David

In the Huffington Post article, you wrote: "Years of working with NGOs and government aid programs were convincing me that handouts are a dead end, temporarily soothing the acuteness of the injustice but taking donor and recipient down a path of dependence that ultimately makes the international wealth divide even wider."

Do you feel that way about a universal basic income? Does your statement only refer to single-recipient donations, that tend to cause dependence? I can't claim any personal experience, but from what I've read in e.g. [1] and [2], an unconditional basic income has positive effects on the community. The lesson I've taken from such pilot studies is that direct, conditionless donations are a very effective way to help the poor. I'm curious if I've learned the wrong lesson, and the benefits only appear if it's happening for a large population (or perhaps even that's not effective, and the studies are flawed or misleading).

[1] http://www.bignam.org/BIG_pilot.html [2] http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100

Maybe there's always a bottleneck to the wealth you receive, but there's no such bottleneck to the wealth you create. You're not limited in in your creation just because some other startup is doing well.

That's also true of working at a larger company, except that larger companies usually have their wealth (product, service, whatever it may be) created and are trying to get more money out of it. Working at one is generally going to involve less raw wealth generation than working at a startup, which I think is part of what the author is trying to say.

This is very similar to the 14-sensor emotiv headset (emotiv.com), which is a little pricier, but closer to a full EEG in scope. One thing I'm not sure of--are the behind-the-ear sensors in the Muse intended to be reference sensors? Because depending on the specific location behind the ear, there's not a lot to see there. That's the standard reference sensor location on the Emotiv, and one of several reference locations on a typical full EEG headset (I think).

If it's not a reference electrode, and is intended to be used for data collection, then the raw magnitude of the data will be next to meaningless. Only magnitude relative to data in the same wearing session should mean anything, given the large variability of skin conductance.

I'll also be curious to see how they've solved the problem of noise on a dry electrode. Using the Emotiv to collect data for an experiment on Emotion, we occasionally ran into a trial's worth of data that was unusable because of (we think) sensor noise, and that was using fresh saline solution on felt sensor pads.

What is the distribution like among the top 1000 channels? Presumably the top of the top 1000 channels far outproduce the bottom, just like the top 1000 far outproduce the rest of youtube. Given such a distribution, what are the top few channels earning? 100,000 a month? 1,000,000 a month? Even more?

Other interesting questions: How much of that is profit? Relatedly, does it cost a prohibitive amount to have a highly successful youtube channel? Does amount spent on production each month correlate with amount earned, or do consumers care much more about the content than the production quality?

What is the median income of the top 1000 channels? What's the overall median income of active youtube partners? What's the median income of channels produced (primarily) by a single person?

Some of these questions should be answerable by looking at available stats, like views for the top couple of channels versus the lower end of the top 1000. (Are the actual channels in the top 1000, preferable ranked, available somewhere?) I'll see if I can answer any more of them in the morning...

It is widely accepted that hippocampal replay occurs during sleep and is an important part of memory consolidation.

It is not widely accepted that this activation is, or even leads to, the subjective experience that we call dreaming.

The article gets it right in the second paragraph, but most of the rest of the paper makes incorrect reference to dreams. Don't expect to program your dreams any time soon.

The actual result here is very interesting in its own right; it suggests that the consolidation process can be directed, and if the replay system plays the role in learning that many people suspect it does, then we might be able to focus our learning on particular experiences. The idea of learning something while you sleep by playing a tape might not be as ridiculous as I always thought it was.

The article claims way more than the paper does.

It's pretty widely accepted that during sleep, the hippocampus replays patterns of activation that were produced during the day. In this case, that means that the rats are essentially traversing the maze in their sleep.

However, this is _not_ dreaming. The neural replay activity is seen in humans and animals alike, but it doesn't correspond to the subjective experience of dreaming in humans, AFAIK.

Just put more of your point in your original post, and people will realize that you actually have a point. They'll be less likely jump to conclusions about your intelligence. >.>

For example, "Are you a scientist? If not, why not? I ask because I wonder if we're jumping to conclusions about the cause of the gender disparity in STEM [...]" would suggest that you're a sane person who has a real point to make.

I want this discussion to go somewhere, by the way. It was an interesting thought.

Dropbox has traction and paying users. Why do they need $200 million? Of course it's not just a two-man gig anymore, but... what is it for?

If their business model isn't supporting the growth they want and they're not going to change it, is throwing money around going to be all that helpful?

Maybe I'm doubting that they'll be able to bring in that many new users because I can't imagine how anyone hasn't heard of dropbox by now -- which is pretty silly. I've just known about it for a long time because of HN.

Or maybe there are economies of scale that I don't know about, and by spending $x they'll be able to save/make $y>>$x?

(...Are they going to get off of s3, set up their own datacenters?)

My bank limits you to 20 characters, which I'll grant is decent. But: NO non-alphanumerics, and, get this, is case insensitive.

This may just convince me to switch banks...

You can do it pretty easily by successive halving. 10%, just move the decimal over add 5% which is just half of 10% add 2.5%, which is half of 5% and add 1%, moving the decimal over twice

...of course you either naturally think that way or it seems like an unreasonable amount of work. YMMV.

Personally, I usually take 15% and add a bit depending on how good the service was.

A note, HN's user system is case sensitive and this is not, which at first led to some great confusion for me. me: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=David not me: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=david

Carnegie Mellon's intro CS course has been in python for a couple of years, and we're switching to ruby for the coming year. Of course, that's followed by (Our own version of! =/ ) C, and then SML.

Question for those who know more than I: what are the tradeoffs of first learning one language in depth, then branching out versus learning several languages(/styles) early on?

I'd never heard of a break-up fee before. It makes sense, but it's a gesture of good faith that I honestly never would have expected to see in the business world. (This also makes sense in the context of a close-knit and trust-based community; I had just underestimated these properties of the startup world.)

Does anyone have experience with a break up fee situation? And if it's not private, what were the amounts involved? It'd be nice to have a sense of scale.

Violent agreement. You and GP seem to be saying exactly the same thing -- because the original still exists, there is no subtraction of property, and it is not stealing.

From the article:

"I’ve seen many similar pleas recently whenever any popular, free web service has problems: “Please, let us pay you so there won’t be any problems!”

But it’s an impossible dream. If a web service is popular enough that you hear about it when it has downtime or major issues, it’s probably a large, very complex system. 100% uptime is effectively impossible."

Please tell us more!

I'm very curious about this, because I know that if I don't have something regularly scheduled for morning or early afternoon I tend to sink into depression, and now I'm wondering if I could perhaps be getting too much sleep. I had thought it was either a) getting sleep at the wrong times (I'll tend to stay awake later each night) and thus missing out on sunlight, or b) that regularity itself prevented my depression. This would also explain it, though.

So you chose a name that was actually a word in another language (tl;dr: pinkeln = peeing in german), and it was embarrassing when you found out. But then you say, "Did it hurt us in the end? I don’t think so." And this is evidence that Color made a good choice to go after a name like theirs.

Color paid half a million dollars for domain recognizability... and this is beneficial because they didn't accidentally choose a name that means peeing.

I don't think your evidence actually argues for your point. What about all the names that aren't a common word in your target language, but don't mean peeing in others, either?

Actually, tetris battle pitts you against replays of other people's games, unless you actually challenge another player. Even then it's not 100%... A friend of mine once challenged me and ended up playing a replay. (Actually, he let me play myself. I lost. )= )

I'm not sure how they handle bombs, since certain moves only make sense given bomb timing and positioning. Also not sure how they handle moves that become impossible at the very top of the screen -- if line timings are different, the replay ends up trying move to a place that a real player actually can't get to.

Edit/Note: If you're playing someone live, it'll say so under your names -- one of you will have 'host' and the other 'live.'

"...continue swapping until you get the idea you actually want."

Looks like this is an intended use case. They should maybe make it easier to do.

But despite that it's a joke deck, it fits with everything I've seen about them so far.

I think from Color's perspective, that's the idea -- only figuring that "adding" implies an acquisition.

Actually, I guess it would depend on whether market validation is worth $10m -- which I doubt, because it's just a feature to them, not a whole product. Also, that's what interns are for, right?

On the one hand, a story like yours of success through sheer determination is awesome and uplifting. On the other hand, the idea of working that hard, for that long, is overwhelming to many.

A lot of people don't think themselves (and may not be) capable of the sustained effort you put in. (Generalizing from my own case is possibly unwarranted, but it's uncomfortable to say this about myself directly. =/ )

Even so, it breaks the flow of the sentence. It's actually quite jarring to read.

I think it would be clear what they were even without the extra indication -- perhaps personal preference, though.

(This is not to belittle the content you've got -- really interesting stuff, pretty well backed up. awesome.)

I think it sounds odd because it's disconnected from its preposition. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever heard a sentence starting with "whom."

As a new vim user, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with them.

What do you find yourself macroing, generally?

Same problem, but I cheated my way past -- hints at the irc channel (including a link to solutions to every problem, but I was on the last one by then ;)

Dupe. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2081211

You'll note that neither Bill Gates nor Warren Buffet is among the 20.

That particular statement may be wrong -- but it's actually unrelated to the thrust of the article. In fact with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet the author was giving examples of people who did not start with nothing. (The rest of the sentence you half-quoted: "but they were raised in affluent homes so they didn't have to worry about keeping their families fed.")

Well, I'll buy it. If other people use blog to mean linksharing with discussion, I'll amend my mental definiton. =P

"And it has become a cult phenomenon as the idea spreads through Facebook, Twitter, the Hacker News blog and other social media."

HN is a blog? Who knew?