skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to move from CTO to COO/CEO role
Hello All,

I am currently a CTO of a startup. My co founder is the CEO. I don't intend to be CEO at my current startup, I am happy and satisfied with my current role. I want to prepare myself to be a CEO or COO type of role in my future endeavors. I am an older candidate, introvert and a foreign national with an accent.

Here in my plan of action,

Attend American Accent classes to neutralize the accent.
Possibly, attend top tier part time mba program.
Improve networking skills

I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions yo u might have.
I just finished my PhD at the age of 28 from an unranked department and received several offers for tenure-track positions at R1 universities. Internships brought my annual income up to well above the national average.

With my new position, my friends in software engineering without a PhD are making 5-30% more than me (in much more expensive areas) and don't have near as much freedom as I do to work on what I want.

I'm definitely glad I went this route.
A long time ago, I was told a story by a Navy Radioman--a specialty which no longer exists. As a demonstration of TEMPEST, someone parked a van at the end of a pier and after a few hours presented to the crew of the ship a log of everything that had been done electronically on the ship. Not just the transmitted traffic, either, but things that they had apparently been able to construct from the CRT displays in use at the time. At a distance.

I don't think your VCR, CRT monitor, or headphones are nearly as secure as you think they are. You might not care about their vulnerability to a sufficiently-motivated actor, but someone else might.
> Again, I don't know the solution. Regulate the number of graduates within a certain degree field?

Stop providing loan guarantees for all students regardless of the marketability of the degree they've chosen?
A PhD is a degree in conducting research. Get one if you want a career in research. If you don't like research, don't do a PhD. Any decent program pays students about a $1.5-3K monthly stipend. Don't have being a professor as the only acceptable end-goal.

There are lots of careers that benefit from or require a PhD besides being a professor. People with STEM PhDs are found in great concentration in R&D settings. For example, when I worked at NASA JPL probably about 50%+ of the scientists had PhDs.

Outside of STEM activities, it can still be an enriching life experience. You don't incur significant debt. It does have a high opportunity cost, if one's undergraduate degree is lucrative. On the other hand, you get the privilege to spend your time trying to create new knowledge.

Real PhD Issues (and Cons):

1) Research is hard and it requires a massive time investment to create new knowledge, especially when just starting.

2) High levels of impostor syndrome. You will likely meet people much smarter than you, and those that can work 80+ hours per week for years. If you fall into the trap of comparing yourself to them, your mental health will suffer. You have to just work toward solving your problems. As one old friend put it, he felt like a genius when he worked as a software developer, but throughout his PhD he felt like an underachiever.

3) Jealousy of your friends "getting their lives started" (kids, buying a home, etc.). Very hard to have any work-life balance as a PhD student.

4) Don't expect to get rich after a PhD. Do it because you think a career in research will be satisfying.

5) If you want to be a tenure-track professor running a lab, you have to be very flexible with where you live. Being a professor is also very stressful.

6) If you want to teach in college, a PhD is required but the main thing a PhD teaches is research -- not teaching.

7) Clearly assess your ability to get a professorship if you choose to do a podstoc. There is little point in one unless a professorship is your end-goal. Many don't realistically assess their competitiveness for professorships. I wrote a blog post about this about 6 years ago (it needs updating):
http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/
> Would this increase the humidity of the local biome? Should we avoid using it in deserts?

Space is pretty big, I don't think anyone's ever considered it a problem there.

And re: reproducing in the tank, the temperatures generated would absolutely sterilize everything that was coming out as propellant. You could shove a zoo in there, and it would come out as fine particulate mist of mostly water and maybe some small burnt carbon particulate matter.

There are probably easier ways of spreading bacteria than via clouds, but it's actually an interesting idea - the bacteria could be used as the condensation locus, and cause rain that brings them to the surface. Just do a pass through the upper atmosphere, farting the whole way...
I'm pretty sure a lot of Uber drivers who weren't aware of "vomit fraud" now are.

In many countries, the previous scammy taxi drivers are now Uber drivers. I thus expect "vomit fraud" to expand unless Uber manages to control it.
I enjoy it, but not given the failure rate I'm experiencing. If I had 50% or less failure ratio I would be ok. But as is essentially every problem is a 2-5 hour struggle where I meander to an answer feeling usually I temporarily learned why X didn't work in that given situation and not something widely applicable.
Let's imagine that we have a new fuel source that works with dirt and sand. Whenever you can excavate, you can use it for fuel. How long until we run out of "land"? Same concept. Except that we have more ocean surface than we have landmasses.

Potable water is precious. Water in general is not.
What sort of credit are you looking for? There are millions of tidy small businesses with steady profit. Just because you don't see newspaper articles about them doesn't mean they don't exist. Look around.

Small businesses are often able to get credit in the form of bank loans once they have established a track record of profitability.
A USB-C hub would be cheaper.
We faced the same issue before pivoting our design services from a local shop to a productized service (http://draftss.com). We had tons of advice about how design on subscription model won't work or that we should have pay per task model or we shouldn't productize our service at all. After A/B testing we narrowed down to the current model where we are catering to 10+ clients every month generating $3000+ in MRR.
> if you want to back up 2FA secrets, just enroll two of them

Could you elaborate on how you do this in practice?
That's only because you're ignoring all the other comments which point out that there are people who didn't get refunds, and that there were others who had to go back and forth with Uber and fight for these refunds.
Quite the opposite. It stands to reason that the brain is much more vulnerable during episodes of high activity.

"open mind" is a hollow phrase, because you need an open mind to take the risk in the first place.

The only up side is that reason cannot overrule the nervous system at great length, which will sooner or later go into intoxication mode, and that the immune system can handle even chronic infections to some degree.

I would argue that some of the mental activity is caused by placebo effect, because I once experienced someone pranked, told to have been slipped MDMA, trying to embrace the situation and turning irrationally exited and happy for no substantial reason. Certainly some side effects may enhance the placebo effect, like weird after taste, alcohol or just staying up late and creating a suitable atmosphere, but believe is a strong cognitive bias. Otherwise one might just feel ill or poisoned.

A lot of the first experience involves sanity checks, so, if psychedelics have an effect on the currently running processes, so to speak, the ability to judge the situation will suffer first and inhibition won't kick in, or overreact. Then anything can happen with whatever one is liable to think about. Certainly nobody will dispute that normal productivity greatly suffers on a trip. So you can't really trust the self evaluation.
which is why I'm wary of using my password manager for OTP, and use a separate one. Not sure if it's too paranoid, but it doesn't make sense to me to keep the 2 in the same place.
That was the joke...
I am optimistic about snaps even though after using them I found a lot of kinks that still need to be ironed out. But for the users downloading free software which is the main use case they are targeting first it works great. I say "for users" because wrestling with snapcraft (the command used to build snap packages) can be pretty frustrating for non-trivial programs. Cross compiling for arm was one thing that I was struggling with and ended up just doing my arm builds on a Raspberry Pi. A think many issues could be resolved by having snapcraft use it's own repo sources rather than whatever the host OS is using. Also for proprietary apps there is currently no way to have a private "store" so you are limited to installing from a .snap package using --dangerous --devmode flags and lose a lot of the benefits of using snaps in the first place (mainly automated updates).
"It's got to be about the worst cost to utilization ration of any feature on the iPhone."

I can't speak to whether you're correct or not, but that feature is a massive time saver for me. It's one of the most compelling features that keeps me on their platform. I have large fingers and selecting text with 3D touch is incredibly easy compared to using the twin cursors offered by iOS/Android for that purpose.

I run into quite a number of folks who have no idea they have 3D touch though. Surprises them even more than me when I show them.

I don't use 3D touch for much else though, which sort of supports your assertion.
Well, assuming everyone is following the law (and while Musk is eccentric... I don't see any reason to think that he's a criminal), we know what is going on inside of Tesla.

Everyone knows the dates when Tesla's bonds are due. We all know Tesla has lost $300 million / quarter per quarter for the last few years. Etc. etc. etc. Its all public information and there doesn't seem to be any "cooking of the books" going on right now.

In the case of Enron, it looked like a normal company but the executives were lying to the public. A few investors published articles noting that the numbers looked "off", which eventually prompted an investigation. Basically: if people lie, there's usually evidence in the numbers. Some numbers look wrong, certain things don't add up right, etc. etc. I've never heard of Tesla cooking the books.
Why can't drivers simply snap a photo of the vomit evidence when filing their claim? Would clarify the situation pretty easily I would think.
You should read Isaac Asimov's "The Martian Way".
I don't recall the studies offhand, but I remember reading that this kind of macho attitude generally has worse results than actually constructive criticism. That wouldn't surprise me. Not many people respond well to this, and it can easily turn into abuse.
All of the examples you gave of jobs that government should be paying people to do are jobs that are already done in the private sector. Tutoring and child care alone are very large industries.

The biggest issue with your proposal is that if those employees paid by the government to do these jobs are paid less than the private sector, you'll put the private sector out of business. If they're paid the same or better, you would need strong incentives to make them go find a different job instead of keeping a market rate job that is assured to never go away.
large sigh
This is talked about by Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies...

The idea of there being too many jobs that require degrees (but really don't utilize them) is touched on, and the proposed solution is for positions to not be allowed to ask for degree status. Instead, they would have to test for aptitude. The whole article is worth a read.
i think you are absolutely correct. It is faulty mostly unwanted, not properly test feature. Need to be re-called and replaced at Intel cost. Period.
I can't believe he raced through all the museums and historical works. St Petersburg is near the top of my list for cultural visits. The Russians bought up a ton of the best artwork in Europe and it resides in the Hermitage. The palaces look amazing- classic enlightened Russia.
I wasn't thinking only about the self-employed (as in S-corp) but also LLC owners that are employees at their own company and smaller ventures/startups(?).

Indeed, at some point the money runs out and that will become actual unemployment, but it will show up in statistics with a rather long delay or not at all.

In the mean time, you have people doing literally nothing while on paper the economy is overheating.

Of course, I'm sure it's a small percentage of the population... so probably not very relevant.
Water is the space fuel of the future. Well, at least the space oil of the future - if you start mining asteroid and comets, water is one of the best component you can get: good for any life around, quite a good solvent if you need one, and more importantly can be a fuel like this or be transformed into oxygen and hydrogen, which is rocket fuel as well.

Also, good luck depleting the water on Earth with space travel. There would be other issues way before this happens.
And make loans dischargeable like any other loan.
Complain right away if the driver is bad and let Uber/Lyft take care of it. If you just rate low and do nothing you kinda let the problem persist.
I don't think they can do so for newer devices, but here's a video from REWA demonstrating the process: https://youtu.be/AYETzuYlEjE
>"She once had her own office, secretaries and assistants, along with titles like “director” that spoke to her decades of experience. Now, she’s a temp — one of many.

>Levi was laid off from her job at a law office during a merger in early 2015, and has struggled to find long-term work. In late 2016, she filed for bankruptcy."

How do you go from director at 59 to filing bankruptcy in fewer than two year after losing your job? Fiscal irresponsibility
The recession was a market correction not just for housing prices but also for labor prices, and a lot of educated/experienced workers have learned that the market doesn't value their skills like they thought they did.
Google's instructions for setting up these keys are unfortunately very bad, so I wrote this guide: https://techsolidarity.org/resources/security_key_gmail.htm
Ask HN: Expanding eCommerce business to China
Hey guys,

I'm maintaining a quite successful business that sells virtual goods, with customers from both Americas and Europe. We have some happy customers from China, and given their enthusiastic feedback, I'm researching the ways to expand to that region.
Yet, from sources I was able to get my hands on it seems the rules of running an eCommerce business in China are vastly different on almost every level.

Do you have any experience in expanding an eCommerce business to China? Are there any particular things to keep in mind?
Sorry to hear it. We had our wedding there and we're glad it was well documented, but it was devastating all the same.
I don't think it's about cost - you have to bring a full car to Uber anyway, a dashcam is nothing next to that.

Tomorrows HN article: Police subpoenas Uber for in-car CCTV video.
Servers are "safely" operable until they die. The failure mode is that the machine stops operating. If your system has redundancy built in it keeps working possibly at reduced capacity. If not it stops. If its essential that service not be interrupted you build in redundancy and ensure that it fails in a safe way if it does.

I'm not sure where safety or insurance comes into this discussion at all.

People upgrade sooner because they stand to gain more than the upgrade costs not because its not safe to operate.
Colleges which accept government funding or government-backed student loans should be required to publish employment and salary data for their graduates. For example, what percentage of alumni have found full-time employment in their degree field within 6 months of graduation? That way students would have a more realistic picture of their prospects and could make informed decisions.
Please Stop Sharing Bad Articles
But isn't that what the rating system is for?
I welcome it

It's just impractical to have high quality software for every niche be built by the FOSS community. Even non-niche products (like, let's say email) leave a lot to be desired

If I could pay companies for these products I would. But I don't because they don't make products for Linux because they think we only want FOSS programs

Also, yes the creators probably don't condone proprietary software but who cares. They're not the market. The users of the OS are the market. And I want high quality software, free or not, source be dammed!
Tracking my workouts has always been a struggle. Even with a perfect UI, and well designed apps like this one, exact tracking will not become ubiquitous until it is completely automatic.
fake vomit?
I know for tips, specifically, the Uber driver doesn't know how much they got from any given person. It just gets pooled up and they see an aggregate. Last time I asked a friend who drove for Uber, the same thing basically applied for ratings. Like a driver doesn't know what you rate them, just their aggregate rating overall, and even then, I don't know how freq it would update for them to be able to make a correlation that the person they just dropped off made an impact on their rating.

With that said, it still sucks this happened to your girlfriend. My guess is that he reported that on the way the ride went (in general), and not based on her giving him a bad rating because I don't think he would have that information. I could be wrong, though. Would love to hear if anyone who drives for Uber could back that up or not about the transparency of ratings per ride.
Admiral or just crackpot?

https://motls.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-utter-insanity-of-woi...
Yes. Very much so.
There's always been a sort of pie-in-the-sky goal of "let people just say what the algorithm does, and let the compiler figure out the best way to implement that algorithm" with the idea being that the programmer doesn't have to concern himself/herself with details about the hardware that bear on the implementation.

The main problem with that idea is that you have to find some language to describe the design, which often ends up being an implementation, and when you look at the invariants that must be maintained for correctness, it's difficult to deviate from that implementation substantially.

Floating point arithmetic, which is the core of most numerical algorithms, is not associative (it is commutative). If someone asks you to sum up a list going from left to right, it is not legal to transform that into a sum that goes from right to left. And unfortunately, in a mathematical sense, associativity is the property that's often the most useful.

So, in practice, the most useful cases to do this kind of heavy-mathematics optimization on are the ones where it's not legal in the first place. Even beyond that, many of these kinds of algorithms are already implemented in a core library that's been around for decades and has been highly-tuned for any architecture you want to run on, so the actual prospect for seeing real gains with a compiler are rather small.
If hardware isn't a requirement, I'd point you at processing.org and the various related projects (openprocessing.org for a javascript front end.). It hits that logo sweet spot for me when introducing kids to actual programming. Then, add a pen plotter to the mix for that "look what I made" kick.
> How do you prove/disprove this kind of accusation?

By having one's rides on Twitch /s

On a more serious note, if police body cams reduce misconduct, perhaps Uber requesting that rides are recorded would have the same effect. That said, it's just an idea, were this kind of behavior to become rampant. Personally, I'm always for less surveillance.
The majority of PhDs in computer science (around 2/3) do get jobs outside of academia [1]. Google might be the single biggest current hirer. I think that it's always been pretty common in this field though. Places like IBM and Bell Labs used to hire large numbers of PhDs back when they had big research groups. And at least in my PhD program, there was never an expectation that an academic job was the post-PhD career path, which I've heard people complain about in other fields. Plenty of our alumni worked in industrial research labs and it was pretty clear that that was one of the standard post-PhD options.

[1] Source: https://cra.org/resources/taulbee-survey/
DNA editing could become an option for parents
I keep hearing that we're in a strong economy, but the reality is that we aren't. It's a strong economy for the rich and powerful, but not really anyone else.

Most American's can't afford a $1000 emergency [1].

Wages actually went down last month [2]

78% of Americans are living Paycheck to Paycheck. [3]

Nearly half of all Americans are low-income or in poverty. [4]

1/5 of children in USA are living in poverty [5]

I want someone to explain to me how this is a "good economy". I keep hearing it. It's total nonsense. I'm glad WaPo is bringing up that workers are still struggling despite these claims of a "strong economy".

[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/most-americans-cant-aff...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

[4] https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Poverty-...

[5] http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html
D-Wave CEO on Future of Quantum Monte Carlo Simulations
Google partners with startup to let Google Cloud devs build blockchain
From https://twofactorauth.org/#banking, the only American or Canadian bank that supports a Hardware Token is Wells Fargo - which only seems to support RSA SecurID: https://www.wellsfargo.com/privacy-security/advanced-access
Google Cloud Launches Blockchain Toolkit for App Developers
SoftU2F: Software U2F Security Keys for MacOS
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think drivers see ratings from individual rides - how would he know who to retaliate against?
Are you familiar with the cost of health insurance for someone in their 50s? Along with other non-discretionary expenses, a significant decline in pay can quickly deplete emergency reserves and retirement accounts.

To assume financial irresponsibility is to grossly misunderstand the issue.
What's a one-dimensional quantum liquid? Is it a math construct, or a physical thing we've created in a lab?
I think this is a revocation and provisioning problem: when the device is compromised, how hard is it to revoke that device and provision a new one for yourself?

Structurally, actually making these tokens should be commoditized anyway. So on the software side, it needs to be not absolutely painful to rotate credentials. Something like a one-time-pad that you can use in "in case of fire break glass" situations.
Does this thread substantially contribute more than the previous hacker news discussion?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17589429

I do realize that this article is from Bloomberg and the other one is from Wall Street Journal. But most of the discussion has already happened over there.
Fair enough, it is just fiction after all. I was thinking that storing it as H20 would be a challenge as storing all the water you might need would take a large amount of space. But I suppose if it was for a craft that would never enter an atmosphere the volume wouldn't really be an issue.
As far as easy to digest resources go, Ben Horowitz's "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" is a great reference as to what skills a good CEO should have.
In term of factory reset
Artificial Intelligence is changing agriculture