blacksmythe

2,107 karma · joined April 28, 2010

#top dfcdfc

blacksmytheon YC Annual Letter 2017

    >> funded over ... 1,470 companies
    >> more than 50 of our companies are worth more than $100 million each.

3.4% is a remarkable ratio.

blacksmytheon Our company’s remote work system failed

  >> less than 10% annual turnover for people who pass probation

I would love to see companies willing to give this data in their post on the 'Who is Hiring' thread. That alone tells me this is probably a pretty good place to work.

blacksmytheon How Satya Nadella revived Microsoft

  >> mimic the leader, so if the leader does X, then their reports do X...

Certainly true - perhaps the best definition of a leader.

There are plenty of people who are managers and not leaders, though.

blacksmytheon How Do You Know a Developer Is Doing a Good Job?

I had a manager that rated you principally on how many mistakes that you made.

Someone who did half as much work and made half as many mistakes was a much better employee as far as he was concerned.

blacksmytheon The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

The Python on-line documentation is really outstanding. I don't use any Python books at all.

blacksmytheon Properly Ground your Circuits

I found this article too basic to be actionable.

Here is a thorough reference on the subject from Artech: https://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Microwave-Grounding-Artech...

A related classic is: High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0133957241

blacksmytheon Hollywood as We Know It Is Over

Developers keep making apps, even when the price is so low.

So far, the cost of people willing and able to build large, complex systems in teams keeps going up.

blacksmytheon Free Range VHDL – VHDL programming book available for free

See Introduction to ASIC Design for a detailed description:

  https://www.u-cursos.cl/ingenieria/2010/2/EL653/1/material_docente/bajar?id_material=305352

blacksmytheon Ask HN: How many comments do you read on HN? Is it worth it?

  >> otherwise I start from a list of commenters.

Perhaps ironically, that is how I found this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tptacek

blacksmytheon A machine will serve you a free Big Mac

  >> The gamers in the crowd will get free burgers with day old twitter accounts

(aged) Twitter accounts appear to be pretty inexpensive:

      http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-twitter-hacker-20160609-snap-story.html


    "The hacker... is asking 10 bitcoin, or just under $6,000, 
    for what he or she claims are the log-in credentials 
    for 379 million Twitter accounts."

blacksmytheon Making the move from Scala to Go

  >> What should programmers who enjoy working with more powerful abstractions do?

Work on teams where the lowest common denominator is higher.

blacksmytheon Why hasn't Haskell taken over the world? And the curious case of Go

I can't find the reference, but I recall someone saying that Dart has huge adoption measured by revenue resulting from its use as an internal Google sales tool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7955819

blacksmytheon Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

  >> 3. install git for windows, which comes with a bash shell that brings you all the linux commands, including ssh.

Thank you!

I often wished that each HN user got one '10x upvote' a week. I would give it to you this week.

blacksmytheon Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

>> because the company is being eaten alive by its competitors

What if you were the best qualified candidate?

Would it be unethical then?

blacksmytheon Noise Protection for Short Term and Vacation Rentals

It should only trigger when loud enough for the neighbors to hear, which seems like a situation where you don't have an expectation of privacy.

blacksmytheon The 10x software development gap

  >> Why are digital leaders (Facebook, Google, Amazon and friends) ten times better at rapidly delivering software than mainstream enterprise organizations?

Because they pay significantly more, and are able to set up extremely narrow hiring filters?

blacksmytheon Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

double digging a garden:

    http://aces.nmsu.edu/ces/yard/2007/020307.html

blacksmytheon Stop Obsessing Over Comments On Hacker News (2015)

  >> not sure how their experiment went with inducting people into YC just based solely on who they were, without an idea,

It was not a success, and was not tried again.

blacksmytheon Rust is mostly safety

    >> Currently Rust is about Go's age but nowhere close in usage.

However, Go has been suitable for production projects for several years longer than Rust.

Rust sits in a very useful niche not served by other languages, and in steady state will probably be more popular than Go.

Go has a very well designed ecosystem. I like it, use it, and am very impressed with everything about it I have seen. However, I don't see use cases that Go serves vastly better than other available alternatives.

blacksmytheon The Monkey and the Apple – Steve Yegge Game

  >> when I brought it back up, a hundred or so old timers appeared out of nowhere.  

     Many of them had to purchase iOS devices just to play, but they splurged.  

     And they started playing insane hours... 

     They're playing upwards of 8 hours a day, around the clock.

blacksmytheon A Rust Belt Native and Technologist Re-Thinking American Manufacturing

As I recall, SolidWorks took the majority of the market from Pro-E in the early 2000's by charging (IIRC) $4k when Pro-E was more like $20k.

I don't know what SolidWorks charges now, but I heard that the price is considerably more than $4k.

blacksmytheon New NIST password guidelines: don't require character types or rotation

  >> comparable problem to "play every possible game of chess" for a computer to figure that out.

my_password + iterator is a very common password convention.

It would be a poorly programmed computer that didn't consider this possibility.

blacksmytheon If you get rich, you won’t quit working for long

An interesting PARC-like collective would be about 50 people working on ~10 projects, about 5 people per project.

As a project becomes successful, it grows to about 20 people, then spins out into a for-profit commercial enterprise.

blacksmytheon [dead]

  >> The great universities of the West churn out far, 
    far more PhDs than there are post-doc positions for, 
    let alone tenure-track.

In steady state, each professor, on average, can only produce one student who goes on to be a professor.

blacksmytheon Let’s Stop Bashing C

  >> 36 seems a not-unreasonable number of severe defects.

The point is that it should have been 5 defects (36 total - 31 memory defects).

blacksmytheon Before You Grow

  >> Airbnb slogged for 1000 days before discovering how to make their product loved.

Airbnb had a network effect product (marketplace of buyers and sellers). Growth accelerated once they had enough of both.

  >> It’s unclear exactly when Airbnb implemented what’s become their most famous growth hack, ... 
    Craigslist had one thing that Airbnb did not - a massive user base.
    https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies/airbnb

blacksmytheon Making the Switch from Node.js to Golang

  >> I can't believe the CTO of digg bought this

Sounds like the project was a success:

    >> Two weeks later, after my initial crash course introduction to Golang, 
       we had a brand new Octo service up and running.

  >> you would also get 2x speedup.

The win wasn't the 2x speedup, it was not choking under heavy load.

blacksmytheon HP Unveils Mini Workstation

  >> It would compete with the IMac then, and with their notebooks too.

Companies that try to avoid competing with themselves often fail quickly and spectacularly (after this approach appearing to work well for an extended time).

blacksmytheon A problem involving power series

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

"Did you win the Putnam?"

    Yes, I did.

blacksmytheon All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware

   >> then the car doesn't look cool anymore.

This doesn't look cool either:

    >> There are videos of three separate Tesla crashes where the Tesla plowed into a vehicle partially blocking a lane.