skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I should clarify point 2 then. I don't mean that for founders it is a finance game, I mean that the idea of a community of high-growth, venture backed "Startups" which Y-Combinator and the various VCs sit at the seat of - is 100% finance driven. In other words, their goal is returns, not "changing the world" or doing anything different than the nihilists [1] on Wall Street. Investors like a company blowing them off to get traction because it is basically no risk for the investor, and helps them track their progress so they can come in later for a massive round.

I point this out because there is such a strong ethos around SV as being this kind of "Anti Wall-street" which I think is reinforced because founders/employees genuinely to want to make impactful stuff. The founders here and elsewhere in the startup world constantly talk about "making a difference," "changing the world" etc. So whereas the junior analysts and salesmen on Wall Street all know and acknowledge that making shitloads of money is the primary goal, I have a hunch that the VC's and LPs in SV (and elsewhere in the startup world) are using the naivety of high producing young, enthusiastic people to make a killing. This is why the archetype of the SV founder is someone who is personally low risk (single, young), is expected to work an insane amount to get growth going, tapping into growing markets and has already validated the market.

That is not to say that founders & finance are de-facto in conflict across the board, and it is also not to say there is some kind of conspiracy between Ron and Jim to juice labor, but I do think that founders are largely seen as a commodity to the finance class in the startup world. My guess is that they VCs are threading the needle really carefully with giving out information about how to get more "founder friendly" terms because founders are too smart to get screwed.

[1] http://exiledonline.com/confessions-of-a-wall-st-nihilist-fo...
Really at this point it's fair to say the the current Linux desktop stack is already a miracle; a backwards-incompatible rebuild is just impossible, or at least with the current state of the mainstream UI development tools.

Which, on the other hand, I think is rapidly evolving, now that OOP is out of its hype phase, and can now be evaluated a bit more (pun almost intended) objectively, and freed from its unnecessary parts, and that front-end JS and functional reactive techniques are bringing new ideas and especially terse and powerful notations and abstractions to describe UI layouts and interactions, to the table.

One can dream of an invention-of-the-C-language-like situation where a team of lone hackers harness the power of a bump in expressive power to formalize the current state of their UI metaphors and reimplement it from scratch and then build upon that at tremendous (relative) speeds...

Well, I dream.

Futzing with front-end JS frameworks is having unexpected effects on my worldview, right now.
What is Gradual Typing
I think 4) holds.

We have 2 spectrums for all known strategies (the amount of gold in the veins is another question):

* Strats that are automatable vs non-automatable.

* Strats that are unique (known to a few) vs well-known strats

Automatable:

Well-Known - This is where HFT becomes an engineering problem. It's also the easiest business decision to make. I hire some engineers + buy some computers and I can mint some money for a time. This is also a race to the bottom -- where there will be some easy money to be made at equilibrium, but it'll be unsustainable for HFT firms at the margin. I would say manual trading has 0 impact here -- and they'll likely get crushed.

Unique - These are strategies that only a small set of firms know. Eventually these strategies become well-known as people move around companies. There must be some secret strategies, though. Otherwise, why would Rentech & Citadel sue their own employees (unless we are to believe Simons & Griffin are simply vindictive). I think manual trading could work here if there is a strategy that simply haven't been discovered by the HFT & quant. It's might be hard, but not impossible. These secrets aren't anything you'll find online or in some trading forum, though. Or perhaps they are, but no self-respecting quant would go there (lest they become laughing stocks in their fund).

Non-Automatable:

Well-Known - PE is an example of one. In terms of liquid assets, maybe penny stocks are another area. If a group of "manual" traders couldn't get permission to delve there... it's probably even harder for a quant fund. It's also the territory of insider info and rumors.

Unique - Maybe being there for the liquidity crashes I stated earlier is a good example. But there are certainly non-automatable unique strats around.

Depending on how much gold you believe is in the veins, all strategies are heading towards automatable & well-known. However, in the interim, I can see manual traders still making money (even with a sharpe > 1). In fact, I would say there are well-known strats you can execute manually (in say, your PA, that return sharpe ~0.8ish).
Spyware: Flashlight application on Smartphones
Amen amen amen.
And I most certainly wasn't comparing the power of Google to that of an individual therapist.

vs

But I think even you will agree that Google, Apple and Facebook have a lot more power over the world than a psychiatrist.
That could easily change with the help of a well funded team like Mozilla.
Says the bro that went to Columbia (for a useless masters)...

[1] http://www.jdiculous.com/
[2] http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremysbernier
In a range voting election, you'd have a lot of people who would bullet-vote for a particular candidate

www.electology.org/bullet-voting

> (100/100 points for candidate A).

Score Voting (aka Range Voting) does not limit the number of votes. That's WHY it's so resistant to tactical voting. If you give Ralph Nader a "perfect 10", you can still help Gore against Bush as strongly as you want. You could even strategize to give Gore a 10 and Bush a 0.
I think a project that attracts that kind of person is already pretty successful.
This is something that as someone in my early 20s is trying to fix. I know a lot of people who don't like to work on projects or open source them because they're afraid of being judged and a feeling that everyone is watching you (this is an emotion I had tackled for a while). Once you realize that there aren't many people looking at your projects (if any), and that those who are, will actually help you, is when you start doing more.

This reminds me of two quotes:

- “Fail faster.”

- "If you're going to make a mistake, make it LOUD so we can hear it and correct it."
Having just finished the book Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton, it seems that the board is the crucial thing for founder control. This really surprised me because I had assumed that the board worked for the shareholders and that if you had the majority of the shares, technically you controlled the board via proxy. But there must be some sort of legal maneuver that prevents this (otherwise, a majority shareholder could call a special board meeting and replace the board or expand it in their favor).

It was puzzling to me how Ev Williams basically got kicked out of Twitter by the board (of which he was a member) when he was the largest shareholder. Perhaps his percentage was diluted down during the previous rounds? The book implied the board kicked Williams out against his own volition even though he seemed to hand pick all the board members.

If a case like Twitter (and now Tinder) where the board sets the ultimate agenda is the norm, choosing board members is something that should be given more emphasis and the info in the post seems to be exceedingly helpful.
Isn't a contract that violates a law, Bad in Law?
Now it is much easier to find friends online
If you don't think about technical analysis as charts and lines, but rather patterns or cycles of market (and human) behavior (which is of course what the charts and lines represent) you might see how technical analysis could have some validity.

Are there patterns in markets? Are there patterns in crowd behavior? I think so. Others may disagree.

Another point... if enough people believe and act on technical analysis signals, the prophecy becomes self fulfilling to an extent.

This is not to say a consistent simple mathematical formula involving Bolinger Bands or the like can be developed with any certainty. I think prediction based on patterns is art as much as science and involves a lot of probabilities rather than exacts.
>>I just want to know when college became some holy grail of uncovering your true potential.

When I did studies here in India, the internet penetration was close to 0. You could visit a library with books, practice paper, pen, and a water bottle and clock record 12 hours straight minus rest room breaks. You could break for tuition classes after wards. And then again work a few hours in the midnight.

This will prep you up for productive work later in life.

The competition is pretty fierce for getting through entrance examinations, and I would say working on hard math and physics problems helps develop your problem solving skills as much as programming does.

>>I've been to college. It absolutely and utterly pales in comparison to the knowledge base I'll never have time to consume for free on the internet.

This depends on how your spent your time in college.
I think you make some interesting points. But a clarification re the last one:

The reason I think it's potentially a social issue is: In that situation you have a small group of people effectively curating the internet (deciding which sites are useable and which sites are not) for a large portion of the population.

More to the point, you're potentially giving a private business' stakeholders the right to decide which media outlets are accessible for certain people, which news sites are useable, etc. Is it possible that this power will be used in a completely benign fashion? Sure, it's possible. But I think it's also worth considering the possibility that these decisions would end up amounting to censorship of certain views.

Your argument about market-choice is a fair one, except that cost is a limiting factor for large portions of the population. We're NOT talking about even-handed limitation of supply in accordance with your ability to pay. We're NOT talking about cost as the outcome of supply and demand; we're talking about choice and access to unfiltered information as the outcome of whether or not you can happen to be rich or poor. If that's not a social issue, I don't know what is.
It's interesting to contrast Tesla and Fisker.
What isn't there to love about fastmail?
Neural Turing Machines Learn Their Algorithms
It looks like free pascal has generics: http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refch8.html#refse46....

But to your larger point, doesn't any non-programmable programming language exhibit the same weakness to some extent?
I don't currently have a "primary desktop", but yeah I run Linux on basically all of my computers. Mostly Ubuntu or Debian - Ubuntu on this computer.

There are a lot of reasons, but high among them are the ability to dive into the code when I'm curious about what's going on under the hood, a solid tiling window manager well integrated with my shell, and habits and familiarity built up over almost two decades now of using primarily Linux.

There's doubtless things other OSes could do to be more my speed; honestly the Windows 8 UI, while ugly, fit my work flow slightly better than previous incarnations. No one targeting "mainstream" seems to want me, though - even the Linux distros are barely usable in the default installs.
I went through this in depth when I spent more time playing at writing a Lisp interpreter.

I appreciate that these two features are crucial.

1. In the Python code of the interpreter, "Instead of making a recursive call that returns a value that is then immediately returned again by the caller, we can instead alter the value of x (and sometimes env) in the original invocation of eval(x, env). We are free to do that whenever the old value of x is no longer needed." That is how we implement proper tail calls. Thus we avoid inflating the call stack needlessly, continually, and hugely.

2. Testing.

The rest seems incremental to me, at least by comparison. I'm not even that excited about the famous Lisp macros. I think I haven't arrived there yet. I do appreciate that backquote reduces contortions just like `%` aka `str.format` does in Python.
You said some very universal statements like "Just walk up to random people and try to find out what makes them tick." This advice can be very detrimental in some cultures.

I am talking about things like this- Friendliness does not make friends in Japan - http://www.uri.edu/iaics/content/2000v10n1/06%20Blaine%20Gos...

The other implication was friendliness is a Good Thing and more friendliness is Better.

The idea that friendliness is even desired with [varying levels of] strangers is cultural specific. Or how much friendliness is acceptable or too much.

I am an oddity in my culture because i wish for much much less friendliness with strangers than my culture dictates is appropriate. I could go for far less stranger friendliness in my life. [Depending on the degree of stranger].
Downgrade iOS 8.1 to iOS 8.0.2, iOS 8.0 or iOS 7.1.2
If you know the length of a user's password, it narrows the search space considerably.
Yahoo buys video ad platform BrightRoll
Disclaimer: my opinions are my own and not representing those of my employer or co-workers. I have no direct relationship to this project and haven't looked it up internally.

Has it occurred to any of you that we might do these things for sheer fun, because doing that is not only allowed but celebrated?
Cooley's Terms and Privacy Generator
Ah, I see. I misunderstood you.

I think that there is some element of truth to that, for some people. Remember that VC is first and foremost a financial profession: they have a fiduciary duty to their LPs to get the highest returns possible. They invest in a different asset class, but they are money managers responsible for allocating capital to the teams most likely to make good use of it.

I also think that there are some founders who are clearly in it for the money as well. Probably moreso of late, with the gold rush mentality these last couple years.

I'd disagree that this is everyone. I think that there are still a large number of founders around who genuinely want to change the world. Many of them are not seeking venture capital, or if they are, they are getting turned down. But I also think that among this population, VCs are seen as the commodity, a resource to be used when their startup has proven itself and needs to scale. Sam Altman used to say many things to this effect, back when he was on the entrepreneur side of the table.

One of the most illuminating quotes was something I read in Dale Carnegie, to the effect of "The guy you're holding a conversation with probably thinks himself superior to you. Let him. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain from maintaining this illusion." It made it clear that there's nothing wrong with different people having different perspectives on who's got the higher status in the relationship, or, more cynically, on who's using whom. In fact, the world runs on this status ambiguity - nobody would ever do a deal in which they think they are going to get screwed, so the only reason we have any commerce at all is for both parties to believe they are the ones getting the better end of the deal. We wouldn't be able to function without Lake Wobegone. (There's another interesting psychological finding where the only people with a realistic self-image are clinically depressed; apparently, if you lack this inflated sense of self-worth, it really does make you unable to function.)
I think the main concern is that in many systems each key doesn't have an equal amount of work associated with it (this sort of thing is usually referred to as a "hotspot").

An example: suppose you have some distributed system storing article metadata and all of the sudden one of your articles becomes very widely shared. The machine that the popular key hashes to gets slammed. Perhaps we'd want to adjust it so that that particular machine is just dedicated to that one article, or some other way to distribute that one article across multiple machines. But we're just using a hash function, so without doing something fancier, we can run into problems when the load suddenly becomes wildly uneven.
I'd love to take you up on this, but I'm afraid I'm thousands of "Miles" away.

Sorry I had to.

Nice Rick and Morty site on your portfolio!
Although I have no first hand or even second hand experience here, there are somewhat widely reported stories of companies saying "accept this demotion as well as a reduction in your stock options, or be fired," to which there's obviously some incentive for an employee to voluntarily accept the reduction.
The main feature of the Android app is push notifications, which requires Google Play Services. A version of the app without push notifications is pretty much identical to just using the regular web app in Chrome Android, so there didn't seem to be a lot of point doing distribution via other means (with the extra maintenance overhead that brings).

If there's enough demand for something else then we'll be happy to revisit this.
I've followed the EFF since the 1990s (and once had an @eff.org mailing address) so I may have some insight. Seth, one of their technologists who posts here, would have more: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=schoen

The danger when dealing with advocacy organizations and DC is that they "go native." It's a variant of the principal-agent problem: advocacy groups cease to act in the best interest of their members/funders. They become enamored of their own press releases, their own ability to have a "seat at the table," or better yet to convene everyone around their table to draft a backroom deal--even if the resulting law is better than no law at all.

The late Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and ALEC, talked about this a lot in the context of conservative groups and GOP politicians. Whatever you think of his politics, Weyrich's insight was correct. I wrote about this in the CISPA context in 2012 here: http://www.cnet.com/news/advocacy-group-flip-flops-twice-ove...

Now back to EFF: post-CALEA the group moved from its DC lobbyist row offices (which I remember fondly) to SF to avoid being part of that DC deal-cutting swamp. They intentionally haven't reopened a DC policy office--I think only David Sobel is in DC and he does FOIA not policy--though they easily could have.

So I'd say your faith in EFF is well-placed. EFF is working in your interests and the interests of its other members, the snide aside in the linked article notwithstanding.

Now even honorable organizations make mistakes, and I believe EFF is being too enthusiastic about a deeply flawed bill. I would side with the Sunlight Foundation and other groups opposing it. But no organization is going to agree with all of its members 100% of the time, and if you like everything else they do, there's no reason to cease your support now.
Having now read most of this and skimmed the rest, it was less useful than I initially hoped; the principles themselves were useful but the book itself is focused on GUI design for Unix.
Heh, I see that all the time! Oddly, this time not so much, but I permit cookies from *.google.com (perhaps you don't). But the "withgoogle.com" domain causes a redirect loop in the login popup…
I am informed that actually the Patent Office is at least starting to back away from 'on a computer' patents.

I confronted a rather weaselly dude attempting to patent troll tabletop roleplaying games by filing for a claim on character conversions, with an exceedingly vague 'with a computer' veneer over it. Fortunately the guy had his application rejected twice, and looked due to have it rejected again (as well as having attracted attention from much bigger fish) before he closed ranks and disappeared.
Is there an app password protect as in CloudMagic? What is the one good reason for me to opt fastmail?
My point was more that this is a thread about the new apps, not about our privacy policies. If you want to start a new thread somewhere I'd be happy to comment on it.
Are you a visionary product manager? ZenPayroll (YC W12) is hiring
Composability, and ease of pulling things between shell and scripts and GUI, are a major win.
Url please?
Listen to this guy, but listen to everyone else, too.

There are all sorts of ways you can improve your odds apart from going to school. There are a lot of things that you can read that will point you in the right direction. There are a lot of interesting things that you can work on.

I never went to University or College or whatever you want to call it, and I've had to turn down multiple good job offers to stick with the great one. I'm halfway around the world from SF, but I would be very happy to chat with you, Miles. Hit me up.
science is so cool.
Based on comments above, I:
1) Turned on google search history
2) searched for 'python lambda syntax' and 'mutex lock'
3) got the invite that opened the foo.bar UI

You get a terminal, from the terminal you request coding challenges. They have a minimal IDE to code in. Choice of language is Java or python. Only tried one challenge. YMMV
It's past the time I can edit my comment, but I agree with your post (you've basically stated what I attempted to, in a much clearer fashion.)

4 years of full time dev work is far more valuable career wise than the average 4 years of college.
I was going to write more articles explaining DHTs in more detail, but I can at least write here a short answer.

My general belief about dealing with nodes leaving the network is as follows: You just notice at some point that a node doesn't respond, and then you look for a better one. That is because a node leaving the network could be caused by a failure or a user that kills the program. A node leaving the network is an interesting time, because the node doesn't have any incentive to behave well.

If a node x wants to join the network, he will first contact a representitive y on the network. y will then search for x inside the DHT, and find the best location. y will then send x that location on the DHT, and x will just join there. You might be wondering how will the links be set up at this point.

At the Chord DHT there is an operation called stabilize that is run from time to time. This operation is where every node updates his finger table. It is mentioned in a more detailed fashion in the original article.

I didn't deal with those stuff in the article I wrote because I will deal with them in the future, talking about DHT security and stability.

EDIT: One thing that people forget from time to time is that DHTs have some hidden assumption that allows them to work. A DHT assumes that things don't change too fast. At least not too fast that individual nodes can not follow.

DHTs can deal with a few nodes joining and leaving, but if lots of nodes become offline in one moment, you might face a problem.

Thanks for reading.
Ask HN: Recommendation for producthunt.com
Can anyone in HN community recommend me for producthunt.com please? Right now commenting is limited and needs recommendation for it. My twitter handle is @purans

Thanks
Thanks for the feedback. We'll look into it for a future update.
"At some point, the software must be developed on the OS it runs on"

I'm not sure that's really true, particularly with emulation.
Good to know; userstyles.org doesn't mention it Safari on the page linked, at least.