skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mind you, I've never used it, but Snapchat has 100 Million monthly uniques.

I can't think of a single company who has reached a critical-mass consumer audience and not been able to monetize. Sure, winds change, MySpaces rise and fall, but it wasn't a monetization failure.

Anecdotally, just a month ago I was walking and because i live in San Francisco I happened across a corner (Howard and New Montgomery) where there were ~20 girls about 13 years old being polled about their tastes, and the questions I heard waiting for my light was "Do you guys like smartphones?" ("yes", duh), "Is your phone more important than your TV?" ("yes", duh), and "What is your favorite app?" and the answer was unanimously Snapchat.

Snapchat is the teenagers answer to the question many millennials have fretted about -- "how will ppl born today deal with having all 18 years of their development online". The answer is: they don't put it online. It's peer-to-peer and temporary by social contract, even if the technology is imperfect.

So far, snapchat has played a savvy game. As an engineer, if they were based in SF, I'd consider working for them. They have tapped into something. Because my 28 year old wife has also been hooked on Snapchat for what seems like a lifetime now. Her most frequent contacts? Both of her 60+ year old parents, numerous cousins and aunts, etc. Her dad uses it to send stupid pictures that you might not expect from a 65 year old white haired CEO-type whose work is about as far away from tech as you can get.
The experiment:

The women, who gave birth to 74 boys and 71 girls, were followed up when their children were aged four to seven and asked about the toys the youngsters played with and the games they enjoyed.

The result:

They found that two phthalates DEHP and DBP can affect play behaviour. Boys exposed to high levels of these in the womb were less likely than other boys to play with cars, trains and guns or engage in "rougher" games like playfighting.

DEHP - used to make PVC soft and pliable, used in products like flooring

DBP - used as a plasticiser in glues, dyes and textiles

I recently read an article on a similar topic: https://medium.com/@GregDowney1/plastics-tiny-penises-and-hu...
I'd add a few points:
1) management fees typically decline after the first few years of the Fund, rather than staying at 2% for the entire 10 years. This is to reflect the fact that partners are expected to do more work during the sourcing and diligence portion of a Fund's life (typically defined as an "investment period" after which they're not allowed to make new investments), and that helping portfolio companies and helping achieve exits takes less time / staff / expense. The GP also typically raises subsequent funds once the investment period is over, the management fees of which helps to fund their overall budget.

2) On the carried interest often the VC fund can only earn that after they've returned a certain amount to Limited Partners (called a "preferred return", and typically ~8%; if they don't return an 8% IRR to LPs, they only get the management fee and whatever they earn on their own out-of-pocket contribution.

In general I'd just add that this is a highly negotiated point for each Fund and differs from firm to firm and fund to fund.

Source: I work as an advisor to investors who participate as LPs in VC funds.
Uh, what's the reason for the downvote?
I like people with guts.
Optimizing Battery Life on iOS
Wow, this is very cool. They invented a new method for printing taking advantage of the fluid nature of liquid to get to every surface of a 3-D object.
I won't do work that I regard as being unethical, nor will I seek work that I regard as not being of lasting value.

I'm OK with any other kind of work. I have a wide variety of experience, and am quick to learn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_olmdAQx5s
Like many things, I suspect many people are against the idea of GMO food _in principal_.

In practice, most of the people who are against in principal will have no problem eating a Twinkie that has GMO wheat in it so long as everyone else is eating one too.
We Accidentally Turned the Entire Statue of Liberty into a Battery
I get offered quantitative investment jobs all the time, as I have substantial experience with finance.

I eventually came to regard it as unethical, so I turn those jobs down.
Glyphosate (Roundup) is not known to be carcinogenic to humans. IARC has controversially classified it as a 2A "probable" carcinogen, but the best epidemiological studies of humans with extreme exposure to glyphosate have shown no link. Glyphosate has very low toxicity in mammals. It targets a metabolic pathway (shikimic acid) that does not exist in animals. It is among the most widely used herbicides in the world, and its deployment does not correlate well with cancer occurrence.
I'd suspect that an organization with the money to bring in a contractor is not too far removed from an organization with money to buy matlab licenses.
The USDA's scientist Robert Kremer's research does not back Monsato's claims about reducing erosion.[1]

What is clear from the research is that roundup:

* causes damage to beneficial microbes in the soil increasing the likelihood of infection of a crop by soil pathogens

* interference with nutrient uptake by the plant

* reduced efficiency of symbiotic nitrogen fixation

* overall lower-than-expected plant productivity [2]

Not to mention that superweeds have already caused thousands of acres of US farmland to be abandoned. [3]

Instead of using GMO for good like golden rice, Monsanto uses it to turn farmers in toxic chemical addicts at the both the expense of our heath and that of our nation's farmland.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/13/us-usa-gmos-regula...

[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/11610301?oldURL...

[3] http://grist.org/article/the-chemical-treadmill-breaks-down-...
GoFar: Make Your Car the Smartest Car on the Street
You could easily avoid that by stopping the script as soon as the button is pressed a single time.
> The other way to do this is just to value equity at $0.

I've worked for startups that gave me stock options, and I've worked for consultancies that have done profit sharing. In every case, I came away with $0. Options can be diluted away and profit sharing is subject to accounting tricks.

The only time I received stock and made money from it was when I worked for a large, established, and very profitable company.

Another thing to consider is that any reward with a vesting schedule will cloud your judgement on when is the right time to jump ship. The advice I was given was that in your 20s you ramp up your income fastest by taking new positions at new companies, and in your 30s the best way to increase your income is to advance within a single company.

I think a good target would be to take a new job every year or two in your 20s, targeting a 15-25% increase in salary each time. However, given that most options have 4-year vesting schedules, that essentially means forgoing stock based compensation until later.
This was hinted at Chicago's JuliaCon about some consulting work. Some of the JuliaCon participants brought up a question - "I love Julia, etc, but how can you convince me that this isn't going to be dumped once you guys all get bored?" - IIRC, Jeff Bezanson replied something along the lines of "I love this project and I'm comfortable starving on ramen while I work on this". Which is a noble thing for Bezanson to say, but actually made me nervous about Julia's future.

Considering it's obvious Bezanson and many of the core contributors works on Julia full-time * 2, I wasn't quite sure how he paid rent/food. And since everyone needs to pay food/rent ... this seems a very good thing for the contributors to continue working on Julia.

If you told me that the core developers were planning to eat ramen for years on end, I'd be very worried for a new language. Instead, this strikes a great balance for Julia to advance and keep the lights on.
Twitter's also losing money, right? LinkedIn, despite all their tactics, makes double digit millions only? Splunk, at several billion valuation loses more and more money, too (enough that killing all R&D still wouldn't make them profitable).
Can I get a good job as an iOS developer after learning just Swift
Hello,

I was wondering what people's thoughts were around employability of knowing Swift (but not Objective-C)?

Some context: I had studied CS Eng. in undergrad (and graduated at the top of my class) from a top program that focused on C++. I and know C++ forward & backward, but I dipped into the business side of things immediately after undergrad. Now, four years later, I'd like to get back into software development and my area of interest is iOS. I've been focused on learning Swift through a Stanford iTunes U course which is really good, but I'm not sure how it would be perceived if I don't know Objective-C.

I'm in the SF Bay Area and looking to stick around here in case that's relevant to the answer set.

Thank you!
PHP Object Injection in Bomgar Remote Support Portal
Medicine@UBA a disaster? Are you talking seriously? Do you have arguments to say that?
Since you seem to have an understanding of what is wrong with it, care to tell about everything you know that should be updated?
I tried evolving a good approximation with Eureqa: https://i.imgur.com/1CTTjYD.png?1
> Most of the major scientific and medical organizations have issued a statement that GMO food is safe (in the sense of being as safe as non-GMO food)

Given two samples of some food F, where one sample was produced by GMO techniques, and one was produced by traditional breeding methods, they will be equally safe. In that sense, GMO is safe, and there is almost no serious scientific disagreement over that.

The concern of many, including myself, over GMO is that it greatly increases the range and rapidity of modifications that can be done to food compared to traditional methods. If/when someone produces a GMO food that harms people, it is not going to be because GMO is unsafe. It is going to be because they were given sharper and faster tools, and they did not have adequate internal and/or regulator oversight to use them wisely.
This makes such an interesting case. There a number of concepts so original and unique that they haven't been included "as a single word" in the conversations that are likely to determine what is considered relevant in world culture. There are cultural patterns that we simply don't have words for. Unless we create a truly universally granular language, that is: `Q: What is your favourite word? A: “Thing”, apparently. The harder I’m writing, the more imprecise my spoken language becomes.`
Contrary to popular opinion, farmers in 2015 are not particularly dumb; over the last 30-40 years, agriculture has been transformed into an analytical and technology-centered enterprise. If glyphosate isn't as productive for farmers as Monsanto claims, why is it so overwhelmingly widely used in modern agriculture?
There are lots of Swift jobs.

http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/united-states/californ...

However, no one will hire you unless you have at least one app in the app store. There's no specific requirement for what that app actually does. As far as I can tell, there's not even a specific requirement that the app be any good.

This has to do with that, at one time, it was quite difficult to get Apple to accept new apps. Now Apple accepts nearly all comers, yet hiring managers still have the idea that applicants are only qualified if they have a shipping app.

What that means is that your knowledge of C++ and Swift and your CSE degree won't help much; what you need is an app in the app store.
> So many people misuse it as such that some even understand it as an attack of the truthness of the statement.

No, they use it as a device to point out that there is more context around the discussion than whether or not something is true or false (hence my point about 2-valued logic).

I could say race is defined by genetics, and while that's technically correct, it adds nothing to a discussion about race relations.

This is the context in which people use this term.

When people say things like "you're technically correct, the best kind of correct", it's a tongue in cheek way of pointing out the observation is true, but lacks contextual information in order to be useful. This is why it tends to be a joke, in general everyone implicitly understands this.
And yet nobody sees a problem in creating stupid crap for stupid users and expecting to ~break even~ get rich selling ads.

This reminds me of a recent article [0], where this line stood out:

> “We just introduced an emoji feature and comments are there so you can have conversations, and there’s more stuff in collaborative streaming that we’re going to introduce,” he added.

"We found a new niche and Twitter is trying to bully us out of it, but look, we'll have emoji soon. Comments too, and more social stuff. It's going to be great!" Sorry to cherry-pick Meerkat, they're actually an OK bunch, but that quote just stuck with me.

Add to this silliness how much money/interest is garnered by apps like Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp (actually, arguably solving a real problem), and it's hard to argue we're not in a similarly idiotic bubble to the previous one. Of course, this also creates valuable stuff (my favourite recently being Slack), but I'd be willing to bet that this huge BS-to-usefulness ratio isn't sustainable in the long term.

0: http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06/meerkat-founder-on-getting-...

edit: instant downvote - if you don't just disagree with my tone, please explain why you think I'm wrong

edit 2: I'm not saying I have an answer, but at least I tried to pick something that seemed worth doing (I work at Lavaboom, we're trying to make encrypted email easy to use - with extra privacy sprinkled on top)
I was wondering about that as well. The discussion so far was far from a flamewar.
I don't get the sense that the "Pros" are moving from Macs to Z, these pros that wanted all the power were already on PCs in the first place. And what HP really meant are the creative media pros (whose industry is still heavily on Macs), not really the same market IMO as the general pros including IT, data analysis, science and so on. I get the feeling HP is trying hard to grab the creative media pros and not really understanding them.

Mac Pro wasn't really about the specs because you always could get more powerful PCs for identical or cheaper prices. So focusing on the pure spec is not going to win you anyone. These creatives are willing to pay the higher costs and HP is missing the point IMO.

Creative media folks like Mac Pros because of the stronger ecosystem of Apple software and hardware. HP, if you want these folks, you need to work on building a stronger ecosystem and explain how it beats Apple on all endpoints.

HP did the right thing of pointing out the stronger connection to the software like
Adobe and Avid stuff but it's like in a smaller print all the way down of the page.
It looks like all of them (they use sqrt() and x^y) will be slower than calling log() directly.
Open Source, REST-Based Cloud Telephony Platform
Thanks Michael - very insightful. Yes that is my goal after completing the class. To build an app and get it into the app store.
Were you looking at the siftscience.com marketing site or the Sift Science console?
I think I would change the name from juju, Ubuntu had it first.
Ask for £35k from the existing company. Leave the discussion of equity out.
The number of bits does seem to affect neural network training and really kills it when you get really low (like 8 to 12 bits). The problem is that really small numbers are rounded down to zero, and then when summed together the result is really inaccurate.

Ideally you could do some kind of stochastic rounding, where the decimal value represents it's probability of being rounded up or down. On average the totals would still be the same. You could probably get the required number of bits really low then, perhaps even only one or two!

Something to look into when these algorithms are put into FPGAs and ASICs, which is starting to happen.
Is the author proposing an open-source tool for registration automation/scraping, which would compete with LastPass, 1Password, etc? Or open-source infrastructure that could be used by all such services?
Contrary to the naysayers, I like seeing stuff like this. Why? Because it's a simple, gentle introduction. It's easily digestible for the newcomer. And it might be easy enough to encourage a newcomer to start building their own VM that goes on to be something real.

For those that criticize it and find faults with it -- I'm sure the author would consider pull requests. Or you could provide your own fork with all the improvements that you believe are necessary.
Bulk content (when cloud storage might not be appropriate) is rarely important enough for reliability to be a concern, and home NAS is totally insufficient for reliability when it comes to truly important content as it does nothing for theft, fire, etc.

If my home media library gets wiped out by hardware failure, replacing it would be an annoyance but not a disaster. Anything that would be a disaster is covered by at least two cloud services.
While seemingly simple, the simple non-turing example is not too far off from the (simple) Forth-like stack-based programming language found and executed in bitcoin transactions.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script
Harvard engineering students devise BBQ smoker
Too bad these don't run OS X...
Was it ever financially wise?
The #1 reason I prefer mobile apps to web apps is because even those that require sign in will remember my login permanently. The entire rest of the web (with rare exceptions) all seems to believe that it's acceptable to require re-login over and over and over. I've drastically reduced the number of sites I use just to end the madness, even with 1Password. How is this still not solved in 2015?
Maybe I wasn't clear: Cash is returned on liquidity events, potentially at maturity (but maybe the fund rolls over positions or delivers stock) and maybe some other rare cases.
Here is it without those operations: https://i.imgur.com/xhyNnU4.png?1

EDIT: Without sin/cos: https://i.imgur.com/mTwgKKO.png?

You could do better by splitting the function into different ranges and using a lookup table for a formula that fits each range the best. This is how many fast approximations are done. See how the residual error fits nicely into a few different curves? Eureqa doesn't support this though.
The article seems to have done two things wrong:

1. Got facts wrong, apparently. I'm not in a situation to know whether it did, but it seems to have, and articles that seem wrong do get flaggedby users, presumably to prevent spreading mistruths.

2. It criticized the USA. I read HN via http://www.hckrnews.com/ and thus get to see a lot of the flagged articles even long after they're dead. Articles that criticize the USA are always in that category. That doesn't mean all of HN flags those, just that there is a critical mass of users with the necessary amount of karma who dislike them.
I'm not saying not to do it, just saying that there are easier ways to get wealth. You might be in the game for other reasons.
How effective could it be to set up a prep program that you can use to record both the time between two clicks and the duration of each click? Then take a few runs with at that to get some average case scenarios and implement those times into the auto-click script? Then depending on when the server counts the press (first click or second click), account for the difference in time between your target time and when to execute the double click.
I think this is largely true. Some of it is cultural (authority is generally unquestioned e.g: politics). Some of it is due to lack of leverage. IT services is a factory model, where anyone should be replaceable. But, if a manager bosses around a key developer in a product company, he would be screwed just like in any part of the world.
Computing log tables is what the would-be first computer was intended to do.
> (All that said, I do still support GMO labelling laws. People should be able to know what they're eating, even if they overreact to that information.)

Why do there have to be laws?

Kosher food isn't handled by federal inspectors. Why should GMO labeling?

Listen, if a bunch of people want to get together, found an organization for a GMO-free labeling, and you can choose to only buy products that go through that inspection process, go nuts. I have no problem with that.

But if you're saying you want to take my money, my tax dollars, to do something based on anti-science lunacy, excuse my french, but no fucking way.
the UN declaration you link to reads, in part:

>Article 26.

>(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.

Rights can be whatever society agrees to
Anything could hide behind this phrase: from making oneself rich to communist-style "sharing" to welfare abolition.
Why Email Marketing Is Like Lord of the Rings
Engineer creates a 3D metal printer prototype for $2 using electroplating
"I couldn't come up with an an attack vector, but I didn’t try very hard."

Would it be feasible to exploit the fact that this trick relies on primes very close to each other?
I love how this is a complementary technology to 3D printing by the way of a traditional printer. Simple. Effective. The biggest obstacle for widespread adoption might be software, in other words a robust toolkit for designing "wraps" of these imprints for your own 3D models.
systemd-nspawn needs root privileges, this doesn't.
Yes, .NET is a good example with a decimal type with:

Approximate Range -> (-7.9 x 1028 to 7.9 x 1028) / (100 to 28)

Precision -> 28-29 significant digits

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/364x0z75.aspx
Yes, .NET is a good example with a decimal type with Approximate Range -> (-7.9 x 1028 to 7.9 x 1028) / (100 to 28)
Precision -> 28-29 significant digits

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/364x0z75.aspx
What's the advisor pay structure like?
When I quit drinking, my sweet tooth grew immensely. That's a pretty common story.
This is a good article that comes up every so often. If you haven't read it, you should. The art is not quite as lost as advertised, though. A lot of C programmers pack structures that way out of habit.

There's definitely some cases where you shouldn't follow the "biggest to smallest" ordering, but they're usually pretty obvious when you run into them. They usually involve inheritance and such.
I walked away from what turned out to be a pretty significant pile of money by not purchasing my employee options at the last startup I was an employee of. I don't regret it and would still advise against people putting actual dollars down on private company options, but options ending up worth something are not a myth.
Good point. H1-B folks have very little leverage, which naturally leads to subservient behavior, and which in turns invite more abusive behaviors from others. I've been on calls where full time employees were yelling at H1-B folks. They would never dare to the same to their fellow full time employees
That's exactly what I was thinking.

"With the $10 million, Richard rents space in SoMa on a seven-year lease, hires lots more people, and within a few months he is able to roll out the minimally viable product to test the market."

There was also $1 million of prior angel investment. So total of $11 million raised before having an MVP to test the market. Is this really representative scenario?
In the example in part 4, doesn't this:

char *p; /* 8 bytes */
long x; /* 8 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */

Just end up being this, to align whatever comes after it in memory?

char *p; /* 8 bytes */
long x; /* 8 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
char pad[7]; /* 7 bytes */