skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
6 SaaS Software Solutions Every Business Owner Should Consider
6 #SaaS Software Pennywise the Clown should Use to Help his Birthday Entertainment Business #Halloween http://saasaddict.walkme.com/6-saas-software-solutions-every-business-owner-should-consider/
I read a comment on HN a while ago that went along the lines of "there is a new breed of startups that's in the business of selling dollar bills for 95 cents". I really like that formulation. Your job gets a lot easier as soon as you provide more value than you charge for it. Seems like that was one of the big problems with Homejoy: they were not able to charge more. The reality is that home cleaning is very price competitive. Anyone with a mop and a bucket can undercut your price, and as long as the customer trusts them and likes them they have no reason to switch. For example I know of a 12 year old kid who decided to start his own cleaning business. He calls it "a boy and a bucket", and from what I am told does a fantastic job. He also charges about 1/2 of the market rate around where I live, yet provides a superb service.
Want a landing page that sells your product?
"I’m reminded of how Steve Jobs scoffed at focus group testing of the ipad, on the grounds that consumers couldn’t judge a new product with which they were unfamiliar. But imagine for a minute that there was a focus group and you were running it. How do you describe the device to the focus group? An in-between device that’s too big for your pocket but not nearly as powerful as a notebook? Consumers will say they don’t want it. A device that has many of the most useful features of both notebooks and smartphones, that fits into a purse or small briefcase but lets you watch movies? They’ll demand it."
I was also imagining an article about people who know how to read in a particular script but haven't learned to write it. That would be an interesting article!
It's Tennessee. There is an incredible level of acceptable racism around here.
I implemented a variant of LSM in C# (BerkeleyDB feature/bug compatible, more or less) for our internal DB server (OO/relational DB).

Yes, it is true that LSM can incur a O(logN) read amplification, it was clearly shown in our bare storage tests. But! The full table scan read in full server has 3% (three percent) difference between different storages (LSM is 3% slower). And, as I haven't used BTrees for LSM levels, but some other superficially similar structures with different construction (and no modification - MVCC), the read of complex structures from our DB (a PCB project - you can guess complexity) netted in clear benefit - that read operation was from 16 (sixteen) to 19 (nineteen) percents faster compared to BerkeleyDB. Given that BerkeleyDB storage backend has not occupied more than 20% of server runtime in our profiles, it amounts to 5 to 20 times speedup in read operations.

This can be explained like using the following argument: because Btree gets fragmented when you randomly insert things - pages get scattered all over the place. The rebuild phase I employed made pages much less scattered (actually, there cannot be more than some fixed number (8 in our case) different contiguous runs of pages to hold all data). This amounted to radical difference in read performance.

Take a look: https://cs.brown.edu/research/pubs/theses/masters/2010/newto...

The paper above discusses Btree fragmentation and proposes something like small LSM structure for indices.
Ah, right. It's really important in the context of Rust. :) People sometimes claim that unwrap() violates memory safety, which isn't true.
only recently started using less.js and thought nesting was helpful: i had a not-so-well organized css file, and systematic nesting quickly enforced a sensible grouping of statements.

also, if you want to change an id attr in your html, say, being thorough about nesting ensures that you only have to change your styles in one place. that's a small win for maintainability?

i agree that mixins are a much cooler feature of less/sass than nesting. it's not so much that avoiding nested structures is "a point of pride" in general-purpose programming languages (certainly not in lisp!) as it is that logical modularity makes stuff easier to read, maintain, and reuse.

and as a practical matter, i can see how nested styles could make things difficult to read if there are too many levels of indentation.
I've watched this command change repeatedly as you've been editing it to make it work.

This is a good example of why I didn't do this in the shell.
You are missing the point of welfare: it is supposed to help people get back on their feet, not keep them dependent on taxpayer's money for the rest of their lives. So training/education, not TVs and computer games.

That $500 could perhaps buy supplies to study at a local community college (tuition waivers/scholarships are available).

Poor != stupid.
Piese pentru auto VW BORA la preturi fara concurenta
Have you considered looking at JSON Web Tokens (JWT) ? See this link below for details including specific libraries for various languages.

http://jwt.io/
Super cool project. Looking forward to start using it.
Its never a direct ballistic route - its a dance of orbital slingshots. You launch from here, so when you get over there, that's where Mars is. And sometimes you do a carom off Venus or whatever, to add some energy that you couldn't afford to get by rocket fuel.

So no, the fact that Mars is sometimes very close to the Earth is not really helpful. What'd be helpful is, if the max distance were not so great. But we're stuck with what nature gave us.

It can help to try Kerbal Space Program, to get a feel for orbital mechanics. In fact, it may be the best way to get that feel.
After reading this, I'm left to ponder why anyone would think this was a potential "unicorn" business where it made sense to take big losses to grow revenue. After all, as the article notes, cleaning services like Merry Maids are a well-established thing. (As are personal references for housecleaners.) That doesn't make a potential new entrant bringing a better UX to the process a stupid idea. But it would seem to limit the potential opportunity.
Immense and growing despite efforts to stop it.

If there is one environment on the planet not in risk it's the Sahara. A lot of Egypt, Northern Africa, Iraq/Palestine would have looked like the American Midwest back when they were empires.
Yes I'm sure thats exactly the situation lujim was describing
Instead of down-voting a relevant, on-topic comment, please provide a counter argument.
I'm personally quite surprised that "watch more movies" is a priority on someone's life-changing plan!
The emission of warm water from (conventional and nuclear) power plants is a significant issue but it's kind of not the most prominent issue w.r.t. nuclear power so it tends to be ignored (e.g. the fact that the water is slightly more radioactive or contaminated gets a lot more attention -- it's well known that heat-loving ecosystems develop around power plant outflows).

The magnitude of the thermal pollution varies by technology. Morroco is planning a heat-concentrating system (boiling water with a giant parabolic mirror, in essence) which produces very intense heat in the middle and actually cools the land in the surrounding errors (since the mirrors will have a much higher albedo than rocks and sand). I'm not actually sure if this is going to be a net increase in heat absorption, so this might be a non-issue. (This form of solar generation is apparently more expensive than photovoltaics, though.)

The Union of Concerned Scientists is much more worried about water use, especially in arid areas, with such power plants.

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewa...

Photovoltaics (solar cells) are pretty much black and about 20-30% efficient) so they're absorbing more incident radiation than rocks and sand and then converting 70-80% of it to heat. We see similar effects from urbanization of desert areas (e.g. Phoenix and Las Vegas) so it's not like the effects will be unprecedented -- they just shouldn't be ignored.
The difference with Uber is that it requires a lot more trust to give someone access to your home while you're away to clean it. Not sure I would want to subscribe to a service where I would have to trust any local dude to visit my home. It's like a nanny. Picking someone to look after your kid is a very personal thing. It's not a lowest bidder thing.
It feels like a big chunk of context is missing in this blog post.

It's pretty clear the author is talking to a specific audience instead of people at large. I have an inkling, but I would have liked to know who he thinks he's talking to.
tldr: You don't have to do programming and coding if there's an existing solution out there that has the building blocks to build a website without programming. One such authoring solution is... Bubble.is.
> Here's a great example of what I'm talking about:

While the email mentions a DMCA notice, I doubt there was one. Content-ID probably detected it, and UMG blocked it without needing to send any DMCA notice, just using YouTube's backend tools. If you search on the DMCA database that Google/Youtube uses, ChillingEffects, there's no match for a notice sent by UMG: https://chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&te...

Essentially, my point is that the DMCA is a legal mechanism to force hosting services to comply, but it isn't needed in this case, since YouTube complies voluntarily.

> It's a matter of trust.

Oh, absolutely, I never meant to say that YouTube aren't being assholes by behaving like this, but we were talking about legal rights, and I don't see them violating those.

And playing Devil's advocate, I'm not sure YouTube is all that interested in implementing these mechanisms - their customers are the advertisers, not Big Content. I'd say it's more like paying protection money after getting the proverbial horse head in the bed - or in this case, the barrage of lawsuits they got between 2008-2012.
Looks great. Will take a look at it when I learn Python.
Oh look, advertising for a product camouflaged as a helpful blog post.
I was more considering an employment tribunal for the judge rather than a standard appeal.
The nitrates used to preserve the meat. Although, your risk is elevated only a tiny fraction compared to say, smoking cigarettes.
Don't rent star destroyers from Darth Vader
That may have a component to unequal pay, but I think trying to paint it as the whole picture (or even the major part) isn't quite fair.

I'd argue the huge pay differentials are often because humans are TERRIBLE at judging long term... anything. A pro athlete can fill a stadium at some $$ per seat, yes. If a pro athlete stops playing, what happens? the stadium stops filling as much, we potentially lose some ancillary jobs from decreased viewing population (but given the number of sports stars and the nature of teams, losing one outside of a very few likely won't cause much), but in the long term, what is the cost?

Now let's remove an equal number of teachers as could be paid with that single salary. Even if this is a low end athlete, given teacher pay, you're losing dozen/few dozen teachers. What is the long term cost to students who can no longer be educated, or get a much poorer education (or simply now have far bigger classes)?

I realize there are many holes in this argument as it asserts a lot about how money is distrbuted/what externalities exist, but I see it as one facet.

There are also the more well explored aspects of "we like to lionize celebrity/success" and "teachers don't have much political or social clout given their resources/our prioritization in society" (although this links back to my prior statements about long term value and society preferences.)

In summary, I think there's plenty of reason to hate/feel guilt about it, and work to change it. Yes, the feelings alone do nothing, but if no one is getting angry then certainly nothing will ever change.
Nobody is building anything on sand dunes. That's a straw man, right? Its the rocky places that have life, and are also useful for construction projects.
Yeah, I get that bit, it's the next part I always get confused by. I'm sure I'll get it in the end. :-)
NilClaass#blank? is incredibly useful because it compliments String#blank? and Array#blank?, which are mostly[1] an alias of #empty?. For most uses where you already know you have a string or array, you probably want to use #empty? directly.

The entire point behind #blank? is that it provides a cross-class[2] method that works even when the object doesn't exist (and you get nil instead). This was designed for Rails to simplify situations such as the params[3] (parsed URL query string), which might not have a particular value.

# when handling "/action?foo=bar"
params[:foo] # => "bar"

# when handling "/action?foo="
params[:foo] # => ""

# when handling "/action"
params[:foo] # => nil

With #blank?, you only need one function call to handle both the empty string and nil cases.

if params[:foo].blank?
# render a static placeholder (never looks at params)
else
# render Foo's markup, using the value in params[:foo]
end

If you cared about the empty states other than as a generic "it's blank", other methods may be more appropriate.

> why does FalseClass respond to blank? with `true`, but not TrueClass

That's a good question. I would have assumed both true and false as not-blank (#blank? => false), as those could both be entered (#present?) values. I suspect it's related to HTML forms only including successful controls[4] in the query string.

[1] https://github.com/rails/docrails/blob/master/activesupport/...

[2] see: duck-typing

[3] http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Paramete...

[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.3.2
We need it to counteract global warming
I actually did this once with Move.com. I have moved a lot over the past decade and used them pretty extensively to hire movers. Since two consecutive moves were local and I told the movers that during the first one, they told me to contact them directly for the second one. I got a discount, they got to keep more of the money.
>Adora Cheung opted to sit among employees, rather than in a swanky corner office.

It's a pretty sad state when it's considered admirable and rare that the CEO of a company that is spending other people's money, and making none, doesn't have a "swanky" corner office.
In your second example, the company literally would not exist without the founder. If you divide up the "value" the act of creating a company provides over the lifespan of the company, it will likely eclipse the value a project manager or warehouse supervisor presently provides.
That looks like a great series of courses. Unfortunately I am too busy with real school right now, but hopefully they offer them again.
MiniMongoose: mongoose in the browser
I don't know how this company works financially but would it be possible that he is not risking much ?

They might be in a position where they don't have too much debt or it would not be tied to him and not put him in a difficult situation if it failed.

The bottom line might be that the risky part of founding the company is over.
Then the description should have started like this: Self-hosted Google Alerts in Go!

That would of saved me a couple of minutes
People said the same thing - that the author had not worked on a large-scale project - when he wrote this utterly insane piece about eschewing classes: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/06/classes-where-were-g...

I think maybe he just enjoys being controversial. I have no idea how anyone could really encourage multiple developers to work on a project with a single CSS file - it seems practically almost impossible to me.
I was a low-level corporate drudge around the time of the Visa IPO. I remember at the time that the Wall St. analysts would say things to the effect that Visa needed to implement a clearer org chart, empower the CEO, etc. (completely ignorant of the fact that Dee Hock had intentionally designed Visa to devolve power where it's needed). Even post-IPO, though, I think Visa must be influenced by its roots.
Which of course has no universal applicability. There are pre-K programs that work, especially where the parents are taught critical skills to help their children develop. See, for example, Harlem Children's Zone.
Getting in a car is pretty much the most dangerous thing a person does in an average day. You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions, but you're trusting that Uber driver with your life.
I've done this several times with TaskRabbit and i'm actually surprised the same thing hasn't happened to them.
IMO, that's the late 90s bubble all over again.

I know... we're not in a bubble now... but losing money and making it up on volume was the big joke back then, iirc.
>The difference with Uber is that it requires a lot more trust to give someone access to your home while you're away to clean it.

In one case you're risking personal items and privacy; in the other your life is actually in that person's hands.
Yes, clarity is not always the goal in writing, especially fiction. I can imagine Mann sitting down reading his drafts to his family, who are all staring blankly at the ceiling, anxiously awaiting the end.

I think this is more of a technique to help people recognize when what they have written is bad. All too often do I get a student who is perfectly well spoken and who has obviously edited their work turn in something that is a mess. When you point out mistakes, they are usually like "wow, how the hell did I overlook something like that?"

It can be hard to recognize that something we wrote is bad, because we know internally what it's supposed to say. Something about the verbal and auditory processes in our brains seem to help bypass that though. It's by no means the only thing needed, just helpful.
I keep seeing this ridiculous (if jokey) strawman, but it makes no sense. Processed meat has been a known risk for a long time.

Need a list? http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-p...
I've completed a bunch of Coursera courses. Quality really varies. Even within the 9 course Data Science specialization [1] track some courses were rather poor while the rest were very good. I'm currently taking the #5 rated course [2]. It is excellent. But I'm only taking it because the Statisical Inference course in the Data Science specialization was so weak.

I would also recommend the Cryptography 1 course by Dan Boneh on Coursera [3]. Excellent if you are at all interested in the subject.

I always download the lecture videos, slides, quizzes, labs and exams because, as mentioned, many of the courses don't allow access once the class is completed.

You definitely have to have plenty of self discipline to complete MOOCs. And I don't have any delusions about a Coursera certificate being useful in landing a job; that's not what I'm after. I'm building the skills I want to apply to my own projects.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhudatascience
[2] https://www.coursera.org/course/statistics
[3] https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto
tbh it might be. I don't get the sense TR is doing very well these days. Very quiet out of there.
> The problem with extreme 1 and 3 is that they provide no incentive to increase your contribution which is why "capitalism" is superior to "socialism" in terms of productivity.

That may be true under normal circumstances (you will likely see overall productivity drop once the poor start to starve or freeze to death) but that still leaves the fundamental disagreement whether overall productivity is more important than meeting everyone's needs.
I think it's an important question any entrepreneur has to answer: what value do I add to the business?

If you're providing some expertise or startup costs to purchase expensive investments (buildings, machinery...) or creating some sort of efficiency of scale, you've probably got a viable business.

If your business plan is to skim money off of workers who could do their jobs and get paid without you, your workers are going to eventually figure that out and cut you out of the equation.
I dont know how to view or edit comment history but I never wrote anything in this comment about sending an email.

You could replace echo with sendmail to do that. Sorry if my point came across as callous to you
It's marginal revolution, a right-wing propaganda site. From Wikipedia: "Cowen also serves as general director of George Mason's Mercatus Center, a university research center that focuses on the market economy and that is funded by the Koch Family Foundation"
You can sell equity to anyone interested in buying it. Does your friends lower middle class uncle that retired from that factory job at Chrysler ten years ago have an extra 20 grand? You can sell him a chunk. You can't hold yourself out to the general public, but you can sell shares if that's what you want to do. There is a very real concept called cost of equity. It's a percentage comparable to loan interest. It's often much higher than the cost of taking a loan if your company is successful.
" I found out what colors would work together and how I could articulate my idea of a subscription box. Here’s how it looks:"

whitespace follows.
Fred Wilson recently wrote a blog post about this:

http://avc.com/2015/10/negative-gross-margins/

A lot of companies will fail because their investors will lose patience and no longer support subsidized pricing.
I'm not so sure this should be applauded. He mortgaged his house, emptied his retirement accounts, and sold all his stock, to what? Make a statement? It just seems reckless to me.
As far as calories go Capital-C Calorie is another way to write kcal. Confusing? Yes, but the terminology is correct.

Anyway, if we are talking about any large quantity of anything we are given a reference point. People have trouble with large quantities they don't encounter in their everyday lives. Not because they are dumb but because they don't have a reference point. Say 100,000 pounds of food. How much is that? I don't know, "enough to feed 100 people for a year." I can understand that. (I made those numbers up)
So is he joining as CTO or some level of director/SVP/VP? He seems pretty technical
This seems pretty misleading. The WHO put these meats in the same class in terms of certainty of being a carcinogen in humans, but I don't see any claim about the rates of cancer caused by each being comparable. That is, they're convinced that it causes some nonzero amount of cancer, but how many cancers it causes is a separate issue.

Also, the picture at the top shows a cheeseburger, but ground beef is never actually mentioned in the article as an example of "processed meats". It represents an older consensus (seemingly unrelated to the current topic apart from the shared theme of "meat bad") that excessive red meat intake contributes to health problems.
That's exactly how I read it. Taking on debt or selling equity are some of the most common ways of financing businesses. I could see if "take on debt" was not in that sentence but even then many (non-VC funded too!) businesses sell ownership in their business to finance it.
Yes, it's true - we have a community built around our product, and oftentimes communities want to help/support each other. So I let our users know that we were on HN since it's an opportunity for them to make the platform stronger by adding many more awesome engineers to get matched to.
Homejoy raised $40 million. I doubt it was ever even close to Unicorn valuation. Am I wrong or is this headline fairly misleading?