skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Best way to acquire small businesses as a pre-launch SaaS startup?
Hi all,

Just to give a brief introduction, we are a pre-launch early stage software startup. We are mainly focused on the recycling industry and making it more optimized and scaled up.

At this stage we are focused on building a network of small businesses in that industry to enable our soft launch and B2C customer acquisition. My question is what would be the best way to go about approaching small businesses and eventually acquiring them? For your reference, our revenue stream is commission based rather than licensing-fees based, so there's virtually little to no risk on the companies side.

Thank you!
Miner fees mediate spam, not the transaction count. (which btw is likely to be enormously higher than 6tps)
It's not actual blockchains they're finding useful. It's the reasonably robust framework that people are building around it, where they get a whole lot for free and just need to optimise that annoying blockchain bit in the middle. Rather than do all of the crypto, security R&D they would need to do by not using 'blockchain technology' they just turn off the mining and get it all for free.
Proof of work is entirely required. Proof of stake is at best a pipe dream - read Andrew Poelstra's writing on the matter.
Like seeing their climate being eviscerated around them with no way to deal with it. :(
Many dongles fell by the hand of SoftICE in those days, I can tell you. I, uh, wouldn't know anything about that.
There's precisely two (and maybe one) reasons where blockchains offer an economic efficiency. Immutability and/or regulatory arbitrage. When you can buy crack on Google and Amazon, then we'll no longer see an efficiency with blockchains.
It's about promoting fairness, equality, and opportunity for everyone in society.

Except for white people, which is why the parent is worried about character assassination. It's a real worry when building a business these days. There's no amount of compliance to progressive ideals that will protect you if you have light colored skin.

Progressivism isn't a fad. It's the consistent direction of society since the dark ages.

Yes, it is. The pendulum swings one way for a little while, then it swings the other way. It's been happening that way for thousands of years.
>"Bitcoin technologies solved some very important problems in the creation of currencies: double spending, decentralization, cost distribution, &c. These are not problems that need to be solved in securities trading. One company running on one platform doesn't have a double spendng problem. Decentralization is irrelevant. And cost is no issue."

You're thinking of the securities trading of today, which has its roots in the 16th Mercantile Revolution of Europe. Securities are still essentially pieces of paper: stock certificates. If you've started a company(assuming it was a C-Corp) you know this system is shit.

While this is the case, equity markets, for all that's been developed are like rocket ships tethered to the ground.

In the future you will be able to do business globally the way you can communicate globally today. That means not just transacting money, but assets as well. Bitcoin is a system of digital tokens, which can represent anything.
For this, you do need the trustless transactions that the blockchain enables. Would you trust a Russian stock market? Russia has very different ethical standards and very different laws. What if you are declared a persona non grata and your assets are to be confiscated? What if Russia and the United States go to war? What about a Nigerian stock exchange? Would it be reliable? Your reluctance to engage in these markets means entrepreneurs there do not have access to capital.

Math and the laws of computation are the same everywhere. This allows for new types and a level of global commerce that will change the world the same way global communication did.

Bitcoin is way, way more than a currency. It allows assets to flow like email. And that is just the beginning.
What would they record it on? This seems to me the biggest drawbacks of seaborne intelligence: any dolphin could be twice as smart as the smartest human but it's really hard to develop technology when you don't have opposable thumbs and the environment is, almost by definition, more fluid and corrosive than the one we share.
Ctrl+D baby
What was wrong with the GNU basic regex?

If you're going to write a stripped down string matching syntax more strictly for "regular" text then why bother mentioning perl?
The readme does say it grew out of the Yandex's webcrawler
> I'm also familiar with Ethereum, and I still don't see it as better than a company-run database for anything like uber/airbnb/etc with a central company behind it.

It's better because no one is taking a cut off of the transactions that the network enables. No one has to approve a new application that uses the network, so every application can build on top of the network. The people own the network, not companies.

This isn't just better, it's better to the degree that the Internet was better than private networks. That difference was world changing, and this one will be too.

> Additionally, if you change your mining to be "people users trust", your security is now equivalent to corporate database security -- a lead pipe to the head to get a password in.

Blockchains have programs that validate transactions. You'd have to get every validator to incorporate a fraudulent transaction. Hacking three financial institutions at the same time, for example, is pretty hard. Ten is even harder.
blockchain is a tree. ledger is just analogy to make it easier to understand.

hashcash needed to prevent swarm of fake nodes making majority vote.
IMO there are many nice things about Haskell, but simplicity is not one of them. It's very consciously a "big" language, rather than a "small" one. As others have mentioned, you can declare your own operators with custom precedence. And don't forget the whitespace rules either. Lennart Augustsson, implementor of at least one Haskell compiler, has said this at some point:

Implementing exactly Haskell's rule for indentation is incredibly hard. In fact, no known Haskell compiler gets it right.

https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-April/0...
The transaction has to be included in a block. That requires proof of work.

As you say, the energy burned should be proportional to the value of bitcoin; if I have 100 BTC then I have a vested interest in mining outside of gaining new BTC -- I also want to protect the BTC&transactions I have from attacks.

The argument that it's okay to spend that amount of money securing that amount of money, however, is nonsensical.

Transactions in traditional databases do take almost no work. There's no thousands of computers computing and discarding hashes just to be able to add and subtract some numbers.

I'll acknowledge that MtGox isn't a good thing to reference here, but the fact of the matter is that bitcoin is rife with things that a regular man would call "unreliability".

I don't appreciate that you immediately condescend that I don't understand anything to do with bitcoin when your response has little substance.

Your response is basically "transactions don't require that energy is burned but energy is burned for transactions" and you have the gall to say I don't understand anything?
You say that one key is experimenting on pets(which will have huge barriers in the west). In china, eating dogs is legal.So why haven't we seen such research coming from china, and especially successful drugs from there?
They're both "improving the world" by some standard, but not quite in the same way. There's nothing wrong with for-profit services, and plenty of "for profit stuff" absolutely makes the world better.

BUT... as technologists / hackers and people with (presumably) a broader vision, I think the onus is on us to prefer and to advocate for services which are "open" or "free" / "libre" (without getting too deeply into the definitions of "open" and/or "free" here).

I would say that it would be wrong to stay that Google Maps doesn't make the world a better place, but I'd also agree with your general sentiment and say let's do all we can to promote OpenStreetMap and the like.
Technically, having biased information can't be worse than having no information (i.e. you can choose to ignore it if you know it is biased and you can try figuring out how and in what direction it is biased).

What's worse in this scenario is not the information itself, but incorrectly assuming the information is unbiased.
The revelation he has had looks trivial to me. Graphs as equations, equivalence of expressions or matrix as linear operators are all something I learned and understood from the very beginning.

I wonder if it has something to do with the textbooks. As a Chinese I often found American textbooks on mathematics so softcore. They have so many analogies, so many "real world" examples that masquerade the true mathematical meaning of the concept. Many of Chinese people argue that these are the reason that Americans are more creative, but I cannot help but wonder maybe the lack of rigor underlies some of problems with American math education.

Or maybe I am just the exception. Maybe other Chinese struggle with math just the same.
It's kind of funny, most people who major specifically in math or applied math will take something equivalent to a course in Real Analysis. RA is basically starting over from scratch and reteaching you the exact same material as calculus, but in a much more formal and rigorous manner. Mostly it focuses on eliminating the not-so-rigorous concept of an infintesimal quantity and formalizing the notion of limits and convergence (albeit, there is a way to rigorously treat infintesimals called nonstandard analysis, but I digress). It involves a lot more open-ended thought than the endless memorization of earlier calculus classes. It's often dreaded by undergraduates as being very proof-heavy, but it was one of my favorites. It always felt like learning the "essence" of calculus, at least for me (who sucks at/dreads rote memorization).
New Qualcomm Tech Could Lead to the Ultimate Drone
Used to be very common when you wanted a fancy font and had no way to bring it to the user. No joke, just old-fashioned.
This depends on how you define the self. That's a philosophical question with many, many possible answers. Humanity isn't in any sort of broad agreement about which one is right.
That page brings back some serious good memories for me.
I found figure 2 needlessly confusing, as it showed the individual components overlapping, it was hard to visually separate them.

Also, needing a key to identify "blue dot" and "red dot" is amusing.
Depends on the chapter and how upset you get when you need to tweak something to make it work :)

Mostly the stuff touching libraries will break but if you know where to look on Hackage you can fix it.
True. But if your car can be self-driving then you don't need to park it, and if everyone's car is self driving then traffic becomes less of an issue.

Eventually I think public transport becomes obsolete, or else an incredibly expensive and rubbish subsidy for the tiny minority who can't afford cars.
> Well, I find whole thing rather controversial, so to say. Depends on what do one mean by "collection" and by "point", eg. if we take point literally: (x, y) \in RxR, then we have to assume that "collection" is uncountable (which seems counterintuitive, esp. from the school student's pov). OTOH, one could treat "point" as representation of that point, eg. pencil mark, so that point is no longer single element, but rather an uncountable subset containing the point of interest, along with its neighbourhood => our "collection" becomes countable, so we could think about it as bunch of indexed points (much more intuitive, isn't it?), shifting our attention towards mapping's representation from the mapping itself.

The whole paragraph does not make sense to me. For example, how is a collection uncountable somehow unintuitive? Why should a point not be a single element, but a subset or a pencil mark? Are you confusing the theoretical graph with the graph actually drawn (which has finite width)?
There is already one in the U.S thus Spinlister.com. I wonder how it works if you get a flat tire, get injured etc..?
What assessment is appropriate? I feel strikingly similar to the OP.
After living in the Yukon for 4 years (see my post above), I have truly come to respect and believe the saying "only boring people get bored".

I have never lived anywhere in my life with so many varied and exciting things to do on any day. I often feel anxious trying to decide between all the amazing options available to me in the Yukon&Alaska. It's such a common thing people up here call it "FoMo" (Fear of Missing out).

Depending on the season, I could be hiking, camping, boating, mountain biking, hunting, fishing, paddling around iceburgs, watching bears, watching whales, hiking on glaciers, hiking up mountains, backcountry snowboarding, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, snow mobiling hundreds of miles into the wilderness chasing bison at -40, etc. Of course I might just decide to read a book by the fire too.

In every one of those activities, it's exceedingly rare to see other people. If we're out more than a couple of days, we don't even see signs of people - i.e. no fire rings, no roads, no nothing.

Move to the North, give it 12 months - if you love it, you'll never leave. If you decide to leave, you won't have lost anything, and you'll have a head full of unique memories.
A hardware ICE or a copy of this was pretty much all I wanted when I was doing C++ back in the early 90's. All I had was Bounds Checker and Turbo Debugger.
"Perl Compatible Regex" (pcre.org) is a popular regex library. The name PIRE is presumably a reference to that.
The main OpenStreetMap.org site is really intended mainly for those contributing to the map. They don't make it clear enough that end users should probably be using one of the many other sites based on their data.
Seems like a riff on the famous Perl Compatible Regular Expressions library (http://www.pcre.org), which is used in a bunch of high-profile things (PHP, and Apache Server, for starters). Kind of like "less" vs "more".

So a bit of an inside joke I guess, but most people familiar with regexes will probably have heard of PCRE, so it's not a terribly obscure reference. I liked it :)
Yes, I was referring to OCaml's single-core limitation. I was under the impression that some smart people working right now on removing the global lock, though?
> I feel strikingly similar to the OP

I'm glad you said that. If you feel comfortable doing so, could you share an anecdote? If a few people describe this from different angles perhaps more will come out of the woodwork and offer some solutions.

I think the person you were replying to was gently suggesting to see a psychiatrist.
You need to speak with your doctor first. You may be out of shape, you may have a vitamin deficiency, you may have something complicated. The answer is in a doctor's office, not HN.
So, 10,000 years in the future they can revive you.

Apparently, we've decided that it has a hard problem to guarantee that we can communicate with the future, even about really bad stuff:

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...

This is about warning the future about nuclear waste, but could be adopted to "vault of frozen heads" (Assuming they haven't failed by then and there was sufficient coolant.)

Sort of flip the opening sentences around: "This is a place of honor!"
Your claim was that there was a 'cost per transaction'. This is easily proved false when you examine the number of transactions in a block. If there were a cost per transaction, some blocks would cost less to produce than others (and/or returning varying rewards to miners. 2. the cost per transaction is directly relative to the price per bitcoin.

As for traditional databases,they are almost always more efficient - I think many of these bitcoin companies are absurd.

As for your pennies reference, I simply don't understand why the cost of a penny is at all relevant. At best, Bitcoin isn't "real" money, and even if it were, I don't know what seniorage costs add to this discussion.

The unreliability of bitcoin may be worth discussing, but that's tangential to your original post. Thus far, I think it's done pretty well in that department considering how new and exotic this technology is.

Your hubris on matters that you clearly don't understand justifies my response, which IMO was fair, balanced, and respectful. Don't rephrase my response unless you wish to misrepresent them, my words stand alone and don't need a tldr.
Google: Structured Markup May Become a Ranking Factor
It might be an old fashioned thing to do, but that web site is not old fashioned. It actually uses web fonts.
Type-Safe Microservices in Haskell
Can we stop pulling out this turing complete quip?

That's like asking on a cooking forum how to open a coconut, and the reply being well any physical object with mass can technically open a coconut with the correct application of force, but yeah, you should probably use a machete.
Only if you know the direction it is biased. If you don’t know this then you are just a sucker in someone else game.

Imagine a coin tossing game where I know the result of a toss and you don’t, but where I can set the size of the bets. Every time you choose correctly I set the bet low and every time you choose incorrectly I set the bet high. It won’t take me long to completely fleece you despite the odds of you and me being right being 50/50 each time.

This is a simple analogy of betting against a hedge fund when you only have access to biased information of their strategy and they know this and can use it to induce you to bet high on a losing bet.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10209693
The intrinsic value of bitcoin (if this matters) is immutable storage. You see this utilized with projects such as counterparty. The non-intrinsic value of bitcoin is the ability to engage in censored commerce. (backpage, wikileaks, silk road, etc.)
What exactly would you be able to verify?

That some dead brains are frozen at the moment?
I suspect you're being deliberately ignorant to why Bitcoin, a fixed quantity commodity that is immune to counterfeiting, has value.

You're confounding physical utility and symbolic value. I don't have a problem with Bitcoin becoming a wild success or another case of Tulip Mania. I do have a problem with your feigned ignorance just so you can maintain your initial position.

You're doing yourself a disservice for life. There's no shame in understanding a concept more and discarding misconceptions.
Just to make sure, is the demo supposed to forward me to https://postgres.demo.envelope.xyz/v1/app/all/index.html? I feel sheepish for asking for this but a TodoMVC would be really helpful, since I'm not sure what I'm seeing in this demo . The idea sounds very attractive though.
Well, to be fair, I was never fan of Access and do think it has customization and expansion problems. I have never built an app using Access, but I have gone through a few broken Access apps and re-written them into web apps. In my limited experience it allows clicker people to build themselves into trouble while making it difficult for them to fix what they build. Just my opinion though. I'm not complaining because I've made money re-writing some messes and making them functional and beautiful.

Dragonwriter's reply (below) sort of sums up my view also. I am not a fan of jamming all the logic in the SQL and like a middle layer... actually need a middle layer to carry out operations on the data before it is presented. I would prefer not to use JS for this.

But again.. I'm sure this project has some uses and would be handy for some people. It's a cool idea and a cool project and I commend your effort. It's just not something I personally would chose to use. Please don't take that the wrong way....
You could also see it as a refreshingly honest take.

Most people who spend time in the wilderness feel the need to write about how great it was and how much wisdom they think they acquired in the process, because let's face it, if you do it and don't come back with some platitudes in tow then you look like a fool.

This author's "been there, done that, got bitten by mosquitoes, saw a moose one time, that was cool" is perhaps more honest than Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau put together.
What I don't get is that the example given:

hello\\s+w.+d$

Is 100% perl compatible, seems more like "subset" than "incompatible". I've seen comments that say it's a "joke". Can any confirm that the title was indeed a joke?

Edit: I know both what a DFA/NFA are, and how they relate to formal language theory and regular languages, the question still stands how a subset can be called "incompatible"
We can remove the arbitrary-but-keeps-getting-extended copyright length limit, and just make the payments scale up exponentially the longer you hold on to the copyright. Disney gets Mickey Mouse as long as it wants, so long as it feels the economic value is large enough.

We can even sell Disney on this by making it easier for them to keep Mickey Mouse under copyright for longer. I mean, they're going to keep it for a long time anyways, but this lets them do so cheaply and with little lobbying over the next ~30 years (depending on how the USG negotiates things). In return, we get sane copyright rules for the rest of the content that isn't that valuable.
> Sometimes i think the authors of Haskell had a completely different glyph set.

Well, its an ML-derived syntax rather than the more common Algol-derived syntax, which forms something of a familiarity obstacle for programmers whose background is largely in Algol-derived syntaxes.

Its probably somewhat easier if you've learned another ML family language first -- especially given that idiomatic Haskell often involves wrapping your head around semantics that are unfamiliar as well, so that you aren't trying to take on both at once.

OTOH, I think the kind of ML-based syntax Haskell uses is a good fit, and its worth learning.
The Decentralist Perspective, or Why Bitcoin Might Need Small Blocks
That was my experience exactly. In the first class the professor told us that everything we learned in calculus was true, but not quite for the reason they taught us. We then re-proved everything withpoint set topology. But it felt like real math.
Yes, because the fear of death totally makes the decision to have faith in sci-fi a rational thought. I sincerely hope our species never solves the puzzle of immortal life or even prolonging a life past a natural existence. The mere thought disgusts me. Please, hell no.
Actually there has been some research into cancer treatment using pets in the west, just not as much as we should be doing [1].

We really need to organise all the pets into clinical trials of new treatments. People have done surveys of pet owners and most people are happy for their pet to participate in such trials especially if they know that they are helping human research and other pets. We just need to start using this amazing resource rather than giving mice artificial cancers.

As for why more research has not come out of China, a lot of really interesting research is going on right now in China, it will just take a little time to filter out to us in the west. Drug development is a 15 to 20 year journey and China has only recently entered this domain.

1. http://vetmed.illinois.edu/translational-cancer-research-ben...
"Herzing’s goal is to get a handful of juvenile females she has known since birth to associate each of three whistle sounds broadcast by the CHAT box with a specific object: a scarf, a rope, and a piece of [brown seaweed]."

I don't see how a dolphin can be expected to know what a scarf is. Helen Keller's first word was 'water'. Something she understood completely. If they'd tried to teach her 'guitar' she may not have gotten anywhere.