skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The other problem with it is that they don't appreciate that probably more than 90% of all code (including the code that touches their ideas) is for unsexy reporting purposes only. The domain expertise accounts for probably 1% to 5% of any business's code, and generally it's the easiest code to design, test, and change later on because it follows very tightly with well-worn practices in scientific computing. You might invent a great new trading strategy, but implementing it is still just the same old vector math and efficient algorithms stuff everyone's been doing for decades.

But with the logging, reporting, parameter management, data provenance, data resource management, etc., etc., the actual creative design of the code matters much more, and a failure to make it extensible is way more expensive to fix down the road than tweaking some O(n^2) scientific algorithm.

As an aside, this is one reason that I think algorithmic brain teasers are a really stupid thing for interviews or predicting positive business impact. With brainteasers, you are testing for rote memorization of a set of optimization techniques (data structure implementations) that maybe touches 1%-5% of your easiest-to-optimize-from-textbooks-or-wikipedia code, whereas the other 95% can almost always be assumed to rely on library implementations of these kinds of structures, and the high-level design of components, particularly optimizing it so that the addition or refactoring of features later is not expensive, is the dominant concern for adding actual business value.

It's just another status game like everything else. Programming labor is asserted to be a commodity item to the company, so that managers can justify lower wage, worse working conditions, etc., for programmers than for business domain experts who are supposedly less easily replaced. But the reality is that a reasonably smart programmer can probably pick up the domain expertise to a high level, even to the same level as a Ph.D. researcher, in a short time, whereas for some reason because of some kind of status-based mental block or lack of curiosity, the domain experts seem incapable of picking up legitimate programming skills.

When most of the code is for reporting, designing the reporting system is a huge priority. But when domain expertise carries political status, the importance of system design is often neglected in favor of campaigning for the supposed critical importance of the favored domain area.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537012
The most important point:

> the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM

So IBM accepted a pile of money for the project and didn't get it done. The blame lies solely on them. Sure, there were bureaucratic obstacles, and government officials who didn't do things necessary for the project, but that's no excuse; IBM was responsible for making it happen.

I keep hearing people talk about government inefficiency as though it were actual government employees who were failing. But it's usually like this: a failure of the bidding process and of accountability, where a large corporation (it's always one of the same few) collects money for a job and doesn't do it.
Wikipedia says about Shang dynasty that it ruled from around 1600 BC till 1046 BC - that is a little over five hundred yars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty

Not that it isn't impressive or anything, but that isn't a millennium!
For sure this is interesting to think about. Is all the work I need to do for the unpaid people who may or may not ever pay me a penny worth it to get a few more users?

if the "work" is just spinning up some new AWS nodes, the math is easy. If lifetime value of a free guy > cost of AWS node, do it. If < cost of AWS node, don't do it.

If the work is lots of staff related hand-holding - then it depends. If your staff is at 100% capacity and you need to hire more staff, it is closer to the AWS example above. If you have staff sitting around doing nothing anyway, then maybe it is "free" as in an already sunk cost.

In their case it seems like they had some engineering flaws in their system (who doesn't), that made the scaling up part harder. Good to think about how to scale up early so you don't hit a wall.
I'm in the same boat. Go's simplicity is initially refreshing, then a huge pain once you find yourself writing the same thing over and over again.

A good example is errors being values — which is a great idea. But then you realize every single function needs to be littered 1-10 cases of

if err != nil {
return nil, err
}

It's an extremely common pattern. It's tiring to write, over and over. Tiring to refactor, too: If you change a signature (to add an error, or add another return value, for example), every error check has to be updated.

Unfortunately, Go doesn't offer any abstractions that might allow you to avoid such boilerplate. Functions that return errors cannot ever be chained, for example: If you have "func bar() (MyStruct, error)", you cannot do "foo(bar())". You must always assign the result to an intermediate variable. You could embed the error in the MyStruct struct instead, but that goes against Go's grain.

I find myself wishing for some magic macro that is smart enough to extract a value and return the error for me. Something like:

try! value, err := bar()

...would expand to:

value, err := bar()
if err != nil {
return
}

I'm with you on upper/lower-case names. It results in schizophrenic-looking programs. Unless I'm writing a library, I tend to just export anything that isn't obviously an internal implementation detail, for consistency.

I'm also up in arms about ":=" assignment behaviour. I've run into several bugs caused by shadowing inside blocks. You have to be careful when refactoring so as not to cause shadowing issues; really, editors should have their syntax highlighting set to highlight ":=" in blinking bright yellow or something. It's so hard to miss.

It's also inconsistent with how you (or, at least, I) want it to behave. It will shadow existing variables by default if there is at least one new variable on the left-hand side, but that's the least conservative behaviour, and feels contrary to Go's strictness — a language, after all, that considers unused imports to be a compilation error. Recently I've started avoiding ":=" in favour of vars, just to avoid falling into that trap by accident.

To be fair, I love many aspects of Go: Compilation speed, relative performance, ease of concurrency, static strictness. But after working with Go for a while and being quite productive with it, I'm at the same time seriously pining for a better language to replace it.
> This is pretty cool for rich people, for whom buying half a dozen US$300 synthesizer modules is no big deal

That really isn't that much in the music hardware world. A decent non-modular synth is £1000+ (in UK pounds now). My Nord Lead A1 [1] was around that (and that's digital - even if they call it 'virtual analogue'). Even second hand analogues can be pretty expensive, I recently purchased a Juno 106 [2] built in 1985 for £700. A Jupiter 8 will set you back £5000+.

It's worth it for those that understand the incredible sound you can get from an analogue synth. Modulars take it that step further where you can get properly involved in creating amazing and crazy sounds and sequences, in a way that's difficult or impossible on a regular synth. Just the hands-on aspect of it can create results that you wouldn't do with a mouse and a VST.

As good as the digital stuff is, I am yet to hear anything in-the-box that sounds close to quality of an analogue synth. For me it's about a balance between the two worlds.

[1] http://www.nordkeyboards.com/products/nord-lead-a1

[2] http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/juno106.php

[3] http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/jup8.php
When Startups Don't Raise
This is a duplicate submission of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535988
The reasonable long-term defence is to improve kernel security.
But it's possible to "get" Go and also disagree with its design decisions.
> Nothing I believe contradicts the idea of civilization, as long as the basis of that civilization is voluntary participation, with the use of force reserved for defensive purposes.

I was born here, I don't want to move and I don't want to pay taxes. What will your civilization do with me?
Ask HN: How to improve communication skills for interview?
I am non native speaker. I am living in different country where English is not native language. But for interviews and all other official work english is mandatory and It is really required to crack the interviews and all.

My communication skills is not up to the mark and I am not fluent speaker. Because of this I am lagging behind from my fellow developers.

Please help and give some advice. How to improve communication skills. What helped you to learn english and become fluent speaker.

Thanks for your help
> The UI on everything Amazon does looks like it was designed by Helen Keller.

Amazon's UI, in my opinion, is a case study in heavily politicized UI design. There are too many parties involved. They all want more screen real estate. They all think their widget is already the key to Amazon's sales, and if not, they think that if they just had a bit more screen real estate that they would increase sales 10X. Because of the magnitude of the involvement and the stakes at hand, proposing a major overhaul would literally create hundreds if not thousands of internal enemies, ready to do anything and everything to take you out.

As a result, we get Times Square with a cohesive font and color scheme.
> The problem with that approach is that the sponsoring employer has borne the cost of the Red Tape, and now the employee has increased negotiating power as they are in the USA.

Which is why you better pay them market rate.

This is also the exact reason for the golden handcuffs idea. Toss them a bunch of stock at the 1 and 2 year marks.
A fun alternative is to build everything yourself for free, from scratch, as an app! Shameless plug: [1]

Some resources for getting started down this path: [2] [3] [4]

If anybody wants to chat about audio synthesis on iOS, feel free to get in touch :)

[1] https://github.com/aclissold/twyst

[2] http://jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines-signals/

[3] http://mkonrad.net/projects/ios_audio_synth.html

[4] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/MusicA...
Your still rationing. Who works out who is and who doesn't come?

My ideal solution would be a gradual removal of all barriers to entry. However that isn't possible.

So why not make H1B open to all types of workers(not just on job titles/industries), and build in a bidding system based on salary. Maybe a system if you pay a substantial amount of salary, you're allowed unlimited.
> You can't refrain from the fact that majority of the refugees are islamists in a sense that they deem apostasy as a crime and homosexuality punishable by death.

I am 97% sure you completely made up that statistic.
Might want to rethink that name. Calibre is already well-known and long-established as an eBook management app:

http://calibre-ebook.com/
So by "game", you mean they submit the applications early? Not sure if I follow.
Key pinning only works for players large enough to get pins in the client software itself. I can not do that, the best I have available is trust-on-first-use, which would carry a giant usability problem for the end user.

I can set up DNSSEC and DANE today, everyone who cares gets an alternative validation path to me, and the Internet is safer because of it.
How I passed the bar and started a software company at the same time
How Facebook Is Stealing Billions of Views
Agree: 11% is a enviable conversion rate! Very impressed with this!! They were emailing Nk users and tweeting Nk more. So let's say you reached (Nk + Nk) + .25 users. Consider a response rate of .3 and you come up with a few thousand more users. Can your process handle a few thousand more? You can test for that. You can also calculate the cost of that increase overall to your company. Seems pretty straightforward.
You clearly have not been following the entire story. Selective facts don't tell the entire narrative.
> particularly high-performance small services that do things like fling JSON around

:/ Their json system reflects and allocates like a mad-man. It's probably one of the slowest parts of the std library.
Fidelity has written down the value of its stake in Snapchat by 25%
The Lie Factory
> packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U

Where are you buying 40 TB hard drives? I'd love to get some ;-)

We actually don't claim these are 'state of the art', more 'state of the inexpensive'. You can buy faster performance storage servers, more redundant servers, etc. But I believe these are one of, if not the, lowest cost storage servers per GB. (And of course, open source.)

BTW, I'm a fan of Dropbox (use it personally) and, in general, think there is a ton of value in developers, organizations, and companies sharing what they've learned about storage. The better and lower cost it gets, the more interesting things other people can do with it, the bigger the industry, and the more everyone benefits.

(full disclosure - cofounder of Backblaze here)
You're a pedant. It's _A_ win, not _total victory_. Carry on.
- One of your parents will die tragically young. You'll be caught unprepared, this will change everything in your world. Maximize the time you have today, work on your relationship with them. It might be helpful to study psychology as a side project.

- You breezed through university relatively unchallenged. Understand now that the only way you'll be able to compete in the market is to out-read, out-study, think more strategically, and work harder than your peers. You'll find this helpful when being tapped as a co-founder. A good place to start, read-up on the wisdom of Peter Drucker> http://academic.udayton.edu/lawrenceulrich/LeaderArticles/Dr...

- Understand that your success goal posts will look entirely different at 30-40-50. Much of the material possessions and career aspirations that seem important now, become junk & meaningless clutter later. Pivoting & reinvention are key to survival. Often you win by surviving.

- That emergency fund saved your neck when the business tanked. Still you wish you had much deeper reserves.

- Stop taking your health for granted. You'll be shocked by pro-athlete peers, whose careers are largely over by their early 30s, their bodies spent. Then one day you too get injured, badly. Start consciously taking care of your body now.
Minesweeper – a brief journey from JavaScript/React to Elm
I don't know, but we are now arguing over the semantics of something I wrote earlier, which seems like a pretty boring argument.

My point is probably better expressed as "many of Snowden's critics don't dispute that he's a whistleblower, but have a problem with what else he is".
We went through this transition at CircuitLab https://www.circuitlab.com/ -- now we have free demos that don't support saving to the server, so they're almost free in terms of server resources. Also, don't allow forum posts from non-paying customers.

As the article hints, the real limit isn't computing resources (CPU/storage/etc), but people resources. Committing these resources to non-paying customers is generally not a winning proposition.

Upfront-card-capture free trial periods and liberal money-back guarantees give your customers the zero-risk ability to guarantee that a product is a win-win, but filter out people who don't take your product seriously enough to consider paying for it.

I'd advise any founders working on SaaS products to provide some sort of free trial mechanism, but probably less than they imagine!
Given other aspects of Go's design, I'm actually a little surprised that Go makes it as easy to drop errors on the floor as it does. It feels like the language's strict checking of unneeded or missing imports and its lack of checking for capture of return values are philosophically at odds.
This is a good answer from the incentives angle - how to motivate people to check whether studies are good or bad. On the object level, the answer is surprisingly simple: actually read the thing. The press is full of stories where a journalist rephrased another journalist's story about a press release about a study, and when you actually go to the study, it says something subtly different. When I see those, I try to jump out of the journalist's summary and get to a PDF as fast as possible, guess what the caveat is going to be, then check for it.
That really depends on where people are coming from.
Dispatch Joins the Ground Delivery Club
That hasn't been true for ages, and, in fact, wasn't even true when you had to had to ask Google to add pins: many of the people that had pins were tiny.

You can set up DNSSEC and DANE today, but thankfully no browser gives a shit. Key pinning, however, will not only protect you, but will also get the CA that actually coughs up a forged cert for your site locked out of Chrome and Firefox.
Interesting... Drawbridge sounds like rump kernels (which can be used in userland processes as well as in VMs), where everything the application does is turned into a small number of hypercalls (12ish IIRC). It seems like there are RISC and CISC forms of higher security system call interfaces (e.g. pledge needing sendsyslog(2) and SOCK_DNS). It is good to see both approaches getting more use :). I hope pledge is adopted widely as it seems like a good approach to easily get significant improvement (particularly when exec is not needed, since restrictions are not inherited).

A link to the pledge man page since I haven't seen it mentioned yet:
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man2/...
Curious your opinion on what you would advise if not Martini or Gin?

I love martini (and lately gin) and definitely love and use go every day. What about these frameworks is not idiomatic go?

Is there another framework that is? Or you suggest just rolling your own using net/http by itself?

Cheers
My mother tongue is Spanish, my second tongue is English and my third tongue is French. I grew up in Quebec and there were two greek guys who made fun of me for not being able to pronounce 'sheep' (in English) properly.
France recently ruled that the BDS movement is illegal. Not sure that applies to companies though.
A great place to ask this type of thing is Volley. There are tons of helpful folks there :-)
Well who is serious? Everyone in DC grandstands, that's how you get quoted. Here are a couple from non politicians:

Jeremy Bash, a former chief counsel to the House Intelligence Committee:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/52158315/t/former-cia-chief-staff-...

> “The efforts to make him into a hero, I think, are going to fall flat,” said Bash. “He’s not a whistle blower. You don’t break the law, steal documents and then make a run for the border.”

Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/snowdens-hypocrisy-o...

> "Whatever the answer, Snowden’s silence about the quasi-dictatorship where he has taken sanctuary is telling. It is yet more evidence, if evidence were needed, that he is not a whistleblower at all"
I discovered the 'toggle' property recently and that's a real improvement to it, which is why I find it less problematic than every other implementation of Fn keys. Still would rather have a full set of keys, though.
The last 2 times I did online order pick-up it was not that convenient. Best Buy pickup wasn't bad, but they couldn't find my order. Maybe looked for 4 minutes? At Walmart, I couldn't even find anyone at the pickup station! It took at least 20 minutes to get the "right" someone (I did flag multiple people down but they couldn't help me). Then it took at least 10 more minutes to go through the process. Admittedly, both experiences were about 3 years ago. Maybe I'll try again.
You make an interesting point. A master's in the United States, correct me if I am wrong, costs around $50,000. That sum is large for American students, but that sum seems unimaginable for middle class foreigners.

Are we getting the 'best and the brightest' with the H1-B (which we all agree is a good thing), or the richest and wealthiest willing to pay whatever it takes to get a visa?
9 Tips to Contact VCs If You Don't Have Friends in VC
Be honest. Let others know how much progress has been made and how far it is from the goal.

Consider the alternatives:

+ walk away and let somebody else or nobody else take over.
+ go to work somewhere where maintaining the project
is part of your ordinary duties.
+ work on it full time even though the funds aren't quite
what you would wish.

The last requires separating the reasons for working on the project. Part of it may be for the money. Part of it may be because working on the project is just what you do. $70.00 per hour is just a number, and a discounted one. If working on the project makes you happy, then getting bogged down over a number is a road to unhappiness.

My gut tells me that explaining the number as "$70.00 per hour" gives users an excuse to devalue your work. Even though this it's clear that you're offering the "friends and family" rate, if you were halfway to $170 per hour, you'ld be where you want to be.

Good luck.
Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell) video about how Facebook's policies are enabling people who steal their (and others) videos and inflating their # of video views.

This has the effect of hurting video creator profits in favor of increasing Facebook's advertising revenue.
If push comes to shove, you can always open source the project.
It's very nearly part of the strategy of one of the players in Stross's Accelerando (http://www.amazon.com/Accelerando-Singularity-Charles-Stross...).
So you're telling me that as someone who comes from a historical power structure, I'm not allowed to have feelings? That I cannot be offended by a book about "Stuff White People Like," because of the "context of historical power"?

That I am to be judged solely by my race and not as an individual? That standards should be different for me because I'm white?

Hardly seems the world Dr. King was envisioning.
You'd think it would be HUGE but it's not, just a side-benefit. We'd love for it to be bigger, but, it's kind of up to the people. If you're a happy Backblaze customer though...might I refer you to our handy dandy referral program: https://www.backblaze.com/refer.html

/MarketingOff

*Edit -> man, we have to optimize that page for our new design layout...

/yells at design team.
I'd amend this to whatever number of hours you need. For some people that's 10 for others 5. Beyond that this is very very true. Tiredness makes everything more stressful and difficult and suppressed creative thought (which good programming needs).
If you can add taxpayers who are already passed the point where you spend huge amounts of money on them then you win. So if you can snatch up people straight out of undergrad into high paying (highly taxed) jobs and have them contribute as young single workers then you should do it.
Moral of the story - there is no great need to keep relying on the same visionary. I like Regina Dugan's ATAP (DARPA) model of kicking the visionary out after 2 years.
What license is it under?