skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This (both the post and the comments here) are very interesting to me from a "some people are intrinsically optimistic and some people are intrinsically pessimistic" point of view.

> Homejoy and ‘fail’ have gotten tethered together in the tech headlines recently but for myself and many of my colleagues Homejoy will always be more synonymous with success than failure.

Rationalization is a hell of a drug And I don't mean that in a snarky way– synthesized happiness every bit as "real" as "genuine" happiness. The brain doesn't discriminate.

Dan Gilbert did a great TED talk [1] about this:

> "Who are these characters who are so damn happy? The first one is Jim Wright. Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal he had done. He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country lost everything. He lost his money, he lost his power. What does he have to say all these years later? "I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way." What other way would there be to be better off? Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there."

Startups are often started by wildly optimistic people, while Internet messageboards tend to be populated by wildly pessimistic people. I'm not saying that either is better or worse, but it's an interesting phenomenon to witness.

So the interesting thing here is... while Homejoy is obviously a failure, I legitimately believe that OP feels good about himself, and probably better than some successful founders feel about their successful startups.

Rationalization is a hell of a drug. [2]

PS: Another lesson I think the cynics and pessimists could take away from this (but, by definition, probably won't) is that you can get away with a lot more failure in this world than you imagine, and still probably end up on top. OP is still probably better off than a lot of us career-ily and in many other ways.

I wonder, if blind optimism could be sold in a drink like coffee, would it be worth buying (in terms of net impact on well-being?) Seems like it might be. Curious for your thoughts.

---

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy

[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/200912/downs...
Not to snark, but my Linux systems also have a configurable message of the day that gets displayed when you SSH in or log in on the console. :)
> dealing in stolen goods is in fact illegal,
> regardless of whether or not you knew the goods were
> stolen in the first place

This is called strict liability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability
It's also funny because memory leaks literally aren't a memory safety issue. If they were, every garbage collected language would be memory-unsafe.
The example in article had went from a GZIPed size of 4.1 MB to 3.0 MB. For the massive increase of obscurity the transferal optimization trade off isn't that great. But it's a double edged sword, I'd also wager obscurity would entice larger AAA game developers to start targeting web.
> For example: I don't understand why Python, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, and so on have not delivered tools that ease the path for those who wish to write applications designed to run code from untrusted sources. I think this would make the web a lot more competitive and overall healthier as an independent institution.

You would have to ask the Python, Ruby etc. people why they don't work on it more, but from the side of the web, there is plenty of effort. First, several languages like those have been ported to the web, by porting their VMs:

http://kripken.github.io/lua.vm.js/lua.vm.js.html

http://ruby.dj/

https://github.com/replit/empythoned

Instead of each language needing to devise a sandboxing mechanism, by porting them to the web, they can be run safely there. This is also much safer for the web: just one sandbox, instead of many.

WebAssembly will improve those ports, by reducing code size and download times and so forth.
What irc client is that? Could you share the config?
Show HN: Magic for job search
Parse time is basically free with WebAssembly
A question - statistically how much better is it than producing OBBs via applying KLT/PCA on the (x,y,z) coordinates, obtaining major/minor covariance axis? I used that one for my SW 3D engine and was quite happy about it - very fast eigenvector computation and only orthogonal projections needed.
When ice sheets were recently found to be melting and breaking off faster than before, most of the media was relating it to global climate change. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. If you don't consider this as evidence against AGW then you also can't consider other isolated local phenomenon as evidence for it. I'm sure scientists know this, but the media and general pundits don't.
Just asked for my account to be deleted, their whole response to this situation is insane.
It is entirely possible to have an extremely good team and talented, knowledgeable people as leaders, but that doesn't make good businesspeople or imply a good vision.
I agree with every single thing about your comment.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if these guys go on to do other things, try again, fail again, try again, fail again, and eventually build something that actually works.

It might not be immediately obvious, but deluded entrepreneurs (with their blind optimism and relentless trial-and-error) make the world a better place. I don't know if we should encourage or discourage it, and I'm not too sure if these people can be discouraged either.

I suppose at best we can advocate for caution and due diligence.
There's no such thing as bug free code. So yes, I've deployed coffee I knew had bugs. And if I took twice as long, and spent the extra time checking, it would still have bugs...
Pacman package manager on windows with msys2
On the spot? Probably not, no. I would begin looking for work elsewhere though, possibly in a different field.
With all the lessons learned, I would think that a completely new implementation would have less security issues.
If it's financially impossible to make a product that doesn't harm people, you don't say "gosh, sorry, but your safety is incompatible with our fiscal goals." You cancel the fucking product.

And beyond that, I don't believe for a moment that--to use the example from the article--it would have increased Grindr's costs by 1000x if they had taken a little while to brainstorm possible negative consequences of an app that lets gay people be anonymously tracked and located worldwide. "Too expensive" is code for "we've decided that the safety of our users is less important than maximizing our profit margin."
All my trash for a year fit into two plastic bags.ere’s how I did it
I can't allow myself to believe that "few" have a passion - I believe if you have a lack of passion, then you're ignorant to the world around you.

Everywhere you turn there are things that could be improved, fixed, wrongs righted, dictators toppled, famine, poverty, racism, sexism, classism, problems that need solving, things to be understood, things to be simplified; things that make everyone's lives safer, more bearable, more comfortable, happier.

If you take a hard look at the world around you and look at ways to apply what you enjoy doing to making people's lives around you better, your passion will come alive.
Basically the twitter bot part is non existing in the talk, but at least it manages to convey a cute basic intro into neural networks.
There are more baggies in corner offices ;)
Darkness at 4PM on a December afternoon feels like the world is conspiring against you, while you're being robbed of your youth.

I honestly despise the mornings. I'm not the kind of person who relishes a schedule, and when I'm being forced to engage in behavior not of my own design, I hate mornings even more.

Bus stops, train schedules, school, teachers, college professors, jobs, work, employment, bosses, none of it anything I ever invited into my life. These things foisted upon me as normal, bald facts. Uncomfortable and coerced.

Go to school or you'll be pumping gas and waiting tables your whole life. Perform at work or you'll be a homeless skell, evicted onto the streets because you can't pay rent. Don't step out of line or civilization as you know it will turn its back on you, and you'll deserve it, because the world never asked for you, either. So don't get smart about it, you entitled little brat.

Get up. Out of bed. Spend time in rooms with strangers for no reason. Abstract concepts will assault you for the next 8 hours. Endure the psychotic nightmare of the public school bus ride.

20 minutes of sunlight on the way to school or work is little consolation for the reality presented to me on a daily basis.

And when that machine which consistently erases one third of my day spits me back out onto the street, what's my reward? Bitter cold, and an immediate sunset drenching the remainder of my waking hours in darkness.

Ask my why I'm a night owl? Everything else has been taken from me.
Nothing. WebAssembly in its current implementation is basically a binary representation of asm.js.
The redhat/fedora repository versions of ES are so badly broken that they are a hazzard. It would be a service for redhat to pull them too.
> Most people don't care if something takes up 10's of MB's of RAM when new PC's are shipping with 16-32GB standard.

ISTR a -now undoubtedly outdated- answer to a question that was very much like "Why will there not be a real Photoshop clone for mobile devices in the near future?". One of the striking things to come out of the analysis was that -absolute best case- you got something like ~300MB of RAM (and -common case- ~100MB) to work with before you got unceremoniously killed.

I would hope that now you can reliably consume ~500MB of RAM per app, but... that's still a far cry from what you can use on a "real" PC.

Unfortunately, memory usage still matters. :(
> I wish we would see a reasoned explanation from the investors of why they put their limited partner’s money into Homejoy.

"There's a 0.1% chance we could 10,000x'd our investment. It might be the next Uber or Airbnb or [[insert_supposed_unicorn]]. You don't want to look like a dinosaur who missed out on the next big thing, do you? It'll only cost you a fragment of your $$. C'mon. For Glory! For Frodo!"

When it fails: "Eh, what can you do. Startups, amirite?"
Web pages are already a far cry from human-readable semantic markup. That's not a hill worth dying on.
A recent survey on in-memory big data processing systems: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7097...
Shipping with bugs is a fact of life. Living with tech debt is an economic necessity because if you don't some other company will and they'll eat your lunch. The comparison with physical infrastructure doesn't really hold up.

I've been a member of ACM primarily because I wanted easier access to ACM library papers, but not any more. I'm uninterested in turning software engineering into a gated discipline with a professional organisation acting as a monopoly keyholder.

Software as a discipline affects too many areas of life for anything much more than a vague platitude as a code. Components may be used for good or evil in ways we can't control. Even something as potentially evil as Metasploit is also almost exactly the same thing you want to use to test for vulnerabilities (personally I would not write a plugin for it).
My Writing Education: A Time Line
Initial Thoughts on Apple TV from a Developer’s Perspective
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/TextFormat...
Considering Slack is a per-organization service with minimal cross talk between organizations, your premise seems flawed.

I mean, Slack appeared on scene after many other technologies existed. People recommend it for their friends because it works well. There is no global network effect at play.
Most of their passions lead them to those low paying jobs not because their passions are unrealistic, but because they don't have the vision to lucratively leverage that passion.
These numbers seem very wrong.
Codegirl
The smugness I see almost always comes from the skeptic/denier crowd, who just love to talk about how stupid people who believe in global warming are and how obvious it is that the whole thing is a hoax because of the global warming hiatus, or volcanoes, or because it snowed on Tuesday, or whatever.

If objectivity is lacking, it is lacking almost exclusively because certain right-wing groups took a scientific issue, turned it into a political issue, and set their politics to oppose the science.

Certainly, there exist fanatic, non-objective people on both sides. But they're not exactly common, and it gets tedious to see comments like yours in every discussion about this issue, and almost always directed at the reasonable people who actually look at the facts, and not at the the people who think climate change isn't science, who think that increased ice mass must be evidence against global warming regardless of the reason for it, or who think global temperatures stopped rising in 1998.
As a note, one does not symlink to `~/.nvimrc` anymore. Things are now in `~/.config/nvim/` with the rcfile in the `~/.config/nvim/init.vim`. This was a bit of a surprise for me the other day when my `nvim` instance failed to pick up my settings and refused to identify a `backupdir`.
Any dev network whose members discuss about tech used in their companies?
Let isGeorgeBoolesBirthday = True
And this is the problem in a nutshell: "I'm okay with trying not to hurt people, as long as it pays better than hurting people does."

I wonder if the real difference between software engineering and other engineering disciplines is that they have a culture of responsibility--of saying "hey, public safety is more important than money"--and we emphatically don't.
Over the long term, wages in first world countries will remain flat or decline and meet the third world countries in the middle.
It's actually much easier to falsify the "this is a bad thing" part. All we have to do is wait and see if it really is a bad thing or not. The length of time to wait should be about 100 years since that's also the limits of most of the AGW predictions.

Your point (1) has a huge assumption about "kill us off". There's no sign that mankind is being killed off. We're doing just fine. The novel mechanism might be transient and the increases in CO2 might be found to reverse.
I haven't figured out how to get the iOS client to connect to a custom chat server. It seems to only support the main rocket.chat server.
SEC moves to allow startup investing via crowdfunding
Are you implying that if people aren't good at something they love doing, they just aren't passionate about it... and that with real passion, being great at something is inevitable?
Seconded.

As you find your "passion", and that might just be a set of skills you care about, or a process, means, method, value, etc... you maximize it, sell it, trade on it, share it, build it and keep moving from there.

Things link together. And seeing those links and where the value is can really pay off and over a number of years doing this you can look back and know you made a difference and probably got paid well doing it.

Rather than expect to find that perfect job, you do the job, and find out a little of who you are and what you really care about. The minute you know, max that out and don't look back.

And when you do another job? Maybe that connects with what you did before. Bonus points for making sure that is true. Again, you find out a little of who you are and what you really care about.

Wash, rinse, repeat.
A Plea for Simplicity – You can't secure what you don't understand. (1999)
It is a legal requirement in the EU under Data Protection Laws.
So, the situation will be no worse than it currently is, but with the upside that more information would be available, and tons of money would not be wasted on stupid investigations.

I do recommend you watch "American Greed" on CNBC.
> I feel like Debian has maybe finally cottoned onto the idea that it only really makes sense to do "transparently apply security upgrades"-style LTS support for packages that are actual OS infrastructure, because people are increasingly vendoring/containerizing anything that affects whether their app works.

Or, for that matter, since Elasticsearch is written in Java, most Java developers just use Maven to pull in dependencies and don't even bother using the OS package manager.
AutoConnect: Computational Design of 3D-Printable Connectors
Top 15 con đường gây đau tim nhất thế giới
And if someone's constantly at their limit?

To take an example from another domain, much of California's Central Valley municipal water infrastructure is unmetered. A consequence of this is that problems with water infrastructure go unaddressed. In most of the cases I'm aware in which meters have been installed, even where there's no actual usage service billing, a near-immediate result is to find many previously undiscovered leaks, mains breaks, or service pipe breaks. While I'm not an uncritical fan of "you cannot manage what you don't measure", there are times when having some sanity checks on usage help.

In the case of online usage, it may be that you're a spam hub. Or that, as at one hosting provider I worked discovered, the interaction of a client's autoplay audio and a particular version of MSIE meant that we were continuously streaming what should have been a 5 second audio clip. We overshot out 95%ile bandwidth cap that month.
I'd agree with your comment. But the "Homejoy will always be more synonymous with success than failure" closing and this [1] make me believe that an important lesson wasn't learned.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10466888
This might be accurate, but it is hardly reasoned :)
Arguably the Tirpitz was the most effective ship of the war as well.
Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?
We just deployed a new attempt to make HN work better on mobile. Should we keep it? Feedback, please.
Sea level rise alone isn't a humanity-destroying disaster. It's just a bit of an expense having to build new buildings further inland. We've done a good job of building nearly every building on earth in the past 100 years. We'll probably manage to do it again in the next 100 years if we need to. We'll probably do it anyway even if we don't need to. Buildings are routinely demolished and replaced when they're too old.
I've been using `nvim` on OS X and Arch Linux for the last few months. I am very pleased with it. Excellent stuff, and the newsletters were a great way of keeping the indiegogo backers informed.
> I honestly think that one of the key ingredients to the success of the web is that just about any web page you can see, just about anyone with modest knowledge can trivially work out how it was done.

Not really. Almost all websites obfuscate/minify their Javascript now, making manually interpreting the code much less than "trivial." I think WebAssembly will be no worse to figure out than obfuscated Javascript.
"Executing Software Engineers for Bugs"

Never have I been prouder to be a plain old programmer. Those software engineers, architects, systems analysts, and data scientists can keep the capital punishment for themselves.
Philip Zimbardo, you mean?
In the context of this thread, I'm saying that scientific progress is being made (in some sense) as more and more people accept the reality of AGW, which "falsified" the previous theory of "We have no idea what's going on." Scientists not being enthusiastic to disprove the core tenet of a very successful theory is not an evidence of laziness. Not everyone can be Einstein, and being Einstein requires you to be actually right (and the previous theory to have a fault that cannot be easily explained, e.g., Michelson-Morley experiment).
I'd argue that is one of the few things live coding is doing right. Trying to get people in the habit of using the platform to exchange cash for help.
New experimental evidence of the effect of language on economic decisions
A world of greener cars is coming sooner than we ever might have guessed
It's very common for the reasons for business failure to seem obvious in retrospect. That's because building a successful business requires getting a lot of independently trivial things right, and doing so under very tight time and resource constraints. If you're a commenter on Hacker News or a student in an MBA course, you have the time to focus on what went wrong, and of course it seems obvious. If you're an entrepreneur building the business, your attention was probably elsewhere, and it's likely that the you didn't even think about the things that killed your business.
I hope to see so the developers that don't like JavaScript stop writing bad JavaScript and just write it in whatever class based type based system they want instead of adding classes and types to Javascript.
If they need to rent then they should do so. This defeats the point of one of the main complaints - that what should be full-time rental housing is being converted to higher-priced hotels, driving up already absurdly high costs for people who want to live in the affected cities.
Yet, isn't much of the web already unreadable due to minification of JS source?
Introducing self-describing Thrift (2014)
Luck is what outsiders label reasons that you get ahead and they don't. The reason a door opened for you and not for them. The reason that you're successful and they're not.

What they fail to see is that it wasn't lucky at all. It may have been luck that that particular door opened when it did, but realistically, from the inside, it was leveraging the best opportunity available at the time. If that door hadn't opened, you'd have taken another route to your objective. There is little luck involved. The only lucky thing I suppose is the probability of taking the route you did.

When you climb a mountain your goal is the summit. The climber who decides "Ah shit, I couldn't do it because there was bad weather, you were so lucky that you hit the mountain when you did and had that window to summit." There was no luck involved... you would've summited anyway, you'd have just taken a different route or persevered longer to get there. That's the difference between those who make it and those who say "If only I'd had their luck."

I guess you could say it took some luck for Edison to make the light bulb... but I daresay if you'd suggested such a thing to Edison, he'd have taken your head off. But that's the difference between seeing failure and seeing the thousands of incremental changes that led from something that wasn't satisfactory, to something that provides lights for the entire world...
This is true and it is where the investors should have stepped in. A good investor would have said to the Homejoy team "we believe in you and will back you in any viable business venture, but the home cleaning market is not a problem that will be solved by technology. Go and find something better and we will talk - here is $50K so you don’t starve in the mean time."
That seems a contrived example. The console is invisible to the end-user, why does it matter if an application can output to it?
"Take an anonymous currency system, for example....Do you build that, or not?"

Obviously you do.

I don't understand why that would be a question.
Maybe just me, but it seems to have a lack of padding around the edges. Also the comment input isn't mobile optimized.
Five Posts to Read Before Reaching Out to VCs
Motorcycle-riding Robot on unmodified motorcycle
> ... and in what sense is "the sun is the center of the universe" not completely wrong?

In the sense that you can make a lot of really accurate predictions about the motion of the planets, with a heliocentric model. For that matter, you can get a lot done proceeding from the assumption that the Earth is flat because, to a reasonable approximation, Earth is flat.

http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html