skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, monoids and monads are different concepts. Monoids are the easier one

It's not the names that matter, or even necessarily the properties, but the general shape of monads and monoids is one we find ourselves using all over in functional programming. A very large percentage of the Scala standard library is classes with monadic properties, even though Scala does not have a monad type built in.

So it's not that people really need to understand monads to do functionall programming: I think that understanding them is unimportant. The difficulty of the concept is proven by what you mention: Tons and tons of blogposts trying to, and failing to, explain monads.

As far as the utility of monads, just look at actual monads that are very useful everwhere. For instance Option avoids large amounts of null checks, making code easier to write and read. And why is this? Because it's a monad. I can transform any type A into an Option[A], and an Option[A] into an Option[B], by just having a function that transforms A into B, unaware that option exists.

Understanding category theory makes it easier to write good, useful mechanisms that take functions as parameters. But we can use a monad without understanding that it's a monad, and that's fine for most people. It never has to be a thing.
This looks to me like yet another attempt at repackaging Push, which was widely touted to be the Next Big Thing some 15 or 20 years ago, and then promptly died a quiet death when the users wholeheartedly ignored it.

Companies love the Push concept, since, when a UI is built on top of it, what the user sees & does is driven by the company, not by the user. But, strangely, users wanna do what users wanna do.

Now, ordinary people have been getting Push notifications on their devices since the first phones appeared in homes over a century ago. It works, in certain very limited contexts, because doing one thing that a friend wants you to do (answer the phone, read an e-mail, swipe a Yo, ...) is great. People like it. Getting a continuous stream of things to act on, when you want to use your phone for something else, is a different matter.

Or might I be missing something?
Ask HN: How much money should you have saved before you start a startup?
Here's what I'm currently thinking:

You need money for two things:

1) Living expenses while you work on your startup, taking into account the possibility of revenue and raising money.

2) Runway for you to live off of if you fail and need to find a job.

Runway for startup:

- Optimal: 2 years of living expenses (LE)

- Realistic: 6 months LE

- Risky: 3 months LE

Time to find a job (obviously this depends on your skills and industry, but let's assume that you're a reasonably skilled software developer):

- Safe: 6 months LE

- Realistic: 2 months LE

- Risky: 1 month LE

Thoughts on this?

Also, I have a separate question - what is common practice amongst people who start startups? How much do they save up before doing so? Note that this is a different question (SHOULD vs. DO).
Surely you don't expect that the targets of these crimes ever consent to them?
How's that possible?

I would expect them to be investing heavily which means low FCF even with positive profits. I also doubt they are decreasing inventory (do they even hold it?)

Maybe the positive cf is just a fluke due to Xmas season? If you sell a lot before the end of the year, and only pay your sellers in Jan, and you have an exponential growth, then the positive cf may mean nothing..
THe Blog Funders' Story and Manifesto
Cold storage is probably safe. I've seen the assertion that it's tape from someone who I wouldn't have thought would get it wrong but I'd now bet against it whether or not Amazon's denial seals the deal.

Robin Harris has argued in favor of BDXL but he's speculated about a number of things. http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdx...

My money would be on the simplest: cold disk. Some support here: http://mjtsai.com/blog/2014/04/27/how-is-amazon-glacier-impl... but it's all speculative and anecdotal. I don't have a problem with the thought that Amazon is getting out ahead of the drive economics, especially given that I'm not sure how widely used Glacier is today.

I do find it interesting that this has been apparently kept under wraps from anyone who would share more widely.
Cuban actually admits that his company was part of the 1999 bubble.

"In a bubble there is always someone with a “great” idea pitching an investor the dream of a billion dollar payout with a comparison to an existing success story. In the tech bubble it was Broadcast.com..."
How Google’s New Wireless Service Will Change the Internet
I'd be curious to know what you were expecting
> medicine to patients but cocaine to users ... no noble mission

I wouldn't say it's ignoble, though you're right, their case would be far stronger if they were supplying a more varied product.

Your explanation of violence doesn't explain why other groups get by with less violence, and otherwise appear to be respectable members of society. Look at a Chicago Outfit's massacre[1] and the Zeta's[2].

I know, I'm abusing the word massacre, but in one case, notoriety is because of the killing of a few rival criminals. In the Zetas case, they just rape, torture, and murder hundreds of innocent civilians.

That seems very shortsighted and not beneficial to business. Unless it's a tactic to raise the barrier to entry by making the whole area just terrible to work in, overall.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Valentine%27s_Day_Massacr...
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_San_Fernando_massacre
Yes, but...

The board decides whether or not to take an offer and that offer includes a set of destinations of funds. In particular, the offer may be $Z = $X1 for retention bonuses and $Y1 for purchasing the equity. Or, the offer may be $Z = $X2 for retention and $Y2 for purchasing the equity. The management - who are likely on the board - may want more of the money to go to retention bonuses for senior execs, while the external board members may want more of the money to go to shareholders. And, in many cases, a board member may be involved in negotiating the deal with the acquirer and may push for a particular deal structure.

tl;dr - The board can have significant impact on how the funds get split up, regardless of the previously signed contracts.
Such rose-colored glasses of the past you have. The handling of the mentally ill in the past was atrocious. Hiding mental illness away is very convenient for society, but it doesn't fix the actual problem.

People who suffer brain trauma often end up with it affecting their personality. It is quite possible that many personality disorders have a physiological basis, one that is not as simple as someone "just stopping their behavior".
Um, holy shit, the article's been updated to refer to Freeway as "a chicken-crossing-the-road game", and there's a footnote acknowledging the correction.
I personally find it encouraging. I learned to speak carefully from my engineer father and the rapid-fire sounds intimidating. I like knowing YC keeps people in the room to look past that (presumably, each interviewing team has its own Jessica.)
One explanation could be "sufficiently advanced compilers". Reread your sentence in the context of C/asm:

Can someone explain the huge performance difference between C and assembly? I though C compiled to assembly, therefore I would think that good handwritten assembly would more or less be the upper performance bound for C.
I get that, but I feel like we've known for quite a while that people who exercise can run longer and have lower body fat, regardless of genetics. Genetics can affect how long you can run compared to others, but you will run longer if you exercise than if you don't.

If you take anybody in the world and have them exercise, they'll lower their body fat, everything else being equal, no? And that's not only the same genes, it's actually the same person.
Latency will kill it. I don't foresee symmetric connections for residential networks any time soon, so when you hit up Wikipedia.org, you will be downloading it from your neighbor's 128 Kbps uplink. Discovering that this neighbor has a copy of the article you want is even more difficult. On top of that, what if you are signed into Wikipedia? Now you are sending your session ID to your neighbor? And what about HTTPS? Can your neighbor now send you resources as Wikipedia.com?

The idea of doing HTTP over torrent comes up periodically and nobody has ye answers to these questions. Besides, online access is not the problem: there is plenty of bandwidth and CDN's already solve the data locality problem.
I read Stoll's books in high-school, and really enjoyed them. And his style of writing.

Predictions are hard, and Stoll got a lot wrong -- but I've always liked the sentiment. As technology is woven ever more tightly into our lives it _is_ important to find ways to disconnect from the digital buzz -- and reconnect with people and experiences in the physical world.

As far as misinformation, I do see lots of crap posted by friends on social media. Smart friends. People I respect. It's not only partisan divide -- it's Science vs Pseudo-Science. Sensationalism. Seductive headlines.

For those who don't like Stoll -- maybe his criticisms hit too close to home -- well, it's easy to discredit him via his off-base prognostications. For everyone else, there's some wisdom there. A bit of cautionary advice to keep us grounded in our ever more digital lives.
That confused me too until I realized the author of the article was talking about the creator of the AI, not the game.
This is probably the clearest explanation of what a monoid is that I've seen. Basically, a monoid is a reduction function that takes multiple inputs of type A and returns a single output of type A. The only caveats on top are that type A must support the concept of an empty value, combining the empty value with x results in x, and that combinations are associative.
For the record, I agree. We definitely make much better decisions when aware of our biases and we can only be truly confident we understand those biases with rigorous statistical analysis. Such supporting data is usually unavailable, though, particularly at the individual level.

My point is only that many claims subject to pretty much the same biases are usually made in HN (about hiring, about software architecture, about understanding technology/futurism) and treated with far less skepticism. That said, I am inclined to agree that the standard should be more skepticism in all cases, rather than less. With the caveat that it might not be practical up to a point.

Although, to be honest, I'd love to go into an interview with "I am X deviations above/below the mean of developer productivity in Java software analysis when compared against a sample of Y developers selected by procedure Z, measured by metric W; I am usually more productive working on teams of size n-m (p < 0.01)."
Looking at the cap table (to the extent it's visible in the S-1) it appears that the big winners are the investors: Breyer, USV, Accel, Tiger Global, and Index add up to 92.3% ownership of the company. [Edit, 65%]

Or am I totally reading that wrong? (Note, I really might be, this isn't my area of expertise. I just scrolled down to "Beneficial Owner".)

Edit: It was pointed out below that I double-counted Accel, making the total closer to 65%. Thanks!
I am Lightning
I kept my day job and worked furiously at night / on weekends.

Meditation to help prevent burnout.

I wouldn't recommend doing it forever - perhaps just through MVP.

If you have kids/wife this may not work.
If it was about judging if a team can execute and if an idea has merits, that's one thing. If its about judging if they fit into a culture you are cultivating that is fine too.

But if its about judging character...This filters out the humble people and curates the narcissistic.

I guess I am saying that most good people don't go around thinking how good they are...and the better a person is the more likely they will take responsibility for everything in their lives, which may lead them to think less of themselves.

Whereas, someone who is narcissistic thinks he is a good guy, and is actually really bad.

I still think they should filter for culture fit and even ethical fit, but they should not publicize it, and definitely should not proclaim they are gifted at it and very accurate in their assessments.

I can think of lots of good guys who would never want to be judged on their character in 10 minutes by someone the valley looks up to and who proclaims they almost always accurate when reading people.

I know my own shortcomings. I am afraid Jessica will see right through me and see how rotten to the core I know I am. But who knows... maybe I am just hard on myself and I really am a great guy. I guess I would rather not find out for sure :)
Hey everyone! We designed IPFS (http://ipfs.io) specifically for this kind of purpose.

archiveteam: would be great to coordinate with you and see where we can help your effort! closure/joeyh pointed me to his proposal for you-- i'll write one up as well so you can check out what is relevant for you. Also, recommend looking into proofs-of-storage/retrievability.

Also, if archivists (Archive.org team, or archiveteam (they're different)) see this:

-----------

Same note in rendered markdown, served over IPFS ;) at:

http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmSrCRJmzE4zE1nAfWPbzVfanKQNBhp7...

-----------

Dear Archivists,
First off, thank you very much for the hard work you do. We all owe you big time.

I'm the author of IPFS -- i designed IPFS with the archive in mind.[1]

Our tech is very close to ready. you can read about the details here: http://static.benet.ai/t/ipfs.pdf, or watch the old talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa4pckodM9g. (I will be doing another, updated tech dive into the protocol + details soon)

You can loosely think of ipfs as git + bittorrent + dht + web.

I've been trying to get in touch with you about this-- i've been to a friday lunch (virgil griffith brought me months ago) and recently reached out to Brewster. I think you'll find that ipfs will very neatly plug into your architecture, and does a ton of heavy lifting for versioning and replicating all the data you have. Moreover, it allows people around the world to help replicate the archive.

It's not perfect yet -- keep in mind there was no code a few months ago -- but today we're at a point of streaming video reliably and with no noticeable lag-- which is enough perf for starting to replicate the archive.

We're at a point where figuring out your exact constraints-- as they would look with ipfs-- would help us build what you need. We care deeply about this, so we want to help.

Cheers,

-Juan

[1] see also the end of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skMTdSEaCtA
I view it in the opposite way - to me, there's nothing weird about stopping when it becomes too expensive; nor do I see a need to draw a line - each possible measure has a different line over which the costs are higher than its benefits.

I don't want to "declare war" on drunk driving. I want to take small and measurable steps that achieve a sustained y/y reduction in those deaths.
Wouldn't something like polaroids be a good strategy, you know, like in Memento? When she forgets everything, have her grab photos from her bag, one together with every person she trusts, one of her in front of her building, one of her in front of a street sign for her neighbourhood. Also, a pocket mirror if she really forgets who or even what she is.
It's their target not sure if those are actually the figures because in 2014 they were to scale from 7 to 1% in 5 years.
There's info on that in the article.
It was also not because of risk but because of low returns.

Besides public funds you also have corporate and private funds which also risk a huge portion of their money in risky capital not only VC.
My native tongue is French, where it is "règle et compas", I translated règle tu ruler, but added straight in front vaguely remembering that the English expression had the word "straight" in it.
Why do we pay The College Board to assess whether students can, say, make logical inferences when teachers are already doing this every day?

Trust.

We will move beyond this current paradigm once we develop a way to accredit (through national scale use/vetting) assessment materials on a much smaller scale. PARCC, ACT, et al. will maintain their current level of influence (functionally, not politically) so long as we can't assure that teachers are assessing their students against agreed upon benchmarks.

If these benchmarked assessment materials could be integrated into everyday instruction (which, as a teacher, they surely can be) AND we can accredit them as accurately assessing student ability on "competency X' then we will no longer need centralized, high-stakes assessment.

This accreditation will come from a decentralized exchange of classroom instructional materials/artifacts which will allow for the 'cream' (i.e. materials that accurately assess 'competency x") to be used, assessed, modified, re-used and finally accredited. Currently, teachers are silo'ed and rarely exchange learning materials beyond person-to-person contact or by physically gifting photocopies. Google docs facilitates exchange with real gains in productivity, but only within your immediate department (which could 4 people, could be 20 - but will hardly be >1000). We need the ability to fluidly exchange learning and assessment materials from all over the country/world that can be easily personalized for our classrooms.

The potential of such a platform could have far reaching benefits beyond assessment, but I'll cut it off now.
I can work the ledger, guys - but what I want is Visicalc...
There seems to be 2 sides to this; someone always says don't hire contractors. Another person says yes hire contractors.

If you can hire an employee for less than you are paying for an contractor (include your HR time, payroll, taxes, other paperwork) there should be some semblance of a balance.

If you hire a Consultant who doesn't care about you succeeding; then he is selling his future short. Any good employee or Consultant will be absolutely willing to do his part to see you succeed; as that leads to him succeeding.

There are bad employee's as well as bad consultants; let's not try and make it black and white.
There are a bunch of places where one human has to guage whether another human is "good" or "bad". EG airport security spotting terrorist or customs officials looking for smugglers or juries hearing witness evidence (or police) or employers interviewing candidates.

All the research I've seen shows that people are lousy at these.

To me her comments are a bit worrying: it sounds about as bad as any other stupid interview technique and it seems like it leaves a big risk for subconcious biases.

Take something as simple as a suit jacket. In one country you leave it on while you're working. Taking it off is sloppy and unprofessional. In another country you take it off and roll your sleeves up. You're working hard, you get hot. Keeping your jacket on means you're having an easy day. These are mostly uncociois and if you're not aware of ot and correct for it you risk calling someone sloppy or lazy eventhough neither is true.

HN frequently talks about bad interview practice; HN sees this as either an example of bad practice or of good practice poorly explained, and so they talk about it.
Someone in the public market could lose a lot, but they also have the option to sell at any time, preventing losses. Private markets with no liquidity will simply cause total loss, as selling is not even an option.
Hrm, that's a bit of a red flag to me. Why bother raising so much money if you're not going to utilize it? Surely growing your business will outpace average annual investment returns. I'm sure the investors have to be annoyed they basically just transferred their assets to Etsy to sit on and not utilize.

And now they're trying to raise an additional $100M via an IPO? It's not like Apple who are literally in the position of "We have so much money we don't know what to do with it."
Edit: which was removed 19 days ago:

https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/commit/d45aa98c9267153ce0...

I guess looking at how verbose the implementation was and what it actually gives you over learning the CSS, you're probably better off learning the CSS.
Or is the mere fact that I made it about a woman proof of its sexist nature?

No, it is not the mere fact that it is about a woman. It is the context here and the framing of the comments. It is the fact that, on the whole, this piece is not being talked about with the kind of respect with which her spouse's writing gets treated here. It is the fact that you and others are not asking how she knows or what it would take to prove it or any other questions that come from a place of "Well, this very powerful, intelligent, successful person has said something I do not understand and I would like to understand it better and learn from it." No, the comments here are mostly dismissive of the very idea that anyone can be any good at this or can objectively know they are far better than average. Most men get asked to show their work. Women get told they are full of shit. There is a difference between the two, a very big difference, and that difference boils down to fundamental respect.

It is in part a contextual thing that is very hard to prove bias on, but if you experience it, you eventually know that there are just no circumstances under which you will be taken seriously and there will always be some excuse and some plausible explanation why no one takes you seriously or respects you while they claim it is unrelated to your gender.

I will just leave this link here on the off-chance that you genuinely would like to understand what I am trying to convey:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-creepine...
How is it readable? It's a well understood convention, sure, but the semantics are completely incorrect. The example in the linked article, by contrast, does exactly what it says. The syntax might be a little odd, but the logic is hardly complicated.
I'll test this one out. Thanks!
Great.

It seems to be an issue with SIMBL which is installed with a lot of addware and older safari plugins. We are looking into the issues and getting back to each person with a solution.

For what it's worth its not related to our code.
Templar: A proxy to improve HTTP API interactions
Unkillable spiders or why you should flush before using a toilet in Australia
Google Maps Welcomes the New Roads API
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partially_ordered_set

A poset is ordered on one relation, and you posit (see what I did there?) that natural selection does the same, and that for humans, it just happens to be greater or lesser degrees of xenophobia?

>A xenophobia indicates intellectual capabilities level not sufficient for FTL.

I don't buy this, and I'm not sure why you do. It certainly shouldn't be taken as an axiom.

> "up" has a pretty clear direction on many axes. For a given axis it is the direction of higher degree of symmetry breakup whatever it means on that given axis. Complexity/specialization and sentience level for biological systems. Managed energy density for technological civilization. Violence control for social organization.

The problem is that the axis isn't given. One is competing on all of these axes all at the same time. And, predictably, progress along one axis may mean regress along another. What if you have a technological civilization populated by sentients with greater or lesser degrees of violence? Did you know that identity theft has increased by astronomical amounts since 1960? And yet we have these shiny iPads. Have we progressed?
It's attributed to Getty Images, so it's actually a stock photo.