skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2017 has been an intense, yet extremely rewarding year to say the least. This year I learned the meaning of "grit".

- Launched my startup on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/slackpass-2).

- Interviewed with YC, sadly didn't make the cut.

- Had hundreds of of calls and thousands of chats with founders looking to create paid communities.

- Helped many create their own profitable, paid communities.

- Became a solo founder.

- Became profitable enough to cover both business and personal expenses.

- Rebranded to LaunchPass (https://launchpass.com) due to inevitable trademark issues with the use of "Slack" in our name, and plans to expand beyond Slack. (btw Slack has been awesome regarding the transition)

- And plenty more I intend to write about in a "year in review" post I'm working on.

Becoming a founder this year was one of the most challenging, fascinating, and deeply rewarding experiences I've ever had.

Here's to a happy, healthy, productive, and successful 2018

Happy New Year HN!
Maybe they’re bright enough to see that it’s not taken and wasted, but becomes the foundation of their incredibly successful state. Not everyone in every country is blinkered by the ideology of the greediest, in the hope of joining them.
>These points about modifying things at run time are important, and not all Smalltalk programmers do this nor even understand it, simply using it as another language and writing something like C in it.

I don't think that's the case.

For one, the design and semantics of the language and overall environment force you to understand this and leverage those kind of features.

Second, Smalltalk being a niche language, it attracts programmers for its particularities and overall merits, and those are more likely to know and leverage those things than not. It's not like random corporate programmers are told to use Smalltalk and they use it like a C or Java. It's programmers who have sought after Smalltalk against the current trends that are using it today, and those know very well what it is.
Static doesn't mean constant or immutable. One can alter static stuff at runtime in all kinds of languages.
send it to a trusted friend who also has a paypal account ...
Mark your calendars, kids, because someone on the internet just got their mind changed. Specifically the b) part, in that my thinking leaves a big blnd spot to reality. The a) part, meh, not so much, but it gives me words for consideration.
They don't for macOS. And the iOS one is invite-only.
I've been finally making serious progress on my startup, and have been picking up bigger customers lately.

I kind of fucked up and decided to try the whole solo founder thing. I don't recommend it.

I had a few bad experiences with cofounders at previous startups, so my rationale was to wait for the right person to come along. But that never happened... so I decided to just go solo.

Being a solo founder has been by far the hardest thing I've ever done. It's been brutal at times.

So what did I work on in 2017? Keeping the company alive and trying to make shit happen.

I'm now 2 years in, still alive, and 2018 is looking really good.
So how come there aren't uber-apps (ha ha) that can spoof apps, looking to servers like real apps, but protecting users?

Well there are such things, but due to the security model they typically require root access. This is not great because rooting your phone makes it much more insecure.

The other option would be to implement an alternative Instagram app that does not show ads. I assume that Instagram has various measures in place that preclude this.
> Someone gave the kill order and a lot of shots were fired.

I honestly don’t believe anyone gave a kill order, I rather feel (maybe not fairly) that police had guns trained on him and heard gun fire and instinctively pulled without even taking a second to analyze situation. If I’m right (good video footage could help prove the theory), this should scare everyone (but likely won’t).
links/info for 2&3 please! Sounds really interesting.
> I would like to see a machine learning system rewrite JavaScript code to perform better

Well sure, we all want a God compiler.
It's relative; CB's reputation is sterling compared to the other exchanges.
I on two separate occasions had the opportunity to professionally program in Smalltalk. It was very rewarding, and satisfying. One measure was that at the end of an 8 hour day, I was exhausted, as it was full-time programming. No compile breaks for swordplay or other ruminations.

But it did give a different model of the world from a programming point of view.
> IMHO, writing high performance Java code is a lot harder than high performance C/C++.

I haven't had to write high performance (numerical) code in Java, but my instinct is to doubt that it's even possible. There are too many levels of abstraction and complexity, which are constantly changing. Does some JIT heuristic get triggered to specialize a method? Does array bounds-check elimination work in this particular case? Does the compiler allocate this array so that SIMD instructions will work? Will the next minor version bump change everything? With C/C++/Fortran you can look at the generated assembly and either beat the compiler into submission, or write the asm yourself. With Java, I don't see a viable path to success.

This is Lisp's "sufficiently smart compiler" problem with a 2000s makeover.
Entry -17 (-437 - -420) @ 4:43pm-5:00pm PST: Wrote response below. Realized I could use this as a journal & started it by editing and adding metadata. #hnjournal

I registered wwpjd.com, which my partner paid for as a gift to me. I renewed ourfirstmind.com. I'll develop them in 2018 & track my progress in this thread.

-1 (-367 - -366) 5:53pm-5:54pm PST: Updated to add timezone data.
Did not try. I'm only looking in southern Germany and afaik nobody does that here.
The inverse is also true. You're responsible for your own safety while hiking etc. You should have no expectation that SAR will come out looking for you because you've done something stupid that requires someone to help you. [ADDED: And depending on electronics generally is pretty much a gamble.]
Then again it's not static. In programming language semantics, there is a distinction between “static semantics” (e.g., lexical scope, type checking) and “dynamic semantics” (execution). Not having a static semantics (or, rather, having a trivial one) is fine, but it doesn't suddenly allow you to call parts of the dynamic semantics “static”.

What's with kids again not knowing basic computer science?
There are plenty of simpler sources of high quality randomness. The important bit is whitening. Virtually all measurements of anything are not as precise as the number of bits used to represent the sample.

Virtually any sensor measuring real world data will be imprecise in the last 1-4 bits. Take 256 raw samples from virtually any real world sensor, run the raw data through SHA-256, voila, you have 256 random bits that's secure against the overwhelming majority of hackers. Take 256,000 samples, run the raw data through SHA-256, now you have 256 random bits that's secure against the NSA.

Cameras are great for this, but first you have to ensure that you're getting the raw data and not an image processed with HDR or jpeg compression or whatever special sauce Google/Apple do these days, and you also have to test to ensure that the image isn't overexposed. If it's an 8 bit sensor and all pixels are pegged at 255 you don't have useful randomness. Although the opposite isn't true: it's impossible to peg all pixels at 0. You'll always get values of 1-10 or so with the same pixels fluctuating +/- 1 or so, even in a perfect darkroom with perfect insulation from cosmic rays and background radiation.

The average smartphone is packed full of gadgets that could be used to generate random data after running it through whitening. Accelerometers, magnetic compass, capacitance of each pixel of the touch sensor, all the radio antennas pulling atmospheric noise, (CDMA, GSM, GPS, bluetooth ...) microphone, camera...

The lava lamps themselves might make the process more efficient, because now some of the higher order bits are random as well. But honestly, from a realistic security standpoint... they're just as well off taking pictures of a blank, uniformly lit white wall. As long as they do whitening properly.

edit: It's still super cool though. Just not... in terms of temperature. It's probably really hot.
Have been too busy building it.

Started with 20 students, they performed remarkably well, started adding classes each month, got into YC and raised a large seed round, solved 2 or 3 other problems that hadn’t been solved before, and now we’re ready to open the gates to more people (our acceptance rate right now is right around 2%)
> seeing severe signs of the social contract breaking in the United States.

The problem in the US is that the higher echelons don't believe that they should be part of that social contract. the social contract doesn't slip if everyone pays their fair due -- including those rich desk pigs who prefer to fatten their bonuses instead of upping their worker's salaries.
You're charged by memory utilization and compute time.

The number of others using it at the same time has no bearing on price.
I believe Pinboard.in offers these features.
I wrote a few free SaaS-like services that combined have over a million users. Sadly, due to the nature of them / the "niche" that they're in (LOTS of competition in this space...), monetization is incredibly hard so I don't profit a ton - maybe a few hundred dollars per month.
1. I was genuinely sharing what I did this year, was not hoping for any positive financial outcomes.

2. Integration with non-profits donations is not trivial. After registering as a non-profit, it takes some time for the list of registered non-profits to propagate through to donation tools (facebook, gofundme, etc). Sometimes, I have to fax in documents to prove legitimacy, and it takes a few days for that to process. I could easily create a gofundme for "help me do x" in my name instead of the non-profit's, but I didn't want to do that.

Hope that clears things up.
Why do that when you can wreck a security engineer’s vacation?
Yes. What does the fact you could do it on your own matter? You can't be bothered to even describe your idea. Why should anyone care to pm You? You never said you wanted to keep it private, you explicitly said your couldn't be bothered to describe it...
I find that statements like this serve only to reflect the writer's nostalgia.

The Playstation/Saturn/N64 generation wasn't even mentioned despite being the one to introduce 3D games which are still being perfected and laying the foundation for the mechanics that are still the basis of almost every single game coming out today.
I don't understand why Apple doesn't have a well-funded bug bounty program. You would think that companies would welcome people finding bugs in their software. Hell, they could give away free MacBook Pro laptops, phones, and IPads along with CASH!!!
As long as you don't try to sell me anything I'm always happy to chat.
It would be interesting if this could be quantified into a hard number- the damage hype does to the overall market, by disillusioning players.Seems marketing is not a victimless crime after all.
No mention of disclosure, reporting, or CVE in the entire article :-(
On the other hand, it could teach a good lesson on technical debt?
So what’s the tradeoff? Is this strictly superior to PoW?
Thank you, I'm on the same page. And you are correct that NPO takes longer and is a more complicated process, but we are diligently working to make it happen.
I really can't see how he thought this would be a successful negotiation. "Don't negotiate with terrorists." If the prison gave him special treatment that would establish a precedent. Subsequently, other prisoners would attempt to negotiate special treatment. If the activity were solely restricted to "pen-testing" then it might be a net positive, however, since we are dealing with known criminals here it does not seem likely that things would go well in the long run.
My wife and I worked remotely (~4 days a week) and we traveled the world. South east Asia, Europe, US and back via Asia to end the year home in Australia. It was an awesome year, saw some incredible places and also got to work on some interesting Dev projects. I had a chance to get a few open source PRs through to a Python CMS and towards the end of the year got invited to join the core development team. Getting more involved with open source has been lots of fun, seeing how bigger teams work together and also actually contributing some complex (for me) fixes has been great.

Fixed: Spelling
It already works with Instapaper too, I just explain it as a Pocket to Kindle service because that's what people use the most these days.

Personally I use Instapaper more for reading because of all the premium features being free and keep Pocket in sync using IFTTT for their good recommendations.
That's why they're calling it a 0day, because they haven't done any of those things.
AI is truly taking over.

Over-engineering solution: Feedback the reviews from customers to a ML algorithm that have for inputs the actual pizza, time, and photos of food from the customer Instagram to truly make the best pizza each time.
I'm actually speaking from experience here. I used Smalltalk during the resurgence of the mid-nineties, and I programmed professionally in it at two different companies. The first was where I learned the language, and it was staffed by the type of programmer that did not really understand the interactivity of the system. They really did write a lot of stuff that looked like C, translated into Smalltalk syntax. Not completely, there were some objects, but they did not really get it.

I had to learn the interactivity stuff from people at the other company, which was staffed by people who'd been Smalltalk programmers for quite a while, and also people who had experience with other dynamic languages, particularly Common Lisp. That was where I really learned how to do the interactive stuff I mentioned above.

You might consider Smalltalk niche now, but in the short period of time before Java came around, it looked like Smalltalk was the future of enterprise computing. That is the period I am specifically talking about.
$31.21 including tip and delivery for me in Manhattan. I just priced a random pizza from dominos.com with three ingredients and that came out to $26.38 total, so it sounds like the roulette.pizza prices are a result of them adding a lot of toppings to a pizza (5-6?). You can also get a large pie from a place that's truly excellent (like Joe's Pizza) for less than $30, though I don't know if they deliver.

It's definitely not worth it from a price perspective. The best deal at the moment, if ordered directly from Dominos, appears to be 2 Medium 1-Topping Pizzas, 16 Piece Parmesan Bread Bites, 8 Piece Cinnamon Twists, a 2 Liter of Coke, and a $1 donation to St. Jude for $19.99.

roulette.pizza could use some better price-optimization mechanics, like fewer toppings (it's really diminishing returns past the first few), picking a pre-made pizza randomly, or even being able to randomly order whatever Domino's deal of the moment happens to be, like that St. Jude offer.
There is a small but growing movement in PL academia to study programming experiences rather than just programming languages. Many of us are basically cyborg programmers these days, reliant on our tools and information resources for increased productivity.
"Responsible Disclosure" is an Orwellian term concocted by vendors to control the actions of independent vulnerability researchers who work without real compensation, using information freely available to consumers, in competition with malicious attackers.

The term you're looking for is "Coordinated Disclosure". Yes, Coordinated Disclosure would involve sending the bug to Apple and waiting for them to publish it.

If you'd like to complain that this disclosure is irresponsible, fine. But try not to do it using the vendor's marketing term, because it's not up to them to decide what is and isn't "responsible". Other reasonable people --- myself included --- will probably disagree with you, and say that getting information out to people as comprehensively as possible is usually the most responsible thing you can do with a security bug.
"It will be illegal to ask prospective employees for their salary history"

Interesting - haven't we all been asked that?
> Teams like Occulus are falling down the same trap as 3DO

Did you try any game like Lone Echo? It's so good it's the only game I broke my "not buying exclusives" rule with (I have a Vive). I paid for about 30-40 VR games in Steam, so it's not exactly a 3DO.

It's spelled Oculus, by the way.
Not only do you need to "stake" your eth for ~a year or so (as is currently proposed), but if you do not act in good faith you burn your entire stake. This incentivizes you to act in good faith. With PoW, you act in good faith since the cost to 51% the network is very high when measured in compute power and electricity, but can be done multiple times and the cost may be worth the end result. The cost here would definitely not be worth it and would not be repeatable.
> The bottleneck seems to be Americans. I live in Canada

This must be the case[1], I keep hearing self-checkout lines being slow but they are always the quickest way out of any store in almost every self-checkout store I've been to in southern Ontario.

[1] maybe a combination of the design of the local systems and the experience of the users, the penetration is quite large in the downtown city I live in, so people tend to be very quick
Thanks.

I feel slightly less embarrassed at having spent three months and counting on Pong.
I agree. Considering that giving away a dev style laptop would be a nice reward, it’s weird that they do not leverage their products as reward.

High spec MBP + some cash goes a long way. Even engrave the freaking laptop to make it “sough after”.
I started this year making tools for the team, then I got put on a project where I mocked up an AR experience using VR hardware ("AR in VR").

Then I programmed the Lightsaber combat in an officially licensed Star Wars AR game. Pretty good on the professional side this year.
I spent a good deal of my spare time on a side project in 2017: https://www.contabulo.com

I'm actually removing all the "Coming Soon" verbiage from the landing page tonight. It's (at least in a mimimally viable sense) ready to go now :)
"...turned out Apple PR channel is much more responsive than product security [...] No wonder nowadays people just throw security issues on Twitter right? What a world we live in."

— https://medium.com/@khaost/your-home-was-not-so-secure-after...
There is a real difference between wanting variety and wanting flawed goods. Mass production is great for mass producing, but not so much for making unique items. We eat food prepared by a chef not because it is flawed compared to McDonald's, but because it's an experience that can't be mass produced.
You sound not entirely unlike someone who gets to sleep at night by telling themselves they only designed them guidance system for a missile, or the fuse for a mine. Hopefully it’s that... the alternative is the absence of a conscience.
It was affectively EA’s console, they tried to support it well. And it was obviously WAY more powerful than the 16 bit machines.

NeoGeo at least had an argument, it was literally an arcade board you could buy at home. To the group of gamers who wanted that stuff there was a strong reason for it to exist and an explanation for its cost.

If they had gotten a couple of killer titles maybe it could’ve done better. Or if the price had fallen faster before the system was declared “dead“ by the public. But by the time that happened it was just too late.

$700 was three SNESes and a game or two at the SNES launch price. But this was three years later so you could probably buy a few more games.

It was just an obscene amount of money, especially for what was still considered a “kids toy” until more into the PS2 and XBox.
Hot code replacement (smalltalk’s fix and continue) is available on many platforms these days (Java since forever, MS C# and C++ for awhile though it was broken for a few years). It is strange that most JavaScript dev environments lack this.
Make vegetarianpizzaroulette.com
The standard answer for where to refer people to so they can buy or sell some coins without even a hint of shadiness or fly-by-night is Coinbase.

That doesn't mean that they're perfect, or that nothing ever goes wrong; it means that they're the highest-reputation exchange available, and that their primary selling point is that reputation.

Also, people happy with something post about being happy far less often than people angry with something post about being angry, because the latter have a problem/grievance to solve.
Ask HN: How would you improve Facebooks Event feature?
Unsurprising for Dominos. In the UK their pizzas are consistently 2x the cost of a good takeaway pizza, or 3-4x the price of something equivalent to Dominos in quality. They only exist because of brand recognition.
After a 10-years-or-so hiatus I finally got back at composing music, and completed 29 songs and 4 albums, this fall only: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4nxDh1lPq0EclBPMNXnYa3 and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgNm_EwMyLBrKp_kmdU3XoA. Doing this in parallel to going through a divorce with three kids has been quite a ride.
Another difference between e-bikes and scooters is that e-bikes do not require a license to drive while scooters do. One of the reasons for the speed limit on e bikes is to avoid this license requirement.
The Mysterious Case of the Linux Page Table Isolation Patches
The previous poster may be confused by the fact that App Engine Flex does not have a free tier. For the record, here are the Standard Edition free tier quotas: https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/always-free-usage-limits#...

And you can trivially ensure you never exceed them simply by setting a $0 daily budget. (Although I recommend setting a low but non-zero cap instead, so your app doesn't go down if there's a legit but unexpected traffic surge.)

Disclaimer: I work at GCP.
Thanks for taking the time to come back and respond. I'm going to try to get it under control for the new year. I'll check out that Dr Drew link.
Can’t speak for parent, but agree with some of what they said. And no, I don’t think those people’s livelihoods ought to be beneath human.

I assume that most people who have those kinds of jobs don’t want those jobs. Rather they need them given the way we’ve structured our society. Those without skills valued by the marked are essentially forced to exchange long hours of menial labor for their survival. Isn’t that more sad?

I think this is why so many folks on HN like the idea of the universal basic income.
In the United States people making 250k plus, ~the one percent, pay ~54% of the income tax [1]. Poor people, approximately the bottom third, pay nothing in income tax.

I too want poor people to earn and have more money but it doesn't seem true that the rich aren't paying their fair due.

1 - https://taxfoundation.org/new-irs-data-wealthy-paid-55-perce...

Edit: To the people downvoting me, please clarify why. From my perspective I'm directly addressing a point in the conversation with a legitimate source. I don't see why this should be downvoted, so please clarify for me.
I don't have any other source of income. I had a pretty good paying job for the past year and managed to save one year worth of savings. I can survive with what I have until June (I think). I'm doing my best to create something that helps at least a few people, and maybe get some money from that too.
Even if I don't, I have already learned and practiced so much more skills than I could if I had a full time job and that makes it worth it.