skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spread over a 30 year mortgage? I'm not saying it's nothing but many people really value peace of mind.
I built a SMS marketing web-app. It's basically a contact-management and mass messenger, nothing fancy. Heroku/django/twilio/stripe stack. People can sign up for your list, and you send them deals or events or whatever as regularly as you feel like.

I built it for a niche that is not very tech-savvy, and largely couldn't be targeted by SEO, because my partner was going to handle sales. The partner faded away almost immediately and there hasn't been any real revenue to speak of. It pays for itself.

It was built for my own business as the original customer, and that business still uses it, but nobody else does. At our peak we had maybe 4 paying customers, but our onboarding wasn't great either (we were brand new) and they didn't all see the value in it.

Anyway, I think with more sales and better onboarding we'd have had a good MRR and not much churn.

Heroku has more than doubled their monthly fee since it started. It used to be profitable with one customer, now it is breakeven, +/- a few dollars. I think I'll move it soon to a $5 VM and it should make about $60/month at that point.

I made some mistakes:

1) trusting my partner to make sales. I already knew they weren't a workaholic.

2) No vesting cliffs or anything. We just have 50/50 and that's it, so I was not interested in working on it solo and paying out half the money, nor starting a fight for full control. I wouldn't lose much to rename it and take it elsewhere, but I wouldn't feel right about it. Anyway he quit selling within a month (about 15-30 hours invested iirc) and so we were dead in the water. I'm close with him and so I left it at that to avoid damaging our personal relationship.

3) I used long-codes, which is a nono for mass-texting. We had some dropped texts, or we think we did (it's very hard to diagnose). Shortcodes were very expensive at the time; I don't know what the options look like now. You can probably pay for access to someone else's shortcode. We don't notice any issues with the remaining customer, which has a list of a couple hundred folks.

I haven't touched the code for over 3 years and it still runs. That's pretty impressive, probably my most solid system. Also some kudos to heroku for not breaking it somehow in that time.

I've never shipped any personal project since then, although I'm getting close on one now. I continued to make the mistake of picking bad co-founders, so for this one I'm solo. I don't expect to get rich, as I have no marketing plan and I find most marketing distasteful. So maybe I'll get lucky, or maybe I'll expose myself to some strangers on here or somewhere when it's ready to sell.
The video actually claims at 05:10 that they can create sounds that can't be created digitally.
Not to be a pedant (who am I kidding), but this is actually one of the examples where distinguishing between "free software" and "open source" is more than a philosophical disagreement.

You actually can create an open source DRM solution, because none of the OSI definition[1] makes reference to user freedom or other issues that DRM violates. As far as the OSI is concerned, DRM is can be released under an OSI license. Of course, you have to consider that according to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, breaking DRM is _very_ illegal (regardless of whether or not the DRM'd media is still under copyright -- which means that DRM has no expiry).

However, if you subscribe to the free software definition[2], then you run into a problem. DRM in principle violates freedom #0: the freedom to run the program for any purpose. Now, there exist free software licenses that don't protect you against this threat (I believe only the GPLv3 actually addresses this issue), but note that just because a piece of software is under a free software license doesn't make it free software (there are whole classes of programs that might be GPLv3 but are still not considered by the FSF to be truly free -- DRM falls under that example).

[1]: https://opensource.org/osd
[2]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

--

Another reason is that I guarantee their EME implementations are going to be full of bugs and making the source available would just make it easier to find them. This is the same AAC conspiracy that gave us the Sony rootkit after all[3] (which then went on to be used by other viruses).

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Yes but not just that. I think the bigger trend is that training oneself to excel at those types of problems meant (in addition to other things) one thing about you back then (that you were really into programming). Now that same behavior likely means that you want to get a nice job at one of the big tech companies, as a result of them publically selecting for that. These are fuzzy indicators to begin with, but they're definitely different fuzz.
At the same time, if you've never seen a solution that uses something like DP, you're not going to see a DP problem and think "oh, I can use DP for this". Part of it is ensuring that programmers have awareness of the tools at their disposal, so they can pull them out when they're under a deadline to get something done on time that's performant
Your interpretation is too weak. It is not just "not necessarily better", it is the stronger "on average are probably worse".

The reason is that programming competitions give more of a boost to your odds of being selected than to how well you'll do on the job. So people who otherwise wouldn't have gotten in now will, and will not perform as well as the people that they displaced.

Which is what happened with hockey players. Being born at the right time of year put you in a bucket with people who were slightly younger than you. Which improved your performance on the tests, but didn't matter once you all grew up. So slightly worse people at the right time of year displaced slightly better at the wrong time of year, and the average came out that people who got through and were born in the latter half of the year were actually better.
I think skeptics uncover truth, while solipsists spread uncertainty.
I agree. A government can't be overthrown by revolutionaries, no matter how clever and well-disciplined, unless it has already become greatly weakened through factors such as poor leadership, technological and economic changes, and religious disputes.
Very sorry to hear about the news SoundClouders. I was an avid user and loved the site, especially how you could comment on specific parts of the songs.

We've got a bunch of engineering positions (everything from entry level to Sr level) at The Trade Desk in a variety of different locations such as London, Sydney, San Francisco, New York, Boulder, San Jose, Aliso Viejo, Ventura and Bellevue.

Here's a list of our open jobs: https://www.thetradedesk.com/join-us/open-positions

Please feel free to email me directly as well if you'd just like to hear more. taek.yun@thetradedesk.com
Do you run webpack to minimize your code for download? Does that process of combining it all into one JS file trigger the GPL license virality (is it even legal to minimize GPL'd code with MIT licensed code)? IANAL but I sure wouldn't want to risk it. Maybe LGPL you could get away with, but GPL seems like a really bad idea for front end JavaScript libraries.
This is a marvelous piece.
Amazing multimedia sci-fi.
Yeah, it is disgusting that someone would eat their own hair (people die from that because it clogs there intestines). Same with POOP/PEE + smell - it's gross because it literally IS gross.
Me too and I'm pretty happy with it. My retention period is 1Y for most systems.
Affiliate marketing is the thing, I guess.
Contagions always spread through only the susceptible fraction of the population. Prior to mass communications, there were too few susceptible individuals in any given population for it to spread. The herd was immune, because any infected person would die before ever meeting another susceptible person.

Enter the Internet. Now all the susceptible people can aggregate around their own forums/boards/podcasts/groups/subreddits and infect each other with their unique strains of madness.

There's no more herd immunity, because all the susceptible people can find each other instantly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711461
I've seen this first hand. I'm married and we had a female developer come in to do some training. Neither one of us had lunch so I asked her if she wanted to grab lunch, as I would have done with any other developer. I don't think either of us thought twice about it but I got some really funny looks walking out the door from some of the other employees.
Disagree. A model is not reality, and is indeed a fantasy. Scientists should be (and usually are) well aware of this.

Importantly, the documentary explores some historical examples of where these models were used to attempt to understand, predict, and shape human behavior. Some might find the use of models in these ways immoral, and in my opinion the documentary does a pretty good job of exploring it.
Totally! The building and deploying is the easy part. Then you have to worry about configuration, secrets, versions, rollbacks, migrations, TLS, logging, load balancing, database hosting, backups, billing, maintenance, reliability, security, capacity, and usability, not to mention marketing and customer support.
Are you married? I expect opposition to 1:1 dinners is higher among married couples.
Put yourself in the shoes of a browser dev faced with a torrent of angry users asking why you "broke Netflix". They won't listen to what seems like a wishy-washy response about the principles of "the open Internet", all they will care about is that they had Netflix and now they don't and it's your fault.

Devil's advocate, I'm no fan of DRM, but from the end user's point of view, it's a necessity.
I don't. It wasn't a personal attack. I think he jumps to conclusions that are unwarranted, and I'm asking him to kindly edit them out. In no way did I attack his person.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/06/soundcloud-lay-off-40-pe...
Not exactly equivalent.

The Copenhagen Interpretation has a pretty big theoretical hole in that the condition for when a wavefunction collapse occurs is not defined within the theory itself. Supposedly collapse occurs during a "measurement". Well, what's a measurement? Your measuring apparatus are all made up of matter that supposed to be following the same fundamental physical laws. I think you'd be hard pressed to write a computer program that takes as input a description of all the particles and their wavefunctions and compute when a measurement occurs. In practice, scientists doing calculations under the Copenhagen Interpretation will choose the points in time to perform a collapse so that the calculations match experimental results. This is what I mean when I say that Copenhagen is non-algorithmic. That's a forgivable mistake if you invent your theory before the idea of an algorithm is formalized (as was CI), but today it's not a forgivable mistake.

If you decide to fix the problem with Copenhagen Interpretation by explicitly defining that a measurement is when X happens for some X, then you've allowed for an experiment whose results can differentiate between Copenhagen and Many Worlds. MWI says that different parts of the wave function can affect each other no matter how distant, though the effect size decreases exponentially with distance. So set up an experiment so that X occurs and then be able to measure interference from distant parts of the wavefunction that are either present (in MWI) or not present (in CI). That distinguishes the interpretations via experiment.
I have had a bunch of little websites that didn't do much of anything. Some problems that have plagued my projects (especially health-related ones):

1) Credibility.

I am getting well when the world says that cannot be done. Most people don't want to believe this at all. So I get called crazy, a charlatan, etc.

2) Inherent monetization challenges in the problem space.

I am convinced that part of what is wrong with modern medicine is that money gets made off of treatment, not off of positive health outcomes. This is a conflict of interest for healthcare providers who have no motive to actually get you well and lots of motive to give you just enough improvement to keep you willing to keep paying for more.

3) I'm a woman.

This has made it hard for me to network, etc. A lot of men who know what I want to learn either will talk to me to hit on me or won't talk to me because they don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Trying to make connections has been really hard.

4. I know how to get well, I don't know how to do business.

I know how to accomplish a thing, but I don't know how to accomplish all the stuff that goes into turning that into a money-making venture.

5. I'm very eye catching.

I have a long history of attracting a LOT of attention. I have really struggled with figuring out how to get the attention off of ME and onto MY WORK. It is getting better, but this has really been frustrating.

There are no doubt other issues, but those are a few things off the top of my head.
The current state of front-end web development isn't a mess, it's actually the opposite. I would argue it is bleeding edge. If you look at it from an engineering perspective (inside-out), it's probably not the best. But if you're looking at the quickest way to deliver value you to your customers, it is unmatched. Every other application development stack other than front-end development requires compile, build and deployment steps. With front-end development, you can literally reach billions of customers whenever you decide to do so. The only requirement is a somewhat modern browser. The current state of front-end development is amazing.
Thanks, this was great! I've been meaning to search for a good technical explanation like this for a while. This fit the bill perfectly.

I didn't realize that the mining process had a lottery-like nature to it. I always assumed that if you bother to mine then you are guaranteed to churn out coins. But I still don't quite get how this process scales to hundreds of thousands of people mining all over the world, as it seems like you could quickly end up with many many competing chains.
Maybe you subscribe to the "one perfect spouse for me" philosophy? From what I see of his attitude from the article, he probably would find someone similar.
Mailprincess for iPhone and Android ( https://mailprincess.com )

Lets people send checks in the mail from their bank account. Also lets you send photos you take as documents in the mail or via fax.

Mostly it was built for fun, to play around with Ionic, and to occupy spare cycles in between client projects. But hoped it would make some money.

So far, just has a few random users.

The main problem is that it's a pain in the ass to get bank accounts verified. You have to wait to confirm test deposits into your bank account, and, by that point, most people churn. Considered adding Plaid to get around that and do instant bank verifications, but it was too expensive to make it worth it from a user perspective.

Recently started thinking it might be fun to make a web version that lets users pay with cryptocurrency.
I have a script that checks which external drives are connected and when it finds the correct ones it backups to them using rsync. (Only /home is backed up but it varies depending on which external drive is connected)
Warrior Games
1. There are multiple cultures, even within predominantly white middle class culture. Each has individual rules. I grew up under one set (observing my parents and their friends, a set of working class individuals) , reached adolescence under another (Evangelical Pentecostal culture), and left that to a third, professional educated rules.

(Now, ignore for the moment that I'm gay, which has an entirely set of other groups and expectations.)

For Evangelicals, it is acceptable to be friends before dating. In current secular trends in the college educated population, women (generally - there are exceptions) expect a man to be up-front with romantic intentions, unless (as above) there are circumstances preventing that intention.

There are boundaries to asking someone out if such changes happen. For example, sometimes it is acceptable-ish to ask someone out when they're exiting (or in) a relationship, and there are times when it's a cause for rejection. Most times, it's cause for rejection, unless it isn't. Can you distill the rules into an easy golden rule pattern? I know I can't.
They laid off 40% of their staff yesterday: http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/soundcloud-makes-major-layoff...
Affero doesn't apply here because this is stuff that downloads and runs on the user's machine. You absolutely are distributing the code to every visitor. That makes it straight GPL.
You don't even need to be in power for this issue to cause problems. If someone in power does something bad, if the lack of social skills prevents you from realizing what they did was bad, then you're essentially going to let it continue by not speaking out about it and you're going to reinforce that whatever that thing was was actually ok. And this is all done without you even realizing what you are doing, because you don't have the social skills realize that you are doing it at all.
CPU Buyer's Guide: Q2 2017
> The thing is, if no humans can spot the flaw, then what difference does it make if they cheated in school? Either way they'll do flawed calculations if we assume your logic.

I don't think that my logic allows us to conclude that. The idea of mathematics is that it is possible for humans to create and apply a system whose correct application makes the genesis of errors, howsoever subtle or undetectable, impossible.

Given this, and the likelihood that a mathematical error (of the conceptual type "any convergent sequences of continuous functions converges to a continuous function", rather than of the computational type "1 + 1 = 1") will not be found, it is especially important that practitioners of mathematics know how to apply their tools correctly, which they probably will not have learned by cheating in school; and, if they are able to apply those tools correctly, then they will not create errors.

(I grant that the weasel word 'correct' and its derivatives risks making this argument circular. I grant that human mathematicians collectively make an awful lot of errors, although I hope that we make fewer professional errors than many other professionals.)

> However, I wasn't really talking about people wanting to become actual mathematicians - those probably wouldn't use Wolfram just because they actually love crunching those numbers manually.

This comment seems to suggest to me the source of our disagreement in the first paragraph. As a mathematician, I don't crunch numbers professionally, and, when I have to do so outside of my profession, don't love crunching them manually. I suspect most mathematicians are in the same boat.
Autonomous vehicle technology, and it's free --> https://github.com/commaai/openpilot

Working, video by a user --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VN1YcC83nA

Where's the snake oil?
Deadlifts and Squats are the two that REALLY make the next couple of days a challenge. And I agree that it's likely not just the fact that the muscles are sore, because, the feeling is systemic. My entire mind and body entity are functioning on a lower level (recovering) in the days following intense Deadlifts or Squats, and to a lesser degree other lifts. I already struggle a TON with "getting going" in the morning, sometimes not reaching peak mental capacity until the early after noon. Lifting only delays this further.

I've talked with "professional" body builders (not IFBB level but people who do it for a living) and most of them say they suffer from very little if any soreness / mental fatigue. It has led me to believe, as crushing to my ego as it is, that I just don't have the same recovery capability as these guys, nor the same potential for growth.

I've gone so far as to get my labs checked, just to be sure I didn't have some obvious problem. Tests all came back normal.

As such, gaining muscle seems out or reach as it requires an intense regimen, and tons of food. When that starts to take away from my work, I gotta do something else. Hence, running :(
Tarsnap for documents (rotated with tarsnapper), S3 reduced redundancy for Pictures (JPG + RAW).
>A realtor can still walk a property to perform a market analysis, which is still more accurate than an automated valuation

Wow, how on earth do you know that!? That's a pretty bold statement and I don't really see anything to justify it at all. You start with "algorithm aren't as accurate as traditional appraisers" and then conclude from that "real estate agents (who aren't appraisers!) can give a more accurate market analysis than algorithms." There's a big leap there.

Even if this was true that real estate agents do a better job than automatic algorithms it's still kind of irrelevant because an appraiser cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-$600 where as an agent costs $5,000-$10,000+. If you need an appraisal you hire an appraiser, not an agent.
If anyone is looking to maintain an entire team (especially in the areas listed in my profile, but any good dev+cloud team actually), I will hire you as an entire team.

Unfortunately, not many names on this list in NYC which is where we'd prefer, but I can also do L.A., Phoenix/Tempe/Chandler, S.F., San Diego, Charlotte, or other options.

Of course, happy to hire individuals as well.

My username at gmail.
The speed of per-thread arenas has been proven for at least a decade. Why snark about getting it in glibc?

I'm a little shocked it wasn't already the default.
Exactly, not all tough problems have to be solved. In this case we probably should optimise for choice rather than an elegant system!
> The question isn't does it work, it's how long does it work for. For example, diets work. But most have a fall-off-the-wagon rate in the couple of months range.

Off the top of my head, I have a friend who have been off of Facebook for 9 years, another for 7, and another who never made an account at all. These are all healthy, happy people with robust social lives: their friends just know they need to be texted to be looped into plans. I know still more people (myself included) who have always had a healthy relationship with social media: short periods of "maybe I'm mindlessly browsing this a bit" followed by minor habit tweaks and straight back to a fully healthy relationship. I eat extremely healthy but every once in a while notice that I'm eating a bit of junk food (perhaps due to stress at work or something). I notice it and fix it and go back to eating extremely healthy. It would be completely inaccurate to claim that any lapse means I have an unhealthy relationship with food, and this is exactly the same as with social media et al.

> I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.

This is a beyond-absurd definition of social media, and you're now talking about something that no one else here is talking about. The idea that there's no value in email and texting beyond dopamine addiction is frankly just insane. When I get statements from my bank, or delivery notifications from my package receipt service or laundry service, or an update that my friend wants to move our dinner date back by half an hour, am I feeding my addiction? Because your bizarre definition doesn't leave any room for responsible e-mail/text usage.

Anyone defining "communication with other people" as an addiction that needs to be killed off is battling far worse demons than social media/dopamine-hit addiction. That may be interesting in and enough of itself but it couldn't be less relevant to this thread.