skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pensions have been getting destroyed on private equity investments for as long as pension funds have existed.

Most venture capital funds return between almost nothing and nothing. Most venture capital companies are horrendous stewards of institutional money. You can look up the available data, it's ugly for everything outside the best of the best.

I fail to see how it's worse to take a 97% loss on the bottom 3/4+ of VC firms, as opposed to taking the same total loss on a spread of crowd equity funding investments.
Until companies with serious cash to spend [0][1][2][3][4] stop buying up startups, this bubble won't end anytime soon.

[0] - http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=UA+Key+Statistics (just recently spent ~$900M on acquisitions)

[1] - http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT+Key+Statistics

[2] - http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GOOG+Key+Statistics

[3] - http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=ORCL+Key+Statistics

[4] - http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=EBAY+Key+Statistics
GPS can be accurate to about 1 meter, I thought. Ten meters should still be good enough to locate someone, unless you're in a crowd.
> How do you schedule a rocket launch when someone else owns the 50-year-old range radar equipment that keeps executing HCF?

Recognize that even if you don't own the radar equipment, it is impacting your ability to deliver value, so spend the necessary funds to get them to replace the radar equipment with something that doesn't have that problem.
I was thinking about the exact same model the other day (even to the point of paying new hires a signing bonus to cover the stock purchase + tax liability). The wall I ran into was how long I would be able to continue such a model -- how big of a bonus would I be willing to dole out? 20k? 50k? 100k?

If switching to a stock options at some point, what is the proper time? Post-A/B round? (obviously a nice problem to have if you have to worry about such things)

Would be keen on discussing it further sometime, since we seem to have arrived at the same conclusion independently.
This isn't an indictment of valuations being necessarily inflated more than they were in 1999. He's critiquing a new preference for private investments which are very, very difficult to liquidate. That lack of liquidity, combined with easier access to investments via crowd funding has the potential to crash very similarly to mortgage backed securities.

It's easy to get in and impossible to get out. If things start falling, investors are locked in for the whole ride down. That structure combined with a heady appetite for putting it in the first place primes the pump for a painful crash.

[edit for question] He implies the SEC is restricting mechanisms for adding liquidity to private/crowd funded investments. Any idea if he has a specific proposal in mind?
> That's like saying families is an obsolete

That's like saying a tennis ball and a planet are the same because they're both round. Scale, you're missing the scale of it.
Pension funds and similar investment vehicles put a tiny percentage of their money into VC funds. Those losses shouldn't affect the individuals much.
I came here wanting to know the same thing. I'm not exactly clued-up on accidents and cars, etc. But it seems highly odd that one can just die from being rear-ended by a car (even if it's going 100)? The only thing I can think of is that the breaks were on, so his body/head whip lashed forward badly or something.

Anyone have any other theories about this sad event?
It's the USA that is car-default. SF, NYC & Chicago are the exceptions, and they have their own special kind of problems too.
Hacker News: where a very human story of empathy and healing immediately turns into a discussion of what this can tell us about the brain's computational architecture.
Like what? There is no well-defined figure of merit for "a startup that is likely to succeed".
Cloud Pub/Sub – Reliable Enterprise Messaging in the Cloud
i actually share some of that here: http://blog.desk.pm/2014-yir/

i primarily did content marketing through blogs and paid sponsorships.
thanks dale!
It's not only pensions, it's insurers and worse underwriters, universities, local governments, non-profit organizations and more. The amount of actual "private equity" in most VC's is minimal to non-existent, people with those amounts of money have much better investments options and more importantly they know better.
Yeah I think so as well. Most of the women were programmers as well.
Google’s Cloud Pub/Sub Real-Time Messaging Service Is Now in Public Beta
Too bad attractive people are convicted less often by juries, receive more one-on-one attention by doctors, receive higher grades in school, etc. Read "Looks" by Gordon Patzer.
Ask HN: Email Invoicing for Side Job
I have been providing occasional computer services (malware cleanup, harddrive recovery etc) as a hobby. I was wondering if anyone in a similar position can recommend a cheap (possibly free) email invoicing software that I could use to provide to my clients? I don't really need anything else as the work is so infrequent.
Because, headline / clicks! :)

The thing I'm frankly most worried about is interest rates, which will be the thing to reset the current angel situation. If interest rates rise, it's likely some of the more levered investors will have a safer place to put their cash than LPs. Seems like it'd be an inverted stage crisis where people either can't raise late stage rounds and maybe that stops up the front?

This is all with about 5 minutes of thought.
They're assuming that big numbers will make engineers shut up and stop thinking.
Only thing I agree on in this article is that equity based crowdfunding is a bad idea
Facebook's market cap isn't 41B, it's about 223B, as of today (using yahoo/google finance):

* https://www.google.com/finance?q=fb

* http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=fb
I've always found this frustrating myself. I was never a fan of immaturity, but I have absolutely no patience for it at my age (it's one reason I hated my last company). The cultish character of some startups and tech companies also creeps me out. In general, I guess an infantile workforce is easier to manipulate than a group of mature adults. Or maybe there's something in the free snacks...

My personal experience has been that companies that need tech (vs. tech companies), as well as the older players, tend to have employees with a greater level of average or at least apparent average maturity. The Peter Pan syndrome you have in mind seems to be fairly unique to new tech, but not new businesses in general. Maybe instead of working for a tech company, you should consider working for a company that has a tech team instead.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing, that looks really cool.
Mark Cuban is the lottery winner who thinks he's Jim Clark.
I can't speak for the person you're addressing, but I regularly express skepticism about the entire range of judgments in this industry, whether it be skills, culture, personality, or anything else, regardless of the gender of the person expressing said judgments. There isn't a single adjudication of skill that is free of external context that introduces what is effectively a bit of subjective chaos. That includes judgments about something seemingly as straight-forward as "fizzbuzz", all the way through to what constitutes "good" software design.
Not a single mention of any of the four founders. Sad.
What are the indications that a model of the world does not emerge somewhere in the neural networks of a Q Learning system?
We've created a national infrastructure that IMO nearly requires driving to be a civil right. That sucks. But I really don't have an answer to this problem when proposals to address this are either voted down or end up ridiculously over budget.
Out of curiosity, do you think that passion alone can carry a crappy idea to success? Is it better to be (truly) passionate with a trashy idea or have a solid idea but only be motivated by financial success?
There is now a channel, #internetarchive.bak, on EFNet, for discussion about the implementations and testing.
>it's been "2-3 years" away for 2 years now.

Technically that's still in spec. Example:

Date: Message

2010: We are 2-3 years away from launch.

2011: We are 2-3 years away from launch.

2012:

2013: We launch.
I think the bigger picture here is that there is a serious worry that bitcoin will benefit those who participate in illegal activities far more than those who do not -- that it offers an advantage that most legal activities don't require or value heavily.
The way the system works, the burden/penalty is on the company, not you, to verify your accreditation status. If you lie on your self-accreditation form, that's the company's problem for selling private securities to unaccredited individuals (and a huge problem it may well be). This is actually one of the big pain points that platforms like AngelList, with their syndicate deals and their self-reporting requirements, solve for startups. AL standardizes the self-accreditation process, and puts up stringent documentation requirements, that make it very hard for a person to lie his way through. Companies get peace of mind that AL investors have the net worth they say they do. FundersClub also does a pretty good job of this, in my experience.

As for the more fast and loose, "crowdfundy" sites? I have no personal experience there, so no idea. I don't see the upside in investing through them.
Just to clarify, are you implying here that elderly, infirm, or underage people benefit from car dependence?

Because...
Make websites look like Geocities
I wonder if they took in account the fact that, as they say, the twin that stopped exercising did so reluctantly and in response to some social or family pressure. In other words, they're comparing a person who keeps doing what he always liked to do with another that had to give up. I'm not sure the result can be transferred to people who never felt the urge and benefit of exercising. How would compare two twins, one of which has only in recent years being forced to exercise?
I'm sure there's lots of namespace room! And if there isn't, then too bad for Urbit.
"Picture another 5 million showing up next year with zero notice."

The commenter was talking about "slowly" adjusting rules and a very thought-out plan. Not "next year" and "zero notice".
I thought dissociation was part of the symptoms of PTSD. Given the history of being abused as told in the article, I am bit perplexed why doctors decide it was DID.

Or is DID some kind of subset of PTSD?
Where would one go to set about purchasing beer for such a new friend?
any company funded without vc money fits your needs
I agree with this. An offer I didn't accept wouldn't disclose the numbers, ran out of funds and shut down a year or two after I declined.
Runcible is the classiest, watch-iest smartphone we've ever seen
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-09-23/are-public-p...

Insurance companies and pension funds make up 50% and upwards of an average VC. The rest of the money also comes from sources which directly affect you such as local government, banks, and other "public" institutions.
"Rich individuals" on the other hand do make up only a fraction of the VC source funding with less than 2% on average.

And while it's true that it doesn't represent the portion of the money a pension fund has invested in a specific VC. If you look at the breakout of your pension fund you'll find just how ridiculously high that percentage actually is. And BTW an insurance company or a pension fund that gets hit with even 5-10% loss means that tons of people lose coverage, premiums sky rocket and you end up losing more money that you could invest yourself otherwise.
How to Automate Enterprise Application Monitoring with Ansible
>So Cuban started (what became) Broadcast.com, ramped it up to $13.5 Million revenue per quarter [1], and sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion (in stock, but we'll disregard that fact for now). On track to do $54 million in a year, means he sold for 1,000x one year's revenue.

And then participates in a television show where 'shark investors' ridicule others for their 'insanely high valuations', which are sometimes as small as 20x one year's revenue.
I love how he's only who he is today because he was lucky and picked the right time to sell his business. Same business would not be worth as much today.
Actually it was an external recruiter. He was saying that all the programmers they've interacted with have never asked those questions.
> Rather than autonomous cars, we should be focusing on Taleb's antifragile solutions like walking and biking.

Self-driving cars are an enabling technology for lower-cost, more-readily-available, on-demand transport, which is a wedge to dismantling the car-ownership-necessary society, which itself is a route to get to public support for community planning that better supports walking and biking as primary modes of transport for able citizens for tasks for which they are suitable, with automotive transport as a secondary form for situations and individuals for whom walking/biking are not suitable.

The two approaches are complementary, not opposed.
https://etsyipo.morganstanley.com/etsy/index.html#/sps/dspFo...
Right but Glacier _will_ provide redundancy. If you introduce even the most basic redundancy to your math (multiply everything by 2), it pretty nearly closes the gap with Glacier's costs. You also forgot to add in the costs of paying at least one human (probably a few) to set all this up and maintain it forever.

The real question is, why do they need this archive to be spinning? What's wrong with tape?
Pretty interesting, not a single mention of any of the founders appear on the S-1 form.
2 minutes into their video I have no idea what the product/idea/concept is.
"What matters is what we can do about it, and pushing for a reduction in car usage is an effective way of reducing vehicular manslaughter."

Let me play a bit of devil's advocate here. Where are you going to draw the line? All too often I see people talking about reducing this, preventing that, etc. However, everyone does so with all sorts of weird convenience and funding constraints/caveats, effectively reducing the problem to "how far can we take this before it becomes too inconvenient/expensive for us".

I say, if you want to prevent/fix something, do it. Throw money/laws at the problem until it goes away or is near-zero. I genuinely used to say that, and believe in it. These days, with my eventual political beliefs, I hope it gets taken seriously so we can all realize the futility in it. Like grasping a balloon in a fist.
If things start going south in a public investment, a shareholder may not be able to exit that, either. The truth is, it's all about liquidity, and liquidity dries-up on the way down.
I am wondering why they don't ask large cloud providers to donate storage. If amazon, microsoft, google, rackspace, joyent, etc all gave them 10pb worth of data, they could just make a facade to their apis and store all the data on there, and just keep one copy of the data and a database of files?

A distributed or p2p model is a great idea, but it seems very difficult to achieve.
> The main mission, supplying medicines in the face of oppressive government regulations, is a noble one, one that people can get behind.

I think drug prohibition is stupid and wicked, but let's be honest: this is not about supplying medicine to patients but cocaine to users. That use should be lawful, but it's certainly no noble mission.

> Or is there an actual plan behind being savages and basically making the entire world think they're just untamed animals?

Every law is backed up by fear of violence. The cartels can't go to a legitimate court to enforce their contracts and settle their disputes, so they fall back on raw force. Over time, the sort of people who enjoy that sort of work do better than those who don't. There are evil people in the world who enjoy inflicting pain and suffering, and I daresay they do very well in such organisations.

Genghis Khan annihilated cities which didn't cooperate with him; the Turks raped and murdered for three decades when they conquered Constantinople; what the Russians did in Berlin isn't fit to be printed; what happened in Allende is really no different.
MCT should be flying its first trips in about 15 years (Elon says 10-12, so we add some). So I'd guess IPO in around 15-20 years. The real colonization effort will probably be getting going in 20-25 years. SpaceX will want to send about 80,000 people each year (or each launch window), and that scale is probably 30-40 years away.

Most of us will see SpaceX go to Mars. And optimistically, I think many of us will go too.
Fair point - so taking the proportion of road deaths related to drink as the measure instead (which should control for your points to a great recent), 31% of US deaths are drink related, compared to 15.2% in the UK. (according to https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...).

Not the 10x difference, but still 2x.
>Amazon Glacier (which is tape-based!)

Citation? Not saying you're wrong but I've seen supposedly "in the know" commentary in favor of both the tape-based and some sort of cold disk-based storage. I've been curious and also a bit surprised that the true answer has never really hit publicly although I'm sure it's well-known within some communities.
The Archive Team have something called the Archive Team Warrior (http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior) which seems quite similar to this except it's a virtual rather than physical appliance. Worth a look.

(edit: although looking further this is more for distributed crawling, while the results will be uploaded to their archive)
When I was experimenting with polyphasic sleep there was a moment of around 30 seconds while waking up where I was conscious and aware but not knowing who I was or where I was until I figured out I was lying in the gras instead of standing somewhere. Them I wondered how I'd gotten there and my memories returned.
Oh, you're right. I haven't thought about this for a while, and I remember my previous assumption about tape storage being challenged. I'll replace that part with "cold storage".

After refreshing my memory: Amazon outright they're using denied tape backup, some third-parties pointed out cold spinning disks wouldn't be very economical, and a few people theorized it's actually BDXL.
Whats your point here, motivation is necessary to realize benefits from training? And the absence causes body fat to accumulate?
That's not the point though. The point Mark Cuban was making is that now people pitching VC firms compare their company to Uber or whatever, versus previously they were comparing it to AOL or Broadcast.com
And the Internet Archive has a lot more projects than just the Wayback Machine. http://blog.archive.org/2015/02/12/whats-new-with-v2/
Because changing human behavior is such an easy task, especially changing the behavior of people who are already intoxicated...
Just pointing out that P2P backup is a well understood problem (in industry and academia) and they should probably partner with people who do this stuff seriously or at least base their design on existing solutions. For example their implementation page right now is trying to do this with git-annex: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/g...
which doesn't feel quite right...
For a more accurate comparison to amazon multiply by at least 3 for redundancy, don't forget to factor in the cost of the real estate, replacement equipment, employees to run it all, etc. You would be hard pressed to beat amazon prices, which are falling over time.
> Recognize that even if you don't own the radar equipment, it is impacting your ability to deliver value, so spend the necessary funds to get them to replace the radar equipment with something that doesn't have that problem.

And then convince the Air Force to certify and let you use your new radar for their payloads.
> That's like saying a tennis ball and a planet are the same because they're both round.

What is this random analogy and what does it have to do with mine?

> Scale, you're missing the scale of it.

The number of tennis balls that would fit in the volume of this planet has 25 digits in it.

So no, it's not even close to the scale of anything. And what does being round have to do with it?

I can't even figure out what your argument is.
Thanks. Not my shining moment and the sibling comment to mine expresses my gripe more eloquently. The original post doesn't say "woman", it says "girl" -- a diminutive. It speaks of easily manipulable men, rather than generously interpreting the author's actions as empathetic. It's calling for normed behavior roles rather than accepting things as they are: there will be people, both men and women, that fulfill both roles described in the article. However, the OP especially strikes me as a vendetta against women: instead of seeing this article as building the case for paying more attention to mental healthcare, it reinforces the OP's implicit view of women as nutjobs and marginalizes the men that support them.

I agree that there are certainly behaviors, especially amongst adolescents, that are similar in outward appearance to those described in the article. My frustration comes from those that repeatedly deny that there are sometimes edge cases that represent actual psychological issues rather than just attention seeking behaviors. For those with psychological issues, seeking help isn't about giving them attention or creating unnecessary drama, it's about helping them achieve a quality of life that they want. People helping one another (medical/psychological professionals to sufferers) isn't something to be disparaged, it's something to be encouraged.
It’s a little more complicated than that. I could temporarily take a chunk, compute the hash, then throw it away and report back that I am happily storing the data, even though I’m not.

Anyhow, read the permacoin paper. It’s pretty cool, and it needs a large petabyte data seed to secure the network. Seems like a win-win to me.
A long time coming, but still sad. I still have a certificate that Maxis sent me in response to a letter (around the time of SinCity 2000), proclaiming me an 'official Maxoid'. All the Sim games (especially SimCity) were hugely influential to me and a lot of my friends.
how much to print+ship a 11x14 watercolor piece?
Downtowns are dying because parasitic exurbs have both removed tax revenue from the urban core while multiplying their infrastructure/services/health costs. It's unsurprising that residents flee cities that become dangerous, dirty highways.

Some of these cities are now beyond repair, not least for the overarching national trend of capital concentration in Silicon Valley/Silicon Alley, but these reforms would still help enormously. For example, Bloomberg's plan to toll bridges into New York City that was vetoed by car-dependent Albany. It's absolutely ridiculous that exurban commuters are allowed to devastate NYC every day, for free, because they're too entitled either to live in the city or even to commute via less destructive trains.

I would really love to hear your explanation why New York City should be required to spend billions on bridges and roads crushed by automobile traffic for commuters who don't even pay taxes into the repair fund. Much less why NYC residents should be forced to give up enormous swaths of precious road real estate at peril to their health and quality of life.
This was posted on HN a few months ago:

https://www.invoiceninja.com/

I convinced a few people to use it and everyone loves it.