skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, I have two separate stories here that might be relevant:

The first company we dealt with was a massive Fortune 50 company early in our existence. They were very interested in our technology, and we were both young and naive. Still, we've been warned so often about dealing with large companies that pretty early into the process we insisted on signing a paid Software Eval agreement. In retrospect, it was a pretty small amount of money (five digits), but at the time it felt like a huge win. From the moment they said "we'd like to try your software", the procurement department was involved -- NDA, software eval docs, etc.

The software eval was "successful" (in fact, we even presented to the CTO, the President, and VP of Engineering of the company), but it wasn't truly an eval. It was a very custom-tailored version of our product for their deployment. And yet it still didn't really go anywhere. Things fizzled out with them for a while and then about 12 months later they came back once again asking to do another evaluation. This time we insisted on success criteria that required them to commit to a set number of seats if the evaluation was successful. The evaluation was successful, and they bought the seats, but even now the deployment is in a state of "proof of concept" -- they bought ~1,000 seats from us, but at their organization size it's just not that material yet. Seriously.

Another company we dealt with was a ~15,000 employee company. They too were very interested in our technology. They emailed us and convinced us to come and do a demo in person. Having liked the demo they told us they wanted to pilot the software. This immediately kicked off the conversation with the procurement department. NDA, software eval, success criteria, etc. This time, we did need to do some additional work, but we were very diligent in making sure that _any_ custom work that we do was applicable to all customers. They too have now bought ~1,000 seats, and are now in the process of rolling AeroFS out to the rest of their company, but as a benchmark, it has been ~12 months since they bought their initial 1,000 seat license. In some ways, even for them the 1,000 seat license was a continuation of their PoC.

Enterprise sales are slow, but the resulting contracts can be quite lucrative. Just make sure you qualify your customers. It sounds like you only lost ~2 weeks on this deal, and that's really not the end of the world :)
Outbound filtering is great but easily beaten with a mild level of sophistication. The addition of outbound monitoring and analysis is gold. What kind if dns requests am I making how many per hour? how many per page load? how many per domain? What do my flows look like? Do i have DNS flows that last an hour? http connections that serve twice the normal data as my normal page load? http connectionsreturned per domain. Is do i return addresses that are not listed on my servers?

Security layers say you should force all your traffic out your neccessary ports then scrutinize your traffic through those limited egressess.
I disagree. It is great if more people learn it, but it is nothing like literacy. The ability to read and write is something that can help you in every aspect of life, which is why a lot of people pick it up (they use it over and over again). Keep in mind even with this being the case functional literacy is often quite low for many people and true illiteracy is still an issue. Even math past basic arithmetic isn't well-developed, people simply don't use it, despite required schooling.

Are computers everywhere and do people use them every day? Yes. But mechanical ability isn't the new literacy and just as many people interact with engines on a daily basis and would be helped by it in daily life. I think it is much more useful to think of programming like woodworking, leatherworking, sewing, soldering, etc. Very useful skills which can improve your life, but not at all necessary, and "only a few people only need to be really good at it" as you stated.
The New Republic is dead, thanks to its owner, Chris Hughes
If people wanted deterministic sequences, they wouldn't be calling srand(time(NULL)). Or srand((time(NULL) + buf_len) ^ rand()). Or, my personal favorite, srand(getpid() * time(NULL) % ((unsigned int) -1)). Though I will admit it is very difficult for me to properly imagine what that developer was expecting.
He implemented bubble sort:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4RRi_ntQc8
I think New Englanders have it worse than most other American regions because their culture is so bland and denialist because of the Puritanical influences that still roam unchecked. It's probable that Mainers would hate Portland just because it's a place where people have fun.

But you seem to be using "culturally important touchstones" as a way to be racist by proxy, so I'll stop this interaction here. I hope you get better.
I suppose you're talking about the "course-management" bit. That's just the way they named things. You could just as well have the following:

<dependency>
<groupId>net.java.dev</groupId>
<artifactId>jvyaml</artifactId>
<version>0.2.1</version>
</dependency>

The artifactId is the name of the jar file.
Couple of thoughts, unsorted brain dump:

* Ranking/Karma systems can and will be abused. See the digg bury brigade, etc. It's really difficult to separate honest feedback from feedback deliberately tailored to vanish unpopular opinion, or hurt people. (It's not like eBay ratings aren't gamed, either. Or Amazon ratings/reviews)

* Related to that: One person's troll is another person's idol. Post on any political topic if you don't believe that :)

* Related: I believe comment-based rating works slightly better than user-based rating. Just because it takes a lot of effort to silence a user by downvoting every single comment. It still allows burying unpopular opinion

* I believe rating systems are gamed because rating is "free". If you only had limited rating capital to expend, I'd assume most people would not want to waste it on burying things.

* On the flip side, reputation doesn't matter to many people because it is assigned to online IDs, not actual people. I.e. reputation is free, as well.

* Instead of a narrow AI, I'm wondering if a simple Bayesian filter might do the trick for the vast majority of Internet trollery. Yes, it's gameable, but as troll filters become more sophisticated over time, gaming becomes OK. [3]

* An immutable ledger of past reputation transactions might be meaningful. (Yes, I'm on the Bitcoin bandwagon with that, sorry). It does not solve the issue of multiple accounts with different reputations, but it's in each participants interest to have each individual entity represent consistent reputation.

* I believe any reputation system will have a social component. What your friends think about somebody you never met matters more than what random strangers think, because chances are your friends and you have at least similar value systems.

* Society-level interventions might start with educating people in "direct communication" [1] and "nonviolent communication"[2]. And yes, education in general helps too. I'm not sure "biological interventions" are without ethical issues.

* You do increase the risk of an information bubble - people might confuse civility with agreement. But I do think that over time, that might sort itself out. In my experience, people I consider of high integrity tend to rank other people's integrity based on behavior, not opinion or political leaning. I might be an optimist.

* It seems I use politeness and trust interchangeable. I'll have to ponder that some more, but it seems fundamentally correct to me. I care about respectful politeness, not fake politeness with ensuing backstabbing.

[1] https://csde.washington.edu/~mbw/direct-and-indirect-communi...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication

[3] http://xkcd.com/810/
As I get farther along in development I realize the cost and time to becoming profitable and break-even is smaller and smaller than I originally expected. It may slow down development if taking smaller investment, however from my experience so far being forced to move slower has its benefits - perhaps including less dilution.
Isn't the problem that the founders have to spend like drunken sailors to show "traction" to have any chance of getting more funding while their investors give them so little money that the runway is then incredibly short? There is very little room for error here.
polarssl sold commercial licenses, before they were bought by ARM
Without some revenue, every company is on a direct course for disaster - by default. I think that the first pitfall some make is to look at investment money as revenue, cash coming in. But its a big giant fallacy.. it is not money from normal operations. Until you sell a product and have money coming in from it you are on borrowed time. This can be intentional and calculated position of building a product and bringing it to market when it is ready, but I get the impression that many don't plan or execute their way out of this fast enough.
It's #2, and I'm not misreading it.

I mean, let's be clear: you can very reasonably hold the belief that one needs to actively work to overcome past bias. But in #2, they're calling out to their model, and specifically this part of this post:

"See what doesn't happen? No change. No mixing back together. In a world where bias ever existed, being unbiased isn't enough! We're gonna need active measures."

But that's only true because their model includes an easily-reached equilibrium (and also because it doesn't include non-diversity-based reasons to move). If it didn't, then past bias would not cause future segregation -- the (in that case never-stable) present state of the world would reflect current biases, not long-past one.

And this is what I'm saying: they have a very simple model. They have a few fairly laudable (though perhaps not actually very effective) personal and political prescriptions. But if the personal and political prescriptions do apply to the real world, they don't do so through the agency of that model.
This is irrelevant in the 1%'s endgame, where everyone but them is living either at subsistence or better yet in debt.

Even if you try to go for a long tail by way of say Kickstarter, the people who buy your top-tiers are going to dominate your focus.
It's already not a terribly good idea to use rand() for deterministic pseudorandom numbers, as the generated sequence isn't portable between systems.
The Apple vs app store is a distinction without any difference though. The whole idea of controlling what users can run on their own hardware is 100% Apple through and through. If you remember the history of iPhone, even that was granted as a concession only after devs started jailbreaking and started developing native apps without Apple's permission.

Now, if with that history and culture, some app store middle manager makes an autocratic decision to remove core functionality from a beloved app, you can't just lay it on "one bad apple" so to speak. This is the culture the whole company is seeped in. This can't be a surprise to someone who has decided to "love so deeply" this entity for so many years.
Rant interpreter v1
If you operate as if every round of financing you get is your last, it is irrational to waste investor money to fake traction. One view of the lifecycle of startups is that companies that try to do that have already lost the game; they're predicating their success on future financing rounds.
Why would you have to "spend like drunken sailors" to show traction? I think you make a much more compelling for having traction if you can continue to grow while spending like a sober sailor.
Or remain on one indefinitely.
Maybe it could be interpreted as "the top 10 most widely used programs today were written by a population of programmers who are a smaller fraction of the population of users than has ever before been true before". (That might still not be true: the number of people who work as programmers at Facebook or Microsoft might well be growing much faster on average than the worldwide population of people who use the software they write!)
I was! Forgive me for playing loose with my terms after one too many comments.

I understood BH/Google to be implicitly criticizing the myopia of "shareholder value" as that term is usually meant.
honestly I was trying to figure out how this is something new. rootkits have been around for a long time now.
Not sure what is non-obvious to you or what kind of recommendations you're looking for...

Anyway, there's a semi-regular HN meetup going on in Tokyo:

http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/

There's also Mobile Monday and Startup Weekend.

For general touristy info, check /r/JapanTravel on Reddit.
How is writing code becoming a "life skill"?
$450k X 97 = $43.7M. WOW! if I could just pick one of those in my lifetime.
Probabilistic Modelling, Machine Learning, and the Information Revolution (2012) [pdf]
This is a meme about the evils of venture capitalists, that their expectations are so uncalibrated that it's more important to act the part than it is to play the part. It might even be true in a lot of cases, but that doesn't make the strategy any sounder, right? You should just write off those investors.

(My take on this is very secondhand, unless you count experience from 1999.)
Will investors let companies do this? Is it going to be OK if you only grow 100% per year because you are living within your means or aiming to become profitable as soon as possible?
I;m sorry there wasn't more talk of Go, I think the author might like some of what Go has to offer.

For example, the comparison about maps at the bottom would benefit from seeing the way Go maps work.

There's the single assignment form:

foo := myMap[key]

This returns the zero value of the value type in the map if the key doesn't exist in the map.

and the two valued assignment:

foo, ok := myMap[key]

This returns true or false in ok based on whether the value exists, zero value for foo if it doesn't exist.

This is actually very like an option type, but what go is missing is the compilation-requirement that you check ok before using the value.... however, go does have the compilation requirement that the ok value gets used somehow, or it'll give you an unused variable compilation error. In practice, this works quite well as a more flexible option type for the simple either/or types (either there was a value or an error).
How far down the stack are you willing to go? Firmware? Hardware? Hardware components? Processing of natural resources required to create those hardware components? Methods for extracting natural resources? The geological reasons why those natural resources occurred in the first place?
It seems like the past year or two have been rediscovery of languages from the not too distant past, and investment into those that are here...

Go, rust, closure, lua, node(js) and a few others have seen some massive interest the past two years, so it isn't that surprising.
There seems to be a huge difference in the quality of teams that use Atlas. For example, I've submitted reports on thousands (ex-hobby of mine) of spam locksmith listings over the years via Maps RAP and MM Report this. The MM team would readily remove spam, whereas the Local team wouldn't, even though the POIs were clearly spammy (special characters in the name). I've also coordinated with other maps users, and it seems the consensus is is that Local team will protect claimed listings at all costs, even to the point of hiding addresses for spam SABs (service area businesses) when they should just be removed altogether. If a spam POI is in the middle of a lake, or has weird characters in the name to evade the spam filters, wouldn't that raise some alarm bells somewhere? Do they have any standards or guidelines for evaluating the spammiess of a POI? Local seems to be engaged in an aggressive turf war with other teams, like Map Maker to protect their listings. Many edits that I've made to benign POIs within MM have been denied by LEs, only to be later accepted and corrected by GRs. Can you comment on the differences in quality among the respective teams, and their methods for evaluating edits? And why are they so determined to keep SABs out of the MM listings, especially considering the many of the SABs are spam, and use virtual offices, PO boxes, and unrelated business addresses (McDonalds, etc.), and, at least in the US, have to be licensed for business (and the business license address itself is a matter of public record? The reason given was that they wanted to protect the privacy of the business owner, but businesses have virtually no privacy (and no one used MM to find businesses except to edit them). SABs used to be visible in MM, now they're not. The "new" Maps RAP is terrible at reporting issues beyond just the basics. Reporting spam with the Maps RAP is a chore and almost better suited to MM.

Regarding florists, they're bad, completely agree. I weeded out a few mega-spam networks a few years ago before I gave up and focused on locksmith spammers. Garage door suppliers, handymen, carpet cleaners, movers, escorts, and lawyers! Lawyers are pretty bad, especially the ambulance chasers/accident attorneys.
We'd also use the internet and, reluctantly, call them. We would identify ourselves as google maps, calling for info about their business.

I don't quite remember the numbers, but it was something like 40 a day? The slower and new peeps would be around 25, and the fast people could do like 80 a day. But there weren't any productivity bonuses besides not being let go, so me and my buddies would do about 10% more than the average and then goof off on the internet or do homework for our python night class.
But did he use Vim or Emacs?!
Can we go back to a scheme where we have a decade of money paid in? I'd happily pay a little more if it helps end the endless name calling and what not.
Most people using NT knew it as version 4. Some folks knew that Windows 2000 was version 5. After that, things got weird: Vista is 6 but Windows 7 is 6.1 and Windows 8 is 6.2: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms72...

Windows 10 will finally (but perhaps temporarily) undo this weirdness, and report itself as version 10, but only to some applications! http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/why-wi...
Sampling from an infinite set with equal probability
Is it open source?

Maybe we should fork it and turn it into a bigger project.

"President's work gets forked".
I wasn't suggesting companies are trying to fake traction, but they do seem to be encouraged by at least some of their investors to hit very high grow rates (say 30% a month) which are only possible if you spend a lot and so have a very short runway.
Thank you for your comment. The week is picking up, and I may not have a chance to repay you in kind once more.

I have put a few of the links on my reading list.
The JavaScript Templating Landscape
What does penetration of armor matter? The only relevant aspect of anti-tank warfare nowadays is mobility kills. Strafe the vehicle from the side, destroy its tracks and its just a big obstacle to the enemy now.

There was an incident in which a mobility kill was scored against an M1. Crew was unharmed and was able to retreat thanks to the other tank covering it. The tank was ordered abandoned and destroyed. The problem was, even firing at it from the other M1 they weren't able to destroy it.
It's a userland trojan and it's "one of the most complex APTs in the world"?

One wonders what these people would think if they found MosDef in the wild.
The Neptune-Pluto alignment is one that might be interesting to explore on a solar system simulator. I suspect you might have to wait a fair fraction of a thousand years for that though, at a minimum.
And it's using libpcap to do it, making it (in that regard) asymptotically as sophisticated as dsniff.

It appears to literally be using cd00r, which FX wrote almost 15 years ago. It's like they assembled it out of junkyard parts from PacketStorm.
Has there been any word about their Android Go project? Would be awesome now that they are updating all their development tools.
yes. When you are "ramen profitable" you are making enough to remain operational which means you are avoiding death and the "fatal pinch" this article is all about.
Any examples of this model being applied in the real world?
I just finished the book "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas" by Seymour Papert (creator of Logo) which would be a give you a good perspective on how computer programming literacy could be used to help people learn (about more than just computer programming). It is a great book that I'd recommend everyone read.
It certainly doesn't make the strategy any sounder, but why are highly intellegent founders who have far more to lose than any investor getting caught in this pinch? This seems to be the missing question from Paul's post.

Edit. Changed how to who :)
I'm hoping that once we have widespread coding literacy (if that happens), we wont have to write our own twitter. Instead services like twitter will provide various "extensibility points" where anyone would be able to inject their own code according to what they need. Sort of like Excel lets you do with macros, but friendlier to use and more pervasive.
Is there any evidence that it patches the kernel? If it infiltrates the kernel, you'd think that'd be the most important detail Kaspersky could reveal; forget about whether the authors ran "strip" on the binary or not.
It Gets Worse: The Yik Yak Story
Run With the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader

http://amzn.com/0060924586
What the hell is going on? This is nonsensical now.
See https://sfconservancy.org
I`m using.
DefineJS: define(function*(){..}); yield require('utils');
At least he knows it's not the best way to sort 1,000,000 32-bit integers
They'll all lose their jobs eventually, along with all the time they expended on this doomed company

They were getting paid, right? I'm not losing time I work at a company that will eventually fail.
People make money doing this sort of thing:

"In 2001 the McCarrigans secured the trademarks Super 13 through to Super 20 in anticipation of the expansion of the Super 12 competition."

More details here, including a couple of other trademarks they bought in anticipation:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&obje...
There are a handful of companies that can't reasonably expect to make money for the first year or two, because what they're building takes so long.

So if someone starts a company that is in this category, is it just dead in the water if the founders aren't already rich/connected?
A progression of books on high altitude climbing. Have read Into thin air, the climb, dark summit in the past month or two, currently reading no way down and have Annapurna: The first conquest of a 8000m peak and The will to climb out from the library.

Reason, finally have the motivation to loose weight and get fit, and am planing to do some climbing locally.

http://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/038...
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Summit-Everests-Controversial-Sea...
http://www.amazon.com/No-Way-Down-Life-Death/dp/0061834793/r...
http://www.amazon.com/Annapurna-First-Conquest-000-Meter-Pea...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Will-Climb-Commitment-Annapurna/dp...
Of course it is better if you can hit a 30% a month growth rate while living like a Scottish widow, the problem is that this is very difficult (impossible) to do. Something has to give here - investors either accept lower growth rates or they accept the need to put in more money.
Companies often want strategic influence on OSS software, as well as maintenance. This would be difficult to run through a clearinghouse. When a project is larger, it can be part of an existing OSS foundation, where there is more experience with arbitrating such conflicts between donors.
"This is sophisticated nation-state malware" doesn't sound quite as stupid as "we found this a year ago but didn't know what it was".