skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>They have full power to act as a censor and limit the right to free speech.

Companies have no obligation to preserve your right to free speech. There is no concept of 'right to free speech' here, since Valve in not part of the government.
Yeah, let's replace judiciary with a 90 degree weld.
The share of young high tech companies seems pretty consistent over the decades, with the exception of dot com, which was no doubt an aberration. Not the norm.

Also, it has ALWAYS been a tremendous risk and challenge starting your own venture. Likely always will be, because there is also tremendous rewards for making it happen. If anything, right now seems like one of the easiest / best times to start a high tech venture in history. Plentiful angel and VC capital. Incredible resources and examples teaching you how to do it (YC, incubators, internet). Flexible tools that can scale up and down depending on company size / need (AWS, open source technologies, facebook / google ads).

To put things in context, I just finished Shoe Dog - the story of Phil Knight / Nike - back in the 60's they didn't even have the concept of VC. His biggest challenge was just getting someone to loan him a little cash so he could finance his inventory which was flying off the shelf! The point is that entrepreneurship is destined to be about tackling a very hard problem that nobody else has solved before - in the 60's that was simply getting financing to fund expansion. Today it's something different. In both cases though, it requires being on the edge and pushing the boundary. I would rather be alive today, playing this game. While the gatekeepers are still around, they have much less power than they used to.
That was a cost of living adjustment, really.
By definition, neutrinos interact with weak force and sterile neutrinos don't.
Can we talk about GitHub's recent censorship instead of flagging it here on HN?
Yesterday I posted a link to a tweet with evidence that GitHub was censoring repos critical of the Microsoft acquisition. I think this is relevant news because just two days ago, the new CEO of GitHub, Nat Friedman said, "I’m not asking for your trust, but I’m committed to earning it." and that "We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud."

Source: https://natfriedman.github.io/hello/

And then yesterday GitHub started cracking down on free speech and censoring people who are critical of the Microsoft acquisition. So, I thought this was worth sharing.

It made it into the top 20 on HN rapidly, but then it disappeared suddenly because some people flagged it.

Proof: https://i.imgur.com/KyQjvWM.jpg

So now we have HN readers censoring a story about GitHub censoring people who are protesting the Microsoft acquisition. So I just wanted to share this story and see if a more productive, open discussion could come of it instead of people censoring each other all over the place. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
The more hostility the public has towards immigrants, the more systems are set up to track people and deport them at the first opportunity, the first error that causes someone to move from "legal" to "illegal".

These tracking systems end up looking at everyone, because anyone might be an immigrant.
Sure, the Apple Watch is only useful for iPhone users. My last comment was how I assumed there was a similar Android Watch device.

I like Apple Pay, I think it is kind of big deal. It's really cool to be able to buy a cup of coffee or some groceries without needing a wallet. It's not the ideal implementation of digital payments, but it's an effective one used by a respectable number of businesses.
That’s a great scenario, but I believe that sovereign immunity prevents the EU from taking action, barring a treaty.
I care more about the fact he was put in a position he had to do it than my bush.
How many computers did Microsoft sell in the 00s?
Marketshare of their OS and associated services, not their phones.
The effective monopoly is in access to the Play Store, which requires Play Services, which is strongly controlled by Google.
> A 'startup' is a high growth type business

No. Not all startups are meant to be high growth but they are still startups.
Repeatedly blows me away how nonchalantly the cryptic trendy community treats wilful fraud.
Not that it matters because a person's worth is not defined by how much money they have... but also we don't know?
> But as someone not born in the US (although I live here), the existence of a prison hospice with any great number of patients strikes me as an act of unspeakable cruelty.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. What strikes me as an act of unspeakable cruelty is that people who have been in prison (felon) are no longer allowed to vote, and get the ability to work but below any kind of minimum wage. As soon as we start to treat people as non-human we enter a slippery slope (see Stanford prison experiment).

The only exception I am willing to make to that is people who are insane. But those end up in involuntary commitment.

And even those 2 examples I mentioned are also just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much wrong with our prison system (especially in USA). I did enjoy the series Orange Is The New Black because it highlighted some examples.
Google does control what equates to an effective monopoly of all smartphone software in the EU. You don't need to sell to have a monopoly that you can abuse.
11 Awesome JavaScript Animation Libraries for 2018
It's different in the EU, but in the US, being a monopoly is not illegal. What's restricted is 1) monopolistic actions like predatory pricing 2) mergers that might create a monopoly
Wasn't it Lincoln who said, "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly"?
What is a PH launch?
I also started from the bottom and experienced plenty of adversity on the way up, yet I feel that my path is very replicable. We live in a nation where if you do well, even in a shit school, that's a fast track to admittance to a top tier university where you'll invariably have all the financial aid in the world, and then some, available literally [and exploitatively] at the click of a button. And from there success is not really in question so long as you major in something that's commercially viable.

And in that regard it's not really an economic issue as much as a social issue. People that come from families with no value for education, or individuals that themselves don't take their education seriously are obviously going to struggle. But those actions are something beyond socioeconomic reasons - as the same is true of somebody born into a rich family - though granted in that case the individual will obviously have more resources to rely on to subsidize his failure.

While I'm sure your circumstances may have dictated such, I'm not really understanding what you're talking about with such a high cost of failure. When I failed, and I did, it simply meant it was time to get a job and work myself up to be able to take shot #x. When one 'sticks', you're set and can use that to enable your future shots.
Pull to Refresh.js
I get what you are saying but I don't agree with your pigeonholing of the definition of "startup". I really don't think all startups are high growth at all. I think that high growth startups are definitely a niche, but I don't think that they are what define startups and startup culture.
> Because many software developers in SV might make over 100K (most do) but have vastly less money left over to actually save compared to someone earning less than half that in other places.

That's just not true.

If you're working in SF on 100k/year, your pay after tax is 5750. Spending 2k/month on rent leaves you with 3750/month, which is almost the pay before tax of someone on half that.
It's probably a very bad idea to camouflage a car.
Microsoft didn’t sell PCs in the 90s either.

People want Android with Google Play store. Google won’t let you do that without restrictions the EU says are anticompetitive.
Because they are also CEOs at large companies and also want bloated salaries so they approve them for their counterparts.
Microsoft did not sell computers but was found to have abused their Windows OS monopoly.
The problem is they have to give three month's notice when quitting a job. When other companies or headhunters learn that you gave notice, they do their best to hire you away from whatever new job you took.

Our HR Department now calls new-hires every couple of days to keep them engaged so they don't take a job elsewhere. It sucks when you hire someone, plan things three months in advance, and.... they don't show up to the job without ever telling you they took a job somewhere else.
Internal Microsoft poll shows employees are less satisfied with pay
In fairness, Tesla has promised that at some point in the future. They have not claimed that they have full self driving currently. Theranos claimed to have their system working.
Where can I get/try good tea? Order online? Any recommendations?
I find it necessary to stop caffeine for 14+ days before I get to experience improved energy levels. For about 1-2 days i feel really tired after discontinuing coffee, then for the next couple weeks I feel OK but not as good as when I was drinking coffee. After a couple weeks I start feeling like I have more energy than when I’m drinking coffee daily.

I still choose to drink coffee just because I love the taste and the ritual so much. I limit myself to 1 cup in the morning daily.
How do they "take the brunt of the losses" when the company tanks in a limited liability model ? unless you mean the actual loss of their stocks, and (at least most of the time) the lack of compensation for them ? because in that case what they're losing are the very tokens of ownership that allowed them to extract the aforementioned surplus value unfairly - the tokens that in my view should mainly belong to the actual value producers.

That's not to say that investors shouldn't be compensated for their initial risks when an actual funds injection is required, mind you; but them being compensated ad vitam eternam - and more generally, them actually owning the structure - makes very little sense morally for me (and beyond "morally", I don't see how this can result in anything else than progressive concentration of wealth society-wide in the long term).

You also assume people can "move on to another job" without too much trouble; again, that may hold true in tech or similar popular domains but it's far from true for a lot of people.
You could try an affiliate program, if you can make the offer payouts good enough. That way the affiliates front the ad cost and you only need to pay them for conversions.

Also, $80k is really not much when talking about investment. I would suggest talking to some angel investors and trying to raise a seed round with convertible notes, either $25k per investor or one or two investors at $100k, both of which are common deal sizes for early stage companies.

Show them the CAC and LTV numbers in the pitch meetings.

All that said... I would be looking for growth from non-advertising channels. Specifically I would be looking at partnerships with schools, which reduces your problem to negotiating deals with a finite number of institutions. I would just straight up cold call school administrators and pitch the product. If you do it right, each school could onboard multiple users (parents) to your platform. This way you only need to worry about reaching N/K schools, instead of N parents.
Automated Feature Engineering in Python
There is a difference between AI/ML safety/robustness (as in ensuring self driving cars don't behave erratically given unexpected inputs), and the skynet predictions.

> Consider critiquing the concrete projects that are funded with AI safety money. Very little of that money flows to research about "preventing malicious superintelligence" or whatever strawman you have in mind. And even projects that consider those questions also consider many much more near-term AI safety questions.

But this ("preventing malicious superintelligence") is EXACTLY what we are talking about. The comment in the OP was quoting the following

> Grants will likely go to organizations that seek to reduce global catastrophic risks, especially those relating to advanced artificial intelligence.
ACSC working with PageUp People on security incident
Being a monopoly is not illegal in the EU either.
I think this is for local deployments of web apps like a localhost site or Electron app. I could be wrong though.
It's interesting to see the differences in the difficulties in starting a business in the US vs. Europe.

It is "easier" to start a business in the US, but it is riskier because of the general weakness of the social safety net (healthcare, social helps, free childcare, etc.).
Microsoft forced OEMs to install Windows at the time. That's a slightly different situation. As far as I know Google is not force-feeding Android to anyone.
as a contractor
Waterdeep CLI – Get any file, from any terminal with 1 command
Even if you know that a company is a pure scam, the market can remain irrational longer then you can cover your short.
I'm not familiar with this site and benchmarks, but from reading comments it seems to be respected.

Given that, I'm confused why this is called "web framework" benchmarks. It looks to me like it is comparing some actual frameworks (which rank very poorly) against minimalist, task-focused http servers (which rank highly).
To be successful, any Android phone needs the Google Play Store. And to get the rights to ship the Play Store, you (as a manufacturer) need to preinstall dozens of Google system apps and services. That way, Google has the total control (therefore monopoly) over the experience of nearly every single Android phone.
Genetics play an important factor. CYP1A2, one of the enzymes that metabolizes caffeine, varies by as much as 40x between individuals.

In those with a high level of the enzyme, caffeine is metabolized quickly, so they can drink coffee in the afternoon and still fall asleep. They are less likely to get anxiety from caffeine, and do not suffer from a higher risk of heart attacks with coffee consumption.

In contrast, a small amount of CYPA12 prevents caffeine from being metabolized and prolongs its effects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYP1A2
I agree with your general point, but there are many more companies and products that do require high performance beyond Google.
Are you really arguing that the law should be replaced with a precise computer language?

Oh my god HN... Laws are typically written with a lot of vague language because humans operate in vague, gray areas. If you write an entirely prescriptive set of laws (Like Hammurabi's Code of Laws) you will forget some things, be too draconian in others, and overall a sense of justice will be lost.
I like that idea. I'll see what we can do!
The phrase for this is "the law of unintended consequences."
They push their OS, which requires fees from and compliances with manufacturers.

The same analogy can be drawn from Microsoft and the desktop OS market in the 90s/00s. They had a monopoly Ewen though they didn't sell computers directly. They still strong-armed manufacturers, like Google is doing today.
They just come over here. Why would they work in india when they can make 4-10x here?
There is a very powerful mythology surrounding the Independent American Inventor, a big part of which is that they overcome the mobs of naysayers shouting, "It can't be done!" by sheer force of personal will and brilliance. On this theory, the mere fact that there are people saying it can't be done tells you nothing (or, in fact, indicates that the target of the criticism is actually on to something really big!)
I’ve used it for web (my failed startup was in Haxe, my side projects still are mostly Haxe).

To be honest these days I mostly just use it as a “better JavaScript” because I’d prefer my backend to be NodeJS rather than PHP or Java or sone other Haxe target. But I really do prefer it to JavaScript, even with Babel and Flow and ES6 and all the things to modernise Js.
You have data to back that up? I don't know that to be true. I've seen many small businesses that have much higher productivity per employee than that of larger businesses.
I'd agree on a grand scale the primary focus should be there first but perpetrators are, in a way, victims as well. Even if you disagree (which is fair enough) they're still human beings.
>>But the work in Amazon is at least two orders of magnitude better than what you get in Infosys.

No. In fact this is precisely the kind of binary classification that forces people to make bad decisions.

Please try to understand that people working Wipro or Infosys or TCS are humans like us, who use the same programming languages and same computers.

This binary classification is why people up becoming SREs at Google, while they could have probably been programmers at Cognizant.
Datomic Ions are a cloud-native version of stored procedures (in Datomic terms). I have not fiddled with Ion but the local dev story with Datomic is fine. One does not need cloud connectivity for local work, and ordinary functions can be run locally in the write path in Datomic. I would guess/assume that these same functions can be deployable as is in Ion- modulo the CI/dependency machinery required for cloud deployments.
I'm not sure those detained due to false positive scans feel the same way regarding 'utility' of the tool.
https://dharma.io/
You might be right, at least in that I'm probably too loose with the jargon. Specifically my complaint is on the "controlled clinical trials" being the "only way", and thinking about it perhaps it's just focusing too much on a less than ideally precise statement from Lowe.

This ties back to the Right To Try stuff though. Suppose there's a new drug researchers have reason to believe might work, maybe it's even synthesized with an individual in mind, so they administer it to a patient after getting consent and (more importantly in the right-to-try discussion) legal approval. The patient either gets better, gets worse, has no change, or develops some new problems. Whatever the case, the data are recorded, it's a study of some sort. I might tend to see this as an observational study but I should probably use the more precise jargon and follow the split of only no-influence being observational and any-influence being "experimental", so maybe the best category is "field trial". Still, it's definitely not a (randomized double-blind gold standard) controlled clinical trial, but can we still learn anything from it? Did the drug work? Did the drug cause any state change? If another drug had been taken would the result have been the same? Causal inference people say you can make (qualified) claims from such data. But it seems that the regulatory mindset at least (which will lag practice, though I don't think practice has changed dramatically enough to influence regulation yet) is "we can't answer these questions at all" and so they require the very expensive (source of the majority of costs for new drugs) controlled clinical trial.

This reminded me of an old thread I keep bookmarked... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819346 "The entire thrust of our medical regulatory system ... is the belief that it's better for 1000 patients to die of neglect, than 1 from quackery. ... The entire process we call 'drug development' is an attempt to gain six-sigma confidence that we are not practicing quack medicine." My real complaint is with this sort of mindset, which I took Lowe to be spreading with his statement about controlled clinical trials.
If smartphones were open we wouldn't have the whole problem. Why can't we have the model of IBM clones of the 80s/90s, where I actually own the device I buy. Right now, I can't even become root on my device without tricks (which one day may not even work).
>I feel like the HN community fails repeatedly to really grok this concept

No. Two weeks ago if you took the temperature of the crowd it would seem dead set on singing the praises of github centralization, encourage others to put all their eggs in that basket, and pretending like open source doesn't exist unless on github.

The popular conversations here have shifted. It probably indicates some shift in what the audience really thinks, but mostly just shows whats popular to bikeshed this week.
> To be successful

Then it's a choice on the part of manufacturers, not an obligation. Look at Amazon: they decide to do without.
This seems like the least objectionable place to do this.

It's already accepted that everyone passing a border show photo ID and get their passage approved and recorded.
From your answer, I get the feeling that you need a manager more than you need a mentor.
In particular:

* if you don't really know what you should/could be working on but are feeling frustrated with your daily routine, you should bring this up with your manager.

* if you still don't know company vocabulary and don't feel involved in the company after a few months, there may be an onboarding / culture sharing issue at play.

That said, maybe you should play the "money game" (as in the movie about baseball). It may be impossible to find a mentor who will do it all (help you grow technically, help you find more meaningful tasks, help you feel more socially integrated) but finding several mentors who can help with each facet is probably easier. E.g. your manager should be in that list re. day-to-day tasks and company culture; an outgoing coworker for the social interaction, etc.

You mentioned that most of the team is much older than you; maybe you can create a "filial" social relationship rather than a "fraternal" one. In my experience, this works quite well if your coworkers are old enough to have kids in high school/college, and you've graduated a few years ago - easy to relate to what they're going through and reassure them that their kids will eventually turn into fine upstanding folks just like you. Plus everyone loves talking about their kids.

This leaves out the big one, the dev/tech mentor... But if you're not looking for someone you can have a normal social interaction with, you can target the grumpy beards who committed 95% of the entrenched esoteric code and ask them about it. (Or, you know, just commit something that'll break their code. That usually gets their attention ;)
Again, I'm not giving Murdoch any credit, but simply pointing out that Theranos clearly did not control News Corp.
Probably someone venting over beers at a convention?
> too low to the ground

What does that mean? The height is adjustable. At full height you still find it too low?
On the topic of state-machines, there are some really cool typed libraries out there. The ones that stand out are motor[0] for Haskell and ST[1] for Idris.

[0]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/motor

[1]: http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/st/state.html
> lack the knowledge and even the curiosity to understand the existing technology

Honestly, this is what I understand least.

I can understand and even respect banking a company on "this isn't possible yet, but maybe we can develop new technology". That's a standard feature of legitimate biotech startups and drug research.

I can comprehend the snowballing risks, overstating a case because you think you're almost at something really impressive. I can't really understand the blatant, verifiable lies like "the DoD uses it", but it's not the first time we've seen those.

What feels new and totally baffling is to not even care what's being done and what's possible. There's no sign that Holmes or Balwani ever had any idea whether they were close to success. This wasn't just betting on horse races with borrowed money, it was betting on a dead horse because you hadn't bothered to check if it was still alive.
Is "co-founder" and "strong influence with ideas" not direct involvement?

Spolsky has a long and impressive resume. What was he doing during the SO era if not working on SO?
15+ experts share their web performance advice for 2018