skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Michael, Aaron,

My name's Aron and I'm building Wanderlust (www.wanderlust.ly): a travel website that shows where you could go based on how much you can spend and what you're interested in.

Wanderlust provides users with a complete trip, including a destination, flight, and accommodation, as well as an overview of the best things to do and see during their stay in that particular destination - after which users may customize the options we recommend and book or, if they’re not sure yet, simply save the itinerary and flip to the next trip that matches the criteria they've entered.

Our main issue:

Low conversion rates (visitor/booking). Particularly due to the fact that we're higher up in the funnel (vs. traditional OTAs) and don't have a lot of credibility in the early stages.

Although I realize this is quite a broad question, any insight on how we might improve would be super helpful!
Wish this was around last year when we launched our app - removing the tedium of build/deploy/versioning to diff groups. Think I'm more excited about containing the feedback into the workflow. Emails, screenshots and overlays worked but felt clunky. Bundling all of this together makes sense. Will give it a try with our next app (note: appreciate the pricing love for indie developers)
In the most literal sense, "being a unicorn" means nothing more than in the last funding round, they sold X% of the company for $Y, and (100/X)*Y >= 1,000,000,000

For example, if DizruptrCo Inc, sold a 15% equity stake for 200 million, they are a unicorn "valued" at $1.333 billion.

How they come up values for X and Y are part of the VC fundraising black magic. What's being reported here and a lot of other places recently, however, is that VC investors are actually willing to put an abnormally high value on Y in late rounds, because liquidation preferences mean they are very unlikely to lose money. Founders also love this, because it means they get to join the Unicorn Club, hopefully on their way to the Three Comma Club.

This is whats meant by unicorn valuations being "inflated". As always, the people who get screwed the hardest if things go south is the employees. People are starting to figure out, however, that a down round, or really anything short of a spectacular exit, for an inflated unicorn means their options and equity are probably going to end up worthless. This could lead to all the best talent running for the door as fast as they can, death spiral, etc.
Don't install updates.
Sounds like you have a great problem. One of the funny things about building products is that you often don't know who your users are going to be until you actually release. This is why we tell companies to launch as fast as possible, and not spend too much time thinking about what might happen before they have any information about how users interact with what they've built.

In your case, your company's goal is to help people get jobs (it seems). As long as you can do that, do it for every user that wants your help. You may have to adapt your messaging to fit the broader base, but that's a good (if hard) thing. If you find that widening your approach hurts your ability to get people jobs, then you'll probably have to change things up.
This sounds like a cool idea - when do you plan on launching your v1?
Feel free to ask your question :)
Could we please have a 'usually' in that sentence. I've had one or two where even though reproduction was easy fixing it was not a small step by any accounting method. In one case the fix required a total overhaul of the system. Several months turnaround on that one between the reproduction and the eventual fix.
Chess is also a great game to compare against, since these numbers have been computed for chess many years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number

10^43 is the approximate number of chess positions. In contrast, 19x19 Go has approximately 10^170 positions.
Clinkle Up in Smoke as Investors Want Their Money Back
Author here. If you've got any questions, I'd be happy to answer.

I'm a little sad that this got posted before I had a chance to write a good tutorial and upgrade the documentation. So, imagine that this project was just about to step into the shower when Hacker News came knocking on the front door. "A package? I like packages but.. damn it. I'm not presentable yet."

All the code in compiled binaries is in Myrddin, other than a few assembly stubs: There is no dependency on any installed library, although you can bind to C if you want -- for example, http://git.eigenstate.org/ori/cbind-example.git/tree/

But everything else is in Myrddin. For example, memory allocations:
https://github.com/oridb/mc/blob/master/lib/std/alloc.myr

Or regexes:
https://github.com/oridb/mc/tree/master/lib/regex

The various system calls are all here:
https://github.com/oridb/mc/tree/master/lib/sys

And so on.

If you want to play with it, there's a playground here: http://eigenstate.org/myrddin/playground

And there's even a neat little regex debugger it ships with that I find useful:

$ redump '[a-z]+'
abc123
Match failed:
abc123
~~~^
Spaceteam!
Yeah, you're right. Whoops.
We were thinking about two/three different things what the grain does:

1) My idea was that the grain exposes selected data to a search indexer.

2) Your idea was that the grain performs the search itself.

I see why 2) would not work very well in the current implementation. But 1) should work well and make it possible to only expose selected data. (Also with central/user specific search.)

Both ideas could by combined via per-grain-search-grains which only hold the local index and are accessed via a central search interface.

The problem, however, remains, that searchable data is exposed data. To me it seems useful that some applications can have fine-grained control about what to expose. (Think of List of Establishments where each has a List of Customers with Credit Card information. You might make one or two things searchable but not everything.)
"It is my understanding that that was simply not available to them in most of Europe."

I hate to break it to you, but Europe has a lot more grass than Afganistan or Middle East. Of all problems, the supply of grass was the least of them.
The main "problem" that kept them out of Europe was that they as people started to change. They stopped being the frugal people living savagely in tents all around steppe. Little by little they become city dwellers and started to embrace luxury and other "decadent" stuff continuously supplied through tributes, enjoying their life rather looking for new conquests. That's how I come to look at it anyway (the Golden Horde).
Hi - What's the metric that you're looking at for growth?
How are you driving traffic to the site and what are your conversion metrics? Have you done face to face user tests with at least 5 random people? Do people have to book right at that time or do you give them the ability to save/share a booking?
Best quote in the article: "“Don't look at [the chicken] directly [...] they get suspicious.”
No, the post says "or C-style code", which is presumably just C++ when you aren't using classes or templates or something like that.
http://www.nand2tetris.org/
In the USA there is a $10 smartphone sale practically every week of one brand or another.

This week: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/tracfone-alcatel-onetouch-pixi-g...

It's very low end for a smartphone but can run almost any android apk and use wifi even without airtime. Some $10 phones can be rooted and then you almost have a full linux-like system.

For $20 you can get quad-core with 1GB of ram:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Straight-Talk-LG-Prepaid-Destiny-L...
And if you like Gunpoint, don't forget Ronin, also indie and also made by a single dev (and with a general aesthetic similar to Gunpoint, but different gameplay).
Not mine either, but their sales pitches to the people above me are really good.
Never had the 50-min CoH2 game? I loved that game, but I don't think I can take the stress anymore, ha.
Marijuana might not be the culprit in adolescent IQ decline
The arguments are either sound or they're not. Why does it matter who wrote them and what motives he or his employer might have?
I'm not sure I understand what you're building. Is it a white label life insurance api to allow financial institutions to sell life insurance?
There's not that much to learn fortunately. The getting started guide should be enough:

http://deployer.org/docs
You could have shown it right here. On the other hand it's pointless to argue since Chuck made his point.
This would be awesome. Running unikernels on top of a formally verified layer sounds really interesting.
If folks are looking to learn more about WebGL, or even a solid intro to graphics programming, might I recommend my Raw WebGL talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4c8t6myAWU

https://nickdesaulniers.github.io/RawWebGL/#/
- Non-thread-safe GC is unsafe. The way to make it safe is to make it thread-safe. Thread-safe GC does not have negligible performance overhead. (Actually, non-thread-safe GC doesn't either, not by a long shot, but it won't show up in small benchmarks as easily.)

- Just being able to allocate on the stack is not enough. You need to be able to freely make pointers to those stack objects. The ways to do that are to either (a) accept the lack of safety and admit dangling pointers; (b) use an imprecise escape analysis; (c) lifetimes and borrowing. Every choice has costs.

- Safety with runtime checks is not equivalent to what Rust does. Rust provides the safety without runtime checks. That yields better performance than safety with checks.

I'm not intending to spread FUD about Nim specifically. The more interesting question is whether it's possible to have a safe language with the same performance as C/C++ without any cognitive overhead. I strongly believe, after working in this space for over five years, it is not.

That's not to say Nim is a bad language. There are lots of things I like about Nim. It's just that it won't escape the basic tradeoff between cognitive overhead and safety/performance.
That estimate would be equally precise and rough, in that the first 85 of 170 digits would all be correct.

Correcting the last 85 digits amounts to counting all positions with various symmetries, which would be as big an undertaking as computing L19, but a whole lot messier..
@YC Thanks for hosting this.. Great founder learning !
Team @anuncio_rocks
What have your experiments looked like? How were you measuring them, and at what rate was your revenue growing? What's your current core metric, and what's been happening to it over the last few years?
All of it is because investment in Q4 of last year was lower than any Q after 2012.

Which is a ridicules reason given that Q3 was by far the highest ever.

With that being said given the state of the public market (going down + low dividends) startups will still look sexy for a long time. I wouldn't worry about it.
Note that Go computers have exponentially gotten stronger through the monte-carlo method. The most advanced Go computers simply "test" various moves by playing billions of games to completion, and then uses that to test the "probability of winning" with a particular move.

In short: use Bayesian logic against the following question: "Calculate the probability of winning given that I've moved a stone at X location". Use monte-carlo to attempt to estimate hard numbers.

I'm not familiar with your terminology... my school of Go uses the term "Tesuji" (Japanese) to describe what you seem to call "Dingshi" (sounds like a Chinese name to me...). In any case, a computer with strong Tesuji (or maybe Dingshi in your terminology), combined with a monte-carlo method to look for "long-term strategic" moves is what has gotten Go Computers to where they are today.

Humans are superior at parallel processing. Go players activate the brain region of vision, and literally think by seeing the board state. A lot of Go study is seeing patterns and shapes... 4-point bend is life, or Ko in the corner, Crane Nest, Tiger Mouth, the Ladder... etc. etc.

Go has probably been so hard for computers to "solve" not because Go is "harder" than Chess (it is... but I don't think that's the primary reason), but instead because humans brains are innately wired to be better at Go than at Chess. The vision-area of the human's brain is very large, and "hacking" the vision center of the brain to make it think about Go is very effective.
That all depends on how you feel about ice sculptures. Maybe only a few people see it before it melts, but that doesn't matter. The skills gained in striving towards excellence are not ephemeral. Even if the product goes nowhere, no one can take away what was gained in the process.

And if the process is pure tedium and you learned nothing about yourself or the tools throughout it, you should try to create the tools that do inspire you to perform the tasks that don't. Manually creating a production build is boring and you rarely learn anything, but creating a good task runner can be incredibly satisfying.
I don't know [1], but!... When you reduce things down to a minimum amount of essential detail, things tend to look similar to other things that share the same constraints. I noticed this when researching Mondrian and the De Stijl (neoplasticism) art movement -- they restricted their palette to mostly primary colors. I could ask if Google's logo or the colors in a bucket of LEGO bricks were inspired by Mondrian directly, but another possibility is that the neoplasticists discovered some kind of minimal, universal design pattern that feels timeless and likely to be "rediscovered" again and again. Are Monument Valley, MagicaVoxel (and Minecraft) inspired by Escher, or is it a natural coincidence that comes out of the minimal use of geometry and perspective they all employ?

[1] Edit: I did some more digging... Looks like they used Unity to create Monument Valley: https://unity3d.com/showcase/case-stories/monument-valley
Beta launch of fashion tech startup looking for beta users and feedback
Try it out; select an article from here ...

http://datagenetics.com/blog.html

Shameless plug :)
While they may not be in the job for the money, there is still a split between those who are in the job for the recognition and those who are in the job for the learning experience. Most of my work is hidden to everyone except those on my immediate team of 2-3, but I learn an incredible amount.
They still have change control, they just have thousands of people committing to it and as long as it works it ships. Still lots of individual CCRs. Change control doesn't mean you get a decent end product, just that you have a log of who did what.
also, if you have a grid with a 16x16 with a point in the middle it would need to travel ~4*1.4 to reach the furthest point on the grid. in order to 1/2 the time it takes you need split into 4 quadrants and add 3 more cars. if you want to half the time again your looking at 17 cars. so to go from 10 minutes down to 5 minutes down to 2.5 minutes it takes ~4 times as many drivers each half. rough calculation. if anyone would like to add a better approximation I love to hear it.
For people interested, Stanford has an excellent online course on deep-learning with an emphasis on convolutional networks. [1]

It comes with video, notes, all the math, cool ipython notebooks and will let you implement a deepish network from scratch. That includes doing backprop through the svn, softmax, max-pool, conv and ReLU layers.

After that you should be more than capable to build a 'real' net using your favourite lib (Tensorflow, theano etc).

[1]: http://cs231n.stanford.edu/
@YC Thanks for hosting this. Great learning for founders and startup teams. Team @anuncio_rocks
Stolen Uber, PayPal Accounts More Coveted Than Credit Cards on the Dark Web
Functional Programming.

The language does't matter but learning the concepts challenges you to think in different terms.
Sounds cool, Pim - how can we help?
> Scheduling one process over another would be no more expensive than jumping from one green (userspace) thread to another on regular OSes, which would be a huge change compared to current OSes, but isn't quite a unikernel, at least under the provided definition.

Sounds more or less like any embedded kernel that runs on an MMU-less cpu. Do unikernels handle interrupts? If so that means they can have preemptive threads, rather than green.
> It's mostly done sarcastically, though when you do it all the time, is it really sarcastic?

Anecdotally, it seems that this is how a lot of new phrasing is spread. It starts off funny, then ironically as an inside joke, then it's just wrote.

My little sister started tapping her index and middle fingers together to make a hash symbol while saying "hashtag [whatever]". Started out as a joke, making a bit of fun of some tv show or something and at the same time pointing out that she "got" the reference... and before she knew it it was second nature.
> Wouldn't that be a lot more efficient if investors just referred unknown companies to a buddy who knows the domain area?

That definitely happens. Most angels or VCs have a domain they are interested in and outside of that they will simply not participate or refer. Happened to me less than a week ago so definitely this occurs and fairly frequently.

> I don't see it happening.

It depends on how close to the fire you're sitting and who you are talking to I guess. In my 'backyard' it happens, frequently and the number of times that a deal is not even looked at is high enough that I never even thought this might somehow be special.

Another thing that will happen is that the party that did the referral will still take part in the round but at a much lower level.

This is a very fluid world you're trying to capture, local customers, connections and cliques will make up a lot of the background for such deals and you'd have to take all of those into account when you try to factor something like this into your worldview.

Personally I'd rather not see angels lose their shirt in areas that are not their domain,better if that money gets spent a bit wiser and on things that they understand.
Maybe it's because I've been working with computers for so many years, but as I was reading this paper I was thinking of all the exceptions to the points that it was making.

I've seen too much time spent optimizing a product that was destined to never find a market, and too little time spent optimizing a product whose poor performance doomed its market entry. And, having spent literally months dedicated to optimizing code, I've also seen that some code could have been easily optimized "up front", while other code would have been impossible to optimize before it was applied to real-world use cases.

Maybe, for me, the real answer is experience. It takes experience to recognize that the market you are in, and the particular problem you are solving, and the approaches you are taking to solve the problem cannot be underestimated - they must be understood as much as possible because they ultimately determine the definition of "premature optimization".
Schema.org RDFa isn't hidden. JSON-LD in a script tag is but that's equivalently goofy.

"stems from another way of thinking about metadata"? Nope. It was a clumsy hack because they actually just wanted to put the <rdf:RDF> tags in the HTML but people would complain about HTML validation so they put it in a comment tag.
Fantastic write up. I know this feeling all too well.

A bit related is when you work in big companies like Apple and Tesla. These guys have a "hero" at the top. There is nothing you can do but wait for that headline that talks about a feature you made and it was Elon Musk's doing or Job's amazing leadership. I have nothing against these two but it is very demotivating to work.
How to deal with imperfect machine learning algorithms
> There's only a few articles in my collection on asynchronous systems (outside I/O) because they're so hard to verify.

GRR isn't hard just time consuming. Yes its not fully verified

>I also figured you were forced to use aging crap that motivated you to try alternatives.

I'm actually a polygot programmer trying to pay the bills. Working in aging tester frameworks pays a lot more then web development. I like Rust b/c its basically C-With-A-Type-System. Its still very easy to reason about how the Cee-LangVM will handle your code.

But yes. Working in a code base from the 80's and switching to Rust is lovely.

:.:.:

The core purpose is exception logging. A lot of the exceptions will get mutated/modified before being reported. "Servo drive failed." is a lot less useful then "Servo communication fault 0x274077343" which I've memorized to tell me that a power surged knocked a comport off line.
# of clients... and everything that would go into increasing that number, fundraising, head count, marketing.
Hi Bill - How many people are using supertask right now?
Thanks Aaron, yes our goal is to 1) help people get jobs and 2) help companies to increase diversity of their workforce.

Another issue is how to retain users. Once a user finds a new job, and is not looking for a new one for a while, how do we keep them coming back to the website? I guess with great career content? Do you have any other ideas on how to keep users coming back?
There are two main points in this debate. Number one, we cannot abide having encryption weakened with back doors. Modern society relies on strong encryption. Number two, no amount of "magical technology" is ever going to replace human intelligence. The front lines in the war on terror is made up of human infiltrators and turncoats, not ones and zeroes.
Norwegian school puts e-sports on the curriculum
The point is that to them that wasn't a piece of shit source. It's the ad tag that your browser downloaded that made it so and the content provider might not even be aware of this.
Hi Aeron & Michael,
we are building pastrynow.com: an easy kit that helps people to instantly start baking Michelin-worthy french pastries.
No special utensil, no additional ingredient and no previous experience in cooking required.

After many iterations we recently built a kit our users really love. We just started to have users talking to their friends about our latest kit!
https://squareup.com/market/pastrynow/tarte-aux-framboises.

Questions:
1) Would you like to try?
2) Our user base is quite small: how do we know if it is a communication or value proposition problem?

M.
Yes; exactly. Silo-ing in large companies where software acquisition, software deployment, and software use are separate functions in the organization is probably the defining influence on 'enterprise software'. This is why so much of it is so bad (sometimes in trivial, easy to change ways), why it's typically so expensive, and why it sometimes so narrowly satisfies stated requirements that it creates whole new problems for the organization.

Silo-ing as an organizational principle almost always goes wrong and what you end up with is a stovepipe organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stovepipe_(organisation)
Fair point -- that's a better reading. Too late to edit or delete :(.
Transpiling on the fly on the server is even more painless than for the frontend:

- Require babel-core/register (as of Babel 6)
- Require your server entry point ES6 file.
- Done.

Everything just seems to work, no need for sourcemaps or anything; line numbers, error reporting, non-ES6 modules, everything Just Works. Haven't had a single issue since starting to do this 4 months ago (knock on wood). Highly recommended!
I doubt very much that your scenario matches the general public. My guess is your scenario is maybe 5% tops (based on no reproducible data!) :)