skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe you should read more carefully.

> No fraud OR charge-back

Strongly implies those to be two different things. You write "Fraudulent chargebacks", talking about a single thing, a specific kind (fraudulent) of chargeback. You also neglect to mention that bitcoin eliminates fraudulent chargebacks by just not having chargebacks at all. Which is a bit like celebrating North Korea eliminating voter fraud.

This kind of thing is everywhere in the bitcoin community: Make absurd, grandiose claims ("be your own bank!", "bitcoin is the future of money", "totally decentralized!" [except for the giant central ledger of all transactions]). And then whenever you get called out on it, you'll retreat to some more limited, defensible argument, and claim that's what you were really talking about all along.

There's a name for this kind of rhetoric, it's a "motte-and-bailey" argument: http://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf
>Efficiency is simply less important.

"More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason — including blind stupidity." — W.A. Wulf
I wanted to take some time before answering this, to make sure that my feelings did not change, and they haven’t.

I do not consider a question of pretending to be someone I’m not a question of “strategy.” I do not need to convince myself that it leads to some better outcome for me to be authentic with people.

It’s one of my values, and values are things you explicitly recognize are sometimes sub-optimal for the things you wish to pursue.
And being in a car is not the only way to kill someone when you're drunk.
I was just thinking today about how cool a modern open world version of SimAnt would be. Oh well.

Edit: Someone posted a link to this but then it got deleted: http://www.formicarium.org/
I wanted to know this as well. Here's what I found: http://www.businessinsider.com/mike-ey-microsoft-hololens-de...
>But if its about judging character...This filters out the humble people and curates the narcissistic.

Good judges of character can see through narcissism and appreciate humility. You seem to be assuming that anyone judging character will be easily fooled.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation going around.

They're chopping off the people of Maxis but the name will remain (ahem!). Same for the IP, it will live on and be farmed to (an)other studio(s).

(I don't side with EA. Sad day for SimCity lovers. Maxis is a mammoth of history and should not be chopped up. My thoughts for the devs that lost jobs...)
New Zealand Spies on Neighbors in Secret ‘Five Eyes’ Global Surveillance
Four comprehensive studies have found that 85%, 87%, 91%, or 93% is reused. The sea containers go to another part of town, where the geeks and technicians are. Agbogbloshie is mostly managing used scrap (cars, appliances, electronics) generated by the 4.5M inhabitants of Accra. Over half the households in Accra had television in 2003.

Links to Ghana specific studies here http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/06/21/231250/uk-man-senten...
Ideas vs. execution
No-one surprised except John Key.
Pretty much typical behaviour for a massive corporation who buys out an innovative company. EMC has done this to more companies that I care to list.
Westwood, Origin, Bullfrog, Maxis....

EA's strategy seems to be "Buy studio, make them shovel a couple incomplete games out of the door, close studio, repeat."

Okay, they're asshats. What I don't get is, how does this make them any money? They're basically strip-mining the games industry, is this really more profitable than actually making good games?
As far as I'm concerned, the time to mourn is upon the acquisition by EA. On that day, the studio is already dead to me. By the inevitable day the name has finally had all "value" squeezed out of it by the corporate behemoth that is now EA, I have long since done my mourning.

signed still bitter about Ultima 8 & 9
Bummer. I'm not necessarily a fan of their titles today, but I grew up with them and they have a very special place in gaming history. Maxis, you will be missed.
My guess is that management gets bonuses based on how well the stock performs, and dividends don't get included in that calculation. So dividends will never cross their mind.
I hope not! Many of our best startups are disliked by hn...
You might think of it like this:

DID: Alice is talking to Bob. At some point in the conversation Bob "dissociates" and is replaced by Charlie. Charlie is in the exact same place as Bob and sees all the things Bob was seeing, but Charlie wasn't here before so no idea where here is, how he got there, or who is talking to him. Alice doesn't know anything's wrong at first but Bob (now Charlie) seems uncomfortable and doesn't know things Bob does, like where they are, how they got there, or who she is. Sometime later the dissociative episode ends and Bob comes back in place of Charlie. Bob has no idea what transpired during the episode because Charlie was there instead, but recognizes Alice and remembers things they had done together.

In this case there is no difference in Bob's or Charlie's ability to perceive the world, nor are either of them perceiving something which Alice could not (barring other conditions). There are no hallucinations or delusions; Bob and Charlie appear to "know" different things, as if they were different people. Of note, Bob and Charlie identify differently but its debatable whether they are (or should be treated as) different persons, hence the change of name.

Schizophrenia: Alice is talking to Bob. Bob is talking to Charlie. Charlie isn't really there, but Bob is either unaware or doesn't mind. Bob's conversation with Charlie may be benign or it may involve plots to take over the world, in either case from Alice's perspective Bob experiencing something which isn't real.

This of course is just a possible scenario for schizophrenia, and if Bob is being treated for schizophrenia he may be better able to control or cope with Charlie. In schizophrenia cases Charlie does not exist to any third party observation; Bob is not identifying as Charlie nor is Charlie an alternate persona. Bob believes he is himself and that Charlie is communicating with him.
Wow, an icon of my childhood gone.

If you're an affected developer, shoot me an email & I'll be happy to put you in our pipeline.
Using your base domain name gives you less DNS flexibility - for example, you can't use a CNAME for your base domain name.

Given that it's fairly easy to put a www. (or whatever) redirect on whatever IP your basename does point at, your users don't have to worry about remembering to use it.
It's easy being smart with billions of dollars, since you have access to the best financial advisors in the world.
Somebody could still make it. It's not like the concept of ants is copyrighted.
Eliminating competition.
I live in Brooklyn and do not have a compost bin at my apartment, do not know anybody with one, and don't know of a single place to bring compost in the borough.

That being said, for the latter point, I haven't tried very hard to find one.
Hah imagine taking over not just a house but the whole world!
People who try to be entirely analytical about everything are rarely good founders.

This is true, but the way people go about the process of sorting out the other elements is a critical part of the analysis (pardon the wording).

I think to say such selection is an 'untractable process' strikes me as an oversimplification, as does dismissing it simpley as "something necessarily done by 'gut feel".

And I think that this (latter) oversimplification is the root of the issue that is worth discussion. This combination of elements is off-putting. It reaks of being arbitrary rather than well considered.

And so its worth more consideration.

Consider the following example.

We are to judge two Atheltes that have equal technical skills and equally strong character traits (in an objective sense), and yet we may still reject or prefer one or the other based on the fit of their respective skillsets.

With the system that is preferred by the (coach, owner, GM) of course being preferred.

That preference for style is not a preference for 'character,' (again, in the objective sense) it is simply a ... preference for the style that fits in with the ex ante preferences of the selection principals.

(not trying to be sexist and use a sports analogy, but its not really any more useful here to use YC or other VC firms as examples).

So, at one layer there is always bias towards style.

Say our team runs a fast-paced offense, that is a style-bias that is layered over technical skill and 'objective' character.[1]

YC seems to have almost made a philosophical point to form its business around some style-bias...insofar as the 'style' of millenial undergraduates cum entreprenuers in primarily male-dominated technical fiels is going to by nature exclude (of course) a wide variey of styles that clash with the 'core style'.[2]

Again, there is nothing with wrong with this style bias.

And I mean that both in the sense that there is nothing wrong with selecting for style-complementary attributes (on the one hand), nor is there anything wrong with dimensionalizing style as an explanatory variable.

Style in this sense is functional to productivity.

The upshot of this is that style is inherently <intuited> before its really comprehended rationally or analytically. This explains why style judgements seem so intuitive and 'snap', but at the same time the phrase 'rigourous sense of style' is not either un-common or innaccurate.

While 'objective' character and Style are both attributes subject to (intuitive, snap) judgement it is really best not to conflate the two.

I think we are doing the topic a dis-service by not calling out style bias as something distinct from objective character evaluation.

-------

[1] What I'll just call 'objective' character here, which has both moral and pragmatic dimensions, but you get the gist, in that its covering things like fundamental integrity, work ethic, and functional social-skills, leadership, altruism, etc).

[2] the core style being the subset of those in the target class deemed qualified enough to be alumni of YC.
so tax payers are padding Elon's pocket book. If a NASA official made that much, people would complain.
<super meta>
Bummed to see this getting as downvoted as it. Although it may be construed as "managerspeak", it is contributing to the conversation as is evidenced by the several well thought out replies. Perhaps a reminder is warranted: downvote!=disagree. At least that's my understanding (and hope).
</super meta>
You're saying families are like nations, in that $arbitraryPerson can't just "come into your family/nation and get all the benefits and rights and privileges as your born children/citizens get". They're saying that the difference in scale makes the comparison invalid; a nation is, say, 8 orders of magnitude larger than a family, and, similarly, the earth is 25 orders of magnitude larger than a tennis ball. For the same reason that comparing the earth and tennis balls doesn't work because of scale, comparing a nation and families doesn't work because of scale.
>So.. you reasoned that it would be safer to be /in front/ of the drunk driver?

Yes? In one scenario I am stuck behind them and potentially having to deal with the results of any sort of screwup on their part, or having to find a completely different route, which isn't always practical.

In the other I leave them behind me and am no longer having to deal with them.

In what world is it more advantageous to be near a drunk driver than away from them?
I have an invite to Apple so I will make sure I hunt out the free food!
Heh. Aren't we apes?
Plenty of people would want that. I'd buy the game if it got to a working beta.
This is just my opinion, though semi-backed by conversations I've had with people who work at EA.

EA Gameplan in a nutshell.

1) Force studio to make changes to a game that benefit the EA but have no tangible (or very little) benefit to the customers (Forcing use of Origin, Sims being online only, etc..)

2) Act surprised when the proverbial shit hits the fan with angry customers.

3) Let said customers know that "you're sorry" and they "have been heard" "loud and clear".

4) Close studio that you forced to make the game breaking changes (or at a minimum lay off most of the staff)

5) Repeat 1-4 yearly.
I'm awfully leery of giving someone else total control over my computer for any reason. Take the security concerns over Dropbox and cloud storage and multiply them by 10. Convenience is great, but I'm not sure it's worth the prospect of willingly handing someone else complete observation and control over my entire computer and everything I do with it.
You clearly don't drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_%28video_gam... This came out in 2000. It's based off a French book series.
That's not a run-on, and all the commas are properly used. Its stylistically awful because there are way to many apositive/parenthetical phrases getting in the way, and because they are nested without using an alternative device (like setting the outer one off with dashes rather than commas) as well as pointless excess verbosity ("at least five years away from being a decade behind the gaming curve").
Have you noticed any specific traits founders who face increased skepticism have that aren't apparent in other founders?
> I'm not necessarily a fan of their titles today, but I grew up with them

I suspect that is part of what led to their demise. I'm in the same boat. I'd much rather run classic SimCity than any of the new stuff.
How about the present sight of "I drove here. I shouldn't drink."
Lots of people, myself included, have spent time calling YC and PG out. If anything, I think she's getting some flak just for being high up in YC.

It's odd that you think Paul Graham's writing is only worshipped here. There's criticism, too.

The halo effect around YC is a form of delusion. Person making important gut-based decisions about people's lives gets criticized for publicly announcing her own competence. Why is that appalling?
What about adding to the insult by using the studio name for their Steam rip-off ?
Oldest Human Fossil Found, Redrawing Family Tree
THIS IS NOT A BRAGGY POST.
According to NHTSA, 39% of all traffic fatalities in 2005 were alcohol-related. Your car is not "perfectly safe", not to you and certainly not to non-drivers around you, no matter what you would like to convince yourself.
I don't actually know that she is or isn't getting more criticism because she's a woman. I just think you really underestimate how much contempt is stewing for YC and PG.
As I am reading this, I wish YC had stayed smaller.
You're travelling at speed to get past a dangerous driver -- so for that short time you're at risk. And then when you're in front of them you risk their poor brake control amd distance judgement until you get far enough away from them.

When you're behind them you iust need to leave a suitable braking gap. They're unlikely to come backwards.
This is a neat idea. I have some random thoughts about doing this in a distributed fashion:

...

In the wiki there's a mention of how the geocities torrent was 900GB and very few people seeded it as a result. There should be a way and an incentive for clients to seed parts of files without having the whole thing. As long as there are enough copies of each chunk on the network, it's fine - we don't care that any one client has the whole thing.

...

Another cool thing is thinking about health metrics - you don't just care about how many people have a file, you care about recoverability too. This seems a bit similar to AWS glacier - you have to take into account how long it's going to retrieve data. You could have stats on how often a client responded and completed a transfer request, what its track record is, and assign a probability and timeframe for correctly retrieving a file.

...

One thing that comes to mind is that whatever the solution ends up being, it should be such that partial recovery should be possible. The example that comes to mind is stuff like a zip file or encrypted image that is completely ruined when a chunk is missing. So maybe it makes sense to have the smallest unit of information be large enough to be still intelligible on its own?

At first I was thinking of a model where chunks get randomly distributed and replicated, but then that made me wonder whether that's a bad idea.

...

And then what of malicious clients? I guess it's not hard to have a hash-based system and then just verify the contents of a file upon receiving it. But can I effectively destroy a file by controlling all the clients that are supposed to be keeping it up? How could you guard against that? Could you send a challenge to a client to send you the hash of a random byte sequence in a file to prove that they do indeed have it? What guarantees that they will send it even if they do?

...

And then what about search / indexing?! P2P search is an awesome problem domain that has so many problems that my mind is buzzing right now. Do you just index predetermined metadata? Do you allow for live searches that propagate through the system? Old systems like kademlia had issues with spammers falsifying search results to make you download viruses and stuff - how to guard against that? Searching by hash is safe but by name / data is not. Etc etc.

I wish this was my job! :)
Right in the childhood :(
Those Pesky Access Denied Messages
Oh I see. Sorry, I'm german, and the word seemed out of context to me. Thanks for clearing that up :)
Wow, haven't thought about SimAnt in a long time. Loved that game, thanks. And SimTower too.
[Disclaimer] I work at Semantics3.

We've been secretly working on a much more industrial-scale version of this, with a focus on getting price updates for eCommerce products.

Basically you can register a product URL, select the price change event that matters to you, and we'll push it to you via our Push Notifications API.

Its been in the works for a while, but we have MASSIVE scale.
Our database is >60 million, and you can get price change push notifications on any of them.

Pretty useful if you're building your own shopping app and want the latest prices! It also helps, especially if you're trying to keep up with Amazon's pricing games.

Link: content.semantics3.com/webhooks-intro
Is not the original SimCity, now called Micropolis, open source and part of the OLPC project distro?

Still, really sad to see Maxis axed.
I hope that is EA's strategy, as it will end them.

The overhead of entering the games industry is cheaper than ever, and as a result we are seeing more and more independent game developers successfully penetrating the market.
These are pretty contrived situations being used to draw sweeping conclusions about human nature.

YCombinator partners get to interact with founders in a variety of situations, over a long period of time. It's not like airport security trying to pick who's a terrorist or a jury evaluating a witness based on formal testimony. It's watching people as they behave and interact with each other, often when they don't know that they're being observed. Hundreds of different people a year, for close to a decade now. The YC partners are in a unique position to develop views that are far more nuanced than "this person is sloppy because he's not wearing a jacket".

Every professional has subconscious biases, from doctors to engineers to investors. What makes them professionals is that their biases are usually correct, and they have sufficient experience to know when to question them. For whatever reason, we react negatively when someone evaluates their own abilities. But it doesn't make sense for everyone to refuse to self-evaluate, or to always speak poorly of their own abilities. When you get to a certain age and level of confidence you know what you're good at and what you aren't good at. People should be able to state the truth as they see it about their own weaknesses AND strengths. And we should be evaluating the validity of those statements, not that their choice to state them.
At least in the case of Baltics cost of living is not a fifth of what it is in the US. In fact it could even be considered similar. For some reason countries like Spain and Germany have CHEAPER cost of living for day to day things (except rent).

This is an interesting thread about people being surprised about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eesti/comments/2xqd01/can_someone_e...

Quality of life is just worse in those regions. It's not very much, but still noticeable. One of the reasons why this is the case is just income being lower for equivalent work. Richer countries just tend to have the better companies with more reach.
Just found this... looks promising. http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=jlcj75c7a3d1v...
>Not convinced by this one. Surely reducing the kinetic energy in this scenario is the safest course of action?

How is remaining near an impaired driver vs. leaving them behind the safer option?

It isn't always practical or possible to find another route, and staying behind a drunk driver and thus near them, or running the risk of running into the results of some sort of mistake on their part is certainly more dangerous than putting them safely behind you.

I don't think I've ever been in a situation where a drunk driver has been speeding around at 100mph - they almost universally go near the speed limit, but controlling their vehicle poorly.

I do not want to be in a situation where I am behind them. Even if I let them put a fair amount of distance in front of me, roads are not always well lit. If they crash, or hit something, I might now be having to deal with debris on the road that I won't be able to see easily, or potentially at all until it's too late.

I fail to see a safer course of action outside of just not driving at all, which, as I live in Texas, is distinctly not a possibility.
Interesting thought, but the loss is of context not moments, so it turns out to be a terrible strategy even though your idea is great.
> No, the comments here are mostly dismissive of the very idea that anyone can be any good

But this isn't something people are pulling from nowhere. There's plenty of research showing that people are lousy at making judgements. She hasn't said how she can make good judgement or how she knows she makes good judgement - there's just a bunch of handwavey stuff and people are criticising the handwavey descriptions, not necessarily her work.
Pretty good strategy from a financial perspective if you consider game purchasing to be a zero-sum game. If your average consumer is willing to spend $XX on games, and $YY is going to solid competitor ZZ, then acquiring and shutting down ZZ, removing them from the game industry, frees up that $YY to be spent on EA games.

What I don't understand about that strategy is what prevents the acquired employees from re-forming as a new company? Are there non-competes in place? Is it difficult to get financing to form a AAA game company? I'm presuming that, regardless of what happens, it takes a while.
Everyone is different; scents, music, words, touch, observing the surroundings, listing the colors they see, focusing on breathing, holding a familiar object (like a rock), etc. can all be used -- whatever works.

You can use drugs to help with the symptoms, but you can't "fix" it with drugs. There's nothing physically wrong with a DID patient (although they do tend to suffer from various "side effects" that are linked with the disorder).

As far as how it works physically, we don't know for sure. Yes, the memories are stored and can later be accessed. Part of the problem is that these memories are stored without being processed or are "stored" with a part that is unable to make sense of what happened. So instead of dealing with what happened the patient relives the trauma over and over again. What's interesting is that one part can "share" a memory with another part. When this happens it's like "remembering" something you've never experienced.