skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Startup CTO experience, how much is it worth?
I have about 10 years experience as a full stack developer with about 2 years experience in a system architecture role. I have the opportunity to accept a position as the CTO of a startup (about 10 employees). The startup has an existing product and has a pretty solid plan on how to build out their platform. It's not going to be the next facebook by any stretch of the imagination, but it does have potential.

My current job is extremely stable and I am very well compensated compared to my peers. I am, naturally, quite reluctant to take a leap of faith like this. I believe my compensation would be within %5 of my current salary, and my equity would be reasonable for my position and the stage that the startup is at.

My question is this: would the trajectory of my career be drastically changed by taking a CTO position for 3 - 5 years at a startup? Or would other companies in the future just look up this company and realize very quickly that it is a pretty small operation? I'm weighing best and worst case scenarios here...worst case is that the company goes bust and I have 3 - 4 years of experience as CTO of a startup.
Very interested to see what Alex does with this. Also, surprised that the blog is editorially independent. That doesn't seem to make business sense?
I think you've got to be a reptiloid to defend "federal judges" and the police. Of all the people in the world they're the least vulnerable from huma perspective. We should probably check whether Orin Kerr has scales for skin.

Or exists.
It's an early step towards more:

Your car has dropped you at work and returned home to avoid CBD parking fees. You then summon it to pick you up and drive you home.

You've arrived back from holiday and summon your car to the airport to pick you and the family up.

You are parking your car(s) in the garage so tightly that you can no longer open the doors while inside.

The car is parked a few blocks away and you want it to come and get you from the restaurant where you've just finished dining.
Thought experiment: is this very different from police targeting high-risk neighbourhoods?

Police have been over-policing black and poor neighbourhoods for decades but no one is protesting that. There will certainly be a correlation between "interactions with the authorities" <-> where police spend their time patrolling, skewing the data.

The only time I've ever been stopped and interrogated randomly, simply for walking down the sidewalk with a hoodie on (in winter) in a bad neighbourhood, was visiting a friend in a housing project. Asking where I was going and who am I meeting.

All of his family and friends get harassed by police living there, despite having zero background of criminality. And in Toronto they record your name/location each time you get stopped and carded in an "anti-gang" database.
From a digital point protective measures such hack proof system can be expensively engineered https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc1MTg but biology is a little bit trickier. I can think of biosuits of the future being like what we see in SciFi which is currently unrealistic but still plausible. I don't know where future protective technologies can go but there has always been some form of measure and countermeasure being developed in parallel one as a byproduct of the other.

As for privacy, I think we don't have as much privacy as we think we do. The thing that technology introduced is the recording of our already public moments. Now they can be played back at someone else's discretion and that someone else can control the narrative of our lives portraying us against our will in whatever way that someone wants. We're stuck here.
I can say that the Australian tax law in this area is very different and using a US designed approach will cause a lot of tax problems for employees.
GPO with AppLocker (app whitelisting) seems to be a good solution for Windows, kind of a pain to setup though.
They asked nicely. And they don't seem to be able to tell if they've fixed it, so they really have no choice but to beg.
Philosophy is irrelevant?
That's really quite a bizarre statement to make.

Philosophy is quite useful in defining AI (philosophy of mind) and quantum physics (philosophy of physics) to name a few. Your comment is beyond narrow minded and ignorant; I should seriously hope you don't hold such views.
How does it compare to blackfire.io or NewRelic?
Obama CV
Yes, I agree. When I wrote the parent comment I was thinking more about implementation detail correctness: memory safety, protocol implementation correctness, etc.

Like you said, Tor has architectural issues. Tor would be fine if it were low-profile, but it's not, and that's a major part of why the architecture is breaking down - it doesn't scale well with increasing users/publicity/nation-state-interest.
Tech companies tend to sell services, which have value, and can be removed from those who don't want to pay. Websites are services.
From experience: Just having the title of CTO does not mean much. It really depends on what you actually do with your time as a CTO that matters. Did you pioneer some new technology? Build an amazing team? Break new ground?

My recommendation when working with startups: focus more on the tasks and what you are willing to do to succeed, rather than having a title.
Apples and oranges.

Bitcoin is a commodity (i.e. you mine it like a gold, not print it as USD).

Was it a best performing commodity of 2015?
> type safe SQL queries

Really? So the compiler will catch this error?

create.select().from(AUTHOR).where(BOOK.LANGUAGE.eq("DE"))

No it won't, because `where` has this type:

SelectConditionStep<R> where(Field<Boolean> field)

If it was type safe, `Field<Boolean>` would have to mention the type of the records that can be queried.

Type safety is what is being sold on the front page as the main value proposition.

Needless to say, I'm not sold on it.
Elephant in the Valley
No. There's exactly 1 excuse for creating an API which exposes passwords and root execution: It's when it's secure to do it. And 0 excuse for the chain of command not understanding the product a company is building.

I'm not saying we should tell off support people when this happen. But they have to show solidarity with customers whose security and privacy was exposed by accepting coarse language when it's there.
It's interesting to me that the Guttersnipe sighting system never really took off, especially with the increase in civilian concealed carry in the US.
You could just tell it to drive around the block a few times even if there isn't a parking space.
Monster-Sized Marine Crocodile Discovered
I'm split on how I feel about Apple's continuing efforts to make iPad education a thing: https://www.apple.com/education/preview/

I have sweet memories of spending many a rainy day in the computer lab during recess on the candy-colored imacs, creating art on kidpix, putting together a crappy HTML site that would link to a friend's crappy HTML site, and playing nanosaur, bugdom, and the oregon trail.

Computer education is huge, but I'm not sure if iPads are the right/necessary stepping stone into using an actual computer. They seem more like entertainment consumption devices than creation driving devices where things get messy and frustrating and force you to fool around to fix them, learning in the process.

I've never owned one and I don't have any insight into how much good vs. harm (distraction) they do in the classroom. Anyone have any anecdotes or thoughts to share on Apple's continuing push into the classroom w/ the iPad?
Yeah I mean I have literally no doubt there are people that are up there (.8 thoughts per second) but is it the average?? That literally sounds like enough thoughts per minute to be a disorder.
I've been using Car2Go often for the past few weeks. That's $0.41/minute for me to driving myself. Granted, it would be more efficient if I could request a car wherever I happen to be, but I'm not we'd see such a tremendous reduction in cost like you've outlined.
Yeah, Tesla is _really_ good at marketing/PR. Also: Calling it just "Summon" and not "SmartUnparkAssist(TM)" or similar
Is there an advantage to Guttersnipe at that range? The article doesn't go into much detail about it beyond saying it is on the ASP pistol.
>Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.

Inferior? I'd rather have no answer and keep looking than the wrong answer that stops the questions.
>However, I do not see how this has anything to do with the concept of entropy.

in short - entropy of the system with lower gravitational potential is higher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity). When oil is mixed into water, the thermodynamic entropy "St,mix" of oil/water system is higher than "St,unmixed" while the entropy "Sg,mix" of the gravitational system of oil/water/Earth is lower when mixed than the "Sg,unmixed" of the unmixed case. In case of bad solubility, like oil in water, we have ["St,mix" - "St,unmixed" < "Sg,unmixed" - "Sg,mix"] and thus system on its own will evolve toward unmixed state.
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Ohh man, this is too good!

While I vehemently disagree with you (without much emotional connection though. Don't mind losing this one), this is STRAIGHT out of 19th century Russian novels. In particular, I'm thinking Turgenev's 'Fathers And Sons'[1]. In it, the university-educated, 'modern' characters, the nihilistic scientific men present very similar views. 'Science can explain away everything, that is what reality is', they proclaim, dismissing any sort of philosophical arguments (rather arrogantly, IMHO, but we can argue over that). It's kind of longwinded (aren't they all, with the exception of Chekov?), but HIGHLY recommended. You get the same sense of change and revolution, and 'waiting for great things to happen' in the novel as I often see in futurists these days.

I don't want to cheapen the experience, but this high-school-level summary sums it up reasonably well[2]:

>The main character of Fathers and Sons, Bazarov, does not want to occupy a philosophical position. Yet nihilism, whether he likes it or not, is a philosophy, a philosophy of destruction and renunciation. Bazarov is such an intellectual character that throughout the novel we see him struggle to understand each new situation in which he is put. Yet, from his intellectual point of view, he renounces romance and many other human values that make life worth living. Part of the drama of the novel is watching how Bazarov can go on living with his philosophy.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons_(novel)

2. http://www.shmoop.com/fathers-and-sons/philosophical-viewpoi...
System/360 was meant to be a good all-around system, not optimized specifically for business or science, as previous mainframes were, but good for both. 360 degrees in a circle, you know.

Notice how it skips System/380. IBM was going to replace the mainframe line with its Future Systems project, which would have single-level store (everything is RAM, everything persists, page cache takes care of moving stuff in and out of physical disk drives) and be so tightly-integrated nobody would be able to clone it, as the plug-compatible vendors had been able to clone parts of the System/360 and /370 systems. The only real result of this was the AS/400 midrange systems, now the i Series, I think.
Apple regularly licenses patents when it agrees they are valid. That doesn't make the news. Sometimes they disagree and that makes the news.
That does sound pretty neat. I don't think I've seen an electric minivan before.

Thanks for the clarification.
> They are already in discussion with stakeholders regarding the emergency deployment of this fix.

You know a company is managed ineffectively when you can't even deploy security patches without talking to stakeholders. In any reasonably-managed company, stakeholders would only be involved with the press release announcing the issue (if at all).
1) This is Google, not the open source community.

2) If you are releasing a security product you don't understand, this is worse than not releasing anything. Normally I'm with you, but this is security. If you need to educate them, __they should not be releasing software__. This is downright irresponsible and harmful. It's like attaching velcro to a door, calling it a lock, and selling it as a competitor to ACTUAL LOCKSMITHS.
Tesla Recall

Tesla Direct

Tesla Mobilize

Tesla Hail

Tesla Greet

Tesla Whistle

And that's just looking at synonymns of summon and hail without doing any thinking
The thinness is to generate an emotional reaction. When you pick up an iPhone in an Apple Store, it's supposed to feel so nice in your hands that you have to buy it, specs be damned.
So you don't like Zizek. Thats fair. But comparing him to Nietche is not.

He is a philosophy popularizer. He writes a lot about some of the greats, himself, like almost all other contempararies not being one himself.

My impression is not that his academic writings are 'pop', in any way comparable to Dan Brown. I have only read a little but he has published. Some of it is essayistic in nature some of it quite heavy.

I get your point. But just because your a not one of the absoulte greatest there ever was, it doesn't him instantly become a superficial literary con-artist the way dan brown has become to be regarded.

Also he seems quite well read and a great analyzer. Not that i agree with all he says, but he is not trying to push agendas as other pop-philosophers are.

A better example of some one being "Dan Brownish"would be sam harris. He is not respected in any way in the acedemia of philoshophy, he doesn't reference the history og the historiagrahy of the field, and simply doesnt seem on-level despite writing a lot of pop-philosophy and being regarded publicy as a true academic.

Zizek is actually a respected academic.
>And that's comparing paper hardware with flying hardware. Spacecraft tend to get heavier as they go from paper to reality.

That's the critical point. Skylon is still vaporware, and they've really assumed the best case in published numbers.
What 'userland' is needed on top of Ethereum 'kernel'? (Gavin Wood)
> You know, at the bottom of your stack someone, somewhere, needs to know a subject well enough to implement things from scratch. If what you are doing hasn't been done before you can't just google or find an open source library.

That really depends on what "from scratch" means. Any particular piece of code can be examined in enough detail that nobody in the whole world would understand all of them. Luckily people who understand specific pieces will produce a part for others to use. Often the only thing that hasn't been done before is one particular mashup of existing parts. Then the skill of coding is like the skill of cooking: using judgement to assemble well known parts into a new whole.

> Do you think when Google decided to create the V8 JavaScript JIT they hired a couple of Django programmers and asked them to google 'how to write a JIT'? Or do you think they specified a certain level of experience in writing JITs on the job advert?

That wasn't the point. I'm not saying that any programmer can do any programming job. But that the selection criterion (language, framework) is in general wrong. If you have a guy who did a JIT for Java, do you disqualify that guy from a JIT for Go job? I don't think so.
It'd be nice if these categories weren't hidden, but at this point, the Netflix UI has gotten so useless that if the service was a little more expensive, it wouldn't be worth the price. Basic UI features that I'd expect from even an alpha quality service like filtering by star rating simply don't exist. Up until today and this post, proper categories did not exist. The whole Netflix UI experience has consisted of scrolling through endless lists of garbage to occasionally find one or two interesting movies/shows. And when I say garbage, I really mean garbage: movies with one or two stars, deservingly so.

I understand that if Netflix allowed filtering by star rating they might only list a few hundred 4 and 5 star movies across the whole service, but it'd be best to let the consumer decide how to deal with that fact rather than hiding everything in a giant pile of shit. I find their star ratings to be very close to accurate and this is the strength of the service. Unfortunately, their discovery UI is so horrific, it negates any strength Netflix has otherwise. If I know what I want to watch, Netflix is great, otherwise I prepare for half an hour of scrolling the same bullshit list of crap looking for anything decent and ultimately giving up.
Healthy Vending Franchise Opportunities USA Canada
Nice, but going to a gun show and running guns across the
border to Mexico does not seem to gather the same attention from law enforcement.

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-j...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24...
This is true. The only time I ever had to talk to my CEO about a security patch was, "Sorry, this bug is kind of urgent and the fix needs to be deployed before tonight. Bring be back some orange chicken?"
Why would you request, beg or plead when it is your personal car that is coming to you? Call maybe... but summon kind of rolls off the tongue better... never mind when you consider how gaming is developing and how you'd run into that particular word in pretty much any game that involves magic and 'calling' things to you.
Re. undefined behaviour, this fairly definitive paper agrees that it has gone too far: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1637.pdf
A nanopass framework for compiler education [pdf]
The wright brothers made the first heavier than air human flight 113 years ago. Look what we can do now! First mobile phone call was 43 years ago and now we have such advanced tech that making calls is almost an afterthought. Once tech gets a grip its momentum is huge.
Wish Keep had a desktop app.
100 years ago, we were just getting around to inventing the light switch. I think you are seriously underestimating the pace at which this technology is advancing. It might take 10+ years for this technology to become mainstream in all likelihood. But 100 years? Not a chance.
And why didn't anyone sue for their right to walk?
GM May Have Just Changed the Game for Electric Cars with the Bolt
One might even call this phenomenon "the death of God"...

EDIT: I'm at -1 here, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead
No, you're missing my point by saying "you have to have the data," and it appears that you are missing some fundamental concepts in normativity.

You do not need data to make a moral argument based upon principle. There is no conjecture involved. (You could read some Kant on this, if you like.) You need data only to determine a particular consequentialist ethics that involves a balance of good and bad outcomes often understood in lay terms as "effectiveness." I think most commenters here would agree that effectiveness is the wrong way to evaluate this system, since epistemologically we cannot know its effectiveness. (... Although many doubt it could ever be truly effective in the presence of creative adversaries.) We can only know that is it categorically wrong.
I think Kerr's article was pretty good, but he does undersell the scope of the complaint. I thought the Hartes' were just trying to sue the officers personally for the bad policy. But their complaint was a lot bigger. From the judgement:

Plaintiffs filed this action against various defendants alleging violations of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for unlawful search, unreasonable execution of the search and excessive force in violation 2 of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs also assert a claim for municipal liability under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978). Finally, plaintiffs assert numerous state law claims against defendants, including trespass, assault, false arrest, abuse of process, intentional infliction of emotional distress and false light/invasion of privacy. This matter is presently before the court on defendants’ motions for summary judgment on all of plaintiffs’ claims. As explained in more detail below, defendants’ motions are granted in their entirety.
This did not satisfy the probable cause. Police dug through the trash and conducted a field test, and the field test incorrectly tested positive for THC. The author criticized these field tests in the original piece as being wildly inaccurate and too easy to coerce into positive results.
>Some more examples of clueless morons being 'terrorists'

Don't forget the Four Lions
As a philosophy major turned engineer turned CEO, I agree with the article about the fall of philosophy in academia. As my concentration advisor half-joked in one of our first courses, "you are majoring in mental mabation."
However, I do not agree that philosophy has been entirely relegated to universities. Thought many of those who self-identify as philosophers reside in academia, not everyone who _behaves_ as a philosopher resides there.
Philosophy literally translates from the Greek to lover of wisdom. Those who pursue knowledge and understanding, regardless of title, are philosophers.
In fact, many of the non-technical articles on HN are philosophical. Asking how to build a company culture or what it means to be successful in the context of a startup are both philosophical inquiries. Balancing the tradeoff between competing interests (e.g. financial vs. mission-driven, personal gain versus organizational gain) come down to questions your values, questioning "what is good". There are few questions as emblematic of philosophy.
> do itself a lot of favors by avoiding this kind of tone

Honestly, I'm impressed that Tavis keeps the tone as professional as he does. This vulnerability and the AVG one from last month (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10803467) are both head-slappingly stupid, just entire features that are ill-conceived and poorly implemented, and from software companies that should know better.
What exactly do you mean by 'reptiloid'?
There wasn't any marijuana. What they thought was marijuana were actually tea leaves.
You're ignoring the fact that religions haven't been able to convincingly answer any of these questions, either. Else there wouldn't be so many of them and they wouldn't be having highly intricate theological debates about the half-dozen types of millennialism and interpretations of whether and to what extent Mosaic law is still relevant, among many other things.

The idea that religion provides some sort of certainty is a complete falsehood trivially debunked by a cursory glance of theological discourse. It provides certainty only to those ignorant of it, just as those ignorant of secular philosophy who never deliberate any of these questions have quite likely settled on some ad-hoc worldview that works for them.

In practice, most of value theory is secular. The laws that underpin most contemporary states are secular. The meaning of life is an unanswered question, quite likely even an ironically meaningless question itself. The afterlife if any is also an unanswered question. Christians disagree between universalism, annihilationism, eternal torment and other dogmas on hell alone.

There are no out-of-the-box answers provided by anyone. Many religions actually conveniently avoid pondering them in any detail.