skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best First Steps for a Startup?
I'm pretty close to finishing a prototype for an app in the live streaming space that I believe has a lot of potential.

My questions are:

1. Should I try to obtain some seed money?
2. If so how and from who (VCs, family, bootstrapping, etc)
3. Who are good ppl to get engaged early on? (marketing, biz development, etc)

Any advice would be appreciated.
To give a recent example, in 2013, federal courts ruled that Apple violated antitrust laws by fixing ebook prices, forcing them to pay nearly half a billion dollars.
I've been very happy with Swinsian:

http://swinsian.com

The UI is pretty utilitarian but everything seems to work.
>I want a test.

There was a time in American history where these were used, and they were used to disenfranchise people of color.
Disputing the charge is the right thing to do in any case. Your CC company should make it very easy to login and mark the charge as problematic. They want to know if bad charges are coming in from the vendor, and this is the best way to track it.

I personally don't think twice about disputing fraudulent or even mistaken charges. I can see how you might want to reserve this tool as an all-else-fails, but really CC companies should be appreciative of people using the tool because it gives them useful signals. Much better than the many many others who are missing the charge and paying for it by mistake.
>One thing Popov had always known about Eastern European hackers: All they really wanted was a job.

how true. Making money/living using your [technical] brain. There were only limited possibility for it in Russia until mid-199x, and it only gradually became reality to the end of that decade. As far as i understand, Ukraine it took at least 10 years more.
For a second I thought that was Formula Graphics language or system. It was one of Flash's competitors back in the day. I toyed with it a bit. Nope. Just Lotus scripting language. Never messed with that one.

Formula Graphics seems to have really disappeared as it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. There's a CNET download that might be it. Not trying it, though.
I don't find pre-employment drug testing terribly problematic, although I would be fine seeing it discontinued in most settings. While I don't use drugs myself I don't have any ethical problems with drug use and I'm frequently in the company of those who do use drugs.

Every single one of my friends smokes weed regularly and are employed despite most of them being subject to drug testing during the hiring process. To me, all a negative drug test shows is that a prospective employee either doesn't use drugs(which is probably a relative rarity these days), or that they do use drugs but are either resourceful enough to find a way to beat the test or disciplined enough to plan ahead. I guess in this sense perhaps the tests do serve some purpose.

My only issue would be with random unscheduled drug testing which to me serves little purpose, outside of jobs were impairment may pose a risk to others.

Far more concerning to me are criminal records or poor credit being used to withhold employment from a large segment of our population.
Linux kernel support for Microcrystal RTCs
I vote that your opinion is not one iota more valuable than that of any non-voter. People like you really should be forced to look into a mirror an hour each day.
But in the pilot wave theory, there is only one actual state of the universe, though that state propogates with explicitly non-local interactions. That state includes hidden variables, namely particle positions, velocities, and IIRC quantum phases.

It may take exponential time to simulate the distribution of measured results given only the measurable inputs (which is what we do when we model experiments), but the universe itself knows the hidden variables and so can calculate the next state quite efficiently. So ontologically, a non-local hidden variables theory is much simpler than many worlds.

Copenhagen is unworkable ontollogically; it assumes some distinction between normal interactions and "measurements" which are poorly defined.
Do you mean the original Dota map? The one from Warcraft 3
This is very similar to time travel hypotheticals. If you travel back in time, and totally change the past, did the future you originally observed actually happen? People existed, they lived their lives, etc. And then suddenly you "reset" the universe to a time where that never happened.

I would argue they did exist, and that the time travel event actually murdered them. I think of the universe as a computer, and any computation it does actually happens, actually exists in some sense. If the universe does a computation of my entire life, then deletes it, that life still happened. It "exists".

I think the same is true of the famous cat experiment. The computation of both possible states of the cat has to be done by the universe. It needs to compute how the cat reacts to the poison gas, it needs to compute the pain it experiences, etc. That's a lot different than a single particle like your example.

When you open the box, the universe may "collapse" to the second possibility, where the cat is still alive. But the first possibility still happened, and it may still be out there somewhere in an unobservable branch. In fact that model seems a lot more mathematically elegant, being completely deterministic and not having to deal with the weirdness of "collapse" events.
Agreed, agreed, agreed, agreed...a million times agreed!

People are alarmingly ignorant of not only candidate's political positions but also lack the interest (and in some cases the ability) to analyze what they are being told and promised in order to reach sensible independent conclusions they might be able to use in driving a voting decision.

We don't need more ignorant voters. In fact, we might do far better with fewer well-educated and engaged voters.

No, I don't mean we should require a Masters degree. What I do mean is that there ought to be a higher threshold to being able to vote than simply being alive and wanting to do so.

How would this work?

Want to vote on a measure for, say, a new transportation law? No problem, here's a packet, study it, take a test, pass the test and you can vote.

Want to vote on a new law affecting patents? No problem. Packet. Study. Test. Pass. Vote.

Want to vote for President? It will require some work. Lot's of issues to consider. It might take a year of studying the issues just to be able to pass the tests.

If we had a system where every voter really and truly understood the issues and could tell bullshit from reality we would not have the equivalent of "political trailer trash" running for office. No Clinton, no Bernie and definitely no Trump.

The three choices in front of us today are truly vomit inducing, each at their own level. It is a sad statement that we finally got here, the same spot nearly every South American country has navigated over the years.

Yes, that spot where Populism grabs the masses and does not relent until the destruction is obvious enough even to those not paying attention. I sure hope we don't go there. The sad truth is that all three of our candidates are Populist manipulators who are not at all good for this country.

...and our voters are too stupid to see through it.

...which is EXACTLY what has destroyed most of South America over decades of Populist manipulation.

Gloria Alvarez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm8cE54uKBo
Simplifying updates for Windows 7 and 8.1
For me, Chrome's performance advantage in youtube playback was what won me over. Chrome handled youtube videos a lot more efficiently than FF. I had an old Core 2 Duo 6600, and it had no problem playing youtube 1080p in Chrome, but completely choked in FF and IE.
I just finished porting a very non-standard and highly customized Ant setup to Gradle, and the thought of now potentially rewriting the Groovy implementation in Kotlin isn't making me jump for joy.

(No, rewriting wouldn't be strictly necessary as Groovy will still be supported per the article. But for how long?)

However, when working with Gradle I do acutely feel the pain that is the lack of IDE support for Groovy, so perhaps this will be a worthwhile move in the long run.
Used to own a PCMCIA wi-fi adapter that predated finalization of the 802.11b standard and which could reliably be induced to blue screen if I caused an HTTP request to be sent over the interface containing a lowercase x.
Disputing a charge just because you don't immediately know what it is, is not a good idea. At least, not if you want to continue doing business with the vendor that made the charge. Companies tend to take a dim view of people issuing chargebacks.
A similar problem occurs even when you control all the hardware.

I work for a company with tens of thousands of servers, and the number of strange things we run into is crazy. The exact same software running on the exact same hardware, and sometimes it just behaves differently.

We like to think that computers behave perfectly predictably, but so much randomness goes on.
Oregon has this, but not on television. There's a voter information book that's mailed to anyone who has a mailbox, a couple weeks before ballots go out. It contains non-partisan descriptions of issues, candidate-provided statements, and arguments for/against with a verified source for each. IIRC anyone can pay some small amount of money to have a position/argument included.
Pi zero is only $5
What I like about Firefox and Chrome is that they democratized Linux as a desktop OS. Till IE was mainstream all sites assumed you are Windows box. Now it's rare that there is site I can't use except few Silverlight based dinosaurs.
> It's sort of the train switch moral question.

No it isn't.
Razmnamah: the Persian Mahabharata
There's a trump joke in there somewhere.
If you don't vote, you're fined. Presumably the government has a national registry of every citizen. If it's anything like my home country, then you're also obligated to keep the government informed of your current address at all times.
I was but a teen age boy in 1992.

I built a file maker database, for a school system.

They have tried to retire it twice. Both projects failed miserably.

For the last 10 years it has been maintained by the same office admin. She still calls me every now and again to ask questions.
Europa League: Τελικός ανάμεσα σε Λίβερπουλ και Σεβίλλη
Everyone in the book did and it seemed reasonable.
The problem is that other people will just create one or more patents which are around using your breakthrough algorithm in different contexts. The famous amazon one-click shopping patent as an example. The internet is the breakthrough, but because there's no patent on that, its easy to surround with patents that should be too obvious to be patents, but have legal teeth even so.

If you patent the core idea, the other patents become a lot less useful. (Not that I think Google is thinking this way. It's just a PR problem to them. When no one is looking, I bet they do whatever they can to get as much money/power as they can.)
Since Ocaml 4 if I remember correctly
The other day I played one of my "Jedi Mind Tricks" albums on iTunes (yes this happened in 2016, because reasons) and as each song played it disappeared from the album list. Apparently the songs were being repopulated in another album under "Army of the Pharaohs" because either iTunes (or I?) had decided to rename the artist at some point.

Probably related, possibly dated: you might want your albums from "The Dwarves" and "Dwarves" (don't judge me man) to be listed together because they are the same band and it's not my fault ITMS has it wrong but if you rename one, good old iCloud will happily download a new copy of the one you renamed.
It only changes WHO is elected, not what's going to happen. Which thus far only is fantasy and speculation. I remember the last time that happened - before Obama. How much "change" did we see? And please - it does not matter if one thinks "it's all the Republicans' fault", assigning blame does not change what the outcome was (is).
Oracle. aolserver. OpenACS?
I don't know where you are seeing a relevant infinity. At any given time, there are a finite number of particles each with a finite number of observables. It's a large number, but finite.
> I learned they don't give a shit about anything but power and money. Not one really cares about my family or anyone else I care about, except for their vote. Not one.

A million times YES.

I wish people understood this. Then voting would not be pointless. We need to figure out a way to place better people in office and that requires smart voters.

This is also where the more Libertarian ideology could help. How? By stripping government of all but the basic functions they are supposed to perform. Over time our government has grabbed more and more power, money and influence. If we pulled them back to basics and reduced the reach they can have into our individual and business lives things would get better.
I actually had to download and try it, to remember the specifics. For this example I just opened up a PHP project.

With refactoring specifically: Komodo supports just "rename class member" and "rename variable" (and "Extract method..." which was constantly unavailable for me).

IntelliJ IDE's support simple renames of members/variables, but more importantly, push/pulling members up/down in a class hierarchy, changing method signatures, moving entire classes into different namespaces.

On top of this, it's little things e.g. the Komodo codeintel doesn't auto-suggest class names if they aren't already imported - you have to import the class (using "use"), and then you can go use it. This is exactly the kind of thing an IDE is supposed to improve - manual steps that can absolutely be automated.
Apk-file: search for what alpine Linux package contains a file
Very fitting handle.

Im really stoked for this and thanks a lot for your hard work.
> multi-process support, a world-class debugger

Regular users don't care for any of that. The reason why they are number one it's because they had the "internet's homepage" advantage and were able to spam everybody into installing it. If you happen to be on Firefox and you haven't installed the last two .0001 releases they start to spam you with the annoying "install chrome" messages on google.com. No wonder everyone and their uncle installed it instead of Firefox if only to get rid of that annoying ad. Reasonable people can disagree on Firefox vs Chrome but let's not pretend that this isn't how Chrome got to be numero uno.
What we learned while hiring the Basecamp summer internship class
Of all the problems facing humanity, making more of us isn't one of them.

Also, ad-blocker-blocker.
Is there an etymological link between "qanāt" and "canal"?
Microsoft Auto-Scheduling Windows 10 Updates
The conclusion of that blog post was that you should enable HTTP2 on your site.
SourceForge now scans all projects for malware and displays warnings on downloads
Why? High voter turnout is like high page visits, it does not necessarily translate into good things. Ideally people who understand political issues and see that by voting they can truly help their ideology must vote.
> We should partner up and procrastinate together

I would join that club.
As some had pointed out on Installing Chrome by other software etc, but normally these are real bad software. Most users who had no idea what Chrome was at the time was presently surprised by how fast Chrome was, and they stick with it.

In ther early 2010s I forced switch the whole company about 200s to Firefox, but few years down the road everyone quietly installed Chrome and was using it. It was fast, and they dont care about anything else. Forcing them back on Firefox were met with opposition, saying using somthing inferior was insane.

Complaining to Mozilla has been served with deaf ears. It was mostly an management issues from top to bottom, they were so full of themsevles, so righoutous, that they fail to relaize the marketing is changing. By the time they realize they have shrink below 20% market share already and were continuing downwads.

Somewhere along the line, Mozilla changed their tone, it wasn't about market shares. It is about Open Web, and always has been. How do you force the Web to be Open if had no influence on it what so ever? They wasted resources on Firefox OS, which is a dismal failure. They think JS is king, and evrything, including the OS should be someday written in JS.

Firefox is dying, and i am glad. Becasue as a users from Netscape era everytime Mozilla / FIrebird / Firefox reborn things has become better.

Firefox is very noble. But the world has never been about one way or the other.

Luckiy in the past year something happen within Mozilla. I have no idea what it is because i am not following their post anymore. ( e10s is STILL not shipped ) But things are getting better. User experience matters, less Janks, memory usage kept low and most importanly Chrome has been getting worst with every release. ( Strange indeed ) This mean more people are swithing back to Firefox.

And for users with specific workflow and 100s of Tab, Firefox is still the only option on the market.
That's an interesting perspective. I take a dim view of companies charging my card incorrectly. Particularly Amazon since they submit many separate charges for items within a a single order, making it virtually impossible to verify the charges.

I believe it is against the merchant agreement to withhold service after a valid charge-back. That would be a major and unwarranted retaliation, which you could probably sue and win a large class action if this is really happening.

I will say, I should have made more clear, the first step in a dispute will be to contact the merchant. They will have a fixed number of days to reply and correct the problem.
Never thought I'd run into another person from Waynesboro on Hacker News of all places. But, I guess I'm here so there's at least two of us. Small world after all.
Money can't buy happiness? That's just wishful thinking
The AEC manages the federal election roll. Enrolling is technically compulsory for all citizens but only seems to be enforceable once you are on the roll.

Failure to get your named crossed of a a voting booth (voting isn't compulsory - turning up is) results in a $50 fine.

http://www.aec.gov.au/
The econ 101 meme is convenient because it is true, and because it is very obvious that many people involved in the discussion don't understand economics.

> San Francisco does not want to be Hong Kong. San Francisco does not want to be Manhattan. What people actually want for their city -- that is, the desires of the people that already live there -- will always trump the demands of people who wish they could live there.

The people who live there are getting what they voted for -- restrictive housing policies and rent control. The voters caused this situation. They just don't understand enough about econ 101 to realize it. If they did, they would change their minds.

People want to move to SF, and bring their money and their labor power with them, and nobody can or should prevent that -- most cities would welcome that kind of investment. The city can accommodate their need for housing, or not. If the city does not accommodate the newcomers' need for housing, it is the existing residents who will suffer most, because the newcomers are generally richer than the existing residents and are better able to compete for housing.
Maybe instead of thinking of it as some sort of decline in service we should consider it as a net improvement in global communication. Media has democratized and you don't even need to convince the local TV news crew to cover your story anymore.

You can just make a clear, coherent complaint in your own forum and occasionally [like in this case] it actually brings about a transformation.

I doubt that Apple's customer service is any worse now than it was before.
The problem with studying a drug using control groups and placebos is that for some drugs (such as marijuana, LSD, etc.) people will know that they must have gotten a placebo due to the lack of effect.

Researchers will sometimes use a substitute to create some effect that a naive participant may believe to be the real thing, but it can be difficult to be convincing. This can damage the integrity of the control group because they would know they hadn't gotten the real thing (and thus possibly negating the placebo effect).

People who know they got the real thing may see benefits that are actually the placebo effect, and if your control group isn't able to control for this effect, it lowers the quality of your study.

There are also moral issues with tough studies such as last ditch experimental studies on stage IV cancers. Even in a double blind study, the research will know they are giving placebos to some of the participants, and thus have no chance of helping them.
You should talk the users and iterate your product. When you have enough traction, talk to investors. It'll make your life and theirs easier.
I personally think that JavaScript is one of the most meaningful and important languages that exists today. This needn't imply that JavaScript's syntax, or its semantics are to be emulated (though we're seeing a bunch of welcome improvements in recent versions of JS). The thing I like most about JavaScript is that it allows anyone, anywhere to easily deploy and share code with anyone anywhere.

So I hope this helps explains why many people feel that compiling to JS is important, even if the syntax/semantics of JS are not equally sought after by those same people.

At the same time, we can't overlook that JavaScript has become one of the most popular languages today. If that were the case thirty years ago, I'm sure the syntax for the ML family would have taken that into account somehow, at least to convey the parts of the two languages that actually are similar - even if only for things as simple as comments. So at least in this V0.0.1 of Reason, some of the things that just don't matter tend to look like things that are familiar to a larger set of people.

I think you've picked up on what looks like an inconsistency in messaging so thanks for pointing it out. I can't speak for everyone else who works on Reason, but I see the two major components (compiling to, and resembling) JavaScript to be largely independent. We can want to compile to JavaScript for totally different reasons than we want some pieces of the grammar to resemble JavaScript and I believe that is the case here. The pieces that currently resemble JavaScript are that way simply because those pieces don't matter too much and why not just be familiar? There are certain syntax features of JS that members of the JS community would tell you were mistakes, and we're not looking to recreate them just for the sake of being like JS.
Late 70's. I wrote the operating system for the Control Pak EM system sold as the Barber Colman Network Supervisor building automation system. Thousands of systems were installed and many are still in use. By cracky. Er, what was the question again?

http://www.controlpak.com/network.htm
LLVM may be better at generating opcodes, but a lot of things are happening between syntax and opcodes, especially type inference, type checking and inlining (including cross module and now cross functors).

Actually, if ocaml "optimized" compiler have shown anything, it's that micro optimizing instructions and register allocation is not as important as once believed. Indeed, for long amongst "sophisticated languages" Ocaml "optimized compiler" was renowned at the same time for the speed of generated code and for the simplicity of its code generation pass, lacking many advanced features found in ghc for instance.
I was going to mention CHIP for $9 https://getchip.com/ but in the time it took me to login somebody posted the Pi zero for $5 so I probably needn't mention it. I will anyway.