skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chelsea Manning to run for Senate
He felt something, near the end. Put yourself in his shoes. Speculation is all we can do, if we're serious about trying to prevent this in the future.

Giving people an outlet is important. The people who reached out to me often felt cornered, for one reason or another. Isn't it reasonable to suppose Aaron felt the similarly?

If people feel like they're allowed to open up about their issues, it can really do some good. But that won't happen by trying to hush people.

Readers: If any of you are considering any extreme action, contact me first. I'll listen. And I won't judge you. I know at least one of you has had similar thoughts. So reach out instead.
It reminds me of this story from Thomas Watson of IBM:

A young executive had made some bad decisions that cost the company several million dollars. He was summoned to Watson’s office, fully expecting to be dismissed. As he entered the office, the young executive said, "I suppose after that set of mistakes you will want to fire me." Watson was said to have replied, "Not at all, young man, we have just spent a couple of million dollars educating you."
It is funny because this guy also fundamentally doesn't understand how Basecoin works.

"If the price of 1 BASE is above $1, the blockchain prints new $BASE to holders of “BASE Shares” (mother of god), a standalone cryptocurrency which is issued in the genesis block and held by early adopters, which then distributes new Basecoins to them as a “dividend.” Holders of “BASE Shares” are free to either hold onto their Dividend-Basecoins (thus not bringing the price down) or sell them into the market, pushing out the supply curve and bringing down 1 BASE’s price. This process continues until the price of 1 BASE drops to $1."[0]

Actually, the Basecoin will first go to the Bond holders. I think there are reasons to be skeptical of Basecoin and stable cryptocurrencies, but this guy's "articles" don't really seem to touch on those.

https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/10/13/basecoin-bitshares-2-ele...
I'm very glad I'm not a student in the USA. In Germany, almost all universities are owned by the state, which means study fees are about 700€ per year - transportation ticket already being covered.
And if your parents have low income, the state will give you a grant of which you'll have to pay back only by half.
I know that this might be a unpopular opinion over here, but there are a lot of fields which are important for a society while offering a relatively low income. In USA's system, these become luxury goods. Fields like Ecology, philosophy, history, education or cultural studies suffer.
I find the idea "it doesn't yield a lot of money, thus it's useless" weird, but that might be a cultural difference.
There is a disconnect between hard economic data that NPR talks about and media/marketers/financial analysts like HSBC talk. So a person hustling wares on a moped for 12 hrs a day, making $2-3K per annum is poor enough to not file for income tax. But for media hype generators if that person ate out at McDonalds on his kid's birthday, he would be the face of new, confident, aspirational middle class who enjoys international cuisines.
Actually, the people I have know that had issues, should be in positions of authority.

So many are not given the chance to get back on track, or retreat from it all together.
this kills the battery though
This was (probably still is) the best approach at AWS in the early days (source: I worked there from 2008 to 2014). Never blame the person, find out why he/she did the mistake and make sure it doesn't happen again.
The problem is not the employee who pushed the button. It's whomever designed a system with no checks and balances against a single human operator's error, given the severity of the outcome.

No way we should accept errors like this as some sort of blameless par for course in software engineering. Especially as SV grows more and more into life-critical systems like autonomous vehicles. If there was deep incompetence in architecting a system like this then yes, potentially the employees responsible for that architecture could be disciplined. If the responsible employees were too junior to design appropriate safeguards correctly, then the finger points at the managers who set up the team that way.

It sounds like the parties to blame here lie somewhere in the management chain between the poor unfortunate button-pusher and the director of all emergency management for Hawaii.
False Alarms of the Apocalypse
Ask HN: How much should I sell my company for?
Hi,

I want to sell my wearable SaaS company but have no idea what its worth. Here is the summary of it:

Corporate: We founded the company 2 years ago. We focused on the LatAm market as a proof of concept. We are 2 founders and 2 investors. We all have 25%. We are willing to sell all of it or a percentage depending on the offer. We can also remain in the business if deemed necessary by the purchaser.

Product/Service:

- Its a GSM/GPS portable panic button, connected to a 24/7 assistance service.

- We began sales about 6 months back, and currently, have 368 paying clients.

- Each client pays $15 month. LTV = $250 USD.

- Churn rate <3%

- We invest in about $1,500 in google adwords a month, and acquire about 80-100 new customers per month.

Financials:

- Burn rate = $9,000 USD per month (without founders paying us salary). This is mostly for the call center and the GSM data payments.
- We have about $120,000 USD worth of products in stock.

Technology:

Modern, agile stack > Ruby on rails / Twilio / Amazon EC2
We can manage the assistance of the service end from anywhere in the world thus lowering dramatically the costs.

Why are we selling? Investor 1 is thinking old school and wants to build a local team of sellers and do door-to-door. We think this must be an analytics first, SaaS-oriented business and as such, we should focus on keeping our churn rate low, customer acquisition costs, etc. Unfortunately, we personally dont have money to buy out this investor and my co-founder is burned out by the entire power struggle with him.

How much should I sell this company for? Thanks for the feedback!!
GFE? SRE?
I'm pretty sure curl is also an alias for iwr.
The head is the larger whole just not physically. Conceptually.
If a group wants to peg a coin to the dollar, why don't they just issue coins for $1, put that directly into a savings account, and allow redemption of any coin for $1?
Show HN: caffeine9 – Keep your Cloud9 workspaces awake
Social Live Music Startup (pre-launch) | Austin, Texas | Back-End Engineer (Python/Django) | Full-Time | ONSITE strongly preferred, will consider REMOTE for an ideal candidate | Salary + Equity

We are building a social platform that revolves around live music events. We are a team of 6 looking for an additional back end developer to join our team. Our web app is launching in the coming weeks and our mobile app in the next few months. We are seed-funded and will be raising another round of capital this year.

At least 1-2 years of experience with Python is required (preferably experience with Django). Our ideal candidate would also have front-end experience with React and/or React Native. Having experience working in early-stage startups is a plus; having an interest in live music is a huge plus.

We have a strong preference for a local candidate or someone who would be willing to relocate in the near future, but we will consider highly qualified remote applicants who live in North America. We are offering both salary and equity for a full-time hire. We will consider part-time arrangements if you are a student based in Austin.

Please email legette26@gmail.com to apply, and include any relevant links (resume/LinkedIn, Github/Gitlab, etc.). We are hiring for this position ASAP – the earlier you get your application in, the better.
Can it load books bought at Amazon?
Ortiz continued to pursue the case, comparing Swartz’s transgression to that of a common thief. The lead prosecutor on the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann, compared Swartz to a rapist who had “revictimized” MIT by not taking a plea bargain, according to a later MIT investigation. Heymann was also bothered that Swartz launched a “wild Internet campaign” in his own defense. (He had not done so.)

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/carmen-ortiz-us-attorne...

Swartz’s attorney Elliot Peters accused Massachusetts assistant U.S. attorney Stephen Heymann of pursuing federal charges against Swartz to gain publicity.

Heymann was looking for “some juicy looking computer crime cases and Aaron’s case, sadly for Aaron, fit the bill,” Peters said. Heymann, Peters believes, thought the Swartz case “was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper.”

Heymann, the deputy chief of the criminal division in the Boston-based U.S. Attorney’s office, also headed the computer crimes task force there, a position Peters said “doesn’t carry much prestige and respect unless you have computer crimes cases.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-steph...

MIT’s behavior throughout the case was reprehensible, and this report is quite frankly a whitewash.

Here are the facts: This report claims that MIT was “neutral” – but MIT’s lawyers gave prosecutors total access to witnesses and evidence, while refusing access to Aaron’s lawyers to the exact same witnesses and evidence. That’s not neutral. The fact is that all MIT had to do was say publicly, “We don’t want this prosecution to go forward” – and Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz would have had no case. We have an institution to contrast MIT with – JSTOR, who came out immediately and publicly against the prosecution. Aaron would be alive today if MIT had acted as JSTOR did. MIT had a moral imperative to do so.

http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-w...
"Author of this article is a troll" != "Author of this article doesn't have a technical background"

I also have a strong background in the field and the MakerDAO project took me a long time to understand. The author makes several mistakes in his opening paragraph.

I'm not entirely convinced that the project will work as intended, but the author clearly doesn't even understand the basic ideas.
In the past, this person trolled Bitshares to make a name for themselves. They selectively cut'n'pasted snippets of the Bitshares forum as some form of evidence in other posts. There is a ton of context there that was removed. A blockchain can give an asset value, but that doesn't mean every market will guarantee those prices. He is now going after the Maker coin. The guy does well SEOing his website with this rubbish but he doesn't seem to understand much outside of that. oh well, no big deal until google/ycombinator point to him as an authority.
Yeah, SLU lacks culture. I couldn't stand to live there, and during the day working there it's somewhat depressing. I'm also growing tired of the rich culture in cap hill though, which comes with homelessness, addiction, and filth. I'd prefer some metaphorical place between the two.
This blog – A serverless experiment
That's called Tether, and its primary problem is that everyone is taking the issuers at their word that the money is going into a savings account, and that they are only issuing it when they receive $1.
The State of Hawaii is spending time and money suing the feds over several things right now. The politicians in charge would probably love to blame this on someone else. The control room is probably staffed by underpaid state employees who aren't paid enough to take part in a government coverup for no good reason.
I can imagine that from a bureaucratic perspective, buying vitamin pills that have an extremely long shelf life is attractive and gives the veneer of paying attention to the nutritional health of inmates.
Not true. I said it was a drill, you repeatedly averred it wasn't, called me a liar, and I provided 2 sources tos support my claim. In this post you've accused me of lying 5 times, but never get around to stating what these supposed falsehoods are.

Retract your false claims.
I wonder why. Storage disk encryption does not, neither does SSL. Why are VPNs using much more power on mobile?
False. He actually has went and reworked troll posts he made in the past. Thats what this guy does. He has no intellectual integrity. His technical background (calling yourself COO doesn't really count as a technical background)
I don't understand why you are downvoted. The relative openness of Android is the reason something like GNU's Replicant, LineageOS or CopperheadOS (all without Google software) is possible in the first place.

To see proprietary and incredibly locked-down devices such as iPhones advocated for so strongly seems so weird. As if openness and security are at odds or something.
I still don't see why all the scientific paper publishing stuff is allowed to work in the way that it does. I mean, don't a large % of the people doing that research use funding from government grants? If public money was used to produce the research, then the public should have free and available access to it -- we already paid for it.
That's probably just a CYA requirement.

I have 17.10 in a VM and it takes 8,7 GB on the disk, with a few extra apps compared to default install.
What Does a $2,000 Ironing Board Look Like?
The author mentions that he's always discovering new user cases for this, and it does look handy.
I wonder if there are any cookbook/recipe style documents around that showcase some of those?
If you want to go down this particular rabbit hole, then let me say that I think it's more likely this was "us" than "them". Now the whole country is talking and thinking about the effects of a real ballistic missile launch. We got a glimpse at the chaos and mass panic that would ensue.

Tomorrow there will be more people in favor of putting a swift and aggressive end to NK's nuclear ambitions than there were yesterday.
A SPECIAL INTERVIEW WITH IDI AMIN OF BELGIUM, KING LEOPOLD II
Builders’ Solutions for Fixing California’s Housing Crisis
What is their core business then?
Regarding iCloud accounts, Apple seems to be forcing the usage of phone numbers for 2FA and account recovery without an option to disable it. I switched from an Android device to an iPhone recently and was asked to setup an iCloud account. I went through the setup process and realized that my phone number was setup as a 2nd factor with no option to disable it [0]. For all the talk about Apple devices being the most secure, not many people seem to be complaining about how Apple forces a phone number as a 2nd factor + account recovery method. Most people backup very personal data to their iCloud accounts and forcing users to use a phone number for 2FA and account recovery is ridiculous. IMO Google gets 2FA right : I can setup a Yubikey + Authenticator + backup codes and remove my phone number as a 2FA method. And I also realized that there's no way to delete an iCloud account. I assumed all the big companies will have an option to delete accounts. I hope there's a law mandating all online accounts need to have a clearly defined lifecycle with an option to delete accounts and personal data if users want to.

(First time using an Apple device, so I might be misunderstanding the 2FA situation, correct me if I'm wrong.)

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204915
Site Reliability Engineering.[0] Google's SRE book is a pretty interesting read.

0. https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html
Have you read "In Search of Memory" by Kandel? It's half autobiography half exploration of that question. His studies on this topic won him a Nobel, and his life story is fascinating to boot!
In the game, the only place I check the platform is to see how big I should make the screen (like 3 lines). Everything else is shared!
The big news here is that you can use a single codebase (and a nice advanced language like ocaml), and deploy to 4 platforms.
The framework I'm using is called "reprocessing", which is a ~port of the "processing" language to OCaml, targetting OpenGL. It abstracts out the different platforms.
Glancing at the restrictions on firefighter, it appears that they fall under the same set of regulations as police.

One finds things like:

> Ineligible for employment with municipal fire department (mandatory for felonies/crimes involving moral turpitude)

> Any felony; Crime of moral turpitude; Crimes involving fraud, dishonesty, misrepresentation or money-laundering

or:

> Ineligible for employment in the police or fire department (second/third/fourth class cities)

> Any felony; Any misdemeanor

Is that a reasonable restriction?

I am of the understanding that these restrictions are in place so that others can't can't compromise the integrity of one working in that office. Having gambling debts is something that allows people to blackmail or otherwise influence a person.

Looking through that, are there any that are particularly "why is this even there?" that you can point out that fall in the mandatory/automatic for consequence type?
Take a look at the machines available from System 76 in Colorado. They come with Linux installed. https://system76.com/laptops. I have an older model and have been very happy with it. And when it had a problem, they did quick repairs for reasonable prices.
> We don't discriminate for many minor crimes

Well that depends on your definition of "minor crimes" and you have no idea what the person you are responding to has been convicted of a "minor crime"

Further most companies do, even if unstated, discriminate based on criminal history.

>if I Google somebody

You should really stop that... You should not base hiring or any other choices off a google search, you are not getting accurate data.

> or something comes up in a background check that's going to do more damage than if they'd just been up-front about it.

That depends. Losing the job is all you are empowered to do thus it seems to me it is the same amount of damage
You are doubling down on discredited reports. You repeated something false. In doubling down, you are lying. This was not a drill, it was a mistake [1]. Your focus on your ego over the facts doesn’t change that.

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-hawaii-inb...
Cosmos OS is another .NET-based OS toolkit that does this. Here's a video of one of the developers talking about this, and other things: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/On-NET/Chad-Z-Hower-aka-Kudz...
Ostensibly you are not paying Elsevier to access the research, you are paying them because they obtained the right to copy the paper.

That's the loophole that many of the writers use to publish pre-prints from their own homepages. That did not stop the publishers from suing them:

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elsevier-versus-open-access
I would not be comfortable working with people who have committed violent felonies.
The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the Most Disruptive Company
You don’t need to use iCloud. Backups can be done locally.
> Efficiency counts, just not in the web world.

Which regrettably by now even end-users are painfully aware of!
And unless I'm mistaken, the people at Maker never said it was hard-pegged to the dollar. It was a soft peg, so the price could fluctuate here and there, but remain roughly stable.
No, snaps are a completely ridiculous overengineering of the concept. They use a package manager and repositories and paclage format and, from what I can tell, some overlayfs, they don't fit in to the normal file management paradigm... Frankly, they're exactly what you'd expect from the Linux community.

AppImage did it much better and even that's overengineered, but its goal is to work on all Linux distributions (without a package manager or a new infrastructure or anything) and really doesn't do much more than the bare minimum to make that happen. Naturally, the Linux Desktop community largely ignores it for making too much sense.
Equation Editor was developed by a third party and MS probably never had the source code in the first place: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057882/error-when-...
Most likely, but it seems like a single disgruntled individual who disapproved of the state's policy could effect such an outcome. We've seen numerous examples of security-related fuckups over the years that were swept under the rug despite the economic incentives to blow the whistle, so I'm no inclined to completely dismiss the possibility.
The prosecutors were in the wrong, but they did not kill him.
Reason code can indeed be compiled to JavaScript using the Bucklescript backend (as can regular OCaml), but it can also be compiled to native since it's just a dialect of OCaml. In the latter case, the programmer would need to avoid JS interop or employ conditional compilation.
I worked in security around the Vista timeframe, and remember the “think of the children” logic for the UAC prompts.

It’s insecure to not warn people constantly. Full stop. (Never mind that desensitizing people or any of a dozen predictable side effects are ignored). It’s oversimplified black-and-white thinking endemic of many management mistakes.
Huh?

There's prison time for building code violations?
Those were compatible but actually used the NEC V20 processor. I have a 95LX, 100LX, a couple 200LX and I'm in the market for a 4MB 200LX and maybe the 1000CX (which lacks the built-in spreadsheet).
Having 72 hours of shelter/water/food, a first aid kit, and some other bits and pieces is not how prepping is colloquially used.

Given a disaster with a 1% yearly chance, and a lifespan of 80 years, lifetime odds of encountering that disaster are close to 50%. Given a disaster with a 0% or a 0.000001% chance, lifetime odds are still pretty close to zero. Disaster preparedness worries about the 1%, prepping worries about what many people including me would consider the 0.000001%, which is why having a pack of water bottles and a first aid kit in a cupboard seems like common sense, but prepping for the fall of civilisation seems ridiculous.
Museum of Forgery and Deception – Salerno, Italy
Chelsea Manning seems to agree that the Democrats are better, too. Otherwise, I don't think she'd be running for Senate as one: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/chelsea-manning-files-us-...
Chelsea Manning files to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland
I don't care what percentage of his income this represents, I am happy for the 33M that wasn't there before.

These are real people it will impact, with real families, and real benefits.

Let's each examine what percentage of our income we have contributed, and then maybe walk around looking down our noses, if you really donate for that privilege.
So Trump was right, the illegal immigration was taking jobs from Americans and his actions to stop it help the lower and middle class Americans. I don't understand why everybody were laughing and dismissing him.
IIRC I wasn't able to download or update apps from the app store without an iCloud account, so an iCloud account is not really optional. Regarding backups, I've disabled all backups to iCloud and upload photos, videos to a google account since I can't directly transfer files to a linux pc.
This is amazing! Thanks for sharing
I've never understood why the supply needs to be fixed. So long as there's a mechanism around creating new coins.
Professor Salvatore Casillo... is the mastermind behind the Museo del Falso, an institution studying and exhibiting fakes and counterfeit objects that are part of daily life. The museum was opened [in 1991] with funds from the city, the University of Salerno and a local savings bank, and since then has featured exhibitions on counterfeit silver, detergents and, most recently, food.

A professor of industrial sociology who focused on entrepreneurship, Casillo came across hundreds of examples of entrepreneurs who went into illegal business, sometimes with brilliant ideas "that made you wonder what they could accomplish in legitimate business," he said.

Together with colleagues who are psychologists, anthropologists and legal experts — all of whom had come across the trend in their own research — he founded a study center and the museum, which was formerly a depot for the city sanitation department.