skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is this normal VC behavior?
Two years ago, a VC found my HN account and emailed me and we developed a friendship in US. The VC is from Hong Kong and has had a couple of small exits (under $50 million USD) in the early 2000s. In 2015, he suggested that we work together on a product, with him taking care of the business side of things and me writing the MVP. He told me that he had contact at firm X where he would show the demo and raise money.

So after a month of working on MVP, things started to move more slowly. Throughout the year, we would huddle for a bit at his place and long periods where I wouldn't hear anything. He was on vacation while I was working on the MVP. This was in March. Many months would go with just "waiting on person Y at firm X" and then summer came. He says that he wants to put his 22 year old daughter who recently graduated as CEO and says he will mentor her and says we would work good together. I found it odd.

It's august now, nothing has changed and now he has some family matters to attend and he needs to delay the meet until November where it would be optimal for him to make the trip back to HK where firm X is. So more months follow with silence until November arrives.

When I ask if he demo'd the MVP or not I get a bit confused by his answer because he blamed a small one off bug that wasn't super critical (it's an MVP for christ's sake) as a reason for not showing the demo.

I did some googling and he is known in HK circles but I discovered through offshoreleaks.org that he has multiple shell companies setup in British Virgin Islands with his daughter as a shareholder presumably from his exits. His buyer was a firm working for US military (I'm personally against helping defense industry)

Now he’s excited again by my new idea and wants to work on it together. I am hesitant. Again he wants me to go to HK and insits on Chinese market which I’m not excited about.
> But nature seems to just not abhor the "vacuum" left in cars filled with just a single rider hard enough to fill that.

I'm not sure exactly what this sentence is supposed to mean, but I assure you as an NYC outer-borough resident, if you created a traffic vacuum in manhattan I would be driving there filling the vacuum by the end of the day.
Preview used to be a really great app. Similarly, Mac OS used to be a pretty great operating system.

And then...

> "... Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there's no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team. There is now just one team, and most of the engineers are iOS first, giving the people working on the iPhone and iPad more power."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple...

The new PDF editing solution is to fumble around with our fat fingers on a clunky oversized iPhone named "iPad Pro" , hooray.

By the way, when was the last time you heard something positive about the Mac, Mac OS, or the Apple effort with the platform?
I have used them for some years and have 2 main issue:

Their servers are slow compared to other cloud providers.

You can't upload files using their ios or Android clients, they are read only.
Quite a few depending on what level of control/functionality you are looking for.

Some are more developer/write your own code focussed, other more graphically focused.

In alphabetical order and not exhaustive.

API.AI (now Google)
Chatfuel (YC)
Converse.AI (disclaimer, $currentstartup)
Flowxo
Gupshup.io
IBM Watson Engagement Advisor/Watson
Meya.ai
Microsoft Bot builder
Motion.ai
Wit.ai (Facebook)

AWS also has a suite of tools that between them you could use, check out Lex, Polly & Steps

All of these do one or more of the following:

NLP
User management
Messaging Platform Integrations
Conversation State & Context Management
Workflow
Human Escalation
Backend integrations (Helpdesk, CRM etc)
Analytics

Pick your poison based on what you need :)
G-code (for 3D printing and milling). It's about as old (within a few years) as COBOL and Fortran.
They won't do this because people will stop buying their overpriced server chips. Desktop is hamstrung to their desires to keep server chips better, even if it means making desktop ones worse.

They tried getting rid of ECC memory support but that wasn't enough to stop people from using consumer chips so now they're just keeping them a generation behind
Ditto, that was my entry to 'programming' - to begin with it consisted of copying a bunch Runescape stats scripts from Hawkee and running on my desktop. As it progressed I included some persistence for some feature, implemented by creating a bunch of global variables with the user's nick as the first part of it. I think I felt that storing to file was overcomplicating things, bearing in mind that I was pretty young at the time.

I do recall coming across some scaling issues, which I resolved by spinning up another instance of mIRC and running it with the name <botname>2. That seemed to work pretty well. 'v2' came next, wholly consisting of changing all of the scripts' colours to be homogeneous.
>couple of years between autoimmune conditions and weight in a reciprocal way.

Don't think it'll take that long. Both seem to be connected to messed up gut flora to some extent.
"if you have a society where people can't agree on the basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?"

with a functioning priesthood as the mediator of truth exactly like societies around the world throughout history have determined the truth. The question is not if this will happen, it's "who are currently the priests?"
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13297455
Don't forget you are directly competing against a human. If you are a judge, which one would you chose? The still frame with a robot voice pretending to be Hawking or the actual human?
Wow didnt know japan is paying people to have kids in an age where robots are taking jobs seems like bad long term idea. Maybe robots taking jobs should lead to a natural population decline.
And the Mac Pro... that is /old/ tech nowadays
Could you elaborate on what makes you sad about their approach?
wavefront lasik is mostly automated already.
No, I still have not installed Sierra on either. I don't want any siri bullshit. I wonder how long it'll last before I'm somehow forced to upgrade to Sierra. I'm willing to bet it'll be fully baked into the next OS release.
Perl. A language that is still ahead of its time. I have a system for building RPMs of CPAN modules and their dependencies automatically.
“Obviously, one possible starting point in combatting obesity could be to inhibit the inflammatory response in abdominal fat while administering cGMP-stimulating active ingredients,” says Prof. Pfeifer to summarize the findings.

As someone with body fat predominantly in the torso I would love to benefit from this research.
There has been increasing evidence of cold stress and fat loss. My understanding is that cold stress increases the BAT (brown fat) cells, which helps burn fat for energy source.

I have been reading the articles in this blog: http://hypothermics.com/. It is an excellent blog that chronicles many of the findings and the author performs a lot of these tests on himself.
Bencoding is as human-readable as MessagePack, but not as concise. I don't see
why would anybody choose bencoding today.

Oh, and it doesn't guarantee that your message will fit in a single line. JSON
can be encoded to a line.
2017 Aspirations of an Entrepreneur Living Mindfully Productive and Well
Ask HN: Platform for building cross-platform GUI apps?
I am interested in building more desktop applications and I am a huge fan of writing cross-platform applications.

I have personally played around with Electron and Kivy, and most recently have started looking at Vala, but other than that I haven't really fully committed to learn any particular platform.

Does anyone have a platform they particularly like in this space (or maybe one they suggest staying away from)?
Tomatoes are truly one of the easiest things to grow, but they seem to be too cheap to bother with the large-scale production. They also get infected sometimes, we lost all of our plants at the end of the season a year ago. But then 2016 had been fine.
I bought the original Alfred v1 Powerpack.

But, they recently made that unavailable for download and want me to buy v3... Which I don't need.

So I've been awaiting an alternative.

So thanks for this ! I'm excited to try it out.
"some cases in the hospital where you see people doing diet as they should and not lossing weight at all"

would love a link if you have one handy. it seems impossible?
Google: go-querystring is Go lib for encoding structs into URL query parameters
Which is why I added the comparison to average wage.
Haven't updated this in quite a while, but here's a list of reading lists + relevant books.

https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368
The way we handle this (and avoid the lowest common denominator problem) is allowing you to have one bot, but then specific 'modules' that execute only if being accessed over a specific network.

This lets you build one bot that supports everything from SMS to Messenger to Slack in the same interface.

Other tools I've seen apparently do automatic conversion of one rich media form to another, but I'm less keen on that idea personally.
Sure, but we can control who we choose to spend time with and who we choose to ignore. The thread is actually about the author who cannot control himself and doesn't know how to even begin to talk to others about his problems with instant messaging. There are many things the author can do, most of which I've pointed out already. Just because we can't control others does not mean we're powerless. Nor does it mean we have to bow down to others' standards and demands for how to lead our lives. Isn't that what personal freedom is about?
Fascinating! And you keep old Macs around to run the toolchain on?
I feel like I just read a lot of opinions by one frustrated dude without a real sense of why classes are bad (or even really why they frustrated him so much). Am I missing something?
Using NPM for more than JavaScript
I love that this is cross platform.

When I tried to install the debian package through the Ubuntu Software Center I received this warning:

The package is of bad quality
The installation of a package which violates the quality standards isn't allowed. This could cause serious problems on your computer. Please contact the person or organisation who provided this package file and include the details beneath.
Lintian check results for /home/<user>/Downloads/zazu-v0.2.1-linux-x64.deb:
E: zazu: maintainer-address-missing Blaine Schmeisser
I will even go a step further. For most people, the Performance of a 2008 era Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz would be enough for non gamers. I have an old business Dell laptop with those specs with 4Gb of RAM running a Plex Server and PlexConnect with Windows 10 and it feels fast enough when using it once you turn off all of the antivirus programs. I don't think I would be able to tell the difference between that and my Core I7 if I maxxed out the RAM to 8GB and added an SSD drive.
IMHO, one of the costs we don't think enough about is maintenance on these software projects. If you have taken the time to learn all of these great frameworks and techniques, that's great, but it increases the cost of the person who comes after you and has to also learn all of those technologies before they can maintain your code.

There is a wisdom that you should never re-implement something that a library exists for, but IMHO a strict interpretation of that view leads to horrendously bloated projects that are nearly impossible to build and maintain. I see this sometimes in node projects where the developers will pull in half a dozen dependencies before they even consider writing a for loop.
I was half-expecting something about the questionably-legal limbo of Guantanamo detainees.
If the holes are being put to productive use by the people demanding them, then sure. Given how little HN likely understands about agriculture, I'd be wary of trying to use "hole digging" as a kind of absurd example.

But this also illustrates how dumb it is to single out elder care as somehow economically unproductive. We pay for elder care because we desperately want our elder family members to be comfortable. If there were labor shortages in this sector, we'd be taking on the work ourselves, at substantial opportunity cost. It's one of the great things about market economies that this work can instead be done by people who have chosen to specialize in it --- they do the work more effectively, at lower cost, and derive more personal satisfaction from doing it.

There is a really weird undercurrent to this subthread that I find unsettling. The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".
If Intel can't do it, who can?
Elixir is in no way a subset of Ruby.
Believe it or not, I actually deal with Progress too.

I feel your pain. :-D
pacemaker/corosync documentation @ http://clusterlabs.org/

nontrivial distributed systems are like crypto: don't roll your own primitives unless you are a masochist, fetishist, time-rich or forced to.
If you actually read those articles and still believe that, I want you to know that I legitimately find you frightening. This is about a person in a position of authority making a statement that normalizes sexual assault. This isn't video games. There are real victims and a culture that perpetuates this. He didn't grope somebody personally and get away with it, he did it in real life and bragged about it. I don't know how to break this down any further and that you tried to flip this into me normalizing rape culture is disgusting. Maybe you need to learn what rape culture is? Maybe it's time to stop pretending that anti-feminism isn't misogynistic. I hope I'm never near you in the real world because your words indicate a lack of care about actions to my body.

I'm out.
And an editor, "On the third day, we a stumbled over a cache of objects".
Net neutrality applies to services like broadband, which are argued to be common carriers. If Comcast is the only Internet provider in my area, I have no easy alternatives if Comcast decides to block all Time Warner affiliated content. Just like it's not trivial to deal with PG&E arbitrarily shutting off my gas and electric.

This isn't the case with search engines. If Google were to blacklist wsj.com, I have many easy options to get to wsj.com. Which is why Google and any search engine has wide latitude to heavily discriminate against content. That's literally the point of PageRank, or any ranking algorithm. Where they have gotten in trouble is when they're accused of promoting Google-made content above other content (especially when the Google content consist of scraped info from other sites).
> Make a horse go uphill for a while and he will soon stop if carrying anything. A car, even an ancient one, not so much.

> you can get much farther with a car than with a horse in the same amount of time, and it needs less maintenance as well.

But that's not faster. That's endurance, reliability, economy. You're arguing that the tortoise is faster than the hare, but "being faster" isn't how the tortoise won the race.
It's such a nice UI paradigm married to a decent lisp (any lisp is better than no lisp :)). Once you get the actual hang of it you can't ever leave it. Just like real coffee vs. instant abominations.
Except that you block the view for oncoming vehicles turning the opposite direction (their left). A properly labeled intersection has white lines (in the US, other places may use something else) that indicate where to stop, and if engineered properly, stopping before these white lines leaves a clear view.
Did the exact same things.
If it is so simple, why aren't they already doing it?

And if they are not already doing it, how do you 'start with' them?
I inherited a Delphi program written in-house for our accounting department. Thankfully it's only about 10,000 lines of codes, and the code is quite readable. But I still have to explain to our accountants how little I know about accounting (it has something to do with money, right?).

On the plus side, Delphi is quite easy to read. I got started with no prior knowledge in Delphi or Pascal, and I was able to roughly understand significant parts of the application within a few days.
> The number of new jobs created each decade in the US has gone down since 2nd world war

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/55/Total_private...
Trend growth looks pretty steady to me, including when typists and telephone switchboard operators were being replaced at a much faster rate than machine welders. The 2000s was obviously a terrible decade, but I'm pretty sure that has more to do with the global financial crisis than any ~2007 breakthrough in robotics
Could be interesting, we've been burnt badly by 2014 era AMD server CPUs that are gutless as crap and have so many microcode bugs it's a right PITA.
I particularly use Electron, because of the ubiquity of Javascript and the fact that you're essentially just building a web app that looks the same on every platform.
OK matt_cutts if u like doing this so much what about the wife and kids at home would you go there and say shit about them
Seeing the same thing and it's irksome. Preview will also choke on the pdf produced from such ps with ps2pdf. Acrobat opens them and when re-exported from Acrobat, Preview reads them again.
> Desktop applications tend to be either not performance limited or limited by something other than the CPU.

The browser is a desktop application and, once the page is loaded off the network, is certainly CPU bound.
> food doesn't need to be grown in urban areas with expensive real estate.

It doesn't need to. But there's an increasing push towards looking for ways to cut the environmental effects of farming, and there transport is part of the challenge. There's also an increasing push for cutting time to market, despite traditional farms being further and further away from most consumers.

Hydroponics in urban areas is likely to converge on the mass market from two directions: Environmentalists looking for options that cut land use and transport, and up-market foodies willing to pay extra for products that are "straight from the farm two doors down" in the middle of a city.

Whether it eventually will get cost effective enough to supplant normal farms is another matter.
GraphiQL.io: test/learn GraphQL using generated data
The largest Perl project I work on is http://www.theregister.co.uk/ which is mainly Perl on the back-end :)
Oh yikes! I'll try and get this resolved.
I don't understand how we continue to dignify the premise that elder care in our existing marketplace isn't a fair trade. We want our elderly family members to be comfortable. If nobody was available to perform these services, we'd do them ourselves, at great personal cost. Instead, we exchange money for the services of specialists. Everybody comes out ahead.

We don't need "the kids to derive considerable value from the old people" to justify these economic transactions.
This IBM patent is practical and viable: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5588199
So what were your thoughts on the specific points raised by Dalio?
That makes much more sense, the job posting seemed more likely a fit for internal user interface tools. Python certainly is a good fit there, but adding in the parts about touching the rocket code seems... well I just can't comprehend the idea of running Python on a rocket at launch time. Then again, maybe all the cool rocket systems will start having REST APIs. ;)

`curl -X POST rocket10.falcon-9.spacex.com/engine/ignite -d '{"countdown": 10}'`

Would both be amazing and terrifying!

P.S. @parent: I admire the work y'all are doing, Dozbog!
Guidepoint | New York City | iOS | ONSITE | http://www.guidepoint.com/

Looking for someone to potentially take over a Swift 3 project.

contact: hnleads@gmail.com
Uses GraphiQL (https://github.com/graphql/graphiql) and faker.js (https://github.com/marak/Faker.js/) to auto-generate documentation and data.

Source code is here: https://github.com/langateam/graphiql.io
1973 German Scifi Film World on a Wire Explores VR Sims and AI Before the Matrix
Don't forget the jobs providing services to the people that drive the trucks. Many of those are going to be lost like those old rail and highway towns that built up and then bust when the popular routes changed.
Update: The link posted is no longer available and looks like it was taken down - I suspect it was removed because Digital Ocean has not open sourced them. I don't know the reason for the decision except a friend contacted Jesse and told me DO needs to open source them.

Looks like there's no other reference to Buoy on Google other than Jesse's work site and this HN post which is a little funny but sad as it was a good resource. RIP until its opened.
I think the problem here is going to be with the agricultural industry. If major industry leaders perceive these as a threat to their operations, it's likely that they will lobby congress to either regulate these our of existence, or somehow just make them flat out illegal.
"No, I swear, I don't care about Call of Duty....no...no..yes, you can use that video card for games but....what? Steam? What's that?"
How to do you "retrain" to get abstract "skills in areas like critical thinking and problem-solving"? When I think "retraining" I think training to perform a different kind of routine job in a different domain or industry. For example, decades ago, the NYT retrained its Linotype operators to a similar computer data entry job[1].

[1] https://vimeo.com/127605643 or https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu or https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...
This was originally shown on German television as "Welt am Draht" in two parts. You can watch both parts on YouTube, with English subtitles.

Part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfXtzBRX3sg

Part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOe0sggQfF4
How Graphs Work
This attitude happens all the time FP in the job comes up and it essentially means the parent commenter's company has no time or resources for training or mentoring.

NoRedInk (among other companies) use non-mainstream FP languages and hire juniors all the time. Turns out that people can learn things quickly if they're smart (which is why you hired them, I hope) and are given mentorship.
Awesome to hear! I hope this works well for you! [:
>The i5 and i7 are both quad-core CPUs clocked at no more than 100MHz away from each other.

I'm not sure thats a fair comparison - clock rate isn't the only thing and the current high end i5/i7 chips (6600k and the 6700k) are 500Mhz apart, and the i7 (as always) has hyperthreading (in some applications, hyperthreading is actually very useful) while the i5's don't. And while the i7 has a 15% higher clockrate, it is ~20% faster, while being 40% more expensive. With the k-series specifically, the i7 having a higher base clock also means you can overlock it better.

FWIW, I don't find Intel's naming scheme unclear, but OTOH, I have been following CPU/GPU version numbers for over 10 years so I could be blind to the confusion.
Thank you very much for mentioning Plato here. I was thinking exactly about this wile reading this paragraph:

> Let us also be clear that classes do not “model the real world”. Objects may or may not model the real world, but classes certainly don’t. Although there are many chairs in the real world, there is no “chair class” in the real world.