skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> VC Funding Means You Will Sell Your Company

> Remember when I wrote earlier that the VC dudes definition of “making everyone happy” after investing in your company doesn’t mean making it profitable? So now you might ask: Okay, so what do my VC investors want? ... They want to make a lot more money.

> ...

> Now, all of this might be none of your business, you might think. But it is! Because now the inevitable consequence, once you’ve taken VC funding, is that the objective of your company has changed: You’re no longer building your company the way you like it. You’re building your and the VCs company so that they can sell it, for a price higher than the one they paid. There are no alternatives. The course is set. You’re building to sell.

Why? Why do you have to respect the VCs' desires? Why can't you take VC funding, then use it to build a company that yields modest returns and live a comfortable life running it (and paying modest dividends to the VCs that over a few years return their investment)? Doing so would (I presume) not constitute any kind of breach of fiduciary duty, so what right can the VCs possibly have to enforce their preference for a more aggressive strategy?

People commenting on startups often imply - like in the quote above - that VC investors ultimately control any business they invest in, and not the founding CEO, even when that founding CEO holds the majority of the voting stock. This strikes me as bullshit. At least, nobody ever spells out the mechanism of control, and their inability to do so makes me think they don't know what they're talking about.

If I'm right that the narrative of VC control is bullshit, then what's the alternative explanation for why CEOs so often choose to pursue aggressive growth and sell their "babies"? Simple: the CEOs themselves want big money. It's not that the evil VCs are forcing the CEOs to do something they'd rather not do. It's that the VCs and CEOs are aligned in their objectives in the first place.
Learn to manage up young bucks. It's the only way you can prevent these VCs from taking your lunch money. Get an informal advisory board if this is your first rodeo.
> whitelist acceptable input variables

A core lesson in ML: this is difficult or impossible. See the classic example with wolves, dogs, and snow. [1]

For a resume example, suppose you don't want to be biased again black candidates, or women. Well, good luck trying to filter out resume experience, skills, schools, and interests so that they don't list anything that is statistically more likely to be found among black folks or women. It's impossible.

So now you have a hiring process that looks at... what exactly?

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-husky-on-the-left-is-c...
An argument I’ve seen is that we haven’t seen a truly communist country yet. The most promising ones (imo) were smaller countries who’s communist ambitions were stifled by American-backed coups. Many of the earlier communist leaders like Lenin and Mao also knew that their countries weren’t communist in practice, as you can’t slip a switch and suddenly you have working communism. Their goals were to establish governments that could lead their populations to eventually being communism in practice instead of just as an ideal. Obviously, this depends on having a government that is actively trying to make itself obsolete, and most politicians don’t want that.

Capitalism may “work”, but it’s definitely not sustainable without checks and balances and limits on wealth accumulation and influence. Allowed to roam free, it’s disingenuous to say they “aren’t perfect”, they’re destroying the planet and its people.
> "The first and main takeaway is this: Companies which receive VC funding are not profitable."

This is patently untrue and deceiving by the author, doubtlessly set to tell a narrative. Sure, some companies that receive VC funding are not profitable, maybe even most, but a sizable portion of the companies that receive VC funding ARE profitable. Denying this is deceiving the readers. In fact, the easiest way to receive VC funding is being profitable!
I had this happen, we survived though, and they failed (spectacularly so). Camarades/ww.com: 1, Spotlife: 0.

And Logitech, who backed Spotlife was more than gentlemanly about it, they sent us all of their traffic for years and years.
With the end of free money (higher interest rates), I wonder if bootstrapped startups could have their revenge over VC-funded ones.

Nothing beats the feedback loop of profitability.
Pre agricultural revolution pictographs and petroglyphs are almost certainly not graffiti. Religious function, navigation, resource marking, animal migration records, record keeping... these are some of the more likely functions.

Tbf, sometimes graffiti is a territorial marking and this is also a likely function.
So does JS, Java, whatnot. That’s not the point.
New Microsoft/ Azure Rapid Application Development Platform for Startups
We are a new startup who have developed an easy-code rapid application development platform that currently supports SQL Server, .NET Core, and Azure. This can also be used to create on-premises software. The minimum requirement is that you are using or plan to use SQL Server as your relational database. You can build new apps or upgrade existing apps .
And the corollary is that if you do have a rocket but no fuel, a dozen others are going to copy your business and add fuel, leaving you with no chance to succeed.
> I'll be able to use the output of the model (that can't be prohibited)

If the model is copyrightable, they can prohibit you from running the model for a commercial purpose, even if they don't have copyright on the output.
https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/cube-clock Or buy the same clock?
Just like any other function call, there's nothing implicit or hidden.

The implicit part is the question of whether an operator is built-in or overloaded. In C, every operator is built-in, so you can look at a block of code and see that there are NO function calls in it. With something like C++, you must treat every operator like a function call.

With C, if I write:

a += b;

I can be VERY confident that this line of code will execute in constant time. With C++ (or other operator-overloaded language), I cannot. I need to know what the types of a and b are, and I need to go look up the += operator to see what it does for these types (and this is not one universal place, it's specific to the type).

Furthermore, this may be the last line within a particular scope. With C I know that nothing else will happen, and that the control flow depends only on the surrounding scope. With C++, I don't know this! There may have been many objects created within this scope and now their destructors are firing and potentially very large trees of objects are being cleaned up and deallocated, and even slow IO operations running.
Euler’s Work on Ballistics
Schweppes has 67.9 mg/L of quinine.

I lived in SE Asia for over 7 years with close to 2 years of living in remote areas with dengue and malaria. I drank my Schweppes tonic water because I am sober and enjoy the bitterness, and it gave me some peace of mind that I was keeping quinine in my system at any level.

Having cobra anti-venom was a lot more important where the nearest trauma center could be 12 hours away by vehicle due to winding, mountainous, and difficult roads before hitting a real paved road.
my bad, guess I missed this
Well, I'm not sure about everywhere but, the work I'm finding is ASP3.0 (IIS6.0) and VB6 (more rare) also Perl and PHP. Many of these projects were started in the late 90s. They are internal systems (billing automation, internal work-tracking, custom "ERP"). Nothing exciting, just old shit that makes money in a non-tech business. I find the work on LI, and I show up when folk search for these olds skills. But I know a few others in this "maintenance" space. One just does legacy Java, one just does old Windows (NT4, 2000), etc. Generally we find work from each other.

Additionally, I think it's hard to enter the "Legacy" space. You have to un-learn some patterns, lots of: oh yea, we used to do this the hard way. The other bump is the documentation - the 1999 docs are buried under the 2009 docs which are decaying under the 2019 docs. The thing called ActiveRecord for example means like 99 things.
You have plenty of options actually, including a safe default:
https://www.sqlite.org/threadsafe.html
“Soviet style communism” quickly became authoritarianism, especially under Stalin. He was communist in title only imo, with a focus on genocide and foolhardily believing that eliminating people with actual education in their fields and replacing them with “the commoners” was somehow good for the country because it looked communist.
> No idea why I want all this misery of competing, stress, exposure, running all the time etc etc.

Have you ever run a business before? The belief that you can build a business without dealing with competition is a myth. Having a successful company requires picking your poison.

Non-VC is a different poison than VC, and I do agree that it is a much better approach for far more many businesses. But make no mistake, having a company with "no stress and making millions for all to live" is not a realistic goal. There is no free lunch in the world of business. Competition is everywhere. You can either ignore it or embrace it.
Threads are Instagram-compatible. It's literally probably Instagram code, heavily modified.

Threads is written in Python, and Instagram is largely a Python monolith.
Your VC founded business can fail without being an horror story though.
" the rest of us who value people over process"

This group will keep shrinking though.
The lottery is not a very good analogy. Let’s look at worst cases. In the lottery you put in cash and usually get nothing back. You literally learn nothing because every draw is random. At a VC-backed startup someone else gives you money. With that money you’re expected to pay yourself a salary. You get to learn at an incredibly fast rate on someone else’s dime. And you get that salary and learning even if your investors are awful and push you to do terrible things and you agree to do those terrible things and they tank the company. In the worst case, it’s a free education with room and board included. And, if it works, there’s a helluva upside.

So, lottery expected worst case: you lose all your money. VC-backed startup expected worst case: you learn a ton and end up no worse financially than you started.

As an aside, whether venture-backed or bootstrapped, having gotten to know a lot of successful founders the characteristic that seems to set them apart is their rate of learning. The best are relentlessly curious, always assume there’s something they don’t know, and seek to learn from as many people as possible.
Lifelogging: Making my self-obsession stronger, one data point at a time
You have a reassuring proof that you have product market fit.
Yes, no language has static typing until you run a static typechecker; for some languages you don’t notice because it is integrated into the normal compiler, etc.
I'm noticing more and more restrooms open to public/shared use eschewing placing mirrors because they always get carved up with everyones' names.

Clearly most people find the act memorable, manners be damned.

(I find the act barbaric, personally.)
And I thought I was an old fogey. That's like griping that today's broadcast television networks don't show the Andy Griffith Show[1], Leave It To Beaver, Mr. Ed., and the original Star Trek.

[1] Which modern gamers may at least minimally know since Barney from the Half-Life series got his name from one of its characters.
This website is as ad-infested as it gets…
> The “town square” analogy for social media is another one of those crap ones that somehow got traction. No one actually wants a town square. They want a cafe at the edge of the town square where they can chat to their mates and watch the world go by. They don’t want some bloke with an amplifier in the middle of the square screaming about how Jesus saves. [1]

A take that I'm pretty agreeable to.

[1]: https://mastodon.xyz/@ianbetteridge@writing.exchange/1106775...
If I see `x+y` in C, I know 100% that it'll be ~0-1 instructions, O(1), and will have the lowest latency & highest throughput that a thing can have, i.e. basically completely ignorable for figuring out the perf of a piece of code, or determining what complex things it may do (additionally, it'll hint that the operands are pointers or numbers). For `f(x,y)`, none of those may hold. With operator overloading, f(x,y) and x+y have the exact same amount of instantly tellable facts, i.e. none. x+y becomes just another way to do an arbitrary thing.

In C, if I'm searching for how a certain thing may be called from a given function, I only have to look for /\w\(/ and don't have to ever think about anything else.

Honestly, operator overloading isn't really that bad (especially if an IDE can highlight which ones are), but it's still a thing that can affect how one has to go about reading code that might not even use it.
Man who won lottery recommends it to everyone.
Social media should be regulated like utilities. They are the "public square" now in all but name - they should be regulated the same way, with free speech enshrined in law just as in public spaces.

Their defence is always "we are private companies so we do whatever they want" - which wouldn't fly if they were a water company refusing service arbitrarily.
That's a feature not a bug and public school districts should do the same.

Because districts are required to provide education to all students, they should establish special schools that are essentially prisons for children with behavioral issues or daycares for the mentally handicapped to segment the student population when necessary.
> the Semantic Versioning experiment has failed

I'm going to take a wild guess that you're going off of experience from something like npm library versions. That ecosystem is a mess, and I don't blame you for mistrusting it.

On the other hand, the Go language has maintained the Go Compatibility Promise remarkably well. https://go.dev/doc/go1compat

In other words, whether or no semver is useful depends on how well its followed. The versioning compatibility would be a problem regardless of the version number system followed. Case in point: Windows 95 v Windows 10.
Some day computers will be fast enough to serve hundreds of bytes of json many times per second.
For more on what it's like being a North Korean software hacker working for the state, listen to the Lazarus Heist podcast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9/episodes/downloads

The whole thing is good but IIRC season 1, episodes 5 and 6 are the ones most specifically about what it's like to be a North Korean software engineer in China stealing money online.
I remember when "silicon valley" came out, and after watching a few episodes I thought it was so stupid and unrealistic... This isn't how startups operated.

Then I talked with other people in the startup world who said it was a perfect match.

That's when I realized that I just worked at competent places.
Just to clarify one possible misconception, the two ends would be the mother and daughter’s phones in this case. Meta shouldn’t have the key to decrypt accessible to them.

You’re absolutely correct that it can be decrypted on either end but Meta should resist putting a backdoor in their app that allows this. If no other reason than it compels them to be in the middle of this criminal case.

Also Facebook Messenger already enables this (https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1084673321594605) but it’s not the default. It should be.

This is just basic privacy and for sure won’t protect you from a focused government attack but it’s a start.
Suspended from Twitter, account tracking Elon Musk's jet has landed on Threads
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22878136
Adding that anything I wrote in C++/MFC at that time is now obsolete.

Everything I wrote in C/Win32 is as much fresh as it had been 30 years back.
One annoyance I have with VC funded startups is how they all try and use the same playbook. Founders are generally inexperienced. Likely good ICs, very good talkers, but not capable of holistically building a company from the ground up. They hire the same roles, in the same order. So many small startups will have over embellished leaders, who are 'head of' or 'director of' something, with 1-2 or sometime zero direct reports. You'll hear how "We NEED a" head of UX, data, support, etc. These types don't want to do the IC work, but want to be 'early stage'. Those people come in, buy the same crap SaaS tools and institute the same culture as the previous place. Maybe this is changing with money tightening up, but it can be off-putting. When considering a new job, I look at who works there, and if its a small company, with inflated titles and people with short tenure everywhere, its a pass.
Everything is fine. From time to time the town square has had riots, been made brick dust by war and been really peaceful and fun. Swings and round abouts. Lets just warm ourselves by the glow of 44Bn dollars burning right now.
Was it Carmel Valley Ranch?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396675

> The conservancy, which operates 22 other preserves in California, and one in Oregon, plans to open the scenic property to the public for hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding in the coming years for free
People will say “good riddance, Twitter was always trash”. Personally I disagree (I’ve been happily using it for years, I just don’t get involved in political shitfights) but even if it is true I will think it’s a notable lesson.

Scaling human interaction up to internet size just doesn’t seem to work. Reddit just about held it together but only because it functioned as a collection of mini communities you could dip in and out of. Almost all larger communities have always been a mess.

I’m not totally sure what the lesson is here but I am very curious where we’ll be in fifty years time. I hope somewhere good, I fear not.
US spies are buying Americans’ data – Congress has a new chance to stop it
Yes, because you very literally need water to live. You won’t die if you go three days without posting on Twitter.
I’m wondering about the failure rate for technology companies. It may be higher or lower than restaurants, I have no intuitions.
This seems to assume that the only reason to start a product company is because you want to gamble on the slim chance that you'll get rich. But what about starting a product company because there's a problem you believe really ought to be solved, and developing a commercial product is the best way to solve it? In that case, wouldn't it be prudent to avoid unnecessary risk?
Was it out of stock? Non-functional?
Nine AI-powered humanoid robots hold press conference at UN summit
> I normally run unit tests after changing comments. It's part of my check-in routine.

I run the tests after running even a part of a file through the formatter. And no, I don't work in Python.
Try Nostr
Some examples:

- Game play that changes with your heart rate

- Switching easily from work mode to a meditation

- Getting ready for bed by watching a VR sunset

Imagine walking into an Apple Store and seeing as new customers are getting fitted and exploring these experiences on 100” OLEDs. Converting the masses requires displaying entirely new experiences, from work to play.
In my mind IRC fills the role of a town square. There's channels with dozens to hundreds of people gathered to chat about 1 specific topic in a mostly unmoderated way (within reason).
Mars 5B years ago: NASA's “Mars Evolution”
To abuse the analogy further, the Internet is the infrastructure on which town squares can be built.

Also most decently sized European cities have multiple “town squares” each with their own vibe (based on the stores/restaurants that have storefronts there).

Unless I’m not getting the authors drift, I see no problem with the bifurcation as long as town square owners don’t put up unreasonable barriers.
MLpedia
To-the-point machine learning concepts and articles, with a weekly newsletter.
> The way to look at this is that this is what happens when you don’t have safe and legal medical abortions.

Most places with legal abortions don't seem to allow them at 28 weeks so that would not have helped in this case.
The Lucretius Problem: How History Blinds Us
The town square of the internet is failing at the same time that real life town squares are getting uglier. Food for thought.
Absolutely. The successful sleepers that are founders and VCs are sleepers very deliberately. They don't want the notoriety. They're already well-known enough by the people that matter, the outcomes they've generated. They are already freed by the wealth they've generated. What does notoriety do but subtract from that?
A friend, college educated responsible adult, went to the petrified forest in Arizona. Park ranger gave the whole talk about how rare and special these rocks are, and how they're disappearing because people are stealing them. The ranger indicated there might not be a park in the future, because so much is going missing. She had an immediate impulse to steal a rock. She claims she didn't act on it, and I believe her.

I think there's some inherit psychology that's tough to get around, some "I better grab one while I still can" deep down part of our reptile brain. People are still animals. Out on vacation they may not be fully engaging their critical thinking skills.

I think, far and away, the most effective preservation is Pele's curse - https://www.hawaii-guide.com/why-you-should-never-take-lava-...

Total fabrication by the parks service. They show you the rocks people have sent back, to lift the curse.

If you're fully engaged and thinking critically, it's harmless. If you're not, it encourages good behavior.

I'm not a big fan of marketing, but the way you tell the story really does have a huge impact on guest behavior.
There is a lot of cheating going on... This is a way to avoid some of it.
The FBI's Anthrax Investigation Sheds Light on Covid Lab-Leak Theory
Ukraine joining NATO is a sure guarantee of WWIII. Putin is a clown, yes - but allowing Ukraine to join NATO would only reinforce the fact that anything the US says in regards to foreign policy in Eastern Europe cannot be taken seriously and should not be trusted.

Why are people cheering for war?
That is not the same problem. That’s a sample bias problem.

The whole point of white listing variables is to only allow things you are comfortable using todiscimrinate. And yes, that likely reduces the power of the model.

Edit: to clarify, your example had the model failing to classify something correctly because the training data did not generalize across real world examples. The problem with diversity bias is that the modes are trained on past data where the labels themselves tend to have some bias. Black candidates do worse. So recreatingthese will generally produce worse outcomes for minority candidates. Now for a lot of these cases the average minority individual is more likely to do worse. Not intrinsically because of race, but still worse.

You can’t realistically expect the model to produce equal outcomes for all classes when all classes are not equal on the actual traits. But you do want to try and make it so that the model doesn’t use race indicators as a crutch that ignores actual good indicators. The common complaint is you hear about a man and a woman applying with the exact same credentials but different outcomes. Well obviously the model had to have additional information besides those credentials if it made different decisions. If this causes problems, you probably should not permit those additional pieces of information.
I'm not saying North Korea is a paradise or anything, but the country is technically still at war with the South Korea, which is heavily backed by the US. I wonder how much can be trusted from a NY Times(a US media company) article written by the "Seoul bureau chief for The New York Times".