skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except, in the case of an acquihire, there is no "acquisition", per se. If 500 startups were to block such a deal, then the founders/employees could simply fold up shop and go to work for the new company.

What the investor is failing to recognize, is that in the case of an acqui-hire, the company has failed - it has zero value, and needs to be shut down gracefully. A good acqui-hire ensure that customers and vendors are paid up to date, and the employees are given a new place to work.

This VC is confused as to the nature of an acquihire, and, furthermore, seems to be ignoring the fact that 99% of the return on their investments come from the two or three companies out of 100 that are very successful. The other 98 to 97 are just a cost of doing business, and worrying about getting back their "investment" on a company that has gone under is just a distraction from the real business of making sure that the two-three companies are very successful.
It does not surprise me, considering he also co-authored http://safecurves.cr.yp.to with Tanja Lange.
The problem is: live programming does not scale and the very few examples are also not convincing.

i.e. live programming isn't programming. It's just a toy now.
i agree that it is mathematical. i would not have said "too", but i guess that is relative.

i reckon it is useful to have some base level of understanding of statistics, mathematics, and applied mathematics (eg solving (regularised?) systems of linear equations or numerically optimising functions) before attempting to understand something like machine learning.

understanding the theory behind the approaches gives you some basis for assessing if a given technique will be appropriate in a given application.

(eg there's no data and no ability to get more? probably can't do anything. there is data, but it was collected in a haphazard uncontrolled way, and no ability to get more? probably can't do anything...)
Trading app Robinhood has 340,000 person wait list and free trades
Do you want to be a programmer or a computer scientist? They're both options. One of them ships software for a living, the other ships journal articles. (This is a joke grounded more than a little bit in reality.)

Your list of interests sounds like that of a computer scientist, but I'm allocating a little space to "Maybe your only exposure to computer programming so far has been undergrad CS and you're describing it in the only language anyone has ever taught you."

The best way to skill up as a programmer, if you're interested in that, is to ship more software. There is deep, mythical knowledge in programming, and it is acquired with sweat on your brow and a pickaxe in your hand chipping away at a coal face made out of Why Doesn't This Freaking Work.

You will note that most programs you work on build on things you have heard about in CS classes but do not implicate most of them directly. Compilers are very nice to understand. If you want to be a programmer, absent you making the goal of working on compilers your life's work for the next 10 years, you will probably not work on compilers. Most coal faces sound like something rather more like "A business has some fairly straightforward transformations to be made on two sets of data. There's plenty of opportunity for smart implementation choices and cleverness, but that mostly informs the small rather than the large of this project." (Cleverness in the large in programming is good selection of which coal faces to attack at all. After you get there people often stop calling you a programmer no matter how much programming you do.)
> The vagueness of 'like' [...] conflates all sorts of different signals. Do you like it because it adds to the joint project of the conversation? Or just because you agree? Or because a statement contains flattering lies?

Hmm, the purpose with 'like' might not be to clarify why someone liked it, but rather to show to people what's worth reading. If many people like something, it's more likely to be worth reading. In this sense, I think 'Like' makes sense.

I agree that 'Like' is ambiguous and could mean lots of different things. However, once you've read the comment, what the 'Like' means is probably fairly clear? (If it's a joke, useful information, or strong agreement.)

---

You mentioned people clicking 'Wrong' as some kind of general negative judgment — I hope they won't do that. Only factual errors and disagreement, I'm hoping.

---

The axis you mention agree/disagree + laudable/problematic — I'm thinking they might be too complicated? Wouldn't people need to read the FAQ to clearly understand how to use these four buttons? — However I do think that something like what you're describing could work at a site like Hacker News.

There's some forum software, Vanilla forums, that sometimes show Like/Agree/Disagree buttons. However, when I studied a few discussions, people essentially never clicked Agree/Disagree, they only used the Like button. -- However, I just found a discussion where people actually do use the Agree/Disagree buttons, see: http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/134718/what-is-it...
Perhaps that's little bit what you were looking for (?), only that they're using 'Awesome' instead of 'Laudable'/'Problematic'.

---

It is possible to click 'Like' and 'Wrong' at the same time actually (a bit like the Voltaire Vote). — However 'Like' + 'Wrong' does sound a bit vague to me, I agree. It could be interesting to explore some possibility for people to clarify why they liked something — perhaps a dialog could appear, that was easy to dismiss, where you could click some button that clarified why you liked it or thought it was wrong.
You appear to already know what to tell him! You believe, and possibly have good reasons that you can tell if asked, that his startup would not fly unless he gets at least 10m in funding.
"for example marginally or completely unemployable addicts."

This is, in particular, a really bad example--consider the background checks and nonviolent felons which are created by the current policies.

Or, you know the, hundreds of thousands incarcerated instead of out in the workforce.
This is fantastic news - I spend about two-three hours a day in iPython. It's completely replaced my tool chain of awk/sed/wc/grep that I previously used to do analytics on various files - and not only allows me to do much more complex analysis, but also maintains "state" in a visual way so that I can quickly hop through a number of file load/analysis/report cycles.

Being able to do this interactively is going to be a huge win.
You mean repeatedly, immediately after accepting? As in, it never lets you have access to the mic?
Actually, the Apple chargers in that link displayed the expected behavior for the USB 2.0 "extended power" (can't think of the actual title) specification. The author has a fancy oscilloscope, but that doesn't mean he/she knows everything.
While true for a lot of countries, this not true for China, which have probably stricter drug policies (with the exception of maybe alcohol). China would not let itself be dictated by US policies.
It sounds like this is a side effect of the "at-will" employment model, then. Do any venture firms' threat models account for this by promoting contract employment all the way to the top?
I can't disagree with you at all, though I don't necessarily share the same level of contempt for javascript. The thought of creating a "new" and "fixed" language to replace it brings the xkcd comic on standards to mind (#927).

I would argue there is a justifiable reason. Before I do bear in mind I accept it may not be a good reason, or one without workarounds, but hindsight makes both of those much easier to see than in the day to day development.

Backwards compatibility. The two words which really haunt web developers everywhere, on so many levels. We don't want old sites to break in new browsers, or new sites to break in old browsers, so fixing major issues of such magnitude would require at a minimum a unique version that could be differentiated from older sites. And when was the last time you saw a version of javascript specified in a websites code?

So then a situation occurs where we could use the new code and "do it right," but we would need fallbacks for old browsers. Or, we could "do it wrong," only use the old way, and development would take significantly less time. While over time the new way likely would win out, it would be a long and drawn out process taking enough developers and managers putting their feet down and saying, no, while this will take more time, cost more money, for the exact same functionality, it is the right thing to do for the future of the language. And getting their bosses to accept that tough sell.

The above seems very similar to HTML5 and IE6/7 support. And how long has that fight been going on?

So yes, one would think the flaws should be fixable, but looking at it from an in the moment perspective as opposed to through the lens of history, it isn't completely incomprehensible as to why they still exist.

Another thought that just popped into my head, is for the majority of the life of javascript, it was used by web developers, many of whom would by todays standards be much closer on the spectrum to "my nephew who designs websites" than a software engineer. It wasn't until much more recently that it began to heavily be used by engineers who pushed the limits much further and ran into these problems. It makes me curious on when the first documented case of these issues was brought up. Was it 20 years ago, or maybe only in the last 5?
Could be a problem for games where your finger might obscure the thing you want to interact with.
I usually disagree with papers like these but this one is a little more accurate to real life.

The concept of "value" in dating is absurd. Everyone judges value differently. Being attracted to another person has so many variables it can't bit factored in.

Are there some "universal traits" that make people physically attractive? Yes, but that doesn't mean the dating world is a hierarchy with the beautiful people at the top.

And having a super beautiful girlfriend isn't always great. I know models who are insanely insecure about their bodies and are just a pain to be around because they are constantly worried about how they look.

I think I generally date cute girls, but I once dated a that was definitely physically more attractive than most of the rest. She would get tons of attention when we went out. Guys would constantly check her out or give me "Great job man!" looks and comments. I knew she was constantly getting invited to social events, parties and probably dates as well.

This amount of attention can really be unhealthy to a relationship. If she is constantly being tempted by tons of guys and opportunities every day, then its just a matter of time when she starts to think, "You know he is nice, but that other guy was really cute."

And thats really how it ended. She just stopped returning my texts and phone calls one day, so I am pretty sure she just moved on to something else. It wasn't too bad for me, she had a lot of flaws even though she was gorgeous.
Why Fitbit Is Still Terrible
Entire Id software tech team moved to OculusVR over internal issues
Firstly, this is a problem I'm not sure is very common - I'm guessing most people do hang out around members of the opposite sex, at work, with friends, etc.

Second, for your specific situation - you say you have a problem. But it's a very solvable one. Find places to hang out with members of the opposite sex. This can be anything from going to specific classes that have women in them and that you also enjoy (e.g. drawing? Pottery? I don't know, depends what you like).

You can also actively try to befriend people who hang out with women.
I think you are very wrong, and your ironic responses don't apply, because there is a major problem with the approach shown in the article.
The problem is that they are not legalizing drugs, and providing a legal and regulated market that replaces the illegal, criminalized, drug-lords managed and violent market. They are just putting less energy and resources to enforce drug laws.

So, living in Argentina, a country that in the past few years has chosen the very same path, I can tell you that the expected result is not something like Amsterdam, but something like the favelas, in Brazil. Liberated zones, where criminal organizations grow much much more stronger, organized and richer than what you see today. Crime raises, because drug addicts need money to buy drugs from those gangs. Criminals get much more violent. Wars between gangs get much more open to control more land. And the entire society suffers.

You want something like Amsterdam? OK, chasing drug dealers, but provide a legal, cheaper and with better quality market. Offer and demand will make them go away. But without a legal market, stop enforcing drug laws and I can guarantee you, that things can only get much worse.
People "stealing to get their fix" ought to essentially disappear once getting a fix drops to 1/10th the price (so much less money is required) and once a reliable source is easily obtained (so you don't have to spend any time searching for the next fix or dealing with roller-coaster withdrawal symptoms because you couldn't find it in time).

When drugs are legal, holding down a regular job will be compatible with drug use; people will work regular hours to pay for their habit, pick up their drug at the corner market on the way home, and take the equivalent of cigarette breaks.

When heroin was a branded product of the Bayer corporation, one of the founders of Johns Hopkins was a heroin addict; he took pills. (The chief long-term problem associated with regular heroin use is constipation.)

So, no: people stealing to get their fix is an argument for legalization.

(How many people are today "stealing to get their fix" of beer or cigarettes?)
Show HN: pkgname, choosing good package names
> worrying about getting back their "investment" on a company that has gone under is just a distraction from the real business of making sure that the two-three companies are very successful.

That, and why are they hoping to extract value from the learning experience of the founders to begin with? People working at many different companies usually learn lots of things and can increase their value just as much as any startup founders.

As an investor, can't you just ignore any hopes that you'll extract any value from an "acqui-hire" when you negotiate the valuation of the company?
I'm sure managers and recruiters in other professions would love to pay more. But they can't. Or they can't compete against Wall Street.
Yes, I can agree that prison is sub-optimal and I would like to sees more reform. On the other hand, having had a family member violently murdered, I would like to point out that the rest of us should have the right not to have to see certain people free ever again. There are better tools, like being confined to one's house, for the more petty crimes. On that, I think we agree, as we do also on the fact that reducing recidivism is in everyone's best interests.

The biggest problem with prison it seems to me is that it pulls them further away from normal society and changes their social circle to one made of criminals. This then leads to all the other ills, as they experience a daily life of overt racism, violence and apathy. As you say, though, it's not 100%. I once knew a guy who, based on what I know of him, is most aptly described as a drug loser. He (amazingly) stayed out of prison for some years after pulling all sorts of really stupid crimes and bragging of them. He managed to avoid issues by being a skilled liar and there being a lack of solid proof. Also, there was the time he fled from the jurisdiction. In the end, he was turned in by his own parents after he attacked and seriously injured them. So as you say, it's "prison made them worse" is only part of the story and many of them. It's certainly true from what I can see, but it doesn't mean they were anyone you'd want to hang around in the first place. FWIW, that person had a loving home and parents who did everything they could to help him (counselors, doctors, etc.). I believe the doctors mostly resulted in him selling or trading his meds and/or taking them with alcohol...

While I do not want to see people go to prison for minor offenses, my biggest worry with decriminalization is that it will turn out to be like deinsitutionalization--i.e. they'll end up on the streets causing problems for everyone else with no real support from society. This does not seem like a net benefit for everyone who is not already a criminal.
The idea was to highlight the smart aleckness of your response, but my goal clearly failed.

But I'm really not quite sure what you are even trying to argue at this point. The original question posed was how to respond to the comparison of the legalization of marijuana to hard drugs.

> It's not as if most people are not aware that you can be prescribed drugs very similar to street drugs.

I have nothing but anecdotal evidence from real life and online forums, but I very much believe that this is false. Many people know cocaine is used as a prescription drug, few people know desoxyn is meth, and fewer still know about heroin. It is for this reason I made that a point of how to respond, in an attempt to question the distinction between legal and illegal drugs and to persuade the conservative viewers (the hypothetical scenario implied fox news) that there is still a conversation to be had, that the question is not already answered like most would believe.
I guess there are a lot of people willing to help him out.

He might be 'bright', but he is not a programmer - though he lectures programmers in his trollings.
It's already illegal. The problem is getting:

1) police to care about this kind of crime enough to come quickly

2) victims to follow through and testify when an arrest is made

3) the public to be willing to commit resources to arrest and incarcerate perpetrators.

It may (or may not) be the case that targeting the behavior is less costly then banning it. Either way, it's not as simple as just banning the immediately-objectionable behavior.
Intel actually provides better documentation on its CPU pipelines than ARM does, especially for anything more advanced than the Cortex-A9. Then with Cortex-A5 and A7 you don't even get instruction timings.

Cortex-A15 you get nothing official, even though there's quite a few hidden gotcha's that are critical for performance (Did you know that the NEON pipelines are 64-bit wide? Or that there's only 1 VFP pipeline whereas there's two symmetric NEON pipelines? That's some of the barest of basics, yet nowhere does ARM publicly document this info.)

Intel you get execution port categories (though you have to infer exactly which instructions fall into which categories), official timings (again inferring precise µop counts), and all sorts of details as to the inner workings of pipelines (random example: there's an entire section about how store forwarding works in Nehalem in the optimization manual, which is quite beyond the detail you'd see in any official ARM manual.)

And that's not counting Agner Fog and the details Intel feeds tech journalists.
Once upon a school Christmas holiday my father brought home a Televideo TS-806 [1] and a terminal. The thing contained a load of documents which they'd like to have on their snazzy new server, but nobody could find out how to copy them. The files were in some alien format, produced by a text processor native to the TS-806. I resolved this by hooking up the thing to a Bondwell 12 [2] through RS-232, printing the documents on the Televideo and receiving them in PIP [3] on the Bondwell. The (single-sided) Bondwell floppies could be read on one of the machines connected to the new server and the problem was solved. I considered this quite a feat at the age of 16...

[1] https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_televideo2anceManualMay...

[2] http://www.z80.eu/bondwell.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Interchange_Program
Engineering and optimization would be more practical applications. Putting an AGI in a decision making position is also extremely dangerous (not that that will stop anyone.)
This is what I have mostly with Rails; when I started working with it I was good at Ruby but didn't use Rails and for a beginner it's horrible. There tons of options for everything, everything is badly documented, most things scratch an itch so when you use it, some of the completely logical things you expect are missing. Samples of gem usage randomly skip steps which can be a hair pulling exercise for a beginner. Then when you finished your app and try to update gems a week later, everything breaks completely. And this is not an attempt at trolling; I now use Rails daily and build rather huge projects in it and this still upsets me. When things work and you know how they work, all is easy and great, installing and using. When either or both of those are not true, you are in absolute hell, especially as a beginner. And nothing of that has to do with actual programming and it shouldn't be needed; your environment should solve this for this imho.
Why I Don’t Do CrossFit
Why technologists want to secede
Alternatively, work for a company that has a good gender balance, or, if you absolutely can't find that on the engineering side, where you interact with non-engineers.

Though the better alternative is to have a life outside of work. Do yoga. Go for group hikes. Go to non-tech meetups, or street fairs, or concerts. Join a dance class. If you really, really need tech to solve all your problems, use Grouper to get a chance to grab drinks with strangers, while still hanging out with your own friends.
Wait, last 40 years? What makes that your metric? Marijuana was outlawed in 1937, heroin in 1925. And the Black Panthers were in part a reaction against hamfisted selective enforcement of dumb laws - including drug laws - by the powers-that-be.
Data mining your children
What are your hobbies outside of work? that's a great starting point that will introduce you into a more diverse population. I've heard good things of the 'meetup' website.
Paedophiles and politicians ask Google to remove their search results
Yup - awesome book, it's timeless.
Fake Kaspersky Antivirus App Found on Google Play
Any specific recommendations for DeAngelo's later stuff?

I too was big into that whole PUA/game thing in a former life (more theory than practice though) and came to much the same realizations about it, particularly after listening to many of Barry Kirkey's radio shows (the very early ones) where he gave you the non-exaggerated, non-glorified view of what it was like to live in that house.

FWIW I also have a similar problem to the OP. Other things in life I'm sorting out right now but taking up classes again and going to meetups are on my radar for the near future.
Many ‘strict herbivores’ will eat animal matter on occasion
UXO (unexploded ordnance) remains a problem quite after the fact. A gentleman in Virginia became the latest casualty of the Civil War in 2008 due to a naval artillery shell.

The house my mother grew up in, and the block surrounding it, had to get evacuated twice. You wouldn't naturally think Pulaski Street in Chicago would be a great place to find bombs but you aren't counting on my grandfather, who twice had a shell land in his foxhole on Iwo Jima and fail to explode. Believing them to be his lucky charms, he brought them home with him after the war and put them in his basement, next to his collection of nails.

The CPD bomb squad said, after disarming the second one, "If he has a third one down here, it is your problem."
Is it still possible to build using cmake?

I too reliably avoid libraries that depend on these old bloated tools (although I appreciate its helpful for packaging; the script complexity and lack of portability is undeniably a trade off cost in using automake; the usefulness of this library for me would be for a static embedded use case, where automake is of questionable value)