skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Throwaway here. I did this with my startup. There were two major players in the industry and I undercut the cheapest one by 35%. Both are hemorrhaging long time customers to my service in droves. Though the key difference is that the product and customer support is vastly superior (as noted by those that have switched).

Launching with a lower price point allowed me to win over the price comparison shoppers and thus further refine the product. That helped the business grow organically and get in the same conversation as the long time players. It's now making $25k/m and growing a lot faster than I expected.

So to answer your question. Yes you can attract more customers by launching with rock-bottom pricing, but you better make damn sure it's a better overall product. Otherwise you just become the "cheap" option in the customer's minds. It's also important to consider what would happen if one of the competitors reacted by matching your pricing. In my case I tried to estimate their overhead by looking at their office location, number of employees, etc. Then I figured a price that would really put some pressure on their finances should they try to match.
Knowing a size and being forced to retain a size are different things. Here's a trivial example (imagine a system to process compressed audio data):

(1) receive packet: compute actual size, allocate buffer, expand data into it, start DMA to a speaker or something

(2) DMA-done: free the buffer

There, I didn't need the size on the free. There are many, many many similar cases, in fact these cases probably dominate.
English language pluralization rules are almost impossible to systemize in a way that always makes sense

http://www.dylanbeattie.net/2017/04/theres-problem-with-phal...
”I want to expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet.”

This is genius. It immediately simply told me exactly what your and service does. A few common, short examples beneath that would also be great. I would see this being great to show off an app on the development branch to a client in a meeting.
DO just happens to be cheaper than AWS for certain use cases, but they didn't get there by out competing on price alone, it ticks a lot of other boxes: it's easier and simpler to understand for a new developer looking to get started, you can calculate and anticipate usage costs with ease, etc. It's not just a good copy with better pricing, it brings something to the table.
That sounds really impressive. I jumped to comment before reading the paper. I found a nice gem in David Tongs lectures [1] in chapter about Dimensional analysis. He mentions Planck legnth Lp ~ 10^-35m, for which "All indications are that this is the shortest distance scale
possible; at distances shorter than Lp, space itself is likely to have no meaning". So 10^-70 sounds like a nice margin.

[1] http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/relativity/dynrel.pdf
There's a subjective balance to be struck between implicitness and explicitness. The example DHH gives are basically default parameters, which is a pretty reasonable amount of implicitness for me.

On the other end of the spectrum are things like Scala's implicit parameters, which I abhor.
thats also something a firewall cant protect you against.
Kentucky Derby 2017
> I'm still looking for the right balance.

You see this is only a problem you face. Instead looking for the perfect language (which doesn't exists) why don't you build it yourself?
Workflowy is great but it feels a bit stalled. I've since moved over to checkvist. The combination of feature with a keyboard driven workflow works well for me.
IoT Single Channel LoRa Gateway Build
Yes. But only if...

1. You can still afford marketing. Products do not market themselves. For all you know that super expensive SaaS is spending only 10% of their money to run the tech and the other 90% is marketing. (intentionally going to the extreme other end)

2. You have TALKED TO CUSTOMERS and you know that price is a sticking point for them.

- OR -

You have another business and the savings on the monthly bill alone would pay for the R&D and running the product. In which case attracting other customers is just icing on the cake.

Edit:

Also, side recommendation. If all things considered equal the product is the equivalent. Don't sell it for rock bottom. You don't need to. Sell it for 25% (for example) lower than the competition. You don't need to be rock bottom you just need to come out slightly on top when the customer is doing their decision matrix.

Not to mention physiologically if it is too cheap people wonder why and they think there must be something wrong with it. Which can get you less sales not more.
I didn't read that from the author's article. I never heard any moral value being ascribed to the principle. If anything, the author seemed to be speaking about it in a fairly detached way, and describes it more as an emergent, amoral property of nature.

Where did you infer moral value in the author's words?
everybody misunderstands natural selection. the field is large enough for a great deal of misunderstanding.
It seems the several critics in this thread think that generalizing and flattening fitness into One Principle is a superior perspective. There's nothing wrong with the article, since the whole point of it is to talk about the nuances of different types of selection.
Nice Office Space reference! :-D
Instead of looking for doing the same thing better and think that would get you customers, I would advise to start from the question "how do I get customers" first, and do that. That's really what you want.
I don't view digital ocean like that at all. I would be using them even if the price was exactly the same. Digital ocean offers a competitive advantage over AWS, they have a simpler to use interface that focuses on getting one server setups working asap.

Some points, integrated console, root password reset, automatic backups. These are features that make them better than aws for a simple side project.
Google had its own social network: Orkut. It was launched at the same time as Facebook and was initially much more popular. (Facebook membership was restricted to a few US universities.)

Google also produced a knock-off of Facebook -- Google Plus -- which is still going but ultimately failed.

In both cases, Google got the technology wrong. However, getting the technology right is still no guarantee of success. There's more to it than that....
And try to make it explode quickly -- if it fails slowly, it can be uses to DDoS, by getting all your worker threads to spend most of their time on your files.
Massive Hack Targets Macron on Eve of French Election
Sure, but the author didn't do any of that. Your battle doesn't really seem to be with him, which is the point of the comment you responded to.
What could it teach? Compiler design? Imperative language design? By "bootstrapping", are you referring to building a higher-level language that compiles to T3X?
Only works if you're in a country outside the US.

Developers in the USA have really high salaries because of the INS moat. If you can crack that equation, then you could do a lot.

BrowserStack vs. Others. Sheer number of people you can task to a single problem.
Yeah, as too often is the case, good-for-business and good-for-society are at odds here.
Not really. You have a state model, once you change it a new immutable slice is created, maintaining the nodes that didn't change. That makes it possible to check for changes with reference equality (old === new), which is fast. Components simply pick a portion of state they're interested in and render once it changes.

That makes your app transparent, meaning what you see is just a reflection of state. State changes, app reacts, state changes back, app is the same as it was. You can slide through your apps history in dev-tools and see it construct/deconstruct itself, it's also very easy to inspect and see what action led to which result: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/a0d66cf145fe35cbe5fb34149...

Redux is a pattern basically, it's pure javascript, no magic, and little behind the scenes stuff.
Code and Coders: components of the sociotechnical system
This seems right to me.

the analogy I'd use is driving a car versus sitting in a passenger seat of a car. When I'm a passenger, I never remember the route we took. I retain almost no information about lefts and rights and landmarks. But if I'm driving, I really only have to drive to a place once to remember the way.
Look up the Nike Oregon Project, which is Nike's running team, re pushing the limits of non-banned drugs.
What topics would the T3X source be well suited to teach?
It is therefore a curiosity that the most free-market obsessed leaders appear to be those most likely to pursue conflict.

How do you prevent monopolies? Ideas that lead to wealth decay or redistribution seem to be an anathema in modern capitalist societies. Regulation apparently stifles the market. How does the monopoly avoid overproduction? Lean methodologies?

[edit] Edited too much out to the point where it seems curt. I'm interested in free-market proponents' views on monopolies. Also, forgot to mention I found the info about synthetic rubber to be particularly interesting -- Wikipedia has more info including posters.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_rubber#World_War_I...
Ask HN: What was Python 1 like?
I can hardly find any information or code snippets about it online. Has anyone worked with it? What were the drawbacks that led to Python 2?
I don't understand the arguments people are making that this is somehow grave robbing. Grave robbing you open up a grave and steal the personal artifacts and possibly the bones of the person interred there. Archaeologists have done a lot of this over the years and that activity is definitely grave robbing. It's a bit more restricted now in the US due to the NAGRA that restricts messing with human remains in some contexts.

In this case though the salvagers are not taking the bones out, nor the personal effects. They are taking huge amounts of steel, brass and copper, none of which were personal artifacts or property of a single one of the persons who died at the site.

To call this grave robbing, then removing a wrecked bus or truck from an accident site on the side of the freeway would have to be considered grave robbing as well. If the person removing the bus also took the body, wedding rings and gold teeth of the victims, that would be a crime. But the person removing the bus isn't doing that.
(2009) Jim Collins' daily work rituals
Alternatively, having a choice of more than one thing tends to cause competition to kick in, which often results in better quality than a single solution that everyone pretty much has to use.
Given this other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14280369

We'll probably be able to use these techniques on other problems in the future as well.
Make the HP Stream 11 into a Linux Crapbook (2016)
This is a good point, however, from a customer's perspective the cost of the problem solved includes what they're already paying for the service.
I would rather not leave myself a crime scene in my code that I have to figure out before I can do my work (especially when debugging!). I bounce around way too many systems in way too many languages to keep all the rules of every ORM and framework in my head.There's always a balance, but you can do really expressive things in the explicit. In the authors example of the Person, Ecto from Elxir doesn't favor magic happening for the has_many; you have to call out the validation AND relationships yourself. I think that's a good thing

schema "people" do
field :first, :string, null: false
field :last, :string, null: false

belongs_to: :company, App.Company
has_many: :assignments, App.Assignment, foreign_key: :person_id
end

def create_changeset(attrs) do
%Person{}
|> Ecto.Changeset.cast(attrs, [:first, :last, :company_id])
|> Ecto.Changeset.validate_required([:first, :last, :company_id])
|> Ecto.Changeset.foreign_key_constraint(:company_id)
end

And in the Assignment changesets you'd do the reverse for making sure the other sides' entities exist, or in the join table for many to manies.

I think the win readability wins later FAR outweigh the few validations I have to explicitly type out. A new person or someone under a deadline can quickly open one of the Ecto schemas, see all the relationships, see the validation being done, and see why stuff fails. And by turning it into a function you must explicitly call, it makes the data the most important thing and not the ORM itself. I could have called that function "parent_changeset" or "lawyer_changeset" if those made sense for what those functions did; they're not specially named. And then when you get that, you still need to actually apply the changes to have any effect.
Yes but build the importer first.
I really like scala's "implicit" syntax/feature, but sometimes I have trouble getting "how does this work...?"

hope scala (or intellij?) would get a "find all implicits related to this file/folder" and other things to help me around
>The only difference is the amount of time that has passed.

To me, your wording makes it sound like you think that is a minor difference.

I think it's a major difference in the negative direction.

These maritime war graves that are being robbed are of men whose children or grandchildren are alive.

(How many souls were lost aboard the HMS Electra alone, over a hundred ?)

A question I'm not sure I want to know the answer to - what are these thieving scumbags doing with the remains of the sailors who died aboard these ships?
This is only relevant assuming...

- The founder is not themselves a developer.

- The founder needs to hire more developers.

- The founder can't afford to live on a shoestring budget while building the product (and doesn't have another income stream).

This is where developer founders have an advantage.

I am US based and I know business and I am a principal level code / architect. I can build and launch a product in a month or less working on it at nights using just sweat equity and besides the time cost, all I need are to pay legal fees ($2000 to register the business, write terms of service, etc), a domain name ($10), and some servers ($100 max if I don't feel like optimizing for cost).

In fact I have... my side projects bring in more income to me than most developers make in a year and they cost me < $2000 to launch. No I won't say what they are on a throw away account because it will reveal who I am.
Something related to functional programming, databases, data analysis, dev methodology, or system architecture. I use a procedural language in my job, but this doesn't seem relevant to it. My degree isn't in CS, if that helps.
This comes off as really petty. It's good software that saves you a ton of time and effort. You spend $10 without thinking about it in tons of other places. If anything I think he should charge more
Thanks, I see there is good activity on Show HN. Ive got some more tidying and documenting of the project to do yet to feel its ready.
2nd Half 2016 Was First Time Majority of American Homes Had Only Wireless Phones
I'm not familiar with RoR, but that explicit version is hard to read. However, I think the problem with implicitness is that when it becomes wide-spread, nobody can read the code with ease (i.e. everyone made their own implicit code, and it comes together poorly). I see nothing wrong with a little bit of magic, especially if it is something you use often.

Side note: the author has a short paragraph about "simple/easy" and "complicated/hard" products, which doesn't ring true with me. I would think most people would say their software product is "complicated, but easy to use".
I know servos don't step, but doesn't the decoder 'count' steps?

But I totaly agree with you, they are completely different. Maybe in this case it was not very clever to oversimplify the problem.

By the way: you point out what I think is great about this business. So much work has been done to control motors very accurate. It's amazing what CNC machines can do today. And also how software optimized motion paths (gcode). And now this hardware. Great stuff!
Is there any reason you're only asking about those three languages? I'd say cater to the teenager's interests.

Do they like PC games?
Maybe look into C# scripting for Unity.
Lua is used for scripting/modding in tons of games. Minecraft I believe is one of the big ones.

Do they like mobile apps?
Java, Swift, Xamarin, NativeScript all come to mind.

JavaScript, Python, and Ruby are all wonderful, but I'm just wondering if there's a reason to limit it to those three. I'd say whatever technologies fall in line with the kids interests are best.
Well, ads currently are used to monetize part of your attention to pay for providing the service you're trying to use.

If the ads all went away, so too might the service.

So there is a debate if there's another viable economy (or even a better economy) than the ad-attention one.

I personally am against ads because the way they operate now fundamentally damages the workings of capitalism as a resource allocation tool.

There's a debate about the economics of ads, which sometimes takes on ethical dimensions.
I very much agree, hence the two latter items in the list. Fundamentals need to be much stronger to deal with decades worth of passing fads than I thought they needed to be when one set of fads seemed permanent (ie: when I was young and starting out). The best way to not get caught up in fads is to be the one out in front propagating real, effective new technologies or methods and letting other people turn some into fads and some not.

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."
Disintegrated Development Environments – How Did We Get Here?
+1 for video idea
The 9 questions that uncover the most surprising insights from employees
In doing so, they also destroyed an artificial reef that was aggregating fish for the local fishing industry. We should at least have a plan to replace that.
A fantastic open-source javascript alternative is localtunnel (https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel). I've used this more often than ngrok after ngrok became a paid service.
I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto... to address this
"They're like elephants and elephant seals."

Yes, yes they are.
Dildo selfie stick: Πως να βγάλετε την τέλεια σέλφι με τον δονητή σας
I would try to find a niche within the market of this competitors, and unbundle the set of features that are relevant for this niche, making the product simpler and slightly cheaper.
An Early History of Pony
"Relaxed definition" is a fairly pretentious way of describing social sciences. Is psychology also not a science, in your view?

Science as a process of study can be effectively applied to phenomena that are not as easy to rigorously measure as physics and chemistry.

I don't really understand where this view comes from. Is it a lack of exposure? There is a rich world of academic study in economics that is deeply complex, mathematical and even empirical, insofar as you can reasonably achieve in a domain that studies human behavior. There's more to it than the Pareto principle and "A Market for Lemons."

Studying the individual or aggregate behavior of human beings is inherently more difficult than inanimate objects. That doesn't mean you can't be rigorous with it.
They do fine for a lot of programming jobs. If you're going to work at a DoD contractor or something, work on the team maintaining a hospital website, or work in enterprise architecture you don't need a 4-year college degree in CS. I actually think you're better off getting a degree in something else and just learning to code on your own time for the vast majority of people.
I enjoyed this article a lot because this is a problem I struggle with often when coding. And not just at a particular point in the lifecycle of a project, it comes up all the time.

Decisions like this are, in my case, heavily influenced by how much I trust the rest of the codebase. Having "magic" code on top of a rock solid abstraction feels nice and safe. When I debug / troubleshoot I don't feel the need to step into the function to look at its implementation one more time.

I am much more likely to be explicit, suck it up and write the boilerplate code once again in a messy codebase where the abstractions change all the time (whether I'm the one who wrote the sucky code or not). In the end, I feel like it comes down to how well your objects / concerns are designed. When the concerns are properly separated and your objects are solid, magic code is indeed beautiful and extremely expressive.
Sorting Two Tons of Lego, the Software Side
Here's an older visualization for other interesting planar n-body choreographies:

http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~jm/Choreographies/

...plus a link to the animations for the linked paper:

http://numericaltank.sjtu.edu.cn/three-body/three-body.htm
oups, meant "routable" instead of "static"
Just signed up and this is almost exactly what I've been looking for.

The Github repo mentions a REST api that can be used to push arbitrary data into the system. Are there any docs around this yet?
The presence of Cesium–137 and Strontium–90 can also be used to identify art forgeries[0].

[0] http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/jul/04/nuclear...
Long-dead? This was only 75 years ago. My nan could have gone to school with some of the men that were killed on these ships. My nan is alive and well.

These ships are maritime war graves. The remains were of men that weren't vikings or ancient Egyptians. They were our grandparents generation. That's pretty damned recent.
Can you provide arguments for this claim so we can debate each other's claims like intelligent people, instead of just linking data without context and linking curt replies?

See this article from the founder of this forum: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_of_Wealth
He implies over and over that it's all very innocent: the 1% are "better", but unfortunately the rewards for being "better" are in a feedback loop that makes them ultra outsized.

This way, it basically removes culpability and replaces malfeasance with a technical bug.

It's a very moralizing article.
i thought this was about implicits in scala
Exactly. DO launched with great pricing, SSDs, and an attractive UI. If they launched with only one of those three we wouldn't be talking about them today.
It's stupid, but it's approximately as stupid as having single object variable names, type names, collections, table names etc. all with the same, indistinguishable singular noun. It's also what programmers have dreamed about since we realised you didn't have to use punchcards, and it's what I tell people programming is like so they can understand what I do.

Rails lets you write code that can be read out loud and still make sense. You can have a meeting about an ActiveRecord class and not get caught up clarifying what you're talking about every step of the way. You could put some code in a presentation to your manager if you really wanted. In three years' time when you look at your code, you can read it aloud again and find yourself saying exactly what it does. Rails lets you describe ideas at a similar level of abstraction as common English speech. That has value, even if it lacks precision. If having a dictionary embedded into the macros is what helps people write code well, then they clearly value matching up with their brain over matching up with a compiler, and good for them.
Whenever I buy toothpaste for sensitive teeth I always do a doubletake when I see strontium listed as in ingredient. I have to think for half a second is that right? Its name alone I guess is what makes me think that but I guess I am confusing it with other nasty radioactive elements.
The US would have tremendous incentive to develop synthetic rubber because of the war anyway, markets or not.