skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>'Well, the fact that someone has made it is proof that anyone can make it. It doesn't mean that everyone will have the same likelihood of making it, though.'

Sure.

Problem is, it takes a basic notion of statistics to grok a statement like that. That's something which, in the US at least, I perceive to be largely absent.

What's said. / What it actually means. / What people hear.

* Anyone can make it. / Anyone can make it with widely varying degrees of likelihood. / Anyone who doesn't make it is a lazy freeloader, except for me and people like me.

* A are more likely than B to have a criminal record. / Though A are 25% more likely to have a criminal record, 75% of A have no criminal record. / A are all criminals.

* On average, C are more intelligent than D. / The topic remains highly debatable, but some research has shown 1 standard deviation difference in IQ between C and D. Whether any observed differences are a matter of genetics or environmental factors is the interesting question. / All C are smarter than all D, period, look it up stupid.
> The days are loooong and the years are so short.

I've never heard it put into these words before. This is a perfect description of being a parent.
> Those jobs may still be open, reasonable people wouldn't
> hold taking another job against you

Also a CTO who has hired many people.

If I've made someone an offer, I want them. If they've had a better offer, that's ok. But if they've turned me down because it went nowhere, I still want them.
I think there is a bit of cognitive dissonance in the tech community about "disruption" versus "big companies." Technology, in general, makes it easier to scale companies to large sizes, and "disruption" often involves using technology to enter an existing industry that is dominated by small, inefficient companies.

A great example is Uber. Uber is making the taxi market a lot more efficient, but it's also well on the path to replacing a bunch of little local taxi companies with a big national one. That's the power of technology: it pushes out the point on the curve where diseconomies of scale cancel out economies of scale. Technology enables consolidation. Other good examples are the dry cleaning and food delivery startups.

It's also not surprising that once an industry has been "disrupted" it takes a lot to push out the incumbent. Small businesses are generally inefficient and prone to failure. Large corporations are efficient and diversified in comparison. A new mom & pop coffee shop might easily out-compete the old mom & pop coffee shop across the street, but they can't offer the scale and uniformity of a Starbucks. When big corporations die, it's either because of their own mistakes, or some seismic market or technological shift (e.g. Kodak).
Design-in-browser bootstrapping project
The Mild Douche-Baggery Quotient
The ReadHat and Apache pages are instructions in how to comply with US law. Since they are at the US, they can not export the software.

ReadHat isn't completely free, but Apache's license has no restricion on exporting the software, as required by FSF guidelines. Somebody not in the US can export it at will. (And the US can forbid Apache from distributing to that somebody...)
Do you have a green card? Is there legal issues with staying in America? I think this would be helpful information; otherwise, getting a new job in Silicon Valley (or America) should be fine for someone as capable as you.
This almost happened to me twice in a four month period.

I was given a job offer at Pixar (back when Pixar made their own hardware). I really wanted to go there but my first son was born and I just didn't feel Pixar was quite stable enough so I turned the job down. Turned out I was right because, if I had taken the job, I would have learned Pixar was getting out of the hardware business and I would have been let go two weeks after starting.

The job I took instead was with Silicon Graphics. I was hired for my video expertise. Was sent to training, set up in a local office, and then the company did a re-organization and my new boss was in Dallas instead of Detroit. My new boss decided he wanted a Fortran programmer and not a video expert so, three months after hire, I'm gone.
6 Great Content Discovery Tools for Your Social Media Streams
The equivalent saying is "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"
Hackathon against climate change
The days when time and resource constraints forced small business to drag its feet on social media are over. Smart content discovery tools have leveled the playing field so that every business has an equal opportunity to win the social media race.
See http://www.reddit.com/r/hfy for more stories with a similar tack
It sounds like you're more embarrassed than anything else. Ask yourself what your life will look like in just 6 months from today. I suspect just fine. At worst you'll still go a bright red color when you think about this after a couple of drinks. Chalk it up and be glad you didn't make the move and then find this out. I have no idea about the circumstances but it's possible these guys need to be commended for moving very quickly to stop you in your tracks once they determined that for some reason the fit wasn't right.
Sorry. I clicked on "Read for Free" when I should have clicked on "Buy now with 1-Click". That's how I was sucked into the join-our-club crap. My Amazon-UI-mind-reading powers are weak.
Exactly. I love Ubuntu Mono and have settled on it after extensive search.
80 Days: The Game
I still haven't seen any reply by Hachette that counters amazon's point that they will all sell more books at amazon's suggested price and make more money overall - amazon, Hachette, and authors. Article just seems a lot of silly side taking instead of logic.
I'd say you did the right thing in not saying what the startup was — it isn't wise to look like a bridge-burner when you're looking for work.
A little humility and self-awareness should go a long way when talking to people about getting jobs. It seems form your post that you're worried that you may have "burned your bridges". But, really, so long as you weren't rude you should be okay.
This might be a derail, but what is the normal procedure by which one negotiates for a signing bonus or a severance package? Some sample verbiage would be nice.
Yeah, technically, Martin Luther King jr. is proof that any black could make it to an important political position in the 60s US, but a single sample only shows that the odds are non-zero.
Ask HN: Does anybody know of a great way to track migraines?
I need a easy way to keep track of migraines. Currently just using a text file but it's a bit unmanageable. Does anybody have any recommendations?
"3 x 10^8 m/s ought to be enough for anybody"
Thanks, that was a much more detailed answer than I could have given.
Execution is hard if you focus on the big end result of the idea. Break the big idea into small concepts or components.

By breaking it down to all the individual steps you do two things:
1. Create a feeling of progress as each step is completed
2. Give yourself opportunity to change as you go since you are working on small pieces of the bigger project.

The most important part is just starting something. If you have an idea, figure out the smallest part of it that you can actually start to create today and then do it.

Let's say you have an idea for an mobile app. Start to draw the pages on paper. Get a small notebook and have each page represent a screen. You now have a small "working" prototype.

From there you can use tools like UI Stencils ProtoSketch to make those pictures interactive https://protosketch.uistencils.com/
A $5 logo designer might steal copyrighted work and get you into all sorts of expensive legal trouble.
I have used the first designer's work and he did a pretty good job for the grand sum of $5. I think he's a design student, so it's a pretty good gig for him (especially because he lives in a low-cost country). I sent him a stock image that I liked and he made a similar design. No complaints from me!
> Are you against the accumulation of capital or do you feel it should have an upper limit?

Neither.

> IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society

Obviously, its a way to measure that. I specifically identified how its a problematic way to measure that -- providing equal utility to someone with greater wealth provides greater reward, which means that those who have accumulated wealth -- often aided by inheritance and circumstance of birth -- are most able to redirect society to serve their utility, including reshaping it to direct future wealth to themselves and their descendants. Left unchecked, this tends to make money, overtime, a worse and worse representation of social value provided by the person holding it, and the market value of exchanges a worse and worse measure of the social value of the exchange.

That's not to say that wealth accumulation should not be permitted nor that it should have a fixed upper limit, because those have their own problems.

But it does need to be recognized as a distortion and balanced. and that's increasingly more true the more the rewards of the economy, before considering regulatory interventions, go to capital rather than labor.
That was Snowden's secret.
It's a story about squick. The aliens aren't merely having trouble grasping the concept. They are revolted by the concept.

Indeed, as you've noticed, their revulsion appears to be the thing which prevents them from getting the picture. It's not as if they haven't seen meat. They've even seen intelligent creatures that are almost entirely meat. That's all part of the joke. If these aliens could get past their squick they'd be clever enough to understand squishy brains, but they can't.
As a complete layman these issues concern me:

- How quickly are the diamonds removed from the body?

- What is their size compared to the smallest capillaries i.e. any potential for blockages?
Good thing I did ctrl+f before I posted this. This radio-drama interpretation is awesome.
Is it too much to ask for a responsive, js-less framework? Or am I just the only one who hates javascript?
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Yes we all understand JavaScript is prototype based and it's certainly possible for a malicious developer to muck with the prototype of your object. In the real world when you have control over the object in question (which imho is the majority of cases) there's no need to call hasOwnProperty.
Well, this is a verbose form asking me to keep my message short. Or shut up, even better. Nice.
Could you talk about what you got out of the YC experience? How is Bikanta different today compared to when you started YC in June?
Sure, feel free to take anything you like, it's all just factual stuff (well, mostly ;-)). Good luck!
> I'd say you did the right thing in not saying what the startup was — it isn't wise to look like a bridge-burner when you're looking for work.

Today I learned that its considered "bridge burning" to communicate a company's terrible ethics in public.
Maybe I should buy some Bitcoin... Keeping a online wallet may be a great way to test a computer's security.

(Ok, half kidding, it's not secure, whatever computer I could talk about.)
That's what I call service. Thanks!
Don't forget trollscript as well then :-) https://github.com/tombell/trollscript
Using scikit-learn Pipelines and FeatureUnions
If I understand how Java implements the ArrayList, yeah, there's not much more overhead vs. an Array.

I don't have the time right now, but I'd be interested if you could whip up a quick simple profile like I did above for various generic Java collections like Map<T,T> and HashMap<T,T> and observe the time and memory consumption for each. I'd guess that the various Hash-like collections in Java will display a similar memory consumption to Perl's.
Brain Training : What Is A Relational Skill?
You're certainly not looking, because BGP insecurity is very old news.
No. Success is, by Western definition, relative. In a post-scarcity society like the West it has to be zero sum or it's meaningless. Once you clear the barrier of survival being a measure for success, success is just doing better than the neighbors.
Brainfuck is kinda cool because it provides such a minimal language with which to practice writing interpreters and even compilers (or a JIT, as with RPython). But it's kinda uncool because of the name and its obtuse syntax.. so anyone know of a similarly minimal language that's more readable?
Really? I certainly wouldn't hold it against him for burning a bridge that leads to people like that..
Fishery – the first startup for fishermen?
"hired and unhired in 2 weeks."

"Deal was to work remotely, till we all figured out the visa."

Looks like the "visa issue" remained to be solved.
Since he was clearly avoiding saying who it was, I think he probably doesn't want to say who it was.
Good idea, it makes the page load for a (way too) long time for me.

That's probably improvable
Looked through the web site and form and whatnot. I don't think people would go through an extra form to contact me, but I can see how it could be useful for people of note like that.

When I clicked in I was expecting this to be some sort of email filter that rewrote emails to be shorter (either by humans or by new summarizing algorithms) or a human virtual assistant to help follow some more complex rules than filters allow to help pare down inboxes. Seems like those would have a broader market.
Pongo2 1.0 released – a Django-syntax like template engine for Go
Stanislaw Lem has written a lot of stories, long and short, in a bit similar vein. About fifty years ago. The wittiest and most hilarious stuff I've ever read.
People need to stop promoting Ghostery. It's made by Evidon, yet another tracking company. Just checkout their website and it's clearly obvious that everyone that installs this extension is doing them a huge favor:

https://www.ghosteryenterprise.com/

It's identical to the adware companies that promise to help remove adware from your computer... but for some reason people keep using it!
Would a driverless truck with $5 million in cargo be programmed to drive off of a cliff or run over the child?

Either way, less people will die with autonomous vehicles, let's start rolling them out ASAP.
Of course it is. Are you perfect, 100% without any flaws? How certain then are you that the employee you hire isn't going to start airing your dirty laundry at the earliest convenience?
You're embarrassed, not fucked. You work in a high income industry, and even if you went without work for 6 months, you're not fucked. Seriously, this crisis pretty much epitomizes "first world problems". It stings, but you'll build up tougher skin and better business sense as a result.

"Deal was to work remotely, till we all figured out the visa." Honestly, that was the problem. You were dispensable, in the mind of the founders. Lesson: iron out all details before starting.

"I joined as employee #1 of a YC startup." The founders know this. If they become the next Dropbox, employee #1 becomes a millionaire or better. Even if it fails, it prestigious. Do you think that caused you to take a job that may otherwise have not taken?
What's The Deal With Metal In The Microwave?
This is a very depressing attitude. A functioning market relies on information flow, and if this information flow is killed because people are scared, the market stops functioning.
I'd say he'd be doing a public service to other people considering a job at that company. If I were a prospective employee I'd like to know more
> till, there are ways to describe the act, like "... said with his quivering nostrils held high in the air, and a sneering look of derision" or whatever.

A "sneering look of derision" is no less subjective, vague, etc., then "snobbishly". Yes, the first parts is a factual description of elements of the elements of the execution of the speech act which led to the conclusion that it was done "snobbishly", and might be more useful in certain circumstances. I already specifically acknowledged that there is a difference between objective factual descriptions of acts and subjective description of the impression an observer has of the act, and that "snobbishly"(like your "sneering look of derision") is clearly the latter, and inappropriate in context where the former is called for.

But it is communicates real information, and different real information than either the factual or the subjective component of your alternative, even when both "snobbishly" and your alternative might be accurate from the point of view of the observer reporting them. Neither is categorically improper, which is best depends on what the speaker intends to communicate.
So in my interview, I mentioned that I had thought of launching the exact same company about a year ago - and one of the reasons why I took this role was because the idea for this service is very close to my heart!
I like how they were executing, so I decided to join them instead of competing.
Also see, The Black Cloud - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud

One of themes explored in science fiction often is the possibility of we coming in contact with life forms so different we wouldn't comprehend the very nature of it.

If all the singularity, AI stuff ever comes true. Some day it will hardly make sense for any of us to even live inside a biological body.
My boss is Tony Johnson. He helped with SLAC's first website (first website in the US, and also the first database driven website) and wrote MidasWWW. Among other things, he mentioned going to the first web conference (where he met everyone TBL, Marc Andreesen, etc...), attended by only 25 or so people, where they wrote out how HTML forms would work on a board. There's lots of information online about SLACs history in the web and some sparse information otherwise, but he'd be happy to answer questions about the early web too. You can also read through the WWW mailing lists, but I think some of what is there is incomplete.
Ask them if they would rather pay what they owe you or have the name of the company public in this context.
Go ahead and explain the situation to the employers whose offers you turned down. Especially in the US, people will understand, and the offers should still be valid.
another truck driver .... http://nasa.orau.org/postdoc/about-fellows/milligan.htm
Why is the burden always on the individual to not "burn the bridge"? I'd say that this startup has burnt this bridge pretty well. It would have been perfectly reasonable for him to tell us who they were and for us to avoid them like the plague.
I didn't pay attention, apparently :(
You are not fucked. Do not say that again, do not repeat it, do you even think it! Pick yourself up as fast as you can and get going. Start hunting again, don't take too long and get back in the groove. The worse period of my life was the moment I made the mistake of thinking "I was fucked" took too long to come out of it, and all it took was starting to think, "I'm not fucked, I can do better, it's possible" Best of luck.
The core of the story is that the aliens can't accept the notion of a meat-based lifeform.

The idea that they might not just be wrong, but also in serious denial, is a cute twist.

Have you really never encountered an intelligent lifeform made entirely of meat who insists, often furiously, that an intelligent lifeform made entirely of meat is impossible? Because they're not exactly an endangered species around here.
If he was 1099 (not uncommon) then that changes the conversation. I know he had a title, but that often is little more than what goes on the business cards.
I was thinking the same thing, which is that if these folks are going through the web, finding licensable and free content for creating a logo out of, putting it into a logo and then mailing it to you, that is probably 30 - 45 minutes of your time so worth $5 is it not?

I don't know if designers get more angry at people who take logos constructed out of stock parts in this way and use them or at the people who supply those logos. There are lots and lots of them out there.
They have offered to pay me for the two weeks.
I agree that it was a good question which shouldn't have been downvoted. But I don't think malicious developers are the real concern in this situation. Rather, it is just a matter of defensive programming. By not using hasOwnProperty (or better yet, ES6 maps), you are creating code that could break just by including a new dependency in the project.
مشاهدة مباراة الهلال السعودي والعروبة
If this is how the company goes about employing their first employee, I don't think they will be around for long.

Yes, if he truly wasn't a good fit, it sounds like they hired too quickly.
I mean monolithic in terms of what the argument was about. Monolithic Kernels can't generally be written in a managed memory-safe language, because it's the kernel that does the memory-safe part. With a microkernel, parts can be written in memory-safe languages, that's why Singularity has to use one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_%28operating_system...
Also, memes such as "can has <xxx>" are considered passé now.
It is a piece of history.

It is also a great story. The young boy outshines the great scholar.

I still think that Tanenbaum might have been right. But the forces of the open source movement were too great, beyond our wildest dreams and were able to overcome any design limitations. Also, Linus did an epic job technically and controlling the forces unleashed.
Oddly enough these kinds of justifications are exactly what the aliens were doing in the story... just goes to show.
Painting in Clojure
I simply assumed that they made themselves look like the locals. It doesn't mean that they are actually made of meat or see themselves as having any other resemblance to the humans.

To give a silly analogy, imagine we visit the world of the Smurfs together. We both paint ourselves blue to fit in, but then you tell me: "they're made out of cake frosting". I'm going to give you quite a strange look when you say that, regardless of the fact that I'm painted blue.
Besides all the nice advice that others have added, I'll give you mine: talk to a lawyer, and have him send physical letters to the company, and to YC.

The lawyer gives you two things:

1) He knows if you can be compensated for the damage;

2) It would give YC an opportunity to take care of this matter.

Oh, and by the way: I don't know their side of the story, therefore I don't want to judge; however, it is very likely that they lied to you - letting someone go after two weeks is weird, and I don't believe that "it's not about you".
I think this is really the sticking point that makes consumer Bitcoin adoption pretty much impossible, as the level of computer security required to keep Bitcoin safe and easy to use at the same time is just not something available to your average joe.

If your private key is compromised, the thief takes your entire balance, and there's nothing you can do about it. So you really want to keep it safe.

Lose your private key, lose everything it was protecting. So keeping the key in only one place, and one place where only you can access, is a big problem. There is nobody out there to give access to your money if you pass away. A hardware failure can be catastrophic.

The problem is that everything that makes the private key survive accidents makes it easier to hack. The way we treat something like this in a corporation is with things like shared secrets: Need 3 out of 5 people to use their issued keys so that the real private key protecting everything is revealed. And even with that level of effort, getting the key is still possible with enough effort.
If you are on good talking terms, and it seems like you are since you mentioned the word "polite" a few times in your post, I would politely ask them for a severance package, in case one is not included in your contract. They can of course politely not give you one. Depending on how the conversation goes, you will be able to recalibrate the "nice guy" stick you are using to measure the founders.