skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is organic growth even possible anymore for social apps?
Starting to wonder if social networks and apps now always need a significant marketing budget to get off the ground. Finding it impossible to raise basic awareness for Roomvine (http://get.roomvine.com) with our limited budget.

We have tried social media marketing but that doesn't really get eyeballs unless you pay per impression. We have tried using student volunteers on campuses but even that rarely converts into downloads.

Seems that people who can get their new app in the hands of users either need to have the money or have a reasonable personal network in the segment they're targeting (in our case, university students).

Open to ideas, feedback and suggestions (or even help?) if you have any.

#HopingForSilverBullet
Real-world tests of small wind turbines in Netherlands and the UK

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6954
Gosh this hits close to home. I tried to start a business with a friend beginning of the year. Too many meetings... Too much money on business cards and logos... Too much travelling... I definitely learned a hell of a lot, but I did have this nagging feeling the whole while like "wait, why do I have a business card, I don't even know what I am supposed to be selling here".
Git deployment requires you to make commits. I prefer having a find + rsync based script that finds modified files and uploads them via SSH.
Has it really been 12 years of ample funding? My recollection is that the downturn in 08-09 was really steep, with Sequoia sending out warnings to all their portfolio companies, mass layoffs at most Bay Area tech companies (my roommate when I moved out here went through 4 rounds at EMC, and was doing the work of 3 people by the end of it), dramatic rent decreases, and the almost total extinction of the Web 2.0 startup craze (remember that?). It recovered in late 2010 with the mobile boom - that's when companies like Uber, Instagram, SnapChat, Parse, etc. were founded. And those companies that managed to survive the downturn (DropBox, AirBnB, KickStarter, Whatsapp, Evernote) emerged quite strong, and were ready to take on massive amounts of funding afterwards.
Interesting to see that all screenshots are taken on a Mac...
that is correct, they even created a website (with a competitor) for some of the people that were let go: http://j-quit.weebly.com/
> "the unimaginably high likelihood of failure"

What? I can imagine the rate might be as high as 100%. That's hardly "unimaginable".

I am not trying to be merely annoying or pedantic here. I simply want authors to tighten up their writing and exaggerate less. With an exaggeration like that, I stop reading.
But that's the whole point and you can turn it to your advantage. Report the salary you want, possibly higher than the one you have and all the recruiters and potential employers will know not to contact you if they cannot pay that much.
I really cringe on statement like this. Since startups are not non-profit organizations I tend to cringe when I hear all this "making the world a better place" mantra. I understand that many startup founders have values and vision but as soon as funding comes I think it gets more complicated that.
Sotoki (by kiwix) [https://github.com/kiwix/sotoki/tree/wiredtiger]

The project aims at making stackexchange website available offline.

Fix the memory leak that was found in wiredtiger branch.

Python

GPL3+
Breakfast is for closers!
Main developer here, feel free to ask any questions :)
It's a real metric in so far as people are actually using your product. Otherwise it's just some email addresses.
Right. The paper is much better than the PR.

It's not clear there's a real security problem here in being able to identify the prime generator for RSA keys. Unless that generator is weaker than it should be. They did find at least two key generators which look suspicious. One generator never generates certain byte combinations, which indicates a possible serious weakness in the random number generation.

Weak RSA key generators have been found in the past. Big flap back in 2012.[1] Some keys were found which were products of two large primes where two keys shared the one factor. This is hugely unlikely statistically; the generator had to be defective. This isn't that bad.

The real worry, of course, is a designed-in weakness in the random number generator, one that's not detectable by the usual statistical tests.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/crypto-shocker-four-...
Electro Music Perfect Songs Pearls Tracks and History Review Part II
Slim in 6 Weight Loss Eating Plan Pdf
40% Education, 60% Experience. These are good proportions.
Real Challenges and Benefits of Starting an Online Grocery Store
It depends, will they use private email servers?
Key Factors to Help You Strike the Best Personal Loan Deal
Personal loans help you meet immediate multiple expenses such as a wedding in the family, a vacation or a home renovation. While these loans do not typically require collateral to back the cash given to you, lenders do need you to complete a lot of paperwork and submit many documents before they approve such loans.
Read more @ http://www.biz2credit.in/blog/2016/10/27/signing-up-personal-loan/
Thanks for this comment.

I think you just saved me time reading the article and further HN comments. In fact, I feel so much time was saved, I used some of it to write this.

I'm serious.
Maybe, but I had to implement Hoare partition scheme which is used in Quicksort a few months ago. If I didn't know Quicksort I wouldn't probably have an idea that this algorithm existed.
the major question is how would a household pay a cost of an iPhone (around INR 50,000) if they can't afford electricity. I know that I sound cynic but that's the truth in India. Rural areas which lack electricity mainly do so because of lack of enough demand that can pay for the electricity. There are NGOs/Non-profits like 'Barefoot College' providing solar-lanterns which IMO is a better way forward: Empowering people by enabling them in making those lanterns which in turn light their houses up. The cost of lantern is factored in the labor work they do in making them.
SALVE: Server Authentication with Location VErification [pdf]
> More often than not, meetings are a waste of time, leaned on by people who don’t want to make a difficult decision and would rather punt it to a group.

I have a different experience. Meetings aren't the problem. Getting 2+ people together is important. The problem is how the interaction happens and the costs and benefits involved. No one said that leadership or communication is easy. Building collective will is both an art and a science.

I say this: don't blame meetings. They are necessary. Learn to run better meetings.
Unit Testing Can Improve Your Learning Process and Make You a Better Developer
I was out of the US then, so I may well be wrong. My recollection (working remotely as a consultant) was that people panicked for a month or two, and after that working in tech was like a magical oasis from the chaos.

What was other people's experience like?
Um, no. Just no. If anything there is something right with people who don't use Facebook. It is tremendously addictive, and fails to do more than provide the illusion of closeness with family, friends, and acquaintances. One of the smartest things I've ever done was delete my Facebook profile. I've never looked back. When I tell people I'm not on Facebook they're absolutely astonished--as if the world would cease to exist without Facebook. Without Facebook I spend more time focusing on real relationships, and enjoy being surprised by what people have been up to when we catch up--via phone, or in person. On Facebook it would just be data points, news, trivia. Like the time my Dad told me my cousin had moved to Texas. "Oh, really?" I said. "How does she like it there?" To which he responded, "oh, I don't know. I just saw from her Facebook that they moved to Texas." Doh.
Mobile Applications of Secret Handshakes Over Bluetooth LE [pdf]
yes, then my firewall rules will grow significantly :)
But then I would be able to use IP masks, as with dnsgate. The hosts file doesn't take wildcards.
The large chunk of malware distributed via websites is through hacked sites which fire the malicious scipts only a in 2-3 visits out of 100. Ads are responsible for about 20-30% of the malware distribution.

So yeah. Your argument does not hold.
There are instances where Chomsky does show that US policy often is ideologically motivated, for instance the Vietnam war which he notes, "could have ended in 1965" as the major aims had been achieved - the region had been inoculated as Indonesia had fallen and Vietnam was devastated.
On the other hand, what you describe doesn't sound like a start up from the high-growth/external investment required point of view.

Sure startup is a sexier way to describe a young, small business but semantics aside, this feels like "traditional" business looking for glamour. Of which I am equally guilty, donnt take this as criticism.
Developers, developers, developers...
Is This the Most Life-Like Robot Ever Built?
Same here. Obviously you're 100% right in how little of a target demographic we are, but I'll never forget the sheer joy of finally saving up the money for the n900 and getting it.

As mentioned, it'd be a usable device on its own to this day. If newspaper sites hadn't become unusable without an adblocker, if I didn't need browser updates every nanosecond and if the latest memory-hogging web trend language wasn't, well, what it was. I'd still use it.

Now I own two mobile devices. A BlackBerry Passport. Great UI, physical keyboard, indestructible. Dead software ecosystem, horribly closed source, last of its kind and while there's a lot to love It's not hard to see why. Then there's a rooted HTC phone. Great choice of software (termux alone makes up for so much). Hate hate hate ssh'ing with a touchscreen. Typing generally. Terrible battery life. Seems like it'll die from one harsh drop.

If my social life would not force mobile messengers on me, I'd have gone back to 20€ dumbphones and text/voice only. Though I bet even those come with a horrible browser and the accompanying remotely exploitable holes now.

All in all? Wonderful project. I'm very much hoping for a third player in the mobile game.
I don't know if there is any shared host cheaper than that (I suppose there are but I'm too lazy to check right now), but sometimes the appeal in using a shared host is in some of their features which you don't get in a VPS (e.g.: cpanel).
Re uppercase: can't afford a syntax-highlighting editor?
I am curious to know the cost of maintenance. Industrial sized equipment is subject to severe corrosion [1], I am not sure if the cost is really one time.

[1] http://www.financialexpress.com/archive/corrosion-india-losi...
Curious why you make the distinction between for-profit and non-profit organizations. All organizations face the challenge of their vision of "making the world a better place" not necessarily lining up with the vision of the folks for whom they want to make it better. For-profit companies at least have the signal of "someone is willing to pay me for this" as a concrete guide to whether they align with anyone.

Watsi's founder talked a fair bit about this in his Startup School presentation (which is excellent, BTW):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlT3UhC7NwQ#t=490
Government imitating Silicon Valley again.
Елки-24.рф
Entrepreneurship is just a goal for the sake of itself, if you're engineer/tech and you are aware you are just a "slave" who does all the work for almost nothing/a little while the so called "entrepreneurs" do almost nothing and get everything, why don't you become a master (i.e. entrepreneur) yourself, and employ another fool to do the real work for you while you grow a fortune doing almost nothing.
Sorry for my English.
> OK, just got an office (sort of, it's shared) in Bangkok but no one works there!

I'm a little curious about this, what do you mean? It sounds like you run pretty lean; why get an office if nobody works there?
Really a poor place too, since we can simulate quantum behavior, albeit inefficiently.
I loved Nokia's smartphones so much. E70, E61, N900... Those were the pinnacles of smartphoning for me. Their successors somehow manage to fall short in vital aspects every single time, it's beyond frustrating.
On UNIX, the Windows, macOS culture is to provide GUIs for developer tools even if they might look a bit ugly.
Interoperability between R and other Languages
My boss used to say breakfast/eating/sleep/sports/anything that's not work is for wimps... Ah Silicon Valley.
Got some kind of build recipe for that? A mobile ssh station that doesn't suck would be worth my enternal soul to me. Or two of those!
What a disaster.

They speak about an open platform (forget open-source), just being open to communities that might benefit from their expertise.

Here is a piece from ages ago, what slack means for huge communities:
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-w...
2 writes from the driver, two from the passenger, each minute is 0.0666... per second.

To get 1M/s, we need 15M cars.

[1] says there are about 2M trips per day, so does this mean Uber records the location of all users every 30 seconds, rather than only when they're waiting for or in a car?

[1] http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/uber-statistics/
Can someone find another source for this? Because the one up now is hardly what you'd call credible:

http://theusualroutine.com/2016/05/24/russia-orders-us-tell-...
> I'm assuming cable makers will stop doing sub-par ones and just stick to Thunderbolt 3 capable

Thunderbolt 3 cables are expensive (just like regular Thunderbolt cables), and there's no chance that cable makers drop cheaper cables. None, zip, zero.

Furthermore, all it takes is one manufacturer making the non-Thunderbolt 3 cables to make things as I described…and remember, using the "wrong" cable can hurt your machine.

The situation with USB-C isn't good and it's very likely that many machines will be damaged as a result of not using unique connectors for unique capabilities/requirements on the cables themselves.
The phrasing reminds me of the Zune product: "Let me squirt you a song". That is not a good thing. :/
Read this article: http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/why-modi-governments... and you'll know why.

The problem is not "lack of enough demand that can pay for electricity". The problem is meeting environmental standards, which incidentally, wasn't a problem at all for most developed countries (there wasn't much awareness about the cost to the environment when US was forging ahead with coal power). Today, the same US asks India to limit using coal for power generation. The only alternative now for India is to either go with Nuclear energy based power grids (which will take longer to setup) or solar/wind (higher initial investment).
Aleppo siege: UN envoy Mistura 'appalled' by rebel attacks
Good luck to them but given the intermittent nature of wind, the main problem with wind energy is storage not the turbine. So a turbine like this, which is probably rated at 500 Watts or so, must be coupled with a battery pack like the Tesla's Powerwall. Even then, 2-5 kWh is not significant. The power consumption of a typical refrigerator 1-1.5 kWh/day.
Node.js is rapidly replacing Java and .NET
Why, cosplay is much more easier and pleasant than the actual thing, especially in the age of social media and role governed behavior - the age of cosplay.

You wouldn't believe how many idiots are cosplaying scientists, leave alone all these hipsters cosplaying intelligence..

In general, it boils down to the social advantage of displaying "success" and "competence" - socially constructed markers.

But there is a beautiful principle in biology - the "signals" must be honest and costly, impossible to cheat - one cannot cosplay parasite resistance, superior foraging ability, or good genes in general. One cannot cosplay youth and health. All these celebrities are ridiculous.

Hipsterism is cheap cosplay of intelligence. Founders cosplay special talents and abilities they does not possess. Nothing to see here.
IMC Trading | Amsterdam | Full-time | On-site | Visa and relocation offered

As a C++ developer you’ll be working alongside traders to implement strategies which will challenge you to be creative with your implementation. You’ll need to timely produce high quality solutions meeting requirements and managing overall complexity of our systems. One of the most fun aspects of the job is that we have a very quick feedback loop. We release early and often to get incremental benefits as they are developed. You’ll be working in a highly motivated team, controlling end-to-end product development. We trade in the most competitive markets across the globe. Our software makes millions of trading decisions daily. We win by making better and faster decisions than our competition. That is why we operate at the bleeding edge of technology.

If you are interested, we’d love to get in touch. Send your email to: dorine.vanderschalk [at] imc.com or take a look at our website: www.imc.com/careers. Our process will consist of a home assignment, two telephone interviews and an on-site interview.
Very cool. Simple enough for me to use as opposed to large MNCs
Hundred times this. You see Qlik/Cognos Analytics/PowerBI/Alteryx/whatever sales guys making demos that make executives drool over the seeming easiness and wow-factor these tools are capable of producing. When the time comes to plug those over your production operative systems, CRM, whatelse, there comes "the now wait a minute" moment especially if your systems and their data models happen to be even slightly on the more complex side.

Edit: The basis of succesful implementation of these tools is to have the data in digestible format and I feel that transforming the data to that business usable format is where the big job is.

In my opinion well done ETL and DW are not going anywhere, even though in some circles they are said to be things of yesterday. Then there's a huge difference between an OK ETL/DW and a Brilliant ETL/DW. Designing a good ETL process is as large parts business and context knowledge as it is a application of data engineering skills. For example, it requires business knowledge AND data engineering knowledge to determine what kind of granular level advanced metrics could or should be calculated during ETL. Service level metrics and service level categorization for different kind of customers/claims/orders/... would be a perfect simple to understand example problem - there could be attributes and value ranges behind multiple relations that probably need to be taken into account and understood.

Edit 2: I've been involved in both sales and execution of so called data discovery sprints, which are a 4-6 week periods where we bring a data engineer, a subject matter expert and client key personnel working together and let them go "fishing". The key thing is that this provides an low cost way for the clients to possibly gain insight on the potential their data could provide. On the other hand, many prospective clients just have so messy data that this data discovery job can't be recommended, which leads to other possible opportunities (MDM, ETL, DW).
O2S-FR-T2-18X Oxygen Sensors – Screw Fit Probe – O2S-FR-T2-18X
> The main purpose of https ... Until now, it has been widely accepted ... No one expected that ... were supposed to be completely hidden from users as well as attackers. The worrying discovery ..

> To help solve this serious issue, Enigma Bridge is proud to have developed a cost-effective, ground-breaking hardware security service which is based in the cloud

This is just a FUD piece trying to sell their fancy cloud-based secure hype generator.
Don't let your dirty hippie sysadmins use scary "Software standard use" methods like OpenSSL for key management!

> ... whether companies think about the quality of their encryption keys or let their administrators use any tool at hand – instead of using secure hardware key generators
> Use of validated secure hardware for key generation is the best approach to protect against many attacks.

To be fair, some method for evaluating the security weaknesses in public keys (like blacklisting the weak Debian keys) is a good thing. I just take offense at this "custom secure hardware > standard software" thing.
ServerlessConf London: Recap
I love 18F! A few months back they published a set of web design standard [0] that I really liked. Accessibility is among their top concerns, so it's legible in all devices and there's a lot of contrast.

I used their color suggestions for my blog [1] (still haven't updating syntax highlighting, terribly sorry about that). The two things I changed were typography sizes and fonts. I decided it would be best to use preinstalled fonts instead of loading a third-party font. I don't think third-party fonts justify slower load times for a static website like my blog. But overall, I really like their color scheme, as it's very comfortable to read on any screen.

[0] https://standards.usa.gov/getting-started/

[1] https://blog.cesarandreu.com/
Font Awesome 5 Campaign
The difference is, I can choose to buy a startup's product, or I can not and watch them go bust with someone else's money. This is the government, they take your money by force and you are forced to "purchase" the "product". Because you have no choice, it would be amoral to treat the government like a startup and compel citizens to fund this "product".
In Seattle there were mass layoffs, people lost homes, the economy spent a few years in a form of stasis. Relative to what I saw happen in other parts of the country though, we were minorly scathed.
Happy Birthday Kendall Jenner
How we recoded HADOPI
A hard peace
Households in the USA (and Canada) are outliers in home electricity use, using about 40% more than numbers 3 and 4 (Australia and France) and double that of number 5 (Japan) in the list at http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity... (I think that list is complete for the top 5, but am not sure)
When you think about it, college degrees in IT/CS are the wrong way to go about IT/CS learning. A 3 year apprenticeship like an electrician or plumber does would make a lot more sense. 60% of your time is spent at work, shadowing and helping an experienced professional who can show you the ropes and explain concepts in the real world. Remaining time spent in the classroom doing theory and learning new stuff.
My degree attempted something like this, with a lot of guest companies providing projects that amounted to coursework. For example, one coursework was to make a front and back end in asp.net with a predefined set of features for a company.

The problem with apprenticeships is that educators are handing over a large part of your training to a company with unknown factors, like mental people with random hangups. Still, I'm sure many of us when we got our first job felt hopelessly unprepared for working in a real company.
Device-free localization with fine-grained subcarrier information
From this thread:

>> a few people who take a bit more holiday than others, but I don't think they are over-stepping what's reasonable

>> as long as you're being reasonable, and you communicate your intention early enough for deadlines

>> If it is being abused your manager will speak to you about it.

Maybe it is just me but I miss the "unlimited" part of the "unlimited vacation policy". Unlimited is not always reasonable, non-abusive, manager-happy-making. It is unlimited.

For example at my last job I took over a process where my predecessor struggled getting things done and missed deadlines regularly. I am not a genius but too lazy so I automated the hell out of the process so that I only needed 3-4 days a month to accomplish everything on time. With an "unlimited vacation policy" I just could have taken the other 16 days of the month off. But seriously, does this actually happen to anyone? Only if is your business and you are your own boss.

[edit] Hier in Germany it is common to have 30 days holiday a year. Nobody would call it "unlimited" but "not enough".
Leverage Your Content Marketing Efforts