skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How would you monetize a webcomics publishing platform?
Hi! I'm working on a personal project, a platform for posting/reading/discussing webcomics.

I want to ask for your advice - what would be the best way to monetize such project?

I'm not going to have ads(don't want to compromise the quality of the website, plus adblockers will soon make it pointless anyway), so I'm looking for ideas about a right way to monetize(that is convenient both for artists and readers).

Any ideas/advice really appreciated =)
"build something people want"

Do people want 2000 different new tech things each year?
Three and a half degrees of separation at Facebook
Immersive command line applications. I've already booked my seat on the next intergalactic shuttle.
Also, I doubt there are as many concert halls where the public has sunk anything near the kind of money that frequently gets sunk into NFL stadiums

The Elbe Philharmonie in Hamburg comes to mind. Budgeted originally at EUR 241M. They're now at 789 Million and counting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbe_Philharmonic_Hall
If you had enough contributors, a sponsored "spotlight comic" feature could work. Or you could potentially offer subscriptions to a "webcomic round-up" type service, for people who want the best comics (potentially in certain categories) packaged together as a digest for them.
How many kids in high school know what a 'compiler' is?
It's not maglev.

For fuck's sake, can people at least read the wikipedia entry on the topic before commenting on it?

It uses an air cushion to reduce friction, it uses linear induction motors to accelerate trains along a route, most of the time it will cost. That means the fixed costs of the whole thing are low. The cars are pretty simple and low cost. The accelerators are also simple and make up a tiny fraction of the length of a track. Most of the track is just a partially evacuated tunnel, which is cheaper to build than a maglev track.
The fact big companies in SV have been caught in a no poaching pact gives an indication of how workers are considered by the owners: just lemons to be pressed. They even strip you from your moral and patrimonial rights on any of your inventions in exchange for some ridiculous equities that give them fiscal advantages. And they call it "advantage". For whom? You do the valuable original part of the job.

In exchange, like a kid you have free lolipops and you have a nice kindergarten kind of ambiance, where immaturity and attitude prevails. You are distracted from thinking.

I faced your situation. I find modern IT mildly innovative nowadays and promises made at hiring often never held, IT culture often toxic. Especially the lack of critical thinking.

Take some vacations. Whatever you plan next. You may have good reasons to be disillusioned. (or none, the thinking is up to you)

Sometime just enjoying life is the right solution to a lot of problems. Because, fuck the IT. Your life and the search for your own happiness matters more than anything else.

By being honest, you are proving to be mature: trust yourself.

EDIT: Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009956
I unfortunately am not equipped with the knowledge about how people use/abuse redis like storage mechanisms. But that bit about how NoSQL is used as a point of upfront convenience is bam spot on. The biggest reason people have given me when I ask them why they want mongo is "easier to add columns".
They're only exported to the sub shell (bash on last line of cli script). Quitting the sub shell would restore them. Perhaps you were confused by the absence of `service:$` in the prompt for the upload command, which I believe was an oversight.
I didn't did anything bad with them just used them in office. I was happy customer until they broke (after 7 month of usage)
It's fascinating to see innovation in this space.

I am also curious to see how the mortgage and realtor industry responds to this type of demand in the future.
Could CockroachDB Ever Replace Redis? A Free Fridays Experiment
No-one's "fixed" email because of the network effect. You think trying to break into the social networking space is bad? Consider that everyone who does use social networking has an email address, along with almost everyone who doesn't.
Just like C and C++ compilers have lots of options to tune all generated code.

Sometime just -O2 or -O3 aren't not enough, regardless how much tuning has gone into them.
Ah very nice, thank you!
Take a look at Programmer's Dvorak[1], for a more developer friendly version of dvorak.

Other than that, replacing old muscle memories takes some time and practice. It took me a full two weeks of half-day practice to type at an acceptable speed with the new layout.

I'm using a mac, and I mapped the caps lock key to ctrl, which is in a more natural position to press with my left pinky.

As my both hands are always on home row when I'm typing, M-x, C-c, C-w, navigation etc. all comes naturally now. I've been using programmer's dvorak for 6 or so years.

If I need to do copy-paste etc. with one hand (when using mouse), I switch back to Qwerty with one quick keyboard shortcut (cmd+shift+a for me), than switch back to dvorak when I'm done.

[1]: http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/
This 10% figure seems to originate on this blog post:
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19848/musks-hyperlo...

The guy makes assumption of single 28 person pod leaving every 30 second to get 3360 passengers/hour throughput. But these parameters are not set in stone. Pods could be joined into platoons that move together to form "trains". With 10 pod platoon you get 33600 passenger/hour -- neary 3x throughput of California High Speed rail when it's built. Pods could also be made wider to accommodate multiple people along cross-section.
Think about it this way:

You’re a startup, and a significant percentage of the money you sent is directly given to your competitors.

Which is what’s happening here. If you’re a non-YC startup using DO, you’re directly financing your competitors.
I love things like this, but also saddened that in the UK the land to put it on would cost at least ten times that amount. The planning system here is a disgrace.
>"For my own part, I do think that one of the tasks of the history of
science and medicine is to chart the trajectory of progress (however we
choose to define it) in an open-minded and expansive way that tries as
far as possible to avoid writing a history that celebrates the 'winners'
and elides the 'losers,' even as it acknowledges that some concepts and
methods have a basis in reality and others don't. In part because being
too quick to distribute laurels and dunce caps can lead us into
unjustified and overly hasty binaries. Not all pre-1800 physicians were
astrologers or quacks; not all who quote Shapin or Butterfield are
ardent proponents of the Strong Programme."

Ben, it's an excellent article. Thanks.

I'm curious if you believe the unjustified and overly hasty dualism is
becoming more or less prevalent?

Since the winners versus losers dichotomy implies competition, another
way to rephrase the same question could be, "Is competition increasing,
decreasing, or staying about the same?"

Whether it's fame and credit for a scientific discovery, or likes and
karma points, or any of the many other mostly fabricated and unnecessary
competitions, to me it seems society is trending more towards divisive
competition rather than beneficial collaboration. Then again, I don't
know nearly as much history as you do. ;)
I am a geek and I've made my first video. It's about weight loss
> In the uk politicians are paid peanuts, hence we have monkeys who make stupid descions like this

Indeed. If only we paid MPs like they do in Nigeria it would all be much better.

Furthermore, to call computer modelling, i.e. recording all the data we can find and then trying to make sense of it via predictive [though inevitably flawed] analysis a religion is one thing; but if your only counterpoint is some waffle about gas giants and the observation that the weather is nicer in Florida than Canada I find your argument unconvincing. We make predictions as best we can with the data, and maths available to us. ANYTHING else is religion because it isn't subject to counter arguments.

Finally, this obsession with politicians "confiscating our hard earned cash" is pernicious nonsense. We pay tax. The government uses it to build stuff. Most (not all - governments are largely made up of people no smarter than you or me) of it is useful. There are places on the planet where taxes aren't collected in the same way. You're welcome to go there and live with warlords, barrel-bombs, water born diseases that wreck eyesight, drug cartels and all the other fun stuff that goes with any system other than the (rotten, annoying, frustrating, inefficient) thing we already have here in the UK.

I'm not from the UK but I consider myself lucky to have spent time living and working here. I build useful things, get well paid, and willingly pay taxes in exchange for roads, hospitals [modulo PPI], schools, sanitation, rule-of-law and so on.
Due the way Delve rewrites Go source code and relies on having it available, I wouldn't call it a debugger.
So, they have the same situation as DO, practically (where we can be sure that the NSA has some backdoor in the systems).
What, any time someone wants an analogy they can simply summon one to their location with their mobile phone?
Excluding all costs apart from material. Yeah, it doesn't cost 20k.
in grade 12 at my highschool we had a whole unit by the guidance staff about college. We took personality/aptitude tests that were all "tell us about yourself and we'll list some jobs you might consider preparing for"

Among other things, it had five year projections for salaries and job prospects. It said "this is what these people get paid now, and this is how we think it will change". It said "this industry is in demand" or "you will have a hard time finding work doing this"

This is not hard to find. Nobody looks
This was an excellent read giving a great insider look at an acquisition from the seller side
Another rule was: Design a product for the “98 percent use” case. [...] Mayer believed on every good product there should be a big button like that for the 98 percent use case, where if the user clicks it or taps it, they get a delightful, fluid, simple experience.

This is all good, but hereis the thing that many designers with great responsibilty doesn't seem to get: As much as there is one big button/search field etc, DON'T REMOVE advanced options for advanced users. Example: For a long time Google Maps on Android it would be impossible to look up a route from anywhere but where you were now. It was not only streamlined to start with current location but rather neutered so you couldn't. To add insult to injury it used to work fine before someone started their UX work :-/
Seriously? You don't get to be a senior vice president by picking background colors.
The advice I give: lateral into the actual company as soon as possible.
Square root of relevance signals to "smooth" them out? I worked a bit on tuning search results, not at Google scale though and it's long time ago, but taking square root, or even logarithm of out of scale signals is a very common trick. Heck, even with the classic tf-idf signal, there are a bunch of heuristics like capping off tf, taking log of idf, penalizing doc length, etc. It's really a trial and error thing.
> Infact this is why Go will remain unviable option to .net developers.

Why should we even bother with Go, if we have C#, F#, JIT, AOT compilation to dynamic binaries (NGEN), AOT compilation to static binaries (.NET Native), NuGET already available?

And yes, I do know Go and even tried some early contributions before the 1.0 release.

For me it is only a step forward for C developers.

Still a very important one, as we need more widespread use of safer compiled languages.
A Smart Bear: When something is true, you don't have to announce it (2007)
Aesthetically not really sure, but definitely a cool idea. Here's hoping they build some of these in the Bay! I can see people buying these in expensive areas to offset the cost of the land.

Kind of reminds me Modern Shed [0].

[0]: http://www.modern-shed.com/
Wow, talk about another ad disguised as an article. Damn South Park was right!
> How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford, but that anyone would want—while also providing a living wage for the local construction team that builds it?

Material is $14k.
> It's not maglev

Oh wow, this is too much.

From the article:

> "The MIT pod has magnet skis that lift it during high-speed cruising"

So, in your own words, "For fuck's sake, can people at least read the article before commenting on it?"

The was the whole reason I brought it up. The original design called for air bearings; the MIT team did something apparently far more expensive. This is concerning.
So what kind of pathologies can it detect?
No, it's worse than that. The French spying apparatus has way less legal boundaries because the government basically doesn't want to acknowledge the spying even happens.

At least you can argue in an American court that you have standing if you have proof the NSA is spying on you
Just remember, as much as you want one big green button, -DON'T remove options if you have existing users, just make them smaller, hide them (but easily accessible) and make sure they reset automatically (at least for noobs).
Google Maps has reached its true potential only now that everyone has a smartphone with GPS. I don't think that it was entirely clear in 2010 just how important mobile would be, or that Google would play such a dominant role on mobile devices. The company was still fixated on Facebook's rise, but it's since jettisoned the focus on social networking (after Google Plus failed to take off).
I think these are very essential qualities of a head of product that had direct influence on making Google the most valued company that it is; They are very complementary to designing a search algorithm - but you need both to be successful. I admired Marissa Mayer's work when she was still in charge and was sorry when she left. I presume it would have been the better choice to make her lead Google+ - if anything this product had a problem with its "personality". I would have trusted her to get this right.
> because it's going to take you several hours to persuade them that you do in fact know how to do your job

Never, ever argue about the person! When arguing with programmers you should only argue about the technical side. For them it's not about prestige, it's about making a perfect system.

X+Y=3 because I know math (wrong)
X+Y=3 because X=1 and Y=2 (right)
I wish I could share your optimism, but I'm afraid that while global increase in psychedelic use might bring some measurable improvement, it probably won't be too much, and definitely not enough.

The main problems I see is that 1) the use of psychedelics is a bit of a shortcut, and as such perhaps deceptively ineffective for long-term change (in contrast to, say, daily meditation), and 2) humans seem to be really good at always returning to some base-line of behavior, and I suspect that this applies equally to 'enlightenment'. This might explain the first point as well.

I only need to look at my friends and extended social circle(s) to see how relatively little their frequent use of psychedelics had on them. The ones where it seemed to have most effect were people who treated it as a more meaningful (and/or spiritual) experience, and especially those who changed aspects of their daily life through this.

Whenever someone brings up Steve Jobs, for example, and his mention of LSD as life-changing, my immediate thought is: 'yeah, but he also lived in an stark, empty house, was spiritually 'active' (don't remember what exactly, some buddhist movement), and went as far as changing his diet and not going to a doctor when he should have. Clearly it wasn't just the LSD, but an entire way of living to go along with that.

I'm afraid that if the use of psychedelics becomes a cultural norm, we'll just give it a small place in our lives where it can do little harm and is defanged of it's power. Like a nice rite of passage to go through before you get back to 'real life'.
Learn to say “sorry” instead of “please”
They reduced calorie consumption, but also mandated that 50% of the diet comes from carbohydrates. Is it possible that for their average experiment participant the weight loss was a result of net reduction of carbohydrates consumed, not variations on a 50-35-15 formula?
I know, but haven't used, La/Tex. I'll need to use it at some point, but for note-taking I prefer plain text files, as I use- except for paper notebooks.
Rejecting Engineering Candidates with Respect
THE “8 HOURS WORKING DAY” ILLUSION
The new Y Combinator: As it tries to scale from 200 to 2,000 companies a year
Please be kinder to others.

Although the Hyperloop concept uses an air cushion for levitation, the winning pod from MIT was indeed levitated by magnets: http://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-students-win-first-round-spacex...
There are only two reasons to have offshore wind power. One is because NIMBYs make it hard to erect onshore turbines. The other reason is that it really pisses off Donald Trump.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shet...
Why HTTPS will never be required in browsers
Idea: Try getting this onboard the internet.org program by Facebook. This is literally the only way I think internet.org could be useful without raising a controversy.
> How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford

Why not rent a flat instead? Wouldn't that be much more economical (no property prices, lower heating costs, less maintenance work, less risk, not built on the cheap)?

I don't understand the fixation on owning a house / living in a single-family house many americans seem to have.
Or install ports of enough to get work done. Ag works very well on Windows.
I've been doing this for years except having coffee while fasting. I've heard antioxidants can take you of ketosis though. Any thoughts?
Damn, those Forest Lords sound suspiciously like Malazan Book of the Fallen ;D
... and? "Way less legal boundaries" — the NSA doesn't even have a published budget. If you're on the internet, you're in their database(s) and so is your data. If you're interesting to them, your sysadmins are already exploited.

Court? Legal avenues? Legal boundaries?! Surely you jest.
I don't agree with Dave, in particular because thanks to Let's Encrypt, my hoster offers SSL for free and many others do.

(Many of the Let's Encrypt sponsors are hoster – and they usually are sponsors because they have already implemented free SSL for their customers: https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/.)
Killing Off Certain Cells Makes Mice Live Longer
As noted in the article, the current mortgage situation isn't good at all.

I wanted to buy land a couple of years ago, to build a tiny house on. I went in willing/able to put a 30-40% down payment on the property, with plans to build my own tiny house completely self-funded over the next year or so. The banks were simply not at all equipped to address that. Despite my excellent credit (high 700s) and low debt, and the cash to make the down payment and good income, they made it clear that I would be able to get a loan on a regular sized house with much less money down, but would not be able to get a loan on just a piece of land with plans to put a tiny house on it.

They were also willing to talk about loaning money for the land, if I could show how I was going to afford to build a "regular" house on the property (requiring going through a builder and getting a loan on the future house). In short, the was no way, short of paying for the property entirely out of pocket I would be able to buy land and build my own tiny house on it.

It was incredibly frustrating. I mean, I'm talking to these folks and they are, with a straight face, saying, "Well, as a first time home buyer, you could put 5%-15% down and buy a house, with the bank loaning you the other ~$160,000." And, I'd say, "OK, but what if I put $25,000 down, and only borrow $50,000 from the bank, and buy a piece of land, and over the next year I build myself a house on that land." And, they'd reply, "That's just not gonna happen."

So, several banks would have been happy to loan me $160k with $16k down on a full-sized house, but no one was willing to loan me $50k with $25k down on land for a tiny house.

I gave up on buying at that time. Will save up and pay cash for a plot of land in another year or two, and build my tiny house then.

I doubt it will change any time soon. Home builders have no motivation to build smaller, banks have no interest in betting on self-built homes. Which is understandable to some degree...but, the sheer hardheadedness of the response was really surprising, to me. I'd always assumed I would have no trouble getting whatever kind of loan I wanted, as long as I brought enough cash to the table. But, for land-only deals, many banks want to see 50% or more down payment, which is silly.

So, tiny houses remain mostly the privilege of those wealthy enough to afford to buy land without a mortgage, or those who don't mind living in places where land is very, very cheap. It's also possible to park a tiny house in a trailer park or RV park (and I know some folks who do that), but that misses the point of home ownership, for me.
I feel your pain. I use both Drive and Dropbox. I think they have the two best cloud storage software, or at least the best from what I've used.
"The county paid $110 to cover parking construction"

That doesn't seem too bad for an entire parking lot (ducks)
I met an engineer that worked at Bose. They had some quirky rules like "no eating in the office" not because of mess, but to get you out of your office at least once every few hours.
One facet of it is cultural: For a lot of people, someone isn't seen as a "real adult" until he or she owns a residence. (Obligatory "if you have a mortgage you're just renting from the bank and have to fix the water heater yourself" line here.)

Another is financial: There are heavy tax incentives towards ownership, though this is lessened in the era of cheap money. (On the other hand, if a mortgage can be had for cheap, that puts upward pressure on house prices because fewer units of currency go towards borrowing costs.)

Still another is logistical: Most areas of the U.S. have very few renter protections. If your landlord wants you out and you're not under a current lease, you're out (property rights of the owner and all). This goes double for the desirable places to live. For those who can manage it, the stability of "my housing cost is a known quantity that varies only a little bit outside of my control" (obligatory "did you save for a new hot water heater?" goes here) outweighs the relative immobility of property ownership. Plus, a somewhat high price is put on the ability to paint one's own walls, have a pet, and do minor renovations without asking for permission. Witness the plethora of "home remodeling" shows and TV channels. In many rental units, doing this is not just frowned upon, it is actively forbidden by the lease.

As always, to stave off the inevitable replies of "but my rental experience has never been like that," your miles may vary. I lived in one apartment in Texas that let me do everything short of bulldozing my unit. I lived in another in Seattle that charged me $300 because I got a drop of orange drink on the carpet in a bedroom.
Man I've meet some dropbox employees and talked about to them about their company. Its kinda frightening. The sheer amount of decadence makes me think the company won't last. It was shocking to listen to them and be around them. They acted like they were the kings of the world and spent like it too. I guess it wouldn't be a bubble if such behaviors weren't common place.