skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand the point, but have to disagree a bit. Skill is as important in Math as anywhere else. The breakthrough ideas of Godel or Einstein would have been lost forever has those guys not also backed them up with solid mathematical evidence which requires great skill. Godel's proof and the complex math behind relativity and Einstein's fight to improve his math skills to justify his ideas are testament to this.

Likewise, skill without ideas happens also. Hundreds or more of screenplays sell every year that will never be made into movies; the writing is technically good so the writers do make money, but the story ideas don't hit, and the buyers eventually realize this before wasting more money.
As tools like Evernote and OneNote rose to fame, I've always wondered why do people use such sophisticated note taking apps? People don't seem to be using it for to do list? Maybe because it allows things to be searched? Can someone explain what notes they take or how do they use it?
I had trouble understanding what's more impressive 18000 feet or 2 miles. 5,4km vs the titanic 3,8km deep
"how it connects with its customers is irrelevant to what kind of company it is"

This is a pretty bold claim. The fact that it's instant, and that it geolocalize every party involved thanks to a mobile app, and that every part of the process is fully automated is what makes uber something different from a regular cab company.

To reduce uber to its high level functions abstracting away the technical details and implementation is i think one of the big mistakes business people make in general. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of reasoning is what business CEO show in their slides before they take the decisions that completely screw the tech companies they're leading.
Yeah, essentially.

A more precise comparison would be always-on incognito plus Disconnect[1]. So, it uses a dumb tracker block list like it could also be enforced by uBlock Origin, and the list that Firefox uses is the list that the Disconnect devs put together.

Then, again, it also depends on which browser's incognito mode you're talking about. Firefox's Private Browsing comes with Tracking Protection, which uses this same block list. So, privacy-wise this is actually identical to Firefox's Private Browsing mode.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disconnect/
Ask HN: How to decide if someone is a right partner?
Hi guys,
I'm a technical person. Last year I helped out a friend (business guy) to co-found a startup. After 7 months of painstaking efforts, I learned it the hard way that our business perspective and visions were just too different for the partnership to work out, and so I left.

A year has passed and I'm thinking of partnering with another two business guys. These guys came to me and explained their idea. I'm pretty impressed with it, but not yet sure if they'd make great partners.

What do you guys think I should do to "try out" the partnership? I'm thinking the following:
1. Offer him my software development skill as a paid (discounted) professional service. As this goes on, hopefully I'll figure out if we're aligned.
2. If through (1) I get along well with them, convert the professional service into partnership.

Do you guys think my plan is reasonable? If so, how do you think (2) should go? As a technical co-founder, what model should I take? Is it getting paid along with equity? Any readings on common-practice for this?

Thanks in advance! :)
One suspects the celibacy assumption says more about we who assume rather than the ancient societies of whom we assume. This is a kind of inter-millennial sexism. If a single king could have relations with hundreds of women, why can't a (presumably professional) woman have relations with hundreds of men? In such a top-heavy situation, she would have found plenty of willing customers! Sure, we are prejudiced against prostitution, but lots of ancient societies weren't.
Our legal team at work (an e-commerce player with 9-figure revenues that's raised 8-figure rounds over the years), are currently looking at React's PATENT clause.

There is a dependency tree here around whether you currently (or plan to in the future) have any patents. If you don't and you never do, then how can Facebook infringe it in a way whereby you'd want to sue?

And then there is the cost of suing. We seem to be reckoning it would cost around $1m to start a serious action against FB, so what does the cost of replacing React look like in that sort of scale? We've costed that, in broad strokes.

So on paper, it all looks like we're fine, right?

But...

But...

Here's where they take pause:

The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice,
if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate
directly or indirectly [...]

Subsidiaries? We don't have any of those.

"Corporate affiliates"? What does that mean? Oh, it's anybody who owns at least one share in us, or we own one share in them.

Wait. What? We have business angels, founders, multiple VC firms and other investors. Do any of them have patents that Facebook might infringe on? What about future investors or people who we might want to be acquired by? Could we have an acquisition blocked because the potential buyer has a war chest of patents they value?

And "agent" means external law firms too, right? So if any of the companies we use for advice on an on-going basis get involved in any patent action, what does that mean for us?

Suddenly it becomes this huge sprawling mess. Risk aversion is important when you're dealing with a company that is already carrying a 9-figure valuation.

We're trying to find a way around it. As an engineer I brought it up with Legal because I want clarity for colleagues and myself: we want a green flag.

Unfortunately, in doing that, we may have brought enough scrutiny to it that they are going to tell us to stop using it.

If/when that happens we'll talk about it and share that information.

In the meantime, we continue to use it, but we're doing so with caution, and we accept there may be a re-tooling cost.
The PS4's PSN store's search function is terrifically awful. Why on earth do they think "typing" is easier using a spin dial for each character in the search query? Not only that but the dial moves so slowly.
LispNYC 15 years and going strong, time does fly
I also must be missing something. XORing the return address on the stack with the stack pointer is similar to other stack protection mechanisms. I forget the precise name of it, but I'm pretty sure one of the existing stack protection tools does exactly this? MSVC's /GS feature is similar but slightly different in that it XORs the return address with a random value initialized on module load.

However, the claim that ROP is impacted seems a bit flimsy to me. After all, ROP only requires that the C3 (RET) or C2 xx yy (RETN YYXX) byte sequence be present at the end of it; these sequences do occur at the end of a function, but they also occur in other places (such as anywhere the byte C3 arises in compiled machine code). ROP tools are programmed to look for the C3/C2 XX YY sequences and do not know or care whether these sequences are at the end of a function. The post is claiming that by transforming the ends of functions, ROP will be affected; but given that it seems to makes no attempt to remove C3 and C2 bytes from elsewhere in the machine code, that ROP tools will in fact continue to work just fine.

Basically the whole thesis of this patch seems to be that "existing stack protection methods will change function epilogues and therefore break ROP". I don't think it will have much of an effect on existing ROP tools. What am I missing?
Not sure why you think PG or anyone at YC has any incentive to fuck people over; they have gob loads of cash and are still trying to help people to build successful businesses. It's not even necessary to be ruthless; pretty much all of the billion dollar YC founders seem like decent people who built the right thing at the right time (and were very very good at marketing).
Marko – An isomorphic UI framework similar to Vue
The problem is that the "lazy" workers sour employers on the notion. So unless your team is filled with motivated, grown-up individuals that won't just use the opportunity to slack-off and do the bare-minimum necessary, then it makes no sense for the employer to try anything but the "butt-in-seat" approach.

I manage people a group of about 20, and I'd love to have a hands-off approach. I.e. Letting them be creative and do their own thing at their own pace. But after a week or two of that with me trying to encourage them to experiment, and absolutely nothing happening, it's pretty obvious that they're not inclined. They want to just be butt-in-seat for 9-5, like a factory-worker, then go home. Maybe they're broken already. Or maybe they don't care enough to apply their creativity or motivation during those 9-5 hours to show me that they can do that.
“Brand Inside Out” – an entire, best-selling book on branding for free
I don't understand the first line. Is "FWD" an acronym, or are you imitating the subject line of a forwarded email?
I think the simplest answer is that no one has sued them for it yet.
How this startup is changing the game for printing and logistics in Japan
Good point. I didn't realize that the native DOM properties are also called "className" and "htmlFor". My point still applies though, that this isn't a JSX syntax issue, your point is that it's also not even a JSX-specific semantics issue.
One thing to note is that the last ice age finished about 12k years ago, and human reoccupation of very large tracts of asia, north america and europe could not have been over night. Large areas (for example the UK north of London) were under ice sheets, but much larger areas would have been tundra and frozen dessert [1]

Additionally there would have been huge inundation of the coastal areas that were previously human occupied.

The creation of new opportunities and the chaos of the disruption of old settled communities may simply have meant that there was a multi-generational selection for successful adventurous cowards!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#/media/Fi...
My experience exactly. There's an odd sneer often thrown about re 'knowing javascript'. From what I've seen of this region of the open-source javascript world (react, redux etc), much of it is at least as good and thoughtful code as I typically find in the native iOS and Android world.
They'd right it if they were fixing it or write it if they were writing it ;)
Get off your horse. You're a kid in your late fifties. Ancient my foot. It's this kind of thinking that allows the little children in their 20's and 30's to think that they know it all.

I'm in my late fifties and will not stop learning and thinking about new things (which are often old things in a different guise), new applications for old technology and how to think about the physical underpinnings of the universe. I teach the young (in their teens, tweens and thirties) to think outside of the box when looking at the universe.

I was taught to think this way in my late twenties by a young lady in her late seventies about always staying young. One's body may get aged but one's mind and spirit shouldn't. One should gain wisdom and yet stay in youthful wonder all of one's days.
It sounds like hypberbole, but the quotes are true. I was professionally writing Objective-C, C++ and eventually Swift for many years before using Clojure full-time for a year. My Objective-C, Swift and C++ don't look the same any more. It does change how you think about programming, in any language. And makes you better across the board.
I'm not suggesting any kind of supply-side Laffer Curve argument. My argument is that corporate taxes are less efficient than individual taxes, not that taxes should be lower overall. I would prefer to increase income and capital gains taxes on high-income, high-net-worth individuals to offset the loss in revenue from reduced or eliminated corporate taxes.
Thanks for posting that. I had that issue and found the article interesting but then lost the magazine (and never thought to search for an online version).
It's a service that makes emails public

https://www.fwdeveryone.com
Thanks for that link. It was a concise and good read.

I don't like the terminology used for the patent retaliation clauses. I see the "weak patent retaliation clause" as fair (within the scope of patent retaliation) and the "strong patent retaliation clause" as harmful.

If I had a say in the matter, I'd like to call a spade a spade and help people understand what these really mean. The terms "weak" and "strong" in this context appear meaningless to me. Without explaining what the clauses mean, the terms themselves don't provide any indication of the (comparative) utility of these.
> and the Russians would be smiling not even out of breath,

You're exactly describing Emma Coburn after she had just won the 3000m steeplechase in London at the World Championships, a couple of weeks ago. Truth is the American that came in second place, Frerichs, look tired as hell, but that was because she had just "improved" her PB by 16 (sixteen) seconds. I guess miracles do happen if the correct juices are taken, those ladies reminded me of a certain Lance Armstrong who always seemed to achieve incredible athletics miracles whenever the Pyrenees were coming.
Start _every_ story with 'once upon a time' and it sounds good already. Audience is hooked.

Storytelling greatly depends on personal charm. Rehearse that first if it can be rehearsed. I am not sure it can.
Among the more interesting speculation I'd seen was that Marissa Meyer might be considered. Putting a woman in charge would send a clear and strong signal.

I'm not sure I'd want to inherit that particular mess, though, particularly not after Yahoo.
Thanks, and yes, we've been doing a lot of work on scaling over the past few years to help with the compile times :)

We've just announced some exciting news too -- the ShareLaTeX team has recently joined Overleaf! More details on that here if you're interested: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-i...
TreeSheets: Free Form Data Organizer
But was it Clojure or perhaps functional programming in general that "changed how you think about programming"?
it depends on how you want to structure your code and give sections to code.

"if (isConnected) {} else {}" emphasizes to me that there are two branches of code which depends on `isConnected` state. It may have only one thing to do right now. But this is major branch. Future git diff will probably show that the code in the body the branch are added/removed.

Ternary expression emphasizes on modification of a single attribute.
With this browser, yes, they are very much targetting technophobes. There's a huge number of people that would like to protect their privacy, but feel absolutely helpless at that. This is Mozilla trying to help these people. This does however not mean that Mozilla as a whole is now targetting technophobes.

Also, Focus has surprisingly been adopted by tons of power users. As a result, Mozilla is now very much working on features for non-technophobes, like tabs, and power users, like Tor support.
If you look really closely at the 20 to 30 age group, much of their creativity is a rehash of old ideas, many of which were shown to be lacking when they first came up. They are successful now not because they are good ideas but because those who support them don't know their history and the consequences thereof. In addition many in that age group has less creativity than those who are older.

Following trends and fashions is a common failure amongst people. Just because something has become fashionable doesn't mean that it is good.
GNU Guix. It uses code staging a lot, which works best in a language in which you can trivially pass around code as data.

It also demonstrates that Scheme is flexible enough to easily implement features that the language designers did not, such as monads and laziness. While both can be done in almost any language, I think that Scheme's macros allow for exceptionally seamless implementations.
Same here. I really tried to believe that Carl Lewis was not doping, as he was one of my heroes as I grew up, but as the time passes I realize that he was most certainly doping. The same will probably happen to today's kids who grow up with Usain Bolt being their idol.
I just noticed that software patents and employment anti-discrimination laws have some very similar problems. With the performance of manual labor jobs and physical patents the tests tends to be relatively objective, and that was probably what both laws was designed for. With many other jobs and with software patents this is often not the case, making the laws much easier to abuse for example.
Indian Gov sites are too slow and what can we do?
Just as a small note, data backup isn't just for hardware or service failure, it's also for ooops I just deleted my bucket. Yes you can rebuild, but that in my case would take quite a few days and money in compute. That having been said hosted services are actually worse in protecting your self from user error...
When young everything was easy, because you knew so little.
Glad to hear you've been finding Overleaf useful!

Re the business model: we don't rely on the user subscriptions for revenue -- we provide services for institutions (e.g. Overleaf Commons: https://www.overleaf.com/universities) and publishers (e.g. templates and direct submission links: https://www.overleaf.com/publishers#!publisherslist), as well as private cloud / local installs for companies: https://www.overleaf.com/enterprises

(and that allows us to provide a solid free plan that works well for most users, especially those just starting out with LaTeX)

But yes, the "how does it make money?" question was always one we found difficult to articulate well -- we certainly didn't do it in the YC interview! :)
I think PG is making a subtly different point to whether or not free speech should be allowed... He is asking how the architecture of a platform can be used to shape speech without the need for direct moderation.
Uber does indeed need tech leadership as their entire premise is to segue the whole world to electric self driving cars. Their whole valuation is based on this premise, not that they replace taxis.

This valuation has been botched by the recent success of Tesla, Apple, Google, GM and a few more who are developing self-driving technology. The one with the best technology will win the race and probably become the first trillion dollar company.

So, in order to keep Uber competitive, you don't need to keep status quo. You need to invent probably the most meaningful technology of this century, at least of the next decades. This requires deep knowledge in tech, artificial intelligence, being able to find the right people for that, navigating the legal landscape in a.i. ethics (e.g. kill my passenger or kill the two pedestrians), motivating your employees through inspiring leadership and being able to lead your company through the next decades.

Adult leadership as you called it is not it. It might conserve the company as is, but you need a lot more than that to make it succeed.

Kalanick had the competitiveness and vision, however could not control his competitiveness, which lead him to build a toxic company culture. He might have succeeded in making Uber competitive to Tesla & Co. from a competition point of view, however, sooner or later the toxic culture would have made the company fold under the pressure, so the decision to replace him was a necessary one.
Neat idea, but that font isn't suitable for any serious webpage. While we're at it, the design could be much better. You/They have the right ideas with quick switches in the form of tabs, but the whole thing could be polished a lot more while retaining the original simplicity.
I'd really love a good Evernote alternative, but the one feature that tends not to exist is full page bookmarking / web clipping. I want to be able to clip a full page easily into the program, which will also save a copy of whatever article I happen to be reading. I really wouldn't mind (and would even love) to roll my own notes system with vim/etc. But without full page clipping, it would be a problem.

Another good thing about Evernote is the easy ability to mix in images, documents, and text.

The reasons I want to leave Evernote, btw, is:

1. I worry about their future and would rather a more open solution.

2. Their software, at least on Mac, really, really sucks. It's slow, and has tons of incredibly ridiculos bugs that have been open for a long time. E.g. when typing in a tag, if there's a dash, it will cause a problem with the autocompletion. For someone who uses the tags a lot and has a whole system based on them, having dashes cause a problem is a big deal, and the fact that it hasn't been fixed in ~ a year makes me really question their priorities.
F2F conversations are an awful example if you're talking about excluding meanness.
Ethereum's VM is computationally universal, aka Turing complete. You can compute any function.

I'd be happy to help clarify these concepts if I can, but I don't understand what you see is the tension between the halting problem and Ethereum.

Imagine that I run a processor for a certain amount of time, like 10 seconds. We start a stopwatch when we begin executing an algorithm, and then we pause the processor after 10 seconds pass. The processor performs a fixed number of operations each second, e.g., a 1 MHz processor does a million instructions.

If we decide to run a program and stop it after 10 seconds or 10 million instructions, that has no bearing on whether the processor's computational model (or a VM simulating the processor) is Turing complete. Deciding to stop the processor after 10 seconds is an analogy for an Ethereum transaction with "gas" for 10 million instructions.

If you wish, you can think of it as an "external" force is stopping the computation.

The talk that you linked claims that Ethereum isn't Turing complete, but that talk is either: wrong, making a nonsensical distinction, or making an extremely nitpicky distinction (depending on how you want to look at it). By the talk's reasoning, a general personal computer is not Turing complete either. The Turing model specifies a machine with infinite tape, so by the standard of the talk, no machines that humanity has ever made are Turing machines, and none of their execution models are Turing complete, because all of our machines have bounded memory. For similar reasons, the fact that Ethereum executes transactions with a bounded number of computations doesn't influence whether it is Turing complete in a useful sense of the term.

If this hasn't clarified things, then I'd suggest articulating the reason why you think the halting problem matters for Ethereum. The halting problem states that one cannot design an algorithm that determines whether all other algorithms will halt or not. So what? Ethereum does not depend on the existence of such an algorithm. Ethereum doesn't try to predict or analyze whether a program will halt - it simply runs the program and finds out! Since these programs are executed for a finite number of steps, then we know that all programs will halt, either by choosing to halt, or by exhausting their number of allowed steps.

The reason I say that it's wrong that "Ethereum is not Turing complete" is because the amount of "gas" for a transaction, and therefore the number of allowed steps, is arbitrary. You pay for gas when submitting a transaction, and so you can supply as much gas as is needed for any program that you wish to run. Because the user chooses how large the fixed bound is (and pays for it), Ethereum is Turing complete in a practical sense. If you make a mistake and submit a transaction with insufficient gas, then you can try again with a larger amount of gas. Most of the time, you can probably simulate the program yourself locally to determine how much gas it requires ... or you can just provide far more gas than the program is likely to need, since excess gas is returned.