skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, that's not accurate. His stockholders and/or venture capitalists do the funding -- remember that "funding" means answering a relatively simple question about risk versus reward. Someone still has to manage projects, make technical decisions. That's what Musk does.

Consider a parallel example -- Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula. Jobs made product decisions, Markkula funded them.
searched this page looking for a "Chessacademy for Go"

thanks.
Given that the proposal describes dampers used to absorb change, I think this is wrong.

By building a system on pylons, where the tube is not
rigidly fixed at any point, you can dramatically
mitigateEarthquake risk and avoid the need for expansion
joints. Tucked away inside each pylon, you could place
two adjustable lateral (XY) dampers and one vertical (Z)
damper.

These would absorb the small length changes between
pylons due to thermal changes, as well as long form
subtle height changes

(see page 11)
E-mail, sure. Facebook ID? No. Most people don't have that 10-20 digit number memorized, and Facebook doesn't really show it anywhere other than the APIs these days either.
Social Media Amplifies TV Advertising
I'd think it would be good for either OS to update the RTC occasionally. So when it does reboot the RTC is sort of accurate.
Well my problem with Hyperloop is similar to any heavy rail solution. It only goes from two fixed points and diverting to other points is very problematic. Some larger cities have multiple airports, would they have multiple hyperloops? Either solution requires some form of transport at each end, light rail, bus, or cars.

Hence I think Tesla combined with the driverless car technology being worked on by Google and others is overall a better solution. Lanes could be added or taken from existing multiple lane roads and given over self driving cars. A network of routes could be established, with and without battery swap stations along the way, to allow people to drive from nearly any point to another all the while doing so safely and with less impact on the environment. Individual vehicles just have too much flexibility to ignore and combining them with electric power and self driving ability would provide a better solution. It could even be extended into mass transit by having buses employing the tech. With a fully protected lane these vehicles could move at much higher speeds all the while being safer.

I like Musk's idea from the standpoint that it points out the fallacy of the HSR system that is proposed, the side effect its easy to point out the fallacies of his idea as well.
to me the article is rather narrow-sighted rant of an engineer with presumed inner-thoughts and inner-workings of a typical sales guy. Interestingly, the same argument could be said by a sales guy to an engineer that even if you do your magic your work will be worthless if you don't know how to sell, which is one of the most repeated-to-the-point-of-truism at HN: let people know what you're doing and why it's important.

I agree with the first paragraph where a sales person needs to know more about engineering than he presumably does. The other part which I would like to add is that an engineer (or a competent one, at least) needs to know how his product is sold, marketed, and presented as a sold commodity.

Am I the only one to read the typical stereotype of arrogant prig engineer characteristic between the line? A kind which a sales person would think of.
I have a coworker who adapts old text adventure games into simple roleplaying games for his young daughters. Planetfall is their favorite.

When I was a kid my parents didn't have a lot of money, so instead of playing video games, I would design entire worlds on paper that looked very similar. Of course, I couldn't play them--the D&D aspect to this is pretty neat.

(I also designed my own cardboard Transformers that would actually transform! I was really proud of those. I remember I had little sliding bits, like revealing the robot's head.)
smaller is better :)

Thanks for doing what you do!

maybe game haiku?
Sheryl Sandberg, Jane Austen, and the Queen of Versailles
I don't agree with your call for sympathy, because Notch is the one who advertised Minecraft on 4chan and Reddit and sold early access to betas. He's the one who advertised 0x10c as a followup.

His work ethic has been criticized in the past because features introduced in one version of Minecraft would be abandoned by the next and remain incomplete. Bugs would remain unfixed for long stretches of time. There wasn't a public bug tracker (if there was any at all), so users had to list bugs themselves on a fan wiki page.

To claim that criticm is "antisocial" and that we should instead treat him as a best friend to have a beer with is an odd notion. Unless Notch is your personal friend, he is just a programmer working at a company, and the only relationship you have with him is as a customer. If you sell something, get used to criticism.
I have seen less criticism from the engineering community than from other groups, thought this may be due to a general reluctance of engineers to go on the record unless obligated.
It always pains me when I see people use cryptographic hashes (such as MD5 or SHA) in situations where they just need a hash with good mixing and avalanche behaviour.

Cryptographic hashes may perform to good quality, but they are a zillion times slower. And obviously they are not guaranteed to be reversible.

Elsewhere in this discussion are some good links to fast, non-cryptographic hashing functions (very cool, I hadn't heard about SipHash before).
> all corporations and CEO's are greedy except for Apple and Jobs (and probably Tesla/SpaceX/Musk).

having had a negative run-in with musk in the mid-90s I have _never_ been under this illusion, at least wrt musk in particular.
So funny! I came in here to post the same thing. Or at least that quote stuck out at me. I really don't like these kind of articles on HN because they feed into the paranoia some developers have. As hard as it is to fathom both sides need each other pretty much equally to maintain long term success.
You still have property taxes, maintenance, and upkeep costs on a home. In condo/co-op situations you have a building maintenance fee. In an urban environment it is difficult or impossible to be self sustaining because there just is not enough land to do so.

An article (I can't reference) in the WSJ on the Greek economic crises discussed a middle aged adult who left a job in Athens, returning home to the country side to milk goats, his income dropping to a few hundred dollars a month. At least there was a country side to return to.

I would argue that a good portion of the "reason we don't work 15 hours a week" is related to government policy. I am speaking globally here, not isolating one country or another. Government policies raise property taxes, rezone areas, sometimes seize property for development (happening at mass scale in China), and do a whole lot of other things to increase economic activity. Generally, an individual sitting in a home not doing much does not maximize the growth of the particular municipality or nation. Thus, that individual finds themselves with many opposed to his or her interests. The only defense is both very strong property right laws and a general belief system ready to support them.
'Almost finished' build of Windows 8.1 still a mess
And a liter is about 1/4 of a gallon (useful when calculating gasoline prices.)
No, but a lot of the same types of problems surface even in all these different fields, engineering does have some rather uniquely diversified fields, but at their core they still follow ...a lot of... the same laws of physics.
"Please don't talk tradecraft to me."

Fine I'm doing it wrong, but you don't have to be a dick about it by waving around someone's lack of knowledge in this space and then saying they are not even knowledgable enough to interact with you. Doing so does not raise the level of discourse.
If IVs are predictable and inputs are influenced by attackers (ie, attackers get a degree of chosen plaintext), attackers can mount a byte-at-a-time decryption attack a la ECB mode; this is what the BEAST attack did. I don't know that this is plausible with Random(), but why even make people wonder? What was the logic behind dropping to an insecure RNG for a random crypto parameter?

It sounds like you're also building a system from scratch that doesn't have forward secrecy. Why don't the parties arrange for temporary secrets and use the public keys solely to ensure that they've securely agreed on them? The system you've built is less secure than OTR, which is widely implemented and already has libraries that work on WinAPI.
I thought the same thing as I started reading through the article - this attitude is endemic to anyone who thinks that what they do is the most important function and that the business couldn't survive without them.

The truth is that you need all parts of the business to succeed, working well together.

That said, I think there are stages in the progression. In the beginning, you can't sell anything if you don't have a product. But once you have a reasonably good product, you need good marketing and sales to have people become aware of it.

I worked closely with the marketing department in my last job and it definitely made me see how big an impact a good team can have. They did a lot of creative work to sell the product.
Fan page for Steve Jobs posts to avoid kutcher's "jobs"
Nice bit of introspection. When I first started working I found I could make as much money as I could ever want by consulting and working. If you don't sleep much and you live in a consulting friendly place, its quite viable. But I too noticed that it made "home" also the "office" and you couldn't really get away from it, and that made it less fun.

So I ended up limiting my consulting considerably, and instead working on "fun" code (mostly robotics based) which as it turned out sometimes people wanted to pay for, but for the most part has been just for fun.

Notch has a wonderful gift, and while I mourn the fact that 0x10c is unlikely to ever see the light of day, I think having him make cool stuff is better than having him burn out trying to live up to the expectation momentum that 0x10c had developed.
I didn't wanted to make sensational title that says nothing about content. I hate this on HN. Such attention hunting is an act without honor.

Article is about V8-juice author abandoning his library for reasons that I don't personally consider right or wrong. I wanted to share this because there is a slight chance that state of V8 documentation (which I've never seen or used myself) is a political decision on a higher level (too little outcome from too much effort) and some discussion around the topic may change that.
RSA, PKCS #1 v1.5 signatures, unauthenticated CBC.
Essential practices for women in technology
How, then, do you account for the very basic and substantial errors described in the article?
That's why it's so awesome. What don't you understand? I get infinite scaling and the datastore. When goread hit the HN front page and the gizmodo front page a few weeks ago, it wasn't any slower: everything scaled perfectly. Consider some of the other readers that have hit the HN front page - they became unusable for a day or two until the traffic died down. App engine is an incredible platform for developing scalable websites.
How to Make Money by Selling All or Part of Your iOS App
For You To Borrow, Some Libraries Have To Go Begging
On Being New Father and Struggles, Lessons Learned While Building Business
Admittedly both of these projects are quite ambitious, but I have to think that delivering equipment to asteroids, maintaining that equipment while it works, and then returning the output of that work to Earth, seems much more involved than building and operating a 300-mile evacuated pipe on the Earth's surface.
We think that the traditional enterprise sales model is dead. And we don't necessarily think that your analogy is always true – see self-pick farms where end users come and choose the produce that they want. There are numerous examples of this as well now in the world of software — see Atlassian, 37signals, Palantir as good examples. Maybe it's just that we should not think about these disciplines so differently. We could probably all agree on that.
Beijing introduces recycling banks that pay subway credits for bottles
Thoughts on Service Fingerprinting
The rich are more disconnected from everyone else in India than pretty much anywhere else in the world, especially a place like the U.S. that worships the middle class. Many rich people in India don't even think of poor people as human, and that's shockingly culturally accepted.
I can only imagine the kind of pressure someone like notch is put in from their players and fans, but there's a little more to this story than "the little side project that ended up owning me".

0x10c was a thing. It was announced, had a domain and website with documentation and updates [1], had preview videos, etc. The point is that it looked and was sold like a product, so it's perhaps understandable that lots of people were waiting excitedly for it.

That said, there'd be nothing worse than notch feeling like he had to finish the game no matter what. That would be a sure-fire recipe for a bad experience all around. I think it's great that he's given his blessing to the independent effort, because 0x10c is just the kind of project that benefits the most from a team of people who hardcore geek out on it.

[1] http://0x10c.com/
Many people would argue that the flip side of this is that less people would make things like this now that the internet offers so much more, easier time-consuming.
But it's not reduced to that problem. It's just screwed by it. Even if you could build the pylons, you still need to make the tube smooth to within 2mm for hundreds of miles.

This says nothing about the overblown cost reduction. Being able to build the hyperploop at 6bn dollars implies being able to build a slower (say 200 mph) but same weight trolly on that runs on the same pylons. This seems dubious.
Is that really the only problem?

It seems to me that expecting hundreds of miles of pipe to be pushed back and forth hundreds of feet (albeit presumably slowly) puts a heck of a lot of stress on the self-same pipe. How is this that much different from building a side-ways space elevator? Even if it's easier to push sideways than up, it still adds up to quite a bit over hundreds of miles.
So, how can we fix this? I like the idea of crowdsourcing funding, as with the Ubuntu Edge (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge).

They aren't asking for funding quite on the same scale as the Hyperloop, but it's definitely larger than the ~ $1 million required for another phone app.
Signatures and message authentication codes aren't the same thing.
As I pointed out though, without some sense of what "many" means, it's not possible to make an effective planning decision based on this hypothesis.

For example, what's the bias error? How many new problems are solved daily by people with expertise in the field, which would take someone without that expertise a long time? This is also different than the class of problems I think you're referring to, which are cases where the experts in the fields are already stymied. Even then, you might not notice the ones where someone with 15 years of experience figures it out, because you expect that to happen, while if an intern solves it then it's notable.

At the point where the group is stuck, dead in the water on a problem, then it's definitely useful to have others look on it, if only because there isn't much to lose by doing so.
solutions like http://code.google.com/p/closure-library/source/browse/closu... have been in use for many years.
I'm not surprised they are scared. Mr. Greenwald has written a New York Times bestselling book on executive authority, broken multiple storoes on his blog about wiretapping that each led to front-page stories on most major newspapers in the country, and Russ Feingold read from my blog during the censure hearings.

I don't think there has ever been a journalist as brave.
Public WiFi Threats Dissected
You're probably right, but I don't have examples to hand.
Yeah. I was surprised to see these since they are both old news.
In a modern society, you will have complex systems where the individual worker is so abstracted away from the concrete value that they will not be able to see the immediate effect of their actions, but this does not make them pointless. To an investment banker, all they see are numbers growing larger, but that does take away from the fact that they're moving millions of dollars, which invariably comes from somewhere.

This is not an issue of capitalism. If you work for someone else, then by definition, the motives for your work are not your own, thus you will often fail to see the immediate point in your work past the description of your company on Wikipedia.

Do truly pointless jobs exist? Sure, but the author sure seems to across as simply listing jobs he doesn't understand as pointless. Perhaps his musician friend could have fared better if he had a better 'PR researcher' to publicize his work. Until we think of a system where we do not work for capital, our lives will revolve around creating capital to sustain ourselves, making it hard for all 7 billion people on Earth to derive meaning from it.
I appreciate the feedback, are you doing multiple comparisons with one constant? I'll take look at this tweak for the next round.
You can either pay or self host (which is quite simple).
This article seems to be one big exercise in "false dichotomy" - the world is EITHER "sales guys are always right" or "engineers are always right"; the world is EITHER "engineers need sales guys more" or vice versa; the world is EITHER "the sales guy is right about feature x" or "the engineer is right about feature x".

Startups and customer development (a la Steve Blank or PG) is messy by nature. That's the whole art of a startup - balancing your own vision for the technology with the market demand and other forces. Both hands are needed to wash each other.

So even a small startup should have a robust Product Management function/group/team that has a leg both in the Customer's world and the Engineer's world.

What's odd about this post is that the company is apparently targeted at Product Managers... but reads like its from a world in which the brilliant-and-precious engineers only ever deal directly with horrible sales ogres. If I was a product manager in the market for a tool like this, I would hope my software vendor had a more nuanced view of how customer/technology teams should interact.

My $0.02!
Two Root Causes Of My Recent Depression
I'm one of them. It is definitely a double-edged sword.
I call his work bullshit after seeing how smoothly Minecraft development was under Jeb, and seeing how mod developers work. It wasn't until a talented and motivated developer took over the project that quality improved, IMO.

And mod developers are out there writing far more fleshed out, balanced and reliable code despite the fact that they still do not have access to the unobfuscated source. Minecraft is still released without an API, or any mod tools, and no source.

When I look at the brilliant and dedicated work of those who reverse engineer the binary for every major release, building third party mod api's like Bukkit and Forge, and allowing for ever-more-smooth updates of a spaghetti of dozens of disparate mods... it's hard not to look down on Notch's work.

I mean hell, the teams reverse-engineering and supporting so many mods are unpaid, and small. They've gotten better, faster, and are more dedicated.

In the past year we've seen unified liquid API under Forge allowing for mods like IC2, Buildcraft and Railcraft to share their liquid tanks, liquid pipes, etc. We've seen multiple microblock API's with Chickenbone's brilliant implementation rolled into Forge. We've seen the massive surge in popularity for managed modpacks (basically package management for first party and third party minecraft distributable). So not only full mod api's and basic package management, but brilliant new functionality exposed in wonderful api's. And half a decade later, Notch/Mojang still can't roll a basic mod api for the game (and their 'plugin-api', which has been in development since 2010 and is still unreleased, is woefully underfeatured compared to what the community offers today from multiple different third party modloaders).

But why does it matter? No one looks down on Jobs for being bad at product design. Because he wasn't a designer by trade, he was a leader. Notch created an amazing platform and has handled it rather well. I'd love to have seen a lot of things prioritized or handled way sooner, but in the end, no one can question the success of his idea.

This coming from a longtime Minecrafter (pre-survival) and current host of an FTB-based server.
My observation on sales in general, and this applies especially to software:

- If you can only sell when your product has every feature, and the cheapest price, then you're not really selling. You're taking orders.

- The sales job creates value by convincing customers to pay up for added value in the product, or accept less value (or benefits or features) if they want to pay less.

- There are two types of salespeople who find a way to add a lot of value.

1 - Those who are in so deep with their customers that they are almost indistinguishable from their own employees. You know you have it when they're invited to join their customer's company softball team, or the customer's security guard waves them through with a smile. The insight they bring back is priceless, and they allow you to preempt most competition.

2 - Those who are fully knowledgable and networked within their company, and can efficiently bring the full power of the organization to bear on the customer problems, making credible promises to the client.

Either 1 or 2 can add a lot of value. It's 1 in 1000 that has both, so that's too much to ask for. The author of the article seems to be asking for #2. I'd suggest that #1 is incredibly valuable too.
The danger of that approach is that, in my experience, it's more likely to turn someone away from Scala. At my last job, some of the engineers did write Java in Scala. In what I'm sure is not a coincidence, they were also the ones who disliked Scala the most, and felt that it was detrimental to our codebase. By not learning its differentiating features, all they saw was the burden of having two languages, library support, spotty IDE, painful Scala upgrades, etc. In fact, since I've left, I've heard that they are migrating a lot of the Scala back to Java; the effort is being led by those who never wrote idiomatic Scala. Again, I'm sure this is not a coincidence.
It seems like many people are making this thermal strain criticism of hyperloop, is it possible that the critics are posting link-bait? I only say this because few are contributing new ideas, and most are writing with substantial amounts of vitriol.
Doesn't seem like an intellectually honest article. It starts out saying 300 miles of pipe creates too long of an expansion to handle at either end and that the design doesn't address this. Although even then the expansion is well within the realms of an airport runway, for example.

But the whole proof by contradiction at the start is proved wrong when he quotes the design document saying there is expansion provisions at the stations, not just the very start and end. So his entire first calculation that is supposed to prove the design untenable is erroneous based just on the parts of the design he himself quotes.