skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launch HN: Vendr (YC S19) – Buying software so you don’t have to
Hey HN: I’m Ryan, the founder of Vendr (https://vendr.com).

We buy and renew software for companies. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. Stakeholders, especially engineers, are required to spend unnecessary time with software salespeople. We believe that the buying process should be dictated by the buyer. For example, if you want to procure New Relic, you should be able to do it your way, not the salesperson’s way. Vendr was created so that companies can get the SaaS they need without needing to invest the time to procure.

My background is in software sales. Previous to founding Vendr, I was head of enterprise sales for InVision and director of SMB sales for HubSpot, so I've learned how to buy and sell software. I’ve witnessed that many salespeople are really good at wasting customers' time (unnecessary qualification calls, demos, etc). Buying and renewing software is complicated, and even more if you want to get the best deal. We take care of all that and get you the software you need, fast, and at the best possible price. We also handle renewals and are able to reduce the price per seat as a company grows.

Vendr is currently buying and renewing software for many fast-growing companies. We are currently working with Canva, GitLab, Brex, Drift, HubSpot, InVision, and others. These companies have hired us to save time and money. And it’s working. For example, in our first 12 months working with InVision, we saved them over $1.5M. Many of our customers are good negotiators, but they’ve realized that spending the cycles is not a good use of their time.

Here’s how it works: We are typically hired by the head of finance or engineering. We analyze and organize your current SaaS purchases and renewal dates. You introduce Vendr to your vendors and we manage the procurement process from start to finish—getting you exactly what you need without ever having to pick up the phone. We are integrated into your Slack environment to keep you posted along the way.

We make money via a monthly subscription to buy and renew all of the SaaS in your stack. Our subscription fee is based on your company size and ranges from $2k-10k+. Happy to chat directly at ryan@vendr.com.

Have you experienced specific issues buying software? How have your experiences been working with software salespeople? We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas, and your experiences!
He’s putting his reputation up against it, which apparently is powerful enough to make the stock slide. He makes money either way (since correctly seeing he can move the stock price), the question is whether he comes out of it with his reputation.
>You'd think these people were careful, considerate, etc.

I'm sure that on average, they're capable, intelligent people. But they're also a product of "right-place-right-time", many times they were "nerds" who were of the right age to get ahead of the internet and become filthy rich.

Now, many of them believe they have insight to offer on everything, from politics to philosophy. PG has complained about this on Twitter: why don't we listen to these successful people on other topics?

Because they aren't as smart as they think they are.
Mercedes in Germany tend to be made in Germany, and there's a network effect in having so many around. I imagine Merc spares availability in Germany is a bit like Ford or Chevy parts availability in the US. With cabs, it's not a question of whether there will be issues, but when, and for how much. Here in the US, cabs routinely do full engine swaps to stay on the road. So many US fleets, like police departments, favor American cars.
When Yahoo! ditched the stupid ® someone had to go around and physically remove the thing from the branding on campus.
I think that this should be the only use case for lambdas. They should respond to events and act as the glue between aws services. If you're doing anything that requires a running time of over 200ms you should be using a proper app server, probably inside a docker container.
> I mean, it claims to do 80% of the work to create an app in an hour

No, it claims that it will do that, not that it does do that. If it was “does”, yes, the VC would be able to verify it. If it is “will”—and that's what they are seeking funding to build out—its a lot harder to verify.
Look at cash flow and you'll see a story different from the casual media reports.

Over $600mm in positive operating cash flow net of cap-ex in the last quarter. Over $1.3bn in positive operating cash flow net of cap-ex over the last four quarters.

Currently they have $4.9 billion in cash and another 1.1 billion in short term receivables. And accounts payable balance has actually been paid down over the last four quarters.

I don't own any but a lot of the financial journalism on tsla seems a little lazy.
Yes, that's ideal. But:

* Sometimes it's not efficient to break a task down or it simply can't be done.
* Sometimes it just makes the code hard to maintain if breaking it down into different components is a difficult task

An example I can think of is loading a very large CSV file into a database. Lambda doesn't have enough memory to read the whole file and even if it did, it might take more than 16 minutes to run. I can try to break it out into multiple tasks and it'll probably be faster, but reading that code is (generally) gonna be much harder.
> I think the ultimate problem is Google doesn't pay anyone

They pay the OEM, don't they?
That's very specific to software that doesn't need much support. I think Intel is probably considered a tech company and they certainly can't scale at near-zero marginal cost.
Q learners have always been too brute forcey imo. Every action from any known state gets a value. That will explode on any meaningful task. Its better to use it in combination with some other model that reduces how many states are seen by the q learner.

But it is a good model to understand some principles and motivations behind the general ideas in AI and machine learning.
Safari with ITP enabled blocks cookies on those font-related resources. But because of other browsers, it's not very nice to send cookies on those resources in the first place.
The Verge simply doesn't get it. WeWork will leverage their real estate assets and come up with an AI-based cryptocurrency to monetize their community base. They will call it "The Country of We." Just wait for it. The time will come.
I’ve found myself really wanting this, but for the impossible-to-gather complement of the data — how are people doing when they aren’t consuming social media and news media?

I find myself often wondering: is the whole world anxious and confused and sad right now? Or maybe just my country? Or maybe just highly-online folks? Or maybe just my bubble?

Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression. But I don’t know how to calibrate at all, I have infinite information available to me and no way to sift through it, and the global marketplace of information seems to mean that anything that attracts attention is either highly biased or a statistical outlier or is otherwise just taking advantage of some human bias that makes it sensational enough to attract eyeballs and spread.
Presumably the OP is referring to the insane amount of money Softbank has invested in the AI space.
Good thing Qt ditched awful WebKit for glorious Chrome. Tracking is "mm mm!" good. It also helps make sure Google's predatory non-compliance and Google-board optimizations continue to spread through all websites.

#ThanksQt
What exactly JSX offers what templating does not?
Disclaimer - I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

AI is certainly not magic, and as an industry we're super far away from what would be considered real AI in the technical sense.
That being said, AI has become a catch all term for everything as simple as linear regressions, all the way through to neural networks.

We don't claim to be able to write apps using AI, we're a platform that is trying to use AI and general automation in order to optimize the traditional SDLC. Actual code generation/synthesis is years away in my opinion and there is far more impact that can be had by going after other manual aspects of software development.
My understanding is that Apple didn't try to block anything, Linux just lacked appropriate driver support for their disk.

It is a testament to how far Linux on the desktop has come that our first assumption when Linux doesn't boot on a new machine is "The megacorp is using secret cryptography" and not "eh, missing drivers."
This is yet another black mark on softbank. Seriously? This should be day 1 of DD for anyone looking into any AI companies.
React (v16 minified via CRA, prod mode) was slightly above the 30kb mark afaik.
Yeah, i would have tried CFLR, or something like that...unless, they have other ambitions...?
Especially if they're only going to present four options, they really should allow each company to list a small blurb to go under their title. It's likely Ecosia would vastly increase it's market share if given this option... and largely why I'm not surprised Google isn't offering such a blurb in the screenshot.
They discuss this very thoughtfully in the blog post from when they kicked the daily stormer to the curb.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
But we don't call, say, banks tech companies. A huge portion of their business requires sophisticated technical infrastructure they create themselves, but we just call them banks.

And there are plenty of normal taxi companies with similar systems to Uber's.
I'm always amazed how much attention supervised learning algorithms get when Q-learning is often better suited for real-world problems that go beyond just classifying things, works closer to how humans actually learn, and is much easier to implement (requires way less code and no training data). I wonder how much of this disparity is because big companies like Google and FB who hold all the training data benefit from only talking about ML techniques that nobody can compete with them on.

At Hiome (hiome.com), we use Q-learning to learn people's habits and automatically program their smart home, and it's insanely effective. Since there's no training data required, we don't even have to violate our users' privacy to aggregate their data, so everything stays local in their home.

I believe similar techniques will get us closer to true AGI than neural nets.
There are alternatives for Samsung and LG, examples:

https://www.samygo.tv/

http://openlgtv.org.ru/wiki/index.php/LGMOD

Of course it depends from models and what not, so YMMV, but essentially they run a Linux of sorts without providing the source code of "key" parts and "locking it down" as much as they can, if someone manages to workaround these "locks" ...

Here is a thread about installing "full" Ubuntu/Debian on a Samsung, but it is from a few years ago, so likely this is only possible to "old" TV's:

https://forum.samygo.tv/viewtopic.php?t=7898
I've often wondered, "Is it just me, or everyone and everything seems to be kinda awful right now?". This points to at least some validity to this idea, or at least as much as the real world reflects onto Twitter.

Is the measurement here flawed? Likely. But it's really interesting to see that some Christmases are indeed happier than others
The Firefox model is a good example. The initial short list of available search engines (7 slots instead of 4) is auctioned off but there's also a "Find more search engines" button with a list of 3,823 providers.

This is not a problem that a UX designer would have a hard time with.
Yeah, from a citizen perspective I agree. C'est la vie. Our governments need to work against this via legislation.

It should not be up to Matthew Prince to decide who to block. He has demonstrated his inability to function as censor in a very visible (and frankly embarassing) way.
We are not stuck here. Check out realworld app.
Canada just got on with a ban on single-use plastic items (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-to-ban-single-us...) which presumably includes plastic bags.

Single use non-plastic items made of other materials like corn starch would be interesting, but they're going to have to be sure to not brand them as "plastic".
> in a bet that the frozen dessert-themed attraction can expand further into...a new theme beyond ice cream

"Hey, let's go to the Museum of Ice Cream so that we can see non-ice-cream-related things."
> where there actually seems to be a viable business model.

It has carried them this far, but the real money will be when they turn to advertising (which investors will eventually figure out and insist on).

Remember all the crazy marketing data ISPs wanted to collect, then we pushed everyone to move to TLS? Well Cloudflare unwraps TLS for all their clients and is in a position to collect all the same data.
That's exactly what happened. Same deal for anyone with Eero mesh routers (Amazon) and Nest/DropCam (Google). It's impossible to avoid them in technology because they just buy everything.
Uber is a taxi company with creative outsourcing of taxis and drivers.
You can have your own opinion but doesn't make it a fact. What is a fact is what she said on national TV less than two months ago:

"Harris said people should not be deported if their only offense is living in the United States without documents."
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/28/democratic-debate-...

Coming across would not be a crime. So as long as a person did not commit a crime, they get to stay. that is defacto open borders.
It can't get much more clear than that.

you can argue if that is a good or bad thing, but that is what she is for, she said it very clearly.
What the heck happened to their OpEx in 2018?!

They went from growing at 60% YoY in 2017 with an 8% Operating Loss, to growing 43% YoY with an Operating Loss of 44%.

To put it another way, in 2018 they grew their revenue 40% (+$58m) and grew expenses 100% (+$115m).

I mean, apparently they raised a huge round and felt the need to increase spending massively. And then saw slowing growth as a response?

Was there a massive boost in R&D output? Entering entirely new product lines? My uneducated impression is that they offer largely the same product this year as they did last year.

The only thing I can think of is that they went from “scrappy startup” to “bloated unicorn” status?
If it claims it will do that, it sounds like they should be raising an Angel or Seed round, not a massive A round.

They raised $29.5 million in a Series A round. That sounds like find-product-market-fit money, possibly a bit of growth money -- NOT pre-product money. You dont need to raise $30M to go from pre-product to product.

The financiers were Swiss VC firm Lakestar and Singapore’s Jungle Ventures led the financing and participation from Softbank’s DeepCore. I'm surprised this would get past them.
if the company was lying to VC's, is it possible for them to recoup their investments outside of a civil lawsuit? I'm imagining some sort of criminal fraud investigation could happen, but dont really know.
The Actor (which cannot be implemented by a nondeterministic TM) sends the 'stop' message to itself. However, just as there can be an arbitrarily long amount of time between two steps of a computation, there can be a arbitrarily long amount of time for a message to be delivered.
Next time I post a video I will post it using AMZN's CDN. Once you have a script it isn't any harder than uploading to Youtube. It is not free as in beer, but is much more free than Youtube precisely because it is not free as in beer.
We just had a project in our app to remove these. We had lists of credit card names and they'd be ridiculous things like "Company(TM) Product(R) VISA(TM) for Business(c)" and the client had no idea which credit card was theirs because they signed up for "Product for Business".

Our legal team agreed that in functional contexts (like picking a credit card name from a select box) we could omit the trademarks. But if we had a page that listed all the features and restrictions about the card (non-functional usage) then they must be there.
So it's an "I" startup? Almost like you get more than you paid for, haha.
That is scenario #1. What about scenario #2?
Ok so we have a single person and a trillion dollar company's PR team both being dufuses. That's guerilla warfare and the company is failing harder.
Zoom has very little defensible tech, it's more about packaging/marketing. Cloudflare is very difficult to duplicate.
> herding you like cattle from one room to another to sell you junk at the end of the hall

That sounds a lot like the World of Coke in Atlanta.
Because a large number of people in society have a legitimate interest in the financial position of a company, irrespective of whether it is private or publicly listed.

Cloudflare have around 75,000 paying customers (not to mention those on the free tier) who are dependent on their services, and would probably like to know if they’re about to go bust.

As would their employees, suppliers, private shareholders, creditors, etc.
Sure, that works. Do you think that would satisfy the OP? Why don't they suggest it in the article/their press releases?
The difference between reality and satire is getting smaller and smaller all the time.
I'm working on a language with similar goals, but with the focus on simplicity:

https://vlang.io

A relatively stable 0.2 release will be out this month.
GoldenEye 007: 12 Killer Facts You May Not Know About the N64 Classic
https://xkcd.com/2173/
The Firefox model is very close to what's being proposed here actually: This is the short list that ships by default, and you can pick whatever search engine you want after the initial setup anyways. I think it's reasonable for them to say they don't want to have 3,823 options on the initial setup screen for the phone, most people are just trying to get through it and don't want an extensive decision-making tree before they can write their first text message.

The difference here is that Google owns Android and Google doesn't have to bid. In my book, this is the case-in-point demonstration why Android and Chrome are the two properties that Google must be forced to spin off. Letting one company own both the dominant platforms and the dominant services that run on those platforms is a very dangerous mix.
Yes it does. If you capture the authentication handshake, it's as straightforward as putting the passphrase into Wireshark.
> But, as I understand the claim, it doesn't do 80% of the work but are 80% of the way there.

No, they claim both that it will do 80% of the work to build the app within an hour and that they are 80% done with the app. (Both claims being 80% makes it easy to mistake them for a single claim, but both are stated separately in the article.)

Tangentially, the two 80% claims together seem to me to pretty forcefully bring to mind the 80/20 rule even before considering whether the claims are completely fraudulent.
>We have incurred net losses in all periods since we began operations and we expect we will continue to incur net losses for the foreseeable future.

The admission that "we've never made money and there's a good chance we never will" being boilerplate S-1 copy is monstrously troubling.

When no one needs to see that a company can made a dollar before investing because profit is for suckers and this company's probably going to be a unicorn, maybe that's the stock tip from the shoeshine boy.
I was going to make a snarky comment to the effect that the Rust syntax for an array of pointers to functions isn't obviously less weird than the C syntax -- I assume the basic thing there is [<type>; <size>] -- but then I noticed that the C syntax above was very wrong, and the correct syntax is weirder :-).

So what it should actually be is int ( * [4])(). The principle is that "declaration mimics use" and that a type is written like a declaration with the variable name omitted. So, for an array of pointers to functions mapping no-args to int:

If f is such a function, you would call it as f() and get an int, so the declaration would look like int f() and the type would be int () except that functions, as opposed to function pointers, aren't first-class objects in C and don't have a type.

If pf is a pointer to such a function, you would need ( * pf) instead of f, so the declaration would be int ( * pf)() and the type would be int ( * )().

If apf is an array of those, then you would need to replace pf with apf[something], so the declaration would be int ( * apf[4])() and the type would be int ( * [4])().

Which is, indeed, a bit weird.

(Note: Spaces around all the asterisks because that seems to be the least-bad way of making HN not interpret them as markup. It's quite impressive how damaging HN's markup feature manages to be given how little it's capable of.)
Why President of Brazil's Comments Matter
The NSA Refuses to Tell Us the Name of Its Slack
> Essentially creating a scenario where no matter who is chosen, Google wins

Given that this is something entirely orchestrated by Google in an attempt to make lawmakers think that competition is A-OK and no legislation is needed to curb Google’s power, this kind of thing is to be expected.
The video didn't load for me, but there was a similar talk on Youtube from Vinge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzRuPGnJxCs
GOOG and FB also seemed overpriced a week after their respective IPOs.
Excellent thread! Thanks all. Also in the process of getting GOing on Go. >:) (Yes, I am a geeky pun guy)
"Heroku’s physical infrastructure is hosted and managed within Amazon’s secure data centers and utilize the Amazon Web Service (AWS) technology", I did not know that.

https://www.heroku.com/policy/security
I'd actually love a subscription that covers multiple low-traffic domains.

Next to a few business accounts for larger projects, I probably have 30 low traffic sites which aren't much of a cost for Cloudflare. I'd happily throw something like 20$ per month their way to have them covered.
it should be back up again
there is a volcano under at least one of the big glaciers
VT and VTI certainly. At anything close to its proposed valuation S&P500 funds too.
my mother's 401k at the time, they were forced to buy company stock. Her company was also in the process of merging with Enron. Luckily, my father had a better plan so they ended up mostly investing in his and what was left over they invested in hers.
Devnet 2.0 and the New Oasis SDK
Google doesn't use Rust for Fuchsia. Rust is used in Fuchsia :) Most of the system is C++ still.
Because they are a massive fund throwing money into every half-baked idea coming out of Silicon Valley?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/softbank-group-looking-to-ride...

That image was copped form an investor presentation. How can anyone take that seriously?
Everybody’s right. Ageism definitely isn’t a thing. Especially not in the tech industry. That totally explains why this post made the top of Hackernews. This guy must be crazy. Let’s all tell him he’s crazy.
thats what you say when you have nothing to say. inform me then. Cite the science. And fyi, the scientific community is one of the most political, ego driven, petty communities around. keep on regurgitating stuff you hear and never verify though.

and 'you people' which you bashed me for, is no different than saying '90% of scientists' good job trashing your own argument.
I don't think this is likely to happen. There is almost surely a class of interesting questions it takes AGI to answer but a math PhD to pose.