skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should I inform investors that my startup employer is a scam?
So I was hired in this startup a year ago. Its aim is to make a SaaS. It's been painfully obvious that nothing gets done about this, the only projects we work on are bizarre random demos or small open source projects on github for "marketing".

The company has not had a series A funding yet, and was almost bankrupting some months ago until a VC gave them "some" millions. Meanwhile, there's still no product, and the company pays for worldwide company trips for no purpose (no conferences or anything), pays for life coaches and frequent global flights for the CEO and who knows what else.

When I say "no product" I literally mean it. It only exists on a powerpoint slide without a single line of code implemented.

The worst part is this startup is 5-7 years old, and has gone through the bankrupt -> saved last minute by investor cycle more than one time.

Average employee stay is 6-14 months. During my employment three managers left the company, and four engineers. There's no documentation about anything because people come and go after they see there's no future in this company.

Should I anonymously inform investors that my startup employer is a scam, and if yes, how should I approach it?
But that gets your "not just for styling" property for free — now another component can use the knowledge that the element is an alert box.
Read about Lavabit
I think generally you should pick something where you have that unfair advantage and you like to do. If you are good at sales of course you should pick something where you need lots of sales, same to UI if you are god like designer of course you should pick something where nice UI is advantage.
I disagree, as an engineer building is too tempting and will get you in trouble. Instead just start selling. Keep the building to an absolute minimum until you've sold something.
It's definitely a website bug, as goes from 1 FPS to smooth if you go to S+U and back to U again. (debugger didn't help, but it's all minified anyway)
edit: so apparently I conducted my test at a really unfortunate time when Twitter was having some global problems. It has recovered and I am not blocked at all.
That would be extremely useful to know about. I never understand how SAAS products deal with tax.
The solution with fade out / fade in is pretty clever. Short layovers will cross-fade automatically, but you don’t need complicated internal information about which train continues from one run to the next.

Stopping would be neat, but may also be visually messy.
On Safari the animations are smooth but mouse clicks are barely registered or only after a few seconds.
I understand that point of view in general, but in this case the only thing making the service a violation in the first place was one dumb trick. I would argue that Aereo was doing their best to remove technicalities.

The ruling also managed to make the law even more inconsistent. If I rent an antenna and install it in a datacenter for TV, that's kosher. If I rent an antenna and pay someone else to install it in a datacenter for TV, that's a copyright violation.
> has been court tested

This is such an underrated test - the response to a court order is; here is every piece of information we have and can hand over. (Ironically any response at all to a court order triggers hysteria amongst the 'privacy' cosplayers out there)
Excellent as thought experiment:

"L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department"

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
To be honest I think most small saas are not compliant.

When you are doing low revenue numbers like this guy under 100-200K per year its hardly ever relevant.

A lot of countries and states don't claim sales tax to international countries under a certain treshold: 30 - 100K per year. (if you are selling to consumers would actually be a waste to charge sales tax)

The EU is different, but if you are in the EU relatively easy to comply with.
Like every other kind of technology before, DALL-E and Co. will help the mass to create a lot of amusing and sometimes passable artworks. Just like the compact camera and the phone camera had helped create billions more photos compared to the previous generations of equipments. But arguably, the trillions of photos and billions of potential photographers didn't help to bring further the art of photography much. Combined with myriads photo apps, they help created tons of amusing and pleasant photo artworks. They raised the bar for what is considered a good, acceptable photo and montage work today. They made creating good photo work much faster and cheaper for the mass, and ways more accessible. However, they didn't change the standard for professional work because they still require the hand and the mind of a talented artist. It will democratize the illustration process but like in every democracy, the elites still set the tone and exercise enormous influences.

In other word, new technology will skew the distribution to the right, increase the median dramatically and leave the old bottom half obsolete. But not the top 5%.
Good programmers know when to rewrite and when not from experience.

> Clever code that reimplements common packages

Common packages are typically not rewritten by good programmers.
Steampunk Cyberdeck Is Made from Wood, Leather, Brass and E-Paper
Most of the comments in this thread are from accounts who are posting their very first comment on HN (some of them even created today). Very inspiring indeed.
There is a misconception that "art" is craft directed at making something fancy looking. Art has always been about communication from one human being to another. Where it is not, it is just decoration or representation.

The just representation was disrupted by photography which has found its own niche.

DALL-E has nothing to communicate. I love it for making good looking graphics, and if that was my job I should be worried. But graphic designers (I know) don't consider what they produce to be art.

When we talk about Picasso and Leonardo Da Vinci we are talking about people.

I am not a luddite I just want us to remember not to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Germany’s Ultra-Cheap Train Ticket Saved 1.8M Tons of CO2
I really don't get it. Just look at history and linguistics, or even archeology if you want a more fact based science. We are lightyears ahead of what we were doing in the 50s. And even this hyperbole is not enough to explain how thing changed. We evolved from Maxwell to Planck in 20 years, and every decade new methods arrive to help figuring out what we previously missed.

Yes some journals are political (or in the case of Intelligence, want to avoid controversy as their subject is already controversial). This doesn't have any impact on the science. Editors are not scientists, and are not doing science. Obviously.
I know people who were in that case. Not a fine, the taxes are just updated, and from now on they have to pay for the pool.

As for the dataset, while I don't know for certain in this particular case, we have a rather accurate database of constructions in France, that could have been used (it's publicly accessible, actually that's what OpenStreetMaps used for the building footprints here), and include pools. We also have "BDOrtho", a public database of aerial photography.

These data can be seen at https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/carte
What? No, you said it, the ear splits the sound into frequencies and physically puts sensors into places where they resonate. Octave resonates in the same place. (but higher octave resonates in one additional place)
yeah that's a reasonable thing to do every day
I would just find another job, let them crash and burn on their own
> I for one thing it would be much more dangerous for Twitter to play judge, jury and executioner but it seems like that is almost what you're advocating for here.

> It isn't on a company to have to get involved in disputes on a public forum that are civil in nature unless they feel that there is a sign of physical danger to the individuals by letting it continue

Your worldview is that it's fine for corporations to create market failure[1] as long as they are not breaking the law, and then they shouldn't be expected to pay for it or make a good faith attempt to fix it.

I view this as wrong, because there are many things that cause tremendous harm despite being legal. The law has loopholes and is incomplete, the justice system has friction and access issues, and so on. The law should just be the minimum bar.

You already intuitively accept this in your personal life. If I was your neighbor, I could study all the noise ordinance laws and pollution laws, and figure out a way to make your life a living hell without technically breaking any law. You would obviously want me to not do this, despite the fact that I wasn't breaking any law.

Twitter could make many systemic reforms to make conversation healthier without any risk of a slippery slope into censorship. It's not just about putting a human in the loop in order to be "judge, jury and executioner". They could change the social and amplification mechanics. They refuse to do this on purpose. Quite the opposite. They pioneered some of the mechanics that put us into this ditch as a society.

I'd also add that it isn't just about moderation of edge cases. It's also about their neglect to enforce basic things such as preventing clear harassment or impersonation or revenge porn in a timely fashion.

You also have no answer for people with no access to the legal system aside from "tough luck". I don't accept it that someone should need tens of thousands of dollars in order to pursue defamation action in order to fix an injustice that Twitter actively encouraged.

If you truly believe that there is nothing Twitter can do, then they should at least give up more of their cash to the governments of the countries in which they operate in order to refund the taxpayer for the additional cost burden that they've imposed onto the judiciary and society at large. Otherwise it's just theft by indirection.

[1] Externalities such as facilitating populist revolutions, genocide, harassment and financial scams.

> I don't see how Twitter encourages mobbing.

Look at Amber Heard's last Tweet. As odious as her character may be, Twitter has facilitated her harassment by not giving her an option to disable quote retweets. The viral mechanics that Twitter has created has compounded that and magnified it. That's why you putting all the onus onto the victim and judiciary (taxpayer) to sort it out is an inversion of morality. The facilitator of the victimization gets to profit off it while the victim pays the cost.
Smooth for me on FF (desktop).
I don't understand the advantage everyone here is seeing. The produced artwork in that reddit thread is a digital collage. The perspective is mangled, the end result looks like a geocities page and a myspace page had a miyasaki-themed baby.

I understand it's a tech demo. The tech just patches in holes in the artwork with flat shapes that match a brushstroke style. It's Clone Stamp 2.0. Stable Diffusion doesn't understand how to integrate together images, it doesn't understand how to create images with all the techniques artists use to make a coherent image.

If you took the basic shapes of a miyasaki film, frame by frame, like a young girl with a pig, or a young girl with a dragon and fed those shapes into the filter, you wouldn't get the miyasaki film back out of the algorithm. SD flattens, freezes and arbitrarily recreates.

This isn't art, this is a frozen heart. There is a sneaking idea among the heart of our youth, that you could capture and recreate all vision in words. Isn't possible.
Oh yeah i may have used confusing terms there. What I mean was 3.5s per 'step'. A full image takes quite a bit longer.
Tao of Tea gave me a cigarette beetle infestation through their edible parchment pound bags. But otherwise, I like their tea.
I was going to write about how I would prefer to have HN a bit more user friendly / clear in UX, but you know what, you're kind of right. HN's UX takes a certain commitment which may contribute to people being more invested in the site.
We should remember to credit Oracle for starting the Xen-on-KVM work. I did start from their old patch set, even if what got merged was significantly different in the end.

I do still want to flesh out the Xen guest support in Rust-VMM at some point.
it's a bit tone deaf given the energy market
I did something very similar to this in 2012:

http://philholden.me.uk/kraya/routemap/

I wanted to simply draw and SVG of the bus route map. The timetable had the lat long of stop positions. I was using d3 so having drawn the map it almost zero effort to animate the busses. It was just a standard transition with a delay and a duration.
Law enforcement blew him off. That's a civil suit. Filing a motion to quash on a subpoena is within their legal rights.

The FBI won't do its job, so cloudflare should do it for them?
Well this is another discussion. I can do just that separately. But it doesn't seem fair to the employees who stay and believe the company's vaporware of making value and have their equity worth millions in an indefinite future time?
So akin to Castaneda's "not doing"?
Technology gatekeeping is completely antithetical to the hacker spirit.

Hackers built all this technology. There's no way a handful of megacorps are going to take it all for themselves.
Unless you want to do more business specifically with said investors, I would not recommend this. Whistle blowers almost always suffer and in this situation you have no moral obligation to the public but rather to some private figures. If I were you, I'd enjoy having an easy job. That said, is your company hiring?
Yes! Nothing is where I'd expect it to be. A notification? Ok, let me see where I'm mentioned. Oh, you won't? Cool.

"Servers" are supposed to be identifiable just by their image. Great idea when you're in a lot of them and visit them rarely.

Adding someone or joining a server has become less hellish recently as they combined some things in a general search, but it's still not exactly nice.

The whole @everyone thing is a mess. No, I don't want to be notified for this funny cat picture.

I don't open it anymore so I don't know about now, but I used to regularly disable all notifications just for it to keep turning them on and bombarding me with them.

You're calling a means of interacting with users Clyde? Well that's weird since it makes it hard to tell it's Discord talking.

Discord is a piece of software that gives me empathy for (generally old) people who dread using computers because they just don't get how the hell they work. I generally don't have problems with anything else, only Discord.

For context: I'm a part of generation Z, but not a gamer.
You can host .mbtiles files with PHP very easily. I wrote a tiny piece of code 9 years ago that I used for a high traffic map server and it worked just fine. https://github.com/infostreams/mbtiles-php

I'm sure there are newer solutions out there, which might have more features and are actually maintained. But this did (and still does) the job.
Presumably the investors are aware and this is some sort of tax / laundering scam?
> but unless you happen to also have egress logs it's still a thornier problem to de-anonymize without heavy resources.

It's an easy problem if you control the majority of the nodes. All it takes is throttling traffic on an exit node and watching which inbound traffic is affected. It is cheap for the US to fund the operation of all Tor nodes in return for the massive intelligence boost it offers.
So many questions! What do you do then? What do the managers do? The engineers?? How have they survived for over 5 years??
Yes, like other technologies, DALL-E and Co. will change and empower the mass, like the compact camera and the phone camera before. It feels like a tectonic change because of its potential impact for the mass. But most people who can not draw have also never hired a professional to do some work. It might make the old, not demanding works obsolete. But not the top 5%.
I don't think it's hyperbole. Some civil servant assessed that the peak of the floods would cover a third, the minister simplified that by pretending that the peak is right now, all over the country. Even if the minister is wrong and the peak is a little later in some parts of the country than in others, that's IMO no significant difference. Just a detail, really. A simplification, not hyperbole.

Sigh.

We won't care about this flood. We won't really care even when the Central Valley of California is submerged, and that's full of rich people. And today I saw another new species of insect on the balcony. More southern species show up here every summer.
I've set up a Discord Bot that turns your text prompt into images using Stable Diffusion.

You can invite the bot to your server via https://discord.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=101337304...

Talk to it using the /draw Slash Command.

It's very much a quick weekend hack, so no guarantees whatsoever. Not sure how long I can afford the AWS g4dn instance, so get it while it's hot.

PS: Anyone knows where to host reliable NVIDIA-equipped VMs at a reasonable price?
the line they've had for a while is that's entirely up to the motherboard vendor to qualify
Tim Roughgarden’s algorithms course is great, pretty sure it’s on Coursera, Edx and YouTube
Was basically in the same situation, did as you said, not my problem, i dont get any money from whistleblowing or caring about that
> If an idea is not clear in my head I cannot write.

Do you type on a computer or write with pen + paper?

I find that for me at least, "writing to think" has to be with pen/paper (a really good stylus + table combination can also work). It doesn't work when typing on a computer. When typing on a computer, I must have the thoughts ready as well.
Canada’s New All-Electric Train-Plane Hybrid Travels Faster Than a Jet
Sweden is a 14 eyes country already.
why are you all so hell-bent on glorifying Popper (pooper). He was just a moron with an agenda.

Btw, tolerance, like democracy is just a bulls$##t concept. Would you like to be tolerant of the neo-trans man going to the same toilet as your teenage daughters???
Go ahead and try it, I assure you that will be the end of your job there.

Listen to others here, just leave. You will not break into that fuct up situation, you cannot improve it, no one will listen to you, and if you blow the whistle you'll be done.
Oh and get your prompt ideas from https://lexica.art if you want good results.
If you see fraud and you don't shout fraud, you are a fraud. Document your findings and do what is appropriate. After all, those VCs are managing people's money. They need to know.
Everyone leaves fast except for some juniors who stay. I will leave as well. At the moment there are no managers, they are trying to hire new ones.
How to stay motivated as a solo maker
The language I'm working on has the following syntax

bitfield ColorWriteMaskFlags : u32 {
red 1 bool,
green 1 bool,
blue 1 bool,
alpha 1 bool,
};

The number after the field name is the bit size. An (offset, size) pair can be used instead (offsets start at 0 when not explicit). After that can be nothing (the bit field is an unsigned number), or the word 'bool' (the bit field is a boolean) or the word 'signed' (the bit field is a signed number in two's complement). The raw value of the bitfield can always be accessed with 'foo.#raw'.

EDIT: There's also no restriction to how multiple fields can overlap, as long as they all fit within the backing type.
In the Shinjuku city hall many years ago there was an animation showing how population desitiy changes in Tokyo during one day. It was absolutely mindblowing, but I have never been able to find it online.

If someone happens to know where I can find this animation I would be really grateful.
The overwhelming impression that I'm getting every time I look into this is that the concept of "race" is outliving biological meaning or usefulness when applied to humans. Fine if you think that's "obviously" false, but science has a very long list of things that initially appear obvious but are dropped as understanding grows and/or terminology becomes more precise. Invoking obviousness isn't very convincing at this point.
I stopped after the first chapter, because to me, the likelihood of the article being true after that was too low.

If you evaluate this chapter and the abstract differently than I do (let's say 50% after the abstract because your are totally open minded unlike me, and 5% after the first chapter because it's really bad but you don't have the negative prior i have), and continue, maybe what's after is more compelling.

But to me, it's hogwash. Unless they write something better.
> how can I ensure my economic status will not be affected?

You cannot.

It sucks, but it's inevitable. The same thing has been happening ever since the industrial revolution. Old skills become obsolete, and nobody cares what happens to people who've invested their entire lives into something that is no longer profitable.
What's stopping you from working another job at the same time?

It sounds like there isn't much work to be done and even if you are found out I don't think they have enough motivation to care.
Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution [pdf]
In this episode of 20MinJS I interviewed Antonello Zanini, software developer and tech writer about JavaScript for SEO.
We covered some topics like:

- How to use JS to improve your SEO
- Some of the common myths around using JS when it comes to SEO
- The crawl budget

And more, check it out!
After the "scary market downturn" they started hiring only people from India, Nigeria, Pakistan, other South Asian countries in order to avoid paying six figures.
I agree with every single word written in this comment :)
My gut reaction is no. It does sound like a dumpster fire so I would leave. You feel a moral obligation to inform investors which is good but be open to the possibillity that there's more going on than you are aware of so things might not be as black & white as they appear in practical and moral terms.
I love how far removed from reality these idealistic blog posts are from "technology thinkers".

You're busy? You shouldn't be so let me give you some cookie cutter advice filled with: "you need", "you should", "you could". More in my book.
YES. I use Slack all day long for work, and mostly love it. When I have to use Discord for some group, I feel like I'm missing everything. The UI baffles me. I'm kinda worried that people might be direct-messaging me and I'd never know. (CAN you DM in Discord? You must be able to, right?)
It was fairly clear that that phone was just the 'example case' for a larger dispute
That is such a ridiculous statement to make. Its literally trolling and not making an argument.

Nobody says this first SLS shouldn't launch. Not that it would matter much if it didn't, but still.

The discussion is about forward looking space policy for the next 10 years, for the whole Artemis program.

SLS will fly LITERALLY 1 and then not again for 2-4 years. In that time a strategy change can and should be made.
Right, like no megacorp ever prevented us from doing whatever we want for our smartphones. Oh wait. (No Pixels don't count, unless you can write your own TEE, your own sensor hub, and your own wake up word)
Do you know of any where that wouldn't be the case?
That's a very valid argument, but it's a bit of a tangent from censorship.

Let me make an analogy to Alex Jones and Trump: if the water company cuts someone off, but they continue to run a huge fountain in front of their mansion, then you can't reasonably claim they're being deprived of drinking water.
Well this isn't about my job. I didn't mention once the problem was me losing my job or anything.
I think this is the standard smart bulb reset procedure - IIRC, I've had to do exactly this for some Osram bulbs I have, and I think something very similar for Hue too.
Remember when Reddit removed the warrant canary?