skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My company has paying customers, good unit economics, a mature technology platform and customer retention is good. The reality is that we have not found a way to gain net new customers in a scalable way so we are doomed to grow at a very slow pace in the current market. We are obviously working on gaining customers faster but the channels that convert well have no scalability. Suffice for the sake of the question that we will not find a reasonable growth channel the coming year.

We believe that pursuing an M&A transaction with other players that can offer our product to their existing customer base is the best way to realize its full potential.

We also believe that additional fundraising is useless as the value of the company will not increase significantly for a potential acquirer.

Luckily, We are in a space that's acquisition-heavy and we have MANY potential acquirers. Overall there are 5 types of acquirers that could find strategic value in buying us.

I have digged up what I could find online about preparing for M&A and selling a company.
However, the advice is pretty generic with statements like "companies are bought not sold". This is obviously the best case and will probably be the most lucrative type of acquisition as well. The reality is that we want to run a competitive auction in a relative short (6m) time-window before we have to pursue additional funding.

Given this opportunity, it would be amazing to clarify the following questions:

1/ How direct should we be about wanting to sell the business when talking to potential acquirers.

2/ Have you seen companies successfully soliciting M&A and running a competitive deal process? If yes, what tactics have you seen that worked and what tactics killed deals?

3/ What drivers do you see most often for corporates to close the deal? For example, from our experience raising VC it is pretty clear that for VC's the main drivers to close are fear of missing out or greed and absent those the "deal" keeps getting delayed forever.

4/ When corporates buy startups, what's the typical timeline they need to see ROI on their investment.

5/ I understand that founders are often locked-in for some period of time and the money is escrowed until certain milestones are reached. What are common milestones corporates set?

6/ How do VC's perceive companies that want to sell? Assuming our VC will be supportive, what can we expect a VC to help with? Obviously they will introduce us to firms they have relationships with but can we also ask them to spread the word to PE firms that own potential acquirers or build a connection to potential acquirers board. How much engagement can we realistically expect here?

7/ Any terms we should be watchful of to avoid getting screwed post-acquisition?
With apologies.

In the interest of public wellbeing, from now on I shall restrict my vocabulary on HNews to Python keywords only.
It doesn't even seem to be necessary to scroll. Just sitting on the page seems to do it. Each time I check history there are more copies. I'm pretty sure I've been to that site before without that happening, so for now I'm going to assume it is just a bug in their JavaScript.
Could be sign of times to come; netflix launching a gameflix.
It's an unfortunate reality. Once Amazon figures out who you are, they send a feed of everything to you at or buy to FB.
If you interact with people this way normally I think I'd rather take my chances with the script-readers, but I'm glad things are working out for you.
> defeats the purpose of a feature built to not require a user to remember a password

And yet millions of people use password-protected password managers.

Including FireFox, which DOES encrypt your passwords, and which DOES allow you to optionally set a master password. And if you do set that password, it DOES use that password as an encryption key. And in that case, if someone gets physical access to your device, they'll need to install a keylogger or brute force your master password. Which requires a lot more effort than simply copying a file, providing more opportunities for the attacker to fail, for you to detect the attack, or for investigators to track the source of the attack.

And no, that won't save you if there's a critical security bug in your OS's kernel. Which there probably is. But that doesn't mean you give up on a sensible and easy to implement security policy.

The calculus is very clear here -- encrypting the passwords costs the developer and the user almost nothing (maybe 10 minutes to 2 hours of time for a competent developer; maybe a penny or two of electricity across the lifetime of the device). And there is a definite benefit to the overall security of the system -- the attacker needs to clear one more hurdle to get device passwords, and security-sensitive consumers can make that hurdle a rather large one (rooting the device and installing a keylogger).

No, it's not a silver bullet.

Yes, it is strictly more secure that the alternative.
Which curve fitting model should I use?
Glassblowing. I've been doing software professionally since 1978. When I first started learning programming I was amazed how easy it was, and how hard it seemed for everyone else. 35 years later I tried glassblowing (hot-shop, not torch) and had the same experience.

Unfortunately I can't afford to pursue my hot glass dreams. My second job is providing palliative care for my wife. That takes up more than my paycheck and most of my time when I'm not writing code.
>Completely understandable. This decision was expected to be polarizing.

The project being OK with polarizing decisions (instead of listening to the community and discussing it) is the dealbreaker for me.

It's OK to build opinionated software, but not at such basic level.
That and I never understood why knödel never took off. I love knödel! I actually brought some back the last time I was in Germany (before learning I could buy them right here in Paris).
I wonder how much "side projects" would help in the job hunt. Build things, put them on github, write 500 words about it, add to resume, repeat.

Maybe I succeeded despite working like this, but I tend to think I succeeded because I worked like this.
I'd expect celebrity to be more "concentrated" for people born from 1920-1980, since the nature of mass media distribution naturally limited how many famous people there were. With the internet, attention has been fractured onto many smaller celebrities, though pop music still creates some very recognizable and controversial stars (Bieber, Kardashians).
Thanks for the response, this is really helpful. I'm unfortunately pretty well-acquainted with the marketing shortcomings of the self-publishing arena, but it's good to know it's not impossible to just start sending agents old-school query letters.
True. It's also very hard to overcome the temptation to put in too much of it to prop up scenes that the director/producer/editor isn't sure about.
The article explains the benefits only needing 2ms to render a frame, and how v-sync means it won't actually be displaying at 500fps.
> If CQRS/ES wants to make it into mainstream it needs to think about tooling.

I agree with this entirely. CQRS/ES applications really help from tailored tooling. Tracking chains of events using correlation and causation identifiers. Auditing commands. Projecting events out to datastores like Elasticsearch. Then using Kibana[1] to create dashboards to drill down into the data. I'd like to go into this in more detail in the future. Revisit this case study after 6-12 months and describe the pitfalls, and countermeasures. Identify tools that allow you to monitor the system proactively.

[1] https://www.elastic.co/products/kibana
Yeah, in hindsight I pretty aggressively missed the point.
Sorry, but I want to keep multiple open sessions to different servers separate, even in tmux.
In Norways case I wonder if AM does not work due to the hilly terrain or something. Don't think there are any stations, I never listened to AM at least and just barely heard about it.
StartSSL still selling certificates
... it hurts from laughing too much. Wow.
I agree with what you say. I also KNOW that coding bootcamp works for the people running the bootcamp and no one else. If you go, you literally piss your money into the pocket of someone else, and leave with nothing of value. Amazing, depending on what side of the fence you reside.
Emoji support would be huge. I can't get this working on Linux, iTerm supports it well though.
Chilean officials can’t explain strange IR signal seen by its Navy
> Lastly, I don't think it's extraordinary at all to claim that Russian intelligence managed hundreds of sock puppet accounts across Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Imgur, Twitter, and other platforms. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that the opposite was true. In fact, none of the claims in the report are extraordinary; it's all extremely plausible.

Perfectly agreed. The United States and China also have these sock puppets, as do other countries. I think this is one of the reasons why people get into a tiffy whenever I insist on working with the facts and not US propaganda and rumors. Get accused of being a shill for Greece, Turkey, Russia, China, etc all the time.

Social media is swarming with sockpuppets, and now the game has escalated more, with H.R. 5181 passing in NDAA 2017, the Center for Global Engagement will be empowered to experiment with the techniques for social media propaganda developed by DARPA's SMISC program.

Don't know if the clock is moving toward midnight, or if just reddit is going to choke on itself.
These vaporware ideas still happen with Kickstarter & Indie Go-Go projects, except people aren't even buying equity, just a promise.

At least with owning equity there are some legal maneuvers for shareholders to go after mismanaging executives.
In order of preference:

Yoga teacher

Professional chess player

Fantasy book author
The report does establish that social media brigading occurred.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf p. 4:

> Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.

Continuing:

> A journalist who is a leading expert on the Internet Research Agency claimed that some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015

I will use those two quotes to provide context for my research.
How far north are we talking here? Calistoga North, or Lassen North? Cause we can keep going further, if we have to...

http://www.oldfaithfulgeyser.com/
https://www.nps.gov/lavo/index.htm
it doesn't feel like life expectancy changes would make such an impact, since it 'feels' like many of the celebrities died before life expectancy. i say feels because I haven't seen an age breakdown.

would it make sense to make many random draws of non-celebrities who died and compared the age of that group against the celebrity group?
I'm sure it can be replaced by custom trait work, though.
I made some small projects on github when I was first learning how to program. I am 100% convinced that's how I "got in"
I am doing this right now...I've been a graphic designer/web developer for 10 years. Half way back at my first year at uni to get my CS Degree and (hopefully) end up working with AI.

You guys are not instilling me with a lot of confidence however.
If it's a public message why would it be encrypted?
Intrigued by the quality of your JS curriculum. Could you share the bootcamp you attended?
When that happened to my WRT54GS, I managed to downgrade to an older Netgear firmware that did not do this check. Then, from the older firmware, I could flash DD-WRT, no problem.

I now build routers / firewalls with a free OS to ensure I do not get burned again.
I don't attach cameras directly to the Internet.
We send briefcases of money (Iran and Pakistan), money and trained soldiers (South America), weapons and training (Afghanistan, Syria), strategic leaks (Egypt) to effectively change regimes -- with some bloodshed typically ensuing.

Now we have fascists like Clapper wagging their fingers at Russia for internet memes, and allegedly liberal people cheering him on for it.

People are out of their damn minds.
How about a Cyber Treaty?

Spending tons of money on cyber security and not getting very far seems like it ups the ante and continues the spy&hack game.

In my opinion its better to find a way to deescalate the security competition.
I approached workworking like software -- iterative refinement. In the physical world that left me with a pile of sawdust.
Maybe I'm weird but I don't look at my phone anymore when using a swype keyboard. I know where the keys are on the screen and can usually get about 90% word accuracy without looking. A quick glance at the final message when I'm done and off it goes.
Just another vote for scroll back - would not use without. I do use tmux occasionally but it is just too awkward beyond keeping stuff running in SSH. I also have a tiling window manager and since I use mouse a lot in browser and other GUI apps it's too much of a pain to switch to keyboard only navigation for the terminal.
The Importance of Memorisation (mp3)
Interestingly this report does not establish or claim that Russia had accessed Podesta's email.
That ended up working pretty well. Somehow I missed the instructions :)
I replied elsewhere, but I'm pasting it here too just so our threads connect.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf p. 4:

> Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.

> some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015
'Hackable' hypervisor provides lightweight virtualization for Windows and Linux
Indeed, partitioning by customer_id is probably the wrong idea. Your number of customers will typically not be an primary key that is difficult to index in memory.

For something like page views, where a single customer will have millions of page views and your typical query will be ordered by date, you'd be much better off partitioning by date.
I've not seen a wooden cake topper like this, but it's very common (and used to be pretty much mandatory, if I understand right) to have something on top of the cake, usually little figurines representing the bride and groom.
That's what I thought... Now I see there was an interesting discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10426106) when it went free online and so actual news.
I'll start caring about condemning Albert Speer the first time I see a "long form" exploring the moral culpability of, say, Valerian Kuybyshev.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_Kuybyshev
> flapp[y] bird made a LOT of people happy.

Dong Nguyen, the creater of Flappy Bird thinks different about this topic - this is also the reason why he took the game down for the app stores:

'"Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed," the developer said "But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever."'

> http://compethics.samething.net/2014/02/20/flappy-bird-and-u...

> http://bgr.com/2014/02/11/why-flappy-bird-was-removed/
IIRC defcon does this with their badges.
podcast by Art Markman and Bob Duke (both PhD) on reasons why long term memorisation of facts is important.
The report doesn't make this claim at all.
Now I just need to install this toggle switch on my phone...
To add up to it, here is one example of companies that validate security in high integrity systems.

http://www.ldra.com/en/software-quality-test-tools

Namely for C, C++, Java and Ada stacks on the domains of medicine, trains, aviation, automotive, factory automation.

This needs to be extended to other business domains.
And the people who have these devices are not going to even care about fixing their devices until their ISP disconnects them for spewing crap onto the internet.

I've been saying for 10+ years that there needs to be something like the DMCA for accountability for security issues.

A copyright owner can send a takedown notice to an ISP alleging infringement and have action taken, but I can't do anything about the 1,000,000 hosts that scan the shit out of us every day.
I'm extremely suspicious of your first anecdote^, given how vital the care and feeding of sources is for someone who makes it to the WSJ, and given that you're probably not being interviewed by Woodward and Bernstein about a story of grave national importance. I suspect miscommunication is at play here, probably in both cases, and I'm confident in that assessment given the drive-by characterization that follows. Can you back up either anecdote with emails from the journalists in question? Your claims, at face value, would lead to the end of more than one career if publicly demonstrated (since you specifically named two mastheads that would care about such behavior, unlike others).

Burden of proof is on you here.

Journalists do lean on sources, but the stakes have to be pretty damned high. I'm willing to be wrong here, but there's an underlying narrative to this comment that I think is really driving it.

^ Honestly, it sounds like your clever spin on a common uncooperative source tactic: "if you don't answer my questions I won't have the context to accurately report the story and will have to write what I have," which is just a reporter being honest and giving you an opportunity. I can see that tactic being interpreted as a threat, to be fair, but it isn't.
How would you feel if someone wrote a story about you saying that you were done with writing, because it's not all it's cracked up to be? And then every time you made a pitch, the editor replied back saying "I thought you had stopped writing?" Or maybe they didn't write back at all because they found this article and suspected you were someone wrestling with chronic burnout?

I would feel more sympathetic if you would show that you understand and appreciate how your actions affected him.
Not sure about Dali, but Picasso actually was an incredible realist painter, too; google around for a trove of cool information.

From the level of detail in Dali's work, I'd expect him to also have some incredible realist works out there.
As someone who's been following this for years now, I couldn't agree more. Private investments into startups is the next financial market to be disrupted. Many VCs and Angels know this too but won't publicly acknowledge it.

If anything, Kickstarter et al have proven there's a massive market demand for it. It's just been the good old boys at the SEC who have been slow to catch up, even when given the mandate to.
d3 comes to mind
But we would want to say the same thing about Russian intelligence and US intelligence and their 'paid trolls'. They do it through layers of obscurity exactly for deniability. We need to hold them all to the same standard. I don't know what that standard is, mind you.
Let's Encrypt + widespread SNI adoption is making it dead easy for SaaS companies like ours to host customer content on customer chosen domains. So their existence doesn't just help the technically proficient -- the "long tail" of websites published through various platforms will start seeing HTTPS as a default. And that's very much a good thing. For example, there should be no reason for publication platforms (like say Medium to pick on an example) to have such complicated custom domain + SSL configurations in the future.

The next step I'd like to see is all the $5 shared hosts supporting HTTPS by default via something like Let's Encrypt. There's really no excuse anymore.

BTW, shameless plug: We've found this process so easy that we've spun a side project out of our main SaaS project called clearalias.com. It's basically a Let's Encrypt proxy that makes it even easier to publish customer content via custom domains secured with HTTPS.
FMRI love competition
> I strongly believe it is the wrong choice for just about every application.

None of these are pure as-originally-outlined-by-Fowler CQRS/ES, but I'm willing to suggest they are paradigm equivalent, real world successful examples:

1. Basically all double-entry accounting/book-keeping/core banking systems.

2. Many RDBMSes. Specifically the replayable log structure of transactions.

3. I sell a service that includes two event-sourced data structures mutated by domain-specific commands. They are used for collaborative decision making in sports management. This aspect works very well indeed: the resulting characteristics are intrinsic to ES structures, are (AFAIK) unique in our market, and represent one of our most customer-retaining capabilities.
It's "operating system".
How much can police find out from a murderer’s Echo?
No need to quit your job or move to Italy. Turn notifications off on your phone, get an espresso machine for your home, buy some decent table wine. Get the books you want to read and start reading them. Go to the library on the weekends. Arrange to get to/from work on public transit and your commute turns into reading time (90 minutes a day for me).

I have a full-time job and read as many philosophy/sociology and math books as I ever have. You can actually try out your plan of full-time study on your next vacation - I bet you will bore of it in three or four days.
I've used the gem 'tenancy' which extends ActiveRecord to set a where statement for the tenant on every query of every object that belongs to the tenant.
Full list of sites that must be censored in Russia
Ask HN: Raspberry Pi distro for flooding ISP logs?
Hi,

I have an idea for an application, but I lack the expertise to build it.

Problem:

ISPs are required, by UK law (link below), to record websites visited by its customers. Many people see this as an infringement of their privacy.

My idea:

Raspberry Pi + "Some OS" that is always on and always hooked up to your router.

This OS's sole purpose is to simply spam random URLs at max capacity. The idea - fill the logs with noise, to hide what you're actually doing. These shouldn't be massive sites or anything - data caps should be considered.

It could be as simple as wget <long list of dynamically-changing urls>. The installation and setup process should be very simple.

Then people just get
* A raspberry pi
* This (preferrably OSS) OS.
* Plug it in, install and "set it and forget it".

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/19/extreme-surveillance-becomes-uk-law-with-barely-a-whimper
It's not just the number of celebrities, it's the number of beloved celebrities. Prince, George Michael, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Muhammad Ali, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher in one year? That kind of clustering of groundbreaking, generation defining celebrity is what made 2016 seem especially rough.