skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that there needs to be a balance. Free trade, consolidation, and competition are of course beneficial in many ways and circumstances.

I do wonder if the disconnect between policy and many of the negative effects I outlined in my previous post is due to the fact that decision/policy makers are disproportionately likely to be the ones benefitting from this trend. And for us as developers, especially so in the US, we're the ones directly benefitting from an industry that naturally lends itself to extreme consolidation in certain cases (e.g. a team making software for thousands of people may not need to expand that much to serve millions or even billions of people. See: whatsapp) and living in the countries with a competitive advantage in this industry. And we also mostly live in large cities with multinational corporation headquarters, so we're insulated or even benefitting from what's happening to smaller communities.

I grew up in a non-coastal city that is neither doing well nor poorly. It doesn't have a lot of wealthy people to "bootstrap" itself into success by means of capital, nor is it an attractive enough investment opportunity for outside investors (low education with brain-drain chicken/egg problem), but it has a few competitive industries and is somewhat of a local resource and business hub. But once you go into the smaller communities in the region around the city, you really see the phenomenon I'm talking about. A big way money enters most of these communities is through farming or other resource extraction (if they're fortunate enough to have these), but the main way is through social security payments. These places would be perfect for low-medium cost manufacturing because they have large numbers of unemployed, working class people who are down to earth enough to take pride in that kind of work.

Those communities are often forgotten when it comes to policy, likely because they are individually small, not culturally important, have some opinions we would consider backwards, and most importantly because they have no wealthy/powerful people to vouch for them. But outside of big cities and regional hubs, where decision makers do reside, this is what a pretty large portion of America consists of.
You've seemed to have left out the proof...
I can't help but think of the Byzantine factions, the Blues and the Greens.

In a riot sparked by a chariot race[0], half of Constantinople was destroyed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots
If there are n possibilities and you can prove that y are always true, then the n-y remaining are never true.
If you trace that number used in the quick facts website to the report its data is based "Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks 1990–2015" you get the following explanation for the data Note that these totals include CO2, CH4 and N2O emissions from some sources in the U.S. Territories (ships and boats, recreational boats, non-transportation mobile sources) and CH4 and N2O emissions from transportation rail electricity. and An ongoing planned improvement is to develop improved estimates of domestic waterborne fuel consumption. The Inventory estimates for residual and distillate fuel used by ships and boats is based in part on data on bunker fuel use from the U.S. Department of Commerce. Domestic fuel consumption is estimated by subtracting fuel sold for international use from the total sold in the United States. It may be possible to more accurately estimate domestic fuel use and emissions by using detailed data on marine ship activity. The feasibility of using domestic marine activity data to improve the estimates will continue to be investigated.

Given this, I'm doubtful the report measures all cargo ships internationally.
The most game-changing additions, IMO:

> "Elbereth" now erodes based on attacks by the player, not monsters scared

> Allow taming monkeys and apes with bananas

> Peacefuls may react when you attack other peacefuls

Also, I'm happy about these QoL changes:

> New status line conditions Stone Strngl Deaf Lev Fly Ride

> Give feedback just before timed levitation runs out
Quote of the day from HyperTools README https://github.com/ContextLab/hypertools

"To deal with hyper-planes in a 14 dimensional space, visualize a 3D space and say "fourteen" very loudly. Everyone does it." -- Geoff Hinton
You are in the late majority or laggards automobile-consumer group, to use Crossing the Chasm terminology. There's nothing wrong with that. However, not everyone is in those groups.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

― George Bernard Shaw
Could we mass pressure treat wood to prevent it from being eaten?
SHA256, a by the Books Implementation
That makes a lot more sense. Sounds like you were more than half way to shutting down already if you dropped two thirds of the founding team. Still it’s advisable to take a step back and digest before pulling the plug, especially since you’ve worked every day for 9 months.
>You have to have a product that works.

it was completely outside the scope of my product. we have a mobile webapp that doesn't work in a uiwebview (ios). simple solution: pop out safari from a button. catastrophic failure: conference apps insist on keeping users in app and so those buttons load up the site in a uiwebview. in fact at the last moment (one day before the conference) i figured out a pretty viable solution, slapped it together in 6 hours, made calls to make appropriate changes on site (at the conference), and it should've gone okay.

>quantifiable value

this is what i think we're missing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15098643

Did you end up going to some conferences? There are serious problems with many conference apps. Even AWS Re:Invent's app had major problems this last year.

If you're wanting someone to do something (like download an app), you need to motivate them to do. This isn't about marketing. It's about delivering value.

Is your app currently only delivering value to the organizers and not really much for the users?
This is an excellent idea to prevent revenue loss caused by false positives, which are rampant IMHO.

It's beyond me why so many merchants opt for the revenue-losing and customer-hostile choice to silently cancel flagged orders and let their competitors run away with the money, while they could easily get a safe sale by making a non-negotiable offer to use an irreversible payment method when a credit card gets flagged.

This reverses the trust issue, it's then up to the customer to determine if he trusts the merchant enough and is willing to give up the additional protection that a purchase on a credit card may offer - some of which the merchant may offer instead - to get the item he wants.
Here is an interesting article from 2013 about the natural history of these spiders with regards to water from Barbara York Main, who started the referenced study: http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1108&contex.... It suggests that long female life spans and large size are adaptations to the arid environment.
This is really disturbing :(
Hopefully accurate?

You should probably write some tests to ascertain that.
>"Elbereth" must now be the only engraved text on a square to function

So... "elberethelberethelberethelbereth" won't work anymore, either.
Wow, I would say though even if you had moved to the US you could have revised history a bit after you became successful and still been local heroes in Australia. Startups do this kind of creative story-retelling all the time.
Maybe so. Does your method give a way to plot the function over the full range of values though? I think that seeing how the gains fall off is as interesting as computing the best case.
That only works for a period of time depending on conditions. In this case, even a few hundred years wouldn't be good enough.
How would you study those two potential variables seperately to find the true cause?

It would be difficult to have such a large indoor area that people regularly focus far away. But maybe you could keep UV lights on indoors in an animal study to see if the UV light reduces myopia.
There are already big names in this list and it was a a tenth (~30) only a few hours ago when I signed. Yoshua Bengio, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Ian Goodfellow, ... Even if it only represents their personal opinion, like herd immunity I'm certain this will prevent widespread adoption.

When I started in NLP as an undergrad, almost all the papers I cared about were free to read from the ACL Anthology. As I shifted into broader machine learning, arXiv became my new home. Nature's closed Machine Intelligence would be a step back. I am glad that researchers and scientists want to keep research open and accessible.

P.S. It's already weird that Nature has DeepMind papers. At least in that case DeepMind have a formalized agreement / enough clout that they can host the paper themselves but even the hint of ambiguity can kill knowledge propagation at many institutions. An example would be "Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge"[0] / "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search"[1].

[0]: https://deepmind.com/documents/119/agz_unformatted_nature.pd...

[1]: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/alphago/AlphaG...
What is an ideogram if it isn’t communication?
There is some evidence that there might be a genetic component to some drug misuse disorders. Specifically, I know that there's been some research done with nicotine here (either out of Columbia or Radboud, don't really remember). Most researchers are still of the opinion that environmental factors have much more effect on drug misuse disorders than genetic.

The trope of "your first dose will get you hooked" is patently false. There's no evidence that this is true. Anecdotal anything, especially with drugs, doesn't mean anything, and all of these outlier anecdotes are actively damaging to the education of the public with regards to drugs.
I generally agree with the article's main thrusts (city living is more "efficient", better/more sustainable infrastructure), but this is a very one-sided view.

Sure, cities are more "efficient". They're also more dysfunctional. What you gain in infrastructure use intensity, you give right back to machine politics, failing school systems, outright embezzlement/theft of funds, huge pension problems, entrenched big-city unions, and bad policing. Just watch The Wire if you want to see what it's like. I live in Oakland, CA, which has had, I think 3 or 4 police chiefs, in the past 3 years.

Perhaps there's some kind of middle ground. A place that's not some spread-out suburbia where "going into town" is a thing, but not quite SF/NYC-level government problems where building a subway comes at a price of 3.5 BILLION DOLLARS PER MILE. [1] Maybe a city of 1 million is about the right size.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
I've had my fair share of family alcoholics. In every case, it has been a response to existential emptiness, and if they weren't destroying themselves with alcohol they'd be doing it some other way. In fact, I think this is a big part of the reason so many people are obese.

This view is supported by science. Research has shown that rats housed in isolation, or with stimulus deprived environments compulsively use cocaine when given the option, while rats housed with other rats in enriched environments use it sporadically.

We need to take a long hard look at our society.
Or do what I do and work with integers and do the heavy stuff on a big computer with lots of CPU and memory.

Integer math is fast, easy, and not error prone, unless you cross the limits in limits.h . But those are simple bounds checking, or you size the vars large enough so that you never need to worry about them. Primarily, if you use floats, you grab the data and send it on its way. Don't process if you don't have to. Drop it to MQTT/CoAP/AMQP.

I'm thinking in the similar way Klipper offloads 3d printer math to a heavy computer with GHz and GBs of ram for trig math and array compensation.
"I don't start new businesses: I let other fellows start them. They put all their money and their friends' money into starting them. They wear out their souls and bodies trying to make a success of them. They're what you call enthusiasts. But the first dead lift of the thing is too much for them; and they haven't enough financial experience. In a year or so they have either to let the whole show go bust, or sell out to a new lot of fellows for a few deferred ordinary shares: that is, if they're lucky enough to get anything at all. As likely as not the very same thing happens to the new lot. They put in more money and a couple of years' more work; and then perhaps they have to sell out to a third lot. If it's really a big thing the third lot will have to sell out too, and leave their work and their money behind them. And that's where the real business man comes in: where I come in." -- George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House, 1916
Yes, it was Thunderbolt.[0] Firewire had the same issue. As does PCIe. But maybe USB 2.0 can be secured. If so, just fill other ports with epoxy. And use metal-flake nail polish to tamper protect seams. If USB isn't securable, give up, I guess.

0) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383130
Unless you perish in a disaster, there is no such thing as business failure. Only mistakes and fuckups (results of which can only 'change' your business into some other shape or form).

So do the obvious to sort things out as best you can; to fulfill your obligations and responsibilities without giving up; be honest with your personnel, customers, and investors/partners - make arrangements to repay who is owed all the while being open about your complete situation.

At least this way there is some hope of bringing a bad situation to neutral ground. You can try and if you give it your best, you can go to sleep at night feeling at ease cause that is the only thing anyone can ever expect of you - that you are honest and doing your best.

(of course, your reputation and ability to do business in this way again in the future may be impacted but such is reality; mistakes and fuckups have consequences of which you have to accept too)
I find DCSS's development goals very interesting in contrast to Nethack. While Nethack is widely famed for "the dev's think of everything", DCSS has been on a streak of streamlining mechanics, such as the latest release collapsing all food items to rations instead of the pizza, royal jelly, and others. Though rip wand of healing.
Property taxes are fairly variable in the Chicagoland area, but there are many places where Chicago is not slightly less, it’s dramatically less.

The sales tax is floored by the state sales tax which makes up more than half of the total.

The Cook County minimum sales tax is 8% with lots of localities matching Chicago’s 11%.

All told I imagine tax rate in the Chicagoland area largely depends on a whole equation of property value/tax & consumption. But I’d be shocked if Chicago was universally more expensive than its suburbs.
10 Synth Wizards and the Machines They Fell in Love With
Monitor, sure. But I don't believe that anyone has enough resources to backdoor everyone's machines.
Do you mean corporate communication? The only way symbols are not used for communication are if they're immediately deleted/destroyed/only written to write-only media/etc. Even your personal diary and notes are communications with your future self.
I've found it hard to write tests (though there are a few here - https://github.com/sahilm/fuzzy/blob/master/fuzzy_test.go ). Match quality is often subjective. Tweaking one parameter messes with others.

This library came out of a project I started. The project never saw the light of day. If I do see real world use, it'll be easier to find bugs and fix them :)
Having used many EMRs over the past 10 years, I totally agree—there are not many (any?) good EMRs out there. Most are clunky UI/UX nightmares that end up interrupting the visit and leave me frustrated and staring at a screen far more than I should be.

I stumbled across OpenEMR a few months ago (as I was cursing Epic and praying for a better open source option) and must say that I’m impressed with the speed of progress. I’m certainly not a developer but I am a physician—if you need any more volunteers from medical personnel, I would be more than happy to help.
no i don't believe in the product and i'm not wrong for not being slavishly committed to it

https://www.google.com/search?q=don%27t+fall+in+love+with+yo...

i do believe in the problem though
This seems timely with this other recent post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16938029
In keeping with history of the "Net" prefix of NetHack, this was posted to Usenet in the rec.games.roguelikes.nethack newsgroup, not a mailing list. Usenet isn't totally dead, it just seems that way from the trendier parts of the Internet. :) That newsgroup is still primary for NetHack.

But sure, there are still more traditional ways to read newsgroups than the Google Groups interface.
I tend to agree. I suspect the availability of guns was useful in a few key engagements, but the accidental weaponisation of smallpox (for example) was much more effective in wiping out indigenous forces.
Ask HN: When did you take investment?
I've witnessed some crazy investments, often before a POC or an MVP. When / How did you decide to take investment and what was your approach?

Example: A 22-year-old colleague of mine, for instance, pitched a simple deck, without writing a line of code and landed $1 million in investment (which by the way, it's a very naive and simple idea / product). The colleague has since missed every benchmark, but still hired a team, and has $500k in the bank. His app I could knock off in a week - but it's not in a space I'm interested in, nor do I feel there's a market (as he is finding out).

To contrast that example, I'm working a full-time job and working any additional hours (10 - 30 hours a week) on my startup. It's slowly generating revenue but isn't much more than an MVP. There's still a ton of work and getting investment would definitely toss fuel on the fire (and let me switch full-time). However, is it worth the risk? I don't know yet, I'm comfortable growing at my current rate as I build out a more solid product, but is that the right choice?

The question is, when / how do you decide to take on investment?
>Did you end up going to some conferences?

yes i've been to ~1 conference per month since that post. would've gone to more but someone's gotta build the product right?

>Is your app currently only delivering value to the organizers and not really much for the users?

this is my stumbling point and it's a serious one because building a useful app for attendees is almost like building a fun app for consumers - you have to delight not just deliver value.
tradeshows are 500B global market.
>after being attacked by a parasitic wasp

So she could have gotten even older, it wasn't a natural death.
in theory said by Yogi Berra.. but in practice ...
I've just read nearly all posts here and I think that HN has done you proud. There is loads of good advice here and very little noise. You have enough loot left for three salaries for one year at $30,000 and some loose change.

You might be able to do something else eg: basic "IT" if you have people willing to give it a go an a few technicians on the staff. If money comes in then who cares where it comes from. Basic IT services are very easy to sell. Yes it is boring but you'd be surprised how it leads on. My little company has some customers that you will have heard of, and you are not from around here. We are boring and I wouldn't have it any other way 8)
FREE EDUCATION: 300 Ivy League College Courses
The brave new world of ‘surveillance capitalism’
Mr Hinton for sure sign this before people prepare statement :]
Your pull request crumbles into dust...
Do 'Nakba' and 'Shoah' share an etymology?

Their etiologies are mixed, at least.
Thanks for writing command-T :)

Let me pull up some embarrassing numbers of fuzzy matching on all of Chromium.
https://archive.is/DNcst
Source? HBS has no such requirement (a friend got in with just 3 years of management consulting experience). Here's a quote straight from the Stanford GSB page: "Work experience is not required for entry to the Stanford MBA Program." Work experience isn't even listed as a requirement on the Wharton application. Etc.

Perhaps you're referring to European programs?
"Wisdom of the Crowds" works really well for some problems, and not at all for others.
Hundred? If the wood is touching soil, try a few decades at best. I just replaced an old rotted out deck that was all pressure treated lumber. Also EPA considers it a hazardous waste.

https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/chro...
Developers Think Ethereum Blockchain Fork Might Just Happen
The same way it has always worked if you're going to exist on an investor's money: reputation and qualifications. A bit of luck helps as well.

Reputation of course involves things such as your past work experience, your past VC experience, past outcomes, who you've networked with that might refer you to an investor, and so on. This is largely about what you've done and how it forms the opinion of others.

Qualifications is what skills you possess, what you've accomplished, your education, your personal history, etc. This deeply ties into reputation. You can claim to be the greatest programmer ever, that's going to be incredibly difficult to verify for most venture capitalists, most basically won't bother attempting to verify it: they're going to judge you by reputation, partially in tandem with your claims.
Digital Identity Is Broken. Here’s a Way to Fix It
There is a kind of game design which works for me, and keeps me coming back. I don't think you can bottle it, any more than you can sell pixar to disney without keeping the brains inside the can. If you just sell the name, you don't get whats marked on the bottle.

Amici di / scuola di "Nintendo", but moved forward from the renaissance? Seriously, maybe you have to study at the feet of the master and accept his/her teachings and method, to make one just the same (but different) ?
How did you find clients with a boring company? I love "boring" stuff btw, I feel like I helped more people doing boring stuff (tech support, simple automation) than the "hip" stuff
I agree with many points in the article, but it seems to me his core point is that alternatively economic and political models to capitalism should be taught in business schools.

It isn't clear to me that this is a job for graduate business education. The author clearly has an agenda to change either some aspects or capitalism, or to change economic systems entirely. I don't know why he thinks educating business school students differently is going to be something of a catalyst for change of this magnitude. People are studying these degrees with the sole aim of advancing their careers within a capitalist system. If you want political or economic change, these ideas are going to have to be spread throughout the general populace, as most of us here live in democracies.

I also don't think its clear what system would be better than capitalism, despite its flaws, and asking a curriculum to give focus on some alternative system which is completely unproven is a big ask.
Taking a break from graphics work to meditate
Ask HN: How do you come up with ideas for a website/product?
Many people have said: build something you need. It seems like all my ideas have already been done.
You shouldn't even need a web browser to view this announcement -- it was posted on 27 April 2018 to rec.games.roguelike.nethack. Assuming you already have a newsreader set up, you can just go ahead and read that message.
Chicago's share of the sales tax is 1.25 percent. It's really not any higher than anywhere else in Chicagoland.
Extensive discussion 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16922147