skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Can you sell a 'nearly' startup?
Before my current project took off and we raised venture funding, I was working on a side project which I almost took live but decided not to at the last minute due to time constraints.

It is a project local to the Swiss market, with a great working technical component, deals with suppliers and partners, marketing/graphic components already made and over $10k in 'promised' revenue (which I never charged as I didn't take the project live).

I rediscovered the project recently and it seems a shame that it is just lying there unused. Yet because there isn't yet anything similar available for Swiss consumers, I'm not willing to give it away for free as i have done with other side projects in the past.

For someone with German speaking skills and a bit of a flair for consumer marketing, as well as 3-4 hours/week, this would make a very lucrative side project (probably).

Anybody have experience in selling (or not selling) their side project?

I'm not looking for much more than a symbolic 'thank you', but I would like something in return ;)
Unlike Unit 731, the scientists in Operation Paperclip were just that: scientists. Their complicitness in the war, while definitely non-zero, was markedly less.*

Unit 731's doctors were more akin to Mengele: personally hacking off living humans' half-frozen arms to see how they reacted in the cold, experiments with gangrene, etc...

Every single concentration camp "doctor" was deemed a war criminal. We didn't import them as a war bounty. Too bad we never did the same for Japan.

----

* The only two exceptions seem to be Kurt Blome and Hubertus Strughold, both brought over in Paperclip, who probably perpetrated some nasty shit but were "tried" and given a pass.
More practically, you can pay someone to fix those problems for you. This someone doesn't need to be related to the original authors in any way, and you can even put out a competitive bid open to the whole world.
You can't book an appointment with most of these directly, and not all of them can write prescriptions legally. For instance, I can't just book an appointment with a nurse to take a look at a cut to see if it needs stitches. The nurse might be the one to actually do the work, but I can't cut out the middleman legally.
Remove C-style for-loops with conditions and incrementers
I'm actually torn on this. I mean, I like that they are trying to push for wifi everywhere. But I kind of thing they should restrict it to certain businesses (Malls, pizza joints, etc) and not residential. I don't ever find myself without wifi at home unless the entire freaking neighborhood is out too (common with Comcast).
So you are ok with 1* million(x) CO2 pollution deaths per year and 6 million(y) other pollution death per year?

*- Move the x as you want, and set y as (7 - x) million.
Coal as a source of our electric power has plummeted in a decade, being taken up mostly by natural gas (but also in small part by solar/wind). Additionally, there is no change needed for an end consumer if the power they use is switched to a different source, whereas to switch a fuel for cars means switching cars. The drive to get people on electric cars means that switching everything off of fossil fuels is a matter of switching the power plants (which we've seen is something that can be done quickly as with coal->natural gas).
Google just launched a new way to help you stay on top of your to-do lists
That can not happen.

Cellular data is not another dumb pipe, it's data transmission grafted with duct tape onto GSM et al., which are ridiculously centralized and proprietary services. There are no open source implementations, no open source hardware, certainly no open source drivers. Even if there were, you would be at the mercy of whoever operates the base station.
There are many reasons, but one key reason is solar radiation. The current orbit of the ISS means that is mostly protected from harmful radiation by Earth's magnetic field. If you moved it away from Earth, you would not have that protection and the station would become very dangerous.

Another reason is resupply. The station can only run for a few months or a year without resupply, and the further you move it away the more difficult and expensive resupply becomes.

There are a host of other reasons, but they all stem from the fact that the ISS was engineered to always be close to Earth, and the space environment elsewhere is sufficiently different that the ISS basically can't work in a dramatically different orbit.
(author here) Here's a quick implementation of error bars for d3.compose [1]. The general goal of d3.compose was to provide the foundation for creating reusable charts and components while keeping the standard library of charts/components relatively small and focused. With that said, there are plenty of charts/components in the pipeline (scatter, area, and callout to name a few) and I'll make sure error bars are added as well.

1: http://bl.ocks.org/timhall/87aee92992f6f7892a1d
Learn something new every day!

Yeah, Cap'n Proto is very similar, FlatBuffers has the advantage in that it compiles against almost all versions of Visual Studio where Cap'n Proto unfortunately decided to use some C++14 features.

FWIW I think I've seen some ports of FlatBuffers into Rust since it's much easier to handle due to the offsets and translation on return value. The former(matching compiler layout) was the part that I was mentioning that seems like something a bit gnarlier than rust would like.
Are You Managing Your Manager?
is it a Hacker News, isn't it?
Learn Enough Text Editor to Be Dangerous Ebooks
When I was a kid, I somehow ended up with a copy of the 1989 edition of The Secret Guide to Computers, by Russ Walter. While it was already outdated by the time I got it (this would be around 1995 or 1996), I found it an absolutely fascinating resource for a number of reasons. One, it was my introduction to programming, and the tutorials in the book really opened my eyes. Two, it was filled with a wealth of information about the home computer era, which was something that I never really got to experience firsthand: my family had Macs when I was little (I was born in '84, and my parents got a Mac Plus in '86, starting my love affair with computers), and we eventually switched to PCs in the mid 90s. All I knew firsthand about the era was from the Apple II models at school. Reading this book introduced me to a whole new history featuring companies I knew next to nothing about, such as Commodore, Atari, and Tandy.

Anyway, a few stories about Commodore's history were imprinted on me thanks to this book, and I'm going to repeat them here from memory.

One: The PET's launch was filled with problems. Commodore originally wanted a guaranteed retail channel, so when they first started developing the PET, they approached Tandy about a partnership where Commodore would make the computer and Tandy would sell it. Tandy politely declined Commodore's offer... because Commodore sold them on the idea making of a home computer so well that Tandy decided they should both make and sell their own computer, cutting Commodore out of the loop and resulting in the TRS-80. The PET's development was filled with delays, and by the time it actually launched, the TRS-80 has beaten it to market. It was already obsolete by the time it came out, and then IIRC they had problems introducing the floppy drive as well, with its launch plagued by delays and mechanical problems. When Commodore began work on the VIC-20, they weren't so much following up a successful product with a next generation as they were desperately trying to make up for the PET's problems.

Two: With the VIC, Commodore found out that naming a computer was harder than it looks, especially when you're trying for an international launch. They originally wanted to name it the Vixen to promote it as sleek and sexy, but the name ended up being too sexy for the European market since "Vixen" is pronounced like Wichsen, which is German for "masturbation". So they shortened it to Vic. Unfortunately, they discovered that a German would pronounce it like Fick, which means "fuck". Ultimately, they decided to go with different names for different markets: they named it VIC-20 in the US and VC-20 (short for "VolksComputer") in Europe. On a similar note, the medicine company Vicks had the same problem, so they chose to spell their name as Wicks in Germany.
Ask HN: When is it time to change jobs?
I'm currently in a position where I'm well compensated and doing enjoyable work in a fairly stress free, relaxed environment. However, most of the development is being done in languages and frameworks (C++ / Qt) that feel increasingly isolated from what most job openings are looking for (web / app / server development).

I've been in my current position for almost three years. The company seems relatively stable so I could (and wouldn't mind) staying for the next 5-10, but I'm concerned that might effectively kill my career. Is there a point at which I've been using older technologies for so long that it would be difficult / impossible to get a different type of job without essentially having to re-train myself?
Those are editors' picks - unrelated to customer sales or ratings. This is a pretty common phenomenon in the world of literary fiction where (a) some are clearly just disappointed that the book in question isn't an easily digestible genre work and (b) many people are inclined to be especially vociferous about their opinion of something they've sunk 8 - 20 hours into.

FWIW, I thoroughly enjoyed Fates and Furies in audiobook format, although it isn't without it's flaws. Critic James Wood gave it a tepid review in The New Yorker.
K-Cups are a really interesting product to me as someone who loves coffee.

We have almost every different way of making coffee at our office (normal machine, chemex, french press, aeropress, big machine that grinds beans fresh and makes cup in ~40 sec) and people still use the K-cup machine.

I know that most of those methods are a bit more time intensive and daunting, but we have a big machine that makes a cup from fresh beans with one button push. I've talked to my co-workers and a lot of them simply like the K-cup coffee better. To me, it's almost objectively worse coffee, but people still love it.

I'm not sure whether it's branding or just what they're used to, but if you give people the option of coffee from a pot or from a k-cup, it seems they'll almost invariably choose the k-cup.
If anyone is interested in the book Sustainable Materials, it's free:
http://www.withbotheyesopen.com/read.php
Most likely those jobs will be aggressively automated, with more investment that would be previously to make up for the higher cost of labor. Just as Uber openly wants to eventually get rid of their drivers, I don't see why fast food chains wouldn't want to have a fully automated drive through restaurant in 100 years. Either that or they will have to differentiate to produce more value by having a friendlier and higher quality staff, like one might see at Chick-fil-A
> the ugly truth is that communal punishment is the only form of punishment that truly works

I appreciate from your other comments that your views are nuanced, but posting something this glib about something this horrific crosses the line here.
I've linked to the news post because it gives context and includes a launch discount, but the main Text Editor tutorial can be found here:

http://www.learnenough.com/text-editor-tutorial
> In Turkey, we've seen on TV or heard of many families turning in their children many many times.

And that's why there's still hope for Turkey.

> In fact, the suicide-bomber-brothers who killed upwards of a hundred victims in Ankara were reported to be islamic state militants multiple times by their parents. They've reported them many times to different authorities.

Well, plenty of people do think that Erdogan is strongly sympathetic to ISIS...

> Here, the west is to blame.

Can blame all you want, but what's done is done. Canada (or rather British territories in North America) was once at war with the Americans. We were at war with the Germans (twice). We got over it.

> The world is a bad place because of your empire building games.

Don't pretend the Islamic world didn't participate in the same. How many cultures were destroyed by Islamic conquests? Remember, Turkey wasn't always Turkish. Istanbul wasn't always Istanbul.

If the West is so vengeful, why IS Istanbul still Istanbul?
Legally, many levels of nurses can't write prescriptions. They also can't take appointments directly--I'm not sure if that's a legal requirement also--even if the work entailed would have been entirely done by them.
Chances are still pretty low, however. I used to be a long-time open source maintainer, and I definitely found (based on my own experience, and the experience of others trying to get started on projects I've worked on) that the barrier to entry to almost any non-trivial code base is fairly high. And debugging is usually more difficult than adding a new feature.

Open source communities also don't "just happen". It's pretty rare for someone to throw some code in a GitHub responsibility, wander off, and later find that it's suddenly become actively (or even passively) maintained.

Unless it's an app that's mission-critical to my life and there aren't any alternatives (even if they're not as good), I can't see myself digging in to fix bugs. And even then, it still feels like a hard sell.

I also feel like most apps that people might love enough to even consider diving into also have server components. If the company running the service shuts down, that's another barrier to setting up your own (assuming the backend pieces were even open sourced too!).

Sure, it happens, but those tend to be very very exceptional cases.
Rogue Secret Service agent who stole from Silk Road sentenced to nearly 6 years
If that was an option, he wouldn't be in YC, half-accidentally or otherwise. Nothing against YC here, but long-term steady-state isn't what they're looking for. Remember that next time you start using a VC-funded tool.
Eventi
Yeah I find it's an interesting approach (as opposed to more traditionally building the sharing/collaboration features into a desktop app)..

I'll also be curious to hear more about what limits the chosen approach end up imposing..
the lie was not neccesary. climate change deniers are worried about the government getting its nose into everything and destroying a country to favour some bankers. if you started with the right arguments like arnold the story would be different.. and its not late.
Damn, this sounds like a fascinating. Refining data to detect the latest and greatest spoofing algos? Thats a fascinating series of puzzles to solve.
Thanks - those make sense. I wonder if there is any opportunity to keep it in use or relevant. We spent $140 billion putting it up there, so if its not viable to spend 2% of that per year keeping it going then I understand the need to deorbit.
I think NASA should capture an asteroid and place it into a stable Lagrange point. The mass of the asteroid could provide resources, radiation shielding, and additional gravitational stability for other facilities/assets at the same Lagrange point.

If suitable engineering is done, stations could undock from the radiation shield and updated stations docked in place, so the investment in delta-v and materiel could be preserved.
Interesting. That's strikingly similar to the idea, held by many in the US, that the new nuclear weapons should be utilized against Soviet ASAP, before they had the chance to build their own. Even Bertrand Russell advocated for this.

That someone I hold as a model in so much could display such levels of collective madness is one of those things I use to remind myself, of how fickle we are.
A survivor's life
Kernel Load-Balancing for Docker Containers Using IPVS
That's what the russians are doing with their modules
"none of us have access to reality unfiltered by our senses and our linguistic programs"

That sounds like a statement about "reality unfiltered by our senses and our linguistic programs".

It's not uncontroversial either, as lots of people have in fact claimed to have just such access.
I think perhaps for home broadband (read wifi) use sure, we could free up another 200 mhz easy - as replacement for mobile broadband.. you wanna look between 600-1900 mhz there, anything much above 2.5 is too high (read expensive) to build a mobile network with because of site spacing.

Much of what's in that band is allocated for point to point microwave and satellite, I'd also caution you, one mans 'wasted spectrum' is another 'vital important service' both of which can be technically correct at the same time.
"... in Roman Egypt (from endemic tradition)" would be a better title.
It would be great if any/all of these developers/companies can guarantee the app will be around for X days / years after the user buys it. Then it's a contract and you wont feel bad/betrayed once the app is gone (acquisition/bankrupt etc)

They can always end of life it after their last sale.

This guarantees the user that it's worth the time/investment, and the company can always decide to prolong the contract / expiration date.

Software (Best if used by X/XX/XXXX)
When you're getting hired you're just selling someone on the idea of you. You just need to create a signal that you're worth the purchase. There is nothing magic about a resume other than it's the most typical way an employee sells themselves. Other signals of your worth could be recommendations, credentials, publications, intelligent conversation, etc.

I prefer the "meet and greet" approach to job hunting. If we have a good conversation about their needs and how I'd satisfy them, I'm inclined to feel a little insulted when a resume is asked for.
> Let them have this experiment. If they're so bigoted and extreme to their own detriment, I wouldn't stop them.

Said someone in Europe, circa 1931.

Fact is, extremism generally hurts more people than the extremists...
You know, I hate the waste of a Keurig, but it has advantages as well as costs. Remember how bad office coffee used to be? Over-cooked, lukewarm, foul? All that goes away with a K-cup machine. I despise the waste, but man is it a colossal improvement in quality.
Drop it on the moon if nobody wants it. Could be a Theme Park when we settle.
>Did you know coffee grinds make a great nutritious supplement to household plants and gardens?

Nope. I don't drink coffee, as I dislike the taste. Chewing roasted coffee is more fun than drinking it.
well the idea that is built with modules should imply that we can swap out the pieces as they age and as the mission changes.

if anything the real reason to abandon the ISS is the same reason we needed to abandon the shuttle program. Nostalgic money pits tend to stick around preventing progress and investment in new and better systems.

I still think one of the best things to happen to NASA in the last ten plus years was having the shuttle program shut down. Yeah it lead to years with lack of capability but it was that shuttle which held back such development and others have stepped in.

I would prefer to get to the moon, having a solid surface under you would have some great benefits, let alone being able to dig deep and hide.
The space shuttle was about half as efficient as the Saturn it replaced. And that's only if you count low earth orbit. If you count beyond that, it is infinitely more efficient since the space shuttle couldn't go further.

The Saturn was given to us by basically empowering a dictator to run the program and get things done, a lot like a CEO. The Space Shuttle was given to us by typical bureaucracy, and lies. Lots and lots of lies told with a straight face to the public.

I don't know that private companies can ever compete with NASA on the scale of spending, but given NASA's current relatively tiny budget, it doesn't seem out of the question.

And I like to daydream about a future where the space shuttle never happened and the Saturn XX single stage super rocket takes vacationers to the moon and then lands itself on its landing pad ready for a quick refuel and return trip.
For those disppointed with Mailbox's abandonment, I'd love to hear your feedback on Polymail (https://polymail.io). We're in private Alpha right now, but we have many similar features to Mailbox like Read Later + some better ones like Email Tracking & Send Later. Feel free to DM me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/foolywk) if you'd like to be added to our next Alpha release!
I'd as much argue that the poor quality is a result of poor oversight on contractors and the overall contracting process.
SLIDES: How to build your audience with a curated email newsletter
If you're asking them to move to SF, yes. But if they choose to move to SF...should they get a raise?
Are there penalties for going through it slowly and/or playing in bursts interspersed with downtime?

No! That's part of the beauty of it -- the game is on 24 hours a day (well, after we get past the roaring pyroclasm I expect on the servers immediately post-launch), 365 days a year, and hundreds of simulated bots are waiting with bated breath on a hard drive somewhere on AWS for when 'kbenson (or anyone else) has 45 free minutes in the schedule.

All three of us are working parents who are familiar with the juggling that goes on. Believe me, we didn't make something you'd have to be an unemployed 22 year old to get through. (In addition to that being a poor decision from a product perspective that would be a really poor decision from a "identify as many of the best engineers in the world that we possibly can" perspective because our working hypothesis is that y'all are presumably pretty busy.)
Nothing wrong with affiliate links if you're a regular user of this site: we're capitalists here. I make sure to include them if I link to a book, because I could use the money more than Jeff Bezos. Of course, I don't link to stuff just for the sake of linking to it, but only do so if I would have anyway. I think it's pretty clear whether someone is a spammer or not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hullo seems to be the person who included some links. They have clearly been here a while, participates constructively, and doesn't seem to spew out a lot of affiliate links (any, actually, that I can see).
The global warming brigade hijacked the pollution issue.

There always will be a debate on global warming. So keeping global warming as the prime focus of fossil fuel usage kept people divided.

If pollution was the prime focus from day one, then more push would have been given to renewable.

Maybe, Arnold is able to bring more people to think in this direction.
"Kill them and take their lab-books" doesn't work?
TIME fiction http://time.com/4135131/top-10-fiction-books-2/ and nonfiction http://time.com/4135245/top-10-nonfiction-books-2/

A whole bunch of subcategories from the Guardian/Observer: http://www.theguardian.com/books#books-of-the-year
ISS takes up about 15%-18% of NASA's budget. It's slated to cost NASA about $3 billion per year, at least, through the rest of its life.

Is that cheap, as far as hundred billion dollar space stations are concerned? Or is that expensive as far as moving on to new projects is concerned (and having budget drag from a legacy program that will be ~30 years old in 2024)? That's part of the debate. Personally I'd rather Congress give NASA another $3 billion in funding just to keep the ISS until we (hopefully) begin replacing it.
wycats/JavaScript-decorators
Evolution: Soundtrack to Life
You can sign up for Facebook with just a mobile number through the app.
I've used it quite heavily to parse data that comes in 85- and 1275-bit chunks and it works awesome.

Edit: sorry, it was bitstring, not bitarray. bitstring.BitArray :).