skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technical analysis doesn't work. Big surprise you lost money. Those guys that you thought were good at it? They lost their shorts at some point too.
I agree. Half of the best software developers I know have university or college degrees. The rest do not. One of the best ones I know is a high-school dropout. In fact, so is my business partner. I value what I learned in college but it's not for everyone and when I hire people, I hire them based on what they can do.

Good luck to you and if you're ever looking to have coffee with someone in the industry in southern Ontario near Toronto (Hamilton to be precise) feel free to drop me a line.
For me, the most important thing about college was 1) setting aside such a massive block of time to learn, and 2) being in a place with a bunch of other people who were also there mostly to learn. That's not to say it's necessarily worth it for everyone, and depending what you're bringing to it it's certainly possible to fail to get much out of it. I think different groups of people over- and undervalue it, in weird ways.
Routing all Firefox users through Tor relays by default would be madness.

* It would make Firefox slow.

* It would place a tremendous load on the Tor network.

* It would defeat content filtering (which includes blocking malware) on enterprise networks.

* It would expose users to traffic interception and manipulation who wouldn't otherwise be so exposed.
Good for you, man. Don't let all these cynical Hacker News people get you down or discourage you. They are all whining and complaining about the mistakes they made. If you don't do what you feel convicted about, and just do what others "advise" you to do... you'll one day become the same cynical person they are.

But you are choosing to do what you are passionate about. So keep fighting!
Robotic Legs for the Disabled
Study: How Yoga Alters Gene Expression
Kim Kardashian Mobile Game Makes $43M in 3 Months
One of the Perks of Speaking Esperanto? Free Lodging Around the World
You still need analog engineers for SoC chip design including voltage regulators and detectors, PLL and clock generation, IO pads.
I suppose you're right and that's why I wrote "virtually zero" and not "no chance whatsoever".

Not only does significant breaking news have to happen while you are in the position, which is already very rare, it has to happen in a way in which you cannot respond and cut it off -- like the stock getting halted. Most intraday stock halts that occur are not exactly a shock (like a biotech or a stock under investigation of any kind) so if you are highly leveraged on that stock to the point where your entire equity can get hurt, that's on you.

If something big like GE or AAPL halts, the move proably won't be extraordinarily huge like 20%+, unless it's an Enron scenario.
It was actually a really interesting development process. We already had the web app, and our main UI developer is an Apple guy, so he took on the iOS version. Meanwhile I'm primarily a Linux guy and work on FastMail's backend services, but also an Android user, so I did the Android version.

What it meant is that the other guy could make supporting UI tweaks as he needed, and I could make supporting backend tweaks as needed (eg push system integration), but we had to come together a lot to find the similarities and differences between the two platforms and do changes for each other.

It became a bit of a competition and we both were working very fast. We had something we could use every day in less than a month and we each learned a huge amount about the other person's area of speciality.

I'm fairly confident if we did just one app first we would have gone much slower and made some bad architectural decisions that would have hurt when we got onto the next platform. If we ever do a third platform client it'll be really easy.
When I started my UG in CS there were 4 women in class of 110.

By the time we finished the degree, there were no women.

And yet tech companies are now being told that in order to bring about equality, they must hire the comparatively tiny number of women making it through these courses over similarly qualified men, simply for the sake of doing so.
1. Recurring billing and dunning.

Subscription renewals are a little script that runs daily. If the charge is declined, a mail gets sent and a date for the next reattempt is set in the database for when the script should try again.

A series of charge attempts and mails go out on a schedule asking the customer to update their payment information or get in touch. The mails are all prewritten, and at least 75% of subscriptions are recovered through this automated process.

It saves time, I don't have to handle following up on declined charges myself (which I hate to do manually), and it's worth six figures a year compared to just letting subscriptions lapse because of one declined charge.

2. Off-site backups and code that validates they're complete and restore-able. It's peace of mind. No server runs forever; you will eventually need that backup.
Finally. The web app seemed to have pretty limited functionality.
Well done! I love FastMail, and am very glad that I switch from GMail. However, one of the best parts of FastMail is that it's just proper IMAP at the end of the day, so while I'm sure some people are going to love this app, I personally don't have much of a use for it.
Medicine had female nurses before it had female doctors, so maybe that helped?
I had a terrible experience with college. I am a lifelong learner and extremely enthusastic, and my time spent in college were both my least productive and totally reduced my confidence in my abilities as I didn't conform with the "department way". I came out of it with a degree and debt free, but I know many people who had worse as well as better experiences. I am now learning civil engineering on the job (materials engineering was my major) and I have a passion for the practical applied sciences (my wife is an assistant winemaker and I took the entire courseload with her start to finish, just couldnt realistically afford to have two of us make a career in it). We aren't even big wine drinkers but it is really an extremely rewarding and suprisingly complex systems engineering challenge to make fine wine. If you are interested in anything I mentioned feel free to contact me
There were people thinking about security in the 1970s, but the proposals were quashed. A comment from this past August from Karl Auerbach, who was there:

I worked on TCP/IP security systems back in the 1970's. In fact one of the threads that led to IP being peeled off from the then monolithic TCP was done on my blackboard at SDC in 1974. The reason we did that was to insert a security/encryption protocol over the packet layer - if it sounds like DNSSEC it should. But in 1974. But it was on a project done for "the government" so it never saw the public light of day.

And:

We made a huge mistake back in the 1970s when we failed to require a mandatory packet security layer between IP and the protocols over it. (We knew even then that we needed it - and had existence proofs of running code - but the gov't wouldn't let those who knew out into the wild to evangelize the concept. So in some sense the problem we have today is do to excessive closure by certain governmental authorities. Even today I am not at all sure what I can say about this stuff.

(He's still under some security prohbitions).

https://plus.google.com/106435630686948313794/posts/i4KmivYf...
It _should_ have an unread message count on the icon. But yes, the iOS version's only significant feature over the regular web app is the addition of realtime push notifications.

The Android app has a lot more right now, mostly because the web app experience has been pretty terrible in the stock Android browser so there was a lot more work needed to get it up to scratch.

Of course we'll keep working on it; we've got loads more plans :)
But if it was built in html, js, etc it'd be accessible on all platforms for far fewer lines code than building separate apps.
Can't wait for their `Device contacts integration`.
This would be cool as a generic tool, like a 1:1 version of Meetup. Which I guess is what dating websites are, but explicitly focused on just talking one time with an interesting person about stuff they are really excited about over coffee instead of dating.

I would like to have coffee with interesting people from time to time.
it's hard to answer this with a blanket statement because it's one company that does many things and builds many products. i'm not sure what the law says about requiring a company to continue to operate a service just for the sake of intercepting traffic, when the morals/mission of the company would otherwise terminate the service. i'd be interested to see if something like this has been tested in court.

the general rule of thumb is, don't base critical parts of your business or personal life on third-party cloud products that may go away for whatever reason, without your control and without notice. this includes Google's random termination of APIs, encrypted email services, etc. have a plan B if for some reason the Tor relays need to be suddenly taken offline, forever.
Go vs. Rust: Productivity vs. Performance
I must've gone to the wrong college. Mine was like high school except there was even more busy work to do, and it wasn't free. With most kids focused on their phones nowadays, could anywhere be like you say? I suspect those days are over.
Sort of, but only indirectly. It can be used to assault without repercussions.
Reading this sort of stuff from manual prop traders makes me laugh. It sounds so amateur hour. How in the world can manual traders ever compete against a short-term stat arb or HFT strategy? It just sounds like pure luck that any of them will make money.

Also, is 130k really a huge loss? I run HFT strategies, and while it would definitely be a big loss even for one of my strategies, it wouldn't be a phenomenal outlier. How small was this guy trading before?
How did he cut the FR-4 so cleanly? Normally when I mill FR-4 it turns into an absolute mess.
Several of the rifles that individuals in the US can own were also developed by the US government!
Lawn Love (YC S14) Is Hiring a Back-End Engineer
Lawn Love (YC S14) is hiring a back-end engineer. We're a small, nimble, product-driven startup working on revolutionizing the lawn care space.

You'll be joining as engineer #2. This means you'll get to work in a ton of different areas, have direct ownership over the product and help define our culture as a company. Jump into a leading role doing end-to-end feature development.

ABOUT YOU

- You're experienced with the full LAMP stack.
- You understand the balance between deploying fast and writing maintainable code.
- You love working hard, not just for financial rewards, but for the opportunity to grow personally.
- You are intellectually curious, and you get stuff done.
- You currently live in (or are down to move to) San Diego.

BONUS ROUND

- You've got previous startup experience.
- You like grilled cheese sandwiches.
- You don't not like grilled cheese sandwiches.

WHAT YOU'LL BE WORKING ON

- Build customer and provider-facing features to make their experience awesome.
- Work on our internal tools to make our non-technical team as efficient as possible.
- Dig into our data to find useful metrics or possible problems.
- Automate all the things!

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM US

- Great compensation and real ownership (both equity and over the product).
- Friday happy hours, and a bunch of other perks.
- We'll make your life easier with great benefits.
- New gear and whatever else you need to be productive.
- Anything else you can think of - help us decide what perks to offer!

We're well funded and are growing quickly. Send us an email at jobs@lawnlove.com, and tell us what you've been working on!
I guess this is only written for other traders? I couldn't make much sense of it and got bored pretty fast.
Ubuntu with plenty of customization, on desktop and laptop. (I also use Mac at work.)

I have a Windows VM just in case for doing 0.1% stuff that I have to do. (Converting PSD files, doing stuff with Vocaloid, etc.) In some way, this separation of Windows in VM works better for my use.

For other things, it works great for most of the part; only gripe I can think of is that Chrome's omnibar input is painfully laggy...

Other than that, it's quite a productive system to work with.
Fair enough, we love IMAP too, and there's no way its going anywhere. We've always cared about standards compliance and client choice, so use what you like and be happy! :)
>Girls should be exposed to sciences/tech and working together with their male peers on complex projects very early in the K-12 system. That would also naturally adjust males behavior too. And thus just 20 years down the road ...

Can I ask for some opinions on this...

What if we took this approach, which is one I personally support as I don't think trying to retrofit equality into the industry by way of gender quotas is right at all, but yet the outcome is the same? What if, after investing time and effort into getting children into technology at a very young age, regardless of demographic, we still see white and asian males dominate the field 20 years down the line?

Do we accept that outcome? Or how much harder will we push to force equality in this area?
Might be too late, but would be cool to show off your dev schools by adding some sort of slot/budget feature that shows how many cups (or money left) you have open for people to "book."
I'm wrong all the time and lose money all the time. The big difference here is I let one get away from me instead of keeping it small/manageable like I always do. It was a situation where I could have controlled it and I didn't. I'm still up more than 4x what the final realized loss was in my trading career.

I used to think TA was a joke. I was very skeptical before using it. I have never bothered to explain why it works intellectual to non-believers. But I do think someone who understood probability and saw the compiled statistics of practitioners would concede that there's 0 chance of non-randomness.
> What am I missing?

Nothing. Buybacks are a way to return cash to shareholders, just like dividends, with different tax implications.

In your example the company has used the share buyback to return 50$ to shareholders. If it wanted to do it evenly it could even do a stock split first turning every 50$ share into two 25$ shares and then buy back one share from each person. That would be functionally equivalent to doing a 25$ dividend per original share but have different tax implications (capital gains are cheaper than income taxes in most places).
If you really have to trust Mozilla here someone is doing something wrong.

Presumably these hosts will be part of a relay family and so tor will not select multiple of them in constructing a circuit.

When it comes down to it no matter how trustworthy mozilla has been in the past, any service they offer could be compromised going forward in a multitude of ways. This is why its important that systems and software be designed to be secure even without trust. (Then, add in some trust for good measure too).
A couple of points:

1. Don't care who TS is. If she was on Spotify, I'd give her a whirl - but since she's not, just not sufficiently bothered.

2. I think she (or her handlers - whoever makes the decision) make a valid point - artists should be able to pick whether they appear on the Spotify free version.

3. Lastly - all the talk about 'artist pay per play' is misdirected, as far as Spotify is concerned.

The only metric that matters is what % of revenue they pay out to the rights-holders. The number now is 70% - ie they keep 30% of total revenue for themselves and give 70% to the label (who is then free to pay the artist as per their agreement).

We can discuss whether 70% is a fair number (I personally have no idea). But talking about anything else is missing the point - since it ends up being a discussion about split between the label/artist/producers/etc - which Spotify has nothing to do with.
Is GitHub down?
Github is down here, in Vietnam. What about you?
SpaceX Spends 320 Times Less on Building the Dragon Than NASA Does on the Orion
Signs of a Broken UX: Dropbox API
Fastmail is part of the open web. So why a proprietary client, instead of joining in with K9?
The typical timing attack in this case, would be leaking password length (the time taken in the for-loop), no? Then there's the possibility of assignment (allowed=false) taking enough time that guessing with, say "00000" and "x00000" might allow one to verify that password starts with x (and then build up to the full password).

But more fundamentally, what is string.Length? Are these Pascal-style strings, or is that a call to a method that walks the string (O(n))? Those kind of issues (along with the full nature of the code path taken by something like assignment and memory allocation) are abundantly more clear in assembler (or byte code, assuming a predictable vm. But a vm likely isn't -- as far as I know it would at least never be more predictable than machine code).
When's part 2 slated for? That was annoying to just get into the meat of the story and then...
Yeah, no. That's called anecdotes, because when you do understand probability and backtest these strategies, they are known not to work in the large.

Stat arb is what happens when you actually do statistics, and these days it's got only a slim to nil advantage.
"The Kim Kardashian Game , Kim Kardashian: Hollywood – Has Made $43 Million in 3 Months"

Yeah... No thanks to Blackberry.

http://nypost.com/2014/10/28/kim-kardashian-loves-her-blackb...

Is there anything this chick won't do for a buck?

And why does the tech segment even give a crap?
>pull a Lavabit

So, silently comply with warrants and other requests until a high-profile case comes along, then refuse to cooperate until a judge gets you to hand over everyone's data and your master keys, then turn that into a big PR show? OK.
>Content providers do have a legitimate interest in protecting copyrighted work

Except DRM in the browser doesn't really accomplish that, does it? Hit The Pirate Bay or Google up a torrent and done. Things like Netflix DRM are only one step above HDCP.
Yeah, I alo made a fortune in the market except for the money I lost.
Keep in mind that buybacks and dividends are very different for holders of stock options. Option holders benefit from buybacks but get nothing from dividends - that money is just gone (unless they are very rare "dividend protected" options). This much bigger than the difference than taxation.

Since management both holds lots of options and makes the decision to do buybacks it is unlikely that they are completely unrelated. Empirically it has been know since at least 1998 that management with lots of stock options are more likely to buyback shares[1].

[1] http://www.nber.org/digest/nov98/w6467.html
I also think it's an important lesson to learn... I'd rather gain that young then older.
in an ideal world, yes, we should require 0 trust; i don't think we well ever live in that world, it is prohibitively expensive and impractical.
> At almost every tech company, the applicant pool is mostly men.

Man, I wonder how we're managing to hire so many competent female engineers. It must be rough for all you poor companies that women don't want to apply to.
What about a population of 100 such plants where the defector gene is very unlikely to surface for whatever reason, and the plants are able to cooperate and that population becomes stronger for it, versus a population of 100 similar plants except the defector gene might be rather likely to show up, making the population weaker.

Couldn't the population without the defector gene, eventually outcompete and extinguish the population where it can appear?
Thanks. I love how you framed your post, from start to finish.

What other texts do you recommend?
How many employed programmers have a CS degree?
If you look at that graph you will notice the rate of women in CS go from halfway between Math and Engineering to matching the rate in Engineering. I think this is at least in part because as Computer Science matured as a field it became very much like Engineering: a well paying career working in private industry doing technical things. I think this attracted lots of men to the field but failed to attract as many women due in large part to gender roles in our society.

That's my long-winded way of saying that CS "moving backwards" is not as accurate as "failing to fix problems that were already there, but not affecting CS as much until it grew up as an industry".
I still don't see why someone worried about the US government would even start using a service where the best outcome of a warrant is that the service gets shut down.
Most important takeaway for me was: In any discussion, it’s not only critical to consider your perspective or that of the person you’re directly dealing with, you must consider everyone else who’s not in the room and their reactions/motivations.

Relevant far beyond the scope of startups
Rumly – Hack your wallet; quickly sell anything to people near you
Pity they can't just get contacts working with the IOS mail client.

Even more a shame since their Web app is pretty good.
Very cool! Another thing that makes me want to go back to Mac OS.
in fact, in 70s and 80s, japan also played with real estate, which is "structure" in your words. it was crazier than china did today.
FYI:http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E6%B3%A1%E6%...
From my point of view, these vesting schemes all seem to assume the employee is a dishonest actor and to place a huge discount against the fact that the employee is risking much more than a typical big-corp employee, for a much smaller chance at a very thin sliver of what amounts to a lottery-ticket-probability acquisition/IPO.

A more equitable scheme would require a company to provide cash compensation "back pay"/"bonus" that brings the employee's compensation up to his would-have-been-market rate if the company terminates the relationship prior to the initial vesting. This protects the company and the employee: the company's shares are safe and the employee has a slight cushion in the form of a lump sum payment if he's cliffed.
He got me reading the whole thing and then it stopped abruptly.

The guy basically just posted the introduction.
> As these old malls die off, they’re being replaced more and more by upscale, outdoor shopping centers...

Well, and the internet.

I wonder if it'd be viable to turn these giant chunks of real estate into some kind of entertainment venue for a while. I'd play paintball in a dead mall, or race go karts around in one.

There's got to be something worth doing in that giant space.
"but it's a mistake to drop out of one of the most effective social networks ever devised by humankind." Listen to this guy, he is giving you great advice!
There are certainly many institutions that aren't worth attending, especially if you tend to be a highly intelligent autodidact. But if you are that type of person, you'll probably be able to find a great university that will accept you and give you scholarships.

I can't speak to kids being on their phones all day, we only had flip phones when I was in school, but you can make personal choices to avoid those things. I personally made a choice to not live anywhere with a TV, for instance, but there sure were a lot of kids in certain circles wasting away in front them.
Now you are just bullshitting. A 130k is a huge loss and a phenomental outlier. You've never had even a 100k loss on your strategies. And by current standards your strategies are not even HFT. I've seen you talking milliseconds. Nowadays people are talking sub-microseconds.
Transcription takes effort and isn't instantaneous.
What an amazing talk. My brain seems to sum up this whole series as: be an awesome person and then run a startup naturally.