skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Age is a factor. Young people whilst educated highly are still very naive when it comes to thinking through the implications of their actions, so they are easy to manipulate and have them produce some nefarious dual use tech.

In fact I would go so far to suggest that someone in their 40's has learnt enough about the ways of the world to know alot better the differences in the rights and wrongs of the world. In other words, you are set up to fail if you follow the traditional educational route.

However its also worth pointing out, the age old problem of spotting giftedness. Einstein was mediocre at school and during his early year's at Uni, in fact it wasnt until his 30's that he started to come up with decent theories, so alot of companies hinder their growth & innovation potential by recruiting youngsters fresh out of an educational establishment.
The uptick...
On a single code base, the most I've worked with at a time is 12.
The scope of your question is too large. Do not compare the complexity of AI to the human brain. Instead compare AI to traditional robotics. In expert systems rules are laid out and logic chains can be followed. AI is a black box of a billion random weighted nodes. The system does not care about 'why' when reducing loss.
Mercado global de datos personales
Thanks, good points to think about!
Going back to the original point, we're actually talking about slightly different things: you're talking about audience retention (making sure that someone comes back), not discoverability (making sure they find you in the first place).

Neither an RSS feed nor a subscribe link enable people to find you in the first place. They do, however, make it more likely that they'll come back after finding you.

You should absolutely also build retention techniques into your Medium posts. And your custom blog. And anywhere else where you care about people reading your content, and keeping on reading it.
Well, that plan does sound plausible.

Seems smart and social enough to get a good job in development.

And on top of that he is quite good at writing. Maybe that's something - in combination with programming skills - he could focus on, career-wise...
I had an idea at some point, but I do not know it if would be feasible. For me it seems that sponsorships/native ads are better than the usual banner style intrusive ads.

Would it be possible to still have a syndicated ad network, but that it would feed you articles in some structured format, that you would get on your backend, and then insert as articles into your blog/website? This way you could format them any way you want.

Of course the payment model would have to shift from displays to something like overall performance of the ads (by scanning outbound clicks and associating them with purchases) and pay by month. And some policing in order to avoid stuff like getting the ad from the network and never actually displaying it.
And it's managed in git.
Oh yeah definitely. Also cause scaling maybe making decent efficient bearings would be nigh impossible and it still would be less efficient.

I know a recreational motorboat is less efficient than a car by a lot, but...scaling.

Oh engineering with so many trade-offs and sad realities. I'm glad I work in a field of rediculous low-hanging fruit.
Dunno really. A human would watch the ghosts behaviour and guess their likely future behaviours based on that. I'm not sure if the software gets that, as it were, or how you'd tweak it to do so.
That's one area where I would like to see web browsers cooperate a bit. At least Firefox and Chromium. This would give better tools to everyone. I won't bet on it, however.
Flow cookbook (gradual typechecker for js)
Doorman: an osquery fleet manager
I guess by supporting the "good" ad networks, if there's any that don't spam your service with 50 iframes and divs and just return simple ads no strings attached. That or if you're hosting a blog, use a known free host. I see Tumblr is working on allowing users to monetize their blogs and get a cut from the profits.
AlphaGo often plays surprising moves. Typically high-level commentary describes the horizon of "surprising" here as playing wider, faster, and more influence-oriented than current professionals think is appropriate. AlphaGo is repeatedly praised for identifying moves which seem too unconcerned with the opponents threats and instead take more power on the board in a leisurely fashion. The first big surprising move it played was a "4th line shoulder hit" which was thought to give too much territory to the opponent (a "3rd line shoulder hit" is considered a very fine and popular move). AlphaGo showed that at the right time even the 4th line variant is good since is gave AlphaGo large influence at the right time and position.

A lot of go comes down to timing. AlphaGo doesn't seem to play moves which are inhuman in that they just make zero sense as much as plays moves which are more daring than humans would like to try. Then, infallibly, it turns out that AlphaGo's daring move had the mark of being amazingly well-timed.
> How can we replace ad networks with something better and saner?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

Not enough traction? Someone has to start using it, people will adapt...
For $ 449.99 I can get a decent Windows 10 laptop, no thanks.
>Also, isn't standard practice for companies to only confirm employment rather than give a review exactly for this kind of lawsuits?

That would be the problem for me if I was an investor. What other types of liabilities does this firm have? They seem to have management that is unable to control themselves how can I be sure this is a isolated case and not standard operating procedure?
Im talking about the faulty logic and wooly thinking that underpins all of those issues. Its all a symptom of that problem.
>> For me 200k employed at Ford seem reasonable.

On top of this think of how much work they have contractors doing that don't count towards the 200k
I think the concern here is more that the blog of a "Designer Advocate at Mozilla" adds context which is totally lost when "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" appears on HN. It's a great title for the blog post, but it's both misleading and uninformative when pulled verbatim from its natural habitat.
Except that he is still using Disqus, which is free to use because they have moved to ad supported model (for the most part).

Even if he isn't running the ads, they are using the script to track users across sites and then feeding that into ad networks.
That depends... are these people who were later successful? Or just those who failed and quit?

If it's the former, then yes. And I'd like to know "what went wrong, and how I fixed it" and some things along those lines.

If it's the latter... then no thank you. I'll stick to the people who overcame adversity and were successful.
This is a perfect example of how online advertising should work. Get a sponsor, show their unobtrusive message. Done.

Can't find a sponsor? Can't have them trust you, or accept advertising that doesn't track user or show targeted ads? Can't afford the time to chase sponsors and manage the advertising?

Then try a paywall. What, no one subscribes? Then take the content off the internet. You have an unsustainable business model.
1. Yes obviously Google does "manually" modify results. Most often, for legal reasons.

2. Manual modification isn't necessary in this scenario. Confused and frustrated people like those I describe above are likely to hit the back button, and that's a strong signal that this result wasn't what they wanted.
You'll be surprised how much faster pages feel without ad scripts - I noticed significant improvements after implementing a no-ads premium option on our website. Even with an ad blocker, things just feel snappier if the scripts simply aren't there in the first place.

I decided to go one step further with my personal site and eliminate all JS completely. I don't get enough traffic to make any kind of analytics or ad code worthwhile.
You already designed it to your preference. I'm sharing mine with you. Reduce the tile size by 50%, turn opacity to 100% on the title bar and increase opacity of the tile thumbnail by 25%?
>> at a scale nothing like Facebook/Twitter/Google

Medium - 150

Google - 55,000

Facebook - 15,000

Twitter - 4,000
I don't think this is so simple with one person shops, as knowing one's value propositions, revenue/profit numbers & acquisition channels etc goes vastly beyond the concept of the presumably worthless 'idea' that people usually refer to in this context.
To be fair, we could probably have both if national rail was a priority. The interstate system was built over decades during periods of high military spending and several conflicts.

Modernization of our nuclear capability isn't necessary a bad thing (if you assume MAD doctrine is effective and that the nuclear triad is a key piece of this).
I found recursion rather easy. But I think it's often introduced too early.

Most people I've seen struggling with it hadn't really understood what a function definition was and how they are scoped. Somehow, creating a function and calling it somewhere else didn't totally convey the concept. In most peoples head these two places used a different function somehow, or they didn't understand that a function creates new variables on the stack, they just assumed that they always override the old ones.
Understanding Different GC Modes with Concurrency Visualizer
Two things:

1. What's the proper way to do a NULL check? In the first example, they show how a NULL check could be optimized away, but I didn't see where they explained how to do it the right way. I might have just missed it though.

2. It would be nice if compilers offered a special optimization flag that performs most optimizations, but also “fills in the gaps” for non standard behavior by behaving how people expect. I realize that this would essentially be like each compiler implementing its own version of the standard in a way, but the reality is that if 99% of the people are making an assumption about how the compiler is going to do something, maybe that’s how the compiler should do it? Perhaps like a “speed+security” optimization flag. GCC already has some flags to handle certain questionable things such as strict aliasing, etc…
Maybe something already exists, IDK. I guess the real solution would be to change the actual standard.

EDIT: A comment elsewhere provides a good response to my second point. It was along the lines of "which optimizations are okay then? Most optimizations broke code at some point".

I guess my response would be to only disable the ones that are the most common trouble makers. Another factor could be the performance gain vs amount of bugs it causes. I am reconsidering my second point though...
No strong preference, I like both. But styled-components beed to ve road tested in a large project before we can appraise wether they're ready for a production ready boilerplate.
Most of the businesses in the list are very easy to copy. There are neither rocket science, neither patents to protect them, neither big money to pay lawyers to protect their work.

Knowing how well the product sells, you can copy it piece-by-piece by saving a lot of time trying different approaches. Author of original product already did all the hard work guessing what will work the best. You just come, copy and profit from his work.
I have just discovered the previous write-ups about your business numbers [0] and it is awesome! So much valuable information. Thanks for taking the time to share!

[0] https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes
>> Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch,

It looks similar but to say it hasn't changed is silly
This is a very honest and upfront article about analytics: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160915/18183535533/traff...
Do you have an exit strategy? As in, something binding in the case you exit or shut down?
Daring Fireball has similar curated, unobtrusive ads. This is the ideal ad-sponsored content, but it seems like it takes a very large audience to be viable and worth the time.
Many one-person businesses focus on niches and do one thing great. Often they also offer great (aka personal) support. Also, quite often, they are great in building a community around their service. Additionally, many of the solo entrepreneurs are good teachers and share what they know. All these factors together make their services (and themselves) so valuable that a competitor with a slightly better price will not take away all customers.
It also doesn't solve the issues for most advertisers. I can't imagine that a large e-commerce site would want to make thousands of individual deals with sites that may or may not generate the desired traffic.

His solution doesn't really scale, for the advertisers, which is why the ad networks exists.

My main issue with ad networks is that they simply aren't technically competent enough to run an internet facing business. Most of them seem to be run by good sales people and not so good IT staff. Most of those I've dealt with simply doesn't understand how the internet works.
Money goes where it's treated the nicest. So where is it going now?
This is really the best analogy to explain PowerShell to Unix people. PowerShell's sweet spot is really not interactive use, but sysadmin-type scripting. It's very much like using Python for sysadmin tasks.
That's nice, care to share some stats?
HN should just get bigger hide buttons and rely on comment count instead of voting.

I could clean up the front page much faster and still see which articles are interesting.
> Android Things used to be called Brillo.

Yes, but the APIs aren't the same as pure Android, and originally Brillo was expected to have a set of C++ Frameworks instead of Java, and Google gave up on it.
Competition can also grow a sector, bringing in many new customers that may have otherwise dismissed an idea or might not have even heard of the idea without the exposure driven by the competition.
>Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous.

I was thinking the same thing. He also has a relatively narrow range of content with an audience that is highly likely to be interested in what his sponsors are offering.

What is the solution for sites that have a much broader audience? It seems like the sponsorship model would become something like NPR's where you're generically trying to target "upper- and upper-middle-class" people with an opportunity for virtue signaling by providing a brief blurb about your foundation's activities or a generic description of the services you offer. Not helpful for most sites.
To 1. I think if you were to do the null check and then dereference, the problem would go away. Oh - and use the variable holding the dereferenced data.
> You have an unsustainable business model.

You have an unsustainable business model given current available technical solutions that meet your ethical criteria. That's quite different.
Very much so, I have tried to paste in some more complex sequence diagrams I have written and they almost work. Except no aliases and no on the fly creation/destruction of participants. (or maybe the syntax is different)

I would prefer if this actually followed the plantuml syntax exactly, that way one could ditch the official java application which is quite bad (and graphs are quite ugly)
Reminds me of http://www.websequencediagrams.com, though that isn't open source.
What you describe sounds similar to affiliate marketing [1]: Post a link to external services and get commission for clicks (maybe depending on conversion).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
In 2016 I took content creation somewhat seriously and the end result was enough income to sustain living in NY.

Not sure if it's worth blogging about yet. Are other developers interested to see how to potentially make software engineer-tier salaries without having to work for another company?

(Note: I also started with nothing. No mentors, no following, no existing profile, no paid advertising, etc.).

Edit: If you're interested, my site is https://nickjanetakis.com.

If you sign up anywhere on the site, you'll get notified when I release content related to starting your own business / building up your brand as a software developer.

I recommend filling out the form at https://nickjanetakis.com/learn-in/2017, because you can include what you want to learn most about which helps me figure out what I should start writing about first.
I think charging money (paywall, donations) is the only acceptable way for sites that can't do "big player" ads such as finding sponsors or having native advertising.
I suspect it's a number of reasons.

- I work to my own schedule. There's no artificial start time. If I feel like I've got something to contribute at any point I sit down and do so. If I feel inspired or get in the zone I'll do 6 or eight hours, if I don't I'll do none, or just a couple of hours.

- Conversely, if I don't feel up to it, uninspired, tired, whatever, I can stop. Taking a break/nap and coming back to something is incredibly valuable.

- I'm so much less stressed than when I was working an 8 hour job. Way more relaxed, so my mental state overall is way better.

- If I sit down and program/operate for 4 hours I spend the rest of the day effectively letting my brain churn on problems. I'm still thinking about the problems that I am working on, I have way more "shower moments".

6 months ago I worked an 8 hour per day job (from home still) and my own personal observation is that I'm way more effective in 4 hours now than I was in 8 at my old job. I feel productive.

This might not work for other people obviously, maybe I just need/like a larger proportion of my time to be thinking time over implementation time.
I like the - "Try unique sweets even if you are in <country>." headline. Did you test the website with and without it?
write an article definitely interested
Bike-sharing revolution aims to put China back on two wheels
What's interesting is how fast they add engineers. Many startups will start out with 1-2 people, then slowly add people as they grow. So the team becomes 5, 8 people. You always read about this in detail when they talk about scaling at a conference. But then they have 300 engineers. That is the growth period I want to hear about.
Tarsnap, online backups for the truly paranoid (mentioned on HN quite often): https://www.tarsnap.com/
ANC/R works by sending out the opposite waveform of the noise, at about the same volume. It does not remove noise.

Passive noise control through insulation is the best solution for residential buildings.
The anti SPA. Love it. I don't really browse on my phone because the JS situation is so bad.
"Dear Congress, I hate your stinking guts, you make me vomit. You're the scum between my toes. Love, Alfalfa" (reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2ONM6n7avA)
“ConEmu does a good job at handling our API and console infrastructure BS.”
I completely missed that the sponsor's message was even there until I scrolled back to look at it.
How about removing that giant self-advertisement at the top of the blog? :)
A LIDAR is available off Amazon as we speak for < $500 and that's end user price. I won't link because I am not spamming but B01L1T32PI. Surely it's not the bees knees but not $7K for sure.
I, alone, publish an add-on on the Atlassian Marketplace. I have several add-ons for diversification, but 1-2 of them is 99% of my income. Server sales are one-off (but 80% of my income) and Cloud sales are recurrent (better if you hope to hire).

Define successful: I 100% live off it ($50k/yr before taxes). Biggest new add-ons are often agencies who can afford to sponsor their development because it's a customer funnel for them; I'm one of the rare new who built a business from scratch and lives off it.

The Atlassian APIs could be difficult[1], but the reward is great: Being a vendor introduces you to the biggest corporates without having to be referenced or pass the Purchase Order process, so you can very easily sell to companies similar to Samsung, HSBC, Defense actors or Ubisoft.

My advice: Build a real product with your add-on, not just a tweak to Atlassian's products. Tweaks = SQL reader, theme, formatting of mathematical expressions, ... Products = Balsamiq, Gliffy, time management solutions, architecture/CAD solutions, requirement management, accounting, aeronautical check-lists, etc. Be a bit ambitious and you'll be the reason why people switch to Atlassian and money will pour onto you.

[1] Difficult = They're scattered between Server and Cloud apis, and architecture is widely different bw JIRA and BitBucket, but it's still possible to start quite fast with https://connect.atlassian.com .
This is about equivalent to saying, "I've stopped beating my wife." only almost everyone beats their wife in the scenario. It's not that you've done good. You've just stopped being bad.

Why does your personal website need sponsorship at all? Why should people pay you for it? This commercial mindset is very weird to me.
This was posted as a HN comment but worth pointing out for anyone who uses Windows command line (and likely ConEmu as it seems to be the main console app for developers these days).

Quote from Michael J. Niksa, who works on Windows Console Host and Subsystem at Microsoft:

> I know the underlying console infrastructure on Windows is problematic. I know that other terminal emulators out there are better than what we've achieved for the Windows Console Host. I know that ConEmu's Maximus in particular has done an unbelievably good job at dealing with the BS that our API and console infrastructure is. I am trying my hardest to come up with a comprehensive solution that can make all of you happy, continues to advance the inbox Windows Console Host, allows other terminals to be very viable alternatives, and keeps my corporate overlords happy.

> My team and I have a lot more in store for the console in the coming year. Please bear with us as we work. We look forward to pleasantly surprising you (hopefully!) as much next year with what we still have to deliver as we did this year with what we achieved in releasing Bash on Ubuntu on Windows.
Patreon has proven itself to be a good model for a lot of bloggers out there with the right kind of following.

The main issue is that to replace all advertising revenue across the board, everybody would need to pitch in something like $150/month. I like paying for things to get rid of ads, and I'm not even sure I'd make that commitment.
But by the time finishing the copy, the owner had improved their product and advanced the roadmap. The key here is constant move, IMO.
Ask HN: What are the biggest problems in your industry?
I am looking for problems to build a business around. If you think that there exists a big problem in your industry around which a good business could be created, do post below.
Not necessarily C++ 14, but you can look at the QT project(s), https://github.com/qtproject and at the boost, https://github.com/boostorg, libraries. They all have good samples, both simple and complex. Both can be a bit advanced, but no more then trying to study swift. And with boost each library can be viewed on its own so it isn't as complex as say QT etc.

There are probably lots of others, just two that came to mind. FWIW too, the latest QT is using more modern C++ and it has made things cleaner. But there are code in QT that can make you scratch your head in wonder, sometimes the code is that way for a valid reason other times, not so much (other than maybe convention).
I'm running https://SignalBox.ai alone, I wrote all of the software and am working on partnering and sales right now.

Previously I have 2 other startups, one was media monitoring and one was forex.

The media monitoring is B2B only. The forex trading is automated and run from my home research cluster.

Both are generating enough revenue to live off (media monitoring 120k forex, 60-80k)

I guess they fit the definition of solo founder and online, but they have no public facing websites (except SignalBox)

EDIT: I also run a slack group for Solo Founders, If you would like an invite, please email me