skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find this pretty rich. Breaking things and selling broken stuff to clients, and then turning around and selling them expensive consulting services is pretty much the biz-model of Oracle.

And then there's this: "In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because of accounting errors.[53] This crisis came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses.[54] This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also settled (out of court) class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison stated in 1992 that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake."[53]"

So Oracle isn't a particularly good example of a well run business with good internal processes (I also wouldn't put them in a list of ethically run companies either)
Is there any significance to the fact that management divided the pokers 4+1 instead of 3+2? If I was trying to gloss over the fact that I couldn't say "5 pokers", I'd be pretty happy to have the excuse to just match what it said on the requisition form.

Something like "You requested 3 kochergi and 2 more kochergi. Here they are."
This is one of the more subtle reasons I dislike the euphemism "differently abled". It makes it sound like accessibility measures are at the expense of regular people's comfort, but that could not be further from the truth. There are some hoops society wants all people to jump through, and disabled people cannot jump through a subset of those. Accessibility measures means removing hoops people are forced to jump through. Everyone benefits from fewer hoops.
But you make that argument like there's a fixed pot of money to go around. $25 to spend on regulation, but tough our ancestors already regulated speed limits and copyright so you can't have any more. Pity about the environment and data privacy but hey.

Thing is there's been a fair bit of growth since my childhood, or even since the widespread adoption of the www. Just compare the sheer amount of crap people have compared to a child of even the 90s. Plenty of slack left for some regulation and changes without even the cost of compliance of 20 years ago - there's so much more money in the system.

If a business is so marginal that it can't cope with a change in interest rates or a new regulation or tax rate then any number of other tiny events would have sunk it anyway.

Note: Not to say I in any way agree with this poorly thought out piece of proposed regulation - it needs a similar response to that given to ACTA.
That GOTO is harmful. Kids find joy in it!
Writing a Markdown Compiler – Part 1
A lot of people with degrees get sorted out if the screen prossee along with people who have no degrees. Because you’re absolutely right, university CS doesn’t necessarily make great programmers.

If I’m hiring for a programming job I typically prefer people with academy or engineering degrees though. They are taught less theory and more application.

A degree isn’t all we look at though, we’ll also look at your public code repository, but we won’t take a look unless you have a degree because we need you to do both theory and application, and we need you to have learned best practices in both.

I’m not saying people without degrees are useless mind you, I just don’t want to spend time finding the ones who aren’t, when I don’t have to.
SF is absolutely hostile to people who have trouble walking.

I spent 10 months on crutches. An example: the useless fuckwits who designed BART made some stations so that, to use the elevators to get from the platform level to the street, you have to

1 - crutch to the elevators on the platform level

2 - get out on the station level

3 - crutch the length of the station to get to the swipe machines;

4 - crutch back the length of the station to get to the elevators from the station level to the street;

5 - stand in a standing pool in the center of the elevator of fucking bum piss and shit on your way to the street.

For those of you who've never used crutches, well, (a) good call, and (b) your armpits look like they should conveniently support your body. In actuality, it hurts. Crutching is uncomfortable, and being unnecessarily forced to crutch station lengths is terrible.

And btw, this stuff isn't rocket science. Anyone who thinks for perhaps 2 seconds about making buildings accessible to people with mobility issues will realize that limiting unnecessary travel distances is one of the best ways to increase mobility.
I watched a fun show on CBBC last night where they looked at Slimemoulds and a prof was showing how they could use Slimemoulds to generate an approximation of the tube network for Tokyo. They place food on population centres on a scaled map and release the Slimemould in the centre and bingo, it grows a nutrient distribution network that maps onto the rail network! A search engine query (I use Qwant) will get you to the work.
It's simply that that's not a new risk. Everyone has grown up with knowledge of that risk and accepted it as a given, therefore it is not alarming. I think this is necessary because to constantly evalute and fear ever-present risk would be debilitating.

New risks however are alarming, and do trigger the fearful 'better not try that in case the worst happens' response in a lot (the majority?) of people - this probably makes sense as a survival mechanism.
The Social Network Soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yydZbVoCbn0
Not the function itself, the log ratio of fit probabilities of any given pair of these. That is differentiable at most the Lebesgue sense and the likelihood requires something stronger. Specifically it has to be smooth everywhere to have KL divergence well defined. Adding a constant will give you a logarithm that breaks at zero still in log probability ratio.

So, both BIC and AIC are ill defined for this family of functions... Part of the reason the measure returns worthless garbage. This also happens with fits based on neural nets with tan or clipped activations. (Because sum of activations is nonsmooth as is fit probability.) But not with RBM or GMM or exponential neurons. These produce Gaussian or Pareto fit probabilities. (Polynomial probably also fail because they're not smooth functions but both measures could be corrected for nonsmoothness of likelilihood in this case.)
Sum of sinc should work too as you get Wishart fit probabilities.

This funny chaotic function? I have no idea how distributed the answers are and whether the distribution is continuous.
It is surprising to me to think that no human being born after the 1930s ever walked on another world.
Can you go into more detail about the GDPR effect? How will they be annihilated by that? Are they collecting more user data than users are aware of, and anticipate that if they told users explicitly what they're doing the business would be annihilated?
Next congress will pass a law forcing these debts to be transfered onto your children.
Ask HN: Who else wants to be mentored to start a productized service?
Hey guys,

I have been running a productized service since a few months and documented my journey extensively here on HN (growing from 0 to now $34k in MRR)

Yesterday I decided to launch a challenge on Indie Hacker where I would mentor 10 founders to launch a productized service and get to $1000 in monthly revenue in a month: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/tell-ih-i-am-going-to-help-10-indie-hackers-launch-their-productized-service-285e37977e

The idea is to select 10 committed founders willing to launch a productized service, validate their business model, and mentor them on a week-on-week basis as well as being their accountability partner.

I am doing this to give it back to the community (I got a lot of advice from HN and IH that I implemented in my current business) and have absolutely nothing to gain from it aside from learning a lot about productized services and perhaps partnering with entrepreneurs in the future.

Let me know if you would be interested in this (if so, reach out to me via Twitter or here or on IH) and I am also open to hear your feedback as regard to this initiative!
As an exercise, work out how much energy it would take to transport a capsule with three people in it to the moon orbit, send a 2 person capsule to the surface and bring them back. Just raw theoretical energy. Then work out how much actual energy the Apollo program took to build an entire Saturn V rocket and all associated infrastructure. Bear in mind most of the time you’re not just accelerating th capsules, you’re also accelerating the rest of the rocket at various stages. The rocket equation is a harsh mistress. I think you’ll find you are many orders of magnitude off.
2things.
1, Spam that contains my Whois data is very much more concerning, especially if it looks like a legitimate service I may already be using.
2, if a company collects my Whois data, and justifies monetising it to me or you, especially under the guise of ‘its for my/your security’, and I am not financially compensated for it, or I am unaware of it, or unable to change the terms and conditions of access/usage of it, then I consider it stolen.
There is middle ground where the team is together, but only the team and it means 4-10 collaborating people. You are not alone and you are not in one room with other teams (especially often calling teams) and not with over 40 people - which generates too much

It should be not one extreme against another.
> This experience taught me the difference between source code and machine code.

Ironically the way QuickBasic works is that it concatenates the BASIC interpreter with a copy of your .BAS file to form the .EXE file. There is no machine code generated.
Weber's Law – our perception is logarithmic [video]
> This is deliberately attempting to conflate re-publication with a hyperlink. Link previews are not needed, are not used for the vast majority of links on the web. Claiming that previews are "almost always" included is patently a lie.

To be fair, most social networks include some kind of link previews. Are you saying this is not a big deal because this will only affect links shared on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Slack, Discord and all other major social networks?
Heh, that's cute. The issue with that is that locating UAV's that are, say 50 meters above the deck, more than 1km from your detector is essentially impossible. Without a VERY dense detection infrastructure, catching these things is not going to happen.

Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves.

Third. Defense against a laser is easy (a mirror, essentially, though you need to know the frequency to get an effective one). I must say that I don't know why you'd try to defend a drone. I'd try to hide it, since that's so easy.

And while a rules-based autopilot is easy to disrupt using jamming, a learned autopilot is essentially impossible to fool into crashing. Maybe you can divert it, I guess.
When did this ethical issue happen? Up until a few years ago, my feeling was that hackers had the high horse regarding ethics, considering free software movement, crypto movements, etc.

Did hackers lose their ethics when money was poured in?
Show HN: Know your potential customer base – Feedback welcome
Just look the word up in a dictionary and find the declension box.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%8...

So kočergá, kočergí, kočerjóg.

English declension is so simple we don't include this information in a typical dictionary entry. ("Poker, pokers, poker's, pokers'")
Makes it easy to pick clients, though.
Apparently, indeed: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/15/us/marijuana-catapult-trn...
A lot of people will suggest building a landing page / MVP to gauge initial interest, but I would start even before that: Don't spend any more time than necessary on something that you don't even know is actually viable.

However, you need to find out if potential customers are excited about your idea. To find out whether your target audience is interested in your idea, I suggest the following validation process:

* Write down a) the problem you're trying to solve and b) your solution. A lot of ideas may sound awesome while they're in your head, but that might change once you transform it from an abstract concept into 2–3 sentences.

* Create a questionnaire based on your idea. Make sure to ask questions relevant to judging whether your idea might take off, such as "How often are you facing this problem" rather than "Have you ever faced this problem". Use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to put your survey online.

* Identify people in your target audience. This is hard. Don't simply email the survey link to your friends - because of something called "Interviewer bias", your friends will rate your ideas more favorably than the general public. Also, it's highly likely that your friends aren't actually in your target audience.

I run IdeaCheck.io[0], where we generate a questionnaire based on your idea and use a panel of respondents to gather direct feedback from your actual target audience. You can read more about IdeaCheck in my Indie Hackers interview[1].

[0] https://ideacheck.io

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/ideacheck-io
Don't talk to police:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

What to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8S4isIxo2w

It's simple really:

https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2897
That's fair, but businesses need to do all kinds of things they'd rather not have to do, just to be able to do business. I'm not sure I really believe the sky is falling just because businesses need to take better care of user data.
I’m Danish and there is certainly a reason n the better programmers have educations, I mean, why wouldn’t they? Not only is education free, the state gives you $1000 a month to study and our culture expects you to have an education.

There would almost have to be something wrong with you not to get one.

That being said, I’m old, I’ve been around since before IT educations were really a thing outside of research and science, and people with degrees are just better at working in enterprise. I’ve had really excellent autodidactic people write marvelous stuff, that was horribly documented and full of hacks that made it really inefficient in the long run, and that just hasn’t happened with people that had degrees.

I still see and hear if the rockstar mentality today, from the manager networks I’m part if, and it’s almost always from employees who haven’t had any schooling.
#CocaCola #databreach has affected about 8,000 workers
Executing better. Going from 1 to 10 to 100
Start with your users.

Talk to your most loyal users and try to identify their needs and the value they are getting from your SaaS. Why do they use your service? What is their single biggest frustration / the single biggest value they get from your service? Can you find similar customers? How can you reach more of the users you want?

Once you really nail the value proposition you have and map out clearly who your customers are and why they love your service it is easier to know where you're going for marketing and growing your business.
Show HN: Buidl Today: A dApp for betting against your procrastination
I am a DApp developer in Australia, and I made Buidl Today without funding or ICO.

Buidl Today is a decentralised app that combines the technology of the Ethereum blockchain and principles of cognitive psychology to help people ship great work.

You can use it to commit to doing tasks and have a friend or third-party review their timely completion. If you fail to meet your goal, the ethereum you staked can be withdrawn by a designated recipient.

The app is currently desktop only, and it has been deployed on the Rinkeby test network. You can top up any browser wallet using free test Ethereum from the Rinkeby faucet.

I’m excited to share it with the community, and hear what you have to say about it.

Product page on Product Hunt:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/buidl-today

Thanks!
Putting the computer to sleep resets it for me. Only happens on anything that isn’t DP (HDMI and DVI->DP)

Annoying for sure.
In Poland, for example, the chairman of this regulatory body has 4 year term and is unremovable. So he doesn't have many reasons to be political.
PentesterLab, make sure you check the bootcamp and the free stuff first
Yes! I started using it ~8 months ago and fell in love with its simplicity. Hunter aims to be a full package manager, so it strives to build a project and all of its depedendencies recursively. This is fundamentally different than just adding one external project and ignoring the depedencies (what ExternalProject_Add does). The downside is this forces Hunter to maintain many forks of original repos just to keep track of the dependency information. Meanwhile, Hunter basically guarantees rebuilds only when necessary and caches all library builds locally in the ~/.hunter directory. It really really simplifies the whole dependency management of a CMake project.
Maybe all that research you write about does not translate down to workers. Because the corporation around here don't seem to implement any of it and decisions don't seem to be much influenced by productivity considerations.

They are not result of complete stupidity either, but they seem to be result of price, how "representative" space is and similar down to earth considerations.
bazel

* does not support Windows fully.

* requires users to install a large amount of dependencies (both JDK and Python 2) just to build a C project.

* requires user to manually write BUILD files for all third party libraries.

* has no way to discover existing libraries on the system.

* no integration with IDEs (most pertinent to Windows users).

Therefore bazel is not going to win over CMake any time soon. Not because it is worse, but because Google's needs are different from everyone else.
I'm pretty convinced that this is due to drainage. Over the last 30 years ditches have been cluveted and ponds drained on all farms, irrigation is now an art - very tightly managed - and farmers round here have dug deep reservoirs to run it. Hedgerows and roads used to have long swampy bits that were ideal for insect breeding, but that's all gone. Farmers here now farm arable or intensive pig/chicken. The mixed economy farms are gone - and with them the small ponds and wallows that were common.

I've got two ponds in my garden, they are a source of head shaking from keen urban gardeners because they are shallow, muddy and a bit smelly - but they team with life and now, in the summer, the air is thick with insects.
The answer is that the "hacker ethos" is just a masquerade with SV in order to try to persuade other professionals and conditon them to approve of such behavior and participate. Sure there's money at play, but the hacker ethos espoused by many SV startups and companies is lip service to appeal to potential candidates and vocal members of a said community. It's marketing, and regrettably people eat it up while thinking they're above such chicanery and tricks.
I would like to hear more from individuals that actually take the time to read every single EULA that gets thrown at them - and what their next course of action is after they do.

For some EULAs, it is possible to abstain using the service once you find something egregious in that agreement. I can avoid downloading an app or taking an Uber.

But when it comes to internet service providers - what are your options? Okay, you read through Comcast's EULA and found something alarming. So your next option is to... read AT&T's EULA and also be alarmed? Is the solution to forgo any cell/internet service?
I was struck by this too. Chinese and Japanese/Korean are exteremely different languages. Japanese is an agglutinative language whereas Chinese is analytic. Japanese is probably organically more similar to English (if it is at all) than Chinese. But one needs to note that Chinese affected a lot of Asian languages and what we used to call Altai Language family (Turkic, Mongolic, Japonic languages) was actually bunch of different agglutinative languages aggressively affected by Chinese (and each other) which made linguists confuse for decades. Note that Altai Language family does not exist, those languages are not related at all (which is another mistake in the website)
Well, I don’t think Github can rewrite the history of a customers’ repo just like that.
Try cancelling your wordpress subscription if you want to see dark patterns in ui
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xECUrlnXCqk
He did start with web apps though (PayPal).
I've worked in private offices, private cubes, and open office.

As much as I personally prefer isolated offices/cubes, the last 4 years in a mostly open office have definitely given me sympathy to the argument for them. I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments. There is something pragmatically useful about having people be able to jump in with their feedback or expertise.

The more isolated people are the more you have to go out of your way to ensure information dissemination and feedback channels are available and utilized. It certainly can work, but I haven't seen it work as well.

Open rooms promote teaching, spontaneous design discussions, etc, that just doesn't happen in the same way over e-mail, chat, stand-up meetings, etc.

There are arguments to go both ways. I used to hate open offices, now I'm sympathetic to them.

A key to making the open office tolerable is that it should not mean no isolation. There are ways to address their concerns. eg, headphones are essential. Obscuring line of site is very helpful. My current situation has me in an area of "open rooms", where rooms with ~11 desks are arraigned in an open office-esque fashion. It's pretty decent. Not super-open, but people can "share space" with the people relevant to them.
Ah, sweet nostalgia. 26 years ago, our once-a-month science teacher in elementary school showed us how to find, open, and use QBasic to print "Hello World." 24 years ago, my Dad took home a computer that his work was going to throw away, and I opened QBasic and started reading the help file. Opening that help file changed every aspect of my life from that moment on. Sometimes I wonder what I would have done with my life if any part of that sequence of events had not occurred.
I found loss of autonomy and inability to use own brain completely killing my motivation. It might be fine with someone with high sociAl skills, but pair programming with someone who confuses own subjective preference with "objectively better" and have sever micromanagement tendencies is hell. And don't tell me that we should fire all bordeline autistic coders, I think we should cooperate in a way that does not make it hell to them nor to neurotypicals who work with them.
He’s referring to the German-Czech produced miniseries, not the book.
Qtom and SpaceChain's satellite OS, bring nodes to space
This wouldn't work with consumer hardware.
This is the beauty of it - you don’t need to make thousands per month to work towards making thousands per month.

The money you do invest can generate a return, which when re-invested compounds. Yes, this happens very slowly at first, but over the course of many years gets you towards your thousands per month.

I don’t have thousands left from my 9-5 job every month, but my assets (accumulated over years) work for me, and I just add what I can to that money making machine.
>So the use case of 'landing on a moving sheep' is probably right up their alley

This is critical, as it's almost impossible to hold a sheep stationary while landing a drone on it.