skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His actual income (after Apple and paying the original game creator) was $276k - which replenished the savings he had cashed-out for development time and then gave him several more years of development on sequels/prequels.
That is with dice.

Startups are not independent random events because some people are better at making startups than other people are.
If you haven't seen it, try out the all-in-one tool: https://github.com/google/netboot
go get go.universe.tf/netboot/cmd/pixiecore

It is completly self contained. The user just provides it with a linux kernel image and the initrd image.
I recommend "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman. It's not necessarily about developing mental models, but more about the fallout of how people can mistakenly use systems if you don't make the mental model of your design intuitive.
His budget numbers & supposed savings vs. sabbatical runway shock me. The 401k bit fits his "roll the dice" theme, but should never have been necessary. I can't help but feel we have an unreliable narrator who's not telling us the full story about finances and motivations.

The truth would be so much more interesting and instructive. What setback really led to needing to clock out and cash out? What was really left of that 800k after the app store cut and taxes and marketing and mistakes? Was it only money that pushed him back into the workplace or something more?

Real life is messy and I can see the hole where he cut that part out of his story.
You solder outside unless you've got a great exhaust fan.
Right now there's no in-person scrutiny upon exit, so I don't see how this would cut down the costs.

DHS needs to justify the benefits and costs of creating such a system. That is, is visa overstay travel fraud enough to justify spending $1 billion on a system, and what failure rate is acceptable?

If there are 1,000 cases of such fraud a year, then I don't think it's worthwhile.

While many people overstay their visa, the vast majority are not going to get someone else to depart the country on their passport, which is what this system is supposed to prevent.

Remember, even 10 seconds per passenger adds up. There were 243,195,022 international passengers in the year ending March. Figure 1/2 of them were departures. That's 121 million people.

At 10 seconds per passenger that's 38 years of additional waiting. If we figure everyone's time is worth $7.25/hour then that's about $2.5 million of additional wasted time.

How much fraud do we need to stop to make this time and money worthwhile?

I'd rather spend that money on reducing a much bigger sort of fraud - the tens of billions in wage theft each year.
> Is it really that difficult to work on side projects on your nights/weekends

It doesn't really have anything to do with "large Silicon Valley tech company". I have a life outside of work, friends, family, etc that I spend most of my nights and weekends curating. Working 40+ hours a week anywhere makes it hard to launch something at night without being young and single or sacrificing time with your family.
> incumbants can always be disrupted *

* Given they fail to recognize a technological tipping point

Microsoft won on the PC. Linux won (in the server world) on standards and open source. Google won on tracking and advertising. Facebook won on mobile.
I'll just add in some empirical results. German power has risen to be some of the most expensive in Europe since they started the Energiewende. They have very low wholesale prices (driving the coal producers out of business) combined with very high retail prices (might be top 3 in Europe?).

The high retail price appears to be driven by the mechanisms driving the Energiewende ie transition to wind and solar.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house...

https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-elect...
The Promise and Peril of Bitcoin (2014)
Candy Japan 2017 Year in Review
Slate Star Codex, probably
Is it archived anywhere?
Just started going down this rabbit hole myself. I've noticed to really grasp and develop your own mental models you deeply have to understand a few things first:

1. Human biases: Every mental model is built upon some human bias.

2. How incentives work: Understanding the motivation behind why people do what they do.

3. Mental thought construction: Understanding how the brain gathers, processes and stores information.

4. Biology: How we've evolved (and haven't) from stone age times and how that still influences us today.

This is by no means exhaustive but are just some of the topics I've found most useful. That said, here are the best resources I've found:

- The Art Of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli: Taught me about human biases. Reads like a directory of most biases.

- Influence by Robert Cialdini: Taught me about incentives and a whole lot more.

- Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff: Taught me about mental thought construction.

- Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charles Munger: Taught me about many things but most importantly good decision making.

- Sapiens by Yuval Harari and his course https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE-kxvSEhkzDEmLQx3RE0...: Taught me about how we've evolved as humans and how we haven't.

- Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman: Taught me more about human biases.

- Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely: Taught me more about how and why we make decisions and what good decisions are.

The thing I've really started to notice is it's not enough to know or read about mental models, you have to ruthlessly apply them. This is tough when even knowing about your biases doesn't stop you from still being affected by them.
I would think that hashing the API keys for storage, like a password, is worth it. It's extremely cheap in both development and CPU time because you can just use SHA-256 (high entropy is sufficient to deter brute force), and avoids unauthorized accesses in case of a database leak.
> I assert that naming the interface for the implementation is almost always the wrong thing to do.

I think it's perfectly acceptable if there aren't really any better names for the abstraction you're creating. car and cdr work just fine as made-up arbitrary names for an abstraction that doesn't really have any more natural names for them; the fact that 60 years ago they weren't actually entirely arbitrary doesn't really change that.
Delusions of Success: How Optimism Undermines Executives’ Decisions (2003)
Same with ads.
Are the miners paying the developers so that they don't implement a solution?
That's a vegan vs. non-vegan argument which really has little to nothing to do with whether we ranch reindeer, bison or beef.
I doubt it. Looking at bitcoin mining hardware, from what I can tell is that ASIC rigs cost about $2-5 per Watt of energy consumed, let's say $4/Watt. Since one might guess that the economic lifetime of ASIC hardware is approximately, say, 3 years (and that's being pretty gracious), then the capital cost of your bitcoin mining rig is about 15 cents per kWh IF YOU OPERATE IT CONSTANTLY.

...but if you only operate it the 25 percent of the time that electricity is free or negative or something, then the capital cost per Watt is like 60 cents per kWh.

Residential electricity is about 11 cents per Watt. Industrial electricity is about 7 cents per Watt, and cheaper in places like the Northwest US with lots of hydro power.

So it doesn't really make sense to buy ASIC hardware and idle it most of the time. You're better off paying even residential electricity rates and operating 100% of the time. If you have access to wholesale/industrial electricity rates, then it makes even less sense to idle your mining hardware most the time.

It MAY make sense to idle the hardware if prices spike, but if you're not operating your hardware the vast majority of the time, then you're not operating cost-optimally.

This point is generally true and applies to other proposed demand-response energy-sinks like hydrogen production: if your capital-cost-per-watt of demand is not very low, then it doesn't make sense to idle production. Capital cost of electrolysis should be the primary focus of any large-scale effort to leverage renewably produced hydrogen, or there's no way to compete IMHO.
My issue with replacing something like reddit is... what exactly to replace it with?

Reddit is entertaining and free. Every time I quit, I end up still seeking out entertainment, but it's no longer free. Movies, gambling, restaurants, bars. TV is free but even less entertaining, imo. Books feel like mental masturbation and very few change my worldviews at this point.

My overall conclusion has been that reddit is not that bad of a habit, comparatively.
Here's a funny satirical antidote for "bet the farm" success-story fantasies like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw
NASA has begun plans for a 2069 interstellar mission
My X purchase has zero to do with “status symbol.”

Then it's interesting that you felt the urge to post about it - are you absolutely sure your motivations are what you think they are?
What, exactly, are they going to be suspicious about in this hypothetical of yours? Humans are pretty good at matching up facial features naturally, a black eye and beard aren't going to trip up anybody looking at you.
SCSS-Lint Auto Correct scripts
> punched in the face the day before your flight.

Not a hard thing to have that happen to you these days considering the "pre-flight interview" they're now doing.
It doesn't mean that you've built too much capacity, it means that the producer estimates that his cost of shutting down some of the capacity is higher than just paying to offload the excess capacity and continuing to run at 100%.

That's an important distinction because you're always going to need more capacity, simply because peak use over the day tends to be 2x-3x more than during off-peak.

Whether negative prices are bad for producers depends entirely on the details of their setup. If they run a coal plant it's obviously mostly bad, since they're paying consumers to take their electricity while they're having to pay for coal.

But it's not necessarily going to be the case with other forms of production, e.g. what's the marginal cost of continuing to run a wind farm at 100% capacity v.s. shutting part of it down? Maybe shutting it down is expensive for some reason, and at that point you can just pay consumers to act as a heatsink, and make up the difference during the day.

Now, everything I've read on the topic suggests that excess negative prices are a bad thing today, but that's not some fundamental law.

E.g. let's say that fusion once invented is going to be ridiculously expensive to start up and stop, and can only run at either 0% or 100%, but it'll be cheap to just keep it running once it's started up.

Then you'd expect that there would be negative prices for around half the day, and for both the producers and consumers to be happy with that arrangement, since the alternative for the producer would be to buy a massive heat sink farm to burn off the excess capacity during the night.

Instead they could use the same money as a price signal to consumers to use their existing heatsinks, e.g. running their heating during the night.
And here in western Canada, there are plenty of ranches which raise caribou, and it's very popular in higher end restaurants.

In my opinion caribou is far tastier than moose, however I could definitely see moose being a more thrilling hunt.
the same goes for real life stuff that you don't use on a daily or weekly basis. just get rid of it if you haven't used it in a year.
The obvious choice is to charge a battery, where a "battery" can be Lithium Ion, Pumped Hydro, Compressed Air (see CAES), or even rocks on an train that rolls up a hill during negative-power and rolls down a hill during positive power costs (see ARES).
Yup, that is a good point. I would definitely recommend anyone with the drive and interest in striking out on their own, do so in their early - mid 20's ... Move somewhere really cheap, and make it happen! You won't be able to do that (or it will be very difficult) once you find a partner because their career may be geographically restricted. Even more difficult if you have children.
Yeah, I'm curious about this. This thread has me thinking that it may be in a city's best interest to enact taxes on empty commercial zoned spaces. Something that increases more the longer a space is empty. I'm not sure how you'd avoid malicious compliance with crappy temp phony store fronts, but it otherwise seems like the type of things cities want.
> I'm going to let this one slide

Thanks for your benevolence.
I don’t know and so I ask: how much is the Chinese public opinion against pollution affecting if at all the directives of their government? Is there more public concern ?
Of course this argument is rather useless when taken as the sole metric by which to decide whether and which standards to use, or implementations to prefer. But why would anyone do such a nonsensical thing as that?
assuming it's a pressure cooker I'd worry about the safety features
"The world isn't all English"

But the history of computing largely is (not totally of course, but largely).

If we were discussing sushi, or katanas, or bushido, or netsuke, would you complain about the language being "Japanese-centric"?

If we were discussing grand opera (or, for that matter, having a technical discussion of almost any kind of music), would you complain about the language being "Italian-centric"?
A compromised unprivileged user could download an empty vulnerability list. A compromised root user could download an empty vulnerability list or do anything else root can do.
You are exactly right. Most criticisms of NPS as a system are based on a single component (overall score) or bad execution.
Neural Network Writes Carols
If you work at a big Silicon Valley tech company, odds are that your employment contract says that they own whatever you do on your own time, if it's at all related to anything the company does (not just stuff you work on at the company or using company resources; anything they do).
The top answer nails it: the husband’s only real option is divorce if she refuses to sign, thereby bringing about the very thing he’s trying to avoid.

But I’d guess here’s a good chance she can talk him down, as I’m picturing one of his tech bro’s going, “dude, you totally need a post-nup. This guy I knew...”
And use lead-free solder. Not much to worry about really.
Plan9 (and Inferno, the virtualised descendent thereof) embody a single, unifying abstraction: that everything is a file. This often stated in Unix but (beyond the /dev and on Linux /proc & /sys filesystems) there’s lots of things that aren’t files (the framebuffer, network sockets...). In Plan9 and Inferno if you want to do something to anything all you need to do is know fopen & company.
If you click through to the comment, you can "favorite" it and then it shows up in https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=dukes_haven&commen... which you can also find on your profile page under "favorite comments".
Of course. Frankly - I don't think anyone reasonable thinks trying 10 times at anything that takes more than a couple of years each time is at all a good idea.
I am interested in hearing about this as well.
A bank in Belarus scrapped ML model that was used to issue consumer loans after a year. Initially the model gave better returns, but after a year it was underperforming. The bank went back to a weighted average of few factors like it was before with humans reviewing the weights. In retrospect this is not surprising. The model tries to predict long-term behaviour, but besides few stable factors like profession, income, education human life still rather unpredictable even after averaging hundreds of thousands cases.
I think your parent is saying that when you actually measure whether your claim is true, it isn't actually correlated in the failure case.

I remember reading something that corroborated this [1]. That source claimed that previous founders of successful companies had a much greater chance at additional success, but previous failures didn't increase your chances (ie. you don't, in fact, learn more from failure than success -- at least when it comes to founding failed startups).

Edit adding source:
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=933932
Inside Sony Kumamoto: A rare glimpse inside Sony’s super-secret sensor factory
Well, the main thing constraining the economic lifetime of ASIC mining hardware is that eventually older generations of hardware cost more to in power to operate than they make... but if power costs go negative, that's not necessarily true anymore.
That’s the usual objection whenever I advocate getting off of Facebook: “But I will lose contact with all my friends!” So, how did you contact them before Facebook?

The fear is unjustified. Your actual friends will keep in contact, just like they did before Facebook. I left FB 5+ years ago and by some great miracle I still have a robust social life, and as a bonus am not wasting hours a day scrolling through useless information about the lives of remote acquaintances.
Only it's not similar in any way.
Are you sure it's complete?
Creative Thinkers Toolkit is the best book I read and re-read with regards to mental model formation.
https://www.amazon.com/The-Creative-Thinkers-Toolkit/dp/B00G...
It does not preclude it but it certainly does not make it easier.

I think you suffer from the delusion that the human mind is rational and logical. It can be, under certain limited conditions. But under most circumstances it is a complete mess.
The problem with your assumption is you're "living frugally" not for the ten years to make your portfolio withdrawal rate, you're doing it _for the rest of your life_.

You live on $30K / year (in the Bay Area/NY, where you're most likely to find a starting / junior / midrange position that offers $140K - remembering that needs to be liquid)...

and after your ten years of "living frugally" (and let's be clear, it's gonna be frugal with $2500/month rent for a 1br 600 sqft apartment eating up well, 100% of your after-savings income, so you're going to be rooming with someone)...

That's what you've got for the rest of your life. Your $750K nest egg will give you an 80% chance of being able to supply $30K/year. Sure, now you can use it to work on your own stuff, but until (and unless) that catches on...
But they can auto-format copy-pasted code from Stack Overflow.
Isn't Shanghai an "autonomous" region? I wonder how much this has to do with preventing Shanghai from becoming larger than Beijing.
Hard to give concrete advice without knowing your specifics (how many months/years of savings do you have? Do you have any dependents? Any debt such as a mortgage? Etc).

As other commenters point out, not working a regular day job is probably a starting point, but not sufficient. Traveling
(Or perhaps even living abroad), volunteering, focusing on a hobby you put on hold while you focused on your job are all viable options.
I’d love to see any code/instructions you have for that. Looks like something I was planning on building.
Wouldn’t you want the fadeIn to be parallel to the Ajax fetch?
They are called Promises. Stop trying to use different words to sound smart
What are example real world applications and/or use-cases where number of acceptors must be more than 3 or 5? Thanks.
Good point.

That's why I said it doesn't make sense to /buy/ (new) ASIC mining hardware if your intent is to idle it. But if it's basically free because it's obsolete, then yeah, it may make sense.
> would you complain

I'm not complaining that programming languages use words based on English; my point is about English speakers having bikeshedding quibbles about those words that don't mean anything to non-English-speakers.

Suppose some Italian, due to some Italian reasons, doesn't like something about the music term dal segno or any other term. Why would I care, know what I mean.
I took off almost a year. It was so worth it. I coded every day for 8 hrs a day 5-7 days a week and I was doing it for the sheer love of it. I reconnected with why I love coding.

I also worked out, cooked dinner for my wife, did all the errands, etc. Overall, I was never bored a single day, and I would quit in a heartbeat and do the same if I every made enough money (unlikely). I had saved up a decent amount of money, but that time off cost me about $60,000 and it's not something I can afford anymore now that I have kids, unless I hit the jackpot.
To develop mental models you need to start at the ground floor, with understanding basic human nature.

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...

https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0...
> It absolutely makes sense to insure routine medical examinations. If they’re not covered, people don’t do them.

Then don't call it insurance. Call it what it is: a subscription to a medical service provider.
Small world. I loved this blog when I was young. Its nice to see it again.
Ah, great catch! thanks for sharing
Contents of Address Register and Contents of Decriment Register.

Two instructions on the original IBM that the first LISP imterpreter was written on.

I heard.
Elon Musk reveals his megarocket (submitting Daily Mail link bc good photos)
My understanding is that this is mostly a dangerous myth. Like it sort of works but you really shouldn’t unless you are ok frying the board. I have been sticking with mostly 3V components and have a separate set of rails and transistors to control that side of things.
This is bullshit. I just switched back from Android to an iPhone X and I'm loving it. More than half of the software engineers I work with have iPhones. None of us seem to be particularly interested in 'image and exclusivity'.
If someone wants a gentle and high quality introduction to Machine Learning, I can't recommend "
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow" by Aurélien Géron [1] enough. I wish I had this book when I was starting. It explains everything from data engineering, through how algorithms work, to practical applications. Everything in Python 3, covering pandas, scikit-learn, tensorflow. It is absolutely wonderful!

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920052289.do
It's happening in India, too. And probably other countries (African nations?) without robust Western-style banking and credit systems.
In C++, I often use LHS and RHS (left hand side / right hand side). I know other people who like fst, eat (first, rest). Both seem better to me, as they have some meaning other than random made up strings (for people who don't use 704).
Buying at $8 would be easy. Not selling at $200 would be hard. Not selling at $2000 would be even harder.
Apropos of the value of his comment, I'm sure you can appreciate that there's a difference between grammatical errors of the "don't understand the rules of language" type, and "poor keyboard/typing".
"If you don't know how genes affect intelligence you don't actually have any useful theory to go by. You also don't know how to judge the effect size of genetics against other causes. These are highly non-linear, complex systems we're talking about: brains and their societies. "

What about twin studies?