skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's pretty astute. I would say VCs do hedge their risk by allocating in many options, sometimes by investing in multiple startups in the same domain or even different/opposite approaches to the same goal. But that could be classified as diversifying their risk too.

Personally I don't mind the idea of going lean in the beginning, which I think applies fairly well to early founders. The current Silicon Valley notion of throwing money at it to generate enough revenue + growth, without potentially having profit for a long time is a bit uncomfortable to me. I have a hard time distinguishing between businesses that are re-investing their income for growth and no profits (like Amazon) vs. those subsidizing their growth from VC money and having little chance of being self-sustainable in the long run (e.g. I don't know where Uber will land).

Ideally, I would like to do a venture where profits do come in even at smaller unit sizes and you can test that before you decide to go big. I am not sure if there is a term for that or if anyone thinks like that.

PS: like your blog and background.
Interesting read on some of the ethos behind HN's goals http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
There's work underway to make concrete carbon negative "greener" by mixing it in a sealed container and adding other chemicals to it to bind the CO2 and added carbon as a solid component of the finished concrete. I can't recall if it's the lime or Portland cement step of the process.
We've done a lot of work on Arc implementations in the last couple years, but the biggest work still hasn't rolled out yet. If it succeeds, it will buy us a lot more performance. But again, visible features wouldn't change, except that hopefully we'll be able to stop paginating large threads.
Yeah, I used to go by this advice, and I found the maintainability of my code dramatically increased when I typed out full names. I don't even use "i" for loop variables anymore. If the length is a problem, invest in an editor with autocomplete.

Well-known abbreviations are fine, like "iter" and "prev", but single-letter variable names notoriously impede readability for me.
This is encapsulation, really, and simply makes the point that the principle applies to packages.
it's $550 million lost revenue in 1Q, which is recognised in 2Q instead. The loss for the whole year is $66M
Previous submissions of this story and related articles:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19205457 (264 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19217640

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215781

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19209069

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19208518

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19206439

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19201369

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19108652

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19082133
I have a lot of friends who originally went into finance in college to "save up" and then pursue their dreams. But once they started living the good life, things changed.

Before you know it, they have a gf/wife who expects the best. An expensive apartment in NYC with a great view they don't have the time to enjoy. And a job that's really a cage because they are addicted to the pay and they know if they leave, they won't be able to make the same amount of money.

It seems the longer you're in the system, the harder it is to leave and be willing to let go of that 5th avenue penthouse with stunning views and the "girlfriend who is hotter than the wildest dreams" or "dream artist boyfriend about to make his break". Sad but true
Ask HN: What Are the Incentives for Reducing Technical-Debt?
I work for a startup that seems to value and reward programmers churning out the most code, instead of those like me who like to think through what they are writing, and then rewrite things to reduce technical-debt before committing.

But the programmers that are most highly rewarded seem to be the ones that make the most changes, even if most of the changes are fixing issues they have previously introduced. I don't want to get penalized for thinking things through, but I also don't want to pick up habits of committing my code before I feel it is ready.

Is this how the industry is? How do I pair getting better as a programmer, with getting better reviews?
This is a common refrain of big tech: That regulation and consumer protection designed to reign in their abuses won't be a problem for them, and will hurt the little guy. It's interesting how loud they plead that they won't be hurt by regulation aimed at them. (Or that they're still opposed to it, if it will actually eliminate the competition.)

The answer is that that line of argument is bull---- and always has been. Small outfits using reasonable moderation practices will never have a problem with any sort of copyright regulation. The issue crops up when massive companies have made copyright abuse a major component of their largely automated platform, and done everything possible to avoid moderating content because legitimate, quality moderation does not scale. And as tech giants, they want to avoid things that don't scale.

The interesting thing is that the so-called "upload filter" law, that everyone says YouTube will already be fine with because of Content ID, will not be satisfied with Content ID. Because a real, human person must be handling appeals, rather than the little automatic deny that Google currently does. It will cost YouTube a massive amount of money to adopt this on it's scale, but will cost small websites or platforms nothing: They already have humans that read their email.
It's not that easy.

'High status' jobs in many ways entail a 'high status' lifestyle.

Example: they got the jobs in the first place as the result of their parents ability to pay for private school, and Ivy League. So in that lifestyle context, you're going to be doing the same thing, it's part of the cycle. Very expensive.

Partners in law firms or consultancies are really in sales. They are using their business relationships to position themselves as thoughtful, successful, excellent pedigree etc..

For the same reason that real estate salespeople who drive people around a lot tend to drive nice cars, many folks in high end careers have no choice but to live that lifestyle.

When you go out for dinner with business associates, you're not going to talk about the deal you got at the dollar store, rather, your golf game, the new club you got, your trip to Pebble beach. If there is any chance anyone will see you in your car, it cannot be jalopi. Telling people about your trip to Davos would be more than ideal.

There are very few fields where high end folks can get away with not quite living that lifestyle. Some doctors, dentists, business owners can do that. People in tech, of course can life alt-lifestyles.

It's not to say that a Director of trading at some big bank couldn't really skimp in stuff either, but it's hard to avoid the expectations of lifestyle.

'Career progress' in may of these fields entails a lot of signalling, and such signalling can be expensive. "I have three kids, so proud they all made it into Ivy League". That's a very powerful signalling statement, and a massively expensive one!

Taxes on regular income are high, and expenses add up - and having a 'fairly comfortable retirement' is not cheap.

I'm not entirely sympathetic to these people, because they do make choices - my point is that they are not living a 'regular lifestyle', their careers often have expensive lifestyles 'baked in' to the process.

Also: "They talked about missed promotions, disaffected children and billable hours in divorce court. They complained about jobs that were unfulfilling, tedious or just plain bad."

I think maybe we all have this, and when the numbers, cars and suits get nicer, those problems don't go away. In many ways, the risks are bigger.

If your company falls flat it can ruin you. A carpenter can usually get work, as can most decent devs.
you surly never tried to write your own mobile wallet. Try to make it for grin/zcash, with "what's on top of that is just a bit of code" lol
Would you want to go to a movie theatre where audience engagement is recorded by a hidden, undisclosed camera? Would you prefer that? People are right to have instinctual suspicion of being covertly spied upon en masse in public spaces.
Barbara Blackburn, the World's Fastest Typist
Should we try try universal basic needs, education, health care ... before income?
A single player that is strong enough can decide that the market will not have more than one player.
Yes exactly, if the market is stupid enough to put up with the Apple tax then let them. Just like the market is stupid enough to put up with a banking tax for low income people through credit cards.
Since when are variables names a language issue?

There is no such thing as "Java length like names", or whatever. There are good practices and bad practices and they are universal.
Speakout Tech: A Call for Tech Worker Whistleblowers
I don't know, there's fewer and fewer places online where I can speak my mind. HN limits me to two posts every 4 hours. These forums were supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, not some echo chamber or one-way communication. What kind of technological terror are we building?
Yes, if the attacker is strictly passive, tofu with public key should be fine. That the attacker is strictly passive is a pretty strong assumption though!
Article says friend is in Manhattan and earned (i.e. total comp) $1.2mm. Very unusual for anyone in finance to have that high a salary short of being a CEO earning $10mm+.

Suppose he lives on the UWS in a 2000 square foot 3-4 bedroom condo which he bought for $4mm and has a $3mm mortgage. With a 30year fixed mortgage, that's maybe $180k a year. Don't forget the $60+k a year in condo fees and taxes. Throw in anywhere from $40-80k for nanny/childcare/preschool for the 1-2 kids he may have and you already have nothing left over if he went to a $600k comp.

I'm not saying he can't choose to live more conservatively, but when you're used to making $1.2mm a year, it's not hard to imagine how he got here. High cost of living does play a part, especially in NYC.
The Azure Security Model – Setting Foot in Microsoft's Cloud Kingdom
I currently live in Utah which, for those who don't know, is predominately of Mormon faith. While those rates aren't published for some pretty clear reasons the overwhelming majority of individuals I've spoken to within the industry tithe at or above 10%. Granted this is the tech industry so middle class and above is common but it is pretty much a requirement to be an active member of the church.

This 1980 statement from the church is an interesting one and the sentiment seems to me mostly unchanged from my admittedly outside viewpoint. https://www.lds.org/study/ensign/1980/06/concerning-tithing?...
You joke, but when have you ever heard of a software company calling their product complete, firing most of their developers, and moving to maintenance mode? Building a product and making money by selling it is somewhat of a novelty in the hypergrowth VC world of software.
What stops an evil squatter from claiming URL's that do not belong to them?
"Inordinate" is in the eye of the beholder. Free speech is curbed all the time in the interests of maintaining smooth operation of society, and as even the most intelligent among us tend to forget, free speech is not guaranteed on platforms like Facebook. There are quite a few laws on the books about hate speech, and how that extends to, say, Facebook ads, is what's being discussed here.
There was a sort of golden infancy period for podcasts, where if you had a iPod you could fit a ton of them on the spinning drive.
Thanks for the explanation, I wasn't aware of the reasoning behind it. I would guess by now all actively maintained performance-critical code has been rewritten in something more modern, so it certainly makes sense for Intel to minimize the number of gates they dedicate to MMX.
Intel's Ice Lake Won't Rid Us of the Ghost of Spectre
You're likely not going to get that $1.2 million job unless you "travel in the same circles" as the people hiring.
They usually aren't however they can be an issue if the idiomatic style trends towards towards bad ones.
Dogmatism and Go are peas in a pod. If your variable is longer than one character you're a dirty Java programmer, or something to that effect.
As are unexported objects.
One more thing: a MasterCard with x% cashback in partnership with Goldman Sachs. This will change the way you pay!

Let's all hope this won't happen otherwise expect a lot of other similar "vertical" services designed to milk existing Apple fans/customers.
I am not sure whether news regarding a children's video game company--unless it's about how they succeeded or failed spectacularly--is something that appeals to hackers.
The about link in the top menu of the page has some information, although not what you are asking for.
Oh wow, a reason to ever actually mean to use the word "ducking"! I guess my phone was on to something...
Thanks for the explanation. Program synthesis is HARD, and we may never solve it, so any progress on this is great to read about.

Good luck with this.
What definition of "completely public" are you using that would include a privately-owned airplane that I spent $100+ to board after going through a security checkpoint?
This has potential. We have too many proprietary chat systems now.

How does it avoid spoofing of addresses and spam?
This seems very much consistent with the Input Hypothesis of language acquisition.

Here's a good introduction to the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_EQDtpYSNM

Edit: Just realized that the originator of that theory, Stephen Krashen, actually got to meet her. Fascinating!
Because being rich is awesome. And if you're rich, you can do whatever you want, including helping overs if that's your prerogative.
I don't understand why this isn't the top comment.
I agree with your point. It is complicated since everytime humans become outraged about something, their emotional side tends to take over and they tend to look for someone(s) to blame and a head(s) to roll without taking all aspects into consideration, for example:

* How to pin-point one or a group of individuals to blame within the company? What if it is someone that has long moved to another company?

*Does finding a scapegoat and forcing someone out of their jobs resolve the matter? Whats the impact in that person's lives? Was it just for the masses to feel better?

To be honest, I think society is rewarding the wrong attitude in some cases. Someone in the reporter's position should have raised the issue to the relevant authorities and after the issue was resolved (at least partially), he should have made a request to publish an article talking about what happened, how many people could have been impacted, the actions he took. The outcome could have been that the reporter receives an award for his work and appreciation from society for raising awareness in the area, the government talking about concrete actions they have/will take, other companies and society works towards improving said issue.
Generating Synthetic Data for Image Segmentation with Unity and PyTorch/fastai
There has been quite a lot of discussion about Nintendo on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=nintendo&sort=byPopularity&pre...
What do you mean? Unless you're using a very old client like pidgin, this stuff shouldn't be a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr
Video message by Fils-Aime: https://twitter.com/NintendoAmerica/status/10986663214730240...
This attitude, which I'll paraphrase as "needing any feature that I personally consider unnecessary is a code smell," is endemic to the Go community and a big reason why I still find myself frustrated by it on a daily basis even after a month of using it for a greenfield project. I don't like the language itself, since I'm generally in favor of a language offering more affordances rather than fewer, but it's fine to write in and I'm ultimately concerned with making the pragmatic choice. When I go to look for what the idiomatic way to do something is, though, wow! It's rarely just "this is the way to do it, since the language optimized for a particular use case by making the tradeoff of omitting the usual features for this": instead, it frequently goes on to assert that those features are unnecessary in nearly every case and languages that provide them are wrong, or old-fashioned, or too Academic, or the people that use them don't care about Getting Things Done. Also, throw in a few cargo-culted potshots at Java for good measure! I've used a good number of languages professionally at this point, and the Go orthodoxy is easily the most off-putting I've ever encountered. I don't know why it's become so aggressively totalizing, but it's not a good thing.
Emoji Are Showing Up in Court Cases, and Courts Aren’t Prepared
Yeah, getting to idiomatically capitalize names has been pressure to move them to their own package in the past, which feels awkward.
An amazing pace lately. The pace is what makes me more sure - just slow enough I think it's done right.
Says who? This sounds like teenagers at school... Not like the people who actually created the language and who are notable experts.
> Godoc also has really nice support for executable examples, and examples run as part of the test suite so you know they're up to date.

Ah yes, the nice godoc feature which only got added to the python stdlib in checks note 2001.
I'd just like to be able to toggle javadoc, phpdoc, godoc visibility on and off entirely (not collapsed to a line, or a marker) just make them vanish until I summon them back.

I find them distracting when I'm reading the code but I don't want them not to exist either.

EDIT: Another thing I'd love to be able to do is 'tag' a variable with a synonym and have that appear next to it eveywhere.

so $strCstAcctRec (I wish that was fake but it's pretty much straight out the codebase I inherited..) would show up as $strCstAcctRec (CustomerAccountRecord).

There are a bunch of ergonomic features like that I've considered over the years, I might at some point try implementing some of them as an intellij plugin.
It's really more of a language community issue, but communities of a language are commonly referred to by the name of the language itself.
You can use NFC tags in a way such that a script is run when the device comes close to the tag. I gather you can thus do things like send an API call to turn off all the lights when you put your phone on your bedside table.
If you can pay attention while doing those things. I am not the OP, but if it isn't music, listening to anything while doing those things is a non-starter for me, especially driving.
No they want full blown control of your life. Obey. Obey. Obey. Obey. Obey.
This seems like a cost issue. Aside from the privacy issues, it’s gotta be cheaper to buy a pile of COTS tablets and bolt them to your airline seats than commission a custom form factor and hardware spec.

That said, this is actually a time when physically occluding the camera makes sense.
Git: Design Doc for the Evolve Command
// `http.get()` returns an optional string.
// V optionals combine the features of Rust's Option<T> and Result<T>.
// We must unwrap all optionals with `or`, otherwise V will complain.
s := http.get(API_URL) or {
// `err` is a reserved variable (not a global) that
// contains an error message if there is one
eprintln('Failed to fetch "users.json": $err')
// `or` blocks must end with `return`, `break`, or `continue`
return
}

This looks really handy. Is there somewhere else (outside of V) where I can read about Option types (in the real world, or in theory).
> Also, no servers have to return your commands in order, and they don't have ids. So you'll code shit like "if the response looks like this, it must've matched up with this one command."

I'm sure you know, but in case someone reads it and doesn't know it this is perfectly as intended: IMAP isn't a request-response protocol, it's more of a pub/sub protocol.
This a terrible idea.
BTW the LuaTeX source isn't really hidden; there's an unofficial GitHub mirror at https://github.com/TeX-Live/luatex (or look at https://github.com/TeX-Live/texlive-source/tree/trunk/texk/w... specifically) and for their official SVN repository at https://serveur-svn.lri.fr/svn/modhel/luatex the username/password (anonsvn/anonsvn) are listed in a few places (e.g. here: http://www.luatex.org/development.html and in their mailing list announcements).
Liberating Personal Health Information with Sovrin and FHIR
Finally, A Design Thinking Software
I'm sure there are many actual professionals using Go. Not just script kiddies.

I happen to be learning Go coming from a C background. I find "The Go Programming Language" by Donovan and Kernighan exemplary and the decades of experience that went into the language really show.
I have to admit the last time I wrote anything larger than short scripts in perl was in the perl 4 period (on HP-UX to boot). I eagerly awaited the perl 5 version of the Camel book, but in the end I jumped ship to python before getting seriously into perl 5.
Yes. If we read that quote in 50 or 100 years, it'll seem hilariously antiquated.
Apple's move to ARM-based Macs creates uncertainty
most ppl in the world have no credit card. I didn't have one till i visited the west.
In Japan, Repairing Buildings Without a Single Nail
Nazis and white supremacists are still shown in a negative light. In fact, I'd say it's even more negative now with people openly suggesting violence against them ("punch a nazi"...). I think the problem with all of this, and one that we're experiencing now is the widening of the definition of nazi and white supremacists. That's where the danger lies and that's where free speech is most valuable. Once you say it's ok to censor nazis then the game changes to redefining your opponents as nazis.

A lot of people will say people who wear MAGA hats are white supremacists for instance. It's a slippery slope, and a dangerous one.
Thieves Have Figured Out How to Bypass Those New Credit-Card Chips
That sounds a bit strong - I was going for "you can't verify that better worlds exist, therefore you can't say with any conviction this world is fallen unless you choose to avoid logic"
Bootstrap Before 4.3.1 Found Vulnerable to XSS Attack
Always used Circle in my Rails app, works very nicely (even though the web experience has been going downhill a little bit lately).
Very impressive that this software was built and maintained by a mostly solo developer into their 70's.

Talk about software lifecycle.

I wonder if there is much of a community around this software and if there is someone who may take over the future direction, much like how Emacs' head maintainership was recently (relatively) given up by RMS.
"To continue watching your in-flight movie, please watch this ad, note looking away from the screen will pause the ad while we wait for your gaze to return."

That is an entirely realistic scenario, patents have been granted for this already. Regardless of an expectation of privacy it is potentially a terrible UX as well.
When Algorithms Think You Want to Die
I feel like I have the opposite problem.

If the name is more than a few characters long, it starts to become non-instantaneous to recognize it. Things get much easier to follow with visually-instantly-recognizable symbols.

So in conditions where a variable is used over a short area in the code (or where it's used _constantly_ over a wide area), I prefer short variables.
Putin Wants Another Missile Crisis
>For example, you don't need to be fully engaged to consume audio in the same way you need to be to consume text or video (i.e. it's easy to vacuum your house or drive a car while listening to a podcast. Not so easy while reading a book or watching a movie).

As a personal anecdote, I DO need to be fully engaged to consume audio in the same way as text or video. Your example of vacuuming is a perfect example, while trying to pay attention to the carpet I'd stop paying attention to the podcast, and i'd have to rewind, which I find tedious.