skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I considered deleting the article, and you may be right about that. But if I can't take criticism, and can't be accountable for what I write, I'm not a very good founder.

What I was trying to discuss was the fact that this spectrum of advice really makes someone an asshole. But then does it take being an asshole to get to the top?

To your point A, the idea that engineers are just tools is exactly what's wrong with the advice I was given. I found it shocking, but there are levels of big business where the line of humanity and numbers can be blurred. My goal is to develop a relationship with someone, and back that up with honest business.

To your point, B, this was from a very select set of people I got advice from and represents a small fraction of my mentorship spectrum. These people are all very very successful. They've built and sold multi-million dollar companies, which is why it's so interesting to me to consider that people operate this way.
I can understand your feeling.

the voting system never works well. down voting should be about quality, not opinion. but people simply down vote opposite opinions.

One lesson I learnt is, never say anything negative about google here.
That thwarting is honestly trivial to counterthwart without even trying. The register at the coffee shop knows which note Alice paid with and which ones they gave in change.
Most people do :)

Take a look at Scott Adams' post on dual areas of expertise. It's one of the best primers on how to think about a career:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...
What are "open source miracles" for early-developed project?
As the EFF argues in the linked brief, there shouldn't be any "civil cause of action related to unauthorized access" when the data in question is made publicly available on the internet.

Craigslist was abusing the CFAA with an expansive interpretation – treating unapproved use as if it were the same thing as unauthorized access – similar to that of overzealous federal prosecutors. Craigslist's argument, if embraced by the courts, would make other cases imposing penalties on the reuse of otherwise-public data easier.

The reference is fair to make these points to a mass audience, although a bit macabre.
Hey, CEO of REX here... would be happy to answer questions.

P.S. We're hiring Chisel developers! If you don't know chisel, but want to learn and have RTL experience, we'd love to have you learn on the job! Check out our website: http://rexcomputing.com
> Showing up means you have plenty of company.

And yet you are probably in the top 0.1% if not 0.01% of the human race.

That's still 7,000,000 people though.
I did this a few years ago with a similar dongle and a homemade antenna. It's a pretty cool thing to see something you cobbled together receiving real-time messages from space.

http://robotrising.org/2012/10/capturing-weather-satellite-i...
We're adding more inventory regularly and Canada is pretty high on the priorities. I'd love to discuss and get more feedback from you if you're open to it. Thanks!
I seriously couldn't image that there wouldn't be? Outside of just being a horrible person, you would be firing a perfectly good employee.

I feel like there's a wrongful termination suit right there. I don't know how people could get away with it. It seems they do?
There is plenty of competition on that side. The bigger problems are that these people are uneducated and don't trust banks. They also frequently get part or all of their income in ways that dissuade from from putting it in banks because they do not want to pay taxes on it or have to explain what illegal things they did to earn it.
In my opinion, Chisel feels like "lets write Verilog with Scala syntax." I personally see MyHDL as a better approach as you can leverage existing libraries for generating code (i.e. use scipy to generate the coefficients for your FIR filter). One plus is Chisel generates C++ code for testing your design which is a huge speed increase versus simulating Verilog.
interesting outcome. Do users own the copyright to their pictures and postings on Facebook? twitter?

Can I build a Facebook scrapper and redistribute it to other sites?
> Isn't that exactly what JL and PG have made a career doing?

Yes, YC was modeled on the help PG received from his friend Julian Weber in creating Viaweb. Weber gave him money, advice, and introductions to other rich people that invested more money. PG wasn't merely determined, he was also helped by powerful people. Without that help it's likely there would not be a YC. No YC, no Airbnb.

YC's very reason for existing is probably its most powerful advice and should be considered implicit with all their other advice: you need help.
There's a merge commit for each commit pulled from libav (and it's frequently not empty, as the codebases have diverged and so conflicts are common).
Google suggest API will be soon discontinued
For it to work, it really needs to be user-owned and controlled, otherwise you're just the next company-of-the-week.
"Thoughts on BLOCKCHAIN as an antipattern considered harmful" ;)
It does say that 3taps has to pay $1m to craigslist that might have killed their onhand cash.
> let's focus on the negative at every turn

You mean like the dearth of humour?
Seems like both sides violated, perhaps the judge had to rule against both but didn't really want to award either side.

EFF wins though so that's nice.
> Beyond that, we used to find ourselves in dependency hell with maven pretty frequently

You'll hit that with Gradle, Ivy, Leiningen, SBT and Buildr too.

> The biggest problem, imho, is that it's inflexible. You can't just (easily) throw in a bit of functionality or make an unusual tweak to your build. So, if you can't find an existing plugin to do what you need, you have to write it yourself.

I'd also call that it's biggest strength. Maven POMs are only ever declarative. I've never hit a FOSS project using Maven that I couldn't build, but I've hit plenty using SBT or Ant that I had to tweak to build.

> I've written a maven plugin, and the documentation/support was rather poor.

I had the same experience with Gradle's DSL documentation, although having a look at it now, they've dramatically improved it since then.
Yes. Have you actually worked a job with tips and commissions? Some days they really end up at ZERO net tips over minimum wage.

PS: If the actual calculation where 70$ + f(X) instead of 70$ or f(X) the top opened would likely be far higher as random tips have a lot of a variation. With many waiters receiving at least one 100$ and a few 50$ tips over a few years. I know plenty of waiters that broke 250$ on a good night. But you see the same thing with raft guides, masuse, or bell hops.
I'm not sure what he's getting at except maybe that penalties for some crimes are so severe here in the states as to incentivize escaping apprehension by any means necessary. I'm thinking about something like drug trafficking where you can go to prison for life.

In general, though, I would agree with you that there can't be many situations in which your life would be improved if you shot at a police officer. By my observation any time someone does that it has the effect of enraging every cop in the land.
It is called the Tueller Drill and the distance is 21 feet. Within 21 feet, a knife-wielding attacker stands a very good chance of stabbing the defender due to the time it takes the attacker to cover 21 feet vs. the defender unholstering, aiming and firing their weapon.
that was my conclusion. in fact the article might as well write up on 'How to become President of United States'. The book 'Hard thing about hard things' talk about this. There's no formula to success. However, we have this hero culture where hardship is required to do great. It simply does not guarantee any level of success. Being a complete lazy ass isn't going to help or working 50 hour week or answering email at 4 am isn't going to push the needle at your company. You might tell yourself that, but it doesn't matter because the outcome is binary. You make it or you don't, or it feels like you made it (sitting in expensive chair in your office on investors dime, burning cash, Andreesen talks about this).

one reason that people are downvoting you is because they know it's true and it scares them. imagine if you told them, no matter how much you flail in the water, a large portion of you will be going back home.
And there are countries in which the police would just shoot you and take your cash. That doesn't say anything about whether cash is better than electronic payments, it says don't live in such shitholes.
This looks like ring voting...

If you want avoid having your promotional submissions flagged as spam,
then you should do a "Show HN" post to indicate that you want feedback
on your project or startup. The "Show HN" submissions are listed under
the "show" link in the top menu and the rules for doing a "Show HN"
submissions are here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Muffled in the Hamptons, Uber Makes Some Noise
Conceptually, I agree with his view that without a better understanding and appreciation for philosophy, humanity is limited by the progress science makes. But if I'm understanding his reasoning, he wants more philosophy so that scientists can become well-rounded generalists, reduce competitiveness, and better communicate to voters and politicians. These might be valuable benefits but, to me, humanity could benefit most if scientists had a much better understanding of rational ethics. IMO, universities are churning out too many unethical scientists and, for proof, I offer how much money goes into government-related projects (e.g., weapons, surveillance, control). A rational understanding of ethics is needed to reduce the research and funding of the plethora of destructive and control-oriented efforts. Not to mention that if scientists ever truly learned rational ethics, they'd no longer ask for government grants as they'd know it's wrong to take stolen money.
The biggest problem with MyHDL in my opinion (As someone using Chisel to make a commercial processor) is its (non existent) "real" simulation capabilities. If something is not cycle accurate (the way that Chisel's C++ simulator is), you can not really be positive of anything...and you don't want to get to physical design and find out you can't meet timing.
> Currently it sucks to write tests with JUnit while using Kotlin

Why?

> XML based Build Tool, I mean seriously? It should at least be somehow human readable.

It's entirely human readable in my subjective opinion. At the very least, it's as human readable as HTML...

> A language should need a sane integration of it, not the library itself.

Any language which has constructors already has the best DI integration available.
I agree.

If you're asking someone to sign up for something, the opportunity cost is huge. $60 for a good development team is terrible.

The point I was making is that it's an unscrupulous way to found a company, and it was advice that came from a few very successful entrepreneurs.

If you're a lightly funded startup, $60k is good, but that needs to be matched with a realistic equity offer as well.
As I already pointed out, you did the math wrong, 70/8=8.75, not 8.25. Now you are just trying to resort to whether or not I can personally relate through shared experience, instead of whether your numbers add up. I have worked in an untipped restaurant position near minimum wage but I didn't have to live on it at the time and so can't directly relate to anyone living on minimum wage or below (which doesn't include the people targeted in the ad since they would make above).
This is now a second former NYT journalist that is also concerned about NYT's fact checking. Wonder if they were replaced by journalists with similar ethical standards.
If it were extremely successful, they wouldn't have written this blog post begging for help to save the project from dying.
The disturbing part of the Sandra Bland incident is that police officers see nothing wrong with the way she was treated. And her death being ruled a suicide was vindication for them.

I know this is a generalization and that I should probably cite sources. But you are welcome to find discussion forums on your own.
Just imagine what it will be like when we have a blockchain engineered for affordably storing megabytes of data. Fun times ahead.
John Zerzan
I dunno, I think the last thing anyone wants are more dialogs on websites, especially mobile.
It'd probably be far easier. Plenty of people would be willing to learn UE4 or already know it. Who wants to learn Wesnoth Markup Language?
hindsight vision is always 20/20. certainly luck isn't all that is required, but despite making the 'right' moves, there's an ocean filled with dead businesses or startups at the bottom. Nobody likes to talk about the fact that these were led by smart people, had everything right going for them until they find themselves in new waters and submerge. It's not at all attractive to write about those that have fallen and that anybody could be next. We don't like talking about it because it is scary. Nobody can predict the waves with 100% certainty. Today's champions maybe tomorrows losers, today's losers maybe tomorrows champions. It's naive to assume that you have complete control over all aspects of your business or life. More often, humanity's greatest innovations have arisen by accident or when they were looking for something and ran into something else. Ask yourself, when was the last time something went exactly as you planned? If you answered 'often', you haven't really tried anything worthwhile.
Last thing I used my R820T for was decoding POCSAG[0] messages here in the UK. It's a paging system, and the messages seem to be broadcast nationwide in the clear. Seems to be mostly used by the NHS and vets. I got kind of depressed reading about dying pets.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POCSAG
Sourceforge was compromised by bad people. Dice bought them.
> Their number one job is not to kill anybody innocent

No, that's what you want their number one job to be. Their number one job is to punch the clock and claim their pension. I relate it to the phrase "to protect and serve." The words "protect" and "serve" are nowhere in the job description for police officer. The motto was devised by the LAPD in the 50s, probably for PR reasons.
Sometimes, you just want to find out if someone is a girl or a guy.

Not every question needs to become a forum for minorities to express themselves. Not every worksheet or webform should worry about "reinforcing the incorrect idea that everyone fits into the gender binary."

Walking on eggshells...
For anyone else who finds green-on-black hard to read:

document.body.style.color = "#333333";
document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#EEEEEE";
> As the EFF argues in the linked brief, there shouldn't be any "civil cause of action related to unauthorized access" when the data in question is made publicly available on the internet.

Why?

The principle underlying the Craiglist lawsuit is centuries old. Craigslist is like a shop open to shoppers. The shopkeeper makes the premises open to the public, but the scope of that access is limited by the shopkeeper's purpose in granting that access. If a member of the public accesses the property for improper purpose, a civil action for trespass arises.

The fact that the premises is an Internet website changes nothing.
Congrats on your work 2ton_jeff!

Regarding zlib, is that the fastest implementation that's currently available?

I rememeber stumbling into a guy that claimed his implementation was way faster (2x or more) than the original zlib, and it was a drop-in replacement and scaled fairly well. Unfortunately, I can't find it right now (it should be bookmarked on another computer).
People don't contribute. That's why they are desperate for developers.
Agreed. I was one of the lead designers of the Spotify page and I saw it the second the page loaded.

They could have at least changed the colors :)
It's hard to take these seriously when they equate digital ransom with actual kidnapping. Clickbait headline if I ever saw one.
That would be fantastic - and admittedly people like yourself or some other folks I can think of (Paul Whiteley of "Questioning Answers" fame comes to mind) are doing really great job on explaining the complex subjects in lay terms.

Please do this!
> , and why it matters that it's soda and not ice tea.

It matters that it was a manufactured lie.

The "ice tea and skittles" was also mentioned every time the name Trayvon Martin was mentioned. Every. Single. Time.

So it must have also had a great importance to everything and everyone.

And the point was to show how these stories are manufactured by removing facts, and replacing them with the narrative... A young 12 year old kid just getting some ice tea and skittles on a bright sunny day - murdered by a white racist who had no injuries, was not arrested, was not handcuffed and taken-in, etc (all points proven false).

> Sorry but you're going to need to explain why having watermelon soda is a shoot-on-sight offense

Why would I have to explain it? What you just said is completely made up, and you are the one saying it. Trayvon was shot because he was beating Zimmerman's head into the pavement. They both made mistakes, it escalated. And everything that was reported was spun to the narrative.
Wouldn't you still have to poll to check if the "leader" still exists?
The NFL Has a Gambling Problem
There needs to be an internet "law" about how all news reporting websites eventually tend towards populism and "fluff" (Ten X About Y That Will Shock|Terrify|Amaze You), rather than unbiased reporting, over time.

Edit: And maybe another law about how frequently they tend toward populism that ends up alienating the silent-majority of their audience setting up a feedback loop as they strive to even greater monetization despite a decreasing audience.
Personally, I'd like to see a US constitutional amendment more or less along the lines of:

> Any law that isn't routinely and consistently enforced is invalid.

...since in my view unenforced laws don't do anything except invite corruption.
I don't know this firsthand, but I've heard from many people that had delved into OpenSSL code that it is an example of code where "many things could be made better", to put it lightly.
Great work by the LANGSEC crowd. My recent interest in parsers was those verified for correctness or security. So, they have security and a certain amount of correctness. A great next step would be combining it with work on formal verification of parsers or generators (see below). On top of that, ensure the subset could generate SPARK and/or CompCert-compatible C code to automate much of the rest of the problem.

TRX formally verified parser interpreter
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.2576.pdf

Validating LR(1) Parsers
http://gallium.inria.fr/~xleroy/publi/validated-parser.pdf

Verifying a parser for a C compiler
http://gallium.inria.fr/~scherer/gagallium/verifying-a-parse...
Krugman used to think like a typical economist, but abandoned this approach and subsequently became a celebrated columnist. Ironically this was years after he wrote an essay complaining how the economists who became popular were rarely the ones who had a good understanding of economic theory:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/ways_of_thinkin....

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/krugmans_danger....
Ask HN: How often does technical debt lead to the failure of a startup?
The question here comes from my concern of how some startups can actually survive with high technical debt with customers? Wouldn't that lead to their failure as a product/service sooner or later?

I work as a web architect contracting with startups on smaller complicated pieces of technologies. These days lots of startups I talk with have a very high technical debt in their product(s) and most of them don't seem to care.

My first advice to them is that things like that can kill a product, but I've had some strange feedback after passing on that advice.

So I wonder if technical debt does actually have pitfalls along the way? (Bootstrapping yeah I agree, but not when you have 8 engineers on the team)
I think it depends on the scale of the project? I do a bit of freelancing for front-end projects, and the sweet spot has been for landing pages and projects that people want to move fast on.

I think in general it's best to work off of referrals and look at hiring an agency or freelancer in the same way you would hire any employee - due diligence.
Wow, this is really interesting... I'm going to return later to read all the comments herein and in the article.
I use this method, both for clients and my personal stuff:

/projects

/company (or persons name)

/project name

/contracts

/created

/documents

/design

/dev

/presentations

/proposals

/supplied

I also have a similar structure starting with products (for internal products) instead of projects etc. Otherwise it is nearly identical. Almost ever sub dir has documents and design as sub dirs too. Contracts have the MSA and each SOW by title and year + month.

I used to put year under projects/products. The problem is that it becomes harder to find things over time (especially for 1 client) and honestly I archive the company's I haven't done business with in over 12 months, so it was fairly stupid to have year for me. We store this structure on box too so that we can easily collaborate, we just don't store /dev in box.

Things under dev are all in git so they are version controlled.

It isn't perfect for everything but so far it works better than any other I have tried/used so far. Hell even my personal real estate projects get put under this structure. And it allows for easy collaboration etc. Always open to feedback myself.
This is the problem with reporting in general --it's full of half truths and poorly researched pieces. Many of these pieces are political one way or another.

They need better editors and fact checkers and other news organs, such as NPR or HuufPo or Fox, etc., which pick up the flame, should not pick up these stories and take them as self evident truths. They should at least do some rudimentary fact-checking if only as rudimentary as ECC. But no, then narratives would die.

Either they want to portray the struggle of the meek in the face of the oppressor. Or they want to forward an agenda. It's as if they want to be the hero or heroin. But at the same time they want to be known as having journalistic integrity and it seems this is just a mirage. It's all propaganda.

Sometimes I think they just want to provide catharsis for the upper middle class. Oh, we're better than those other middling people, we care. We truly feel sorry and truly want to bring better things to the disadvantaged --but it's all to lessen their own guilt.

There is nothing wrong with saying, a few nail salons are found to exploit a few new immigrants... But no, it has to be a widesweeping generalization, demonizing all nail operators --who can't retaliate against the machine that is the nyt.

I think someone has brought up the idea of a "genius" for these kinds of hitpieces where people with subject matter knowledge or expertise could comment.
OpenSSL could be way better. That's why LibreSSL exists. But it is something that lots of people are looking at.
That there is a huge subsidy is fact: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/01/23/drivers-cover-just-51-....

And that analysis understates the subsidy. In fact it would be far more expensive for private organizations to build those roads due to the need to negotiate with individual landowners. I.e. drivers don't pay for the benefit of the government exercising eminent domain to build roads.
You can read the various terms of service and user agreements to find out.
They pick some funny spots. I once noticed a nest built right in the middle of a large wind chime, the monsoon was just starting and this tiny bird was on her eggs in a high wind symphony. Ended up lashing the chime to a hardpoint on the ground and wrapping the tubes to to stop them from moving. The bird didn't budge.
Running on FreeBSD with ZFS. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/575914887190159360