Happens in US, China, Africa, Europe.

> - they're expected to learn the Way We Do Things In This Company until their 30s,

Ok but then they have learnt them and are good to go for another 30 or 40 years until they retire. Having job security is no joke when health insurance, housing, family is involved. There is something to be sad about it. It might even be worth a salary cut.

> - they attend work for extended hours,

Depending what you compare to. American workers also work what Europeans might consider crazy and unreasonable hours (if you add vacation or lack of into the mix especially).

> - the workforce capacities are planned dozens of years in advance,

I have seen large military industrial contractors lay off thousands in a swift hand move because some major contract from US govt got lost. The other extreme is you know not plan in advance and only plan 2 years ahead then let everyone go and re-hire/re-train/re-certify new ones. Is that better. I am not sure yet.

> - decision-making is centralized in the hands of the major companies, investments are interlocked between company-arranged rents, company-arranged investments and company-arranged paperwork,

Wait, isn't most of the US economy run by large organization which make decision not unlike dictatorships. Centralized with the classic pyramid management scheme. I guess if all we do is read HN we might get a bit of a wrong impression about how the economy and labor market works here.

> - and they have competition from foreign products which were produced by more officient economies, e.g. the iPhone

So China (FoxConnn)? Yeah China is great. They are efficient but that is in part because they are willing to cut corners and disregard safety or health standards.

But yeah I get it, you mean to say "Apple" and by proxy -- US. Well they can't do everything well. Their car businesses are doing well. Look at Ford, GM etc vs Honda and Toyota. Perhaps there the situation is reversed.
As Paul Graham points out, it is absurd to think that he or anybody at his firm would be swayed by someone's physical resemblance to Mark Zuckerberg. However, I have the sinking feeling that in this respect, Mr. Graham and his partners are the exception rather than the rule. That may well be one of the reasons why they are so successful. Not that I have hard data, and I'm not sure if reliable data could be obtained, but I have personally witnessed a frighteningly large number of incidents in which people were obviously influenced by the physical appearance of those whom they were tasked to judge.
No-Spend November – Can YOU Help?
I'm rather partial to your comment. Though as a cipherpunk of my own generation, fully knowledgeable of rubberhose cryptanalysis and the rest, I do hold out hope that some of these technologies balance power and push them into the hands of the benign individual more than they magnify the power of a select or chosen few.

If all technology provides more power to everyone, but unevenly to where more is added at the top than the bottom, then the only thing that is left to defend against power inequality are court systems and forms of mass unrest. I distrust the completeness of the former (we've seen them go bad) and rather dislike the latter.

The pendulum could of course swing too far the other direction into anarchy. This, too, leaves my mouth bitter.

Ultimately I think technologies like Tor aren't so bad. Certainly it is nothing compared to nuclear weapons or personal firearms. Information and communication, while they can aid criminal behavior, are not criminal in themselves. Like has always been the case - long before it was possible to monitor and store information and communication for later introspection - criminal acts are acts in the physical world and they can be investigated there.

https://www.schneier.com/news/archives/2014/04/bruce_schneie...
Uber employees also get a lot of Uber credits as part of their compensation package. I'd be curious to see how many would still use Uber if it cost money out-of-pocket.
I feel like I get this advice all the time. "Invest in Indexes" is ridiculously popular advice. I've also been exposed to portfolio theory in lots of academic literature.

It's not obscure within finance or without.
Believe me, a lot of us agree with you!
>Will multiple datacenters allow you to continue setting up new accounts using nothing but bitcoin?

I don't see how they could stop you. None of the btc hosting sites I've seen ask for real ID (passport, drivers license, etc..) They also allow you to rent by the year, though I suspect you would have to scale up fairly often. Overall though, I think anonymous hosting wouldn't be a problem (tor + ssh + tumbled btc).

The server imaging is a tough problem, however, as long as you ensure that you never upload any info that could point back to you, you should be anonymous.

Hopefully a truly decentralized marketplace will emerge before the next bust...
Janitors keep places clean so programmers can focus on programming and thus "contribute to society." Assuming programmers are doing some good, not cleaning their own office lets them do more of it.

In this way I think janitors can contribute significantly. But I think the more important point is that contribution to society is always a team effort, not an individual thing. Any contribution you make is in part thanks to your parents, teachers, co-workers, janitors, and so on. They deserve some credit.
Investors usually get preferred stock, which sometimes comes with

* liquidation preferences

* dividends payable upon liquidity events (with their own liquidation preferences)

* board seats

* pro rata rights with future rounds

Depending on specific type of investor, some of these things turn out to be super-important compared to others.

A lot of late-stage also is facilitated by wealth management arms of large investment banks, and is a way for their clients with net worth of $1m+ to get in on the deal before the IPO, at which point even marginal returns are acceptable. A Google query with terms "Facebook IPO", "date: 2012", "private market", "regretted" sheds some light on that.
Twitter collaborating with woman advocacy group to help report abuse/harassment
The Google car's 300,000 accident-free miles demonstrates that we are technologically quite close to a level where we can have truly autonomous cars, even if the regulatory and societal frameworks need some time to catch up. And yes, we are also at a level of truly profound change in many, many different areas (such as the conversion of the middle-class salaried job into a freelance mixture of Ubering and Taskrabbiting). I think the time you're describing is already here.
You can't win.
It sounded like a promising effort, until the last paragraph: "[The advocacy group Women, Action & the Media] said the project will last as long as its two-person staff can keep up and accumulate robust enough data."
Of course the YC founders can't be fooled by someone's resemblance to Zuckerberg - we all know how silly that would be!

However, there are certainly things they would be fooled by, especially given a) the relative shortness of YC applications/interviews, and b) that they are all very smart and experienced people and as such are very likely to succumb to cognitive biases.

In fact, given the number of "10 tricks to get into YC" posts we see around YC application season (I wish my mock title were an exaggeration), I would be very surprised if there weren't any traits that did in fact fool PG et al and that could be used advantageously if one's only goal were to get into YC for the sake of it (it's very silly, but I've met many such people during my years in the startup scene).

We know that there are attributes that are good signals to them - they have said so. Examples include being a self taught hacker (preferably programming since high school), being close friends/having worked in the past with the other founders, focusing on things that don't scale, talking to the customers, etc. I would be terribly surprised if there has never been a founder who has filled all these checkboxes, made PG say "whoa this person reminds me of our past founder X, and they were super successful, of course we want them in the batch", only to have them fail miserably during YC.

So what did PG get tricked by in the past? That would be an interesting essay.
This must be about something that is really important in certain circles. I guess.
Completely guessing here, but this feels like it was prompted by journalists pressing him about it, probably in relation to a diversity story.

In other words, they're likely using the quote as a club to hammer pg with. Maybe justifiably so, it really was kind of a dumb thing to say.

Just yesterday Jesse Jackson had an interview saying he thinks it's time for the government to get involved in tech company diversity, so there could be some more journalists preparing stories on the issue.
> If they have organized labourers, they're 5-10 years away from their end.

Ignoring the self-driving car bit, how does unionization of drivers end Uber?
indent goes well beyond indentations too, despite the name :)
That leads you to wonder: if a programmer desired to switch from C/C++ to another language but hasn't by now, why not?

Another reason to use C for your project is the ubiquity of C compilers and C bindings to other languages. Software like Lua and SQLite wouldn't be as widely-used if they were written in another language.
I think this is so true. Not to mention that a lot of the hackers on the site loathe sites that require javascript and will often prevent any script from executing, so the login modal might be useless to a large percentage of the HN community. The current HN design is really awesome because it only uses the most primitive of elements. It's as if, like Austen said, there's no design at all.
>> Buying stock is a 50/50 bet. The price can either go up or down.

Just because there are two possibilities does not mean they are equally distributed.
This post was killed by user flags. We're unkilling it because (if I know HN) it will be reposted ad nauseum if we don't.
Source for the relative amount of cost versus benefit? What is the avoided cost of kids not feeling social pressure to engage in legal drug use (as they do with legal alcohol abuse)?
Usually they use a data provider/library like maxmind or a few others.

If the question is how someone like maxmind or others assemble that data it is usually done through a mix of ARIN, data aggregators and ISP data. ARIN will give which ISP and which country it is assigned to. ISP's generally have blocks regulated to specific areas of the country, e.g. mine is "RR-SOUTHEAST-BLK2", as I am on brighthouse, and that block has 67.8.x.x in it. And data aggregators purchase data from ecommerce and other sources to gather location data on individuals and their IP's. This is then aggregated, split and sold in many ways.

There are also some companies/startups working on GEO location to be able to target a person on any device based upon knowing the IP's they have used and some algorithms around the user-agent of the browsers etc. This means they can target you with marketing based upon who you are and your purchase history.

*EDIT:
As for lat/long, ZIP codes in the US have a centroid lat/long as assigned by Tiger data (and others). So they will use that as a starting point, and if an aggregator has purchased your data from someone they may be able to get the lat/long even closer through the matching algorithms.
I don't think the user would take kindly to obstructions to their browsing / app experience...

"Why does it take an extra unnecessary step to launch an app!? You're telling me this is for my own psychological good?!"

I suppose this goes to classical arguments about the role of government in banning drugs or mandating seat belts. The state doesn't think you are responsible enough, so they create an external structure (fines / criminal penalty) to make you do good for yourself.

Others would say that a sad restriction has been placed upon them because the rest of the population cannot regulate themselves to the satisfaction of the state. It can also be argued that now people rely on external pressure or structure to behave well rather than setting up their own internal structure.
85 richest now have as much money as poorest 3.5B
I've been using Webpack with Hot Module Replacement to handle all my front-end packaging lately. Webpack's documentation leaves a fair bit to be desired, but it's really well implemented, and the developer is super-helpful on gitter.

After having been spoiled by Webpack, I'd not be excited about working on a project that didn't let me live-edit with Hot Module Replacement and support js.next->js.today transforms. If they do come up with a One True Way, I really hope they implement some of Webpack's best features.
Common software stacks
Can anybody point me in the direction of common/popular software stacks. I'm looking to expand my knowledge and skills. E.g. the ELK stack. Something in wiki format would be ideal. Thanks HN
That was an amazingly thorough writeup. I very much enjoyed it. And I no longer want to move to japan...
So embarrassing. It is in fact textfiles.com. Sigh. Sorry all.
Sorry investors, but AI isn’t going to give you that return you were looking for
To me it feels like he used the Obama Kenya thing as a way to keep people from quoting it. I'm not sure it will work because the birther debate hasn't gone away either.
How many of those accident-free miles were in uncontrolled conditions? How many of them were negotiating traffic in a rainstorm, or unplanned detours around construction, or getting boxed in by semis on the interstate, or dealing with people maybe or maybe not about to jump across from the median, or anything near the sort of calamitous and hard to manage situations typically leading to human accidents or fatality?

The Google car is brilliant but from what I understand "quite close" is stretching it.
It's really hard to do MPT on your own. I got really into finding a collection of 10-12 mutual funds that are in a collection of sectors. I also mixed it with a strategy of selling each fund when it went below its 12-month moving average, and buying back in when it went above. I backtested it a bit and read some studies and it seemed reasonable. Sacrifice a little upside to protect against more downside. It sure would have saved me had I followed those strategies during the last two mega crashes; the dotcom bomb and the finsys crash.

Of course, since doing that, the S&P has been on a sustained climb that I've only partially benefitted from since I've had some bond funds, etc. The selling/buying has worked ok - it's whipsawed me in some cases and saved me in others, but given that I'm not spending more than a day a month on it, and that I only have a surface level understanding of sector-balancing, and that while it seems my funds are cheap, who really knows for sure... I'm regularly tempted to just dump the whole thing and get back into one fund, just in time for the next crash the other part of my brain says.

Also, it's worth pointing out that a lot of the "beat the market" talk is rubbish for entirely different reasons. People tend to get more cash to invest when times are good, and less when times are bad. That means that the average person is going to buy more when the market is high, and less when the market is low. I don't ever see this accounted for in studies. Even if you were to drop your money in an S&P-500 index fund whenever that money becomes available to you, you're still going to underperform the S&P-500 long-term by a moderate amount.
The "Making Software Dumber" talk by Travis Ormandy (Google) should be
interesting for anyone doing fuzzing research, or just curious about
fuzzing in general. It covers some of his research work and design
decisions on the "Flayer" fuzzer.

[1] Slides: http://taviso.decsystem.org/making_software_dumber.pdf

[2] Videos: https://archive.org/details/hitb-2009-maylaysia-dumber

[3] Research: http://taviso.decsystem.org/research.html
>he doesn't know where to put a function that seems to belong in two modules.

In a third module, where else?
There is a almost simultaneous thread: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542898 (91 points, by whoishiring, 6 days ago, 145 comments)
I imagine they'll want to preserve the option to port Alexa to other hardware platforms.
I'll bite. In Python:

def odd_count(letters):
return lambda ch: letters.count(ch) % 2

def anagram_of_palindrome(letters):
return sum(map(odd_count(letters), set(letters))) <= 1

How's that for some higher-order function action?

But really, unless you are deriving programs by doing algebra you are missing the point of things like map() and reduce() (as far as I know no one is actually doing Functional Programing the way Backus described. Am I wrong? I'd love to be wrong.)

Go read Backus' Turing Award paper: http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf
"Using small (100-200KG) LEO communication satellites means 100's of launches over a decade and unlike GEO's the constellation will have to be constantly refreshed due to their short life span."

I understand that cube sats are not a candidate, i some how doubt that 100KG sats are even a candidate. The closest we have so far to non GEO orbit satellites are MEO's like the KA-SAT's and other Ka-Band satellites these orbit at 7500-9000 KM orbits which is about 4 times higher than LEO and they weight 6 tonnes of about half is fuel intended to keep them in orbit for about 15-20 years.
Out of those 4 remaining tonnes 3 are used by satellite bus it self which includes the power plant and all "space" components. The payload is under 1000KG and that is barely sufficient to house enough communication equipment to provide about 400Mbit bandwidth.
How are they planning on doing the same with something that weight as much as keg i don't know.
The minimum URL is amzn.com/$ASIN.
Do you know about Scala?
I'm an engineer. I don't have the time to become a brilliant investor too.

For people who don't quite know what they are doing, it is gambling.
on the contrary uber is position to dominate the self driving car industry in terms of actual service provided to passengers