skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's some merit in what the professor is saying. A lot of the minutiae get in the way when you want to get something done. Who wants to wrestle with some obscure option to some kernel module to get ones graphics drivers working before starting work on a serious graphics project?

However, having grown up in an era when GNU/Linux wasn't friendly at all, I think I learnt a lot of stuff that's valuable to me even today. Much of it was concrete factoids which I no longer need or use but the valuable parts were some kind of "meta" skills (which Eytan[1] discusses much more eloquently in his rebuttal) which serve me very well even though I don't wrangle with the nitty gritty of getting obscure software working on my computer. Some examples I can think of are.

a. I can decipher man pages and other unfriendly but mostly technically complete documentation.
b. I can speak the language of the programmer fairly well which makes my work much more smoother than if I had to speak through a UX interpreter.
c. Given some kind of task, I have the confidence that once I learn the domain specific stuff, the computer and software can't really cripple me and prevent me from getting work done.
d. In case of an emergency, I know where the metaphorical life jackets are and what to do. I also have the confidence to get and use them.
e. I'm conversant with the ideas of pipes and other such tools that allow me to automate away annoying tasks which would have otherwise bothered me.
f. Even when resources are scarce (e.g. over a slow net connection on some remote machine), I know that I get work done without the fancy interfaces.

This makes me generally more efficient and I don't think I'd trade all those years of dealing with these arcane tools for anything else. I mentor students these days and a thumb rule I use to evaluate them is to see if the've managed to install a "non-mainstream" Gnu/Linux distro on their machines. If they've managed, it's almost surely a sign that they're good learners.

This is not an argument for making command line interfaces hard or keeping them that way. It's just that there's a school of thought that'll sacrifice ease of use for power and there's some value in that even for people not directly working on the tools themselves.

Footnotes:
[1]: https://medium.com/@eytanadar/on-the-value-of-command-line-b...
"On paper, the shares in the latter are worth much more (based on the current public valuation)."

By 'public valuation' I assume you mean a $ figure that was announced after the last funding round. Your shares probably don't have liquidation preferences, whereas the investors' shares probably do. So, you can't rely on a valuation calculated by a journalist. You need to do the math.

"How much of this could a candidate expect to know about and should it factor into a decision?"

Companies are used to dealing with people who don't understand, or do not look too deeply into the numbers. So, I guess they will expect you not to ask for details. However, without knowing the details of the cap table (including, as you say, the volume of shares outstanding, and the different rights attaching to different classes of shares) you can't hope to arrive at a useful valuation. Many people on HN suggest valuing startup equity at $0, and this is one of the reasons.
He's 100% right. It's all "bullshittery". Unfortunately, that's a rather trivial observation. Kinda like saying 2 + 2 = 4. The next part is the hard part - which to fix first?

I think what he really wants is a suri like AI that just does it all for him. Of course, at that point, I suspect skynet will have taken over.
Old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8438129
Thanks! It's a spinoff from my iPhone app, Streaks (http://streaksapp.com)
This is a weird thing to say. Look at the Fortune "Unicorn list" (the first Google hit I get for [unicorn list]):

1. Uber (not ad-funded)

2. Xiaomi (not ad-funded)

3. Airbnb (not ad-funded)

4. Palantir (not ad-funded)

5. Snapchat (ad-funded)

6. Didi Kuaidi (not ad-funded)

7. Flipkart (not ad-funded)

8. SpaceX (not ad-funded)

9. Pinterest (ad-funded)

10. Dropbox (not ad-funded)

11. WeWork (not ad-funded)

12. Lufax (not ad-funded)

13. Theranos (not ad-funded)

14. Spotify (not ad-funded)

15. DJI (not ad-funded)

16. Zhong An (not ad-funded)

17. Meituan (ad-funded)

18. Square (not ad-funded)

19. Snapdeal (ad-funded)

20. Stripe (not ad-funded)

It just keeps going like this. These aren't even ad-ecosystem companies. I'm not sure how far down the list you'd have to go to find an adtech firm.
The command-line is also an abstraction. I'm not anti-command line (for non-user stuff), but it irks me that we see the command line as some kind of god-given fundamental bloc, rather than just another abstraction that just happen to be at a level most programmers are happy with. I think the command line will persist as long as keyboards are the primary data entry tool, but nothing makes the command line inherently less leaky than other interfaces.
Thanks for these. First link (and similar others I've found) has helped me get up to speed on terminology and other issues at play.

I haven't been given information about what % of the company the shares I'm being offered represent. How critical is this do you think? Can I take the company at their word in terms of what the shares are worth at what they state is the current valuation of the company?
This is brilliant, keep up the good work. Honestly I can't think why none of us thought of this before (or so I believe).
The two problems are sort of equivalent when you realize that the shell is just a REPL to your OS, and commands you type are, generally, API calls.
Without going into specifics, there was a static analysis tool that was part of the toolchain that caught multiple writes in different modules or in tasks of different priorities. It was a build error unless allowed on a case-by-case basis.
That we still revolve around static, line-based interpreters from the VT100 era (over more intelligent CLIs or hybrid UIs like Oberon) is indeed rather quaint, and the proliferation of underdesigned programming tools also, but I strongly disagree with the author's claim that all these Unix programs are "[bullshit] not intellectually interesting in any way". Perhaps I'm one of the few people who actually likes to read the source code to the nodes in their /var/log/packages, but potentially getting involved with userspace system programming is not to be dismissed.
The one that I bought through Elcot -- in association with the TN Govt (in 2008) had OpenSUSE installed by default.
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You seem to be deeply confused. Hillary casting a pro forma vote for something does not equate in any way with initiating the thing in question.

Deep down, you know this, of course. You know it's blatantly silly for you to say that Hillary Clinton is "on par" with W. But somehow your filter just failed to kick in.
> People run diesels due to durability. They run at lower RPM than similarly designed gas engines, and last longer between rebuilds.

This makes plenty of sense for heavy machinery and trucks. This makes no sense for passenger cars, and little sense for most consumer SUVs and light-duty trucks. On any decent modern car a gasoline engine with proper maintenance is the about the last thing to go. How often does a typical car owner rebuild their engine? By the time you get to 200K, a car is typically a money hole for reasons having little to do with the engine. This goes double in northern climates with real winters. By the time the engine needs a rebuild you have a rust-bucket clunker that should be replaced with a more contemporary model.
He's not trivializing anything, he's merely expressing a rather obvious (and frankly sophomoric) statement - software can be made more user friendly. And making software more user friendly actually isn't that hard. What is hard is to figure out which software to make more user friendly (given finite resources). That is a very very challenging problem.. and what's more is a sign of your intellectual worth in solving it.
He makes a good point. I once tried teaching my two teen-age kids Python. I was surprised to discover that before we could get into any Python I had to explain all kinds of things I took for granted (or, perhaps I don't remember how I learned them) - what is terminal (this is OSX), what is the command line, why it's called "shell" and what is the kernel, what is the current directory, what are text files, how to edit them, why there is vi, vim and emacs, etc, etc. All in all it's many many hours of explanation of the environment which you need to understand before you can do any programming. We spent a couple of weeks on this stuff, got to some basic Python and then the summer was over :(

It's especially curious that one of these kids took a class in high school called "Computer Science" and they were using Java as the learning language. Somehow they managed to write programs that performed cool animations without knowing what the command line is.
Well, the number I'm using is what the company has told me is their current valuation (it's slightly higher than what was reported by press after the last round of funding, but not dramatically so). The share prices I'm being given are stated as a fact based on this valuation (along with optimistic projects of what they might look like were the company to multiply in value).

Should I ask about liquidation preferences? % of company that the # of RSUs I'm being offered represents? I guess there's no harm in asking.
That C^2 factor is a bit of a problem. Calculate the mass equivalent of any reasonable amount of energy you intend to "throw" and you will be disappointed. In the other direction, that c^2 term works pretty well (for atomic bombs anyway).

For the relationship of the mass-energy equation to the force exerted by radiation. see Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure
Yes, and algebra is the "command-line bullshitery" of doing physics.

I struggled for many years over this (my username is an in-joke with myself). There's basically two days a month that i can actually comprehend algebra, the rest of the time those little symbols merge and splurge themselves across the page until i'm dizzy.

The beginnings of a breakthrough happened when I started writing a program (algorithm) for every bit of algebra I couldn't understand. Now I am starting to see that the equals sign is just not for me. I think in processes, not static equalities. And indeed, there is a whole branch of mathematics with this philosophy: category theory.
Well, it's interesting that anyone would be concerned about (1) meanwhile probably 99% of open source projects use e.g. github, bitbucket, gmail, etc...

If it's an open source project then shouldn't everything be out in the open anyways? If that's not the case then it implies it's a private project in which case there should be a budget...

Maybe Im wrong though?
Once again, you conveniently leave out the key part of the comment in question: the source of the funding.

Citizens United wasn't about speech. It was about unlimited anonymous money flooding our elections.

Nothing is wrong with criticizing a politician. That's obvious. But thanks for the clumsy obfuscation attempt.
With Facebook and Apple effectively owning a number of viral channels on mobile, I wonder how you think of the larger problems of channels in general. It's not like the past when a multi-friend selector was easily available. Will you guys be integrated with the chat platforms (FB, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc.) or do you think old school is still cool?
This follow up article is definitely worth reading. But just to put things in perspective, I got my degree in physics, and I overcame bullshitteries in programming, plumbing, machining, electronics, mechanics, bike repair, and so forth.

I think that part of the value, if not the major part, is that at the PhD level, you're given a problem that is ill defined, that your advisor doesn't know how to solve, and whose solution doesn't necessarily come entirely from within your field. Though I was a physics student, solving my thesis problem required developing skills beyond my advisor's own expertise, in areas such as electronics and programming. I had to invent a solution that he had not imagined. It helped a lot that those things were also my hobbies.

Which brings us to this reality. One day, and I pretty much guarantee it will happen, your student will download something from the Web and they will get stuck.

You don't know stuck until it's actually on fire. ;-)
I've been told that there are various gray market (?) channels to sell shares in a company that is not public, but I don't even know what to search for to find more about these. Do you have any pointers on that?
All good points.

The CPU, Flash and RAM share the silicon die with lots of specialized peripherals like CAN controllers and hardware timer units. There's a lot more on the chip than just a CPU.

Also, cost is king in automotive...
Think about it this way: in 1995, you'd have spent those 10,000 hours reading other people's C code, reading the same dumb hash table or linked list implemented 400 different ways, the same goofy 4-5 line loops implementing "split" with strtok() over and over. But you don't anymore, because most research isn't done using C.

In 1995 you'd have said "learning to understand what a strtok string split routine looks like is learning how other people think and write software". And you'd have been right. But you would also have been describing bullshittery that we are all glad not to have to deal with anymore.

That's the overall feeling I get from this piece: there is more bullshittery to eliminate than the 400 different versions of "xmalloc" that we had to deal with in 1995.

Also: that because understanding how to iterate over the tokens of a colon-delimited string with strtok() isn't actually intrinsic to much computer science research, it's very important that we don't judge aptitude or capability by how conversant people are with strtok, or whatever it is strcspn does.
Show HN: A simple progressive hash encoding scheme
I'm also a researcher in the same basic field but not that good at this "bullshittery".
The use of resources and property is what drives coercion in the first place. It's very convenient of you to not be interested in property; if you ignore resources and access to them and every driver of conflict and coercion then sure it's truly wonderful to be against coercion. But this is solipsistic: We can all live without food or property or shelter and never force anyone to do anything and starve to death alone. But the moment you even pick a berry you have taken it from everyone else and are claiming it as your property. Similarly with animals, water, property. This in itself is a coercive act; it involves the threat of force in your view. So simple human existence is by nature coercive. The state is only a formalized tool we use to reduce it: general agreement on basic principles and a willingness to share.

Your point about the moral authority of 51% of the population coercing the remaining 49% is an interesting one, but I would answer thusly: you are not coerced at all, in fact you are free to exist without obeying the state. All you must do is avoid taking the state's possessions: don't breathe our air, don't eat our food, don't live on our land, don't drink our water. If you're willing to do this you can live completely coercion-free. It's the kind of choice libertarians love; the illusion of one.
I really enjoyed reading this post, and it looks like the Amiga was ahead of its time.
"nohup tar -jxvf giant.tar.bz2 2> cmd.errs &”

Someone doesn't know how things work and is complaining about it. The above command is just programs put together in hope that it looks complicated, but are also totally useless, and not actually installing anything (it unbzip an archive, detach it from the controlly TTY, redirects errors to a file, and run in the background, while verbosely writing down what it does, because, nobody knows why anyway)

I don't find most-programs CLI all that bad - in fact, its more consistent than the GUI stuff with some exceptions (generally coded by people like the author, an many java-based programs, mind you, go figure, etc.).

Sure, I'd like to say "hey make everything works" and the computer does it for me. But until them things like "yum install blahsoftware" is REALLY fast an easy (heck it beats the phone apps stores by such magnitudes that I can't even?)
It's 3 words. Done.

Heck, you want to install a full software suite, configured, with services auto deployed etc? Today you can also do this also in 3 to 6 fucking words. That's amazing if you ask me.
For every kind of team sysops work I've ever done, I would say that Slack is indeed the best available tool.

Not every organization needs this kind of workflow though, so the best available tool depends on what your organization has to integrate. (Disclosure: I've never tried HipChat.)
Wow, and here I thought I was just parroting a line Josaiah Bartlett had about school board elections in New Hampshire.
I like how you're ignoring the testimony of an actual attractive/cool/popular person to make your point about attractive/cool/popular people.
>What's the minimum I should do to protect myself before trying this experiment?

Have a lawyer at the ready via speed dial. This will cost you alot of money if you are going to be doing something unethical.
Letsee,
If Methadone/suboxone treatment costs $4k/year, that would have paid for 1.75 million patient-years of therapy.
And employed a lot of US health care workers.
And prevented who knows how much crime, child neglect, missed work...
I had the same response. I can't imagine hearing a carpenter go on and on with "Its absurd that i have to set the depth of my dadoes. Its so hard to be me and have to sharpen my chisels. Someone like me should not have to set the depth of my planes or adjust the width of the opening. Damn you Lie and Neilsen you are ruining my brilliance. If thats not enough I have to constantly explain these things to these wretched apprentices that are always bothering me." It sounds like entitled whining to me. It is a job, not a recreational activity. Soldiers have to clean their rifles and ballerinas need to break in their ballet shoes. I have to imagine that even individuals at the pinnacle of their professions occasionally have to deal with things they would rather avoid.
Biculturalism (2003)
Obligatory xkcd link

https://xkcd.com/1168/
what is "TCB"?
Meteor Weekly Issue #2
Frankly, I appreciate a good bottleneck that selects against people that can't grok basic unix admin and system maintenance.

How many hours (thousands) and dollars (tens of thousands) have I wasted on "programmers" that don't even have a home server running in their closet...

That's an interview question at rsync.net, btw. What computer(s) do you have (running) in your closet ? What computer is connected to your television ?
I've done this in a non-professional environment to allow my partner to understand what I do.

We used a whiteboard to draw a flowchart of the logical steps needed to make Tetris work, then wrote pseudocode for those modules.
The core product is an ecosystem for the workplace. There are 4 actors that it targets.

For Commercial Real Estate buildings is a SaaS platform that allows them to build out a profile for their building, configure all their services and amenities, invite everyone in their building to join their profile. They can then use the platform to communicate to everyone in their building (by push, sms or email) and offer all their services and amenities to people (book a room, join a health & wellness program, reserve a parking space)

For companies that exist in these buildings, it is a SaaS platform where they can build out their profile, offer their own services and amenities and invite their employees to join their profile. They can then use the platform to communicate about their company, offer services, etc.

For retailers/vendors/QSR's its a SaaS platform to configure your profile and offer your services. The easiest example is a QSR that wants to offer order ahead.

For the end user, the employee that shows up to work everyday, its a mobile app and web platform that connects you into all of the above things.

We are still revamping out website with all this new material (isn't every startup).

Let me know if you have any more questions!
Is this going to be something that users can customise?
> Back around 1999 I was running Gnome and E.16 (or was it 15?) and I had a hugely customizable UI

Why don't you keep using it? I'm still using sawfish.
It's a real lab that is recognized and funded by NASA.

> NASA/JSC is implementing an advanced propulsion physics laboratory, informally known as "Eagleworks", to pursue propulsion technologies necessary to enable human exploration of the solar system over the next 50 years, and enabling interstellar spaceflight by the end of the century. This work directly supports the "Breakthrough Propulsion" objectives detailed in the NASA OCT TA02 In-space Propulsion Roadmap, and aligns with the #10 Top Technical Challenge identified in the report.

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20110023492

That is because "Breakthrough Propulsion" is included in the NASA Technology Roadmaps:

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/home/roadmaps/index.html

> TA 2.3.7 Breakthrough Propulsion

> Breakthrough propulsion is an area of technology development that seeks to explore and develop a deeper understanding of the nature of space-time, gravitation, inertial frames, quantum vacuum, and other fundamental physical phenomena with the overall objective of developing advanced propulsion applications and systems that will revolutionize space exploration.

It's good to be skeptical of weird or unexpected results, but this is a real area of study for NASA. It's not an investor scam or something like that. And really, it makes sense. If NASA is not going to look far into the future of space travel, who is? It's prudent to spend a bit of money chasing down crazy ideas, just in case one pans out.

That said, this particular "announcement" is apparently just a forum post, and I agree shouldn't be treated as an official NASA announcement.
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That's fine and I agree to some extent. But you said 'nothing good for anyone.' Some organizations abusing social media doesn't nullify the good things that have happened because of it.