skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks so much for telling that story.

In hindsight, what do you make of companies choosing or rejecting venture funding in the first place?
I'm sorry you had those interactions with me in the past!

I think I've grown since, but it still sucks to hear that about past-me.
Honestly doesn't seem like he failed at all. Sounded like just bad times for the business. I mean 2 years of difficulty seems like a minor thing in the grand scheme of the business lifetime. Not only that, the business literally keeps growing if the graphs are to be believed.

Failing is when you can't come back and you close the business.
Your point is valid, really, and it's something I'm struggling with ethically. The problem is the other services in San Jose are by and large much worse in every other way (unless you really want pizza) and I do rely on deliveries for my current schedule. At what point is the right answer to sacrifice your own needs in order to boycott?

So right now I'm making DD pay as much as possible for each delivery to me, which is the point where I at least retain a bit of self-respect. My hope is this gets "corrected" before I have to quit the service, but if that becomes the only real choice it's what I'll do.

As far as the tipping, I do need to get an envelope of small bills going to meet my own standards there, but at least I haven't hurt the Dashers worse. The moment the 20% tip would be enough to raise their payout (DD guarantees a minimum of $1 from their own pockets, so that's $4.51+) I've tipped it regardless of the offset. They're victims in this.

But regardless of any perceived hypocrisy you may have on my part, DD is a bad actor here. Gig economy has always had the strong potential to exploit the "contractors," but this actualizes that potential in a big way. Even the sub-min-wage base+tips model for service employees isn't this egregious.
Google and Apple Enable Saudi Arabia’s Male Guardianship Policy
I paid for the photos. But if I had a little bit more time for preparation I would find some other creative way. You see, I was helped by my mum and her friends to organize the wedding. And found a great guide how to plan it too late here https://www.weddingforward.com/ I wish I would turn it back..
> "doesn't that imply the numbers games in those communities are offering better odds than the state implementation?"

No. It would imply that if you assume those number games are honest or that players can rationally and accurately assess the honesty of those number games. Neither of which is true. Why do you think the Nevada Gaming Control Board exists? Because organizations that run gambling operations cannot be trusted to stay honest, and because libertarian theories about consumers figuring everything out themselves and regulating the industry through market forces don't play out in reality. Government regulation is the only way to keep the gambling industry honest. The only other option is to tread on those snakes and stamp it out completely.

> "if so, what exactly is the state monopoly protecting us from?"

Fraud in the number games themselves, and the adjacent violence associated with criminal gangs who run numbers games.

> "increasing enforcement in immigrant communities,"

This is something we should be doing no matter what policy towards gambling is decided on, because immigrant communities are entitled to the same quality of policing as any other community. The status quo of denying adequate policing to many of these communities is a social injustice.
Show HN: Moment, the single source of truth for all interactions with your users
His arguing for inflation, exactly. And read the quote. The way it works is by stealing from workers.

> "let's say we have a deflationary economy, doesn't that lead to high unemployment which is a feedback to more deflation"

I suppose in a deflationary economy the equilibrium state is no one will have a job?
It's nice to see the US military working in sci-fi and fantasy.

They could throw in a couple billion to also develop some form of non-reactive propulsion to go with their inexhaustible and clean power supply.
The Clinic Giveth and Most Definitely Taketh Away
Canon's leaked full-frame mirrorless is a compact version of the EOS R
the issue is you didn't directly attack Facebook and therefore are in violation of the groupthink de jour.
How is that even remotely possible, unless he got no equity in pinterest? They are ~10b IPO'ing this year. Even 1 basis point of pinterest is worth more than what Gumroad brought in.
Well, and the people trying to make a living producing content.

The average content producer (like every one who isn't already popular) doesn't get to flick a switch between "general ads" and "personalized ads".

They get to choose between no ads (because they are too small to attract private ads) and the ability to make money. Look at Adsense or Youtube.
I work on this. Happy to answer questions if people have any.
The question boils down to, where should the line be drawn as to how badly of a deal someone should be able to opt themselves into.
at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do wonder why those should be the only two metrics to consider. IMO, the range of metrics is nearly infinite and highly subjective.
I don't know why you arr being downvotes, but your understanding is consistent with mine.

Although I still think the Instagram acquisition was at some level also vertical since one could argue Instagram was a more efficient delivery conduit for a certain subset of the population, and what Facebook was really out for was to pad their datasets.
not really. imo.
> While the text of the bill is not currently available online, we can be sure that what it will do is leave gaping loopholes through which ISPs can climb to screw over their subscribers.

What's the point of this article? They admit they don't even know what's in the bill.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments like this to Hacker News. Even if you have a good point, it damages the quality of the thread.
This story seemed inside-out to me. With the "you just have to find the right pre-existing market" logic, as well as the (much more significant to me) "but we were venture-funded, which was like playing a game of double-or-nothing," buried as an aside.

I think these are the real stories in this story: basically stable and relevant, coupled with irrational growth pressure. I get it, though: the personal journey through the wilds of Sand Hill Road, doing battle with market forces with an army of unknown strength, and so I would have liked to see some spotlight on the mistake of taking VC.

In this way, we also see this conclusion about halfway through the essay, "[s]o instead of pretending to be some sort of product visionary, trying to build a billion-dollar company, I’m just focused on making Gumroad better and better for our existing creators. Because they are the ones that have kept us alive."

I remember hearing a lot about Gumroad! People in the UK(? Aus?) used it a lot! In that way, this incredible journey appears as another log on the fire when it could have been part of a nice house. Or something like that. Everything about this story signals a decent business that was killed by VC.
Fine, if that's what you believe is the point of inflation. Whom does "investment" benefit? Go down to the tenderloin in SF, look around, and ask yourself if these people are benefitted by 'investment'. And the mechanism, as indicated in the quote, has at least a side effect of lowering the real value of workers (his words, not mine) wages.

Inflation is exactly stealing from the poor to give to the wealthy. There's a reason why the income gap turned in mid 70s when Nixon closed the gold window; we can never hope to fix income inequality with linear downward redistributive policy until the compounding, upward redistribution is stopped.
Oh that's great! I'm gonna look into integrating Gumroad into my product in that case. One question: Do you support domestic cards from India? Or just credit cards?

Because that's a problem I face with Stripe as well.
Send those kids out of their neighborhoods ? Mandatory school desegregation should be the norm.
Good job man! Money isn't everything.
Facebook splitting up the word “sponsored” to sneak past adblocker
The big surprise is the disabled PCIe 4 support. It makes sense in isolation, but since they plan on launching Zen2 ASAP with PCIe4 being one of its flagship features this would be very complementary. Doesn't the left hand of AMD talk to the right hand?
https://www.natuurmonumenten.nl/projecten/marker-wadden/engl...

Here's another example of an ambitious project in the Netherlands to create an artificial archipelago in the former Zuiderzee, which has been a lake for nearly a century.
Very interesting. I too have a doppelgänger, several in fact, due to me getting an early gmail address. I have seen all sorts of things, car insurance, memberships, a renovation agreement for the condo, amazon purchases, etc. His gym even came after me because he forgot to pay one month. I used to reply, explaining they had the wrong email, and never once, ever, got a response.
Hi HN,

We were frustrated at how all of the data about our customers were in different silos, and how difficult it was to get the various systems to talk to each other.

The idea behind Moment is that it's a single platform that covers everything from lead gen to marketing, sales, transcribed voice/video calls, support, and user testing. No need to pay tens of thousands for an "integration engineer".

I'd be happy to answer any questions.
Hello Sahil, thanks so much for sharing this. I know it helps a lot of founders out there.

One question: You mentioned that you raised ~$8m from investors, but that your liq. preferences used to be $16.5m. Was there a 2x preference in the Series A term sheet?
Slaking the World's Thirst with Seawater Dumps Toxic Brine in Oceans
I'll buy that the private sector can't solve the tragedy of commons, but if governments can't, we're all lost. The fact that the system we currently exist in uses fossil fuels doesn't equal the right of those who extract it to reap unlimited profit, or to pollute others' environment no matter how gradually or secretly.
Microsoft Used $500M to Shape the Tech Housing Debate
i'd settle for 60-70fps at 1080p on max settings.
Is anyone aware of a way to cheaply purchase multiple Raspberry Pi Zero W's? They are sold at $10 but are limited to 1 per person. If you want to buy more, the price is around $20 each. That's a big price difference if you are buying 30 out of pocket to teach a class.
The author mentions hiring a lot of good friends, so I assume they did it because they believed in him and the mission.
He took VC money to found the company. I assume he had to sell to someone at some point.
btw, ClusterFuzz, the infrastructure behind OSS-Fuzz was open sourced today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106771
If they fixed power (stop using USB micro B, add a power switch header) and SD card stuff (let me boot from USB), I would be so much happier with my pis. But as it stands they are really messy to work with.
Actual paper link: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/2/eaav0961

they can only increment or decrement a number by 1 ("honeybees were able to use color as a symbolic representation of the addition and subtraction signs and learned, during 100 appetitive-aversive trials, to thus add or subtract one element from different samples. ")

The paper is fairly readable even outside the area of expertise. It's straightforward behavioral work.

Amusingly they used sugar as the positive reward and quinine as the negative reward. I quite like the taste of quinine...
"it's not a smoking gun that a bunch of our lawmakers publicly announce their intentions to destroy US tech companies and it's a coincidence that our policies have that same effect, it's just that we are a diverse bunch of white people".

Pathetic.
> There is another big group. A lot of dead mice (neuroscience).

I'd add in Beagles, Capuchins, Zebrafish, and Mongolian Gerbils there too.
> There is, of course, the $178,000,000 we have {sent, channelled, moved-through-our-platform, assisted in transferring} to creators

All of the above seem synonymous and none seems particularly malicious, but "sent" is easiest way to express it. For a marketplace, I don't think anyone's naive to believe the host is directly advancing funds to the tune of millions. Is it really necessary to nitpick that?
What I Learned from the Hacker Who Spied on Me
I think nature is indifferent to all.
Wouldn’t that result in transcoding from one lossy audio format to another? I’ve always been advised against that.
Non-personalized direct response ads seem to do pretty well.
I'm pretty sure this is the best post I've ever read on Hacker News, because of its potential positive impact on others. It's one thing to give advice, it's another to back it up with detailed life experience. The lessons shared here are invaluable ones, and if writing this story helps others learn them without having to go through as many trials to get there, you have done a great service. Bravo.
Who are you? If you want to handle people's customer data, you should at least some basic legal information on your site.
Tokimeki Unfollow
It did mention a success rate of 70%. Though not how many numbers were on the cards.
Webpack bundle analysis, for every commit
It is still baffling to me that the tech world has glommed onto a business model where steady growth and a solid core of loyal, happy customers is considered a failure.
> and is already nurturing pink flowering plants, sooty tern birds, and even barn owls

I was surprised to learn recently that Barn Owls are one of the most prevalent avian species across the whole world:

>> The barn owl is the most widespread landbird species in the world, occurring in every continent except Antarctica. Its range includes all of Europe (except Fennoscandia and Malta), most of Africa apart from the Sahara, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Australia, many Pacific Islands, and North, Central and South America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_owl#Distribution
Just make the state a passive non-voting shareholder, with a stake of, say, 10%. It receives a dividend, just like any other shareholder, so interests are exactly aligned, and there's nothing management can do to avoid paying the state, while also paying shareholders.

The state would benefit from share price rises by existing capital gains tax paid by the individual shareholders when they realize the equity gain. This would prevent avoidance of dividends in favor of share price appreciation through buybacks.

It leaves the problem of cross-border flows, such as fradulent notional payments for intangible assets, such as licensing, which would still be able to move profits and dividends to other countries.
I've been thinking about it some. The pattern seems easy enough to entirely split view functions from hook logic. Using the usual counter example:

export function counterView (count) {
return <span>{ count }</span>
}

export function Counter () {
const [count, setCount] = useState(0)
// … useEffect to setInterval count or whatever
return counterView(count)
}

At this point, though the question becomes is this pattern buying you anything? Pure view functions should be easier to test, but React testing library's act() tool looks like it isn't that much more painful to just test the full component. Similarly, pure view functions are potentially easier to reuse with different "component logic", but I'm unsure how often that would be the case.

It's maybe a bit clearer as a pattern where the "stateful" and "stateless" stuff may be than mixing the two, and certainly seems like it might help make it easier to follow the "Hook rules" (most of your loops and conditionals should be inside the "pure" function). But it's potentially also just a source for extra noise/boilerplate.

Like I said, I'm still thinking about it, and something I expect to explore in an actual codebase at some point.
After 15 years of doing math, I've decided that, for myself, the best introduction isn't the one that's "rigorous" or "in-depth", it's the one the leaves you wanting to learn more. For me, that was Colin's book. I wish more topics in math had entry-level books that explicitly helped contextualize why certain questions were being asked, rather than defining undergraduate simply by what material is covered/how things are proved (of course, I ended up as an applied mathematician, so it could just be me).
I hope this gets released to download/stream, it only had a limited release in my city. My friends who went said it was really good (both the coloring and the footage itself).
No they don't, every major cloud provider can meet any legal requirement you've got.

This comment was true 15 years ago. It's now so outdated that you're flagging yourself as one of those basement dwellers I wrote about above...
Dear Bert,

Hope this time you || your HR staff will be able to respond to candidates about the decision promptly instead of getting disappeared.
1) Fair enough, 25% of the requests would just take ~4x as long to get a more-or-less complete sampling. So how about a revised version: shard the requests, so CloudFlare only sees A-G, Google only sees H-P, etc.

2) No argument about that. I'm considering the privacy angle. A pre-DoC proxy would know your IP but not the DNS request contents, and the DoC provider would have the request but not the original IP.
There's a third possibility: The advertiser guessed the email address.

Well, in this case probably not. Though I wrote "facebook@domainiown.example" above, it's really more like "myrealfirstandlastnamefacebook@domainiown.example." So the chances of it being guessed are infinitely small.
Not the ones that are in my junk folder currently.
I'm not surprised by this, these strategies are based on pretty timeless human foibles.

People are always going to prefer to buy something everyone else is buying, (no one was ever fired for buying IBM). Some people will want to buy 'cheap', some investors will just want to receive a dividend cheque every year.
That's just saying it's the decisions that are arbitrary, not the rules.

OP implies that judgement should be not just within the limits of the law, but dictated by it.

Truly, the cut off where a law's guidance ends and judgement begins is rather arbitrary. Exegesis of law is difficult. OP takes the principled stance that law exists to conserve the power of governance (totalitarian). You take the stance that judges are arbiters (arbitrariness). That's no contradiction. In a perfect world, every body could excert their will arbitrarily. Practically though, individual wishes are mutually exclusive. Thus, totality is impossible, and harrasment prossecution e.g. only a retarded (too slow) meassure. Even totalitarianism has to make ammends (assuming e.g. it would want to abolish perversely incentivized harrasment for good) and it's therefore a misnomer. That the law has or tries to have in effect a monopoly on power (I'm translating loosely from German Gewaltmonopol, where Gewalt is power, violence, force ...) as the dominating institution in the market might be just a liberal thing. If the invisible hand of the market works, that's not a bad thing. If dismantling monopolies were a bad thing, OP's shallowly underhanded call for opposition to this monopoly woud be just too ironic. It's downright paradox, although I might be missing a few presupposed assumptions.
Is Genocide Predictable? Researchers Say Absolutely
That's right. Even very dumb criminals will often plead that they were dumb, not malicious, even when the circumstances of their capture make such an explanation ludicrous.

"I'm sorry sir, I kicked in your front door and started looking for cash and valuables because I was drunk and thought it was my house! I made a huge mistake!"
Veritasium has a good overview of the replication issues in much pf modern science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q
A technology? Sure. Technology in general? Not at all.
Yes, they're selling a variety of extras and kit parts. And soldering irons.
The article and it's title suggest that the toxin is "bred out" of the fish, but it is actually a result of bioaccumulation from toxic organisms (eg bacteria) in their environment. Fish cultured in tanks are naturally free from it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugu
`fzf` is more of a broad interface for fuzzy matching lists with any number of possible uses.

Marker uses a similar interface but is built entirely for a particular use case (bookmarking, recalling, and autofilling commands with their options and placeholder parameters). Something that could have been built on top of fzf but it's not the same thing.
I can't help you but a workaround might be to ask each student in the class (or their parents) to purchase one individually.
New Relic Acquires SignifAI to Bring AI to IT Operations
Off topic, but Sahil, love your drawings and paintings on your IG.

I've thought about the idea of moving to a place like Provo from NYC, but I work in cybersecurity, and I don't think there's a client base anywhere but DC, NYC or maybe SF.
For those interested in the repo: https://github.com/google/clusterfuzz
> the market is not as efficient as it is supposed to be

I have a recent business degree, but not finance or econ. In school we were strictly taught the market is efficient and I fully believed that. But I've seen online and discussed in person a (seemingly) growing idea that markets are not in fact efficient at all.

Are there any economists/finance people that can shed light on this? Are these new ideas gaining traction, or old ideas just sticking around?
We're a small team from Toronto, Canada that's also behind ParseHub.

Our goal was to launch quickly and iterate, so the public-facing portion of the site is somewhat barebones at this stage. We'll be sure to add legal info shortly.
This is totally awesome, @sahillavingia. For a young guy, you have learned some incredible lessons about business in a VERY short time. You are positioned well to build that billion dollar venture that you originally dreamed of. It might not be called Gumroad, but who cares?

"It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is, or how fast you ship features. The market you’re in will determine most of your growth."

This is so utterly, absolutely, painfully true. We hear stories of hypergrowth as if you can just choose that path and it magically happens. Reality is: most companies never get to hypergrowth. Your only real option is to pick a large potential market with a reasonable hypothesis for getting there. And then see what happens.
Binance Chain Will Charge $100K for New Coin Listings
> The easy deployment...

This is an important point that is still underappreciated even today with all of our hindsight.
It's Not Too Late for Social Media to Regulate Itself
Sure, but there's a difference between medium-soft sci-fi and space fantasy. Star Trek is deeply unrealistic, but it at least attempts to, as you say, use its gadgets to explore interesting premises. Star Wars is fantasy with ray guns.
Several previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Coroutines%20in%20C%20points%3...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis#Cr...
I suspect if you contact them directly as an educator they would be able to arrange something.
raddle.me - free speech-minded actual leftists allow a clone of r/The_Donald on their site.

Voat? Yeah, they're kinda gross...
this was a nice and soothing read...
They should have said $178,000,000 in transactions.
I know criticism is rarely nuanced online, and it can unhelpfully trigger people's fight response. So I hope this doesn't come across as vicious, but:

> people do get disable kids all the time

struck me (a profoundly disabled person) as very dehumanizing.

I regularly trade quality for quantity of life. Socialising in ways that allow ways of relating I otherwise cannot access is not 'alternative medicine', it is living.

I respectfully suggest a bit more humility. Listen to disabled gamers before you firm up your opinion.