skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We just do all that compilation prior to check-in for release branch. Basically, version control holds the compiled 'snapshot' of a working app, and host specific variances in the code is forbidden. (composer is for project bootstrapping rather than a 'build step')
-btw, we do this with subversion since git doesn't handle large repos well +empty directories.
Welcome to Surfacegate
Hi YC partners,

Founder of https://credhot.com here. We're a link shortener that uses interstitial advertising to make money. We rev-share with people who share content using our shortener, so they get paid based on their traffic.

People know about us in the Bitcoin community because we pay our users in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has benefits when it comes to microtransactions, so it's not just a marketing strategy. We think that sharing content via our service can help bring Bitcoin to the masses. ChangeTip is already doing this via the tipping model; we want to drive adoption with advertising.

First talking point: From your perspective, does paying users in Bitcoin help or hurt the viability of the idea?
> Threads won't be able to share FBO's or VBO's, but we're working on SharredArrayBuffer, which will allow multiple threads to share data (more like C style arrays than JS style lists, they still would have to be glBufferData'd to VRAM from RAM).

It would be amazing to have fast GPU-GPU transfer. Is it the case in Firefox that using texImage2D/texSubImage2D on a main thread context with a worker <canvas> will result in a guaranteed GPU-GPU transfer? Or does that download the pixels to the CPU and re-upload them?

> Isn't that the case for all applications?

Yes, but I haven't been following GPU tech recently so I wasn't sure if that still applies universally. Maybe some day we'll get preemptive multitasking on GPUs :)
Hi Michael and Aaron,

I built Game:ref (www.gameref.io) last year. It's a hardware anti-cheat device meant to be used in local and online eSports competitions to make sure that sponsors aren't being swindled out of huge prize pots. Cheating is a multi-million dollar problem[2] and I thought I would do something to fix it.

Even though I was featured in PC Gamer, Polygon, Vice Magazine, Tom's Hardware, and a few others, I failed to get any traction. Since, I've gotten a comfortable and well-paying "real" job, but I still work on the project in my free time. I heard that funding hardware is notoriously difficult. Is this true? If so, is it worth it? What would be the best way to move forward, if any?

Thanks!

PS: If you're interested in the technical details of how it works, you can check out this[2] blog post.

[1] http://www.pcgamer.com/hacks-an-investigation-into-aimbot-de...

[2] http://dvt.name/2015/finishing-what-intel-started-building-t...
The fundraising process of often about creating leverage over investors. Companies need to think about raising VC rounds (and large angel rounds) as a reward for creating a growing product in a multi-billion dollar market. Also many companies screw up fundraising by running the process in serial vs in parallel.

Here is a mini guide for a 2 minute pitch - why don't you fill it out so I can see where you are (each answer should be 1-2 sentences at most): 1) what does your company do? 2) How big is the market? 3) Describe your month over month grow? 4) What do you understand about this market that others do not? 5) How do you make money? 6) Why is your team the best team to tackle this problem 7) How much are you raising?
An interesting bit of Internet-culture history is that the original "guide" was a long post to kuro5hin:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/30/91945/8971
Chinese sentence structure is in many cases identical or very similar to English, and follows the same general word order, Subject-Verb-Object.
As I remarked elsewhere, what was more interesting to me was that the 2x2 board has hundreds of billions of games (assuming a superko, I suppose).

It's easy to recognize that there must be a lot of them, but hundreds of billions is absurdly fast growing. As another data point, the 2x1 board has 8 games.
This sounds similar to dating sites. A happy user is one who doesn't need you anymore!

The thing is, dating sites solve a known problem that a lot of people have, but by no means does it end there. Relationships are hard and take work, where are the apps that help build strong 1-1 connections?

Same thing for you. Increasing workplace diversity is awesome, but hiring is only a tiny part of that. I'm sure that many of your users face similar challenges being a minority in their work environment. How can you bring them together to solve those problems once they have their job?
Just thought I'd point out that the example given doesn't tell us anything about liquidation preferences (though of course you can assume they would be involved, since we're talking VCs here, but they don't matter).

The relevant financing term here is anti-dilution. Here's Feld: http://www.feld.com/archives/2005/03/term-sheet-anti-dilutio....
The interesting thing about that study is that the protective effects only work if you're exposed before you're one year old. This makes it a bit late for most of us on HN.
hmm - yes that is much much harder - why do you want to handle the product in house?
It's $15 a month (3.75/wk). I don't know why you believe the cost is $37, but that is not accurate.
Any B2B startup where most of the clients are also startups are going to be hit the most.
Hi - funding for hardware is certainly difficult, but there are quite a few investors who do it, and it is easier than it was even six months ago.

If I were you, I probably wouldn't determine whether or not I wanted to focus on the company based on the perceived ease/difficulty of raising money, but on whether or not I thought I were solving a big problem with big potential. I don't know enough about the market you are describing. If you 100% fixed it, how much money would you save esports sponsors?
I hope this does not happen to him, but wait until he releases a game (that might even be a really good one) and gets nowhere because 1,000 other people released a game that week. It's a tough industry now! You probably appreciate the indie side of it when you're in AAA, but I can tell you from experience you appreciate the AAA side of it when you're in an indie!
I need to go through my youtube watch later list and download them all for my commute.

Great tool.
Bitcoin has died 93 times already[1]. Maybe this time is different?

[1] https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/
It probably didn't sound like anything because it's most likely a misattribution (see the more detailed answers here: https://www.quora.com/Who-said-Quantity-has-a-quality-all-it...). Not saying that Quora or Wikipedia are authoritative sources, but many of this sort of alleged quotes by Stalin are usually either what someone thought Stalin might have said, or coined by Western authors writing about Stalin and later misattributed to him.

Most references I've found point to an American saying this quote (or similar) in the 70s.
Larry Page Is Still Innovator in Chief
It may be cheaper than the print version! The daily subscription to the paper is close to $900 a year if you calculate the cost after the promotional period ends; however, weekday-only and Sunday-only home delivery subscriptions are ~less~ than the cost of Unlimited Digital access alone, and include Unlimited Digital access as part of the deal. Funky economics.
After 30 Days, the FAA Has Now Registered Almost 300K Drone Owners
I'm not attacking him/her and I hope it wasn't interpreted that way but that is a ridiculous statement by any POC in the United States to make.
See dcole2929's response regarding the incredulity of that statement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949198
It allows any website with traffic (ideal targets are banks and financial institutions) to sell life insurance on their website using our JavaScript web app. A BOFA user cannot currently buy life insurance on Bofa.com, but can by going into the bank. A bank could offer life insurance online via our white labeled modal and take their users from getting a quote to e signing the policy. We handle the entire process with the user on the BOFA website.
Building a product search engine (https://percht.com)
Percht has a few goals:

1) give you the lowest price for any product online
2) develop an assistant that’ll buy you whatever at x price automatically
3) build an unbiased gameified community around shopping

What do you think are the biggest issues with the approach many other shopping search engines have taken that have prevented them from beating entrenched monopolies like amzn and goog which dont have complete results or 100% consumer alignment.
Netflix Makes Good on Promises to Crack Down on VPNs, but Blocks Are Short-Lived
Not really, some members of the public don't understand it.

Inflammation is a symptom, and chronic inflammation leaves you vulnerable to other problems. It's also pretty easy to measure.

As an example, when I was struggling with back problems, at one point my sed rate was over 90mm/hr (ie. really bad). It was 3 about 3-4 years prior, and 25 about 6 months prior to my spinal fusion. (I was 25 at the time) Drawing the conclusion "inflammation caused back problems" is wrong. Using the inflammation measurement to say "things are getting worse" as part of an overall assessment of my condition is a sensible conclusion.
I went to your site and I am watching this stream: https://beam.pro/Noplix - how do I participate in the game play?
It's $3.75 a week for Web and smartphone access only. For Web and tablets it's $5 a week, and for both it's $8.75/wk.
I think you forget to read:
================================
Prerequisites and Requirements

This is an intermediate to advanced level course. Prior to taking this course, and in addition to the prerequisites and requirements outlined for the Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree program, you should possess the following experience and skills:

Minimum 2 years of programming experience (preferably in Python)
Git and GitHub experience (assignment code is in a GitHub repo)
Basic machine learning knowledge (especially supervised learning)
Basic statistics knowledge (mean, variance, standard deviation, etc.)
Linear algebra (vectors, matrices, etc.)
Calculus (differentiation, integration, partial derivatives, etc.)
See the Technology Requirements for using Udacity.
I think it's hard to say without knowing more. On the one hand, paying in btc probably restricts the number of people willing to use your product by virtue of there being not that many people who have btc accounts. On the other hand, it might make you more popular with a small group of people.

Most great products start with a core of really happy users, and then expand over time. Do you have users that love you and use your product every day? Many times a day?
Red Hat OpenShift Review – Free and Open Source Linux Hosting
Photos and videos taken with the camera, music and audiobooks for offline listening (in the countryside, commuting), sat nav apps, 3D games, a few movies or TV shows to entertain the kids in a tight spot, ... (I am currently at 42GB).
Just one: me. I've been in stealth mode and I basically "finished" building the website within the last week and have done no advertising (in fact this is the first time I've talked about it online). That leads to the obvious question of how to acquire more customers for a Saas product (which ties to my accelerator question). I'm hoping to gain some insight on the product's broad viability from this post and maybe a ShowHN. People who I talk to in person love the idea and are enthusiastic but none are really in a position to buy it. Thanks for the reply!
Here's their site: http://nullisland.com/
Yep. Which also means that whatever advantages they bring, we can probably get in a traditional system call API if designed the right way.

There was a highly interesting research project along these lines: https://arrakis.cs.washington.edu/

The Arrakis paper also show how much overhead the traditional UNIX architecture is (contrary to the authors assertions) for many popular workloads. It is now merged back into the project it was forked from (Barrelfish) which in itself is a very interesting research project. Well worth studying for those that don't believe UNIX is the last word in OS design.
Please check before reposting this again.
Couldn't agree more. Even worse are GitHub READMEs that usually go on and on about how to download, compile, install and run the compiler (how about making it so simple you could do it in 2 lines?!) and how to contribute code, without actually explaining what makes the language different.
120 Uses for Your Empty Data Center
IBM's Rational toolset of a decade or a bit more ago, still makes me shudder.
I knew Davos was dying when some model girls I know who are big in the "party circuit" of Ibiza/Tony Robbins seminars/Superbowl/Burning Man started adding Davos as a stop on their party tour circuit.

It seemed like major players stopped going and the people who go now are just scenesters who want to feel important, see and been seen.
Agreed. I think JS is quite a broken language that should probably be replaced. It won't be, but it probably should. I know Google thinks Dart could be that language but they're not even trying to put the VM into Chrome, so it's just another replacement that needs to be compiled.

I was complaining about some JS stuff (particularly the required writing of "use strict") in the #nodejs freenode irc chat the other day and someone asked me a way to help solve these issues without breaking 50 year old code. Thinking about it, I think a good attempt would be to create an HTML meta tag that would tell the browser to parse all JS in strict mode. Maybe there's something already out there. This is already possible in nodejs, but browser side I think it could be a big help in moving things forward.
There's a lot of stuff Solaris got right, long before the Linux world did, and in some ways, it's still catching up.

DTrace? Sure, there's a plethora of dynamic tracing tools in linux, but it's honestly just now starting to catch up with eBPF. If eBPF stack traces make it into 4.5, that might be the first time I can look at Linux dynamic tracing and go "Yep, it's arrived"

Systemd certainly apes quite a bit of it's functionality from SMF (and, personally, I'd argue SMF still does basically everything better...)

ZFS? Still the king of filesystem/logical volume management. Btrfs might catch up someday

Zones? Again, still ahead of the linux equivalent in functionality. And lx branded zones are awesome.

I'm not saying nothing needs to advance ever again in the world of OS research, but I think we need to be honest about how much we owe to Sun for having created the modern template for a great amount of functionality that Linux is just now having come into existence, and it's not like things at Joyent, OmniIT, Nexenta, and other Illumos developing shops have stagnated either.

I often disagree with Bryan on specific points, but I think you do him a disservice. While many of the things Sun did might be viewed as an incremental update to existing concepts, it's still something that the Linux community has yet to catch up with.

Anyway, even when he is wrong, I think he often brings up a viewpoint that results in some interesting discussion.
As an engineer looking to launch an app with a wide target audience, should I focus on marketing to individual niches and gain traction, or explain how my tool can actually help everyone?
Hi Michael and Aaron, We started as a digital health company powered by data science. Gradually, what we have discovered is that a lot of our competitors in digital health want to use our data science engagement platform. Now, we have two questions:
(a) should we continue doing the weight loss or pivot fully towards a data science engagement platform company ?
(b) If we should switch to data science engagement platform, should we focus on health or should we go towards all consumer apps?

Thanks,
Ashu
Thank you, that's helpful.

1) Romulus (https://romulusapp.com) is a CRM and ticketing cloud service for local governments. Think SalesForce + ZenDesk for constituent services.

2) There are 90,000 local governments, each with 10-15 departments that interface directly with constituents and need our software as it is today. ARR per customer (department) is ~$9k.

3) 50-100% MoM growth for the past 6 months. Sales is focused on penetrating new cities, then we've had great success with referrals from existing customers.

4) Building a better product isn't the hard part, since "best government software" is a super low bar. Innovation is in the business model — avoid RFPs, find one decision maker, lower CAC with growth through referrals — which means our growth engine is exactly the same as startups in other sectors.

5) Per-user recurring subscription. Right now $40/user/month, lots of room for expansion there.

6) Founders were early engineers at Gusto, so we know how to bring delightful products to unsexy problems and build a mission-driven culture. We are passionate about solving this particular problem and have worked for over a year to de-risk the business before asking for investment.

7) $2,000,000 to get to $1m ARR, at which point we raise a Series A.

P.S.

I don't think of fundraising as a reward or a goal in and of itself. It is a means for us to achieve our potential. We hold ourselves to a high bar for product and impact. If potential investors recognize that, cool, but we're not in this to be on TechCrunch.
That stream doesn't have interactive controls enabled, try heading to one of the streams labeled as interactive from the home page.

You might need to log in to get interacting, you can use:
User: testaccount2
Pass: DummyPassword
Ok - so you could approach this in a few different ways. Here are two:

One way is to try to sell big enterprise contracts to big banks. This is really hard for startups to do, unless you have a product you know they really want, have deep connections or experience selling to banks, and have all the compliance and security requirements in place.

Another way to try this is to sell to smaller sites. They're more likely to adopt quickly, but you'll need to make sure that you maintain quality, are generating enough traffic and conversions to be worthwhile after the rev share, and don't devolve into something that appears scammy.

Do you know who actually wants what you are building? How have you figured that out?
Personally, I prefer to go to Amazon over shopping comparison sites for a couple reasons: I already have an amazon account so I don't have to create an account and put type in my cc info and I know amazon can ship quickly. I wonder if you can build a shopping comparison site that holds my cc and shipping info so that I can literally check out on the shopping comparison page...
>* The separation of different forms of content...

Disagree. The NYTimes is at the forefront of dynamic content and page layouts. They inspired a couple of startups to build publishing tools after their Snowfall article was published http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...

For more interactive articles, check out this
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/us/year-in-interacti...

>* The font in their title...
Serif fonts aren't dated, and this is part of their branding and aesthetic. Of course a company founded in 1851 will not have the same aesthetics as a company founded in 2016. As a designer, I think their text and page layouts are some of the best I've seen.

>* The discoverability of content...
Unless you have access to their analytics, you aren't in a position to criticize their page layout. The problem with these armchair critiques is they are never argued with data.
I never said anything of Linux (I am critical of it), and I don't know how you came up with this odd Linux/Solaris dichotomy.
Is Google's Waze app making traffic worse?
Can you be more specific? What is your idea?
Minimal setup for a Play framework project
This sounds great. What type of fees are you considering?
In case anyone is still struggling with the concept of a 'unikernel', I found this article to help in clearing it all out: https://ma.ttias.be/what-is-a-unikernel/
Why does it take so long for an oil drop to hit gas prices?
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10712327
From the article: "...hydrogen sulfide under a pressure of 1.5 million atmospheres exhibits phonon-mediated superconductivity at 203 K".

So, yes, dry-ice level temperature, but incredibly high pressure.
We're learning. Move fast & break shit doesn't work on Wall St. We knew how to build the best financial sentiment NLP in the world, but we had no clue about the space we would eventually sell into. It's cautious, slow to act, skeptical, very sophisticated and secretive. We had to find a client who knew exactly what to do with our data without any handholding and was a bit forward thinking, even experimental in that they take chances on startups. We found that perfect client (actually they found us!) and they could see the value of what we built right away, probably better than we could. They loved us so much they eventually invested in us so we knew we were on the right track and they've been helping us ever since. Growing client #s required us to become experts in a number of different areas so we took our time getting them right.

Yes we make money per client. Large ARR contracts
Because France was playing Orc and researched lighter throwing axes instead.
The short answer to this is that by partnering with a bank (we have before and will continue some relationshops we've already started) you are limited by their underlying technology platform in the data you get, the data you pull out and anything you'd like to do with that information. Even how you'd like to show it to the customer.

Everything is vetted through their counsel and their management team and your hands are always tied by their wishes.

While you might be able to find a super innovative bank that allows you to have some creative freedom its really the difference in owning a home vs renting a home (even if you have a very lenient landlord).

When you own it decisions are yours to be made, good bad or ugly, when someone else does there is always someone to answer to and there is always a period of time that has to pass between thought and action.

That period of time in a small and nimble startup we believe is the difference in success and failure
What does the '8-bit' refer to?
I find it incredible, too. As UnoriginalGuy says, lab tests don't always tell you what's going wrong in the field. But the fact that they don't know what's happening (if that's true at all, some other posts have called the whole article into question) is still the designers' fault. With modern hardware, the most important thing -- the thing you start building on Day #1 of the project -- is built-in diagnostics.

In the case of something like the 737 rudder problem, those planes were designed 40 years ago, in an era when it wasn't practical to record every bit of operating data in real time, or add cheap, lightweight sensors to everything in sight. That's not true anymore. Whether they're building a drone, a fighter plane, a spacecraft, or even a modern passenger car, there is no excuse for requiring people to stand around some wreckage scratching their heads. The onboard controllers should be able to tell them exactly what went wrong. If they can't, then that's the problem to be solved first.