skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
She sounds horrible and I hope she fails.

First, there's her focus on hours.

Our team didn’t seem driven; they all finished work each day at 5:30. I remember watching “The Social Network” and admiring the passion and intelligence of the group of young engineers. My team didn’t look like that.

She wasn't unhappy because of the bugs. She was unhappy because her team didn't look like a star team. (How many stars would put up with her attitude?) What a fucking narcissist.

Second and related, there's her use of The Social Network to get a sense of what programmers are supposed to "look" like. That's offensive on so many damn levels I can't keep track of 'em all. The kicker, though, is this:

Because I’m a non-techie boss, my engineers know that I don’t understand how much time they will need to complete a task, __a deficiency that I’m sure they sometimes exploit__ (emphasis mine) and that I find incredibly frustrating.

What. A. Fucking. Bitch.

New York is swarming with non-technical douchebags whose connections get them some seed capital and possibly enough resources and client contacts to get started, and maybe even hire a few talented but clueless engineers who'll throw long hours after a bad idea. Avoid those types. They're horrible. They aren't successes in their own sphere (if they were good in the business game, they'd be in finance or consulting) and they aren't technical either, so you can't learn fuck-all from them. A great business partner, you could learn from. The sad fact, though, is that the rock stars of the business world have zero interest in the VC-funded startup world. Tech 8+ like me can't find our equals in the VC-funded world (Damaso Effect) because Biz 8s are CEOs' proteges and portfolio managers at hedge funds.

Not everyone who isn't technical sucks, for sure. However, the business world sends its rejects to manage nerds and nowhere is that more apparent than when one reads articles like this. There are great Harvard and Stanford MBAs, but they don't seem to end up as "business co-founders". They go into private equity, hedge funds, and CEO-protege type roles in business and stay there.

Finally, if you're going to found a tech company, learn technology. Learn to code well enough to understand why software engineering is hard (so you don't become that douchebag who thinks he could do the programmers' jobs with a year of training), learn how to deal with 140+ IQ people, learn how to identify useful problems, and learn enough about software culture that you're not using a fucking movie for pointers.
Codebug for the Mac isn't time travelling, but coupled with Xdebug and some break points it'll drop you into an interactive console at various points you want to explore. I'm hooked :)
"Stories used to sell political positions" ⊄ "Facts"
Note that it powers a usb device. Every single iOS device and every Android device that I know of have a USB on one end of the cable.

Also, is anyone really innovating in Laptops these days? Is there a reasonable expectation that something like "A new type of charger" can even happen in the next 12-24 months?
Making the power adapter longer also makes it more prone to fall out of the wall, especially with Euro style plugs.
Please don't put your engineers (or any one else in your company) on death marches.
CLaSH: A functional hardware description language
US Only. Insert my sad face here. Canada gets no love... sigh.
Ask HN: What Do You Automate?
At my office, we try to automate as much as possible. We automate builds and deployment but also less "techie" stuff like downloading the office Youtube playlist to a local computer.

So, HN, what do you automate? What tools do you use for that?
The follow-up comments:

> Malcolm Pollack 14 Apr 2014 at 2:33 pm
> “Not white”? “Not male”?
> How about “No Irish need apply”?
> Imagine if you announced that you were looking to fill job openings, but didn’t want any women or blacks.
> That this can be done so openly, so blithely — and that it is considered not an act of unconscionable bigotry and race war, but rather as a badge of honor — is very ominous indeed.

> Ralph Thayer 14 Apr 2014 at 3:27 pm
> “Not white. Not male.”
> Noted.

> BubbaMustafa 14 Apr 2014 at 5:56 pm
> So you hate whites and males? That’s a blatant discriminatory statement. You have shown your true colors. Way to go!

> LitThom 14 Apr 2014 at 6:04 pm
> “Not white. Not male.”
> That is just wrong. I mean we all get you, and I agree with a strong approach to diversity, but that is just wrong.

> Will Cate 14 Apr 2014 at 8:02 pm
> re “Not white. Not male.”
> Thanks for letting us know that this is not an operation to be taken seriously.

> JOC 14 Apr 2014 at 8:35 pm
> It’s so hip to discourage employment of white males, especially if you are one (and already have a newsroom full of them.) #johncook’swhiteguilt

> JOC 14 Apr 2014 at 8:49 pm
> It’s so hip to discourage employment of white males, especially if you are one (and have a newsroom full of them).#johncookswhiteguilt speaks in terse, serious language.

As a minority, I understand how these people feel; as a minority, it does however also bother me that these people react in such a reflexive manner. It is such a small percentage of times where people like that experience any sort of discrimination. Frankly, if I reacted in this reflexive manner every time I faced some mode of discrimination, the people I surround myself with would find me to be an insufferable, whiney brat.

Strong language, perhaps, but I can think of no other way to characterize how I would be perceived in analogous circumstances.
in a zero-sum game my positive discrimination is your negative discrimination
First, there exist software environments where errors cost significantly more than a hardware run. Obviously, those environments contain hardware as well, but "cost of a runtime error" is clearly not the only important thing here.

Second, my only point was that the example given was a piss poor example of the difference between hardware and software. Obviously a bad example doesn't disprove the claim it's supposed to support.
For a rudimentary definition of multiuser, that works. :)

I was thinking more of a access/excel fusion that has a more robust backend, but sure.
My father-in-law was pretty high up in the NY State taxing agencies before he retired. When I once asked him why he thought the tax codes in the US were so complicated, he said it was simply because the US likes to use the tax codes to for social engineering and many different people have had their hands at the controls over the years.
A great companion to Cutler's piece (which is excellent in its depth and analysis) is Andreas Schou's G+ post "So, why is Silicon Valley studded with an implausibly large number of abandoned barns, shacks, and other things that don't look like they belong here?":

https://plus.google.com/112482032780181267192/posts/FLUkbf4k...

This details a great many seemingly illogical (but actually financially sensible) consequences of California's 1978 property "tax reform" measure, Proposition 13.

Schou (recently hired by Google) is among the brightest lights on G+ in my experience. Much as I try to avoid the site, he draws me back at least to look.
German citizen here. 70% of all tax literature is German, because our law is notoriously complex. Efforts to simplify it have largely failed. So, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Thank you Steve for what you do for Rails; I admire the way you deal with it
This looks like a funded, experienced, hardware team with an already finished product. Are they only using Kickstarter for exposure? If they're looking for validation/upfront manufacturing costs they should be doing pre-orders instead of "crowdfunding"
> Within a few months, we had a team of four. Development seemed slow and our live site was littered with bugs. Our team didn’t seem driven; they all finished work each day at 5:30. I remember watching “The Social Network” and admiring the passion and intelligence of the group of young engineers. My team didn’t look like that.

I think the real lesson is she hired the wrong team. In all fairness, it's a tough thing to do seeing as she had no technical background to evaluate them. Finishing work at 5:30 is a good thing but slow development and a site "littered with bugs" is something that shouldn't happen, especially with such a small team.
Square Hires Amazon AWS Exec Alyssa Henry as Engineering Lead
Too bad my laptop requires 240W power adapter :)
Failure is the best thing that could happen to Google Glass
Is there anything more disgusting than ads that are disguised as mid-article section headers?
This reads as how to run a company poorly and how to build a terrible company culture.

Some gems:

> they all finished work each day at 5:30. I remember watching “The Social Network” and admiring the passion and intelligence of the group of young engineers.

Yep, a fictional movie about the founders of a social network is definitely a good benchmark for how much your engineers should be working—not standard professional hours.

> We’ve been through three [lead designers].

Yes, blame the designers for ridiculously high turnover, where you have 3 people in the same position within a year.

> a deficiency that I’m sure they sometimes exploit

Right. Not trusting your technical employees and assuming they are trying to exploit you is a fantastic way to inspire passion and trust. In fairness, since she seems to be a pretty big fan of exploiting others, it's natural that she'd expect the same.

> they worked day and night

That is not a desirable thing, it should be considered a mistake in planning which must be avoided in the future.

All in all, it sounds like she's building a terrible company to work for. Not surprising that she's (according to Crunchbase) only raised $500k.
"They are not outright saying NO to white males"

Cook's statement was: "Not white. Not male." That seems to be pretty unambiguously saying "no" to white males.

Affirmative action would be something along the lines of: "We encourage applications from women and ethnic minorities."
It powers one usb port and a laptop.

Nobody is buying it just for the usb port; it's bigger and more expensive than existing usb outlets.
Wait, she also works for the NY Times as a columnist (according to her LinkedIn profile)? Is this a blog or an ad?
Automattic (WordPress.com) is seeking to raise more than $100 million wp.me
Mindfire Is Free To Download Today (April 2014)
Shouldn't a power adapter like that be grounded?
Pink > White
As I mentioned in the post, I don't do this for Rails anymore, but past me says thanks. :)
They thought that in the 80s too! Read the page...

There is nothing new in computing, every 10 years the same things come round again and again. That's why old geezers like me become cynics.
I can't help wondering whether the Sudbury School model would work quite so well in encouraging moral behaviour if it was filled with problem kids with gang affiliations rather than the offspring of well-to-do parents with a deep interest in finding their kid a suitable environment.
Did you read the question? Because in context, it really DOESN'T look like they're saying that. I can't believe people are accusing an organization that is MOSTLY white males of discriminating against white males!

Q: Are there particulars attributes or beats you’re looking to fill

A: Not white. Not male.
Regarding market and buzz, that's exactly what they're doing. They certainly have proved their market. The rest really depends on their long term goals.
Those who haven't read Kumar, Grama, Gupta and Karpis[1], are doomed to rediscover it, painfully.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Parallel-Computing-Analys...
Nice. To speed things up, you could look for 128 byte malloc'ed chunks with a 16 byte header of "xx xx xx xx 90 00 00 00" or "xx xx xx xx 91 00 00 00" (for a 2048 bit modulus).

Looks to me like OpenSSL caches the modulus for Montgomery multiplication and that's where the primes in higher memory are coming from (see rsa_eay.c around line 774).
This is something important that I forgot: GitHub's permissions are such that you need to have commit to truly do this job effectively. For Rails, this means that the issue team has commit on GitHub, but isn't actually allowed to commit. It hasn't been a significant problem.
Unless some radical change happens to laptop power supplies in the next few months - a change from designs that have remained the same for over a decade - it's very likely this adapter will work with the newest (normal) laptops available when it comes out.

Also, laptops have very flexible power input circuits that will accept a wide range of DC input: they'll start running from ~12V (the voltage of an almost-dead battery), and go as high as the voltage specs on the input components allows - 25V (filter caps) is the usual absolute upper limit. Higher voltage means lower I^2R losses but manufacturers like to leave some safety margin, which is why 20V is somewhat of a de-facto standard given the parts available. The general power distribution circuits in a laptop are like this: there's a main power rail, whose voltage varies with battery voltage when running on battery, and is the DC-IN voltage with the adapter plugged in. The voltages for the CPU, GPU, chipset, etc. are all generated by DC-DC converters supplied from this main rail. There's a set of diodes/MOSFETs that wire-OR together the battery and DC-IN to the main rail, preventing current flow in the wrong direction. It also powers the battery charger.

I've read a lot of laptop schematics, and all of them use very similar power circuitry, often with the same components. The only real concern with device compatibility is in the ID schemes that some manufacturers use, either to "lock out" third party adapters or encode wattage selection. The simplest ones are nothing more than a resistor in the plug, different values for different wattages (IBM/Lenovo is one example). More complex ones use a 1-wire interface to an EEPROM or other storage element (Dell, Apple) (http://www.laptop-junction.com/toast/content/dell-ac-power-a... http://www.righto.com/2013/06/teardown-and-exploration-of-ma... ). Then there's all the others that have no ID at all, just +/- input, and these are the most compatible.

About the Dart itself: the technology used here (VHF SMPS) has been around for a long time in military/aerospace applications, where size/weight is more important than reducing switching losses.

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/vhf-lapto...
Well predicted.
Good thing there are no cynics here. ;) x2
Slight tangent: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/15/d...

I wonder if Donald gets audited or not because he admits he doesn't know the accuracy of his return.
couldn't agree more.

But besides efficiency, i'd also like to see RF interference measurements on this one. There is a reason good power converters are fixed in one voltage output and use transformers...
I don't agree with that premise though. I agree you would end up with a complement of capable employees but it doesn't address culturally-embedded, systemic discrimination. That is what affirmative action is designed to address. I presume to respect your intellect, so I am sure you are aware that access to quality education is problematic for various ethnic and racial groups in the United States (and beyond - but I am specifically addressing affirmative action).
My streategy eventually became refusing to deal with it, and prodding them to develop a relationship with a local computer store - if I can't answer something in a single sentence or two, I say it's too complex to explain and they should have someone look at it. This didn't go down that well at first, until I got them to agree that they wouldn't try to fix their car this way if I was a mechanic, and trying to fix their computer without being able to see it was just as inefficient.
I always thought the Wikipedia progress animations illustrated the difference between A*[1] and Dijkstra's[2] nicely (and see some variations compared[3]).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Astar_progress_animation....

[2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Dijkstra...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Subh83/CommonsContrib#Ani...
Agree with this. Even tearing down a simple electronics device - eg Paul Allen or Wozniak taking apart things as kids to try to figure out how they work and put them back together - is a form of learning by cloning.

When I was first learning to write code, my favorite thing to do was, upon finding a nice piece of code, walk through it and assemble a clone line by line to mentally recreate the process of how it works a to z (and often testing variations or different orderings etc).
BitUndo – Double Spending as a service
It actually does, check the FAQ at the bottom, it was a mistake on their end.
I'm definitely with you on the way she treated her team and what she expected from them... but seriously... please put your IQ back in your pants.

I don't believe in "learn to code if you want to manage technical people," but it is definitely true that if you don't have at least a basic understanding of what your team is building and how, you should have someone who does informing your decisions and filtering your input.
I also read it thinking someone had open-sourced some gardening tips or planting layouts. Whoops.
Nods. The nice part about the type system is that it can automatically reject (some) misuses of the structures. I've found that helpful while learning some of these things as it can let me know that I don't actually understand something that I thought I had. I agree that emphasizing the typed aspect can do an injustice to the other algebraic properties.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/datasift-there-is-no-change...
Best comment so far. If his intention was to say "Diverse staff; we are looking for new and varied backgrounds and cultures to cover our stories", he should have said something along those lines to avoid the expected (and justified) "WTF" of saying they aren't accepting any more "privileged" positions.
In case anyone is wondering the website is updated when GitHub sends a merge or push webhook to our server where a Gulpfile then builds the static site from a Jade template.
Match.com for Startup Founders
That's a fairly cynical and negative point of view that goes against the core ideas on which Kickstarter was created.

And yet, there's a high chance that you are 100% right.

I find it sad that we'll have to always consider that particular scenario from now on. Stupid Facebook.
I get NaNs when I put a Dwarf star as close as I can to the parent star. Perhaps a black hole is generated? :) http://www.stefanom.org/spc/?view=3069947
She's an NY Times columnist writing about her start up experiences. She only has one start up, so it's the one she talks about in all her blog posts.
I've worked among devs who don't want to own their code in production, they'd rather just code and then throw new code over the wall for the sys admins to deploy.

The anti-DevOps developers don't understand how databases work so they want an ORM to make it easy for them, and they don't know how to configure a web server so they want PaaS solutions to let them do 1-click deploys, and system command prompts are scary to them. Frankly such developers just plain suck. They don't like DevOps because they don't have the skills to be DevOps.
How SV army could ruin the weather?
91 million: http://www.stefanom.org/spc/?view=3074137
Is this a USB 3.1 supply? Because that is where everything is going.
I love feature lists where you compare EVERYTHING YOU HAVE AND NOTHING YOU DON'T.
Cross Platform? Um no... Windows only...
I thought I had to be wrong and looked again. Nope, can't find a *nix version anywhere.
It looks nice. How is this similar to / different from iDoneThis? visually it seems nicer, but does it have the same email integration and daily updates? (I noticed weekly, is this configurable?)

The only reason I can see for us to NOT use it, is because we already use rollbar[1] (for tracking js errors) and rollout[2] (for feature flags). The name 'Rollcall' will create way too much confusion for us. Sounds silly, I know, but it does have an impact.

[1] https://rollbar.com/
[2] https://github.com/FetLife/rollout
Gotcha. Sorry to be snippy earlier!
That sounds like a good process for smaller projects. For larger projects, or projects where developer attention is a precious resource, not so much. For example, look at the detail provided by the issue submitter to the nouveau (open source Nvidia Linux driver) project: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76732

Not only is there a lot of log output, the submitter took the trouble to run git bisect on the Linux kernel to see at which point the breakage occurred. I'm sure the submitter spent quite a bit of time and has a high level of familiarity with the project and related tools. This will help developers to isolate the problem and provide a quick fix. Without this level of detail, the issue might never get fixed.
I like both the idea and the implementation but I hate it when links open in new tabs. If I want a link to open in a new tab, I can do it myself.
Agreed. CircleCI does very similar things for status and Rollcall looks like a great way to replace some ad-hoc things we do.

But $15/mo seems insane for a 13 person team. It makes me think you guys won't be around in a few months, and makes me reluctant to commit.

Baremetrics charges $250/mo! You should charge at least $50, but probably $150.
I would like to see exact dimensions of this thing. All I see on the page is "2.5 cubic inches".
Fair enough. It's just sad to see technology create barriers between people.
I seem to recall this was Twitter's original model, at the very beginning. "Let your team know what you're doing" or something along those lines. Retweets and replies and the whole pile of other things made Twitter into a completely different thing that couldn't be used for that purpose.

I thought it was a cool idea then, and it's cool to see someone re-examining the status-communicating problem today.
I agree, she does sound absolutely horrible.

That being said, I think you're being slightly too harsh on business types in general. Yes, the vast majority are rejects who couldn't cut it in finance/consulting so ended up "doing startups."

But there are also people who are in fact excellent but get sick of the soullessness of business. They can often even be leaving a role as a CEO-protege or private equity genius to follow a passion for solving a specific problem through a startup.

Of course, as they are few and far between, it's pretty hard to find them. Especially since if they're actually competent they have the connections to immediately hire top engineers.

One thing I've found is that, surprisingly, the closer you stay to their expertise the better they're likely to be. If some Harvard MBA is starting another social network, they're likely an idiot. But if a former bond trader is working on enterprise software for bond traders, it can often be that they really did leave because they discovered an interesting problem worth solving. At the very least, it means they're bringing a lot more to the table in an enterprise startup than "business experience."
Do you happen to know if there's a particular term or metric that describes the cost of the overhead of interconnecting elements?
An interesting variant of prime-number search. It may not turn up the largest primes yet known... just the economically valuable smaller ones.
I expected some command line tool for github instead of manual navigation through 800 issues. This way he could have saved batches of issues, neatly organized in a directory structure suiting his needs.
Or maybe we white males should just rest assured that we aren't being discriminated against, especially not by an organization of mostly white males, and think more carefully before we post things like this to HN. You knew exactly how people would interpret it, but you chose to ignore the context in which the question was asked.