skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know any of the details of Maven, but I've done a lot of federal work, and there are a few very good reasons to do insignificant projects, mainly based around past performance.

In order to do any work for the government, you have to show that you have have done the work before to a satisfactory standard, and that you've done it for a type of agency similar to the one requesting proposals for the work.

So, while a given project might be nearly worthless, you do it so that you can say that you did it, so that you're eligible to do it again in the future. The side, but still major benefit of this is that it excludes would-be competitors from getting that qualification, adding barriers to them for getting similar work like this in the future.

Smaller companies, even companies that do exactly, or even only a given thing, often find it hard to get work doing their chosen thing because they don't have these past performances. To get their first qualified performance, they typically have to partner up with a larger company that has qualifications for work at the agency (think Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, etc.), and do small bits of work as a sub-contractor for them until you have enough documented performance to do the work on your own.

Whether or not these particular military contracts are worth much, it opens the door for a larger variety of contracts, which can be worth tens of billions per year.
No, it can't.
I was being a dick there, I admit it. Just a subject that I am passionate about. But the thread did spiral into something else. Sometimes you just throw shit and see what sticks.
The US is directly and indirectly responsible for more civilian death than any other coutry since the cold war ended.

Basic human decency should be the answer to why you shouldn't help kill even more.
Since everyone is saying they still use it: I deleted my account last month. I might have missed a few events but likely none I would have gone to anyway, at worse maybe a house party or two where I know the host and nobody else.

Social life has primarily moved to Whatsapp, which everyone I was talking to on FB was already using so no hiccups. I use Discord but it's primarily for gaming. I much, much prefer anonymous or semi-anonymous social media so I'm mainly on reddit for memes and whatever.

In regards to that event idea: I think where FB really stands out for events was that it functions as a calendar as well. Everyone you invite likely checks FB daily so not only are they guaranteed to see the notification for the invite (rather than it going into a spam folder...) but they're also going to see that event on their homepage whenever they log in. And you can see what's coming up easily, see what your friends are going to etc etc. I think it would be really, really hard to get the same level of functionality cross-platform. Maybe an app with SSO, but it kind of relies on having a strong user base to begin with which is tricky: the ticketing/event management market is already quite saturated. And for social events Facebook is the status quo, I can count on one hand the number of people I know who don't have a Facebook account, FB users have no reason to move to another platform. That said if anyone has an actual plan, hmu, I've got spare time to help.
And do you know what it is that really upholds the peace we all love?
NYT had a nice profile of one of the lawyers a few years ago [1]. It had this quote from Sam Altman:

>Asked to sum up the tech community’s feelings about Mr. Edelson, Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a technology incubator that invests in very young companies, said the lawyer was regarded as “a leech tarted up as a freedom fighter.”

He's the American Max Schrems.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/technology/unpopular-in-s...
Does the connection get reused?
There is, remove the max-width from the <pre> element and change white-space of the <code> element to e.g. pre-line.
What in God’s name are you asking? You seem confused as to the nature of my comment, which was merely pointing out the massive difference in context between WWII and today.
This article specifically references not having to deal with cross-compiler differences as a monoculture advantage. So there are _differences_, perhaps not incompatibilities.
Like thousands of companies unfortunaly. The fsf has not intension to enforce legally the licence, which kinda make it moot.
Yes. The comparisons of CO2 output aside, methane mining is increasingly being shown to be a major contributor to methane in the atmosphere. Being a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, we need to minimise the production of methane, rather than increase it. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/26/what-is-...

As far as renewables go we have options including wind power which are already cheaper than natural gas plant: https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-...

So both from economic and ecological viewpoints, natural gas is a bad idea.
Revive – 6x faster, drop-in replacement of golint
The burden of compliance lead to many businesses scrambling to meet the deadline or else they would pay fines up to £17.5million (€20million).

I can't hear this anymore.
its wrong because we don't want to one day wake up with autonomous drones flying over our head that can kill us. Upload a video to youtube with the wrong ideaology or keyword that triggered some AI to flag your account? Get ready to be fragged as soon as you step outside. I'd like to opt out please
Username checks out. So social media and search are guarantors of world peace? From a non-US perspective, it looks more like SIGINT against allies by treaty.

But hey, it's a private company, no harm, no foul.
What stakes are you playing monopoly for? When the game is packed up back in its box, is the winner walking away from the table with value extracted from the other players?
Yes, the arguments you outline would also be ways to reduce cognitive dissonance as well ("if we didn't do it, others would").

I don't think Google would stop all wars by not contributing to this project. But Google, and the employees who work at Google, has power - a kind of power that's very, very different from my power as an individual when paying taxes or when voting for a federal employee (behaviors that create dissonance for me because they contribute to the war machine). I think that power can, and should, be used to prevent wars - not to make them "cleaner". The small attempt at organizing protests made by some employees at the company was a good step, but the only one I have heard of (maybe there have been others?) and I want the people who have the most access to power to start thinking about what they are doing and trying to make more positive changes.

Consume less.
Be more mindful of environmental damage.
Speak out against the oppressive regimes that help murder people.
I think the reason this is a problem is something you stated: Google brands itself as a global company. I’m an American and while I acknowledge the density of intelligent people that work at Google, the fact that they ostensibly have “global interests” makes me concerned that they could do this work safely. Please do not interpret that as some jingoistic platitude. That’s just...reality. While the “company” may be loyal to the US the people who work on these kinds of projects would need to be highly scrutinized.
That’s crazy...

Hooray, low effort comments!
Sounds like he’s affective and doing good work.
Indeed, my bad, I totally read his answer too fast and missed "The encrypted data can and should be wiped too, but it's a lot more reliable to have your security model not rely on that."
> ... after all, they are loyal only to profit and the USA.

You know what, most employees of Google or Facebook would vehemently disagree, including American citizens.

In fact, say anything like that in Google's internal groups and I'm sure some lawyerfolk will descend down on you, hissing "Would you please stop talking about what you have zero ideas about?" (These days it might even involve HR. After all, saying to half of your coworkers that their work amounts to being a fifth column wouldn't go too well...)
Agree to all of those points. The part where any "investors" essentially have no say, control, or equity in the company would certainly defy any possible reason for a sentient angel or corporate investor to make an investment. There's an abundance of red flags that people need to seriously look at.

Other gems from the article:

> “I know most of the I.C.O.s out there are either fraud or won’t deliver on their promises,” he said. Envion, he believed, was different.

Uhh...

> Seif Shieshakly, an adviser to Envion who is based in the United Arab Emirates, said that the I.C.O. structure had “cut out so many middlemen” and created new investment opportunities, but that “the lack of regulations, again because of the infancy of I.C.O.s, carries risks that regulated environments would generally have far less of.”

This one again speaks for itself.

> The investors have also turned up evidence that some of the founders sold their own tokens before the current mess spilled into the public.

Wow... so I guess with a lack of regulation, insider trading is suddenly cool again.

> But he said the funds added up to only $50 million at this point, not the $100 million that the founders had claimed. Mr. Woestmann said the founders hadn’t raised as much money as they claimed. And the declining price of virtual currencies has dropped the value of the various digital tokens Envion is holding.

So they not only willingly defrauded investors, but also basically used the money like a bank instead of a company, and just purchased other crypto assets to trade and earn from.

> Jessica Smith, a 21-year-old in England, said she had put $28,000 into Envion — almost all of the money she had made over the last two years of trading cryptocurrencies nearly full time. She said she was now looking for new work.

That's a very painful lesson about putting all your eggs in one basket, but one she will probably learn from.
Neat! It's fun looking through these and seeing which ones catch your eye. I think the Redis logo might be my favorite.
Business’s good!
Having a child is literally one more mouth to feed, I hardly think the disincentive is larger for wealthy people. That's just a bizarre piece of logic.
When you are dying perhaps your definitions change.

I hold the controversial (and often dismissed) opinion that Google is dying. I assert they are dying in part because they built a company around search advertising before they knew how to build a company, their initial success gave them the confidence and agency to create structural impediments to their ability to do anything but search advertising. And the search advertising market is not only saturated it is getting more competitive as the easy gains to be made there have already been milked for what they are worth.

I support that opinion on the meager evidence of how they more and more cravenly monetize properties that they previously kept free of such things, their repeated failed attempts at building any other business outside of search that brings anything close to the margins they need for their business model to work, and the lack of 'barriers' to other well funded and durable companies from taking away everything that is special from them. (Bing, Uber, Cruise, Facebook, Apple, Etc.) They get less and less per click and they spend more and more to buy more traffic for their search boxes as documented in their financial statements for the last decade.

They have repeatedly come under attack from outside agencies which see their use of, and exploitation of data about people as either anti-competitive or a violation of basic human rights. Those efforts have resulted in fines and legislation that has been cutting off other ways to monetize the traffic of their place in search.

From that misguided perspective, military contracts make total sense. What they have is a tremendous infrastructure that can be wielded by a relatively small number of engineers to do amazing things. For now, that capability is unique. By turning it from a cost center into a profit center (or even a less cost center) it can help them make the profits they need to keep things rolling. When I was working there I got to see what spending 4 billion dollars a year on infrastructure buys you. It rivals what nation states can field, it rivals what the US government can field. Renting that out to a price insensitive buyer for a unique asset? Sounds like saving yourself from dying to me.
I have this queasy feeling that the U.S. is killing people who aren't actually taking up arms against it.

If doing so shaves a few percent off the error rate that's saving innocent lives, but it's also becoming an essential part of a process that kills innocent people?

I'd prefer standing against the slaughter.
Use a portmanteau generator for inspiration. Think about what words represent your company holistically. Think about content you're providing. Consider your audience. When you think of something don't tell anyone until it's registered.
Definitely not 'expected'. I like the mailing list bug tracking more than having that on git{hub,lab,whatever}.

git makes it even possible to host a repo on multiple git* hostings, but apparently nobody came up with a successful distributed pullreq/issue tracker yet.
MTailor (YC S14) Is Hiring a Creative Director
But still better overall than coal, perhaps?
Source please. I've Not seen anything stating most tech employees are anti Maven.

Blind had a poll and it showed the exact opposite, with a strong majority for Maven.
System Administration Screencasts (2017)
Also a lot of people don't want children. It's a lot of responsabilities and constraints, so you need to feel the desired for it.

The new generation grew with aids, feel less influenced by the authority selling the one family lifestyle and use more contraception.

Now wait for Vasalgel to take off. When males will have total control of their involvment in pregnancy, you will see the numbers go down even more. And probably some serious changes in the man/woman dynamics.
In the Morning to You!
I'm not sure, perhaps an international journalism organization?
Tesla Autopilot Crash Survivor Shares His Story [interview]
A case study in refactoring Clojure for performance
See https://www.facebook.com/tsla3/posts/942377245933745 for background
That is not a counterpoint in any sort of way to what I was saying. Fear of being controlled could be enough. Thus making the origin point above my post wrong.
*effective
Argumentum ad populum

Ignoring whether or not the world actually does, or how vehemently they might disagree, the rightness of a thing isn't measured at all by how many people think the thing is right.
Why would you not have that as a default? What things can go wrong? Not having it means you have to think about transactions in every method or you accept database inconsistency.
If none of us buy that nonsense, why would Google employees? Alphabet = Google. We all know that.
Why You Should Spend Time Doing Nothing, According to Science
Mexican food cooking meets digital marketing/commerce
This article has the typical dichotomy of a piece discussing the medical aspect of addiction: after waxing on for paragraphs about the medical nature of addiction, and how the rats she studies are helpless to avoid relapse, it then ends on a moral note, stating that "the choice [to maintain sobriety] is his".

Well, if addiction is in fact a medical problem, then the choice is not entirely his, is it?

For people like the father, I'd strongly recommend getting on and staying on methadone. It's not easy, but it's a real of a lot better than going to prison and destroying one's family.

That may be the one choice he does have.
> In my case, if KiCAD were hosted on github, I would have already contributed by now.

I suppose it's useful never to underestimate the role of culture and tradition when it comes to these things. For the Gnome project, it's probably very important not to rely on a closed-source system, and their developers have a long history of using very different tools anyway.

The barrier doesn't work that way for everyone, either. I "grew" up (programming-wise) before Github. It seems way less cumbersome for me to make changes and submit a patch via email or whatever than to go through Github's fork the repo - do the changes - make a pull request - sync the repos dance.

(Edit: this is especially true for early contributions, or for late and complex contributions, where the review process is a little more, you know, long-winded. Github's review tool is quite atrocious.)

> I think its a shame that more of these projects don't adopt a strategy of "let's try github, and if they screw us over, then we'll migrate to a platform with more freedom".

That's a really risky thing to try. First, moving the entire infrastructure to Gitlab has been a pretty massive undertaking for Gnome -- and Gnome is one of those open source projects that really has resources. Most projects with Gnome's size and history can maybe afford to do that once every seven years, when there's a relatively quiet time and whatnot.

Second, you never really know how that "screw us over" thing is gonna happen. What if the way it happens is that, among other things, when they close your repos or whatever, they cut access to the API for your project? How are you going to migrate to a platform with more freedom then? Copy-paste every bug report ever?

IMHO, 10-15 years from now we'll be really happy that Gnome really understood that "there's no cloud, it's just someone else's computer" thing :-).
Nobody's wearing colored contacts? That's really interesting.
I basically agree with the last points. As to the drone strikes, I believe there is potential there for decent things. Who is to say these would not grant the power to stop a war by executing key individuals in a scenario where a manned strike would be prohibitive? And yet there is a clear moral hazard of facilitating murder. I’m not wise enough to see where the balance lies. I choose not to work on projects like that but I have trouble condemning some of these things out of hand.
iMessage came after WhatsApp (WA itself isn't the first messaging app...), I wonder why WA didn't get big in the US, maybe it's because virtually all mobile contracts in the US include a texting package. As for WA, one key to its success was probably the automatic upload of your address book to see who of your contacts is already in the system (and the privacy side in the battle of privacy vs convenience loses another battle), on other IM clients you had to add contacts manually.
Is it arming Saudis to create famine in Yemen?

Or is it that police can drop literal bombs on Black neighborhoods and few will ever know about it?[1]

Or is it that when I'm in the US, I'm more likely to be murdered by police than to be murdered by anyone while in Japan?

Or is it that Chicago has a murder rate 5x that of Somalia?

Or WMD lies? Gulf of Tonkin lies?

You may love this, but does everyone?

Wolf Blitzer said he does: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...

1 - https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/18/407665820...
I always thought of "UW" as the university of waterloo
Great link! Spent quite a while checking several statistics... Bookmarked.

Super interesting stuff.
Those are called friends.
I'm no good at picking names. I'm better at "code names", where I basically just find a pop culture reference that makes me laugh, like for an RSS feed reader, I might name it "Seymour" after the character from Little Shop of Horrors ("Feed me, Seymour!"), just as a contrived example.

But my one piece of advice is to make sure your startup name and domain name pass what I call the Bar Test. If your name passes the Bar Test, it'll probably be memorable enough to turn into some conversions.

The test is simple: imagine you're in a loud bar or a concert, and someone asks the name of your company. You yell the name at them, and they scream back "COOL! I'LL CHECK IT OUT ON MY PHONE"

Can they spell it correctly without you having to yell out the letters one-by one?

If your company name is "Onederful" (YC startup), then you'll yell "WONDERFUL" and they'll try and spell it that way -- and be wrong. The obvious tell that your name fails the bar test is if you find yourself constantly spelling it for people: "I work at Wonderful -- O-N-E-D-E-R-F-U-L".

Examples of names that pass the bar test: ZipRecruiter, Zoom, Twitch, Apple, Stripe, Square, Airship, Atrium,

Names that definitely do not pass the bar test: Shypt, Scalyr, Gamelynx, Roofr, Scribd, Symple, Tipe,

To be fair, there are some very popular startups/apps that fail the Bar Test, such as Flickr, but IMO they are the exception rather than the rule.

Good luck. :)
Your parent comment did not make that claim
Having read through the latest filings, it looks like the District Court judge is pretty upset with Facebook and its tactics, and was willing to give no leeway to their request to stay the case as a result. He wanted a trial, and soon.

One of the tactics that they used was going over his head to the Ninth Circuit to request a stay at the district level (https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=253527059...), which the Ninth Circuit then granted (https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=253580963...). So then the district court judge had to effectively grant the stay anyhow, which he had just denied:

"ORDER. In light of the circuit court's order, all remaining pre-trial and trial dates are vacated. Signed by Judge James Donato on 5/29/2018. (This is a text-only entry generated by the court. There is no document associated with this entry.) (jdlc3S, COURT STAFF) (Filed on 5/29/2018)"

This is what having infinite cash buys you in the American legal system.
And why are such emails so optimistic and positive? Because of the bonuses that they might lead to. For creating killing machines...
> Uh, for the same reasons they would do so on any other platform?

Wrong. Windows is a closed source, proprietary platform. One would develop OSS for an OSS operating system.
Extending this argument, would you be OK if they helped other countries as well? Or just your country? I am trying to see if you are arguing from a patriotic perspective or saying that there is nothing wrong with military collaboration in general? I don't see why a company should only collaborate preferentially with one country. Either they shouldn't collaborate with any military as a part of some policy, which I don't see as enforceable. Or they should be free to collaborate with any country while not sharing any confidential data with each other. That gets us to corporations truly owning the world.
Well, Morocco changes its DST four times per year so that during Ramadan the night (and subsequently lunchtine) falls earlier.

Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so.
— Douglas Adams
Congrats, you won HN humor of the day award.

FYI, Facebook runs Katran in production: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1906146702752923/open-sourci...
I think the easiest answer to that is to ship a stripped-down emacs that starts in org mode, probably with keys remapped to the "standard" set (`C-a` for select all, etc).
ForkBase: an efficient storage engine for blockchain and forkable applications
Serial did imply RS-232 because it was an established industry standard, and by the 80s more than twenty years of hardware supported it. It's still in use today on technical equipment, although most of the world has moved on to its descendant - USB.

It's true that RS-422 was technically better, but it was only ever used in the Apple ecosystem.

Existing RS-232 hardware needed an adaptor or a complete redesign. This severely limited the appeal of the Mac in industrial automation, scientific control, and electronic development, and often made basic printing more complicated than it needed to be.

Realistically, most of those were never going to be prime Mac markets. Even so, sales and market niches were lost to the PC and to competitors like HP.
Existential risks to software engineering (2018)