skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are the benefits of making a SaaS product exclusive or invite only?
Hi HN,

Looking to source the wisdom of the crowd here. Me and a friend have been working on a new SaaS marketplace in our spare time; haven't really marketed or experienced any growth yet, and me and said friend are debating as to how to make it "sticky" with potential users going forward.

He is convinced that using a Dribbbble-like model where we close off user sign ups to a small number of users to add a dimension of 'exclusivity' on the platform will in some way make the platform more desirable. To me, this is an odd proposition, but I am aware that the "invite-only" model is popular for many SaaS and even new hardware businesses—as a way to artificially generate a feeling of scarcity that somehow leads to increased buzz and therefore traction. It's been done by startups like Coin and Robinhood, et al.

On the contrary, I believe that interest for a new product piques during a short window; and if I'm not eligible to register on a platform during that window—I may lose interest or even be turned off from signing up. That's been my personal experience with Dribbble; although being a semi-decent designer, their confusing invite system has made me totally lose interest in ever becoming a member.

Does anyone have any insight or experience in this area? Would love to hear any feedback or thoughts.

Since the nature of the product may steer the direction of this decision, I will include a link [0].

[0] www.blendful.com
Thanks for the reply. I'm currently learning XCode+Swift and finding out about the "scavenger-hunt driven development" that you perfectly described.
At what point is it wrong to profile someone? If every terrorist and no one else had a blue crystal at the end of their nose, could we use that as a signal to check these people? What if every terrorist and 1 innocent had that? Where is the line drawn between when you can and can't use a data point to influence your decision? For what it's worth, I'm a man, and it seems that men tend to be more violent and more likely to be terrorists than women. I wouldn't mind if I on average got extra scrutiny because of my gender relative to women.
trampoline might be the bad example because there is some physics involved and smaller shorter bodies are easier to move while they bounce. Children can literally do backflips easier the same way that if they took a fall they wouldn't get hurt nearly as much.
People sit on the floor b/c of a lack of seating which is by conscious design so as to inhibit people lounging around.
Fascinating test of CPUs made over last 10 years
Comedian impersonates bank boss to get £8000 back to scammed customer
Can't drive memory bandwidth? I can saturate any memory interface with ease. All line rate Ethernet systems (pushing 100+ Gb/s now) are done with FPGAS. What are you talking about??

I can program a kintex ultrascale @ 16 bits transmitted at something like 100Mhz. The system is up fully in less than 5msec from power good. This feature is used in every system where milliseconds count - including military systems. Are you confusing JTAG reconfiguration speeds with production configuration speeds?

I'm very confused by what you said, can you elaborate?
> My teacher is very particular about the exact shape your mouth and tongue should be making. She's the first language teacher I've had who's done that.

Isn't that mainly because you're learning Mandarin where tone actually matters? In English you can pronounce can ad anything between "can" "ken" "keen" and a few others depending where you're from. I don't believe that's still valid in Chinese.
That sounds like a terrible thing for New Yorkers and make just a bad thing for Americans at large. Why do you categorize this as a win?
> Several months ago I emailed them [...] haven’t heard a peep since.

Stupid question: Why don't you ask again? Several months ago it was in release candidate mode, while now it is a real product. You should probably be able to get more concrete information now.
> Adults have a better sense of when they actually understand something, rather than just superficially.

Dunning-Kruger would disagree; in another context (martial arts), this is why we have so many people quit after 2 years - they think they have a complete understanding of the art because they know all the moves and quit out of frustration that they are still getting corrected. I've been training for a decade and I still think I'm bad.

I get what you were saying; however, I disagree with terminology used.
3D Touch is extremely non-intuitive.
I literally said exactly this: iOS makes simple things easy and difficult things hard-to-find.
I get that. But isn't this some kind of reverse bias ? What if a genuinely good Brazilian wants to be your friend ? You're precluding them based on their nationality.
Sorry I was unclear. My comments were meant for the author, not the poster.
In my travels in < 10 non US countries since 2001, the security hassle has varied, but always been substantially lower.

Not a scientific sample, to be sure!
The dumb thing is that for me AMP doesn't even work. It doesn't seem to reliably preload.
I think the questions of building quality are a bit broader than just this project. It causes me to ponder how ambitious new construction projects always end up very expensive and showing issues. It feels like the US has lost its knack for big ambitious construction that it had in the 20th century.

This seems independent of whether or not it's a popular attraction.
Extreme agoraphobia, social anxiety, very little to talk about... Most 31 year olds are working, raising children, etc., and don't live in their parents house. Don't underestimate the shame he feels when around others. Outside his family, I think it is overwhelming for him.
> As various warnings went off in the cockpit, they never reached the conclusion to use the runaway stabilizer procedure.

We continue to put the microscope on Boeing but this is why there is a person in the cockpit: to oversee the planes automated systems. There were multiple failures, and while we pick apart Boeing, we have not done the same to the pilots.
That's instagram. It isn't made by apple, and works the same on any phone.
I read on kobo, and wish for better tools for note taking and recording questions, etc.

Should be the perfect tool for deep reading and techniques like SQ3R... but it sure ain’t.
3D Touch is an optional feature. You can use an iOS device without 3D Touch (I do, for example, because I do not personally own a device with this feature).
Good for you. Stop complaining and make a move.
Full disclosure: I work for Red Hat Consulting

Officially, Fedora & Fedora Server are the upstream for RHEL Workstation and RHEL, respectively.
That's not my experience in London, but YMMV.
I have always been under the impression that the only reason children learn languages faster than adults is because they don’t worry so much about how they would be perceived if they said the wrong thing, pronounced something wrongly etc.
The adults egos hinders theme

In fact, I always thought adults would learn languages quicker than children if they where given the exact same circumstances because of their greater knowledge.
Yes, and he goes into that at length in the article. The HN thing was just my addition; shop talk basically.
Living in Korea as a male native English speaker I found the best practice I usually had was with Older women and young women who were too embarrassed about their English skills to even try.
My rule of thumb: if I hear a mistake once, I let it pass (maybe it was just a one-off mistake instead of a misconception). If it hear it twice, I offer the correction kindly. All such interactions have been met with gratitude.
This will be known as age where people wasted Helium on stupid things. We might need it in the future.
What you say is certainly true, but also not a fair characterization of what I wrote; we deliberately designed xi-editor from the early days to be consistent with the CRDT model (see the "rope science" series for thinking from the very early days).

But yes, if you have an existing editor or application and you try to just add CRDT, there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
One thing that appears concerning in the series of articles being written about the 737 Max incidents is that they suggest a culture at Boeing of speed/cost over safety.

Now we can assume that the Max won't re-enter service until this issue is completely solved (I'm sure regulators will be extra-scrupulous here and customers will want cast iron re-assurance).

However, is anyone going over all the other safety decisions and changes made to other Boeing models over the period of the Max development?

It seems unlikely that this was an isolated incident of rushing things for commercial benefit...
> They are not "advertising a commercial license".

https://blogs.oracle.com/graalvm/announcement "GraalVM Enterprise is available for purchase and is free on Oracle Cloud."

> They are saying NOT to use the Enterprise version in production

[citation needed]

> The only reference I've ever seen to Twitter using GraalVM in production is in this discussion thread.

Considering that Twitter has been talking about this in public for some time, this statement is unlikely to make the point you were trying to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR5NDkIZBOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtgKmzgIh4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbccuoaLChk
"Brazilians who were only interested in staying within a Brazilian bubble doing Brazilian things."

I don't think he treats random brazilian differently, just that he isn't seeking a brazilian community.
>Learning a third language is much easier than the second one. //

I didn't find this.

First language, English; second, French; third, Russian. Fourth, BSL; fifth, German.

I don't think French helped at all with Russian, but maybe I'm wrong (I don't know any Russian any more). What probably would have helped is doing Russian if I'd already done German in the way I was taught that, ie strong on grammar. Russian was taught with a heavy focus on declensions (that's the language's fault I think) but prior to that I didn't even know there was such a thing as a "case" as I was taught English [and French as far as I'd gone at that point] grammar through use and not in a structured way.

My main problem learning German was that I could only think of BSL signs (or occasionally French words) when I needed to think of a German word.

Do you have a source for your claim or is it just an assumed fact?
I listen to audiobooks on non-fiction and find that relistening brings out much more depth in the ideas (and my comprehension of them)

My new plan is to read a summary of the book’s ideas first, perhaps read the summary twice. Then see if this increases the initial immersion.
This type of belief is exactly what I was referring to when I said that one of the main features of his illness is that it resists anything that we would consider rehabilitating. Attitudes like this add to the sense of shame: "why don't you get out more and try to be normal like us. Everyone thinks it's a good idea for you." Makes me sick.
There was never any evidence to support the critical period theory. It was poor statistics from the very beginning.
If a hazard or potential failure mode can be eliminated in the design of a system, it's better to do that than to rely on every single operator to mitigate it individually.
Did those properties gerrymander NYC zoning to allow the buyers to get green cards in exchange for purchasing residences?

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financin...
Many comments here get fluency and the lack of an accent (pronunciation) mixed up. Although pronounciation and general entonation is part of being fluent in a language, the message is still the most important factor in fluency and the only one being evaluated by the quiz in the study.

For instance, many people who are native English speakers have terrible accents (ie Texan, Scouse, Scottish, etc etc) that make it hard for other native English speakers to understand, even though they're nearly 100% "fluent English speakers". In fact this applies to many if not all languages.

As a curiosity, two of the most lyric works of literature ever written in the English language - Lolita and Heart of Darkness - were written by Vladmir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, one Russian and the other a Polish immigrant to the US that had terrible foreign English accents.
The core of the discussion precisely revolves around Boeing wilfully making it more difficult for the person in the cockpit to oversee the planes' automated systems.
No, but it does mean that the marketing budget of Oracle is insane relative to how much influence it can buy in a poor country.
What an absurd and tiresome comment (actually though). Just because he has a different opinion than you doesn’t mean that opinion is biased. Perhaps he likes apple because he finds their interfaces intuitive, as opposed to saying their intuitive only because he likes apple. IMO, comments like yours have no place on hacker news.
Surely we've done enough brain experimentation to know that "people who do more learning have more neurons" is false?
CMU ML Minecraft Competition
My bank knows a huge amount about my finances, addresses, purchase history of almost everything and I'm sure lots else.

I guess what matters is what data holders do with it.
You keep a history of all the slugs, never reuse them, and have them all (but the current) redirect to the current. Done. No pesky integers in URIs.
> The simplest explanation that best fits existing data, and makes useful predictions for the future.

My main issue with that definition is what makes it a useful prediction. Does a theory (for particle physics) that predicts the Higgs Boson more useful than one that didn't? If not, then before we collected the data to reject other theories they all would have been equal.

I would rather suggest that the properties of a good theory are best fitting existing data and having specific predictions for future measurements.

> Falsifiability, in this perspective, isn't a requirement in and of itself - it's a natural consequence of the requirement that theories be useful.

If you are of the opinion that any good theory is falsifiable (in the sense described in the article), then presumably you disagree with the rejection of falsifiability in the article. Where would you say the error in logic in the article is?
Thank you; the article failed to mention it at all
cool, thanks for the reply
Logging a Lot in Journald
For a long time there was not much use for helium, so it was wasted (vented in to the atmosphere). Then we started storing it. Then we sold off the stored helium, driving the prices down. Now we're out of stored helium and the prices are going up again.
>IOS is significantly easier and more intuitive than any PC ever was, including the Mac.

How so?

One of the key points of the article is that the the perceived intuitiveness, especially among expert users, doesn't extend to people unfamiliar with the interface. I have seen my own folks struggle with iOS, especially recovering from accidental taps as the article mentions. My mom hits the home button on her iphone whenever she hits the wrong UI button. On her laptop, that happens much more rarely. I forgot who said this first, but I firmly believe that software developers should personally watch non-expert users interact with their UI before shipping.

Your point about toddlers being able to scroll and zoom, applies to most things kids do. They can pickup a remote and turn the TV off, or unlock doors, play handheld video games, etc, etc.
This is great news. Congratulations. How are you going to help companies and their investors define performance for the long term in this new age?
A Millennial's Thoughts on Embarking as a Software Engineer – Rookie's Lab
Helium is continuously created by radioactive decay of other elements underground. But it's a slow process; we're using helium at an unsustainable rate.
I just wanted to note that Dominic Gates and the Seattle Times have been the gold standard for reporting on the 737 MAX. Really great work by them on reporting a technical subject so non-experts can understand.
If you find this era interesting, I recently read the book "Burning down the Haus"[0]. Most histories I've read of the region and era focus a lot on the mechanics or politics of it, but the book was interesting to me in that it made you aware of the changes, the ebbs and flows of the East German security-state over time as they fought against even harmless "dissidents" and the abuses (and to a lesser extent incentives) to address those. Now I'm not bleeding-heart, but a lot of the tactics really start to look familiar. Modern America isn't that far removed from the Stasi.

[0] - https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-east-g...
Then you haven't read my username.
> The article is basically a hatchet job.

Also labor propaganda.
Precisely, when it comes to public companies and government entities, lines can blur and governments do have a track record of introducing laws and regulations to enable access.

Another way of thinking about it is - if the NSA wanted coca-cola's or KFC's secret recipe; They would already have it.

But social media as a whole, is for governmental security services, the greatest invention they never made.
>Everyone climbed some hill. //

That sounds awful to my en-gb ears. "They climbed some hill" sounds like a weird way to say "a little of a hill, but not the whole thing".

"They all climbed hills" or "Everyone climbed one of the hills" if people didn't climb more than one hill each.
I submitted the page because I found it interesting.
I was excluding video cards, and comparing a 1999 computer (say a 300 MHz 1 core Intel Pentium II with 100 MHz RAM) to a 2019 computer (say a 3 GHz 8 core Intel I9 with 1 GHz RAM). There is some wiggle room there on clock and bus speeds and width, but all within a similar order of magnitude:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

This chart doesn’t go as low as we need, but we can extrapolate the Pentium II to a score of about 50 and the I9 to 2500 ( although if we include the I9’s 8 cores, we get a score more like 20,000 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-9900K... ). So we’re looking at about 50x faster single-threaded performance between 1999 and 2019.

That means that since 2019 clocks are 10x faster than 1999 clocks, there has been only a 5x performance increase per cycle (most of this probably due to longer pipelines, larger cache and wider busses which are evolutionary rather than revolutionary technologies).

Yes, there have been major price decreases. But only minor increases in performance. Computers have exponentially more transistors, but only linearly better processing power and bus speed. Had performance kept up with the 100x increase in transistor count per decade (10,000x every 20 years), The I9 with 8 cores should have scored about 5010,0008 = 4,000,000. But it only scored 20,000, so it’s only reaching about half a percent of its potential performance.

We don’t hear any of this talked about much because it’s an inconvenient truth. But from my perspective, Moore’s law ended around 2000. If it was up to me, I would scrap the rat race towards incrementally faster single-threaded performance. One divided by half a percent indicates that chips today should have roughly 8*50 = 400 cores to adequately make use of their potential processing power. For a hardwired (non-FPGA) chipset, I’d reach higher than that and target 1024 cores running at 3 GHz, with as much as 16 GB of on-chip RAM running at 1 GHz (16 MB per core so they can be programmed with local copies of their own operating system), for a chip with roughly the same transistor count as today, and costing under $1000.

My training was for designing a MIPS-style chip running at roughly 100 MHz. I don’t see any mystery in designing the scaled-up chip I’m suggesting. In fact, it would be far simpler and cheaper to design because we’d only have to do it once for perhaps a 4-6 stage pipeline with little or no branch prediction or cache logic and then repeat that in a 2D mesh. A single core would run up to 5x slower than an I9’s, but we’d have over 1000 more of them to do whatever we wanted with.
The optimism in this thread is nice, but where are the success stories which would support your hypothesis?

To overturn "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" proverb you need to show that a 30 year old can achieve similar level of mastery in 5 years of intensive study/deliberate practice as a 10 year old.

You are not going to become an olympic gymnast if you start practicing backflips at 30.

Take 100 kids and immerse them in a language at 10 and they all will be fluent by 15.

Take 100 30 year olds and not all of them will be fluent by 35. I know of many such examples, adults living in foreign countries in total immersion, speaking the foreign language as their main language and still not passing for a native.

My hypothesis: You can get decent in many fields of learning as a 30 year old with dedication but not great.

The field near and dear to my heart - chess is just one of many fields where late greatness is lacking.

There are NO chess grandmasters who learned the game at 25. The few late starting outliers started in their late teens.

Talented kids become GMs at age 13-15 these days after 5-7 years of study.

In fact there are very few people reaching master level who start with tabula rasa at age 20+ and not for lack of trying.

Grandmaster is not an super exclusive title: there are 1600+ of them in the world.

My hypothesis is that reaching the innate mastery in many fields requires a crucial effort in your teen years.

So far I can't find many late starters.

One such outlier Joseph Conrad started writing in English in his mid 20s.

Still he did learn English earlier than that. Per wikipedia - "Shakespeare brought him into the orbit of English literature." and that was at an age of 10 or so
Another reason to get DT fusion working.
Similar exit experience. I left to go to graduate school and my skip level (a MS lifer), who was a mentor and a role model for me, with whom I had regular meetings for years, didn't even say goodbye, he pretended he didn't see me while walking past me down the hallways. It was a serious breach of company loyalty in his mind. Ironically a few months later he was out himself working at a different company, as the project we were on was panning out poorly and people started to jump ship. I don't miss it there.

Like the OP said, I'm sure there are plenty of great teams at the company, and you can still have long, fulfilling employment there, but I could never relate to that experience.
No more metallic mylar balloons? Good riddance.
https://www.powerprotectionresource.com/articles/439843-myla...
By the way, just as an observation, an iPhone is more a "personal computer" than a PC ever was ...
> people should learn NOT to write shell scripts,

Knowing the basics of shell scripting is not optional. As a dev on a unix system, it's just a question of time before you have to read and tweak other people's scripts.
xi-editor pioneers a hybrid where "identifiers" are actually the tuple of revision and position. The motivation is to buy back some of the performance edge that OT has because of its use of position. I think if you are going to do CRDT it's pretty compelling, but that's also somewhat orthogonal to the complexity concerns raised in my original post.
You contribute something you need. The deal is that you benefit from the change yourself. Upstream gets your change for free, but will (hopefully) continue maintaining it. (If they don't take the feature in it doesn't matter they got it for free ...)
So does this mean Shenandoah is not suitable for things like caching? Should this even mean I should avoid trying to re-use objects if possible?