skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I loved my UP24. Then it died after six months. But then I loved my replacement UP24... until it died after a few months too.

The beauty of a single function device is that I didn't want a watch or an Uber app or whatever on my wrist. And better yet, without all those things the battery lasted two weeks at a time, and it was a nice unobtrusive non-statement on my wrist. I really didn't mind the price, if only they could've made the damn thing work for more than a few months...
> If an investor or employee of the investor/accelerator/incubator makes a sexual advance towards me or anyone in my company, then they are stripped of all of their shares in my company (even the ones that have vested) and there will be a public notice to shareholders as to the reason why.

As someone unfamiliar with investment contracts, what's the typical burden of proof like for comparable "nuclear option" moral clauses? Is there typically some kind of evidence required in the contract? Or is it just assumed to be "whatever will hold up in court"?

To be clear, I think this is a very interesting idea, and am in fact a little sad it isn't common place (it seems like something that should be covered by the kind of morality clauses which I understand to be common place). However, an idea like this needs to be enforceable to be practical and thus valuable.

EDIT: Since this is an often controversial subject, I want to be very clear: I'm not trying to imply that founders/employees will make these claims up. Rather, that assertion is one which is very likely to be used by the well-paid legal teams of whoever you're trying to evict from your board. Would this kind of clause actually stand up in court under that kind of assault?
Imzy is slow and boring. Looks like a second system effect version of Reddit + Digg.
And then?
I had such a negative experience with their jambox, when I was shopping for fitness trackers I wrote them off immediately. Personal devices are a market where quality really matters, and people have long memories for a bad purchase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard_p...

Just as one example. A years-long open submission and selection process. In what way do you feel that results in a 'monoculture'? How would it be done differently and better?
That was my persistent thought as I was reading the article. How is it even remotely possible that the legal system did not see the trafficked men as victims here? It was prosecuted as if Arefin's sole crime was against the state, and the men he effectively enslaved were merely witnesses. (Which is also more or less how it was treated by the first few authorities it was reported to.)
Samsung makes a lot of the parts in their phones. They probably do a lot less waiting on 3rd party companies.
8chan is quite close to what you described. Although the anonymity-first censorship-resistance thing might give you more than you bargained for once you get there.
Leaving a job I liked in DC and a lot of friends in the area for the world of Bay Area startups and moving to the Valley. Two years later, I am now a much better developer, and happier person with a lot more control over my future.
Where did you go? Would you mind sharing what you have learned?
Speaking of PR mis-steps...

I do remember seeing a TV ad a long time ago. Their new short-lived tagline was, "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible."

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jbcurio/8740859605

But to me it came across as, "Without Monsanto, life itself would be impossible."
1) don't use objects, use bare methods and don't mutate input data

2) `from collections import namedtuple` reinforces 1

3) nice lighweight tests, py.test or nose

4) integration tests so you can actually refactor w/o having to recode 100 unit tests

5) write as little code as possible
For desktops systems, maybe, but there's a reason almost nobody delivers SAAS stuff on Darwin, even as some do deliver on Windows.
The Google Python style guide might be a good start: https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html

I've also heard that at Google they require assert isinstance for every parameter of every function.

New Relic has very good tools for profiling python code if you're running a service.
Changing jobs often. Working at the same place for more than 2 years rarely pays off, even you get glowing reviews and everyone loves you - it doesn't convert to the dollars. You might get a 10% raise, but you will not get +40%. Getting comfortable costs you tens of thousands of dollars.
Personally I focus on not creating large projects. I make as many small individually tested libraries as I can and assemble them in smaller projects.

Not exactly the 'microservices' approach, but similar ideas.

One of the most useful things related to this is to focus on interface design. It's easy to scrap a bad implementation and re-implement the same interface later, it's harder to fix a bad interface that you're using all over the place. Making some implementations pluggable up-front will also make it easier to swap things out later.

Another thing that ended up causing the most pain in the long run was building in too much functionality directly instead of leaving things up to plugins. Plugins can more easily be enabled or disabled to compose specific functionality. The alternative is tons of code and tons of configuration options to handle every little corner case.

As far as lower level tools, the 'coverage' tool integrated with your test suite is a must have.
Mozilla addresses this, in part, by having one "module owner" but also multiple "module peers". All code changes in a module should be reviewed by the owner or (more usually) a peer. Having multiple peers reduces module owners' review burden, reduces bus factor, and gives "reviewees" someone they can appeal to if their PR is rejected. Linux has a similar organization with Linus' "lieutenants".
The troubling part, to me, is not the case itself. I personally don't believe the sex tape was newsworthy (at least not as much of it as they released).

The troubling part is that we have someone secretly using money to manipulate a case in which he is not a direct participant.

Wealthy people should not be able to weaponize our legal system.
I agree with this and in general think the degree of randomness in outcomes and survivorship biases aren't fully appreciated by a lot of folks examining the startup world.

With that said, I do think there is one trait that is common to successful products/projects ...they were successfully sold.

Now this might seem obvious after the fact but I think the amount of effort expended in 'selling' should be somewhat proportional to the novelty (and or perceived ineffectiveness )of the product. If you don't have an evangelist (on your team or external) that can sell the idea to customers, employees, business partners, investors ... your chances of success are greatly reduced.

And even then pure randomness and timing (you could be too early/too late ) will drive the final outcome.
if there was one people would use it to hire others.maybe google or facebook has one internally, but publicly there isn't one as per my knowledge.
Sketch. :)
I would also like to know what was the biggest risk you took in your career that you ended up regretting?
Right out of college I made the huge mistake of joining one of the big consulting companies. Six months in I hated it so I just quit.

At the time I was living in Houston, where I didn't have much of a network, so I packed up my stuff and moved back to San Antonio. I attended college in San Antonio and at least had some contacts there, mostly revolving around the coworking center Geekdom.

No job but I had enough savings to float myself for a few months.

A friend of mine from there put me in touch with a startup he had invested in—they were still in Techstars and he knew they needed an engineer. I contracted with them for a bit and joined up full time after they graduated and raised a seed round. Arguably they risk was theirs as their first engineering hire was a fresh dev who'd never had a full time programming job. They moved to Boulder after the program and six months later I followed.

Now I'm at Twitter, because I quit a job I hated and bet that my contacts would pay off.
This is not a replacement for Rx, actually it relies on Rx. SmartReactives is an addition to Rx which allows you to get an IObservable from an expression for free, while with just Rx you'd have to instrument your expression.
How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left versus Right Debates Irrelevant
Well, first of all, retail square footage is not a great way to measure retail, (imo, and all of this is US centric) I may be in the minority here, but the US has such a ridiculous amount of retail space per capita, head and shoulders above any other country, I find it to just be insane. And as such, I don't think it's good measure, especially given that we have so much unused retail space now, along with my suburban sprawl note, which this is all about. Further, do not take what has been happening in the past 2 to 4 years as the norm, either in retail, housing, etc. It is very much not the norm.

There are more old/overbuilt/poorly-located (again, not poorly located, but rather a victim of socio-economic and local changes) than there are new malls being built. And I have already made note of this fact. I already made note that new malls tend to be entertainment centers. There are more dying malls out there than there are new malls being built. And once again, a lot of those malls focus on entertainment (more than just food and a movie theater, and again, "shopping as entertainment") as well as high end goods. (you are not going to have 10 malls in a mid-size city each with a Louis Vuitton store, you're going to have 1, if they're a large enough city.)

"but most markets are actually experiencing modest-to-insane amounts of growth." Nope. Not at all. Cities are experiencing modest-to-insane amounts of growth. Many small cities, towns, rural communities are static or contracting at a modest-to-insane rate. And guess what is happening to the malls located in those communities? (again, I noted this in the og comment; people tend to pay attention to NYC, San Fran, other large cities. Most Americans do not live in those places, those places are not the norm, they are the exception. This is something that many commenters of HN who live in those large cities seem to not grasp.)

The dead malls are very much a part of the landscape, and will remain so (until they're torn down and redeveloped, which is what is supposed to happen.)
How are you getting and validating your ideas? Are you just trying to scratch your own itch?
Haven't you heard they are going to destroy airbndb because they invented a self install lock app, people will be rushing to the stores to install these locks because it solves so many lock related issues, it's more expesive then what's already on the market, it's a great signal to local regulations that your illegally renting your house, and as a bonus they do zero marketing, it's all win.
Regardless of who's to blame and all that meta conversation, Motorola has not been doing great with the updates these days. The original Moto G was updated to 5.0 something like 9 months after the launch of 5.0. Moto E (2015) was updated from 5.0 to 5.1 and then abandoned. Turbo II got 6.0 a month or two ago.

There are almost certainly worse OEMs who never update anything, or update 2 years late, but I would not describe Moto as rapid on updates.
Genuine question...

How does one get fired as an admissions counselor? Was it just a lay off, or was it something else?

Regardless, congrats on the programming job.
A First Look at America's Supergun
(In reverse chronological order)

1) Quitting ZenPayroll. Ended up leaving what are now millions of dollars of (paper money and unsellable) shares on the table, at a time when the company was clearly taking off. Now building a values-focused, mission driven company the right way and loving every minute of it.

2) Quitting LivingSocial after 11 months when I realized that they weren't what they sold me on. The pitch was building back-office tools for SMBs, but in the end they never did the right thing for SMBs if it wasn't also in their interest.

3) Dropping out of college as a philosophy major, believing I could learn to program. Joined LivingSocial as an aspiring engineer, which turned out to be a great place to start. Great exposure to the Ruby community, experience with hard things (scale, caching, business problems creeping into the product.)

As you may notice, my biggest fear is regretting wasted time. While I tried to change each one of those places to be what I knew they could be, until you start your own company you must (rightfully) defer to what others decide is "right". I've realized I have an incredibly high bar for making difficult decisions, which isn't realistic to "manage up."
Any post that includes the string "Hitler" is wrong.
I started freelancing and definitely think more about a self sustainable paid service, and have more time to work on it too. I'm trying to improve myself as a consultant but think I'd prefer to concentrate on a product. But a bit short on the ideas. Would love to hear some examples you'd think was not a stupid idea to work on.
> you can't ask permission or you'd be out of business before you managed to change the laws.

That strategy didn't work out too well for Zenefits.
I've been following this series of articles. As a total beginner in the field, I found it to be a quite approachable introduction and learned a lot reading it. Thank you !
> If ... or employee of the ... makes a sexual advance towards ... or anyone in my company, then they are stripped of all of their shares in my company

Wait a sec, I don't get it. If I as employee like some girl and ask her for a date, is it a sexual harassment?

To be honest, I don't like this trend...
> Despite there not being a single shred of scientific evidence in favor of open office workspaces being a good idea and overwhelming evidence in favor of them being counterproductive for most software developers, this unfortunate fad is currently widespread. Software developers need private workspaces to ply their trade.

Yep. Perhaps this could be softened a bit to say there are different sorts of devs, some seem to work OK in open plan offices and some need private work space. But personally I'm in the latter group. My company moved to open office space and I've come to not even think of the office as a place where I get real work done. Thankfully they allow me to work from home as well, that's one of the main things I'll be looking for in future employers. I have to admit I can produce a feeling of moderately intense anger by just thinking of the Yahoo executive banning work from home because she believed that everyone's job involved frequent impromptu hallway chats or whatever the fuck.
A range of 0..100 could be a static error. There's nothing fundamentally ambiguous about the technique, eg you can shift by 100 already.
Finding Better Economic Ideas to Rebuild America
He understands that, but he does not like to use this shorthand for strcmp, because it conveys a conflicting meaning.
I'm much the same, and I prefer explicitly writing "== 0" in those situations.
Why don't you surprise me by not downvoting this after reading just the first sentence, because it is a serious question:

Is "never forget" really the best response to a trauma in the first place? I'm not sure this is a settled question. If I'm raped let's say, should I carry that rape vividly in my head every day for the rest of my life, in the hopes of avoiding it in the future? If I do that, haven't I already in fact ruined that future by thinking about the same trauma every day and making it part of my reality? Also, if you believe some people, that which you think about constantly, even for purposes of avoiding it, is exactly what you bring into being, in both subtle and, some say concretely manifest ways.

Maybe instead I should try to forget the incident (knowing I never really will, but letting go of it as much as possible) and move on with my life? Those who are haunted by traumatic memories would probably love to forget them if they had the option.

What if we utterly forgot about Hitler. Would we be worse off, really? Do we NEED to study injustice to learn justice? Do we need to study brutality to learn kindness? Or do we just get our hands dirty by acculturating ourselves to things that are not justice, not kindness? Again I'd say it's far from a settled question.
Bring it up to your boss, and make sure you're clear that you need it to stop. These are the kind of jerks that can do a lot of harm to your confidence and your career as a programmer, especially if you're a minority in programming already (by making question if it wouldn't be better if you just went and did something else, which is already something that the world is telling you from the get go).

Don't let it slide, raise the issue to HR if you need to.

If it doesn't end, go find another job where you can grow and just leave. Don't look back. Working with people like this is very poisonous in lots of insidious ways, and ultimately never worth the stress
I actually told my bookstore that students this fall could use either the 2nd or 3rd edition of a book (Sipser, which for the record is breathtakingly expensive, but the 3rd edition is nearly identical to the 2nd, right down to the typesetting), not really expecting them to follow through. To my surprise, they did---the bookstore website lists both editions and says either is acceptable.

...but if you buy or rent them at the college bookstore, they cost about the same. D'oh. On the open market, used copies of the 2nd edition go for less than a third the price of used copies of the 3rd.

(So I sent my students an email apprising them of the situation and suggesting they get their orders in before the thousands of other CS students buying their fall textbooks. :)
For Jawbone, Fitbit et al. the hardware has been commoditized, the software has limited utility and the whole 10,000 steps a day seems like a fad. It's incredibly hard to maintain users once the honeymoon period ends.

Personally, I'm long on UA, but I still have some lingering doubts about their acquisitions with ConnectedFitness and the their Healthbox or whatever.

I'm a pretty competitive triathlete and all of my gear is Garmin or some other niche specialty company. I love it and it works but the market space is limited to athletes like me.
Modern anti-fascism.
The link is to a mailing list post by John Regehr dated April 10, with no followup on the topic. He has since made other posts to the lists on other topics, so it does not appear to be a permanent issue.

How might this be interesting to HN readers? Or did I miss something?
What does sleep has to do with stress?
Improve world health with night night . みんな
The issue is that there's no scientific reason to be opposed to GMOs. They're perfectly safe to eat and not worse for the environment. The organic lobby has successfully demonized GMOs to the general population, and now they want to have them labeled to scare people away from eating them. Do you really think we should be legally requiring the labeling of something that doesn't actually matter, in response to a successful marketing campaign by the competition?
yes, risk is risk. Anyone in the cryptocurrency space is well aware of the fact that tomorrow we could all wake up with a 0 balance. As for the legal aspect, the creators and curators have been assailed on all sides by critics and naysayers from the beginning, and yet they move forward. They either understand the risks, and deem it worthy, or are just plain stupid. Given the credentials of the individuals involved, I doubt it's the latter.
You can create poisonous food with conventional techniques. The problem with the anti-GMO movement is that they're focusing on gene splicing without worrying about conventional methods. Labeling and testing cultivars is not a bad idea, but simply labeling "GMO" vs. "non-GMO" gives a false sense of security.

http://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-pota...
Hey, I'm working on something similar to what you're describing (focused on mobile right now) and would love to get your thoughts. My email is in my profile, please reach out and I'll show you what we've got so far.
The code looks like the ones from C64. I used to write C64 Basic when I was 5 to 10 years old. (Later my father bought me an Amiga 500 and I started to play around 68000 assembly with MSeka assembler. There was also a C compiler, but there wasn't any documentation about C and the libraries. So I didn't choose to learn C with trial and error. Also there wasn't any Internet... Assembly was so much easier and logical to me at those days.)

But at some time, my C64's tape recorder broke. And I couldn't save the programs I wrote. So, programming to me was, waking up in the morning, start writing some program and playing with it, and in the evening when I switched off the power button everything would be gone. But I loved to play with my C64 :)

At those days, sometimes I even wrote very long programs. But I must admit that, when I see those 322 lines, it really frightened me now! It's looks like a million line C or Java codebase to me. I have no intention to refactor that code at all.. But I agree it would be fun.
The rare primates of “Drill Ranch”
Yes, it definitely does. There has been a recent shift in the past decade or so among a lot of people, I've been noticing, where respect for strict freedom of speech and press has been in decline. A loss of the ideal of "I may disagree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it".
I pay really close attention to trends and try to tap into things that aren't overly competitive.

I also run ads to an MVP before investing too much time into it. Don't get me wrong, not everything I have launched made money. I have lost my fair share too ;). I tend to shut a service down fairly quickly though if it's losing money.
Why roll your own first when you can use an out of box solution to see if the monetization is a good strategy before investing engineer time into it?

If it's a good fit they can always roll their own later. Hell, they may be rolling their own right now but wanted to start capturing the additional revenue at a lower margin immediately.

>just to avoid a bit of regex

I've never heard of Viglink and am too lazy to google, but I'd wager the real value provided by the company isn't adding affiliate codes, but rather strong analytics features allowing you to optimize revenue across different affiliates etc.
Another one: Doing market research well is really hard, and not something the person/group has a lot of experience in. It also might result in finding out that there isn't really a market which means we would have to abandon or drastically change our plan, and we really don't want to do that. So, let's just not bother and assume there is a market!

Then there's the fun dynamic where if you are being really honest with yourself you don't care too much about whether there is a market or not, you just want to see the idea in your head become reality, because it would be super cool and you will feel good for having been able to do it. Which might be fine for a one-person side project, but otherwise not so much.
The worst thing he's said is he'd kill families of terrorists, which is bad but nowhere near Mein Kampf.

Also, he hasn't written them in a book, it's an off the cuff threat, which makes it less serious, in my opinion.
What advantages does the DAO offer over a regular fund for investors?

It looks like you get less regulartion and legal weight if things go wrong...am I missing something?