skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all: honor to your for the courage of founding and running a startup. Being a founder myself, I know how hard it is compared to many other alternatives.

Second: I doubt you "have failed to learn anything valuable". If you sit down, take pen and paper, and try to list things you've learned since the beginning, I bet you that you'll come with several items in just half an hour.

But, to your point: you want to shut down and return ~half the money to investors. That's very responsible. Others would like to continue pushing, possibly to get to a point where you can raise a larger round.

I have to say, it's hard to find PMF (Product-Market Fit) just by spending $120k in a few months. The fact that you haven't found it yet does not mean you're not on the right path.

You have been vague (I guess you don't want to give away too much about the company identity), so it becomes hard for people like me (and I guess others) to try to help you in a meaningful way.

The only real piece of advice that I want to give you is this: when you have a strong feeling about a decision, when it comes from deep inside you, don't ignore that voice. Somehow, we tend to know what's the right choice even if rationally we think we don't.
Just to add to this a couple days late..

All this focus on coding in interviews is actually completely misplaced. Early in my career I had no problem writing anything you asked, but reading other people's code, and having a deep understanding was something completely different.

Now 25 years later, I can still code, and given greenfield development, or just larger pieces of work that by itself is somewhat isolated, I can make features appear in a shocking short time. Similarly debugging my own code, even once its reached into the hundreds of thousands of lines is usually better done by thinking about what in the code base would case the given behavior.

OTOH, the skill that really matters is the ability to debug problems in a code base written by a team I wasn't originally part of. That is still really hard, I'm fairly reasonable at it, but it probably takes me longer to understand someone else's code that it would have taken me to write it.

This also means my bug fixes tend to take a few days if the bug is in an unfamiliar piece of code. But, it also means that I can usually come up with a fairly trivial fix (frequently just a couple lines of code). Vs a lot of code reviews i've been on (which is similarly hard piece of software engineering) where there is a ton of noise and some 1/2 fix that fixes a particular case but fails to solve the general problem.

All that was a long winded way of saying that I suspect that software engineering is in levels, there is the first level where you learn to code, and there is the second level where you learn to understand all the different ways other people code, and then there is the third, where you can analyze the latter alongside a problem to determine not only does the solution solve the problem, but is it covering all the edge cases. A 10x programmer is frequently someone who avoids the second case, and fakes the third case by only reviewing code which touches subsystems they wrote. Interviewing solely for coding skills rather than coding skills + ones ability to read analyze other people's code is missing the most important and hardest part of quality software engineering.
Time is an even scarcer resource than money.

You don't have much money.

You don't believe in your product.

All signs point negative.

If you're looking for permission to cut loose, you have it. Work on something you believe in. Don't waste any more time on an unworkable startup.
HackerRank is looking for a product analyst in Bangalore
Read your OP and all follow up posts in the thread. My advice is take 2 weeks vacation (travel somewhere), and do not work during this time. You need to step back and digest what you’ve learned so far. Don’t feel guilty about taking this time, it’s necessary for making an important decision.

If you come back after 2 weeks and feel the same way, shut it down and return funds to investors. Your investors and advisors are very very naive (how did you raise 220k as a solo founder with no product? How did you spend 120k in 9 months!?) and it would be unethical to take advantage of them by continuing in something you no longer believe in. You’re closer to the business than they are, your judgment about whether it’s time to pull the plug is more accurate than theirs.

On the other hand, if you come back with a fresh perspective and want to keep trying, do so and inform investors appropriately. And try to reduce your absurd burn rate.
Wow. TIL.
MPEG is now standardizing (progressive) point clouds for the visual SLAM scenario. They are going forward with an octree with voxels.
An Interview with Rick Dickinson, Sinclair Designer (2014)
OMEMO adoption seems to be on a roll:

* https://omemo.top/

> even less servers support the features required to support it.

Does the server require something special to support OMEMO?
It's important to keep in context where the term "Wisdom of the Crowd" came from and where it succeeded.

"The classic wisdom-of-the-crowds finding involves point estimation of a continuous quantity. This has contributed to the insight in cognitive science that a crowd's individual judgments can be modeled as a probability distribution of responses with the median centered near the true value of the quantity to be estimated." [1]

Notice that the term said nothing about adversarial games and or games which have moves.

A better model for those types of games is the experts' problem / multiplicative weights algorithm -- where the solution consists of a weighted plurality which is updated every turn. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicative_weight_update_m...
Similar to you, I also use both. Github for work (because every startup uses a Github organization for their codebase, so if you work for one, you use it), and for any open source work I contribute to, or create. Bitbucket for personal projects, because not every project is an open source one, for various reasons -- maybe I'm just playing around, write scrappy code, or maybe it's a serious side project with revenue like a business and I don't want the code to be open. Free private repos is nice.
Are you selling 24/7? To actual potential customers. Forget selling to investors.
Oxford, Cambridge and UCL are relatively inexpensive if you manage to secure some scholarship.

Some Scandinavian, French, Swiss and German universities are excellent. Scandinavian ones are quite inexpensive at foreign rates.
if it takes 24 months, how do you convince investors to fund those 24 months of searching, before you can show any meaningful numbers?
Jeff Dean signed it, so...
How does one know to what degree foreign investment does or does not affect property prices?
Jeff Dean: https://twitter.com/jeffdean/status/990390991260606464?s=21
One of the really impressive things about Nintendo is their corporate culture has encouraged passing on of institutional knowledge to younger minds within the company. Shigeru Miyamoto is coming up on retirement age, and some of us have been wondering how Mario and Zelda would fare without him. Well, we needn't wonder: Miyamoto was not very actively involved in the development of Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild, and those games turned out great.
>one could argue this was “the World, including Kasparov versus the World, excluding Kasparov

Well only if he also posted his best ideas for how to beat himself. It's Kasparov vs the world and Kasparov cheated a bit.
I kind of do but to be honest the cool parts will be hard to see on a screenshot. I'll just have you wait. Sorry about that. Sign up in the google forms above.
The NetHack dev team is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1
Drawing with boids
This is one step forward in a positive direction for the US. I'm very happy to hear my neighboring country taking a more common sense approach to drugs. First Korea and now this.. What the heck is up with the world.. People are finally waking up. :)
There's a lot of compliance stuff that goes into EHRs on top of all of that. Accessibility is extremely important as well- voice recognition being a huge part of that (OpenEMR offers integration with the Microsoft EMR, but I don't believe that has decent medical support which would be a huge limiting factor).
Depends on your database. For example, Spanner it is better to use random numbers for the primary index, as monotonically increasing ints will cause hotspots on the database.

https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/schema-design#choosing...
Dragon Medical works great with the system! Not free though.
How is that not zero confidence?

They built something, sure, but the technical cofounder believes it has very little/no utility. That's telling.
Fair enough. I guess you would figure out how long it takes to either clag the code from somewhere else or write it yourself and plug in the math at the bottom of the page (as they are trying to quantify the value of doing this).

I strongly suspect dragging in memmem() would be the most cost effective way of doing this and run in the most places, even if it's a non-standard GNU libc extension.
The downside is the (disquietingly common frequency of) sites which return a jumbled mess of incoherent elements or a blank page(!) when Javascript is disabled.
15 Types of Regression you should know
Agreed. There’s no shame in pulling the plug at this point, in fact it’s the honorable thing to do.
Prison is pretty life destroying pretty much anyone not a danger to others would be better off outside a cell. Also poor people generally aren't poor because they smoke too much marijuana it's not even remotely addictive like that.
> If the tax is high enough, it encourages organized crime to form a black or gray market, as is the case for cigarettes in the US, which are smuggled and sold on the black market.

Yep. Same with marijuana: https://reason.com/reasontv/2018/04/02/californias-new-recre...
It must be hard to be as creative as they are, since JP punishes weed possession so heavily ;)
You miss the parents point: White was playing with the rest of world's analysis and Kasporov's analysis, Black was only playing with the rest of world's analysis.

Literally reading all the thoughts of your opponent is a little more than "cheating a bit". It is putting your opponent on your side of the table.
Was it tested in MS Edge?

Does not quite work there...
> Do Greeks driving affect the whaling industry?

I’ve always wondered this as well.
In the wild, they get to be free until the day they are killed by a predator.
In captivity they are treated cruelly, fattened, and slaughtered with no chance of escape. How is that a "plus side"?
"The" in this context is used as a general classifier for all the science and mathematics related to quantum information. It wouldn't make sense to use "A theory of..." unless you're speaking of a particular case that doesn't fall under the general classification.
But if the US units went away, you wouldn’t have to worry about those conversions once everything “legacy” was handled. And even then, it wouldn’t require knowledge of both systems beyond having a calculator for the conversions to get them there. Once gallons and the like are gone? Bliss.

I may not have articulated it correctly, but if everyone would go metric, as the majority of the world is already, it’d be better for everyone. Being an outlier with a system that is a bit obtuse serves no one.
I have many examples in mind. Here's an old article with good examples: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/6/92482-a-tour-through-t...

In general I'd say that for any dataset, the ideal visualisation depends on the features and meaning of the data, but almost always some combination of geometry, colour, shape and size can capture all the dimensions. Beyond a small number of categories, colour, shape and size are much less visually informative than geometry. Most often creative use of geometry on different scales is the best first stop for high-dimensional data, for example using faceting (like with ggplot2's facet capability: http://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/facet_grid.html). Simulating 3D is almost never required or optimal.
Building desktop app with Rust and Elm, no Electron needed
I can't think of a single website where your email is publicly visible on your profile by default.
> My understanding is weed is more expensive per intoxicating amount than alcohol in seattle

I'm a Seattle resident. No way that's correct. The pot is way, way cheaper.

Using fairly "middle class" products, percentage of a $15-20 gram that has intoxicating value is lower in dollar value than a draft beer ($6).

Even focusing strictly on value products, there's no single-unit alcohol product (40oz, tall boy, etc) that can compete against the common $3 preroll.
ex-Stanford affiliate here.

Regarding grad school, one of the simplest ways to get in is to simply get hired as a full-time employee (FTE) of the department and be favored by one/more PI's. It's not strictly assured, but it helps because they'll at least help you make your application better, if not show some unconscious, preselection bias.

For undergrad, don't try too hard too look like an overachiever with a million surface, common extra-circulars... focus on a select number socially-redeeming clever hacks for low-income or third-world countries, and really hustle hard. Start a profitable social venture startup also. Do something badass like donate platelets every week, liver lobe or a kidney. A clever art installation project would help too, especially with pictures.

- These will kill it. Take every AP test you can to get 5's.

- Study your a55 off for the ACT / SAT.

- Do dorm life. It's the best part.

- Join a greek society.

- Arrange classes to graduate in the least time possible.

Also out-of-state tuition: charging based on ability to pay or whether a foreign country is picking up the tab, rather than just out-of-state, would be ideal. This way, lower- and middle-class out-of-state students aren't penalized.
This is the most ironic thing I have seen all day
Apparently the patch for the bug I reported in 2004 (C343-20) didn't make it into this version, despite being fixed four years ago. The glacial timescales are kind of endearing at this point.
> That definitely sounds interesting, but I'm also a little blazé at this kind of announcement.

I can't blame you and if I were you I would be a bit skeptical too.

> I have vague recollection of seeing this kind of ambition multiple times, and zero recollection of seeing any of them concertize.

Which ones for example? You are right, it's problem that people have been trying to solve however most of the proposed solutions were either very academical or very specific. They weren't trying to help you with composition.

> I guess there is a lot of hidden difficulty in the task.

There is however I like to think I've managed to remove quite a bit of it.

> I'm also not sure about that IDE analogy. IDEs and advanced code editors are basically notepad with lots of extra features that increase productivity, at the cost of added complexity and some extra learning effort.

Don't strain the analogy. It's a music composition software that tries to help you.

> Meanwhile, current DAWs can already be very complex and hard to learn fully, because they already have a million features to boost productivity in various ways. So if current DAWs are "notepad", I'm not sure I want to know what an "IDE" even looks like.

Here's the thing, most of current DAWs are for editing of sound. Cutting, mixing etc, they have surprisingly few features that are related to tonality and composition. And Sibelius and all that sucks a stiff one too. How many DAWs actually understand the concept of a scale and how many understand this concept "productively". Ive tried all of them and they are all terrible for this. E.g. if you have 10 tracks playing a chord, and you want to change said chord, you have to go through all the tracks and change the notes manually. That's very annoying.

Not to mention that all current DAWs have terrible, terrible interfaces. I can go for hours on each of them and why it sucks, so pick one, I'll try to tell you why I hate that particular one.

> In any case, I wouldn't belittle the existing tools so much. Several DAWs are deeply scriptable and extensible, on top of the plethora of rapid-workflow features they possess.

I don't want to script things. I want a tool, not a toolkit. And not all things are scriptable. And I also want really good visualization and fast workflows. And you can't really build new UIs.

If you want to talk about this more, send me an email (it's in my profile), I can talk about this for hours.
Completely agree. There are always going to be people that want to try drugs, and a portion of those people are going to be successful. A portion of those people will use drugs on a semi-regular basis, a portion of those people will become addicted, and a portion of those people will commit crimes as a result of their addiction. But why attempt punish everyone that takes drugs because some percentage of them commit crimes?

Why set up the system to amortize the public cost of addiction over long periods in the form of hospital visits, lost productivity (both directly due to addiction and indirectly as a result of former criminals' difficulty rejoining the job market), public assistance, court costs, jail costs, and prison costs, rather than focus on rehab and breaking the addiction itself?

If you look at history, drugs were almost never criminalized because they posed a public health crisis - and when they arguably did (as in alcohol prohibition), criminalization created more problems than it solved. Usually the motivations had something to do with xenophobia, moral panic, or politics. Alcohol prohibition was fueled by general animosity towards immigrants (Irish) and a growing Catholic population, with a smattering of both moralism and public health concerns spearheaded by women's rights groups. Marijuana was criminalized largely due to xenophobia toward mexicans and black people. Crack carried harsher penalties than regular cocaine because black people used it. LSD was cracked down on to quell anti-war sentiment in the Vietnam era.
Having confidence in something, and finding out that your target audience doesn't want it, or need it are 2 entirely different things.

Per his OP, the technical founder has not explicitly stated whether he believes that the product has zero utility. Rather he's saying that he found out (from data I suppose) that there is no product market fit for it.
I'm not sure manufacturing is that similar. US output is at near record levels https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS and companies that outsource like Apple are sustaining themselves fine. There is less employment in manufacturing but its probably more down to more efficient manufacturing technology combined with 'peak stuff' https://hackernoon.com/welcome-to-peak-stuff-e699820c7e9b
Tell your investors/angels asap. Sell what's left and return money to them first. Reuse/recycle what you have. Don't just throw the code or the team away. Move on. Remember that failure is the default setting for learning. Learn and try again with something else. Never give up!
Elon Musk got car #1 and therefore by their reconning the shittiest one.. There's Karma in action.
Here is my take on it: Rebellion is a big part of teenage life (especially if the child is from a broken home). There is an urge to break rules, to question authority and to disobey the law. But the urge to rebel varies from one individual to the next. Trying banned drugs is one way to rebel against the system.

You say:
> 1. It's been medically shown that some drugs cause aggressive and violent behavior. Why should we allow an increase in that kind of behavior if it could be largely prevented as it is now?

How do you know that some drugs cause aggressive and violent behaviour? It's because it's in the list of banned substances. Banning gives it the popularity it would have never gotten in the first place. There are plenty of pharmaceutical drugs that are equally or possibly more potent than the list of banned substances but are not in common knowledge primarily because those drugs haven't been banned. That's one big advantage of legalization. It removes these drugs from the bucket list of rebellious things to do. The novelty wears off with time.

> 2. If all drugs become legalized, what's to prevent addiction to certain drugs sweeping across an entire population and devastating productivity? If drugs are more accessible it seems likely that more people would experiment with and become addicted to more debilitating drugs.

That isn't going to happen the way you think. Those who weren't going to dope in the first place wouldn't be inclined to anyways. That leaves the others who were already addicted. These people always got the adulterated/spiked drugs from the peddler which put them at real risk of overdosing. At the very least, those addicted now can be taken care off by Government rehabilitation institutions that would be legally permitted to administer a clean doze of the drug in reducing amounts, slowly getting the addicted person off the dangerous drug if possible.

> 3. It seems like whether drugs are legal or not, if you get addicted to some types of drugs you become effectively unable to earn an income. Even if legalizing drugs reduces the prices, aren't the people addicted to them still going to commit crimes to make the money they need since they still can't work normal jobs?

Yes but it's going to stop the spiral of new people getting addicted. The danger here is the attachment of drugs with acts of rebellion. The only way to separate the two is by legalizing drugs. Also what is the Government gaining by prohibition? Instead of solving the problem of drug abuse, prohibition creates two big problems:

1. A thriving black market controlled by the Mafia.
2. No tax revenue for the Government and huge costs for enforcing Prohibition.

Governments, in my opinion, should not concern with social issues. It should be purely legislative and administrative, only intervening during natural disasters or wars. The burden of solving social issues should rest only and only with the society. Currently, in all countries that have one or the other forms of Prohibition, the Government has taken over the burden from the society instead of letting the society/community self-regulate.
I think you are absolutely correct with your assessment. I recall Alan Cox (welsh bloke, big beard, Linux kernel hacker (well: simply hacker in general will do)) posting on G+ about someone booting enough Linux on a hard disc to get a prompt. No not the disc itself, off the firmware on the controller.

You may also like to consider that nearly all modern server systems have an iLO/iDRAC or whatever that can do all sorts of things, and at least one internal USB interface. PCs can have the Intel ME and other horrors. The best you can hope for is that it is only your local intel. agency that potentially have routine access to your system.