skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you did the tech startup, what would you like your role be?

Would you be the product guy, designing screen flows, talking to users, figuring out how to solve people's problems? Would you be the biz guy, doing deals and making sales? Would you be the technical architect, staying up late hacking away?

===

If you love (and notice I keep using the word "love", consciously) programming, then it's just a matter of interview anxiety. That is solvable. Some great companies don't do standard whiteboard interviews. You could focus on those. You can also bolster your overall hireability by participating in open source projects (my project - https://github.com/attic-labs/noms - is always looking for contributors) and publishing code on github.

At my startup we don't do whiteboard interviews for exactly this reason - lots of people just suck at them. It doesn't give you a good signal. More and more smallcos are going this direction.

===

If what you really love is product design, or business development, or sales, then you can try and get work doing that. I am aware of people who have totally hustled their way into great companies as bizdev or product by just doing what needed to be done before even getting hired ("hey, I found you a customer -- btw can I have a job??").

This also can work for engineers btw. "hey, I fixed this bug for you, btw can I have a job??".

When I was at Google, we had a guy show up to one of the OSS projects. He started sending in patches, participating in the mailing list, making design proposals. We hired him. It largely wouldn't have mattered how he did on the interviews, it was clear he was a star before he walked in the door.

===

I would also note that you don't need to go to one of the big-four to get connections for a future thing. Tech is very close-knit. People cycle in and out of bigcos and tinycos all the time.

It's infinitely more important how much impact you make, than where you are. Change the fate of a small company and everyone there will love you and sing your praises. You'll have opportunities from all those people's direct and indirect connections.

Go to a bigco, and it is actually harder to make as big an impact. You'll know more people directly, maybe, but it will be harder to really impress them.

===

Good luck, again. I've been where you are. It sucks, but you'll get through it.

Try to focus on what you want, then put one foot in front of the other to get there :).
Ask HN: What are the big recent tech companies in India other than Olacabs?
Ola Cabs is the Uber of India. What other big tech companies you can think of in the region? What's the Alibaba/Baidu or Facebook/Google/Airbnb equivalent?
You may be right. I work in the Bay Area, and I see a lot of devops projects in Go these days. In fact, I'm hard pressed to find a new devops project that isn't in Go.

But I agree that the Bay Area, and San Francisco specifically, is a bit of a bubble. So its very possible that there is little Go traction in other cities.
She held out a plate to me, which I shyly refused. Go on, she urged me. "Food is never food unless you share it with others, no?" she said. I accepted and found love at first bite.

I also remember a hearty Punjabi woman we met on another trip. She sighed at my mother's humble offering of idlis. "I can never make such soft idlis at home," she said, as I bit into her fragrant alu paratha (a flaky, potato-stuffed Indian bread), wondering why anyone who could eat such manna every day would ever want an idli.

These food exchanges would invariably extend into detailed introductions, exchange of family histories, discovery of common acquaintances, all culminating in a boisterous game of cards or round of antakshari (contest of Hindi movie songs) and a final promise to keep in touch.

There's something very beautiful about complete strangers interacting and engaging deeply with one another, free of any selfish desires besides that of companionship. There are many things I love about today's world, but that sense of camaraderie does seem diminished these days.
I wonder if the author still believes this, 7 years later.
Sizing Up the Next Commander-In-Chief
Brazil is a disaster. In LA Chile has a quite stable economy and cautious banks (but it could be a pain to bring money into the country because of this).
True. And it's being done already! Here are just a few papers by my graduate school cohort.

Pdiff ("perceptual diff") uses perceptual metrics including visual acuity to diff two images. This is frequently used for image based regression testing of websites. It's really handy when you need to diff images that don't come out pixel identical every time, like images made with different browsers, or images that involve some randomness.

http://pdiff.sourceforge.net

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/pubs/1999/RPG99.html

http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/pubs/2000/PTYG00.html

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
The bank example is terrible.

The inconsistency is an absolute PITA for the consumer. The delays are are a terrible, terrible user experience, and the consumer has to spend more money in the end.

It's extremely expensive, both in money the bank has to spend on auditing and in the legal framework that has to be put in place.

The bank example is the perfect argument for consistency, not against.
I've come across it quite some times when visiting the states.
Summary: "...[T]he technology uses a complex suite of algorithms and an array of ultrasound emitters to produce the sensation of touch. Critically, unlike other haptic control systems, the technology enables users to receive tactile feedback without needing to wear or touch anything physical, and has recently been awarded a patent for the innovation."
I guess that Apple would be already able to produce laptop SoCs running at 5-15W TDP, with e.g. 4 to 6 CPU cores at 2-3GHz, outperforming newest Core i7 chips for laptops.

That could allow to maintain, or even increase, profit margings, with margin for lowering product price. Running that path, in my opinion, Apple could take 50% of laptop market. E.g. high quality laptops with BOM (bill of materials) of 150 USD selling for 400-600 USD. Or even less.
Because Windows would run on Apple's new chip all the sudden?
Agreed. That's the central tenant of Andela [1]. I just got back from Kenya and was blown away by how talented the engineers were. Going to Nigeria next month and can't wait to compare and see what Zuck was seeing.

1. http://andela.com
head's start and end tags have been optional for almost forever. You could omit both per the HTML 2.0 DTD, the first standard version of HTML. (Some of the earlier drafts didn't allow them omitted, though.)
The Phenom 300 does not use FBW. The Stability Augmentation System (generic term) is digital, but there is a mechanical link to the aileron and elevator.

My understanding is the GPS and Inertial Measuring Unit (IMU) are combined. If there is a loss of GPS, the Autopilot & Yaw Dampener considers the IMU from that channel unavailable.

Only the newer Embraer 450 & Embraer 500 models are FBW aircraft. They also have side-stick controls.
This. A train line could probably increase ridership if they could guarantee that the train will always smell like strongly seasoned food.
Your comment seems based on the article suggesting humans should handwrite HTML like this, which I don't think is the intention here. Somebody else posted about the spec description of open <p> tags and there is no way you'd want to have that in mind when writing markup, just close the tag. This would be like a more powerful form of removing trailing comas, which is "neater", but is extremely painful whenever you're refactoring and moving things around.

You say the HTML tag has no meaning, but it has the advantage of being explicit instead of implicit, as well as universal.

There are situations where implicit is better, because the explicit way feels like a big waste of time and demotivates developers.

There is also a lot of value in conventions, as all the efforts around coding standard and linting tools show. It forces different people to work more similarly, using an established way to do things instead of their own quirks, facilitating collaboration and sometimes educating them about the features and caveats of whatever they're using.

I've never been annoyed writing <html>, <head>, which happens a handful of times in the lifetime of a project that I'll spend thousand of hours on.

Again, I don't think any of this is relevant here, as those optional tags would be cleaned up at build or rendering time, and reinserted by the browser / parser. This seems like an awful lot of computation to save a few bytes though, but maybe processing power is that cheap nowadays.
No it's not vanishing . This food is part of our culture. It still exists in the city... And is now reinvented to be kitsch [1]

[1] http://www.finelychopped.net/2015/11/why-breakfast-at-khar-s...
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is my favorite game of all time.
The Google HTML Styleguide people, really should inform google.com that they are bloated.
VNC in VR: Synchronized Virtual Desktops
But this style guide wants you to be liberal in what you send.
Why doesn't Google produce an html formatter instead of a style guide, like gofmt for html? Applying style guidelines correctly and consistently is much easier to do in software than meatware.
By analogy open source is free as in baby while closed source is like a baby in a maximum security prison. At least one you have the option of fixing when it breaks. The other, you hand someone cash and maybe they fix it.

The other problem, especially as software migrates in to pay-to-use cloud services, is that you have no clue what the future $ cost will be.

Software startups that began with free tiers or really competitively priced tiers have morphed in to things that cost six or seven figures a year. String a few of these together and suddenly you have to figure out how to roll those costs back on to your own customers -- and it may turn out you don't have a viable business model. Further down the road, some of those companies won't exist. Some may be purchased by Oracle/IBM/MS and then reallocate funds from upkeep & dev to nightmare salespeople.
I always wondered whether ultrasound devices were not explored due to production/cost issues or for some other reason. Years ago (pre-iPhone) I wanted to do passive user recognition on a touchscreen music product because some Polish researchers showed it was possible to image fingerprints well enough for recognition with ultrasound sensors placed around the bezel. Why carry RFID or depend on BT or something external when you can do it internally without any configuration? Maybe someone knows more about actual manufacturing of ultrasound tech...
India overall is a very fragrant country. That's the word I would choose that is more neutral/positive compared to "pungent".

It sounds like you have a very sensitive sense of smell and you would not do well in India.

But for others - if the point of travel is to have new and novel experiences, and your senses being the primary entry point for experiences, India is the most intense sensory experience I've ever had - the smells, the sounds, and the sights all combine to overwhelm.

As would be expected with a developing country of over a billion people, not all sensory interactions are positive, but with the bad comes far more good, and a worthwhile distinct experience.
Microsoft is repositioning as a cloud service provider.
Similar to https://github.com/illacceptanything/illacceptanything ?

;-)
There's already some evidence of friction between military and the (in)corporate Congress. Military folks are made up of people who live in and grew up in economically difficult situations, and as the US civilian gov and their intelligence orgs continue their strengthening of alignment with corporate interests (profit above all else) the friction is going to build like the rising waters.

Edit: cliche, but history has such examples. The military is becoming more aligned with the needs of economically lower classes, while the political, corporate elites and their intelligence orgs align with their own interests of profit, money and the ruling class. One such example was ex military personnel targetting the "elites system of oppression" by force, where the prison systems make them billions/year with labour costing pennies on the dollar.

The fall of the Roman Republic is one such historical occurrence where the military became more aligned with the common citizen than their own republic government.
That actually was done toward the tail end of the 1980s PC wars. The Commodore Amiga and several other machines could sport x86 add on boards that would let them run DOS apps natively.

It would not be good for a laptop though, and that is almost all of Mac sales. Too much space and power consumption.
Haha.. the brilliance of the "staple" article can only be realized by nostalgia. If you've experienced what she said - in India, in your childhood, among the then open-and-freely-mingling people - you would not compare it to a DC to Baltimore ride. Or any train ride in the Western world.

I personally related to every bit of that article. Used to go from Ahmedabad in Gujarat, to Chennai - in Navjeevan express that takes 36 hours, every other summer. Thanks to this author, I just relived that memory :)
probably the wrong question to ask. As has been pointed out, the key feature is "are my friends on it or is it easy to get them on it?" I can't think of a feature that would get the average FB user to switch.
I read this blog post, as well as "Rethinking backend with webtasks" [1], and I'm still not 100% I understand the motivation behind this - I'm not a frontend developer so I probably don't have the right perspective to understand. Here's what I can gather:

The service that this fellow works on, Auth0, wanted to offer very flexible ("write your own plugin code") customization to their users, beyond what webhooks can offer, and didn't want to require their users to host that code themselves. So he/they built a flexible, scalable execution runtime (the webtask runtime) that can sandbox and execute the arbitrary code provided by their users. Basically, Auth0 is hosting its own Lambda as a service for its users, specifically for running code in response to events/requests that occur within Auth0.

Is that right?

If I work on a simple application, not a service that needs to offer this kind of extensibility to its users, does this concept have any benefit to me?

[1] https://tomasz.janczuk.org/2015/04/rethinking-backend-with-w...
I've been sleeping on best practices here... is it preferred to do a script with defer in the <head> over putting it at the bottom of the <body> now?
Not really. Ultimately, once you get beyond the HTML parser you're just working on a DOM and other data structures derived from it. And unless you made the DOM much stricter, you could always end up with an invalid (i.e., doesn't match the schema) tree through use of scripting, so you still need to handle it.
Not our proudest moment..

Regarding lost life stocks, this can be solved by having a herdsman watching over the life stock. But no one wants to work as such, and therefore they kill the wolfs instead.

(My grandfather was a herdsman.)
The title is a bit misleading - I thought salt was the food which was being described as vanishing :-)

I am not going to disagree with any of the other commenters. (After all, it has been said that everything you think is true about India - the exact opposite is also true somewhere in India)

The question of trust is an important one, maybe even more than the issue of an economy which is developing (and hence making people more insular) - people on HN may not be aware, but there was a time (admittedly quite a few years ago) when there would be literally a news article every single day about the "biscuit bandits"- people who offered drugged cookies, which are usually called biscuits in India, and made off with the victims' valuables.

I just searched online for "biscuit bandits" and found this ironic story - although I don't know if it is true.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/CBI-inspecto...

CBI is like the Indian FBI.

(edit: Changed funny to ironic. To answer webtechgal, I meant funny in an ironic sense. The problem had been going on for many years when this person who worked in law enforcement was victimized. If it is possible to dupe law enforcement in this way, one can only imagine how challenging it is for the regular folks)
I meant "asks for all his expenses to be paid", not fees.
I came back to make a comment just like this, but you already did it better than I would have.

The metaphor I had in mind was restaurants that make too much food, and (sometimes; some restaurants) they donate it to foodshelves (when appropriate) or sometimes just to some homeless guys who happen to be nearby. The extra food is an externality of their real purpose as a business, which is to take money in exchange for feeding people. They could throw the food away, but instead they're doing something nice with it. Almost nobody would say they should throw the food away because the homeless guys who happen to be the recipients of their largesse are benefiting, while other, further-away homeless guys are not. Such an argument would be idiotic.

In just this way these videos and course materials are an externality of the 'real' business of Berkeley, which is educating the people who are admitted to Berkeley and enrolled in the classes. Berkeley, and others like them, are going above and beyond to be nice to the rest of humanity, to our great collective benefit. This ADA thing is just a kick in the face, and it pisses me off.
I can't help but wonder: What is roguelike?
How is it morally correct? It's not the lawyer's fault you are deaf. Why not make everyone equally pay taxes to subsidize the cost of the disabled? Putting the cost on the people that serve the disabled isn't really fair, and creates bad incentives, as seen by this very post.
Web Surfers Have a Schedule and Stick to It
For anyone working on federal training, this has been a thing for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_R...
Can you elaborate what made them talented?
Every western country went through a similar transition in the last 20 years with a generation remembering the days when kids would bike to their friends house, people knew each other in neighborhoods even in large cities, and communities just felt tighter.

It remains to be seen whether this is reversible and we can still bring it back, whether we actually replaced it with something better (replacing few strong social bonds with many more weaker bonds), or even whether it's just artificial nostalgia that ignores the poverty, discrimination and segregation of the past.
absolute need for consistency is rare, unless deal with anything remotely similar to "financial transactions".

Thankfully the author's premise of "NoSql == inconsistency" is wrong in at least one case. Google Cloud Datastore offers ACID compliance. I use that to great effect (I run a subscription SaaS with usage quotas)
Even if they made advertising money on it, it may not have been very much.
For the love of god, can we please move on to more pressing matters.
Yes, Apple could potentially save between $100-$250 BOM cost. But it is likely Apple would also want their Mac range to be completely Retina.

Basically Apple will still be selling at a similar price range and not entering the low end market. But they just offer much better value.
Because stars in the sky is a high contrast visual. That applies here too, I increased the contrast using Photoshop and the illusion is gone, you can see all 12 dots perfectly fine — http://imgur.com/a/G4xR4
I think they are spot on, outside the fovea, contrast detection capability of our eyes dip drastically thereby blending the dots lying outside the fovea with the surrounding grid. Increase the contrast to the point where even the regions outside the fovea can detect it and the illusion goes away.
> can be cheaper than buying the indexes directly for a lot of people.

If that's what you think, you've missed some of my post :-). Specifically, I said:

> you can buy the same Vanguard ETFs with no minimum.

As an individual you can get 0.05% VTI directly from Vanguard. No $3k minimum (minimums are a mutual fund thing).
Brogue is very traditional and very thoughtfully designed. It's the author's idea of what Rogue might look like today if development had continued.

https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/

It's my favourite Roguelike because it's the genre distilled to its essence. Also the short bits of flavour text are very well written.
For me it was his choice of words; he is phrasing all questions using SE Asia vocabulary.
While I don't use Github persay...I was using a similar feature on Gitlab. Here's a screenshot[0] of my board.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/4gcF4Qc.png
Hackbook Elite demo
You're really over thinking this. The classical problem is more or less designed to be a utilitarian thought experiment. Are you willing to be actively unethical for a greater ethical action? Are you willing to be passively unethical to allow a greater ethical action to happen? Is it possible to be passively unethical?

There is enough philosophical meat in the thought experiment without going "out of bounds" and trying to undermine the question. Your comment would make for a good modern essay, but it frankly dismisses the spirit of the problem.

Good faith arguments in philosophical debates require both parties to have a common set of premises. If you don't both work from those premises, you need to go "down" to your next set of shared premises and start arguing "up" from there. If you don't do this, you're just talking past each other and you end up in a Wittgenstein-ian limbo where each of you is arguing coherently but disparately and no one is going to take the other's point.

Given this, it's not a good faith argument against the trolley problem to say that an action doesn't make sense due to premises that are not typically included in the classical problem.

Furthermore, the only reason we have thought experiments like this is because it is difficult to reason in the abstract without formal training. Using concrete allegories helps to give participants mental "skin in the game" to illustrate whether or not their opinions are coherent.

Allow me to restate this problem: "Given a simulation where you have the choice between certainly observing five people die by taking no action, or certainly saving five people by taking an action that certainly kills one person, and all persons are equally familiar to you, what do you do?"

Now, a valid response is to disagree with my problem as stated. That's fine, but then we need to argue something else because we're no longer talking about the trolley problem as it is classically defined and intended.
You can be against ADA without being against disability access entirely. The main complaints are that it's enforced through lawsuits which bankrupt small businesses. Often over trivial issues, like their mirror being 1 inch too high, or the parking sign not having the correct sticker on it, etc. That's a very different thing than not having a wheelchair ramp.
Doesn't matter much with defer or async. If you but the at the bottom, they start loading in parallel slightly later.
I always saw dots between the keys on my Macbook Air. Thanks to you I finally know the name for this phenomenon.
Not trying to be pedantic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

It's games that are like Rogue.
As long as no one is wearing a wire.
Well, we're playing make believe with the requirements. In fairyland the user and the profile need to exist together. Only the fairies know why!

If you can relax the requirements, you can relax the constraints.