skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should I put blocking video ads on my fintech SaaS?
Hi, I have created a fintech saas as a side project with four other people. It's basically a website where people can get financial advice based on our proprietary algorithms, statistics and charts.

We currently have paying customers (in the 10-50 range), and the website is only accessible through a subscription... However we are struggling to find a way to make some real profit from this project.

We plan to release a new version of the website, with many new features and a graphical redesign, and today the marketing guy came up with the idea of a totally different business model: make the website accessible to everyone, but show a non-skippable video ad every X minutes to non paying customers. Those with a subscription won't see ads at all.

I really think it's a bad idea, especially for a website (we don't have an app)... What do you think, and how should I make my point stand?
Here's a few ways to get a peek at a company's culture, particularly how they interact with customers and how customers perceive them:

1. The company's responses to public issues/tickets/discussions (on GitHub issues/pull requests, a support forum, whatever). Do employees provide thoughtful replies or frustrating form letters ("Great idea! Please vote for your feature request here:")? Is the person responding actually qualified to answer? Where appropriate, does the individual's personality come through or does the reply feel perfunctory or rushed? Do issues ever get closed, and when they do, is a useful explanation provided?

2. Twitter interactions between the company and users. Search Twitter for "to:companyname" for replies and "@companyname" for all mentions. Depending on the company, searching Reddit for the company or product name(s) may also turn up interactions.

3. Search engine keyword research/planner tools. What other words/phrases are used alongside the company or product name? Google and Bing both now restrict their tools, but many third-party planners are public and some include things like inbound link pages. (For a less-complete view, check which phrases are autocompleted in Google and Bing's search form input fields.)
The big advantage of actors are that they are compatible with network loss. Erlang and Akka actors are network transparent. Local-only actors are missing the point, IMO.
Three ways to get started with Serverless
Using pypy runtime will be advantageous in comparison with cpython runtime
From my understanding, China’s system is actually similar, just that the media makes it more dystopian.

These are for wealthy debtors that refuse to pay. And they are only barred from the high speed rail and not regular trains.

The idea is to force them to pay fines that they can easily pay, but refuse too. Once paid, their credit score can start building up again.
Lithium ion batteries are the combination of something that needs to be mined in the third world, with fuel shipped from across the world, combined with battery acid. Something like 20ml of that will kill you. It will also kill pretty much every plant and even most bacteria. When it doesn't melt down that is.

Oh and their fuel, the electricity ? Mostly comes from coal power plants which, despite TRIPLE the efficientcy actually still managed to produce more CO2 ...

Electrical cars are heavier because of the batteries, so in practice it's not quite triple the efficiency.

Electrical cars are very environmentally friendly at the location they're used. On balance, they're probably about even or slightly worse than petrol cars.

There's a simplification many economists argue for. In our modern world, price is a proxy for energy expenditure, which is what mostly matters when it comes to pollution. Therefore cheapest thing (measured over it's lifetime of course) is going to be the most environmentally friendly. This price takes many more things into account than any analysis ever will and therefore be more accurate. By that measure, electrical cars definitely lose by around a factor of 2 at the moment.
I first read the book nearly 40 years ago when I was 12. I recently found this radio adaptation narrated by the author himself.
Helpful for Automating Code Modifications
The word "unrelated" is awfully subjective. I could, of course, improve at spelling things out, but one never knows how much elementary illustration is necessary.

Of course, no one believes their own words to be flamebait. Makes the rule about as useful as "don't piss on the escalators"--no one who does it will be dissuaded by a sign.
Literally all of my ~20 accounts work, and the only reason I switched from Mint was because they couldn't connect to 5 of them. PC is light-years ahead of Mint in terms of reliability.
Oh, I forgot about the two classes of public suffix - and yes, if the BRs categorically forbid it and it's on an intentionally-machine-parseable list, then I agree there's no excuse for allowing issuance before a software upgrade to explicitly carve out an exception.
Not arguing either way, but to answer

>Why should you be able to prevent others from saying true things about you?

The obvious reason is privacy. Misdeed is subjective and the aggressive broadcasting of supposed misdeeds can be a conformist beating stick. Literal truth is a low standard for determining whether something should be said. Personally, I think Buddha's heuristic is pretty useful:

When determining whether you should say something,

Is it kind?
Is it necessary?
Is it honest?
Does it improve upon the silence?
Lots of practical challenges for sure!
I'd listen to "experts" such as Petraeus less -- their salaries depend upon them not understanding a lot of things.

Now, your mother or some random person X might not be able to eloquently compare the merits of pacifism vs realpolitik, but tons of average persons have good arguments, grounded in reality.

Even more so if those persons are not in some US state that had no contact with war and global politics since forever (aside from some local poor people getting into the army), but e.g. from countries that had actual first hand experience with neighborhood countries, foreign invasions, etc, and have a pragmatic understanding about those things.
Ocean Microphones May Have Recorded Lost Malaysian Jet's Crash
Nestor, Menelaus and Helen appear in Odyssey. I think even Achilles makes a brief cameo when Ullyses traverses the Underworld. Also the fate of Agamemnon is also described at some place.
Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Marilyn Robinson. Somebody upthread mentioned Camille Paglia. If you include journalism, politics, criticism, and humor in a recognizable voice that reveals the author's personal take on life, there are many more: Oriana Fallaci, Katha Pollitt, even Nora Ephron and Pauline Kael ...
That sounds like wishful thinking.
The US certainly does soft punishment of dissidents and doesn't seem to hurt itself much on the innovation front. I mean, innovation is definitely lower than before, but still better than everyone else.
Shocking. Megacorp who makes its money by dataminding people is lobbying against privacy.
I wonder how much optimization medium complex app can get from LLVM 7 which is part of new release.
From a security perspective, it is better to have the endpoints just share the session secret with a DPI box, instead of running the DPI software on the endpoint.

If the endpoint in compromised, in the first scenario, the most the attacker can do it not share the session secret. This is easily detectable.

In the second scenario, the attacker can pretend that the endpoint-local DPI software is still being run, while completely going around it.
I don't buy this at all. It may be true for projects with only a single developer, but consider environments with a larger team.

First, every developer has a development environment. If someone goes on holiday for a few weeks they will come back to a personal environment that's likely several steps behind everyone else.

Smart engineering orgs have one or (hopefully) more QA environments which differ from production by design - they're where you preview and test upcoming features that may involve schema changes.

At a certain scale individual teams may have their own dedicated QA environments, for testing in-development features without disrupting the work of other teams.

Then there are environments for running integration tests, hooking up to CI systems, load testing etc.

There may be only one production environment but there could be dozens or even hundreds of other environments that need to be able to reliably apply migrations up to a specific point.

The Django approach to migrations handles this really well.
Sorry, no. You're reading something into what I said. I'm using "slog" to mean "long shitty period".

I was guessing review/stack/rank at the beginning of the year because I've spent time working at recently PE bought company, and quit once I saw the pattern.

When do managers write reviews? They don't have to be delivered to the employees before rank/stack/layoff...
See my comment here about organizations with many engineers and teams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19289778
Thank you for pointing this out. Most Hacker News comments are so wrapped up in their ideology--as evidenced by the response which reads your assertion as derisive.
EditorConfig: Consistent coding styles across various editors and IDEs
>> In ML encapsulation, shielding away of inner details often does not work.

I call bs on this. It’s just that we haven’t yet invented a consistent type theory on top of ML.
"For a 1-second-long, 1-watt sound wave in water, the amount of mass would be about 0.1 milligrams."

Does it makes sense to imagine a propulsion mechanism based on that? Or is this application idea missing something obvious?
I use the free tools as well, but most of the folks I consult for, I also administer their mail account server @ Google or Microsoft, so I can keep an eye on both sides of the transaction. Implementing SPF/DKIM/DMARC/smtp-tls also helped keep things clean. You can register as a postmaster @ AOL, Microsoft & Google, and also get reports if something is reported as spam.

A well behaved remote mail server should either reject/bounce the message, or deliver it to a user's spam folder, it should never just drop it. Unfortunately, It's near impossible to determine if your message ended up in a user's spam folder :(

My server sends 50-100 messages a month, tops, and I never send mass messages, just direct messages to family, friends & customers. The biggest issue I had was when Rackspace periodically (+ voluntarily) reported their VPS IP space to Spamhaus, which required me to inform Spamhaus that I was responsible for that specific IP, and it should not be on the blacklist.
Exactly. People living in urban areas are used to the noise or the requirement for silence but when I moved to an apartment from my parents' house I hated every second of it.
I use the sleep cycle app linked up to my hue lights (one is just a generic GE connected light) and have it set to turn the lights on when I wake up and fade them out when I go to sleep. Sometimes they do fade out quite quickly which is annoying. Not sure what’s up with that.
Money. Just finished reading an article about how it takes around $250,000 to launch a startup. Sure the cost to launch a startup has decreased like pg said but the cost to market it has increased to offset it as the startup space is getting crowded.

We are growing comfortably but a cash injection would expedite the process. Talking to VC is futile as it's always a wild goose chase especially outside of the valley.
> These boxes can only work with a single static secret, which is shared between the DPI boxes and the actual servers. If the servers are using a forward secret mode, this is no longer enough, you have to share a secret for every session.

Actually, the boxes can also MitM the entire SSL connection. This just happens to be a much more efficient system. It can easily be turned off without affecting the connection, and it doesn't introduce extra latency.
Moreover, this system allows for post-hoc DPI rather than requiring that it happens on-line.

> But wait, the moment you have to have software running on every endpoint, why do you need a special box?

There are reasons beyond 'market dominance' for not wanting to do this on the end-points. End-points are numerous, heterogeneous, occasionally and occasionally difficult to access. This makes actually implementing this system on all endpoints very hard. Let alone keeping all end-points up-to-date.

In general, which sounds like the nicer approach to take: "drop in solution" or "solution that affects all endpoints and needs to support all endpoints".

The discussion is a lot more about 'Is PFS an acceptable loss for getting DPI' with a very large side discussion about whether DPI should even be possible.
This looks amazing. The problem is the surface area is so high the amount of time required to assess, evaluate, learn, and determine whether it's really a good architecture is probably prohibitively high. I wish I had a solution or a recommendation for how to get around this problem. I'm currently exploring AWS Amplify which isn't the same by any stretch of the imagination but offers a not terribly dissimilar set of benefits. I already know Amplify is far from perfect and I wish it used a different DB on the back end but at least I know it's well documented, surrounded by tons of blog posts, and likely to be maintained for the foreseeable future.
> Couldn't the client just find and blacklist misbehaving nodes? (Which Bitcoin already does, right?)

That particular report is essentially "if you send a message with an invalid checksum, the peer just ignores the message and carries on instead of banning you and thereby wastes bandwidth and cpu time".

But this is kind of a pointless report (of a sort all too often produced by paid auditors :( ) -- the same "attacker" can simply send the same messages with a _valid_ checksum at no more cost to them, using the same resources, but totally bypassing the ban. So why bother?

There may be good or bad reasons to disconnect or ban a peer that does something incorrect or unexpected-- depending on the nature of the incorrect action--, but bans that can be evaded by sending one constant instead of another with the same resource usage are not useful protections against denial of service. A downside of this particular ban is that you'll ban hosts that are guilty of the crime of being behind an overactive NAT or idiotic censorware proxy...

[In fact, a lot of the motivation of the checksum is simply to avoid inappropriately banning peers whos messages were invalid simply due to the network corrupting their traffic. Banning on an invalid checksum defeats much of the purpose of the checksum in the first place.]

Bitcoin is moving away from bans more or less completely because of their minimal utility (over otherwise necessary anti-isolation handling) compared to the amount that they amplify the negative effects of simple misconfigration (or even, have themselves resulted in attacks).

The earlier poster's comment about bandwidth usage attacks is probably referring to the fact that no matter what your bitcoin software does a third party can still chew up inbound bandwidth by e.g. sending ICMP echo requests, SYNs, etc.
The great thing about cryptocurrency being FOSS is that this can and likely will be fixed across all Bitcoin forks.
It should be shocking, though. Comments like this don't contribute anything to the discussion and I would argue they're actually harmful because they make people complacent. If Facebook continually assures us that privacy is important in their discourse, but then on a practical level does what they can to destroy it, that's a big scandal and they should be raked across the coals for it.

Edit: typo
In fact, it’s much worse than what media portrays. Chinese media has no spine and there is no such thing as free press in China. What you hear from outside media is a small glimpse of a rising dystopian one party system.

See the following article for a detailed analysis of the credit score system and its ramifications:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/china-surveillan...
Math has a culture where author affiliations are often mentioned only as a footnote, at the end of the paper, and not at the front of the paper. For a field with such culture, where it has repeatedly been shown that quality work can come from many places, this kind of coarse gatekeeping creates a very unpleasant environment. I'm trying to imagine the motivation of the platform creators, but drawing a blank. Maybe it's a ham-handed attempt at spam filtering.
This was never about TLS. Only a stupid person would go "right, we have to decrypt traffic, we control the clients, lets break the crypto".

Surely your IT department already updates the software on client computers. Time to put on their big boy tech pants and decrypt data where the secrets are, on the clients. Then your industry can stop harassing everyone else for bad crypto.
A bit more detail: https://njal.la/ accepts cryptocurrency.

I like njalla. Would be nice to see some others taking their approach. Anyone know of others that embrace the idea that one should be able to register a domain name anonymously?
You should be able to test the model and reject ones that are below threshold
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954077 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671020.
From what I have seen, it seems like the preferred encyclopedia here for non tech things is Atlas Obscura.
Using a Kanban Board to Manage and Promote Helm Releases
No Borges? Or E. B. White?
So you’re trying to say if an employee of a company has their personal account deleted google will take down the company gsuite? Please.
That graph is the best example of fake news in existence today. Why combine the cloud vendors like that? Obviously an agenda.
Not the catchphrase but real definitions:

Commoditization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commoditization

Economies of scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
Are these people under non-competes? I see a dozen customers for a competing (read: "clone") company with 'fanatical' support in the comments.
Knowing how sausages are made makes for a more educated sausage consumer.
That’s surprising about IBM but good to hear - was your experience there before or after Lou Gerstner’s turnaround?
This is a gaf where you can see the greed, malice and idiocy so clearly...
That's MO of all large corporation. Take Monsato for example - beautiful website full of happy parents with smiling children and message: "we love you and food quality is important". Behind the scenes: bankrupt farmers by spreading your own copyrighted seeds on their ground and try to patent human genes.
This is a super interesting idea. How does it work with creating a better model? It would make sense if you train the model in series but is there a method to merge(?) the models when it's trained in parallel?
SEEKING WORK - London - Remote Only
I am a highly experienced (10+ years) Deep Learning and full stack developer.

I built a Drag and Drop Deep Learning product from scratch, and a Video Analytics and LIDAR security platform from scratch:

Technologies:

TensorFlow, Cuda, RabbitMQ, Celery, Django, AngularJS, Numpy, Numba, Pandas, scikit-learn, Thrift, GRPC, Postgres, Cassandra, Hadoop, Cython, PyPy, Postgres,

Highly experienced in Fully Connected, Convolutional, GANs, Time Series, Reinforcement Learning, objective functiom optimisation, explore exploit, topology optimisation as well as deploying high performance and horizontally scalable models and infra.

I'm happy mentoring juniors and doing code reviews too. I have previously led teams of up to 25 developers having grown the team from a starting point of 3, myself included.

If you would like to see examples of my work please reach out to me, and I can show you entire platforms I have written myself functioning. I am currently working on monitising these with resellers, so if you're interested in working on that with me too, please reach out

Looking for full-time / part time work to extend my runway

alainr.richardt@gmail.com
"I use the free tools as well, but most of the folks I consult for, I also administer their mail account server @ Google or Microsoft, so I can keep an eye on both sides of the transaction."

Is this new ? I have been part of discussions on HN about personal mail servers for ... 8 years ? This is the first I have heard someone mention registering their mail server with google ...
how can someone be born with the wrong gender if there is no such thing as a gendered brain
I had not heard of Simafri. Looks good actually.

It's true that you need a hosting provider in addition to a domain name. It's good to discuss privacy-enhancing domain name registrars and privacy-enhancing VPS providers in the same breath.
Apparently this article confuses "OpenSUSE" (which there is no verion 12.4 of) with SLES and even tests an old version thereof.

There are other grave mistakes in there, so I wouldn't recommend reading it at all.
I think the next programming language I write will be named the Software Programming Language.
Well, look at all of the UI redesigns on HN, and that site is good! Oh, wait...
We've been building out a lot of the foundational technology on EOS. It's part of our roadmap for 2019 to hire some Kotlin/Android developers.

If you're interested in EOS/Blockchain/Cryptography/Mobile, we should have a chat.

https://get-scatter.com/careers
Another reason to put the year is it helps people decide if they’ve read it before.
>I've always preferred to have those types of discussions in person with some whiteboards available for fleshing out ideas.

Not everyone has people to talk to in person that understand their subfield. In a small institution it might be 100 miles to the nearest person who could converse fluently in what it is you're thinking about, even if thousands of them exist.
Texas Sharpens Aim at Surprise Medical Bills in Bipartisan Proposal
Almost every dutch person has or had a bicycle, The electric bicycle started out targeting older people so they could keep using a bicycle while getting older. Now they are also targeting young mothers, and commuters. We (dutchies) bought a electric bicycle for my wife because it's easier with a kid in a seat on the back, and it makes the radius where she picks the bicycle over the car bigger.
A useful tool is sender score: https://www.senderscore.org/lookup.php?lookup=0
>> even though few people really check the initial fingerprints the way they "should."

I am yet to see a single hosting provider which doesn’t only allow you to set up your own authorizarion key in a new instance, but which also immediately gives you the generated key of the instance that you can put in the .ssh/known_hosts.

So frankly it’s not just “people”.
I've not used an actor model--is there some router component that resolves the process to which a message needs to be sent? Is every send() operation a tuple of `(address, message)`? If so, presumably the router component decides whether there is a local actor or whether it needs to go out over the network?
At least they didn't succeed in derailing the passing of the GDPR. That's certainly encouraging and I guess the only piece of good news from the article. The rest paints a pretty depressing picture.
PE ownership explains everything. This is going exactly per the PE playbook.
As I see, that you require a math phd address. Why do you think that only PhD in math might contribute to the discussion? You are just making it impossible for people with non standard background to participate. You are reinforcing opinion widespread in academia that only people from the right background could do any meaningful research.
Linode have been my goto since ~2010.

Never had any downtime and the only degradation I can remember was when they got hit by a collosal DDoS a few Christmases ago (since then they've invested very heavily on ensuring that can't happen again, US DC's where down/sporadically up for days).

Hands down my default choice.
Hitman Runner Convicted of Mob Murder on GPS Watch Data