skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
VC is a fools game if you bet on the company going big to the extent that you're willing to work for nothing time after time. Take more risk when you get large chunks of equity, but even then expect a decent salary relatively quickly.

When you go into it demanding what you're worth and knowing the risks, on the other hand, it's not a fools game. It's a calculated high risk, high reward ride.

I've worked in many VC funded startups, and I've made money on all of them. Mostly not much above a normal job, but I've only ever put in "free" work or underpaid work for short periods, and then compensated with higher income later.

It's about not getting taken in by the sales pitch to the extent that you stop negotiating, and about not overestimating the value of the equity on the table. I typically won't take an offer that I wouldn't have taken in a non-startup without the equity.
Well, this is a nation that has a religious belief that merely educating people magically creates jobs requiring higher ed, so its not surprising our economy is also based on a magical belief that if people need jobs that are not welfare dependent wage slave tier, then that need, in and of itself, will magically create the those better jobs. Posting stuff like that on twitter is just like prayer, surely it'll be answered eventually.
Thanks. Were people as panicked inside Facebook during the outage, as I was as a user trying to browse meme groups?
Hey, quick question (and maybe this is just a legacy from before open source):

From[1]: "If you do not wish to pay for code intelligence, you can disable language servers in the Code intelligence section of the site admin area."

The pricing page however says that feature is included in the free version. It just doesn't seem to make sense to me.

[1] https://about.sourcegraph.com/docs/code-intelligence/install
The first sentence...

> “People tend to underestimate the financial opportunity that startups represent for early employees.”

I would laugh if it wasn’t so sad.
Taut – a tool for Slack
I realize you say this somewhat in jest, but I want to respond to this because the first sentence of of William Gibson's _Neuromancer_ is paradoxically both timeless and time bound.

> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

That first sentence characterizes the novel's diegetic (in-narrative) setting by giving the sky a property of an alternate medium (television). Unlike gentler rhetorical assertions such as simile, the declaration that the sky possessed a property of television suggests that the setting--like the intra-diegetic setting of the (Morrocan) beach in which an unnamed adversarial AI imprisons Case--is also a media construct in which the reader is imprisoned.

In other words, the media topology structuring the novel's outermost narrative is a recursive formation of one medium inside another medium and this structure is timeless. It's merely recursion.

However, fully understanding the literary (as opposed to narrative) significance of such a structuration depends upon knowing what television was and why any of its channels might be "dead" as opposed to "live".

A useful point of comparison can be found in William Shakespeare's _As You Like It_ (II.VII.139-143)

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. [. . .]

The significance is timeless, drawing power from the assertion that life is in fact lived on a stage. On the other hand, the description is also time bound (as well as culturally circumscribed) depending as it does on the greatly diminished (since Elizabethan England) medium of live performance.

EDIT: Fix predicate in first sentence. Formatting. Change "at" to "a" in penultimate sentence.
To be fair, when you become a doctor it is because your peers grant you the title, not merely due to your GPA.

Outside the US, engineering is the same. Within the US, there is no formal board for software engineerig but we can at least informally say one is an engineer if other engineers would recognize them as such. I know people whom graduated bootcamps and could qualify as engineers, albiet inexperienced ones, and those who have finished 4 years of schooling but cannot practice engineering.

The guy in the article was inducted into the Academy of Science and Engineering at 34. Whether that makes him pretigious or not isn't the question, but there is no doubt in my mind that he is an engineer.
10 VS Code Extensions for Front End Developers in 2018
The battery is not an afterthought. The big players do not have an answer to the gigafactory at this point. They can build all the cars they want but without batteries they won’t be electric.
He's simulating how he thinks anti-housing people think. "this post is me exaggerating the NIMBY parts of my brain to a degree I’m not sure I honestly support." Though if the arguments aren't very good it's either because anti-housing arguments fundamentally can't be made any better or that he's not doing a good job doing NIMBYs' views service.
It's true that most of Star Trek uses vague or made-up terms for computing measures, but Data formally refers to his own storage in units of "quadrillion bits", and apparently using that as a definition of "quad" makes for a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate for other uses, even today.
while progressive economic policies continue to march forward

March forward? If anything there has been a dismantling of "progressive" economic policies over the last few decades. To the benefit of the economy.
Me too. So that I could click the "reject all" button, having also marked the "save as default preference" checkbox, and be done with it forever.

Integration of legalese into browsers should have been done a long time ago (another useful thing would be a "ToS" button in the address bar, so you don't have to go hunting for ToS and privacy statements, and read them in whatever painful CSS flavouring the site uses).
If Amazon should be paying $15/hour, why should other companies not also pay that much? They are literally doing exactly what was asked of them. Do you not want the same for employees of other companies?

I can understand that its fair to be cynical of their motivations, but they are doing exactly what people have been demanding of them.
Here’s What Donald Trump Thinks About Cryptocurrency
> Mainstream economists and political theorists believe that raising minimum wage reduces wealth inequality which creates economic and political stability

There is nowhere near the level of consensus on this issue that you're implying.
I Created ‘The Bernank’ on YouTube. And I Was Mostly Wrong
I’ll give back another anecdote. This did nothing for anyone I know.
Actually the problem is that if they show up and shoot someone, heads won't roll due to the excuse that "Well it could have been a real emergency so we came in shooting just in case."

How many incidents have their been in recent years where the cops acted too slowly and cautiously vs incidents where someone innocent died or was injured because they came in guns blazing?
YouTube encodes are always done from the source. When new codecs like AV1 are introduced they reencode from the originally uploaded source not from other YouTube encodes.

The immediate benefit of AV1 will be felt by people with decent machines but terrible bandwidth as the higher compression will give them higher quality. There's talks given by YouTube employees about this process when VP9 initially rolled out and how different parts of the globe benefitted depending on their tech and infrastructure levels.
Amazon knows most of that $15/hour will be paid into Amazon - regardless of employer - as they have 51% of American commerce. They're turning America into a huge company town.
Why shouldn't self-interested action be praiseworthy?
I have seen people express a desire to be able to choose what "kind" of person should be allowed to move to San Francisco.
That's incorrect. Mainstream economists are quite divided on whether minimum wage laws help the poor, let alone the other things you mentioned. See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage
Location: Boulder / Denver

Remote: No

Willing to relocate: Yes, USA

Technologies: SQL, C++ , Matlab, Mathematica, Python, Java, LateX, Atmega micro-controllers, Solidworks, Labview, NI Circuit Design Suite, Lathes, Mills, MIG/TIG welding, Pneumatic Tools, Micro Soldering, Nano-Optics, Spanish, Italian

Résumé/CV: http://heffern.net/rob/

Email: robert.heffern (at) gmail
I'm not sure Java would have changed at all if it wasn't for C#. From the start, Java was never particularly quick to get new features or break any sort of compatibility.
That parent comment also is the only person who has mentioned "working for a low wage". It was not part of my original comment, and not the scenario I intended to describe.

It is a valid point, though. Working for a low wage at any company is a fundamentally different story than an above average wage at a bootstrapped success that can afford to pay good salaries.
That's nice, but only deals with people-moving, not any of the other infrastructure burdens of higher density. So, yes, by ignoring most of the issue while addressing a tiny corner, YIMBY’s are exactly papering over the issue.
Absolutely. There are attempts in other fields. For instance it's encouraging to find that no one (I believe and hope) has complained that 82 per cent of obstetrics and gynaecology medical residents in the US in 2016 were female.
The Problem with Gender Studies (2016)
a complete lack of a safety net

Nearly 2/3rd of the federal budget is for social programs. What do you mean a "complete lack of a safety net"?
One major function of minimum wages is to offset the fact that union wages keep ratcheting up and in rust belt areas the minimum wage people could not afford the new items made by union people, like cars - so that is why they buy used cars - if any.
In a sense there is a need for a maximum wage as well, to limit this factor.

This reduced spread between high and low wages is why Germany does so well - in effect the country becomes a large efficient factory. Which is why unions have a management role, board seats etc, so they know when an excess wage is bad for the company and for the country as a whole. Japanese and Korean unions do this as well, but in general do not have board seats. The USA lacks in this respect, so we have a lot of poor at work without enough money to buy much stuff - and selling stuff builds the economy.
So exhausting. Give them a break. They did a nice thing.
However, the meta does in fact exist. The optimal, mixed strategy is only optimal when your opponent uses the same mixed strategy. We don't, so if the AI can predict us then it can do better.

An optimal AI should therefore include theory of mind, and human-prediction in particular, such that it can stay ahead of the meta.
> "And is up there with the biggest (if not the biggest) hacks of all time."

In what world is this even remotely the case? OPM, Equifax, etc are far more serious hacks than this. Yahoo's multiple breaches dwarf the Facebook hack. 3 billion vs 50 or 90 million:

https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/03/technology/business/yahoo-b...
Thanks for that, got it updated.
> someone who decides to tackle a very hard problem with very high risk of failure is likely to look less productive on paper.

This is the central problem with today's academic research environment.
> Being both a homeowner

I'd wager that the vast majority of these people are not homeowners. I'm personally not a homeowner and if I missed a rent payment, my apartment complex could start eviction proceedings against me.

Now I've personally got more than enough in savings to be able to move jobs if I so desired, but when a large percentage of this country has little to nothing in savings, they don't have the same luxuries that you and I enjoy.
Quick back-of-the-envelope math:

Let's assume this raise will affect 250k workers this coming holiday season, bumping their pay from $12 to $15 (+$3).

Over 12 weeks at 40h/week, this represents an additional $360M in labor cost.

Using AMZN's 2017 revenue of 177.9B, this equates to 17.7 revenue-hours.
Joydrive Outpaces Competition Customers Crave Netflix-Like Car Buying Experience
Yes, to be clear, I think raising the minimum wage and decreasing wealth inequality is a good thing, even if it marginally negatively affects me in the short term.
It's actually a bit funny...

* East Germany was practicing State Capitalism with Communism as the ultimate goal.

* West Germany was practicing Social Democracy, aiming at capitalist growth.

Which of the two was actually (more) socialist (in the sense of reaching socialist aims) ? O:-)
It was not (or not just) for cost-saving reasons. It was due to a cross-licensing agreement between Intel and IBM for technology called Bubble Memory which turned out to be flop, but IBM didn't know at the time that it would flop.

"Next came the 8088, the processor for the first IBM PC. Even though IBM engineers at the time wanted to use the Motorola 68000 in the PC, the company already had the rights to produce the 8086 line (by trading rights to Intel for its bubble memory)"

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/pa-microhist/inde...
there is always a myth that someone with absolute control of resources could more efficiently re-allocate those efforts.

But first you have to obtain absolute top down control in order to do so.

Very similar to how command-and-control politics schemes could be in theory more efficient than messy democracies, but those messy democracies, while inefficient, produce variety that guard against the much larger errors of mis-allocation, ineptitude, or corruption.

Also the person with the vision of absolute top down control typically selects their vision as the correct one. If only we implemented my vision, since it is the correct one.

If we did what the OP suggests we'd be communicating with CORBA across the net, have artifacts such as "car" and "cdr" x10.
Something might have changed here recently; the past couple of days I noticed all GDPR popups I get have "reject" set as default for everything in the "Details" view. Unfortunately, they don't communicate this on the initial view, so I still need to review the details before continuing.
I've always wondered, what _are_ those large groovy switches on the front?

They're just numbered with integers [0..21, colored in groups of 3 presumably for octal]! are they seriously for bit flipping??
Part of me, though, worries that the ship has sailed. For a while .NET was probably completely fine from Microsoft's perspective, because the platform was (AFAICT) dominant in their target market of enterprise apps.

Then big data became a thing, and basically the entire core ecosystem was written in Java. I think it's becoming a bit of a wedge issue - Java has everything that .NET has, but .NET does not have its own equivalent of, for example, the Hadoop ecosystem.
Sure they would. You can avoid upgrading a device you depend on, while installing the latest beta and .0 OS releases on a test system or partition. That's what most developers I know do.
Try applying for it when you really need it. Bankruptcy due to medical emergencies is unfortunately pretty common.

I've done my bit of social security for the United States all the way from where I'm sitting, it's that good.
I'm saying it will not push my wages up. And that's a good thing.
Hetzner is awesome. Been with them fro 5 years.. they're great!
And I think that kidnapping someone is a greater crime than looking through their backpack without probable cause, but the government is supposed to be held to higher standards.
Yes, as encompassed in "it stopped being valuable enough to staff."
It’s a very temporary restriction not at all comparable. It applies only until the next uptick and is essentially a strengthening of the circuit breaker rules.

These rules are designed to slow trading down on the order of minutes to hours so market participants can catch up and make rational decisions. This is completely different than broad market distortions pervasive in both Japan and China - both in intent and effect.
I don't advocate for downvoting those whom I disagree with, if it were up to me you wouldn't be downvoted.
MasterClass Downloader
Amazon is good at getting ahead of the political winds. They started collecting sales tax just before it would have become a legal requirement.
3. Everything is dominated by people trying to make money, pushing out all other values.
Well, I assume he's out to sell something.

1) He says you should delete your facebook account. It's too late, the data is already there. Deleting does nothing.

2) "By company-ending I mean Facebook would never recover from the consequences of so much user data being dumped online for all to see" utter conjecture. there are petabytes of data, dumping that online is hard. Exfiltrating unnoticed is hard.

3) "This is potentially so bad that it could be called the Great Facebook Hack of 2018. But again, we don't know how much stuff was stolen. Yet." Again conjecture. This could be called the "great facebook spotted a hack on two account and stopped it before it got bad"

This is pointless punditry from someone who literally is nothing to do with facebook, has no contact with people close to the matter, and is just guessing.

yes, that much data in someone's hands is bad, but so is google, and the legion of databrokers and ad spinner.
Thank you for the clarification. Yes that makes sense. I'm probably mixing it up with an interview where one of MS ex-employees (Joel Spolsky?) mentioned Bill's affinity for BASIC which is why early MS Word has WordBASIC (not Lisp or Pascal) as its first macro language. It later became VBA Visual Basic for Applications. This philosophy and influence continued all the way into the CLR languages VB.NET and C#. Bill was never a C/C++ guy like his employees who were working on Windows & Office codebases.
I think we should praise this move by Amazon, but also realize they're probably the world leader in warehouse robotics. If they raise wages, and push for wage increases now, there is a short term effect of reduced profits for Amazon, but it also puts pressure on raising costs for competitors while Amazon is on a path to being much better insulated from those costs. It also gives them better community relations basis when siting or expanding locations.

Is this cynical, or good move on the part of Amazon? A little of both. It is a smart long-term profit move for Amazon. But I would also say that overall would be great to spark a trend where companies compete via both smart capital investments to raise productivity, and being willing the share the benefit of rising productivity to employees as a tool against competitors.
Pushing the limits of streaming technology
Hetzner is great. We host about a petabyte of search data on them over at http://www.datastreamer.io/ (my search company).

I'm working on a new startup around a personal web archive and annotation system (https://getpolarized.io/) which uses Firebase but I would love to figure out how to use Hetzner as their prices are amazing.
Precisely this. A small shop in Mobile, Alabama being forced to pay the same minimum wage as some company in Santa Clara County is ridiculous. A rented closet in the Bay Area costs more than a house payment in Mobile. Also, the tax burden on $15 in Alabama is far lower than the tax burden on someone in California.

Want to give low wage people an actual pay raise? Cut federal payroll taxes since those affect workers equally as they are percentage based.

A $10 wage in Alabama is far more valuable than a $15 wage in Sunnyvale. And conversely, a $15 minimum in Alabama would be more catastrophic to a business than the same minimum in Seattle.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2018/08/30/bezos-un... everything he's going after is going to cost jobs or create many low wage jobs
A lot of the problems encountered in poverty are due to ignorance; of how things work, where to get help, where the line is, it actually makes a lot of sense that low-wage workers think that being without a job for 1 to 2 months is a death sentence.

The real problem though is that "just get a new job" may or may not be possible, but if it is possible, the mechanics of how to do that are not available to low-wage workers. It doesn't really matter that there are plenty of jobs out there if the people who could work at them are not aware they exist, or how to apply for them.

Education, as per usual, ends up being a barrier.
There was a lot of interesting things going on between VW and Porsche 10 years ago. First Porsche silently tried to buy VW by accumulating shares and call options. They ended up with 42% of the shares and call options for another 32%. Since the German state of Lower Saxony owns 20% and would never sell, only 6% of the shares were floating and it created a short squeeze. For a short time, VW was the most valuable company in the world. (1)

Just a year later, after the global recession and the resulting decrease in Porsches sold, they were facing problems repaying debt and ended up being purchased by VW.

(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/business/worldbusiness/30...
This is what climate change news feels like too.

> "Blah happened at City/Nation and it is potentially a planet ending event."

It's hard to take Chicken Little serious. All of the sensationalism feels like a magician waving a cloth with one hand, to distract the audience from the other hand.
Ask HN: Some open-source conferences focusing on data management,data science?
Hello!
Could you advice some open-source conferences focusing on data management, data science or topic specific, like graph database conferences in the US? I am looking for something not so big, with an attendee number around 100-500.
THANKS!
Corporations are not people, and do not "deserve" praise. They exist to enrich their shareholders.
Just read a book called "Rise of the warrior cop" that explains many SWAT teams were funded by the federal government, not out of necessity, just due to politics.

There were many, many, citations that would suggest SWAT members are not trained any better and tend to in fact be overly aggressive and not held to many standards at all.
A Self-Driving Truck Startup Keeps It Simple, Stupid
Deep space travel could destroy astronauts' guts
Then mom and pop will need to work their store, instead of underpaying employees.
Whether Obama is a hypocrite or not is certainly a matter of opinion. The defining moment was the missed opportunity to end, or begin to end, the war on terror.

Up until that point the invasions, surveillance, renditions, torture and threat to civil liberties could be justified as, or at least categorized as, means to oppose Al Qaeda. By killing bin Laden he became just another enemy in a long line of people that the US wants to kill. And the methods of the war on terror, instead of a regrettable period in US history, just another tool for the US to use as it sees fit.

> And would anyone expect different actions from Russia? From Israel?

Probably not, which is sort of the point.
Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all the things we got up to instead of dealing with this thing that is the only thing that matters.

That's been happening since Generation X kids were old enough to understand what a mess our parents made of the world.

Unfortunately we haven't done a very good job of making a difference. Frankly I'm a little disappointed in my cohort in that regard. We knew things needed to be different, and we were mad as hell about how the preceding generations fucked everything up... and then we got so caught up in the drudgery of every day life that we kept perpetuating the same problems instead of fixing them.

I'm not terribly optimistic that any subsequent generation is going to do a much better job in general. It seems to be a fundamental human failing that we're not good at dealing with issues that span time-periods longer than our lifetimes. :-(
It is average at a quiverful of companies in a handful of locations.