skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Entrepreneurship – A second attempt | Feedback welcomed
I have come to the realization that my current startup's lethragic growth rate will not allow me to afford a living in the bay area. As such, I am presented with a few options: Get a job, or take another shot at starting a company (albeit, working out of a cheaper city). I am heavily leaning toward the latter, but this time I want to take some feedback earlier on from the YC community as I have found the people here to be amongst the most honest and knowledgeable.

I would appreciate your critique (as well as pointers) of some of the ideas I am proposing for my next startup. Also, do you think there is a market need/ actual problem to be solved, or am I just forcing the issue?

a]
Outsourcing: As I plan to operate out of Africa for a while, I was thinking of a managed outsourcing business where we train and place the smartest candidates on projects ranging from creative services to development. I see a shortage in talent locally and this model could allow companies to augment their talent pool with affordable labour.

b]
Similar to A above but a focus on deploying and managing opensource projects such as wordpress, moodle, open ERP etc. Not only would I provide the technical talent, but also the operational labour to perform services like order management, chat management etc

c]
Building a tool gamifies social actions (twitter, fb, instagram sharing etc) - with a lotto/random winnings component that creates recurring engagment by players

I would appreciate any feedback.

Regards.
If you do the emacs tutorial (in the menu), you'll find a lot of the ctrl- keystrokes work in osx textboxes, which is surprisingly handy. ctrl-n, next line; ctrl-p, previous line; ctrl-k, cut to end of line, ctrl-y yank the text back (but there's no full kill-ring)

a bunch of them work in bash too, ctrl-r for reverse i-search of your history.

You probably already know more than you think, and learning 10-15 basic commands will get you a whole bunch of utility all over the place.
Yeah, well, I had the same problem with Emacs, after I switched to it from Vim. I thought that it was ridiculous to be learning new keys and commands all the time. To avoid it I learned Emacs Lisp, read some of Emacs C code and wrote a few k loc long Emacs config[1] along with a couple of libraries, not to mention installing and customizing hundreds of plugins. I never learned Emacs actually, I just rebound everything in a way that suited me and my memory and reflexes.

So, there you have it. You don't need to learn Emacs at all if don't want to, just learn Emacs Lisp first! Although Org mode specifically has a rather unpleasant API.

[1] https://github.com/piotrklibert/dotemacs_reloaded/tree/maste...
> You might be technically right, but I guarantee you that by your definition the vast majority of software out there is defective.

Your point being? That it's untechnically correct?

> The solutions you mention are non-trivial. It is really easy to make a mistake. While it may not be the operating systems fault at the end of the day, designing a system like this is setting up the overall experience for failure. A well designed system should make it easy to get right and not the other way around.

Which is all kindof true, but doesn't change that those APIs are the way they are, for historical reasons. Just because some API is broken, doesn't mean your code will work correctly when you pretend it's not broken.

edit: just to be sure: yes, the special-casing of zero-sized allocations is somewhat of a bug, which we still have to live with. Other than that, the API is actuall perfectly fine--if you don't check for allocation failures and you can't handle it if your program gets interrupted at any point, that's just a bug in your code, there is no useful general way to abstract those problems away.
Doing a business for fun and exploration
It means much: who is operating it and under which jurisdiction.
One important difference to LLVM is the backend (machine code generation).
libFirm uses its graph-based intermediate representation with explicit data dependencies not only in the "middleend" (i.e. for architecture-independent optimizations), but also in the backend.
In contrast, LLVM uses completely different representations for the middleend and backend.
libFirm still has explicit data dependencies and SSA form in code generation, which simplifies several important code-generation phases.
(LLVM has a more classical virtual/physical register approach.)
It's simpler from the theoretical viewpoint of compiler construction and it's also easier for engineering a compiler.
E.g. it allows for decoupling spilling and register assignment.
It also enables checkable register allocation, because in our representation the register assignment is just an annotation and the explicit data dependencies (which operation uses which operands) is still the primary encoding in the graph, which allows having a checker for the register allocation.
SSA form gives the usual benefits that the question "what is the definition of this value?" is directly encoded in the graph and is readily available.
Having the same representation as the middleend allows for reusing passes in the backend.
E.g. we run the middleend's code placement (loop-invariant code motion) in the backend after instruction selection.

Also there's been a lot of work on the AMD64 backend and for example it is able to run the SPEC benchmarks.
The info on the page is just a bit stale.
(Note to self: Update the page)
If Netflix ever brought in ads, it would be for a lower cost subscription rate, perhaps free but I doubt that. They know the wrath of their users who unsubscribe en masse when they screw up.
Even though I'm doing a side project on this myself: language learning.
And I was pretty down on the whole "tablet" idea for a long time because it kept getting tried and tried and tried, and failed each time. Then Apple made the iPad. And while the tablet market may have slowed down and failed to conquer the universe or destroy all other laptop-like form factors, it is a solid market segment that isn't going to disappear that has made a lot of money since then.

There are exceptions. That's why I don't phrase this in terms of "never ever try". I say you ought to go in with eyes wide open. Look at what has failed, see why, see if you've got a story that you can do better. It's basically very, very expensive market research that you can get for free. If you then want to put your money on these numbers and spin the wheel, at least you did your due diligence and hopefully maximized your chances.
I don't know how education is typically paid for in the UK. This would be a great move in the US, since most of the types of jobs most likely offered by a Penguin (I'm assuming) aren't going to go far in paying off student loans.
#1 What is the complexity of boolean matrix multiplication?

#2 Is there a parallel algorithm for GCD?
In the relatively early days of Expedia, I had a major travel headache because the airline and Expedia were pointing fingers at each other, each saying I needed to deal with the other one to fix the problem (which was not of my doing in the first place - the airline changed the schedule, making my connection impossible). In addition to the reasons I described in my first comment (not trusting that I am seeing all of the options), this is the other thing that puts me off of booking through third-parties. The benefits of booking through someone other than the direct provider need to be huge before I will consider it, and they never are with these travel planning sites.
Fair Use for the Rich and Fabulous?
> This is so totally messed up. Having an entire DOM with all the associated scripts running live, just for a thumbnail.

Agreed. And suppose the "thumbnailed" website had a thumbnail of the parent linking site...
20 Hollow Copyright Claims
I could go on and on about the benefits of org. And the org-Babel full fledged literate programming environment is another game changer. I used org for a scientific conference I attended recently. From one org file, I could provision a VM in the cloud and get various Docker containers running via tangling with plenty of human friendly exposition. (See tramp mode too.) I could then export that file as an extended abstract via Latex export (conforming to the conference formatting guidelines) and also produce attractive HTML (see ReadTheOrg). Also checkout this literate devops video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljNabciEGg
The bugfixes of today are the legacy standards of tomorrow
Why no one has solved event discovery: http://www.hughmalkin.com/blogwriter/2015/9/23/why-no-one-ha...
Thanks for your reply! Going to look into the NER capabilities of NLTK.
Google built special censored version of YouTube for Pakistan
Japanese Researchers Revive Frozen ‘Micro-Animal’ After 30 Years
اسعار السيارات الأوربية في مصر 2016 بعد تخفيض الجمارك – تراخيص
The main points of this (i.e my) post on the mailing list still apply.
Nowadays everything is even more nice. (:
HPACK, Static Table Definition
A good read, but it's another tech/car article that completely fails to take into account two huge things: Car Culture and things that aren't cities.

On car culture: There is still an extremely large community of people in the U.S. (and I have no reason to believe this is restricted to the U.S) who buy cars NOT based on efficiency and price, we buy what we like. This is a huge factor that I've heard no technical pundit address yet. Excluding the Tesla which is a masterpiece, almost every other electric car is extremely dull. Lackluster styling, meh on performance, and focuses on gadgets to make the sale. To a "car guy," an electric car is right there with a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry; it's mashed potatoes. It's a doughnut with no filling. Yeah, it will do the job and it will do it well, but you don't have any fun with it. When I'm going to out to spend a years salary or so on transportation I want something I'm going to enjoy driving.

On the other thing, I have yet to see an even semi-autonomous car that can handle NOT being in a city. Intermittent Internet access, gravel/dirt roads, long stretches of unmarked highway, etc. I can't picture one of Google's cars making it's way up the driveway to my house, I have a feeling it would just stop at the edge of the driveway (dirt) and go "Welp, my tiny 8 inch tires can't handle an obstacle of that magnitude, get out and walk."

I realize these are the concerns of a small market but when people throw around terms like "the car of the future" I feel the need to point out that it's not the future for everyone, and in fact might be the future for a very small group of people while everyone else keeps doing what they're doing.
Why I Only Take Uber and Lyft, and Refuse to Get into Another Taxi
On spaces in the paths of programs and files on Windows
Man, I've been wanting one of those for years. Even just searching for interesting concerts is a tedious chore on most sites. The lack of anything like this means I basically have a few favorite local venues, and I try to keep up with their programs. It's really not ideal.

There is a small site that maintains an event calendar for my city, oriented towards a certain subculture. That's by far the best thing I've seen for discovering new things to do.

I don't know if there's an actual business model in any of this. That's definitely the hard part. But it would be such a useful resource.
Being expensive anywhere makes you a target. Sometimes the threat is far off, sometimes it's immediate.

Just remember, as the CEO and HR are encouraging you to have passion for your company and work, they are always trying to figure out when and how it will make sense to replace or get rid of you. It may just be in the back of their minds, but they'll check on it regularly, and when it becomes feasible it'll be done.
My thought was to develop a library for code re-use among clients. It would cover common problems/features. In your experience, do many contract workers have such a thing?
Cool! They're the second Tuesday of every month, as it says on the site. And they're at 6PM at CoWorks.
Firstly, lots of work has been done here. See for example http://www.worldofnumbers.com/repunits.htm (factorizations of repunits up to 8580 digits).

I also think repunits are, in general, easier to factor because ones that do not have a prime number of digits have obvious divisors.

Certainly, rep units of up to 50 digits are factored easily (Google a bignum factorization program online, and try for yourself)

Even disregarding that, the original code computed a square root about sqrt(n) times (that's why its running time went up by a factor of 10 for every two digits added). Even without using advanced factoring algorithms, you can factor that number using, at the very most, sqrt(n) trial divisions.
You don't tell them: give me what you value it for. You do your best to estimate what success will be (in value) to them. Then you negotiate from that.
Amazon Reveals Details About Drone Delivery Program
The use of silly putty as a self-shaping polishing disk is ingenious.

Link from the article: "Rigid conformal polishing tool using  non-linear visco-elastic effect" https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-18-3-22...
No but for real, where is the travel planning service that actually does all of these things laid out in the article? I've been wanting this for years, and all I'm reading is about how I should never build it. And there seems to be quite a few stories where some startup tried to build a trip planning site, and they pretty much succeeded, but they got acquired and shut down! That's so frustrating.

> The Priceline Group spends over $2 billion per year on Google Ads alone.

WOW, that's unbelievable.

> even when one of them sends a link to some vacation rental he’s found on Airbnb that’s not available on your app.

I thought this hypothetical app was supposed to be amazing in every way, and it doesn't even support AirBnb
OP if you're reading this.... this is how it works
>Some people are just not cut out to be entrepreneurs. And once the money dries up, these will be the first ones to go.

But why care? Some make it some don't, everyone who wants to should try.
The other comments have you covered I think but I wanted to reiterate how worth it learning org-mode and spending the time to customize your configuration is. It's a bit daunting at first, so it may take a bit of time and some learning, but it's absolutely worth it.

I use org-mode for my entire GTD workflow (calendar Agenda, next-actions, tickler, maybe, and projects), I use it for capturing quotes or blocks of text that I really want to save for later (my spark notes file), I use it for capturing my "recipes" of anything (software, realizations, food, etc...) in my grimoire file, I use it for capturing notes or thoughts while I'm reading books (with nice capture templates for guiding me through setting the page # and paragraph # in the property drawer), I use it for all of my web bookmarks (I have a bookmarklet integrated in Chrome that auto-fills fields in the capture template for the website), I use it for articles in my To Read list with a Chrome bookmarklet for auto-filling the capture template, AND I use it for my spaced repetition routine with org-drill.

I also use it extensively for work on-top of all the above. I have a capture template for my team's weekly standup meetings, I use it for taking notes during meetings and structuring action plans, etc...

The capture templates, org-protocol for external programs to activate a capture template and pre-fill with data, customized Agenda views (so I get a nice "HUD" for long-running tasks + my 4 day agenda), and refiling (this is one of my favorite parts of org-mode!!!) are absolutely invaluable and an incredible tool for my productivity.

Nothing matches it in breadth and depth, nothing. And as is the case w/ Emacs, you can customize everything to suit your workflow or make tweaks - maybe you have a great idea for improving something! For me I was able to create a highly customized Agenda view specific to my personal deficiencies (I forget about long-running important tasks that aren't a "SOLVE IT TODAY" task).
From the front page testimonial:

> in less than 5 minutes the project was fully spec'd and underway.

Honest question: why would I need a top '1% developer' for a project that can be fully spec'd in less than 5 minutes?
Recruiters don't exist to act as external sales people for your agency. They are there to find individuals for companies to hire.
I agree with this, and I think "Student Loans" are the subprime mortgage crisis of the hour. I get particularly incensed when we read reports of for profit universities convincing kids they will have great job prospects if they get their diploma and will be able to pay off any loans they get now. The banks collude with them because as you mention they aren't really pricing risk, there is no risk, they are just taking 0% interest money from the Fed and converting it into 8% interest money from delinquent student loans.

But that said, I would hope that people have enough responsibility to only take loans they intend to repay, and to work within the system to repay them, rather than assert after the fact that the system is broken and so the tax payers should bail them out.
> The power of a desktop js editor with org-mode capabilities would be awesome !

I think the power of a desktop elisp editor with org-mode's capabilities is rather more awesome. What does JavaScript offer that elisp doesn't?
Very much so. Had a similar reaction to the "Aliens!!!1!!" megastructure articles of the last few days, "need to duck over to hn and see what someone not selling ad space has to say about that"
hg-git already works with gitlab, doesn't it?
The blockchain is open source software, and anyone can create a currency based on it. That's why you have dogecoin, litecoin, etc. However, in order for a currency to be valuable, people have to use it, and bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that has really taken off.
No it's a commodity if it's non-differentiated from others. You can still have non-commoditized work that operates at scaled efficiency. You just have to have something that makes you better or different.
Same in Austria, even accessible through web at http://teletext.orf.at/
I'll grant you the first point. But what sort of conspiracy theory? It elegantly explains overrepresentation without any coordination. Once you account for the Ashkenazis much higher IQ, there isn't anything for a conspiracy to explain.
If your a vim person try evil mode. I hear great things.
You cannot hold dual citizenship and get a security clearance, and a clearance is required for many government contractors (certainly defense contractors, anyway).
Ask HN: What JavaScript library/framework can I use to build simple Web UI?
I want to build Web UI for a simple REST backend. It is a side-project and so doesn't have to look super polished: a couple of pages with sortable lists + few forms and buttons to insert/update items. Basic user auth.
What is the simple and quick way to build something like this?
I am not a UI dev. Last UI I needed was built in Delphi 5 :-) I don't really have desire to spend months on learning HTML5, CSS3, Photoshop, and reviewing hundreds of frameworks and libs. Just need to build something decent-looking and move onto other things.
IMO, "sane defaults" are missing from pretty much every operating system out there -- both in their installers and the resulting installed system.

It all comes down to that "convenience versus security" trade-off and, for better or worse, those implementing these systems tend to lean more towards the "convenience" side. It's going to take some major changes before we start seeing systems that are "(mostly) secure by default".
BASIC in Minecraft
A Message from Stewart Butterfield to Slack Employees
Can we not post anything with paywalls or just give the non-paywall link.

This makes it inaccessible for most HN users.
That is several orders of magnitude off for engineer positions at Bay Area tech companies with name recognition. At my last employer the interview rate was about 1%. Obviously some channels (like referral) had far better hit rates than others (like applications off the website).
My mother-in-law started out as a secretary, and is now the COO of a mid-sized company.

The CEO of Xerox had a similar career track, being an executive assistant and then somehow making the shift to management and then working her way up to CEO. It's something that is rare, but doable in the past, but this is something that could never happen in this day. I think people are more pigeonholed now that 30-40 years ago, unfortunately.
Smarkets has been OK. There's very little scope for arbitrage between Betfair and Smarkets markets, although I've had a couple of small scores doing that. Mostly, I can usually get a reasonable amount matched at the same price as Betfair, and only pay 2% commission on profits.

I don't trade that much or play in running. Smarkets is really crap for in running bets. It takes far to long for the bet to be placed. They also don't offer an SP option, if that's important to you.

I don't know about bots, because they don't have an official API, just an XML odds feed.

However, it would appear they used to have an API in the past. No idea if it still works.

https://smarkets.com/api/

http://smarkets.github.io/smk_api_docs/
Why sacrifice any ol' goat when what you need is [a] ram?
https://abc.xyz
Because the auto companies are far, far behind on software and, now in comparison to Tesla, hardware.

I was told by a GM employee in their tech center in Warren, they have COBOL running in VMs on modern servers whose terminal screens get scraped into excel spread sheets. This is one of many examples I could give you. I could literally spend hours telling you the horror stories. It's government levels of inefficiencies and leadership has little or no visibility into the system.

Everyone in Metro-Detroit knows of the problems in the auto industry. The leadership lacks vision and workers find their niche and retire hoping to do the same things with maybe a promotion to management. There is not a constant drive, at least in the software side of things, to constantly improve and learn like in there is in Silicon Valley.

The above is applicable to GM and Ford. Chrysler, on the other hand, is a whole other level of screwed. There's a reason they've been bailed out 2 times by the government and now bought/merged by a foreign car company, AGAIN.

Apple, Google, Tesla and Uber will crush all but a few existing automakers, around the globe, and leadership has just now come around to acknowledging the threat. The regular Metro-Detroiter has no idea.
I get why GitLab wrote this, but it seems like just a stab at GitHub.

There seems to be a lot of hating on GitHub here, but I personally love GitHub (and we use GitLab at my current employer).

I think GitLab is doing a great thing, and I appreciate that their community edition is free and open source, but GitHub has been able to provide an invaluable service. They have a great community that facilitates open source projects and a vastly better UI than GitLab (though that isn't saying much with how awful GitLab's UI is).

I'm eager to see how GitHub evolves in the future with GitLab as a competitor, as GitLab has a lot of nice features (built-in CI, etc).