skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: A friend has an offer from an ethically questionable company
Hola HN. I'm in a situation that I think a lot of us have been in, but I've never really seen advice on what to do.

For the second time in a year, I have a friend who is considering an offer from a company whose vertical is highly questionable.

Specifically, this company provides intelligence on the "dark web," ostensibly tracking (and I quote) "terrorists and their supporters."

They literally boast about working with the NSA for the past few years, at a time when, as we all know, parts of NSA SigInt were wholesale criminal operations, illegally spying on people.

Their "news" section is full of glorification of war and state intrusion. It almost reads like a parody.

My friend currently has a job at a much more wholesome company, but, as you might guess, this offer constitutes a substantial pay raise.

My main concerns are that my friend might be asked to do something really horrible and, due to a confidentiality agreement, might not discuss the matter even if it becomes haunting.

Obviously I want to be supportive and help my friend make a decision that is sustainable over the long-term.

The hardest part, I think, is distinguish what I do in these situations (decline without a second thought) and what's best for a friend. I don't know every detail of the kinds of opportunities my friends have, and I realize that I'm in a pretty privileged position even within the open source / python communities; the last thing I want to be is callous.

Have you ever been in this situation? What, if any, advice did you offer?
The difference is that a robber has no legitimate claim to money, while government exists partly (according to some primarily) to provide security from internal and external threats. In fact, the Constitution enshrines that balancing between security and privacy in the 4th amendment. Not all searches are prohibited, only "unreasonable ones." The government has the power to search, without restriction, provided it exercises that power through the check of getting a warrant.
Yes, and in this scenario, the best we can hope for, is a defiant management saying "go ahead, look very closely at us", and publish the communications sent by the FBI in a press release. I can see it's possible something like that will happen but the company would be in serious trouble soon after.
I was mostly curious on how team develops on eCS or BL. What tools, what libs, practices.
It is remarkably different. The amount of Asians/South Asians in tech is very high. If there were material racism, then you wouldn't see this. I don't know anyone who wouldn't hire a smart person based on their race. I'm sure it exists in small quantities, just like everywhere else, but I believe it's much smaller in tech than any other industry. The reason why there aren't a lot of blacks and Hispanics in tech I believe is because there simply aren't a lot going to school for it. Again, this was my experience in college, and the experience of most of my colleagues. Which again is because the poor education system especially in poor areas, not because companies are racist against blacks and Hispanics.

I gave my opinion. This is what a discussion consists of. Nowhere did I discourage people from trying other solutions.
Agreed, and I am pointing out the bad phrasing. Just because there's different concerns by different people does not automatically imply it's important to balance them. Perhaps they should be weighted to more to one side and less to the other, which is usually the case. Is it more important for citizens to have a modicum of privacy or is it more important for authorities to have pervasive surveillance?
Simple C# Web Server
Got the right stuff? NASA is hiring astronauts
A nice feature is easily being able to find a match preceded and / or followed by something else within N lines. I always found that cumbersome with other tools.

Great for looking through Android code, when you want to find API call X used along with API call Y.
At least I've never run across anything I'd want to read on Bloggr.
curious: what's the underlying computational model for the language? the untyped lambda calculus? universal turing machine ? Or there's something new?
"new protocol" is likely going to be less secure than TLS1.2. And TLS1.2 doesn't allow multiple signatures - it's usually in the form of "(hash)-with-(encryption)" (for example oid 1.2.840.113549.1.1.5 - SHA-1 with RSA Encryption) and since that's embedded in the hashed contents, you can't easily add new signatures that require specific parameters.
They believe heliocentricity is correct as in they believe the orbital mechanics work out only if you pick Sol as your inertial reference? They don't believe you can pick an arbitrary inertial reference and get the physics to work out, a la general relativity?
From OP, in the section "Our first mold":

After seeing a few span examples, are we ready to describe the set of all spans with a Hoon mold? Well, no, but let's try it anyway. Ignore the syntax (which we'll explain later; this is a tutorial, not a reference manual), and you'll get the idea:

++ span
$% [%atom p=@tas]
[%cell p=span q=span]
[%cube p=* q=span]
==

This mold is not the entire definition of a Hoon span, just the cases we've seen so far. In English, a valid span is either:

- a cell with head `%atom`, and tail some symbol.

- a cell with head `%cell`, and tail some pair of spans.

- a cell with head `%cube`, and tail a noun-span pair.

I do think this is clear enough. I'm not sure it's intuitive enough. The following chapters should help with that; sorry.
That's an interesting strategy in light of some of the recent discussion on private tech company valuations.

Sam Altman recently claimed [1] that the large valuations of late-stage private tech companies may be more notional than real in a number of cases, because they're extrapolated from the pricing of investment rounds that are nominally equity investments, but are really more like debt instruments in their actual terms. Given that, it might not really be appropriate to consider them as actual valuations in the traditional sense, because the "investor" is doing something closer to making a loan, vs. buying an ownership stake of a company at an implied valuation. The good side of this, in Altman's argument, is that some of what looks like a bubble in that sector might not really be one, because even though the valuations are very high, these valuations in some sense don't even really exist, because people aren't actually buying equity in the companies at those theoretical valuations. So instead all that's happening is that people are improperly computing implied valuations based on things labeled "equity investment" which weren't equity investments.

If that's true, but then people are buying into other companies on the assumption that the private tech companies' implied valuations are real valuations, and can be used as a benchmark to value competitor/peer companies, that sounds like at least someone is putting significant real money into investments based on these valuations... but elsewhere. That's at least eyebrow-raising.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10495402
I usually go through a few of the reviews, more depending on the price and relative number of reviews...

Of course with technical goods, you see a lot of reviews from people who don't know/understand what they were buying... (1/5 stars, this network adapter [PCI Ethernet] wouldn't work in my laptop)

Other negative reviews are about dealing with amazon for returns, or wrong product shipment, which really shouldn't be under the product review. Though it's worth seeing some of that.
Is it possible to attach a receipt (say scanned PDFs) to a Ledger entry? I am interested in ledger, would like it to be the accounting system for my side business, a bit more bookkeeping feature such as the receipt attachment would be great for tax filing purpose.

Edit: I know that Ledger uses plain text for each entry. Though I kind of wonder how do you guys keep those receipts.
Nock: http://urbit.org/docs/dev/nock
It’s not great in San Francisco either. I looked for parks nearby and it recommended Union Square.
> Is it widely used?

Seems to be fairly popular.

> Can you get staff with a couple years experience using ledger?

It mostly (from the anecdotes I've seen) seems to be used by people who don't have dedicated accounting staff.

> Will accounting staff be productive using the interface?

See previous answer; the "accounting staff" using it are usually programmers, either independent business persons keeping their own books or using it for personal accounts.

They're probably more productive using text-editor + source control + CLI than they would be with a traditional GUI.

> Does it cope well with multiple simultaneous users?

That's an issue mostly offloaded to the VCS, where needed.

> Are the fringe case glitches known?

In quality software, known glitches are fixed.
Same here. For things like vacation houses, VRBO has been much better. I feel that there is a lot of high-end inventory there. Plus, house owners are familiar with the site, so they stick with it, even if the experience is not great. There's untapped potential on VRBO.
> + for readability, - for precise versions. Good luck receiving critical updates this way...

Real lesson. Authentication failed and no clue why app couldn't start. Developer spent almost two days and realized a new gem version had been released and the new version was not compatible with the current release. Quote developer "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me."

Imagine auto-scale (no image) or installing packages during docker container initialization, in production, the word "fuck" will fill up your mailbox/IRC/Slack/HipChat/ChatBot from your dear SRE / DevOps because of lack of regression testing.

Same argument goes for auto system update in Ubuntu. To receive critical update you better have a process to review, and warn critical updates. One change in the system API can screw up your entire system.

If you want the fail hard model, which is really useful, the best way is to have two sets of requirements.txt. One for random Saturday testing (just launch a docker instance running tests with latest version of packages installed), and one for development all the way to production.
I worked in a college computer lab with PS/2 systems that had OS/2 1.X on them with the option of booting up PC-DOS as well.

After that I worked at a tools company that had OS/2 2.X systems on PS/2 systems and we upgraded them with Kingston Microchannel cards that added more RAM and used IDE hard drives. Using Client Access/400 for DOS/Windows ate up the 640K of DOS RAM, but in OS/2 it used the memory above 640K so more of it was free. It was the AS/400 client software that we needed to access DB2 databases and other things. We also used Token Ring and was a big IBM shop. Until management decided to switch to MS-DOS 6.X and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with MS-Office 4.3 to get everyone on it standardized because they got a bulk discount from 800 Software. The IBM PS/2 systems got replaced with Compaq and Gateway 2000 systems that were cheaper. We also used Windows NT 3.1 and switched to Windows 95. I was downsized in 1995 before the Windows 95 roll-outs.

But I had OS/2 experience that got me a lot of job interviews, like Enterprise Rent-A-Car used OS/2 and I almost got hired there. OS/2 was phased out and in 1995 I couldn't get OS/2 3.0 Warp working with my 486DX PC clone so I got Slackware Linux instead. OS/2 3.0 Warp lacked driver support for certain hardware and that was the downfall of OS/2 from 1995 and on.

Edit:Typo
I guess it is always that balance, but at the end of the day, he who controls the flow of information does have the ultimate power. Fed's require access to monitor for disruptive things, yet the minute the population finds out, its a free for all( congressional hearings, lawsuits etc...); yet the same political BS occurs when a situation does occur,(9/11) and nothing was done to prevent it. In the end it is a no win situation. Frankly, we do need to be protected.. mainly against ourselves...
The Truth about iOS Crash Reporters
I do this by putting the PDFs in the same git repo as my ledger file, and then adding a filename to the entry as metadata:

2015/11/04 * (12345) Walgreens
; receipt: /receipts/12345.pdf
Expenses:Medical:RX $10.00
Liabilities:Credit Card

It isn't an attachment, strictly speaking, but you can get at it with scripts and such.
Yes, see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510608
Switzerland has a lot of open space also...it isn't so dense.

The key point is stability: housing prices really shouldn't fluctuate much outside of abnormal conditions. So even if they are high, as long as they are stable, then you at least feel ok about taking that loan out if you can.

The problem is that many see real estate as an investment and an opportunity to get rent. That does nothing for the economy, and at least property taxes work against that (Swiss takes that to the next level with a rental tax, even if you don't rent your house).
Just a comment with a link to a Dropbox file would work.
If anyone is interested in working on this (or other exciting Spark related things) @ IBM please reach out to me ( my HN username with the letter k removed at us.ibm.com )
My own math background is limited enough that this magic word doesn't naturally occur to me, though I do know what it means.

That's usually a red flag for me; I want to keep the level of modern math required really, really low. In fact, when I use math-ese in the doc, the goal is to avoid confusing people who do actually know math. As this discussion illustrates, that's quite a bit harder than one might expect.
That version of msbuild isn't fully compatible with the one that lives in VS's folder, even when VS is installed. I've had it fail when trying to use it to compile stock projects made by Visual Studio, without anything fancy in the scripts.
That sounds simple and effective. Thanks.
Python really stole its thunder. That and Perl6 being stuck in development hell for 15 years.
The samples page you cite is helpful.

The other two affordances that caught my attention on that page are (optional) multiline captures, e.g. for XML entities that might span lines, and the --replace modifier, which can transform a captured bit of text, simplifying the

grep var= FILE | sed 's/var=\(.*\);/\1/'

usage pattern.
OS/2's multi-tasking was incredible for the time. I used it for BBSing too. I didn't host one with it though. I could zmodem download files (which could take hours) in Telemate in the background while I played Doom 2. Doom played at full speed with no issues and the download would maintain the same speed. This was on a 386DX-40 with 4MB of RAM and a 14.4k modem.

OS/2 Warp holds a special place in my geek heart along side BeOS. The only OSes I've ever used that just did things that didn't seem possible in the contemporary operating systems of the time.
The final nail in the OS/2 coffin was trying to find driver support for your hardware.

The nails before that were lack of OS/2 native apps, since OS/2 could run DOS and 16 bit Windows software, companies didn't bother writing OS/2 native software anymore since they could write DOS or Windows and sell it to OS/2 owners in Win-OS2 mode. Lack of programming language support except for IBM VisualAge products.

But third party driver support, Microsoft did it better than IBM and got more OEMs to make Windows drivers and not make OS/2 drivers. When Microsoft still supported OS/2 with IBM they got third party driver support for it, after Microsoft abandoned OS/2 the third party driver support dried up.
Predictable reliability is relevant, certainly. Safety critical systems are frequently hard real-time,[0] by definition resource-constrained.

Aspects of functional paradigms are good for safety critical systems, e.g., using pure functions when possible, when it leads to more predictable and testable systems. Recursion and non-strict evaluation, however, are clearly problematic viz. stack consumption, system load, and execution time; ditto for purely functional data structures and associated functions.

[0] I'm hedging here with frequently, but I'm having trouble thinking of safety critical systems that aren't hard real-time off the cuff… perhaps supervised expert systems, say an automated pathology platform, might count?
Those apartments are being bought by speculators, not urbanizing farmers. Those farmers can't really afford these apartments though, nor can they send their kids to local schools even if they buy them (China hasn't reformed the huko system yet). So they come to the cities as migrant workers, leaving their families behind, living in cheap dormitory accommodations or even in basements (lookup "ant tribe"). China will have to sort out this imbalance before urbanization can drive much of the economy, and speculation doesn't really help here (maybe they could eventually afford a $200k apartment, but $1 million? Really?)
I suppose that this is one of the rare cases where I must disagree with you.

The constitution presupposed a very limited and disciplined Federal Government. The Federal Government which now exists is a wide-ranging administrative state that ignores the 10th Amendment, does not limit itself to enumerated powers, and employs discretionary enforcement of almost all of its regulations and many criminal laws. We should also remember that 3rd party doctrine was much less powerful in the era before the internet, and I cannot imagine that the founders would have endorsed it.

In the face of this situation, it seems that no citizen would be foolish enough to ignore or deny even a request from any agent of the Federal Government.
My God. That video of the monkey compulsively pecking away at that touch screen for rewards...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEeU8CV_3Mo

That video hits so much closer to home than it should. I see a lot more of myself in that monkey than is comfortable.
I think you raised a fair point about existence in 10 years. I feel there will be consolidation in this space. Either big players acquiring smaller ones for AUM growth or collusion between two small players.
The point on WiseBanyan is interesting. I feel there are other markets like APAC where this model can be replicated by some of these startups. That way they can become bigger quickly.
Startup Physics
This same line of reasoning can be used to argue against going against the grain of anything.

Nobody's twisting your arm to switch. If it provides utility greater than what you perceive to be its disadvantages, use it. If not, don't.
What is it like to be owned by Warren Buffett?
Are the tables rigged or not? Going in as an optimist into a scam will surely be a bad thing.

Living in China, I've learned to appreciate fair financial systems. Many investments I wouldn't have considered in the states before now look like really good deals, simply because they are much more "fair" than what is available to me in China.

China has no low risk/low yield investments beyond long term savings accounts that don't even beat inflation. That is why so much money was rushing into the stock market, and now again, real estate. Because literally there isn't anything else (ok, maybe some undergound banking deals, but do you want to deal with the mafia?).
HN can be super frustrating sometimes. You're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com if there's anything we can help with.
I feel like something is broken on here. There isn't a single red or yellow icon, where I live, in LA either.
study linked in article: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/tr...
Some humans have 4 cones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Human_tetrachrom...
Probably due to double-bookings from Airbnb. That sort of thing makes being 2nd place a bit tough. If HomeAway does manage to get substantial share of bookings, that problem will begin to shift to Airbnb, though.
not trying to be snarky, but you do understand who posted the response above(i.e. mitchellh) right??
No, I actually think that having combinators like that makes sense; it's a perfectly reasonable (and very APLish) design choice to Huffman-code those kinds of operations as combinators. I've worked with Haskell code that makes extensive use of symbolic combinators, and once you get used to a given set, code using them can become much more readable. And using symbol pairs where related operations have related symbols makes even more sense.

I just don't think it makes sense to invent fanciful names for them based entirely on their symbology, rather than their function.

It's your language; you can call things whatever you want. But I've seen many languages that I would like to succeed fail or grow very slowly because they failed to engage well with prospective users. And when you already have a nearly-asymptotic learning curve, why add more to it?
> MoneyDance doesn't appear to be a double entry system

You didn't look very carefully then
Hola for academic papers.
So to prove your point, you pick a hotly-debated verse that has had literally thousands of years of argumentation behind it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_5:17

Trivializing its exegesis (and hermeneutic) doesn't do anyone any good, least of all your point. And you ignore the social and historical contexts: Jesus was speaking to Jews and probably didn't want to alienate them so his wording may have been political. Not to mention that Acts 15 explicitly addresses your point: it's very clear that Gentile Christians do NOT have to abide by Jewish (Mosaic) Law:

> Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.”

(.. and a few verses down ..)

> Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”
Can you point to the security tradeoff/design decisions regarding Docker? I would really appreciate it.
It's basically equivalent to:

$ export LC_ALL=C; grep ...

The regular grep works on Unicode, which can be 10 times slow. Sift works on plain bytes. Also sift benchmark is somewhat inflated. Test on your own data.
Am I better off simply investing in S&P 500 or a Vanguard target fund? Or does FutureAdvisor or Betterment or Wealthfront provide some unseen benefit?
>> The space is relatively not mature yet to be able to gauge effectiveness. Time will tell. However, what we observed was some robo advisors are creative in a way to prevent losses. Also, another observation was who is in their team. Sometimes we see prominent brokers/experts on the team which may/may not translate to a better return, while there are clearly some who do not have stock investment experts which translates to weaker investment strategies.
Big thread running -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510562
> What happens if he makes a mistake in testing, and the loss in reputation causes a small company to go out of business?

What about it? I'm sure Google makes minor changes to their search algorithm that drive small companies into bankruptcy all the time.
René Girard has died
One might also consider that a dictionary should be considered a service, to provide the user a means to identify and understand unfamiliar language. I think, too often, people treat dictionaries as official authority on language. But I'm not aware that there is any such thing as a central language authority for any language other than French. So, for a dictionary to include a word like "selfie" is not necessarily a definitive inclusion of the word in the language (as literally no-one holds that authority), but a statement that new things are going on that readers might, just perhaps, want to know about to stay relevant.
Works for me now...
Mine points to a McDonald's nearby. Hmm...
This [github issue comment](https://github.com/svent/sift/issues/7#issuecomment-14469087...) hinted on the possible reason of sift's speed.