skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> (You'd guess that 40 year old Unix applications could work too without recompilation, though I've never tried it)

40 years takes you to 1976, at which point there's no longer any ISA-level compatibility between the hardware we have now and the hardware Unix ran on then. Basically, nothing we have looks like a PDP-11 to software, and Unix didn't run on much else in the mid-1970s.

(Tidbit: 1976 is when the Lions book came out. Full source code, with apposite and useful comments, for Sixth Edition Unix, passed around as samizdat long afterwords due to Bell Labs enforcing copyright on the Unix source code not long after.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6t...
How seriously would you look at an autonomous vehicle in the next 5 years
This was something I was thinking about the other day, mainly due to my love of driving. How many of you would seriously buy an autonomous vehicle?

It seems the auto industry is moving towards this at a fast pace. Part of me feels perhaps this might be fad for the automakers to make a quick buck, but I do see a whole industry for these vehicles. I guess at the end of the day, there could be room for both autonomous driven vehicles and regular cars.
> Postgres probably does have a problem in that there are too few people writing these major patches

I don't think that's the major problem. That is having enough experienced people with enough bandwidth, to make those patches suitable for integration.
It is not a contradiction, it is a sham. To wit:

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29, section 3:
"These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." [1]

[1]: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng...
The SR-71 flight manual kind of describes it.

Pyro devices fire, yanking your boots backward onto a metal plate. (so that your feet will come with you) The canopy is blasted off.

A rocket launches you out.

Very briefly, you experience heat like a hot oven caused by the air being compressed in front of you. It's about 500 F. The suit mostly protects you.

A drouge chute gets you going feet first, head last.

More pyro devices fire, cutting some straps and then pulling a seat liner tight. This tosses you out of the seat.

I think more pyro devices... there were a lot. You end up with a survival kit dangling a few dozen feet below you and of course with a parachute above.

You get some dye, a gun, a raft, etc.
> However the claim that mathematics is either 'theorems' or bust

The theorems of mathematics are what distinguishes it from other enterprises and provides us with a degree of certainty of the correctness of our conclusions that would otherwise be unavailable. No number of (Euclidean) triangles measured, however great, would convince us equally well that their interior angles always sum to 180 degrees, nor would any exhaustive search of pairs of integers convince us equally well that the square root of two really is irrational.

By exaggerating the accomplishments of Africans to a lay audience, the article is minimizing the accomplishments of Europeans.
I blame the DSMV for lumping us all together. There are definitely some similarities, like stimming, touch aversion, and hyperacusis, but the degrees to which they affect daily life are dramatically different.
Also factor in their limited services. Why would I use dropbox when I can use a service such as Google to handle multiple services in one place?

Also, file storage is a commodity at this point. Differentiating your cloud storage solution from the others only matters when you offer something other companies do not.
The complexity of the current procurement system means that only giant contractors with an office of red tape experts can effectively bid on the big contracts. These giant contractors get giant and hugely profitable contracts which would have required more competitive bids with a less broken procurement system. In turn the giant contractors reward the politicians that keep the system working in their favor with campaign contributions, hefty speaking fees, cushy positions after leaving elected office, and so on.
We should really stop looking to Google Trends to infer the popularity of a subject (something I've been guilty of as well!). The number of searches can't be completely correlated to the popularity, because as word-of-mouth and general knowledge of a service builds, the more likely people are to go directly to that service and not perform a Google search.

Additionally, Google trend numbers are relative to all historic search activity. As Google's market share changes over time, that's likely to impact what Trends shows as well, skewing the correlation with subject popularity even further.
Why tasteless and problematic? Do you think it's biased/untrue?

Racial slurs ("dog eating") and observed behavior (littering) are very different things.

> Really, students from China will dilute the reputation of your degree?!

full context:
> not kicking them out or punishing them for what they did negatively impacted everyone's college experience, and will continue to dilute the reputation of my degree.
Any connections in the Cambridge, MA office?
Would you happen to know a good way to learn performance optimization? I'm working with datasets currently that I am trying to get to run faster, and I cannot tell if the limitation is on my hardware or due to ignorance on my part
Bitwise Cyclic Tag – Esolang
I'm interested in what your negotiation principles are.

I've always heard that a candidate should never share salary information and require the company to provide the first concrete number in the form of their initial offer.

However, I've repeatedly used all of the "business-professional" and "HR approved" sorts of conversational techniques to enact this advice, and the only result that has ever occurred is either (a) the company literally refuses to even conduct a single interview with me before knowing salary information, or (b) the company finally makes a job offer and it is extremely low, something around 50%, of what I have earned previously in similar roles.

95% of the time I say I am more focused on assessing cultural and technical fit for the position, making sure I would jell with the team, finding out more about the company, learning more about the trade-offs required for the role, etc., as reasons for not providing salary information as literally the first point of communication with HR, it results in an instantaneous rejection.

I still believe candidates should not agree to unfair information asymmetry by revealing their salary or wage preferences first. The problem is it just seems that something like 95% of all hiring managers will outright immediately reject you, on principle, if you don't agree to bear that unfair information asymmetry.

All the great techie blog posts on being a better negotiator, like this:< http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ > -- they sound great and give me a pumped up rah rah feeling, but in practice they basically never work.

My interviewing experience with this has covered large multi-national companies, tech firms, small boutique quantitative finance firms, start-ups, consulting companies, and education technology. There certainly are industries I am missing, but it has seemed like a universal phenomenon to me.
Did you really get scurvy when you were in YC?
I chuckled a bit because the GP mentioned Oracle. I'm sure you've heard this one:

Customer: "How much does an Oracle database license cost?"
Oracle Rep: "Well, how much do you have?"
You're not getting "ripped off" by having a base salary of 125K USD (with benefits and equity) fresh out of college.

Tell you what, with a Bachelor's in Chemistry (in my year 176 people started, only 42 finished the degree so it's not a free lunch) I can expect to make between 40K and 60K CAD out of college and pay higher taxes than in the US. With a master's that I'm working towards, I'd be on the upper end of that spectrum. So boo-hoo to those making only 125K with equity and benefits.

:/
Cuba will have to step up its game with their Internet access, which is almost non-existent.
This is interesting to me. The 140 character limit definitely works for what Twitter does, but is it optimum? How would you even tell?

I love the long form messages that being in a place like HN allows you to have.

I also think that there's something unique to Twitter that being on HN does not provide. I can't quite articulate that yet, though. Would anyone using Twitter care to try?
That doesn't really work well, because frequently for more complex patches there's more than one significant author. So we end up crediting them in the text of the commit message instead. We're slowly converging of using a bit more standardized descriptions of who authored a commit, but so far it's not easily machine parsable :(
Its ability. It's is a contraction for it is or it has.
That was interesting. My physics teacher from high school told us that he used to be an SR-71 pilot, and flew missions near the Soviet Union, but couldn't tell us much more than that due to most of it being classified. It sounded like he really enjoyed that job.

Now I get to read about what sort of stuff he was doing. I see that his name is briefly mentioned in this article as an SR-71 pilot based at Beale AFB, so I know he wasn't just making it up :).
Does anyone have information with how some of the "multi cart" games worked, like Mario/Duck Hunt/Track Meet? Surely, all 3 games didn't fit in 32k right?... right?

http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/3-in-1_Super_Mario_Bros._/_Du...
Can You Really Fry an Egg on a CPU?
I work in Portland, have 5 years of experience, and I'm making about 90k after bonuses (no stock or sign-on bonus).
I love Portland, my hours are very nice (~35hours), and I have a good amount of technical freedom. But boy....Maybe I should make the move up to Seattle.

It'd be nice if people mentioned how many hours/week they work for me to get a good idea of what to expect. Especially since we're talking about Amazon.
So you think it's OK to demand the shutdown of a site, saying it "should be taken down immediately"?

If it's potentially exposing the personal information of others, yes. The fact that the above statement values the hypothetical feelings of a person providing the aforementioned site rather than the personal information potentially exposed by anyone using the site suggests that perhaps priorities have not been evaluated properly.

My statement was simple, short, and to the point. No criticism of its author was made nor intended.
That's right for $@, but AFAIK only $@ – for instance you can't do:

for filename in "*.txt" ; do...
How to Use Reddit to Promote Your Blog: Use Reddit to Drive Traffic
Learn to use reddit to grow your audience! http://www.onlinelivingblog.com/2016/03/how-to-use-reddit-to-promote-your-blog.html
Keeping the limit at 140 or maybe a little longer would be fine, but it shouldn't consume characters to attach an image or URL. It's annoying that when one tweets with a URL, every character of the URL is counted, but then replaced with a shortened t.co link anyway. And because they host images themselves, they shouldn't count as characters consumed.
http://www.onlinelivingblog.com/2016/03/how-to-use-reddit-to...
Exactly!

On a somewhat related note: The original Another World[1] would probably fit into the caches that your CPU has as a matter of course these days.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgkf6wooDmw
How much traffic per day does hacker news typically get?
yeah, sounds like a typical month at a startup. don't worry, next month will be even worse, and you'll probably have even less money.

what's amazing is how few journalists actually have gone through this process, and how even fewer write about it.

the fact that he wrote a huge blog post about it means he's somehow surprised it's almost always this hard to do actual work on products and services -- which is why success is so vaunted and worshipped, not because it's fun and glamorous, but because it's basically getting just the shit kicked out of you 24/7.
A significant chunk of that list is "I don't like white people but there are so many of them and I can't escape". Luckily for me I don't feel any need to escape from Indians and their food is super tasty!

I really wish I could find a less stupid definition of privilege to cite, but no one ever gives me a better one.
What would you be doing if you weren't running YC?
> Have a problem with React? Fix it.

That's not how things work in the real world and you know it. Furthermore if you're good enough to fix React then you're good enough to write a complicated JS codebase without the need for a third party language.

> It also means that Typescript is barely a step up from Javascript

Typescript is a huge step up from Javascript has it brings type safety, which eliminates a whole class of errors, make the code easier to read and document and the price to pay for using TS is quite low compared to using Scala.js .

Scala has its place, but right now it's definitely not in the front-end.
I thought this was a great article, and trigram indexes are definitely an amazing tool to have in the arsenal.

I think PostgreSQL fulltext search (with tsvector, tsquery etc.) is given an unfairly bad rap though. I'm not sure that "full text search works best when the text vectors are stored in physical columns with an index" is true - in my experience there's no performance penalty to just indexing the tsvector expression - no need to worry about additional columns or triggers.

I also think the assertion that the key problem is that "full text search is that words are broken up according to the rules defined by the language of the text" is very context-dependent. In many situations that's the most awesome feature of fulltext search. Usually when I search for "cat" I'm not interested in results for catacombs or categories, but when I search for restaurants, results matching restaurant (singular) are relevant too.

I definitely see that for a use-case like GitLab's, where the data includes code, full text search's stemming would be a hindrance rather than a help.
Small. In general, we just look for progress commensurate with resources. If you've raised more money and been working on the company for longer, we expect more progress than if you've just started.
I have a love-hate relationship with that feature.

On the one hand, some of the most insightful things that I've seen on Twitter have been written in such way.

On the other, it's just so effin ugly. You can't reply/share/like the whole thing at once, so you end up with splintered conversation trees with different people replying to different parts of the mega-tweet.

I think it's a poor design choice, really.
I had to make a HN account once I saw this title. I'm Nigerian. Benin City is clearly still there. The modern Benin city is very obviously divided into 'old Benin' and Benin city proper.

So no, not 'lost without a trace'.
I've been following you and @paulg as well as many other YC members for a long period and I'm quiet confident that you'll adhere to the vision/idea behind a project that I'm about to start this year.
Do you recommend that I apply for YC really early, like now, just to present the idea ? Or should I develop it and apply with a prototype ? Or should I launch it and then apply ? In which case can YC help the idea to have bigger chances to succeed ? And in which case you do you most likely accept the application or at least give it a better chance ?
Reasons to prefer sed/awk: you're in bash

Reasons to prefer sqlite: it's easier to embed in an app, you want sort, join, split-apply-combine, scale, transactions, compression, etc.

Reasons to prefer pgsql: sqlite's perf tools suck compared to pgsql (last time I got stuck anyway) and I'm sure there are lots of sql-isms that sqlite doesn't handle if that's your jam. EDIT: forgot everything-is-a-string in sqlite, just wanted to add that it has bit me before.
Easy error handling in Node.js
I know right ... Jesus.
If you send a DMCA takedown notice, you don't get to choose the status code that gets displayed after the content is removed.
The word "consider" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Topic: Donald Trump's info
A simple way to change the limit without changing the limit has been shared here before.

Profile name shouldn't count as part of the 140 character limit.
I want to add to this that you want to be careful about deriving meaning from one's physical actions alone.

I may have just crossed my arms, but if you'll look closely you'll notice I wasn't looking at you when I did so. It's not that you said something that I'm closing myself off from, it's that it sent my mind on a tangent that made me feel insecure. There's a number of reasons to cross one's arms other than shunning away from people around you.
This is just knee-jerk, spiteful cynicism. I know a number of people who dream of working for the U.N. and getting the job through connections certainly doesn't factor into it. Quite the contrary: landing a U.N. job (at least in the U.S.) is extremely difficult, and certainly far more difficult than other job opportunities available to these sorts of people. They're driven to the U.N. out of idealism, not laziness.
How do you feel about #hnwatch?
This seems like a silly thing to have an article about.

What next, are we going to have the news report when Fiverr changes the width of their "What are you looking for?" box to 361 pixels instead of 359 pixels to work around a browser display issue?

Or if Amazon adds a new dropdown menu to their product detail sidebar?
Are you at all concerned that the compressed timetable leading up to Demo Day contributes to founder burnout and unhealthy lifestyles? How do you know the program isn't inadvertently damaging some of its participants?
I think it's a response to Lyft, whose plan is more convenient because it allows drivers to rent the vehicle.
Most of the comments in this thread are focusing on the author calling ETL boring -- that is the title after all. But I found the greater point of the article to be about empowering data scientists and giving them autonomy. This post reminds me of Jerry Chen's DDI post [1], except it's about data science.

The notion that a data scientist's only job is to "write a statistical model" and then it's someone else's problem to run it in a distributed environment only exacerbates the problem and lowers DS code quality.

Full disclosure: my company Pachyderm [2] is trying to solve exactly the problem Jeff is talking about in the post. We've built a data processing platform on top of the container ecosystem. Basically, the data scientist has complete control over the runtime environment for their analysis since everything is bundled into a container. It scales to work for actual "big" data, but it also great for small teams that don't have massive infrastructure resources.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/01/the-geek-shall-inherit-the...
[2] github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm
In management school there's a lot of flexibility regarding the nature of a leader. In your experience grooming founders, what has been the most efficient style of leadership?
No they don't. The electromagnetic spectrum doesn't even have a zero (a wave with zero frequency isn't a wave).
This is a copy/paste from a prior HN discussion that I had:

[it's definitely true] that employees are discouraged from seeking buyers because there is an unspoken implication that this means the employee is "losing faith" or "believes less" in the company, or is getting ready to leave.

If the party line is: "hey, we are going to be a billion dollar company!" and then one employee says "hey, I want to sell at this $100M valuation", even if the $100M is a solid upside from the employees strike price the next natural question for the founder is: "hey, why would you sell at this valuation if we all know we are going to unicorn?"
Lots of people are reasonable and could understand many good reasons to sell at that point, but in high-growth culture those are not always appreciated. Sure, employee can/should suck it up, but it still makes it more challenging.

Generally, I think this is why company's should more regularly organize secondaries, it removes this dynamic to a certain extent.
I think from the context he meant to say "Minecraft Server is nominally Open Source."
I've seen it claimed that due to the lower fuel costs, and the lower maintenance, that taxis are a fast growth market for electric cars so that may be a factor as well.
> Minecraft, which is written in Java, is nominally Open Source

Minecraft is not open source by OSI's definition and doesn't even have the source code available. The Minecraft server is distributed as a compiled JAR file. What does the author talk about?
Do you think YC would have been interested in something like Minecraft back in its infancy if you saw how fast user base was growing?

Does YC have any interest at all in startups (if you can call them that) whose main product is a video game of some sort?
Actually, Facebook copied the @mention system and the #hash_tagy thing from tweeter so... there.
Great timing, thank you! I was just in the midst of preparing to set up a Minecraft server for my son and his buddies.
It's not silly because this is something that a lot of people care about. The other things you've mentioned are, obviously, completely irrelevant to most people.
What's in the article sounds like way more than that and it's really the whole tone of the article that bugs me. Yes Mojang doesn't have to let you use its IP to help you market your thing. Yes Mojang can dictate the terms of their product, and no you don't get special treatment because you know people at Microsoft or have a widely read blog. Like really? The article is dripping with petulant self-entitlement. It's disgusting and I say that as someone who usually likes the author.
6 minutes to drive to a customer and 6 to drive him where he wants to be.

You're assuming that each ride is independent, but that's already not the case with their Smart Routes - the driver picks up a customer, then picks up another one on the way, then drops off the first and picks up a third, etc.

The goal stated by their CEO is "perpetual rides", in which the car is never without a passenger.
There is also ~32000 dollars of other people's money at play. I wouldn't write this project off as failed yet, but it sounds like an attitude of "it's a fun project for the kids and we don't really know what we are doing" that doesn't seem to appreciate this fact. (EDIT: on the other hand, he is backing it up with extra money, instead of trying to fail out of it cheaply somehow)

The comments on the article are interesting to read, with people arguing both sides.
What are your thoughts on working with the Ontario government to study UBI?
We fund companies with no traction/revenue all the time, though the bar is higher.

A really compelling idea is more important to us than traction or revenue. We understand how quickly exponential growth happens.
That assumes that the Cuban's in charge want to get it fixed. The Internet is not non-existent in Cuba because of some technical problem.
Taleb is an idiot: https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/682361866321002496
Yeah, that... Makes a lot of sense. Always surprised me that the URL counted for the char limit.
OR new workers are never paid as much as the previous generation in the current regime of structural suppression of worker wages.

Sorry, but yeah kill all men.
I'm still a student so I don't know a lot about salaries, but is this kind of increase common? 130k to 280k in two years sounds extreme
the article draws some weird conclusions

>> Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.

so, men made the computer programming prestigious and better paid? How about construction, why is it not prestigious (or not as prestigious as programming) despite the fact it is clearly dominated by men? how about plumbing? taxi?