skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started RestBackup, a backup service for small business databases.

I coded 6 months before talking to customers. When I finally talked with them, I learned that I built mostly the wrong thing. I spent half a year changing my product to fit their needs. I could have saved about 6 months by talking with people first.

Then I used the wrong sales strategy. I focused on cold emailing, snail mail, and cold calling, which was demoralizing. The pressure of impending failure was too much. I lost nearly all motivation and productivity. After another half year, I ran out of money and gave up. I could have succeeded at sales by consulting with an experienced salesperson in the industry. They would have told me to find out how my target customers buy products like mine: they buy whatever their local IT services company recommends. Then I would have focused my sales effort on the local IT services companies and probably gotten enough sales to take off.

Now it's 5 years later and I'm trying again, with a new business. Wish me luck! :)

TLDR:
1. Talk to potential customers before building anything.
2. When stuck, seek advice from experienced people.
The opposite problem is a compelling one as well. My transplant surgeon says that "Snow White isn't going to be your organ donor", meaning that patients must understand that every organ will have flaws and exposure to disease, exposure to imperfect lifestyles, etc.

None are perfect. But transplant recipients don't need a perfect organ. They just need one that will get them through their natural life. A "good enough" one.

This mindset is important for the moment when an organ becomes available. Many patients on the wait list for organs actually turn down donor offers because of some imperfection the doctor told them about. In fact, some people turn down an organ just because another patient previously turned it down - even though the reason might have nothing to do with the viability of the organ itself. The consequences of such a decision can be fatal.

Instead, my surgeon pioneered the idea of transplanting Hepatitis C infected livers into patients who needed transplant because of HepC-driven liver failure. His idea was that young people recently infected with HepC who die tragically are often in otherwise excellent health (HepC is a slowly progressing disease) and make good donors.

His work allowed him to clear out the backlog of patients awaiting liver transplant at his center, with success rates as good as any other hospital. And today, it's possible to kill HepC with anti-viral agents post-transplant.

(Minor edit for clarity.)
US imposes new tariffs on $200B of Chinese goods
It started as a good idea while social networks hadn't yet reached the level of adoption and engagement that they would later, but getting users to start using anything new is very difficult. The limit on the number of contacts (that one could have) may have further impacted the network effect.

It's a bit unfortunate that the first thing that comes to my mind when Path is mentioned is the address book upload by the app without asking users.

I don't think there's no space for such an app now, since more people (relatively speaking) are aware of and are concerned about large networks like Facebook and their impact on privacy and society. Coming back with a privacy focused offering that targets those who want more meaningful interactions with a limited number of people might get some traction, even if it remains niche.
An interesting question: how did the founders of Reddit make it worth their time to return to Reddit after having sold to Conde Nast? There must not be many startups where founders have sold and then returned, right?
The Apollo astronauts were also trained quite extensively in geology. Highly recommend the Apollo 12 episode of From the Earth to the Moon for a great look at that.
I've never had to use this myself (all the addons I want are already in addons.mozilla.org), but I've heard that it works pretty well in the past. (Interestingly, there are a bunch of reviews claiming the auto-download feature doesn't work anymore, so you might have to use something like http://crxextractor.com/first).
You can say the exact same thing about electric cars.

Hydrogen is not a primary energy source, it is an energy storage and distribution tech, just like batteries.
Well, eventually, when that computer has sophisticated software and all the appropriate sensors. An array of optical sensors that you ignore anyway won't really cut it.
I have just created this clock addon for Firefox browser user
And that's fine if those people would stay within those communities. But they don't. And so they present their warped vision of the world in front of women who just reel in shock and leave the site.

My point is that the overwhelming trend is for Reddit to become more mainstream. Which means leaving some communities behind.
None of that is actually a rebuttal.
This is so incorrect it hurts.
> safely

I've seen people do all sorts of foolish things. When the rain is so hard that I can't see more than 15 feet, I pull over and stop.
I grew up with that kind of summer rain in Illinois, too. After about five minutes of it, yes, a lot of (sane) drivers pull over. But it comes on very suddenly, and for the first two or three minutes, traffic flows continue.

If you're in the center lane and traffic is heavy on both sides of you, while your windshield (or camera) is overwhelmed with water, you need to keep moving with traffic for a bit -- or you get rear-ended.
And then some idiots do a referendum and the state ends up voting itself out of the union?
What did they do? Their home page doesn’t give it away and their about page is just the farewell letter linked by the OP.
I never used NeXTSTEP but I am always curious about what didn't make the transition to Mac OS X. Was the Digital Librarian different than Spotlight?
Yep the key to climbing a hill in snow is to keep your speed up so momentum carries you over slick spots. I've seen a slick hill look like a Tetris game with stuck cars in many different orientations.

It's the same with a muddy and wet 4WD road.
It's a (roughly) Zond-7 trajectory.
I kind of went through the same path as you and I am hooked. Are you building what you wanted to at this robot company? Can you describe the product vaguely?
They didn’t need any support of the product at all after buying it outright?

I can see how you’d be temporarily without money, but not sure how they’d take away all income.
From that article:

> Also snow seems to be solvable, as there will probably similar patterns that the sensors get in their signals.

Real snow is not just a software problem. Fancy rear facing sensors near bumper? I hope they function through a couple inches of frozen muddy spray. Front windshield? Sometimes needs scraping. Lidar on roof? Does it work through the big heap of snow on it?
The edge cases are a show stopper: You are talking about something like "driver assist" or upgraded cruise control. Thing is, still need a human right there.

Much of the dream of self-driving is for no human driver there, for taxi cabs, school buses, 18 wheel trucks, local deliveries from pizza or Chinese carryout, USPS, UPS, or FedEx, etc. For that, for current technology, for current traffic, on current roads, there's no hope at all because the edge cases are way too common in practice (can't put up with mean time to destroying an 18 wheel truck of six months -- 5 million miles is more like it) and require full, wide awake, sober, mature human intelligence with full ability at reading, talking, understanding, natural language understanding, hand signals, flag signals, tough to read road signs, etc. Edge cases.
Here is an example of a relatively expensive rate for processing with a merchant account (2% plus 10 cents per transaction, with a 10 monthly fee) versus Stripe. Note how the breakeven for getting a merchant account is when you start processing more than $428 a month(assuming an average transaction is $15).

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/zuzn1lhfdg
it's mad to fit our inner body-clock and live around something as arbitary as a 9-5 and the railroad clock...
You're right. The larger question is how many productive hours people are putting in (which is not easy to measure) and what they're actively doing about reducing the number of hours by improving productivity, efficiency, automation, etc.

Constant firefighting is not what any workplace should be about for a long period of time.
But an analogous situation holds for almost all performance benchmarks of any product right? That seems to be an argument against ever making any benchmarks public.
If it costs almost nothing to run why ever kill it off...
Man, think of all the Transformers movies he could buy (20).
I’m not an expert in self driving car engineering. I have some experience with ML but not in a significant professional way. What I have is a decade of professional experience building all kinds of software and a skeptical eye.

You have a problem that is unconstrained, with infinite variables, where even a simple mistake can have catastrophic outcomes. Society itself may object to self driving cars for a ton of reasons, from safety to simply driving like a grandma and slowing everything and everyone down. The cost to develop this technology, plus the added cost of hardware to each car, will be enormous and is not obviously a cost savings over a $15 per hour human. If the self driving car is doing anything other than getting from A to B, you still need a human (or a human-like robot) to handle the unloading / delivery / whatever at the end.

Now, I’ve worked at companies with extremely talented and intelligent engineers, and something as constrained and seemingly simple as making a login form can take a long time to perfect - and no lives are at risk! Just imagine the challenges and requirements for building self driving cars. New hardware, software, real-time processing and analysis of tons of data, all to drive split-second decisions that can kill people if done incorrectly.

Huge challenge - huge risks - huge money - uncertain payoff. This is not something that will appear suddenly. If there aren’t convoys of self driving trucks operating in desert highways overnight, where it’s dry and straight and flat and no one else is there, then we aren’t going to see city taxis for a very long time.
> Can someone explain to me why I should want to become good at management?

You said half of it yourself: because transitioning from engineering to management entails a promotion.

(The other half: because at most companies, a promotion in turn entails a raise.)
Fish tail doesn't necessarily mean you are going too fast. If you are cruising, it means let off the gas. Have you ever driven a rear wheel drive car on a packed road? You will fish tail when accelerating from a light or stop sign. You need to build some speed and ride the fish tail out.
Apple and Dell are two off the top of my head
It doesn’t matter if they are better. It just matters if they are more marketable.
I'm surprised they didn't mention that these trees STINK.

Edit: Looks like it was mentioned in the comment section in the article.

https://www.businessinsider.com/bradford-pear-tree-semen-sex...
There's a name for this technique, if you're curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_stand
Voat is too extreme to ever challenge Reddit. I think it's a given that we'll see a new wave of social media companies that put "moderation/censorship" first. Many users won't like that. If anything, what remains of Reddit will be better positioned to become the new Voat, and cater to people who don't want strict moderation. But since Reddit has been taking baby steps away from that for the past couple years, it would be an awkward reversal.
Personally, i just recommend were introduce temporal lag. Time moves too fast in general. So we should just slow it down.

Just like the Fed can print more money, the government can just make minutes worth more.

Why do we need 60 minutes in an hour? If we only had 30 minutes in an hour, then we would get twice as much done in half the time!
It depends on what you do with that computer. I have a gaming computer that I rarely do work on, and I bet there are a ton of kids willing to rent out their gaming computer when they aren't using it who don't care much about security.
Goals change.
No, what is meant it's so small, that no one can tell how big the difference is and more importantly, does DST waste or save energy.
ESP works magic because it can do things that a human physically isn't allowed to do, namely "stop this one wheel from spinning faster than the others".

Incidentally, if you've ever tried driving on snow/ice/mud in a 4x4 car with fully locking differentials, you have a completely mechanical solution that beats ESP.

And FWIW, Swedish insurance agency research pointed out last year that cars with permanent 4x4 and ESP were up to 40% more likely to get into severe accidents in bad conditions, because the driver does not get the "hey, this road is slippery, better slow down" experience, so they go too fast for the prevailing conditions.

http://feed.ne.cision.com/wpyfs/00/00/00/00/00/3E/5A/A2/wkr0...
Using Dual SIMs on the iPhone XR/XS
The part I'm still confused is: how does the cache being updated? For example in the traditional web architecture if I go to www.example.com/index.htm, the host server of example.com tells the hash of index.htm and depending on that my web browser decides to use its cache or do a fresh request.

How would this work in IPFS? How about dynamic pages? Does that mean my browser still has to contact www.example.com to get the latest version's hash but then has the option to request the file from IPFS instead of www.example.com? What about if example.com goes down?
Time is just a concept that distracts us from living life at our own pace.
Is there anything in the actual content of the article you disagree with?
That’s step one in losing your throne as the cool place to go. The Reddit founders understand this, but few others seem to respect how deadly it can be to social software.

Consider: “YC is so large that we need to suppress negative stories on HN.” What are the diffs between that, which is clearly a tactical mistake, and rooting out your list of unfavorable du jours? Are you sure it’s an invalid comparison?
Waymo’s Michigan testing facility is very close to my home. I’m really curious to see how they do on snowy pothole ridden roads in Michigan. I’ve seen very few of them on the road this summer but if there’s supposed to be heavy testing and validation going on perhaps we’ll see an army of them on the roads here soon.

I’m curious how self driving focused groups are solving lane detection and managing surrounding traffic on snow covered roads. It’s not uncommon for a multi lane highway to be completely covered with snow and multiple tracks for different ‘lanes’ that overlap. It’s also not uncommon to see cars just making their own lanes. This occurs even after the snow has stopped flying.
It'll outsell every luxury sedan in the US in its first year.

If that kind of outcome gets you implicated for failure, BMW must be distraught as it looks at those dwindling 3 series sales figures.
Your list seems focused on behind-the-scenes TLS implementation details. I have no doubt Google has contributed positively in that regard.

Personally, I've found their handling of the Symantec root distrust mediocre (from the perspective of an affected site owner). However, the biggest issue is the changes to the display of certificate info in Chrome 69. To present a certificate with an authenticate legal entity the same as an insecure site indicates we have different priorities, and they no longer align.
Yes, except you need to produce about 3x more energy for the hydrogen powered car to get the same range as the battery powered ev.
A better use if this money would have been to try and eradicate proverty and hunger in Africa or unemployment in Europe.
The contagion is merely a symptom of the presence of one of the vampire-squid’s blood funnels attempting to extract all possible economic value from this new market.
This provides more context: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/17/rip-path/
That just gave me a flashback to my college accounting courses. So many examples where a discount was offered for on time payment. Must be a reason that technique has been around long enough to be a fixture in accounting textbooks.
You have to look it up either way. This just makes it easier to communicate.
Right. And even very reliable honest people might get some facts very wrong after, say, 35 years. Of course, you can't even suggest this anymore.
>they recommended effectively what we already knew we needed to do but leadership was too afriad to do. so the board convinced the c-levels to spend $500k+ on these consultants to effectively validate the findings.

They did their job well in that case. And seemingly nobody in the company could do it so their fee was worth it.
I agree with you that hands-on experience with manufacturing is crucial for getting your fist batch out. However,what stopped you from joining one of those hardware accelerators in shenzhen?
What would prevent using the same technique of only retaining the maximum Z direction return to tell the difference between a refracted rain drop and car bumper?

Perhaps it is that the rain drop refracts the beam to all sorts of other objects which can make it difficult to tell which actually has the longest Z-distance return?
I'm in a suburb outside a city in Australia and see half a dozen Teslas when I walk to the park with my kids. It's absolutely mind blowing how far and fast they've reached.
I think it would be more succinct to describe WaveSense as ground penetrating radar for positioning purpouses. It's pretty orthogonal to autonomous driving which obviously would benefit from any extra position sensor, but it does not actually contribute autonomous driving.
A more fun art project would be if he sent two animals of many species around the moon.
... or every IKEA product!
I keep hoping that we get some sort of SR Hadden "visionary" type. "The first rule of government spending, why build one, when you can have two at twice the price?"

Maybe Musk is the closest we've got right now? SpaceX, Boring Company, Hyperloop are pretty visionary for civilian projects. Even Mr. Hadden wasn't very well liked by those with "lesser" visions.
Honestly, I don't see how this is any bigger of a deal than going to the moon in the first place. There is a level of forced sentimentality here, as if a painter or a musician is going to see something different from a regular astronaut, because they're just special.

Any time I see something like the level of response somewhere, I can't help but assume everyone thinks they're saying what they're supposed to say. "This is so beautiful, etc." It means I like art. I'm not an artist (I didn't take that risk with my way of life), but I like and can appreciate art which may as well be the next best thing, so I will post the comment saying I almost cried and everyone can know what a spiritual/sentimental/artistic person I am!

Sorry, don't mean to be cynical. I just don't understand how this is a big big big deal to cry over. I hope they succeed and make something great out of it afterward, just some of the comments here seem way, dare I say, over the top.
I am curious about inflating school shooting numbers. Do you have links for that? Are you saying that there were fake deaths and there are crisis paid actors?
What I've seen a lot is lots of companies do not have a meaningful Individual Contributor technical career track. You join as a junior developer, then 5 years later you are a "Senior Software Engineer" and that's it. Your salary flatlines, your project responsibility/impact is capped, with no further opportunities to grow career-wise. Join another company? Fine you get a 5-10% pay bump but you're still at the highest level: The dreaded "Senior Software Engineer". OK, so some places have a "Staff Software Engineer" or "Principal Software Engineer" or whatever they call it. It's still basically the end of the road for a non-manager. So few places offer anywhere to grow after reaching this level, besides management.

These companies then say, "Hey, engineer XYZ, you seem to be smarter than the average bear. We would like to reward you with career growth, but we are not imaginative enough to come up with something beyond Senior Software Engineer. How about instead we make you a manager? Go, here is a team of people, go off and learn this entirely different skill set and manage people! What could go wrong?" That's pretty much how most places make engineering managers, and it's tragic. Here we have some of the smartest, technically competent people. I mean they rock as individual contributors and should be thriving. But they're not because they don't want to be managers, they just want a software development career!

To me the solution is to simply let coders code and hire managers to manage, and provide equal career and salary growth to each group!
RON.js - JavaScript Implementation of Ruby Object Notation
I expect that they'll blacklist anything iffy. The ipfs.io does, so hey. But you can run your own ipfs demon, and gateway. Even as a tor .onion service.
If you're good enough then volunteer or hire yourself as a tutor or night college teacher.

Also, there are a number of people that produce calculus tutoring youtube videos. Maybe you can try that.

Unfortunately, a large percent of what we learn will eventually be forgotten due to lack of use. Most of what we learn will not be used at work. I remember spending tons of time studying calculus yet I've yet to use any of it. If ever I need to use it I will need to review it to refresh my mind but most likely I won't remember most of it.
They took development in house. It’s not like PHP (despite some obfuscators being available) can’t be edited by anyone who barely knows the language.
Well, it didn't completely fail yet. It's still going 13 years after I left, actually. But part of the struggles were brought on by my mistake with a military customer that probably cost us the contract.

This was back at the beginning of the Iraq war. Our main contact told me the US should attack France, as they weren't supporting the invasion. I made the mistake of saying I was glad he was executing policy, not making it.

Oops. They started migrating to another product. Oh well.

Lesson is, if you're going to object to what a customer thinks, do it when its your own company. It's not really fair to make such a choose for everybody at your company. Kind of self indulgent, actually.

And people are entitled to their opinions and my mouthing off didn't change anything. An exercise in futility that only cost us.
Lord of the Wings
I wrote a detailed and (to me) heartbreaking account of this two years ago. The article went viral and kind of freaked me out, but I think the advice is as good as ever.

https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/why-i-turned-down-...
Can that be that in US cities there is not trmendous amount of left turns? At least that was the rwason I heard why the Amazon Logistocs routes in Europe were planned without any left turns driving everybody crazy and adding a lot of wasted time.
You mean Journey app? It doesn't allow sharing
> I could have been SalesForce if I hadn't been arrogant.

Did you overcome that and learn from the mistakes? No offence, but to be honest you saying "I could have been SalesForce" makes it seem like you're still working on the arrogance part.
7) Avoiding hard conversations This is the one I failed at hardest. Well.. my teams might say that accepting arbitrary deadlines was worse, but this is what I personally took as the signal I wasn't suited:

I just couldn't give negative feedback during performance review
Google image search brings up tons. I expected it to be a semi-enclosed structure (think log flume), but it turns out it's really just an absurdly long flat conveyor belt, carrying dust and soil more than the "ore" I'd imagined (although some photos show more defined rocks and ore).
Ten Years After the Crash, We’ve Learned Nothing