skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take!

Tangentially, I hate this phrase. It ignores the fact that there's an opportunity cost to missed shots. If you're imagining the metaphor of a ball game, it's possession (and thus time and position). If you imagine the metaphor of a gun, it's your limited supply of bullets. This exhortation has an implicit assumption of endless resources, which are typically not available in the real world. Of course there are times you should risk things on an uncertain outcome, and be willing to move on to the next opportunity - trying to hold on to a declining situation is often motivated by a sunk-costs fallacy.

But I've heard the 'miss shots you don't take' thing proffered too many times as an excuse for ego-driven, risk-indifferent, and resource-wasting decisions and I'm pretty tired of it. There is a certain sort of person (but I don't men you, parent poster) who comes into a situation, fucks everything up, and then sails off with the excuse of what a bold, visionary risk-taker they are, blaming any obvious failures on the timidity of the team/colleagues. An excess reliance on sports metaphors has become a huge red flag for me in picking the people I work with.
σ_0, indeed
Burning Man is a great week to be in the Bay Area. Shorter lines for everything, less traffic, more seats on the bus, et cetera. I wish it lasted a month.
When the attitude is to dismiss every "corner case" that arises, suddenly you find yourself not doing any security work. After all, every attack is a corner case. 99% of users will never be attacked. Why spend all this energy on things most users will never need?
As a guy who owns 2 tractors and an excavator, and as a software guy who has faced the same problem, you have my sympathy.

I think the answer is quality. All my equipment is Kubota, they make good stuff, if you keep on the filters and fluids they will outlive your kids.

I never seriously considered chinese tractors. I looked at them, they are cheaper for sure, but you are pretty much on your own if they break, there isn't the dealer network like there is for Kubota or Deere.

I'd much rather have a used Kubota than a brand new whatever with yanmar engine in it. My mechanic, who has 40 years of fixing tractors in the San Joaquin valley under his built, claims he has never had to full rebuild on a Kubota. He loves that chinese stuff though, keeps him busy :)
Only worth it if you get paid while on duty above and beyond salary.
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Feel free to add your own links. Or do we just have to take your word for it?
"The various forms of cooperation are incontestably one of the most equitable and rational ways of organizing the future system of production. But before it can realize its aim of emancipating the laboring masses so that they will receive the full product of their labor, the land and all forms of capital must be converted into collective property. As long as this is not accomplished, the cooperatives will be overwhelmed by the all-powerful competition of monopoly capital and vast landed property; ... and even in the unlikely event that a small group of cooperatives should somehow surmount the competition, their success would only beget a new class of prosperous cooperators in the midst of a poverty-stricken mass of proletarians. While cooperatives cannot achieve the emancipation of the laboring masses under the present socioeconomic conditions, it nevertheless has this advantage, that cooperation can habituate the workers to organize themselves to conduct their own affairs..."

~ Bakunin
I did rotation based IT for awhile and the questions that people ask are good but the #1 in my book is:

- Will you get any form of compensation if you have to work after hours?

Where I worked - that was a no. You were paid industry minimum and when you were on call - you were expected to be alert/on call 24/7 AND come in and do your normal 8+ hour shift. Now - I don't mean a 1-1 level of compensation but at least be flexible especially if you were on call.

The calls themselves weren't usually bad - but if you have to come in on a weekend anything you planned on over the weekend is now shot and that can be extremely stressful.
Moonman: 3 Years of Solo Gamedev and 2 Left to Go
Hey HN

3 years ago I started working on a game called Moonman -- a procedurally-generated adventure game.

I posted here two years ago with my blog entry "The Last 2 Years" ( http://bp.io/post/1501 ). 18 months later and I'm still working on the game by myself. I'm now in my final days of a Kickstarter campaign aimed to help fund one more year before the public release ( http://kck.st/1DElnw3 ) and I'm happily on track to reach the goal.

It's taken me 3 years of solid development before I felt comfortable to launch a Kickstarter, and I'm excited to be able to finally hire an additional person to work on my game. The game will take one more year before a public release and then probably another year after that to fix bugs, do the console ports, etc. Here's a visual history of the last 3 years ( http://imgur.com/a/NnEmN ).

I never would have thought I would be working on one game for 5 years, but I understand now that these things take time. Instead of thinking of it as one long project, it helps to think of it as a series of prototypes -- each one building on from the last and getting better along the way. After a few grim periods of uncertainty and depression, I'm finally feeling pretty proud of where it is going.

The best thing about this whole Kickstarter campaign is the great support from the whole gamedev community. I've been tweeted by Notch, chatted briefly to Vlambeer, received a shout-out from Ron Gilbert, and have spoken to many other awesome gamedevs.

There are a lot of solo gamedevs out there, and I'm sure there are also a lot of solo start-ups. If you've been working alone for years on something and are unsure about its future then I hope my little story assures you that long-term persistence can pay off. I've still got a long way to go but excited to enter this next stage in my gamedev career.
A couple of random bits of trivia:

* Dijkstra's Ph.D. was in theoretical physics, but I don't believe he ever actually did much. Instead, he was working on computing systems. Famously, when he was getting married, the Amsterdam official recording the marriage wouldn't accept "programmer" as a job, so his marriage certificate says "theoretical physicist."

* Dijkstra was not a wildly big fan of functional programming. Admittedly, he was less a fan of other things, and I've had this sneaking suspicion that his was simply another allergic reaction to recursion, but still...his guarded command notation was essentially imperative.
Karma came from a culture that believes in reincarnation. It is payback for your behavior in past lives. "Instant karma" is therefore payback for your behavior in your current lifetime, without an intervening turn of the samsara cycle.

If you kicked a puppy right before you died, and got slapped too hard just as you were born into your next life, that's regular karma. If you stole someone's car for a joyride when you were 16, and your car was stolen by a joyrider when you were 90, that's instant karma. The number of intervening years is not the important factor, but the number of intervening rebirths.
You mean how the government can take your children away from you through Child Protection Services?

But that's a detail. Governments do sell our children away quite literally, which is why young people entering the market now pay for health benefits for the elderly - because the State is too incompetent to properly manage the money those elders put in themselves when they were working.

Try another argument. Good one though.
> Block level scoping will introduce coding nightmares trying to figure out what scope your variable is in.

I almost suspect you are trolling here. The variable is in scope inside the block in which it is declared. What could be simpler? With JavaScripts function-scoping, you can declare a variable inside a nested block, but it is still in scope outside and even before it is declared! And if you forget the "var" it is suddenly a global variable.
I've held several jobs where I was required to carry a pager: NEVER AGAIN!

I've yet to find a company that doesn't abuse it to save money. Unless I own the company or have a significant share I no longer agree to help the bottom line by messing with my health.

I might have had bad experiences compared to most but since you're thinking about this option, wouldn't it make sense to think about why the company hasn't just shifted an existing resource to 2nd/3rd shift to help versus trying to save money by making you do another job on top of your day job?

Good luck with the switch!
[2011] Resignation Letter from Steve Jobs
You might want to take a couple seconds to think about all the ways that taxation is different from actual slavery, and how clueless and asinine your comments look in light of that.

Taxation doesn't control who you can marry. Taxation doesn't confiscate your children. Taxation doesn't prevent you from practicing your religion. Taxation doesn't require you to take the name of the person who owns you. Taxation doesn't deliberately keep you ignorant and uneducated. Taxation doesn't beat you to death if you try to escape (it is trivially easy to renounce your US citizenship). Taxation doesn't tell you are less than a human because of your national origin. Taxation doesn't make you owned by one person, a thing that can be sold to another person.

Get some freaking perspective.
I mean, if you go back far enough, there wasn't such a thing as a games industry, so everything was an "indie" game.

I say Spacewar! is the original indie game.
Anyway to sign up to an announce list?

Without github integrations this would end up being another tool to divide our time across, but with github integration then I could see it solving the higher level project management issues that github doesn't do so well.
How We Found Out the #Patriots Beat the #Seahawks on Twitter Too
So show me one.
miniLock [1] seems like a good alternative to PGP for both file encryption and email. It's just so new and it should have more audits.

[1] - http://minilock.io/

They've recently launched Peerio as well which is kind of a closed email-like system with easy to use end-to-end encryption based on miniLock.

https://peerio.com/
You probably just have to accept that pure puzzle games aren't for you. It's the same for me, and Braid is the game that made me accept that fact. I could see it was great, but I couldn't enjoy it past a certain point. No need to be negative, just move on and play games you enjoy.
I don't think he thinks most people here are "good programmers".
Maybe just accept your inevitable oblivion, go quietly into the night and let history make of you what it will?
Those are pictures of the reflection of the light from the sun off of a mirror.

"The final elements, a pair of tunable Michelson interferometers, enable MDI to record filtergrams with a FWHM bandwidth of 94 mÅ. Normally 20 images centered at 5 wavelengths near the Ni I 6768 spectral line are recorded each minute."
The same test but on i7 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=i... - Go winner!
Message Systems is hiring operations engineers
Sierra started with Ken and Roberta Williams working out of their house on Mystery House, in their spare time while Ken held down a full time job. Later, of course, they became a big company and so no longer indie.

"Next time, be more careful!"
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fab-com

Flash sales to e-commerce
Depends on what you are supporting. If the call volume is high due to a badly designed product, and it's not being redesigned or the fixes aren't incoming any time soon, it can drive you crazy. If it's just a stop gap for policy reasons and you don't get many calls, it's not bad at all.

One thing I would say is that while the (my) natural reaction when I get paged (sms) is to jump right up and get it done... but sometimes depending on what you are supporting and as long as you use discretion you need to know when they can wait 15,30,45 mins before you get back to them. This small leeway will help keep you sane.
Fraudulent tax refunds are a huge issues that the IRS has not kept up with. The IRS itself estimates it paid $5.2 billion to identity theives[1]. Protecting taxpayers without creating too much of a hurdle to tax paying is a very hard problem to solve.

[1] http://time.com/money/3419136/identity-theft-social-security...
Don't even get me started on this. I worked at a place where I noticed an account getting added to Domain Admins over a holiday. I attempted to call the head infrastructure guy - who didn't pick up. Later I found out the reason why he didn't pick up was because he didn't recognize the number.

Granted - I probably could have left a VM and he probably would have called me back...but I would kind of expect him to pick up on a phone that was paid for by the company...
There's a small chance your decision means death or severe illness to me or my family members. I don't support you making that decision for me.

You don't get to drive 100 mph on the highway because it entails risks to other people. Same situation here.
Interesting, but misplaced effort.

The biggest problem in widespread adoption of PGP/GPG is client support.

Case in point. I've been looking into sizes of various online communities, and decided to look for any hard statistics on the actual traffic levels of Usenet back in the day. So I looked up the old admins. One of those is Eugene "Spaff" Spafford. Also known as something of a security expert -- he wrote the book on it: Practical Unix and Internet Security (PUIS). I've a copy on my shelf.

He's at Purdue these days, and his homepage there (http://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/) lists a PGP key (http://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/pers/pgp.html). So I grabbed that, and ran a fetch of the signatures for the key. If you want, you can speed that with a bit of shell magick:

gpg --list-sigs 'A40F862E' | grep ^sig |
cut -c'13-21' | sort -u |
xargs --max-args 10 gpg --recv-keys

There's a limit to how many keys keyservers will return, but 10-20 seems a generally safe bet.

Wrote my brief email using mutt (which was designed as a reference case for MIME-encoded PGP email), and awaited a response.

I no longer use PGP. Please send me readable text.

Yes, from Spaff.

So I sent him the unencrypted text, he found my Usenet questions interesting. But I was curious about his lack of use of encryption.

He responded (and gave me permission to quote him):

I don’t have a convenient PGP implementation for my Mac. I used
to use the commercial version, but it requires Java and that’s a
huge risk. GPG implementations require lots of software I don’t
entirely trust, plus there is no nice interface to my email.

So yeah. The guy who wrote the book on Unix and Internet security, stymied by lack of a decent client.

Until mainstream vendors are integrating this, we're going to be stuck.

There are other issues.

If I've got multiple devices, I may well wish to use different keys on them. Which means I've got a key-management issue of having people use the right key(s) on messages. There's the problem of key loss (you lose access to everything encrypted with it). There's the challenge of inputting long passphrases on Mobile devices (I'd far prefer a OTP / keyfob type solution or other form of semi-physical security, plus a shorter passphrase). There's device-based backdoors and other exploits. Etc., etc.

I've used PGP/GPG for nearly two decades. It remains something of a pain to deal with....
I don't have a source, but I'm sure I've read about coops that hire a CEO. Basically, they offer a CEO enough money to attract a skilled executive, but they still own the company, and can collectively give the CEO the boot if things go sour. So, individually, everyone answers to the boss, but the boss then answers too the collective group.
I'm very confused by your reply.. are you trying to say you have three separate groups? ops, devops, and developers? With devops existing to communicate between ops and developers?
I'm not getting that Firefox issue now for some reason. I'll file a bug report if it happens again.
I didn't make myself clear; I don't dispute her ownership over any single copy of the bread. What I dispute is her ownership over all possible copies of the bread - over the very intellectual concept of that bread.

As for the communal property, you're missing the point. I don't dispute her ownership because it "belongs to everyone". I dispute the concept of ownership over non-scarce things like the shape/smell/color/etc of a abstract loaf of bread.

It's not that she doesn't own it, it's that the very idea of ownership doesn't apply.
Here's a nice thread about Jonathan Blow's view on investing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2198255

you are better off taking the mental energy you would have expended on "investing" and subsequently worrying about your money, and instead funneling it into your creative endeavors. You will make more money that way, especially when you take a long-term view.

...

If creative endeavors are profitable, you can use the resulting money to fuel more creative endeavors, thus making the world a better place. Keeping money in a bank account or publicly-traded stock does not particularly make the world a better place.

Once I got approximately into the f-you money level of income, it became crystal clear how fictitious money is in the first place. I wake up one morning, and bam, I am wealthy! Why? Because someone said so and typed a number into a computer. Okay... that's kind of weird.

Given that money is so fictitious and somewhat meaningless, it is a shame to give into primal hoarding impulses, just so one can see the number in one's bank account go up like a high score in a video game. It's much better to make like Elon Musk and use your money for what it is: a way to wield influence to make the world more like you would like it to be.
I agree with you on the sentiment, but note that Jetbrains products run great on Linux and do a lot more magic than IntelliSense.

PyCharm even does a great job for dynamically typed Python, relying on type annotations, run time logs, etc.
shareware.
Yeah, I've found that programmers who work a lot in C++ are a different breed from those who tend to work with higher level and GC'ed languages more. It really boils down to the task at hand I think. There are always going to be people who want explicit control to those who want the system to figure out things for them.
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From the team that brought you Cryptocat.
I've been dreaming lately of starting up a worker coop in silicon valley that focuses on consumer robotics. Is anyone interested in something like that? I'm an extremely capable hardware guy with a broad skill set and extensive robotics and manufacturing experience. I'm running my own little start up now that could help fund initial operations, and could use some people who excel at software, mechanical design, or general operations.

I am really troubled by the way traditional companies exploit workers, and see that as a major problem of our age. If you could show the world that a worker coop could succeed doing something highly technical like robotics, it would serve as proof that the cooperative model can work for more than just chicken farms. I'd be focused on growth like a silicon valley startup to some extent, but quality of life for everyone in the organization would be a big deal.

I'm also kind of curious about B-corporations, which allow a specific public benefit to share standing with profit as a legal goal. This would be more silicon-valley friendly as far as funding, since worker coops don't have the same revenue generating opportunities for investors. Though the coop could agree to some kind of internal "revenue tax" to pay back investors or save money.

I'd love to see some wealthy people just give their money away to talented organizations that want to spread public good. What I'd love most would be to just work on open source robotics that help the world. I've been developing a system for 3D printed robotics that use as few non-printed parts as possible, making it easier to collaborate online with hardware designs. I don't typically even use screws, since sourcing them can be expensive and slow - most parts just snap together or interlock.

An alternative plan though is for me to get rich the traditional way and then use my own money for good, so I am going to be checking out the new YC RFS for hardware whenever that comes out. I have some good ideas about improving life in the kitchen that might be workable. :)
libgcrypt is pretty rough, yes.

The plus side is that GnuPG by design has a relatively limited attack surface. It's tough to conduct a side-channel attack that requires thousands of message stimulus-response tests to get a single key or message bit, given that each iteration of that attack will (in typical GPG usage) require manual intervention.

As long as your crypto isn't "online", GPG is still a pretty safe bet. You can't say the same thing about a lot of newer crypto libraries.

However, if you're doing something like encrypting a session cookie, you should use Nacl, not GPG.
"Fab acquired three similar European startups that year in all-stock transactions. It bought Casacanda in February 2012, Llustre in June 2012, and True Sparrow Systems in November 2012."

True Sparrow Systems is a web development company in India not a flash sales site. Hope the rest of the facts are correct in this story.
You're right. But my question is about income from those at the margins who are laid off fired etc. Due to stack ranking, etc. How is that addressed? It's important to get those people in the economy as much as its important to attenuate cxo salaries...
I'd be really, really cautious about throwing "No True Scotsman" at Seth David Schoen and Erinn Clark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Schoen

His hopelessly out-of-date homepage: http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/

That said, yes, PGP has a notable failing in that there's no reliable method for repudiating a key, particularly one generated by a hostile party.

If you've hung on to your key revocation certificate you can revoke a key you have generated. But that's only a small part of the battle.
You're absolutely right, and I think this is more an assumption about cooperatives rather than how cooperatives actually work. For example, Mondragon is a federation of coops some of which have hundreds of employees; they're not going to have a debate with everybody about everything.

Another way to think about it is that cooperatives are the ultimate expression of a democratic workplace. Yet it's not as if every law were discussed by everybody in a democracy.

In a way, that shows that we have a lot to learn about how cooperatives can work. The quote of the union representative is very relevant: Cooperatives aren't magic dust, even though I personally believe that they are one of the key tools for dealing with the problems of capitalism. As a society, we simply have too little understanding of how cooperatives work, and until enough experiences is collected and networks exist to advise founders of cooperatives, and all those other little things that help traditional business founders are extended to cooperatives, it's going to be difficult.
Hopefully mandatory computer science education doesn't fall into the same trap as mathematics, where the "introductory" version taught in grade school becomes so simplified and rote that it loses all of the qualities that make it creative and interesting. There is definitely a systemic problem of kids thinking they are "no good at math", despite an early introduction, and I'm not sure why CS would be so different. Of course, that's still a lot better than not having mandatory math classes at all.
I see this a lot these days. Great sub-100 million dollar businesses that fail because investors believe they can make it a 1 billion dollar business.
Netflix Is Developing a Live-Action LEGEND OF ZELDA Series
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