skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was aware of how logically I was interpreting the statement.

That said, there are many companies out there that differentiate on support, so I still feel OPs statement painted with an overly broad brush. The example I gave from where I work was simply an anecdote.

No company is perfect and there will always be conflicting priorities when resources are finite (so, always). I didn't intend to plug, but since someone else in this thread accurately guessed...I work at SmugMug. We are a SaaS business, so keeping customers happy such that they never feel a need to leave aligns our business priorities very nicely with those of our customers. However it is also very much in our company's DNA.

I'm still not convinced though that a crappy customer experience is ever better than a happy one when it comes to growing a successful business that's in it for the long haul.
Lol! I was in a large tech company, so the stock was as good as cash. Since I could not get finance-level pay, I figured out how to draw lines around my work so I at least had a pretty good life outside of work. It took me a couple of years to figure that out though.
This is certainly the issue that is preventing game devs from adopting Git.

On the other hand game devs at this point are very used to Perforce, and it looks like Perforce is interested in solving this problem from the other side, by adding Git features to Perforce Helix and making it distributed.
In Australia you can't actually have a valid contract if one party has to give up their rights under consumer law or if it can be proved that either party didn't act in good faith, or if either party was given false pretences as to what the contract contains, which has actually helped out a lot of people here who are tripped up over very cryptic small print, like flood insurance that would cover flash flooding from rain but not tidal inundation.
But the line of argument that says, "Some dude once dismissed an Apple product that turned out to be successful, thus all future dismissals of Apple products are invalid" is still silly, and people should not make posts that are nothing by that quote.

Honestly, here in Anno Domini 2015, I'm not sure that that quote is ever relevant to anything. But if you're going to make an argument that there's some parallel between Malda's sentiment and somebody else, at least, you know, argue it. We can all come up with snide quotes that sort of vaguely involve one of the principles under discussion.
Don't hit humans with your car, no matter how much they irritate you. It's morally wrong.
If Microsoft would break out the old Interix (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix) code and throw it on here I'd be ecstatic. (Interix was pretty great, back in the day. I think MSFT made a mistake deprecating it. A lot of FLOSS tools built on Interix just fine, back in the '99 timeframe, and if it hadn't been put out to pasture it could have definitely served as a sell into the POSIX world.)
No, you don't get it. The point is that is working insane hours worth the hourly wage you get in finance.
Disclosure up top: I work for the EFF on copyright activism, and submitted this article here, but didn't write it.

Just wanted to say that, as others have noted, the excerpted words come from a 71 page reply, but I wouldn't say it was anything like picking four unrepresentative words. Take, for example, this longer paragraph from the filing:

> Hacking video game access controls facilitates piracy and therefore undermines the core anti-piracy purposes of Section 1201. As explained above, hacking the video game access controls requires, by definition, hacking of the video game console or similar device in order to play the hacked video game. Once the access controls for the video game console are hacked, regardless of the purported purpose or intent of the hacker, any content, including pirated games, can be played on a video game console.

> What's more, console hackers may distribute their console-hacking solution to gamers that have no intention of using it for the purposes stated in the proposed exemption. The risk of piracy is even greater on personal computers and similar devices that do not utilize device-based access controls to prevent the installation of unauthorized software. The individual can use consoles to make and store infringing copies of copyrighted games and other content and to distribute these unlawful copies online to a large audience.

You can't really go line-by-line through a 71-page comment, but it's fair to say that that sort of rhetoric—conflating "hacking" with piracy with illegality, regardless of context—runs throughout, and is what my colleague highlighted here.
so everyone loves to talk about Southwest but I'd say the far more representative example is Virgin America. Despite being the mesia darlings and winning all sorts of awards, it's hemorrhaged money for 6 straight years before posting a meagre profit (http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/26/business/la-fi-mo-vi...).

As you mentioned, it's always hard to separate out cause and effect but I'd argue Southwest's unique fleet and labor arrangements gave it a temporary structural advantage. Now that those advantages are disappearing, it seems to be reverting towards the mean (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023039497045794596...).
Not sure who "he" is that you are referring to here. I've never worked in finance. I was just relating what people in finance have told me.
I find myself wondering if you have ever sat down and read a EULA carefully, because typically it includes a statement like this close to the beginning (this one from EA's EULA for The Sims 3, but IMHO pretty typical):

Right to Return: If you do not agree to the terms of this License, and if you purchased this game from
a physical retail store in the United States, and if you have not installed or used the Software, you may
return the Software for a refund or exchange within thirty (30) days from the date of purchase by
following the instructions for return available at warrantyinfo.ea.com.

(emphasis added)
But I never paid for a subscription so I never agreed to those terms.
Planned obsolescence.

If people have old games to play, they can play them instead of new games. All sorts of creative industries have an interest in destroying the public domain because it provides value to the world which thus means less demand for new creations. Nobody wants to admit this, and it is usually not consciously the focus of their copyright arguments (even to themselves), but it's the real source.
How do we crush this dismal stat? 7% investor money goes to women-led startups
I've never understood this brand of 3D printing detraction - yes, I could absolutely make 80+% of the "glue" parts I make with my 3D printer using crap from the hardware store.

But then I would have to know what crap I needed in advance, and go to the hardware store. I like getting to be extra lazy, and 3D printing facilitates that nicely. The end result also usually functions well and looks great.

I personally wouldn't have designed that EDF mount the way it was designed, but it works and I can't argue with the totally cool end result.

On a side note I'm super glad the author of this blog post used LiPo fire bags. I thought the hype about LiPos as bombs was overblown until one in my homemade electric bike caught fire on the charger once. I was very lucky that I always kept the bike outdoors on my porch, but never again! Always on concrete, in a bag from now on.
Most of them are really bad, and what angers me is that it's mostly because of the laziness and the greediness of those who run them.
Apple's solution has the advantage of working with every app that reads from or writes to the camera roll - i.e. photos are downloaded on demand, and uploaded when taken - rather than only a single manager app. Of course, this is an unfair comparison, since third parties are not allowed to hook that deeply into iOS, but it is what it is.
Unless your timeframe is strictly intraday, I'd avoid the ETFs. In most cases the futures are trading in backwardation which just means that next months futures contract is more expensive than this months. So when they do the roll every month there's a slight drag. This is the problem with leveraged ETFs but also a number of popular non-leveraged stocks like USO and UNG.

I'm curious why you think there will be an increase in upcoming volatility intraday?

My opinion as a trader is: markets are random, scalping/daytrading is a hard (some would say impossible) way to make a living. I like to trade options because there are more ways to win. I can collect theta (time) decay even if the price stays fixed.

If for example you think bond yields will increase, then you're bearish on the bond market, so that view could be expressed by buying a calendar spread... eg in $TLT, sell the May $130 put and buy the July $130 put. The goal is that the May put decays in value while the long-dated put decays more slowly. Increased volatility will have an outsized effect on your long July option. You can do that trade for $192 per 1-lot.

But to be clear, that's very different than scalping in and out of a position intraday.
I'm reading between the lines here, but I think the ESA's motivation is roughly (if privately):

"If people can play hundreds of old games for free, it will be harder to force them to pay for newer games! They'll get used to 'free' as a price point, and they'll have lots of free games to keep them amused!"

No, I didn't read the 30 page document the ESA wrote. I just know how people in power think: They want to keep as much control as possible, to buttress their position, even to the point of doing seemingly insane and harmful things that might, conceivably harm their position.

The hacker argument is particularly pathetic, but you're right: The 30+ pages wasn't motivated by that tiny excerpt. The 30+ pages was motivated out of desperation, since they're looking at declining sales numbers in the traditional gaming space. [1]

[1] http://gamerant.com/npd-gaming-decline/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/03/22/174940...
> None of the games in question are making any money, and the publishers don't expect to make any money in the future on them.

I don't know if that's true. Steam, GOG, Nintendo's Virtual Console... there's money being made on publisher back-catalogs these days, and even if the publisher has no current plan to release or support these games, the value of that back catalog is part of the total value of the company at sale or liquidation.
I think his complaint is that the paid version only stops the person paying from seeing ads. A subscriber, for example, can't share their photos with a family member without them being interrupted by ads while viewing them.
There are meetings, and there are presentations. The latter often benefits from scripting & rehearsing, particularly if there is a large audience.

What's sad is when a meeting is actually just an elaborate ruse of a presentation.
I'm 1/3rd through ESA's response and it is clearly far more nuanced than EFF is pretending it is in this blog post. As a threshold matter (to adopt the argot) it should be enough for you to know that EFF is misrepresenting ESA. It's especially disappointing given that even the most charitable summary of ESA's position would still leave most of the Internet on EFF's side.

(I put the rest of my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345206 --- read it before HN flags it off the site; it's what you asked for.)
The naming is fantastic, I mean, Umbral Moonshine Conjecture.

By the time we actually find a theory connecting all this stuff, it will probably have aggregated a name so ridiculous that nobody will believe it.
We didn't create mathematics from nothing. It's a language that we created to describe certain patterns that we saw in the universe, beginning with elementary patterns such as counting and working up to things like calculus.

Mathematics is not unreasonably effective any more than English is.

Some of these patterns appear so fundamental that it's virtually impossible to imagine them (in a detailed way) as being different. Maybe this is because our brains, being physically embodied, are constrained by these same properties of nature in terms of how they process information. We can't picture 1+1=5 because we literally can't think it.

Once you have a language with a grammar, you can also start exploring the "pure" properties of the language. Writers do this with written languages, constructing oddities like Ulysses and "a rose is a rose is a rose" and buffalo^8:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

Since the language was induced from nature, exploring its structure can sometimes let you deduce very strong and powerful hypotheses about nature. But these hypotheses are not true (a.k.a. theories) until they are confirmed by experiment or observation. The combinatorial rule space of a language is so large it will contain an effectively infinite number of meaningless coincidental patterns, and Turing proved that the halting problem is undecidable so you can never be "done." The inverse is also true: there will always be facts of nature that cannot be hypothesized by studying any language or logic system. This is the primary consequence of Godel's incompleteness theorem.

TL;DR: Languages are induced to describe reality, therefore you can make conjectures about reality by playing with them. But not all such conjectures are true, and some things must be true that cannot be thus conjectured.

Edit:

Come to think of it, I am not certain that "The combinatorial rule space of a language is so large it will contain an effectively infinite number of meaningless coincidental patterns" is true, or at least I'm not aware of a proof of this akin to Godel's theorem (wouldn't this be the inverse of Godel's theorem?). It could be that all theorems and patterns in mathematics (and other languages for that matter) either directly reflect something in nature or are isomorphic with something that reflects something in nature.

If this were true it would be impossible to make a meaningless statement that is syntactically correct in any language. Tolkien's endless discussions about orcs and elves are talking about something, just maybe not literal orcs and elves.
There's another nice win to this type of solution: it solves the Orphan Works problem

Right now a disturbingly large percentage of recorded audio is hard to preserve because it's not clear who to contact or the rights-holder doesn't have a system for handling obscure items. If you're a film-maker and want to license a track by a major artist, it's pretty straight-forward – call Sony and make sure you have enough zeros on the end of the check – but if you wanted something obscure – period jazz or blues, garage rock, etc. – you might not even be able to find who currently owns the rights after decades of people drifting out of contact, corporate mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies, etc. Even a modest annual payment could have the side-benefit of ensuring that any work under copyright would have current contact information on file with the Copyright Office.
Yes--choose the language and development process that makes it easiest to reason about the desired properties of the program.

Example: seL4 is written in C (as in, written by hand by fallible humans--not compiled down from a higher-level language [1]). But, the C is written in such a way that it is feasible to prove its equivalence to a Haskell prototype which had previously been proven correct.

Yes, language choice can be important. But, the degree of its importance depends on what you're building with it and how you're using it.

[1] http://www.nicta.com.au/pub-download/full/7371
Yes, I am not sure if they calculated this based on Mars being a perfect sphere or not. I did find this interesting image of all the water on Earth, compared to the size of Earth: http://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/global-water-volume.html
Read Mandelbrot's book, it's an excellent gateway drug into that type of thinking.

> There has been some work on figuring out how to use Fractal Geometry to analyze financial time series data but it's still in its infancy.

Are you talking about things like the hurst exponent and such?
Slack built up $11m in annual revenue in a really short time, and is adding $1m in contracts every 11 days. At what's about $7/person/month, that's a lot more than no one.

http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-growth-after-one-year-2...
They were not ideas. They were working versions.

At some point you have to put your ideas/implementation/whatever out into the open (you might even have to advertise its existence). At that point, anyone better resourced than you can probably just mimic your work.

What alternative does anyone really have?
And it's built with React.js!
Banks Are Betting Big on a Startup That Bypasses Banks
According to "the Big Short" and other sources, before the 2008 crash, high level executives all over the industry were managing with the metric "value at risk".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_at_risk

The "1 in 3 billion years" quote sounds like exactly the kind of line of thinking that was in the Big Short.

It's up to smart people to understand what statistical model they should probably use.

It's not just that their model is wrong -- and VaR is certainly wrong. It's that NO model is right.

That is, the fundamental problem is that they are trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Black swans aren't quantifiable by definition.

If you think there is an "appropriate statistical model", then definitely read the Black Swan. I'm glad it came up many times in this thread, because that means the point has been driven home. If you don't get it, you need the 300 pages of beratement it gives you :)
> Group purchasing for work

I use https://www.splitwise.com/ for this. Works well for everything from big expenses to burgers. Use it in my flat too.
Awesome post. I don't usually expect to see this kind of philosophical stuff on HN. I think there's a lot of truth in what you say here. It just like, people in denial about who they are all the time. Reminds me of Emerson "Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide"
I've lost data (well, they were backed up, so not really lost...) to playing with beta filesystems (reiserfs 4, if memory serves well), never to HFS+.

I'm pretty sure somewhere in Cupertino a team is working on a new file-system, but I seriously hope they don't ship it before it's ready. I wouldn't mind playing with it in beta though...
I would like to know which ones were turned down and which ones were funded. This will give us a better idea on whether these stats are purely based on gender or the idea of the startup.

It doesn't really make any sense as to why a VC would turn down a women-led startup just because of gender. They are in it to get an ROI.
Where's the best place to get details on the internals of the Windows kernel regarding things like that?
I don't know Haskell at all, the ~"all functions only have one argument" concept interests me.

>"had an easy time explaining how (2 * 3) really is two functions, each with one argument and one result, and he drew it out on paper nicely" //

So, like you pass the multiply function an argument which is a list (2, 3). Or is it more like you pass the multiply function the first operand (2 in this case) and it returns a function multiply-by-2 which you pass the second operand? The latter seems like it would get sub-optimal pretty quickly. Mind you surely here the compiler produces the same sort of assembly [repeated addition here] making it just a way to abstract around an alternate mental model.

I've just looked at https://wiki.haskell.org/Currying, could someone walk through how something like arcsin(0) works - that's probably a bad example - something that takes a single variable input but has multiple solutions (returns n.π in this case, but say sqrt or an anagram function or ...)?

I'm sure you can tell I'm not a computer scientist, not even a programmer ...
This is a great move, and I really appreciated the point made in the article that while it won't necessarily affect all women in a uniformly positive way, it does help to remove a an male advantage based on stereotypes.

Also, extensive discussion previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330734
I completely agree there are negative externalities to focusing purely on next-quarter's bookings. But specifically around attracting and retaining salespeople who deliver bookings, if you pay basically nothing before they hit quota, and then piles of hard cash as they rack up the numbers, you tend to starve out the under-performers.

It's not 'proof' by any stretch, but I was recalling this article while typing the original comment: http://www.saastr.com/a-framework-and-some-ideas-for-your-fi...
France's TV5Monde 'hit by Islamic State Hackers'
"Men, Pao told the Journal, often negotiate more aggressively than women, leading to higher salaries."

Wow. Just wow. So Pao is trying to stop discrimination and stereotypes...by enforcing discrimination and stereotypes.

Women (and Men) should be taught to fight for what they are worth.

"but we aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation"

Some people deserve better compensation. Personally, I wouldn't ever work at a company like this. I have too much self respect.
As someone who works in the arts, I disagree. You're assuming a 'lump of attention', in which if attention is paid to public domain work (eg a classic silent movie) some other modern work will have to go unwatched. That's true in the very short term, insofar as most people like to watch one movie at once (or play one game at once, or...adjust as appropriate), but a great deal of cultural work depends for its aesthetic effect on consumers' familiarity with prior work, notwithstanding the fact that one is 'competing' with it. The project I'm developing right now includes a bunch of references to other work, some of which is due to fall into the public domain in a few years, and other work which may or may not be in the public domain (I'm actively following a piece of litigation to find out whether I need to cough up thousands of dollars in licensing fees to have someone sing 'Happy Birthday', for example).
Women in tech: Silicon Valley needs to take a play from the NFL
This doesn't aound any different from any other company on the planet if you look at it from this angle. The author seems overly entitled and disgruntled. Any job is what you make of it.
it says "Researching your name to ensure it is available", but how?
I like the idea. If you have a surface to react against, why not use it? It doesn't change the functionality, so it isn't just becoming a snowmobile as others claim, you just have to set it up so it maintains ability to slide.

I think a pair of small tracks on the back with some kind of speed sensors to make it coast without drag is ideal (think bike coasting system with drag compensation).
No, nothing I use supports synchronizing scroll buffers beyond ZNC's behavior of dumping the scroll buffer to whichever client is connected (Colloquy on iOS, Textual on OSX). I've not found the dumping behavior to be that terrible, but I don't frequent very popular channels so it's generally not pumping out thousands of lines every time I open the app. For the most part that doesn't inconvenience me, I can respond to any pings or queries as necessary and catch up on conversation. If I need to review anything outside of ZNCs buffers it's a super quick task to just go and read the logs from disk. The main critical feature is not losing private messages and pings when moving between client, which ZNC achieves without fail.

Like for you IRC isn't anything beyond recreational for me, so quirks in the workflow are just fine to work around. If it was my primary method of communication I'd be looking into improving it I suspect.
I would fain give up my imaginary "soul" in return for the whole world.