skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I need Twitter for support for my product, but I don't really use it that often. So a while ago I set it up to be basically write-only: I use Zapier to send me emails for @mentions and relevant search terms, and I reply to those from a TweetBot instance which only has columns for mentions and the same search terms. So I can reply if something needs replying to and send product updates, but otherwise I don't see Twitter at all. It's been a huge time saver and mental health improvement.
That's great for Amazon, and for people who shop at Amazon...
Did we watch the same video? I'm not in the least bit offended, I just feel like he wasted my time. If he'd just explained it, it's then up to me to research the underlying bits. Not up to him to tell me I'm too uneducated to do so.
I remember this era like it was yesterday. Ruby on Rails in 2008 was on 2.1 or 2.2 (before it was merged with merb) and was 70 or 80% of the way there before it was mature. I think rails 3.0 is when the framework matured and stopped changing so much.

There were a lot of decisions back then that were made because it fit the rails vibe, like the fast adaptation of coffee script. In some ways it was a mistake, but in other ways it was kind of putting a foot down on the whole philosophy of rails, which was to optimize heavily for finding the ideal language of the framework, and worry about the implementation details later.

In 2008, Rails still had trouble running on windows, shipped with sqlite as the default database, did not support many other databases, had 1 or 2 servers options, was not modular (you couldn't swap out ActiveRecord), did not have Arel (so all sql queries were heavily unoptimized), had a hard dependency on jQuery... the list goes on. But because it was unrelenting on the values of the framework, we have the beauty that is rails today, which still captures the magic of rails in 2008, just with the implementation details filled in.

In some ways, Rails had a very strong startup mentality, in that it was always under-engineered instead of over engineered throughout its life until rails 4ish.
>We've all accidentally left the soldering iron on, sometime in our decades. The sensors in the iron lets it shut off and not burn your house down.

Specifically for the Metacal irons, all of the ones I have used have a magnet in the stand that causes the tip to idle at a reduced temperature using some sort of feromagnetic magic. The great thing about those irons is they have such fast thermal control that it heats up in the time it takes you to lift the iron from its stand to your work. They also have a deep sleep they go into if they detect the tip is idle for more than a few minutes which can be disabled in a production environment. And for some absurd reason, it is all implemented in hardware...
Why is it that starting a tech start up is seen as an uber difficult task often resulting in burnout while starting a business in a technical occupation such as electrical or refrigeration is (seemingly) less risque? Surely there are a plenty of opportunities where rather boring software can be applied to business problems. Does it always need to be a monumental technical accomplishment to create a success?
In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'
If that's the case, definitely don't start a company. Instead of being beholden to one manager, you're all of a sudden beholden to dozens... employees, investors, board, customers, etc. Being a founder is just a job.
The media have been particularly bad at explaining that our best knowledge changes with time, as we figure out any test things, and governments even more so.

Our understanding of the way the virus is transmitted changed quite a lot in 6 months. At some point we thought it was mostly spread by direct contact; then by droplets; now we believe it is airborne, to a certain extent. Governments also had the incentive to limit use of PPE to critical workers because of the short supply. It was also obvious that several governments were clueless. So yes, you were told not to wear a mask, whilst at the same time you were provided with facts that contradicted it. This was obvious if you were following the news, particularly the evolution of the then-epidemic in China, Taiwan and South Korea.

Well, for that you need to follow real news, not Fox, the Mail, or disinformation campaigns spread by social media. You also need a grip on how science works, because journalists won’t explain, and often don’t seem to understand.
Your self-description aligns very much with my own. Feel like we might get along well. Would love to chat. Shoot me a PM if you're willing.

Cheers, mate. There definitely is a place for people like us in the world.
Both words need to go imo
Even if you needed to, there are much better ways to bribe than cash in the US.
A little less exciting, but Roger's Pass (another mountain pass between BC and Alberta) was named after... Major A. B. Rogers was hired in April 1881 by the railway company to find the pass with the promise of having the pass named after him and a $5000 bonus. [1].

$5000 is worth ~$125,000 today. Not a bad reward.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Pass_(British_Columbia)
Who is we, and who's paying for the parade?
Seigniorage for coins is at or near 0. Inflation did this
Of course we need to quantify "in some cases" for your argument to hold. Humans aren't perfect reasoners, for example. The examples I saw were impressive and were mostly correct, apart from some minor syntax errors or edge cases. This wasn't a Markov chain generator where the "interesting" responses where cherry picked from a pile of nonsense.
For me, the way I thought about it was a bit different. When I did YC I had already worked at Google for a while, and the question I was asking myself was less "do I want to be a founder?" and more "is starting a company something I ever want to try out, in a career that will probably span decades?" If you've had jobs you liked in the past, and you figure that you can probably find those jobs again, and you don't immediately need the big company salary, what is a startup really risking? The worst case is that you work on it for a year or so, it goes nowhere, and you go back to work somewhere else. You miss out on some money but you're going to learn something new in any case.
I assume they are primarily referring to the effects of obesity and type II diabetes on the immune system dysfunction in general.

That said, it seems that obesity also plays a major role in autoimmune disorders.

>Moreover, obesity worsens the course of RA, SLE, IBD, psoriasis and PsA, and impairs the treatment response of RA, IBD, psoriasis and PsA. Extensive clinical data and experimental models demonstrate the involvement of adipokines in the pathogenesis of these autoimmune diseases. Obesity appears to be a major environmental factor contributing to the onset and progression of autoimmune diseases.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15689...
Jonathan Blow – Video Games and the Future of Education [video]
You order a hammer and a saw, one store has the hammer, another the saw. They are one order but may arrive different days and it’s not always well coördinated or communicated with customer.
They better make the experience much better. They don't pay the gig workers nearly enough to care and get this stuff right. I don't blame the pickers at all. The stuff in retail stores isn't labeled for warehouse style picking.

When my wife sends me to the store with the list, I have a hard enough time getting exactly what she wants, and I already have a pretty good idea what she wants since I live with her.

A poor hourly gig worker has no chance of getting it right.
IMO, damned if you do damned if you don’t.

Before covid it took me 12 months to find a job. I applied to 100 companies. Ironically, got a job during covid and the job is pretty relaxing compared to the job hunt. During the hunt I thought: society is kinda forcing my hand here.

Also: a lot of knowledge workers have to work a lot of hours and keep on learning (e.g. doctors or programmers).

To me, it feels much more like a pick your poison type of thing.
So students should be expected to operate in hundred-degree heat? It's well-know heat harms focus and productivity. This is fine for kids in new york who can just bundle up against the cold, but one can only do so much against heat in places like Texas where temps can top 110.
That sounds like he needs childcare, not education. That is the responsibility of his parents.
It's the difference between R&D and other forms of labor. One tech startup might capture the entire market, but one electrician can't.
Possibly, but my great great grandparents were school aged in New York in the late 1800s. There were 10+ kids and 2 adults in the family. Mom might have been at home, but she was busy.
Agreed but as a slight tangent history is not about just recording the major events but the little ones too. Who knows what will be important in the future. Maybe that little startup that just got ignored on demo day is gonna change the world as we know it.

I agree, stay informed. But really.... How many times a day do you need to be updated on the recent developments and the current status?

In the past people would get their news once a day in the paper and then later at certain times on the radio and early TV. Is that enough to stay informed?

What has happened in the last 12 hours that I must know now instead of just catching a summary tomorrow morning?
No, they mean random subset of what you tried to order. If you use Instacart, at least in California, there is a good chance that 1/3 of your items will be "unavailable" and they just won't get it.

The problem is, if you order flour, milk, and sugar, and then they don't bring the sugar, you can't make the thing you wanted to make. But you also can't return the partial order.
I stopped trusting VPNs that weren’t hosted by me years ago. Wireguard is simple enough that any reason to is rapidly diminishing.
I think the first game relied on weapon overheating to limit how fast you could fire.

The second game used ammo clips and that made combat far easier.
starting a startup is not the same as starting a business. By definition a startup is a type of business whose business model is not yet proven. So you end up with 2 types of risks in a startup - the normal risk of starting a business (like the electrical engineer), as well as business model risk where the model may prove to be unprofitable.
>The part of your brain that internalizes consequences doesn't fully develop until you're around 25 years old

You're providing excuses for a teenager, when children become capable of understanding that stealing is bad around age 3 to 5 - he is far too old for the "idiot kid" excuse to fly. Even if he didn't get the whole "having a criminal record can ruin your future life" in the concrete sense, they should absolutely know better than to steal. They said they had no idea it was so much, but even so it is beyond belief that they thought no one would notice tens or hundreds of dollars stolen, let alone tens of thousands, or that they could get away with it.

Frankly, society is far too eager to excuse criminal kids who do things like this and then cry about having to face consequences. The parents should file a police report, it will be a very harsh lesson to the kid but he has screwed up on an incredible scale. I do feel sorry for these young offenders who have their future seriously altered, but empathy should not get in the way of the parent being made whole from the crime comitted against them.
I remember as I was starting my company, I reached out to a founder of a company you've likely heard of for advice. We grabbed drinks, and he practically begged me to not start a company, for my own sake. I thought he was a dick.

But he wasn't wrong. Write down a list of why you want to start a company. I bet the list involves things like "building something nobody else has," "getting to program and design and do a bit of business-y stuff" or "freedom to work on what I want". That's only true when you start. Pretty soon, you're spending all day in meetings, and only a small portion of your time will go to the things you currently enjoy doing... and you'll feel guilty because there's something more important you should be doing. (Me? I'm currently procrastinating on an investor update, an H1B application and two performance reviews.) You'll spend more time writing emails than writing code. You end up bogged down in organizational issues, not dreaming up cool new features. Rather than having one boss, you now have dozens... investors, customers, employees, etc.

Oh, and the rejection. The non stop rejection. Every single day, hour, minute. Investors, customers, employees, potential employees. It's not personal, but it sure feels personal. Even when things are going great, there's tons of little micro-rejections, non-stop. I wish someone told me that.

It's really hard. I don't know a single founder who hasn't had relationship problems because of their company, or suffered from depression. Hanging out with founders is less like the TV show Silicon Valley, and more like group therapy.

This isn't to say you shouldn't do it. But just be prepared for what being a founder actually entails. Talk to a few founders of medium sized companies about how they're doing. If you're still on board, then maybe you're right for the job. For me, I wouldn't change a thing... I love it. It's incredibly hard, but there's a reason I haven't even thought of leaving. If you're the same way, then go for it!

But don't do it because you want to do it. Do it because you literally can't imagine not doing it.

(If you're doing it now and things are getting hard and you need someone to talk to, my email is in my bio :) )
I'm willing to pay Home Depot/Lowes/Best Buy/Target/Costco/REI/Nordstroms/Apple multiples of what Amazon would cost to ensure I don't have to waste my time searching through uncurated AliExpress garbage.
The commitment point is very true, and extends to employees and clients if you're in certain spaces and want to maintain a clean record in civil or moral court.

The rest of these arguments seem like bad framing. From a certain school of thought, entire point of a startup is to leverage your risk taking ability relative to incumbents in the market and your economic peers. Working at a startup forces you to learn more, faster; and you're challenged by real market factors, not artificial incentive structures created by a large org or academic institution. You also wear a ton of hats that you have no access to early in your career at larger orgs or in academia. Hiring, management, sales, accounting, taxes, finance, product ideation and refinement, etc - early years at FAANG or medium sized orgs will not expose you to all of these. Even an experimental team that lets you play with cool technological toys.

"Not being at school" is an silly way to describe, "4 years of school is sometimes a poor choice of use of the best risk-taking opportunities of a person's life".

"Your VC is not the one at risk here" is a reason to avoid VC, subvert some of the incentives that VCs give you, or ignore a subset of the advice they they give you, not a reason to avoid risky ventures.

It's important to note that the author here is an 18 year old and has no significant real-life perspective on either running a company or being part of a larger org. Nothing about that affects their ability to accurately pontificate on the pros and cons of running a startup, but there also isn't a lot of skin in the game or experience to back up that perspective. The bayesian prior here is negative.

If you're partway through a uni degree or similar learning program, or an incumbent engineer at a small or large org, then you should look at starting or joining an early-stage startup as a great way to take risks that you will be less able to every year (because of increasing costs of living, commitments to a new generation of your family if you marry and have children, incentives to purchase real estate, etc). The payoff will hopefully be huge and will be distributed across potential exits, experience, and personal growth.
> It appears seven Hong-Kong-based VPN providers – UFO VPN, FAST VPN, Free VPN, Super VPN, Flash VPN, Secure VPN, and Rabbit VPN – all share a common entity, which provides a white-labelled VPN service.

> VPNmentor created an account with one of the providers, and spotted that new account in the logs, specifically "an email address, location, IP address, device, and the servers we connected to." VPNmentor alerted the providers involved to get the cluster removed from public view, as well as HK-CERT, though it seems no action was taken to immediately rectify the situation.
If you're starting an electrical company, you're probably using off the shelf components and using tried and trusted techniques to install them. A tech startup is more closely equivalent to a company designing new electrical components. I wonder how many of those fail?
If you do these online orders from retail stores, a lot of times they just bring you some of what you order and then tell you the rest is "unavailable". But you can't cancel the order because they already picked it for you.
Can one seriously compare COVID-19 to a TB plague? Especially in context of schools where mortality rate for the school aged appears to be less than any seasonal flu on record.
The small apartment building I live in is set up this way. I don't really mind, but I wish they would find a way to accept cards (credit and/or reloadable) rather than only coins because as it stands right now, I have to go to the bank and get $50 worth of "laundry tokens" (quarters) every few months, since I don't spend enough cash day-to-day to naturally collect enough change for the laundry.
Yes 100%.
I'm suing for RSI
> Being a founder is just a job

a founder has the power to make changes to his job. An employee doesn't.

Even tho a founder is beholden to their investors, board and customers, the founder is also empowered (after all, he/she calls the shots).

An employee is beholden to his/her manager, but cannot "call the shots" but simply takes orders.
DIY Video Hosting
> the current regime

Of course American regime.
Don't expect any help from the govt fixing this, it's a win/win from their perspective.

No coins means more businesses forcing credit/debit use. More credit/debit use means it's harder to hide cash transactions and therefore means more tax revenue for the govt. As an added benefit, it creates permanent paper trails that can be utilized when convenient.

I go out of my way to pay cash, now just need to make sure I bring enough change.
Great series! Thanks!
> If you wanted to see what the most paranoid, security-conscious people are connecting to, and you wanted to install software on their systems that is designed to read all their network traffic and then redirect it through a single choke point, then setting up a VPN service with a huge advertising budget would be a great way to do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY
Title is a bit misleading, 3/4 of the arguments against being a founder in the article are conditions that may not apply.

1. Reliance on a co-founder is stressful 2. VC vs founder risk profile 3. Don't dropout to found a company

I think these all apply more to the "get rich quick" approach and sure, I agree that is a bit of a moonshot.

But instead of writing off founding, why not look at ways to mitigate risk? Complete an education, spend some years working in an industry, or start a bootstrapped company in a niche that you learn from the industry. Or any combination of those that fits your risk profile.

And have an exit plan in mind, for either the success story or the failure. That solves the sense of self- a calculated business plan that didn't work out does not have to be devestating.
It would seem they ignored this advice
> Especially in context of schools where mortality rate for the school aged appears to be less than any seasonal flu on record.

There is no good data to back that up. Since we've been keep track, most kids have been staying home, away from other kids. Schools have been closed, playgrounds have been closed, and so on.

There is a good chance it doesn't affect them as much, but it's not entirely clear since they haven't been socializing as much as adults.

The data we do have says that COVID-19 is 3 times deadlier than the flu for kids 5-17, and 190 times deadlier for kids 0-4, but that's because the numbers are small: https://i.insider.com/5ef234caf34d051bc821d0d8?width=700&for...

Also, lots of adults work in schools. 1/3 of teachers in the US are over 50.
Its talked about a lot because the VCs are out there beating a drum, as they should. Drawing a crowd. Hopefully an interesting one.

Once you get a crowd, everyone starts doing what the people around them do. Its natural. It takes some time and experience to figure out whether you need to be there or not.
The downsides are still there it takes the same level of commitment, dedication, and obsessive effort to bootstrap.

It has taken me 5 years to bootstrap a niche b2b saas to $1m ARR. It is both awesome and terrible.
Come on, this obviously depends on where you are- the article is a New York city newspaper talking about new york and the northeast.

You can't do outdoor classes in Texas in August, but by late September or October it becomes totally feasible.
The difference is in the HN-style (and Bay Area) understanding of the word "startup", which is focused on hyper growth at all costs or bust. Starting a small business in something like HVAC is very different in that you typically start small, with relatively low ambition, and grow the business organically over a long period of time. The latter is definitely difficult and sometimes stressful, but not in the same way as when you have investors pushing you to bump your revenue up by 10x in the next year or gtfo.
There is some merit to the criticisms, though they were given with a total lack of tact. Web standards are important and define multiple ways you can provide custom attributes while still working with valid code and not stepping all over the platform namespace. By using invalid HTML this makes the job of web standardization harder, plus users of this code have to practice writing invalid code and hope the tool fixes it. There's just simply nothing gained from this design choice when making it valid and future proof would have been just as easy.

I totally agree with the "ignore the haters" attitude, but I am also in agreement with the criticism. Maybe this can be an opportunity to improve it and have it work with valid HTML and then even more good comes from this mis-handled issue!
That's why as a manager I always set my teams okrs to be aligned with whatever crap business is going to place in the scrum stories.

I've seen tech OKRs that are things like "reduce tech debt" or "decrease loading time" or "reduce downtime" but without hard tangible stories in sprints, it's just wishful thinking.
There has been a ton of research into how different animals experience pain. You are correct that we don't know how they experience it, but based on nervous system structure and other behavior, we can make some conclusions about the nature of the pain and whether it's a basic avoidance mechanism or something more complex that would involve suffering.[1]

That said, I think a good rule is to not cause unnecessary pain/suffering in any living thing (e.g. if trapping rodents, use something that leads to a humane death).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates
WPScan – A Black Box WordPress Vulnerability Scanner
I tried buying some custom Nikes with "ADIDAS" written on the side. The online tool explicitly banned it. I got the online form to take "PUMA" but the shoes arrived with no custom message.
Asking developers if they're "productive" is absolutely the wrong metric. Developers, well, love writing code. Lots of code. But in reality, code is a liability, not an asset. (That Bill Gates quote about airplanes and weight, etc.)
>The sensors in the iron lets it shut off and not burn your house down.

The old Wellers did that 30 years ago.