skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The silliest part of the article is actually buried in the graph: the number-one reason people regret angel investments is that the company's "financial projections [were] overly optimistic."

All financial projections in an early startup's pitch deck are going to be overly optimistic. That's because it's a startup, not an established company with a proven business model. Angels shouldn't be filtering for degree of optimism in the projections, which are mostly meaningless at this stage. They should be filtering for the underlying assumptions in the projections. It's about the inputs in the model (strategic, human, and technological) -- not the exactitude of the projected outputs.
Looking at your blog, I wouldn't want to work anywhere that would consider you a culture fit.
that is a pretty fking good observation on wtc. wow.

the value is that you get to see inventory that you can't find anywhere else and all consolidated onto a single platform.
500 shops. all in 1 place from ny, la, chicago.

is it better to show the inventory? or have a deeper landing page with more info? we have 10,000 curated lifestyle products with a catalog and guide.

what is the best way to communicate that without getting to wordy?

when i had the signup modal two steps in, noone wanted to sign up bc they can get most of their daily dose of cool items fed to them on 1 page. would it be better to have sign up modal pop up after x time? would that help even if it was 10 seconds?
I happen to really like coding challenges. I much prefer them to a "technical interview" situation, which I find very stressful--trying to answer difficult questions in real time.

However, the coding challenges I've done for applications have always been in the vein of "solve this interesting puzzle and show us how you did it", not "do some boring day-to-day work, but do it for free".
Hi Daniel from Authy here. I helped with the design of this infrastructure last year and I was a little shocked we weren't able to do automatic fail-over with PostgreSQL.

I'd be interested to know if anyone here is running a Postgres pool that handles automatic fail-over how are you doing it? Specifically which watch-dog are you using, how are they handling slave to master promotion, how do you add more slaves automatically and how do you load-balance.
In theory a single transaction cannot involve more BTC than exists, but that's not a practical limit since you couldn't buy all the BTC that exists anyway.
Sure, we could probably tone the copy down a bit :) If you don't mind, I'm going to see about getting some of the stuff in your demo into Ionic, that'd be cool.
At least two of these three senators have been yelling into the wind about NSA abuses for around a decade. But sure, jump on to the Internet and spout nonsense if it makes you feel better about your government turning into a surveillance state.
i recently launched http://bootgrad.com to tackle the same problem. good points, rholdy. i believe though that there needs to be some objective statistics. sure, every bootcamp has different requirements and focus on different skills and have different lengths. i believe that if enough data is put out there, then bootcamps will be forced to open up their books.
Not to mention Wyden was the one who asked James Clapper the questions that lead him to lie to Congress. Still have no idea why Clapper still holds his position.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsmo0hUWJ08&t=33s
Seems like bad advice considering how freely the money is flowing right now and how valuable a good investor could be.
Or just press and hold the mouse. You dissapear. Wait a little bit, you win.
Co-Founder of Everypost.com: Tips to Build your Social Media SEO Strategy
yea but that involves work in a sense. You have to tend to this land and develop communities or the land is worthless. I'm sure the value grew over time as the residents were able to make it into a nicer place.

They didn't just buy a few bytes of data & see the value appreciate by 9billion% just for sitting on their fat asses.

And that's the other issue. Land is an ACTUALLY limited resource. We don't know how to pull it out of thin air. The Bitcoin currency is artificially limited just to force a supply/demand situation. People can make other competing currencies just by forking the code.
Not really. It is much easier to lose or make illegible a piece of paper or data than it is to lose large heavy gold or to damage the gold to a degree that severely reduces its value.
politely asking for a formal admission of wrongdoing counts as "not fucking around" now? how about some actual punishments or any sort of deterrent to more of this sort of behaviour?
As the article mentions, 1/2 of all investments lose money (source: http://sites.kauffman.org/pdf/angel_groups_111207.pdf). Given that, plus the fact that 6-12 months usually provides a lot of hints about whether an investment will be a good one, these findings don't seem very surprising.
First Winamp, and now John Carmack leaves id. This has been a brutal week.

On one hand, it's exciting to see John working on VR tech. I really do hope we see something amazing out of it. But it still feels wrong, an id Software without Carmack. Hopefully they can continue on and reclaim some of their former glory as well, and let's hope Carmack keeps in the spotlight.
I agree and disagree. I am a candidate and prefer coding challenges provided they are reasonable. Meaning, if you are wanting to check the person's ability in x, check the person ability in x, not y. So for example give a starter code with part that would showcase person talent in x is left out. Yes, this involves prior effort on the part of the company to come up with this exercise and on the person. I don't quite vouch for code samples, because it is very difficult to understand where they came up with the ideas and who wrote the code, and if it was a multi-person project. In the former case, it is a very controlled experiment and one you designed, so one can judge much better.
It's weird they didn't designate him as "Spiritual Leader" instead or something that fits him better long ago.

Everyone knew this, so it's weird it had to end in this drastic manner.
That would seriously diminish confidence in bitcoin, though it might encourage spending of bitcoins. I suspect the latter will not be enough to overcome the former. The end result would likely be bogus transactions between addresses merely to keep the money "alive". Adding 0 value and potentially negative value as now a set of useless transactions will sit in the ever growing blockchain.

Similarly, during the transition of clients accepting to clients not accepting those coins, what happens if there's a transaction from one of them? What if it's only partial, they spent 2k but left 2k, they're active but now out 2k BTC that they can't spend?

This is sort of like discussing blacklisting "stolen" BTC. Suppose I figure out 100 brainwallets and steal 1000 BTC. Before I get added to the blacklist, I transfer 1 BTC to each of 1000 addresses. Do you blacklist the whole chain of addresses going back? Do you only blacklist that one amount (essentially reducing the value of those addresses by 1 BTC each)? What if one of those addresses is yours and I'm just tainting every address I can find. You'll have 1BTC that you can't spend, and you don't know to whom it belongs. Which of the original 100 addresses do you send it back to if that's the intent of the system? Do you send it back to a known hacked address? Does the former owner have a mechanism to announce a valid new address for kindhearted souls to return their bitcoins to?
I got Xprivacy on my android so it doesn't affect me. Before that I had Pdroid. These things don't affect me because I take privacy in my own hands.
Ask: Best developers tools you've used (any language)
I was curious to hear what the general HN community considers the best developer tools they've every used, regardless of what language the tool is specific to.

Talk about whatever, from how Lein and Clojure allow you to require a specific version of Clojure as a dependency (as opposed to the rbenv/rvm or nvm hackery seen in ruby and javascript respectively), to how npm does all dependencies locally to projects to avoid the hell that is dependency conflicts when all deps are stored in a global space, to lisp machines, the small talk developer environment, LightTable, gdb, etc.

There is a lot tools devs can learn from what is available for languages they may not be familiar with and it'd be nice to get one long thread highlighting some of the tooling you should check out for inspiration.
Free and New Printable MAT Sample Questions with answers (
I wholeheartedly agree about treason, but perjury is a perfectly reasonable thing to charge people with here. And it's a plenty serious crime. For non-immune people, it means jail time. For the president, it's good grounds for impeachment.
Consumer conditioning, it eliminates a psychological barrier to getting paid apps. If normally you download free apps and then one time you get a paid app and you have to enter a password then it makes you think twice and increases the risk you'll reassess and stop the sale. The way it is now the habits involved in getting paid or free apps are the same. It's apple simplifying things for you mentally even though it takes more of your time.
No excuses, remember. What about your personal Github profiles?
Not sure why anyone is downvoting you- this is the quote:

"John Carmack, who has become interested in focusing on things other than game development at id, has resigned from the studio,""

It does sound kind of testy/flippant to me. But it could be out of context.
Google's Doctor Who doodle
While I agree that the request to build, deploy and open source the code of a website is a bit too much, I think you are exaggerating a little bit on the why's you wouldn't do it.

"I'm not equipped to do your challenge" - really?

"Engineers aren't different" - again, really?

Rhetorical question: you don't want the job, do you?

I am not sure if the issue is with the hiring process, or with the candidates' ego here. Candidates. Plural. As the article's author doesn't seem to be the only one.

Apparently there is a lot of people that believe they are rockstars and they don't need the job, the job needs them.
Challenges like this help to figure out non technical skills as well, like: how committed a candidate is; how much he wants that job.

I'd rather hire a junior that is committed than a senior that is not.
Yes, as their CTO. Which makes me wonder if we've seen the last of his Code God skills. (But maybe not...)
Neo4j 2.0: A Giant Leap For Graphkind
"latest fashion crap!" i love it. your gf must be hot then.

btw. can i ask you if you were deterred in signing up bc of the modal that popped up? other people here seemed to be pissed. i've tried to test so many different ways. it seems like if there is a story written about us (pr piece) conversion skyrockets. otherwise, conversion goes down. but if i show inventory and other parts of the site, a lot of people are lazy bc we have a forever scroll function on the shop page so people just browse what they want for 5 minutes and they leave.

any insight would be super helpful. thanks for the compliment!
I think giving immunity for breaking the law, in advance, also strains the concept of rule of law...
I believe it is illegal in US. They do exist in UK. Not sure on their legality there.
Read the questions at the end. The letter isn't fucking around:

Huh?

They wrote a letter. With polite suggestions.

I like the letter, and I'm happy to see many more letters like this. Heck, I might write my own letter. But you are spinning this.
10 Links Every Saturday - GoldieBlox, Gravity Spinoff, Amazon Meetings
I seriously doubt it. You should read his tweets. He's still very much a programmer.
Placing the president above the law itself violates the concept of rule of law. I don't know of anything that explicitly grants the president immunity from criminal prosecution. The ability to pardon grants an implicit immunity absent impeachment, but pardon is forbidden in cases of impeachment.

This, of course, could be my ignorance. Certainly the only appearance of "immun" in the Constitution is in "immunities" in an unrelated context.
If your product catalog is good enough, users will sign up. Don't force Facebook authentication either.

Also, I can't tell if your site is like Pinterest, where I flag things I'm interested in, or like JackThreads, where the store's product selection is nicely curated.
Very happy for John - his early days were at the very forefront of PC game development and while iD still does great stuff, video gaming is in a very stable, iterative place right now.

Hopefully chasing this VR dream will take him back to those early pioneering days.
They've embraced it to a large extent with a huge number of sequels. Aside from that, Quake 3 is considered by many to be the apex of fast-twitch FPS skill games. It certainly makes Call of Duty look like grandma's bridge club.
Lessons from Healthcare.Gov: Contracts and Delivery Methods
You don't need to melt the metal for there to be "chemical bonding". And now for me to probably mangle what I remember from material science.

When you're dealing with metals (and alloys) you're pretty much dealing with a lattice of atoms. It's not very useful to talk about individual atoms "chemically bonding" with each other, or at least not the way you would talk about say... bounding sodium and chlorine to get table salt, or nitrogen with oxygens to get nitrates.

Instead, you have this lattice of metal atoms, within which you can incorporate other atoms. Say you had a lattice of iron. By incorporating other metals into the lattice (say magnesium, or nickle), or even other non-metallic elements (most famously carbon) into the lattice, then you get different alloys. But at no time are you actually bonding say an iron atom with a carbon atom making a "steel molecule".

So when you weld dissimilar metals/alloys, what you're trying to do is to get two dissimilar lattices to "blend" into each other. When you have a crappy weld, one of the things that happen is you get a crappy boundary layer (potentially of stuff like metal oxides) sitting between the two lattices. Whereas if you have a "perfect" weld, the two lattices will seamlessly merge into each other - you'll get this diffusion zone. In the case of two similar metals, then the two lattices can actually perfectly merge - that is what Feynman is trying to get at there.

So, back to the point. Creating a good weld is in many ways as close to "chemically bonding" as you can get with metals / lattice structured materials. Or at least, in a useful sense.
Ah. I should have finished the review:

"The real problem with this result, however, is that it is not Wolfram's. He didn't invent cyclic tag systems, and he didn't come up with the incredibly intricate construction needed to implement them in Rule 110. This was done rather by one Matthew Cook, while working in Wolfram's employ under a contract with some truly remarkable provisions about intellectual property. In short, Wolfram got to control not only when and how the result was made public, but to claim it for himself. In fact, his position was that the existence of the result was a trade secret. Cook, after a messy falling-out with Wolfram, made the result, and the proof, public at a 1998 conference on CAs. (I attended, and was lucky enough to read the paper where Cook goes through the construction, supplying the details missing from A New Kind of Science.) Wolfram, for his part, responded by suing or threatening to sue Cook (now a penniless graduate student in neuroscience), the conference organizers, the publishers of the proceedings, etc. (The threat of legal action from Wolfram that I mentioned at the beginning of this review arose because we cited Cook as the person responsible for this result.)"
The AOSP Browser uses the system webview, and the webview is now chromium-based and continues to be updated. So it's only abandonware in the sense that the UI didn't change with the latest release.
You can have multiple addresses per wallet but BTC is still stored in addresses, not wallets. So if you have some BTC in address A and none in address B then you can't use B to buy anything. If you transfer money from A to B that leaves a record.
Windows Scanner Driver using SANE network frontend
This exactly.

With the exception of my current employer, who asked me to make a small static site with some JS oddities (about 6 hours total), they've all been fairly simple challenges just to get a grip on my thinking process, not really have me do the routine stuff.
I never thought about your situation. As a kid web dev I used to limit password size for db issues as 'byoung2' said: like using a VARCHAR(42) or something like taht depending on the way I store the hash!
Anyway, next time I'll think about you and allow user more space for password! :)
So, I decided to treat your awful comment like you decided to treat the original article.

> I have to

That's not true. You don't have to reply. No one is requiring you do that. You've already started off by lying. This means anything else you might want to contribute is awful and worthless.

> say

You didn't. You typed it out. I'm pretty sure you didn't "say" anything. And now you are trying to be confusing. That's just awful.

> , that headline font is awful

Well, that's your opinion. Your opinion is worthless because you haven't validated your credentials.

> and the link highlighting on the blog's front page is worse.

So, not the page we were directed to. Did you happen to check out his Facebook page, too? Did you decide to comment on his awful dinner choice last night?

> There is a bit of oddness

This whole sentence is odd. In fact, that sentence is far worse than anything the OP did. You would say it's awful. In this case, you'd be right, because it's a shit sentence.

> in declaring yourself a front-end person by talking about not needing to be tested as a back-end person

That's not what he's doing. He's saying he's a front-end person, and was tested for back-end work. He's not saying he's a front-end person by talking about not needing to be tested as a back-end person.

Those are two completely different things. If you don't immediately understand why, I apologize, but you wrote the awful and confusing sentence.

> when you're applying for a front-end job yet having a blog with a such a jarring front-end.

What's jarring about it? Surely you aren't speaking of the design. That would be a designer, not a front-end person. And we've established he's not apply for a designer's position.

Unless you are suggesting all designers should be expert programmers? Because that's the only way what you said remotely makes any sense.

Awful, just awful.
Presumably any attacker only cares about the encrypted data, not the user's credentials. The data is encrypted with a single data-key - so the attack would focus on cracking that key.

The attacker knows that identical processes are used to encrypt that data-key. Even with multiple keys and nested encryptions, it seems that at the very least that the reduced entropy of search space around the data-key can be used to optimize a brute-force search. This would be further compounded if at least one user's key-encryption-key were known.

I'm probably missing something important, but if I've learned anything from the cryptopals challenges its that you don't want to reduce your entropy in any way.

Would a simple solution be to add a random salt at each level of the nested key encryptions?
I understand the point the author's trying to make.

For me, personally, this would be the better choice to judge my skills - and probably would lead to better chances for me to get the job. I suck at these braindead trick questions that are considered 'clever'. I'm not comfortable around a whiteboard only, being grilled by one or more other people while thinking.

I'm not slow, not really anyway. But I'm faster and better the more I know about the stuff at hand. I'll be good on the job, I'll suck solving math puzzles that some guy just read about in a book that ranks high on Amazon's list of code puzzle collections..

So - I'm glad that there's both. The author obviously would've preferred to show his skills live, in a discussion. This guy here would be happy to hand you a (small, mind you - I agree with the time-sink argument) finished project and discuss _that_ afterwards.
A nice literal example of why the US has three separate, adversarial branches of government. When one gets a bit full of itself the other two have time to band together to put the offender in its place before it can become truly dominant.

Also, this is the most important part of this entire scenario - not the spying, not the secrecy, not the internets, but the executive overreach. The use of spying and secrecy to gain tremendous power (including over the other branches of government). The ability for the executive to grab enough power to coopt the legislature and deceive the courts - and get away with it. Were that to have actually come to pass little else would have been important. It's intriguing and relevant (for us) that this overreach was made possible by the knowledge gap generated by rapidly advancing technology - 'trust us, we'll get the bad guys with this newfangled technology stuff like twitters and facebooks'. But in the end, it's just a power-grab.
New partnership provides knowledge-based programming environment
I strongly disagree with the premise of this title (or the conclusion of the story).

Bad recruiters are bad, yes. But there are good recruiters (even if they're hard to find!)

A good recruiter knows not to do things like spam developer mailing lists, stiff candidates on reimbursements, or any of the many ridiculous shenanigans we often hear stories about. A good recruiter also knows that the best way to recruit talent is to develop longstanding relationships with said talent, and therefore understands that meeting with developers who aren't actively looking for a job is not only a valuable use of their time, but arguably the most valuable use of their time[0].

That said, I've had my fair share of bad experiences with recruiters. I'm still waiting on a travel reimbursement for a company I interviewed with (and eventually turned down, partly because of this debacle) months ago. (It's not a 2-person, bootstrapped company; they have well more than enough cash to cover a ~$500 check.)

I really wish there were a "wall of shame" for companies that take more then 2 months to reimburse people (especially student candidates) for travel expenses. Six months (the longest I have ever had to wait, from a well-funded company that was later acquihired) is the longest I've heard of.

[0] Yes, I had a recruiter stop responding to my emails a couple of years ago when I told him that I was several months away from graduating and wanted to wait a couple of months before actually beginning the interview process.
This demonstrates something we all ought to remember: whenever a new business idea pops up in the consumer web arena, some people are optimistic and hail it as the future of that business, while some dismiss it as a fad saying "that'll never work". The last group is often considered conservative and old fashioned by the first, as people who just don't get it. Then the idea takes off, generates a lot of buzz and a lot of investment. But those initial signs and that meteoric growth don't mean much. In the end, it turns out that sometimes the optimists are right and sometimes the naysayers are, and it's really hard to tell who's right and who's wrong for quite some time.