skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Making a living from my side project – Part 1 – I'm Scared
About six weeks ago I decided to try to turn by side project BugMuncher into my full time job. I posted a Tell HN at the time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10152465) and got some amazing responses, as well as some requests to document my progress - I was unsure at first, but I've now decided write a completely transparent blog series about it.

I've just published the first instalment, which deals very honestly with the huge amount of fear I currently feel - https://blog.bugmuncher.com/2015/10/22/from-side-project-to-profitable-start-up-part-1.html - I'd love to get some feedback.

Thanks,
Matt
Wow. It's the Economist version of saying the Millennials aren't as good as the Slackers (who aren't as good as the Baby Boomers (who aren't as good as the Greatest Generation ...)).
I never contributed to Mono because they didn't allow it if you had MS source code access. That was probably prudent, though should be OK now I'd guess.
Sweden is running out of housing for refugees so it's pitching tents
Just curious, what do you mean by 'free money'? Most loans I've seen over the last few years vary from anywhere between 2.5%+ (houses) to 17% (credit cards). I don't think anyone would think of those as 'free'.

I would think the interest rates going up would actually encourage people to save more.
I am pleased to see my two senators rejecting this dreck, however it appears that they are in the minority.

I think this is a major loss. We can't encrypt our information or make technological solutions to totalitarian surveillance when our information is in the hands of backdoored companies, which we really can't avoid interfacing with.

We really need to put more pressure on the politicians via corporate rejections of legislation. They listen to money. Companies with cash to spare need to be taking the lead in forming super PACs etc to rail against the people who voted for this bill, especially during election season, but starting well before. These political problems don't go away on their own.
It sounds like the original article may have greatly overstated the emissions from these fires. I came in after it got fixed so I don't know.
The Complete, Unofficial TEMPEST Information Page
Everything written about here is in relation to VC funded companies. For people building companies without outside investment, and who pay employees with money, none of this is true at all and in fact sounds nonsensical.
Pg talked about "measurement and leverage."Please see this http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
You don't get paid really well just because you do anything fancy.There is a reason why Larry Page and Sergey Brin dumped PhD for industry.
That's exactly why my wife likes to shop there. (And Trader Joe's for similar reasons)
I have to respectfully disagree with this article. While it may be spot on in some scenarios, it couldn't be further away in others.

As a co-founder, I didn't take a salary until a year into the startup (same with my other two co-founders). Even when we received our accelerator funding, all of it went towards our first hire's (an engineer) salary and operating expenses. At this point, our risk was significantly higher, not slightly. If the company didn't succeed, I can tell you our first hire was next in line for a cushy market job, and he was being actively poached, not us.

After we graduated the accelerator we raised a ~$1M seed round. We hired more two early team members at market salaries. Each of the co-founders were taking $33K salaries. Why? We wanted the budget to hire great people. So no, they definitely not a similar pay cut. In fact, it's increasingly hard for early stage startups to hire good talent at less than market rates because there are plenty of amazing startups hiring above market. Our risk at this stage was even higher, because failing would burn most of our bridges with our new investors (maybe a couple wouldn't hold it against us), where as if our engineers went on to start something, no investor would think twice about their history working at a failed VC-funded startup.

We didn't increase our salaries again until we were generating revenue. Even now, ~four years in, I'm taking $20K less than the starting salary for a junior person in the role I have. While I want to increase that a little more as our revenue grows, I don't think it's fair to take a market salary at our stage.

I'm not complaining, but to say being an early employee is a rotten deal is unfair. If our startup goes under, I definitely have the more rotten deal. It only looks like I had the better deal if we succeed.

And if you want to start a startup, I encourage it, that's the only way you'll know how truly hard it is.

NOTE: This comment is a rehash of a comment I made on a similar statement. I am reposting it because I feel like it addresses this and sheds a little light on the other side of things.
I'm from 18F and will be paying attention to this thread throughout the day. Feel free to ask any questions - we'll do our best to answer them!
A lot of the links are dead now, but there's a wealth of information in here if you poke around with the Wayback machine.
> Identity does not require consensus, naming does.

It's not just about global consensus on naming, but also global consensus on data associated with that name (which includes proofs/verifications/signed-statements etc). In other words, the system described in that post is not just "DNS for people", it is "DNS + PKI for people".

> Satoshi Nakamoto is the perfect proof that a secure online identity

The Satoshi Nakamoto secure identity you're describing is missing the human-readable part of Zooko's triangle. Not having human-readable names is a major limiting factor for practical adoption.
From the data I've seen, yes, they have gone from professional jobs to service sector jobs - or, at least the data indicates that those are the type of jobs that are being filled during recent memory. It's been a hunch of mine that the displaced older workforce's jobs simply don't exist anymore (layoffs due to technology, better for investors) and the service sector jobs would normally be for the younger population as they 'move up' through the ranks...but they can't get in...those spots are taken by the over 55 group. I think that they almost have to work, e.g. no retirement savings, unwilling to move to rural/low-income areas where their SSI might be sustainable. Vexing.
Wait... then, what _IS_ tax-free about it?

If I still have to pay capital gains tax and sales tax on it, then what's different about taxes in regards to bitcoin vs. government currency?
Now that the cost of publishing has gone to nothing, you trust that someone who knows what they're talking about (e.g. Asphalt & Rubber) will eventually see a popular but incorrect story and write a correction.

https://stratechery.com/2015/in-defense-of-the-new-york-time...
Things like this just reinforces my impression that Chromium & Chrome is slowly crossing the line from being privacy-invading to actual spyware.

And yes. Obviously I don't use them.
You should do some critical thinking and trust yourself.
There's more than just fabrication to consider. The reason they think generated limbs might be useful is that in current hand transplants, pre-existing limb nerves grow into the new hand, giving it sensation. This does not happen with the spinal cord (and anything that made it happen would be a huge therapeutic breakthrough all on its own). The cranial nerves (those going directly from the brain to the heart, gut, ears, nose, etc) are another potential stumbling block.

That said, it does make the (numerous!) science fiction novels that have had something like this as a premise seem somewhat more plausible...
Yes, you have massively miscalculated the % of the company owned by employees.

On a further note, even once you get that number right, it silly to talk about the average employee stake from that number. You're dealing with a power law here where talking about an average makes very little sense.
Your links do not support your assertion that palm oil consumption has anything to do with trans fat replacement. The graph on the Mongobay site shows US Palm oil imports growing years before trans fat concerns became widespread.
ArboldC – Arnold Schwarzenegger's Programming Language in Action
Microsoft Azure CTO on the Future of Cloud Building (Interview)
Buying it, because now it's treated as an exchange of currency. There is now nothing different between Bitcoin and Euros as far as taxes go, which is as it should be.
I got a serious case of decision fatigue recently while trying to invest.

(As a note, this means that I am very much NOT soliciting financial advice with this comment. If you want to tell me a different decision I could have made, especially something I considered such as index funds, you are doing the opposite of helping.)

As one of those things you're supposed to do when you realize you're an adult, I decided to automatically invest a portion of my paycheck. There are of course a lot of investment companies who would love to help with that, and first I had to pick one. I picked Merrill Edge because it seemed the easiest to set up the automatic deposit with.

At that point, the site told me: Welcome! You want to invest in a mutual fund, right? Here are EIGHT THOUSAND of them you could choose from. Good news! You can even filter them by 20 different criteria that you would know what they mean if you worked in finance!

All the highest-rated funds of course have statistically indistinguishable rates of return, so there is no real financial basis to make the decision unless I think I'm clever enough to know who is a better fund manager than who, which of course I'm not.

Oh, by the way, they've tried to address the problem. They have a set of "Merrill Edge Select" funds. Of course you get to them in a different interface, you have to choose which jargon-ful category of Select funds you want, and once you do so you still get 20 options in 4 sub-categories.

So I could just make an arbitrary decision, and trust that these products are indistinguishable, right? Not so fast. My first arbitrary choice led me to nearly start an automatic investment in a fund that specifically makes socially conservative, "Biblical" investments, and I found this out by googling the name of the fund at the last minute. Egad.

I have been through a process that was much better than this. It wasn't on the Web, it involved actually walking to an investment bank's storefront. Aside from unavoidable questions about taxes, they asked me two things:

* What year do you plan to retire?

* How much risk can you tolerate?

And then they picked one fund. Take your 8000 choices and shove them, Merrill Edge.

In case I need to say it again: no financial advice please.
Are you saying, "if you are too stupid to move out of Argentina"? I think many of us here would take exception to that. And we actually do have a National Library with a few million volumes; it's just that its selection of IBM Internal Technical Reports is relatively thin.

My friend who lives in Lahore, like 6 million other people, is not so lucky; his National Library has only some 0.2 million books, and it's a couple of hours away by car. Unlike many of his countrymen, at least he has a car and doesn't live in a part of the country where "Islamist" highwaymen might kidnap you off the highway for ransom.

Maybe you think he's stupid for not moving to the US. But I assure you that it is not as easy as all that. I haven't seen my parents in five years, and I miss them.
Oh, come on. It's clear enough from context what the parent means: "that weeds out some people right away".

The latter phrase could be rephrased as "people who have grown up in an environment which taught them how to learn".
Please check out this great app for barter
Although I understand the need, I hate grouping all 1.3+ billion people into a single stereotype/culture as the "Chinese."

I've been to china and have spent a lot of time there both studying and working and the first thing you experience in China is the diversity. There's a small part of the Chinese population that would actually consider hell money as apart of their culture.

User "stupandaus" had a good point about the different waves of Chinese immigration to US/Canada which included different ethnicity and even language that would give a reason why hell money isn't seen in some areas.
If you dig below the surface you might see why it does.

For example, how would you imagine a system could implement key revocation and signed statement revocation?
Who comes up with this stuff? I've used the MS GUI toolkits (WinForms, WPF, Web Forms if you consider that similar) and don't recall ever hearing about such obviously poorly designed stuff. They aren't perfect but they're fairly great. I've heard OK this about other GUI kits, too. What attracts such terrible stuff to the web?
> Asymmetric crypto clearly is in NPcomplete

To be in NP-complete a problem must both be in NP and every problem in NP must have a polynomial time reduction to it.
This means that NP-complete is fully contained in NP and in fact smaller if P!=NP.

For example P is contained in NP and if P!=NP then no problems in P are in NP-complete.
Kudos to the Prison Policy Initiative and Demand Progress for kicking ass on this. This is what progress looks like.
Very much alive :-)

Checkout: https://github.com/blockstack

for implementation of different software components and protocol documentation!
The article author qualifies himself pretty well - he has broken multiple stories about Mission and was the first journalist to ever ride their prototype.
A personal announcement of a blog is not a Tell HN. It would be better if you submitted the blog post directly.
Thanks, so depending on how you count unincorporated, self employed workers, you get between 3.5% [1] and 9% [2] of the labor force underemployed (not looking at salary). I suspect there are more Uber drivers than successful independent consultants, but we don't have data about that.

That's better than I expected.

[1]: (6036) / (2357 + 146464 + 19656)
[2]: (6036 + 8357 + 820) / (2357 + 146464 + 19656)
As someone who works in e-commerce, this is a pretty hard problem to solve. There are so many products, so many categories, so much freaking data for each one that our small company had to hire someone just to help with wrangling all the data. I can only imagine how big Best Buy's merchandising team is.

You'd need to get all hands on deck, every month or so, to manually go through the whole store and look for data defects. And have them rotate who looks at which parts every time. You can't automate it, because the failure case is essentially, "It looks wrong." In theory, it's worth the effort, in practice, nobody does it.
Sometimes, people would rather see themselves as lazy or free spirits than admit to disability. I was acquainted for a time with a homeless man who seemed able bodied but had a mental health issue. He quit his job and walked away from his worldly possessions to get off the zombifying drugs required to make him employable. I have a different disability but made similar choices, so I am sympathetic. But he was very resistant to admitting that he was too handicapped to hold down a job. I knew him a while before that became clear to me. And it isn't anything you would infer at first glance. If you saw him, he looked tall and strong and able bodied, he sounds intelligent and is intelligent and the degree to which he is not mentally sound is just not obvious to casual inspection.

I have two adult sons who have never had jobs. They also look hail and hardy. They both have some issues. We are still trying to work out how they can make money in spite of being basically unemployable.

I suspect this happens more than is recognized. My handicap was not identified until age 35. I got called "lazy" a lot until I had a diagnosis. I am a woman and was fortunate to be able to hide out for many years behind the title of full time wife and mom.
We don't currently have plans to add PayPal, but we certainly could if the demand is high enough. Is it a barrier to have to pay by credit card? Would love to know your thoughts on the software as well if you have signed up for a free account.
iOS 9.1 Is Here
It seems that the salary schedule is out of line with the actual value of the employee's labor (assuming that there is no widespread irrational behaviour in the industry). This could be related to a skills development plateau, decreased attitude/attention/enthusiasm, or possibly even risk-aversion in older employees.
Jokes seem inconsistent on HN. Sometimes I'll see a good, quick one and it'll be upvoted (which honestly I'm fine with; jokes are fun) and sometimes they'll be downvoted immediately. But the common theme I always noticed with jokes and HN is that, even when they're upvoted, they don't turn into mega pun threads like Reddit's do. I rarely see a joke just keep going on HN.

In the end I think the HN and Reddit audiences are different. Yeah there is overlap but I don't think there is a ton of overlap.
Not every language masks it, Swift certainly doesn't.
Basecamp 3
> It made me wince slightly when the article listed one of the names of # as hashtag, rather than hash. A hashtag begins with a hash, but the two aren't the same. (Although this looks to be a distinction that will be lost with time.)

It already has been. Whenever people mention a hashtag on a tv show or commercial, they always read #FooBarBaz as "hashtag foo bar baz". So it already is a common pronunciation for '#'.
Study reveals cheese is as addictive as drugs
The mobile on-screen keyboards are the only reason I even attempted to use <input type="number">. I could've gotten away with using <input type="tel"> which doesn't have any type of validation associated with it, but the keyboard presented on iOS doesn't have a period key (or a comma for those other languages) which means you can only enter natural numbers. Android on the other hand does provide a way to enter periods form the "tel" on-screen keyboard.

What I don't understand is why this weird validation behavior only exists for <input type="number"> and not for other input types that have built-in validation rules such as <input type="email"> and <input type="url">. Imagine an <input type="email"> reporting that its value is an empty string if the user didn't enter a completely valid email address.
They were very popular before that. I recall finding great use for them around 97. Easiest way to have complicated graphical navigation.
Apple sells targeted advertising and their T&C say they may use data for targeting.
I think people may be reacting to your dismissal of support for a cause you seem to believe in, because these new supporters weren't on board soon enough for you. If you support this cause, why would you denigrate new supporters in this way? It's counterproductive.
Isn't the armed forces model relevant here, which also happens to fan out:

"Experienced" soldiers work on the strategy while
new recruits work in the trenches.
I'm seeing this as well. The served html says

<title>A story about &amp;lt;input&amp;gt; | Hacker News</title>

It looks like it got double encoded.
Want an Unbreakable Password? Write It in Iambic Tetrameter
When you weren't taking a salary, how did you support yourself and pay for your [living] expenses?
BigML and the Polytechnic University of Valencia Promote Machine Learning
I have heard of people from all backgrounds getting into the program.

Totally worth your time. Many questions like this on https://www.reddit.com/r/omscs .
Quantifying User Experience
Agree. My Vizio TV has a plex app, but i can't use it without plexpass.

I gave up and now running kodi on raspberrypi
I use a wireless mouse that sits on my coffee table. I also have a wireless keyboard that I keep on the shelf underneath the coffee table, but most of the time I don't need it.
One way to respond to a VC
Javascript as a language totally sucks.
I am pretty sure we have better access to information now than before.
> The reform passed 3:2 along partisan lines, with the appointed Democrat commissioners voting in favor, and Republicans against.

it's kind of terrifying to think that a single republican in the wrong place could have blocked a measure affecting millions of people.
Look at Ada first and see if there is anything missing.
I know this is controversial, but the humane thing to do is to allow inmates unfettered access to the internet. Contrary to the orthodoxy on the matter, I assert that this will reduce the strength and relevance of 'prison gangs.'
Introducing Merlo 4 and how to work on your projects with a full time job
> Why not just use text input? Because on iOS, `type="number"` is the only way to get a keyboard with both digits and a decimal separator.

Really? How would you enter a street address into a form consisting of just text inputs?
> what's different about taxes in regards to bitcoin vs. government currency

The difference is that Bitcoin is now recognized as a currency, and as such is not subject to VAT when one wishes to, for example, exchange Euros for Bitcoin. Previously, EU residents would pay VAT on such an exchange because Bitcoin were more or less recognized as a good or service, and thus subject to VAT.
We've Lost Nearly Half Our Social Referral Traffic in the Last 12 Months
So Google gets diversity points for helping non-traditional students access the technology (thought they still pay 13k for it themselves) but will hold no liability if they don't succeed? Cheaper PR than an actual training program, I suppose.
It's just odd on its face that so many of these decisions, which absolutely have an otherwise legislative character, are being made by the executive branch.
Supersingular Isogeny Key Exchange
I've been banned from HN plenty of times before. It hasn't stopped me in years past and it won't now.

Anytime you try and suppress a rebuttal with "I know you're about to say..." it's basically a cop-out. I won't bother giving you a detailed response that you'll respond with something like "Yeah but your language was inflammatory"

If a guy doesn't 'agree' with what I've spent years studying as if his opinion somehow trumps the facts and research, that's fine. I hold the opinion that it's within my rights to break him down over it.

I don't get to be anything. I haven't attacked anyone in this thread yet, I've only used my words, and like I mentioned, I've been banned off probably a dozen other accounts here on HN, but it won't prevent me from coming back and making sure that my voice is heard.

Maybe political correctness isn't the right word, but the concept behind the phrase is exactly what it's about. Suppression of things offensive is a specialty of HN, demonstrable by many banned accounts and hidden conversations.

What you can't undo though is that a few people read what I had to say. I know that shadowbanning and the like goes on, and it doesn't really make a difference as long as a few people here and there see that stuff before it disappears.
From developer to Product Manager – how I did it and how you can do it too
I don't understand why the Republicans voted against.

Look, I get it, you support private industry. But let's remember context, you support capitalism where COMPETITION exists, in this situation it is an artificially created monopoly of one company.

Now if they had an alternative proposal that required prisons to have two or more vendors, I'd be totally onboard with not setting an artificial price restriction. Since hopefully competition will provide the market price.

Essentially they have lost the forest for the trees. Yes government weighing into capitalism is "bad" but government already allowed that by removing competition, so this is a correction of that existing issue.

The article touched on the whole video conferencing thing... It is absolutely criminal that jails restrict actual visitation for the purposes of then charging prisoners to use their video conferencing system (sometimes which requires the family to physically visit the prison, thus making it even more farcical).

The whole private prison thing makes me want to vomit.