skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't think the right to your own work and it's profits are an issue of comfort.

No person with a debt is entitled to the profits of their work, free or otherwise. The debt here is the cost of their incarceration. I don't propose they pay back the entire portion of their incarceration, but I think they should be responsible for paying back what they can while they're in prison. Within this model, you could make provisions for prisoners to elect to pay a sum after release (thereby making it optional labor as a means of repaying the debt they entered into), but this isn't without its own moral quandaries.

The crux of the issue in my mind is that someone needs to pay for incarceration, and while tax payers are going to have to pay a large portion regardless, the incarcerated should contribute what they can. Of course there are likely many injustices in the justice system which would cause this policy to impact some groups more than others (males vs females, for instance), but those issues are orthogonal to this, and consequently they should be addressed separately, insofar as they exist.
a/A, the bootcamp primarily represented on this sheet, is indeed very selective. The spreadsheet is not filtered though not all alums participated. a/A tends to accept people with STEM degrees from good schools or people with career experience that translates fairly well to software development. I went to a/A 3 years ago as a college dropout who played poker professionally for a number of years. I remember being intimidated going in when the intro emails started flying and everyone seemed to be an engineering graduate from an Ivy League school or similar.

As part of the pre-course prep and application process, candidates are going to cover a good bit of ground. They won't have studied algorithms proper, but they'll have mastery of loops, control flow, and many toy problems.

Once the program starts, they'll get exposed to some basic algorithms and design principles by building games like chess or computer controlled hangman guesser. From there they will be introduced to web programming, javascript, and the relevant frameworks the program focuses on.

Then it's pulling it all together to build a site, create a portfolio, and begin studying data structures and algorithms. The last 2-3 weeks of the course are dedicated to data structures, practice whiteboarding, and job applications. Not many people are passing the Google interviews at the end of the 12 weeks, but some do. What usually happens is that people that are set on working at the Googles or Facebooks spend another month or so studying their butts off with things like Cracking the Coding Interview until they're ready.
If the platform weighs 100,000 ton and scrap iron is between $50 and $100/ton, then the rig's scrap value can't be more than $10,000,000, but it can be a lot less. Maybe it costs you a couple million dollars just to have it towed back, then maybe a couple million in labor and tools to cut it up, and a million in hazardous waste (asbestos) disposal, and so on. TBH, I don't know how much all of this really costs, but I can see where dismantling a rig could potentially cost quite a bit more than its scrap value, and thus the thing can have a negative value. In that case it might be quite attractive if the owner of the thing can transfer that responsibility to someone else. They might even pay you to take it.
Are you familiar with the difference between options and RSUs?
That's a very grim picture you paint; I don't believe the majority of US citizens would be OK with this, if there was an awareness.

Must be incredibly hard to come out of a system like that rehabilitated, and not very bitter.
probably gonna be another recurrent comment, but Facebook and Palo Alto are hardly a generalization of a trend, more of an exception actually.
Okay, but what is the point of saying that base comp tops out at just over 200k? Quite often people with 200k bases make 500k+ total comp, so it is very misleading to focus on the base. After all Sundar Pichai's base is $652,500, but total comp is 200 million ...
Chemical feedstock is a much smaller fraction compared to heating and transportation. And they might not even release carbon into the atmosphere. Plastics for example don't release their carbon for a long time.
OpenSUSE Is an Amazing Underestimated Distribution
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. Would you please not create accounts to do that with?
Now there's a relic from another age: the entertainment industry was still operating on the old model, Japan was a perceived threat to US businesses (!) and the Internet was not yet a "problem".

I can't imagine the 2017 version of this letter.
I mean, yes, but from the outside some examples can look an awful lot like "my tiger-repelling rock works because we haven't been attacked by tigers".
WINGS evaluated Bancor with whale weighted median forecast within 4% of actual
But how is that any different than Uber? IMO people are going to be in for a real wake-up call when these companies finally kill traditional taxi company and there is a massive rate hike. Right now everyone loves Uber because they are cheaper than the equivalent Taxi ride but that is only because they are operating a massive loss and do some shady things with the way they hire and pay drivers.
Will the Lichess app and platform have this issue? And if not, why not?
I've never been at a company that's actually cared about when I work. Is needing to ask your boss about coming in at a different time actually common?
Wallops rocket launch tonight could create 'artificial aurora'
> Meaning, I'm not sure what the developer was thinking

A 32bit integer is pretty much the default numeric type for the majority of programming tasks over the last 20 years. Even with 64bit CPUs, 32bit is still a common practice. Probably 99% of all programmers would make the same choice unless given specific requirements to support more than 2 billion values.
So how much do you think bootcamp grads who go to Google make total comp?
Fine, call it what you like, my point is that it's not the moral equivalent of conventional slavery.
Constantly amazed by how many people rock up here, like clockwork, to defend an the unlimited take on this business model: "Oh, it's just the hotel industry that hates this", "If only we just built like crazy Airbnb wouldn't be a problem". Riiiight, all we need to do is live in unregulated megacities and the magic of the market will deliver.

Here's the thing: a lot of people out there bought homes and apartments in countries that had these funny things called 'laws', where they expected that they were going to live in communities, not surrounded by rentiers running random hotels sans staff and regulation. A lot of apartment buildings in Sydney are essentially now completely fucked by this - you buy an apartment and find out you're living in party central and your neighbours are a never-ending collection of randos.

I think it's pretty clear from the extent that these companies go to obfuscate the actual addresses of the houses that they are not working with clean hands here. That aspect of the business model should be flat out illegal. Oh, you're going to operate a hotel, but you're not going to tell anyone where it is?
I absolutely can't stand how destructive terraform is by nature. We have switched to Ansible, which has an excellent AWS module, and never looked back.
From post-it note to prototype: The journey of our Firefly
You'd have to be producing something valuable, but then again, that's one of the economic models behind seasteading is production of high value goods which are forbidden to produce on land. ie: drugs, dangerous materials, etc.
For all the noise tech startups make about meritocracy, they sure do a poor job of separating the work from personal issues which spells doom for minorities in a lot of instances.

I lost count of how many times, something innocent like not going to lunch with the team regularly (I'm a picky eater), or participating in whatever game the team was nuts about (foosball, or various exotic board games) turned into personnel issues where all of a sudden I was "unavailable to the team", or "distant and aloof" etc, even though my professional contributions were just fine or even stellar.

You can imagine how stressful it is to show up to work everyday wondering what bullshit non-work related nonsense is going to come up that day and require another stupid chat with your manager. And in the midst of that you're expected to keep up a cheerful demeanor and work well with the same assholes that keep bringing up this irrelevant crap because the fault in these interactions couldn't possibly be with them.

The day it becomes about the work, and not personal discomfort with new and differing points of view about communication and interaction, diversity at tech companies will become an after thought ... in a good way.
you can stay a private company forever, surely walmart isn't a startup.
Yours is the first comment in this chain that I can say pretty confidently isn't sarcasm. So it kind of breaks the chain, making the sarcasm in this chain non-recursive. Which means maybe you were being sarcastic after all? Actually I don't even know if my own comment is sarcasm or not.
Ask HN: Tired founders facing acquihire – please advise
After 18 months of 80+ hour weeks, no weekends, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of opportunity cost income, I am tired.

I'm having a really difficult time making a decision and appreciate any advice the HN community can offer.

Here is a quick summary of my situation:

A bit over a year ago, I left a high paying corporate job to start a company. For ~6 months, my co-founder and I did not pay ourselves and ran through a lot of our savings. We soon got accepted into a top tech incubator and were able to use their small investment to keep running. After graduating from the incubator and without even really trying, an investment of more than $1 million fell into our laps. Shortly after, a very successful company contacted us about a potential acquisition and after two months of talking extended a "low-ish ball" acquihire offer to myself and my co-founder.

I wish we had the momentum and growth to comfortably pass on the offer but the reality is that we have not had much confidence in the business for a while. Even before the investment fell into our lap we considered "pivoting" to an entirely new idea because we were so frustrated with the highly competitive market in which we were operating. The acquiring company now also has plans to enter our market and it would be very difficult to compete.

The terms of the deal allow us to mostly pay back our investors in full and would line us up with great jobs. It is not the exit we dreamed of but it gives us a nice story for the future and allows us to "wipe our hands clean".

We have been working 80+ hours weeks without weekends and extremely low pay. My health has been declining (I was recently injured and need surgery but cannot without better insurance) and I had to move away from friends and family. I'm still young but my savings have essentially run out and I have become somewhat disillusioned by startup life.

Is it time to call it quits?

Thoughts?
> Its cost, $300 million

For a 1.4 mile bridge 100 meters off the ground? That is a fucking steal. How do they pull this off?
As far as I can see, political transition is not a problem in near term. The situation is actually better after Arab Spring.
The hard part with software licensing is making it resistant to cracking. This doesn't attempt to make things difficult, it would take under an hour to crack any app that uses this for licensing.

I suppose the target for this service are app developers who don't have their own website / server infrastructure. It seems trivial to issue your own license tokens and have clients check in with your website for an OK / BAD response.
We absolutely did refer to the 90s as "the 90s" during the decade. A couple of anecdotes. I got my first corporate email account in the 90s. The 90s were also a boom decade the economy was blazing hot, radically different than the 80s, and we knew it.

So with the new access to email and the blazing economies, we sent around listicle emails with the title of "You know it's the 90s when". Classic listicles include:

- You eat standing up.
- Your dining table is a flat filing surface.
I am confident that one could learn enough algorithms in 12 weeks to pass the Google interview with no prior programming experience. One just needs to focus on competitive programming problems, start from the bottom, and work 50hrs a week.
Well you've basically stated those industries that are specifically and geographically tied to Canada.

Of course commodities and the financial system to support them as well as local consumer banking have that funding. All nations do.

It is the 'soft' economy outside of that where the differences lie.
>This can only be the case if the state, county or city owns the last mile and allows any business to rent it.

Telephone companies are a public utility, and are, in most jurisdictions, legally required to lease space on utility poles to ISPs.

Laying lines is the largest cost of setting up an ISP; by using telephone poles, the cost would become manageable for a small business. Small business loans would be sufficient to cover the cost of setting up a small ISP.

As far as profitability goes, end-users could come together to set up a co-op, if they wanted better service.

>And as for your second point, I said screwing over you end-user for a reason. If it's more profitable to undercut prices to get the cheapest users, while selling data and deals to other market actors based on your users data, ISPs will compete for that instead of speeds, privacy concerns and other. And your choice becomes between varyingly shitty deals.

ISPs can undercut prices for the cheapest users, but the cheapest users aren't everybody. As I said, a lot of people will pay more for decent service. If you want a better analogy, consider a user choosing an iPhone 7 over a no-name Android phone. If price were the only consideration, Apple would not be one of the largest businesses in the world.
Well, I feel a tad lost (in terms of what you were intending with your remark), but count me educated. Thank you for the link.
> It's funny that a microsoft app has become another example of an installer behaving like malware.

It behaved that way before Microsoft bought them. It doesn't behave that way anymore. Microsoft improved the behaviour.
Except that "git commit" isn't sufficient.

You have to use "git add" on a bunch of files that you have used "git add" on before.

As far as I can tell, every other revision control system tracks a file for "commit" once it has had even a single "add". This is the default case and what 99% of people want--"I told you to keep track of the file. Now keep track of it until I tell you otherwise."

git is the only revision control system I know of where I have to "git add" the same file over and over and over and over ... before doing "git commit".

But that is fairly standard git UI practice--"Optimize the 1% case and make the 99% case annoying."
Is the idea that you're in international water so you can do what you want? What stops a navy coming and confiscating your equipment then? They stop drug smugglers and pirates in international waters all the time. And you'll be static!
Right, you are correct.
Australian startup taps IBM Watson to launch language translation earpiece
Bay area has higher cost of living and Washington has no state income tax. But yes, Bay Area comp packages are higher in raw numbers than those in Seattle.
Cool, yeah, that's what I meant by partitioning, which I guess is more of a database term.
Petrochemicals and plastics are only a small fraction of oil demand. The vast majority is used as fuel.

So no, we won't totally eliminate the need for oil for a long time. We also won't totally run out of oil for a very, very long time. But we can eliminate the need for 50-75% of current oil demand in this century, possibly the first half of this century.
Also, it would mean that informality would be a privilege of white people.
Banks don't want the highest quality, they want to "own" the customer. And Google would want to collect analytics on the system if they had anything to do with it.
I thought terragrunt was a must have for that kind of deployment.
Not necessarily the halfway mark.

Peak oil is about the point where oil production (weird word for moving it from below ground to above ground, but part of it is refining) is largest.

We would be fortunate if that ends up being near the half way mark, as that would likely mean that production wouldn't fall abruptly.

Also: I hope we will never run out of oil. Ideally, alternative energy will get so cheap that it will become uneconomic to get out the last x%.
I weight trained for a good 5 years. I then had a scaphoid wrist fracture and can't put much stress on wrists. Be careful, if you overdo it like me, then you may have to go years without lifting at all. I can't even do a pushup now.

Also doesn't help that Healthcare in US is so ridiculously expensive that a single mistake will cost you months of salary.
> If the price or experience is in any way different users will happily jump ship

And that's one of the many reasons why users will not jump ship. It'll cost billions of dollars in red ink to compete with Lyft and replicate the price & experience. It costs more to successfully compete with Uber. Which is why there aren't / haven't been tons of successful competitors to Uber in the US market.

No, you can't bootstrap a competitor to Lyft's $2 billion VC blackhole. No, it's not easy to do. No, users won't just bail on Uber to try your start-up. No, ridesharing isn't a commodity, precisely because the experiences are not all the same and never will be.

It'd be like claiming that retailing is a commodity (it's not), so therefore you can bootstrap a competitor to Walmart or Amazon. Except, you know, for the hyper scale that enables them to operate at slimmer margins than you can (your ability to compete with them at what they do declines at an accelerating rate as they increase scale), and the vast data they have on every angle of customer behavior (which you entirely lack, which negatively impacts your business in a thousand ways vs Walmart or Amazon). One of the things that protects a Walmart from being susceptible to commodity-style competition, is among other things their incredible data and national consistency (which small time operators and start-ups can never replicate; if I go to a Walmart in Texas it'll be similar to one in Virginia, I can be relatively confident in the results of my shopping trip there).
I've really enjoyed these videos, so thank you! If I might make one suggestion, in addition to (or instead of) the wireless lavalier microphones that the guests wear, could you also set up some microphones on tables in front of the guests? That way, in post, your video editor could choose whether they want to use the lavalier microphone audio or the microphone on the desk audio. Ms. Lee's microphone is picking up a lot of rustling from her hair touching the microphone and it makes the audio hard to listen to. Microphones on a table in front of your guests would have avoided this problem. A wireless lavalier mic makes sense if your guest is lecturing and walking around, but for two seated guests microphones on tables would probably be better or at least a good addition to your setup.
Sure, that's expressive of my viewpoint which I guess is probably a minority viewpoint but I bet it will grow over the coming years.
I wanted to second this. I've got a similar project [1] for photos, videos and audio files. It encodes much of the metadata into the filename itself [2].

[1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

[2] https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal...
Calling the Roman economy "capitalism" seems like a bit of a stretch, given things like the Emperor's ultimate control over anything. If you roll with it you're doing a massive white wash of history to praise capitalism for eventually improving problems it faced.

>as well as some slavery and conquering which impoverish some populations to enrich others).

Massive understatement, roughly 15% of the population of Rome were slaves and the Pax Romana is often seen as one of the causes of the breakdown of the economy. This is a common theme with capitalism and it's enrichment periods. It's very hard to argue that most of the world benefitted from colonialism.

>And Rome periodically put them back into grinding poverty by reducing the size of the grain dole because it was too expensive? Funding consumption can't reduce long term poverty (give a fish vs teach to fish).

And capitalism periodically put them back into grinding poverty with massive crashes or unchecked greed. Teaching a man to fish isn't that helpful if you then own all of the poles and materials to make the poles and refuse to share.
Watching WWDC: The Impact on Marketing
It's running out of oil reserves that are easy to get at. There will always be more oil, but some portion of it will always cost more to extract than it is worth.
We have no plans to charge for our current API
Cousin comment helped me out a bunch:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540054
The Dart VM team is super active. If you are a VM geek this group[1] is a good way to follow what is going on.

Dart now targets the Web (two compilers - one for development, one for "production" - both transpiling to JS), the server (Dart server VM - fast native JIT VM), Mobile via flutter (support for AOT on iOS), and Fuchsia.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/?fromgroups=#...
The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory
How many cunts does it take to untuck this story?
I think language plays by natural selection rules; speciation mirrors groups of people that don't speak to each other anyway.
Its funny, I was sort of expecting something disturbing because I got the recommendation through Weaveworld.
I think I basically understood this concept, but having it explained so succinctly made me pause and re-read it. Thank you for summing it up so well.
I have to wonder by how long this technique predates WWI, since history is littered with subversive cues and signals.

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

Probably, any earlier than the 19th century and textiles were probably still pretty valuable, that they weren't just thrown around.

Also, perhaps most notably is the scytale which is pretty much the same concept, although probably minus the steganography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scytale
Peak oil is about the fact that after you remove half or so of the oil from a particular oil well, removing what is left gets very expensive. We aren't running out of oil, but we are unlikely to ever again see oil that is as cheap as it once was. We are running out of cheap oil, and that is game changing.

Most reserves have already hit or passed that point. Most oil today is more expensive than it was, say, in the 70s because you have to inject water to force it to the surface and things like that. Just digging a hole and watching it gush skyward from internal pressure is a thing of the past, basically.
Simple Free Timesheet Calculator with CSV Export
with what did they replace the lard?
No idea. But it's my first real job and better safe to ask than sorry to assume things.
Heroku ChatOps for Slack