skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know a guy who fixed a long-standing traffic congestion problem in his city by replacing some complicated parking signs on a busy thoroughfare with simple, MUTCD-compliant "no parking any time" signs (which are cheaply available from a variety of manufacturers and can easily be ordered online). They've been up for ages, nobody has touched them, and it's not clear whether the city doesn't mind or simply hasn't noticed.
You could use this in conjunction with something like Cleverbot to create a virtual pen-pal who sends you snail mail letters.
This guy ate it for 30 days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg
And you were doing so well until you said "the blockchain".

(The singular with a "the" means the Bitcoin blockchain, which is increasingly centralised under a decreasing number of Chinese mining pools. And this is apart from the stupendous list of problems with literally every single aspect of Bitcoin. It may not be a great idea to pin any of our hopes on the digital Cue::Cat.)
Non-black people get profiled too.

What other purpose does that question have other than to further profile you? How does it bear in any way on a driving infraction?
The bets are contrived for sure, but that was for the purpose of simplicity.

I believe the LinkedIn profile betting example is something feasible in the future, that we can't imagine very well by today's mores.
Cheaper than a bunch of funerals.

100 hours of solo driving in 4 days should be simply classed as 'reckless' and should result in your license being taken away before you kill a bunch of people. Especially when also transporting passengers.
Shi'a traditions state that Ali had a different recension of the Quran - it contained the same text as the Uthmanic, but the Surahs were arranged in chronological order. So it seems plausible to me that, at least, different versions of the Quran pre-standardisation differed in the order of the Surahs.
If we avoided reading books simply because they have criticisms, we'd never read anything.
I assume that he's running the calculation as a whole, on the entire body of startups. In other words, given that these pro-rata investments must be all-or-nothing to avoid signaling risks, what're the financial returns of investing in the entire body of YC startups that raise follow-up funding, regardless of whether they're actually a good deal individually?

I can see how this could easily turn out in YC's favor. For one, the really obvious failures often flame out during YC itself and fail to raise follow-up funding, and so YC wouldn't have any obligation there anyways. And the really big successes become worth far more than $250M, enough to subsidize many failures.

The big question for me is what it does to incentive alignment - it seems like YC now has an incentive to ensure that companies it doesn't like don't raise follow-up funds, as well as incentives to get lower valuations on the early funding rounds. It also in theory should make them pickier about their application process, knowing they're committed to participating in any follow-up rounds. On the plus side, they have an incentive to ensure that promising startups do raise follow-up funding (rather than go out of business), it avoids some of their misaligned incentives relative to the rest of the investment community, and they have an incentive to keep helping their investments later in life.
Dear Mom: How Do You Find a Mentor?
There is certainly a metagame but there is also metagame between spam and spam filters.

It's a dynamic equilibrium that can be accounted for.
Every place I've worked, either being interviewed or doing the interviewing, has worked on a "multiple interviews and pick the best" basis.

This first past the post nonsense is crazy.
bcheung, I absolutely agree that CRISPR is substantive and even very exciting. But sloppy allusions to things far from fruition make me not like this particular article very much.
I imagine it's because 10% kicks in really easy and requires the you to stop and think about your actions. If you need a full 50%, screw it, go for 6, almost everyone else will. At 10%, though, you stand a fairly good chance of being the tipping point.
It's called history. Even to this day Arabic newspapers/books don't have the extra symbols to aid reading. These were introduced for non-arabs.
Do you have superhero coding skills? Compete in the Total Recode Challenge
And then one person says that they chose 6 points and haven't won it via lottery. The other students can't retaliate because the only way to get back at her would be to take away points from the entire group
Entertainment is not mutually exclusive with the utility.
Water bailouts. Har.
The article specifically state that the grades are not curved.
No, we live in a capitalist society - what is needed is a way to monetize such services that is as easy as trading in sensitive personal data behind the guise of "free" services.

Or a different social order (my favorite) - but the first problem is probably much easier to solve in a short time-frame.
>Firstly, he's not a 'self-appointed ethicist', he's a professor appointed by the University of Washington.

Yes he is - all “ethicists” are self-appointed. The particular self-appointed ethicist in this article is actually a philosophy professor. I can call myself an ethicist too if I want to - ironically I can’t call myself an engineer.

>I don't see any ethicists opposing geoengineering in principle, they're just pushing for a full debate - which would include many more aspects than just the engineering one.

Can you actually find one? I have read dozens of posts and papers from these self-appointed ethicists and I have never come across one that supports anything new. They never raise any real reasons to oppose anything new, they just oppose the new because it is new.

There is no point having a “debate” about geoengineering unless we actual do some research first to know if it is possible.
I'd rather post a question here and learn something with the goal of attaining nonzero (but positive) business acumen than to say nothing and set myself up for a possible failure in the future.

It might also be the case that someone else learnt something too.
I wonder if the prof has given any thought to what made that one class unique, if there were any factors that distinguished it from his other classes

off the top of my head, I wonder if it was a particularly small class

though I could imagine a lot of other potentially relevant factors
What we see in practice with all extant implementations of blockchains is increasing centralisation. Because computing hashes is the sort of computation whose efficiency per watt greatly increases with more and more specialised hardware. Thus the Bitcoin situation, where the promise of everyone being able to mine a few coins has become a small number of Chinese mining pools; altcoins do no better.
"Asynchronous, non-real-time schemes that look like vanilla web traffic are the best."

It's a shame that high-latency mix networks died out with Mixminion [1] a few years ago. There's a lot of interesting research that never got implemented, that would, in my opinion, bring us a lot closer to truly anonymous email.

If this is a topic you find interesting, take a look at the Pynchon Gate [2]. It's a private information retrieval system, proposed by Sassaman (Mixmaster), Cohen (Bittorrent), and Nick Mathewson (Tor), that had a lot of interesting ideas about how to facilitate the anonymous retrieval of email.

It was never implemented, but it's a very approachable paper that serves as an excellent introduction to the incredible world of anonymity networks.

[1] https://github.com/mixminion/mixminion/

[2] http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/sassaman:wpes2005.pdf (PDF Warning)
There is a big difference between a party themed "Corporate CEO's and HOES" (Penn State+) and people getting together to play beer pong. Beer pong's likability is analogous to Corn Hole. Anyone can do it. Almost anywhere.

The sign than reads "Twitter Frat House" is unnecessary.
This is perfect, thank you very much, I appreciate you taking the time to write this out.

Do you have any recommendations on books to learn about finding exploits in general? My specific skills are in deep and nuanced areas of the Android kernel, and I have some good ideas on potential areas to investigate, but a thorough understanding of the subject would be helpful. It seems like a very lucrative hobby or full time endeavor.
Ask HN: What's pro-rata? (And How to learn that related stuff?)
With the recent top post about YC "adding a pro rata provision" I feel like a complete n00b in these topics. I'm a startup founder and we're profitable, but I'm not familiar with all these terms. Maybe because we've bootstrapped and never need to raise money, but I still want to learn in case we ever receive private funding.

Related question: I remember reading a post a woman wrote about how a founder can get screwed and lose the all the rights to his/her company when the company was sold. Anyone remembers?

Sorry for the extra-n00b. Thanks!
Common knowledge among Muslims. I memorized the entire Quran word-for-word when I was 12 years old myself, as did many of my friends.
15 years now and no, back when I started I wouldn't have expected a sign-on bonus or such a large salary. If you're in one of the major hubs though you can expect six figures early on, within 2-4 years depending the skillset and your negotiation abilities.
I don't think you would have a spoiler, or someone who pulls the demand. I think the money would actually stop that pretty quickly because of the peer pressure ramifications from the others in the class.

So, a 20 person class has 2 6pt slots. You take the bids and collect and hold the money. Grades are announced and then you hand out the money or give it back to the original bidders in case of betrayal. The spoiler is basically denying the points and cash to everyone. I get the feeling the identity of the spoiler would be found, if for no other reason all the innocent folks showing their papers. I hope the spoiler is graduating and not coming back because that type of crap is remembered.
Robot as marketing strategy: Bosch bets on Rotimatic’s consumer flatbread maker
> the females

I can't see this usage any more without picturing a Ferengi saying it, or maybe Davis Aurini.
Or better: "How 2 wives created Silicon Valley". Rewind the clock to that morning in 1938 when Bill Hewlett started working with David Packard in the garage at the house where Packard lived. They worked there for 1 year. They made no money for 1 year. Meanwhile, Mrs Packard went out to work, and later Mrs Hewlett went out to work. And for several decades afterwards, this was how many early stage startups in the Valley were financed: finance-via-wife.
I have paper copies going back to the mid 80s.
Am I the only one that reduced the article's credibility the moment I saw the poster from Hackers used as the lead-in image?
They would see that you were communicating (because by necessity, all your stuff passes through them) but not who to, because they couldn't strip off the next layer of the onion. Much like Tor.
A popup or dropdown could be used to show multiple external links. We have found though that if we need to add an extra source, we simply add an extra sentence that has its own verb. For example:

Person A claims that Person B did something, but person C claims otherwise.

We use a different source links on each italicized verb. This works for us, due to the way we write posts, although there are some edge cases. It'd be interesting to see if it works for other sites with different requirements. The principle is to avoid footnotes and try to match the links meaning directly with the text. As the other poster mentioned, there perhaps should be a color distinction, or some other identifier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_rata

For example: "In corporate practice, a pro-rata dividend means that every shareholder gets an equal proportion for each share he or she owns."

As for not getting screwed, the best thing you can do is to get a lawyer to review all your contracts.
CP/M hardly ran on anything but S-100 bus machines in the beginning.

It was common in those days to compile the BIOS directly into your copy of CP/M, rather than running it from ROM. CP/M had memory areas set aside that you could patch. The ROM was only expected to contain a boot loader that would copy the OS image into memory and jump to it.
But why am I busting my ass, working those long hours, while you're not, and you're still going to get more than me?

Because you're getting paid, presumably. Why does it matter if some hypothetical founder In absentia is making more than you or not? Know your own value and negotiate compensation that seems fair. If you want "free money for laying around" then negotiate a large portion of your own compensation as a percentage of the company's profits (or as stock in a company that offers dividends). Ownership isn't just for the founders.

Anyway, that aside, the truth is, most people in most companies aren't really "busting their ass", at least not all the time. They're coasting, doing just enough to not get fired, and spending plenty of time reading Dilbert, Techcrunch, Hacker News, Facebook, whatever. If people are busting their asses, they probably have what they consider a good reason. Something like:

1. They want a promotion / raise.

2. They are just plain passionate about what they are doing.

3. Their compensation is somehow tied to the performance of the company.

4. They're trying to impress somebody for whatever reason. Maybe so they can go on to start their own company.

5. Insert $WHATEVER.
But the challenge doesn't make sense, there isn't much risk, no fear of being known. Economic studies have covered this before, would you rather make $50k where everyone else makes $75k? or make $40k where everyone else makes $30k and people pick the latter because they want to have more than their peers. Everyone getting the same points doesn't change anything relative to those around me.

In a paper score, assuming 100, 2 to 6 points just doesn't mean much. 6 points is greater than 5, it could take me from 84 to 90! I'll go for the gusto and try for 6. 2 points just doesn't make any difference, and I wouldn't feel any better getting 2 points.
What adderall does to your brain
You want something that is perceived to be fair in order to minimize the chances of someone deciding he'd rather get nothing than 2 points.

If I were in the class I'd propose a weighted lottery where everyone had a chance to be one of the sixes but those with worse grades had a somewhat better chance. While there might be disgruntlement over the weight, I'd guess it'd be less severe than if someone that an entire fairness factor was being ignored.

An interesting questions would be what to do if someone issued an ultimatum to the group "give me one of the sixes or I will ruin it for everyone". I'd think in that case every move ends with no one getting any points.
Agreed, but your assumption may not be correct.
BTW, Casinos are forbidden in Turkey.
Qualcomm says may split itself, cut jobs
Apple just confirmed everybody's biggest fear about China
Interview: The Pitch is a podcast that lets you invest in early-stage startups
Not only did Vector Graphic build complete systems, they also sold components. My first computer had their Z80 processor board at its core.
Qualcomm Slips Modestly on FQ3 Profit Beat, Cost Reduction Plan
It's correct. There were thousands of people who memorized the verses at the time of Muhammad(pbuh). Muslims recite the Quran at least 5 times a day in the daily prayers from memory. Even today there are millions of people in all age groups who've memorized the whole Quran in Arabic
Coinkite Offline Bitcoin Tools–Backup(KeyEscrow), Key Gen and Sign Transactions
I made a very early version of something like this in 2002 using a loophole that allowed me to frame content in such a way that the original site was visible in an iframe with avatars and speech balloons for the visitors floating over the iframe. Unfortunately the next release of the major browsers closed that loophole (because it could be used in bad ways just as easily as it could be used in good ways). That was a real bummer, I really liked the idea of 'meeting' people on other websites if you both visited through the portal.

Maybe with the current generation of browsers there is another way to achieve the same effect.

On websites with lots of visitors this would likely not work but then you might limit the visible entries to those from some slice through the population based on certain criteria (location or other demographic data).
Curious: what did you ask?
This would be great for porting already-done and well-defined stuff to oddball platforms that you don't have in-house experience with and are not comfortable vetting talent in that particular platform. "We're primarily an iOS company, here's our existing app, here's what it looks like, how every interface behaves, the backend services it hits, etc. Now just do exactly this, but on Windows Phone." I don't know if I'd have the guts to use it for "I've got nothing but an idea--make me an app from nothing!"
Assuming you mean the Mac IP and if so I believe Microsoft had a cross licensing deal in place which would cover it. It never got to litigation though.
That's a ridiculously trite response.
Everyone's dream? I dunno, getting life-changingly rich by selling worthless stock is kinda scary, much more so than winning a lottery (and I never bought a ticket because, among other things, winning is irksome.) It'd kinda ruin it for me.

I mean, I'm in it for the money and all, but one needs a lot of contempt for the guy stuck with worthless stock to feel perfectly fine with the outcome. Unless you genuinely thought it was a good deal for the buyer and even then its disappointing a bit
you're creating a straw man with this "forever" business that keeps paying a checked-out owner a huge dividend. you don't like the idea of it because it's impossible.

in reality, over the long term (years), they are either run into the ground, embezzled from, or sold.

management and ownership will always eventually overlap in any sustainable business.
Pretty ridiculous that there would be outrage over red plastic cups!

I like how the very first sentence claims discrimination against women in tech and links to Ellen Pao LOSING her case as proof.
We featured The Pitch on BetaList a while ago and since I was really intrigued about the concept I decided to interview the founders to hear more about the backstory.

Would love to hear what the HN community thinks :)
I think we are missing some context - and that is very important to show if the students could communicate/collaborate (such as a homework question) or a test question.

> I would say at best you have a 50/50 chance of a total stranger choosing the option that is better for the common good.

It depends on factors such as the student's current grade. I would argue you are more likely to choose 6 if you have a lower grade.

> If it were the general public at large I would estimate at least 60% would choose the more personally beneficial option.

Here is an related experiment. Choose N random people, and offer 2 choices: $50 or $200 and run the same experiment.

Here is an interesting question - are people less "greedy" if the prizes/points have a greater span? Such as instead of 2 points and 6 what about 2 points and 20 points.

I think the experiment is interesting any way you think about it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Sleep+Is+the+New+Status+Symb...
"100 hours of solo driving in 4 days"

uh... its more than 4 days, right?
Accelerate Microsoft SharePoint with WAN Optimization
1 copywriting quibble: "We live in an era where major founder leverage ..." -> it's not an era, it's more like a few years and it could flip pretty quickly.

(Sorry couldn't help myself.)
You're right I vaguely remember seeing a very wide range of top scores possible. From 25 - 200
Fair enough- and I do. I assumed you were commenting on the tweets, my mistake.
How did this hoodwink.d worked?
How long do we have to wait before the Pao case stops being dragged out as proof of 'sexism in tech'?

It seemed to me that certain parts of the media decided the case was a slam dunk, Pao lost, and now it's still being mentioned because...?
Well, I have :)
I wonder if jealously could also play a role here. The option to choose 2 points doesn't seem completely risk-free to me from an "emotional" point of view:

Suppose you choose the 2 and the class was actually disciplined enough that the points weren't lost. Then you might think that there might very well be a small group of students who got 6 additional points because they were greedy and you were not.

If students underestimate the risk of all points getting lost, they might in turn overestimate the "risk" of getting less than others if they play it safe.
I'm picturing some slaveholders in the mid-1800s tut-tutting John Brown, saying how they see no problem with slavery (naturally they treat their slaves with respect and no slave has ever complained to them), saying how the abolitionists are losing a lot of credibility behaving like that.
>Really, what use would I ever have of these silly walled cloud or streaming services?

OTOH, your use case could be called "outlier" and "a throwback".

Most young kids don't care for owning music at all (not talking about the few buying vinyl, or the slightly more buying digital, I'm talking about the huge majority).

They are OK with streaming like Pandora and Spotify, not to mention they're fine with just YouTube most of them time.
Half sarcastic, maybe. But, genuinely curious about how they are managing the risk around scoping/estimation. Perhaps using overly conservative estimates or else assuming that on average their estimates will be close. Or maybe those Google/MIT engineers are magical.
Are you aiming to make a point here or is this a joke?
Does that mean YC will fight against the "Major Investor" clauses in funding rounds that only allow pro rata rights to investors who have X% ownership?

http://www.2-speed.com/2014/09/dreaded-major-investor-clause...

Of course, 7% might be enough to overcome the threshold in many cases, but as an angel investors in YC deals, I have lost my pro rata rights following a YC Note/SAFE conversion this way (despite the docs suggesting I am protected).
In the world of Frondo there would be no discount on future revenues, which implies a world without risk and that's the fundamental that he's missing.
Typo should be: ... differentiation is a binary ...
Its so hard to believe that the end goal is to be a curated oDesk- which essentially makes it even worse than a online labor marketplace- a services business of which there are 100,000+ in the world. What would be the differentiator?

The idea isn't new and there have been startups like GroupTalent, Crew and TopTal that have tried/are trying this and many others in various different verticals.

I'm wondering if the A list angels and VCs are privy to some deeper plan about what this intends to become long-term.
People collect old manuscripts and books. People donate old manuscripts and books. Not that surprising
This is correct. We price out the gigs ahead of time and match them with developers who like the price.
Really? Now you can't have company parties with a college party theme?

When are we just going to come out and say that all of this moral outrage has jumped the shark?
I think the article didn't have much to say about this story, and decided to throw in content from other articles to pad it out.
I can't seem to find easy directions for putting it on an X201; got any suggestions?