skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did this with Pearson (SAMS imprint) and wrote HTML5 Unleashed. My first time = $10K advance and 12.5% (I think, forget) royalty rate. I'd gladly answer any questions.

> what else should I be thinking about?

Time. I spent a better part of a year of my free time researching and writing the book. Its almost like I skipped a year-ish of life. Of course, the next time I write a book will be a lot quicker.

In terms of hours worked, its not a lot of money. If you like writing (and I do), it may still be worth it. Like most projects, the second one you do will probably be much quicker and feel a lot better than the first!

By the way everyone I worked with at Pearson was an A+ friendly, helpful person. I have a much less favorable impression of Packt, but never wrote for them.
How about in constructors?
Why is the primary factor behind Theranos's bubble the fact that its founder was a woman? That is a notable aspect but Elizabeth Holmes also leveraged powerful connections and a TED-friendly dream to get that hype. There are plenty of female-led startups that did not reach any notable status despite having a woman at the helm.
Jonathan Schwartz?
Social sciences haven't been "playing science", they are just as scientific as physics. It's just that physics produces more reliable knowledge via the scientific method, while the social sciences produce less reliable knowledge.

The key point here is that science is not limited to the scientific method. The scientific method just produces more reliable knowledge, but is not the be all end all of science, it's just a limited subset, just like the "hard" sciences are a limited subset of science
There's nothing wrong with paper books, it's just that you have to consider the tradeoffs now that we have multiple formats.

Pros: Can lend it out, doodle in the margins, flip quickly through the pages, use without electricity, etc.

Cons: Can't search by text string, can't highlight a word to look it up in the dictionary/wikipedia, can't sync highlights and notes to the cloud, can't use without light, can't carry 10,000 in your pocket, can't read at 2x speed while jogging (audiobooks), etc.

Different people have different priorities, and they'll choose their format accordingly.
While I agree that a genuinely static site should be written as such, I'm not writing websites that were possible in 1991, and I don't see why I should have to, to get simplicity and productivity: we've come a long way since then.

So, I did a little bit of work to simplify my set up(s) and then to make it useful to others.
I also applied, and my application also indicated that I wasn't looking for a job afterwards.

I am a nobody, have never worked at any high profile tech darlings, was not returning to another job, have no money myself, and contribute nothing to diversity (white cis male).

I thought I had no chance.

I was accepted and had a great time.

Hope this helps.
I'm currently an author with O'Reilly, writing about the design space. (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920038887.do)

I am in the final stages after over a year and half. I was in your position not too long ago and researched as much as I could before accepting, so I will skip things you will find in a quick Google search.

Negotiating:

1. Everything is negotiable, remember that

2. Under promise on #pages, they ask you for an estimate but lowball it because thats how they price it and then will ask you to fill it.

3. Get in writing what they will be contributing.

Choosing the topic:

1. Choose a topic you are passionate about

2. Choose a topic you know a lot about

3. Choose a topic you can write a lot about

4. Don't be afraid to tweak the topic half way in.

5. Choose a topic that will sell in a year and half.

Writing the book:

1. Write an outline, write the first chapter, throw it away, and rewrite the outline agin.

2. Its better to lose work than to keep going in a direction that isn't working

3. You'll be busy but be reading other books as much as you are writing.

4. Wake up early or stay up late, 0 distractions is the best for writing

5. Talk out loud, like youre presenting to an audience to get unstuck from writers block.

6. Get feedback as soon as possible.

Marketing the book:

1. If you can, get in writing what marketing they will do for the book.

2. Negotiate on how many free books you can get to give away

3. Sales on Amazon are important, direct sales there, esp on launch day.

4. Start a newsletter (yay more writing!)

Other:

1. This is a second job

2. It does open a lot of doors

3. Consider a co-author for your first book. I added one towards the end and wish I had done it sooner. Its easier to collaborate and bounce ideas off each other and keep each other accountable.
I think my favorite part is the fake door installed by an artist. Are there other examples of this sort of thing?

It reminds me a bit of power outlet stickers.
I almost said "uh, Starcraft was written in Forth" but I was thinking of Starflight. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight)
>1 +

That's unnecessary. But then again I can't really blame them. It isn't always clear when you have to do that. Also a previous version might have used strlen() instead of sizeof.
Its 18 minutes at the same station. Not that I would, but you could give it to a few close friends without it ever being an issue. You might need an additional, non-unlimited card, for when you meet up with them some where in the city.

I'm not sure whether MTA is smart enough to catch on to that or not.
> 2) Exercise at $100 [1], spending $1 to buy. Tax on $99 short term capital gains owed, or ~$35.

This makes no sense. Simply exercising an option is not a taxable event--you're just trading a contract for shares of a stock. There's no money going into your bank account.

Furthermore, you aren't taxed short-term capital gains when you haven't realized a profit. You'd need to exercise AND sell at $100 / share for those gains to be taxable. The correct taxable amount in this scenario would be $9 / share ($1 spent, $10 earned, net gains = $9).

[1] Assuming you meant "exercise at $100" here.
The stock needs to be public by the time you exercise to be able to do this.
Dvorak's comment on piracy stands out -- it was a useful marketing model:

And despite complaints by the company and others, people wanted software they could copy and use on more than one machine. During this era piracy sold software and created market share. People would use a bootleg copy of Wordstar and eventually buy a copy. Wordstar may have been the most pirated software in the world, which in many ways accounted for its success. (Software companies don’t like to admit to this as a possibility.)

Bill Gates somewhat famously did admit this talking of piracy of Windows especially in East Asia -- he'd much rather a pirated copy of Windows was running than a legal copy of GNU/Linux.
I asked someone who does this. Somewhat transcribed comments:

Expect $0 to $3k from a really shitty publisher who is probably just going to waste your time, or a serious publisher who believes you'll waste the publisher's time, or both.

$3k to $6k from a publisher who has some clue, but the topic is extremely niche. ("Pentesting South African Wifi Networks with Monads")

$6k to $12k from a publisher with some clue for a book that will sell fairly well to a big niche developer audience - something like a developer guide to Android or iOS.

$12k to $25k for super-popular consumer tech books for mainstream topics like macOS, iOS, and so on.

Royalty rates are 8% to 12%, maybe 15% for someone with a track record. (8% and $5k is standard for mid-list unproven fiction. Tech rates can be higher.)

Watch out for comedy royalty rates on ebooks. (15% on a downloadable file? 50% or GTFO.)

True: advances don't usually earn out. And if you write more than one book the unrecouped advances get added together, so you will never, ever, earn out, unless a book becomes an unexpected best-seller.

Which it won't, because publishers do not promote books. There's a sell-in period aimed at store buyers before publication to get the book on physical shelves, but otherwise publishers do somewhere between exactly zero and almost zero marketing and promotion.

Bottom line: writing books on its own is largely a waste of time, unless you want to research a topic and get paid to learn it and don't mind producing a book to pay for the payment.

Writing books as shop windows for other tutorial content and/or consultancy can work very well.

People who know what they're talking about, can write to a deadline and make sense, and are willing to accept pocket money are incredibly rare. Publishers often trawl for new writers, and if they find someone who is all of the above and not too easy to flatter they may be willing to push the advance higher than usual to close the deal.
Is Pokémon GO down or not?
if you remember NASAs rules for programming, and MISRAs rules, then dynamic allocation is out of the question. Certainly for most all embedded devices I've worked on all significant memory is statically allocated, and the rest are stack variables. Ideally with proofs of maximum stack depth.
My book (my first and only) <https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/d-cookbook> got $3000 advance, plus an on-time completion bonus, and now, two years later, continues to pay me ~$200 royalty checks in excess of the advance every quarter...

That's not a large sum of money, considering that it took about 6 months of nights and weekends it took to write the book, but it isn't nothing either.
How to convert video to PS Vita
I remember at least one system where the USB port allowed you to plug in USB stick and then let you listen to the music you had on it. So it's just a proper USB host.
> Wouldn't the prudent thing to do be to sell at least enough stock to pay the tax?

It's not liquid yet, that's the issue. That's what is nice about most RSU plans -- they immediately sell to cover, so you don't receive a ton of stock with an attached tax bill.

But illiquid options are different; the capital gains tax is for the paper-wealth you just received. That same paper wealth can evaporate, but the tax bill remains.
IMHO the arguments given in the quotes in the article are not very compelling, in view of the fact that humans have been identifying physical locations with far more complex and inconsistent systems for literally centuries:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301

Compared to "real-life addresses", URLs are an absolute pleasure to handle and understand; which naturally raises the question of why so many people seem to have trouble, or are suggesting that others do, with URLs? It's just a "virtual" address, in an easily-parseable format for identifying a location in "cyberspace". Perhaps its the "every time you put an intelligent person in front of a computer, his/her brain suddenly disappears" syndrome (for lack of a better word)?

The advocacy of search engines instead of URLs is also not such a great idea; sadly, search engines like Google today do not work like a 'grep' that lets you find exactly what you're looking for, do not index every page (or allow you to see every result, which is somewhat equivalent), and the results are also strongly dependent upon some proprietary ranking algorithm which others have little to no control over. If relying on links and having them disappear is bad, relying on SERPs is even worse since they are far more dynamic and dependent on many more external factors which may even include things like which country your IP says you're from when you search.

Search engines are definitely useful for finding things, but as someone who has a collection of links gathered over many years, most of which are still alive and yet Google does not acknowledge the existence of even when the URL is searched, I am extremely averse to search engines as a sort of replacement for URLs.
I thought she was the most qualified CEO they had in a very long time.

Yahoo Mail has been a huge driver of their user retention, webmail usage has almost fully shifted to mobile. Facebook has gobbled up a big chunk of display ad revenue along with Youtube and video ads in general. Pretty much everything they can't control sucks for Yahoo.
Fine cooking is a combination of simple things. You meld together a sequence of simple tasks that result in a complex recipe, but we still do the basics of cooking that our "caveman" ancestors did. When the simple things become unnecessarily complex, it prevents us from creating a good recipe. We get so caught up in the unnecessarily complex details that we lose site of the goal.
The bubble and valuation? Thats not the real discussion here. The meltdown of a company that has no consumer product would never have drawn clicks. Fidelity could have marked it down 50 times and never made the news. There are tons of biotech startups with lofty valuations.
Here's what Flipkart is planning to do about it.

- Shrink marketplace model.
- Increase inventory led sales.
- Tighter quality control.
- Work with large retailers & cut down on the seller base.
- Bring back private labels.
- Build financial services ecosystem.

A detailed account on how Flipkart is trying to mend its ways is here: http://goo.gl/zRZ1FP.
Bruce Schneier Has Joined the Board of Directors of the Tor Project
And the Falcon 9 first stage has nine engines, so that's about 9-14 million dollars worth of engines for the stage. That's in the ballpark of a quarter of the total hardware cost of the booster, and that almost certainly doesn't include the testing overhead for each engine.

Anyway, my point is, even if all that SpaceX had to work with for reuse was the main rocket body and a pile of the majority of the engines in working order, that would easily add up to tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment, and thus tens of millions of dollars of cost savings on reflight. There's practically no way that reflight could be more expensive than a new rocket, there's just not enough complexity in the vehicle for that to realistically be possible.
You should try a clipboard manager (on Windows, I use 'ditto.' Search for 'ditto clipboard manager.')
Init methods is the answer to that (but it potentially forces some additional complexity around initialized/not-initialized state into the other methods).
I've not seen a large production C++ code base that did anything with exceptions other than to catch them, record some debug information and restart.

This is especially true when third party code is involved. C++ is hard enough to get right without exceptions; dealing with failure in bodies of code that you didn't write and maybe don't have control over (or even source code of) is death on wheels.

If that means the code I'm working on isn't modern . . . I think that's fine. But the first volume (of three?) of Herb Sutter's Exceptional C++ should be enough to convince anyone that dealing with exceptions "correctly" is time better spent eschewing exceptions and restructuring your code so you can do worthwhile hard things.
Data Gallery – Think with Google
What are sandwich years?
Worst hair for sure.
It's possible that they've already reflown returned engines without telling anybody. There are some indications that this has happened, and it would be a fairly safe thing to do on some flights (since the Falcon 9 can deal with an engine out situation, even at T+0). It's likely they'll do just that with engines and other components in the future as well, such as landing legs and grid fins.
Carly Fiorina.

Yahoo was dead man walking before Mayer came on. She wasn't the right hire to save it, but she wasn't the hire that killed it.

Fiorina drove HP into the ground hard. It's survived, only barely, but no thanks to her.

And while both are women, I'd keep an eye on both Nadella (Microsoft) and Pichai (Google). Nadella's got a turn-around job. Pichai's starting from a better position, but with a company that's grown fat, lazy, distracted, and manifestly evil. I'd actually say Pichai's got the harder job, and I've not been particularly impressed.

(The fact that I had to look up each of their names to confirm spelling says something about the lack of billing either's getting.)

I'd argue too that Sculley at Apple was quite possibly Worst Hire Ever, in terms of total impact and lost potential. Latter proven by Job's return.

(That said as someone who's not particularly a fan of Apple or Jobs.)

Gil Amelio at SGI did spectacularly bad things rapidly as well.
Ask HN: Why / Why Not Use Electron?
More and more apps that I've seen published here are heavily disliked for their usage of Electron. What experiences have you had with Electron and why / why isn't it a good idea to write an application with it?
I mostly know that him through reading about his daughter on TMZ
When Yahoo bought Geocities, both were public.
> Social sciences haven't been "playing science", they are just as scientific as physics.

This sound a lot like trolling, but I'll bite for this once.

You can't have less/more reliable knowledge. Science can't be half-wrong and half-right. You're either right or you're wrong. Your theory can't be vague and non-falsifiable. And you have to get a lot more than what you put into your theory. Regardless of how much you want to call it science, that is just pseudoscience.

I personally really don't want to be associated with such "scientists". Which is why I think twice using the word science/scientist and tend to use the word physics/physicists. All thanks to scientists who are able to think out-of-the-box, unlike the narrow-minded stupid physicists who don't know anything but scientific method!
Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Mayer has been tech news' pinata for over a year now, but the company was sliding before she was even hired. Looking through a list of dead Yahoo services, it reads as an obituary of region specific social networking sites and forgettable web services[1]. Social sites are notoriously fickle, and boosting one to popularity is somewhat of a dark art. Web services are a dime a dozen, and Google or Facebook probably has a better one. Yahoo seemed like it failed to break into any enterprise offerings either.

Poor leadership, and failure to attract talent. They didn't have the same culture pull as Google/Facebook/Apple in the latest tech bubble. And why work for Yahoo if you could do the same thing with VCs funneling you money? I think one of the most telling things is the lack of OSS from Yahoo. Their top repo on github has been effectively dead for around a year [2]. Yahoo hasn't been a tech company is almost a decade, and it shows in their products. Not even their numerous acquihires have netted them anything.

EDIT:
Looking at a timeline of Yahoo, they haven't launched a major product since 2006 (10 years). All new products have been bought [3]. Imagine if Google's last product was Docs. No Android, no Doubleclick, no Street View, no autocomplete in search, no Chrome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and...

[2] https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=user%3Ayahoo&ref=searchre...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Yahoo!#2006
DjangoCon 2016: Day 1 Recap
Funny you should use eggs as an example. I do feel too full after 3 eggs, but just right after 2. Unless I'm eating just eggs, in which case 3 is just right. Or unless I'm making an omelette, which is almost impossible with just two eggs. In that case, my dog gets a good part of one of those eggs.

As I say, it did take a few months. I also needed to eat a little slower - I was a fast eater of big meals. Mostly just experimentation and willpower - you have to get used to waiting to feel full. I go by the two fist rule: your stomach's about as big as your two fists put together.

My family also likes to go out to eat a lot. I ask for a box as soon as the food comes, and put half of the food in it. I used to finish the other half, but now I'll usually end up adding a bit to the to-go, and making two meals out of that later. If I'm by myself, I usually just order an appetizer (I do find myself eating more of just one type of dish per meal). If I go with my family, I'm ordering a meal, because, hey, free food!
Well, maybe. It's still bang-bang control, and to get decent quality you'd have to dedicate the processor to bit-banging the port. With the Mac you just filled in a buffer that got DMA'd along with the video. Not great, but at least you could do waveforms using a slice of the CPU.

The PC was built to beep, and that's about it. Anything you got out of it past that was painful and used a lot of CPU.
My source tells me that low five figure advances happen regularly for the right topics, and four figures aren't unusual at all.

In fact she's just received mid four figures for about two weeks of repurposing - i.e. cutting and pasting - content that was already written and needed some reformatting and light editing.

This isn't common, but it does happen.

A few hundred dollars is more of an insult/negotiating wipe out than a real advance.
Free Continuous Deployment Service for Android
Thanks for trying and leaving feedback. The purpose of this was to be able to generate grammatically correct and humorous interpretations out of any number and combination of emojis.

And yup, you can hit the decode button as many times as you want, you'll get a different interpretation each time.

English -> Emoji coming soon
I dislike Electron apps that I use because they're incredibly bloated. I don't know if that's always a guarantee with Electron.

I've seen people criticize Electron for being slow/unresponsive, but VS Code is incredibly fast and responsive, so I know for a fact that Electron usage doesn't guarantee slowness.
I tried Forth for the first time three years ago, and it's been a kind of guilty pleasure ever since. Even though I can write a program about 3x as quickly in a mainstream language, I sometimes reach for Forth because I think it's so much fun. People don't often mention this aspect of it. There's something satisfying -- in the same way that proving a theorem or solving a riddle is satisfying -- about finding a minimal way to coordinate the data flow on the stack. And, no matter how well you do, it seems you can always stare at it the next day and find a tiny improvement.

When I read Moore's material, I feel like he fell into that positive feedback loop in some kind of pathological way... He keeps rebuilding and rebuilding basically the same CAD hardware/sw system, recreating it simpler and more elegant in his eyes every time. For years and years.

Building a forth system from scratch really is an eye-opener... Many have written about how strange and beautiful it is to take your base language and then add the ability to make comments and perform if-then control flow from inside the language. You build it up from nothing but it's a functioning language/interpreter the whole time. Very cool.
I'm not making a normative claim, my only point was that the same technology that worked 20 years ago still works today and it's the developer's fault if they don't like the tools they've chosen to use.
Can someone just go ahead and inject a blink tag so we can get the full 1994 experience? Oh, my retina...
Why China is probably never getting Pokemon Go
> Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale?

Intel and IBM come to mind.
I could listen to Chuck Moore all day long.

Here's my favorite - demonstrating his CPU CAD software back in the early 90s, written in Forth and running on a PC. Quite impressive for back then.

Part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_cf8n58Ews

Part 2 (the meat of the presentation):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbd7Xu0ibJM
When it becomes easier for a site to write native iOS and Android apps for clients than it is to write a pretty JS front-end that works on all browsers, it's going to be bye-bye web as we know it.
Cost is an issue, but most labs already live "month-to-month" on grants and try to reduce the cost of research when possible.
What is bloomberg's MO with these near unreadable articles?