skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Question from a naive person trying really hard to get into programming: what are good resources/where should I start, etc?

I've done quite a bit on Codecademy, and I get it, but there are still a lot of things I am just ignorant of, like where you actually type code (what's a good source code editor?) and so on.
I imagine many of your models need assistance with takedown requests/copyright issues on other sites. You guys should offer a takedown request service to them to let them know you have their back and care about them even when they're not live on the site.
"It used to be the case that governments funded a lot of development of breakthrough technologies. The bad news is that they have mostly stopped"

I have to plug the newest BBC In Our Time podcast on absolute zero - where basic science research (hey let's see how cold we can make this gas? Cool! Now this one?) provided refrigeration, superconductivity, superfluids, MRI scanners and more.

We cannot think VC can replace government long term funding but we can and should support VCs who are willing to go all in on long term funding and make it cool again. Politicians will go a long way on just standing next to billionaire investors for photoshoots.
> Do you think an employee is better described as being a buyer?

No, I'm asking why you see yourself as a seller-like-Walmart, which is a subtype of seller who freely offers a public fixed price in advance of negotiations (if any.)

It's entirely normal to negotiate for different kinds of things in different ways... And your labor is quite different from anything Walmart sells.

> If you don't even know how much your time is worth, how is anyone else supposed to know?

Well, so what? That cuts both ways! If the company also can't price the tasks they need finished, how is anyone else (i.e. the employee) supposed to know?
Am I the only one who doesn't know what RFS stands for? Its not clear from AcronymFinder either.
If only reality was this beautiful.

I completely agree with your stance but we both know x % of the rich ones aren't like, say, Gates, but rather the contrary. They try to find ways to lose less (taxes and whatnot) and gain more then they already have.
Yeah this is an interesting problem to think about. A proper solution to this could have far more applications than bitcoin as well.
Yes on both. The second point is particularly interesting, and counter-intuitive. There's something about the necessary learning curve to figure out how to use a Bloomberg terminal that makes it sticky. People end up viewing knowing how to navigate the terminal as part of their professional skillset. Of course, that probably only works as long as there's no serious enough alternative in sight.
See the other comments on this thread.

Technically, if you lose your H1B job, you're out of the country right now. However, in practice there is some leeway, though lawyers differ on what they expect USCIS will let you away with (there seems to be some consensus on "10 days" though).
One thing that caught my eye was the 50% 401k match up to the federal max (which I think is 25% of salary). Not sure how that work out, but maybe it's if you're making 100k, then if you contribute 25k, they'll throw in an extra 12.5.

What tends to be the industry standard these days? Given all the talk about programmer salary ranges being artificially constrained, one thing to optimize for is how quickly you can save up enough retirement savings so you can retire, so an employer with an aggressive 401k match can really help with that. Most people I know have paltry 401ks where they'll get a straight 3% contribution, or a 50% match up to 6%, or something like that.
What would an unusual partner be?
Tl;dr: They ALL knew. They were ordered to comply. The denials are lies.
May be based upon the assumption that if Facebook did it, then Google must also do it.
In the words of the poet Philip Larkin, we're all "stumbling up the stair/into fulfillment's desolate attic."
This actually sounds really interesting. At my last startup, I built the infrastructure for a live video streaming platform for concerts. Handling HD concert video can't be much different from cam streams. Shame you're not hiring OPs.
A lot of big adult companies (both straight and gay) have their technology centres in Montreal, Canada, and were renown for being horrible places to work, between the conditions themselves and the shady habits of management.

You would think that an industry that would already have enough reasons for job candidates to not work there would run a tighter ship.
Show HN: NameThatStatus A new game using your friends' FB statuses
But the returns can still be good.

Let's say you do just that, snag half the market and get 10k users each paying you $500/mo for their niche.

That's still a $60m/yr business.
Interactive photos of Gemini 5 and 11 over Baja California
It was a couple of weeks in which some emails weren't accessible - the account was still usable for new emails and emails before Feb 26th. There was definitely no week-long outage - the outage itself was (robn can correct me here, since I wasn't present for it) about half an hour.
Definitely compress first. While it is true that there is the same amount of entropy before and after encryption, you'll never be able to identify it from the bitstream (otherwise your encryption is broken). Compression works by understanding statistical patterns in the process that is creating the data stream, and encoding the data based on this information to achieve a reduced stream size. An encrypted stream is generally assumed to be indistinguishable from random data, so you won't get nearly as much (if any) compression from this pseudorandom stream.
I'm shocked I tell you - I had no idea such things went on!
Request for Startups: http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html
Contemplate what proportion of those moments are related to work and money, and contemplate how much those issues permeate the rest of your life to the point where they impede your enjoyment of other facets of life.

I made a conscious decision to work from home and comfortable places because I realized that commuting two hours a day was destroying my health. Very few projects would be worth that sacrifice to me (although I realize that many are out there).

I made a choice to eat mindfully and properly in every meal unless I have something else of extreme urgency. I find very few things are worth interrupting a meal. There's at least one hour of every day you can enjoy tremendously, and many people lose complete sight of that.

I am not disagreeing with your premise, but the truth is that most people's desires, in my opinion, seem to be highly misplaced, given that not many people out there are actually working towards a goal so noble that it's worth the rest of the sacrifices in their lives. Having shorter vacations, less time for relaxation and pursuing hobbies is worth it if you're engaged on projects that give tremendous satisfaction and make a difference.
I worked in a NSFW company(back in 2005), i was literally watching PRON during work ,that was my job(and developping some VOD backend ).Funny at first , but 1 year into the job, and frankly i could not take it anymore. Because there is the stuff that is ok to see and the stuff that is not.

But the technology side of that job(scalability,video processing and editing pipelines,media servers...) was really interesting.
Nicely done. Some support for real-time updates would be a hit (using eg a firebase websocket URL as a data source, or a JSONP url for interval polling).
The lawyer quoted in the article appears to contradict this: “Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process, that any recipient company would receive.” That's not a black bag job.
So, is that really knowing "enough" to avoid the things you mention, or can the heuristic be that you should know the standard library?
NASA: society may collapse due to inequality and environmental issues
Nioxin Reviews – Are Nioxin Reviews Honest?
Yes, the PDF is paywalled. Would you mind posting a Dropbox link to it or emailing it to me? Thanks!

This is a very interesting paper, but I need to analyze the specific method they used to keep mice awake. All that paragraph says is "we used a previously validated technique," with no details as to how specifically they woke the mice up.
OpenBSD: Retire hp300, mvme68k and mvme88k ports.
Haha, that is on the more civil side of FD discussions. Many hackers have ego problems.
Visualizing Bird Songs with Web Audio
Music to Chords
From Beta to Billions: Payfirma's Multichannel Payment API
Really was a great list, one of my favorite. I will miss it, sincerely.
The federal max is 17.5k (or 23k if one is over 50), as of http://taxes.about.com/od/retirementtaxes/qt/401k-contributi...
Because I don't believe software is built around the ability to memorize algorithms from computer science courses and recite it. Even if you apply the algorithm, you are still coming from learned memory, something you read and recanting with slight variations.

If it was based on the specific technology and questions and in the context of their business problems, I would understand. I hated memorizing sorting algorithms and be asked to pretend like I'm reaching an epiphany as I'm doing the problem live. Frowning profusely, and slowly writing the solution, and emerging as if you just solved a complicated physics equation.

Tell me to build a small project in the stack you are using, if I don't think I will be able to do it, it will show.
I think you know what he meant. But just in case: the steam engine allowed people to harness energy that would have been impractical or even impossible to harness without it.
I currently am doing something very similar, and I feel pretty strongly that I could literally do this until I die, just like I plan to do my music gigs until I die.

Literally, I am billing < 20 hours a week, and unless I become disabled and/or get dementia/Alzheimers, I feel that I will like doing what I am doing in some form or other forever.

I've done a lot of different things in my life, and this _is_ having it nice. It's far nicer than the "retirements" of many of my friends in their 70s, though I will grant it is not as plush or completely free of pressure as my parents' retirements as school teachers/administrators.
As a native of Montreal, I had a lot of OPs friends who lived through those companies. I actually ended up doing sysadmin work in Ottawa, then Vancouver. Avoided a lot of that junk.
I think some of the replies here are missing the point. 5% could be huge, sure. You would think it would absolutely dwarf the $20.

So why risk missing the next Minecraft for a measly $20?
I find that the best way to learn it is to start poking at it. Fire up Wireshark, load google.com, and take a close look at the traffic. You'll see every packet going back and forth, and can try to figure out what each one of them is. Set up a proxy that can MITM the SSL connection, and look at the contents of the packets. Just setting that up will probably tell you a lot about how it all works, and you'll be in a better position to see the plaintexts of all of the handshaking traffic.
Well, it consumes fuel. It turns (some fraction of) the fuel into useful work.

Before the steam engine, there was the horse. The horse turned a much smaller fraction of the energy input into useful work.

This means that the steam engine lowered the cost of useful work. We (over)simplify this, and say that the steam engine lowered the cost of energy.

But I have a nagging feeling that I may be explaining the blindingly obvious to the deliberately obtuse...
HN Plays 2048
Money, attention...these should be side-effects in living a good life.
So simple, so true.
Think of integrity as fidelity. Encoding ensures that your information can be reconstructed accurately on the other end of a communications channel (whether that be the internet, to and from the hard drive, or even just to the person standing next to you).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431569
This sounds terrific, but it doesn't seem self-consistent between wanting companies with the scale of ambition of SpaceX and Tesla, but insisting on early momentum being critical and avoiding a big and expensive initial project.

Tesla took four years to introduce their first product, the Roadster. When they went public two years later, they had gone through a net loss of around 300 million dollars, and were still two years away from introducing the Model S. Even then, it had a few near-death experiences. SpaceX took 200 million dollars of investment, and took four years to launch their first flight, which failed. Over the next two years, their second and third flights also failed. Neither company really showed momentum until seven to nine years after founding.

It would be nice to see a clear path from a three-month-to-demo-day minimum viable product to a breakthrough company that overturns a capital-intensive industry, but it's hard to think of good examples of this so far. At the least, it would probably require substantial development before applying to YC, and/or starting with a very limited prototype.
I have wanted to experiment with some ideas that would solve "real world" problems, but software has always been vastly more accessible. Maybe YC could also consider funding companies with consumer products aimed at making other fields more accessible at home. Sort of analogues to the cheap personal computer. Like the Personal Lab, Personal Biobrick Lab, Personal Fab Lab.

Another idea is just any consumer focused startup in one of the areas he focused on. For example an inexpensive solar panel kit you could buy at Walmart. Or maybe advanced hydroponics kits for people to grow some of their own food. I believe the key to really taking advantage of new technologies in an efficient way is to get them widely distributed and into the hands of individuals and families. And I think that high tech solutions to a number of traditionally highly centralized or large organization-driven areas such as energy and food production can make better distribution of those things practical and will result in not only a more efficient but also more robust and secure future for families.
Thanks for the great reply!

I didn't realize the Chrome web store requires your private key. That's insane.
Indeed. One could argue that government is the original crowdfunding.

This is actually kind of a nice illustration of how backwards our ideas of social services have become.
Dutch government opts for improving nation’s startup ecosystem
The most generous I've ever seen in a big company was Wells Fargo offering a 100% match on the first 6%.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tolmasky
What? No. Doctors and nurses get burned out all the time. So do cops and EMTs. Just because you've dedicated your life to serving others doesn't mean that constantly being on the line to help others can't burn you out. In some ways it can even be more stressful, because when you're only out to help yourself, you can justify easing back every now and then to reduce the pressure. When you're helping others, it's harder to do that because of the feeling that you're failing them in their moment of need.
I agree completely! We're really excited about email transparency. Supporting it well has been one of our goals from the beginning. We have a few users who practice it (including us!) with whom we're working very closely to make sure we meet their needs.

For that matter, if anyone reading this is working with an organization that implements this philosophy, I would love to talk to you!
A distinction between actual breakthrough companies and meta-breakthrough ones would be nice. Companies that enable others to magnify their efforts (such as https://experiment.com/) are different from ones that create new tech (Tesla/SpaceX). Meta companies have fuzzier goals and have longer term goals than tech ones. They are also, perhaps, more software oriented than tech ones.
If you want to see an awesome visual IDE/Debugging action, check the video "Creating a Level - 10 - Blueprint Doorway Pt2" in youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2Ua6ncLcVY&index=11&list=PLZ...
Having interviewed folks from NSFW companies, I can tell you that it's a great place to beef up the resume and learn lots of useful skills. Their scaling and operations problems are fairly interesting and unique.

That being said, there is definitely a stigma that comes with it. I have no problem at all hiring someone who worked at an NSFW company, but I definitely have friends who have said "I wouldn't want to work with anyone willing to stoop so low morally that they would work there"
That's for deferral, not matching. I think 100k would mean, you can defer 17.5 (so 82.5 is subject to federal tax, and 100k is subject to fica), and then up to 25% of salary can be subject to matching. Although maybe some employers just stick to matching the deferral?
We sort of have this system already in place - it's called part time work, and it's generally reserved for jobs that don't offer benefits like paid vacation time or health insurance.

If I am willing to work 3/5 days a week for 3/5 of the pay, do I also only get 3/5 of the health care coverage and 3/5 of the vacation time of my 5/5 peers?
Looks interesting, I'll try using it for a week or so and see where it takes me.

Bit of advise however: The front page of the website doesn't really describe it very well. There's barely any screenshots (and the ones that exist are hidden for two thirds of the time), and there's not much of a description of the actual application. There's descriptions of what features it has over your competitors, but not really anything about what the core product is. Honestly, if I saw the website outside of the context of this comment thread, I probably would have passed it by.

All in all it looks like a good alternative to Google Keep which I can feel good about using. Best of luck!
> advanced hydroponics kits

We're working on it: http://automicrofarm.com/ (well, aquaponics, not hydroponics).
I think someone figured out how to unleash its AI on this :)
Bypassing web application firewalls using HTTP headers
this is awesome, lmao
> To maintain proper levels of abstraction.

Abstraction is only a tool, a means to an end; not the end in itself.

> Which is extremely fast, simple, side-effect-free, and likely optimized away by RVO.

Copying is one of the fastest things a processor can do, but that's not a reason to do it unnecessarily, even if the compiler optimiser could simplify it.

> That's also not an issue of "simplification"; it's just premature optimization.

Really? I suppose that if you consider abstraction the ultimate goal, you might think that shorter, simpler code would be "premature optimization"...

> Part of the design is that each individual board is responsible for translating button presses to USB keycode deltas.

That functionality remains the same; the receiving board just collects each bit of the scancode and passes it through directly to the USB. The sending board is still the one doing the matrix scan and position-to-keycode translation. The receiving board is just a passthrough.

> What's the downside to this? The bursts occur way faster than human perception could hope to notice.

It adds complexity to the software, because it has to deal with start/stop conditions, etc.

> Besides, if you want to be pedantic, any serial protocol communicates in "bursts".

Not if the clock is continuous; once the receiver and sender are synchronised, the sender can e.g. keep transmitting 0 bytes when there is nothing to send, and keycodes (which are all nonzero) otherwise.
As davesean points out below, this isn't talking about fiber tapping and whatnot, this is talking about FISA orders

> Neither De nor any other US official discussed data taken from the internet under different legal authorities. Different documents Snowden disclosed, published by the Washington Post, indicated that NSA takes data as it transits between Yahoo and Google data centers, an activity reportedly conducted not under Section 702 but under a seminal executive order known as 12333.

So the companies knew that they were receiving secret court orders to disclose data. Well, duh.

Edit: he even says so explicitly:

> “All 702 collection is pursuant to court directives, so they have to know,” De reiterated to the Guardian.

Thanks for saving that for the last line. All the rest is just trying to connect dots they have no new evidence for.
What's the difference between PTO and vacation?
YC will need a change in their funding model if they want to fund these type of technologies. $14k to $20k is irrelevant if you need 3 years R&D and/or $5M capital to prototype; we need new metrics for funding businesses with high capital cost and/or long incubation time.
http://www.quora.com/TJ-Holowaychuk-1/How-is-TJ-Holowaychuk-...
It's not about "sorting" or any particular algorithm, it's about whether you're actually considering the costs and tradeoffs of the code you're writing (which is actually a big part of software engineering), and are equipped to handle those. Now, one cost is execution time, another is memory usage, another is development time, another is maintenance effort and so on. These costs are spread across different domains, but it's important that a programmer considers them.
South America is a huge fucking continent. There are places in the Andes in Chile and Argentina that have standards of living comparable to 1st-world countries and a quality of outdoor activities that go beyond what you could get in the best Alpine towns of Switzerland, with free, high-quality public education and good universities nearby. They're obviously not the cheapest places to be in, but they easily cost 1/3 or less of what living in California does.
Loomio: The Occupy Inspired App for Consensus Decision Making
I had an opportunity to work in a NSFW company (2009) that had a lot of traffic and very interesting technological problems. It was a real small team and frankly... smartest people I have had a chance to work with so far.
Quick to condemn, yet they were probably using those sites that night.
Amway Μία από τις μεγαλύτερες εταιρείες άμεσων πωλήσεων στον κόσμο
That's the problem with a lot of these sites like codeacademy, they walk you through coding, but they hide a lot of the process.

To answer your question, the editor, etc. depends on what language you're programming in.

For HTML, all you need is a simple text editor, notepad on windows, textedit on mac, gedit on windows. Sublime if you want syntax highlighting.

Type in a few lines of code, save it with a .html extension and double click the file. The offline webpage should open up on your browser.

Javascript is pretty similar, just save the file with a .js extension. You'll have to make sure the JS file is linked to your HTML file.

I think the best resources are still books if you want to learn to program. They generally recommend software to use as you work through the book.
Flappy Shark
I would assume companies applying to this RFS would be mostly in their later stages and probably already have some type of funding. A lot of these seem to require significant costs up front.

One thing that makes YC and other incubators so amazing is people who didn't grow up with a wealthy family and have financial obligations such as student loans can hack together a prototype over a weekend, apply to YC, and have almost as good of a chance of getting in as anyone else. I can totally see why YC would want to fund later stage companies though.
i don't know if this helps anyone, but it's vaguely related to the article. if you're read taleb's "antifragile" then you can think of agile development as "antifragile development". and if you do that, and understand the difference between antifragile and merely robust, you can see what "parts" of agile make most sense.

from the article (my emphasis):

> Agile was a personal practice. Implicit is a personal way of orienting oneself towards a development process that accepts, even welcomes, change.