skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Takeaway: don't join a startup as one of the first ten employees if you value your financial future.

It is the dirty little startup secret. Top performers who care about the company/vision/product frequently get shafted.

The problem is they typically have significant leadership roles and have a lot of emotional investment but they haven't negotiated leadership style exit packages or any official power.

For example I was a top performer at company X ~10 years ago and I really cared about the product and our customers. So when new senior management started pushing a complete re-write of our systems into another language stack I pushed back.

I argued it would cost $8-$10 million and give us minimal benefit. It wasn't helping our product or our customers. I argued we should upgrade one part of our system and measure the benefits etc.

And then... I was let go for poor performance (way to really stick it to me!). They still haven't finished the rewrite but are still around and doing "ok" in the market.

If I was a bit wiser and more mature I would have simply said "Great lets re-write it" and used it as an opportunity to learn the new language and ecosystem and then jump ship.

Now this happens in large corporations as well as startups... But the really toxic part about startups is they go out of their way to hire and advertise to top performers who buy into the product vision etc and then they shaft them.
These services are really replacements for IRC bouncers, which are not as well standardized (but should be).
They announced a start-up/small business plan [1] of $49/month.

[1] http://www.qt.io/start-up-plan/
Here's a link to the general project: http://madlag.github.io/jarvis/

///edit: hmmm this might be a different project. Yay for namespace collisions...

I think this is the actual personal assistant project: https://github.com/ajminich/Jarvis
This is awesome! At work, we're a heavy user of google's network load balancer to route persistent TCP websocket connections to our haproxy cluster. It's worked flawlessly. Glad to see the design behind this released!
They work best when you have a very inexpensive product where you can still make a profit by doubling your MSRP then selling for "80% off". Doesn't do wonders for your brand though, which is part of why the company I work for which has been doing this for the better part of a decade is trying to move away from the model.
You're right, but the implication of your post is that there's nothing Canada could do about the problem.

The correct response is that Canada should implement Australian-style restrictions on foreign ownership of real estate. This problem has been solved before, it's not that hard.

It would suck for those who bought into the game late, those in the high-end RE business, but the benefits of having a real estate market that has actual price discovery based on the population who could actually live in the properties is definitely worth it, because housing would become more affordable, disposable income would increase, and consumer debt would decrease.
Official report translated here by a reddit user: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4al2ek/argentina...
> is there any reason that IRC couldn't be used as the underlying protocol for these Slack-esque apps

The IRC protocol is old. It predates HTTP. Some things are possible in theory, but pointless if no client supports them.

Look into ircv3 (http://ircv3.net/), they're writing new specs for the IRC protocol to build exactly what you're talking about. It's very promising, although IMHO too little, too late - Matrix looks like it's going to take the crown eventually.
I want to pay people a monthly salary - as normal everywhere else. I just don't want them to work HARD for it, just SMART. They can choose their hours, and if they don't need to communicate - there's no need to overlap with anyone else. If comm is needed, they'll have to sync up with others - its up to them and the task.
The email ends with If you have questions, please reply to this email and we will be in touch to discuss.

I think it boils down to this, if the email said "Hey, we noticed you have special access, and we are trying to clean those up. You should either use the regular API with rate limits or our commercial offerings. Let me know if you have any questions." then I think the appropriate first step would be to contact Twitter and explain your situation. Since the actual letter contains that and just more information about possible options, I don't see why it should be viewed any differently.
Almost all writing I've read from the paypal mafia is ridiculous. Granted they've done some cool stuff, but there is a reason that Robert Downy Jr. decided that when he needed to play an eccentric comic-book millionaire, he followed Musk around.
Cached version:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fjLltw...
True of NASA in general these days.
> XMPP does not directly solve the problems the authors of those chat apps deal with

Could you please recap which problems exactly? I though the problems which matter nowadays is independence from vendors, and, after that, reuse of existing software.

> Doing things properly requires writing XEPs and just a lot of hassle which a company building its own little Slack killer doesn't want to invest in

So they don't. But I think it's obvious that the point of current discussion is that owned networks are no more satisfactory because of lack of openness and freedom. XEPs and IETF RFCs are exactly for this purpose, so they are necessary.

> If you want to fix this, you have to do that work for them.

For whom "them"? Vendors of yet another IM service? I don't need any of them.

> You have to make XMPP a direct solution that says "Spin up this server, write a cool UI, and your product is done".

It is pretty much so nowadays. You would be surprised how many commercial messaging systems run XMPP software internally, and how much building up the solution is close to what you've said.
Because I have something resembling a soul?

Iirc, their marketing said they were ~95% accurate.
These 25 Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries
Right, but surely if you're selling it that's much more incentive for a cease and a desist (regardless of whether it is free software).
Text-To-Speech in 1846
"There's enough headroom available to add another million requests per second without bringing up new Maglevs"

How awesome is that?
Hey Dan,

This is great feedback. Thank you.

I was playing with a more technical landing page, but didn't want to make it seem overly complicated.

We are definitely working on options for growing apps. I want any transitions to be as smooth as possible. We are also working to find the right pricing.

Thanks again for trying it out.
sigh :)
World Happiness Report 2016: Denmark is happiest; Burundi is unhappiest
How is it in any way "innovation"? It's almost literally a college dorm.
A lot of how personal data is collected and sold is detailed in Bruce Schneier's "Data and Goliath" (http://www.amazon.com/Data-Goliath-Battles-Collect-Control/d...) and confirms what you're saying.
I'm curious if there are other distributed generation techs which could make sense -- 1KW windmills, thermal/stirling/etc.

Solar economics might make it win over everything else, though.

Also might be fun to subsidize solar by selling data. In exchange for hosting/keeping clean/etc. the solar panels, you get most of the power, and a small amount of data, which is then provided as commercial data service to the nearby area.
It seems clear to me that they're asking about the expected value.
Very well written. Stock options don't pay for the groceries. My landlord doesn't take a potential bonus as a reason for not paying rent.

You need to be able to find a way to make ends meet with just base salary.
Thanks for the tip on JUCE. I have an audio project I've been wanting to implement for a while, and procrastinating because of ugly audio APIs, JUCE looks just the ticket.
If a small business bases it's business on something produced by another company and does so without a contract, I don't have a lot of sympathy. That's the whole point of contracts. Clearly outlining what each party is responsible for and expects.

If a contract isn't feasible, at least make sure it's in the other side's best interest to keep the situation going. Getting free access when it costs the other side (in managing access, serving requests, handling support, etc, no matter how small) is not something I would feel comfortable basing a business off of.
Connect IRC with Mattermost: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

You can also talk to Mattermost team on #matterbridge on Freenode.
I have some incredibly fond memories of SimFarm and SimTower. Also, SimIsle was like a precursor to Tropico.
He way be adding other search terms. Or perhaps the person in question meant comments from other sites (like reddit) which would increase the number of links to the content (which is exactly what google looks for).
That ascii art is cool!! Is it a feature of the Akamai CDN?
We implemented them ourselves, and it took quite a bit of work.

Our magic weapon is Erlang, which is a wonderful language for working with protocols, and a wonderful runtime for working with many things happening at the same time.

The other magic weapons are the Cowboy webserver and the Gun http client -- both written by Loïc Hoguin. Loïc doesn't work for us, but we've been sponsoring him financially for over two years (https://medium.com/@abs/what-we-learned-from-sponsoring-an-o...).

Our frontend doesn't really matter as much, since it's just a dashboard, but we use TypeScript with Flux and React (it's been great).
My kids and I love LED candles. They look like 3-inch diameter cylindrical candles, complete with a wax exterior (which is, I admit, really frustrating at times), and have an LED inside that provides a flickering light. As a bonus, the batteries seem to last nearly forever since it's basically one LED and a small circuit.
Meteor in Flip Flops
Beyond Round Robin: Load Balancing for Latency
ECMP is old, we've being pulling this stunt for a long time, for the right applications (e.g., UDP, short lived TCP). Adding/removing routes in ECMP can cause flows to hash to a new destination. The connection tracking and consistent hashing in Maglev is important to deal with faults and avoid disrupting unrelated flows. Still nothing new.
> In the email, we encourage people who believe their app is within the bounds of acceptable use cases on Twitter to contact us directly [...] the notice is NOT about shutting down this app. It merely inquires about why the developer needs elevated access, something that is typically reserved for our business partners.

What? This is absurdly, obviously, completely wrong. Did you read the email you guys sent? Either it's forged, or you're talking out of your ass.

Your response is great, reasonable, and, as a developer, would improve my opinion of Twitter if it had the slightest link to reality.

> The owner of this app elected to blog publicly about the situation before contacting us, which is unfortunate.

It's unfortunate they took your very clear email at face value and reacted in the way it was clearly intended to invoke? "Hey, when we told him to fuck off and die, we meant 'why don't you drop by the offices and have some cake!', why are you guys so rude?"
Awesome, thanks for the link. I'm looking forward to looking at more of your projects!
Has anyone compared Rocket.Chat VS Mattermost?

What are the significant differences (advantages/disadvantages)?
Must be quite rare then, the Ikeas in Köln (x2), Düsseldorf, Essen are still sans credit card. The ones just over the border in Holland do accept credit cards.
They've been a heavy Azure user too. Probably more than AWS.

I'm glad there's now at least 2 and probably 3 competitors for public cloud infrastructure. So many things were at risk, including adoption of public cloud in general, when it was a sole source monopoly from Google (OpenStack/Rackspace/etc. was basically stillborn, and VPSes aren't the same thing, nor was VMware ever really credible for public cloud)

Neither GC nor Azure are as comprehensive as AWS, but together at least one of them is usually a viable alternative for any given deal.
"It's foolish, and, honestly, kind of offensive, to imply that pushing diversity and at the same time pushing business success are somehow at odds with each other."

Offensive? We're not even allowed to disagree with you about meta-level issues now? Nobody is being insulted or harassed, no one is being subjected to prejudicial remarks about any facet of their being -- and yet it's still, somehow, offensive?
I don't mind them, normally, but in the case of Wired their detection is broken for uBlock. It continues to detect the blocker as on, even once disabled. So, reading Wired is now impossible for me, even if I accept their ads (which, I tend to be fine with for companies I trust not to be too invasive, and not to have ads that make noise or start video without warning).
Apps built with front end web tech are nearly always heavier than their fully native counterparts, for one. It's nothing for an electron-based app to gobble up 150MB, 250MB, and higher amounts of memory while doing (in terms of resources actually required for the given task) nothing. A great comparison is Sublime Text, which takes up ~35MB of memory at cold start, even with a few plugins enabled. Compare this to VS Code or Atom, which take around 200MB right out of the box. That's downright comical, and I can't accept the "but resources are cheap" excuse. That mentality has been robbing users of the lightning-fast, ultra-silky experiences that are possible even on decade-old hardware for years now and it needs to stop.

Aside from that, non-native applications inevitably introduce accessibility issues and UX incongruencies with the rest of the system that are difficult if not impossible to resolve entirely. There's a huge trade off made when using web tech for desktop applications and developers would do well to deeply consider their choice of technologies before acting.
I've noticed that it won't work for most sites (for me, in Chrome at least) unless I open the web link in an incognito window.
I assume it's related to cookies / referrer in some way
AWS---[DX---GCI/DP]---GCP

It's sorta like that.

Disclaimer: I work at GCP, so feedback on how you'd like to see a more detailed version might actually have an effect!
Would it even have gotten coverage in business insider if he had not had an interest in it?
I just ship the articles to instapaper
FYI this slide from Sony explains a bit more about what I was talking about:

https://i.imgur.com/UijG9Qll.jpg
New iOS malware targets stock iPhones, spreads via App Store
Actually I don't think so. The main thing the owners of big networks are afraid of is spam.

We provide a ridiculously expensive way to connect, say, Slack to Skype, which is ==great for Skype==, from almost every possible angle. It means Skype users can stay on Skype instead of switching to someone else's Slack team.
Rez gets a leg up from being conceptually built around what we thought VR would be like (think Lawnmower Man), and (according to Mizuguchi) designed to accommodate future VR technology from the start.

The game engine has been significantly reworked to accommodate VR; it offers a 360° panoramic perspective rather than constraining you to face forward, and the playstyle in VR is "look to aim" much like Vanguard V. I'm to understand that the enemy placement in the original levels has been changed somewhat to make better use of the technology, and no one has seen "Area X" (all new content) yet...
Huh. I have actually been looking for precisely this --- I was going to go with the Guardian's Scribe, but I might investigate this instead.

Unfortunately it looks like it's JQuery and AMD modules, and I'm a Polymer and browserify shop, so it may just not be feasible. [sad face]
Still waiting for that reality on the desktop side of things....
It's a real piece of hardware.
I for one enjoyed these human touches in what was overall a very calm and reasonable essay.
> Probably some signs here... I wouldn't say he was fired "fast" by any stretch of the imagination.

He didn't mention it, but there was political/PR situation that happened at Github shortly before that and it's entirely conceivable that his firing was Github distancing itself from him for that reason. It was his former partner that was the center of the very public allegations of sexism at the company and she had some none-too-flattering things to say, again publicly, about his role in the matter.

As a manager, it wouldn't even cross my mind to fire someone that was underperforming when they had previously been such a strong contributor without at least first trying to figure out why the performance suffered. Where I have been involved in such abrupt terminations, it's always been because of something unrelated to performance (sexual harassment, abusing the corporate card, etc). The fact that he was never given an explanation from the company only makes this explanation seem more likely.
FingerIO: Using Active Sonar for Fine-Grained Finger Tracking
#define and &&

heh
Yes we are running a mySQL 5.6 Database on RDS.

If the Database you want to migrate/replicate from is running on Amazon you should be able to make it a replication source.

I saw nothing that stated the database HAD to be on RDS. You use the servers address to setup the endpoints. And provide a database username and password to connect with so it should be doable.
I know.. don't be negative.. however, that image along with its caption "Pedestrians checking in on the AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol Go match on the streets of Seoul (March 13)" was too funny.

(It shows pedestrians ignoring the giant screen that is showing the game.)
Hmm, do YOU understand Twitter's platform and users? If you have some cool insights into those things then I'd love to hear them!
The argument holds true for innate preferences as well. It's one thing to argue that some preferences are innate in men versus women, another thing to prove that these preferences would cause women or men to avoid tech more than their counterpart on average in a vacuum, and a particularly extraordinary thing to prove that the "optimal equilibrium of gender" in tech is significantly different than 50/50 because of both of the above.
How is the reliability? I want to like GCP but I have never trusted their services in general.
thank you for the tip, will try that
This is just... wow. The guy spends three years developing a product on Twitter's platform and they just kill it off with one e-mail? It's fair enough if they need to change their API policy, but at the very least they could have acknowledged all the work that he's done and found a way to help him and the other developers in the same position to make the transition as painlessly as possible. Not... whatever corporate BS this was.

Given how much Twitter is struggling already, is this really the time to be alienating more of its community?

Personally, I've had a really nifty side project that I've been working on since last year that I wanted to launch on Twitter's platform, but as of a month ago I've all but given up on actively developing it. All the people that I know on Twitter with whom I wanted to share it have either left already, or are only sticking around because as-of-yet there's nowhere else to go that does what Twitter does.

So I'm curious to hear some perspectives on this: clearly the direction that Twitter has taken is making a lot of devs unhappy, but what would be the right thing to do? What sort of API access would people ideally want to see it provide? What would be the ideal best-case scenario necessary for the devs to want to start coming back and putting their time into building the ecosystem?
> Mansplaining is gender neutral if it is used in a gender neutral way.

I'm just imagining the furor if someone said that about, say, "harpy" or "hysterical."
Commercially available?
I don't quite understand what approach you are advocating, but for me "it should be difficult to craft a payload message that looked like a valid message for the log." is not good enough for a system service.
Types are nice, but in the end a type doesn't convey all the semantics.

Types also add overhead. They can be also superfluous and unnecessary.

Getting your types in a application right and to gain the optimum from them is quite some work.

Over the years, i learned to appreciate more unittests over more types.
I so sick of EC2 rogue 'underlying hardware issues' and EBS volumes dropping dead... AWS Console status will say everything is 'Okay' even when there are major problems - it's a joke... I wonder to myself, is it because I recently migrated (December 15) over and they are starting to buckle? Really a bad experience. At this rate I'll be looking at Google next month, or going back to Colo (25 servers, 100TB) so not much, but still worth doing right.
PayWhirl v2 is now in public beta
> (The most important skill is building a mental model of the workings of reality.)

Sorry, that's just too funny. It has a "in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe" kind of attitude. It kind of makes sense, computer science is just applied physics and logic.
That article linked to this one: http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/former-nasa-official-...

Very different take. :)
Does TypeScript suffer from the same performance issues that Gradual Typing systems share [1], or does it sidestep these by virtue of being transpiled? Naively I'd guess not, which would mean that converting a library to Typescript would often impose a severe performance impact on JS users, but potentially afford significant gains for TypeScript users.

In TypedRacket, for example, using types in some (but not all) of your code can result in up to 100x slowdowns, until eventually breaking through into performance gains once most or all code is converted.

[1]: http://blog.acolyer.org/2016/02/05/is-sound-gradual-typing-d...
:-)

https://xkcd.com/927/
Yes, I have thought about that as well many times. AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage…

Perhaps because the hard part of creating an online chat is the network effect and scaling, everyone thinks they can have shot. With so many being thrown at the wall, eventually a lot of them stick.
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google, and I'm oncall for this service.)

No.

Edit: expanding on this a little, it's not something that's been released so we can't talk about it. I don't think I can comment on "illumin8"s proposals other than to say that I'm pretty sure they don't work here.
IRC Cloud is based on IRC:

https://www.irccloud.com/
What you mean to say is Twitter is a publicly traded company owned and operated by private individuals. Those private individuals have rights and protections granted by the government jurisdictions in which Twitter operates.
Why People Call Me Man of God- AruKay
True, but most clients have it on by default.

Also on public IRC you tend to have a channels of 80 people, all idle.
Main points for me:

1. Don't serve user supplied content from a subdomain of your main site. Facebook fixed this by removing the redirect from photo.facebook.com to their CDN, so now user content comes from *.akamaihd.net.

2. If a user uploads a PNG (or whatever), and you've validated it for that content type, don't serve it from your servers with a different content type. Clever users can make files that browsers will handle in different ways for different content types. Facebook's CDN still seems to allow serving files with the wrong (unvalidated) content type just by changing the file suffix in the URL.
Way to blame the victim, man.