After 14 years running my own businesses, I’ve failed a lot. I haven’t kept count thankfully, but I’d say I’ve started at least 50 businesses / ideas and out of those, 3 have worked. And when I say worked I don’t mean staying in business, I mean resulting in either a decent income for me at the time or a decent asset that’s worth something to me or someone else. With all the risks you take as an entrepreneur, I don’t see replacing your job and getting to work from home as a significant enough reward to count as success.

The startup community likes to glorify failure but I don’t. Failing sucks. Failing slow sucks infinitely more. That’s why it’s OK sometimes to give up, to free you up to move onto an idea that could bring you something that the startup community doesn’t talk about near as much: actual fulfilment and success.

Summary:

1. You are completely clueless about what you are getting yourself into
2. You are working on more than 1 thing
3. You are the wrong person for the job
4. It’s not a business it’s a charity
5. You can’t build a story / brand around it
6. You are trying to change buying habits
7. You are operating mainly on assumptions
8. Your offering isn’t interesting enough
9. You are getting bad advice

Once lauded for its sane defaults, the latest Ubuntu release has usability issues.

A comprehensive, technobabble free explanation of how Bluetooth contact tracing (doesn't) work and why simple solutions are often not that simple, if not outright dangerous, when applied in real life.

written by Walter Bright

My career has been all about designing programming languages and writing compilers for them. This has been a great joy and source of satisfaction to me, and perhaps I can help others with some observations about what you’re in for if you decide to design and implement a professional programming language. Of course, this is a book length topic, so I’ll just hit on a few highlights here, and avoid topics well covered elsewhere.

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

As tech conference organizers ramp up for the fall season, you may be seeing calls for papers (CFP) landing in your email box or social media feeds. We at All Things Open (ATO) have seen a lot of presentation proposals over the years, and we've learned a few things about what makes them successful.

CLI tool for exploring arXiv (inspired by karpathy's brilliant ArXiv Sanity Preserver)

The script will create data/pdf/, data/txt/ and data/summary/ directories to hold files downloaded from arXiv. I am also aware that this is a rather stupid way to implement a datastore but DBs seem a bit over the top. Text from PDFs are auto-converted on downloaded and are used to suggest future articles to the user. Downloading articles is idempotent.

Create a pdf with barcodes to backup text files on paper. Designed to backup ASCII-armored GnuPG and SSH key files and ciphertext.

Rob Pike, the co-author of the Go programming language, speaks about a career spanning four decades, and the evolution of Go over the last ten years.

Hashicorp Vault hogs the limelight as cost-effective powerful KMS solutions are hidden in plain sight. Chris McGrath explores the underrated Mozilla SOPS.

A few of our favorite SSH tricks and tips sure to improve your daily experience.

Zenodo is a free and open digital archive built by CERN and OpenAIRE, enabling researchers to share and preserve research output in any size, format and from all fields of research.

This HN thread contains several tips and hints regarding methods, approaches and tools to share secrets across people and systems.

Tmux is great. Tmux defaults are not. How to make use of a brilliant tool without breaking your fingers?

Editly is a tool and framework for declarative NLE (non-linear video editing) using Node.js and ffmpeg. Editly allows you to easily and programmatically create a video from set of clips, images and titles, with smooth transitions between and music overlaid.

Semi-supervised clustering

• Seeded-KMeans
• Constrainted-KMeans
• COP-KMeans
• Pairwise constrained K-Means (PCK-Means)
• Metric K-Means (MK-Means)
• Metric pairwise constrained K-Means (MPCK-Means)

Active learning of pairwise clustering

• Explore & Consolidate
• Min-max
• Normalized point-based uncertainty (NPU) method