skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you find critical thinkers/beta testers for your SAAS/Product?
tl;dr looking for a way to find critical thinkers/beta testers for my SAAS.

Hi everyone!

The last few weeks I have been developing my own Software as a Service product* hoping to launch soon, however now that I'm coming closer to the first beta release of the software I have no idea what to do next. Obviously marketing should be the first step, if the product is ready to be released. But its not. Instead of that I'm looking for a way to find beta tester and/or people that want to do some critical thinking of the product. Free or paid doesn't matter much, since after all the product should be profitable.

Personally I don't think ProductHunt is the way to go since the product isn't finished. Neither is Hacker News because it would quickly turn into a 'rate my saas' spam I'm afraid. Reddit may be an option. but as far as I know there isn't a sub reddit dedicated to this. The final resort would be actual advertising, but there is no guarantee people would give their feedback.

* I'll put this at the bottom since I don't want to disguise this post as an advertisement, I genuinely want the best way to find other people. But here it is: https://servitor.pw Once again it is rough on the edges and still requires a lot of work.

Edit: I'd like to apologize for any grammer or spelling mistakes, English isn't my native language.
inevitable that this will turn into another taxpayer bailout, somehow
The problem with that is that they become a talent pipeline for Facebook/Google/Apple/Netflix.

I met tons of people who did 2 years at amazon and departed to Facebook for a fat offer that was worth far more than the remaining unvested amazon stock.

Trying to nickle and dime people when they come in the door just leads to people departing early. Employee turnover is a massive cost.
Liable how? And to what extent, the idea "let the companies be liable for their own data breaches." sounds good until you think about for more than 10 seconds.

Identity Fraud is not normally carried out using just 1 breach, so it is several breaches combined that give a criminal what they need to commit full Identity fraud.

Credit Card Fraud can almost never be traced back to a single breach.

Are you holding the company that collected the data, or the company that the data was stolen from liable, often times these are not the same entities.

I can probably come up with about 1000 other things to bring up in relation to "let the companies be liable for their own data breaches."
The main purpose of a wildlife camera-trap is to be set and left in the wild for days, weeks or months. In this sense can be called permanent. The best models are relatively expensive and can be stolen if you don't hide it carefully. Those camera are also used for fighting against environmental crimes (i.e: exposing arsonists walking the forest at 4AM minutes before a fireforest starts), so can be vandalized.
The numbers are less shocking after running them through a cost-of-living comparison with your base salary.
The quality at Westervoort's Cafetaria de Uithoek[0] was better consistiently back when they used to fry with lard.
[0]http://www.cafetariadeuithoek.com/
You could try Paper.js. If you use this, make sure to use Symbols instead of Path or Rectangle objects, otherwise you will run into performance issues quickly. There is an online editor at http://sketch.paperjs.org which is nice to play around with.
I used to think richard stallman was just a paranoid lunatic...
Well, the more time goes by, the more i think he was just 100% right. It's time to be much much more careful and radical with the path technology is taking us.

It's time we all invest a bit of our time to provide real open and benevolent alternatives to facebook, google, amazon, and all the rest, because they're steering internet toward an orwelian nightmare.
Fairly useless unless you're part of a roughly $1-trillion dollar[1] global industry, you mean?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade - Take the 2003 figure as a % of world GDP, apply to today's world GDP.
That's quite insightful. I see you really know what you're talking about and any examples or snippets will be helpful. You are also welcome to collaborate with me on the project for fun if you want (it was a great challenge for me). I'll probably look into it again next weekend to implement your suggestions.

How much do you reckon we can get the response time with these optimizations? Right now the 340ms is nodejs + php-cli + my wrapper script (that inits s3, etc) + the actual content script (another php file) and request for the css framework from a CDN.
I first read him when somebody recommended "La Place de la Concorde Suisse" to me. Having served in, and opposed the Swiss army myself (considering it an utter waste of time and money), I found his writing one sided, and rather naively regurgitating pro-army propaganda.

It was only some years later, reading "Atchafalaya", that I started appreciating his writing: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya
Or get a Shift Card (partner of Coinbase) and buy some nice coffee or gas or plane tickets... Everything is useless if you're a moron ;-).

https://www.shiftpayments.com/
Terraform requires significant infrastructure to get the same state management and implicit on-device access that CloudFormation's metadata service does. A common pattern in systems I oversee or consult on is to use CloudFormation's metadata service (which is not the EC2 metadata service, to be clear) to feed Ansible facts or chef-zero attributes in order to have bootstrapped systems that do not rely upon having a Tower or Chef Server in my environment.

The Terraform domain spec is not sufficiently expressive (just look at the circumlocutions you need to not create something in one environment versus another). It's way too hard to build large modules, but the lack of decent scoping makes assembling many small modules difficult too. Worse, the domain spec is also requires HCL, which is awful, or JSON, which is a return to the same problem that cfer solves for CloudFormation. One of my first attempts at a nontrivial open-source project was Terraframe[1], a Ruby DSL for Terraform; I abandoned it out of frustration when it became evident that Terraform's JSON parsing was untested, broken, and unusable in practice. Out of that frustration grew my own early CloudFormation prototypes, which my friend Sean did better with cfer.

If you're looking for an alternative to CloudFormation, I generally recommend BOSH[2], as it solves problems without introducing new ones. Saying the same for Terraform is a stretch.

[1] - https://github.com/eropple/terraframe

[2] - https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh
Thank you for sharing your perspective, it has described what I have been unable to articulate for quite some time now.
I just realized this was posted 4 years ago. The "to 10,000 in 2017" was a pretty good guess.
Negligence
If there are other people in your team who think the same, then bring it up to your manager(s). Unless you bring it up nothing will change so the only way out is to leave the company at that point.
Shit, somebody gave me 0.05 BTC a few years ago to go to a talk about what it was all about. Hopefully I still have that paper wallet, it must be worth close to $500
It's pretty useless for those, too.
The goal is to be able to identify you, not recover an image of you.

This is just as much PII as your fingerprints. Fingerprint based devices store metadata not images. I can't look at a fingerprint and connect it to a person, but a machine can. Similarly the output of a NN designed to recognize people will be useful for validation. Otherwise biometrics would not work.

Remember if they are using your photo as training data the NN is going to learn you vs someone else or it's useless. If they can find you in any photo that's as effective as handing a person the uploaded photo and giving the same task.
Thanks. I will take a look.
What per-app tabs are you talking about? This whole idea is actually cross-app tabs.
2 Online Business School Students Make Forbes 30 Under 30
People wonder why the bees are gone or why it's gonna be a total wasteland for life in no time.
intros have been poorly done by many artists. When Pink Floyd does it, wow. When The Tea Party does it it's gimmicky.

I could not imagine VH's Hot for teacher without that intro.
You might have a good excuse, but don't deny what is really going on here.

These "free" analytics services have a dark side. The price for using them is that they get to build profiles of your users, with varying degrees of invasiveness. And once you sign up with them, you are selling out your users.
It doesn't have to be a hash really. They probably use some image processing techniques to process facial features and store the signature.

I'm not sure how it identifies a human from a bot though.
Just a minor correction, you can't stop bitcoin! :)
Elon Musk vs. the Flat Earth Society vs. Slashdot
The world's first waste-to-energy crypto mine
The trouble is, it's another news-recycling and aggregation site. We have too many of those now. Too many pundits. Not enough reporters on the street, or at least on the phone, out there collecting information.

(Too many of the people who do have new information online are all about me, Me, Me!. News stories do not use "I".)
You're not wrong. But in my case, that had been basically forbidden as an option, essentially because it "wasn't supported by Amazon," and because there's just additional risk to non-standard approaches. AWS certifications cover CloudFormation, so you can hire for that with low risk pretty easily. Other nonstandard utilities, not so much.
Well, this happened a couple of years ago in a World Cup skiing event.

https://youtu.be/xeviAWB0i4Y
You could upload a fake photo to login, delete your content, and then delete your Facebook account.
Additionally, the most widely used programming language in finance, Microsoft Excel, is based entirely on IEEE binary floating point arithmetic (though with a few hacks on top [1]).

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/43046570/392585
So, your experience in Australia, applies to a city that has a population of 870,000 residents, and a total daytime population of over 2,000,000 all in a 46 square mile area, also with nearly every single intersection controlled in some fashion - no joke, pretty much every intersection has a stop sign or signal lights.

So based on this you give us your throw-away "3 second gap" comment, helpfully telling us that this is the law and something something emergency stop etc drive safe?

With an average speed of less than 10mph, and a very dense city, your normal traffic "rules" don't apply here. Don't even pretend you can understand how things are here without experiencing them.
It's arguable that it's this process that allows the wiki concept to be successful in production.

Are the Wikipedia anti-spam/manipulation efforts discussed/outlined in detail somewhere?
So progress is hell on earth and technocrats are cheering it up?
I wonder if something like this could be built when expanding or reconstructing major parts of a city... not just to have a way for people to move without being exposed to the elements, cars, trucks and bikers, but also to serve as a conduit for fresh/waste water, electricity, gas and communications.

Benefit would be that it would no longer be neccessary to cut open streets when something breaks or needs to be expanded/upgraded, as well as that everything is protected from the elements and it's incredibly cheap to install new lines should the need arise. The power required for lighting and ventilation could come from swapping the asphalt with armed solar panels...

And by only installing it when the respective area is being dug up anyway it would not create that much cost for digging.
Yes, though a radio station would often times start with an intro and let the record play through the next track (speaking as a child of the 70's when progressive rock / concept albums were at their peak). DJs & programming directors knew that certain tracks would not make sense on their own and would adjust.

I have a hunch that it's not streaming that's really responsible, per se, but the "Shuffle" function that's been available since the CD player. I tend to have a large playlist and more often than not, I set it to shuffle the tracks. But I did essentially the same thing when I had a 60 CD changer years ago, too. I think this trend probably started there, accelerated when MP3s and ripped CDs became popular (prior to steaming services) and streaming is just the next step in that progression.

The way we consume other media is likely to part of this as well, so saying it's streaming is perhaps a bit of a stretch even if streaming makes it possible to jump more easily.

(for the record I have not read the article, though I scanned it to be sure they were talking about streaming services).
> yes, you're going to have to trust them with a copy of it.

No. They could have you compute a fingerprint locally without uploading the image itself, preferably through some audited open source software, without auto-updates. They only don't do that because they want to guard their image hashing as corporate secrets.
Hashes don't necessarily work on the raw bit representation of something. You can have a hash which works on higher level constructs, which for images one solution would be called a perceptual hash.
OP here.

This lib is a brick in an adblock for radio broadcasts I have been developing for a while and that I am progressively open sourcing.
Amazon's delivery drones could self-destruct to keep you safe
Kubernetes emphatically does not do better at resource utilization than not using Kubernetes. You should figure on between ten and twenty percent of wastage per k8s node, plus the costs of your management servers, in a safely provisioned environment.

You can argue about the configuration-based deployment being worth it--I disagree, because, frankly, Chef Zero is just not that complicated--but it's more expensive in every use case I have seem in the wild (barring ones where instances were unwisely provisioned in the first place).
Holding any commodity comes with a huge amount of risk (what do I do with these oil barrels? ... livestock? ... crops?). Settling futures would involve moving these things from place to place.

But whither bitcoin, you say? Moving those is easy! Yes, but holding them is hard. Who wants Your Favorite Mutual Fund to hold bitcoins? Not them, that's for sure. There's much more risk there than necessary.
> I understand that it’s hard to compare non-salary compensation. But these figures give the impression that compensation for a Bay Area software engineer is shockingly lower than the reality. RSUs and bonuses at established companies will easily double your take home pay.

I agree with your overall message, but base salary itself is very important. That's what puts a roof over your family's head and food on the table. Bonuses and RSUs might accelerate retirement, but I wouldn't put them into the overall household budget.
> Smart move of them to ship something and patch it up later if needed, they successfully defended against GKE’s assault and are vying to stay on top.

If you had to release a product to support the open source front runner, you did not successfully defend against it; you conceded after your tooling adoption failed.

As long as Kubernetes leads the way, lock in at any cloud provider is prevented (can even move back on-prem when the winds shift again). Kudos to Google for enabling that, but they have their own motives (ie disrupting AWS uptake).
The thing news startups need more of is neither news nor investigation, but distribution. Too many news organisations think that quality content is the driver of news, when the challenge is to get distribution, and then you can make news of whatever quality you like. By focusing on "quality content" WikiTribune falls into the same trap.

https://newslines.org/blog/wikitribune-will-sink/
I think triplebyte's commission is 25% of first year salary, but that doesn't mean the people behind triplebyte are solely motivated by larger commissions.
You're right with the syntax.

Just look at Reason. They make OCaml more userfriendly for JavaScript devs, and FP-people are hating that the language loses all its beauty...
What is awkward with things like table top simulator is when they don't have a rules engine, so you don't get the benefit of learning edge cases through the game engine and don't get the bookeeping sped up, so you still have to watch everyone else take their turn to make sure they're not accidentally sneaking resources.

boardgamearena has the advantage of actually having rules engines so you can also relax more while playing knowing the engine is taking care of the rules freeing you up to making tactical mistakes instead of rule mistakes.
If it's anything less than 90% I would be surprised. It will not be in the ballpark of 30%.
Use any theme with GitHub Pages
>> "Yes, I know they are bigger but I can assure you that if you ask random people in my country most would know NASDAQ while very few would know CME"

Just go out to a target and ask 5 people... Unless you live on mars already.
I think that was true for the iTunes years before Spotify and other streaming services came along. Before, you had to pay for each song so you picked just a few you liked. Now, it's just as easy to play the whole album as to play one song. (In facts, it's easier to queue up an album than to play one song at a time since you have to choose what to play fewer times per time interval.)

Anecdotally, we've seen whole-album concepts become big hits in recent years: Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, Kanye West's Life of Pablo, Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book, etc.

On top of that, almost all hip-hop songs these days have intro tags (which producers worked on the song.) Not instrumental of course, but non-song content none-the-less.
Doesn't Instagram use the same approach on their Stories Camera on Android? Seems more of an issue with Android Camera performance/APIs than an engineering critique.
It only loads top 30. There is no support for additional stories or pages. If you're interested in this, you can create an issue on the github repo for this feature. http://github.com/francium/hn-diet
> If the police need to get involved for this every time, they're going to be very busy.

Well, they'll need something to do when speed traps become useless and there are far fewer motor vehicle accidents.
I'm trying to send $700 in bitcoin to purchase something. It's going to cost me $65 to buy the coins and several hours of time.

Of course, I am banned from Coinbase for an innocous bank mistake. There's literally no other options to buy coins at 1-2% in the US.
I was recently trying to do something similar and looked/tried go as a solution but I ran into some initial issues around my own confidence that the shared lib would work and that I wouldn't eventually really mess up the deallocation step.
I've always been a negative detractor of bitcoin. But then I realized the problem was it was marketed wrong. As a currency, it's a nightmare of a creation. But as a store of value, it's actually pretty good. As long as you don't buy in at one of the speculative bubbles (which admittedly is when the majority of people get in), it's been pretty good at more or less maintaining its value.

As a non-physical thing, it's a good place to go when you're not sure about where to put your money. That used to be the role of the dollar, but this is a good alternative that has cheaper forex fees.

I think the long-term value of bitcoin will not be buying groceries, but storing money while you wait for your the storm your grocery stores currency is in to subside. Probably not relevant to Americans right now, but I'm sure some people in Latin America can see the value.
Not to mention in most places, highways (the places where cars make the most noise) are far away or acoustically shielded from where there are people.
I love Pixelmator. I would definitely pay the $60 for pro, just for the single-window interface; but each new OSX version just gets worse. I've planted my feet in Yosemite, until either things turn around, or gets old enough to force me onto full-time Linux.
At least in bitcoin's case -- if its market cap increases substantially as a result of being listed, then that would stabilize its exchange rate.
Sounds about right. I paid 500 euros for my 0.05BTC piece of history (there were some fees and all that of course).

Maybe I just bought a piece of something like the Berlin wall and when everything goes to shit and this whole train wreck evolves into something more sane later on in 100 years or whatever, my grand children can sell my 0.05BTC on Sothebys or something :D ..
Coinbase “experiencing all time high traffic (...) – 8x the peak in June”
> It doesn't really offer anything in terms of interacting with RDF triples or making complex graph queries.

SPARQL is supported.
There are two main paradigms here

1) "native" graph db
Neo4J is an example of this. This takes advantage of index-free adjacency. Each node knows what other nodes it is connected to and hence traversals are very fast. The issues you run into are when you try to scale. Data that fits onto a single machine is fine and you can replicate your data for fast parallel reads/traversals across disparate regions of a massive graph. However you no longer have the concept of data sharding and distributing the graph as index-free adjacencies don't translate across physical machines. And another drawback is highly connected vertices, you will expend a tremendous amount of resources deleting or mutating a vertex with, say, 10^6 edges. But that vertex is probably a bot so you should delete him anyway.

2) inverted index graphs, non-native graphs, whatever anti-marketing name it might have.
These rely on tables of vertices and other tables of edges. Indexes make them fast, not as fast for reads but very fast for writes. And you get distributed databases (Cassandra, for example, a powerful workhorse of a backend with data sharding and replication factor, etc.). But then you have to yet another index to maintain and the overhead can get expensive. This is the model adopted by DataStax, who bought Titan DB (hence the public fork to Janus) and integrated it with some optimisations and enterprise tools (monitoring etc, solr search engine) to sit on top of Cassandra.

Both now have improved integration with things like Spark. Cypher is probably faster than Tinkerpop Gremlin especially with the bolt serialisation introduced in recent versions of neo4j.

So janus is the graph abstraction layer of the second type and so needs somewhere to save these relationships. It all comes down to use case (and marketing) to decide what works best for you.
Always. Frameworks are just tools. Typically, when building large JavaScript applications I prefer to avoid the unnecessary dependency nonsense. I understand, though, there are many developer who lack the confidence to make that choice easily.
Well, it's rather disappointing that they didn't catch something as simple as that ;)

It's already nontrivial to create fake Facebook accounts. For those serious about it, who already deal with IPs and mobile numbers, I can't imagine that creating novel photorealistic faces would be all that problematic.
Okay. If its works amazing, so it can be work on other compiled languages? This will be amazing and it can be game changer.
What do you mean by "control points"?
Probably because Amazon is bad at naming things.
I'd highly, highly recommend using kube-aws over kops for AWS. Its far more transparent as it uses CloudFormation templates, though it does have a higher upfront time investment. Probably two hours as opposed to the 30 minutes or so that kops requires.