skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently read Zero to One, the Blake Masters / Peter Thiel manifesto (of sorts).

One of the interesting points he makes there is to come down on the side of monopoly. I interpreted it as a one-sided position, but I think they were putting forward this one-sided position to stand in contrast to the typical one-sided view of monopoly you often hear -- namely the other side.

Most people are anti-monopoly. Competition s good! But low-margin businesses are like starved animals that will eat your face off to survive. A low-margin business chases out "nice" founders and executives -- they simply don't make it in that environment. You really do have to be an asshole to extract margin from nothing, because part of the way you do that is by squeezing people including your employees. In tight low-margin industries nice people finish last.

Monopolies -- or at least companies in industries with margins and pricing power like software -- can afford to be nice. They can afford to pay higher salaries, be more tolerant of mistakes, give better benefits, have looser schedules, etc. Obviously there are exceptions as people will be people, but on average these industries tend to be nicer places.

Nicer founders and executives can also make it in these industries, and in fact might have an advantage. People want to work with them.

Monopoly like most other things in economics and ecology is a paradox. You (economically speaking) want your employer or company to be a monopoly, but not others. That's because for others you are a customer, so you want them to be subject to brutal competition.

But there's a dark side to monopolies too, namely that they get lazy. The ideal is probably to have some monopoly and pricing power around, but not too much. Like most things in living systems the optimum is somewhere in between and the edges are both pathological.
Doctors are not infallible.

I often look for alternative answers online and get a second and even third opinion from other doctors.
I tend to agree with all that.

My first Linux was Redhat 5.1 (not RHEL), but I ended up switching to Debian Slink and OpenBSD for whatever reason. Since then I just personally find Redhat based distros a bit wierd or clunky (based on lack of familiarity), and prefer to stick with the Debian/Ubuntu side of the fence.

Reason to prefer Ubuntu LTS over Debian Stable: fixed 5yr support period instead of a variable period.

Reason to prefer Debian Stable over Ubuntu LTS: all packages in repo are in the same security patching regime. With Ubuntu you have to be a bit careful using packages from Universe or Metaverse.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, even when you don't think much of someone's work.
If you have a job and get paid for it then you already have a skill that you are monetising, just as active income.
"But in industries with slim margins, you see more cutthroat behavior."

Absolutely. Not to mention in business and industries which are being operated by typically older people who have families and are in fear of losing their job or their business or their house (which is often collateral for loans). It's easy to be a relaxed nice guy if you are a tenured University prof with an office of dusty books. Or a startup guy who has multiple plan b's. [1] A bit harder if you've got outstanding accounts receivable as well as aggravating customers and cutthroat competitors. And the type of run of the mill mediocre people that you typically get to work for you if you are not a "startup".

[1] And let's just put it right on the table here. Anyone who gets a large amount of funding and fails gets their ticket punched and gets another try either working for another startup or perhaps raising for another idea. And actually the larger the failure (and visibility) it's typically good for the next thing someone will do. Edit: Failure in traditional business is failure. It's a negative plain and simple. You end up working for someone in their lackluster business and since you may have lost some of your assets you can't even typically start a new business (and your friends and family are not going to give you an additional money, nor will you be able to get bank loans..)
The more efficiently you work, the less you get paid?

True in the micro; false in the macro. If I deliver under budget and on time, I get more work from that client. Keep doing that and they find you more work. You get to keep billing, perhaps for years.
Not what I wanted to hear, but thanks for the reply.
> Plus, no ads

Well, except for the constant posts about YC classes & post postings for YC companies. Getting first crack at pretty much any startup and getting employees for those startups is worth way more than any ads that would ever be posted here.
I think that would do it. The Ashley Madison leaks are just the tip of the iceberg. What if someone released a dump of _everything_ the NSA has captured about certain groups of individuals over their entire lifetimes? (assuming there are torrent sites with enough storage to handle it...)
Newer and smaller.
> The presence of a type system definitely improves maintainability, however it is only one of many factors. Being C and Haskell both statically typed, are they equally suitable for long term development?

They're both statically typed, but the type systems obviously aren't equal. I would argue that stricter types are in fact one of the main things that helps me be more productive in languages with MLish type systems compared to C which lacks e.g. generics and proper sum types.

That said, I find Elixir very interesting for the exact reasons you said.
No-hassle, cloud-managed OpenStack
Lots of reasons.

Because online research might prompt first-aid, before visiting a doctor.

Because we like to prepare ourselves before receiving (possibly terrible) news from experts, to soften the blow.

Because we tend to reach for our smartphones in stressful situations.

Because doctors are fallible.
Or the router manufacturers will properly modularize their designs so that the parts you need to replace to fix a compromise are separate from the parts that ensure that the radio stays on legal frequencies, under legal power limits, and uses legal modulation modes.
I recently bought an ADSL modem/router TP-Link 8970 (or something). The thing is awesome, except for that fact that it doesn't support OpenVPN... Supports PPTP or IPSec.

Now if only, I could install OpenWRT on it. Since OpenWRT makes ROUNDS around every custom software I've seen on low-end ADSL modem/routers makes me wonder why on earth companies don't just ship OpenWRT and get over with it?
Interesting, and this is why people think Google is abusing its popularity as a search engine in monopolistic ways. What better way to "inject yourself" into the conversation right?

It would be funny if it took points off for visits to StackOverflow :-)

As a hiring manager I have been bombarded with a wide variety of these 'skills based screens.' As everyone seems to have a take on it, I expect this to get worse before it gets better.
Hm. A monopoly doesn't have to worry about losing business nor employees to the competition. They can squeeze both for the last drop of blood.

ATT was a monopoly for years. They underpaid, charged for pathetic service, and were inefficient to the nth power. Maybe there was cash to be milked by individuals somewhere in all that. Probably executives. But I'm not sure the rank and file had it cushy.
Except for the people who take these things to 11:

http://www.hennesseyperformance.com/2015-dodge-srt-charger-h...
> The Bill of Rights and later amendments do not encompass all rights, thus things like privacy do not need to explicitly be listed to count as a right.

Who decides what rights exist?
Describe a "new problem". I only rarely encounter truly unique problems.

One thing it does do is allow scalability in a pretty straight-forward, integrated way.
My company budgets a small amount for customer appeasement each month. The funds can be used toward discounts, expedited shipping, upgrades, etc. We can usually start every support response with empathy as opposed to protecting ourselves from loss. The result is a focused work environment, happy customers, no burn-out, no venting, no therapy bills, and a reminder to keep things this way by continuously improving the product(s).
I'm not sure what the booth staff are even there for. Every time I've had an issue when visiting NYC, they tell me to mail stuff to the MTA. Machine ate your twenty dollar bill? Write a letter. Card not swiping? Write a letter.
NASA took the safe bet, because a 'multimillion dollar spacecraft' was on the line. But was it really?

They already satisfied all the original mission directives. The spacecraft is now essentially free. Anything from here on is gravy. Why play it safe? It can be a plain expected-value play.
Nothing groundbreaking here, just reframing (yet again) how to think about success so that founders focus hard on growth rate. Good stuff.

Sometimes I wonder if PG is targeting/excluding audiences by speaking in a mathy way.

"If he was bad at extracting money from people, at worst this curve would be some constant multiple less than 1 of what it might have been. But a constant multiple of any curve is exactly the same shape."

This makes perfect sense to a native math speaker but takes some effort for others to digest. I wonder if that is deliberate or just the way he talks.
Primarily the money funding everything wants you to be in California. They want you in or very near their network, for all sorts of obvious reasons.

You'll see statements like this: "Q: Do I have to be in California / Silicon Valley? A: No, uhhhh, but, uhm, well it's extremely preferable." They're being polite when they say you don't absolutely have to; what they mean is, you have to be a particularly incredible opportunity if you're not.
The question of whether specialization requires hierarchies is kind of the question that Coase sought to answer in the Nature of the Firm. To make a long story short, Coase thought the answer was "no" so long as it was more efficient for the specialists to contract with consumers of their services on a open market than it was for them to work together in a firm under managers. I think Coase's answer seems more obvious now thanks to the Internet. Back when he published it was pretty counterintuitive for a lot of people.

These days, I think hierarchy is required only where private information needs to be shared with the specialists in a carefully choreagraphed way. If we don't have to worry about who knows what when, then the specialists can synch up and deliver to customers just fine without managers. But if there's some super important private information that can only be shared in sequence with particular specialists in order to maximize a good result, then no hierarchy is a mess.

In other words, human hierarchy now is almost entirely derived from the architecture of private information.
The future of work is freelance
> Well I am an amateur as well so don't take my words for anything. I just offered a perspective (that is probably obvously wrong in some way if an anthropologist/sociologist/historian would look at it).

Oh, me too. I'm not an expert at all. I'm just thinking out loud here with you.

I think things like religion, state-- any relationship of domination between people that is regulated by violence, really is completely parasitic. By that I mean that instead of thinking of things like states and patriarchs and masters as enabling social structures, we should think of them as coopting social structures in order to get more out of the collective than they put in.

A lot of it can be phrased in terms of ownership. Religion, priesthoods, claim ownership over morality, over good behavior. By doing so, they become parasites. People are naturally receptive to cooperative relationships that benefit everyone. We are a communal species. By forcing themselves into the equation of every relationship between people, priests are now seen as valuable. Are they? I will say no. I refuse to accept that they are. They wormed their way into goodness and spirituality (which are, in my mind, truly essential to our humanity) and now thrive off of it unjustly.

Patriarchs claim ownership over families by establishing concepts like blood line and inheritance. They create the idea of social identity that persists and propagates itself far beyond their own presence. They have taken a very human relationship: respect and trust, and turned it into something one can own. Patriarchs are parasites. Family is the natural, human idea that has been expropriated to justify their parasitism.

> They don't necessarily. But slowly over the ages groups that held those beliefs somehow proliferated more than those that din't. It could just be a fluke, a correlation with some other hidden variable. But maybe it was the cause and a light statistical advantage over a thousand+ years can make a large difference.

I don't think we have to see it as a fluke. There's a very obvious causal mechanism: Violence. Lots and lots of violence. Man beats the crap out of woman. Men subjugate women under threat of violence. Men set up a fence around land and call it property; they demand it be respected, under threat of violence. Priests yoke gods into pantheons, build temples, claim authority and ownership over all human social relations... under threat of violence!

A fist isn't a clever thing. Maybe we should just accept that since the neolithic our societies have been shaped by a human fist punching a human face-- for millennia.
Slut-Shaming happens on the internet too.
So if you're a founder, here's a deal you can make
with yourself that will both make you happy and
make your company successful. Tell yourself you
can be as nice as you want, so long as you work
hard on your growth rate to compensate.

Doesn't this imply that if you have less than a "hyperlinear growth curve" you should be a raging sociopath[1]? Fuck that.

[1] Or, to be precise, "a rapacious, cigar-smoking, table-thumping guy in his fifties who wins by exercising power"
D is the only language I know which at least tries to provide C++ interop (without going through the C ABI). Being syntactically and semantically closer to C++ is an advantage here. This is probably the biggest promise D has for game developers. However, it is not production ready yet.
This makes so much sense, especially for growing companies. You want viral growth - your next customer is massively more valuable than dollars now.
I agree. The Ashley Madison leak is a great example! It's almost like we have become our own super ego.
Their firmware is the feature they're selling you. The hardware is generic and without their wonderful firmware, they'd be competing solely on price. This is what the skinjobs think, at least.

BTW, openvpn performance sucks eggs on the processors used in consumer routers.
#notthe1sttime
> Compare Meerkat and Secret to Facebook and Snapchat.

Fair counterpoint, although it raises the question on what is considered "word of mouth." Both Meerkat and Secret had an absurd (and unwarranted) amount of coverage on Twitter and tech blogs.

In Silicon Valley, that's considered "success" for a startup.
I do keep a VPS for less serious things, or things that I'm less likely to work on any further. But I usually force things to graduate from that server fairly quickly. There are a few reasons for this:

1. It forces me to commit to a project a bit more (but not totally), since I'm putting a tiny bit of money down to support it.

2. Sometimes I know I need to push the project forward, but I'm not in a good headspace to make real project-specific progress. On days/mornings like this, I tend to push the project to its own server, just because it's work with a clear goal that requires less thought.
It seems to be a fairly common pattern for a startup to offer a bunch of stuff for free, or to ask for very little in return. This startup then attracts a bunch of users, and for a while everything's good.

Then the growth starts to slow down. The company needs to continue growing financially, to appease investors and so on, so they start to ratchet up their monetization. User experience and product quality begin to suffer.

By this time the company is usually pretty entrenched, with some combination of having driven all their competitors out of business or by having a strong network effect. Users will want to leave, but they don't have any other viable options.
> Maybe successful people in other industries are; I don't know; but not startup founders. [1]

I don't understand, "startups" are an industry in their own?

Would a food delivery startup not be in the food service industry? A logistics startup not be in the logistics industry?
You never said anything about web framework before, you said MVC. That's a different discussion. Although we were using MVC in Struts 1 back in what, 2001?
> Management versus worker is an adversarial relationship

This is because the needs of a company are not the needs of an individual.

>Management democratically accountable to labor seems perfectly reasonable

Have you seen the US political system? Do you think if you apply democracy to management then it won't be corrupt? I only see people voting for the manager who promises the biggest benefits.
Ask HN: Wordpress Workflows, Code/DB Versioning and Deployment
Hello,

I'm investigating about Wordpress Workflows.

It seems that code and database versioning seems to be a problem among Wordpress developers, not to mention deployment between local, staging and production servers.

I will like to know if that's something you also experiment or if you have a Workflow of your own you will like to share.

My end-goal is to research as much as possible about the topic and try to implement the best methods on my own solution in the form of a SaaS platform.

Any feedback is welcome.

Thank you.
Grid-tied power inverters are implemented this way.
The initial comment period has been extended September 9th. This was requested by the ITT and TIA.
The "wider web development community" was using MVC; Struts and Spring built more websites than Rails did for several years.
Social justice warriors never lose revolutionary vigilance!
It's a way of writing that targets rational-types, or even nerds.

That's why Hacker News is so good. If you want to discuss business in a more mundane way, there are lots of other spaces for that.
As a skeptic I have to wonder whether Google lobbied for this prior to their OnHub release. I'm also expecting Apple to announce some sort of router on Sep 9 to go with HomeKit + AppleTV. Both parties would have a vested interest in locking down the open source router ecosystem.
How to Develop Designer's Intuition
So you mean that having device with unlimited network, memory and TPM data access with encrypted firmware and separate processor should not be considered as a huge risk factor?

Due to targeted attack or leak from Intel potential malware can use it to elevate privileges, hide from any type of audit, survive complete system reinstall and even be used to silently infect systems by remote entities.

And lack of TPM module allows to steal encryption password by application running with system privileges, which already have all required access anyway.
I remember when i was living in LA, i read some theory about how the mini-mammoths got to the channel islands, and why there is little archaeological sites in southern California. He proposed that at some point in history, people lived in a valley, that is now the waterway between the mainland and the channel islands. He surmised that as the waters rose, they erased the evidence of the man, and stranded a group of mammoths on the island, who slowly shrunk due to limited area and resources. Always thought it was an interesting theory.
Excellent point, I honestly hadn't considered that. I've spent more time dealing with functional programming than in actual languages with immutable structures. Thanks for pointing that out.

I think my other point still stands, things like optional keys, or missing or required keys still must be shared throughout the app. Everything that touches that hash needs to know its structure.
> It seems to be a fairly common pattern for a startup to offer a bunch of stuff for free, or to ask for very little in return. This startup then attracts a bunch of users, and for a while everything's good.

That's less about being nice and more about business development in a time where people are very hesitant to spend money.

If a startup offers something for completely free, it's never out of altruism.
The book How Doctors Think makes that point very explicit and provides some useful tips for working with your doctor(s) to get the best treatment. I highly recommend it to anybody and everybody, FWIW.

Doctors are not infallible.

Case in point: After having a heart-attack, my GP and my cardiologist have both recommended I generally avoid taking Ibuprofen. Apparently it has some possible negative cardiac implications. OK, so a while back I was at the ER for some random pain, and the ER doctor said "take Ibuprofen". I told her that my GP and cardiologist both said not to, due to the cardiac risk and she goes "Oh, really? I didn't know anything about that. I'll have to go look that up. Thanks for the tip".

So yeah, even doctors don't always know everything. I mean, really, how could they? They're experts, sure, but their domain is too big, too vast, for any one to know all of it. It would be like expecting one of us to be an expert in all of C, C++, D, COBOL, Julia, R, Erlang, Forth, Haskell, Java, SQL, FORTRAN, Ada, Scala, and Clojure, AND know all about all of the latest libraries as they come out, AND know all about all of the newest emerging tools all the time. Nobody could possibly do that, and no one doctor can keep up with everything going on with medicine.
But if it provides a really good standard library altogether (unicode, structs, enumerable, etc) with an excellent tooling and powerful abstractions (like protocols), then surely yes.

I can't comment on excellent tooling. Language-specific package managers never tend to be excellent, which is why I appreciate the limited scope of a tool like rebar.

Again, you are overvaluing a language based on the libraries it exports, rather than on its true a priori merits. Some languages are designed for intense extensibility and expressiveness, like Forth. An argument based on laundry listing abstractions to dissuade someone from using it would be rightfully dismissed as nonsense, since it is their prerogative to define the threshold of abstraction they need.

Furthermore, I've noticed that people who tend to promote languages based on the mere reductionist listing of abstractions tend to not understand those abstractions well themselves, treating it as dark wizardry.

Erlang is definitely malleable to reasonable extensibility. See Erlando which adds Miranda/Haskell-like monadic patterns to Erlang.
> In fact, as he continues he leans forward and seems on the verge of standing up

I always stops on sentences like this one and admire the writing.
Yeah, I think so. But I agree that this sort of moral compass is probably more needed by a freelancer - more freedom, more decisions to make, so in this sense I can see why you'd qualify it as such, even if these guidelines are more universal...
I got a glimpse into this when I talked to someone who was following the nightscout program for their child.

http://www.nightscout.info/

They were non-technical people. Yet they had an android phone connected to a medical device using a 3d printed bracket and short usb cable. The android phone was reporting to a windows azure instance. Pebble watch polling the azure instance for updated levels.

The sysadmin in me recoiled at the myriad operational deficiencies and potential failure modes. Yet they don't have a better option. I get that the FDA has standards it has to apply, but I imagine that many things they would reject would still be vastly better than this. Is there a term for 'the risks people will take anyway rather than wait for something perfectly safe'. Like if you make wait times at crosswalks too long will more people get killed crossing the street?