skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Transactions in AdTech are different than normal payments.

For example, imagine an ad campaign spending $30k/month at a rate of $5 per 1,000 impressions. The customer may want their budget spread evenly throughout the month, so the software sets a daily budget of $1000. But this really represents 200,000 daily impressions, each of which is a transaction that subtracts from the available balance in real-time. The buyers software is talking to an ad exchange and keeping track of the budget every time an individual impression is won.

To add some more complexity, the impressions are probably billed as second-price auctions, so they aren't all exactly $0.005 each. Some are $0.00493, some are $0.00471, ect. Each one of these numbers is reported back from the exchange to the buyer's software in real time and the buyer is responsible for managing their budget.

This is just an example, but hopefully it illustrates how it can become impractical to account for this kind of thing using something more traditional like PostgreSQL. It would be reasonable to log all the impressions to something like Hadoop for the analytical piece of the software, but there needs to be something more real-time for budgeting to prevent overspending. The big ad exchanges can host hundreds of thousands or even millions of auctions per second, so not turning off bidding can be very costly.

This process of auctioning ad impressions across many buyers through an API is called real-time bidding.
The short version is that I don't treat it conventionally. Suffice it to say that an ounce of prevention is worth at least a pound of cure and not living in a mold-infested hell hole has done me a lot of good.
This is amazing, not sure why it doesn't have more upvotes, or more positive comments. Classic HN, I guess.

For all the people who are commenting that it's a copy of something else -- get over yourselves, just about everything is a copy of something else (or a combination of things that already existed).

Love the dead simple intro page and room joining/spectating ease.

Glad the web has come this far.
I would have never said that, but now that I've come across it a few times, I think it's great – easy to get an overview of high level topics and dig into those that are interesting. Definitely not very discoverable, but pretty useful.
So, like level 2 of microcorruption?
>Actually, you did:

>> We're all human, we may love programming and farming

>> we're all working toward retirement

ok my bad, I didn't mean everyone as in everyone on the face of the earth. There's obviously outliers, I made a mistake for not specifying that.

> also appreciate how Bill Gates transformed from an elite coder into a dabbler as soon as it suited your argument.

What the hell is this? Can we not have a civil conversation without insulting each other?

I am NOT Changing my argument. As of what I KNOW, Bill Gates is currently a dabbler. He doesn't code regularly he's not part of any big coding projects. But back in the heyday he was an excellent coder and his code was responsible for much of early success in Microsoft.

Your attitude is not conducive to civil conversation and you're really pissing me off. You accused me of changing my argument even though from my perspective I did not. You say stupid shit about me like this:

"You're evidently not someone who ever let facts got in the way of a good story."

I understand we may have different perspectives, but there are better ways of expressing it then being excessively negative. You could of asked me what I meant by things that have been inconsistent in our conversation, you could have politely asked about the conflicting details. There is no need say I am "obviously" someone who ignores facts.

Please refer to proper etiquette below:

http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline

That's my last word. I'm not going to continue on with a whole flame war and populate this thread with anymore shitty comments that no one wants to read.
Sorry to hear you couldn't give birth to your own unicorn but thanks for sharing the story, a good read.
This article is very insightful. One of the interesting things about jobs, and a source of frustration and the reason I'm much more interested in being a founder than an employee-- is that so many companies are run by people who don't know what they're doing.

I've seen this from 20 year old startup "founders" who don't know their industry, to 50 year old billionaires who have lots of business experience, and thus opinions, but no wisdom about running a software company.

Even with our industry being around for 40 years or so, there are very few companies where programmers are managed by programmers who understand programming. Too much of the time its "Business" people.

So, not only are you going to be incentivized by how well you're paid vs the problems you're given, you're also going to be affected by the quality of the environment ("open plan office? sigh, I can't wait til I have been here long enough to quit.") to the amount of interference and straight up hassle (sometimes even harassment) you are getting from management.

Let me give you an example: Last year I worked in an office run by an ex-navy Seal. He cussed, all the time. His motivational technique was to threaten violence- literally. He was a bundle of barely contained psychotic violence and you were just waiting for something to set him off. I half expected he was going to come in some day and shoot up the office. I don't know what his problem was but he was not right in the head. Needless to say, he knew nothing about programming, software, or even business- his entire career had been in the military. Certainly every 5 minutes he wanted to have a meeting about something.

He thought it was funny to bring in bongo drums and a cowbell... and if we were too quiet, he would bang on them. For awhile he was showing up at 4pm and trying to get us drunk. I guess that's how they bond in the military.

I am not making this up.

That company is now on their third team-- they've had %400 turnover in employees over the past 2 years, with the average employee lasting less than 6 months. And they still haven't figured out what the problem is.

There's no way to know when getting hired that you're going into an office like that-- and while that's an extreme, over the past 30 years, most of the places I've worked have been dysfunctional to one degree or another.

So, you're negotiating your salary, you're also having to figure out how much combat pay premium you need to tack on.

And if you're in the business of hiring people, give them meaningful equity and a real vesting schedule if you want them to stay at your startup-- then show them you have the skills to turn the company into a success. You can start by producing a healthy environment for work. (and I don't mean giving me a year supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon.)
Or you could put a TOC at the beginning (you know, like in a book) and do no sliding at all.

-> No confusion, great overview, direct jumps with hyperlinks, easy to realize with pure HTML.
Makesto: Animated visual stories made easy
You use distributed databases and have never encountered an inconsistency? What scale? What are you using, I guess not any of these: https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen.
1.5s here. It's not the total time, but the way it loads, 3 bunches of very quick accumulations. Pleasurable to witness.
Am a Perl hacker; can confirm, and also elaborate: in the back of that VW bus is some random balding ex-hippie trying to build you a new bus out of butterflies while muttering about apocalypses and parrots. He's been sitting there for more than a decade, and you kind of feel sorry for him so you just leave him be.
I am not an egalitarian. I am for equal rights. Egalitarianism is the belief that all people should be equal in all things. It leads to socialism, which leads (eventually) to Venezuela (for example) as people cannibalize one another.
Your public road analogy is very wrong. A better analogy would be a private road with a sign saying "Google streetview welcome. runbycomment stay out." Would you feel entitled to drive down the private road? Would the owner allowing Google to drive down the road make you feel entitled to do it?

We aren't discussing a public space. We're talking about a private server. They pay for hosting and bandwidth. Why do you feel entitled to use it?
If the child is too young to express a preference, you don't need to choose between (eg) dolls or trucks - baby toys need to be primarily something that can't hurt the baby. If the child is old enough to express a preference, you can ask the child or their parents.
The article missed one big point.

All those temp workers are unionized. The union does not guarantee them a job, but it does guarantee them a certain salary and benefits when they do find a job. It's a closed shop, so if they do hire a non-union member for a job, they become a union member.
Because it doesn't have ads.
In all of the examples you mention it was understood by people paying attention the level of risk. I knew there would be a housing bubble and crisis in 2001 because I read an article on mises.org that pointed out the two factors: (Clinton era CRA "reforms" forcing people to lend money to those who couldn't repay, because doing otherwise was "racist", an issue brought up by Barack Obama's class action lawsuit... which, by the way, turned out to be false- when corrected for income there was no racial bias in lending during the period) and Bush's policy of lending money lower then the real cost of it (a result of the dotcom bubble, and by the way, a police that is currently in action inflating the new bubble.)

I knew citibank was in trouble. I looked into Worldcom, Enron and Tyco back then as investments and didn't like their books.

While the average person may not read a companies annual reports, and the average person may not think about the consequences of forcing banks to lend money and then giving them money at a rate below the market rate, but happily buying the resulting loans (via fannie mae) at market rates... those who are paying attention can.

In those cases the info is publicly available.
This is going to be a disaster for Malta. These people don't fuck around when it comes to damaging the places where they live, and with a population under half a million on tiny island, the place can't exactly take a lot of abuse.
That's not, necessarily, what egalitarianism means. But regardless of words, why do you think a world where equal rights actually exist (or have more actual existence) isn't better one where the idea of equal rights is merely known?
The "killer currency" must reach a point where it is robust enough to withstand what Kroll, Davey, and Felten describe as a "Goldfinger" attack. [1]

They use basic game theory to show that any actor participating within the Bitcoin community would not commit a 51% attack. They go on to identify the biggest threat to a budding virtual currency: some outside actor being able to take a sufficiently large short position on Bitcoin (or otherwise gain utility from Bitcoin's destruction), then mounting or simply threatening to mount a 51% attack. This would start a death spiral that would cause rational actors not to participate in the network at an increasing rate.

They conclude that good, active governance is necessary to make sure that Bitcoin and similar virtual currencies survive.

The creators will need to "touch" the currency in order to protect and maintain its value. A true killer currency would be a virtual currency that is pegged to some well-chosen and largely diversified basket of essential goods such as wheat, lumber, metals, energy, etc. Peg the currency to a broad range of economic inputs and raw materials.

[1] Full paper here: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~kroll/papers/weis13_bitcoin.pd...
Forcing adults who would automatically think "trucks for boys, dolls for girls" to think about their choices is, in itself, valuable. As a child I was given dolls because I was a girl. I had absolutely no interest in dolls. Nor in trucks. I wanted building toys, animals, and dinosaurs.
It's an interesting point, although Path may not be the best counter example since Path's founder is well off from being early at Facebook.
Pretty sure iOS allows no app access to some of that info.
Sandvine: Two-Thirds of North American Internet Traffic Encrypted by 2016
> Publish the fact that it can be done without publishing how to do it (yes, you have to be reputable).

Chances are that just changes the lawsuits to defamation ones.
Lending Club is long on buzz, short on profits
Yeah, I'm not sure there's really a whole lot we can glean from the purchase of founders' stock here. To an outsider, it feels unfair, but I agree that without it the founders would have likely spent that $25M down to zero.
The lies you mention are not actually information asymmetries between the buyer and seller of Citi shares, so the comparison isn't really very apt.
Alibaba, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter are contributors to WebScaleSQL.

So yes it is absolutely still relevant.
Syntax is always a prime candidate for bicycle shedding so they'll always be brought up but uncommon syntax is jarring at first.

One problem I see is how overloaded the `#` character is right now. I think one problem that Scala is stuck with is how many things for which `_` is used.
I'd guess they use a hybrid approach ... the statement about iPhones always being on the verge of selling out is a red herring.

Whether you ship by air or sea, so long as you do it consistently, the number of phones you have available is a constant based on the rate you're manufacturing them. All the air versus sea argument does is change the lag in receiving them.

Assuming the rate they can be manufactured can be adjusted based on demand, you want to make sure you're always on the verge of selling out to avoid carrying more inventory.

So my guess is that they normally ship by sea but increase the manufacturing rate and ship some percentage of phones by air to keep the stores "just stocked enough".
Dude whatever to all the negative comments. This is pretty awesome. Even though the game is simple and has been done before this is a super super well polished implementation with enough unique twists on the idea to make it fresh. You've also given credit to your inspiration which is cool.

Great job!
Don't get me wrong. I love programming too, and I certainly have my own projects on the side.

But work is work, which this person is doing. People who say that working as a coder is like going to disneyland everyday because their totally enamored by programming... I find it hard to believe that many people are like that. Burn out is a real thing.
That depends heavily on where you are. Near the capital yes. Away from it... not so much.
What exactly are these "unique twists"?
I don't think so, especially when they are that damaged.
There are also many more whose weight is in the normal range, but their "setpoint" is such that they consider themselves too skinny or too fat.
Yep. I don't get the value in this, pushing the problem somewhere else just creates new problems. Instead of being able to rely on distributions and gargantuan open software, now we go off and roll it all ourselves?

This is a good path to job security, but I don't see what else.
The author mentions this in the middle of the article:

"It helps that, despite the work’s fleeting nature, Hollywood is strongly unionized, which keeps wages high. According to the rate card of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 728, which represents union film-­lighting crews in Los Angeles, even entry-­level electricians on a major film set make more than $35 an hour — i.e., more than 40 percent higher than the national average for electricians — and make that wage over 12-hour days."
Never got into the game, way too many racists.
Isn't this obvious to anyone who takes a little time to think about evolution and biodiversity? Yes, little changes caused by chance persist if they don't hinder the creature's ability to survive & reproduce. And these relatively benign mutations can accumulate until one family is very different from one that was once more obviously related. I don't see how this "surprising" and "provocative" proposal that chance plays a role in biodiversity is at all "controversial" or even new. What's more, the journalist seems to think that this "finding" means she can downplay natural selection, when in fact this article should really be nothing more than an emphasis of the role of chance in speciation since natural selection is basically predicated on the biodiversity caused by chance mutations. This really seems like publishing something 100 years after the first airplane was built to say: "Hear ye! Amazing new finding: In the absence of wings or power, an airplane simply falls due to gravity!" Maybe the actual research/paper is of more merit than the article suggests?
While people tend to use Aphyr's posts as anti-nosql-cannon-fodder, I don't think he has ever advocated for anyone to straight up not use a database or used any of these results to show that no one should use NoSQL ever.

These seem like highly detailed Github Issues (infact the recent elasticsearch was a GH issue-turned-blog post), and these issue are brought to attention so that they could be fixed - not to slander the name of the company (and when they are, everyone benefits). IIRC, even after finding these bugs were published he continued to use elasticsearch.

Given how hard these problems are and how difficult they can be to reproduce, these writeups seem to be the most appropriate way to highlight these issues.

That said, if I was an aerospike user I'd be happier knowing this issue exists, someone has debugged it, and supported a detailed report about rather than being called in at 3am and discovering our data is funky.
How about this resolution: "Ah. Okay, so it's like that. Tell you what, why don't you mull it over and I'll come ask you about it again next year." You were getting by just fine without it before, you'll get by fine without it even after you know about it. No need to burn any crops, just make your case a little better next year, be a little less cooperative come harvest time, and he'll get the picture eventually.

Game theorists always seem to assume that there's no such thing as nuanced communication.
I think founders should take some money off of the table in every investment round, beyond the seed/incubator stage. (In fact probably every employee should be able to do this, maybe to a max of %10 or %20 of vested shares.)

The first reason is that you want he founders to be focused on the company, and not struggling to make ends meet. That way they can make long term decisions.

Secondly, every round the founders lose more and more control. They should be compensated for this. Yes, they have economic dilution from the investment as it is now, but some of the shares the investors buy should be founders shares. This results in less dilution for the company, and is a repayment of the sweat equity they founders have created.

One of the big problems with venture capital these days (and the reason I won't take it anymore) is that it disrespects the founders by demanding liquidation preferences for the VCs. As if the VCs who merely put up other people's money should have rights superior to the people who literally put part of their life into the company. That's not right. All shares should be equal, and if not, the founders should at least be respected. (For those firing up your keyboards to explain to me why LPs are necessary, two points: 1) I've heard a bunch of arguments for this already. 2) they've all come from VCs and are self serving. You can't really make an argument that it's better for the company or fair for the founders.)

Thirdly, too often I've seen VCs force founders to revest shares. But the value of those shares was already earned. The founder incentive to do well comes from increasing the value of the shares... and revesting the shares denies the founders crucial voting rights that they have earned already. (And makes it that much easier for the VCs to force a founder out, which is usually a bad idea in my experience.)
I didn't spend enough time to figure that out. I just assumed that the audio piece that went along with the slide deck wasn't uploaded and closed my browser.
I don't think this is intuitive enough.

If your slide deck needs a secondary nav, it probably shouldn't be a slide deck.
I'm shocked that the top two HN comments as of writing are bikeshedding the submission's web design.
No, the point doesn't hold up. That's like saying 'workbench' or 'car' is too general to mean anything. It's a general category and you put adjectives in front of it as needed.

And if you're going to eschew the term and use descriptions instead, then it's important to get the descriptions right and not arrange them just so your favorites are up top next to ProTools even though they don't belong there.

Better categories:
Professional DAWs - these do everything well: ProTools, Logic, (maybe) Cubase.
Consumer DAWs - these aim to do most things well: Reaper, Ardour, GarageBand.
Sequencers - geared for hip-hop and electronic music: Ableton Live (yes, it's awesome and will probably become full-featured), Fruity Loops.
Trackers....

My point is being fussy about the term DAW derailed GP's question, when they asked if it's a DAW they're asking if it's a general purpose or specialty platform which is frankly a good question.
Black Mesa Half-Life Mod Released on Early Access Steam
Hypothetically: Lua->Clojure->Javascript (since Javascript is supposedly one of Clojure's compilation targets, in the form of ClojureScript).
Verizon Falsely Promising Better Netflix Streaming with More Expensive Tier
Betteridge's law of headlines is indeed in full force here :)
I think it's more an issue of incentives than political inclination or geography. The police have a lot of power. Any investigations into officer misconduct (at least prior to widespread cellphones) generally resulted in the officer being cleared. That means that there's little/no incentive NOT to do something bad; the odds you get caught are minuscule.

Even if there are no truly evil, bad actors the lack of a restraining force means that even with random events and outcomes, officers will tend to behave worse and worse on average. Initially bad events are outliers but as more happen with no repercussions the average slowly creeps towards "worse" and what used to be rare becomes commonplace.

So to me it's clear that the police need better management from folks who really get a kick out of putting very, very bad guys behind bars. If a normal person murders someone they get the full force of the justice system against them. If an officer does so, currently they tend to get white glove treatment.

We're seeing that the trend might be changing a little in Baltimore, but we won't know for sure until the trial is done. They don't have to be convicted in order to know that the trend has changed, but they need to be VIGOROUSLY prosecuted for what happened.
There's always outliers, which is what I think Notch is... Without quantitative data I may be totally wrong though.

I still think most people would stop coding once they had the resources to command other people to do it for them. Take for instance, Elon Musk, I'm pretty sure he's no longer in the trenches. That guy started coding at 12.
Americans had far more rights in 1788, as long as they weren't slaves [1]. And in 1788, people from anywhere in the world could escape to America (as it should still be).

[1] Many Americans were against slavery in 1776, but it would have meant losing the Southern colonies and thus losing the Revolutionary War.

edit: I picked 1788 because that's the year the US Constitution was adopted.
Says a lot about Google Ventures that when something goes south with one of their investments they'll go to the press and slam you.

Not the first time either.

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-between-google-...