skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I've had an idea for a company; my current employer wants me to build it
I have been working in the software industry for retail clients for awhile and greatly contributed to growing a non-tech company to hundreds of millions in revenue using the technology platform I and my team built.

For a few years now I have been thinking about how I would like to build a platform to help other companies replicate this success by using some of the methods we used that are not prevalent in the market. But I do not currently have the ability to not have a full time job so have never acted on it. And I have never been closely connected with the start-up community to really be knowledgeable enough to be comfortable around the idea.

I started working for a new technology company in a tangential industry and they would like to fund the people and money for me to build this idea for them. I am sure that I would become an integral part of this new division and it would likely lead to decent bonuses and more money and promotions. It also fits in well with what this company already does.

But I feel like I would be losing this dream of mine and a lot of the upside monetary benefit if this becomes successful.

Does anyone have any thoughts or anecdotes or ideas or suggestions related to this situation?
> The problems with observable boil down to the fact that the callback requires a lot of context to know what change should happen in response to the event. In this way, I think it is fundamentally in tension with the goals of reactive UI, though some systems have managed to reconcile the two, often with compiler help to translate fairly straightforward declarative logic into an observable-based implementation: SwiftUI and Svelte come to mind.

I don't understand the main issue brought up with observables. What exactly is that "context" you're talking about, and how is it bad?

Observables, at least the way used in my https://github.com/raquo/Laminar/ UI library, define the dataflow graph of your application, letting you channel data into other data and/or into incremental DOM updates without using virtual DOM.

You don't need any additional "context" to know what change happens in response to what, defining the flow of data with observables and then binding some of them to DOM parts that you want them to affect or to source data from is literally how you write your application logic. You will need to express that application logic somehow, and doing that using observables is quite straightforward.

I'm not familiar with SwiftUI, but Svelte is not really any more about observables than React is. Disregarding how it's implemented under the hood, Svelte's API is made to be superficially similar to React but without virtual DOM, and that comes at a very high cost of designing their own language and requiring their own compiler. So you end up with a callback-driven API that to the user feels a lot like React's state + props + render method, and it's nothing like working with plain observables.
Well yes. This is phase 2 of 3 the first being embrace (see Microsoft loves Linux) and the current one being extending. Only here they’re extending Windows to cater to Linux use cases. The next and final phrase is extinguish. If Windows becomes equivalent to running a Linux distribution but can also run the entire Windows ecosystem of applications not to mention all your games the way they were meant to be played, not via proton or any other translation layers, then what will be the point of greater Linux adoption among businesses and governments? Licensing? All Microsoft would have to do is make Windows free and make all that revenue back on upselling Azure and/or Office.

Personally I tried WSL2 out and it was pretty good. The problem was I was still running Windows and I absolutely can’t use to UI to save my life. I loathe it. I’m a huge fan of tiling window managers and Regolith’s my current DE of choice. And lucky for me my games run in proton, I work on backend systems such that I don’t have any dependencies in on anything that runs on Windows (Google docs for office work). So I would not be WSL’s target audience.
Is total human/intelligent species population not a prerequisite for industrialization. If so, we would expect to see a lot of fossilized remains, which we have not seen.
I respect and individual’s choice and would never diminish it. Having utilized both techniques we are discussing, I can say holding the home button on a phone and issuing a voice command while walking away is a very different user experience than tapping several times on a watch, to start a timer.

No matter what I need a notification about, it’s the same action every time if I’m boiling noodles or filling the bathtub or preheating the barbecue. No configuration necessary. I appreciate that level of simplicity.
I've yet to see a calculation where these factors balance the salary gap across the Atlantic. How is a European dev on 40k going to get to say $120K with tax, healthcare, and holidays?
Oh sorry, I didn't realise you submitted it.

Thanks!
Language is still an incredible barrier between cultures.
The claim that is was translated from Chinese was invented in this very thread from someone who happened to see a Chinese version.
I don't know if there are any studies about why dark mode is so popular these days, but my guess is because of using screens on poor lit rooms or even in complete darkness.

In those conditions it's super annoying to switch from a dark UI to a bright one which I guess its why light mode gets so much irrational hate.

Obviously users should be able to choose what works best for them.

I'm in my 40s now and I care much more now about my vision. I guess most proponents of dark mode are actually much younger than me.
>but it is a software distribution built around a Linux kernel

No google Play Store is the distributor NOT Android, Android and Linux is just part of the runtime.
1) Seems like your career progress should have given you more confidence in yourself than was naturally provided by your background. There's an expression "fake it till you make it" that might apply. If you can't fake it, can you take courses or work on open source projects that will upgrade your resume?

2) Do you have control over the tech stack of tools you work with? After a period of unemployment I got a dev job at a tiny company that allowed me to choose the tools and the framework I chose at the time (ExtJS) got me head hunted to join a much larger better-paying company six months later.
Which Dutch unicorns came out of that ecosystem you are talking about?
Music appreciation is very much tied to its era. I noticed a few days ago that Sibelius wrote 7 (~ romantic) symphonies in 30 years, then none in the next 30 years as Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky et.al. changed the face of music.

When it comes to music,'greatest' is judged in the very long range. In the short range, Webern and Salieri were highly regarded, Bach forgotten. 99% of the 50s-60s-70s 'oldies' are gone from the radio. Radiohead's 28-year-old 'Creep' (foreshadowed by famous 60s Roy Orbison and Left Banke choons) now sounds ... like satire. Today everything on the radio sounds like rap or pap to me.
This is a good list!

Besides these EU projects there are also national projects within EU member states. Like for example the NIC-SE foundation that manage the .se ccTLD tend to grant money to small startups.
Around 2015. Enchanted Objects by David Rose
You may have jumped over a few good things about the USA...
Or wait for smartphones to be invented.
Excellent yt chan: vlad9vt, just pictures of artifacts and structures set to music https://youtu.be/EHFe10dp0L4
Indeed, I thought for a moment about Switzerland, that might have one of the highest rate of multilingual websites at least in Europe.

I wasn’t able to find what fraction of the Internet sites are multilingual but would be curious what’s your estimate. I still would be surprised if it is >10%. Maybe more if you weight by traffic but that is not the relevant metric here.

The plug-in approach has another advantage: there are several reasonable approaches to a multilingual site, i.e. you can have a default language if a translation is not available. Or rather show nothing. You may want to force a translation of each page. How do you track the translation of changes in one language, etc.

By picking/adjusting a plug-in you get the behavior you want instead of a one approach satisfies nobody default solution.
That's true about the oil; coal too. If we're not completely wrong about how those resources are created (there are some alternate theories) then we're the first civilization to use them.

However, most of what I've read about prehistoric advanced civilizations discussed them using crystals (quartz) and deriving energy from the earth. Some form of piezoelectricity. There are theories today connecting earth quakes, quartz deposits, and ball lightning, which could be hinting at an energy source we haven't explored yet.
How about they just collect fucking taxes?
You need to separate sales from marketing. Sales is a conversation, marketing is a broadcast. Marketing gets the phone to ring, sales takes the call and closes the deal.

For B2B sales resembles project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit.

For larger deals you "sell with your ears" as much as you talk.

I find Neil Rackham's "Spin Selling" very useful. Peter Cohan's "Great Demo" embeds a lot of discovery advice and suggests that a good demo is really a conversation driven by mutual curiosity about customer needs and software capabilities.

For B2B customer development interviews (those early market discovery conversations) I have a short book you may find helpful. See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2020/01/30/40-tips-for-b2b-cus... (there is also a link at the bottom for a PDF version).

Two final books I would suggest, while not exactly sales books, are "The Innovator's DNA" by Clayton Christensen and "The Right It (Pretotype It)" by Alberto Savoia. They cover a number of techniques for finding the right problem to solve and determining if your solution is a good fit for customer needs. I mention them because it's not uncommon for a startup to have a product problem that manifests as a sales problem.
America has the fundamental problem of large size, little EV infrastructure and poor public transit outside metro areas.
Most people (particularly in the US) do not understand this. In addition, the actual placement of the tax makes a great deal of difference. Owing 35% on income above $35k is very different than owing 35% on income above $220k. Very people know where the tax brackets are.
Well apple both limits the number of times that prompt can be shown to a user and makes sure that all ratings are counted, not just favorable ones. Seems like the best option short of banning pop up alerts altogether.
One of the rare hip-hop albums
I come back to regularly.
It depends where in Europe and where in the US. Google adjusts salaries based on the local market. Salaries in Google's Zurich office is higher than in the Bay Area.
Right, but people seem remarkably reluctant to use the facility which is just there, and it might even be proscribed for systems that aren't "joined to AD", for unexplained reasons. If ephemeral certificates are also used, your ticket can presumably cover getting them too. It's probably not an option for systems with off-site users, though, since sites won't expose their AD systems or put something in front of them.
Ah. I mean, sure, but it took a state level actor to make use of that against a state level target. So I stand by my statement that for the average user of a coffee pot the risk is negligible.
maybe they d be good in population-dense europe , but US sprawl practically requires huge batteries
This response is not sustainable when applied to entire populations for extended periods of time. Not only for the economy, but also for the mental well being of people: you can't build a society without contact (if you think this is too much, I've seen already people distancing from the elderly that might require aid for getting into a bus, for example, as if they were plagued).

Secondly, vaccines work, but people forget pharmacological treatments, which can make a terrible disease manageable. As someone with a background in pharmacology, it baffles me when these options are never considered (like a post, probably trolling, which I saw on HN once, "The drugs don't work. Enjoy your 24 months quarantine").

Secondly, the "2+ years off" depends on the estimates. These are estimates made with previous experience, where one could afford waiting, if need be. This is not the case.

"We can't wait 18-24 months", said at one point CanSino's CEO. I agree with him. Drugs or vaccines should, if the tests allow it (and despite the popular thinking, the current vaccines aren't rushed, the speed is mainly done because a lot of money has been poured into recruitment and monitoring) make sure that the situation is it at least lessened before that.

Because if not, people will start blatantly ignoring any recommendations from authorities (and that would also mean governments becoming even more heavy-handed than today, which is already worrying).
Lean Customer Development by C. Alvarez.

Solution Selling by M. Bozworth
Someone already mentioned SAP. Also Booking.com. But also ARM (though it's hardware, not software).

Europe also produces 20% of world's research in the field [1]

The big question though is: do we measure success correctly? The vast majority of "great American companies" are either vaporware with inflated valuations, or produce zero innovations [2]

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/european-rd-review-f...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24460504
It would be nice if downtowns had zones where only local delivery and max-20 mph cars could be used, along with bicycles, etc. safer for everyone.
There is only one feature I would like to see in LibreOffice.

LO has a nice ability to save documents in an all-ASCII, line-oriented encoding. These would almost be perfect to commit to a Git repository, as small changes to the document result in small changes to the output.

With one exception: Each line of the output starts with what amounts to a random number, unrelated to the number on the corresponding line of input. That makes the ASCII output mode practically useless for change tracking.

Various clunky and impractical workarounds are published. The bug report requesting stable ASCII output is over a decade old and mentions SVN instead of Git.
This visualization is pretty eye opening in illustrating the difference between a cushy six-figure job and the ultra-wealthy that we're talking about as the complement of "us plebs"

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Real talk: You are perpetuating bias with your technical interview process
A highly responsible civilization that achieves space fairing tech could rebuild its environment, leaving a clean planet as a gift for future species to emerge, and move to the stars. Sort of artifical-creationism, but phycally achievable, it's a matter of civilization goals.
What is this supposed to change?
Bob Moesta's new book has some good pointers on it, it's currently on sale on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Demand-Side-Sales-101-Customers-Progr...
Others have commented with statistics about this basic element of reality in the U.S.
I don't think you can just divide distance by velocity like that, even ignoring relativity as there are the long acceleration and deceleration phases.

This calculator says it would take 80 years when I approximate a solution where max velocity is .1c: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/space-travel?advanced...

.1c isn't fast enough to cause significant time dilation for the travelers so they end up spending nearly the same 80 years on the ship as well.
I find a lot of junior devs have this vision of what a senior or lead developer is, It sort of equates to an upper classman. When you get to that point you realize you don’t know much more than you did when you were younger, but you’re called on to make decisions. More often than not, it’s organizational structure and responsibility. I always counsel people to try to grow into their role rather than abandon it for fear they’re doing it wrong. There is rarely a ‘wrong’ way to be a senior developer short of just refusing the added responsibility. (And in my experience, that has almost nothing to do with software dev. )
how big do the models get? are you able to say?
The PC was supposed to democratize computing. It did, and then Microsoft found a choke point. The internet was supposed to democratize communication. It did, and then Google found a choke point.

It seems like this two steps forward, one step back pattern might be the rule rather than the exception. Even the article defines AI democratization in terms of using models rather than training models, as the costs of training sophisticated models seems beyond the common developer even according to idealists.

AI in particular seems to be a centralizing technology at this point, given that a model is often a black box to the user. The amount of data as well requires a massive telemetry apparatus, and designing likely models seems the province of people with PhDs.

So yes I'm a bit pessimistic that AI will have a democratizing effect on technology or society, at least in the near future.
"the EU needs 'big companies' that employ a lot of people, pay high salaries, can afford to sustain complicated projects with know-how, to acquire and integrate other projects."

Why? Funding open source projects seems just as useful to me.
The certificates have an expiration date, so if something goes wrong on that end at least it will expire after some time.
Also, this takes care of role-based access - this you might not have with an authorized_keys file solution?
Your salary is not what makes you working class or bourgeoisie. The distinction is, broadly, whether you must sell your labor to survive.
If LDAP is down in an LDAP environment, you cannot authenticate anyway.

Our systems people get local accounts on machines for disasters like LDAP-down. Everyone else is LDAP-only, including ssh keys.

This is nowhere close to "where we started". Now we have a handful of privileged accounts and centralized auth management across thousands of other accounts.

Centralized logging and centralized auth are pretty much mandatory above some size. Without them, you literally do not know who is doing what.
I'm a little thick. What are you implying here?
I like how that comment phased it in a way that didn't deny owing the money.

IIRC, the IRS assumes some amount of tips per time worked and expects taxes for that.
> What makes it expensive is the big chem, and it's stranglehold on processing them into cathode, and anode materials.

Could you expand on this?
EITC fraud is a major problem.
I’ve always loved this paper, for its particular combination of heterodoxy and emphasis on testable hypotheses. There are so many things we don’t know about past human civilizations that have left non-geological markers (who were the “Sea People,” the full story of Petra, tons of undeciphered ancient scripts, etc.) that it doesn’t seem terribly strange that an industrial civilization could have bloomed, died, left few traces, and what traces they did leave are the kind only a geochemist or paleoclimatologist might notice.
You certainly sound like the sort of person who is chronically surrounded by a surprisingly large number of idiots.
Totally! This would bring me to work and back for half a month. I can also load my EV at work, so there wouldn't be any range problems. Would love to see something like this for the European market.
This is exactly how I feel about tutorials on YouTube.
Berlin is just one city, and that city only has a few million people. Population wise, it ranks behind Moscow, Istanbul, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan and the Ruhr area. All of those have at least one million more inhabitants. How is "major tech hub" measured?
Absolutely. Java was the first mainstream language with automatic memory management and garbage collection. You have to remember that before that people were building line of business applications in C or C++.

Java made it possible for average engineers to turn out relatively reliable applications, in a fraction of the time it'd have taken them with any other option (apart from Smalltalk but it was already niche by then).
Skimming the paper, the researchers already propose their own interpretation of possible causes, but one thing I couldn't find is whether they controlled for familiarity with mirrors. A full-height mirror (within reach of small children) might simply be more common in western households.

Edit, nevermind, there's a whole paragraph on that towards the end:

> It may be important to note the general use of mirrors in each of the cultures. Although we did not include an independent measure of the extent and nature of mirror experience in these cul-tures, the experimenters visited many homes in these various communities. Although mirrors are present in most non-Western and all Western homes, their use varies considerably. It is more conspicuously and frequently used in the West, compared to any of the other cultures considered here. Western children are more likely to have shared mirror exposure with others or to have seen themselves in a mirror in the presence of others, a situation presumably unfamiliar to the non-Western children we tested. The unfamiliarity with public mirror exposure may be linked to the enhanced “freezing” behavior by non-Western children, particularly when discovering that their face is marked. This inhibition may correspond to the fact that children do not know how to behave, one way or another, in this context.
> Most "startups" in the EU are nothing more than grant chasers. There's very little private VC money because of all the grants.

Potato potato. Most "startups" in the US are nothing but VC money chasers and often lose billions of infinite investor money (looking at you, Uber) for indefinite periods of time. How is this different from grants other than it's "free" government money in one case and "free" VC money in the other?
Again, ideally, everything is so well connected you'd just stop the problem before it occurs, with sufficiently smart devices. Eg, your pot detects the rise, and sees its about to overflow, it can signal the stove to lower the heat. Same with the kettle -- it gets on fire when it runs out of water, but stays on. A "smart" kettle could detect that, and shut down before the fire starts. Of course, after the fire, there's nothing it can do... but targetting the cause rather than the symptom has potential, for probably many issues

But to be clear, I'm not advocating anything -- I'm just describing why IoT is a thing, and people get excited for. I don't actually believe this universe will really exist anytime soon, as it requires "sufficiently intelligent" technology and communication, which really almost starts to approach knowing how to cook your food for you to accomplish anything non-trivial

But the belief is what drives this tech.
We also argue whether others outside of our mind are self-aware.

And most physicists think free will is bunk and therefore we are not self-aware, everything is an illusion.
^high speed/collisions in a tiny tin can.