skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"We’re building our own transit backbone across the planet. More on that in an upcoming blog post next week."

This is interesting... Leasing point to point connectivity like this is surely very expensive for a VPS provider, I understand non-connectivity players like OVH and Google Cloud doing this but Linode?
10+ years customers here. Except that my VM crashed once, all the years have been reliable.
Yeah... this seems like a really fast way to lose customer trust.
I am not a fan of packaged Turkish delight. It seems to always be terrible.

When I was a child, my family would occasionally buy made-in-house Turkish delight from a small, family Turkish food store, which has long since closed, near where I lived, and it was different and better. It had a softer, gooey-er texture and more delicate, less sweet flavour. Rose is the most memorable flavour for me. I believe our original inspiration for buying it was, in fact, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

My mother and I tried making some myself a few years ago to reproduce that memory, but the result was fairly sub-par, although still better than the packaged versions.
The reason that reduced gravity helps is that after processing, you can loft it back into orbit.

You can't manufacture fuel in orbit (it's a vacuum), and you can't manufacture fuel on the Moon (oxygen can be extracted with a lot of heat, but we can't make rockets without a fuel).

But you can manufacture fuel with Martian atmospheric CO2 and frozen water.
European Parliament Committee Recommends End-To-End Encryption
Yes, but the audience it's written for generally cares about questions like "what is the pain point you are solving for your customer?" That is one of the first questions a funder asks — and given how many funders they have lined up, presumably there is an answer.

As for pitching law firms on efficiency, that's actually an uphill battle in many ways. Lawyers bill by the hour, which means that there is not a natural demand for tools that increase efficiency. Post-recession, there is an increasing amount of fixed-fee work, which helps on this front. But the bread-and-butter for many firms (especially prestigious ones, who don't have to accommodate fixed-fee arrangements) is hourly work.
The problem is “actual characters” are an ill-defined term; that could mean either code points or graphemes. See, e.g., http://unicode.org/faq/char_combmark.html
No competent programmer I know has to work 40 hours a week to have their needs met. The best ones charge rates would allow them to have their needs met working <10 hours a week.
I don't think so.

The problem is environmental regulations raise the cost of doing business. Which is fine, if you live in a place like the US, say, or Australia. But if you live in a country where people are already going hungry, a small increase in costs means people on the margins are going to literally starve to death.
Quite informative, thank you. Can you explain the ethics issue? Or do you simply mean you or forced to take ethics courses?
Having completed startup school (https://www.startupschool.org/presentations/240)

I can say without a doubt it's useful, and would recommend it.

This is a post I made early explaining my thoughts (relevant here):

What's helpful is that you're placed in a group of say 20 other companies all trying to produce something, some are making money, some have literally nothing. You can learn from one another, share ideas, test out each others products, etc.

One thing most people trying to start a company don't have is a support network of highly motivated people doing the same thing. I know I personally do, but many of my fellow startup school colleagues do not. That's what's helpful: The startup school group office hours (or therapy sessions).

The second most valuable portion of startup school, is that they force you to be accountable. If I say I'm doing X, they want to see it. They expect results, and they push you to share.

Finally, and perhaps most valuable portion of startup school for some, is the fact you can network. I'd argue this is different than group office hours. There are many companies that have synergies, for example my project: https://projectpiglet.com/ can help identify trends, or "experts", which other teams could use.

There are other examples, but it's definitely been useful.
That being said, it is not YC proper. You don't get funds, many of the founders don't actually have an LLC or C-Corps. Many are in school, or (like myself) have full-time jobs working 50 hours a week.
Although not being able to work on the project full-time sucks, I've definitely made progress I wouldn't made, with the help startup school. We would have had less without it, the ideas from the team have bubbled up and the support pushes us to do better. I would recommend it.
That's a brilliant idea! When my children are of an age I will surely try this out myself.
OMG the back and forth is exhausting.

What I've personally decided is: my entire family has been using coconut based products for generations and my grandparents have lived to sufficiently long ages. I would be happy to live just that long and thank you, I will continue to use coconut oil.
Yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14566264
Fair enough. I was speaking generally. In the case of this specific venture, you may very well turn out to be correct.

Good luck with your new business!
Most of the new jobs will be created by the human resistance. While this includes trainers, I think a majority of the new occupations will be military based.
Big If :/ it's quite common for vpn to be blocked. Sainsbury's definitely blocks OpenVPN.
The SV way.
I'm just pointing out that "well India has done it for a long time so it must be good" is a logical fallacy as not all practices engaged in there will positively effect health. No offense intended.
Thought about this extensively. But I feel the imposter syndrome creep up every time I go this route.

My mistake is that I spent too much of my career working for tiny startups with 1 or 2 engineers, doing grunt work. I never got the chance to lead big projects and prepare myself to be competitive in that bracket.

I have friends who are in that space, or higher (CTO, etc...). Although I hold my own with them in terms of technical knowledge, they all have backgrounds leading teams and working for big companies.

I made a mistake in trying to chase the startup dream.
You did nothing wrong. The HN-hive-mind deludes itself that it's a higher order being.
This isn't true. It was well-understood from antiquity that Earth was round--had to be, otherwise stuff like Eratosthenes's measuring of Earth wouldn't...well...work. It's a trivial thing to observe, too: if you're high enough over the ground, you can see horizon curvature. That knowledge was not, contrary to popular thought, widely lost during the Middle Ages even in Europe and definitely not in the Eastern Roman Empire or places east.

Serious flat-Earth thought was ideologically motivated in the late 19th and early 20th century and bears some interesting parallels to climate change denialism.
>"It really seems like there's a huge opportunity here for guys like me to bring years of experience hacking on UNIX systems into the Microsoft world because there's a lot of "this is how it's done" and legacy systems thinking."

I wish you luck, but do bear in mind that support considerations are very important in the business world, especially businesses where IT services are in a supporting role to the main business. With that in mind, I'd hazard a guess that XML is one of the least problematic parts of what you're working with.
I wouldn't use him as an example because he dresses the same way every day to project an image.

But I agree. You can find clothes that fit well for very cheap. If you're associating with people that care how much you spent on your clothes, you should maybe consider associating with other people.
Yeah. He was both.
Organized labor is treated as stakeholders in the enterprise vs a counter-party in the US.
Show HN: Prometheus-NATS Exporter (GitHub)
I stand corrected then. Thanks!
Given the sustaining market for artisanal wine and cheese, I think we can hold off a bit on predicting the future of work.
Right... except in this context we're clearly talking about digital computers. Intentionally confusing the two does not contribute to the discussion.
The three categories are:

- "trainers" to train the AIs,

- "explainers" to investigate the "black box" and get insights and knowledge out of it, and

- "sustainers" to monitor and make sure that the AI behaves appropriately (think, e.g., Microsoft's Twitter bot-turned-Nazi).
Be realistic about point a).

And for point b), it's always truck drivers brought up in these instances. Yes, think of the poor truck drivers. I'm sure they love doing a dull job.

If a job is replaceable by machines, it's not worth doing.

I get the worry that people will be without livelihood, but it's not as if this world has a shortage of work to be done. If we had no more work to do, sure, bring on the UBI. But we do. Clean litter out of forests, plant new forests, visit the sick. Whatever it is, there will absolutely be more work for humans in the future. People not being forced to drive trucks means they could be doing something else more useful.

And if people lament losing a particular job and having to pick up a new one, well, sorry but that's reality. I could just as soon lament not getting paid to doodle cartoons.
I can see how scammers would abuse such a service but u should not be so quick to assume that that is his major customer base.
There have been numerous occasions where I was required to do SMS verification for legit accounts, and I didn't want to expose my phone number.
It is easier to reach a stable orbit from the moon.

The question is how much harder is it to build a self-sustaining civilization on the moon than Mars, and is that difference worth the easier orbit?

I don't know the answer. I suspect what matters is the number of stages to orbit for a large mass vehicle. We can just about build a single stage craft from earth, but it can't carry anything. On Mars, a SSTO can carry many tons. You could carry even more from the moon, but I suspect a viable SSTO to orbit is key, and a few extra tons doesn't add much. So at that point, you may as well go with the warmer site with more-comfortable gravity, Mars.
> To your first statement, is this even true of Amazon?

Definitely, to the extent that Amazon puts pressure on everyone selling commodity goods.

To your second point, it's not obvious to me that Amazon has cost jobs at the lowest rungs.
Goldman set out to automate IPOs and it's come far, really fast
I don't think the point of the site is to sell the product.

It's to build awareness and recruit great people. They talk about the problem they're solving, their legit team, and list the positions they're hiring for. All wrapped in a clean design.
> People climb Everest for the challenge, not because its most convenient mountain.

Notice that once they reach the summit, they don't stay very long. They don't plan on building a home there and plant potatoes.

Musk is not just talking about exploring mars in this paper. He's not talking about a Everest-like challenge. He's talking about colonization, which in the eyes of many, is extremely premature at best, completely delusional at worst.
reach out to him here: <redacted>
You don't have to maintain a pressure differential on Venus- oxygen is a lifting gas in the comfortable sections of Venus's atmosphere.

Hot air balloons are a well-understood technology.
If only this were true.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/26/sumatra-borneo...

>Official figures show more than half of Indonesia's rainforest, the third-largest swath in the world, has been felled in a few years and permission has been granted to convert up to 70% of what remains into palm or acacia plantations.

>Nine villages have been in conflict with the giant paper company April, which has permission to convert, with others, 450,000 hectares of deep peat forests on the Kampar Peninsula in central Sumatra. Because the area contains as much as 1.5bn tonnes of carbon, it has global importance in the fight against climate change.
Look, everyone should be making their own informed decisions about their health and nutrition. I've made mine, and that's to completely cut out extraneous carbohydrates, and eat adequate amounts of protein, with healthy fats thrown in for flavour and satiety. I've never felt healthier, more focused, and full of energy in my life. For me, I stick to green and cruciferous vegetables. My fats include olive oil, butter, avocado oil, and coconut oil, in that order. Canola oil is used sparingly. And of course, any fats normally found in meats, nuts, eggs, and dairy.

Even if you don't subscribe to my way of eating, please understand that the American Heart Association has a financial interest in promoting this biased research. They receive most of their funding from private donors, and are backed by pharmaceutical companies that produce statins which they sell to us for big money. Finally, in the US, a lot of your food is labeled with the AHA's Heart-Check Food Certification Program.

To meet the AHA's Heart-Check requirements, you need to adhere to these requirements: http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/HealthyLiving/HealthyEating/He...

They have a financial interest in promoting these loaded facts so that companies keep paying them for the label.

Coconut oil is definitely not going to meet those requirements. These are the same people that keep telling you to eat less butter, and eat more grains. If that worked, then why are so many of us struggling with our weight, diabetes, and heart disease? Moreover, I'm sure these studies increased fat intake without decreasing carbohydrate intake at all, which completely changes the interactions in the body.

Do your research, and judge for yourself. I just hate that folks are being told these loaded facts and are being set up for failure.

BTW, as of today, I've lost 18.6 lbs in 53 days with this new lifestyle. It does work, and I'll be getting a follow-up blood panel in 3 months to confirm it.
I'm just sad that true disruption isn't happening in the grocery/food sectors; buying WF, or throwing tech at food isn't a solution that will reduce food costs or feed more people...

I'd rather see someone create a business that makes it so that anyone on minimum wage can support and healthily feed a family.
Here! I spent a lot of my early career porting legacy code from one language/platform to another and I liked that well enough. Now I spend more time refining my own code than is really necessary, just because I enjoy it.
For write once and forget type of code like a website implemented by a contractor or throwaway code in Jupyter notebooks, the formal verification has a negative value indeed. For anything complex under maintenance ability to see that code behaves as expected in the edge cases without running it is invaluable.
Let's not doxx people here.

How certain are you that it's the same person? How certain are you that the scammer isn't just picking a random scapegoat, and registering a domain in their name?
> When you have a documented record of mistreating you're employees, both white

Yes, the infamous NYT story. It's funny, because I've yet to see all the ugly that story implied was wide-spread across the company. AWS can be notoriously difficult (particularly the not-so-fun S3 on-calls).

But there's an enormous difference between a wide-spread problem, and a problem that seems to be focused, very narrowly, on a few teams.

> Amazon has done neither of these things.

You say that with authority. Do you have ANY familiarity with Amazon's internal policies/changes that have gone into affect regarding these news stories?

Here's my problem: A company of some 300,000 people had documented cases of mistreatment. You've, in turn, determined that not only is this problem so wide-spread that we can define Amazon as a "bad employer" but, apparently, they need to take the time to personally inform you of any changes that have been made as a result of said problems.

> might extend that same umbrella of mistreatment over an acquisition.

And yet, of Amazon's acquisitions every single one of them have been left to their own devices.

You seem to have an agenda, which is fine, but let's not pretend your summary is in any way based in fact, but rather, exclusively on a few articles in newspapers.
As an aside, the creation of both Zappos and WF was told on NPR's How I Built This. Very interesting podcast if you like company culture and how it's designed/maintained.

http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this
Unfortunately, I am failing to readily find good references, but coconut oil has long been medically recommended for serious stomach disorders, including cystic fibrosis (which causes pancreatic insufficiency, among other things) and stomach cancer. This is in part due to the fact that it can basically be used directly by the body without digestion. It can simply be absorbed.

I have no idea if it is heart healthy, but this sort of broad dismissal is unfounded. Maybe it does bad things for your heart, but if you have gut problems that are literally killing you, coconut oil has a long track record of helping with those. This can be life saving if your gut issues are severe enough.
Good point. Plus the author is in the UK, which has much tougher libel laws.
instant-runoff is sold on false premises. Advocates suggest that you can honestly vote and not see spoiler effects. But instant-runoff eliminates a candidate in each round, and when your 2nd choice gets eliminated before your 1st choice, your 2nd choice never gets counted. This results in a wide range of messed up results that spoil elections and can fall back to strategic voting.

The best answer is Star voting (Score Then Auto-Runoff), which just does one instant runoff between top scoring candidates, thus counting everyone's scores equally. See http://www.equal.vote for details
Shouldn't a rel="nofollow" be enough to not give any "link juice" to the webpage?

<a href="Link.html" rel="nofollow">Link</a>
> Yet all our ancestors have survived.

I wonder what you would have posted if they hadn't.
>> Shit, for $120 you can get a near perfect fit tailored shirt shipped from HK

> For $20 bucks you can get an nice dress shirt from Costco.

That is not at all comparable unless you happen to be shaped like a Costco shirt-rack.
The Fun of Reinvention
NASA shows off its tech on Capitol Hill
A few weeks ago there was another announcement about the advancement in arresting the evolution of a quantum system

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347231

In this way it seems to me communication may be possible

A sort of sending bytes stead bits
I've been with them since 2009 and can confirm that every time I reached their support I've got nothing but good answers and quick action.
I used Linode for a really long time, hosting all sorts of personal projects over the years. A few Wordpress setups, some PhpBB forums, and other random small projects that I worked on. It was always nice having a box I could SSH into and do basic "is_it_down" ping/traceroute/nmap scans of things I was trying to reach.

Since all of my dynamic based sites are dead and I'm just on static based sites now, I just threw it all into Google Cloud Storage and host it from there (which greatly reduced my money hosting cost).

Overall Linode did a great job hosting for me, especially considering the price. But moving to "cloud" providers where I don't have to worry about keeping things upgraded and secure was worth the move to me. I enjoyed it for a long while, but there are easier to maintain services out there now.
> As easy it is as a contractor (as I can attest) to make fun of previous implementation spacemen who came before you, they often had the laudable goal of creating something that would be easier and cheaper to work with moving forward.

It's one thing to have the domain expertise to accurately anticipate future asks and preemptively prepare for them. But I've seen very few cases of that, compared to projects that were design pattern lasagna. Layer upon layer of abstraction to solve imaginary problems that were never real nor will ever become real. And all those abstractions cost the same as those which actually solve problems.

My approach is always to solve the problems you actually have, and no more. This includes abstractions for unit tests; that's an actual problem. (You are putting all those external dependencies behind interfaces for mocking, right?)
First of all, what does that have to do with ANYTHING being discussed in this thread? Second, any "programmer" working 10 hours a week and charging enough to live comfortably on that isn't a programmer, they are a consultant.
It's hard to say what any random patent means in terms of Amazon's larger business interests. When I worked there(and I'm sure it is still the case today), we were encouraged to bring any kind of novel idea we had to the patent team, and they would take care of the rest.
I'm continually unsold on this. Mars is far away, inhospitable, and feels like a run-before-we-walk kind of scenario to me. Merely sending humans to Mars seems like a huge task, let alone keeping them alive there.

I've felt for a while that a more practical path would be along the lines of:

- Asteroid capture around Earth to develop material processing/construction in space (seems way cheaper than launching ships and resources into orbit, makes space station construction practical?)

- Robotic moon base with electromagnetic launcher (cheaply/easily launch resources from the moon, provide practical, closer, safer experience in constructing human habitation away from Earth?)

- Mars/Venus.

Am I missing something here? Can SpaceX really make launches cheap enough that the benefits of construction in orbit aren't worth it? Is trying to move a biosphere to another planet easy enough with no prior experience?
Other articles from same blog series reported on HN recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14299020

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14486157

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14424305

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347702
I'm sorry your hipster friends have given you such a bad taste for coconut oil. Personally, I use it all the time in cooking and find its taste rather enriching. The other day, I was making collard greens, but instead of cooking the onions in veg oil or butter, I used coconut oil... it certainly adds a hint of coconutty flavor, but its not overpowering; on the contrary I found it rather delicious :).
This is just cargo-cult lawyering. Telling a candidate the reason why they failed is standard practice for Facebook, Google, and many startups.

I think that it's a good sign of how confident a company is in it's outlook by how they approach interview feedback.

Unless that feedback belies discrimination toward a protected class, it poses no legal risk. Conversely, it sours the candidate's impression of the company when a recruiter refuses to give meaningful feedback. People talk. A future customer might be friends with that candidate who failed.
Keep in mind, these videos are nice, but unlike demo day, they are unlikely to result in funding. For companies that are working on getting stuff out the door, the video is probably not the highest priority.
What do you mean exactly? Linode is in the same facility in, for example, Frankfurt as everyone else (DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc.) and DO and Vultr both have the better network, so I don't quite understand why Linode is special in your eyes?