skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a true takeaway. Redundancies are even layered - for example, there may be redundant computing modules, running redundant (and possibly independently developed software). These computing modules may be multi-processor, have multiple banks of RAM and flash, etc ... but not used in the typical COTS way. Instead of being devoted to increasing computing power, they are devoted to ... you guessed it, redundancy. In highly critical hardware, you could physically remove one of the CPUs from the board while it was running, and the system would log a fault and keep on ticking without so much as a timing jitter.

EDIT: Also, for those of you who don't mind working for a massive corporation instead of a startup, avionics is a fascinating niche of computing. It's what I do, and I love it :) They pay is a bit worse, but hey, I have a pension. It also helps that many aerospace companies are in lower cost of living areas than startups. More importantly, the problems of next-gen avionics are completely unique, unsolved, and engaging.
In markets like real estate and private business, I agree with everything you wrote. In a liquid, public market like publicly-traded stocks though, I'm not so sure. I don't disagree that if you devote your life to it, you could possibly find an edge - although it will likely continue to get more difficult as institutional players become ever better at exploiting (and thus removing) any inefficiencies. But even if we accept that it's possible, you would almost certainly have to accept significant volatility to do so. And even if you didn't, you would ultimately be devoting your life to winning a zero-sum game. (Similarly it is possible to become good enough at poker or (with more difficulty) blackjack to make a living from them. Even a good living, potentially. But you're going to have to weather some downswings along the way, and you won't have any consolation in the fact that you're creating something of value - as you would starting a business for instance.)

So I guess I don't disagree with anything you wrote, but I question whether it makes sense for a person to devote the majority of their energy to playing the stock market. (And I definitely agree with you that it would indeed take the majority of one's effort over the long term to have any reasonable chance of success beyond pure luck.)

Edit: I should add that I would consider some proven, passive strategies such as tilting to small and value to be exceptions. These do theoretically allow for slightly superior returns without life-consuming effort, at the likely expense of taking on some additional dimensions of risk. I personally keep a moderate small/value tilt.
I meet Ezra at RailsConf 2007, this was pre Engine yard if I am not mistaken. At this point he was all merb. He was fun to be around, very positive attitude and extremely smart.

Sad day…
Hate is a strong and emotional word.
The assumption is that you work for the startup and have a critical enough position to earn equity, and therefore have more influence over its performance than that of a public company.
Paul, I get a sense that you have a keenly ingrained sense of morality and justice. What you may want to try is looking at fictional or hypothetical scenarios which depicts people's actions from an observer's point of view. Then compare the same facts coming from a friend's point of view.

You will be astonished at how different the two can be.

Nobody here is saying the YC and VC community are all evil super-villians. But as PG's essay and your views here indicate, there may be a startlingly shallow understanding of the nuances of human behavior in the YC community as a whole.

Techies such as ourselves tend to be very optimistic and trusting people. We always give our friends the benefit of the doubt when we can. But you and PG are seemingly taking this way, way too far in spite of mountains of contrary evidence (and I'm talking evolutionary biology, not just anecdotal).

Humans are primates who form status hierarchies and ruthlessly enforce them via any means necessary. This includes power asymmetry, extortion, bribery, status signaling, and a whole host of others nasty behaviors (watch Game of Thrones for the full gamut). That PG and yourself apparently deny this basic biological fact for a certain group (i.e. YC founders) does not make it less true.

I have to disclaim here that I'm a huge fan of yours Paul, and I know much about the incredible struggles you've faced in life. I know the only way to move forward is to be relentlessly positive, and this is also my own personal philosophy. However, part of being a rational person is trying to see the empirical world for what it is, not what we want it to be. I think this is the only thing PG is guilty of; He wants founders to be above average in altruism, when the reality may be the opposite.

All the best, and forever a fan.
I use Wealthfront, which allows you to park your money into an account, and depending on your level of risk, will automatically balance it across the US Stock Market, dividend stocks, emerging and foreign markets, bonds, and natural resources.

For account values over $100K, they will do tax loss harvesting for you automatically, and prevent wash sales. For over $500K account values, they will actually buy stocks for the entire S&P 500, and allow you to take tax losses on individual stocks (which you can't claim on ETFs).

I found their presentation to be quite helpful:

http://www.slideshare.net/adamnash/personal-finance-for-engi...

If you want an invite, PM me.
Well, you also need a box that's adapted to the speaker, otherwise it won't make much sound.
Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud
Computing

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28...

I've been attempting to write a paper on virtualization and other Cloud/datacenter machine managing software. This was one of the first papers I read in my Cloud Computing class, and I actually recently came back to it after becoming lost reading countless papers on more specific cloud research. It really clears up a lot of confusion on terminology regarding different forms of computing services and the challenges in the field. I wish I knew from the start how much more accurate the statements in this paper are compared to a lot of other content out there, and that I could have been warned about how misleading that other content would be due to authors trying to validate their own software creations.

Before I came back to it, I was playing with the thought that the cloud is really just corporatization of computing resources that only leaves the biggest players to survive because of profits, which really vibes with this paper. It really is just computing infrastructure as a utility and the idea is nothing new. There are several other papers out there that make the same points, but I appreciate this one for really nailing the practical terminology without any sort of vagueness. It's not surprising that it is such a highly referenced and popular paper.
We know that being a Roman or Viking sympathiser is acceptable 1500 years later.

We do?

Did the Romans or Vikings even have a common ideology one could "sympathise" with, regardless of the intervening timespan?
Exactly. There's a big difference between investing time and money in a venture where you have some control over the outcome and unnecessarily concentrating your passive investments in a single company (or even in anything less than the broad market, given the ubiquity of low-cost index funds). And even then, assuming your startup succeeds, you wouldn't want to wait too long before diversifying some of the profits (which the article supports).
And most of biology (including you).
Implementing a Meta System in C++
Or maybe people who write code for a living a) don't find it difficult to remember that fencing text with asterisks gives you italics and b) fencing text with asterisks is far, far faster than taking your hands off the keyboard and playing swoopy/pointy/clicky with a mouse.
So buy shorts.
:(( What happened ?
Depends on how much home you go for; most people buy or rent far more home than they need or can afford. Sure, if you're in the middle of Mountain View or NYC, even the tiniest apartment can be exorbitantly expensive, both in absolute terms and as a fraction of salary (which does not scale to the same degree). Those locales are fundamentally expensive to live in unless you get very creative. On the other hand, in most other locales, if you're willing to live on the high end of "student" rather than on the high end of "professional", while getting paid like a professional, living on a small fraction of your income is quite feasible.

And in any case, there's no sense giving up on the idea completely even if you can't hit the most aggressive savings rate; even if you only save 50% of your income, you can retire after 17 years, which puts you on track to retire in your early 40s instead of your late 60s. Even better, as you progress through your career, your salary will likely increase, but your spending doesn't have to match. 50% of your salary right out of college may only be 25% of your salary later on.
You just created a work for hire for your employer. You should have negotiated this earlier, and especially before voluntarily donating it to be used at your company.
You should really go see interstellar, I saw it last night and it is probably the closest thing to a 3hr version of that short video that exists. They are both really fantastic films. I would also add that interstellar is worth seeing in IMAX if you can.
Houses are pretty cheap, compared to how much money you need to retire.
Have you another passion in your heart?

I think you have(like drawing,painting,etc).

I ever felt like this before I'm a painter but suddenly I like philosophy.

And now i hate painting!
Honestly IMO tax loss harvesting becomes very straightforward if you have a nice, simple portfolio of index funds. Your entire portfolio will be maybe 3-5 funds, so there really isn't much to keep track of. A few minutes reading the superficial loss rules for your jurisdiction should do it. (Generally, as long as you sell a fund at a loss and replace it with something similar, but tracking a different index, you're fine.)
I'm pretty sure it's intentional, although they obviously wouldn't admit it.
All just speculation right now, but apparently there will be a service on Wednesday December 3rd in Portland, Oregon.
I've had only awesome experiences as an Uber rider (in the Boston area and Bay Area) and all the drivers I talked to seem pretty happy (especially ex-taxi drivers). I agree the software is a bit shotty, but I'd bet they are aware of and working out all the kinks.
He used to fly little radio controlled helicopters all over our office at Engine Yard. Playful and fun. The real tragedy has little to do with his departure from the world of
technology. The real tragedy is that his son, who must be no older than six, has lost his father. So so sad.
Bogleheads is a great resource, but I expect most HN readers can handle managing their asset allocation manually (using a simple "three-fund portfolio" or similar), which allows you to save a bit on expenses compared to a target date fund, as well as take more advantage of tax management techniques like municipal bonds and tax loss harvesting.
I have a two year old who loves reading and learning. I make sure he finds learning interesting so the skills and knowledge he's picked up are a natural part of his play.

The negative replies to your comment irked me as being a bit brief and harsh.

But I do wonder where "we haven't progressed as quickly as I had hoped" came from? What made you hope for more? Prior children? Holding him up against brilliant peers? Arbitrary expectations?

I think it's one thing to push and motivate your child in a supportive and happy way, but another to have rough expectations, even if you don't share them with your child. Your experience teaching them can be as positive as theirs is being taught by you.
Perhaps you're right; perhaps 1-2% of people (if that) could potentially beat the market in their investments. And the majority of people think they're in that 1-2%.

Meanwhile, index funds have the lovely advantage that you can't do worse than the market.

If you have extra energy to spend investigating investments, use it to diversify into a handful of minimal-overhead index funds rather than just one. And if you fancy yourself an investor as a hobby, take a small fraction of your savings and play with it, and congratulate yourself if you manage to do better than "buy high and sell low".

But in general, most people would greatly improve the status of their investments by just throwing the whole thing into a halfway decent index fund. That's the most sensible general advice when talking to a large audience of people; get them there first, which takes far less effort, and then let people who really think they can do better attempt to do so.
I've attempted reading this paper about half dozen time and no, it's far from "clear". The language and description of the paper requires a LOT of context and understanding of 1900s state of world. There are quite a few "companians" that can help. Here's snippet from [1]:

Modern readers turning to Einstein’s famous 1905 paper on special relativity
may not find what they expect. Its title, “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies,”
gives no inkling that it will develop an account of space and time that will topple
Newton’s system. Even its first paragraph just calls to mind an elementary experimental
result due to Faraday concerning the interaction of a magnet and conductor.

[1] http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.pdf
Highly skilled immigrants are losing interest in America
Om and React.js Does It Better
If you do get a lot of money somehow, read The Challenges of Wealth, by Amy Domini. Most people who get a reasonably large chunk of cash all at once blow it, in an average of seven years. A sizable fraction of old pro athletes are broke. So are a sizable fraction of lottery winners.

As a rule of thumb, any investment where they call you is no good. If it was any good, it wouldn't need paid sales reps.
It looks like the famous Bjarne Stroustroup quote holds true for markup languages as well as programming languages.

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds (1993)

http://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/valkanov/pub/classes/...

The foundation of the Three-Factor model, which shows how market returns can be very accurately described using exposure to market, small, and value factors (as well as term and default factors, primarily used for fixed income). The foundation of modern value investing.

A Stand-Alone, Split-Phase Current-Sourced Inverter With Novel Energy Storage

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=468271...

There's nothing particularly special about this paper except that it was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics and I wrote it. :P
One – Read Hacker News, Designer News, Product Hunt, Reddit, Slashdot in One App
If you care about a 6-7 year window, especially the most recent 6-7 year window, target date funds aren't for you. They'll underperform when the market is doing well. They'll also suffer less when the market tanks. Overall, they're a safer investment if you really do have a fixed target date and want to retire close to that date, and thus you have much less tolerance for risk. In particular, they tune for less risk the closer you get to the target date, to limit unexpected surprises.

If you're near the beginning of your career, you don't have a fixed retirement date in mind, and you're investing a substantial enough fraction of your income that you will likely retire earlier than average, then you might want to pick a standard index fund with a fixed proportion of stocks and bonds based on your tolerance for risk, and leave it that way.
SwampDragon – Build real-time apps with Django
If you take care of legal stuff I am really interested in such service. I just don't want to sign the papers myself. I don't understand many of the legal matters with selling a house and afraid of being in trouble if I do it all myself.
Ezra was a playful hacker who was never afraid to strike out and build something crazy.
We do have OpenResty support. But sailor doesn't work just with it. It also works on Apache, Xavante (a lua written server) and Mongoose (a very lightweight server)
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon Released
Yep, and there's also exists plugin like that for vim. Although it doesn't exactly comply to github's column alignment markup.

https://github.com/dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode
Contrast the "media noise" of Woz with Jobs.

There are hundreds of reports from colleagues, family, friends about the characters of each of these people. They are completely different.

There is video evidence confirming these judgement. There is video evidence of Woz going around being a pretty sweet guy. There is video evidence of Jobs berating people and being mean.

Should we--the unconnected public--pretend that we can't know anything about these people just because we haven't met them?

It's not true that you have to know someone personally to judge their character.

We, the masses, don't judge people by how they treat their friends, superiors, or other rich, connected, powerful people (like you).

We judge them by how they treat the little people.

Being mean is like being trustworthy. Sometimes it only takes one sufficiently mean act to become a mean person--especially if that mean act is toward a little person who can't do anything to fight back.

You're a modern aristocrat, Paul, whether you like it or not. Not every aristocrat is abusive but one trend throughout history is that the kind aristocrats usually protect the evil ones. The servants know the difference. The nice aristocrats are ignorant. The mean artistocrats pull the wool over the eyes of the nice ones. If the servants complain about the mean ones, the nice ones side with the mean ones. Class solidarity, willful ignorance, or both?

I am very sure this is what is happening in Paul Graham's case, and likely yours too. You are apologizing for the cruel aristocrats because they don't show you their true colors.
Sorry for not being a native english speaker
GCC was explicitly against a plug-in architecture for political reasons, but did grow one when llvm showed up
Sailor's website does not use the bootstrap feature. To be honest I just picked a random nice-looking open template. It has its issues but it's not that bad! XD I confess I gotta work on that. Thanks for pointing it out!
How Mendeley Helps PhD Students Become Successful Scientists
very sad news! shit man! you will be missed
shit man! that sucks, you will be missed :-{
I learned to read at about the same age as your kid. Make sure you place the same value on math and programming as you do reading such that your kid sees it as something important and fun. Maybe lead by example and play math-based games every morning or evening.

Good luck, you're doing great already.
The Imitation Game: how Alan Turing played dumb to fool US intelligence
Mr. Money Mustache will probably tell you to move to a different place[1], saving time and money by reducing the commuting time[2] etc..

NB I neither agree nor disagree with his ideas (still have to decide.. :))

[1] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/28/get-rich-with-movi...
[2] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
Hahaha cool! Thanks, go ahead!
My reaction to Wanderers was also to consider our own planet. For all the curiosities out there yet to be discovered, Earth is flat-out stunning. I was watching segments from David Attenborough's Africa earlier and thinking that what we have already discovered is incredible, and (in general) we're already doing some excellent work in trying to wreck it.
The last 6 or 7 years hasn't exactly been average for historical performance in either stocks or bonds. I'd expect that the target date funds would wind up underperforming in this sort of market, and likely outperform in down markets, especially once you factor in ill-advised market timing/panic changes when the bottom drops out.
One is glad to be of service! :D
Show HN: A Simple Platform for Team Blogging (with Markdown Editor)
This is a 48 hrs working to test my framework, but it is completed to use, please try it. Thank you.
You hit the nail on the head. When I bought my house, I found the house, but I was scared of the paperwork and a realtor did that for me. And we plan to change that for both buyers and sellers, by using better, simpler software and real estate attorneys. We will soon be in a position to take care of end-to-end details of the transaction - inspections, tours, contingencies, mortgages, escrows. And, if someone does not want to use these services from us, they can go on their own too. Freedom of choice
Thanks! As an undergrad, I'm specially happy!
Because they're trying to do a lot more.
Google Glass App a Finalist in Richard Branson's Extreme Tech Challenge [video]
rigorous exercise did wonders for my passion, so did a sport fishing trip.

learning a new language or starting a new project will probably reignite that spark.
Pretty high in any case I would say.
If you're exchanging salary for equity you have to look at taking a job at a startup like an investment decision. I don't know what the broader startup stats are now, but 1 in 6 sounds about average. It means you should negotiate down vesting periods and try and spend a few years at each startup before figuring out if it will succeed or not.

My anecdotal opinion is that more startups are cashing out for at least something because of acquihires and low-end mergers. I had a friend whose startup ran out of money, he accepted a few points of another startup in exchange for the assets of his failed startup and that startup that bought his assets ended up selling for $100M+ after less than a year earning him a decent return.

On another note - it would be pretty cool if someone did the equivalent of an index fund but for employee options. Get together with 5-6 of your friends at different startups and exchange options with each other to hedge the risk.

Another way to diversify your exposure is to get advisory roles at startups and pick up 25-100 b.p from 4-5 different companies for helping them out. This has worked out pretty well for myself.

There are some VCs who will also invest a small slice on your behalf if you introduce them to a deal they end up investing in, which can also work out pretty well if you are able to spot good investment deals, know the founders, etc.

For a culture where stock options, M&A and investing is so prevalent there really isn't much information out there in terms of making the right investment decisions and how to handle and work with money.
My thoughts exactly when I read this article.
I do not expect "someone else" to pay for it. As best as I can figure at least 20% of my gross income is going towards social programs already via compulsory contributions (income taxes). Required contributions to these programs based on peoples' ability to pay seems like a good solution to me, though the allocation of those funds could be done a lot better.

As far as voluntary contributions go, I do make some, but a big issue is finding and vetting charities where donations would do the most good. Psychology plays a bit into it too - "We currently have W and need X to meet demand for services. Every Y above X lets us also do Z" is more appealing than "Every dollar helps!" with no transparency.
Wow... Very sad news. His twitter page shows him living in Eugene, Oregon, my hometown. I wonder what he was doing there.
So I just did the math. I work at a startup in NYC and could probably make more money at $BigCo. I should be able to save %50 of my current salary and be able to pay rent and have a decent daily spend to the point that it's 2AM and I'm furiously recalculating a lot of scenarios. That has to count for something. :)