skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it can be broken up into three parts. First:

Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall.

For many people, that's a sufficient description to get the idea. If not, you have the second part:

File Sync and Share for the enterprise.

Not as descriptive as the first part if you know what Dropbox is, but if you don't it will at least let you know how to categorize the product and whether it's something you might remotely be interested in. Finally:

Free up to 30 users.

Now they've made sure the next most salient point is given, the next thing you would most likely want to know. Everything else is something you can dig a little deeper for, but for the most part you know whether this is something you want to pursue or not. I think it's brilliant.
> Agreed, I finally admitted last year that I was tired of maintaining my own MP3 library.

If a subscription service could get me out of that chore, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But the music I listen to is crazy all over the place, and if the service doesn't have even one of the songs I want, then it's worthless. Even if I can upload mp3s, now I'm back to maintaining an mp3 library. If I switch services, I have to either pull out my mp3s or hold on to them, and if I'm holding on to them, why not hold on to all of them.
Vlieg goedkoop naar de zon met Thomas Cook Airlines
The Detroit Water Project (YC W15) Connects Donors to Unpaid Water Bills
Yes, but that represents a very small minority of artists. Most lose a lot of money or break even if they're lucky. Check out this article by Pomplamoose, who are a relatively successful band.

https://medium.com/@jackconte/pomplamoose-2014-tour-profits-...
Play with your animations (backward, forward and pause) in Firefox Dev Tools
I'm interested in something like this. I'd be looking for someone to build out quite a few projects I have. Probably 10 to 20 hours a month, maybe more.

They're all things I could build myself over time but it would be 10x faster with someone experienced on it. I can wireframe, provide decent requirements and fast feedback.

I'm really looking for someone to help me simplify my projects (not turn them into long development cycles) I want to iterate quickly and see what gets users, try some things for fun and learn from there.
People often forget that paying someone to do something is an expense, not a benefit.

Sure, people need jobs, but not jobs that can be done by cheaper and more effectively by machines. Employment opportunities are not a means of themselves.

This (IMO flawed) economic thinking is best captured by economist Keynes:

"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." [0]

[0] Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6 pg.129 "The General Theory.."
I think this article hurts itself by assuming a pure market scenario: different firms are competing with each other, some adopting an open source strategy, while others pursue a closed source strategy.

That's not what's happening, however: open source doesn't just involve the market-based production of goods (e.g. databases), but also elements of non-market (i.e. voluntary) production.

Mixing this up with for-profit business models has a number of side effects, which the author ignores. Look at Red Hat and Canonical: they are market competitors, yet they contribute to the same Linux kernel and system.

If one of the distributors and service providers dies, a much more smooth transition can happen to it's more successful competitors, since they are using variants of the same tool.

This is exactly the sort of properties I'd be looking for in infrastructure technology - which is the exact kind of thing that open source has become omnipresent in.

So: no, I don't think putting a lot of emphasis on open source is bad.
related

https://medium.com/backchannel/how-to-make-moonshots-6584501...
"Why is the world so troubled right now?" also reminds me of Neal Stephenson's comments in Some Remarks and "Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out" (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17stephenson.html?):

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

One can see the bizarrely powerful rejection of science in parts of the right (regarding climate change), the left (regarding vaccines) and obviously in much of the Middle East.
Your definition of 'evil' totally removes intent. It can be unacceptable, unfortunate, or something else. But 'evil' implies unmitigated badness. This is not a black and white issue.

Besides, you're begging the question. The jury is still out on whether or not overall quality of life will in fact decrease. Historical trends strongly suggest otherwise. Let me be clear, I'm not saying everything will be dandy. I just don't know. And you don't either.
Couldn't disagree more. His story about building BH into a powerhouse centered on valuing things at more than just book value (notably, See's Candy, which was one of their first amazing investments, which he was worried about purchasing for 3x net tangible assets, but notes that it was only because he wasn't yet skilled at Munger's investment style yet). One of the durable advantages he looks for is having a strong brand (as he says in the letter) -- Coke is not that atypical an investment for them.

His reason for being largely extremely-low-tech is that he loves to understand the businesses he invests in really, really well (probably his big competitive advantage), and by his own admission, he doesn't really understand tech.
>You ever hear this line: "Winning the Fields medal tells you two things about a person, that they were capable of achieving great things and that they didn't."

Would you mind explaining this a little bit more, please? I would imagine that significant or groundbreaking mathematical discoveries qualify as "great things" by someone's reckoning.
Apple Is Tinkering with Augmented Reality, Too, Analyst Says
I think it really comes down to MS not being able to backport their internet presence, and newer DirectX interfaces to older versions of windows. Software developers want to target modern browsers, and game developers want to target newer interfaces. They've doubled down on Office as a service/rental. They've doubled down on their Azure cloud services (which are pretty damned good now).

They're competing against very-near free ChromeOS and Android... they're also being encroached by Apple's OSX and iOS. They had to diversify their income strategy and get windows to a loss-leader position. It makes sense. Keeping developer mindshare and their office software in place, even across platforms is far more valuable in the near term. Their long term strategy isn't too different from where the likes of IBM and Oracle have gone before, but with a bit more focus on their developer and consumer interests.

As I'm using linux more frequently for a deployment target (even in Azure), and more inclined to reach for node.js (io.js) over C#.. it's nice to see MS open up software (.Net vNext) and platforms (windows) a bit more. I setup a docker container for a small C# microservice (migrating password schemes on login for accounts that were in an ASP.Net website) running .Net vNext, and it was pretty cool to be able to do.
This Simple Consideration Can Seriously Boost Your Site’s Usability
Yahoo to close Beijing research centre (~350 employees)
I also often use @ for specifying location. See you @office, @home.
I am also for @who should !do #what ~when

I think you have a good idea for "one time only, not planned tasks".

Don't try to make this the next project management tool. Just a syntax/app to handle last minute, unplanned and delegation tasks.
Maroon coming home from the North side?
Oh, now I understand why that's error is such a big deal for people.

I guess it never clicked for me since whenever I come across it I usually also have access to a stack trace or that line number which threw the error.
Interesting, I wonder if there is something linking dataflow and functional reactive programming.
I haven't bothered to look at Russians' responses to Uber, but the whole idea must seem strange to any Russian. It has been normal in Russia since the fifties to flag down cars (i.e. everyday, private traffic) on the street and pay a driver for a lift. Usually the fare is cheaper than a taxi (I don't remember ever calling a taxi in Russia). The drawback is that not all drivers are headed in your direction, but then again, it's only a matter of time till someone who is comes along (this problem is further ameliorated by drivers who moonlight as gypsy cabs and will take you wherever for the right price).

My point is that the service that Uber provides is viable primarily due to largely baseless social conventions (i.e. middle-class paranoia). If the fare is all that matters to a given consumer, then any car/driver will do. If security matters more than fare, then taxis will do. Uber is operating in a gray area between these extremes and as soon as A) we cease fearing our neighbors (I believe that the decline of suburbia and renewed urbanization will eventually take us there) and B) taxi services will begin offering better technical solutions, Uber's service will become largely obsolete.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll add it. What kind of brand is it? I couldn't quite get your message fully.
> Automation is wonderful. Destroying jobs is amazing. For most jobs, anyway.

Right. Increasing efficiency is a double edged sword, and we will have to walk a very fine line if we want to make this ongoing tech revolution work for the greater good.
1268 years is correct.
They need to retitle that article "Old man yells at cloud".

The intellectual vacuum of this article can be summed up by the fact that the author chose a fictional character as his Silicon Valley CEO strawman. At least point to a real villain!
Nomadler – Community of nomads
Privately run standardized testing generates a lot of money. Money influences politicians. Getting money out of politics would help prevent that influence. Citizens United went in the other direction.
How do you feel about '>' as WHEN indicator?
Hopefully a little less than they'd discount a comment from someone who'd casually impugn the integrity of a total stranger on the Internet solely to make a banal point-scoring argument.
IT firm baits hackers with online model train set
Because HN'ers are results based people in general and the results on autonomous cars are currently terrible. Still no solution to driving in the snow, heavy rain, and other poor visibility conditions. Still no solution to weirdo edge cases like a madman running up to your car with a bat (I used to live in a poor neighborood and had this happen once and accelerated away. My dumb smartcar would have stopped to avoid hitting him and let me be victimized).

Personally, I'd rather take my chances with the occasional drunk than worry about Google's bugs killing me because some H1B engineer with 4 hours of sleep was forced to write some really junky code that didn't understand some edge case. I look at what Google is able to do practically like Android and am not impressed. Even the best code quality for automation, for example NASA's work on rovers, is wrong occasionally and those things move at a snail's pace with almost nothing around them! The state of AI itself is in shambles. Its healthy to be skeptical of extraordinary claims like Musk's. We just aren't there yet and may never get there considering the fuzzy logic that driving requires.

Not to mention the anti-progressive thinking that better cars are the solution to our transportation woes and refusing to accept that we will reach a post-car age in urban centers sooner than later. This is like building a better horse drawn carriage. Sure its technically impressive, but its just not the real solution here.
Containing my excitement in case this is an early April Fools joke... but if this has anything to it at all it will call for an entire re-reading of many ancient texts, particularly the Sumerian, which describe war on Mars (primarily between contentious relatives a la Macbeth [a story in itself repeated in almost every culture independently]), a migration to Earth, and in the devastation, the complete destruction of a planet in our solar system, the remnants of which allegedly became our asteroid belt. This story has been repeated in a handful of ancient cultures in very specific detail.

We are the aliens!

explosion
I don't use Spotify so I was unaware of that - really interesting (and clever/dastardly).
The author of Mer is unhappy with Ubuntu and this looks more like an attack than a constructive post.

MediaTek is now contributing directly to the Linux kernel. Those header files are from 2010. It's just an issue of updating them.
I did the same with my twin. It's quite common from my understanding.
In my experience, while Spotify pays little outright, it is one of the few services that genuinely provides exposure in a beneficial way, one that may actually correlate to iTunes sales. That mentioned, Spotify deserves credit for paying anything, rather than sitting around and saying that exposure itself is a tangible payment form (e.g. McDonalds & SXSW). As Spotify expands, I can genuinely see new nations discovering my music, and that's quite interesting and appreciated.

I think it's important to remember that I'm speaking as an "unsigned" and independent artist. My income is not noteworthy from digital sales, and frankly does not even recoup the amount that I spend on distribution. However, unlike the majority of "signed" artists, I have extensive rights management avenues, very little overhead, and if I ever do make a lot of money through digital channels, it will not subsidize a system that I utterly dislike on practical and ethical grounds (ex: no health insurance for signed artists). YMMV.
Microsoft's Dongle PC
I feel like this post is considerably better than the OP. Like most things in tech it helps to come at it with a cool head.

It seems increasingly as I get older programming it is more an exercise in patience. If you want to build something useful today you need to use today's tools regardless of how good or bad they are.

The mistake some people make I think is to norm this and accept bad tooling as a matter of course.
Show HN: Track your employees moods with CompanyMood
Well, it's a different parameter space, that's all.

We tend to operate in the usual 6-dimensional parameter space for everything we do (3 position vectors, 3 speed vectors), but there are equivalent parameter spaces that do the job just as well. In some cases, the alternate spaces are more useful - polar coordinates are the most common example.

The paper quoted in the article found a parameter space where very interesting transformations and symmetries take place.
What exactly do you mean by going through an exit and not cashing out? In the exit I went through, everyone stayed for a couple of years and helped integrate the product into the larger company's offerings and infrastructure. No one was cast aside, but some people got bored and left, and some stuck around and are just regular engineers who are part of a larger company now. After going through an exit and getting some money, some people feel they have scratched their startup itch and are happy to be out of startup mode now, and some want to start something new and prove they can "do it again".
Lender fee to be replaced with loan servicing fee after consultation
> I remember being a kid, and thinking that CNN must have some really intelligent, mature writing, that I was simply too young to understand. Now, they post these sensationalist headlines

Ironically, we can attribute the flourishing of trash articles like these to the new media landscape that has arrived due to the emergence of new technologies...
Bitbucket PM here - we're considering this for the future if there are are a lot of requests for making snippets embeddable, please raise an issue at https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/
> I am sure this is not quite how you mean it, but to me this comes across as saying "if it doesn't affect my life, or my friends, then who cares."

No, that sounds about right. I don't blame others for caring, or think they shouldn't care. In fact, I'm glad they do. But I don't.

> You should care about things that don't directly impact your life -- partly because you can make a difference in these things, sometimes, if you get involved.

Fixing the military industrial complex or some other country's fucked up government isn't really on my TODO list. For better or worse, it's not how I want to spend my life.
PG's advice isn't geared primarily towards VC interests (beyond a successful startup), it's mainly biased because it's based on his own personal experience. There's no conspiracy.

Historically YC has given more power to entrepreneurs vs the VCs. JL & co. founded YC mainly because VCs sucked even more at the time. Given what YC has accomplished, I'm sure a lot of people can say that they've made things better.

Can the current VC environment be improved? Yes. Has it gotten much better ever since YC's influence has grown? Yes. Will Sam change one of YC's core missions of giving founders more equal footing? It's possible but I really I doubt it.
It's incredible that there's no money in a thing that has been a need for the human being for centuries. Actually entertainment in general, has been a need since the origin of our species.

The indie music industry as a whole is already selling more than the 3 major record labels together in the US. Once that 20th century model is 100% over, we will see technology doing really cool things in collaboration with music.
You are really overstating the degree to which 'Muskmania' exists.

It's pretty much just that people are excited about someone who appears to be genuinely interested in putting his money into some long-term, pie-in-the-sky projects. In a rather short-term-focused world, that's a refreshing thing. It's totally understandable that people want to hear about that, and certainly it looks pretty encouraging to me (free nationwide network of car chargers? re-usable rockets? Hyperloop? All pretty cool. Maybe not the salvation of humanity, but a nice change.)

However, I can see you clearly have an intense dislike of Musk for some reason, and won't be convinced by that. Probably better to leave it at that.
Wow, didn't know that. Thanks for sharing, I really learned a lot!
I would argue there is value in the bubble payout itself. Even if you're good at saving & investing over the course of many years the assets and liquidity you have when you cash in your equity gives you a chance to take risks and meet potential business partners that you don't have as a salaryman who's good with his money.
At SXSW, Meerkat Beats McDonald’s at Cutting Through the Noise
But there's an impedance mismatch here. The copyright holders are being paid per-play but the users are paying all-you-can-eat. That's always going to be an imbalance. The only way to "fix" that would be to charge "Terry" a cent per listen like a jukebox.

This is a bit like being a vegetarian at a buffet and complaining about your admission fee paying for steak which all those other people are eating. It's true, but you came to the buffet because it was much cheaper than a la carte with better service.
To me they're a mixed bag. I've enjoyed many titles from them (Dragon Age, Titanfall, Dead Space, NFS: HP, Mass Effect, Bulletstorm, BF: BC2, and countless other titles from older gen consoles and even older PC games like Archon and Kings of the Beach).

I think that when expectations are set high (most any recent BF release), disappointment is sure to follow.
Insomnia REST Client v1.0.0
Yogic Identities: Tradition and Transformation
Its so ironic that the author is a journalism professor. This article would make for a perfect Journalism 101 case study on cheap rhetorical tricks: appeal to anecdote, straw man, etc.
This is a great piece of design. It works in 2d, 3d, the colors are meaningful, the walk through is informative. Bravo.
Skylines is hands down my favorite game right now and is directly responsible for my highly unproductive, but fun, weekend.

I agree! I found this game on Steam last weekend and spent 5-6 hours building a city. It really is the next SimCity city building fans have been waiting for.
Well put. I'd like to further the notion that major labels / legacy businesses do their best to eat all the pie and only leave crumbs for the rest of the community. Put in a metaphor, when gorillas fight, nobody cares about the ants until enough of them start stinging together. Not perfect, but hopefully you get the point.

My source is the following article over at Complete Music Update, which elaborates on the tactics employed by YouTube in their goal of competing with Spotify:

http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/independent-label...
> Or is it "for each user, divide their $10 by the number of streams they played and pay that to the copyright holder of the streams played?" So the more streams you listen to the less artists get paid for that?

I think his solution works like this:

Lets say you listen to Beck for 50 times, Beyonce 50 times, and Drake 100 times. That gives you 200 total streams, which a respective stream distribution of 25%, 25% and 50%. We can assume you enjoyed Drake more since you listened to him more so he should get more money obviously. So Beck and Beyonce each get $7 * (0.25) = $1.75 and Drake gets $3.50 for the month.
Well if you're still interested in following the ongoing work to change that check out Principia :)

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/68502-WIP-Princi...
https://github.com/mockingbirdnest/Principia
No, of course not. Bear in mind that most bands/artists had a manager, who took care of the business side and who earned a percentage of the payout from labels, concert promoters, etc., and was thus incentivized to get the best deal on their behalf.
AeroFS does allow you to share folders in a read-only way, so that only one-way syncing takes place. If only one user is authorized to edit a file, I think this should work for your use case, no?
What GPU does your machine have?
100k App Downloads in 1 Weekend
I don't think there are many who would seriously suggest that YC/PG have bad intentions but survivor bias can have exactly the same effect.

So can a "big picture" view: a 90% probability of failure might not seem nearly so bad to someone who can hedge by investing (not necessarily just $) in hundreds of companies. Expectation maximization is much more appealing when you have enough trials to get one of them off the ground. Whereas a founder "starting from 0" might reasonably prefer a ~maximin approach. Neither objective is wrong or corrupt, but advice that suits one and not the other might as well be.

PG and everyone in YC know this and I'm sure they all make honest efforts to work around the tension, but we should be realistic about the fact that tension exists.