skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, sometimes. But if your company is not doing so hot and you see some ridiculous acquisition and think to yourself how the fuck did that happen, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that it's political bullshit when in fact you don't really know the whole story. You don't know what the tech is or what the real numbers are or what the purpose of the acquisition was. I think it's very easy to jump to a conclusion on an emotional basis, and our belief in our objectivity is what makes this all the more treacherous.
I don't know whether VCs have changed, so much as they've either pushed themselves or been pushed into an inappropriate role.

A large part of it is that big companies have given up on trying to innovate (they just buy innovations, at a panic price) and the people from whom innovation typically came are now a pariah caste of almost-unemployable miserable geniuses. Even worse, those people can't raise funding anymore because they've been outcompeted (for attention, press, and funding) by people with superior social polish but shittier ideas.

VCs are private equity guys. For deciding whether two $300-million biotech companies should merge, they're probably the best people out there. It's not that they're "good" at making those calls, but that the companies are so complex and unusual that almost no one is, and they're the most adept at figuring out what's going on amid the chaos. They might be able to tease out a +0.02 correlation in decision-making while the rest of us would get zero. For figuring out who has the competence to start a tech company? They're in the dark. Not a clue among them. It's not what they learned in business school or McKinsey. They'd do 100 times better to have a person like me do the talent scouting/vetting, but for a variety of reasons that will never happen.

The real evil isn't VCs so much as it's the replacement of R&D by M&A, representing a wide-scale trend of engineer disempowerment. Being a software engineer used to be an R&D job because non-engineers understood that they didn't know how to do that job, so it got a lot of autonomy and trust. Now, it's being treated as commodity work, and the result is a catastrophic dilution of the industry. VCs aren't singularly to blame for this, but they certainly didn't stop it.

It was actually a lot better, for engineers, to be in R&D labs of large companies than it is to be an engineer at a VC-istan startup. You had more career growth and more opportunities to learn stuff. Don't be fooled by the bullshit equity handed out now. Sure, these R&D engineers didn't get rich at 27-- they had to strike out on their own to do that, and many were happy being upper-middle-class technology researchers as a lifelong career, so most never did-- but most VC-istanis don't either.

We need to bring back the R&D flavor of the software industry, or we'll have lost the industry for good.
YMCA, gym, Stanford has commuter showers for people that bike.
Not to be too obvious, but what about plain old Microsoft Query? I pull data into Excel from time to time with that.
I've a different but related use case. I want to make a 5 GB file in a specific format, which requires that the data be sorted. I want it to run on my laptop machine, which has 4 GB of RAM. I dump the unsorted data to a sqlite database, tell it to use up to 1 GB of cache, create an index on the sort field, and pull back the sorted data, which I can stream directly to the file.
Rhabdo is probably what you're thinking of. As a minor point, traumatic cell death is generally considered necrotic, not apoptotic. Apoptosis is programmed cell death.
It always seems to be my look Google is heading in the direction of a WebRTC based messaging service/client and then suddenly the product group veers off into another direction. WebRTC has been nearly here for several years now but it does seem to arrive...
People are advocating Go because it delivers. It has great concurrency primitives (channels), it is "boring" language syntax wise, and it is fast.

Beyond that, it deals with a lot of the 'ugly' things around the edges of other languages. Dependency management, build management, deployments... all these IMHO are much more well thought out in go.
One of the best adventure input systems ever.

I still want to get an Arduino and build a real-world "distaff". Not sure how to properly model the inputs...
The Apple founders would be unable to get funding these days. They wouldn't even get a meeting.

This was true in the 70s as well. The Apple founders had to rely on revolving credit from the parts suppliers to get the parts they needed to get off the ground.
What does realtime refer to in this case? Live updating of Disqus threads? Does that mean there's an open connection for every post I visit that has Disqus comments?
We all remember Open Social, right?
For one, a shared-nothing design makes migration to different machines easier and doesn't require a stop-the-world garbage collector.

Erlang is memory safe in the presence of many-core (or many-system) parallelism. Go is not (you can segfault, possibly in an exploitable way, if GOMAXPROCS > 1).

Erlang unbounded channels reduce deadlocks because your sender can continue execution without waiting for a receiver.
Perhaps we just look at these things in different ways -- as an analogy, when I die, I'll be happy to know my organs will be donated to those who need them so that some good can come from my death. Even if I had no knowledge that my organs were being donated, it doesn't change the benefit they'd make to someone in need; likewise, an animal may have no knowledge of the fact it'll be of benefit to people after it dies, but that doesn't change the fact it will be. The manner of my death (and whether some other person is responsible) doesn't change the fact that something good can come of it. That doesn't justify my death, of course, or forgive anyone who may be responsible! If someone had murdered me, they'd still be guilty of murder. But that doesn't mean my organs weren't useful, and money doesn't even come into it.

But I'm not trying to change your mind here, just offering up an alternative perspective.
The processes are first class and can be killed and monitored from the outside.
You can bash, as long as it's factual: "X is more expensive, has a lower resolution, smaller area display, shorter battery life, and is heavier than Y. Buy Y!". They're all facts. But you can't say (in the rest of the world outside the US anyway) "X sucks because it's slower than Y. Buy Y!", unless you have big brave lawyers or X is somehow slower on every independent factual measure.
Access is for people who should be programmers but aren't yet. If you find yourself thinking about Access it's probably time to hire some proper programmers or get some proper programming training rather than a SAMS teach yourself VBA in 21 days book (OT, do they still have them?).

But most businesses won't realize that/be too cheap to spend the money to save much more money. Although it's much better these days than it was 5 years ago.

Though I know a lot of MI people where most of their job could probably be automated.
At no time has there ever been a Linux kernel release with no local root exploits. There have been periods of uncertainty when we didn't know the exact exploit but we always find out eventually. Keep this in mind whenever you think about Linux security.
1. Yes, that is one of the reasons for Go's speed.

2. You don't have many options aside from Gevent.

3. I can't talk for them, but my Python bottlenecks were mainly memory related. I was simply using up too much of it, due to how it was handling each request. My pattern was a basic Data/Handler/Json one. Which is as simple as they come. Yet, I was having issues (at a small scale).

4. Yes, of course. I considered and built parts using other languages. Did some testing, too. But Go stood out as the best choice given my needs.
I tend to view the tech R&D golden age as a product of post-war prosperity and the unique advantages the US had during the latter half of the 20th century. Trust between corporations and employees, and indeed the longevity of corporations themselves has now been so eroded that no one is willing to continue playing the long game of R&D. Take into account the insanity of how the patent system protects all the wrong people and has on balance the exact opposite of its intended effect, and I see the current situation as a bit of a Darwinian inevitability.

Being a software engineer is still a kick-ass job compared to almost anything else out there today.
How Google Wins Over Users By Giving Them Less
Apple vs. Government: How they make their money
With no acceptable offers on the table, Atari is going to auction
Well I would love an official Youtube app for my Windows Phone but Google doesn't make one and has no intention of. Can I blame Google?
If you read a few of Dijikstra's comments from the 70s and 80s, I think you'll find the software industry was a wreck then too.
I added it based on a comment. Yeoman is interesting because it has "rails like" generators. This can be nice on a project of size, for consistency and saving time.

Yeoman uses Grunt, which is nice for building, watching, and packaging.

Not strictly needed, but very useful and recommended.
Who cares what kind of features others add, if they can't even communicate with each other. Google of course define their priorities. So far they claimed that interoperable protocols are basis of their features. If it's the features they are after and they don't care about interoperable protocols then they aren't better than Facebook and other "competitors" who disrespect their own users by not letting them to communicate with others, as if we are in the stone age of computing, when one couldn't send e-mail from AOL to Compuserve. If that's the case, it should be a good reason to advise others to dump Google services.

They gain advancing interoperable and connected IM network. If they are OK with creating another walled IM mess for selfish interests (as if we don't have enough of these Skypes, Whatsapps and etc.) then let them be boycotted.
I'm 30. I grew up when a Discman was normal. Yes, a CD that spins in a portable device. It even had skip protection! Now? My children will laugh at such a notion.

"Daddy, what was it like when someone else had to make the stuff you used?"
"Edge" I meant purely in terms of fuel efficiency. If you consider the average consumer looking at buying a passenger car they might be willing to spend a premium on a more efficient car. Two common choices are a modern diesel or gas hybrid. At least here in the US the hybrid is a slightly more attractive choice if you factor in the purchase price and the price of diesel.
With Compass Mixins + SASS/SCSS, I don't look at these anymore. Compass mixins are so convenient. I think people should start using LESS or SASS. It makes life so much easier. http://compass-style.org/index/mixins/
We have a failure to communicatem, nigger.

----

AUTHORITY
This illustrations is well known but here it is for the record:

In U.S. Navel Institute Proceedings, the magazine of the Naval Institute, Frank Koch illustrates the importance of obeying the Laws of the Lighthouse. Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities.

Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing reported, "Light, bearing on the starboard bow."
"Is it steady or moving astern?" the captain called out.
The lookout replied, "Steady, Captain," which meant we were on a dangerous collision course with that ship.
The captain then called to the signalman, "Signal that ship: 'We are on a collision course, advise you change course twenty degrees.'"
Back came the signal, "Advisable for you to change course twenty degrees."
The captain said, "Send: "I'm a captain, change course twenty degrees.'"
"I'm a seaman second-class," came the reply. "You had better change course twenty degrees."
By that time the captain was furious. He spat out, "Send: 'I'm a battleship. Change course twenty degrees.'"
Back came the flashing light, "I'm a lighthouse."
We changed course.

----

God says...

will I recompense upon his own head.

17:20 And I will spread my net upon him, and he shall be taken in my
snare, and I will bring him to Babylon, and will plead with him there
for his trespass that he hath trespassed against me.

17:21 And all his fugitives with all his bands shall fall by the
sword, and they that remain shall be scattered toward all winds: and
ye shall know that I the LORD have spoken it.

17:22 Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will also take of the highest branch
of the high cedar, and will set it; I will crop off from the top of
his young twigs a tender one, and will plant it upon an high mountain
and eminent: 17:23 In the mountain of the height of Israel will I
plant it: and it shall bring forth boughs, and bear fruit, and be a
goodly cedar: and under it shall dwell all fowl of every wing; in the
shadow of the branches thereof shall they dwell.
At least in CPython sum() will go through PyNumber_Add over heap allocated Python objects. With numpy.sum, the inner loop of the ufunc is summing over an contiguous block of machine types.
That wasn't a very helpful criticism. The basic principle of pre-cooking quinoa, beans, and sweet-potatoes is a good one for many people who want ease of preparation, tastiness, "real food", and something much healthier than what they're currently eating.

Also, the nutrition data site says that it's got ~124% of the recommended vitamin E (http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/recipe/2832909/2)

What would you add to this to make it better?
I look forward to having each part of my body rebuilt from scratch as I age. Death? Not in this century.
And, ironically, the community functions better than most others. Correlation or causation? Who knows.
One of the best video's I've ever seen!

I wonder how the thought processes of the followers differ as the crowd grows? The first guy must have made a more concious decision to join shirtless dancing guy because he believed in his cause and thought it looked fun. But towards the end, the dancing is no longer important, it's just a good feeling to be a part of something big.

"When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in"
> That doesn't sound like an offense that should be hellbanned.

Well, IIRC, it is.
it becomes slower than standard DBs

Sorry but either you're ignorant or being deliberately disingenuous. Either way this statement is completely untrue for many use cases. Can you not imagine situations where a document database would be orders of magnitude faster than ANY SQL one ?

Think about a document with hundreds of embedded documents which equate to joins in SQL.
SizeGenetics Canada: Where Can I Buy SizeGenetics In Canada?
Ask HN: Do most software freelancers work-for-hire?
I would like to get some idea on what type of freelance agreements are more common in software development. Do you work for hire or some other form of agreement ?
That's why I use VC-istan. They're different things. Silicon Valley has a 70-year history and it hasn't always been VC-istan. VC-istan is just how it died.

To be completely honest, I never knew you intended to imply a geographic location when you use the term "VC-istan". I always thought you were applying that to refer to, basically, all VCs, anywhere.

Not sure if that changes to the extent to which I agree/disagree, but it is a detail that wasn't apparent (at least to me).
Go channels are not really asynchronous. On the sender side they block until the buffer has room. This can lead to deadlocks.

Erlang processes have very small stacks just like goroutines do.
I don't get it.

Convincing people to give you large sums of money has always been based on gaining their confidence. And people being what they are, that confidence has always been based more on how you present yourself than on any objective logical measures.
Yes. Our realtime updates vote counts and new comments over websockets if your browser supports it. If not, we fall back to some more typical HTTP streaming.
Fair enough, but I think most economists agree on the problems with a gold standard [1]. This is moving off-topic, but it's interesting that this seems to be one of many topics where there's a rare consensus between economists, but the general public holds a different opinion [2].

1. http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-re...
2. http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569378...
Yes, if you're working in the academia, you have the luxury to say such BS.

Let's see Harm Bakker "get it right the first time" under changing conditions, sloppy inherited code, a pointy haired boss, etc...
Self-Destructing Messages Enter the Workplace With Browser App
Good luck! I imagine there'll be some interesting challenges. I don't know how useful the alt-text will be since I guess it's sort of a cheeky second-comic, so coming up with clever ways to index relevant ideas/terms will be interesting.

You'd probly get some impressive looking results by just taking the echo-chamber approach of looking for HN links to comics and index what the discussion was about.

Hell, just hard-coding comments for horse battery staple and bobby tables would probably pass 30% of the unit tests :)
What makes the quantum players able to beat the limitation of the classical players with multiple trials?

Every time I read an article discussing quantum mechanics, particularly new results in the field, I get more and more of the feeling that we are just missing something. According to the article entanglement can occur on the scale of lightyears but those entanglements cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light.

The linked article on Schrodinger's Hat seems to be violate another rule about observation, but there's always this caveat that prevents it from violating some quantum principal.
'dont be evil'
Nextdoor is now available for iPhone
The sweeping generalizations and alleged industry-crossing trends in this article undermine a very basic truth: that a small minority of people are successful by kissing ass rather than kicking it.

The author has set up an imaginary "nobility" (including himself, presumably) of people who's intentions are—by his definition—"pure". You're either an entrepreneur or a "corporate stooge". There is no middle ground. There is no one in a Fortune 500 company who is responsible for delivering results, apparently. (Unless we're defining "entrepreneurs" as "anyone who is not a corporate stooge," which seems like a stretch.)

Moreover, there's apparently no one who can both play the "political game" and deliver results. As if the mere presence of the former taints the well, so to speak.

I think the fact of the matter is the politics—relationships, perception, track record—do matter and should matter. If you think you can build a good product and people will beat a path to your door, you're horribly naive. As a VC faced with two equal products, would you rather back someone who's already built a product and had an exit, or someone who's doing this for the first time? The former is certainly lower risk...
Have to agree the problem with SQLite isn't SQLite it's the generally terrible wrappers companies put around it.

On both iOS and Android the default ones are terrible. And even many third party ones aren't the best.
Wait, what? You mean that the claim that "they could write it in a number of other languages" was falsified? Or maybe you think that "Python VM is slow"? No? Then these points still stand. Geez.

There is nothing special about ditching Python and getting speedups. Just last week I did the same with rewriting a service in Erlang - and I'm almost certain that it will perform even better on 8 cpus than even Go would.
Artificial light, sleep deficiency, and the rise of LEDs
They can be. By default a `make(chan int)` is blocking, but you can give it a buffer size with `make(chan int, 1000)` or something and it won't block until it's full.
50 hours a week is pretty common for companies that produce commercial software, startup or no. Some segments (games, for example) are more.
A few years back, I was standing in a puddle in a shed plugging in a golf cart when lightning hit a few feet away from me. It was like a bomb going off, vaporizing sheets of drywall, turning the wooden beams into splinters, and blowing a chunk out of the concrete.

In the room upstairs, it melted a mirror and fried all the electrical devices. A monitor close by got a really neat wavy pattern like it was exposed to a magnet.

All in all, that was a terrible afternoon at work.
What, concretely, does Google gain from spying on you? In contrast, they have a very clear profit motive for search: they get paid a lot of money to put ads next to the search results.
I've gotten hung up on this before, but after two years away from the Valley, I realized a lot of this stuff is small potatoes.

We've all seen companies that have been involved in multi-million dollar transactions on pure hot air and politics alone. These can seem discouraging to people who want to build actual businesses, and deals like Tumblr and Instagram are in another league entirely.

But, for most of them, you really have to look at the actual magnitude of these things (on a financial level) before you decide to be indignant about them.

As a thought experiment, if you take the amounts of money involved in typical fundings and even a lot of exits, and compare it to amounts of money involved in things outside the startup ecosystem, it can be thought-provoking, even if you're comparing apples to oranges.

For instance:

- The project budgets of large consultancies. (e.g. I worked on a routine project at a consultancy once where the budget was $12M.)

- Smaller government agencies and civil engineering works (e.g. new Central Subway on 4th St is around $900M [how much politics do you think is involved in that?])

- Real estate listings

- The amounts invested in even smaller hedge funds/mutual funds. (I think Zed Shaw had a piece on this)

- The profits of bigger SV companies that actually are profitable (Google, Apple, etc). Or, the budget of some given department in such a company.

- Real acquisitions outside of tech (see the WSJ on an average day for figures that can make your head spin).

I know these things are obvious, but it really needs to be stated sometimes. It's hard to rationalize big numbers unless you really think about it. And you can get tunnel vision living in the Valley.

$5M here and there is chump change in the grand scheme of things in the world that venture capitalists and large enterprises inhabit. There is bound to be a certain amount of noise you see observing these transactions, and definitely politics. Fun to watch and comment about, but not really important.

While these aren't grave injustices, I guess I would concede that when taken wrong, it does have some chilling effects for people like the OP and myself. The current business climate does create some awkward and unnecessary dilemmas for people in the uncanny valley between being an entrepreneur and an employee. There are plenty of smart people who, in a perfect world, might go for starting a fairly medium-risk/medium-return sort of business. But with all the "smart money" on crazy startups impacting everyone's salaries, the rents, and the news cycles, it changes things. If you do go ahead with it, you might be tempted optimize your business at least partially for a potential acquisition and spend more on generating hype than on the fundamentals. Or you might get such a compelling offer from one crazy, poorly-proven but well-funded and well-connected startup that you forgo your perfectly viable plan entirely.

So, the odd politically-motivated acquisition or funding shouldn't make you feel bad, but the cumulative effects can be suffocating for sure!