skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My two cents:

The 90s and 00s were a very unique time in business and tech history. With just a computer, internet connection, and knowledge of a few programming languages, anybody could start a site or an app. Because they were among the first to do it, they got rich.

Nowadays, although the cost of computing is way down (more people have computers/mobiles and cloud computing is dirt cheap compared to the on-site hosting a decade or two ago), the necessary complexity for a novel IT product is way, way up.

For example, social networks are pretty much complete. You have the big one (FB), the lightweight (TW), the pictures (IG), the secret (SNAP), and so on. Go ahead and try to make your own social network. Your costs are next to nothing but you will probably not become the next Facebook Snapchat.

However, there is a lot of opportunity in the ML/AI spaces as well as with electronics and IoT. That requires a further investment in education/training as well as capital expenses (GPU/TPU/cloud for ML, hardware costs for electronics). So the barriers to the weekend coder are much higher, even though the opportunity exists.

Likewise, working in higher education with a close relationship to the state has revealed enormous opportunities, but they require extensive knowledge of grant writing, local codes, etc. More barriers to entry, but nothing insurmountable.

In short, there’s still gold in them hills. But mining ain’t what it used to be.
Well, here's a funny story. After being kicked off of GitHub, the project was moved to GitLab, but on GitLab, there was nothing but a notice that the project had moved to Gitorious. There was nothing at all on Gitorious, and doing a Google seatch showed me that the project could be found... wait for it... once again on GitHub.

https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality

Either they repented of their views about censoring satire, they haven't noticed it's back, or they think it's a real thing. <shrug>
Not only does he probably have a good amount of savings, he can easily get a new job if this experiment fails. It’s a gutsy move I’d never be able to do but not really something he can’t recover from.
How do you take a monopolistic action if you have a small market share?
Series 3 is actually thicker than Series 0 I believe.

You would have better luck putting Series 2 hardware in there.
Deployment to a production environment is usually different than running locally. I have a CloudFormation script to handle deployments.

Well, I also have a yml file that builds my Lambda package with CodeBuid since I develop on Windows and Python packages with binary dependencies don't work on Linux based lambdas.

The CodeBuild step will package the Linux versions of the packages.
Musk absolutely didn't start from "very little": https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/04/10/2014-rocket-man-the-o...

> After [Musk's parents] divorced in 1980, Elon mostly lived with his father, who says he owned thoroughbred horses, a yacht, several houses and a Cessna. One of their homes was in Waterkloof, a leafy suburb of Pretoria that was popular with foreign diplomats.

> Wanderlust ran on both sides of the family. On holidays, Errol [Musk's Dad] and his kids would travel, he said: to Europe, Hong Kong, throughout the United States. Or they’d take the plane to Lake Tanganyika, where Errol had a stake in an emerald mine. Elon would later get his own pilot’s license, but he no longer has time to fly.

> While wealthy South Africans typically hired maids and gardeners, Errol decided that his children would do chores and cook their own food, taking shifts.

Michael Dell: http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ca-Ge/Dell-Michael.ht...

> In 1984, as a first-year college student in Austin, Texas, Michael Dell borrowed $1,000 from his parents to start a computer accessories business.

To put this in perspective, in 2015 less than 30% of Americans have $1000 in their savings: https://www.gobankingrates.com/banking/savings-account/62-pe...

Kalanick's parents: https://www.recode.net/2017/5/27/15705290/bonnie-kalanick-mo...

> From teaming over complex science projects like building a real electrical transformer to giving him his first experience programming computers, [Kalanick's dad] had been the one to bring home early computers for his tech-curious son to fiddle with.
Shout-out to Yerba Mate tea (which this drink is based on) which I got introduced to on a recent trip to Argentina and now enjoy at home now and then, thanks to Amazon (I got the special cup and special metal filter straw and everything!). It's been called a "supertea" due to its various health benefits in addition to being a CNS stimulant. I'd recommend trying it. I add a little honey, but sweetener is up to you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerba_mate

For reference I got this mate mug https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01GJXBR94/ref=oh_aui_se... and these straws ("bombillas") https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M1N9U23/ref=oh_aui_se... (because the one that came with the mug let a bit too much tea particulate through) and am very happy with that combo.

Here's a good video on the "ritual" of making it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BW1-pE4XaE
> Apparently the UK doesn't do it, but other EU countries do.

The UK has the ID document details checked by airline staff (or their contractors, like handling agents) with document details passed on to the Border Agency.
Really? Didn’t know they did that.

MS had effectively the same rule too, didn’t they? Wasn’t that (one of) the reasons we didn’t see Linux as even a BTO option for the longest time?
Sounds more as if he thinks a new programming language might possibly be able to let him eke out a living while doing work he enjoys. No riches in sight, so far as my reading of it is concerned.
That is an unfair characterization. They did what they did to protect their brand from a Streamer who is making money from other people’s content via monetization and to which they wanted no association with.

Many corporations wouldn’t allow monetization of their content by someone else so they were quite generous to generally allow it. But that comes at their sole discretion, as is their right.

If somone reads the article you linked, I think this is pretty clear.
I hope it's clear in my comment that I'm neither apologizing for Facebook nor sympathizing with Thiel and his crap etc. I think assuming-good-faith and looking for charitable explanations is a good practice, even if I actually don't believe people actually deserve the charity.
The Swiss did not join the EU while it maintains very close relations, which likely has very large impact due to current exchange rates.

On 6 September 2011, the Swiss franc effectively became fixed against the euro: the Franc had always floated independently until its currency appreciation became unacceptable during the eurozone debt crisis. The Swiss National Bank set an CHF/EUR peg that involved a minimum exchange rate of 1.20 francs to the euro, with no upper bound in place. The Bank committed to maintaining this exchange rate to ensure stability. The peg was abandoned on 15 January 2015, when renewed upward pressure on the Swiss franc exceeded the Bank's level of tolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_U...
> Why would you do that, in general?

The main purpose is to maintain a clean set of commits. So rather than having a history like:

Add method and unit tests
Update version to 1.2.3
Fixed issue in method
Fixed syntax error
Addressing review comments

you only have the first two commits.

> That seems needlessly hostile to reviewers

Why would doing something like this be considered hostile? The problem here is the tool used for reviewing code, not the submitter or reviewers. Other review tools have had the feature of viewing the diff of the branch across rebases for quite some time now.

The only other alternative is to rely on the submitter to make sure they squash the amendments they make into the correct commit. That in itself is more difficult after making multiple commits of that nature. What usually happens in that case is that those commits end up as part of the master branch. This makes it more difficult to revert certain changes because they're split across multiple commits and it also makes it more difficult to track down the source of a bug. It also makes it more difficult to see which commit was responsible for a given change when using git blame.
I'm the Engineering Manager for the Reviews team at Reflektive (performance management SAAS), and I have to say that this article rings true with me personally and aligns with our company's mission. The recent trend when it comes to performance management is that companies a) no longer want the feedback process to be centrally driven and b) feedback between managers and direct reports should be given on a more frequent cadence. The latter point is especially challenging, because no software out there can magically can change an individual's behavior; the company culture[1] has to exist first to foster it.

Every company is different, but for some traditional companies Reflektive works with them to initially roll out Performance Reviews because companies have dedicated budget for it. Then, once they're comfortable with our tools, our Customer Success team partners with them to craft a roll-out plan for our "Check Ins" product, which is a lightweight feedback tool intended on used every 3 months. For Check Ins, it's meant to be purely about development; at Reflektive, our Check Ins contain no performance rating scores nor do we use it for compensation (we have a separate process for that).

The good news is that a LOT of companies, ranging from small startups to large 50k-employee enterprise companies, actually want to shift towards a more employee-driven model. Our team's number one priority right now is to empower employees/managers to own their own feedback process and to increase the frequency of feedback between managers and their teams. I'm super excited about what's coming down the pipeline!

[1]https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1df5MALZKZU6lOeIXUiO-...
The hell am I doing working for money when I could just be lying to dumb rich people? Hey Richie Rich, I just invented a machine that cures bowell irregularity by whispering pleasant self-affirmations in your ear. "Relax, you are your body's destiny, release your burdens and fly free." I'll take my billion in cash, please.
If you have a flip-flop atom then you can do some meaningful stuff; IIRC the gate-level circuit simulator that the Nand To Tetris course uses can't handle this stuff, and you can still build a CPU. I guess it just depends at what level you want to think about the circuit.

Edit: maybe it should be called a "logic circuit" instead of a "digital circuit".
Definitely not. Presumably the gold subscription would be associated with a group for your open source projects, and your personal private projects would be completely separate (and free, just with Core functionality).
Ask HN: Static site hosting with Google Auth
There are various documentation sites we want to host as a company (e.g. Storybook with our react component library). We don't want these to be publically available, which rules out GH Pages, Surge.sh, etc..

Google Sites is great because it allows us to have Google Auth (we run on Google Apps), but we can't upload a static site to it.

What's the best way to host a static site protected by google auth for a given domain?
Id have a pretty bad opinion about a person who would turn down an opportunity, especially those one's that require skills than can be learned easily.
This was in response to Practical Tip #1: "People don't have to say when they are working."

I'm arguing that this tip is harmful. I should know he was on vacation, and thus have a plan in place to handle anything that might come up while he's on vacation. If I'm completely in the dark about when he's working, things are going to be a lot more difficult.
I think that it allows you to evaluate the tradeoff between DIY services on raw http servers and using a framework that reduces development time but is much slower in production.
Ions is the name of a service. Datomic is a database. These aren't jargon.

Are you also bewildered by "Postgres cluster" or "MongoDB cluster? Why isn't it your responsibility to spend the 10 seconds to see that Datomic is the name of another database?
FF runs fine on my six-year-old Thinkpad. Of course I run PrivacyBadger which blocks most adverts and trackers.

Are we really saying that Chrome is just more efficient at wasting CPU cycles to show adverts?
Isn't GitLab a centralized service?
Man, this brings me back to the days of experimenting with Redstone in Minecraft. I only ever got as far as a 4-bit ALU, but it really helped set me up for my circuit and logic classes in college. I wouldn't trade those days for anything.
At first I thought this comment was right on the money, but then I read the article.

"... the decline in new retail businesses isn’t an acute crisis. More worrying, however, is the decline in high-tech business formation. Tech businesses, unlike corner stores, tend to be high-growth businesses...."

Sonnyblarney, did you read the article before posting?

One big trend I've noticed is that small businesses (startups and slow growth businesses alike) are much more likely to do business with startups. A decline in small business is a positive (not good) feedback loop that adversely affects startups.

Consolidation in many sectors is out of control, not just tech. Finance, media, healthcare come to mind, but it's really endemic because fewer small businesses means fewer customers, longer sales cycles, more bureaucracy to navigate and therefore fewer startups.

Putting this in the broader geopolitical context, government antitrust actions are nowhere in sight. National champions, a la Putin & Xi Jinping, and subsidized state-owned enterprises (SOE) will eat the free market's lunch, in the short run, every time. Economic liberalism is really in a difficult spot because globalization has opened our markets to this kind of exploitation.
Motivate Employees by Changing the Workplace Environment
But they'd also take themselves out of a situation where non-corrupt authorities could use their power appropriately. You have to do the ethical math on the likelihood of either possibility and the consequences, which is subjective.
That's a fundamental problem of teamwork. This also happens when the coworker sitting right next to you, working the same hours, has a higher-priority task than the one you're waiting for.
Adding to the list of "If you want hosted Git": Keybase.io.

They provide encrypted git hosting for free: https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone

No issues, pull requests, and social features though.
I'm not disagreeing with you, because there is definitely a balance, but I definitely see places where we have have too many laws, which leaves room for tyranny.

For example, If there are so many laws that everyone is always doing something illegal all the time, then a corrupt cop can stop anyone he wants to at any time, because they've got to be guilty of something. It's a reason for types of deregulation, and keeping law slim in general.
Right, and as I said in my comment, the GPL isn't for developers per se, it's for the freedom of end-users. That's THE point.
It’s not global percentage of a certain market that defines a monopoly.

Apple has 100% market share in the iOS market. Due to that fact they’ve got exclusive control over a significant percentage of the population - consider that customers cannot install another OS on the hardware they’ve bought and they cannot move their iOS apps on another Android phone either.

To make an analogy consider that you’d complain about your local electricity provider having a monopoly and I’d tell you that you can always move to another city or country, there, problem solved, it was your fault for staying there.
That number sounded surprising to me, so I decided to read the paper that it's sourced from which is available here [1]. The first company they listed is SpaceX which of course is true. The next is Mu Sigma [2]. According to Wiki at least that company was founded in Bangalore. The next company was Palantir [3] which is Peter Thiel, so okay. The next is [4] Zenefits, which at least according to Wiki again was founded exclusively by an American. Shooting what seems to be 50% on the first 4 companies they list makes me kind of wonder about the accuracy of their numbers?

I'm not sure how they generated their list or numbers, but it does not seem well supported. I'm also unsure how they picked their 87 companies given that their are hundreds of companies with revenues north of $1 billion (which was their metric), that were of course all at one time or another just a twinkle in somebody's imagination.

[1] - http://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Immigrants-and-Bi...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_Sigma

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenefits
Wealth inequality in the United States
People that do not understand why Android is free and fail to recognize how Google is using its dominating position in one market to dominate other market should read this "Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement" [1] and here HN discussion [2].

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17047348
This is from 2016. Can we update the title?
Has anyone tried hosting one of the the self hosted services on an EC2 instance? What are the ~monthly costs? I'd really rather not have to do the admin work to maintain local hardware
Thank you for agreeing on some parts of my comment.

The parent comment that I reacted to did not sound as sincere as yours. I am not assuming you or the previous commenter as white. It's not about the individual but rather my point is about the larger society, it's cultural institutions that have historically "whitewashed" the whole world. All of our experiences are colored in that sense. This needs to change. In fact, it's vital when worlds are coming together.
Thank for for posting this. I posted a similar link which gained 70+ upvotes within minutes before being deleted with no explanation.
Best of luck. Is there any place you wrote about why you belive Zig is better than all the other alternatives to C? Why should I look at Zig, insted of looking at Rust?

Not trying to be dismissive, genuinely curious what your thinking is.
You could install a buttload of webcams for the price of one robot?
I have not heard of any censorship happening on GitHub. Can you provide some more details and proof?
I think we might have very different experiences and definitions as what counts as the bottom

My bottom was having very little money in my name, with parents that were poor and disabled as a result of the hardships of being fishermen. I had barely enough to take care of my family and go to college (with financial aid) as a result of other very personal circumstances. Even then, I had to make a choice.

I could either spend some of that money on my failing health and never graduate from college, or focus on my education and hope I can fix it later. I went with the latter. Financial aid can only go so far when you're one medical issue away from disaster.

When I finally got a career I had to have multiple rotting and infected teeth extracted because I couldn't afford to get them fixed prior. My family had a history of bad dental issues and I managed to hit it hard.

This is what I mean by the bottom. If my dental issues had gotten worse, then I would've been screwed. This is the reality for a lot of people that grow up in poverty. It doesn't necessarily matter if we can get financial aid when there are other circumstances stopping us, affecting our education or worse.
Even though I see where you are coming from, my view is a little bit more reality based: startup culture is very intertwined with VC and such kinds of investment - and 'by the numbers' - they must be high growth.

Put another way - there is so, so much risk with VC (and such) investment - that the kind of 'regular to medium growth' businesses are actually economic failures for most VC's.

So imagine you have a 'startup' that you grew over 10 years to 100 employees and profitability - even if you made your investors 'some return' - it actually may not be enough return to justify the implicit risk.

So when you adjust for risk ... it's actually not a win. This is something that a lot of founders struggle with understanding.

Anyhow - so my view is - startup = high growth as a matter of pragmatism.

But yes, bootstrapped, mid-growth tech companies don't really fit with the 'small business' profile (aka contractors, cafes) as well so you have a point either way.
Facebook testing downvote-upvote kind of feature
> Why can't we have the model of IBM clones of the 80s/90s

Because that model was a costly mistake from IBM’s perspective, which they tried (and failed) to crush as soon as they realized what was happening (and later, by promoting a new proprietary architecture with the PS/2).

No one, on the supplier side, wants to repeat that model.
There are people who are not authorized to leave the country. Paul Manafort, for example.
> MS had effectively the same rule too, didn’t they? Wasn’t that (one of) the reasons we didn’t see Linux as even a BTO option for the longest time?

Until 1994: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsofts-1994-consent...

Note that the MS one was different: OEMs paid license costs based on computers shipped (with/without Windows), whereas Google requires complete exclusivity if you ship one device with Google Play Store.
Your Best Companion to Educational Institutions Management
It would be good to have this on npm also
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Its totally not because the 1% has captured all the value created by increased productivity over the past 50 years. Definitely not.
This feature won't even work for anything designed for fault tolerance. I believe it can only work for things that either rely on other properly fault tolerant services or that are completely stateless, idempotent, so they can be retried and eventually consistent (in which case the state still has to be handled by properly fault tolerant systems). Either way kubernetes cannot help here.
I already use Backblaze as it's important to have off-site backups whenever possible. However, needing to wait several weeks to download my data is not always an option. I'm a digital hoarder and by that I mean I have >30TB of data. My backup solution for most things is 3 local copies and 1 remote copy. Files I don't deem important enough to pay to store 3 times locally aren't backed up locally but still are backed up with Backblaze. Some things are easier to entrust to someone else (eg: git repos) than trying to maintain local mirrors. Also a Backblaze backup of a git repository doesn't do me much good if I want to quickly grab it (talking minutes to download from Gitlab instead of hours/days from Backblaze) so it makes more sense to use Gitlab as a remote so I can quickly grab it if I lose my local copy.

All of that aside, it's still easier to maintain-and-test a remote repository than to maintain-and-test local repositories.
Yeah, if there really is a "simplification" market why just built out a number of useful data services over SMS and encourage folks to buy old feature phones with just talk and text functionality.
> if it's not a mask, it's going to probably be legal.

I believe masks are also legal. First amendment + a religion that lets you cover your face = your right.
Reminds me of the fellow that took a year off to create an amazing new version control system. He made svk, which was pretty good except for being followed too closely by git.

However good Zig looks, there's also Nim, ATS, Rust, and a dozen more. Seems like a good time for programming languages -- which means a dangerous time to quit your day job for one.
Applesauce – Make exact images of copy-protected Apple II floppy disks