skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On first reading I thought this was a way for employee's to cash out without requiring the company to go public, which I think most people who have worked for a startup in the past 10 years would agree is sorely missing.

> The new set of documents explicitly state that the investors’ shares can’t be subject to restrictions on transfer (with minor exceptions) after the earlier of five years or a $100 million valuation.

But I guess its not...

> Ahmed adds that TATS does not have an impact on the common stock that founders and employees hold, as such stock is subject to a right of first refusal in favor of the company and the largest investors.

So I guess this just lets investors but not employee's get out of illiquid companies? I guess this is good for a very, very, very small set of people, but doesn't help the most vulnerable group, the employees.

I know its not fair to expect Y Combinator to have to solve every problem in startup land but at some point you'd think they'd look up and realize that they are making money, the founders are making money due to early cashouts, VC's are making money but the employee's of Y Combinator startups are still getting very little of the value compared to everyone else.

At some point employee's are going to realize that working for an early stage startup isn't a great idea.
Ask HN: Does your company have an open source release policy?
I'm working with some fairly new technology (k8s). There's a lot of simple things that can be done with a few minutes work. I've already got a blanket signoff to contribute to upstream repos, but today I found something that would work best if I release a new repo. I'd like to do it from a corporate perspective, because I think it would be good citizenship, however, we don't have a general policy for how public releases are managed.

Does your company have a general open source release policy? Does it include different patterns for contributing to an existing project, vs creating a new project? What about small vs. large projects; i.e. a small module for common use (leftpad) vs a larger project expecting a community (tools like Envoy, Kubernetes)

If there's examples of open source policies we could simply adopt, that'd be great, too.
do people still play?
I found Infinite Jest extraordinarily compelling, hilarious, and endlessly entertaining. I wouldn't go as far to say that it was "hard to put down". The book will fatigue you at points, as there is such a density of ideas within a single page that you need to just step back for the day and take it all in. But I was inevitably drawn back every time to sit down and open Infinite Jest again and again. Maybe it was the prose, or the endearing and terrible characters that DFW make all come to life, or the sprawling mystery plot. I love the way DFW makes these small, minute observations of life that always seem to make me go "yeaaaah I can relate too!" So many unforgettable moments in that book, including the section about marijuana, and the chapter of the kids playing tennis analogized with war.
Smart idea and I think the opportunity of centralizing newsletters and categorizing each would increase make upstart super valuable. I signed up and look forward to next wednesday.
MyCPU
Show HN: VizFiddle – JSFiddle for Visualizations
What has always been fascinating to me is this. If critics options matter that much why can't they make more money just offering those opinions directly to the company by way of high priced consulting?
You just repeated the statement Im arguing against: "generous definition of worked." The goal of PHP was to help people, esp non-experts, quickly build web sites. People off all skill levels managed to build web sites that did what they intended in the intended use case. As in, PHP worked for the exact thing it was designed for. It also went beyond that by getting massive adoption by people cranking out too many sites go count. Its success at its goal is legendary in a good or bad way depending on who you ask.

Next, you talk about the preference for secure, web apps. Being a high-assurance, security engineer, I'd expect you to immediately start talking about Ada, Opa w/ modified back end, SWIFT on SIF, Ur/Web, Haskell with secure framework... languages that are systematically dedigned to either make classes of vulnerabilities impossible or reduce them greatly. Also, esp Ada or SPARK whose low-level libraries are written in same language for as much safety as possible. Instead, you counter insecurity of PHP use by recommending a Prolog not designed for security with low-level components probably written in C or C++ since most Prologs are. It's probably gotten almist no pentesting to knock out low-hanging fruit either. If those are true, then that's highly hypocritical that you'd smear PHP while recommending something so insecure or uncertain in its security.

Far as downvotes, it was because you made a bogus claim about PHP's success with no substantiation. I certainly didnt downvote you cuz Im anti-censorship, voted to eliminate downvotes on Lobsters, and it's impossible to downvote a person replying to you. Check that claim by looking for downvote option next to my name. I instead prefer to counter bullshit with facts in actual comments. Also, with citations when I have time. As is clear by this one.
I don't see any reason why that would be unenforceable, but resellers are not a party to that contract, and there is no contract if you just buy new cartridges and refill those ones.
HOSTS file compilation for blocking unwanted web connections
In Russia, the cars drive you?
> Aldus Pagemaker?

It was strange to use a desktop publishing tool to write papers, but I fell in love with its story editor[1], which looked like a plain text editor with a left column that indicated the applied style for that paragraph or heading. I would do all my writing in the story editor for a distraction-free experience, before I got handy with text editors.

I guess it was obvious even then that I would gravitate toward plaintext markup.

[1] InDesign ended up incorporating the story editor concept from Pagemaker: https://rockymountaintraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02...
>> I'd go so far as to say I don't think EULAs should be considered a valid legal instrument.

Agreed. The EULA is not even mentioned at the point of sale. Most notably, the company that sold the software often has no idea who has entered into such an (alleged) agreement with them. I thought acknowledgement was a critical part of contract law, but somehow clicking a virtual button in private is claimed to qualify.
But that kind of information should just be in the instructions for the assignment. It's a problem with the instructor, is what I'm getting at.
It's amazing how similar this is to my experiences answering the correspondence for

https://www.eff.org/awards/coop

However, I'm at a big disadvantage there because while general-form compass-and-straightedge angle trisections have been proven to be impossible, primality testing is known to be possible and we are actively soliciting solutions. (And even worse, we—like the Clay Mathematics Institute with its much more intellectually-important problems—actually do have prize money available, unlike the trisection problem.) It's just that several people per month refuse to believe that the problem is difficult and computationally intensive and was selected for precisely those reasons! Instead, they believe that they can solve it by pure reasoning, by finding a formula that generates prime numbers.

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

It's even possible that this is the computer age's equivalent of the trisection and cube-duplication problems...

People I've corresponded with have exhibited all of the characteristics that Dudley describes here. :-(

The worst part is that (rather like the angle trisectors) a majority believe that mathematical results are tested experimentally and observationally, by trying them out and seeing if the results look right. For example, a lot of people have submitted formulas for primes which allowed them to find two or three or four primes (or simply two or three or four numbers that they didn't know how to factor, even though the factor program from coreutils can do it).

Also, like Dudley's correspondents who "think that the trisection is important" and even suspect it may lead to "practical alchemy" with transmutation of elements, we get claims from people who have found theories of everything, often including new physics theories and complete reinterpretations of mathematics and the foundations of mathematics, which they believe will be very important to society. One recent correspondent insisted that "10 is not a number, it is a concept".

Dudley described being sad that people have in some cases spent years of effort pursuing a mathematical impossibility. I often feel the same way because you can see people who are very, very passionate about mathematics and yet refuse to believe that mathematicians know anything about their subject or that one should study mathematics in order to make progress in it.
This has been resubmitted many times but it's off-topic. Official comment from dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432970
Argh..too much jargon, had to stop reading..
I think she's trying to say specifically that patent rights are preserved in the U.S., because that's where U.S. patent law applies.

Her dissent is brief and only partial; and so I think she's only calling attention to a minor point that nonetheless has legal ramifications. Remember that the court's can also be to clarify the laws, and in this case, it seems to me that she took the opportunity to point out a gray area that might come up in the future. I see this "dissent" (if it can really be called that) as a footnote of sorts. "Watch out for these situations here", she's saying. It's not a political stance, but rather pointing out a technicality.
Great article. Thanks to Dan Wang for writing it.

My main difference in perspective with this article (I'm hesitant to call it a disagreement, because it's more a matter or perspective than any specific conclusion) is that I don't think people need to be consciously aware of market or societal forces and pressures to be powerfully influenced by them.

I think anyone who wonders why more people don't major in CS (as well as other fields claiming a "shortage") should read the chapter on pay and professions from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations". I don't think they need to read it and accept it without critical thought, just be aware of the perspective - that there are a huge number of inter-dependent factors, other than pay, that powerfully influence the desirability of a profession.

Here's a link:

http://geolib.com/smith.adam/won1-10.html

This is all pretty intuitive - if you want people to take on tedious, odious, or dishonorable work, you may have to pay them well.

I actually think CS, and programming, may be a more unpleasant profession than people recognize. Huge open offices, back visibility, SCRUM meetings that deny long term thinking and autonomy, constant technology churn, age-related employment issues, and, yes, specialized visas that mean employers can rely on captive employees who can't leave the field and have limited rights to leave their employer, all these things do mean that CS may be a much less desirable field for people with academic talent. Also - while wages are high, this may be the Silicon Valley effect. A job that pays an average of 120k, but plays this consistently in smaller, less expensive cities, may be more desirable than a job that pays 150k on average, but where 95% of the employment is concentrated in a place where the median price of a house is $1.2+ million.

Just for a dose or reality, a registered nurse in San Francisco earns more, at the median, than an application developer. That's a-ok by me! Nursing is a tough job. But if someone prefers to do good as a nurse and make more money than siting around fixing bugs in the latest javascript framework, come on, that's perfectly rational!

I really don't think young people need to have analyzed this to be influenced by it. There's a reason we call it the "invisible hand".

In short, if it is rational to avoid this field, that's probably enough to conclude that these are factors in deterring workers from it. I don't think you need to prove hyper-awareness specifically of these issues.

Keep in mind, people who are capable of learning to code and work in software development teams do have a high level of capacity for work and study. They have a lot of options. I'm not sure that software development, as a field, is all that competitive with the other things they can do.

In short, people may be behaving very rationally by avoiding this field.
There are a couple of reasons I'd argue it's best to avoid switching version control environments early on.

1. Integration with whatever build/issue tracking systems are present is worth preserving until you have the time to recreate it properly.

Duplicating what's already there under the new environment is always more problematic than it looks like at first glance. This is especially true when you're dealing with any in-house components (which usually manage to show up somewhere).

2. A clean break where you leave the old VCS behind and archived is tempting, but it's rarely ideal in the long-term.

The old archive is likely to wind up being deleted/lost/bitrotted/etc after a year or two. Invariably, you wind up in a spot a few years down the line where it would be useful to have the full commit history, and the old VCS winds up being inaccessible. Ideally, you'd want to preserve as much history as possible when migrating. However, trying to correctly preserve commit history (and associated issue tracker info, etc) is always a time-sink, in my experience. It's easy for simple projects, and a real pain for complex projects with a weird, long history. Choose the time that you attempt it wisely.

---

Again, I'm not saying don't move, I'm just saying that it almost always winds up taking a lot of time and effort. I'd argue you're better off spending that time and effort on other portions of the project early on.

Also, things like git-svn can be real lifesavers in some of these cases, though they do add an extra layer of complexity. If you do want to use a different VCS, I'd take the git-svn/etc approach until you're sure there are are no extra integration problems.

All that said, yeah, if there's no history and no integration with other systems/tools, go straight for something modern!
I use both. They are useful in different situations. printf is lightweight, and can let you dump a lot of information very fast. It's a good approach when you're reasonably confident about what you need to know. A debugger gives you more flexibility about the questions you can ask on any particular run.
An excellently subtle line of English text to say "yeah your friend can refill your printer cartridges for you, without facing penalties of patent infringement"
Energy and Civilization: A History
This looks really cool!! Are there similar tools or equipment available today? How does Serotiny compare to them in pricing, speed and effectiveness?
Quite often there is an embedded component in the mix somewhere, or even a machine that is not networked in any present day sense of the word.

The whole reason these jobs exist is because modern tooling and the luxury that comes with them is unavailable. But I've yet to find a platform where that counter trick did not work, even on embedded platforms you can usually get away with a couple of incs and a way to read out the counters.

If the timing isn't too close to failure.

One interesting case involved a complex real life multi-player game with wearable computers. In the end we got it to work but only by making all the software run twice as fast as it did before so we could use the odd cycles for the stats collection without the rest of the system noticing. That was a big of a hack. And the best bit: after making it work we then used all the freed up time to send extra packets to give the system some redundancy and this greatly improved reliability.

That system was running 8051 micro controllers and the guy that wrote the original said that 'this couldn't be done'. Fun times :)

The server side portion of that particular project got completely re-written as well roughly along the lines presented in the article, that wasn't a huge project (500K lines or so) but I was very happy that it wasn't my first large technical debt mitigation project or I would have likely stranded.
> "...is there a chance steroid use is widespread?"

Considering the level of competition in American football I would be surprised to find a significant number of players not taking steroids.
Because monetizing your open-source project means you take on a second job.

Here are your choices:

* Turn your OSS project into a company (Docker). The pro is that you can capture a lot of the value, the con is that you're splitting your project into CE/EE and also now you're a CEO

* Give the software away for free and charge for the hosting (Gitlab). Pro here is that you get recurring revenue, but the con is that now you're in DevOps and wear a pager. Also this model doesn't work well for libraries, only "apps".

* Charge for support (Ubuntu, Nginx-ish). Pro here is that by helping folks implement your software, you'll have a long line of success stories. Con here is that it isn't scalable - your upside is bounded by the hours you can bill

* Get a job at a company that will fund you to work on it (React, Angular). Pro here is that you can make tons of money with a job you love. Nice work, if you can get it. Con is that now you work for that company and you're subject to whatever whims they have.

* Run a Kickstarter (Light Table, Diaspora). Pro: you can gauge demand and you don't have a boss. Cons: it's one-time revenue, you have potentially inflated expectations, and just kidding, now you have 1,000 bosses.

* Run a Patreon (Vue). Pro: you have autonomy and recurring revenue (yay!). Con: now you're a personality. This is limited to celebs who are good at marketing _themselves_ as much as their software

* Ask for donations (Babel, Webpack). Pro: this works for tools and libraries (not just apps) and you can keep your mission. Con: Companies feel these donations have ambiguous deliverables. There's a lot of mental overhead too (How many projects can one company fund per month?)

* Sell documentation, books, videos (React Training, my current gig). Pro: JavaScript fatigue makes you money! Con: Writing the docs isn't as satisfying as writing software (for many developers)

So to answer your question: monetizing your open-source project means you take on another job _besides writing software_.

In an ideal world if you write software and it gets used, you'd be able to capture some share of that value. But we're not there yet.

[If you want to chat more about funding OSS, reach out to me (see my profile). I'm working on a few new ideas.]
The court doesn't rule on that contract issue. It is not in play in this case at all, as it would require that Lexmark sue its own customers for contractual infringement. The ruling mentions:

> even if the restrictions in Lexmark’s contracts with its customers were clear and enforceable under contract law

> and whatever rights Lexmark retained are a matter of the contracts with its purchasers, not the patent law
IANAL but I was trained at one time as a real estate agent. This is not legal advice and especially does not constitute personalized advice about anyone's particular situation.

Real property is not chattel. There's an exacting legal distinction between real property and chattel.

In the US, real property deeds carry what in the real estate field is sometimes called a "bundle of rights" which are by default included together but can be separable. One is the occupation and use of the land. One is the right to dispose of it to another buyer. One is the mineral rights to what's below the surface. One is inheritability. One is the freedom to put the land to particular uses. It's possible for example to negotiate a contract in which a person, party A, has nearly full ownership of land for a lifetime but it then goes to another party, and party A is not free to sell to someone else in the meantime. It's possible that you own a home under which you own no oil or gold rights. It's possible even (at least in some places) to grant a deed with lease-like restrictions such as giving your ne'er-do-well child a house and land that he actually owns, but only so long as he completes rehab and no drugs are ever found there.

Deed restrictions are agreed to by a number of nearby landholders and depending on jurisdiction may count as a contract or may actually be more fundamental to the ownership of the property, which further may depend on how the property was conveyed to the buyer. In many states or counites / parishes in those states, deed restrictions are on file with a government office and apply only for a certain number of years. A certain number of landholders must agree to new restrictions. A certain lower percentage of them must agree to keep enforcing existing restrictions. Depending on the type of restriction, the nature of the organization enforcing, how equally they've been enforced in the past, the jurisdiction, and potentially other factors they may carry no weight at all or may result in civil actions up to fines, liens, and specific performance rulings to correct deviations.

In Houston, or maybe it was Harris County (most of Houston is in Harris County and much of the county's land is in the city, so it's easy to forget when not using the information that often) HOAs were told that the bylaws must be on record, must be provided to property holders, must be enforced 100% the same across all restricted plots, must be mentioned at regularly held meetings, and a few other conditions must be met or they were completely null and void. I live in a community with a reasonable HOA, and I'm glad it's neither a free-for-all (there's little to no zoning at the city level) nor one of those HOAs that charges hundreds of dollars a month to come and measure the grass and use a spectrometer on the exterior paint.
Go is way faster than Python. Go's design meshes well with my ideals, so for me it's a joy to use.
state of the art. very creative.
What does "zero-knowledge design"[0] mean? I don't understand the link between "zero-knowledge proofs" and the storage of genetic data.

[0]: https://serotiny.bio/notes/applications/car/
The article uses "SME" out of nowhere like I know what it means.
Haha. There is an anthropomorphic element to it.

When most people think 'robot', they think of something with human or animal-like elements. So for example a rolling delivery or security drone would be a robot, but an automated car would not.
I wish you'd just write out (at least some of) the newsletters, reach/audience, and pricing. I'm hesitant to give you my email address without knowing any of that.
The Experience of Secrecy [pdf]
You don't need to worry about AI taking over. AI will become a slave to capitalism, just like the rest of us.

Can you imagine the billions of dollars of research investment such a company will require to build such an AI? It'll be a company with an enormous valuation and huge revenue pressures to full-fill. With such enormous economies of scale, there will be entire divisions implemented to watch over and monitor every aspect of operations. Just like Google optimizes every last byte on their homepage - every last algorithm, every last though the AI has, will be dissected, monitored, quantified and anlyzed. 1000 year Simulations will be run to ensure that not a single bot is misplacing any of it's attention, every loop counted. If a single cup a coffee doesn't get delivered on time, it will be corrected.

A much bigger problem will be - what to do when the richest .00001% are making 90% of the world's income. This is the problem we should be focused on.
Going Out for Lunch Is a Dying Tradition
What about Princess Celestia from Friendship is Optimal? That's somehow more sinister and dreadful than a plain ol' AI dedicated to torturing a single human forever.