skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can attest that it's a great book. It took my Make savvy from "pretty average" to "can build Makefiles that conform pretty decently to DRY". Not all of the book is useful to me, but it's a pleasant read and also a good well-indexed reference manual and I consult it at least monthly for fun.
Ask HN: What is fair compensation to move a successful desktop app to the cloud?
Hi HN,

I'm talking with a friend about moving his father's successful desktop app into the cloud. I would like to know what you I should ask for in return.

A few facts:

- The app performs scheduling for a consumer niche

- Been around for 15+ years with a loyal customer base, top 3 SEO results for relevant queries

- Downloadable desktop application with a once-per-year licensing fee, no auto-renewal or subscriptions

- Many complicated scheduling algorithms to rewrite, but the rest is not very complex

- None of the old code is useable outside of the logic it contains

- The owner is getting old and wants out badly of daily operations. Nothing is off limits. People have already turned him down on this offer.

- It did $90k this year in passive sales, mostly returning customers that have used the product for a long time
- Multiple interests of acquisition by larger players in the space pending a move to cloud

- He wants me to take things over essentially upon finish

I consider this to be a six month re-write at a minimum, at a time when I'm feeling very busy with other companies and projects.

What would you ask for (equity + cash) to do this?

My going idea right now is ~35% equity with a $5k per month x 6 months building fee. I've considered bumping that cash option up and offering a 'payback' based on earned revenue once it's complete, but I don't know - I tend to constantly undersell myself and my abilities as a very capable full stack developer.

A friend warns me that I need a path to ownership plan. I don't know what that would look like.

Any help is appreciated.
JavaScript and Python can't match performance, scalability, security, rich libraries for developing enterprise applications that comes with Java Ecosystem.
The simplest way to avoid most of them is to ban script mixing, especially mixing Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Cherokee.
Heads up: I work for 1Password

Any reason why you'd say unfortunately there? I see it as a pretty big perk rather than an unfortunately. But I would also like to understand a bit more so I can pass along any necessary feedback to our team.

Thanks!

Kyle

1Password Security Team
Highest Converting Woodworking Product on the Internet
I wonder if there is a formalism out there that relates medicine's differential diagnosis to engineering's fault tree analysis [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tree_analysis
Although it would take a lot of energy to escape the gravity well of a gas giant, all of the gas giants are also far away from the sun. In the case of Uranus, this means that there is more energy to be gained from dropping towards the Sun to Earth than would be lost by escaping Uranus' gravity well.

For a visual representation of this, see https://xkcd.com/681/

So, one could imagine a siphon which would take helium from Uranus to Earth. A normal siphon moves a liquid out of a gravity well by relying on a deeper gravity well. Of course, there a limits to the height that siphons can handle, based upon the vapor pressure of the fluid, and the idea of running a really long tube from one planet to another is kind of ridiculous. However, the same energy differences could be used in principle to power a more realistic scale system, like a recirculating ship which gains kinetic energy on the Uranus-Earth run and loses it on the pick-up-helium-at-Uranus run. Such a system would need to dump angular momentum around the Sun at one of the planets, because this doesn't balance when you move mass from one planet to another.

My inner five-year-old loves the idea of mining gas from Uranus. :)
More than 120 jobs axed at Dundee manufacturing firm
Yeah, I'm not even scared of flying but I'd raise a stink if they tried to push me into a 737 Max, mainly based on principle. Given how FAA tried to initially defend the status quo and kept the planes flying to not shake the boat, trust is gone. Boeing would have to convince the regular public that the problem with the plane is solved - which might be an impossible task because public do not understand what really went wrong and how it would be fixed. So someone else can sway them the other way around just as easily. People would still choose the "safer" option.
I don't think you ever get full answers as to what is wrong other than the first time it gets raised. The very first "value violation" will get raised probably multiple times but it will usually be inconvenient to do anything about it. It then becomes a wound that starts to fester and it is probably the last time you hear about anything bad. All the little violations widen the wound and make it even worse and erode the trust.

Once the trust is gone and its gone the moment that "value violation" wasn't fixed (handled won't cut it here, a conversation isn't the solution just the holding pattern that ensures the trust will disappear) the trust starts eroding and so does the honest information flow. I think infected wounds is a much better analogy because they invite further infections, the coffee with a friend is just the result of someone offering a fresh set of skin without the emotional pain. The wound carrier also hides them under clothing so people don't see it, but they were still wounded and the person who wounded them isn't getting anything honest out of them again.
This model is sort of absurd. It doesn't take into account the most important factor... people.

If you made a model of the world today back in 1920, it would be comical.

Imagine you went back to say 1920 and told people that in 2020 they would be surrounded by talking televisions, phones, that we'd be sending people and ships to the moon, mars, etc. and that they could instantly talk to any person on the planet (including loved ones on the other side of the world), they would not believe you.

In the last 100 years (heck even the last 20-30) we've invented a staggering amount of new and interesting things.

In the last 100 years people created interstate highway systems, nuclear power, the internet, radio data networks, self guided weapons, self guided vehicles, robots, rudimentary AI, etc...

What if in 100 years we make fusion work (probably for space travel/war?) and then we replace the existing infrastructure with that. And what if we can do enough carbon removal or storage to solve this?

Any model that doesn't model the history altering inventiveness of humans is not an accurate model at all. It's just really fancy navel gazing.
Private equity (PE) has a bad reputation for a good reason. I wouldn't jump to migration immediately, but you should keep an up to date export in a secure place. PE can take years to drive a company into the ground with debt.
Wow that's pretty interesting! Thanks for sharing.
But aside from APL and a few Haskell coders, who isn't programming in ascii? I mean, sometimes i chuck an emoji into a comment but I don't think that really counts.

And how could programming in ascii have solved this bug? The problem is that the strings were compared without giving any thought to what "are these strings equal" is supposed to mean.

The only general solution to this kind of bug - that is, to considering distinct emails to be identical - is to have a special function that can check if two emails are identical according to the spec. This function will be different than determining if two names are the same in an American database where dotless and dotful i are the same, and that function will also be different than a function determining if two names are the same in a Turkish database where dotless and dotful i are different. Although I don't know why you're trying to compare strings for identity, you're probably just after similarity anyway - how often do we convert strings to lowercase before we compare them.

Generic string equality functions are always the source of bugs, since there's no useful, single uniformally applicable definition of string equality.
Targeting kids, last year I built a tool to write interactive stories, playable on the web and as Alexa skill: https://xn--erzhlkreis-s5a.de . The documentation (in German) is here: https://storylab.schettler.net/doc . The embedded programming language is, in fact, Egg by Marijn Haverbeke https://eloquentjavascript.net/12_language.html
the argument is actually "this time it will be different because without material deprivation people will participate fully and democracy is oxygen to a planned economy, in contrast to Russia which was desperately impoverished when it started this".
I think you got it!

The is a paradox in 'climbing the ladder' and giving away financial resources. Simply because, in the competitive market, you aggregate resources by taking it from others. Either competitors or random individuals. Philanthropy should start giving away those resources to the actors most in need, and they may be very close to your activities, but then you can't aggregate and climb up. The market doesn't have sympathy, and lack of resources can be devastating during tough times.

Don't climb the ladder. Who cares.
Accenture Agrees to Acquire Clarity Insights, Boosting Artificial Intelligence
Compiler Auto-Vectorization Using Imitation Learning [pdf]
>If the message was "I baked cookies, come by my office if you'd like to try some" do you think this person would similarly be fired?

Yes I do. 100%.

>put in place a better review process,

This is your solution? The process was intentionally lax so that you wouldn't have too much red-tape when soliciting contributions. The assumption was that this wouldn't be abused by your Security engineers(!!). Your solution to this is to make the process more onerous because one individual couldn't behave like an adult? How about you keep the process as is and you fire the individual who couldn't differentiate activism from security work.
https://github.com/mitchellw/fennel-layer

Once I get a few quirks ironed out, I'll submit a PR to spacemacs to include it in the dev branch
23andMe to share customer gene data with GlaxoSmithKline for $300M
Different viewing angle needed but Google does similar stuff themselves, e.g:

On Google.com if you present a Vivaldi user agent and arrive via a redirect, the search text box will be misaligned
On Google Docs if you present a Vivaldi user agent you will receive a warning

https://vivaldi.com/de/blog/user-agent-changes/
The problem with your point of view is that it applies equally to the companies that hire you, and they have very little incentive to be on your side.
Hey Everyone, I have a friend that struggled to lose weight and a lot of it has to do with the type of food you are eating. She came across this 100% free book that I am happy to share with you for free just email me on freeforyo2020@gmail.com just say send me the free ebook and I’ll have it sent over straight away.
"vulnerable"

It's a shell script as part of your build system. Surely you're not passing untrusted input to your command line are you?
I miss the old google home widget board thing. I know google hosted it but it felt very much like a simple dashboard and customizable.
OpenBSD U2F/Fido(4) Driver
Defmacro can be implented in 7 lines of syntax case, and gensym is in syntax case as well. The difference is that CL has you jumping through hoops to have something resembling hygiene, whereas it is default in scheme.

It is one of many ideological differences, and I dont understand why that one has become so divisive.
What do you think of his parents saying he was excited to be working for the Clinton campaign? That there was no suspicious anything found on any of his documents? That he didn't even have access to any of the emails?

They gave a mountain of evidence why his death has been turned into a political conspiracy theory. There is next to no evidence in favor of your theory. The idea that Assange's comments are in favor of it is incredibly weak - he was receiving additional information after Seth Rich was already dead.
I strongly oppose public unions.

Unions are good for private companies, as there is a balance of powers - if the owners pay employees too little, employees quit, whereas if the employees protest too much, the company doesn't sell anything - both scenarios lead to collapse / bankrupcy, so both sides are motivated to cooperate and find a compromise.

In public services, there is no such balance - the state isn't constrained by market forces, and it won't collapse no matter how much employees protest. In addition, state employment usually comes with other benefits (e.g. job & pension security), so really the employees shouldn't be complaining and holding the whole country hostage.
I agree because I use the JVM but I do not use Java. So I care about changes to the JVM and ecosystem but changes to the Java language itself don’t mean anything to me.
"I'm personally incredibly annoyed by just the idea of "Unicode is hard, let's do ASCII", most of the world is non-ASCII, it's just annoying and sad to still see systems that fail when people try to use their native languages."

You are correct that most of the world is non-ascii and I am enthusiastic about recognizing that diversity and I am willing to pay certain costs in return for the richness it provides.

However, I will point out that certain systems have been deemed crucial and in need of deliberate (and brutal) dumbing-down. Specifically, I speak of the global Air Traffic Control system that is English only[1].

Tagalog/Flemish/Satsugu is hard. Let's (land airplanes with) English.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English
Citations needed: most of it is actually blood plasma as far as I can tell[1] [2]. Just because you don't like the messenger doesn't mean the message is false.

[1] https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/wtf-why-does-the-us-expo...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/two-percent-us-export-income-blood-...
Birthday Wishes – Get the best birthday wish for your family and friends
Heads up, I work for 1Password

We have guides here for migration from other password managers:

https://support.1password.com/import/

Let me know if that helps or if you run into any trouble.

Kyle

1Password Security Team
In the US. Decidedly not in other countries, where it is just something you do.
(Not GP) I haven’t tried it myself yet but tesseract.js’s demo looks promising.

https://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/
this isn't a real distinction. people only displaced things like standard oil with a lot of outrage and after years.
Want to run that past HMRC or try working for any public body, Oh apart form "self employed" barristers, funny they seem excluded unlike us greasy engineers and boffins

With IR35 its much more favourable tax treatment on 2x to 3x FTE pay
I don't understand this "wouldn't let me" stuff. Pull out your phone and call someone. Some random person in a meeting room at Google isn't the police. You aren't in custody. If you're uncomfortable then walk out. If anyone at my employer was the least bit aggressive to me I would immediately walk away.
You're right. It literally links to (what appears to be) an internal company document. go/nlrbnotice
>That justice isn't equally applied doesn't excuse the perpetrator.

If you can prove it isn't being applied fairly it can result in rewards that more than cancel out any such penalty. Such discrimination cases can be hard to prove but can result in significant rewards magnitudes greater than the ticket fine.
A former company I worked for was under a consent decree. Their legal team had to come up with remedies that were acceptable by the government to address them - not their security team.

I was the dev lead responsible for writing software that would be used by the department that was most impacted by the decree. Should I have taken it upon myself to create pop ups informing them to be careful about compliance? Legally, I probably couldn’t have been fired but would that have displayed good judgement?

When you are part of certain departments or positions, you have more access and therefore are expected to have better judgement.
I think the punishment is warranted for the fact that it is an internal security tool. I don't know of any large company that would allow this kind of code commit without that level of punishment being taken. She was trying to be sincere in her actions but comes off as completely naive that what she was doing was a serious violation. I don't see her winning this to any degree and at 21 it will be a big learning lesson.
The 0.01% of liquid net worth concept is useful.

The rest of the article is not very useful. The higher one's liquid net worth, the more differences in priorities and consumption patterns.
Yikes. That is straight up black hat shit. What ever happened to posters and bullhorns?
Not this one. The answer is yes, we will run out of helium, it is one of the few truly non-renewable resources. You can use chemical processes to make methane or petroleum-equivalents, and coal can be replaced with charcoal, but once all the helium atoms have drifted off into space, they're gone forever.

It just won't happen soon.
I'm really not a fan of this breakdown because it seems to put each order of magnitude increase in liquid net worth as equal space on the graph. What percentage of people fall into each level. Maybe 50-60% of American adults fall into level 1?

Surely, most folks will never reach Level 3 on this chart. While this is an interesting way for someone who has made significant increases in their income over the years, I don't think the thesis holds that the best way to increase your ladder is to just save money.

We're all (or mostly all) wage earners here. Whether you are making $15/hour at a fast food gig, or $200+/hour as an engineer, you aren't going to save yourself into a new level. Saving might take some pressure off, and make you a little more comfortable within your level, sure, but for most people, it isn't reasonable for them to save 10 times the money they already have liquid without changing their income.

The idea that we're all just a few 'steps' away from being independently wealthy is one of the worst parts of American culture in my experience. The individualism that follows from "if I can just outcompete someone else" seems to me to be the root cause of things like a general anti-labor sentiment, minimum wages as low as $2.13/hour, etc.
There have been smart asses talking about Peak Caol for 250 years. We are going towards going on 70 years of Peak Oil. There were widespread scares in the 70s about all kinds of metals running out because of 'Overpopulation' (another nonsense concept that people repeatly dig out. In the 60s there was a believe that fission materials was incredibly limited. In the 90s and 2000s there was an actual beleive that there were not enough 'rare earth' materials.

And we had for a long time a clear economic explaition why this happens. Its well understood but somehow the same ideas are repeated all the time.

And your example is horrifingly bad, because if we were talking about humans there would be a mountain of evidence that in fact humans are not important.

However in the whole history of the modern world we have never actually run out of a non-renewable resource. Even when supposedly the smartest people predicted it over and over and over and over again.

At some point this is just idiological bable unsupported by even the slightest amount of evidence and should be treated as such.
> put everything we could into the database (work queues and pup/sub included). It was magical.

I've been building systems on some pretty similar ideas for the last 5+ years, and have a similarly optimistic outlook on it. Just to add another datapoint here, we've been able to scale them up to 20-40x higher than your figure (a couple thousand jobs/sec) on a single (albeit beefy) MySQL instance. It definitely takes a fair bit of care & we certainly have some time invested in it, but it can be done.

I guess my services haven't had (gotten to? :-) ) to share databases with other services for quite some time -- they did when I started my job! -- but even with that concession, the benefits of DB guarantees have been amazing. There's nothing like a transaction for preserving your sanity.

The best tactic I've learned from these systems is to think really hard about the batching & partitioning behavior to keep msgs/sec high enough & transactions/sec low enough to stay afloat.
It is so interesting to see these problem solved again and again.

Very important bit to understand, that many smart people (including perhaps some in this HN discussion) don't know yet: the semantics of an event store are meaningfully different from the semantics of a pub/sub system. If you pick up a pub/sub system and start trying to build an event store based system architecture with a set of CQRS-ES-style followers, you will find you are reinventing a bunch of things quite painfully.

Here's what we did, a few years ago. In some ways it is similar to EventTide.

https://blog.oasisdigital.com/category/cqrs/

https://github.com/OasisDigital/nges

We picked up JGroups, a truly spectacular piece of open source technology, and used it to automatically wake up event stream listeners in a distributed way. (At the time there was some limitation of the NOTIFY mechanism in PG that sent us this direction.). With very little code around automated wake-up, we achieved low latency (and therefore fast automated testing) of an arbitrary group of event stream followers.
(Not parent but I have experience from both sides: I regularly purchase five-figure software licenses for my clients, and help clients optimize their own pricing.)

It's about trust and expectations.

If a software company blindsides me with a 1,000% price increase overnight (or ∞%) without advance warning, then how can I trust them to warn me in advance about other major changes in the future? If they don't have the decency to give advance notice about that, can I trust them to give me advance warning before they change major features, or plan to have downtime, or plan to shut down--which becomes a real concern if they're fumbling around with pricing changes.

SSO and access management services are things I want to have zero nagging concerns or doubts about. Anything that shakes my trust in those services is enough to make me consider other options.
It sounds like she coopted a security tool to spam users with a political advocacy message.

Hard to see why she shouldn't be fired for that.

Of course she has the right to express that message, and it seems to be factually correct. But that doesn't mean she can use a security tool to spam people.
I find LetsEncrypt to be a hassle. About 1/3 of the time the auto-renew doesn't renew because some python dependency changed, etc.
Human beings have the innate right to manage their own bodies.

For any government or doctor to dictate to the individual adult citizen what he/she can or cannot put into or onto their bodies, is tyranny.

Enforce the laws against real crime. Leave sick people, one of whom will inevitably stumble across something new which works (eventually benefiting all) alone.

Doctors have, seemingly, forgotten that many of the innovators who they study and revere for their breakthroughs, had no university degrees.

Arrogance and protectionism - all the while stifling innovation.

It is time for this unfortunate cycle to end.