skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to Not Get Investment for Your Startup
It’s a stunningly humid evening in Soho, Hong Kong, two days after our startups MVP launch.

Our Product Hunt listing reached a meagre 68 up-votes, though around 20 clients have integrated our product and two of these have upgraded to the $197 monthly subscription.

Only a third of the way through my first strawberry daiquiri, I antisocially connect to WIFI and begin the habitual, smart phone facilitated dopamine hunt through:

- Slack
- Email
- Skype

An email notifying me of the Linkedin message shown above attracts my attention:

"Hey Tom,

I came across AskTina on Product Hunt and love the idea. I'm an investor at X, an NYC-based fund spun out of X- would love to set a time to chat and learn more about what you're building. Shoot me a note if you're free to discuss.

Thanks

X"

To put this message in perspective…

Over 4 years of starting startups/online businesses I have never been approached by or considered approaching an investor.

A mixture of fear and $ signs scroll into my subconscious as I continue socialising.

2 hours (and numerous margarita’s later), it seems like a fantastic idea to respond.

Fortunately enough, as I checked in the morning, we had managed to schedule a call for later that week.

Though unfortunately like most of the investors we have spoken to over the past 3 months since that fateful response…

“More traction please”

Translated: you’re not good enough.

The Medium post here:

http://bit.ly/2a3sO9B

Follows the rest of the journey of rejection and heartache that I believe accurately depicts the fundraising process for all early stage startups.

I welcome all comments/questions below :)
imagine how many hours do you need to spend studying basic to be able to write that
Fair comment!
... which is exactly what cryptographic signatures are for
Very few organizations in the world truly need to scale out their database. Their problem is usually that of a bad design. For those that need to scale out, NoSQL is not a magic solution either. The scaling out solution pretty much these days for SQL database is replication, sharding and partitioning tables. Postgres does these very well.
I plan on test driving 10 this weekend. From what I've heard (installation tactics aside), it seems like Win10 is a better Win7. What about it doesn't make it a better Win7?

Edit: Clarification.
Why not? Arguments in favor of dropping the free program as promised:

- It would be the same as before.

- Continuing a failed strategy won't suddenly be any more successful. Why should those who didn't upgrade until now suddenly do it? The most likely reason will be because they have to - in which case letting them pay is the better business strategy.

- It sets a bad precedent for the future (from their POV), nobody would take similar announcements seriously any more.

That said, my reason for not upgrading my PC thus far is that on my officially Windows 10 supported Dell XPS 13 9333 (from 2014) ultrabook (which I bought with Windows 8.1) I have quite severe sound driver crash issues (the actual Realtek driver is even worse, but with only the Microsoft High Definition Audio Device driver I have them too, and I'm not alone), and I have to restart explorer.exe (the window manager) occasionally because something hangs. No chance to get anything done from Dell, even though they officially support the upgrade. On my XPS 8500 PC - two years older - it isn't even officially supported, and it also has a Realtek audio chip. So I'm really reluctant to start the upgrade. I'll do it just before end of the month, but I'll be sure to have everything backed up even if they say I will be able to revert the installation.
Made with Blocks?
This morning, I saw yet another intro to programming using a blocks UI this morning. This one was particularly upsetting because it didn't even contain any concepts of "coding" that I could recognize. At least some of these blocks intros talk about iteration or conditionals.

Why be so misleading? Is our profession really that uninteresting that you have to avoid introducing any of what actually happens?
[citation needed], please. I follow SpaceX pretty closely and to my knowledge this has never gone beyond random internet commenters' "what if?" speculation.
>given up on mobile

I don't know about that, they sure have been pushing a lot of new builds lately :

https://www.reddit.com/domain/blogs.windows.com/search?q=bui...

though I guess they did sell part of Nokia or something.. Sad because those phones are super durable for someone like me who breaks devices constantly
There is: http://www.worldservice.org/docpass.html
I'm excited to play with this. I wonder what kind of overhead it has. I imagine it would be fairly low.
Windows is mostly sold as OEM on new computers. For existing/old computers they have minimal sales... so they are giving it for free here...

Gut since they will start with subscriptions very soon I wonder what is their long term plan with these Win10 installations on existing computers...
Anecdotal of course, but for me Windows 10 is a better Windows 7. Virtual desktops, some small upgrades to the shell (stacked, pauseable copy dialogs, ...) make it worth it, and I haven't found anything from Windows 7 that I can't use anymore.
His mom was and his children are, that's for sure.
The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Best Remote Developer
> "your files are exactly where you left them"

That was my favorite message during install. Thanks Windows, I had never once worried about that previously but I have to say you specifically mentioning that it wouldn't be a problem definitely made me wonder.
> "I want to have my own family first and then comes math."

Considering the value of success in his society, he might want to change priotities. ;)
> why something like Mongo or Couch is a bad idea

Couch is fine, other NoSQL is fine. It's just Mongo I don't like:

- weak, if any, guarantees on data consistency and safety;

- poor API. If you need anything more complicated than `findOne`, there are at least 3 unrelated syntaxes with major differences that are not compatible;

- performance is not what marketing team says it is. Even at home JSON turf, Postgres is pretty comparable.

If you have data and queries that will benefit from document store, go for it. But don't choose only based on marketing.

There are many more rant on the web, I like this one:

http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-ne...
How+to+Download
It does not have to be global to bring the thread of extinction.
A local conflict with a few tactical nuclear weapons, say between Pakistan and India, would be an existential thread to humanity.[0]

[0] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/local-nuclear-war/
Didn't Intel cancel chips for mobile phones this spring after the rather spectacular failure of Atom gaining any measurable marketshare? ARM has an architecture monopoly.
What about desktop market share?
Running-Induced Systemic Cathepsin B Secretion Associated with Memory Function
>some of those features have gone into the dustbin for good reasons

I'm curious what features you're thinking of. I know PHP put lexical scope into the dustbin, but languages since then haven't. Looks like the wrong decision in retrospect. Python put multi-statement lambdas in the dustbin but I don't think there's consensus that that was for good reasons.
It sounds simple, but are you drinking enough water?
Look up on CouchDB problems, several of its customers have given up on it (more than MongoDB it seems)

It's not a bad idea, MongoDB has a lot of undeserved hate (some of it deserved, but the minority), however I'm not sure it would do syncing as you want automatically (CouchDB is probably closer out-of-the-box to what you want)
I know someone who still uses LocoScript. Thankfully the PC version rather than the Amstrad PCW version. Old word processors take a long time to die.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocoScript
> Lisp just isn't that much better than our current languages. Sorry.

No need for apologies -- it weakens your argument and makes you sound unsure.

Lisp is that much better than most languages. The isomorphic syntax used to represent both data structures and program code is an oft-touted feature that few languages lay claim to (so-called, homoiconicity). The reason this concept is wonderful is that it allows us to use syntactic substitution with the same rigour as Leibniz and Tony Hoare. We can take any expression, substitute parts of it with other expressions and give it a symbol. And because the rules of substitution in Lisp are well defined it works all the way down.

Where you run into trouble is with the dynamic environment. CL decided it was enough to give programmers a function to generate unique symbols. Others such as Scheme insisted on a hygenic macro system. The difference is that one requires the programmer to be more careful in order to not restrict the forms one can write.

This is why macros are cool.

Other features I miss (that aren't unique to Lisp):

- Incremental compilation (Eiffel)

- Conditions and restarts (Multics)

- Circular data structures

Update: grammar.
> When I tried a pre-Win10 Lumia in a store I actually found it very impressive, but I heard that the Win10 mobile launch had a rocky start.

It's been solid since, but the first month or so of Windows 10 on a Lumia 950 was rough going. Store was unreliable, battery drained in ~6 hours (same hardware/usage will now last me 24+ hours), and auto-updater got permanently stuck at 0%. Only way to move to a working build was to factory reset the phone.
Looks like the call fails and they return an error message.

"Twilio does not support outbound calls [...] to [...] premium rate telephone numbers."

https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/voice/what-types-of-phone-nu...
I remember when 7 (and even Vista for a certain number of users who had a powerful machine and the right hardware) came out, there was a lot of them saying how happy they were to upgrade from XP (and definitely Vista for obvious reasons). Finding someone who loved 7 compared to Vista was easy, they were everywhere.

Contrast that with 10, I think I've found maybe 2 people in my group of online and offline friends who "like" it, not love, just like, and the rest are varying degrees of indifference and of course there's a few people who outright hate it.

One of my sysadmin friends is currently looking into if he can rebuild his company laptop with 7 because he just can't stand 10.

I only bring this up because it seems like while people didn't like 8 hardly at all, nobody really seems to love 10 either. They either shrug their shoulders because they don't care, or they tolerate it because it's better than nothing.
Trump leads the west’s flight from dignity
Windows 10 is awesome. Everyone I know was excited to upgrade. I think it's much better than Win 7. I think you'll like it.
Yeah, totally. I'm always open to being wrong on stuff, plus as I struggle to learn Russian it helps to try to understand words better - I can say that business-wise, I've had no need to тоска nor do I anticipate it. Since I'm not good enough at Russian to get into their literature without a dictionary in hand, I can't really find examples of it in literary or poetic works to get a better idea of how it's been used.
(I agree.)

If you see a submission with a very bad title in the front page, you can ask the mods to change it with an email to hn@ycombinator.com

It's usually faster to use the email because sometimes the comments are unnoticed.
Game programming in Java
More than half a decade before OPs internship began, Kodak had already spun off a chemical company thats fairly successful to this day.

I think a good analogy would be HP. Legendary lab test equipment up till 1980 or something. Spin off the legendary lab test equipment division into a new company thats successful to this day AFAIK although they rename / rebrand every five years. The remainder tries to coast by selling imported Chinese stuff with its famous name rebranding the cheap import, but the writings on the wall as it crashes.

So for both examples, if your core competency is XYZ and you spin off your healthy XYZ division and don't really have a post spinoff plan, the empty dehydrated husk that remains will wither away pretty quickly.

Essentially you've got what banks call the good bank / bad bank strategy where you split and one fails and the productive part remains. For whatever reason companies like HP and Kodak throw the historical branding into the "bad company" side. But the "good company" sides are healthy and in business to this day.
Still befuddles me how badly Twitter has neglected list functionality. On every device/platform, there's a differently-obfuscated way to just see the damn lists you've created, nevermind create them. I get that making lists isn't fun, but they never seemed to try to make them easy to make. The end result is that new users who enthusiastically follow others see a stream of unfiltered shit and end up either just quitting, or obsessively pruning their follow list.
DAO Fork Spoof Attacks
The US didn't support the Taliban against the USSR. The Taliban came in to existence after the Afghan-Soviet war. Matter of fact, many of the Mujahideen supported by the US during the war later fought against Taliban.
Wordstar had a sort of vim-like quality to it, where you could type your way with ease and power without using a mouse.
Heh, I don't think you need to be too smart to sit at the top of a bureaucratic mess, but this is just a childish X-files style conspiracy theory more than anything, and likely the result of me being disillusioned with politics in general.

I wouldn't put too much thought into what I said, since I certainly didn't.
Is anyone else impressed that it's only 131 lines long?? I have to do more work to set up a plain empty window and OpenGL when I create my games these days!
Masayoshi Son explains why Softbank just bought ARM for $31.4B
This is what happens to me - I need to make a purchase of some sort, and so I research for a couple days before purchasing. Then after purchasing, I see ads for said item for a while. Even on Amazon, where I bought the thing.

So close, yet so far...
Is Working Full-time Bad for our Brains?
Surprising given that I've really been enjoying Windows 10. Built a recently and I put it on it just figuring it was stable enough. I'm really liking it and find it so pleasant and seamless I haven't even disabled UAC!
Microsoft Press Lets Editorial Staff Go
The Lumpy Web
US troops do absolutely nothing on Korea and Europe other than as stand-by and a geopolitical deterrent. The troops in Iraq were acting as the fighting force for the official regime. These are very VERY different things. US toops were occupying Iraq, they are not occupying South Korea.
I am too. Very curious what he means here. His message is vague as hell.
Usually by radio with the assistance of some standard autopilot features like gyroscopic stabilization.
Show HN: Turn long videos and audios into shorts
> The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piece of engineering.

True. I remember the feedback a WW2 vet pilot gave after testing PC FS. It went something like 'if flying on a PC got any more realistic, you'd need a pilot's license to do it.' !!
One day it was all Wang dedicated word processors, the next it was all Microsoft Word.

Of course this very much depends on what you were doing at the time, but MS was pushing very hard to establish their 'office' products.

The turning point was 1989, with Windows just barely being usable, then 3.0 came out and it went very quickly.
Nikolaus Waxweiler writes in the announcement that he was led "to strip the v38 Infinality code to the bare minimum and remove all configurability in the name of speed and simplicity".
That depends very much on what the primary mission is. For LEO missions like the CRS flights, then sure. For GTO launches, they probably don't have the margin needed.
Peter Thiel will speak on behalf of Trump at the RNC
> "Even Bernie Sanders wanted US to remain a partner of Saudi Arabia to "get rid of ISIS", but I don't think he ever thought it through too much."

Sanders has built his popularity on his domestic policies. His record on foreign policy is somewhat less stellar.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-sanders-troubli...
"Your files are exactly where you left them"

I found something very HALish about that screen. A vague somewhat reassuring statement with an ominous tone. I mean, great, they're right where I left them but will you grant me access them?
other than an ownership change, this should not bring much of change to the market or ARM dependant companies,shouldnt it? .

If it was any other company like Intel or Samsung, things would have been different. I see that even Intel is developing chips based on ARM
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-...
You misunderstand. It's not the CO2 of the plants that are eaten, but the heavy equipment necessary to grow the food, the tractors, and everything else involved in growing food.

That's why produce is so expensive - it takes a LOT of energy to grow it.
Even if the data is anonymized, isn't there a risk of a data leak, someone inferring your identity based on your browsing preferences? Like imagine someone who lives in a small town who's really into model railroads, and nobody else around is. Whoever from xyz location has done lots of browsing about model railroads, is likely that person and now we can see what else he/she's been browsing.
I think this is true.

Perl was one of the first hugely successful dynamic languages, though I will politely defer to Shell and TCL folks for a rigorous discussion of that claim. (:

Perl has been really serious about testing since early on, and, to my understanding, remains one of the most test-centric major languages out there.
If constant decline does not say failure for you i don't know ether.

Given its slow, but consistent non the less.
[Bloggers] A Comprehensive A-Z Guide on How to Make $1000+ on a Blog Post
They've been around since the days that programs were distributed on floppies as shareware.
Show HN: Mutual fund visualizer/comparison tool
Interesting and sad too. I worked there from 1987 to 1996 mostly in the film business. However, the lab I worked in used digital imaging to analyze and measure silver halide grains used to make film emulsion! So we were well aware of progress being made in digital imaging.

When I got to photocd, the management’s focus was on replicating the quality and detail of film in the digital space, and they did not notice/understand that the lower level of quality of digital would still be useful. Their marketing was driven too much by the voices of professional photography and the ad industry’s need for the quality capability of enlargement.

My colleagues and I actually started work on a business plan to use lower resolution digital imaging for applications in real estate and other industries that could use snapshots of lower resolution. We had really just gotten started on this, when management found out via a personal dispute of one of my colleagues and hauled us in for discipline. We stated our case and said we thought Kodak should get involved, but that fell on deaf ears. Our group fell apart when Kodak did not renew one of our contracts, and he went to work for Sony writing their digital image storage software, which became one of the top tools at that time.

The impression I got was that upper management was well aware of the digital advance but completely oblivious to the speed of its progress. They thought in terms of the huge length of time it took to develop new film products and their associated factories. In 1992, they actually thought that digital would not be a serious threat until about 2005. Oops!
"Throwing salt" can also be used to mean "casting dispersions", as it were. I think the article tosses a bunch of salt towards Bill Gates, but who knows what the motivation was. I'm guess when properly confused, you might just throw some salt for luck, and end up looking salty yourself. :)

Edit: I'm talking about the author throwing salt, not any of the posters here.
Compressify's developer here. Would love any feedback on the site and video results.
Sorry if the server is slow, it's getting the product hunt hug of death.
> the old protocol was very suitable

It wasn't, because I've managed to lose my history with it. I very much prefer my history to be synchronized to a server I cannot lose.

If your objection is not about cloud storage, then your objection isn't about the protocol, but its implementation (e.g. usage of HTML/Javascript): https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-auth-server/wiki/onepw-protoc...

> you download the browser once

That's not true. Modern browsers are set to upgrade automatically in the background, without notifying the user.

If you're paranoid, you can self-host your own Sync server, but then if you don't trust the vendor of your browser, then you've got bigger problems and I hope you're compiling your own binaries.
I started with Mongo, used it for little bit over 2 years. Then new project used Postgres (2 more years). After that I got a chance to work with Couch.

Whenever I encounter Mongo nowadays, it's either simulating multi table joins on app level, or inventing locking with Redis.

Part of the issue is people storing relations in NoSQL just because, but I can't think of any use cases where Mongo wins over other NoSQL solutions. Perhaps you have some?
If you like this sort of thing, I wrote some code a couple of years ago to generate and solve logical deduction problems, such as the "Cheryl's Birthday" brainteaser:

https://github.com/shaungallagher/cheryls-murder/blob/master...

The code isn't very clean (it was written hastily as part of a hack days project at work) but the notebook walks you through it, so even if you're not familiar with Python, you'll get a sense of the technique.
Chinese $1.24 bln takeover of Norway's Opera fails, but alternative deal set
That's more or less my point, isn't it? It would have been possible to (attempt to) hand over responsibility to the Iraqi military while still keeping troops there in case things went south (as they did).
Eve Diary: UI
Should be useful in exactly the same way that the WSJ's excellent Blue Feed, Red Feed (http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/) is. Thanks for sharing!
Once they've done a lot more landings, yes. Until then, I'd wager their focus is on testing materials after re-entry for annealing, heat and stress fractures, ablation, and so forth.

From this they'll be able to optimise their design (more so than already) to be more resilient to these forces, and will end up with standardised check-lists for re-flight. They're also working heavily on autonomy, so the current ground crews of hundreds could diminish to the same kind of numbers one has for commercial flight. If you launch 200 times a day, which is where they are headed, it becomes routine space traffic control with inexpensive ground crews following procedural manuals.

So, I wouldn't expect any rapid turnarounds soon, but give it ten years and they could be turning them around in hours or days, which would absolutely change the economics of space flight. I don't think Musk is into demand driven pricing - he wants his eutopia to be for all - so we may see spaceflight costs rapidly trend down to the same order of magnitude as current commercial flight, perhaps by the 2030s, perhaps sooner. So far they've maintained fantastic momentum.