skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked on Otto's server side software as a contractor for five months. The company had some servers written in C and exchanging messages using a custom binary protocol, designed for millions of transactions per second, when they needed only 2-3tps, readability, and the ability to make fast changes. We rewrote those servers in Go, found and fixed consistency errors in them, and actually got to the point where you could understand the code and deploy changes to it in hours, in other words, we delivered in a big way on what they asked us to do.

The company did not have the money to pay its bills for at least two months before shutdown, finally laying everyone off on December 12. There was nothing to indicate they didn't have money to pay us before then. I probably won't see a dime for the last two months of work. Other contractors took bigger hits than me. In total Otto owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to contractors for work already performed.

I'm beyond upset at the recklessness of the management and the board in this situation. They could have laid off the contractors in October when they realized they did not have enough money to pay all liabilities. They could have explained the situation and offered a bonus in the event of a successful exit.

Instead they said nothing about their insolvency, continued having us working on the (implicit) assumption that they could pay us, and continued gambling with invoices owed to me and other contractors.

If I ran my own company this way, if I just lost customer data or wrote broken code, I would not be in business for very long. Yet in VC land, the board (Reid Hoffman, Josh Elman, Sam Jadallah) will just go to the next venture.

I'm in a hole and looking for work in January, if you or your company needs help. I'm also happy to pass on the names of the other contractors who are getting 86 cents on the dollar for their work in 2017. https://burke.services
Agreed!. They took a chance on hardware

Look at all the companies building the same old SAAS products doing the same old stuff and getting tons of investment.
Where does it say it in Google Photos?

I only see email, with no warning that album will be public.

The Via Sharable link screenshot is from Google drive, which works as expected.
If you love someone you should be willing to give anything up. Anything. Morals, country, God, anything -- let alone, property.

If not, that's ok but it's not "love" in my book.
I want to write a bot that analyzes all of the Stack Overflow posts by Brian Goetz(https://stackoverflow.com/users/3553087/brian-goetz) and count every time he's responded to "Should I...." / "Which is better/faster..." questions with "just write the code that is simplest and easiest to read".

It must be in the hundreds by now.
Same thought. It sure is more relaxed and nicer, but how can you have a well functioning society this way?
These articles really do change the conversation in Washington, when the byline is someone like George Schultz. We don't expect to hear this sort of thing from a member of the Nixon and Reagan administrations. In fact, it's not common to hear it from the Clinton and Obama administrations. But if it were from a Green or a Libertarian, it wouldn't reach the NYT op-ed page because it'd be uninteresting, and nobody in Washington would talk about it.
The tech is here now, and we’re in real trouble without solid laws around this.

People who would be interested in the misuse of this technology aren't, as a rule, interested in whatever laws you might think appropriate for regulating it.
Make successful daily deal website with important insights
A Momentum Conserving N-Body Scheme with Individual Timesteps
I always bring this up whenever copyright extension is mentioned: Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants" [1], a worthwhile read on the effects of a super-long copyright extension. The story itself is under a Creative Commons license.

[1] http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
Second Google result for "alexa control standing desk" should help you, or Reddit.
> It's pretty hard for me to tell how to engage Trumpism.

How about start with a list of Trump supporters concerns?

Then try and understand why they are concerned.

To force yourself to be honest try and argue in support of some of their key positions.
I highly disagree. Implementing an AI requires being able to work effectively in chess notation. Either you can choose long algebraic notation, which is pure squares (which can be encoded/decoded into a move type) or short algebraic notation, which requires knowing piece types (which is an AND between a bit representing the square and piece type bitboards) and being able to differentiate between multiple attacks to a square (which is an AND between the move square and attacks by other pieces of the same type).

This is complicated by the two approaches not being apples-to-apples, however.
Implementation is hosted here: https://bitbucket.org/qirong_zhu/taichi_public/
When you picked your original door, you had a 1% (1 in 100) chance of picking the winner.

Consider the 99% cases that you got the original choice wrong. Then the host has no choice, he must close all doors but the winner. So 99% of the time, the host is forced to leave you the winning door.

The other 1% of the time, you chose the winner, so the host can do whatever he likes.

But 99% of the time (99% of the times you play this game) the host is going to be obligated to close all but the winning door.
The description in the article is

> The contestant must pick a door, and then the host opens one of the two doors the contestant didn't pick, to reveal a lemon.

I'm not a native English speaker, but I think this is ambiguous between "to reveal a lemon" specifying the reason or the outcome. At least I seem to remember constructions like "They tried again and again, only to fail each time.", which obviously aren't about motivation.
How does it feel? As a german I can't imagine it.
It seems like future may locate the point where America began it's decline with Nixon's war on drugs (though that definitely first of America's wars on substances).
The fact that we are having this conversation across time and space shows the power of Lick's "Intergalactic Computer Network". We have reasons to be optimistic.

On the other hand, on top of the computer hardware/software communication layers where this conversation takes place, there is a profound layer that we seem to take for granted and not consciously aware of (like fish in the water), i.e., written language composed and consumed by real human being (English in this case). To communicate effectively with this distributed (non-local in space) and asynchronous (non-local in time) layer, we need more contexts other than the words themselves. In Rob Pike's Bell Labs and Alan Kay's bean-bag-chaired PARC, local synchronous face-to-face communication would be much more effective because the audience were from the same background and shared the same context.

Let's take a look at the contexts of Bret Victor's blog post "Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails". These are excerpts of private written communication (emails) between Alan Kay and Bret Victor. We could imagine what Alan had in mind when he wrote those emails, or what Bret had in mind when he read them, further more, why Bret made those excerpts and posted them on his blog. However, since we were neither Bret nor Alan, we can only read them within the constraint of our own contexts. We can only guess what message Bret wanted to send with his blog and we are not even sure we (HN community) are his intended audience.

I am sure there are some YC funders reading this and the fact that we don't see any of them making a statement here shows that they are also under the constraint of their contexts. So I guess the challenges and solutions to funding of research lie upon these contexts as well.

It is all about pink and blue planes.
Reading it now, thanks!
Yeah it feels sort of retrograde, mentioning Portugal for some peripheral point but not mentioning its actual policies that would involve anything but Prohibition.
Measuring Perceptions of Uncertainty
Seems unlikely Netflix would sell right now or anytime soon. Their current growth, at least in content, seems to be exponentially increasing; doubt they are anywhere close to their peak.
Looking at it from the odds of losing side made it much clearer for me. Thanks!
I usually love it when some is late because it gives me some time to relax/prepare before meeting them.
I don't think others in my culture (Germany) view it the same and can understand that it's very annoying if someone is late to an important event, however.
Humble Book Bundle – Python (Packt)
I like having tests but I would bet if you audit you production stack it's very likely that a very large portion of it does not really have tests yet is prob most stable part of your stack like Linux kernel etc.
Irreverently, fuck this attitude instead.

Silicon valley is chock full of know-nothing delusionals who love the smell of their own farts a little too much. People who're convinced that their idiotic pilgrimage towards delivering a "magical" "experience", while completely divested from common sense and lacking any semblance of an answer to "but why?", will nevertheless change the world and "delight" users.

Fuck all of it.

Here's what this genius has to say: "...the software team challenged themselves to complete the full user experience so that our customers would fall in love with the way they engaged the product and actually experience joy as they used it."

Huh?

Whatever. Let's put a chip in it.

I've never EVER had an interaction with a motherfucking lock where the lock was even the subject of my consideration, let alone worthy of delighting me. Usually when I'm unlocking shit, I'm focussed on what lies beyond the lock.

There really IS such a thing as solving the wrong problem. I'd say all the engineers who joined this foolhardy project deserved what came their way, but unfortunately most of them were probably young engineers desperate for experience or a chance to work at a "startup".

This fucking internet of shit trend cannot fucking die soon enough.
The Linux way - use "cat /dev/urandom"[0]

Also here is cool simple shell script - "noise.sh"[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11238247

[1] https://gist.github.com/rsvp/1209835
It definitely triggered very negative developments like mass incarceration.
At least the employees were paid for each day that they worked. At least five contractors were not paid for work dating back two months.
Thanks for this! These notes are incredibly useful and makes me want to read some of these books I haven't read before. It's also a great reminder of books I have read in the past and need a quick refresher on.
What does Dread Pirate Roberts trial have to do with legalization?
https://www.youtube.com/user/CarlSagan42

a gaming stream edit dump where the vast majority of videos are of mario maker

the creator, carlsagan42, is a molecular biologist, post doc, working on ways to develop vaccines using plants.. a topic, among others, discussed on stream

the videos are edits of a once a week ~3-5 hour live stream

the community surrounding mario maker is really great with a ubiquitous quality of laughing off failure and mounting obstacle to overcome that resonates with me

one way carlsagan42 is noteworthy is in the way each level is approached experimentally while vocalising the inner monologue describing what is being done and why

i have spoken about one element of what is great about mario maker on this forum in the past(o)(i).. mainly parallels to algorithms

but there is so much more to appreciate beyond the game engine itself and the level makers' manipulations thereof

different level makers have different personalities that come through in their level design and it is fascinating how often and consistently makers develop new creative ways to utilise the finite tools of the mario maker engine

whether it be: the tightly complex one screen puzzles of seanhip2, or the trolling exploration of jon, or the glitch induced brilliance of psycrow, or the expansive puzzles of pinkbirdo, or any of the awe inducing creativity and 'kaizo' madness of the entire community, or even the surprises and 'hot garbage' of 'super expert'; culture emits

(o) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675970

(i) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15067544

i'd recommend searching for the carlsagan42 videos with the makers and 'keywords' mentioned above because the playlists are often incomplete or simply too broad of categories to address the makers individually

that said the playlists can be an easy place to start and determine if the community is something you want to explore further:

'Puzzle Level' playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UxOBEr3SXs&list=PLbsPvOo5P-...

'Cool Levels' playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj1-q4E4PuQ&list=PLbsPvOo5P-...

'Super Expert' playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIf4Piq8I9k&list=PLbsPvOo5P-...
They have literally zero dollars in the bank. They have not had enough money to cover their liabilities since at least October.
Why can't they just?
For a platform to provide scaling, it pretty much has to provide proprietary services if those services are to scale as well. AWS proves this point, with their proprietary elastic block store, elasticache, SQS, SMS, etc). I don't know Azure at all, but I'd be very surprised if it's scalable services weren't proprietary too.

So I hold that it is the scaling that locks you into GAE, but only to the extent that you desire scaling. Scaling gives you redundancy and reliability too, don't forget.

> GAE -> easy to get in...very hard to get out!

If your codebase is really 70% datastore API calls, I'd strongly suggest writing your own wrapper so you can change datastore by updating a few primitives. But in any case, GAE is no harder to get out of than any other scalable platform.

> and expensive...

We run three services with millions of users, for about 250 USD per month. Given a single dedicated server starts at $75 USD per month, and that we'd need at least four servers for redundancy and scaling, and that we'd need to hire a system architect/administrator for say ten hours a month to maintain them, I think GAE is excellent value.

> and risky...

You don't say why you think GAE is risky. In terms of uptime, our experience is that it is an order of magnitude more reliable than AWS or Azure. The other risk people sometimes suggest is that Google will discontinue the platform, but Google seems strongly committed to Appengine and Appengine has a three year deprecation policy for any part of the service.

> it's not worth it

We obviously disagree on this point. I would accept "it's not worth it if you will never need scaling and are happy to do your own system admin for free".
My dictionary has ornithopter as "a machine designed to achieve flight by means of flapping wings."

Looks like Merriam-Webster agrees:

> "an aircraft designed to derive its chief support and propulsion from flapping wings"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ornithopter
>>The issue with PoS is that it just makes the rich richer, the more coin you already have, the more reward you'll get.

You're neglecting the fact that everyone can stake their ETH, whether they hold a bit or a lot.

The rate of return on all staked ETH is equal, so the rich don't see their total ETH grow faster than the poor. While it does grow in absolute terms, their holding stays the same size relative to the total ETH supply, which will grow at the same rate as their own holding.
It's good this happened, else we'd have another Juicero on our hands.

Ridiculous price, beautifully over engineered product, a slight update to a centuries old problem, but at least they didn't get the opportunity to burn up as much investor money as Juicero.
It’s $100 for 5 years for both programs...I think anyone who can afford a plane ticket could afford this if they wanted to.

If anything you’re agreeing to speedier service in exchange for reduced privacy through greater surveillance on your travels.
This is not what Tesla has ever done. Only a small fraction of people pay a large deposit for super-premium cars that come out first, and the rest pay a limited deposit.

On the other hand, just about every Kickstarter ever has a ton of people who've paid in full. Yet these Kickstarters frequently fail, because it takes a lot more money than entrepreneurs expect to ship a quality product.
I retract my statement that it's unambiguous. The article leaves the possibility that the host didn't know where the car was and revealed a lemon only by chance. In this case there's no reason to switch doors. The host has to know where the car is and always reveal a lemon.
While at some times she seems to be rambling or making no sense(she over uses the words doing, everything), her point rings true to me. You need idle time to understand yourself.

I have seen other sources say that kids need downtime. To just use their imagination. Constantly having your eyes glued to TV or your phone does not make a healthy person.

She also mentions that people make the mistake of 'over-doing'. Which I also agree with.

While I feel like she could have made her case clearer and cleaner(although she was writing to a child so maybe this is perfect), I agree with her.
So what if he wasn’t there the entire time? Why are you trying to attack his credibility?
The article is riddled with typos. Coupled with the exaggerated claims that "All shared photos are public" leads me to believe this was written purely to get internet points.
I didn't get Markov chains until now. Thanks OP!
A traditional and effective measure against urban rat populations is stray cats. But for whatever reason people in the west won't allow that anymore.
so you're running a build server?
It may be because in the EU (and The Guardian is a pro-EU UK news organisation), Google is up before the regulators on more than one case, for example recently receiving a record fine from EU authorities that runs into the billions of dollars. They don't appear to have been randomly chosen, but appear to be the European most-wanted in terms of multinational tech companies accused by authorities of abusing their power.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/11/google-ap...
GP is saying the radiation is emitted by the component package itself, i.e. the random decay of particles in the ceramic surrounding an IC can cause errors.
It May Be Too Late to Eliminate the Carried Interest Loophole
I'd heard a lot of good things about JBP and my first experience of him was his first conversation with Sam Harris[0]. His attempt to redefine the word "truth" was frustrating and consequently I've struggled to work up the energy to listen to anything else.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gdpyzwOOYY
A Note from Our New Publisher
> and I understand that IQ measurement is a very unreliable

What gives you the idea that it is unreliable?

It is one of the most consistent and reliable measurements in psychology.

> culturally predicated way of measuring intelligence

In what sense?

In the sense that it is only a good indicator for success because of the way our society is currently setup?

Quite possibly. But I don't see that as a criticism of IQ.

It is really a criticism of the disturbed individuals using "intelligence" as the key driver of human worth.

By the way that kind of thinking is more prevalent with the intellectual elite who visit hacker news than it is of the average alt-right supporter.
Was this angle of Disney’s schenanigans popularly known last time they pulled the stunt?
I really want to use Firefox on my Pixel 2 but the scrolling still feels really chunky compared to Chrome. I hope there's still room for improvement there. I've been really happy with the newer Firefox builds on my MBP.
I think the main thing is that new technology routinely builds on top of old technology. Sure, it would be nice to still be collecting royalties for your 100 year old patent, but you can't build anything new unless you license all the technology that came after it. The cross licensing necessary would simply mean corporations having to shovel vast sums of money to legal firms. It's simpler, cheaper and better for corporations to have patents expire. As another poster commented, we are starting to see large software companies realise the massive downsides to software patents and I suspect that we will see those restricted even further in the next 10-15 years.

For copyright, on the other hand, certain franchises are worth lots of money but there is a limit to how much you can build on past works. Disney could theoretically insert Mickey Mouse into every film they make, but that grows old fast. They have to create completely new stories, characters, etc to make money.

There is very little incentive to cross license most creative works. Even where it is done fairly liberally, for example American comic books, I think you could argue that it isn't necessarily a good idea. Apparently the most lucrative approach seems to be to exploit something while it is popular, then sit on it for 20-30 years before you "reboot" it for the next generation. What the copyright lobby is protecting against is that potential "reboot". They generally don't want it to be used in the meantime.

I think this is one of the areas where the FSF gets things right. It's really misleading (and potentially dangerous) to lump "intellectual property" into a single bin. All of the things commonly referred to as IP are really different in terms of motivations of actors and consequences to society. Would anybody seriously argue for time limits on trademarks, for instance? It would be an interesting world if anyone could sell "Kellog's Corn Flakes" just because the trademark was old ;-).
Thank you, Kevin, for everything you did.
Seems like that's the goal of all companies today - turn everything into a skinner box aimed at directly stimulating the pleasure senses while stimulating a stream of money from your bank account. Maybe it failed because the lock was sold as a one off payment instead of a subscription model, and didn't sync (yet) with a dopamine-dosing brain implant.
> Silicon valley is chock full of know-nothing delusionals who love the smell of their own farts a little too much.

And Hacker News is full of people who lob bombs at everyone who tries and fails because it makes them feel superior for never having tried, all the while vastly underestimating the difficulty of building something meaningful.

Most efforts at building something great fail, so it’s easy to shit on everything and be right 90% of the time and think you’re a genius. The thing that makes Silicon Valley work is that the times when you’re are what really matter. If you say Facebook is overvalued at $3 Billion (as most of HN agreed) you could easily be wrong not just 1x, but 100x.

The world would be much better off with more people trying and failing while using hyperbolic language than having more trolls throwing parties on their graves. There’s absolutely no shortage of the latter.
>Can I do this faster if I don’t write a test? The answer is always no.

I think the answer is mostly no but it's dangerous to think that it's always no.

I've been given many stories in the past for which writing a realistic
automated test would have taken days, manual verification took minutes
and the code was fairly isolated and did not get changed very frequently.

Writing a test under those circumstances is actually a pretty poor investment.
There's no "large political incompatibility between the current players" when it comes to passing out corporate favorable legislation.
Context switches put it into kernel memory, not process memory. That's safe.
Your reaction does not reflect the reality of the situation
I am. You should definitely be able to send messages to piece objects. That's not incompatible with the Board object having a bitboard for its internal representation of board configuration. The piece objects have contextual identity based on the board configuration. Hint: they don't have positional state.