skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A 'startup' need not be something in
Silicon Valley, based on information technology,
venture funded, and intended for an exit at
$1+ billion.

Working at GM, GE, IBM, Cisco, or any of a long
list of other famous, big companies tends to
be a long walk on a short pier and not a 'career'
with which one can get hired, buy a house,
support a family, grow in prosperity, pay for
college for the kids, and retire comfortably.

Why? Such a career needs to last about
45 years, and in all
of the history of the US since the Industrial
Revolution there has been only a tiny fraction
of jobs in large corporations that could be
the basis of such a career.

E.g., might have
joined IBM in 1950 and then, 44 years later,
lost the job when the company lost $16 billion
and went from 407,000 employees down to
209,000 and cleared out rush hour traffic jams
in a large chunk of Upstate NY. That was about
the best shot at a 45 year career in IBM: Join
before 1950? IBM was not much of a company then.
Join IBM after 1950? Likely the job would last
less than the 44 years of my example.

GM? Shipped
most of its jobs out of the US, helped Detroit
and much of Michigan and much of the Midwest
Rust Belt look like a war zone, and went bankrupt.

GE? Discovered that good products made in Japan
sold quantity 1 retail in the US for less than
the direct, marginal manufacturing cost at GE,
and GE closed down big chunks of their business.

So, what's keeping people in the US employed?
Mostly small businesses, especially ones with
a geographical barrier to entry. Such businesses
do need to be started and, thus, are startups.
The US has millions of such businesses all
across the US in big cities down to towns
that are just crossroads. Net, startups
are most of what is keeping the US economy
running.

So, the broad idea that startups are rare
and strange with a lot of obscure aspects
is a bit silly. E.g., long lists of points
of tricky advice on just how to do a startup
are a big silly for nearly all US startups.
E.g., in my neighborhood, the guys mowing
grass show up with a relatively new truck
worth, say, $30,000, towing a trailer with
at least one lawnmower worth maybe $15,000 --
could plug together quite a server farm
for that much cash.
But what do you think causes burnout? Doing 10 years of work in 3 years? To me, that's energizing. What causes burnout for me is doing the same thing too many times.

Also, doing too little work over too much time with too many chefs spoiling the broth.

Also, repeatedly building things that get scrapped due to a change in direction.

So I've found startups less burnout-inducing than big companies.
The point is that you shouldn't have to configure things like @Path because they can be inferred from the class name. Why not:

class Hello {
def get() {
"Hello, world!"
}
}

I would prefer to see this and then let someone have a routing config somewhere else if they want to move the /hello endpoint.
I'm glad to read this, nemesisj. I was just reading last night the parameters for applying my startup idea for inclusion in the YC program, and was getting pretty excited that such a program exists.

I'm new to actually trying to be an entrepreneur (as opposed to just thinking about it), and it is encouraging to read that your version of working more than fairly-standard full time is management failure. I agree entirely.
Was the flying performed on the frog's part, or was it assisted by the 360,000 pounds of thrust coming out of the rocket?
Thanks Stephan.

I will reach you.
Here's another easter egg - it's a sarcastic warning if you try to perform date operations on a nil date:

" -[__NSCFCalendar components:fromDate:]: date cannot be nil

I mean really, what do you think that operation is supposed to mean with a nil date?

An exception has been avoided for now.

A few of these errors are going to be reported with this complaint, then further violations will simply silently do whatever random thing results from the nil. Here is the backtrace where this occurred this time (some frames may be missing due to compiler optimizations):"

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12505833/what-kind-of-sar...
Well, native apps are pretty much always better than html5 apps. The only main reason to make html5 apps is to reduce developing costs by a significant amount. I don't think anyone disagrees with that.
"HTML tags lea͠ki̧n͘g fr̶ǫm ̡yo​͟ur eye͢s̸ ̛l̕ik͏e liq​uid pain"

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...
Yeah, then you read the article and it says "molested."

I went back to verify this and couldn't find it (!). Until I searched for "gang" instead... That's when I found The Guardian had changed the wording in the last few hours! If you scroll down to the bottom you'll find this:

"The standfirst to this article was amended on 12 September 2013. It originally referred to a girl who "let herself be gang-raped" to get her BlackBerry back. The misrepresented the text of the piece, which says she allowed herself to be sexually assaulted."

So, go ahead and blame technologists for allowing the internet to cater to our more prurient interests, but the newspaperpeople seem to the ones directly responsible.
> how is looking at tits misogynistic?

The question has been well-covered in a related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6352595
The handheld scanner and mill are key. My dentist and I also spoke about 3D printing, and he said you need 50 micron resolution or better, which 3D scanning and milling can do, but not 3D printing. You want the best fit possible, otherwise the piece will fail.
Any ideas for Lisp drink?
Interesting that HN keeps killing threads on this topic:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360328

A stubborn refusal to confront the problem is what helps these attitudes fester.
I love how wtf, in Androidland, stands for "What a Terrible Failure"
Coder for Raspberry Pi
This would be great. We need more of this in NYC.
He didn't mention 9/11 - he mentioned the WTC "bombing"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing
the problem isn't that girls are being attacked for being girls... it's that any technical person is going to be broken down to their flaws (their humanity), and then attacked for it. that is what technology does. did girls not see the terminator when they were growing up? the reason that "sexism" is on any stage is because women can't handle being judged, and would rather cry about it on a podium in front of people without microphones, than sit in an office and develop technology.
That's fine, then TC shouldn't put any CrunchFund people on the judging panel.
I hadn't realised it was quite that crazy.

I'm still wrestling with CE approval for a device containing a GSM module. Which looks like it's going to be about E15000 for the radio and electrical testing, plus the complexities of RoHS compliance (random lab testing required, even if all your components are certified lead-free?)

I've concluded that Tindie-style electronics cottage industry is basically illegal in the EU. Fortunately I can still buy stuff from dealextreme and alibaba that doesn't have to comply..
Yes and Russian presidents get much larger platforms from which to sell their opinions on foreign policy to Russians. What's your point?
The closest I've ever come to understanding what it's like to have depression, or any other neurological disorder affecting mental state, was a few years back when I had a particularly bad cold and/or allergies, and decided to take Mucinex DM.

By the end of the first day I felt a general malaise. By the end of the second day I was feeling something I've never felt before, or since. Everything, and I mean everything in life seemed without value or purpose. The only thing that kept me functioning and not immobilized as a curled up ball in bed were the expectations of my family and job (which was also for family). Even so, I could tell I wouldn't be able to keep that up much longer.

When I come home, my two young daughters would run up and want to talk to me. While I admit, I sometimes lose patience for them when I'm tired, in this case I patiently let them explain what had happened so far that day, but the entire time, without exception, I could only think about how I wanted this to be over so I could sit down and do... what? Nothing seemed worthwhile. No TV, no book, no computer. I realized I might as well go lay down on the bed. My goals and ambitions were also gone. I didn't want to work, I just wanted to be left alone.

I lasted another day on Mucinex before I decided this was definitely not healthy, regardless of how much less phlegm I had to deal with, and stopped taking it. I felt normal (if stuffy) within a day or two.

I'm not saying this is the same as depression, I really have no basis for knowing. All I know is that if that's what people that are depressed feel like, I feel very, very sorry (and terrified) for them. The idea of the ramifications if that lasted long term are horrendous. If I survived it long term, I'm fairly certain it would be at the cost of ruining my life.

Interestingly, a friend of mine said he had a similar experience with Mucinex DM a few months later. I didn't get into the details with him though (although I had already described my experience before). It seemed too personal to ask for more detail, considering my own experience.
The reduction of women to a collection of body parts is often seen as a form of dislike for holistic femaleness -- it robs a person of their humanity. 3rd wave feminism might disagree with this to a point, but the 1st wave certainly wouldn't.
You say "meme of the day" but I'm sure you don't mean "meme of the day". It's more than a day long issue, and it's not a meme.
If I were reading a book where I could look at tabular data split across multiple pages and not see the headers at the top of each page, I would throw it out. When looking at multiple screen-fulls of tabular data, the expectation remains.

I was making applications in VB5 in the late '90s that solved this problem. Expecting it 15ish years later in a platform that includes tabular data as a core feature is not unreasonable.

HTML+CSS+Javascript is a poor general-purpose application development platform and an okay document engine. It is only made usable by the herculean combined effort of the entire 21st century software industry.
Scottish government pledge to end car emissions by 2050
Young Turks' III Points Festival Marries Music, Tech, Art in Miami
Understandable. When I was doing Keto everything and everyone suggested rum and Diet Coke was the best when out drinking.
According to people working in the industry in NYC that I talked to, a lot of the bonuses dried up after the financial crisis. Nowadays, the income for someone starting out (not an intern, but as a full time job after college) is only $80-90k.
Read the description of the photo on Instagram; they go into that.
http://packlove.com/optimus-prime

This website gives customizeable one page profiles for your pets. Seems pretty heavily used, I signed up one time and I get emails every couple of days because another user "loved" my pet.
Writing a reasonable program in Brainfuck isn't that hard. Malborge, on the other hand, was specifically designed to be impossible to write useful programs in. IIRC, Brainfuck was designed to be easy to write a compiler for.

From the wikipedia article linked above: "Malbolge was so difficult to understand when it arrived that it took two years for the first Malbolge program to appear. The first Malbolge program was not written by a human being, it was generated by a beam search algorithm designed by Andrew Cooke and implemented in Lisp"... "A correct 99 Bottles of Beer program, which deals with non-trivial loops and conditions, was not announced for seven years".
It is. I grew up in a bit of a different family. My grandparents are very wealthy.

My family does not transfer wealth. My Dad and my uncles are all self made men, the only thing they have to fall back on is the bed and food at their parents if things go south, not a cent of their money, and this has been made clear from their modest, even poor upbringing. No private schooling. No excessive tutoring, no special hires. You are dealt the same hand as everybody else. To my grandparents and parents, simple having FOOD and a free bed to fall back on is more than enough to alleviate any stress we have.

Everybody in my family works like dogs to reach my previous families wealth, and now it's the same for me. As soon as I was legal, my parents gave me $1000 for rent and food for the first two months of living on my own or I can return and pay them rent and still live under their rules.

While I'm not on the streets, the shame of having to return is a great driving force. The moment I moved out I didn't waste a second, I got to work, everyday, all day, because time was limited.

It is definitely a motivator.
How to Support a Woman in Tech
Why Companies Founded By College Dropouts Rarely Hire College Dropouts
It won't be enough until we see the headline, "NSA disbanded; Alexander held on charges of treason"
HN has had several stories this week on the Techchrunch Disrupt fiasco. The Business Insider story, not so much.
Sounds like you do believe in US exceptionalism
It might sound wrong to you, but that's fine. You can do something else. There are plenty of people who love working in banking with this sort of culture (and the financial rewards it brings). There's nothing wrong with different people having different goals.
Which is why the article says "in the next five years"
Ask HN: Fingerprint as a Service, for developers on ios?
Any chances for Fingerprint as a Service ?
After Google forked WebKit a few months ago into the Blink project the Qt trolls got together and decided that they will basing the future Qt WebKit module on the Google fork of WebKit and not the (Apple maintained) WebKit. While similar the two differ in a few key aspects the main one being if the WebKit/Blink webviews are in process or out of process (ignoring the discussion complication of webkit2).

There were various other reason for following Blink and honestly the day Blink came out I would be shocked if there hadn't been meetings in every company contributing to WebKit putting together a mini-project to decide if they should follow Google. There were a lot of little pain points in the WebKit project and Google in one swoop cleaned up a ton of them. If anything I see WebKit as an example of failing to steward an open source project on the part of Apple or the community as a whole. Everyone was working on their own problems that it was hard to get movement to fix bigger problems that applied to all ports. Even very visible things like letting each port have their own build system sounded good originally, but was one of the things holding the project back. I was on the edge of the community (worked on the qtwebkit port, helped port chrome to linux, ce port, blackberry port, etc) so I know only so much, but it would be interesting to hear from someone closer in the community not about what was bad technically in the project, but how as an project we (socially?) didn't fix them. Why didn't the WebKit meetings fix this? Did Apple have too much say because they owned the svn server to the detriment of themselves?
My phone? I didn't have a cell phone while growing up, the only phone at home was in the living room. So no wiretapping really needed...

And seriously, your parents aren't the NSA. Of course they should do what you are doing and of course you will do what you can so that they don't find out. It doesn't mean having a GPS tracker on you at all times.

I stand by my original point: the internet can be a very dangerous place filled with strangers, it's irresponsible to let your kids browse it unsupervised.
Massive Molasses Spill Devastates Honolulu Marine Life
Almost every employer I've had has emphasized the extreme hours before making an offer. It has never turned out to be a problem.

Only once did I object, and I didn't get the offer that time.

I think they say this stuff because it's part of their self-image; they really believe they're working crazy hours when in fact they're working 45-50 hours/week. Also because they want to screen out those who really want banker's hours and have no flexibility.
Personally I am seriously thinking of doing so.

A 16GB Nexus now cost $249 since last week, while a 16GB iPhone 5s costs $649. My thinking is that I can also buy the next upgrade to the Nexus and still save money.

One issue I do have is that the attraction iMessages , and leaving the iPhone world will close this door for me.
Site is currently down, here is their video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDAw7vW7H0c
Excel strengths come from the fact that the main mode of operation is generally declarative.

Excel's weaknesses for use in large scale systems largely come from the fact that it isn't easily maintainable because, in the same main mode of operation, the actual code is hidden in cells that need to be accessed individually (in terms of usability for someone trying to maintain it, its almost like having one line of code per source file, since you have to open each cell to bring the code in it into the "editor".)

The most common way to circumvent the problem posed by the second feature in Excel is to resort to coding in an imperative language, which negates the benefit of the first.

FP languages share the first feature, but not the second.
If Apple sold it as an operating system, they'd have to deal with a nightmare of drivers. As it stands one disk can cover almost every Mac ever made, and they're content with that.
I don't know, I understand your point but personally I do feel different about a small indipendent shop and a bigger company and I have different expectations from them. Smaller operations are always sustaining bigger risks and don't have as much wiggle room (and we know how high the risks are for apps these days).

You may say that's because I'm a developer too (though not indipendent), but I feel the same way about other fields, I like to buy my clothes in small stores instead of malls or eat at a local restaurant instead of a chain.

Usually my experience is better with smaller operations but in this specific case I think the Reeder author hasn't communicated very well and should have been more transparent from the beginning. Still, for the reasons above, I'm less likely to be really pissed at him than I would be to some large company that did the same.
You can also boot an iPhone in WTF mode, though I'm not entirely sure anybody outside of Apple knows what it does.

http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/WTF
Not too long ago HN was dominated by a wave of these stories that was not equaled until the NSA revelations.
To Enjoy Driverless Cars, First Kill All the Lawyers
Is that an official API? How long has it been around?
I'm actually about to go back to keto, as last time I bailed out halfway to my target. I might try rum this time, thanks :).
> It seems as if lead should be easier to press into shape than steel so I wonder why the difference in techniques.

I only worked briefly in a cold-forging factory, but I remember there being issues with wire stiffness and difficulties with getting economical yield when making very small things. We were working with steel, brass and copper, so lead may be different.
A = {all areas ∈ Tech | TNY's staff can cover the area at the level they cover other beats}

B = {all areas ∈ Tech | area interests TNY readership}

A ∩ B = ________
I like what is said here, but this isn't what first principles are. First principles are fundamental laws from which all else can be built. They are the underlying assumption in a proof or the laws of thermodynamics. They are not the hole to the drill or the email to the iPhone. Those are products, results. Like I said, I think the point is right. People focus on the technology rather than the result. This is the principle behind real, Christensen-style disruption (not the buzzword, but the real phenomenon). Sometimes you just need to do something better in a different way, while ignoring the horsepower (or whatever other metric) was the norm for a deprecated reason.
The C#, it turns out, is the same as a Java but with a finer stock of liqueurs. The recipe for C#.NET however, is proprietary and no one can quite explain why one in a thousand makes you ill, or why the bottom of the glass seems to fall out sometimes.
Samsung responds to new iPhones
I work for a small company (less than 20 people including contractors) that has been in business for 16 years. When I left my giant-ass defense contractor job to come here, a couple people there insisted on referring to it as a "startup". It is rapidly becoming a word that means whatever the speaker wants it to.
Whiskey. Neat.
You're offended that other people were offended? I think everyone (even you) knows what they meant by "lockerroom attitude" even if you disapprove of the word choice.
What three pivots taught us about the game of entrepreneurship
I couldn't find any videos of shot towers in action, but I did find a video of a man demonstrating a handmade modern shot manufacturing machine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwVvdIFyQ0Q
Ill get on the "plugging my positioning plugin train" - Here is my plugin for floating the table's header:

http://mkoryak.github.io/floatThead/

I am a both sad and happy that it may be obsolete soon. Maybe I can add feature detection for this and short-circuit 1000 lines of logic if sticky position exists.
If you want to bring started.in to your city, click here! http://seattle.started.in/contact-us/
On top of being embarrassed for doing this on stage, these people should be embarrassed for presenting such a fucking dumb idea for a hackathon.

On an 100% unrelated note, Adria Richards has transitioned from "Technology Evangelist" to "Programmer"?
Probably a combination of fatigue and not wanting to deal with the toxicity these type of threads tend to be utterly soaked in. "Confronting the problem" is hard in the company of reasoned discussion and nigh-impossible in the face of extremists.

*edit

And that's why I flagged it. Not because I'm some horrible sexist, or because I want women to fail, but because I don't want HN turning into Tumblr or SRS. On top of all that, they also tend to be the worst kind of predictable and boring - i.e. the complete polar opposite of what great HN content is. No thanks.
At the risk of not contributing anything but a negative comment, I feel like saying the latter is as damaging if not more so than the former. Broad generalizations which assume something which I think is fundamentally untrue (aside from whatever the core causes of the gender discrepancies are) do not serve to assist the situation. I've met plenty of nice guys in tech (more than assholes) and plenty of asshole women in tech. I think the problem (And, to be frank, I'm not sure calling it a problem is the best term, at the risk of attracting some ire) is far more complex than that.
It is clear that perverse incentives exist in some industries, and that those industries have failed to self-regulate. They now need regulation forced upon them.

Luckily, in the UK, we have the European Working Times directive, and so interns should not feel forced to work 70 continuous hours.
You have food and a free bed to fall back on. That's an immense safety net--exactly the kind of privilege we're talking about. And presumably that free bed is in some safe, comfortable suburb or at least the nicer part of the city, the food's not too bad either, and you can even take your MacBook home with you.

Some people don't have any living family members who can take them in. Both of my parents, all of my grandparents, and my only aunt are all dead. The rest of my family are people I don't know too well. I don't have the safety net you have. I've known immigrants who send most of their money back home to their parents. I know parents who have to support their own children.

Being young and childless with parents willing to take you in and feed you is a huge privilege and a massive safety net. Don't go around saying you're motivated because you don't have one.
Probably: 0.1 lbs thrust from the frog, and 359,999.9 lbs thrust from the rocket