skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the founder of a venture-backed company in my 30s with two young kids under five. My co-founder is also in the same boat. A few points:

1. My wife works in a well paying field (nothing crazy, but comfortable), and we were financially stable enough to be able to live without my salary for a couple years.

2. We were very customer focused from day one, even before we incorporated. We signed up several customers (using LOIs) with just a deck, before we wrote any software.

3. We discovered a very clearly defined problem, a payer and clear willingness to pay.

4. I don't work like I used to. I feel much wiser about how I spend my time rather than brute forcing it with hours. Because of the two kids, I effectively work 9-5, M-F. I don't work weekends. During 9-5 though, I am dialed-in (I don't spend time reading the news or checking instagram). I delegate much more aggressively than I used to. I don't think I'm actually outputting much less than I used to, I'm just more efficient and focus on the more important things.

5. Venture - this is what it's for. There is still a bunch of venture out there for seed/pre-seed. We raised money early on and that allowed us to take small salaries (and hire folks to delegate things to).

100% it's definitely not as easy to start up in this stage of life, but it's also not impossible. Happy to connect with folks who want to connect (commiserate?) about this situation.
"There's this guy that never worked in his life, and he died of a heart attack at 32".

Someone in "/prowork" could write this and it would be equally relevant for my life choices. Meaning: zero relevance.
if the OS was pushable it's not an OS it's just an app.

memory management is hard, and all major OSes still have serious problems with it.
There's no way anybody could have known!
This already basically exists, with things like VIP / "meet and greet"
> Just that some ADHD symptoms can be misinterpreted as bipolar, which I'm confident is true.

By lay people yes, I would assume so, but most people without a mood disorder have no idea. But msitaking ADHD for Bipolar is much less likely by psychiatrists. I am sure it goes both ways so sorry for painting an overly broad brush, but I have been in the field for a while. ADHD is sort of a thing right now so the trend is misdiagnosis of ADHD.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21318193/

"ADHD was overdiagnosed (all patients with ADHD had received the diagnosis, as did 38% of patients with MDD and 29% of patients with BD, respectively),"

Just a anecdote. Both myself and my nephew were "diagnosed" with ADHD, and both ta the same young age. They gave us both ADHD meds and it led to a horrible manic episode for me and it led to my nephew's suicide.
I would like Linux distributions to ship a system wide telemetry service that can be enabled / disabled at the installation time or anytime later on.

This service would be guaranteed to be unidirectional, would store data publicly on non-profit-run servers and domains and fully comply with GDPR (by not storing any PII and ano/pseudonymising everything).

Developers would connect to this service over dbus and consume the uploaded data in daily batches.

Hosting and hardware fees would come from donations by distributions and other organizations distributing money to the FLOSS ecosystem.
I started my company in my late 30s, married with a kid. I'm sure everyone has a different strategy based on their circumstances, but this is what has worked for me:

1. Saved money through normal tech job and paid off obligations where possible, so expenses weren't too high and savings were good. So the risk of trying something on my own was manageable.

2. Left my tech job, but did consulting first for a few years. Easy to go back to a normal job if consulting doesn't work. Used savings to get through the initial period of figuring out how to do consulting. Really nice to have some kind of side income in this period - like teaching online courses or whatever fits into your skillset.

3. Built up money through consulting, but also built up contacts and partners in the target industry.

4. Pivoted from consulting over to the start-up in the same industry when the timing was right. Could have fallen back on consulting if the company failed. The nice part about consulting is you can split your time between paid work and your own work in whatever ratio you want, so you aren't ever jumping off a financial ledge.

It's not like this was some master plan. But it is how it worked out for me and we were thankfully relatively stable at each step.

As far as the company itself, my advice would be (1) Find really good partners you trust that are good at what you aren't good at. Being good at programming is maybe 20% of starting a tech company. (2) Don't up-end your life to start a solo side-hustle SaaS where you are convincing people to pay you $19.00 - find a real industry with real money to spend. Or alternately, keep a side hustle as a side job until it actually gets some traction.
Column: Sam Bankman-Fried exploited the ‘effective altruism’ fad
People use it purely for that reason. If they don't, their usage will drop, which will reduce their revenue. The fact that this revenue comes from Google is largely a byproduct.

Its not a perfect system, but it should somewhat work.
This was about how that long list of suppliers gets selected, not about how they make money. If you look through my previous posts, you’ll see I acknowledged most of these suppliers aren’t on the list to make a ton of money from NASA, and that a lot of suppliers don’t even attempt to make the list for that very reason.

There’s already enough corruption in govt, we don’t have to make believe it’s in places that’s it’s not.
Bravo! A tremendous achievement!!!!
I found this interesting and approachable, thanks. To be honest, I'm not trying to come up with anything ridiculous, mostly just wondering if FHE could add any value to use cases where PAKEs and E2EE are involved; that is, could it enable more capabilities or better usability with E2EE client-server systems. So far it feels as though the answer is "not really." That having been said, it's obviously still useful and undoubtedly a technique like PIR could be used in tandem with other techniques that are designed to preserve user privacy even if they don't directly compliment eachother. The use case of not being able to discover who the user is talking to in a chat definitely seems like an excellent idea, and I'd like to explore that some time.
I'm a poor performing Googler. Not in the sense that I work at Google and perform badly, but in the sense that when I use Google for search, I perform poorly. I don't get the results I'm looking for, get junk results that waste my time, and get ads that are not just not relevant, and are actually designed to distract me from my search. And the suggestions! Let's not even go there.
I was a member of an enthusiastic friends-and-family gaming group through the early and middle 1980s. We spent a good chunk of that time on Diplomacy, then moved to modified Diplomacy on custom maps (my first wife worked for USGS Map Sales, and so we had good maps to work with in creating our own Diplomacy maps), and from there we graduated to Nomic.

If you think Diplomacy is long and exhausting, wait till you get a load of Nomic with a bunch of enthusiastic players.
There is plenty of other hardware that is comparable. In fact- numerous laptops exceed them in a number of specs.

"Isn't it absurd that no vendors who support Linux are making Apple laptops?"
yeah dude just "take" a salary from your seed round. lmao
FYI you are quite literally describing dungeons and dragons, just virtualized and automated. But on that topic, I've had a sort of similar idea kicking around in my head, but on a bigger scale.

I want to run a game of DnD using a heavily modded Crusader Kings or Civ to simulate the world they are playing in. Just set up the starting conditions, like the various kingdoms, their methods of succession, their relationships and blood feuds with other kingdoms, the internal treacherous machinations and possible rebellions brewing, wars between kingdoms, etc, and then just let it run and use that to generate the overarching plot events of the setting while somehow translating the players actions as some kind of input into the simulated world so they can affect it as well.
yeah there's overhead with the fonts bundled in. we might change this, https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/discussions/132

i wasn't aware you could selectively choose characters for fonts, but that'd be ideal
Seems similar to the story about Russian hackers being instructed to leave computers alone that have Russian language enabled. I don't think enough people are cognizant of the fingerprint that their browser leaves behind.
Well that's what I did, I made both iOS and Android version of an app and some of the design.

I mean, a mediocre complexity app doesn't need more than one developer for a "slow improvement mode".
For those not familiar with meteorite identification: they can be tricky to tell apart from other rocks and random debris found on earth. I love this Professor's site [1], first attempting to deter people from sending him tons of useless rocks. Starts with some "Rude Admonishments" that are worth a read. His site is also at the top of the sites recommended by the Utah Geological Survey as resources for people who think they may have found a meteorite.

[1] https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/what_to_do/
I find them very useful and they often make the code cleaner. A dynamic run-time bound for a buffer can also make the code safer. VLAs are only dangerous when implemented naively (allocated on the stack without stack probing).
If a method is not generalizable to the entire dataset, it's not that useful.

When processing text at large scale, the usefulness of heuristic approaches like the one we're discussing diminishes rapidly.
I'm really curious, where did you find your consulting opportunities? And what did you precisely consult on?
Are we even allowed to do side projects? What if our employer claims ownership or even conflicts of interest with what we are building? How will i even present it into hn or producthunt with my name and all my credentials while i am still working somewhere else? Any employer would fire us on the spot if they found out, wouldn’t they?
I really hoped that projects like lastnpe[0] will have more visibility.

0. http://www.lastnpe.org
It's very cool, great job
Yeah it is worth pursuing. Other tricks companies play is posting notices in different breakrooms organized by job function.
It's mostly frustrating that this is still the rhetoric from Apple now that they are the largest company in modern existence. They have the faculties to release their Unix drivers and even provide world-class Linux support while still profiting heavily from their hardware sales. Yet, they don't. Every time they're given an opportunity to err on the side of freedom or choice, they shrug.

This is an ongoing problem that has prevented me from daily-driving MacOS since Catalina. Really a stance I wish Apple would revert, even Microsoft does a better job here than Apple.
Not even kidding, I'd rather have just that than any material item I'm likely to get.
MVP Referral Program
We're a consumer service and have about 1,000 active users with some of them championing us via word of mouth.

We want to further increase and give back to these "champions" through a referral system.

What should I be thinking about and what is a good 1st step towards doing this?

Best,
Johnny
It requires the source asset to be compressed using brotli-g as well, so it's dependent on the hosting servers to be of any value.
> See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/521737 for example.

I'm not convinced that the fork()/exec() issue is the correct justification, at least not entirely. As an example, Solaris supports fork()/exec() yet it doesn't do overcommit (at least not by default, I think) and has no OOM killer. And Solaris has a long history of being a very robust OS.

Also, in most cases I don't see what is the problem with reserving more disk space for swap (disk space which would almost never be used anyway), especially if the system becomes more robust as a result of that.

I think I recall Linus justifying memory overcommit by observing that the vast majority of applications don't handle out-of-memory conditions gracefully, so it's better for the OS to kill a misbehaving process (that is allocating too much memory) and let the others continue working normally than have every single process in the system have to handle out-of-memory failures, which they don't usually handle gracefully. But I'm not sure if I'm recalling this correctly.

I don't think either the overcommit design or the naive "all allocated address space must be reserved" design is the correct approach. I know almost nothing about Windows memory management, but it sounds to me like having "commit/uncommit memory" system calls separate from the "allocate/deallocate address space" system calls to be a better approach.

But I think the OS should try to reserve more space for the swap file before it starts returning ENOMEM to the "commit memory" system calls like Windows seems to be doing (judging from the blog post)...
Yes. Your team members care about what they do, and think it's important. You don't think it's important and you view them as replaceable. Your intent is quite clear.
Also compilers violate the ABI when they know the violation can't be observed, so the external tool would have too many positives.
Or maybe Microsoft finds it's a cheaper and easier to leverage their monopoly position if they operate in "perpetual beta" by rushing out new features before competition can get a foothold, then using their (paying) users as their testers. Rather than, say, testing and hardening their products sufficiently before launch.
Yes, there's also a collision check, but it's not truncating to 7 characters and adding as needed to get past collisions. Rather it's truncating to N and then adding as needed. N=7 for a new repository, but it'll relatively quickly bump that to 8, then 9 etc

You don't need a very large repository to start bumping it up to 8 etc. E.g. my local redis.git is 9, some local few-thousand commit (partially automated) that I've only ever added to are at 8 etc.

This changed in v2.11 released in late 2016[1], but because the observable default on a new repository is 7 the "it's 7 unless collisions" has persisted in various places online.

All of which is to say that if you brute-force the first commit to be 0000001..., it'll start being displayed as <that><x>, where <x> is a random 0..9a..f character, unless you brute force to 8, 9 etc.

1. https://github.com/git/git/commit/e6c587c733b4634030b353f402...
Is it a bad thing?
It wouldn’t be compatible with regular nullable references.
Work on Mx GPU drivers is particularly interesting as it could allow for performant MacOS virtualization on commodity PC hardware. Right now if you virtualize MacOS interactive desktop performance is unusably slow unless you pass through a PCIe GPU.
I'm not following your scenario here. How would a font be able to create these fragments at all?

I can imagine a font rendering a glyph as a line of code. But under the hood it would still be just a byte or bytes corresponding to that codepoint.
"TeamViewer installs suspicious font only useful for web fingerprinting" (238 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163940
The meteorite was worth way more than the price of a new Malibu. And the Malibu itself sold at auction for way more, too. So, hope every day to have your car struck by a meteorite.
An iPhone is a computer. An iPad is a computer. A Macbook is a computer.

Any questions?
I feel compelled to provide a counter-point to all of the "you can't" comments here.

It's possible. I started a company with my co-founder three years ago. We both were mid-thirties with kids when we started. We've since went through YC, raised a seed-round, and the company has been growing ever since.

What worked for me:

- I saved up money and drew from that while we were getting the company off the ground. My co-founder and I went close to a year without a salary. Having a spouse that works also helps.

- Having a relatively low cost-of-living helped. It never felt like we were reducing our quality of life, although this was in the middle of the pandemic so we weren't able to go on vacations etc even if we wanted to.

Building a company is a lot of work, but that's true regardless if it you're married with children or not. I think parents have the advantage of being forced to be efficient with their time. It did require a lot of work after-hours coding to get things off the ground, but I probably would've been coding on something anyway.
... for marketing and monetization.
I think I understand what you mean. Bootstrap = use your current salary. VC = use startup funds to pay yourself but it gets touchy real quick.

I currently make 140k in MCOL, so to hear that taking a 140k salary isnt out of the question, eventually, is reassuring.
Bravo! Tremendous work. I love that Meta AI has open sourced the models and the code!
Interesting, I had heard the "chicken scratch" explanation pre-internet and assumed it was so. But looking now "primary starting line" makes better sense
I'm afraid we're looking in the wrong places. See: http://txti.es/egregores
I am always quite astonished how bad the default layouters for graphs perform. When I was still doing compiler optimization in the beginning of the 2000s we did not struggle with quite big graphs thanks to cool graph visualizers such as vcg [1] . Two weeks ago I was tempted to try it again after nearly 20 years because I was frustrated even visualising a relatively small graph in python (cytoscape seemed to be the only working software in the end but it was quite a pain to get it to just render what I wanted)

[1] https://www.rw.cdl.uni-saarland.de/people/sander/private/htm...
> Are all startups at my age generally side hustles that become profitable enough to quit my day job?

Kinda, successes will generally be:

1) Ascended side-hustle (soooooo much luck involved on this one),

2) You basically already have minimal FIRE money or better (for whatever reason—saved well while earning high, family is rich, whatever) and can afford to take a couple years without an employer with negligible risk to your financial stability, or

3) You have a high-earning spouse to cover the bills while you give your dream a try

1 is easily the hardest and least-likely to succeed—so much less time to put into it, and you're having to steal free and family time to do it rather than working during... work hours.

(see also: getting started with a career in the arts, especially 2 and 3)
I think VLAs were a very good idea and they were not made optional because somebody thought they were a bad idea, but simply to make C11 easier to implement. VLA can be dangerous when the size depends on external input an when implemented without stack probing.
Anecdote: I teach coding to children, including occasional private lessons in client homes. For the latter, families need to supply computers, which one client didn't realize. I managed on the first day by having the two girls pass my personal laptop back and fourth, but I made it clear they'd need to each bring a computer next week.

So I was a bit surprised the following week when one of them showed up with an iPad! But, it had that attachable keyboard and trackpad Apple sells, and it really did work fine in the web-based environments we use.

Broadly speaking, I agree that most people think of Macs as computers and iPads as iPads, but I don't think that distinction is meaningful. Macs and iPads are marketed for most of the same things, and Apple has even begun touting how they have the same chips inside!
I have made software architecture diagrams, but more "descriptive" than "prescriptive" ones, by generating graphviz from source code analysis tooling. (The objective here was getting oriented in a large codebase where there wasn't really a rigorous diagram of anything written down anywhere, and trying to find sort of a min-cut where putting a line through the graph of imports would cross the fewest edges)

In my experience graphviz handles up to thousands of nodes and tens of thousands of edges without really breaking a sweat.

edit: I've done the same thing with extracting AWS diagrams from aws describe* calls, with good results.
AI Alignment as a Religion
An Interactive Guide to Flexbox in CSS
Hi there! I'm someone currently doing this. I'm CTO at a small startup in Oakland, am married, have a 4-month-old, have a mortgage. CEO just turned 40, also has a mortgage, is married, and has two kids.

Like everything, there's tradeoffs in time and money. Will you move faster if you're spending all of your time hustling on the startup? Maybe! Not every business and not every startup requires 24/7 hustle. Does this force ruthless prioritization? Yes. That's a good thing!

It also means my cofounder and I are very cautious in hiring, using offshore contractors anywhere we can, because we know that the pool we're dipping into is legitimately our own salaries. This is also a good thing! Paying yourself enough to live on without stress and keeping all other expenses low and tight is still "running lean" in my book.

Ok, so how: We got lucky of course, but some of that luck can be replicated. My CEO already knew some VCs from previous networking; those VCs gave us some pre-seed working capital, which allowed us to build enough to get more VCs on board, which gave us a year+ of runway to keep building. We did a _lot_ of pre-vetting with our target market before building, and the nice thing about pre-vetting is you can do it while you still have a job working for someone else.

The thing to remember as a founder is that part of why tech companies provide great salaries and so many perks is so their employees can be at work and fully focus on the work. You should treat yourself like a valued employee as a founder, and create the conditions for you to do your best work, which probably means not stressing about paying the mortgage.

The hustle and drive should come from your passion for the business and the approaching zero cash day, not forcing your family to live on ramen.
No, it's like ignoring aestheics of hair and fingernails when rest of the body is in danger.
Ask HN: What tools do you use to understand your codebase?
In my opinion, the hardest part of software engineering is managing cognitive complexity. I'm curious what solutions folks have found to make this easier?

Some examples of products that tackle this general problem are:

- Codestream: discussions embedded in codebase

- Dendron: better documentation

- Readme: interactive api docs

How do you manage complexity in your code? Are there any tools you wish existed that don't?