skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Would you ever work on your SaaS at your day job?
Do you think it's a reasonable risk to work on my SaaS at work? My context:

I have 1-2 hours of free time each day max, if nothing comes up. This is because I have a baby. The 1-2 hours sacrifices perfect sleep.

My job on the other hand is not always demanding. I might be able to get a good 2 hour block in for myself. In addition, I have private space and my company is not in software, so they are more likely to be unaware.

My SaaS idea is intended to be a personal scale business, so even if caught it's unlikely my company would be interested in it. Totally unrelated to their business as well. There is a slim chance my idea can catch on larger than I expect, but I'm not banking on it.

I also do not come from a CS background, so it takes me triple+ the time of what some of you can hack out a site. I've only created one app and I have to learn new tools for this new one. Thus the time crunch is even more extreme.

I can work on my app through a web IDE and private IP (HTTPS). Will the company be able to detect it? Alternatively I can shell out for a new Macbook I suppose, since I have private space to work.

My idea if successful will need some network effects to keep away copycats, so I'd like to be able to work full bore. However I cannot afford to quit my job.

I'm in California. My employer is not based there. I did not have to sign any IP agreements.

Would you work on your SaaS on the job if you were me?

Thanks.
Completely public crowd-investment in startups is a bad idea. Crowdfunding is (mostly) great, but people invest money expecting a return, and startups do not generate returns the way the stock market does. Crowdfunding as a public investment vehicle is going to hurt a lot of people.
How does it compare to zsh (more specialy the package o-my-zsh)? The only thing that catch my eyes was the shell command being completed automatically in grey in the background. That will be great to have this in zsh.
HackerNews posts have yet to produce a single paying customer :)

OP, I'm hesitant to share that strategy out in the open. Customer acquisition has certainly been our biggest challenge. Feel free to DM me if you'd like to chat privately about it.
Why not use an atomic compare-and-swap instruction as offered by all of the major underlying hardware architectures?
A three-wheeler! Unfortunately in the UK this is almost certainly no-go; we've had our fill of the Sinclair / Reliant / etc.

I'm really unsure about this whole 'equity crowdfunding' thing. Risky ventures are for a certain class of investor; you need a certain amount of information too. I'm all about getting public access into these things, but you really can't evaluate it on the information presented...
Please take a look at the Linux Foundation's just published census of the security risks of open source projects. Truck factor would be a great addition.

https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-census
That's irritating! I'll have to take a closer look at what they are doing, as I'd like to keep flash around on a click-to-run basis.

I'm surprised that websites can do any kind of file path detection on a client...
Equating Uber with Transport Innovation Considered Harmful
I came to post the same thing. I would want an actually secure line (ZRTP, or similar) to be used for medical communication.
You would have to use sync.Atomic for all reads and writes. If you just use normal reads and writes it's in violation of the Go language memory model. It might work for now or it might start a nuclear war. You never know.
I've never run into anyone who's defined it the way you do; everyone I've heard define it does it in terms of not yet having taken a cash investment from a non-founder.

"We've bootstrapped the company so far, but we don't think we will ship a MVP without taking at least a seed round" wouldn't draw any protests of misuse, in my experience.

You are correct that most bootstrapped companies that have launched end up supporting themselves; that's survivor bias in action.
Fish is probably my favorite shell after having worked with csh, bash, and zsh. But I have to use RVM at work, and it's a real bummer that RVM and Fish don't play nice with each other. I know rbenv works great with Fish, but I'm stuck with RVM at work. So using zsh as a second choice for now.
There are exceptions to this rule--i.e. there are ways to not really be thread-safe but to have things work anyway--but they fall in the category of "you have to really, really know your CPU and be willing to write processor-specific code that just happens to work", so you can basically ignore them.

My favorite is the libdispatch abuse of cpuid to flood the pipeline on Intel CPUs for this problem: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2014-06-06-secrets-...

But really, take Coda's advice. If you aren't synchronizing your reads, you can basically just assume your code is broken.
Here's the mutex source: https://golang.org/src/sync/mutex.go . The fast path is just a CAS, which of course is going to be fast. But it's also important to know how it performs under contention.
How did they get such clear "No" answers?

That list of rejections was very, very unlike my experience trying to raise VC, which was more like 7-10 VC firms giving meaningless "yes, soon!" responses until we gave up.
This analysis seems to me to be deeply flawed. At only a glance, at least two of the projects mentioned at TF=2 have entire companies that are dedicated to them: ansible and elastisearch.

According to Crunchbase, Elastic.co has between 51 and 200 employees, and has raised over $104MM in venture capital. According to Github, there are at least 27 employees of Ansible, Inc. that have commit access to github. Even if we assume that many of these people are not "core developers", saying that the "truck-factor" is /2/ is so far from accurate as to go from merely wrong to straight-up deceitful.
In the context of the original, "tremendous pressure from people coming from Twitter and Reddit to have issues resolved a certain way", i.e. a social media campaign to use politics vs. "merit" in making a particular decision, even if the decision is correct as the original notes, I'm willing to label that "input" as illegitimate, and dismiss it (politely or not).

It's very dangerous to give into that sort of pressure, for the next "request" might be very wrong. Although depending on the nature of the situation, that can be even more dangerous, since it has been demonstrated this can cost you your job or career.

(I'm afraid I'm come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to do future projects under a pseudonym, I have unPC discussion comments going back to the '80s that are still on-line last time I checked, all the way to this 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9815052 .)
Check out the playlist linked in the Voyagers of the Golden Records sounds http://web.mit.edu/lilybui/www/
This algorithm assumes that a user is a person, so some of its matches are incorrect:

- atom
- caskroom
- mongoid
- celery
- etc.
Be careful with that benchmark. It's very vulnerable to SROA and constant propagation optimizing it away to nothing. (Doesn't look like Go's compiler optimizations are able to do that based on those numbers, but a modern optimizer will.)
I really enjoyed this article. It is obvious that the author has some real insight. Also, I am tired of otherwise smart people automatically assuming they are smart in any field, not just their own. It seems the author is too.
Never mind, now with a better resolution image I can see they are clearly craters.
I wasn't familiar, and I'm not familiar with Mercurial in general, but that looks like it could help. Thanks, I'll keep it in mind.
This has no contention and is essentially a no-op? Or do I not understand go?
Tales of Technical Cofounder
New Reddit CEO to maintain Pao's decisions and policies
Ask HN: What tech stack would you use for a brand new webapp?
I'm a pretty experienced developer (15 years in the industry at well-known tech companies), but lately I've been in management and while I still code in my spare time, I'm not totally up to speed on the newer stuff. I have some new side projects I want to work on, and I'm curious, in 2015, what tech stack would you build a brand new webapp in? I'm not asking what's "BEST" — I'm just asking what you personally would use if you were starting something new today, and why.

By "webapp" I'm thinking of stuff in similar size and complexity to something like Wunderlist — fairly simple, but with a nice UI and maybe eventually a companion mobile app. These will be small projects I do on my own for fun. No other developers to worry about, and I'm not looking for or expecting massive adoption (though I'd rather not use something that's unable to scale, in case I get surprised).

I've worked with a lot of languages over the years (including C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, PHP, Javascript, and a little bit of Go and Ruby), but I'm willing to learn just about any language and frameworks that make sense.
What is the worst that will happen?
Attitude extremity is measured by a questionnaire on three dimensions: economic, social, and environmental.

I notice that of the 8 economic questions, three are essentially the same question rephrased (labeled "eqwlth", "eqincome" and "goveqinc") and two additional questions are very closely related ("helpsick" and "helpoor"). It's not clear how these 8 questions do a very good job of measuring attitude extremity along the economic axis.

Questions along the other axis also seem too nuanced for a simple 1-5 answer (agree-strongly to disagree-strongly). For example are nuclear power stations "extremely dangerous" to the environment. Well, in my mind, of course they pose some danger, but less so than the coal plants they often replace. I'd have to disagree strongly that they are "extremely" dangerous (i.e. be classified as having an extreme attitude). I'm not trying to start an argument over the pros and cons of nuclear power here, but just wanted to point out that the questions selected by the researchers introduce their own bias where shallower answers seem more centrist.

Perhaps I'm too sensitive about these kinds of classifications. I consider myself a libertarian and usually feel poorly categorized by surveys.
people should know what they are getting in to. if they don't, just like the normal market, that's their problem. it would be very nice to destroy the vc market, or at least give them some more competition, and also to see some of the wealth generated returned to the people rather than back in the pocket of people who already have lots of money.
What are some good current Smalltalk implementations? The only one I've really heard of is Pharo.
And this is the prime example of the type of product that should not be crowdfunded, under any circumstance.

The model makes some sense for simple branded products which (i) aren't that appealing to VCs and (ii) have chances of success closely allied to ability to generate buzz from evangelists (though I still expect the return on the asset class to be negative when its equity funding rather than pre-orders)

The model makes no sense whatsoever for technically complex but potentially very high return inventions, where the choice of crowdfunding as a fundraising strategy is basically a big red flag saying "we think people unable to do due diligence are our best bet for [the next stage of] funding"
Needs a mirror
As a developer is it a good or a bad thing to have a high Truck Factor? There seems to be a trade-off. Management and business wants low Truck Factors, but talented developers do not want to be replaceable code monkeys. Do projects with a low Truck Factor lose specialist knowledge?

Then I wonder when the Truck Factor applies and if you would always want to lower it. For a few projects I worked on invoking this Truck Factor irked me. A low Truck Factor is insulting to your skills (for you ten others), but a high Truck Factor can be too. Who likes to hear that management is already planning to continue your work after you are found to be roadkill?

I don't even want to hear this metric in a start-up, because how would you even optimize this metric? Be glad you have something worth dying over.
If there were actually a government body that cared about "cyber"-security, they'd be hauled up in front of it. They're basically an infosec Bhopal - creating a toxic mess that other people have to clean up over a period of decades.
Shouldn't there be a disclaimer though?

Or, at least an example of when it would be a good idea to use a singleton over some other pattern?
Y'all can play this game before it even comes out! Just search up "Noctis IV"
It does seem likely that this could end up being Aptera Part II.
Simple tool for resize and compress any PNG images for iOS and MacOs apps
Perhaps because their rejections were seemingly policy-driven ('we don't handle/haven't had luck with this category') rather than qualitative?

I've heard the same happen to friends attempting to seek investment in 'music' and 'gaming' businesses - clear rejections based upon their 'category'.
It's funny that people are okay if their credit card gets stolen but if someone finds out you have high cholesterol, all hell breaks loose.
Not disagreeing with tptacek but IMHO Kickstarter style rewards with an option to purchase a complete vehicle would be preferable.
It's interesting how all these people arguing against Reddit are unaware of the prime principle by which Reddit decides to shut down communities. To reuse his analogy:

Communities are shut down when they don't stay inside their rooms.

There's a term for that, brigading. On 4chan the principle was called "anonymous isn't your army". Generally the people who build such "high amounts of free speech" places don't mind if literally everything is discussed, but they, and over time also the userbase, reacts strongly if sub-groups try to use the power of the crowd amassed to actively and negatively influence other people, be this other sub-groups on the site, places elsewhere on the internet, or even physical places or people.

Edit: He also says "tens of floors", which further demonstrates the ignorance, since Reddit would be better described as thousands of floors. ( 676,951 sub-reddits according to redditmetrics. )
Every user downloads and runs arbitrary code constantly, as updates. In the far future updates might come with a formal proof of their security, machine-verified on download, but for quite a few years still we will be stuck with just cryptography.

A front door would be using Microsoft's signing keys. As long as you don't leak the keys, you aren't diluting security in general. A back door would be just leaving vulnerabilities around. It's a meaningful distinction.
I think the distinction is that cryptography is much closer to thought-crime than to any physical crime. It's on the continuum of banning speaking in private. There are a lot of ways to slice it, but it boils down to privacy being illegal per se. It would be unconscionable by the majority if the implications were clearly understood, but because it's "technology" somehow the fearmongers are able to spin it (as they do so many things) as a national security issue.
Yes democracy has its problems as well, that's the entire point of that famous quip. Which countries would you most want to live in and how many of them are democracies Nazi Germany accomplished some impressive things, but they were the exact opposite of good government. A clear majority of countries are either actual democracies or pretend to be, because of a near worldwide consensus that democracy is the best option we have.
Enough Is Enough: No More Babying Women in Tech
Sign PDFs from Your Smart Device
Current/former Reddit joke about diluting Conde Nast's ownership
I am surprised that they only got 7 rejections, I would expect a lot, lot more NOs
i posted to a similar question on reddit a while back:

"Listen man, I was in an incredibly similar position as you were. I took a gap year where i taught the MCAT and lived (somewhat) in the city. After I got accepted to medical school, I backpacked through South America for 3 months and met some incredibly interesting and beautiful people from all walks of life. In the summer I worked a 40hr/week job as a Kaplan instructor where i met other Instructors. Some where in medical school, some where about to start, and some quit medical school. I had this amazingly fun experience of working with fun people but also having a robust life outside of my job.

Then i went to medical school. I don't want to insult anyone here but the atmosphere in medical school is not inspiring. First, it has the same vibes as law school.. you're going to meet a lot of people who are clearly there because of the prestige and respect the career brings. Second, medical school is a bubble. There is very limited time you have to spend outside of those who you're doing medicine with. Third, and this one is personal, you're not going to meet too many fun creative, wildly free spirited people there; most will be type A personalities that are largely concerned with their grades (which is understandable, just something to consider.) You'll also notice that medical school just becomes this constant circlejerk of "our lives are so tough because we're in med school/ we get no sleep/these tests are so hard" and it gets pretty fucking annoying.

I realized going to medical school is deciding that your life will revolve around your career. The first day I was there, they told us you have a minimum of 7 more years of schooling, and that's if you do something like pediatrics.
You sound just like i did when i was about to start. I sucked it up, thinking how bad could it be? It can be pretty fucking bad, man. I ended up quitting within a few months of starting because i immediately knew this was not a culture that would allow me to grow in the direction i wanted to grow.
Lastly, I also went to a DO school. I'm not sure how MD schools are but I can say for certain that many schools are clearly just doctor making factories that are trying to squeeze as much money out of you as possible.

Lastly, you should very carefully consider why you want to do medicine. Medicine nowadays has become more of an assembly line process so the rewarding nature of the healing someone and bringing them back to health has been hugely diminished. Also keep in mind that your paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to lose your twenties for a career. The material is definitely fascinating (which is why i went to medicine) but the beuracracies of this old profession will likely drain you.
Please pm if you've got any questions at all."

As a side note, I have succesfully transitioned into a career as a software engineer. It brings a lot of the freedom and quirkiness that i was seeking (:
Not entirely correct.

This doesn't work for many hotel paywalls, because they would have a catch-all rule for all DNS A queries (resolving to a local IP of authenticating proxy) and block everything else. And the reason is exactly because of the DNS tunneling, which was making rounds in p2p circles as far back as 2005 if not earlier.
Intacto 2013 Flat Design vs. Realism
Funny you should say that because in the last couple of years every time I hear of something neat in web development it's in Python. Especially in the HN community it's quite dominant.

Mind you, I'm a C# developer without any knowledge of Python so I'm not at all biased.
These rejections are a testament to why you shouldn't give up just because smart people give you a hard "no", but also why storytelling is so important. These investors clearly did not understand Airbnb, and I think the Airbnb guys would admit that's in large part because they did a bad job explaining it.

Explaining why something that is small today could some day be huge is so hard.
I've been working on a similar list, highlighting the most depended upon projects rather than GitHub stars: https://libraries.io/bus-factor
Last time I checked which was about 2 years ago, I've started seeing paywalls that blocked DNS.
Moreover, there are a number of agricultural products where we're already keeping the price artificially high. Shifting demand toward these shouldn't see any increase in price for a while.
Venture capital funds tend to underperform the market, and are subsidized by allocation requirements at their customers (pension funds, university endowments) that encourage relatively small slices of huge funds to be put into longshots and stuff that isn't correlated with lucrative investments. At least, that's what Kauffman said about it.

To generate outsized returns for a small subset of investors, you don't have to be anywhere nearly as sophisticated as a VC fund: you can just run a lottery.

If you want to do something more socially useful than a numbers racket, crowd-investing probably isn't the best way to go.
> you still need the user's willfull cooperation.

Not always, especially when law enforcement can request data straight from the provider, which I would imagine happens in the majority of internet crime investigations. Because let's be real, how many internet companies have a zero knowledge policy towards their users' data?
All of this is poorly defined (edit: I meant mathematically not well defined) as a game theory problem, from the premises to the suggestion that it's "the prisoner's dilemma with extra credit".

First, the prisoner's dilemma is defined for two people, which this is not. Furthermore, the prisoner's dilemma assumes perfectly rational actors; we cannot assume that of students.

Second (and related to the number of players), the 10% metric has different meanings based on the number of players (students). With two people, one person opting for six points constitutes 50%, which might be the case for an advanced elective at a small school. A first year biology class at a major university might have hundreds of students, in which case we can treat the 10% condition as stated.

Third, the outcomes of the prisoner's dilemma are either absolute gain or absolute loss - either jail or freedom. In this case, no possible outcome constitutes loss relative to the starting state; a player can fail to gain, but cannot be worse from where he or she started before playing. A premise that would make this closer to the prisoner's dilemma would be that if more than some percentage of the students opt for the six points, then all students lose six points.

Overall, this seems like something this instructor is doing for fun rather than as an experiment in a formal extension of the prisoner's dilemma.

For my part, I'd opt for the 2, based on what I remember about undergraduate students. I have no formal reasoning to support this, however.

tl;dr As stated, this is neither an extension of the prisoner's dilemma, nor is it well-defined in any case. It seems to me that any suggested solution will require either additional data or additional assumptions. Either way, I'd choose 2 points, and I would be interested to see the outcome of this instructor's survey.
Imagine the article rewritten as "The Death of the Internet."

All the premises are the same, and largely true: there's no strong central control, it's basically run by volunteers who have conflicting interests, and there's some abhorrent stuff out there.

The conclusion, that it's a failed experiment, doesn't seem to follow.

Reddit may die someday. Could happen, aggregators die, but I don't think a scandal means it's at death's door.

Even though I disagree with the conclusion, especially its forcefulness, the article has a fantastic collection of links. The links would be a great first place to catch the journalistic zeitgeist.
7 rejections after a meeting with 7 potential investors, not 7 rejections overall
I see your point, and I was a bit hasty, very embarrassing.

That'll teach me to just skim an article quickly.
On Honesty and Startups