skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Be Hard to Compete With
I read Sam Altman's blogpost on "How to be successful" where he makes this point on "Being Hard to Compte with".

To quote Sam: " The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields. There are many other strategies, but you have to figure out some way to do it."

What other strategies to HN'ers follow to "be hard to compete with"?
Is space exploration / commercialization speeding up? It is now that almost every day we hear some new awesome space mission.
I think you're identifying the core issue here, that is, frequently vs infrequently read code. I'd argue that if you've spent enough time in go, variables like `i`, `conf` and `ctx` will become very recognisable and easy to skim over, if they're always used in the same context.

If it's less "boilerplate" code, I'd go for more descriptive names. I think.

I like the sorta described "rule" in this document; the longer the variable is used, the more descriptive it should be.
Well as the article states, one-lettered variable names should only really be used in tight loops; `ctx` is a better name for e.g. a function argument.
The issue is, that if you want to create a startup because you want to get rich from it, it's the wrong attitude all together and will probably fail. Your concern shouldn't be how to get rich quick, but how to build a viable product that solves a real issue. If you get that done, the money will come.
I bet they are anti-vaccination as well...
Ask HN: Best Way for s.o Who Knows Statistics to Contribute to Medical Research?
You can assume:

- good knowledge of statistics

- ability to write good R and Python

- some knowledge of human physiology

- no interest in financial compensation

Is there a research equivalent to open source software? What's the best way to contribute without in-depth domain expertise? Which research areas might benefit most from this?
You need to push them in a correct and somewhat precise way so you need to grab the debris somehow before applying the push.
Maybe if you - and more importantly, everyone that will read the code in the future - are comfortable with domain-specific expressions like that. It depends on the audience really.

As an extreme example, scalaz is similarly a very specialized DSL. Or in my personal experience, functional constructions like map, flatMap, foldLeft and reduce (which I never learned in school).
I think pretty much for the large majority of cancers early detection leads on average to both longer survival and better quality of life.
It's not just you, we're just half-assing both.
Sure, it’s not just a question of ratios. But I think it’s hard to make the case that « value » has worked lately as well as it used to work.

Active value is not outperforming either:
http://news.morningstar.com/fund-category-returns/

If you think those are closeted indexers we could look at hedge funds and I don’t think value stars have shined in the last years (but maybe my perception is not fair and it’s the result of over-reporting of the misfortunes of value investors: https://www.google.ch/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/artic...).

But the fact is that even Warren Buffet is doing just “ok” in relative terms. (Yes, he has a lot of money to manage. But he also has access to investment opportunities that nobody else has.)
One can never?

Okay, suppose that I were to back up all of my mail to each client device; three at the moment, or four if you count my old phone, which is still running because I haven't gotten around to wiping it. Then I'd have five backup sites instead of one. But four of those are backed up to the fifth, so the size of the mail backup would be quintupled, the activity on the backup device would increase and with it the number of possible occasions for a failure, and the age of my oldest backup would be automatically decreased to compensate.
It's a free-rider problem - if large cloud companies fork every successful open source infrastructure project, don't contribute back, and pull away a significant chunk of users, then there's a lot less incentive for other companies to invest in future open source development, because they'll have fewer users and get fewer code contributions.

Potentially that shifts things from a good equilibrium where everyone reaps the benefit of many people contributing to the same projects, to a bad equilibrium where every major cloud player develops closed-source products separately.

I don't think it affects all open-source projects, particularly not small ones or ones where some is scratching their own it. But it's hard to build certain types of complex production-quality infrastructure without full-time employed developers working on it.
Funny, the first message I got on actual OkCupid was from their recruiting. My profile did have one passing mention about programming, maybe it was that or maybe some values / attitude / some other thing they caught.
Looks like these aren't cherry-picked, because some are absolutely terrifying.

https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/bubble-app-pics/aifull...

https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/bubble-app-pics/aifull...

https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/bubble-app-pics/aifull...

https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/bubble-app-pics/aifull...

https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/bubble-app-pics/aifull...
In Europe or more specifically Germany we have Honeypot.io. They are different because the companies apply to candidates. They have assistants that help both the companies and candidates and tries to guide them to a better hiring process.

I have been on both sides using it for both recruiting and finding a job and I like it. The main problem as a candidate is that some companies still seem like they don't really care and just spam everyone with copy/paste templates but it was really nice to have some interesting companies apply to me.

As a recruiter I love it because it is easy to contact candidates but the main issue is lack of candidates. We have a shortage of developers to fill positions which is why Honeypot was started in the first place I believe.
That statement acknowledges the compromises within itself? There's also the unstated "freedom", "availability" and "documentation" constraints.
Invitation to Survey on Augmenting Code Editors with External Information
This too.

I've worked for startups a few years now, and as many HN commenters here have said, you WILL have many bad days. You'll see crazy shit once in a while, so it's almost always easier to answer your question by starting with why NOT to join a startup.

Justin Kan has a good writeup on this: https://www.atrium.co/blog/work-at-a-startup/

Read it, and then read it a second time. On your second pass, put more thought on the "what if the startup fails", as one tends to overestimate the upside (riches etc.) without weighing out the downside of the risks involved. Unless you feel "yes, this is what I sign up for" very strongly, you probably shouldn't.

Just to wrap this point up, here's why I'm where I'm at. I've "roughly" figured out something I can live with in my career. Working in a big company with big bureaucracy, slow processes and being told to do something insignificant kills me, and I'm better off working at startups and hopefully start something my own later on, despite the potential downsides.
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And this shows exactly why many oppose unions in the tech industry, despite the incredulity of union supporters: they make it easier to impose rules which many of us profoundly disagree with.
>Just like it's happening with websites

What is happening with websites?
Modern Dictatorships and the Fall of Democracy: A System Ruled by Data Oligarchs
Dassault already won the trust of half the world with the Mirage.
Lots of countries have a space program, of varying levels of capability. Even Bolivia.
In quite many I have encountered as an employee.
I didn't, so I won't be crying now.
The current iteration of the .NET Framework, .NET Core, is proper Open Source under the MIT license. .NET Framework 4.x above is a different beast all-together and requires Mono for cross-platform compatibility. I am guessing you are fully aware of the difference, but worth pointing out for readers who might not be :)
France also recruits hackers as part of their beta.gouv.fr community, they are pushing things forward to more open source from the inside of the government. Many of them are not only at betagouv, but also at laquadrature or framasoft and the like.
There are a lot of daily activities that don't require your full attention

- commuting (driving, bicycle, public transport)
- getting ready for work (shower, getting dressed)
- cooking, eating
- laundry, dishes, vacuuming, ...
- shopping
- gardening
- exercise/working out
- ...
I’ve looked at the first two of those and I found them still too awkward due to being very text-typing heavy. Similar to play.js so I guess it mightn’t work well for me. I do have a keyboard and get by, but it’s uncomfortable for anything but shortish bursts and while I can of course use a normal keyboard, when I have one available I typically also have a laptop or desktop available so it’s easier to just use those. Like I said, I really dream of something more touch-friendly like an iPad-max/msp type language.

Still, I’ll try the ones you linked again and see. Maybe I got it wrong.
Was that supposed to be an irony or you didn't really check those links? All those projects have tons of commits and activity going on, by multiple people (35 in the case of Django!).
Sounds like the objections are from the privacy implications of the live stream.
Another issue is that location, even 60 miles, can affect salary enormously. Go even to some of the suburbs of London and it's a lot less then inside London. San Francisco Bay Area is a huge anomaly with in California. Berlin commands lowersalaries done the rest of Germany. And to get enough data across different sectors which pay differently and roles which are not quite the same as described elsewhere but titled similarly, seems to be quite difficult. How do your data compare with glassdoor for example?
Why Online Shopping Needs to Be Replaced
If you're running IT for a major corporation and you have an issue with your OS that prevents your business from operating, what do you do? Hope that your IT team figures out an issue they've never seen before in code they have no particular expertise in? No, you want to be able to pull in people who actually know the technology and have seen it all before.
That's not really correct.

I wrote a project at Google that had nothing to do with Google's business, in fact, they explicitly had chosen to not get involved with that whole area at all (Bitcoin). I applied for ability to open source it under the Google name and was denied, I asked for a copyright release back to me and was also denied. The open source programmes office had decided they wanted my project dead and preventing me from doing anything with it was their tool.

Eventually I was able to get these decisions overridden by escalating up (way up) the management chain, but it was a huge pain and the OSPO decided that the exemption applied only to me, not other Googlers, so of course the moment the company hired someone else who happened to be involved with writing the "Bitcoin Core" software already, they tried to force him to exit the project and the same fight had to happen all over again (with more escalations to top management).

The whole nonsense with someone in middle management (who shall remain nameless) deciding to kill spare time projects because they personally didn't like the idea really turned me off to these clauses. Google doesn't need them, they aren't threatened by side projects of employees and the whole thing causes far, far more drama than it can possibly ever avoid.
The intended audience is mostly China ("look at how similiar to an ICBM this space rocket is"), but the program is scientifically very useful despite that.
The British counterpart to Minitel was not Teletext (a one-way system that was present throughout Europe anyway), but Prestel. It wasn't hugely popular, not on the scale of Minitel, but it did have the UK's first highly publicised hacking case leading to changes in the law: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36306419
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https://weeve.co - they're doing video screening for the application process
All trackers are equal, but some trackers are more equal than others.
Top Mobile Ad Networks for Acquiring App Users
That's not an incompatible fork; that's just AOSP with a few apps preinstalled. Likewise vendors like Samsung are able to add their own interfaces on top of Android, but that wouldn't do for Purism.
It certainly depends on how you're approaching it. If you're thinking it's a chance to make more money, nope, you're better off making money at your posh job, or switch to a company focused on maximum payout (e.g. netflix). If you're passionate about it no matter what and are willing to work through five years of continuous failure (e.g. airbnb's story), then no need to ask, you're going to do it no matter what.

However, if you're somewhere in the middle, I think startups are a great learning experience. Go work at an early-stage startup that will pay you less than your current job and less than your market rate, but you get to experience a different style of company and style of work. Or save up money from your posh job so you can afford to not make money for a year and try starting your own company for that time. Or just coast a bit at your posh job and take that extra energy and put it into starting a side business.
If an existing iOS or Android phone is even a viable option for you, you're not the target market.
The Origins of Life: The Managed-Metabolism Hypothesis
What the heck... this guy just wrote more words on his personal infra than I have probably written in my lifetime.

In all seriousness, everything said in the top ranked comment by chubot - ditto here. The article was too long for me to finish, though.
I'm very comfortable with this specific level of interactivity. :)
I thought Nassim Taleb’s books (Fooled by Randomness and Skin in the Game) were quite rigorous.

What makes his book airport literature?
Due to the time it takes to prepare and launch one, liquid fueled rockets have very limited strategic or tactical relevance... The US learned this with the first generation of titan ICBMs which were stored horizontally and intended to be erected+fueled on demand for launch.
"the first ARM-based Macs could come in 2020, with plans to offer developers a way to write a single app that can run across iPhones, iPads and Macs by 2021"

Although this may very well be true and somewhat beneficial (see the related story about "unified Mac/iOS Apps from Ars Technica), the existence of "fat binaries" on Mach means that having multiple CPU architectures does not prevent shipping single combined binaries (for some definition of "single") today.

NeXTstep shipped single binaries for 4 architectures (68K, Intel, HP PA and SPARC), and due to the app-wrapper architecture, you could actually add the binaries for different OPENSTEP platforms as well, for example Yellow Box for Windows and OPENSTEP for Solaris.

Not sure anyone actually did this, but you could easily have had an actual single program supporting 3 operating system and 4-6 CPU architectures (if you include the 88K and PPC systems they had in the lab).
No, I think they're still mainly focused on the 2. The latest announcement was [1]:

> So, we’re excited to announce that nearly three years after the introduction of the Fairphone 2, we’re not releasing a new model just yet. Instead, we’re aiming to extend the life cycle of the phone as much as we can.

[1] https://www.fairphone.com/en/2018/05/08/keeping-your-phone-l...
I like to use a full sized Mac Bluetooth keyboard with my iPad. I haven’t found a case keyboard I’ve liked.
A problem, for the author's perspective, in adopting this mentality is that it leaves a lot of room for dishonesty with oneself.

Clunky writing writing can be explained away with "readers are dull and lazy." Whether that's the case or the author has not found a user-friendly & medium appropriate way to work through difficult material... Concluding the latter is likely to produce the best book.

Brian Greene wrote a fantastic walk through of special relativity. He used the "atomic pong on a moving training" that will take an ordinary reader from speed of light invariance to time travel. It was (iircc) a few pages, one picture (the atom bouncing on a train). Incredible bit of pop-science writing.

From there, you can grok what "time flips in a black hole."

Assuming readers (or users) are stupid is just a lot less likely to result in better writing. Concluding that your writing can be easier to understand is.
“Twenty years ago I imagined doing it with an augmented reality display and a one-handed (chorded) keyboard.”

The idea of being more productive away from my desk has always been appealing.

I hope he explores this further. This would be an improvement to the computer strapped to you.
I'm curious, why was this flagged?
Firefox/Mozilla is not as reliant on Google anymore as it once was, having diversified which search engine gets set in which area. There would also still be a reason for google to be the default search engine even in a browser that blocks third party trackers by default, namely the original reason of getting users to use your search engine. So I don't see a problem here and I doubt Google would or could force Mozilla to not make that change, even though the business people in Google probably don't like it.
The open source projects that are most threatened like this are the more complex infrastructure software that doesn't naturally get build as a side-effect of other work.

If you look at a company like Red Hat, they're focused on building things that will work reliably for the diverse needs of their thousands of paying customers. Whereas a lot of open-source contributions are really about solving the contributor's specific problem.

Sometimes if you get many people each making a contribution that scratches their specific itch you end up with something great. Other times it isn't cohesive.
Schools? Certainly my both my daughters school and my niece and nephews school has bet the farm on iPads, and are now looking for ways to teach programming without having to buy new hardware for all the kids. Something like this could be another way to do that.
Hey Techcrunch, I fixed this headline for you:

"Redis Labs Changes Its Non-Open-Source License Again"
There are simply more players on the field now. With ESA, JAXA, CNSA, among others, and the emerging private sector we can diversify into many exciting space projects instead of going for a single (no matter how amazing) moonshot.
> The title on the article is wrong. H1B workers aren't immigrants and using that word in this context is wrong.

The title is exactly what the new policy means.
Sometimes Dude is also one of the best engineers you know when he can just get some “heads down” time to himself, but when forced to be in an environment with many easy distractions, he acts like a kid on the playground. Or something.
"But if you develop a point-of-sale system (say) and sell it to a store chain - they might not have any motivation to publish the source - even if it includes a patched mysql, or some gpl code etc (maybe a patched Linux kernel?)."

They also have no obligation to publish it. You are distributing the software to them, you have to give them the source code along with it. They are using the software, not distributing it further, therefore GPL does not require them to publish the source code.

(I'm not trying to argue with you here, as I think you know this - I just thing your comment does not make this detail clear enough. :) )
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Given the choice between close source software and open source software which is restricted legally I will still gladly take the latter.
We have unpopular laws that populism would like to see repealed - in the UK, the human rights act for example.
For some interesting insight in this, Fairphone has published the cost breakdown of their phone [1]. It's quite a bit more expensive than similar phones, but only about €5 of that is justified by the "fair" part of the phone - most of it is just source materials being more expensive due to their small scale.

[1] https://www.fairphone.com/en/2015/09/09/cost-breakdown-of-th...
Years ago I read "Growing Artificial Societies - Social Science from the Bottom Up" by Joshua M. Epstein and Robert L. Axtell and was really motivated to do computer modeling as some sort of hobby.

For me at least the problem was once I got their original model up and running I wasn't able to sustain the focus to construct a graphical representation that was compelling. So I never went back and debugged the stuff that I added to model (not seriously anyway).
Discreet Log Contracts: Private, Scalable Smart Contracts
Will this also force Do Not Track to be on, similar to the current tracking blocklists in Firefox? That's the primary reason why I have it turned off and rely on uBlock Origin + a few other extensions.
At least they provided a great deal of notice. 7 whole days.
To add to this, in no circumstance have I ever seen developers spending 100% or even close to 90% of their time actively writing code or thinking about code and working. Heck, for most of the ones I’ve worked with, it’s probably closer to 60% productive time during office hours, with the most productive being somewhere between 80-100% busy.

Just because you (the person before you, actually) are a reclusive jerk, doesn’t mean everyone else also hates people and chitchat.
Funny thing, Hindus warned of this in multiple tracts in their own flowery ancient language, so it is apparently not unknown. Their solution was to stress out the role of their experienced guru to guide it and carefully mete this out.
Given the alternative would be working while being sedentary, I think it's probably a fairly good (if odd) setup? I'm assuming he doesn't take the laptop like that when we he wants to walk to the shops at the weekend.
Was there really any question whether Japan could build an ICBM though? Russia and maybe even North Korea can make them.
Validating Services in Scala
Lord Byron in the Armenian Monastery in Venice
FWIW, I've been running Synapse since 0.20 or so (for at least 2 years now), and there has never been a breaking change in the protocol as far as I'm aware. I had to read release notes at some points to get the upgrade to work, but it was mostly Python-library-related stuff IIRC.
easy to build means easy to replace. is it true?
I don't really mind it on twitter, as twitter is anything but serious, and you can't really have any coherent text there.

But such elements in a regular article simply harm its coherence and readability for anyone that does not spend much of their time in (rather noisy and immature, IMHO) communities which feature "meme image macros" heavily.

(Bonus negative points if some of the images are animated. That makes me think that the author actively hates the readers.)
"I could tell you, but then I would have to [...]" - subscribe you to my newsletter.
how do you build things in space? Do you plan to put factories in orbit? That sounds implausible.