skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have a story on startup failing due to tech debt, but I do have a story about technical debt forcing us to pass on potentially acquiring a startup.

A potential acquisition came our way that seemed to be exactly what we were looking for. Customer traction and revenues, the features exactly what we were looking to overhaul. There was very high internal interest in acquiring the technology and the company.

The need for this set of features was so high and the internal development estimated to be so costly (in developer time and delays in other projects) we were willing to overlook that this app was not built on our primary stack and only a few of our developers were familiar with. The language choice made by the company didn’t cool our appetite. However, technological choices made us pass on the acquisition.

They didn’t use a framework.

This means that our developers would have a very long learning curve. We also saw a lot of code that did what a framework would have taken care off and this means that we would have had to learn, maintain and expand the that code instead of working on the revenue generating features.

We found close coupling of code all over the place. This meant we couldn’t quickly extend and modify the features as we wanted without first paying back the technical debt accumulated by the developers.

It wouldn’t have mattered which framework they would have chosen as most of them have good documentation and force some sort of standard development practices. However, we couldn’t take a chance that all the behind the scenes stuff would need a rewrite if we wanted to expand and scale the platform. We passed.
> It honestly sounds like they are so self-centered that they only care about their arrest stats/job performance + personal safety. They care nothing for anyone else's safety if it gets in the way of their job performance numbers. That is a horrific concept, honestly.

If you think of them as undisciplined teenage boys in over their heads, given a job for which they have not developed sufficient levels of mental maturity and responsibility, it kind of seems less nonsensical.

> Rhoads, the Fairfax County police lieutenant, was upfront about this mind-set. He explained that it was standard procedure to point guns at suspects in many cases to protect the lives of police officers. Their firearm rules were different from mine; they aimed not to kill but to intimidate. According to reporting by The Washington Post, those rules are established in police training, which often emphasizes a violent response over deescalation.

Another teenaged boy in over his head.

Honestly, I lay very little blame at these people's feet. If you keep moving up the chain of command, eventually you will get to someone with the mental capacity to know this is wrong, and this is where the responsibility lies. Or, if this person's peers are so corrupt that he is literally powerless to do anything, then you move up one more level. Somebody somewhere is responsible for the way this is being handled, but it ain't the guys at this level. Expecting effective police policy to be set (at least entirely) at the local level is....unwise.
If only the chocolate fountain was infinitely copy-able :)
I'm not so sure YouTube was first. There were a LOT of video startups at the same time as YouTube. Honestly I think a lot of YouTbe's early success was due to rampant copyright infringement. Once Google bought them companies like Viacom smelled money and went after them.
As far as I'm aware from my brief use of tomb, it's a small shell wrapper around GPG and dm-crypt[1].
I suppose realistically anywhere you have access to the required tools (or something that pretends to be them but does platform-specific stuff underneath) you could use tomb.

[1]: https://github.com/dyne/Tomb/blob/e79aaa99620e004682d99eaa0d...
> If neither the civilian nor the cop can be proven to have committed a crime, they should both go free.

This won't help much if the citizen is dead.
> and will make its API source code, the settlement agreement, and other legal filings and public policy resources available.

This is interesging to me. A couple years ago being young and naive i received a cease and desist order from craigslist legal team demanding i remove my craigslist scraper from github. It was largely a toy project to play around with an html parser library i wanted to learn anx thought it could be useful. Of course I now understand it was against their tos and from an ethical standpoint, avoid scraping anything unless getting permission, but at the time I was terrified I'd be sued for a ton of money. It felt incredibly aggressive to go after me , a student at the time.

So I'm curious.. is it illegal to scrape but ok to release the source code? Where is the line drawn?
This is an awesome reply! Just awesome.

Folks rarely notice how much a decision making matters on this regard and technical knowledge matters a lot on the way. Since having a company* acquired sometimes could be a good business return, but in the first place due to hitting the pedal it has brought lots of technical debt which makes an acquisition impossible.
I'm a big fan of Monte Carlo simulations, and highly encourage their use. But is important to remember that there are a few cases where a Monte Carlo model (or, as far as that goes, any simulation probably) can be pretty off, perhaps to the point of being useless, or even misleading in a damaging way:

Off-hand, I can think of two big ones:

1. Missing variables. Of course this doesn't matter if you're only working with one variable, like estimating the value of pi. But if you have a multi-variable model, and your model is missing one or more variables that affect - in real life - the thing you're trying to simulate, then the model may be less than worthless. This is why it's so crucial to be sure that you've identified all the variables. Unfortunately, for complex real-world scenarios, that's often very difficult.

2. If the model (rather, the output from the model) itself affects the real-world domain you're simulating.

That said, MC is a very powerful and useful technique and it's worthy of being in everyone's tool-belt.
I am sure this gets frustrating to hear over and over, but it is astonishing how little freedom there is in the land of the free.

There is the caricature of the German secret police going 'Papieren, bitte', but how is having to fear that any random encounter with police may end with jail or even death any different?
I suspect most people don't have much of an interest in the actual job of being an astronaut. Simply want to experience a trip into space.
It sounds like you're being dismissive, like you're saying discrimination is only discrimination if someone is suffering bodily harm or being deprived of their constitutionally-granted rights. I hope that's not how you meant it.
The shorthand is a politically-charged term that was designed to frame, for the listener, the target being described and to remove sympathy for them as a human. It's not libel when the person's words can be proven, nor to describe the utterance of said words. It's an opinion upon words that were said, thus not libelous.

Prior to the 1880's, the US used to be a nation that accepted the many who would become the hands that raised America to its place on the world stage. Somehow, the spawn of those earlier waves think that they are the reason the US is great and seek to limit entrance of the minds and labor of others who come seeking that old dream of meritocracy.

"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
What are more companies like Valve? Seriously...
Not all problems really count as technical debt, IMO.

To figure out which ones do, I sometimes think about the correctness vs. completeness spectrum.

Correctness is how well the architecture fits the problem, how well edge cases are handled, if it's a service then whether it's built to scale horizontally, etc.

Completeness is how shippable the thing is. Are the important features there, are the bugs not too severe, could the thing live in production without causing severe harm, etc.

Some problem domains live only at the far end of the correctness spectrum, like software that life depends on, flight control, nuclear reactors, etc.

Other domains might be all the way on the completeness side, like the throw-away prototypes, temporary stand-alone marketing sites, etc. If it works at all, you can ship it. Problems there don't count as technical debt.

Obviously most projects are somewhere in the middle.

Most high-growth companies can get away with erring a bit toward the completeness side, and ignoring correctness for many things, because a lot of stuff will be re-written every year or so to handle the changes in the business brought on by customer growth. Since it will be re-written anyway, it might not be useful to think about the lack of correctness as technical debt because you won't ever pay the debt. The real trick is figuring out which things must be perfect now and which can be improved later.

Getting that wrong either way could lead to the failure of your startup. Settle for nothing but perfectly correct architecture for everything, and it might take too long to ship. On the other hand, ignoring severe problems in a critical system might somehow limit growth, cause a legal problem, etc., and eventually sink the company.
Specifically in JavaScript (some are already available in ES6): Proxy, Symbol (especially Symbol.iterator), computed property names, destructuring, and splats... just to name a few!
Great! I can imagine how we can extend other browser functionalities using asm.js
Every time you aim a gun at an innocent persons' head without first doing due diligence before escalating, you increase the chances of an accident or misunderstanding which results in an innocent person dead.

Which we hear about all the time. So WTF?

In any event, why would a squatter merit such a hostile response?
There's no need to wait: the n900 was real Linux (with X, apt-get and anything you could want) as was the n9. If Nokia hadn't scrapped the n9 virtually as soon as it was finished it would be a serious competitor right now.

The experience, speaking as an n9 user who eventually moved to Android, was much more pleasant on the n9. The only problem was limited app selection.
Rasky – Open Source KVM Over IP with Raspberry PI 2
I don't follow. A donation is a net loss even after the tax deduction. There is no profit from funding a non-profit, even if you can take a tax write off.

If you want to be cynical, good PR would be a much better explanation than something involving taxes.
Tilak Your House Everyday with Vaastu Tilakam by Dr Puneet Chawla
I don't think it's flippant at all, indeed, my impression is that it's widely considered the only practical approach to dealing with software patents if you're not an enormous company that can devote significant resources to patent research.

Unfortunately software patents, as implemented in the U.S. especially, are a morass full of landmines and predators, and offering little of value. By and large the patent holders (both legitimate and illegitimate) tend to stick to trying to extract money from rich players (which is mostly the large companies that do have the resources to care about patents) and/or making patent-exchange deals to protect themselves. Unless you have a lot of money to throw around, it's a game you can't win, and any attempt to deal with the system at face-value is a pointless waste of scarce resources.
I watched a bunch more and now I feel better able to spot them just by looking for the swimming style. Seeing people go from ok to drowning is something I wouldn't recognize without having watched these.
Ask HN: Are you happy with the AWS console UI?
Are there better alternatives out there. It's been frustrating to use for a less than trivial network architecture for a project I've been working on.
While I favor body cameras, I don't think your reasoning here holds up. Even if we assume cops only favor their own safety and power, we would expect to see this policy around high speed chases - they are dangerous for the cops as well.
Out of curiosity, how does this provide personalized terms and conditions?
Can you elaborate on the scale involved here?

Was the acquisition price in the 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M range?

Was the cost to replace/rewrite the systems in developer-years estimated in the single-digits, 10s, or 100s?
It's a metaphor:

https://youtu.be/pqeJFYwnkjE

Essentially how well you can write a program to reflect your understanding of a problem. Though it has come to more generally mean writing crap in a lot of cases.
Thanks, that is a very good metric that you shared with an example:

> "correctness vs. completeness spectrum."

and yes! It's a double edge sword:

>"Getting that wrong either way could lead to the failure of your startup."
Did you consider Jolla/Sailfish?
Python 3 has been the default on Arch for 3 or 4 years now. If only Python 2 was installed, it's because you installed a package that required python2 and didn't install python explicitly.

$ pacaur -Qi python
Name : python
Version : 3.4.3-2
I don't think popular culture is on your side. Even Time Magazine's biography of him describes him as aloof:

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,993017,...
"... purpose in granting access."

"... for improper purpose, ..."

But in the 4/29/13 Order the Court says it would follow Nosal and that purpose is not enough to sustain "unauthorized access".

Instead it says Defendants' failure to cease and desist after receiving notification from the Plaintiff is the reason why it is not dismissing the CFAA claim.

If Defendants had simply "scraped" from a third party who was "authorized" to access Plaitiff's website (Google?), then perhaps the outcome here might have been different?
I have some of the same concerns and would like to see someone from industry who has actually done it before I spend much more time on it. My additional question is then how did the academics do it? There are some tools that negate some/most of the need for gate sims but at my company we still do not ship without SOME gate sims.
Unpaid internships in the US are mostly illegal except under some fairly contrived circumstances.
Same thread.
I haven't looked for a precise definition, but it's what you will have to spend in the future for problems that exist in your technology today. Those problems could be outright bugs, or design choices that will make it more costly to continue development work in the future as the product and business follow a normal course of growth.
No, it moved because the forkers were also the Debian package maintainers.

Basically it was a big split down the middle, the entire project split in half.
I'm curious what inspires people to go three levels deep into a game of tautological platitudes.
> it makes small compressed HTTP payloads impossible to determine whether guessed bytes were correct or not (well, depending of course on the size variable of the random bytes added).

Hm, ok. At least you didn't "just add some random padding" :-)

Thanks for the comment on structure. Might be nice to try and make ssl/tls terminating proxy as a separate binary I guess.

As for the code, for someone new to fasm it wasn't immediately obvious that to build one had to assemble then link (fasm -m $((bignumber))[1] project.asm project.o && ld -o project project.o # optionally strip project). Might want to but that in a Readme/makefile/build.sh. I found the general recipe in the hello-example - but a short readme in the various project folder and/or top level wouldn't hurt.

[1] ed: from https://2ton.com.au/HeavyThing/#echoserver

fasm -m 262144 echo.asm && ld -o echo echo.o
Have you heard any story similar to what's happening with OP where fastmail support ended up resolving the issue quickly and in a timely manner?

I'm not trying to imply that it would be the same, genuinely curious if I can expect better by switching.
Here is a different answer, Zillow[1] seems to think there are about 1,200 homes (approximately) are for sale in San Francisco. If 120 people buy homes for cash it takes 10% of the available inventory off the market.

[1] http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/San-Francisco-CA/pmf,pf...
1. None of those features (except sealed ADTs, which really aren't necessary) is missing from Kotlin. The set of Scala features Spark is using is pretty much identical to Kotlin.

2. I don't see how IBM's investment has anything to do with Scala, though. Spark is a great product, and deserves an investment even if it were written in BASIC.

3. Even if Spark did rely on Scala features that aren't in Kotlin (it doesn't), Spark is a library/framework/middleware completely unlike enterprise projects. It is orders of magnitude smaller, for one. That is not to say it isn't awesome, but I wouldn't extrapolate from its choice of technologies (including the language) to the enterprise.

4. Clojure makes writing DSLs easier and with far less magic. Groovy DSLs are also as powerful as Scala's and easier to write. Kotlin DSLs are not as powerful, but are more than enough for Spark.

5. I've never, ever, said Scala is unusable. In fact, I've always said (and believed), it is a very powerful language. I have said that that kind of power is not what most companies want or need, and that that kind of unopinionated kitchen-sink, cutting-edge language is probably not suitable for long-time maintenance in large companies. I completely stand by this. My problem with Scala, again, is not that it's a bad helicopter, but that it insists that it's a good choice if what you want is a car (unless you actually try to drive it like a car -- as Spark does -- in which case you invite the ire of the entire community), and, IMO, it isn't.

6. It's OK to not like your language. It's OK to say it. It's OK to explain why. And it's OK for you to disagree. That doesn't make me biased, and certainly not some kind of bogeyman. It also doesn't justify ad hominem attacks, which -- unlike my criticism of Scala -- are completely unfounded.
In theory blogging on github issues could actually be quite convenient.

- Great(==standardized) markdown support.

- Easy image support.

- Uptime is someone else's problem.

- Sending someone your blog also directly links them to your ~entire public codebase.

- Builtin sane commenting system.

- Can keep code beside the blog. Its aggravating to find a living blog that links to a dead code host.

- Free with zero setup cost for everything above.

- Not having to deal with ruby dependencies for jekyll...

Edit: You know, I think I'm going to host my blog in this manner. When writing the above list I realized I'm sick of having to handle each of those.
Live Coding for Browsers
What's memory?

Lua's much more high level than that, and it makes no promises about timing at all.
While describing the function of a circuit like MyHDL and many other languages have tried to do it cute, they have never come close to a real engineer

I agree with you on that. For a beginner I think a high level language is the wrong direction to go because it's taking them further away from the method of designing a HW solution.
It's adding another layer of abstraction.
Well in my case it was "doing science, in space!" which was something I thought would be really cool, after all if you're in space you're already in a target rich environment for discoveries, and then getting time to do science there? Well no end to the things you could find out. As a kid I used to write down space experiments in my notebook[1] that I would do when I was in space.

[1] Not exactly epic experiments though, I recall that one of the sillier ones was tie two fans together at the base, with their blades facing opposite directions, and see how fast it would spin.
Or our Kotlin actor API: http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2015/06/04/quasar-kotlin/
check this out - it debates the privacy issues around this subject http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/634624c6-312b-11e5-91ac-a5e17...
"... or even just violating your terms of use, CFAA is merely the statute that enables that."

Are you sure? The Court in the 4/29/13 Order says violating terms of use would not be enough to sustain a CFAA claim. See page 6.

It is interesting how the Plaintiff changed the TOU after the "unauthorized access" and how the copyright claims were dismissed early.

The Defendents made a mistake by ignoring the C&D letter - that opened up the potential for CFAA liability. But I'm not sure they made a mistake in believing they could copy and serve the same classifieds. It appears they could if they obtained them through a third party.
You might also check out the past few years of NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month):

https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014
https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo
There is no "TASB" for appraising Technical Debt like there is an "FASB" for Financial. So most measures resemble the parable of the Six Blind Men and the Elephant.

Trade off an extra day to do each release versus 30 days to fix the release process? Trade off an extra week to add a feature versus a month to refactor and a month of customer turmoil on the refactored release? Trade off a month of getting complete test coverage versus saving two days on a future feature development?

My guess would be that the startup founders are doing a better investment calculation than it might appear to you.
Proximity based professional networking – A game changer
I have vague memories of opening new windows with window.open to fill out a form and communicating state back to the parent window. I also did it with iframes, probably to upload a form without a page refresh.
Mobogenie Download – Complete Android Manager Freeware
I'm unsure of the question, getting the most out of an MBA at Stanford BS?
I try to make the case like this in my organization (and have in my previous one as well): we can easily quantify the enormous amount of money - particularly but far from exclusively the financial value of time - we spend on our performance review process. But what we don't really know, and what very few organizations really know (because "performance" is usually a very troublesome criterion) is what value that process is delivering back to the organization.

One of the problems is that most organizations want their process to "Do It All." They want it to be development for the employee while also being the primary determinant of administrative decisions. Further, they want it to support all administrative decisions: who's great at their current job, who is most capable of succeeding in their next job (i.e., who should we promote?), how should we distribute our pay raises, what do we do with this year's STI and LTI, etc.

It's broken, and expensive. Maybe it can't truly be fixed, but at least we can save some money, time, and frustration. That doesn't mean nobody gets feedback, or that we don't set and track goals. But it doesn't have to be the way we make it. If we put half as much effort into making managers better at leading people I have no doubt the impact would be much more clear.