skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What exactly do you mean by going through an exit and not cashing out?

Essentially I'm interested in hearing about the consequences and outcomes of an exit for technical staff who don't get rich and therefore can't take time out.
> "mathematical objects directly" do not exist in the real world

Well, there's an influential minority that thinks mathematical objects are all that exists (Tegmark multiverse). I don't necessarily agree with them, but that's one way to rigorously define the domain for a utility function, in a way that is not obviously exploitable. Another way is to define utility in terms of an agent's perceptions, but that is exploitable by wireheading, and IMO that flaw is unfixable as the agent gets more powerful. I'm not aware of any other approaches that are different in principle from those two, so I'll stick with the lesser evil for now, and hope that someone comes up with a better idea.
Since a lot of early civilizations seemed to be very slave heavy I wonder if that had anything to do with it. Agriculture requires more labour which leads to more slaving. Male slaves would work the fields with less of a chance for reproduction, and the landowners/slaveowners would have their pick of the female slaves.
New JavaScript techniques for rapid page loads
A simple guide for creating Debian/Ubuntu Packages
Dell bought ConvergeNet, which made a fibre-channel virtual storage device. At the time their stock price was >$50. By the time I could sell, it was half that. So I didn't 'take home' as much as I'd have liked to. But on paper it looked good for a while.
http://i.imgur.com/ONHTVZU.png
I played a similar game some time ago. I looked up people from a nationwide (French) elite math program. Most people where either university professor in Math, CS or theoretical Physics, or they were working in finance. Two opposite environments it seems.

I wonder how their lives is in the financial industry. I imagine finance as a demanding and stressful environment, driven by big egos, commercial types. How do these math geniuses fit there? what level of freedom do they have in their job? in term of schedule, things they work on and so on...
The 1933 Harvard-West Point Math Competition: Genesis of the Putnam Competion
I really like the jazz tracks from SimCity 3000 (the ones that play when things are going well). They tickle my brain in just the right way.
I'm not adding a fourth dimension to my code.

http://www.aretheplanetsaligned.com
The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)
It is useful to put projects like this in context. People are dying for want of $1000 - $5000 worth of medical treatment in poor countries.

"Donors have given over $170,000 for water bills for over 900 families in Detroit." 170 children's lives could have been saved for the same amount.

If you asked the beneficiaries of this project whether they would prefer a life was saved over their water bill being paid, I think most would say save a life.

Though these people are desperately poor (and probably rationally hopeless), they are citizens of a wealthy and powerful nation that will not let them suffer too much like over a billion other people with real problems do.

Watsi.org is a good place to start if you are serious about helping people.

I'm astounded that the practical and serious people at YC are participating in a goofball project like this that is competing for resources with serious efforts to do good.
His final comment "and listeners should be to0.", I'm not sure I understand?

How does Terry's subsidization of yoga studios make any difference for Terry's listening experience?

Unless it's a very deep point in that Terry's subsidization, if it didn't happen, would cause more small artists to pop up onto the scene thus increasing the diversity of the catalog.
Aren’t these textures already reusable? The constructed texture object (the result of textures.lines(), e.g.) can be called on as many selections as you like to reuse it.

I feel it’s a matter of taste, but one practical reason I prefer chaining to configuration objects is that you get a runtime error when you misspell a property, rather than it being silently ignored.
It still looks cool. That's cool
This is especially important for large app startup time.
For a senior, non management, engineer at one of the big companies in the vally, 250K in total comp is pretty common.
There are various writing platforms that store files at Dropbox. I don't use any, but I have used http://writeboxapps.com/ in the past and it does what it does very well.

Not that there isn't room for one more -- people are different, so the need for different apps --, but just be aware that this is not a super nouveau idea.
>> "...assuming no secret deals..."

You're totally right on the merits, but it's worth noting that the big record labels are composed entirely of and built their empire solely upon unjust-seeming secret deals, and we have no reason to believe that they've stopped that modus operandi now merely because they're dealing with Spotify.
Chipset Model:	Intel HD Graphics 4000
VRAM (Dynamic, Max):	1024 MB
Specifying and Verifying Concurrent Algorithms with Histories and Subjectivity
I'm at the bottom end of that range - here are my real numbers for one real option vesting story (on a throwaway):

1. I quit an engineering job at a bigco to become engineer #2 (employee #3) at a startup where I was given about 1.5%. I joined just after their initial fundraise.

2. I took a huge pay cut - from $120k in total comp at bigco to $60k at startup.

3. The startup was acquired roughly 2.5 years later by a larger startup, my pay went up to $140k and my options converted to roughly 0.1% of the larger startup.

4. I stayed for a year at the larger startup, vested half my options and purchased them, which cost me about $60k to exercise. This is a lot of money to come up with when you've been underpaid for a couple of years.

5. The larger startup was acquired by a large public company - my shares were worth just shy of $500k once the dust settled.

Overall, the money I lost in salary is a little bit less than what I gained in equity over that 3.5 year period, once you factor in taxes, exercise costs, the time value of deferred compensation, and the raises I presumably would have gotten if I had stayed at bigco.

I'd do it again in a heartbeat because the experience was amazing (and led me to start my own company), however, I would have a hard time advising anyone to take a big pay cut in exchange for employee equity for solely financial reasons.
Doesn't this experiment rely on a certain critical mass of people consuming information in a non-organic fashion?
> Building and regulating civilization has a cost, if you want to improve people's lives, don't be so greedy about it.

This. I wish many a company took it to heart. But then again, a lot of companies (and startups) don't care about improving people's lives; some unfortunately use the talk about "improving lives" as a marketing angle.

As for Uber, it's pretty clear now that they don't care about improving anything else than the contents of their wallets - I'm surprised that no one banned them yet for literally being assholes.
Oops... forgot to mention this was Chrome on a Windows 7 machine.
thank you very much, going to make a deploy once HN traffic will calm down! :)
I can't speak for Spotify, but can for Pandora... I listen maybe 20 hours a month, and just got sick of the ads... That's all there was to it. I don't want to curate my music more than a like/dislike and it works for me.

That said, I don't like the model that's currently in use for online-only music stations... it's tough all around.
So it's like latin declinations?
When I read the URL, I was initially worried because I thought Tom Wheeler was saying this.

>As anyone who's talked to an automated system on the phone lately can attest, "automated" usually means "worse."

He does have a point there. It takes me much longer to buy my groceries using self-checkout than it does to go stand in line for a human to ring up my purchases. Using an automated phone system is similarly pretty irritating.
So much hype in one article.
The average consumer only spends $48 on recorded music per year.[0] At $100+ per year, services like Spotify are much more expensive for all but the most prolific music collector.

[0]http://recode.net/2014/03/18/the-price-of-music/
Politics intrude as cybersecurity firms hunt foreign spies
I think we're assuming that the many users who listen to indie bands spread their listening among many different bands (each use has a difference preference) whereas users who listen to top 40 all listen to the same artists.

There is also the idea that some "users" are businesses playing background music all day, and that they are more likely to all choose the same pop songs (which the most people are familiar with) and to play them all day everyday. Unlike a normal user who typically listens to a wider variety and for fewer hours a day.
nice. good work!
Pick your Final Four with math
I completely disagree with Aaron, who here seems to jump rather quickly to the (merely asserted) conclusion that the news (i.e. the world) doesn't affect him. (Without this same news we would not have heard of Snowden OR, in an ironic twist, of Aaron himself). Furthermore, how ironic is it that we're discussing this itself on a self-purported news site?

The news, even global news, absolutely affects all of us even if we live local, cloistered lives. Let us take the United States - which is overly represented on this site. The US economy is fueled by its finance and investment sectors, which are in turn fueled by neocolonialist enterprises overseas. The success of the US domestic economy is fundamentally tied to its navigating geostrategy and multilateral diplomacy, its overthrowing of governments, stabilizing and destabilizing nations with propaganda and embargos, fixing international law in favor of the leaders of its private sectors, and in its opening resources abroad to US companies is the primary and nearly exclusive driver of the finance sector. And in fact, domestic and international law now blur due to a similarly increased globalization.

I find it odd that Aaron, known for his stance on free access to information and to being informed, would fall only to the knowledge of the academic - and not information and facts about the world in which we immediately live.

Yes there are some truly irrelevant news items (take celebrities). One must filter and prioritize. It is a small price to pay.

I would love to defend whichever notions have offended downvoters.
It gets even more complex if you take the fairness he's suggesting to it's logical conclusion. The system proposed still values playing each song equally, but shorter songs comprise less of a user's streaming activity.

So the per play rate should be determined by taking 70% of the user's subscription, dividing that by the number of seconds of streaming that user streamed that month and then multiplying that by the number of seconds that user streamed the artist's song (since songs can be stopped mid-song).

Regardless of how they bill, it's likely that artists will have to, for the most part, just trust Spotify. There can, and should, be independent audits of the billing code. It seems an analogous situation to what the NGC does around computerized gaming systems. Users have to trust that the system is fair, but the NGC is very thorough about checking that code complies with applicable laws.
Hooks for iOS makes your notifications smarter
I've suspected as much would happen during the agricultural revolution, but I did not expect such a huge disparity.

If the 51% male/female ratio did not change, then 16 out of 17 males must have either been killed, enslaved, or been left frustrated. This would imply a highly patriarchal society where the local king and his cronies are the only ones fed, and to whom you would sell your daughters to. The only other explanation would be mass infanticide of males, but to see this in multiple regions is suspect.

"It wasn't like there was a mass death of males. They were there, so what were they doing?" The article raises a very good question. In all places studied, agriculture must have favored a highly stratified society.
"somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others"

Yeah, thank god we're past this as a species
1. As soon as I'm playing more tracks than the number of tracks an average user pays I'm actually paying less than what Spotify currently pays.
2. People who do not play much music will probably not be exposed to much else than well know artists (Ie. Top 40). Or otherwise said: if I'm into music and spend time discovering not-so well known bands I'll probably play more tracks than the average user.
3. The number of people who will play less than the average number of tracks will be bigger than the number who play more.

The end result is that rich and well known artists will end up getting more money, and lesser known artists less.
For broader accessibility: a system like Civ's, where the system can play itself / do computations for you, but lets you dial up the amount of player-control.
I don't see much discussion of Spotify's role in setting their subscription pricing. I think this is an area where artists have a legitimate gripe.

For example, in a hypothetical world let's say Spotify could capture a high amount of market share and still be profitable at $0.10/month. If they had the same revenue split they could say that they are giving artists 70% (0.07/month). I think the artists would rightfully complain that Spotify is devaluing their product.

Artists like Taylor Swift are starting to catch on but people act like she's greedy and out of touch when she pulls her catalog.
Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but why is a private company even been allowed to test kids?

In a nutshell: because a profound ideological shift has occurred in the last 40 years, which dictates that nearly all aspects of public life should ultimately be privatized -- real effectiveness, hidden costs (and nefarious side effects) be damned.

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
Shuddle raises $9.6M for a ridesharing service safe enough for kids
And many of the links still point to active pages.

But I miss ftp.apple.com (or was it ftp.info.apple.com? The later still exists though I can't remember any URLs and the root is 404.) They had all their technical documents online going back to the Apple II. Free developer tools and OS disk images. And private directories for employees to show off what they were working on at the time.
I liked the notation thing, are there any other examples of applications that work like this, with a notation system that normal people can use (and do not feel like they are programming)?
How fast does poop fall?
A clone of the Google NowithMaps/Play persistent search bar
SimCity 3000 and 4 were both made with EA owning Maxis. They were both great.
Thanks! I think the Iris 6100 is a bit newer than that. Still, gives me pause.
My 16 yr old is interested in pursuing this field (not sure what to call it - 'Genetic Anthropology'?). Can anyone recommend online resources to help a newbie get the lay of the land? Or in-person resources (talks, exhibits, clubs etc.) near Palo Alto CA ??
This article is a visualization / coordinatization of Newtonian physics. GR has nowhere near enough effect to make a simple planetry orbit elliptical.

Baez has earned more credibility than to be written off with a vulgar thoughtless one-liner. He is a Physics major.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Baez
Can Your Webcam Do This?
Google Admits Glass Prototype Was Overhyped
FWIW, they call it "Industrie 4.0": www.plattform-i40.de/
I'm using the bitcodin service for several projects and it works like a charm. I highly recommend it.
No, but I believe humanity in general wants things to be beneficial to them AND simple. Hell most Americans (being one myself) don't just 'want' they feel entitled to. Because of that, I believe a huge number of artists would not bother to make sense of monthly records which could reach 1800 pages, and would complain even though they were presented with such records explaining why their 50000 plays this month were less valuable than their 3 plays the prior month.

I am not saying the Spotify method should not be changed just showing that the proposal at hand should not be called 'simple'.
I joined in Google in early 2005, post IPO, as an entry level SWE. I was probably employee #3000 - #9000 (there were about 3000 employees at the time).

I made over $2M from stock options. Lots of people sold their stock as soon as it vested, in which case it would've amounted to about $1M. If I had held out until now (the price spiked around 2013), it would have been closer to $4M.

I think people don't understand the order of magnitude difference between great companies and astounding companies.

A great company is worth $300 M. Google is worth $300 B.

That means if you would have gotten two THOUSAND dollars from the successful company, you would get two MILLION dollars from Google [1]. 3 orders of magnitude is a big difference!

If your goal is to get rich, it's perhaps a better strategy to join the right company at the right time, rather than start your own company (although that was definitely not my strategy).

Though this advice sounds obvious, I haven't heard it in many places. I recall a startup class lecture [1] from a founder of Asana, on why NOT to do a startup. And he said don't do it for the money -- because if you want to do it for the money, you should join a company like AirBNB or Dropbox now. These are companies that could be at a similar cycle in their growth as Google was in 2005.

In other words, join a great company that could be astounding.

Another source is Piaw Na's book. I don't really know him, and at first I thought it was weird to have a career strategy of choosing companies based on equity, but it's definitely a logical thing to do if you're so inclined:

http://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Guide-Silicon-Valley-Startup...

$2M doesn't sound like that much any more, but when I see these HN threads about exits and equity, I believe I made out better than many startup founders, as a regular employee.

[1] caveat: I believe Google was still idealistic and generous in 2005; the Valley has changed a lot in the last decade, so YMMV

[2] I can't find it here, but I thought it was? http://startupclass.samaltman.com/
Here are two ideas for non-traditional news, that would reduce the information overload, and make news more interesting and healthy:

- Actionable news. Only news to which you can (or have to), as a citizen, take some action. Examples: Changes in law, cultural events that will take place in the future, openings of new institutions, planned political demonstrations or petitions.

- Old news. Only give news about something after it is resolved, not when it is happening (avoid especially breaking news). Examples: Instead of speculation who will be appointed to some office, just tell me who was appointed. When disaster occurs, wait three days when the information is more complete about the aftermath. Reviews of products that have already been released.
I spent ~3 years at Twitter (2010-2013) as an engineer and manager. Made a competitive salary while there. Left with almost $2m in equity (ISOs + RSUs).

I sold the bulk of my position quickly due to serious concerns about tying the bulk of my net worth to a single company's future.

After strike price, AMT, and income tax I ended up with roughly $1m in cash. Probably could have been closer to $1.2m if I knew what I was doing tax-wise.

Not a reproducible pattern to be sure, but it was a nice outcome.
Nothing stops an attacker from pretending to be a thousand different people, but there are a couple of obvious improvements you can make:

- Don't just check the certs you want to verify, but also check others, and publish your findings.

- Check with multiple alternative systems, so that the chance of

- Allow users to assign trust to third party monitors that checks the logs.

Rotating certs is not really a different problem than issuing it in the first place - it just requires you to not trust a cert indefinitely.
"In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the same as saying one man, on average, will father a child with about four or five different women? I suppose given the timescale being discussed, "recent history" may mean the last few centuries, but this average still sounds very high to me.
The article starts with a magnificent exercise in false equivalence: "We have no problem taking Wall Street executives to task for decisions that leave American families financially devastated, yet we give Silicon Valley billionaires a pass when they do the same thing".

No, they don't do the same thing. If I automate in 5 minutes with software a process that used to take three people with pencils and erasers four months, I have not done the same thing as taking out insurance policies against bad mortgage securities that only I know are bad because I'm the one who took the good mortgages out and replaced them with bad mortgages because the fine print allowed me to do this.

Yes, both do eliminate some jobs. One because those jobs can now be done more efficiently by machines. The other, because massive amounts of wealth was destroyed by financial trickery.

It's so hard to get past that point that I almost didn't read the more sensationalistic presented but nonetheless worthy of consideration issues that followed.

Yes, social media and other internet behemoths are doing alarming things to privacy. Yes, we need to be concerned if we send millions out of work, with no clear path to employment. Yes, we should be concerned about the intense concentration of wealth in a winner-take-all economy.

All kinds of interesting ideas have been presented (minimum basic income, for instance). But you won't find any discussion of them in this article.
General Relativity is not needed to explain elliptical orbits. This is a very clever reformulation of classical mechanics, and certainly not horseshit.
I tend to hover over links on aggregator sites like this, and find the nomadler.com/out?url=http[...] kind of annoying. I'd suggest making the href the actual URL. If you want to route people through /out, I think you can just hijack the click event.
Your second paragraph makes it seem as though you didn't read my comment. If you had, it seems unlikely that you would have condescendingly said "Let me be clear" before repeating a point I had already made. Otherwise, why did you do that?

But I accept that there is some grayness around the idea of intent. I think that that gets resolved with the concept of responsibility. Once the possibility that our actions could be causing harm is raised, we have the responsibility to be aware of this and avoid it if we can, otherwise we are just as culpable as someone who 'intended' harm. Not taking the possibility seriously makes us culpable if harm occurs.
> "Good heavens! If there's anything else you can imagine doing, don't stay in math"

I heard similar advice from people in many different lines of work including laws, finance, medicine, academia... usually they add it's not as interesting as it used to be.

It's a matter of compromise. I wish I could have the salary of banker, the freedom of a tenured professor and the prestige of a doctor.
Moltin (YC W15) Wants to Simplify E-Commerce Development
> The suit also alleges that Hong was told that she was not integrated into her team at work “because she looks different and talks differently than other team members” and was subsequently replaced “by a less qualified, less experienced Indian male.”

Uh, what does her replacement being Indian have to do with anything? Unless the implication is that most/many of the other team members are also Indian? While it's not a stretch to believe that an employee would experience discrimination for being one of the relatively few women at a tech company...are there really that few Asian/ethnically Chinese employees at Facebook? Or perhaps just in her department?