skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Examples of founders doing whatever it takes to fund their startups?
Repost since it didn't get much exposure last time.

(Original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14906251)

As most of us know, starting a company is a lot more difficult than the tabloids make it out to be. On top of that, getting proper funding is next to impossible. Airbnb founders created political themed boxed of cereal during the McCain-Obama election in order to keep the lights on [1].
What other examples like this are there?

[1.] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/airbnbs-surprising-path-to-y-combinator/
Airport lounges offer all kinds of drinks and snacks that I'm certain this person is not ignoring. They are also using the facilities and causing more congestion, making it less pleasant for the paying customers, so they are stealing the value that the lounge offers from other customers.
At one point there was an Android app that could identify strangers. They nerfed it so that it couldn't do that anymore. I'm sure they could do the same for the glasses.

But yeah, that's why it would have to be real subtle.
English timber framing is cool and everything, but the Japanese really deserve the title for figuring out how to make more or less permanent wooden buildings a very long time ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dry%C5%AB-ji

I am sometimes surprised, in my research into permaculture, at how many of these problems were solved by the Japanese a thousand years ago. In food, clothing, homes, tools, the level of efficiency and sophistication in the ancient techniques is astounding.

I've often thought Japanese culture strange, but lately I tend to conclude it's because they dealt with issues centuries ago that the west has only now started to think about.
English timber framing is cool and everything, but the Japanese really deserve the title for figuring out how to make more or less permanent wooden buildings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dry%C5%AB-ji

I am sometimes surprised, in my research into permaculture, at how many of these problems were solved by the Japanese a thousand years ago.
It's far too big to be usable on mobile.
Except BlackHat happens annually on multiple continents. Sure, DEF CON doesn't, but there are comparable conferences elsewhere (CCC for example).
The lines between security researcher and malware creator is becoming increasingly murky.

When is it research, pretending to be a bad egg to get more info or actually being one?

As long as its was fun and games no one really minded, but now malware is used to hold schools and hospitals to ransom. Even criminals don't go after schools and hospitals. Extreme greed and criminality can't be minimized away as 'hacking'.

The infosec community likes to be edgy but they need to clean up their act and not give airtime and cover to criminals, and its difficult to believe they don't know who these are.
I wish people would stop using the word "modulo" like this.
What's the definition of "intended" here? I would not normally say that someone desperately covering up business failures as they keep running it intends there to be any loss.
Why becoming a developer was a big mistake
I see how that came across as obnoxious, so thanks for the perspective.

I do think there's a pretty common failure mode for teams who don't have much experience with ML, though. Teams who don't have much experience with ML often take "We don't have much data" as a parameter of their problem, and don't see that this is something they can decide to change. This can lead to a lot of time spent experimenting with different unsupervised approaches that are a poor fit for what they're trying to do.
First, a judge can usually give a "directed verdict" of the person is obviously innocent.

Secondly it is much easier to pay off a judge and keep it quiet than a bunch of random jurors.

Thirdly judges can become calloused by virtue of their continued sentencing people to prison. They won't have the empathy that the jury will feel for both the accuser and the accused.

Fourth, the jury can ignore an outrageous law. For example oftentimes they refused to convict escaped slaves in the north.

Putting your freedom in the hands of one person who may very well be corrupt is much more dangerous than puttIng it in the hands of regular people.

Additionally I can't remember where, but I heard that 10 people or so working together usually come up with as good a solution as an expert anyways.
Protothreads – Lightweight Stackless Threads in C
I don't defend him in any way but he is not indicted for stealing people's bank account just for writing software that does that, please don't spread disinformation about this.
In my experience, hiring enlisted folks has been super successful (especially coast guard veterans), while hiring commissioned officers has been, with one exception, poor. I'm referring to officers with substantial careers in the military, not ROTC folks who put in their time and bugged out.

This is despite the fact that given my background I know more commissioned officers than I do enlisted folks. I assume this is simply that to be successful in the military you have had to adapt to a bureaucracy and structure which is radically different from the business world I live in. Certainly the risk/reward calculus is different. I am not trying to imply they are idiots.
I have accidentally stumbled on a solution to 1., if nobody knows how to copy a SIM: I have an eleven year old Blackberry — full keyboard, not T9, and both new enough to be using the 3G network and so old nobody maintains distracting apps for it.

I can even, despite its age, use it to make a WiFi hotspot so my development phone with no credit can go online when I'm outdoors.
yeah, this isn't new news. but it is a very nice write-up and simple enough that any technical person should be able to grasp it
I have to agree. Explosion/Spacy has a lot of Marketing BS. That said I think SpaCy is actually pretty solid and when you are in the NLP field give it a try.
I entered a livestream question session with this clown and asked him his opinion on CRSPR tech and he replied "It has not future because 'it doesn't work'".. Thats when I knew he was full of crap
Bad advice. That's likely to make it a lot worse.
Tell HN: I want to sell my company
On 6/11/13, I launched Breaker 101 here on Hacker News. It is a first-of-its-kind online web security course, for which I had come up with the idea a few days prior, wrote up a syllabus, and then put it up for presales. I was worried that I wouldn't get the 10 students I set as a minimum and that I would have to refund everyone. Instead, I sold out in hours. Over 50 seats at $1250-1500, bringing in somewhere around $80k in a single day. I ran the first iteration of the class a few months later and while there were growing pains, it went exceptionally well.

I attempted the same thing a second time around, but saw a small fraction of the success. I am not a marketing person and the attempts which were made to market it simply didn't work. Eventually I decided to drop the price down to $150 and make it hands-off. While I'm available for 1-on-1 sessions with students, these are infrequent and require only a few minutes of my time each month. The class largely runs itself and is basically pure profit; my total overhead is about $30/mo.

All that said, I have a kid coming and too many irons in the fire. Breaker 101 is bringing me ~$900/mo on average, but it could be making so much more with a skilled marketer/businessperson behind it. I want to sell the class and move onto the next phase of my life.

I'm using MixPanel for my analytics, which appears to miss ~10-15% of my users but should be fairly representative. I'm averaging approximately 400 uniques/month. There are no ads, no strategically placed posts, etc; it's really all word-of-mouth. Total sales are $133735, with $17441 of that coming since 3/21/16 ($8350 since 11/7/16).

I'm looking for $40k (negotiable) for the following: Domain name (breaker101.com), all course content (homework levels, class videos, writeups), infrastructure (VPSes, primarily), customer lists, and my input/name/assistance for some period we negotiate.

Feel free to ask anything here or email me at cody.brocious@gmail.com
Obviously, edge computing won't work for every use case. But it could get us off this obsession with tying everything into a centralized server that you have no control over. /rant
For someone who could believably repair it. I thought that would be implied by "that I couldn't have gotten back together", but I forget that someone need that kind of thing spelled out to them.

It's easier to get a hold of the necessary screwdrivers than to actually repair the device.
Yeah, but judges are no better at interpreting the law many times. If you don't believe me, go read some of the decisions by americas Supreme Court. For example they said a man was black therefore no a man therefor he had no right to sue in court, which basically means no rights at all. How they missed the part about due process I don't know.
A for-profit prison industry has no interest in solving the problem. See school-to-prison pipeline, where pupils are incarcerated for infractions in school.
I see, thanks for that info on Julia's performance.

As for OOP, I feel like that's more a matter of preference. I don't buy the functional is better (generally speaking not specific situations where it might be). But I could be wrong, I just don't see evidence, only anecdotal claims by fans of functional programming (which doesn't mean they're wrong only that I'm not convinced). To be fair, they have arguments against OOP in favor of functional, but I'm not personally sold. Or maybe I just like Ruby and it's approach to OOP.
The L.A. Times editor in chief is on GitHub and made an open-source patch
>You can't have it both ways.

I certainly can, because my argument doesn't rest on the screws being effective. The only important part is that Apple chose a screwhead on the sole basis that it tried to be a barrier to customers, which is a principle that I take issue with. If the screws were later easily bypassed, more power to the consumer, but it doesn't excuse the design choice.
> One can lose weight by increasing consumption or by reducing intake. For some people the first thing works better, for others the second.

I complete agree here. I don't think popular advice seems to be doing a good job of explaining this.

Going on anecdotal data. On my wrist HR monitor I seem to be easily hitting around 500 Kcal per weight training session. Assuming on the worst case that the monitor is off by about half, I have burned 250 Kcal per session. This in addition to a easily achievable cut of 250 Kcal with my diet leads me to ~500 Kcal a day. Which would fall in the realm of the calculation you make with biking. I find this easier to perform than an hour of biking :) Plus an additional goal is to increase muscle mass. So as a tradeoff it seems to work.
Jail time for Goldman/JPM execs: 0 and counting ...
> >the cops couldn't tell the difference

> is there any indication that's the case here? the FBI isn't a bunch of complete incompetents.

if they arrested someone selling the malware (which they did), and to get free that person say they can deliver the author (which they did), but instead point to any random security researcher he found working on that malware (we dont know). now, this plus the person whitehat research, the circle is closed and it would take one lifetime and imense legal fees to prove otherwise.
Mastercard Eyes Cryptocurrency Refunds in New Patent Application [pdf]
Potentially related to this issue over 5 years ago? https://it.slashdot.org/story/12/03/06/0136243/amd-confirms-...
Returns are irrelevant in the context of this argument. Jobs that provide real utility (not "breaking windows and repairing them") were created, and that's enough to justify the energy spent mining. Furthermore, an average investment takes years to generate returns. It's too early to call such investments worthless.
No one should do anything ... but IMO the best outcome here would be for AOO to a) highlight the availability of LibreOffice on their landing page (with perhaps a header on their other web), and b) release a final OpenOffice version with some similar pop-up or notification that directs users towards LibreOffice.
I'm not sure what the grandparent was implying, but there's definitely a major benefit for larger screen sizes, even for those that are completely blind. iOS voiceover and other accessibility UI affordances are much more difficult to implement on the watch form factor, where a very small amount of content can be 'active' at a time.

There are some interesting startups targeting the possibilities here, but right now, smart watches provide a less capable experience for everyone right now.
I have the same issue with the same solution. It’s called Disk Inventory X on macOS.
I was until their recent insistance to copy Adobe design and removing "distracting" colors in their UI.

Also since their new licence scheme it seems releases quality can be hit or miss.
In theory, or in practice?

Developing for the Samsung Gear S2 was one of the most frustrating experiences in my life. Tizen is a trainwreck.

There are no games being changed with that platform.
I'd always heard "Europeans", not "European people"; if Google is just confused (and I wouldn't rule it out -- look up "Goofle Translate"), I think it's because "European people" is a pretty rare semantic construct.
Typical HBR article.

Sure. Decisiveness, adaptability, reliability, etc. are great.

But the biggest problem is when the CEO is decisive, the CEO is engaging the team, the CEO is adopting to environment and the CEO is reliable - but the CEO is doing it all wrong. I.e., the CEO just doesn't have a clue.

As Napoleon said (and many others): whoever is industrious and stupid should be shot on the spot.

The best CEOs are the one who are lazy and very smart. Lazy? Because they will delegate their vision to other people. Smart? The CEO will have the right vision and delegate to the right people.
> A deficit of about 4000 calories a week is healthy for a loss of about a pound.

There isn't really a hard and fast rule here, it depends on the person. If you are obese enough, you can engage in an extended fast with no food whatsoever (just water, vitamins and electrolytes) and lose up to a pound per day in ketosis.

But obviously that should only be done with the supervision of a doctor.
It can mean "except for differences accounted for by" which I think is correct here.

http://www.wordnik.com/words/modulo
>Does he really mean that proper go code has direct access to fields rather than encapsulating them???

Yeah, so?
There’s a debate raging in science about what should count as “significant”
Regarding Weev, should planning on selling the data really affect the legality of his behavior? I mean, there are services that sell data they scrape from websites after all.
Funny thing is I was just discussing this with a Rails dev who was surprised there was nothing like Devise. I said - I think there has to be I just haven't researched it that hard. I guess not.
Confirmation bias, mostly.
Tell HN: A gigantic JavaScript security opportunity – who is going to do it?
There needs to be some sort of new "antivirus" type application that does the job of ensuring a javascript application is built from packages that are secure/not compromised.

I do not want my code to have this sort of thing: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=malicious+npm+package

Doing all this is too brittle and not repeatable enough: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/08/find-projects-infected-by-malicious-npm-packages.html

Presumably there is alot of work to be done for this package to know all current security issues and analyze packages to find them, but that's where the opportunity is.

As a developer, I don't want to be using malicious components, I would rather buy some antivirus type package and scan my application or source code or something.

I will pay money to buy this service/application.
Maybe in Wales? Modern England (and most of modern Scotland) is mostly Anglo-Saxon, not Romano-British.
I already wear glasses all the time. Lots of tradespeople wear eye protection all the time.

I don't think I've seen the killer app yet, but if it's awesome, wearing glasses won't be too much of a problem once they become slim and light.

I don't want to carry a big flat phone in my pocket, but its worth it.
Did you even read my comment? You don't just work for one hour usually.
ARKit is impressive, but AR is a solution looking for a problem. I don't foresee it becoming really useful anytime soon.
Taleb is correct to call out this cartoon as the politically correct nonsense that it is. A saner society might agree with him and ask itself why, in the current day, history needs to be rewritten to be completely fictitious.

Taleb's persona, however, does not lend itself well to open debate over such issues, as he champions himself as being a lone iconoclast against the "IYIs". All we can do is enjoy the show, I guess.
If it's a disease, it's a social one. We've normalized what used to be fairly abnormal. Today, the person who is 75 lbs over weight looks around, readily sees someone 150 lbs,200 lbs or more over weight. The +75'er thinks "I'm not overweight."

Humans do that. We adjust. We assimilate. We make presumptuous about validity based on what we see. That's the disease.

That said, it doesn't help that people like Oprah have led the "love your body" parade. Sure. Do it! It's your body. But that doesn't make it healthy. That does mitigate the broader societal damager you're doing.

Sure. Let's stop fat shaming. But let's also stop being in denial about the personal health implication of carrying too much extra weight.

I don't understand how we can discuss healthcare, the cost of healthcare, but then not talk about (personal) health. We want lower costs and we want to be more and more unhealthy. It doesn't work that way.
Try again in 6 months.
Npm has namespacing.
> Prosecutors don't charge people if they aren't fairly confident that the evidence will result in a conviction.

Yes they do. They throw a huge array of charges, provable or now, at people with the intent to scare them.

Punishing people for refusing to plead guilty should be a crime.
Emerging Technology to Address Climate Change
Yes, ARKit.

With 3D hand tracking and gesture recognition.[1] When the new Clay SDK releases (RSN?)[2], I expect a new wave of ARKit demos.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa9wgHkIucs&start=43
[2] http://claytheworld.com/news/
Of course there are always outliers. However, the older you get the less likely you are to be overweight. That is, you'll typically die sooner, not later. I'd say ("premature") death qualifies as unhealthy ;)
When the defense gets absurd, I go looking for the defender's agenda.

In this case, the original commenter wants to tar all centralized institutions as corrupt (congress, news, etc). His strategy is to paint Shrekli in the best possible light, to make him a martyr for the cause.

He even paints Shrekli as another Snowden:

> It exposes it. Not quite as monumental, but a Snowden moment. Remember, congress did squat about the price gouging, because that's what they get paid to do.
Army tells troops to stop using DJI drones immediately, because cyber
> Only 7% of the high-performing CEOs we studied had an undergraduate Ivy League education, and 8% of them didn’t graduate from college at all.

If you confuse correlation with causation, you could say that it's better to be a drop out than graduate from Ivy League
Looking for JavaScript Programmers (ReactNative And/or Meteor Preferred)
Hello everyone!

My name is Mihir and I am going to be a senior at New Trier High School in the fall. I recently co-founded a mobile application and web development company called BitByBite, Inc. alongside another incoming senior and an incoming junior. We're working with our first client on an app that will hopefully help teens going through difficult mental/emotional stages, especially with conditions such as depression.

We are looking for programmers that are comfortable and experienced with JavaScript. Ideally, those who have prior experience with ReactNative and/or Meteor (a backend) would be great, although that is not a requirement. We are offering payment in a variety of different forms including equity, royalties, and/or cash, and so we are flexible in that regard. However, we would greatly prefer if you would be able to work with us through equity and/or royalty deals, as we are indeed a high-school start-up, and we are quite cash-strapped at the moment.

Please contact me at mihirrkumar@gmail.com OR my cellphone at (847) 596-1214 if you are interested in working with us as a programmer over the next month(s) as we begin to work with new clients on exciting apps and websites while finishing developing an app that will help those undergoing mental and emotional distress.

Thanks!
I would suspect the vast majority of the cost of drugs is R&D, including the FDA approval process. They can factor that in on initial cost when they release the drug. The 10% is only for increases.

Hopefully instead of someone buying a drug that has already been released won't buy it because they can jack up the price 5000%. They would have to factor in the 10% rule when purchasing. Unfortunately this might lead to expensive release costs, but that already happens.

It might not be perfect, but 6000% increases because more yachts is a hell of a lot worse.
Technically it loses potential oxygen out of its possibly finite supply required to stay alight.

But I like the sentiment :)
>>> How do they do it in this day and age of "FAQs", "Forums" and "Helpdesks"? :)

The secret: Employee retention.

Everything is easier when the knowledge stays in the company.
XNU has an equivalent to vDSO: the commpage. It is also used for time.
Tried emailing the above email but never got a response back. I saw in your reply you didn't reply to some of the applicants last month because they were new college grads.

With that in mind, are y'all looking for someone with the skills to hit the ground running or someone who can learn on the job?
There is evidence that he was a white hat hacker now, and that is enough for current white hat hackers to be worried.
Google Vizier: A Service for Black-Box Optimization [pdf]
Kudos.

But the point is, you changed your lifestyle, and stuck with it. I think most who lose weight put it back on because they don't change anything. As if being thinner makes bad food less bad :)
I'm confused what exactly you want me to do?

I've said I have 0 problems publishing their data publicly. I'm happy to own even the stronger model of doxxing you lay out. I've put a few time qualifiers on it you didn't like.

But I have no problem burning the the identity people who think they can use me or my infrastructure to defraud others. Quite the opposite.
You mean the same phone, or a different phone?

The Apple Watch already can and does use WiFi and will connect to existing configured access points:

http://www.iphonehacks.com/2015/05/how-to-ensure-apple-watch...

Presumably if you tethered your personal phone to a second phone, then the apple watch could and would also connect directly to that second phone's WiFi hotspot without your personal phone present.
In the 90s we were also excited about the internet and mobile phones. We had just stopped being excited about neural networks.

Things mature at different rates.
Yup, getters/setters in POJOs drive me up the wall. So much simpler in languages that have proper const/mutability qualifiers.
Heil Hitler! /s

(Seriously, read Snyder's _Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning_ for how Hitler saw the US as a role model.)
I liked the analogy, though I'll confess I clicked the link expecting to see a layman explanation of some interesting physics trivia.