jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
[TL;DR version] If you love what you are doing, it is really hard to pivot when it is unsuccessful.

It may be non-obvious but I think your statement captures the trap perfectly. How did you define success?

If you use an internally defined success to be "I'm doing what I love" then it becomes tautologically impossible not to succeed :-). If you define it as "supports a particular lifestyle I associate with 'successful' people" then you run the risk giving up on your own happiness to chase an externally defined goal. Many people do this, its why the phrase 'keeping up with the Joneses' is easy to understand.

When you talk about how your love of doing something is 'hurting your career' what you are saying is that you won't make as much money as you might otherwise make if you continue doing what you love.

Ask yourself if you are OK with that. My thesis is that when you start doing things for their earning potential rather than your personal desire to do them, you run the risk of having a bank full of cash and a bunch of sour memories of the last n years of your life. Worse still, if life throws you a curve ball at the very moment in your life, all the cash in the bank may not be able to get you back to doing what you love. Ever.

Its not easy either, it may sound like a bunch of platitudes and aphorisms but understanding what makes you personally happy, distinct from the influences which have tried to define happiness for you throughout your entire life, is a challenging task to take on. For me its the single biggest reason to try new things as you just may find something you love to do that you never realized was so fulfilling before.
Same to you...
JA: How do you react to the opinion that non-free software is justified as a means for raising dollars that can then be put into the development of completely new software, money that otherwise may not have been available, and thus creating software that may have never been developed?

Richard Stallman: This is no justification at all. A non-free program systematically denies the users the freedom to cooperate; it is the basis of an antisocial scheme to dominate people. The program is available lawfully only to those who will surrender their freedom. That's not a contribution to society, it's a social problem. It is better to develop no software than to develop non-free software.

So if you find yourself in that situation, please don't follow that path. Please don't write the non-free program--please do something else instead. We can wait till someone else has the chance to develop a free program to do the same job.

What a lunatic
His complaint seems to partly center on the amount of swear words... one reason I prefer HN over other communities is we are not scared of the word fuck. Swearing is a part of honest society (and, luckily, gratuitous swearing is downmodded to oblivion in my experience).

Why did pw0ncakes get upvoted. a) because he is probably right but b) mostly because he accurately represents his generations reaction to things like this (and, lets face it, the original post was rather silly/incindary)

My suggestions (which will not be popular with many of Ycombinator’s hackers but may meet your goal of civility).

And here's the problem with this entire post; it adopts the same slightly sneering, "peering down on us" tone. It's not overtly rude - but no better, really, than "fucking asshole" (once you get over the swear word).

It's not, actually, a post about improving civility on HN - it's a thinly veiled attack/return shot :)

Ok, I'm not going to support calling the guy and asshole (he sounds like a bit of an idjit, I think, reading through the various posts/comments etc. and the original post he made before the updates did sound a bit "asshole") and, yes, there is a slightly growing problem of attacks over fair argument here in HN comments. But this is still a stellar community; positive suggestions are good, sneering resentment, probably not :)

Send me alerts when comments come in on a story I’ve written

That's silly; just monitor your logs if you want to see when HN comments come up (or set up a google alert etc.).

But actually I would prefer not encouraging people to come here to write about their posts unless they are already a member, reasoning:

- they are probably not "up" on how things work here, and so it risks going downhill

- comments here can be acerbic and honest, and people do take offense at that (which seems unfair to the writer)

By all means if it benefits the discussion invite him/her in. Otherwise leave it be :)
One of the things I was hoping I'd hear people comment on here what Miller says towards the end, that perhaps Kish's aversion to physical closeness, perhaps "loving" in general, and a desire to be independent, were mutually exclusive. While, I personally would agree there is an argument that being a helicopter parent does not help build a sense of independence in someone, I'm really curious if it really is true that a desire of closeness to others in general is really the opposite of that.

I guess it makes some sense naively (independence or apartness vs. dependence or together-ness)? But the way I think about it is that a desire to be independent needs to be tempered with a desire to socialize and be close with others. May be they are orthonormal axes in a person's "personality space," but a healthy balance of both will give a person a good norm overall. This seems opposite of what they hint at toward the end, that these two qualities may not be orthogonal but in fact, anti-parallel.

Perhaps Daniel's aversion helped him overcome the enormous odds against him, an entire culture that put that "blind" label on him and would have necessarily pulled him far into that the more "dependent" side--I mean, that was the point on the whole rest of the episode. It was needed for him given the extreme pressure he was under from this culture. Still, I hope that for many other people who do not have this extreme desire for independence that they need not be forced into it just so that the rest of us see them as equal. That certainly is not fair for them if they do not desire it.

I say all this because while I have a close love for a few close friends and family members, I usually like to be independent myself. However, I've learned as I've gotten older that sometimes you need to rely on others even when you think you won't, which isn't easy for me. A healthy balance seems better, as I've reluctantly accepted.
What do you guys think? What's good, what we can improve? Is the USP clear?
There may be some of that, but at least as importantly: as people get older they tend to be less delusional about how brilliantly successful their crazy idea is going to be. By "not delusional" I mean "they have a statistically valid estimate of the likelihood of success."

That means they don't found companies as often.

This is not a criticism of 20-somethings who leap into startups--there is no better time to do it--particularly because some of them succeed, and then we all get nice things. But it is in the nature of startups that the odds of failure are so high that the kind of level-headed, staid, steady, sensible person you'd really like to be running a company is the kind least likely to be running it.
> He's empowering others to destroy their lives, which very often leads to more crime as addicts will steal or even kill for their next fix.

What about alcohol? Cigarettes? Poker? Penny stocks?

All of these things have contributed to people blowing their savings, futures, and ruining their own lives and their families' lives.

By criminalizing drugs, people who want to fix their behavior are unable to because they're afraid to go to jail.

What we need is support centers, like we have for alcoholics, gambling addicts, sex addicts, internet addicts, and addicts of any other kind. Prohibition didn't work for alcohol in the 20s, and it hasn't worked for drugs.
> I don't care if the meth dealer is a hip and gentle guy. He's empowering others to destroy their lives

You do know that Paul Erdös, the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century (if not ever) was a meth addict, right?

I'm not saying "meth is good"; but that blanket generalizations are bad.
I have spent like 10 minutes approving everyone (as I am really social and have no problem meeting people whatever their interest are). So far, no matches. Got bored, but will come back in few hours to check it.
You do realise that the street outside a large property is typically substantially longer per person than that of an apartment block, right?
However, you can disable the thumbprint login option, just like you can disable the pin login option. Or you can add a more complicated login. Apple gives you more flexibility to make your own choice about unlocking your iPhone, they're not saying that you're thumbprint is your password.
What do people use for drop-in debugging nowadays? SoftICE's original company went away a long time ago, and last I checked, the company that bought the code (and rebranded it something like Driver Studio) is also no more.
shrug As someone who's done Kickstarters for comic books, it's still a hell of a lot less expensive than printing a ton of books on spec and getting them into the bookstore/comic shop distribution system. You'll lose like 50-75% of your cover price to all the middlemen involved in that.

When you plan your campaign, you look at the cuts taken by your crowdfunding site and its payment processor, and you work out all your numbers with that taken into account. I just go with a flat 10% of the take going to Kickstarter and Amazon. And if you're shipping stuff, build a lot of slack into the budget for that too. It keeps creeping up.

If 2% of the final number either way matters to you, then good luck finding a way to take payments without them. I mean, yeah, it'd be nice to live in a world without payment fees, sure. You'd have to battle the huge amounts of money banks have available to pour int politics. Have fun tilting at that windmill, Hackeress.
People steal alcohol bum and steal money to get it and it's legal.
Shouldn't 'breaking a few city laws' land them in jail or with a hefty fine or something? If everyone 'breaks a few city laws', the situation would be unsustainable.
Really, really, really trivial but I get annoyed when I have been upvoted (ie my total karma has gone up) but I cannot find the post that got the vote. Anyone know of a program that already exists for addressing this?
Fair point (though those numbers only include Xbox360, PS3, and computer, not the myriad of mobile incarnations). There could be a lot of RTS players out there who have been quiet over the years, just waiting for this opportunity. But the same way the post brings up Street Fighter 4 (a non-FPS modern sequel to original old school game with "big" following) and it's ability to parley huge buzz and vocal fanbase into decent but not great sales, I have major doubts about how StarCraft II can stack up against the current industry standards of success. Even more so if they are alienating their core demographic by removing cherished multiplayer features.

Maybe this will find success not through the older generation that remembers the original, but instead by giving rise to a new generation of RTS players who never even knew what they were missing in this FPS and MMO dominated world.
Eventually, post-industrial society syndrome will be a viable diagnosis. Unfortunately, the treatment is to get rid of all your stuff.
Here's a paper on one (just a random one from google) http://www.med.univ-rennes1.fr/cerf/publi/ADM_index1.html

Here's a patent: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6607482.html

There are lots of a papers, and a small number of working prototypes, but I have not heard of any that are actually being used.
"A little madness now and then, is relished by the wisest men" - Mr Willy Wonka.
I only skimmed the article so they might have covered this, but I would think that this comparison would, at least in theory, hold true for any two substances.

Pressure is pressure. No liquid is going to react differently to pressure applied by your head and shoulders than it does to pressure applied by your arms and legs. In other words: swimming is essentially pushing against something with your head while you push against something else with your arms and legs. The pressure and force received from these two actions should stay comparably constant in any PURE substance.

So maybe you would swim at a different speed in mud, if there were rocks in it.
"Nope. We'll end up with a lot of old-tech solar that isn't as good as what we'll get by waiting."

No, we'll still get the years of use from the "old tech" while new tech is being developed, partly on the back of what was learned by bothering to develop the old tech in the first place.

What if we decided not to build cars until we developed the Prius? Or computers until the iPhone? You have to go through the stages, tech doesn't happen fully realized without what went before.
The problem is still that even with Dart we have so little choice of languages. What is needed is a way to implement any language of choice on the web, probably through a sandboxed low-level virtual machine that supports threading, and which has no garbage collector (so languages can implement their own if desired).
You should just apply, if you're talented enough I'm sure they'd accept you. I doubt they have an arbitrary if founder = 1 then reject.
I've been using Python for the last two years and I totally love it. While it does support functional paradigms, it's not actually a functional programming language.

Having said that, I would love to pick up Clojure next. Realistically though, I'm going to dive deeper into Python.
"and then torturing small children to condition them into complacent compliance with their destined roles seems morally indefensible to me."

Yeah that's a good point. Initially I classified that with the 'minor issues' I mentioned, that I felt he just introduced to scare the reader, but revisiting it it seems like it's a pretty fundamental part of the described system, if you can't engineer the fetuses into children who are already happy and OK with their place in society. Then again, it's been a while since I read it, wasn't the engineering meant to produce A or B or whatever type people, and the scene with the children not so much about conditioning their place in society but something else? Sorry I'd have to dig out the book.

(I know this sounds like I'm advocating for engineering fetuses to be complacent children but I'm not - I'm just saying that in the system in the book as a whole I don't see much of a problem with it, much like genetically engineering fetuses to correct for a birth defect, if we could do that.)

"(Incidentally, soma was repeatedly described as side-effect free. I'm curious where you read it as having destructive qualities.)"

The mother of the protagonist, the one who was 'rescued from the savages' (sorry don't remember names), got a severe soma addiction that killed her in the end, no? I don't remember reading explicit mentions of being side-effect free. I thought there were several mentions of a maximum amount that people should take.
There's a huge difference in having ad revenue and being completely dependent on ad revenue. If Google lost ad revenue it would immediately collapse, unlike Apple or MS.
As a start: http://eloquentjavascript.net/
Listen to: http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/
Also track: http://www.nakedjavascript.com/
And http://howtonode.org/
How would you go about doing this? Are there good books?
Apple is the biggest monopoly in the US right now. Hands down.

They get to get away with everything!

Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. all get hammered on the daily in the US and in the EU. But, Apple is a golden child that can do no wrong.

Do you people not realize that they've created a peer-pressure device in the form of the iPhone by packaging SMS and iMessage into 1 app called "Messages"?

How is that even legal?!

The app should be broke up into 2.

You should be given options on what messaging app you want to install.

Their practices are anti-competitive.

15-30% cut via the App Store for Apple?! Is this a joke?!
Funny, but I use a stylus with it.
Your advice here is good. You might want to quietly watch a few trainers in action, if you can do so unobtrusively - I did, and it helped. I picked a female trainer over a male trainer because I saw a few of the male trainers at my gym barking drill-sergeant-style, and I knew I'd react poorly to that.

As for the complements to a stranger, I did have a couple of random people at the gym say 'you've been working your ass off' or 'you've lost a lot of weight' in a non-creepy way when I was in line at the juice bar and I definitely appreciated it. But everyone's different.
To be fair there is some evidence that in certain cases raising the minimum wage can, because of anchoring, raise wages overall without having a harmful effect on employment. But in general you are right.

What there is less evidence for is the entire thesis of the grandparent post.
What a disaster, that people should have to produce to consume.
Yes, but in doing so, you traded a memory write for a branch. And memory accesses are linear, so that's likely faster than the cannon. So surely we could go further? That's how I got the idea.
You can get electric wind-up torches with a mobile phone power socket. You just wind and the phone charges (in minutes?)
The C standard exclusively uses the phrase "null-terminated" to refer to strings.
so basically, you're against the NSA using these tactics to oust their competition (who was already doing something illegal)? why isn't the bribery receiving an equal dose of your moral high horse?

I m not saying what the NSA did was right, but that isn't really the issue i would have with their massive monitoring - it's that the information could be abused, or mis-used. The other part of the NSA problem is the National Security Letters (NSL), which is basically tyranny. I don't care that an american corporation managed to win more contracts this way, but that such powers could be abused.
Thanks for your comment! :) StartupList are close to AngelList in design, yet we have a yin/yang relationship. They cater to investors, StartupList caters to early adopters and startups.
You have an interesting perspective. But governments can create, or shall I say foster, market incentives -- and not just by getting out of the way. A cap and trade program illustrates that, as does mandatory product labeling. Markets and governments have more akin to flowers and gardens than to oil and water. They need each other to function.

Or do you have another truth to share?
False. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/oct/02...

As a rule of thumb: if your source is New York Post, you should try looking elsewhere.
My browser opens up a download dialog on clicking this link. It's probably because the response headers don't include "Content-Type", and so it doesn't know if it will be able to interpret the response.
Different market and different product. Cellebrite customers have the devices in hand, and need to extract data for forensics. NSO customers compromise phones remotely and silently in order to spy on what the owner is doing.
! might be "less" punctuation than [[ noreturn ]] but is a lot harder to google. And why do you need the "->"? That is just more line noise.
I would say that VC is naive and doesn't understand the lengths that the CCP goes to prevent a free democracy. The current regime understood what happened during the fall of the Soviet Union and are extremely keen on not allowing that to happen again. We have already given China many decades to free their markets and their people based on the principle that "free markets lead to wealth and wealth leads to democratization" and look where we ended up. Furthering this line only emboldens the CCP.
Yesterday we had a story about google's anti-union activities and hn was saying how evil and untrustworthy they were. Now hn is praising Google for censoring and being arbiters of truth just because they think Google is going to censor "correctly" or in line with their political leaning. One day google can't be trusted. The next day google should determine the political discourse of countries.
Hah...before you commented, I searched to see if there were any decent TOTP command line tools, found that, found that it's available via Homebrew ("brew install oath-toolkit"), and installed it.

After that, I tried several examples from the man online man page [1], copying/pasting from Firefox to a terminal. Many of them failed, with errors like "oathtool: hex decoding of secret key failed".

To save others time...get your examples for copy/paste by doing "man oathtool" in another terminal and copying from there. The online manual has the dashes in arguments like "--totp" and "-w" rendered as Unicode minus signs (U+2212). Command line arguments need good old fashioned dash (U+002D).

There's an email address at the bottom of the page for reporting bugs, but my email client didn't like it. Sure enough, there are dashes in the email address which on the web page are Unicode minus signs, so had to grab it from the man page to send off the mail.

[1] https://www.nongnu.org/oath-toolkit/oathtool.1.html
As others have noted, the announcement does not reveal the thinking that went into this decision. But certainly pg and other principals are aware of what's happening in the People's Republic of China under the Xi regime. pg retweeted the following news items about China recently:

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1195728248040087552
The New York Times @nytimes Nov 16
China has detained up to a million Muslims, a campaign it calls a benevolent and routine effort against the pull of extremism. But 403 pages of Communist Party documents we obtained reveal how officials plotted to carry out a ruthless, coercive clampdown.

https://twitter.com/CoveringDelta/status/1196491222765965314
Demetri Kofinas @CoveringDelta Nov 18
We've known for years that governments are interested in developing bioweapons that target specific populations. What I didn't know until this week's episode are the lengths to which the CCP has reportedly gone to obtain the genomic data needed to do it.

https://twitter.com/nathanattrill/status/1192670115017310208
Nathan Attrill 周雷森 @nathanattrill Nov 8
In China, it’s possible to pre-book an organ transplant, something that would be impossible under a voluntary donor system – raising suspicions of widespread organ harvesting.
I sincerely doubt any amount of invention would change the fact that it costs $4,000 and essentially does the same thing as a $140 scooter.
Wow. Next thing Souvenir will fight back.
Google made an OS that can support dozens of different hardware user interface variations. It is the phone makers that keep tailoring it along the lines of making it touchscreen-centric. Any one of the handset makers could come out with a keyboard-centric design at any time. The OS is rather agnostic on this.
My last experience with UHaul involved an old truck that broke down in transit. While its inconvenient to break down any time, its doubly-so when all your worldly possessions are packed in there.
Having been to one game so far, I can confirm that the experience is very different live vs. on-tv.

Then again, I don't find them annoying on tv - so there may be personal bias.