skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: A 31yr old's dilemma
Hi HN,
First, some background. I'm 31, technical, and working at a Prestigious Tech Company (PTC). Live in NYC. An engineer most of my career, and in the last few years, some BD too. I've started companies before : once when I was 24 (solo) and once when I was 27 (cofounder). Both profitable, and the latter growing fast w/ a recently closed series B. I left that company very early because of a life tragedy, but have regretted it ever since.

Last ~4 years at Prestigious Tech Company (PTC) have been mixed. Great to have stability, to travel and to work with smart people. But near impossible to get truly motivated.

For much of the past year I've been quietly building, and have a new MVP that I have very strong conviction in. Felt motivated again. Believe the business is decently validated via talking to and onboarding some early users.

I'd like to raise some funding and run with this, BUT:

a) PTC may IPO in ~2020 which makes staying almost certainly the safer financial decision.

b) The 'society' at PTC is awesome. Having a place to go / big group of smart and ethical people to hang out with. I recall some of the loneliness/unhappiness of my first solo business.

c) Most importantly: I don't have a non-technical cofounder. I'm under-networked. Used to see that as a positive attribute (ha) - now it's just frustrating. Despite being mildly tech-twitter-famous I don't have many real connections w/ cofounder types in my life. Worried that when it comes to raise my inability to have attracted a cofounder will be a negative signal. Founding with a relative stranger may also be a relatively negative signal / bad idea.

HN: What would you do in my shoes? Is my failure to have built this network over the years a sign that I shouldn't pursue this? At 31, am I past-the-post to some extent?

PS: Since I'm seeking a cofounder - if you'd like to learn more, please reach me at fathomsdeep@protonmail.com
> Higher ranked schools are often better at research as well, you can get more bang for your buck than lesser ranked schools.

Just to be clear, Princeton ranks close to 15-20th in CS. Many state schools do out rank Princeton in CS and they do not have such labs yet.

I can understand if IAS or the Math department was the main reason to open a lab there. But, if it was quality of CS faculty that exclusively factored into the decision, then there would be other state schools in the line ahead of Princeton.
Don't have a favorite singular:

Master of Orion

Master of Magic

Ascendancy

Raptor: Call of the Shadows

Chuck Yeager's Air Combat

Command & Conquer

Diablo

Falcon 4 Gold

Doom II (with some ridiculous levels I hacked like an enemies mosh pit on a secret outside area)

Warcraft

Capitalism

SimCity Enhanced

Welltris + Mouse Commander mod (TSR that converted mouse movement into simulated keypresses)

11th Hour

Also: that universal crack/trainer from way back and all the demoscene goodness that went into awesome cracks, cheats and trainers
Which platform would be better today from practical standpoint? for a remote team of developers. Matrix?
The best line is at the end:

*> “Many of us are temporarily able bodied and will face exclusion as we age. When we design for inclusion, we’re designing for our future selves.”

Accessibility is like security, usually neglected and left as an afterthought unless one is impacted by it. Actually it’s worse than how security is treated because the consequences of not being accessible aren’t as wide or as bad as a security incident (even in jurisdictions where accessibility has more value).

What would make it easier for developers to include accessibility is better built-in tooling, similar to the MS Word example cited in this article. There are browser extensions that can help test for and report accessibility issues (and remedies), but it’d be better if these are built-in in the toolset used.
What is Symplectic Geometry? (2016) [pdf]
I’d wager that’s not the only reason. There seems to be a deeper philosophical story he wishes to convey.

There is the beauty of emergence which is a pattern being highlighted over and over. From the math patterns emerge the basic microbiological patterns, which then emerge the more conplex macrobiological patterns, which then leads to humans. And then the author shows us humans also being a substructure of the larger pattern that we may call society or humanity. He shows this in capitalism as well. He seems to reiterate that at the end of the capitalism video by flashing back to the mechanical components of capitalism being not much different than the mechanical components of a human. He then also discusses the evolution of the mind I’m guessing as he mentions the emergence of the digital mind.

As we explore further, we realize all these thoughts are coming from the mind. There is a had barrier between mind/body or objective/subjective reality.
There are also messages of hope that humanity transcends its current weaknesses (war, conflict, etc)

And he then concludes with his thoughts on the nature of the universe(mind?) being open-ended and unlimited of options, ever changing.

Everything he brings up is at some point related back to various philosophical principles, with of course, the story being mostly told by images and sound instead of words. Which I appreciates as well.

All-in-all, I found it a beautiful story.
This is an absolutely fantastic talk.

tl;dw (others can jump in if they'd like):

- Organism morphology seem to be highly dependent upon large-scale electrical potential differentials between cells

- These electrical networks are primarily regulated by cell-to-cell gated ion channels; simple chemical pumps (the same types of membrane proteins that control faster-acting electric potentials that enable muscle contraction, neural activity)

- These networks and patterns of bioelectric signalling have stable memory (once a pattern between cells is induced, it remains stable) and are responsible for driving "subroutines" of large groups of cells -- morphological gene, protein expression downstream of this

Michael Levin mentions a few times how they manipulate these bioelectric fields towards desired morphological outcomes ("we don't apply electrodes", etc.)... but I have a feeling the CS-y people might still get a little lost, so, I'll try to summarize as best I can. (Some nuance will be lost, apologies in advance.)

The gated ion channels (mentioned above) are simply protein complexes that transfer ions (K+, etc.) across cells (and thus regulate the overall bioelectric signature: charge of specific tissues, regions). As protein complexes these gates themselves can be altered either in the way they're built (genetically) or with a "cocktail of chemicals", this cocktail being one that interferes to some degree with the rate at which ions are transferred between cells.

To make an analogy to human society to help you understand: imagine individual cells (or cell types, tissues) are like countries, and imagine ions are engineers. Gated ion channels are border crossings, complete with Visa requirements and regulations. To stably get more engineers from [Head Country] to [Tail Country] to build a head, you'd try to find a way to prioritize skilled immigration acceptance in [Tail Country]. This means you modify [Visa requirements] slightly, but not enough to relax immigration requirements completely and throw the country's economy into chaos.

Modifying [Visa requirements] (gated ion channel behavior) is a much more nuanced and stable way to change organism morphology, and it appears to be as elegant as it sounds re: regulating downstream effects. Really exciting stuff. If I had remained in academia I would be extremely interested in pursuing this field of research, definitely having a moment of rose-tinted glasses here :).

To opine on my own: what I'm really interested in, personally, is the applications to individual organ regrowth that isn't just restricted to [whole organism morphology]. The immediately obvious benefit of this work, to me, is the prospect of eliminating transplant lists altogether.
Meta. This is HN. Full of doudgebag liberals
According to the below link, this is not a new rule, but something the UPA government passed. This new order just lists out the agencies that can access the data, where as the original rule didn't list anyone specifically. I remember the "provide password or 7 years jail" was a thing for a while.

https://www.firstpost.com/india/mha-says-snooping-order-base...
> Is Slack legally required to do this?

Yes, absolutely. Breaking sanctions is not just illegal, it's a criminal offense. There have been sanctions against Iran since roughly when Trump withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [1] in May of this year.

The CFO of Huawei was arrested in Canada per a request by the US because of their dealings with Iran [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-05/huawei-cf...
Surely you don’t actually mean “forever”
Ask HN: Music sampling fun / beat box for 7 year old?
My son really enjoys making “songs” using what I can only describe as “mouth noises....” some combination of words, lip-smacking, humming, humming, and various other mouth-generated sound efforts ...like a bad beat-boxer mixed with a bad Skrillex mix.

He does this all spontaneously....he’s not recording anything.

He’s 7 and has no computer skills (we are a Windows family) or musical instrument skills.

Any suggestions for an app (iOS) or device that he could have fun with and maybe learn a little? I dug up the Korg VolcaSample Digital Sample Sequencer [1] but I reallly know nothing about this space at all and this may be waaay of base.

Thank you!

[1] https://www.google.com/shopping/product/2188865375698125258
Companies always interview a handful of candidates for each opening, so it feels like hardly anyone is passing because for each job, 1/7 gets it. On top of that just coding isn’t enough, you have to stand out so they can unambiguously say you’re the best. So you need soft skills and whiteboard skills as well.
* Even though anyone can learn to code, not everyone can code already

* People get nervous in interview settings and there are many reasons why you might fail a coding interview despite being good at coding

* People who tend to not pass interviews end up doing more interviews than people who do pass them, skewing interview stats (everyone thinks they are hiring the best, but that can’t be universally true)
Well, there's my thesis :)

There has been some work on this. Apple's Pages uses an implementation of the Hobby spline, demonstrating that it can be used in real consumer products. I think if you put these two side-by-side though, mine comes out quite a bit better; when you push the Hobby spline you get curvature extrema quite a distance from the control points, and mine doesn't do that.

Hobby's work has of course been an inspiration for mine for a long time, and it holds up academically quite well too - it has just the right blend of practical and aesthetic considerations and theoretical analysis; his solver runs in linear time and there's a proof it always converges (as long as tension values are within a reasonable range).

And of course there's the k-Curve work from Adobe. I think it is a step forward from Hobby in some ways (more robust) but a step back in others (it's not as smooth and most especially doesn't form true inflections).
I used Google Maps and most other google apps fine while in Iran. Youtube and some other sites are blocked, but that's actually from the Iran side. Of course these are all free services, I assume I could not have actually paid for any paid services.

EDIT: I know that Google AppEngine and probably Cloud are blocked, because they provide foreign nation with "computing resources", but that's also its own different bucket.
Isn't that what they have now?
there are at least 4 values.

rsrp, rsrq, sinr, rssi

rsrq is probably the important one. You can clearly see usage of the cell tower with that.
This is just a bunch of random points added together. You have the confidence of someone fully ignorant of the subject matter.

The equation is relatively simple. Out of everyone that visits your online store, a small % will make a purchase. You can can both optimize quality and quantity of traffic. For traffic, you need to keep it coming every day, through out the year. Discord has that returning traffic/users. Game publishers do not.
Ads are core part of how today’s world economy works, like it or not.
Prebuilt maybe have some nice margin, but I don't know any gamers who haven't bought their PC custom, or assembled by the retailer. Those have very thin margins, both component manufacturers and retailers have very stiff competition.
GPS is receive only, no mobile data is used there.
Thanks for your service and your spot on advice!
Yes, I work for a SaaS provider and we maintain blocks on access from a short list of embargoed countries.
I absolutely agree with that, scrolling feels really janky but I did get used to it.
Any US company is not allowed to do business/operate in embargoed countries. That's what an embargo means.
I thought of that as well. Once you have a different frequency you can also do more bizarre fun things.
http://optics.org/news/7/1/11
If you like the music, I recommend one of Max's AV shows, they are spectacular. Here's one of them: https://www.aether.live

His latest album is different musically from Emergence but it has a central narrative, this time focused on the human mind. http://onehundredbillionsparks.net

Emergence is probably my favourite album :)
I worked at a couple companies where these "sudden pushes" to knock out embargoed countries were made. They both came when new legal counsel joined the staff.

It's very clear to me that this is some housekeeping attached to their IPO.
V-RAY 4.0 for 3DS Max 2019 Crack and License Keygen Free Download
> hopefully not too specific

> CB1 is mostly in the brain / nervous system

I was worried for a sec, but nope, quite the opposite. Could you be a little more specific?

> ... are very beneficial and doesn’t give ...

Look, everytime I post this it gets a handful of down votes and nefarious comments like yours from people who would have recommended cigarettes for a cold and all kind of ailments. Heard the term "snakeoil"? It burns because it affects the heat receptors. Doesn't mean it's actually warm.
They could, sure. They could also give you a free pony with every phone.
Matrix is the protocol, Riot is a Slack-like implementation of the protocol: https://riot.im/

You can use the default (free) Matrix homeserver with Riot and you'll basically have a free chat system without any setup (besides installing the client).

I've been using Riot for a while now, and while Slack does seem a bit more polished, having client-side encryption for all my messages gives Riot the upper hand: I don't worry about sending passwords or sensitive info as much as I do with Slack.
I find it interesting this was not responded to as it is a great and easily understood description of how one could see Brave as a scam.
When I owned a German car, the speedometer read somewhat too high, compared to Japanese cars that were quite accurate. Also, on German cars I've driven, when they were stopped, the MPG gauge went to the maximum, rather than zero as would be correct. So I infer that German consumers want to be lied to about some things, just perhaps different things.
They use Lucas-Lehmer's[0] which is specifically for Mersenne primes[1]

https://www.mersenne.org/various/math.php#lucas-lehmer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas%E2%80%93Lehmer_primality...
We socialized the gains too. The shareholders and customers of banks vastly outnumber the employees of banks, and they all benefitted from the government's preventing the collapse of the banking system. The government even made a positive return on the taxpayer money it spent on the bailout.

Did you honestly believe we all would have been fine if the banks had failed in 2008? A collapse of the banking system would have destroyed the economy and badly hurt every individual American. We didn't bail out the banks for the sake of the banks, but for our own sake. Taking the moral position that the banks deserved to fail would have hurt us more than it hurt the banks.
Is FirstPost rightwing?

>The Ministry of Home Affairs on Friday clarified that its recent order authorising 10 agencies to snoop on any computer in the country in the interest of national security is based on the UPA-era IT Act and the IT Rules 2009 that allow for surveillance by a competent authority and said all cases of surveillance will be placed before a review committee headed by the cabinet secretary.

https://www.firstpost.com/india/mha-says-snooping-order-base...

I know for sure that "give password or spend 7 years in jail" is not a new rule. It was there for at least a while.

>Section 69 of the Information Technology Act, as amended by the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, empowers the central and state governments to compel assistance from any "subscriber or intermediary or any person in charge of the computer resource" in decrypting information. Failure to comply is punishable by up to seven years imprisonment and/or a fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#India

>A major amendment was made in 2008. It introduced the Section 66A which penalized sending of "offensive messages". It also introduced the Section 69, which gave authorities the power of "interception or monitoring or decryption of any information through any computer resource". It also introduced for child porn, cyber terrorism and voyeurism. It was passed on 22 December 2008 without any debate in Lok Sabha. The next day it was passed by the Rajya Sabha. It was signed by the then President (Pratibha Patil) on 5 February 2009.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Act,_20...

UPA ruled India in 2008.
(putting on my Ravenclaw tie)

It's for the Greater Good™!
It looks like an in-browser thing:

https://ludios.org/tmp/jon_blow-fs8.png

https://ludios.org/tmp/jon_blow2-fs8.png
But (0) is a completely neutral thing for most members of a FOSS community. Amazon starting up a new service won't stop me from merging code or change my (generally zero) income. It only hurts you if you're another company who also wants to exploit the software for profit.
Can’t publically trade your stock if your house isn’t in order.
https://pwsafe.org/ by Bruce Schneier
"By mid-1986, 19% (6.5 million) of Japanese households owned a Famicom;[12] one third by mid-1988.[35] By 1990, 30% of American households had the NES". ~ 90 million households in the United states in 1990, which suggests that if you didn't have a NES, you probably had one or more friends who did, and were probably hanging out at their place all the time. That sounds pretty mainstream to me.

(contemporary example: Taylor Swift is decidedly mainstream. Does everyone listen to Taylor Swift? No. At best half of teens and twenty-somethings and drops off going through olders. Does everyone know someone who listens to Taylor Swift? Pretty much.)
>I'm not interested in efforts to treat political compromise as holy writ.

The concept of natural rights started with philosophers, not politicians. You seem like you need to do a little more reading on this subject.
The argument is that you can't concentrate two beams to hit the same spot from the same direction.

So yes, you can have a bunch of lenses each focusing from a different direction.

And if you do a good job of aligning them, each lens will look as bright as the sun/moon from the target.

But that's your limit.
I use keepassx and yeah it could use some tlc, but overall I consider stability a feature in security software. How does one tell if xc isn't just a bunch of wannabes making keepassx with blackjack and hookers until they break it? At least keepassx has taviso's off-handed Twitter comment that it "looks sane".
> have any of these people so eager to tell us this been to any of these places or shared a few words with people from these allegedly oppressed areas? No.

Certainly there are people concerned about the recent news of massive Uighur internment camps who have been to Xinjiang. I myself have, twice. That region has, after all, been commonly traveled by overlanders going from Central Asia on to China and Southeast Asia. Before the Beijing Olympics, travel there was relatively hassle-free.

And yes, I did do a lot of talking with the Uighurs at the time (I was keen to learn Uighur after already knowing closely-related Turkic languages of Central Asia) and I heard nothing but complaining about the influx of Han Chinese. Now, however, according to reports from travel fora, foreign travelers in Xinjiang are being pushed through the region quickly by police and prevented from any contacts with the Uighur population at all.
I pretty much gave up on Matrix after the following exchange: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8697151

Perhaps I am overreacting, but that sort of attitude on matters core to basic privacy in the post-Snowden era seems both problematic and incurable.
I agree on most of your points. There is nothing inherently wrong with an appeal-to-authority in this case. If any substantial number of "reliable" physicists have looked at this problem, and if they unanimously agree that there is no way to concentrate light reflected from an object to produce a temperature greater than that object, then my intuition is almost definitely wrong and their conclusion is almost definitely right.

The nice part about physics though (like Munroe, I was also an undergraduate physics major) is that in simple cases like this, a suitable expert can usually defend their position with an argument comprehensible to a nonspecialist outsider. My doubt in this case is not that the experts are wrong, but that the experts haven't actually looked at the details of Munroe's argument and stamped it as "approved".

I think the part I find "offensive" is that CydeWeys is not claiming to be an expert himself, but is claiming to have certainty in what the experts believe. I don't know exactly why I find this offensive, but I do. And yes, this may be a problem with me, and not with CydeWeys' argument. I would not be offended in the same way by someone claiming "I am an expert and I approve this argument". Still, my question to him is genuine: what gives him this certainty?
Yep, countries in "free world" don't do that. LOL.
Agreed but I picked corporations as a practical threshold for commercial exaggeration vs trying to police people at flea markets or the like, and also because the whole purpose of incorporation is to shed liability (in most cases) and that the fiscal immunity should come at a price of some freedom.
And what of materials that burn at a temperature below the temperature of the Moon? If 100C is the limit, there are materials that burn at much lower temperatures such as Phosphorous (34C).
44-12 doesn’t really tell you much about the solidity of this position in the Australian parliament.

The Liberal & Labor parties both decided among themselves to support it, and have policies that lead to 100% of MPs following the party line.

(Don’t know if it’s a good idea for Australia, but it’s the game-theoretically correct thing for the parties to do under the rules we have, so...)

No-one ‘crossed the floor’, voting against their party, because it gets you kicked out of your party. [Automatically, if you’re a Labor MP]

They knew they wouldn’t change the outcome here, and they’d be out of the conversation going forward.

In particular, Labor gave the measure 100% of its votes, but it seems like the only way the party got majority support for it is by agreeing to vote to repeal and amend it next session. It was not a solid agreement.
Princeton is a tiny school which still has Tarjan and Appel. And it's a half hour ride from NYC.