skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take a peek at KDE sometime; it's my favorite (and IMO most usable) DE of the pack.

Xfce is at the "light but jank" end of the pool. Try changing your password via Settings: you can't. Thunar, its file manager, is extremely basic. Dolphin, KDE's file manager, is even better than Windows's Explorer (you have split directory views, way more options, terminal integration, etc.), which always amazed me. How is this free GUI product made by a handful of volunteers exceed the thing this megacorporation has offered for decades?! Meanwhile, Gnome's file manager mimics Xfce's in basicness, and on top of that you can't use Dropbox or any other tray apps cuz kek B o l d D e s i g n(TM)(R).
The sad thing is the xbox game pass has been working for PC for ages now and a year ago the process was simpler.
... one of the KPIs that are used to measure success is the number of press articles about the project :)
$20M
I'm curious if Apple has some data that people secretly like the touchbar (I've never come across someone who uses it for anything). Beyond just being fancy-looking when you're in the Apple store comparing laptops... which I think is the whole point and makes you question the priorities of Apple's recent leader.

I wouldn't even care about the Touchbar if they left the rest of the keyboard alone, but apparently the escape key was seen as an unimportant key.
My First PCB
I worked for a company that would do this exactly, with an additional variable. The sales folks' bonuses were based on the original estimate, not any overruns. So they'd promise the customer a certain feature set then, write up the minimum feasible estimate, collect their bonuses, then blame engineering for the extra cost, feature creep, etc... when it was all by design.
Autophagy and intermittent fasting: the connection for cancer therapy?
I do this sort of thing with triggers and table-based materializations of views.
Founders are protected through carveouts that they can negotiate as part of the acquisition.
> "We may be reaching that point soon within the next decade. That will require constant progress year after year."

How are we not there already? What does your phone do today that it couldn't do five years ago, and is that thing actually so important as to justify five years of ewaste? And what do you think it doesn't do today that a few more years will fix?

The biggest problems right now are fragile hardware (a phone should not shatter when dropped), poor repair-ability (particularly battery replacement, which should be a trivial matter) and shitty wasteful software that has fewer features than it did years before but somehow uses more ram and more CPU time because the industry is obsessed with hiring the cheapest most inexperienced developers.
I only played with ISPC a little bit. What I found is that it is really great if you need to write a large volume of SIMD code and that code sticks to one lane size. Like, 4 32-bit floats or ints. But, if you want switch mid-stream to 8 shorts or 16 bytes, you’re gonna have a hard time. Or, if you just need a few instructions, it’s easier to just use intrinsics.
A Hidden Connection Between Digital Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Relativity
I would love to see presidential debates where each candidate is hooked up to an EEG polygraph-type device. Might not work on psychopaths though.
> Did you really miss the word "after"?

Nope. That's why I said "so close".
The rest (it really gets worse)!

"So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like "Open" or "Save". No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback."

Still try to read the pdf (links are here on HN) as there are the reactions of the managers and it seems most... don't feel they have anything to do with all that.
That's called participation and it's negotiated as part of the raise.

Non-participating: at liquidation, an investor chooses. They may either be paid back their investment (or more, if they have a multiple), OR they may choose to convert to common and get that percentage. They will, obviously, choose whichever pays them more =P

Participating is then also obvious: investors get their money (or negotiated multiple) out, and then get their ownership percentage of the remainder.

One thing that happens is companies very eager to raise monster rounds agree to shitty terms on all of the above. It's a lever founders and investors can manipulate to raise bigger rounds.

see eg https://medium.com/@CharlesYu/the-ultimate-guide-to-liquidat...

So your answer: $28m. Because if you agreed to 2x preferences, you're raising on shit terms and the investor probably got participation as well.

Generally if you raise on good terms, you can get a 1x non-participating.

But it's good to know the details.
Not that surprising actually, the static models (ie a crane in a scrapyard) have been electric for a long time.

If anything, the biggest challenge / last bastion will be for the highly mobile operations, bringing all the needed infrastructure to power them, which isn't as much as problem with diesel.

Maybe we'll see trucks mounted with large arrays of batteries to deploy on the field.
> Pirsig used note cards or slips of paper

Ah, yes, my mistake. In my memory I confused index cards with PostIt notes.

> and not really about motorcycles at all

It's Zen, but it's not about Zen; it describes motorcycle maintenance, but it's not about motorcycle maintenance.

These are just a vehicle (no pun intended) for Pirsig to show us the inside of his post-apocalyptic mind, as far as he could remember once being who he called Phaedrus before they zapped him.

I found the book a multidimensional view of Pirsig's current and previous mental state and philosophy, just like the description of a computer software architecture is a multidimensional view of the architecture, neither and none of which can be described by a mere linear narrative.

It (ZATAOMM) is part philosophy, part memoir, part attack on what he calls the Church of Reason, part description of insanity, and more things I can't think of right now. No wonder it took him 4 years to pull together all those threads of consciousness, some of which were very damaged indeed.

Although, like another commenter noted, just spending 4 years on writing a book doesn't mean it automatically deserves accolades - and I agree with that observation - someone who reads it with even a fraction of the patience and insight with which it was written, might be tempted to award accolades after all.
This matters more now that the current crop of tech companies have taken so much money.

In the old days, when software companies sold software rather than traditional services enhanced by software, it was common to get to profitability around the B round and then never take any more investment after that. Google took $25-35M and then nothing until IPO, running the company from 2001-2004 off cashflow. Microsoft took nothing except a small mezzanine round (to align incentives with the I-bankers) right before IPO. Github took a $50M Series A on a valuation of $500M; VCs owned 10% of the company, and the 3 founders + employees split the remaining 90% of its $7.5B acquisition. Indeed took a Series A and is profitable. Atlassian took a $60M Series A 8 years after starting the company, when it was already profitable. PlentyOfFish, HotOrNot, Reddit, Wufoo all raised either nothing or just angel money before being acquired.

When you're capital efficient, you get to keep the majority of any sale price.

The current crop of unicorns like Uber, Lyft, WeWork, Postmates, DoorDash, Instacart, AirBnB, and Stripe have all taken massive amounts of capital though, sometimes in the multi billions of dollars. That has to be returned to the investors before the common shares (founders & employees) make anything. If they hit on hard times before a liquidity event, there's a good chance that the common will be wiped out, and investors effectively own the company. Why shouldn't they, when they put up all the money that the company's been burning?
By being transparent and giving all the numbers needed for the employee to make a good decision.

For what it's worth, I've always valued options at private companies as zero in making career decisions and looking back I don't think that heuristic ever steered me wrong (even at a company that is now a "unicorn")
Ah thanks for jogging memory in regards to the names. :)

> Neither one had any official impact on ratings, rewards, or career velocity.

Ah interesting, my understanding was that people who can gone through HiPo were sorta blessed. Then again I guess in theory the people who get selected for HiPo should already be doing the work to make their career velocity look good.

I saw all sorts of interesting stuff while I was at MS. It was a crazy place to work. It was sort of like working at a company that does everything 5-8 years too early, and then tries again 2-3 years too late.

* Tablets
* eBooks
* MP3 players
* Smartphones
* Smart TVs (Micorosft bought Web TV in 1997!! That is what, 15-20 years too early?)
* Tablets again
* Cloud based document syncing (See: What Sharepoint tried to be)

They also made some sort of automation creation tool for business users that, IIRC, got cancelled after one release and replaced with something else. I only know about it because I signed up to do internal user testing for it.

This is on top of all sorts of crazy one off projects. (In 2011 I was on a team attempting to make an autonomous household robot! How long before those become a viable thing outside of Roombas?)
A few observations: I was watching a documentary on building a Very Tall Building and the concrete pouring engineer (it's a thing) was standing up at 1000 feet directing the exact mix of cement to water, etc because that makes a huge difference in the strength, which matters a lot in 1000 foot buildings.

Another: one of the very first steps in human tech history was "mine limestone" (see The Knowledge). So many things come from lime!
But if one station is charging 3.69 and another is charging 3.39, should I assume that the one charging more actually paid 30 cents more a gallon, or have that much more for expenses? Or are they making an extra quarter gallon? right now I can go buy regular for anywhere between 3.20 and 3.80, for no apparent reason.

If the profit margin is really only a few cents a gallon, it seems like there should be a big incentive to simply charge an extra $0.05 a gallon.

I've also noticed some stations charge way more for regular, but the same for premium... They just don't have as large a spread, which would in courage people to buy premium.

This is an Oregon, too, where there is a unusual situation for gasoline since people aren't allowed to pump their own and it has resulted, for some reason, in significantly fewer filling stations.
That's where the difference between participating and non-participating preferences come in. Participating meaning that they also participate in the remaining surplus (so on your example $28M). Non-participating means they choose whichever is better (in your example they wouldn't since $20M is better than 10% of $100M, but if the company sold for $300M they'd choose $30M instead of the $20M).
It's also in the Tips app, which prompts via notifications to learn about new features in iOS after an upgrade. You can ignore it, or you can let it walk you through the changes to your device.
The Phoenix failure wasn't really a software failure, if I recall correctly. It was more that when everything moved to Miramichi the people who understood the byzantine government pay systems basically didn't follow and the result was people with no clue of what they wanted or how to do it being heavily involved. No software firm can succeed in those conditions.
I have an Ubuntu dedicated server. I reboot it every Sunday, yet there is rarely a week where on Friday I don't see this when SSHing in due to auto-updates:

0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

*** System restart required ***

Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS

Linux ubuntu 4.15.0-34-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 27 15:21:48 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
A lot of words to say something very simple - information asymmetry via contractual complexity is being abused to profit those writing the contracts.
This is exactly correct. Organizations that create dependency on such highly performing individuals can coast on their talent while they're around but once they're gone, its hard to replace them.

Usually these uber-productive individuals are required and necessary during the early stages of a corporation where you literally need that kind of productivity to survive. Once an org matures though, there is no such requirement.
I found Consider Your Options (by Kaye A. Thomas) helpful and easy to understand.
Wannacry: The Marcus Hutchins Story [video]
...or try using Google Docs in Safari on iOS 13 with a text editor in split view.

Two blinking cursors and no easy way to choose which window is active. To enter text in the Google Doc after using my text editor, I have to tap the URL bar twice, dismiss the suggestions, and then it's active.

Given that my iPad is my only computer, this release has been really rough. It's getting there, and I'm sure with time it will only get better.

Just wish it was more reliable and less buggy: I've used iPads constantly since the very first one, but this has had me looking at laptops and Microsoft's Surface...
They'll do worse - any reason you put forward for not using their fetishised system will be summarily dismissed, regardless of content, and ultimately even your own experience with said fetish will be denounced as a lie.
"they're previously worked with? That's a good sign."

As in good, or bad?
May be you should not send purchase receipt by default? I don't know why everyone does that as I don't care about it at all. If it's not required by law, add button to your UI which will mail receipt (or better just let user download it) and that's about it. While I'm not marking those receipts as spam, I'm sure that some users would do that as it's unwanted mail for them.
And the cake definition includes a lot of learned knowledge about humans, foods, rituals, pleasurable tastes, aesthetically pleasing looks; you practically are a domain expert on wedding cake already, you know what is possible, roughly how much it costs, how the difficulty scales with size, what isn’t possible, what isn’t reasonable, what options are available, how people will react, down to a very small scope of possibilities. what’s the cake equivalent for Martians who don’t eat and don’t have weddings and may not see in the human visual spectrum?

I want a thing which will be a centre of attention at an appropriate moment of their existence which their senses will experience .. an appropriate sensation to convey .. to achieve the appropriate goal of goodwill, at an appropriate amount of resource expenditure?

Does that still cover the important bit? If I say I want peace among nations, have I just done the important bit of international diplomacy, and it just needs some experts to tidy up the details?
Life Artificial (sci-fi novel)
I personally hold that math is a science of sorts that is grounded in physical reality. What then if their maths were experimental in nature with less logical abstraction?
Ben is a brilliant man with many fascinating and insightful videos.
Distillation reduces accuracy and removes the contextual precision. For example reducing a whole document to some N (1k or so) dimensions have worked very poorly in my experiments for short queries - typically making the relevance worse than basic keyword search.
Quick thanks for making the equity comp guide free! It's come at the perfect time for me. I'm also on the wait list for the tech recruiting guide and will be happily purchasing it when it's available. Great stuff you guys are doing!
Usually it just means gutting the department that moves. The UK has been trying this with the BBC, forcibly relocating the organisation to the north of the country. It encodes a basic assumption that in government, skilled and experienced people are so unimportant you can just lose all of them (as very few people want to relocate to a place chosen specifically because it's fallen behind). Says a lot, really.
Apps 4 ride: overview of the steps moped and car share apps per city
Because your company raised money from VCs.

This will never happen at a bootstrapped company.
Natural language is a lot more expressive than boolean expressions of keywords. Perhaps experienced searchers who use the same approach to query formulation that worked well two decades ago are no longer the true power users. Maybe they are just dinosaurs.
In my opinion:

Liquidation preference of 1x (or lower) is just sensible alignment of investor and founder incentives. The investor wants to make sure that if they buy 20% of the company for $5M, the founders aren't now incented to take advantage of them (in an extreme example: the day after the fundraising, liquidating the company for its assets, taking home $4M themselves and handing the investor back $1M. In a less extreme example, selling the company (in toto) for $10M a year or two later).

Liquidation preference of higher than 1x is a whole different thing. It's, at its most benign, something kind of like a financial instrument a little more like debt than stock, trading a more-guaranteed return for a lower price, or at its most pernicious, basically an attempt to create false impressions of a company's value. If you sell stock with a x3 liquidation preference, that is deeply different, and conveys considerably less investor confidence, than selling the same stock at the same price with x1 liquidation preference, but the press releases get to not mention the preference.
the problematic circumstance is when the company doesn’t perform and is forced to raise under desperate circumstances. if you can make that distinction then early equity is worth stupid money (and just leave quickly if the company doesn’t perform)
Trump confirms US will leave Paris climate accord
Do you have "Displays have separate spaces" unchecked in mission control settings?
From a 40,000 foot view, it's odd that employees who are investing their professional effort are relegated to a lower equity tier. I think the person asking the question in the article makes a valid point: why is it fair for human capital to be devalued in this way?
>(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)

Was that the one with all the floating "tiles" on the screen? IIRC it was influenced by the Zune UX. I remember when my father purchased a Windows phone as his first smartphone. It had already been announced they'd stop supporting them, but the Verizon guy didn't tell him that. I actually rather liked the UX and OS; the thing about Android's "desktop" that I dislike is its "pagination" - i.e. you can fit 12 icons on one page, and have to flip through them. So I have my calendar on one page, 8 icons or so there, my work email on one, my personal email on the next. I can navigate it quite quickly, but compared to the Windows tiles it seems antiquated for some reason.
Yep:
"Your design is supposed to satisfy what people see, not computational algorithms. It’s why the designer’s eye should always play a part in the equation."

The entire point is that the designers eye can not possibly percieved things the same as every other person. To evaluate readability you should look not at the average rating from all users but the lowest average for each condition/group as they will be the ones who cant read it.

I had to stop reading at the defense of gray text - there's no excuse for that. Ever.
While I quite like the term artisan in some ways, mechanics do not build new things. You could call a maintainer a digital mechanic if you really wanted I suppose.

From my perspective software engineering will become more like engineering is now over time, just as engineering itself has become more rule bound and safety conscious over time, presumably since around the start of the industrial revolution.

The term engineering carries gravitas because getting it wrong is a big deal, and its becoming apparent the same is true when software goes wrong.
This kind of thing also got me to OS X. Now I'm looking at fiascos like the MBA/MBP keyboards, the bug-fests that are x.0 OS updates, and the way Catalina kills 32-bit applications for little reason (that I can discern), and I find myself wondering if I should quit the Mac world.
No, I cannot disagree with this more strongly.

There's nothing good about it that you couldn't do better with customizable toolbars before.

If there are ways to customize it now, I'm not smart enough to do it anymore.
Even as a very early employee (say number 20) of a unicorn probably will not make that much...you'd be lucky to get $2M if it sold for $1B...

Most people are better off just working at a big company if they want to build wealth.