skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that statement is really rather silly. It's a bit like saying "anyone who is going to drink coke is already drinking coke". There's a ring of truth to it, but it still falls flat.

Edit: a few things: arguments based on the behavior of "the majority" and arguments founded on the principle that 100% of all people who have ever been Game of Thrones viewers are completely and utterly committed to viewing every single season are rather weak. Viewership of shows changes from season to season. More so, not every TV show viewer is the sort of person who must start a series from the beginning. Pulling in folks who are caught up on Game of Thrones but haven't been hooked on the current season and pulling in folks who will begin mid stream (and then maybe go back and watch from the beginning, or not) adds to their viewership. More viewers means more purchases, more purchases means more dollars.

Not to mention the value of retaining their existing viewership base.

These are all the same reasons why coke continues to dump massive amounts of dollars into advertising despite already being well known and having a huge chunk of the soft drink marketshare. In fact, the returns on investment for advertising already popular products tends to be higher than for products just entering the market, because the numbers are so big. There are millions of Game of Thrones fans. If even a few hundred thousand existing fans who might have held off on watching the new season are kept on the hook and if even a few hundred thousand non-watchers gain interest in the show via starting with the new season and if only a small fraction of those folks end up purchasing the discs, or HBO (in whatever form) then that's a considerable amount of money in HBO's pocket that would have been left on the table.

Which isn't saying it wasn't an accident, but business wise this is still a win for HBO.
Israeli Drone Maker Has $6B Backlog and a Red-Hot Stock
Not me.

And disagree if you like, but I've come to realize it's not my path. I understand that there are tons of clever, educated, privileged, and young people working on the problems that plague us. I have no plan of sacrificing the little bit of comfort and pleasure I've carved out in this world for the tiniest chance that one day something I did might add value to human kind.
I don't think Confluent really counts as "non-LinkedIn team" :)

"Jay is co-founder and CEO at Confluent. Prior to Confluent, Jay Kreps was the initial developer on several open source projects, including Apache Kafka, Apache Samza, Voldemort. He was the lead architect for data infrastructure at LinkedIn."

(Martin Kleppmann also has a LinkedIn background)
How to Test and Validate Startup Ideas: – Lean Startup and MVP
Planet Labs Raises $118M Series C to Cover the Earth in Tiny Satellites
Free Interactive R coding tutorials using RStudio
The analogy doesn't hold. There's absolutely no value in all chopping off our hands, but there _is_ value in requiring all traffic to go over HTTPS.

We can deprecate HTTPS for a decade without actually disabling it, and in the unlikely event that we _don't_ figure it out, we can undeprecate it some years later.
TLS and NaCl are entirely different beasts. NaCl is a nice piece of technology, but TLS isn't just a technology solution; it's fundamentally a policy solution. TLS solves (or tries to, at least) both the "who am I talking to" problem and the "are we talking securely" problem.

NaCl can only replace the second one, which is a nonsensical idea to propose because it's not an issue (and it's the easier problem to solve anyway)
Looks awesome, there's so much to do to improve the efficiency of the government. Any thoughts on how your software might work with sites like NextDoor where I see a lot of local government discussions happening? Also, small thing but Francisco is misspelled on your address.
It makes sense to talk about lines of code when thinking about engineering hour efficiency. It costs the same amount for a programmer to write one line of C as one line of Assembly, and the rate of bugs tracks lines of code as well. The underlying libraries and abstractions should be considered if you're thinking about computing efficiency.
All Eyes on Virginia as Lawmakers Face Major Surveillance Decisions
I would love to know exactly what the financial arrangements are with YC "partners". Obviously they aren't all created equal. Curious what the upside is and how it compares to traditional partner arrangements in law, accounting or investment banking. [1] Nobody is given the title of partner in a law firm or accounting firm in a similar way.

[1] Or for that matter, VC's.
Digimarc solved this.
StartSSL at least a while ago picked up the hash algorithm from the CSR.
EFF Signs Joint Statement Urging Canada to Dismiss Anti-Terror Legislation
You will probably lose the same amount of money you thought you were saving in management and communication.
I despise people who use formal equations to explain otherwise simple concepts.
> I skipped Anathema

You my friend, have missed out big time.
With today's trends of massive series A rounds, how should entrepreneurs think about staying lean with so much pressure to go big and a prevailing winner-take-all mentality within the VC world? Moreover, what's your take on the series A mega-round?
It's been years since I've read it but "On Writing" is still one of my favorite books of all time. It's worth reading whether you write much or not. His description of the time he was struck by a van (and nearly killed) while walking down the road near his home with his head in a paperback book is alone worth the read. He said the guy driving the van was reaching into a box of raw meat and tossing chunks to a dog in the back of the van and didn't see him walking on the side of the road. He said it was like a scene from one of his novels. I recall that he also goes into some detail about how he struggled through a long period of near poverty with his wife Tabitha always supporting him and staying by his side. So she deserves tremendous credit for his success. For me the book was more about persevering through the struggle to create in general.
offtopic - I've seen a number of blog posts using this hand drawn diagram style recently, does anyone happen to know how it's done? (answers other than "by hand" appreciated)
Reamde was very mediocre compared to the ones you skipped.
>Right, because Joyce, Pynchon, and Nabokov would have benefited from being told to write "as little as possible".

They might have. Especially Pynchon, but Joyce too.
You can buy the ebook. It'll just magically appear on my Kindle on release day.
Ah, you're right on the leak source. I over read "within". Sadly if they do pinpoint who leaked the copy I'm not sure it'll ever become public knowledge.

HBO has had DVD screener leaks before. If they all have the same watermark and the watermark is the only tracking info they have then, for all the reasons you put out, that'd just be silly.
Thank you so much for your honest advice. I will try to include this into my work and talk to my client. Great that you do AMAs these days. I very much appreciate it!
What happens when the exception test expression throws an exception?
I think that could be avoided by making sure that large parts of the signatures overlap. There's probably some scheme to be able to recover which copies were used to make the leaked copy (up to some finite number of copies, but it quickly becomes impractical to get enough copies).
Two main areas: System Application / Native Application Programming AND "Business Application" programming.

System programming still considers C/C++ the best. Heavy applications that need good performance are still built using C/C++. For example, Google Chrome, Adobe Photoshop, Games etc.

For developing "Business Applications", they need a rapid delivery system, easiness of development, better collaboration etc., and most of the business systems consider Java programming. Because Java has a good collection of libraries and frameworks, great support and documentation. It's suitable for both desktop (Eclipse IDE is developed in Java) and web applications.

Other popular business application languages include Javascript (not related to Java in any ways), Python, Ruby, Scala etc.

So, you need to consider which is your preferred area to work on.

- If you are too much interested in developing OSs, drivers, games, or high-performance applications, you can go with C++.

- If you like to develop business systems (like websites, weather APIs, BigData analysis, this HackerNews website, social networks, online-shopping, share-trading platforms etc.) you can leave C++ and learn some trendy langs like Java or Ruby.
There are so many assumptions baked into these questions that it's a little hard to answer. First of all, I'm not a fan of the "10X engineer" framing. I'm much more interested in the systems that companies can build to create 10X teams.

I am thinking of two conventional "10X engineers" right now that I've worked with in my career. One is extremely loud, brash, judgmental and basically scary. If you are brave enough to come to him with a question, and he thinks it's stupid, you will basically never live it down. The second is extremely humble, quiet, and gentle. If you come to him with a question, he probably won't answer it but will show up two days later with a fully-implemented solution that he created at 2am just to see if it was possible.

In most companies, the first 10X engineer tends to get promoted to a position of seniority, while the second is generally allowed to quietly leave the company when they get bored. And don't even get me started on all the incredibly talented people out there who our biased hiring processes can't ever identify as "10X."

If you ever get the chance to mingle with some of the truly famous founders, ask yourself if they strike you as the smartest people you've ever met. Now, many of us get star-struck when we meet people who are rich and powerful, and we rationalize whatever garbage comes out of their mouths as genius utterances, because deep down we're all still primates. But if you can get past that, you'll notice that a lot of really successful founders (and investors for that matter) aren't especially bright or thoughtful. But they do have other critical character traits that helped them succeed. Here's a PG classic on the subject: http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

He also has a great essay about the importance of grit and determination but I can't quite remember the title.
Why not use SignalR?
I liked the Baroque Cycle books a lot. I like Anathema too, but it kind of lurched along; some of the philosophy portions were a bit dull.
Looks like Paper, by FiftyThree:

https://appsto.re/us/KfqkE.i
I'd be curious what the equivalent idea of what you are doing (by posting here as AMA) would be if you weren't Eric Ries posting on HN. So for Eric Ries this is "lean" (or what used to be known as "gorilla marketing") but for someone who doesn't have name recognition what is the equivalent? [1]

[1] Simply recognizing that someone without name recognition doing something similar on HN is not assured of getting any attention.
This is a good time to bring up the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect(xhe).

It's where you read a page full of comments about something you really and truly deep know something about and see how very, every wrong nearly everyone is...

...then you go on to take every other page pretty seriously without remembering just how far off people were on the topic that you know about. I experienced this the other day when people were talking about beep.js on HN.

(xhe) http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...
Stock options are cheaper for the company, and it's as simple as that.

The company giving out options doesn't need to pay taxes on them, while RSU are considered compensation which requires taxes to be paid by the company.
Step out of the HN echo chamber. C++ isn't going anywhere.
Hilariously the HBO show Silicon Valley had a pretty decent take on this last night: just take less money. There's no law that says you have to slurp up as much dumb money as the market will throw at you.

But regardless of how much money you take, lean is about a disciplined process of decision making. Can you build a culture of high-tempo testing and make it stick not just for the founders but for all employees? That really has nothing to do with how much money you take.
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What Happens When Students Boycott a Standardized Test?
This is exactly right. When someone asks the question what was "Joe" doing yesterday there should be at least one person who can say "I was working with him via {email,chat,phone,VC} on that thing we had discussed earlier." Or... "Oh, didn't you see his email? He sent out that design doc for further discussion" or some other variant. Even in companies with an established work from culture it's important to communicate frequently and with detail.
Looks awesome!, but requires 10.10 or later.
Are there any particular skills or traits that you looked for in your startup co-founders?
Is it the same as the 'Agile' approach that is so prevalent in software industry these days that aims to deliver software reliably on time?

How do you differentiate good variability from bad ones in software development?
30 Reasons Why Russell Brand Is Wrong and We Don’t Need No Revolution
Let's be honest: I almost didn't make the front page. My post got to about #25 on /newest with only like 9 upvotes. If it had rolled over to page two, I doubt I would still be answering questions right now. So no, I don't think this kind of technique is useful for marketing if you don't have name recognition.

However, there are many other ways to build rep in a community like HN without being famous. I bet if any of the highest-karma posters did an AMA they would get a lot of attention. Personally, I'd be fascinated to learn more about who they are.
Other interesting comparisons would be usable power. ICE is about 20% efficient, but electric motors are 90% efficient. So a lithium ion gas tank needs about 4x less energy.
Fun to try with code (mildly). Here's the geekiest I could do that's worth sharing :-) http://i.imgur.com/IBaLCn4.png - based on the first stanza from the following:

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Lisper got to sit and wonder, (Y (Y Y))?

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Lisper got to tell himself he understand.

— Kurt Vonnegut, modified by Darius Bacon,

(as quoted on this blog entry http://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html about y-combinators)
When will it be merged to the mainline? (or is it already there?) Will it eventually be a run-time option, or always a compile time option?

The latest reference I can find is http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-devel/201410/msg00001... - were the problems solved?

Thanks for LMDB. It is awesome.
Well, because I hadn't read the excellent book Founder's Dilemmas, I didn't have a clue about what to look for. Honestly, the biggest criteria was that they were willing to work with me!
After many years I still don't really grok the idea behind exceptions, and I get this feeling that I'm not alone with that. There probably is an extremely smart idea supporting this whole "handle all errors with exceptions" style, but I haven't seen any good explanation yet; instead what I see most often is a case of Stockholm syndrome - "it's in the language, it's The $LANGUAGE Style, it must be Good!".
I had the exact same experience with Anathem.

I remember around the 200-page point thinking, "ok, now we're getting started."
Three sentence stories are nice: https://i.imgur.com/KJjbwf1.png
Market to Mondays – Part 5
Tableflip.club
What does your book writing process look like now? What did you learn writing The Lean Startup and how much of the teachings of the lean concept itself are applicable to book writing?

Cheers! /Martin
USCIS Completes the H-1B Cap Random Selection Process for FY 2016
When you're trying to build a richly detailed world in your readers' minds, "as little as possible" might still be quite a lot of writing. But even such a detailed piece of work can suffer from superflous words and pointlessly convoluted grammar. Every letter of a finely crafted piece of writing should contribute to the intended effect.
In THE LEADER'S GUIDE, will you also make available business tools you suggest for lean-startup project? A bit comparable to what Alex Osterwalder & strategyzer is offering it (Canvas, Test&Learning Cards, Progress Board, etc.)?
Privacy Tools best served fresh – OpenSSL versions in privacytools.io downloads
It's always so hard to read things on a dark background on a backlit screen.
And especially looking at light backgrounds after that.
Why is that?
Ok, I'll check it out.
Ahh, thanks - I checked that the speakers weren't currently working for LinkedIn, but I didn't look further into their backgrounds.

Oh, well. I still hope to one day read about someone else using Samza in production.
Now _that_ is a good question. Most agile systems are designed to insulate management from the volatility inherent in software development (and to tamp it down a little bit). They aren't really designed to exploit the positive variability.

Here's a classic example: let's say I have a story card that says "build a feature that lets 10000 customers buy a widget from our store." In most classic agile systems, the engineering team will do their best to understand the customer requirement and see that it's built appropriately.

Now let's say that 0 customers show and buy the widget. Who's fault is this? In traditional agile, it's the Product Owner's fault, not the engineering team.

But exploiting positive variability would say: the effort required to build this feature requires knowing in advance how many customers want to buy the widget. The engineering effort is totally different if the answer is 0, 10, 100, 10000, or 1000000 customers. So rather than build the feature as specified, let's do an experiment to try and assess customer demand first, then build in response to that demand.

That means that sometimes a story will take 10X longer than you originally planned and sometimes it will take 1/10th as long. But in the end, you'll get a better business result. That's positive variability.
Keep in mind you can generally only anycast a /24's worth of IP addresses, so it's very unlikely they're doing this with single IPs.
10 Simple Things Most Startup Founder F*#K Up
Also a few more things to add to your comment:

1. Real world spatial discovery is easier than 'virtual' discovery. Exception is probably Wikipedia, but it is not as well curated as your typical public library. Probably easier to discover music through CDs in a rack (curated by parents' tastes) and books in a library (curated by librarians, etc.) or home (parents).

Is there an application for virtual reality here? It sounds a bit like science-fiction and funky, but perhaps an e-book library / bookstore where you pick books in VR. Or more realistically, perhaps book and music discovery game apps?

2. For discovery of books and music, algorithmic recommendation systems are not sufficient. You also need curation. IIRC, as a kid, I did not look at books simply because they are similar, but mostly because I just found them in the shelves, where they were because a librarian or teacher or parent had found it to be worthy.
What do you think has changed the most for startups today since when you wrote "The Lean Startup"?
Bit offtopic, but does anyone have suggestions for simple full text search engines? I basically want something for names, just a couple of thousand, nothing fancy. Setting up something like ElasticSearch seems like overkill (and is quite hungry for specs as well). I was thinking about simply hacking something together with Redis and Python, but i suppose someone might have a better solution.
Man, no kidding. It feels like a very inelegant info dump. While I realize those tend to show up in Stephenson books at some point or another, it's a rough way to start.
I liked a lot about Anathem but found Reamde unmemorable. I'd love to see a return to form
Scammed? No, I wouldn't say that. Not paid? Certainly!

Generally, I have a pretty straight forward and easy to understand contract that everyone must sign before work starts. This helps to keep this situation from happening too often. I also bill regularly which means I don't have a huge amount of accounts receivable at any given time. I do not believe in billing the entire amount after delivery.

These tactics don't always work and things happen where I don't get paid. Usually I speak to the client directly and ask them to just pay up, working with them on terms that will work for their situation. Most clients are super happy and relieved to get this type of help from me. This works about 80% of the time. It works 100% of the time when the client would like me to do work in the future.

If they don't pay at that point I do two things. First, I don't work with them any more, thus I stop my own financial bleeding. Second, I will start to make demands. Depending on how much I am demanding this could be a simple written letter saying "Please pay before further legal steps must be taken." Generally almost all clients will pay at this point. If they don't, at times, honestly, I just let it go and write it off as lost funds and move on.

I have, on two occasions, taken clients to court for the money. This never saw the light of a court room and both cases were settled out of court almost immediately. These are drastic steps which I do not recommend.

With all of that said, is this something you are having trouble with? Your situation may vary and more details will help us to know how to help you.
Thanks Pilif, you're correct - I've fixed that section and credited you and brians.
No, I will not. I am not yet sold on the tools approach to lean startup adoption. It's not to say I am opposed to it, but I haven't really seen it work in companies. I prefer prose: convincing people to try it and letting them build their own tools.
Same as pre-order I suppose. I suppose his complaint was that don't build the hype unless we can get hold of it. It's like Nolan's movie teasers which end with "Summer, ++Now.Year()".
> (e.g., Tierney's Willpower) that suggest that we have a finite reservoir of self-control that we should expend wisely.

You mean Baumeister & Tierney's Willpower. That is not how I remember their thesis. I believe they compare willpower to a muscle in that it can become temporarily depleted, but also strengthened through practice. Either way, I would sooner take Baumeister's word for it, seeing as he has done actual research on this.
Meanwhile, it's perfectly OK for Netanyahu to keep threatening to bomb Iran: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/02/brief-history-...

It's perfectly OK for the US/Israel to attack Iran's industrial infrastructure with a virus: http://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/ (an act that Obama said would be an "act of war" if done to the US)

It's perfectly OK for Israel to kill Iranian nuclear scientists: http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/US-pressuring-Is...

And it's perfectly OK for people like John McCain (who came this >< close to becoming POTUS) to sing about bombing Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg

But hey, Ahmedinajad says one sentence that's dubiously translated, and that's not OK.
Ask HN: How would you create a new (recognized by UN) nation?
I enjoy the plot where multiple groups converge on a single location to get their hands on some key object. It's the same structure as two of my favorite movies: The Fifth Element and True Romance. When the groups are stereotypes as in True Romance, I find it even more entertaining. Reamde had all of that: bikers, anti government mountain people who are armed to the teeth and gangsters from multiple foreign countries :-)

I'll see if I can check out Anathem at some point, but Baroque is really too much of a commitment for me. I'm a slow reader.

Edit: Anathem not Anathema (thanks __david__ and lmm)