skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just left my job a few months ago because I wasn't happy. These responses apply to that job.

1. The money was good ($175k as director of engineering in Los Angeles) and the hours were 9-5.

2. I wish I had more autonomy to manage my team. Although I was director, engineering was basically under the control of product and upper management. Unfortunately they knew nothing about how engineering works.

3. A chance to define a new role, possibly R&D or skunk works, so I could contribute but not be bound by the traditional management hierarchy.

4. Ultimately nothing, since he was the problem. He is CEO of a tech company but he can't even plug in a thumb drive. He has said in the past he views engineering as "black magic" because he doesn't understand it.
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This comment has been made about pretty much every batch of YC, right back to when it was only 8-15 companies.

The response is the same now as it has always been in the past: YC knows it can't predict in advance which companies could be home runs, so its approach is to "bet on the field" (which, thanks to power-law returns, actually works in startup investing in a way that it doesn't in horse race betting).

Remember, Airbnb and Dropbox were roundly panned when they first appeared out of YC, and in both cases were very nearly not accepted at all (Dropbox was rejected on the first application. Airbnb was accepted even though YC thought their home-sharing business was stupid and would most likely fail. YC accepted them because they were impressed that Airbnb had bootstrapped themselves by selling breakfast cereal).

Plenty of other companies that looked like winners early on have failed, and others that looked ridiculous have gone on to become very successful.

But nobody knew which would be which at demo day.

To understand more about YC's m.o., read these PG essays:

http://paulgraham.com/swan.html

http://paulgraham.com/altair.html
Who's to blame for enterprise security breaches? Probably all of us
Buy pre-used phone (~$50 for an older-gen device). Use pre-paid phone service. (~$40/month). Doesn't need to be expensive if you're willing to forgo the latest and 'greatest'. I use pre-paid Verizon anyway since it's the best deal for my usage pattern.
I concur. I disclosed a flaw in the apple website through their disclosure program. They took over 3 months to fully acknowledge it and no fix is forthcoming. This is a poor response.
Ask HN: What should I ask before joining a new startup?
Hey guys,

I've recently been offered a development position at a (kind of) newly founded startup. Before I go ahead and accept, what are the questions I should be asking to make sure that I don't get myself in a bad position? The guys I've been talking to seem nice enough, but I don't know them well enough trust them.
Smartphones are depressing. It used to be tomshardware, anandtech and such had interesting articles. Now it is "there
Is a new iPhone", I guess somebody must want a small flagship phone". Intel is not competing on performance, but the will o wiap of power which can be wiped out byna stupid web ad that spina up your CPU. They have phone envy but the result is today's computer isn't better than a 4 yr old computer so of course sales are in the toilet.

Now those review sites have quiet computer porn and don't tell you that you can buy the same skus they talk about and then wind out switch's the fans, hard drives and other things ten times or so before your custom build is quieter than a 737 takeoff.

They are always hiring new smartphone reviews because it is a soul destroying job for anyone who has a passion for software, electronics, business, etc. They oughta hire a fashion reporter.
Cheap phones are actually in the $60 price range.

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Galaxy-Prevail-White-Mobile/dp...

http://www.amazon.com/Nokia-Lumia-640-Annual-Contract/dp/B01...
It does matter where RSA-1024 is being actually used in Tor. As far as I understand, as long as it's not for some long-term keys, it still shouldn't be a problem. Please write if you know more on this subject.
I wouldn't sound too satisfied on their behalf. The Cesanta guys really just implemented a well known flasher feature (on chip digesting) that speeds the process up a lot.

Don't get me wrong - they deserve recognition for it. But their work here is a case of the open source community finishing an incomplete tool from the manufacturer rather than generating something really new.
Attic + s3cmd sync works fine for me. At least, well enough that I won't be using a closed-source solution. If this is released as open source, great!
Especially when crypto is involved. Given the large number of completely broken cryptosystems, making this open source will give it a fighting chance to not be entirely broken.
Financial worth comes from your net worth, yes. But your worth as a human being isn't related to any of that.
Can small/medium sized businesses realistically compete with big brands online?
One word: fserves.
Not even a single marijuana industry startup ?
agreed, but not sure if Red Hats embrace&extend is any better - all corporate entities seeking too much influence/power in the oss ecosystem should be carefully watched
Schiller wasn't talking about you.

He qualified it as people using PCs that are more than 5 years old. They have usage patterns and goals completely different than anyone on HN. They don't use IDEs. They don't need "full Unix power" or anything similar.

Their usage probably looks like web browsing, sending/receiving email, and listening to music at most.

For them, an iPad is a probably a good functional alternative, even if the price point doesn't work.
Good points all round. I enjoy StackOverflow's contextual IM implementation - as soon as a conversation becomes too lengthy it creates a room for you and attaches that room to the question/answer.

If I were to have a shot at disrupting Slack, I'd definitely contextually interleave IM and email into a variety of systems: tickets, bugs, processes, etc. Just today I spent an unacceptable amount of time hunting down an email related to a ticket. Communication should occur within the context of work, not alongside it.

> At least emails could be responded to at relative leisure.

We thought IM was the answer to the email problem. Instead, we've found out that we've replaced it with a far greater demon.
Seen this from a different angle: watched a rookie admin delete the only copy of the soon-to-be-production database, which was the result of a year of data-mangling/massaging before it could be put online for production .. saw him do the delete, nothing I could about it in time.

Spent a week recovering the data, a block at a time .. learned enough about the database filesystem to write an 'un-delete' tool, sold it after using it to successfully recover the original project, and have never looked back ..
Actually, I haven't done much with it, just messing around, so don't take this as absolute or anything but;

Using Rust cross platform, across IOS and andriod, wasn't really that difficult to do...sure, the tooling isn't fully there yet. But I don't think it's any harder than c++, if anything, easier. Cargo is amazing and what makes Rust really nice to use. The community will create better IDE's and an ecosystem of tooling for cross platform, both mobile and desktop OS's. I believe Go also has some fairly popular mobile cross platform libraries as well that are probably much further along than Rusts'.

I can't say for Windows phone as I have never done anything for it and I think it's dead...
Off the Silk Road, Beyond the Great Game: Histories of Modern Central Asia
This "magic bullet" mentality is exactly what is wrong with OOD/OOP. If it was not used to model the reality, I'd find it much more tolerable.

> I doubt human beings are smart enough to reason about what good programming practices look like.

You don't need to be smart to reason, after all, reasoning is a formal, mechanical thing. And there is always a mechanically derived best possible model for each and every problem domain. So it is in fact always very easy to prove that OOP is inadequate and another model is this many times closer to the formalism of the problem domain. For every problem domain out there. There is no place for personal preferences, it's all formal.
DropBox has a 60k line project http://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-amaz...
> publishing code under a FOSS-license means giving back to the community

As far as I can tell his code is still up on github. He removed it from a poorly implemented distribution channel on which many people happen to unwisely depend. I'm amused at how much people are concerned about this breaking apparently production code. It will serve as a good lesson to many inexperienced and lazy engineers, I suspect.
So now it's "Tick-Tock-Tweak".
Your criticisms of Slack are actually criticisms of your company's use of Slack. You can tell people to keep non-work chat to a few channels that people who don't want to see that stuff can mute. You can have a rule that states "Notifications of server fires should not be done over the company chat application". You can have a per-team, per-project channel for conversations about those things.

It's not really any different to email. I've worked in offices where people use group lists to inform everyone that there's donuts in the kitchen, and dozens of people reply-all to say thank you. That doesn't mean email is broken; it means people use email badly. In exactly the same way, Slack is a tool. How you use it determines how effective it is.
That sounds like a way to make the attack surface twice as big.
SVN says this better than I can:

> It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes, you can use tools as they weren’t intended, but most people follow the patterns suggested by the design. And so in the end, if people are exhausted and feeling unable to keep up, it’s the tool’s fault, not the user’s fault. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design.

https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat-74...
The Rise of Buy Me Once Shopping
And no-one talks about HipChat anymore.
but ... but ... but ... it's right in the name !
How many axis, what's the volume, what rigidity/accuracy, which materials are you comfortable with?
The Uber On-Demand Model, It Turns Out, Doesn’t Translate to Many Other Sectors
A <100$ smartphone can do all of those things.
This cuts particularly close to home for me. I work for an educational company with developers that actively mock schools with low resolution screens and poor JavaScript performance, not to mention Android and Fire tablets, while they sit on these brand new MacBook Pros with SSDs and Cinema Displays doing their testing. The schools don't have these low power machines because they're dumb or not tech savvy. The vast majority have them because they are poor. We are trying to help the poor and you are completely missing the point. If you can deliver the exact same content in a way that doesn't require a high performance machine that is the ideal. The more we can do server side the more we are giving instead of taking.
I think you've just reinforced op's point instead of showing how he was misguided.

Saying "Good OO is comprised of good design" is meaningless - good code regardless of methodology is comprised of good design. You can't have good code unless it's been designed well. Good design is not a feature of the OO methodology, they are two independent properties of a program (design quality and methodology).

"Expecting good OO of a programmer who just knows the rules of OO" is exactly what OO was sold to us as achieving. By following the rules of OO design we were supposed to be able to automatically have better programs that were less likely to end up as spaghetti. If we wrote lots of small classes that just did one thing well and encapsulated their state properly we would magically have programs that were easy to understand and maintain, and we would be able to re-use the classes in other programs!

This was hardly ever achieved by anyone, and if it was it was independently of OO methodology not due to it. As you point out, reinforcing the op's points, it's very easy to get OO very wrong, even for experts.
Every Eve Online teamspeak chat I have ever been in had a better discipline than any skype or slack work chat I have ever been in.
Charted: Terror attacks in Western Europe from the 1970s to now
Not only that, but K5 also charged for accounts.

Right now, the login/password field is bugged so you have to type in the URL string to get to your account. ICU/brain dead is about right for K5 now, unfortunately.
Great argument for non-depreciating assets. But too bad computers probably depreciate more than cars! But I have been converted to the cult of Apple with their Macbook Pro's. I think a used one is probably a good value. I am using a mid 2012 MBP and it is still great. I won't be able to use a non Apple trackpad anymore I think.
Dear Apple, there’s nothing ‘really sad’ about using a 5-year-old PC
I think the "price of being poor" is a thing to be considered here as well. Similar to the boots theory[1], I've seen my mother in law spends hundreds of dollars every year on support with Dell, and other people to keep her crappy old Windows machine running. It truly is sad, to pay someone $300 to fix a machine that's worth less than that but what is her option? Honestly, she would be much better off with an iPad for playing Youtube videos and getting email.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...
They're still in the honeymoon of warm-fuzzy public perception, sitting in plenty of cash. They're not going to be disrupted soon apparently. Not even by freemium and advertising and a few different features, native clients, etc. or being just good. See Ryver.
> 2011 Macbook Pro

Now do the same thing on new Macbooks.
slack web client is hot garbage -- it takes a 5-count to switch threads.
The posters that boost productivity for me are usually reference ones may not be specific to the field - i.e.
http://www.unihedron.com/projects/spectrum/

Makes me look at big picture and think of possibilities
and compiler.
And what would that culture problem be?
Yeah no drug is without side effects and long-term use of anything should be seriously questioned to be sure it's worth it.

Article claims a 10% increase in the risk compared to those who have not taken the medication. Do not misread that as a 10% risk of developing dementia. So if for example there is an 5% chance of developing dementia in your lifetime, the enhanced risk is now 5.5%
StartCom will log all issued SSL certificates to public CT log servers
Dispelling the nuclear baseload myth
Defeated Go champion Lee Sedol wants a rematch against AlphaGo
A clickbait title (also not the original title) with buzz keywords.

A package manager should be fast, easy to use, with good conflict resolution —and useful information when this fail, fast downloads and a web of trust behind it.

Not incidentally, you get this from major GNU/Linux distributions.
So.. story time. While at the university, there was that project where we had to create an elevator simulator in C as a way to learn threading and mutexes. All the tmp files were stored in ./tmp/.

In between build/run/debug cycle, I would "rm -fr ./tmp". But once, I did "rm -fr . /tmp". At that time I didn't know any better and had no version control.

I had to redo that 2 weeks in a night, which turn out to be more easier than expected considered I had just written the code.

My lessons from that:

A) Version control, pushed somewhere else.
B) Use simple build scripts.
You say that, but the guy sitting right behind me happily used his 4s until last month. And he's a heavy app user, installing all sorts of stuff, from flight tracking, weird weather apps, bird watching, whatever. I'm not sure if that counts as a joke from where I'm from.
Eating Less Meat Could Save Up to $31 Trillion (and Many Lives) – Civil Eats
expensive car but it lasts longer and you save money in the long run is not equivalent to buy some quality hardware that is updated regularly instead of spending low on cheap things. You left out that part where it says save money in the long run. Which is also exactly the thing which is extremely likely not going to happen with Apple hardware.
If you're on a tight budget, then £20 a month matters. It might be loose change to people like us, but unfortunately there are people who have to budget the meals they eat to bring costs down.

And to use your watch analogy, you wouldn't expect people on tight incomes to buy a Rolex when a <£15 watch works the same.
Streaming Biggest U.S. Music Industry Revenue Source in 2015
I bought an iPhone 3GS in 2009, that's 6 and a half years ago and my daughter now uses it at school. It even still connects to the App Store. Other than a cracked screen it works fine. Battery life isn't great, but it gets her through the school day.

These things have incredible lifetimes and also keep their resale value very well. So in terms of value, I'm not convinced that iPhones are a frivolous luxury. In my experience they're a reliable long term investment.

Is that relevant to low wage earners? I think so. If iPhones stopped getting software updates 12 months (or less) after launch and ended up in a junk drawer soon after, I don't think they'd sell nearly so well in any demographic range.
They seem to be filtering certain email providers. I tried to sign up with sneakemail (a paid email service) and the reg system told me "Please sign up with your personal email address." - when I entered a password. :-(
I completely agree, recently took my Acer c720 with Lubuntu on it with me on my trip to GDC, it cost me £170 new and I could use it for everything I needed, which was basically just working on my game and browsing the internet.

One of those things I could not do on a £800 - £1000 ipad. The other thing I could do on it, with the minor benefit of a retiner HD display
Levenhuk microscope range expansion
> street cred

wat
Nope.

Usenet died because of 2 reasons:
The burden of carrying alt.binaries
The burden of pirate media on distributed Usenet servers from alt.binaries

They made a great point of attack for the MPAA and RIAA member associations. And traditionally, ISPs provided these services. I think it was 2006 when Comcast finally pulled the plug. Most other ISPs doesn't even offer a connection at all, which is a shame.

But that's why it died.
My home PC is over eight years old and still functions adequately. I enjoy using it and maintaining it much more than I would fumbling around with a new Apple iPad. It cost about $2800 new, and I've spent about $300 on upgrades since then. So the total cost of ownership is about 390/year. I don't think this cost is much better than buying new iThings every couple years. But I get a much more powerful device, and it requires me to learn a few basic things about the computer to keep it up. So for me, as I suspect for a lot of people, a decision to maintain a PC system is not really as much about cost as it is about fun.
Gnome in GuixSD
A better app would holistically encourage proper use. Slack does not. For example, what if we could schedule group chats? We schedule meetings (well, I hope we do). Group chat is just digital meetings. If all chats are just throwaway (metaphorically, it's all archived, of course!) private chats with only the people that need to be included, then we can schedule them for a specific time (with a Doodle-type scheduler, even).
Ask HN: Help with Stock Options of Acquired Company
I need some help regarding my options (this was the first time I held startup options). The company I was working for gave me (ISO) employee stock options. They are all vested already. About 4 months ago, this company got acquired, in what I suspect was a down-round. However, I got absolutely no information about this, and don't know the details beyond what was in the press. I tried to contact the new CEO several times, but he hasn't replied to any of my emails. The company I worked for was based in New York and the acquiring company in San Francisco.

It is possible that my options are worthless. However, what is the official/legal procedure here to determine what they are worth? They haven't tried to get in touch with me, and haven't been responding to my emails either. I have all the signed PDFs from the former company/CEO outlining the option details.

Would greatly appreciate any help.
Liebreich: Europe at a clean energy crossroads
a couple of nits on twistedmack's generally good response:

* a prior art search is not required (that's the PTO's job) but i usually recommend it since it'll save money in the end if there's dead on prior art. it's also required if you want to expedite the process at the PTO.

* you can file for a provisional first then have a year to file a non-provisional based off that.

on your follow up: the time process varies wildly but its in the years time scale (not months or shorter). anecdotally i just gave the PTO a call regarding an application that has been sitting around waiting for an initial response for 2.5 years now, which is somewhat uncommon but not out of the realm of possibility. you can speed up the process, but the PTO charges a rather hefty fee for it.

disclaimer: i AM a patent attorney (and former examiner), but i'm not your attorney!
Just an anecdote, but I have an iPad and use it all the time. I bought a logitech keyboard for it. If it weren't for that, I also would never use it. I have a 15" MBP and I don't like carrying that around with me. But the iPad I have no problem bringing anywhere that I won't need a full laptop (for coding, etc.)

That said, my iPad is a couple of generations back now. I don't feel compelled to upgrade it at all, it does what I need it to (browse the web, read e-mail, take notes, play some games, etc.) For this I find the iPad Pro too big and it certainly won't replace my MBP for real development work anytime soon.

And another data point, I just upgraded from an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 6S+. The only real reason I upgraded was because the 4S was a 16GB phone (it was a work phone) and the battery isn't lasting much anymore. Other than that, I honestly wouldn't feel the need to upgrade.

Anyway, just my thoughts and situation.
Brussels Attacks Fuel Debate Over Migrants in a Fractured Europe
Check out the Brave browser
CoW?
Sell them or give them to poor kids.

At least where I live people drop working stuff off at FreeGeek instead of tossing them in a dumpster.
Canonical is more ham fisted, but RH seem more and more insidious.

If you look at some of the more controversial maintainers of various Linux related projects, they are on RH payroll (but you have to dig a big to learn that, as quite often they are presented as individuals).

This means that communication and coordination between them can happen across corporate channels rather than public ones, and only reach public channels after they have started applying the patches.

Look at cgroups for example. Initial development was done by two guys out of Google. But now its maintainer is on RH payroll. And he has upped and decided that it needs to be reworked to have one user space manager.

And who else but another RH employee has such a manager ready and waiting? While a third party project has to scramble to catch up with the changes.
>I am not aware of a socialized plan to put phone in the hands of poor people

"Since 1985, the Lifeline program has provided a discount on phone service for qualifying low-income consumers... The Lifeline program is available to eligible low-income consumers in every state, territory, commonwealth, and on Tribal lands."[1]

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
We agree that nobody deserves support, I was responding to the story regarding the broken builds issue.
> 14. (Edison's Law) "Better" is the enemy of "good".

That's a traditional russian saying, never seen it attributed to Edison before.