skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So it was a total growth viral sign up tactic.

To secure 250K users, they offered 20K shares or something like that.

To sign up, you had to tweet, fb share, etc....

250K users in queue enabled them to do a lot of things, but in many senses it may have been a false proxy.
> What surprises me is that in many European countries, you can now order ALL of your groceries delivered.

You can do it in much of the US, too; a number of brick-and-mortar grocery chains offer online ordering home-delivery services, even before considering third-party or online-only grocers.
I'm a dev who came from the Rails world to a primarily Wordpress one in my current gig.

Wordpress still has some pain points for me (schemaless database) that are only half-solved for me with plugins (mainly ACF Pro and Post To Post Links) and a lot of code. I've basically built a request router and ~MVC into Wordpress several times over, but not something I'm satisfied with enough to release to public.

Most of the practices that we're used to elsewhere can be applied in the Wordpress space.

Our build process relies on GitHub, Composer, Satis, CircleCI and Ansible (and we use Homestead locally). We use modern hosts who are amenable to git deployments so we don't have to use sftp. It took some work to get to here but it's easier. Honestly it's far easier than most of what I've had to deal with in the Rails space.

Wordpress, for the right kind of sites, can be great to develop on. Truly great. And it's always great for content creators. I have yet to see another CMS deliver half that experience for content creators. Please, show me one -- so that I don't _HAVE_ to use Wordpress anymore.

This gig has been interesting though. I see it as an opportunity to bring saner practices into the WordPress space. If anybody is going to LoopConf and wants to have a beer and a chat, let me know.

Keep the plugins to a minimum and you'll have a great time.
Typo and/or non native speaker?

> See src/script.js for more details on how the domains where found.

Probably s/where found/were selected/.
Parallel to what I mentioned, if you are driving in an open country road with nothing around you, you don't have to be as careful as if you're driving in rush hour traffic on the highway where everyone is trying to get home. You can be less cautious on the open country road and still be confident you won't get hit by something.

As humans we have a finite amount of resources, whether it's time, concentration...the key is to pick wisely and balance.
It's a spectrum, where that liability is only a net negative past a certain point. Most WordPress users don't reach that point.
Don't hear it. All I hear is someone that thinks leadership at large companies can make a difference. Oh wait, I did hear a logic chain breaking there. The break was caused by some kind of pre-conceived notions about leaders making a difference.
I have Freefly VR that I purchased few months ago. I watch some youtube videos (360) once in a while but mostly it stays in the dust.
Jamaican bobsledders having fun, but they're serious athletes too (1988)
I always have kept an eye on jet.com, I like it, but I have not been able to find the goods I want to buy. Even not even thinking about prices.
At my place, we have plenty of older folks(40-50s), but a lot of the older guys suffer from either NIH syndrome or do-not-want-to-innovate syndrome or barely surviving-syndrome. Some of them are in management and also just don't get it. This definitely biases myself against older folks if I ever have to interview, but usually interviewees can barely pass a phone screen anyway regardless of age.

It's frightening since I'd imagine that these things I implement now may be irrelevant 10-20 years from now and would imagine myself butting heads with the next gen of kids as an older guy.

I guess we will have to see if ageism becomes irrelevant as time goes on and the current generation of 20s kids that become the hiring managers 20 years from now lose their bias as they age. I'm hopeful as tech has had a lot of growth and the current 20-30s technologists value the older folks.
So this is why they tore down all those grocery stores in Park Royal and built high end clothing stores instead.
> Wouldn't tougher requirements on non-producing patent holders be a better way to go?

That would be inadequate in my opinion. No doubt some NPE are particularly vile, but producers abuse patents, too.

Producers like to manipulate the narrative by focusing attention on NPEs and pretending that NPE are the cause of all patent abuse, even while the producers themselves are abusing patents.
well, I didn't know whatsapp uses erlang until now
and I think it didn't really help make erlang more popular

for me I believe it was couchdb that brought erlang to light .. but now it seems erlang isn't really getting any more popular

but yea, of course being used by whatsapp is very strong validation for erlang
Ask HN: How does a computer read the OS from disk when booting up?
Whenever I read instructions like http://os.phil-opp.com/multiboot-kernel.html to load a minimal OS from scratch, I wonder how a computer finds the code for the OS to run. The OS resides on a file in the file system (/vmlinuz, or kernel.bin in the above link), and the file system is an OS construct requiring device drivers for hard disk, SSD, CDROM or USB depending on what the BIOS is configured for and a bunch of other things. Surely there's no way all those drivers fit in the boot sector of a drive? How is anything else past the boot sector ever read?
If you're interested in contracting work, I highly recommend checking out Gigster. It's extremely meritocratic—if you're good, you can easily make $200k+ a year, and there's no in-person interview hoop to jump through.
Or are forced to set up joint ventures with Chinese companies as a condition of entering the Chinese market.
After a few years, once the technology transfer/know-how has been transferred, the joint venture is dissolved.
I guess what the gp is getting at is that 80% of the work hasn't gone into the UI and it shows
If by "prompted" you mean:

@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now!

Then, yes, users will be prompted in the scariest possible language.

Compare this with HTTPS/browsers, which care not a lick if a certificate/fingerprint is different, provided that the certificate is valid and the chain is trusted.
(Reproducing OP text to linkify links.)

Whenever I read instructions like http://os.phil-opp.com/multiboot-kernel.html to load a minimal OS from scratch, I wonder how a computer finds the code for the OS to run. The OS resides on a file in the file system (/vmlinuz, or kernel.bin in the above link), and the file system is an OS construct requiring device drivers for hard disk, SSD, CDROM or USB depending on what the BIOS is configured for and a bunch of other things. Surely there's no way all those drivers fit in the boot sector of a drive? How is anything else ever read?
HTC Vive owner. Mine is mostly on the shelf. I bring it out when new people visit and want to give it a try, but I haven't played otherwise.

It's still a good time and the novelty isn't completely worn off...games like Chamber 19 (Xortex from The Lab) or Fantastic Contraption are a lot fun once I get myself to turn it on. But I haven't played a really compelling game--I'm hoping Budget Cuts is as good as it looks.

The wow factor is huge the first few times. The VR immersion really works. I just haven't found a game yet that combines that Wow with game mechanics I want to keep playing for more than the novelty of it.
Business in general is filled with cargo cult thinking in my experience.
So weird to see people trying to put a positive spin on this for Uber.

Uber lost in China, flat out.

> Negate Lyft's efforts to run around Uber in China by empowering Didi to crush them

What? Didi and Lyft struck a deep partnership. Lyft doesn't have Chinese operations. The pressure induced on Uber by Didi and Lyft working together is part of what got Uber to admit they were losing the fight and didn't have a reasonable path to victory.

As for framing their 20% stake (actually, it is 18%) as a win, consider this:

Uber burned over $2B in cash in China. If simply owning a % of Didi was an acceptable "win" state for Uber, they would've been much smarter to simply invest that $2B into Didi. Just a year ago, Didi was valuated at only $13B... even then, the $2B would've resulted in a ~13% ownership stake. Last year, they were valuated under $10B. Tencent got a ~20% stake in Didi for just $15M only 3 years ago.

In fact, Uber could've played a much stronger hand and ended up with far more than 18% of Didi if they'd offered to invest $1-2B and agreed not to enter China in the first place. Or, they could've made a credible threat by growing rapidly (as they did) for a year, and then offering a merger + an investment from a position of strength. Instead, they played a suboptimal strategy. They continued to operate in China and their growth slowed, meanwhile they burned even more money, their investors started making noise about backing out, and they gave Didi time to strike huge strategic partnerships (Kuaidi and Lyft) and raise a bunch more money, all of which strengthened their position relative to Uber even further.

The time to strike a combination with Didi was 1-2 years ago. They could've got a much, much better deal while still spending only the same total amount of money.

This was a loss for Uber, and it absolutely wasn't their intended outcome, nor their best outcome.

Uber has absolutely dominated in other markets. So, it's not like they're dummies or poor operators. They are amazing in terms of market domination. But let's not put a sugar coating on this. Call a win a win and a loss a loss.
Without doing any of the math, this actually seems like the right solution. An automated truck that can drive around while a swarm of drones are continuously dropping off packages - basically an aircraft carrier.
> I'd love to see an American's reaction to a speech where Xi Jinping exclaims that he will ensure that all Americans start using Baidu as their search engine.

Why would anyone care?
Nice article. Thanks for reminding this forgotten trick
I'm really into sim-racing (iRacing and Assetto Corsa). I used my DK2 and now my CV1 almost daily for the last 1.5 years.
Redlight-Seduction Buenos Aires Escorts
Also Zuckerberg is married to Priscilla Chan who is ethnic Chinese although she grew up speakingk Cantonese.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Chan_(philanthropi...
> I don't recommend doing ecommerce (directly) with it, or anything that could gather sensitive information, but for "just a website" with a bunch of cool stuff, WordPress is pretty much impossible to beat for the sheer amount of "cool stuff" you can do without ever writing code.

Yes, basically don't store anything like this in the WordPress database. There are tons of services you can use, like Hubspot for forms, that allow you to abstract all of these things away from your site and still use WordPress.
Asynchronous Android Programming book
Most of us have work to do. When we receive a document -- which may contain confidential, trade-secret, or even classified information -- that doesn't work in LO, we don't have the time to stop what we're doing, discern what in the document is giving us the problem, and craft a test document that replicates the provlem well enough to fix the bug. Our software needs to support us 100% in our work, which means 100% compatibility with established formats, or it's not going on our computer. Those are the only two choices.

The Ribbon is Microsoft-patented tech. Adopting it in LO would be infringing.

Yes, all this means Microsoft Office is the only viable solution. Cowboy up and purchase the fucking software.
> Problem is the club doesn't seem to want any new members above a certain age.

Which is precisely the problem that was being pointed out earlier - how meta! :)
> Could you point out the inaccuracies? Aside from the QR code non-sequitor, nothing jumped out at me.

It's an article about homegrown internet services that does not mention the Great Firewall, as you alluded to somewhat. Given the myriad reasons listed for the services' success, this could be considered by some as a lie by omission.
LeadGenius looks gross too. Has it been praised on HN?
wordpress.com. They deal with the security updates so you don't have to, and they have support for ssl now.
I have an oculus - I played with it daily for around two weeks after getting it, but can't remember the last time I touched it. I'm not a big gamer though - I mostly was interested in trying out and programming for VR and just have found other projects more interesting.
So, is ADD/ADHD actually a real thing, or is it just part of a trend to make everything out of social norm "a condition".

I mean naively speaking, we didn't evolve to sit in classrooms and read books, grow up and sit in the offices. So I would expect on spectrum of human temperaments, there must be a significant portion of people who are not cut for concentrating and calm-behavior.

Generally being skeptical about a lot of modern social "sciences" (potentially made for grants or big business, not reproducible, based on correlations), but aware of my ignorance here, I wonder if there is anything that would convince me that medicating my (hypotetical) hyper-active kid is justified, instead of pushing for environment in which the kid can just scream and run more.
As a user of external services to build my own SaaS, I am actually forced to prefer the per-use billing model. So much so that I have signed up for only 1 service that bills monthly (and because they are priced way below the competition's monthly charge), and 4 that have a usage-based billing model.

What the usage-based pricing model does, it helps you capture startup customers early on when they are pre-revenue, then you get to keep them as they grow.
Hello all, CTO and co-founder here.
Happy to answer any questions about the analytics, stack or anything else.

Cheers, KY
It feels like the author reduces Silicon Valley to SF. What he was idolizing exists in Palo Alto or Mountain View. Redwood City also has that "trouble-free little city ran by geniuses" feel to it. Downtown SF is another story and doesn't show that shiny techs-wanna-save-the-world vibe.
> "Those would have to be some impossibly harsh terms"

Harsh terms yes, but not uncommon.

Preferred shares are common for investors that pay out at a multiple of the common shares, so in an exit the preferred pool can be paid at a dramatically higher rate than common shares.

Funding often also comes with guarantees on return - i.e., if the exit price is below a threshold, the investor gets a guaranteed minimum return before other are paid. This works out for the company if it's a smashing success (the upside is also capped) but can wipe out common shareholders if the company sells for anything less than stratospheric valuations.

This should be a lesson to anyone thinking about working for a startup: a company raised $570M and sold for $3B, and in all likelihood the employees will receive very little from this sale.

In the modern startup fundraising scene, and the way startup equity is structured for employees, if your company exits for anything less than a mind-boggling headline-making valuation, you are almost certainly receiving little to nothing.
The may be smart, but the business model seems to be failing. Not clear how this helps WalMart much.
Vibrations bring still photos to life
I love python, and Django is awesome, but to claim that the paid for Aldryn Cloud comes close to the WordPress.org 5 minute installation [1] is stretching it.

It's not just about the time taken it's about the almost complete flexibility of any web server anywhere.

The Aldryn Cloud is if anything similar to the WordPress.com setup where you just fill in a form and they handle the hosting for you.

But WordPress.org had their 5-minute installation sorted out 10 years ago.

N.B. That now along with the installation you have a complete choice of what language you want your entire system in. The amount of work that has been put into translation by WordPress and making sure that the entire rather huge ecosystem can be translated is phenomenal.

They have some pretty good automated system testing for security flaws in the plugins that are submitted. I've witnessed what happens when one fails. They send you what the problem is and how to replicated it.

Bare in mind all of this has been done through open source code with what I'd say is still done with companies that are run with very little greed. You won't find Mark Zuckerberg here answering questions on HN, but Matt Mullenweg has long been giving answers on here [2].

[1]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Famous_5-Min...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt
The data fluctuates month to month. The data for both months was accurate. They may get political in how they present the data, but the way the collect and generate the data appears sound.
Nope, leverage ratios are still too generous and if a bank failed, you can bet your ass we'd bail them out in a heartbeat.
Using Anchore's Open Source Container Validation Engine with Jenkins
And yet, somehow, NeverBounce is a viable business.
> So if I make business decisions via ouija board or in a cocaine induced rage, I'll have a leg up?

No, but you'll have a job on Wall Street or maybe be a hedge fund manager.
They are a YC company.
Yup, this is poor writing: "Y is true because had X been true then Y would follow"
Ask HN: What's the best investment you've made?
Public or private market — what's the best investment you've made? How sure were you when you made it that it would pan out as it has? How long did it take to pan out? And have your investments (number of investment, amount per investment) increased or decreased over the last ten years?
>the world and all the accumulated knowledge of mankind opens up to you, as long as you're willing to go after it.

And have the time and access, two things that are lacking for many who are willing to go after it.

I could have learned twice what I did in college were I not working 40 hours a week to pay my rent and feed myself.
I don't think that's a very helpful rule of thumb. For one thing, it defies the notion of supply and demand.

The hot jobs with modern skills are paying the most and also desperate to find people. It's people who favor older stacks who have trouble finding a job and get paid less.
To clarify, this is why running a rouge access point is bad. It isn't (as I thought from the title) about why it's bad for the conference organizers to run their own conference WiFi.
I doubt it as well, and I completely agree with what you and others have said. While I rarely use Windows, it's unsurprising to see software from smaller development shops release software with no signature (or at least historically it's been unsurprising). So, this complacency sort of breeds the habit of simply clicking through and installing anyway. Heck, I even remember when installing certain drivers often required clicking through similar warnings since they occasionally weren't signed.

While I'd like to think things are generally better now, I think the historical inertia of Windows' ecosystem and how conditioned users have become to ignoring such warnings is at least partially (mostly?) at fault. There's no easy way to correct people's behavior, and enforcing certain settings (e.g. only installing signed software) would mean either 1) upsetting power users or 2) users still finding a way to disable such checks.
> So, a reasonable question to ask is what can I recommend to non-technical people when they need a website quickly and inexpensively that won't make me feel like I'm setting them up to get owned?

Get them to use a hosted WordPress solution. So many times I see people hire someone to set up a VPS with a customised version of WordPress and then think it'll just run itself and stay secure.
Could the same have been said for Dollar Shave Club?

Maybe a good time to join a CPG/e-commerce startup :)
The invasion of Iraq is what I had in mind. I wanted to point out the senselessness of that operation.
And now you're trying to make up for it!
AMA with Kenneth – Creator of Requests, Python Overlord at Heroku – is now live
Don't forget the USA's ace in the hole for brewing civil unrest in other countries: Hollywood. (I'm being mordant here; not advocating for international psy-ops.)

American media project a depiction of life that is very attractive by design, and this raises expectations among consumers of this media. If Chinese people were not aware of the lifestyles of westerners, the Chinese government would be under less pressure to improve standards of living. And yes everyone in every country knows that popular culture depicts dreams and aspirations rather than reality, but even with this discounting of what people in the developing world see they become aware of the quality of life in the west.

This causes an expectations revolution that is putting tremendous pressure on the Chinese government, which is not necessarily a bad thing but can cause society to destabilize if growth stops.
Violating the Outer Space Treaty would be a cool thing to go to jail for.
> Are we not human? Do we not know ourselves?

These are aren't mutually exclusive.

But suffice it to say people just happen to have similar opinions about fashion, religion, ideologies, etc. as what is needed to fit in and global media has accelerated the process. The fact that people like stuff isn't in question, but we're amazingly good copy machines for reasons that helped us become the dominant species on the planet.
You make it sound like the West consciously decided to outsource to China. This is not the case, and the West would not have had the unity to be able to consciously do such a thing.

Simple market dynamics caused this, albeit caused by market manipulation on China's part. China buys US debt, lowering the value of the Chinese dollars to the US dollar, making stuff in China dirt cheap.
> First the law expressly forbids a patent on ideas.

But in practice, is entirely about broad ownership of ideas. An intermittent wiper is a neat idea, but not at all hard to design.

Yes, in this story the inventor found a 3rd-party (Mercedes) part using almost his exact design but that simply proves how obvious the solutions are.

Similarly, slide-to-unlock (etc) are absolutely, worthlessly, trivial technical ideas. It's good UI perhaps, but it's harder to decide which direction users should have to swipe than it is to actually implement.

> Moreover, this patent actually fostered innovation for a competing product

No, it forced worthless UI changes. Like making one car company use a joystick instead of a wheel.

> simply violate someone's better invention without paying for it.

And this is the crux. You think that it's an invention, as opposed to a UI standard. What technical details most impress you about it? What, other than the UI element, do you think is novel?
AirBnB Launches In-House Design Studio
I work at a makerspace and we just got our 2nd vive. We also have a Rift and a Hololens. The Vive gets the most use. I go through periods of use and then ignore it for a bit. But as long as games continue to be released, I think I would be using it regularly. I am real excited for more multiplayer games. PoolNationVR is a great example of a quality polished VR experience that you just cant get in any other medium. Cant wait for a multiplayer ping pong experience. Rec Room and AltSpace are 2 other interested free social vr experiences.
You can use cert signed keys with ssh.
Just bought it, I'm on my second week, everyday I can't wait to get home and play again, using monitors is completely obsolete now... I have a friend that has it since 2013, and he use it almost everyday ( he himself says ). And I am also a developer myself, I had a game that I had put aside because I wasn't enjoying it so much, so I decided to put VR support on it, and now it lives again!

Edit: Oculus CV1