skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You wrote "declined to remain as CTO." That assertion requires inside knowledge. Note Andreas Gal was made CTO within two months of my leaving. There was a reorg that I announced (which is public info), and a CTO plan which is now clear enough.

I realize it's easy to speculate unintentionally but I try to draw a bright line around things like speaking for someone else, saying they "declined" an offer where you weren't involved and didn't actually see any offering or declining.

In the link I sent about board resignations (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10654651), I wrote "Alistair Barr of the WSJ was working on a story about Mozilla being in trouble". Barr was getting the "need CEO with mobile experience" line from someone, possibly an ex-executive, even a (soon-to-be-ex) board member. A number of people thought it might be Gary Kovacs, but no one knew for sure.

For my part regarding getting the appointment, I can only say that "mobile experience" line did not come up. Doing Firefox OS (for all its problems) did get us a lot of mobile experience and good partner contacts. I'm engaging with some of those contacts at Brave, so I think the ding from whomever leaked to Barr was not material re: me, then or now.

On where law comes from, why CA voters can override the CA supreme court, see "status quo" on at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12721928.

Obama had no skin in the game in California, but he did say (to Rick Warren in public) that he supported the conjugal definition of marriage. He did not explain how he squared this with being against Prop 8, as far as I know (references welcome). It sure looks like strategic lying to me, and nothing against Obama -- I voted for him in the 2008 CA primary. Politians do this kind of inconsistent fence-sitting all the time.

Thanks for writing back.
To be fair, May is months away. Not today or even a week from today.
The lack of auto filing is not the core issue with our tax code. The ridiculous complexity is. I want auto filing but the tax code could be drastically simplified without the government directly competing with TurboTax.
> The entire point is to demarcate what functions interact with the world and which don't. This makes testing easier, reading code easier, composition easier.

This is 1. a tradeoff , 2. subjective. Words like 'bizarre' aren't really necessary, and come off as feigned surprise (passive aggressive).

You think a function being easier to test (without reaching for extra tools like mocking libraries, presumably), justifies needing to write and understand 'monads' in order to interact with the real world.

Another programmer finds myObject.doExplicitThingToWorld() far more expressive and easy to understand and is very familiar with the mocking tools/practices they need to test that.

As for composition ... well composhmishion. It's so rare you can actually compose your business logic/app-code (beyond the original use-case you wrote the thing for, which you might well have chosen to write in a 'compositional' way).

It's neat for frameworks and libraries to create composable stuff but it just doesn't come up as often as we'd all like to hope in our day-to-day code in my experience. And if you really want to compose something OO absolutely has ways to do it.

(So composition is not the big win over OO some FP fans make it out to be IMO).
> I think this is down to the sad truth that most developer roles offer very little challenge outside of learning a new stack.

This is a gem observation from this thread. In my own tech sphere the first thing developers are talking about with each other is the new x,y,z lib or framework they're using to accomplish something relatively banal. There's still a lot of work out there that really boils down to basic CRUD and reporting at the end of the day, and developers naturally begin to invent complexities on top of that CRUD to make the work interesting and challenging. I'm absolutely guilty of this first hand.

I've found personally it also doesn't help that past work on projects e.g. large Rails apps that were never architected well turn out to be such nightmares to work on. The memory of the end state of these projects lingers with developers as they move onto the next piece of work, and they're inclined to say "no that doesn't work" and pick up shiny new-tech to do the old job instead.

As a side analogy: most small business construction jobs, e.g. building a timber frame house, don't involve the builders arriving on site and are stumped by the challenge of how to put up the framing for the bedroom walls - there's also very little challenge in these projects, yet the reward is in the completion.
Building a website doesn't have to be complicated. You build a Rails site 10 years ago. You probably used jQuery, if you used JavaScript at all. Why can't you do the same today?

The real problem here is that not enough developers understand that "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Once more of us get a handle on that, life will be better.
> after even a few moments of consideration

While your general point might be right, this is an unfair implication. They've gave it plenty of consideration, considered with many, many people, and did so all in the open: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/
It's not functional, and not automatic but Rust has an arena type which supports very fast allocation and de-allocation, with the restriction that de-allocation has to happen all at once.
Laugh.ly grabs $2.25M for its stand-up comedy streaming service
A calorie is a calorie though. Try not eating. Cut down your calories to zero, insulin ain't going to keep you alive and you'll lose all your excess weight. Will it be fun and make you feel good? No. But you will lose weight I promise.

You can lose weight by eating 1000 calories of french fries or 1000 calories of kale every day. Eating the kale will probably make you FEEL better and be easier to maintain over the long run, but both work. Ease of following the diet does not mean that calories are somehow an inaccurate way to measure though.
They really needed to lose the dinosaur, but this isn't an improvement.
Some Colleges Have More Students from the Top 1% Than the Bottom 60%
Firebase engineer here -- what don't you like about the Firebase Console? Any specific things that we could improve?
I added Scala.js in the comments.
> Your goals are either memory isolation for better distribution/concurrency/clustering/fault tolerance/garbage collection or shared memory for ability to work with large datasets more efficiently.

The isolation is not physical, but logical. Implementations are free to use zero-copying and make everything just as efficient. Theoretically compiler could even optimize message passing overhead away for systems with shared memory in some cases. The opposite is also true, shared memory is also logical and there is a lot of room for a lot of clever things, like eliminating races.
I don't think you can do an 83b for options from a private company, which is what the article is about.
Heh cheers, I just found /sys/class/leds/dell::kbd_backlight/brightness :)
Show HN: NYC homepage – weather, subway, and news updates
> depending on the company you join, they may have restricted your ability to trade private shares without special approval from the board

If your shares have this restriction they are practically worthless. Also be wary of sneaky language on page 40 of a random document signing away your ability to sell--have seen this from otherwise-reputable Silicon Valley names.
It's definitely crappy. I'm not sure what rules the founders operate under, but it's definitely something investors and underwriters push. Nominally it's to control liquidity, and it does do that, but it does so specifically by handing all early returns to a few of the shareholders. It's not hard to imagine other systems that would, with a bit more work, manage liquidity while letting everyone access the market.

On the options - I'm honestly not sure. I don't think it's barred by contract (since that's about managing actually control and share movement), but I don't know what options trading looks like for newly-IPO'd stocks.
There's a lot of embedded hardware where running Linux makes sense but running a browser does not. This market may be even larger than the desktop market.

OTOH this rules out laptops that OP wanted.
OT3rdH ARM started with devices like these in mind, but went all the way to pretty powerful, desktop-comparable machines like current smartphones.
They have the app data on the Android side which is probably a decent proxy for the iOS app market, but Crashlytics gives them direct visibility into a sizable chunk of the ios market.
One dating site. And his own employees wanted him to stay.
"A calorie is a calorie" is wrong, sure, but so is Newtonian physics. It leads to a lot of better-than-random-guessing predictions about what you should do in order to achieve certain goals. Want to gain weight? A gallon of milk is roughly 2k calories, so if you add that to your daily diet you ought to put on weight. Want to lose weight? You should probably "eat less", and calories are a good approximation of how much "less" eating less is.
How utterly shameful that programs based on imprisoning people who refuse to hand over a share of all currency they receive in private trade are the primary political objective of major subsections of the population (the 'left').

What depravity man engages in out of greed.
They're lobbying for the government to stay out of the auto filing business, not to keep the tax code over complex. I think the government should auto file but simplifying the tax code would be a huge improvement without that.
>Hanley says he did not secure the approval of the FDA before carrying out his experiment either. The agency requires companies to seek an authorization called an investigational new drug application, or IND, before administering any novel drug or gene therapy to people. “They said ‘You need an IND’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t,’” recalls Hanley, who traded e-mails with officials at the federal agency. He argued that self-experiments should be exempt, in part because they don’t pose any risk to the public.

Until you start modifying the germ line, of course.
GOLD: Set to Extend Short Term Upside Pressure
It was mere chance that I noticed it at all. I normally don't (consciously) pay much attention to usernames. "GOOGLE CEO" could reply to me and I probably wouldn't notice it so the disclaimers are a nice addition, IMO.
Yep, it's way easier and way less friction to store everything including payment information in one huge database accessible to all employees.

A security nightmare, but time and time again we've seen you don't need good security to make a lot of money.
Analysing 8 weeks of AI news, research and VC deals
Irrelevant.

Humans are also not known for keeping track of how fast they run to millisecond precision but people do it to achieve a goal.

If your goal is to lose weight, track calories to do it. I can lose weight on demand eating nothing but junk but keeping track of how much of it I'm eating.
Just because 100 people agree to jump off a bridge, it doesn't mean it's a good idea!
He may possibly receive less scrutiny by the FBI or Justice Dept in the new administration.
> Though I don't personally like the color scheme, the new logo was by far the best of their options

Honestly, they could just write "mozilla" or "m" in lower case in #f00 and move on. Firefox is getting pushed out by Chrome, which was arguably their most mass-market offering, so that cash would be better spent on tech, where flashy redesigns don't really matter.
How Nepal got the electricity flowing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiVVzxoPTtg
This is called out of band GC. We've been doing it for years in Ruby with Unicorn https://blog.newrelic.com/2013/05/28/unicorn-rawk-kick-gc-ou...

However when the ruby community moved to Puma which is based on both processes and threads it was needed less. Not that this is rocket science (it's still far behind the JVM and .NET), I assume a hybrid process/thread model is something that hadn't reached a critical mass in the Python/Django/Flask/Bottle community?
I remember hearing something about there being problems with RISC-V+GCC since FSF wanted copyright assigned to them. [1]

RISC-V did make it to llvm[2], with there being healthy development there. I remember Fedora running on RISC-V successfully.

Anyone know what happened with the whole copyright assignment problem?

[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12633037

[2]:http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-August/103748....

EDIT: I found a comment[3] in the old submission which answers my question.

[3]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13385968
The lightest 13-inch laptop on the planet is only for serious business
DigitalOcean Load Balancing Service in Private Beta
> There's still a lot of work out there that really boils down to basic CRUD and reporting at the end of the day, and developers naturally begin to invent complexities on top of that CRUD to make the work interesting and challenging.

I'd go so far as to say that _most_ work today (at least in startups) is building CRUD apps. The technology has changed, but the work hasn't. Inside of building CRUD apps in Rails, we now build them in React.
I'm not sure if you've ever been without money based on your questions. If you aren't making much money to begin with, there is no fallback plan or savings. It doesn't exist, whether you are going for a better job or not. You save just enough to do what you need to do and you risk everything to go. You pay for travel the cheapest way you can, usually on a bus of some sort. It's not a clean process.

I'll readily admit that there is a certain reprehensibility to those who insist that the poor are just lazy. Most poor people aren't lazy, they're just depressed, misinformed, and without hope. They are fundamentally disadvantaged.

However, that's not what is being said here. No one is contradicting that. What I'm saying is that despite their disadvantage, there are ways to escape. It's never going to be easy for them. They are never going to go from poverty to a six figure developer job, but no one in history has ever jumped directly from the bottom to the top without an extraordinary event or miracle.

John Adams said - "I am a soldier so my son can be a shop-keeper and so his son can be an artist."

The American dream is not overnight wealth. It's not wealth in even a single generation. It's the chance for more. Someone who is very poor can make the most important leap of all fairly easily: unskilled to skilled labor. They can go from the guy with nothing to offer to the guy who can run electrical wiring or the guy who can fix pipes and they can do this very cheaply in a very short amount of time. From there, they can earn enough to either go to college themselves, teach themselves, or pay for their kids to get ahead.
I get a yearly cash bonus and I treat that with the value of zero. I don't budget and/or plan it before I get it because there's a chance it's lower/higher than last year or non-existant.
> If anything these videos seem more hokey to me in that they are implying a deep connection between the mathematical model and reality

I agree with this for sure. Conceptual and aesthetic beauty are different. In terms of aesthetic beauty, these are some examples of the kind of things that were shown to us (at least when I was growing up) as examples of how "mathematics can be beautiful":

http://www.softlab.ntua.gr/miscellaneous/mandel/mandel.html /
http://www.intmath.com/numbers/math-of-beauty.php

At best half-hearted attempts that neither show conceptual beauty, and definitely not aesthetic beauty. Especially that fractal page, ugh. Since then, people have gotten much better about this sort of stuff, e.g. with fractals, look at how much more imaginative and aesthetically beautiful these are, and yet still generated:

http://www.ams.org/mathimagery/thumbnails.php?album=13 /
http://www.fractalartcontests.com/2007/winners.php

I'm reading Goedel-Escher-Bach right now, and that's full of brilliant examples of both aesthetically and conceptually beautiful things, and ties far-flung concepts together.

Anyway, what does "mathematically gibberish" even mean? Most of these videos are (if I'm understanding correctly) in essence generative processes, resulting in some interesting and (subjectively speaking) beautiful behavior. I don't know if you could truly call them "mathematically gibberish" as much as perhaps just argue that there isn't an exceedingly simple set of equations that give you complex and lifelike behavior. But that's great - I think it's OK to consider the idea that perhaps the processes that govern nature around us just aren't very simple and conceptually pure. That a set of equations that generates fractals is interesting, but it's even more interesting how romanesco broccoli gets its fractal-like look WITHOUT having an overarching global process enforcing a set of equation-rules. That our models of certain processes that we find "beautiful" are just abstractions on top of the actual messy way the system works (e.g. how we found that newton's laws are sort of the emergent result of how the lower layer of physics works). Anyway, these are just my opinions :-)

edit: Of course there are fields studying all this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems
I didn't want to cut sugar because -- apart from the size of portions -- I didn't want to change the type of food I was eating or my eating habits. The habits include some chocolate with coffee almost every day and moderate alcohol in the weekends (so it's more like a 5/7-day thing). This means I can easily continue the diet and habits indefinitely even after reaching the goal as I reach the equilibrum.

Overweight from start was minimal (4, maybe 5 kgs over BMI 25) but I got rid of the "gut" that was starting to form and it was extremely successful. I actually have no idea what the calorie deficiency was: I just ballparked it for the first two weeks and then kept that while measuring my weight every morning. I'd say it's about 600-700 max with the weekends reserved for no fat-loss.
Hi Berk. ;)
Who wants to take advice from a hypocrite?

It would be like a dental hygienist that didn't floss, or a personal trainer that never did squats, or an arms control advocate with armed bodyguards, or an envronmentalist that never separates recyclables from the garbage.
> React is ... functionally equivalent to Vue if all you include is react.min.js

Not really, you also need react-dom.min.js ;) But even then, Vue is sporting automatic reactive dependencies, computed properties, watchers, conditional class names, and other things without requiring a trip to some random NPM package. And it's still a smaller payload than react/react-dom
That's just one of the problems with the whole stock options tax rules. You really have to pay to play (triple taxation!), and it makes the golden handcuffs so much more more worse. You see a lot of people doing short term sales because they can't afford to hold onto the stock for a year and take the AMT hit.
Yep, this is why I Google/search candidates I'm considering. Truth be told, I could care less about the unfortunately photo from last year's New Year's Eve party that got posted on a candidate's Facebook page and somehow I came across and much more interested in finding out what may or may not be a direct reflection on professional judgment.

One time mistakes, like a drunken party happen, a wrong course of action consistently held is disqualifying.

Not only should this guy not work in I.T. again, but he shouldn't work in any career that grants him a modicum of trust. Over time he might change his ways, but I'd need to see clear evidence of that before I'd consider hiring him.

Of course, everything is contextual, too.
Nylas Mail is the first email client built from the ground-up to be extensible. It's kind of like emacs in that way– you can create new plugins that add any sort of new functionality, whether that means connecting it to GitHub, Quickbooks, your CRM, etc.
Might be relevant: https://golang.org/doc/faq#variant_types

Sometimes one wishes people from the go time would have spent some time hacking ML-derived languages.
Ask HN: Product management internships for experienced folks?
I'm a product manager for a semiconductor company. We're pivoting our product line & won't have any significant activity for at least nine months. The pay is OK, the revenue stream is relatively stable and my reputation is good. But we literally have nothing to do. This is true across multiple departments.

A lateral move to another co is doubtful. (I'm just over 55.) I'd like to do an internship that can use my combination of product management, semiconductor and data science skills.

Suggestions?
Section 4.03 of IRS bulletin 2012-28 (https://www.irs.gov/irb/2012-28_IRB/ar12.html) states, "If property for which a § 83(b) election was filed is forfeited while substantially nonvested, § 83(b)(1) provides that no deduction shall be allowed with respect to such forfeiture. Section 1.83-2(a) further provides that such forfeiture shall be treated as a sale or exchange upon which there is realized a loss equal to the excess (if any) of (1) the amount paid (if any) for such property, over (2) the amount realized (if any) upon such forfeiture. If such property is a capital asset in the hands of the taxpayer, such loss shall be a capital loss."

I'm not an accountant nor a tax expert. My layman's understanding of that clause is that (1) the amount paid was $375, and (2) the amount realized was $375, so the buyback nets $0.

Could the nonvested shares somehow be defined as "a capital asset in the hands of the taxpayer" with a cost basis of the FMV at exercise time, even though they're not technically property of the taxpayer yet? Perhaps it depends on the specific terms of the early exercise and the buyback?
I don't understand the downvotes since that's about the official stance of the go team -- see the FAQ (cited somewhere else). Agree with it or not.
>Another way to say this is that what we eat doesn’t matter; it’s only how much

The big, glaring, obvious problem with this is "how much you eat is the only thing that determines weight gain/loss" doesn't imply that what you eat doesn't matter. What you eat can easily change how much you eat; it's much easier to consume a giant pile of calories if it's a cake than if it's spinach.
Galileo isn't in LEO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_Earth_orbit but yes, shutting off the signal would mean that a radius of about 7000 (GPS sats can be seen across about 6500~ miles depending on the exact orbit and angle, Galileo will have more coverage since they are at a higher orbit, if you really want to know here is how you calculate it http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/77651/how-to-find-rin...) miles has no SatNav...

Jamming can shut down GPS in any range from 10M to 100,000M turning the transmitters of effectively shuts down GPS to half the globe.
]
It is also a bizarre buy.

Google has been building a competitor to fabric crash reporting. 6 months ago it was an MVP, but the version unveiled recently is pretty close to fabric.

I am not sure what they are buying here, it seems that google could sherlock everything that fabric does, especially since fabric is not that great in my experience.

Maybe it just illustrates that I am missing some info on why Google would get in such a buyout
Some pre-IPO companies offer RSUs. Facebook did this I believe
Yep, we've considered building an iOS and Android version. But that means we need to make more money and hire more people. Our team is very small right now.

The new sync engine is written in Javascript, which is faster than Python, but the main performance improvements came from changing the architecture.