skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’ve grown a project into a successful business. What else can I do to grow?
Hey everyone,

Around four months ago I launched https://www.instaaa.com. Starting as a personal tool to solve the frustration I had with launching businesses, Instaaa’s aim was to promote your business on 125 directories for you - eliminating the hassle and stress of doing so yourself. It’s 100% manual and you’re emailed a breakdown of each submission once complete.

People loved the concept and it’s since turned into an extremely profitable business. I deal with new clients every day and generate a stable income but have a constant voice inside my head telling me I should be growing and improving the service even more.

I was wondering what tips and tricks you all have to market/promote Instaaa (ironic, I know). I’ve tried reddit and Facebook advertising, however this resulted mainly in clicks and no conversions. All of my growth at this point is organic/word of mouth and I’m looking to test the waters with advertising and whatever tools you recommend.

Feel fee to critique my website also if you believe you have some ideas which could increase conversions. Any feedback/advice is welcome!
I wonder why there isn't a CEOs union? Maybe the smarter/better someone percieves themselves the less they think collective bargaining would work to their benefit.
Quantstamp appears to be based on a "proof of caring" scheme where basically you get paid in their currency to promote them on sites like Reddit. What about that screams "legitimate" to you?
The easy work around is to open a "local" office or wholly owned subsidiary that they run the contract through. It happens all the time with "minority-owned, female led small businesses" to win government contracts.

All the Beltway Bandits (DC consulting companies) know how to play the game, to what degree they play it is the only question. It's unfortunate that they game the system but the rules are set up to encourage it.
also, Samsung has Tizen as a hedge / card against Android; so this may also be Google building up its leverage.

As you suggest, perhaps this iteration of hardware will be like Microsoft Surface. Well built, slightly more pricey hardware that set the bar for the industry..?
was hoping someone mentioned this - am always a bit jealous of the crew in their back facing seats. Looks a bit safer to me.
OK, my comment wasn't clear in the security context, because the post I was responding to didn't talk about security specifically. Sure, I'd like security updates and I'll apply them. Too often, as someone else noted here, my only choice of getting them also includes the latest design and heavy framework fads. In the ideal world, I'd be able to secure my device, without changing unrelated things I liked about how it used to work.

Against my will, 99.5% of my email and social connections are saved by Google, Facebook, and the servers of whatever random apps slurped my friends' contacts. (Example: Venmo has a large and accurate friend suggestion list for me, somehow. I assume all those people have my number in their phone and their Venmo app matched it with my number.) So that ship has kind of sailed anyway. Their devices are compromised by design.
Nice. Terrifying.
You don't really think that... you just repeat it because some retard said so.
People don't always act in their own long-term self-interest. Also, unions have a lot of flaws that can blind people to their benefits.
The last sentence strikes me as sort of old school and somewhat client-hostile. Unless you're working on an embedded system that will ship physically and never be opened again, your code is going to have to change--if for no other reason than to accommodate changes in the underlying technologies. This is especially true considering the libraries and dependencies that are baked into software projects today.

If a critical security patch requires a change in the code, your client is going to have to either change it themselves or get you on the job pronto... and do you really want to set the expectation that you will be available pronto, forever?

I think the days of write the code, launch, then ride off into the sunset are over. Code should be considered temporary and perishable, and IMO consultants should acknowledge that upfront and help their clients plan for it.
legal D:

if(foo)
bar();
baz();

A language design bug copied from C. A feature that is good only to add a class of bugs to programs in your language with zero benfit. Perl wasn't tasteless enough to copy that. D designers were, does that convince you they have the right taste to design your systems language?

Alexandrescou is exactly the kind of C++ person D is designed for (and now by). Is the code more important or the data transformation being performed by that code? Garbage collection, same as golang with the same perception that it's a replacement for java/python/ruby/perl not C nor C++ - this will be the perception and they will say "yeah but ..." sure, but that perception is not devoid of merit. "You don't need ..." nup, as an engineer I decide that, I don't want it imposed.

Low level access to raw hardware, zero cost convenient abstractions, no runtime cost imposed by the language, consistent, easy to get right (or at least harder to get wrong, less gotchas). Whatever replaces C & C++ will tick those boxes unless hardware changes dramatically. People believe that D doesn't.

Then there's just practical stuff like using facebook's linter - well you can't, it just doesn't work. https://github.com/facebookarchive/flint
Is the D version even there? Too hard, too alpha, the overhead of a new language needs more to sell it. I haven't yet programmed a line of Rust or Go but both look more compelling.
Henry Ford introduced the 8 hour work day. That was non-union.

Unions also openly shut out non-whites and burned down competitors businesses, and many other things.

The unions were the Mafia. They lost power over the things the Mafia likes to do. It's a minor a miracle they survived.
Yes, that's right. It's well into the bottom half of U.S. states by GDP per capita, which still puts it at around 4-5x the GDP per capita in most Eastern European countries (which was my point).

The United States is ridiculously wealthy, even in places Americans love to denigrate. That's worth remembering whenever you feel like comparing Florida unfavorably to this or that other place.
Yes, SW is the key; especially Linux. ARM is way ahead of other embedded CPU architectures in terms of Linux support.
SF spends about $214 million per year on homelessness. About half of that is for housing.[1]

Dallas considered building a concentration camp.[2]

[1] http://sfist.com/2016/04/12/no_san_francisco_does_not_spend_...

[2] http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/even-the-idea-of-homeless...
Andrew Ng launches $175M AI fund
1. Keep talking to people who've finished projects. Eventually you'll get to people who recommend their GC.

2. If you've run out of people to chat up, try going to your city's build permits department and see which builders have been getting permits in the last few years. Not a guarantee of quality, but gives you a list to interview.

3. Ask for referrals from your architect or engineer. And then ask the referrals for references.

But even if you do this, finding a good GC in Silicon Valley is very hard right now.

I tried getting contractors to bid almost a year ago. From 25 calls/emails, I got replies from about 8. Of those, half said some variant of "sorry, too busy to take on new projects right now."

I can't imagine how much crazier it'll be this year with the hotter housing market and the added demand for rebuilding after the fires.
Aren't there many more general software developers than there are VP's, founders, and low digit employee exiters?

Like, I'm curious what drives the demand for homes in the ~$2M range in the bay area, if it's not the general software developer who's able to afford it.
A company already coordinates the salary of all their workers. It is only fair that workers also be allowed to look out for their collective interests.
you think the auto worker unions killed the midwest?

The industry is still afloat despite foreign car companies eating US car company's lunch (because of poor quality on the US side, and that's not on the linepeople), and many people in those industries are getting proper paychecks.

The only difference I see in a non-unionized auto industry is even lower wages and less time off. Unions didn't cause bad car design.
In America, the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment requires that property owners must be compensated when their property is seized for public purposes, so any seizures still come out of the government’s budget. States are supposed to raise resources using their tax power, not the police power. The correct law to reform is California’s tax limitation law, Proposition 13.
Anyone who's ever seen a University budget can see why they'd never do that.

Slippery slope, if you outsource/fully digitize the teachers...administration comes next.
The draw of CoreOS Linux for me is its curated pairing of the Linux kernel, Docker, and etcd. There was a commercial entity reviewing upstream changelogs and making sure that they were pairing components appropriately. I wonder if an non-commercial district can really get this right.
Advanced everything is utterly dominated by C++.
Thanks for this comment.

I live in the Mission. When I have a friend come over from out of town, their first shock comes from the large number of homeless tents literally on my doorstep, a few blocks away from a major street (Valencia).

I then take them for a walk. As I pass the empty block at 22nd and Mission, I tell them how it used to be a tall apartment building where poorer people lived under rent control for a long time, and the landlord burned it down because he couldn’t evict them and wasn’t happy with the money he was making. Second shock.
https://missionlocal.org/tag/22nd-street-fire/

Finally, we take a stroll to Dolores Park, and I point to them the house that Zuckerberg bought. There’s usually a homeless person hanging around, so one can provide a little verbal comment: “this person survives on a few dollars day, and a few floors above you have someone worth $80B“

There are no words to describe how screwed up things are.
In Berlin you can live in a decent apartment in the city center for 400 $ per month. The only reason this is not possible in SF is that you have so much low density crap even in walking distance of the center. This is insane.
It might appear that way to people that weren't involved in the history, but a lot of it was based on ideas learned from stateless linux, circa 2004.

People in the desktop team had been working on read-only root OS's for a long time, and it was only at a certain point that RH management bought off on forming a product/spin. But to say that work only started once Atomic was a thing would be inaccurate.

It's probably fair to say that ChromeOS/CoreOS lit a match under some upper management though.
> on this site is sickening. [...] may mean nothing to Americans [...]

You're on a predominantly American site, commenting on an article about American unionization, admitting that your situation is different than Americans, and yet are sickened by predominantly American opinions towards these things? You can't admit regional differences and then be sickened by others contextual, region-biased opinions. You have flawed logic.
It's actually very easy to explain.

Homeless people are attracted to places with nice year round weather. SF provides that.

They are also attracted to places where they are tolerated or accepted. The people of SF are very tolerant of the homeless. As one of the commenters here says: "I bring cash, you run out after just a block or two." Sounds like a great place to be homeless.

As for root causes, homelessness is mostly caused by drug addiction and mental illness. According the the National Coalition for the Homeless:

"A 2008 survey by
the United States Conference of Mayors asked 25 cities for their top three causes of homelessness.
Substance abuse was the single largest cause of homelessness for single adults (reported by 68% of cities).

Substance abuse was also mentioned by 12% of cities as one of the top three causes of homelessness for
families. According to Didenko and Pankratz (2007), two-thirds of homeless people report that drugs
and/or alcohol were a major reason for their becoming homeless."

As for mental illness, according to a research summary compiled by the Treatment Advocacy Center:

"Approximately one-third of the total homeless population includes individuals with serious, untreated mental illnesses"

More affordable housing will not offer relief to the homeless because their state is largely caused by addiction and mental illness, not by high housing prices.
The article itself points out that SF is already spending $305 million a year on homelessness. The number of homeless people is only officially 6500. It's probably closer to 12,000 but how much more do you want to spend? That's $46K per person!

You prop up this solution of something vague but close to socialism as a silver bullet, but with no evidence. If $46K per person doesn't show that socialism is failing to work, then what will?
If they worked on the C client, they then have to work in C, which is bad.
(This is one of the things covered in their Tradeoffs section, along with the problems with serialization and the C client's thread pool).
Many of the homeless people in SF probably escaped the cold Chicago winters too.

Due to nice weather, California cities have to support many of the Midwest’s homeless population. To compensate, there should be a lot more federal funding for homelessness.
With less traffic on the network circa a year ago and before, it was plenty fast and cheap. I think it's in need of an upgrade so it can make bitcoin great again.
There needs to be a balance. They do become powerful but also are major forces for raising the standard living overall.
Stupid nerds, that's who Google can sell to. Everyone else will buy anything else.
How in the world is that point incorrect? Housing isn’t being built at nearly the required rates to at least depress the growth in costs - and that’s been fairly well established here and elsewhere. Are you saying that population growth in California isn’t a factor here? AFAIK the growth rate is still positive, albeit decreasing. Though that’s statewide, the pattern is the same in SF.

This sounds like a basic supply and demand question, no?
It won’t be. Every ICO I’ve bought into and the subsequently sold once it hit the exchanges has made me ridiculously amounts of money. Some sells were stupid, others were brilliant but they were all green.

My stocks have increased as well and hold the majority of my investments, but they increased by 11% last year. My Cryptocurrency increased by 1153% in the same period of time. As long as that happens Cryptocurrency isn’t going away, even if it makes no sense.

It’s taking money from other people by selling useless shit, so it’s obviously not going to last forever.
Bedrooms, multiple kids, large spacious bathrooms, an office, a gym, a combined living room/kitchen/dining room open space for hosting parties, and most importantly of all, storage space. That can become 3000 sqft fairly quickly, of which you only use 1000 sqft frequently as a family :D
Thank for putting it into words for me. Its so hard to express political support for these types of solutions without being decried as a naive bleeding-heart liberal.

That said I'm under the impression that a huge fraction of bay-area homeless are of the mentally-unsound variety not the out-of-work variety.
The city pays about $45,000/year per homeless person according to the figures in that article. That’s why there’s so many of them.
http://gafw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/UGA4799073-clear-...
FDA to Limit Diarrhea Pills
No, 3/5 of them simply became milkmen. Wait.
In the face of all of the companies that illegally colluded to suppress developer wages sitting on massive reserves of cash...

It’s the same thing as poor whites clinging to racism because they think it elevates their class position. False consciousness abounds.
~$163M project management software. [0]

Last round valued at $600M. [1]

Any guess what this round is valued at? Unicorn?

[0]https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/asana

[1]https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/30/task-management-app-asana-...
Anecdotally, I once had someone on facebook randomly start berating me over the use of the word "trans", because I was being disrespectful. I was of course talking about transmissions/gearboxes, but this fact was lost on that person.
You know, I agree with you to an extent, and for certain people who work certain jobs, I think this logic makes sense. If you are a person with the skills in a field that is highly competitive, you can probably get a new job as soon as you decide to leave the previous one.

But for most people, this is not true; it might take anywhere from months to years to find a new job. Now, you can easily argue that this is the same for employers, and I would agree that you are correct; it can take months to years for an employer to find someone capable of doing a job.

So, it might logically seem like both parties are making an even trade, with equal risk for both. Either side can walk away from the deal at any time, and both sides have the risk of taking a while to find a replacement for the other.

However, if you think about it more, you see why the employer has a huge advantage over the employee, and why I think it is a bit simplistic to just say 'both sides enter and leave the agreement voluntarily, so we don't need any protections for anyone'

When a person loses their job, they are losing 100% of their earning power. That has a HUGE effect on the quality of life for that person. On the other hand, a company is only losing 1/n of their productive capacity. Even if you assume the person is worth 10 other people, any decently sized company is going to be able to absorb the loss pretty easily.

Now, I am not saying that we need super strict worker protections, but I don't think we can just wave away the concerns about the power imbalance between workers and employers.

Personally, I think good unemployment benefits is probably the best mitigation that maintains everyone's freedom while still mitigating the power imbalance somewhat.
Most news sites, yes. They want Google's crawler to crawl their full text, and Google responds poorly to sites that treat their crawler differently than real search users, so if your Referer (sic) header is Google, news sites will often give you the whole article.
You are pure evil.
What I read was "It seems to mean nothing to Americans - but it should, because..."
Not saying that unions are perfect, but the US auto industry problems are much deeper than unions. These unions are just navigating on a difficult situation that was not caused by workers. Viewing them as the cause for the troubles of the auto and steel industry is just stupid, plainly coming from anti-labor mindset.
> Base promotions on skill, not seniority.

I have always been curious about the long term efficacy of that policy. At its face, it seems good, but I wonder if it disincentivizes expirenced people from training promising young talent.
Betterment. I don't do individual stocks anymore. I still have some because they pay out nice dividends or it's just not worth selling them. But I've been very happy with Betterment. It's definitely fire and forget.
Made in China: Why are their manuals so poor?
Interesting... I started out pretty sure you were wrong about this but you and others are bringing me around. Good discussion.
Shortage of housing that's affordable by minimum-wage workers is the fundamental problem. Plus lack of workable public transportation to places where housing is affordable.

I imagine a meat grinder something like this. First you get evicted because you earn too little to pay the rent. Then you lose your job because you can't stay presentable. After a while, it's pretty much irreversible.

So yeah. We need affordable housing. And we need fair wages.
For Bezos, Buffett and Dimon, a Health Push Years in the Making
Probably the most common in our house:

1. The world doesn’t own you or owe you. At the end of the day, your fate is decided by the sum of your own actions.

2. It’s ok to fall, but do not wallow. Get up. Learn. Move on.

3. Life is earned in struggle. Anything is achievable with enough work. Never allow yourself to be convinced great can be made easily.

4. Always be kind, but be willing to be unkind.

5. Love yourself. If you find otherwise, refer to rule 2.
Neither latest EJB nor spring are complex.
This is an interesting article that describes building a $2-6 million dollar house in a matter-of-fact manner. I wonder what the prospective audience size for this article is in the Bay Area –maybe less than 5000 local people are capable of affording these properties.
How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming
Do or undo – there is no VACUUM
I suggest you brush up on your American history: https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/august-20/
Does anyone know what mental health is?
I use Apple notes as well for its simple UI and limited options (which I find a plus).

I jot a lot of notes though, and still prefer revising on pen and paper so I wrote an Apple script that prints all notes in a given date range and I then review/consolidate them.

I try to do it once a week, and it works pretty well.
not to mention all the anti-poaching stuff that was revealed.

Why would they need to have those agreements if people were being paid a fair price?
With two software developers in the family you're bringing in 300k to 400k. That makes 2M much more reachable.
~$2M is definitely an established developer.

But this home was estimated north of $6M

"The total cost would be $6,562,500."
Oh boy, you must be really young.

No parallel in C++?!!!??

That is where EJBs and Spring come from.

The enterprise architects that created those kind of designs, were the same ones that on earlier decade were doing them with C++.

Apparently micro-services are now a thing, well on the late 90's we had Sun RPC, CORBA, DCOM. All tied together with a cluster distributed transaction management.

Sprinkled with code generation tools, based either on UML or Booch diagrams.

It was lovely, then came Java with CORBA support out of the box, RMI and GC. So they moved camps.

And yes, I am also to blame for a few CORBA objects, maybe still runing on a couple of HP-UX systems.
> and the 99%ers write Java EE structures.

I.e. overengineering.
This is a good example what happens when everyone wants to do some kind of "impact investing". Companies have to come up with clever ways to market themselves even if it is disingenuous.
So many people being very pedantic about it these days.
From another perspective, it sounds like you're trying to stop other workers from telling you to get bent if you treat their colleagues improperly! :)
This sounds approximately correct, and is a good perspective for an entrepreneurial forum. This is what investors call a moat. It's such an effective one that we have legislation designed to deal with it.

This is not a comment on ethics or morality, it's simply one on strategic efficiency.
Rough Waters: Gentrification and Cataclysmic Money
I've never understood the problem some people have with hate crimes. Don't we already have plenty of crimes where the only differentiator is mental state or intent? Hard to see how a hate crime classification is any different than, say, Murder 1 versus Murder 2.
Pragmatism over ideology should be the rule of politics. Whatever works and provides the better situation. Too many people get bent out of shape over whether something is liberal or conservative, whether it's fair, whether it applies to their situation (I had to work hard for my home), etc. How about whether it solves the problem?
Two of my coworkers hated theirs so much they went iPhone this cycle. One cited something about random clicking noises and hardware problems.