skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using Sama's definition of a hard-tech product or business as "where there is doubt that the technology can be built at all", a bunch of successes come to mind.

1. Tesla (Market Cap ~$29B w/$14B+ in pre-orders)
2. SpaceX (Valued north of $10B)
Elon's companies faced massive doubts about tech feasibility, both when started and at basically every-point since.

3. Oculus.
Sold for $2B in March 2014, including $1.6B in FB stock that's now worth 2x more.

4. Machine Zone
The messaging platform for Game of War/Mobile Strike is very "hard tech". (Google/AWS still lack equivalents and MZ was kinda forced to take a "time out" to develop it.) In 2014 the WSJ said they where fundraising at close to $3B and now their cash flow powers global TV add campaigns.

5. Cruise. "Hard Tech" and a big win for YC.

6. Zoox. They started w/a prototype and have made huge progress.

Many new business lines at public companies faced huge doubts about tech feasibility and are now clear home runs:

7. Nvidia
Every new chip is "hard tech" and they've grown massively in the last decade.

8. iPhone/Apple + Android Inc.
Smartphones are really, really, "hard tech". So many doubts on both the tech and product side are now forgotten!

9. Google (mentioned by others)
In addition to search/adds/Android, I'd say maps/gmail/infrastructure/android are all examples of "hard tech". Each was viewed as "hard tech" when released. (Contrast Google Maps w/Apple's disastrous maps launch years latter.)

10. AWS
If you had pitched AWS as a startup, in late 2003, you would have faced lots and lots of technology skepticism. A phenomenal success.

11. Amazon Echo
Hard tech, took a massive team to develop. Doing great as a product.

Crossing "the valley of death" in commercializing new tech is really hard. But there are vast success!
I think you seriously over estimate the portion of the population who cannot squat or deadlift an empty barbell on day one.
The peril is already there. It's not created by those who leave. It's created by those who setup the conditions in such a way that all the people with self-respect leave. And this is how it should be: people should absolutely NOT feed a bad system. If all the best people leave, it sends a very clear signal. A lot of abuse and exploitation specifically happens because the best people are often too caring and good natured to leave.

If this is what we setup, we absolutely deserve to lose scientific progress over it. Then, perhaps we'll learn, figure it out, and set it up right. Expecting people to sacrifice themselves for the greater good while they're being exploited is both foolish and immoral.
Do you have any evidence that drinking/drug taking leads to LBD? Otherwise, this is just a classic it-won't-happen-to-me-because-I-do-X justification (see: I won't get cancer because I eat well, I won't have a car accident because I'm a good driver, etc) which is pretty harsh to those who are affected.
Peercoin: Bitcoin Without the Energy Bill
32, married and kids.
St. Louis Missouri.
Recently jumped from about 87K to 100K plus 10% yearly bonus.
Benefits and good work env.
The funny part is the suggestion that you go through each and every one of the 9 million images and verify their licenses. It's basically impossible. It's funny that, by suggesting we do the impossible, their butts are covered.
A small group can splinter off and survive.

My arm cannot survive on its own
Male 34, 12 years full-time, working in Denver area as a Java dev.

$145k, $90k/year in RSU, 15-20% bonus from base salary.
I taught Processing (a Java library w/ its own IDE) to some middle- and high-school students for a week, and everyone had lots of fun from day one. It is extremely visual and has lots of great documentation + easy examples online. All I did was show them the basics, then every now and then went up to the board to introduce a new fun thing. We had some really, really great final projects. Everything from intricate interactive/animated scenes to complete games.

Something else I loved was that many students got to apply their math knowledge naturally and in a fun way, e.g. shooting bullets at angles, rotating turrets, following parabolic paths, and even a ray caster. (As an added bonus, Processing uses a very similar IDE to Arduino.)

I happened to teach another group of kids Arduino, which was fun but frustrating to some. Our final project of the week was very complicated, and only a few students finished it. I also unfortunately had many students fry parts and boards, which was frustrating when I gave so many reminders how to avoid it. (Though, young students are not exactly careful about double-checking their wiring.)

My recommendation to you for middle schoolers (ages 11-14) is to use Lego Mindstorms. Largely, the middle schoolers in my class were not patient/meticulous enough yet to effectively wire, write software, and most importantly debug when something goes wrong. (After all, it could be the software, wiring, OR a bad part.)
Email is an amazing tool. I don't understand the rush to get rid of it.

It is a free standard with many implementations on both the client and server. It is exceptionally easy to manage email. Many servers have great systems for categorizing emails and storing them long-term. Email is fast. Everyone has one.

There is this weird myth that Email magically kills productivity while Slack and GitHub don't. I never understood this - slack and GitHub have a lot more distraction with their social media components.

I see the day coming soon when in order to work with other people I'll need to find and install one of the x tens of IM clients. The day when I can't find anything because it is in a million places and its real hard to search 10 years of conversation when messages don't have basic metadata like a subject. :(
Thanks, I suspected someone would provide the names.

On Dantzig: there's training, and there's the capability to come on a problem cold, treat it as an ordinary exam question, and find a solution within a day or so, to something which had dogged the rest of the maths world for years or decades.

I'm not denying that Dantzig had had formal training by this point. But he'd also accomplished in small time what others hadn't in big.
Thanks to you as well.
If you believe that patents, in general, are more good than bad, because they coax trade secrets out into the open after an amount of time, then they are just as valid for inventive software as for inventive hardware/chemistry/biology/mechanics.

I'm not sure that follows. Do you think the ability to keep and preserve trade secrets is the same for all those fields? Keeping a trade secret in software that runs on end user' computers seems much more difficult than keeping the technique used in a chemical reaction a secret. I tend to think that just about everything software related would otherwise be out there and available.

I'm also not sure that coaxing trade secrets into the open is a significant reason that patents are good. At least, I have trouble thinking of cases in any of those fields (much less software) where I think that the overall rate of scientific progress in the world is better as a result of knowledge disclosed in a patent. Do you have examples? In particular, for something software related that is better known today because it was disclosed in a patent which has since expired?
1. We have lots of discussions in other places about how passion may not be all that valuable. There are people who are very well suited towards a field but not terribly passionate. What exactly justifies this obsession with passion? Is it about passion being necessary, or are passionate people just that much easier to exploit?

2. I'm sure they said that about rocket science, too. Of course, SpaceX is repeating all the same mistakes that academia is so perhaps it will go the same way.

Science shouldn't be done privately but if academia keeps messing up like this it will eventually move there if anyone cares about it.

> Also a lot of people you find in the sciences simply aren't that motivated by money.

It doesn't matter what people think they're motivated by. This is a capitalist economy. If you don't care about money, then you don't care about the reality you live in, and, sadly, that's true for a lot of day-dreamy scientists. How money flows is important, and people being exploited is a form of malfunction of such an economy that should always be mitigated.
I've often wondered what effect it would have if the media universally started referring to "suicide bombers" as "mentally imbalanced religious fanatics".
I gave up on drop box long ago, but someone in my company uses a paid version of it for some reason still, and group policy means it's on my windows machine. I made the mistake of plugging my phone into my work PC to charge it recently and got a lovely little attempt to get me to back up my photos from my phone - so I don't lose my memories! which caused me to promptly circumvent corporate policy via my buddy working in helpdesk and uninstall it.

I don't understand why, once already installed, they are trying to get me to use it more. They won't make more money will they? Are they using this as a way to get me to get close to a limit and upgrade?
I think it's a deliberate barrier to entry: they're basically saying "if you can't be bothered to learn how to do it, we don't want your contributions."

Linus occasionally rants about some of the crap that gets in, and I have a feeling he certainly doesn't want more, which would happen if the barrier was lowered. Here's a somewhat recent example:

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html
Parents paying for their children to get additional lessons to get an educational advantage isn't something you'll see 'communists parading around'. In fact the article makes it clear that the official position is that kindergarten teaching should be low pressure and using cramming classes is discouraged.
My Gods, please accept my condolences.

When your husband, Robin Williams passed away, I mourned for him. I was only someone who greatly appreciated his humor and drama. As a personal mourning for someone whom affected me as a viewer, I watched "What Dreams May come"....

It is one of his saddest and yet most beautiful movies. I live with, and am married to someone with Bipolar disease. I am grateful and happy she accepted me, yet I know she has it. It's OK, as I shall be aside her. But I know she has had similar beliefs and impulses. And please, do not believe I'm comparing us two; I am not.

I can guarantee one thing; He won't be forgotten. I know how much he affected my life, in the humor, and the great joy of his films and comedies. His comedy was infections, in the most joyous way possible! I nary could stop laughing on his 2011 comedy he gave that was recorded by HBO! We had to stop the recording for a half-hour for us(not we-us!) to catch our breath! And eventually, we continued the insanely-funny comedy!

He was such a wonderful and amazing reporter... And yet when he passed, I mourned. I have only mourned for very few.... and yet when I didn't think I would mourn for someone whom I only knew through their acting, I did.

We lost someone very special to all of us. Whether it was through their comedy, their hilarity, through their drama, or through their serious drama; he was special to so many of us.

I do hope you not only survive, but greatly thrive! One of the things you can do is be yourself ! Don't forget that! You can also continue his legacy; do what you're doing right now and continue bringing the thought and reminder of this disease. It's not common yet, and still needs further advocacy. You're in a perfect area to bring this area of genetic/prion disease to light.

And, please don't forget yourself! Yes, Master Robin Williams (yes, a master, in the arts of Comedy, Drama, and Acting)was a great person who brought his laughter and commedia to all, but don't forget yourself.. You succeed him. Do the best you can do, in his name. It may not be commedia. If may not be acting. But that's OK. Do what you do the best!

May the deities he and you believe in bless you.
The largest provider in my nation is one of these networks, they don't do a thing until forced my the regulatory body.
Get a better sense of browsing history via Chrome/Firefox
I know you mean that 'nobody died', which is great, but the loss of a 200 million dollar satellite, a 50 million dollar launch vehicle (both representing tens of thousands of person-hours of work), and several further person-hours of time wastage investigating this incident, and months of delays in future launches... all this could hardly be called 'victimless'.
Yeah... is there a "gitignore" option for dropbox or alternatives (like Syncthing)?

I mean... there's a certain point where you are now syncronizing "crap" that shouldn't be needed (bin/obj/etc)...
Why on earth do you people want to keep fucking with the OS like this? Why can't you just knock it off?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
Most brokerages make you go through a rigorous process to make sure you're qualified to handle margin trading

If by "rigorous process" you mean "check this checkbox to acknowledge that you read the PDF we sent", then yeah, that pretty much mirrors my experience.
This is slightly more complicated than the Times makes it -- but no more friendly to Trump. John Hempton has a good breakdown here;

https://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2016/10/some-comments-on-...

Debt parking is a pretty interesting topic and would clearly be criminal tax evasion if discovered.
PHP Code Sniffer with Docker
Yeah, I can see how would think about it that way if you get hung up on the idea of deductions as expenses. What I would prefer is if companies acted more like LLCs/flow-through entities, where all profits or losses flowed through to the owners, in proportion to their ownership stake.

Making distributions (dividends) deductible against the corporate tax burden allows companies to closely approximate this. It would encourage them to return cashflow to investors, which is the point:

Investors (in theory, owners) should participate in the cash flow of the companies they own, rather than bank on the capital gains/share prices leverage casino.
I think "enterprise" really means "designed for living in a datacenter", with its accompanying temperature-controlled environment. If you want durability/reliability/ruggedness, "industrial" is the keyword to look for.
The fun thing was that copyright law was probably never meant to be enforced against non-commercial copying. Of course, copyright laws are not the only example of laws that are poorly designed.
I have a brother HL-L2320D (laser, love it). It doesn't have wireless and that was a conscious choice at the time, as an old Raspberry PI got put to work as the print server.

If you find something without networking it isn't hard to find a way to add it on!
I'm personally sympathetic to "I'll need a research team and five years" missions. I think both university research and xkcd are great! But it's a critically different from YC's definition that:

Hard tech = "There is doubt that the technology can be built at all."

Though many pieces of technology face huge doubts, what's key is often a team can get to a working prototype or partial release in way less than 5 years! (E.g. Dropbox.) YC is exactly the type of environment to refocus a 'research style' team exclusively on demonstrable progress.

The problem with the xkcd definition (if attempted in a startup) is very few research teams can continue to fundraise for 5 years without a product or significant prototype.

A partial solution to the "doubted" tech is often good enough to build a great company.
For hard drives, 'enterprise' has traditionally referred to durability. For example, they've had a much higher MTBF.
>top theatre

It is the lowest tier of theater which demands the greatest sacrifices, because it can, because the people making it are desperate for work. The budgets are also smaller, so more responsibility is heaped onto smaller crews.

The best people get to work with the best theater companies, which have the best working conditions. They have to, or the best people would not work with them. This is often but not always formalized with a union contract.

Top theaters are usually union houses. The actors and stage managers belong to Equity, the crew to IATSE, the designers to United Scenic Artists, etc. In most cases, getting your union card is synonymous with making it into the "big leagues." On union shows, breaks, working hours per day, advance notice required for a call, which tasks can be assigned to people with specific positions, etc. are strictly regulated. Your work is held to an extremely high standard, but the hours in which you are expected to perform it, and the kinds of things that can be made your problem, are strictly bounded.

At higher levels, staffs are larger and more specialized: roles that would have been solo in a lower-budget world are a principal and several assistants on Broadway. Tasks that would have fallen to you by default have dedicated personnel, and you may in fact be expressly forbidden from doing them by the union contract.

There is immense upward pressure on the quality of your work because most engagements are short-term. Even if it's very hard to get fired, you still need to cultivate a network that is impressed by and likes you if you want to keep working.

The theater community, particularly at the top, has an admirably low tolerance for this kind of abuse.
I vote for using the Berkeley Document Summarizer[0] on all submissions.

[0] https://github.com/gregdurrett/berkeley-doc-summarizer
If you use github, you can also utilize git am to pull changes locally - i.e. add .patch to the end of a pull request url, navigate to the resulting url, copy the new url, then run curl <insert url> | git am -3
Drum Master (2012)
I believe that Ada allows case insensitive identifiers in order to prevent programmers from using the same names for different variables/procedures. Once I saw some C code like this:

int x, X;

X = 0;
for(int i=0; i < N; i++) {
/* long code to calculate the value of x */
...

X += x;
}

Personally, I appreciate that there are languages which prevent this, like Ada and Pascal.
> Presumably, a process of trial and error will
be needed to find the right choices

This is a huge difference between macroeconomics and thermodynamics. You can't just have a control group of people, test a policy with them and say 'omg they died of starvation'. I know well designed experiments exist such as basic income, but I hope I made a point: You can't just test macro policies as you would test heat transfer in a lab.
I'm sure people do it many ways, but here's my approach:

Anybody can put a story in. (A story is some shippable unit of work that creates business value or otherwise improves things for some user.) Once a week, the team (by which I mean a cross-functional group of people committed to delivering value together, in the Balanced Team style [1]) sits down and talks about what should happen next.

This happens in the context of some agreed-upon set of long-term goals. In a startup, that's usually clear. In larger companies, a process like OKR [2] is a good way to make sure that a team has a clear purpose that meshes with the rest of the org.

The only hard rule is that the product manager has the final say on backlog order. But that's a power that should be rarely used; disagreement is usually a sign that people understand things differently, and that's worth sorting out. Often disagreements are worked out by proposing experiments. Questions of short- and long-term get worked out dynamically; in sane environments people are pretty good at striking that balance.

[1] http://www.balancedteam.org/

[2] e.g.:http://eleganthack.com/radical-focus-is-here/
Nice!!! Specialty? Company?
I don't think he has the scale to require NoSQL. Cloud SQL could host his data and his reporting in a single database.
It turns out that the people who need the most help might have a hard time telling doctors the truth about their symptoms for a variety of reasons. I think you're right that this would be better, but I think it would be really sad to avoid helping people just because they had problems with self-awareness and communication.

I might be wrong though. :)
One reason why we might be better at debugging is doctors are penalized for "fuck it, what happens if I do..." and we are not.

We get to mess with large permutations of different causes and effects, that we stimulate, in a short time while that would be unethical for medical professionals.
Ask HN: Time tracking app
Most of our team members are having a flexible schedule and getting paid per hour. We use slack, so we tested few slack apps, but all of them seem not so intuitive, too manual, we are forgetting to turn on/off a timer. What are you guys using?
Also hilarious is the fact that every single one of them will provide email notification when you're offline.
Club Necaxa vs. Deportivo Toluca Live Streaming Free
Where in South America do you spend most of your time?
As Kephael and the article point out, one clear advantage of enterprise drives is that they typically have capacitors that allow them to clear their caches in the event of power loss.

> How many studies have been done verifying ...

With due respect, what verifies the allegations in the comment?
Oracle is very responsive with suggestions for trivial tickets, like how to use an existing feature.

They are nigh worthless for adding features or fixing bugs that you're the first to file on.

So their support is good for average workloads, but non-existent for extreme cases - like Internet-scale systems.
What seems powerful about this idea is its more like a common physical space you gather in with your friends than a phone or video conference. You show up "in the house" (treehouse, cafeteria, club, call it whatever) and some of your friends are there, some aren't. You don't have to call people up and interaction just happens naturally more like it would if you walked into a room of your friends.

I wrote off Snapchat with many of the same kind of flip dismissals and I was pretty wrong about how popular it would eventually be. I'm too old for this app, or even snapchat, but think back to when you were a teen and remember what it was like to just shoot the shit with friends after class. Thats the kind of interaction they seem to be trying to facilitate.
Right, I knew there was a misunderstanding initially over what company I was referring to (CleverTap, not 10gen/MongoDB) and we were mostly on the same page :)

RocksDB is great, WT is getting to be great, both are getting better and have solid teams working on them. LSMs have great use cases, btrees too. 600 QPS you do not blog about.
It's rated to handle 10 DWPD (drive writes per day) - meaning that one could write 8,000 gigabytes of data a day, 365 days a year, for 5 years (~17 petabytes), and the drive will still be chugging away just fine.

It actually means something more like "we don't feel confident that the drive will last more than 5 years at 8TB/day." --- and if you do the maths, assuming perfectly even wear, this means they're rating the flash at ~20K cycles/cell, which sounds a bit ambitious for 20nm MLC considering that ~10K cycles was the norm for 65nm MLC several years ago.

1TB Samsung 850 Pro (which has some of best endurance of consumer ssds), on the other hand is only rated to 300 terabytes of data written.

That totals around 300 cycles/cell, which seems like 3-bit/cell ("TLC") flash to me, or cheap small-process MLC.
You may know it's possible, others on HN may know it's possible. But if you release Dropbox for Joe Random on the internet, it actually makes sense to notify him that he can backup his photos from the phone when you discover the phone is being connected. It's helping feature discovery, not pushing addons - as you say - they don't explicitly make more money from this.
Printer? Is this 1994? Are we savages?