skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way we've figured out so far is really learning from a failed past experience. We built a product in the past which was a kind of Yodlee or Plaid competitor (http://spout.co) and learned alot of what consumers cared about along the way while never hitting an actual nerve with clients who were willing to pay us money.

I think we started like most people would here, by partnering with existing banks. So we have a signed pilot with one major bank and are working on a partnership with another one. But knowing how slow they move we started looking at other avenues that could make a more immediate impact.

The pilots are around lost or stolen cards and being able to have your autopayments as proxy cards so when the number of the card on your Target or Home Depot account gets stolen the number of the card in your wallet doesn't have to change and vice versa.

What we're working on now is a way for people to identify bills in their email that we can then process and remind them when they're due and how much money they may have left in their accounts when paying them. This allows us a couple of opportunities.

1. To get consumer eyeballs on something and to see if people would like to pay bills via a simple Venmo-like product.

2. Building a base of potential users for an actual bank launch.

In that vein some of the underlying tech behind an actual bank itself becomes the most interesting part of the problem once a transaction is approved.

But until we get behind the kimono we really don't think theres a way to know how much we'll have to build or improve with the underlying tech and systems but we suspect what is built can be leveraged in several ways.

What we do expect is a complete questioning and re-thinking of how every single thing is done from how customers deposit money to how we issue new accounts and how underwriting is done on loans of all types.
Security Advisory: Stored XSS in Magento
I'm trying to remember/piece together what happened.

I believe I added a dependency that wouldn't compile with the snapshot I was running (10JUL2015?). So then I updated to a new snapshot (14AUG2015?), and a previous dependency would no longer compile (since it hadn't been updated). I think this could have been due to libc changes, which I guess were marked unstable (and this was the result of them being removed from the main rustc distribution?). I did some manual tweaking, and/or the problem fixed itself in a few days.

I next came back to rust a few months later, where after that experience, I went ahead and updated to the 1.4 release. I figured libraries should generally aim to keep working with numbered releases, regardless of the upgrade treadmill. I guess (in your framework) that's applying unstable expectations to numbered releases, which is what I've been doing this whole thread - I don't care that code will break at future point, but I do desire consistency in the meantime!

I was next surprised to find out that the syntax extensions for eg serde were used completely differently with the numbered releases because procedural macros were disabled (I hadn't yet touched my own projects that use procedural macros or libcore).

The snapshot story is probably better these days, given that libraries should be more stable. It has always been annoying feeling like my rust is continually "out of date" and dependencies could break and require me to update, involuntarily breaking my code. This has been a problem all along, and I had hoped it was over with numbered releases. Alas.

From my perspective the main source of pain is that rust eschews having traditional numbered unstable releases. Instead creating a harsh dichotomy between uber-stable releases and uber-changing snapshots. One can alleviate some of that pain only if they're willing to take the web 2.0 give-up-control-of-your-computing plunge and run eg rustup.sh, which of course helps the fundamental problem to persist. Granted, the problem will be moot as rust libraries become more stable and the stable distribution becomes more featureful. We're apparently just not there yet for my purposes.
Thanks again Aaron. Here are my last questions. :)

1) What are your biggest worries about companies focused on hiring? What type of problems do you foresee for us in the future?

2) What was your initial reaction when visiting our website? Was there something that annoyed or puzzled you?
Over the past six months we've been writing an Android framework with two uses. One use is to spin apps off of the framework. The other use for the framework would be for the ultimate goal of publishing a spreadsheet app for Android from it.

We just published our first app based off the framework yesterday (linked in parent post). The framework work we have done so far was put into yesterday's app (a browsable, searchable spreadsheet-like front end to the Android device's call log, text messages, calendar etc.)

Our next step will be to implement in the framework the feature to save and share a document. The spreadsheet ultimately can use that, but it can also be used in the nearer term for spinning off an app to save an Android phone's text message history.

We also plan to have an app using this framework which can handle Microsoft Access databases. The features needed to do that will help in the ultimate goal of a spreadsheet.

The main prioritization conflict for us is how much work to do on these cast-off apps, versus how much to do on our ultimate long-term goal of a spreadsheet. Especially work which can't be rolled back into the longer term goal.

So the question is if the game plan of writing a framework with an ultimate goal of a spreadsheet, casting off apps from the framework on the way to that ultimate goal - does that sound like a decent game plan?
As paraphrased in the article, Davies's claims appear either misleading or lacking substantive content. (When he says "activating ancient genes" does this just mean "activating genes that are inactive in some cell types but have been strongly preserved because they are used in other cell types"? If so, how is this different than the mainstream understanding of cancer?) However, the best criticism I've been able to find keeps getting bogged down in disputes over terminology, e.g., http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-physici... .
San Francisco Companies with the Highest Number of Open Job Positions
Well done! — I so tweeted this! This will enrich so many people's lives.
I understand it, I just disagree with the presentation. If you're sweeping complexity under the rug, say so and provide a link to further reading. I don't think cross-entropy is that common that someone in the target audience for this course would quickly and easily see the nuance.
I think you should totally do a ShowHN and product hunt. The first test is to just get it in front of people and see what they do with it and what kind of feedback they have. This won't happen magically or automatically. Good luck!
Thanks for your reply!

The largest cheating scandal (that happened about a year ago), had $250k up for grabs[1]. With that said, the exact number is difficult to quantify, as if the cheater is successful, then no one is the wiser.

[1] http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/25/csgo-esports-communit...
I think features-over-quality is a common priorization.

From managerial point of view it's hard to discern sane quality improvements from just changing the code because of aesthetics if there is no clear business driver.
agreed. thats' the goal with #2 the shopping assistant. web crawlers are currently all GET, it's about time we start POSTing data
I've been spending a lot of time in a neonatal intensive care unit [0] lately. It's driving me nuts watching them use Outlook to coordinate patient care. I suppose it works, but seems like Outlook should be a low bar to overcome.

I accidentally saw a sign that they have a medical simulation lab here at the hospital and for the first time in 5 years I'm seriously considering giving up my own business to go get a day job.

[0] Don't worry too much. He was just a little early. Otherwise very healthy.
We started out wanting to do a similar model as Eaze/Meadow - but we found we weren't adding enough value to existing dispensaries/delivery services to warrant a decent fee/percentage (since they already had customer bases and we were starting from 0 with no outside funding like the other companies).

Then after running everything in-house for a while, I realized that it was actually a much better model to handle everything in-house because then we have complete control over product quality, customer experience, drivers, as well as being more profitable (we we profitable within our first two months). We've tried a few partnerships with outside delivery services and it never worked out because they were never able to replicate the very high standards of service that we require (coming from a background in hospitality management myself). I know there are all these companies purporting to be the "Uber for weed", but that's not really that accurate. If Uber were doing the same thing as these other startups in transportation, then the proper parallel would be Uber partnering with existing Taxi companies rather than independent drivers. Uber cuts out an established middle-man, but the other on-demand marijuana startups are partnering with established middle-men rather than cutting them out of the value chain.

However, I think the single biggest reason to go in-house is that services like Eaze/Meadow can never compete with us on price. I consider our prices to be somewhat high right now, since our cash flow is still so fragile, yet we are still undercutting Eaze by around 20% on most products even as they have over $11 million in funding.
I'd like to know how such a change would be implemented, would taxes go up so the government can pay back to the very same people? Savings must be made for it to have an impact.
So far the FB CPC hovers around $0.70. We need >200 users per flight booking. A hotel booking has not been made through our platform yet. Not much data has been collected though, seeing as we've only been live for 2 weeks.

It might be important to note that, at this point, we're not so much interested in how much we make from the actual booking as much as we're interested in the conversion rate itself. We use the Expedia & SkyScanner APIs, which was more practical from a technical perspective to get to MVP as soon as possible. But the affiliate fees for flights are close to nothing ($2 if we're lucky) and we have different solutions in mind.

We only ask for the user to sign-up once she clicks the 'save itinerary' button, which we believed would be the most seamless. The most confusing part of the product so far has been the fact that we currently have two 'book now' buttons once the user tries to book her flight, something we're addressing.
Copenhagen requires a leap of faith to accept wavefunction collapse.
Well, I did get to keep a nice office chair from the office cleanout that I still use ;-)
We've had around 2.8k signups so far (launched in October). We have about 200 users active per day. I just checked and 89 of them have been active in all previous 5 days. We have a few outspoken believers in the concept (< 10). We just solicited feedback from our base and got only 20 responses, so probably could do better there.
Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8729762

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077187
What are the alternatives, in the *nix world? The BSDs are in much the same place as Linux on most of those specifics, or further behind, or heavily using the tech from the Solaris side.

HP-UX? AIX? What do you think is doing better than Solaris or Illumos on those things?
Reading...reading...

Oh my god they're `eval`ing url components
You should, it looks delicious https://www.google.com/search?q=Chinese+yellow+soup&tbm=isch...
Yes please. Detailed technical comments are the salt of HN (IMO).
Hi Aaron & Michael, There is a 20-year-backlog of life-saving therapies that are left sitting in university laboratories untested and 30 million Americans suffering from untreatable rare diseases who have no idea these potential cures exist.

My best friend and I are developing a medical research discovery platform. We allow people passionate about a condition to discover, promote, and eventually fund cutting-edge research.

We've been working to seed the platform & overcome the regulatory barriers that have previously prevented success in this space. How can we balance the slow bureaucratic requirements of university administrators to correctly implement our solution with the early rapid growth needed for our startup?
We've built a bug reporting tool that captures a screencast along with the network traffic, which leverages WebRTC and a browser extension, capturing bugs in real time. ( http://www.bugreplay.com ).

1) We have a good number of qualified leads that are interested in beta testing our product. Does it make more sense roll out our beta in small batches at a time, to get more feedback from a smaller number of vocal qualified leads, or to cast a wider net during the beta process?
What were some of the best beta rollouts you've seen and why did they go as well as they did?

2) What's some of the most interesting uses of WebRTC you guys are seeing now, and are there any pitfalls you folks have seen with the technology that you would advise us to look out for?
Survival of the Unfittest (2006)
A web app to manage human relationships. Reminders to ping people over varying periods of time, emphasizing note-taking to help stir up conversation topics.

I see myself using this in my personal life, with former business colleagues, as well as when job interviewing.
Your point one sounds like a fallacy fallacy, i.e., just because some conditions of a fallacy are present, does not mean it applies.

The article does not state that every aspect of the hunter gather microbiome is superior to the modern day ancestor, rather just acknowledges the complex and long process of evolving mutually beneficial microbiota which is being disrupted by modern technology. That statement is not as controversial as you imply.

Perhaps when you aren't so busy reading Hacker News, you might be "bothered" to give a more complete reposte.
One experiment involves offering a subscription service to online premium study notes. We measure number of subscribers, downloads, and revenue. Students who subscribe typically keep and use the subscription until they finish school: the biggest problem is the very low conversion rate in the first place. We know that students want study notes, because they download free notes from our site all the time, but very few are willing/able to pay. This is a recurring theme for us: we get enormous interest when offering something for free (whether notes or seminars), and get complaints as soon as a price tag is attached.

We reached the point a couple of years ago where we realised we had largely captured the maximum potential user base in our home state, which left two obvious strategies: growing revenue (in that state) and/or growing the user base (in other states). From that point our core metric has been revenue, with a view to further growth once we had nailed the model. Our primary revenue source has been advertising (from universities and colleges and others), as that seemed to give the greatest return for the fewest complaints. It grew very quickly from zero, but has stagnated in recent years as advertisers developed a preference for programmatic platforms. That shift has prompted the present search for a new business model. Meanwhile, the community itself continues to thrive.
Not only did they pioneer web news content, before that nando.net was even an ISP - in fact, it was my first ISP.

It seems odd looking back now, seeing how "newspapers" have all become lumbering dinosaurs, but at the time this particular newspaper was on the bleeding edge of innovation.
1) You need to be more clear about what the product does - Ticketing cloud service / CRM are jargon - how would you describe it to your mother and father?

2) When sizing the market you need to either go top down or bottom up? How much money is spent by governments on this type of software per year right now or if every target government in america was using your product how much revenue would you generate?

3) 50%-100% MoM is great - whats your Mrr and are their any particularly notable towns who are customers?

4) Your unique insight is really in how to sell software to a government without long lead times / large sales teams - can you be a bit more specific about your technique here

5) Great - how many potential users are there per typical customer

6) Cool

7) $1m ARR isnt actually that high of a bar anymore when it comes to raising series A - much easier if you hit $2-$4m ARR - also that should get you to break even which makes raising an A easier

PS: Did you guys apply to YC?
WebVan isn't the right analogy - a real estate bubble is a better one.

In the .com bubble, no one was really sure how things would shake out, so there were lots of companies who wouldn't have succeeded no matter how big they got (the "losing money on every sale but making it up in volume" business plan). When the .com bubble crashed, real estate was seen as a much stronger investment because no matter how low it went, it was real "stuff" that had a sort of intrinsic value - it may go down, but it wouldn't go to 0. A similar thing happened in Tokyo real estate circa early 90s. A Tokyo apartment still has a lot of value - you'd probably think it very expensive - but it's still 80% cheaper than it was at its peak.

The problem with lots of companies now isn't that they won't ever be profitable, or that they don't have realistic business plans, it's just that their valuation is way more than their earning stream will ever support. They are valued at "we'll eventually take over the market" prices, even though they'll only ever reach niche market status.
> - Logo design 6 hrs. I created 18 different prototypes
> - Frontend design - 3 days

This is why people can do things in 48 hours. They just pick stock designs and go with them.
How Buffer Cheats on Open Salaries
Good point. The advantage that I am looking to get from unikernels, one that no one seems to mention, is that the whole area of functionality that's above hypervisor but below posix/win32 is suddenly open to play with for application developers.
You're missing the point of standardization - it's not a legislative process that requires implementation, it's a documentation process to show what has already been implemented and how you can interoperate with it.
Webmention already has multiple libraries and services implementing it.
I know great, not just good but GREAT developers who don't even have a GitHub. Yes, it's awesome when someone has one, but if someone doesn't have something on their blog or GitHub does that mean they don't know said subject? Nope. I'm questioning the methods used here.
I guess they also might had some math tricks that made it easy, tricks that you may now count as another "art" lost. But then would you try to rediscover some art about how some people dealt with something imperfect (because they had to) or you would rather look for something better that doesn't require clever tricks in the first place? Now I come to think that (at least) some loses present opportunity value in themselves!
Lots of other good info has already been posted so the one thing I'll mention is that eventually people get sick of the "mad scientist" (I know as it has happened to me).

It's great to try new things and live on the bleeding edge but at some point the people you work with are going to get tired of switching to the new hot thing. You can only re-do your architecture so many times before people start tuning you out or start to say "no", then what happens?

You'll go back to doing the same thing you were doing such as adding new features (using the already existing tech), fixing bugs, scaling out, etc. That or you'll find a new place to work which, depending on how long you lasted, means you might lose that equity you were given.

Honestly, if you want to play mad scientist and build cool shit you should be a contractor and build solutions for companies that come to you with problems. You get to build it, hand it over and then move on to the next new thing.
1) Initially, we sold "pastries for catering" to very small size start ups in our area. With the money we generated from the sales, we built the first prototypes that we used to deliver the pastries we promised.

And when we delivered to these small companies, we explained to the employees (who really liked the pastries they had) how they can do it at home.
We closed our first (3) sales like that.

2) Then, we spent a lot of time wandering around Costco and Safeway's "baking" department with baked samples to pitch everyone we see passing by (when they eat the samples, we tell them they can do exactly the same at home).
It wasn't effective because we haven't closed anyone though everyone said "it's a great idea, I'll definitely try".

3) Same for the neighbors: we literally went to all our neighbors with the same strategy. But still no sales (though they eaten all the samples). We also put some flyers in the mailboxes of people who weren't at home and somebody sent us an email to tell us it is forbidden and he'd sue us... and even even signed "welcome to america"

4) Then we started hustling our colleagues, friends, family. We sent direct emails, called them or even visited them.
This way, we closed almost all our sales (15).

5) We also started reaching out bloggers. Now, we are super-limited because we can't deliver out of the bay area (I'm literally driving myself and delivering each kit by hand). So we pitched the top 66 bloggers in the Bay Area who are talking about baking. 16 replied, 10 of them showed some interests, we delivered to 5 bloggers and one of them published an article (we never asked for it): dessertfirstgirl.com/2016/01/pastrynow-raspberry-tart.html
This didn't drive any sales yet.

Finally, we have also given about 20 kits "for free". We typically don't like to do that. And none of the "free user" have ever ordered.
We spend a lot of time with every user to discuss and the number one "issue" they find is: "it's too expensive".

And that's a huge problem because literally none of them complains about the kit. They all say "it's incredible, I don't bake at all and the outcome is exactly like the picture" BUT, still, the price seems to be a blocker.

That's why we can't decide if our unique value proposition is too low or if we haven't successfully communicated our value to our users.

M.
I don't think the posting had anything to do with Joyent's strategy in the market, but everything to do with him being goaded on Twitter into writing the article: https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/690215406317875200
> But some events, even with stateless services, need in-production, live, interactive debugging in order to be understood.

The question then becomes if it is reproducible since "debuggable when not running normally" seems to be the common thread of unikernels, such as being able to host the runtime in Linux directly rather than on a VM.

I think it if you try a low level language these kinds of things are going to bite you, but a fleshed out unikernel implementation could be interesting for high level languages, since they typically don't require the low level debugging steps in the actual production environment.

In either case unikernels have a lot of ground to cover before they can be considered for production.
Starting a new reply thread because we nested too far.

I think my biggest fear is the exact thing we just talked about: frequency. Creating long term customer engagement is super hard. I think it's also hard for recruiting cos to build distinct and valuable brands as opposed to becoming commoditized resume lead gen.

One question I had on hitting the site was "what is the main purpose here?" It has the feel of a content site, but your goal is to get people hired.