jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I think this is often not true, and the examples in the post show that.

People had already been willing to put their real names online. Friendster launched 1-3 years earlier, grew very fast, and if they hadn't been alienated their users and been hamstrung by technical problems, they might have gotten to be Facebook.

Airbnb is a great company, but VRBO.com had been around since 1995 and is now going public (as part of HomeAway) -- they did pretty well through the real estate boom. There was also Couchsurfing, founded about 5yrs before Airbnb. Could they have been Airbnb? They succeeded at getting users, so I think they were only missing two key pieces: they hadn't realized that if you charged people to stay you had a great business (or didn't want to do that), and they weren't very good at making backups.

Of course Dropbox had a whole forest of competitors. I don't think Box.net or Xdrive or whoever failed to become runaway successes because people didn't have enough devices - there were millions of geeks with multiple computers and there had been for years. And there was plenty of broadband: YouTube had already been around for 3 years. Dropbox succeeded because they made syncing easier to use, and because they marketed that better than anyone else.

There are definitely some startups that couldn't have succeeded a few years earlier, (like the Zynga example which needed the FB channel to exist). You couldn't have made AdMob any earlier because a lot of people needed to go buy smartphones. You might have been able to build YouTube in 2004, but not in 2002, because you needed broadband penetration, fast computers, and a Flash player that could stream video.

Sure, riding a wave or exploiting market trends can be helpful. I think a lot of great products could have been built much earlier though, and the limiting factor is often simply that it's difficult to know what's important, and difficult to get the important things right.
This behaviour is implemented with few lines of code in the sample app, but we should probably make this the default behaviour in the framework itself with an option to override it.
They can be as toxic as they want to be. I will still continue to eat them ;-)
Many people contribute to open source projects for years without complaining about rudeness.

Many people don't contribute to open source projects because rudeness discourages them from contributing.

I'd rather have more people contribute (and feel good for doing so).
You have a good path, but humans have different flight requirements than probes. If we tailor spaceflight development to robotic probes, the technologies required for human flight may never be developed.
No, it wouldn't, there's more than enough stuff like this that goes around that taking one slice off the stack isn't really going to change the stack. ;)

The thing is these solutions all sounds great on paper, but in practice for the common person? Not so much. For those people that know what their doing it really doesn't matter because they know what they are doing and update as they scale.

It's the 99% of the rest of the people who see "how easy that was" and suddenly they're over their head. And they are the same people who tell you that you can't change anything about the broken ass interface bolted onto the spreadsheet while you're fixing it.

"Can't you just fix it so it will stop crashing? Why do you want to change all of this? We don't have approvals to change this, the spreadsheet is what was approved by change control. Just make it work."

IT WILL NEVER WORK. Go away. =D
False dichotomy. Communism (or whatever approximations of it we've seen) isn't the only alternative.

The inherent problem in any case is concentration of power, whether it be in the state or in megacorps.
Good point - but one correction, there aren't thousands but millions of developers, 6mm+ to be precise. http://www.phonearena.com/news/6M-developers-in-Apple-ecosys...

Paradoxically, I think the power of the tools, resulting in the ease of development, and the democracy of the Apple Store is a major contributor to the difficulty of competing for user mindshare, and the resulting low prices.
"It takes time and effort to master" - Yes, but as we know this is accidental rather than essential.
nice. who wants to fork this for Rails? :P
Who's who?
That's basically the sort of thing I was getting at: that motives are by no means straightforwardly rational among humans, let alone aliens.

Your point about extremely long-sighted competition is interesting though, and might be a rational motive if the universe were seen as fundamentally zero-sum.

On anthropic bias: look up how many times we almost had a nuclear war. Makes me wonder about quantum immortality. Maybe we're just in the universe where we didn't incinerate ourselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...
Spatial navigation and logical reasoning improved by higher levels of testosterone, for example.
Using TECS to go from NAND gates to assembly is 4-6 evenings worth of work and totally worthwhile. I have a rough idea how compilers and operating systems work but until TECS everything below that was run by little laptop pixies.
I was very impressed by Unity, I'd been using a tiling window manager for a while but after rebinding some miscellaneous shortcuts to Super+(right hand key) I'm totally happy with it.
Lisp and Haskell programmers would both worship the lambda. Instead of making the sign of the cross they would draw the sign of the lambda across their chest to show reverence..
For a recent example of perf in practice, see "git gc: Speed it up by 18% via faster hash comparisons" on the git mailing list

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/17228...
I'm in the "thought provoking post, but disagree!" camp on this one.

As a guy who has been the CEO for most my startups, I'd NEVER say that I deserve more equity because of that.

Also, 5% for the IDEA? Jeebus. Is THAT idea the source of your eventual triumph? Or is it the 100 ideas that come later? If you pivot from your idea 6 months down the road in a direction your co-founder suggests, does he get a portion of that 5%? Or perhaps more, because it's your (now shown to be a bad) idea that wasted 6 months?

I DO agree that you need rules for who wins when a disagreement can't be resolved-- you can have those rules without handing over equity. You should also have rules for dissolution.

Co-founders are a market like any other. With these rules, and with Dan's outstanding reputation, I have no doubt that he could land a co-founder. But it'd always be a lesser co-founder than he COULD get. Minority shareholders are also more likely to bolt/get grumpy when things get rough.

In short, Dan's trying to maximize his personal wealth in the (exceedingly rare) event that the startup wins (sees liquidity) rather than maximizing for the company's chance of success.
There's a difference between "I dont mind lugging it around" and "I lug it around a lot". I had a 17 inch once and realized that, even though I could move it, the weight and size made it inconvenient. It ended up sitting on the desk all day.

Needless to say I replaced it with a 27" iMac.
I enjoy Xiangqi immensely. There's a great quote: Western Chess is a war, Chinese Chess is a battle.

There is less messing around with openings as well. That appeals to me as I am just a casual player. You get to the "fun part" much faster.
I'm going to mention what I think the other big definition of magic is, because I haven't seen it spelled out yet. It's when there is something that is occurring in code but you have no handle on how to follow it back to where the magic occurred. For instance, you write a class that looks something like

class A:
thing1 = 0
thing2 = 0

but somewhere in between your definition and your usage, the class is suddenly an ORM mapping onto a database. As cool as that may be, just looking at class A, you have no idea where to look for that behavior. If you had to subclass something to get that behavior, you could have looked there; if you had to call a function on the class to get this behavior, you could follow it back from there, but when you have this sort of magic you can't. The forensic trail has gone cold.

If you think about it, you can see how the two definitions are related; this sort of magic tends to stay something you don't understand because you don't just naturally pick it up over time, you must make great effort to figure out what the problem is. But it's a different problem with a different solution, certainly.

Generally the two places this magic lives is in some all-encompassing framework, and in the language itself. Perl has numerous magical constructs, some of which turn out to be very difficult to even search for in the docs because it isn't even obvious what the operator is. The flip-flop operator comes to mind: http://perl-tricks.blogspot.com/2007/01/flip-flop-operator.h... If you encounter that for the first time you can be really lost trying to figure out how the list construction is occurring and it's not at all obvious what to search for.
Doomed to fail since Google takes a chunk and it still leaves all the content available to anyone with adblock. It'll get some small use I'm sure but not enough to be notable.
I don't write a TCP stack, but Juho Snellman writes a TCP stack for living, and I found the following anecdote on writing an interoperable TCP stack interesting.

http://snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-11-11-tcp-is-harder-th...

TLDR: There are TCP implementations that can't handle SYN retransmission which you have to interoperate if your TCP stack is the product.
> If it is really desired you could implement throttling according to packet loss, but not in the way that TCP does it - by buffering and waiting - instead you'd just send packets every N frames. You can't do that if you're just using TCP since you don't know when packets are dropped.

It is really desired (and there are a bunch of ways to do it, and plenty of libraries that already implement them). Please, please implement protocols in this way, and not in the way described in the article.
I've had the same problem for a while -- one of the down sides to running a business and being its sole software developer / sysadmin.

For software development specifically, you can change how you approach programming and find that it's possible to still make progress on software in 30 minute increments.

Practice thinking about your project throughout the day. Get the "big idea" stuff done while you're on the toilet, driving, taking a shower, getting lunch. Keeping the project "loaded" in your head helps to predict architectural issues, makes it easier to break the project down into smaller pieces, makes it easier to get started coding, and keeps you motivated to work on it.

Choose a list of small things that need to be done. Every project has them. Don't try to get the small thing done completely right the first time. For example, say my project needs to be able to read email headers. How should it go about that? (Think about that throughout the day.) It will need a function that reads a message and spits out the headers separate from the body. Write that, that's easy. Then it'll need a function that reads each line of the headers, and returns them as an array. Write that, that's easy. Then it'll need another function that takes each element of the headers array and splits them into label: value pairs. Write that, that's easy.

A nice side effect of this approach is that you end up with some very clean code. Each function does one thing, does it well, and its output feeds naturally into the input of the next function.

Build a library like this. If you only have 30 minutes at a time, your personal library of code is essential. Maintain and organize it. (That's another thing that can be done in 30 minute chunks.) Keep a notes file open in a tab in your IDE and do regular brain dumps to it. Write unit tests, or go back and do cleanup on a function that needs cleaning up.

Then, on a regular basis -- at least once a week, in my case -- retreat to a coffee shop or call up a buddy you have that's a writer, and set a "productivity day". The key is to get out of your regular environment and have another person with you. You each end up pushing the other to focus and be productive. Use this time to put all of your functions together, do some testing, and build scaffolding for the "big" parts of your project. My session about a week ago netted me almost 1,000 lines of added/deleted/modified code, according to Github.

It's a very different approach from the usual method of "sit down and bang it out for hours," but it works, and it helps to defeat all that mindset about flow that other programmers struggle with.
Hi, I'm an engineer at IMVU. We use this for almost everything! Status updates is a pretty simple example but we constantly invalidate data for things such as user's list of friends, credit balance, and our real-time chat.
So sad to hear this. Too many rubyists gone this year. I knew him only loosely from conferences and twitter but the guy was interesting and inspiring.
What time frame does this decline occur over? The number of women in the workplace has significantly increased over the last 40 years.
You don't have to wonder. Take a look at any public housing development where the majority of residents depend on some form of public assistance.
What's a "TCP truther"? Is it hiding under the bed?

> There you go. Congestion avoidance over UDP. Problem solved.

Yes, that sounds entirely reasonable. Please do this, instead of what is described in the article.
If a phone is the first solution that comes to mind for a person that never saw or heard of a phone in their life, then that indicates phone was a bad patent.
> I seriously do not get why people think that companies do 'good' for any other reason than money.

Because companies are made up of people and people are capable of doing things for reasons other than money.
> I assert it’s possible to have a simple language where it’s difficult to shoot yourself in the foot

Zig would be one such example.
The biggest obstacle to this is that the Exchange's primary customers are the electronic trading firms. A firm like NASDAQ makes the majority of its revenue from co-location services and high-speed market data lines.

It's difficult for a new exchange to break into the space (or an existing one to go out on its own) with rules that disadvantage high speed traders. IEX at 0.9% market share for example has been working on solving the problems with a slow SIP feed for a couple years now.

I like these kids of ideas, but a bit of regulation couldn't hurt to speed things up...
What's wrong with brush/pen technique?
I found myself thinking "the fine art of bullshit, as told by a bullshitter" while reading this article. I was annoyed because there is no subheading or useful intro that tells me what this is about so i can decide if I want to read it or not. Just a vague title and a vague picture. The writer might think this is clever -- I think its misplaced.
Cory House from Outlier Developer. Great course on Pluralsite.
I will add the X201 to that list. I have been using one, exclusively with linux, for the past 4 years.
Looks like we've got something similar in Canada,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Information_Protection...

I'm excited to try it out at my university!
Why? Any snooper still sees a DNS lookup for this domain followed by a connection to it. This is not such a dynamic site - it's fairly obvious what you will be accessing.
I watched a documentary showing how hackers can get your CC number (and basic info I think) simply by using an NFC enabled device and standing next to someone with such credit card. I think the Square method is safer, for now.
Ubuntu LTS already has the hardware enablement stack to solve this very issue. You stay on the LTS but get newer kernel/mesa/etc for hardware support.
Beej's guide is great and still very relevant today (at least if you're programming in C). Are there any equivalent documentation/tutorials for other domains? An equivalent for machine learning would be great, although part of what makes Beej's guide timeless is that a lot of the underlying concepts and syscalls have been static for decades.
I have also experienced the crash on resume issue. It is only some of the time--like once every few days. But it is still pretty annoying. (currently using kernel 5.8x) It might not be the highest priority for them, but it would be cool if they could fix it.
There will be other architectures after x86 has died. Mark my words.
You need a phd in sbt to do things like "copy the jars", or "have a second set of dependencies".

The proponents of the approach that sbt takes have failed to realise that build tools have zero value whatsoever, every second spent on them is a second wasted.

What you want is a good mix simplicity (yes copy paste is fine) and some basic examples to follow, and the ability to break out into script if you are doing something unusual.
wow. We've run into rsync bugs like this and just chalked it up to "things happen"
The situation is more nuanced in my reading in wealth, income and inequality.

In particular, people don’t actually care about absolute inequality. They care about progress and opportunity. As you stated, the inability to provide for basic needs trumps the fact that you have an iPhone.

But the inability to provide for basic needs is not necessarily caused by wealth divergence. Medical care costs today have little to do with wealth, and more to do with the cost disease, regulatory morass/capture and transferring costs from the young to old.

Housing costs, another huge personal expenditure, are driven by local NIMBY restrictions and city zoning planners.

Education costs are clearly not driven by the wealthy, unless you believe Bryan Caplan’s signaling theory (which I personally do). But in that case, tax transfers don’t help either.

And so here is part of the nuance. Some of the wealthy are ‘stealing’ the money via power/regulatory capture etc. Others are not, they are growing real wealth. Yet others are destroying jobs via automation whole making products cheaper.

I’m personally less well off because my Dr. can charge 3x his value and my local city vigorously defends single family zoning at the expense of non property owners. But I’m not really worse off that Elon Musk is selling cars at a competitive price or Tim Cook is selling headphones at 550 a pop.

And that nuance is important. Equally punishing the growth with ‘theft’ hurts the economy and doesn’t fix any of the underlying problems.

All of these excess costs, make it very hard for people to stay afloat let alone build capital/wealth.

And those problems persist regardless if we transfer via taxes; housing markets are artificially constrained and tax transfers will just get sucked up to bid the price up. The medical system will find ways to suck up as much money as it possibly can. Giving people more money just to have it siphoned off isn’t a great fix.

So I, as a 1%er wouldn’t mind higher taxes. But we have to fix the underlying problems first. Otherwise your just taking my money to hand off to my Dr’s Porsche fund while the less well off get nothing in return.
Why does it matter if what he did was immoral? Many things that are not immoral can have bad outcomes.
The point isn't that you must trust google or anything, but that if you are serving users other than yourself, blocking the entirety of google isn't a viable option. In the case that you're only doing it for yourself, you likely have safeblocking disabled or know how to whitelist the safebrowsing endpoint yourself (it's a separate domain) that it's a non-issue.
I hope they are at least using the “Beverly hills cop” theme song for that.
There was recently some attention about an Airbnb engineer in NYC that whipped together a covid vaccine reservation utility site in a day or two that put the official NY government site to shame.

In the NY Times article about it, some of the reader comments was "NYC should hire this guy!" or "He should come work for the city!".

To which people more familiar with SWEs replied "that will never happen, he probably makes several times what a government (or gov contracted) SWE makes, and that's why he can do this while the government team cannot."
I don't know, the smartest programmers I've ever met have also been the most helpful ones, willing and able to explain incredibly complex concepts patiently and clearly.
I am serious. A bit exaggerated but essentially you pay someone to lie to you. And that does not sound like something I would want to support.
The rating of my reviews matches the overall rating of my app.

That is not the case - at all - for the app(s) I mention in my Twitter thread.
I don't know, the smartest programmers I've ever met have also been the most helpful ones, willing and able to explain incredibly complex concepts patiently and clearly. They make everyone around them better.
The ISA doesn't have that much influence on efficiency (other than, like, x86's insane-length encoding requiring spending more power on decoding).
It's designed to work through a mobile app via the iOS SDK: https://stripe.com/docs/terminal/payments/setup-sdk?terminal....
Teens already master it. Many preteens master it just fine. My son had VPNs set up to bypass region locks on anime and bypass bans on game servers by the time he was 10.

It's adults that'll need to learn. I foresee a lot of awkward conversations with parents trying to ask theirs kids how to set up VPNs while pretending it's for a different purpose.
Thanks for the list, I will check it out. I think I read something by Reynolds, but it didn't stick. Will look at it again.
Jason, you might want to read my comment again. I am not dismissing the usefulness of your compilation. There's also nothing wrong with building up page rank for a new domain as long as you're adding value doing it.

Anyways, best of luck to you in your venture.
What crazy luck! Would have sucked to not have Evernote around!
It is, but it's not bad in the way that an outside advertisement is bad: there's no conflict of interest.
Ours are set quarterly, usually to the prior quarter's prices, but more when the work load demands fewer hours. Usually contracts (which run for a <year) lock-in the rate for the quarter they're made.
Techcrunch in disarray. Founder moves to Seattle and loosens already inadequate editorial control. Spreads wild speculations and rumors without research or validation, lashes out when proven wrong.
Thanks, editing!
It's important to note that the valuation assigned by government appraisers is often well below what the property would be worth on the open market. When I was young, my grandparents were caught up in an eminent domain suit. They were to be paid about two thirds the worth of their home (the worth of their home, in this case, being based on mortgage appraisals[1]). If they had run a business, they would have also had to factor in relocation costs, downtime, etc. Insofar as the seizing body is an interested party, or operates via political pressure from an interested party, the "fair market value" is prone to work in the buyer's favor.

[1] - obvious disclaimers - This is anecdotal evidence, and it happened in the 90s. Perhaps there was a tendency amongst lending institutions to inflate their appraisals so as to justify offering loans with higher profit margins. But I still think my point holds.
That's not to mention the whole Calcanis affair.
Sweet. I just uploaded a file so people can use this trick:

http://fwdint.com/media/chrometabs/