skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I cringe every time I have to read the MSDN documentation. When you really need it, it barely goes into detail to explain what a class/method/parameter does, how to use it, or give any useful code examples.

Its just a false sense of security, in my opinion. Python and Django has great documentation that most of all is relevant with good examples. For the things that you cant figure out, you can always read the source and you will find the answer.
Exactly. I think that itself actually an interesting "hard tech" problem: how do you move fast, iterate, and be first-to-market without killing anyone?
Sorry about that. Corrected myself.
From the article, it seems like a few million users/day is a typical expectation, but record-breaking isn't.

>Throughout my career as an engineer, I’ve had a hand in numerous product launches that grew to millions of users. User adoption typically happens gradually over several months, with new features and architectural changes scheduled over relatively long periods of time.
Civil asset forfeiture is reported in great detail.
The SSD encryption key will only be deleted in case of a tamper event, NOT when the unit is moved. Tamper events are:
* freezing the unit
* drilling the secure enclosure or other wise breaking the traces on it
* prying the enclosure off the PCB
So I don't think you have to be too worried about a false trigger of a key erasing.
I did debug NodeJS backend (multiplayer games) with Electron.

It was very cool because I was able to see internal server state on simple HTML dashboard I made (for example I was able to see map with player positions or some important game variables etc.).

And I made some controls(buttons etc.) to dynamically change state on backend (for purpose of tweaking/experimenting/etc.).

So it was like turbo-debugging :)
I've no doubt it matches how other countries report unemployment; the UK's about as bad. Also, one of the things that annoys me is exactly that this isn't something that Trump pulled out of his hat - the existence of unemployment that's hidden by the statistics has been a topic of discussion for a long time, especially on the left. Then Trump comes along and the fact checkers declare that U3 is the one true definition of unemployment and anything above that is an unpatriotic lie designed to undermine America. It's all been a bit much really. (Though even U6 isn't broad enough to help much here.)
We’re Building an Open Source Self-Driving Car
In what is known as the "AdS/CFT correspondence" or "holography", it is conjectured/believed (based on many reasonable physical arguments) that a condensed matter system will have an equivalent description in terms of a gravitational system in one higher dimension.

In those models, the temperature of the system in the lab typically corresponds to the Hawking temperature of the black hole in the higher dimensional gravitational system. (That is where my knowledge of the subject stops.)

For thos who seek technical details, Hartnoll has a short summary (2009) of the formalism on which the 2010 result is based: https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.3553

@dzdt: A little too hasty to judge don't you think? (ref comment quoted below)

> I think it is bad journalism, intended to boggle not enlighten [...] I don't know anything about this area to guess whether there is really a black hole analogy [...] But I am confident it isn't a useful analogy to make anything more clear!
The UK system puts it into the general fund and actually requires a crime to have been committed.
Correction. The temperature monitor is INSIDE the secure shell.
I've been an organizer of several hackathons and participated in Startup Weekend. The judging guidelines vary across organizers, theme, and city. In general, Startup Weekend events focus on business model generation and customer validation, with building an actual product following.

And remember, it's a weekend: the "winners" typically don't turn the project into an actual startup.

I think of like in school, you can learn because you want to know things or you can learn to the test because you want the mark to move on.

Would you rather build something hard or build something more likely to win? From my experience, it's not the same apps that do both. I also don't think one approach is necessarily better than the other, just personal preference, plus also depends on the team dynamic you end up with. For example, I wouldn't try to solve a hard tech problem on a team with mostly non-tech people because their expectations can be unrealistic. But if my team is 3 experienced startup engineers that can iterate, well why the hell not?
It has that functionality too, but is indeed mainly an exchange.
In Chicago, maybe 10 years ago, they found a warehouse full of undelivered mail that the mailman was just dumping there.

And recently, 22,000 pcs were not delivered because the mailman was unhappy about a transfer or something.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/mail-carrier-charged-n...
That's just one, adding more require elevated privileges, with 127.0.0.0/8 you have 256³ at your disposal.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think that treating software as dichotomous with "hard tech" (instead of orthogonal) is a profound mistake that really proliferates, not just through VCs, not just through the industry, but through our entire culture. So, so many (especially older) hardware guys I know don't see software as a real field, and I think this is a big part of the reason why.

And much of the discussion about technical debt, about "the web toolchain sucks", or "operating systems suck", or X, Y, Z, they all suck... so often, I think that's just a different way of saying "we have this really hard problem, and we've spent decades piling really innovative partial solutions to it on top of other really innovative partial solutions, but nobody has come along with something that really, really works." And it's a tremendous problem.

The response I've seen in the past is, "We love those ideas, they're just more appropriate for, say, YC research." But for hardware, the bar is automatically different: it's understood that there must be some degree of longer-term research and development that goes into a product. And I think that's completely untrue: both require experimentation, both require feedback, both require upfront work to get right. And to be honest, this misunderstanding probably stands at the core of the strongest arguments I've ever heard against the maturity of the software industry.
This is a misunderstanding of fundraising. If you give up 50% of your company, no investor will touch you unless you're already profitable or growing like Uber. So unless you believe you can go from zero to unicorn with $500k, giving up such enormous equity is doom for the company.

That $120k is intended to last 3 months, not 1 year. And afterwards most companies go on to raise 7 digits for much less than 50% of their companies.
We are actually talking about this. Thanks for your interest.
California Governor approves statewide publicly available retirement plan
Related: https://priceonomics.com/are-rotisserie-chickens-a-bargain/
While Airflow is better than cron, my experience with it was miserable. I much rather have a thin layer on top of each ETL task and have my upper level code do whatever needs to be done (run on schedule, run in sequence, run on demand), than have an airflow layer in between, doing trivial tasks (periodic scheduling, and linearizing a dag, really?) and impeding my access.
Now is probably the best time to get into "hard tech" - aka industrial automation, automotive, aerospace & defense, energy & utilities, etc.

Look to GE for a prime example - a $250B manufacturing and processing behemoth rebranding itself as an agile tech startup with GE Digital and Predix rolling out across many of its factories. Its 2015 10k was titled "Digital Industrial" and really describes the company's new focus on "hard tech":

We are just beginning our transformation as the Digital Industrial Company. The Internet has had a massive impact on consumer productivity and commerce. Its impact on industrial markets is just now being realized. By 2020, 10,000 gas turbines, 68,000 jet engines, more than 100 million lightbulbs and 152 million cars will be connected to the Internet.

At GE, we have decided to generate and model this data ourselves—both inside the Company and with our customers. This is what we mean by becoming a Digital Industrial. Our Digital Industrial capabilities will expand our growth rate, improve our margins and bring us closer to our customers.
There was a time when every sale had a clear endpoint, followed only by routine service and maintenance. Now, sensors on our products send constant streams of data, analyzed and translated into upgrades that drive productivity in industries where even the smallest incremental efficiency can mean very large gains. Capturing it will be a mission in every one of our businesses. Our aspiration is to offer with every GE product a pathway to greater productivity through sensors, software and big-data analytics.

Why GE? I assure you we didn’t wake up one morning with “software envy.” We have been investing in software and accumulating data for decades. Competing will not require big acquisitions. Rather, the technology required to compete is in our sweet spot. So, why not us?

Similar story if you look outside of the traditional IT market and across the embedded market. Software is being layered on top of "hard tech" to collect data and provide value in a ton of markets that you won't see covered in Tech Crunch. Or maybe you will, given that YC is now pushing for founders with knowledge of these grittier industries.
Both Google Compute Engine and Google Container Engine are Generally Available (i.e not experimental) and will run Java 8 and Python 3.

App Engine != all of Google Cloud Platform

(I work on Google Cloud)
PPI isn't everything. The quality of the glass/plastic is also an issue. My DELL 4K monitor certainly has the resolution, but it also looks like I'm staring at a textured surface because they use cheaper acid etched plastic as the anti-glare solution.
What if `function2` needs to log something? Without dependency injection, you need to pass that logger to the function. With dependency injection, that logger is available without having to pollute the method signature with an implementation detail.
What if the drug only makes mice be more nervous or active and that's why they found the submerged platform more quickly?
Yeah, the cables were very cool to see.

For others reference, the Iowa DC's are two buildings a third of a mile long and at least two stories of data halls, with at least one other smaller footprint that I believe is 4 stories, and plenty of room to grow. The Oklahoma campus is similarly massive.
If you have any writeup about your PostgreSQL to Elasticsearch denormalization/aggregation/transportation methods I'd be very interested to read about it!
The article says containers were used, but the D word is not mentioned?
Though, 4 of those are US Gov only.
apps would silo it. also it's nice they didn't call it a moon shot program (even though google uses that term internally)
Even if the road capacity increases with self driving cars, I find it hard to believe that its ever going to reach the same densities as other forms of transportation. Pictures like this one[1] come to mind.

[1] http://urbanist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454714d69e2017d3c37d8a...
I guess this use the new (Chromium) debugging API in NodeJS !?

https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/6792
To figure out where the next AWS regions are going, go down the wikipedia list of countries by GDP and try to think which large markets are not well served yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

In the Middle East there are several markets larger than Israel, and putting a region in Israel will probably not be tenable for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the like.

There is no region in Africa...

Russia & Eastern Europe is not that well served...
​Google beats back Oracle again in Java Android case
Win a SpinaliS Hacker Series Chair Valued at $1390 in Canada
RPC vs PC means introduces a greatly increased probability of random failure. If you're trying to do something transactional, you're in a different world of pain.
I prefer Hard Business to Hard Tech. Some businesses may be easy on the tech side, but very hard on the customer acquisition side because they require a complete change in the way people think and/or behave.

In that light these businesses were easy tech but hard Businesses that ended up being worth a lot: Ebay, Amazon, Uber, AirBNB, Dropbox, and more.

EDIT

10 of the top 15 Unicorns

Uber - Not Hard Tech

Xiaomi - Kind Of Hard Tech

Didi - Not Hard Tech

AirBNB - Not Hard Tech

Palantir - Hard Tech

Snapchat - Not Hard Tech

Wework - Not Hard Tech

FlipKart - Not Hard Tech

SpaceX - Hard Tech

Pinterest - Not Hard Tech

Dropbox - Not Hard Tech
Is it just me, or does 1 month seem like a really short time frame for the initial invocation of this contest? Why couldn't they set the deadline farther back?
Not really, from AWS perspective it's about locating regions close to potential customers with $$$ and a desire for a local region. That desire might be due to regulatory requirements or poor connectivity to other regions.
Ranking of Most Active GitHub Users
100 FinTech Problems to Solve for Singapore
Horse hockey.

I've stayed abreast of events in the lives of close friends because....I talk to them in real life.

I stayed in touch with people....because I used the phone or email.

I stayed up-to-date on news...because I followed several different news sources directly.

People who won't communicate with you because you're not on Facebook aren't your friends. If you can't be bothered to exert the minimum effort to keep in touch with people (a problem that is far, far older than Facebook), you probably don't need to stay in touch. And if you aren't motivated to make the time to keep abreast of world events outside of a curated soundbite machine, chances are that it doesn't make much of a difference.

I hate to sound so damn curmudgeonly, but I don't understand why so many folks are hellbent on creating a symbiotic (some would say parasitic) relationship with a large data-gathering corporation.
Another point on judging criteria is that it varies widely based on who your judges are too. Those categories are pretty broad with plenty of room for interpretation intentionally.

If the judging panel is less technical, you'll have to sell your idea differently. I've seen cool tech hackathon projects fail because of bad presentations, either because they're ineffective or they just didn't practice. It's kind of less than ideal that you're judged for the whole weekend based on how well you can sell in a 2-minute pitch, but then again it's not all that different from the real startup world.
I think that's confused because a lot of people read a blog post from a decade ago about a dynamic script loader and IE6, and have retained the mistaken belief that a script loader is necessary for performance. I regularly encounter websites which wait for a loader script to initialize before starting to request a static set of JS+CSS files, where a simple <script defer> or <script async> would have been both easier and considerably faster.

(That's not to say that dynamic loading isn't a useful tool, only that a non-trivial number of web developers have fossilized impressions of the modern web performance environment)
Texas Joins Legal Fight to Block Internet Oversight Transfer
That's not what I meant by "takes people out quickly." I mean that once someone gets symptoms of lung cancer and needs health care as a result, they die more quickly than someone who is starting to see the symptoms of old age and needs health care for that.

I.e. someone who dies at age 60 from lung cancer is less cost to the system than someone who live to 95 and dies of "natural causes."

That's not saying lung cancer is good, but it is saying that reducing health care costs is not a good reason to try to reduce smoking.
GP probably means display monitor, not temperature monitor.
Yeah, working in the SoC industry (closer to the silicon side), I'm regularly frustrated at the gulf between the state of the art and what's usefully available to the public.

I'd love to have a multi-core ARM64 with integrated PCIe, SATA (NVMe!), USB3, IOMMUs, maybe a few Cortex-Rs around for some real-time/MCU-type work with GPIOs and stuff... All of which I've seen and worked on in the industry. But none of that is open to the public :(
Kudos to the open source design but they should not encourage users to run windows on it.
Providing the best possible App Store experience
I didn't understand a word, and I bet 99% of people who clicked the link didn't either.
These smart pens are dumb and not worth the cost/trouble. Focus on improving your handwriting and then write stuff down on normal paper and use a decent handwriting OCR.

Even the one Microsoft developed for OneNote/etc is pretty good.
Open sourcing self driving car data
Hackers Infect Army of Cameras, DVRs for Massive Internet Attacks
Right, OP was asking why having physical access to a "normal" machine means pwnage: cold boot is one of those ways. The ORWL page describes how they mitigate that.
> Many hard tech founders come from academia or big company backgrounds, where projects can be expensive and slow. We help these founders shift into a much more iterative mindset so they can move faster.

I think this is key and I hope it takes off beyond YC. I used to work on a DARPA-funded R&D project in the wireless space. DARPA's culture is really cool: throw a bunch of money at PhD program managers, give them a ton of directorial discretion, and let them fund "blue sky" projects they think are really cool. But it's a very academic mindset and the mission creep is huge. DARPA kept sending us down these "oh can we do this?" rabbit holes. At one point our radio grew an expert system that processed XML-formatted regulatory directives.[1] We spent huge amounts of time doing things other than solving the core problem. A decade later consumer deployment is still a ways away. It would be so much further along if DARPA had the focus of something like YC.

It seems like a no-brainer to those in Silicon Valley that you should find a tractable subset of your problem and pound on it until you've figured it out. That's not the way the big research institutions working on "hard tech" usually operate, and it's not really how major research universities teach people to think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Agent_Markup_Language
World's largest elevator starts lifting ships over the Three Gorges Dam
Like when Puzzle Magazine would feature envelopes from letters they received where their address was in the form of a puzzle for the post office to solve.
One of the nice things about cloud in general is that it's self-serve for small customers (enter credit card info, a few seconds later you have some computers in the cloud), but as you scale up and start paying millions of dollars per month and sign up for the "Platinum" or "Enterprise" or "Premier" plans, software engineers start showing up at your door to help you design, launch, and fix your service. I've seen this with Google and Amazon, and I imagine it's probably also true for the other providers.
Java containers are better viewed as the forerunners to general-purpose PaaSes. They load and health-check the app, route traffic, capture logs, inject services and the like.

Containers are a great building block for PaaSes. Red Hat have built their latest OpenShift on Kubernetes, for example. My own employers, Pivotal, are the majority contributor to Cloud Foundry, another containerising PaaS using a different container system.

Even in Java, folk are moving towards apps that bundle their own container. Spring Boot does with Tomcat by default. It turns out that the giant Java app servers were great, but eventually wound up with the same problem as previous generations of highly shared services: without strong isolation guarantees, it becomes necessary to heavily gateway production to prevent outages or degradations. That backpressure creates de facto waterfall.
I do blame them.

You're in a cage. They are outside the cage. You ask. They have no incentive to comply. The power dynamics are not in your favor and that's why they can treat you poorly and get away with it.

Poor treatment in jails/prison helps no one. Everyone who goes to jail is not a cop-killer or wife beater. Even those people do not deserve poor treatment.

I get it. It's easier to generalize then treat each individual as a special snowflake. However, some people would rather kill themselves than go to prison. This also makes the job of police officer more dangerous if people would rather die than surrender knowing all that awaits for them is torture (sleep deprivation, disgusting food, forced labor, isolation, confined spaces, rape etc.).

We do not treat criminals as human beings. We offer them no path to be rehabilitated. They cannot vote, cannot get jobs easily and are social outcasts.
You'd be surprised by the amount of people who committed non-violent, victimless crimes and had their lives ruined forever by this broken system.

I understand the police officer is not exactly a social worker. They are a cog in the system but they are not helping, not attempting to improve/change the system and are to blame (along with prosecutor, the justice system and authorities in general).

It boils down to one thing: They have POWER and you don't. They play a role in maintaining the status quo, you don't. Therefore, they are to blame.

Sorry for the rant, it boils my blood when people with no power make excuses for the poor treatment they received from people with actual power.
That paper does not directly mention black holes, but holographic correspondence (which is even in the title!) does seem to have strong connection to black holes and higher dimensions, which is further spelled out in the references. As far as I can tell (which admittedly isn't much), the black hole connection goes deeper than just an analogy. Overall, I don't feel like Quantas short reference there is bad journalism, the subject matter being truly quite mind-boggling.

Here is another article from the same reporter about this holographic stuff:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130701-signs-of-a-stranger-...
DropBox was hard-tech when it came out; they reverse engineered the Finder so that your DropBox folder would appear like a normal Mac folder. They may seem like a commodity now because everybody's doing stuff like that (and in many cases, APIs have appeared that make it trivial), but when they first launched, they did stuff most people assumed was impossible. Twitch/Justin.TV was also hard-tech when it came out, though now the hard parts are built into every iPhone.

Other than that, I largely agree. The last software hard-tech company to strike it really big was Google. There've been a number of open-source projects doing what I'd consider hard-tech software, though - Bitcoin, git/Mercurial/Darcs, Bittorrent, TensorFlow, etc.

(My definition of hard tech, as applied to software, is "Software where you need to use scientific-method trial-and-error to build core pieces of the product." If you can read an online tutorial or reference manual and build the product, it's not hard tech. If you need to poke around at things, observe the responses, and build your own model of how things work, it is.)
I'm not clear what point you are trying to make.

No-one is entirely independently successful, but there is a big gap between (for example) someone whose parents give them nothing, and someone whose parents "lend" them $1 million to get started.
Static Linux also chooses musl: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12588854

And choosing the Almquist shell is not that remarkable, when one realizes that Ubuntu and Debian both did.
Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things talks about this. Zuckerberg contributes to the management chapter.