skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is a fair question, but like most things with humans, almost impossible to answer in a definitive way.

Which is precisely why you have to be very, very, very careful. The matter-of-fact way it was phrased in the blog post didn't give me the impression that there was a whole lot of skepticism regarding her abilities. If one does make such a grandiose claim, it seems like a person conscious that it is a grandiose claim would preface it with a whole lot of qualifiers and such.

> There was once an accidental control group though. Jessica missed about half of the interviews and PG, RTM, and Trevor were left to decide on their own. I would estimate that the error rate without her was about 2x-3x as high.

I'm curious what the sample-size is and what error-rate actually means. I realize with the control group question and this question, I risk coming off as awfully pedantic.
Ping pong tables and nap times do not equate to values, culture or community. Sure they can be tangentially related but that's about it. These are surface level features that do very little to describe the "Softer" stuff that actually matters.
I can understand a degree of suspicion, but seeing as this is Hacker News, a reader shouldn't have to wait very long until others with this experience could vouch for its verisimilitude (or lack thereof), as I was able to do from my own personal experience with a girlfriend three decades ago ... definitely way before the generation of people you're referring to. Hmmm, and my girlfriend did not really fit into the "typically white, middle class kids" pattern you're referring to.
Sennheiser introduces 2 modules for Google Project Ara
You're not showing "humanity" if you stick with someone in a new relationship upon discovering a mental disorder. It's a personal choice; someone making a different choice doesn't lack humanity.

And once children are involved, it is not just about you. Plus, you're bringing that person not only into your life but into your family.

Here is something: what if your feelings change because of this? Should you stay, just for the sake of demonstrating your humanity to the world?

Oh, right, it's okay to break up because of changing feelings, because those are human.
Another RITer- one of my friends is quoted in the article- I don't think I ever knew Mike's name but we were definitely in the same place at the same time quite frequently.
Definitely sad.
Hmm, tricky. What about carrying a mirror as well; do folks retain the ability to recognise themselves that way?
Enable Ruler in Google Maps to Measure Distance – Android
Really?

Imagine how many more hours a day you'll have to look at your android device when you don't have to pay attention to driving to and from work? Or going on road trips.
PARCC testing in Colorado has disastrous first day
FCC approves net neutrality rules, reclassifies broadband as a utility
Most of the use of Dart at Google is client-side code running in the browser, but there's server-side use too. One example: Google Fiber settop boxes run server-side code on the Dart VM.
It would be nice to have a coffee table book of startup culture inspiration with a spread for each company with a few office pics and bullet points on what makes their culture unique and successful.

Everyone knows about Zappos and Google, but I feel like there are few enough well-known examples that every time I've ever been involved in white boarding on this at various startups we've always come up mostly empty handed.
When to not learn
I agree with your sentiment. That said, this is an amazing community, no reason to feel ashamed of HN because of the ignorance of a few comments. That those comments almost always get downvoted to oblivion, reveals the true character of HN.
If it was your home and you recognized it, and the people in it, then that is not relevant here at all.

You're equivocating between the colloquial use of "dissociate" (as in "marathon runners practice dissociation and association") and the clinical term as it is used in this context for a disturbing disorder which has nothing to do with driving a memorized route on "auto pilot".

And, by the way, you'd still hit the brakes if a kid jumped out onto the road chasing a ball. It's just multitasking.

Simliarly, a piano player isn't "dissociating" just because he or she isn't thinking about which finger goes to which key at all times.
Introducing #Angels
Pot, meet kettle: Obama sharply criticizes China plans for encryption backdoors
Freedom implies openness, but openness doesn't imply freedom.

Gmail's JS is open, but it is not free.
Seattle's police department has a YouTube channel for its body camera footage
"The most infuriating thing about having a family member with a personality disorder, my own dive into ab-psych, is that they can turn it on and off in certain contexts, they can be triggered and they can avoid being triggered, but not in a context where you need them to, where you beg them to. It is a way in which they are acting, an unhealthy coping mechanism and pattern of thinking that colors all their thoughts - but it is not something that they can't control or observe at all, only something that they don't usually control or observe well enough to avoid causing problems. There is no clear line between their disorder and their voluntary behavior and their personality, it is one unified whole."

This is so very true. The member of my family with a clear personality disorder would likely be a criminal if she wasn't able to turn it off or otherwise limit it in various public contexts.
I am not an accountant, this is not tax advice.

You're usually correct, except for two things (in the US):

1) Holding stock for a year before selling is taxed at the lower long-term capital gains rate (~20% vs ~39.6% at the highest brackets).

2) Exercising an ISO is seen as a taxable income for the purposes of the Alternative Minimum Tax, so exercising late (when the difference between FMV and Strike Price is high) has a higher chance of incurring an AMT burden, whereas exercising early does not incur an AMT burden (because the spread is small) nor a normal tax burden (because this is how ISOs work).
Yes. I'm reminded of a project that I didn't really "get" when I first came across it, the Least Authority File System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoe-LAFS - it seems these guys have been building for exactly this kind of application!
WRT "Cars are dumb machines" I find it fascinating in this discussion that its assumed we can trivially deploy an AI smart enough to out drive a human, but nobody wants to talk about humans being so dumb they get drunk then go driving after decades of incessant propaganda and punishment. I don't think a species that can't stop drunks from driving stands a chance at creating an AI that can outdrive humans.
> Companies with bad cultures try to motivate employees with fear and intimidation, or simply fail to motivate them at all, and everyone wastes their time playing video games or whatever. Not surprisingly, those rarely do well.

This seems like it could be a chicken or the egg problem though. How do you know that good culture isn't a byproduct of success. If Google stock were tanking, how do you think the culture would look? I honestly don't know.
And this imo, is one of the reasons why JL's input has been so valuable to YC over the years. If a company's culture reflect that of it's founders personality focusing on founders who are "good" people goes a long way towards ensuring the companies YC funds act a certain way. Whether that way is good or not is up for debate but from pure anecdotal evidence I'd argue that YC startups tend to comport themselves better than others.
I just loaded it seconds ago. Nothing to see here.
You onow these are in the Universal Declaratin of Human Rights, right? And that these are things that many countries have agreed are human rights and are things that they should work to? And that they're now part of international law?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_...

And so, while they are just shot some people made up they have a bit more going for them than that.
Can you provide a list of big American corporations that are able to consistently make billions of dollars in profit in the US tax jurisdiction and pay no taxes or have a negative tax basis (in cases that don't involve using a big loss to offset taxes)?
You say you do online payments. Do you handle non-profit classification correctly?

My university has a policy that no student organization may use any form of e-commerce because of the difficulty/impossibility of getting a PayPal/Stripe/Square account to respect our tax-exempt status. If you could do that, it might solve a real pain point for student organization leaders.
Make it compatible with http://Archive.today and http://Webcitation.org please?
'Your marketing page sucks' is true, but not useful or insightful.

My suggestion is something like: 'Your chats, to-dos, and project management -- free, and in one place.'

That is compelling enough that I might sign up and try it.

Contrary to some of the advice on here, I would not try to explain how this product works in any great detail on the homepage. This is because it seems (I haven't tried it) like a complicated tool.

Focus on building a solid onboarding process that walks users through the usage of the product. This will be more useful to your users than any video or screenshots.

This is all without having tried the product or knowing too much about the space/your ideal users, so take it with a grain of salt.
Depends on the type of options you have. If you have ISO, yeah. I'd probably wait because there are "games" you can play to not impact your total tax bill for the year (i.e. not trigger AMT).

If they are NQSO, the difference between your option price and market price is a taxable event. So if your option price is $1 and the company IPOs and has a price of $12 when you exercise, you owe taxes on $11 per share (this is a gross oversimplification). Now if you had purchased before the company is acquired/goes public, the price might just be $5 so your overall tax bill is lower. You exercise at a lower price and hope the price goes up.
The research shows these results for typical human beings. If you did a survey, a typical human being would be terrible at and will overestimate their ability to discriminate good startup ideas from bad ones. But PG does have this ability. Similarly, she is probably a atypical human being with an excellent 'social radar'.

Also, she gets feedback so she gets to improve.
You own more than 5% of the company? With that stake you should be on the board if you exercised the options. There's only 20 5% owners in any company.
This sounds a lot like torrents, and I would think that it'd be less work to solve the problem of newer snapshots of torrents (or put all the new content into new "chunks" and thus new torrents) vs. re-inventing the entire thing.
Interesting. Definitely useful since most the marketing automation tools I've used are just email focused. Can we look forward to a Zapier integration?
Yes it is, Jack Tramiel did it to avoid taxes. It helps if you are wealthy, then you can arrange for an appointment to the UN and get a UN Passport[1].

[1] https://info.undp.org/global/documents/hr/Guide-to-the-Issua...
How to Setup Your Own Software Development Company, 6 Years Later
New York City Adds 2 Muslim Holy Days to Public School Calendar
> Which is precisely why you have to be very, very, very careful. The matter-of-fact way it was phrased in the blog post didn't give me the impression that there was a whole lot of skepticism regarding her abilities.

Speaking about unconscious bias, although this judgement can be valid, would you have said the same about say, a (male?) engineer claiming that "I can often tell good software architecture from bad". Which is a similarly subjective, heuristic-based imprecise classification problem.

Not saying you wouldn't, by the way. But I wonder if for plenty of us there are biases in play here as well, since we are talking about skills usually considered less "hard" scientifically (even though they are just as much 'hard skills' as the above example about software architecture [1]).

[1] Unless you are in the 0.00001% of developers who deal with formally specified and verified software.
Distributions are not long term capital gains. The only real tax advantage is no FICA. It could be a lot if you aren't paying yourself much in wages, but I would be wary of the IRS disagreeing with your "market value wage" in that situation.
I actually agree with this response. Because of Microsoft, Seattle has become Silicon Valley North, just the same as NYC has become the Silicon Alley and Chicago is... whatever they're calling Chicago now.

All of them are similar, heavy car usage, not enough walking, and no safety for humans.

Google is trying to solve it by making smarter cars. How about we solve it by making our communities smarter instead?
What kind of zapier integration would be most useful? Would it be best if we hooked up with salesforce, or other larger providers? Or just expose zapier hooks for our APIs?
I dealt with physical illness which caused large amounts of anxiety and stress. If you've recovered from a dehumanizing situation, often you don't want to invite those negative emotions back into your life. You just cross your fingers and hope it doesn't happen again.
the reasons as posted:

"I've always been a good judge of character–even as a little kid"

"In fact my cofounders respected my opinions about character"

"I can tell things like when people are BSing, how tough they are, if they get along, .. whether they're good people or not."

"Paul, Robert and Trevor are really good at technical stuff, but it's precisely because they're so good that they often misjudged founders as people. " while "I didn't always understand the details of the questions they'd been asked"

"I just have a very intense reaction to people I think have bad characters. "

At this point my reaction is as it always is when someone belive they were born with special abilities, but the article does end on a better note:

"I now have experience dealing with literally hundreds of startups. So now when I see a problem I've usually seen the same problem ten times before."

Born ability? I would call it earned experience, while I strongly suspect she was as bad as anyone else at being a judge of character before that.
That definitely makes it harder, especially since norms for what is or isn't honest or ethical are far from universal (e.g. what kind of copying is ok and what kind is stealing). This is another reason why it's beneficial to have a culturally diverse team.
It's hard to know where to place the blame for delays, though. They have to deal with multiple government bureaucracies, bumping, launch windows, and weather. Even if SpaceX executed perfectly every time there would still be schedule slip.
I could see this as a Kickstarter project of sorts.

Sell a device - a Raspberry Pi with an SD card preloaded with "plug and go" software - that people can buy for $50. Sell alongside it an inexpensive SATA and/or PATA enclosure into which people can put their old drives. They basically plug in their old hard drives and forget about it, perhaps writing off the tops ~$25/mo in electricity cost as a donation†.

When they plug it in, the RPi gets an IP and announces its availability via DNS-SD (Bonjour/Avahi/etc.). The user downloads a tool or just knows to visit `myarchiver.local` to pull up the control panel. The control panel lets the user set up IP options, time, etc. as well as control bandwidth usage, scheduling, etc. They can also see the amount of space used and set up notifications of some kind (reboot for updates, disk space, etc.).

This little device just sits in a corner and is effectively a multi-TB shard of this 20 PB and growing cloud storage system preserving the Internet. Box it up with some sexy industrial design and some attractive packaging, and it becomes a conversation piece, just like your Apple Time Capsule, Amazon Echo, Butterfly Labs Jalapeño, or other newfangled life device, except it's actually storing more than porn, cat pictures, or magic internet money.

† I don't know how feasible it is, but go with it.
There's been a combination of SpaceX developmental delays and the US government budget for commercial space getting cut every year, which causes the contracts to get stretched out.
I often ask myself these same questions.
Interesting. What platform did you build it on?
One Twin Exercises, the Other Doesn’t
So from now on we should call every structure which is implemented inside library, compiler or JIT using a pointer, a "pointer"?

> In computer science, a pointer is a programming language object, whose value refers to (or "points to") another value stored elsewhere in the computer memory using its address.

You have your answer here. In JavaScript ("programming language"), v ("object") has a value of JavaScript structure called object. Internal representation of v sure does use a pointer, but from JavaScript perspective, it surely is NOT a pointer. If you get the value of v in JavaScript, you don't get memory address ("value [that] refers to (or "points to") another value stored elsewhere in the computer memory using its address") - you get the object itself. That's what references do, not pointers.
My guess is that they're targeting middle-aged-monied-nerds-who-don't-ride-bikes, which is a reliable but tiny market. The kind of people who buy recumbents and put them on Craigslist a few years later, unridden:

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/bik/4910738255.html

http://inlandempire.craigslist.org/bik/4894883743.html
I think we can all read that as "not in my lifetime", though I may just be a pessimist.
>There are sometimes legitimate reasons to be going quickly. I have, at times, needed to have bursts of speed into the 90s to safely get around a drunk driver going 70.

So.. you reasoned that it would be safer to be /in front/ of the drunk driver?
If you or others are struggling, I recommend "Learn You A Haskell". It's a great book that explains them well.
Well, of course. That's why Elon said that Tesla and SpaceX need to be profitable; it's just not the primary goal.
This still doesn't add up. You offer a 24 hour turnaround, yet you hope to learn about a company, plan a campaign around that situation, figure out appropriate metrics to evaluate whether it is effective, and then execute on that in 30 minute bursts.

Even if you can do that, you will have an incredible amount of trouble making a consistent profit unless you can keep your acquisition costs very low. And, frankly, based on what I've seen it's very hard to trust you so I'm not sure how low your acquisition costs could get.
Some of the key numbers aren't there. It's not clear how much stock the insiders retain after the IPO. At least there's only one class of stock, though. Google and Facebook have two classes of stock; the insiders hold the class with a majority of the voting rights. (That's rare; the only other big US company set up that way is Ford.)
"All those widows and orphans"

Spare me. What are the numbers on those widows and orphans? Because the thing is, tech investment right now is driven by investors and funds—entities that by definition should be able to handle their losses. Entities that by definition are more educated about the downside risk than the tons of John Q Public idiots that were day trading Internet stocks back in 2000.

Maybe the numbers support what he's saying. If they do, I'd love to see them. shrug
Hardly anyone thinks Bitcoin is going to displace national currencies. In a Bitcoin success scenario, bitcoin would be an additional currency that co-exists with inflationary currencies. As governments will always retain the power to tax, their currencies will always have value, and they will always be able to spur activity through inflationary monetary policy.

" You bring up the internet but remember that it is goverment regulator who protect and enforce Net neutrality - not Comcast."

That's the telecoms, which deal with the underlying infrastructure, not 'the internet'. The telecommunication industry naturally gravitates to a oligopoly, because it provides a utility. It is inherently not competitive, so it's justifiable for government to set ground rules. That is until a decentralized global meshnet can replace the current infrastructure.

If the internet itself had been subject to thousands of regulatory bans, like prohibiting people from running a server without a license from a state or federal regulatory agency, it would be nothing today.
Depends on the part. The brain can alter what they see in the mirror. For example if they think they're fat and you show them in the mirror that they're not they still may not believe you. It's a fascinating topic.
"... when people are BSing, how tough they are, if they get along, and surprisingly often, considering I only have 10 minutes to observe them, whether they're good people or not. ..."

That's a difficult task. Was it the comfort/discomfort paradigm used here? (cf: Navarro: http://www.jnforensics.com) From experience, you only really grasp the mettle of ones character in adversity.

You can ask questions and see if the response is causing a person discomfort, but that's all. The reason for discomfort could be nervousness or a host of other things. More questions need to be asked based on the observation.

"We continue to filter for character"

Who are the worst offenders? Does the adage, 'want to get an honest answer by avoiding management and ask an engineer' apply?
I'm talking about the very early days, so there was no stock to tank, the company was largely unknown and not yet "successful".
Travis Kalanick is the Frank Underwood of the startup world
Over the last three years Cuban has consistently, publicly said he doesn't see a bubble.

Now he's seeing one derived from crowd funding? I'm not sure whether to think he's on to something, or whether he dislikes the idea of having vastly more competition for the sort of angel deals he frequently does. These new crowd funding sites are pushing up his cost to get into early rounds on good companies. There's no chance he likes seeing his entry fee substantially pushed upwards (lowering his returns); he has frequently pointed out how much he dislikes Silicon Valley's expensive early valuations and has proclaimed he views that as an isolated bubble.
> "We should all write more C."

Erm... speak for yourself :)
Jason Scott, an archivist at archive.org (and other things) was recently a guest on The Web Ahead: http://thewebahead.net/97.
10000?! The UK, with a population of approximately 1/4 that of the USA and more liberal alcohol laws, had ~260 deaths from drink driving in 2013. Rampant might not be the right word, but something isn't right.

(Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...)
A look at the upcoming features for PC-BSD 10.1.2
this is a very good point. and this:

We saw exactly that with Ruby, for example; developers assumed that they could escape from the verbosity and enterpriseness of Java just by changing language, ignoring the pitfalls that could be experienced.

this worked for a lot of people until they got to the architectural stuff. but going from Java to Ruby (infinitely nicer) is distinct from going to J2EE to Rails (easier to get started, harder to keep going).
I wonder if formal training in, say, anthropology or social psychology, would help as well. Seems unlikely that you can have a dedicated judge of character from every different culture on earth.
Running a country is harder than running any startup
>In retrospect it sounds obvious that if the company sells for less than the money the investors put in, your x percent is worth nothing.

that is what i've been wondering about. If going into startup i take a $50K/year salary hit wouldn't it mean that i'm actually investing $50K/year and thus should get the same quality and price of shares (not options) what the early investors do?
Where exactly would you be storing the note? Curious as to how durable/invisible it would be to the user.