skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work as an independent consultant as my "startup". I had been consulting for about 5 years for other people and saw less and less value in letting the consulting company take 65% of the money they charge for me. I made a good salary, but I never took health benefits, though I did use 401k matching. Anyway, it took a while, but I made the correct contacts and was able to sign MSAs with the 2 major software vendors I do work for, and now can land my own work. I now bill for about 85% of what the other companies charged for me, and even after paying both sides of the employment taxes I have come out way ahead. I found an 18 month project that was planned so that nobody would work > 40 hours a week and have a 7-4 work schedule. There is a possibility of travel, but I will increase my rate for those gigs to make up for the "hardship".

I dont know that I could really call my business a startup, but I do think that if you are working your ass off as a consultant and have a legitimate skill set and the right contacts, you can make your life better. It sounds like this guy just traded one sweatshop for another of his own making.
Read the rest of the comments. There's plenty of confusion, and it's not applied consistently. Saying "it should not explain itself because of tradition" is only valid as a justification if you actively want to keep people out.
it was not necessary, only to satiate my curiosity.
Don't worry: we won't. You, me and the rest of us are going obsolete ;)
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Try giving your talk at a smaller, local meeting (if possible) for practice.
Hello, I wrote the blog post. There is a link to a video in the blog and we published something at NSDI last week:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi16/technical-sessions/...
I'm curious why you think it is inappropriate. I find it very tasteful.
Digital Longevity
UPDATE: To everyone worried about their privacy on AngelList: We’re sorry. Thanks for all your feedback.

We’ve made more changes:

1) We stopped using the first-person on all emails. We wrote that first-person notification literally 5 years ago when we had a few thousand users, and we never re-visited it. It was pretty stupid. Now they all clearly come from AngelList.

2) We won’t send notifications to companies when you add them to a project. We used to because the project shows up on the company profile too. But it’s not what people expect, so we stopped, and we stopped showing the projects on company profiles too.

Thanks again.

Dave

AngelList
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlaams_Blok
Wow, fantastic advice -- if only we weren't so financially illiterate, proud, and foolish to boot!
Heh, Brotli + http2, it looks so Fast: http://www.http2demo.io
I did not know this when posting the link, but I find it pretty hilarious. Thanks.

Hipster neutral link: http://stackoverflow.com/a/597200/1176872
> By what possible rationale could you say that recent immigration has anything to do with this

I didn't say it was recent immigration that caused this incident, we both know that (if they are 2nd generation, it couldn't be recent).

> other than that they're Muslim

You think that their religion has absolutely nothing to do with this? I mean, even unjust prejudice within their host country because of their religion could easily cause social isolation and economic disadvantage leading to anger - that seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me and largely places the ultimate blame on the host country.
The #1 or #2 post the entire time the bar's been up has been "Andy Grove has died". How can you call this information undiscoverable?
UPDATE: To everyone worried about their privacy on AngelList: We’re sorry. Thanks for all your feedback.

We’ve made more changes:

1) We stopped using the first-person on all emails. We wrote that first-person notification literally 5 years ago when we had a few thousand users, and we never re-visited it. It was pretty stupid. Now they all clearly come from AngelList.

2) We won’t send notifications to companies when you add them to a project. We used to because the project shows up on the company profile too. But it’s not what people expect, so we stopped, and we stopped showing the projects on company profiles too.

Thanks again.

Dave

AngelList

(Posting at top-level in case people miss it as a reply)
I was speaking more to the entire apple product line. Laptops, PC's, phones. Apple users easily pay on average 1/3 more for comparable hardware. Their software used to be of higher quality, but that is no longer the case.
I never understood the hatred for Cygwin, its a (set of) DLLs that form a POSIX->Windows translation layer.

All the bulk is just the utilities that people want to provide once they've got that layer (i.e. CoreUtils).
Can Wikipedia Views Predict Market Movements
When there are isolated deaths like traffic accidents, the authorities take pains to notify the next of kin before releasing public details, so you're not seeing the family car on the news wondering if the driver made it. In cases like this, it's all over the news and many people may have an accurate idea of if their loved ones were likely in the affected area. You may call it bullshit, but I've seen a lot of people very relieved to get the news that someone is okay quickly and efficiently like this. It's one of the better things made possible by Facebook.
Create Fonts in Illustrator CC with Drag and Drop with Fontself Maker
Comparing ggplot2 and R Base Graphics
Connected objects: controversy over the safety of the French network SigFox
I'm sure even bottled water isn't prone to pollution, but more and more alarms are raised about medical pollution in tap water. So I'm still happier when I drink out of a bottle.
I QR'd my two backup private keys and corresponding CSRs, printed them out, and gave one set each to my two partners to keep safe. I agree that it seems a little overkill, but it doesn't have to be terribly complicated.
Oh yeah, that's a good point. I think I should have specified Schedule A... and/or C maybe?
This gets asked every time the black bar happens.
Some people do not know better and that is where the 'taken advantage of' comes from. It is buyer beware, but to me it's a scummy business practice.
VR won't be a mass market product until the brick becomes less brick-like.

The VR market is likely to be limited to gamers and a few devs for at least the next few years. That's not a tiny market, but it's much smaller than the market for phones and tablets.

It's also unlikely to take off until VR becomes social, with couples and families all playing in the same virtual space on the same hardware.

Costs and hardware requirements make that impossibly expensive for now.
My read of this article could be summarized as:
Want fanciness without the stress? Don't go for corporate world nor start a startup.
Haha ... me too! 2010 Macbook Pro that I've upgraded piecemeal. It is starting to act flakey so need to upgrade soon. It is surprising how long Apple is doing to do the Skylake update.
How dark is your personality?
Working in japan all the big companies feature systems like this. You get a e-mail and a call by a automated system. Then you have to respond with your status and if you can come to work :)
It gets worse, since in this case it's not even a trade-off between convenience and security. In Sri Lanka they had (and perhaps still have) security scanning at the entrance to the terminal.

As a result people have to bunch up outside the terminal, making them even more vulnerable than they otherwise would be.

Any true improvements would have to come from streamlined pre-screening, e.g. chemical detectors (or dogs?) in the concourse sniffing things out without making people stop or bunch up. Hard to do.
After reading The Rise and Fall of American Growth -- a brilliant work that most here on HN would find relevant -- I came away more convinced than ever before that legalizing drugs would reduce a great deal of drag on our long term economic growth.
Quite possibly. Another submission had been flagged to death earlier today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11334908
I still think we overemphasize the threat of terrorism and it plays directly I to the neocons narrative. I wish we stopped playing their game. If you're worried about someone, reach out to them directly. I can see the value of this in case of a tragedy that affects thousands but not here.
There is a high element of bullshit social control in situations like this.

You could probably hire a few people in (say) Eastern Europe and set them up with great process, tooling, and telecon and beat the hell out of consulting groups that run their consultants ragged, but running them ragged is a mechanism of control. You are so committed to it you are not going to question any assumptions.

It is like the way that if you want to succeed in certain professions you pretty much need to move -- it satisfies the ideological idea that "we are hiring the best people from all over the world" and it separates you from friends and family and once more makes it almost impossible you will question the unspoken assumptions your career is based on.
I might be a bit overzealous in saying we can get the results down to 0 but there are many major countries that have not been attacked by ISIS.

The narrative after 9/11, and after both Paris attacks were "this is a war of civilization, of culture. They attack us because we are free". I think a lot of us realise on a conscious level that this narrative simply isn't true, but the narrative still stands.

Foreign intervention make us targets for "retaliation" (I'm trying hard to not apologise for monsters murdering a bunch of civilians pretty indiscriminately). There are many major countries and populations that are easier targets for Daesch that don't seem to get attacked. If this was about maximum carnage so many worse things could be happening right now.

The whole "having a population not super happy about the current government" thing doesn't seem to help (in terms of building a support network). Though even that requires a pound of salt: a journalist on twitter pointed out that in the case of the Paris attacks, there were support networks... but they were mainly for "normal" criminals (drug dealers and the like). We're not talking about a huge set of jihadists, but a bunch of opportunists [0].

I think most people would recognise that the IRA bombings and the Troubles was a result of policy, not culture. Daesch is, I think, pretty similar. It's not like a bunch of people got up and were like "We hate the West!". There's a lot of stuff involved. Not that it justifies their actions, but it's at least good to be lucid when thinking about the why.

[0]: https://twitter.com/joshuahersh/status/712280093343793153
Probs for the idea. Nice thinking!

I guess we as programmers should seriously think about the future of our craft.

If, for example, we feel we are basically using the same building blocks over and over again, we should seriously think about organizing libraries and code snippets and questions asking for such snippets in an organized way and provide ways to transpile 1 solution in different languages etc..

We should not accept the current state of our craft as final and rather think about how to improve in general.

If for instance something like StackOverflow has become the Wikipedia of Code then let's think hard about how to make into a full blown tool, with all the features and semantics we need.
It was a nice project the way it started and grew but it doesn't have to stay like that forever!
@dang: Am I still penalized from the voting-ring detection algorithm?
Is that sarcastic? You had great destruction of capital in WWII, there was severe labor shortage and you had the GI bill. And you had the whole world to be rebuilt.
The 2005 Podcast Core Sample – March 21, 2016
3D was never really there as a technology, it was pseudo-3D.

VR tech is actually quite impressive, and as a result people will figure out how to apply it to humans.
Can't speak for Facebook, but as for HNs attention, you didn't submit a story about those blasts. How appalling. If you think something is important and relevant to HN's interests, submit it. It's not 100% everyone else's responsibility to submit things to get votes.
The "end for OS X" is a giant load of nonsense from someone focused on iOS. I could see eventually merging iOS and OSX, but Apple is a bit hoist on its own petard there since it insists that the experiences be completely different. Almost everything below the UI layer is the same.

Apple makes plenty of profit from its OSX machines, and needs to diversify more, not less. It also needs powerful machines for development, design and other tasks. Apple's culture would never accept switching to Windows, and Linux is still lacking in too many respects.

What Apple should do is improve OSX (high color depth support, better graphics performance, ultra low latency etc.) as well as releasing cutting edge hardware that outperforms anything in the industry. Rackable, higher-end Mac Pros supporting SLI and gobs of memory that could gang together using Thunderbolt would be a good start. Apple should be using its vast market capitalization to lead the industry forward. It has the resources to do many things at once.
Or, as in my case, don't do a PhD. I really thought I wanted to, but as it turns out, I didn't:

http://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-progr...
Wondering why did I get a downvote? Isn't what I said just a valid opinion, on a matter of philosophical (i.e. irresolvable) differences?

Edit: getting more downvotes, without any of the downvoters caring to justify them so far, so I can only speculate as for the reasons behind them.

I'm wondering if the downvoters (I'm guessing from the USA) are aware that my views are already a law in many of the liberal democracies of Europe? There are laws which put you in jail for saying certain things, and they are enforced (there are people who are doing time just for saying things).
This isn't even the end of it. Just to clarify, besides moving it like on a trackpad, you can force touch the "keyboard" while still holding down your finger, and it'll select the word underneath. Force touch again and everything will be deselected. All while you're still in the "trackpad mode".
Hot Robot Feels More Emotions Than Your Ex
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It's a nice feature. However, I found it's hard to get it right to use kb as a mouse with 3D touch. Sometimes it just wont' register no matter how hard and fast I press down. Very frustrating.

Apple, are you listening?
You've identified a correlation.

What solipsism is objecting to ("big claim"/"hypothesis") is the statement "There's a reason for that", which implies that there's a causal relationship between the prevalence of haggling and countries being "backwards and economic disasters" (for which there's been no evidence provided).
For your point 1, that's just splitting hairs. It's in the insurer's interest to increase profits, rather than to provide care. So you just pointed out a way they found of increasing profits, which results in both ballooned healthcare costs and increased premiums all around. This isn't helping me get high-quality healthcare at affordable prices.

For your point 2, you protect people from catastrophic losses by having a single payer: the government. Insurance is supposed to be a way of protecting people from catastrophic losses, which is why we have it for house fires, car accidents/thefts, etc. Healthcare is not about catastrophic losses in most cases, it's about ongoing care to maintain health. You getting your yearly checkup at the doctor is not a "catastrophic loss", nor is you getting an ultrasoound to check out something the doctor found to make sure it isn't something really bad. These are just ongoing care, and it isn't what insurance is designed to handle fundamentally.

As for $200/month, I wish. More like $800/month.
Or if you live in Flint, Michigan or any other number of places in the US that don't have potable water.
Precisely. As a kid I learned to stop being bullied by ceasing to grant the reaction that they were after.

As long as we keep on demonstrating that their strategy is effective they will continue to pursue it.
> For every attack that they "didn't see coming" there are, most likely, plenty of attacks that they "did see coming" and stopped. Even more likely is that we don't hear about these stopped attacks because they aren't sexy news. Or, when attacks ARE stopped, and it's published, people question whether it's just blustering by the government to justify their jobs.

The problem with this argument is that it can be used to justify any security measures, no matter how costly or stupid. Because maybe it's really very effective in practice but we can't tell you about it?

You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability.

So no, they have to justify that the costly and stupid security measures actually work. Or we'll have nothing but costly and stupid security measures that don't actually work.
any individual person is, de facto, allowed to decide whether or not they use drugs regardless of the legal status of the drug in question.

drug prohibition laws represent something else. they represent the power of the state, and all the inherent violence that goes along with that, bearing down on those that choose to use legally proscribed drugs.

I hope you have a full understanding of what you're saying. legal prohibition implies state sanctioned violence.
U.S. V. Apple: Never Mind
Just read about Andy Grove yesterday in The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. Great book (though its thesis and the story in the book would contradict the assertion that a single man built Silicon Valley).
It still astounds me that we haven't solved reusable modules in 2016.

Sure, we have libraries, apis, package managers etc. but every time I read a code base, there is always a utility function reinventing the wheel.

Someone wrote it because it is still difficult to discover modular code and reuse it easily.

It's pretty nuts when you think about it. Imagine mechanical engineers having to recreate the same CAD file because they can't find a component with the same functionality (which does happen but for other reasons e.g intellectual property).

But we don't have the same intellectual property challenges and yet the best tools we have to discover and reuse code are 90s search engines that treat code as raw text with zero contextual understanding and often outdated code snippets.

PS: I love your project btw.
It's fortunately not _that_ easy to get a software patent. It'd be quite difficult to patent something that's the length of an average stackoverflow answer. There's also a lower limit on the length (and originality) for copyright which I doubt many answers reach.
> more dense than gzip and compress/decompress faster

If you're saying brotli compresses/decompresses faster that gzip, it doesn't according to Cloudflare tests [1] (see table near bottom).

Even the fastest compression level of Brotli is slower than the highest/slowest compression level of gzip in most cases.

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/results-experimenting-brotli/
Invokedynamic – Java’s secret weapon
The problem is mainly with external borders, not internal. They are likely getting weapons and other aids from outside, you can't just buy AK47 in EU.
There's a very popular experiment that goes a bit like this. You and another person must share $100. You get to pick the distribution, the other gets to accept or reject. You get one choice.

If you pick say $50 each, the other person tends to always accept. If you give him more, he'll accept too. But what if you give yourself $75, and the other $25?

If he rejects it, you both get nothing. Turns out, at certain levels (cant remember where), people tend to reject.

Which is interesting, because every non-0 figure is a benefit to you. If you get $5 and the other $95, why reject it? You'd get nothing. It's a one-time experiment, you're basically rejecting free money.

It turns out that the other guy getting $95 and 'screwing you', is so bad, that you'd rather reject free money than for him to get more than he 'deserves'.

Now if this was your enemy, or say someone close to you, sure. But this experiment holds with complete strangers you don't see and will never meet. The notion that someone gets more than you, when normal moral notions suppose you deserve an equal amount, incites people to be vengeful even at the cost of free money.
I'm not so sure this is great advice for PhD students. Junior faculty maybe.

You should fix a lot of other things first (in particular, prefered methodology and advisor) and then, after fixing those things, choose applications toward the left-hand side. A few reasons:

1. If you're doing it for hype alone you will be miserable. Ph.D. students tend to be out ahead of pretty much everyone in terms of the nitty gritty details, so they often hit the trough of disillusionment right around the time everyone else is at the top of the hype curve.

2. A Ph.D. is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be paid (sometimes comfortably) to work on (mostly) whatever you want. If it's not at least a little self-indulgent, you're wasting a great opportunity.

3. You'll have the rest of your life to chase the next sexy thing.
> They're not that bad (GNU coreutils is generally pretty good) and you usually remember the edge cases fairly quickly (eg `dd`). Sadly you get inconsistencies in all coding frameworks, whether it's semantic, function names in the core libraries or whatever.

Generally this is all awful and low-level. Just see the UI interface difference between 'dd' and 'Copy File' on a Lisp Machine. The UI is worlds away.

> UNIX shells do have a lot of hidden gotchya's which can make life "interesting" (read: "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck" lol). But the power of being able to use reusable blocks of any language through pipelining (and to a lesser extent, exit codes) is genius. It means one can mix and match LISP, Java, Perl, Python, C++, Go all inside one shell script.

You can do that on a Lisp Machine, too. With the difference that no pipelining of text is necessary. Just reuse the objects. The data is all fully object-oriented and self identifying.

Note that I'm using Unix and other OS variants since the 80s and I'm fully aware of command line UIs from VMS, SUN OS, Cisco, IBM AIX, OSX, GNU, Plan9, Oberon OS, and various others.

> I do understand the hate towards UNIX shells.

It's not hate. Most Unix shells are just fully dumb. Many people like to use primitive text based UIs with lots of corner cases, which makes them look intelligent for remembering obscure commands, obscure options without real UI help.

Take cp.

The shell does not know the various options the command takes. The shell does not know what the types and the syntax of the options is. The shell does not know which options can be combined and which not. It can't prompt for shell options. It can't check the command syntax before calling it. It can't provide any help when the syntax is wrong. It can't deal with errors during command execution. There is no in-context help. It can't reusing prior commands other that just editing them on a textual base. The output of the command is just text and not structured data. There are really really zillions of problems.

There have been attempts to address this putting different user interfaces on top. For example IBM provided an extensive menu based administration tool for AIX.

> But no tool is perfect and pragmatically I've found shells to be far more productive than anything I've ever attempted to replace it with. Which is the real crux of why we use these tools. But like anything in IT, this is just my personal preference. Your mileage may vary.

Many people have found shell productive. That's why there is a zillion of different shells. You can even use Lisp-based shells like scsh and esh (http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2007/02/16/esh-the-fabulous-f...) or GNU Emacs.

But for most part all these attempts stay in that little box and don't escape the general problems.