skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm good friends with a startup that was trying to raise money for their Utah-based company. Really strong growth rate, revenue coming in, etc.

They went up and down sandhill road/SF, and got a couple really lousy offers for funding, and were shocked at how harsh the VC community can be.

Their board member (one of our closest/best mentors) recommended they go back, but make the first slide in their pitch deck "We're moving to San Francisco." They got five term sheets in the first two days, ended up raising from a top-tier firm.

Yes, this is anecdotal, but no, this is not an exaggeration. You can raise money being unwilling to go to the bay area, but you have to have a really compelling vision/growth rate. People have to be fighting over you.

VCs are weird.

Oakland or something may be a different situation (not sure if doing the South Bay thing would even save you any money - Palo Alto ain't cheap), but anecdotally people in Utah get told the same thing again and again. You can stay in Utah, and costs will be way lower, but you'll probably pay for it. (Note: our company is remote with headquarters in Utah)
Fascinating story.

I personally wish the article had gone a little further into being snarky, perhaps subtly, in recognizing how stupid, meaningless, unfunny, and unclever the idea of .io for "in/out" is for domains. Most websites and all computers do input/output and there's nothing interesting about that fact. I think it's a dumb trend, and I have an irrational, emotional dislike of the suggestion that it is good in any way for all these annoying startups and their dumb domains. end rant
> You can stick with Windows 7 if you want

Not indefinitely. It will get EOL'ed, and at that point it might not be possible to opt-out of the upgrade.

Which isn't bad given that MS isn't going to keep supporting W7 forever: It's a genuinely bad thing to have unpatched OSes with known security holes (zero-decade, I suppose?) out in the hands of non-technical users. That kind of thing was moderately acceptable when Average Windows User was behind a dial-up line, but those are going away, too.
I am an author of a distributed database (http://gunDB.io/) and I thought this article was fairly good, but with one grievance. Hashes aren't the ultimate solution.

Certainly hashes will make things a lot better, but a lot of people I know (including some of the people referenced in the article) are heralding them as the second coming of the web.

I disagree because they present more problems, ones that are harder for humans and easier for machines. First off, in order to find the data you practically speaking have to already have the data. Second, if you don't have the data, then you have to know the hash, but how do you know the hash without having had the data OR trusting some authority for the hash? Now you are back to centralization.

Third, and most important from my perspective, a hash often times will point to outdated content because by the time you find it it might have changed (this of course is a good thing but can be problematic). I know they addressed this a little bit in the article but it is worth reiterating. The point is that it is hard to do synchronization on hashes and I would argue that sync is the more important problem and that is what I am trying to address in my open source database.
Not this weekend, you can't!
There's some work being done in this area now: https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/06/15/agile-bpa-is-here/
> For some (bad?) startups, this is an even more valuable function of engineers than engineering.

How on earth is this healthy? If your "company" continues to exist by sucking up investment money gained by doing a song-and-dance with a group of folks in an office, but never churns out a product, this is success? Good lord.
>Actually the house was rented for the purpose of hosting the program, not the other way around.

From the CFP I got the impression that the residency is hosted in the same place you all are currently living:

>live for four months in a 10,000 ft² mansion in San Francisco (of which the organizers are long-term residents)

Is that not the case?
It's not that the bust is coming soon. Startups are notoriously bad tenants as a class, whose life cycle is too short. Signing long lease with them just doesn't make sense. By definition a startup is an experiment to build products and a business in a short amount of time, with one to two years of funding in most cases. 9 out of 10 these experiments fail, so 9 out 10 startup tenants will move out after a short time. Commercial landlords want long term tenants, not people going out of business in one or two years.

Commercial lease is really only applied to companies that can stay in business. A long lease is often not enforceable. The incorporated company simply declares bankruptcy and it's hard to collect the money on the full term of the lease. I remember in the Dot Com bust days some failing startups simply stopped paying rents but stayed on, to stretch that last dollar or to burn out that security deposit.
I just always felt a more equitable distribution of funds (as PA is a no fault state) is to have the people who have $100,000 cars to buy the insurance as they are the ones with the disposable income to afford it. The guy making 8 dollars an hour at Walmart with his 900 dollar beater isn't getting much value from that set up.
I live in West Oakland and the favorite game is still "fireworks or gunshots". Its a great place to live if you're in your 20s, but I wouldn't want to move my family here. Maybe up by Berkeley is better?
Los Angeles gets about 13 inches of annual rainfall. San Francisco gets about 20. Chicago gets about 36. New York gets nearly 50.

LA and SF may not be "deserts" in some technical sense, but it'll do for practical purposes.
Oakland is HUGE. You can't generalize it that much. There are so many sub area in Oakland that range from insanely dangerous and crappy all the way up to incredibly safe and beautiful (Rockridge, Piedmont). Also areas near Oakland like Emeryville are getting much nicer.

Unfortunately the prices in these places are also skyrocketing. I started paying $3k/mo for 1400sqft in a not great part of Emeryville last year. The current price for my exact same unit is $3400.
Ads-free Solitaire will cost you $10
I might be blind, but where was that assertion made?
"we've got instead IndexedDB over WebSQL (which many devs choose to wrap)"

It doesn't matter how developers choose to use IndexedDB, what does is for a Web standard to be sane and WebSQL never was. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9978713

"asm.js over NaCl (which v8 team as shown doesn't require a special compiler mode to optimize for)"

I don't see how not requiring a special compiler is an argument against it.

"ES5/ES5.1/ES6/ES7 language bloat over Your-Choice-Of-JS-Successor language or actually fixing the issues with JS"

ES5/ES5.1/ES6/ES7 ARE efforts to fix issues with JS and mostly driven by Mozilla.
I think it is about time that we (the users) reclaim the right to our data and what we do with it.
Never since the days of mainframes and timesharing have we been turning over so much of our (personal) data and the processing of it to third-party, centralized servers. Our computers are starting to look like nothing more than fancy graphics terminals, just a few steps up from the VT100's of yore.

It's about time we start doing something about this.
That's pretty specious. Your work requires you to use it. So presumably you'll only be testing on your VM instance. And if you are using at work, then use the Enterprise version, which doesn't use a Microsoft account whatsoever. And lets you control all of these privacy concerns, including telemetry.

You bitching that your job requires you to test a product against Windows in a VM is not the same as Microsoft holding you personally hostage to give up all your personal information, however you try to spin it.
I'm tempted to say that you'll get better at it with more experience, but... I'm not happy with the design of my part of my current project, either, and I've been doing this for thirty years. (You will get better at design with more experience (and more input from good software designers). I'm way better at it than I was in my twenties. But there's still plenty of places that I'm not satisfied with the design.)

Are you by any chance a perfectionist? There always will be places to improve your designs, especially if you're a perfectionist. Part of the answer is to not be such a perfectionist. You can scale perfection (or almost perfection) up to a point, but not beyond; 2000 lines seems like reasonably close to the breaking point.

Everybody's more comfortable in their preferred environment. Learning a new set of tools is not fun, because you're less effective than you would be in your normal environment, and you know it, and you compare your clumsiness with the new tool to how well you can do with the old one. But you sound like a pretty smart person, and you should be able to learn new things pretty readily. It sounds like you're unwilling to ride through the phase of uneasiness, of I-don't-know-how-to-do-anything-with-this-stupid-new-tool, of feeling dumb and clumsy, for long enough to become proficient. Look, I don't like having to do that, either. I usually kind of resist doing so for a while. But don't let it stop you from learning new stuff; whatever you go into, you're going to have to do that.
Some of it's pay as you go, oddly enough. But you are largely correct that more money equals more access to these kinds of things.

There is a company in China that paid them to install Office 365 in their data center. There is an amount of money that will make them install it in your data center, too.

I just think that there has never been more choice for end users and a lot of this stuff about privacy is disingenuous. There are a group of people that wouldn't be happy even if MS released their own version of TAILS and hosted part of the Tor network. (It would be "embrace, extend, extinguish!"..."Tor is part sponsored by the Navy...I be MS gives your Tor traffic directly to the NSA."...It's really not hard to imagine the BS.)
If you're on Facebook, then I think it's reasonable to assume that Facebook is recording what you do on Facebook.

If you use Windows, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that Microsoft is downloading your browsing history and keystrokes.
I have found that this says more about the ability of the management and less about the ideas underpinning remote work. Large companies figured out some time ago that they could have a large remote workforce. So it isn't just Basecamp or whoever that is doing remote work. Remote work has it challenges but (and here is the important point) they can be managed if the team knows how to manage.

FOSS proved over two decades ago that you can build complex competitive systems with people you have never met. The fact that you couldn't make it work doesn't mean that it doesn't work. It means your company could not figure out how to make it work for you.
> I never understood why investors need to be 'close.'

It's particularly jarring given how many of the same investors are arguing we should tear town universities and replace them with MOOCs, demolish shops for Amazon, and so on and so forth. Apparently face time and interpersonal interaction is an irrelevant artefact of the old world except when it comes to their own industry.
Just out of curiosity, how many channels are you subscribed to? Also how many messages per hour? more or less...
Why Programming is Hard
Even if it doesn't fail and turns into a unicorn, its space needs will rapidly increase and it will still want to move on to bigger and better offices.

The entire point of a startup is to not stay its current size - either it will grow wildly or disappear altogether.

If you can comfortably occupy the same amount of space for 2+ years, you're not a startup, you're a small business.
US revises visa process by focusing on great UI
I support this cause, but perhaps not spearheaded by the FSF. Their support materials and such promote strictly free distributions, which has a severe usability penalty and are not a great choice for people new to Linux.
Splashy Water Tracker
Not to pile on too much, but the Fed has been amazingly slow to raise rates and only shows signs of doing the most timid increase. It's the cheap money that's fueling the mad rush, yes, but it's a blunt policy tool being used to help along parts of the country that are really still struggling.

Until Detroit and Stockton and Pittsburgh are doing well again, aggressive policy is going to continue to fuel massive growth in SF and the Bay Area.

Tightening is not coming fast nor aggressively.
Apple will debut new Apple TV in September (including SDK)
UX Strategy from Start to Launch
Top 50 Healthcare iPad/iPhone App
I like my software knowing what I like and what I'm interested in.

So do I, but I don't like my software vendors knowing it too.
Well, trade secret laws vary state by state, but Data General Corp. v. Digital Computer Controls, Inc.
seems to support their claim that a paywall is enough to claim the information is "protected."

In that case, Data General sent design documents to anyone who bought their computers, with a contractual agreement informing about their confidentiality, and that was deemed to be protected and therefore DCC to be at fault for using them for making a nearly identical computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Corp._v._Digital_....
Well, then, new landlord business if the startup fails.
Yup, and we have an annual summer program to give air conditioners away to elderly people and such. Why not also a little water, especially considering the difficulty of stopping it.
The last thing I saw before my iPad's browser crashed out were the words, "ROLEX : Rolex value your time".
gok covered this fairly well in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9978755

It's a big, really big dataset, and things get far better the more data you have. In order to even have it, let alone keep it up to date, a significant amount of space and memory would be needed.
Cryptoplay withAngularJS, feel free to add your algorithm or any feature you want
Google, a very large company with nearly unlimited technical resources, continues to bus workers 40 miles down the peninsula every day because they want workers to stay on-site. Google, of all companies, could afford as much office space in SF as they need, yet they still choose to only have a relatively small satellite office there.

The experience of large companies that have large remote workforces and FOSS projects that have workers so motivated that they'll work for no pay probably doesn't translate well to a small startup that doesn't have the resources of a large company, nor the employees so motivated that they'll work for free.

Remote work, as you say, has it's challenges, and sometimes it's better to pay the money avoid the challenges than to pay the money to confront the challenges.
Yes you can resize it, to 1/4 of that or so.
Native Americans iirc thrived without the concept of "privatized land" for thousands of years. Same for basically other self-sustaining native population in history.

Okay, you got the occasional clashes with other clans for land but hey, you could always move somewhere else. That's impossible now, given the massive numbers of humans on this planet.
I have lived in West Oakland and currently live in Adam's Point (both in Oakland's borders) and it feels like an entirely different city.
Maybe they used the equivalent of a trap street[1], creating fake providers to catch scrapers? If Amazon had them in their service, it'd be pretty damning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
It's sad how true this is.

I still fondly remeber the days of Firefox 2.5. IMO the best browser ever. It feels like Mozilla is trying to shove more shit down my throat with every update.

I'm by no means trying to defend Microsoft here. I installed Win10 yesterday, and they replaced my FF default with Microsoft Edge (which is arguably better than IE, but still not something I'd use voluntarily).

Why can't Mozilla ship their bloat as default-addons so I can at least easily remove all code associated with them. Revisiting about:config after every update gets really annoying. At this point the only thing mozilla has going for them is that all alternatives are worse.
That's why civil discovery is a thing.
> Hell, look at this very thread on HN. There are people further upthread essentially saying, "Whatever, I like it because it's convenient."

Is that so ridiculous a concept? People routinely trade privacy for convenience.

Sending my location to Google through their maps is ridiculously convenient. Getting around using public transportation, especially in a city I'm unfamiliar with, would be a pretty awful experience without it.

While it's a small convenience, Gmail parsing my airline confirmation emails into an easy-to-read format is pretty cool, and I like that it's done. To do this (and have a spam filter), they must be parsing my private email in some capacity.

I've personally never been a fan of digital personal assistants. I've only used Google Now and found it more annoying than effective. But I can certainly understand why getting up-to-date traffic information when you're about to drive home from work would be a really useful thing to have. To do that, it has to learn your daily habits.

Convenience and privacy are almost always at odds with each other. It's a give and take, so ideally I should be getting more convenience for whatever privacy I'm giving up. That may not be the case here, and I'm not saying where your personal line should be, but don't assume people are ignorant just because they're choosing convenience over privacy. (Not saying you are personally, but others in this thread are.)
here's a wild thought - play with your kids. seriously, they love it. as they get older, they'll want to 'play' with your toys and one of those games might be doing goofy things on/with a 'computer'. then instead of 'playing' engage deeply with their school learning journey where playing with computers is a really useful and occasionally enjoyable thing that may be (but probably is not) happening _in_ their school. for extra pro points, blog your ideas/experience and get other parents involved.
UPS is going out of business, too. UPS owns warehouses, trucks, and planes, none of which are very defensible advantages. Like the companies I listed, they're a network effect company. Those companies are going away because bigger networks can be formed on the global computer by anyone who wants to participate—warehouse owners, truck drivers, bike messengers, etc.

UPS gives Amazon a good deal because they push so much volume, and it's way easier to sell to one company than it is to sell to millions of them. But the global computer makes it feasible to directly connect every producer with every consumer—it won't be hard to sell to millions of them. If a shipper needs guaranteed future business, customers can band together and put a contract for lower prices on the global computer that enforces a payment or reputation penalty if a minimum spending limit isn't reached. Decentralization gives everyone the economies of scale that once required the backing of a megacorporation.

Most of the advantages of scale are reducible to middleman-free interactions on the global computer.
You mean they had the good fortune that their ancestors did not land in a desert.
Large companies manage to not go out of business while still having a large remote workforce.

Large companies often have a ton of inertia, not a lot of competition, and they often take a very long time to fail. Just because they've started doing it, and are getting away with it for now, does not mean it's a good idea.

I'm not saying it's NOT a good idea, I'm just saying you can't tell based merely on the fact that they're doing it. They also have lots of employees who put in the bare minimum and punch a clock to draw a paycheck. Does that fly in a smaller, less well-funded company?
They would need a new approach to monetary policy to really have justified raising rates in 2013, because there was neither inflation nor full employment, the two things the traditional Taylor rule watches. Inflation was stuck around 0.1-0.2% for all of 2013 (below target), while unemployment was around 7-8% (above target).

If the SF Bay Area had its own monetary policy, things look a lot different in the local statistics, of course.
Huh. They should probably increase that number.
Why would you use Julia over something like Erlang for parallel? Is it better math support? Seems like Erlang has a good model for this but does lack in other areas.
The criminals responsible for this treasonous leak should be hunted down and imprisoned :-)
> Also, it's kind of embarrassing that Mozilla's official video for this shows an unactivated version of Windows 10.

All pre-release builds of Windows 10 have that watermark. Why is that embarrassing?

Edit: I stand corrected; there is an "Activate Windows" watermark distinct from the build identifier, which was added in the later preview builds. There was a window of time where new VMs couldn't be activated, since the Preview keys had been killed but the final release was not yet available. Looks like we recorded this on a fresh VM running a preview build, which can't be activated. Oh well.

Cite: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_win...
Toto.
I might just be tired of hearing the same arguments over and over, but it I did see the assertion that BitLocker shouldn't be used to keep your "secrets". As if the choice of which drive encryption software you use on your laptop should be your primary concern when securing yourself against an adversary. (The primary concern is to thoroughly evaluate your adversary and look at your available options for opsec and InfoSec. Maybe you need drive encryption. Maybe you need burners. Maybe you should only use public terminals. Etc. It also means seriously asking yourself if you actually have an adversary or just like to think that you might some day.)

Just sort of saying..."How can you trust MS NOT to have backdoored bitlocker just use Linux. Suck it NSA." Won't actually make you secure.
Another reason I didn't see mentioned: many open floor plan spaces are still permitted as light-industrial spaces. Due to the intricacies of the city's zoning laws and unfortunate politics, landlords are at a greater risk of receiving a zoning violation for leasing space to a tech company than they would be if they found a "blue-collar" tenant.
Help them even more by trying GNU/HURD.
Part of the way that FreeNET addresses the dating issue with hashes is to attach a version number to the content. A monotonic integer that goes up each time it's updated. In this case then though the hash can't be represented directly by the content but is instead more like a UUID. Which puts you back at your second point which FreeNET doesn't really have a way to deal with either, so it ends up people trading urls on message boards essentially.